Broadly,
urbanism is a focus on
citiesA city is a relatively large and permanent settlement. Although there is no agreement on how a city is distinguished from a town within general English language meanings, many cities have a particular administrative, legal, or historical status based on local law.For example, in the U.S...
and urban areas, their geography, economies,
politicsPolitics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...
,
social characteristicsThe term social refers to a characteristic of living organisms...
, as well as the effects on, and caused by, the
built environmentThe term built environment refers to the human-made surroundings that provide the setting for human activity, ranging in scale from personal shelter and buildings to neighborhoods and cities that can often include their supporting infrastructure, such as water supply or energy networks.The built...
.
Philosophy
The philosophy of urbanism posits that cities are vitally important to society. Cities or other dense human settlements are said to serve a variety of important functions.
Diversity
Outside of cities, most people are not exposed to the same level of diversity-in both thought and personal characteristics-as they are within them. According to urbanists, this mingling of diverse people is vital to fostering tolerance and acceptance in the broader society.
Environmental protection
It is well established that people living in a modern city have a significantly smaller impact on the environment. Those living in cities have a reduced or eliminated need for an automobile and a heavier reliance on walking, cycling, and transit. Land in dense urban areas is also more efficiently used than in suburban or rural areas which require an enormous amount of infrastructure to service. Further, in apartment buildings, or shared dwellings, as well as many other aspects of city living, there is a sharing of common goods and services. A thousand people can share the same small park, rather than each have a lawn. Renters in a large apartment building lower their heating costs by sharing walls, effectively only needing to heat one sixth as much as a person in a standalone structure of the same size.
Culture
Cities have historically been the driver of culture. Most cultural institutions throughout the world are located in central cities.
Study
Urbanists distinguish urban areas from rural areas by their higher population
densityUrban density is a term used in urban planning and urban design to refer to the number of people inhabiting a given urbanized area. As such it is to be distinguished from other measures of population density. Urban density is considered an important factor in understanding how cities function...
. They maintain that the difference in population entails a difference in the social and political order as well. Initially, some scholars denied the social and political differences between
ruralRural areas or the country or countryside are areas that are not urbanized, though when large areas are described, country towns and smaller cities will be included. They have a low population density, and typically much of the land is devoted to agriculture...
and
urban areaAn urban area is characterized by higher population density and vast human features in comparison to areas surrounding it. Urban areas may be cities, towns or conurbations, but the term is not commonly extended to rural settlements such as villages and hamlets.Urban areas are created and further...
s, and insisted that there was no point in a specifically urban studies; but this debate has been largely resolved in favor of urban studies, and it is now widely accepted that cities need to be studied separately from the country.
Having established that cities are genuinely distinct from rural areas, scholars have studied cities according to three different perspectives: the internalist perspective, which looks at spatial and
social orderSocial order is a concept used in sociology, history and other social sciences. It refers to a set of linked social structures, social institutions and social practices which conserve, maintain and enforce "normal" ways of relating and behaving....
within a city; the externalist perspective, which views cities as stable points or nodes in the wider globalizing space of networks and flows; and the interstitial perspective, which attempts to reconcile the two perspectives through understanding how the social, temporal and spatial ordering of a city is influenced by global, external forces, and how it influences them in turn. For example, in
The Ordinary City (1997),
AminAsh Amin FBA AcSS is a professor of geography at the University of Cambridge and formally at Durham University, UK. He graduated from the University of Reading in 1979 with a first-class degree in Italian Studies and then gained a PhD in geography from Reading in 1986...
and Graham argue that the urbanscape can best be understood as a site of co-presence of multiple spaces, multiple times and multiple webs of relations, tying local sites, subjects and fragments into globalizing networks of economic, social and cultural change.
"Urbanism" in its wider sense will also include the study of the interaction between the city and the rural
hinterlandThe hinterland is the land or district behind a coast or the shoreline of a river. Specifically, by the doctrine of the hinterland, the word is applied to the inland region lying behind a port, claimed by the state that owns the coast. The area from which products are delivered to a port for...
. No city can exist without a hinterland to supply it, but, because of communications technology, this hinterland may be less easy to identify than it was in pre-industrial, agrarian societies, and furthermore the conception of how the hinterland relates to the city may change throughout history. In the
Roman EmpireThe Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....
and
ancient GreeceAncient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
), for example, the
municipiumMunicipium , the prototype of English municipality, was the Latin term for a town or city. Etymologically the municipium was a social contract between municipes, the "duty holders," or citizens of the town. The duties, or munera, were a communal obligation assumed by the municipes in exchange for...
and
polisPolis , plural poleis , literally means city in Greek. It could also mean citizenship and body of citizens. In modern historiography "polis" is normally used to indicate the ancient Greek city-states, like Classical Athens and its contemporaries, so polis is often translated as "city-state."The...
were considered to consist of both "urban" centre and hinterland, with which they formed one unified social, political and economic entity.
The word urbanism is also used as a qualitative complement to the description of various urban and rural forms; i.e., informal urbanism,
new urbanismNew Urbanism is an urban design movement, which promotes walkable neighborhoods that contain a range of housing and job types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980s, and has gradually continued to reform many aspects of real estate development, urban planning, and municipal land-use...
, self-sufficient urbanism, sustainable urbanism, centralized or decentralized urbanism, neo-traditional urbanism, and transitional urbanism.
See also
- Abahlali baseMjondolo
Abahlali baseMjondolo , also known as AbM or the red shirts is a shack-dwellers' movement in South Africa which is well known for its campaigning for public housing. The movement grew out of a road blockade organized from the Kennedy Road shack settlement in the city of Durban in early 2005 and now...
- Bajalta California
- Landscape urbanism
Landscape Urbanism is a theory of urbanism arguing that landscape, rather than architecture, is more capable of organizing the city and enhancing the urban experience. Landscape Urbanism has emerged as a theory in the last fifteen years...
, an urbanism modeled on the disciplines of landscape architectureLandscape architecture is the design of outdoor and public spaces to achieve environmental, socio-behavioral, or aesthetic outcomes. It involves the systematic investigation of existing social, ecological, and geological conditions and processes in the landscape, and the design of interventions...
and ecologyEcology is the scientific study of the relations that living organisms have with respect to each other and their natural environment. Variables of interest to ecologists include the composition, distribution, amount , number, and changing states of organisms within and among ecosystems...
.
- Micro-urban
Micro-urban is an informal term for smaller cities of 250,000 or less with certain urban characteristics normally found in large metropolitan centers...
- New urbanism
New Urbanism is an urban design movement, which promotes walkable neighborhoods that contain a range of housing and job types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980s, and has gradually continued to reform many aspects of real estate development, urban planning, and municipal land-use...
, a response to contemporary problems such as urban sprawlUrban sprawl, also known as suburban sprawl, is a multifaceted concept, which includes the spreading outwards of a city and its suburbs to its outskirts to low-density and auto-dependent development on rural land, high segregation of uses Urban sprawl, also known as suburban sprawl, is a...
and traffic congestion.
- Unitary urbanism
Unitary urbanism was the critique of status quo urbanism employed by the Lettrist International and then further developed by the Situationist International between approximately 1953 and 1960....
, a critique of urbanism as a technology of power by the situationists.
- Peer-to-peer urbanism, a form of urbanism that promotes participation and design by a city's inhabitants.
- Urban geography
Urban geography is the study of areas which have a high concentration of buildings and infrastructure. These are areas where the majority of economic activities are in the secondary sector and tertiary sectors...
- Urban design
Urban design concerns the arrangement, appearance and functionality of towns and cities, and in particular the shaping and uses of urban public space. It has traditionally been regarded as a disciplinary subset of urban planning, landscape architecture, or architecture and in more recent times has...
- Urban planning
Urban planning incorporates areas such as economics, design, ecology, sociology, geography, law, political science, and statistics to guide and ensure the orderly development of settlements and communities....
- Principles of Intelligent Urbanism
Principles of Intelligent Urbanism is a theory of urban planning composed of a set of ten axioms intended to guide the formulation of city plans and urban designs. They are intended to reconcile and integrate diverse urban planning and management concerns...
- Urbanate, a living environment envisioned by the Technocracy movement
The technocracy movement is a social movement which arose in the early 20th century. It put forth a plan for operating the North American continent as a non-monetary society. Technocracy was highly popular in the USA for a brief period in the early 1930s, when it overshadowed many other proposals...
.
- World Urbanism Day
The international organization for World Urbanism Day , also known as "World Town Planning Day", was founded in 1949 by the late Professor Carlos Maria della Paolera of the University of Buenos Aires, a graduate at the Institut d'urbanisme in Paris, to advance public and professional interest in...
.
Further reading
- Amin
Ash Amin FBA AcSS is a professor of geography at the University of Cambridge and formally at Durham University, UK. He graduated from the University of Reading in 1979 with a first-class degree in Italian Studies and then gained a PhD in geography from Reading in 1986...
and Graham (1997) "The Ordinary City" in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 22 pp 411–429
- Manuel Castells
Manuel Castells is a sociologist especially associated with information society and communication research....
The Urban Question, Network Society
- Peter Geoffrey Hall Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century
- David Harvey
David Harvey is the name of:*David Harvey *David Harvey , geographer and social theorist*David Harvey , American luthier...
(1989)Flexible accumulation through urbanization
- Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs, was an American-Canadian writer and activist with primary interest in communities and urban planning and decay. She is best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities , a powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States...
, The Death and Life of Great American CitiesThe Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs, is a greatly influential book on the subject of urban planning in the 20th century...
- Henri Lefebvre
Henri Lefebvre was a French sociologist, Marxist intellectual, and philosopher, best known for his work on dialectics, Marxism, everyday life, cities, and space.-Biography:...
(1970) "The Urban Revolution"
- Kevin Lynch
Kevin Andrew Lynch was an American urban planner and author.Lynch studied at Yale University, Taliesin under Frank Lloyd Wright, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and received a Bachelor's degree in city planning from MIT in 1947...
, Image of the City
- Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford was an American historian, philosopher of technology, and influential literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer...
, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its ProspectsThe City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects is a 1961 National Book Award winner by American historian Lewis Mumford.It was first published by Harcourt, Brace & World ....
- Robert E. Park
Robert Ezra Park was an American urban sociologist, one of the main founders of the original Chicago School of sociology.-Life:...
, The City - Suggestions for the Study of Human Nature in the Urban Environment (1925) and all the publications of the Chicago schoolIn sociology and later criminology, the Chicago School was the first major body of works emerging during the 1920s and 1930s specialising in urban sociology, and the research into the urban environment by combining theory and ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago, now applied elsewhere...
- Saskia Sassen
Saskia Sassen is a Dutch sociologist noted for her analyses of globalization and international human migration. She is currently Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Centennial visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Sassen coined the term global city...
(1997) The global city: London, New York, TokyoA global city is a city that is deemed to be an important node in the global economic system...
- Richard Sennett
Richard Sennett is the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and University Professor of the Humanities at New York University...
The Uses of Disorder
- Ed Soja Postmetropolis
- Scape Magazine 'Scape is the new international magazine for landscape architecture and urbanism.
- Richard Florida
Richard Florida is an American urban studies theorist.Richard Florida's focus is on social and economic theory. He is currently a professor and head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management, at the University of Toronto. He also heads a private consulting firm, the...
2009 "The Great Reset"
External links