Current debates in urban theory from a scale perspective: Introducing a scenes approach

Abstract

Chinese

Cities, all over the world, have become more diverse than ever. This poses great challenges to urban studies and theorising. In this article, we review current debates in urban theory through Howitt’s (1998) three-facet conceptualisation of geographical scale and find that urban theorists have high levels of disagreement on the areal (scale as size), the hierarchical (scale as level) as well as the dialectical (scale as relation) aspects of the city. We show that, if urban theorists are to find a common approach to the city, we should contemplate: 1) what cities to study; 2) from which geographical level(s); and 3) how the city relates to other entities. We illustrate how the theory of urban scenes could potentially be used to address these debates in urban theory.

Keywords

scale of the city scenes urban studies urban theory

Introduction

What is the nature of the city? The city has been defined in a myriad of ways because, as Castells (1968, 1977) so famously noted, scholars have yet to agree as to whether this is a question about geography or one about social relations (see also Wu, 2016). Whereas for some scholars the city is ‘an environment’ for human interactions (Whyte, 1943; Wirth, 1938), for others it is ‘a growth machine’ (Logan and Molotch, 1987; Molotch, 1976), ‘an entertainment machine’ (Clark et al., 2002; Florida, 2002a), ‘a site of assemblage, multiplicity, and connectivity’ (Robinson, 2006; Roy, 2011), an ‘object being assembled at concrete sites of urban practice’ (Farías, 2011; McFarlane, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c) or ‘an image and ideology’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2011; Merrifield, 2013) (for reviews, see Paddison, 2000; Robinson and Roy, 2015; Scott and Storper, 2015; Storper and Scott, 2016).

In this article, we argue that this debate about the nature of the city can, to a large extent, be attributed to the fact that many urban theories operationalise the city at very different geographical scales. Scale is ‘the geographical organizer and expression of collective social action’ (Smith, 1995: 61) and, according to Howitt’s seminal (1998) definition, it has three facets. Specifically, geographic scale has an areal facet that refers to size (census tract, province, continent), a hierarchical facet that refers to level (local, regional, national) and a dialectical facet that refers to relations (relations to other cities, to the social and political order and to the larger society) (Howitt, 1998: 52). We argue that this three-facet conceptualisation can help to organise ongoing debates about how to conceptualise cities, by focusing the conversation on issues pertaining to each facet separately – level, size and relations – and how these perspectives interact. We hope to clarify that, rather than directly engaging recent debates about geographical scale (e.g., Cox, 1998; Marston, 2000; MacKinnon, 2011; Marston et al., 2005; Paasi, 2004; Smith, 1995), our goal is to use the concept to scale (examine and understand) current debates in urban theory (see also Scott and Storper, 2015; Storper and Scott, 2016). In Jones’ (1998: 28) words, scale is not viewed ‘ as an ontological structure which “exists”, but as an epistemological one a way of knowing or apprehending’.

To advance this argument, we identify core debates associated with each facet. First, we show that, from a size perspective, urban theorists have debated whether the focus of study should be world cities or ordinary cities, big cities or small cities, or cities in the Global North or South. Second, we show that, from a level perspective, while urban scholars largely recognise the multilevel nature of the city, there is little consensus on whether the city should be approached from the neighbourhood level, from the nation-state level or from the regional and global level. Third, we show that, from a relational perspective, urban theorists have yet to agree on how the city relates to other trends, processes and structures, including demographic diversity, amenities, cultural activities, patterns of consumption, the economy and political governance. Taken together, these arguments show that many positions in urban theory may be located by their orientation to specific debates about different aspects of city scale.

To make progress on current debates in urban theory, we suggest that urban theorists would do well to consider avenues for bridging across various approaches to each facet of scale: different approaches to size, different approaches to level, different approaches to relations. In other words, we should contemplate: 1) what cities to study; 2) from which geographical level(s); and 3) how the city relates to other entities. The goal is a set of conceptual tools that facilitate studying cities of different sizes and locations, at different geographical levels within them and in terms of the specific relationships between cities and geopolitics, territory, structure, culture, history, economy, environment, society and so on.

This is a challenging problem, with no easy answer. Taking it on requires an openness to theoretical and conceptual experimentation, where we investigate the potential of various points of view. In this article, we examine the recently developed theory of urban ‘scenes’ (Silver and Clark, 2015, 2016; Silver et al., 2010) as a candidate for incorporating and synthesising diverse understandings of scale, whether areal, hierarchical or relational. After briefly overviewing the main lines of this theory, we pursue the claim that it holds the potential to transform diverse and different cities into a common unit of analysis-scenes. In particular, we elaborate how the theory of scenes provides resources for addressing debates around all three facets of scale, offering a promising avenue for further efforts at theoretical and empirical integration.

Current debates in urban theory from a scale perspective: Size, level and relation

Though urban studies is a large, interdisciplinary and diverse field, a few ‘schools’ or theoretical frameworks have tended to predominate: the Chicago School, the Political Economy/Neo-Marxist approach, Cultural Analysis, the Postcolonial/Ordinary City approach, Assemblage Theory and Planetary Urbanisation Theory (see also Paddison, 2000; Robinson and Roy, 2015; Scott and Storper, 2015; Storper and Scott, 2016). Because these schools developed at different times and places, each has a particular and distinctive understanding of the city and of the urban question. In what follows, we aim to show that, because there are significant differences in approaching and understanding the geographic scale of the city among these schools, they conceptualise the city in significantly different ways. We make this argument by considering how three critical facets of scale – size, level and relation – as identified by Howitt (1998) are reflected in prominent debates about the city.

The urban debate from the perspective of size

Some of the aforementioned traditions emanate from scholars working in North America and in Europe, such as the Chicago School, Political Economy, and Cultural Analysis. Owing largely to this history, much (but not all) urban research has featured large cities in the Global North, especially in the USA and Europe (Gans, 2009; Robinson, 2006). The Political Economy approach has, for example, considered such big global/world cities as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai and London (see, e.g., Friedmann, 1995; Sassen, 2001, 2011). Since the focus for these scholars is often on how large western cities intertwine and interconnect in the formation of global economic and migratory networks, small cities and cities in less developed regions are considered less often (e.g. Sassen, 2001, 2011).

Alternatively, Ordinary City scholars argue that every small and every ‘ordinary city’ is built from a unique combination of economic, social, cultural and institutional assets (Amin and Graham, 1997). As a result, they suggest that greater attention must be paid to small cities, to cities in the Global South and to the ‘Third World’ (e.g. Bell and Jayne, 2009; Robinson, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2011; Roy, 2009, 2011). The titles of articles written within this framework – ‘(Re)theorizing cities from the Global South’ (Parnell and Robinson, 2012), ‘Thinking cities through elsewhere’ (Robinson, 2016), ‘Cities in a world of cities’ (Robinson, 2011), ‘A view from off the map’ (Robinson, 2002), ‘Seeing from the South’ (Watson, 2009), ‘Small cities?’ (Bell and Jayne, 2009) – aptly illustrate these calls. In turn, the notion of ordinary cities has been critiqued because it overlooks the fact that a few global cities do ‘have the necessary economic specialization and therefore extraordinary function of commanding and controlling neoliberal globalization’ (Smith, 2013: 2290).

In between the ‘ordinary city’ and ‘global city’, ‘small cities’ and ‘big cities’ debate, Assemblage theorists argue that we need to refrain from categorising cities as, for example, ‘global cities’, ‘ordinary cities’, ‘Third World cities’ and ‘African cities’. Instead, they suggest that every city is an open process, a multiplicity of processes of becoming, because, in Farías’s (2011: 367) words, ‘we don’t know what we are looking for until we find it’. The city as such is produced by ethnographic and narrative accounts. From this perspective, the size of the city cannot be determined a priori, because the outcome only exists after the boundaries of the city are set by its selection as an object of study. This argument has been criticised as ‘naïve objectivism’. If there are no theoretical guideposts, it is then difficult to distinguish between the trivial and the important in the study of the city (Brenner et al., 2011; see also Storper and Scott, 2016). Finally, for Planetary Urbanisation scholars, the ‘size of cities’ debate is irrelevant. For these scholars, because everywhere is urban, it makes little sense to treat cities as unique social or geographic entities; from this vantage point, such efforts invariably rely on ‘an image’, ‘an ideology’ or ‘a pseudo concept’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2015; Merrifield, 2013; see also Storper and Scott, 2016: 1128). Thus, the debate over what size cities to study is meaningless at best, and ideological distraction at worst.

The urban debate from the perspective of level

The founders of Chicago School sociology and their students used Chicago as a lab in which to study a variety of topics including crime, violence, poverty, migration, family and social organisation (Park, 1915; Whyte, 1943; Wirth, 1938; see also Saunders, 1981: 250).Whyte (1943), for example, famously investigated the formation and organisation of local gangs, documenting the lives of ‘corner’ and ‘college’ boys in an Italian slum of Boston. Because the neighbourhood was the unit of analysis not only in this but also in many other such studies, some have characterised the Chicago School as ‘neighbourhood’ rather than as urban sociology (Wellman, 1979; Wellman and Leighton, 1979: 363).

In the Political Economy approach, macro-level structural factors such as capitalism and social inequality are usually used to explain urban forms and growth (e.g. Brenner, 2000; Castells, 1983; Harvey, 1985; Lefebvre, 1991; Zukin, 1980, 2011). For example, in ‘The city as a growth machine’, Molotch (1976) argues that the growth of the city or any locality is a result of competition between local elites over production factors such as land, capital and labour. If the Chicago School has been primarily focused on the micro-level, the Political Economy approach has featured the macro-level. Because its primary emphasis is on macro-level structural factors, it tends to overlook the agency of individuals and the organisations to which they belong (Gieryn, 2000; Gottdiener and Feagin, 1988). That is, the Political Economy approach tends towards ‘a top-down, universalistic, single view of the world that cannot explain the local and the particular’ (Ribera-Fumaz, 2009: 45). Critics argue that urban processes and changes also need to be considered from below (Dear, 2000).

Cultural analysts have attempted to capture the uniqueness of place in their approach to urban forms and urban growth (Clark, 2004; Florida, 2005; Florida and Mellander, 2010; see also Sharp, 2007). Cities have distinct histories, customs and traditions that might shape the place and its residents in a unique way (Clark, 2007). Local location matters. As Clark (2011: 221) writes, ‘if every city is unique, it is because general processes combine in unique ways in each location’. Therefore, by recognising the role that the distinctive culture of any particular city plays, not only in understanding larger political-economic processes but also in creating urban changes, cultural analysts have made attempts to close the micro–macro gap (Nylund, 2001).

The Ordinary City approach sees all cities as ‘ordinary’, as different combinations of social, political and economic configurations (Amin and Graham, 1997; see also Smith, 2013). Hence, it adopts an epistemological construction of scale, focusing attention on the particular activities in a horizontal space, thereby downplaying the multilevel nature of the city. As with the Ordinary City approach, Assemblage theorists also conceptualise the city without levels of geographical scale. Cities are everywhere and nowhere on a flat earth (McFarlane, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c; see also Storper and Scott, 2016). For Planetary Urbanisation scholars, the contemporary urbanisation process ‘continues to be shaped and contested through contradictory, hierarchical social relations and institutional forms of capitalism’ (Brenner et al., 2011: 225). From this perspective, while everywhere is urban, the process of urban place-making still comes from social forces at a variety of scale levels.

The urban debate from the perspective of relation

Chicago School scholars have tended to study segments of urban social and ecological structure rather than the totality of the city, or else they have used the city as a laboratory for testing theories and hypotheses that have little to do with the city itself (Gans, 2009; Saunders, 1981). While these studies tackle general issues that may have particular manifestations within cities, the city itself as a subject matter has a tendency to fade into the background. The net result is that the city tends to appear as a container for rising social complexities. Challenging the Chicago School tradition, Political Economy scholars attempt to relate the city to macro-level social processes, and particularly to capitalism (e.g. Lefebvre, 1991; Logan and Molotch, 1987). In this approach, the city becomes the ‘conduit of capital and control’ or the ‘localization of social forces’ (Zukin, 1980: 582; 2011). Accordingly, a city (or any locality) needs to be conceptualised not only as a set of social relations, but also as a group of actors who play active roles in practising and reshaping those social relations (Cox and Mair, 1991).

Instead of viewing the city as a product of the capitalist economy or a process of capital accumulation, Cultural Analysts tie the city to cultural amenities and patterns of consumption. The city is ‘an entertainment machine’, where cultural diversity and high levels of talent, tolerance and technology generate growth and change (Clark, 2004, 2007; Dear, 2000; Florida, 2002b; Glaeser et al., 2001). From this cultural perspective, the city is produced through its relationship to a particular combination of local and global processes. Still, placing excessive emphasis on consumption without taking into account matters of production and other sociopolitical elements is also problematic in understanding the urban process (Cox, 1998; Cox and Jonas, 1993). Both Assemblage and Postcolonial theorists recognise that cities are so big, so complicated and so diverse that the focus needs to be on what is ordinary and what is particular about each city. Each city is an event/activity that happens in a particular place at a particular moment (Farías, 2011; Farías and Bender, 2010). Hence, from a relational perspective, every ordinary city becomes ‘a site of assemblage, multiplicity, and connectivity’ (Farías and Bender, 2010; Robinson, 2011: 13; see also Storper and Scott, 2016). From a Planetary Urbanisation perspective, we have entered an age of planetary urbanisation, and therefore there is nothing outside the urban (Brenner et al., 2011; Merrifield, 2013). As Brenner and Schmid (2011: 13) write, ‘today, the urban represents an increasingly worldwide condition in which political-economic relations are enmeshed’. Since the city is the world and the world is one city, the study of the city will require major theoretical and conceptual innovations and a new epistemology of the urban that focuses on the urbanisation process (Brenner and Schmid, 2015).

To make progress on these wide-ranging debates, there is a need to incorporate and synthesise these diverse approaches and understandings of size, level and relations of the city. In the remainder of this article, we pursue the proposition that the concept of ‘scenes’ (Silver and Clark, 2015, 2016; Silver et al., 2010) can potentially be useful in this effort.

A scenes approach to the city

By ‘scene’ we refer to the aesthetic or ambient character of a place, the way a place offers experiences, dramas, and meanings to be enjoyed or rejected by potential consumers. A city’s scenes are thus more than its physical spaces, occupational bases, political parties, and groups of persons labeled by demographic characteristics, although these all contribute to its scenes. (Silver and Clark, 2013: 13)

A particular scene emerges at the right time, in the right place, with the right people. Examples of urban scenes include, for example, the New York art scene, the Silicon Valley startup scene and the Paris fashion scene (Hamdaqa et al., 2014: 45).

Scenes analysis encourages us to approach cities (or places in general) not simply in terms of the presence of, for example, churches, parks, bike paths, juice bars or cafes; people of different races, classes or nationalities; or music festivals, sports activities or social movements; but holistically, in terms of the distinctive meanings created by the specific combination of all of these elements (see also Silver, 2012; Silver and Clark, 2013, 2015). Urban places could be where people live (place as residential neighbourhood), work (place as industrial cluster) or protest (place as political arena). Most importantly, they are also where people express, communicate and share values, feelings, experiences and moods. Thus, seeing urban places as scenes, we understand these places from a consumer’s point of view. This is different, for example, from seeing place as residential neighbourhood. Whereas, from a resident’s point view, trust is the symbolic source of the places because it promotes social cohesion and mutual support in the neighbourhood, the symbolic source of scenes is buzz – ‘the distinctive types of experiences participants can expect to enjoy in a scene’ (Silver and Clark, 2013: 15).

Accordingly, from a scenes perspective, to study cities is to study the diverse scenes that are created by the interactions between people and amenities in a particular city or neighbourhood at a particular moment. In other words, to study cities is to ‘capture the experiential attractions rooted in the on-going public life of its businesses, people, places of worship, activities – in the particular mix of concrete practices’ (Silver and Clark, 2015: 426). Therefore, the scenes approach considers the character of the city, the experiences the city offers as well as the meanings a city delivers, and how they are enjoyed or rejected by potential consumers (Silver and Clark, 2013).

It is a multidimensional approach that goes beyond the traditional analysis of cities to highlight the sensibilities and meanings associated with places. In general, three dimensions, namely authenticity, theatricality and legitimacy, combine to create the scenes of any particular place (Silver and Clark, 2015, 2016; Silver et al., 2010). Authenticity refers to notions of what is real or fake, theatricality refers to styles of mutual self-presentation and legitimacy refers to standards of ethical behaviour. Places value or devalue certain types of authenticity, theatricality and legitimacy. For instance, a particular sense of authenticity can arise from evocations of locality or globality, state or anti-state, ethnicity or non-ethnicity, corporateness or anti-corporateness, and rationality or non-rationality; a sense of theatricality from exhibitionism or reservation, glamour or ordinariness, neighbourliness or distance, transgression or conformity, and formality or informality; a sense of legitimacy from tradition or novelty, charisma or routine, utility or nonutility, egalitarianism or particularism, and self-expression or fitting in (Silver and Clark, 2016: 42; Silver et al., 2010). Specific combinations and positive or negative weighting of these dimensions lead to the creation of distinctive scenes that can be identified for any particular place. For example, the combination of a negative score on tradition, utilitarianism and egalitarianism and a positive score for self-expression and charisma may produce a bohemian scene (Silver and Clark, 2016: 66).

These concepts were formulated to help characterise qualitative meanings of places in a holistic yet analytically tractable form. Here we seek to push them further, proposing in a preliminary and provisional way that scenes theory has the potential to speak to debates on the size, level and relational aspects of the city. Let us consider each in turn. The theory of scenes has potential for addressing current debates on the size of the city insofar as scenes analysis transforms diverse and different cities into a common unit of analysis-scenes. While many cities share common characteristics such as income, education and population density, it is also the case that each city gives local residents and visitors very different and unique experiences and feelings. Therefore, while the theory of scenes was developed at the University of Chicago and has thus far primarily been used to study large cities in the Global North, it can be extended with the assumption that different cities not only have their own unique scenes but also share regional and global scenes.

The theory of scenes can also be used to address current debates about the level of the city. Scenes analysis provides a means of capturing and synthesising local and global forces within and across different levels of geographical scale. The city could be deconstructed as having a neighbourhood level, a state level, a regional as well as a global level. In each level, amenities can be used to measure and capture the inner characteristics or scenes of the city. If, at the global level, a city is home to a large number of Global 500 corporations and international flights then it is likely that the city presents a global city scene (e.g. New York, London, Shanghai, Hong Kong or Tokyo). At the state level, the presence of state political institutions can signal political scenes and the role that the city plays in the political structure of the nation (e.g. a capital city). At the neighbourhood level, the population demographics of the city (e.g. age, income, level of diversity) can be used to indicate a certain type of scene that the city presents. Scenes analysis, therefore, can capture neighbourhood scenes, national scenes, regional scenes and global scenes as well as large scenes created from the interactions among smaller scenes.

Finally, the theory of scenes can be applied to the relation debate insofar as scenes analysis considers a multiplicity of social forces. Scenes of the city are created from the specific combination of physical structures, persons of different characteristics, local activities, governance structures as well as from regional and global fashions. The specific combination of all factors at different geographical scales including population make-up, restaurants, buildings, streets, neighbourhoods, associations, social activities, city governance, regime culture as well as global forces produces a variety of scenes across cities, which, in turn, lead to city-level variations in people’s value orientations and behaviours as well as social, political and economic behaviours.

Conclusion

When urban scholars have as their perspective different scales of the city, they are likely to generate different theories of the city. The Chicago School originated during a period of rapid urbanisation. Because Chicago was one of the most problem-plagued cities in North America, this contributed to featuring issues such as crime and neighbourhood disorganisation as key aspects of urban studies. The Political Economy and Cultural Analysis approaches to the city emerged during a period of rising globalisation and economic and cultural connectivity. More recent urban theories such as the Ordinary City and Planetary Urbanisation theories are clearly influenced by the high rates of urbanisation in North America and the exponential growth rates of urban areas in non-Western societies. Because cities at different places and times often show unique characteristics in their areal (read size), hierarchical structure (read level) as well as in their dialectical relation to other entities, urban theorists have formed distinctive understandings of the nature of the city over the last century. If urban studies is to further advance then we need to find conceptual tools capable of speaking across these different aspects of the city.

Such tools should be constructed not based on cities at particular places and times, but based on cities in general at different places and times. As Storper and Scott (2016: 1116) recently pointed out:

such a theory would need (a) to account for the genesis of cities in general, (b) to capture the essence of cities as concrete social phenomena and (c) to make it possible to shed light on the observable empirical diversity of cities over time and space.

In terms of the approach taken in this article, what is needed are conceptual tools for incorporating and synthesising diverse understandings of the areal aspect of the city, of the hierarchical structure of the city and of the dialectical relations of the city.

In this article, we have suggested that the theory of urban scenes could potentially be used to achieve this goal. We outlined how scenes theory can be used to address the size debate. Scenes theory can be used to consider small and big city scenes while at the same time allowing for the fact that each city could have its distinctive scenes as well as scenes similar to other cities. We outlined how scenes theory addresses the level debate insofar as scenes can be analysed from multiple levels. National city scenes, regional city scenes and global city scenes can all be compared and contrasted. Finally, we outlined how scenes theory can be used to address the relation debate insofar as it takes the totality of the city into consideration. That is, to study the city is to study scenes of the city that are created through specific combinations of physical structures, persons with different characteristics, local activities, governance structures as well as regional and global fashions, and to study how scenes, in turn, shape individual value orientations and behaviours as well as macro-level social, economic, political and cultural indicators.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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