What year did the world become majority urban?
2007
-as population grows, the urban population grows 4x as fast
How can we see that the scale of urbanization is increasing?
As evidenced by the emergence of megacities, conurbations, and megalopolises around the world
What are some of the implications of urbanization?
- Behavioural
- Socio-economic
- Political
- Cultural
- Environmental
What are the urban management challenges?
- Environment
- Population size and growth
- Services
- Society - behaviour
- Unemployment
- Racial and ethnic issues
- Privacy
- Modernization and globalization
- Traffic
- Governance
What is urban planning?
the technical and political process concerned with the design of the urban environment
What is a MDC?
More developed country; urbanization accompanied and was the consequence of industrialization; high levels of prosperity
What is a LDC?
Less developed country; urbanization has occurred only partially due to industrial and economic growth; lower standards of living
Back then where did kings and queens decide to build a city?
They had a say in where their castle would be and then the city grow around from there
What were historical patterns in urbanization?
Centers of orgnanization grew independently from one another and didn’t know what the other was doing
What/where were the first cities?
First city was mezapotania, then nile valley,
Indus valley (present day Pakistan),
yellow river valley (china), mezoamerica (NA)
What are the stages of urbanization?
- Preindustrial: most people will employed in primary sector, worked out of city walls where agriculture was
- Early industrial: manufacturing was important when steam engine was a thing, mostly in London where it started
- Late industrial: service sector,
- Post industrial
What are the different labour categories?
• Primary: ag, fishing, forestry mining,
• Secondary: manufacturiing
• Tertiary: service sector
Quaternary: info sector, IT, biotech
Why is early industrialization interesting?
Still dynamically linked to rural society
• Types: religious, administrative, political
• Cities still linked to hinterland, but now we arent denpendent from hinterland casue our food and resources come from all around the world
What is mercantile?
Growth in mercantilism
• State controlled manufacturing (guild-based), trade (e.g. Venice)
• More emphasis on growth and trade, goal isn’t wealth entirely
What is capitalist?
Goal of economy: expansion
• Profit maximization
• Individualistic, minimum state-control
• Led to industrialization
Why Cities are always in flux (the position in the hierarchy)?
- Overtime size of cities have changed since the beginning
- Up and down wasn’t as pronounced in china, the cities in china remained as cities and didn’t really crash, there was influx but was never not a city
What has urbanization been accompanied by?
globalization
How are cities connected?
by flows of people, goods, services and capital that unite cities, people, environments across space and time
What is driving globalization?
Urban institutions
What is driving urbanization rates?
Flow iof people is driving urbanization rates, mostly unequally. Decision making centers are all in urban areas and influencing the flow of people
What are the different faces of globalization?
- Economic/Financial: hoomogenization (same food everywhere), everywhere we go its going to feel like we are in the same city
- Political: UN,
- Social/cultural
- Knowledge
- Technological
- Ecological
What is the spatial distribution of cities?
- Physical attributes and situaiton. Within larger geographical context how do the citis fit in? on trade route, coastal cities, can they connect with other cities etc.
- Cities funtions and urban econmies
What kind of renters do cities act as?
i. Market centres (trade & commerce)
• Central place
ii. Transportation centres (transport services)
• Break-of-bulk or containers
○ Waterways, highways, railroads, switch of transportation mode
• Usually a hub for multiple modes of transport
iii. Specialized service centres (government, recreation or religious pilgrimage)
What is the central place theory?
- Central place theory (Walter Christaller) explained regular size, spacing and function of urban settlements in fertile agricultural region
- Largest city surrounded by medium sized which are in turn surrounded by small cities (spatially organized, nested hierarchy)
