Starting with the Scott/Storper article and then progressing through the following readings in the order of the syllabus had a tremendous effect on my interpretation of this week’s readings. Scott and Storper are essentially arguing for an economic determinism that defines the urban: a dense agglomeration of production, exchange, and consumption enacted in a set of conditions both material and social (land use, location, and human interaction). Cities exist by the grace of economic activity. Humans are not auxiliary to such phenomena, but they are subject to it – the social is embedded in the economic. This is certainly true of exurban societies, and the “land use nexus” can be found in rural areas too. Creating a benchmark to differentiate urban and non-urban, however, is risky. As Martinotti reminds us, cities mean change. Density and population are relative terms when defining a city. How can we differentiate?
Park and Burgess echo (or initiate?) the economic determinism that generates a city. The division of labor that was deepened and institutionalized by capitalist development yielded enough surplus to accommodate new vocations, currency, a system of utility that is not defined by social mores, and above all, dense networks of people and exchange – cities. Although these sociologists may insist on the urban as a set of “attitudes and sentiments,” or the “city as a state of mind,” such conditions remain framed by the economic circumstances that enabled them to emerge. Social and political phenomena are not independent of economic phenomena: they are reactions to, plans for, and symptoms of, the economy. DuBois reminds us that the “slum is a symptom, not a fact.” He clearly understood that slums have been socially produced through an economic vocabulary.
Zukin is emphatic on the issue of space as an expression of such social relationships. She also emphasizes that “the city is an expression of economic processes.” These conditions allow for and perhaps exacerbate economic and social injustices, but thanks to their defining characteristics (density, agglomeration, mobility) they are also prime sites for resistance and change.
Each reading attempts a definition of “urban” to focus inquiry and theory more precisely. But each struggles to differentiate “urban problems” from “people problems.” At the same time, they all agree (some more explicitly than others) that economics drive the developments that shape urban experiences. Economics are not necessarily capitalist in nature, either: large urban settlements like Venice or Rome in the early modern or ancient eras could not strictly be defined as capitalist, or even proto-capitalist societies. But they were still sites of innovation, knowledge exchange, reaction, growth, politics, reform, expansion, and diversity. I suppose I might fall in line with Scott and Storper (and, thus perhaps Zukin) by understanding the urban begins with understanding the economic processes that belie it.
