Urban Studies

A Canadian Perspective

N. H. Lithwick, Gilles Paquet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351685979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

This study, first published in 1968, was one of the first books on Canada's urban development, bringing together the viewpoints of professionals who had studied various aspects of city growth – economic, social, geographic, political. The book demonstrates the effectiveness and potential of the cross-disciplinary approach and will prove useful to all those interested in the future of our cities.

Introduction

1 Prolegomena to Urban Analysis

N. H. Lithwick
Gilles Paquet

The Rise of Urbanology

The trickle of interest in the city that began in the inter-war period now has turned into a flood. All around us there has been growing concern over the problems of the structure of cities, their functioning and their evolution, and in the “inter-connectedness of city shape, city movement and city values”.¹ Entire issues of the most widely circulated American magazines have been devoted to a panoramic view of the scope and the scale of the problems created by urbanization.² Thus, the public at large has been made aware of them. In Canada, the climax of concern was reached at the Federal-Provincial Conference on housing and urban development in Ottawa the week of December 11, 1967.

This interest has been deepened by the conviction of scholars that urban issues will prove to be the most important problem of the second half of the twentieth century.³ Revelations such as the fact that as many persons were urbanized in Quebec in the 1940’s as in the entire preceding century, or that there were as many families with income below $3,000 in Montreal and Toronto as in the whole of the Maritime provinces have further awakened the Canadian public to the urban reality.

The field of urban analysis has been given a tremendous impetus by these developments. Many research projects have been launched and entire research institutes brought into being.⁴ Partly because of the very recent emergence of academic interest and, as we shall show, partly because of some inherent difficulties in the analysis of complex systems such as cities, we have not progressed much beyond superficial pronouncements about the urban crisis facing our nation of cities.⁵ Nevertheless, the newly acquired academic acceptability of urban analysis and the institutionalization of research in this field permit us to conclude that the birth of urbanology has taken place.⁶

Historical Antecedents
and Current Analysis

The recency of these developments has led many urban scholars to feel that they were entering an entirely new field. But urban research has a very long history with very impressive credentials dating back to ancient Egypt, to the Greek polis and Roman civitas, through Pirenne’s medieval cities, Renaissance Italy’s cities and the cities of the industrialized world.⁷ As a result we have a substantial stock of descriptive material, including comments, critiques and comparisons of diverse urban phenomena.

Even the antecedent for urban analysis as a discipline sui generis goes back at least fifty years. Some of this work developed within the boundaries of the traditional disciplines. For example, in sociology and ecology there was the work of Park and Burgess⁸ which found its Canadian interpretation at McGill and Laval Universities.⁹ Then there was the pioneering work of Christaller and Lösch in economic geography.¹⁰ In addition, there were several attempts to deal with the urban problems at a cross-disciplinary level, including possibly the work of Bowley and the English authors of the demographic-socio-economic civic surveys.¹¹

An important and venerable attitude toward the city has been to visualize it as a global society in the small, because it has “the advantage of mirroring the complexities of society within a frame that respect(ed)s the human scale”.¹² Man has been led by this attitude to use the city as a laboratory in which to conduct his social experimentation. Thus, it has been “in terms of the city” that “Utopias from Plato to Bellamy have been visualized”.¹³ The consequences of this attitude have been mixed. On the one hand, the need for public policy at the urban level has long been appreciated.¹⁴ On the other, however, the need for a comprehensive understanding of the reality has not been recognized and anything with sufficient aesthetic or fiscal appeal has sometimes been palmed off as urban policy.

Thus, despite long-standing interest in and concern for the city, it has remained a particularly elusive entity. The urban landscape has been examined but the urban phenomenon is still very poorly understood. And while the complexity of the problem is acknowledged in scores of books, nowhere does one find a strategy for the analysis of the urban unit in all its complexity.

This book then is an attempt to find avenues that might lead us toward a global concept of the city.

An Approach to Global Analysis

If, despite the need for a global approach to the urban unit, research has remained partial in scope, the reasons must be clearly understood. All too often research workers are accused of having too narrow a focus on the problem, or their disciplines are viewed as being too compartmentalized to permit cross-disciplinary dialogue. The real difficulties lie on a more basic plane, namely the weakness of the conceptual apparatus for dealing with these complex problem areas or meta-problems.¹⁵

In a number of ways the problems facing anthropology are analogous to those facing the urbanologist. In both cases the globality of the socio-economic-cultural system is fundamental. Anthropologists have responded to this problem by introducing the concept of “total social phenomenon” which captures the globality factor at the theoretical level.

Dans ces phénomènes sociaux ‘totaux’, comme nous nous proposons de les appeler, s’expriment à la fois et d’un coup toutes sortes d’institutions: religieuses, juridiques et morales – et celles-ci politiques et familiales en même temps; économiques – et celles-ci supposent des formes particulières de la production et de la consommation, ou plutôt de la prestation et de la distribution; sans compter les phénomènes esthétiques auxquels aboutissent ces faits et les phénomènes morphologiques que manifestent ces institutions.¹⁶

In these total social phenomena, as we intend to call them, all sorts of institutions are expressed simultaneously: religious, judicial and ethical – pertaining both to the family and the body politic; economic – involving particular forms of production and consumption, or rather of collection and distribution; without mentioning the aesthetic phenomena which characterizes these artifacts, and the morphological phenomena through which these institutions are manifested. (our translation)

One could not easily capture the complexity of the urban phenomenon more accurately. It may be possible to eliminate the conceptual bottleneck in urban research by drawing on the experience of anthropologists. However, we cannot lean too heavily on them since Mauss himself, after examining superficially these “total social phenomena”, was unable to produce effective tools with which to analyze them.

In part the failure to move beyond the descriptive elegance of total phenomena to its effective analysis is due to the highly aggregative nature of the concept and the global units with which it is concerned. Since there is a dearth of tools even for simple aggregation problems, the fact that a breakthrough has not been made should not surprise us.

By decomposing the aggregative unit into three stages it is possible to fully comprehend the degree of complexity involved. Our particular mode of decomposition is of some interest since at several stages significant advances in aggregation have been made.

The first stage is the aggregation within disciplines, which involves the moving from micro units (individual elements) to macro units (collective elements). This area remains a source of our greatest problems. Even in economics the difficulty has not been overcome.

The second stage involves the integration of various disciplines. So much has been said against cross-disciplinary work that pinning expectations on it might seem naïve in the extreme. However, the independent convergence of many disciplines on the use of systems analysis and its usefulness in examining problems of a cross-disciplinary nature offer real possibilities for important insights into global-type problems. One can cite, for example, the universality of the power formula known as the Pareto law in economics and as the Zipf law in linguistics, and which led to all sorts of rank-size rules. The application of the principle of allometry in the examination of the relative growth of urban and rural components of the whole system is another example.¹⁷

At both stages, however, meaningful analysis has been retarded by the persistence of superficial classification schemes. The role of this intellectual bottleneck can best be seen by reviewing the zoology books of the eighteenth century. Zoologists of the day used to classify animals by the number of legs or by similar “apparent” criteria. This led experts who were at the mercy of this classification scheme to regard a whale as a fish and a bat as a bird.¹⁸ The shift of attention to more fundamental structural features rapidly led to superior classification schemes in the sense that much more of reality could now be understood. In economics, an analogous shift to more useful classification schemes emerged in the work of John Maynard Keynes. Hicks has stressed that the real breakthrough into aggregative analysis resulted from the way in which Keynes decided to aggregate markets into two classes according to their fundamental mode of operation – price-adjusting and quantity-adjusting.¹⁹

Our contention is that the way to approach globality, which requires an aggregation stage and an integration stage, is to shift the discussion from the level of superficial analogies to basic functional homologies between the many dimensions of the urban phenomenon.

An examination of the components of that phenomenon by a process which would parallel the disassembling of a drum by a child in an attempt to understand the source of the noise would not be particularly useful. Global (total) phenomena can be tackled only at the multi-dimensional level. Any attempt to reconstruct it from partial ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Prolegomena to Urban Analysis
• Part One Toward a Cross-disciplinary Approach
• 2 Urban Growth and Regional Contagion
• 3 Urban Growth and the Concept of Functional Region
• 4 Urban Land Use: An Economic-Geographic Concept
• Part Two: Urban Analysis: Some Case Studies
• 5 The Economics of Urban Land Use
• 6 The Integration of Metropolitan Federations: the Interaction of Political Theory and Urban Phenomena
• 7 Social Consequences of Urbanization
• Part Three Public Policy for City and Region
• 8 The Scope of Urban Policy
• 9 Housing Policy and Urban Renewal
• 10 The Concept of Regional Government and a Proposal for Ontario
• 11 Approaching the Urban Unit: Some Conclusions and a Beginning
• Bibliography
• Index