Cities (Sociology)

Syria’s main cities, beginning with Damascus and Aleppo, are padded with neighborhoods whose housing, design, and sewage facilities, are the product of the residents themselves. Known in the common official dictum as “the zones of illicit habitat,” such neighborhoods have been constructed from scratch by the inhabitants themselves, defying all kinds of rules and regulations imposed by state and municipal authorities.

This project focuses on one such Aleppo “illicit” neighborhood at three interrelated levels. First, it examines the norms of the habitat created by the inhabitants themselves. The latter have to decide not only at planning their own homes, but also public infrastructures, such as roads and pavements, water, electricity, telecommunication and sewage facilities. Second, it analyzes the contractual norms that lie behind the exchange and sale of properties. Since such neighborhoods fall outside state regulations, the users must create their own contractual norms to exchange property, in such a way that contracts would eventually become “legal” once endorsed by state officials. Third, we examine the private and public norms that help construct the space for a “society of individuals.” Taking into consideration Erving Goffman’s motto that “the street is a society,” we follow actors in their face-to-face situated encounters, paving the way to the dialogical structures that make the existence of a “society” possible.

In this chapter, I use my experience with studying gayborhoods as an opportunity to reflect on five methodological problems: (1) how to sample hidden populations; (2) how to interview like an ethnographer; (3) how to bring demographic statistics into conversation with cultural meanings; (4) how to move beyond binary conceptions of the city; and (5) how to identify indicators of queer spaces. These five conundrums collective capture the spirit of "queer methods," a provocative new subfield emerging in sociology and beyond.

The entry begins with a definition of geography and with a description of what the discipline shares with the other social sciences and what makes it distinctive among them. Terminological clarifications are provided with regard to the relationship between human geography and physical geography, and between human geography and urban geography. After a brief history and overview of human geography’s engagement with social theory, the entry offers a discussion of the politicization of contemporary human geography and of how this phenomenon is reflected in theory building and concept development.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118430873.est0464

This research, conducted by the author when a Senior Researcher at Newcastle University, UK, was funded by a UK governance organisation to help them assess, integrate and improve their understanding of the governed population.

ABSTRACT: Governance organisations have been urged to develop more holistic evidence-based approaches with partners to better deal with issues affecting the governed population. This presupposes an understanding of the population, yet there has been little research work addressing how governance organisations come to understand their governed population, nor how this understanding can be improved upon within such organisations.

This case study examined in-depth how understanding of a governed population was developed within one UK local governance organisation and it explored how such understanding might be developed and improved through more holistic and evidence-based organisational learning within the organisation and its governance partnerships.

The research methodology involved placement within the governance organisation, participant observations on several projects and innovative initiatives, observations within, across, and outside the organisation, and also interviews with varied key stakeholders.

The study examined:

- stakeholder engagement and networks
- current and varied understandings of the population
- mechanisms actually used for developing understandings
- the influence of context on organisational learning

and analysed these to arrive at a recommendations to improve organisational understanding of the governed population.

In the case studied, significant strengths were found: including innovative past learning trials for development, extensive ongoing networking activities, and many varied and accumulating quantitative datasets available across partnerships.

However, entrenched organisational approaches and practices constrained the development of holistic evidence-based understanding, for instance: the absence of systematic maintained collective learning processes; weak recording and forgetting of understandings; methodological exclusion of stakeholders from the development of understanding; the relative neglect of qualitative data, explanations, investigations, interpretations, and reflexivity; and also implicit organisational acceptance of such limitations and low aspirations.

Nonetheless, untapped opportunities existed to enable change including: latent practitioner knowledge and innovative management champions, the desire for improvement and raised aspirations within learning networks, and the development potential of alterative learning approaches.

It was concluded that more holistic evidence-based understanding was possible, but required new learning approaches beyond those then in use in both local government or academia.   

Recommendations are made to utilise and develop improved organisational learning approaches trialed and reported in the case study.

It is argued that the case study findings, conclusions, and recommendations may be applicable to other similar local governance organisations and partnerships that seek to better understand local populations, services and interventions.

The work was also submitted for, and awarded, an MPhil (at Newcastle University, supervised by Prof. Patsy Healy)

Ancient Mesopotamia, “the cradle of civilization,” was the birthplace of some of the earliest citiesof human history, a sophisticated writing system, complex bureaucracies and literary tradition, andthe highly skilled production of artifacts. Te Euphrates and igris River basins form the backboneof this historical geography: Mesopotamia—literally “land between the rivers” in ancient Greek—the land of cities, agricultural prosperity, scribal culture, and textile production.

The small town, an environment adapted to the paradoxes of West Africa. A study on the distribution of small towns, and a comparison of the spatial an social system of seven settlements: Badou and Anie (Togo) ; Jasikan and Kadjebi (Ghana) ; Torodi, Tamaske and Keita (Niger)

In the first place, the role of small towns within the urban network is analyzed, as well as the nature of the links between them and their "hinterland". Therefore, in the first part, deals with the following issues : the study of the spatial pattern of small agglomerations in west africa and the modalities by wich they multiply ; the role of small towns in the evolution of the urban networks of ghana, togo an niger ; and, finally, the regional and local functions of the seven settlements chosen for study. In the second place, a functional model of the social-spacial system of the west african small towns is developed. An analysis of the spacial, demographical, political and economical processes taking place in the seven small towns makes it possible to elaborate this model and go beyond local particularities.

In establishing an anarchic framework for understanding public space as a vision for radical democracy, this article proceeds as a theoretical inquiry into how an agonistic public space might become the basis of emancipation. Public space is presented as an opportunity to move beyond the technocratic elitism that often characterizes both civil societies and the neoliberal approach to development, and is further recognized as the battlefield on which the conflicting interests of the world's rich and poor are set. Contributing to the growing recognition that geographies of resistance are relational, where the “global” and the “local” are understood as co-constitutive, a radical democratic ideal grounded in material public space is presented as paramount to repealing archic power in general, and neoliberalism’s exclusionary logic in particular.

""This book investigates the founding and building of cities in the ancient Near East. The creation of new cities was imagined as an ideological project or a divine intervention in the political narratives and mythologies of Near Eastern cultures, often masking the complex processes behind the social production of urban space. During the Early Iron Age (ca. 1200–850 BCE), Assyrian and Syro-Hittite rulers developed a highly performative official discourse that revolved around constructing cities, cultivating landscapes, building watercourses, erecting monuments, and initiating public festivals. This volume combs through archaeological, epigraphic, visual, architectural, and environmental evidence to tell the story of a region from the perspective of its spatial practices, landscape history, and architectural technologies. It argues that the cultural processes of the making of urban spaces shape collective memory and identity as well as sites of political performance and state spectacle.

Excerpt
http://www.cambridge.org/servlet/file/store6/item7256988/version1/9781107027947_excerpt.pdf""

The writing which this volume brings together is as multifaceted
as are its objects of investigation. Ranging from theoretical or
design-based perspectives to historical and politically charged
foci, the chapters reflect an amalgam of concerns with the social,
visual, political and material aspects of developed and developing
cities. While all share a passion for cities and incorporate the use
of visual material as either objects of investigation or illustrative
accompaniments to textual or ethnographic analyses, the mixed
methodologies and theoretical paradigms employed reflect
a wider academic trend towards a critical cross-breeding of
disciplines for a more expansive, and arguably more inclusive,
conceptualisation of the urban. The chapters reveal the city
through the lenses offered by different fields, and speak to the
multiple sites involved in the production, contestation and
experiences of urban spaces. Each chapter offers explorations
of the spatial and temporal scales of urban transformations,
centring on the authoritative and oppositional acts that
simultaneously make the city. In this sense, there is an inclination
towards analysing representations of urban change, and the ways
in which transformations are reflected in the fabric of city space
and life. The authors address the politics and experience of urban
change by travelling imaginatively between the past and the
present, the abstract and the specific, the global and the local,
the human and the material, and the social and the technological.
In their creative engagements with the many textures of `the
city´, they suggest the need for us, as readers, to pause, revise,
and re-envision our own sense of urban forms and futures

L'Afrique du XXIe siècle sera urbaine. En trente ans, la population des villes a triplé et, dans quelques décennies, la majorité des habitants du continent sera citadine. Le nombre de villes moyennes ne cesse d'augmenter et le processus de décentralisation politique et de déconcentration administrative s'étend. En Afrique de l'Ouest, le débat local s'est instauré et prend de plus en plus d'importance. Les nouvelles collectivités urbaines s'imposent désormais comme des acteurs nationaux incontournables et comme les points d'attaches des réseaux transnationaux. Pourtant, d'un point de vue théorique comme d'un point de vue empirique, les approches anthropologiques des phénomènes urbains semblent insatisfaisantes pour étudier les villes moyennes. Le travail de terrain permet d'observer l'existence de phénomènes sociaux qui cadrent mal avec les analyses contemporaines de la ville. Pour des raisons liées au développement de la discipline, la plupart des travaux se refusent à étudier les villes moyennes de manière globale et renoncent ainsi à mettre au jour l'espace symbolique et pratique partagé par les populations au sein du cadre commun que constitue leur localité. Cet ouvrage fait l'hypothèse que l'analyse de cet espace permet de mieux saisir les transformations sociales en cours et leurs implications politiques. Pour développer une analyse des villes qui ne soit subordonnée ni à l'étude des métropoles et ni à celle des communautés, ce livre pose les jalons d'une nouvelle approche méthodologique et théorique inspirée de la théorie des représentations sociales. Le livre ébauche un bilan de la littérature anthropologique consacrée à la ville en Afrique et esquisse une nouvelle anthropologie des villes moyennes. Elle se déploie à travers une étude de cas consacrée à la troisième ville du Burkina Faso : Koudougou. Son histoire tumultueuse et les manipulations politiques ont donné à cette agglomération la réputation d'être une ville rebelle. La position de la ville dans l'espace national reflète les transformations qui ont marqué le pays depuis le siècle passé. A travers l'analyse de trois représentations sociales - l'urbanité, l'autochtonie, la réputation de la ville - l'auteur engage une réflexion sur l'évolution socio-politique du Burkina Faso dont la portée s'étend bien au-delà de ce pays et concerne plus largement les villes moyennes de l'Afrique sub-saharienne.

Feiert der von einigen Seiten bereits lange totgesagte Flaneur seine erneute Wiederkehr? Neuauflagen bereits vergessener oder unbekannter Bücher, von und über Flaneure geschrieben, haben deren Ideen und Praktiken der Stadtwahrnehmung wieder in Erinnerung und in die Diskussion gebracht. Das Werk Franz Hessels steht hier geradezu exemplarisch. Hatte er in den 1920er Jahren die Pariser Flanerie nach Berlin transformiert, wurde in den 1980er Jahren nach langer Zeit der Vergessenheit der Flaneur Hesselscher Prägung wiederentdeckt. Diese plötzliche Zuwendung zum Flaneriekonzept eines Autors, der mehr als vierzig Jahre als vergessen galt, wirft einige Fragen auf. In welcher Form hat sich Hessel mit der Großstadt auseinandergesetzt? Warum tat er dies? Was genau hat er in ihr wahrgenommen? Und was läßt seinen Ansatz heute wieder relevant erscheinen? Darzustellen, worin Franz Hessels spezifischer Blick auf die Stadt bestand und diesen Blick einer kritischen Betrachtung zu unterwerfen, hat sich die folgende Arbeit zur Aufgabe gemacht.

In 1995 I invited Lebbeus Woods to prepare an exhibition for the Sala Montcada of the Fundació "la Caixa" in Barcelona, as part of a season I curated entitled "Volatile Sites". After spending time together in New York, he conceived the idea of creating a structure in the form of an island, a kind of scenographic float, to be built in the centre of the gallery space. He called this "The Wall" (in Catalan, La paret).
Woods' wall in fact had multiple surface planes, angling irregularly, in the temporal style of many of his drawings of the time. On this site of action he attached existing drawings and sculptures, as well as adding further pigments, 3D elements and new drawing to the surfaces themselves. Lebbeus spent many hours manually working the surface, in a rather expressionist spirit.
Lebbeus Woods (1940-2012) left a compelling legacy as an experimental architect. The project of The Wall, however, is still relatively unknown; the images of the installation scanned here have never before been made available online. I trust that this short and rather modest accompanying text, and the document of The Wall itself, might awaken new interest in lesser-known aspects of Woods' creative personality.

Cet article s’appuie sur une enquête de terrain réalisée dans trois nouveaux quartiers de Courbevoie et Levallois-Perret (Hauts de-Seine), situés à proximité du centre d’affaires de La Défense, et au sein desquels les résidents cadres et ingénieurs d’entreprise sont fortement surreprésentés. Il s’agit d’espaces issus du processus de refondation (new-build gentrification) qui contribue régulièrement à l’élargissement de l’axe historique des beaux quartiers. On analyse successivement les ressorts et motivations des choix résidentiels de leurs habitants, la faible sociabilité locale liée à un entre-soi particulier, et enfin le rôle central joué par le marquage de frontières symboliques socioéconomiques (internes aux classes supérieures) dans les dynamiques d’agrégation. Cette dernière apparaît par ailleurs comme suivant une logique largement distincte de celle dont relève l’évitement des classes populaires (altérisées et stigmatisées).

This article is based on fieldwork conducted in three new neighborhoods of Courbevoie and Levallois-Perret (Hauts-de-Seine, west of Paris), which are located near the business district of La Défense, and where corporate professionals and managers are overrepresented among the residents. These areas have been transformed by the process of new-build gentrification that regularly contributes to enlarging the historic western axis of Paris’ upper-class neighborhoods. The paper analyzes successively the causes and motivations of the inhabitants’ residential choices, the weak local sociability associated with this specific type of urban self-segregation, and the key role played by the drawing of socioeconomic symbolic boundaries among the uppermiddle classes. Indeed, homophilic aggregation in the refounded neighborhoods follows a logic largely different and autonomous from the (complementary) one – based on radical alterization and stigmatization – that motivates the avoidance of the working class.

This paper argues that a sustainable and culturally enriched engagement with place primarily comes from
understanding the context of the place — its history, its layered meanings and the contexts that individuals draw from their understandings of their physical environment, mediated by their past experience. It will propose that ‘sense of place’ (‘genius loci’) is the physical manifestation of authenticity and outline a simple model for understanding authenticity. It will draw upon examples from Perth, Western Australia to show how the topography and interpretation of the city’s historical connection to water still is a defining factor for city development and how memories of the built environment in the inner city have strongly influenced residents’ sense of place and, by extension, their sense of self.

I initiate the discussion with a statement about cognitive-cultural capitalism and its concentration in large global cities. This is followed by an argument to the effect that the specificity of the city resides in the manner in which the diverse social phenomena that it contains are brought into a composite pattern of spatial integration. With these preliminaries in mind, I examine the economic structure of the city in cognitive-cultural capitalism, with special reference to the emergence of a new division of labor and the changing configuration of intra-urban production space. This account leads directly to consideration of the restratification of urban society and its effects on neighborhood development and social life. The final section of the paper picks up on the notion of the Common in cognitive-cultural capitalism and offers some speculative remarks regarding the implications of this phenomenon for the economic and social order of cities.

Article based on paper presented as part of Panel 24: ‘Looting, Refusing, Negating, Embodying’ ‘Critical Refusals’ Fourth Biennal Conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society, University of Pennsylvania, 27-29th October 2011

http://www.pdcnet.org/radphilrev/content/radphilrev_2013_0016_0001_0375_0385

http://web.asc.upenn.edu/news/Critical_Refusals_Conference.pdf

The ‘slum-free India’ slogan that came to the fore in urban policy discourses in the mid-2000s has marked the draconian shift from in-situ slum improvement to slum relocation. Accordingly, the burgeoning literature on urban governance in India has portrayed slum dwellers as victims of such neoliberal forms of development. Despite its unique focus on the socio-spatial configuration of poor people’s exclusion, it has paid little attention to their resilience to such processes. Drawing on qualitative data obtained from two slums in Ahmedabad, this paper examines the manner in which some residents collectively negotiated with the local government either in defence of their right to housing or in pursuit of personal gains through manipulating the compensation for relocation. This paper has three objectives. Firstly, it gives an overview of the Slum Networking Prograsmme (SNP), which was implemented from 1996 to the late 2000s through a partnership between aid agencies, local government, non-government organizations (NGOs) and community-based organisations (CBOs), as an example of in-situ slum improvement. Secondly, it portrays the process by which the SNP was replaced with some rehabilitation schemes as evident in the provision of dwelling units in multi-storied housing blocks, which are typically located in urban fringes. Thirdly, it presents the diverse strategies that slum dwellers took to claim their right to housing and livelihood. Some residents sought redress with an NGO and the opposition party. Some residents sought co-operation from their neighbours through coercive means and attempted to obtain more compensation than would be available to them by claiming inappropriate data on their households and neighbourhood. This paper concludes by stressing that the powerful in a slum can mobilise an ‘illegitimate’ means of survival when they are at risk of eviction and deprived of access to ‘legitimate’ channels of claim-making such as NGOs.

A collection of working papers from Writing Cities, a student-led collaboration and a process of exchange between graduate in the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), MIT Media LAB, Harvard Graduate School of Design and Harvard Law School.

Our goal in this paper is to trace out the main lines of symbiosis that link the cultural economy with celebrity and glamour. We observe two trends emerging with great force in the 21st century: The commodification of celebrity and its trappings, and the democratization of celebrity across the globe. These phenomena emerge in the context of the modern city, and they constitute a dynamic nexus of developmental effects. We proceed by deriving celebrity and glamour out of the logic of commercialized cultural production in association with localized scenes, fandom, and a specific kind of economic and cultural infrastructure. We show that this logic is most intense in major world centers of contemporary capitalism. Celebrity and glamour have major economic impacts on these centers both through their integration into localized systems of agglomeration economies and their effects on the marketing and commercialization of culturally inflected outputs, producing winner-take-all geographies responsible for the individuals and scenes that maintain the celebrity ecosystem. We conclude the paper with a critical examination of the wider social and political meaning of celebrity and glamour and their relations to commodified culture generally.

This article argues that although the lives of young homeless people are characterized by high levels of mobility, when examined closely movement is also revealed as heavily
restricted. While a network of agencies moves the young people around the city, the official borders of borough councils and the non-official territories of young people feed into an experience of London as a series of exclusionary bounded areas. Within the
accounts of the young people, mobility is talked of as a resource but also in terms of loss and dislocation. The article argues for going beyond the opposition of mobility/fixity in order to examine how some people become fixed in mobility.

"Le nombre de plus en plus élevé de villes moyennes en Afrique nécessite de développer une analyse du phénomène urbain qui ne soit subordonnée ni à l’étude des métropoles ni à celle des communautés, lesquelles ont fait les beaux jours des études anthropologiques. Après être revenu sur l’histoire de la discipline, cet article esquisse les jalons d’une approche globale de la ville permettant d’étudier de manière comparative les centres secondaires.

An important feature of urbanization process in Africa is the proliferation of small and medium urban centers which constitute the major part of the urban population today. However in the literature these towns remain often in the shadow of studies devoted to the analysis of metropolis or small communities in the city. After a retrospective of urban anthropology’s history, this paper outlines a global approach able to grasp secondary cities in a comparative perspective."

The main purpose of this book is the sociological questioning of the Lisbon city continuous population decrease. The presented thesis, sustains that one of the major dynamics transforming, in the last decades, the Lisbon city-region, and its most important urban centre, is the gentrification of a part of its territory. The reverse of the resident population decrease in the country’s capital has been the intensification, in the last two decades, of gentrification processes in its urban and social fabric. The major urban centre of Lisbon, instead of following the background idea of loss of centrality on those dynamics, maintains a crucial structured role in the urban life of the city-region. It presents a distinctive character in what concerns the morphology, functionality, social fabric, diversity and growing cosmopolitanism of lifestyles, which allows sustaining the hypothesis of the city in transition as a city that follows the path of a new urban cycle, shaping a process of re-urbanization. The book arguments are exposed on the following grounds: (i) discussing the main drivers of the current societal change (chapter 1); (ii) discussing the key possibilities concerning the current urban changes, and the patterns of city that are emerging from them (chapter 2); (iii) analysing the nature of change subsumed on the gentrification processes (chapter 3); (iv) analysing what could be in course, in the contemporary social changes concerning the lifestyles sphere.

This landmark study builds on international practice and knowledge in urban revitalisation, city competitiveness, place branding and marketing, urban regeneration, tourism, retail and town centre management, among others to offer a multidisciplinary assessment of how town and city centres can compete and prosper sustainably by positioning themselves strategically on the basis of their 'DNA' or 'personality'.

The report offers a simple town centre 'personality' test linked to a typology of town and city centres. It also offers, for the first time ever in the UK, a national town centre performance framework linked to a do-it-yourself set of key performance indicators that anybody can use straight from the box without any previous knowledge of market research or statistical analysis.

I maintain that the main focus of museums has migrated from objects into experiences. “Curiosity cabinets” were about putting together weird or unusual objects. Nowadays we see more or less the same thing, but instead of objects we have activities. It seems that to survive in today’s market, museums cannot work simply as they worked for decades before. I claim that a museum becomes a kind of an “everything place”. Museums need to be multipurpose and flexible. They take over some roles that other institutions—restaurants, theaters, schools—traditionally have played in the city.

This report examines the dynamics of how socio-spatial exclusion and how it plays out around homeless shelters in the Indian city of Hyderabad. Using the concept of NIMBY (Not-In-My-Back_Yard), the analysis reveals how exclusion is based on the construction of prejudices, how community opposition evolves, and how different stakeholders use a variety of strategies in order to make push their agenda forward. Finally, the report relates the findings from the analysis to broader societal issues in India, particularly the themes of governance and participation.

Over the years, the nature of drinking water supply and associated practices of consumption and regulation has enormously evolved in the cities of the global south. The existing literature on water provisioning in Indian cities is mostly skewed towards the megacities. The million plus cities, which are the new sites of ‘urbanization’, are less studied. In this context, the article analyzes the current scenario of drinking water provisioning in Patna and attempts to situate the ‘water economies’ in the broader debates on development, state and sustainability.

Patna presents a pertinent case of endemic ‘state failure’ supposedly due to an inept state machinery to manage ‘water economies’ which led to unregulated private and community appropriation of groundwater to meet drinking water needs posing critical sustainability challenges at the city level. The article argues that sustainable development of urban centres will depend on how, in the long run, the unregulated exploitation of natural resources (in this case water) is managed through appropriate ‘institutional mechanism’ and how an equitable water provisioning is ensured to the citizens.

The objective of this paper is to identify the phenomena that occur within the cities of Latin America that have caused the current situation, which revitalizes and constrains the actions of those in the international system further limiting the risks and challenges expand inside. These contradictory phenomena occur on the inner level: 1) Dual City vs. Urbanization, 2) Urban management vs. Corruption, 3) Urban welfare and Inequality, as well as externally, 4) International visibility 5) Cooperation vs. Competition.

The explosive growth of urban spaces in India in the last 20 years cannot be characterized as urbanism, since they are directed neither by pragmatic planning nor architectural ambition.  Instead, it is driven by the idea of “development” led by a confluence of real estate companies, bureaucracy and political class that benefit from it.  The only conceptual model that is realized in the urban space is the exclusive and exclusionary gated-community intended either for living, working or shopping. As a result, it is not uncommon to be greeted in the morning with full front-page newspaper advertisements promoting the latest apartment complex or villas of luxurious living with security, serenity, unparalleled views of lakes and non existing landscapes, and above all, sexy and happy people discovering their repressed passions.  What is offered in these full page spreads is not a dwelling that can be made into a home, but a promise for living elsewhere beyond the reach of grinding urban life—congestion, pollution, noise and concealed violence.  The metaphor I employ, in my paper, to understand the arrangement of this urban space where the living elsewhere finds its home is the ruin.  The Indian urban landscape is dotted with gated complexes that without any perceptible center are, like ruins, disconnected fragments interspersed with disintegrating and decaying public spaces.  The predominant aesthetic frame for reconfiguration of urban space as a realizable domesticity is the picturesque.  The gated community is presented as a locus amoenus of congenial modern living—security, luxury and happiness.  Employing ruin as metaphor and picturesque as an aesthetic frame I describe the spatial configuration of new urban India as well as analyze the contradictions of the contemporary Indian gentry that lives elsewhere.