Question

urban --- for 1500 words each question

1. Discuss the particular nature of the urban context in shaping the social life in modern society.

2. Explain the major geographical and sociological perspectives on urban development.

3. Examine the critical urban issues in global and local contexts.

Answer 1

Ans 1. The nature of cities, including declarations that the urban is an incoherent concept, that urban society is nothing less than modern society as a whole, that the urban scale can no longer be separated from the global scale, and that urban theory hitherto has been deeply vitiated by its almost exclusive concentration on the cities of the global North. This article offers some points of clarification of claims like these. All cities can be understood in terms of a theoretical framework that combines two main processes, namely, the dynamics of agglomeration/polarization, and the unfolding of an associated nexus of locations, land uses and human interactions. This same framework can be used to identify many different varieties of cities, and to distinguish intrinsically urban phenomena from the rest of social reality. The discussion thus identifies the common dimensions of all cities without, on the one hand, exaggerating the scope of urban theory, or on the other hand, asserting that every individual city is an irreducible special case.With the increased mobility that has accompanied globalization, cities have become main venues of social and political transformation. Main urban centers are situated within transnational networks of economic and cultural exchange, which turned them into strategic spaces for the global economy, but also arenas where the diversity challenges traditional ideas of citizenship and fosters new citizenship practices and identities . While different authors have pointed out that anonymity and alienation are typical traits of urban lifestyles (Simmel 1903; Beck 1992; Castells 1983), mushrooming grassroots initiatives seem to prove that the urban environment can be a fertile ground for new as well as traditional forms of civic engagement. Rooted in-between the private and public spheres, urban activism grows from concrete challenges like density, diversity and an imbalance of power among urban stakeholders. These stimulate the development of a specifically urban civil sphere as described by Alexander (2003), including place-oriented, democracy-oriented as well as ‘quality of life’-oriented forms of social engagement and collective action. It embodies opposition to the general trends of privatization of public spaces and housing, socio-spatial segregation and residents’ lack of access to decision-making influencing their everyday life. Worldwide, the growing professionalization and institutionalization of some urban movements (thus distancing themselves from the radical postulates) generated cleavages in the urban movement environment, as many emerging initiatives were critical of co-optation and routinization of local organizations activities. This bifurcation of the urban activism strengthened the mobilization of the city’s middle class, whose representatives were involved in both progressive (ecological, feminist, anti-war) and conservative (reactionary or NIMBY) activities.As a result, in the last years, we can observe the development of a global network of organizations and initiatives representing the rights of residents (such as the Social Forum, Attac or Future of Places), guided by slogans of spatial justice and residents well-being. At the same time, global demands for democratization are translated into the local context and actions of urban movements. As in the case of other social movements (e.g., women’s or ecological movements), urban movements from the very beginning have had the character of a multi-level network combining various forms of urban involvement, such as grassroots neighborhood initiatives, protest groups or local associations. As shown by the historical analyses, over time the level of diversity and complexity of this network increased, and its composition was dynamically changing with the transition of some organizations from the area of civil society to the field of public services or party politics and the emergence of new allies (like squatter movements and tenant associations). As a result of its liquid and multi-level character, operating as a loose network of organizations, initiatives and individual actors function now both on the global level, and in individual cities and even local communities. In some cases, also national or regional urban movement platforms operating at the meso-level are emerging, as is the case with the Congress of Urban Movements in Poland (Domaradzka 2018), Right to the City Alliance in the USA (Sinha and Kasdan 2013) or Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca movement in Spain (Santos 2018).

Ans.2. The three major sociological perspectives offer important but varying insights to help us understand urbanization. Table 14.1 "Theory Snapshot" summarizes their assumptions.

Table 14.1 Theory Snapshot

Theoretical perspective	Major assumptions
Functionalism	Cities serve many important functions for society but also have their dysfunctions. Functionalist theorists differ on the relative merits and disadvantages of urban life, and in particular on the degree to which a sense of community and social bonding exists within cities.
Conflict theory	Cities are run by political and economic elites that use their resources to enrich their positions and to take resources from the poor and people of color. The diversity of social backgrounds found in cities contributes to conflict over norms and values.
Symbolic interactionism	City residents differ in their types of interaction and perceptions of urban life. Cities are not chaotic places but rather locations in which strong norms and values exist.

Functionalism

A basic debate within the functionalist perspective centers on the relative merits of cities and urbanization: In what ways and to what extent are cities useful (functional) for society, and in what ways and to what extent are cities disadvantageous and even harmful (dysfunctional) for society? Put more simply, are cities good or bad?

In essence, there is no one answer to this question, because cities are too complex for a simple answer. Cities are both good and bad. They are sites of creativity, high culture, population diversity, and excitement, but they are also sites of crime, impersonality, and other problems.

Since sociologists began studying urbanization in the early years of the discipline, an important question has been the degree to which cities are impersonal and alienating for their residents. In 1887, German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1887/1963) raised this question when he wrote about the changes that occurred as societies changed from small, rural, and traditional cultures to larger, urban, and industrial settings. He said that a sense of community, or Gemeinschaft, characterizes traditional societies. In these societies, family, kin, and community ties are quite strong, with people caring for each other and looking out for one another. As societies grew and industrialized and as people moved to cities, he wrote, social ties weakened and became more impersonal. Tönnies called this type of society a Gesellschaft, and he was quite critical of this development. He lamented the loss in urban societies of close social bonds and of a strong sense of community, and he feared that a sense of rootlessness in these societies begins to replace the feeling of stability and steadiness characteristic of small, rural societies.

One of the key founders of sociology, French scholar Émile Durkheim, was more positive than Tönnies about the nature of cities and urbanized societies. He certainly appreciated the social bonds and community feeling, which he called mechanical solidarity, characteristic of small, rural societies. However, he also thought that these societies stifled individual freedom and that social ties still exist in larger, urban societies. He called these latter ties organic solidarity, which he said stems from the division of labor. When there is a division of labor, he wrote, everyone has to depend on everyone else to perform their jobs. This interdependence of roles creases a solidarity that retains much of the bonding and sense of community found in small, rural societies (Durkheim, 1893/1933).

Contemporary research tends to emphasize that strong social bonds do exist in cities. Although cities can be anonymous (think of the mass of people walking by each other on a busy street in the downtown area of a large city), many city residents live in neighborhoods where people do know each other, associate with each other, and look out for each other. In these neighborhoods, a sense of community and strong social bonds do, in fact, exist.

Urbanism as a way of life.urban residents are more tolerant than rural residents of nontraditional attitudes, behaviors, and lifestyles, in part because they are much more exposed than rural residents to these nontraditional ways. Supporting Wirth’s hypothesis, contemporary research finds that urban residents indeed hold more tolerant views on several kinds of issues.

Conflict Theory

Conflict theory assumes a basic conflict between society’s “haves” and “have-nots,” or between the economic and political elites and the poor and people of color. This type of conflict, says conflict theory, manifests itself especially in the nation’s cities, in which the “haves” and “have-nots” live very different lives. On the one hand, the rich in American cities live in luxurious apartments and work in high-rise corporate buildings, and they dine at the finest restaurants and shop at the most expensive stores. On the other hand, the poor and people of color live in dilapidated housing and can often barely make ends meet.

Beyond this basic disparity of city life, conflict theorists add that the diverse backgrounds and interests of city residents often lead to conflict because some residents’ beliefs and practices clash with those of other residents.  crime is the result of “culture conflict.” In particular, he wrote that crime by immigrants often results from the clash of their traditional ways of thinking and acting with the norms of American society. As one example, he wrote that a father in New Jersey who had emigrated from Sicily killed a teenage boy who had slept with his daughter. The father was surprised when he was arrested by local police, because in the traditional Sicilian culture a man was permitted and even expected to defend his family’s honor by acting as the father did!

More recent applications of conflict theory to urbanization emphasize the importance of political economy, or the interaction of political and economic institutions and processes. In this way of thinking, political and economic elites in a city (bankers, real estate investors, politicians, and others) collaborate to advance their respective interests. Thus urban development often takes the form of displacing poor urban residents from their homes so that condominiums, high-rise banks and other corporate buildings, posh shopping malls, or other buildings favoring the rich can be built. More generally, these elites treat cities as settings for the growth of their wealth and power, rather than as settings where real people live, go to school, work at a job, and have friends and acquaintances.

Urban geography is the subdiscipline of geography that derives from a study of cities and urban processes. Urban geographers and urbanists examine various aspects of urban life and the built environment. Scholars, activists, and the public have participated in, studied, and critiqued flows of economic and natural resources, human and non-human bodies, patterns of development and infrastructure, political and institutional activities, governance, decay and renewal, and notions of socio-spatial inclusions, exclusions, and everyday life.

Urban geographers are primarily concerned with the ways in which cities and towns are constructed, governed and experienced. Alongside neighboring disciplines such as urban anthropology, urban planning and urban sociology, urban geography mostly investigates the impact of urban processes on the earth's surface's social and physical structures. Urban geographical research can be part of both human geography and physical geography.

The two fundamental aspects of cities and towns, from the geographic perspective are:

1. Location ("systems of cities"): spatial distribution and the complex patterns of movement, flows and linkages that bind them in space; and
2. Urban structure ("cities as systems"): study of patterns of distribution and interaction within cities, from quantitative, qualitative, structural, and behavioral perspectives.

Cities as centers of manufacturing and services

Cities differ in their economic makeup, their social and demographic characteristics, and the roles they play within the city system. One can trace these differences back to regional variations in the local resources on which growth was based during the early development of the urban pattern and in part to the subsequent shifts in the competitive advantage of regions brought about by changing locational forces affecting regional specialization within the framework of a market economy. The recognition of different city types is critical for the classification of cities in urban geography. For such classification, emphasis given in particular to functional town classification and the basic underlying dimensions of the city system.

The purpose of classifying cities is twofold. On the one hand, it is undertaken to search reality for hypotheses. In this context, the recognition of different types of cities on the basis of, for example, their functional specialization may enable the identification of spatial regularities in the distribution and structure of urban functions and the formulation of hypotheses about the resulting patterns. On the other hand, classification is undertaken to structure reality in order to test specific hypotheses that have already been formulated. For example, to test the hypotheses that cities with a diversified economy grow at a faster rate then those with a more specialized economic base, cities must first be classified so that diversified and specialized cities can be differentiated.

The simplest way to classify cities is to identify the distinctive role they play in the city system. There are three distinct roles:

1. central places functioning primarily as service centers for local hinterlands
2. transportation cities performing break-of-bulk and allied functions for larger regions
3. specialized-function cities, dominated by one activity such as mining, manufacturing or recreation and serving national and international markets

The composition of a city's labor force has traditionally been regarded as the best indicator of functional specialization, and different city types have been most frequently identified from the analysis of employment profiles. Specialization in a given activity is said to exist when employment in it exceeds some critical level.

The relationship between the city system and the development of manufacturing has become very apparent. The rapid growth and spread of cities within the heartland-hinterland framework after 1870 was conditioned to a large extent by industrial developments, and the decentralization of population within the urban system in recent years is related in large part to the movement of employment in manufacturing away from traditional industrial centers. Manufacturing is found in nearly all cities, but its importance is measured by the proportion of total earnings received by the inhabitants of an urban area. When 25 percent or more of the total earnings in an urban region derive from manufacturing, that urban area is arbitrarily designated as a manufacturing center.

The location of manufacturing is affected by myriad economic and non-economic factors, such as the nature of the material inputs, the factors of production, the market and transportation costs. Other important influences include agglomeration and external economies, public policy and personal preferences. Although it is difficult to evaluate precisely the effect of the market on the location of manufacturing activities, two considerations are involved:

• the nature of and demand for the product
• transportation costs

Urbanization

Urbanization, the transformation of population from rural to urban, is a major phenomenon of the modern era and a central topic of study.

Ans.3. For ecological science to facilitate urban sustainability, it is important to understand that cities, suburbs, villages, and exurbs around the world are highly dynamic and are exhibiting new forms and relations. The nature and variety of these changes go well beyond the familiar frameworks employed by ecologists, and draw attention to knowledge, data, and concepts from cities and research traditions that may be outside the experience of individual projects. We believe that combining specialized frameworks in a new synthesis is an important step to stimulate and organize new observations and analyses, and to accommodate urban changes that are not yet well documented by multi‐dimensional, interdisciplinary research in urban ecological science. This paper attempts to help ecologists navigate the changing intellectual landscape represented by global urbanization.

A prevalent model of urbanization, associated with industrialization in the Global North, is examined and its failures noted. The failure of this urban development model invites consideration of the emerging model of urban megaregions, and the appreciation of the diversity of models of urbanization and urban areas that are appropriate across the Global East and South as well as in the dynamic urban areas of the Global North. To emphasize the functional nature of the new forms of urbanization, we employ the “continuum of urbanity,” a conceptual model that accounts for the variety and increasing scope of connections within and between urban areas, and between urban and formerly distinct rural territories. The continuum of urbanity identifies the dimensions of social, economic, and bioecological differentiation and interaction that increasingly define and motivate the form and function of complex urbanized or urbanizing regions. The new synthesis of these conceptual frameworks helps recognize the dimensions of crisis and opportunity in established, growing, shrinking, and yet to be born cities and towns. Such crisis opens the way for enhancing the sustainability of urban areas.

city can narrowly refer to the central business district, or to dense commercial, residential, and industrial nodes in an urban region. But the inclusive sense of urban refers to the entirety of dense, heterogeneous, extensive settlements. It refers to mosaics that include such centers, but which interdigitate with agricultural and unmanaged lands (McGrath and Shane 2012). In this inclusive sense, the terms “city” or “urban” stand for extensive urbanized areas. Beyond this definition, there are shortcomings of specific models of the urban and of urbanization.

The concept of “city” has accumulated many assumptions. This does not mean that everybody makes all of these assumptions, but they clarify the conceptual space. For roughly the past 100 years, the city has been thought of in these ways: (1) centralized, (2) discrete, (3) industrially focused, (4) engineered for sanitation, (5) metropolitan cores, and (6) permanent and monumental (Melosi 2000, Gandy 2003, McGrath and Shane 2012). These classic assumptions highlight the changing nature of urban systems.

The classic city assumptions represent a snapshot. There is also a temporal model. It takes industrial cities, regions, and countries to be the epitome of a sequence of settlement, construction, innovation, and generation of wealth. This model suggests that industrial cities are the result of a trajectory that leads to stable, complex civil, economic, and material conditions. “Developed” areas are materially wealthy and subsidized by resource and human inputs from elsewhere (Ford 1991). They have institutions for managing the flows of resources, the production of goods, finances, and social interactions. They are also associated with monumental architecture and grand city layout.

But this temporal model of cities is flawed. The error is summed up in the term “postindustrial.” The life of cities clearly does not end with an ideal, persistent, stable industrial condition (Decker et al. 2002). Although cities have life, they do not have an organism‐like life cycle (Light 2009). In many situations that had been touted as the height of city development in the mid‐20th century, further change occurred. Many former industrial powerhouse cities lost much of their industrial economic base and jobs, along with huge proportions of their populations.

urban environmental problems taken by most international development agencies (a notable exception being the Dutch government’s DGIS, which explicitly includes the urban social environment as a focal area, alongside the urban physical environment). However, a review of a range of bilateral and multilateral donors suggests that several factors skew the operational definition of environment away from many of the central environmental concerns of the urban poor:

1. Responsibility for taking the lead on environmental matters is often assigned to divisions that are not directly involved in urban development assistance on the grounds that the environment generally, and natural resources in particular, are primarily rural concerns. Such divisions are unlikely to have the knowledge or influence to promote urban environmental issues. Moreover, they have a tendency to define environment in natural resource management terms, which can easily lead to ignoring the environmental health issues that are of particular concern to the urban poor. National and local environmental agencies in recipient countries, the natural counterparts of environmental staff in development agencies, also tend to define their role as one of ‘protecting’ the environment and to view most of the environmental threats in low-income neighborhoods as beyond their mandate.
   
2. Broad definitions are employed to illustrate the importance of environmental issues but narrower definitions are used to construct environmental indicators, while still narrower definitions are typically employed to identify environmental programs and projects. Thus, for example:
   • It is routinely noted that millions of deaths every year from diarrhea and respiratory infections could be prevented by environmental improvements.
   • Statistics on household access to water and sanitation are only sometimes included in lists of environmental indicators.
   • The projects that target such improvements are generally infrastructure projects and are labeled as such (i.e. they are rarely part of a donor agency’s ‘environment’ portfolio).
   
   This can easily give the impression that environmental initiatives are responding to a far broader set of environmental concerns than they actually are, while at the same time ignoring environmental benefits that can come from ‘non-environmental’ initiatives.
   
3. Operationally, a distinction is often made between two different approaches to environmental improvement: investing in ‘stand-alone’ environmental initiatives and attempting to ‘mainstream’ environmental concerns into all development activities. It is generally held that ‘mainstreaming’ is ultimately more important. However, at least in its early stages, mainstreaming tends to define the environmental agenda in terms of reducing the environmental impacts of development in both urban and rural areas. Thus, in the urban context, the cross-cutting environmental goal is often expressed in terms of ‘protecting’ the environment or ‘preventing’ the degradation of urban water, land and air. Again, this can easily detract from the local environmental threats that are of particular concern to the urban poor.
   
4. Pressure from Northern environmentalists has been an important factor in convincing international development agencies to address environmental issues. Northern environmentalists are usually more concerned with regional and global issues involving the natural environment than with local environmental health burdens faced by the urban poor. Again, this reinforces a tendency to ignore the environmental threats facing the urban poor although it does put pressure on development agencies to address global environmental issues.

As international and local interest and capacity to address urban environmental problems increases, new, more locally-driven environmental strategies are also emerging. Many cities in Europe and America, and increasingly in Latin America, Asia and Africa are experimenting with city-wide initiatives to address environmental problems. Bilateral and even more often multilateral donors have been supporting a number of these initiatives, often called Local Agenda 21s. There is still much to learn from these local initiatives, including perhaps how best to define urban environmental problems in their local context. Ultimately, while it may be useful to define urban environmental problems in the abstract, operationally it may be more important to respond to local initiatives in a coherent fashion, whether or not they fit some abstract definition.