Urban Geography

10 Key excerpts on "Urban Geography"

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  Cities In Space

  City as Place

  • Prof David Herbert, Dr Colin Thomas(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • David Fulton Publishers

    (Publisher)

  Space, Figure 1.2 Subdisciplines of human geography for example, was central to the positive science of spatial analysis, place is the key concept for a humanistic and cultural approach, and environment was both a focus of earlier approaches and a new concern of studies of the sustainable city. A definition of Urban Geography, developed with reference to the discipline as a whole and recent experience of actual research, is Urban Geography studies the patterns and processes which occur between and within urban places; the objective form which these take, the subjective manner in which they are interpreted, and their mode of origin at both local and societal scales. Among the subdivisions of human geography, Urban Geography sits somewhat uneasily as Figure 1.2 shows. Whereas economic geography and social geography are distinguished by thematic concerns, Urban Geography studies an area. Frey (1973) commented on this type of issue with the suggestion that geography considered both single elements or topics which could be studied systematically, or assemblages of areas which could be studied regionally. As an area-based study, an Urban Geography can cover a catholicity of interest. More commonly, however, studies of individual cities focus upon historical, economic, social and political aspects and have some specialist interest. Urban Geography consists of a range of studies of different aspects of the city as a human place and is centrally concerned with those economic, social and political forces that find expression in urban areas. In modern terms these characteristics serve the subdiscipline well. The analysis of ‘the city’ gives it a holistic approach, as much concerned with interactions as with the separate strands of urban life

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  Economic and Social Geography

  • R. Knowles, J. Wareing(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Made Simple

    (Publisher)

  Martin, J. E., Greater London. An Industrial Geography, Bell, London, 1966. Murphy, R. E. The American City. An Urban Geography (2nd Edn), McGraw-Hill, New York, 1974. Murphy, R. E., The Central Business District. A Study in Urban Geography, Longman, London, 1972. Robson, B. T., Urban Analysis: A Study of City Structure, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1969. Robson, B. T., Urban Social Areas, Oxford University Press, London, 1975. Scott, P., Geography of Retailing, Hutchinson, London, 1970. Yeates, M. H , and Garner, B., The North American City (3rd Edn), Harper & Row, New York, 1980. CHAPTER TWENTY CITY AND REGION From preceding chapters it will be clear that any city is inextricably bound up with its surrounding area to operate as a unified functional region. Relation-ships between towns and their surrounding areas are implicit in the hexagonal service areas of central place theory. Even the origin and emergence of urban settlement forms depended on the provision of a food surplus from the surrounding countryside. Much later, the effects of the Agricultural Revolution were equally vital in allowing towns and cities to grow to unprecedented sizes during the Industrial Revolution. The modern city is just as closely tied to its surrounding region as earlier cities, perhaps even more so. Improved transport and communications have allowed towns to extend their services further into the surrounding rural area, and have also permitted urban workers to live far beyond the city limits and travel to work each day. It has been said that 'to a degree quite unknown in the past the inhabitants of the areas between urban centres look to the towns and are drawn within their spheres of influence' (A. E. Smailes). Thus, town and countryside are still economically and socially interdependent. The exact nature of the economic dependence of any town upon its surrounding region is next considered more closely.

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  Urban Geography

  • Dave H. Kaplan, Steven Holloway(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Those of you who wish to make a career in planning will find this chapter especially informative. The final section of the book, Part VI, first exam- ines cities in the developed or industrial parts of the world other than the United States and Canada (Chapter 13) and in the less developed nonindustrial areas of the world (Chapter 14). These are fascinat- ing reviews of where and how people live such dif- ferent lives in the world cities. Finally, Chapter 15 details the geographic layout of cities in Latin Amer- ica, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast- ern Asia. WRAPPING UP Urban Geography today is the leading substantive area of geography and the one in which GIS tech- nology, the leading growth segment in contemporary geography, is most often applied. As with other social and behavioral sciences, Urban Geography is a product of the past century, with most of its accomplishments occurring only within the past few decades. Urban Geography has taken advantage of the opportunities of using multiple perspectives on how to conduct research to better understand our changing urban regions in the United States and Canada and around the world. Given the rich academic and pedagogic traditions built by multiple generations of geographers interested in the city, contemporary urban geographic education, training, and research offer challenging employment opportu- nities in private industry, government, planning, and education. CHAPTER 2 THE ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF CITIES Between the rail and the river there is sparse cultivation and little villages of mud huts or reed-mat shelters are dotted here and there; but westwards of the line is desert blank and unredeemed. Out of this waste rise the mounds which were Ur, called by Arabs the highest of them all, the Ziggurat hill, “Tell al Muqayyar,” the Mound of Pitch. —C. Leonard Woolley, 1930, p. 17 (Figure 2.1) Only in the most recent period of human history has a significant proportion of people lived in cities.

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  Urban Geography

  A Global Perspective

  • Michael Pacione(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  PART ONE The Study of Urban Geography 1 Urban Geography from global to local Preview: the study of Urban Geography; global triggers of urban change—economy, technology, demography, politics, society, culture, environment; globalisation; localisation of the global; the meaning of geographic scale; local and historical contingency; processes of urban change; urban outcomes; why study Urban Geography? INTRODUCTION Urban Geography seeks to explain the distribution of towns and cities and the socio-spatial similarities and contrasts that exist between and within them. If all cities were unique, this would be an impossible task. However, while every town and city has an individual character, urban places also exhibit common features that vary only in degree of incidence or importance within the particular urban fabric. All cities contain areas of residential space, transportation lines, economic activities, service infrastructure, commercial areas and public buildings. In different world regions the historical process of urban evolution may have followed a similar trajectory. Increasingly, similar processes, such as those of suburbanisation, gentrification and socio-spatial segregation, are operating within cities in the developed world, in former communist states and in countries of the Third World to effect a degree of convergence in the nature of urban landscapes. Cities also exhibit common problems to varying degrees, including inadequate housing, economic decline, poverty, ill health, social polarisation, traffic congestion and environmental pollution. In brief, many characteristics and concerns are shared by urban places. These shared characteristics and concerns represent the foundations for the study of Urban Geography

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  City and Society

  An Outline for Urban Geography

  • R.J. Johnston(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1.  The Concerns of Urban Geography

  Geography is generally accepted by its practitioners as ‘that discipline that seeks to describe and interpret the variable character from place to place of the earth as the world of man’;* Urban Geography attempts such description and interpretation for those parts of the earth's surface classified as urban places. There is no universal definition of urban places. The usual criterion is that an urban area should be a nucleation of settlement in which the great majority of the population is not employed in agriculture. Most statistical agencies set a population size threshold below which such a nucleation is not considered urban. But the majority of urban places are large and the majority of urban dwellers live in big towns and cities. A precise definition is of little relevance except for detailed statistical comparisons, therefore; in this book, the terms ‘town’ and ‘city’ are used interchangeably to apply to any non-agricultural settlement containing more than a few hundred inhabitants.

  As a recognizable sub-discipline, Urban Geography is a relatively recent development; the first textbook on the topic in English, for example, was not published until the 1940s. Growth has been rapid in recent decades, however, and Urban Geography is now a major sub-discipline. The reasons for this late development are not entirely clear, for towns have long been salient features of the landscape. Until the decades after the Second World War much geographical work was concerned with the evolution of landscapes, especially rural landscapes, with a focus on human artifacts rather than on the humans themselves.

  Some work on urban areas was done in this genre, emphasizing, for example, the importance of site and situation as influences on urban fortunes. Geographical interest in the definition of regions, areas with common characteristics, led to work on the hinterlands of towns, the areas for which they were the trading nexus, and on morphological regions within towns and cities, as reflected by street patterns, building types and materials, and building uses; interest in the townscape was slight, however, in comparison to the volume of work on the rural landscape. Before 1950 very few academic members of the discipline would have called themselves urban geographers, and it was only a change of emphasis in geography as a whole after about 1955 that made the urban place a major focus of academic research.

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  Applied Human Geography

  • Rodolfo B. Valdenarro(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Delve Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Broadly categorizing the Social Geography is dealing with the human behaving pattern while being in its cultural and social aspects. Social geography deals with the relation of social phenomenon and its spatial aspects. Social Geography in 1940’s was mainly concerned with identifying the regions, geographical patterns and their association with social outlook. Though there is an overlap between Human Geography and Social Geography as a subject matter but both of them has their own values. Social Geography implies more emphasis on relation between two individuals, individual and groups and individual and culture as well. Urban Geography: It is concerned with the different aspects of cities and urban processes. Urban geographer’s studies the various points involved in the urbanization in urban cities bringing urban life and the built environment as the primary focus. Urban geographers cites the way urban towns, cities are constructed and most importantly governed. Urban cities are different from each other in their social, demographic and cultural characteristics. Economic, Social and political aspects are also very important in Urban Geography. With the starting of 19 th century urban planning started to become a professional field. The term Urban Geography emerged in 1973 in David Harvey’s publication of “Social Justice and the City.” Before the term came in bright light the urbanization planning was studied just as a professional development practice. Historical Geography : It as another branch of geography studies the way of geographical changes brought in over the times. Historical Geography is the study of a region or a place with its geographical changes occurred in the past. Until Philipp Cluver the German scholar or also known as the founder of historical geography published German geography with classical and land knowledge in the 17 th century. Applied Human Geography 40 Historical Geography was unknown by the time the book came into existence.

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  Human Geography

  People, Place, and Culture

  • Erin H. Fouberg, Alexander B. Nash, Alexander B. Murphy, Harm J. de Blij(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  When we succeed, the province and the country succeed.” Geographical study of cities and urban areas straddles subdisciplinary boundaries, drawing on political and economic geography, social and cul- tural geographies, and other disciplinary work on humans and the built environment. We can define a city as a conglomeration of people and buildings clustered together to serve as a centre of politics, City Conglomeration of people and buildings clustered together to serve as a centre of politics, culture, and economics. FIGURE 10.2 Detroit’s abandoned homes. Urban geographers study cities such as Detroit; they also study how governments work to build and rebuild cities, and they try to understand the interlinkages between political, social, and cultural geography and Urban Geography. We must remem- ber that cities do not simply grow; sometimes they decline as well. How cities such as Detroit evolve is complex, involving eco- nomic, social, cultural, geographic, and political factors. Since it went bankrupt in 2013, Detroit has sought to reimagine itself as a smaller city than it once was. With beautiful historic buildings, some of the United States’ most famous artworks and sculp- tures, a vibrant arts and cultural community, successful sports franchises, a growing tourist industry, and an active, engaged community, the spaces of the city will continue to evolve and change. As geographers, we are interested in tracing the evolu- tion of urbanization in geographic context; in understanding how economic, cultural, and political factors influence the shap- ing of a city’s form and function; and in studying how people live, work, and play in the cities they create. Heather Maguire, doctoral candidate, York University © Julie Dermansky/Julie Dermansky/Corbis 276 CHAPTER 10 Urban Geography ©iStockphoto.com/IVYPHOTOS (a) (b) ©iStockphoto.com/Kokkai Ng FIGURE 10.3 Distinctive city skylines. (a) Toronto, Ontario; (b) Sydney, Australia; (c) London, England.

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  Geographies of Love

  The Cultural Spaces of Romance in Chick- and Ladlit

  • Christian Lenz(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • transcript Verlag

    (Publisher)

  Cultural Geographies Space is to place as eternity is to time. J OSEPH J OUBERT T HE W ORLD A CCORDING TO G EOGRAPHERS The relationship between people and their (created) surrounding(s) is looked at closely in geography and, more precisely, human geography which aims “to explain the spatial patterns and processes that enable and constrain the structures and actions of everyday life.” (Dear and Flusty 2002: 2) Human geography is one of the two great strands of geography, the other being physical geography, which includes for example geomorphology or biogeography (cf. Kirk 1963: 359, 361). In their Introductory Reader in Human Geography , William Moseley, David Lanegran and Kavita Pandit characterise human geography as focusing on “the patterns and dynamics of human activity on the landscape.” (2007a: 3) However, depending on the focus geographers want to apply, they would either narrow the focus on the human activity or stress the “human-environment dynamics (or the nature-society tradition).” (Ibid.) Whereas the latter deals with diverse topics such as political ecology or agricultural geography, the former aspect of human geography addresses issues such as Urban Geography, economic or political geography and cultural geo-graphy (cf. ibid.: 4). Especially cultural geography “concentrates upon the ways in which space, place and the environment participate in an unfolding dialogue of meaning. 1 ” (Shurmer-Smith 2002: 3) Cultural geography “includes thinking about how geographical phenomena are shaped, worked and apportioned according to ideology; how they are used when people form and express their relationships and ideas, including their sense of who they are.” (Shurmer-Smith 2002: 3) This con-firms what Peter Jackson anticipated in his famous Maps of Meaning twenty years 1 See also Knox and Marston: “Cultural geography focuses on the way in which space, place, and landscape shape culture at the same time that culture shapes space, place, and landscape.” (1998: 191)

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  Information Sources in the Social Sciences

  • David Fisher, Sandra Price, Terry Hanstock, David Fisher, Sandra Price, Terry Hanstock(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Saur

    (Publisher)

  Coverage includes physical geography, as well as economic, political, and social geography. As such, it is a particularly good source for literature on geology, climate, environmental issues, regionalism, economic development, local politics, local government, public policy and planning. Some foreign language literature is included. Online Geographical Bibliography - American Geographical Society Collection . This is the electronic version of Current Geographical Publications (see (a) Print above) and provides access to the collections of the American Geographical Society at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The online database covers 1985 to date and can be freely accessed from the above Website. The database can be searched by title keyword, author and subject. Sage Urban Studies Abstracts (ISSN 0090-5747) (London: Sage, 1962- ). Quarterly. The abstracting service is available as a full-text electronic journal as part of an institutional subscription to the print version (see (a) Print above). Additional search facilities may be available if using one of a number of intermediaries such -*440 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY as NESLI or SwetsnetNavigator. All aspects of urban studies are covered including: policy, transportation, spatial analysis, planning, environment and comparative urban analysis. TOURCD: Leisure, Recreation and Tourism Abstracts on CD-ROM. It is the electronic version of Leisure, Recreation and Tourism Abstracts discussed in {a) Print above. The CD-ROM contains citations to more than 32 000 documents published since 1976. It is updated on a yearly basis, those requiring more regular updates would need to subscribe to the quarterly print publication. Urbadisc (London: London Research Centre/Greater London Authority, 1970- ). Issued twice a year on CD-ROM, Urbadisc is a cooperative production from Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

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  The History of the Social Sciences since 1945

  • Roger E. Backhouse, Philippe Fontaine(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Human Geography 171 financial imperatives). It came to the fore in the early 1990s as the ‘cultural turn’, drawing much inspiration from the burgeoning multi-disciplinary enterprise of cultural studies. It emphasised hybridity, seeking to break down barriers between different ‘types’ of geography – economic, social, political, urban, etc. – through an awareness that common human traits and behaviour patterns (‘culture’) underpin most (if not all areas) of life and are inscribed in spatial structures that constrain and yet facilitate fur- ther action. 10 One particular impetus for a substantial number of human geographers was post-modernism and its stresses on heterogeneity, particularity, and uniqueness. This was expressed in work that (at least implicitly) respected arguments derived from Marxist, realist, and structurationist scholars but distanced itself – often aggressively so – from spatial science. The latter was seen as failing to ‘to take seriously the complexity of human beings as cre- ative individuals’ (Cloke et al. 1991, p. 17), with behavioural geographers restricting themselves to ‘a fairly narrow conception of how human beings think and act’ (Cloke et al. 1991, p. 67). Instead, geographers were offered a range of approaches that, according to a major introductory textbook promoting the genre: avoids the easy and ultimately dull options of retreating into worlds of compiled fact or modelled fantasy. It engages with real life and real lives, embracing their wonderful complexity. It seeks to do more than record or model; it tries to explain, understand, question, interpret and maybe even improve these human geographies (Cloke et al. 1999, p. ix) focused, according to a parallel book, on describing and explicating the ‘meaningful nature of life’ (Cloke et al. 2004, p. 283).

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