City as distinct society

Cities are more than just an agglomeration of people The urban is different from the rural, but how?
good? modern, advanced, cosmopolitan excitement and diversity or bad? fragmented, decadent, socially polarized, commercialized?

Urban morphology: the social geography of cities

Louis Wirth (1938) on Urbanism as a Way of Life

theory of the social responses to urbanization
process of traditional, rural peoples adapting to a new kind of social environment

cities are big, dense, and diverse, which leads to:

lots of impersonal interactions with lots of many different people desire to nd ones place in society and build social distance from others leads to spatial clustering/separation of different groups potential for deviant behavior as rootless individuals struggle to adapt to new social norms

Urbanism as community lost

Wirth was building on older, Germanic scholarship that viewed the modern industrial city as a fundamentally different kind of human community
The old = Gemeinschaft (community)
theoretically ideal village life with deep, mutually dependent, family-based relationships built around folk, household economies and informal traditional methods of discipline and control

Alternatives to the community lost perspective

Herbert Gans urban villagers
older, central city neighborhoods with multigenerational immobility pioneering new suburban communities of people sharing common interests

The new = Gesellschaft (society)

theoretically ideal modern city with numerous, shallow relationships amongst a large, diverse population specialized labor with formalized corporate/factory settings discipline and order obtained through formal, institutional rules, regulations, and laws concerns about alienation, deviance, and anomie

Jane Jacobs promoting busy sidewalks and the social benet of regular informal interactions among strangers in public
she doesnt really disagree with the theory, but instead optimistically posits that gesellschaft need not lead to widespread anomie vibrant public spaces become the antidote to the loss of traditional community bonds

The Chicago School

Univ. of Chicago, Sociology (1920s30s)
landmark modern social science Chicago as site and subject of study; Chicago as the shock city encapsulating industrial urbanism in the USA ca. 1900

Urban morphology
Urban Morphology
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

Core themes:
social deviance immigration, industrialization, and new transportation impacting the city human ecologyadapting to a changing social environment (social distance translates into spatial distance; dynamics of neighborhood invasion and succession) empirical methodologies (census maps, ethnography) urban morphology

Urban Morphogenesis is the study of how these morphologies develop and change over time

Modeling Urban Morphology

Starts with the Chicago School and Concentric Zone Theory
spatial logic based on economic bid-rent competition and social invasion and succession competition single, dening urban center (the CBD) newer, more spacious, more afuent homes on the periphery, compared to transitional inner city

Alternative Models
Homer Hoyts Sector Model (1930s)
patterns of home values (rents) afuent properties along high-rent corridors still a single-center model

Harris and Ullmans Multiple Nuclei model (1940s)

more than one growth pole/center agglomeration economies and diseconomies

Murdies 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) Daviss Ecology of Fear and Dear and Flustys keno capitalism

Postmodernism: The L.A. School

USC and UCLA Departments of Geography and Planning
Ed Soja, Mike Davis, Michael Dear, Allen Scott, et al. Los Angeles as the shock city of todays high-tech information, entertainment, and defense economy; with suburban sprawl and immigration-related social-economic conict

characterized by neo-Marxist and postmodern themes:

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

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 ction) New alliance of taste and capital that still can be elitist