Urban Geography in America, 1950-2000

Paradigms and Personalities

Brian J.L Berry, James Wheeler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134728657
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Urban Geography in America offers a comprehensive historiography of this major field. Compiling the best essays from the flagship journal Urban Geography, it shows the evolution of the field from the 1950s to 2000, as it shifted from data-driven social science modeling in the 1960s to the more critical perspectives of the 1970s to postmodernism in the 1980s to feminism and globalization in the 1990s. It covers all the major trends and figures, and features some of the most important names in the field. Ultimately, this will be a necessary reference for all scholars in the field and all graduate students taking introductory courses and preparing for their comprehensive exams.

IV

Urban Geography in the 1980s

Chapter 15

Introduction—The Sea Change of the 1980s

Urban Geography As If People and Places Matter

Paul L. Knox¹

Abstract

The literature in urban geography grew rapidly in the 1980s, with a general shift of academic interest toward cities and urbanization that was prompted by a global economy that was increasingly articulated through networks of cities, and by an awareness that the world’s population was rapidly becoming increasingly urbanized. The literature also grew more diverse as researchers took on the economic, social, cultural, and political changes that were occurring as a result of new spatial divisions of labor and the “new economy.” Within this expanded literature, and within the social science literature generally, the theoretical roles of space and place were strongly reasserted. [Key words: urban geography, sociospatial dialectic, built environment, structuration, cultural geography.]

Looking back now at scholarship in urban geography during the 1980s, one can see the elements—somewhat disparate at the time—of what was to become a more catholic subdiscipline. During the 1980s, the sense of competition among a few rival approaches (Wheeler, 2002) was eclipsed by a breadth of scholarship in which urban geographers have subsequently been able, as Ron Johnston (1984) put it, found ways to accommodate not only the general (things that are universally applicable), but also the unique (things that are distinctive, but whose distinctiveness can be accounted for by a particular combination of general processes and individual responses) and the singular (things that are interesting and remarkable but about which no general statements can be made). The 1980s were marked by a great ferment in human geography in general, a ferment that was paralleled in other social sciences and intensified by an unprecedented degree of intellectual trafficking, both between human geography and other social sciences, and between Anglo-American and continental European scholarship.

Whereas the 1970s saw the dominance of the spatial analytical tradition in urban geography challenged by the emergence of behavioral, humanistic, phenomenological, and historical materialist approaches, the 1980s forced many urban geographers to consider afresh both the nature of their subject matter and their theoretical and methodological approaches to it. All of us were grappling with the empirical consequences and theoretical implications of a sea change in economic, political, and cultural life in the world’s leading economies. The pivotal point had been the “system shock” to the international economy that had occurred in the mid-1970s. The Eurodollar market, swollen by the U.S. government’s deficit budgeting and by the huge reserves of U.S. dollars resulting from the quadrupling of crude oil prices in the wake of an OPEC embargo, quickly evolved into a new, sophisticated system of international finance, with new patterns of investment and disinvestment, contributing to new and modified geographies at every scale. Toward the end of the decade, amid a phase of deindustrialization, Thatcherism and Reaganomics propagated a climate of privatization based on the idea that welfare states not only had generated unreasonably high levels of taxation, budget deficits, disincentives to work and save, and a bloated class of unproductive workers, but also that they fostered “soft” attitudes toward “problem” groups in society: disadvantaged households and individuals (whose numbers were increasing as a result of the new spatial divisions of labor associated with the onset of globalization). The U.S. president’s Commission for a National Agenda for the Eighties accepted the inevitability of a “nearly permanent” underclass, but nevertheless there was a marked shift away from collective consumption and Keynesian economic management toward deregulated capital accumulation. New social formations were emerging as part of post-industrial societies in most OECD countries. New urban forms were beginning to emerge in response to socioeconomic polarization and to the recentralization of high-order producer services. Meanwhile, the transnational material culture associated with the new economy was accelerating the attenuation of the meaning of place in people’s lives.

So, just as urban geographers had developed neat models of the sociospatial structure of “the city”, so cities and urban society began to change in unexpected and unpredictable ways. Generalizations drawn from factorial ecologies and the modeling of consumer behavior in residential markets suddenly seemed much less compelling to many of us—a “normal science” that seemed abstracted from contemporary patterns and processes. Similarly, mainstream cultural geography in the United States seemed all but irrelevant to the cultural vitality and hybridity of cities: its focus on the rural and the archaic seemed hopelessly esoteric, while its super-organicism abstracted culture from the dynamics of the contemporary political economy and the material conditions of urban society (Duncan, 1980). Thus the turn to broader social scientific frameworks and, more specifically, to contemporary adaptations and interpretations of Marxian and Weberian theory. Urban geographers began to read the influential work of French structuralists and post-structuralists such as Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Topics that had hitherto been approached in empirical, descriptive terms now came into question in terms of their social construction, identity, and contestation. Questions of race and ethnicity, for example, traditionally examined in terms of segregation indexes and historical patterns of migration and residential mobility, were now excavated in terms of cultural hegemony and the interactions between political culture and economic circumstance (Jackson, 1987, 1989; Anderson, 1988; Smith, 1989). Questions of gender were approached in terms of the lived relations of women’s lives as part of processes of production and reproduction under capitalism (Hayden, 1980; McDowell, 1983; Brownill, 1984; Little et al., 1988; Mackenzie, 1988). Meanwhile, with the emergence of new social formations and new urban form, some new topics were identified. Among them were homelessness (Mair, 1986; Dear and Wolch, 1987), gentrification (Smith, 1982, 1987; Rose, 1984), and the emergence of gay and lesbian spaces in cities (Castells, 1983; Lauria and Knopp, 1985; Knopp, 1987).

David Harvey’s interrogations of the political economy of urbanization (1982, 1989a) were broadly influential in setting out a Marxian interpretation of the relations between capital, class, and the built environment. Harvey’s writing, grounded in historical materialism, did not lend itself easily to the sociocultural dynamics of cities that were beginning to interest many young geographers. Nevertheless, Harvey recognized the importance of this dimension of contemporary urbanization in The Condition of Postmodernity (1989b). Harvey’s work opened windows for many geographers on to the broader landscape of ideas encompassed by structuralist theory. Equally, his books did a great deal toward gaining attention and respect for human geography among the practitioners of other social science disciplines, but it was Ed Soja (1980, 1989) who reasserted most forcefully the importance of space and place in social theory. Soja put space and place in a central role in constituting, constraining, and mediating social relations. His notion of a sociospatial dialectic—a continuous two-way process in which people create and modify urban spaces while they are conditioned in various ways by the spaces in which they live and work—has proven central to understanding the processes of contemporary urbanization. It provides a framework for an urban geography as if people and places matter.

Important contributions to theorizing the social construction of urban spaces and places were made by several geographers in addition to Harvey and Soja (for example: Ley, 1983; Thrift, 1985; Sack, 1988), but it was Anthony Giddens, a sociologist, who developed what is arguably the most robust framework for understanding the operation of the sociospatial dialectic (Giddens, 1981, 1984). Giddens’ structuration theory, centering around processes of time-space routinization and time-space distanciation, led us to see urban places as continuously “becoming” (Pred, 1984, 1985). Structuration theory also helped resolve what for me had been the competing attractions of Marxian and Weberian approaches, recognizing the importance of knowledgeable actors, or agents, and of institutional arrangements (which both enable and constrain action) in the production and reproduction of specific social contexts, or structures (Cullen and Knox, 1981; Knox and Cullen, 1981a, 1981b, 1982).

Moving as I did in the early 1980s from a small department of geography in the United Kingdom (where I had pursued research in regional economic geography, medical geography, and rural geography as well as urban geography) to a department of urban affairs and planning in one of the leading colleges of architecture in the United States prompted me to focus or at least to try to focus my teaching in urban social geography (Knox, 1982) and my research on the social production of the built environment (Knox, 1984, 1987). In this context I found Michael Ball’s work on the structures of building provision (Ball, 1986) to be particularly helpful. Ball drew attention to the social relations, always specific to time and place, among key actors landowners, investors, financiers, developers, builders, design professionals—and the regulatory institutions of government, the professions, business organizations, and organized labor. The potential of this framework has not (yet) been realized, largely, perhaps, because of the confidentiality surrounding property and construction deals, but also because of the sheer complexity of business and professional relations surrounding the production of the built environment.

In contrast, the emergence of a new cultural geography has generated a rich vein of scholarship with important implications for urban studies. Strongly influenced by French critical social theorists especially Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre—two of the most eminent social philosophers of the late 20th century, who recognized space and spatial practices as central to explanations of the dynamics of contemporary society—British geographers forged a new cultural geography that drew on both North American humanistic approaches and British approaches to social geography. This new cultural geography, with its focus on place, consumption, and cultural politics, emerged in parallel with the “cultural turn” associated with postmodernity. Theorizing the slippery concept of postmodernity gave rise to some arcane, involuted, and self-referential writing (in the same way that Marxian social theory had seemed to turn in on itself in the late 1970s and early 1980s) that no doubt earned the new cultural geography a bad name in certain quarters. Meanwhile, the mainstream of the new cultural geography, represented by Dennis Cosgrove, Stephen Daniels, James Duncan, and Peter Jackson, developed around landscapes and their meanings (Cosgrove, 1984; Cosgrove and Jackson, 1987; Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988; Duncan and Duncan, 1988; Jackson, 1989). As a result, the built environment became a subject of much greater potential interest. Before the new cultural geography, urban landscape analysis tended to be, figuratively, one-dimensional, emphasizing the development of physical form— morphogenesis—at the expense of the lived social relations of spatial practices and cultural politics. But, seen in this broader context, urban landscapes become palimpsests of meaning. This encourages us to understand the built environment through peoples’ ways of seeing and, in particular, to interpret the symbolic aspects of built landscapes and to analyze the social contestation of built space among various socioeconomic, ethnic, and lifestyle groups.

By the end of the 1980s, urban geography seemed to be thriving. With the world’s population becoming increasingly urbanized, and a global economy increasingly articulated through networks of cities, there was a general shift of academic interest toward cities and urbanization. An immense literature had accrued through the 1980s. In addition to the work briefly described above, there were important additions to the literature in the spatial analytical tradition (see, for example, Cadwallader, 1985) and in the behavioral and humanistic approaches that had emerged in the 1970s (e.g., Eyles, 1981; Tuan, 1986, 1989). Membership in both the AAG Urban Geography Specialty Group and the IBG Urban Geography Study Group were at all-time highs, and the contributions of urban geography were increasingly recognized both within human geography and more broadly within the social sciences.

References

Anderson, K. J., 1988, Cultural hegemony and the race definition process in Chinatown, Vancouver, 1890–1980. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 6, 127–149.

Ball, M., 1986, The built environment and the urban question. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 4, 447–464.

Brownill, S., 1984, From Critique to intervention: Socialist feminist perspectives on urbanization. Antipode, Vol. 16, 21–34.

Cadwallader, M., 1985, Analytical Urban Geography. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Castells, M., 1983, The City and the Grassroots. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Cosgrove, D., 1984, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. London, UK: Croom Helm.

Cosgrove, D. and Daniels, S., 1988, The Iconography of Landscape. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Cosgrove, D. and Jackson, P., 1987, New directions in cultural geography. Area, Vol. 19, 95–101.

Cullen, J. D. and Knox, P. L., 1981, The triumph of the eunuch: Planners, urban managers, and the suppression of political opposition. Urban Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 17, 149–172.

Dear, M. and Wolch, J., 1987, Landscapes of Despair. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Duncan, J., 1980, The superorganic in American cultural geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 70, 181–198.

Duncan, J. and Duncan, N., 1988, (Re)reading the landscape. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 6,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Contributors
• Section I: Foundations
• Section II: Urban Geography in the 1960s
• Section III: Urban Geography in the 1970s
• Section IV: Urban Geography in the 1980s
• Section V: Urban Geography in the 1990s
• Index: Paradigms
• Index: Personalities