程序辅导案例 > Program >

代写辅导接单-Week 1 Introduction

欢迎使用51辅导，51作业君孵化低价透明的学长辅导平台，服务保持优质，平均费用压低50%以上！ 51fudao.top

Choose ONE city that interests you and write an essay around ONE of the following topics. Please clearly state which city and topic you have chosen.

Topics: agglomeration, inequality, housing, social infrastructure, community, innovation, mobility, creativity, technology, economy, social networks, infrastructural networks, connection, migration, verticality, volume.

Reading list

Week 1 Introduction

Pre-lecture Question: Why should we study cities?

Cities are astonishing places. Often described as one of humanity’s greatest achievements, they are a collective response to some of our most fundamental needs. Centers of innovation, cities generate tremendous wealth and opportunity. Markets and factories, skyscrapers, shopping malls and stadiums, cities are places where things get made, whether that be cars, toasters, furniture, laptops, or less tangible things like experiences, trends, contracts and code. Cities also shelter and nurture millions of people in ways that often feel close to magical. They are full of communities and people fashioning novel and striking ways of living together. They facilitate all sorts of unique freedoms, unique ways of pursuing desire and self-expression. For all that, cities can seem thrown together and accidental, a mess of incompatible and unlikely elements. They can be engines of inequality and greed; places where the fact that some people are rich is the result of others being poor. They can be dirty, smelly and polluted. They can segregate and exclude. They are often ugly and inhumane. Other aspects of city life are clearly the result of elaborate, meticulous planning. Think of the extraordinary coordination that allows millions of commuters to pulse into and out of a large city each day. Or the often taken-for-granted (until they aren’t working) systems of infrastructure that keep water running, homes heated and cooled, phones and internet working. The extensive networks of care involved in educating children, caring for the sick and providing for the vulnerable, speak to the multitude of informal arrangements and formal institutions that serve and protect those in need. For all their flaws and inefficiencies, their inequalities and inequities, it is remarkable how many different things cities are and do. In today's lecture we will begin exploring the different ways we may think about cities. We'll also go through an overview of the module.

This week's readings

To get started here's a recap of the key arguments from the powerpoint . The reading is the introductory chapter of the book Key Thinkers on Cities. This is a key textbook for this module. (必参考文献)

Once you've got a sense of the arguments from the first reading have a read of a range some other more specific takes on how cities might be studied. Edgar Pieterse is a leading expert on urban development and policy in Southern Africa. The second chapter of his book City Futures provides an excellent primer on urbanization in the so-called Global South. Edward Glaeser is an economist and he paints a rather different view of cities and how they work in the introduction to his The Triumph of the Cit y. A further perspective this time focusing on cities as centres of migration is provided by the journalist Doug Saunders in his book Arrival City . the social theorists Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid agree that cities are important. But, in a theoretical key that is very different to Glaeser or indeed Pieterse, they argue that we should not be talking about cities per se rather processes of urbanization. Have a read , see what you think. Lastly, sometimes its interesting to look back and see how thinking about a problem or issue has changed or shifted over time. Brian Berry's essay on urbanization and counter-urbanization describes an urban landscape that looks both very familiar and quite strange.

Week 2 The economy of cities

Pre-lecture Question: Why does economic activity concentrate in cities?

This week we are exploring why it is that cities are centres of so much economic activity. Despite the fact that cities are often expensive both to live in and to produce goods and services urban conurbations are where the majority of the world's economic activity takes place. This is the central question that we be examining. We will be looking at the relationships that make cities economically dynamic places, and at certain economic activities and industries come to concentrate in some cities and not others.

Key readings （必参考文献）

There has been a flourishing of work on urban agglomeration over the past couple of decades both from economic geographers and urban economists. An excellent summary of this work is presented by the economic urban geographer Michael Storper in his book Keys to the City (chapters 2 and 3). This provides a conceptual overview of the different ways that agglomeration economies operate, and how they favour urban concentration. This reading is central to everything taught this week so it is worth taking the time to read Stopper's work carefully. Many of the ideas examined by Storper have their origins in the work of Jane Jacobs, so we would also like to have a read of this chapter from her influential The Economies of Cities .

Further reading

The reading for this week winds through a series of a debates about how best to think about the social bonds and linkages that characterise urban life. In classical social theory the transformation form traditional to modern society was closely related to the transformation from a rural to an urban way of life. This chapter on community provides a short introduction to some of these ideas, as well as exploring how these ideas have been overtaken by contemporary thinking. Peter Saunders provides a more in-depth discussion on these themes. Two of the classical accounts of the modern big city as a distinct social space are the German sociologists Simmel's The metropolis and mental life (from 1903) and the American Louis Wirth's 'Urbanism as a way of life' (1938). For all the attempts to describe urban environments as analytically unique (as Simmel and Wirth do) much work around community and connection in cities has come to focus less on its uniquely urban features and more its persistence. Classic work in this vein includes the work of Herbert Gans (pdf to come) and Janet Abu-Lughod's work on Cairo. In Cities By Design Fran Tonkiss provides an up to date reflection of this work. Contemporary work on the development of transnational communities of migrants in cities like London, Los Angeles and Boston (to name but a few examples) has explored how urban communities may be stretched over great distances. An introduction to transnationalism and urban communities can be found in thisshort overview . Peggy Levitt in her work on Dominicans living in Jamaica Plains, Boston, provides a great example how cities may be populated by 'transnational villagers .' Caroline Knowles and Douglas Harper provide a vivid portrait of how Filipino domestic workers make a community for themselves in the public spaces of Hong Kong. And here's the example of Mexican migrants in Los Angeles from Margaret Crawford's Everyday Urbanism from the lecture. Transnational urban connections are not, however, only the preserve of relatively under privileged urban migrants. This article on New Zealanders in London shows how 'middling' migrants might also be woven into transnational networks of connection. I wrote it with David Conradson so obvious I think the argument is pretty sweet.

One of the key argument's of this week's lecture is that concepts such as community might be too far reaching for the kinds of social interaction that defines - and holds together - much of contemporary urban life. That certainly is the argument that Ash Amin is making in his article in City (see the seminar readings above). And it is an perspective explored by Jane Jacobs (remember her from lecture 2?) in one of the most famous sections of her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities . This also suggests that cities are an interesting informational space, where their diversity and heterogeneity is consistently generating new nodes of connection... The nature of these connections is explored in Mark Granovetter's essay on the strength of weak ties. It is worth thinking about the similarities between Granovetter's discussion of the power of social networks, and that of Wellman's from the key seminar readings.... Ash Amin's writing encourages us to think of the dense and often sensuous materiality of urban environments. He encourages us to think of our connection to and communion with a whole range of non-human agents and agencies. This is developing an argument he originally made with Nigel Thrift in the book Cities Reimagining the Urban . This a dense and not exactly straightforward set of arguments. This short introduction to Amin and Thrift might help you better understand their work. And here's an article inspired in part by Amin's arguments exploring the work involved in making public spaces work. Drawing on a similar ethos, but with slightly different theoretical tools Eric Laurier and Chris Philo explore how everyday urban conviviality is produced. And here's an attempt by Derek McCormack and me to think about the way practices of sport and fitness animate and connect people in cities. And here's a lovely example of what Derek and I are thinking about, an example of how Zumba is helping working class Latina women claim back their streets. What do you think? Should urban geographers be exploring these kinds of things?

Lastly, the entries from Ash Amin , Jane Jacobs , and Richard Sennett will help you think about the ideas from the lecture and the above readings.

Week 5 Infrastructure of living together

Pre-lecture Question: Why are physical infrastructures important for the collective life of cities?

This week we are exploring the various techno-material infrastructures through which the common life of cities is fashioned. The lecture examines how the concept of infrastructure might be used to understand the ways that allow cities and urban environments organise and sustain life in urban environments. The concept of infrastructures helps us to think about much of urban life is about a whole range of collective arrangements -- some of which are explicitly public in character (owned and run by a public body), others which are private (owned and managed privately) but which are nonetheless central to the collective functioning of cities and neighbourhoods. Whilst the emphasis of the lecture is on infrastructure that works, the lecture will also consider the ways such infrastructures might fail.

Key readings （必参考文献）

Star, S. (1999) The ethnography of infrastructure, American Behavioural Scientist, 43, 3: 377-391. NB: this is NOT a text on cities, it is a text on the concept of infrastructure. It provides the intellectual framework through which we will be thinking about the collective and social infrastructures of urban life.

Having read Star read through:

Coutard, O., & Guy, S. (2007). STS and the City: Politics and Practices of Hope. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 32(6), 713-734.

The article starts by having a dig at a range of scholars who have focused on how urban infrastructures become entangled in structures of domination and exclusion. But what is most interesting about this piece is its focus on how remaking urban infrastructures can open all sorts of possibilities for creating fairer, more sustainable, cities and urban environments.

A good example of some of these possibilities in the case of infrastructures of water provision are provided in:

Bell, S. (2015). Renegotiating urban water. Progress in planning, 96, 1-28.

This article provides a great case study of what social scientists -- urban geographers among them -- can bring to debates on infrastructural transformation in urban environments. A key argument we are making this week is that infrastructural systems for the provision of services like clean water, sanitation, waste water, power, transportation, and so on are more than just technological systems. They are socio-technical systems, and as such they as much the proper domain of social scientists as they are for engineers and planners.