Essay Plan
With reference to a city from the list below, write a critical essay on ONE of the topics
covered in the module. In your response, explain why an urban geographical perspective is
necessary to an understanding of this topic.
The cities include:
1. London
2. LA
3. Paris
4. Copenhagen
5. Amsterdam
6. Berlin
7. New York
8. Chicago
9. Hong Kong
10. Sydney
11. Singapore
12. Johannesburg
13. San Francisco
14. Miami
15. Toronto
16. Vancouver
17. Mexico City
18. Lagos
19. Moscow
20. Shanghai
21. Buenos Aires
The module topics relevant to this essay include:
Globalization and the global city; gentrification; urban mobilities; inequality, division and
difference; urban politics; global South urbanism; city futures; cities and nature.
Urban geographical perspective:
geographical location (global/local) and spatial relations (social, economic, cultural, for
example) add to the understanding of the topic.
With reference to the city of London, write a critical essay on inequality,
division and difference. In your response, explain why an urban geographical
perspective is necessary to an understanding of this topic.
Introduction:
What is a city? What makes London a city?
The defining of a city is subjective—could be attracted to its offers or wanting to get away
from it e.g. how holidaymakers choose to advertise cities.
Features of the city can also be found outside of the city—but smaller in scale; is size
distinctive to what cities are?
A particular combination of elements to be a city?— very few cities shave the same mixture
of elements/features; something can be a city feature yet not all cities will have it and it
doesn’t define exactly what a city is.
“We tend to conflate the physical and the human aspects together and, while we can say with
some confidence what we mean by ‘urban’ in physical terms, it is much more difficult to spell
out its social significance.” – Robson, 1975, p.184
What is a urban geographical perspective? Why will it contribute to the topic at hand?
Urban geography seeks to explain the distribution of towns and cities and the socio-
spatial similarities and contrasts that exist between and within them. If all cities were
unique, this would be an impossible task. However, while every town and city has an
individual character, urban places also exhibit common features that vary only in
degree of incidence or importance within the particular urban fabric. All cities
contain areas of residential space, transportation lines, economic activities, service
infrastructure, commercial areas and public buildings. In different world regions the
historical process of urban evolution may have followed a similar trajectory. Increasingly,
similar processes, such as those of suburbanisation, gentrification and socio-spatial
segregation, are operating within cities in the developed world, in former communist
states and in countries of the Third World to effect a degree of convergence in the
nature of urban landscapes. Cities also exhibit com-mon problems to varying degrees,
including inadequate housing, economic decline, poverty, ill health, social polarisation,
traffic congestion and environmental pollution. In brief, many characteristics and concerns
are shared by urban places. These shared characteristics and concerns represent the
foundations for the study of urban geography. Most fundamentally, the character of
urban environments throughout the world is the out-come of interactions among a
host of environmental, economic, technological, social, demographic, cultural and
political forces operating at a variety of geographic scales ranging from the global to the
local.
THE SCOPE OF URBAN GEOGRAPHY
Urban geographers are concerned to identify and explain the distribution of towns
and cities and the socio-spatial similarities and contrasts that exist within and between
them. There are thus two basic approaches to urban geography:
1. The first refers to the spatial distribution of towns and cities and the linkages between
them: the study of systems of cities.
2. The second refers to the internal structure of urban places: the study of the city as a
system.
In essence, urban geography may be defined as the study of cities as systems within a
system of cities.1Figure 2.1indicates the scope of urban geography as well as the
subdiscipline’s links with other branches of geography. The diagram also indicates the
power of urban geography to synthesise many different perspectives so as to advance
our understanding of urban phenomena. This eclectic approach to the analysis of urban
places extends beyond geography to incorporate research findings and knowledge
across traditional disciplinary boundaries. The integrative power of urban geography is
a key characteristic of the subdiscipline.
A second principal characteristic of geographical analysis of the city is the centrality
of a spatial perspective. This distinguishes urban geography from cognate areas of
urban study such as urban economics, urban sociology or urban politics. We shall see
later that there is a long-standing debate among social scientists over the relative
importance of spatial and social forces for the explanation of urban phenomena. However,
as we saw in Chapter 1, it is important to be clear about the place of space in urban
geography. By acknowledging the importance of spatial location we are not implying that
space per seis the key explanatory variable underlying patterns of human activity in the city.
The significance of space varies with context. For example, spatial location is of no real
significance in the electronic hyperspace occupied by flows of finance between cities in
the global economy but maybe of fundamental importance for the spread of infectious
diseases in a Third World squatter settlement. The spatial perspective of urban
geography is of real analytical value because, as Massey (1985) observed, the world does
not exist on the head of a pin.
City has social significance:
Tangible aspects vs. intangible aspects—
Intangible qualities of city life that makes it distinctive e.g. luxury and poverty, amenity and
pollution, tradition and innovation, order and disorder, volatility and conflict, difference and
indifference, public services and welfare provisions, freedom and dependency (tensions).
Experiences of the city will differ—perhaps due to location.
Cities exaggerate relationships—more intense activities.
Cities contain different physical features and experiences—stories to tell.
What will be discussed in the essay?
