Galactic City Model

3 Key excerpts on "Galactic City Model"

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  eBook - ePub

  New Jersey

  A Geography

  • Charles A. Stansfield(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  constellation of cities, satellites, and suburbs was forming, the original megalopolis. Gottmann believed that this northeastern megalopolis was the forerunner of many others, and he was right.

  The most recent phase of centrifugal tendency in urban functions and among urbanites is that examined in northeastern New Jersey, but present throughout the state and nation. Geographer Peirce Lewis terms this highly dispersed phenomenon the galactic city, an intermingled sprawl of urban functions and urban-economy participants with open countryside. In this galactic city, there is a virtually universal dispersal of characteristically urban activities and people through low-density rural areas as well as medium- and high-density, more traditional, urban-suburban forms. The once tightly bounded, compact city appears to have exploded outward, flinging people and functions into its outer hinterland and, at the same time, loosening up the former concentration in the core. The line between city and countryside, in the process of blurring for more than a century, is now almost invisible. Rather than a line, there is a very wide, and widening, amorphous zone of transition. If the urban-rural boundary could be objectively identified, it would have little significance, economically or culturally. Pieces of the city, or rather the functions of the city, have been flung far out from the old cores; manufacturing enterprises, warehouses, various services, retailing, and resort activities are found scattered, seemingly randomly, over a huge urban-suburban hinterland. While commuting is still a way of life, commuting is much less certain to be from suburb to central city. Just as likely, commuting takes place from suburb to suburb, countryside to suburb, and even city to suburb.

  Imagine a simple diagram of average population density showing density changes from the central core to the furthermost suburbs. In the early nineteenth century, the density curve would have been more vertical than horizontal, with a steep decline in population density outward from the center. This curve would have begun to flatten when the trend toward suburban residence, pioneered by the wealthy, was democratized by the horsecar and electric trolley, producing compact, high-density suburbs at the same time that railroad commuting permitted more affluent urbanites to move to more-distant suburbs. The eventual drop to low rural densities would occur farther away from the city center.

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  Cities, State and Globalisation

  City-Regional Governance in Europe and North America

  • Tassilo Herrschel(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  implement agreed strategic objectives ‘on the (local) ground’. This duality between strategic, more or less ‘virtual’, spaces, and ‘real’ governmental (state) territories, has been addressed and articulated in different ways over the last two or so decades, although concerns about how to govern metropolitan(ised) regions go farther back, to the beginning of the twentieth century, when the industrialisation–fuelled rapid growth of cities into urbanised regions was seen as first and foremost a challenge to the ability to regulate, plan and govern these new phenomena which so blatantly ignored existing administrative boundaries, territories and institutional responsibilities (Geddes 1915; Mumford, 1938). Geddes pointed to the challenge faced by the city to reconcile local individuality with broader ‘civilization’ as conditioning context, of which cities are a part of, and function as ‘the specialized organ of social transmission’ (quoted in Mumford 1938: 7) This ‘transmission’ function reflects the inherent inter-scalar position that cities occupy in the vertical organisation of the state. Gottmann’s concept of megalopolis (Gottmann and Harper 1990), seeking to capture the continuous urban landscape between Boston and Washington in the USA, as already well established in the 1950s, epitomises the emerging, then new, urban regionalism and the concern with its nature and governability in the early twentieth century.

  Debates on urbanised regions – or city-regions – have thrown up the contrast between the two main approaches to the interrogation and explanation of city-regions in their economic and governmental rationalities and modi operandi, and associated forms and mechanisms of governing them: (1) a ‘strong’, quite conventional option of a fundamental, top-down instigated territorial and institutional reorganisation of governmental hierarchy and scalar territorial responsibilities; and (2) a much ‘softer’, so-called ‘new regionalist’ (Hettne and Söderbaum 2000) option of using virtual spaces as first and foremost conceptual–strategic spatial rescaling of perspectives and relations between existing

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  Doing Global Urban Research

  • John Harrison, Michael Hoyler, John Harrison, Michael Hoyler, Author(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Alongside new theories and concepts, the emerging paradigm of planetary urbanization is also driving forward important developments as we think through how best to do planetary urban research. New methods of cartographic investigation, geospatial analysis and visualization are forming an important part of the work examining the planetary urban. While terms such as the Urbanthropocene (Luke, 2014) try to highlight the expansive reach and complex nature of urbanization processes, continuous technological advancements in remote sensing, data science and Geographic Information Systems promise that their unprecedented dimensions can be thoroughly understood, charted, and eventually adequately managed (Potere and Schneider, 2007; Solecki et al., 2013). As grasping the multi-scalar urbanization processes becomes increasingly important to questions of uneven social and ecological development, the proliferation of new tools and methodologies of visualizing the planetary urban offers exciting new potentials.

  However, while technical and quantitative advancements in visualizing the planetary urban are necessary, they are on their own largely insufficient to fully grasp the complexities of urbanization processes, as long as they are limited by a particular conceptualization of the urban: a conceptualization framed around the condition of agglomerations in their various forms (city, metropolis, megalopolis), primarily focusing on their socio-spatial configuration (growth, expansion, economic and demographic performance) and their relationships with each other (networks of cities, polycentric urban regions). This conceptualization has led to a paradoxical condition. While the importance of the relationship of agglomerations to the rest of the planetary terrain is widely recognized, it is poorly understood. Moreover, when it is considered, it is often framed through an unproductive binarism, that of the urban world exercising some sort of influence over its rural surroundings (Seto et al., 2012; Seitzinger et al., 2012). A summary of this understanding is offered by an introductory statement of the UN-Habitat agenda on ‘the global context’: cities, although covering no more than 2% of the total land area, host the majority of the world population and contribute around 70% of world GDP. At the same time, they absorb over 60% of global energy resources, and generate more than 70% of greenhouse gas emissions and 70% of global waste (UN-Habitat, 2016). In short, the urban world is a small percentage of the earth’s surface where the majority of the population is concentrated (Burdett and Sudjic, 2007; UN, 2012), characterized by the ability to contribute economic surpluses (Glaeser, 2011; Florida, 2012), but also ecological deficits, which are sourced and spread upon a great external, rural world of sparsely populated areas of low productivity (Rees and Wackernagel, 1996; Seto et al., 2010).

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