The Dictionary of Human Geography (211 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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urban ecology
Two different perspectives relating to the study of urban environments: the first, drawn from the chicago schooL, examines the spatiaLity of urban land use and social groups; while the second refers to urban nature and an ecosystems approach. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Urban ecology from the crncaGo school is part of the broader human ecoLogy tradition. It treats urban land use patterns as the result of social processes such as competition, seg regation, invasion and succession among social groups, resulting in a ?natural? spatial order despite constant mobiLity and expan sion of the system (Berry and Kasarda, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Hawley (1950, cited in Berry and Kasarda, 1977) modified this ecological app roach to emphasize interdependence among individuals and their activities, and constant adaptation to the physical and social environment (Berry and Kasarda, 1977). Scholars continue to pose research questions relating to human organization and commu nity, urban form and environmental adapta tion, but the urban ecology approach as derived from underneath the human ecology umbrella is not dominant. Critiques of the Chicago School?s biological metaphors and lack of specificity in defining key terms, such as ?environment? (Berry and Kasarda, 1977, pp. 14 15), contributed to the decline, as has the rise of new approaches to concepts of nature and ecoLogy itself. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The ecosystem perspective often called urban political Ecology is the contempor ary, and dominant, approach to urban ecology (Keil, 2003). It shares with the early ecological approaches recognition of the importance of interdependence, social relations and human environment relations (Vasishth and Sloane, 2002). But as Wolch, Pincetl and Pulido (NEW PARAGRAPH) point out, the Chicago School ecologies transposed biological metaphors and ecosys tem thinking on to human activity and relation ships, leaving all conceptualizations of nature as separate from and outside of the urban. Contemporary urban ecology seeks to redress this omission, incorporating nature and non human species into an approach that recog nizes the interdependency and coexistence of social, political and environmental processes and events in the urban sphere. Urban political ecology examines urban and nature as inter related, mutually constituting dynamics, rather than separate arenas (Keil, 2003). Further, urban political ecology explicitly links urban environments and problems of sustainabiLity to global processes such as capitaLism. Urban ecology is one of a growing area of ecological scholarship, analytically linking humans and nature in LocaL gLobaL reLations. dgm (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Keil (2003); Swyngedouw and Heynen (2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
urban entrepreneurialism
A strategic and political response by urban policy makers to the loss of income from taxes and intergovern mental fiscal transfers. It entails a shift from the management of pubLic services to specu lative strategies intended to attract private investment and government grants through place marketing, spectacular developments and so forth (Harvey, 1989a). Entrepre neurialism is distinguished from earlier rounds of boosterism by the local public sector?s assumption of risk associated with develop ment through its role in pubLic private (NEW PARAGRAPH) partnerships. Jessop (1998) adds a definition of entrepreneurialism focused on MNovatioN: urban entrepreneurs devise new ways of doing urban govErnancE in order to be as competitive as possible. em (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Hall and Hubbard (1998). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
urban exploration
Involving journeys thro ugh cities as a means of discovery and the construction of geographical knowledge, the term is often associated with the activities of nineteenth century social explorers and reformers, who ventured into urban spaces in the ?heart of empire? to report on their condi tions and bring them to wider public attention. As with cultures and practices of exploration more generally, such explorations have been subjected to considerable critical attention, which has focused on the colonial discourses and unequal power relations that framed them, the encounters they involved, and the ways in which their accounts were not simply neutral but had material effects for example, scripting urban areas as ?dark?, ?undiscovered? and populated by a ?race apart? (Driver, 2001a, ch. 8: cf. coLoniaLism; imperialism). The term has been appropriated for other ends, however. Among those seeking to turn around the colonialist language of exploration has been the radical geographer Bill Bunge, through his urban ?expeditions? in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of the Society for Human Exploration. Based in Detroit and later Toronto, these aimed to be contributive rather than exploitative, democratic rather than elitist, as they worked with disenfran chised residents of inner cities, planning with them rather than for them (see Merrifield, 1995; see also radicaL geography). (NEW PARAGRAPH) More recently, the term ?urban exploration? has been taken up widely by individuals and groups interested in investigating areas of cities that are ?secret?, overlooked, forgotten or obscure. Such practices are also sometimes named ?infiltration? and typically focus on places off limits to the public, including aban doned buildings, ruined constructions, transit and utility tunnels, storm drains, rooftops or secure sites (Ninjalicious, 2005). Often involv ing photographic documentation, and imbued with a sense of play and curiosity, their profile and popularity has expanded rapidly through media attention and proliferating internet sites. Modes of urban exploration have also been important in recent arts, cultural and writing practice through projects that seek (NEW PARAGRAPH) to engage with city spaces and their potential ities beyond galleries and other formal arts institutions (Pinder, 2005b). Some of these are indebted to the earlier politicized spatial practices of the situationists as well as to longer visionary and literary traditions of urban wandering as they intervene in how spaces are imagined, represented and lived. (See also psychogeography.) dp (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Driver (2001a, ch. 8); Pinder (2005b). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
urban fringe
Those areas around urban cores that are functionally or morphologically linked (but not necessarily contiguous) to the urban region and have an emerging (sub) urban settlement structure. They tend no longer to be dependent on agriculture alone and do not simply take overflow from urban industrial, transportation or commercial activ ities in the core. The term is a statistical cat egory. Statistics Canada, for example, defines the urban fringe as including ?all small urban areas (with less than 10,000 population)? within census metropolitan areas that are ?not contiguous to the urban core? (http://geodepot. statcan.ca/Diss/Reference/Tutorial/UF tut2 e. cfm). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the 1980s and 1990s the urban fringe was the focus of much attention, as traditional urban cores lost significance to industrial and commercial competitors in suburbs and net worked small towns close to metropolitan areas. Terms such as ?exopolis? (Soja, 1992), ?Zwischenstadt? (Sieverts, 2003) or ?edge city? (Garreau, 1991) signalled the growing signifi cance of emerging denser nodes in the urban fringe. Rk (NEW PARAGRAPH)
urban geography
The geographical study of urban spaces and urban ways of being. It was the chicago school of sociology, and not geographers, who initiated the study of urban space (Fyfe and Kenny, 2005). Early urban geography was characterized by histor ical studies that saw physical morphology to be a determinant of urban development, or regional studies that looked at the different relations between towns. By way of contrast, Chicago sociologists studied human ecology, gathering data through social surveys and par ticipant ObSERVATlON, and producing rich urban ethnographies. It was not until the mid 1950s that geographers, drawing heavily on sociology and neo classical economics, and on the locational theories of geograph ers Chauncey Harris and Edward Ullman, systematized the sub discipline of urban geog raphy. Over the next 50 years, urban geog raphy advanced to a central position in the discipline. By the 1960s and 1970s, urban geographers had become key players in the quantitative revoLution. Urban geographers adopted LocationaL anaLysis, the philosophy of positivism and the methods of spatiaL sci ence as the tools of their trade. The economy of cities was central to their work and a num ber of urban geographers sought to translate their theories into urban policy prescriptions for the revitalization of deindustrializing cities. The theoretical models associated with this spatiaL science, such as centraL pLace the ory, industrial location theory, urban factor iaL ecoLogy and the rank size ruLe, was the backbone of a broadly (neo )classical school of analytical urban geography. At the same time, there was other work on the city in geography that resisted the orthodoxy of spatial science. Kevin Lynch?s (1960) The image of the city, provided a sort of behaviouraL geography that looked at people?s perceptions of the urban environment by analysing their mentaL maps, and prefigured, in radically different form, recent work on the city as text, and the body and the city. (NEW PARAGRAPH) By the early 1970s, however, spatial science was being criticized for not explaining the social processes behind the spatial patterns being mapped and modelled, and two alterna tive theoretical frameworks emerged one from marxism, espousing a radical poLiticaL economy approach, and the other from humanism, drawing on the pragmatism and the more interpretative methods (as opposed to the modeLs) of the Chicago School. These approaches are evident in two very different books that focused on the city David Harvey?s (1973) Social justice and the city and David Ley?s (1974) The black inner city as fron tier outpost: images and behavior of a (NEW PARAGRAPH) Philadelphia neighbourhood. The former rejected liberal assumptions about the city and began to expose the structural logic of capitaLism and its role in social inequality; the latter was interested in how individuals experienced the city and the values and mean ings they attached to it. Although focused on the city, these books are often seen to be stud ies in sociaL geography this mirrors the fact that studies of the urban at this time began to dominate other sub disciplines, including also cuLturaL geography, economic geography and poLiticaL geography and sub disciplinary boundaries became more blurred. Indeed, patterns of urban social and ethnic segregation were being analysed by social geographers such as Ceri Peach and Fred Boal. (NEW PARAGRAPH) From the late 1970s, global economic (and, indeed, the associated social) restructuring significantly expanded the scope of urban geography. New research agendas emerged looking at financial capital, silicon landscapes, telecommunications networks, the new urban ism, the new (urban) middle class and gLobaL cities. Research interests moved away from the inner city to the suburbs and edge cities and, indeed, outwards from the metropolitan to the global scale. Those that did choose to study the inner city looked at urban revitaliza tion initiatives and festival marketplaces, and began to theorize processes of gentrification. The geographical literature on gentrification that was to become so central to urban geog raphy in the 1990s saw its genesis in the mid 1980s with the publication of Smith and William?s (1986) Gentrification of the city. In this edited collection, theoretical debates raged between structure and human agency. From this point on, urban geographers began to seek a more sophisticated conceptualization of agency in an urban geography that was dom inated by political economy. In the late 1980s, Marston, Towers, Cadwallader and Kirby (NEW PARAGRAPH) argued, in a chapter titled ?The urban problematic?, that urban geography was suffering from a decline in its vitality due to the crippling historical legacy of outmoded approaches, but that it was beginning to move into new areas of research and expertise. In the 1980s, two distinct but overlapping devel opments feminism and postmodernism began to permeate urban geography. Feminism charged urban geographers to look at the lives of women in the city and to reconsider urban theory in the light of feminist theory (McDowell, 1983), whilst postmodernism forced urban geographers to consider the privileging of one urban theory over another, the social construction of the urban, and the fact that there were differences in the city other than class and race/ethnicity, such as gender, age, sexuaLity and disabiLity. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the 1990s, the import of feminism and postmodernism forged the cultural turn in social geography and the subsequent emer gence of the new cuLturaL geography in the discipline as a whole. As a result of urban geography?s relatively greater attachment to quantitative and applied work, the strong influence of political economy, and its long tradition of empirical and practical research, it embraced the cultural turn relatively late. This state of affairs was nowhere more apparent than in the debates over gentrifica tion that dominated urban geography at this time. In the early to mid 1990s, debates over the causes of gentrification became stalemated between Neil Smith?s political economy production explanation and David Ley?s humanist consumption explanation demon strating to many geographers the necessity of challenging and (re)negotiating such metanar ratives. In some respects, however, the slower import of the cultural turn into urban geog raphy was fortuitous, as it meant that urban geography was able to avoid many of the allegedly immaterial excesses in which social and cultural geography became embroiled (Lees, 2002). Over time, interest in the iden tity politics of difference in the city grew, culminating in the notion of ?cities of differ ence? (Fincher and Jacobs, 1998). The hegem ony of human centred urban theories was questioned so that non human actors, such as animaLs, began to be included in urban theory, leading Wolch, West and Gaines (NEW PARAGRAPH) to construct a trans species urban the ory. And urban geographers began to integrate the study of Language and cuLture into urban geographical analysis much more fully. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In many ways symptomatic of the fact that more or less everything and everywhere had by now become urban and that urban geographers identified themselves less as urban geographers and more as feminist, post modernist, Marxist or population geograph ers, in 1993 Nigel Thrift proclaimed an ?urban impasse? the loss of the urban as both a subject and object of study. Nevertheless, refocusing on the urban as a subject and object of study, there was a proliferation of work in the 1990s on global cities and on global eco nomic restructuring. Certain cities emerged as the command and control centres of global capitalism cities such as New York, London and Tokyo. Sassen (1991) argued that such global cities are characterized by an hourglass socio economic profile, with growth at the top and bottom ends and decline in the middle ranks. Hamnett (1994) refuted this claim, arguing that the outcomes of gLobaLization in cities are mediated by national and city specifics. Rather than focusing on individual cities, Beaverstock, Smith and Taylor (2000) examined the networks that connect such world or global cities. Drawing on sociologist Manuel Castells? (1996b) The rise of the net work society, they argued that global cities should be studied less as places and more as a process located in a networked space of fLows. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The notion ofglobal or world cities, though, is very much from the point of view of the west. And urban geographers are increasin gly critical of the hegemony of the West in urban theory, evidence of the impact of post coLoniaLism on urban geography. Countering this hegemony, urban geographers are now complicating the dichotomy between the urban north and south in terms of both urbanizations and urbanism, and between First World and third worLd cities. Unlike McGee?s (1971) pioneering work on Third World cities, which called for urban models to be sympathetic to the cultural and historical backgrounds of such cities, contemporary work on Third World cities argues that in an era of globalization a process of convergence has emerged such that there should now be a single urban discourse that is inclusive of all cities. Chakravorty (2000), for example, uses Calcutta to demonstrate concerns about Third World cities being viewed separately from the development of First World cities, and argues that urban development in one part of the globe cannot be understood without reference to urban development elsewhere in the world. This idea that urban processes are now con verging around the globe can also be seen in the gentrification literature. For gentrification is now seen to be a process of ?new urban coLoniaLism? occurring all over the globe from Brazil to Poland to Japan. Also linked to global economic restructuring, post sociaList cities have come under the lens of urban geograph ers. There has been some research on post socialist eastern and central European cities, but more recently there has been a proliferation of research on the ?market socialism? of con temporary Chinese cities. Perhaps not sur prisingly, it seems to be the economically successful cities that attract the most research. Jenny Robinson (2004) asks how it is possible to write across diverse urban contexts, which are distinctive and unique, but also intercon nected and part of widely circulating practices of urbanism. She argues that suggestions that growing convergences between cities of the ?North? and the ?South? make them more com parable are a little misleading, and that the ambitions of post colonialism suggest that sim ply universalizing Western accounts of cities is inappropriate. Instead, she suggests that if we are to engage in a properly comparative or transnational urbanism we need to excavate and disturb some long standing and frequently taken for granted assumptions about how urban geography deals with differences among cities. She argues that two key concepts have led urban studies to this impasse the con cepts of modernity and development. These have to be unpacked and urban geography allowed to learn from the diverse tactics of urban living around the world. (NEW PARAGRAPH) As urban geography entered the twenty first century, Michael Dear (2000) proclaimed that ?the dominance of the Chicago model is being challenged by what may be an emergent ??los angeles school?? ?. Like the Chicago School, the LA School is not a geography school; rather, the LA School is made up of scholars largely, but not solely, based in the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at UCLA, even if many of those scholars are in fact geographers. Where Chicago was seen to be the exemplar of the old, modern, industrial city, Los Angeles is touted as the exemplar of the new, postmodern, post industrial city. With its decentred urban sprawl, gated com munities and edge cities, LA is (re)presented as the prototypical postmodern urban land scape multinucleated, disarticulated and polarized. The city has become so unpredict able that the School represents it as a centre less urban form, a keno gameboard in place of the Chicago School?s concentric rings of industry and settlement. Yet this new repre sentation is still subject to the forces of capit alism. Dear even invents a new language for the new urban processes to be found in LA to signify the distinctiveness of postmodern urbanism words such as ?cybergoisie? (elite executives and entrepreneurs), ?protosurps? (marginalized surplus labour), ?commudities? (commodified communities) and so on. Most geographers have been critical of claims about the paradigmatic status of Los Angeles. Nijman (2000) has argued that Miami, which also experiences the same issues, but at a smal ler and as a result more intense scale, is more deserving of the status of quintessential post modern city; whilst other authors have criti cized the ?thin? methodologies behind the LA School?s research. In time to come, ?postmod ern urbanism? may become one of the defini tive statements of the LA School, ?notable more for its intellectual bravado than theoret ical displacement? (Beauregard, 1999): on the other hand, all that is not solid also melts into air. (NEW PARAGRAPH) At the same time as urban geography has taken on board the interpretative turn, it has begun to move in another direction too, towards what Batty (2000) calls ?the new urban geography of the third dimension?. Here, the approach is quantitative rather than qualitative, and studies use data sets to detect fine scale, intensive and extensive, patterns in metropolitan areas. In this work, GIS and modelling are the central techniques not textual, semiotic or discourse analysis. This reminds us that urban geography covers a large community of researchers, using differ ent approaches to study the urban. In contrast to the LA School?s representational turn, Amin and Thrift?s (2002) Cities: reimagining the urban demonstrates a non representational turn (see non representational theory). Amin and Thrift argue that cities are too intri cate and as such are difficult to generalize, thus voicing the limits to representation encountered in the hermeneutic tradition. They argue that the city is a spatially open entity, cross cut by various mobilities people, information, commodities and as such to properly engage with the ?multiplexity? of the city we have to recognize that cities are the ?irreducible product of mixture?. This way of looking at the city has implications for how we define urban life and for a new politics of the city. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In recent years, urban geographers have become more confident of their position again. Aitken, Mitchell and Staeheli (2002) maintain ?that [urban] geographers are [now] at the forefront not only of understanding con temporary urban space, but also of imagining and mapping its futures?. No doubt connected to this new confidence, urban geographers

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