Urban world

The survival of society has always depended on safeguarding the equilibrium between the variables of population, resources and environment. The neglect of this principle had disastrous and fatal consequences for civilisations of the past. We too are subject to the controlling laws of survival, but unlike them we are the first to be a global civilisation and therefore the first to have ever faced a simultaneous and world wide expansion of population, depletion of natural resources and erosion of the environment.

The concentration of the urban population of countries into large cities occurs in all parts of the world. It is a pattern that is independent of region, length of urban history and level of economic or urban development. Metropolitan dominance is most pronounced in South America and the Caribbean. The million cities in these regions house 45 percent of the urban population. Million cities equally dominate the urban hierarchy in many of the world’s most rural regions and countries. Despite the low overall level of urban development, around 30 percent of the urban population of south central Asia lives in cities with over one million people. They include the mega cities of Calcutta, Mumbai and Delhi. A similar percentage lives in million cities in southern Africa. Lagos is the largest city in this region, with a population of around 13 million.

Despite their enormous size, the world’s major cities at present are viable and stable places that represent a significant social and economic achievement. They contribute disproportionately to national economic growth and social transformation by providing economies of scale and proximity that allow industry and commerce to flourish. They offer locations for services and facilities that require large population thresholds and large markets to operate efficiently. The major cities house many million of people at extremely high densities and yet provide a range of opportunities and quality of life that is greater than that which is enjoyed in the surrounding rural area. Urban residents, even in the world’s poorest countries, have better access to medical services and higher levels of social welfare than those who live outside the city. The differences are reflected by most of the major social indicators. For example, infant mortality rates re lower in urban areas in 18 of 22 developing countries for which comparable statistics are reported. The urban rate is more than 20 per 1000 lower than the rural rate in Brazil, Ecuador, Ghana, Indonesia, Liberia, Mali, Morocco, Nigeria, Peru, Senegal, Thailand, Togo, and Zimbabwe.

Dire warnings of the imminent social or economic collapse of one or other mega city appear periodically in the press, but such a disaster has yet to happen. Social conflict or economic catastrophes are normally played out across and between regions or nation states rather than exclusively within individual cities. Disturbing pictures of poverty, congestion and pollution in Calcutta, Mumbai, Rio and Bangkok, and of riots in Los Angeles and Beijing readily divert attention from what such places represent. Rather than gigantic social mistakes, cities, generally, are highly successful settlement forms.




Critical approach to Culture, and Communication

Critical approach is a theoretically informed understanding, of the social order in which communications and cultural phenomena are being studied. This is a characteristic which shares with another major tradition of research - cultural studies. Both work within a broadly centre left view of society, both are centrally concerned with the constitution and exercise of power, and both take their distance from the liberal pluralist tradition of analysis with its broad acceptance of the central workings of advanced societies. But this shared general stance conceals long standing differences of approach, generated by the divergent intellectual histories of these traditions, and sustained by their very different locations on the contemporary academic map.

Work on communications from within a cultural studies perspective is centrally concerned with the construction of meaning how it is produced in and through particular expressive forms and how it is continually negotiated and deconstructed through the practices of everyday life. This project has generated work in three distinct, but related areas. The first, and by far the largest, concentrates on the analysis of cultural texts, including those produced by the media industries. In contrast to transportation models, which see media forms such as thrillers, soap operas or documentary films as vehicles for transmitting messages to consumers, cultural studies approach then as mechanisms for ordering meaning in particular ways. Where content analysis sees the meaning of say, a violent act in a television drama, as definable in advance and detachable from its position in the text or the programme’s relation to other texts, cultural studies insists that tits meaning is variable and depends crucially on the contexts supplied by the overall narrative, the programme’s genre, and the previous publicity surrounding the show and its stars.

This emphasis on the relational dimensions of meaning and its consequent mutability is pursued in a second major strand in cultural studies research, which is concerned with the way that audience members interpret media artefacts and incorporate them into their world views or life styles. This ethnographic thrust celebrates the creativity of consumers, and offers a powerful unnecessary counter to simple effects models. It views audience members as active subjects, continually struggling to make sense of their situation, rather than as passive objects of a dominant production system. This thrust is part of cultural studies wider attempt to retrieve the complexity of popular practices and beliefs. As a powerful counter to the simpler notions of effects and the dismissive critiques of popular culture as trivial and manipulative, it is clearly a very considerable gain. However, as we shall see, it can easily collude with conservative celebrations of untrammelled consumer choice.

In common with liberal defenders of the free market, the new populists of cultural studies focus on the moment of exchange when the meanings carried by texts meet the meanings that readers bring to them. In both styles of analysis, this encounters removed from its wider contexts and presented as an instance of consumer sovereignty. It is also a signal of popular resistance of ideology countered or evaded; top down power opposed by bottom up power, social discipline faced with disorder. This romantic celebration of subversive consumption is clearly at odds with cultural studies long standing concern with the way the mass media operate ideologically, to sustain and support prevailing relations of domination. But even if this wider perspective is restored there is still the problem that cultural studies offers an analysis of the way the cultural industries work that has little or nothing to say about how they actually operate as industries, and how their economic organization impinges on the production and circulation of meaning. Nor does it examine the ways in which people’s consumption choices are structured by their position in the wider economic formation. Exploring these dynamics is the primary task for a critical political economy of communications. In doing so we would be following the instance of not looking for the components of a product but for the conditions of a practice.


Three means of citizen engagement with the state in a democratic society includes: first through the ballot box as part of the electoral process, second as active citizens enrolled in civic participation at a local scale, third through involvement in social engagements. Each of these activities is it self a result of particular rights enjoyed by citizens in a democratic context – the right to vote, the right to participate in government and the right to participate in social, religious, economic and cultural activities. The difference between de jure and de facto citizenship frequently has a spatial manifestation – on finding that their rights are restricted in particular often public spaces, excluded groups create more private, marginal, spaces in which proper machineries can be achieved and the enforcement agencies of the state or of an intolerant minorities may be compromised and be negotiated.