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178 Cards in this Set

  • Front
  • Back
an economic perspective of urban areas
concentrations of workers, consumers, households, and firms.
Why does economic activity cluster?
Agglomeration Economies - Firms seek to maximize profits through “economies of scale” -- increases in efficiency and productivity by maximizing the returns obtained from a given level of fixed costs. When economies of scale vary over space, they are called location-specific economies of scale, or agglomeration economies.
Alfred Marshall 1842-1924
the first to provide a detailed
analysis of agglomeration economies
Alfred Marshall identified three possible sources of agglomeration economies
1. Information spillovers.
2. Non-traded local inputs.
3. Local skilled labor pool.
1. Information spillovers.
If many firms in the same industry are clustered together, it
maximizes the opportunity for the sharing of partial, “tacit”
knowledge -- incomplete, non-traded information on market trends and what employees at different firms are doing.
2. Non-traded local inputs.
When certain firms rely on a specialized local infrastructure -- a transportation network, highly customized services or supplier networks -- they all share in the benefits, and the costs of provision decline as more firms join the cluster.
3. Local skilled labor pool.
Firms benefit by having sufficient quantities of labor, and highly specialized skills among workers. Labor recruitment and training/retraining costs for firms will be reduced when firms cluster together
Edgar M. Hoover, one of the first analysts in the field that came to be
known as regional science, classified agglomeration economies into
three types
1. Internal economies of scale.
2. Localization economies.
3. Urbanization economies.
1. Internal economies of scale.
Some firms achieve economies of scale simply by virtue of their size.
In this case, the benefits that Marshall identified as external become
internalized in a large, dominant firm that makes a large investment
in a particular location.
2. Localization economies.
When firms in the same industrial sector cluster together, each can achieve economies of scale through exchanges of information, skilled labor, and product development. Supplier firms specializing in aviation components (Seattle) or automobile components (Detroit, Birmingham) thrived for many years through localization economies
3. Urbanization economies.
Economies of scale can also benefit firms across many different sectors. Jane Jacobs (1960) extended Hoover’s work to illustrate how multiplier effects and tacit information could spread across different industries, so that one emergent industry cluster could quickly generate benefits for seemingly unrelated activities.
The urban-economic geographer William Coffee, in “Canadian Cities and Shifting Fortunes of Economic Development,” analyzes how employment in Canadian metropolitan regions has become increasingly:
1. Tertiarized
2. Professionalized
3. Tied to non-standard forms of employment
4. Dominated by new types of work
5. Composed of new production processes
6. Consolidated into large metropolitan areas,
but dispersed within these metropolitan areas
7. Integrated into the global economy
Economic base theory
Douglass North proposed a theory based on his research on the resource towns of Oregon and Washington. North theorized that “basic” sectors of a city’s economy -- those that export to other places -- determine the success of all other local, “non-basic” sectors. Earnings from exports of natural resources or manufactured goods, for example, generate income that is spent at local retailers and restaurants.
North’s theory began a debate. The prominent economist Charles Tiebout (1924-1968) suggested that, as an urban economy grows, its market becomes large enough to produce some goods and services locally that would have previously been imported -- what is called “import substitution.” For Tiebout, the size of a local economy depends on
1. The income derived from exports.
2. The proportion of this income spent on local goods and services -- the “local multiplier.”
3. The proportion of this spending that remains within the local economy -- instead of being siphoned off to non-local owners or governments.
The basic premise of economic base theory
that a region consists of exogenous and endogenous sectors, and that particular attention should be paid to the exogenous, or basic, sectors as the drivers -- is central to almost every structural economic model or forecasting system now in operation
the economies of Canadian cities
are simultaneously growing and becoming more local in their orientation. The income generated through exports no doubt is still crucial to the economic vitality of these cities, but our results suggest that the circulation of this income within the local economy has increased.”
Why can’t these debates be resolved once and for all?
1. Insufficient data.
While there is a wealth of data on national economies, until recently there has been very limited information at the urban and regional scale. Government statistical agencies, moreover, avoid providing data that could disclose the internal operations of corporations in particular places. Yet these are precisely the kinds of data that we would need for an accurate measurement of export base and local multiplier effects.
2. Misleading data.
Not everything that counts is counted. Informal and non-market activities -- including the activities of people who are working hard at activities that are not classified as “paid employment” -- are crucial to the daily lives of people in cities and regions. But these activities are not included in “official” economic accounts
The mix effect:
Local employment in a particular sector at the start of the time period, multiplied by the difference in the national growth rate for that sector and the national growth rate for all activities.

For manufacturing:
national growth rate for manufacturing: 9.04%
national growth rate for all activities: 18.49%
0.0904 - 0.1849 = -0.0945

mix effect
-0.0945 x 82,900 = -7,834
The local growth effect:
Local employment in a particular sector at the beginning of the time period, multiplied by the difference in the local growth rate for that sector and the national growth rate for that sector.

For manufacturing:
local growth rate for manufacturing: 37.39%
national growth rate for manufacturing: 9.04%
0.3739-0.0904 = 0.2835

mix effect
0.2835 x 82,900 = 23,502
END OF SLIDE!!
DOWN 1
Socialist Slides
Getter Done!!
The Swan House in Brussels
Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels met to draft the notes for an essay that became the Communist Manifesto. The Manifesto gave voice to a growing international movement that sought to challenge the stark inequalities of industrial capitalism: never before had the world seen such wealth, and never before had the world seen such inequality and impoverishment of people whose only way to survive was to sell their labor-power. The 1848 Manifesto was published just before a wave of revolutions across Europe, and later that year, Brussels leaders felt it most prudent to banish Marx and Engels from the city
socialism
- The word comes from the French socialisme, to describe the political climate of the French Revolution of 1789-1793
French Revolution of 1789-1793
inspired by demands for universal suffrage and full rights of participation in government -- a challenge to the established order of royalty backed up by the authority of the Catholic Church.
The meanings and realities of “socialism,” therefore, were contested from the onset...
As was mentioned above, it is claimed that the revolution was inspired by ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité, however; the seizing and maintenance of power against the established order of rolyalty was, in reality, authoritarian and militaristic -- and the old inequalities of feudalism were replaced by new inequalities based on property rights that betrayed the intentions of socialism.
The common theme of socialism
a desire for alternative ways of life with greater cooperation and equality rather than individualism, competition, and inequality. Yet the past two centuries have created a plurality of socialisms
plurality of socialisms
-Libertarian socialism,
- Christian socialism,
- Democratic socialism,
- Eco-socialism,
- Scientific socialism,
Libertarian socialism (Or Anarchism)
rejects the legitimacy of state authority
Christian socialism
seeks to restore religious institutions to the original radicalism of Jesus
Democratic socialism
tries to build popular support and alliances of workers in unions for incremental change
Eco-socialism
maintains that social justice cannot be achieved without ecological justice
Scientific socialism
is how Karl Marx described his theory of the dynamics of capitalism
Certain individuals worked across multiple categories of socialism. Once such person was J.S. Woodsworth
He was a Christian socialist and was an ordained Methodist minister who worked with the poor in Winnipeg’s North End, before receiving a pastoral posting in Gibson’s Landing, BC, in 1917. He resigned from the Church in 1918 because of its support for the War, and then became active as a democratic socialist, serving as the first leader of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, established in 1932 in the crisis and poverty of the Great Depression.
Geography’s history
has always been defined by power and resistance. The expansion of geographical knowledge has always been bound up with imperialism and colonialism, ever since the days of Strabo’s support for the Roman empire. But wider geographical knowledge brings new ways of thinking, which can be deeply subversive.
In relation to the history of Geography, the anarchist geographer Piotr Kropotkin (1842-1921) said...
“the duty of socially-concerned scientists lay in articulating the interests of subordinate social classes and combating poverty, underdevelopment and social justice.”
Urbanization has always involved actual or potential revolutionary change...
Since the “urban revolution” of Mesopotamia -- and perhaps much earlier -- one essence of the urban has been defined by density, heterogeneity, and divisions of labor involving political questions of how to allocate an economic surplus. Large, dense concentrations of heterogeneous populations under conditions of increasing inequality enhance the appeal of philosophies and social movements advocating alternative ways of life, cooperation, and equality.
1. How has state socialism shaped urban systems?
The answers depend in part on how state-socialist regimes came to power. Three factors are most important:
1. The geographical origins of revolutionary movements.
Urban-based movements viewed cities as the leading edge of development, modernity, and progress, while peasant-based revolutions viewed cities with suspicion.

2. World-systems historical-geographical context.
When vast empires became state-socialist regimes in Russia (1917) and China (1949), the immediate task was to consolidate national and regional power through urban-systems planning to serve national economic goals.

Smaller and later state-socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa were incorporated (sometimes with coercion) into established state-socialist networks of trade, investment, migration, political alliance, and assistance.

3. National geographical context.
In smaller states, new socialist regimes often confronted an urban system marked by a high degree of primacy inherited from the capitalist colonial period -- a disproportionate concentration of population, wealth, and economic development in a single, large city.
Principles for planning the socialist city, from the 1935 Moscow Plan, often called “Stalin’s Master Plan.”
1. Limited city size envisioning a maximum population of 5 million. An internal passport system was introduced in 1932.
2. State control of housing.
3. Planned development of new residential areas based on “superblocks” with daily needs within walking distance, aggregated into “micro-regions” of 8,000 to 12,000 people.
4. Spatial equality in “collective consumption” of consumer and cultural facilities.
5. Limited journeys to work with heavy investment in public transit.
6. Strict land-use zoning to separate industry from residences while limiting work journeys.
7. Rationalized traffic flows to designate key routes for necessary vehicles while minimizing congestion and pollution.
8. Extensive green space with parks and other public spaces enabled by public ownership of land.
9. Centralized symbolic spaces with the heart of the city given to monumental architecture and spaces for public events.
10. Town planning as an integral part of national planning.
Post-socialist urban transitions
1. Privatization of industries
Consequences for the urban system include divergence between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ among single-industry towns.

2. Privatization of land and housing
Has created enormous opportunities for individual wealth accumulation, but has increased inequalities based on location, timing, and differential access to connections and information.

3. New scales of urban growth, planning, and politics
Some aspects of economic decisionmaking are decentralizing and drifting ‘down’ from central-planning ministries to cities and regions, while other decisions are being pushed ‘up’ to the institutions of transnational capital investment.
Periphery Slides
Study Hard
How is today’s urbanization different from that of the nineteenth-century era of industrial urbanization?
1. It is proceeding most rapidly in places with the lowest levels of development.
2. It involves far more absolute numbers of people.
3. The link between urbanization, growth, and rising living standards has become contingent.
4. More urbanization now involves precarious, informal employment and squatter settlements.
5. Rising expectations are creating more tense political conflicts.
Theories of Development in the Global South
Modernization theory
Dependency theory
World-systems theory
Stages of Colonial Urbanization
Stages of Colonial Urbanization
Pre-contact
Mercantile colonialism
Transitional phase
Industrial colonialism
Late colonialism
Early independence
The New International Division of Labor
Gross National Happiness
The term was coined by Bhutan’s King Jigme Singye Wangchuk in 1972.
Wangchuk’s suggestion began as an informal remark, but his government quickly took it seriously, and then Michael and Martha Pennock -- researchers from the Vancouver Island Health Authority -- helped design a comprehensive survey instrument.
An international conference, “Operationalizing GNH” was hosted by the Bhutan government in 2003.
End of Slides
Go On
What is Globalization?
The most influential definition comes from the journalist, columnist, and author Thomas L. Friedman. He sees globalization as a level playing field. Globalization
“involves the inexorable integration of markets, nation-states, and technologies to a degree never witnessed before -- in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations, and nation-states to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before. The driving idea behind globalization is free-market capitalism -- the more you let market forces rule and the more you open your economy to free trade and competition, the more efficient and flourishing your economy will be.”
Friedman’s definition is paradoxical because globalization is not, in fact, inevitable, and “free markets” aren’t really free. They require a lot of hard work and tough decisions.
Free markets and globalization require active political decisions and political conflicts over fundamental questions. How much power are nation-states willing to give up to other nation-states, or to private corporations? How are property rights defined? When does a government’s effort to help its own businesses or workers get classified as “interfering with free trade”? Is a market really a “free market” when there are tight rules and regulations on how innovation takes place -- patents, trademarks, copyrights, and other forms of intellectual property?
The concept of the “World City”
first described by Patrick Geddes (1854-1932), a Scottish biologist, sociologist, geographer, and town planner.
Patrick Geddes
He was influenced by philosophical claims that evolution could be applied not just to individuals and species, but to human societies. He regarded large city-regions -- what he coined the term “conurbation” to describe -- as the logical evolution of previous kinds of cities. He devoted an entire chapter of his 1915 book Cities in Evolution to “World Cities and Their Opening Competition.” World Cities were the leading edge of “a new economic order -- a Second Industrial Revolution” arising that requires “corresponding changes in economic theories.”
By what characteristics do we distinguish the world cities from other great centres of population and wealth?
they are usually the major centres of political power. They are the seats of the most powerful national governments and sometimes of international authorities too; of government agencies of all kinds. Round these gather a host of institutions, whose main business is with government: the big professional organisations, the trade unions, the employers’ federations, the headquarters of major industrial concerns. These cities are the national centres not merely of government but also of trade. ... Traditionally, the world cities are the leading banking and finance centres of the countries in which they stand. Here are housed the central banks, the headquarters of the trading banks, the offices of the big insurance organisations and a whole series of specialised financial and insurance agencies.”
“Christaller for a Global Age,” Peter Hall
Peter Hall suggests that central place theory needs to be updated to consider the growth of informational industries, financial services, and global economic linkages. Hall observes that Christaller’s theory, which focused on the nation-state, now needs “higher-level” central places -- first-tier global cities and second-tier global cities. Meanwhile, some of the smaller, lower-order settlements in Christaller’s scheme “have lost any service functions they may have had, such as a village store or post office.” The physical towns may not have physically disappeared, but their central place functions have usually been undermined.
The World City Hypothesis
1. The form and extent of a city’s integration with the world economy, and the functions assigned to the city in the new spatial division of labour, will be decisive for any structural changes occurring within it.
2. Key cities throughout the world are used by global capital as ‘basing points’ in the spatial organization and articulation of production and markets. The resulting linkages make it possible to arrange world cities into a complex spatial hierarchy.
3. The global control functions of world cities are directly related in the structure and dynamics of their production sectors and employment.
4. World cities are major sites for the concentration and accumulation of international capital.
5. World cities are points of destination for large numbers of both domestic and/or international migrants.
6. World city formation brings into focus the major contradictions of industrial capitalism – among them spatial and class polarization.
7. World city growth generates social costs at rates that tend to exceed the fiscal capacity of the state.
Saskia Sassen
explained the fundamental organizational dynamic connecting globalization and world cities: the spatial dispersion of production paradoxically makes it more important for large companies centralize their key decision-making activities: it is important to have a strategic position in the world’s most important “command and control” centers to supervise and coordinate far-flung, globe-spanning networks of production, investment, and distribution.Sassen’s influential Global City consolidated a conventional wisdom that the world’s three indisputable global cities were New York, London, and Tokyo.
Below the “top tier,” however, there is great disagreement on which cities are more global than others...
Disagreement persists because:
1. There are many alternative measures of globalization or “world-city-ness.” One side of a “global city” is the number of bank headquarters; but another side is the number of undocumented immigrants struggling to survive.
2. Different measures yield different rankings. There’s now an entire world-city-ranking business. The rankings are not a reflection of some underlying reality; they are epistemologically performative -- the rankings help to shape actions by important decision-makers.
3. The “dirty little secret” of world-cities research is that most rankings measure the characteristics of individual cities -- but global-city theory is about relational networks among cities.
How can we measure and map the world system of global cities?
urban geographers have worked to create new relational measures of global city networks. Let’s consider one example -- the “advanced producer services firms” data compiled by Peter Taylor. The logic: globalized capitalism is led by powerful companies in key sectors -- banking and finance, accounting, advertising, and the law. If we can identify the world’s dominant firms in these “producer services,” then their headquarters and major office locations provide a measure of importance. If a lot of dominant global firms locate in a city, then this tells us how important that city is to global capital.
1. A first step in making sense of the list of cities and producer services firms is to graph the number of different types of firms in each city.
2. Then we can measure the similarity of different cities in this “space” created by our graph.
3. This similarity measure can then be used to group cities together.
Pythagoras
The Pythagorean Theorem helps us create something called a “distance measure of similarity,” or the “Euclidian” distance. We use this distance to help group cities together to their closest counterparts.
The next step is grouping observations into categories, or “clusters.”
Hierarchical” clustering methods require four steps:
1. Examine the statistical distance between every pair of observations (cities)
2. Join the pairs that are the most similar (i.e., the “closest”).*
3. Recalculate the statistical distances amongst all observations.
4. Repeat Steps 1-3, until all observation pairs are joined into a single category.
Airline connections are valuable indicators of world-city networks
1. are one of the few available measures of direct transnational urban flows.
2. are the most visible manifestation of world city interaction.
3. reflect the continued importance of face-to-face meetings among elite decision-makers.
4. capture the preferred mode of inter-city travel for migrants, tourists, and the elites of the transnational capitalist class.
5. are actively sought out by cities aspiring to world-city status.
End of This Slide
10:14 PM - Work Hard - 12 to go BRO!
Globalizing Vancouver
Geeeeeeeetter done
THE ARGUMENT:
In our contemporary era of globalization and transnational ties -- when places around the world are integrated by trade and massive flows of capital investment, media-scapes of news and entertainment, and flows of migrants, tourists, and investors -- “cities” at first seem like small, insignificant places beneath the giant world of globalization. Both neo-classical “free marketeers” as well as critics of capitalist globalization share the same assumption: the forces of globalization are universal and all-encompassing, more powerful than any particular spot that happens to serve as today’s landing strip for globally-mobile capital.

But cities are distinctive mixtures of history, geography, culture, politics, and economics. The “giant world of globalization” is far-flung across different places, but these places are always local (a particular city and neighborhood) and globalization actually happens through specific decisions by particular government actors, entrepreneurs, and investors. Cities don’t just respond to or reflect globalization. Cities, with their particular histories and geographies, actually constitute globalization. And Vancouver’s distinctive contribution to that process -- and how we now think about it -- is something known as the “Pacific Rim Urban Mega-Project.” The idea is mostly that of the urban geographer Kris Olds, so let’s call it the KOPRUMP -- Kris Olds’ Pacific Rim Urban Mega-Project...
The story has two parts:
1. Theories of how globalization is related to cities,

2. A case study of Vancouver’s globalizing property market called “Tales from Vancouver via Hong Kong.”
Theory:
Globalization is widely understood as the rising share of human activities that cross the boundaries of nation-states. But most analysts tend to privilege the “economic” and describe a “big world” of globalization. The neo-classical economists and free-market advocates who work on behalf of billionaire investors, for example, focus on the investment opportunities of a big, vast world of globalization.
Urban thinkers have also been deeply influenced by the work of Manuel Castells. According to the standard measures now used in the academic business (the times scholars cite one another’s work), Castells is the single most influential sociologist alive.
One of the theories that has made him famous is his distinction between the “space of places” and the “space of flows.”
The “space of places”
is made of the cities and neighborhoods where individual people live their daily lives.
The “space of flows”
is made up of the fast-moving circuits of investment, information, and movement that connect places all around the world.
The two spaces
The two spaces are separate, and most readers interpret Castells’ work to emphasize the power, speed, and expansion of the space of flows compared with the weakness, slow pace, and shrinking domain of the space of places. “Cities are structured, and destructured simultaneously,” Castells writes, “by the competing logics of the space of flows and the space of places.”
Globalization is powerful, but our theoretical understanding of it has usually involved a series of dualisms
Future Past
Flows Places
Function Experience
Power Culture
Global Local
Kris Olds argues that this widespread dualist approach falls into three main traps
1. “Narratives about global flows are fundamentally abstracted, decontextualized, and dehumanized.”

2. “...the content of the global flows is homogenized and distanced from the fundamental ordering and signification processes associated with the ‘authors’ of the flows.”

3. “...few analyses provide provisional accounts of the concrete ‘articulations’ that accompany the processes of global flows as they unfold under geographically and historically specific conditions.”
Kris Olds thinks we need to take seriously the warnings of the urban theorist Janet Abu-Lughod,
who once suggested that the economistic portrayal of globalization as a big, inevitable, powerful, all-encompassing force was leading to a confusing
“global
babble”
Olds draws inspiration from the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, who has analyzed how the “global cultural economy” is composed of multiple domains of globalizing processes. He describes global-city landscapes as produced by
ethnoscapes
mediascapes
technoscapes
financscapes
ideoscapes
Economic decision-making is “embedded” in particular cultural systems of meaning and value, and specific historical contexts.
What this means is that a purely economic approach -- which assumes that there is always a single, economically optimal way of pursuing profit -- ignores this broader context. Economic decisions are shaped by social, cultural, and geographical context. Olds calls for a “decentered version of world-systems theory,” taking into account “the perspectives and imaginations of situated actors who formulate, funnel, and skim material and nonmaterial flows.”

“The more culturally oriented scapes (ideoscape, mediascape) are not necessarily subordinate to ... the more economically oriented scapes (technoscape, financescape).”
To illustrate how and why these theories matter for cities, Kris Olds provides an analysis of the $3 billion Concord Pacific Place redevelopment project on the north side of Vancouver’s False Creek.
Olds’ purpose is to “look at the globalization of Vacouver ... in a less economistic (more culturally sensitive) nature” through a “theoretically informed case study” of particular actors “associated with the global flows of property, capital, images, and property development expertise.”
The story begins in the 1980s, when corporate and political leaders in British Columbia had been struggling to find a new competitive economic niche for Vancouver.
Traditionally, Vancouver had served as the interface between Western Canada’s staples economy -- natural resource commodities and agricultural products -- and exports through Canada’s largest port. But the staples economy is boom-and-bust, and in a terrible economic downturn of the 1970s, Vancouver began to diverge and “de-couple” from the provincial and regional economy.

Business and government leaders sought to use Vancouver to reposition a struggling province for greater attention from international investors.

The bid to host the 1986 World Exposition in Vancouver was a part of this overall development strategy.
Expo 86
was held on 204 acres (80 acres) of industrial land formerly used for rail yards, sawmills, and other processing facilities of the city’s role as a staples export hub. This single site is about one-sixth of the entire downtown core.
the success of Expo
After the success of Expo in attracting worldwide attention, the Province had to decide what to do with the huge land parcel; provincial authorities had recently launched a privatization program to transfer many publicly-owned properties to the private sector.
“During the course of Expo ’86, Premier William Bennett organized a dinner party. One of the attendees was George Magnus, a close associate of Li Ka-shing,” a Hong Kong billionaire. “Magnus is one of Li Ka-shing’s ‘interlockers’ -- a western manager with responsibility for forming the interface between the Chinese and Western management cultures of Li’s firms, as well as handling negotiations with Western businesses and governments. After the Bennett dinner ended, Magnus had a brief conversation with the Premier about the future development of the BC Place site following Expo’s closure.”
The Expo Lands were sold in May 1988 for $320 million. Li Ka-shing, “Hong Kong’s richest, most powerful and well-connected property tycoon,” bought the land as part of a plan to “deepen his linkages with Vancouver” not just as an investor, but also as “a father, and as patriarch of the Li Group” of companies and subsidiaries.
The family chose Canada as a “second home” for several reasons:
1. Li Ka-shing’s previous experience with properties acquired in Canadian cities since the late 1960s.
2. The house in Vancouver’s Oakridge neighborhood where the family had vacationed since the 1970s.
3. Long-term connections formed with financial institutions, especially CIBC.
4. The accessible nature of Canada’s immigration system.
5. The social and political climate of Canada, and of Vancouver.
Victor Li and Terry Hui launched Grand Adex, a company that developed almost 1,000 condominium units in Richmond and other Vancouver suburbs.

Grand Adex gave Victor and Terry valuable experience, but “for Victor, the first heir to Hong Kong’s largest corporate empire, this type of work was not of sufficient importance and scale to endow him with a local, let alone national or international, reputation.”
Redeveloping the Expo Lands, by contrast, would be a huge project. Victor Li “had decided, even before the fair had closed, that he wanted to buy the site”; the Globe & Mail called the sale the “land deal of the century.”
A new company, Concord Pacific, was established, and detailed redevelopment plans were prepared. The first plan envisioned a standard “resort” model cut off from the rest of the city, with no public access to the waterfront; After lengthy negotiations with City planners -- led by Larry Beasley -- new plans integrated the site with the rest of urban street grid, and provided public waterfront promenades. Redevelopment began in 1988.
Concord Pacific Place allowed many institutions and actors to achieve important objectives:
Concord Pacific Place allowed many institutions and actors to achieve important objectives:
For the Province, the land sale smoothed the process of privatization, and the redevelopment helped reconfigure Vancouver’s “gateway” function.
For the City, the plan responded to a growing jobs-housing imbalance, providing a large supply of centrally-located housing, and also promised national and international attention.
For the developer?
Most global-city theory would emphasize profit maximization. But Kris Olds’ experience as a City Planner, and his interviews with more than 50 decision-makers in Vancouver and Hong Kong, highlight other considerations:
Vancouver was an ideal setting because
1. Immigration trends were creating new market opportunities that Li Ka-shing and Victor were uniquely positioned to understand.
2. Vancouver’s “power hierarchy” was easier to join compared to the “established old-money, ‘old boys’ network cities such as Toronto or New York.”
At the same time, according to the director of the University of Hong Kong’s Business School, “Vancouver was probably viewed to be distant enough for any potential problems to be quickly resolved before damaging gossip spread back to key people and institutions in Hong Kong.”
Conclusion: Vancouver remakes global-city theory
1. Context Matters.
2. Economics is Embedded.
3. Cities Constitute Globalization.
1. Context Matters.
Globalization is dramatically reshaping the relations among cities, but cities are not interchangable “landing strips” for capital in an abstract, dehumanized “space of flows.” Cities present unique configurations of economic, social, and political factors.
2. Economics is Embedded.
Economic considerations matter in global-city processes, but so do the “ethnoscapes” of cultural diasporas, the “mediascapes” of reputations, and the fundamentally social, cultural meanings of family expectations.
3. Cities Constitute Globalization.
Cities are not just “reflections” of globalization; they provide unique settings in which human actors refine the processes of globalization. Lessons learned in Vancouver’s Concord Pacific Place shaped trends in other globalizing cities:
a. One of the Hong Kong secondary investors in Concord Pacific, Cheng Yu-Tun, backed Donald Trump’s “Trump City” in New York City.
b. Concord turned to Toronto to develop Concord CityPlace, with 8,000 units, and the North York Concord Park Place, with 4,000 units.
c. The revised plans for Concord Pacific Place made “Vancouverism,” and many of those involved with the project, famous. Larry Beasley, for example, became a prominent international speaker, and served as a consultant to Abu Dhabi.
End of Slides
11:30 - I`ve been up later
Real Estate Slides 1
Your Kinda Stuff
Functions of urban real estate markets:
1. Provision of facilities for economic and social needs.
2. Allocation of locations among competing needs.
3. Investment and a long-term store of value.
Johann Heinrich Von Thunen (1783-1850
A German farmer in the early nineteenth century, Von Thünen became concerned with ways of improving the cost accounting used on his estate. He devised a way of understanding the relations among commodity prices, transportation costs, and farm-to-market distance in deciding the optimal use of a particular parcel of land
Farms close to the market have lower transportation costs, and so can demand higher “location rents.”
The economically optimal crop depends on 1) the price at market, 2) transportation costs, and 3) distance to the market.
But the most important theoretical point is the mechanism by which market processes create spatial structures:
“(1) land uses determine land values, through competitive bidding among farmers;
(2) land values distribute land uses, according to their ability to pay;
(3) the steeper curves capture the central locations.”
Alonso replaced the von Thunen concern for different crops with the different land uses found in the modern city, and replaced the idea of a central market with the concept of a central workplace and “central business district” (CBD).
The household differs from the farmer and the urban firm in that satisfaction rather than profits is the relevant criterion of optimal location. A consumer, given his income and his pattern of tastes, will seek to balance the costs and bother of commuting against the advantages of cheaper land with increasing distance from the center of the city and the satisfaction of more space for living. When the individual consumer faces a given pattern of land costs, his equilibrium location and the size of his site will be in terms of the marginal changes of these variables.”
The Alonso model assumed
that middle- and upper-income workers would not bid as much per unit of land at the center -- but would take advantage of low land costs on the urban fringe to get large lots to build large houses.
With less flexibility to afford the costs of automobiles and commuting, and the need to be close to industrial workplaces, lower-income workers were assumed to bid more for centrally located homes -- trading off space for accessibility.
The paradox: poor people live on expensive land, while rich people live on inexpensive land.
Slide Complete
movin' on
Real Estate 2/3
Running Low on one liners at 11:59 PM
“...in an urbanized world, the distinction between capitalist and landlord has blurred...”
“The lender ... holds a piece of paper, the value of which is backed by an unsold commodity. This piece of paper may be characterized as fictitious value. ... If the pieces of paper begin to circulate as credit money, then it is fictitious value that is circulating. ... If this credit money is loaned out as capital, then it becomes fictitious capital.”
End of Slide - There is a written word document on "real estate 2" and corresponds to real estate 3 but it is really long....
So focus on your essay and **** that ****
Housing Slides
12:05 - Moving along
The meanings of housing
Use value:
Exchange value:
Use value:
1. Shelter, privacy, and living space.
2. An expression of status and privilege.
3. A physical and social environment (the features of the immediate vicinity of the unit itself).
4. Accessibility to the broader urban and regional landscape
Exchange value:
5. A means of saving and accumulating wealth, for owners.
Components of neighborhood change
1. Ongoing physical deterioration of housing units and public infrastructure.
2. Flows of investment and disinvestment.
3. Mobility of households and individuals.
4. Changes affecting households and individuals in situ.
All of these processes operate spatially across the metropolis, and create distinctive housing sub-markets.
Vacancy Chains
When a newly-created housing unit is completed and occupied, the household that moves in leaves behind a vacancy at a previous home, unless this is a new household. When the newly-vacant unit is occupied, the household’s move will create another vacancy.
As households move into new homes that better suit their needs and resources, vacancy chains move in the opposite direction.
“Filtering” was first described by the real estate economist Homer Hoyt in the 1930s. The growing field of housing economics led to a proliferation of filtering studies, which showed that:
Building new low-cost housing units
tended to produce “short” vacancy chains.
Building new high-priced housing units
produced “long” vacancy chains.
Why People Move
1. Forced relocation
2. Voluntary moves
Induced
Employment (job change, retirement)
Life cycle (household organization, marriage, children)
Adjustment
Housing features (space, quality/design, cost, tenure change)
Neighborhood features (quality, social character, public services)
Accessibility (workplace, shopping, school, family/friends)
The Neighbourhood Life Cycle Model
1. Development.
2. In-filling.
3. Downgrading.
4. Thinning out.
5. Renewal /
Reinvestment
Economic theories of housing markets, originally developed to explain dynamic market processes, became formalized as policy decisions that shape those market processes. However, there is nothing natural or inevitable about the neighborhood life-cycle, or filtering, vacancy chains, or the relations between housing and social space.
Housing is shaped by political economy -- the rules of the game. All too often, however, debates over housing and neighborhood change are distracted by the focus on the social characteristics of who moves in and who moves out.
End of Slide
12:30... and you are moving and cleaning all day tomorrow.. Why is ebaumsworld even a consideration when you have hours of work to complete? You are tired and making fun of yourself.. Get to work.
Skipping Hedonic Vancouver
Cause I read it 6 million times already and own that ****.
Social Area Analysis Slides
Distinctive neighborhoods and social worlds develop in large cities and metropolitan areas; is it possible to draw general lessons about who lives where in the complex social mosaic of the metropolis?
I'm going to social area analysis my own face with my fist when I wake up tired as **** tomorrow because of my laziness and desire to type stupid ******** for stupid pointless flash cards.
Classical urban models
One of the first systematic attempts to classify urban residential areas was undertaken by Charles Booth (1840-1916), a philanthropist and businessman in London. He inherited his father’s shipping business, but became concerned with the social conditions of the city. He began doing block-by-block surveys. The result, published as Maps Descriptive of London Poverty (1889-1890), played a prominent role in policy debates over the idea of “poverty line” as well as old-age pensions and other reforms.
The most famous and influential urban model
came from the work of scholars at the University of Chicago in the 1920s, who were working to build a new discipline (sociology) while trying to make sense of the fast-growing city around them.
the social organism.”
The individual, as Comte expressed it, is an abstraction. Man exists as man only by participation in the life of humanity ... the individual man was, in spite of his freedom and independence, in a very real sense ‘an organ of the Great Being’ and the great being was humanity. Under the title of humanity Comte included not merely all living human beings ... but he included all that body of tradition, knowledge, custom, cultural ideas and ideals, which make up the social inheritance ... an inheritance into which each of us is born, to which we contribute, and which we inevitably hand on through the processes of education and tradition to succeeding generations.
The City (1925), a book
became the most influential work in all of sociology and urban studies, Park began by noting that the city is “something more” than a collection of people, buildings, and institutions. “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 a product of nature, and particularly of human nature,” and “the city is the natural habitat of man.”
The force of nature
In humans, the “biotic impulse” is represented by Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Human behaviors are driven by competition and the survival of the fittest.

“Social Darwinism” was associated with a particular kind of politics, favoring a conservative status quo.

Implication: everyone is in the right social position given their abilities. If their abilities were different, then competition would ensure they wind up in a different social position. Competition always ensures the “right” outcome.
Darwin and the City
The Chicago School metaphorically treated the city as a plant biome -- a “human ecology”
Neighborhood social spaces were produced by
competition
dominance
niches
a process of “invasion and succession”
The force of culture
ulture -- cooperation within groups -- modifies the force of nature
“Moral communities,” with communal rules of belief and conduct, emerge to blunt competitive and individualist instincts.
The city becomes a patchwork quilt of distinct moral communities
Some of the Chicago School theorists made the mistake of presuming that moral communities could be evaluated according to the economic success of the group.
Homer Hoyt
Homer Hoyt earned a law degree in the 1920s, and then began studying the economics of real estate. He earned a Ph.D. in 1933 with his work, “One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago,” then got a job as the Principal Housing Economist at the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in Washington, D.C. Hoyt arrived just as another Roosevelt-era New Deal agency, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), had completed a massive survey of urban real estate -- the “real property inventories.” Hoyt and his assistants mapped data for 142 cities as part of the FHA’s role in deciding where to insure mortgages.
Homer Hoyt’s Sector Model
City spatial structure is shaped by the physical features that constrain and channel growth in certain directions. There is a directional component to residential patterns:
PULL factors and PUSH factors
“Pull” factors:
High ground
Waterfront locations
Transportation routes
“Push” factors:
Low ground
Valley bottoms and floodplains
Industrial activity, pollution
Multiple Nuclei Model
In a famous 1945 article in a sociology journal, Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman questioned the idea of a single center. Instead, they suggested that city landscapes are fragmented into a complex patchwork of different kinds of land uses.

This patchwork can be organic -- reflecting historical development patterns -- or planned
Multiple nuclei develop because:
Different activities have distinct locational requirements.
Some activities have agglomeration economies -- efficiency gains from clustering together.
Some activities are incompatible with others
In the mid-1950s, a pair of sociologists at Stanford, Shevky and Bell, undertook surveys and analysis of Census data, and proposed that the essential basis of neighborhood segregation in modern cities involved three fundamental hierarchies
1. Socioeconomic status
2. Family status
3. Ethnic status.
Their method for ranking and mapping neighborhoods came to be known as...
“Social Area Analysis.”
In the early 1960s, Brian J.L. Berry, at the Center for Urban Studies at the University of Chicago, used factorial ecology to continue the Chicago School tradition, but with major changes:
1. Large empirical data sets that exceeded anything available to the early Chicago School sociologists.
2. An inductive approach that incorporated more and more measures of local neighborhood characteristics.
3. Explicit appeals to scientific objectivity and planning precision.
PCA and Factor Analysis
PCA and factor analysis work by analyzing the inter-relations amongst individual indicators, and distilling a large number of individual variables into a smaller number of “composite” variables -- principal components, or “factors” -- that capture as much as possible of the information in the original dataset.
The result:
individual variables are transformed into underlying, “latent” dimensions.
A latent factor like “deprivation,” for example, would be measured by low incomes, high rates of unemployment, low educational attainment, large proportions of single persons and female-headed households, and so on.
Brian Berry, and the Canadian urban geographer Robert Murdie, used factor analysis as a way of synthesizing the three “classical” spatial models. In most cities,
1. The “economic status” factor conformed well to Hoyt’s sector model.
2. The “family status” factor lined up with the Chicago School concentric zone model.
3. The “ethnic status” factor reflected the Harris/Ullman multiple nuclei model.
Criticisms of the Chicago School and Social Area Analysis
1. The classical models were too simplistic, and did not account for the increasing social and spatial complexity of metropolitan areas.
2. The Chicago School tradition encouraged “structural-functionalist” thinking -- observed inequalities were viewed as natural parts of a societal “equilibrium.”
3. The spatial models were over-determined: multiple processes could have produced the observed spatial patterns, and the models could provide no definitive answer to “why” certain patterns persisted.
Contemporary Social Analysis - The “Los Angeles School” and postmodern urbanism
scholars studying Los Angeles challenged the ideas of the Chicago School and classical social area analysis. Whereas the traditional approach emphasized a search for order, regularity, and organization, the Los Angeles scholars identified trends that were creating uncertainty and contingency:
Global forces transforming local places
The fragmentation of the “single” viewpoint of modernism, replaced by the multiple perspectives of postmodernism
The Los Angeles scholars transformed social area analysis from a positivist science into a poststructuralist form of social criticism -- such as Mike Davis’ reworking of the concentric zone model into the “ecology of fear.”
Contemporary Social Analysis - Geodemographic Analysis
social area analysis became somewhat less popular in academic studies at precisely the time the approach took off in the private sector. An entire new “geo-demographic marketing” industry emerged in the 1980s, devoted to classifying consumers according to the neighborhood where they lived. “During the last decade, your zip code -- actually the community it represents -- has come to reveal more about you and your neighbors than any postal clerk ever thought possible. Those five digits can indicate the kinds of magazines you read, the meals you serve at dinner, whether you’re a liberal Republican or an apathetic Democrat. Retailers use zips to decide everything from where to locate a designer boutique to what kind of actor to use in their TV commercials. ... College and military recruiters even rely on a city’s zip codes to target their efforts to attract promising high-school graduates. Your zip code is no longer just an innocuous ivention for moving the mail. It’s become a yardstick by which your lifestyle is measured.”
Old Geographies of Data
1. Systematic observation and measurement were difficult, expensive, and rare.
2. Statistics were state-istics: nation-states required data to govern, and collecting data required the authority and resources of empires and nation-states.
3. Data analysis required the resources and expertise of professionals, it took place inside obscure government agencies or in universities, and data were regarded as objective information to be used to evaluate the truth-claims of scientific statements -- data enabled the achievements of the scientific method, and the formulation of scientific laws in the philosophy of positivism.
New Geographies of Data
1. Systematic observation and measurement has become automated and default -- “always on.”
The science historian George Dyson (2012) estimates that the “universe of self-replicating code” grows at five trillion bits per second.
2. Statistics have become privatized.
While nation-states still collect vast quantities of data, social information associated with the public, Keynesian welfare state has been under attack --
U.S. Republicans’ attacks on sampling and the long-form Census
Harper’s elimination of Canada’s long-form Census
Elimination of U.K. long-form Census (see Shearmur, 2010)
-- while private/corporate datasets have exploded
Axciom, Inc. has 23,000 servers collecting and analyzing 50 trillion transactions annually, by 190 millon consumers, represented in 1,500 “data points per person.”
VGI (volunteered geographic information) (Goodchild, 2012), and social web data are providing a “virtually unlimited sandbox of data in which to play” (Barrett, 1995).
Nation-state governments have been transformed by neoliberal corporate governmentality.
3. Data analysis has been democratized, it has become performative, and the flood of data is transforming public debate, scientific practice, and corporate activity in a world of competing post-positivisms.
New Slides - The Urban Underclass
study cutty
What is the ‘underclass’? What makes it urban? What are the origins and implications of the images, metaphors, and explanations that circulated so widely in media portrayals of the riots in France’s cities?
The term ‘underclass,’ introduced to describe surprising features of America’s post-World War II boom in the 1950s and 1960s, was soon popularized and woven into policy and theoretical debates over American urban problems and the legacy of racial and economic barriers in urban housing markets. Explanations rooted in a structural conception of urban poverty soon gave way to a well-orchestrated conservative political movement that advanced a behavioral, culture-of-poverty set of explanations.

By the year 2000, the term “underclass” and its theoretical assumptions had become a central feature of urban debates in many countries.

Today, the word occupies a paradoxical position: journalists use it to signal a sophisticated understanding of the roots of a particular urban problem; but when stripped out of its theoretical, historical, and geographical context, the word is vulnerable to multiple and contradictory interpretations.
Gunnar Myrdal
a prominent Swedish economist, studied for periods in Germany and the U.K., and then came to the U.S. as a Rockefeller Fellow (1929-1930), and then on studies commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation of New York (1938-1944) and the Twentieth Century Fund (1957-1960).

In 1962 and 1963 he delivered a series of lectures to U.S. audiences: in January, 1962, to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York; in April, to the Council on Foreign Affairs in San Francisco; in June, at Howard University in Washington, DC; and finally, a series of three lectures in April, 1963 to audiences at the University of California, Berkeley. These lectures were subsequently assembled into a book published as Challenge to Affluence
There are three important aspects of Myrdal’s account.
First, it emphasizes the structural roots of the problem
Second, the account does not single out any particular kind of geography associated with the ‘under-class
Third, for Myrdal the underclass includes people from a variety of racial and ethnic identities
the structural roots of the problem
for him, underlying economic changes that have diminished the supply of suitable job opportunities are at fault. His analysis does identify some of the behavioral problems that can be expected among those who are victimized by structural economic change; but individual behavioral problems are the result, not the cause, of poverty.
the account does not single out any particular kind of geography associated with the ‘under-class
the victims of structural unemployment and under-employment include African American sharecroppers in the piedmont South, white coal-miners in the highlands of Kentucky and West Virginia; and workers in the “sweatshops in the cities.”
the underclass includes people from a variety of racial and ethnic identities.
Ultimately, Myrdal’s use of the term was inextricable with his sense that the American economy was leading to fundamental changes in its class structure; although he might have had some passing interest in describing unique aspects of who the underclass members were and what they were doing, he was much more interested in the long-term economic shifts that were making it impossible for some people to survive in an increasingly competitive society.
William Julius Wilson’s book, The Truly Disadvantaged
emphasized the structural changes in the economy that were creating permanent unemployment and poverty -- giving rise to a ‘tangle of pathologies’ of crime and other deviant behavior in the inner city.

But accepting Wilson’s structural explanations would have required radical economic changes that would be deeply unpopular among the wealthy and the middle classes. Wilson’s analysis of the ‘tangle of pathologies,’ by contrast, was wildly popular. Political operatives seized on parts of Wilson’s work to justify dramatic shifts in the treatment of poor individuals, families, and neighborhoods
Charles Murray
Reagan and others were influenced by the conservative policy analyst Charles Murray, who argued that American social welfare policies

“make it profitable for the poor to behave in the short term in ways that were destructive in the long term. ... We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead. We tried to remove the barriers to escape from poverty, and inadvertently built a trap
Conclusions
1. The “underclass” began as a social-science term to draw attention to the structural failures of America’s economic growth, which were creating permanent, structural problems in the labor market. The term was distorted into a behavioral explanation

2. Discourse matters.
Words and phrases like “urban underclass” are part of the performative power of urban discourse: words can frame the way problems are understood, and can influence theoretical understanding as well as policy decisions. As urban geographers, therefore, we should carefully study the histories and contexts of discourses about cities.
3. Discourse travels.
The phenomenon Edward Said calls “traveling theory” is a powerful and efficient method of communication. But it can be dangerous, creating false equivalencies and misunderstandings across different contexts.
Homelessness
Something you will be dealing with if you don`t start studying.
Defining Homelessness
At the most basic level, homelessness is “defined by a lack of shelter in which to sleep and to perform basic activities such as bathing.” However, one should consider how strict is the definition of “shelter” is? Should people in tent cities be counted among those who have shelter? Does a person suffer “a lack of shelter” if they have to turn to friends or extended family to sleep on a couch or in a basement?
For these reasons, most urban analysts accept a wider definition developed by the United Nations several years ago, involving two criteria:
broader definition of homelessness by urban analysts developed by the United Nations several years ago, involving two criteria:
Not having a place that can be considered “home,” and thus being forced to sleep in a temporary shelter or outside,
or
2. Having access to seriously deficient housing. Deficiency is here defined as “housing that is lacking in one or more of: sanitation, protection from the elements, safe water, security of tenure, affordability, personal safety, and accessibility to daily needs (particularly employment, education, and health care).” This broader definition has far-reaching implications: most crucially, it implies that the most visible signs of homelessness in a city -- people sleeping on the sidewalks at night -- represent only a small proportion of the total homeless population.
The broader definition “embodies not only those who literally have no home, but also those who do have some form of shelter but whose present housing situation is precarious and insufficient. The difference between these situations is often conceptualized as one between
absolute (or ‘literal’) homelessness (not having any home) and
relative homelessness (precarious or insufficient housing).”
Measuring Homelessness
1. Cross-sectional, or “point-in-time” estimates from field surveys.
2. Use of service estimates.
3. Longitudinal survey estimates.
Causes of homelessness:
The Individual Model: Homeless populations have higher rates of...
physical disability
mental illness
substance abuse
criminal behavior
delinquency
family breakup
domestic violence
inability to work
poor job skills
Explanations under the individual model
assume that personal failings -- some problem with the individual -- cause homelessness. ... The implicit assumption in this model is that individuals are homeless, at least at some level, due to the choices they have made or failed to make in life.”
Policy recommendations based on the individual model
emphasize mental and physical health services, job training, substance abuse problems, family counseling, and similar interventions.
Military Vets and Homlessness
Military veterans comprise a disproportionate share of the homeless population.
Compared to other homeless people, veterans are more likely to suffer long-term homelessness.
Veterans have higher rates of “Tri-morbidity” (co-occurring mental illness, physical illness, and substance abuse).
Consider the logic of the individual model: how can personal deficiencies and choices explain the higher risks of homelessness among those who served in the world’s largest and most powerful military force?
Structural models
“explain homelessness not as the result of personal failings but as an inevitable outcome of the main structural features of modern capitalism, such as unemployment, high rents, wage inequality, uneven development, and a housing system set up to benefit homeowners at the expense of tenants.” Structural explanations are part of a political economy perspective on class relations and political conflicts over the allocation of resources, such as housing. Policy recommendations from this perspective emphasize changing the rules of housing and labor markets: reducing wage inequality, supporting the creation of affordable homes not provided by the private market, etc.
Integrating individual and structural explanations
There is no doubt that various individual-level problems are more common among the homeless. But individual-level factors can only explain who is more likely to be homeless -- not the dramatic increase in homelessness as a social phenomenon.
“...while combinations of individual-level factors may be ultimately responsible for exactly who ends up without a permanent home in any given place, the proportion of such persons left without market housing is dependent on local housing market conditions, particularly the median rent level and the relative number of households competing for each unit available...”
Public Policy.
please continue with public policy and homelessness...
the era of “urban managerialism
from the end of World War II through the 1980s, Canada’s federal government coordinated economic and social welfare policies, and provided support for the production of market rental housing as well as non-market social housing.
the advance of neoliberalism in the 1980s
the federal government began “devolving” and “downloading” more responsibilities to the provinces, and then entirely eliminated support for non-market housing in 1993. In turn, most of the provinces downloaded more responsibilities to local governments, which were forced to become more economically competitive in “urban entrepreneurialism.”
In the early 1970s, almost half of all new housing built in Canada was either purpose-built market rental, or as non-market social housing.
Today, social housing is barely 1% and purpose-built rental is only one-tenth.
The result
a variegated urban geography of homeless policies: some cities and provinces are more proactive than others.
But local finances are restricted -- homeowners resist increases in property taxes -- requiring cities to forge partnerships with other levels of government, and with private-sector interests, charitable foundations, and nonprofit institutions.
The result is a patchwork of partial, incomplete, and crisis-driven responses to a worsening homelessness crisis
New Scales of the
“Geography of Survival
Consider a partial list of laws in various cities:

In New York it is illegal to sleep in or near subways and to wash car windows on the city streets.
In Eugene, Oregon, and Memphis, Tennessee, beggars are required to obtain licenses -- after being fingerprinted and photographed.
In Berkeley, California, and Cincinnati, Ohio, it is illegal to beg from anyone getting into or out of a car, near automatic teller machines, after 8 P.M., or within 6 feet of any storefront. It is also illegal to sit or lie on sidewalks between 7 A.M. and 9 P.M.
What explains all these anti-homeless laws?
Don Mitchell’s analysis of homelessness:
“Annihilation of Space by Law”
1. Increased capital mobility -- the real and threatened ability of corporations, individual investors, and wealthy individuals to move away -- has dramatically intensified the shift to business-oriented “urban entrepreneurialism.”
2. “When capital is seen to have no need for any particular place, then cities do what they can to make themselves so attractive that capital…will want to locate there.” (Mitchell, 1997, p. 304).
3. City politicians and managers are thus forced to compete with other cities to offer “livability” and “quality of life.”
4. Since most middle-class and wealthy people find it unpleasant to see homeless people or be asked for money by beggars, more and more city leaders have incentives to use legal remedies to cleanse the streets of those unable to compete in a contemporary globalized economy.
5. The result is a proliferation of “quality of life” laws against “disorderly” behaviors in public places. But for people with no private spaces (homes) to which to retreat, these laws criminalize essential human activities -- erasing the spaces in which homeless people are allowed to be, to live.
Giuliani
pursued a “zero-tolerance” policing policy that involved harsh crackdowns on jay-walkers, window-washers, graffiti taggers, and homeless people. Their tactics made Giuliani famous nationally and internationally -- he became known for “cleaning up Times Square.” “Broken Windows” theories became popular in city police departments in city after city -- and an organized network of think tanks encouraged city officials to pass various laws criminalizing “quality of life” offenses
End of Homelessness
For you, not them.
Pacione’s review of the major contemporary models of future urban form
1. The Green City.
2. The Eco-City.
3. The Dispersed City.
4. The Car-Free City.
5. The Compact City.
1. The Green City.
Ebenezer Howard’s (1898) “Garden City,” Patrick Geddes’ (1915) evolutionary planning “based on a knowledge of natural regions and their resources, and Ian McHarg’s (1969) Design With Nature.
2. The Eco-City.
aims to employ innovative ‘closed-loop’ environmental technologies for water, energy and waste management, economic growth based on creativity and innovation and sensitive to local environmental and cultural contexts, sustainable urban design principles, and a high quality public realm both physically in terms of public space and socially in terms of social capital and promoting good governance.”
3. The Dispersed City.
“Key themes of the ideal model include the centrality of small-scale economic and political organization, grass-roots political empowerment, an emphasis on collective action, local economic self-reliance, including farming and industry, the use of appropriate technologies, recycling and re-use of materials, and the value of ‘natural’ ecological or resource areas as potential political boundaries.” The extreme example comes from Frank Lloyd Wright’s “city of the future.”
4. The Car-Free City.
A proposal by the architect J.H. Crawford (2000) to use principles of network topology to design car-free human settlements.
5. The Compact City.
“Twentieth-century proposals for high-density urban living are associated especially with high-rise residential buildings made possible by advances in technology.” Clearest examples: Le Corbusier’s (1929) plan for a city of 3 million, and Soleri’s (1969) proposal for a three-dimensional city.
6. The Network City
Based on global competition and “knowledge-intensive centres” integrated into broader metropoli. “A small but growing number of modern urban agglomerations consist of an intricate web of corridor cities” with functional competitive advantage; examples include Randstad Holland, Singapore and Malaysia’s “Multimedia Super Corridor,” and the Kansai region of Japan.
7. The Informational City.
The replacement of physical interaction with “telematics.” “Some see the annihilation of distance and time by telematics as heralding a trend towards an extreme form of urban decentralisation that will inevitably lead to the dissolution of the city. Other theorists see modern communications technologies enhancing the power of the city by reinforcing the centrality of cities within nodal communications networks.”
8. The Virtual City.
“For some cyber-utopians the virtual city represents a future urban environment liberated from the constraints of place-bound interaction. For others the virtual city heralds a dystopian urban future characterized by the kind of social disintegration portrayed in films such as Blade Runner.”
In the short term, telecommunications alter urbanization in two ways:
A “global positioning” approach with cities using telematics to attract investment, tourism, etc.
An “endogenous development” approach, with “telematics being employed in an effort to overcome the economic, social, and cultural fragmentation of contemporary urban life, thereby reinvigorating the local within a globalising world. This would involve initiatives ranging from community television and ‘electronic public spaces’ to virtual cities such as AlphaWorld, Second Life and the Digitale Stad in Amsterdam.”
The concept of the “World City”
first described by Patrick Geddes (1854-1932), a Scottish biologist, sociologist, geographer, and town planner.

He was influenced by philosophical claims that evolution could be applied not just to individuals and species, but to human societies. He regarded large city-regions -- what he coined the term “conurbation” to describe -- as the logical evolution of previous kinds of cities. He devoted an entire chapter of his 1915 book Cities in Evolution to “World Cities and Their Opening Competition.” World Cities were the leading edge of “a new economic order -- a Second Industrial Revolution” arising that requires “corresponding changes in economic theories.”
The City of
Cognitive-Cultural Capitalism
Cognitive-cultural capitalism, as theorized by Scott (2011a, p. 846) identifies a new historic frontier of capitalist expansion defined by

“(1) the new forces of production that reside in digital technologies of computing and communication; (2) the new divisions of labor that are appearing in the detailed organization of production and in related processes of social re-stratification, and (3) the intensifying role of mental and affective human assets (alternatively, cognition and culture) in the commodity production system at large.”
Moore’s Law
describing the geometric growth rate of hardware information processing speeds) is now Zuckerberg’s Law -- the Facebook co-founder’s dictum that people share twice as much information every year as they did the year before -- opening up new global commons of use-value social relations for cognitive-cultural capitalists to cultivate into exchange-value products. Exchange values can be harvested directly through various forms of entrepreneurial monetization, or indirectly through the cognitive rents of advertising in what Mander (2012) calls the “privatization of consciousness.”