How useful is the identification of tensions to an understanding of cities dd304

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TMA 1 DD304 C G BRAISBY T38011110

How useful is the identification of tensions to an understanding of cities?

The identification of the tensions that exist within a city are vital to enable us to understand cities and the way we imagine them.  Cities are great open intensities, where commodities, information, products and people are brought together.  As a result of this great coming together we are left with a range, diversity and difference that is not found, at such a scale, in places other than cities.

One key facet of the book is how the city cannot be understood just by looking at its physical geography, individual communities and networks, it is the interaction of these communities and networks that are centred within, yet reach out beyond, the physical limits of the city.  The difference and diversity of these heterogeneous networks and associations within a city lead to tensions as these groups are found in close proximity.

To understand a city we need to look beneath its overall impression and look at how these networks and associations interact or not with each other.

On first impression a city can seem to be a very orderly place, a set of rhythms and flows that can be found in most cities around the world, with some local variation.  People seem to flow as one as they head for work or carry out the many services that a city needs, what is not apparent is the way in which the residents of cities have little day to day interactions.  Individuals harbour indifference to others that they may meet on the streets and mass transport systems as they travel from home to work and back again.   Within the daily rush hour those returning home following their night jobs, such as cleaners and security guards, are lost in the sea of individuals working ‘normal’ office hours.

Louis Wirth suggests that because of the large numbers of individuals living in close proximity that ‘contacts of the city may be face to face, but they are nevertheless impersonal, superficial, transitory and segmental’ he sees this behaviour as a form of immunisation of individuals from others expectations, there are too many people to get to know them all.  We have to remember that Wirth was writing at the time of the depression and that this may have had some impact on his observations.

We see that the residents of the city are freed from traditional senses of community, they see no compulsion to mix with individuals that they feel they have no connections with, there are groups and networks they can connect with and there are groups and networks that they can treat as others, the great variety of people leads to a greater variety of social networks that people can choose to connect to.

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The essence of Wirth’s theories is that individuals can choose with whom they mix and associate with, outside of traditional pressures they have greater freedom.  This choice of association leads to the spatial segregation of groups as they choose not only to identify with each other but also form their own neighbourhoods.

By forming spatially segregated communities individuals start to exclude others from not only their associations and networks but also from their geographical location.  Power relationships lead to the rich forcing out the poor from their residential districts as prices rise along with the desirability of the ...

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