GEOG 340: DAY 17-18
Finishing Chapter 13; Urbanization, Urban Life,
and Urban Spaces
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
HOUSEKEEPING ITEMS
• On Tuesday, I showed a short video on
the “golden ratio,” as elaborated on by
Leonardo Da Vinci. I talked about it last
week, as did Thanh.
• Tuesday we heard from Sarah & Keltie,
along with Melissa, who will share some
resources and her discussion questions.
Today we will hear from Doug R. and
from me.
• We need to start scheduling the project
presentations, which will be very short,
and which will have to overlap with the
chapter presentations.
• We need to coordinate better the
remaining presentations and make sure
there is a division of labour, so here is
the schedule. Please talk to your copresenters.
Name
Topic
Week
Thanh
Chris
Shaping space
Mental maps
10
Maggie
Role of cities in eco-crisis
11
Tomson
Taylor & Emily
Urban growth in
developing countries
12
I should have seen to it that people were organizing a division of labour; if you are
presenting the same week as someone else, talk to them!!
FOLLOWING UP
ON THE LAST
CHAPTER
• I wanted to share with you some material I reencountered in a book, The Urban Order, by
John Short (recommended).
• In a chapter on “The City as Text,” he talks
about Spiro Kostoff’s observations about
recurring urban forms:
 Organic (medieval, garden suburbs, exurbia)
 The grid (popular with communitarians and
land speculators alike)
 The ‘diagram’ (military geometry, cosmic
symbolism, utopian experiment)
 Grand manner (“…ceremony, processional
intentions, a regimented public life” – from
Babylon to Nazi Germany, and expressing the
pretensions of political power, and
 The skyline, be it Gothic cathedrals (celebrating
the divine) or modernist towers (celebrating
corporate and financial dominance).
ADDITIONAL
POINTS BY
SHORT
• That Vitruvius, active around the time of Christ,
argued that buildings should have the same
proportions as the human body and should be
human-scaled. Short also points out that some
architecture has also been explicitly phallic or
suggestive of the female breast.
• That only a few geographers and sociologists
have addressed the city as a terrain experienced
by our bodies and senses.
• That the meaning of buildings will vary according
to social status.
• That whereas Greek and Roman (and other) cities
were culturally coherent, our cities are not. They
don’t tell a common story – “we can identify the
letters but it does not add up to a sustained
narrative.”
ADDITIONAL
POINTS BY
KEVIN
LYNCH
From “Image of
the City” (1960)
• Urban theorist, Kevin Lynch, argues that
what makes cities legible are five elements:
 Paths (streets, railways, transit lines, canals,
etc.)
 Edges (linear breaks in continuity,
boundaries, rivers, shorelines)
 Districts (areas with a common identifying
character)
 Nodes (major intersections, junctions,
shopping malls, where points converge), and
 Landmarks (external points of reference like
mountains, buildings, signs, monuments,
etc.). These provide orientation and a sense
of place.
• The authors vividly describe different
conceptions of urban vs. rural, and what
CHAPTER 14 best meets people’s needs.
• What best meets your needs? City?
Country? Village? And, if city, what size of
city?
• Remember Ebenezer Howard’s attempt
to find the perfect compromise in the
“garden city.”
• The authors also talk about the
sociospatial dialectic – in which urban
space shapes urban society and vice
versa. Can you think of examples?
CHAPTER 14
• Their reference to the concept
of the lifeworld is rather
complex, but what I take from
it is that, partly by
circumstance and partly by
choice, we create semipermeable bubbles for
ourselves within cities. We do
not engage with all of the city
all of the time. It would be too
overwhelming. We have our
routines.
• What is your lifeworld, even if
it is subject to change and
fluctuation?
• The bourgeoisie…. has drowned the most heavenly
ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous
enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy
water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved
personal worth into exchange value, and in place of
CHAPTER the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has
set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free
14
Trade. …The bourgeoisie cannot exist without
constantly revolutionising the instruments of
production, and thereby the relations of production,
and with them the whole relations of society….
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted
disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois
epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen
relations, with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newformed ones become antiquated before they can
ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is
profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with
sober senses his real conditions of life, and his
relations with his kind.” – Karl Marx and Friederich
Engels.
THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION
• Another perspective on the early modern era was
offered by historian, Karl Polanyi, originally from
Hungary, in his book, The Great Transformation.
• Polanyi argued that the enclosure of the commons
disembedded people from nature and from their
communities.
• In the UK, this occurred when landowners discovered
that it was more profitable to dispossess tenant
farmers and replace them with sheep to meet the
demand for wool in the burgeoning textile industries.
• The farmers, driven from the land, became potential
workers in the factories or migrants to other lands
such as Canada, the U.S., and Australia.
• The process of enclosure occurs to this day.
CHAPTER
14
• The Industrial Revolution, and consequent
urbanization, was one of most wrenching
social processes ever encountered by human
beings. Three sociologists who were amongst
the first to study the phenomenon were
Ferdinand Tőnnies (1855-1935), Emile Durkheim
(1858-1917), and Georg Simmel (1858-1918).
mechanical vs. organic
solidarity
Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft
struggle of the individual against conformity
• Gemeinschaft= strong communities ties as found
in rural and traditional societies. Gesellschaft=
functional ties based on impersonal
interdependence, as found typically in cities.
• The ‘mechanical solidarity’ of traditional
CHAPTER societies is based on groupthink. ‘Organic
14
solidarity’ emerges from the differences and
densities of urban society where people are
linked through a division of labour.
• At a certain point, though, organic solidarity can
yield to anomie, and thereby to deviance
(breakdown of norms).
• People also are faced with psychic overload in
cities, become indifferent to others, and seek to
protect themselves and find ways to withdraw.
• Sociologist Richard Sennett has even argued
that people seek to avoid difference, and
instead look for homogeneity.
• Dual aspects of cities – freedom to be ourselves
without constricting social conventions, but
danger of becoming part of the ‘lonely crowd.’
CHAPTER
14
• Durkheim was more optimistic about cities
than Tőnnies . He saw more scope for
freedom there. Tőnnies saw cities as places
of selfish impersonality, as in the following
poem by 16th century English poet, Robert
Crowley:
And this a city
In name but in deed
It is a pack of people
That seek after meed (profit)
For officers and all
Seek their own gain
But for the wealth of the
Commons
No one taketh pain.
And hell without order
I may well call
Where every man is for himself
And no man for all.
WHO HAS NOT
PASSED BY
PEOPLE IN NEED
ON THE STREET?
IN SOME EXTREME
CASES, PEOPLE
IGNORED THE
CRIES OF PEOPLE
BEING ASSAULTED
OR MURDERED
OVER AN
EXTENDED PERIOD
OF TIME
ROLES
AND
SETTINGS
• Other theorists have talked about the
fact that for the multi-faceted nature of
humans to blossom, we need
appropriate spaces. It’s hard to feel holy
in a shopping mall. To be part of a body
politic, we need public spaces to
assemble and protest. To enjoy authentic
cultural experiences, we need cultural
venues, and to commune with nature,
we need wild places.
• Vancouver, for instance, has no central
plaza. The Art Galley grounds have
become the de facto place to hang out.
• A related point made by Ray Oldenberg,
The Great, Good Place, is that people
need “third places” – not just work
places or domestic places (where they
reproduce themselves physically and
species-wise) – but social spaces to meet
with friends and hang out.
“THIRD PLACES”
A countervailing force….
“Night of the Texting Dead”