Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
What is clear is that urbanization is now the
dominant way in which society organizes spaces of
economic activity and social life. It is also apparent
that the particular forms that urbanization take are
becoming ever more varied and complex. To these
ends, it is important that when we begin to analyse
the environmental implications of urbaniza-
tion that we do not see urbanization as a singular
process. While often characterized by similar
underlying processes (see
next section)
, cities
vary greatly in their spatial form and modes of
operation (see Roy, 2009). Consequently, when
you are considering older industrial cities such as
Manchester and Birmingham, the sprawling low-
rise cities of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, rapidly
expanding megacities such as Lagos or Kinshasa,
or mega-regions such as Hong Kong-Shenhzen-
Guangzhou, you are likely to find very different
forms of environmental relations and ecological
problems associated with them.
approaches were not concerned with mapping
the internal dynamics of the city, but were instead
interested in the connections that existed between
capitalist economic and political systems and
urbanization.
6.3.1 David Harvey and the
capitalist city
In his celebrated book
Social Justice and the
City
(1973), the British urban geographer David
Harvey established one of the earliest frameworks
for thinking about the connections between
urbanization and capitalist economic develop-
ment. Drawing on the insights of Marxist polit-
ical economy, Harvey developed a
process-based
reading of the city. This process-based reading
of the city rejected studies of cities that saw them
as closed spatial systems, following an internally
driven logic (a view developed within the Chicago
School). Through a series of publications on
the city throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s,
Harvey argued that cities constituted bundles of
interconnected political and economic processes
(including the production of goods and services,
financial investments and the buying and selling
of land) that connect urbanization to the logics of
capitalism (see Harvey, 1985a; 1985b; 1989a;
1989b; 1996).
Following his appointment as an associate
professor in the Department of Geography and
Environmental Engineering at Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore, in 1969, Harvey was able to
see close-up the dynamic ways in which capitalism
and urbanization are connected. At the heart of
Harvey's argument is the assertion that it is no
coincidence that urbanization really started to
emerge as a significant social and economic force
at the same historical point that we see the rise of
the first forms of capitalist industrial systems.
For Harvey, cities are not merely patterns of
settlement, they reflect the spatial logic of capitalist
development. The relationship between cities and
capitalism can, at one level, be seen in relation to
what Harvey terms the
primary circuit of capital
6.3 THEORIZING THE CITY:
FROM GROWTH MACHINES
TO THE FAVELA
In the context of the rising significance of cities
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
academic enquiries into the nature, form and
function of cities gradually emerged. Chicago was
home to one of the earliest and most prominent
groups of urban scholars. The Chicago School of
urban scholars (including Ernest Burgess, Louis
Wirth and Robert E. Park) saw the city as a
laboratory within which to study emerging social
patterns and practices (see Bulmer, 1984). These
studies led to the construction of the famous
models of urban land use that continue to be
widely taught in geography classrooms throughout
the world. Despite its role as a point of origin for
urban studies, this section is not concerned with
the theoretical modelling of urban space that was
characteristic of the Chicago School. This section
instead focuses on a branch of urban theory that
began in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These