La naturaleza de las ciudades El alcance y los límites de la teoría urbana

Abstract

There has been a growing debate in recent decades about the range and substance of urban theory. This debate has been marked by many different claims about the nature of cities, including declarations that the urban is an incoherent concept, that urban society is nothing less than modern society as a whole, or more recently, that urban theory hitherto has been deeply vitiated by its almost exclusive concentration on the cities of the Global North. Our goal in this paper is to offer some points of clarification of this debate. We argue that all cities can be understood in terms of two processes, namely, the dynamics of agglomeration/polarization, and the unfolding of an associated nexus of locations, land uses and human interactions. We claim that these processes constitute the essential nature of cities. On these bases, we put forth criteria to distinguish specifically and intrinsically urban phenomenon from the rest of social reality. Our discussion also seeks to identify the common dimensions of all cities without, on the one hand, exaggerating the scope of urban theory, or on the other hand, asserting that every individual city is an irreducible special case.