Student-Written Reading Notes, Images, Citations for each Session

This page contains reading notes for each class session. Groups of 2-3 students will upload text (and perhaps images, references and links) by TUESDAY before each week's session. Please sign up for two sessions. (You do not need to work in the same groups for your two sessions.) Please sign up early in the semester. See the class webpage assignment page (updated link) for more instructions.

NOTE to students: all students registered in UP650 have editing access to this document; be sure to click "sign in" at the bottom of the page (using your UM account), and then click on the pencil icon above to edit. Format: take advantage of headers (for organization), and the ability to insert links, images, etc. (If you have difficulty accessing the editing function of the site, please make sure you are logged in via your UM -- and not your private -- google account. Let me then know if you still have access problems.)

Sept 16 - German School

[note: if no-one volunteers for this week, I can easily cover this week. SC]

Sep 23 - Chicago School (Jacob, Jieqiong)

Sept. 23: Chicago School (Park, Burgess, Wirth) and beyond

Questions:

• • To you, what are the most distinguishable intellectual contributions of the Chicago School? Or to put in another way, what separates the Chicago School from the other “schools” (approaches, theories, etc) of urban studies?

  • Compared to last week’s readings (German School), in terms of understanding cities in a methodological sense, are there any similarities or dissimilarities?

  • From an epistemological perspective, how would you categorize this week’s readings and which approach do you favor the most?(Fischer’s categorization among three theories of urbanism, Parker’s differentiation between the Chicago School work (the case study, participation observation method) vs the theoretical )

  • Do you think the theoretic perspectives of Chicago School can be employed to the ongoing urbanization in other parts of the world? Or what do you think are the limitations of Chicago School in knowledge generalization?

•Park, Robert, Human Ecology, in The Urban Sociology Reader. [also in Canvas]

• • How do you define “human ecology”?

  • How does the concept of “ecology” contribute to understanding the city, compared to last weeks’ readings?

  • “Society, from the ecological point of view, and in so far as it is a territorial unit, is just the area within which biotic competition has declined and the struggle for existence has assumed higher and more sublimated forms.”

  • “Human ecology has, however, to reckon with the fact in human society competition is limited by custom and culture.”

  • The levels of social orders: ecological order, economic order, the political order, and the moral order. The higher the level dominates, the less freedom human gets.

  • “It is the interaction of these four factors—population, artifacts, custom and beliefs, and the natural resources that maintain at once the biotic balance and the social equilibrium, when and where they exist.”

•Burgess, Ernest, The Growth Of The City: An Introduction To A Research Project, in The Urban Sociology Reader. [also in ebrary as a chapter in Marzluff, John, (ed). Urban Ecology : An International Perspective on the Interaction Between Humans and Nature. Boston, MA, US: Springer, 2008, pp. 71-78. [ebrary link]

• • Succession: a term borrowed from plant ecology that describes a process of urban expansion characterized by each inner zone extending its area by invading the next outer zone (based on the concentric zone model of a city).

  • Centralized decentralization: a telescoping of several local communities into a larger economic unity in outlying zones, dominated by central business district.

  • In contrast to Simmel’s seemingly contradictory attitudes towards metropolis and the division of labor, Burgess uses the concept of Metabolism to indicate the promising part of differentiation and segregation.

  • Movement may be a fixed and unchanging order of motion, designed to control a constant situation, as in routine movement. Change of movement in response to a new stimulus or situation, is called mobility.

  • “To describe urban expansion in terms of extension, succession, and concentration; to determine how expansion disturbs metabolism when disorganization is in excess of organization; and finally, to define mobility and to propose it as a measure both of expansion and metabolism, susceptible to precise quantitative formulation, so that it may be regarded almost literally as the pulse of the community”

•Wirth, Louis. 1938. Urbanism as a Way of Life, in The Urban Sociology Reader. [also in Canvas]

• • How do you differentiate Wirth’s perspectives from Simmel’s in terms of how cities have influenced the ways of urban dwellers’ life or human behavior collectively?

  • The city could be defined sociologically as “a relatively large, dense and permanent settlement of heterogeneous individuals”

  • Based on these quantitative measures: Population size, density, and heterogeneity, understand cities from three interrelated perspectives: physical structure, social organization, attitudes/ideas.

  • “But despite the multiplication of research and textbooks on the city, we do not as yet have a comprehensive body of component hypotheses which may be derived from a set of postulates implicitly contained in a sociological definition of city, and from our general sociological knowledge which may be substantiated through empirical research. The closest approximations to a systematic theory of urbanism that we have are… Max Weber, Robert Park… But even these excellent contributions are far from constituting an ordered and coherent framework of theory upon which research might profitably proceed.”

  • “We must also infer that urbanism will assume its most characteristic and extreme form in the measure in which the conditions with which it is congruent are present.”

  • “The miscellaneous assortment of disconnected information which has hitherto found its way into sociological treatises on the city may thus be sifted and incorporated into a coherent body of knowledge…. The prospective for doing this are brightest through a general, theoretical, rather than through an ad hoc approach.”

Gans, Herbert, Urbanism and Suburbanism as Ways of Life: A Reevaluation of Definitions, in The Urban Sociology Reader (first edition only).

• • Wirth’s essay was written before the exodus of white residents to suburbs, which Gans thinks can not be generalized and need to be revised in terms of the various changes that happened to American cities. Also, Wirth’s paper primarily deals with urban-industrial society (mass society) rather than the whole city that includes the folk society.

  • The demographic characteristics of a neighborhood is more influenced by the age and housing price of that area than the location of that area. In this sense, there are not significant differences in ways of life between settlements in city and suburb.

  • Individual's’ behavior is determined by their economic position, cultural characteristics, and by their marital and family status (Adaptation VS. Perference).

  • Denies that ecological factors, particular the size, density, and heterogeneity of the wider community have any serious, direct consequences for personal social worlds.

•Fischer, Claude, Theories of Urbanism, in The Urban Sociology Reader.

• • Determinist, compositional, subcultural theory.

  • Determinist: urbanism determines individual behavior and psychology, personal milieus; urbanism destroys social world

  • Compositional: Social worlds are largely impervious to ecological factors, urbanism has no serious, direct effects on groups or individuals. individual characteristics matters

  • Subcultural （culturally distinctive groups）: urbanism generates a variety of social worlds, intensifies subcultures. A synthesis of the determinist and compositional theories.

Mumford, Lewis. 1937. What is a city? Architectural Record LXXXII (November).

• • “The city as a purely physical fact has been subject to numerous investigations. But what is the city as a social institution?”

  • “The city in its complete sense, then, is a geographical plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an esthetic symbol of collective unity.”

  • “The city creates social drama”

  • “Social facts are primary, and the physical organization of a city, its industries and its markets, its lines of communication and traffic, must be subservient to its social needs”

  • City size: “to express size always as a function of the social relationships to be served.” the role of technology, the change from “mononucleated” city to “polynucleated city,” highway construction, decentralization and suburbanization.

  • “Instead of trusting to the mere massing of population to produce the necessary social concentration and social drama, we must now seek these results through deliberate local nucleation and a finer regional articulation.”

Saunders, Peter. "The Urban as an Ecological Community," in Social Theory and the Urban Question. London: Hutchinson & Co. 1981, pp. 48-79.

• • “The ecological approach to social relations was characterized by an emphasis on the biotic as opposed to the cultural aspect of human interaction.”

  • The congruence between spatial and economic differentiation: differences in land values determines the distributi

Parker, Simon, Urban Theory and the Urban Experience: Encountering the City (Routledge). Ch. 3.

• • In these writers the ambition is to identify the ‘essence’ of the city, and to reduce this great, confusing concentration of humanity into an intelligible schema. Empirical or practical urban studies, on the other hand, tries to make sense of this seemingly chaotic and unstable world in the manner of a naturalist whose task is to count and classify the flora and fauna s/he encounters into distinct classes and categories.

  • “Micro-level” case study or participation observation method give us a vivid and detailed portrait of city life. While macro-level approaches such as Durkheim’s concept of organic versus mechanical solidarity, or Simmel’s notion of the blasé attitude, or Weber’s work on status groups (what Abbott calls the sociology of variables) aim at a more universal view of model society.

  • 
    

  • In studying the particular aspects of urban life, did the Chicago sociologists ignore the universal qualities of the urban experience that more abstract theorists such as Simmel and Weber attempted to convey? Not necessarily.

Lynch, Kevin. 1974. The Pattern of the Metropolis. In An urban world, edited by C. Tilly. Boston,: Little Brown.

• • Describe and evaluate a variety of urban forms based on three dimensions: accessibility, grain, focal organization.

  • The individual should have the greatest variety of goods, services, and facilities readily accessible to him. He should be able to choose the kind of habitat he prefers; he should be able to enter many kinds of environment at will, including the open country, he should have the maximum of personal control over his world.

  • “Perhaps we can make such a proposal more concrete by stating it as a set of actions rather than as a static pattern.If this were the form desired, then the agencies of control would adopt center definite policies.”

Sep 30 - Harvey I (Matan, Joel, Faiq)

Useful Concepts

The corporate state (and national interest)

Dialectical materialism

Accumulation (and production)

Class struggle

Time-space compression

Capitalism and labor

Commodity (and the commodification of space)

Militant Particularism

Abstraction

Questions for Reading

Epistemology

• 1. How does Harvey assess the Chicago School sociologists (what is his criticism)?

  2. What does he assert about the relationship between ideology, research methods, and conclusions?

  3. What does he believe are the advantages of Marxian scholarship?

1. Do you agree with these arguments?

Disciplinarity

1. How does Harvey reflect on the role of academia in general, and geography in particular, in contemporary society?

2. What role does he think geography should assume?

3. How can we link that to the disciplines of Urban Planning, Urban Studies, Architecture, History, and others that deal with the (particularly urban) built environment?

4. What does the dimension of ‘spatiality’ add to the social sciences?

On the City and Urbanism

• 1. What role does the city traditionally have in Marxist scholarship? How does Harvey alter that understanding?

  2. How does Harvey describe the conditions of industrialized cities, systems of production, and the relations between capital and labor?

     1. How does this relate to Simmel’s discussion on money?

1. How does the case of Baltimore (chapter 8, “The View from Federal Hill”) illustrate Harvey’s ideas about accumulation and class struggle in the city?

Oct 7 - Harvey II & Castells (Seulgi, Naganika)

Part I. David Harvey (Cont.)

Key question:

How can particular urban policies be understood given the mechanism of accumulation of capital in the capitalist society?

Key terms:

Accumulation of capital, Overaccumulation, Spatial fix, Crisis in the capitalist society, Annihilate space with time (credit, fictitious capital), Managerialism, Entrepreneurialism, Urban governance, Commodification of culture.

Ⅰ. Interpretation of Historical Housing Policies in Seoul, South Korea based on Harvey’s Conceptions

1. Housing policies during a period of rapid economic growth through 1960’s – 1980’s

Picture a) A view of Han River (1966) Picture b) A view of Han River (1989)

Picture d) A blueprint of Newtown plan Picture e) Gile-eum Newtown site in Seoul

• • Distinct contexts for Large-scale housing supply by the government in 2000’s

  • Main agendas: to (re)develop housing environment; to revive a depressed real estate market

  • As a means to deal with surpluses in human labor power and capital (High rate of unemployment and unemployed capital)

  • Construction works as a common stratagem to surmount an economic crisis

- Inducing reinvestment in short/long-term projects

- Boosting domestic demand to absorb surpluses

• • Potential/substantive adverse outcomes

- Displacement of the natives of a given region

- Drastic increases in real-estate values only serving for property owners - who gains profits from Newtown projects?

- Tearing down existing communities and regional alliances

- Reproduction of social classes through spatial divison of residential areas depending on economic status (e.g., public rental housing)

II. Discussion on standpoints as planners

According to not only Harvey but also actual cases, there seem to be obvious possibilities that professional knowledge of planners would serve to sustain existing political orders or expand the capitalist mode of production either intentionally or unintentionally. Unless planners are immune from political neutrality, what stances should we have for an ethical standard?

Sources

Picture a) https://www.flickr.com/photos/smothers/381182363/

Picture b) http://www.ehistory.go.kr/

Picture c) http://www.capital.cl/vida-y-estilo/2015/03/19/060311-los-edificios-que-se-alzaran-como-los-mas-altos-del-mundo-en-2016]

Picture d) http://land.hankyung.com/news/app/newsview.php?aid=2016022962601

Picture e) http://news.joinsland.joins.com/total/view.asp?pno=115144

1) Refer to Jun, S. I. (2009). Crazy About Apartments: A Sociological Review of Modern Korean Housing Development (Korean). Seoul: Esoope. and Gelézeau, Valérie (2007). Republic of Apartments (Korean), translated by Hyeyeon Gil. Seoul: Humanitas.

Part II. Manuel Castells

Castells, Manuel. 1977. The urban question : a Marxist approach. (translation of La question urbaine by Alan Sheridan). London: Edward Arnold. [read Section II: "The Urban Ideology, pp. 73-112].

KEY TERMS

1. Urban ideology (Pg 73)

2. Urban society (Pg 75)

3. Urban culture (Pg 78)

4. Urban revolution (Pg 87)

5. Urban Social Milieux (Pg 97)

· Industrialisation and Modernisation – what are their distinguishing factors? Do they go hand in hand? Or does one replace or supersede the other? (Pg 76, 95)

· What should be the urban units of study and analysis for Planners (Ref to text on Ledrut’s classification Pg 102)

· Urban sociology – what are the changing perceptions and arguments since German school, Chicago school to those of Castells?

· “Urban supersedes the city that contains it in seed form”

· An attempt at answering the urban question using a combination of different terms: Social relations, Culture, Industrialisation, Modernisation, Capitalism, Ecology, Urban space, Urbanisation, Social Actors

Eg Simmel: Industrialisation -> Urbanisation -> Social relations (??)

Castells, Manuel. 2010. The Space of Flows (Ch 6), in The Rise of the Network Society (2nd edition). Wiley.

KEY TERMS

1. Milieux of Innovation (Pg 419)

2. Space of Flows

3. Space of Places

4. Space of Power

5. Core networks

6. Nodes and hubs

7. New industrial Space

8. Secondary Milieu

· Concept of International Spatial Division of Labour (Hyderabad as a secondary milieu; example of Google) Video: Intro to Hyderabad

Hi-Tech City, Hyderabad Source: Steve Dave

Hi-Tech City, Hyderabad Source: BMI Business Centre Services

· Which of the following definitions of space do you relate to (from your field’s perspective of it)? Has your perception of the definition of space altered since the first class?

1. “Space is crystallised time”

2. “Space is not a reflection of society, it is its expression”

3. “Space is the material support of time-sharing social practices”

· Layers of spaces of flow: 1. Circuits of electronic exchanges, 2. Circuits of hubs and nodes, 3. Spatial organisation of the dominant managerial elites

· “Elites are cosmopolitan, people are local” (Pg 446)

· “Space of flows is blurring the meaningful relationship between architecture and society” (Pg 449)

· In his discussion on flows (pg 442), can one include architecture as a flow of design and ideas; thereby dissociating it from being treated as the sole expression of societies’ identity (Pg 449)

· Space of Flows Vs Space of Places

Oct 14 - Lefebvre/Production of Space

Key terms and concepts to understand while reading Lefebvre:

• Abstract, concrete, and 'concrete abstract.'

• Space versus Spatial

• Theory of Moments

  • Rhythm-analysis

  • Use of Oeuvre

• Production (in Hegel and Marx).

• Space as perceived vs. conceived vs. lived.

Oct 21 - Global Cities

The World City Hypothesis, Friedman

• • Cities as “basing points”

  • Seven Interrelated Theses of the World City Hypothesis

  • Invokes language of core and periphery, and semiperiphery to classify cities

  • Says that these have not been quantified yet in data

  • Focuses on more “global north”

  • Uses problematic language re: colonization

  • How does Friedman’s representation of cities within an axis correspond with Castell’s “space of flows”?

Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims, Sassen

• • Looking at globalization through the lens of cities

  • Argument that global cities inherently lose sight of local developments

    • Money, resources, etc. gets invested in city

  • How are city politics affected by the nation it is in? How is a city affected by the global networks it is connected to?

  • How does Sassen’s argument about globalized cities/localities interface with Castell’s “space of flows”?

Power in Place: Retheorizing the Local and the Global, Michael Peter Smith

• • Separation between Global and Local

  • Argument that localities fight back against global through resistance

  • Attempts to capture and view the local and global only reinforce binaries

  • Integrates historical study of globalization with the work of ethnographers to inform discussion of locality

  • Ultimately states that you cannot leave out localities in considerations of global development

Re-presenting World Cities, King

• • “The city…is above all, a representation”

  • Four categories of roles of people who live in Western Cities

  • Globalization as intensification of global connectedness

    • Differential reach

    • Migration and cultural effects

    • Process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization

  • What is the significance of a world city as a real site for the instruction of new cultural and political identities, or for processes of cultural transformation in general?

  • What relevance might world cities have for the persistence or modification of existing local/regional/national identities, or alternatively, the construction of new transnational ones?

Cities beyond Compare?, Jamie Peck

• • There is an inherent epistemological bias in how we view global cities, implicit in colonial theory

  • Current urban theory in globalization creates a false binary

  • This false binary benefits the north, or west.

  • Removing the bias, or “decolonizing urban theory”, requires a critical re-evaluation of the literature, which this article meticulously accomplishes.

  • Uses Vancouver as a comparative study for how to re-integrate the “global south” into global planning discussions without privileging the north.

  • Agrees with Roy that there needs to be a “new geography” of critical urban theory

What is urban about critical urban theory?, Ananya Roy

Constructs her theory around three analytical points

1. Idea of “rural” as “constitutive outside”(Chantal Mouffe, 2000) of urban

2. “urban” as historical geography

3. “urban“ and “rural” as governmental categories

“We have to analytically and empirically explain the processes through which the urban is made, lived and contested.”

Opposes the theory of totalisation and suggests that generalisation can happen through the acceptance of “historical difference”

Oct 28 - The Geographic Imagination

“Towards a new epistemology of the urban?” Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid

Brenner and Schmid ask us to revisit the question of how we know the urban, “through what categories, methods and cartographies should urban life be understood?”

Brenner and Schmid firmly believe that the urban as we know it has been seriously, and rapidly, changing since the “long 1980s,” a period of “worldwide sociospatial restructuring” (p.154).

For these authors, urban theory is currently undergoing a type of “renaissance,” as efforts to explain or demarcate the recent global/neoliberal nature of the urban has prompted a rejection of “the national-developmentalist configuration of postwar world capitalism” (p.154) and produced new theories in its place.

At the core of their inquiry is the question: What are the “very sites, objects and focal points of urban theory and research under contemporary capitalism?” (p.154)

Questions:

What do the authors argue is ‘new’ about the urban since ‘the long 1980s’?

· What is the difference between capitalism and ‘the urban’? Between human activity and ‘the urban’?

· What do you think are the boundaries of planetary urbanism? (ie what is ‘outside’ of planetary urbanism)

· Do you agree with the premise they establish that “the urban is no longer coherently contained”? (p.155)

Existing theories of the ‘contemporary global urban’ are: Urban triumphalism, technoscientific urbanism, debates on urban sustainability, debates on megacities.

They propose a 7-point manifesto to work towards a new epistemology of the urban: see pages 163-178

Key terms: agglomeration, urban epistemology, postcolonial urbanism, planetary urbanism

Richard Walker, Building a better theory of the urban: A response to ‘Towards a new epistemology of the urban?’ (2015)

Walker's briefly illustrates the flaws that he sees in Brenner & Schmid's Planetary Urbanism discourse and writes specific responses of each one of their theses.

His remarks on Planetary Urbanism:

- it is more of a manifesto rather than a theoretical statement

- it is invalid to place the urban-age discourse at the center of the discourse

- they position themselves in relation to post-colonial theorists.

- there is ignorance of urban history

- there is lack of a precise definition of what they mean by "urban"

- there are errors in their approach to social science

- their writing style could be simplified

Kate Shaw “Planetary urbanization: what does it matter for politics of practice?”

- Shaw is responding to Brenner and Schmid’s article and “reflects on the normative and practical potentials of the planetary urbanization thesis” (p.588) focusing on the application of theory

- Her positive assessment: “the concept of planetary urbanisation encourages us to see the whole rather than the differently sized illuminated dots on the dark background of the satellite-generated image, allowing the agglomerations and hinterlands to be seen as relational, co-constitutional, and hence does a better job than the urban age of capturing the uneven spatial expressions of capitalist development.” (p.589)

Questions:

· A focus on applied theory brings us to a question of scale. In the search for “new cartographic methods and analytical vocabularies” (p.593) do questions of scale help orient us to respond to Brenner and Schmid’s call for planetary urbanism?

· Consider the binary of agglomeration vs hinterland. How does this change your thinking about urban vs rural?

Jason W. Moore, Environmental Crises and the Metabolic Rift in World-Historical Perspective (2000)

Moore explains the roots of global ecological crisis by referring to Marx's concept of "metabolic rift", establishing a historical framework in reference to Wallerstein's The Modern World-System I (1974) and creating a synthesis of these different discourses to introduce his concept of "systemic cycles of agro-ecological transformations."

Key Concepts:

Marx and metabolic rift :

- the metabolic rift : an ever widening rupture in the nutrient cycle between city and country (p.124), a systemic process (p.127)

- primitive accumulation as a social process that operates in multiple scales (p.125)

- division of labor between city and country (p.124, 126)

- meanings of subordination of rural producers to the law of value : surplus population of peasants who can sustain urban population and the agriculture becoming urbanized as it is subjected to the capitalist imperative to increase productivity (p.126)

- Moore's remarks on the metabolic rift : metabolic rift as a vector, limits of geographical expansion on the 20th century, capital colonizing already exploited territory (p.128)

Wallerstein's The Modern World-System I (1974) :

- the limits of feudalism : exhaustion of land, agriculture heavily dependent on weather conditions, social structure of inner population, Black Death (p.129-132)

- geographic expansion : motives and consequences (p.131-135)

- framework of the Modern World-System as a tool to understand the forces behind uneven regional development and the critique of Wallerstein's perspective (p.135)

Moore's concept of systemic cycles of agro-ecological transformations:

- the thesis: "The environmental transformations following the 14th-century crisis constituted a world ecological revolution that was central to the emergence of the world capitalist system in the long 16th century." (p.136)

- systemic cycles of accumulation : repeated accumulation crises on a world scale (p.137)

- metabolic rift in the 16th century - the concept of "closed system" versus "flow-system" (p.138)

- accumulation of capital as a metabolism (p.138) and successive reorganization of world ecology (p.141)

- 8 primary changes in the ecological relations of production (p.142)

5 cycles of agro-ecological transformation (p.142-144)

William Cronon, "Pricing the Future: Grain," selection in Nature's Metropolis (1991)

Cronon explains the process through which the commodification of the produce of the earth led to complex systems of capitalist accumulation and investment. He uses the example of grain in the American Midwest, and how adding value through movement, storage, and increasing flows of information were instrumental in creating the advanced economic processes of futures trading and speculation, which completely obscures the original, natural value of grain itself.

- Merchants served as the nexus of produced commodities from the earth, which only had as much value as their immediate utility, and the risk and rewards of urban markets. (p. 105)

- Insurance was a crucial component in preventing potential ruin when nature itself compromised the successful commodification of harvested goods at market. (p. 108)

- The full realization of the power of the (grain) market could not be realized until rules were codified to regulate standards for every link in the production and market chain. (p. 116)

- With the advent of greater technology (the grain elevator, the railroad, the telegraph), grain ceased to be a commodity that was valuated based directly on the quality of its particular harvesting and transport, but an abstract good that was readily exchangeable for other grain or cash. This was yet another act of “weakening its link with geography” and separating it from the ‘natural’ processes that created it. (p. 120)

Sarah Knuth, “Seeing Green in San Francisco: City as Resource Frontier." (2016)

Knuth argues that corporate interests, in their efforts to initiate more ‘green’ building, seek to do so out a desire to capture quantifiable value in both utilities savings and through an artificially created market demand for such construction. This has significant implications, both for meaningful efforts to create ‘greener’ cities, as well as the changing relationship that these urban spaces have with the hinterland as the site of the natural.

- Extractive industries have, since the advent of capitalism, created systems of valuation and exploitation of natural resources, which transform “free gifts of nature” into commodities. This results in a shift in the way resources are viewed, as they become valuable due to their utility or marketability. (p.630)

- New iterations of urban capitalism have been successful at transcending the commodification of tangible, extractable objects, which are not typically readily found within the city. This has resulted in new practices of deriving value from debt, real estate, and the flows of capital itself. (p.632)

- The emerging field of green certification allows investors to subjectively decide to perform upgrades and claim that a project is green, while “ignoring others that others might find as or more relevant.” (p.635)

- The designation of buildings as ‘green’ often has little or no association with the nature or behavior of the businesses housed within it. (p.637)

- The valuation of green infrastructure and building has not only been driven by the savings that it can derive from conservation efforts. It is now seen as making these “properties intrinsically more valuable.” (p. 639)

Notes from One of the Authors

I. The "planetary urbanization" thesis and (several of) its critiques

A) How is the urbanization process today transforming global landscapes and environmental processes? Is it then still meaningful to think about bounded urban spaces, or is everywhere "urban" now?

B) Rejoinder: Haven't cities been transforming their hinterlands/resource peripheries for a long time? What, precisely, is new now? Are we risking reinventing the wheel and ignoring a lot of more empirically grounded and theoretically precise work in favor of the newest abstract intellectual fad?

II. Cities and their hinterlands: exploring the history, considering new ideas

A) How does Cronon help us think about how (the transformation of) nature produces cities, and vice versa? I.e., how does the urbanization process, and particularly efforts to "discover" resources, transform natures, and produce new (second) natures (Neil Smith's term).

B) What do processes of resource "discovery" look like? How does converting non-human natures into resources transform them?

C) (Pay attention to processes of simplification, classification, marketization, financialization - they come up in many other resource discovery processes, including for radically novel "resources" today such as "ecosystem services", tradable pollution credits, and other resources that are intended to provide a source of value to power green capitalism)

D) Is conversion to resources actually compatible with environmental conservation/a sustainable green economy? How do processes like simplification and marketization threaten to undermine the green economic vision?

III. Urban metabolism and capitalist world-ecologies

A) The subfield of urban political ecology has helped popularize the notion of urban metabolism as a way of understanding city-hinterland relationships (nominally one better rooted in Marxian understandings of the reproduction of capitalism, although in practice as developed through JB Foster et al. it has often been used primarily to talk about urban nutrient imbalances - concentration of waste in cities as pollution, while the countryside is starved of nitrogen and other "waste" nutrients. It is often also used to talk about networked infrastructures and flows of water, waste, etc. through them.

B) Jason discusses the concept more historically. Particularly, he integrates it with his broader project of integrating longue durée history of the development of capitalism from a global perspective (especially via Wallerstein's world-systems model) with world ecological history. Cities have helped transform world natures for a very long time, including through colonial encounters.

IV. Turning the resource gaze back on the city

A) A recurrent issue in city-hinterland analyses is that they ignore how the transformation of nature dialectically changes the city itself (Dick Walker critiques this in Cronon, and Scobey's Empire City is a useful exception). That neglect is particularly problematic if we take the urban political economy/second nature thesis seriously - i.e. that cities are not "unnatural."

B) Green capitalism is actually moving in important ways to define new green "resources" in cities as well as in rural resource peripheries. And not all urban "ecosystem services", waste markets, etc. look like natures. Skyscrapers are just as important as parks - and more so to global investors right now.

C) Empirically green building and markets for energy efficiency retrofits are likely to be a big deal in 21st century green economic development, urban development, real estate strategies, climate change politics, etc.

D) But green building certification is really weird - even as certifications like LEED have moved to do better re: including things like retrofits rather than just new building, they ignore (more or less deliberately) buildings' deeper involvement environmental transformations within and beyond the city. This is particularly a problem considering that skyscrapers have been on the front line of a new green building boom in world-class cities like San Francisco: those nodes are particularly significant in organizing environmental transformations.

E) We must consider financialization as a force in these urban and rural transformations - the explosion of instruments for real estate speculation and investment (especially in the neoliberal era) has since the 2008 collapse taken on important green dimensions. Real estate developers and investors are developing new instruments that let them get a piece of the green resource discover/green economic development action. High-value property in downtown like San Francisco's is a major front now because those buildings are something they'd be betting on in any case, but the market is poised to expand in unpredictable ways - ones both promising and risky for just urban climate transitions. They risk both exacerbating gentrification in cities and facilitating "green" land and resource grabs abroad - a lot of new critical work on ecosystem services, the green economy, etc. (including mine in other articles) is noting that investment banks are trying out traditionally urban real estate speculation instruments in resource peripheries globally (e.g. for farmland).

· Florida receives his fair share of criticism among scholars/academics, most of whom Tochterman suggests are more drawn to “just-city” models of development. However Florida “reigns as the public face of planning and urban economic development” (76). What do you make of this gap? Why the academic criticism for Florida and the public praise?

· Both Jacobs and Florida tapped into the ‘zeitgeist’ of their historical moments, and remain popular and influential figures. What made their ideas so compelling, and what makes them so long lasting?

· Tochterman argues Jacobs and Florida both stress the crucial importance of diversity and tolerance as key to a ‘successful’ city. How is this diversity and tolerance imagined? How does Tochterman critique their visions? How would you plan for, or design for, diversity and tolerance?

· For the Urban Planners!! Tochterman ends with a critique of the position of urban planning itself: “the time has come for…a reassessment of the planning profession and its purpose in the twenty-first century” (84). He suggests, “In the realm of planning there is a need for a coherent vision ensuring that citizens from all walks of life continue to participate in the street ballet that Jacobs adored” (84). What role do you think urban planning fulfills? What purpose does it have in the twenty-first century?

*Sharon Zukin - “Whose Culture? Whose City?”

Zukin discusses the ways in which culture is used to either democratize or demarcate urban space. With the implicit segregation that took place with suburbanization (and the consequent control of cultural imagery in those spaces), cities remain the primary space in which cultural identity is both reproduced and contested. Processes such as gentrification display this tension, with both a desire to visually represent ethnic culture for mass consumption as well as subordinate those that originally helped construct that culture by relegating them to the serving the consumers. Similar dynamics play out in market-driven historic preservation and creation of historic districts, as the conversion of these spaces for wider public consumption often requires dramatically either altering elements of the spaces themselves (during redevelopment of, for example, industrial waterfronts) or obscuring and ‘rewriting’ the historical uses and cultural situation of a space.

Cultural displays by particular groups, as well as public art, can reframe the perception of urban space by lending new social significance to it, which also has economic implications. However, direct investment by private interests can effectively hijack a space, imposing controls on both ‘democratic’ displays of culture as well as unfettered public uses of that space. Pushes for the ‘privatization’ of space are often led by concerns about public safety, which is typically rooted in fear of other types of users in general, and middle-class fear of minorities and the poor in particular. With this, despite the traditional proximity-based necessity among groups to share urban spaces, the creation and reproduction of fear of “Otherness” has driven the desire to create spaces that exclude many from meaningful participation.

Questions

- Besides gentrification and historic preservation, where/how does the rewriting of cultural imagery or narratives play itself out? Is it a ‘natural’, gradual rewriting, or is it forced?

- Do you believe that there is room for competing cultural narratives within the same space?

- Is it simple capitalism that drives the gentrifying tendency to appropriate spaces for their pre-existing culture, or are there other elements that are inherently at play in this process?

- Does the redevelopment of an urban space obliterate the pre-existing cultural significance of a place, or is it simply augmented/reimagined?

- Does the creation of cultural art in urban spaces immediately set that space up for popular (read ‘outsider’) consumption? If so, does it make it more ripe for appropriation and/or gentrification?

*Josh Sides “Straight into Compton: American Dreams, Urban Nightmares, and the Metamorphosis of a Black Suburb”

*A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, “Latino Landscapes: Postwar Cities and the Transnational Origins of a New Urban America”

In grouping both the Sandoval-Strausz and Sides articles, we see how culture is mapped onto space both physically and metaphorically. Culture is present in Oak Cliff and Compton in material ways, from the new formation of front lawns in line with Latina/o practices to the cultural production of a commodified place. Moreover, the histories of each place are also intertwined and altered by cultural shifts in these environments. The influx of Latinos and African American into each respective place altered space. Although Compton has more national and even global name recognition, Oak Cliff also allows us to access a transnational narrative of space and place formation. Both articles focus on the history of these places, but they also provide a theory for understanding and analyzing the role of meaning making in cities.

We have talked extensively about global cities and networks. Sandoval-Strausz gives us a way for engaging with cities as part of a transnational network and describes a cultural organization of cities with social solidarity. Does Sandoval-Strausz provide something new for us on networks of capital flow on a transnational basis? Is there something distinctive about the formation of transnational cities, for example Miami, where residents are simultaneously connected to two different locals? Widening the lens from a local, even national, viewpoint becomes important for shifting narratives of displacement and growth.

Sides article challenges us to change our awareness of cities beyond their metonym. Sides explains how Compton’s growing attention was commodified by cultural industries, which in turn contributed to its marginalization. Sides writes: “But if the material circumstances of Compton were typical of America’s declining suburbs, its location was not; its geographic proximity to the heart of the nation’s film and music industry shaped Compton’s transformation to metonym” (596). What does Sides mean by metonym? Is this concept portable to other places? How can understanding a city’s cultural past and present affect planning for the future? Is it desirable to build cities that become metonymys?

FYI: According to the OED, a metonym is: “The substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant, for example suit for business executive, or the turf for horse racing.”

Spatial Urbanism

*Stehlin/Tarr

Stehlin/Tar argue that progressive city reforms (namely, cycling and gardening) are inherently complicit in perpetuating inequalities of the city, and contribute to what they call a “scalar mismatch”. The article builds upon the premise that cycling and gardening is a type of new urban placemaking. Because these activities take place on a hyper-local scale, they ignore broader implications of regionalism, and obfuscate serious structural inequalities.

*Martin Manalansan

Manalansan’s article outline the way in which neoliberal practices in New York have impacted queer people of color in the city. The piece argues that neoliberal reforms at the local, state, and federal level have shifted discourse in queer communities, and contributed (whether intentionally or not) to the re-shaping of urban space through these interventions. The article notes the outsized impact that specific institutions, such as mass media, private business, and the state, have had on shaping these discussions.

Questions on Spatial Urbanism

-Both these pieces highlight disparate actors that contribute to the re-shaping the urban landscape (local vs. market influence). Which of these approaches resonates with you, or do they share common ground?

-Thinking to specific examples from Manalansan or Stehlin/Tarr, how do residents’ “claim” a space as authentically theirs, and what is the process by which these claims can be renegotiated or shifted? Are these claims on the physical space fixed or fluid?

-Thinking specifically to Stehlin/Tarr's argument, what can be changed so that progressive urban practices of gardening or cycling do not ignore long-standing practices of existing community members?

-Both pieces mention a tenuous balance, and in effect a moving target that shifts with any intervention (positive or negative). Stehlin/Tarr suggest that local focus on cycling and gardening is obscures and distracts from broader issues. Manalansan raises this question of “homonormativity” on p. 2 of the text, defining it as a “chameleon-like ideology” that pushes for progressive causes, but simultaneously shifts the definition of privacy that is needed to achieve progress. Given these relationships how can activists successfully implement change?

-To what extent does privilege impact the ability for a specific group to shape the urban environment? Can they control what this looks like, or does it happen beyond their control?