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City as Ideology: Reconciling the Explosion of the City Form with the Tenacity of the City Concept
Abstract
This paper is a theoretical reexamination of the traditional concept of the city in the context of urbanization processes that exceed it. Recent decades have seen a proliferation of new variations on the city concept, as well as calls to discard it altogether. I argue that both options are inadequate. The city has generally been understood as a category of analysis-a moment in urbanization processes-but might now be better understood as a category of practice: an ideological representation of urbanization processes. I substantiate this claim through an examination of three tropes of the traditional city which in material terms have been superseded in recent decades in the Global North but retain their force as ideological representations of contemporary urban spatial practice: the opposition between city and country, the city as a self-contained system, and the city as an ideal type.
... Rather they point us, with the help of the analytical lenses we develop, to a different way of understanding and practicing democracy. The paper seeks to move beyond the view in urban geography that urbanisation not only dissolves the actual, material city but also the city as a democratic project (Wachsmuth, 2014;Madden, 2012;Roy, 2019). Further, it goes against the tendency to think of democratic politics in terms of a dualism between the state and opposing political forces emergent from society (for discussion, see Beveridge & Koch 2021). ...
... Within the context of urban research, the city is, at first glance, an unlikely candidate to reinforce democracy or to open up democratic imagination as urbanisation strongly calls into question the meaning and usefulness of the concept of the city, both politically and spatially. In this section, we argue that even though the city as a distinct urban form and specific moment in the process of urbanisation has lost its clarity (Wachsmuth, 2014), the city as a representation of urbanisation, an object of struggle and democratic ambition makes people do things. The city as a democratic imaginary (see e.g., Frick 2023) is generative of political practices, organisation and democratic demands. ...
... Intriguingly, de Olde & Oosterlynck (2022) have noted that the city still matters to those who position themselves as outside and in opposition to it (in their case the 'rural' areas of Flanders, Belgium). From a different perspective, Wachsmuth (2014) has argued that the city concept is mainly ideological. It does not denote an empirical moment of urbanisation that can be properly delineated as a unit of urban analysis. ...
Urbanisation is changing landscapes, social relations and everyday lives across the globe. But urbanisation is also changing the ways democracy is understood and practiced. Nevertheless, the relation between urban-isation and democracy remains conceptually and empirically underdeveloped. Our aim in this paper is to provide a novel way of thinking about this relationship that addresses two limitations in current debates. First, there is the dominant view that just as urbanisation dissolves the actual, material city it also dissolves the city as a democratic project. We challenge this understanding, arguing that across the globe claims for and forms of urban collective self-rule signal that the city retains democratic significance in a very specific sense: as an object of practice and thought the city is a source and stake of the urban demos. Second, there is a tendency to either restrict the question of democracy to state-centred forms of political action or to place democracy completely outside the realm of the state. We argue however that urbanisation unsettles seemingly fixed boundaries between the state and society and thus opens the possibility of weaving together a new democratic fabric encompassing both. In addressing these two strands of debate together, we outline a democratic politics of urbanisation that shifts perspectives from institutions to practices, from jurisdictional scales to spaces of collective urban life. Seeing democracy like a city, we argue, foregrounds a way to reimagine and to relocate democracy in the everyday lives of urbanites.
... Functional mix is also one of the cornerstones of the city as an attractive living environment. In this vein, besides being put forth as a response to issues of sustainability, the compact city ideal taps into a growing interest in new urbanism and the traditional city as a vital and ideal living environment, one with preferred aesthetics (Burton 2002;Tunström 2007, Wachsmuth 2014. Originating in the US during the 1980's, new urbanist agendas included pedestrian friendly streetscapes, mixed-developments, neotraditional aesthetics, transit-oriented developments and increased density. ...
... These aspects have grown their influence in planning contexts throughout the world (MacLeod 2013;McFarlane 2016). Resting on scholars such as Jan Gehls and Jane Jacobs and their "idyllic descriptions of centre urbanism" (Haarstad et al. 2023:7; see also Røe et al. 2022), the growing interest in new urbanist strategies tapped into the compact city discussion, however increasingly adjusted to a neoliberal era, drawing direct relationships between the city and urban competiveness (Wachsmuth 2014). ...
... These ideals aim to contribute to a sense of community and social change (McCann and Ward 2010; Sharifi 2016) with density and compactness used as key features of a good plan (Adelfio et al. 2021;McFarlane 2015). This 'ideal type' of a traditional city reduces urban complexity to a function of physical attributes and systems, separating the city from nature or the non-urban environment (Wachsmuth 2014). ...
Outdoor recreational activities, at recreational facilities, in nature and urban green areas, are proven to benefit both the mental and physical health of urban residents. However, in the contemporary urban planning paradigm, where compact cities are forefront, planning for outdoor recreational amenities is increasingly in conflict with such compact ideals. In a Swedish context, a historical perspective on the question of outdoor recreation in the urban sphere discloses a rich legacy of past welfare recreational planning resting on the notion of enabling sports for all. In this thesis, I aim to offer an interpretation, and to deepen the understanding of, the interactions and tensions between outdoor recreation, compact city models and lingering planning legacies of past recreational planning. I do this in order to scrutinise the conditions for outdoor recreation within the compact city. The thesis adopts a material-semiotic approach and leans on assemblage theory, science and technology scholars working on the ordering effects of planning and previous studies on materialised discourses in the landscape. Findings of the thesis indicate an increasing fragmentation of outdoor recreation. This fragmentation leads to multiple definitions of the issue and a fragmented geography for outdoor recreation. These intertwined fragmentations, the thesis argues, support the rationales of the compact city, while marginalising outdoor recreational geographies. Based on the findings, the thesis concludes a need of reassembling landscapes for outdoor recreation and suggests that a historical perspective offers a fruitful way to do so.
... The definition of urban also requires interpretation. There has been a widespread debate in urban studies on what the terms urban and city mean, and in particular, the boundary constraints, spatially or otherwise (see eg Allen et al, 1999;Marcotullio and Solecki, 2013;Wachsmuth, 2014). This ongoing conflict over definition presents a further issue with regard to what is being measured and where, resulting in difficulty in comparing across cities/ urban areas. ...
... The definition of urban also requires interpretation. There has been a widespread debate in urban studies on what the terms urban and city mean, and in particular, the boundary constraints, spatially or otherwise (see eg Allen et al, 1999;Marcotullio and Solecki, 2013;Wachsmuth, 2014). This ongoing conflict over definition presents a further issue with regard to what is being measured and where, resulting in difficulty in comparing across cities/ urban areas. ...
... The contribution of Brenner and Schmid remains pertinent on the theoretical plane, particularly for its decentering of the "city" as a confined and enclosed space. In their opinion, it becomes imperative not only to present "the 'city as ideology' (Wachsmuth 2014) but also the critique of 'methodological cityism' (Angelo and Wachsmuth 2015) and of the 'urban age discourse' (Brenner and Schmid 2014) to (re)affirm the distinctiveness of the city-centric and the excentric urban and, ultimately, to move towards a new epistemology of the urban (Brenner and Schmid 2015)" (Castriota and Tonucci 2018: 514). This perspective goes further by "provincializing" (Chakrabarty 2000) the city, introducing three moments of urbanization: (1) concentrated, (2) differential, and (3) extended urbanization. ...
Under the influence of concentrated and extended urbanization, Andean cities and the different altitudinal zones of their “hinterlands” are experiencing profound changes in land cover — from the central plazas up to the highest peaks. The complex regional-geographic characteristics of these socioecological systems, such as the vertical complementarity of land use, require a montological perspective on verticality and urbanization: it transcends disciplinary approaches and can be crucial to properly interpret the trajectories of land cover change and formulate hypotheses for future practice-oriented research. Which trajectories of land cover change characterized altitudinal zones of Andean cities and their surroundings over the last three decades? Are there similarities that allow for the formulation of more general hypotheses? Using the Peruvian cases of Cusco and Huaraz, and combining a traditional altitudinal zonation model of land use in Peru with direct field observations and GIS-based analyses of remotely sensed data from 1991, 2001, 2011, and 2021, this study identifies the main trajectories of land cover change in the Quechua (>2300–3500 m), Suni (>3500–4000 m), and Puna (>4000–4800 m) regions — and finds insightful similarities between Cusco and Huaraz: (1) an impressive area of built-up land substitutes grassland in the Quechua, which, following regional altitudinal zonation models, is characterized by irrigated and rain-fed cropland; (2) an unexpected expansion of irrigated cropland takes place in the Suni, which, in theory, often lacks irrigation infrastructure and is mostly used for rain-fed tuber cultivation; and (3) a clear change from “other land” to grassland occurs in the Puna — where grassland is thought to predominate, anyway, since pre-Hispanic times. Hypothesizing that these changes reflect the interplay between speculative fallow, agricultural intensification, and ecological restoration, the results can be read as vertically complementary, local manifestations of concentrated and extended urbanization in a formerly peripheral mountain region of the Global South — and they underscore the need to overcome mental city-mountain dichotomies for a socially inclusive and ecologically balanced Andean development between plaza and peak.
... The demographic, ecological, socio-political, economic, and other dimensions of the accelerating "urban age" have produced both startling transformations of planetary life and productive tensions over how these are to be understood. A shift in focus from urban form to urban process, especially evident in research that seeks to move beyond the city as a bounded unit of analysis and/or organizing principle Streule, 2020;Wachsmuth, 2014) is central (but not reducible) to theses of "planetary urbanization" (Brenner and Schmid, 2015;Merrifield, 2013). As Beauregard (2018: 11) rightly argues, this epistemological shift "provides an answer to 'what is a city?' by displacing the question. ...
In this article, we outline the central tenets of an endogenous theory of neighborhood change in Mexico City known as blanqueamiento (‘whitening'). Drawing on longstanding research and intellectual exchange with local scholars and activists, we illustrate the promise this concept holds for transcending the many limitations of ‘gentrification', and its metaphrase translation, gentrificació n, in this and other contexts. We argue that while blanqueamiento and similar theories from outside the Global North often face extreme difficulties in emergence, their value to both critical scholarship and urban politics can be profound, and should be more fully explored and recognized. We demonstrate this value in Mexico City through an exploration of this concept’s core meanings and expressions, specifically in the areas of: 1) belonging, displacement, and racialized aesthetics; 2) architecture, design, and globalizing aesthetics; and 3) finance, money laundering, and the insidious complicity of aestheticized consumption. In support of our overall argument about the need for more productive urban exchanges and the critical co-production of knowledge on the topic of urban change through translation, we bring together insights from ongoing debates on the nature and uses of gentrification in contemporary cities and the politics of theory-making and conceptualization in geography and urban studies across the globe.
This is a discussion of how the “urban question” became a topic of general interest in the media, based on a bibliometric analysis of newspapers from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, targeting a specific process of urbanization in the United States, hinting at how the public perception of urban studies came to attract different fields of research and how new responsibilities were added to urban management. Sources used were the historic newspaper databases of Chronicling America and the New York Times, via ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Preliminary conclusions indicate directions for further multidisciplinary debate, summarized as follows: understanding of the city may have originally proceeded somewhat naïvely, disregarding central features of the urban phenomena; early methodological instruments were more frequently based on limited observation than on deeper surveys; and there is a continuing period of innocence and convergence in the understanding of the urban question.
In the context of hotly contested debates within critical urban theory, many scholars have recently attempted (both implicitly and explicitly) to move beyond the relational-dialectical concept of ‘totality’, taking up the notion of ‘the constitutive outside’ in its place. With this in view, this article seeks to (1) develop a critique of the ways in which the concept of the constitutive outside is deployed in these debates; and (2) to sketch another path forward – one that understands capitalist urbanisation as a distinctive moment in the evolution of a world-encompassing and internally related socio-spatial totality, while also attending to well-founded concerns among theorists of the constitutive outside regarding the question of difference and ascriptive hierarchisation. More precisely, this article will pursue a close reading of work on the constitutive outside in critical urban theory, suggesting that it effectively re-articulates longstanding and entrenched tenets of capitalist ideology, positing the image of a ‘space-time of the other’. And it will conclude with a revised conceptualisation of totality for critical urban theory, building on Nancy Fraser’s recent work on capitalism’s racialised, gendered, and ecological ‘hidden abodes’.
The last century brought a series of new issues for cities in Latin America. It also has challenged several ideas apparently well established. Sustainability research is in constant need of a more robust and updated set of concepts to work with, specially in urban environments. The aim of this article is to discuss two different conceptualizations which are key for this theoretical articulation in urban spaces: the first with a permanent nature and the second with a transitory characteristic. In order to understand this possible conflict, a case study is proposed comparing nine urban solutions in Brazilian cities. Three categories of uses are set: housing, retail and transportation. Initially this debate is analytically contextualized in the period called modernity but it discusses post-modernity scenarios as well to help to comprehend distinct time perceptions. The need to answer rapidly to new planetary questions influencing cities in Brazil has led to a rush in many urban, metropolitan and global dynamics. This is at the core of a huge set of environmental issues. The conclusion shows that impermanences happen so frequently that they may become a new kind of permanence. Truly sustainable cities can be reached only if this dilemma is better understood by policymakers.
A widespread demand has grown up in the United States for statistics on large cities and their surrounding areas of high population density with which these central cities have a substantial amount of day-to-day contact. Since 1947, a federal interagency committee has been meeting the demand by defining Standard Metropolitan Areas. The general criteria used in determining which cities shall have S. M. A.'s and what surrounding areas shall be included should be rooted in a meaningful concept of the metropolitan area. The program has also had to take account of the interests of the local areas affected, many of which interests are non-statistical in nature.
This paper calls for "new geographies" of imagination and epistemology in the production of urban and regional theory. It argues that the dominant theorizations of global city-regions are rooted in the EuroAmerican experience and are thus unable to analyse multiple forms of metropolitan modernities. By drawing on the urban experience of the global South, the paper presents new conceptual vectors for understanding the worlding of cities, the production of space, and the dynamics of exurbanity. It makes the case that such area-based knowledge deepens recent theoretical attempts to articulate a relational study of space and place.