Tag Archives: urban sociology

Two minutes to sum up Le Corbusier, Bauhaus, and Herman Miller

Posted on by

Refresh your architectural knowledge with these short videos on the influential works of Le Corbusier, Bauhaus, and Herman Miller.

I’ve asked this before: where in a K-college curriculum does a typical American student learn about modern architecture and design? I remember learning about Greek and Roman architecture in Western Civilization in high school. But, I don’t remember ever formally learning about more modern developments. I suppose some of this could be taught in art classes at older ages or in history courses. For example, it is hard to ignore the development of the skyscraper in American history in the late 1800s and early 1900s but this could easily be taught more from an angle about industry and progress rather than aesthetics and urban planning.

Because of this question, my urban sociology course this past spring semester spent several weeks discussing architecture and urban planning. All together, we read Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, talked about New Urbanism, took a Chicago Architecture Foundation walking tour titled “Modern Skyscrapers (1950s-present),” and watched several episodes about sustainable design and development in the PBS e2 series. This led to some good discussions about the social life and role of buildings and urban design.

h/t Curbed National

Reconsidering what sprawl, suburbs, and world-class city mean

Posted on by

A sociology grad student involved with the city of Calgary regarding development and growth suggests we need to step back and reconsider the “vacant terminology” used by “urbanistas”:

When it comes to sprawl, said Gondek, the term actually means “non-contiguous growth of an urban area.”“It’s uncontrolled, it’s unplanned. In our opinion, it’s simply not the case for Calgary,” she said…

“Suburb” is Gondek’s least-favourite misused term, preferring the term “community” instead.

“Suburbs, as they are properly defined, are areas outside the metropolitan region,” she said.

“They are bedroom communities. It’s an American concept that means independent municipalities outside of the city.”

Growth on Calgary’s edges actually involves periphery communities, not suburbs.

“Calgary’s so-called suburbs are actually a part of the city — there’s nothing ‘sub’ about them,” said Gondek, pointing out that these homeowners pay property taxes into the same pool as inner-city residents do.

The third phrase is the idea of just how “world-class” is Calgary.

Gondek looked at various indices to see how cities are rated on their globalness. She found a wide variety of measures, depending on what angle of “globalness” was sought to be defined: population, income, walkability, transportation — any number of measures.

Gondek drew the conclusion that indices of world-classness depend on the subjective views of what the creators of the indices decide is world-class, rather than any real, fundamental, unified definition of the term.

Some of this makes sense. Suburbs are now vital parts of metropolitan regions rather than ugly step-children of cities. Also, sprawl is not necessarily unplanned or disordered as critics suggest; there is a logic to it, typically involving profits to be made by developers and others. Both of these terms are often loaded with negative connotations by critics.

On the other hand, the definition of a world-class city seems more set to me. The term used widely in urban sociology actually is “global city” which has a lot of overlap with the concept of a world-class city. The global city is typically defined as being a global economic center with a high concentration of FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) industries. But, there are other dimensions to global cities including cultural and government institutions. (For one example of these various dimensions, see this ranking of global cities.) I wonder if the suggestion that world-class city is a nebulous term is done so that Calgary can feel better about what it is doing…

Analyzing cities in 1588

Posted on by

A newly translated into English work from an Italian observer in 1588 provides a perspective on cities:

His book called On the Causes of the Greatness and Magnificence of Cities, written in 1588, has just been translated into English for the first time in four centuries and published by the University of Toronto Press.

Funny how modern it is, once you get past the obligatory nod toward the ancients and Botero starts talking about the world he actually knows. This stretched from cities built by the Incas (he admired their engineering) to the Indian island of Goa, a vigorous trading partner of the Portuguese.

Botero doesn’t care much about fortresses and armies; he looks for trade, transportation routes, a middle class, contact with foreign states, universities, and growth, as well an an effective ruler. Not so different from our day…

Botero writes: “Someone will ask me which is of greater value for improving a place and increasing its population: the fertility of its soil, or the industry of its people?” That’s easy, he says. Industry wins over farming or other production of raw materials every time.

This article suggests Botero seems to have a more modern perspective on cities and has been called the first urban sociologist. Having never encountered his work before, I wonder if we could flip this around: perhaps Botero was living at the leading edge of the modern era in northern Italy in the late 16th century. The Italian Renaissance had already occurred. This would be around the same era in which Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism suggested modern capitalism developed. Cities were connected more than ever before and Europeans now had information about cities in the Americas and Asia. It still takes someone to notice and point out these changes but the world and big cities were changing by this point in time.

Sociological views of the village in India

Posted on by

A review of a new volume on the Indian village provides some insights into how the village is viewed:

AT a time when the general disenchantment with village life appears to be the spirit of new India, the editing of a volume on village society is definitely an act of intellectual courage and professional commitment. We keep hearing scholarly pronouncements on the declining sociological significance of the village and village studies. We are told that the Indian village is no longer a site where future can be planned. Rather, it is an area of darkness – full of despair, indignation, filth and squalor, and mindless violence…

Interestingly, for the urban Indian, the village has always been more than a simple social morphological other to a town or a city. The village has not merely been despised for its lack of electricity and other modern amenities; it has also been perceived as a burden on the national conscience because of its abstract moralised qualities of backwardness, bigotry, illiteracy, superstition, and a general lack of civilisation and culture. For the children and grandchildren of “Midnight’s Children”, the village continues to be emblematic of the rustic world of thumb-impression (angutha-chaap) country bumpkins. At any rate, unparh gavar (illiterate yokel) can hardly be a worthy role model for a nation as aspiring as ours. In a way, the decline of the village in the creative imagination of Indians in recent decades is almost complete…

Put differently, it is time we treated the village as an explanandum in sociological research. We cannot go on assuming the village as the container par excellence of the larger processes of rural-agrarian social change. It never was. The introduction brings out in lucid prose the historicity of the study of rural society. It demonstrates that, for long, the study of the village has been an abiding preoccupation of sociologists/social anthropologists in India. So much so that “village studies” came to stand for Indian sociology in the initial decades of its growth and development as an academic discipline.

In course of time, the village attained paradigmatic status as a template of indigenous society and economy, and village studies very often came to be projected as a shorthand for knowing and understanding Indian society by both professional sociologists and the intelligentsia. The efflorescence of village studies, as a distinctive disciplinary tradition of inquiry, is testimony to the considerable analytical and theoretical significance that the village and the studies of the village enjoyed for more than a century and a half.

Three thoughts:

1. It would be interesting to know how the view of the village in India compares to how villages are viewed in other developing cultures. In places where mass urbanization is currently taking place, are there countries where the village is viewed more positively?

2. I was asked a while back about rural sociology. This subfield has really declined and only a few schools still specialize in it. I assume this is partly because the United States has become an urban nation (80% of Americans live in urban areas). Yet, rural places are still important, particularly in other countries (like India) where rapid changes are taking place.

3. This is a reminder that big city life (living in places with more than a million people) is a relatively recent development in human history. Even in developed countries, this has only become common in the last 120 years or so. We may like our cities but most humans have lived in smaller settings. This change was so remarkable during the Industrial Revolution that it helped give rise to the discipline of sociology.

Tying subways to the concentric rings of the Chicago School

Posted on by

Joel recently noted an academic study that suggests subway systems converge on a similar form. Whet Moser of Chicago argues that understanding subway patterns requires considering how cities grow and the concentric rings model of the Chicago School of urban sociology.

This is where I get skeptical that subways converging towards a “common mathematical space may hint at universal principles of human self-organization.” The subway systems the authors study were built within a relatively narrow band: 1863 (London) to 1995 (Shanghai). But they’re all also very old cities. Shanghai has a dense central business district, dating back to its long history as a port town; Moscow’s rings radiate out from the Kremlin and Red Square, following old fortifications; Beijing grew out from a model of urbanism that way predates Burgess and Park:

Many researchers reached consensus on urban morphology of the Old Beijing from physical composition. It is agreed that the Old Beijing was laid out exactly according to the concept of the Chinese utopia capital city in the book Kao Gong Ji, Notes on Works, written more than 2,000 years ago. The ideal city form is ‘a walled square city of nine by nine li (4.5 kilometers) with nine north/south main streets and east/west main avenues, three gates on each side, the ancestral temple on the left and an altar on the right of the palace, municipal administration buildings in front of the palace and a marketplace behind it’ (Fu, 1998; Liu, 1986).

So: who cares? If it’s just a neat little mathematical model, what’s its relevance? It’s relevant when the model becomes prescriptive, as the authors of “World Subway Networks” write:

In the case of Beijing, Seoul and Shanghai, it seems that their relative ‘youth’ is why they have not yet reached their long time limit.

Translation: since the subways were started after 1971, they haven’t fully converged on that ideal “core and branch” shape and ratio…

In short, Beijing is stuck in Park and Burgess’s concentric zones, and wants to move towards Harris and Ullman’s multiple-nuclei model. At the very least, it’s neat to see these comparatively dated theories of urbanization at the forefront of 21st century development. But the Beijing subway system may be following a multiple-nuclei model…

In other words, urban sociologists started to figure out that the concentric rings model doesn’t seem to fit all cities (though it still seems to overlay nicely on Chicago, it doesn’t fit other places like Beijing or newer Sunbelt cities in the United States). First came the multiple nuclei model in the 1940s and then a whole new paradigm, the political economy approach, started to emerge in the 1960s. The political economy prescriptive relies less on prescriptive models and instead focus on a different mechanism: whereas the Chicago School emphasizes competition for land and cities growing as people seek out cheaper land, the political economy model focuses on the profit motives of developers, politicians, and business leaders.

So if we looked at subway growth and locations in the political economy perspective, we could examine why lines and stops were built in certain places. Using two other forms of mass transportation as examples, we know that a good number of railroad and streetcar owners in the mid to late 1800s built lines to their new real estate developments. In other words, these lines were not built to service existing residents but rather to spur new development. I bet you could find some scholars who would argue that subways may sometimes be built to wealthier neighborhoods rather than poorer neighborhoods because there is more money to be made in these connections.

Still using Chicago as “urban laboratory”

Posted on by

Following in the tradition of the Chicago School which saw the city as an “urban laboratory,” sociologist Robert Sampson explains how the findings from studying Chicago apply to the entire country:

Many cities were considered as a possible launching pad for the study, but Chicago got the nod for its composition of whites, blacks, and Latinos — the three largest groups in the United States — and for the access to the city’s extensive statistics on health, police, and more. “Chicago offered us a picture of American life that we thought was broadly representative,” Sampson said.

According to Sampson, a vast array of social activity is concentrated in place. “We studied crime, health, altruism, cynicism, disorder, collective efficacy, civic engagement, leadership networks — all of which are influenced and shaped by neighborhood effects.”…

Even as the world is increasingly globalized, neighborhood structures remain local and important. “Neighborhoods have legacies,” he said. “Crime and poverty are durable over long periods of time. From the 1960s onwards, cities went through amazing social change — riots, crime — to one of the largest decreases in violence from the late 1990s to the present. Yet communities are persistent in rank ordering. People are moving in and out of neighborhoods, but the perceptions of neighborhoods stay largely the same.”

What’s more, he found, no community in Chicago transitioned from black to white, a pattern he shows is similar to the United States as a whole.

To sum up: place matters.

I’ve thought several times over the years that I would like to see more work about whether Chicago is really representative of America as is often suggested or if other cities are better options. To put it another way, is Chicago studied more often because there is a legacy of studying Chicago well at the University of Chicago and other schools or because Chicago is truly unique? Others have argued that other places are more emblematic of more recent patterns – check out the Los Angeles School for a differing opinion. Chicago might represent Rust Belt cities but what about Sun Belt cities?

When looking at American cities that seem to get most research attention or are covered in “classic works”, having an established research school with an interest in urban sociology seems to matter. Chicago gets a lot of attention as does Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City. This makes sense: these cities have great universities and it is logical that researchers and graduate students would look at some of the surrounding areas and be able to justify this study beyond simply saying it is more convenient or cheaper. In contrast, other major cities don’t seem to get the same level of scrutiny, places like Washington, D.C., Detroit, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and a number of other ascendent Sun Belt cities.

Perhaps my thoughts are too impressionistic and one could try to quantify just how much each city actually does get studied. But even then, there are cities with histories that matter, research legacies that have inertia and are likely to continue for some time. Someday we might have a Houston school or an Atlanta school but that requires resources, effort, and research that is recognized as being relevant and innovative.