Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2014, volume 31, pages 75 – 90

doi:10.1068/d21911

City as ideology: reconciling the explosion of the city

form with the tenacity of the city concept

David Wachsmuth
Department of Sociology, New York University, 295 Lafayette St, 4th Floor, New York,
NY 10012, USA; e-mail: david.wachsmuth@nyu.edu
Received 24 October 2011; in revised form 2 June 2013; published online 28 November 2013

Abstract. This paper is a theoretical reexamination of the traditional concept of the city in
the context of urbanization processes that exceed it. Recent decades have seen a proliferation
of new variations on the city concept, as well as calls to discard it altogether. I argue
that both options are inadequate. The city has generally been understood as a category
of analysis—a moment in urbanization processes—but might now be better understood
as a category of practice: an ideological representation of urbanization processes. I
substantiate this claim through an examination of three tropes of the traditional city
which in material terms have been superseded in recent decades in the Global North but
retain their force as ideological representations of contemporary urban spatial practice:
the opposition between city and country, the city as a self-contained system, and the city
as an ideal type.

Keywords: city, everyday life, idealogy, representation, urbanization

Introduction
Could the concept of the city now be ideological? Henri Lefebvre suggested as much in
The Urban Revolution:
““The concept of the city no longer corresponds to a social object. Sociologically it is
a pseudoconcept. However, the city has a historical existence that is impossible to
ignore. … An image or representation of the city can perpetuate itself, survive its
conditions … . In other words, the ‘real’ sociological ‘object’ is an image and [above all]
an ideology!” (Lefebvre, 2003, page 57).
A common assessment of The Urban Revolution is that its claims of an emerging urban
society were at best premature. And this may be so. But there is a broader methodological
point lurking in the particular usage Lefebvre makes of the word “city” (usually ville
but occasionally cité). He uses the term to refer only to a historical phenomenon (eg, the
mercantile city and the industrial city) or to a present-day representation (the image or concept
of the city), and implies that these are one and the same object. Yesterday’s sociological
truths may become today’s ideologies.
It is in this spirit rather than one of self-contradiction that we can interpret the fact that
Lefebvre’s discussion of the city as a sociological “pseudoconcept” came only two years
after his idea of the “right to the city” (Lefebvre, 1996): the analysis of urban society requires
new conceptual tools even as the experience of urban society remains tethered to some extent
to the traditional, historical idea of the city. This observation offers a strategy for resolving a
central dilemma of contemporary urban and spatial theory: how to reconcile the explosion of
the city form with the tenacity of the city concept?
In this paper I answer this question by way of a theoretical reexamination of the traditional
concept of the city—and its legacy in the context of urbanization processes that exceed it. By
the ‘traditional city’, I refer to the analytical tradition handed down through Western social
science via the Chicago School of urban sociology in particular that could be summarized in
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three tropes: the city–countryside opposition, the city as a self-contained system, and the city
as an ideal type. They are the common epistemological core of Park’s, Burgess’s, McKenzie’s,
Wirth’s, and Redfield’s approaches to the city, despite the different substantive features of
the city emphasized by these different scholars, such as Park’s (1936) ecological succession
or Wirth’s (1938) size/density/diversity triad. Together, these three tropes define the city
as an analytical form, and they have historically comprised something like the collective
unconscious of Anglo-American urban studies.
The argument proceeds as follows: (1) I argue that, in the North Atlantic at least, we
should neither dismiss the concept of the city as outdated nor try to resuscitate it as a category
of analysis, but rather treat it as a category of practice: a representation of urbanization
processes that exceed it. (2) Furthermore, I argue that the city-as-a-representation is not
neutral or innocent, but rather is ideological, in the sense that its partiality helps obscure and
reproduce relations of power and domination that critical spatial theory seeks to expose
and confront. (3) I substantiate these claims by examining the three tropes of the traditional
city not as analytical features, but as ideological projects.

New urban forms, new urban concepts

Recent decades have witnessed a bewildering proliferation of new urban morphologies and
processes, and an equally bewildering proliferation of new concepts to capture them. Simply
witness Taylor and Lang’s (2004) nonexhaustive list of a hundred such concepts. Only a
few have become major research concerns in urban studies (eg, “world city network”) while
most have remained niche ideas (eg, “slurbs” or “archipelago economy”), but it is hard to
look at this list without seeing in it a sort of meta-argument for qualitative change—in other
words, an “urban revolution” (Lefebvre, 2003).
Taylor and Lang (2004, page 955) themselves offer two possible responses to the eruption
of new urban concepts: “One is to celebrate the variety: the world, especially the urban world,
is inherently ‘messy’ … . The other is to suspect that there is more than a little incoherent
thinking abroad in contemporary urban studies.” A third—and in my view more persuasive—
approach would be to accept both of these responses but then move on to historicize the
relationship between the concepts and the material processes being conceptualized.
The urban world might be “inherently ‘messy’” and there may be “incoherent thinking”, as
Taylor and Lang suggest, but these things have always been true. If the forms of urban spatial
change afoot in the contemporary era are particularly amenable to messiness and incoherent
conceptualization, an explanation for this should lie not just in the forms themselves, but in
the interaction between them and the concepts traditionally used to describe them.
The impulse more often has been to assume that new material arrangements will cast off
their old discursive trappings (and presumably secrete new ones). Habermas, for example,
observes that “our concept of the city is connected to a form of life”, but that “in the meantime
that form of life has changed so much that the concept that grew out of it can no longer
keep pace”, and so “the question arises whether the very concept of the city has not been
superseded” (Habermas, 1989, page 17). The impression we are left with is that the concept
of the city is withering away, deprived of the material form that gave it life.
And yet … the old idea of the city persists. Taylor and Lang claim that the terms describing
new urban spaces suggest a negation of the idea of the traditional city, an argument seconded
by Merrifield (2013, pages 910–911). But nearly a third of Taylor and Lang’s terms are
simply “____ city”, with some descriptor filling in the blank. In other words, it seems that
the only thing that has been forgotten in this explosion of new critical urban research is the
stubborn tenacity of the city concept itself. The problem is that, while the traditional concept
of the city is no longer a convincing one, the obvious remedies are equally unconvincing. On
the one hand would be an attempt to recuperate the term ‘city’ (perhaps with a novel prefix to
City as ideology 77

make it term 101 on Taylor and Lang’s list) as an adequate analytical concept corresponding
to some pattern of contemporary urbanization—but which pattern? Amin and Thrift (2002,
page 2), for example, claim that “the possibility of recognizing cities as spatial formations
gives us a legitimate object of analysis”, but proceed to offer an account of these formations
whose very heterogeneity seems to contradict the claim.(1) On the other hand would be a
peremptory dismissal of the city concept altogether, as Merrifield (2013) suggests—but the
idea has proven tenacious, and we should account for that rather than simply wish it away.
To avoid the false necessity implied by these poles, we instead could move perpendicularly
to both of them if we approached the city not as a category of analysis but as a category of
practice: a concept arising out of a given social practice rather than adequately grasping it.
After all, a concept that has undeniable ongoing purchase in everyday life may nevertheless
be a “chaotic” one for the purposes of theory-building and empirical research (Sayer, 1992).
This distinction makes explicit the nonidentity of (and potential radical difference between)
“categories of everyday social experience, developed and deployed by ordinary social actors”
and “the experience-distant categories used by social analysts” (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000,
page 4). Inspired by this distinction, I want to reinterpret the city concept as a category of
practice, and in particular as ideology.

The urbanization of ideology

The term ‘ideology’ has nearly as many meanings in social theory as there are authors who
have written about it (Eagleton, 1991), and any reading of it must be selective. Here I draw
on the “negative” (Larrain, 1983) or “critical” (Purvis and Hunt, 1993) tradition, according
to which ideology expresses the way that the forms of appearance of social reality under
capitalism are systematically distorted to the benefit of some and the detriment of others.
While critical conceptions of ideology are often rooted in a realist philosophy (Sayer, 1992)
positing an experience-independent ‘objective’ reality that can be accessed by science, they
do not require a radical distinction between ‘science’ and ‘ideology’ that maintains the
former can somehow escape the latter completely (Althusser, 2001). It is sufficient simply
to posit that: (1) different theoretical and practical understandings have varying degrees of
adequacy to the phenomenon they attempt to understand, with adequacy here being defined
as distinguishing necessary properties from contingent ones (Sayer, 1981); and (2) some
(more ideological) forms of understanding which claim to understand the reality of things
actually do not manage to penetrate much beyond those things’ forms of appearance. As
Sayer lucidly argues, “it does not follow from the fact that all knowledge is fallible, that it is
all equally fallible” (Sayer, 1981, page 7, emphasis in original).
Drawing on the critical usage of ideology, my argument is that, in the context of the
contemporary North Atlantic, ‘the city’ is a form of appearance corresponding only partially
and problematically to urban reality. Or, rather, realities in the plural: critical geographical
scholarship shows that they are multiple, complex, and contradictory. But the concept of the
city obscures this multiplicity, at the very same time that it is a product of it. The city is an
ideological representation of urbanization processes rather than a moment in them.
The premise for this claim is that the experience of urban space is necessarily partial, and
that representations are the corollary to any complex social process we cannot immediately
experience in its totality. Representation is a cognitive shorthand, a way of rendering
conceivable aspects of social reality that exceed our ability to perceive them. As  Goonewardena

(1)
 In this context it is striking to note that powerful and long-overdue challenges to the hegemony of
Anglo-American urban theory have tended (implicitly or explicitly) to confirm the city as a lowest
common denominator for urban theory even as they expose the parochialisms with which it has
traditionally been treated (eg, Robinson, 2011).
78 D Wachsmuth

(2005, page 52) explains (en route to a theorization of the “urban sensorium”, to which I will
return shortly):
““Now, if society were actually transparent, that is, if the totality of the structure of social
relations were directly accessible to everyday human consciousness—then there would
be no pressing need for an ideological representation of it. But it is clearly not so.”
Representations are not optional. Goonewardena makes this observation with respect to
capitalism itself, but more modest social ensembles also elude our direct perception. What
about urbanization? Surely so, particularly if we define the term expansively as Lefebvre
(2003) would have us do—that is, as a multiscalar process of the production and reproduction
of the built environment, linking global structures of capital and the state with practices of
everyday life, a process that historically characterized the space of the city but has since
shattered that space and become generalized. How can planetary urbanization (Brenner,
2013) be comprehended except through representation?
Here it is worth emphasizing the difference between the city–urbanization relationship I
have in mind and the standard understanding of this relationship in urban and spatial theory.
Risking some oversimplification, I will summarize the standard understanding of the city–
urbanization relationship—both in mainstream and more critical traditions—as one of moment
and process. ‘Process’ because urbanization has been understood as a transformation over
space and time: of population (Davis, 1945; UN-HABITAT, 2008; cf Brenner and Schmid,
forthcoming); of urbanism as a way of life and its corresponding form of settlement space
(Wirth, 1938); of relations of accumulation (Harvey, 1989a) and social reproduction (Castells,
1977); or of some combination of these. ‘Moment’ because, in the standard understanding,
cities are the still frames comprising the urbanization process: stop the process at any point
in time, and the discrete spaces you observe are the extent of urbanization. Within this
metatheoretical consensus there have been disputes about whether the city or urbanization
is the proper object of analysis (Harvey, 1996), but no real disagreement about the basic
relationship between the terms.
In contrast to this standard understanding I am here following Sayer’s (1984) suggestion
to treat the city as a “thought object” rather than a “real object”, or, in the sociological
language I have been using, as a “category of practice” rather than a “category of analysis”.
This theoretical maneuver shifts the explanatory task away from condensing complex
urbanization processes into objective city moments, and toward charting how these processes
are experienced and interpreted by social actors in everyday life and thus formed into
practical representations. While urbanization might now be a planetary process, it is not lived
or experienced as one.
This implies that any tenable concept of the city will look less like a scientific abstraction
and more like a cognitive map (Lynch, 1960; Mazer and Rankin, 2011). After all, depicting
the spontaneous representations that arise directly from everyday urban spatial practice was
precisely the goal of Lynch’s justly celebrated exercises in cognitive mapping. But I have
in mind something closer to Jameson’s (1991) cognitive map of postmodern totality, which,
as Goonewardena (2005, pages 56–57) reminds us, was meant explicitly to despatialize
an operation that for Lynch was always self-evidently spatial. Totality, Jameson argued,
could obviously not be represented spatially, so the exercise in mapping it might be able to
“transcend” the spatiality of the map (1991, page 416). And the same could be said about
urbanization and the everyday experience of it: there is no reason to think that it can be
adequately mapped. As insightful as Lynch’s cognitive maps are, we risk a kind of design
fetishism if we imagine that the experience of urban space can be adequately reduced to a
cartographic representation. If we redirected Jameson’s impulse to despatialize the cognitive
City as ideology 79

map back toward Lynch’s original object of analysis, what would we find? What would a
noncartographic representation of urban spatial practice look like?
Perhaps it would look like the traditional idea of the city. ‘The city’ is a concept that
mediates the everyday experience of urbanization processes that are too complex for us
to directly perceive. It is only tenable as a phenomenal category, not an analytical one.
It would be meaningless and formalistic to suggest that there is one mass representation
of people’s relationship to the urbanization processes they experience. But in the context of
the contemporary North Atlantic at least—the historical–geographical ensemble that has
inherited both the intellectual tradition of the traditional city and the urban forms that inspired
it—we must look for reasons why something like the traditional city remains a plausible
representation of urbanization processes that have exceeded it. Moreover, we must investigate
to what extent “the city” faithfully represents these processes and to what extent it distorts
them as ideology. The concern is not that our everyday representations of the city might be
‘wrong’ in analytical terms (because who would expect the categories of practice used by
social actors to be the same as the categories of analysis developed by social scientists?),
but rather that—as social imaginaries in Castoriadis’s (1987) sense—they help structure and
legitimate a social order founded on exploitation.
Once we treat the city as a category of practice, the claim that the traditional Western
concept of the city is an ideological one is not so far fetched. After all, we have known that
partial, everyday representations of urban space are likely to be structured in particular ways
at least since Simmel’s (1971) “The metropolis and mental life”, which in effect describes an
ideological environment (the ‘blasé attitude’ and the feeling of social distance) arising from
certain patterns of urbanization (generalized relations of money exchange and an enormous
density of social interaction). This question is what Goonewardena (2005) has theorized in the
contemporary moment as the “urban sensorium”. His linchpin is the contention that the gap
between the global structures of capitalism and our consciousness of them in everyday life
(ideology par excellence) is paralleled by a similar gap between the structures of urban space
and our consciousness of them in the phenomenal experience of the city. Goonewardena thus
suggests that the contemporary urban sensory environment (the “sensorium”) systematically
obscures not only the structure of urban space, but also the basic workings of capitalism itself.
Put momentarily in Althusserian terms,(2) if the city is a representation of people’s
imaginary relationship to real processes of urbanization, then what types of urban subject
does capitalist urbanization interpellate—and what ideas of the urban? For it is not only the
case, as Goonewardena argues, that our experience of urban space selectively structures our
understanding (ie, representations) of capitalism; the reverse is also true: our experience of
capitalism selectively structures our understanding (ie, representations) of urban space. This
latter claim Castells (1977) developed in what he called simply the “urban ideology”—the
belief that the city, along with its generalization within an “urban society”, is the causal force
for social transformations that in fact are driven by class antagonism. Such analyses, he argued,
falsely suggest the viability of a common front of all urban citizens against common urban
problems. Williams (1973, page 96) had a similar critique of the misidentification of capitalism
as urbanization, calling it the “the last protecting illusion in the crisis of our own time”.
In effect, both Castells and Williams build on previous debates about the proper research
object for urban studies (Benet, 1963; Castells, 1976; Manheim, 1960; Wirth, 1969),
while more directly raising the political implications of these debates. Scholastic debates
about what a city is and what urban studies should be, they imply, are an expression of a
constitutive ambiguity in the role of urbanization within capitalist society—the very topic

(2)
 Althusser (2001, page 162) defined ideology as “a ‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship of
individuals to their real conditions of existence”.
80 D Wachsmuth

that Lefebvre (2003) attempted to historicize. But while Castells and Williams identify a
similar problematic, each stops somewhat short of explaining it. If urbanized capitalism
persistently appears simply as urbanism, we should be able to explain why this is so as part
of a theory of urbanized capitalism itself. Here Lefebvre offers some suggestive aphorisms,
but nothing really approaching a theory.
We can find such a theory in Harvey’s work. Harvey (1989a, chapter 8) analyzes the
urban process and its ideological forms of appearance integrally, identifying the production
of fetishized understandings of sociospatial relations within the city. But he does not ask
whether the city itself could be considered a fetish, and this is the additional step I am taking.
The most fruitful way of understanding the traditional concept of the city and its persistence
in the North Atlantic in the face of a qualitatively transforming urban landscape is as a
phenomenological category—a practical understanding of urban space—which distorts what
it represents. The concept of the city is not ‘obsolete’, and we do not need to ‘reinvent’ it for
contemporary urban conditions. The concept of the city is ideological.
Accordingly, I now return to the three tropes of the traditional city—the city–country
opposition, the city as a self-contained system, and the city as an ideal type—and briefly
indicate why they have progressively faded as adequate analytical descriptions of
urbanization processes in the Global North yet remained plausible ideological representations
of these processes. As indicated above I have singled out these three tropes as the dominant
formal delineations of the city common to Western social science and particularly the Chicago
School of urban sociology, in spite of the large variety of content the city concept has been
called upon to grapple with. I critically reconstruct these three features of the city concept as
ideological dimensions of contemporary urbanization, by commenting in each case on (1) the
historical development of the trope as a feature of capitalist urbanization and as a social–
scientific concept via the Chicago School, (2) the phenomenal experience of urbanization in
relation to the trope, and (3) state and capitalist projects that have shored up the trope and
thus the traditional concept of the city. What follows is intended not to break new empirical
ground, but rather to reprise a familiar periodization of the urban process (eg, Harvey, 1989a,
chapter 1) in a different context, and in so doing to shed light on an important contemporary
instance of the social production and experience of space: the city as ideology.

City and country: beyond the spatial division of labor

The first trope, both historically and logically, is the opposition of city and country, the sine
qua non of the traditional concept of the city. It was only once city and noncity came to be
seen as separate social orders that an identifiable urban social science came into existence,
delineating its object of analysis in contrast to a nonurban outside: the countryside, the
wilderness, the traditional village, etc. And it is the apparent obsolescence of precisely
this opposition between city and countryside that has been central to new approaches to
understanding urban space. Yet the opposition remains central to urban experience, and to
strategies of uneven development encouraging and leveraging this experience. In other words
the city–country opposition upon which the traditional concept of the city rests is not obsolete
but ideological.
The separation of city and country during 19th-century Western European industrialization
is a familiar story that needs no detailed rehearsing here (eg, Perelman, 2000; Polanyi, 1944):
from the enclosure of the commons and the dispossession of peasants from the land, to the
concentration of the workforce in the rapidly growing metropolises alongside manufacturing
fixed capital. This historical development of the spatial division of labor between industry and
agriculture also corresponded to other city–country distinctions within the socially produced
landscapes of capitalism: spatial mappings of social understandings.
City as ideology 81

One of these is the assumption that urban and rural are spatial containers for society
and nature, respectively (Wachsmuth, 2012). Nature, external to the city, provides the raw
materials to be transformed, within the city, into society and provides a periodic escape from
the pressures of society thanks to its leisure spaces. The industrial revolution’s concentration
of manufacturing and population in Western European cities (and the corresponding
deindustrialization and depopulation of the countryside) made this a plausible idea, and
prompted a range of social responses by the end of the 19th century. These ranged from urban-
oriented social reform movements (Addams, 1990) to planning and design interventions such
as Howard’s (1965) garden cities and a landscape-architecture oriented towards providing
green sanctuaries from busy urban life—for example, Olmsted and Vaux’s Central Park in
New York (Spirn, 1995).
The other important guise of the city–country opposition is a morally inflected distinction
between urban and rural ways of life. We owe this distinction to Wirth (1938) and Redfield
(1947), both of the Chicago School but the best historical analysis of it comes from Williams
(1973). Here the city is the site of progress and the future, but also of depravity, impersonality,
and imbalance. The country, meanwhile, is the site of tradition and the past, but also of
morality, togetherness, and harmony. This understanding had existed, as Williams notes,
in some form or another for hundreds of years, but became a widespread experience and
hence basis for social mobilization during the industrial revolution (Calhoun, 1982), directly
motivating many of the radicals and utopian socialists of the 19th century.
These three mappings of the city–country opposition (division of labor, society and nature,
and way of life) are analytically distinguishable but in practice tend to overlap and blur. The
mainstream of Western urban studies, following the Chicago School, relied simultaneously
on all three mappings as the basis for a teleological analysis of capitalist urban social
transformation which took for granted a stable or self-evident division between city and
country. The separation of the city from the noncity thereby also became the separation of
the city from history—an ideological timelessness which gave the Chicago School research
program its clarity but ultimately also led it to run aground when this assumption became
manifestly insupportable (Benet, 1963).
By contrast, the neo-Marxist renaissance in geography and urban theory historicized the
city–country opposition, but assumed that it had been ‘overcome’. Castells, Harvey, Lefebvre,
and Smith all carry this assumption, generally by reading city and country narrowly (as Marx
himself did) as the spatial division of labor and capital between industry and agriculture.
This mapping has indeed become decisively attenuated throughout the Global North and in
many parts of the Global South, starting with the industrialization of agriculture: as Perelman
(1973) points out in reference to the 20th-century US, many of the workers who left the farm
and migrated to the city remained part of the agricultural production process, producing
agricultural machinery and inputs such as tractors and chemical fertilizers which were to be
metabolized by an increasingly small farming workforce. More recently, the suburbanization
of industry has accomplished a similar result in the opposite direction.
It would be a mistake, however, to simply close the file because city and country no
longer correspond to the spatial division of labor in advanced capitalist economies. All three
of the dominant historical mappings of city and country remain, to varying degrees, plausible
representations of everyday life in advanced capitalist urban society, even if the precise
referents have changed. And these representations are actively encouraged and produced
through strategies of accumulation and state power.
In contemporary American public discourse, for example, small towns and the suburbs
have readily occupied the position of the ‘country’ in moral inflections of the city–country
opposition (eg, ‘Wall Street’ versus ‘Main Street’). And not by accident: this is precisely how
82 D Wachsmuth

the suburbs were conceived of and marketed—as an escape from the evils of the city, and as a
return to traditional small-town values (Fishman, 1987). Meanwhile, gentrification projects, in
the United States and throughout the world, have been consistently and successfully marketed
as opportunities for cutting-edge, “progressive” urban living (Smith, 1996). In both cases, the
ongoing subjective salience of urban–nonurban distinctions has been actively encouraged as
a strategy of accumulation, alongside equally consequential state representations of space,
such as funding formulas for national and regional investment schemes, and censuses and
geospatial data collection and operationalization.
Similarly, for all that agriculture has long been as industrialized as automobile
manufacturing, cities still tend to be experienced as gray and the countryside as green. In
the United States in particular, suburbanization has substantively undermined any objective
coherence to the society–nature mapping of city and country, but in such a way that suburban
living continues to be widely construed as nonurban and closer to nature. Bell (1995) reports
similar findings in his ethnography of a small English village, where the city–countryside
opposition remains central to social identity and to practical interpretations of class. And
there is money to be made selling this “out-in-nature” experiential frame (Brewster and Bell,
2009) to city dwellers: across the North Atlantic, expanded circuits of tourism allow easy
access to sustainability-oriented ‘eco-tourism’ schemes (Weaver and Lawton, 2007) or to
amenity-heavy premium nature retreats. Similar processes are at work in ‘sustainable city’
projects, which have become important components of entrepreneurial urban governance
strategies—what While et al (2004) have called the “greening of the growth machine”. These
projects trade on narratives of the return of nature to the city (Keil and Graham, 1998),
and thus rely on a representation of urban environments as nonnatural except where they
incorporate superficially green elements, such as city parks or suburban lawns. Only the gray
city can be greened.
These representational dimensions of the separation of city and country have not waned
alongside the political–economic blurring of the spatial division of labor. After decades of
suburbanization and revolutions in mobility and communication technologies, the city–
country opposition is incoherent as a category of analysis but coherent as a category of
practice. And is this disjuncture simply a coincidence, a value-free curiosity? Of course not:
the systematic production of the desire to flee the gray, decrepit city for the green, suburban
countryside and then the desire to return to the edgy, modern, greening city have been central
to uneven development on the regional scale for the last fifty years (Smith, 1996). The space
between city and country as a category of practice and a category of analysis is the space of
ideology.

City as a system: the urban lifecycle and the commuting zone

The second trope of the traditional city is the city as a self-contained system. This trope has
informed generations of scholarship on cities as urban worlds with their own endogenous
logic, internally integrated but externally differentiated from surrounding hinterlands and
other cities-as-systems. In fact, it did so long before cities in the Global North reasonably
approximated such systems, during the Fordist–Keynesian era of metropolitan urbanization
and city–suburban integration. Unlike the city–country opposition, the trope of the city as
a self-contained system existed in theory before it existed in practice. And while the trope
persists to some extent in urban studies, like the city–country opposition it has mostly been
relegated to the theoretical dustbin, even as it continues to inform everyday representations
of the urban and strategies of accumulation.
Prior to the industrial revolution, social commentators in the West generally understood
the city not as its own independent social world but rather as expressive of general social
relations writ large (Sennett, 1969, page 3). The separation of city and countryside challenged
City as ideology 83

this understanding, however, and gave Western social science the trope of the city as a
distinctive, self-contained social system, particularly because of the pioneering work of the
Chicago School of sociology. Park (1915) used the metaphor of a “mechanism” to describe
the system-like properties of the city, while Burgess (1925) proposed to understand the city
as an organism. Alongside his famous concentric-circle model of Chicago, Burgess described
an urban system within which people and their social ties circulate, integrate, and disintegrate
in an unceasing metabolic process. The organicist idea is a dynamic one, but it is remarkably
autarchic. Burgess’ urban organism endlessly reproduces itself with barely any reference to
the outside world: the urban metabolism has no fuel. In actual fact, the apparent development
of cities as integrated social worlds was predicated on massive, continuing inflows of capital,
resources, and people from outside, a state of affairs captured in subsequent iterations of the
urban metabolism concept [Wolman (1965); see Wachsmuth (2012) for a historical overview].
A preoccupation of the Chicago School’s investigation of the urban organism was a
search for its laws: the rules of the city system. This preoccupation was in fact widespread
throughout geography and urban studies in the 20th century, including within the neo-Marxist
revival, as Castells’s (1977) search for the functional specificity of the urban (Brenner,
2000) demonstrates. And while such universalistic urban scholarship is now less common
than it once was [although see Bettencourt et al’s (2007) mathematical laws of urbanism
for a prominent counterexample], the city-as-system trope persists latently in urban studies
through methodological localism—the analytical privileging of the local scale as a means of
decoding its internal structure (Brenner, 2009). However, since the 1980s critical approaches
within urban and spatial theory have largely dispensed with the idea of cities as self-contained
systems, just as they have dispensed with the opposition between the city and the countryside.
Research on the relationship between globalization and urbanization (Friedman and Wolff,
1982; Sassen, 2001), urban rescaling (Brenner, 2000; 2004; Swyngedouw and Heynen,
2003), and networked urbanism (Graham and Marvin, 2001) has shown the contemporary
North-Atlantic urban world to be a multiplex, hybrid one, whose component city systems
are always partial and perforated. But there is an intuitive phenomenal logic to the city as a
self-contained system, both in temporal and spatial terms, which raises the possibility that the
trope persists ideologically even as it has faded analytically.
In temporal terms the cyclical and uneven patterns of urban change suggest an analogy
between the urban ecosystem and the ‘natural world’, where ecosystems and their components
are seen to experience a lifecycle. The physical environment of cities evolves, ages, and
decays, and the social environment seems to as well. New infrastructural growths emerge
where a break in the urban canopy lets sunlight (or capital) shine through, and every so often
a fire sweeps away old growth and sets the stage for new. Such ecological metaphors make it
easier to see the city as a self-contained system. The seesaw pattern of uneven development
at the urban scale appears as the local logic of a system in motion, when it substantively
implies the opposite—the systematic penetration and remaking of urban spaces by regional,
national, and global capital (Smith, 2008). This is ideology in the classic sense: a form of
appearance which makes it more difficult to understand the underlying exploitative reality.
The apparent inevitability of the urban lifecycle has long justified and facilitated urban
accumulation by dispossession (Metzger, 2000).
In spatial terms an important source of the plausibility of the city-as-a-system trope is
the daily spatial practice most typical of large, motorized urban agglomerations in the Global
North: commuting. Burgess’s (1925) original formulation of the urban-ecosystem idea
emphasized the importance of nonroutine movement of people within the city, but routine
movement—commuting—has proved far more influential in efforts to characterize, and
in fact to create, the unity of an urban area. Functional definitions of urban space—rooted
84 D Wachsmuth

abstractly in economic interconnection between places, and concretely in commuting ties—

originated in the United States around the beginning of the 20th century (Shryock, 1957)
as a means of defining an integrated urban economic space when many such spaces had
expanded beyond municipal or county borders. The commuting zone has subsequently been
widely adopted by statistics-gathering agencies worldwide as the accepted way to measure
and compare urban areas in regional, national, and international contexts, and considerable
effort has been exerted to establish the consistency of different definitions.
But there was an important historical transition from efforts to identify cities as systems
to efforts to create them: the imperative to remake and integrate urban areas around the urban
lifecycle and the daily commute. This imperative is readily identifiable in modernist
urbanism; as Aksoy and Robins (1997, page 26) argue, “the modern city, like the modern
nation, was imagined as a space that should be unitary, coherent and ordered”. But it did not
become a decisive force in the production of space until the period of Fordist–Keynesian
national industrial development after the Second World War. Throughout Western Europe
functional integration within and between urban regions was a central component of spatial
Keynesianism, with local administrations serving as the policy vehicles for wide-ranging
national-programs of infrastructure investment, welfare state development, and metropolitan
institution building (Brenner, 2004). In the United States, suburbanization played a
macroeconomic role similar to the welfare state in Western Europe, mobilizing effective
demand into new economies of scale (Florida and Feldman, 1988), and here the key vector
for functional urban integration was highway construction typified by Robert Moses on the
regional scale and the Eisenhower interstate highway system on the national scale. Within
urban areas the task was to render central business districts maximally accessible to daily
commuters from the new suburbs. Since existing large cities already had dense downtowns,
often predating automobiles entirely, this was not easy and required large-scale, violent
demolition of neighborhoods for new transportation infrastructure (Berman, 1988). But by
the end of the 1960s American urban regions had generally been refashioned into integrated
commuting regions.
However, even after the period of major highway construction ended, the Fordist–
Keynesian era saw state policy deliberately and repeatedly employed to ensure that the urban
lifecycle continued to churn. Students of urban planning in the United States will be familiar
with federal-government and state-government planners’ use of the neighbourhood-lifecycle
theory to justify destructive policies of “planned shrinkage” in deindustrializing metropolises
(Metzger, 2000). These technocratic and capital-led efforts to remake cities as integrated
systems did not happen without opposition. Community resistance to megaprojects, urban
renewal, and planned shrinkage was often fierce and sometimes successful. Still, these
transformations of urban space were squarely at the center of a postwar (sub)urban ideology
of universal automobility (Sheller and Urry, 2000) that was broadly shared.
Since the 1970s, meanwhile, state and capitalist investments in the production of urban
space in the Global North have increasingly abandoned the ‘modern infrastructural ideal’
of integrated cities in favor of what Graham and Marvin (2001) have called “splintering
urbanism”—neoliberalized, customized infrastructure networks that privilege competitiveness
over equity. But although the city as a self-contained system thus might appear to be as dead
in practice as it is in theory, splintering urbanism may have had the contradictory effect
of decreasing the objective coherence of urban areas while potentially increasing their
subjective coherence. To use the example of commuting patterns in the United States: the
suburb-to-central-city commute for which metropolitan highway networks were constructed
has shrivelled in comparison with intrasuburban commuting. More strikingly, the proportion
of commuters who commute outside their metropolitan area has been growing at almost three
City as ideology 85

times the rate of commuting overall since 1980, and now stands at 8% of the total (Pisarski,
2006, pages 52–53). This may seem a small figure, but metropolitan areas are specifically
designed to aggregate commuting patterns, and they are constantly redefined to account
for such developments. Despite statisticians’ best efforts, the commuting zone—the state
representation of the city as an integrated system—is slowly unravelling.
But what has happened to the subjective experience of commuting? For one, the daily labor
migration has become a daily reproductive migration. That is, the trip from home to work and
back has become a smaller and smaller share of the daily commute, and “is now festooned
with associated and integrated trips … dropping things off in the morning and picking them
up on the way home” (Pisarski, 2006, page 151). Whereas in the early 20th century the spatial
practice of an urban working-class American would have been clustered relatively tightly
around the home and the workplace, now spatial practice is increasingly diffuse—a pattern
observable (although to a lesser degree) throughout the automobile-centered urban world.
In other words, even as the commuting zone in aggregate is splintering, each individual
commuter’s everyday experience has come to resemble an aggregated commuting zone. The
metropolitan area as the sum of one million point-A-to-point-B commutes is giving way
to one million personal metropolitan areas. As the objective basis declines for considering
the city a system unified by automobility, the subjective basis for experiencing it as such
may have increased—and with it the plausibility of ‘common urban front’ ideologies which
minimize racial and class divisions and present the city as a space of equality even in the face
of the systematic dismantling of the provisioning of this equality.

City as an ideal type: urban competitiveness

The third and final trope of the traditional concept of the city is the idea that cities are
fundamentally comparable to one another—that ‘the city’ in general is an ideal type, of which
individual cities are discrete instances. Put pithily: every city is a city. In combination with
the previous two tropes, the city as an ideal type provides the dominant formal framework
for the study of urban space in the 20th century: cities are externally differentiated from
the countryside, internally integrated as self-contained systems, and related to each other
as instances of the same type. More so than the previous two tropes, assumed ideal-typical
urban comparability remains strongly present in urban studies, although arguably there have
been multiple ‘universes’ of urban comparison that until recently have only infrequently
overlapped—most notably the Global North and the Global South (Robinson, 2011). In
recent decades, this trope has metastasized into a key axis of globalized entrepreneurial urban
governance.
The paradigmatic ideal-typical conception of the city, as with the previous two tropes,
belongs to the Chicago School. Chicago ethnographer Redfield (1947) uses the Weberian
language explicitly to contrast the type of “folk society” with that of “urban society”,
while Wirth’s (1938) tripartite definition of the city as large, dense, and diverse similarly
constructs an ideal type in contrast to a rural settlement. In both cases, and in ideal-typical
urban scholarship more generally, the concept of the city is not meant to capture all the
diversity of social conditions existing in any given urban area, but rather to analytically
accentuate certain key features. And, while the specific features vary from analysis to analysis
[Amin and Thrift (2002) provide a good overview of the diversity of content captured by
the term ‘city’], what is consistent is the assumption that there is some inherent condition
of comparability underlying the city. Here we can note that, as problematic as Redfield’s
folk–urban typology is, it had at least the virtue of explicitly identifying its condition of
comparability: modernization. More often the underlying comparability of cities has simply
been assumed rather than argued: ‘the city’ floats outside history, while an endless variety of
specific cities enters and exits the world stage.
86 D Wachsmuth

Although the trope of the city–country opposition emerged both in practice and in theory
during industrialization in the 19th century, the city was conceptualized as an integrated
system before it was made so under postwar Fordism–Keynesianism. Likewise, although
scholars have long compared cities (McFarlane, 2010), in practical terms the city as an ideal
type belongs squarely to the neoliberal era, under the guise of urban competitiveness. Urban
competitiveness is a key phrase describing entrepreneurial urban governance (Harvey, 1989b)
oriented toward attracting globally mobile capital investment as a means of economic survival
(Brenner and Wachsmuth, 2012). Not all urban entrepreneurs are targeting the same ‘spaces
of competition’—global cities such as New York and London are generally understood to
be competing within a different global space from export-processing zones in Manila or
Shenzhen, for example. But across the world there has been a striking generalization of the
need to compete and the potential limitlessness of the global urban competitive playing field.
Competitiveness (or the lack of it) is often portrayed in the media and mainstream
scholarly accounts as a natural, almost ontological property of cities in the contemporary
globalizing economy, and thus has become an urbanized instance of Margaret Thatcher’s
famous pronouncement that “there is no alternative” to neoliberal capitalism. In the global
political–economic landscape, competition between cities is widely viewed as inevitable. But
such competition is better understood not as a property of city-ness, but rather as a structural
effect of coalitions of local elites mobilizing to defend and promote their geographically
fixed interests, as in analyses of urban growth machines (Logan and Molotch, 2007) and
territorial alliances (Harvey, 2006). Such elite coalitions seek to muster as broad a base of
support as possible for their favored policies, and one prominent means of doing so is the
fostering of ideologies of local community (Cox, 1999)—a local, united ‘us’ to compete
against a nonlocal ‘them’ (Castells, 1977). Of course not all feelings of local community
are ideological, and, as Harvey (1989a, page 236) notes, capitalist attempts to foster local
community as an accumulation strategy are an uncertain business that can backfire through
the inadvertent encouraging of local communities of resistance. Still, the systematic efforts
of boosters (Boyle, 1999), entrepreneurial urban governance agents (Harvey, 1989b), and
growth-oriented local media (Logan and Molotch, 2007, pages 70–73) are aimed at producing
a depoliticized representation of a unitary city competing in a world of similarly unitary
cities—precisely the trope of the city as an ideal type, but in practical, ideological form.
The implications of this political and discursive framework for comparing cities are
clearly illustrated by a recent policy statement from the Greater London Authority:
““London … needs to compare itself with other cities for the purpose of identifying best
practice for policy … . It is our view that having a common standard is more important
that having the right standard since in some senses if there is a common standard which
represents city-regions in a reasonably consistent way then that itself is the ‘right’
standard” (Freeman and Cheshire, 2006, page 2).
Translation: comparison is necessary, never mind what is being compared. Taylor and Lang’s
(2004) list of a hundred concepts to describe recent urban change should make it clear that
this trope has increasingly little analytical purchase on the contemporary urban world. Many
of the terms they identify describe new inter-urban systems that, when taken together, suggest
heterogeneity and variegation to be the emerging urban norm. So it is striking that the last
thirty years have seen the emergence and consolidation of an urban governance paradigm
rooted in the broad and necessary comparability of bounded cities on a global scale.
A recent innovation in urban policy which has been key in facilitating this comparison is
urban benchmarking (Greene et al, 2007). Actors ranging from international think tanks to
popular media to municipal chambers of commerce now routinely publish ‘competitiveness
reports’ and lists of ‘best places to live’, which are widely reported on in local media.
City as ideology 87

Local elites deploy the same discourse in attempting to build support for favored policy
interventions, again working through (and often with the overt support of) local media and
appealing to national media to make the case (McCann, 2004). The result is a nexus of media,
public opinion, and portable urban policy centered on the competitive threat from other cities,
and a discursive uniformity of intuitive urban comparability.
The general phenomenon of local elites or politicians attempting to muster broad local
support for an economic development agenda favorable to a narrow range of interests is
certainly not unique to the neoliberal era, as Logan and Molotch’s (2007) historical analysis
of the growth machine in the United States demonstrates. But the ubiquitous assumption that
competitiveness is a (or even the) key problem of urban governance is of recent origin. No
doubt there are other factors one could focus on to help explain the ongoing intuitiveness
of the city as an inherently comparative unit, even despite political economic restructuring
making such an understanding increasingly implausible in analytical terms. But urban
competitiveness illustrates straightforwardly a confluence of elite interests and everyday
understandings that is characteristic of all three of the tropes of the traditional city I have
been discussed.

Conclusion: who benefits from the city as ideology?

This paper is an attempt to deal with the specter of the city that hangs over critical urban
and spatial theory, and it is one part séance and one part exorcism. The preceding discussion
is tentative, but it should suffice to illustrate the following dilemma. In recent decades,
qualitatively new patterns of urbanization have transformed inherited sociospatial landscapes
and thereby called into question the coherence of the city as the basic unit of urban analysis.
But these patterns have not necessarily had the same impact on everyday consciousness of
urbanization—the ‘cognitive maps’ of these new urban spaces may still resemble the traditional
city. So on the one hand we have complex patterns of urban growth that have exceeded the
traditional idea of the city, while on the other we have the ongoing salience of the city concept
to everyday urban spatial practice. The former suggests the futility for critical spatial theory
of continuing to bend the concept of the city to fit these new forms of urbanization—what
elsewhere I have called “methodological cityism” (Angelo and Wachsmuth, forthcoming;
Wachsmuth, forthcoming)—while the latter suggests the importance of not simply abandoning
the concept altogether. What I have outlined here is a third way: to treat the city as a category
of practice, as a representation of people’s relationship to urbanization processes, rather than
an as a category of analysis adequate to describe these processes themselves. But in a specific
sense: we should systematically interrogate the city not simply as a neutral representation,
but as ideology—as a structured misrecognition that critical urban theory and practice
must confront and seek to change alongside the sociomaterial forms that produce it. Such a
project implies treating the “right to the city” (Lefebvre, 1996) with some caution, since as
an emancipatory urban imaginary it is only one potential orientation within the wider field
of ‘the city’ as a normative concept (Catterall, 2011), a concept always already laden with
power relations.
After all, the adequacy of the three tropes of the traditional city I have discussed is not
the same for all social actors. Just as the idea that ‘hard work pays off’ is ideological but
adequate to capitalists, the traditional concept of the city is ideological but adequate to urban
elites—the problem in both cases is that these ideologies are not adequate to most people.
Suburbanization and gentrification as accumulation strategies, sold on the myths of city and
country; metropolitan integration, sold on the myths of automobility and the urban lifecycle;
urban competitiveness, sold on the myths of an urban ‘us versus them’: radical geography
and urban theory must uncover and resist both the policies and the myths. At least many or
88 D Wachsmuth

most workers know that they are being exploited in the labor market; at a minimum we need
to strive for the same understanding about the city.
The challenge is that these ideological tropes do not endure simply because elite actors
want them to; they continue to correspond to a common experience of urban society, and
thereby influence scholarly as well as everyday understandings of urbanization in the Global
North. The geographical specificity of the traditional city concept is significant in its own
right: the three tropes of the traditional city all have North Atlantic provenance, and their
problematic dissemination around the world as mobile capital, mobile policy, and mobile
theory are all of a piece. The project of generating “new geographies of theory” (Roy, 2009)
must thus also entail a critique of the old geographies that have persisted too long.
Acknowledgements. This paper has benefited greatly over the years from conversations with a large
number of people, including at a series of workshops and conferences where it was presented between
2010 and 2012. I would like to thank in particular the two anonymous referees, as well as Hillary
Angelo, Neil Brenner, Bob Catterall, Daniel Aldana Cohen, Stuart Elden, David Madden, Geoff Mann,
Stuart Schrader, Neil Smith, and Esmé Webb.
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