Cities and Social Change

Encounters with Contemporary Urbanism

Ronan Paddison, Eugene McCann, Ronan Paddison, Eugene McCann

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781473906181
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This textbook of essays by leading critical urbanists is a compelling introduction to an important field of study; it interrogates contemporary conflicts and contradictions inherent in the social experience of living in cities that are undergoing neoliberal restructuring, and grapples with profound questions and challenging policy considerations about diversity, equity, and justice. A stimulant to debate in any undergraduate urban studies classroom, this book will inspire a new generation of urban social scholars.
- Alison Bain, York University "Stages a lively encounter with different understandings of urban production and experience, and does so by bringing together an exciting group of scholars working across a diversity of theoretical and geographical contexts. The book focuses on some of the central conceptual and political challenges of contemporary cities, including inequality and poverty, justice and democracy, and everyday life and urban imaginaries, providing a critical platform through which to ask how we might work towards alternative forms of urban living."
- Colin McFarlane Durham University What is the city? What is the nature of living in the city? This new textbook provides students with an in-depth understanding of the central issues associated with the city and how living in a city impacts its inhabitants.

Theoretically informed and thematically rich, the book is edited by leading scholars in the field and contains an eminent, international cast of contributors and contributions. It provides a critical analysis of the key thinkers, themes and paradigms dealing with the relationship between the built environment and urban life. It includes illustrative case studies, questions for discussion, further reading and web links.

Examining the contradictions, conflicts and complexities of city living, the book is an essential resource for students looking to get to grip with the different theoretical and substantive approaches that make up the diverse and rich study of the city and urban life.

Section 1 Theorising the City

1 Introduction: Encountering the City – Multiple Perspectives on Urban Social Change

Ronan Paddison

Eugene McCann

The great buildings of civilization; the meeting places, the libraries and theatres, the towers and the domes; and often more than these the houses, the streets, the press and excitement of so many people with so many purposes. I have stood in many cities and felt this pulse; in the physical differences of Stockholm and Florence, Paris and Milan; this identifiable and moving quality; the centre, the activity and light. Like everyone else I have also felt the chaos of the metro and the traffic jam; the monotony of the ranks of houses, the aching press of strange crowds, this sense of possibility, of meeting and movement, is a permanent element of my own sense of cities …

Raymond Williams (1973) The Country and the City

On being asked what it is that defines the city, and more specifically what defines the meaning of living within cities, most of us would reply in experiential terms, as the cultural critic, Raymond Williams, does in the epigraph. While our reflections of the city may embrace our imaginations of them, it is through our experience of them that our material needs are met. Cities are the spaces in which most of us live out or daily lives. But our relationships with the city involve much more than can be encapsulated in saying that it is in them that the quotidian is transacted. Cities are the arenas in which we conduct our private and public lives, in which we establish networks of social interaction, and in which we are able to secure work and provide for material needs. The sensibilities we have towards the city emphasise the diversity of attributes they encapsulate which become reflected in the ambivalent emotive appreciation we have of them. As Williams shows, cities are variously places of exhilaration and excitement, of wonder, and sometimes of fear and apprehension.

Any understanding of how cities become viewed needs to accept the role agency plays. How we relate to the city reflects the self, our positioning within the city's social make-up, the ‘baggage’ of the self that is brought to the daily process of living within it (Bounds, 2004). Our experiences of the city, and therefore our appreciation of it, vary. For the excluded – the poor, in particular – the celebration that surrounds the making of the postmodern city and the multiple ways in which it caters for consumption is a far cry from their experience of everyday life in the city, in which survival and ‘thwarted consumption’ (Bauman, 1998) are the enduring markers of everyday urban life. For those able to participate in the consumption opportunities which cities offer, the experience of living in the city will be radically different, albeit one likely to be qualified by the anxieties of everyday urban life.

These differences are graphically captured in contemporary novels of the city. In (for example) Capital, John Lanchester's 2012 novel of present-day London narrates a rich story centring on the experience of those living in an ‘ordinary street’ of terraced housing in south London, Pepys Road. Built as an unremarkable street of terraced properties at the end of the nineteenth century, Pepys Road was targeted at the lower-middle-class family ‘willing to live in an unfashionable part of town in return for the chance to own a terraced house’ (p. 2). For much of its history, the road and those living on it remained unremarkable. Lanchester takes up the biography of the street in more heady times, in the 2000s, by which point it had already experienced early gentrification since when, following the boom in London's financial sector, the street had become the home of the rich. But if it had become a street in which being a new arrival was confined to those enjoying a hedge fund manager's income, it was home too to some ‘original’ residents who had stayed on and whose lifestyle remained modest. Added to this was the story of the multiple workers who serviced the street and its new occupants, many of them immigrant, Poles as well as those from Africa and the West Indies. Much of the perceptiveness of the novel is in the ways in which it draws out what the experiences of everyday life were for the diversity of characters involved in it, their social lives and the intersections between the street's occupants and those servicing it.

Pepys Road is an imagined (but nevertheless real) space used to draw out the stories of different urban lives, stories which are not peculiar to London. In its essentials, the different experience of the wealthy and the recent immigrant, the elderly and the young au pair, are stories that no doubt would be repeated elsewhere in other northern cities, and increasingly in some southern cities. Defining himself around Shanghai, Tash Aw, in Five Star Billionaire (2013), follows the experiences of the city's diverse population in a city which encapsulates the urban explosion in China, the dazzling opportunities it creates for some, and the much more constrained lives it means for the majority.

The stories told in these literary representations of the city help explore the excitement, contradictions, conflicts and tensions arising from the social experiences of living in cities. It is these characteristics of city life that this volume intends to explore in a theoretically and empirically informed way. While the novelist has the luxury of being able to employ literary licence in developing a narrative, social scientists need to ground their arguments theoretically and, through robust methodologies, explore the social life of the city. In the rest of this introductory chapter we sketch out an understanding of the theoretical legacy and how it might inform the multiplicity of encounters in the contemporary city, before turning, subsequently, to explain the structure of the volume.

Introducing Urban Social Theory – Alternative Perspectives

Any understanding of urban social life is dependent on theory – reasoned arguments which define the ideas we have of the city and which seek to make them comprehensible. Fundamentally, urban theory aims to explain how and why cities develop, how they are structured and how and why they change (Hubbard, 2006). Translated into social terms this is expressed through an understanding of sociality in the city, how cities are imagined and represented, how difference is part of city life and is negotiated, and how social order is maintained – issues that are both diverse and often fraught with epistemological problems as to how they should be explored. Small wonder, then, that just as theories adopt different forms – some open to quantitative assessment and others more discursive – so too is urban theory a diverse medley of ideas.

As diverse a field as urban social theory is, what is equally true is that what defines the nature of urban encounter is itself diverse. Here, encounter can bring in classic tropes linked to city life and its complexities: ‘the stranger’, social distancing as a strategy aimed at the avoidance of encounter; the overarching and uneven impress of structural processes on different social groups; the experience of city life and urban materiality; the role of immaterial cultures in fashioning city life; and what living in cities means for our health. What we need to emphasise through such examples is that encounter is a multifaceted expression into the nature of city living, complex in its own right, but made patently more complex by the multiplicity of ways it becomes translated through and by different social groups within the city, and that it is mediated through the self. This hints at the potential benefits of theoretical diversity, its responsiveness to different types of research questions which urbanists exploring the social geographies of the city are likely to pose. This said, we can begin to sketch out the legacy of urban social theory, mindful of the reality that much of it is ‘western’ in it origins, the implications of which are returned to later.

Urban theory is a rich as well as diverse field. There is a considerable legacy of ideas on the nature of city life and its spatial dimensions on which to draw. While some have been superseded by later theoretical developments, others have not only withstood subsequent scrutiny of time but, as in the case of Simmel (1903, 1997), have been revisited in contemporary urban thinking (Frisby, 1986). What the historiography of urban social theory tends to suggest is that rather than theory developing in a strictly progressive fashion – ideas of each ‘phase’ being effectively supplanted by later ideas – its development has been more cumulative. Much of the Chicago School – its deterministic thinking, for example – may have been abandoned, but its models of urban social morphology, the iconic representation of the city encapsulated in Burgess’ concentric zones, for instance, continues to be the focus of research (see, for instance, Beveridge, 2011). Perhaps it is because many of the social problems of living in cities are enduring – issues of social distance and segregation, the mixing of diverse ethnicities, problems of social disorder and crime and others – that the return to earlier urban research is tempting for its ability to throw light on contemporary configurations. Earlier theories do not necessarily become negated but exist to be revisited, albeit critically.

How, then, can we begin to appreciate the legacy of urban theory? Frequently its appreciation is explored historically, beginning with those early writers who sought to understand the link between cities and modernity through to contemporary accounts drawing on poststructural and postmodern ideas of the city. The approach is certainly able to demonstrate the richness of urban theory and how it has come to terms with the changing character of cities.

In reality, urban theory responds to different empirical questions. Further, it is by exploring the ambitions urban theories have that we can begin to appreciate their contribution to understanding the social life of cities. We argue that these ambitions can be identified by two dimensions that help to loosely position different urban social theories: their scale and scope.1 By scale we mean the perspective from which theory approaches the understanding of the city. At one extreme are theories which treat the city holistically, effectively viewing it from above, with the aim of understanding the city, or an aspect of it, as a generalised statement. In contrast, other theories commence their dissection of the city with an individual or small part of it – a neighbourhood – or a particular process or aspect of it, a view which is effectively drawn from below. Scope refers to the comprehensiveness of theory, the extent to which it seeks to embrace some overarching explanation or is more restricted in its ambitions. Expressed as a binary, what needs to be said is that in reality much urban research is conducted so that while being rooted closer to one end of the continuum linking the two poles, it remains aware of the other. Understanding the city, as the Chicago School was to readily acknowledge, meant that research needed to be conducted from both perspectives. The claim is not, then, that these two dimensions effectively classify urban theories but that they begin to shed light on the different questions urban theory has sought to address and the different perspectives from which it has begun to explore the city in social terms.

Viewing cities from above has been a continuing tradition within urban social theory. Given their unprecedented scale, the rapidity often of their development, the contribution immigration made to their growth and diversity, and the potential threat the scale of cities constituted to social and political order, understanding how cities were emergent, how and why they developed morphologically, and what its linkages were with modernity, were questions that were bound to attract the early attention of urban theorists. For some theorists – beginning with Engels’ (1844 [1971) depiction of the rise of Manchester and adopted later by some of the classic work of the Chicago School – unravelling the city was expressed in morphological terms. Engels’ description of the city in concentric terms in which the bourgeoisie were able to distance themselves from the grime and the poverty – and indeed were able to visually cocoon themselves from it – led to a more holistic interpretation of city life rooted in capitalism. Through the use of dialectical thinking, Engels (and Marx, though he was less concerned explicitly with the city) was able to draw out the tensions and contradictions that were already apparent in the early industrial city, particularly the recurrent attempts by elite groups to maintain their privileged position and the conflicts to which this gave rise. Yet, as fertile a research territory as there was in drawing out the connections between city life with capitalism, it was not to be for more than a century that they were to become more rigorously explored by urban analysts, a rich vein of which was to be explored in the writings of Lefebvre (1991, 1996), Harvey (1985, 1989b, 1989c) and others.

Other perspectives – some of the writing of the Chicago School, in particular – were to be more immediately influential in steering how cities should be understood and studied and became key paradigms within much of the twentieth century. They were also, given the breadth of research undertaken by the School, not restricted to viewing the city from above – as a complement to this, pioneering ethnographic research unfolded the dynamics of the neighbourhoood from below (Zorbaugh, 1929). Yet, it is through the work of Burgess and his iconic concentric zone model, together with the use of biological reasoning to help explain the social patterning of the city and its dynamics, that the Chicago School was to offer a perspective that was to become so widely cited. The appeal of being able to transcend the complexities of the city and represent it in a simple geometrical model was to encourage alternative geometries, the work of Hoyt and of Ullman. It was an appeal that continued to influence urban social research over 50 years later through the factorial ecologies of the city that became fashionable following the ‘quantitative turn’. In its use of biological arguments – that the dynamics of the city's social geography were somehow the result of natural processes – the School was to confront more stringent critique. Rather than being a given through ‘natural’ forces, the social geographies of the city and their dynamics were the result of political and managerial interventions. Here, it was to be Marxist-led – and, for some, Marxian – ideas that were to offer a more convincing explanation of the processes operating at the macro-level in the city.

A different version of the top-down perspective, while still treating the city holistically, focuses more on the individual and their interaction in everyday city life. As a response to modernity and the radically different environments in which burgeoning city populations were forced to adapt, some urban social theorists turned their attention to the ways in which the individual sought to come to terms with living in cities. In his classic essay ‘The metropolis and mental life’, Simmel (1903 [1997) argued that cities created much more challenging environments than rural areas by virtue of the size and complexity of the city, so that the individual in being forced to adapt to the multiplicity of stimuli did so by becoming blasé. Such a technique was a coping strategy, but it was also one, as Hubbard (2006) has pointed out, which continues to resonate with behaviour in contemporary public spaces – the ability of the individual to be indifferent to anti-social forms of behaviour or other incivilities, providing they do not directly challenge the self. Simmel was to root the indifference of the urban citizen in the money economy of the city and the growing dependence on social interaction being transacted in terms of exchange value. The money economy of the city, then, was to erode the ‘old’ ties considered characteristic to rural society. Robinson (2006) has pointed out that we should be careful not to generalise this conceptualisation of the comportment of the individual in the modern city, arguing that it is the product of research and observation in only a few cities of the global north (see our discussion in the concluding chapter). Nevertheless, Simmel's argument was to lead other theorists to draw out the implications of the money economy, cities and modernity; for Kracauer (1927), for instance, they were to lead to novel forms of urban visual culture linked to consumption, an argument which, if anything, has even greater resonance in the contemporary city.

The argument that sociality in the city was materially different from that associated with the rural or, put in other terms, that the nature of city life was in some senses distinctive, already alluded to by Simmel, became explicitly associated with Tonnies (1887), Durkheim (1893) and, later, Wirth (1938). Each, like Simmel, sought to explore the nature of urban social life looking at the city holistically but looking at it from the role of the individual within the city. Tonnies’ distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft became translated into the distinction between rural and urban societies (though it was not a connection drawn directly by Tonnies himself). In gemeinschaft societies there was a strong sense of community brought about in part by their relative immobility – kinship connections were strong, as was a sense of tradition and loyalty. In contrast, gesellschaft societies were defined by the ascendancy of individualism, the instrumental relations between citizens centring on exchange value and by the relative loss of community. Both types of society were drawn as the extremes of a continuum so that Tonnies avoided the pitfall of binarism. Durkheim was to draw out a not dissimilar set of distinctions between the rural and the urban through his constructs of mechanical and organic solidarity respectively. Later, Wirth was to define urbanism as a distinctive way of life linked in the first instance to what he characterised as the three defining features of cities: their size, density and heterogeneity.

The frequency with which the ideas of these early writers are rehearsed reveals their continuing influence. This is not to deny of course that they have been subject to considerable criticism. Wirth has been criticized for his failure to distinguish what was distinctive about living in cities as opposed to an urban-industrial(ising) society. The idea, too, that cities lacked a sense of community, or were not able to show a continuing sense of community in different areas of the city and amongst different social groups living within it, was clearly not to be supported by a lot of empirical evidence. Yet, there are ways in which the influence of these early theorists remains, notably in the claim that city life is characterised by a lack of social cohesion and in which urban life is becoming, if anything, more individualistic. Though too easily over-stated, the ‘loss of community thesis’ continues to reappear in contemporary urban research, particularly in debates over social capital and social cohesion.

An alternative tradition in urban social theory (and research) is rooted in viewing urban processes from below. The ‘cultural turn’ has been a major fillip to its development – in the burgeoning use of ethnographic methods of analysis, for example – though its origins lay in the Chicago School which, while developing more holistic appreciations of the city as we have seen, were aware of the need for complementary studies which explored the city f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustration List
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Section 1 Theorising the City
• 1 Introduction: Encountering the City – Multiple Perspectives on Urban Social Change
• 2 Representing and Imagining the City
• Section 2 Experiencing the City
• 3 The ‘New’ Middle Class, Lifestyle and the ‘New’ Gentrified City
• 4 Being Poor in the City
• 5 Living with Difference: Reflections on Geographies of Encounter
• 6 The Everyday City of the Senses
• Section 3 The Liveable City
• 7 Dis/Order and the Regulation of Urban Space
• 8 Walling the City
• 9 Health and the City
• 10 Cities, Nature and Sustainability
• 11 Just Cities
• Section 4 Reflections on Cities and Social Change
• 12 The Good City?
• 13 Conclusion: Engaging the Urban World
• References
• Index