THE urban geography is the area of geography that is concerned with studying, understanding and carrying out propositions about the urban space and its constitutive processes. This area of knowledge has a strong interdisciplinarity with other fields of knowledge, such as Politics, Economics and, mainly, Architecture and Urbanism.
What is urban space?
Urban space is the organization of human activities juxtaposed in the geographical environment. These compositions are responsible for the formation of cities and the activities inherent to them, as well as their socio-spatial organization system.
It is important to understand that the terms urban and City, despite being commonly used as synonyms, can designate different elements. The urban refers to practices that differ from the rural in the sense of concentrating, preferably, activities related to the secondary (industries) and tertiary (commerce and services), while the rural is composed of unoccupied areas (such as forest reserves) and agrarian areas, which specialize in primary sector practices (agricultural, mining and extractivism). The city, on the other hand, is the materialization of the urban, with population agglomerations and their expressions (sets of houses, buildings, leisure areas, etc).
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In the context of the city, there may be non-urban practices, although this is becoming less frequent. An example of non-urban practices in cities is the existence of smallholdings for the production of vegetables that, eventually, are located in areas of high population density. On the other hand, the transfer of an industry to the countryside can designate the manifestation of an urban practice in rural areas.
What's in this section?
The texts in this section aim to address the theme of urban space, cities and the dynamics of urbanization, at levels ranging from local to global. Therefore, issues such as the urban network, the types of cities and intra-urban processes will be addressed, such as slums, urban segregation, the manifestation of social and environmental problems, among others.
By Rodolfo Alves Pena
Graduated in Geography
“Urbanization is a characteristic sign of economic modernization. The transfer of the population from the rural to the urban environment accompanies the transition of an economic standard of living supported by closed and self-sufficient agricultural production for another, based on industry, commerce and services. Behind the urbanization process is the intensification of the social division of labor and the deepening of commercial production”.
(MAGNOLI, D. Geography for High School. São Paulo: Current, 2008. p.402).
The urban differs from the rural not only for its position, but also for its social, economic and even cultural characteristics. According to the excerpt above, we can consider that the urban space involves:
a) practices predominantly related to the secondary and tertiary sectors of the economy, in addition to a socially more complex labor dynamic.
b) orderly divided work organizations, without the same austere attributions that are generally linked to the productive system of the countryside.
c) a lower cost-benefit ratio for the worker, due to the presence of machinery at the heart of production, unlike what occurs in rural areas.
d) more advanced technological production, given that cities have more advanced mechanical structures than large spaces for agricultural production.
e) a logic of accentuated economic and social dependence, given that cities were not able to achieve the same self-sufficiency as the agrarian environment.
“Those who approach it are impacted by its size: kilometers of avenues, with their houses and sheds and blocks of buildings, a profusion of signs and advertising images. The movement of people and objects that circulate 24 hours a day is present in everything, even on the screens of the colored panels that project the electronic world onto the city's constructed geography […].
Meanwhile, rivers such as Tietê and Pinheiros, which formerly spread over wide floodplains, have become sewage channels squeezed between expressways [...]. At certain points along its margins, under illuminated advertisements, wooden and brick shacks with hanging clotheslines and advertisements for tire repairmen, manicures and "for sale cold" can be seen; in others, skeletons of unfinished or bankrupt buildings, ruins entirely covered by inscriptions in incomprehensible spellings alongside profusely painted and illuminated buildings. Further on, sets of intelligent towers, gleaming in steel and glass, reflect the landscape marked by the rawness of these contrasts”.
The excerpt above presents a narration that describes the environment and landscape of the city of São Paulo. The pace of activity and the structural problems mentioned are explained, respectively, by the concepts of: