The City – book review

2020

The City. Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess (with a new foreword by Robert J. Sampson). University of Chicago Press. 2019. Every academic discipline has classic texts that introduce new perspectives or challenge dominant ideologies. These books are required reading for those who aspire to be experts in a particular field of study and serve as common currency when engaging with other scholars. Within the diverse and ever-expanding field of urban studies, the shortlist of foundational volumes often includes Ebenezer Howard's

Planning Perspectives, 2012

At the end of the 1930s, Americans interested in the fates and futures of their cities had the opportunity to consider two new efforts to summarize urban problems and propose solutions. The first was Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy, published in 1937 under the auspices of the National Resources Board. The second was The City, a film sponsored by the American Institute of Planners for showing at the New York world's fair in 1939. The report and the film arose out of different analytical traditions, the first from the approach that embedded urban planning within a larger field of social science and policy making and the second from the physical planning and design tradition that had marked planning practice in the first third of the twentieth century. This article considers the origins of the two texts, compares their topical coverage and prescriptions for change, and argues that their differences encapsulated a deep tension that has continued to be manifest within urban planning in the United States into the present century.

Urban History, 2003

This bibliography is a continuation of and a complement to those published in the Urban History Yearbook 1974–91 and Urban History 1992–2002. The arrangement and format closely follows that of previous years. There is an index of towns on p. 489. The list of abbreviations identifies only those periodicals from which articles cited this year have been taken.

Journal of Urban Affairs, 2012

Changing Contexts in Urban Regeneration: 30 Years of Modernization in Rotterdam (Amsterdam: Techne Press, 2010).

2008

ABSTRACT This chapter examines methodological concepts and theoretical implements used in urban studies and their impact on and development of historical research. Following a survey of debates on defining the city, the chapter presents three theoretical concepts that influenced the approach to the city in social science and opened up new prospects in urban history–the system of meanings, spatial terms of place, space, and borders, and the theory of liminality.

Journal of Planning History, 2003

has a particularly good chapter. Marxists usually divide the city's history into three stages: the commercial city, the industrial city, and the corporate city, corresponding to the successive phases of commercial capital, competitive industrial capital, and corporate or monopoly capital. The commercial city, which lasted until the middle of the nineteenth century, was a center for trade, craft manufacturing, and mercantilist government. Its residential structure was relatively heterogeneous and not as segregated as it would become later: "People of many different backgrounds and occupations were interspersed throughout the central city districts, with little obvious socioeconomic residential segregation. In the central port districts, the randomness and intensity of urban life produced jagged, unexpected, random physical patterns. Streets zigged and zagged every which way. Buildings were scattered at odd angles in unexpected combinations." The only group that didn't share in this central portdistrict life was the poor-beggars, casual seamen, propertyless laborers-who lived outside the cities in shantytowns and rooming houses, moving from town to town. As the commercial city grew, the only major change that took place in its organization was the rationalizing of land speculation, the birth of the "urban grid" characterized by straight lines, ninety-degree angles, etc.

Urban Studies, 2016

For some time now, the field of urban studies has been attempting to figure the urban whilst cognisant of the fact that the city exists as a highly problematic category of analysis. In this virtual special issue, we draw together some examples of what we call urban concepts under stress; concepts which appear to be reaching the limits of their capacity to render knowable a world characterised by the death of the city and the ascent of multi-scalar de-territorialisations and re-territorialisations. We organise the papers selected for inclusion into three bundles dealing respectively with complex urban systems, the hinterland problematic and governing cities in the age of flows. The phenomenon of urban concepts under stress stems from the existence of a gap between existing cartographies, visualisations and lexicons of the urban and 21st century spatial conditions and territorialities. Given that this disarticulation will surely increase as this century unfolds, a pressing question pr...