Republic of the Philippines

PARTIDO STATE UNIVERSITY

Goa, Camarines Sur

College of Education BA204

Module 2: Introduction to Urban Geography

Course Code: SSED19 Week No./Date: Week 2/Feb. 15-19, 2021

Course Title: Geography 3: Urban Geography Professor: Ralph C. Navelino
Section: BSED-SS3A Term: 2nd Semester 2020-2021

A. Introduction

The study of urban places is central to many social sciences, including geography, because of their
importance not only in the distribution of population within countries but also in the organization of economic
production, distribution and exchange, in the structuring of social reproduction and cultural life, and in the
exercise of political power.

This module, explores the introduction of Urban geography and its concepts, scope and meaning.

B. Learning Outcomes:

At the end of this module, you should be able to:

1. Identify the different geographic concepts;
2. Examine the development of urban geography; and
3. Create informatics portfolio.

C. Learning Content

Introduction to Urban Geography

Urban geography seeks to explain the distribution of towns and cities and the socio spatial similarities
and contrasts that exist between and within them. If all cities were unique, this would be an impossible task.
However, while every town and city has an individual character, urban places also exhibit common features that
vary only in degree of incidence or importance within the particular urban fabric. All cities contain areas of
residential space, transportation lines, economic activities, service infrastructure, commercial areas and public
buildings. In different world regions the historical process of urban evolution may have followed a similar
trajectory. Increasingly, similar processes, such as those of suburbanization, gentrification and socio-spatial
segregation, are operating within cities in the
developed world, in former communist states
and in countries of the Third World to effect a
degree of convergence in the nature of urban
landscapes. Cities also exhibit common
problems to varying degrees, including
inadequate housing, economic decline, poverty,
ill health, social polarization, traffic congestion
and environmental pollution. In brief, many
characteristics and concerns are shared by
urban places. These shared characteristics and
concerns represent the foundations for the
study of urban geography. Most fundamentally,
the character of urban environments
throughout the world is the outcome of
interactions among a host of environmental,
economic, technological, social, demographic, cultural and political forces operating at a variety of geographic
scales ranging from the global to the local.

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 Republic of the Philippines
PARTIDO STATE UNIVERSITY
Goa, Camarines Sur

BA204
Definition of Urban geography

1. Kohu- Urban Geography is in part merely a special phase of settlement study applied to various
complex areas processing sharp internal differentiation.
2. Griffith Taylor- Urban Geography includes the site revolution pattern and classification of towns.
3. Dudley Stamp- Urban Geography is infecting the intensive study of town and their development in all
their geographical aspects.

All these 3 geographers suggest the study of town in individual manner. By the view of the importance
of Urban Geography some geographer suggests that the study of town is related with its associated
areas.

Scope of Urban Geography

cities and the socio-spatial similarities and contrasts that exist within and between them. There are
thus two basic approaches to urban geography:

1. The first refers to the spatial distribution of towns and cities and the linkages between
them: the study of systems of cities.

2. The second refers to the internal structure of urban places: the study of the city as a
system.

In essence, urban geography may be defined as the study of cities as systems within a system of cities.
The scope of urban geography as well as the sub-discipline’s links with other branches of geography. The diagram
below also indicates the power of urban geography to synthesize many different perspectives so as to advance
our understanding of urban phenomena. This eclectic approach to the analysis of urban places extends beyond
geography to incorporate research findings and knowledge across traditional disciplinary boundaries. The
integrative power of urban geography is a key characteristic of the sub-discipline. A second principal
characteristic of geographical analysis of the city is the centrality of a spatial perspective. This distinguishes urban
geography from cognate areas of urban study such as urban economics, urban sociology or urban politics

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 Republic of the Philippines
PARTIDO STATE UNIVERSITY
Goa, Camarines Sur

BA204

Concepts of Urban Geography

1. Location and Movement

➢ Centrality
• Central business districts have been an important part of traditional approaches to urban
geography, as seen in models of urban structure and theories of location.
• There are subtle differences within such central areas, between high-rise office clusters, ‘zones
of transition’ between service and manufacturing neighborhoods, retail streets and apartment
blocks.
• The 1980s witnessed the beginnings of a rediscovery of city center living, characterized by
apartment living and new social groups adding to a so-called ‘urban renaissance’. However,
critics have pointed to processes of displacement and gentrification, and the power of property
developers and corporate leisure groups in shaping urban politics downtown.
• The mobility paradigm is an interdisciplinary collective of researchers attempting to reconfigure
the social sciences (including human geography) through placing movement and mobility at the
center of the social science’s definition of society.
➢ Global cities
• From world city to global city.
• Rise of globalization among global cities.
• High diversity in language, culture, religion, and ideologies
• Dominance of the national region with great international significance
• Major manufacturing centers with port and container facilities

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 Republic of the Philippines
PARTIDO STATE UNIVERSITY
Goa, Camarines Sur

• BA204
Considerable decision-making power on a daily basis and at a global level
• Centers of new ideas and innovation in business, economics, culture, and politics

➢ Transnational urbanism
• It is an attempt to think through the ways in which cities are evermore defined by all sorts of
connections to faraway places. More specifically, it is an attempt to think systematically about
the ways such long distance – often trans-border – connections are increasingly organized
through people leading lives that are lived in ‘two places at once’, lived both “here and there”.
• Transnationalism is a concept that seeks to make globalization conceptually
manageable. If focused on the concrete practices that allow social, economic, and
political relationships to be stretched across national borders.
• Trans-migrants of all social backgrounds construct intricate social, economic and political
networks that knit together places over often very substantial distances.
• These transnational social morphologies profoundly shape the dynamics of the cities that they
encompass.

2. Constructions
➢ Nature
• Different ideas about nature have shaped both ideas and theories about cities and attempts to
redesign the physical spaces of urban life.
• Nature is no longer understood by geographers as ontologically pure: rather, it tends to be
conceived in terms of a set of hybrid relations between physical and imaginative, human and
non-human processes.
• Cities are therefore no defined against nature, but are locations where hybrid natures are
produced and transformed with particular intensity and complexity.
➢ Materiality
• Materiality has often been under-conceptualized within urban geography.
• Any definition of materiality must not reduce it to brute matter, but recognize that there are
many ways in which it can be theorized.
• Urban geographers and other are beginning to develop an understanding of materiality as a
dynamic process rather than a static thing.

➢ Infrastructure
• Infrastructure has a huge role to play in the functioning and feel of cities, from sewer systems to
power plants, as well as underpinning the connectivity of cities which is often taken for granted
by globalization theorists.
• While seen for much of the twentieth century as a public good, oriented toward universal access,
many new developments are based upon a ‘user pay’ ideology, allowing premium services for
those who can afford to pay more. Access to such infrastructure is unevenly divided within cities,
with the situation even more extreme in underdeveloped countries, which have often suffered
from inappropriate and destructive megaproject development undertaken by Western firms.

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 Republic of the Philippines
PARTIDO STATE UNIVERSITY
Goa, Camarines Sur

• BA204
The successful functioning of infrastructure allows individuals to be seen as ‘cyborgs’. However,
system breakdown threatens the taken-for-granted comforts of everyday life in prosperous
cities and reveals the human dependency on natural resources and scientific expert systems.
➢ Architecture
• A tension between materiality and representation has characterized how geographers have
thought about buildings for some time, but increasingly there are moves to synthesize and
reimagine the connections.
• Geographers have been interested in explaining the mobile and relational production of
architecture, and the technological systems that underpin its design, construction and
maintenance.
• Perspectives from landscape geography have shifted from a fixed accounting of visual artifacts
to a deeper, archived-based interpretation of the social, economic and political processes that
shape the built environment.

3. Envisioning and Experience

➢ Diagrams
• As a schematic presentation of process, the diagram has and continues to be central to the
production and reproduction of urban geographical knowledge.
• The diagram has traditionally been understood as a representational technique, more recent
work within human geography has focused on diagrams as per-formative devices – devices that
perform certain kinds of work
• Drawing upon such work is possible to reaffirm the creative element of the diagram when
thinking about urban space.
➢ Photography
• Photography as a practice can also be understood as the manipulation of images. However, while
geographers have tended to deal with real and representational spaces as completely separate
entities, they have become interested in their interplay.
➢ Body
• Bodies are at the center of how urban spaces is experienced, yet much of western knowledge
has excluded the body from the business of thinking of urban space. The influence of this can be
seen in much of urban planning and governance through the effort to regulate and control
bodies and forms of embodied conduct.
• The body is a key site at which the politics of urban space is registered, reproduced, and
contested.
• Urban geographers and other have recently foregrounded affectivity as an important element in
understanding the relation between bodies and cities.
➢ Virtuality
• While often associated with digital experience, the virtual can be differentiated into three
elements: the imaginative virtual; the digital virtual; and the temporal virtual.
• The imaginative virtual in an important element of everyday urban experience, through literary
accounts, memories, dreams, and desires.
➢ Surveillance
• Surveillance has a significant role in the governance of individual lives such as crime prevention,
internal security, and personal finance. It also raises concerns about the invasion of individuals’
privacy rights, not least in reality television programs.

4. Social and Political Organizations

➢ Segregation
• Segregation has been of interest to urban geographers since the very foundation of the sub-
discipline.
• Segregation is multi-casual and multi-dimensional.
• High levels of residential segregation can be corrosive, but ethnic enclaves can also offer
essential resources and assistance that facilitate social mobility.
• Middle class elite urban populations are increasingly seeking to restructure urban space so they
do not have to come into contact with people of lower social status.

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 Republic of the Philippines
PARTIDO STATE UNIVERSITY
Goa, Camarines Sur

➢ Urban Politics BA204

• Cities cannot be understood as cohesive entities, with singular, common interests. Rather, their
governance and internal wealth distribution is highly politicized.
• Cities are represented and performed, and actors such as mayors have considerable power to
communicate specific visions or discourses of what a city should be, has been and will be in the
future.
➢ Community
• Urban theory has long been shaped by the idea that cities are defined by an absence of genuine
community.
• The media plays a central role in the construction of community in the contemporary city. It
helps generate a sense of connection among otherwise diverse urban populations.
• The idea of ‘community’ is not just about inclusion. It can also be employed to exclude those
who are seen as different or other to the majority.
• Many urban geographers now prefer to consider the dynamics of social connection, or
communion.

5. Sites and Practices

➢ Consumption
• Consumption has been a major interest in the social sciences in recent times. Geographers are
interested in the sites and practices where consumption takes place, how particular sites may
encourage or facilitate consumption behaviors, and how particular social relationships may be
located in particular sites.
• Consumer landscapes are sometimes ‘disguised’ to frame the user as an ‘audience member’
rather than an economically targeted consumer. Practices of advertising encourages consumers
to exercise their ‘self’ through their choice of commodities.
➢ Media
• The geography of media includes not only the places where media is made, consumed, and
distributed, but also the nodes (or media capitals) between which they pass.
➢ Public Space
• Public space refers to spaces that are open to the general population (‘the public’). In an ideal
sense this would mean public spaces are open to all. In actual fact, few public spaces fit this ideal.
• Many urban geographers argue that the public space of contemporary cities being eroded by the
rise of consumerism, specale-isation, of urban space, and a generalized fear of crime and
difference.
➢ Commemoration
• Monuments come in many different forms, and are public spaces for people to mourn, debate,
and protest. They act as markers of major events and their protagonists.
• Media events challenge the traditional role of monuments in their function as commemorative
objects. Media events can also be commemorative acts, linking people to paces.

Development in Urban Geography

Urban development processes are greatly affected by structural transformation of societies.

Over the past decade, societies have witnessed changes that were unprecedented in recent history: the
collapse of political and economic systems, new integration policies, globalization of the economy and
the decline of the nation-state, mass migration, governmental retrenchment, and social restructuring.
Structural changes in societies manifest themselves distinctly in urban areas and every generation needs
to engage in the discourse on a country's built politics, the sustainability of urban form and design, and
the ecological footprint of major cities and suburban areas. Urban geography deals with the analysis of
the complex dimensions of urban social, economic, cultural, and political processes, patterns, and
structures and urban planning processes to build up or retain local comparative advantages, while
retaining cities as livable urban places and securing their sound social and environmental development
for future generations.

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 Republic of the Philippines
PARTIDO STATE UNIVERSITY
Goa, Camarines Sur

BA204
D. Learning Activities and Assessment Tasks

Task 1. Q & A: Answer the following questions in two to three sentences only regarding the origin of Urban
Geography.

1. What are the different concepts of urban geography?

2. How do these concepts affect urbanization in a city?

3. Give some development of urban geography in the Philippines?

4. Identify the role of community in urbanization.

Task 2. Informatics’ Portfolio: Create an informatics’ portfolio showing the highlight of urbanization in the
Philippines according to five periods:
1. Spanish
2. American
3. Japanese
4. Post-liberation
5. Contemporary

Scoring Rubric:
Criteria 4 3 2 1
Included Most of the Some information Many major
information that information are included are trivial, information are
are important and important or and major facts are excluded, and too
Quality of content interesting. No interesting. One or missing. many trivia are
major details are two major facts included.
excluded. may be missing.
Accuracy of • Facts are • Facts are • Facts are accurate • Facts are often
Content accurate for all accurate for for most (~75%) inaccurate for
information almost all events of the events events reported
reported on the reported on the reported on the on the
informatics. informatics. informatics. informatics.
• Citations are • Citations are • Very few citations • No citations are
provided and provided but are provided. provided.
complete. incomplete.
Pictures/ Graphics Pictures and Most pictures and Few of the pictures Pictures and
graphics are clear graphics are clear and graphics are graphics are not
and relevant. and relevant. clear and relevant. clear and relevant.s
Visual Clarity and The informatics has The informatics has The informatics The informatics
Appeal excellence design a nice design and needs needs significant
and layout. It is layout. It is neat improvement in improvement in
neat and easy to and easy to read. design, layout and design, layout and
understand the neatness. neatness.
content.
Quantity of Facts The informatics The informatics The informatics The timeline
contains at least 8– contains at least 6– contains at least 5 contains fewer
10 events related 7 events related to events related to than 5 information.
to the topic being the topic being the topic being
studied. studied. studied.

Module 2- Introduction to Urban Geography Page 7 of 8

 Republic of the Philippines
PARTIDO STATE UNIVERSITY
Goa, Camarines Sur

E. Assignment: Answer the following question in two to three sentence only. BA204

1. Describe the evolution of Philippine Urban system and its development.

2. Evaluate the programs of Philippine Urban Geographers.

3. What are the different forms of Urban maps?

F. References:

Hall, Tim (2010). Contemporary Geography Series: Urban Geography. Routledge Printing Press

Briney, A.T. (2019). Learn about the study of cities, urban geography. https://www.thoughtco.com/overview-
of-urban-geography-1435803

Larson, R.A. (2019). Urban Geography. https://www.opengeography.org/ch-9-urban-geography.html

Prepared by: Reviewed by: Approved:

RALPH C. NAVELINO JOAN A. MONFORTE, PhD MARITA S. MAGAT, PhD

FACULTY PROGRAM DIRECTOR DEAN

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