The constitution of the city and the critique of critical urban theory

Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110110
Author(s):  
Allen J. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Structure ◽  
Special Reference ◽  
Spatial Dynamics ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
Developmental Phases ◽  
The City

A theoretical account of the genesis and internal spatial structure of cities is given. The essence of the urbanisation process is described in terms of the following main developmental phases: (a) the emergence of relationships based on specialisation and interdependence in society; (b) the pre-eminent role of the division of labour within these relationships and its recomposition in dense spatial nodes of human activity; and (c) the concomitant formation of the networked intra-urban spaces of the city. These phases are then contextualised within three intertwined dimensions of urban materiality, namely, an internal dimension (the internal organisation and spatial dynamics of the city), a socially ambient dimension (the relational structure of society at large) and an exogenous dimension (the geographic outside of the city). In light of this account, an evaluative review of what I designate ‘the new critical urban theory’ is carried out, with special reference to planetary urbanisation, postcolonial urban theory and comparativist methodologies. I argue that while every individual city represents a uniquely complex combination of social conjunctures, there are nonetheless definite senses in which urban phenomena are susceptible to investigation at the highest levels of theoretical generality.

New Urban Spaces

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Brenner
Keyword(s):  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Urban Restructuring ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Intensive Research ◽  
Spatial Strategies ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
The City

The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing. How can these transformations be deciphered? In this book, critical urban theorist Neil Brenner argues that confronting this challenge requires not only intensive research on urban restructuring but new theories of urbanization. To this end, Brenner proposes an approach that breaks with inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement unit—the city or the metropolis—and explores the multiscalar constitution, political mediation, and ongoing rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric, from the local and the regional to the national and the planetary. New Urban Spaces offers a paradigmatic account of how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban life, the role of multiscalar state spatial strategies in animating them, and their variegated consequences for emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization. The book also advances an understanding of critical urban theory as radically revisable: key urban concepts, methods, and cartographies must be continually reinvented in relation to the relentlessly mutating worlds of urbanization they aspire to illuminate.

Race and the construction of city and nature

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (9) ◽  
pp. 1948-1967 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Loughran
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Spatial Dynamics ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The City

Recent scholarship in critical urban theory, urban political ecology, and related fields has emphasized the “hybridity” of urban–environmental systems. This argument is contrasted with the socially constructed “binary” relationship between “city” and “nature” that dominated historical understandings of urban–environmental connections. Despite wide agreement on these issues, the trajectories that precipitated this shift in city–nature boundaries have been understudied. Many explanations position accelerating urbanization or changes in global political economy as driving the decline of the city–nature binary. This paper proposes that this transformation is also a product of the changing cultural and spatial dynamics of “race” between the 19th-century and the present. Drawing on research on urban parks in Chicago, I consider the production of park space at four important historical moments: (1) the mid-to-late 19th-century, when large picturesque parks were built; (2) the early 20th-century, when reform-oriented “small parks” were constructed; (3) the post-World War II period, which was marked by the development of recreation facilities; and (4) the contemporary period, where linear parks like Chicago’s 606 (which I term “imbricated spaces”) bring together built and natural environments in new ways. Through this analysis, I argue that the social construction of “city” and “nature,” as spatialized through urban park development, was co-produced with racialized spaces and symbols and contributed to the creation of metropolitan racial boundaries. Further, I argue that historical shifts in these racialized spaces and symbols have been implicated in the weakening of the city–nature binary and the rise of the hybrid city–nature relationship.

The City-Logic of Resistance: Subverting Urbicide in the Middle East City

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 10-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Civil Resistance ◽  
Extreme Variant ◽  
Urban Terrain ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

Most armed conflict today takes place within urban terrain or within an urbanised context. An extreme variant of such armed conflict is violence perpetrated by external state and non-state forces within the city, known as urbicide. Urbicidal violence deliberately strives to kill, discipline or deny the city to its inhabitants by targeting and then reordering the sociomaterial urban assemblage. Civil resistance within urbicidal violence seeks to subvert the emerging alternative sovereign order sought by such forces. It does so by using the inherent logic of the city in order to maintain/restore the community's social cohesion, mitigate the violence, affirm humanity, and claim the right to the city. This paper investigates the city-logic of civil resistance through examples drawn from the recent urbicidal experiences of Middle East cities such as Gaza, Aleppo, Mosul, and Sana'a. Theoretical insights from the conflict resolution literature, critical urban theory, and assemblage thinking inform the argument.

COVID-19 pandemic and the poor in the urban spaces of India with special reference to Mumbai

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sujayita Bhattacharjee ◽  
Sanjukta Sattar
Keyword(s):  
Special Reference ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
Socioeconomic Crisis ◽  
The City

PurposeThe lives of the poor in the urban spaces of India are filled with hardships. They live amidst poverty and struggle to survive within other problems such as insecure jobs, lack of proper housing, unsanitary conditions and low levels of health immunity. This vulnerable section of the population has been rendered furthermore vulnerable by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in ways that were never imagined before. Taking this into consideration, the purpose of this article is to examine the vulnerability of the poor in the urban settings of India with special reference to Mumbai in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology adopted in the study is based on the analysis of secondary data and content analysis of the existing literature. In addition to this, the study also makes use of certain narratives of the urban poor in Mumbai that have been captured by various articles, reports and blogs.FindingsThe findings of the study reveal how the urban poor of India, with special reference to Mumbai, the financial capital of India, has emerged as the worst sufferers of the socioeconomic crisis caused by the social distancing and lockdown measures imposed for combating the pandemic.Originality/valueThe study tries to explore the reality of the urban poor's right to the city in the wake of the pandemic.

scholarly journals The Role of Urban Morphology Design on Enhancing Physical Activity and Public Health

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (7) ◽  
pp. 2359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sadegh Fathi ◽  
Hassan Sajadzadeh ◽  
Faezeh Mohammadi Sheshkal ◽  
Farshid Aram ◽  
Gergo Pinter ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Physical Activity ◽  
Space Syntax ◽  
Urban Morphology ◽  
Physical Activities ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Equation Modeling ◽  
The City

Along with environmental pollution, urban planning has been connected to public health. The research indicates that the quality of built environments plays an important role in reducing mental disorders and overall health. The structure and shape of the city are considered as one of the factors influencing happiness and health in urban communities and the type of the daily activities of citizens. The aim of this study was to promote physical activity in the main structure of the city via urban design in a way that the main form and morphology of the city can encourage citizens to move around and have physical activity within the city. Functional, physical, cultural-social, and perceptual-visual features are regarded as the most important and effective criteria in increasing physical activities in urban spaces, based on literature review. The environmental quality of urban spaces and their role in the physical activities of citizens in urban spaces were assessed by using the questionnaire tool and analytical network process (ANP) of structural equation modeling. Further, the space syntax method was utilized to evaluate the role of the spatial integration of urban spaces on improving physical activities. Based on the results, consideration of functional diversity, spatial flexibility and integration, security, and the aesthetic and visual quality of urban spaces plays an important role in improving the physical health of citizens in urban spaces. Further, more physical activities, including motivation for walking and the sense of public health and happiness, were observed in the streets having higher linkage and space syntax indexes with their surrounding texture.

Place Management/Making

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hoe Su Fern
Keyword(s):  
Urban Spaces ◽  
City Centre ◽  
Governance Structures ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Place Management ◽  
Policy Documents ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The City

This chapter examines the role of the arts and artists in rejuvenating urban spaces in Singapore, where place management ideas are currently being used to rejuvenate parts of the city centre. Coexisting alongside state-driven initiatives are artist-led strategies where local art practitioners and organizations activate latent and/or under-utilized spaces. Through an analysis of policy documents and qualitative ethnographic fieldwork, this study explores the interplay between top-down aspirations and formal place management efforts, and the organic ways artists have activated and engaged with spaces. Ultimately, I argue that there is a need to balance formal governance structures with more support for artists engaging in organic, ground-up initiatives.

scholarly journals KARAKTERISTIK PERKEMBANGAN STRUKTUR RUANG IBU KOTA KECAMATAN GEMOLONG KABUPATEN SRAGEN

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 118
Author(s):  
Dhoni Setiawan ◽  
Mardwi Rahdriawan
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Spatial Structure ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Integrated System ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Physical Growth ◽  
Land Use Patterns ◽  
Use Patterns ◽  
The People ◽  
The City

<p>City is a space that serves as a center place of activities, over time the city was experiencing growth and development, both physical and non-physical conditions. So these conditions affect the change in the pattern of land use, activity system as well as the pattern of people and goods mobility that are happening in the urban system. The phenomenon of the emergence of new urban areas (cities and towns) in IKK Gemolong causes changes in land use patterns along the road corridor is experiencing rapid development, it is evidenced by the increased activity and physical growth of the city. The conditions were observed with the growth of new activities such as residential, commercial district and other commercial areas. So that it will affect land use patterns, activities systems and people and goods mobility patterns that occur, which in turn will affect the characteristics of the spatial structure of the development of IKK Gemolong formed as a town in Sragen. The focus of discussion such as land use, population activity systems, as well as the people and goods mobility which the influencing factors of the formation of the spatial structure of a city. The study is considered important because as the basis for consideration in the development of towns in the future. This is because the policy of urban development continues in administrative and sectoral nature, so the presence of the regional autonomy policy of development with regional and integrated system and assessed more quickly to implement. This study used quantitative an quantitative study method. The analysis results indicated the characteristics of land use in Gemolong dominated by settlements, while the commercial district developed along the main streets of this town because Gemolong have function as service centers for its surrounding areas. The residents of Gemolong mostly have work in the non-agricultural sectors, such as trade and services, while the population as a farmer is relatively small, so that these conditions indicated that Gemolong says as urban area. The people mobility in Gemolong originated from both internal and external area of the town in destination location of commercial areas to have studying, working, shopping and other purposes. The residents of Gemolong do not have to big cities to access the daily life necessities for since it is already available in Gemolong. Based on the phenomenon of Gemolong have a compact city type of development, while the structure of urban spaces that were formed have view more functioning of each of the regions even though the condition is still occurring mixture of functions. Then, the structure of urban spaces is the type of sector, although not as ideal as yet which happened in developed countries.</p>

scholarly journals A Review of Robert Shaw, The Nocturnal City. London: Routledge, 2018, 126 pр.

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (48) ◽  
pp. 239-251
Author(s):  
Fedor Veselov
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Night Time ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Artificial Lighting ◽  
The Public ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
New Research ◽  
The City

This review focuses on the book The Nocturnal City written by the British social geographer Robert Shaw. The author’s major objective is to put the night at the center of the research agenda in urban studies, to contribute to urban theory in general, and to open up a new research field — nightology. The theoretical ambition for Shaw is an attempt to establish a dialogue between planetary urbanism (critical urban theory) and the post-structuralist understanding of the city (assemblage thinking). The author employs the conceptual model of ‘three ecologies’ developed by Felix Guattari; it considers the city as consisting of three interconnected layers: ‘self — society — earth’. Another important analytical tool is the post-colonial metaphor of the night as a frontier, which Shaw develops, considering specificities of the nocturnal city: infrastructures of artificial lighting and cleaning, the night-time economy, the changing aesthetics of cities at night and the experience of night-time at home, beyond the public space. The book does not offer a ready-made solution to theoretical problems and reveals just a little of the empirical diversity of nocturnal cities, but it is recommended as an introduction to a new field — nightology (especially for the Russian social sciences) — and as an elaboration of the discussion around the compatibility of critical urbanism and assemblage thinking in urban theory.

scholarly journals Toward Urban Spaces of Quality: Through the Existing Urban Legislations in Egypt

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 234
Author(s):  
Haitham El Sharnouby
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Research Issues ◽  
Urban Quality Of Life ◽  
Negative Effect ◽  
The Government ◽  
Egyptian Government ◽  
The City

Egyptian urban spaces suffer from a chaos that is the result of crowded and disordered pedestrian sidewalks, streets and shop signage. This chaos creates a negative effect on, both, the image of the city and the quality of life within these urban spaces. Many legislations and regulations in Egypt attempted to deal with these issues. Similarly, the Egyptian government established many organizations and authorities in order to deal with these issues with little success. The National Organization of Urban Harmony (NOUH) is one of those organizations established by the government to take the responsibility of dealing with pedestrian sidewalk and shops’ signage while the municipality deals with road occupations. These organizations should perform their responsibilities through the Egyptian legislations. The research at hand aims to find a solution to that particular problem which has influenced the quality of the street and its reflection to the quality of life as result. In order to find a solution, the research attempts to find a mechanism to boost the role of shop signage as an element of urban spaces in order to emphasize street quality. Thus, the research well be divided into four parts: part one reviews the quality of urban spaces and the meaning of its terms while part two reviews the concept of the quality of life and the relation between the quality of life and urban spaces. Part three demonstrates the urban quality of life through tangible and intangible approaches. Finally, part four reviews the Egyptian legislations that deal with research issues and attempts to find the difficulties that faced when enforcing laws. Finally, the research conclusion illustrates the most important issues in the research and their proposed solutions.

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