Cities and Suburbs, Lecture 1, Sociology 402/504 University of Alberta. CC-NC Rob Shields 2014

1. Prof. Rob Shields
H.M. Tory Chair and Professor,
Sociology 402 / 504
University of Alberta
City as Nexus and Context
Cities and Suburbs Lecture 1
Saturday, 10 January 15

2. Sustaining urbanization
• First large cities:
• Uruk, 6000 years ago -
modern day Iraq
• Innovation, writing, division of
labour, mass production,
knowledge, public works,
administration...
Saturday, 10 January 15

3. Saturday, 10 January 15

4. Urban Nexus of issues
• Urban and Rural
• Citizenship and Community
• Land - Spatial Justice
• State and Markets
• Plans (Representations) and Habits
(Practices)
• Shelter and Energy use
• Alienation and Engagement
Saturday, 10 January 15

5. Georg Simmel
• Sociology as study of forms, geometries
• of social interaction.
• Metropolis and Mental Life
• The city as a the ‘form’ of modernity
• Blasé Attitude, density, stress
• The Stranger
The deepest problems of
modern life flow from the
attempt of the individual to
maintain the independence
and individuality of his
existence against the
sovereign powers of
society, against the weight
of the historical heritage
and the external culture
and technique of life.
Saturday, 10 January 15

6. Patrick Geddes
• Survey then Plan:‘close observation technique’
• Evolution of Cities:‘regional planning’ ‘local-global’
‘connurbation’...
• Starts with Darwin but more Bergsonian ‘creative evolution’
• Master planning: Palestine (Israel), India
• Synthesis from biology
• ‘Conservative surgery’ vs
modernist gridiron plan
• Bottom-up challenge to
top-down approaches
Saturday, 10 January 15

7. Patrick Geddes
Within this den sat Geddes, a most unsettling person, talking,
talking, talking – about everything and anything. The visitors
could criticize his show – the merest hotchpotch – picture
postcards – newspaper cuttings – crude old woodcuts –
strange diagrams –archaeological reconstructions; these
things, they said, were unworthy of the Royal Academy –
many of them were not even framed – shocking want of
respect; but if they chanced within the range of Geddes’ talk,
henceforth nothing could medicine them to the sweet sleep
which yesterday they owned. There was something more in
town planning than met the eye!” (pages 128‐129, 3rd edition,
1959).
Saturday, 10 January 15

8. Lewis Mumford
• ‘[The city is] a conscious work of art, and it holds
within its communal framework many simpler and
more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in
the city; and in turn, urban forms condition
mind….The dome and the spire, the open avenue
and the closed court, tell the story, not merely of
different physical accommodations, but of
essentially different concepts of man’s destiny.
The city is both a physical utility for collective
living and a symbol of those collective purposes
and unanimities that arise under such favoring
circumstance. With language itself, it remains
man’s greatest work of art’ (The Culture of
Cities, Lewis Mumford (1938): 5).
• ‘the suburb served as an asylum for the
preservation of illusion. Here domesticity could
prosper, oblivious of the pervasive regimentation
beyond.This was not merely a child-centered
environment; it was based on a childish view of
the world, in which reality was sacrificed to the
pleasure principle’
Saturday, 10 January 15

9. Lewis Mumford
• Terrain: Cities are a product of the earth. They
reflect the peasant’s cunning in dominating the
earth...
• Social density: the essence of each type of soil and
labor and economic goal is concentrated: thus
arise greater possibilities for interchange and for
new combinations not given in the isolation of
their original inhabitants
• Hearth:They are the molds in which men’s [sic]
lifetimes have cooled and congealed, giving lasting
shape, by way of art, to moments that would
otherwise vanish...In the city, time becomes
visible: buildings and monuments and public ways,
more open than the written record, more subject
to the gaze of many...leave an imprint upon minds...
• Complexity: orchestration of time and space no
less than through the social division of labor, life in
the city takes on the character of a symphony
• Hub: remote forces and influences intermingle
with the local
Saturday, 10 January 15

10. Louis Wirth
• ‘Chicago School’
• Civilization and Cities
• Anonymity and the city
• Immigration and minorities,
• Diversity
• ‘The Ghetto’
• ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’
Saturday, 10 January 15

11. Louis Wirth
• ‘Chicago School’
• Civilization and Cities
• Anonymity and the city
• Immigration and minorities,
• Diversity
• ‘The Ghetto’
• ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’
Saturday, 10 January 15

12. • ‘Chicago School’
• City as social ecology
Saturday, 10 January 15

13. Henri Lefebvre
• City as ‘Oeuvre’ (a great collective work or production)
• Production of Space: a spatial trialectics
• Critique of ‘Everyday Life’ and alienation
• ‘Right to the City’
• Avant grades - from Surrealists to May 68
• Legacies: rural sociology, urban culture, postmodern theory,
urban economics
Saturday, 10 January 15

14. • Global megacities
Urbanization is part of
the social production
of space
Saturday, 10 January 15

15. Jane Jacobs
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities
• critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s
• "social capital", "mixed primary uses", and "eyes on the
street"
• The Economy of Cities
• Washington Square Park, GreenwichVillage, Spadina
Expressway
Saturday, 10 January 15

16. Multiple Modernities
• Keil, R Welcome to the Suburban Revolution in Keil, R.,
Ed. (2013). Suburban Constellations. Berlin, Jovis: 8-15
• McGee,T. Suburbanization in the Twenty-first Century
World in Keil, R., Ed. (2013). Suburban Constellations.
Berlin, Jovis:18-25.
• Wirth, L. (1938). Urbanism as a way of life.The American
Journal of Sociology 44(1): 1-24. http://periplurban.org/
blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/
wirth_urbanismasawayoflife.pdf
• Watson, B. (2014).What makes a city resilient? Retrieved
January 3, 2015, from http://www.theguardian.com/cities/
2014/jan/27/what-makes-a-city-resilient
• Granzow, M. Review of Mah Industrial Ruination
SpaceandCulture.com http://www.spaceandculture.co
•
Saturday, 10 January 15