Urban Social Processes

Urban Studies Adjusts to a New World
Winter 2008 Interaction

The United Nations estimates that half the world’s population today lives in urban areas. By 2030, the figure will be two-thirds.

But the cities of 2030, even the cities of today, bear little resemblance to the ones studied by the first generation of urban studies scholars in the 1960s. Those scholars created the interdisciplinary field as a way of analyzing poverty, crime and racism in the United States. But the urban settlements of the future will be, above all, rapidly growing mega-cities in Asia and Africa with scarce infrastructure that place nearly intolerable pressure on the natural environment.


L.A. Cicero

Sociologist Doug McAdam, faculty director of the Urban Studies Program, says a global approach to the field is the only one that makes sense, and that Stanford is ahead of the curve in that regard.
Domestic poverty, crime and racism are still with us, but the new incarnation of urban studies confronts new problems and wields new tools. Globalization, technology and the environment are now crucial players in the field; without them, in fact, it would make little sense to study cities. And in the United States, the escape to the suburbs turns out to have had far-reaching consequences on the city left behind, on infrastructure and on culture.

So just as the urban studies programs of the 1960s were a response to the social problems of that era, it’s time to take a second look at the field to see how well it responds to the new situation.

“Definitely, there is a need for a rigorous interdisciplinary field called urban studies,” said sociologist Doug McAdam, faculty director of Stanford’s Program in Urban Studies.

“But it can’t be rooted in a romanticized, backward-looking set of urban issues. That kind of flavor hangs over many university programs, and we’ve had those fumes ourselves, the community-organizing model reflected in a sixties-style activist approach. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it can’t be all there is. There must be a global approach.”

The opportunity to incorporate that approach came a few years ago when the Urban Studies Program ran into trouble at Stanford. Members of the faculty were concerned at the program’s lack of focus. The program had been moved from political science to sociology, and few Academic Council members were teaching its classes. As a result, lecturers were hired, each one teaching his or her specialty, further weakening the program’s focus. McAdam was asked if he would step in, and he agreed on condition that the program get an extra year before coming up for renewal.

“Then we sat down and said, ‘What should an exciting, innovative program look like?’” he said. The answer involved restructuring the major’s concentration areas, building a solid core of required classes and wooing new faculty.

Restructured concentrations

There were three concentration areas on the books, but one—Urban Planning and Design—already had been significantly weakened when its architectural component moved to the School of Engineering in 2003. The first decision, then, was to eliminate the area altogether and fold its planning and design components into a new Urban Society and Social Change concentration. A second concentration, Urban Education, was left intact. A third, new concentration was created: Cities in Comparative and Historical Perspective, which is drawing particular excitement, McAdam said.

“The exclusive focus on urban problems in the United States didn’t make sense when the most interesting things were happening in other places,” he said. “The most rapid urbanization is happening in Asia.”

“We’re ahead of the curve on this,” compared to Stanford’s peer schools, he said. “We’re different, too, because we don’t have a public policy or architecture school, and that’s usually where urban studies is embedded. But ours is more interdisciplinary, more liberal arts.”

One of the new required courses is Cities in Comparative Perspective, taught by anthropologist Paulla Ebron in fall 2007. She had helped develop the course with geographer Karen Seto, who teaches in the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences in the School of Earth Sciences.

“It’s very challenging to work in a very interdisciplinary environment,” Ebron said of the class. “It’s not just ‘you do your thing and I’ll do mine,’ because then we’re the same people as when we started. It showed me I actually do think as an anthropologist.”

The final projects presented in Ebron’s class indicate the field’s breadth but also the commonality of the problems the students and texts address: migration and longtime residents in Las Vegas; check-cashing outlets in Phoenix; the fashion industry in Buenos Aires; the impact of the U.S. Navy’s departure from Hunters Point; the odd class structure of Dubai.

The importance of comparative analysis was also underscored by the graduating Class of 2008’s choice in the fall of their Model Scholar speaker: Carl Nightingale, from the University of Buffalo, who spoke on “Splitting Cities in Early 20th-Century Johannesburg and Chicago.”

“Crisis and decline seemed to be the only narrative” to urban studies decades ago, said program director Michael Kahan, himself an urban historian. But he went on to say that there also has been thematic continuity. He pointed to technology as an important influence on the field today, particularly software for geographic information systems (GIS) and social networking.

“In a way, though, it was technology that brought the field into existence in the first place, as American historians using the early computers were able to do quantitative analysis of social and class problems for the first time,” he noted.

Seto is an expert in GIS, which she uses in her pathbreaking research on patterns of urbanization and environmental destruction in China. (GIS is now a required skills course for the urban studies major.) In the fall she taught Urbanization, Global Change and Sustainability.

“We often study urbanization from a humanist perspective, looking at economics and policy,” she said. “But urbanists rarely study cities from the natural science perspective other than saying that urban spaces have taken over green space, that cities are where biodiversity used to occur.

“I think we need to marry these two visions. I strongly believe urban is the solution; most people live here. But we need to start configuring urban spaces that are sustainable.”

If cities used to be a fixed variable, a known location, the object of study today is a moving target. Migration flows, Ebron said, “lead us to ask questions about what is created as a result of the migration.” In other words, the object is a process.

Likewise with the urban environment, a series of linkages.

“People draw connections between the destruction of the Brazilian rainforest and McDonald’s hamburgers, or between the Indonesian rainforest and Home Depot products,” Seto said. “Even if there’s not a direct line, the areas we are destroying are intimately connected to urban living. We have to look at landscape on a continuum.”

Projects abroad

If globalization provides the context for these connections, it is only logical that undergraduates go abroad, often with the aid of competitive research fellowships. To that end, the Urban Studies Program is working on the creation of a three-week Bing Overseas Seminar.

The cohort of 2007, with 20 graduates, was particularly global.

One of the projects most often pointed to was that of Colin Miller, whose 2007 honors thesis was “Instruments of Peace: Music, Community Development and Environmental Justice in a Brazilian Neighborhood.” Miller (currently on a fifth-year Fulbright in Brazil) obtained Haas summer fellowships to go to Brazil, where he studied street music and taught violin to poor children.

Then there was Deland Chan, Seto’s student and the winner of the Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research last June. Her thesis, “How Migrant Workers Find Housing in Beijing: The Role of Individual Agency in Differential Housing Access and Outcomes,” studied the migration of peasants to Beijing, where they are not always welcome. Another medal winner was Lola Feiger, who received the Robert M. Golden Medal for Excellence in the Humanities and Creative Arts for “The Memorialization of Urban Concentration Camps: Reading the Scale and Infrastructural Complexity of Sachsenhausen for an Understanding of the Holocaust.” Her adviser was Charlotte Fonrobert, associate professor of religious studies.

“Our students are so distinctive. They do extraordinary work, better than anything I’ve ever seen in a traditional department,” McAdam said. “They push each other hard. They constantly have to defend their major, so they’re driven, they don’t just drift there. You can’t just settle into urban studies.”
Also in This Issue

Doing African Studies
On the ground in Africa
Teaching and learning how to teach and learn
Rediscovering creativity by building it
Urban Studies adjusts to a new world
Gender: A fiercely interdisciplinary terrain

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