Urbanism
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- This article is about the study of cities. For the similarly named record company, see Urbanizm Music.
Urbanism is the study of cities - their economic, political, social and cultural environment, and the imprint of all these forces on the built environment. In addition Urbanism is also the practice of creating human communities for living, work, and play; covering the more human aspects of urban planning. Urbanism assumes that there is such an entity as the "urban" with its characteristic high population density, and that it can be clearly distinguished from the "rural".
Some scholars[citation needed] initially rejected the notion that there were any significant differences between the social and political order in the rural or so called urban, hence there was no point in a specifically 'urban studies'. However, this debate is largely out of date, and it is widely accepted (UN Habitat 2000) that cities do exist in a fundamentally distinct state from rural areas, and that the world population is increasingly living in urbanized areas. However, the importance of the hinterland within the construct of an "urban centre" must be recognized.
In a modern world this hinterland is less easily defined due to modern communications technology, but in a pre-industrial, agrarian society, it would have been much more evident that the city cannot exist without a hinterland to supply it. This, however, assumes that such an agrarian society thought within the same framework as the modern, and in many cases (such as that of the Roman Empire or ancient Greece) this can be seen to be untrue; The Roman and Greek municipium or polis can be seen to be a social, political and economic entity consisting of "urban" centre and hinterland.
Having established that a 'city' is an ontologically distinct 'urban' as opposed to rural area, scholars have studied cities from several dimensions: the internalist perspectives which looked at spatial and social order within a city, externalist perspectives which viewed cities as stable points or nodes in the wider globalizing space of networks and flows, and the interstitial perspective which attempted to reconcile the two perspectives: by trying to understand how globalizing flows and external forces influence, and are influenced by, the social, temporal and spatial ordering of a city. Amin and Graham (1997) argue in The Ordinary City that the urbanscape can best be understood as a site of co-presence of multiple spaces, multiple times and multiple webs of relations, tying local sites, subjects and fragments into globalizing networks of economic, social and cultural change.
[edit] See also
- new urbanism, a response to contemporary problems such as peak oil and traffic congestion.
- unitary urbanism, a critique of urbanism as a technology of power by the situationists
- landscape urbanism, an urbanism modeled on the disciplines of landscape architecture and ecology
- World Urbanism Day
[edit] External links
- Hollow city MP3 interview with Rebecca Solnit on the evolution of the US city and contemporary threats to it
- Collection of articles on Shack Settlements
- Urbanism and Aisthesis: Rostros y lugares del anonimato | ciudades, pintura metafísica y sobremodernidad by Adolfo Vasquez Rocca PhD
[edit] Further reading
- Robert E. Park, The City - Suggestions for the Study of Human Nature in the Urban Environment (1925) and all the publications of the Chicago school
- Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
- Kevin Lynch, Image of the City
- Peter Geoffrey Hall Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century
- Richard Sennett The Uses of Disorder
- Saskia Sassen (1997) The global city: London, New York, Tokyo
- Manuel Castells The Urban Question, Network Society
- David Harvey (1989)Flexible accumulation through urbanization
- Amin and Graham (1997) "The Ordinary City" in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 22 pp 411-429
- Henri Lefebvre (1970) "The Urban Revolution"
