Exam #1: Part I

Question 1

What does Diego Rivera say that modern industry is built on?

Answer 1

The “truth” of surplus value extraction that lies buried beneath the New York skyline.

The temples of modern industry are built on the value extracted from the worker’s bodies…now left discarded in a homeless shelter reminiscent of a morgue.

In spite of the fact that the bodies have been used and discarded, the processes of surplus value extraction continue, for “customers” still deposit wealth extracted from used-up bodies in a bank vault that lies even farther below the skyline.

Question 2

What is a city a mixture of?

Answer 2

Land, labor, and capital

Question 3

What makes cities unique?

Answer 3

Skyscrapers, subways, and embassies

Question 4

What is geography?

Answer 4

Geography = The study of physical and human landscapes, the processes that affect them, how and why they change over time, and how and why they vary spatially.

Question 5

What is one interesting thing about American cities?

Answer 5

One of the interesting things about American cities is the way “we” have constructed our living arrangements (socially and spatially)

Question 6

How much of the world’s population urban and why? What will the future hold?

Answer 6

Continued urbanization over the last 50 years has resulted in a situation whereby half of the world’s population is now urban
The numbers of urban dwellers almost quadrupled between 1950 and 2000 going from 733 million to 2.857 billion
Over the next 30 years (i.e. 2000–2030), the world’s urban population is projected to grow at nearly double the rate expected for the total population of the world
By 2030, demographers predict that around 61 percent of the world’s population (5 Billion people) will be living in urban areas
All future population growth for the foreseeable future is expected to be absorbed in urban areas.

Question 7

When we build cities what are we trying to capture?

Answer 7

When we build cities we try to capture the best of town and country life.

Question 8

What is a basic demographic sketch of US?

Answer 8

The United States’ population has increased 85 percent from 1950 to 2001, growing from 151 million to 283 million in just fifty years.
Taking into account the recent recession the U.S. population is now projected to be around 399.8 million by 2050 (far short of the 439 million that was projected four years ago).
The United States has historically had one of the highest natural growth rates of any industrialized country in the world.
The US population is growing by about 2.5 million people each year.

Question 9

In Anglo-Saxon culture there exists a deep and enduring tension between the image of the town and that of the country side. What are some examples of that tension?

Answer 9

It is an imagery of opposites
The rural is virtuous (family, traditional morality, community, peace, innocence) and backward (ignorance, limitation)
“I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, the liberties of man” (Thomas Jefferson)
The city is full of vice (egoism, materialism, anonymity, ambition) and achievement (learning, communication, light, worldliness)
a blend of progress and pollution

Question 10

What are some tensions within a city? Why does this make a city unique?

Answer 10

Luxury/Poverty
Amenity/Pollution
Order/Disorder
Volatility
Conflict
Difference/indifference
Public services
Welfare provision
Individual Freedom/dependency on others
Inconvenience 
And intoxication (To cause stupefaction, stimulation, or excitement by or as if by use of a chemical substance)

Maybe what makes the city unique is the attempt to deal with (or make the best of) these tensions

Question 11

When we address the question of what is a city it is not enough to catalogue features and experiences … we must take into account:

Answer 11

• The scale and intensity of urban life
• The combination of urban elements
• The social significance of the city

Question 12

Why was Mumford important?

Answer 12

Mumford was critical of the role of planning

• He worried about the tendency to separate different aspects of the city instead of bringing them together
• Work was separated from home
• Rich were separated from poor

Question 13

What was Mumford concerned about in regards to planning a city?

Answer 13

Mumford was concerned that planners had the notion that if you fix the hard city (the physical design) than the soft problems would be resolved

Question 14

What did Mumford think was the correct approach to planning a city? What do you need first before you can design anything?

Answer 14

He didn’t think this was the correct approach. Instead he thought that we need to think of the city as a social institution that accommodates relationships that cannot be found elsewhere.If planners couldn’t be convinced that cities were socially organized, then they couldn’t design them to be livable. (we need to think about cities as a series of layers) Critical Point: You don’t begin with design you begin with a discussion of values.

Question 15

What is Mumford’s definition of a city?

Answer 15

“The city in its complete sense, then, is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity. The city fosters art and is art; the city creates the theater and is the theater. It is in the city, the city as theater, that man’s [sic] more purposive activities are focused, and worked out, through conflicting and cooperation personalities, events, groups, into more significant culminations.” (Mumford, 1937)

Question 16

What does Mumford mean by the phrase/term geographic plexus?

Answer 16

• Plexus is derived from anatomy and it is used to describe the networks (plexus) of nerves, blood vessels, tubes for air, and food that make up animal bodies
• Mumford meant that the city is made up of many networks through which flows, interchanges, and interactions take place
• The city was like a body, living on its different functions – a combination of interlaced parts

Question 17

Why do people use metaphors to describe cities?

Answer 17

Many metaphors have been used to comprehend cities
Some stress negative overtones/anti-urban feeling
Some signify the excitement, liberation, and enlightenment of cities

Question 18

What are the four metaphors of a city that Bob wants us to know?

Answer 18

Jungle, organism, machine, bazaar

Question 19

How is a city a jungle?

Answer 19

• It’s a jungle out there (competition, chaos)
  
  • Densely packed, intricately intertwined, potentially dangerous (a place of perceived threat)
  • Lush and fertile
  • Diverse species crowd together and battle with each other for room (a struggle for survival, full of snakes, competition for scare resources)
  • Dangerous for those who stray from pathways and for those who do not know how it operates (a strange place full of strangers)
  • Fragile and delicate (on the brink of disaster?, concern over invasive species/ individuals)
  • The production of personal knowledge and predictability (creation of niches, territorial control, sense of identity, comfort, local neighborhoods).
  • 4 D’s (diverse, dense, dangerous, delicate)
  • 3 C’s (competition, confrontation, comfort)

Question 20

How is a city an organism?

Answer 20

• A system of specialized organs functioning together
• A refer to it when you want to make some kind of large scale change (i.e. surgery)
• Each part is dependent on each other (interdependency and interactivity)
• Focus on lived experience (not simply hard stuff like buildings)
• Each part of the body has a role to perform
○ Streets/subways = arteries/ circulatory system
○ Parks = lungs
○ Heart = CBD
○ Sewer = waste
○ Intestines = water systems
○ Communication lines/ power gird = nervous system
○ Bones = topography
• A heart attack might come from traffic gridlock
• Uncontrolled growth might reflect a tumor
• Can we check the pulse of the city?

Question 21

How is a city a machine?

Answer 21

• Production and wealth creation are the central role
• Controlled by a few
• Enslavement of ordinary citizen
• The well being of citizen is not accounted for
• At times used to reflect issues of design, planning, and architecture

Question 22

How is a city a bazaar?

Answer 22

• a place of astonishing richness (diversity and activity)
• a place of liberation and opportunity
• a place of potential/ emancipation
• the city is a salad bar of ingredients which an individual can create his or her particular sustenance.

Question 23

What are the essential physical means of a city’s existence?

Answer 23

• Fixed site
• Durable shelter
• Permanent facilities for assembly, interchange and storage

Question 24

What are the essential social means of a city?

Answer 24

The essential social means are:
Social exchange (the city’s physical form is based on social exchanges or various kinds (economic, institutional, cultural, etc.)
Social exchanges are predicated on specific networks
These networks are geographical in two senses:
They intersect within the city
They stretch beyond the city to other locations
the social division of labor (which shapes both economic life and cultural life)
The shared sense of vibrancy and creativity
“the city may be a personal drama, but it is also a social drama”
The city like nowhere else brings people together into a narrative that is both personal and social

Question 25

What are the associations that form between individuals and groups within the city?

Answer 25

How do people form associations (or not) with each other?
Where do people congregate? Why?
What influences these associations (Proximity? Distance?)
How do proximity and remoteness change the ways in which people relate to one another?

Question 26

The manner in which urban institutions operate (business corporations, local government, state departments, bingo halls, churches)

Answer 26

How does the city function?
How is it organized?
How is power distributed?
How is conflict resolved?

Question 27

Why was Mumford concerned about the urban way of life?

Answer 27

American cities in Mumford’s opinion were producing personal and social disintegration

Mumford feared that as cities became larger they ceased to be places of opportunity and creativity (and American cities were larger spatially than anywhere else)

He felt that cities were increasingly:
Dominated by strangers
No longer places of ‘congregation’ but areas of ‘dissipation’

Question 28

What was the cause of a rise in urban populations?

Answer 28

• agriculture surplus
• Hydrological factors
• Population pressures
• Trading requirements
• Defense/military theories
• Religion

Question 29

How did agriculture surplus cause a rise in urban populations?

Answer 29

• more food = ability to geed a sedentary population
• administration of the surplus required new centralized structures of social organization
• new stratifed structures and instituions were rewquired to to assign rights over resources, impose taxes, deal with propoerty ownership
• building construction required occupational specialization

Question 30

How did hydrological factors cause a rise in urban populations?

Answer 30

• early cities emerged in areas of irrigated agriculture
• elaborate irrigation projects required a division of labor, cooperation, and the intensification of cultivation
• but not all cities required massive irrigation

Question 31

How did population pressures cause a rise in urban populations?

Answer 31

Increasing population densities/growing scarcity of wild food sources brought the transition

Question 32

How did trading requirements cause a rise in urban populations?

Answer 32

• need for a system to organize long-distance trade

- cities emerged at important crossroads of trading networks

Question 33

How did defensive/military theories cause a rise in urban populations?

Answer 33

• protection for valuable irrigation systems

- intensification for protection

Question 34

How did religion cause a rise in urban populations?

Answer 34

• the development of a religious elite who controlled alter offerings may have led to social change that initiated urban development
• a ceremonious concern for the dead

Question 35

What does V. Gordon Childe say were the 10 conditions/criteria of earliest cities?

Answer 35

1. concentrations of relatively large number of people in restricted area
2. developed social stratification
3. while most citizens were farmers, some pursued non-agricultural occupations:priest, craft specialist, administrators
4. the production of an economic surplus and its appropriation by a central authority, such as a king or deity
5. writing, to record economic activity and the myths, events and other ideological issues that served to justify the discrepancies between the privileged and lower classes
6. exact and predictive sciences to forecast the weather for agricultural production
7. monumental public architecture which could include such structures as temples, palaces, fortifications, tombs
8. figural art
9. foreign trade
10. residence-based group membership in which people of all professions and classes could share in a sense of community.

Question 36

What are the stages of evolution-devolution of the metropolis cities and periphery towns?

Answer 36

1. Polis
2. Metropollis
3. Megapolis
4. Parazitopoli
5. PatalopWhat iolis
6. Nekropolis

Question 37

What is an eopolis? What scale is it?

Answer 37

Scale = village

Village life. Permanent habitation and stable agriculture.
Permanent utilities for storage
Differentiated communities based on topography and resources (mining villages vs. fishing villages vs. agricultural villages)
Important technical advances (utensils/agricultural tools)
Nucleus of culture.

Question 38

What is a polis? What scale is it?

Answer 38

Scale = town

Association of villages and kinships with a common site lending to:
defense
common deity
common meeting place.
Mechanization and a rise in industrial production by division of labor:
Special instruments of power and precision.
Free energy = free time (less emphasis on physical survival)
Less obligation to practical labor = more time devoted to extending
cultural heritage (e.g. important buildings/architecture, books,
sculpture)
New cultural and political functions (theater, stadium, guildhall, school)
Dependence on local region for water, food, building materials, resources.
The rise of moral culture
Reason and Reflective thinking
The city comes into vogue (rise of Athens)Socrates preferred urban life because he thought “men were his teachers”

Question 39

What is a metropolis? What scale is it?

Answer 39

Scale = city

Within the region, one city emerges as dominant (Commanding strategic location, better land for agriculture, better supply of water and resources, safe harbor, better land or water routes)
Site or situation makes it attractive to a larger number of inhabitants
Further specialization of economic and social functions
Specialized trade and industry, fresh invention, development of ideas, library and university.
Surplus of regional products = expansion of trade routes (long distance trading/administration)
an association of poleis’
Agriculture subordinate to manufacturing: rivalry of “patricians of the soil” and industrialists
Migration of an elite within the polity. Breach between owners and workers.
Religion and culture become self-conscious: new synthesis and fusion.
Maximum release of cultural energy.
Personalization of war
Signs of weakness beneath the surface
An individualism that seems to disrupt older social bonds without replacing them with anything (basically the city fails to absorb or integrate cultural elements)

Question 40

What is a megalopolis?

Answer 40

OVERGROWN METROPOLIS/SHAPELESS GIANTISM/SENSELESS SUBURBIA
Capitalist mythos of bigness and power dominates.
(Accumulation without real (social?) purpose)
Owners of production subordinate every other fact of life to achievement of riches and display of wealth.
Belief in abstract quantity: biggest, most expensive, largest, greatest, highest, etc.
Financial domination by means of trade and legal processes. (Military conquest/Aggression)
Extended agricultural base but the lines of supply are tenuous
Callous moral sense.
Standardization of cultural products (art, literature, architecture, language all suffer)
Monopoly of cultural capital (news media, advertising, mass communication – creates controllers and conditioners of symbols)
Mechanical reproduction
Failure of direct action.
Scholarship and science by tabulation: sterile research, quantitative education. Knowledge divorced from life.
The idea of consensus is destroyed – control reigns
Uncontrolled expansion, unscrupulous exploitation, materialistic repletion
Beginning of the decline
People “push through acrid lung-rotting air and work their way home, avoiding each other’s eyes in the subway”
People are assaulted in full view of bystanders who do nothing to help the victim

Question 41

What does urban growth/ sprawl unleash?

Answer 41

A desire for control and regulation

Question 42

What was the creation of the metropolitan myth?

Answer 42

Treating cancerous tumors as normal manifestations of growth
Application of salves, advertising incantations, public relations magic, mechanical remedies until the patient dies before their own failing eyes.
Urban examples:
Slum demolition
Model housing
Civic architectural embellishment
Subway extension
Urban renewal
We tend to treat the symptoms, not the problem

Question 43

What is a tyrannopolis?

Answer 43

AUTHORITY RULESEconomic and social parasitism (too many demands placed on spending capabilities)
Overdevelopment and social decline
A city of parasites to a city of diseases
Predatory intensification of commercial cycles (i.e. gentrification)
Failure of the economic and political rulers to maintain bare decencies in government and business
Widespread moral apathy and failure of civic responsibility (each individual and group takes what it can get)Post-Politics
Overstress of mass sports
Growth by civic depletion
Domination of respectable people who behave like criminals and of criminals whose activities do not debar them from respectability.
Decline in agricultural production (soil erosion, environmental scars)
Municipal and state bankruptcy.
Decline in rate of population increase (birth control, slaughter, suicide)
Drain of national taxes to support the military establishment.
Cessation of productive work in the arts and sciences (funding cuts, etc.)

Question 44

What is a nekropolis?

Answer 44

CITY OF THE DEAD (A tomb for the dying)

Towns become shells.
Monuments no longer carry meaning
City of the dead
The city is a container for negative life
Those who can flee, do (like they did in Rome in the 5th Century).
Those who stay riot and rot.
The death of the civilization and the dissolution or destruction of the city
The last person does not care to reproduce because he/she no longer wants to live
The names persist; the reality vanishes

Question 45

What does this quote mean?

“Our present civilization is a gigantic motor car moving along a one-way road at an ever-accelerating speed. Unfortunately as now constructed the car lacks both steering wheel and brakes, and the only form of control the driver exercises consists in making the car go faster, though in his fascination with the machine itself and his commitment to achieving the highest speed possible, he has quite forgotten the purpose of the journey. This state of helpless submission to the economic and technological mechanisms modern man has created is curiously disguised as progress, freedom, and the mastery of man over nature. As a result, every permission has become a morbid compulsion. Modern man has mastered every creature above the level of the viruses and bacteria—except himself.” - Mumford

Answer 45

….

Question 46

What does this John Stuart Mill quote mean:

“it is hardly possible to overrate the value, in the present low state of human development, of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar. Such communication has always been one of the primary sources of progress.”

Answer 46

….

Question 47

Why did Wirth see urbanism as a way of life?

Answer 47

Wirth defined the city as “a relatively large, dense and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals”

Question 48

What does this Robert Park quote mean?

“The city … is something more than a congeries of individual men [sic] and of social conveniences – streets, buildings, electric lights, tramways, and telephones, etc.; something more, also, than a mere constellations of institutions and administrative devices – courts, hospitals, schools, police and civil functionaries of various sorts. The city is, rather, a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of the organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this tradition. The city is not, in other words, merely a physical mechanism and an artificial construction. It is involved in the vital processes of the people who compose it …”

Answer 48

…

Question 49

How does Louis Wirth distinguish urbanizatio from urbanism?

Answer 49

Urbanization: a related set of economic and demographic trends producing rapid and dramatic changes in cities

Urbanism: an interrelated set of social and psychological responses to these trends

Question 50

What are the three main attributes of urbanization according to Wirth?

Answer 50

Size
Density
Social Heterogeneity

Question 51

How does size impact cities?

Answer 51

More people generally equals greater cultural and economic diversity
Yes, natural increase will increase size but migration (rural-to-urban) and immigration increase the potential for diverse groups to come into close contact
Greater population creates the need for formal control systems
Large differentiated populations lead to divided/specialized occupational structures

Social interactions are increasingly depersonalized

Relationships based on functional and formal roles as opposed to personal relationships

Real risk of social disorganization and disintegration

“The size of a city’s population is a crude measure of urbanity, for it reveals nothing of the wealth or poverty of the citizens, of their education or lack of it, of their level of culture and degree of accomplishment”

Size does not indicate whether a city is growing or stable or shrinking.

Question 52

Why does Wirth think size is important?

Answer 52

Wirth argues that large numbers of people make a difference to how people interact (or not) with one another.

Why?
Because of the greater range of variation between individuals
The result is spatial segregation (color, ethnic heritage, economic and social status, race, etc.)
Because of the greater number of social interactions
More opportunities to form bonds that do not rely on kinship ties, neighborliness, tradition, etc.
Because of the greater potential for differentiation
Contacts are more impersonal, superficial, transitory etc.
The results are both positive and negative
Positive: individuals are released from obligations and expectations that might arise from living in a tightly controlled community
Negative: individuals might forfeit a sense of participation in communal life (distance themselves from other people and their problems)

For Wirth, size both enriches and disorganizes social life

Question 53

How does density impact cities?

Answer 53

Increased populations attempt to crowd into inadequate amounts of urban space
Competition for space intensifies producing spatial fragmentation and segregation
Social-psychological effects of increased density produces geographic stereotypes
People attempt to maintain social distance
Crowding and diversity may lead to a greater degree of tolerance

Question 54

Why does Wirth think density is important?

Answer 54

Why is density important?
Wirth wasn’t all that concerned with concentration of people into a limited space but he was concerned with the effects of this compaction.
Size he already thought led to superficiality and indifference
Density he thought produced a distancing effect
We become indifferent to the contrasts between squalor and splendor
We live in close proximity to one another but don’t care about each other
We begin to rely on artifacts (anything human-made)
We can find people who are like us, so we group with them and produce areas of the city in our own image
Again the results can be both positive and negative
Positive: coexistence of differences can lead to greater tolerance
Negative:
there are simply too many examples of exploitation and exclusion to suggest that we trust one another
The greater the number of social interactions , the greater the possibility that they will interfere or conflict with one another
The result is the creation of new forms of social control
The clock
The traffic signal
Density causes us to change the media through which we orient ourselves to our urban milieu
How do we learn about events, other people, problems? (radio, internet, television, newspaper, gossip, tabloids)
We might/can live “closer” to people that we have no emotional or sentimental ties with

Question 55

Why is the where question of urban encounters important?

Answer 55

“The urban world puts a premium on visual recognition” (Lewis Wirth)

The where question of urban encounters is important because our knowledge of strangers is shaped by where we see them and how they appear
Think for a moment and reflect on how many times you said/noticed that someone seems to be out of their element/ “out of place”
A reliance on superficial attributes (clothing, language, public behavior, and other visible signs)

Question 56

What is the formula for how anomie (all about you) is created?

Answer 56

dynamic density –> [division of labor, heterogeneity, mobility] –>anonymity –>anomie

Question 57

Why do cities cause social heteorgeneity?

Answer 57

The city breaks down stable identities
Instability
Insecurity
Greater sophistication
Cosmopolitanism (more than a single allegiance to a particular group or social status)
People participate in many social circles – none of which can command their undivided attention
We have a different status or even a different identity in each circle
The urban personality becomes disorganized
Urban space becomes fluid, unstable

Question 58

What negative attributes can cities cause?

Answer 58

Isolation - Compacted physically, yet isolated socially, the city populace is seen as a lonely crowd
Anomie – who is involved more in collective life?
Alienation – does city life cause our aspirations to skyrocket beyond reason leaving us feeling powerless.
Deviance – rates of crime, or other moral deprivations (alcohol, divorce, illegitimacy, suicide, religious affiliation)
Malaise - in an environment where one is surrounded by deviance (public misbehavior), beset by stimuli which tax one’s psychic capacities, and bereft of close personal ties, malaise should be expected

Question 59

We shouldn’t forget that urban growth is more than accounting for a population increase ….

Answer 59

There is a spatial component as well

Question 60

What was the First Migration?

Answer 60

First Migration
Massive immigration from Europe
People driven by social dissatisfaction, religious persecution, economic need
Arrived at compact coastal settlements (New Amsterdam, Boston, Baltimore, Charles Town, New Orleans)
Irish, Scots, English, Germans and Swiss, and enslaved Africans

Question 61

What was the Second Migration? (1787-1890)

Answer 61

Second Migration (1787-1890)
The U.S. government’s institutionalization of land grants and other incentives help encourage town building and land speculation on a vast scale – triggering the settlement of new communities across the continent
People leave Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia to seek their fortunes elsewhere (settling valleys and highlands near the coast and then along rivers (Ohio River valley)
In short, the urban system begins to stretch across the vast interior
Settlement was driven by overland trails, railroads, and interior watercourses
Homestead Act (1862)

Question 62

What was the Third Migration?

Answer 62

Third Migration (began around 1820 but was at its most powerful from 1870-1920)
New forms of industrial entrepreneurship, new technologies challenge agrarian lifestyles
Steam power/electricity rearranged settlement patterns
People migrated wherever factories/mines/machinery were located
Factory and trading centers grew quickly (Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, etc.)
By 1920, unprecedented numbers of people lived in cities – a majority of U.S. residents
Cities begin to dominate federal politics
The rise of suburbs and the widespread influence of the technologies, factors and forces that made them possible/desirable
The end of the first great Black migration from the South signaled the tail end of the third migration

Question 63

What was the Fourth Migration?

Answer 63

Fourth Migration
Began with the widespread acceptance of the automobile
In 1900 there were only 8,000 motorcars in the United States
By 1920, there were 8 million (and it was just the beginning)
Bolstered by the Federal Aid Road Acts (1916) to the Interstate Highway System (1944, 1956) the country’s urban system expanded to almost unfathomable dimensions
Aided by the founding of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in 1934 and its program of insuring mortgages for privately owned, bank-financed houses (aka: more new houses could be built and more people could afford them) [suburban life became cheaper than city living]
The FDA and highway system literally helped to drive jobs right out of the city into the suburbs (and most things followed – retail, services, schools, recreation opportunities, civic amenities, etc.)
Better real estate and more privacy was to be found 20 miles, then 50 miles beyond the city’s edge
By 1970, suburbanites outnumbered central city dwellers
And the suburbs built during the fourth migration were unlike those of the previous migration – any place would do so long as roads (access) and jobs were available (farms, woods, river delta, marsh, prairie, desert)
The fourth migration is not over but some argue that Black migration to the suburbs (now more than 30% of Black Americans live in suburban neighborhoods) may cap the this movement

Question 64

What was the Fifth Migration?

Answer 64

Fifth Migration
This migration began around 1970
The attractiveness of a place might not be driven by easy highway access or government credit
A different population is moving (no longer a disadvantaged population seeking unskilled jobs)
A different population who is less concerned about living in the suburbs, but working in the city
Instead, many of today’s migrants are placing a higher priority on leisure, health and personal safety
Not a young population on the move as before
Today, retirees (the elderly population of America) is expected to double from 1990 to 2030)
Where will they go?
How will their decision alter land use?
Will there be new urban patterns?