What is City?
In our first week of class, we primarily focused on the conceptualizing what is a city. When trying to a define a city, it became clear from our class discussions that it is very difficult to come up with one universally encompassing definition that applies across both space and time. Last term, I took the course Urban & Transportation Policy, and we concluded that the most encompassing definition of a city is simply a lot of people living close together. Of course, this is vague, but gets that essence of what a city really is. If add to the definition very specific elements like types of infrastructure or certain amounts of economic activity, we may begin to exclude cities from previous centuries or even cities today in areas of the world where development looks a lot different than in Canada. However, the definition of “a lot of people living close together” is not the most useful when trying to understand the functioning of Canadian cities. Then, it does begin to make more sense of adding in different elements of political boundaries, population characteristics, sociological patterns, and economic activity as we discussed in class.
Something we did not get to discussing is the difference between a suburb and a city, though the terms came up several times. What is a suburban area? Typical images that come to mind are highly residential areas only accessible by car, with very little economic activity perhaps beyond a corner store. This contrasts with what we typically consider “the city”, which is the high density, mixed use developments typically in the downtown core. But are these suburban areas distinct from the concept of the city or an integrated part of it? Local and provincial Governments have intentionally designed cities to have core of economic activity and a separated residential area through the zoning laws. But suburbs and the “city” (which I believe is more accurately called the core) are dependent on one another in a way that I do not think it useful to classify them as different entities when discussing the functioning of cities. In fact, the distinction is probably resulting in political divides that make it more difficult to govern. People in suburban areas often feel separated and less dependent on the core, causing division in municipal politics. Suburban residents may prefer a reduction in taxes compared to improving transit service or economic development in the core because they do not realize how these policies benefit them. These issues are then exacerbated by some municipal election system that have councillors representing distinct wards and thus pitting the suburban and urban councillors against each other, creating wedge issues that may not be the most productive. Perhaps, we must consider how do we better integrate suburban and more “urban” areas to help them realize that they both must come together to function as a city.
