Introduction
Since the emergence of what are generally understood to be the first âmodernâ cities in Europe and North America in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, urban theory has been an important component of social science research. As we move through the second decade of what theorists, analysts and commentators term âthe urban ageâ or âurban centuryâ, so it seems that it is becoming more important that urban theory generates new ideas and thinking in relation to the production of more inclusive and just urban futures. How we â as academics or students â go about doing this demands we name and pay attention to our theories. For theory is the lifeblood of the academic system, the tools of the trade through which complex ideas and understanding are generated, expressed and represented. Thought of in this way, theory in academia is equivalent to the language, lexicons and vocabulary used in many work places around the world: by car mechanics, computer programmers, doctors, heating engineers, lawyers, and so on. Professional worlds and their specific configurations can, of course, seem alien to those outside. Nevertheless, such things are the basis on which ideas, information and knowledge are communicated and exchanged. It is theory that enables the expression and performance of critical thought and intellectual advancement, important not only for the production of academic knowledge, but also in influencing how academics find out about cities through the methodologies they use, and, furthermore, in work which seeks to positively influence diverse audiences beyond universities (see Case study 1.1). For many undergraduates and graduate students, âtheoryâ is intimidating, one of the most challenging elements of acclimatizing to academic life. For those of you who can read, talk and write about theory, your studies are likely to be rewarding and, in all probability, successful. Theory should not be feared, and the challenge of getting to grips with the complex, exciting and sometimes frustrating and annoying nature of urban thinking is likely to be the most intellectually rewarding element of academic study and research.
CASE STUDY 1.1 WHAT IS URBAN THEORY AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT
Urban theory consists of ideas, languages and vocabularies that seek to explain cities and urban life. Urban theorists work to offer explanations of cultural, economic, political, and social practices and processes and their spatial manifestations. While it might seem obvious, theory always comes from somewhere and sometime. Urban theory can be grand with a high level of abstraction and/or draw on empirical, localized or contextual understanding of how cities are formed, how they function and how they change. Urban theory can be about âbigâ urban questions as well as those focused on the âordinaryâ and everyday. However, with a concern to explain rather than describe, urban theorists seek to make the city understandable or legible. The challenges of explanation, none the less, ensure continual controversy and debate. Urban theory is thus an always-contested field, drawing on and/or critiquing, even eschewing, past theoretical work in order to offer new explanation of urban experience.
The critical perspectives offered by urban theory also play an important role in influencing how we find out about urban life through the methodologies we use to research the urban experience. Urban theory also resonates beyond academia. Important not just because of its intellectual value, urban theory is a resource utilized in many ways by a diverse range of actors, such as artists, musicians, planners, policymakers, politicians and writers.
Urban theory is the unique contribution that academics make to our understanding of cities both within and beyond universities. In these terms it is important to acknowledge how the emergence, evolution and impact of urban theory have informed how and what we think about cities. Highlighting weaknesses, omission and silences in the development of urban theory is, of course, the fertile ground that leads to the emergence of new critical perspectives. Contemporary urban theorists must rise to the challenge of how/if their critical perspectives capture complexity and diversity, drawing on rich intellectual traditions of creative and innovative thinking in order to keep pace with the ongoing development of the urban experience.
In this chapter we offer you a way to begin to better understand the meaning and value of urban theory; we first highlight some (but certainly not all) of the dominant currents of urban thinking, competing perspectives and long-standing fault-lines. In doing, so we also touch on how theory is related to the methods that have been used to categorize, label and study urban life. In drawing this introduction to a close we offer some insights into the twenty-six chapters of this book and how they might be read individually and together in order to gain an understanding of the theoretical terrain that underpins critical perspectives on the city.
A brief history of urban theory
Urban theory is constituted by work that takes place across a range of disciplines including: anthropology, architecture, cultural studies, economics, environmental studies, geography, history, planning, psychology, sociology and so on. Despite this inter-disciplinary nature, the contribution of these disciplines to urban theory has ebbed and flowed over time. While there might not be universal agreement, it is possible to argue that it is geographers and sociologists who have made amongst the most important contributions to advancing urban theoretical debates. Such comments not with standing, urban theorists, no matter what their disciplinary background, have invested considerable amounts of energy and time writing and debating the question of just what it is we should think about when we think about cities: a physical thing, a location in space, a political entity, a set of economic activities. Should we think of a city as being an administrative organization, a place of work, or a place to call home? Certainly we should consider how in a city we find ambivalence and boredom, love and hate, security and danger â and how cities can be places of hope and desire, pleasure and despair. As such, despite there being a set of different disciplinary contributions, it is often the case that theorists are (more often than not) speaking about the same things (see Case study 1.2).
Despite much common ground, a single and straight forward definition about what constitutes âthe cityâ is difficult to capture in simple terms, and furthermore any attempt to sketch out and depict the development and trajectories of diverse, complicated and contested notions of what constitutes urban theory over the past couple of centuries is similarly problematic. In this section we respond to such a challenge, but in doing so acknowledge the limits to adequately synthesizing and summarizing what is, when read together, a vast collection of contributions. In highlighting key ideas and people we acknowledge that any review of the history of urban theory is incomplete. It says as much about us as the authors, as about the field of work we purport to represent. As the reader it is important that you are not seduced by any âneatâ depictions or clearly laid out âfamily treeâ of thinkers or genealogy of ideas â it is, in sum, impossible to capture the complexity and depth of urban theory in this short introductory book chapter, or indeed in a series of books. For many academics, understanding, engaging with and keeping up to date with the development of urban theory is a lifelong challenge for their professional careers. Moreover, for those of you seeking an introductory understanding, do not think that as new sets of approaches, critiques or ideas emerge past work is left behind or lost forever. There are lots of examples of difference co-existing, or of traditions that were once out of favour being rescued.
However, it is also important to note, that for a significant proportion of academics who write about cities, advancing or contributing to the development of urban theory is a minor or at best secondary concern. For example, the emphasis of many top-ranked urban studies journals that publish research and writing on cities is often weighed towards presenting empirical descriptions and explanations of practices and processes in cities. Similarly, highly popular textbooks aimed at students often tend to neglect the complexity and depth of interdisciplinary theoretical debate, instead identifying broad trends and key milestones in order perhaps to make content more accessible for readers. Many academic writers engaged in working beyond universities, and involved in policy and practice, may also not consider themselves to âdoâ theory at all. Of course, there are many other journals and textbooks that do indeed lead with theoretically complex and/or groundbreaking empirical evidence. Moreover, for those seeking to make theoretical work legible for diverse audiences, including students, policymakers and practitioners, a key concern of their work is to apply critical theory to make positive changes in our cities and the lives of their citizens. While we will touch on such concerns, histories and debates about the relevance of urban theory throughout this chapter, we now turn to a review of developments and trajectories of urban theory â while reminding you to have at the forefront of your mind the many possibilities and pitfalls that are bound up with such a project.
CASE STUDY 1.2 WHAT CONSTITUTES âTHE CITYâ
What do you think about when you think about âthe cityâ? Take a moment. What emotions, experiences, images, smells, sounds or words spring to mind? Lots, we are sure. The city is a complex mosaic, made up of probably everything you can think of â and more. However, despite popular and apparently shared understandings of what we understand to be a city, a consensus amongst urban theorists has been much more elusive.
Historically urban theorists differentiated the city, from towns or villages according to population size or density, built form, or economic, political or religious power. It was the concentration of people, living and working together, the agglomeration of buildings and infrastructure, institutions and organizations that defined urban spaces and places as cities, where a distinct âway of lifeâ emerged that was different from the âcountrysideâ. In other worlds the city was a physical space or territory, within which people and things in close proximity, with rhythms and tempos, led to the establishment of diverse and new urban cultures.
More recently, urban theorists have argued that distinctions between the rural and the urban have become irrelevant, or at least less relevant, and that the spread of urban life has led to the bleeding together of numerous cities, small towns, suburbs and so on to such a degree that it is more relevant to talk of city-regions, or globalized urban systems than discreet urban spaces. Such insights highlight how cities are not discrete bounded territories or individual settlements but, instead, that flows and juxtapositions, porosity and relational connectivity define urban life. As such, cities are now understood as existing in an era of increasingly geographic extended spatial flows â where relations stretch out across space. Cities now are considered as discontinuous, internally diverse, open and relational. In these terms all cities and expressions of territory are to varying degrees punctuated by and orchestrated thorough a myriad of non-territorial networks and relational webs of connectivity. Such insights suggest that if it ever was, it is now more difficult to offer a simple definition of âthe cityâ. Moreover, there is also a growing concern that urban theory has been overly dominated by a focus on a small number of large cities in Europe and North America, and that there is a need to develop a more comparative and cosmopolitan, inclusive and diverse urban theory if we are to better understand the proliferation of urban life around the world.
While great cities have existed throughout human history it was in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that industrial revolution and rapid urbanization in the global north generated larger and more physically, politically, economically, socially, culturally, spatially and infrastructurally complicated cities than had previously existed. The foundations of the city that we seek to know today were laid; the kinds of grand (and not so grand) buildings, work and home lives of urban residents, models of citizenship, transport, infrastructure, leisure activities, social structures, fashion, identities, politics, consumption, and problems of health and disease, congestion, poverty, crime, homelessness and social divisions that are familiar to us today began to emerge at that time. For example, the birth of the modern city led theorists to develop the argument that dominant rural traditions were being replaced by new distinct forms of living in cities. Sociologists were keen to identify how a social continuum linked different types of community cohesion and social relations in urban and rural areas. Writing tended to be underpinned by a nostalgic view of a declining rural way of life (Tönnies 1887; Durkheim 1893 [1964]; Simmel 1903). Durkheim, for instance, suggested that beliefs, customs, dynamics, norms and routines that had previously created social cohesion based on likenesses and similarities between individuals were being eroded by the emergence of city-states and an urban market economy where social bonds were dominated by specialization, or in other words, a new kind of urban solidarity based on mutual interdependence. Georg Simmel (1903: 15) also argued that as urban modernity flourished and expanded at a rapid pace, city dwellers developed a âblasĂ© attitudeâ and âaversion to strangersâ that could lead to conflict and tension. Such a blasĂ© attitude was described by Simmel as bystander indifference, founded on an abdication of responsibility and failure to care for our fellow citizens, leading to distanced people in cities. Many theorists at the time expressed the view that the newly developing city was cold, calculating and anonymous. For example, Engles (1844) highlighted how in the worldâs first industrial city, Manchester (UK), workers were exploited by capitalists and lived in inhuman conditions. It was also argued that, anonymity and a lack of social bonds relating to community, neighbourhood and kinship ensured life in these newly emerging cities was superficial and transitory, with urban citizens struggling to deal with alienation, anonymity and the isolation of the new modern city (Weber 1921; Wirth 1938; Durkheim 1893; Simmel 1903).
The urbanization of North America and the growing academic interest led to the establishment of the worldâs first Department of Sociology, in Chicago in 1892. Co-founders Robert E. Park and Ernest Burgess considered Chicago their âurban laboratoryâ and sought to explore how humans adapted to new formations of urban life. The Chicago Schoolâs enduring contribution to urban theory has been the development of models of urban and social structures that sought to explain how the emergence of mechanisms of market economies were constituted by physical and social organization of the city. Indeed, the most famous legacy of the Chicago School has been representations of city in diagrammatic forms to explain land use, phases of invasion and occupation, zones of transition, social segregation and so on. While the urban-modelling advanced by the Chicago school was later seen as grossly oversimplified, such work was, none the less, an important springboard for measuring, modelling and representing the city. Moreover, many of the ideas that drove the work of the Chicago School were influenced by now-discredited concepts derived from eugenics and social Darwinism, which were applied in order to depict how pathologies of social life related to an urban ecology of competition and survival. Indeed, Hubbard (2006: 26) argues that âseminal work of early sociologists on the psychosocial economies of urban space was later to inspire some relatively unsophisticated theories of the impact of the environment on behaviour specific forms of housing and criminal behaviour, health and moral virtue of dwellersâ. Such important critique not with standing, representations such as Burgessâs Concentric Zones Model and Hoytâs Sector Model are still the stuff of high-school classes. Moreover, despite some highly problematic theoretical foundations, the Chicago School importantly focused on what can be described as âmicro-sociologyâ and also pioneered methods, both of which have become mainstream academic activities today â participant observation and ethnographic techniques were utilized in order to study âurban subculturesâ such as gangs, homelessness and prostitution.
In Europe, social theorists were also theoretically engaged with the emergence of modern life and the cities that were beginning to form. For example, the Frankfurt School, set up in the early 1920s, founded by left-wing, middle-class German Jewish intellectuals took up the legacy of the writings of Karl Marx in order to advance understanding of social change. While not all thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School directly studied the city, their work has, none the less, had an enduring influence on urban theory. Writers such as Herbert Marcuse (1932) and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1947) advanced Marxâs concept of âalienationâ to emphasize how mass production of cultural artefacts such as music, fashion and literature produced a âculture industryâ that worked to integrate workers into capitalist society. They argued that the âculture industryâ led to a destruction of âgenuineâ folk culture through the mass standardization of production and consumption, and further that a transformation of everyday culture had taken place, where workers were willing to accept boredom and exploitation at work because they could escape during their leisure hours to enjoy art, music, fashion, shopping and so on.
Other members of the Frankfurt School applied such thinking to the development of the modern city in a more focused way. Walter Benjamin (1999), who undertook research on the emergence of shopping arcades in Paris during the 1920s to 1940s described the ideological imposition of âcommodity fetishismâ, which was a âtrickâ played by capitalism to disconnect the socially unjust conditions of the production of goods from the people consuming them, via their purchase in new spectacular urban spaces â shopping arcades â built using new technologies to construct grand âartificialâ covered shopping streets from glass and steel. Similarly, Siegfried Kracauer (1926) described the emergence of beautiful and grand new spaces of consumption such as theatres, libraries, town halls, cafes, department stores and so on as âmass ornamentationâ, where spectacular architectural design, fashion cultures and âwindow shoppingâ were examples of ludic pleasures of consumption that masked social inequalities (see Jayne 2005). While there has been significant criticism of the writing of the Frankfurt School for assuming that people were âmindless dupesâ buying into, rather than having a critical appreciation of, strategies of capital accumulation and the associated new urbanism, the ideas and topics studied by this influential group of scholars have had a long-standing influence on urban theory.
A further profoundly important thinker that began his writing career in parallel with the work of both the Frankfurt and Chicago Schools was Henri Lefebvre, a French sociologist and philosopher. Lefebvreâs illustrious career began to flourish with his âcritique of everyday lifeâ written in the 1930s. Also drawing on Marxist philosophy, Lefebvre argued that by colonizing everyday life, capitalism was able to reproduce itself. Working on similar terrain as members of the Frankfurt and Chicago Schools, Lefebvre discussed alienation, boredom, consumption, and the promises of freedom that emerged with increasing leisure time, which was increasingly shared across society. Lefebvre argued a consequence of the work and leisure rhythms of capitalism was reduced self-expression and a poorer quality of everyday life. Importantly, Lefebvreâs 1984 critique advanced previous urban theoretical debate through his work on everyday life, by arguing that it was the progressive development of the conditions of human life, rather than control of capitalist production, through which humans could achieve a socially just world. Lefebvreâs later work (1968, 1991), from the 1960s onwards, which had minimal impact at the time it was published has subsequently had profound influence on urban theory, focused on the âsocial production of spaceâ and the âright to the cityâ.
While urban sociology was advancing new understandings of the emergence of the modern city and developing ideas of how to facilitate progressive urban change, geographers focused on applying and advancing the traditions of modelling and measurement initiated by the Chicago School. For example, post-war urban geography sought to establish itself as a spatial science, with calculators and computers being used to produce models through tested and verifiable hypotheses. Geography, at the time, saw itself as a âhard scienceâ of the city, where mathematics and statistics underpinned a quantitative approach to studying urban life. In stark contrast to cutting-edge sociological urbanism, urban geographers were focused on âaccuracy and rigorâ. This lent itself to applied writing and findings that provided âobjectiveâ and âvalue-freeâ perspectives that were particularly influential in urban planning and policy formation. Scientific concepts and methods allowed theoretical projects to model land use, migration and land values, residential behaviour and spatial arrangement, size, and number of settlements, hierarchi...
