urbanism

Urbanism is the study of cities, their geographic, economic, political, social and cultural environment, and the impact of all these forces on the built environment. Urbanism is also a species of urban planning, focusing on the creation of communities for living, work, and play.

Urbanists distinguish urban areas from rural areas by their higher population density. They maintain that the difference in population entails a difference in the social and political order as well. Initially, some scholars^{[citation needed]} denied the social and political differences between rural and urban areas, and insisted that there was no point in a specifically 'urban studies'; but this debate has been largely resolved in favor of urban studies, and it is now widely accepted ^[1] that cities need to be studied separately from the country.

Having established that cities are genuinely distinct from rural areas, scholars have studied cities according to three different perspectives: the internalist perspective, which looks at spatial and social order within a city; the externalist perspective, which views cities as stable points or nodes in the wider globalizing space of networks and flows; and the interstitial perspective, which attempts to reconcile the two perspectives through understanding how the social, temporal and spatial ordering of a city is influenced by global, external forces, and how it influences them in turn. For example, in The Ordinary City (1997), Amin and Graham argue that the urbanscape can best be understood as a site of co-presence of multiple spaces, multiple times and multiple webs of relations, tying local sites, subjects and fragments into globalizing networks of economic, social and cultural change.

"Urbanism" in its wider sense will also include the study of the interaction between the city and the rural hinterland. No city can exist without a hinterland to supply it, but, because of communications technology, this hinterland may be less easy to identify than it was in pre-industrial, agrarian societies, and furthermore the conception of how the hinterland relates to the city may change throughout history. In the Roman Empire and ancient Greece), for example, the municipium and polis were considered to consist of both "urban" centre and hinterland, with which they formed one unified social, political and economic entity.

The word urbanism is also used as a qualitative complement to the description of various urban and rural forms i.e.: informal urbanism, new urbanism, self-sufficient urbanism, sustainable urbanism, centralized or decentralized urbanism, neo-traditional urbanism, transitional urbanism, other urbanisms, etc.

References

Eduardo, Lopez; Rasna Warah (2006-7). "Urban and Slum Trends in the 21st Century". UN Chronicle. http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/2006/issue2/0206p24.htm. Retrieved on 2007-08-21. 

See also

• Landscape urbanism, an urbanism modeled on the disciplines of landscape architecture and ecology.
• New urbanism, a response to contemporary problems such as urban sprawl and traffic congestion.
• Unitary urbanism, a critique of urbanism as a technology of power by the situationists.
• Urban geography
• Urban design
• Urban planning
• Urbanate, a living environment envisioned by the Technocracy movement.
• World Urbanism Day.

External links

• “A Home for Town Planning Kula-Odzaci” Kula, Serbia
• Hollow city MP3 interview with Rebecca Solnit on the evolution of the US city and contemporary threats to it
• Collection of articles on Shack Settlements
• Housing struggles and theory newswire
• Urbanism and Aisthesis: Rostros y lugares del anonimato | ciudades, pintura metafísica y sobremodernidad by Adolfo Vasquez Rocca PhD
• Kerb 15 - Landscape Urbanism. This issue includes contributions from Charles Waldheim, Mohsen Mostafavi, FOA, Karres en Brands, Kongjian Yu, Kyong Park, Kathryn Gustafson, Stephen Read, Kelly Shannon, Richard Weller, RMIT Press, 2007.
• Landscape Urbanism Program at the Architectural Association
• Professional network for Landscape Urbanism
• Urbanism News website
• Urban Design information website

Further reading

• Amin and Graham (1997) "The Ordinary City" in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 22 pp 411-429
• Manuel Castells The Urban Question, Network Society
• Peter Geoffrey Hall Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century
• David Harvey (1989)Flexible accumulation through urbanization
• Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
• Henri Lefebvre (1970) "The Urban Revolution"
• Kevin Lynch, Image of the City
• Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
• Robert E. Park, The City - Suggestions for the Study of Human Nature in the Urban Environment (1925) and all the publications of the Chicago school
• Saskia Sassen (1997) The global city: London, New York, Tokyo
• Richard Sennett The Uses of Disorder
• Ed Soja Postmetropolis
• Scape Magazine ’Scape is the new international magazine for landscape architecture and urbanism.