Urbanism as a Field of Study

From Left to Right: Ildefons Cerdà, Louis Wirth, Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, Jan Gehl1.

Books out of the Blue

Sometime last summer, during one of my regular walks exploring an urban neighborhood—I've long found that the old advice to "pound the pavement" is the best way to stay actually grounded as an urbanist—I unexpectedly stumbled across an independent book shop2. The weather was blisteringly hot, and being a sucker for a good bookstore, I popped in, as much for the AC as to browse. My brain numbed by the heat, I perused the shelves, duly impressed by the store's selection and curation, but not focused on anything in particular. My detached drift, however, came to a sudden stop as I stumbled across something that made my heart lurch: an entire section labeled simply, "Urbanism."

At first glance, I was ecstatic. Not so long ago, finding books about cities was a thankless task, even in the best shops. If you were lucky, you might find a small selection of books about urban design tucked in at the back of the architecture section, some pieces of urban history peppered in with general or local history, or perhaps some works of urban theory stashed in amongst other, more general works of sociology. To suddenly be faced with a dedicated section stacked with luminaries like Jane Jacobs, Kenneth T. Jackson, Mike Davis, Christopher Alexander, and Richard Sennett seemed almost transcendental3. It felt like urbanism as a field of study—as a discipline all its own—had finally come of age, and was finally starting to get the attention it so richly deserves.

Looking closer, however, my crest began to fall almost as quickly as it had risen. While it was tremendous to see all the authors listed above in one place, they were hardly contemporary: most of their groundbreaking works were at least thirty years old, and many were far older. There were also plenty of newer works as well, of course—most of which deserved (or at least, at a glance, seemed to deserve) their spot here. Seeing them all in one place, however, made it clear that while there were undoubtedly a lot of contemporary books about cities, most here came out of their own specific field, not urbanism. There was a lot of history (for instance, Lizabeth Cohen's excellent work on Ed Logue), biography (Richard Rein's book on William H. Whyte), sociology, social science, a few books of policy, and enough expensive architecture tomes to rival the construction cost of a Santiago Calatrava project4. Many of these works (at least the ones I have personally engaged with) are good or even great. Almost none, however, could truly be said to come from the domain of urbanism itself.

Of course, from a certain perspective, this makes sense. Cities are intensely human creations, and they can be approached from almost every human viewpoint. As such, no discipline has a monopoly on things urban. What's more, urbanism itself is nothing if not a multidisciplinary field. An urbanism without history, without sociology, without policy, or without architecture would be an impoverished domain. But while many of the works on the shelf undoubtedly advanced our understanding of what cities are and how they work, all came wrapped in the imprimatur of another discipline. Even after many decades of work, the study of cities and urbanity—the study of urbanism—is still not really given its due as a serious field unto itself.

This is particularly odd because, less than a decade ago, cities and urbanism were having something of a cultural moment. On the world stage, cities like Medellín, Bogotá, and Curitiba were becoming darlings of the design and planning worlds, each demonstrating their own new and unique ways of creating and revitalizing urban space all while dramatically improving urban life. In 2016, the United Nations convened UN Habitat III, focusing on the much-ballyhooed fact that, for the first time in history, more than half of the world's population now lived in cities—a proportion that has continued to rapidly grow to this day. Meanwhile, in the United States, the nation's urban renaissance was in full swing, and positive conceptions of cities began to enter the popular consciousness in a way that they hadn't for decades. Urban places retook center stang among the nation's cultural and economic vanguards, and as they did, property values (and rents) began to soar in what Richard Florida would soon label "superstar cities5." Major publications like The Atlantic began entire publications like CityLab (later sold to Bloomberg) to report on urban news and carry urban commentary. Less capitalized, more activist-oriented websites like the Streetsblog network soared in popularity. Many a university created new professional degrees based around more complex ways of understanding and working with cities—including the one where I got my postgraduate degree. Books on urban topics were suddenly best sellers, from the works of economists like Ed Glaesar and the aforementioned Florida to transportation professionals like Jeff Speck and Janette Sadiq-Kahn to historians like Lizabeth Cohen and Richard Rothstein to political iconoclasts like Chuck Mahron and beyond6. It felt like the world was on the cusp of recognizing the importance of urbanism as a field.

And yet, since then, the pace of urbanism's expansion has slowed dramatically, if not reversed entirely. The reasons for this retrenchment are not entirely clear. Partly, it may be a result of the pandemic and the rise of remote work, giving a certain class of workers a desire for more home space with less of a need to be in urban centers every day. It may also be related to the unrest of the summer of 2020, which helped rebirth right-wing, explicitly anti-urban beliefs about crime, disorder, and urban life that many had thought had finally been put to bed. This has only been reinforced by the global rise of a new far-right populism often built on an explicit hatred of cities and the people in them. More prosaically, it may also simply have been the public, politicians, and the academy losing interest in urbanism: it was simply no longer the hot new topic of the moment. (Of course, urbanism wasn't new in the 2010s, but its cultural moment certainly was). Maybe the public perception of the field had been weakened by various competing online definitions and political projects—something we will discuss later. Whatever the reasons, however, publications began to shrink, academic programs began to close, and urban books stopped topping the charts, when they were being published at all. As a result, the field can at times feel no closer to respect than it even has before, even as urban issues are more important than ever.

Make no mistake: as the bookshelf I came across shows, cities remain an incredibly popular topic for all sorts of fields to engage with. But works that emerge from the actual discipline of urbanism—from the study of what cities are, how they work, and how they can be made to work better—are surprisingly rare, indeed. And that is a crying shame. Cities are some of if not the most complex things humans have ever created. They deserve a field all their own, one that recognizes and studies both their physicality and their systems as a complex whole, and then puts that knowledge to use to try to improve them. They deserve the dedicated field of study that is urbanism.

Origins, Etymological and Otherwise

So what exactly is urbanism as a field of study, and how did it come to be so underappreciated? To answer that requires examining where the field originated, and how it fits in with other, related disciplines. Indeed, in part, urbanism occupies such an odd position because the field has long been so poorly defined and delineated. That doesn't mean that the word "urbanism" is or ever was meaningless, and indeed, over the decades, it has slowly crystallized into something clearly recognizable, especially to those whose work involves cities. But as is often the case with words (and fields) whose meanings have morphed and grown over time, exact definitions have rarely been put down on paper. Most people simply aren't lexicographers.

There are exceptions, of course. A 2018 entry in the Oxford Bibliographies, for instance—a tool designed to give researchers a background into a discipline—defines urbanism as, "...broadly encompass[ing] town planning and urban improvement, often a technical activity overseen by professionals; it is also taken to relate to the processes and interactions of urban society with the built environment, a more all-encompassing definition in which agency is afforded to urban populations in the shaping of the environment they inhabit7." This definition, while extremely wordy, is certainly not a bad place to start, and encompasses a lot of what urbanism means today. That wordiness, however—the authors need to continually stack dependent clauses—also goes a long way towards demonstrating just how much the word has morphed over the years, growing away from traditional urban planning and towards something far more intellectually encompassing. To begin to outline urbanism as a field today, it helps to examine how both the field and the word that described it have morphed over time.

The most obvious place to start is Louis Wirth's seminal 1937 Urbanism as a Way of Life, the academic paper that arguably introduced the word to the English-speaking world. Wirth was a sociologist, and his definition was an entirely sociological one. He argued that "urbanism" was a mode of life very different from traditional "folk" ways of rural life, describing how living amongst so many heterogeneous people and large-scale systems created not only tolerance towards difference and cosmopolitanism, but also, in his view, weaker social ties and even a kind of anomie. While he was clearly ambivalent about the nature of this way of life—at one moment pointing out its strengths, the net bemoaning what it does to human beings—he also contended that these strong differences made urbanism a worthwhile topic of study all on its own8. Wirth's article was phenomenally influential (see, for example, the title of this piece) to the point that many dictionaries still list his usage as the word's primary meaning9. But while his paper was notable, few today use the word in the exact manner he described, even in sociology. There is no doubt that the type of work Wirth was doing and the arguments he was marking are still a core part of today's urbanism (albeit usually with far more sanguine conclusions). He was also one of the first to recognize urbanism (and especially urban life) as a standalone topic worthy of study in and of itself. In the near century since its publication, however, the word urbanism has evolved to point to something quite different from With's mode of life.

This shift might in part be the result of a sort of global contextual collapse with the non-English world. Indeed, it could equally be argued that the true origins of what we now consider urbanism lay in the work of Spain's Ildefons Cerdà from the 1850s through his death in 1876. An engineer, polymath, and what we might today call an urban planner (a field he helped pioneer), Cerdà's work—including his famous plan for Barcelona's Eixample district—fused theory and practice in a way that still seems emblematic of urbanism today. Amongst his many contributions is the invention of words like "urbanization" with his 1867 "General Theory of Urbanization," and as such "urbanism" and its cognates have been used in the Spanish-speaking world for something akin to a combination of urban architecture, urban design, and urban planning—that is, something closer to today's definition—since long before Wirth's article. This usage, which along with the work of Cerdà only became more accessible in the Anglosphere over the course of the twentieth century, may well have influenced urbanism's meaning in English. This is especially true given that "urbanism"'s modern use is closer in tone to other English "-ism" and "-ist" formations10.

Cerdà's 1859 plan for Barcelona's Eixample.

At the same time, the shift might also be the result of a kind of ontological shorthand. Wirth's studies were intimately tied with a very specific group of thinkers at the University of Chicago that came to be known, perhaps unsurprisingly as the Chicago School. (Confusingly, this Chicago School—of either sociology or urbanism—has no direct connection to the school of economic thought bearing the same name save, of course, alma matter). This group, as we'll touch on later, laid many of the foundations for both modern sociology and modern urbanism. It's very possible that, as the decades passed, the term urbanism itself came to be retroactively labeled to the type of work that these scholars were doing, rather than something they themselves were referring to. After all, it's quite common for those studying a subject to be named after what they study, be they economists, biologists, or even, eventually, urbanists.

That said, while Wirth's piece was important, both the reality of cities and the ways people conceptualize them have changed rapidly in the 100 years since its publication. Indeed, the urban landscape has undergone multiple major realignments, both practically and intellectually, since the 1930s. For instance, the world has seen the dominance of high Modernism, Le Corbusier, CIAM, and the Athens Charter, followed by the subsequent fall from grace for each. The US alone has seen the coming and going of urban renewal, the rise of suburbia, and the development of auto-centric city building (sadly not a phenomenon limited to one country). This country has also seen deindustrialization, disinvestment, and the nigh-abandonment of urban places, and it has seen the modern American urban renaissance, amongst so much else.

These real-world shifts have often come around thanks to major changes in how we view and understand urban cities—and when they haven't, they have instead often inspired those same intellectual shifts in the first place. The academic realm has seen a succession of different schools of thought each have their moment in the sun, from Marxian critical geography to transnational studies to the explicitly postmodern Los Angeles School, which in many ways is diametrically opposed to its older Chicago counterpart. For American urbanism in particular, the most important of these has to be the Khunian paradigm shift of Jane Jacobs and her ilk, who fundamentally shifted our understanding of urban environments and the ways in which we approach them 11.

The practical side of the field has also seen massive seismic shifts, as well. Consider the waxing and waning of New Urbanism, a school of thought focused on how architectural form and urban design might shape social interactions and urban life. New Urbanism's name alone gives some insight into the shift of the word itself. Urbanism clearly no longer referred just to a sociological concept; it was now primarily an intellectual and professional approach to cities and urbanity. This definition would cement itself during the mushrooming of ideas that followed the turn of the century during the beginning of the American urban renaissance. As interest in cities skyrocketed—and as American cities began to increase in population for the first time in half a century—a plethora of hot new "urbanisms" began to take root, from landscape urbanism to green urbanism to tactical urbanism to market urbanism and many, many more12.

By the 1990s, the language of urbanism and urbanist was firmly in place. For example, in 1995 famed architect Rem Koolhaas could declare the death of an old, modernist "urbanism" and tell us instead to look to new understandings of cities as a whole, all while writing in the professional press and feeling no need to define his terms (Of course, one could also view that as simply Koolhaas being Koolhaas, but that's another story)13. Along the same lines, in 2000, even a sociologist like Robert Putnam freely used the word "urbanist" to describe the work of the likes of Jane Jacobs and William Whyte14.

Urbanism was no longer a sociological mode of life. Instead, the word began to essentially co-evolve alongside the field of study it was coming to define. Over the decades, in fits and starts (and, occasionally, in massive intellectual and popular shifts), urbanism progressively pulled itself out of the disciplines that had borne it, and created a distinct identity separate from architecture, planning, sociology, and the like. It began to take on a character all its own, containing both the friendly agreements and bitter divides that define any worthwhile discipline. The result is something identifiable, unique, and deeply valuable—even if, as a whole, it is still finding its footing in the world at large.

What Urbanism Is

“ The construction of cities, if it is not already, will soon become a true science that will require great and profound studies in all the branches of human knowledge, and most especially in the social sciences and in all the admirable advancements of modern civilization. ”

Still, while this potted history gives a decent outline of the topic at hand, sketching a partial footprint, it still leaves the key question unanswered: what precisely is urbanism as a field of study?

In as broad a stroke as possible, urbanism is simply the study of the city (and more specifically, of urbanity) as a topic unto itself—as well as the application of that knowledge to not only test hypotheses but to improve cities. At its core, urbanism is a field that seeks to understand what cities are, how and why they function, and ultimately, how they can be improved. This includes not only the physical structures that make them up, but also the human systems and human experiences that define city life—including how all these pieces interact to form an interconnected, functional system. Because cities touch on almost every aspect of humanity, urbanism is deeply intertwined with the tools and theories of many other fields, from economics to architecture, design to sociology, psychology to history, and beyond. Urbanism is in no way seeking to replace these disciplines. Rather, it uses many of their methods and insights to support key theories, insights, and methods all its own. Urbanism is about seeking to understand cities holistically: not merely as economic, social, cultural, or physical entities alone, but as a complex and unique phenomenon all their own.

If that feels like a squishy or overly broad definition, that's precisely the point. One reason people—myself included—tend to be hesitant to write out a definition of urbanism is that, by its nature, it's a wide-reaching and interdisciplinary field. Much of what is core to urbanism today has arisen from people who were outsiders to both traditional academia and conventional forms of practice, and no one wants to be the one to accidentally cut out a facet of the field that will later turn out to be critically important. Just as importantly, and perhaps even more difficult to navigate, every discipline has powerful fault lines within it. Almost everyone deeply involved in any given intellectual pursuit will have strong feelings about which theories, thinkers, and/or facts are critical to the field, as well as about where the boundaries of the field itself lie. Almost invariably, these will vary from person to person and from perspective to perspective, and there will be disagreements—often impassioned ones. At their worst, of course, these can cause a discipline to fracture. In the right measure, however, they can also be seen as the sign of a healthy field, one that is open to new ideas and includes a multitude of different approaches.

I for one certainly have strong beliefs about urbanism. I believe that cities are complex, emergent phenomena that arise from the interactions of people—interactions that occur at every scale, from daily face-to-face encounters at the bottom all the way up to the interactions between massive, human-created systems systems at the top. I believe that cities occupy a vital place in human existence, as shown by their omnipresence and importance throughout recorded human history, but also that they don't have a singular "purpose" as such in clear human terms. Rather, they exist because humans and human societies exist, and their shapes and functions can either help or harm those same individuals and societies in various ways. I particularly believe in the importance of defining the urban and separating it from mere city-nes16. While the last 150 years or so have shown us that we can create functional cities that are not urban (see the automotive sprawl of most American cities), the process has led us to realize just how important urbanity is for cities to function at their best. Finally, and perhaps most controversially, I believe most urbanism is born out of a love of urbanity and an appreciation of the power and potential of cities. This celebration, of course, should never be hagiographic nor ignore the real downsides and problems that cities and the people in them face. Nor should this approach imperiously seek to replace every other understanding of what a city is or why it works. Ultimately, however, urbanism was born in opposition to schools of thought that explicitly demonized cities, city people, and city life. The field bears the imprint of this foundation as a chip on its shoulder, a birthmark that pushes it to affirm the importance of the urban against the forces that seek to demonize or destroy it.

At the same time, I'm also well aware that there are many other urbanists out there who might disagree with me on one or even all of these points. Not only is that fine, it highlights precisely why having a defined field is so important in the first place: it creates a space for vital debates like these to occur. Cities are a broad topic, and to understand them with any level of complexity demands a broad diversity of viewpoints. Ultimately, however, urbanism exists—and is necessary—because cities are unique enough, important enough, and complicated enough to require dedicated study. They deserve a field committed to exploring their complexity, without the need to answer to others.

That said, there is one final definition of urbanism—and especially of urbanist—that has also long been recognized: the professionals who work directly with cities and use the knowledge they gain doing so to advance the field. Indeed, from its earliest days, urbanism has been deeply intertwined with all sorts of professional practice, from planning to architecture to engineering and beyond. This may well partly be a result of the field's comparative absence in academia: for anyone seeking to study cities and urban function, practice has long been one of the best ways to directly engage with the subject matter while also putting food on the table. That said, urbanism is also simply a highly practical pursuit. Indeed, in many ways, the story of urbanism can be seen as a story of intellectual revolutions against abstract theories that don't seem to match the facts on the ground. As a result, much of the discipline has focused on developing tangible knowledge that bears the imprint of today's reality, as well as finding solutions that work in the here and now. Urbanism may ultimately be driven by a desire to understand cities, but that pursuit of knowledge has long been paired with a preoccupation with practice, a desire to use that knowledge to build and improve real-world urban places.

The list of prominent urbanists who have come out of practical work is enormous: Christopher Alexander, Donald Appleyard, Allan Jacobs, Michael Sorkin, and Jan Gehl all immediately come to mind, along with a host of others17. At the same time, that doesn't automatically make every urban planner, every architect working on urban projects, or even every urban developer an urbanist, per se—although undoubtedly many are. Instead, the key thing about these urbanist practitioners is that they have utilized their practical work to expand our collective understanding of city function. They don't jealously guard their knowledge as a trade secret, nor are they simply out in the field applying the principles that others have developed without at least some level of introspective investigation. Instead, they are out there putting ideas to the test, seeing what works, and, when all is said and done, sharing their insights with those outside of their professional world.

Ultimately, urbanism is a social science mixed with a very healthy serving of humanistic perception. As with all social sciences and other human-centric endeavors, the line between seeking to understand and the desire to put those ideas into practice can be a fuzzy one. This is made all that much harder by the fact that cities are not purely mechanical entities that can be quantified with absolute precision—they are human creations that respond to human culture, human beliefs, and human activity. It isn't exactly possible to build a perfect twin of a city to do double-blind studies on. At the end of the day, however, urban ideas must be at least somewhat demonstrable in the real world. This isn't to say that non-immediately practicable ideas have no value, but rather to emphasize that a city is more than a toy for a single mind to play with—and that policy preferences, in particular, must actually accomplish what they set out to do. This is one reason that the practitioners who utilize their insight to advance our urban understanding are so vital to a successful urbanism, and have been since the field's beginnings. Such is the nature of studying something so innately physical yet also so fundamentally human.

What's Close—The Related Fields

But while that begins to define what urbanism is as a field of study, it also obviously leaves a lot to be fleshed out. What are the boundaries of the discipline? How does it differ from other intellectual traditions? Where does it fit in among other approaches to the city? To understand the shape of urbanism, perhaps it's best to borrow a practice from the discipline itself and get out there to walk the territory. Urbanism shares a deep connection (and even a genetic lineage) with many other fields, and indeed, urbanism couldn't exist without the work done in a host of closely related disciplines—at least not with the same quality of insight that it has today. Examining these related approaches not only helps differentiate urbanism as its own approach, highlighting the ways it is unique, but also helps add some dimension to the sketch we've begun.

Architecture is perhaps the most obvious and well-known of these related fields. In fact, historically speaking, both professional urban planning and professional urbanism were in large part born of architecture—sometimes to the detriment of all three disciplines. Indeed, one branch of their shared family tree can be traced back to the grand designs of the likes of Daniel Burnham for Chicago and San Francisco or Christopher Wren in London—or, on the more analytical side, back to the influential diagrams of Giambattista Nolli in Rome. Even without considering their shared history, however, the connection between the disciplines are easy to see: many of the key questions of architecture are also key concerns in urbanism. For instance, how and why do people use various types of space? How are spaces laid out by people so as best to serve the needs of their users and inhabitants—and which of these are the most effective at any given moment? What roles do various physical forms, materials, and construction methods play? The list goes on and on.

Left: Part of Daniel Burnham's plan for Chicago. Right: A section of Nolli's 1748 map of Rome.

The differences, however, are also plainly clear—even if the fields can sometimes blur around the edges. At its core, architecture is about design and creation, whereas urbanism revolves around understanding systems, people, and places, and how they all interact together. Good design, of course, often requires a good systemic understanding to be truly impactful, and conversely, a good systemic understanding often needs not only a sense of how design works, but often its own internal design-sense to be of practical use. Still, when architects (or landscape architects) try to reinvent urbanism, the results often leave a lot to be desired—and leave a lot of consternation in their wake18.

This fundamental difference of approach—design vs complex systems—shows up again and again in any comparison of the two disciples. Architecture, for example, is generally focused on only a single building (or at most a group of buildings) at a time, whereas urbanism tends to focus less on particular structures (unless they are of great import) and far more on, as the architect and urbanist Jan Gehl famously put it, the space between buildings19. Thanks to its building- and client-focused nature, architecture usually does not concern itself with the people and organization within a building beyond their physical wants and needs, let alone how these groups interact with other individuals, groups and systems around their immediate vicinity—all of which are key concepts of urban function. At the same time, with the exceptions of highbrow architecture and the architecture academy, architecture practice is far more uniformly focused on physicality than urbanism is. Since at least the nineteenth century, professional architecture has worked hard to define itself as a fine art. Conversely, one of the core tenants of urbanism is that a city is not a sculpture, not a work of art to be willed into existence by a master creator20. While there are strong debates about the importance of aesthetics within urbanism—just as there are about the role of aesthetics versus function in architecture—the two fields usually start from very different points and proceed in diverging directions using their own distinct methods.

Now to be clear, none of this is to dismiss or disdain architecture in any form. It is simply a different field than urbanism, with different focuses and different concerns. In fact, in actual practice, both urbanism and (urban) architecture are at their best when architects and urbanists can speak the same language, share information, and build solutions together instead of fighting against one another.

As we saw with Louis Wirth, sociology—and in particular, urban sociology—is another discipline that has a long and deep connection with urbanism. Indeed, just as part of urbanism's family tree runs back through architecture, another very different branch runs back through the aforementioned Chicago School. As we saw, Wirth himself argued strongly that urban life and urbanity were a discrete topic deserving of deep study on their own. What's more, the work of many of the other Chicago School thinkers, such as Robert Park or Ernet Burgess can be considered classical founding works of urbanism—even if much of their thought is clearly tainted by the prejudices of their time21. Burgess's concentric ring model of a city, for instance—albeit significantly modified with time—still deeply influences the way urban cities are understood. And of course, urban sociology has only continued from there, radically shifting our understanding of cities and urban cultures multiple times through the works of people like Herbert Gans, Claude Fischer, and especially Lyn Lofland, whose work on the public realm explains so much of what makes urbanity tick22.

Burgess's famous concentric ring model of the city23

As with architecture, it is hard to to understand urbanism without at least some understanding of urban sociology—and hard to understand urban sociology without at least some understanding of the physical, spatial, psychological, and systems-focused issues that run through urbanism. That said, just as with architecture, the focus of each discipline is also different, albeit with considerable overlap. While sociology focuses intently on the study of people and human systems, it is also part of a larger corpus that seeks insight into human nature and human interaction that goes far beyond the scope of urbanism. Meanwhile, urbanism focuses on the interactions between people, their systems, and the physical environment, a change that might seem small, but which creates a new focus all its own. Ultimately, urbanism and urban sociology share many tools and ideas, and should be key partners. Many individual urban sociologists will drift closer to urbanism, and many urbanists will drift closer to urban sociology in their work. But that said, urbanism is no more "merely" applied sociology than it is applied architecture.

A similar argument could be made for urban economics. Economic understanding is vital to urbanism: it is a vital part of not only how and cities form, but how they function. For that reason, just as with urban sociology, some of the most influential works of urbanism have from from urban economists, including the likes of the Homer Hoyt (who worked closely with the Chicago School), Donald Shoup, and Alain Bertaud24. Just like sociology, however, economics is a discipline that extends in many other dimensions beyond just the study of cities—just as the study of the city is a discipline that goes far beyond the bounds of economics alone (something urban economists miss at their own peril).

Another sibling field to urbanism is urban planning. Both are clearly related on a deep level, and indeed, in some of its early incarnations, planning shared the same mission of seeking to understand cities and how they work—with varying degrees of success. Urban planning, of course, has always been primarily focused on putting its understandings to work in the physical world. And yet, calling urbanism theoretical planning or planning applied urbanism does not quite seem to capture the differences. For one thing, it elides the contentious history the two fields share. American urban planning largely took root amidst a generations-long anti-urban turn towards the doctrines of lower density, rigid use separation, and, eventually, automobility—things that would eventually metastasize as urban renewal, rigid zoning, and suburban supremacy. Contemporary urbanism, in contrast, got its start as a radical break with the 19th and 20th century dogmas that had defined planning to that point. Now, to urban planning's credit, the field has changed dramatically since its darkest days. At the same time, many of the practical tools of the trade, such as zoning, are still rooted in its formative era (and the subsequent responses to it).

Perhaps because of this, urbanism simply has a wider focus and different outlook than a great deal of traditional planning. This may in part be because American urban planning was developed as a thoroughly modernist doctrine organized around a positivist vision that sought to bring order to what they perceived as chaos. Indeed, perhaps the sociologist and urbanist Richard Sennett was correct when he mused that while urban planning is largely based on deductive logic starting from first principles, whereas urbanism is usually more strongly inductive, seeking to make sense of deeply complex systems25. In fact, unlike traditional planning, urbanism is usually centered on the understanding of a city as a complex system that is by necessity chaotic, for that seeming chaos is actually what makes complex systems function in the first place.

Of course, much of this may arise out of urban planning's focus on direct practice, whereas urbanism—at least as a field of study—usually centers on understanding first. Make no mistake, urbanism is very concerned with making cities better, but the field's comparatively detached position can give it a more reflective and broader outlook than a primarily practice-based field can (and of course, many a practitioner may well be frustrated with urbanism as the opposite).

This practice focus points to another equally significant difference. In the United States, at least, urban planning has been organized into such a professionalized field that it can sometimes feel nigh parochial. Make no mistake, many great thinkers and practitioners come from a planning background, and the best planning schools are still bastions of deep understanding and the exploration of fundamental questions. Unfortunately, however, the planning academy has also needed to be a credentialization program designed to certify students to work with specific tools (again like zoning) in a very specialized realm. As a result, while planning schools still do a lot of excellent research and produce many excellent thinkers, other parts of the field are explicitly designed to train a specific set of technocratic workers for a very specific modern municipal setting. At its reductive worst, professional planners spend their days working to apply rules they didn't create (and have major qualms with) before, every twenty years or so, being able to work on their own master plan that then will go on to be largely ignored itself. As a result, more than a few urban planners have quit the field to enter consulting or to find other related urban jobs because, to use a line common in the industry, they had no interest in being, "zoning customer service representatives."

Once again, this shouldn't be read as too much of a disparagement of the discipline, but rather an attempt to explain the differences. While there are some deep divides between planning and urbanism, it's usually not a huge chasm—and the two groups often share similar goals. Plenty of great urbanism comes from planning and planners. What's more, not only are plenty of planners urbanists, but given the field's largely outsider position to date, plenty of urbanists are also planners, or at least have a planning background.

There are two final academic fields worth mentioning, both of which share a deep overlap with urbanism, often to the point that drawing distinctions can be a difficult task: urban studies and urban geography. Both are deeply interdisciplinary fields, and works from both schools play a major role in the urbanism canon (such as it is). For some, the similarities might be so overwhelming that, under a broad definition like the one proffered above, both urban geography and urban studies might simply be considered different approaches to urbanism—or at least a type of convergent evolution towards a similar constellation of knowledge, just simply arising from quite different backgrounds.

Of course, pinpointing the exact dividing line between any set of closely related intellectual fields can be maddening: the closer you look, the more your mind reels, trying to find the exact line in the sand. This is not to say that there aren't noticeable differences in both form and thinking between urban studies, urban geography, and urbanism. Rather, while some of these differences are questions of intellectual focus, others are more of a matter of political philosophy. While to my sensibilities politics feels a poor way to categorize intellectual pursuits, academic realms do not exist outside human history and human foibles. We should expect human disagreements to color the shape of any form of human inquiry. At the same time, I also explicitly want to avoid the nigh-colonialist attempt at conquest that so often happens when one field examines another. Although both urban studies and urban geography share a lot with urbanism, both are also distinct approaches in their own right, with insights (and baggage) all their own.

Urban studies has a core focus that aligns closely with urbanism: a drive to understand cities and the way life unfolds within them. Like urbanism, urban studies often engages deeply with topics like urban history, modes of urban development, methods of defining and categorizing cities, the relationship between their physical shape and their interleaving systems, the modes of life they engender within them, and the human systems directing their course, both inside and outside of their bounds. It's probably easiest to understand the difference between them by tracing them back to their origins: while urbanism has usually come out of practice or out of practical critique, urban studies is firmly a child of the academy, with roots in both critical and cultural studies. Both fields bear the deep imprint of the forces that birthed them, and in the case of urban studies, this is often seen in its need for structural critique—especially critique of large, abstract power structures like capitalism. This has also often meant that urban studies is often comparatively cold to understandings rooted in non-critical traditions, or to practical solutions to immediate issues—both of which are closer to the heart of urbanism. To put it a different (and perhaps more pompously philosophical) way, if it can be argued that urban planning stems deductively from a priori normative ideas, urban studies centers on deductive reasoning from critical theory. Both represent a different trend from urbanism's more phenomenologically inductive approach. Or, to put it in more human terms, while urban planning often works from a deeply-seated set of beliefs as to the correct ways to organize cities and urban studies starts from the perspective of complicated theoretical constructs, urbanism attempts to work backwards from observations of how cities function on the ground.

That is almost certainly too strong a gloss; such is the nature of trying to sum up a complex field from 30,000 feet. Still, in a strange way, urban studies can be seen as almost a mirror image of urbanism: the former focuses on how people in cities live and how systems play out in cities, while the later focuses more on how people live and systems function in cities. That is obviously a subtle change of focus, but like all small changes in complex fields, it can lead to surprisingly different results.

Once again, none of this is meant as a critique of urban studies, which has produced many fascinating and deeply important ideas. Rather, it is an attempt to differentiate two distinct but closely related ways of understanding the urban world.

Urban geography is another academic practice that has evolved separately from urbanism, but shares a tremendous amount of overlap. Just like its parent field, human geography, urban geography seeks to understand human society, culture, politics, and economics through a spatial lens—in this case, one focused specifically on cities. Like its peer urban fields, urban geography tackles some familiar big questions, such as why cities exist where they do, how and why they interact with both the country around them and one another, why they are structured the way they are, and how all of these forces shape not only their function, but the lives of those who live within them. Unfortunately, however, it's hard to discuss urban geography without discussing a bigger issue: the collapse of human geography within the US academy following the end of the Second World War. In a process that began at Harvard and slowly spread across the entire upper echelon of US universities, geography was declared 'obsolete' as a discipline, with detractors claiming that it lacked quantitative rigor. As a result, the field was left to either universities in other countries—where it's still valued and continues to thrive—or "relegated" to "lesser" public universities. This tenuous existence only got more difficult with urban geography's critical turn in the 1970s and 80s, led perhaps most iconically by the Marxian work of David Harvey and his disciples, such as Neil Smith26. In part a reaction to the remaining chunk of the field’s turn to quantitative work, in part a return to geography's original roots, and in part a scream of anger, the critical turn created a split in urban geography—one which more than a few suggest may be irreconcilable. As a result, urban geography in the US remains a small and fractured field, with certain quarters having retreated into the bitterness of ideology, others into the detachment of poststructuralism, and others still into the cold embrace of quantitative metrics. Once again, none of this inside baseball is meant to demean the work of urban geography, which has provided more than its fair share of core insights to urbanism. Agree or disagree with his work, there is no more consummate urbanist than David Harvey.

Still, just as with urban studies, there are differences between the fields, even if they are subtle. Most notably, urbanism tends to have a more direct connection to physicality than urban geography—or even urban studies, for that matter. As a result, urbanism often deeply investigates the specific intricacies of the places and structures that define urban life, the places where the human interactions that define urbanity occur. Urban geography, in contrast (especially in its data-heavy form) often tends to focus on things that are more abstract, such as pure spatial allocation. Of course, this distinction is far from a rule; it's more of a generalization. There is plenty of urbanism that is concerned with abstract systems, and plenty of urban geography (and urban studies) that focuses on physicality.

Still, if that distinction holds, this focus on physicality might also go some way to explaining another difference between urbanism and both urban studies and urban geography: its more direct connection to practice. Urbanism has a bent towards both practical knowledge and knowledge that can be demonstrated in the field. This is part philosophy and part pragmatism. After all, it's far easier to change something physical (or to change a system that directly affects something physical, such a bus network or garbage pickup) than it is to shift a deeply-seated aspect of society. This practical focus, however, can often clash with the structural (or post-structural) values of critical urban studies or critical geography. Incremental improvements may or may not lead to deep, massive changes in the fundamental arrangements of society—and as such may or may not satisfy the mind that seeks them.

That said, when it comes to practicality, urbanism is bounded on both sides. Unlike urban studies or urban geography, it is not normally entirely theoretical, but unlike most urban planning or urban design, neither is it solely a practical endeavor. This is a fault line that runs all the way through urbanism. While the study of cities is a concrete field that demands concrete answers, not all knowledge need be born out of pure practicality, either—even if it should firmly be rooted in reality.

What Urbanism Isn't: The Power and the Peril of Pop-Urbanism

Wherever you precisely draw the line between urbanism and its sibling fields—or even if you draw a line at all—this gives a fair sketch of urbanism as a field of study as it has generally been understood over the course of its development. In the past decade or so, however, this slowly accreted understanding—and the field that has built up along with it—has been destabilized by a surprising force: urbanism's own moment of popularity. While mass awareness of urban issues and urban theory did bring with it a brief moment of fame and prestige, as the field grew it also raised a host of difficult questions about the lines between knowledge, disciplines, political movements, and identity in the age of the social internet. Put bluntly, certain new and popular usages of the word "urbanism" may accidentally be consuming the nascent, still-delicate field that inspired the new usage in the first place. This may seem like mere navel-gazing—as urbanism itself shows, words can and do change meaning. If left completely unanswered, however, this new usage runs a real risk of erasing the field of urbanism's ability to operate under its own name, or even worse, potentially even drowning out the insights that it has secured to date.

To return back to where we started, urbanism today is in a particularly weird place as something at once obviously important and yet also often overlooked and undervalued. At times, the field feels no closer to respect than it ever has been before. And yet, there is one exception to this general observation, where this stall or decline seems far less clear: social media. Urbanism's broad cultural movement coincided almost exactly with the rise of the social internet, and over the past decade-plus, the field has proved a surprisingly popular topic across various social networks. In fact, an argument could be made that social media played a significant role in urbanism's popular growth. As it is wont to do, the social internet allowed people who were dispersed in space but shared a common interest to begin building a community—and with it, a stronger identity. For a field like urbanism, with thinkers and practitioners spread not only across the world, but also across many separate disciplines, this was an exciting time. The internet connected individuals like never before, not only encouraging a cross-pollination of theories and approaches, but also helping to bring a host of urbanism-inspired ideas into the political realm, pushing them far closer to physical and legal reality than they ever had been before.

As the online urbanism community grew, however, the very meaning of the words "urbanism" and "urbanist" began to destabilize, at least in the online context. This newly connected cohort included people from a huge range of backgrounds and with varying levels of expertise, running from academics with named professorships to practitioners with years of experience to independent thinkers and advocates who had been toiling alone for years all the way down to passionate individuals who had just discovered the field and approached it with the zeal of a convert who has only read a single book. Soon, many of even the more passive observers of the field began to take on its nomenclature, and as the mid-to-late 2010s continued, more and more self-described "urbanists" seemed to appear every day online. All of the sudden, what people meant when they discussed "urbanism" and "urbanist" became deeply muddled, especially compared to the more established, research- and/or practice-focused understanding that had come before.

Of course, as is probably clear from the history and definition above, urbanism and urbanist have long been relatively vague, open-ended terms. In large part, this is because urbanism has long been a sort of outsider field, without a clear, dedicated home in either practice or the academy. Unlike, say, "urban design," with its coveted connection to the Harvard Graduate School of Design, there has never been a single institution or a single curriculum to clearly define what urbanism is and what it isn't. Instead, urbanism and urbanist have long been terms claimed by people from many backgrounds, operating in similar ways across many different disciplines. A positive side effect of this has been that, both by choice and by circumstance, urbanism as a field has long shunned credentialism, and instead incorporated expertise from non-traditional sources and methods. Indeed, while I poke a bit of fun at "self-described 'urbanists,'" in truth, all urbanists have been self-described to some degree or another—unless they've been so-labeled by someone else—myself very much included. Consider, for instance, how two of the main figures of urbanism in the United States, Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte, came to the field not through academic pathways or specific types of practice, but through their passion and their work creating knowledge, as an urban planning and architecture critic turned theorist and a journalist turned public space polymath, respectively27. From its inception, one of urbanism's enduring strengths has been its ability to incorporate the passionate outside observer who, through hard work, disciplined thought, and diligent research and observation, becomes an expert in this comparatively young field.

In an era of slower publishing, the vagueness of a term policed only by deep interest and the ability to gain some measure of intellectual traction has been an advantage and, at times, a curse. The field would not exist in the first place if it weren't allowed to develop organically, nor would it contain the breadth of knowledge it currently does if it were more rigid. Conversely, however, this same openness and fluidity may well have slowed its acceptance as a field worthy of sustained, dedicated inquiry.

Either way, across all fields, the radical flatness of the social internet has caused the line between enthusiasts of a work and the work itself to collapse. As a result, in certain online contexts, "urbanist"—a word that had once been used almost exclusively to denote someone who studied or worked with cities in some deep way, be it academically, professionally, or independently—has come to signify something more akin to "fan of cities," at least amongst certain groups. For this self-described urbanist (and self-described professional), this transformation has been deeply unsettling. It feels almost as if the word "physicist" were suddenly redefined to mean "someone really into Neil deGrasse Tyson"—a ludicrous situation all around.

To be clear: this is not about new people and new ideas coming into the field, with or without academic or professional backing. Urbanism only exists today because of the work of both amateurs working to become experts as well as experts in other fields dedicating themselves to the study of cities and the urban. There is no one singular path to becoming an urbanist, and what's more, there's still plenty of room in the field for the passionate outsider to make a significant impact. Urbanism shouldn't only be the domain of the credentialed and the privileged—even if credentials and expertise must, at the end of the day, mean something.

And yet, even if we welcome and celebrate amateurism—and even if we want it to be a broad field—the words urbanism and urbanist need some level of shared clarity lest they become meaningless. Obviously the nature of language is fluid and definitions change; perhaps this is how Louis Wirth might have felt about his term morphing into something he hadn't intended. But while definitions can of course shift, this change runs a real risk of essentially recording over urbanism as a field of study in the process. It would be one thing—if still contentious—if this new definition came about due to new ideas, but as a move to satisfy the vague proclivities of a single moment in time it feels downright disastrous. If urbanism comes to signify nothing more than simply being a proponent of a certain kind of space, urbanism as a field of study is rendered nameless, potentially imperiling all the knowledge that the discipline has developed to date. All of this is only made harder by the fact that this crisis is not coming from some conquering enemy, but rather from the misguided appropriation by people who are ultimately deeply invested in urbanism's work. But ultimately, the study of urbanity is far too important to be erased by a fad, no matter how earnest that infatuation may be.

A Political Project?

That said, there is another wrinkle to this discussion about urbanism's place in the world that is harder to simply define away. Put simply: is urbanism better seen as a field of study or as a political project? Consider a different pair of similarly-formed words that come from another once-outsider field: "feminist" and "feminism." A person who describes themselves as a feminist may well be an expert in some form of women's studies, gender studies, advocacy for women, or some other associated field. More often than not, however, it is a self-applied term (or, on occasion, a term of derision applied by others) for proponents of certain sets of ideas and, often, the implied political projects inherent to them. As with urbanism, these sets of ideas (as well as the political projects they engender) can vary dramatically. From a wider perspective, however, they share enough similarities to make them identifiably feminist. In other words, feminism can be a field of study, but it can also be an applied political practice or even—depending on how one defines the term—an ideology.

Finding the philosophical and ontological distinction between a field of study on the one hand and the political projects related to that field of study on the other can be an incredibly difficult proposition even in the best of times. Some disciplines resolve this issue by simply denying that a distinction exists at all, instead claiming that all knowledge is inherently political—in effect, that all knowledge is ideology. Certain other fields, conversely, would fight to death to make it clear that their knowledge is separate from the political recommendations that they believe it might suggest. This is obviously a distinction that isn't going to be resolved here, and I have no interest in getting stuck in the middle of a shouting match involving terms like positivism and post-structuralism right now.

Even with that said, however, urbanism is an interesting case because in all but its most detached, ivory-tower form, it tends to come part and parcel with a desire to improve cities and a predilection towards practicality. Urbanism was in large part born of practical fields, and it includes amongst its ranks many members of those fields. At the same time, the people who make up urbanism, like those who make up any other field of study, aren't neutral observers: they are already self-selected to care deeply about the fate of cities and the urban. The result is something that all social sciences have to grapple with: different modes of understanding often seem to imply specific solutions to specific problems, which can make it very difficult to separate understanding from the policy prescriptions that understanding seems to suggest.

All of this is only amplified in the Anglophone world—and especially in the United States—where anti-urban beliefs have been deeply rooted in the culture for more than two centuries28. Most of us in the English-speaking parts of the world have lived our entire lives marinating in a culture that views the urban and urbanity as suspect at best, and downright evil at worst—morally, environmentally, and ecologically. Far more often than not, urban places are seen as the home of greed and exploitation, of poverty and the poor, of social unrest and social undesirables, of dirt, disease, deception, destruction, and dishonesty. Given that backdrop, it's easy for even the most monkish urbanist to feel the constant need to correct the record, and do their best to educate the masses on the beautiful, important things that they're missing. There is a constant desire to show that urbanity has value, to protect it where it currently exists, and to change the legal regulations and cultural attitudes that prevent us from building more.

Now, for practitioners working in the field, the distinction between a subject matter and a political program is not really much of a concern: politics is already part of the job description. What's more, even the most academically cloistered professional should of course feel free to put their knowledge to public use. Society thrives when people use their expertise not merely to enrich themselves, but to try to improve the world for all. Urban experts should educate people about the power and importance of urbanity; should engage with the people and the systems that build cities; should work to ensure that building urbanity is possible and practical; should help build high-quality, functional urban places; and should help make the places we live and work in now better for all who use them. Urbanism need not solely be a detached field of study. In fact, it would be foolish to imagine that anyone passionate enough to engage with it deeply would not be pulled to some degree towards some type of active practice or hot-topic discussion.

That said, the word "urbanism"—especially in its pop-urbanism incarnation as often seen on social media—has begun to be strongly intertwined with a number of very specific political battles and political views. Indeed, the rise of internet urbanism has come directly alongside the rise of a number of urban advocacy movements, from street safety to bike and transit advocacy to YIMBYism29 and so on. There is nothing wrong with any of these political movements on their own terms, and indeed, these are movements I personally agree with far more often than not. What's more, it's easy to see why each of these movements is connected with urbanism, as well as why they are dear to many urbanists: they are projects aimed at improving urban space and urban function in ways that society has often ignored or underprioritized. It's a testament to the power of the social internet that these movements have been able to generate enthusiastic support, make real change in the world that exists today, and, along the way, generate even more awareness and material for the field of urbanism as a whole.

And yet, for all of that, it's crucial to remember that none of these political projects are necessarily core to urbanism as a field of study. Any given person might find themselves in agreement or disagreement with some or all of these campaigns and still be deserving of the term urbanist. Nor, on the other side, does someone who holds all the "right" beliefs on these issues necessarily earn the term "urbanist," even if they are vocal about them to the point of pushing away friends and family. It isn't healthy for any field to become defined entirely by the political battles of the present. Put simply, it belittles the topic at hand: any field worthy of study has far more depth than whatever is en vogue at any given moment. Indeed, at different times in the history of American urbanism, different political topics have dominated the discourse, from fights over urban renewal to demands for local political control to battles over historic preservation to the implementation of the form-based codes of New Urbanism to tenant's rights and anti-gentrification advocacy and so on. Each one of these topics—not to mention countless more—is still important for urbanism as a field, even if many of the actual battles that spawned those moments have fallen into the rear-view mirror.

To predicate urbanism on au courant struggles is to reverse causality. Fundamentally, it is the expertise and interest in urbanism that drives urbanist involvement in political action, not the political action that determines one's position as an urbanist. Make no mistake, urbanists will almost assuredly feel called to work on the contentious issues of the day—as well as to raise the saliency of issues that aren't already on the public's radar. What's more, each of the aforementioned modern political movements is at its strongest when it can draw upon a broad field of expertise—including and especially the diverse expertise of urbanism. That said, this is where urbanism's deeply practical side makes the distinction between a political program and a field of study far harder to draw. For some, being deeply active in political battles is a form of practice key to their self-definition as urbanist. That is fine—putting ideas into practice is important, and urbanism has a long history of practical adherents who put their ideas to the test and share the results. What's more, the urban political movements of today are important, vitally so, and it's exciting to see them grow in strength and power. But it's also important to remember that they are at least somewhat separate from the field as a whole, even when they are directly inspired by it. It's one thing to be an expert dedicated to putting certain ideas into practice. But having the correct list of clearly articulated positional statements on present-day battles is not the same thing as being a student of the city.

That said, wherever one falls on this argument between urbanism as a field of study versus urbanism as a political movement, one thing should be clear: urbanism is far too valuable for us to allow it to be redefined into a vibe. Urbanism is not some subcultural clique like being a goth or a punk, not a fashion or status signifier to be worn when it feels like it fits. The use of the term "urbanist" should be broad, but it cannot mean nothing: it should represent passion, wisdom, knowledge, and/or expertise. Make no mistake, it is a very, very good thing that there are people deeply interested in urbanism, and even better that there are so many interested in fighting the good fight to make cities better places. This passion should be celebrated: it gives the field a real-world strength it's never had before, and gives it a real chance at effecting change. It is exactly out of this passion that new urbanists will be grown—and indeed, as we've seen, many of the passionate people fighting those good fights are already undoubtedly urbanists by virtue of their work. Urbanism's strength has long been in its ability to recognize the value of non-traditional expertise as well as expertise that arises outside of its original confines.

At its core, however, urbanism as a field is the study of cities and urbanity. The term urbanist is a claim to expertise and knowledge, however broadly read. It is not a pop culture status signifier or a political mood. If it isn't already clear, I hate policing either the field of urbanism or the word itself. Urbanism should encompass many things, and ultimately, where and how the line is drawn between what is urbanism and what is not is far less important than realizing that there is a line to be drawn in the first place. Else, this vital school of thought, already underrepresented, risks being redefined away into nothing more than a social media merit badge.

A Political Project?

When people find out that I am not only an urbanist, but a writer, one thing they often ask—at least if they are the literate type—is who some of my favorite authors are. It's a good question, and to be honest, one I often have difficulty answering. I know how that might sound off the bat: I am in no way trying to claim that my work is unique or incomparable or even good—that is for others to judge. Rather, I simply find it hard to assemble a list of contemporary writers to even consider in the first place. Of course, if we just want to discuss style and prose, I have a lot of opinions, but the question as I read it is implicitly searching for a topical answer. I am an urbanist first; I usually don't write for the sake of writing, but to share my own thoughts and put my own expertise to work discussing places, issues, and understandings. Ultimately, I hope to contribute my own little set of pieces to the larger puzzle that is the field of urbanism as a whole. But while I can name a host of great works of contemporary urbanism by exceptional thinkers (a large number of which are already suggested throughout this piece), most of these are one-off monographs from authors whose background and other works are mainly in a different field altogether. On the one hand, there's nothing wrong with that: as I keep repeating, urbanism is at its best when it's a broad field. But to put it bluntly, while there are plenty of people writing pieces about urbanism (or about cities), there are few writers out there, at least in my experience, who consistently write urbanism.

I don't think this is in any way due to a lack of quality urbanists, urban thinkers, or writers. Indeed, we are blessed to have many of those, including many who combine all of the above. Rather, urbanism as a field unto itself—urbanism that may use some of the tools of other disciplines but doesn't confine itself within fields—simply lacks enough significant outlets to support people independent of other work. From a writer's perspective, there simply isn't much of a market for written urbanism. There are only a handful of publications that carry deep urban content, and of those that exist, many carry their own baggage, be they tied to other fields, located deep within academia, or dependent on the broad popular press.

From one perspective, that's obviously far better than nothing—I am sure there are disciplines out there that would kill for even that level of awareness, however limited it might sometimes feel. Journalistic coverage of urbanism and its concepts, for instance, has helped spread knowledge of the field wide, and has helped pave the way for many of the aforementioned political projects. From an expert's perspective, however, the journalism that covers a field is not the same thing as the field itself, even if some specialized journalists do later go on to become published experts of their own. Something similarly laudatory can be said for the popular press, which has done amazing work to bring urbanism to a larger audience, and is why urbanism even has the pleasure of experiencing an identity crisis in the first place. That said, the mass market will always be a fickle beast for writers and thinkers. By its nature, it will only ever gravitate to the most broadly compelling or the most earth-shattering works. It's great that this broad outlet exists—to be blunt, the field would certainly have no problem fighting to keep its name from being diluted if it didn't—but it's simply too limited to be the only outlet. Academia, in contrast, has something of the opposite problem. Most academic work is written in a register that seems designed to repel all but the most passionately engaged—and often pushes even them away, as well. Unlike a lot of urbanism, academia is a highly credentialed world, and it can be almost impossible to access even just as a reader outside of a university setting. What's more, as urbanism lacks direct academic backing, there are few academic journals that qualify as urbanism outlets, and many of them are in other, related fields like planning. Last but not least, there are few if any professional journals or trade magazines for urbanism. Not only is the field still young and small, but these types of niche publications have struggled mightily in the digital age. As a result, for anyone working on questions of urban function outside of a university setting, the pickings are slim, where they exist at all.

That said, if you'll permit me a moment of navel-gazing, there's also an argument to be made that all of this is too specific to me personally. My position as an independent, professional urbanist, writer, researcher, and theorist is an odd one. This would almost certainly be true in any discipline: no field of study is particularly great to its out-of-track knowledge producers—assuming there is even a track to follow in the first place. It's easy to see why, of course: the pursuit of knowledge doesn't fit neatly into a supply-and-demand framework, and that is doubly true when the knowledge being sought is explicitly geared towards the public benefit. Theoretically, this should be the role of academia, but beyond both urbanism's own complicated relationship with the academy, higher education was already a shrinking, incredibly competitive world—and that was before the current wholesale attacks on its very foundation.

This situation hasn't been helped by the collapse of publishing in the digital age. People (myself often included) simply have little interest in paying for words and thoughts anymore, especially not enough people to support niche yet vital fields like urbanism. This is not to say that the digital era has been entirely destructive. The internet is a double-edged sword, providing outlets for new types of work, and indeed, is almost certainly the only reason you are able to read this piece in the first place. With rare exception, however, while the internet may be a powerful tool for the dissemination of voluntarily produced knowledge (or at least, used to be, given the massive sea of misinformation and machine-generated content that floods it today), it has had great difficulty supporting knowledge creation in any sort of self-sustaining way. I am no exception: this is one reason I also work along the lines described above in some of the political projects that urbanism has inspired in its wake.

At the same time, to be blunt, no one gets paid for sitting around and having deep thoughts—and I don't expect nor want to be any exception. It feels more than a little gauche to even discuss this when so much of the American intellectual firmament is being ripped apart by the forces of sheer malice. And even if current events weren't so dire, it's hard not to worry that perhaps I'm just incredibly selfish, entitled, and naive, seeking something that would not only materially benefit me, but which I would love to see in the world.

The last part, however, is why I bring this up at all. I can't escape the belief that we still need paths for both traditional and non-traditional knowledge to rise to the surface. That in order to cultivate a bigger and more effective field of study, urbanism needs to support the creation of urban knowledge. The only reason urbanism exists as much as it does today has been due to the hard work of people in other fields and from other backgrounds, who toiled away to understand, and then brought that understanding to the wider world's attention. That is remarkable and shouldn't be overlooked, but urbanism, in whatever form, deserves more attention—and more constant attention—than that. I want every urbanist to have a list of writers and thinkers—modern, active professionals focused on urbanism itself—a mile long ready at the tip of their tongue that they can recommend to anyone.

I don't necessarily know how to make that a reality; I don't know how to solve the quandary of knowledge production in any underappreciated field. No discipline is particularly great to those who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge—even when that knowledge explicitly leans towards practical effect. Professionalization of the field in some way might help—or at least recognition of the field as a profession—as would academic, non-profit, or governmental30 support. Even without an answer, however, I keep coming back to the same fundamental thoughts. That knowledge matters. That testing that knowledge (as well as the ideas and ideals behind it) in the real world matters. That understanding how something so vitally important to the human experience—the city—functions on the most immediate levels matters.

To a significant degree, my answer is this essay. To try to continue to convince people what up until recently we seemed ever closer to understanding: that urbanism is a unique and vitally important field. By focusing on cities and urban function, urbanism studies the interactions of buildings, plans, systems, spaces, peoples, and cultures in a way no other single discipline can. It gives us insight into something we're still just beginning to truly understand: the glue that holds cities together, and that can make them one of the most powerful, most impactful forces on the planet. I hope that someday soon, one way or another, the field will produce even more research, test and implement more real-world solutions, provide valuable insight and consultation to cities, regions, and nations, and create ever-more revelatory thinking and writing that spreads all of this knowledge to as wide an audience as possible. Not everyone needs to know the ins and outs of how cities and urbanity function, of course—specialized knowledge is called specialized for a reason; it takes time to truly understand the breadth of the field. Still, more general awareness of urbanism as a field might help fight the omnipresent anti-urban slander that pervades our ever-more-urban culture. And more than anything, I hope that urbanism will be able to do all this not as an adjunct to other fields or as only a sly outsider force, but proudly and prominently under its own name.

Cities are some of, if not the, single most complex things humans have ever built. The shapes they take and the ways they function have a direct influence on the daily lives of billions of people—over half the world's population and growing rapidly31. Cities are the engines that power the economies of regions, nations, and the world. They are the places where a huge percentage of our culture is created and shared, the places where many of both the social ideas and social institutions that shape our shared existence arise. They are the structure of everyday life for an inconceivable number of people's daily lives. It only makes sense that cities should be a popular topic for many different, diverse fields of inquiry.

Cities, however, are too important and too singular to leave for only other fields to cover. They are consequential enough and unique enough to demand their own discipline—perhaps even multiple disciplines, as urbanism's sibling fields demonstrate. Cities are at once concretely physical yet deeply human. They are vitally important components of human existence. They require a field that recognizes the importance of both their physical aspects, their systemic aspects, and their human aspects, one which can study their complex interactions as a holistic system, and which then puts that knowledge to work to try to improve them.

That may not be the cleanest or most precise definition of a field, but as I said before, that's precisely the point. Just like the kaleidoscopic palimpsests that urbanists study, the field of urbanism thrives most when it encompasses a broad range of perspectives, and when it can include many approaches and many definitions. Debates within the field about what cities are, how they function, and how to improve them are inevitable—and important. For these debates to be anything more than just shouting into the void, however, they need a field in which they can occur in the first place. Conversely, if I am defensive over the words urbanism and urbanist, it's only because the topic is far too important to be lost to the whims of shifting internet culture. Urbanism should be broad, but urbanism is not a fad or a fashion statement or even (just) a political movement, at least in the traditional sense. Yes, in part it is a commitment to the appreciation of, and advocacy for, cities—including critical appreciation and critical advocacy when it's necessary. But more than anything else, it is a commitment to understanding cities and how they work.

It is honestly amazing that urbanism has finally reached a point where an independent bookshop finally considers it a worthy topic to have a section to itself. That, however, is only a start—one which, given everything that has happened over the past decade, can sometimes feel perilously fragile. Urbanism needs to find homes in the professional and academic worlds, and needs to find more ways to support more in-depth study. It is certainly too important for us to let its meaning be completely diluted as if it were a mere fad. In order to improve cities—to help build, maintain, and improve places that will last, that will continue to serve all of us, both today and in the future—we need to have a solid understanding of what they are and how they work on the most fundamental levels. We need both knowledge that deciphers the mechanisms that make cities and urbanity so powerful, as well as practical ways to put that understanding into real-world use. In short, we need the field of urbanism. It is vitally important, and deserves far more respect than we've given it.

• 1. Michael Mehaffy, "The architect Christopher Alexander in 2012" (March 30, 2016, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ChristopherAlexander2012_cropped.jpg).
  Gene Driskell, "Jan Gehl", (September 1, 2006, https://www.flickr.com/photos/68073433@N00/235446144/).
• 2. Jane Jacobs, "Pavement Pounders and Olympians," Architectural Forum (May 1956. In Nathan Storring and Samuel Zipp, eds. Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs, Random House 2016).
• 3. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. (New York: Vintage Books, 1961).
  Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
  Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso, September 17, 2006, New ed, original 1990).
  Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, & Murray Silverstein, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. (Oxford University Press, 1977). (See also: "A City is not a Tree.")
  Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1977).
• 4. Lizabeth Cohen, Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).
  Richard K. Rein, American Urbanist: How William H. Whyte's Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life (Washington: Island Press, 2022).
• 5. Richard Florida, Cities and the Creative Class (New York: Routledge, 2005).
• 6. Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City (Pan Books, 2012).
  Florida 2005.
  Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step At a Time (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2012).
  Richard Rochstein, The Color of Law (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2018).
  Charles L. Marohn, Jr, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2021).
• 7. Fabrizio Nevola, "Urbanism," Oxford Bibliographies (November 29, 2018 https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780195399301/obo-9780195399301-0407.xml).
• 8. Louis Wirth, "Urbanism as a Way of Life," The American Journal of Sociology (1938, 44, 1-24).
• 9. "Urbanism," Merriam-Webster.com (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/urbanism accessed August 19, 2025).
• 10. For more on Cerdà see Michael Neuman, "Ildefons Cerdà and the future of spatial planning," The network urbanism of a city planning pioneer (Centenary paper TPR 82, no.2, 2009, 2011).
• 11. Blair Lorenzo, "Stolzenbach, Jacobs, JFK, and the (Re)Emergence of American Urbanity," The Fox and the City (September 7, 2015, https://thefoxandthecity.com/articles/stolzenbach-jacobs-jfk-and-reemergence-american-urbanity).
• 12. Jonathan Barnett, "A short guide to 60 of the newest urbanisms and there could be many more," Journal of the American Planning Association (Volume 77, Issue 4, 2011).
• 13. Rem Koolhaas, "Whatever happened to urbanism?," Design Quarterly (1995, 164, 28-31).
• 14. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (Revised and Updated): The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2001, 2021), 19, 209.
• 15. Quoted in Neuman 2009.
• 16. Blair Lorenzo, "The Question of the Urban," The Fox and the City (September 7, 2015 https://thefoxandthecity.com/articles/the-question-of-the-urban).
• 17. Alexander et al, 1977.
  Donald Appleyard, Liveable Streets (Berkley: University of California Press, 1981).
  Allan B. Jacobs, Great Streets (1993, MIT Press: 1995).
  Michael Sorkin ""Introduction: Variations on a Theme Park" in M. Sorkin (ed.), Variations on a Theme Park: Scenes From The Few American City and the End of Public Space (Hill and Wang, 1992).
  Michael Sorkin, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan (London: Reaktion, 2009).
  Jan Gehl, Cities for People. (Washington: Island Press, 2010).
• 18. Andrés Duany and Emily Talen, eds., Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents: Dissimulating the Sustainable City (New Society Publishers, 2013).
• 19. Jan Gehl, trans. Jo Koch, Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1987).
• 20. Jacobs 1961, 372-3.
• 21. Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984[1925]).
• 22. Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (Free Press, 1962).
  Claude Fischer, The Urban Experience (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976).
  Lyn H. Lofland, The Public Realm: Exploring the City's Quintessential Social Territory (Aldine de Gruyter, 1998).
• 23. Park & Burgess 1925, 55.
• 24. Homer Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago: The Relationship of the Growth of Chicago to the Rise of its Land Values, 1830-1933 (Washington, DC: Beard Books, 2000).
  Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking (Routledge, 2005).
  Alain Bertaud, Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities (MIT Press, 2018).
• 25. Pablo Sendra & Richard Sennett, Designing Disorder: Experiments and Disruptions in the City (Verso, 2020), 21.
• 26. David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
  Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (Routledge, 1996).
• 27. Jacobs 1961.
  William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (New York: Project for Public Spaces, 1980).
  William H. Whyte, City: Rediscovering the Center (New York: Doubleday, 1988).
• 28. Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
• 29. "Yes In My Back Yard", a movement to encourage reforms and build more housing that views itself as the antidote to the "Not In My Back Yard" cry of NIMBYism.
• 30. I am aware of the irony of writing that at this moment in time, when so many scholars in so many respected fields are seeing their life's work foreclosed.
• 31. I told you it was a much-ballyhooed fact