地理学と都市問題:

Abstract

In this conceptual investigation, a set of hypotheses on potential socio-historical aspects and conditions of the establishment of the urban question are proposed through examining each concept of urban space explicitly or implicitly presupposed within corresponding urban geographical studies. One of the preliminary hypotheses on the relative novelty of the establishment of urban studies and theoretical formulation on the urban question is that this socio-historically specific domain formation as the amalgamation of urban studies and the urban question may have been related to the birth of the modern nation-state as a distinct socio-political and territorial surveillance institution. Urban space, under this institution, is seen as a function concomitant with the degree of its efficiency from the vantage point of social control and/or surveillance. The social scientific discourses on urban space are hence doomed to conceptualize it in its totality until it has become relevant. The general theory of urban space has contributed most effectively to the formation of a socio-historically specific domain of which raison d'etre tends to be taken-for-granted with scarce doubts. From the early Chicago sociologists to not a few of contemporary urbanologists, the main direction of research has been consistently to develop this general theory of urban space, with little concern for the sociohistorically specific conditions for its overall establishment. In reality, this has created an irresolvable tension between seeing urban space socially and seeing social groups spatially, and resulted in a miscellaneous chaotic conceptualization of modern urban space which has, indeed, gradually been formed through the duration of the modern era. Given that this kind of historical specificity surrounds the discursive formation of the urban question and its subsequent domain formation, we may as well redirect our geo-historically sensitive research interests towards the very politico-juridical and administrative processes through which the modern nation state has succeeded in transforming existing historical urban space with its socio-historically and culturally specific social relations, and finally incorporating it as a territorially distinct organizational unit, that is the urban municipal corporation, for its socio-political constitution as well as governance.