Key Concepts in Urban Studies

Mark Gottdiener, Leslie Budd, Panu Lehtovuori

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781473933965
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Städtische Soziologie

"Key Concepts in Urban Studies is written in an accessible, concise way and introduces students to the key topics in urban studies. Drawing examples from different parts of the world, this authoritative resource exposes students to the diverse forms that cities take, and the social, spatial and temporal dimensions of urban living.It is an essential resource for students across disciplines interested in the city."
- Lily Kong, Singapore Management University "An insightful multidisciplinary introduction to the multifarious places, processes and problems that constitute modern cities. Its short, digestible entries unpack the complexity and evolution of urban conditions, offering cross-references between concepts and links to key literature and to useful current and historical examples. The book's clear, often sharp critical edge also encourages deeper enquiry."
- Quentin Stevens, School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University Key Concepts in Urban Studies is an essential companion for students of urban studies, urban sociology, urban politics, urban planning and urban development. This revised edition has been updated and expanded to provide a keen global focus, particularly in emerging economies with discussions on the creation of "dream cities" in the Gulf States and a renewed emphasis on building mega-scaled "downtowns" in India and China. New features include:

• Contemporary and international examples throughout.
• Detailed entries on environmental concerns and the sustainability of urban development.
• Discussion of the role of consumption in city culture and urban development.
• New entries on modern urban planning and adaptive urbanism.

Key Concepts in Urban Studies is a must-have text with an explicit focus on contemporary urbanism which students will find invaluable during their studies. Mark Gottdiener is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at The University at Buffalo (SUNY).Leslie Budd is Reader in Social Science at the Open University.Panu Lehtovuori is Professor of Planning Theory at Tampere University of Technology.

1 The Chicago School

Academic studies of the city as a unique form of settlement space were rare until the 1800s when the German sociologist Max Weber wrote a sophisticated analysis tracing its history as a phenomenon of social organization (1966). Somewhat later, the Anglo-German, Friedrich Engels, also the lifelong friend of Karl Marx, wrote a critique of urban living under capitalism (1973). These efforts stood alone until the turn of the 20th century. Just prior to World War I, the University of Chicago founded the very first department of sociology in the US under the leadership of W.I. Thomas and Albion Small, who had been a student of Weber. Their interests were in general aspects of sociology, but in 1913 they hired Robert Park who possessed a specific and strong interest in the urban condition. Park was a newspaper reporter who had acquired extensive experience in the southern US which conditioned him to the injustice of racial discrimination. He also had experience as an urban crime news reporter in Minneapolis, New York City and Detroit. When he was obtaining his doctorate in sociology, he spent some time at the University of Berlin, Germany, where he studied under Georg Simmel, the European sociologist most responsible for writing about urban life (see entry on The City). When the Chicago department hired another sociologist with an interest in the city, Ernest W. Burgess, the two set about to study Chicago as an urban laboratory. Together they founded the first ‘school’ of urban analysis, the Chicago School, and both they and their students published a prolific amount of research until the 1940s, including the first systematic field studies and ethnographies written by professional sociologists.

The members of the Chicago School were uniquely concerned about city life. They called their approach Human Ecology, because they were influenced by Darwin to consider human social adjustments to the urban environment as similar to the way plant and animal species attuned themselves to their more natural space (for a critique, see Gottdiener, 1994; Gottdiener and Hutchison, 2000). In place of the emphasis on political economy characteristic of the New Urban Sociology, the Chicago School preferred a biologically based metaphor typifying human interaction (see entry on Social Production of Space; also Gottdiener and Hutchison, 2000). Thus, they avoided the study of capitalism, preferring instead to view economic competition as a manifestation of the general struggle for survival that unites all species on the planet. According to Park, the social organization of the city resulted from this struggle over scarce resources. It produced a complex division of labor because people would adjust to the biologically based competition for survival by finding specific ways they could compete based on their ‘natural’ abilities.

Other members of the Chicago School took a more spatially sensitive approach, while retaining their emphasis on biological rather than political-economic forces operating in the environment. Roderick McKenzie emphasized the role of location and argued that establishing a physical position within the environment was most important in the struggle for survival. Individuals or groups that were successful took over the best locations within the city – the higher ground, the prime business locations, the preferred neighborhoods. Those that were not as successful in this spatial competition wound up in less attractive locations. Thus, the population sorted itself out within the environment as a consequence of this process. McKenzie studied the patterns that this spatial sorting produced for both social groups and businesses.

Ernest W. Burgess was also a member of the early Chicago School (see entry on Models of Urban Growth). For him the spatial competition created by the struggle for survival produced a land-use pattern of concentric rings of settlement around a centralized business district.

Louis Wirth was also a member of the early school (see the entry on The City). The Chicago School researchers viewed city life principally in negative terms. They explained phenomena such as crime and family break-up in terms of social disorganization. For them the city broke down traditional primary relations and therefore contributed to various negative aspects of urban living. Later on this approach was criticized for its overly disparaging view of city life. Another criticism was that their work favored the biologically based approach to locational adjustment and ignored the factor of culture or the role that symbols played in determining spatial patterns within the city. In 1945 Walter Firey wrote a critique of Burgess’ concentric zone model by showing how the land-use pattern of Boston was an expression of ‘sentiments and symbols’ in addition to the ecological competition over space. Despite these criticisms, the idea of ecology persisted as American urbanists preferred to ignore issues of class and race, which the political economic approach demands (see entry on Social Production of Space).

After World War II the ecological approach was revived, but it ignored the Chicago School’s emphasis on spatial competition in favor of a form of technological determinism. The new perspective was called Contemporary Human Ecology. Urban land-use patterns and the distribution of population and activities were a product of communication and transportation technologies. As the technology of these means of interaction changed, human ecologists argued that so did the patterns of social organization. For example, it was claimed that, although the process of suburbanization had been present since the late 1800s in American cities, it did not become a mass phenomenon until after the automobile became a consumer good that many people could afford. Subsequent research reversed this claim and established the fact that ‘while the street car, electric trains and automobile may be credited with lowering initial density levels in cities... they were not responsible for “emptying out”’ urban areas on a mass scale.

Another argument by human ecologists in the 1970s claimed that while cities expanded in size their central business districts also had to grow in administrative functions. This was so, they argued, because the command and control activities of the urban area had to increase as the size of that region grew, just as a cell’s nucleus expands when the cell develops. A similar argument was advanced in the 1990s when Saskia Sassen (1991) claimed that globalization had produced ‘world cities’ through the concentration of command and control activities. Upon closer examination, the human ecology argument was shown to be false (Gottdiener, 1994). Command and control functions in the form of corporate headquarters had been dispersing throughout multi-centered metropolitan regions as those agglomerations themselves expanded. In the 1960s, for example, New York City was home to over 120 national and international corporations. By the 1990s that figure had dropped to slightly less than 90, at the very same time that globalization advocates were calling New York a ‘global city’. Later on Sassen’s argument about the effects of command and control concentration was also proved false (see entry on Inequality and Poverty). There is no evidence that these activities require a central city location, as the human ecology approach maintains. However, global financial activities possess components that still do prefer such inner business district locations (see entries on The City; Globalization and Meltdown).

There are many things wrong with the ecological perspective, both the old and contemporary schools, in addition to its false biologically based conception. Ecologists avoid any mention of social groupings belonging to the analysis of late capitalism, such as class and race. They see social interaction as a process of adaptation to an environment, in keeping with their biological or ecological emphasis, rather than being produced by relations deriving from powerful factors in economic, political and cultural organization, as the socio-spatial perspective suggests. Although they emphasize location, they ignore aspects of the real estate industry (see entry on Real Estate) and its role in producing spatial patterns of development. Finally, human ecologists completely ignore the role of political institutions in channeling resources and in regulating competition over scarce resources in a market-based, capitalist economy. With regard to the latter, they focus on the demand-side view of markets, which emphasizes individual decisions, rather than the supply-side that highlights the role of powerful actors in manipulating the market for desired ends.

References

Engels, F. 1973. The Condition of the Working Class in England, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Gottdiener, M. 1994. The Social Production of Urban Space, 2nd Edition, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Gottdiener, M. and R. Hutchison 2000. The New Urban Sociology, 2nd Edition, New York: McGraw-Hill.

Sassen, S. 1991. The Global City, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Weber, M. 1966. The City, New York: The Free Press.

2 The City

A city is a bounded space that is densely settled and has a relatively large, culturally heterogeneous population. The history of cities dates back to the Neolithic period. The oldest known city is Catal Höyük (7500–5700 BC) in present-day Turkey, while Erbil (founded 6000 BC) in Iraq is the oldest continuously settled city. Today, Erbil is the capital of Kurdistan with 1.3 million inhabitants. In contemporary Urban Studies, the term ‘city’ is often used in loose or confusing ways (see entries on The City and Beyond; Classifications and Definitions of Places;Multi-Centered Metropolitan Regions andUrbanization and Urbanism for more discussion).

Cities are important principally because of their political clout. A US city, as an incorporated municipality, has the power to tax and the power to raise money via bonds and other financial instruments. Legally it can hire its own police force and provide for all social services to its residents. Cities have the power of self-governance and they have their own elected officials. As a consequence of the latter, city administrations have political power nationally. Mayors of cities have national political clout, much more so than their suburban counterparts, and this is why cities themselves are important.

In Europe, unlike the US, the formal municipal situation varies enormously depending on different systems of government and governance. In France, the big five cities, Paris, Lyon, Marseilles, Lille and Bordeaux exert enormous formal and informal power. In Germany, the City-Länder of Hamburg, Bremen and Berlin operate with a regional system of government that boosts their position relative to other cities. In the UK, London is the dominant city and its power and influence formally and informally outstrips other cities. The system of sub-national government also has tended to change frequently in the UK. Currently, there has been a shift back to notions of city-regions and ideas of regional balance in the UK.

The political power of cities is related to their position as sites of economic activity. Despite the apparent remorseless march of globalization and digitization, certain activities of large transnational firms still crowd into some of the world’s major cities. The benefits of co-location are expressed as agglomeration economies in the form of specialist labor markets, transport accessibility and access to shared lifestyle aspirations. The City of London retains its position as one of the world’s leading financial centers as a result of these agglomeration benefits (Budd and Whimster, 1992).

Cities are also considered to be important because they are the site of ‘urban culture’. In the past, this characteristic was easy to understand because of its contrast to the culture of the countryside, i.e. rural areas. However, decades of suburbanization and the ubiquitous influence of national media have considerably blurred this distinction so that it has limited value today. One feature of cities that is not characteristic of other areas is the presence of a viable street and pedestrian culture. The urbanist, Jane Jacobs (1961), claimed that the urban street is the fundamental aspect of city life (see entries on the Neighborhood;Planning and Public S...