Advanced Urban Geography; readings + lectures
Universiteit Utrecht
2024
GEO4-3903
English summary with some Dutch notes
Includes: All the lectures, own summaries of all the literature and ChatGPT literature summaries
Does not include: summary of Shields, R. (2013)
Lecture 0: Course positioning & instruction (17-09)
How do cities change over time?
Glaeser “Triumph of the City”:
The idea of what a person is → economist view
How cities make us successful
Geography aspect: what people do, lot of things are missing, especially the social perspective
Virtual as well as physical mobility, they intertwine
Trends
- From a place-based towards a person-based society
- Increased physical and virtual mobility
- Less tied to your neighborhood, less important than it used to
- Where you go and who you know
Movement, activities and interactions
- Activity fragmentation
- e.g. door o.a. ICT/technologische ontwikkelingen kan je activiteiten overal en op verschillende
tijden uitvoeren → more flexible and mobile
- Accessibility is an issue, inequality (urban environments offer more opportunity than rural one)
Spaces and spheres
- Multiplex city
- City as a network (of different scales) with relations (social, economic)
- The practices that matter that produce spaces and spheres
How are we going to research this?
Concept, theories and research. Their connections and flows.
Post-structuralism
- “Meaning and action must be set in a context of extensive relationships…meanings and actions
cannot be seen as simply manifestations of underlying structures - they proliferate in complex and
unexpected ways, depending on the relations established between subjects and objects”
(Murdoch, 2006, p.9)
,Assemblage urbanism
- “Assemblage thinking is a manifesto for the multiplicity and indeterminacy of space and spatial
formation” (Qian, 2020, p. 85) → things that are emerging, growing, developing, it’s a process,
not really ending
Contexts
- Describe the circumstantial environment for certain activities to take place
Contextual approaches, including:
- Spatial trialectics approach
- Daily activity path approach / Time geography
- Embodied experience approach / Sensuous geography
- Urban systems approach
- Daily life domains approach
- Neighborhood effects approach
,Lecture 1: The production of public space: discourses, practices and identities
- Analyzing discourses of actors involved in the city centre redevelopment, resulting changes of
public spaces and consequences for daily life practices and identities in city centres
- Discourse = an ensemble of ideas, concepts and categories through which meaning is given to
social and physical phenomena, and which is produced and reproduced through an identifiable set
of practices (Hajer & Versteeg, 2005, p. 175)
Ideas of how cities should change; how it should look like in the future
Entrepreneurial city/urbanism
Managerism → entrepreneurialism. Response to an urban crisis (especially in the 70s, 80s → what’s the
new economy? what’s the new discourse?) leisure, tourism, etc.
- Everyone is competing all over the globe
- Not only people are mobile, ideas as well, they travel from one city to another
- Successful ideas are being copied to other cities
- Image of new consumer: where does it come from? how does it materialise?
Spatial triad (important!)
Constantly interacting, the interaction between the three produces space
- Spatial practices (perceived space): the physical city, its maintenance, redevelopment and the
daily routine of everyday life (Leary, 2009, 196).
“From the analytical standpoint, the spatial practice of society is revealed through the deciphering
of its space” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 38)
- Representations of space (conceived space): comprise “conceptualized space, the space of
scientist, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers…” (Lefebvre, 1991,
38). Where the power tends to be, top-down power. Intellectual conceptions of urban areas for
analytical, planning and administrative purposes. Planned/intended use of space.
- Spaces of representation (lived space): “space as directly lived through its associated images and
symbols and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’ (Lefebvre, 1991, 39)
These spaces take shape though the daily routine of users. (more a bottom up process).
They are the sites of resistance and counter-discourses that have either escaped the purview of
bureaucratic power or manifest a refusal to acknowledge its authority. A space of imagination and
emotion which may be linked to the clandestine side of social life.
→ Tension and conflict between the three
We give meaning to space (we create it)
“Homeless people would create counter-spaces in shopping malls?”
Counter space could move into the representations of space
- Urban space as a social product
- “Sites that counter the dominant organisation of space and which refuse a predatory logic of
capital: they are places valorized in terms of use rather than exchange value” (Tonkiss, 2005,
p.64)
- Representations of space/ conceived: dominant
City space (Leary, 2009)
, = not natural, but constituted by a physical presence and social processes
= constituted by social relations = constituted by space = constituted by social relations = … → forming a
‘spatial triad’
City centre redevelopment
Image of new consumer
“Shopping is an experience” (and gets promoted)
Consumer mobility: investing to keep pace with and outperform competitors
Competitive feeling: striving for distinctiveness, fear of ‘losing’ and believing in ‘winning’
- Shopping more for just looking instead of always buying something
- Functional facilities: designing shopping themes and multifunctionality
- Shopping centres should not be a space where people just to their shopping, but it should be a
space that people want to visit
- Physical form, designing shopping routes and circuits (e.g. Flying Tiger, Normal met 1 lange
route)
- ‘Walking in circles’ → weg kwijt dus meer winkels langs en geld uitgeven (zoals Westfield Mall)
Exclusion and resistance
- ‘Cosmopolitan city centre’ (lot of cities are marketing themselves as cosmopolitan)
- A form of difference which is planned, regulated and commodified as part of the marketing of the
city
- Example new shopping area Nijmegen: ‘Verbonden te skateboarden’ → skaters distract shoppers
- Strategies of homeless
- Resisting exclusion
- Resisting ‘spatial identities’ (that space is only there for consumers)
- Resisting homelessness identities
- Resisting ‘personal identities’
- To retain their pre homeless identity
- Through the presentation of a respectable self
- Dis-identifying…..
Counterspace
…a counterspace in opposition to the one embodied in the strategies of power (p. 381)
Power in the hand of policymakers, planners, etc. top down imagination
How you should behave in it (conceived)
“Sites that question the dominant organization of space and which refuse a predatory logic of capital; they
are places valorized in terms of use value rather than exchange value (Tonkiss, 2005, p. 64)
“The open-ness of the urban has been a key pathway in which modernist society capitalized on innovative
ideas. These are often from outsiders who disrupted the status quo…This makes the open city a machine
for creative social and economic development” (Shields, 2013, 347)
Temporary, ‘in between’ spaces
How a counterspace embraced policymakers, hoort bij city as a creative city
