Reflections: The Science of the City

Allen J. ScottUniversity of California – Los Angeles

Some Definitions/Characterizations of the City

• “The city is a collection of one or more separate dwellings in a closed settlement.” Max Weber.

• “A city may be defined as a relatively large, dense and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals.” Louis Wirth.

• "The city … is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity.“ Lewis Mumford.

• “By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.” Jane Jacobs

• “Ne pas essayer trop vite de trouver une définition de la ville; c’est beaucoup trop gros, on a toutes les chances de se tromper.” Georges Perec.

The Genesis of Cities: The order of history and the order of analysis

• HISTORY:• Surplus of foodstuffs (hunting? agriculture?)• Division of labor (agricultural vs nonagricultural work)

• Further division of labor in nonagricultural work.

• Functional interdependencies.• Clusters of producers and families• Long-distance trade

Towards an Analytical Understanding of the City

• The abstract theory of: division of labor economies of scale and scope agglomeration• Proto-urban forms as an outcome of localized

economic growth and development – most notably after the Industrial Revolution.

Analytical Genetics Continued:The Urban Land Nexus

• Agglomeration by definition involves multiple human activities.

• These cannot all be accommodated at a single point in space.

• Hence a twofold locational process:1. Convergence towards a mutual center of gravity2. Allocation (e.g. by competition) to unique locations.

• Three generic and interdependent spaces: Production, social, circulation

Impossibility of “Equilibrium” under conditions of market competition.

Hence the urban land nexus calls insistently for institutions of governance.

(Cf. later comments on Commons)

Analytical generality but historical specificity

These general processes work themselves out in specific social and geographical contexts:

1. Level of development.2. Rules of resource allocation.3. Social stratification.4. Political authority and power.5. Cultural norms and traditions.

Examples

• Ancient Jericho• Ancient Babylon • Imperial Rome• Timbuktu in the Empire of Mali• Tenochtitlan in 15th century Aztlán

(contemporary Mexico)• Manchester in the industrial era in Britain• Los Angeles, Mexico City, Hong Kong

The City Thus Represents --

(a) a specific local scale of economic and social interaction (pace planetary urbanists) …(b) … generated by agglomeration processes …(c) … focused on the imperative of proximity … (d) …deriving in the first instance from the division of labor …(e) … expressed extensively in the urban land nexus ...(f) …and almost always endowed with governance arrangements that attempt to deal with the problematical effects (+ and -) of density and propinquity.

The eclecticism of existing urban theory

• The eclectic nature of urban theory/analysis: a failure to distinguish the necessarily urban from the contingently urban.

• i.e. a distinction between (a) those things that are contingently IN the city and (b) those things that are intrinsically OF the city qua an agglomerated land nexus. (Cf. Poverty)

• Eclecticism is intensified by currently fashionable:

• -- ordinary city theory, • -- assemblage theory,• -- postcolonial urban theory • with their insistence on difference,

particularity, “provincialization,” and ontological “flatness.

The City in Capitalism

• In analytical terms, the city emerges in capitalism as producers in selected sectors and their workers converge locationally around their own center of gravity.

• (At the same time, the city represents a basic condition for the social reproduction of capitalism. There is no historically realized version of capitalism where cities are absent).

Three very specific empirical versions of agglomeration and the urban land nexus:

• 1. The 19th century industrial town (Cf. Engels on Manchester).

• 2. The mass-production metropolis of the 20th century

• 3. The global city-region of the 21st century (cognitive- cultural capitalism).

The Commons

• A focus on agglomeration and the urban land nexus points immediately to the phenomenon of the commons – especially in cognitive-cultural capitalism.

• (i.e. what mainstream economics considers implicitly as normatively undesirable. The commons as an aberration, or, “market failure.”)

• The urban commons is one of the key foundations of urban viability:(a) Competitive advantages(b) Communal life (socialization and biopower)

• In cognitive-cultural capitalism, the commons is expanding rapidly : – (a) in cyberspace (Rivkin, Benkler, Rullani, etc. – (b) in the city:

• Agglomeration economies.• Communal epistemic and cultural resources (foundations of

Chamberlinian competition).• The creative field of the city.• The “smart” city• Socialization and habituation (Cf. Frankfurt School, Hardt and

Negri).• Public goods and institutions in order to optimize the commons

in the public interest

• Need for a reformulation of the science of the city:

(a) A thoroughgoing genetic theory of theform and logic of the city.

(b) A corresponding description of the city in cognitive-cultural capitalism.