Urban Geography - Slides

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Michael Pacione described the main epistimological in the discipline of urban geography as...

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1. Environmentalism, 2. Positivism, 3. Behavioralism, 4. Humanism, 5. Structuralism, 6. Managerialism, 7. Postmodernism, 8. Transnationalism, 9. Postcolonialism, 10. Moral Philosophy

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Environmentalism

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In the period of the early 1900s before urban geography emerged as a systematic field of study, most geographers were studying regions or countries, and sometimes using the ideas of “environmental determinism” -- a simplistic way of thinking that most all geographers today would reject. But we can learn a lot from the earliest urban geography studies of cities, which often studied the influence of the physical environment (rivers, coastal ports) on the locations and growth rates of cities.

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Positivism

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The use of the “scientific method” of drawing on established theory, gathering data, testing hypotheses, and working with other scientists to generalize and refine ‘laws’ that look much like the laws used by physicists. In urban geography, this took the form of a “quantitative revolution,” and understanding cities in terms of “spatial science.”

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Behavioralism

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In response to disappointment in the predictive power of many of the positivist quantitative revolution models, some geographers suggested a focus on individual perceptions and behaviors: individuals moving around in a city, for example, might not be taking the ‘least effort’ transportation routes across a city as predicted by the models. Behavioralists showed that the “real” map of the city routes matters less than the “mental” or “cognitive” maps of individuals

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Humanism

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The humanist philosophy accords central importance to human awareness, agency, consciousness and creativity. ... The aim of a humanistic approach is to understand human social behavior using methodologies that explore people’s subjective experience of the world. In practice, this means a change from the positivist principles of statistical inference based on representative random samples of the population to the principle of logical inference based on unique case studies using methods such as ethnography and analysis of literary texts to demonstrate ‘the social construction of urban space

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Structuralism

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A set of principles and procedures originally derived from linguistics and linguistic philosophy that seeks to expose the enduring and underlying structures inscribed in the cultural practices of human subjects. Some urban geographers turned away from structural linquistics to structural political economy and Marxism: for urban structural Marxists, the way to understand a city is to understand its society’s underlying social relations of economic production under the “laws of motion” of capital accumulation. In the West -- Western Europe, North America -- Marxism was also a bold political challenge to the economic inequalities and geopolitics of the 1960s, and the association of positivism with imperial and military projects:

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Managerialism

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An approach that applies the ideas of the sociologist Max Weber on ‘social closure’ to understand a common feature of cities: social groups often seek to maximize their social benefits by restricting access to the resources and opportunities they control; many cities also have a class of powerful managers -- professionals and bureaucrats.

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Postmodernism

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The “rejection of grand theory” and an emphasis on human difference. Postmodernism was a challenge to the over-arching explanations used by structuralists as well as positivists, in their search for universal laws. Instead, postmodernism emphasizes multiple and competing truths in the social world -- which can only be understood by exploring the “multiple viewpoints of diverse individuals and groups.” Postmodernism flourished for a time, but it has been severely criticized for its relativism: if there are multiple truths, then how can science help us make moral and ethical choices when people or groups in a city disagree?

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Transnationalism

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Transnationalism emphasizes the profound changes in human thought and understanding that come with the growing share of human relations that take place across the boundaries of nation-states. In the 1970s, there was widespread attention to the effects of “globalization” on cities; it soon became clear, however, that “global” and “urban” processes both influenced one another. An approach called “transnational urbanism” involves studying specific local actors and processes in many places in different countries to understand how the urban experience is changing: consider migrants who send remittances to families in their ‘home’ countries, or ‘citizens of the world’ who spend time living or working in multiple countries

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Postcolonialism

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The era of formal colonialism is past, at least in most of the world. But colonialism persists -- through economic relations that structural Marxists study, as well as the subjective thoughts and perceptions of people studied by humanists, postmodernists, and transational urbanists. Postcolonialism helps us understand how “heritage” is defined in old parts of cities in formerly colonized cities, for example, and the “cultural and ethnic hybridity introduced by Algerian migrants in Paris, Puerto Ricans in New York City,

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Moral Philosophy

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The use of philosophies of ethics to “examine critically the moral bases of society.” Urban geographers constantly face ethical questions: how accurate should a model of traffic accidents be for us to accept the results as the basis for policy? What disparities in pollution or living conditions are acceptable?

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French philosopher August Comte

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Comte was the first philosopher to use the word “sociology.” He proposed that a “science of society” could be developed by following the example of the natural sciences -- mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology (biology), and social physics (sociology

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What is positivism?
Number 1

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"(1) Scientific statements were to be grounded in a direct, immediate and empirically
accessible experience of the world, and observation statements were therefore privileged
over theoretical ones...: observations of events were the leading particulars of scientific
inquiry and as such, observation statements could be made independently of any
theoretical statements that might subsequently be constructed around them.

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What is positivism?
Number 2

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(2) Scientific observations had to be repeatable, and their generality was to be ensured
by a unitary scientific method that was accepted and routinely drawn upon by the
scientific community as a whole.

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What is positivism?
Number 3

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(3) Science would advance through the formal construction of theories which, if
empirically verified, would assume the status of scientific laws.

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What is positivism?
Number 4

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4) Those scientific laws would have a strictly technical function, in that they would
reveal the effectivity or even the necessity but emphatically not the desirability of
specific conjunctions of events: in other words, they had to take the form 'If A, then B' ....

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What is positivism?
Number 5

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(5) Scientific laws would be progressively unified and integrated into a single system
of knowledge and truth....”

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Central priorities of Chicago School urban geography

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1) “an Enlightenment epistemology,” with “a close attention to data sources and to empirical regularities;”
2) “the search for theory to explain these regularities” and to provide generalizable “laws” of spatial organization, and
3) a heavy emphasis on quantitative evidence and statistical inference.

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The positivist Quantitative Revolution

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shaped the emergence of urban geography in the 1960s, but by the end of the decade new revolutions were underway. Positivism came to be seen as mechanistic and de-humanized (obsessed with quantitative observation and metaphors of ‘social physics’) and also politically corrupt (tied to U.S. military funding for the social sciences).

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In Search of Common Ground

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1) We need a wide range of different methods and epistemologies, even if we can’t be experts in all approaches ourselves.
2) Certain questions are more suited to some epistemologies than others.
3) Different goals require different methods and criteria for distinguishing ‘valid’ knowledge from ‘invalid’ truth claims.

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computing technologies

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Today, the enormous popularity of computing technologies as applied to spatial processes and spatial data -- Geographical Informational Sciences (GIS) -- leads many urban geographers to see a new quantitative revolution, and a resurgence of positivism. Some urban geographers welcome this new revolution, others have concerns

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Key questions

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When and where did the first cities appear?
Did cities give rise to civilization, or were cities simply the byproduct of social, cultural, and political transformation?
What can we learn from ancient cities that will help us understand cities and social change today?

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1. The first cities.
The conventional wisdom

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Mesopotamia -- the “land between the two rivers,” the Tigris and the Euphrates, was settled about 10,000 years ago after the end of the most recent Ice Age.
Improved cultivation in fertile river valleys led to an “agricultural revolution” that produced a consistent surplus, enabling an “urban revolution” that created the first cities about 5,500 years
ago (3,500 BCE, ‘before
current era’).

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the largest of the
Mesopotamian cities

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UR was capital of the Sumerian empire from 2300 BCE to 2180 BCE, and had a population of about 34 thousand; up to ten times that many lived just outside the walls.

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Mesopotamian cities

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socially heterogeneous, with a detailed specialization of labor, and dramatic innovations in quantification and writing

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‘cradle of civilization.’

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All of the evidence of innovation, hierarchy, and organized power led archaeologists to view Mesopotamia as the ‘cradle of civilization.’

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The significance of Çatal Hüyük

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The site dates to 7,500 BCE, and perhaps even earlier -- a full 4,000 years prior to the “urban revolution” of Mesopotamia.
In contrast to the fertile river valleys producing an agricultural surplus in Mesopotamia, Çatal Hüyük is on a high mountain plain with low agricultural productivity.

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population of Çatal Hüyük

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At its peak, the settlement had about 6,000 people living in a densely-settled area of about 32 acres; was this, then, just a village precursor to the “true” urban revolution of Mesopotamia? Mellaart offered strong arguments that this was indeed a city:

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Mellaart's argument that Çatal Hüyük was indeed a city

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The wealth of material produced by Çatal Hüyük is unrivalled by any other Neolithic site. Moreover, not being a village but a town or city, its products have a definitely metropolitan air: Çatal Hüyük could afford luxuries such as obsidian mirrors, ceremonial daggers, and trinkets of metal beyond the reach of most of its known contemporaries. Copper and lead were smelted and worked into beads, tubes, and possibly small tools, thus taking the beginnings of metallurgy back into the seventh millennium. Its stone industry in local obsidian and imported flint is the most elegant of the period; its wooden vessels are varied and sophisticated, its woolen textile industry fully developed. At Çatal Hüyük we can actually study the transition from an aceramic Neolithic with baskets and wooden vessels to a ceramic Neolithic with the first pottery

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Roman distinction of a city

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civitas (people coming together to form a settlement; city; civilization)
urb (physical place of settlement; urban)

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What is a city?

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Common criteria:
permanent residence
large population
high density
social heterogeneity
Alternative criteria:
economic function (market settlements or trading centers)
cultural ingredients (arts, sciences, writing)

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Oldest Known City/Village

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Excavations at Jericho, Israel/Palestine.
70 feet below the surface, the first settlement dates to 8,000 BCE

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Two considerations help us sort through the conflicting evidence on the earliest cities:

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1. The emergence of cities is best understood on a continuum, from agricultural villages and trading posts to ‘true’ cities.
2. Urbanization in different regions of the world is best understood as geographically contextual and contingent, rather than part of a single linear process.

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Gordon Childe believed the emergence of cities were the result of 4 things.

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Population: increased numbers permitted by surplus
Organization: complex division of labor, ruling elites, specialists
Environment: fertile river valleys allowing surplus
Technology: innovations to manage and allocate surplus.

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Empircal Challenges to Childe's claims

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Excavations in poor agricultural environments at Jericho, Çatal Hüyük, and elsewhere undermined the material basis of Childe’s analysis of the role of an agricultural surplus in the division of labor.

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Theoretical Challenges to Childe's claims

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Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (1970)
Jacobs’ read of the evidence led her to suggest a ‘trade thesis:’ cities were born of trade, and survived by exchanging vital commodities and food with trading partners. Instead of agriculture giving rise to cities, Jacobs suggested, cities shaped agriculture by spreading agricultural innovations through far-flung trade networks.
Lewis Mumford, The City in History (1961)
Mumford challenged the view of culture, politics, and religion as dependent variables.

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Conclusions
conventional wisdom

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The conventional wisdom dates the emergence of the earliest cities to around 3,500 BCE in Mesopotamia, in an “urban revolution.”
2) Since the 1960s, archaeologists and anthropologists have steadily pushed back the date ever earlier with new discoveries.
3) Advances in knowledge mean that there is no universally-agreed date for the origin of cities -- because a) archaeological work continues, b) there are different ways to define cities, and c) there are different theories of how urbanization is related to social change.

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What can we learn from ancient cities that will help us today?

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1) Epistemology matters - how to observe, gather data, and build knowledge in the field of archaeology.
2)The past is not really past. Changing knowledge of the urban past is often used in contemporary political projects -- nationalism and sovereignty claims, colonial reconciliation efforts -- and to attract international tourist revenues.
3) The history of urban civilizations -- their endurance and collapse -- may help us understand current challenges.

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New technologies are reshaping our abilities to look into the past

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We only have about 5,000 years of written history -- writing was developed in Mesopotamia and Egypt just before 3,000 BCE (Fagan and DeCorse, 2005, p. 147).
Dendrochronology (tree-ring analysis) was only developed in 1913, and radiocarbon dating in 1949.
Since the 1970s, new dating techniques -- potassium argon, obsidian hydration, thermoluminescence, fission track, and others -- have enabled greater precision in absolute chronology.
But “all excavation is destruction of finite archives in the ground that can never be restored to their original configuration.”

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Renaissance

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***

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British landscape architect Thomas H. Mawson (1861-1933

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In 1912 was introduced to an audience at the Vancouver Club as “perhaps the greatest living authority on city planning.” Mawson was presenting a plan he had been asked to prepare for the fast-growing city -- Vancouver had only been incorporated twenty-six years earlier, in 1886. Mawson was excited at the chance to shape a new city before too much damage was done by unplanned growth

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Mawson's Plan

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Mawson’s plan envisioned a grand statue, garden, stadium, and parade ground at the entrance to Stanley Park -- and a widened grand boulevard providing a central axis for the city, down Georgia Street.

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Mawson's Proclomation

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Mawson proclaimed that Vancouver would become “the Paris of the Pacific,” and Georgia Street would become “Vancouver’s Champs Élysées.” The Avenue des Champs Élysées in Paris is one of the world’s most famous streets. The name is French for the Elysian Fields, in Greek mythology the “abode after death of the brave and the good.”

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Historical Context of the European Renaissance

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- Linguistic evidence ties the settlement of ancient Greece to the ancient urban civilization of Egypt
- By 800 BCE cities were growing on the Greek mainland, and soon a “Greek urban diaspora” had colonized much of the Mediterranean coasts.
- Rome, founded by Romulus in 753 BCE, came to dominate Italy, and then after the defeat of Carthage (264-241 BCE), extended power across the North Africa coast. Greece was made a Roman province in 146 BCE, and “the expansion of the Roman Empire ... carried city-building, and in particular the grid-iron plan, into Western Europe.”

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Historical Context of the European Renaissance (continued)

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Roman imperial expansion created the world’s largest city system -- a network of cities connected by governance, trade, and the universal use of Latin.
The empire reached a peak about 180 CE, then entered a long period of instability and collapse, with Rome sacked repeatedly (in 410 by the Visigoths, 455 by the Vandals).

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Historical Context of the European Renaissance (continued)

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- “Much of Europe entered a Dark Age of economic and cultural stagnation,” after the fall of the Roman empire, the expansion of Muslim control of Mediterranean trade routes in the 700s, and Viking raids from the north in the 800s.
- European cities of the Middle Ages were isolated, had higher death rates than rural areas, and were confined by walls to defend against repeated wars; inside the walls, the densely-packed cities evolved in an “organic,” unplanned tangle of streets and alleys.

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Historical Context of the European Renaissance (continued)

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A partial revival in long-distance trade networks began in the 1100s, with new settlements built around the burg (walled fortress of Roman times). Increased trade supported the rise of small merchants, traders, and elites not dependent on feudal lords or the Catholic Church -- they came to be known as burghers (from burg or bourg), and much later, as the bourgeoisie

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Historical Context of the European Renaissance (continued)

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Beginning in the 1200s, increased maritime trade in the Mediterranean enhanced the wealth of several cities in Italy. Wealthy merchant families of Florence competing to support scientific and cultural innovations created a unique “Florentine School” of painters in the 1200s. Similar trends in other Italian cities eventually came to be described as a “Renaissance.”

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What the Renaissance meant for Cities

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the Renaissance brought a “true” urban revolution. achieved in the fourteenth century was the true urban revolution, for it meant not only the rise of a few scattered towns and cities but the appearance of a genuine urbanization, in the sense that a substantial portion of the population lived in towns and cities

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Three dimensions of the Renaissance urban world

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1. Urbanization
2. Urban design
3. Urban planning

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1. Urbanization

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the trend of an increasing share of a society's population that lives in cities or urban areas.

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2. Urban design

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the physical layout of streets, buildings, public and private spaces, and other land uses

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3. Urban planning

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state intervention in the urbanization process -- as well as the ensemble of ideas used to influence, organize, and justify that intervention

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The Four Horsemen of Renaissance Apocalyptic Beauty

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1. War: military technologies and the rise of the nation-state.
2. Colonialism: the knowledge and wealth gained from global exploration and exploitation.
3. Disaster: fires, plagues, and other dangers of rapid urbanization.
4. Religious politics: Christianity vs. its others, and divisions within Christianity.

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War:

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Gunpowder was believed to have been invented by the Chinese in the 800s, and was introduced to Europe through Arabian trade networks early in the 1300s. The new artillery made the medieval cities -- walled cities protected by moats, or cities placed on high hills -- more vulnerable

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War (continued) - Mumford puts it best

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In the attempt to equalize military conditions, the towns from this point on were compelled to abandon their old system of simple walls, defended for the most part by a citizen soldiery. They were forced to hire soldiers, so that they might sally forth and engage the enemy in open battle; and after the successful defense of Milan by Prospero Colonna in 1521 they were forced to adopt the new methods of fortification that had been worked out there by the Italian military engineers.

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Disaster

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About half of Milan’s population died in plague in 1490, and this is believed to be a factor in the plans drew up by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), who worked in Milan for six years in the 1490s. da Vinci proposed “breaking up the city and reconstructing it on sanitary principles

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the Codex Atlanticus

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da Vinci “evolved a scheme for an Ideal City which would be situated on a beautiful river, free from sediments, gravel, or boulders, which would not flood the surrounding country or dry up. The river with its canals would be of great advantage because it would carry away all the dirt and refuse of the city. The width of the streets should be equal to the average height of the houses. There were to be two categories of streets, the upper ones with gutters in the middle and the lower ones flushed by the regulated water from the river. Stairways connect the upper and lower level. The upper streets were reserved for the gentry -- the gentili nomini -- and for strolling; those on the lower level for service vehicles and other wheeled traffic, and in general for the use and convenience of the people.

da Vinci’s proposal was part of a broad movement for utopian “new town” designs, in Italy and elsewhere, that Gutkind calls “The Ideal Cities of the Renaissance,” as “programmatic statements expressing the new ideas that developed following the disintegration of medieval mentality

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Religious Politics

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Denmark’s King Christian IV was defeated by the Hapsburgs in 1629, one of the decisive moments of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) caused by the political rivalry between Catholic and Protestant princes in Germany.

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The Thirty Years’ War

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ended with the Treaties of Westphalia (1648), which helped to create the modern system of nation-states that we recognize today; at the same time, the rise of nation-states were bound up with the expansion of ever-larger armies “sallying forth” to engage enemies that Mumford describes...

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Disaster (London Examples)

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London grew rapidly and defied growth controls. The medieval city walls (shown in red) could not contain growth after about 1000 CE.
Queen Elizabeth in 1580 tried to stem the growth by banning all construction within three miles of any of the gates of the City; revised laws followed in 1602, 1607, and 1615.
London was devastated by fire three times in the seventh and eighth centuries, and again in 982.
Plagues killed 33,000 in 1503, 41,000 in 1625, and 69,000 in 1665.

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The Great Fire of 1666

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destroyed 13,200 houses, the Royal Exchange, Custom Hall, 87 churches, and left 80,000 homeless

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the response to the Great Fire of 1666

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King Charles II created the framework for modern city planning by issuing decrees requiring fire-resistant materials in new construction, widened streets as firebreaks.
Ordered a survey of ownership in the burned area.
Established a “city planning commission,” with three commissioners appointed by the King, three by the City.

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Colonialism

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the entire legacy of the European Renaissance was financed through the exploitations of colonialism, with the rising maritime power first of Spain and Portugal, and then France and Britain.
Spanish conquistadors looted the wealth of the Aztec and Inca empires, then used forced labor in agricultural estates and mines.
From 1503 to 1660, Spanish shipments from Latin America tripled the amount of silver in Europe.
The slave trade, begun as early as 1570 by the Portuguese for labor in Brazil, expanded dramatically with a peak between 1660 and 1780. An estimated 45 million Africans were enslaved. About a third died enroute to the coast; about one-third died in the “middle passage” from West Africa to the Americas. An estimated 15 million slaves arrived in the Americas.

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institutions associated with the industrialization of Europe

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had their beginnings during the slave trade, or emerged out of the fortunes the trade created.
- Barclays Bank was once known as “Barclays Bank D.C.O.,” for “Dominions, Colonies, and Overseas,” and was established by a Quaker family that engaged in the slave trade
- The famous company Lloyds of London began as an insurer of slave consignments and slave ships.

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Exporting the renaissance

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the European-created city became the model for urban growth and development worldwide. In some regions, it was imposed on indigenous societies that were exterminated and shoved aside (as in North and South America and Oceana). In regions with long histories of indigenous cultures and urban life, it existed alongside of and transformed indigenous societies (as in most of Asia, the Greater Middle East, and Africa

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Renée Descartes

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There is strong circumstantial evidence that the geometric order of these new Renaissance towns helped to shape the philosophy of Renée Descartes. Descartes integrated geometry and algebra (in the ‘Cartesian’ coordinate system), and built a philosophy known as rationalism on the doctrine of the mind/body dualism

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The Circumstantial Evidence

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- Descartes spent formative periods in places shaped by the new urban environments created by Renaissance town-building (he was in the Netherlands when the Thirty Years’ War began).
-He traveled repeatedly between Paris and the Netherlands between 1618 and 1648, almost certainly passing through several towns that planning historians have described as reflecting “the geometrizatio of lived space
-Descartes repeatedly made “distinctive references to his own urban environment,” and used architectural and street metaphors of order, symmetry, and the perspective of straight avenues in developing his philosophy in the Discourse on Method
-Descartes also met an advisor of Cardinal Richelieu who was responsible for a city, Richelieu, that may have been modeled on Christianopolis

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Christianopolis

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Descartes mentions in correspondence that he had read Civitas Solis, (‘City of the Sun’), a 1602 utopian plan that inspired a theologian’s proposal for “Christianopolis,” a city plan designed to bring God’s perfection to the shape of the earthly city.

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Conclusions

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The European Renaissance replaced the stagnant, isolated, unplanned urbanism of the middle ages with a new synthesis of urbanization, urban design, and urban planning.
With colonialism, “the European-created city became the model for urban growth and development worldwide.”
There is evidence that the environment of the Renaissance city influenced the thought of Descartes and other philosophers of science and modernity

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Industrial City

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Beginning in the eighteenth century, the European-created city began to take a new form: the industrial city. As Pacione puts it, “The industrial city first developed in Britain, the cradle of the industrial revolution, but soon spread to Europe and North America.”

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Technological innovations that, quite literally, took place around the English Midlands between 1750 and 1850

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- A “spinning frame” (1768) that used rollers to untangle cotton fibers, developed by Richard Arkwrite, a barber and wigmaker from Preston
- The steam engine (1769), developed by James Watt, an instrument maker in Glasgow, Scotland
- New techniques to remove impurities from molten iron (1783), developed by Henry Cort, a naval agent working near Fareham
- The construction of a locomotive using Watt’s steam engine, devised by William Symington and William Murdoch (1774), then improved by William Hedley (1812), and George Stephenson, culminating in the first public railway (1825) between Stockton and Darlington

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The “Industrial Revolution”

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Industrialization was a material and economic transformation, but our history of it is also a discursive project. The concept of the industrial revolution is contested and contingent.

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Contested

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Some historians argue that there were important changes in goods production in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; others identify multiple industrial revolutions, such as
1. England in the late 1700s
2. The United States in the late 1800s
3. Asia and parts of Latin America in the late 1900s

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Contingent

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The industrial revolution took place in England and then spread across Western Europe, but that doesn’t mean that all of its causes originated here.
- Before 1492, most of the preconditions that would be critical for the eventual rise of industrial capitalism were present not merely in parts of Europe but also in parts of Asia and Africa [HOWEVER] After 1492, Europe gained three additional preconditions:

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Additional Preconditions

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a. The accumulation of wealth from the mines and plantations of America.
b. A vast expansion of global markets for products produced in Western Europe or imported and re-exported.
c. The achievement of capitalist political power on a wide scale in Western Europe, “something that had not happened elsewhere except on very small terrains.”
All three of these precursors .. appeared because of, or would not have appeared had it not been for, colonialism.”

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the nineteenth century

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as the industrial revolution spread across Europe, agricultural workers were displaced from rural areas by rising productivity -- leading to migration to the cities, and then, for many, to the new opportunities promised in North America.
In North America, European settlement and urbanization was proceeding from East to West.
The landscape of new opportunities, therefore, created distinctive migration streams

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Urban consequences of industrialization

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Industrialization made urban growth synonymous with industrial growth. “Industrial economies needed what cities had to offer: the physical infrastructure of factories, warehouses, stores, and offices; the transportation networks; the large labor pools; and the consumer markets.
- Leading industrialized cities saw massive crowding, terrible congestion, and pollution. Industrialization created “shock cities” -- cities that came to be seen as the physical manifestation of all the disturbing trends in society, economy, and culture of an entire era. Manchester is the iconic shock city of the industrial age.
- Industrialization created a “sedimentation” of new structures and inequalities laid atop the legacy of earlier urban patterns of Renaissance and medieval social relations
- The rise of the industrial city
reflected and reinforced global
realignments: cities like Manchester
grew and declined based on shifts in
colonial-era trading networks, while
new colonial adminstrative and
commercial centers were established
across Asia

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Distinctive Features of North American Urban Industrialization

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1. A more “pure” form of urban industrial growth
(Given the shorter history of urbanization, industrialization shaped many cities in the U.S. and Canada from their initial establishment. An urban system developed in which towns prospered or declined based on industrial productivity)
2) A distinctive historical trajectory for a “golden age” of industrialization
( Escaping the devastation of World War I, North America emerged as a dominant industrial power; again after World War II, this competitive advantage was strengthened).
3) Fordism

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Fordism

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based on Henry Ford’s innovations in assembly-line efficiency, involved the use of scientific management practices of Frederick W. Taylor, and a bold 1913 decision to pay workers a high wage of $5 per day -- to reduce turnover, and to ensure that workers could afford to buy the final product.Ford’s system involved vertical integration -- bringing all aspects of the production process under the same corporate control, in the same location. This ensured quality control and efficiency, but was only viable under conditions of stable product demand and minimal international competition.

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The Fordist “golden age”

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survived from 1945 to 1973, and then collapsed amidst energy price shocks, geopolitical shifts, and rising international competition. “Vertical distintegration” destroyed many of the large integrated structures of manufacturing, requiring new “post-Fordist” strategies of subcontracting, ‘just-in-time’ production, and ‘flexible specialization.’

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post-Fordist” strategies

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subcontracting, ‘just-in-time’ production, and ‘flexible specialization.’

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Reasons for deindustrialization

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1. Increasing economic instability and unpredictable demand.
2. Policy shifts in taxation, regulation, and international trade.
3. Automation and the replacement of labor by capital.
4. The increasingly global scale of the search for cheap labor.

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uneven development

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what Neil Smith diagnosed as a “locational see-saw” of growth and investment in some places, achieved through disinvestment and decline in other places.

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The Post-Industrial / Postmodern City:
Soja’s “six geographies of restructuring”

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1. Restructuring the economic base of urbanization.
2. The formation of a global system of world cities
3. A radical restructuring of urban form
4. The changing social structure of urbanism
5. The rise of the carceral city
6. Radical transformations of urban imagery.

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1. Restructuring the economic base of urbanization.

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A shift from Fordist mass-consumption vertical integration to post-Fordist flexible specialization

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2. The formation of a global system of world cities

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Dominant cities expand their trade areas “outward” to the global scale, while being transformed by “inward” flows of capital and labor

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3. A radical restructuring of urban form

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The comparatively neat spatial structure of the industrial city -- with the sharp divides between factory and office, between blue-collar and white-collar neighborhoods -- is replaced by a much more intricate and unpredictable mixture. As Soja puts it, the city is “simultaneously being turned inside out and outside in.”

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4. The changing social structure of urbanism

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Class polarization is increasing, but so are contrasts amongst different lifestyle groups with identities that cannot be understood solely in terms of class

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5. The rise of the carceral city

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Complex spatial patterns of widening inequality lead to the proliferation of mechanisms of separation, surveillance, and control: gated communities, private security forces, and video surveillance.

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6. Radical transformations of urban imagery.

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Postmodern corporate media complexes -- Hollywood, Disneyland, and all sorts of other cinema and media -- create a “postmodern city hyper-reality” that “has diffused from such specialised factories into everyday life.”

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An urban system

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any network of interdependent urban places. Significant changes in one city will have consequences for other cities in the system.

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the relationships between large and small cities remain stable over time; this urban system stability is variously interpreted as evidence of

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- economic equilibrium (economists)
- spatial regularities in human behavior (physicists)
- path dependencies in settlement, migration, and policy (geographers, sociologists)

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Canada provides an interesting case study of urban systems change for various reasons:

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- The urban settlement fabric is relatively new, with a distinctive simultaneous experience as a colonial-settler society and a site for staples extraction and “branch-plant” manufacturing
- Canada has a vast land area and a small population, accentuating the significance of regional variations and transnational influences
- Canada is dominated by proximity to the U.S. -- 70 percent of Canada’s population lives within 150 km of the border -- but maintains strong policy contrasts in urban and regional development

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Epochs (an instant in time) of Canadian Urban Development

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1. The mercantile era, 1600-1800
2. Agricultural settlements, 1800-1850
3. The ‘Great Transitions,’ 1850-1945
4. Post-World War II Fordist/Keynesian boom, 1945-1975
5. Neoliberal deindustrialization and service-sector growth, 1975-current

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1. The mercantile era, 1600-1800

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A typical colonial pattern, with an economy “oriented towards the provision of staples to the home country, and any economic development that might have competed with the ruling country was intentionally deterred.” At the end of this period, Canada’s population reached 340,000.

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2. Agricultural settlements, 1800-1850

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This period involved much higher rates of immigration, and a rapidly growing population. Natural increase was high, and conditions in Europe -- the Irish famine, the Scottish land enclosures -- favored emigration and settlement of agricultural areas in Ontario, the Maritimes, and Quebec. Market settlements developed to serve dispersed agricultural populations. At the end of this period, the population reached 2.4 million, with the three largest cities Montreal (58,000), Quebec City (42,000), and Toronto (30,000).

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3. The ‘Great Transitions,’ 1850-1945

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The development of a railway network, the expansion of the staples economy, the settlement of the prairies, and the formation of an industrial heartland. International demand for grain and a determination to prevent U.S. encroachment on the territories of British North America promoted prairie settlement. Industrial development was shaped by the National Policy enacted in 1879, which introduced tariffs on manufactured goods from the U.S.; early industrial development was dominated by U.S. branch plants established to circumvent the tariffs. Industrial development is concentrated along an axis from Quebec City to Windsor, creating an industrial “heartland” with urban-industrial dynamics that contrast with the staples-driven hinterland across the rest of Canadian territory. By 1941 the population reaches 11.5 million, with Montreal and Toronto both approximately 1 million.

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Canada’s urban-industrial “heartland”

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sometimes described as the nation’s “Main Street.”

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4. Post-World War II Fordist/Keynesian boom, 1945-1975

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Social programs and economic policies developed to cope with the Great Depression of the 1930s consolidate a period of industrial growth and rising consumer demand. The Fordist regime of accumulation is premised on mass production and increased wages achieved through productivity gains and trade union negotiations; public-sector policy, following the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, emphasizes the stimulation of aggregate demand and redistribution programs. The heartland/hinterland contrast widens, with comparatively stable urban industrial growth along the Quebec City - Windsor axis, versus boom-and-bust cycles more prevalent across the hinterland. Large metropolitan areas are shaped by dramatic downtown office growth and vast suburban single-family housing development; by 1971, Montreal reaches 2.7 million, and Toronto 2.6 million.

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5. Neoliberal deindustrialization and service-sector growth, 1975-current

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The oil crisis of the early 1970s, along with key political decisions in the U.K. and the U.S., lead to the collapse of the Fordist-Keynesian compromise. Shifts in trade policies with the U.S., culminating in the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 and a wide variety of bilateral and multilateral agreements with other countries, expand access to inexpensive consumer goods; yet free trade seriously undermines a succession of sectors -- textile and garment manufacturing, electronics, appliances, and eventually the car industry, “the jewel in the Canadian industrial crown.” Neoliberalism privileges de-regulation to achieve competitiveness, accelerating deindustrialization and replacing mass middle-class manufacturing employment with more polarized job structures in service industries. This period brings a realignment of the heartland/hinterland contrasts in economic growth: growth rates taper off consistently in the heartand, while hinterland growth rates match or exceed -- with fluctuations driven largely by staples demands in globalized commodity markets. The heartland/hinterland divide gives way to a new dichotomy between large metropolitan regions with diversified economies and immigration-driven growth, versus smaller urban areas more reliant on uneven regional trade areas, little immigration, and stability or absolute decline.

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Under conditions of neoliberalism and globalization, most attention to the contemporary Canadian urban system focuses on the top tier

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Between 2001 and 2006, half of Canada’s population increase of 1.6 million took place in just five metropolitan regions: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, and Edmonton. As much as 80 percent of the country’s economic and population growth over the next few decades will occur in only six broadly-defined city regions: the Greater Toronto Area, Vancouver and the lower mainland, Montreal and its environs, Ottawa-Gatineau, and the Calgary and Edmonton regions. What happens in these six urban regions will define the country’s future, both positively and negatively. If our large cities succeed, the country will prosper; if they fail, the consequences will be severe for everyone and every region of the country.”

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The strongest association for employment growth

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market accessibility -- being located in an area surrounded by dense settlement. Agglomeration effects are regional, however, not local

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In many cases, raw values and percentage figures show extreme variations, especially for small areas. One common approach, therefore, is to find a way of expressing changes in terms of how observed patterns depart from what we would expect based on a city’s size. One way to do this is?

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calculate a simple “growth quotient”:

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growth quotient

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absolute city population change, as a share of national population change DIVIDED BY / total city population, as a share of national population.

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various multivariate analyses to answer questions like "Are Canadian cities fundamentally different from U.S. cities? Is globalization erasing the differences between U.S. and Canadian cities? Does the variation within each national urban system exceed the differences between them?" The results....

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the results of the various multivariate analyses generally support the contention that Canadian cities are sufficiently different and distinctive within a North American context that they require separate consideration. While Canadian and American cities may be subject to similar causative processes, such as the transformation of employment structures, population deconcentration or immigration, there are other processes which are structured differently and perform differently, such as intergovernmental relations.” “...Canadian urban areas are very different places to those in the United States. Hence, the notion of the ‘North American City’ can be of only limited value and may be potentially misleading.”

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More recently, John Mercer and Kim England updated the analysis of Myth of the North American City. Some of their findings:

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Through the 1980s, Canada had none of the classic American “urban crisis” city-regions defined by central-city population loss in the context of overall metropolitan decline. HOWEVER - this optimistic evidence of a distinctively Canadian urban path seemed to disappear in the 1990s. Several factors may be driving a convergence in the patterns of growth and decline....

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Several factors may be driving a convergence in the patterns of growth and decline in canadian/us cities....

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- Deindustrialization, with a continued transition from manufacturing to services that is reshaping labor markets and the urban economic base.
- Demographic trends, with aging of European-origin ‘White’ populations and increased immigration from the Global South.
- Political and policy paths, marked by neo-liberal emphasis on ‘business friendly’ interventions, privatization, cuts in social service spending, as well as spatial strategies in politics

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after considering a variety of these urban indicators, Mercer and England rejected the convergence hypothesis:

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“...it is our considered judgment that ... Canadian cities are more public in their nature and U.S. ones are more private...The public city is more attuned to Canadian values, ideologies, and practices. It expresses a strong commitment to a greater emphasis on collectivities over individuals, though this has weakened...”

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the “public-private continuum”

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is moving decisively to the Right, towards greater inequality. Between 1970 and 2005 in the City of Vancouver, the share of middle-income census tracts fell from 65% to 31%. High-income tracts increased from 16% to 32%, while low-income neighborhoods increased from 19% to 37%.

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In the period between Confederation and the present, two distinct national identities have matured along with the Canadian state.

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1) The identity of the French-Canadian nation has turned from a focus on the Roman Catholic Church to a reliance on provincial authority
2) The English-Canadian identity has evolved from its strongly British affiliations toward an identity that envelopes all of Canada’s diversity.
Both changes in French Canadian and English Canadian national identities betoken shifts in their spatial identities.”

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Multivariate discriminant analysis

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can combine many indicators into a single “discriminant function” that measures the continuum between “Canadianness” and “Americanness.”

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“Sin City” discourse in the Canadian City

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1. Historical fears of urban poverty
2. Contemporary media images of crime, violence, and social deviance
3. Environmental impacts of urbanization

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Central Pace Theory

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Central place theory: an explanation of the
distribution of large and small settlements as the
result of the economics of serving trade areas. A
hierarchy emerges that reflects differences
among goods and services. Consumers are willing to travel very far for some goods and services, for example, but not for others.

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staples theory

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suggested that
change and growth in any regional economy can be understood in terms of the timing and location of staples discovery and exploitation: places where valuable natural resources are discovered and utilized for export earnings enjoy, for a time, a windfall that can be invested in other economic activities to build a solid foundation for diversification, industrialization, and sustained urban and regional growth.

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Innovation diffusion theory

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Over the medium to long term, urban population growth is a function of the number of innovations originating within a city’s economy or successfully adopted from outside sources. Larger cities, with larger economies, are likely to produce more innovations, thus attracting migrants to the city and helping to ensure that residents do not leave for other cities. Therefore, the sheer size of large cities
ensures a strong and steady stream of innovations, which in turn contributes to a steady source of population growth. Smaller cities must depend more on adopting innovations that diffuse from other, usually larger, centers

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economic base theory

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A variation on the theme of staples. retains the notion of a leading, specialized sector driving diversification and urban growth -- but considers all kinds of industries. In economic base theory, the basic sector is any economic activity in which a particular place specializes, and exports to other regions or cities; the non-basic sector consists of economic activities oriented towards local consumption (for instance, the mundane assortment of lower-order retail and service functions that all cities have). A city’s basic sector is regarded as the engine that drives local growth, since it is this sector that attracts “new” earnings from other places; non-basic activities, by contrast, simply reallocate money that is already in the local economy.