FIGURE 14.1 Theming of the Urban Environment. New York, New York Casino/Hotel complex in Las Vegas. SOURCE: Photograph by William Holt.
The beginning of the twenty-first century marks a new era in human history. The world’s urban population numbers more than 3 billion persons. For the first time, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas, and in the next two decades the number will increase by another 2 billion to more than 5 billion persons. In 2030, it is expected that some 70 percent of the total world population will live in urban areas (United Nations, 2012).
We know that these urban areas are linked in exciting and new ways that would have been unimaginable just a short time ago. We are connected by a global economy where the life opportunities of persons in one country may depend on capital flows of new investments from a nation on the other side of the world. The mass media brings us world music from Africa and the Middle East. We use the Internet to keep in touch with old friends who move to other countries and to make new friends in places we have never even heard of. We inhabit a global world, to be sure, but more than that, it is, for the very first time, an urban world.
The people living in this new urban world, the urban world of the twenty-first century, will confront many new and important issues. More than a third of the world’s urban population now live in shantytowns, many with inadequate drinking water or sanitation, substandard housing, and few economic opportunities. The number of persons living in urban slums will increase to more than half of the world’s urban population by 2030—some 2.5 billion persons (Neuwirth, 2006; UN Habitat, 2009). Air and water pollution will increase as the less developed nations industrialize and create new urban infrastructures that require the same resources for development that we find in the developed nations. This is already happening in China and India. A changing global climate may lead to major changes in crop production and weather patterns around the world, creating new scarcities of food and water that we have barely begun to consider.
The new global society will be an urban society. And no field of study is more important for understanding these changes than urban sociology. Will urban sociology step up to this challenge?
Urban studies is a comparatively recent field of study. Perhaps because of the exciting changes—and important challenges—that the new urban world of the twenty-first century presents, urban studies and its related disciplines—urban sociology, urban geography, architecture—have emerged as something of a growth industry in academic publishing for the past decade or more. This work is built around both new and old perspectives in the field and offers some insight as to where urban research will lead in the future. In this final chapter, we explore several topics that are important to our understanding of the new urban world—globalization, world cities, theming of the urban environment, racialization of urban space, the revanchist city, and cyberspace and the end of the city.
First, there is an extensive literature on globalization and world cities. We have discussed some of the important characteristics of globalization and the impact of globalization on urban development in the industrialized countries (Chapter 10) and in the developing world (Chapter 11). But it is important to remember that globalization is not a new phenomenon, nor is it a new area of study in sociology. We usually think of globalization as something that started recently and is just now having important effects on our lives. Although many textbooks seem to suggest that globalization began with the European discovery of the Americas and the development of European colonial empires, there are earlier precedents. The great Chinese empires of the Middle Ages linked trading centers across Southeast Asia with the Chinese urban centers, then the largest cities in the world. Even earlier, Rome, the first truly urban civilization, depended on wheat grown in Egypt to sustain its growing urban population, and Roman cities across Europe and the Middle East were linked with an extensive road system. Indeed, much of the spectacle of ancient Rome was the product of globalization, from the obelisks brought from Egypt and placed in the Roman Forum to the exotic animals exhibited in the Colosseum that came from countries at the edge of the empire.
The European colonial system connected cities across the world in a new and more systematic fashion. During this period of mercantile capitalism, raw materials (silver from the Americas, spices from the Far East) were brought back to the European trading cities. The neocolonial empires of the twentieth century reestablished and intensified this system of economic dominance (even today the majority of export crops produced in the Philippines is under the control of just one American corporation—Dole). This system of globalization and colonial dependence is described by the world systems theory of the 1970s and 1980s, in which the industrialized countries and the former European colonial powers are seen as part of the core, and countries in the developing world are seen as part of the periphery (Wallerstein, 1976). The current literature on globalization builds on these earlier models to describe an increasingly complex system of economic competition and urban growth.
Significant issues of economic and social justice associated with globalization have been contested in protests against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in cities across the world. We know something about the costs of globalization in terms of job loss and economic restructuring in metropolitan regions across the United States (Chapter 6) and in other industrialized countries. Perhaps less well understood is the impact of globalization on urbanization and urban systems in the developing nations, and on the everyday life of families and children in these countries (Katz, 2004).
The growth of urban centers in China (the number of metropolitan areas with populations of more than 2.5 million persons will increase from a dozen in 2000 to more than twenty by 2025) is largely a consequence of the concentration of industrial production in the urban clusters identified in Chapter 11. In many other countries in the developing world, the growth of urban centers is the result of continuing migration from rural areas as individuals and households are unable to support themselves from simple agricultural work and come to the cities looking for work. Most of the growth of urban populations in the developing nations in the coming decades will be of this type (United Nations, 2012). These urban centers will not be part of the world urban system in the ways currently described in the literature; instead, they are likely to become part of what has been called the Fourth World—areas left behind in the globalization process (Giddens, 2000; Hutchison 2009).
Globalization remains a topic closely studied by urbanists in all countries. One key area of globalization research involves the study of how it affects local labor markets. Changes in the demand for high-and low-tech labor, retail workers, or financial service workers, for example, can directly affect the economic well-being of cities. Commercial growth and housing development are all tied to the ebb and flow of local jobs, including the quality of wages.
Box 14.1 Miami, Capital of the Caribbean
Miami may be the most foreign of any large metropolitan area in the United States. Its exotic qualities often invoke images of glamour and splendor, as well as a sense of alienation from mainstream America. The city is above all a showcase for the forces of globalization and the complexity of those forces. According to some measures, Miami is the most internationalized metropolitan area in the country. The effects of globalization on Miami have been massive and are unprecedented in urban America.
In about forty years, not a long time in the life span of cities, Miami was transformed from a quiet resort town at the periphery of the United States to a dynamic metropolis in the center of a growing economic region comprising North and South America and the Caribbean. Between 1960 and 1990, the population of Dade County more than doubled to approximately 2 million people, and the urban economy grew accordingly. By 1996, Dade County’s economy was $56 billion, exceeding the gross national product of Colombia, one of its main trading partners.
Miami’s transformation and growth are based on the convergence of two developments: large numbers of Latin American immigrants and the globalization of the world economy. The latter facilitated the intensification of finance and trade flows across political borders, allowing for the emergence of international economic regions, such as the one in which Miami plays a prominent part. Massive immigration, in turn, gave Miami a definitive advantage in terms of human resources and as a node in the globalizing world economy.
In 1960, on the eve of Miami’s transformation, Latinos made up 5 percent of the metropolitan populace. Today, they represent more than half of the city’s 2 million people, and approximately 66 percent of all Latinos are Cuban. According to the 1990 census, almost half of Miami’s population was born abroad, and over 60 percent speak a language in addition to English at home. Miami’s rise to prominence is often attributed to its becoming a multicultural city. The presence of large numbers of relatively skilled and educated bilingual Latinos makes Miami an attractive location for companies that do business in Latin America. However, the influx of immigrants was accompanied by a rapid internationalization of Miami’s economy.
Miami handles more than a third of all trade with Latin America and over a half of all trade with Central America and the Caribbean. More than 350 multinational companies have offices in Miami, and it has become the third largest foreign banking center in the United States (after New York and Los Angeles). Miami is the prime example of a world-class trading city in the United States, made possible by the cultural connections created by its binational communities.
Tourism is still a major source of income, but it is increasingly aimed at international markets, especially Latin America and Europe. Besides tourism, international trade and real estate have become leading sectors of the Miami economy. All growth is welcome, but the city is primarily promoted on the basis of its virtues as an international place. Miami’s designation as the capital of Latin America, the Americas, and the Caribbean has been in vogue since the late 1970s.
SOURCE: Jan Nijman, “Globalization to a Latin Beat: The Miami Growth Machine,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 551, No. 1, 164–177 (1997).
American metropolitan regions have been adversely affected by the flight of industry and people from the urban core. Industrial decline has been attributed to the acquisition of local businesses by multinational corporations. Some transnational corporations have purchased American companies just to shut them down or downsize them to increase corporate profits and strengthen market position. These actions have contributed to urban decline. Other places have benefited from new investment, much of it also involving multinationals. Sustained growth in places like Los Angeles, San Diego, and Miami owes a considerable amount to the continuing viability of those cities as sites of global investment (see Box 14.1). Future research on globalization needs to examine the contradictory impacts of this international business activity to determine how they affect different parts of the metropolitan region.
Peter Hall’s work in The World City highlighted seven metropolitan regions—London, Paris, Moscow, New York, Tokyo, Rhine-Ruhr (Germany), and Randstad-Holland (Netherlands)—and brought attention to cities as places of political and economic power (Hall, 1966). But the study of global cities emerged more directly from world systems theory and political economy models of urban growth (Chapter 4). Friedmann and Wolff (1982) introduced the concept of a global network of cities where urbanization was linked to the internationalization of capital, and a later article by Friedmann (1986) suggested that the way in which cities are connected to the world economy offers a key to their growth and development. Cities connected to the world economy in similar ways would be alike regardless of differences in history, national policies, and cultural influences. The global city is the site of the concentration and accumulation of world capital engineered by professionals in specialized control functions, such as lawyers, computer programmers, and accountants.
Saskia Sassen’s study of global cities argues that the presence of global cities has important consequences for the nation and for the global economy (1994; 1999; 2001). Sassen’s work is different from the earlier world system theory in that she asserts that the leading global cities, not the nations themselves, have emerged as key structures in the world economy. The global city is characterized by specific forms of urban development, including the redevelopment of the urban core and displacement of the poor, construction of high-rise office towers, and an increasing social and spatial polarization. The transformation of cities into high-tech international business centers privileges global corporations at the expense of other groups, particularly minorities, immigrants, and women. Sassen presents the corporate office building as a metaphor for the polarization that characterizes the global city. During the day, the building is occupied by highly educated, well-paid executives making global transactions; at night it is cleaned by female immigrant workers paid minimum wage. The influence of global firms on urban development raises important moral claims: Whose city is it? (Sassen, 2001).
While this literature has focused on major world cities, other work has emphasized that many cities compete to become global cities. The decline of manufacturing means that cities must find new ways to link to the global economy; they compete with one another to attract corporate headquarters, sports facilities, and new businesses to achieve world-city status (Short, 2004). Abrahamson (2004) suggests that almost all cities are likely to have some features that make them global and that the focus on a small group of cities—such as Sassen’s work on New York, London, and Tokyo—underestimates how widely the global-city construct may be generalized. Chicago and Frankfurt, for example, are significant global cities when concentration of economic activity is used as a measure; Los Angeles figures prominently in cultural activity but is less important in other areas.
In his analysis of global cities, Mark Abrahamson ranks thirty cities on a composite economic index (including the number of stock exchanges, banks and financial institutions, multinational corporations, and services) and cultural industries index (recorded music, movies, and television). The resulting global economic hierarchy puts New York at the top of both indexes, with London, Paris, and Tokyo grouped in a second tier with similar economic and cultural profiles. Abrahamson (2004:164) notes that “everyone else lags substantially far behind them.” He finds evidence of regional economic centers—Chicago and Frankfurt—as well as regional cultural centers—Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Manila—cities that could move to world-city position by increasing their cultural activities (something that both Chicago and Frankfurt have sought to do) or by increasing their economic potential. These sorts of development activities are the focus of John Rennie Short’s work on global cities (2005). He notes that the discourse on globalization leads cities to seek development that will better connect them to the new world economy: the construction of international airports, the establishment of international business centers, the building of world-class sports facilities, and the successful competition for events such as the World’s Fair, the Olympics, and the World Cup.
Many scholars have expressed concern with the way “world cities” and “global cities” reify earlier colonial/imperial models of a “world system” with the implied ranking of cities as either modern or in need of development (Fraser, 2006). Although current research gives considerable attention to world cities, from our perspective, the concept of “world cities” is misguided. At times these urban spaces act as cities because some of their global functions are concentrated in their cores. When speaking of stock and bond trading, for example, the spaces corresponding with these activities would be lower Manhattan, the City of London, and downtown Tokyo, respectively. Market trading is generally a centralized city phenomenon, although stock markets like NASDAQ are inscribed in telephone and computerized telecommunication links worldwide and have no physical space at all.
Multinational corporate headquarters are the other major component of the global economy, and these are increasingly located outside the cores of large cities in separate centers. Many corporate headquarters have left Manhattan for areas in the multicentered region of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, or for places in other parts of the country. Often the “world city” is but a small space embedded within a larger metropolitan region.
Returning to the metaphor of the office building in the global city, it is the maintenance staff and service workers who make these buildings work on a day-to-day basis. They lead their daily lives in very different spaces of the metropolitan region than the office staff who occupy the buildings during the 9-to-5 workday—and the company executives live their lives in yet other spaces! The deconcentration and reconcentration of command-and-control centers across regions, the increasing divide—both spatially and socioeconomically—among those who occupy these centers, and similar sociospatial factors make it imperative for future research to take the multicentered metropolitan region as the focal urban form.
The built environment across the metropolitan region, including urban and suburban settlement space, is increasingly themed and branded because franchising and media advertising is so much a part of the way our economy works. In addition, with the decline of manufacturing in American cities, tourism has taken over as one of the major ways downtowns now make money. Theming is the process by which attractions compete for consumer dollars. Increasingly, cities and metropolitan regions in developed as well as developing nations rely on theming and branding as their urban economies shift from production to consumption.
Most of us have visited theme parks (Disneyland, Disney World, Busch Gardens), eaten at themed restaurants (Hard Rock Café, Rainforest Cafe), and visited themed nightclubs (House of Blues). Research on the role of theming in American culture and, more exactly, the way theming is used to sell products and places that, on their own, may not be markedly different from one another, is a relatively undeveloped area of study (for an exception, see Gottdiener, 1995; 2001; Hutchison and Wright, 1996). In Las Vegas, for example, every casino sells the same product, gambling, although they may vary slightly according to their house odds. On the outside, however, each casino is different, and each offers a thematic fantasy as an attraction. Many of the themes can be bunched together: the Wild West, the romanticized desert, famous cities of the world, and exotic tropical locales. These motifs work because they have already been well established as familiar symbolic forms by Hollywood cinema and by television (Gottdiener, 2001).
The success of places like Las Vegas over the decades as a gambling mecca, in contrast to the decline of American cities with industrial/manufacturing traditions, pinpoints both the prospects and problems facing places as they attempt to attract new investment and residents; not every location can depend on casino gambling for economic stability (Gottdiener, 1994). In 1972 Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour, and Denise Scott Brown published Learning from Las Vegas, an important book that examined symbolism in the architecture of the Las Vegas Strip and the iconography of urban sprawl. What we can all learn from Las Vegas in this day and age is precisely the way architectural theming can be used to attract people to urban areas. We have seen the collapse of Atlantic City, an older resort community in New Jersey that was rebuilt as a casino gambling complex in the 1980s, in the second wave of the global financial crisis just two decades later. In Las Vegas, theming is the major weapon in the competition for customers, and casinos have gone to previously unheard-of lengths in the creation of spectacular environments that provide fantasy stimulation and entertainment. When theming is used by other American metropolitan regions in order to attract tourists, however, popular Las Vegas motifs may not work. The promotion of local tourism and the development of UEDs (urban entertainment districts) as a new growth industry require places to research precisely what themes make sense within the local context. Future research should pay attention to these efforts and their variation among urban places.
FIGURE 14.1 Theming of the Urban Environment. New York, New York Casino/Hotel complex in Las Vegas. SOURCE: Photograph by William Holt.
The racialization of urban space refers to the process by which urban and suburban social space becomes associated with various ethnic and racial groups and to the serious consequences of extreme segregation that still plague American society. The racialization of space impacts the activities and opportunities of groups and individuals both within and beyond particular urban spaces. For persons living within racialized spaces, stigma is attached to the address they include on applications for employment; for persons living outside the racialized space, the racialized neighborhood (and its residents) are to be avoided (Hutchison, 2009). The racialization of space is a clear example of how the sociospatial perspective takes us beyond human ecology to analyze meanings that are given to urban spaces. As we saw in Chapter 1, urban spaces are meaningful spaces—they have specific meanings (sometimes contradictory) to persons within and outside of the local community. Racialized spaces often are contested spaces, and groups within the community struggle to define these spaces in particular ways (Wacquant, 2008).
The concept of racialized space is important for understanding particular patterns of development in cities. In the United States, older inner-city neighborhoods, housing projects, and the like have become associated with minority populations and with violent crime. Gotham (2002) describes how racialization was a fundamental part of the debate over urban renewal and the future development of black and white space in Kansas City. City planners painted a picture of the inner-city neighborhoods as racialized spaces, which made the decision to allocate public money to condemn housing and business the only acceptable plan for development.
When the downtown areas of cities become racialized space, there is a decline in business of all kinds. The redevelopment of the Chicago Loop, highlighted by the very successful development of Millennium Park that turned downtown Chicago into a major tourist destination, required the elimination of downtown movie theaters that featured black films and the removal of other institutions that served this population. This was followed by the development of a new arts district that brings in a very different clientele, including new Borders and Barnes and Noble bookstores. The tourists to the area include not only visitors from other states and even countries, but also persons from the suburbs who avoided the downtown area for decades and viewed Chicago as a “black city.” The project has been viewed as a success as the area has become deracialized (Hutchison, 2005).
Although the racialization of space invokes the image of inner-city neighborhoods, the concept can also refer to other areas. It has been used by scholars in Europe to study ethnic populations in the multicultural city and by scholars in the United States to study ethnic neighborhoods and populations. One of the most visible and long-lasting of these neighborhoods is the ubiquitous Chinatown; other areas such as Italian or Irish neighborhoods are also prominent features of the American urban environment. In many cases, these neighborhoods were defensive—the Chinese, Italian, and Irish immigrants experienced prejudice and discrimination when they first arrived in the United States, and the ethnic neighborhood provided a safe haven and opportunity for members of the ethnic group (Chapter 8).
Although much of the research on the racialization of space focuses on negative labels that are forced on the community by members of the dominant group living outside of these spaces, racialized spaces may also be created from within the neighborhood or group. Street gang graffiti advertises the presence of groups competing for control of urban space and creates racialized spaces that may appear dangerous and mysterious to the outsider. In many ethnic neighborhoods, one finds murals that have been painted to create a racialized space that becomes a source of pride and identity for the group.
There are racialized spaces that have positive images as well. In Chicago and New York there has been extensive gentrification in Bronzeville and Harlem, the former ghetto areas in each of these cities, and in both cases the visitor can take guided tours of the area (for a fee). Tourist bureaus in major cities supply maps that show the location of ethnic neighborhoods, such as Chinatown in New York and San Francisco, along with lists of ethnic restaurants and stores. The example of Chinatown, discussed in Box 14.2, is very interesting in this respect; it is an example of how a racialized space that long held negative meanings (opium dens and prostitution) in the popular imagination has been given a positive meaning (an important tourist destination) that has now become part of the city’s advertising campaign (Lin, 2010).
When Neil Smith set out to study gentrification in New York in the 1990s, he was struck by the changing political climate that had brought about new laws targeting the homeless, panhandlers, and other groups (Smith, 1996). There were attacks on homeless persons and gays in the streets, and affirmative action and immigration policy was under attack in the courts. Smith coined the term “revanchist city” to describe the new political order. The term comes from the French word revanche, which means revenge, but which also has a specific social meaning. Revanchist refers to the bourgeois radicals who opposed liberal reforms in the Second Republic and the socialist parties that had put forth women’s rights and other social reforms. After the fall of the Second Republic, when the French government surrendered to Prussian forces in the Franco-Prussian War, the people of Paris formed the Paris Commune and refused to turn the city over to the new government. Much of the city was destroyed in the subsequent fighting, and when the Paris Commune was ended, the leaders and their followers were hunted down and a terrible revenge taken. More than 40,000 persons who had defended the city, the enemies of the
Box 14.2 Racialization and Tourism in Chinatown
The phenomenon of Chinatown occurs in many major cities in the West, recreating a small part of the Orient. Chinatown came into existence in the old American West because of the large-scale immigration of cheap Chinese labor during the building of the railroads. These areas have always been regarded with an element of suspicion and fear by Westerners, together with a curiosity and desire to indulge in the pleasures and vices that frequently seem to occur there, even to this day.
The liner notes to Thin Lizzy’s Chinatown album capture the air of mystery surrounding the racialized community. San Francisco’s Chinatown intrigued tourists from its beginning. One of the main attractions toward the end of the nineteenth century was a group of opium dens that flourished in the warren of underground passages beneath the houses, shops, and restaurants. In 1877 Miriam Florence Leslie, wife of the publisher of Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, toured one such den with a group of friends. She recorded her impressions in her book, California: A Pleasure Trip from Gotham City to the Golden Gate. The tour guide was a local police officer. As late as 1974, the popular image of crime and corruption captured public attention as the title of the Roman Polanski film Chinatown (even though the story does not take place in Chinatown).
By the end of the twentieth century, Chinatown had become something very different. No longer dark and mysterious, it now was a tourist destination, advertised in city maps and the official tourist web pages for major cities (not just in the United States but across North America and in other countries as well). While some Chinatowns remain working communities, others have taken on a Disney-like flavor as they shed ethnic culture for tourist business. As is the case with other themed environments, the re-creation of the historic ethnic community means that it no longer is a living ethnic community; the racialized space has been tamed and marketed to the larger society. Chinatowns are important economic generators within the community; after 9/11, when many businesses across Lower Manhattan were struggling to survive, the mayor held a news conference announcing that the rebirth of the city economy would begin in Chinatown.
bourgeois political class, were executed. The revanchists had taken their revenge and restored political order.
There were similarities, Smith suggested, between the revanchism of nineteenth-century Paris and fin de siècle New York City. The liberal climate of the post-1960s had been replaced by paranoia and fear generated by sensational media coverage of immigration, crime, and other hot-button topics. In 1993, Rudolph Giuliani was elected mayor, promising a better quality of life for “conventional members of society.” The revanchist policies of the Giuliani administration blamed urban decay on the failures of liberal policy and on the marginalized populations of the city. Among those identified as major threats to the established order were the homeless, panhandlers, prostitutes, squatters, graffiti artists, squeegee cleaners, and even reckless bicyclists (Slater, 2009; Vitale 2008). Laws against panhandling, begging, sleeping in the open, and the like were used to remove the homeless from the streets, at the same time that funding for programs for many of the marginalized populations was in decline.
The concept of the revanchist city has become very influential in urban studies, but neoliberalism and revanchist urban policy was not something entirely new in the United States, nor is it confined to New York City (Harvey, 2005; Raco, 2012). Metropolitan governments have long imposed harsh penalties on the homeless and other groups who are thought to be threatening to shoppers, commuters, investors, and tourists. Smith’s discussion of the revanchist city has been used to describe the 1990s redevelopment of central Glasgow (MacLeod, 2003), the control and management of public spaces in Britain (Atkinson, 2003), street vendors in South America (Swanson, 2007), and policies directed against Muslims and other ethnic groups in Rotterdam (Uitermark and Duyvendak, 2008).
Even before the economic crisis of the 1990s, there were calls to cut spending on social programs of all kinds. With the mounting expenses and growing deficit due to the Iraq War, it would be necessary to cut expenditures for housing, food stamps, and other programs. Similar arguments were made during the 1980s, when high levels of military spending led to increasing deficits; in both instances, Republican administrations used the federal budget crisis as an argument to cut funding for those groups most affected by the declining economy. In earlier chapters, we have noted the increased political activity of groups on the right in periods of economic decline, and we can expect to see much the same in the coming decade as public anger and fear over the declining economy reaches a climax. We have seen new legislation intended to clear public spaces of homeless populations (Beckett and Herbert, 2009; Cloke and Johnsen, 2011) and to curtail free speech in public spaces (Appleton, 2014). Revanchist urban policy designed to restore public order and directed against marginalized populations, and the growing opposition to these policies, will most likely be an increasing area of study for urban sociologists (Deflem, 2008; Leitner, Peck, and Sheppard, 2006).
Finally, there is a literature that emphasizes the growth of new technologies and the new information society, resulting in a declining importance of geography and space and, ultimately, of the physical structures of the metropolis. This discussion is connected in some interesting ways to the decline of the public realm. The more time that persons spend online, whether talking with friends, shopping in cyber malls, or
Box 14.3 The Meanest Cities in the United States
While most cities throughout the country have laws or practices that criminalize homeless persons, some cities have stood out as more egregious than others in their attempt to criminalize homelessness. The National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty have chosen the meanest cities in 2009 based on one or more of the following criteria: the number of antihomeless laws in the city, the enforcement of those laws and severities of penalties, the general political climate toward homeless people in the city, local advocate support for the meanest designation, the city’s history of criminalization measures, and the existence of pending or recently enacted criminalization legislation in the city. Although some of these cities have tried to address homelessness in their communities, the punitive practices highlighted in the report impede true progress in solving the problem.
The ranking of the meanest cities places Los Angeles first, followed by St. Petersburg and Orlando (home of the tourist destination Disney Epcot Center). Two other southern cities followed in the ranking of the top five: Atlanta and Gainesville. Other cities in the top ten included in the NCH listing were San Francisco, Honolulu, Berkeley, Bradenton (Florida), and Kalamazoo (Michigan). Florida not only has the largest number of the meanest cities, but also has three of the top five meanest cities in the United States!
St. Petersburg (ranked second) wasn’t even on the list of the twenty meanest communities in 2005, but broke into the top ten in the 2009 listing. Here’s why: since early 2007, St. Petersburg has passed six new ordinances that target homeless people. These include ordinances that outlaw panhandling throughout most of downtown, prohibit the storage of personal belongings on public property, and make it unlawful to sleep outside in various locations. In January 2007, the Pinellas-Pasco public defender announced that he would no longer represent indigent people arrested for violating municipal ordinances to protest what he called excessive arrests of homeless individuals by the city of St. Petersburg. According to numbers compiled by the public defender’s office, the vast majority of people booked into the Pinellas County Jail on municipal ordinances were homeless individuals from St. Petersburg.
SOURCE: City Mayors, “Do Not Handcuff the Poor and Homeless,” 2009 (http://www.citymayors.com/society/homeless_usa2.html).
trolling websites, the less time they spend participating with fellow citizens in their local community.
Manuel Castells (1998) describes contemporary society as an informational global economy, where the global structure of the world system is based on a logic of flow, connectivity, networks, and nodes. The core activities of the global economy are linked in real time, and the daily work schedule is now on a planetary scale. While your credit card company may have service lines open from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM, this means that call operators in India on the other end of the line are working from 8:00 PM to 8:00 AM on a night shift in their home country. Capital flows in the emerging markets—the urban clusters in Japan and China discussed in Chapters 10 and 11—bypass the corporate headquarters of the West. Global cities are no longer defined by the presence of the corporate headquarters, but by a space of flows.
Castells’s view is unsettling. If the new global economy is in fact a system of flows as he describes, there is no longer a geography of spatial location, and social processes will have no particular grounding in the study of cities, suburbs, and metropolitan regions, thereby erasing the importance of urban sociology as a discipline. Clearly, Castells has overstated his case because strategic locations are a necessity for businesses, and the valorization of particular places is exactly how urban landscapes grow. Furthermore, what about all the people left behind by the new global economy? People inhabit lively inner-city neighborhoods, older industrial towns, and growing megacities of the developing world that may not be fully “wired” to the world system but are still connected to it in older ways that have always functioned well for global capitalism in the past—through ordinary trade, manufacture, retailing, and other activities located in specific places. A new term has been used to describe the spaces left behind in the new global economy—the Fourth World—but this is clearly no compensation to the millions of people left behind in the empty spaces of Castells’s “information economy” (Hutchison, 2009).
Interestingly, it was Karl Marx who wrote that capitalism would destroy space and time by accelerating the production process in the pursuit of profit. This brings us back to the work of Henri Lefebvre, to his concept of the social production of space, the emergence of metropolitan regions, and the origins of the new urban sociology.
Clearly Marx was correct: modern capitalism has created new technologies that have collapsed time and space; our casual references to the powerful idea of cyberspace indicate how quickly and pervasively this transformation has taken place. Yet the core of the global economy remains manufacturing, as Marx also asserted, even if people in the United States only have the vaguest ideas of how that key process plays itself out in obscure regions of China, India, and Southeast Asia. The important challenge for urban sociology, of course, is whether the information economy makes the metropolitan region irrelevant.
There is a growing body of literature arguing that urban spaces are still important. Even if we place an online order for goods produced in a country in a different part of the world through Internet shopping, the places where the goods are manufactured are grounded in time and space, as are the locations where the goods are stored and shipped. This suggests that we need to base our understanding of the spaces of flows to those areas where productive activity and social reproduction occur; in other words, we are still interested in specific spatial locations and in the everyday lives of persons who live in multinucleated metropolitan regions of developed as well as developing nations. But it also seems clear that the city, as a physical entity, becomes less and less relevant as the metropolitan region expands and the new information technologies link nodes of activity across these metropolitan spaces. Louis Wirth would likely struggle to reconceptualize how size, density, and heterogeneity would inform our analysis of the urban world of the twenty-first century!
In Urban Sociology: Images and Structure, William Flanagan (2010) divides the field of urban sociology into the culturalist approach and the structuralist approach. In general terms, what Flanagan means by the culturalist approach is the human ecology of the Chicago School and the later development of urban ecology by Amos Hawley, John Kasarda, and others. We have referred to this as the mainstream urban sociology of the past. Under the structuralist approach, Flanagan includes urban political economy, world systems theory, and the related areas of study that began with the revolt against mainstream urban sociology in the 1970s. These theoretical models are structural because they emphasize the importance of social structure (and in some cases, the role of the state) in determining urban development and social interaction within the urban environment. The theoretical models Flanagan identifies under the structuralist approach would view urbanization as a result of factors outside the metropolitan region, whereas the culturalist approach would study urbanization by focusing on factors within the metropolitan region.
As we saw in Chapter 3, the work of the Chicago School of urban sociology was diverse in subject matter and research methodology, and we drew a sharp distinction between the famous studies by the students of Robert Park and Ernest Burgess referred to as the Chicago School of Urban Sociology (which reflected the ideas of human ecology) and the later applications of human ecology in the work of Roderick McKenzie, Amos Hawley, and others (which we refer to as urban ecology). Flanagan also includes the tradition of community studies, including the work of Robert and Helen Lynd (Middletown and Middletown in Transition), Herbert Gans (The Urban Villagers and The Levittowners), and others under the culturalist approach.
In Chapter 4, we described the emergence of a new urban sociology in the work of Henri Lefebvre (The Production of Space, Critique of Everyday Life) and others in the 1960s. This also is a diverse area of study, including the Marxist urban sociology of Manuel Castells (The Urban Question, The City and the Grassroots) and David Harvey (Social Justice and the City), the urban growth model of Logan and Molotch (Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place), and the like. This work has now merged in what we refer to as the sociospatial model of urban development.
In the final chapter of Urban Sociology: Images and Structure, William Flanagan suggests that there is a new unified perspective for urban sociology. The competing models of the past may not have merged into a single model, according to this view, but it seems clear that neither the culturalist approach nor the structuralist approach can adequately explain recent developments in the urban world. The culturalist perspective focuses on events within neighborhoods (community studies) or the city (urban ecology), but it does not place the everyday lives of individuals within the new global society. The research methodology and theoretical models that are used by urban sociologists following the culturalist approach do not make the necessary link between daily life in the metropolis and the larger urban structures that connect persons around the world in the twenty-first century.
The structuralist approach, on the other hand, focuses attention on the global system of capitalism and on the political economy of urban life at the national and sometimes metropolitan level. This approach is necessary for understanding the development of the world urban system, and it helps to explain patterns of economic development and urban change within and across nation states. The importance of this perspective is obvious if we want to understand how environmental policies in the developed nations have led to the migration of industrial jobs to developing nations by companies that do not want to comply, or how the new global economy has created the “dual city” pattern of high technology coupled with a growing service sector in cities in the developed nations. What the structuralist approach cannot do, according to Flanagan, is help us understand the impact of these changes on the everyday lives of persons in cities and metropolitan regions across the world.
Flanagan suggests that a unified perspective for urban sociology will result in a better understanding of both the structural forces that have created our new urban world and the impact of these changes on the lives of individuals in the growing urban agglomerations that now account for more than half of the world’s population. The structuralist approach is essential for understanding the powerful forces of global capitalism that have swept across the globe, creating a new urban world in its image. In this new world of growing social inequality and troubling exploitation of the world’s diminishing resources, future generations will most likely live in larger and larger urban agglomerations, in a built environment that is far removed from the urban-rural world that our grandparents knew. To understand the new modalities of urban life—whether it be in older metropolises of Europe with urban histories stretching back hundreds of years or the newer and larger megacities of the developing world—we will need the ethnographic accounts and community studies of the culturalist approach.
Flanagan’s argument concerning the need of a unified perspective for urban sociology is reasonable. While urban sociology may have started from a common point of applying the European tradition (represented by the work of Tönnies and Simmel) to the circumstances of the industrial city at the close of the nineteenth century, the field has become increasingly eclectic. New edited volumes on urban ethnography remind us of the importance of this transition in urban research (Duneier, Kasinitz, and Murphy, 2013; Orejo, 2012). Recent work in cultural studies offers us glimpses into the lives of persons around the world and emphasizes the ways in which global urban cultures have developed as our world shrinks and our lives become more dependent on other groups and other cultures. At the same time, we know that although there are differences from one area of the world to another and that there are distinctive urban cultures because of historical traditions, religion, and the like, the emerging urban metropolis of the twenty-first century shares some important characteristics regardless of country or region. It is not simply that they are linked with one another in the ever-expanding system of global capitalism. Most importantly, these urban agglomerations increasingly look like the multicentered urban region studied by the sociospatial perspective.
In an earlier work on comparative urbanization, Ivan Light published a drawing from ancient Sumer showing the destruction of a city, with the caption, “The City as an Eternal Death Trap.” This is one view of the urban future, something that we are familiar with from films such as Blade Runner, Logan’s Run, Robocop, and Escape from New York. The fragility of urban life was brought home to Americans by the great tragedy of 9/11. This event was followed by discussion among urbanists about the future of high-rise buildings—who would want to work or live in one? (Interestingly, the three tallest buildings in the world were built after 9/11!)
The apocalyptic view of the urban future is not entirely new, of course. Whether this is depicted as the destruction of the city by divine wrath or by nuclear warfare, human populations have long feared for the survival of the city—the creation that Lewis Mumford considered the greatest achievement of mankind. More recently urban theorists have added to this bleak vision, as we saw above, with prophecies that the city would wither away because of new communication technologies. We know that this is unlikely to happen. While the Internet exists in unbounded space, it requires a concentration of resources in research and development and manufacturing, and while these services and production nodes may be located in different countries, or more likely dispersed across a metropolitan region, they are still grounded in physical space. The idea of urban clusters that have been used so successfully in promoting industrial development and controlling urban growth in China appears to be an appropriate metaphor for this new arrangement of activities across the urban region.
In earlier chapters we described the multicentered urban region as characteristic of suburban growth in the United States (Chapter 6). As we know from looking at urbanization in the developed nations of the UK and the European Union, this pattern of development is not unique to the United States, and in fact has a long history in both regions. Other terms have been used in other countries—patchwork urbanism in the UK (MacLeod and Ward, 2002), polycentric urban development in the EU (Kloosterman and Musterd, 2001; Parr, 2004)—but the pattern of development is similar to that that found in the United States. While there is room for great concern about the conditions of urban life for persons in the growing slums and vast megacities of the developing world (Chapter 11), the city is not likely to disappear in the foreseeable future. Nor is it likely that the multicentered metropolitan region will be altered by the planning of new urbanism or other policies intended to regenerate the city, and should we return to the future, we most likely will encounter multicentered urban regions very similar to what we see now in the developed nations. So how can we best study the multicentered metropolitan region of the future?
For many urbanists, analyzing metropolitan phenomena involves a choice between the competing paradigms of human ecology and political economy. While human ecology has been useful because it appreciates the role location plays in social interaction, it under-theorizes this role and adopts one-dimensional, technologically deterministic explanations for sociospatial processes. In contrast, the political-economy approach deals with many important concepts and issues that ecology neglects, such as the role of capital and class in the urban drama. It too is limited, however, because it neglects aspects of culture and politics that cannot be reduced to class phenomena. Unfortunately it also ignores the important features of spatial relations by considering location merely as a container for economic processes.
By adopting the sociospatial perspective of the new urban sociology, we move beyond the limitations of political economy to explain how the built environment changes and develops. The narrow focus on the restructuring of global capitalism cannot alone explain the changes experienced by metropolitan development in the twenty-first century. Once spatial patterns are altered in one region of the metropolis, this change affects all other parts not just of the metropolis, but also of other cities in the regional as well as national and even international hierarchy of urban regions. The missing element is supplied by a focus on real estate interests as the leading edge of change that channels growth in specific directions. Hence, social space operates as both a product and a producer of changes in the metropolitan environment.
The ecological and political-economy perspectives both assume that the state has only a weak role as an agent of change. Human ecology simply ignores government intervention. Too often, political economists have treated the state as simply the direct agent of capitalist interests. The involvement of the state in sociospatial development of urban space within and across metropolitan regions is both critical and complex. First, government policies help provide the “pull” factors of growth. Second, they are the focus of urban and suburban social movements that aim for a redistribution of both wealth and social costs. Third, government officials are relatively autonomous agents who do not simply follow the needs of capital alone but pursue interests of their own to bring about social change. Finally, national policies of taxation and spending transfer wealth from one region of the country to another; hence, programs such as military spending are critical causes of regional growth or decline, in addition to private-sector investment patterns. As we have seen demonstrated in a variety of contexts, private-and public-sector efforts often work hand in hand.
The sociospatial perspective utilizes a semiotic approach to understand how culture and ideology define sociospatial processes, such as the appeal to progress and modernism in urban renewal or the use of religious belief to structure the ancient cities of the past. The sociospatial approach considers all built environments as meaningful social spaces. Behavior occurs within these social spaces, but our own behavior may change the meaning and use of that space. The sociospatial approach further captures the special articulation between territory and culture that produces lifestyle networks and variation in daily community life within the metropolis. Ethnic, gender-oriented, or racially defined lifestyles enact themselves within the built environment. The street corner, the mall, the coffee house, the local bar, the school cafeteria, and the commuter train, car, or bus are all special venues where social networks interact.
Finally, the sociospatial perspective takes an integrated view of the multicentered metropolitan region. We have considered both urban and suburban settlement space. The traditional field of urban sociology possessed too narrow a focus on the central city. Urban texts invariably treat suburbs only in a special chapter devoted to that purpose, while the remainder of the text specializes in the study of the large central city, even though a majority of population, employment, and business activity is located within expanding metropolitan environments. Urban or suburban concerns are largely metropolitan concerns, and any governmental efforts should begin from a regional rather than a local perspective.
The future of the metropolitan inquiry will require important conceptual changes. In place of the traditional urban sociology, we should have a field called the “sociology of settlement space” that would deal with all forms of human settlement—towns, cities, suburbs, metropolises, the multicentered region, and the megalopolis—so that we no longer privilege the city as the sole urban form of space. In place of a contentious and often confusing clash of different paradigms (ecology for aggregate data analysis, political economy for economic issues, and the culturalist approach for ethnography), we can look forward to integrated discussions at all levels (micro, macro, and meso) following the synthesis of the sociospatial approach. Finally, by critically evaluating the planning efforts of the present and challenging them to recognize the importance of space, we have a means by which we can construct and live in a more humane and enjoyable environment that confronts, rather than hides from, the seemingly intractable issues of environmental, representational, and social justice.
cultural approach
cyberspace
globalization
world system theory
world city
racialization of urban space
revanchist city
theming of the urban environment
information society
space of flows
multicentered metropolitan region
structural approach
Manuel Castells
Saskia Sassen
1. What is the relationship between world systems theory and globalization? How did these concepts develop? Have you encountered them in other courses or books that you have read? How is the use of these terms in urban sociology different from their presentation in other courses?
2. What is the relationship between world cities and global cities? What are some of the factors that might be used to determine whether a city might be included in a list of global cities? Why do the authors critique the recent emphasis on the global city in urban sociology?
3. What is meant by the racialization of space? How is this concept linked to some of the basic propositions of the sociospatial perspective presented in Chapter 1? Can you think of examples of the racialization of space in the community where you grew up?
4. What is meant by “theming” of the urban environment? What examples are given in the chapter? Can you think of other examples of theming in commercial development in your community? In new residential development or in the redevelopment of older neighborhoods of your community?
5. Manuel Castells’s work on the new information society and the space of flows might lead some to suggest that cities are no longer important. What do you think of this argument? How would you critique Castells’s argument using the concept of the multinuclear metropolitan region and sociospatial theory more generally?
6. What is meant by the revanchist city? Where did the term originate? Can you identify events or policies within your own community that might be included in this discussion of the revanchist city?