Make up your own sentences using the words and word combination given below.

To be discerned from, to be better off, to be plagued by infectious diseases, to store food, to move food from countrysides to cities, to prevent from spoilage.

9. Group-Activity: Role-Play.

Imagine yourself as a city planner who has been asked to design a new town, one that would be built “from scratch” and would maximise the virtues of “community”. What would this new town look like in terms of the following characteristics? It might help you to describe this planned city.

1) Population size.

2) Racial or ethnic composition.

3) Housing (residential density).

4) Socioeconomic or social class composition.

5) Spatial locations of major activities (residences, factories, offices, shops, cultural centres, recreational centres).

6) Transportation system (public and/or private).

7) Other distinctive or unique features.

1. How do the characteristics you have described above increase the sense of community among residents of your planned city?

2. How is your planned new town different from the typical American city of comparable size? Which sociological orientation explains these differences best-urban ecology theory or one of the various political-economy perspectives?

Unit 21 The future of urbanisation

1. How does the political economy model explain patterns of urban land use?

From the perspective of the political economy of urban space, the shape of cities is the result of powerful groups who promote urban growth in ways that advance their economic and political interests. Those who control important institutions such as banks, corporations, and real estate use their power to shape the growth and development of cities to their advantage. Sociologists who work in the political-economy tradition have given special attention to three aspects of urban development.

First, Gordon describes the rise of the modern corporate city. The typical large American city, with its downtown cluster of skyscrapers housing corporate headquarters and its widely dispersed manufacturing facilities on the outskirts, is not merely the result of developing transportation systems, as urban ecologists would suggest. Rather, the corporate city was built in this way by and for those who control the largest corporations; its spatial pattern reflects the economic and political interests of this group. For example, by locating new manufacturing plants on the periphery of cities, capitalists were better able to control labour unrest by segregating workers from their peers in other plants, making it more difficult for seeds of discontent to spread from factory to factory. The corporate towers in the centre city are physical embodiments of the centralised power of modern corporations, and represent its complete separation of administrative from production func­tions.

Second, Molotch uses the political-economy perspective to interpret the growth of American cities. Molotch suggests that in a capitalist society, the expansion of cities becomes a source of increasing wealth and power for those who control urban land. The growing city, in effect, is a machine that increases the value of property and thus enhances the wealth of those who own it. Land-owning elites encourage the growth and development of cities: a powerful landowner, for example, might encourage the construction of a new convention centre next to the downtown shopping area. Although the convention centre might benefit shopkeepers and other citizens of the town, the primary financial beneficiaries are those who own land on or around the proposed building site (as land values skyrocket). Local government often fuels the growth machine, for example, by providing tax breaks to developers who build new offices or factories in the city.

Third, Feagin examines the relationship between urban development and changes in the world economy. From this view point, the growth and development of cities are not only the result of local landowners profiting from a growth machine. The exploding growth of Houston during this century, for example, is linked closely to that city's changing role in the worldwide oil industry. Houston grew as a global centre for oil technology and equipment as well as for oil refining and the manufacture of petrochemicals. When oil prices rise, Houston becomes a boom town; when they fall, Houston's growth slows as unemployment increases and offices fall vacant.

2. What is the future of urbanisation in the United States?

Two developing trends hint at the future of urbanisation in the United States. First, gentrification is the conversion of working-class, often run-down areas of a city into middle- and upper-middle-class urban neighbourhoods. Few big cities have not been touched by the movement of white-collar professionals into once-depressed neighbourhoods and by their efforts to refurbish substandard housing. The motives of gentrifiers are varied: some want to live closer to their work; others want to avoid the perceived boredom of some suburbs; still others want to be nearer to entertainment. Gentrification has been encouraged by local governments, who sometimes provide tax incentives to encourage the restoration of historic buildings.

Most people who gentrify are moving not into the city but from one part of the city to another. Gentrifiers display a common set of characteristics: they tend to be white, between 20 and 40 years of age, with above-average income, in professional or managerial occupations, and generally child­less. The former residents displaced by gentrification are less easily described: their incomes tend to be below average, and most have blue-collar or lower white-collar occupations. On other socio­logical dimensions, there is simply too much variation to identify a typical person displaced by gentrification. Some people regard gentrification as a minor variation on American patterns of expressing status (prestige) and wealth. Whereas their parents would have celebrated success with a ranch house on two acres in the suburbs, the sons and daughters, now in their thirties, measure success with a townhouse in some chic inner-city neighbourhood like Georgetown or Brooklyn Heights.

A second trend in urbanisation is the location of huge manufacturing plants in small towns that are some distance away from metropolitan centres, resulting in new " rural boom towns." The growth of manufacturing jobs in nonmetropolitan areas has grown by 24 percent; the corresponding growth in metropolitan areas is only four percent. The location of the General Motors plant in the once-tiny village of Spring Hill, Tennessee will have profound effects, some desired and others feared. Studies suggest that the plant construction will create new jobs, increase the flow of money through the local economy, improve housing, raise property values, and improve community ser­vices. Spring Hill, however, is likely to face several disappointments as well: local unemployment will not be reduced because outsiders (including persons employed elsewhere with GM) will be hired at the new Saturn plant; tax breaks given as incentives to attract GM to Spring Hill will significantly reduce revenues going to local governments; and the costs of providing additional services (from sewers to schools) is likely to exceed increased tax revenues. Finally, evidence sug­gests that residents of these rural boom towns-especially younger people-express more negative feelings about their lives than their counterparts in small towns that stayed small.