Midterm

Question 1

when did the world cross the majority urban threshold?

Answer 1

2007

Question 2

significance of “territorial stigmatization”

Answer 2

eg. downtown eastside
- very dangerous, must be careful about “blocking off” areas of the city
- how is it that social problems become spatially concentrated in certain urban places?

Question 3

significance of crossing majority urban threshold

Answer 3

1. no generation before has experienced planetary urbanization
2. at same time, world crossed mobile threshold (smartphones “untethered” computing from fixed locations)
3. at same time, world crossed robotic threshold (online, humans were outnumbered by bots and algorithms)
   - -> smart cities

Question 4

territorial stigmatization

Answer 4

blaming places for social problems that may be caused by things going on elsewhere

Question 5

“insider as insighter” doctrine

Answer 5

1. doesn’t solve every problem of how to portray and understand the complexity of urban life
2. insiders can become globally-recognized representatives and targets for scrutiny
3. cannot be absolute - otherwise scientists could only study people exactly like themselves

Question 6

“insider as insighter” definition

Answer 6

You have to be one to understand one. That is, outsiders cannot truly understand insiders. This doctrine holds that individuals have a monopoly on knowledge or privileged access to understanding by virtue of their group membership or social position, or lack of it.

Question 7

transcending the “insider as insighter” doctrine

Answer 7

1. do or read fieldwork studies
2. open heart and mind on the road
3. reading, watching, and listening carefully, respectfully, and modestly

Question 8

difference between acquaintance with and knowledge of urban life

Answer 8

1. news, novels, and art can make us feel as if we have experienced something ourselves
2. images and words may substitute for personal experience, giving us ‘unexperienced experience.
3. language, image, and sound can substitute for “acquaintance with” types of knowledge
   eg. portrayal of downtown eastside

Question 9

positivism

Answer 9

A theory of knowledge that seeks causal explanations by analyzing the relations among observed phenomena

Question 10

criticisms of positivism and rational extraction

Answer 10

1. the scientific method’s assumptions that there are causes and effects that can be tested
2. that objectivity can be achieved
3. that subjective insight plays no role in actual scientific endeavors
4. the very notion of objectivity is suspect
5. the positivists’ clear distinction between facts and values

Question 11

why positivism and rational extraction remain important

Answer 11

• the ideal of scientific objectivity may be too important to discard, but it is also the most widely criticized
• positivism remains important; but it should always be integrated carefully with an understanding of history, politics, culture, and other ‘non-positivist’ kinds of knowledge

Question 12

importance of the 548+ cities with over 1 million

Answer 12

some mega-cities have more people than nation-states

Question 13

implications of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle for urban studies

Answer 13

1. observers can never remove themselves (and their biases and preconceptions) from the act of observation
2. it is impossible to observe something without changing it in some way, and the change may be unpredictable
3. we cannot study things without adopting some point of view
4. science can never be entirely value-neutral, and facts cannot be cleanly separated from values

Question 14

Chicago school of urban sociology

Answer 14

a group of scholars at the University of Chicago who used positivism to claim scientific credibility for a new discipline. The Chicago School approach emphasized careful, objective observation, and the search for general rules of how cities developed. Ernest Burgess, for example, proposed a “concentric zone” model to generalize where different groups lived inside the city. The Chicago School approach was used in cities throughout the world, and dominated social inquiry from the 1920s through the 1960s.

Question 15

Global network university (John Sexton)

Answer 15

Instead of waiting for the best international students to apply, N.Y.U. will go to them, students enter the university through three ‘portal campuses’: N.Y.U. New York; N.Y.U. Shanghai; and N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi. They leave the portals to spend up to three semesters circulating through the school’s thirteen study-away sites, situated in ‘idea capitals’ like Berlin, Accra, Buenos Aires, and Sydney.
“an extrapolation of the theories of the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who predicted that people around the world would become increasingly interconnected: a membrane called the ‘noösphere,’ self-aware and god-like, would envelope the earth. ‘We – humankind – find ourselves at an inflection point, a critical threshold,’ Sexton has written.’”

Question 16

How does the development of the interdisciplinary field of urban studies fit into the wider history of academic disciplines?

Answer 16

• increasingly, teachers, grad students, and researchers are becoming interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary
• it developed in the 1960s as a response to the needs of academics and practitioners who sought a less piecemeal approach to urban phenomena
• often viewed as either a multi-disciplinary or an interdisciplinary field focusing on urban-related theory, issues, and policies

Question 17

hypothesis example

Answer 17

because there are no homeless shelters in Shaughnessy, the council must have fought attempts to build any

Question 18

V. Gordon Childe

Answer 18

(1892 - 1957)
Childe saw the agricultural surplus of the fertile river floodplains of Mesopotamia as the key to understanding the social and cultural development of an urban civilization. In his famous synthesis of 1950, “the Urban Revolution,” he outlines ten criteria for identifying a true urban civilization.

Question 19

Childe’s materialist perspective on urbanization came to be summarized as the “POET” complex:

Answer 19

Population
Organization
Environment
Technology

Question 20

Çatal Hüyük

Answer 20

Archaeological excavations have provided evidence of cities, or at least “proto-urbanization,” 7,500 BCE

Question 21

What was the most important evidence that helped Martin Bernal re-think our conventional wisdom about ancient Greece?

Answer 21

Black Athena: connections between languages revealed that Greece was settled by Egyptians and Semites, rejected by Eurocentrists

Question 22

factors that have re-shaped knowledge about first cities

Answer 22

1. new archaeological fieldwork and technologies of observation and measurement
2. non-positivist interpretations of the experience and meaning of ancient urban civilizations (ex. stories of ancient greek city-states)
3. ongoing debates over historiography (ex. Black Athena)

Question 23

“Future of the Past”

Answer 23

means that factors in the future reshape our knowledge of the past

Question 24

Ferdinand Tönnies

Answer 24

1. gemeinschaft (community) - strong family ties, preindustrial rural life
2. gesellschaft (society) - fast paced, transient, impersonal nature of city life, bad according to Tonnies

Question 25

Emile Durkheim

Answer 25

1. mechanical solidarity: a collective conscience maintained by strong family ties, a shared moral code, and close proximity - social control achieved through legal codes that emphasize retaliation and punishment for crimes that violate the “collective conscience”
2. organic solidarity: based on functional interdependence that was created by an increasingly complex division of labour - social control achieved through legal codes that emphasize impersonal, contractual restitution
3. anomie: the social void - complex divisions of labour become dysfunctional, leave individuals feeling alienated

Question 26

Georg Simmel

Answer 26

metropolis fundamentally transforms mental life - “tempo and multiplicity” of urban vs “slower, more habitual, rhythm of small town and rural existence”

Question 27

Louis Wirth

Answer 27

1. shift from primary to secondary relationships - interact in roles, not personally
2. density and heterogeneity - mosaic of social worlds in a city (what the individual loses, the city gains)

Question 28

neoliberalism

Answer 28

ex. Deng Xiaoping (China, 1978), Margaret Thatcher (UK), Paul Volcker and Ronald Reagan (USA, 1979-80)
- revival of 1700s/1880s classical liberalism (Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo)
- “proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong property rights, free markets, and free trade”

Question 29

axioms of neoliberalism

Answer 29

1. people act in their own rational self-interest
2. consumers are sovereign in the marketplace
3. the market is self-regulating
4. the “invisible hand” works to serve the public interest and bring about social equilibrium
5. a rising tide lifts all boats
6. wealth trickles down from top to bottom

Question 30

how does neoliberalism remake cities

Answer 30

1. the freedom of “free” markets and private property rights must be protected by the state, by the threat of police force and violence
2. cities are forced to compete for economic investment
3. whereas government policy in the past tried to moderate social inequalities, today’s policies tend to reinforce and intensify unequal outcomes
4. cities themselves become the subject of schemes to accumulate capital, creating massive bubbles (ex. global financial crisis of 2008)

Question 31

Immanuel Wallerstein

Answer 31

In a series of books and articles, the historian (1930-2019) has shown how the history of capitalism since the 1500s has produced an integrated world system of uneven economic and political power (World Systems Theory)

Question 32

World Systems Theory

Answer 32

1. dominant “core” achieves wealth through exploitation of impoverished “periphery” that supplies cheap labour, natural resources, markets for excess production, and dumping grounds for wastes
2. some countries can get into a highly competitive, unstable “semi-periphery” but only if they can exploit weaker countries

Question 33

attacks on “suburbia”

Answer 33

1. Kunstler - bad architecture, bad decisions designing landscapes creates place not worth caring about
2. Mumford - ultimate effect of suburban escape is a low-grade, uniform environment from which escape is impossible
3. Whyte - empirical evidence that suburbia encouraged standardization and conformity
4. Friedan - women in suburbs spend more time on unpaid housework (empirical evidence in Vancouver Metropolitan region)

Question 34

problems with critiques of suburbia

Answer 34

1. the preferences of many who live in suburbia
2. the positionality of the critics
3. the increasing complexity and diversity of suburbia

Question 35

William Levitt

Answer 35

“King of suburbia”

• family business building war workers’ housing on contract with US military in the 1940s
• largest private housing project in American history on 4000 acres in NY after war, negotiated largest line of government credit to help returning soldiers buy homes

Question 36

Levittown

Answer 36

saw principles of industrialized mass-production and adapted to house building, refused to sell to African Americans

Question 37

modernization theory

Answer 37

theory of economic development that is optimistic that all countries can become wealthy if a “modernizing elite” is allowed to lead a country through trade, technology, and development - “the stages of economic development”

• eg. most governments, international institutions like the World Bank, and corporations
• political ideology can corrupt economy

Question 38

spatially distant neighbours (Ananya Roy)

Answer 38

middle class have a limited, sanitized experience with poverty

Question 39

spatially distant neighbours (Ananya Roy)

Answer 39

• middle class have a limited, sanitized experience with poverty
• if America is so rich, how are there homeless people?
• poverty is a relational concept - Rajan felt better off in his squatter shack than homeless in America because while he was poor, he was not homeless
• while poverty in the third world seems familiar, poverty at home seems unknowable (spatially proximate strangers)
• the rich have state help, the poor have self help

Question 40

urbanization in the Global North vs Global South

Answer 40

the global north is urbanized, the global south rapidly becoming urbanized

Question 41

urbanization in the Global North

Answer 41

already been urbanized, and are more than 75 percent urban - but now the rate of change in the urban share is very slow

Question 42

urbanization in the Global South

Answer 42

much lower urban shares - a little more than one-third - but the rate of change, the pace of urbanization, is much faster

Question 43

Daguerre’s first photograph

Answer 43

the only two humans that appeared in the street scene were a man and a shoe shiner, because nobody else stayed in the same place for long enough to appear

Question 44

critical visual theory

Answer 44

a body of knowledge that emphasizes how photographs are more than simple reflections of reality - photography is a complex social, cultural, and economic process, and it influences how people perceive experience the world

Question 45

postmodernism

Answer 45

developed in France in the 1960s, became influential around the world, especially on the west coast of North America (San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles)

Question 46

influence of postmodernism on study of cities

Answer 46

Los Angeles school (challengers of Chicago school) emphasized diversity, indeterminacy, and a multiplicity of new ways of knowing, “what you see depends on where you are seeing it from”
- profound implications on the technologies of digital communication (silicon valley), and the entertainment industry (hollywood), transforming our perceptions of the real world and blending with imagined worlds, shape how people perceive cities, eg. Baltimore in the Wire