The City E-Book

Deborah Stevenson

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Concepts
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 332

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This book is a fresh and engaging analysis of the city as a central concept in contemporary social thought. It probes the contested and negotiated ways in which cities are built, understood, lived and imagined. Taking a thematic approach and drawing on a range of theoretical, methodological and empirical points of reference, it examines such subjects as urban inequality, public space, creative cities, globalization, the night-time economy, suburbia, and memory and emotion.

In The City Deborah Stevenson argues that, as theories and concepts shape what is known about cities and urban life, it is necessary to build conceptual frameworks that engage with the intersections and tensions between urban processes and trends, as well as with the complexities of everyday urban life.

This book’s combination of original insight and critical synthesis will make it an invaluable contribution for an international, interdisciplinary readership of students and scholars in sociology, geography, urban studies and wider social science and the humanities.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Key Concepts series

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Plates

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Theoretical City

Introduction

Conceptualizing the city

Urban sociology rethought

Complexity and the rhythms of everyday life

Theory, method, knowledge

2 Material City

Introduction

Spaces of neoliberalism

On the edges of affluence

Gentrification and displacement

Conclusion

3 Everyday City

Introduction

Public space and its uses

Reimaging and the ‘creative city’

The suburbs and beyond

Conclusion

4 Dark City

Introduction

Spaces of the night-time economy

Surveillance and policing

Marginality and the urban night

Conclusion

5 Emotional City

Introduction

Emotions in place

Memory and urban space

Landscapes of belief

Conclusion

6 Global City

Introduction

Globalization, networks and circuits

Metropolitan modernity and the ‘residual’ city

Localities in the margins

Conclusion

7 Imagined City

Introduction

Themes in the landscape

Immobilizing the spectacle

City visioning for community development

Conclusion

8 Conclusion

References

Index

Key Concepts series

Barbara Adam, Time

Alan Aldridge, Consumption

Alan Aldridge, The Market

Jakob Arnoldi, Risk

Colin Barnes and Geof Mercer, Disability

Darin Barney, The Network Society

Mildred Blaxter, Health 2nd edition

Harriet Bradley, Gender

Harry Brighouse, Justice

Mónica Brito Vieira and David Runciman, Representation

Steve Bruce, Fundamentalism 2nd edition

Joan Busfield, Mental Illness

Margaret Canovan, The People

Alejandro Colás, Empire

Mary Daly, Welfare

Anthony Elliott, Concepts of the Self 2nd edition

Ian Evans and Nicholas Smith, Knowledge

Steve Fenton, Ethnicity 2nd edition

Katrin Flikschuh, Freedom

Michael Freeman, Human Rights 2nd edition

Russell Hardin, Trust

Geoffrey Ingham, Capitalism

Fred Inglis, Culture

Robert H. Jackson, Sovereignty

Jennifer Jackson Preece, Minority Rights

Gill Jones, Youth

Paul Kelly, Liberalism

Anne Mette Kjær, Governance

Ruth Lister, Poverty

Jon Mandle, Global Justice

Anthony Payne and Nicola Phillips, Development

Judith Phillips, Care

Michael Saward, Democracy

Timothy Sinclair, Global Governance

John Scott, Power

Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism 2nd edition

Deborah Stevenson, The City

Steven Peter Vallas, Work

Stuart White, Equality

Copyright © Deborah Stevenson 2013

The right of Deborah Stevenson 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 2013 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, 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: 978-0-7456-4889-7

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4890-3(pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6338-8 (Multi-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6339-5 (Single-user ebook)

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

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.

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For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

Dedicated with love to my father RobertThomas Smythe (1929–2005)

Plates

All photos are by the author unless otherwise credited.

2.1Canary Wharf financial district, London, UK2.2Terminal 3 Beijing Airport, China, designed by Norman Foster2.3Former hospital now apartment complex, Sydney, Australia3.1A street market in Florence, Italy (Source: courtesy of Therese Kenna)3.2Redeveloped inner-city laneways, Melbourne, Australia (Source: Rae Allen, Wikimedia Commons)3.3Suburbia, Sydney, Australia (Source: David Shankbone, Wikimedia Commons)4.1Temple Bar entertainment zone, Dublin, Ireland4.2Nightclub lockout sign, Melbourne, Australia5.1President Obama at the Ground Zero memorial, New York City, USA (Source: The White House, Wikimedia Commons)5.2St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City (Source: Monchelsea, Wikimedia Commons)6.1Oriental Pearl Tower, Shanghai, China (Source: Pyzhou, Wikimedia Commons)6.2Waterfront redevelopment with convention centre and artificial beach in the northern Australian city of Darwin (Source: kenhodge 13, Wikimedia Commons)7.1‘I Amsterdam’ sign, the Netherlands (Source: courtesy of Therese Kenna)7.2Dubai Mall aquarium (Source: courtesy of Therese Kenna)7.3Stratford Westfield sign, London, UK

Acknowledgements

There are many people who provided friendship and support during the writing of this book. At Polity, Emma Longstaff and Jonathan Skerrett, ably assisted by Lauren Mulholland, were enthusiastic at every stage, first encouraging me to prepare the proposal and then assisting to ensure the timely completion of the manuscript. Production Manager Neil de Cort saw the book through to publication, while copy-editor Justin Dyer worked on the manuscript with considerable care and attention to detail. Thanks are also due to the anonymous reviewers of both the proposal and the manuscript for their probing comments and suggestions.

The book was completed while I was on study leave, and I am very grateful to the University of Western Sydney for giving me this valuable time in which to write. I acknowledge the Australian Research Council for funding two Discovery projects, which informed several chapters of the book: The City after Dark: The Governance and Lived Experience of Urban Night-Time Culture (DP0877906, with Stephen Tomsen and David Rowe) and Places in Transition: A Case Study of Cultural Planning in an Australian City (LP0454987, with David Rowe and Kevin Markwell).

Sincere thanks go to my colleagues at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney for providing a welcoming and stimulating work environment, and to Vibha Bhattarai Upadhyay for diligent and engaged research assistance. Melissa Maucort warrants special mention for being a mainstay during my term as Head of the School of Social Sciences. Therese Kenna gave invaluable feedback on an earlier draft of the manuscript and I greatly appreciate her generosity in providing photographs. My thanks also go to: Ien Ang, Lee Artis, Nathaniel Bavinton, Tony Bennett, Lisa Hanlon, Ellen Jordan, Wayne McKenna, Kevin Markwell, Trenton Oldfield and Stephen Tomsen. David Rowe was a constant source of advice and support, as well as a useful photographer and tireless and perceptive co-explorer of the urban. Finally, I thank my family and especially my mother, Nancy, and my sons, Rohan and Cameron, for reality checks and the love that is all too often taken for granted.

Deborah Stevenson

Sydney, 2012

Introduction

City life is now the dominant form of existence for most people on the planet, which means that cities are at the centre of the political and economic processes and social relations that shape and define the contemporary world. Cities are sites of anonymity as well as of the most intimate of lived experience – of contradiction and continuity. While for some the world has entered a ‘golden age of cities’, others argue that the global dominance of the urban is the single biggest threat to social and environmental sustainability at both the micro and the macro levels. In attempting to explain cities, urbanization and urban life, including their rhythms, complexities and consequences, scholars utilize an array of often contradictory theories, concepts and methods. These approaches and frameworks, and the empirical insights they produce, have also variously been used to justify interventions in city building and attempts to manage processes of urban development and shape the lives of urban dwellers. Such interventions, however, and the theories that underpin them, are not value-free. Rather, they are informed, implicitly and explicitly, by particular beliefs about the foundations of knowledge, causality and the nature of the social world. In addition, just as concepts, theories and methods shape academic and professional perspectives on the city, they also influence the character and experience of urbanism.

In order to gain insights into such interrelationships and consequences, and in an effort to appreciate significant urban trends and influences, it is necessary first to probe how the city and urban life have been studied and explained. The starting point for this endeavour is the concept of ‘the city’ itself and some of the contested and negotiated ways in which it has been understood, used and imagined, including the meanings that are attached to it. It is this challenge that informs the concerns of this book.

Cities and urban culture are of interest to scholars and students across a wide range of social science and humanities disciplines, notably sociology, geography, economics and history. Each field has developed a substantial body of knowledge about aspects of the urban, and scholars ask research questions that are informed by the concerns and orientations of their particular discipline. They bring to their analyses the theories, concepts and methodologies of their subject area, and many debates about the city take place within discipline-specific fora, at particular conferences and in academic journals. As a result, conceptualizations of the city are invariably partial and not uncommonly developed in the absence of a robust engagement with the insights of other disciplines. That said, disciplinary and explanatory silos are also as much reflections and, indeed, outcomes of the vastness and complexity of the urban object as they are indicators of intellectual purity and boundary maintenance.

It was partly in response to what is regarded as the limits of disciplinarity that the field of urban studies emerged to facilitate the multidisciplinary (sometimes interdisciplinary) study and discussion of the city. Significantly, urban studies is not a synthetic field, nor does it necessarily transcend the disciplines; rather, it augments them by providing a space for collaboration and exchange. As Beauregard (2010) notes in his useful survey of urban studies, the ‘pull’ of the disciplines in the study of the city is strong and many of the most influential contributions to knowledge, and certainly those that are foundational, continue to be grounded in specific subject areas, especially sociology and geography. In addition, and unlike a field such as cultural studies, urban studies is not defined by an identifiable body of theory or set of methodologies. Its purpose, boundaries and object of analysis thus remain ‘fuzzy’ (Paddison 2001a: x).

Against this backdrop, the current book is sociological in its orientation and aims from this standpoint to address some of the ways in which not only urban sociology but urban studies and the urban disciplines more broadly understand, or contribute to understandings of, the contemporary city. It argues that the most incisive conceptualizations are those that transcend rigid divisions and established dualisms (such as the ‘West and the rest’, the ‘global and the local’, the ‘rural and the urban’) and seek to provide nuanced insights into urban variety and complexity. In commencing this task, the book builds on and engages with significant debates, synthesizes bodies of thought, and draws, when appropriate, on the findings of original research to examine conceptualizations of the city in different national and local contexts as well as different historical and political moments. The book not only reassesses the city and highlights a range of viewpoints, some of which are novel and surprising, but it traces influential concepts and themes in a concise and clearly framed way. It is this combination of synthesis and originality which makes the book suitable for both students and researchers across a range of fields.

The book seeks to draw attention to the significance to cities and urban life of macro processes and systems, including the global movement of ideas, people, goods and practices (and their interconnections), as well as of the personal, the micro and the place-based. The underpinning assumption is that the city is at once conceptual (an idea and the object of theory), material (occupying real space and being formed in response to a range of macro and micro processes) and experienced (lived, sensory and enveloping). Each chapter is self-contained and able to be read in isolation, but important links are made throughout the text between topics and debates, and subtle synthesizing arguments are developed. The book does not present a ‘shopping list’ of urban theories or a history of urban thought. It is neither exhaustive nor all-encompassing. Rather, it is an engaged work that deals with different ‘cuts’ into, or ways of approaching, the concept of ‘the city’. By taking a thematic approach, it thus introduces readers to a range of significant concerns in the production, reproduction and conceptualization of the city.

The opening chapter identifies some of the most influential foundational frameworks in urban studies, as well as key processes that have either shaped the contemporary metropolis or are salient features of urban life. The importance of theory and method is introduced in the chapter, which recognizes that knowledge about the city is significantly constructed through the methods used to research it. In Chapter 2 the urban consequences of industrialization, ‘neoliberalism’ and the circulation of capital are considered and several prominent features of contemporary urban landscapes are discussed, including gentrification and the ‘new geographies’ of wealth and exclusion. Also highlighted are the significant spatial consequences of the current global economic crisis that was triggered by the collapse of the ‘subprime’ mortgage market in the United States. The most visible urban effects of this crisis include the growing tracts of residential desolation and abandonment.

Chapter 3 examines issues of urban homogeneity, complexity and diversity. In particular, the chapter provides insights into such concerns as suburbanization and the use, and increased privatization of, public space. The chapter suggests that a range of factors, including class, race, gender and age, influence people’s presence in public space, and these characteristics are often celebrated as features and evidence of urban diversity and cosmopolitanism; however, they can also be (real and imagined) barriers to public space – both marker and cause of exclusion. The chapter goes on to consider the ways in which creativity, culture and consumption are being mobilized to reshape the metropolis and its uses. The idea of the ‘creative city’ and the economic and symbolic value being placed on attracting the so-called urban ‘creative class’ are significant in this context.

It is the intersections of time and space that are central to the concerns of Chapter 4, which looks at the notion of the city at night. The activities that take place in any city after dark play a significant role in shaping the image and liveability of that city and contribute, both positively and negatively, to urban economies. The chapter delves into the main bodies of academic thought that have been influential in explaining and informing both the development and regulation of what has come to be known as the ‘night-time economy’. The first of these perspectives emphasizes the goal of stimulating night-time urban space, while the second view is concerned with after-dark criminality and disorderly behaviour and so focuses on processes of regulation, surveillance and policing. The chapter investigates these issues and tensions with reference, in particular, to the United Kingdom and Australia.

Beginning with the proposition that the affective is an important element of contemporary urbanism, Chapter 5 explores what it means to understand the city as the location of the flow and expression of passion and emotion. To this end, the chapter provides a framework for explaining the relationship between emotions and the city, acknowledging that this relationship is multifaceted, socially constructed and located and experienced at the level of the body. Monuments and memorials are significant features of the urban landscape, serving as markers of both power and marginalization as well as being prompts for the expression of collective and private emotion. Cities are also the spaces where religious belief is performed and where the architecture of belief (particularly in the form of places of worship) frequently dominates. The practices associated with religion inform uses of, and movements through, urban space, shaping the rhythms and patterns of travel to and from places of religious significance, including churches, mosques and sites of pilgrimage.

Processes of globalization have transformed cities and their study. Every city is now in some way locked into (or out of) significant global circuits of information, capital, people and ideas. The task of Chapter 6 is to consider some of these circuits and their varying and uneven urban consequences. It is in this context that the complementary ideas of the ‘global’ and ‘world’ city gained currency, and the chapter highlights the international flows that have come to define and construct such classifications and associated urban hierarchies. The chapter argues that a significant outcome of globalization and world-global city theses is the ‘othering’ of those cities that are not part of the primary circuits of economics or influence. These are the ‘second cities’, the ‘small cities’ and most cities in the developing world. Indeed, the vast majority of cities are not world or global cities at all. They are, nevertheless, defined in terms of their location vis-à-vis the global, and a consequence of the fixation on global networks, hierarchies and processes has been a countervailing interest in these residual or marginalized cities as well as in the ‘other’ of the global: the local.

Attempts are routinely made to position cities within the various circuits and hierarchies of commerce, tourism and creativity, and often central to these reimaging strategies are major urban development projects focused on former industrial or waterfront sites. Chapter 7 is concerned to probe such urban redevelopment initiatives which operate/come into existence through the circulation of ideas, strategies, people and money. It suggests that city visioning is as much about sameness, universality and predictability as it is about difference and the local. Nevertheless, redevelopment and reimaging projects are located within very specific cities and urban precincts and thus are interpreted and experienced in the context of these spaces. They also function as the zones or territories that connect a city to broader (national, regional, global) financial and other processes and insert it into the itineraries of tourists. Not only are significant global circuits the impetus for building and reshaping urban space, but they are also framing new forms of urban governance, something which many have described in terms of the reassertion of the local. Such processes and initiatives, although global in their scope and influence, have quite varied local consequences that highlight considerable differences among cities. For many cities of the ‘third world’ or ‘global South’, for instance, city building is occurring within a ‘developmentalist’ framework that is being fostered by influential supra-state bodies, such as the World Bank and the agencies of the United Nations.

The concluding chapter brings together the themes and arguments of the book. It closes with a consideration of some emerging challenges in urban studies and urban development, and the continuing utility and sustainability of the concept of the ‘city’. In particular, the chapter reiterates the importance of understanding contemporary cities as being formed at the intersection of the real, the imagined and the experienced.

1

Theoretical City

Concepts and Frameworks

What is the city? How did it come into existence? What processes does it further; what functions does it perform; what purposes does it fulfil? No single definition will apply to all its manifestations and no single description will cover all its transformations, from the embryonic social nucleus to the complex forms of its maturity and the corporeal disintegration of its old age.

Mumford 1989/1961: 3

Introduction

The question ‘what is the city?’ is one that has troubled scholars from a range of disciplines from the beginning of the academic study of society. Furthermore, as Mumford suggests in the passage above, it is simply not possible to see or capture the complexity of the city in a single view or to explain it with reference to an all-encompassing theory or set of concepts. In also considering how theories and concepts shape what it is possible to know about cities and urbanism, a recurring theme within urban studies is the continued usefulness of the idea of the city for explaining contemporary urban environments that are sprawling spatial conglomerations cut through with diversity in all its guises and formed through meta structures, processes and trends. Cities are also comprised of micro sites of formal and informal processes of governance and experience. Some scholars have rejected the idea of the city altogether, arguing that concepts including ‘urban’, ‘postmetropolis’, ‘multi-centred metropolitan region’, ‘city-region’ and ‘megopolis’ have more explanatory force and more accurately capture the social and spatial complexity of ‘the city’. And yet the idea of ‘the city’ lingers, as do the associated assumptions of its unity and capacity to be known.

The aim of this chapter is to introduce some of the most influential perspectives in the study of the city and from this consideration to point to the need to understand cities as being simultaneously material and conceptual. It does this first by tracing key foundational ideas, including those of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology and the Marxism of Manuel Castells, David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre. The chapter also highlights the importance of methodology to the study of the city. What is evident from the discussion of this chapter is that until very recently and irrespective of theoretical orientation, urban studies has attempted to explain the city and urban life with reference to overarching and universal concepts and assumptions. Cities were seen as limited and knowable, and as producing cultures and ways of life that were predictable. It is now accepted, however, that such totalizing explanations are unsustainable. Not only are cities diverse and unpredictable, but so too are the cultures that form within urban space. Explanations of urban processes must take account of the networks and circuits that link different cities as well as different spaces within the same city. They must also be open to explanations forged at the micro level of the lived and the everyday, and so a key task of this chapter is to point to approaches that make this possible.

Conceptualizing the city

Fundamental to the task of building social science knowledge about cities and urban life is the compilation (and utilization) of a theoretical language – a toolkit of concepts and categories which provides the frames, themes and metaphors required to reveal and explain urban trends and complexity. Concepts (and the urban processes and phenomena they interrogate and construct) are contested, interlocking and located. They are also incomplete, often ideological and deeply political. Concepts draw attention to the particular and provide entry points into a subject matter. If, however, they are engaged uncritically, in isolation, or as part of an oppositional binary, they can constrain and close off alternative ways of seeing and understanding. The city is itself a concept at the same time as being understood with reference to concepts, which means there is no one definitive set of explanations and no one definitive object that is ‘the city’. Cities are the hard physical spaces of built infrastructure, architecture and planning as well as the soft spaces of representation, imagination and everyday life – simultaneously material, imagined and lived (Soja 1996). They are constructed through discourse, theory and use as well as at the interface of nature and culture.

The study of the city has a long history in sociology. Indeed, the development of the discipline is entwined with the growth of the modern industrial city, and many foundational sociologists, including Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim and Georg Simmel, all in some way engaged with the problem/issue of the city. For Simmel, the city – or ‘metropolis’, as he called it – was ‘not a spatial entity with sociological consequences, but a sociological entity that is formed spatially’ (Frisby 2007: 248). Weber (1958/1921) also analysed the city as a distinct form of social organization, framing it in terms of an ‘ideal-type’ (which made possible comparisons between cities/forms of urbanism) and emphasizing the role of economic activity, religious and legal institutions and political organization in cities and urban life. Importantly, for Weber, physical size was not a determinant of city status, at least not sociologically; rather, what mattered, in his view, were social institutions and the existence of particular forms of association.

During the twentieth century a sub-discipline of sociology emerged that was specifically concerned with the study of the city (see Savage and Warde 1993). Central considerations for urban sociologists include probing the relationship between the city and society, understanding the nature of urbanism, and examining the role of the state in processes of urban development and the allocation of urban resources. Urban sociologists have also examined the part played by the city in producing or supporting structures of social inequality, most notably those associated with class, gender, race and ethnicity, while some have pondered the nature and indeed very existence of a specific urban object of study. Urban sociology is anything but a unified field of inquiry. Rather, urban sociologists utilize, and engage with, a range of oft-competing theoretical and methodological approaches, many of which come from outside the discipline as part of the broader interdisciplinary field of urban studies. And with this variety has come the development of a raft of concepts and ways of seeing and explaining cities and urban society. For instance, some conceptualize the city as being a system comprised of interdependent networks and components, while others argue that the forces of capitalism have created cities that are sites of inequality and function to protect capitalism, private property and the accumulation of wealth – to highlight but two broad approaches.

The concern of many of the early urban sociologists was to develop a conceptual framework that was capable of explaining all cities and all urban processes, irrespective of their different histories, cultures and geographies. This goal was the urban sociological equivalent of seeking to formulate a ‘theory of everything’. Of course, the focus of urban sociology was very much not only on ‘Western’ cities, but specifically those of the global North, and, as with sociology more generally, the concepts and theories developed were embedded in the intellectual context of this ‘global metropole’ (Connell 2010: vii). Most influential initially was the Chicago School of Urban Sociology, which was at its most active between 1915 and 1945, but dominated urban thinking until all but the last few decades of the twentieth century. The Chicago School sociologists, who used their home city as their ‘laboratory’, had two main concerns: to trace the patterns and processes of urbanization, including identifying their core characteristics, and to ascertain a uniform urban culture or ‘way of life’ and the social and spatial factors that produced it (Wirth 1995). And a coherent conceptualization of the city was pivotal. For instance, Louis Wirth (1995: 80), who was one of the most influential members of the Chicago School, explains that ‘[i]t is only insofar as the sociologist has a clear conceptualization of the city as a social entity and a workable theory of urbanism that he can hope to develop a unified body of reliable knowledge. … ’

The city, for the Chicago School, was an ecological system or unity that adapted systematically and predictably in response to changes in population, demography and the physical environment. This was a ‘characterization of the urban subject’ which, according to Sharon Zukin (1980: 576), ‘laid the basis for certain commonly accepted conceptualizations’ of the city and urban life. It had a number of key dimensions. First, the Chicago School believed that, as with biological or ecological entities, urbanization and urban change followed predetermined patterns which were observable and, thus, predictable. Second, they regarded urbanization and a range of associated technological, social and cultural processes as being inextricably linked to modernization. Third, Chicago School accounts of the ‘subjective factors’ which shape urban morphology, including explanations of neighbourhood concentrations of particular ethnic groups, focused either on the personal preferences of residents, such as those associated with taste and social status, or on ‘rationality or efficiency’, whereby urban ‘space seemed to reflect the characteristics of its inhabitants’ (Zukin 1980: 576). Fourth, according to the sociologists of the Chicago School, the urban environment caused or amplified negative individual and social circumstances, such as crime and deviance. Finally, the role of the state was never questioned in Chicago School conceptualizations of cities, urbanization and urbanism, and if it was considered at all, it was assumed not to play any role beyond functioning to support urban and social ‘needs’.

According to Wirth (1995), a city can be defined with reference to three interconnected variables: size, density and heterogeneity. The more of each of these variables a city has, the more urban that city is, while a change in any one, such as a decrease in population density, will lead to a change in the urban character of the city. In this respect, the city and urbanism are defined against their ‘other’ – the rural and rural life – creating a dualism that continues to permeate much urban thought (Stevenson 2003). The Chicago School also held the view that empirical research is required in order really to know the city and urban culture. As a result, not only did the Chicago School establish the conceptual parameters of a sociological understanding of the city that was hegemonic for most of the twentieth century, but they also developed a methodological approach to urban research that is still influential. Specifically, and as discussed further below, the Chicago School pioneered applied urban research that involved (often in combination) participant observation and the use of official and other statistics to map the social profiles of cities and neighbourhoods.

It was not until the 1970s that the supremacy of the urban ecology perspective of the Chicago School was successfully challenged. This challenge came first from a Weberian-informed urban sociology concerned with urban managerialism and housing classes (Rex and Moore 1967), and then most effectively from the Marxist perspectives that emerged in the wake of the urban crises of the mid- to late 1960s. What was crucial to Marxists was that Chicago School-inspired urban sociology had not only failed to predict the urban unrest, but that it also lacked the conceptual tools needed to explain it. The result was an intellectual crisis that went to the core of the sub-discipline. As Zukin (1980: 577) puts it, ‘[A] basic failure of conceptualization had led to almost total intellectual paralysis.’ The critical approaches that developed in the explanatory vacuum created by the failure of urban ecology came initially to be known as the ‘new urban sociology’.

Urban sociology rethought

The new urban sociology had a number of core concerns which underpinned the conceptualization of cities and urban life. In particular, researchers saw the city in terms of conflict rather than consensus, and highlighted the significance of capitalist accumulation and class struggle to the processes of urban development and resource allocation. A strand of the new urban sociology emphasized the role of social relations, including gender, class and race, in shaping urban form. Others regarded cultural meaning, imagination and the symbolic as important aspects of the development and experience of urban space. The significance of macro, global processes operating in combination with those of the national and the local was also highlighted, as was the role played by all levels of the state in managing urban space and urban populations to support capitalism. Finally, not only did the new urban sociology challenge the conceptual basis of the sub-discipline, but it also questioned its very object of analysis – the nature and existence of a set of social processes that were specifically urban rather than features more broadly of the social structure. In addition, although labelled ‘sociology’, this new field quickly emerged as interdisciplinary, with key insights coming from disciplines other than sociology, in particular geography. Considered together, these approaches formed a broadly ‘sociospatial model’ of explanation (Gottdiener and Hutchison 2006: 368) that stressed the importance of structures and connections. What was significant was the linking of urbanization to larger processes of industrial capitalism, effectively assigning urban ecology to the history of sociological thought.

In her tracing of the intellectual terrain of the new urban sociology, Zukin (1980: 582) suggests that two conceptualizations of the urban subject/object came to dominate the field: one that regarded the urban as ‘the localization of social forces’ and another that viewed it as ‘the conduit of capital and control’. Zukin goes on to explain that both conceptualizations ‘inspired a particular “wing” of the new urban sociology’ that roughly divided along national lines. On the one hand were those French Marxists who were interested in the city as localization and to this end examined ‘questions of how space is used in the process of social reproduction’ – concerns such as social segregation and the inequitable distribution of urban resources were important to the French. American urban studies, on the other hand, was more interested in examining ‘cities as conduits of capital investment and labor discipline’ (Zukin 1980: 582). Key concerns for these urbanists included ‘the growth and decline of particular urban areas, locational shift of economic enterprises and population, and the role of construction and real estate in the economy’ (Zukin 1980: 582).

One of the most influential theorists in the French new urban sociology tradition was the Althusserian Marxist Manuel Castells, who, in examining the social movements and urban unrest of the late 1960s, set out to develop a systematic understanding of the urban processes of capitalism. In particular, Castells (1972) was concerned to assert the scientific basis of urban sociology and to identify the function of capitalism that was specific to the city and, therefore, the object of study of urban sociology. He concluded that it was consumption or, more accurately, ‘collective consumption’ that was functionally unique to the city and thus should be the object/subject of the sub-discipline. By collective consumption, Castells (1972: 75) meant services such as health, education, transport and town planning, the ‘organization and management’ of which ‘cannot be other than collective given the nature and size of the problems’. Castells went on to argue that the provision (or lack) of collective services and resources was frequently a source of tension and could under certain circumstances lead to urban protest and unrest. He also argued that at the core of this unrest was the failure of the state to manage effectively both the distribution of urban resources and any resulting crises. In other words, for Castells the urban crisis was in effect one of collective consumption and the failure of urban governance/management. From this conceptualization, he went on to suggest that urban struggles over collective consumption had the potential to connect with working-class movements in ways that could result in the overthrow of capitalism. ‘The city’ for the Castells of The Urban Question, therefore, was the city of industrial capitalism and the capitalist state, ‘urbanism’ was the culture of this city, and ‘urbanization … the integration of all remote regions into the capitalist world system’ (Zukin 1980: 583).

Contrasting with the structural Marxism of Castells are the views of urban geographer David Harvey (1973, 1982), who is one of the most high-profile theorists in the American Marxist tradition of urban studies. Where Castells saw urban crises in terms of consumption, Harvey explained them in terms of a crisis of capital accumulation. In this, he was greatly influenced by Henri Lefebvre’s (2003a/1970) argument that the entwined processes of urbanization and advanced capitalism have created a secondary circuit of capital – real estate investment – that is emerging to be more influential than the primary industrial circuit of capital. According to Harvey, over-investment in the manufacturing sector of the economy (the ‘primary circuit’ of capital) results in falling rates of profits and leads to the switching of investment capital from the primary to the built or second circuit of capital. For Harvey, it is these crises of accumulation that drive urban change and urbanization under capitalism. Where Harvey regarded this process as a ‘cyclical’ one ‘of expansion and contraction synchronized with the pattern of capitalist growth and crisis’ (Kipfer et al. 2008a: 7), Lefebvre (2003a/1970: 1) proposed that society was becoming ‘completely urbanized’ and proffered the idea of an ‘urban revolution’ and the possibility that urbanization was now the context for industrial capitalism: ‘[B]y “urban revolution” I refer to the transformations that affect contemporary society, ranging from the period when questions of growth and industrialization predominate (models, plans, programs) to the period when the urban problematic becomes predominant, when the search for solutions and modalities unique to urban society are foremost’ (Lefebvre 2003a/1970: 5).

Lefebvre saw the survival of capitalism as being entwined with the processes of urbanization. Stefan Kipfer et al. (2008b: 290) point out that ‘Lefebvre’s hypothesis about complete urbanization was meant to apply to the world as a whole. The urban as a level of social reality is thus subject to analysis at multiple scales: the scale of metropolitan regions, national urban systems, and transnational, potentially global urban networks and strategies.’ Although offering different sets of explanations, Marxist urban sociologists and geographers, nevertheless, shared a conceptualization of the city in terms of capitalist forces and generalizable principles. Thus, no matter the framework, the rhythms of cities, city building and capitalist accumulation are seen as entwined.

The critical approach of the new urban sociology continues to be influential in urban studies, and the key insights that were developed initially in response to the urban crises of the 1960s and then to the subsequent epistemological and ideological crises of the sub-discipline have remained instructive. They have again proved important as researchers seek to explain the urban dimensions of both the global financial crisis that commenced in the United States in 2007–8 and, more recently, the riots that occurred in many English cities in August 2011. Castells has moved away from his early work on the city, but it may well be timely to reflect on whether his political economy could contribute to understandings of such contemporary urban crises. In recent years an increasing number of urban researchers have come to be interested not just in the ‘big’ processes of urbanization, industrialization, urban protest and structural inequality but also in the everyday, lived aspects of cities, with several sophisticated analyses seeking to understand the city at both its macro and micro levels. To this end, many have looked to disciplines including, for instance, cultural studies for the theoretical tools to examine the city as a ‘signifying object’ and to understand the structures of meaning that underpin individual and collective relationships with, and within, cities and urban space (Stevenson 2003). Indeed, following cultural theorists such as Michel de Certeau (1988/1980), the necessity to understand the city as it is lived and imagined has become increasingly obvious. De Certeau contrasts the rational ‘concept city’ of the planner, architect and urban bureaucrat with the lived (and often subversive) city of everyday life and direct experience. He is interested, in particular, in the claiming and interpreting of cityspace that occurs through the act of walking or moving through space – what he terms the ‘tactics of everyday life’.