Planning in Divided Cities E-Book

Frank Gaffikin

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 676

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Does planning in contested cities inadvertedly make the divisions worse? The 60s and 70s saw a strong role of planning, social engineering, etc but there has since been a move towards a more decentralised 'community planning' approach. The book examines urban planning and policy in the context of deeply contested space, where place identity and cultural affinities are reshaping cities. Throughout the world, contentions around identity and territory abound, and in Britain, this problem has found recent expression in debates about multiculturalism and social cohesion. These issues are most visible in the urban arena, where socially polarised communities co-habit cities also marked by divided ethnic loyalties. The relationship between the two is complicated by the typical pattern that social disadvantage is disproportionately concentrated among ethnic groups, who also experience a social and cultural estrangement, based on religious or racial identity. Navigating between social exclusion and community cohesion is essential for the urban challenges of efficient resource use, environmental enhancement, and the development of a flourishing economy. The book addresses planning in divided cities in a UK and international context, examining cities such as Chicago, hyper-segregated around race, and Jerusalem, acting as a crucible for a wider conflict. The first section deals with concepts and theories, examining the research literature and situating the issue within the urban challenges of competitiveness and inclusion. Section 2 covers collaborative planning and identifies models of planning, policy and urban governance that can operate in contested space. Section 3 presents case studies from Belfast, Chicago and Jerusalem, examining both the historical/contemporary features of these cities and their potential trajectories. The final section offers conclusions and ways forward, drawing the lessons for creating shared space in a pluralist cities and addressing cohesion and multiculturalism. * Addresses important contemporary issue of social cohesion vs. urban competitiveness * focus on impact of government policies will appeal to practitioners in urban management, local government and regeneration * Examines role of planning in cities worldwide divided by religion, race, socio-economic, etc * Explores debate about contested space in urban policy and planning * Identifies models for understanding contested spaces in cities as a way of improving effectiveness of government policy

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Preface

Part I: Introduction

Chapter 1: Introduction

Setting the Scene

Outline of Structure and Argument

Chapter 2: Conflict in the Changing City

Forms of Urban Division

Chapter 3: Understanding the Urban

Farewell to Keynesian–Fordist Industrialism and Welfarism?

Globalisation and Neo-Liberalism

Urban Regime Theory

Beyond the First World lens

Making Sense of the Debate

Chapter 4: The Divided City

Introduction

Explanations of Division

Ethnicity and Urban Conflict

Ethno-Nationalist Contest

The State of Conflict and Conflict in the State

Chapter 5: Identity, Space, and Urban Planning

Identity and Diversity

Multiculturalism and Cosmopolitanism

Space and its Contestations

Policy and Planning Responses to Diversity

Chapter 6: Collaborative Planning and the Divided City

Shifts in Planning

The Role of Collaborative Planning

Development and Division

Part II: Case Studies

Chapter 7: Development Amid Division in US Cities: The Cases of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago

Introduction

Pittsburgh: History of Partnership?

Cleveland—‘mistake on the lake'?

Chicago: the ‘spectacular' city

Race and Division

Divided City: whose Regeneration?

Chapter 8: Contested Space, Contested Sovereignty: The Case of Belfast

Introduction: An Unresolved Sovereignty Contest

Space and Political Violence

Residential Segregation and Spatial Deprivation After the Conflict

Profiling Segregated Spaces

Segregation and Deprivation

Summarising the Divided City

Tackling Division and Deprivation: A Difficult Agenda

Community Cohesion and Economic Austerity

Moving Forward: The Role of Planning

Facing the Future

Chapter 9: Between Sovereignty and Pluralism: Other Divided Cities

Divided Country—Divided City: Nicosia

Divided Cities in Britain: Oldham and Bradford

Promoting Community Cohesion in Oldham

Bradford: From Ethnic to Shared Space?

Conclusions

Part III: Conclusion

Chapter 10: Planning Amid Division: AWay Forward?

Introduction: The Formidable Task

The Paradoxes of Peace Building

Planning Shared Futures in Divided Cities

The Paradoxes of Planning in Divided Cities

The Problem of Community

From Community Development to Community Capacity

The Role of Planning in Narrowing Contest

Implications for Planning, Governance, and Capacity

Final Considerations

Bibliography

Appendix: Methodology

Secondary Data

Primary Data

Index

This edition first published 2011

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gaffikin, Frank.

Planning in divided cities : collaborative shaping of contested space / by Frank Gaffikin, Mike Morrissey.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-9218-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. City planning–United States.

2. City planning–Northern Ireland–Belfast. 3. Urbanization–United States.

4. Urbanization–Northern Ireland–Belfast. 5. Belfast (Northern Ireland)–Ethnic relations. 6. United States–Ethnic relations. I. Morrissey, Mike, 1946- II. Title.

HT169.U5G34 2011

307.1'216–dc22

2010049557

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDF [9781444393187]; Wiley Online Library [9781444393200]; ePub [9781444393194]

Preface and Acknowledgements

Certain terms dominate contemporary social discourse. Among these are: globalization, diversity, governance, inequality and sustainability, concepts that are central to our concerns in this book. Both the pace and scale of social change across the world are pronounced, as is their spatial imprint on place and community. This is most evident in large urban settlements. When it comes to reversing the debilities of de-industrializing western cities, there has been much debate about the efficacy of not only economic agglomerations, flexibilities, and creative milieu, but also of social capital, networking, and inclusive and integrated partnership governance. The relationship among these factors in the Global North's resurgent urbanism is more complicated and differentiated than usually acknowledged. Similarly, the massive urban change occurring in the Global South, and the related parlous state of many impoverished slum inhabitants, demand multifaceted appraisal. In both cases, socio-spatial transformations have generated new inequalities and dislocations, and these have often intersected with old animosities centred on ethnicity, religion, and nationality. Particularly when combined, the combustible impact of such visceral forces tests the resilience of many cities in today's world.

A central argument in this book is that urban planning and policy are concerned with the shaping of social space, and such space is at the heart of many urban conflicts, particularly those that connect issues of territory and identity. Thus, since these public interventions cannot be de-coupled from those related to conflict resolution, they have to demonstrate their relevance to deeply contested urbanism. As they grapple with the difficult links among inclusion, cohesion, and socio-economic well-being, their agenda has to prioritise the building of community capacity and connectivity. But, it has to start with a candid recognition of the significance of space in divided cities, and of the imperative to knit regeneration and reconciliation in the search for non-violent responses to grievance and contest.

Knowledge production is a collaborative rather than solo project, and this book owes much to the ideas and arguments of many colleagues in both casual conversation and formal seminar. Included in these influences are the stimulating thoughts of friends in the Planning cluster at Queen's University Belfast. In particular, Malachy McEldowney, Ken Sterrett, and Brendan Murtagh have been both informative and provocative guides over many years. Other colleagues at Queen's University have also contributed their appreciable scholarship, including Liam O'Dowd, James Anderson, and Dominic Bryan. Wider afield, Ralf Brand in Manchester University and David Perry in the University of Illinois, Chicago, have both inspired us, and perspired with us, in many joint research tasks. Beyond academia, many accomplished people, with whom we have worked in the community, voluntary and public sectors over many decades, have helped shape our analysis, while anchoring our theoretical and conceptual edifices to ‘real world’ problems: Paul Sweeney, Brendan Boyle, Duncan Morrow, and Jackie Redpath, to name but some. Finally, the support and forbearance of our families have been invaluable.

Part I

Introduction

Chapter 1: Introduction

Outlines the core objective and key arguments, and summarises the key points in each of the chapters.

Chapters 2–6

These chapters form the conceptual and theoretical framework: understanding the contemporary city and the nature of its conflicts, and the specific role that urban planning and policy can play in addressing problems of division.

Chapter 2: Conflict in the Changing City

Explains how the urban is changing–essentially how the global is becoming more urban and the urban more global, and the implication of these changes for conflict in cities.

Chapter 3: Understanding the Urban

The key conceptual and theoretical debates in urban studies over recent decades, and where this leaves our understanding of what is happening in the urban arena at a global level.

Chapter 4: The Divided City

Various theories and interpretations about the nature of ‘the divided city’ and why there may be a proliferation of such contested cities in the future.

Chapter 5: Identity, Space, and Urban Planning

A more detailed look at the links between identity formation, cultural collision, protectionist views of territory, and urban space in a transnational and cosmopolitan context.

Chapter 6: Collaborative Planning and the Divided City

Given this spread of the urban, and growth of city conflicts, what is the role of planning and policy in addressing these divisions?

Chapter 1

Introduction

Setting the Scene

The spatial focus of this book is on the urban, the settlement form which most of humanity now inhabits. While the conceptual focus is on ‘divided cities’, it acknowledges that in one sense all cities are divided, in that their ‘publics’ and stakeholders have differential access and vested interest, marked by distinctions of class, ethnicity, and gender. Accordingly, it distinguishes between two main forms of urban contested space. One is where dispute and antagonism relate to issues of pluralism, and concern rivalries about imbalances in power, welfare and status among distinctive social groups. The other kind is about sovereignty, where there are similar pluralist disputes about equity, rights, and social entitlement, but these are interwoven with an ethno-nationalist conflict about the legitimacy of the state itself.

An example of the former explored here is Chicago, a deeply segregated city, where race is a stark fault line in both the city's historical narrative and contemporary discourses, and has been persistently seminal in the configuration of its social space. So, for instance, when people think of the black American ghetto, Chicago comes readily to mind as the home of its epitome. By contrast, Belfast typifies the second form of divided city. In a strange contortion, they are both crucibles and instruments in the overall contest about nationality in these troubled lands. Here, the manifesto of the combatant group that claims to be subject to suppression and conquest (Catholics/Nationalists/Republicans in Belfast) is not merely concerned about equity and security with regard to the dominant group (Protestants/Unionists in Belfast). Rather, their immediate equality agenda can be interpreted as a transitional ‘Trojan horse’ politics unfolding over time into the fundamental objective of what they proclaim as a liberated homeland. In short, particular conflicts in such cities about equality and development get wrapped up in the more general conflict about the legitimacy of state ‘ownership’ and prerogative. The question of ‘whose city’ is inextricably part of a bigger quarrel about ‘whose country’.

This significant distinction between cities divided on a socio-economic or ethno-religious basis, and those conflicted around sovereignty contests is often under-observed. Of course, the distinction makes a big difference. Often, advocates of city peace-building will speak about fostering a sense of common belonging, rooted in a politico-legal concept of citizenship. Yet, in the case of sovereignty disputes, citizenship is itself at the very source of the conflict. Thus, although both kinds of urban division tend to promote territorial segregation, each type demands its own understanding and intervention. Specifically, as illustrated in this book, the intricacies of sovereignty contests require a sophisticated synchronization of planning and policy around social inclusion, community cohesion, and conflict resolution. The challenge of this integrated approach is that pursuit of one strategy can amplify the difficulty in another. For instance, social inclusion programmes that attempt to redress inequities between contending groups can inadvertently provoke antagonism from one side that believes such redistribution is designed to disadvantage them. In turn, this perception that ‘the other side’ gets more can deepen the acrimony, thereby frustrating the promotion of inter-community cohesion. Yet, a durable peace demands that inclusion and cohesion are not mutually exclusive.

Faced with such entanglement, it is tempting for planners and those charged with urban development to disclaim its relevance for their remit. It is easier for them to don the mantle of apolitical technical professionals, who are obliged to deliberately disregard these contexts in order to protect their detached impartiality. But, in this book, it is argued that such apparent ‘neutrality’ in the midst of urban conflict is a delusion. Moreover, without a conscious concern about its impact on the divisions, planning and policy can inadvertently accentuate rather than ameliorate such conflict. Indeed, many aspects of these disputes come down to sensitive issues of territory and space—particularly in cities caught up in sovereignty contests—and since planning is fundamentally about the shaping of social space, it is inevitably intertwined with these awkward dilemmas.

Addressed more positively, it is argued here that planning can provide the spatial underpinning of all the relevant interventions to resolve such conflicts. But, to achieve such a mission, it has to be reconceptualised beyond the narrow ambitions of physical land-use planning. New forms of spatial planning offer a paradigm for the kind of sustainable, comprehensive, inclusive, and participatory approaches to city development that may open up this conceptual and operational transformation. While this is much easier said than done, there is urgency about this recasting, if only because there are portents of proliferation of urban contests in the context of a globalising and urbanising world that accommodates substantial social segmentation, new geo-political antagonisms, environmental degradation, and related resource rivalry. In extreme conditions, such features risk the partitioning of many cities into the fortified enclaves of the rich and powerful alongside the settlements of the economically precarious and the ghettos of the excluded. Any such stark socio-spatial separation threatens to promote deepening inequalities, create separate social universes, and foment violence—all of which can serve to not only impede solidarity of common citizenship, but also to inhibit democratic politics. The very sustainability of cities in such circumstances is suspect. Even short of this forbidding scenario, there is an imperative for a new planning that proactively addresses the challenges of the divided city. Given this central argument, the book attends to the case through the following structure.

Outline of Structure and Argument

The book is divided into three main sections: the opening section, covering Chapters 2 to, addresses the conceptual and theoretical frameworks and the dilemmas for planning and policy in their interventions in this problematic terrain; the second section comprises three empirical chapters that offer analysis of case study cities (Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Belfast, Nicosia, Oldham, and Bradford); and the final section consists of a concluding chapter that connects the issues and arguments with the earlier theoretical considerations, and offers a paradigm for effective planning and policy in contested cities.

Specifically, Chapter 2 deals with the nature of the changing city, within which the problems of division fester. Essentially, it emphasises that we live in an urban world. Since there is no longer a simple urban–rural dichotomy, the ambiguity of territorial identities and boundaries means that ‘the city’ cannot be articulated in definitive spatial terms. Rather, it is an arena that is being continuously reshaped through social construction and relations within a spatial form of peri-urbanised city-regions (Knapp et al., 2006).

Many urban areas are seeking amalgamations and networks with proximate city neighbours to achieve a more potent development axis, based on scale, synergy, and other forms of collaborative advantage. However, the inflated rhetoric of such territorial cohesion still tends to exceed the reality. Importantly, the new Urban Age is not simply the rolling out of the Western urban experience over the last two centuries, which, for instance, featured a close link between urbanisation, industrialisation, and modernisation. Many current city expansions in the poorest parts of the world are unattended by economic opportunity and growth, thereby generating pronounced social inequities and tensions.

As expressed by Soja (2000), just as the global is urbanising, the urban is globalising, and both the development and conflictive potential of contemporary urbanism lies in the interplay of these twin processes. The big urban changes are evident in the Global South. Accordingly, the proclivity for urban theorists to assume the urban experience of the developed world as normative is inappropriate. Rather, a new urban scholarship is demanded, one that acknowledges the dramatic demographics in the Global South, and which seeks an explanatory synthesis, based on what urban study in both first and third worlds can learn from each other. For instance, a notable condition of urbanism in the developing world—informality—contains relevance not only for our insight into places registering the most acute urban change, but also for ways in which such features find contested manifestation in first world cities. Urban conflict is not reducible to singular cause or type, and thus distinctions of divisions need to be drawn that respect the complexity and variation, while acknowledging that specific case studies contain permutations of these different types that inter-penetrate in unique ways. So, while the case studies focus mostly on the familiar urban milieu in advanced Western countries, they are framed in an appreciation of the changing global context and the dynamics generating potential conflict in areas like the Global South.

Trying to understand these significant changes in the urban, Chapter 3 considers the key theoretical and conceptual constructs employed to understand urban change and development for around a half a century. The era in urban policy, in which they held sway, was concerned about a rational planning system, framed to decentralise jobs, investment and people from concentrated metropolitan areas, while providing incremental improvements to the built environment in the old cities. By the 1980s, the urban issue had changed. More fundamental questions were raised about the very viability of the city in mature economies, in the context of a radical shift in their political economies, and about the increased significance of expanding cities in the emergent economies in the context of greater globalization and urbanization.

Thus, Chapter 3 explores the tentative remaking of urban and social theory to make sense of these ‘New Times’. Over recent decades, urban theory has sought sanctuary from both the positivism of nomothetic spatial science and the over-determinism of Marxist structuralism. Alongside general discourses such as post-modernism, and more specific explanatory schemas such as urban regime theory, there has been since the 1980s, a set of ideas such as structuration and post-structuralism. These accord human consciousness a more central role, while conceding that the latitude for human agency is constrained by both structural context and social contingency.

One theoretical framework, accommodating the realist and complex dimensions of context and contingency, offers interpretation of the singularity and inimitability of a particular place within a broader causal analysis of a globalised social world. A central problem underlying all of this debate is its emphasis on the first world city, to the neglect of the significant ramification for an urban world of the emergence of intensive urbanization in the Global South, and of the increasing transnational character of urbanism almost everywhere. Such reconstituted urbanism exemplifies the interaction of the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ city, an interface that holds the promise of opportunity and cultural hybridity, but also contains the threat of accentuated conflict, and thereby reveals a great deal about the contemporary city.

Within this theoretical understanding, Chapter 4 explores the nature of the divided city. Cities today are shaped by rapid global processes of unsettling socio-economic change, within a largely de-regulated market-driven environment and an exploitative system of unfair ‘free trade’: the de-industrialization of the West; the transnationalisation of a big slice of manufacturing to the Global South; the role of hypermobile capital; increasing migrant flows; the diffusion of an acquisitive materialist culture; and degenerated urban enclaves of concentrated poverty alongside the cosmopolitan spaces enjoyed by the beneficiaries of neo-liberal globalisation. In turn, such divisive patterns have provoked urban contest, and alternative forms of globalisation from below, expressed often in ‘the informal city’.

In just under a 60-year period since the Second World War, across the globe, five times more fatalities have resulted from civil wars (16.2 million) compared with interstate wars (3.3 million) (Fearon and Laitin, 2003). Many of these have had, at their root, a protracted contest around ethnic identity, since over 90% of the world's nations are multi-ethnic with the majority, over 60%, of all conflicts since 1945 involving intrastate group clashes (Bollens, 1999). Moreover, many such conflicts have a strong urban component.

As presaged earlier, two main types of divided city are distinguished: the first where the conflict is centred on cleavage of class, race, religious affiliation and ethnicity; and the second, where these fractures and frissons and the state's role in addressing related issues of pluralism and equity, are inter-penetrated with durable disputes about sovereignty and the legitimacy of the state itself. In both cases, the concept of identity is assuming greater prominence in a period that encompasses what appears to be contradictory dynamics of uniformization and differentiation, reflected in both the extension of globalism and the resurgence of tribalism. The former offers the potential of multiple identities, but within a power structure that mostly privileges the images, artefacts, and idioms of neo-liberal capitalism. The latter offers retreat to forms of local bonding and cultural purity that contrast the intimacy and safety of familiar solidarities with the distance and dominance attached to global determinations. Identity finds spatial expression in territory, which itself is socially shaped. While in many instances, territory will be accepted as natural and authentic, it is when its legitimacy, meaning, and ownership are contested that the role of power in its determination is most clearly exposed.

Chapter 5 examines the issues of identity, territory, and space further. While for many identity is more a state of on-going re-definition, in ancestral struggles, such as those of an ethno-nationalist kind, it can be fixed, singular, and primal. In a world marked by cultural relativism and collision, there is deep argument about the respective merits of universalist cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and cultural particularism in achieving social cohesion amid increasing diversity. Far from the anticipated de-territorialising impact of globalization, territorial sensibility remains potent, and plays an emblematic role in constituting a sense of identity, attachment, and rootedness in a world given more to impermanence and spatial–temporal compression (Kahler and Walter, 2006).

Summarising the argument about space and its inherent contestedness in the ‘divided city’, it can be said that space has little or no inherent meaning. Rather, its meaning is socially constructed. Accordingly, specific spaces can be subject to diverse and contested readings. Moreover, social space is relational, in the sense that social interaction composes its content and image. Yet, space is not itself some kind of passive stage on which is played out the ‘theatre’ of social life. Rather, it is an active agent in the social formation of human settlement. It both reflects and changes the multiplicities of its users. In this way, it is largely dynamic, continuously being re-made and re-defined. Thus, its ‘meaning’ can change over time (Massey, 2005).

Chapter 6 addresses the role of planning in contested space, highlighting that one crucial difference between cities partitioned on socio-economic or ethno-religious bases and those divided as a consequence of sovereignty contests, is that the latter typically contain more problematic features of contested space since the idea of indivisible territory minimises the scope for peaceful negotiation and compromise. Different models of urban planning and policy can operate in contested cities. But even ones designed to promote equity and conflict resolution can be entrapped in the complexity and contradictions of deep-seated struggles. Potentially, the new shift to spatial planning and the engaged and dialogic nature of collaborative planning offer pathways to a more productive role for such public intervention in cities marked by ultra-stratified identity politics and ethno-nationalist contest. Nevertheless, there are limits to a proceduralist view of collaborative planning, particularly in the highly fragmented circumstance of uncollaborative parties locked in mutual hostility and subject to power differentials. This suggests that a more agonistic model of planning is demanded.

These theoretical, conceptual, and discursive chapters are followed by three empirical ones that scope across the sovereignty–pluralist distinction drawn earlier. Chapter 7 looks at three US cities, located in the Mid-West region, which have been subject to significant economic restructuring: Chicago, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. In exploring the divisions of these cities, largely rooted in the pluralist fractures around race, ethnicity, and class, the extent to which planning interventions pay heed to, and impact on, these conditions is addressed. While all three cities have pursued a development-led form of renaissance within at least a nominal framework of public–private partnership, the emphasis attached to a market-driven approach has been notable. Moreover, the form and role of the racial divide in each city has been different, and arguably has impacted on the outcome of their regeneration drive. One spatial rivalry that has featured in all three cases concerns the relative priority attached to the development of the Downtown over the neighbourhoods, particularly those communities where the concentration of race and poverty is most acute. Within this kind of common political–economic framework, what differences in strategy and outcome are apparent, and how do these relate to city divisions, particularly around the category of race?

Chapter 8 deals with the sovereignty-contested city of Belfast. It argues that this ethno-nationalist dispute has seen a close correspondence between the spaces of the most acute deprivation and the spaces where conflict around identity and belonging has been most trenchantly fought. Accordingly, policies of community cohesion and social inclusion are both relevant interventions within a participatory spatial planning framework. But they have to be closely aligned and under-pinned by a deliberate conflict-resolution strategy. Specifically, programmes for compensatory regeneration and wider city-region development and those for inter-communal reconciliation need to operate as twin processes that are mutually reinforcing. Yet, it is acknowledged that the re-distributive attributes of social inclusion initiatives can unintentionally intensify divisions, thereby making the objectives of community cohesion even more intractable. Some of this conundrum is evident in the limited success of both conventional and innovative approaches to planning and development in the city in recent decades.

The final empirical chapter covers both sovereignty and pluralist examples— Nicosia in Cyprus in the case of the former, and Oldham and Bradford in Britain, in the case of the latter. It attempts to highlight the different agendas that derive from this distinction—incremental political accommodation in the case of the former, manifested in gradual physical and spatial transformations; and emphasis on community cohesion and social inclusion in the case of the UK cities. However, despite this different emphasis, and the conceptual demarcations in the nature of the division, it also acknowledges some of the interface between these two types of city strife. Both places have experienced sectarian violence centred on contested identity and territory. For instance, inter-communal riots in Oldham and Bradford prompted public engagement about the roots of this upheaval, with considerable focus on contentious links between identity and territory. While clearly the ethno-nationalist hostility in Nicosia is rooted in a visceral dispute about sovereignty, it may be considered that the genesis of the ethnic hostilities in Britain is totally different. The distinction between the two may seem to be reflected in the more absolute and physical divide that separates Greek and Turkish Cypriots in Nicosia. However, the contrast may not be so unadulterated. For some of the Islamic protagonists in Britain, there is also a ‘sovereignty’ dimension—if only in their conviction that sovereignty belongs ultimately with the divine rather than secular authority, and that it has a global writ rather than a specific national one. Similarly, for some of the white adversaries, relevance is attached to a facet of English nationalism, whose sovereignty they perceive to have been compromised by the growing presence of ethnic groups with a presumed primary attachment to a foreign culture. This is not to infer that the two urban contexts replicate main aspects. Rather, without losing the important distinction between the sovereignty and pluralist disputes, it is to acknowledge that places from both kinds of contest can share some similar elements with respect to identity affiliation, inter-communal tension, and the linked issue of competitive access to urban space and resources.

In conclusion, Chapter 10 draws the analysis of the case studies together with the earlier conceptual and theoretical considerations that frame the challenge of planning in divided cities. Beyond the main models of planning in contested space—the neutral, partisan, equity, and resolver approaches—there is a proposed new model that fits within creative versions of spatial planning and facilitates the kind of agonistic deliberation that may hold promise for conflictive cities. In this task, there is recognition of how incongruities among planning and policy agendas may derive from ontological, epistemological, ideological, and methodological disputes. Deep divisions in cities generate contest between protagonists about the reality of the context and content of the conflict; about the form and validation of knowledge that offers causal understanding; about the rival values and perspectives that inform the mission and behaviour of the adversaries; and about the methods of data collection and analysis designed to elucidate the actual situation. Thus, where cultural collision is acute and mutual trust is fragile, what can appear as rational and equitable to one side can appear as unreasonable and discriminatory to the other. Patently, we do not occupy an exclusively rational social universe. Even without endorsing the relativities of post-modernism, it can be said that emotion, intuition, and such like, also play their part. Thus it is that two very different world views can see ‘reality’ in very different ways, and this binary lens can become further entangled with a familiar pattern in city conflicts whereby one side's expectation gives rise to the other's enhanced insecurity and ‘bunker’ mentality. The closing chapter considers these dilemmas and offers an imperfect pathway to a more productive discourse.

This book derives from the participatory action-research work of the authors over the last two decades, during which they have been intensively involved in the policy-making and evaluation component of urban/regional policy and planning, while also engaged at the meso and micro levels with regeneration and community agencies of various kinds. In particular, over the last five years, they have been involved with an international collaborative research project, known as Contested Cities and Urban Universities (CU2) that has sought to work through a strategic partnership between academy and various city stakeholders in co-producing knowledge about the nature of divided cities and efficacy of planning and policy responses. Other colleagues have contributed to this work and their ideas have helped us clarify our own thoughts in these pages. In particular, we would like to recognise Professor David Perry, Director of the Great Cities Institute, University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC); Ratoola Kunda (UIC); and Dr Ralf Brand, University of Manchester, UK. Within Queen's University, Belfast, our team has included: Professor Malachy McEldowney, who particularly led our research in Nicosia, and whose reflections we draw upon for that case study; Dr Ken Sterrett and Maelosia Hardy, whose primary research in Oldham and Bradford has assisted our two case studies in the UK, and Gavan Rafferty, who has worked on the issue of governance in divided cities.

Chapter 2

Conflict in the Changing City

In considering the complexion of urban division and conflict, it is helpful to set the context of the contemporary city. Urbanity is changing markedly, reflecting shifts in economy, polity, diversity and demography, while its divisive and fractal character is putatively accentuated by related social and ethnic polarities. Since the concept of the urban realm is increasingly complex (Healey, 2007), it is no longer feasible to define it simply as human settlement outside the rural, ‘an inhabited place of greater size, population or importance than a town or village’ to quote a dictionary description (Merriam-Webster, 2005, p. 226). Thus, we have the idea of ‘metropolis’ to acknowledge that urban built environments in advanced economies have tended over the last five decades to stretch out beyond original municipal boundaries in variegated manifestations of sprawl (Downs, 1994), sometimes connecting together economically interdependent metropolitan areas in forms such as conurbation and metroplex. While the prevailing narrative in the industrial city since the 1960s has been one of decline and even death (Jacobs, 1961), like Mark Twain's, its demise has proved to be exaggerated. Rather than degenerate, it has mutated into a more amorphous form, whereby the effective spatial unit of urban analysis extends beyond central cities to at least encompass the hinterland of suburban and ex-urban human habitat. As expressed by Knapp (2006, p. 61):

Old dichotomies between centre and periphery, urban and rural, settlements and open space, are fading …Cities, suburbs, towns and rural areas grow increasingly together into a new poly-nuclear and fragmented urban patchwork.

Indeed, some have identified this perimeter settlement as a distinctive urban form, known as ‘edge city’ (Garreau, 1991), that, particularly in the US, has now configured to the final destination of a three-stage development: starting with the suburbanisation of people, largely involved in dormitory living and commuting to downtown; transforming further with the malling of America, which saw the re-siting of downtown retail and offices in satellite suburbs; and culminating with the relocation of substantial economic activity to the more autonomous ‘superburbia’ or ‘technoburbs’, where a sizeable share of metropolitans now reside, recreate, shop and work. Bloch (1994) refers to this ‘rise and shift to the periphery’ as the inversion of the metropolis, displacing the conventional centripetal and largely radial dynamics of development from the urban core outwards with a more tangled mosaic landscape. Linked to this concept is the description of that belt in the urban fringes just beyond ‘city limits’, where reside both farmers and households in a hybrid city-countryside known as the peri-urban (Cavailhes et al., 2004). Representing ‘the transitional zones between distinctly urban and unambiguously rural areas’ (Simon, 2008, p. 167), these diffuse interfaces manifest what some have labelled extended metropolitan regions.

This pattern of low density urban expansion has also become evident in Europe, where urban compaction used to contrast favourably with the typical sprawl in the US. In Europe, growth in built-up locations peaked in the 1950s–1960s, since when the urban footprint has stretched into surrounding countryside, exemplified in the conglomerate development along the Rhone Valley down to the Mediterranean coast. In such formations, ‘development is patchy, scattered and strung out, with a tendency for discontinuity’ (European Environment Agency, 2006, p. 6). A mix of social circumstance and policy has spurred this dynamic, including: income growth, low commuting costs, low cost of agricultural land acquisition relative to brownfield development, and intractable inner city problems (ibid. 2006, p. 10–11):

Indeed during the 10-year period between 1990 and 2000 the growth of urban areas and associated infrastructure throughout Europe consumed more than 8000 km2 (a 5.4% increase during the period). On a straight extrapolation, a 0.6% annual increase in urban areas, although apparently small, would lead to a doubling of the amount of urban area in little over a century. Historical trends since the mid-1950s show that European cities have expanded on average by 78%, whereas the population has grown by only 33%. A major consequence of this trend is that European cities have become less compact.

These patterns are becoming evident also among the former ‘socialist’ cities of Eastern Europe. Though once spatially contained by a combination of centralised planning and mass use of public transit, they are experiencing acute pressure toward low density sprawl as incomes rise, new housing choices emerge, access to the private car extends, land markets are deregulated, and planning controls are eased.

Others have characterised the new cityspace that combines dispersal and agglomeration as the post-metropolis (Soja, 2000, p. 250), expressed ‘as “the city turned inside-out”, as in the urbanisation of the suburbs and the rise of the Outer City. But it also represents “the city turned outside-in”, a globalisation of the Inner City that brings all the world's peripheries into the center, …This redefines the Outer and the Inner City simultaneously, while making each of these terms more and more difficult to delineate and map with any clarity or confidence’. This explanation of reconstituted territoriality builds on Soja's previous publication, Thirdspace (1996), in which he spoke of the exopolis, to capture a linked triple process of urban change—the demise of the traditional city, alongside the growth of outer cities, amid the growing influence of exogenous factors on all cities in a globalising world.

Taking this spatial pattern further, the idea of ‘city-region’ suggests that individual cities have to be understood increasingly in their regional context. Thus, for example, European balanced development policies lean towards a polycentric network of urban areas in regional and sub-regional locales to optimise economies of scale and scope (Davoudi and Strange, 2009). Such multiscalar clustering raises questions about the ‘shifting territory’ of urban governance (Murdoch, 1997), and about how such composite urban areas can achieve smart connectivity in policy and planning. This is particularly so if the spatial unit is extended even further. For instance, Gottman's concept (1957) of megalopolis originally referred to the 500 mile corridor in the north-eastern US region, where a cluster of urban areas from Boston to Washington constituted a powerful economic and political zone in the country as a whole. Similar urbanised complexes have been identified in Europe, such as the ‘blue banana’ area that covers a vast tract of urbanisation and concentrated economy, stretching from Birmingham to Milan, and including London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Cologne, Frankfurt, Basel, Zurich, and Turin. Other less pre-eminent socio-spatial geometries in Europe include: the ‘golden banana’, a coastal ‘sun-belt’ corridor from Valencia to Genoa; the ‘Flemish diamond’, comprising an agglomeration of Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp and Leuven, with a total population of 5.5 million; and the Randstad in Holland, linking Amsterdam (finance, transport) to Utrecht (service sector), The Hague (government) and Rotterdam (port).

This megalopolitan agglomeration, based on integrated strategic city-networking, has been elaborated in the contemporary term, mega-region, to capture forms of urban settlements that grow beyond the metropolitan, noted not only for substantial population size, but also for significance in economic output and innovation. One study of these integrated sets of cities and surrounding suburban hinterlands identifies 40 mega-regions in the world, with output of more than $100 billion, that together produce two-thirds of world output, and 85% of global innovation (Florida et al., 2007, p. 4):

As the distribution of economic activity has gone global, the city-system has also become global—meaning that cities compete now on global terrain. Urban mega-regions are beginning to relate to the global economy in much the same way that metropolitan regions relate to national economies.

Thus, such mega-regions can network more together than to other parts of their own nation states. Indeed, for some like Ohmae (2000), these region-states are almost replacing nation-states as the ‘natural’ business units, operating with modern telecommunication and transport, across political boundaries in what is supposedly an increasingly ‘flat’ and borderless world (Friedman, 2005). Such network power is seen as offering the synergy and nimble flexibility that can attend greater liberation from national polity.

This is particularly so in the context of globalisation (Brenner, 1999), which has contributed to the reshaping of the city in many ways. One example is the emergence of ‘global cities’ (Sassen, 1991; Isin, 2000; Olds, 2001), marked not only by their role as command centres in the world economy, as nodal post-industrial production sites of global finance and business services, as concentrated sources of innovation, and as lucrative markets of elite consumption, but also by their mutual worldwide networking (Sassen, 2002). Critics of this tag (Huyssen, 2008, pp. 10–11) suggest that:

the global city had become a slogan serving either to claim avant-garde status for certain, primarily Western centers of finance and services or to articulate ambitions elsewhere to join the urban upper crust…the conceit of the global city has itself become a way of reasserting Western notions of advanced modernity and urban developmentalism which ignores many vital aspects of urban life that fall outside its purview.

Some insist that the current characteristics of the global city have been evident in embryonic form for around 150 years, and that their mature manifestation is simply a recently accelerated process layered on an existing integrative trajectory. As noted by Abu-Lughod (1999, p. 2) in respect of New York: ‘…even though the pace and scale of today's globalized economy— and thus of the global cities that serve as its “command posts”—are faster and vaster, and the mechanisms of integration more thoroughgoing and quickly executed…the seeds from which the present “global city” grew were firmly planted in Manhattan during the middle decades of the nineteenth century’.

Another aspect of this ‘global’ impact is the development of more mongrel cities (Sandercock, 2003), comprising greater diversity of ethnic populations due to factors like increasing migration patterns. In broad terms, this holds the prospect of either more pronounced conflict around the politics of identity and contested space, or the nurturing of cosmopolis, where pluralist engagement across crucial divides can fashion a creative combination of multiculturalism and cultural hybridity, within a framework of common citizenship (Kymlicka, 1995) and ‘a recognition of intertwined fates’ (Sandercock, 1998, p. 125).

But, despite all the transformative re-patterning in the advanced economies, the most dramatic redefinition of the city is happening in the Global South. Since 1950, the human population has expanded from 2.5 billion to 6 billion, and 60% of this massive growth has occurred in urban areas, particularly in the developing world, where there has been over a sixfold increase in urban populace. As expressed by Gray (2002, p. 10): ‘People who are now over forty have lived through a doubling of the world's population’. In 2007, an historic mark was reached, when 50% of humanity was designated as urban, compared with approximately 25% in 1950, and 10% in 1900. This epochal change augurs the Urban Age. Moreover, the projection is that by 2030, global urban population as a share of total population will reach around 60%, and a likely 75% by 2050.

This accelerated urbanisation means that between 2001 and 2030, virtually all world population increase will happen in urban areas, and in the process, the world's slum population will double to around 2 billion, thereby spiralling from 32% to 41% of the world's urban population over this period (Tibaijuka, 2007). In 1975, only 27% of the developing world's population was urban. By 2030, it will be 50% (Hinrichsen et al., 2002). Over a longer time frame, from 2007 to 2050, the world's urban population will likely rise from 3.3 billion to 6.4 billion, an almost doubling increase that exceeds the expected increase of total world population over this period, reflecting substantial migration from rural to urban settlement (UN Population Division, 2007).

One feature of this striking growth is the emergence of megacities, a phenomenon mostly concentrated in the Global South. Of course, large cities have existed for some time. Think of ancient Baghdad. But, in 2000, there were 388 cities in the world with 1 million plus residents. By 2015, the figure is estimated to rise to 554 such cities (Hinrichsen et al., 2002). Defining megacities as locations of 10 million inhabitants or more, of the top 10 such places in 2007, only two were in the advanced economies: Tokyo at 35.7 million and New York–Newark at 19 milllion. Moreover, by 2025, the big increases will have occurred in cities like Mumbai (from 18.9 million to 26.4 million), Delhi (from 15.9 million to 22.5 million), Dhaka (from 13.5 million to 22 million), and Kolkata (from 14.8 million to 20.6 million) (UN-Habitat, 2008a 2008a). Taking the case of Mexico City, its area has spread out from 9.1 to 1500 km2 from the start of the twentieth century to the present. Its populous, polluted, and multinodal form contributes to its reputed chaotic and dangerous cityscape. Hailed by some as a ‘monstropolis’, it ‘has grown in such a staggered and awkward manner that it seems to lack any sort of master plan, a city in which one can barely conceive one's day-to-day survival’ (Canclini, 2008, p. 88). Such mammoth urban centres have been termed ‘primate cities’, referring to how their over-urbanisation reflects their society's uneven development and locational inflexibility. For instance, the population of Thailand's capital, Bangkok, was 6.7 million in 2000, 30 times larger than the next largest city (Gottdiener and Hutchinson, 2006). Given their size and diversity, their vulnerability to natural disasters associated with climate change, the immiseration of so many of their residents, and the resource rivalry involved in building physical and social infrastructure sustainably (UN-Habitat, 2008b 2008b), these urban giants face the potential of protracted social conflict. Taking this trajectory of the ‘endless city’ (Burdett and Sudjic, 2008) to an extreme prediction, it has been posited that time will see the creation of the ecumenopolis, whereby humankind will live in one continuous worldwide city.

A bleak reflection of this intensified urbanism is the steep growth of what has been dubbed shadow cities, referring to the illegal squatter settlements that express an indomitable resilience and ingenuity among the world's poorest. Creating makeshift incremental neighbourhoods outside the ‘asphalt world’ of the formal planning process (Neuwirth, 2005), such people live in the denied or invisible city, constituting a new paradigm of human settlement, a ‘zone of silence’ in terms of recognition, legitimacy and public debate (Global Urban Observatory, 2003). Davis (2006) characterises this proliferation of the precarious habitat of barricadas, favelas, and shanty towns as a ‘planet of slums’, a labyrinth of spatially concentrated destitution and related conflict. But, even within the Global South, significant poverty asymmetries prevail. An estimate in 2005 indicated that ‘in the least developed countries almost three quarters of the urban population were slum dwellers’ (UN Population Division, 2007).

In summarising this conceptual confusion of the contemporary city—reflected in the various neologisms such as ‘the multi-nucleated metropolitan region, the polycentric urban region, the new techno-city, post-suburbia, the galactic metropolis, the city without, the postmodern urban form…’, Isin (1996, p. 123) concludes that the root characteristic is that of socio-spatial fragmentation and discordance within a global context. But, whatever categorisation is employed to reflect the urban mutations and differential geographic scale and reach, the important point to note is that the spatial and the social interpenetrate, and the intrinsic spatiality of social life, as Soja (2000, p. 8) reminds us, is critical to comprehension of contemporary urbanism:

Urban spatial specificity refers to the particular configurations of social relations, built forms, and human activity in a city and its geographic sphere of influence. It actively arises from the social production of cityspace as a distinctive material and symbolic context or habitat for human life. It thus has both formal or morphological as well as processual or dynamic aspects.

Given this changing definition of the urban, investigation of planning in the divided city—this book's central focus—is predicated on an understanding that divisions in cities have diverse cause and form.

Forms of Urban Division

In the contemporary period, eight main forms of urban conflict have been argued:

1. Some insist that with the transformation over the last four decades in the mature economies—variously characterised as the shift to late capitalism, disorganised capitalism, post-industrialism, or the informational society—has come a more pronounced bifurcation of the labour market and a related acute socio-spatial segregation between rich and poor. In its starkest form, the flourishing gated communities of the wealthy and the languishing ghettoes of the underclass are deemed to constitute a dual or two-speed city that is inherently unstable and prone to conflict. Others suggest that this stark contrast is over-simplified.

2. With the massive and rapid growth of the urban in the Global South, due mainly to the ‘modernisation’ of the emergent industrial economies and the related influx from rural settlement, has come a strain on urban infrastructure and an accentuation of social inequality amid proliferation of informal development, whose legitimacy and welfare are deeply contested. Such confrontations risk rending whole urban regions, with potential for recurrent discord.

3. As a feature of globalisation, alongside the greater mobility of capital, labour, trade, and information, there has been an increasing migration pattern, particularly from less developed to richer economies. Such new demographic configuration brings greater ethnic and religious diversity to even formerly homogeneous societies, and since the new populations tend to congregate in kindred city communities, the urban has become a concentrated arena that tests humanity's ability to live peaceably with difference.

4. A pre-eminent version of such ‘culture wars’ has been the global contest between militant Islam and other politico-religious systems such as the West. For some like Huntington (1996), in the contemporary world, the principal fractures that engulf large populations in caustic and violent dispute are linked to a ‘clash of civilisations’. In this view, the primary condition of world conflict is no longer rooted in the ideological tussle of the Cold War, but rather rests in the diversity of cultural and religious identity, particularly the major fault line that involves elements of Islam and their perceived enemies. While producing new macro-geographies, such as the provocatively designated ‘axis of evil’, this absolutist confrontation also hardens ancient enmities in specific cities like Jerusalem and Beirut, and sparks newer ones in cities like Baghdad.

5. The urban is likely to become increasingly the site of ‘new wars’. This is attributable to both the massive urban growth in the Global South, and the nature of modern warfare. Since insurgents are particularly susceptible to high tech precision weapons in open terrain, adversaries of the most powerful nations will increasingly seek the density and congestion of urban ‘cover’, both to merge with local non-combatants and to curtail the superiority of their foe's advanced weaponry. Moreover, as illustrated in the case of Baghdad, as insurgents seek to erode the will of their opponents, such protracted attrition holds potential for igniting local inter-ethnic enmities.

6. The role of ideology and/or government systems can engender intentional socio-spatial fissures, and related discord. For instance, Berlin's partition and ultimate physical carving was connected to a global ideological contest, while South African cities were submitted to a state strategy of mandatory racial segregation, discrimination, and subjugation.

7. Increased global economic activity and the related pressures on global warming have sharpened rivalries over sources of energy and communication access. This has led to speculation that many future wars will be ignited by struggles for oil, gas, and water, and in the longer term perhaps by conflicts for those parts of the planet most secure from devastations visited by climatic change. Again, such global contests will come to ground most acutely in specific cities, and the racial profile of the forsaken in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina illustrates the politically toxic capacity of such catastrophes.

8. The end of the Cold War was accompanied by the collapse of authoritarian regimes that had held diverse nationalities forcibly under a centralist polity. Moreover, the buttressing of surrogate and satellite administrations by the two main ideological combatants proved no longer tenable. Together with on-going de-colonialisation, such ‘liberations’ have de-frozen old ethnic animosities and ushered in a new wave of ethno-nationalist contest. These new arenas of dispute about borders and sovereignty, such as the Balkans and Chechnya, join those nationalist cauldrons of more long-standing, such as the major conflicts of Israel–Palestine, Lebanon, and Kashmir–India–Pakistan, and those less significant geo-politically, such as Cyprus, Northern Ireland, and the Basque Country. There is a tendency for such macro quarrels to find most ferocious expression in the main urban centres, such as Jerusalem, Beirut, Sarajevo, Grozny, Nicosia, Belfast, and Bilbao.

In short, much of the world's urban divisions can be located within this typology. But the explanatory force of each ‘type’ can be debated. Moreover, specific conflicts comprise specific permutations of them. But, whatever the difference in context and form, urban conflicts share a linked set of issues: history, identity, territory, propinquity, legitimacy, equity, and security. In general terms, analysis of these contests tends to fall predominantly into four frameworks:

The political (addressing the basis of legitimacy, and including arguments about governance and about whether pluralist democracy offers the most effective instrument for securing consensus and compromise between protagonists).The economic (examining the material basis for class and power inequities, seen to underpin the fissures).The cultural (emphasising the way rival norms, traditions, and claims of ethnic groups determine mutual antagonism, ranging from estrangement to active hostility).The spatial (the relational geographies that attend the conflict).

The view of this book is that all cities in the contemporary world are in some regard ‘divided cities’. Thus, it is important to make a differentiation about the type of division. Two main types will be distinguished here. The first concerns those disputes which are predominantly about pluralist issues of social class, status, power and equity, and the second concerns how macro disputes about state sovereignty become encapsulated most acutely in micro spaces in the main cities of the territories involved. Of course, in many cases, it is not such a simple dichotomy. In particular, those cities caught up in sovereignty conflicts also experience the socio-spatial fragmentations of pluralist quarrels, and it is the inter-penetration of these that shape the contingencies of particular situations. Similarly, it will be argued that causal frameworks are not reducible to the neat categories outlined above. For instance, the material impacts on the cultural and political, and is, in turn, influenced by them. In other words, cities are complex intricate arenas, whose social and spatial contours are moulded by multiple inter-connected dynamics, and these need to be deciphered further before consideration of planning's distinctive role in addressing urban conflict.

Given the main character of urban change and division outlined here, how are these features to be understood? The next chapter examines the theories that have dominated discourses about the city from the twentieth century, and their explanatory merit, while the subsequent chapter explores the main conceptualisations of conflict in cities.

Chapter 3

Understanding the Urban

In the 1970s, the energy crisis and subsequent recession accelerated the process of de-industrialisation, as part of a transnational corporate restructuring within a deepening globalisation, all with a profound impact on urban socio-spatiality. By the 1980s, the very survival of the city in the developed market economies appeared to be problematic, as its very raison d'être was being recast in the wake of the substantial shake-out of industrial employment. Moreover, the marked socio-spatial changes seemed to qualify the interpretative relevance of conventional urban theory, which lacked a convincing purchase on that transformative period. Since then, the widening contour of urban studies has seen the increasingly interdisciplinary complexion of the genre. Contextually, there has been the contribution of public policy in addressing the way socially allocated capital was being reshaped, and the implication for the most deprived urban spaces. Political economy has offered insights into the urban impact of changing production regimes and the crisis in Keynesian economic management. The reorganised role of the local state following greater privatisation and centralisation of its former role has been a concern of sociology and politics. Responding to the de-regulation tendencies in development control of land use, urban planning has been impelled to a more pluralist conceptualisation beyond its social democratic roots. But perhaps the subject area which, in examining the new spatial forms derivative of all this change, has engaged the most integrated debate is that of economic and human geography.

To take some examples of standard urban theory to illustrate their limitations, we can start with neoclassical location theory about the competitive operation of the land market. Concentrating on the cost–benefit estimation of optimal location and land-use allocation in particular built environments, with the purpose of identifying the favourable conditions and incentives that magnetise profitable investment (Walker, 1980), most versions accorded great significance to distance. For instance, Christaller's central place theory posited hexagonally shaped market areas, founded on two key concepts: threshold, which was a measure of the prerequisite minimum demand level to sustain a service, and range, which was the furthest distance a customer was prepared to travel to purchase. The empirical practicality of such modelling for maximum economic utility can be queried, as can its emphasis on description rather than explanation (Healey and Ilberry, 1990, p. 23):

.… neoclassical approaches to economic geography can be criticized for seeking explanation at the level of the individual firm, farm, or office, for building abstract models in which real world decisions are treated as additional factors, and for ignoring the historical conditions in which firms are operating.

In the 1970s, a more inductive exercise took hold, in a behavioural perspective which attempted to develop generalised spatial patterns from empirical investigation at the micro-level. Since focus was often on psychological penetration of individual values and motivations, it postulated imperatives besides profit maximisation, including security and satisfaction, and acknowledged the constraints on location decision making, imposed by the range of information and the scope for its application. As such, it strayed beyond a narrow positivism, with a greater potential for including subjective perceptions in the land-use calculus (Pred, 1974). A different perspective came with modernisation theory, a linear and evolutionist formulation, which posited that successful urban development was contingent upon the degree of exposure to, and diffusion of, metropolitan progressive ideas and values (Rostow, 1971). Variations of this theme are Tonnies' (1957) dualistic distinction of gemeinschaft, resonant with traditional rural values, and gesellschaft, typical of modern urban society, and dichotomies in which the city is perceived as an environment at once liberating and isolating, in which informal ascriptive relations, and related solidarities, give way to more contractual ones, linked to achievement, rationality, individualism and mobility. By the same token, such change is seen to risk greater instability and conflict.

Another variation in this urban analysis is found in terms of culture and ecology, tracing itself back to the Chicago School, which was concerned to research how such a large mosaic city, faced with rapid transformation, density, and heterogeneity, could adapt and endure. Leading figures in this team, like Park and Burgess, produced a theory of social ecology, a Darwinian construct of the city as a social organism, virtually subject to natural laws.

In this model, urban space is seen to be shaped by a continual series of territorial manoeuvres, in which those ‘fittest’ social groups survive best in the struggle for best settlement. Burgess elaborated this proposition via his social mapping of concentric urban zones, whereby the inner circle denoted a Central Business District, rippling out to a suburban or satellite town belt. Least attractive was the ‘zone of transition’, bedevilled by disorganisation and cultural impairments. This dynamic of invasion and succession is appreciative of the decaying potential of the older parts of the urban core, a difference with the Alonso model, which takes a more ahistorical and idealised view of centrality and distance. For urban ecologists, then, the central focus was on the dynamic in the built environment, derivative of competitive individuals pursuing their consumer preferences in a largely market environment.

It was the cultural dimension which most engaged another of the Chicago team, Louis Wirth (1957), for whom the urbanised culture of modern society strained to accommodate large numbers of people from mixed social groups in tightly packed spaces, consonant with civility rather than unruly dispute. A derivative of this theoretical strand lay in community studies, in which researchers often immersed themselves in a particular neighbourhood in ethnographical penetration of its specificities. By the 1960s, the pedigree of this approach was challenged by those like Pahl (1968, p. 293), who were convinced that it was social rather than geographical location which really mattered. He disowned as a fruitless exercise ‘any attempt to tie particular patterns of social relationships to specific geographical milieux ….’