Geography 552: Urban Systems
Update: 4 April. I recently discovered that it is possible for me to push the final paper deadline a bit later than I once believed. (UBC has lots of rules and regulations, but many of them are informal, contradictory, or simply never written down. I asked one of our dedicated staff members to ask precisely what the cut-off date was to ensure that grade submissions would not cause problems for students.)
So, the revised deadline for the final paper is 9:00 AM, Friday, May 2. The syllabus has been revised. All other admonitions and policies on the syllabus still stand. Your last opportunity for feedback prior to the final deadline is 9:00 AM, Tuesday, April 8. I will be traveling from April 15 through April 27. I do not check email while I am traveling.
If you are having difficulty getting started on the writing, you may be interested in this.
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No readings are required before our first class, but if you do have time, I recommend you take a look at this: Michael Kahn (1971). "The Seminar." Unpublished manuscript. Santa Cruz: Kresge College, University of California - Santa Cruz. [Thanks to Jayme Walenta and F. Bonnie Kaserman for recommending this piece, which is also used in a course at the University of Kentucky.] We certainly won't use Kahn's recommendations as absolute, rigid straightjackets, but many of the individual and collective suggestions and insights are very much worth consideration.
If you can't make it to our first class, please read the updated syllabus, and make sure you attend the next class meeting. Stop by my office for a chat (see this for my office hours), or send me a note for access information for course materials. But for other issues, please use good judgment before firing off emails asking about issues described in the syllabus.
Urban Journals
For reference, here's a small sample of some of the best places to find the latest peer-reviewed scholarship on cities and urban life. Let me know if you'd recommend that I add other journals to this list. Please note that you may need to be working on a computer at UBC, or working through a proxy server or Virtual Private Network, for these links to give you full access to the articles.
Critical Measures of Urban Inequalities
This course examines the use of systematic and synthetic analytical methods to document, diagnose, and challenge urban social inequalities. 'Systematic and synthetic analytical methods' is an inconvenient, cumbersome phrase, but it is necessary to convey an accurate description of our task: to mobilize a spirit of caclulated orderliness to break down or dissolve complex problems into constituent parts for detailed study, and to assemble the various parts into a coherent whole. We will consider the production and distribution of quantatitive data on urban phenomena at various geographical scales; the use of univariate and multivariate descriptive and inferential statistical techniques, models, and mathematical metaphors, mappings, and visualizations; the deployment of systematic searches of press, legislative, legal, and regulatory databases; mixed-methods approaches seeking to break down the quantitative-qualitative dualism; the construction of compilations, indices, and tabulations derived from abstractions of qualitative data sources; the use of historical, political, and legal analysis to diagnose the history of databases and indicators produced and used by governmental entities and private corporations; and progressive, activist organizing efforts to counter state- and corporate-driven priorities in measurement.
Our work in this seminar is premised on five key assumptions. First, the intensification of urban social inequality over the past two generations is deeply problematic, and demands a sustained commitment of theoretically-informed empirical research, activist commitment to organizing and social justice, and careful strategic engagement with existing structures of law and public policy. Second, human geographers should be part of the interdisciplinary effort to document, understand, and challenge urban inequality. Third, geographers will be excluded from large parts of this interdisciplinary effort if they are unable to engage with the array of methods and techniques recognized across many of the social sciences. Over the past generation, many geographers have been taught to avoid these techniques (especially quantitative or statistical approaches), because of the ascendance of multiple, influential, and competing "post-positivist" epistemologies. Despite the foundational disagreements among post-positivist approaches, they do find common ground in a) a rejection of positivism as a fundamentally flawed epistemology, b) a presumption of the equivalence of quantitative and statistical methods with positivist epistemological claims, c) a suspicion of quantitative and statistical techniques as instruments of state surveillance, governmentality, and oppression, and d) a commitment to qualitative methods as epistemologically superior and politically progressive. Fourth, the shared assumptions of post-positivist approaches are historically and socially constructed; linkages between methodology and epistemology are negotiated and chosen, as are the presumed dichotomies between qualitative and quantitative inquiry. Fifth, these shared assumptions become facts -- quite literally, things that are done -- when they are widely performed and repeated. When talented, hardworking young scholars who see themselves as politically progressive, intellectually ambitious, and theoretically cutting-edge decide to avoid learning methods perceived as quantitative, statistical, or otherwise 'positivist,' the result is a powerful self-selection process. Each scholar who makes this decision helps to reduce the pool of quantitative skills amongst political progressives, while also relinquishing the opportunity to communicate with (or challenge) conservative quantitative scholars and policy analysts on their own terrain.
Things Done, Things That Could be Done
Not long ago, Robert W. Lake, Co-Editor of Urban Geography, offered a frank and sobering assessment of the state of much social science research under the simple, provocative title, "Just the Facts." Lake is anything but a hardcore just-the-facts positivist. But amidst the horrors of impending war and worsening social exclusion and structural inequality, he noted that "One would be hard pressed to discern the severity and pervasiveness of these matters in the pages of most academic journals." Lake suggested that we have lost the spirit of Herbert Gans, Michael Harrington, Gunnar Myrdal, and others who were "prompted by a moral repugnance of observable inequalities and an insistent, unquenchable optimism that society could and would do better if only the facts were placed in evidence." Lake's lament is of course one voice among many in the continuing scholarly debate on the purpose, meaning, and relevance of urban research. Yet his assessment is particularly valuable as a reminder of how much has changed in the last generation, as urban geographers have questioned the meaning, limits, and relevance of structural imperatives, observable inequalities, and the facts.
Can we recover any of this unquenchable optimism? What can be done to place the facts in evidence, and to mobilize them to challenge urban inequalities, observed and otherwise? Can society do better? In this seminar, we tackle these questions from initial premises that "critical engagement and scholarly rigor are understood as compatible properties" and that for better or worse the links between scientific means (epistemology, methodology, technique) and ends (politics, morality, ethics) are contingent and contextual, not necessary and immutable. Our goal is to marshal a diverse set of theoretical, methodological, and empirical traditions to forge a 'hybrid' geography that can serve as an instrument of strategic and tactical maneuvers for social justice and new emancipatory geographies. The choices involved in fusing divergent traditions are never free of tightly woven networks, structures, and constructions of socio-cultural meaning and power; yet any decision to abandon methodologies on the basis of their historical abuses is a risky move of unilateral disarmament. As Adorno put it: "Genuine refutation must penetrate the power of the opponent and meet him on the ground of his strength; the case is not won by attacking him somewhere else and defeating him where he is not." Insurgent quantitative practices, and a strategic positivism chastened by our witness to the reactionary appropriation of the legitimacy claims of objectivity and metaphysical realism, can help the urban geographer committed to social justice to penetrate the power of her opponent and meet him on his own territory, to create new and emancipatory urban systems. Accordingly, we will examine a series of research initiatives that fuse quasi-positivist empirical analysis of urban inequality with critical social theory, in a pluralist recognition of "the rich tapestry of the field as it has been woven throughout its recent history, nourished by the quantitative revolution, the rise of Marxism and humanistic geographies, and the effervescence of feminist, postmodern, and post-Colonial thought." Case studies include the magnification of inequalities in so-called 'global' cities; recent trajectories of metropolitan class polarization; feminist perspectives on methodological debates and daily urban life; racial segregation and policy responses to concentrated urban poverty; evolving inequalities of gentrification and anti-homeless policies; dilemmas of identity and categorization in data, activism, and regulation; and informational activism in digital cities in the shadow of threats of nascent forms of 'geo-slavery.' Some of the material involves multivariate quantitative methods, but this seminar is not an uncritical methodological survey. It is also not an extended external critique. We're aiming for something in between these two, a critical engagement with the value and limits of the methods for understanding and challenging contemporary urban inequalities -- sensitized to the need to frame constructive criticism within a spirit of care of the subject.
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"As a geographer who uses mathematical methods in order to critique neoclassical economic geography and develop a Marxian political economic alternative, who has supported the growth of feminist, anti-essentialist and post-structuralist human geographies, and who works with marginal communities struggling to use GIS to better understand and improve their environments, I have long been convinced that progressive human geography can take advantage of quantitative practices. This seems to be an increasingly unpopular position." Eric Sheppard (2001). "Quantitative Geography: Representations, Practices, and Possibilities." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19, 535-554, quote from pp. 535-536.
Looking up and trying to speak, Chicago, March 2006 (Elvin Wyly)
St. Louis, Missouri, July 2007 (Elvin Wyly)
"Good studies and bad studies are not 'mutually conceling.' Regardless of what some advocates may claim, there are some objective facts and, hence, some objective truths. Whether public policy reflects that reality is not a choice left to those in the academy, but producing and protecting the research itself is our choice and our moral obligation." Elizabeth Warren (2002). "The Market for Data: The Changing Role of Social Sciences in Shaping the Law." Wisconsin Law Review 2002, 1-34, quote from p. 17.
In Urban Geography, "One can find articles on urban transformations around the world, feminist urban geography and queer theory, homelessness and welfare reform, urban identity and citizenship, racial segregation and environmental justice, patterns of e-commerce as well as traditional manufacturing, transportation and land use, urban governance regimes, implications of globalization and transnational immigration flows. The list goes on and on, speaking to the rich tapestry of the field as it has been woven throughout its recent history, nourished by the quantitative revolution, the rise of Marxian and humanistic geographies, and the effervescence of feminist, postmodern, and post-Colonial thought." Jennifer R. Wolch (2003). "Radical Openness as Method in Urban Geography." Urban Geography 24(8), 645-646, quote from p. 645.