The themes discussed in the readings is the city seen as sociological construct, and what makes a city. It also focuses on urban in a modern episteme and how urban has become the object of analysis. How urbanism comes in to play when defining city. The expansion of city, the segregation of places is talked in the burgess article. Money becomes an important part in urbanism explained by simmel.The certain features which a city requires to become livable is explained by Jane Jacobs.
According to Lewis Mumford a city is a sociological institution, which we can relate back to the polis by kitto which stated that polis is an ideal city where people socialize and interchange their thoughts. Mumford also saw urban experiences as an important component
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He focuses on the physical growth of the city and according to him the rapid urban expansion lead to the increase in diseases, crime, and disorder. Burgess also mention some important features of the growth of city like expansion (physical growth) metabolism (changing of social organization) and mobility (the changing of experiences and thoughts). The change of language is also seen as the cities are an object of analysis. Louis wirth an urban sociologist, shows how city is a sociological construct, it always mended and is constantly changing. In his article urbanism a way of life, he started off by explaining the three main features of the city are 1) large population size, 2) social heterogeneity 3) population density. These factors also lead to a change in urban life for example the large population causes the segmentation in relationships and social heterogeneity means that a city has a variety of culture and class structures, the high density can cause peoples role to be specialized. He also discusses the consequences of urbanism i.e. it can lead to anomie (isolation) and the change in norms and values is a result of urbanism. He also said that urban city provide freedom as well as isolation. The isolation is explained in wirths article “the ghetto” he looked at the history of ghetto which lead to the origins of the emergence of segregated areas. The ghetto was first used for the Jewish settlement
From walkmans to CD players to iPods, technology has evolved over the succession of the years; humans have taken extensive steps towards a technological transformation that has revolutionized the manner in which several individuals communicate with one another. Likewise, various humans have opted for more modern methods to connect and contact their loved ones such as speaking on a cell phone, video chatting, e-mailing, instant messaging, and conversing through social media. With these contemporary methods of communication, global interaction has now been facilitated and easily accessible; conversing with individuals from across the world is as transparent and prompt as speaking with individuals within the same city. Nonetheless, these technological
Social historians in recent years have started to look at the people who made up most of the population in cities, people who are usually ignored when looking at society,
...ss, and some contradictions between modern life and traditional life as modernism elements. The so called modern-time is compared by the late traditional aspects of life. Change is a way, a progress, and even an irony that is shown in the text. There is only one truth ruled by the aldermen maybe as capitalists that an unchangeable figure does not admit it. All this shows the complexity of modern urban life; and disillusionment.
Aesthetic control in the city serves a number of purposes. For one, the zero-sum logic of interurban competition incentivizes the purification of urban space and the presentation of ‘cleanliness’ for the purposes of city marketing. As transfer payments decline as a source of revenue for municipal governments, cities are desperately attempting to enhance their international reputation for the purpose of attracting tourism and capital investment. The cleansing of visible poverty from urban space is accomplished through police harassment and displacement of visible poverty and other ‘undesirable’ uses of space(Kennelly 9). The city’s adaptation to market logics also influences the way urban space is produced and presented internally, to its own population. For example, concentrations of homeless people are said to deter visitors and consumers from traveling to and shopping in those parts of the city [BY WHO]. Visible homelessness is also targeted by city authorities because it disrupts attempts to render the city as a landscape (Mitchell 186). Rendering the city as a landscape is a means of presenting the individual with an illusory sense of control and freedom in the complex urban environment where control in fact belongs to the totalizing economy and freedom for some comes at the expense of freedom for others. The illusion of control is in a sense the way citizens are alienated from the constitutive parts and production of the city. Instead of seeing the realities of capital relations, or the activities of labour reproduction required daily to renew the urban workforce, citizens are presented with a stage on which the daily dramas of the “pacified public” can take place (Mitchell 186). On this stage, a certain kind of “legitimate” citizen expects a broad freedom to move through space without resistance or disturbance, such as may come from encountering or being confronted by
In this chapter, we learned about how different communities were developed. We learned about preindustrial cities, industrial cities, and postindustrial cities. We learned the process of urbanization through the functionalist and conflict perspectives. We also learned about the many different types of communities that there are. Communities are found everywhere. No matter where you go, you will always find yourself in a community of some sort, and you will always belong to a community somewhere, whether it be residential or political, or both. It’s amazing to think about all the different types of communities there are in this world, and which types of communities you yourself might be associated with.
Urbanisation in Metropolis is accentuated through religious iconography and philosophical ideologies. The Metropolitan populace delineates an urban agglomeration where urbanisation is symbolised as the Tower of Babel. In the scene where
The United States was very much a rural state in the past and it took us a long time to change and become an urban majority than a rural one. The United States began shifting from rural to urban around 1910 through 1920 and surprisingly is still shifting to this day. Rural culture is nothing to be looked down upon but the benefits from urban areas outweigh the rural in many aspects. Without the rise of urbanization we would not be the colony and superpower we are today.
* Urban Professional^s recognition of the increased variability, robustness, and interest in both the urban area and their work. * Conservation Activist^s commendation of the lower consumption of resources, and reduced pressure on sensitive environment areas, suggestive of a reduction in urban sprawl. * The Development Industry^s equations of profit established through better and higher levels of land use. Essentially urban consolidation proposes an increase of either population or dwellings in an existing defined urban area (Roseth,1991). Furthermore, the suburban village seeks to establish this intensification within a more specific agenda, in which community is to be centred by public transport nodes, and housing choice is to be widened with increased diversity of housing type (Jackson,1998).
Again, this section will give a working definition of the “urban question’. To fully compare the political economy and ecological perspectives a description of the “urban question” allows the reader to better understand the divergent schools of thought. For Social Science scholars, from a variety of disciplines, the “urban question” asks how space and the urban or city are related (The City Reader, 2009). The perspective that guides the ecological and the social spatial-dialect schools of thought asks the “urban question” in separate distinct terminology. Respected scholars from the ecological mode of thinking, like Burgess, Wirth and others view society and space from the rationale that geographical scope determines society (The City Reader, 2009). The “urban question” that results from the ecological paradigm sees the relationship between the city (space) as influencing the behaviors of individuals or society in the city. On the other hand...
Chaffey, J. (1994). The challenge of urbanisation. In M. Naish & S. Warn (Eds.), Core geography (pp. 138-146). London: Longman.
In the “Metropolis and the Mental Life”, Georg Simmel aims to explicate the confines and conventions of modern life. Simmel accomplishes this as he compares modern life in a metropolis with that of the countryside, noting the behaviours and characteristics of people in response to external factors. Simmel explains this by explicitly detailing how social structures affect certain personal connections. Several prominent themes of urban living are investigated and considered by Simmel in his article, the main points, harshness of the metropolis, modernity and subjective and objective cultures, are discussed in this essay.
Sociologist … explained that open pattern of suburb is because of seeking environment free noise, dirt and overcrowding that are in the centre of cities. He gave examples of these cities as St. John’s wood, Richmond, Hampstead in London. Chestnut Hill and Germantown in Philadelphia. He added that suburban are only for the rich and high class. This plays into the hands of the critical perspectives that, “Cities are not so much the product of a quasi-natural “ecological” unfolding of social differentiation and succession, but of a dynamic of capital investment and disinvestment. City space is acted on primarily as a commodity that is bought and sold for profit, “(Little & McGivern, 2013, p.616).
Susan S. Fainstein, Scott Campbell. 2003. Readings in Urban Theory. Second Edition. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Urbanization is the process of becoming a city or intensification of urban elements. Since modernization, the meaning of urbanization mostly became the transformation that a majority of population living in rural areas in the past changes to a majority living in urban areas. However, urbanization differs between the developed and developing world in terms of its cause and the level of its negative outcomes. Korea, as one of the developing countries, experienced what is called ‘ overurbanization,’ and it experienced a number of negative consequences of it, although it could achieve a great economic development by it. This paper examines how urbanization differs between the West and the rest of the world, the characteristics and process of urbanization in Korea, problems sprung from its extreme urbanization, and government policies coping with population distribution.
...ts path into sociological treatises on the city might consequently be filtered and consolidated into a reasonable group of learning. By chance, just by method of some such hypothesis will the humanist get away from the vain practice of voicing in the name of sociological science a mixture of frequently unsupportable judgments concerning such issues as destitution, lodging, city-arranging, sanitation, metropolitan organization, policing, promoting, transportation, and other specialized issues. While the sociologist can't take care of any of these handy issues anyhow not independent from anyone else he might, assuming that he identifies his fitting capacity, have an imperative commitment to make to their appreciation and result. The prospects for doing this are brightest through a general, hypothetical methodology.