Benjamin W. Stanley

Urban Open Spaces in Historical Perspective: A Transdisciplinary Typology and Analysis

Urban open space provides a unique conduit for the sociospatial study of urban history. We propose seven categories to help scholars historically situate and analyze urban open spaces: food production areas, parks and gardens, recreational space, plazas, streets, transport facilities, and incidental space. We use these categories, and the contrast between grey and green space, to compare examples from archaeological, historical, and recent times across a broad geographical range. Top-down and bottom-up actions dialectically intersect in the establishment, use, and reproduction of urban open space, and many open spaces prove to be particularly flexible in serving the general population. These findings can inform comparative urban analysis, and they help contextualize current debates concerning the socioeconomic, political, and urban ecological functions of open and public spaces.

Ethnic and Class Clustering through the Ages: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Urban Neighbourhood Social Patterns

This paper presents initial findings from longer-term transdisciplinary research concerning the social dynamics of urban neighbourhoods. It examines the spatial clustering of ethnicity and class in neighbourhoods over urban history, from Bronze Age Mesopotamia to contemporary cities. Fourteen distinct drivers of social clustering are identified, grouped under the headers of macro-structural forces, the state, local regimes and institutions, and bottom–up processes. The operation of these processes is examined through three historical and three archaeological case studies of clustering. It is concluded that: clustering is a common, but not universal, attribute of cities; there is much variation in clustering patterns, both within and between cities and urban traditions; and, consideration of a wide variety of drivers is required to understand historical and modern residential dynamics.

Service Access in Premodern Cities: An Exploratory Comparison of Spatial Equity

Spatial equity studies measuring urban service access have been conducted in variety of modern settings, but this research has not been extended to premodern cities. This article presents an exploratory, transdisciplinary pilot study of service access in six premodern urban environments to better understand the historical origins of inequality. Using archaeological and historical spatial data, neighborhood and household access to three types of service facility is studied across different urban traditions. Findings reveal that the size, shape, and spatial structure of cities may influence service accessibility as much as political influence over facility siting or residential choice. Most cities display a spatially concentric pattern of accessibility, and denser cities tend to display more equitable service access. Elite groups possess consistently better service access than nonelite groups. Although this exploratory study must be expanded to produce firmer results, it indicates the importance of interpreting modern urban inequalities from a long-term perspective, and points to the efficacy of comparative, spatially oriented, urban historical research for generating new insights into urban processes.

Conceptual approaches to service provision in cities throughout history

All cities, from the distant past to the present, provide services for their residents, but the nature and level of urban services vary widely, as do the providers. How are we to understand this variation? We examine the major theoretical and conceptual approaches to urban services, and find that none is sufficiently comprehensive to explain patterns of service provision in all types of cities: public choice theory, co-production, critical theory, urban political ecology, collective action theory, and social integration. We use two premodern cities – Zanzibar and Tikal – to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of these theories. A major challenge is to account for both central administrative control of services and more generative, bottom-up service provision.

Leveraging Public Land Development Initiatives for Private Gain The Political Economy of Vacant Land Speculation in Phoenix, Arizona

Land speculation has been an integral component of the political economy of land development in American urban history. In the American Sunbelt, land speculation occurs amid progrowth governance regimes that engage in intermunicipal competition for capital investment. This article presents a mixed-methods case study of vacant land speculation in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, before, during, and after the mid-2000s property boom. Results indicate that land speculation represented a significant barrier to both public and private infill development efforts, and that some municipal development initiatives actually facilitated private speculative profits. Speculative strategies are enabled when weaknesses in the coordination and bargaining power of urban growth regimes, derived from conflict within and between governmental scales, can be exploited by individual market actors. The self-propulsive nature of speculative property market cycles, unconstrained by local regimes increasingly dependent on nonlocal capital investment, represents an autonomous force actively orienting entries into property markets and influencing the ability to enact sustainable infill development.

An historical perspective on the viability of urban diversity: lessons from socio-spatial identity construction in nineteenth-century Algiers and Cape Town

Social heterogeneity is fundamental to many conceptions of urbanism. Social contact in diverse cities is valorized by theorists linking pluralism with social justice, democratic functioning and the psychological development of tolerance. Others express caution, noting that conflict and instability are equally possible outcomes of intergroup contact. This paper argues that these ongoing debates can be informed by longer-term, cross-cultural perspectives on urbanism. The nineteenth-century histories of Algiers and Cape Town, cities characterized by extreme diversity, are reviewed to show the nature of diverse social contact in open spaces. The intertwined construction of group and neighborhood identities in each indicate that the very definitions of ethnic and class diversity are contextual and evolving, contingent on both neighborhood interactions and structural socio-economic forces. Thus modern efforts to plan for place diversity must grapple with a moving target and may be most realistic when confined to a focus on the built environment.

The Speculative Growth Paradigm in the History of Phoenix

This chapter presents a history of Phoenix, Arizona, from initial settlement to the present day with a thematic emphasis on the ways in which the city’s economy has been imposed by distant sources of capital, labor, and ideas rather than self-generated. The strong influence of local growth boosters in the continued expansion of the city is reviewed to show how the attraction of outside investment and the promotion of private interests have been paired throughout Phoenix’s history. The reliance on non-local capital investment for the majority of the city’s basic infrastructure and employment opportunities illustrates the tenuous sustainability of Phoenix’s historical trajectory. The importance of property speculation, often paired with fraudulent schemes or political economic clout, for the historical process of land development is emphasized in particular to show the lack of transparency and public control over urban land use. Development policies that privilege the exchange valuation of property and strong individual property rights have arisen in this historical milieu and have become deeply embedded in current land policy structures as well as in the socio-economic expectations surrounding land use. Such policies and practices are based on an implicit endorsement of perpetual urban growth as well as a particular vision for suburban, auto-dependent environments, both of which present challenges to emergent notions of urban sustainability based on locally generative economies and dense infill development.

Comparative Methods for Premodern Cities Coding for Governance and Class Mobility

We describe methods of coding and analyzing historical and archaeological data for comparative analysis of premodern cities. As part of a larger study of spatial access to urban services, we identify eight relevant contextual domains and define variables for each domain. Information from publications on each city is assembled, and the data are coded independently by three scholars and checked for agreement. To date, we have completed contextual coding for 15 cities. Here, we focus on methods to analyze relationships among variables within contextual domains using two example domains—Class Mobility and Governance. Key methodological points involve the problem of missing data, multiple tests with an appropriate correction, and the importance of variation among cases for effective analysis of a domain. Our interpretation of preliminary findings highlights a degree of independence between two different arenas of social life that may relate to collective action. Documentation of our procedures contributes to a growing body of systematic, comparative, cross-cultural analyses of mid-size samples. This study is distinctive in its focus on cities rather than cultures, societies, or polities.

A History of Property Development and Ownership in Downtown Phoenix

This chapter presents a history of land use, ownership, and development in downtown Phoenix since World War II, training specific attention on public and private strategies of development, often in conflict, that have produced Phoenix’s particular urban environment. This chapter continues on to present novel data regarding the prevalence of vacant land and the localization of property ownership. Land and development policies born from both neoliberal and sustainable development approaches, all intended to rectify serious issues of vacancy and abandonment, have impacted the character of downtown and led to both tensions and compromises between different stakeholders. While many attempts at revitalization have relied on an auto-dependent vision of urbanism promoting large institutional projects, this approach has been increasingly challenged by local arts community members emphasizing a local, bohemian, self-generating economy based on cultural production. Site-specific attempts to encourage development by public-private entities utilizing municipal tax incentives are often targeted at both of these development visions, producing conflict and exerting unintended consequences on the private market. The historical success of development is quantitatively measured by studying the extent of local underdeveloped land over 30 years, showing notable but spatially uneven decreases in urban vacancy overall. Non-local property ownership is assessed and mapped over 20 years to show that local ownership of developable property has significantly declined, and when paired with interview data indicating the importance of local commitment for bohemian sustainability outcomes, the study indicates that non-local ownership has decreased the transparency of local land use and development processes.

Policy Approaches to Transparent Urban Development in Phoenix

This chapter presents a comprehensive list of policy recommendations aimed at translating sustainable development theory—including a notion of transparent urban development—into real-world outcomes in Phoenix’s contemporary regional political economy. Citing a systems-based approach to sustainability, where the interwoven components of a complex social-ecological system must be elaborated before solutions are presented, this chapter builds upon the political, economic, and historical picture painted in the first four chapters to propose detailed policies aimed at rectifying issues with the sustainability of local development. Proposed policy changes are organized by the jurisdictional scales at which policies operate, including the state and county scales crucial for land use and development policy in the State of Arizona. In particular, alterations to government systems regulating property value assessments, land taxation, municipal regulatory power, and other areas are proposed, as well as innovative ideas and practices for private development market offerings. Municipalities in Arizona and elsewhere in the United States are ultimately hamstrung by a lack of explicit home rule powers under federal law, and as growing political polarization has generated a new state-based movement to preempt municipal power over land use, the effectiveness of many proposed policy reforms for enacting transparent urban development may require a new political emphasis on local power.