Urbanism

Urbanism is both descriptive and prescriptive.

Prescriptively, urbanism is the study and practice of creating human communities for living, work, and play; it covers the more human aspects of urban planning, where the prescriptive aspects of urbanism are more fully covered.

Descriptively, urbanism is the study of cities - their economic, political, social and cultural environment, and the imprint of all these forces on the built environment. Urbanism assumes that there is such an entity as the "urban" with its characteristic high population density, and that it can be clearly distinguished from the "rural". Some scholars ^{[[Citing sources citation needed]]} initially rejected the notion that there were any significant differences between the social and political order in the rural or so called urban, hence there was no point in a specifically 'urban studies'. However, this debate is largely out of date, and it is widely accepted (UN Habitat 2000) that cities do exist, in a fundamentally distinct state from rural areas, and that the world population is increasingly living in urbanized areas. However, it must be recognized that within the construct of an "urban centre" the hinterland is most important. In a modern world this hinterland is less easily defined due to modern communications technology, but in a pre-industrial, agrarian society, it would have been much more evident that the city cannot exist without a hinterland to supply it. This, however, assumes that such an agrarian society thought within the same framework as the modern, and in many cases (such as that of the Roman Empire or ancient Greece) this can be seen to be untrue; The Roman and Greek municipium or polis can be seen to be a social, political and economic entity consisting of "urban" centre and hinterland.

Having established that a 'city' is an ontologically distinct 'urban' as opposed to rural area, scholars have studied cities from several dimensions: the internalist perspectives which looked at spatial and social order within a city, externalist perspectives which viewed cities as stable points or nodes in the wider globalizing space of networks and flows, and the interstitial perspective which attempted to reconcile the two perspectives: by trying to understand how globalizing flows and external forces influence, and are influenced by, the social, temporal and spatial ordering of a city. Amin and Graham (1997) argue in 'The Ordinary City' that the urbanscape can best be understood as a site of co-presence of multiple spaces, multiple times and multiple webs of relations, tying local sites, subjects and fragments into globalizing networks of economic, social and cultural change.

Urbanism

See also

Further reading