Cities
1. Where are cities?
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Urbanization
Definition
2. Where are people in cities?
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Formal Models
Recent History of Cities
3. Problems of inner cities
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Physical, social and economic
Housing, Redevelopment and Gentrification
4. Problems of suburbs?
5. Urban Policy and Planning
• Important point - 3) can not be understood without 4),
and vice versa.
Defining the city
• Impossible to understand the American City
without including the suburb.
• Historian/Geographer Bill Cronon claims
Chicago includes the plains and mountain
region, since Chicago uses these resources.
• As I will use it, the City comprises the Central
City and the Suburb
• What is to be done about the Atlantic Seaboard,
Is it one giant city?
City Life
• Mechanical vs organic solidarity
• Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)
– Size, density, and dynamism
– Anomie and deviant bevavior (possible, but not necessary)
• Psychic overload (Georg Simmel – 1905)
• “Lonely Crowd” as liberating
• Louis Wirth
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Size, Density and Heterogeneity
City dwellers are withdrawn, impersonal
Unrestrained and self-centered
Unsupported
Fragmentation of social life
• Generalization: Europeans have seen the city more positively
than Americans
City Models
• Concentric Ring
– Economic Rent
• Sector
– History matters
• Multiple Nuclei
– Cities don’t have just
one center
– Functional clusters
Concentric Rings (Burgess) Model
• The city grows
like an onion
Economic Models
• Land use is determined
by which use can earn
the most profit.
• Key factor is the
“willingness to pay” for
accessibility, land and
amenities.
History
• Mercantile City (pre 1840)
– Commerce and elites are central
• Early industrial city (-1880)
– Commerce and Industry are central
– Free-for-all development
• Industrial City (-1920)
– Large-scale industrialization
– Generalized housing market
• Suburbanization (-today)
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Automobile
Land use zoning
Subsidized home ownership
Mass-produced housing
• Polycentric metropolis (1970- today)
– Edge Cities – suburban hubs of shops and offices
Urban Realms model
• Our lives are mostly
lived in one realm
• A economic model,
not a social model
Why are the poor centralized?
• Filtering and vacancy chains
• Obsolescence:
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Functional
Form
Locational
Style
• Deindustrialization and the Spatial Mismatch
Hypothesis
• Land rent theory
– Space vs Accessibility preferences.
What is Gentrification
• Definitions difficult, but…
• Renovation of housing and community in
older, low income neighborhoods through
the influx of more affluent residents (the
gentry).
• Is gentrification bad or good?
Good Gentrification
• Reinvestment
• More private investment, less public
• Expansion of tax base without increase of
services
• Encourages retail activity
Bad Gentrification
• Displaces poor residents (900,000 / year?)
– Disproportionately elderly, female headed
households
• Raises rents
• Caters to the wants of the wealthy (fancy
pants academics like me call these wants
“consumption patterns”)
Why does it happen I
• David Ley (1996)
– Demand side
– Humanistic
– Cities are hip again
– Rejection of “cookie-cutter” suburbs and
modern downtown highrises.
– Appreciation for places with history and
ethnic/architectural diversity
• Early high-risk moves sanitize the ‘hood,
as well as make it more hip.
Why does it happen II
• Neil Smith (1996)
• “Back to the City” movement of capital
– Preconditions
• “Devalorization” during sprawl era
• Rent gap
– Initation
• Professional developers flipping properties
• Occupier-developers
• Landlord developers
Rent gap
• Capitalized vs
Potential Ground
• Investment,
Disinvestment and
the “spatial fix”