Urban Civilization : Causes And Effects Of Urban Pololiticization

Through a multitude of significant changes physically, conceptually, economically, and more, the societal reformation of cities in the Progressive Era had set themselves as the foundations of American civilization. The juxtaposition between the rich and poor statuses in these urban areas show the drastic separation within developing cities. Through this division caused a wide variety of living conditions, the majority of which held the overcrowded sections of cities where the population mostly stayed while the higher end communities had more luxurious lives. Through this success of entrepreneurship and economic growth from all aspects in cities, the entire landscape, both physically through innovative architecture and the perspectives outside rural and suburban areas had on them, had transformed for the better in these areas.

From 1890 to 1920, cities in the United States experienced a rapid growth that was unprecedented in years previous. This growth was caused by a number of factors and resulted in both positive and negative consequences. Such factors included, industrialization, technological advances, migration and immigration. Although American cities greatly improved by the expeditious urbanization, these factors also developed numerous challenges including pollution, sanitation problems, a need for environmental reform, political corruption, overcrowding, high crime rates and segregation.

Urban studies aims to develop an understanding the modern city metropolis. As Savage et al. have pointed out, the urban encompasses far more than just the physical city itself; understanding the city help us to understand many aspects of modern life (2003, pp.4). Many of its features, such as mass media and public transport systems have spread throughout society over the past century. Sociological studies of urban life began with the landmark publication of 'The City' in 1925 by sociologists Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Louis Wirth from the University of Chicago, students of Georg Simmel who shared his belief that the urban environment changed man's

Despite increased diversity across the country, America’s neighborhoods remain highly segregated along racial and ethnic lines. Residential segregation, particularly between African-Americans and whites, persists in metropolitan areas where minorities make up a large share of the population. This paper will examine residential segregation imposed upon African-Americans and the enormous costs it bears. Furthermore, the role of government will be discussed as having an important role in carrying out efforts towards residential desegregation. By developing an understanding of residential segregation and its destructive effects, parallels may be drawn between efforts aimed at combating

Well known in cities at the time were the City Beautiful movement and the city practical, however, social issues were merely pushed to the side. Wirka (1996) explains that “both are undoubtedly important movements in the history of planning” (p. 57), however, she goes on

“Words are not passive; indeed, they help to share and create our perceptions of the world around us. The terms we choose to label or describe events must, therefore, convey appropriate connotations or images of the phenomenon under consideration in order to avoid serious misunderstandings. The existence of different terms to describe gentrification is not an accident, neither is the plethora of definitions for it” (Palen & London, 1984, p. 6). SAY SOMETHING Peter Marcuse (1999) argues that, “how gentrification is evaluated depends a great deal on how it is defined” (p. 789). Defining gentrification properly is necessary for anchoring an analysis of neighborhood change, particularly in light of recent scholarly efforts to replace the term (to describe the process) with less critical names like: ‘urban renaissance’,

Recent events that have highlighted racial tension in the United States have had even a larger number of opinions that vary regarding why the nation continues to struggle with such a challenging issue. In our text Chapter 6 titled “The City/Suburban Divide” (Judd & Swanstrom, 2015, p. 136) identifies a subject that very well may contribute to the tension. A reference to the “urban crisis” describes a landscape that is littered with “high levels of segregation, inequality and poverty, along with racial and ethnic tensions.” (Judd, et al., p. 165) Many scholars argue that the crisis was a result of the demographic changes the nation experienced following World War II as advancements in technology and infrastructure aided White Mobility. The term “White Flight” has been used to describe a massive relocation early in the twentieth century when the White Middle-Class population left the cities for suburban areas following the great migration.

Lipsitz uses practices of the housing market to illustrate how the diverse practices provide the privilege to white people in the current institutional arrangements. The capital resides in suburban houses has proven many white families’ economic mobility, although few white Americans recognize that segregation has historically been the guarantee of suburban real estate values. Housing policy and real estate practices, banking and finance, education, tax codes and subsidies, the behavior of the courts, and the norms of urban policing are all heavily inflected by a racialist logic or tend toward racialized consequences. Lipsitz delineates the weaknesses embedded in civil rights laws, the racial dimensions of economic restructuring and deindustrialization, and the effects of environmental racism, job discrimination and school segregation. Lipsitz describes the centrality of whiteness to American culture, and explains how the whites have used identity politics to forward their collective interests at the expense of racialized groups, including African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos.

In the constantly changing economy of cities, the growth of city housing is oftentimes neglected. In “Cities Mobilize to Help Those Threatened by Gentrification” Timothy Williams recounts how gentrification has evolved over the years. Mentioning how cities have changed in order to appease the younger professionals, Williams shows how the city itself is in jeopardy due to the tax increases. Slowly loosing their faithful residents as well as historic culture cities face a big deal. Williams gives quotes from faithful residents, “…long time homeowners are victims of the success story”, (Williams 346). In “Cities Mobilize to Help Those Threatened by Gentrification”, Williams uses his credible quotes and modern statistics to generate the reader’s emotions, with desire to change how city officials go about gentrification in culturally infused cities.

Racism is a constitutive feature of capitalism. Along with other modes of domination, racism constructs and enshrines those social hierarchies that legitimize expropriation, naturalize exploitation, and produce the differential value capital instrumentalizes in the interest of profit (Rodney 1981; Robinson 2000; Melamed 2015; Pulido 2016). Historically in the U.S., race has been produced in and through space. Housing, lending, zoning and environmental policies, as well as foundational and ongoing confiscatory processes at the heart of racial capitalism have linked race, place, and power in pernicious, “death-dealing” ways (Gilmore 2002:16; Lipsitz 2007; Fraser 2016). From the frontier to the plantation, the border to the reservation, the constitutive geographies of U.S. nationhood have inextricably bound race and space. Scholars of racial capitalism embed uneven development within this active and ongoing co-production of race and space. They emphasize that social difference is foundational, not incidental, to the production of the uneven spatial forms that underwrite racial capitalism. Race has been produced with and through space via urban renewal, restrictive covenants, systemic abandonment and the ‘racialization of state policy’ (Gotham 2000:14) by which the benefits of housing, lending and other urban policies have been afforded to some and denied to others (see Coates 2014; Shabazz 2015 for Chicago). Thus, vacant land and buildings on Chicago’ s South Side are not

The term Gentrification was coined by a British Sociologist Ruth Glass to describe the movement of middle class families in urban areas causing the property value to increase and displacing the older settlers. Over the past decades, gentrification has been refined depending on the neighborhood 's economic, social and political context. According to Davidson and Less’ definition, a gentrified area should include investment in capital, social upgrading, displacement of older settlers and change in the landscape (Davidson and Lees, 2005).Gentrification was perceived to be a residential process, however in the recent years, it has become a broader topic, involving the restructuring of inner cities, commercial development and improvement of facilities in the inner city neighborhoods. Many urban cities like Chicago, Michigan and Boston have experienced gentrification, however, it is affecting the Harlem residents more profoundly, uprooting the people who have been living there for decades, thus destroying the cultural identity of the historic neighborhood.

Chinatown, Olvera Street, and Compton all contributed to culturally diversity and the expansion of Los Angeles. Although Los Angeles has become rich in cultures, its evolution did not go without racial tensions and segregation. With the arrival of blacks from the south, white-Los Angeles did always recognize the minority community. Angelenos did not always embrace diversity with pride, but perhaps the sad part is not the fact that racial segregation took place, but the fact that it was not created by just the individual, but also by the organization. Federal programs like the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Homeowner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) divided up Los Angeles into a complex socio-economic racial-class system. The influences of the local level influenced the federal level and revolutionized the finance industry. (Avila, lecture 2/5/02) These federal organizations blatantly labeled minorities as derogatory, uneducated, second-class citizens that brought down property value in “white” neighborhoods. Latinos and Black were often labeled as a “minority problem” and even as a “disease” on official HOLC documents. The HOLC implemented strict government guidelines and kept maps of white neighborhoods confidential. It also devised a formal and uniform style of appraising homes by breaking neighborhoods into race classifications by letter. As Waldie states, “The Montana Land Company made it clear that lots were

Cities are generators of economic life and source of changes in the world. Thereby, Jane Jacobs in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities puts into relief the role of cities on the social and economic levels, while denouncing the disastrous consequences of urban renewal programs. To that extent, in chapters 2 and 3, she discusses "The Uses of Sidewalks”, arguing that over all people need safety and trust in their city. Therefore, first she claims the necessity of keeping streets and sidewalks safe because they are the “vital organs” of cities (29). Secondly, she argues that the functioning of cities should be organized in order to foster human interaction in which “casual public

In Jane Jacobs’s acclaimed The Life and Death of Great American Cities, she intricately articulates urban blight and the ills of metropolitan society by addressing several binaries throughout the course of the text. One of the more culturally significant binaries that Jacobs relies on in her narrative is the effectively paradoxical relationship between diversity and homogeneity in urban environments at the time. In particular, beginning in Chapter 12 throughout Chapter 13, Jacobs is concerned greatly with debunking widely held misconceptions about urban diversity.

New Urbanism, a burgeoning genre of architecture and city planning, is a movement that has come about only in the past decade. This movement is a response to the proliferation of conventional suburban development (CSD), the most popular form of suburban expansion that has taken place since World War II. Wrote Robert Steuteville, "Lacking a town center or pedestrian scale, CSD spreads out to consume large areas of countryside even as population grows relatively slowly. Automobile use per capita has soared, because a motor vehicle is required for nearly all human transportation"1. New Urbanism, therefore, represents the converse of this planning ideology. It stresses traditional planning, including multi-purpose zoning,