Intercultural Urbanism

City Planning from the Ancient World to the Modern Day

Dean Saitta

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786994127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Cities today are paradoxical. They are engines of innovation and opportunity, but they are also plagued by significant income inequality and segregation by ethnicity, race, and class. These inequalities and segregations are often reinforced by the urban built environment: the planning of space and the design of architecture. This condition threatens attainment of wider social and economic prosperity. In this innovative new study, Dean Saitta explores questions of urban sustainability by taking an intercultural, trans-historical approach to city planning. Saitta uses a largely untapped body of knowledge-the archaeology of cities in the ancient world-to generate ideas about how public space, housing, and civic architecture might be better designed to promote inclusion and community, while also making our cities more environmentally sustainable. By integrating this knowledge with knowledge generated by evolutionary studies and urban ethnography (including a detailed look at Denver, Colorado, one of America's most desirable and fastest growing 'destination cities' but one that is also experiencing significant spatial segregation and gentrification), Saitta's book offers an invaluable new perspective for urban studies scholars and urban planning professionals.

1 | INTRODUCTION

It is widely proclaimed that we live in an Urban Age. Popular and scholarly commentary is full of references to humankind now being an urban species: Homo urbanis (Brugmann 2009; Gleeson 2014). We routinely hear that most of the world’s population lives in cities, that people are moving to cities at an accelerating pace, and that settlement in cities is key to a sustainable future and our best hope for survival. At the same time, it is argued that because of urbanization’s global nature something called ‘the city’ has ceased to exist. We are surrounded by dramatic metanarratives (Brenner 2019:300–333) and animated discussions about what the city is, and whether the city is the creator of the global environmental and social sustainability problems that bedevil us, or the solution.

We can debate the veracity of the many claims made about cities and whether today’s urban growth is unprecedented in human history. However, it is certainly the case that we are living in a key urban moment. With their status as crucibles of innovation and engines of economic opportunity it is undeniable that cities are major attractors of human population. It is also undeniable that the urban built environment – its form and design – has a huge impact on how people live in cities. It affects their opportunities for interacting within and across social group boundaries, their ability to accumulate social capital (Putnam 2000; Westlund 2014), and their overall life chances. This impact may not be as consequential as the more direct impact of urban policies and programs, but we should not discount the built environment’s relevance to whatever possibilities the city has for improving collective life going forward. As Neil Brenner (2019:302) puts it, ‘urban spaces have become strategically essential to political-economic and sociocultural life around the world, and to emergent visions of possible planetary futures’.

Accompanying global urbanization is the increasing cultural diversity of metropolitan regions. By cultural diversity, I mean differences in individual and group-level ways of believing and living that are shaped by ethnic background, history, position in a global spatial order, and other variables. Cultural diversity, along with human biological diversity, is the traditional subject matter of anthropology: the study of the human condition across all space and time. Cultural diversity is also a hallmark of urbanity; it goes with the territory of being urban. The history of the city is the history of human diversities meeting, interacting, coexisting, and sometimes colliding. Diversity has been an inherent feature of urban life right from the beginning (Mandanipour 2014). Today, ethnic diversity is becoming ‘increasingly salient as a determinant marker in the urban world’ (Irazábal 2011).

There are at least two major reasons for this increasing saliency of ethnic and cultural diversity. One is the dramatic global movement of immigrants and refugees produced by political upheaval, climate change, and the human desire to seek greater economic opportunity (Hou 2013; Çaglar and Glick Schiller 2018). The other is the impending demographic transition within open, democratic societies that will alter the ethnic and racial mix of cities; for example, the shift from a majority white to a majority non-white population in the United States. According to the United States Census Bureau, the USA will become a ‘majority minority’ nation by 2050. This transition is putting increased pressure on US metropolitan regions to accommodate differences in ways of living. It is exacerbating pressures on the form and quality of housing, on the provision and use of public space, and on the availability of social services. Of course, it is also putting pressure on ethnic groups themselves, both newcomer and resident. Depending on political and economic circumstances, encounters with diversity in human history can very easily generate anxiety, distrust, fear, and open conflict.

All things being equal the ethnic and cultural diversification of cities is a positive thing. It is well-established that such diversity is part of what makes cities generators of creativity and opportunity. Much social science research indicates that cultural diversity is a boon to creating a broader-based civic prosperity (Ottaviano and Peri 2006; Mandanipour 2014; Benner and Pastor 2015). It amplifies the ‘knowledge spillover’ effect produced by dense human interaction that Jane Jacobs identified in her seminal work The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs 1961). Immigration in the United States since the 1970s has helped cities by reversing population loss, raising home values, and lowering crime rates (Myers 2007; Vigdor 2014; Sandoval-Strausz 2019:291–325). The positive effects of such immigration is the untold story of postwar urban America. The dominant narratives are about 1960s white flight followed by the 1990s return to the city of mostly white ‘cultural creatives’ (sensu Florida 2002; see Sandoval-Strausz 2014; 2019:10–11). Wood and Landry (2008) powerfully speak to the ‘diversity advantage’. The power of cultural diversity is something to be valued and harnessed, the sometimes difficult challenges of living with diversity notwithstanding.

However, we live at a time when the power of diversity to create civic prosperity is being weakened. It is being weakened by deepening economic divisions between rich and poor, divisions that in the modern age have generally correlated with race and ethnicity. These divisions of class and culture have a spatial dimension, manifested as concentrated wealth and poverty and unequal access to public space, green space, and other urban amenities. When regeneration of historically impoverished areas occurs it often results in the displacement of the most economically vulnerable households and groups, pushing them to urban margins or into other urban spaces where survival is made even more difficult. Sometimes the displacement is more psychological than spatial, exacerbated by the spread of political ideologies that demonize minority populations and render them strangers in their own land. Compounding the problem is the increasing privatization of the public realm via national and foreign corporate buying of city centers (Sassen 2018; see also contributors to Low and Smith 2006). This trend has accelerated since the financial crisis of 2008, producing wealth for international elites in the form of (mostly underused) luxury housing. Today, downtown surface parking lots are being bought up for similar purposes (Acitelli 2019). These developments are not only eliminating shared public space where diversities can interact, but also producing homogenized cityscapes: a form of social gating by other means (Florida et al. 2014; Mallach 2018). All of this threatens the attainment of a broad-based civic prosperity.

The cause of this state of affairs is, at least in part, neoliberal or free market economic policies. They have rendered urbanization the new means by which capital is accumulated and class position secured in the post-industrial era (Harvey 2012). But it is also an urban planning and design problem. Current approaches to planning and design are unfriendly to diversity in two main ways. First, they are shaped by thinking emanating from countries – and former colonial powers – located in the Global North and West. Second, they are informed by a very short history. Most official histories of urban planning and design only go back to the nineteenth century, at best to the Renaissance. These spatial and temporal constraints have produced a planning and design paradigm that, at the end of the day, is largely monocultural in character. It produces urban forms, architectures, codes, and other materialities that reflect the norms and values of Western majority cultures. This ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Contemporary Urbanisms: A Critical Conceptual Analysis
• 3 Culture and the City: Ethnographic and Evolutionary Approaches
• 4 Intercultural Urbanism: A Deep Time Perspective
• 5 Toward the Intercultural City: Good Starts, Promising Directions, and Alternative Models
• 6 Conclusion
• References
• Index