Patchwork Urbanism

Mapping a Patchwork Urbanism

In looking to describe and interpret the patchwork character of contemporary metropolitan landscapes, it is important to acknowledge that throughout history, cities have been unfolding in a relatively chaotic fashion. In terms of geographical location, the mercantilist era helped to stimulate many urban settlements around major seaports and the subsequent onset of industrialization and railroad transportation, which partly fostered the industrial city. The latter became quickly characterized by a strict division between the domiciliary spaces of the bourgeoisie and workers' quarters, which were often adjacent to the factories and workhouses. The consolidation of the industrial city in the twentieth century via the rise of Fordist mass production and mass consumption saw a notable division emerge between a concentrated downtown—with its cosmopolitan central business district; arts, cultural, and shopping facilities; and handsome town-houses—surrounded by a rapidly expanding periphery of largely low-rise suburban tracts. An extension and deepening of state power also saw formal urban planning emerge to shape much of the geography of development and land use. If clearly representing a spatial imaginary of a U.S. urbanism (and one reasonably captured by the Chicago School of Urban Sociology's concentric [Page 587]ring model), this modernist metropolitan landscape also did something to capture the shape of many towns and cities across much of the globe, from Brazil to Australia.

Patchwork Urban Economy

A retrospective reading of this urban form throws into sharp relief the less orderly, more chaotic metropolis of the early twenty-first century. Indeed, the urban planning scholar Ed Soja explicitly contends that the mid-twentieth century modern metropolis has been usurped by a postmetropolis. In a process that can no longer be simply described as suburban sprawl, postmetropolitan landscapes are being stretched out ever further and punctuated by a range of economic and social trends that are decentering the city to form an increasingly complex and polycentric urban geography. The sociologist Manuel Castells also considers how virtually all contemporary city economies are undergoing some fragmentation as they become enmeshed in the variable geometry of the globalizing network society. This can be seen in rapidly developing cities in China and in a globalizing city like Kuala Lumpur, where the state-led development of premium high-technology spaces appears to be more directly networked into global flows rather than toward their local contexts.

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