402 1.key

Prof. Rob ShieldsH.M. Tory Chair and Professor,

Sociology 402 / 504

University of Alberta

City as Nexus and ContextCities and Suburbs Lecture 1

Saturday, 10 January 15

Sustaining urbanization

• First large cities:

• Uruk, 6000 years ago - modern day Iraq

• Innovation, writing, division of labour, mass production, knowledge, public works, administration...


Urban Nexus of issues

• Urban and Rural• Citizenship and Community• Land - Spatial Justice• State and Markets• Plans (Representations) and Habits

(Practices)• Shelter and Energy use• Alienation and Engagement


Georg Simmel

• Sociology as study of forms, geometries

• of social interaction.

• Metropolis and Mental Life

• The city as a the ‘form’ of modernity

• Blasé Attitude, density, stress

• The Stranger

The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life.


Patrick Geddes

• Survey then Plan: ‘close observation technique’

• Evolution of Cities: ‘regional planning’ ‘local-global’ ‘connurbation’...

• Starts with Darwin but more Bergsonian ‘creative evolution’

• Master planning: Palestine (Israel), India

• Synthesis from biology

• ‘Conservative surgery’ vs modernist gridiron plan

• Bottom-up challenge to top-down approaches


Patrick Geddes

Within this den sat Geddes, a most unsettling person, talking,talking, talking – about everything and anything. The visitorscould criticize his show – the merest hotchpotch – picturepostcards – newspaper cuttings – crude old woodcuts –strange diagrams –archaeological reconstructions; thesethings, they said, were unworthy of the Royal Academy –many of them were not even framed – shocking want ofrespect; but if they chanced within the range of Geddes’ talk,henceforth nothing could medicine them to the sweet sleepwhich yesterday they owned. There was something more intown planning than met the eye!” (pages 128‐129, 3rd edition,1959).


Lewis Mumford• ‘[The city is] a conscious work of art, and it holds

within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind….The dome and the spire, the open avenue and the closed court, tell the story, not merely of different physical accommodations, but of essentially different concepts of man’s destiny. The city is both a physical utility for collective living and a symbol of those collective purposes and unanimities that arise under such favoring circumstance. With language itself, it remains man’s greatest work of art’ (The Culture of Cities, Lewis Mumford (1938): 5).

• ‘the suburb served as an asylum for the preservation of illusion. Here domesticity could prosper, oblivious of the pervasive regimentation beyond. This was not merely a child-centered environment; it was based on a childish view of the world, in which reality was sacrificed to the pleasure principle’


Lewis Mumford• Terrain: Cities are a product of the earth. They

reflect the peasant’s cunning in dominating the earth...

• Social density: the essence of each type of soil and labor and economic goal is concentrated: thus arise greater possibilities for interchange and for new combinations not given in the isolation of their original inhabitants

• Hearth: They are the molds in which men’s [sic] lifetimes have cooled and congealed, giving lasting shape, by way of art, to moments that would otherwise vanish...In the city, time becomes visible: buildings and monuments and public ways, more open than the written record, more subject to the gaze of many...leave an imprint upon minds...

• Complexity: orchestration of time and space no less than through the social division of labor, life in the city takes on the character of a symphony

• Hub: remote forces and influences intermingle with the local


Louis Wirth

• ‘Chicago School’

• Civilization and Cities

• Anonymity and the city

• Immigration and minorities,

• Diversity

• ‘The Ghetto’

• ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’


• ‘Chicago School’

• City as social ecology


Henri Lefebvre

• City as ‘Oeuvre’ (a great collective work or production)

• Production of Space: a spatial trialectics

• Critique of ‘Everyday Life’ and alienation

• ‘Right to the City’

• Avant grades - from Surrealists to May 68

• Legacies: rural sociology, urban culture, postmodern theory, urban economics


• Global megacities

Urbanization is part of the social production of space


Jane Jacobs

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities

• critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s

• "social capital", "mixed primary uses", and "eyes on the street"

• The Economy of Cities

• Washington Square Park, Greenwich Village, Spadina Expressway


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital

Multiple Modernities

• Keil, R Welcome to the Suburban Revolution in Keil, R., Ed. (2013). Suburban Constellations. Berlin, Jovis: 8-15

• McGee, T. Suburbanization in the Twenty-first Century World in Keil, R., Ed. (2013). Suburban Constellations. Berlin, Jovis:18-25.

• Wirth, L. (1938). Urbanism as a way of life. The American Journal of Sociology 44(1): 1-24. http://periplurban.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/wirth_urbanismasawayoflife.pdf

• Watson, B. (2014). What makes a city resilient? Retrieved January 3, 2015, from http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jan/27/what-makes-a-city-resilient

• Granzow, M. Review of Mah Industrial Ruination SpaceandCulture.com http://www.spaceandculture.co

•


http://periplurban.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/wirth_urbanismasawayoflife.pdf






http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jan/27/what-makes-a-city-resilient




http://www.spaceandculture.com/2014/12/02/michael-granzow-review-essay-industrial-ruins-and-ruination/

http://www.spaceandculture.com/2014/12/02/michael-granzow-review-essay-industrial-ruins-and-ruination/

402 1.key

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