The concept of informality has often been misunderstood. Its, especially, urban character is rarely appreciated. With respect to urban development, it was once thought to distinguish the Global South, a view that is changing, but an alternative has not been systematically articulated. Based on an extensive survey of literatures, this article clarifies the urban character of informality, articulates its global relevance, and proposes a framework for understanding its major modes: latent, diffuse, embedded, overt, and dominant. Their relative frequency distinguishes cities, regions, and nations while their identification facilitates the comparison of places.
It is time to rethink the geography of American cities and suburbs in the first half of the twentieth century. Theoretical argument and substantive research have both challenged the received wisdom, which continues to rely heavily on the ideas of the Chicago school of sociology and especially those of Ernest Burgess. In theoretical terms, writers have challenged the view that geographical patterns merely reflect society, suggesting instead that space is integral to economic and social processes. A company does not make its production and location decisions separately: each implies the other. Similarly, a household chooses to live where it can afford, and what it can afford depends on the mix of work strategies that a certain location allows. Such theoretical insights imply that even if the geography of urban areas conformed to the models of the Chicago school, it must be conceptualized anew. 1 In fact, historical research is challenging the substantive accounts offered by Burgess and by many later writers. The enduring model assumes that jobs were concentrated near the city center, except for a few large factories at the fringe. It supposes that jobs and low wages kept immigrant workers in central cities, sometimes in sectors along radial rail lines. Supposedly, only affluent families could afford new suburban homes, while the exclusivity of the suburbs was ensured by suburban self-rule. This view stresses inner-city poverty and suburban affluence. It has inspired many studies of central immigrant ghettoes and slums and, following Warner, the suburban experiences of the middle class. 2 Recently, however, some writers have provided disconfirming evidence of industrial decentralization and of fringe settlement by workers and 262
The way we think about the geography of American cities and suburbs in the first half of this century has, for several decades, been framed by the writings of Ernest W. Burgess, Homer Hoyt, Chauncy Harris, and Edward Ullman. Burgess's zonal model has been especially influential, gaining ascendancy in the postwar period. Contemporaries knew, and recent historical research has shown, that this model was faulty in several important respects. It gained influence as later scholars simplified its conception of the suburban commuter fringe, at first to a contrast between industrial and residential suburbs and then to the singular myth of the middle-class enclave. Suburban affluence came to be contrasted with inner-city poverty. This revised zonal model implied the existence of a political, social, and economic fault zone between city and suburbs and differed markedly from that which Burgess had developed. It gained influence even over historical research because it was associated with the influential Chicago school, because it lent itself to analytical treatment by the mode of social science that had become dominant by the 1960s, and because of the decline of American cities in the postwar era.
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