L16: Critical Urban Geography Flashcards
Privatization of urban space
- selling of state-owned enterprises, goods, and services to private investors
- Issues: concentrated wealth in a few hands, public must pay more for basic needs
gentrification
the displacement of low income residents in the pursuit of reinvestment and resettlement by the middle or upper classes
Rent gap
Acts as an explanation for gentrification. According to theory investors will be most likely to purchase land when there is a disparity between current value and possible future value (pretty much buying when prices are low and then jacking them up)
Speculation (land or housing)
When people/companies invest in buildings or land not to primarily to use, but to hold for a period of time, in the hope that their price on the market will increase so that they can be sold again for profit
Sweat Equity
unpaid labor employees and cash-strapped entrepreneurs put into a project
- ex. Homeowners fixing and updating their own homes, gives better value to property
public urban geographies
Analysis of the public sphere in hopes of improving the lives of those who live and work there
Mixed neighbourhoods
Relates to opinion in reading. Mixed neighbourhoods may not always be a good idea because marginalized groups less likely to benefit. Despite theories, when put into practices desired results are not actualized.
- ex. strong social networks and positive bonds of community are often destroyed
- ex. social cohesion fails to occur
right to the city
Coined by Henri Lefebvre, it is phrase used to describe working class struggles for political space in the city
- focuses on role of ordinary people in opposing the erosion of the urban public realm by private development sector
- wants a more socially inclusive public sphere
- ideal city
- against neoliberalism
- ex. Activism against La Cite development near the McGill Ghetto
neoliberalism
ideology that assumes that the competitive free market is the most efficient way of organizing the economy and society in general
5 main points
1. Rule of market (fewer regulations, reduction of wages, de-unionization, total freedom of movement of capital)
2. Cut public expenditure for social services (reduce funding)
3. Deregulation
4. Privatization (selling state owned enterprises to private development sector)
5. Eliminating the idea of a public good
urban entrpreneurialism
outsourcing of state activities to the private sector and the reframing of cities as competitive entities and commodities to be sold
ordinary urbanism
Interest in ordinary urban lives. Gives insight onto greater forces.
- Important to study real people
- Connect scholarly theories about urban change to communities and their struggles
urban renewal
The extensive state-led redevelopment in mid-twentieth century Europe and North America. Pattern of destroying established residential areas and turning them into commercial sectors
David Harvey
Influential urban geographer who was one of the first to consider the city from an explicitly critical perspective
- “The grandfather of critical geography”
- built his career fighting injustice
- particular focus on wider economic contexts that effect urban sphere
Chicago School
Presents a modernist theory of cities as based on social darwinist struggles for urban space
- comes with limitations
- Work done was highly influential on urban theory
Myth of the American Dream
Idea that anyone is able to access social mobility by living in the US.
- Impoverished but hard working immigrants are believed to be able to move up the socioeconomic hierarchy and move out of the inner city to bigger and better housing in the suburbs
- means that many people believe neighbourhoods are natural areas for particular populations and neighbourhood change is desirable
