The unprecedented urbanization of the nineteenth century (also termed as the Second ‘urban revolution’) triggered a rapid shift in settlement from the country to the city. It ushered in a world of capitalist endeavours where manufacture and production playing a major role in formulating the social structure. Unlike rural settlements of the country, the industrial city was marked by social mobility and economic disparity.
The spectacular residences of the bourgeoisie contrasted sharply with the humble living conditions of the street-dwellers who relied on their wits to make a livelihood in the city. The city was thus characterized by perpetual transformation—new ideas, technologies and practices constantly transformed the social structure within a rapidly changing urban environment:
To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know everything we are. (Berman 1)
The modern city was thus marked by spatial and temporal ambivalence, in sharp contrast to the socially secure rural life.
The inevitable conflation of modernization, urbanization and industrialization resulted in the emergence of key ideas that establish urbanism as a way of life. An important idea here was the size of cities that have now become larger and therefore more crowded. The social structure of cities was emancipatory, unlike rural settlements, more diverse, so that it was more individualized. Irrespective of its socially-emancipating nature, cities were viewed as essentially cold and calculating2. Friedrich Engels’ work in particular documented the inhuman living conditions
experienced by workers in the industrializing metropolis.3 The anonymity that the city made possible was posited as its defining characteristic. Max Weber argued that the city needed to be defined as “a settlement of closely spaced dwellings which form a colony so extensive that the reciprocal personal acquaintance of the inhabitants, elsewhere characteristic of the neighbourhood, is lacking” (Swedberg and Agevall 36). This lack of reciprocity bequeathed the city a space of liberty and autonomy, and allowed the possibility of forging new identities unburdened by personal histories.
This was a powerful motif in urban theory that aided in the examination of the innovative and civilized nature of cities vis-à-vis what Karl Mar calls the “idiocy” of the rural4. Yet, as Ferdinand Tonnies’ reminded us, the flipside of anonymity and freedom can result in feelings of insecurity and a profound sense of loneliness despite being in a crowd5. Louis Wirth too highlighted the decline of social relations in urban centres, so that the urban transformed into a space of anonymity6.
The work of these early urban sociologists concentrated on the nuances of the psycho-social life of cities. Interestingly, the identification of particular pathological conditions of the city legitimized a series of theoretical interventions in the urban environment. These included projects on planned cities7. In this context the establishment of the first Department of Sociology at Chicago in 1913 was an effective measure that established urban studies as “a legitimate and important field of study” (Hubbard 24)8. Drawing on the Darwinian theory of survival the co-founders, Robert E. Park and Ernest Burgess, proposed the concept of human ecology by which cities were viewed as “the outward manifestation of processes of spatial competition and adaptation by social groups which correspond to the ecological struggle for environmental adaptation found in nature” (Cooke 133). Such ideas are representative of the early attempts to comprehend the differences inherent in the urban landscape and counter the same with built models of urban habitation. The impact of the city on social psychology is further explored by Georg Simmel. In his essay “The metropolis and mental life” (1950) Simmel suggested that the city’s size and complexity results in the “intensification of nervous stimuli with which city dweller must cope” (28).
Thus, the urban experience is dealt through a transformation of the individual consciousness that involves “a filtering out of the detail and minutiae of city existence” (Hubbard 18)9.
The constant preoccupation with modeling patterns of urban land use through planned city projects resulted in the emergence of the spatial science that sought to explore the complexities of the urban as a spatial structure. David Harvey develops this argument in Explanation in Geography (1969) where he underlines the problems of land use patterns in the city. Despite the being aware of the variations in land markets people lived in “suboptimal locations because they lack perfect knowledge or ability to act on that knowledge” (Hubbard 30). While this meant that the logic of the market does not hold, it exposed the problems associated with planned models of the city. As a result studies of the urban now concentrated on the actions of the urban residents who interpret and use the city based on their limited knowledge of their surroundings. It was during this period that Kevin Lynch introduced the notion of the mental map of the city. His book, The Image of the City (1973), expands on the mental picture of the city that we have in our minds to show planners and architects how to design legible cities. Although full of contradictions and inconsistencies, Lynch’s theory inspired a legion of studies which attempted to examine the ways in which people interpreted and acted in cities.
Urban geographers began fleshing out the internal dynamics of the city through the examination of human spatial behaviour and its impact on the urban landscape. New challenges soon emerged as urban patterns began to alter:
deindustrialization recast the relationship between the city and its suburbs, and economic globalization brought about fundamental changes in inter-city relations.
Land and other social goods became the stronghold of a few key individuals. The control and distribution of these assets lead to the development of the theory of urban managerialism. This theory explored how planners, real estate agents, mortgage lenders, financiers and architects managed and controlled urban assets and their distribution and circulation. They could deny certain social groups access to particular property which translates into the denial of certain spaces of the city. This discrimination highlighted the social inequality that marked the urban landscape. The influential role of these key actors in the distribution of urban resources resulted in the emergence of a ‘new urban sociology’ that examined issues of conflict, injustice and poverty. Commenting on the uneven social pattern and its causes David Harvey emphasized on the existence of
a clear disparity between the sophisticated theoretical and methodological frameworks which we are using and our ability to say anything really meaningful about events as they unfold around us … There is an ecological problem, an urban problem, a debt problem, yet we seem incapable of saying anything in depth or profundity about any of them. (Social Justice 128-229)
In this light, the change in the theoretical orientation of urban studies was premised on a sense of disappointment among urban scholars regarding the inability of urban theory to satisfactory explain the inconsistencies and contingencies of the urban.
The sense of disillusionment paved the way for the emergence of a Marxist approach to the urban that was concerned with the interrogation of distinctive forms of social conflict. Marxist urbanism rested on the idea that the social structure is informed by transformations in the political economy, and is thus organized to replicate and reproduce specific modes of production. The commodification of labour was the most significant development for it advanced the capitalist mode of production. Marx said little about cities, but he did acknowledge the spatial-temporal aspect as elementary for the exploitation of new markets and populations. The growth of cities was a key aspect in this area. Cities not only became concentrated sites of labour but also provided a ready market for new commodities. While the expanding city contained innumerable possibilities for the capitalist classes, it also resulted in the impoverishment of the proletariat. Marx comments:
The more rapidly capital accumulates in an industrial town … the more miserable and impoverished are the dwellings of the workers … improvements of towns, such as the demolition of badly built districts, the widening of city streets, the erections of palaces to house banks or warehouses obviously drive the poor into even worse and more crowded corners. (Capital 65, qtd. in Hubbard 37)
In modern, capitalist societies, Marx argued, new forms of socio-spatial relations were constantly being evolved resulting in the reproduction of capitalism. In the 1970s, the
‘Marxist’ canon, inspired urban scholars to embark on a fresh investigation of the urban—here the city was recognized as the pivot for the growth of class conflict and ideological control. This approach paved established the important of the role of space which David Harvey recognized as the spatial fix. Accordingly, spatial difference was
seen implicate capitalist relations and the city was now both a unit of production and a locus of social reproduction. In his book The Urban Question (1977), Manuel Castells argued that the organization of cities made possible for the state to provide the necessary facilities required to reproduce and maintain a flexible, educated and healthy workforce at the least cost10. Castells emphasized that the spatial form of the city was implicated in a number of significant ways in the reproduction of capitalism.
This reinforced the idea that spatial transformation must be understood within the broader context of social transformation because social space is a fundamental dimension of society. Developing this point, Castells emphasized the need for a structural reading of the city
beyond the description of mechanisms of interactions between activities and locations, in order to discover the structural laws of the production and functioning of the spatial forms studied . . . There is no specific theory of space, but quite simply a deployment and specification of the theory of social structure, in order to account for the characteristics of the particular social form, space, and its articulation with other historically given, forms and processes. (Urban Question 124)
This structural solution to the ‘urban question’ was a valuable corrective especially where urban spaces were seen to be produced by the knowledge and action of those who inhabited them. Castells’ defined the city as “a residential unit of labour power, a unit of collective consumption corresponding ‘more or less’ to the daily organization of a section of labour power” (Urban Question 148). This definition reduces the concept of space to simply signify the social processes; Castells recognized space to be a physical quantity that offered no knowledge of social relations. Despite this narrow take, Castells exposition of the urban question is significant for it located social processes as a direct result of the production processes in the city. David Harvey and other urbanists elaborated this argument later11.
Harvey identified urban space as an active moment containing processes of capital accumulation and class struggle. He propounded that surplus profits could be invested usefully to generate processes of urban renewal especially in times of economic slump. This idea stressed on the role of the built environment as a source of profit and loss:
Under capitalism there is a perpetual struggle in which capital builds a physical landscape appropriate to its own condition at a particular moment in time, only to have to destroy it, usually in the course of a crisis, at a subsequent point in time. The temporal and geographical ebb and flow of investment in the built environment can be understood only in the terms of such a process. The effects of the internal contradictions of capitalism, when projected into the specific context of fixed and immobile investment in the built environment, are thus writ large in the historical geography of the landscape that results.
(Social Justice 124)
Harvey read the urban landscape as subject to contradictory impulses of investment and disinvestment. At the same time there was an imperative to segregate upper-class and working-class residential areas that would suppress any form of working-class agitation. This form of segregation created an uneven urban landscape which, in turn, encouraged suburbanization12. Significantly, the role of the state was crucial to deliberate on the contradictions of capitalism. The process of suburbanization created problems, especially in the provision of housing and transport infrastructure. Urban planners now worked to resolve the conflicts between capital and labour by creating cities that functioned as spaces of capital accumulation.
It is impossible to do justice to the rich diversity of Marxist urban theory in the context of the present chapter. It is probably suffice to suggest that all urban theory inspired by Marx rests on the idea that urban development can be understood only in relation to capitalism. Capitalism is the root of all urban problems and provides answers to the ‘urban question’. The Marxist perspectives on the city were never subscribed to by all, many urbanists prioritized agency over structure to explain the differences and diversity characteristic of city life. For example, Marxist urbanism encouraged a productive dialogue between feminist and Marxist scholars in the context of the urban landscape. Feminist theories draw attention to the ways in which knowledge about the city is created by discourses that reflect gendered power relations13. The representation of the city as a site of capitalist reproduction has been criticized by many feminist scholars who argue that the experiences of women in the city, their mobility and visibility are connected to their place in the capitalist economy14. The issue of safety has been a major preoccupation of feminist scholars15.
Dora Epstein’s essay “Abject terror: a story of fear, sex, and architecture” (1997) is a compelling account of the ways women negotiate their fear when traversing through the city. According to Epstein women break up the city into places that are safe and unsafe by identifying areas and streets that can be walked alone and those that must be traversed with others. The strategies they adopt is reflective of their negotiation of the city. Feminist-oriented urban studies argue that the position of women within society and the city is perhaps best explained with reference to both the capitalist mode of production and the structures of patriarchy. The fact that women experienced the urban differently from men resulted in a shift in focus, and women’s studies began acknowledging this difference. However the alternate to this argument has been presented by feminists like Liz Bondi and Hazel Christie who argue that cities actually render visible the spatial location of women and their subsequent exploitation in the employment structures of the city. Thus, as a site of complex power-play the city graphically records the logistics and consequences of the intricacies of negotiation of gender, subjectivity and identity (Bridge and Watson 293).
Postcolonial studies have had a profound influence upon contemporary urban studies, prompting a critical interrogation of many of the field’s earlier theoretical assumptions. The relationship between the colonial and postcolonial is a complex one especially in the context of the ideological forces that shape urban space. Postcolonial perspectives on the urban question the normative assumptions inherent within the analysis of the political economy. It also critiques the essentialized concepts of class, race, gender, and sexuality16. In Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (1996) Jane Jacobs states, “Imperialist operations and ideologies also shaped urban spaces of deprivation” (73). Postcolonial urbanism thus concentrates on revealing the power dynamics that inform the representations of urban space. Cities are seen as sites for the manifestation of practices that are not simply political and economic but also cultural. Similarly, spatial forms, designs of the built environment and socio-cultural ideologies have considerable influence upon the constitution of social identities and subjectivities. An important implication here is that the language and concepts used to describe certain Western cities (such as Paris and Chicago) cannot be regarded as appropriate for describing those cities beyond the West, as is the case with Bombay.
By implication, this means that these concepts may be not be adequate to account for the diversity of cities in the West, especially in the context of their varied roles in
geographies of imperialism and the Empire. The concept of postcolonial urbanism is dealt with at length in the third section of the chapter.
Postcolonial theories have become increasingly significant in human geography in their emphasis on the questions of difference as they are played out in the politics of city life. This idea of other forces, colluding with capitalism, being at play, is also a defining characteristic of post-structural thinking. The post-structuralist emphasis on language, representation and power underlines a different way of thinking about the production of space that involves entwined of immaterial and material forces. The proponents of post-structural thought—Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray and Jean Baudrillard—sought to develop alternatives more flexible in the re-thinking of the disorderliness of life. Chief here has been the concern to move beyond totalizing theories and incorporate the richness of the local and the particular. By the late 1970s the industrial city had mutated into a very different species. The ‘de-centering’ of cities resulted in the emergence of a peripheral urban development that concentrated on new urban centres or cores which effectively become what Joel Garreau called edge cities17. For such reasons, the post- industrial city has often been described as a centreless urban form18.
In the essay “Urban lifestyles: diversity and standardization in spaces of Consumption” (1998) Sharon Zukin points out that the most significant feature of post-industrial cities is their organization around consumption rather than production.
This is manifest in a plethora of urban spaces that include malls, multiplexes, cafes, marketplaces, nightclubs, parks and museums (Hubbard 44). This implies that the post-industrial city is premised on new ideas of social control where individuals are recognized as consumers and non-consumers, instead of workers and the unemployed.
This is explicated in David B. Clarke’s The Consumer Society and the Postmodern City (2003) where he argues that the consumers’ need for commodities has been replaced by desire. This desire cannot be sated, only fuelled by the spectacle of goods available. In the essay “Consuming life” (2001) Zygmunt Bauman extends the argument further to show that the wants of the consumer have been replaced by needs, so that it is difficult to discern between the two. The seductive quality of present-day capitalism tempts the consumer into impulsive and conspicuous consumption. This is
a contradictory process—in an era of employment insecurity and risk, consumption promises security, but fuels that very insecurity:
Seeking security through consumer choices is itself a prolific and inexhaustible source of insecurity. Finding one’s way amidst the deafening cacophony of peddlers’ voices and the blinding medley of wares that confuse and defy sober reflection is a mind-boggling and nerve-wracking task. (Bauman, qtd. in Rojek 303)
Such seduction allows the consumer to buy security and freedom despite the fact that the market is proliferated with new brands and products. The design and ambience of consumer spaces is an important factor that fuels consumer desire. The consumer spaces are designed to seduce, to encourage the consumer to buy more products, but contradictorily, this desire is never sated. The exclusion of the urban poor from such spaces however creates a space of disenchantment and segregation. Michael Davis’s City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990) explores this city of spatial disenchantment where the city appears as a repressive and violent space as segregation offers fewer spaces of democratic social interaction19.
The post-industrial city is thus a complex and divided city. The ordered system of production of the industrial era was replaced by a more consumer-oriented mode of social control. The result is a patchwork of cultural change, explicates David Harvey.
Harvey asserts that the contemporary city contains a plethora of cultural signs and images, thus forming a mélange that is devoid of order. This is largely an outcome of what Harvey calls “flexible capitalism”—an idea he elaborated in The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1989). Apparently, the postmodern city is a product of cultural capitalism that operates on the logic of manipulation of the urban landscapes20. The postmodern theming of places and the celebration of spectacle lure the consumer into consumption. This is a significant idea that is suggestive of the ways in which consumers are manipulated. Edward Soja extends Harvey’s interpretation of the postmodern city to indicate the emergence of new urban spaces that was inextricably linked to the operative logic of capitalism.
The question that arises here is whether the contemporary city can be usefully explained with reference to the theories evolved in the context of the modern city as Harvey and Soja’s work implies (Hubbard 49). Cities have undergone remarkable