The Urban Geography Reader

NICK FYFE, JUDITH KENNY, NICK FYFE, JUDITH KENNY

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429603860
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias físicas
• Subtopic: Geografía

Drawing on a rich diversity of theoretical approaches and analytical strategies, urban geographers have been at the forefront of understanding the global and local processes shaping cities, and of making sense of the urban experiences of a wide variety of social groups. Through their links with those working in the fields of urban policy design, urban geographers have also played an important role in the analysis of the economic and social problems confronting cities.

Capturing the diversity of scholarship in the field of urban geography, this reader presents a stimulating selection of articles and excerpts by leading figures. Organized around seven themes, it addresses the changing economic, social, cultural, and technological conditions of contemporary urbanization and the range of personal and public responses. It reflects the academic importance of urban geography in terms of both its theoretical and empirical analysis as well as its applied policy relevance, and features extensive editorial input in the form of general, section and individual extract introductions.

Bringing together in one volume 'classic' and contemporary pieces of urban geography, studies undertaken in the developed and developing worlds, and examples of theoretical and applied research, it provides in a convenient, student-friendly format, an unparalleled resource for those studying the complex geographies of urban areas.

Part One

Foundations

German immigrants in front of their boarding house in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (late 1880s). (Courtesy of Judith Kenny)

Introduction to Part One

Why consider urban scholarship that pre-dates the end of World War II? Students generally acknowledge the need to pay some attention to their discipline’s academic history. In the case of the following four articles, however, such attention goes beyond “paying one’s (disciplinary) dues” since, in various ways, each has influenced urban geography for over six decades. Although only two were written by geographers, reference to all four may be found in the first textbooks devoted to the subdiscipline and in the majority of today’s introductory texts. For their continued visibility, we might title this section “the pioneers” in recognition of the scholars who produced them – or “the classics” in deference to the texts’ perennial presence. Instead, the section is titled “Foundations” to acknowledge that during the mid-part of the twentieth century there was a point at which geographers deliberately constructed a new subfield devoted to the analysis of urban areas, and those urban geographers viewed these articles as worthy of study.

Although their impact on the development of urban geography cannot be disputed, consideration of the continued significance of these four texts requires individual examination. Even after such an examination, given the array of themes and approaches contained within urban geography today, a lively debate would follow as to their place in the discipline. Those debates are reflected in the themes of the later sections. While urban geographers may be committed to a progressive discipline, they continue to engage in the literature of the past whether: to extend urban theory associated with the earlier writings; or more likely, to contrast contemporary conditions with historical ones, including the assumptions of earlier schools of thought; and/or to acknowledge the consequence of geographic thought on contemporary and current policy and the construction of knowledge. We engage this literature for various reasons, but certainly they have contributed basic vocabulary and metaphors to our ongoing discussion of urban patterns and process.

Placing these influential articles in context requires recognition of the particular time and specific place associated with the emergence of the subfield. Urban geography developed in the late 1940s from a timely mix of traditional geography, the influence of the Chicago School of Sociology, and contemporary responses to city planning, and emerged as a systematic area of study in the 1950s with the modernist goals of contemporary social sciences (Taaffe 1990: 422). For this first generation of American and British urban geographers, Readings in Urban Geography (Mayer and Kohn 1959) is the text that defined the new subfield of urban geography during their student careers. In their Introduction to this pivotal text, editors Harold Mayer (1916–1994) and Clyde Kohn (1911–1989) describe the field as “now at a stage at which some of its concepts and generalizations have been clearly formulated and a large number of hypotheses [are] stated as bases for further investigation” (1). Furthermore, they announce, they are emphasizing concepts and theories instead of the descriptive approaches of the past. The Mayer and Kohn Reader pulled together several strands of work into a dominantly spatial framework, thus outlining the basic structure of urban geography that persisted in the university curriculum well into the 1980s.

Indicative of the “accelerating rate at which the field of urban geography is advancing,” Mayer and Kohn claim that much of the scholarship generated prior to 1945 had been superseded by more recent contributions drawing on new theoretical formulations, more sophisticated methods, and newly developed modern techniques. Yet the earlier work of land economist Homer Hoyt, and that of geographers Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman, met their standard of evaluation and were included in the volume, while sociologist Ernest Burgess’ influence was present through a borrowing of his concentric zone model.

Borrowing, as we shall see, is a process that greatly contributed to the development of the new subdiscipline. The fact that this is the only section in The Urban Geography Reader that contains work by non-geographers underscores the significance of the field’s net borrowing at its inception. Although the four authors included here did not share the same disciplinary background, they did share the same geographic location. Each of these pioneers of urban spatial theory is associated with the University of Chicago which undoubtedly facilitated borrowing, and raises interesting questions about both the sociology of knowledge and efforts to define disciplinary boundaries (see Entriken 1980).

Early twentieth-century industrial Chicago figured prominently in the development of urban theory, serving as the iconic North American model for urbanization and the site of fieldwork for members of the Chicago School of Sociology. Burgess’ “The Growth of the City,” the first essay in this section, exemplifies the seminal work on the social structure of the city conducted by members of the Chicago School. Not only did “The Growth of the City” produce one of the most famous models in social science, but the volume in which it was originally published – The City (1925) edited by Chicago School members Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Roderick McKenzie – also had enormous influence. As geographer Michael Dear recently observed, The City still “retains a tremendous vitality far beyond its interest as a historical document” (2003: 500). This vitality corresponds, Dear argues, to the book’s expression of the modernist analytical paradigm applied to the urban condition, which remained popular for most of the twentieth century and, arguably, well into the twenty-first. The assumptions that underpin this paradigm include: the linear progress of society that evolves from traditional to modern and with that progression, a changing construction of social relations; an agency-based interpretation of urban process with individuals’ choices, rather than structural constraints, explaining the urban condition; and the concept of the city as a unified whole in which the center organizes the hinterland.

Burgess’ essay incorporates each of these assumptions into his explanation of both the pattern and process of growth in a concentric zone model. The appealing simplicity of Burgess’ model may explain the fascination that has gripped generations of geographers and other social scientists who continue to contemplate concentric zones of land use despite numerous critiques of Burgess’ evaluation of urban pattern and process. It is an interesting comment about the history of the subdiscipline that in one of the first urban geography textbooks, Robert Dickinson (1947) wrote that the pattern applied specifically to early twentieth-century, industrial Chicago. By the 1950s, however, the systematic approach of successive urban geography texts generalized its significance beyond that of Chicago.

Arguably, Burgess’ concentric zone model has heuristic value in examining portions of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century North American cities. Even when considering portions of Los Angeles, viewed by many as the urban opposite of Burgess’ model, Ed Soja (1989) uses the vocabulary of zones and sectors to describe certain, older sections of the city. For the most part, however, the Chicago School and the concentric ring model has become the foil for which contemporary geographers critique urban theory related to the early twentieth-century city. Dear and Flusty (p. 138), as well as Soja, discuss the Chicago School’s conception of the city to underscore how a postmodern view of urban process shifts away significantly from modernist perspectives on the city. Others, such as Walker and Lewis (p. 121), underscore the failings of the Chicago School model of urban growth in explaining even early twentieth-century metropolitan areas, by noting that its emphasis on the city’s social geography obscures the operation of the American city’s political economy and the early suburbanization of industry.

In 1939, economist Homer Hoyt developed a revised version of Burgess’ model theorizing urban growth as a star-shaped, rather than concentric, pattern of development as land use radiated out from the urban center along transportation corridors. His sector theory, based on his attention to the residential real estate market, emphasized that once variations in land values arise, similar land use patterns persist as a city expands. The Federal Housing Administration commissioned this study, the results of which were published in The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities (1939). The second essay that follows in this section is drawn from his 1939 study because it describes both the concept of “filtering” in the housing market as wealthier property owners sought the novelty of new development, and the relationship between socio-economic characteristics of residential populations and the stability of neighborhoods. As discussions of gentrification and urban form in later sections remind us (see Smith, p. 128, Bondi, p. 251, and Ley, p. 304), Hoyt’s model reflected contemporary trends rather than a universal principle for the housing market. Reflecting the influence of human ecology on British social geography, however, attention to urban residential patterns was sustained through the 1960s in Britain. Mann adjusted Hoyt’s and Burgess’ models to correspond to the British city in 1965, while the primary focus of urban geographic research in the United States shifted to a neoclassical economic inspired location theory (see Johnston 1971).

Although Hoyt’s sector model was viewed as progress in theorizing the internal structure of the city, the impact of his work was experienced more widely because of its influence on the interpretation of changing housing markets. As the Federal Housing Administration’s transmittal letter stated, it was deemed a useful “guide to the development of housing and the creation of a sound mortgage market” (iii). Perhaps the most influential land economist of his era, Hoyt’s study had profound impacts on American housing assessment practice and thus on the geography of metropolitan areas for an extended period, since it favored new construction and inscribed social and racial prejudice in lending practices. Published research reflects contemporary priorities and perspectives for society, and Hoyt’s work powerfully underscores the potential immediate and long-term impact of research on policies and programs that shape the urban environment – with all of its consequences (see Jackson 1985).

The empirical requirements of Hoyt’s theorizing presented employment opportunities for a number of Chicago geographers during the late Depression years. Hoyt was appointed Director of Research for the Chicago Plan Commission in 1939, which employed Harold Mayer, among others, to compile a land use survey. Mayer, later editor of the first urban geography reader, was then a graduate student at the University of Chicago along with fellow students Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman. As Mayer reminisced in 1990, the relationship between urban geography and urban planning at this time was particularly close and would further shape the nature of the new subdiscipline in its applied and economic-oriented direction.

Edward Ullman, author of the third essay in this section and co-author of the fourth, was one of the most influential geographers working during the early development of urban geography. In “A Theory of Location for Cities,” Ullman brought the work of German geographer Walter Christaller to the attention of English-speaking geographers. Christaller’s central place theory introduced concern for the geographic structure among cities rather than the structure within a single city. Ullman was a doctoral student reflecting upon the regular spatial pattern he had observed in the cities of Iowa when he “discovered” Christaller’s book on the system of service centers in southern Germany. Ullman credited his discovery of Christaller to the German land economist August Losch (Harris 1977: 597). Losch not only facilitated the diffusion of Christaller’s work but also produced a comparable spatial theory oriented to the distribution of manufacturing centers soon after (1940).

Ullman ascribed to Christaller’s central place theory significance for an interpretation of settlement distribution comparable to the concentric zone theory’s contribution to the interpretation of land use within cities. Such high praise reflected the desire to develop generalizations for a discipline focused on location theory. Christaller himself had sought to complement Von Thunen’s location theory on agricultural land use around market centers (1826) and Alfred Weber’s theory of industrial location (1909). As he built on a tradition within the German social sciences, however, Christaller rejected traditional geographical methods of inquiry focused on empirical evidence and emphasized instead the development of theory based on logic that could then be “confronted with reality” (Berry and Harris 1970: 116). This vision of the discipline presaged the development of geography as a spatial science during the 1950s. Despite Ullman’s early efforts to set a new direction for geographic research, however, Christaller’s research was not fully recognized among English-speaking geographers until the rise of the “Washington School” in the 1960s (see Johnston 1997: 66–70).

In the final essay of this section, Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman not only address the nature of cities but they outline a framework for urban geography itself by summarizing two general categories of patterns and relationships for analysis – systems of cities and the system within a city. The relationships that they are interested in are primarily economic and, as they explicitly and confidently state, the purpose of that knowledge is to assist in planning the future of cities.

Despite this optimism, the multi-nuclei model that they offer as a reflection of a growing fragmentation of the metropolitan area suggests greater unpredictability than is found in either Burgess’ or Hoyt’s...