Response to “The History in Urban Studies: A Comment”

Journal of Urban Affairs, 2010

The record of learned concern with cities is nearly as old as the city itself. In the past several decades, however, a distinct academic field of "Urban Studies" has emerged. This article characterizes the context, internal structure, and content of the field through interviews with leading scholars, probabilistic multidimensional scaling analyses of survey data, and a content analysis of a leading journal. The article concludes that although Urban Studies is in some respects not a bounded "academic discipline," it is an intellectually coherent, distinctively structured, and promising field of inquiry steered by complex, ever-changing, and often-large-scale realities and real-world problems of evolving human settlements.

Journal of Urban Affairs, 2011

ABSTRACT: A recent survey of the field of urban studies in this journal downplayed or overlooked the significance of urban history. In fact textbook coverage, and an analysis of urban publications in the Web of Science database, indicate that historical research has always played a major role in the field. For three reasons, it always should: the past shapes the present; the study of change encourages critical understanding; and the past offers many examples for use in comparative analysis.

2016

Urban studies today is marked by many active debates. In an earlier paper, we addressed some of these debates by proposing a foundational concept of urbanization and urban form as a way of identifying a common language for urban research. In the present paper we provide a brief recapitulation of that framework. We then use this preliminary material as background to a critique of three currently influential versions of urban analysis, namely, postcolonial urban theory, assemblage theoretic approaches, and planetary urbanism. We evaluate each of these versions in turn and find them seriously wanting as statements about urban realities. We criticize (a) postcolonial urban theory for its particularism and its insistence on the provincialization of knowledge, (b) assemblage theoretic approaches for their indeterminacy and eclecticism, and (c) planetary urbanism for its radical devaluation of the forces of agglomeration and nodality in urban-economic geography.

2012

Mevrouw de Rector Magnificus, Geachte Collega's en Gewaardeerde Toehoorders, I want to use this opportunity to reflect on the nature of the field of Urban Studies. In accordance with the international orientation of the field and in the presence of our own international staff, I will do so in English. My lecture will discuss the field of Urban Studies mainly from a purely academic point of view, the opportunities it offers but also some of its intrinsic challenges. It is a broad field and my words today will reflect my own views, my affection for the sort of broad historical-geographical scholarship of the likes of Lewis Mumford, Fernand Braudel, Peter Hall, John Friedmann, Richard Walker, or Gyan Prakash. I will refer to some of my own research, but I will also aim at what I consider to be the field of Urban Studies at large. My main argument is that the urban scale provides a critical lens on the social world, particularly in the present era of globalization. And while Urban Studies is evidently associated with the city, I will argue that the urban is about more than the city. The lecture is rather wide-ranging and will for the most part be situated somewhere between Amsterdam, the United States, and India, and I will appeal to your versatile imagination as we jump around the globe. The renewed attention to the field of Urban Studies is also driven by interested parties and stakeholders outside the academy, including government and the corporate sector. So I will include some remarks about the social relevance of the field and how we might position the Centre for Urban Studies inside and outside of the university. Inaugural speeches generally focus on the speaker's specific area of expertise but since my appointment is closely related to the Research Priority Area in Urban Studies and the establishment of the new Centre, I should also reflect on the general nature of the field, some of the big questions, and where it fits. As a result, there is quite some breadth to my lecture, maybe a bit unusually so, and I ask you to bear with me. Urban studies Let me start off with some general observations. There are two intriguing qualities of the field of Urban Studies that explain its appeal and at the same time 

In the midst of what has been termed the "urban age," two divergent approaches to understanding life in cities have emerged. In this first of three urban geography Progress Reports, I engage these two strands of urban theory, identifying key differences in their intellectual, political and geographical genealogies, and consider their political and epistemological implications. Borrowing from Chakrabarty's concept of History 1 and History 2, I name these approaches "Urbanization 1" and "Urbanization 2." Urbanization 1 is exemplified by the planetary urbanization thesis that posits the complete urbanization of society, whereas Urbanization 2 is characterized by a more diverse set of interventions, united by a political and epistemological strategy of refusing Eurocentrism and "provincializing" urban theory.

There has been a growing debate in recent decades about the range and substance of urban theory. The debate has been marked by many different claims about the nature of cities, including declarations that the urban is an incoherent concept, that urban society is nothing less than modern society as a whole, that the urban scale can no longer be separated from the global scale, and that urban theory hitherto has been deeply vitiated by its almost exclusive concentration on the cities of the Global North. This paper offers some points of clarification of claims like these. All cities can be understood in terms of a theoretical framework that combines two main processes, namely, the dynamics of agglomeration/polarization, and the unfolding of an associated nexus of locations, land uses and human interactions. This same framework can be used to identify many different varieties of cities, and to distinguish intrinsically urban phenomena from the rest of social reality. The discussion thus identifies the common dimensions of all cities without, on the one hand, exaggerating the scope of urban theory, or on the other hand, asserting that every individual city is an irreducible special case

22nd International Scientific Conference Engineering for Rural Development Proceedings

The lack of a universally accepted definition of the term “urban” has led to inconsistencies and challenges in the fields of research, policy, and practice. This paper addresses this problem by conducting a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis of the concept of “urban”. By understanding the significance of a clear definition of “urban”, this study aims to facilitate better communication and comprehension among practitioners, policymakers, and researchers working in the field. The paper begins by tracing the historical origins of the urban concept and the factors contributing to the development of urban areas. It then examines the traditional, functional, social, and cultural approaches used to define urban areas, while also discussing the challenges and limitations of these definitions. The analysis reveals that a place can be identified as “urban” if it has a diverse and complex social structure, a vibrant economy, and a high concentration of facilities and cultur...

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...