Contents
List of illustrations
List of tables
List of boxes
About the authors
Acknowledgments
Walk-through tour
Introduction
Using this book
PART I THE FOUNDATIONS
CHAPTER 1: Cities as places and spaces
Cities as places
Identity, community, and security
Human beings make and remakeplaces
Place and space
Cities shape the fates of humanbeings
Cities and people
CHAPTER 2: Social theories of urban space and place
The social and theoretical rootsof modern urban theory
The Chicago School of Sociology
Life in the city as a way of life
Early social theories of urban life
CHAPTER 3: Social theories of urban space and place
Theoretical descendents of Marx
The return to place and the turn to culture
Going global: The 1980s and the creation of the global city
Evaluating theories of the city
CHAPTER 4: Methods and rules for the study of cities
First rules for doing a social science of cities
Cities and the question of numbers
The city as a case study
Ethnographic and historical case studies
From one to multiple cases
A last but very important rule on doing a good social science of cities: Fitting good theory to good methods
And what about insight?
PART II THE CHANGING METROPOLIS
CHAPTER 5: The metropolis and its expansion
Metropolitan growth: Basic features
The metropolis and its expansion
The mobility of people and groups in the metropolis
The metropolitan center and its links to the hinterlands
Human agents and social institutions in the expansion of the metropolis
Urban growth, institutions, and human agents
CHAPTER 6: The origins and development of suburbs
What is a suburb? Definitions and variations
A brief history of suburban development
Changes and challenges in contemporary suburbs
Suburbs as places
CHAPTER 7: Changing metropolitan landscapes after World War II
Los Angeles: The prototype of the postwar metropolis
The changing metropolitan order
The emerging global economy: A brief overview
People, place, and space in a global world
PART III THE METROPOLIS AND SOCIAL INEQUALITIES
CHAPTER 8: The early metropolis as a place of inequality
Colonial cities as unequal places
Early urban diversity
Cities of immigrants
Making the American ghetto
The significance of urban diversity and inequality
CHAPTER 9: Inequality and diversity in the post-World War II metropolis
Inequality and the metropolis
Gentrification and the remaking of the metropolis
Social diversity and thetransformed metropolis
Reconstructing the contemporary metropolis: New ethnic enclaves
Other dimensions of urban diversity
The Western metropolis in flux
PART IV THE METROPOLIS IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD
CHAPTER 10: Urbanization and urban places in developing- country cities
Urbanization: The basic path and its impact on place
Developing-country cities in historical perspective
The basic dimensions of urbanization
From process and system to place
Megacities as places: Opportunities and challenges
Reassessing the developing city
CHAPTER 11: Cities in the global economy
Cities in a globalizing world: Theoretical Background
Emerging cities in the global economy
Re-emerging cities in the global economy
Moving more deeply into the global economy
Cities in a fully networked global economy
Interdependence between cities and the global economy
PART V CHALLENGES OF TODAY AND THE METROPOLIS OF THE FUTURE
CHAPTER 12: Urban environments and sustainability
Making use of nature
Urban environments
Global environmental concerns
Addressing environmental issues: Toward sustainability
CHAPTER 13: The remaking and future of cities
Between place and space: Reinforcing a theoretical vision
Remaking cities from above and at critical moments
Place-remaking on a larger scale
Daily place-remaking from below
Remaking cities for the future
Cities of the future and the future of cities
A final look at the twenty-first-century city
Glossary
References
Index
The Introduction to Cities: How Place and Space Shape Human Experience companion website contains a number of resources created by the authors that you will find helpful in using this book for university courses or for your own intellectual growth.
List of urban studies journals presents a large number of scholarly journals that publish urban research from around the globe.
Annotated list of urban studies web resources directs you to the websites of research centers, data compilers, and nonprofit organizations working on urban questions.
Annotated documentary guide provides information about a number of films that help to illustrate many of the key themes in the book.
Essay and discussion questions supplement the critical thinking questions included in the book.
Additional cases and examples are provided for use in the classroom, including a guide to how to pair them with the relevant chapters of the book.
This edition first published 2013
© 2013 Xiangming Chen, Anthony M. Orum, and Krista E. Paulsen
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chen, Xiangming, 1955–
Introduction to cities : how place and space shape human experience / Xiangming Chen, Anthony M. Orum, and Krista E. Paulsen.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-5554-0 (pbk.)
1. Cities and towns–Social aspects. 2. Urban sociology. 3. Urbanization–Social aspects. I. Orum, Anthony M. II. Paulsen, Krista E. III. Title.
HT119.C485 2013
307.76–dc23
2012009764
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Tourists walk along the Bund (Wai Tan) in front of the Pudong skyline. Shanghai. © Eightfish / Getty
Cover and internal design by Design Deluxe
| Figure 1.1 | Percentage of population in urban areas by world and region, 1950–2050. |
| Figure 1.2 | Redevelopment in the older areas of Shanghai has displaced an estimated one million households. This woman was one of the last remaining residents in her neighborhood, having refused to relocate. |
| Figure 1.3 | Jane Jacobs at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village in 1961. For Jacobs, the neighborhood tavern was an important place for locals and visitors alike to renew connections. |
| Figure 1.4 | Murals in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood announce – and enhance – the area’s Mexican heritage. |
| Figure 1.5 | A horse and buggy ride in front of Hoffburg Palace, Vienna. Tourist spaces often include elements that connect places to moments in the past. |
| Figure 1.6 | Attractions such as markets (this one is in Gualaceo, Ecuador) ensure that public spaces remain well-used, as the presence of people tends to attract even more people. |
| Figure 1.7 | A parking spot in Tromsø, Norway is remade into an urban forest as part of PARK(ing) Day 2009. |
| Figure 2.1 | Manchester as it looked in the 1840s (around the time that Engels was writing). As in other industrial cities of this era, Manchester’s poor and working-class residents struggled to find decent housing and food, and lived with polluted air and water. These circumstances, as well as the unprecedented crowding found in growing cities, contributed to early theorists’ generally bleak view of urban life. |
| Figure 2.2 | Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City Plan attempts to unify the city and the natural world. Not only is the small city surrounded by natural and agricultural spaces but nature can also be found within the city as well in the form of parks and gardens. How different is this vision from contemporary small towns and suburbs that try to balance the advantages of urban and rural spaces? |
| Figure 2.3 | Le Corbusier’s 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris. The Isle de la Cité, at right center in this image, is one of the few recognizable features in this radical proposal. Note how the winding streets and blocks are razed and replaced with a much-larger-scale, “efficient” grid surrounding the skyscrapers. These “superblocks,” combining many standard-sized city blocks, would become a hallmark of Le Corbusier-inspired planning as adopted worldwide. |
| Figure 2.4 | Ernest Burgess’ map of Chicago’s “concentric zones.” The Central Business District, in Chicago known as “the Loop” after the elevated railway that circles it, is Zone 1. From this dense center we move to decreasingly dense outer areas at the city’s edge. As applied to Chicago, the zones or rings are really semi-circles. The wavy line that vertically bisects this figure represents the shore of Lake Michigan. |
| Figure 2.5 | Row houses along Acorn Street in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood. Although the narrow cobblestone streets confounded modern standards of efficiency, for residents and visitors they held great sentimental value. |
| Figure 2.6 | As this scene from a Manhattan sidewalk reveals, the density of urban environments brings people into close contact with one another even when they have no social or emotional connections. Wirth argued that this proximity, and the resulting overstimulation, leads city dwellers to adopt a blasé attitude as a means of defense. |
| Figure 2.7 | International Pillow Fight Day 2010, as observed in Brussels. |
| Figure 3.1 | A child walks through the Islington area of London, 1966. At the time of Harvey’s early writings, conditions for the urban poor of many developed nations were no better than those of their counterparts in the nineteenth century. |
| Figure 3.2 | Many types of community organizing and urban protest movements build on the critiques of urban inequality put forth by David Harvey. Here protestors from Los Angeles’ Bus Riders Union pressure the Metropolitan Transit Authority to end a mechanics’ strike in 2003. |
| Figure 3.3 | Soccer City Stadium in Johannesburg, constructed for the 2010 World Cup. Sporting “mega-events” are one way in which cities can generate positive attention in the hopes of attracting growth and investment, but this often comes at a cost for residents. |
| Figure 3.4 | Children at play on a New York City sidewalk. While playing in the street was often derided as akin to juvenile delinquency, many urban children had few other places to play. Jane Jacobs made the case that streets and sidewalks provided play spaces that adults could easily supervise from steps or windows, thus decreasing the likelihood that children would get into trouble. |
| Figure 3.5 | New York’s SoHo district in 1970. While this street still bustles with commercial activity, garment manufacturing was on the wane and the area was becoming home to more and more of the artists that would transform its character. Note the “Loft for Rent” sign on the pole at the right. |
| Figure 3.6 | Canary Wharf in London epitomizes the urban impact of global economic transformations that Sassen calls attention to. Once a working dock, the wharf’s navigational use faded with the shift to container shipping that accompanied economic globalization. The area has since been redeveloped as a financial services center. |
| Figure 3.7 | The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, designed by Frank Ghery. The museum has helped a city once known for mining and shipbuilding to redefine itself as a center of art, culture, and, of course, tourism. |
| Figure 4.1 | A new Whole Foods market opened in New York City’s Bowery neighborhood in 2010. While the area was once synonymous with vagrancy and crime, it is now home to upscale retailers such as Whole Foods, which specializes in organic and natural products. A systematic inventory of the retail and service offerings in a neighborhood can be one means of documenting changes associated with gentrification. |
| Figure 4.2 | The Street Life Project made innovative use of cameras to capture what really happens in public spaces such as street corners and plazas. Whyte and his team would analyze the film, frame by frame, to see how many people were present in a space, how long they stayed, and the kinds of interactions they engaged in. |
| Figure 4.3 | School children in Muncie, Indiana around the time of the Middletown study. The Lynds and their assistants focused on ordinary facets of town life, including who went to school and what the school day was like. In doing so, they emphasized the typicality of Muncie, stating in their introduction that “a typical city, strictly speaking, does not exist, but the city studied was selected as having many features common to a wide group of communities” (Lynd and Lynd 1959: p. 3). |
| Figure 4.4 | Many urban scholars and practitioners make use of photography to reveal aspects of life in cities that are otherwise hard to capture. Joan Kadri Zald, a social worker and photographer, documented homeless individuals in Tucson and Ann Arbor, calling attention to complex dimensions of their lives and backgrounds. This married couple was among the large number of homeless families that Zald encountered in her work. |
| Figure 4.5 | Walking the dog is a routine activity that brings individuals into contact with places and one another. Sociologist Margarethe Kusenbach suggests that accompanying people on these outings can be a productive research strategy. |
| Figure 4.6 | Railroads play a central role in Cronon’s analysis of Chicago. In this 1870 map you can see that by the time of the Great Chicago Fire the city had established itself as a central transportation node connecting the productive lands of the American west to the markets of the eastern seaboard and Europe. It then became a center of manufacturing and processing as well, leading to the city’s unprecedented growth rate in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. |
| Figure 5.1 | Sprawling Mexico City is among the many cities that are now most appropriately understood as a metropolis. |
| Figure 5.2 | Harris and Ullman’s multiple nuclei model. |
| Figure 5.3 | New York City’s Director of Public Works Robert Moses tours a new housing project being built in the city (Moses is on the right). While some of Moses’ works were praised – particularly recreational amenities such as Jones Beach – others, such as the Cross Bronx Expressway, were broadly criticized for the number of homes destroyed and communities disrupted. |
| Figure 5.4 | Paris, as remade by Haussmann, seen here from a balloon in 1889. The familiar radial form of the city, with its wide boulevards and monuments, is actually one of the first examples of a broad-scale urban renewal project. |
| Figure 6.1 | The mass-produced tract homes that constitute the stereotypical image of the suburb. In reality, suburbs and their residents have always been more diverse than images like this suggest. |
| Figure 6.2 | The edge city mode of development is not limited to the United States. In Paris, La Defense conforms to Garreau’s definition of an edge city, as do areas in other major European and Asian cities. |
| Figure 6.3 | Swedish Programme housing in Malmö. High-rise apartments are common in European suburbs and elsewhere, but epitomize the density that Americans were seeking to avoid in moving to the city’s edge. |
| Figure 6.4 | The former Phipps home on Long Island (now Old Westbury Gardens) is typical of the mansions built by US industrialists to mimic the estates of the English nobility. This model of the suburban “good life” is reproduced through the current era in the United States and globally. |
| Figure 6.5 | A streetcar in suburban Los Angeles. Electric and horse-drawn streetcar lines gave form to early suburban expansion. Streetcar lines were usually privately owned, and many owners (such as Henry Huntington, who owned the Pacific Electric Railway line seen here) made the bulk of their fortunes as real estate developers. |
| Figure 6.6 | Houses in suburban Kentlands, Maryland face a common green space; cars are relegated to the rear. Designed by New Urbanist firm Duany Plater-Zyberk, Kentalnds demonstrates how contemporary suburban communities can encourage density and walkability. |
| Figure 6.7 | The components of a house to be built in Levittown on New York’s Long Island in 1948. Builder Levitt and Sons popularized a type of assembly line construction that, together with federally subsidized mortgages, made owning a suburban home far less expensive than renting in the city – at least for those who were not excluded by racially restrictive covenants. |
| Figure 6.8 | While some gated communities contain modest single-family homes or apartments, others are among the most opulent of suburban developments. Amenities including pools and golf courses abound, and the increased security, or at least the impression of security, is also sold as an amenity. Here a security guard checks a car at a gated subdivision outside Seattle. |
| Figure 6.9 | Transit-oriented development in the Seattle suburb of Redmond (note the “Park & Ride” sign, indicating that cars can be left here for the day while commuters take the bus into the city). Like many first-ring suburbs in growing metropolitan areas, Redmond’s density is increasing. |
| Figure 6.10 | Demolition of a home in Cuyahoga County, outside Cleveland. A number of suburban communities here took advantage of federal funds to eliminate vacant, abandoned, and blighted homes in once thriving suburbs. |
| Figure 7.1 | Los Angeles, as seen from a satellite. Nearly every developable parcel within this 100 mile stretch is covered by houses, businesses, and roads. |
| Figure 7.2 | Demolition proceeds on a Pittsburgh steel mill in the early 1980s. Like many cities in the Midwest and northeast, Pittsburgh’s economy was radically transformed by the closure of mills and related industrial plants. |
| Figure 7.3 | President Barack Obama’s biography has brought new attention to community organizing, a strategy for improving urban neighborhoods that became widespread in the 1960s. Obama worked in neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago, an area devastated by deindustrialization. |
| Figure 7.4 | Industrial growth in Japan, particularly the manufacture of automobiles and consumer electronics, transformed its cities in the 1970s and 1980s. Here televisions are being made at Hitachi’s Yokohama manufacturing facility in 1971. |
| Figure 7.5 | The demographic explosion in Shenzhen, 1979–2009. |
| Figure 7.6 | The Santa Fe Bridge border crossing between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso. These and other cities along the United States–Mexican border have experienced dramatic growth due to the development of maquiladoras on the Mexico side. |
| Figure 8.1 | As this 1935 photograph of a London street shows, the experiences of the same place are very different for different individuals – in this case, the man who has his shoes shined and the man who shines shoes. |
| Figure 8.2 | Mexico City’s Zócalo, or Plaza de la Constitución, bordered by the Metropolitan Cathedral and National Palace, illustrates the type of central plaza dictated by Spain’s Laws of the Indies. Here, as in other colonial cities, the forms that spaces took symbolized just what groups and institutions held power. |
| Figure 8.3 | Mulberry Bend, as photographed by Jacob Riis circa 1888. Initially an Irish neighborhood, Mulberry Street later became the heart of New York’s Italian immigrant community. Italian-owned groceries and banks lined the street, and new immigrants knew to find their way here to look for work. |
| Figure 8.4 | Birthplaces of Five Points adults, 1855 and 1880. |
| Figure 8.5 | Jacob Riis, “Italian Mother and Baby, Ragpicker, New York,” circa 1889–1890. In one of his most famous images, Riis simultaneously reveals the struggle and humanity of his subjects. This woman worked as a ragpicker, sorting through trash for usable bits of cloth, paper, bone, or other materials. Tenement apartments routinely provided storage for the gleanings before they were sold. |
| Figure 8.6 | The Gate of Harmonious Interest marks one boundary of Victoria’s Chinatown. Like many Chinese enclaves in North America, Victoria’s Chinatown was once viewed by outsiders as a dangerous and unsanitary place, but has since become a symbol of vital and desirable urban diversity. |
| Figure 8.7 | Immigrants to the United States by birth country region, 1850–1930. |
| Figure 8.8 | Percentage change in black population over the preceding 10 years, by US Census region, 1890–1940. |
| Figure 8.9 | What were then called the “negro quarters” of Philadelphia (probably the Seventh Ward), around 1900. This area was at the heart of Du Bois’ study. |
| Figure 9.1 | Martin Luther King Jr. after being hit by a stone at an event in Chicago, 1966. Although the US South was the site of pronounced civil rights struggles at this time, tensions were at least as high in the segregated communities of the northeast and Midwest. |
| Figure 9.2 | A woman in a make-do shelter beneath the Manhattan Bridge in New York City. While homelessness is often regarded as a timeless and pervasive problem, the rate of homelessness increased dramatically in the 1980s. |
| Figure 9.3 | Shops in Berlin-Kreuzberg, an immigrant neighborhood, cater to the area’s Turkish population. |
| Figure 9.4 | Toronto’s 2008 Gay Pride Parade. Gay and lesbian populations are creating neighborhood enclaves and recognition through formal celebrations in more and more cities. |
| Figure 10.1 | Level of urbanization. |
| Figure 10.2 | Singapore’s financial district. A city-state, Singapore is arguably the only fully urbanized country. |
| Figure 10.3 | The urban pyramid. |
| Figure 10.4 | Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, was forcibly emptied by the Khmer Rouge in an attempt to recreate an agrarian state. |
| Figure 10.5 | The 10 largest cities by 2020. |
| Figure 10.6 | A Ferrari showroom in downtown Shanghai. |
| Figure 10.7 | The Gini index for 12 world cities and national averages. |
| Figure 10.8 | A striking contrast between São Paulo’s Paraisopolis favela and a gated condominium in Morumbi. |
| Figure 10.9 | Water is delivered by truck in Lomo de Corvina slum in Lima. In many poor urban areas in the developing world, public services such as water, power, sewage, and trash removal are limited or nonexistent. |
| Figure 11.1 | Egyptian traders outside a Palestinian-run restaurant in Yiwu. Although Yiwu is not well-known outside international trade and manufacturing businesses, it is one of the most globalized cities in China. |
| Figure 11.2 | Rajarhat New Town, near Kolkata, India. |
| Figure 11.3 | Construction in Rajarhat New Town, near Kolkata, India. Here development is oriented toward the needs of a rapidly growing information technology sector. |
| Figure 11.4 | The Art House Tacheles (Kunsthaus Tacheles) in Berlin. Built at the turn of the twentieth century and occupied by diverse tenants throughout its history, Tacheles has become a central point in Berlin’s art and cultural scene. |
| Figure 11.5 | Pudong (east of the Huangpu River), Shanghai around 1980 (a) and 2010 (b). |
| Figure 11.6 | Community participation and concerns for domestic and global events, Pudong, Shanghai, 2001. |
| Figure 11.7 | Personal global connections and eating McDonald’s or KFC and buying foreign brand-name clothes, Shanghai, 2001. |
| Figure 11.8 | The Pearl River Delta region, Guangdong Province, China. |
| Figure 11.9 | Dubai Palm Jumeriah and adjacent development, as seen from a satellite. |
| Figure 11.10 | Europe’s “Blue Banana” economic region. |
| Figure 11.11 | Les Halles, long the site of markets in Paris, continues to provide shopping space but in a completely redeveloped place. |
| Figure 12.1 | Aqueducts, like these built by the Romans in Segovia, provided an early means of harnessing natural resources to serve urban populations. |
| Figure 12.2 | Headline from the Los Angeles Times, July 29, 1905. The article continues, “The cable that has held the San Fernando Valley vassal for 10 centuries to the arid demon is about to be severed by the magic scimitar of engineering skill. Back to the headwaters of the Los Angeles River will be turned the flow of a thousand mountain streams that ages ago were tributaries of the current that swept past the site of the ancient pueblo of Los Angeles to the ocean. The desert has yielded up its wealth. The problem of Los Angeles’ water supply has been solved for the next hundred years.” While it is difficult to imagine such an unabashedly positive account of such an event in today’s news media, the tone here provides insight into the strong desire of Los Angeles’ boosters to obtain water. |
| Figure 12.3 | The Kingston Crescent area of Winnipeg during the 1950 Red River Flood. The river crested at its highest level in some 90 years, breaking levees, destroying bridges, and submerging 600 square miles of urban and rural land. Over 100 000 people were evacuated. |
| Figure 12.4 | When many small polluters are found in the same neighborhood, the cumulative risks to residents’ health can become quite high. Here Lejano and Smith have plotted the cancer risks for a small Los Angeles neighborhood (Huntington Park). The vertical axis indicates lifetime risk (e.g., 400 in one million). |
| Figure 12.5 | Protestors mark the 25th anniversary of the gas leak in Bhopal that killed some 8000 and injured 150 000 others. Not only do toxic industries disproportionately locate in poor and minority areas but these communities also have a difficult time gaining redress for illnesses and injuries suffered as a result of exposure. Victims of the Bhopal accident and their families are still seeking what they feel is adequate compensation. |
| Figure 12.6 | In slum areas where access to water is limited, residents often have little choice but to use rivers to meet basic sanitation needs. Bathing and washing in urban rivers are common in developing-world cities; pictured here is the Buriganga River in Dhaka, which is polluted by industrial as well as human wastes. |
| Figure 12.7 | Bus rapid transit (or BRT) in Curitiba, Brazil, which is often looked to as a model of public transit efficiency. Dedicated bus lanes, “tube” stations where riders pay before boarding the bus, and a mix of local and regional routes contribute to the system’s success. |
| Figure 13.1 | Chinese workers sew T-shirts at the Bo Tak garment factory in Dongguan city in Guangdong province, southern China, May 27, 2005. |
| Figure 13.2 | Vacant lots outnumber homes in some Detroit neighborhoods. Residents, planners, and government officials are now trying to reimagine and remake a city with only a fraction of its former population. |
| Figure 13.3 | Crowded and chaotic Lagos provides one model of what the future might look like for the majority of city dwellers. |
| Figure 13.4 | The entrance to a work unit (danwei) named North China Optico-Electric Co. The danwei provided workers with housing and needed services, and a compulsory type of community. New urban forms have eroded that old model of community, without yet replacing it with a new one. |
| Figure 13.5 | Net migration and natural growth rate in Shanghai, 1995–2006. Net migration rate = in-migration rate minus out-migration rate. Natural growth rate = birth rate minus death rate. |
| Figure 13.6 | Construction on the Imperial Towers in Mumbai. In the coming years, the volume of new construction in Indian and Chinese cities will dwarf all cities in the West. However, large Chinese cities like Shanghai are much taller and more vertical than their Indian counterparts, such as Mumbai. |
| Figure 13.7 | A woman and child bicycle through Vauban, a German suburb designed to be largely car-free. Homes are also constructed for maximum energy efficiency to enhance sustainability on multiple fronts. |
| Table 1.1 | Percentage of GDP generated in urban versus rural areas, 2009. |
| Table 1.2 | Place versus space. |
| Table 4.1 | Approaches to urban case studies. This table, adapted from work by sociologist Neil Brenner, presents different ways in which the study of a single city might be approached. As a case, a city may draw interest as the first of a kind (prototypical) or as an extreme or common expression of a trend (archetypical and stereotypical, respectively). |
| Table 4.2 | Rankings for tolerance and creativity; US urban regions. Richard Florida’s investigation of the cities in which creative professionals cluster led him to a variety of novel measures. The Gay Index, developed by Florida’s collaborator Gary Gates, ranks cities in terms of their concentration of gay and lesbian adults based on 2000 US Census data. This closely corresponds to the Creativity Index, which combines multiple indicators of creative and high-tech productivity in an urban area. |
| Table 5.1 | Projected populations of the world’s largest urban agglomerations in 2025. |
| Table 7.1 | Racial/ethnic composition of places in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, 1960–2000. The Los Angeles area, including suburban Orange County, became much more diverse over this 40-year period. Although we have collapsed a number of minority categories here due to limitations in the data reporting (particularly in the early years), the pattern reflects a pronounced increase in immigrants from Latin America and Asia. |
| Table 8.1 | Percentage of residents born outside the US, 1870–1930. |
| Table 8.2 | Indices of dissimilarity for black and white populations, select US cities, 1980–2000. |
| Table 8.3 | Indices of exposure and isolation, black and white populations, select US cities, 2000. |
| Table 9.1 | Immigrant (foreign-born) populations of select US metropolitan areas by city and suburbs, 1980 and 2005. |
| Table 9.2 | Percentage distribution of total immigrants to Canada living in key cities and provinces, 1981 and 2000. |
| Table 12.1 | The ten costliest earthquakes, 1980–2010. |
| Table 12.2 | Damage and displacement from Hurricane Katrina (August 29, 2005). |
| Exploring further 1.1 | Place attachment |
| Studying the city 1.1 | The globalization of gated communities |
| Studying the city 1.2 | Tourist spaces |
| Making the city better 1.1 | PARK(ing) day |
| Studying the city 2.1 | Friedrich Engels in Manchester |
| Exploring further 2.1 | Urban planning as a remedy for urban ills |
| Studying the city 2.2 | Walter Firey on sentiment and symbolism |
| Making the city better 2.1 | Technology and urban isolation |
| Making the city better 3.1 | The Los Angeles Bus Riders Union |
| Making the city better 3.2 | International sporting mega-events |
| Studying the city 3.1 | The urban villagers |
| Exploring further 3.1 | From spaces of production to spaces of consumption |
| Exploring further 4.1 | Validity and reliability in the study of public spaces |
| Studying the city 4.1 | Finding demographic data |
| Studying the city 4.2 | The go-along |
| Studying the city 4.3 | Applied sociology and action research |
| Studying the city 5.1 | The Chicago School’s natural area studies |
| Exploring further 5.1 | Beyond concentric zones |
| Studying the city 5.2 | Hinterlands as empire |
| Making the city better 5.1 | Zoning |
| Making the city better 6.1 | The lawn |
| Exploring further 6.1 | Gender and suburban life |
| Making the city better 6.2 | Accommodating automobiles |
| Studying the city 6.1 | City and suburb in popular culture |
| Exploring further 7.1 | The unwieldy metropolis |
| Making the city better 7.1 | Community organizing |
| Studying the city 7.1 | Border metropolitan complexes |
| Studying the city 8.1 | Canada’s Chinatowns |
| Making the city better 8.1 | Jane Addams and Chicago’s settlement houses |
| Studying the city 8.2 | W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Philadelphia Negro |
| Exploring further 8.1 | Defining and measuring segregation |
| Exploring further 9.1 | The “culture of poverty” debate |
| Making the city better 9.1 | Organizations that aid the homeless |
| Exploring further 9.2 | Tax increment financing |
| Studying the city 9.1 | Mary Pattillo’s Black on the Block |
| Studying the city 9.2 | Annika Hinze on Turkish Muslims and their neighborhoods in Berlin |
| Making the city better 9.2 | Spaces and places of the LGBT community |
| Studying the city 10.1 | Ancient cities |
| Studying the city 10.2 | An unprecedented experiment with urbanization and megacity building in Chongqing, China |
| Exploring further 10.1 | The informal economy in African cities and beyond |
| Making the city better 10.1 | Microlending and urban economies |
| Making the city better 10.2 | The Dharavi redevelopment project |
| Studying the city 10.3 | Martin Murray on Johannesburg |
| Studying the city 11.1 | Leslie Chang’s Factory Girls |
| Exploring further 11.1 | World cities versus global cities |
| Studying the city 11.2 | Cities in global networks |
| Making the city better 11.1 | Global urban growth, displacement, and the role of non-governmental organizations |
| Studying the city 12.1 | Man-made disasters |
| Making the city better 12.1 | London’s cholera epidemic and the beginning of epidemiology |
| Making the city better 12.2 | The environmental justice movement |
| Exploring further 12.1 | Transportation and sustainability |
| Making the city better 13.1 | Urban agriculture in Detroit and beyond |
| Studying the city 13.1 | Projecting urban growth |
| Making the city better 13.2 | Remaking slum housing |
| Making the city better 13.3 | Vauban, an auto-free suburb |
| Exploring further 13.1 | The right to the city |
 | Xiangming Chen Is the founding Dean and Director of the Center for Urban and Global Studies and Paul Raether Distinguished Professor of Global Urban Studies and Sociology at Trinity College, Hartford, and Distinguished Guest Professor in the School of Social Development and Public Policy at Fudan University, Shanghai. His books include The World of Cities: Places in Comparative and Historical Perspective (with Anthony M. Orum, Blackwell, 2003), As Borders Bend: Transnational Spaces on the Pacific Rim (2005), and Shanghai Rising: State Power and Local Transformations in a Global Megacity (ed., 2009), and Rethinking Global Urbanism: Comparative Insights from Secondary Cities (coed., 2012). Several of his books have been translated into Chinese. |
 | Anthony M. Orum Is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was the founding editor of the journal City & Community, and has received several awards, including the 2009 Robert and Helen Lynd Award for Lifetime Achievement and Service given by the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. His publications include City-Building in America (1995), The World of Cities: Places in Comparative and Historical Perspective (with Xiangming Chen, Blackwell, 2003), and Common Ground? Readings and Reflections on Public Space (ed. with Zachary Neal, 2010). Several of his books have been translated into Chinese. |
 | Krista E. Paulsen Is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Florida. She has published widely on the city, urban tradition, and the ways that places develop and maintain distinctive cultures. Her research examines the ways that homes and neighborhoods reflect and reproduce cultural ideals associated with family and community, and her teaching takes in urban sociology and urban studies, environmental sociology, community, and qualitative research methods. She is currently at work on the edited volume Home – Place – Community: International Sociological Perspectives (ed. with Margarethe Kusenbach and Melinda Milligan). |
The authors would like to thank a number of people whose contributions and assistance made this book possible. It is no exaggeration to say that this work would not exist without the patience and enthusiasm of Justin Vaughn, our acquisitions editor at Wiley-Blackwell. The editors and production staff with Wiley-Blackwell – Louise Butler, Hazel Harris, Dave Nash, Annie Rose, and Ben Thatcher, as well as a number of others – shepherded us through this process and made innumerable contributions to the quality of this book. We are also grateful to the various anonymous scholars who reviewed this book. Their feedback was vital. In particular, we wish to acknowledge the comments of Jan Lin, Robert Kleidman, Tai-lok Lui, and Charles Jaret. Their criticisms and suggestions, which we received toward the completion of our first draft, helped us to organize the book more effectively as well as to more clearly and forcefully articulate the book’s major themes of place and space. We also thank Dale Morgan at Wiley-Blackwell and Katie Song of John Wiley & Sons (Asia) in Beijing for facilitating the translation of this book into Chinese for publication by Fudan University Press toward the end of 2012. Mr. Hui Zhu in Shanghai has done a tremendous job in finishing the translation of the manuscript early enough so that the Chinese edition could and would appear soon in China after this book is officially published in the United Kingdom.
We also wish to thank a number of research assistants and other colleagues. David Boston researched and wrote a number of the boxes. Their quality reflects his broad curiosity and passion for the study of cities. Annika Hinze allowed us to use some of her observations and acute insights into the experiences of Turkish immigrant women in Germany; she prepared the box on this material that appears in Chapter 9. We urge readers to look for her new book that examines these matters in greater detail and is forthcoming in 2013 from the University of Minnesota Press. We thank several undergraduate research assistants at the Center for Urban and Global Studies of Trinity College for their contributions to this book. Curtis Stone (class of 2010) produced three beautiful charts for Chapter 11. Yuwei Xie (class of 2011) located some material for several boxes in Chapter 11 and Chapter 12. Henry Fitts (class of 2012) searched for and compiled the online urban resources for the book’s website (www.wiley.com/go/cities). We also are grateful to Terry Romero, administrative assistant at the Center for Urban and Global Studies at Trinity, for indexing the book.
Individually, we wish to thank the following:
I owe another long-overdue thanks to Joel Smith for turning on my interest in studying cities in the 1980s when I was a graduate student at Duke University. My friend and former colleague Tony Orum helped to push my interest further through our joint publication of The World of Cities (Blackwell, 2003). That book created a wonderful opportunity for my own scholarship on Chinese and Asian cities to blend with and complement Tony’s work, and that partnership is now joined with Krista’s expertise in this broader collaboration. My work on this book has been enriched by conversations and collaboration with many colleagues at and through the Center for Urban and Global Studies at Trinity College over the past five years. Laura X. Hua helped to edit a few chapters and was a loving source of support. Finally, I thank the 30 students in my “From Hartford to World Cities” class in fall 2011 for reading the almost finalized chapters and collectively endorsing our shared goal to write a book that will really help students like them to understand cities.
Xiangming Chen
I embarked on the study of cities almost 30 years ago, prompted by my curiosity about the many changes I was witnessing in Austin, Texas. For me this book represents the culmination of my years of observations and reflections. I thank Xiangming and Krista for their supportive collaboration on this work, and I thank my many friends and students who across the years have helped me to better appreciate why and how place plays such an important role in the lives of human beings.
Anthony M. Orum
A research sabbatical granted by the University of North Florida allowed me substantial time to work on this book. My colleagues in the UNF Department of Sociology and Anthropology were a constant source of information, inspiration, and support through this process, as were the students in my courses on Urban Sociology; Race, Place and Inequality; and Community Organization, Change and Development. I also wish to thank Harvey Molotch for introducing me to urban sociology, Sharon Dunn for sparking my interest in old buildings and neighborhoods, and Nick Hudyma for his patience and support while I worked on this project. Finally, thanks to my coauthors Tony Orum and Xiangming Chen for making this collaboration so productive and enjoyable.
Krista E. Paulsen
As you read through the individual chapters in this book you’ll
find the following features, designed to help you develop a clear
understanding of cities and their role in the human experience.
Part openers The book is organized into five parts, and each part opens with a page listing the chapters it contains. The parts are color-coded, making them easy to identify.
Key topics Each chapter opens with a list of the key elements and concepts of the chapter, which will help to guide your reading.
Chapter table of contents Each chapter also begins with a list of its main headings and sub-headings.
Exploring further One of three types of textbox designed to enhance your reading of the book, Exploring further explains concepts or phenomena in greater depth.
Keywords Throughout the text, keywords are highlighted in bold, and you will find the definition nearby in the margin. The chapter keywords and their definitions are also collated in a glossary at the end of the book.
Studying the city Studying the city textboxes present distinct research techniques or findings.
Making the city better Making the city better textboxes focus on the efforts made throughout history to improve cities’ inhabitability.
Suggested reading Each chapter ends with a list of suggested reading, giving you the opportunity to take your knowledge and understanding of the subject further.
Critical thinking questions These questions are found at the end of each chapter and help you to revisit and consider the chapter’s main points.
You are about to read a book about cities. We cover a number of different cities, ranging from those in the West, such as Berlin and Chicago, to those in Asia, such as Shanghai and Mumbai. We want to furnish you with as complete and as rich an introduction to the nature of cities as we can. We have written this book in a particular style – what one reviewer has said is “almost conversational.” Cities are hard enough to understand without wading through a lot of difficult concepts and what critics of the social sciences often call jargon. We have tried in all instances to avoid jargon, and to make cities come alive in our prose.
Every author faces choices when writing a book, especially one like this that aims to be comprehensive. What ideas shall guide us on our journey? What ideas are important enough to make them key themes for an exposition about difficult material? We have faced those decisions and made certain choices in the narrative materials you are about to read. As you get further into this book, you will begin to learn more about our choices and why we made them. But here, at the outset, we want to share with you some of our thinking and reflections about the choices we have made.
The first choice we have made is to introduce a few basic concepts to guide us along our journey. Two concepts are essential to the way we think about cities: they are both places and spaces. Cities are places in the sense that people become connected and attached to them. The lives of people today typically occur in an urban environment, and so it is important for us to flesh out the nature and character of that environment. How do people make cities as places, whether through deliberate action or through the routines of their daily lives? And how do urban places act upon people?
We argue that cities as places provide three fundamental things that are important to human life and experience. They furnish a sense of community; they provide residents with a sense of identity; and they also help to establish a sense of security for people, a feeling that one can live in a particular neighborhood or street and be safe. As we introduce you to the specifics of cities throughout this book, we will come back again and again to emphasizing and illustrating the importance of cities as places, and of these three dimensions in particular.
In addition, we argue that cities are spaces. They offer a way to configure and to shape the material and natural environment of which they are composed. They have streets, houses, commercial buildings, and so on within, and their expressways and other transportation lines are configured in ways to help people move in and out of cities. Cities also provide public spaces – areas where their residents can come together and help to build a sense of community that is vital to the city as a place. Parks, sidewalks, and public squares are essential forms of public spaces, and they are crucial to the daily living that occurs in cities.
As you read through this book, these ideas, which at this moment are bare and abstract, will become more concrete. Indeed, the first chapter of this book is all about cities as places and spaces, and will furnish you with a number of specific examples and illustrations to make all of this clear.
There is a second critical choice we have made, and it is equally as important as the guiding concepts we have used here. This is the choice to emphasize the changing currents and elements of history as a way of showing how the theories about cities change as well as how cities themselves have become transformed, particularly over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. One thing is certain: cities do not remain the same. They change from one time to another. Early on in the United States, for example, cities were, as some observers have said, “walking cities.” They were small and people could get the things of daily life done by simply walking from one site to another. Parents could walk with their children to parks and schools; men and women could head off to work only minutes from where they lived.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century in the United States, and somewhat earlier in the United Kingdom, the world became transformed. The Industrial Revolution introduced a wide variety of changes that would affect the lives of people and also the shape of the cities and their surrounding rural environment. The space of the emerging industrial city began to expand. New industries opened, providing an opportunity for many people to migrate to the city and to find jobs. With all this expansion, and more, the character of the city began to change. One could no longer walk easily from one end to another. Eventually new forms of transportation, including buggies led by horses and later streetcars, emerged that would change the very character of a city’s streets and sidewalks as well as the social and business rhythms of everyday life. The composition of cities would change too, as populations became larger and more diverse.
This change from the walking to the industrial city was momentous. Equally momentous have been the transformations of cities over the course of recent decades. Some industrial cities have lost industries that had been their foundations: cities such as Manchester or Barcelona or Detroit have seen their factories and manufacturing firms move elsewhere, often to places in Asia. On the one hand, this sort of change has emptied and altered the character of a place like Detroit, leading to the loss of people as well as industries. Those left behind have been the poor, often the black poor, and their lives have been devastated by the loss of jobs. On the other hand, Detroit’s economic and manufacturing losses have turned out to be the gain of places elsewhere in the world, in China and India, for example. Over the course of the past 20 years alone, a number of new megacities have grown up in Asia. With new industries and plentiful jobs, these cities now have become the booming metropolitan areas of the early twenty-first century, just as Chicago and New York were at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Because cities have become so transformed across the globe over the course of the past century or so, we believe it important to take account of these changes in our narrative about cities and how they develop. We have done so by attending to historical forces and, where appropriate, dividing our story about cities into two historical periods: roughly before and after World War II. This is a convenient line of demarcation as many things happened after the war – economic changes as well as political changes – that would shift the patterns of urban growth across the world as well as lead to the sorts of transformations we point to above.