urban geo

first 10

Park & Burgess (1925)

Chicago School. Their book is titled “The City” but is almost entirely about Chicago, so one city stands in for all cities. Urban study started in sociology, not geography.

Spatial science, then Harvey (1973) and Ley (1974)

1950s and 60s quantitative geography looked for general laws (central place theory, locational analysis). Critics said it ignored social processes and human experience. Two responses followed: Harvey’s Marxist political economy (capitalism’s structural logic produces inequality) and Ley’s humanist focus on how people experience the city.

Soja (1989) and Dear (2000), the LA School

LA is presented as “the place where it all comes together”, the model postmodern city. Critics said the methods are thin and that Miami fits better (Nijman).

Latham et al. (2012), three problems with using one city as the model

(1) Why that city and not another? (2) It homogenises cities, so the exception becomes the norm (Amin & Graham 1997). (3) Cities in the Global South get studied under development studies instead of urban geography.

Robinson (2002, 2006)

Writing about Western cities goes unmarked as “local”, while writing about non-Western cities names its region, which hides a universalist assumption. The global city vs megacity split leaves out many “ordinary” cities.

Thrift (1993), “urban impasse”

The loss of the urban as both a subject and an object of study. Urban geographers began identifying as feminist, postmodern, Marxist or population geographers instead (Lees, in Gregory et al. 2009)

Lefebvre (1970), The Urban Revolution

Predicted the “complete urbanisation of society”. Urbanisation replaced industrialisation as the motor of capital accumulation, so there is no “outside” of the urban.

Brenner & Schmid (2015), planetary urbanisation

“The urban is a process, not a universal form, settlement type or bounded unit.” Examples: megacities, infrastructure networks (submarine cables), restructured hinterlands (export zones, data centres), resource extraction, industrial agriculture and land grabbing. The lecture lists five of these, and the full paper has seven theses.

Derickson (2015), Urbanization 1 vs 2s

Urbanization 1 is the planetary thesis (Marxist, Lefebvre, macro scale). Urbanization 2s are the postcolonial and feminist work that provincialises urban theory and looks at everyday life. Her critique: planetary urbanisation takes European universalism to a “more-than-global” scale and asks who can actually do politics at that scale.

Ruddick et al. (2018)

Planetary urbanisation puts epistemology (part of philosophy that studies the nature) ahead of social ontology (part of philosophy that studies the nature, properties, and basic categories of the social world), so it leaves out subjects, the everyday, and a “constitutive outside”. It also overlooks migration. Examples of struggles that don’t reduce to urban: Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, pipeline protests.