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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Cities are raucous, cacophonous, and complex. Many dimensions of life play out and conflict across cities' intricate landscapes, be they political, cultural, economic, or social. Urban policy makers and analysts often attempt to "cut through the noise" of urban disagreement by emphasizing a dominant lens for understanding the key, central logic of the city. How To Think About Cities sees this tendency to selective vision as misleading and ultimately unjust: cities are many things at once to different people and communities. This book describes the various ways of seeing the functions and landscapes of the city as place frames, and the constant process of negotiating which place frames best explain the city as place-making. Martin and Pierce call for an explicitly hybrid perspective that shifts between many different frames for making sense of cities. This approach highlights how any given stance opens up some lines of inquiry and understanding while closing off others. Thinking of cities as sites of contested perspectives promotes a synthetic approach to urban analysis that emphasizes difference and political possibility. This mosaic view of the city will be a welcome read for those within urban studies, geography, and social sciences exploring the many faces of urban life.
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Seitenzahl: 378
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Boxes
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: Cities are Places
Places and place-making
Place framing
Using a place-framing approach to think about cities
Place politics
The focus of a place-framing approach to urban analysis
Infinitely branching (subjective) universes: exploring urban place imaginaries
The book that follows: examples of differential place framing in cities around the world
2 City of London: A Machine for Living/The Seat of Wealth
The City by and for capital
The City as a vanguard for modern(ist) urbanism: the Barbican Estate
Where these frames align, and where they diverge
Conclusion
Notes
3 Tehran: Islamic Developmentalism/Diverse Cosmopolitanism
City of economic intensity and growth
Unevenness of growth – Tehran as a swallower of resources
Tehran as a city of choice
Frame synergies
Conclusion: overlapping frames and hints of other imaginaries
Notes
4 Worcester: Local Economic Engine/Regional Forest Under Threat
Remaking downtown, again
The city as environmental policy nexus
Worcester as an urban forest
Conclusion: the place/s of Worcester
Notes
5 Portland: Paradise of Environmentalism/Legacy of Exclusionary Racism
Portland as an icon of ecomodernist progress
Portland as a place of white supremacy, colonial land theft, and racial erasure
Who frames what and why?
The aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and the re-racialization of Portland’s dominant place frame
Notes
6 Chongqing: International Cyberpunk Marvel/National Policy Innovator
Chongqing as a city with a weird, cyberpunk, and futuristic built environment
Chongqing as a place that promises a more egalitarian mode of urban development
Conclusion
Notes
7 Jerusalem: Religious Tourist Destination/Ethno-National Citadel
Touring the Old City
Framing power in the city
Conclusion
Notes
8 Conclusion: The Impossibilities of Fully Knowing a City
The importance of interrogating cities
Revisiting the three major points of emphasis
Why it all matters: place framing makes the effects of everyday urban politics visible and explicit
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Dedication
DGM: I dedicate this book to my family. In memory of and with thanks to my mother, and with love to Dan, Naomi, and Isaac. I adore you all and thank you.
JFP: I dedicate this book to Malcolm and to Rowan, who inspire me every day as they discover and assemble, piece by little piece, the abundant beauty that exists in this world.
How To Think About Cities
Deborah G. Martin and Joseph Pierce
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Deborah G. Martin & Joseph Pierce 2023
The right of Deborah G. Martin & Joseph Pierce to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3618-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3619-1(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022939160
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Boxes
Urban and the City
History of Place Theory
Conceptual Framing and Place Frames
Structure and Agency
Capitalism and Urban Political Economy as a Comparison of Systems
Urban Economic Processes
Modernism and Urban Design
Urban Cultural Geographies
The Growth Coalition
Urban Agglomeration
Freedom and Diversity in Cities
Municipal Development and Finance Strategies
Policy Mobilities
Urban Environments
Sprawl, Density, and Urban Growth Boundaries
Ecomodernism
Residential Segregation and Redlining in America
Race in Early American Urban Theory: The Chicago School and W. E. B. Du Bois
Black Geographies
City Branding
Asian Futurism, Sinofuturism, and Orientalism
Urban Migration and Hukou in China
Land Markets
Toponyms and Demonyms
Landscapes and Power
Acknowledgments
This book, like all big writing projects, has been supported in ways small and large by a whole host of people, not all of whom we can manage to name here.
DGM: Clark University, and the Graduate School of Geography in particular, has been a supportive, nurturing, and also challenging (mostly in a good way) environment as I wrote this book. Sabbatical support, the students in my classes, and the intellectual environment as a whole provided a robust context for the writing process. Undergraduate students at Clark University, particularly within the Human-Regional Environmental Observatory (HERO) program, have enthusiastically adopted the notion of “relational places,” integrating the idea into some of their work. Their adaptability to the idea of multiple place frames helped us to imagine some of our future readers. I am grateful to be at an institution where I am challenged and able to contribute in myriad ways, and at the same time feel valued.
JFP: Most of the writing of this book occurred while I have been situated in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Aberdeen, where colleagues have welcomed me with open arms, even in pandemic times. The experience of living in the United Kingdom (and thus in Europe!) has widened my gaze and made the book better. Thank you to the dedicated folks at Aberdeen whose collegiality made this project possible.
TOGETHER, IN CHORUS: We would like to thank Emma Longstaff, a commissioning editor at Polity in 2014, when the seeds of the idea for this book were planted. Jonathan Skerrett and Karina Jákupsdóttir followed up as patient and helpful stewards of the project. Azadeh (Azi) Hadizadeh Esfahani and Amy Yueming Zhang generously provided their insights and substantive engagement as (co-)authors on two of the chapters. Sophia Jacobson and Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen provided useful details about sights and sites in Jerusalem. Along our way, many colleagues, students, and friends (lines here blur) have engaged with and pushed our thinking on cities and place. Kate Boyer, Sarah Elwood, Jody Emel, Katherine Hankins, Helga Leitner, Mary Lawhon, Gordon MacLeod, James Murphy, Mark Purcell, John Rogan, Eric Sheppard, Olivia Williams, and many other interlocutors who have helped make these ideas stronger and clearer: we thank you.
–1–Introduction: Cities are Places
It is harder than you probably think it is to think clearly about cities.
Are cities defined by clusters of high-rise buildings connected by large roads or highways? Are they rows of restaurants offering a wide variety of ethnic foods on walkable streets where neighbors know and recognize one another? Are they chaotic crowded sidewalks or buses with people jostling and competing with one another for access to doors or seats with windows? Cities are all of these, but they are not only these. Trying to make sense of cities requires some way of organizing these scenes or features: a strategy for making sense of their concatenated elements.
Scholars of cities usually organize these scenes or features into analytical categories like economy, politics, or culture. They often focus on how one of those dimensions shapes or defines being in a city. This book makes the argument that the most productive way to understand a city is to think of it as multiple cities at once. Cities are places where what is meaningful to people is the way they combine various processes, ones that occur in domains like economy, politics, and culture. Yet the most visible processes are not always the most relevant ones for analysis, and different urban participants will care more about one kind of process than another.
Cities are where people make connections and build relations of many kinds: in that sense, they are sites of serendipitous engagement. We call this productive urban serendipity “propinquity”: socially, economically, or politically useful proximity. Cities are also sites of density, though what counts as dense is often perceived in relation to what surrounds the center of a cluster (see box, “Urban and the City”). Levels of density seen at the suburban fringes of New York, United States, or Manila, Philippines, would be characterized as central and bustling in more diffuse cities such as Brisbane, Australia, or Oklahoma City, United States.
Together, these two terms (propinquity and density) can serve as an initial shorthand definition of “the city.” Yet we would also say that these two terms on their own are also somewhat unsatisfying. They help distinguish cities from their surrounding rural contexts by capturing the idea that cities contain something like “lots at once.” In other words, cities have people, buildings, transportation arteries, and activities in relatively close proximity. But propinquity and density do less to explain the urban process that produces those cities or the character of cities as an object of analysis. Why are cities sites of propinquity and density? How do they become so, and how are the conditions of propinquity and density sustained over time? What motivates individuals to live in cities, and why do they stay? These and similar questions form the core of urban analysis.
This book attempts to cultivate some habits of mind that can make effective analysis of cities easier. The text explores how the authors, as urban scholars and observers, attempt to deal with the challenge of thinking about cities in a rigorous way while embracing their complexity and plurality.
Places and place-making
We advocate for an analytical approach drawn from the discipline of geography that focuses on places. Traditionally, geographers emphasize that places are made up of the meanings that people attach to geographies, human processes that shape the landscape, physical characteristics in the environment, and non-human processes, all at once, iteratively changing over time. This understanding of place tends to foster a notion of places as singular agglomerations: a product of the accumulated history of people making geographically located meaning.
Urban and the City
The word “urban” captures the idea of a built-up area of human settlement. It usually also connotes density, distinguishing built-up areas that are relatively small, like mining settlements or small towns, from areas that have a significant concentration of human-built infrastructure (roads, buildings, and utility systems like sewers and power lines) as well as people.
A “city” represents a built-up urban place that is sufficiently large to need a political system that enables regulation of people and their circulation within that urban space. A city almost always includes a legal entity, with specific laws that enable a particular system of government to administer it. The laws creating city governments, and the sorts of powers that these governments have, vary by region and country, and so the details depend on where the city is located. Even if a city government is clearly established over an urban area, this does not mean that the city boundaries encompass all the urbanized land in the area. There may be towns or other built-up spaces that do not function politically in the same way as the city; these areas are urban but may be governed, or managed, as part of separate cities or towns, or as parts of a larger political region (which may be rural as well as urban). For example, many urban areas have adjacent but politically distinct municipalities that include built-up urban areas. Conversely, some cities contain areas of land with very low-density development.
So while city and urban are not the same thing, they are related. Cities always have some, if not completely, urban characteristics – namely density of people and built environment, and diversity of activities – but not all urban places are legally cities. Sometimes – often, in fact – an urban area contains multiple cities and/or towns (which usually have different political powers than cities).
Geographers, sociologists, and other scholars have explored “the urban question” of how much density of people and built infrastructure is enough to denote “urbanness,” and what urban life is for and about (e.g., Wirth 1938; Castells 1977 [1972]; Brenner 2000). Early sociological ideas in Europe about urban life focused on the idea that people could be unknown to one another in a city, and thus were not bound by kinship ties and social norms as they had been in more rural contexts (Tönnies 1955 [1887]; Durkheim 1997 [1893]). These scholars also debated whether urban life was alienating people from their mutual obligations to one another. Manuel Castells, writing in the 1970s (Castells 1977 [1972]), emphasized the importance of social organization and government provision of infrastructure in urban areas, which supported communities through services such as schools, garbage collection, and roads. He also wrote extensively about collective organizing as a positive element of urban life (Castells 1983).
A crucial argument throughout much urban scholarship over the last century is that urban places generate new social ideas and change because of the bringing together of different people and resources in one relatively dense place or area. Geographer Ed Soja (2000) wrote about this function by pointing to the visual art on the rock walls of the ancient ruins of Çatal Hüyük, which existed in Turkey about 10,000 years ago. His point was that when people live together, they create more than just what they need to live. Other scholars have likewise highlighted the importance of social organization and expression as part of urban and city life. These include Ed Soja with his attention to arts in ancient cities, Louis Wirth (1938) and his description of the “theater” of urban life in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, and Henri Lefebvre (1996), who wrote about the oeuvre (connoting artistic and non-waged work) of urban residents.
Doreen Massey was a geographer whose scholarly writing on places, economies, and cities has been very influential on the thinking of your authors here. Massey writes that places are bundles of space–time trajectories (2005). The word bundle has metaphorical connotations: while it has a literal descriptive meaning as a cluster of things bound together, its usage is often associated with a group of long things (sticks, wheat, etc.) bound up as a set with a ribbon or rope by a person. The use of the word “bundle” here seems to bridge its literal and metaphorical meanings.
A place bundle isn’t like wheat in that you can’t pick it up and move it elsewhere; but neither is it a natural, preordained set. Bundling describes the process by which people select or choose what counts in their own minds as a part of a place, and what does not. Bundling is an activity we’re all engaged in, all of the time: making sense of the world by sorting it into this place and that place, according to our own understandings and logics.
But what in the world is a space–time trajectory? Massey tries to capture the idea that both physical and social objects are part of places. What does this mean? Think of famous plazas like Red Square in Moscow, or the National Mall in Washington, DC. These places include objects like sets of large buildings (the Kremlin, the Smithsonian Institution), as well as open pedestrian areas that most of the time contain little or nothing at all. But Massey also emphasizes that place bundles include social patterns and human beliefs or intentions. So the rhythmic return of US presidents to the Mall every four years to be inaugurated is a part of the bundle that makes up that place; so is the repeated pulse of bodies to celebrate the nation with fireworks each 4th of July, and its irregular occupation by protesters of various kinds. The paths traced by those people through space and time (i.e., space–time trajectories) are transient, but their cumulative repetition in physical spaces makes the trajectories durable in people’s imaginations of the place.
Place framing
Space–time trajectories can be social or physical or emotional or experiential, but the bundling process is always a human act, not a natural event. In previous writing, we have emphasized that trying to convince others that one’s place bundle is the right place bundle is always in some way a political act (Martin 2003b; Pierce and Martin 2015). When a North American or Australian university makes a statement that it is situated on unceded Indigenous lands, it is attempting to persuade others about its relevant geographical context. Situating the university within a tribal geography as opposed to that of a regional state or a city has political implications. Yet so does the more conventional bundling into the geography articulated by the land’s contemporary rulers, even if agreement with dominant norms raises fewer eyebrows.
Any effort to persuade people to share a geographical imagination is a kind of politics. We borrow the vocabulary of framing from social movement theory in calling these political efforts to persuade others of the correctness of one’s own place vision as “place framing.”
People are constantly jostling with each other about what constitutes a place, asserting that their own version is the correct one. Developers, city officials, and groups of residents, for example, advocate for certain forms of urban development as important and vital for urban life, while other buildings or businesses or even people are abandoned or left behind. We call these competing views of experienced geographies “place frames” because of how they focus attention on some geographies more than others, just as a window frame shapes a mental image about a landscape beyond the walls of a home.
As noted at the outset, urban places share the core characteristics of propinquity and density. They are all cities, after all. But different place frames emphasize different elements of the city, even as they might also include elements that are shared. Our argument is that one can’t assume that the same characteristics of urban places matter most across different contexts because “what matters” is a matter of politics and perspective.
History of Place Theory
Place as a concept often implies rootedness or location. A place is because it has a name, a meaning (multiple meanings) for some aspect of human life. The idea of a fundamental human connection to place was articulated in the 1970s by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, who wrote both that place is “a center of meaning constructed by experience” and also that places “are points in a spatial system” (Tuan 1975: 152). In this characterization, Tuan highlighted the difference between a focus on meaning and a focus on generalizable knowledge. He pointed to cities as particularly significant places in part because they are centers of population, where many individual experiences accumulate into sites of multiple meanings, even if these meanings are not all publicly evident in the concatenation of people, building, roadways, and activities that constitute any given city. More recently, Tim Cresswell (2014) has written about the importance of places in this tradition of located, meaning-laden geographical experience (see also Relph 1976; Adams, Hoelscher, and Till 2001). Extending Tuan’s idea of place as experience, some geographers, environmental psychologists, and others emphasize human connections to place as part of an individual’s place identity (Lewicka 2008; Kaplan and Recoquillon 2014; Devine-Wright 2015; Main and Sandoval 2015). This approach to place focuses particularly on individual cognition and emotion, as well as collective experiences, and how these shape place conception and understanding, as well as a sense of self or community.
Other theorists of place such as John Agnew (1987, 1989) and Doreen Massey (1984, 1991, 2005) understand it as multifaceted and relational. They draw on Tuan’s and others’ focus on individual experiences and cognition, while also emphasizing societal systems and processes. Agnew (1987) argued that place is comprised of three intersecting elements: locale, the immediate setting for everyday life and interactions; location, which is the broader economic, social, and political situation of the locale in relation to other places; and sense of place, which captures the emotive, affective relation of site to individual. This three-part definition brings together the specificities of any given location, regardless of its scale, the interconnections of places, and the human meaning brought to bear on given geographies. Massey (2005) argued that places are in fact “bundles” of assembled ideas, material items, and experiences, all drawn from multiple scales and people. It is important to note, as geographers have (e.g., Tuan 1975; Massey 1991), that places are not necessarily small and intimate; one’s kitchen is a place, cities are places, and so too are countries. Taken together, place scholarship tends to emphasize the meaning-ladenness of place for human experience, and the mutually constitutive relationship between place and people (both individual and collective).
There is a kind of double movement going on here. On the one hand, people argue for a particular place by engaging in framing and persuasion; on the other hand, they sometimes claim that the place they are framing is natural, deeply rooted, and unchanging. This doesn’t mean that people are disingenuous; it just means that people disagree about what is essential and timeless and what is transitory or illusory. (It is actually a quite common tactic for people to try to persuade others of their beliefs by characterizing those beliefs as natural or uncontroversial.)
Cities contain many different things and processes at once: for example, built environments, types of living places, and modes of living. Place framing is one of those kinds of processes, but climate change and tectonic shifts are examples of other (more physical) processes that also contribute to the city as a place. Because of the inherent complexity of cities, it is naturally a difficult task to decide where to enter and how to scope urban analyses.
We emphasize that urban places are made up of many different kinds of parts, and that these parts function both independently and also as part of a whole. Think, for example, of a stream that is part of a large urban watershed. On one hand, that stream is a resource that people care about for aesthetic, economic, and health reasons: it has multiple dimensions of value for different groups of people. On the other hand, it is also simply the result of processes of water cycling interacting with the landscape, insensate and indifferent to the social or political machinations of the humans that wander around nearby. The stream is both of the urban assemblage, a part of it; and also apart from it.
Thinking this way sounds easier than it is. If you practice seeing cities this way – as sites where many plural place frames overlap, where different actors compete to affect what “counts” and what does not – we think you will be able to see and understand what happens in cities more accurately and perhaps with more awareness of the limits of one’s ability to see the city as a whole.
Using a place-framing approach to think about cities
Thinking about cities as a series of overlapping, contested, and divergent place frames emphasizes that some elements of the urban context are foregrounded and that others are latent or intentionally obscured. A place frame is a lens on a city; the place-framing approach is a way to focus on the ways that different actors promote different elements of a city to their own ends.
Saying cities are places, as we do, is saying that the way to study cities is to examine their many constituent place frames. These different frames emphasize different elements: built and natural environments, modes of life, patterns of cultural celebration, and economic logics. Many scholars of cities focus less on cities-as-places and more on a particular way of explaining cities-as-processes; in our view, such approaches tend to offer singular place frames that prioritize specific elements of cities and treat those elements as though they function as a whole explanation.
Seeing the city first and foremost as a machine for economic growth (Logan and Molotch 1987) is a common analytic metaphor. That lens on the city helps to explain a host of processes oriented to production and exchange. It is natural to try to extend one’s understanding by deepening or widening an analytic approach that has been helpful; this is a human tendency. We are sympathetic. At the far end of this tendency, however, you end up insisting that the meaning-laden geographies of others don’t really matter – that their meaning making is explained by factors beyond their own understanding or focus. For example, Marxian urbanists often say that other modes of difference (like race or gender) are relevant to analysis, but that they are important within the Marxian frame of capitalist expansionism and class conflict. Conversely, while urban economists think that Marxian urbanists are wrong about what ails cities, they agree that economic processes are the decisive ones: cultural process or social negotiation are derivatives of underlying economic factors.
The economic is not the only possible analytical lens: feminist urbanists tend to focus on how cities manifest a series of male-oriented and male-dominated perspectives, such as how paid work is organized, how childcare is valued and spatially accommodated, and how houses are designed and constructed. Other systems that contribute to these elements (such as transportation systems or public health infrastructure) are important, but from a feminist analytical perspective they are first shaped by gender and then secondarily also impact social and economic systems. Committing to a single key analytical approach creates incentives to reinforce the centrality of that approach incrementally as analysis continues, even when that runs counter to what residents themselves think matters about the cities they live in.
Urban economists are not wrong that urban economies exist: indeed, these scholars describe and highlight important urban processes. But their descriptions are also inevitably incomplete. Too often, they see the part as the whole and, we argue, foreclose understandings that help us see cities as places not just more complex in the present but holding more potential place-ness (experiences, built environments, etc.) in the future. What we are saying is that to understand cities is to understand that they are always more than one thing at once. A city is many different machines for many different functions. If one understands a city as only one machine, producing one kind of outcome, then one has fundamentally misunderstood that city.
Conceptual Framing and Place Frames
The concept of “framing” characterizes the interpretive schema (Goffman 1974; Giddens 1976) that “function to organize experience and guide action” (Snow et al. 1986: 464). Framing was originally articulated as a way of describing that individuals mentally select and order their ideas around a topic or schema, but it has also been understood in a more collective sense to describe social meaning and action (Schön 1980; Snow et al. 1986).
Scholars of activism, also known as social movement theorists, found this term particularly useful for understanding how people come to share and articulate agendas for collective action and activism. Sociologists David Snow and Robert Benford coined the term “collective action frames” to describe how groups of people come to share perceptions, grievances, and hopes for the future in order to advocate for social change (Snow et al. 1986; Snow and Benford 1992; Benford 1993). As Snow et al. (1986: 466) argue, political actors such as social movements “not only act upon the world, [. . .] they also frame the world in which they are acting.” The concept has been extended to describe articulations of collective identity (Gamson 1992; Hunt, Benford, and Snow 1994; Polletta and Jasper 2001; Fominaya 2010; Adler 2012), as well as to understand dominant ways of knowing around social issues such as energy policy (Eaton, Gasteyer, and Busch 2014; Hazboun et al. 2019; Wolsink 2020).
Geographers Deborah Martin (2003b) and Hilda Kurtz (2003) each adopted the concept of frames to understand the ways that some social movements connected their grievances and advocacy about social change in reference to specific locations and geographies. Martin argued that activism oriented to improving the economy and landscape of a particular neighborhood demonstrated “place framing”; while Kurtz described an activist strategy of “scale framing” in environmental justice conflicts in Louisiana, United States. Both of these scholars argued that specific geographical contexts of activism inform collective organizing.
Hewing closely to the articulations of collective action frames, place frames include motivational elements that define and characterize a place-based community, as well as identifying grievances, or problems, that framers have identified and wish to solve with particular action or policy (Martin 2003b). Place frames thus offer a way of understanding how people think about and articulate shared norms or agendas for places, which helps to produce places both discursively and materially. Indeed, Martin (2003b: 731) argued that place framing works to “constitute places and polities at a number of spatial scales.”
Other geographers use the place-framing concept to explore conflicts over land use, socio-technical change, community organizational agendas, and urban policy generally (Larsen 2004; Elwood 2006; Pierce, Martin, and Murphy 2011; Uitermark, Nicholls, and Loopmans 2012; Murphy 2015). Pierce, Martin, and Murphy (2011) in particular propose application of the concept beyond collective action, arguing that place frames capture the ongoing active contestations of all places.
Our goal is to explore different understandings of cities in order to understand dominant meanings but, also, the ways that other meanings intrude and challenge, and what difference the framings make for urban life and possibility. Historically, seeing cities as sites of disorder and moral vice has been a common framing technique: here, the key characteristic of the city is that it is alienating, socially corrosive, and thus corrupting of the people who live there. Related to this is a moralizing frame of the city as a site of immigration and social difference: here, the city is a kind of frontier beach upon which migrants wash up with uncivil habits that break the social order. Another (perhaps contradictory) frame is of the city – especially the “global” city – as a kind of cosmopolitan playground for the privileged and wealthy. Each of these frames has adherents, both academic and non-academic; these frames tend to powerfully shape those adherents’ understandings of what they observe in those cities.
Place politics
The process of urban place framing itself is negotiative, but framing as a process does not have a specific political or ethical valence. This means that while a given observer may see particular frames as having desirable (or problematic) ethics, framing itself is a process in which people of all political stripes participate. Place framing is intrinsic to social negotiation: it is a thing that all social actors do as they try to make the world they live in reflect their values and preferences.
Emphasizing that framing is not in itself “good” or “bad” as a process makes it analytically easier to attend to multiple simultaneous frames by subtly changing the incentives of urban analysis. If an analyst takes (for example) a more conventional economic perspective on urban growth, there is an incentive to seek to explain as much of the urban landscape as possible in terms of the theory that has been adopted: more explanatory leverage means that your work has more power and predicts more. But if an analyst tries to understand how much of the urban landscape is explained by the application of Frame A as opposed to Frame B, the analyst is already oriented toward the limits of that frame: how much is A and how much is B. Starting analysis by focusing on the negotiations between advocates of multiple frames tends to encourage a more open-ended analytic approach.
Relatedly, an urban place-framing approach makes it easier to see and hear the voices and analytical perspectives of people who have historically been less empowered in the urban landscape. One widely agreed characteristic of the lives of poorer people, for example, is that a larger proportion of their collective “capital” is social rather than economic. Yet classic gentrification theory still often centers the ways in which marginalized urban communities are economically marginalized by rounds of displacement from neighborhoods (Smith 2005 [1996]; Lees, Slater, and Wyly 2013). An urban place-framing approach to analysis doesn’t argue that economic factors don’t shape the housing landscape – they do. Rather, it emphasizes that the reasons that poorer people mourn displacement are often not, in their own terms, centrally about wealth accumulation. Gentrification is as much a conflict of values about urban places as it is a conflict about the accumulation of wealth (Davidson 2009).
The focus of a place-framing approach to urban analysis
There are three important attributes of urban analysis centered on place framing that we seek to emphasize in this book. These are not the only characteristics of an urban place-framing approach, but we see these three as clearly in contrast with tendencies in the wider urban literature.
First: a place-framing-oriented approach to thinking about cities emphasizes a balanced approach to the effects of human agency and social, political, and economic structures. Social scientists use the word “agency” to describe the capacity of people to choose their own paths forward. As we’ve described above, scholars and public policy actors work to simplify urban analysis by reducing the number of factors to which they pay attention. It is often the case (though not always!) that in seeking to reduce those factors, they make it easier to predict the change of one factor in terms of one or a few others. For example, it is common in urban economics to celebrate an approach to analysis that “explains” 30 percent of a variable’s change (like, say, how vertically a city is built) based on (say) only four other variables. Urban political economists, similarly, may see agency as a real phenomenon but often see it as overwhelmed by the structural dynamics of modern capitalism, on which they focus.
Structure and Agency
In classical economics, the “rational actor” is imagined as a reasonable, completely self-actualized individual who makes an unending set of free choices to their own maximal benefit. In contrast, scholars in political economic traditions have tended to emphasize our capture within social and economic structures that make it difficult to even imagine alternative pathways through life (Harvey 1989b). This distinction between agentic and structural explanations was, for a time, a point of significant conflict between social scientists.
Pierre Bourdieu (1977) and Anthony Giddens (1984) were key theorists who attempted to reconcile structure and agency, saying that humans are both structured and agentic. Giddens used the word structuration to describe the mutually constitutive processes through which structures shape people and people shape structures. Since the 1990s, most urban theorists implicitly accept that both agency and structure shape societies, while varying in the degree of emphasis on one or the other.
In examining agency, feminist scholars such as Iris Marion Young (1990) and J. K. Gibson-Graham (1996) examine the ways in which people create their own subcommunities in cities, and can develop bonds of support and exchange that transcend or work around the dominant forces of money-based exchange. Sociologists Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria Robinson (2018) detail the many ways that Black Americans have shaped the culture and community infrastructures of US cities, despite institutional racism that mostly ignores these identities and support networks, particularly in scholarly accounts of urban process and culture.
Theorists who focus more substantively on structures highlight the role of the economic system in shaping urban economies based on property value and exchange (Harvey 1989b; Blomley 2003). In such accounts, the economic mandates of capital investment drive urban processes from what is built to where it is built to why municipal authorities help developers to obtain property for private investment. So while more structural accounts acknowledge a role for individual human agents, such as city officials or developers, their actions are understood to be shaped by the demands of a broader system, usually capitalism, rather than by individual choice or understandings.
We agree with these actors that structures exist and that people’s individual choices are often influenced by wider processes. But we also see that people are constantly making choices about the places where they live. Those choices (often small, everyday ones) iteratively produce and reproduce cities over time. In paying more attention to agency, we push back against the strong tendency to center economic explanations for personal choices at the expense of others, even though economic factors matter. In this sense, we think that focusing special attention on agency is a corrective toward analytical balance and integration of structure and agency, rather than a claim that societal structures aren’t present or don’t matter.
Second, thinking about cities as places emphasizes that all understandings of those places are partial or incomplete. When people articulate place frames, they are always, inherently, including trajectories they want to emphasize and excluding others which undermine their narratives. If an individual frames Baltimore, MD, United States, in terms of the centrality of its predominantly Black population, it might downplay the city’s long history as a home to one of the largest Jewish populations in the United States outside of New York City. Alternatively, if a community frames Baltimore in terms of the long history of its working waterfront, they may center the idea of Baltimore as a distinct urban-economic region, downplaying its economic and political interconnectedness with Washington, DC.
Focusing on place bundling and place framing doesn’t mean that one’s goal is to expose all of a city’s place frames and synthesize them into some sort of mega-frame. Instead, we take note of how analytical and/or political goals shape bundling and framing. One attends to the trajectories that are needed to achieve an understanding toward an end. This is true of scholarly analysis, political analysis, and the analysis of supposedly apolitical residents who merely want to protect the mature trees on their streets. Everyone frames, and frames are always partial.
Third, a place-framing-oriented approach to thinking about cities emphasizes that place frames aren’t just plural, or multiple; they are radically plural. Because everyone engages in bundling and framing, attending to place means seeing the world as full of overlapping places. Lots of people will sort of agree with each other about key elements of what constitutes Aberdeen or Birmingham in the United Kingdom; that agreement represents effective place framing over time. Yet close examination will reveal that their frames actually diverge extensively on (say) whether the nearby oceans are a part of Aberdeen, or (say) whether the expansion of high-speed rail is slowly embedding Birmingham within the placeshed of London. These disagreements signal overlapping, not thoroughly congruent, frames.
Thinking of cities as radically plural – as sites of multiplicity, of place bundles sprouting endlessly in every direction as life reorients residents to recognize their cities anew – orients one toward thinking about the problems that specific place bundles and frames solve in people’s lives, rather than toward some one-true-theory of the logic of the city. When people reorient their urban lives around childcare, or petcare, or anti-war politics, what the city’s ways and stations enable or obstruct for them suddenly changes. The city is a (metaphorical) machine for living, but what constitutes living is always in flux. So too, then, is the city.
Infinitely branching (subjective) universes: exploring urban place imaginaries
Cities are made up of many different kinds of elements: for example, buildings, people, communities, identities, and future goals. In urban contexts, these elements are densely, cacophonously packed in. Each element has its own individual trajectory (a car tracing a curve through an on-ramp onto a highway, or a high-school student whose life is headed toward achievements and an office in a tower high above crowds on the street) but, when combined, these parts constitute an object that is more than the sum of its parts. In thinking about the “big” elements of a city – such as its economy, cultures, built environment, natural environment, history, or housing – a separate story could be told about each object or agenda. But so too can stories be told about how these elements are combined.
Imagine a person walking along a sidewalk on a city street, perhaps a downtown street. Depending on where in the world this downtown street is located, the specific sights – the construction of the sidewalk, the width of the travel lanes, the affordances for pedestrians, etc. – will vary. Nonetheless, the street offers myriad sights, sounds, and smells. There are other people walking along the street singly, in pairs, and in the occasional group, and a few others stand in doorways. They are wearing a range of business and casual attire – suits, formal dresses or skirts, jeans, and in some cases worn or ripped clothing – and some are carrying briefcases or looking at phones. Some people tear past the walker, rushing ahead to the next intersection. Others stroll more casually. Snippets of conversation are audible, laughing as well as more strident tones. In one doorway, a person is sitting on a stoop, hair unkempt, wearing stained and worn clothing, a large plastic bag beside them. A waft of body odor comes from the spot. Along the street are buildings of concrete, glass, and brick. Signs large and small in a mixture of languages indicate banks, restaurants, coffee shops, and law and accountancy offices. Some people are visible in large street-level windows at a bank: the windows draw the eye inward, with the tellers’ counter and tall writing desks visible from outside. In the street, a taxi, bicyclist, and a bus each pass in the lane by the sidewalk, negotiating the space tacitly with each other and other cars in the street. Engines rev as a light turns green; a horn blast echoes from a block away.
