The Nature of Cities: The Scope and Limits of Urban Theory

Abstract

There has been a growing debate in recent decades A disputed conceptThe quotation above echoes a widespread view, namely, that cities are so big, so complicated and so lacking in easily identifiable boundaries that any attempt to define their essential characteristics is doomed to failure. The same problem haunts urban studies generally, with a plethora of diverging claims about the nature of cities competing for attention. Despite this confusion, most of us have little hesitation in dealing with everyday propositions to the effect, say, that cities are now growing rapidly at locations all over the globe or that urbanization is moving ahead more forcefully than at any other time in human history. Indeed, urbanization is so prominent a feature of our world that scholarly agendas attuned to this issue continue to proliferate, even as disagreements multiply as to how exactly cities should be conceptualized and studied.

Urban studies after the age of the city

“…Indeed, to a significant degree each already exists in conversation with the others (see, for example, Catterall and Wilson, 2014;Robinson and Roy, 2015;Scott and Storper, 2015). But each does come freighted with different implications for the future of urban studies as a coherent field of study.…”

Who Governs the 'Ungovernable'? Examining Governing Relations in Urban Informality

“…This emphasis on relations in collective action is linked to my reading of informal organizations in urban spaces. I argue that informal vendor organizations are non-market agents of collective action as they implement mechanisms to address urban 'disfunctionalities' (Scott & Storper, 2015) and manage hawking spaces with or without state support. By non-market agents of collective action, I draw from Scott and Storper's (2015, p. 8) contention that "market logic alone is congenitally incapable of regulating the urban commons in the interests of economic efficiency and social wellbeing".…”

“…These agencies are local in character and/or they exist at higher levels in the governance hierarchy. For instance, land use regulation is undertaken mostly (though not exclusively) by local institutions like formal government units and various civil associations (Scott & Storper, 2015). I consider vendor organizations as part of local civil associations that enforce collective action mechanisms to pursue goals that are not purely economic-driven or market-oriented.…”

“…Dubbed as 'the Entertainment City', this urban gentrification in the neo-liberal age (Ortega, 2016) Scott and Storper (2015) define agglomeration as a mechanism of sharing, matching and learning. "Sharing is about the dense local inter-linkages within production systems… Matching refers to the process of pairing people and jobs... Learning is the dense formal and informal information flows…" (Scott & Storper, 2015, p. 6).…”

“…When tied to urban socio-spatial relations, the post-dualist lens argues that space is produced (Lefebvre, 1991;Massey, 2005), hierarchized (Lefebvre, 2006), relational (Healey, 2007b;Lemanski & Marx, 2015) and embodied in ideas (Kelly, 1997) of multiple players. My point of departure, therefore, moves beyond looking at the congested spaces occupied by informal vendors as mainly an outcome of locational utility (Janelle, 1969), spatial mismatch (Duffhues & Bertolini, 2016), and urban agglomeration or 'disfunctionalities' (Scott & Storper, 2015). Rather, I view them as part of multi-faceted and socially constructed trajectories and processes (Healey, 2007b), which may be questioned, challenged, and modified.…”