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Introduction: Cities are Places

It is harder than you probably think it is to think clearly about cities.

Are cities defined by clusters of high-rise buildings connected by large roads or highways? Are they rows of restaurants offering a wide variety of ethnic foods on walkable streets where neighbors know and recognize one another? Are they chaotic crowded sidewalks or buses with people jostling and competing with one another for access to doors or seats with windows? Cities are all of these, but they are not only these. Trying to make sense of cities requires some way of organizing these scenes or features: a strategy for making sense of their concatenated elements.

Scholars of cities usually organize these scenes or features into analytical categories like economy, politics, or culture. They often focus on how one of those dimensions shapes or defines being in a city. This book makes the argument that the most productive way to understand a city is to think of it as multiple cities at once. Cities are places where what is meaningful to people is the way they combine various processes, ones that occur in domains like economy, politics, and culture. Yet the most visible processes are not always the most relevant ones for analysis, and different urban participants will care more about one kind of process than another.

Cities are where people make connections and build relations of many kinds: in that sense, they are sites of serendipitous engagement. We call this productive urban serendipity "propinquity": socially, economically, or politically useful proximity. Cities are also sites of density, though what counts as dense is often perceived in relation to what surrounds the center of a cluster (see box, "Urban and the City"). Levels of density seen at the suburban fringes of New York, United States, or Manila, Philippines, would be characterized as central and bustling in more diffuse cities such as Brisbane, Australia, or Oklahoma City, United States.

Together, these two terms (propinquity and density) can serve as an initial shorthand definition of "the city." Yet we would also say that these two terms on their own are also somewhat unsatisfying. They help distinguish cities from their surrounding rural contexts by capturing the idea that cities contain something like "lots at once." In other words, cities have people, buildings, transportation arteries, and activities in relatively close proximity. But propinquity and density do less to explain the urban process that produces those cities or the character of cities as an object of analysis. Why are cities sites of propinquity and density? How do they become so, and how are the conditions of propinquity and density sustained over time? What motivates individuals to live in cities, and why do they stay? These and similar questions form the core of urban analysis.

This book attempts to cultivate some habits of mind that can make effective analysis of cities easier. The text explores how the authors, as urban scholars and observers, attempt to deal with the challenge of thinking about cities in a rigorous way while embracing their complexity and plurality.

Places and place-making

We advocate for an analytical approach drawn from the discipline of geography that focuses on places. Traditionally, geographers emphasize that places are made up of the meanings that people attach to geographies, human processes that shape the landscape, physical characteristics in the environment, and non-human processes, all at once, iteratively changing over time. This understanding of place tends to foster a notion of places as singular agglomerations: a product of the accumulated history of people making geographically located meaning.

Urban and the City

The word "urban" captures the idea of a built-up area of human settlement. It usually also connotes density, distinguishing built-up areas that are relatively small, like mining settlements or small towns, from areas that have a significant concentration of human-built infrastructure (roads, buildings, and utility systems like sewers and power lines) as well as people.

A "city" represents a built-up urban place that is sufficiently large to need a political system that enables regulation of people and their circulation within that urban space. A city almost always includes a legal entity, with specific laws that enable a particular system of government to administer it. The laws creating city governments, and the sorts of powers that these governments have, vary by region and country, and so the details depend on where the city is located. Even if a city government is clearly established over an urban area, this does not mean that the city boundaries encompass all the urbanized land in the area. There may be towns or other built-up spaces that do not function politically in the same way as the city; these areas are urban but may be governed, or managed, as part of separate cities or towns, or as parts of a larger political region (which may be rural as well as urban). For example, many urban areas have adjacent but politically distinct municipalities that include built-up urban areas. Conversely, some cities contain areas of land with very low-density development.

So while city and urban are not the same thing, they are related. Cities always have some, if not completely, urban characteristics - namely density of people and built environment, and diversity of activities - but not all urban places are legally cities. Sometimes - often, in fact - an urban area contains multiple cities and/or towns (which usually have different political powers than cities).

Geographers, sociologists, and other scholars have explored "the urban question" of how much density of people and built infrastructure is enough to denote "urbanness," and what urban life is for and about (e.g., Wirth 1938; Castells 1977 [1972]; Brenner 2000). Early sociological ideas in Europe about urban life focused on the idea that people could be unknown to one another in a city, and thus were not bound by kinship ties and social norms as they had been in more rural contexts (Tönnies 1955 [1887]; Durkheim 1997 [1893]). These scholars also debated whether urban life was alienating people from their mutual obligations to one another. Manuel Castells, writing in the 1970s (Castells 1977 [1972]), emphasized the importance of social organization and government provision of infrastructure in urban areas, which supported communities through services such as schools, garbage collection, and roads. He also wrote extensively about collective organizing as a positive element of urban life (Castells 1983).

A crucial argument throughout much urban scholarship over the last century is that urban places generate new social ideas and change because of the bringing together of different people and resources in one relatively dense place or area. Geographer Ed Soja (2000) wrote about this function by pointing to the visual art on the rock walls of the ancient ruins of Çatal Hüyük, which existed in Turkey about 10,000 years ago. His point was that when people live together, they create more than just what they need to live. Other scholars have likewise highlighted the importance of social organization and expression as part of urban and city life. These include Ed Soja with his attention to arts in ancient cities, Louis Wirth (1938) and his description of the "theater" of urban life in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, and Henri Lefebvre (1996), who wrote about the oeuvre (connoting artistic and non-waged work) of urban residents.

Doreen Massey was a geographer whose scholarly writing on places, economies, and cities has been very influential on the thinking of your authors here. Massey writes that places are bundles of space-time trajectories (2005). The word bundle has metaphorical connotations: while it has a literal descriptive meaning as a cluster of things bound together, its usage is often associated with a group of long things (sticks, wheat, etc.) bound up as a set with a ribbon or rope by a person. The use of the word "bundle" here seems to bridge its literal and metaphorical meanings.

A place bundle isn't like wheat in that you can't pick it up and move it elsewhere; but neither is it a natural, preordained set. Bundling describes the process by which people select or choose what counts in their own minds as a part of a place, and what does not. Bundling is an activity we're all engaged in, all of the time: making sense of the world by sorting it into this place and that place, according to our own understandings and logics.

But what in the world is a space-time trajectory? Massey tries to capture the idea that both physical and social objects are part of places. What does this mean? Think of famous plazas like Red Square in Moscow, or the National Mall in Washington, DC. These places include objects like sets of large buildings (the Kremlin, the Smithsonian Institution), as well as open pedestrian areas that most of the time contain little or nothing at all. But Massey also emphasizes that place bundles include social patterns and human beliefs or intentions. So the rhythmic return of US presidents to the Mall every four years to be inaugurated is a part of the bundle that makes up that place; so is the repeated pulse of bodies to celebrate the nation with fireworks each 4th of July, and its irregular occupation by protesters of...