ancient cities

942 Urban Theory
embrace very different assumptions and modes of
analysis for explaining and understanding how
individuals act in groups to create cities, how
urban structures shape and constrain consciousness
and behavior, and how people unite to
change urban reality.
A variety of definitions of agency and structure
and their relationship dominate urban scholarship.
Structure can be defined as manners of thinking,
acting, and feeling that are external to and coercive
of individual and group action. Informal structures
include norms, values, beliefs, and rules. Formal
structures include laws, regulations, organizations,
bureaucracies, institutions, and large-scale
processes such as capitalism and globalization.
Conceptualizations of agency can vary according
to one’s theoretical intent and orientation. On the
one hand, agency can range on a continuum from
nonreflective, habitual, or repetitive actions or
adaptation to existing conditions. On the other
hand, agency can refer to intentional and resistant
actions, planned strategies and methodical organizing
for change, and oppositional mobilization
to transform cities. Urban theories provide different
answers to questions such as what is action
and why is it significant? How do groups act?
How do macro structures and global processes
suppress individuality while engendering new
forms of urban identity?
Despite much heterogeneity, recent urban work
theorizes structure and agency as a spatial
phenomenon—with spatial attributes and spatial
influences—and examines how different spatial
meanings and locations can enable or constrain
particular forms of social action and behavior.
Major theoretical strands of globalization research,
for example, have been permeated by geographical
concepts—for example, time–space compression,
space of flows, space of places, deterritorialization,
translocalities, and scapes. Meanwhile, globalization
researchers have employed a variety of distinctively
geographical prefixes (for example, sub-,
supra-, trans-, and inter-) to explain various emergent
social processes that appear to operate below,
above, beyond, or between spatial structures and
geopolitical boundaries. In addition, urban poverty
research has focused attention on the role of
spatial location and “neighborhood effects” in
socially isolating the urban poor from education
and employment opportunities, restricting avenues
for pursuing upward mobility, and reinforcing
antisocial behavior. Acknowledging that neighborhood
context shapes poverty reflects the
increasing use of geographic units of analysis
and spatial metaphors—“concentration effects,”
“spatial isolation,” “ghettoized poor,” “super
poverty areas”—to delineate the causes and consequences
of urban poverty. This flourishing research
dovetails with recent theorizing that views urban
space as an object of political struggle, a constitutive
component of human agency and identity, and
a facilitator of as well as a constraint upon action.
Urban spaces shape and condition how individuals
and groups think and conceive of themselves, cultivate
and develop personal and collective identities,
and contest as well as reinforce prevailing
structures of race, class, gender, sexual orientation,
and other social inequalities.
Current Status of Urban Theory
The contemporary urban world is under major
transformations, and a plethora of theories call
attention to the changes and novelties of the present
moment. A growing diversity of theories and
modes of theorizing has resulted from the increasing
influence of feminist theories, critical race theories,
and postmodern theories. The open and
variegated theoretical landscape is transforming
urban studies from a field dominated by a few
paradigms and their delimited theories to one in
which inclusion, diversity, and ambiguity are the
watchwords. As a result, today’s urban scholars
have many more theoretical options and tools, and
there is less need to choose a single perspective as
one’s own. The recent cultural turn and linguistic
turn, combined with the popularity of discursive
analyses and textual deconstruction, have sparked
lively debate within urban studies and across
scholarly disciplines. On the one hand, the idea
that scholars deal with “facts” and analyses reflect
an objective urban reality has begun to crumble
under the assault of postmodernism, poststructuralism,
and variants of feminism. On the other
hand, econometric theories and research continue
to orient urban analysis based on the axiomatic
assumption that it is possible to represent (“mirror”)
urban reality through the use of specific
methodological techniques, concepts, and theories
without making assumptions about the nature of