CityReads│What Constitute the City?

Allen J. Scott 城读 2020-09-12

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What Constitute the City?

Why is it that people congregate together in geographic space, and when does any resulting cluster constitute a city?

Allen J. Scott, 2017. The Constitution of the City: Economy, Society, and Urbanization in the Capitalist Era, Palgrave Macmillan.

Source: https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783319612270#aboutBook

In his short novel, Species of Spaces, Georges Perec warns us not to be too hasty in any attempt to define the city: “it is much too big and there is every likelihood that you will get it wrong.” Perec’s warning is not to be taken lightly, for the history of thinking about cities is littered with an abundance of different and often-conflicting identifications of their supposed essential features. Here are few sample opinions about the nature of the city as offered by various luminaries in the field over the last century.

[A city is] a continuous area having everywhere 10,000 or more people to the square mile (Mark Jefferson, 1909).

The city is a collection of one or more separate dwellings in a closed settlement (Max Weber, 1921).

A city may be defined as a relatively large, dense and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals (Louis Wirth,1938).

The city … is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity (Lewis Mumford,1938)

By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange (Jane Jacobs,1961).

The city is a social product resulting from conflicting social interests and

Values (Manuel Castells, 1983).

The city is everywhere and in everything … What is not the urban? (Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, 2002).

Cities are … fundamentally about the display of wealth and power (Richard Walker 2016).

In his book, The Constitution of the City: Economy, Society, and Urbanization in the Capitalist Era, Economic geographer Allen J. Scott seeks to reconsider the foundations of urban theory and to propose a robust concept of the city. He identifies a specifically urban social logic and to distinguish the city as a material phenomenon embedded in and structured by society as a whole.

In this book, he recounts how the essential foundations of the urbanization process reside in two interrelated forces. These are the tendency for many different kinds of human activity to gather together to form functional complexes on the landscape, and the multifaceted intra-urban space-sorting crosscurrents set in motion by this primary urge. The argument of the book is pursued both in theoretical and in empirical terms, devoting attention to the changing character of urbanization in the capitalist era. Cities provide essential foundations for the continued social reproduction of capitalism itself, and there is, indeed, no version of capitalism anywhere at any time that is not intimately associated with some form of urban development.

What common denominators, if any, can be adduced as minimal points of reference in debates about urban analysis? Are there foundational issues of urbanism that can help us in this task? If so, how do we use them to move further forward? And, more immediately, is it possible to establish a criterion of judgment that allows us to discriminate between the different ideas alluded to above and to sort out those that seem likely to offer the most promise for continued research and policy guidance from those that lead us away from these goals?

However much individual cities may differ from one another empirically across time and space, they are all marked by a common underlying logic of socio-spatial integration that enables us to recognize what it is that constitutes their inherently urban character.

Therefore we must distinguish those phenomena that function intrinsically as elements of an urban process from those that may also be found in cities but have no necessary relationship to urbanization as such.

Why is it that people congregate together in geographic space, and when does any resulting cluster constitute a city?

Urban land nexus, that is, a set of interrelated locations forming a composite integument and anchored geographically by the forces of agglomeration.

In modern cities, and probably most cities in the past as well, these patterns can generally be broken down into three different categories reflecting fundamental attributes of urban existence, namely, spaces of production where economic activities and employment sites are concentrated, spaces of residential and social activity given over to areas dominated by housing and family life, and spaces of circulation comprising the physical networks that allow for movement through the urban land nexus. In certain situations, we may need to add a fourth category representing the symbolic (ceremonial or political) spaces of the city. the city, and its materialization in the urban land nexus, can be represented as a mode of spatial integration of many disparate social and economic phenomena whose urbanity flows from the fact that they are drawn together by the imperative of mutual proximity.

Agglomeration is critical in this regard because of its virtues as a source of cost reduction, efficiency, and innovation. The competitive space-sorting mechanisms of the urban land nexus are structured above all by the phenomenon of land rent or value.

We can formulate the definition of city by reference to the urban land nexus as a specifically local scale of economic and social interaction that is (a) generated by agglomeration processes deriving in the first instance from the division of labor; (b) reinforced by diverse economies of scale; (c) structured by prevailing modalities of decision-making and behavior in relationship to overall social and property relationships; and (d) almost always endowed with governance arrangements that attempt to deal with collective issues of coordination and management. There is a further proviso to these conditions, namely that throughout history, cities have always been linked over both short and long distances to locations beyond their own confines so that they invariably function as nodal hubs of far-flung external connections.

This concept of the city that captures the essential logic and substantive character of urbanization by means of a focus on agglomeration and the urban land nexus. Virtually anything can potentially be urban, even though not everything that is found in the city is actually urban, for the urban is defined not by the things it contains but by their mode of spatial integration. An urban process cannot be identified in terms of size or substantive functions, but only in terms of an agglomerated spatial logic relative to a congruent external environment.