15.4.2010
City Mosaic: Urban (Cultural) Ecology
gy
Timo Kopomaa, Prof.
15.4. Spring 2010
Course home page
• http://blogs.helsinki.fi/kopomaa/opetus/concepts‐and‐theories‐in‐urban‐studies/
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Focus: urban studies, multidisciplinary (communication studies, environmental
history, sociology, urban
history,
sociology, urban sociology, human
sociology, human ecology), Finnish
ecology), Finnish case studies
case studies
Theories &
• Theory explains the generalizations
• Abstract constructions
• Suits also for other data than what has been
observed
b
d
• Guides us to new facts and findings
• Compiles, systematizes, explains
• Problem: complex social world
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… Concepts.
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notion, idea.
Represents the phenomenon,
naming on the conceptual level.
theory … conceptual system
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City Mosaic: Urban (Cultural) Ecology
City
Ecological studies & key concepts
Critics & background
Urban land use models
’Urban‐socio‐cultural‐ecology’, content
Potential studies & topics
city/urban place
• A reasonably large and permanent
concentration of people within limited
territory.
• Closed living area with several dwelling places (Weber)
• Big size, density of people, heterogeneity (Wirth)
• Living place, where it is likely that people who do not
know each other will meet (Sennett)
• The beginnings: ritual‐political centre or
functional benefits?
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In the year 2000 top ten cities of the world
in terms of size of population are projected to be:
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1. Tokyo
2. São Paulo
3. Bombay
4 Shanghai
4. Shanghai
5. Lagos
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6. Mexico City
7. Beijing
8. Dacca
9 New York
9. New York
10. Jakarta
Impact of city life
• Deterministic theory & interpretation about
city: historically, decay, deprivation, hard life
• ‐ urban communities
• ‐ Simmel, Park, Wirth
Simmel Park Wirth
• Negative social & psychological effects: anomie, urban stress
• ”Now”: study of urban phenomena ‐ and best
practices ‐ more compositional theory of the city
Ecological studies, key concepts:
• Population size/composition /distributions
• related to areal units, physiographic features & time, • including questions of of
concentration/segregation/density/access to population, • population movements, including natural
increase, migration, succesion and assimilation. (Handbook for social research in urban areas, Unesco 1965)
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Concept: ecology
• Origins in Darwin’s web of life
• Term: ökologie (Ernst Haeckel 1834‐1919)
• Study of relations between living species, associations of different
of different species, and their
species and their physical
and biotic surroundings through the exchange of calories, material and information.
(The Social Science Encyclopedia)
 concepts (Park 1936; Chicago School):
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The web of life
Competitive co‐operation
Struggle existence
The balance of nature
Competition dominance succession
Competition, dominance, succession
Symbiosis
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Community, disturbance, climax equilibrium, invasion
Natural environment, zonal models
(The Dictionary of Human Geography)
• Emphasis on biological rather than political‐
economic forces operating in the environment
• ’The succesful’ took over the best locations
 spatial
i l sorting
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• The struggle for survival  land use patterns
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• E.W.Burgess, Zone theory: an ideal
construction of the tendencies of any town or
city to expand radially from its central
business district (the Loop).
business district
(the Loop)
Zone theory (1927)
Models of urban land use
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• Urban ecology emphasizes biogeophysical over
social structures and processes.
 BUT…
• Large cities produce new subcultures.
• Urbanism has unique consequences, including the production of ’deviance’, not because it destroys
social worlds – but because it creates them.
•  Compositional theory & view over the city, ”mosaic of social worlds” richness of opportunities & influence on population.
l i
• Critics: • Chicago School/ human ecologists; environmental determinism … naive analogies, crude
empiricism, functionalist inductivism, simplistic
notions.
• Within the framework of political economy of industrial
capitalism, the trend (partially under Marxist inspiration) has related
urbanism
more closely to issues of class, power and social movements. (Castells 1977)
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Back to the Early Urbanists
• Georg Simmel (1858‐1918): Metropolis‐essee
• Ferdinand Tönnies (1855‐1936): gemeinschaft,
gesellschaftin
• Chicago School/Human
Chicago School/Human Ecology 1920’s
• Louis Wirth (1897‐1952): Urbanism as a Way of Life ‐article
• Robert Park, Ernest W. Burgess
•  Marx, Engels, Weber, Simmel
• Friedrich Engel’s The Condition of the Working
Class in England (1845/1969)
• Max Weber : The City (1921/1958). Urban
y
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community. Market, fortification, administrative/legal system, form of association reflecting the urban life
• Louis Wirth (1938). Urban social contacts/ urbanity: impersonal, superficial, transitory
and segmental
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• The first field‐research monograph of the Chicago School of Sociology :
• Nels Anderson: The Hobo – The Sociology of j
the Homeless Man ((1923,, In Finnish Kulkumiehet – hobojen
elämää 20‐luvun Amerikassa, 1988)
• pioneer participant observation
Hobo‐institutions on a ”main stem” (servicescape)
• William F. Whyte (1943). Street Corner Society. urban ethnography: closed‐knit Italian–
American neighbourhood in Boston, anonymity, but also web of friendship, kinship
occupational linkages; a mosaic of urban villages
• Whyte emphasized the supportive role played
by the ”street corner society”; training for operating in the larger society.
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• Heikki Waris introduced to the Finnish scientists
the ecologial analysis and the modern
empirical research methods.
f
area
• The studyy of the Birth of the Workers
Kallio in Helsinki (Waris 1934) was historical
study, the description concentrated to the period and living conditions of 1900:
• strong relation between the residential
density of the area and the mortality rate.
How to Do Ecological
Research (1970)
• Map the area (pathways, movements etc.)
• Observation of social interaction (territories, ways of life, people)
of life people)
• Official statistics (births, deaths, sex)
+ A descriptive survey (types of activities etc.)
 Planners: liveable, serviceable city
• What is your ”weekly urban territory”? • Draw on the map your urban living/moving
area? 9
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Social and physical environments yield influential and latent environments
• Potential environment. Physical arena for potential actions and interpretations = robustness
of the environment
• Influential environment. The realized potential
environment, adopted by users
• Latent environment. The unrealized potential
environment resilience of the environment. Latency can be increased/decreased by physical
change. Latency may remain to be discovered .
(Herbert Gans, see Anderson 1978, On Streets)
… Chicago School
Human ecology (McKenzie) : a study of the spatial
and temporal relations of human beings
as affected by the selective, distributive and accommodative forces of the environment; of the environment;
humans compared to animals have purposive
actions and collective effects.
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Postmodern urban condition (see figure):
Field of opportunities
Consumtion oriented landscapes
Connections with the information highway
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Los Angeles school vs. new weberian studies
• Mega‐cities vs. medium‐sized cities
• Urban history, studies in Europe
vs. American Cities, studies
• Europeanization of the city: nurture and promote
local cultural activity in the city (cultural
in the city (cultural planning); planning);
celebration of ’the street’, a return to the human
scale
 ’European City of Culture’
• The European mature city & social security systems: e.g. reduced poverty among older people
• Sustainable development; robust city (Le Galès 2002)
 Lefebvre:
• The Production of Space (1991). Space is not
a neutral and passive geometry. Space is produced and reproduced
p
p
and thus represents
p
the site of struggle. 
• Open urban space, collectively consumed , common and shared object of consumption.
• The more dense the city is, the more there is struggle over space ‐ but also meetings in the space.
• Spatiality
is the term used to describe the dynamic and interdependent relationship between society’s
construction of space, and the effects
of space and the effects of space
of space
on society (Soja 1985).
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cultural ecology
• Cultural adaption, theory of cultural ecology
(1930’s)
• A view of human behaviour, description of ecological
interactions
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• Biological ecology: ecosystem, energy flow, cybernetics & system theory 1960’s 
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• Neo‐Darwinian thinking, socio‐ecology (1970’s )
Socio‐ecology
• To classify cities and towns
• E.g. how people actually cope with
environmental hazards
• Historical approaches
• Political environmentalism and environmental
development
• Contemporary human ecology : communication, transportation technologies, central city location
Emphasis on socio‐cultural aspects:
• cultural ecology. An approch to the study of the relations between a cultural group
(a mode of life associated with specific material and symbolic practices) and its natural environment.
and its
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’urban cultural ecology’:
• Observations: social worlds + cultural products, build
environment
• Multidisciplinary approach
• Places & their meanings, space hierarchies, functional
sectors (zones based not on class, race, family
on class race family modes, modes
but life styles, cultural preferences and necessities)
• Changing ways of life and meaningful everyday
environments
• ”Explain the birth and the modes of life of cultural groups
related to diverse environments, places and regions.” (TK)
Cultural aspect in urban ecology, potential case studies:
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Metabolism of the city, ICT
Swarm intelligense of the new‐nomads, ICT
Zones of the creative class
Epidemics
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Favorite urban place s of the rock fans
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Place.
• The contextual, mid‐1980s: people are socialized
as members of groups that are constituted in places, and the nature of those groups can vary
place to place. p
(Agnew & Duncan 1989)
from p
• A locale, locality (Giddens 1984): arenas within which
interaction occurs and group identity develops.
•  theory of time geography (Hagerstrand 1982).
• The importance of the nature of a place, sense of place  identity
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• Taking place seriously (Urry 1995): real interest
on writings, architectural designs, paintings, guide books, literary texts, films, postcards, advertisements music travel patterns, advertisements, music, travel
patterns
photographs etc.
• Consuming places  forms of the tourist gaze
romantic, collective, spectatorial, environmental, antropological …
tourist gaze, some points:
• Places are visually consumed, sight is constitutive for doing observations
• Visitors and local people gather to attractions
• Perceptional
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l environment
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h
have
to be
b seen in i
the historical context
• Experience‐driven society
City’n’RockScene
• Favorite places of Finnish rock star: sex shop, disco bar, Japanese restaurant, rock club, home tower  attractions for fans:
• to meet Him, to feel the atmosphere prefered by
Him mapping the traces/reference
Him, mapping
the traces/reference points of Him of Him
like all the other pilgrims (community, shopping)
• Local visibility, must for the members of the creative class? • Rock‐scenes: place marketing, city image
• City as a stage for festivals and concerts
• Atlas, device for the song writer…
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Trendy young people’s Salo Town 1955‐80
Salo Town
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”Ecology of Cosyness” ,
Favorite places of the youth in Salo (1955‐80):
2 film theatres
4 bars
4 bars
3 schools
5 clubs, halls
Bus station, sport field, square, street, department store, shops
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• Identity:
• Place identity (individual)
• Regional identity of the local people (Relph 1976):
• identities, stories
identities stories about who we are as local
as local people
(collective ),
us and them/the other = dynamic process
• Identity politics: based on stereotypes, typefying, otherness & distinctions
• The locale as a fragment in society
• Cultural
C l
l identities
id i i = exerciseing
i i of power
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