Contested cities: social processes and spatial form

Cities are close knit communities. They are also fundamental ecological features in themselves and the process. In week 9, we had a seminar on topic “contested cities: social processes and spatial form” written by David Harvey, a well-known geographer. He thinks that cites are critical to understanding the current human condition and they are sites of conflict based on race, ideology, gender and other social categories. David Harvey emphasize the importance of thinking about cities in terms of processes rather than just things. Those processes are both shaped by time and place and shape time and place. The twentieth century has been the century of urbanization. At the beginning of this century, no more than 7 per cent of the world’s population could reasonably be classified as urban. But this stage there is as many as 500 cities with more than a million inhabitants.

 As Harvey had mentioned, time and space has the great role in urbanization, and urbanization being the urban process which links between the city and process. The view of space and time do not exist outside of process. Each particular kind of process will define its own distinctive spatio- temporality. From this point we have to understand that space and time are not simply constituted by but are also constitutive of social processes.

 Community has a great role in an exploration of process/thing relationship. It is important to acknowledge that a lot of community activism is absolutely fundamental to many forms of social struggle. Community activism can be very important moment in more general mobilization. So construction of community is not as an end in itself but as a moment in a process. That is why Harvey criticizes the belief that good design will solve social process problems. He argues the social process underlying even the best designed, community enhancing place need to be cultivated and sustained. Just building a remarkable physical community will not create community, but there should be a dialectical view of relationships between process and community.