1
Q
What are ‘conurbations?’
A
- large, poly-centric city regions, a logical evolution of previous kinds of cities
- coined by Patrick Geddes (1845-1932)
- influenced by Darwinian evolution
2
Q
What is a ‘desakota’?
A
a region of an intense mixture of agricultural and nonagricultural activities stretching between large city cores
3
Q
Why do the new urban theorists disagree with the urban ecologists?
A
On what happens to community when cities become global city-regions…
Urban ecologists: metropolitan communities are held together by
- functional interdependence
- a complex division of labour
- advances in technology
- a natural tendency towards equilibrium or balance
New urban theorists: metropolis is shaped by
- the inequalities of global capital
- the new international division of labour (NIDL)
- local politics coalitions and social/cultural divisions
4
Q
How did Constantine Doxiadis view cities?
A
ecumenopolis, the “universal city”
- “We should realize that the universal city has already been born and is acquiring dimensions which will eventually cover the entire inhabitable Earth.”
- urban processes shaping all kinds of landscapes on the planet
5
Q
What is ‘Cascadia’?
A
cities and suburbs from Vancouver BC, to Seattle and Tacoma WA, to Portland OR
6
Q
How has urban ecology been involved in contemporary U.S. politics?
A
- today’s urban economists in favour of free markets:
“although individual societies rise and fall over the long wave, human society tends to progress through cumulative advances and transferability of technology and economic organization. The result is societal growth measured in terms of system complexity, energy and products consumed, territory covered, and population supported.”
7
Q
Who is Lucia Vega Jimenez?
A
- example of Castell’s analysis of how “information society” is partitioned between the space of places and the space of flows: the corridors and halls that connect places around the world have to be understood as exchanges and social refuges, as homes on the run, as much as offices on the run
- these are “essential matters that do not concern only the cosmopolitan elite, part of the new urban experience of hundreds of millions.”
- Lucia Vega Jimenez lost her life as a result of racist immigration laws
- “The holding cells below the Vancouver International Airport and Vancouver Public Library are a grim metaphor of the invisible underclass of 11,000 migrant detainees, including children, held in CBSA custody every year.”
8
Q
Where is Vancouver’s Trump Tower?
A
Coal Harbour, across from Shangri-La tower on West Georgia (permanently closed)
9
Q
Who is Aihwa Ong?
A
- anthropologist who describes her identity as “a Huaqiao (overseas Chinese), or a Straits Chinese born in Malaysia.”
- author of flexible citizenship: the cultural logics of transnationality
- sense of alienation rather than spiritual homecoming when visiting China, visited booming Southern cities, “My sense of alienation was enhanced by racial/cultural chauvinism and the pronounced importance of degrees of perceived Chineseness in shaping local views about wealth and modernity.”
10
Q
What is the ‘space of flows’?
A
Manuel Castells: the increasingly rapid movements of capital investment, communications messages, and people going from one place to another
11
Q
What is the relation between social media usage and levels of urbanization?
A
- 40% of cross-national variance of Facebook penetration rates can be associated with cross-national urbanization rates
- social media has transformed key aspects of urban social relations (suburban + rural too_
12
Q
How does Louis Wirth’s perspective on urbanism as a way of life help us understand social media?
A
- Increasing “size of the population aggregate”
- will affect the relations between them and the character of the city
- more individual variation
- limits possibility of all members knowing each other personally
- changes character of social relationship - The segmented self
- urbanites meet each other in segmental roles
- acquaintances are usually in a relationship of utility
- explains schizoid character of urban personality
- individual gains freedom from emotional controls of intimate groups
- loses spontaneous self expression, morale, sense of participation that exists in integrated societies - urbanites are bound to exert themselves by joining with others of similar interests into organized groups to obtain their ends
- results in growth of community groups, volunteer organizations
- Self and society
13
Q
What does ‘urban system’ mean?
A
a network of interdependent urban places
- significant changes in one city will have consequences for other cities in the system
- more than a century of research and documents regularities in urban systems - measurable, predictable relations between cities of different sizes (eg. urban system stability)
14
Q
Louis Wirth
A
- born in Gemunden, Germany; family home was a “social center” in the village
- emigrated to America, received scholarship to University of Chicago before WWI, discovered new field of sociology in courses with Albion W. Small, Robert E. Park, and Ernest W. Burgess
- graduated from Chicago w/ 3 degrees, became professor under Park in sociology dept.
15
Q
Wirth’s theory
A
there’s a distinctively urban personality: “Urbanism as a Way of Life” (1938)
- cold, instrument rationality
- individual isolation
- a segmented self of multi-faceted roles in complex divisions of labour
16
Q
urban system stability
A
interpreted as evidence of
- economic equilibrium
- spatial regularities in human behaviour
- path dependencies in settlement, migration, and policy
- -> in US 1790-2000, industrial cities rise/fall, but system remains stable and reproduces itself
17
Q
How has Wirth’s ‘segmented self’ been abused in U.S. politics?
A
- Trump spoke more directly than ever before to the extreme fringes of the Republican coalition, including white nationalists angry about the multi-racial, multi-cultural evolution of the nation (led by its cities and people who get their news from alternative media and social media, and who are vulnerable to conspiracy theories to make sense of an increasingly unstable, insecure, and changing economy and society
- Wylie created Bannon’s “mindfuck” tool to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup
- Russian interference with 2016 election
18
Q
What was Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s perspective on the most consequential decision of the U.S. Supreme Court?
A
Loving v. Virginia: (1967)
- decision that held anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional (despite Brown, several states still banned interracial marriage)
- unanimous decision that was meant to end apartheid in America
19
Q
How do cities reflect and influence relations of race, ethnicity, and identity?
A
- socio-spatial dialectic: space shapes society, but society also shapes space (Grace Lee Boggs)
- -> the socio-spatial dialectic of segregation vs. mixture
- segregation still persists:
- 78 percent of Blacks and Whites would have to move in order to create a perfectly integrated city.
- number of Blacks stopped and frisked was 2.29 times their share of the population - diversity, mixture, hybridity:
- In the Vancouver Metropolitan region, 48.9 percent of people identify as “visible minorities”
- at least in the Global North / West, many large cities are now “majority-minority
- examples of conflict, misunderstanding, and tension are manifest almost everywhere. Less obvious, but just as prevalent, are examples of resourceful ways diverse people are working together (Camarillo)
20
Q
new urban theorists
A
- interpret social change and urbanization in terms of the way societal processes and structures produce advantages for some groups and disadvantages for others
- 3 questions:
1. what is so natural about power and poverty, wealth and inequality
2. how can the metropolis be the natural outcome of equilibrium when nearly all cities are structured by the powerful institutions of governments, corporations, and transnational capital investment
3. why use biological metaphors to understand the metropolis when politics is far more important? human nature is what we decide to make it - David Harvey, Audrey Kobayashi, Ruth Wilson-Gilmore, Joe Darden, Manuel Castells
21
Q
urban ecologists
A
- optimists, emphasize technology, modernization and progress
- improvements in transportation and communications technology result in constant movement and communication that tie the vast metropolis together and help maintain a sense of metropolitan identity
- Chicago School, human ecology
22
Q
What does the history of the Irish and Italians in U.S. cities teach us about race, ethnicity, and identity?
A
Whiteness is a concept that evolved furthest in United States in the middle of the twentieth century, as the descendants of European immigrants gradually forgot the differences between Irish, French, Germans, Italians, etc. – as they came to see themselves as separate from 1) African Americans, and 2) new immigrants from Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
23
Q
intersectionality
A
(Kimberle Crenshaw) Axes of social difference – such as race and gender – are interactive, additive, and cumulative. This means that some people will experience multiple kinds of disadvantage, while others will enjoy multiple kinds of privilege
24
Q
What are the dilemmas of surveys and statistics on race and ethnicity?
A
- long form census: a legal infrastructure to monitor racial and ethnic inequalities, to help eliminate discrimination
- Counting and categorizing emerge from a racist history, and these practices can perpetuate differences, encouraging people to see themselves in terms of categories and separation
- not counting makes it nearly impossible to document and challenge injustice, and if we simply eliminate racial data, that does not automatically eliminate racial inequality – it just makes it invisible (David Theo Goldberg)
25
strategic intersectionality
The careful management of intersectional identities to confuse the opposition and achieve political goals, while offering opportunities to new, diverse generations of professionals and politicians.
26
What is interesting and paradoxical about the history of the word ‘immigrate’?
immigration: a form of migration that occurs when people move from one nation-state to another, permanent and voluntary
- first known usage of the word “immigrate” in the English language was in 1623, and its origins can be traced to the Latin immigratus
- modern idea of a “country” or a “nation state” wasn’t really stabilized until the Peace of Westphalia that ended Europe’s religious conflicts, the “Thirty Years’ War,” in 1648
- word came into usage just as capitalism, colonialism, urbanization, and migration were transforming Europe and the world
27
What is the political paradox of urban immigration?
The vast majority of people who migrate from one country to another arrive in cities. Urban immigration is part of what created nation-states and gave them power. But in the modern era, nation-states control immigration: cities can’t issue passports. Cities have almost no legal power over the laws and regulations of immigration and citizenship.
28
Where is Humayun Khan?
buried in Arlington, "there is only the headstone, inscribed with an Islamic star and crescent, standing among dozens of Christian crosses of other veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan in the cemetery’s section 60, the plot called ‘the saddest acre in America"
29
How does world-systems theory help us analyze urban immigration?
- 19th century industrialization spread across Europe, agricultural workers were displaced from rural areas by rising productivity -- leading to migration to the cities, and then, for many, to the new opportunities promised in North America
- in North America, European colonization, settlement and urbanization was proceeding from East to West
- landscape of new opportunities, therefore, created distinctive, and urbanizing, migration streams: Eastern cities like Boston are known for their large Irish communities, while farther west, cities like Milwaukee and Chicago were booming at the time many immigrants arrived from Germany, Poland, and other parts of Eastern and Southern Europe
30
What is urban ‘spatial assimilation’?
- in-migrating groups initially settle in inner-city enclaves, typically in disadvantaged areas. As their individual members experience social mobility and acculturation, they usually leave these enclaves in search of more residential amenities. Since amenities are generally concentrated in neighborhoods where the majority group is dominant, this search generally implies entry into majority-group areas
- most immigrants who live in concentrated neighborhoods earn less money, for example, than immigrants living in “dispersed” patterns
31
How does False Creek North illustrate transnational urbanism?
- while immigration overall is somewhat centralized, recent immigration is transforming many suburban neighborhoods across much of the metropolis
- BC’s historic connections to East Asia have produced complex patterns of transnationalism
- an almost perfect inversion of classical spatial assimilation, because Canada’s immigration policy has been designed to recruit not just middle-class professionals, but also very wealthy business entrepreneurs and investors
- immigration integrated Vancouver’s homes and real estate with Castells’ global “space of flows” of capital investment (correlation coefficient between Vancouver’s average house prices and net international migration was 0.98)
- offshore Condo Sales and “Monster Homes”
- middle class transnationalism (astronaut families and middle class drops in living standards)
- transnational politics (PRC and HK clashes)
- transnationalism from below (Jimenez)
32
How does Marx help us understand urban inequality?
- contemporary class relations emerged with the shift from agriculture to urban industry
- industrial capitalism could only take off if labor was “free” - not meaning that it had no price, but that workers moved freely about in search of work, because they had to sell their labor for a wage (proletariat)
- above all that the worker must be separated from the land
- bourgeoisie - determined the work process, the conditions of work, and paid wages less than the value of what the workers produced
- class relations are determined by the means of production
33
How does Weber help us understand urban inequality?
- while he regarded Marx’s analysis as important, he challenged the idea of a single, economic determinant of class
- identified three dimensions of social hierarchies:
1. An economic order (class). 2. A prestige order (status) 3. A political order (power)
34
What has changed in the politics of studying urban class inequality?
1. Marxist perspectives on class have always been challenged from the political right, but recently have also been questioned from the left: how is class shaped by gender, race/ethnicity, religion, and other aspects of social life and identity?
2. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European communism, and China’s post-1978 reforms, have altered the politics of studying Marx.
3. There has been growing interest in the complexities and uncertainties of the “middle class.”
4. More than a quarter-century after the end of Soviet Communism and the Cold War, there is less of a political stigma associated with Marxist theory. Even some of the most successful capitalists now understand that Marx offered powerful analyses of the dynamics of innovation and economic transformation
35
Who is Yi-Fu Tuan?
famous geographer who grew up in economic poverty but with a distinguished family history
36
How does Martin Bernal help us understand connections between Link Wray, the Mississippi Delta, the Six Nations of the Grand River, and San Francisco?
1. Martin Bernal: Black Athena author "I believe in cultural creativity and mixture"
2. Link Wray: instrumental track "Rumble"
3. Mississippi Delta: Robbie Robertson inspired by the kinds of music he learned about from both White and Black musicians playing in the Mississippi Delta. “The first time the power of music really struck me was on the Six Nations Indian Reserve.”
37
What do we learn from different estimates of the populations of the Americas prior to European colonization?
- conventional wisdom (based on written histories of European explorers) was that the total Indigenous population of the Americas was only about 1 million
- began to change in 1966, when a young anthropologist, Henry F. Dobyns, used detailed information from Jesuit birth and death records to estimate a total population between 90 and 112 million.
- first whites to explore many parts of the Americas may therefore have encountered places that were already depopulated
38
How does the period between the 1820s and the 1850s in the Vancouver region help us rethink time and space?
- the Lower Mainland was a space of uneasy coexistence between European traders (most of them working in some way for the Hudson’s Bay Company) and the twenty Indigenous First Nations peoples of the Halq’emeylem ethnolinguistic group
- historical geographer Graeme Wynn has described the region as an “unstable space.” “Might history have taken a different turn at this point?”
39
Who is Jody Wilson-Raybould?
- “Indigenous voices are increasingly shaping our country"
- band councils are a creature of the colonial Indian Act and typically there is more than one band within a given territory of an Indigenous people
- simplistic approaches, such as adopting the UNDRIP as being Canadian law, are unworkable and, respectfully, a political distraction to the hard work required to actually implement it
40
How is the Royal Proclamation of 1763 reshaping cities today?
- In BC, where very few treaties were signed, the First Nations Summit leaders issued a statement:“With Confederation, the First Nations – Crown relationship has regrettably been guided by federal control under the constraints of the Indian Act, not by the principles articulated in the Proclamation...such solutions include the negotiation of modern-day treaties, agreements and other constructive arrangements"
- "we are using this founding document of this country and its anniversary to usher in a new era of reconciliation of Canada’s shameful colonial history, to turn around centuries of neglect and abuse of our sacred and diverse nations'
41
How does Roberts Bank help us see time and space in new ways?
- Westshore Terminal at Roberts Bank, built in 1970, is Canada’s largest coal export facility
- In recent years, Westshore has proved to be an increasingly popular choice on the West Coast for United States mines, particularly in the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming
- disparate processes trace the global geographic mappings that flow through the urban and ‘produce’ cities as palimpsests of densely layered bodily, local, national, and global -- but geographically depressingly uneven -- socio-ecological and technonatural processes (Swyngedouw)
42
How does the concept of the ‘cyborg’ help us understand the relations between cities and nature?
- the commodity relation and the flow of money veils and hides the multiple socio-ecological processes
- "a process of fusing the social and the natural together to produce a distinct ‘hybrid’ or ‘cyborg’ urbanization (Swyngedouw)
43
How does the concept of the ‘cyborg’ help us understand the relations between cities and nature?
cyborg = “a living organism, some of whose vital parts have been substituted by electronic or mechanical devices.”
- “The urban world is a cyborg world, part natural part social, part technical part cultural, but with no clear boundaries, centres, or margins.” (Swyngedouw)
- most strikingly manifested in the physical infrastructure that links the human body to vast technological networks...a series of interconnected life support systems (Gandy)
- -> the cyborg of nature’s metropolis in planetary urbanization is, literally, evolving.
44
What is ‘ecological modernization’?
- the mainstream, dominant approach to environmental problems
- an environmental version of the modernization theory of how poor countries develop and follow the path of today’s wealthy countries
--> EKC
- the solution offered by every government and corporation that faces pressure to change currently unsustainable practices (eg. Shell's Quest carbon capture)
- for some measures of environmental impacts, there does seem to be a curve with reductions at higher levels of wealth
but
1. not true for all indicators of environmental impacts
2. results are very sensitive to how things are measured
3. off-shoring of pollution
4. nothing inevitable about these curves: improvements have resulted because of political struggles to change laws and regulations
5. Earth doesn’t care about details like “per unit of economic activity.” --> tipping point
45
What is unique about the Vancouver metropolitan region’s relations to nature?
- birthplace of Greenpeace and most residents strongly support the goals of environmental sustainability
- metropolitan region is a major “gateway” for the vast fossil fuel and import-export networks of Western Canada
46
What is the environmental Kuznets curve?
Simon Kuznets (1901-1985)
- the idea is that countries sacrifice the environment in order to develop, but eventually when they become wealthy enough there is a willingness and ability to pay for environmental protection
- increased wealth will eventually lead to environmental improvement with changes in technology financial incentives efforts to ‘green’ economic growth
- staying the course’ on an unsustainable expansionist, high-consumption path (William Rees, 1995)
47
What is the political paradox of local government?
bodies of government that are closest to the people, where individual residents often feel they have the best chance of being heard on issues they care about, usually have the least power
48
Why did the City of Vancouver begin CityPlan?
CityPlan grew out of a long history of changes in Vancouver’s urban regime. Rising resistance to the growth machine forced the Mayor and Council to allow more citizen participation.
49
How does False Creek South differ from False Creek North?
Redevelopment of False Creek South, emphasizing
• cleaning up old industrial lands, rebuilding with medium-density residential
• mixed-income housing (1/3 low, 1/3 middle, 1/3 market) with blend of ownership, rental, co-operatives•public parks and open spaces
• preservation of selected industrial activities along with arts and crafts and entertainment on Granville Island
False Creek North: after Expo 86, sold to wealthy investor Li-Ka Shing for luxury development
50
Who is Lori Lightfoot
- mayor of Chicago
51
How has neoliberalism and urban entrepreneurialism been reflected in Vancouver politics?
- shift from managerial urbanism, where the main purpose of city governments was to provide local services to residents, to entrepreneurial urbanism where cities competed to attract investment and development
- CPR and Shaughnessy
- Expo lands and Li-Ka Shing
- Olympics
- weak mayor model with no wards
52
Why does Benjamin Barber think mayors should rule the world?
- National and international politics, however, is often all about competition and confrontation - most are paralyzed, with constant fighting that seems to prevent action on major issues
- Cities, by contrast, are where pragmatic mayors have to get things done -- because they are closest to the people
53
What does Jimmy Boggs have in common with Berry Gordy, Jr.?
Jimmy Boggs: "America today is rapidly reaching the point where, in order to defend the warfare state and the capitalist system, there will be automation on top of automation"
cybernation: the fusion of information, communication, and automation
Berry Gordy, Jr.: applied assembly line principles from working in auto industry to music industry --> motown records
54
Who is Boss Tweed?
- (1840-1902) a behind-the-scenes power broker of Tammany Hall who never even ran for Mayor
- controlled a ring involving the mayor, the city controller, key aldermen, and numerous ward-level operatives from 1866 to 1871, looting the city of hundreds of millions of dollars
- Tweed’s machine was built on a hierarchical system of control and loyalty, and it was sustained by the votes of hundreds of thousands of poor immigrants as well as deals with the increasingly powerful White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) industrial robber-barons.
- media exposed his corruption in 1871 (machine boss cartoons)
- Tammany's downfall - also failed in managing the combination of class and ethnic/religious conflicts in the city
55
What’s the new precinct captain?
social media: a bit of Hollywood creativity, and a lot of “Big Data” analytical techniques for online engagement
(eg. Mira Oreck's re-election bid of Barack Obama involved a sophisticated “machine” to identify and reach voters with customized messages)
56
Who is Lori Lightfoot?
Campaigned as an anti-machine outsider -- and beat Toni Preckwinkle (left) by capitalizing on Preckwinkle’s ties to the machine. But Lightfoot’s role as a prosecutor and on the Police Board have angered younger community activists. She has responded to calls to “defund the police” by telling activists that, under police union rules, doing so would undermine efforts to diversify the force: “We'd have to get rid of the youngest, most diverse, most well-trained officers."
57
Who is Harold Washington?
- First black mayor of Chicago, defeated Son of Boss
| - faced pressures different from any other mayor
58
What does Immanuel Kant have to do with urban transportation?
aspects of Kant’s philosophy emphasized time and space as the basis of all human perception and knowledge --> changes in transportation technologies change the experience of space and time in the city
59
How did positivist urban theory influence transportation planning?
eg. CATS, the Chicago Area Transportation Study, a massive study undertaken between 1954 and 1962 that employed 350 researchers and involved interviews with 57,000 households
1. Inventory(mapping land uses residential, industrial, commercial, etc.).
2. Trip generation (analyzing how many trips started from each of the land uses identified in the inventory).
3. Trip distribution (identifying the destinations where travelers were going).
4. Modal split (estimating how many travelers would drive automobiles, take buses or trains, etc.)
5. Network assignment (modeling the specific routes travelers would take across the city).
- -> positivist urban science led planners and public officials to build more and more roads, trying to make movement across the metropolis easier and more efficient (eg. Moses, induced or latent demand)
60
How do attitudes towards automobiles relate to transportation planning?
Cars are not just transportation; they are status symbols of wealth and achievement, and thus they become part of conversations that now often circulate globally.
61
How does competition to host the Olympic Games influence growth machines?
city-as-a-growth machine theory (Harvey Molotch): emphasizes the interplay between political and economic competition between and within cities
- growth serves as a unifying force of local politics
- from smokestack chasing to hallmark events
- enthusiasm can be drawn upon ... in order to gain general acceptance for local growth-oriented programs
GEOG 250
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