Defining urbanisation processes

Schmid and his co-authors suggest that we can identify a range of new terms to describe the urbanisation processes which are producing a diversity of urban territories across the globe.

The paper identifies urbanisation processes as:

“a moment of generalisation: to detect a bundling of characteristics, common underlying mechanisms, logics, regularities and common traits in the way urbanisation unfolds and proceeds, thus producing similar outcomes.” (p.30).

The authors note that “urbanisation processes” can be identified and defined as involving:

“material transformation of a territory”

“specific regimes of territorial regulation, or governance”

“disruption, dislocation, and re-orientation of the inhabitants’ urban experiences and everyday lives.”

Read an extract from this paper explaining these terms (page 29-30), influenced by the urbanist thinker, Henri Lefebvre. It is his terms of “conceived, perceived and lived” space which the authors use to develop their definition of “urbanisation processes”. They describe the meaning of these terms in the text.

The extract is available in the ‘Downloads’ section below.

The reference for the full article, which you might like to explore further as part of the extension activities this week, is: Schmid, C., Karaman, O., Hanakata, N., Kallenberger, P., Kockelkorn, A., Sawyer, L., Streule, M. and Wong, K. P. 2018. Towards New Vocabularies of Urbanization Processes: A comparative approach. Urban Studies. 55, 1: 19-52.