Selected Urban Theories
From Gil Stelter, "Does Urban History Need a Theory of the City?: Theory and Urban History" in The Urban History Newsletter, March 2001.
Below are two lists of theories in the field of urban studies. Although the divisions are not always clear cut, in general functional theory deals with how the city works and normative theory deals with what the city is.
Functional Theories (urban theories)
1. The city as a system. The classic article is “Cities as Systems within a System of Cities” by Brian Berry. He argues that cities are entities with interdependent parts and can be studied like any other system. Theorists who emphasize urbanization suggest we turn our attention away from individual cities and concentrate instead on the broad societal processes that result in cities. What are some "broad societal processes that result in cities?"
2. The city as an economic engine. For a detailed theory of how cities generate growth, see The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs. Urban historians have emphasized the role of city-building elites and the ways in which cities have effectively channeled the activities of other levels of government. The concept of channels of capital is important, as is the idea of cities as foci of regional economies.
3. The city as communications network. These theories range from the images of physics—cities operate like magnetic or gravitational fields of force with humans as particles—to theories about the movement of goods, services, and people (transportation studies), to the question of symbolic interaction, or ways of “reading” the city. The most exciting model of how social interaction can lead to cultural creativity, technological innovation, and effective organization of large populations has been developed by Peter Hall in his excellent book Cities in Civilization.
4. The city as contested space. Theoreticians have moved away from notions of community based on homogeneity or sameness to concepts of community involving class, race and ethnicity, and gender. Conflict/consesus. The leading theorists of the class-based city have been the neo-Marxists David Harvey and Manuel Castells, but they have recently turned their attention away from the city to analyses of trends in capitalism and information technology. The tremendous outpouring of theoretical and historical literature on the question of African Americans and the city is exemplified by the two excellent special issues of the Journal of Urban History. Some of the most dynamic new work challenging traditional conceptions of how a city works comes from those studying gender. An example from literature is Susan Squire, whose Virginia Woolf and London: Sexual Politics and the City shows how Woolf used a basic strategy of feminist revision, a decentered perspective, re-framing as central what was previously seen by men as marginal.
5. The city as built environment. This is a vast field of rapidly changing theories, including decision-making theory, new planning and architectural theories, and from economics at Stanford, path-dependence theory—the way past decisions affect or limit decisions in the present.
6. The city as personality. While not a full-blown theory, it has produced the most popular form of history, the urban biography. The community is seen as a whole, usually with a distinctive character. Excellent examples include Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham (1999), in which New York is seen as a dynamic entity with deal driving and sharp practice in its genes, and Peter Ackroyd, London (2000), a city with theatricality and materialism at its core.
Normative Theories (theories of the city)
Theories of the city are closely related to prevailing cultural norms in any particular era and sometimes can be ascertained only by what we know was done in planning and building cities rather than by what was expressed in written form.
1. Cosmic theory. The idea that the city must reflect the order of the cosmos was the earliest and most widely held theory of the city in the ancient world. The most important guide to this kind of city is the late Paul Wheatley whose work on ancient Chinese, Japanese, and Indian cities emphasized the significance of religious purposes rather than trade or defense in city building. Cosmic theory was most highly developed by the Chinese and was gradually codified into a Book of Rituals. Indian town planning of this kind was also spelled out in a series of texts. The Roman foundation of towns was based on divine laws with orthogonally and orientation determined by cosmological connections. This became the basis of town foundations throughout much of Europe and North Africa. In the ancient Americas, Teotihuacán’s great regular grid was carefully oriented astronomically.
2. The city as machine. This appears to be the most widely held idea of the city throughout history, but it is the least developed theory conceptually. The city as machine is not a magical or sacred place, but a practical, secular place without any cosmic meaning. It is an artificial creation, the product of human agency, not natural growth. The development of mathematical physics in the seventeenth century and the ideas of Newton and Descartes provided the basis for a rational, orderly universe and cities reflected that particular notion of order. The idea of the city as a machine underlies much of the city building and rebuilding in the modern world, as in Haussmann’s transformation of Paris, the planning of the nineteenth century grid in North America, the re-shaping of New York by Robert Moses, and Le Corbusier’s visions of the Cartesian city. The machine analogy continues to be the basis for most current urban practice, from land subdivision to zoning.
3. The city as organism. The most popular normative theory of the city in the twentieth century has been the city as organism. The city is a living thing, with definite boundaries, an optimum size, and an indivisible internal structure. The idea is at least as old as Aristotle but the modern theory is based on the natural sciences, especially biology. The most elaborate academic expression of the theory came from the Chicago School of sociologists led by Robert Park and Ernest Burgess and many historians still find this approach useful in their study of a city’s internal organization. The concept of symbiosis that Park emphasized also could be applied to an organism’s external relations which has been developed as the metropolitan thesis. The fullest application of this latter approach, combined with environmentalism, is William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis, where the city is seen as part of nature. Jane Jacobs takes this even further. In her The Nature of Economies, she argues that cities and their economies are not only like an organism, but cities and their economies are subject to the master processes that also govern nature.
4. The city as constellation. None of the three traditional normative theories seem adequate for representing the uncharted terrain of modern urbanism, in which the relevance and even the existence of the traditional city is questioned. Several terms have been suggested for this new form including atom, urban field, cosmopolis, and nonplace urban realm. I prefer “constellation” which implies many centers rather than the old hierarchical solar system configuration.
Two elements of an emerging theory should be added. The first comes from literary critic Christine Sizemore whose A Female Vision of the City explores the views of five women novelists who make London their setting and their main character. She concludes that it is possible to go beyond the current male-centered theories to one that is non-hierarchical, accepting of a variety of people, and accepting of fragmentation and change. She feels that a multidimensional matrix best symbolizes this kind of city.
A second is the well publicized series of attempts to conceptualize the decentralized form of the modern city. Much of the recent literature portrays Los Angeles as the harbinger of this new type of urbanism, with theorists seeing the Los Angeles School replacing the older Chicago School at the theoretical heart of urban studies. Much of this discussion ignores earlier forms of the dispersed city (going back to ancient times) or earlier examples like Tokyo. But Los Angeles does seem to be the most extreme version with its sprawl, its class and racial polarization, and a culture in which illusion often seems to usurp reality. Decentralized in space, time, meaning.
The shortcomings of these theories are all too obvious. Many are highly value-laden despite their apparent objectivity. Many are time and culture bound even though they claim universality. And functional theories in particular are extremely presentist in orientation, lacking any serious historical dimension. Nevertheless, these theories can be important organizing principles which help us to make sense of what often appears to be a chaotic and unreadable phenomena, the city.