February 4. Scale, Density, and Complexity: Framing the Modern City
Theory
Allen J. Scott and Michael Storper, 2015. “The Nature of Cities: The Scope and Limits of Urban Theory,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39(1) January: 10-15.
Robert E. Park, 1915. “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment,” American Journal of Sociology 20(5):577-612.
Ernest W. Burgess, 1925. “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project,” in Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and R.D. McKenzie, The City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 47-62.
W.E.B. Dubois (1899). “The Problem,” chapter 2 in The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Sharon Zukin, 2011. “Is There An Urban Sociology? Questions on a Field and a Vision,” Sociologica 3:1-18.
Guido Martinotti, 2011. “Comment on Sharon Zukin: There Is, There Is!” Sociologica 3:1-15.
Approaches to the Case Study: Historical Mapping
Come prepared to select an aspect of the case study which you would like to research.
Before the discussion of the case study, explore the neighborhood fabric of New York City and the LIC case study as of the 1940s at: https://www.gc.cuny.edu/Page-Elements/Academics-Research-Centers-Initiatives/Centers-and-Institutes/Center-for-Urban-Research/CUNY-Mapping-Service/Projects/New-York-from-the-1940s-to-now; and, http://www.1940snewyork.com/
For more general context on early efforts to map cities, explore Hull-House Maps and Papers, wage and nationalities maps: http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/410008.html
Also explore maps of redlining circa 1935-1940 in U.S. cities from Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America; https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=4/36.71/-96.93&opacity=0.8;
Workshop
We will demonstrate how to use http://www.oasisnyc.net/map.aspx to investigate building-block-lot detailed information on properties in New York City including your research site if it is in the city.
In her essay “Is there an Urban Sociology?” Sharon Zukin writes “the production of space always represents forces of capital, always implicates political elites, and sometimes also provokes collective resistance”(10). Scott and Storper also seem to agree with this understanding of the production of space, and even Park and Burgess, though much more reminiscent of Durkheim than Marx, do not contest the role of economic forces in shaping urban environment. Zukin’s line immediately made me think of Spivak’s foundational question “can the subaltern speak” in terms of the production of space (and I acknowledge my appropriation of her question is tenuous). Can the subaltern produce space? Or does that creative power lie always in the hands of capital? What do these tensions between power and freedom look like in our case study example?
Hi everyone – hope I am posting in the right place. Looking forward to class tomorrow and learning from you all.
My thoughts on this week’s readings and thinking about the LIC case study — In Park’s The City raises a lot of questions for me with regard to the class and race implications of (im)mobility and accessibility in New York (Park, 27). I wonder about this relationship particularly in the context of Amazon’s plans for HQ2 in Long Island City (LIC). While Park focuses on the example of immigrant mobility between Europe and the U.S., this is clearly not the case with 21st century (im)migration: the mobility in question for Amazon is that of class-based fluidity and mobility. While Park emphasizes the significance of communication in addition to of course transportation for urban mobility, I am most curious personally about the way the surge of demand in LIC will influence alternate modes of transit to supplement the subway system, and who the heightened stress on the system will ultimately disserve.
How will Amazon’s presence impact LIC and its broader metropolitan area through the lens of transit and infrastructure? Thinking about Burgess’s discussion of expansion as physical growth — including the city/surrounding metropolitan area as “physically contiguous” spaces — “defined by that facility of transportation,” has there been an exploration of HQ2’s impact on the surrounding areas in Long Island and NJ/CT (Burgess 38)? I found this quick read helpful when thinking about Amazon’s transit-relationship with Seattle — https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/11/amazon-hq2-chose-transit-new-york-dc-subway-metro-mta/575932/. What lessons can New York City glean from this track record?
Another area in which I am eager to learn from you all is thinking about race and urban design. DuBois begins to explore in chapter two of The Philadelphia Negro, the experience of racism in Black communities is affected by and in turn influences the shape of the modern American city. In critique of the Chicago school, I am curious to see how the intersections of race and nativity come into the conversations of mobility in the context of Hunters Point, as the syllabus calls “one commercial-industrial-residential neighborhood as a case study.” The 1943 New York City Market Analysis maps remind us of LIC’s immigrant (white) working class past: how will heightened development affect housing costs and service congestion in some of the most racially diverse areas in Queens in/around LIC?
The Historical and Ecological Aspects of the Urban
Theses first readings, particularly Scott & Storper and the Zukin/Marinotti set, raised a number of issues that I have not thought about, namely, whether the “urban” as a category of sociological analysis can be meaningfully separated from the non-urban and the rest of “society at large”.
If it is a muddle to think there is something meaningfully different about a concentration of people living and working in and near a particular piece of land, then my own experiences tend towards the opposite (which is a reason to distrust personal experience and the anecdotal in discussing something as global and pervasive as the urban): “society” as I have encountered it has been almost wholly urban or at least colored by proximity to the urban. Some of the places I have lived can project the illusion of completeness and self-sufficiency: the famously self-regarding New York metropolitan area, the superconnected city-town-suburb mixture that is the Randstad (the Dutch megalopolis that encompasses Amsterdam, the Hague, Rotterdam, Utrecht and everything in between), and, on numerous occasions when visiting family and relatives, the large-city-next-to-other-large-cities that is Southern China.
The relatively few references in the articles to the historical origins of the urban, the ancient cities, may provide a clearer backdrop for an understanding of the urban as differentiated from society at large. The early cities as an exception from the vast majority of society being engaged in the (surrounding) agricultural sector, and their siting at ecologically and economically important locations (the confluence of rivers or source of fresh water, along long-distance trade routes) suggest that there are important environmental and economic aspects to cities even (or perhaps especially) from the earliest times. Today, the economic rationale for the dense concentration of people and infrastructure at nodal/entrepot locations (eg Chicago, Hongkong) remains clear; the ecological dimension is returning with a vengeance as rising water levels and depletion of water and other living resources make us reexamine the rationale for dense coastal metropolitan zones in perennial flood zones and large cities arising in seemingly inhospitable and certainly unsustainable places such as desert-dry Phoenix reliant on water diverted from many hundreds of miles away. Climate change in fact pits the economic rationale for cities against the coming ecological reality – the foundational benefits of being on the coast or along a river against the eventual total loss from inundation. Many cities are immobile “sitting ducks” – an irony, then, in the many references to “mobility” – personal, social, transportational – in discussions of the urban.
“Are we more isolated as we are more connected?’
This question has been playing on mind when considering “the modern city” complete with its attractive looking high rises and advanced infrastructural systems. Over the years many cities have often experienced economic and social crisis in a post-industrial world leaving city planners to review the fundamental purpose and rationale of the urban within the context of 21stcentury requirements; often with the aim of marketing places in a revised context. It is, therefore, not surprising that opportunities for branding are tempting as city developers re-examine cities in a post industrial environment and strive to overcome negative perceptions about places, as well as to attract visitors, new businesses and residents as well as powerful stakeholders and financial investment.
The dominant economy centric viewpoint pushes the local governments and planners to squeeze out the whatever urban space (often compromised from cities’ public spaces) left to monetise the city. Richard Floria’s “creative class” (prioritising investment in attracting creative class to the city) argument topped up by Edward Glaeser’s fight for luxury high rises with and overly simplified defence for it (building a thirty storey housing becomes much less of a marginal cost for developers than a five storey one once the return on investment considered from the same size plot of land, so here is the solution to the city’s supply & demand problem) is leaving me with the question above.
Sure Floria’s call for creative class sounds innocent initially, and lets be honest, social classification has been done and around for long enough and nothing new, but my problem is the top-down managerial, imposed idea of who decided who is creative? Who determines that nevermind the sheer isolation of the other industries. And for Glaeser’s point, it is an easy thing to claim when you are backed by the elite economy but also high rises are not built for the affordable anymore (as they mainly started as in the past). The riddling question I now have is what becomes of the already existing social gap, inequality and institutional segregation and, more importantly, who will actually benefit from this alienating call for the creative class only club?
Hi everyone, I really enjoy your sharing, and sorry for the very late posting.
The first week’s readings range from early thoughts to current trends of urban studies. No doubt, there are various disciplines claims to study cities with their own methodologies, but the boundary among them is sometime ambiguious. Although my background is sociology, I’m always wondering is what I’m doing sociological. The dynamic definition of “the nature of cities” and the debate on “urban sociology or not” make me think about the significance of cities. Whether typology or complexity, critical thinking or strategic planning, city is absolutely important in categorizing behaviors, social groups, institutions and other subject. So Zukin concludes, what we need to do is more empirical studies ” to know what kinds of social structures are created in one place but not in another, and why” from temporal-spatial perspective with interdisciplinary methods.