urban decay

Examples of urban decay in the following topics:

• Models of Urban Growth

  • Harlem, New York is an example of a neighborhood with a long history of urban growth and decay.
  • Since that period, the neighborhood experienced urban decay and became a hotbed of crime and poverty.
  • Such preferences echo a common strain of criticism of urban life, which tends to focus on urban decay.
  • According to these critics, urban decay is caused by the excessive density and crowding of cities, and it drives out residents, creating the conditions for urban sprawl.
  • Cities have responded to urban decay and urban sprawl by launching urban renewal programs.

• The Rural Rebound

  • During the 1970s and again in the 1990s, the rural population rebounded in what appeared to be a reversal of urbanization.
  • Since the 1950s, many middle and upper class individuals have moved to nearby suburbs to escape crime and urban decay.
  • White flight during this period contributed to urban decay, a process whereby a city, or part of a city, falls into disrepair and decrepitude.
  • Symptoms of urban decay include depopulation, abandoned buildings, high unemployment, crime, and a desolate, inhospitable landscape.
  • White flight contributed to the draining of cities' tax bases when middle-class people left, exacerbating urban decay caused in part by the loss of industrial and manufacturing jobs as they moved into rural areas or overseas where labor was cheaper.

• Urban Decline

  • Another characteristic of urban decay is blight, the visual, psychological, and physical effects of living daily life among empty lots, abandoned buildings, and condemned houses.
  • But what causes urban decay?
  • In some ways, urban decline is an inevitable result of urbanity itself.
  • Economic decline tends to lead to urban decline.
  • The current response to urban decay has been positive public policy and urban design using the principles of New Urbanism.

• Shrinking Cities and Counter-Urbanization

  • White flight during the post-war period contributed to urban decay, a process whereby a city, or part of a city, falls into disrepair and decrepitude.
  • Symptoms of urban decay include depopulation, abandoned buildings, high unemployment, crime, and a desolate, inhospitable landscape.
  • Urban decay was caused in part by the loss of industrial and manufacturing jobs as they moved into rural areas or overseas, where labor was cheaper.
  • This exurbanization may be a new urban form.
  • Often these approaches aim to increase urban density.

• The Potential of Urban Revitalization

  • Urban revitalization is hailed by many as a solution to the problems of urban decline by, as the term suggests, revitalizing decaying urban areas.
  • Urban revitalization is closely related to processes of urban renewal, or programs of land redevelopment in areas of moderate- to high-density urban land use.
  • Urban revitalization has been around since European city planners in the nineteenth century began to consider how to reorganize overpopulated urban areas.
  • Urban revitalization certainly provides potential for future urban growth, though the story of successes and failures remains mixed so far.
  • Urban renewal can have many positive effects.

• Disinvestment and Deindustrialization

  • After automobile manufacturing was largely moved overseas, Detroit has come to be known for urban decay and an abandoned city center.
  • Today, Detroit is associated with a high concentration of poverty, unemployment, noticeable racial isolation, and a deserted urban center.
  • Deindustrialization can have strongly negative effects in urban areas that were formerly heavily reliant upon the manufacturing sector .

• U.S. Urban Patterns

  • Census Bureau classifies areas as urban or rural based on population size and density.
  • Boise, Idaho is an example of an urban area that is officially defined as urban by U.S.
  • Department of Agriculture tallied over 98,000,000 acres of "urban" land.
  • Urban areas are delineated without regard to political boundaries.
  • In the United States, the largest urban area is New York City, with over 8 million people within the city limits and over 19 million in the urban area.

• Social Interaction in Urban Areas

  • The first is an urban ecology model in which the social scientist considers how individuals interact with others in their urban community.
  • Simmel argues that urban life irreversibly transforms one's mind.
  • The first set asks how social interactions are shaped by urban environments and how social interactions in urban environments are distinct from social interactions in other contexts.
  • These are the types of questions asked by Simmel and urban anthropologists.
  • This changes one's orientation to the urban community.

• Sociological Perspectives on Urban Life

  • Urban sociology is the study of social life and interactions in urban areas, using methods ranging from statistical analysis to ethnography.
  • This is one of the earliest examples of a subcultural study that explained the organization of urban subgroups as opposed to strictly highlighting the disorganization that accompanied urbanization.
  • Urban ecology refers to an idea that emerged out of the Chicago School that likens urban organization to biological organisms.
  • Urban ecology has remained an influential theory in both urban sociology and urban anthropology over time.
  • Explain urbanization in terms of functionalism and what the Chicago School understood to be some of the causes of urban social problems at that time

• Urbanization

  • Urbanization is the physical growth of urban areas as a result of global change.Urbanization is also defined by the United Nations as movement of people from rural to urban areas with population growth equating to urban migration.The United Nations projected that half of the world's population would live in urban areas at the end of 2008.Urbanization is closely linked to modernization, industrialization, and the sociological process of rationalization.
  • Percentage of population which is urbanized, by country, as of 2005.As more and more people leave villages and farms to live in cities, urban growth results.The rapid growth of cities like Chicago in the late 19th century and Mumbai a century later can be attributed largely to rural-urban migration and the demographic transition.This kind of growth is especially commonplace in developing countries.
  • The United States and United Kingdom have a far higher urbanization level than China, India, Swaziland or Niger, but a far slower annual urbanization rate, since much less of the population is living in a rural area.
  • Urbanization can be planned or organic.Planned urbanization, (e.g., planned communities), is based on an advanced plan, which can be prepared for military, aesthetic, economic or urban design reasons.Organic urbanization is not organized and happens haphazardly.Landscape planners are responsible for landscape infrastructure (e.g., public parks, sustainable urban drainage systems, greenways, etc.) which can be planned before urbanization takes place, or afterward to revitalize an area and create greater livability within a region.Planned urbanization and development is the aim of the American Institute of Planners.
  • Percentage of population which is urbanized, by country, as of 2005.