The City: The Basics

Kevin Archer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136193200
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The City: The Basics provides a brief yet compelling overview of the study of cities and city life. The book draws on a range of perspectives – economic, political, cultural, and environmental aspects are all considered – to provide a broad comparison of the evolution of cities in the rich Global North and the poorer Global South. Topics covered in the book include:

• a brief history of cities from ancient times to the post-modern present
• the differences between "global cities" in the North and "megacities" in the South
• the environmental impact of urban life and the idea of sustainable cities
• urban planning, urban politics and urban poverty.

Featuring suggestions for further reading, recommended websites and a number of maps and illustrations, this is the ideal starting point for those interested in any aspect of cities or urban studies.

1

Cities and City Life

For the first time in human history, most people now live in cities. This urbanization of the world’s population is predicted to continue, even intensify, in the years ahead. According to one estimate, by 2020, global population will reach 8.1 billion and only 37 percent of this total will live in rural areas. The pace of city growth is especially rapid in poorer countries of the Global South, particularly in Asia and Africa, where the urban population is expected to double between 2000 and 2030. Indeed, a recent report by the United Nations estimates that by 2030, cities of the Global South will account for as much as 81 percent of the world’s urban population. It is clear, then, that the urban condition, across the planet, is fast becoming the human condition.

In addition to describing the historical and contemporary processes behind these trends in global urbanization, this book is an attempt to determine, in broad overview, what this latter assertion means. In what ways does life in the city differ from that in rural areas? If it does, what are the differences and in what ways do these differences matter for the human condition, now and in the future? Some have argued, for example, that life in cities is so significantly distinct that it represents a whole new form of social relations demanding, in turn, new ways of thinking about one’s neighbors, one’s self, and one’s place in a greater community. If this is the case, then it behooves those concerned about the global human condition to figure out just what the implications may be of such rapid urbanization on a planetary scale.

To study “the city” in this way it is necessary to take an interdisciplinary, holistic approach. There is nothing out there in reality that is the city “economy” that is not already related to city “politics,” city “culture,” even to the city’s natural “environment.” Inner-city poverty in the United States, for example, has as much to do with policy-making or a culture of insecurity as it does with job creation and markets. Similarly, a world of hyper-wealthy cities and hyper-poor cities did not just appear as a result of some natural economic evolution but, rather, as a historical legacy of political oppression and economic exploitation on a global scale. While the following chapters of this book focus specifically on one or another of these aspects of the city, this essential interrelationship among them needs to be kept in mind if one is to come to a comprehensive understanding of the city. At the same time, one needs to avoid reifying the “city” as if it were an active agent itself. The “city” does not “do” anything or act in certain ways but, rather, city people do, in various ways with various results.

City and Country

The initial thing to notice about cities is that they consist of relatively large and densely packed groups of people crowded into small pieces of territory. This is at once a fundamental change from rural life where small groups of people sparsely occupy rather large territories. From this quite obvious beginning arise several less obvious characteristics of city life. First, this large group of city-people somehow must find a way to feed itself. The limited territorial extent of the city precludes the possibility of feeding all from within. Second, the fact that we are talking about a relatively large group of people means that the population of the city cannot consist solely of extended family members or a few well-known neighbors. Rather, it is a population of relative strangers, difficult, if not impossible, to get to know on anything more than a limited basis. In this social context, it is difficult to know who to trust or to whom to delegate decision-making authority for the whole. Third, this dense population of relative strangers necessarily includes individuals from all classes, rich and poor, coming from different villages, near and far, with different, and sometimes very different, customs. Because of close proximity in the city, it is difficult, if not impossible, to avoid interacting with such social and cultural strangers. And such interaction necessarily produces reflection on, even a questioning of, one’s own social station and what appropriate cultural norms and customs might be.

Already, this overly brief account sets one on the path to thinking about some distinguishing characteristics of city life. In the chapters that follow, these characteristics will be discussed in more depth in terms of the specific economic, political, and cultural traits of cities. Before turning to these, however, it is necessary to highlight one further thing with regard to cities of increasing importance in the world today. This fourth aspect concerns the relation of cities to the natural environment. City populations necessarily build dense configurations of material and relatively permanent living, working, and symbolic monuments. Such monuments replace or otherwise extremely modify the nature of the place. Similarly, large, tightly packed human populations on small territories not only need food to survive, but also water for drinking, cleansing, producing goods, and flushing waste. Occupying such a small territory, city populations also need someplace, and increasingly someplace else, to dispose of their material wastes. Cities thus have a significant ecological impact which cannot be ignored and which some argue makes them inherently unsustainable as modes of human life. That this may be the case will also be explored in this book. Here, suffice it to say that if cities are, indeed, environmentally unsustainable, then the fact that the planet is so rapidly urbanizing should be cause for great concern for everyone. Again, this small book is intended as a broad overview of just what might be at stake in this respect.

The Global Spread of Cities

Since the Agricultural Revolution, when much of humankind stopped being predominantly hunters and gatherers, there have always been cities in the world. However, since the Western Renaissance (ca. 1250), the nature of city development changed and, indeed, cities began to spring up and develop on a regular basis first throughout Europe and then in the non-Western world as a result of European exploration and eventual domination. Unlike earlier cities which emerged and grew, if they did, essentially on the basis of religious or political reasons, the emergence and growth of cities after the Renaissance became more a function of changes taking place in the economic life of countries. As a result of Western imperialism after 1492, a world system of economic development centered on Europe emerged in which cities around the world were either developed or reoriented in order to facilitate the functioning of the system as a whole.

Contemporary city life both in the Global South and the Global North reflects this historical spread of Western economic domination. To understand today’s cities it is thus necessary to look more closely and critically at this history, as will be done throughout the chapters of this book. Indeed, some argue that the economies of cities in the Global South remain in a neocolonial relationship in the still Western-dominated world-system, which continues to hinder their development even after formal imperial relations have ceased to exist. This explains, it is argued, why post-colonial cities have not and, in fact, will never achieve what has been called global city status in the world economy. Cities in the Global South, according to this view, will always remain economically dependent upon the Global North and such truncated development explains why ever-larger megacities in poorer countries is not an indication of economic success as much as failure. In fact, such megacities are really an example of over-urbanization or city growth that is out of all possible control or regulation, whether in social or environmental ter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Cities and City Life
• 2. Cities as the Source of Civilization
• 3. From Trading to Industrial Cities
• 4. From Industrial to Post-Industrial Cities
• 5. City Economics
• 6. City Politics
• 7. City Culture
• 8. City Environment
• 9. City Planning
• 10. City Futures
• Glossary
• Index