What Makes a Place Urban?
| Dates: | 26 October 2022 |
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| Times: | 12:00 - 13:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Environment, Education and Development |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Adults, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Dr Sean Fox |
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Please contact Felix Agyemang at <felix.agyemang@manchester.ac.uk> for the Zoom link and password for this event.
The quintessence of urbanity is a sustained geographic concentration of strangers. Physical
congregation—or corporeal copresence—has wide-ranging environmental and social
consequences that produce urban contexts. In practical terms, this means that demographic
criteria alone are sufficient to classify a location, settlement, or region as more or less urban.
We use a series of thought experiments to demonstrate the conceptual limitations of popular
definitions of urbanity, such as the economic structure of a community, the presence of
physical infrastructure, the political or administrative status of a geographic unit, or the degree
of connectivity between people. We show that these are not essential to what makes a place
urban but are instead common epiphenomena associated with places that have a sustained
geographic concentration of strangers. This definition does not require a settlement to be
permanent, allowing for ephemeral urbanity (dense but temporary settlements), resolving
many classic exceptions to previous definitions of urbanity. We suggest that urbanity is best
conceptualised and measured on a continuum and discuss how this can be done empirically
to advance our theoretical and practical understanding of urban places and urban systems
globally.
Speaker
Dr Sean Fox
Role: Associate Professor in Global Development
Organisation: University of Bristol
Travel and Contact Information
