Sustainability and urban education

Urban Geography as if Urban Knowledge Matters, 2020

This article identifies two main challenges to the future of urban geography. First, the challenge of thinking about urban geography as a more or less coherent discipline in an era of fragmented work histories, with many researchers employed on temporary contracts and moving between countries and institutions, each with its own cultures of work and expectation. Second, the challenge of moving beyond the writing of internalist histories of geography, and instead approaching urban geographic research as if urban knowledge matters, in all its diversity.

Area, 2003

Urban geography in the 1980s experienced significant transformations in theory, method, and practice largely from new currents in social theory. In this paper we describe and analyze the ways in which social theoretical influences shaped our own work as we entered the discipline first as graduate students and later as junior faculty. Drawn into the social theoretical currents that were swirling both within and outside (urban) geography, our own earliest work was an attempt to engage with and struggle against some of these currents. In our paper we address the theoretical, methodological and practical issues that most challenged us as representatives of a generation of urban geographers who "came of age" in the 1980s. We specifically address our common interest in making a space for a sophisticated conceptualization of agency in a paradigm of the urban political economy that was over-determined by structural theory. We use Caroline Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman as an epistemological framework for thinking through our evolving feminist work on culture and social reproduction as well as an entry point into the dramatic changes that were occurring in geographers' theorizations of capitalist urbanization in the 1980s. [

Urban geography is the study of urban places with reference to their geographical environment. Broadly speaking, the subject matter includes origin of towns, their growth and development, their functions in and around their surroundings. The subject of urban geography has gradually taken a special place among the various branches of geography in the period after the Second World War in various foreign and Indian universities and colleges. With the increase of population globally, towns and cities have become magnets of economic, social and political processes. The changes brought about by these processes have become instructive as well as interesting too in case of the single phenomenon, i.e., city in a spatial context. Under these circumstances, the studies of towns and cities have formed an essential part of the branch of Human Geography. Meaning of an Urban Place: It is one of the most essential and immediate problems to decide 'what is urban?' How does it differ from its counterpart, i.e., rural? In everyday life we are aware that difference between rural and urban depends upon their nature of workthe former being engaged in agricultural operations and the latter in non-agricultural activities. But it is a difficult task to transform the above stated meaning between the two different natures of settlements into precise and scholarly terms. This is because of the fact that 'an urban place' has been defined differently by different scholars and agencies. Even the United Nations Demographic Year Book (UN, 1990) has given a wide range of examples covering the various countries defining demographically. UNO defines a permanent settlement with a minimum population of 20,000 as an urban place. But several countries have their own minimum such as Botswana (

Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 2011

Urban Geography is a new branch of geography which developed 20 th century for the first time, Mr. Karl Massert had given the outline of Urban Geography in 1907. In 1915 the study of Urban Geography is started in Chennai. Aurousseau (1924) was among the first ones who gave an outline of the subject matter of the urban geography. He is of the view that since this part of geography embraces a large part of human geography if fails to be a specialized subject and therefore is not sure about the nature of urban geography. In 1949, Griffith Taylor has written a book by the name of "Urban Geography" exactly. The starting of the study of Urban Geography is due to the work of R.L. Singh in 1955. But after analysing various approaches he concludes that the regional study of towns and their functional study do form an important component of its scope. This gave impetus to the 'site and situation' and 'functional' approaches within this discipline. The morphological approach gained momentum with the emergence of the Chicago School in the late 1920s. They paid attention to diverse social and economic factors that were responsible for the segregated land use in the city. Thus, now the scholars diverted their attention to the complexities of the cityscape rather than concentrating on the growth and layout of the cities. This gave foundation to the new urban geography where this discipline became more of an integrated systematic study. In the words of Dickinson (1947), urban geography is not about planning but is concerned with various factors which are inherent to the spatial and geographical structure of the city upon which planning should be based.

Urban geography as a discipline evolved in the twentieth century. Over the time it has developed into a well-established discipline which deals with the study of urban settlements within the framework of their geographical setting. One can say that the scope of the sub-discipline constitutes the study of origin of urban settlements, their morphology and its development, their functions in and around their environs. With the increase of population and these settlements emerging as the magnets of economic, social and political developments; the discipline had gained importance in social sciences. The earlier urban geographers mainly concentrated on the physical aspects of the cities and their situation. The main emphasis was on the relationship that existed between the location and the structure of some particular cities and their surroundings.

So now comes culture but not, of course, without its caveats and discontents. Urban geographers would do well to heed Don admonition that "there is no such thing as culture" in the sense of an ontological thing on which geographers, perhaps despairing of deciphering the economy, can now focus their analytical attention. Mitchell suggested, instead, a focus on the "idea of culture" as an ideological strategy and a medium for the assertion and expression of power. This is a provocative argument that demands the difficult task of uncovering the sources of power (sorry, the economy is still in the equation) and tracing its effects on what Susan Hanson (this issue) refers to as "people's everyday lives in cities." Each of the research areas that Trevor Barnes (this issue) marks as signs of the cultural turn in urban geography-research on public space, the culture industry, housing consumption, migration, and the urban economy-entails an explicit focus on power relations and their consequences, although the slide into anecdotal narrative exerts a powerful and dangerous attraction.

Urban Geography, 2003