Instructors

Essay and discussion questions supplement the critical thinking questions included in the book.

MCQ test bank includes interactive self-assessment questions and answers.

PowerPoint slides includes content outlines, an overview of the Critical Thinking Questions, an in-class activity and “Key Take-Aways”; and a list of vocabulary to master. It also features tables and graphs from the book.

CONTENTS

List of boxes

About the authors

Preface to the second edition

Acknowledgments

Walk-through tour

Part I: The Foundations

Chapter 1: Cities as places and spaces
1. Cities as places
2. Identity, community, and security
3. Human beings make and remake places
4. Place and space
5. Cities shape the fates of human beings
6. Cities and people
Chapter 2: Social theories of urban space and place: The early perspectives
1. The social and theoretical roots of modern urban theory
2. The Chicago School of Sociology
3. Life in the city as a way of life
4. Early social theories of urban life
Chapter 3: Social theories of urban space and place: Perspectives in the post-World War II era
1. Theoretical descendants of Marx
2. The return to place and the turn to culture
3. Going global
4. Power, politics, and ordinary lives
5. Evaluating theories of the city
Chapter 4: Methods and rules for the study of cities
1. First rules for doing a social science of cities
2. Cities and the question of numbers
3. The city as a case study
4. Ethnographic and historical case studies
5. From one to multiple cases
6. A last but very important rule on doing a good social science of cities
  Fitting good theory to good methods
7. And what about insight?

Part II: The Changing Metropolis

Chapter 5: The metropolis and its expansion: Early insights and basic principles
1. Metropolitan growth: Basic features
2. The mobility of people and groups in the metropolis
3. The metropolitan center and its links to the hinterlands
4. Human agents and social institutions in the expansion of the metropolis
5. Planning and metropolitan development
6. Urban growth, institutions, and human agents
Chapter 6: The origins and development of suburbs
1. What is a suburb?
  Definitions and variations
2. A brief history of suburban development
3. Changes and challenges in contemporary suburbs
4. Suburbs as places
Chapter 7: Changing metropolitan landscapes after World War II
1. Los Angeles: The prototype of the postwar metropolis
2. The changing metropolitan order
3. The emerging global economy: A brief overview
4. People, place, and space in a global world

Part III: Social Inequalities And Power in the Metropolis

Chapter 8: The early metropolis as a place of inequality
1. Colonial cities as unequal places
2. Early urban diversity
3. Gender in the early metropolis
4. Cities of immigrants
5. Making the American ghetto
6. The significance of urban diversity and inequality
Chapter 9: Inequality and diversity in the post-World War II metropolis
1. Inequality and the metropolis
2. Gentrification and the remaking of the metropolis
3. Social diversity and the transformed metropolis
4. Reconstructing the contemporary metropolis
5. The Western metropolis in flux
Chapter 10: Power, authority, and cities as contested spaces
1. States and markets
2. The changing global economy
3. Cities today as contested spaces
4. The nature of local governance and politics
5. Local authorities and marginalized peoples
6. Contesting mistreatment by local authorities Resistance and aid
7. Major contests over deep meanings and spaces in the metropolis
8. The contested spaces of Berlin
9. Conclusion

Part IV: The Metropolis in the Developing World

Chapter 11: Urbanization and cities in developing countries
1. Urbanization: The basic path and its impact on place
2. Developing-country cities in historical perspective
3. The basic dimensions of urbanization
4. From process and system to place
5. Megacities as places Opportunities and challenges
6. The developing megacity as a lived place
7. Reassessing the developing-country city
8. Notes
Chapter 12: Cities in the global economy
1. Cities in a globalizing world: Theoretical background
2. Emerging cities in the global economy
3. Re-emerging cities in the global economy
4. Deeper into the global economy
5. Cities in a fully networked global economy
6. Interdependence between cities and the global economy

Part V: Challenges of Today and the Metropolis of the Future

Chapter 13: Urban environments and sustainability
1. Making use of nature
2. Urban environments
3. Global environmental concerns
4. Addressing environmental issues
Chapter 14: The remaking and future of cities
1. Between place and space: Reinforcing a theoretical vision
2. Remaking cities at critical moments
3. Place-remaking on a larger scale
4. Daily place-remaking from below
5. Remaking cities for the future
6. Cities of the future and the future of cities
7. A final look at the twenty-first-century city

Glossary

References

Index

EULA

List of Illustrations

Chapter 1

Figure 1.1 Percentage of population in urban areas by world and region, 1950–2050.
Figure 1.2 Redevelopment in the older areas of Shanghai has displaced an estimated one million households. This woman was one of the last remaining residents in her neighborhood, having refused to relocate.
Figure 1.3 Jane Jacobs at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village in 1961. For Jacobs, the neighborhood tavern was an important place for locals and visitors alike to renew connections.
Figure 1.4 Cairo's Tahrir Square – during the Egyptian uprising of 2011, when as many as one million protestors would gather there. This public space became a crucial site for organizing and communicating, and it became a symbol for the movement itself. In other countries experiencing the Arab Spring uprisings, public spaces also played key roles, such as the make-do use of a traffic circle in Bahrain.
Figure 1.5 Murals in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood announce – and enhance – the area's Mexican heritage.
Figure 1.6 A horse and buggy ride in front of Hofburg Palace, Vienna. Tourist spaces often include elements that connect places to moments in the past.
Figure 1.7 The addition of grass and benches converts a San Francisco parking place to a park as part of 2010’s PARK(ing) Day.

Chapter 2

Figure 2.1 Manchester as it looked in the 1840 s (around the time that Engels was writing). As in other industrial cities of this era, Manchester's poor and working-class residents struggled to find decent housing and food, and lived with polluted air and water. These circumstances, as well as the unprecedented crowding found in growing cities, contributed to early theorists’ generally bleak view of urban life.
Figure 2.2 Ernest Burgess’ map of Chicago's “concentric zones.” The Central Business District, in Chicago known as “the Loop” after the elevated railway that circles it, is Zone 1. From this dense center we move to decreasingly dense outer areas at the city's edge. As applied to Chicago, the zones or rings are really semi-circles. The wavy line that vertically bisects this figure represents the shore of Lake Michigan.
Figure 2.3 Row houses along Acorn Street in Boston's Beacon Hill neighborhood. Although the narrow cobblestone streets confounded modern standards of efficiency, for residents and visitors they held great sentimental value.
Figure 2.4 As this scene from a Manhattan sidewalk reveals, the density of urban environments brings people into close contact with one another even when they have no social or emotional connections. Wirth argued that this proximity, and the resulting overstimulation, leads city dwellers to adopt a blasé attitude as a means of defense.
Figure 2.5 International Pillow Fight Day, as observed in Vancouver, Canada.

Chapter 3

Figure 3.1 Protestors from Los Angeles’ Bus Riders Union. Many types of community organizing and urban protest movements build on the critiques of urban inequality put forth by David Harvey. Here protestors from Los Angeles’ Bus Riders Union pressure the Metropolitan Transit Authority to end a mechanics’ strike in 2003.
Figure 3.2 Soccer City Stadium in Johannesburg, constructed for the 2010 World Cup. Sporting “mega-events” are one way in which cities can generate positive attention in the hopes of attracting growth and investment, but this often comes at a cost for residents.
Figure 3.3 Children at play on a New York City sidewalk. While playing in the street was often derided as akin to juvenile delinquency, many urban children had few other places to play. Jane Jacobs made the case that streets and sidewalks provided play spaces that adults could easily supervise from steps or windows, thus decreasing the likelihood that children would get into trouble.
Figure 3.4 New York's SoHo district in 1970. While this street still bustles with commercial activity, garment manufacturing was on the wane and the area was becoming home to more and more of the artists who would transform its character. Note the “Loft for Rent” sign on the pole at the right.
Figure 3.5 Canary Wharf in London epitomizes the urban impact of global economic transformations that Sassen calls attention to. Once a working dock, the wharf's navigational use faded with the shift to container shipping that accompanied economic globalization. The area has since been redeveloped as a financial services center.

Chapter 4

Figure 4.1 A new Whole Foods market opened in New York City's Bowery neighborhood in 2010. While the area was once synonymous with vagrancy and crime, it is now home to upscale retailers such as Whole Foods, which specializes in organic and natural products. A systematic inventory of the retail and service offerings in a neighborhood can be one means of documenting changes associated with gentrification.
Figure 4.2 Schoolchildren in Muncie, Indiana around the time of the Middletown study. The Lynds and their assistants focused on ordinary facets of town life, including who went to school and what the school day was like. In doing so, they emphasized the typicality of Muncie, stating in their introduction that “a typical city, strictly speaking, does not exist, but the city studied was selected as having many features common to a wide group of communities” (Lynd and Lynd 1959: p. 3).
Figure 4.3 Many urban scholars and practitioners make use of photography to reveal aspects of life in cities that are otherwise hard to capture. Joan Kadri Zald, a social worker and photographer, documented homeless individuals in Tucson and Ann Arbor, calling attention to complex dimensions of their lives and backgrounds. This married couple was among the large number of homeless families that Zald encountered in her work.
Figure 4.4 Walking the dog is a routine activity that brings individuals into contact with places and one another. Sociologist Margarethe Kusenbach suggests that accompanying people on these outings can be a productive research strategy.
Figure 4.5 Railroads play a central role in Cronon's analysis of Chicago. In this 1870 map you can see that by the time of the Great Chicago Fire the city had established itself as a central transportation node connecting the productive lands of the American West to the markets of the eastern seaboard and Europe. It then became a center of manufacturing and processing as well, leading to the city's unprecedented growth rate in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Chapter 5

Figure 5.1 Sprawling Mexico City is among the many cities that are now most appropriately understood as a metropolis.
Figure 5.2 London's Petticoat Lane, which became home to Jewish migrants in the early twentieth century. As populations shifted, the neighborhood synagogue became a mosque.
Figure 5.3 New York City's Director of Public Works Robert Moses tours a new housing project being built in the city (Moses is on the right). While some of Moses’ works were praised – particularly recreational amenities such as Jones Beach – others, such as the Cross Bronx Expressway, were broadly criticized for the number of homes destroyed and communities disrupted.
Figure 5.4 Paris, as remade by Haussmann, seen here from a balloon in 1889. The familiar radial form of the city, with its wide boulevards and monuments, is actually one of the first examples of a broad-scale urban renewal project.
Figure 5.5 Ebenezer Howard's Garden City Plan attempts to unify the city and the natural world. Not only is the small city surrounded by natural and agricultural spaces but nature can also be found within the city as well in the form of parks and gardens. How different is this vision from contemporary small towns and suburbs that try to balance the advantages of urban and rural spaces?
Figure 5.6 The Bo01 District of Malmó, Sweden. Here sustainable planning practices aim to incorporate high density on a human scale. Design features include green spaces, cycle and pedestrian paths, and living roofs.

Chapter 6

Figure 6.1 The mass-produced tract homes that constitute the stereotypical image of the suburb. In reality, suburbs and their residents have always been more diverse than images like this suggest.
Figure 6.2 The edge city mode of development is not limited to the United States. In Paris, La Defense conforms to Garreau's definition of an edge city, as do areas in other major European and Asian cities.
Figure 6.3 Swedish Programme housing in Malmö. High-rise apartments are common in European suburbs and elsewhere, but epitomize the density that Americans were seeking to avoid in moving to the city's edge.
Figure 6.4 The former Phipps home on Long Island (now Old Westbury Gardens) is typical of the mansions built by US industrialists to mimic the estates of the English nobility. This model of the suburban “good life” is reproduced through the current era in the United States and globally.
Figure 6.5 A woman and child bicycle through Vauban, a German suburb designed to be largely car-free. Homes are also constructed for maximum energy efficiency to enhance sustainability on multiple fronts.
Figure 6.6 The components of a house to be built in Levittown on New York's Long Island in 1948. Builder Levitt and Sons popularized a type of assembly line construction that, together with federally subsidized mortgages, made owning a suburban home far less expensive than renting in the city – at least for those who were not excluded by racially restrictive covenants.
Figure 6.7 A worker prepares finishing touches at Palais de Fortune, a gated community in Beijing. While gated communities take many forms around the globe, the model seen in the US – an upscale community rich in amenities, and designed to affirm the status of residents – is increasingly common.
Figure 6.8 Transit-oriented development in Arlington, Virginia. Located in the Washington DC Metropolitan area, and on the subway (Metro) line, the suburb of Arlington is now home to dense development similar to that seen in central cities. Near the Ballston Metro Stop, one can access car sharing, bike sharing, subway and bus transportation.

Chapter 7

Figure 7.1 Los Angeles, as seen from a satellite. Nearly every developable parcel within this 100 mile stretch is covered by houses, businesses, and roads.
Figure 7.2 Demolition proceeds on a Pittsburgh steel mill in the early 1980s. Like many cities in the Midwest and Northeast, Pittsburgh's economy was radically transformed by the closure of mills and related industrial plants.
Figure 7.3 President Barack Obama's biography has brought new attention to community organizing, a strategy for improving urban neighborhoods that became widespread in the 1960s. Obama worked in neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago, an area devastated by deindustrialization.
Figure 7.4 Industrial growth in Japan, particularly the manufacture of automobiles and consumer electronics, transformed its cities in the 1970s and 1980s. Here televisions are being made at Hitachi's Yokohama manufacturing facility in 1971.
Figure 7.5 The demographic explosion in Shenzhen, 1979–2013.
Figure 7.6 The Santa Fe Bridge border crossing between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso. These and other cities along the United States–Mexican border have experienced dramatic growth due to the development of maquiladoras on the Mexico side.

Chapter 8

Figure 8.1 As this 1935 photograph of a London street shows, the experiences of the same place are very different for different individuals – in this case, the man who has his shoes shined and the man who shines shoes.
Figure 8.2 Mexico City's Zócalo, or Plaza de la Constitución, bordered by the Metropolitan Cathedral and National Palace, illustrates the type of central plaza dictated by Spain's Laws of the Indies. Here, as in other colonial cities, the forms that spaces took symbolized just what groups and institutions held power.
Figure 8.3 Mulberry Bend, as photographed by Jacob Riis circa 1888. Initially an Irish neighborhood, Mulberry Street later became the heart of New York's Italian immigrant community. Italian-owned groceries and banks lined the street, and new immigrants knew to find their way here to look for work.
Figure 8.4 A family works making artificial flowers in a Lower Manhattan tenement. “Outwork” or “homework,” primarily conducted by women and children, was a common source of income for immigrant households. This practice blurred the lines between places of work and places of residence, and concerns that goods made in tenements might be sources of contagion was one impetus of the Tenement Reform Movement.
Figure 8.5 Birthplaces of Five Points adults, 1855 and 1880.
Figure 8.6 The Gate of Harmonious Interest marks one boundary of Victoria's Chinatown. Like many Chinese enclaves in North America, Victoria's Chinatown was once viewed by outsiders as a dangerous and unsanitary place, but has since become a symbol of vital and desirable urban diversity.
Figure 8.7 Immigrants to the United States by birth country region, 1850–1930.
Figure 8.8 Percentage change in black population over the preceding 10 years, by US Census region, 1890–1940.
Figure 8.9 What were then called the “negro quarters” of Philadelphia (probably the Seventh Ward), around 1900. This area was at the heart of Du Bois’ study.

Chapter 9

Figure 9.1 A woman in a make-do shelter beneath the Manhattan Bridge in New York City. While homelessness is often regarded as a timeless and pervasive problem, the rate of homelessness increased dramatically in the 1980s.
Figure 9.2 Demonstrations against gentrification in London's Shoreditch neighborhood resulted in vandalism of businesses viewed as emblematic of larger processes of gentrification in this area. Here the Cereal Killer Café, a trendy restaurant serving cold breakfast cereal, can be seen marked with red paint thrown by anti-gentrification activists.
Figure 9.3 Syrian, Iraqi, and other Middle Eastern refugees are among the latest migrants to European cities. Refugees are especially eager to reach Germany, which has been more welcoming than some other counties, and where economic opportunities are perceived as more readily available. Here, refugees arrive by train in Munich.
Figure 9.4 Shops in Berlin-Kreuzberg, an immigrant neighborhood, cater to the area's Turkish population.
Figure 9.5 Marchers at New York City's 2016 Gay Pride Parade carry images of the victims of the Orlando Nightclub Shooting. Gay Pride Parades provide an opportunity for LGBT visibility and celebration. They also provide opportunities to acknowledge the ongoing struggles of LGBT people for equal rights and freedom from violence.

Chapter 10

Figure 10.1 The squeezing of the state and the shifting locus of power.
Figure 10.2 Map of Jerusalem identifying the major religious areas of the city.
Figure 10.3 President John Kennedy looking across the Berlin Wall at East Berlin (June 1, 1963).
Figure 10.4 People celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall, November 10, 1989.

Chapter 11

Figure 11.1 Level of urbanization.
Figure 11.2 Singapore's financial district. A city-state, Singapore is arguably the only fully urbanized country.
Figure 11.3 The urban pyramid.
Figure 11.4 Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital, was forcibly emptied by the Khmer Rouge in an attempt to recreate an agrarian state.
Figure 11.5 The 10 largest cities in 2014 and by 2030.
Figure 11.6 The Gini index for 12 world cities and national averages.
Figure 11.7 A striking contrast between São Paulo's Paraisopolis favela and a gated condominium in Morumbi.
Figure 11.8 Water is delivered by truck in Lomo de Corvina slum in Lima. In many poor urban areas in the developing world, public services such as water, power, sewage, and trash removal are limited or non-existent.

Chapter 12

Figure 12.1 Egyptian traders outside a Palestinian-run restaurant in Yiwu. Although Yiwu is not well-known outside international trade and manufacturing businesses, it is one of the most globalized cities in China.
Figure 12.2 Rajarhat New Town, near Kolkata, India.
Figure 12.3 Construction in Rajarhat New Town, near Kolkata, India. Here development is oriented toward the needs of a rapidly growing information technology sector.
Figure 12.4 The Art House Tacheles (Kunsthaus Tacheles) in Berlin. Built at the turn of the twentieth century and occupied by diverse tenants throughout its history, Tacheles has become a central point in Berlin's art and cultural scene.
Figure 12.5 Pudong (east of the Huangpu River), Shanghai around 1980 (a), and 2015 (b).
Figure 12.6 Community participation and concerns for domestic and global events, Pudong, Shanghai, 2001.
Figure 12.7 Personal global connections and eating McDonald's or KFC and buying foreign brand-name clothes, Shanghai, 2001.
Figure 12.8 The Pearl River Delta region, Guangdong Province, China.
Figure 12.9 Dubai Palm Jumeirah and adjacent development, as seen from a satellite.
Figure 12.10 Europe's “Blue Banana” economic region.
Figure 12.11 Les Halles, long the site of markets in Paris, continues to provide shopping space but in a completely redeveloped place.

Chapter 13

Figure 13.1 Aqueducts, like these built by the Romans in Segovia, provided an early means of harnessing natural resources to serve urban populations.
Figure 13.2 Headline from the Los Angeles Times, July 29, 1905. The article continues, “The cable that has held the San Fernando Valley vassal for 10 centuries to the arid demon is about to be severed by the magic scimitar of engineering skill. Back to the headwaters of the Los Angeles River will be turned the flow of a thousand mountain streams that ages ago were tributaries of the current that swept past the site of the ancient pueblo of Los Angeles to the ocean. The desert has yielded up its wealth. The problem of Los Angeles’ water supply has been solved for the next hundred years.” While it is difficult to imagine such an unabashedly positive account of such an event in today's news media, the tone here provides insight into the strong desire of Los Angeles’ boosters to obtain water.
Figure 13.3 When many small polluters are found in the same neighborhood, the cumulative risks to residents’ health can become quite high. Here Lejano and Smith have plotted the cancer risks for a small Los Angeles neighborhood (Huntington Park). The vertical axis indicates lifetime risk (e.g., 400 in one million).
Figure 13.4 Protestors mark the 25th anniversary of the gas leak in Bhopal that killed some 8000 and injured 150 000 others. Not only do toxic industries disproportionately locate in poor and minority areas but these communities also have a difficult time gaining redress for illnesses and injuries suffered as a result of exposure. Victims of the Bhopal accident and their families are still seeking what they feel is adequate compensation.
Figure 13.5 In slum areas where access to water is limited, residents often have little choice but to use rivers to meet basic sanitation needs. Bathing and washing in urban rivers are common in developing-world cities; pictured here is the Buriganga River in Dhaka, which is polluted by industrial as well as human wastes.
Figure 13.6 Bus rapid transit (or BRT) in Curitiba, Brazil, which is often looked to as a model of public transit efficiency. Dedicated bus lanes, “tube” stations where riders pay before boarding the bus, and a mix of local and regional routes contribute to the system’s success.

Chapter 14

Figure 14.1 Chinese workers sew T-shirts at the Bo Tak garment factory in Dongguan city in Guangdong province, southern China, May 27, 2005.
Figure 14.2 Vacant lots outnumber homes in some Detroit neighborhoods. Residents, planners, and government officials are now trying to reimagine and remake a city with only a fraction of its former population.
Figure 14.3 Crowded and chaotic Lagos provides one model of what the future might look like for the majority of city dwellers.
Figure 14.4 The entrance to a work unit (danwei) named North China Optico-Electric Co. The danwei provided workers with housing and needed services, and a compulsory type of community. New urban forms have eroded that old model of community, without yet replacing it with a new one.
Figure 14.5 On a site once referred to as the “Forat de la Vergonya,” or “Hole of Shame,” this park in Barcelona's Casc Antic neighborhood reflects residents’ efforts to remake a once degraded place as a site for recreation and community-building.
Figure 14.6 Net migration and natural increase rate in Shanghai, 1995–2006. Net migration rate = in-migration rate minus out-migration rate. Natural increase rate = birth rate minus death rate (see Chapter 5).

Figure 14.7 Construction on the Imperial Towers in Mumbai. In the coming years, the volume of new construction in Indian and Chinese cities will dwarf all cities in the West. However, large Chinese cities like Shanghai are much taller and more vertical than their Indian counterparts, such as Mumbai.

List of boxes

Exploring further 1.1 Place attachment

Studying the city 1.1 The globalization of gated communities

Studying the city 1.2 Tourist spaces

Making the city better 1.1 Remaking space through “DIY urbanism”

Studying the city 2.1 Friedrich Engels in Manchester

Studying the city 2.2 Walter Firey on sentiment and symbolism

Making the city better 2.1 Technology and urban isolation

making the city better 3.1 The Los Angeles Bus Riders Union

Making the city better 3.2 International sporting mega-events

Studying the city 3.1 The Urban Villagers

Exploring further 3.1 From spaces of production to spaces of consumption

Exploring further 4.1 Validity and reliability in the study of public spaces

Studying the city 4.1 Finding demographic data

Studying the city 4.2 The go-along

Studying the city 4.3 The challenges of doing urban ethnography

Studying the city 5.1 Projecting urban growth

Studying the city 5.2 Hinterlands as empire

Making the city better 5.1 Zoning

Exploring further 5.1 Timeline of planning history: A selective chronology of key events and developments

Making the city better 6.1 The lawn

Exploring further 6.1 Gender, family, and suburban life

Making the city better 6.2 Accommodating automobiles

Studying the city 6.1 Increasing suburban poverty

Exploring further 7.1 The unwieldy metropolis

Making the city better 7.1 Community organizing

Studying the city 7.1 Border metropolitan complexes

Studying the city 8.1 Canada’s Chinatowns

Making the city better 8.1 Jane Addams and Chicago’s settlement houses

Studying the city 8.2 W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Philadelphia Negro

Exploring further 8.1 Defining and measuring segregation

Exploring further 9.1 The “culture of poverty” debate

Making the city better 9.1 Addressing homelessness through “housing first”

Exploring further 9.2 Tax increment financing

Studying the city 9.1 Annika Hinze on Turkish Muslims and their neighborhoods in Berlin

Studying the city 9.2 Locating LGBT populations and places

Making the city better 10.1 The Right to the City movement, racial justice and affordable housing in San Francisco

Exploring further 10.1 Homelessness and organizations that aid the homeless

Studying the city 11.1 Ancient cities

Studying the city 11.2 An unprecedented experiment with urbanization and megacity building in Chongqing, China

Exploring further 11.1 The informal economy in African cities and beyond

Making the city better 11.1 Microlending and urban economies

Making the city better 11.2 Dharavi redevelopment project

Studying the city 11.3 Martin Murray on Johannesburg

Studying the city 12.1 Leslie Chang’s Factory Girls

Exploring further 12.1 World cities versus global cities

Studying the city 12.2 Cities in global networks

Making the city better 12.1 Urban redevelopment, peri-urban planning, and informal housing improvement

Studying the city 13.1 Man-made disasters

Making the city better 13.1 London’s cholera epidemic and the beginning of epidemiology

Making the city better 13.2 The environmental justice movement

Exploring further 13.1 Transportation and sustainability

Making the city better 14.1 Urban agriculture in Detroit and beyond

Studying the city 14.1 Remaking places of environmental trauma

Making the city better 14.2 Remaking slum housing

Exploring further 14.1 The right to the city: theory and practice

About the authors

Xiangming Chen

Is Dean and Director of the Center for Urban and Global Studies and Paul Raether Distinguished Professor of Global Urban Studies and Sociology at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and Distinguished Guest Professor in the School of Social Development and Public Policy at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. His (co)authored and co-edited books include The World of Cities: Places in Comparative and Historical Perspective (Blackwell Publishers, 2003; Chinese edition, 2005), As Borders Bend: Transnational Spaces on the Pacific Rim (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), Shanghai Rising: State Power and Local Transformations in a Global Megacity (University of Minnesota Press, 2009; Chinese edition, 2009), Rethinking Global Urbanism: Comparative Insights from Secondary Cities (Routledge, 2012), Confronting Urban Legacy: Rediscovering Hartford and New England’s Forgotten Cities (Lexington Books, 2013), and Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai (Routledge, 2016; Chinese edition 2016; Korean edition 2017).

Anthony M. Orum

Is now semi-retired and living in Austin, Texas. For almost half a century he taught courses in sociology, urban history, and political science. Besides the current book he also wrote several others: Black Students in Protest (1972); Introduction to Political Sociology (several editions beginning in 1978); Power, Money & The People: The Making of Modern Austin (1987; 2002); City-Building in America (1995). In addition, he has published books with Joe Feagin and Gideon Sjoberg, A Case for the Case Study (1991); with Xiangming Chen, The World of Cities: Places in Comparative and Historical Perspective (2003); and with Zachary Neal, Common Ground? Readings and Reflections on Public Space (2010). Currently he is the Editor-in-Chief of The Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2019). Not one to leave any stone unturned, he is engaged in new empirical research on Austin, Texas as well as trying to rethink many of the basic issues and theoretical approaches concerning urban development and expansion in the world.

Krista E. Paulsen

is Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Florida, where she teaches courses in urban sociology, environmental sociology, place-based inequality, and qualitative research methods. She has published widely on the city, urban tradition, and the ways that places develop and maintain distinct cultures. Her current research examines how cultural practices including consumption and representation shape homes and neighborhoods. She recently co-edited the volume Home: International Perspectives on Culture, Identity and Belonging (Peter Lang Publishers 2013; with Margarethe Kusenbach).

Preface to the second edition

Those of you familiar with the first edition of Introduction to Cities will notice several important changes in this edition. A number of chapters have new sections that address topics we – and some of our readers – felt required more elaboration. For instance, Chapter 5 now contains a section on urban planning, which was discussed only briefly in the first edition. Chapter 6, on suburbs, contains a new feature on suburban poverty and additional content on suburbs in the developing world. Chapters 8 and 9, on diversity and inequality, now contain substantial sections on gender in cities and urban LGBT spaces, respectively. Chapters 11 and 12 not only contain updated material on cities in Europe, China, India, and the Middle East, which were featured heavily in the first edition, but also include added examples and evidence about cities in Africa and Latin America. Chapter 14 incorporates the new and reorganized material, especially regarding Detroit into a slightly expanded synthesis and prospective look at the future city.

Perhaps the most substantial change to this volume is a new chapter that takes account of power and politics more seriously in cities. After its completion, we realized that the first edition barely mentioned the topic of power at all. In Chapter 10 we highlight the role of power by showing how the changes in the global economy have helped to set in motion regular and fundamental contests between the authorities and residents over the use of spaces in cities. We examine basic types of municipal governments and then consider the ways that contests over power develop between various groups of residents, for example, the homeless, and local authorities. Finally we try to show how questions of power and division are written deeply into the cultural fabric and history of cities. Here we highlight two key examples: Jerusalem and Berlin. We could just as easily have used other examples from across world, including the city of Chicago. In the end we try to show in this chapter how power is absolutely critical to understanding the nature of life in the modern metropolis.

Because cities are ever-changing, we have updated many of the statistics, examples, and figures included in the first edition. We have also included new cases and teaching resources in the supporting materials included at www.wiley.com/go/cities.

Xiangming Chen
Anthony M. Orum
Krista E. Paulsen

February 28, 2017

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank a number of people whose contributions and assistance made this book possible. It is no exaggeration to say that this work would not exist without the patience and enthusiasm of Justin Vaughn, our acquisitions editor at Wiley-Blackwell. The editors and production staff with Wiley-Blackwell – Liz Wingett, Kitty Bocking, Doreen Kruger, Joe White, Atiqah Abdul Manaf, as well as a number of others – shepherded us through this process and made innumerable contributions to the quality of this book. We are also grateful to the anonymous scholars who reviewed this book from its formative stages to near completion. Their feedback was vital to producing what we hope will be a thorough, timely, and broadly accessible work. We also thank Dale Morgan at Wiley-Blackwell and Katie Song of John Wiley & Sons (Asia) in Beijing for facilitating the translation of the book’s second edition into Chinese in the near future.

We also wish to thank a number of research assistants and other colleagues. David Boston researched and wrote several boxes for the first edition which remain in this volume. Their quality reflects his broad curiosity and passion for the study of cities. Annika Hinze allowed us to use some of her observations and acute insights into the experiences of Turkish immigrant women in Germany in the box, Studying the city 9.1, which appears in Chapter 9. We urge readers to look for her book Turkish Berlin: Integration Policy and Urban Space from the University of Minnesota Press. We thank several undergraduate research assistants at the Center for Urban and Global Studies of Trinity College for their contributions to this book. Curtis Stone (Class of 2010) produced three beautiful charts for Chapter 11. Yuwei Xie (Class of 2011) located some material for several boxes in Chapter 11 and Chapter 12. Henry Fitts (Class of 2012) searched and compiled the online urban resources for the book’s website (www.wiley.com/go/cities). Shahzad (Keith) Joseph (IDP class of 2018) made all the PowerPoints for the book’s website. We also are grateful to Terry Romero, administrative assistant at the Center for Urban and Global Studies at Trinity, for indexing the book.

Individually, we wish to thank the following:

I owe another long-overdue thanks to Joel Smith for turning on my interest in studying cities in the 1980s when I was a graduate student at Duke University. My friend and former colleague Tony Orum helped to push my interest further through our joint publication of The World of Cities (Blackwell, 2003). That book created a wonderful opportunity for my own scholarship on Chinese and Asian cities to blend with and complement Tony’s work, and that partnership is now joined with Krista’s expertise in this broader collaboration. My work on this book has been enriched by conversations and collaboration with many colleagues at Trinity College over the last five years. Laura X. Hua helped to edit a few chapters and was a loving source of support. Finally, I thank the 30 students in my “From Hartford to World Cities” class in fall 2011 for reading the almost finalized chapters and collectively endorsing our shared goal to write a book that will really help students like them to understand cities.

Xiangming Chen

I embarked on the study of cities almost 30 years ago, prompted by my curiosity about the many changes I was witnessing in Austin, Texas. For me this book represents the culmination of my years of observations and reflections. I thank Xiangming and Krista for their supportive collaboration on this work, and I thank my many friends and students who across the years have helped me to better appreciate why and how place as well space play such an important role in the lives of human beings.

Anthony M. Orum

My students at the University of North Florida have been an unflagging source of inspiration and motivation in producing the second edition of Introduction to Cities. I am grateful for their questions and curiosities about cities and urban life, as well as their concrete feedback on the first edition of the book. I also wish to thank my colleagues in the American Sociological Association’s Community and Urban Sociology Section. The intellectual vitality of this group, as well as its warm and supportive culture, have sustained me for many years. I am ever grateful to Harvey Molotch for introducing me to urban sociology. Finally, thanks to my co-authors Tony Orum and Xiangming Chen for making this collaboration so productive and enjoyable.

Krista E. Paulsen

Walk-through tour

As you read through the individual chapters in this book you’ll find the following features, designed to help you develop a clear understanding of cities and their role in the human experience

Part openers The book is organized into five parts, and each part opens with a page listing the chapters it contains. The parts are color-coded, making them easy to identify.

Key topics Each chapter opens with a list of the key elements and concepts of the chapter, which will help to guide your reading.

Chapter table of contents Each chapter also begins with a list of its main headings and sub-headings.

Exploring further One of three types of textbox designed to enhance your reading of the book, Exploring further explains concepts or phenomena in greater depth.

Keywords Throughout the text, keywords are highlighted in bold, and you will find the definition nearby in the margin. The chapter keywords and their definitions are also collated in a glossary at the end of the book.

Studying the city Studying the city textboxes present distinct research techniques or findings.

Making the city better Making the city better textboxes focus on the efforts made throughout history to improve cities’ inhabitability.

Critical thinking questions These questions are found at the end of each chapter and help you to revisit and consider the chapter’s main points.

Suggested reading Each chapter ends with a list of suggested reading, giving you the opportunity to take your knowledge and understanding of the subject further.

About the website

Students

Instructors

INTRODUCTION TO CITIES

How Place and Space
Shape Human Experience

Second Edition

List of boxes

About the authors

Xiangming Chen

Anthony M. Orum

Krista E. Paulsen

Preface to the second edition

Acknowledgments

Walk-through tour

PART I
THE FOUNDATIONS

Students

Instructors

How Place and Space Shape Human Experience

Second Edition

Xiangming Chen

Anthony M. Orum

Krista E. Paulsen

How Place and Space
Shape Human Experience