The Infrastructure of the Beloved Community

BYU English professor Jamin Rowan on the intersection of literature and civic engagement

The Utah Monthly recently interviewed Brigham Young University (BYU) English professor Jamin Rowan, whose interest in cities animates both his scholarship and his life as a Provo resident. This conversation transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.  

Dr. Rowan on the genesis of his interest in cities

I grew up in the 1980s, which was a real anti-urban period for America. Anti-urbanism had been strong in the second half of the twentieth century, our postwar moment when we really subsidized suburbanization, so we could have white flight out to the suburbs, [while] cities retained racial minorities, lower classes, so to speak. So there was this real turn in how we talked about and thought about cities. And the ’80s were in some ways kind of the tail end of that kind of anti-urbanism. So I grew up with the idea that cities are dangerous, cities are bad, cities are places where people are unkind, and then when I moved to Boston in the very late ’90s, early 2000s, I was totally surprised by how much I loved living in the city. And specifically, how connected I felt to people. You know, riding the T, the Boston subway system, I just felt so connected to humanity. I didn’t necessarily have deep relationships with anyone on the T, but I just felt that kind of connection of witnessing the diversity of humanity. And my culture had given me nothing to explain that feeling, there were no narratives that I was aware of, no discourse that could help me understand and explain that sensibility that I experienced in the city: riding the subway, on the sidewalks, in crowded spaces with lots of people around me. 

Was this discourse you found that of urban studies?

Yeah, so urban studies is a broad, kind of interdisciplinary—urban studies mostly involves people working in the political sciences, or urban history, urban planning; not many people are working in literary studies, but that was my thing, my contribution to the field of urban studies was to say “ok, let’s think about the narratives that are running through places like The New Yorker, novels of the 1930s,” but then I joined those more literary spaces to sociology, or urban-planning figures like Jane Jacobs. So I kind of cobbled together this urban studies discourse that came from all different kinds of fields or disciplines. 

What was the payoff? What new narratives helped you make sense of urban life?

In some ways the project really began with my reading of Jane Jacobs, who wrote a book in the early 1960s called The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and it’s long been recognized as a really important work in changing the way that we thought about urban planning, but I saw it as much more. I saw her as repackaging a bunch of different threads of urban discourses into a complete alternative vision of the value of living in cities, and celebrating different kinds of urban relationships. For a long time in our culture in the US, we’ve really celebrated and really privileged intimate relationships that are rooted in this idea of sympathy. Sympathy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the gold standard of relationships. If you have sympathy for somebody, that is the sign of a really great, valuable relationship. So we really prioritized the intimate, deep, personal friendships, and really ignored the value of any kind of more casual, less-formal relationship . . . like the ones you form when you pass someone on a sidewalk, or see someone on a sidewalk multiple times, or ride the bus with somebody. For us, in our culture, we had marginalized the value of those relationships, and Jacobs came out and said “Well actually this is what makes cities really great, is the opportunity to have these non-private relationships. That you don’t have deep commitments to every person that you meet, that you can have these relationships that are these chance encounters, or these street-level contacts. That’s why we love living in cities actually, and that’s what makes for a good city. We should design cities to provide and prioritize those kinds of relationships.” So she really packaged all of these different strands from the past into a complete whole that really gained purchase in our cultural imagination. 

When you came to Provo, did you find ways to put into practice what you’d learned in graduate school? 

When I came to BYU, I tried to find ways to teach urban literature and culture when I could, but probably the thing that made the biggest difference to me was that I was appointed to serve on the planning commission. So I served on the planning commission for six years—2013 to 2019 maybe—and that was a really interesting experience. I really loved seeing that side of urban life, just seeing the nuts and bolts of how cities work and how zoning laws get changed. And I really loved my experience there, and I began to realize that the contributions that I made, in part I was able to make because of my familiarity with urban history and urban planning and all that stuff, but I was also able to make them because I knew how to listen to stories, I knew how to identify patterns in stories, I knew how to identity the meanings that people were giving, the ideas that their stories had been built around, and kind of question the meanings. As in, do we want to make decisions about the future of our city based upon this particular set of meanings that people are building their stories around? So I really loved that; I realized that my literary studies and my humanities training had given me a skill set that I used to be a good citizen, or to contribute to my community as a citizen-volunteer on this commission. 

Can you tell us more about this? How exactly did your humanities background help you unpack the stories behind development?

Whenever a developer would bring to the city a higher-density residential project, anything beyond a single family project, and have it in a single family neighborhood, or on the edge of a single family neighborhood, the neighborhood would turn out in droves to protest this project. They would come out and say why, for all sorts of reasons, this project would be bad. What they’re really doing is telling stories about what they want the future of Provo to look like. 

So there’s a project that came before the planning commission that’s on University Avenue, north University Avenue, just south of the River Woods. It’s a big, new housing—, a relatively new, much denser housing development. The neighbors from the surrounding area came out and really were upset about that. At the heart of their concerns was a particular understanding, or a particular set of meanings of what the concept of a renter was, like, what kind of person a renter was, and all the reasons why renters were bad for their community. And this happened over and over again. I mean, that’s a particular example, anytime a project like this [came before the commission], that’s what would happen. “Renters are bad. We don’t want renters. Renters are overtaking the city.” And I just found it deeply problematic to be so openly prejudiced or biased about a group of people who can’t afford at that stage of life to purchase a single family home. You know, it’s a kind of prejudice that, operating in other ways, would never be tolerated. 

Also, I love my house, where I live, you know, in some ways, I hope to never leave. But there may be a stage where I’m old enough that I can’t live there anymore. I don’t want to leave like the decades’ worth of social networks that I’ve built, I want to be able to stay in my neighborhood. And right now, there’s nowhere in my neighborhood that I can stay. Because we hate mixed-use anything in general, especially mixed-use residential. We only want a particular type of residential unit, you know, next to each other. We, in our culture, hate mixing residential, different kinds of residential products, so to speak. But it’s really bad, because then people have to leave their communities when they, you know, age into a different stage of life, instead of being able to stay there and keep contributing to the community and keep those relationships that they’ve developed for decades.

Why are Americans so adamant about the primacy of the single-family home? 

It’s because of our tradition in the US of what we might call Euclidean zoning. Back . . . when urban planning and zoning as a planning tool emerged in the early twentieth century, it was in the industrial era, when we were trying to get people away from factories. [The thought process was that] factories are bad to live next to because they pollute, they pollute the air, we want to get people away from this. And so we really entered into this, like, separate-the-uses line of thinking—factories over here, people are living over here, shopping over here. And it’s just exerted a stranglehold on our imaginations. But you know, when you live in places like France, and those cities, people, we love going to those cities, as Americans, and they’re mixed use. I mean, there are people living next to where they work, and shop and all that kind of stuff. And even when we go to our own cities that have retained some semblance of mixed use, we love those places.

How would you like to see Provo evolve to become a more livable city? 

I mean, I think UVX [the Orem-Provo bus system] was a major step forward in the right direction, just establishing a public transit system. So I thought that was a huge development. And I love the bicycle infrastructure that we’re developing. And [that’s] thanks, you know, thanks in large part to groups like BikeWalk Provo who’ve been really great advocates of developing bicycle infrastructure. I mean, I can go almost anywhere I want to, I feel like, and feel safe on my bike. And my kids go almost anywhere that they want to and feel safe for them. I’m a huge ebike person. We have three ebikes, I love it because it extends the range of what my kids and I can do on bikes. So I think those are some really positive developments. And I think that Provo is doing a lot of great kind of infill development, especially downtown, where we’re getting denser and denser downtown, putting in housing projects that are much denser. 

I think the thing that I would love to see more of, and this, I think is where some people get really nervous is, is now developing denser housing along some of those transit routes. So like people in my neighborhood would hate me saying this, but I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it anyways. I would love to see denser housing along 900 East. We should be getting a new UVX station right by that new music building. People love BYU; if we had denser condo living for retirees, along 900 East, people would love living next to BYU campus—they access all the music, all the culture, all the sports, just the things that BYU has to offer. They’d be close to public transit. I could move into one of those condos, when you know, my kids are gone, and still stay in my neighborhood. So I would love to see more things like that all over Provo, where we have slightly denser housing options for people to move into and still stay in their neighborhoods. 

I would love to see zero BYU students bring a car. I understand it’s impractical for some people in terms of work and stuff like that, but if BYU could establish this culture of we bike and we walk and we can get around on UVX and the FrontRunner. And you know, that gets us where we need to go. Yeah, I would love to see that. I hate when I hear BYU students complain about parking. Which they do incessantly. Don’t bring a car. Bring your bikes. Walk. Ride UVX. Ride the FrontRunner.

Dr. Rowan’s book recommendations:

Novels about cities:

Tropic of Orange (Karen Tei Yamashita) 

Native Speaker (Chang-Rae Lee)

Nonfiction books about cities: 

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jane Jacobs)

Palaces for the People (Eric Klinenberg)