Urban Geography 101: The History and Context of Urban Geography

In this lecture…

– Key themes in Urban Geography

– Approaches to Urban Geography

– Introduction to urbanization process

– Some random US city definition terms

The Study of Urban Geography

• Important questions

– What attributes make cities and neighborhoods distinctive?

– How did these distinct identities evolve?

– Are there regularities about the spatial arrangement of towns and cities?

– Are there regularities about land use within cities and the patterns of neighborhood population (by class, household type, race, etc.)?

– What are the causes of these regularities?

– Who benefits or profits from the way these regularities occur?

• Answers come by situating cities in broader economic, social and political life.

– While also understanding that cities are not just shaped by these wider contexts, but are also shapers of them

Four Central Geographic Themes

• Space: What is out there, where society and nature happen

– It is the geographer’s argument that not only does society take place in space, but how space is organized greatly impacts society (corporation limits in tax collection, for example)

• Territoriality: The tendency of particular groups within a society to establish some form of control, dominance or exclusivity within a localized area.

– These spaces become particularly important in molding the behaviors of these groups

4 Central Themes (cont.)

• Distance: How far apart things are (duh).

– In cities, distance is often thought about in “how much time” or “how accessible” instead of how “many miles.”

– For example, distance from amenities determines opportunities for good quality of life.

• Place: An individual, unique setting. Can be big (Florida) or small (the lake out back of the student center), like or unlike other places

– Urban geographers particularly interested in why places vary, and how sense of place influences people’s spatial decisions about where to go and what to do where.

Approaches to Urban Geography

NOTE: All of these are still practiced, usually in combination

• 1950’s – Descriptive/Morphological (what is the settlement like, how does it reflect the natural environment)

– Not scientific, in the sense that few generalizations could be made, and those could not be tested or easily applied

• 1960’s – Spatial Analysis (using statistical data like the census to build models that predict future patterns)

– Problem: Models can make generalizations, but, by their nature (ie, the demands of making formulas), reduced the complexity of the world and its people.

• This “scientific” approach sometimes led to bad policy.

• And while algorithms have gotten better, and powerful tools like GIS and remote sensing have emerged, there will always be a gap between numbers & the world (just like there is a gap between words & the world)

Approaches (cont.)

• 1970’s bring about approaches that try to address weaknesses in spatial analysis

– Behavioral Approach: Using social psych techniques to get statistical data about spatial decision making

– Humanistic Approach: Using observation and other qualitative methods to capture people’s subjective feelings about places; less interested in models

– Structural Approach: Argues that understanding what is behind the data patterns is key; namely, macro (large scale) trends in political economy and socio-spatial order

– Feminist Approach: All earlier work assumed space only inhabited by men (seriously); turns out women are differently situated

Approaches (cont.)

• 1980’s brought the structure/agency approach (trying to link structural macro approaches to individual humanistic approaches, saying both structural constraint and human ingenuity mattered)

• 1990’s brought post-structural approaches (which argue that the world is more complex and chaotic than the structures we create to describe it and we should be humble, nuanced and focused in claims we make)

– Comes with increasing focus on who defines meaning, how meaning is defined, and to what end

• This also brings a focus on how identity (race, class, gender, and sexuality) matters in who accesses what and where

• Again, despite all the challenges, the spatial analysis approach, especially now that it is armed with GIS, remains popular among researchers.

• Nowadays, most people recognize that different approaches are required depending on the goal of the research and the questions that are asked

The Urbanization Process

• It is a much greater change than simply more people living in built up area. These include changes in:

– The urban system (how cities and towns within a region, country, or internationally interact with one another)

– Land use (how land is used – duh)

– Social Ecology (the social and demographic composition of neighborhoods)

– The Built environment (all stuff people make)

– The nature of urbanism (the forms of social interaction and ways of life that develop in urban settings)

• These changes can be impacted by citizen groups, developers, government policy, legal action, urban planning, and countless others as well as the macro changes on the next slides

Processes: Economic Change

• The authors emphasize this as the most important driver of urban dynamics

– Others would argue technological change is key (the railroad, street car, non-load bearing walls, automobile, air conditioning, container shipping, internet); others, cultural change as cities are attractive to young people

• But certainly, as the economy changes, land use demands change and especially the relative importance of cities in the urban system change

– For example, people used to actually move to, instead of from, Detroit and Cleveland during the Fordist era.

Economic Change (cont.)

• They argue urbanization trends closely follow changes in the nature of capitalism (especially in the U.S.)

– Competitive Capitalism (late 1700’s to late 1800’s)

• Started with competition in small markets between family firms with little government interference

– Only after the Civil War in the U.S., with the coming of a continent wide railroad system and a stronger federal government, do we really get a nationwide market

» This allows businesses to get bigger, labor power to organize, and forces the government to take a more active managerial role

• Agriculture still a major part of the economy (with mining becoming of growing importance), with emerging manufacturing to provide both machines/transport for agriculture & some limited consumer goods

• Ends with the depression of the 1890’s, which followed a world-wide speculative expansion in the 1880’s (much in US railroads and mines) and a period of over-accumulation (where more is produced than can be consumed, leading to a bubble then collapse)

– All these cycles end in a period of over-accumulation

Economic Change (cont.)

• Organized capitalism (from about 1900 to about 1980)

– Movement towards Fordism (which is the coupling of mass production with Taylorism (scientific management), and high enough wages to encourage mass consumption.)

• It was also a combination of big business and big labor

• Also sees the emergence of advertising, and new mediums of mass communication like radio and television

– Government’s role in regulation and economic management expanded (first after the 1890’s panic, then again after the crash of 1929) and also in providing better quality of life (during and following the depression and WWII with social security, GI bill, highways, etc)

Economic Change (cont.)

• Advanced Capitalism (1980-onward)

– Rise of service economy

• This economy is bifurcated – meaning that it has both a high skill/high wage/high profit end & a low skill/low wage end that is still profitable b/c of low cost

• Also means proximity to primary resources (like farmland or minerals or even ports) matters less

– Also deindustrialization

• Not a decline in the overall amount of manufacturing production, but a decline in industrial jobs

– This because of both automation and shifting jobs overseas where wages, regulations and taxes are often lower

» This is the new industrial division of labor, where there the wage hierarchy gets spread across international boundaries leading to new forms of uneven development

» Thus the rise of a truly transnational corporation that produces & sells world-wide; also world cities like NYC, London and Tokyo where many of the control centres are;

» Also see increasing global intercity competition

Economic Change

• Advanced Capitalism (cont.)

– Besides a service sector, this era is also about specialization, customization and niche markets

• This requires flexible production, where all inputs are not fixed, including labor, factory location, supplies, and everything can be on demand

– This is made possible primarily by high speed communication technologies (first satellite, and then the internet), which allow huge volumes of information about distant sites to accessible instantly

• It also allows once small dispersed markets to coalesce and expand through websites, message boards, social networking sites, etc….

– Thus, it the close, stable, top-down relationship of big business, big government, and big labor in nation states has broken down, along with mass communication and mass production; new systems of control emerging like supra-national institutions and NGO’s.

Other processes

• Demographic Change – Who and how many people come to cities impacts them greatly (why Miami is different from Nashville)

• Political Change – Big shifts in how government’s role is viewed can change cities greatly (reform movements in 1870’s brought parks; war on terror brought ugly barriers; 1980’s saw national governments scale back leaving cities to compete with each other);

• Social Cultural Change – Urban areas are often home to subcultures that influence wider society; housing preference within and between cities change greatly as culture changes; emerging global cultures are making cities more alike in many ways

Other processes (cont.)

• Technology Change – Major technology changes can radical alter cities (and in fact, the issues of urban living spur many technology changes).

– Again, canal, railroad, street car, non-load bearing walls, car, air conditioner, jet and internet are the big one’s for US cities.

– But also, the authors point to the hugely transformative effect on cities of the birth control pill, which allowed the limiting of family size, greater women’s participation in the workforce, and the growing number of single people

• Environmental change – Cities are huge consumers of resources and producers of waste; the local environment greatly impacts land use and potentially global environmental change will harm some cities (especially arid and coastal cities)

Random Terms (for defining a city in the US)

– Urban Area (US): densely settled contiguous area of 50,000 + person (with at least 1000 per sq/mi in core & 500 per sq. mile in surrounding territory)

– Urban Cluster (US): densely settled with at least 2500 but less than 50000 persons (with at least 1000 per sq/mi in core & 500 per sq. mile in surrounding territory)

– Core Based Statistical Area (US Census): Has one urban area of at least 10000. The county (or counties) that contain this area is the central county; the largest city (or possibly three largest cities) are the principal city; outlying counties are included if a significant number of people commute to the central county.

• CBSA’s can be either a Micropolitan Statistical Area (at least one urban cluster of 10000+) or Metropolitan Statistical Area (at least one urban area),

• Large metros with a core of +2.5 million can be broken into Metropolitan Divisions

– All Urban Areas are divided into Census Tracts (about 1000-8000 similar socioeconomic people), Block Groups, and Census blocks

• Adjoining macros and micros can make a Combined Statistical Area

– In 2007, there are 579 micros, 374 macros, 127 Combined Statistical Areas