CityReads│What Is the Nature of Cities?
All cities can be understood in terms of a theoretical framework that combines two main processes, namely, the dynamics of agglomeration/polarization, and the unfolding of an associated nexus of locations, land uses and human interactions.
Scott, A. J., & Storper, M. (2014). The nature of cities: the scope and limits of urban theory. International Journal of Urban & Regional Research, 39(1), 1–15.
Source:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12134/full
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‘Don't be too hasty in trying to define the city; it is much too big and there is every likelihood that you will get it wrong’. This is the quotation from French novelist Georges Perec. Indeed, there is a plethora of diverging claims about the nature of cities, which haunts urban studies.
In the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, a sort of orthodoxy, based on the work of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology, could be said to reign in urban analysis, which dealt with the city primarily as a congeries of socially differentiated neighborhoods caught up in a dynamic of ecological advance and succession. By the late 1960s, however, the ideas of this school of thought started to come under intense critical scrutiny, notably by Castells (1968), who suggested that there is nothing especially urban about the questions studied under the banner of urban sociology because in the end they are simply questions about society at large. He further dismissed the work of the Chicago School tout court as nothing but an ideology that obfuscates the more fundamental nature of capitalism as a framework of social organization. Thus, by the early 1970s, the main traces of the Chicago School were being swept away by a powerful stream of Marxist approaches. The new-Marxist approach to cities insisted on a concept of the city as a theater of class struggle, centered on land markets as machines for distributing wealth upward and on associated political claims from below about citizenship rights to urban space and resources.
The 1980s brought three main lines of investigation about cities and urbanization. First, feminist scholars such as Massey (1991) and McDowell (1983) established an analytical framework focused on the gender dimensions of cities, while longstanding interest in ethnicity, race and class in urban contexts was also revitalized. Second, a rapidly growing research thrust developed out of the work of authors such as Friedmann and Wolff (1982) and Sassen (1991) on the rise of a global urban system and the effects of globalization on the internal structure of cities. A third major trend has revolved around the reconceptualization of older concerns about urban politics and governance by Brenner (1999), Cochrane (2006), Harvey (2007; 2012), Jessop (1997) and others. All of these different lines of urban investigation continue to develop and grow at the present time.
By the turn of the millennium, a number of further important shifts in theoretical sensibilities about cities could be detected. One of these shifts involves a strong postcolonial critique of urban theory, arguing that much twentieth century urban theory has its roots in the global North and hence its claims to universality must be called into question. A second recent shift, calls for new kinds of methodological approaches to urban research based above all on actor-network theory and assemblage theory.
To summarize, urban studies is susceptible to endemic and ever widening discontinuity and disjuncture in the conceptual frameworks, questions and methodologies that dominate research. This sense of fragmentation is further reflected in the constantly changing watchwords that circulate through the literature in successive attempts to capture particular spatial or temporal conjunctures of urban development, such as captive cities, manipulated cities, postmodern cities, insurgent cities, consumer cities, cities as entertainment machines, the carceral city, the neoliberal city, the fragmented city, the dual city, the digital city, the global city, and the creative city.
We are concerned here with an attempt to build a general concept of the urban and the urbanization process that we believe can help to bring a shared vocabulary to the debates that proliferate within the field.
Cities are always embedded in wider systems of social and political relationships at many different scales. These contextual circumstances stamp individual urban centers with diverse distinguishing features, and give rise to numerous variations in their form and function across time and space. Hence, some cities have entered into a post-industrial phase, others are dominated by manufacturing employment; some are located in relatively prosperous countries, others are in countries where rampant poverty prevails; some are embedded in societies that are relatively homogeneous in terms of their racial and ethnic makeup, others in societies that are characterized by enormous diversity in these respects. Do the admittedly enormous variations in the empirical makeup of cities that result from these differing contextual circumstances warrant a plurality of different concepts of the urban? Or can we cut through this Gordian knot to reveal a coherent concept of the city as an object of theoretical inquiry?
We argued for a positive answer to the latter question by insisting that the essence of the urbanization process resides in the twofold status of cities as clusters of productive activity and human life that then unfold into dense, internally variegated webs of interacting land uses, locations and allied institutional/political arrangements. Without negating the general nature of urbanization as a particular mode of spatial integration and interaction, we identify five variables playing a significant role on molding the individuality of particular citie.
1. Overall levels of economic development vary enormously across time and space.
2.The rules that govern resource allocation have major impacts on urban development.
3. Prevailing structures of social stratification have a powerful impact on neighborhood formation.
4. An additional important source of difference stems from cultural norms and traditions.
5. The overarching conditions of political authority and power leave deep traces on urban development in any given society.
The peculiarities of the empirical phenomena that occur in cities and the ways in which the contextual variables enumerated above compound the sense of diversity. While so many analysts are tempted to treat every city as a special case and to insist on the futility and dangers of conceptual abstraction. Such as assemblage theory and actor-network theory. Empirical particularities are important, but conceptual abstraction helps the researcher to reveal diversity and difference in basic observational data, just as it is an essential prerequisite for the construction of useful empirical taxonomies.
There are systematic regularities in urban life that are susceptible to high levels of theoretical generalization. Examination of the cities of the global South may necessitate a radical reformulation of urban theory, but the reformulation will not come solely from the fact that these cities exhibit prima facie empirical differences from those of the global North. Rather, it will come from whatever new insights that the study of urbanization in the global South may provide about the logic and inner workings of urban agglomeration processes and associated dynamics of the urban land nexus.
Throughout the course of history, urbanization has been fundamentally engendered by a complex interaction between economic development, divisions of labor, agglomeration, specialization and external commerce. Accordingly, we can say that the most basic raison d'être for cities resides in their role as centers of economic production and exchange within wider systems of regional, national and international trade. All cities can be understood in terms of a theoretical framework that combines two main processes, namely, the dynamics of agglomeration/polarization, and the unfolding of an associated nexus of locations, land uses and human interactions.
Rising levels of economic development in any country have strong causal impacts on urban growth via agglomeration and specialization processes. This relationship is manifest in a consistently positive empirical relationship between national rates of urbanization and GDP per capita. However, a two-way relationship is also at work here, Economic expansion and urbanization should therefore properly be understood as being intertwined in a recursive path-dependent relationship over time with its critical hinge point focused on processes of agglomeration. The economic effect of Agglomeration can be generally understood as a mechanism of sharing, matching and learning.
1. Sharing refers to dense local linkages within production systems as well as to indivisibilities that make it necessary to supply some kinds of urban services as public goods.
2. Matching refers to the process of pairing people and jobs, which is greatly facilitated where large local pools of firms and workers exist.
3. Learning refers to the dense formal and informal information flows (with their stimulus to innovation) that are made possible by agglomeration.
Agglomeration has powerful feedback effects not only on economic development, but also on society as a whole. It is the basic glue that holds the city together as a complex congeries of human activities, and that generates, in relation to its endemic common pool resources and social conflicts, a highly distinctive form of urban politics.
Since the agglomeration are of importance, should we not also be able to circumscribe individual agglomerations in geographic space? The answer is negative because modern cities have effectively lost their identity as meaningful spatial units. With the development of external trade, cities have functioned as systems of dense local interactions imbricated in complex long-distance interactions of people, goods, and information. There can be no rigid and absolute boundary between the city and the rest of geographic space. The city exists concretely as a localized or scalar articulation within the space-economy as a whole. The city is to the space-economy as a mountain is to the wider topography in which it is contained. In neither the case of the city nor the mountain can a definite line be drawn that separates it from its wider context.
Moreover, the specificity of the urban depends not so much on the crude ratio of its internal to external transactions, but on the contrasting qualities of these two sets of transactions and their locational effects. In fact, intra‐urban transactions are usually quite different from long-distance transactions in that they are marked by high costs per unit of distance and dense information content (whence the frequent need for face-to-face contact), and these kinds of interpersonal transactions are one of the mainstays of urban agglomeration. As globalization intensifies, there is much empirical evidence to suggest that the urban scale of interaction remains extremely vibrant, indeed, increasingly so.More to the point, the rise of a globalizing world system has been associated, not with the demise of the city, but rather with intensifying agglomeration/urbanization processes across all five continents.
The urban land nexus is a also a feature critical to any account of the nature of the city. It means an interacting set of land uses expressing the ways in which the social and economic activities of the city condense out into a differentiated, polarized, locational mosaic.This phenomenon emerges as the extensive expression of agglomeration, and is molded to significant degree by the behavior of firms seeking locations for production and households seeking living space.
There are three major components of the urban land nexus.
1.The production space of the city where work and employment are concentrated.
2. The social space of the city as manifest in residential neighborhoods.
3. The circulation space of the city as represented by the infrastructures and arterial connections that facilitate intra-urban flows of goods, people, and information.
These three major components of the urban land nexus are marked by endless empirical diversity and interpenetration. Nonetheless, they can be described by their roots in generalizable processes of agglomeration/polarization and their spatial integration within the city as a whole.
The urban land nexus is very much more than a simple aggregation of independent private locations, there are also many individual, communal and political actions that impinge upon them. The essential nature of urban land is that it is simultaneously private and public, individual and collective, and that its shape and form express the intertwined dynamics of the individual actions of firms and households and collective action on the part of institutions of governance.
This mass of urban relata must be set in the wider context of society as a whole, without, however, conflating the two so that the distinctiveness of the city is lost. One point of departure for dealing with these matters is to insist on the distinction between issues that are to be found in cities but that are not intrinsically urban in character, and questions that deal with issues of cities in the strict sense that revolve around processes of agglomeration-cum-polarization and associated interactions within the urban land nexus.
For example, there are usually many poor people in cities, but it does not necessarily follow that all aspects of poverty are inherently urban in character or that poverty is caused principally by urbanization. Poverty is primarily engendered within a set of macro-social processes related to the level of economic development, the structure of overall employment opportunities, and the availability of education and training.
The discussion thus identifies the common dimensions of all cities without, on the one hand, exaggerating the scope of urban theory, or on the other hand, asserting that every individual city is an irreducible special case. We emphasize the commonalities across all types of cities and the organizational processes that shape them. This manner of proceeding helps to guard against over-hasty impulses to take certain dramatic or peculiar instances of urban development (e.g. the crumbling infrastructure and violence of Kinshasa, the extensive slums of Mumbai, or the current financial collapse of Southern European cities) as evidence that a reformulation of theory is required. On the other hand, it prevents us from unwarranted temptation that cities around the world are all converging to a common empirical template.
Viable urban theory should enable us to distinguish between those dynamics of social life that are intrinsically urban from those that are more properly seen as lying outside the strict sphere of the urban, even when they can be detected as a matter of empirical occurrence inside cities. The widespread claims tend to assimilate all forms of social and political action into an urban totality as cases of severe conceptual overreach. Even in the twenty-first century, when, for the first time in human history, most of human existence is geographically contained in cities, not all or even the greater part of this existence can be described as being intrinsically urban in the senses that we have laid out above.