The Death and Life of Great American Cities

In the first four chapters of this book, the author, Jane Jacobs discusses why sidewalks are so important to a city and what makes them so significant. Jacobs differs with Howard's and La Corbusier's ideas and says that they are all irrelevant to how cities work.
She starts off by saying the three primary uses of sidewalks which are safety, contact, and assimilating children. She says that street safety is promoted by pavements which shows the public and private seperation. She says that people are more so protected or feel protected from the eyes of all the pedestrians on the streets and those watching out of their office building windows. By this she basically meant that over time pavements contribute to building trust between neighbors and in the community. Also, because of so many stores on the sidewalks of cities, the social life is enhanced because of all the storekeepers finding out about retail news and spreading it to pedestrians that enter their stores. A great point that she states is that sidewalk contact and safety combined together, puts a nice block on racial discrimination and segregation. It forms bonds and brings more people together.
Jacobs then goes ahead to say that trust cannot be built in artificial public places such as a game room in a housing project. She is going against the idea of the Radiant City and the Garden City. She further goes against these theories by saying that the sidewalks are a safe environment for children unlike big city parks because of the lack of security and surveillance in the parks. She says successful parks are those under a lot of use from companies and residents.
Overall Jacobs has her own ideas of what should make a great American city and it doesn't have anything to do with what Howard or La Corbusier think. To read further about Jane Jacobs and her ideas click on her homepage. http://bss.sfsu.edu/pamuk/urban/

Urban Planning

Urban planning was an attempt to rationalize and control the uncontrolled development in urbanization. People wanted to get the city back under control by architecture and zoning. There were a few different theories having to do with urban planning and how to make cities into what are today's suburbs. In the cities there was concern about crime, deviance, unwed mothers and people were wondering where the society was headed.
Ebenezar Howard who wrote "Garden Cities of Tommorow" had the idea to remake and contain the city. He looked at what populations are doing and how they are behaving. He said there are three magnets which draw people where to live. At this point people either lived in a city or a country. With this theory the city and country would come together and take little pieces from each to make today's suburbs. This created a co-op, this is where everyone collectively owns shares in a building and not just one or two people. The entire community benefits rather than some individuals. This also keeps prices moderate with people's incomes and limits the size to 30,000 people per town. Howard's five main things for this was decentralization, which is breaking up the big cities into little smaller cities, agricultural and industrial, cooperative land ownership, and large scale planning. The first town-country was Radburn, New Jersey back in 1929. To read more about Howard and to get a look at good old Radburn, NJ click here http://www.gmu.edu/library/specialcollections/plancomm.html

Concentric Zone Theory

During the 1920's Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess developed a unique program at the University of Chicago. They mainly based it around the city of Chicago at the time but they elaborated on the theory of cities and said that the most important force of a city was competition. Land was a big issue in their elaboration and how people competed for land which forced different groups and types of people into one section, such as the poor, and the wealthy into another area. This forced more areas to pay higher rents which forced businesses to move away from the center of the cities. Park and Burgess called this a succession. The model that they call the Concentric Zone Thoery said that cities would form five different concentric rings dealing with the central business district, transitional zone, working class, and residential zone, and commuters zone. The Circle starts with the cities center and moves outward away from the city. If you click on this link you will be able to see an image of the Concentric Zone Theory and will be able to understand it better. http://www.rri.wvu.edu/WebBook/Briassoulis/figure3.2c.jpg

The Great Towns

Frederick Engels elaborated on how England was the most powerful kingdom with lots of rivers, waterways, and colonies which made it the first nation to industrialize. In the 1780's there was about 20,000 people there and by 1801 there was 70,000 people! So in about 20 years the kingdom more than tripled it's population.
This kingdom worked because it had the Geimenschaft quality. This was a community where everyones was communistic and religion played a huge role. By saying communistic these people were basically like thye Amish in how everyone contributes and helps out. This type of life would not stay forever...
The Geisellschaft type of life soon took over. This is where people had self seeking interests, private property, and specialized labor was happening which is one peticular type of job. Wage and money started to be very important to people and people started reducing labor costs to induce profit.
In the Geimenschaft there was like a consensus which is an agreement. Mechanical solidarity and Organic solidarity started to take place as well as the Division of Labor. The Gemeinschaft all had to do with community, mechanical, status, and was traditional. The Geseillschaft had to do with contract, organic, class, and was modern.
To further understand more about these two bug "G" words you can click this link http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/undergraduate/introsoc/gemein.html

Industrialization and Cities

The Industrial Revolution and the age of exploration both began in the 16th century. This was happening in the European countries and resources and wealth eventually brought up the emergence of capitalism. Resources and wealth also made Empires where people had protection and guarantees which were basically laws back then. Laws came about because of the Empires that were forming. An interesting story about one of the first empires and how it was ruined follows...http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE1D9103EF937A1575BC0A965958260
On the other hand, colonies were also emerging. This brought up state of exception which was the suspension of all the laws and rights. No individual was protected and anything was able to happen without any consequences.
In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries the rise of the corporation occured, they took over from the monarchies. The most famous and successful corportaion was the East India Company. The other side of this is the Technological Innovations that occured. The Steam Engine was huge because it increased the productivity of machines, transportation, and agricultural production. Also, small scale local productions called Cottage Industries formed which are now present day factories. During this time population and capital produces the factory, it makes them larger and more efficient.
Two german words that have great meaning are Gemeinschaft which is the german word for community. This is basically ascribed status while the other word Gieseillschaft which is society associations and that status is achieved. A great term in this time was Contractual which meant that everything we do is based around a contract, such as arranged marriages . By this point people really started to become individuals.
Also at this point in time family really started to become important. The nuclear family which is your imediate family became important because it represented stability. An interesting facet is the wea;thier the family was , the less important family was to them. The poorer the family was the more important family was to those indiividuals. Over time capital forcesthese social relationships to change which ended up resulting in seperated individuals also known as Nonads.

The Stone Age Transforming

The Stone Age was around 9,ooo BC and around this time permanent settlers started to emerge. As this happened many other things changed which would make for a different future. Agricultural surplus and social organizations occured, things that make cities unique today.The Stone age/Neolithic period eventually turned into the Agricultural Revolution where warming took place and the ice age died off. As this occured so did favorable conditions for farming. Great innovations were created such as the stone axe, bow and arrow, and many metal tools. All of these gave humans huge advantages when dealing with agriculture.The next step was the Urban Revolution. This created larger settlements for people that were permanent. These settlement had up to 50,000 people living there. In this time period specialists started to form. These people would specialize in one task and be a professional at it. This made things more efficient for everyone and everything. Ruling classes also emerged and they were to keep eveything organized and to accumulate capital. Also at this time, writing had emerged in cities. Writing was a huge impact because it was used for recording taxations and just simply communicating and getting informatio out to the people that lived in the cities. Another big deal in this time was trade which enabled cities to get what they needed by doing trade.This time period just simply capped a huge turning point in the evolution of cities, and this time period is what made cities so special and unique. Cities are so neat because over time you can actually see time. It is more so with the European cities such as Italy and France where most of the city shows its history and background. http://www.frommers.com/destinations/slideshow.cfm?destID=228From this link above you will be able to see Italy and the art and historical architecture in all the famous cities.

First Blog

1/30/2009 - 5:00:14 PM

This is my first blog ever! I am going to start out lighty and hopefully progress every week with new blogs. It will be interesting to compare these first few blogs to my final ones.
Urban Sociology was an intersting class today as we learned many numbers and facts about cities and how they have emerged over centuries. 7,000 years ago was when the first cities came about. So cities have obviously not been on earth as long as humans have. Cities gradually came about in places such as Mesoptamia, Egypt, China, and Peru.
Many definitions in todays class were interesting such as a Mega City which is a city with 10 million plus people. Also the comparisons between the past and future predictions were very cool. There was only two Mega Cities in 1900 which were New York and London and inthe year 2020 there is to be predicted over 20 Mega Cities! In 1900 there was only one billion people on earth compared to 2030 where there is to be a predicted 8 billion, 8 times as many! If you think about this cities have just grown enormously over time. As the population grew, the cities grew.
People that live in cities have certain attitudes and a different kind of psychology emerges. They have what is called a Blaze attitude. With so much going on around them they just seem to zone out and not be distracted by all of the distractions around them. They seem all relaxed and in another zone.