Dear M. (2005), "Comparative Urbanisme",

Dear M. (2005), "Comparative Urbanisme", Urban Geography, Vol.26 No.3, pp. 247-251 In any geographical work, the inevitably idiographic creates problems in the move towards the nomethetic; that is, the specifics of place often render [rendre] generalization nugatory. p.247 The Chicagonistas assumes inter alia : a modernist view of the city as a unified whole, I.E., a coherent regional system in which the center organizes its hinterland; an individual-centered understanding of the urban condition, in which urban process is typically grounded in the overall urban condition, including spatial structure; and a linear evolutionist paradigm, in which processes lead from tradition to modernity, from community to society, and so on. For their part, Angelistas counter that the concept of an urban core organizing its hinterland is obsolete, since the urban peripheries now organize what remains of the center; that a global, corporate-dominated connectivity is balancing, even offsetting, individual-centered agency in urban process; and that a linear evolutionist urban paradigm has been usurped by a nonlinear, chaotic process that includes pathological forms such as gated communities and life-threatening environmental degradation. p.248 The principal logic in all Chicago models is that the center organizes the urban hinterland. The Los Angeles school precisely reverses this logic. For it is no longer the center that organizes the urban hinterlands but the hinterlands that determine what remains of the center. p.248 In contemporary urban landscape, "city centers" become, in effect, an externality of fragmented urbanism; they are frequently grafted onto the landscape as an afterthought by developers and politicians concerned with identity and tradition. Conventions of "suburbanization" become redundant in an urban process that bears no relationship to core-related decentralization. p.248 The task of comparative empirical analysis inevitably begins with a first case study, necessary for establishing a viable template from which comparative work can proceed. p.248 -World City: the emergence of a relatively few centers of command and control in a globalizing economy, increasingly referred to as "city-regions," and functionally integrated with national with national as well as international urban hierarchies. -Cybercity: the challenges of the information age and the rise of a "network society," especially the emergence of geographically well-defined "technopoles" of growth that contradict the much-touted capacity of connectivity to supplant the constraints of place. -Dual City: an increasing social polarization between the rich and poor, between nations, between the powerful and the powerless, between different ethnic, racial and religious grouping, between genders, and between those who are digitally connected and those who are not. -Hydrid City: the fragmentation and reconstitution of material and cognitive life inspired by global and regional migrations, including the collapse of conventional identities and communities, the emergence of new concepts of citizenship, and the rise of cultural hybridities and spaces. -Sustainable City: the emergence of a world-wide consciousness about the need to protect and conserve natural resources and to manage urban growth in order to ensure the future viability of global habitat by minimizing the ecological impact of human activities and settlements. p.250 In spatial terms, the border is not confined to la linea, nor even to border states but is an all-pervasive [generaliser] bi-national phenomenon. p.251 Today, it is oblivious that cities are subject to very different set of intentionalities, encapsulated by such terms as post-colonialism, post-Fordist flexible accumulation, postmodern urbanism, and the like. p.250 An urban political economy, launched in the 1970s, and inspired by a Marxian modernism focused on the general dynamics of capitalist society rather than the specifics of any particular city; and a postmodern urbanism, emerging in the 1980s out of a so-called "post-industrial" society, and inspired primarily by Los Angeles. p.251