If city refers immediately to a reality that we think to understand well, this word however misleads us by simplifying to the extreme this “urban realm in its relation to the whole social” (Amiot, 1986) on which it draws.

In order to try to go beyond the usual use of the term “city” to refer to the new urban complexity, specialists invoke neologisms such as “Meta-Polis”, “meta-city” and use dynamics such as “glocalization” or other terms to mean the new spatial-temporal characteristics of urbanization in the era of globalization. The latter, through the explosion of spatial boundaries, seems paradoxically to abrogate the local when faced with the global and to de-territorialize its living spaces (Appadurai, 2006). Nevertheless, at the opposite end of the spectrum of these considerations, we also find the development of the city as an object of merchandise: “city marketing” or “city branding” have become an obligation nowadays as a tool for promotion and planning.

That is why we are looking for different names for the new forms of urbanization. Thus, some talk of metapoles (Archer, 1995), meta-cities [1] and others of novel urban configurations, mega-regions and urban corridors (UN-HABITAT, 2010), or the more traditional talk simply of agglomerations.

According to UN-Habitat, it is expected that 7 out of 10 people will be living in urban areas by 2050. Urban dwellers will then likely account for 86 % of the population in the more developed and 67 % in the less developed regions of the word. Even in the less urbanized regions, such as Africa and Asia, the proportion of the urban population is expected to increase to 61.8% and 66.2%, respectively. (2010)

Despite the exceptions that confirm the rule, and in an apparently inescapable rush towards the urbanistic paroxysm, the world caught in the generality of statistics is now mainly “urban” and urbanization is now global. Clearly, we are now in the “urban civilization” in the sense that Marcel Mauss gives to these phenomena, common to several societies and which stand out from ordinary social phenomena by their extent in space. This urban civilization will not be eternal since social phenomena are also historical processes, doomed to their transformations. On the first level, urbanization is nowadays a commonplace trend carrying us more or less straight. We get used to it by the force of circumstance, we share the effects and recognize the characteristics, we subscribe to its principles and at the same time, we question its substance. Therefore, we make urbanization and consequently, in theory, we can participate in the change.

Urbanization processes, as different they are all over the world, represent initially one of the great social transformation’s expressions that we are living at this beginning of the twenty-first century. We shall remind a precision that is usually forgotten: urbanization is both the action to urbanize and the growing concentration of populations in its resulting forms of “cities”. It designates nowadays the processes, planned or not, of investments of space through constructions, populations and networks of equipments and it is not and has never been the sum of cities nor the adaptation of the cities of Babylon, Athens or Rome…It no longer shares the same characteristics of the designed urbanization model of the Roman Empire or the Spanish crown which had succeeded in conceiving and implementing it in the “New World”, the Americas that are today together with Western Europe, the most urbanized regions of the world. This is not about the same urbanization than the one that “spacialized” trade relations in the Middle Ages nor the industry of the old ages of Modernity. For the time being, it follows the flow of globalization and we seek to understand its new specificities.

We are therefore faced with a practice whose origins date back to Antiquity, which is renewed in the history and is fuelled by a project of society. First and foremost, urbanization marks out the construction and layout of human settlements, beyond its organization and meaning, and this astonishing daily dynamic is greater than the possible outcomes. A mysterious and fascinating whole, a dimension of our life that shapes our societies and that is produced by them. The vague, all-encompassing term is bracketed with its own supervision discipline, “urbanism” [or urban planning], born out of the demands of the industrial society, its methods, its principles and technical nature, the organization and planning of the constructed. This is the first stage of the capture of the urban issue.

However, urbanization knowledge does not come exclusively from “urbanism” and arises sometimes in opposition to some of its models. Beyond the technical, artistic or expert orders (architecture, engineering or “urbanism”), understanding the urban issue [knowledge of urbanization] belongs to an epistemology of diverse disciplinary origins. These disciplines, with their battery of concepts and theories, bring along the second level of understanding of the urban fact: geography, anthropology, sociology, political science and economy and indeed, within other epistemologies, philosophy and literature, to name just the most traditional. And finally, urban civilization is interpreted and questioned by the daily social experience, practices and lay knowledge of inhabitants. The third dimension to understanding the urban issue is finally the one which is fed by all these principles, learning, experience and knowledge: it is that of politics which in this case call the need for public regulation and can include the practice of social organization and also, but with a great deal of caution, governance.

In their young career, social sciences and humanities questioned urbanization processes since the beginning of last century. They always ask new questions that contribute more and more to understand to understand a very complex phenomenon that starts in the analysis of links between the organization of territories, the organization and orientation of societies.

Given the fact that it is a social phenomenon, it would appear that urbanization cannot be analysed per se precisely because its relations with society, politics, the economy and culture depend on the complexity of the relations among these dimensions and between each dimension with urbanization itself. Social actors, knowledge, power, values, needs and projects mingle in an almost inextricable way that most of the time lead to confusion.

We can easily describe and draw up a list of characteristics common to all the entities of society that are part of our urban civilization, the most important of which being universal. But at a deeper cognitive level and in view of the complexity of the phenomenon, the “substantific marrow” [2] (Rabelais, 1534) of the urban form lies in the dynamic links that it develops in a plural way with its generating structures, such as physical forms, social relations, needs, aspirations and inhabitants’ representations, and finally, the meanings and the discourses that give to the urban issue its features of identity.

The analyses of the social and human sciences and the technical or legal studies have followed urbanistic treaties. Urban sociology was made up more from the need to understand a new epistemological field, than by its particular methods or approaches. Geography, anthropology and philosophy in general provide us with the most thorough ideas. But the subject, rich with all the constituent dimensions of time, meaning and functions, and the three levels of understanding already mentioned above, is difficult to grasp in its complexity. Hence the need for a transdisciplinary analysis whose methodology is permanently under construction. Thus, the urban object involves spatial planning, the construction of living spaces and the constitution of human agglomerations; it also includes relations that establish meaning and mechanisms of social reproduction. The whole, being in continuing processes of implied negotiations with society. The “urban question” once set, remains an open question.

We should now tackle the important issue of the city, historically linked to our problem of understanding the urban fact, principally as a legendary producer of meaning. Thus, the links between the city and urbanization can be compared, from a cognitive point of view, to the links between urbanization and society. However, they are of a different nature.

The city, as an ideal place of dialectical tensions between social life and its forms, is now being largely overtaken by the urban issue. It provides, regarding the latter, a limited representation in its objective characteristics and at the same time a symbolic and ideal reference, allowing it, in the best scenarios, to project a Utopian horizon of hope. However, neither the urban fact nor the city, despite appearances and discursive shifts, can establish a causal determination with social relations. In other words, the most common trend currently consists in linking social phenomena with the urban issue in a mechanistic manner, imposing relations of dependence between the former and the latter, as a naturally established link.

Consequently, the city is directly discernable but difficult to comprehend. There are two main reasons for its ambiguity: in today’s reality, it is imprecise in its specificities more than before, and in its physical, legal and functional limitations. In the world of ideas, it is precisely what one might consider as an archetype.

The etymological roots of the word “city” are various. In French, it is closed to the Latin villa (country house) which in the fifth century meant “a group of houses built against the villa” [3]. In English and Spanish, the word “city” comes from civitas, which includes the quality, the condition and status of citizen as well as  the community to which he belongs, or even, a politically organized population within a broader structure, commonly the State. Connected to city, Urbs is also a Latin word which refers to “the city of all cities”, in other words, Ancient Rome. To finish with Latin roots that are constitutive of our conception and issue, Urbanitas is the quality of what is from the city: urbanity and courteousness. Therefore, the city has connotations of excellence that becomes a qualification taken to the extreme, when one is dealing with current urban sprawl and its unsatisfactory structured and ordered territories, giving greater importance to the values it represents while distancing itself from the underlying and real facts.

The ideal city also takes on an aesthetic nature insofar as it constitutes an abstraction of space and of its projections towards a history that links it directly with the will-be society with the project, or with a society in crisis with utopia. The physical city is built on foundations of ideas, discussions, designs and on archetypes belonging to founding civilizations (Jerusalem, Babylon, Athens, Rome, etc.), with a direct connection to the model that societies would like to have. The city has thus mostly become the mythical illustration of the place that founds history and territorial laws, while promoting democracy, peaceful cohabitation and social cohesion through the sacralisation of places, streets and maps, that is to say, in the processes of reciprocal adjustments between Urbs and Civitas constitutive of “urbanity”. The city- discourse and design- is thus the symbol ex ante of the urban reality.

Indeed, we try to give meaning to the elements surrounding us and escaping us. There is no exception with the city. By analogy we attach a mythical model to each of its current or potential functions. Thus Rome appears as a universal reference of all human agglomeration.  But the city can also become an ideal society or in progress, strong of the symbols of certain treaties that created our fundamental references on the political life as The Republic of Platoon, on the paradise as The City of God of St Augustine, or on the dissenting and creative dismissal of what goes wrong in the society like the Amaurote of More. In other words idea preexists to reality and attempts to coincide with the real facts to comply with a sort of “urban paradigm.”

In the same way, the current dynamic of urbanization that differs deeply from the under-lying idea of the ideal city seems to take its own remote paths of the original trends by obeying to other rules and logics. The human contemporary agglomerations, without abandoning the principle of coincidence with images of the city and without the possibility to answer favorably to these norms, tend to be seen only in an automatic relation between the serious urban contemporary challenges and an ideal city that became out of necessity, pure ideological discourse.

The last characteristic of this “urban paradigm” is the adjectivation of its name. When we place against “urban” to a noun, it becomes an adjective and tries to bring an explanation, but it qualifies without producing knowledge. Thus, the paradigm would intend to be self-sufficient in order to understand the phenomena.

In fact, the social phenomena such as poverty or security can take place in territories and urban areas, but the respective territories do not reveal the phenomena. Thus, for example, the expressions “urban violence” or “urban poverty” could lead to the understanding that violence and poverty are characteristic and consubstantial features of the urban issue, a field within which the two phenomena would take place naturally and exclusively. In other words, living spaces do not product social links, but coproduce them dependently from the issues at stake. However, the assumption of causal determination between each other seems to be today one of the driving forces of urbanism and one of the major obstacles in the comprehension of urban dynamics.

For these reasons, the contemporary comprehension of the urban issue can be enriched by the analysis of the ideal city that a society is granting itself, insofar as it could consider it as a kind of ideal model to be reached, but it might not be enough. Indeed, the relation between the qualitative idea of the city and the fact produced by urban processes belongs to the discourse and not to the epistemology. Firstly, we have a problem to access knowledge by the excessive use of the metonymy towards ideology that moves it away from the scientific conscience that we could develop on the urban fact. Then, our second problem lies in the separation between words and reality. The ideal city has only a few empirical accesses in the characteristics of the new urban fact. It is one of the major problems of social transformations underway: we are in the presence of new phenomena that we keep trying to understand with the old categories, overwhelmed by the events.

In the case of city, the first referent of the urban areas is traditionally “the agglomeration, lying upon a continuum of built-up areas” (Moriconi-Ébrard 1993). The United Nations had defined agglomerations as a continuity of built-up areas in which none are separated from the closest by more than 200 meters in Europe…(1978) [4] and the urban population is referring to the human inhabitants living within the contours of a contiguous territory. [5] Therefore the continuity, the proximity of constructions and the definition of a form limited by its contours are characteristics of the city. In this regard, the difficulty we have to face is due to the urban dissemination, technically known as « Urban Sprawl », that seems to be today one urbanization’s specificities.

Indeed, the first reason of this « universal » dissemination is the technical order.  With the last material possibilities of exchanges and the development of the globalization’s “mobile societies” networks, space and time are extending in the virtual opening-up, and agglomerations are becoming open territorial extensions, crossed by traffic lanes and communication networks that expand their influence as far as possible. The second reason comes within the social dimension, which in urbanization tends to impregnate the entire society, in its living conditions and its mindsets, beyond populations exclusively urban or rural. Therefore the dichotomy between the countryside and the city, territorial indicators thanks to which we were used to localize ourselves before globalization, is becoming inaccurate.

In the other hand, the complexity of the urban fact lies also in the fact that it is about an epistemic object that requests an analytical work, a technical and economic object that requests an operational work and a public object that requests a political work.  These three dimensions of the urban issue –analytical, operational and political- enable us to have another approach to our theme through the development of closer interconnections between knowledge and policies, social and human sciences knowledge shedding light on urban issues that in the practice are treated and regulated by public policies. Regarding the aspects of equipment and planning of urban areas that represent the operational dimension, they try to give satisfaction to the needs of the improvement of living conditions of the built environment and make of the urban issue a development issue.

In this context, besides the major themes of land tenure, property holding or basic services of infrastructure for dwelling, there is an increased interest for social and political questions, such as citizenship, social inclusion, democratic rights and the fight against poverty, as well as the quality of living condition of the built frame. Thus the urban issue is a wide field that affects, in different ways and for different reasons, the large spectrum of social actors: inhabitants, technicians, experts, designers, regulators, politicians, investors, researchers and academics. In other words it is about the social dimension of territorial policies. Consequently urbanization has to integrate appropriate directions and regulations in space and territory planning policies that have the ambition to ensure the coherence vis-à-vis a society project as well as its actors.

References

Amiot, Michel. Contre l'État, les sociologues, Paris, 1986.

Appadurai Arjun: Fear of Small Numbers: an Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham, Duke University Press, 2006

Ascher, François : Métapolis ou l'avenir des villes. Paris, Odile Jacob, 1995

Bauman, Zygmunt: Liquid Times. Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge, Polity Press, 2007

Moriconi-Ébrard, François : L'Urbanisation du monde depuis 1950. Paris, Economica, Anthropos, 1993

Rabelais, François : Gargantua et Pantagruel, Prologue (1534)

UN-Habitat/ State of the World’s Cities 2010/2011: Bridging the urban divide. Earthscan, 2008.