Urban Geography

A Critical Introduction

Andrew E. G. Jonas, Eugene McCann, Mary Thomas

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118608500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología urbana

Urban Geography a comprehensive introduction to a variety of issues relating to contemporary urban geography, including patterns and processes of urbanization, urban development, urban planning, and life experiences in modern cities.

• Reveals both the diversity of ordinary urban geographies and the networks, flows and relations which increasingly connect cities and urban spaces at the global scale
• Uses the city as a lens for proposing and developing critical concepts which show how wider social processes, relations, and power structures are changing
• Considers the experiences, lives, practices, struggles, and words of ordinary urban residents and marginalized social groups rather than exclusively those of urban elites
• Shows readers how to develop critical perspectives on dominant neoliberal representations of the city and explore the great diversity of urban worlds

Chapter 1
Approaching the City

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1. 1.1 Introduction
2. 1.2 Being Geographical, Being Urbanist
3. 1.3 Approaching Cities as Processes: Urbanization and Development, Urbanism, and Planning
4. 1.4 Urban Geography: Foundational Approaches
5. 1.5 Conclusion: Building on our Foundations
6. 1.6 Further Reading

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1.1 Introduction

Approaching the city. What do we mean by this? Do we hope to kindle some excitement in you? Yes, we do! We assume that you have enrolled in a course about cities, or that you have picked up this book, because you are interested in cities and interested in learning more about their dynamics. If you are like us, you have probably always been drawn to cities and to urbanism – the distinctive ways of life that characterize cities – even before developing an academic interest. You might consider yourself to be an urbanite, someone that has always lived in an urban environment. Or you might be from the suburbs or a rural area, but have moved to the city to attend college or university. Or maybe you are studying in a small town but you expect to move to a city when you graduate. In any case, we guess that you have often approached cities in the most straightforward sense: you have travelled toward one. As your plane broke through the clouds on its final descent, as your bus or car rounded one last bend to reveal a spectacular skyline, or as your train gradually made its way through an ever-intensifying landscape of factories, office and retail parks, houses, and apartments, toward a central station, you probably found yourself stimulated by excitement, expectation, and curiosity; perhaps by nervousness and trepidation or, most likely, by a mixture of all these feelings.

Urbanist (urban scholar) Mike Davis imagines such an approach to Dubai:

As your jet starts its descent, you are glued to your window. … [T]he plane slowly banks toward the desert mainland [and] you gasp at the even more improbable vision ahead. Out of a chrome forest of skyscrapers soars a new Tower of Babel. It is an impossible half-mile high: taller than the Empire State Building stacked on top of itself. You are still rubbing your eyes with wonderment as the plane lands. … With your adrenaline pumped up … you round off the afternoon with some snowboarding on the local indoor snow mountain (outdoors, the temperature is 105°[F]).

(Davis, 2006a: 47–48)

Bright lights, big city

Cities – their bright lights, spectacular buildings, and extreme experiences – have figured centrally in people’s imaginations for centuries. They are places of possibility and danger, of hope and disappointment, of power and powerlessness, of glamour and destitution, of production and consumption. They are often seen as different or special – separated off, sometimes behind walls – from the rural areas beyond. They are often seen as sites where new innovations emerge and as places that epitomize new forms of social organization.

For example, scholars like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels saw the English cities of the nineteenth century as epitomizing the new economic and social order of industrial capitalism. When studying these cities, they saw places of intense and innovative economic activity, novel social interaction, global interconnection, and massive inequality. Cities, like the world, were in flux as industrial capitalism grew exponentially. While we often imagine Marx and Engels in their later gray-bearded lives, it was a young Engels, only in his mid-20s, who approached London for the first time on a ship travelling up the River Thames in the mid-nineteenth century. As it does for many of us, this first approach to a storied city set his mind racing, his adrenaline pumping, as he tried to comprehend the multitude of sights, sounds, and smells he encountered. London was remarkable for its

gigantic docks in which are assembled the thousands of ships which always cover the River Thames. I know nothing more imposing than the view one obtains of the river when sailing from the sea up to London Bridge. … The further one goes up the river the thicker becomes the concentration of ships lying at anchor, so that eventually only a narrow shipping lane is left free in midstream. Here hundreds of steamships dart rapidly to and fro. All this is so magnificent and impressive that one is lost in admiration. The traveler has good reason to marvel at England’s greatness even before he steps on English soil.

(Engels, 1845/1987: 30)

We return to Engels in Chapter 4, but for now we can agree that, whether in the nineteenth century or in the twenty-first century, cities inspire awe as we approach them.

Yet, it would hardly be useful for us as social scientists to simply celebrate the awesome and positively awe-inspiring aspects of cities (Figure 1.1 is an example of such a celebration). Things are never that simple. Indeed, the very next line of Engels’ description of London notes, “It is only later that the traveler appreciates the human suffering which has made all this possible,” a point he goes on to emphasize in his book through an extended description of the immiseration of working people in Manchester. Similarly, the purpose of Davis’ imaginary descent into spectacular Dubai is to set up his deeply critical analysis of the sources of “Dubai Inc.’s” recent spectacular growth.

Figure 1.1 Dubai’s iconic architecture on display in an advertisement in a Tokyo train station. The romantic allure of the city is on sale here, invoked through the flowing feminine dress and happy smile. The image also emphasizes the global interconnections among the world’s cities.

Photo: Eugene McCann.

Approaching a city, living in one, or studying them necessarily evokes mixed feelings. Cities like society, then and now, are awesome and simultaneously awful. This makes them fascinating and troubling to approach, but it also makes the study of urbanism, in all its various facets, an important task. By studying cities, we are able to shed light not only on urban life but also on a vast array of processes, institutions, forces, interests, inequalities, and identities that constitute society more generally. This tension is most eloquently expressed by one Marxist scholar, Marshall Berman, speaking of another, Walter Benjamin, who studied the rise of modernity in Paris during the nineteenth century:

[Benjamin’s] heart and his sensibility draw him irresistibly toward the city’s bright lights, beautiful women, fashion, luxury, its play of dazzling surfaces and radiant scenes; meanwhile his Marxist conscience wrenches him insistently away from these temptations, instructs him that this whole glittering world is decedent, hollow, vicious, spiritually empty, oppressive to the proletariat, condemned by history … but he cannot resist one last look down the boulevard or under the arcade; he wants to be saved, but not yet.

(Berman, 1982: 146)

Urbanists who think critically about cities find that they are sometimes repelled by certain aspects of them, just as they are drawn to others. Box 1.1 contains an exercise that you can perform to think about your relationship to your city or town. So, how do we manage this tension between “urbanophila” and “urbanophobia” and use it to aid our understanding of cities? This is where a different connotation of “approaching the city” comes in.

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Box 1.1 Experiencing the City

Many of us inhabit an urban area. We live in its neighborhoods, use its services and infrastructure, participate in its social and cultural activities and experience its various environments. In engaging with your city or town in these various ways, you quickly develop understandings of the place based on your own experience in combination with your understanding of larger forces that shape cities.

Take some time away from this book and: (1) write some field notes on a recent urban experience you have had (i.e., notes written during or immediately after an event that describe and reflect upon it); (2) write a short discussion of the experience, describing it based on your field notes and tying it to larger forces that seem connected to it; (3) use this experience to write a little about your feelings about cities in general and your city or town in particular. Are you in love with the place? Can you hardly wait to leave? Are you ambivalent? No matter your answer, write about why you have these feelings.

For example, if the bus runs past you some morning this week as you are trying to get to campus, or if you have difficulty finding parking when you drive there, this (and its consequences) would be an experience you could discuss. You would also need to link the specific experience to larger issues by identifying possible reasons why the bus ran by you or parking was hard to find (both of which might be related to public investment in transportation infrastructures).

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Academic approaches

Travelling toward a place is not all, or even most of, what we mean when we say “approaching the city.” An “approach” is also an intellectual stance that we take as we address a process, situation, or problem that we are trying to understand and...