Urbanism

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Template:Cleanup-date Urbanism is both descriptive and prescriptive. Prescriptively, urbanism is the study and practice of creating humane communities for living, work, and play; it covers the more human aspects of urban planning, where the prescriptive aspects of urbanism are more fully covered.

Descriptively, urbanism is the study of cities - their economics, politics, social and cultural dimensions, and the imprint of all these forces on the built environment. Urbanism assumes that there is such an entity as the "urban" with its characteristic high population density, and that it can be clearly distinguished from the "rural". Some scholars Template:Fact initially rejected the notion that there were any significant differences between the social and political order in the rural or so called urban, hence there was no point in a specifically 'urban studies'. However, this debate is largely out of date, and it is widely accepted (UN Habitat 2000) that cities do exist, in a fundamentally distinct state from rural areas, and that the world population is increasingly living in urbanized areas.

Having established that a 'city' is an ontologically distinct 'urban' as opposed to rural area, scholars have studied cities from several dimensions: the internalist perspectives which looked at spatial and social order within a city, externalist perspectives which viewed cities as stable points or nodes in the wider globalizing space of networks and flows, and the interstitial perspective which attempted to reconcile the two perspectives: by trying to understand how globalizing flows and external forces influence, and are influenced by, the social, temporal and spatial ordering of a city. Amin and Thrift (1997) argue in 'The Ordinary City' that the urbanscape can best be understood as a site of co-presence of multiple spaces, multiple times and multiple webs of relations, tying local sites, subjects and fragments into globalizing networks of economic, social and cultural change.

See also

• unitary urbanism, a critique of urbanism as a technology of power by the situationists

Further reading

• Robert E. Park, The City - Suggestions for the Study of Human Nature in the Urban Environment (1925) and all the publications of the Chicago school
• Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
• Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture
• Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
• Peter Geoffrey Hall Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century
• Richard Sennett The Uses of Disorder
• Saskia Sassen (1997) The global city: London, New York, Tokyo
• Manuel Castells The Urban Question, Network Society
• David Harvey (1989)Flexible accumulation through urbanization
• Amin and Thrift (1997) "The Ordinary City"
• Henri Lefebvre (1970) "The Urban Revolution"

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