Week 6: Global Cities

To me, the most interesting discussion that this week's reading brought up was the notion that the geopolitical creation of nations is now obsolete and the city-state is the new geopolitical unit of relevance. I am not particularly impressed with the modern nation state; colonial boundaries, war, division of cultures/families/people due to boarders created by war or colonization. However, to replace the nation state for the city state based on capitalist forces seems like a spectacular way to create groups of people and geographical reasons who a ignored losers in the global capitalist economy. 

When it comes to geopolitical relevance urban and rural need to be reasonably balance, even if their populations are not. I believe that it is easy for city folk (I count myself as one) to think that the world revolves around the city, but million of people who don't have any access to food (produced in rural areas) are useless. 

That's all for now.

Week 5: Uneven Geo of Capitalism

I really appreciated Susan Fainstein's article, Changing World Economy and Urban Restructuring, because while I respect and largely agree with the Marxist critique of capitalism it is often just that, at critique, no solutions, and no clear path out. Fainstein's article helps progressives visualize the possibility of change.

She explains that two world views, the macro and the micro are both correct and both should be understood, but that action usually happens on the micro scale. She does mention how national politics makes local change hard (think about California passing gay marriage, then getting a ton of national attention for it, and then voting it away again), but she suggests that at the community, city, and maybe even regional level that changing the relationship between government, capital, and people is indeed possible.

Week 4: Urban Agglomeration

Molotch's, City as Growth Machine raises the question, if you limit the population of a city what number is the upper limit? If the limit is 500,000, what if Susan and Scott have baby Alice and baby Alice turns out to be the 500,001 Santa Barbaran? Is she kicked out? Can local government really control in that way?

Some cities have none-developable greenbelts that prevent sprawl at the periphery of the city (like Portland); very different than a population cap. In the case of Portland the government is controlling land in a upper class community in a first world country. The same land use regulations are ineffective most Latin American cities, where squatters create informal where they are legally not supposed to be.

I agree that the race to the bottom between cities, counties, and states - to offer the best benefits to business, in the pursuit of jobs, but to the detriment to society as a whole - is a problem. However, I do not think that Beverly Hills or West Palm Beach style population control methods are replicable on a large scale; what works for a small group of organized elites does not work for the larger urban community.

I think Molotch's article is an interesting thought experiment, but I don't agree with his prescription.

Week 3: Questions and Episte

Engels and Deegan - I'm trying to connect these two readings and only finding weak ties. Here's what I got:

• Engels was observing society and thus a sociologist, not just a philosopher and political theorist.
• Deegan might have thought that Engels' observations were markedly male.

Aside from trying to make connections, Engels description of Manchester, England made me think of Carolina Maria de Jesus's autobiography Child of the Dark, which is her observations of living in a Sao Paulo slum in the 1950s. In reading Engels one likes to think that we've come so far, that society will not tolerate those kind of squalid conditions for our fellow humans, but yet we do.

Deegan's observations of sexism in the University of Chicago's school of sociology were interesting, but not ground breaking for a female raised in the 1980s/1990s. Just this past weekend my friends (male and female) and I discussed sexism in the work place, how likely it was that the man perpetrating it was completely unaware, what is to be done about it, etc.

I am acutely aware that the findings in Deegan's study relates to my work in public transportation planning. Attending the transportation research board's annual meeting is very much like walking into a white male frat party - transportation engineering and planning are very white male dominated in the US and Latin America (white is relative in Latin America). Aside from being conscious of this, I'm not really sure what my take aways from Deegan's work should be.