Essay 2 - see attachment for topic and readings

2 - see attachment for topic and readings - Essay Example This view divides cities by class into areas occupied by those who control the means of production i.e. the bourgeoisie as well as the proletariat who works for a living. The Marxist view of the development of cities certainly takes class very seriously as there are rich neighborhoods and poor areas which are demarcated quite strongly by the developments taking place in a city. With time, the changes in the development of the city took factories out of the city centers and moved them to the outer edges of the city limits. Gary, Indiana is used as an example of that occurrence and the cause given for this change is that the factory owners wanted to avoid the presence of unions on their factory floors. Unions were difficult to form and maintain outside the city limits therefore unions could be avoided in this manner and control over the workers could be maintained with a capitalist agenda (Gordon, 1978). The same ideas are supported by Harris & Lewis (2001) but they given other economic reasons for the changes in the cityscapes of North America. They suggest that polynucleation was the reason for these changes and this was caused by the diversification of population and the lack of availability of workers of one type or another in a given location. Low prices for land as well as labor also helped the cause of those manufacturers that were ready to offset the cost of moving their production units by gaining access to cheaper tools for producing their goods. Thus the reasons for the development of our cities as they have are not based on social theory, but rather an economic agenda. Perhaps the most important point made in the both the essays is the idea that technology will affect the development of cities in the future as it has done so in the past. For example, the advent of the automobile meant that people could easily cover a lot of distance on their own without the use of trains or other transport and that meant that they