ancient cities

930 Urban Studies
meanings ascribed to it by individuals and groups.
A neighborhood tavern where everyone knows
your name might have a sense of place characterized
by warmth or friendliness. Senses of place are
not necessarily positive, however; an industrial
district’s sense of place may be characterized by
isolation or even fear. Place attachment occurs
when an individual’s or group’s identity becomes
bound up in the meaning of the place, as when one
identifies as a New Yorker or a Berliner. Spaces
that are inauthentic reproductions of real or imagined
places (e.g., Disneyland in California,
Dracula’s Castle in Romania) or that are indistinguishable
from one another (e.g., shopping malls,
airports) are often said to lack a sense of place, or
to exhibit characteristics of placelessness.
Having a sense of place can also refer to being
oriented to one’s surroundings, not in terms of
physical coordinates, but in social and cultural
terms. Maintaining this sort of orientation requires
the construction of mental maps of urban space,
which organize places primarily by their roles in
individuals’ lives and only secondarily by their
spatial locations. Thus, a city dweller’s mental
map of the areas around his home might include
the produce market, bank, and coffee shop because
they are part of a daily routine, but might ignore
the location of the fire station or factory because
they bear little relevance. Such a mental map of the
area allows the efficient navigation of a highly
complex urban space by focusing attention only on
selected components and, at the same time, creates
nuanced and idiosyncratic understandings of the
urban space itself.
Although each individual’s mental map of a particular
urban space is unique, shared and collectively
agreed-upon meanings can emerge that serve
to define microgeographies, that is, segments of
urban space that have recognizable identities of
their own. Neighborhoods, for example, often have
specific names and reputations among locals; they
serve to organize patterns of social, cultural, and
political activity in urban space. As an analogue to
the ecological habitat of a species, such micro geographies
serve as the fundamental unit in the ecological
approach to urban space, with the most
notable example being the definition of 75 community
areas in Chicago by researchers at the University
of Chicago. In some instances, neighborhoods
become so closely associated with a particular
group, product, or activity that their identity is elevated
to the status of a “brand,” recognizable even
to nonlocals. The meaning of such urban spaces as
Paris’s eighteenth arrondissement and the Castro
District in San Francisco are irrevocably tied to the
bohemian lifestyle and the gay community, while
Hollywood and London’s West End depend on the
film and theater industries, respectively. As such
spaces become more commercialized or are reproduced
elsewhere, their authenticity is often challenged,
raising postmodern questions of what
constitutes a real urban place.
Zachary Neal
See also Growth Machine; Land Development; Lefebvre,
Henri; New Urbanism; Racialization; Social
Production of Space; Urban Design; Walking City
Further Readings
Alonso, William. 1964. Location and Land Use: Toward
a General Theory of Land Rent. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Gieryn, Thomas F. 2000. “A Space for Place in
Sociology.” Annual Review of Sociology 26:463–96.
Gottdiener, Mark. 1994. The Social Production of Urban
Space. 2nd ed. Austin: University of Texas Press.
McKenzie, Roderick D. 1933. The Metropolitan
Community. New York: Russell and Russell.
Molotch, Harvey. 1976. “The City as a Growth
Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place.”
American Journal of Sociology 82:309–32.
Sassen, Saskia. 2001. Global City: New York, London,
Tokyo. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Whyte, William. 1980. The Social Life of Small Urban
Spaces. New York: Project for Public Space.
Zukin, Sharon. 1991. Landscapes of Power: From
Detroit to Disney World. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Ur b a n st U D i e s
Within the social sciences, the city is imagined as
an object of society rather than a fact of nature
(though scholars are increasingly blurring this distinction)
and, in that vein, is conceived as a material
space of functional and social relationships