Final Flashcards
What are ‘conurbations?’
- large, poly-centric city regions, a logical evolution of previous kinds of cities
- coined by Patrick Geddes (1845-1932)
- influenced by Darwinian evolution
What is a ‘desakota’?
a region of an intense mixture of agricultural and nonagricultural activities stretching between large city cores
Why do the new urban theorists disagree with the urban ecologists?
On what happens to community when cities become global city-regions…
Urban ecologists: metropolitan communities are held together by
- functional interdependence
- a complex division of labour
- advances in technology
- a natural tendency towards equilibrium or balance
New urban theorists: metropolis is shaped by
- the inequalities of global capital
- the new international division of labour (NIDL)
- local politics coalitions and social/cultural divisions
How did Constantine Doxiadis view cities?
ecumenopolis, the “universal city”
- “We should realize that the universal city has already been born and is acquiring dimensions which will eventually cover the entire inhabitable Earth.”
- urban processes shaping all kinds of landscapes on the planet
What is ‘Cascadia’?
cities and suburbs from Vancouver BC, to Seattle and Tacoma WA, to Portland OR
How has urban ecology been involved in contemporary U.S. politics?
- today’s urban economists in favour of free markets:
“although individual societies rise and fall over the long wave, human society tends to progress through cumulative advances and transferability of technology and economic organization. The result is societal growth measured in terms of system complexity, energy and products consumed, territory covered, and population supported.”
Who is Lucia Vega Jimenez?
- example of Castell’s analysis of how “information society” is partitioned between the space of places and the space of flows: the corridors and halls that connect places around the world have to be understood as exchanges and social refuges, as homes on the run, as much as offices on the run
- these are “essential matters that do not concern only the cosmopolitan elite, part of the new urban experience of hundreds of millions.”
- Lucia Vega Jimenez lost her life as a result of racist immigration laws
- “The holding cells below the Vancouver International Airport and Vancouver Public Library are a grim metaphor of the invisible underclass of 11,000 migrant detainees, including children, held in CBSA custody every year.”
Where is Vancouver’s Trump Tower?
Coal Harbour, across from Shangri-La tower on West Georgia (permanently closed)
Who is Aihwa Ong?
- anthropologist who describes her identity as “a Huaqiao (overseas Chinese), or a Straits Chinese born in Malaysia.”
- author of flexible citizenship: the cultural logics of transnationality
- sense of alienation rather than spiritual homecoming when visiting China, visited booming Southern cities, “My sense of alienation was enhanced by racial/cultural chauvinism and the pronounced importance of degrees of perceived Chineseness in shaping local views about wealth and modernity.”
What is the ‘space of flows’?
Manuel Castells: the increasingly rapid movements of capital investment, communications messages, and people going from one place to another
What is the relation between social media usage and levels of urbanization?
- 40% of cross-national variance of Facebook penetration rates can be associated with cross-national urbanization rates
- social media has transformed key aspects of urban social relations (suburban + rural too_
How does Louis Wirth’s perspective on urbanism as a way of life help us understand social media?
- Increasing “size of the population aggregate”
- will affect the relations between them and the character of the city
- more individual variation
- limits possibility of all members knowing each other personally
- changes character of social relationship - The segmented self
- urbanites meet each other in segmental roles
- acquaintances are usually in a relationship of utility
- explains schizoid character of urban personality
- individual gains freedom from emotional controls of intimate groups
- loses spontaneous self expression, morale, sense of participation that exists in integrated societies - urbanites are bound to exert themselves by joining with others of similar interests into organized groups to obtain their ends
- results in growth of community groups, volunteer organizations
- Self and society
What does ‘urban system’ mean?
a network of interdependent urban places
- significant changes in one city will have consequences for other cities in the system
- more than a century of research and documents regularities in urban systems - measurable, predictable relations between cities of different sizes (eg. urban system stability)
Louis Wirth
- born in Gemunden, Germany; family home was a “social center” in the village
- emigrated to America, received scholarship to University of Chicago before WWI, discovered new field of sociology in courses with Albion W. Small, Robert E. Park, and Ernest W. Burgess
- graduated from Chicago w/ 3 degrees, became professor under Park in sociology dept.
Wirth’s theory
there’s a distinctively urban personality: “Urbanism as a Way of Life” (1938)
- cold, instrument rationality
- individual isolation
- a segmented self of multi-faceted roles in complex divisions of labour
urban system stability
interpreted as evidence of
- economic equilibrium
- spatial regularities in human behaviour
- path dependencies in settlement, migration, and policy
- -> in US 1790-2000, industrial cities rise/fall, but system remains stable and reproduces itself
How has Wirth’s ‘segmented self’ been abused in U.S. politics?
- Trump spoke more directly than ever before to the extreme fringes of the Republican coalition, including white nationalists angry about the multi-racial, multi-cultural evolution of the nation (led by its cities and people who get their news from alternative media and social media, and who are vulnerable to conspiracy theories to make sense of an increasingly unstable, insecure, and changing economy and society
- Wylie created Bannon’s “mindfuck” tool to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup
- Russian interference with 2016 election
What was Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s perspective on the most consequential decision of the U.S. Supreme Court?
Loving v. Virginia: (1967)
- decision that held anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional (despite Brown, several states still banned interracial marriage)
- unanimous decision that was meant to end apartheid in America
How do cities reflect and influence relations of race, ethnicity, and identity?
- socio-spatial dialectic: space shapes society, but society also shapes space (Grace Lee Boggs)
- -> the socio-spatial dialectic of segregation vs. mixture
- segregation still persists:
- 78 percent of Blacks and Whites would have to move in order to create a perfectly integrated city.
- number of Blacks stopped and frisked was 2.29 times their share of the population - diversity, mixture, hybridity:
- In the Vancouver Metropolitan region, 48.9 percent of people identify as “visible minorities”
- at least in the Global North / West, many large cities are now “majority-minority
- examples of conflict, misunderstanding, and tension are manifest almost everywhere. Less obvious, but just as prevalent, are examples of resourceful ways diverse people are working together (Camarillo)
new urban theorists
- interpret social change and urbanization in terms of the way societal processes and structures produce advantages for some groups and disadvantages for others
- 3 questions:
1. what is so natural about power and poverty, wealth and inequality
2. how can the metropolis be the natural outcome of equilibrium when nearly all cities are structured by the powerful institutions of governments, corporations, and transnational capital investment
3. why use biological metaphors to understand the metropolis when politics is far more important? human nature is what we decide to make it - David Harvey, Audrey Kobayashi, Ruth Wilson-Gilmore, Joe Darden, Manuel Castells
urban ecologists
- optimists, emphasize technology, modernization and progress
- improvements in transportation and communications technology result in constant movement and communication that tie the vast metropolis together and help maintain a sense of metropolitan identity
- Chicago School, human ecology
What does the history of the Irish and Italians in U.S. cities teach us about race, ethnicity, and identity?
Whiteness is a concept that evolved furthest in United States in the middle of the twentieth century, as the descendants of European immigrants gradually forgot the differences between Irish, French, Germans, Italians, etc. – as they came to see themselves as separate from 1) African Americans, and 2) new immigrants from Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
intersectionality
(Kimberle Crenshaw) Axes of social difference – such as race and gender – are interactive, additive, and cumulative. This means that some people will experience multiple kinds of disadvantage, while others will enjoy multiple kinds of privilege
What are the dilemmas of surveys and statistics on race and ethnicity?
- long form census: a legal infrastructure to monitor racial and ethnic inequalities, to help eliminate discrimination
- Counting and categorizing emerge from a racist history, and these practices can perpetuate differences, encouraging people to see themselves in terms of categories and separation
- not counting makes it nearly impossible to document and challenge injustice, and if we simply eliminate racial data, that does not automatically eliminate racial inequality – it just makes it invisible (David Theo Goldberg)