contemp

• Urbanism


  The restructuring of space
• Factors that restructure space

  • Large firms/corporations choosing where to place factories, R&D etc.
  • Government controls over land and industrial production
  • Activities of private investors buying/selling houses and land
• The financialization of urban space empowered owners of finance and capital to reconstruct urban space to meet their needs, with government allowing construction of needed infrastructure
• Urbanism and social movements

  Groups/organizations seeking reforms in society, often triggered by urban concerns like housing, pollution, parks etc. Marginalized groups trying to alter living conditions
• Informal urban networks are becoming the new normal for urban development, with growth of slums sparking movements to call for sustainable urban ecology
• Agrarian cities


  First cities in Sumeria marked technological development and innovation, with writing, wheel, plow, social institutions, private property, military power, patriarchy, slavery
• Agrarian cities unleashed inhabitants' creative potential to solve urban problems, leading to leaps in engineering, transport, agriculture, astronomy, writing, mathematics
• Industrial cities


  Factories and mass wage labour packed into city centres, with proletariat, industrial bourgeoisie, and urban poor emerging as new classes
• Post-metropolis/Global cities


  Cities that became hubs for global flows of capital, production, and services, with unique assets like universities, research, finance, culture
• Characteristics of global cities

  • Preeminence of specialized skills and human connectivity
  • Decent infrastructure, cleanliness, cultural/recreational facilities, and physical connectivity
  • Facility with English as global language
• Traits of global cities (Sassen)

  • Developed into 'command posts' for global economy
  • Key locations for financial/service firms influencing development
  • Sites of production/innovation in expanded industries
  • Markets for financial/service industry 'products'
• Global cities have differentiated functions within global networks, e.g. Taipei/Shenzhen in tech supply, Geneva/Nairobi in civil society, Dubai/Hong Kong in air transport, Washington/Brussels in politics
• Costs of global cities

  • Financialization limiting shared living spaces
  • Urban demand transforming landscapes, causing environmental degradation
  • Energy-intensive car dependence leading to pollution and congestion
  • Urbanization as a force of exclusion, with growth of slums
• Other costs of global cities

  • Housing inflation distorting local economy and upward mobility
  • Resentment towards migrant workers in lower-end jobs
  • Inequality and 'flattening of cultures' with homogenization
• Post-familial city


  Trends towards increasing density, high housing costs, weak urban education, remote work enabling, and women in workforce making family life more difficult
• Diminishing birth rates and aging population are a major challenge for cities, leading to segregation of generations
• Younger generations


  • Pursue hobbies, fashion, restaurants - personal pursuits not readily available to their homebound mothers or overworked fathers
  • Lifestyles are more important, and their personal networks mean more than family
  • Can be single, self-satisfied, and well
• Women's growing involvement in the workforce

  Necessary for decades in order for couples to afford children, but it also makes it more difficult for them to raise them
• Pervasive busyness


  Affects society in high-income countries, makes matrimony and child raising more problematic
• Biggest Challenge to the Cities: Diminishing birth rates and the aging population
• The shift to an aging population creates, particularly in Asia where urbanization is most rapid, the segregation of generations, with the elderly in rural areas and the younger people in cities
• The negative impacts of rapid aging and a diminished workforce are already being felt, even in such prosperous countries as Japan and Germany
• By 2030, Germany's debt per capita could be twice as high as that of a bankrupt Greece in 2014, and to help address the shortfall, officials have proposed more taxes
• Even in traditional, thrifty Asian nations such as Japan and Singapore, savings rates have been dropping, and there is growing concern over whether these countries will be able to support their soaring numbers of seniors
• In rapidly urbanizing, relatively poor countries such as Vietnam, the fertility rate is already below replacement levels, and it is rapidly declining in other poorer countries such as Myanmar, Indonesia, and even Bangladesh
• Urbanization changes us; it creates new environment, new ways of thinking, new patterns of work, of governance in production and exchange, of interaction between people of which we come to redefine ourselves and our relationship to the natural environment
• The Covid-19 crisis forced the city folks or the people in general to rethink and reevaluate their perception of and relationship to their environment and neighborhood
• Ethics of scarcity


  Citizens were forced to reuse old utensils and economize on food - goods such as flour, sugar, and eggs quickly disappeared from supermarket shelves
• Existential crisis


  The close presence of death, which was daily aired in the media and expressed in hair-raising figures, unleashed an existential crisis
• Millions of people, who until then had never worried about climate change, reconsidered their rushed form of life
• The coronavirus appeared to be an ally of the eco-lifestyle
• Materialism yielded to spiritualism
• Community, friends, and family became priorities
• Improving one's quality of life turned into the most recurrent New Year's resolution for 2021, and a different way of managing time seemed to be the key to achieving this: more time spent going for walks, cooking, enjoying hobbies, being with the family, etc.
• This change in values was reflected in consumption habits
• Luxury and superfluousness started to be regarded as irresponsible whims
• While tourism, hospitality services, and night-time leisure activities suffered tremendous losses, the acquisition of personal and domestic hygiene products and food - especially fresh fruit and vegetables - increased by over 30 percent
• Over 60 percent of those interviewed claimed that they would continue to buy local products once the health crisis was over
• A change in values and a change in consumption habits took place
• The message was to resist, and that forced cities to take a crash course in resilience