ON SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT, COMPARATIVE RESEARCH, AND INCLUSIVENESS: A COMMENTARY1
Larry S. Bourne2 Department of Geography and Program in Planning and Centre for Urban and Community Studies University of Toronto Toronto, Canada
Abstract: This article offers a critique of the common practice of labeling an institution or group of people as a distinct school of thought, ideology, or methodology, and calls for more open, inclusive, and comparative research in urban geography. The former argument highlights the negative effects of within-group dialogue and its inherent exclusionary tendencies, whereas the latter stresses the role of context and contingency in understanding our cities. Examples are drawn from the experience and characteristics of North American cities to illustrate the crucial importance of national institutions, politics, culture, and geography in shaping those cities, and the challenges involved in writing theory and defining an inclusive research agenda. [Key words: North American cities, labeling, inclusive research, comparative analysis.]
I wish to begin by thanking the organizers for putting together this special issue on the Chicago and L.A. “Schools” of urban geography (which had its genesis in a session at the Chicago AAG Meeting in March 2006). This endeavor is most useful because it illustrates the arbitrary nature of such self-identified groups as well as facilitating academic debate. There is very little opportunity for those with different perspectives on issues of theory, method, and practice to engage in open and meaningful dialogue. Our increasingly specialized and fragmented discipline tends to encourage debate that is inwardly focused, directed to those with similar interests and ideologies, and protected from external criticism by the lack of a common language. This narcissistic tendency, by design or accident, implicitly marginalizes, devalues, or simply ignores the intellectual contributions of others outside the group. This isolationism is not only exclusionary but ultimately counterproductive, and it may reduce the value and utility of our research insights for the larger community of which we are a part. THE ISSUES: LABELING AND EXCLUSION My commentary focuses on two sets of issues that may appear separate but are, in fact, closely related. Initially, it raises a concern, widely shared, regarding the downside of the increasingly common practice of labeling this or that institution or group of people as a
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The three maps were generously provided by J. Simmons and S. Kamikihara. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Larry S. Bourne, Department of Geography and Program in Planning, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G3, Canada; telephone: 418-9781593; fax: 416-978-7162; e-mail:
[email protected]
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177 Urban Geography, 2008, 29, 2, pp. 177–186. DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.29.2.177 Copyright © 2008 by Bellwether Publishing, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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distinctive school of thought, ideology, or methodology. Second, and as a means of countering the potentially misleading generalizations that often flow from narrow withingroup dialogue, it argues the case for more transparent and comparative urban research— research that is not only open to criticism, but more likely to be inclusive of a diversity of ideas and perspectives. In other words, the argument is for research that spans different research paradigms as well as different spatial scales. The latter argument, in turn, raises the crucial issue of context, and stresses the importance of recognizing that our research reflects the cumulative inheritance of both local and national institutions, cultures, and everyday practices. The imprint of this inheritance is evident in the orientation and style of most of the research emanating from and focused on both Chicago and Los Angeles. I conclude with selected examples from Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. cities to illustrate some of the benefits and challenges of inclusive and comparative analysis. What is my concern regarding the negative effects of labeling? The exercise of labeling (or branding) is a standard technique in the image-making business, and is specifically intended to enhance the marketing of individual products, processes, places, and personalities. It is also inherently selective, frequently distorting, and potentially exclusionary. In academia it is often convenient and usually relatively easy, indeed too easy, to attach broad labels to certain types of research or groups of researchers based in specific universities or localities. The direct costs of academic labeling are obviously low relative to those involved in the worlds of commerce and entertainment, whereas the indirect costs—such as in discouraging social interaction and the open exchange of ideas—are usually hidden and potentially nontrivial. Moreover, those labels invariably take on a life of their own, assigning priority and prominence to particular research styles, or points of view, that are not warranted by the empirical evidence available or the quality of the research outcomes. Nor are these labels representative of the resources and diversity of expertise available within the larger research community. Students of the city may wish to debate the merits and demerits of the underlying assumptions, research styles, and methodological approaches that are frequently attributed to the Chicago School, and those more recently claimed by members of the L.A. School. Others may even wish to argue the logical basis, or even the existence, of such clusters of research. But I have no intention of doing so. I find neither of these descriptive labels to be particularly accurate nor analytically useful; indeed, both are intellectually limiting and exclusionary. COMPARATIVE RESEARCH AND THE UNITED STATES AS SPECIAL CASE The second and related point, on the need for more inclusive and comparative research on cities (not simply on Chicago and Los Angeles), is obviously not a new argument. It becomes more relevant, however, given the tendency to self-identify distinctive schools or specialized subgroups of urban research. The most appropriate bases for inclusive research, and the actual comparators, can be drawn from across subdisciplinary boundaries, blending ideologies, methods, and paradigms, and applied across different spatial scales, from local and regional to continental and global. Comparative research is obviously not easy under any circumstances. However, urban geographers based in the United States, and those studying cities in the United States,
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face a particularly difficult challenge in incorporating comparative analyses that transcend national contexts and boundaries, while at the same time addressing the importance of contingency in their research. To a certain degree, this inward perspective is understandable. Given the immense size, wealth, and influence of the country, and the strength and sophistication of the U.S. academic community, it is relatively easy to overlook research undertaken in the rest of the urban world. The tendency is to consider such research as irrelevant, or at best as a series of special cases. No one would articulate theory based on such special cases. It is, however, frequently forgotten that the United States is itself a very special case. The growth and character of its cities, not just Chicago and Los Angeles, cannot be understood without reference to the nation’s history, economy, culture, and government, as well as its political attitudes and institutional structures. Those cities are, to use current terminology, embedded in a uniquely American context, involving layers upon layers of events, politics, laws, regulations, policies, practices, and personal histories. Thus it is difficult, if not impossible, to build theory based only on the U.S. urban experience, let alone the experience of one or two cities, even if such theorizing begins by explicitly recognizing and then incorporating the effects of that context. When I look at Chicago and Los Angeles, and much of the excellent research based on those remarkable cities, I see not two competing models of the future of cities elsewhere in the world, but rather the uniqueness of American (i.e., U.S.) culture, values, institutions, and policies. Both cities are period pieces. They represent massive physical and social constructions undertaken in special places and environments, during given time periods, and under differing conditions, and as a result they exhibit contrasting economies, social geographies, and political settings. Chicago is a fascinating laboratory for urban research, particularly research set in the first two-thirds of the 20th century; Los Angeles is an equally fascinating laboratory for research during the second half of the century. They are what they are. But what they are not, in themselves, are urban models for anywhere else. To stimulate discussion, one might ask how different U.S. cities would be today if the context and content of urban growth and development had been different. How different, for example, would the social ecology of cities be today if the traditional Black/White racial divide and systematic racial discrimination had essentially disappeared over the postwar period? How different would the geography of the U.S. urban system be without the growth of the federal government or the military, or without the close proximity of Canada and its cheap natural resources, or without Mexico and its vast stock of surplus labor? Other questions on cities and research styles come to mind. How different would the physical form and everyday lived experiences of U.S. cities be if they were not internally politically fragmented, and if metropolitan governments and regional revenue sharing were more widespread? How different would the style and content of U.S. urban research be if the central city/suburban political divide, which frames (indeed preoccupies) so much of that research, had been reduced or removed? How different would cities be if the federal government had built (or subsidized) a nationwide rail network instead of—or parallel to—the interstate highway system; what if health care was universal; what if the tax system had been neutral with respect to investments in new and old portions of the built environment? How different would cities be if the playing field for development in
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suburban and inner city locations, in terms of regulatory systems, taxes, and the like, had been less uneven (Bourne, 1996, 2007)? And what if income inequalities were decreasing rather than increasing? The answer is we do not know—although it would certainly be interesting to speculate. The point I am attempting to make is not a criticism of U.S. cities but rather that those cities, for better and worse, cannot be detached or abstracted from these inherited contextual conditions and policy decisions. THE UNITED STATES, CANADA, MEXICO: CLOSE TOGETHER BUT STILL WORLDS APART? To illustrate the importance of cumulative layers of context and contingent paths of development, it would be useful to draw examples from the United States’ two smaller NAFTA partners, Canada and Mexico. These three countries obviously differ markedly in their population size, history, economies, cultural diversity, and politics, as well as in their natural endowments and physical geographies (Bourne, 2005; Bunting and Filion, 2006; Simmons and Kamikihara, 2006). They also, arguably, differ in their basic social values, as Lemon (1996) and Adams (2003) have pointed out for Canada and the United States. The urban systems of the three countries, broadly outlined in Figure 1, reflect those conditions, and the relative sizes, characteristics, and spatial distribution of the continent’s metropolitan areas (all 392 of them) in turn help to define the national geographies of growth and change. Despite decades of increasing trade flows, cross-border migration (legal and illegal), and numerous other transnational linkages, the three systems continue to be separate and distinct. Levels of economic development, and specifically per-capita income levels for metropolitan areas (shown in Fig. 2 for 2000), remain markedly different. Cities with the highest incomes are all located in the Untied States, as expected; those with the lowest are almost all in Mexico. In between, however, lies a range of moderate-income cities throughout all three countries. As another example of the boundary effect, migration flows among metropolitan areas, shown in Figure 3 as the destination of the largest population outflows from each city, clearly illustrate the effect of the borders. For Canada and the United States, the border is relatively porous for goods, financial services, travel, cultural products, and capital investment, yet migration flows on both sides are contained within and shaped by that border. The flows between Vancouver and Toronto (5,000 km [3000 miles] apart) are several orders of magnitude greater than those between Vancouver and nearby Seattle, or between Toronto and almost adjacent Buffalo. For Mexico, the U.S. border serves both as a strong magnet and as a barrier; for the United States, in contrast, the border is a defensive perimeter with the Third World. The slow pace of continental integration is due in part to longstanding economic and cultural differences and in part to public policies and practices, especially but not exclusively those of the U.S. government. Capital and most goods move more-or-less freely across the borders, but people do not. The cities in all three countries also mirror the regions within which they are located— including the inherited political and institutional contexts of those regions, as well as their proximity to the border. How else, without reference to the location of national borders, does one explain the sharp contrasts between San Diego and Tijuana, Houston and Monterrey, Chicago and Winnipeg, Toronto and Buffalo, or Detroit and Windsor? Why
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Fig. 1. The North American urban system, 2000.
else does Tijuana exist? Windsor is a major automobile-producing city not because of its water quality. How else does one explain the massive size of Mexico City without reference to its history and to the highly centralized political system of which it is a part? How else would one explain the cultural distinctiveness and vitality of Montréal without the French factor, and the situation of that city within a political entity that reinforces cultural identity and linguistic preservation? Similar “what if” kinds of questions can be asked about the evolving form and structure of urban areas. How else, other than with reference to legislative powers, does one explain the fact that the rapidly growing city of Calgary (1.1 million) simply annexed (until recently) rural land as needed for new suburbs before they were built? The result, in political terms, is that Calgary has no central-city municipality and no contiguous suburbs. How else does one explain the booming residential sector in the downtown core of
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Fig. 2. Income per capita.
Vancouver, and the absence of freeways, without reference to politics (e.g., the municipal reform movement of the 1970s), policies (e.g., immigration and transit policies), the existence of a metropolitan regional government, and a proactive provincial government? How does one account for the emerging concentrations of poverty in Toronto’s early postwar suburbs without taking into account the actions of the metropolitan government in redistributing public housing during the 1960s to what was the rural/urban fringe at that time? The principal question is not whether Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. cities differ, individually or collectively, which they do, but rather that they incorporate their distinctive histories and contexts. All three are of course subject to increasing global pressures and incentives that facilitate free (i.e., managed) trade, encourage economic integration (when it is in the national interest), and accommodate media-based cultural
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Fig. 3. Interdependence: Migration flows, 1995–2000. Source: CONAPO, data from INEGI, XII Censo General de Poablacion y Vivienda (2000).
commodification at an international scale. These convergent pressures are, in turn, combined with increasingly intense diversity of consumption and lifestyles at local and regional scales. Yet in between the extremes of the global-local continuum, national boundaries, cultures, institutions, and policies still matter, especially in the neoconservative political climate of contemporary North America. Still we may ask: how different are our cities? A number of years ago, Gordon Ewing undertook to re-analyze data on U.S. and Canadian cities drawn from the classic study by Michael Goldberg and John Mercer (1986) of the myth of the North American city. The Goldberg-Mercer study concluded that although there was a North (read Anglo-) American city type, in terms of shared characteristics, Canadian and U.S. cities were nonetheless distinctive. Unfortunately, their work did not include Mexico; nor has the initial study been updated with the same empirical depth and breadth (England and Mercer, 2006).
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In contrast, Ewing (1992) argued, in a provocative paper, that the differences between the two sets of cities largely disappeared if the researcher “controlled” for a number of specific attributes. Three particular attributes were identified by the author: (1) U.S. cities were on average older and larger than Canadian cities, which in my interpretation meant that U.S. cities had older housing stocks, more redundant industrial spaces, and longer periods of deterioration and out-migration; (2) U.S. central cities on average contained smaller proportions of their total metropolitan area populations than was typically the case in Canadian urban areas, where regional governments, annexations, and mergers were more common; and (3) the racial composition of U.S. cities was substantially different. This is precisely my point: U.S. cities cannot be understood outside of these conditions—that is, the political, institutional, cultural, and racial settings within which they are so clearly embedded. These conditions cannot be controlled for: they permeate virtually all aspects of U.S. urban social structure and daily life. They are, like the roles of politics, policy, and the state in general, internal to the urban process in the United States, as they are in other countries. They cannot be assumed away. In this regard, urban researchers in the United States share many of the same challenges facing colleagues everywhere, but on a much larger canvas. Researchers working on cities in other Western countries are more likely to accept—and respect—the importance of cultural differences, the role of the state, and political contingency in their work. This is the case, I would argue, not only because those differences are more readily apparent, particularly in smaller countries, but because they are considered important factors in understanding their cities and in seeking solutions to their problems. In other words, models or explanations cannot be easily and uncritically transferred from one national or cultural setting to another. Yet, at the same time, our ideas and hypotheses can and should be tested in different political environments and at different spatial scales. In this way, politics, policies, and culture are more likely to become internalized, as part of the process of designing a research strategy and articulating theory, rather than serving simply as exogenous variables to be held constant. THE LIMITS TO IMPORTING MODELS AND ASSUMPTIONS: AN EXAMPLE Examples of the importance of differences between the national contexts that shape urban development, not to mention specific illustrations of the difficulties of comparative research, often come from more mundane sources. A few years ago, we had a visit at the University of Toronto from a team led by a prominent Minnesota state legislator who was attempting to sell a small nonprofit foundation on the application to Toronto of a research framework they had developed. This framework was supported by a graphics software package for metropolitan analysis and the identification of areas of disadvantaged populations. Given their slick presentation, and the importance of the issues, it was not surprising that his firm had been in high demand among U.S. urban governments. Beyond access to Canadian census data, they requested information from us on four specific indicators: (1) the fiscal capacity of local municipalities, (2) revenues and expenditures by school districts, (3) school lunch programs, (4) the proportion of Black population. We could only offer to provide data for the last indicator, and that was subject to the proviso that until recently race had not been included in the Canadian census. The
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other indicators were unavailable; indeed, we argued, they were largely irrelevant. They were irrelevant not because the City of Toronto is without serious fiscal problems, or issues of school underfunding, or the presence of poorly nourished children, or disadvantaged Black (or other visible minority) citizens. The City has all of these problems, and many more. The source of the difficulty seemed to lie in the uncritical import of models with implicit assumptions. The contrasts in images, values, and expectations that were clearly evident between the visitors and the local research community appeared not to be attributable to a lack of information or preparation, but to differing assumptions regarding the role of institutions and the underlying architecture of public policies. Schools in Ontario, for instance, are funded centrally by the metropolitan or district school board, and when necessary (e.g., the north and inner cities) by the provincial government. Thus all schools receive more-or-less the same base funding, plus further assistance (albeit insufficient) for children with special needs. In a similar fashion, all urban municipalities have roughly the same fiscal capacity. They cannot go broke, they cannot go into debt for operating costs, and many receive funding from the province and (indirectly) the federal government to ensure relatively equitable standards of service provision. The City of Toronto, like most other local municipalities, has serious problems nonetheless, including fiscal problems, but these have somewhat different origins and they are addressed (more-or-less effectively) within a different legislative framework. Both processes are then expressed in a different local geography of urban development. The legislator and his team went home empty-handed, and with his standardized model in shreds. THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX: COMPARATIVE AND INCLUSIVE RESEARCH This commentary is not intended to be a critique of U.S.-based urban geography, and certainly not of American geographers per se. Nor does it imply that there are no parallels in form and structure, no commonalities in the urban development process, and no shared social and institutional experiences in North American cities. Obviously there are parallels, and there is some evidence of convergence in form and function. Indeed, such parallels are important in understanding the evolution of the urban process in each country. Rather, this commentary is intended as a challenge, an invitation to consider a more open, outward-looking, and inclusive research strategy than is typical within specific paradigms or self-identified schools of research. It is also an acknowledgment that the best way to temper and test one’s ideas about cities is to step outside the box of within-group research, and then apply those ideas to other locales and to cities in other cultures and countries. Only then can we construct urban theory that rises above the particularities of place-and-time-specific conditions while, within the same research framework, encompassing the critical role of different national contexts. REFERENCES Adams, M., 2003, Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values. Toronto, Canada: Penguin Canada.
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Bourne, L. S., 1996, Reurbanization, uneven urban development and the debate on new urban forms. Urban Geography, Vol. 17, 690–713. Bourne, L. S., 2005, Taking the pulse of the sub-discipline: The state of urban geography in Canada. Urban Geography, Vol. 26, 271–276. Bourne, L. S., 2007, Understanding change in cities: A personal research path. The Canadian Geographer, Vol. 51, No. 2, 121–138. Bunting, T. and Filion, P., editors, 2006, Canadian Cities in Transition: Local Through Global Perspectives, Third edition. Toronto, Canada: Oxford University Press. England, K. and Mercer, J., 2006, Canadian cities in continental context: Global and continental perspectives on Canadian urban development. In T. Bunting and Pierre Filion, editors, Canadian Cities in Transition. Toronto, Canada: Oxford University Press, 24–39. Ewing, G., 1992, The bases of differences between American and Canadian cities. The Canadian Geographer, Vol. 36, No. 3, 266–279. Goldberg, M. and Mercer, J., 1986, The Myth of the North American City. Vancouver, Canada: University of British Columbia Press. Lemon, J., 1996, Liberal Dreams and Nature’s Limits: Great American Cities Since 1600. Toronto, Canada: Oxford University Press. Simmons, J. and Kamikihara, S., 2006, The North American Urban System: The Limits to Continental Integration. Toronto, Canada: Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto, Research Paper 205.
