International Journal of Urban and Regional Research· 2014Q1
The Nature of Cities: The Scope and Limits of Urban Theory
- 859citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2014year
Short summary
This article proposes a unified theoretical framework for understanding all cities, combining agglomeration/polarization dynamics with the nexus of locations, land uses, and human interactions.
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Key points
- Proposes a dual-process framework (agglomeration/polarization + location/land use/interaction nexus) to define the urban.
- Identifies common dimensions across all cities, distinguishing urban phenomena from general social reality.
- Addresses debates about the coherence of the 'urban' concept and the limitations of past theory focused on the Global North.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Abstract There has been a growing debate in recent decades about the range and substance of urban theory. The debate has been marked by many different claims about the nature of cities, including declarations that the urban is an incoherent concept, that urban society is nothing less than modern society as a whole, that the urban scale can no longer be separated from the global scale, and that urban theory hitherto has been deeply vitiated by its almost exclusive concentration on the cities of the global North. This article offers some points of clarification of claims like these. All cities can be understood in terms of a theoretical framework that combines two main processes, namely, the dynamics of agglomeration/polarization, and the unfolding of an associated nexus of locations, land uses and human interactions. This same framework can be used to identify many different varieties of cities, and to distinguish intrinsically urban phenomena from the rest of social reality. The discussion thus identifies the common dimensions of all cities without, on the one hand, exaggerating the scope of urban theory, or on the other hand, asserting that every individual city is an irreducible special case.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2014 · DOI ↗
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Field: Urban Studies
Urban StudiesSocial Sciences