Study note on academic ideas about urbanization

Study note on academic ideas about urbanization

Academic ideas are bolded

Michael Dear and Steven Flusty. 1998. “Postmodern Urbanism” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 88(1), pp. 50–72.

“From Chicago to Los Angeles It has been a traditional axiom of classical writing about the city that urban structures are the domain of reason (Jonathan Raban 1974:157). The Chicago School General theories of urban structure are a scarce commodity. One of the most persistent models of urban structure is associated with a group of sociologists who flourished in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. According to Morris Janowitz, the “Chicago School” was motivated to regard the city “as an object of detached sociological analysis,” worthy of distinctive scientific attention: The city is not an artifact or a residual arrangement. On the contrary, the city embodies the real nature of human nature. It is an expression of mankind in general and specifically of the social relations generated by territoriality (Janowitz 1967:viii–ix). The most enduring of the Chicago School models was the zonal or concentric ring theory, an account of the evolution of differentiated urban social areas by E.W. Burgess (1925). Based on assumptions that included a uniform land surface, universal access to a single-centered city, free competition for space, and the notion that development would take place outward from a central core, Burgess concluded that the city would tend to form a series of concentric zones. (These are the same assumptions that were later to form the basis of the land-rent models of Alonso,Muth, et al.) The main ecological metaphors invoked to describe this dynamic were invasion, succession, and segregation, by which populations gradually filtered outwards from the center as their status and level of assimilation progressed. The model was predicated on continuing high levels of inmigration to the city. At the core of Burgess’s schema was the Central Business District (CBD), which was surrounded by a transitional zone, where older private houses were being converted to offices and light industry or subdivided to form smaller dwelling units. This was the principal area to which new immigrants were attracted, and it included areas of vice and generally unstable or mobile social groups. The transitional zone was succeeded by a zone of working-men’s homes, which included some of the oldest residential buildings in the city and stable social groups. Beyond this, newer and larger dwellings were to be found, occupied by the middle classes. Finally, the commuters’ zone extended beyond the continuous built-up area of the city where a considerable portion of the zone’s population was employed”;

Nora Libertun de Duren. “The National Embeddedness of Urbanization Trajectories” City & Community 10:4 December 2011.

“... the links between cities and the nation-state are often neglected in recent studies of urban change. This is not to say that globalization is not one of the most relevant phenomena to understanding urbanization today. In the early nineties, urban scholars studied globalization through the analysis of “world cities,” which became the lens through which one could disclose the workings of globalization itself (Fainstein, Gordon, and Harloe 1992; Marcuse 1993; Friedman 1986; Sassen 1991; Castells 1989; Hall 1998). Since then, theories of globalization have evolved, allowing the study of urban networks even when the scholars challenge the conventional global-to-national-to-urban hierarchy (Taylor 2004; Davis 2005)”;

“Above and beyond facing similar challenges, cities—as opposed to nations or rural areas—have a complexity and a distinctive internal logic in the way that they transform themselves which justifies them as an object of study. They become a unity or system in the sense that Robert Park (1915, pp. 577–578) defined the city . . . the place and the people, with all the machinery, sentiments, customs, and administrative devices that go with it, public opinion and street railways, the individual man and the tools that he uses, as something more than a mere collective entity. We may think of it as a mechanism – a psychological mechanism – in and through which private interests find corporate expression. Insofar as the consequences of globalization and the specificity of urban systems warrant studying cities per se, the lessons learned in one urban setting become a point of reference for other urban settings too”;

Adrian Atkinson (2015) Asian urbanisation, City, 19:6, 857-874, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2015.1090188.

“Urbanisation is progressing in Asia at breakneck speed, producing almost overnight city regions sprawling vast distances into the peri-urban countryside. As they grow, in unplanned ways, so the problems deepen. The provision of all manner of infrastructure lags increasingly behind with consequent problems of traffic gridlock, seriously inadequate sanitation and, in coastal cities, increasing flooding where the impact of climate change threatens to render whole urban neighbourhoods unliveable. Meanwhile super-rich minorities are emerging where, nevertheless, poverty is—temporarily—kept at bay and a vast mass of new middle classes are attempting to live the modern consumer life amidst rampant corruption that expresses itself particularly in massive oversupply of upper income housing that few can afford with whole developments remaining permanently vacant. Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam is a typical case where currently a kind of euphoria is palpable where much of the population feel they have arrived in the modern consumer world. Whilst officialdom projects growth in all dimensions to be continuing into even the more distant future, one may be sceptical that this can, in reality, continue for much longer”; [Asian urbanisation progression]