City as distinct society
Urban morphology: the social geography of cities
Cities are more than just an agglomeration of people The urban is different from the rural, but how? • good? modern, modern, advanced, advanced, cosmopolitan cosmopolitan excitement excitement and and diversity • or bad? fragmented, decadent, socially polarized, polarized, commercialized? commercialized?
Louis Wirth (1938) on “Urbanism as a Way of Life” theory of the social responses to urbanization • process of traditional, rural peoples adapting adapting to a new kind of social environment
cities are big, dense, and diverse, which leads to: • lots of impersonal impersonal interactions interactions with lots of many different different people people • desire to find one’s one’s place in society society and build social social distance from others others leads to spatial clustering/separat clustering/separation ion of different groups • potential for for deviant behavior behavior as rootless rootless individuals individuals struggle to adapt to new social norms
Urbanism as “community lost”
Alternatives to the “community lost” perspective
Wirth was building on older, Germanic scholarship that viewed the modern industrial city as a fundamentally different kind of human community
Herbert Gans “urban villagers”
The old = Gemeinschaft Gemeinschaft (“community”) (“community”) • theoretical theoretically ly ideal village life with deep, mutually mutually dependent, dependent, family-based family-based relationships built around folk, household economies and informal traditional methods of discipline and control
The new = Gesellschaft Gesellschaft (“society”) (“society”) • theoretical theoretically ly ideal modern city with numerous, numerous, shallow relations relationships hips amongst a large, diverse population • specia specialized lized labor with formalized formalized corporate/ corporate/factor factory y settings • discipl discipline ine and order obtained obtained through through formal, institutiona institutionall rules, regulations, and laws • concer concerns ns about alienation alienation,, deviance, deviance, and anomie anomie
• older, older, central city neighborhoods neighborhoods with with multigenerational multigenerational immobility immobility • pioneeri pioneering ng new suburban suburban communities communities of people sharing sharing common interests
Jane Jacobs promoting busy sidewalks and the social benefit of regular informal interactions among strangers in public • she doesn’t really really disagree with with the theory, theory, but instead optimistically optimistically posits that gesellschaft need not lead to widespread anomie • vibrant public public spaces become the antidote to the the loss of traditional traditional community bonds
The Chicago School
Urban morphology
Univ. of Chicago, Sociology (1920s–30s)
Urban Morphology
landmark modern social science Chicago as site and subject of study; Chicago as the “shock city” encapsulating industrial urbanism in the USA ca. 1900
Core themes: social deviance immigration, industrialization, and new transportation impacting the city human ecology—adapting to a changing social environment (social distance translates into spatial distance; dynamics of neighborhood invasion and succession) empirical methodologies (census maps, ethnography) urban morphology
Modeling Urban Morphology Starts with the Chicago School and Concentric Zone Theory •
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spatial logic based on economic bid-rent competition and social “invasion and succession” competition single, defining urban center (the CBD) newer, more spacious, more affluent homes on the periphery, compared to transitional inner city
the organization and evolution of urban spaces; unplanned “natural areas” that display an order, not randomness • economics: land value, land use • population: race, ethnicity, other group identity • politics and law: controlled, enclosed territories
Urban Morphogenesis is the study of how these morphologies develop and change over time
Alternative Models Homer Hoyt’s Sector Model (1930s) • patterns of home values (rents) • affluent properties along high-rent corridors • still a single-center model
Harris and Ullman’s Multiple Nuclei model (1940s) • more than one growth pole/center • agglomeration economies and diseconomies
Murdie’s urban mosaic (1970s) • economic status tends to be sectoral • family status tends to be concentric • ethnic-racial status tends to be clustered
The “Galactic Metropolis”
Critical Urban Geographies Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, postmodern, and other theories present different models, but emphasize similar themes • mobility and spatial entrapment, enclaves of wealth, poverty, and difference (e.g., citadels, ethnoburbs, ghettoes, edge cities) • Davis’s “Ecology of Fear” and Dear and Flusty’s “keno capitalism”
Postmodernism: The L.A. School USC and UCLA Departments of Geography and Planning • •
characterized by neo-Marxist and postmodern themes: •
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Postmodern Design The postmodern responds to criticisms of modern philosophy and practice a “restless” revival and juxtaposition of traditional subjectivity, complexity, pluralism, disorder, diversity
But is it really better? emphasis on symbolism; contrived, imagined identities; “dreamscapes” heritage refurbished, but perhaps in a trivial, romanticized and commercialized way? (“form follows fiction”) “New alliance of taste and capital” that still can be elitist
Ed Soja, Mike Davis, Michael Dear, Allen Scott, et al. Los Angeles as the shock city of today’s high-tech information, entertainment, and defense economy; with suburban sprawl and immigration-related social-economic conflict new urban morphologies and systems: newly industrialized regions challenge the old industrial core, while suburbs challenge downtowns new enclosure movements: a “carceral city” of bunker architecture, privatization of public space, and gated communities (culture of fear and security) new civic cultures: “The redistributional city of late modernism is turning into the entrepreneurial city of early postmodernism” (John R. Short) new global economies: a “post-Fordist” world system anchored by technopoles and a cosmopolitan, “hyper-real”, culture-knowledge-symbolic economy new looks/landscapes/architectures
