Urban Geography

Like geography itself, urban geography is defined more by a way of thinking than by its content. A wide range of topics and issues are viewed through the lenses of space, place, and environment as well as by the categories city and urban. What exactly city and urban mean has been the subject of much theoretical and philosophical debate. That dissonance has led different people to very different notions of what urban geography is. This entry summarizes some of the chief theoretical and philosophical approaches toward urban geography that are represented in the field and includes brief discussions of topics typically addressed in the field.

Some of the earliest approaches to urban geography developed out of an attempt by early- to mid-20th-century human geographers to spatialize 19th- and early 20th-century urban sociology. They married an emerging morphological human geography to a more process-oriented urban sociology, such that various social patterns and behaviors could be identified and understood as responses to a specifically urban environment. The logics of Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Ferdinand Tönnies, and later those of Louis Wirth, Herbert Gans, and Claude Fischer, were foundational here. They are perhaps best represented by the geographic models of urban structure made famous by Ernest Burgess, Homer Hoyt, Chauncy Harris, and Edward Ullman.

Also inspired by 19th- and early-20th-century social theory are a number of approaches that emphasize social structures and hierarchies of power. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Max Weber, among others, provided a continuing intellectual basis for various political–economic approaches to urban geography, where cities and urban space are both products of and inputs to capitalist social relations. Less materialist variants of these approaches are represented by, among other things, analyses of urban landscapes and neighborhood change in which the roles of culture and meaning systems are seen as crucial parts of the social structures and hierarchies of power in question. Recently, these have highlighted not only capitalist social relations but also patriarchal, racist, and heterosexist social relations.

The quantitative revolution of the mid-20th century led to an array of positivist approaches. On the one hand, there emerged a body of work focused on the morphology of cities and city systems, including location models (e.g., central place, bid–rent) and systems theories and models (e.g., rank–size rule). These spatial science approaches to the city presumed that human social life and its outcomes mimic the laws of geometry, physics, and/or biology. On the other hand, behavioral approaches purported to account for the vicissitudes of human behavior and the human[Page 518] condition by applying quantitative techniques and the scientific method to human behavior. For example, urban geography from these perspectives often traced out the time–space routines of individuals in an urban environment and their outcomes.

During the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the apparent failures of modernism (e.g., science, technology, reason) to deliver on their promises of a better world led to devastating critiques of positivism and structuralism. So-called postmodern and poststructuralist geographies have focused on fluid and unstable realities, multiple truths, and the politics of representation (including particularly the political power of semiotics and rhetoric). Often fueled by the anger and frustration of social movements whose participants felt excluded by more conventional approaches (including Marxism), these new approaches tend to approach the urban as texts in need of deconstruction (both analytically and politically). They focus on the often colliding and fragmented meaning systems reflected and reproduced in urban landscapes and designs as well as their connections to often elusive and highly contingent—but nonetheless real—exercises of power.

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