ABSTRACT
A basic physical description of a city – a community of individuals linked by a common location in time and space, typically characterized by a density of population and infrastructure – does not begin to capture the social dynamics of urbanization. Yet how cities are perceived, defined, and function, in those respects, depends largely upon the observer's point of view. Consider the diversity among the classic interpretations. Mumford (1937) argues that a city is a theatre for social action, a stage that intensifies and underlines the gesture of the actors and the action of the play. For the Chicago School, cities are organic constructions – they are the natural habitat of civilized man (Park, 1925). A city is a set of shared experiences (Simmel, 1903), a state of mind, an impression filtered through prisms of subjective space, the outside world, and social life. It is a conceptual location (Donald, 1999). For Haussmann and Le Corbusier, it was an ideal to be realized, a vision of both built form and social organization (Ryb-czynski, 2010). It could be a utopian island – glittering, ordered, and efficient. For others, the city represents a blighted environment and decaying society. It is an arena where broader patterns are reproduced and mediated, social and industrial structures are shaped, and the opportunities and inequalities of capitalism play out (Harvey, 1989; Swyngedouw and Kaika, 2003). It is also a political space in which these forces are contested (Brenner, 2004; Cox, 1997). For many of these descriptions, the city is a conceptual space that various forces compete to shape, but where limits are only implied.
