City

In “what is a city?” Mumford lays out his fundamental propositions about city planning and the human potential, both individual and social, of urban life. He says that most of housing and city planning has been not well planned because who have undertaken the work have had no clear notion of the social functions of the city. According to him the city is a related collection of primary groups and purposive association: the first, like family and neighborhood, are common to all communities, while the second are especially characteristic of city life. Author also says that when the physical environment itself becomes disordered and incoherent, the social functions that it harbors become more difficult to express. One further conclusion follows from this concept of the city: social facts are primary, and the physical organization of a city, its industries and its markets, its lines of communication and traffic, must be subservient to its social needs. According to Mumford today’s planner must treat the social nucleus as the essential element in every valid city plan: the spotting and inter-relationship of schools, libraries, theaters, community centers is the first task in defining the urban neighborhood and laying down the outlines of an integrated city and also consider the limitations on size, density, and area cause they are absolutely necessary to effective social intercourse and they are therefore the most important instruments of rational economic and civic planning.

In this article author has discussed about Generic city. Generic city is the city liberated from the captivity of center, from the straitjacket of identity. The Generic city breaks with this destructive cycle of dependency: it is nothing but a reflection of present need and present ability. The definitive move away from the countryside, from agriculture, to the city is not a move to the city but it is a move to the Generic city, the city so pervasive that it has come to the country. Sometimes an old, singular city, like Barcelona, by oversimplifying its identity, turns Generic. The Generic city is always founded by people on the move, poised to move on. In Generic city housing has either been completely solved or totally left to chance; in the first case, towers or usually slabs, in the second a crust of improvised hovels. Mainly there are three elements in Generic city: roads, buildings, and nature; they coexist in flexible relationships. Any one of the three may dominate: sometimes the road sometimes nature. There are also some negative points of Generic city like Buildings may be placed well or badly. Networks become overstretched, age, rot, become obsolescent; populations double, triple, quadruple, suddenly disappear.

Michael Porter has described the advantages and disadvantages of inner city:                                                                    Advantages : Access to labor , easy transpiration , local purchasing   power, and urban economics clusters such as the  tourism and legal industries. Locational benefit of inner city is access to broadband  telecommunication . The inner cities tend to be sitting right on the big cyber hubs , and so getting access to broadband  communication is very easy relative to suburban location.                                                                                                                                                                                      Disadvantages: Higher building cost, additional cost of water, other utilities, worker’s compensation, health care and other taxes etc., less security, employee’s less skill, less management skill.

The aggregation of urban population has been described by Ernest Burgess. A sociological study of the growth of the city, however, is concerned with the definition and description of process , as those of (a) expansion ,(b) metabolism , and (c) mobility. The typical tendency of urban growth is the expansion  readily  from its central  business district by a series of concentric circles , as the central business district, a zone of deterioration ,a zone of workingmen’s homes, a residential area, and a commuter’s zone. Urban growth may be even more fundamentally stated as the resultant of processes of organization and disorganization, like the anabolic and catabolic processes of metabolism in the human body. The distribution of population into the natural areas of the city, the division of labor, the differentiation into the social and cultural groupings, represent the normal manifestation of urban metabolism, as statistics of disease, crime, disorder, vice, insanity, and suicide are rough indexes of its abnormal expression. The state of metabolism of the city may, it is suggested, be measured by mobility, defined as a change of movement in response to a new stimulus or situation. Areas in the city of the greatest mobility are found to be contacts of city population, as in the increase per capita in the total annual rides on surface and elevated lies, number of automobiles, letters received, telephone, and land values. A cross section  of the city has been selected for the intensive study of the urban growth in terms of expansion, metabolism, and mobility.

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