GeoJoumal 9.

3 279-285 279
~) 1984 by D. ReidelPublishingCompany
0343-2521/84/0093-0279~1.05

Defining the Urban

Sayer, A., Dr., School of Social Sciences, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton,
BN1 92NjUK

Abstract: In everyday discourse, the term "urban" causes few problems, but it certainly has for
social theory. While the paper accepts the recent consensus that the term no longer serves to
refer to a distinct object in capitalist societies, it argues that the familiar arguments have been
confused by inadequate approaches to the problem of definition and inadequate concepts of
'space' and "ideology'. Clarification of such definitions is a prime task of social theory and
different methods of definition are discussed. The paper ends with a commentary on what is
probably the best attempt at defining the urban - Raymond Williams" "The Country and the
Cib' '.

Why should anyone worry about the meaning of "the urban"?
For the purpose of most everyday activities the concept of
'the urban" rarely causes any problems; neither, for that
matter, do the terms 'social' or 'space'. Yet as soon as we try
to explain the objects to which they are supposed to refer, the
terms become problematic, almost mysterious. In this paper I
want to examine what might be learned from the problems of
defining 'the urban' and related concepts.
In the last ten years, a large proportion of theoretical
work in urban geography and other disciplines interested in
the urban realm has been devoted to the problem of
definition. Despite the fact that no-one seems to doubt that
we live in the most urbanised societies in human history,
many theorists have paradoxically insisted that capitalism has
dissolved the identity of the city, so that the concept of the
urban no longer has a distinctive, coherent real object, only
imaginary ones.
While the search for explanations of urban phenomena
requires an adequate definition of the meaning of the urban,
in the sense o f an object to which the term can re/er, there is
another approach which seeks to discover the meanings of the
term j a r people. Meanings tell us not merely about the things
to which they refer, but also about the people who articulate
them, and the society in which they live. Places have
particularly powerful associations for people; they can come
to function as signifiers but what they signify may relate to
matters which have little connection with particular places as
such. For me, the outer London suburbs have strong but
largely negative associations. It is easy enough to pick out the
principal signifiers, the rows of semi-detached houses, the
trunk roads, and so on, but what is signified by them for me is
more elusive, and is indicative of a whole way of life - the
boredom of suburban childhood, the 'prison' of the family,
the suppression of the communication of real feelings
produced by the lower middle classes' enslavement to
consumption and their endless quest for respectability and
separation from the working class, and so on.
Normally in social science, these two sides - the
objective and the expressive - are separated analytically.
Most attention is of course given to the former, the latter
being left to the humanities or humanistic geographers to
study, perhaps because it is not considered an appropriate
object for "science'. However, it can be argued that the
separation leads to defic~ences on both sides. How cities are
built and how they function depends on actions and social
relations which are informed by the expressive order of ideas,
and the meanings and ideas are shaped by (inter alia) material
circumstances, so the two aspects ought to be integrated
analytically. Therefore, in my discussion of the problem of
defining the urban in research on its objective forms (if they
exist) I shall try to show how we are driven to consider the
content of the expressive side, and conversely, in trying to
interpret the meaning of what is signified by places such as
cities I shall show how the objective side can and must be
considered. I shall take Raymond Williams' The Country and
The Cio,1)as an exemplar of the second approach.
Discussions about definitions depend on assumptions
about the nature of "meaning'. The assumptions are rarely
280 GeoJoumal 9.3/1984

rural countryside In other words, meanings and actions or practices are

"reciprocally-confirming'2). Now this might give the
impression that meaning is purely a matter of convention, so
v i l l a ~ c u l t u r e that, for example, a city is simply whatever people choose to
to/n built-up o p e ~ call it or make it. However, while there is certainly an element
metropolis industry! of convention, not just any convention people care to dream
up will do. Those conventions or definitions which inform
I urban / leisure
actions which do not fit with the differentiations and ways of
I
cnurbatiInJ X / [
acting of the real world itself will be abandoned as they fail to
~- ~- X / work inform successful practice. What is practically possible
CITY depends not just on the nature of the external world but on
the causal powers of people, and hence on the extent to which
they are able to objectify their ideas. It is therefore not
surprising that the nature and meaning of 'the urban' should
change as societies develop materially and conceptually.
In everyday life, we use a wide range of concepts which
have, by and large, proved sufficiently adequate to enable us
to carry out routine tasks. But while commonsense definitions
of 'the urban' are satisfactory for these purposes, they do not
stand up well to sustained conceptual examination. In
everyday life, we think with our concepts but not about them,
Real Objects and hence -
,,In everyday language, contradiction which does not get in the way
of function is tolerated... (it is) not taken as contradiction at all
Fig 1 Sense and reference in the definition of 'city' because it is taken in context. "'3)
When we think about our concepts or encounter novel
......... relationsof reference practices, the contradictions and silences become clearer. This
-- senserelations
reflection, this attempt to resolve tensions and contradictions,
(Only someof the more mundanesenserelationsare included. and make sense of life is not, of course, the preserve of
'scientists', experts or academics. As will be shown later, it is
apparent in everyone's search for place and with that identity,
and in highly mediated ways it informs practice. The most
made explicit but they have significant effects on social obvious examples of practical attempts to resolve the tensions
theory. Meaning is not merely 'an academic matter of of everyday concepts of the city and related phenomena such
semantics'; it concerns how we identify and differentiate the as the countryside are new towns and garden cities, but in fact
world in practice. The adequacy of our definitions and even the most mundane of urban artefacts bear the imprint of
concepts then has a crucial effect on the success of the actions attempts to objectify and signify particular meanings of the
which they inform and on our attempts to understand the urban. Though their purpose may only be as a source of
world. An obvious example of this practical significance was profit, they always also signif~t): they are simultaneously not
the redefinition of the city implicit in local government only use-values and part of the circuit of capital but part of
reorganisation. the expressive order.
But it is not merely that practical effects may follow as a The second point about meaning concerns 'sense and
consequence or by-product of conceptual developments. reference'. Now it is often imagined that the meaning of a
More important, but less widely recognised, is the fact that term like 'city" can be given simply by pointing to the object
meanings are only established and negotiated through to which it refers through the 'act of reference'. However, the
practice in the first place. Take the example of the meaning of world can only be known under particular descriptions and by
the terms 'public' and 'private'. Although their meaning has means of concepts. We therefore need to be told how to look
not been static, they have informed actions in our society for at and think about the object being pointed at, which aspects
centuries and have in turn been objectified in social and to ignore and which to consider, and what other objects it is
spatial organisation, most clearly in enclosed and locked like. In order to answer these questions, the 'sense-relations'
spaces. These 'objectifications' are interpreted as confirming which link the term 'city' to others and which collectively give
the conceptual distinctions on which, in turn, the ations the term its sense must be specified. The meaning of "city' is
producing the material arrangements depend. It is then determined by the 'play of differences' among related
inconceivable that such socially-produced material sets of concepts. The other concepts may also refer, via their
differentiations could exist without the conceptual distinction, sense-relations, to real objects, indeed without reasonably
and vice versa. stable reference, the 'play of differences' would either
GeoJournal 9.3/1984
dissolve or become a purely arbitrary matter of convention,
and hence language would cease to function. Therefore, sense
and reference are interdependent; they can only be defined
jointly (Fig 1).
I have argued elsewhere 5) that the proper business of
'theory' in social science is not so much the provision of
formal, logical systems from which predictions may be
deduced but the 'normative explication' of important though
poorly understood terms, with the aim of improving our
conceptual systems. As Quine put it:
"Any word worth explicating has some contexts which, as wholes, are
clear and precise enough to be useful; and the purpose of explication
is to preserve the usage of these favoured contexts while sharpening
the usage of other contexts. "6)
So "normative explication' involves the re-working of the
sense-relations of problematic concepts such as the 'urban'. If
this is indeed the prime task of theory then the preoccupation
of urban studies in the last ten years with the meaning of the
urban is quite appropriate. Once again, this is not just a
matter of semantics; it affects how "carve up" our object of
study and what properties we take particular objects to have.
To neglect meaning is to reduce the possibility of discovering
the causal powers of objects.
Now 'normative explication' is always difficult because it
is rarely clear which of the many uses of a term are
problematic, and hence which sense-relations should be cut,
and which new ones should be constructed. Also, particularly
in social science where meanings are constitutive of our
objects of study and not merely external descriptions of them,
it is difficult to stop using the term in its problematic senses.
So, for example, we may wish to cut the sense-relation which,
in everyday thinking, connects the 'urban' to 'built-up area',
but since such associations still inform some social practices
they cannot be simply forgotten. It is therefore not surprising
to find apparently 'commonsense' uses of terms connected
with the urban, in the work of urban theorists who formally
reject such uses. When Castells refers to, say, Paris, the
everyday sense may be adequate for his purposes on some
occasions; the combination of 'theoretical' and 'actors"
concepts need not cause problems - whether it does depends
on the context. More generally, difficulties arise if we cut too
many familiar sense-relations, for it then becomes uncertain
what the disputed term's reference is, and hence what the
argument is about, we become like explorers who have lost
their bearings. I believe that this problem has definitely arisen
in urban theory!
How does research on urban phenomena in human
geography and related disciplines look in these terms'? I do
not want to rehearse the history of attempts to define the
urban for that has already been done by others 7) ; rather I will
comment on a few tendencies in the matter of definition.
It is clear that the now discredited practice of defining
the urban simply in terms of demographic and physical
characteristics effectively treated the city as an 'independent
variable'. While it paid considerable attention to the problem
of delimiting and measuring cities, it largely ignored their
281
conceptualisation, with the result that by default, unexamined
everyday concepts were used which dehistoricized the city.
The dissociation of 'the urban' from a particular spatial
form or container was an important step, but it opened up or
uncovered rather than solved the most difficult problems.
Built-up areas and their boundaries might not be of much
sociological significance, but at least they were observable.
Abandoning this connection did not suddenly reveal
distinctively 'urban' social relations, structures and processes.
Rather, at least in the study of capitalist societies, it brought
about a progressive elimination of candidates for 'urban"
objects. Alternatively - although in fact it amounts to the
same thing - it became difficult to see what was not urban in
advanced capitalist societies; in referring to everything it
failed to refer to anything.
Recent years have seen several attempts to salvage
something from this disarray, but these have run into several
difficulties. Some of these arise through a failure to
understand the subtleties of conceptualisation, others through
a failure to grasp the significance of everyday concepts of the
urban. And there is always the possibility (quite likely in my
view) that in capitalist societies, there is no distinctively urban
object.
Consider the following ways of classifying and defining
an object. We can look for common properties among the
members of some class, in this case whatever is common to all
cities. Alternatively we could look for diagnostic properties,
or 'nominal essences', that is, those characteristics which
distinguish urban from all other phenomenaS) - The former
method encourages ahistorical concepts which focus on
superficial similarities. Likewise, diagnostic characteristics
may be superficial. Both methods can fail to identify what
actually produces the phenomena in question, or what effects
they may have.
One of the most important features of recent urban
studies has been the ascendancy of an interest in what
processes actually constitute the objects which we call urban,
relative to the concern with what disd,~guishes them. In this
respect, themes such as the production of the built
environment, the reproduction of labour power and the
growth and decline of urban industry have come to the fore9).
Much has been learned from this work but it still does not
escape the problem of defining the urban. None of the above
processes is unique to what in every day terms we know as
cities.
One response to this situation has been to try to combine
causal and diagnostic criteria for defining the urban.
Castells I0) and others argued that some of the constitutive
processes were either distinctively urban, or at least took on a
distinctive form in cities, for example, the provision of the
collective means of consumption. This strategy has
subsequently been attacked for its exclusion of other
constitutive processes which were no less important causally
even if they were less distinctively urban; and on the grounds
that its diagnostic criteria were not restricted to urban
phenomena. Note once again how theorists repeatedly feel
282
obliged to justify their preferred definitions by reference to
their ability to encompass at least some of the everyday uses
from which they are trying to escape. This situation is not as
strange as it may seem; new concepts cannot be plucked out
of thin air, but must be forged out of pre-existing ones, even
though they may be the ones from which we are trying to
escape.
Another response abandons the hope that a coherent
and distinctive urban object exists in capitalist societies, but
considers it important to continue research on the causally
defined processes which had previously been wrongly treated
as being peculiar to cities. For example Bevanll)and
Saunders 12) argue that issues concerning social reproduction
might usefully be relieved of the burden of relating to
peculiarly urban phenomena. Saunders rather confusingly
nevertheless retains the term 'urban' purely as a 'convenient'
one for the study of "social provisions in the context of the
relation between the state, the private sector and the
population of consumers"13). At the same time he concedes
that some researchers may still be interested in the particular
spatial form that these processes take, be they urban, rural or
whatever.
"If our theoretical concern is with a specific social process (say the
process of collective consumption) divorced from the question of
space, then we certainly have the basis for a sociology, but to term it
"urban' can be no more than a convenient convention. If, on the
other hand, our concern is with the significance of spatial
arrangements for the maintenance of capital accumulation, then our
problem may indeed be designated as 'urban' (meaning spatial), but
our approach to it can hardly be termed "sociological'(it is, rather the
application of theories of political economy to a geographical
object)." 14)
Now this kind of simultaneous redefinition of several familiar
terms can induce dizziness, but with certain qualifications, I
think it is legitimate.
Against those who have plundered the works of the
founders of social science for their insights on space and
urban phenomena, Saunders has argued convincingly that
Marx, Weber and Durkheim took little interest in space,
compared to their other concernsl5). This, and the above
quotation may disturb many geographers, for it is surely the
case that 'space makes a difference' and therefore cannot be
ignored. However, matters are not quite so simple. 'Space
itself' does not make a difference; it only makes a difference
in terms of the particular objects which constitute it. For
example 'proximity' and other spatial terms are 'contentless
abstractions' and as such have no effects, but proximity, as
opposed to separation of say, an unemployed person to a job
vacancy, certainly does make a difference. Because spatial
terms are contentless abstractions, until we specify what kinds
of object with what kind of causal powers actually constitute
spatial relations, there can be no abstract general theory of
space that is applicable to all objectsl6).
In addition to this, although material objects always have
'spatial extension' they rarely necessarily have a particular
form of spatial extension, while the form of their spatial
relations to other objects is contingent. So for example, a steel
GeoJoumal 9.3/1984
works or railway line have limited ranges of possible spatial
form but it is contingent whether they are located next to a
housing estate, a park, a port or whatever. Where socially-
produced systems are concerned, there may be some (usually
fairly loose) constraints on the range of possible spatial forms
that they can take if they are to function, but the nature of
those forms will in turn be constrained by the causal powers
of the objects constituting the system, for example, the traffic-
bearing capacity of roads, available modes of transport and
types of activity. Now I have argued elsewhere that abstract
theories are concerned with necessary relations between
objects, and what they abstract from are the contingent
relations that hold among objectsl7). These contingent
relations (e.g. questions of spatial form) make a difference to
the eJfects of the operation of causal mechanisms, but it is
possible (and indeed easier) to study the social structures in
virtue of which they operate in abstraction from these
contingencies. Abstract social theory can therefore abstract
from the contingencies of spatial form, but research on
concrete effects must take them into account.
Now Peter Saunders does not accept the realist theory of
knowledge and philosophy of science on which this is based,
but I think it does lend support to his conclusion, provided we
do not restrict the spatial to the urban. On the realist view,
cities could only be treated as structures and hence as objects
of abstract theory rather than merely as contingent
conjunctures if they had certain causal powers which were
irreducible to those of their constituents, and in the case of
capitalist cities, it is doubtful if they do. Our capacity to think
is not reducible to a capacity of each of our cells to think and
so thought can be treated as a coherent, irreducible object of
study. But if what happens in cities is wholly reducible to the
powers of their constituent objects and structures, then cities
are not coherent objects of abstract theory. When examined
they appear to 'dissolve' into their constituents and these turn
out not be unique to cities.
To complicate matters further, many of the 'new' urban
theorists have used the term 'space' in highly ambiguous
ways. While claiming to use a relative concept of space they
have in fact abstracted objects from the spaces they
constitute. So while the work of writers like Castells is littered
with references to 'space' and 'territory' it is rarely possible to
discover what kinds of spatialCbrms they are talking aboutl8).
If one is to be consistent in rejecting absolute concepts of
space and if spatial relations are contingent, then one cannot
hope to construct a general abstract 'theory of space'.
A n important feature of marxist work on the city is the
recognition of the role of 'ideology' but this has not always
been usefully interpreted. Now there are several quite
different conceptions of 'ideology', but whichever one we use
there is a common danger to be avoided. This is the danger of
theoreticism, of confusing the definition or derivation of an
adequate 'second-order' concept of ideology with the
empirical or 'first-order' problem of determining the specific
content of ideology in particular societies. Often in recent
years, marxists seem to have assumed that answering the first
GeoJournal 9.3/1984
question would also take care of the second, with the result
that despite all the references to ideology and the 'urban',
little has been said about its contentl9).
Everyday ideas associated with the city which, for
example, assume the existence of 'urban problems' can be
shown to be ideological in the sense that they are false ideas
which obscure real processes, but which nevertheless, despite
their falsity may have real effects. Not all everyday ideas need
be false, but the illusion that they are has been created by the
stretching of the meaning of 'ideology' to embrace not only
false consciousness but consciousness in general, albeit with
the possible exception of 'science'. Matters have been made
worse by the influence of the extraordinary epistemological
assumptions that informed the research of the French school,
and particularly Castells, according to which it appeared that
the truth or falsity of ideas could be determined a priori from
their conditions of production, so that the 'truth' of 'scientific'
ideas derived from their immaculate conception, while the
falsity of lay knowledge was similarly guaranteed by its
origins20). (These ideas are what I have inferred from this
kind of literature; they are rarely stated unequivocally.) The
truth or 'practical adequacy' of particular ideas is a
substantive question, not an a priori one.
All knowledge, whether true or false is influenced by the
material circumstances in which we live, and insofar as the lat-
ter are unevenly developed so too will consciousness be une-
venly developed. But our ideas, even those about places, are
not completely determined by such circumstances but are al-
ways formed through concepts which are available to people.
While these conceptual systems can of course be changed in
practice and to a certain extent be made to adapt to circum-
stances, they always retain some traces of their origins, so that,
for example, our current ways of seeing the city are heavily in-
fluenced by historical images. Some of these mediating images
may distort, but this property is not a monopoly of ruling class
ideas, nor is there any reason to believe that the removal of the
latter distortions would enable the masses to see their situation
with absolute objectivity, whatever that might mean, any more
than it would for scientists: material circumstances would still
have to be interpreted via some conceptual system or other.
Through a combination of a theoreticist epistemology,
and a neglect of human agency, 'structuralist' writing on the
city tended to regard everyday concepts of the city critically
but dismissively - the kind of criticism which knows how to
judge but not how to comprehend. Through failing to
examine closely, with the aid of empirical research, the
specific concepts held by people in relation to their actual
material circumstances, it was difficult to see why they
thought as they did. As a result there was little penetration of
popular consciousness.
One author who has refused this reductive treatment and
has tried both to criticise and to comprehend ideas about the
city is Raymond Williams in The Country and the City.
Although Williams is not a geographer, I believe his work is
of considerable importance to geographers of both marxist
and humanist persuasions.
283
In Williams' writings, meanings are always examined in
their social context, as they are given by particular kinds of
people in particular situations. They are treated not only as
descriptions of material conditions but as transformations of
pre-existing meanings and as meanings jor others - for
communication and sharing as a medium of social intercourse
- that is, not only as a set of labels for their environment but
as a way of relating to others. Shifts in the meaning of terms
like 'city' and 'country' are intimately associated with changes
in actual social relations and practices. Some of the changes
are subtle, others dramatic, reversing earlier associations. At
the same time these meanings are often inadequate for
grasping their objects. While Williams exhaustively examines
a wide range of ideas about the city and the country in order
to 'comprehend' them, there are few that escape criticism.
The contextualisation of meaning takes one step further
in The Country and the City: people seek not only to
understand their circumstances but to give meaning to their
lives, to form identities. People seek out situations in which
they think their desired identities will actually be confirmed
through their actions, their material circumstances and the
actions of others towards them. Images of places are strongly
affected by this search, particularly in the quest for
community, as an 'organic' form of association in which
people can develop their individuality through their
unalienated relations with others. Everyday concepts of the
urban are therefore not merely descriptive but expressive and
carry a heavy affective load of associations which allude to
much broader and more fundamental concerns and responses,
as do my images of London's outer suburds.
As a way of assisting the understanding of everyday
concepts of the urban, consider the following list of
oppositions: city - county
industry - agriculture
agriculture - naturel
impersonal - human
consumption - production
civilized - barbaric
masses - community
urbanity, sophistication - rustic, simplicity, innocence
work- leisure
week - weekend
progress - tradition
Associations from each pair of oppositions "spill over' in the
vertical dimension of the list. Several oppositions have
changed sides at various times, such as the association of the
city with consumption and the country with production. As
Douglas argues this 'spillage' does not take place merely in
the realm of semantics but characterizes the rules by which
people structure their experience and actions, and by which
institutions are structered.
"'Sets of rules are metphorically connected with another, allow
meaning to leak from one context to another along the formal
similarities that they show. The barriers between finite provinces of
meaning are always sapped either by the violent flooding through of
social concerns or by the subtle economy which uses the same rule
structure in each province". 21)
284
In their attempts to express their images of places and what
places signify regarding their way of life, people often appeal
to the equivalences and metaphors created by this 'leakage',
but in so doing often distort the experiences of both the
origins of the metaphors and their 'targets'. For example, the
use of an imagery of idealised rural communities for
interpreting suburban 'communities' does justice to neither.
Yet the important thing is not merely to criticise the
distortion but to show what produces it.
The images discussed in The Country and the CiO' are far
more numerous, complex and subtly differentiated than my
crude reconstruction, but certain themes appear repeatedly,
albeit invariably in disguised form. One is the theme of
dispossession, in which places take on associations of the loss
of attachment to the land and control over production, the
loss of skills and of an 'organic' relationship between one's
being and one's work. Another related theme is the
replacement of a dominant mode of social relation of
communal involvement, membership and active participation
and enjoyment by "modes of detached, separated, external
perception and action" (p. 298). None of the contrasts
implicit in these themes can reasonably and authentically be
lined up with either the city or country as simple objects,
although the common use of urban and rural imagery as
'partial interpreters' of the feelings involved in the themes
tries to do just that.
Williams is quite unequivocal that it is not the superficial,
objective contrasts between city and country that generate
these significations, but the modes of social relations and
technological changes produced by capitalism, and these cut
across everyday distinctions between the urban and the rural.
Now the obvious marxist explanation of these repeated
feelings of dispossession, separation and externalisation
evident in peoples' images of actual and ideal places or
'communities' is in terms of material expropriations, such as
the enclosures and the destruction of rural domestic industry,
plus the objective separations produced by the breakdown of
local economies and the internationalisation of production
and exchange. But while it is true that these have rendered
many processes beyond the control of individuals, so that the
products of their labour (e.g. new technologies) face them as
alien and hostile forces, what is often forgotten is that there
has also been a loss of meaning and identity. So many kinds
of activity have been stripped of their meaning either because
as work they are only done for money and not for the use-
value of what is produced, or because as consumption they
inhibit rather than enhance our sharing of experience with
others. It is not just that so much is beyond our control, but
that so much is beyond our understanding. This leads to a
condition which has been termed "ontological insecurity'22),
whose symptoms include the endless search for "escape
attempts'23), such as new fashions in dress, architecture,
internal decoration and leisure through which we just might,
in the midst of our highly impersonalized society, forge an
identity and sense of belonging for ourselves. And these are
not merely middle class preoccupations, for although some
GeoJouma! 9.3/1984
marxists have found it difficult to acknowledge they are
evident in working class culture and the preoccupation of
many so-called 'urban social movements' with questions of
identity as well as material deprivation and powerlessness e.g.
black consciousness.
What then are the implications of all this for geographers
and other students of the city'? The lesson for marxists must
be that the question of what places signify cannot be
dismissed as merely an external and ideological description, as
an epiphenomenon. Not only are the significations very
revealing of wider features of society, they also make a
difference to practice, indeed they may inform and be
reciprocally confirmed and objectified by actions. From the
point of view of developing abstract theory, an analytical
separation of the material form the expressive order may be
quite harmless, but the two dimensions must be brought
together to provide concrete explanations of so-called urban
phenomena.
If the lesson for marxists is that the expressive order must
not be forgotten in dealing with the material form of society,
the lesson for humanist geographers is the converse. Williams
is insistent that the main themes running through the
significations of the urban and the rural are not to be taken as
general indications of some ahistorical "human condition: the
irresolvable choice between a necessary materialism and a
necessary humanity" (p. 353). Rather they only make sense in
the specific contexts of the lives of the particular people who
articulated them, only not as an expression of some asocial
'individual condition' but as expressions of ways of relating to
others in the determinate structures of a particular society.
A n d to answer the question 'why these beliefs?" it is
necessary to understand the historically-specific material
conditions in which and about which the beliefs are held.
There is certainly more in The Country and the City for
humanistic geographers than an example of how literature
can tell us about places!
Finally, Williams acknowledges the disappearance of the
urban as a distinct object in capitalist society. Just as 'urban
political economists have shifted attention from the question
of what distinguishes cities to the processes that produce
them, Williams calls for a shift from the examination of the
differences between images of the country and the city to the
'unresolved division and conflict of impulses' which constitute
and are signified by the images. In both cases, the constitutive
elements cut across the country-city distinction in very
complex ways, and hence in both, the attempt to force the
elements into distinct urban or rural moulds is misguided. Yet
as Williams shows, even though informal and formal concepts
of the urban are inadequate and inappropriate for capitalist
societies, there is much that can be learned from them in
terms of what they signify. Furthermore, in dealing with
images so stronly influenced by what people value in life, their
examination can take us beyond mere academic analysis into
the consideration of possible better ways of life. And
whatever the search for a 'truly human geography' might
involve, I take it that it must at least include this.
GeoJournal 9.3/1984
Footnotes
1) 1973 Page numbers refer to 1975 Paladin edition.
2) This is a term Williams uses in several of his other books.
3) B. Barnes (1974) Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theoo,,
RKP, p. 38
4) For discussions of the meaning of the terms 'signifier',
"signified', etc., see R. Barthes (1973) Mythologies, Paladin.
5) In my book 'Method in Social Science: a realist approach"
Hutchinson, 1984
6) W.V.O. Quine (1953) "Two dogmas of empiricism", p. 25 in his
From a Logical Point of View, Harvard U.P. 1980
7) See especially M. Castells (1972) The Urban Question, Arnold.
8) See A. Edel (1979) Analyzing Concepts in Social Science:
Science, Ideology and Value Vol. 1 Transaction: New
Brunswick, NJ
9) Harvey, Castells and the Community Development Projects
were probably the prime movers in this change.
10) M. Castells (1979) City, Class and Power, Macmillan
285
11) 'Social reproduction and the reproduction of labour power:
beyond urban sociology', Sussex University Urban and Regional
Studies Working Paper 22
12) P. Saunders (1981) Social Theory and the Urban Question,
Hutchinson.
13) ibid. p. 258.
14) ibid. p. 256.
15) ibid.
16) A. Sayer (1979) 'Theory and empirical research in urban and
regional political economy', Sussex University Urban and
Regional Studies Working Paper 14. Appendix
17) ibid. and in my 'Explanation in economic geography: abstraction
versus generalisation', Progress in Human Geography, vaI. 6.G),
p. 68-88, i982
18) Sayer, 1979, op. cir. Appendix
19) Castells would seem to be a good example.
20) Castells, 1972, op.cit.
21) M. Douglas (1973) Rules and Meanings, Harmondswortb, p. 13.
22) See A. Giddens (1981)A Contemporary Critique of Historical
Materialism, Macmillan.
23) L. Taylor and S. Cohen (1975) Escape Attempts"