Cities, Change, and Conflict

A Political Economy of Urban Life

Nancy Kleniewski, Alexander R. Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429663178
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Cities, Change, and Conflict was one of the first texts to embrace the perspective of political economy as its main explanatory framework, and then complement it with the rich contributions found in the human ecology perspective. Although its primary focus is on North American cities, the book contains several chapters on cities in other parts of the world, including Europe and developing nations, providing both historical and contemporary accounts on the impact of globalization on urban development.

This edition features new coverage of important recent developments affecting urban life, including the implications of racial conflict in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere, recent presidential urban strategies, the new waves of European refugees, the long-term impacts of the Great Recession as seen through the lens of Detroit's bankruptcy, new and emerging inequalities, and an extended look into Sampson's Great American City.

Beyond examining the dynamics that shape the form and functionality of cities, the text surveys the experience of urban life among different social groups, including immigrants, African Americans, women, and members of different social classes. It illuminates the workings of the urban economy, local and federal governments, and the criminal justice system, and also addresses policy debates and decisions that affect almost every aspect of urbanization and urban life.

PART I

Thinking About Cities

CHAPTER 1

Examining Urban Issues

The city magnifies, spreads out, and advertises human nature in all its various manifestations. It is this that makes the city interesting, even fascinating. It is this, however, that makes it of all places the one in which to discover the secrets of human hearts, and to study human nature and society.

Robert E. Park: “The City as a Social Laboratory”

This book is about cities, one of the most widespread features of modern life. Cities are exciting, vital, and diverse—sometimes to the point of bewilderment. They contain the sights, sounds, and smells of humanity and the many products of human activity. People seek cities for jobs, to buy goods, to have experiences, and to be with other people. They are also places where the inequalities of wealth and poverty, the contradictions of growth and deterioration, the contrasts between social cooperation and competition are evident on a daily basis. Cities contain, in magnified form, many of the best—and worst—features of our society.

This chapter is an introduction to the kinds of questions and issues that will be raised later on; it is a sampler, preview, and synopsis of some major issues in urban sociology. In this chapter, we will begin by exploring two issues:

1 How do we North Americans regard cities, and how do we define cities?

2 What does it mean to study cities from the perspective of political economy?

After discussing these two issues, we will analyze contemporary urban issues as previews of some of the important points we will explore in more depth later in the book.

WHAT ARE CITIES?

Maybe it’s the rush as you exit the Allston toll plaza in Boston and see the entire skyline in front of you, or the thrill of the Chicago skyline as you enter the “loop” from I-290, or Los Angeles as seen from I-10. Or it may be the sense of smallness you experience as you emerge from the Midtown Tunnel in Manhattan or walk toward City Hall on Market Street in Philadelphia. It could be the irritation of traffic as you travel the Washington Beltway or circle Atlanta on I-285. Cities exasperate and exhilarate. We all think we know what they are, but do we?

Cities are defined in many different ways, but the definitions that most people know are cultural definitions. A cultural definition is a social construction of what people in a given society think of as a “city,” and as such cities vary from place to place and from time to time. At the end of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance, King Gilgamesh looks upon the walls of his home city of Uruk with great pride: for people in ancient Mesopotamia 3,000 years ago, the city wall was the symbol of urban greatness. In contrast, many nineteenth-century paintings of American cities highlight not the city wall—there were none—but the great smokestacks and plumes of soot reaching into the atmosphere. Although today most Americans would see such a scene as a symbol of environmental degradation, at the time, it was perceived as a symbol of industrial and urban greatness.

The task of the sociologist interested in researching the city is to define the city with enough precision to distinguish between individual cities and between cities and non-cities. Although our cultural concepts are important in generating such definitions, we nevertheless find that there is no one satisfactory way to define the city. Consider, for instance, a metropolitan area of about one million people, such as Tucson, Arizona; Rochester, New York; or Salt Lake City, Utah. A visitor from one of the three largest metropolitan areas, New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago, respectively, might perceive each of these cities to be quite small and unsatisfying. In contrast, someone who grew up in a small agricultural town might find them to be large and exciting. In other words, the cultural definition of a city depends in part on where an individual was raised. This complicates the definition of a “city” for social science research. Nevertheless, there are ways of discussing cities that account for the subjectivity inherent in such an exercise.

The Urban–Rural Continuum

One way of accounting for the subjectivity inherent in defining cities is to place settlements on a continuum of developed versus undeveloped space called the urban–rural continuum. At the rural end of the continuum are spaces that have not been developed at all, such as open prairie, forest, and desert environments. Their opposite at the urban end of the continuum are spaces that are completely developed, as in such urbanized environments as downtown Chicago’s “loop” and Midtown Manhattan. These are spaces where nearly every inch has been planned and developed as part of the city, even in parks such as Grant Park in Chicago and Central Park in New York. Between the most urban and most rural spaces are the vast majority of places where people live. Agricultural towns are rural, for instance, but normally have a small village that in its fundamental landscape is urban. Smaller cities and large towns typically extend their development over large areas but are also surrounded by agricultural landscapes.

Sociologists refer to the differing types of development found in urban and rural areas as “combined and uneven development” (O’Connor 1998). Derived from a Marxist perspective, this refers to the tendency of economic development to take place in certain areas, such as manufacturing in cities and agriculture in rural places. The level of wealth is typically affected by the pattern of development, and historically urban areas have had more concentrated wealth than rural areas. Within metropolitan areas, however, the pattern of wealth distribution can vary considerably (Lobao, Hooks, and Tickamyer 2007). In some metropolitan areas, for instance, downtown areas and suburbs attract considerable wealth—this is evident by a stroll through New York’s Upper East Side and a drive through its wealthy suburbs in Westchester County. In other metropolitan areas, however, much of the wealth is found primarily in the ring of suburbs surrounding the city, such as in metropolitan Detroit.

The concentration of development, both economic and residential, that characterizes cities is a central concept in defining cities. One economic characteristic of a city is that it exhibits economies of scale. This means that as the size of a place, just as the size of a company or other economic unit, increases, the cost per unit of providing services decreases. In cities, this often refers to certain types of municipal services. For instance, assuming that the cost of maintaining a mile of roadway is constant, the higher the number of taxpayers paying to maintain the road, the lower the cost is for each individual taxpayer. If mile A of a highway has 100 taxpayers and mile B has only fifty, it would cost taxpayers of mile A half as much per year for maintenance as mile B taxpayers. Companies in cities also benefit from economies of scale, and this is evident in the fact that very large cities also tend to have very large supermarkets and very large malls. The scale of a city is also related to such issues as crime, cultural creativity, and entrepreneurialism with larger cities often (but not always) attracting more of each (Bettencourt, Lobo, Hebling, Kühnert, and West 2007).

Cities also exhibit economies of agglomeration. This refers to the benefits that accrue to companies located in cities where similar firms also exist. For instance, the American automobile industry has historically been concentrated in the region near Detroit, Michigan. Although the “big three” automakers—Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors—compete against one another, being concentrated near one another gives each firm access to a specialized workforce and suppliers competing for their business. Similar concentrations of industry are found in such metropolitan areas as San Francisco (computers) and Seattle (aerospace). We will examine this further in Chapter 4.

Cities are not simply places of business and residence, however. Cities are also “nodes” in a global network of cities, each interconnected to the other through the various transactions that characterize human life, whether financial, cultural, or otherwise (Sassen 2002). In fact, cities have always been characterized by a “global” system. The earliest cities were participants in a “global” system that extended from southern Mesopotamia, in present-day Iraq, to what is today southern Turkey (Algaze 1993). The system included a relatively well-developed urban economy centered on the cities of southern Mesopotamia, the largest of which was Uruk at nearly 50,000 residents, and a wider region with which people traded manufactured goods for raw materials. A similar system was found during the Middle Ages in Europe that set the stage not only for modern nation-states but for the current global economy (Sassen 2008). In our current global system, almost the entire planet is a participant, but the basic structure is similar. There are at the top of the hierarchy global cities, the “big three” being New York, London, and Tokyo (Sassen 2001). There are also cities of a national or regional importance, and further down the hierarchy cities of a more local importance. Smaller towns and agricultural villages are also part of the global system. This hierarchy of places with the global system exhibits a rank-size order. According to Zipf’s Law, the population of a town multiplied by its rank will be equal to the population of the largest city in a nation or territory (Auerbach 1913). For instance, the population of Los Angeles (population 3,834,340 in 2007), the nation’s second largest city, is about half of the population of the nation’s largest city, New York (population 8,274,527 in 2007). In many regions, however, particularly in developing nations, there is a very sharp drop off in population after the largest city, a condition called primacy, in which case the largest city is referred to as a primate city.

The rank-size order of a given region or country is in part the result of the function of a city in the wider political and economic system. Cities typically act as administrative centers for both government and private economic firms that are networks across a society. For example, New York City is the global city par excellence, and its suburbs are spread across multiple counties in four different states. New York is orders of magnitude larger than Philadelphia and Boston, cities of national importance that are also the “cultural capitals” of their own regions of Pennsylvania and New England, respectively. Within New York State, there are several large metropolitan areas that administer their own particular regions, such as Albany (New York’s capital) and Buffalo. There are also a number of smaller metropolitan areas that have their own spheres of influence, plus a number of small towns and agricultural villages, that function to bring goods and services from the global economy to the local level and send goods and services produced at the local level into the wider global economy.

Cities typically provide central place functions to the people who live in the surrounding area (Christaller 1966 [1933]). A small agricultural village, for instance, may have a gas station, a hardware store, a supermarket, a bank, a post office, and perhaps a few retail shops. According to central place theory, certain places provide services that are important to the overall functioning of a system, and those places that provide these “higher order” services tend to have more population and a larger market. If we consider that an agricultural village may provide a limited number of functions to its residents, then those residents must travel to other places for higher order services, and this relationship is found in places across the urban–rural continuum. For instance, a small metropolitan area might provide most of the shopping that an individual will want, but some items might only be available in a very large metropolitan area. Consider that car dealerships are everywhere but Ferrari dealerships are located in only the largest metropolitan areas.

Since 2008, a majority of the world’s population lives in cities, a stark contrast to the past when most people lived in rural areas (Wimberly, Fulkerson, and Morris 2007). In modern societies like the United States, up to 80 percent of the population lives in cities and their suburbs. People in cities and their suburbs typically exhibit urbanism: the social psychological effects of living in proximity to a large number of other people (Wirth 1938). Residents of urban areas have social interactions that, from the perspective of residents of rural areas, tend to be impersonal, utilitarian, and transitory. As such, a high proportion of modern societies live in cities and suburbs, the dominant cultures of such societies typically exhibit urbanormativity: the general view of urban life as normal and real. Urban in this context does not refer specifically to the culture of cities per se, but rather that the lifestyles and cultural attitudes of people who live in such societies express a belief in the dominance, and even superiority, of urban institutions (Thomas, Lowe, Fulkerson, and Smith 2011; Fulkerson and Thomas 2014).

TABLE 1.1 The Ten Largest Cities and Combined Statistical Areas in the United States, 2010

City	Population	CSA	Population
1. New York	8,175,133	1. New York	23,076,664
2. Los Angeles	3,792,621	2. Los Angeles	17,877,006
3. Chicago	2,695,598	3. Chicago	9,840,929
4. Houston	2,100,263	4. Washington–Baltimore	9,051,961
5. Philadelphia	1,526,006	5. San Jose–San Francisco	8,153,696
6. Phoenix	1,445,632	6. Boston–Worcester	7,893,376
7. San Antonio	1,327,407	7. Dallas–Fort Worth	6,817,483
8. San Diego	1,307,402	8. Philadelphia	7,067,807
9. Dallas	1,197,816	9. Miami	6,166,766
10. San Jose	945,942	10. Houston	6,114,562

Source: U.S. Census Bureau 2014.

Defining Cities

Defining the city is a difficult task, not only because of cultural definitions and the continuum of types of urban places, but because the sociological definition is by its nature imprecise (Thomas 2012). Corporate boundaries typically do not encompass the entire developed area of a city, for instance, and so most cities have surrounding urbanized regions referred to as suburbs. As such, using the legal definition of a city wil...