ancient cities

836 Urban
dynamic and contradictory, constantly becoming
open to variable and uncertain outcomes depending
on the interpenetration of global and local
forces (space and place, capital, state and citizen,
etc.). Thus apparently local problems like job loss,
poverty, class tensions around gentrification and
displacement, and other urban struggles and social
tensions are understood in the framework of
the broader structural organization of society
and space, its dialectical interpenetration with
locality and agency, and its uneven development
over time.
Finally, some implications of this concept for an
urban research agenda are worth reflecting on.
First it requires careful attention both to local patterns
of change and contestation in, for example,
housing markets, built-environment investment
and disinvestment, employment, and the like, and
global processes (capital circulation) and spatial
structures (the class system of capitalism). The
final research challenge is to attend also to the role
of the state in regulating cities and localities in
order to underpin the process of capital accumulation,
assuage social conflict, and ensure the reproduction
of labor power. These questions about
governance bring us further into questions of
political ideology and regulation and how such
things also interconnect with the global and local
dimensions of uneven development. The theory
also has political importance insofar as its central
and defining concern is focused on the contradictions
and inequalities of capitalist development
and their implications for localities and communities.
As such it is a useful approach for any program
of action research driven by some kind of
emancipatory interest.
Michael Punch
See also Disinvestment; Gentrification; Globalization;
Governance; Harvey, David; Revanchist City; Social
Movements; Social Production of Space; Social Space
Further Readings
Harvey, David. 1982. The Limits to Capital. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell.
———. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of
Difference. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
———. 2000. Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh, UK:
Edinburgh University Press.
Lee, Roger and Jane Wills, eds. 1997. Geographies of
Economies. London: Arnold.
Massey, Doreen. 1984. Spatial Divisions of Labour.
Basingstoke. Hampshire, UK: Macmillan Press.
Smith, Neil. 1984. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital
and the Production of Space. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
———. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification
and the Revanchist City. London: Rutledge.
Walker, Richard A. 1978. “Two Sources of Uneven
Development under Advanced Capitalism: Spatial
Differentiation and Capital Mobility.” Review of
Radical Political Economics 10(3):28–38.
Ur b a n
Urban comes from the Latin urbs, meaning “city”
and most often is used as an adjective, referring to
the characteristics of a town or city: urban life or
urban sprawl, for example. Various derivatives of
urban include urbanism and urbanization. In the
United States, in particular, urban has become
identified with negative characteristics of contemporary
life—urban crime and urban poverty—but
it also has been used to market urban lifestyles
that stand out from the mainstream.
While the use of urban to describe the modern
condition is ubiquitous (a 2003 report from the
United Nations noted that half of the world’s
population now lives in urban areas, with a projected
60 percent of the population expected to live
in urban areas by 2030), there is little agreement as
to what threshold should be met to qualify a place
for being “urban.” The United States defines urban
as places with a population of 2,500 or more (50,000
persons are required for an urban area), while the
United Kingdom includes places with a population
as low as 1,000 if the land use of the village can be
identified as “irreversibly” urban in character. In
Greenland and Iceland, urban includes localities of
just 200 persons. A compendium of definitions
used around the world (published in the Yearbook
of the United Nations) shows that in many countries
urban is defined simply by the official “municipalities,”
while in some cases the political definition
is merged with a population threshold: In Austria,
communes of 5,000 or more persons are considered
urban, and in Switzerland the number is
10,000. Clearly the range of definitions makes