都市理论导论:21世纪的视角

rban Theory:A Twenty-First Century Introduction to Urban Theory

本文梳理了两个世纪以来都市理论的主流思潮和长期争论。作者首先指出都市理论诞生于18世纪末至19世纪初,这与欧洲和北美洲的现代都市化进程基本同步。继而概述了都市理论的两大传统:一是芝加哥学派以建模和测量为主的定量研究和实证主义传统,二是法兰克福学派以马克思主义政治经济学为基础的文化批评传统,这两个传统影响了后来的都市地理学、洛杉矶学派、全球城市研究和都市文化研究等。此外,本文着重介绍了女性主义、后殖民主义和后结构主义与都市理论的交叉融合,认为这种“混合搭配”的方法是当代都市理论的特征之一,它质询了不同理论传统的矛盾,汲取了众多学科的批评经验,加深了我们对城市的理解。

This article teases out the dominant currents and the longstanding debates of urban theory in the past two centuries.It first traces urban theory back to the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,a period witnessing the emergence of the first modern cities in Europe and North America.Furthermore,the article adumbrates two traditions of urban theory:one is the Chicago School’s quantitative and empirical research featuring urban-modelling and urban-measuring,and the other is the Frankfurt School’s cultural criticism based on Marxist political economics.The two traditions have a far-reaching bearing on urban geography,the Los Angeles School,globalcity research,urban cultural studies and so on.The article then focuses on how feminist,postcolonial and post-structural thinking intersects with urban theory,arguing that this“mix and match”approach is one characteristic of contemporary urban theory,which interrogates the critical tension between different theoretical traditions and draws on ideas and thinking across a raft of disciplines to develop critical understanding of the city.