Sunday 4 August 2019

Geographical imagination exam revision notes 2019 consolidation 1-3


Examination revision note - #1 (on utopia) [re: question 1]


Leonie Sandercock (2002) Practicing Utopia: Sustaining Cities, disP - The
Planning Review, 38:148, 4-9, DOI: 10.1080/02513625.2002.10556791.

"Cities are neither organisms nor machines. They are flesh and stone intertwined. They are “built thought.” They are the containers of dreams and desires, hopes and fears. They are an assemblage of active historical agents making daily choices of how to live well";

"I’ve argued that in working towards more sustaining cities, we need some
new models of planning practice which expand the language of planning beyond the realm of instrumental rationality and the system world, and speak about (and develop the skills for) organizing hope, negotiating fear, and mediating memory, as well as developing the habits of a critical/analytical mind. This transformed language would reflect the emotional breadth and depth of the lived experience of cities: cities of desire, cities of memory, cities of play and celebration, cities of fear, cities of struggle";


Frank Cunningham (2010) Triangulating utopia: Benjamin, Lefebvre, Tafuri, City, 14:3, 268-277, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2010.482268.

"The positive side of utopian thinking, that which prompted Henri Lefebvre to ask ‘Who [of progressive thinkers] is not a utopian today?’ (1996, p. 151), is its rejection of fatalistic or, as in the case of too many urban planners, politicians and architects, opportunistic acceptance of a status quo. Proactively, utopian thinking is implicated in the formulation of radical goals. As David Harvey puts it: ‘[W]ithout a vision of utopia there is no way to define that port to which we might want to sail’ (2000, p. 189). Critical urban theorists such as Harvey and Peter Marcuse react to this situation by the dual exercise of exposing ways that existing urban realities
support oppressive and exclusionary social structures and practices while at the same time projecting alternative visions. One challenge for the critical theorist is to articulate visions while avoiding the negative potentials of utopianism. A typical strategy for doing this is expressed by Marcuse. General features of a desirable future are negatively identified by reference to oppressive characteristics of the present—justice instead of injustice, community spirit instead of profit seeking, and so on—while more concrete prescriptions are ‘left to the democratic experience of those in fact implementing the vision’ (Marcuse, 2009, p. 194)";

"The critical theorist thus cannot avoid a measure of utopianism. But this raises the core challenge to all utopianisms that the more radical their visions are, the more vulnerable they become to dismissal as unrealistic. Classic utopians were not much bothered by this problem, since their aim was just to describe radically different futures leaving it to others to figure out whether or how to try attaining them. But this stance is not acceptable to the critical theorist who wants to contribute to actual urban change";

"A key concept in Lefebvre’s approach to utopianism is ‘transduction’, or the intellectual construction of possible objects. Like Tafuri, he sees utopian visions as ideologically infused, but they can also serve in an ‘experimental’
way to prompt challenges to existing structures, functions and forms, thus also challenging the ideological rigidity of exclusively structuralist, functionalist or formalist thinking (Lefebvre, 1996, pp. 151–155)";



Examination revision note - #2 (on future city, with special reference to smart city) [re: question 1]


Malene Freudendal-Pedersen 1, Sven Kesselring 2,* and Eriketti Servou. 2019. "What is Smart for the Future City? Mobilities and Automation" Sustainability 2019, 11, 221; doi:10.3390/su11010221.

"In today’s cities and regions, multiple mobilities—social, technological, geographic, cultural and digital—are at the core of new types of socio-material and cultural relationships and shape people’s everyday lives and businesses in many ways [1,2]. The rapidly moving technological developments in transportation and communication have changed cities’ pulses, their pace, and reach. The urban scale is thereby an interconnected element of the global “network society” [3,4], with new forms of social, cultural, and economic life emerging. This increase in the amount and speed of mobilities has strong impacts on ecological conditions, and, so far, no comprehensive sustainable solutions are in sight";

"The “smart cities” discourse is frequently connected to a sort of “engineering logic” aiming for optimizing the social layout, the urban infrastructure and networks, and (at least) parts of human interactions [26,27]. Often, “smart cities” are considered as coded spaces facilitating self-learning socio-technical environments grounded in IT and artificial intelligence, where software is applied to facilitate the efficient use of resources, space, infrastructure and energy, and to provide user-friendliness and sustainability [28]. Alternatively, they are seen as assemblages of technologies aimed at increasing competitiveness, administrative efficiency, and social inclusion [26,2933]. These ideas of the smart city have been strongly criticized for being an enforcement of the “technocentric planning paradigm” [22,34] where the planning of movements in cities focuses mainly on traffic, with “seamless mobility” as an almost unchallenged principle for an efficient organization of societies [35,36]. Against the background of the growing debate on smart cities, it becomes even more important to integrate the human scale and the social and cultural practice systematically in scientific analysis, planning, business models, and collaborative work on the future of urban living and working conditions";

"The debate around “smart cities” is still very dynamic and open and it lacks clear definitions and sharp distinctions. Some of the prominent concepts in the field are currently the digital, the virtual, the networked, the connected, and even the cyber city [26,4143]. Beginning in the early 2000s, many of these debates coincided with the increasingly powerful discursive framing of smart cities [26]. For some authors, the smart city discourse is concerned with developing and deploying new technologies in cities for a range of sectoral objectives [4447]. Others see the smart city as
an assemblage of technologies aimed at increasing competitiveness, administrative efficiency, and social inclusion";

"From the early 2000s onwards, the smart city discourse has become hegemonic in articulating solutions to the risks and unintended externalities of increasing demographic trends that are caused by the urbanization of the 21st century and environmental concerns about climate change [48,61]. This is based within a regime of technological innovations and the digitalization of society [65]. In this context, smart cities promise to solve urban problems (such as environmental degradation, traffic congestion, inefficient services, etc.) to increase economic prosperity. Citizen participation will be facilitated by bringing together a range of innovative technologies, infrastructure, and data management techniques";

"According to Hajer and Dassen (2014) [71], the formation of the smart cities discourse revolves around five key characteristics.
(1) The dominant concepts are smart grids, big data, efficiency, infrastructure, system, energy, monitoring, and information, which highlight a “managerial take” on cities with the new possibilities of ICT tools being applied to urban problems (ibid).

(2) Smart cities are typically discussed within “glue coalitions”, which are new cross-over forums where business, government, and knowledge institutes meet each other, but their enthusiasm has not penetrated into academic debate. These forums function as discourse coalitions that reproduce a particular way of seeing and perceiving society. Some representative examples are the “Guggenheim lab” organized by BMW, the Crystal pavilion in London built by Siemens to showcase the future of the smart city or the Inzell Initiative, which is a cooperation between the State Capital of Munich and the BMW Group [71].

(3) The smart cities discourse is often being institutionalized through liberal practices, such as public-private partnerships. As part of this shift from public service and infrastructure to public-private partnerships, the way in which consumers pay for their urban services is likely to change and public works will be replaced by a “pay per” approach [57]. While this change might provide a fertile ground for urban entrepreneurship, it ignores how cities work sociologically and politically, and how particular understandings of smart cities relate to the existing system of governance [72].

(4) Within the smart city discourse innovation gets approached mainly as a technological matter. Often, its protagonists neglect the social complexity of urban environments and the contested nature of regional and local debates and decision-making. The move from problem to solution is frequently made too fast and it leaves very little time for debate. In other words, the conditions under which the future of sustainable cities has to be achieved are not discussed adequately [71].

(5) Finally, the smart city discourse lacks historical sensitivity and awareness. Case studies show that it often fails to articulate why things are the way they are. Urry (2016) [73] points out that missing knowledge and awareness of historical developments very often are the reason for failure
in urban and technology policies. This attitude reproduces the technocratic planning regime of modernity, where positivist ideas, rationalism, functionalism, and the universal power of generic optimal solutions based on quantitative models were dominant";



Examination revision note - #3 (on divided city) [re: question 4]
Compiled by Joseph, K.K. Ho, dated August 4, 2019

PETER MARCUSE. 1993. "What’s So New About Divided Cities?" International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley.
"... the city may be seen as divided roughly into the following quarter:
(1) Luxury housing, not really part of the city but enclaves or isolated buildings, occupied by the top of the economic, social, and political hierarchy.
(2) The gentrified city, occupied by the professional-managerial-technicalg roups, whether yuppie or muppie without children.
(3) The suburban city, sometimes single-family housing in the outer city, other times apartments near the centre, occupied by skilled workers, mid-range professionals, upper civil servants.
(4) The tenement city, sometimes cheaper single-family areas, most often rentals, occupied by lower-paid workers, blue- and white-collar, and generally (although less in the United States) including substantial social housing.
(5) The abandoned city, the end result of trickle-down, left for the poor, the unemployed, the excluded, where in the United States home-less housing for the homeless5 is most frequently located"

"These felt divisions in the residential city are roughly paralleled by divisions in the economic city:
(1) The places of big decisions include a network of high-rise offices, brownstones or older mansions in prestigious locations, but are essentially locationally not circumscribed; it includes yachts for some, the back seats of stretch limousines for others, airplanes and scattered residences for still others.
(2) The city of advanced services, of professional offices tightly clustered in downtowns, with many ancillary services internalized in high-rise office towers, heavily enmeshed in a wide and technologically advanced communicative network.
(3) The city of direct production, including not only manufacturing but also the production of advanced services, in Saskia Sassen’s phrase; government offices, the back offices of major firms, whether adjacent to their front offices or not, located in clusters and with significant agglomerations but in varied locations within a metropolitan area - sometimes, indeed, outside of the central city itself.
(4) The city of unskilled work and the informal economy, small-scale manufacturing, warehousing, sweatshops, technically unskilled consumer services, immigrant industries, closely intertwined with the cities of production and advanced services and thus located near them, but separately and in scattered clusters,6 locations often determined in part by economic relations, in part by the patterns of the residential city.
(5) The residual city, the city of the less legal portions of the informal economy, the city of storage where otherwise undesired (NIMBY) facilities are located, generally congruent with the abandoned residential city";


Mehdiabadi, Parisa Mard (2015). "Divided Cities," Agora Journal of Urban Planning and Design, 118-126.

"Architecture is entangled in a web of political, social, cultural, and economic powers. As a spatial practice, architecture has the capacity to reallocate cultural powers and to constructively contribute to social change. In divided cities, however, architecture is misused as an ultimate method of containing and managing intercommunal tensions. Giving physical form to fear and misunderstanding, these constructs only sustain and exacerbate long-standing problems, since “physical partition often affirms local assumptions about persecution and encourages one ethnic community to antagonize another” (Calame, 2009, p. 5). Division of the urban fabric destroys the essence of place, hinders communal identity and sustains distrust as competing groups manipulate images of the city and historical past for their own benefit. Intercommunal tension cannot and should not be addressed by erecting of walls, fences, and no man’s lands, but rather through open dialogue and exchange. Although divided cities are not prevalent in urban history, they represent the power of architecture as a cultural agency and demonstrate how, if misused, they can lead to urban dysfunction and permanent division";

"Historically, the purpose of city fortification has been twofold: to provide passive security against external threats and to inhibit the social assimilation that usually accompanies a dense and cooperative urban environment. Although creating a wall around a city helps with the physical definition of a community, it also has the power to divide because it draws a distinction between those within and outside of the city. As Lewis Mumford noted, “physical barricades have historically provided a functional separation between civilized and uncivilized domains for resident communities” (Mumford, 1960, p. 54). The city boundary emphasizes social hierarchy and sustains prejudice and mistrust among community members";

"Similar to city walls, permanent or temporary partitions in divided cities are constructed out of fear and distrust among different ethnic and/ or social groups. In the case of Cyprus, the Green Line is a de facto international boundary between the self-proclaimed but unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and the Greekspeaking Cypriots in the south. The partition line is about ten kilometers long and varies in width between twenty meters and four meters as it runs through the urban and suburban terrain. “We are destined to get worse, not better, for as long as there is the concept of fear and siege. So if fear is, at the core, the most dangerous emotion… then remove the fear. Now, how do you do that? Is it done by walls? Is it done by education? Is it done by being inventive about how you share the land? I’m not sure that I have any of the answers – plenty of the questions.”  ...";

"As cities reflect local demographics in spatial form, each city can be perceived on a continuum between perfect spatial integration and complete segregation. As an example of a divided city, Nicosia, capital of Cyprus, reflects total spatial segregation between its two ethnic groups. Intercommunal rivalry in Nicosia frayed the normal urban functioning, resulting in a complete schism along its east-west ethnic fault-line";


Marco Allegra1*, Anna Casaglia2 and Jonathan Rokem3. 2012. "The Political Geographies of Urban Polarization: A Critical Review of Research on Divided Cities" Geography Compass 6/9 (2012): 560–574, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2012.00506.x.

"In the last few decades, a growing interest has surrounded the urban dimension of conflicts. The concept of the ‘‘divided city’’, in particular, has been employed to describe a wide range of political, economic and social cleavages in the urban sphere and their spatial manifestation";

"The contemporary metropolis is characterised by new forms of closure and exclusion (Wacquant 1996, 2008) and increasing social, economical, and political fragmentation (Sassen 2001); it appears ‘‘to be manifesting as an intensely uneven patchwork of dystopian spaces that are [] physically
proximate but institutionally estranged’’ (MacLeod and Ward 2002). The body of academic contributions on the subject of divided cities implicitly supports the guiding hypothesis of this review article: that, in Haim Yacobi’s words, ‘‘in the present global context, more and more cities are becoming polarized, ghettoized and fragmented in surprisingly similar ways’’ (Yacobi 2009, preface). Yacobi’s observation points to the problem of understanding what kind of conditions produce spatial polarization and how different kinds of conflict intertwine in the same cities";

"The common emphasis on the idea of ‘‘divided city’’ hides a great variety of definitions, approaches and methodologies, and covers a wide range of investigations. The literature on world cities investigated how the process of globalization and economic restructuring creates spatial polarization in the urban structure (Castells and Mollenkopf 1991; Fainstein et al. 1992; Sassen 1991), while other authors focus on the ‘‘wounds’’ inflicted by economic asymmetries and state-violence – as well as the processes of recovery of the urban systems (Schneider and Susser 2003; Till 2012). Other contributions underlined how socioeconomic and cultural cleavages result in phenomena of residential segregation (Massey 1996; Massey and Denton 1993; Philips 2007; Scho¨nwa¨lder 2007) or privatization of urban space (Atkinson & Blandy 2006; Glasze et al. 2002, 2006; McKenzie 1994).

Violence and fear are entangled with processes of social change in contemporary cities generating new forms of spatial segregation (Atkinson et al. 2004; Caldeira 1996, 2000); in turn, spatial inequalities tend to reinforce social inequalities (Skop 2006). Many authors have interpreted this trend as the progressive demise of a more integrated model of urban development in favour of a fragmented patchwork of impoverished ghettoes and affluent enclaves (Davis 1990; Graham and Marvin 2001), while others have observed the delicate and often controversial role played by urban planning and artefacts in framing the encounter of groups and communities (Bollens 2009; Brand 2009; Healey 1997; Sandercock 1998; Yiftachel 1998)";


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