Urban studies after the age of the city

Abstract

For some time now, the field of urban studies has been attempting to figure the urban whilst cognisant of the fact that the city exists as a highly problematic category of analysis. In this virtual special issue, we draw together some examples of what we call urban concepts under stress; concepts which appear to be reaching the limits of their capacity to render knowable a world characterised by the death of the city and the ascent of multi-scalar de-territorialisations and re-territorialisations. We organise the papers selected for inclusion into three bundles dealing respectively with complex urban systems, the hinterland problematic and governing cities in the age of flows. The phenomenon of urban concepts under stress stems from the existence of a gap between existing cartographies, visualisations and lexicons of the urban and 21st century spatial conditions and territorialities. Given that this disarticulation will surely increase as this century unfolds, a pressing question presents itself: what is to be done with the field of urban studies after the age of the city? In this introduction, we argue that there exist at least six ways of responding to the present conceptual difficulties, each implying a different future for urban studies. We place under particular scrutiny voices which argue that nothing less than a scholarly tabula rasa will suffice. Our conclusion is that the phenomenon of concepts under stress provides an opportunity to think afresh about what to do with the field of urban studies and that it is premature to foreclose discussion about possible futures at this point.

Keywords

city complex systems flows hinterland planetary urbanisation urban urban studies

Introduction

In the early 21st century, there has emerged a turn towards ‘the urban’ which is in every sense comprehensive, decisive, and epochal. A new ‘Urban Age’ has been boldly declared (Gleeson, 2012). We are now, it seems, an urban species; more people live in cities than live in rural areas and in myriad ways the plight of humanity has come to be seen as inextricably tied to the welfare of cities. As the fate of homo urbanus is debated, new ruminations have emerged on the urban and urban policy, and new images have appeared of the urban utopias and dystopias that are, and those that may yet come. In the Urban Age, there is a sense that the primary task of our times is making cities work efficiently, sustainably and equitably. Now more than ever the human future is not discussed without reflection upon the fate of the city.

Paradoxically, however, at the same moment as the wider world is feting the city and championing the urban as a category of practice, there has emerged a troubling set of concerns regarding the coherence of the city as a category of process and the integrity of urban studies as an intellectual tradition. In fact, for some time now, the field of urban studies has been attempting to figure the urban cognisant of the de-territorialisations and re-territorialisations that are transmogrifying its object of analysis. In an effort to secure ongoing traction, traditional urban concepts have been subjected to an imaginative if discommoding degree of stretching, pulling, twisting and contorting. In this virtual special issue, we draw together some examples of what we call ‘urban concepts under stress’; concepts which appear to be reaching the limits of their capacity to render knowable the historically novel and complex socio-territorial assemblages and spatial conditions which are emerging as the 21st century is unfolding. Below, we organise the papers selected for inclusion into three bundles, dealing respectively with complex urban systems, the hinterland question and governing cities in the age of flows; and introduce each paper therein.

We begin this introductory essay by reflecting upon the extent to which the current bubbling to the fore of so many concepts under stress points to a more problematic future for urban theorising per se and what might be done in response. We argue that there exist at least six ways of responding to the present conceptual difficulties, each implying a different future for urban studies the field, and perhaps Urban Studies the journal. We place under particular scrutiny voices which have proclaimed the arrival of a new age of planetary urbanisation in which nothing less than a scholarly tabula rasa will suffice. We review the provocations of Neil Brenner and Christian Schmidt who claim that the field of urban studies is a 20th century ‘spatial ideology’ that has been rendered obsolete by 21st century urbanisation processes. Our conclusion is that the phenomenon of ‘concepts under stress’ provides an opportunity to think afresh about what to do with the field of urban studies and that it is premature to foreclose discussion about possible futures at this point.

Figuring the urban after the age of the city

The phenomenon of urban concepts under stress stems from the existence of a gap between existing urban cartographies, visualisations and lexicons and the death of the city and ascent of 21st century spatial conditions, de-territorialisations and re-territorialisations. As Hillary Angelo recently put it in this journal, not only is ‘the relationship of the city to its perceived opposites’ changing quantitatively, it is also shifting qualitatively, challenging the integrity of hitherto powerful notions and ‘unsettling many of the foundational assumptions of urban studies’ (Angelo, 2016: 2). We feel that this disarticulation will only increase as this century unfolds, raising a pressing question: what is to be done with the field of urban studies after the age of the city? In this section, we identify six possible ways of responding to the present conceptual difficulties. We title these: in defense of urban theory, urban theory as a progenitor of the new, towards an urban political ecology, in search of a new theory of urbanisation, towards new theoretical practices and the rise of data-driven cartography.

A first response is simply to reassert the ongoing significance of ‘the city’ to urban theory and to defend the status quo (Scott and Storper, 2015). In a number of recent interventions Alan Scott and Michael Storper suggest that ‘cities are everywhere characterized by agglomeration involving the gravitational pull of people, economic activities, and other relata into interlocking, high-density, nodal blocks of land use’ (Storper and Scott, 2016: 5; see also Scott and Storper, 2015). Thus, they argue that it is important for disciplinary coherence and political purchase to retain the city as a distinct object of analysis. Of course, we should be careful not to default to this position out of a sense of ontological insecurity and existential anxiety or disciplinary chauvinism. But to lose the city would certainly be to lose one’s bearings. Cities remain constitutive of how we perceive the material world: one knows when one is in the city, in the suburbs or in nature. The city remains a powerful symbolic or cultural category: blind to any crises in urban theory, cities have distinct identities, politics, souls, beauties, reputations and so on. More analytically however, we might say that urban studies will continue to exist for as long as the city continues to exist as a functional category for many stakeholders and economic sectors, not least in those contemporary leading edges of the globalising urban economy, retail, entertainment industries, real estate, transport, media outlets and employment. Moreover, for as long as concepts such as ‘gentrification’, ‘counter-urbanisation’, ‘suburbanisation’, ‘inner cities’, ‘central business districts’ and so on continue to have purchase on the world, obituaries announcing the passing of the age of the city might be said to be premature. If the city remains a cogent category of process and of practice, then a case can be made for its retention as a category of analysis.

A second response is to recognise that the world of cities is indeed ceding to a new world comprising complex socio-territorial configurations and assemblages but to insist that this new reality can still be apprehended by starting with existing conceptual frames, assessing where they appear to be insufficient, and migrating to new conceptual frames only thereafter. Urban studies can serve as an epistemological portal to a new world, a methodology of discovery, a port of embarkation and a progenitor of new or more accurately derivative theory. Wyly (2015: 2528), for instance, argues that the concept of gentrification should be radically extended to capture the way in which ‘the competitive class reshaping of urban space … [is now] sufficiently pervasive and transnationally connected through flows of ideas, money and aspirations to be reasonably considered part of something “global” in reach and influence’. Of course such responses imply that it is possible and productive to solve a problem by starting with that problem (rather than, say, transcending it). But is this not a sensible course of action to take? It is after all, the founding rationale for Classical Pragmatism and Deweyian notions of progress. Only by twisting and contorting old concepts until they break and by ruminating over where, how and why they break, might it be possible to figure out where we might need to go in our search for better concepts. Far from blind-sighting any search for disruptive new spatial lexicons, reflexivity around the insufficiency of urban concepts then might usefully serve as a productive point of departure for unearthing constructs capable of rendering knowable spatial conditions today and capable of fuelling a new urban politics. This strategy has the benefit of modesty; it enables those who are agnostic about the extent to which existing theory is being rendered obsolete to move towards re-theorising only when existing categories of analyses are shown to be inadequate. In his essay on ‘city becoming world’, for example, David Madden (2012) does not abandon the notion of city per se but draws on Jean Luc Nancy as well as Henri Lefebvre to call for a new critical global urban imaginary in which the city remains an important philosophical and normative figure even as it dissolves empirically.

A third response is to recast the problem of ‘methodological cityism’ as a problem of severing the city from its ties with nature and to turn for inspiration to the rise of an exciting new tradition of urban political ecology studies. As discussed by Angelo and Wachsmuth (2015), what is required here is a shift towards socio-natural explorations which bring together the human and non-human aspects of cities, their politics and socio-technical networks, and the hybrid, cyborg and Frankenstein socio-natures which lie at their heart. Announced by Neil Smith in his 1984 book Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space and advanced in William Cronon’s (1991) magisterial book on Chicago and the Great West in Nature’s Metropolis, urban political ecology has traced distinctions between culture and nature, society and nature, and town and country to the European enlightenment and demonstrated the ways in which capitalist modernity has conspired to sustain entities as autonomous, which are in fact dialectically constituted. And so scholars such as Eric Swyngedouw, Noel Castree, Paul Robbins, Richard Peet and Michael Watts think in terms of an urban metabolic rift and refuse boundaries and categories that attempt to seal off human activity from nature. More recently, scholarship on the proposed Anthropocene epoch in Earth System science and stratigraphy – scientific canons that strike an awkward and difficult relationship with urban political ecology in many ways (see Malm and Hornborg, 2014) – further supports the sense that urbanisation is inseparable from nature, even planetary functions. At the same time, Ross Exo Adams’ (2014) examination of the work of 19th century Spanish civil engineer Ildfonso Cerdá on the apparent naturalness of global urbanisation, and its resonance with ecological urbanism’s efforts ‘to reconstruct nature as urbanization’, underline the problematic politics such naturalistic thinking can generate.

A fourth response is to jettison urban studies as currently constituted, to identify and cast off ‘the city lens’ (Angelo, 2016) and try to develop an entirely new ‘way of seeing’ more suited to the contemporary condition, as Angelo (2016) and Merrifield (2013a) suggest. This includes developing new cartographic techniques and visualisation tools to yield better insights into the complex socio-spatial assemblages that are crystallising and dissolving today. Of all the responses to conceptual stress in urban studies, this is perhaps the most radical, insofar as it would appear to demand a tabula rasa for urban studies. For this reason, we provide an extended commentary of it below. Supporters of this position cast city thinking as little more than a 20th century ‘spatial ideology’ and reject ‘methodological cityism’ as debilitating; an impediment to comprehension. This charge has been levelled particularly forcefully by Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid in their revival and reworking of Lefebvre’s ‘planetary urbanisation’ thesis. Calling for new theorisations of capitalism and its territorialisations, and attending to the importance of political economy, power geometries over the surface of the Earth, and the uneven development of political capacity over space, they call for sustained interrogation of historically novel mechanisms of agglomeration and the intertwinings, imbrications and enmeshing in these agglomerations of hinterlands of all kinds – or what Brenner and Schmid call ‘operational landscapes’. A city-bounded urban studies, they argue, has little place in this age of all-encompassing urbanisation processes. And so they speak in terms of what might be done about ‘the field formerly known as Urban Studies’.¹

A fifth response is to exploit the present moment to rethink root and branch the kinds of theorising practices which have tended to underpin urban studies to date. For example, by calling attention to the importance of the geography of urban theory and in particular the Western centricity of many urban theories, concepts and ideas, feminist and postcolonial scholars such as Jennifer Robinson (2015), Eric Sheppard, Helga Leitner (Sheppard et al., 2013) and Ananya Roy (2015) have underscored the need to engage critically with the politics of universalism and have called for a provincilisation, historicisation and relativisation of urban theory. Roy (2015) for example argues that given ‘the undecidability of the urban […] what is at stake is a critical urban theory attentive to historical difference as a fundamental constituting process of global political economy’ (p. 1). This work valourises, as Robinson (2015: 10) suggests, ‘more provincial, modest and revisable claims about the urban’. It is a move towards particularism that some, including Wyly (2015) and Storper and Scott (2016), fear goes too far; Wyly because it obscures the globalising reach of general processes of gentrification (understood as ‘the upward class transformation of urban space’ (p. 2534); and Storper and Scott because it denies what they see as the enduring analytical utility of a singular modernity, the causal significance of capitalism, and a universal concept of the city.

A further direction from which claims about the urban are being rethought – too loosely in the view of Storper and Scott (2016) – is assemblage thinking (McFarlane, 2011). As emphasis shifts from cities to complex socio-spatial configurations, post-structural iterations of the concept of the assemblage are playing a growing role. Assemblage thinking encourages a focus upon power as rhizomatic, dispersed, decentred and fragmented. It scorns simplistic accounts of causality, and foregrounds to a large degree contexuality, heterogeneity, instability, multiplicity, contingency in historical processes. In the hands of flat ontologists, some assemblages scholars go as far as embracing a new methodological focus upon the ‘site’, where the site is understood as a realm of ‘infinite singularity and variability, where matter is immanently self-organising and pure difference unfolds’ (Woodward et al., 2010: 271). Assemblage thinking also highlights the discursive, so that not only is ‘the city’ understood as an assemblage, but one component of such an assemblage is the imaginary of ‘the city’ itself. Overall, these feminist, postcolonial and assemblage-based reconceptualisations of the basic objects of urban studies are intensifying the challenge to and debates about metro-centrism in urban studies by arguing for more situated theoretical endeavours.

A final response to urban studies’ current conceptual difficulties is to question the need for urban theory tout court and to move towards data-driven spatial science and data-driven cartographies (for a critical overview see Kitchin, 2014). We live in the era of Big Data. Big Data comprises information sets which are huge in volume (consisting of terabytes or petabytes of data), rapid in velocity (being produced in real time), exhaustive in content (n = all) and indexical, interoperable and scaleable. Moreover today the emerging fields of Data Science, Algorithmic Studies, Information Science and Geographical Information Science (GIScience), or Geocomputation, is radically expanding what is possible in terms of analysis, pattern recognition and automated and manual responses. Big Data and developments in data science and geospatial technologies will likely revolutionise the ability of urban scholars to visualise extended urbanisation. We live perhaps on the eve of an epistemological revolution that will result in the end of conventional urban theory and the creation of data-driven rather than knowledge-driven urban science. The development of digital humanities and computational social sciences may result in radically different ways of making sense of urbanisation and spaces of flow. Already, a dazzling variety of visualisations and mappings have been produced, allowing for the first time insights into a multitude of complex and recursive flows of people, information, resources, pollutants and so on between agglomerations and their operational landscapes. With all of us now acting as information points and technology-enhanced cyborgs, Wyly (2015) argues that this move is inseparable from the shift to cognitive-cultural capitalism which dangles the tantalising possibility of humanity transcending all frontiers. But such universalism is an illusion, Wyly warns. For although spatial boundaries such as city–country may be dissolving, those between classes are hardening, and moreover it is through such techno-utopian framings of meritocracy and universal progress that these planetary gentrifying processes are now taking shape.

Although appearing at times to be incommensurable, these six responses to the conceptual stresses evident in urban studies are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Indeed, to a significant degree each already exists in conversation with the others (see, for example, Catterall and Wilson, 2014; Robinson and Roy, 2015; Scott and Storper, 2015). But each does come freighted with different implications for the future of urban studies as a coherent field of study. On the bases of each we might witness different eventualities: a continuation of urban studies as the study of the city (however complex agglomerations become), a steady evolution of urban studies as it tries to provide solutions to local points of failure, a recasting of urban studies as the study of cyborg socio-natures, a revolutionary rupture leading to disruptive new lexicons of the urban, a move to embrace less metro-centric and more situated theoretical manouvering, and/or a methodological turn predicated upon geospatial, data-driven uncoverings of emerging territorialisations.

Our intention is not to elevate any one response over the others; indeed our conclusion is that it is premature to foreclose discussion about possible futures at this point. Defense of the status quo has the merit of preserving and valorising intellectual resources that have been a century in gestation, but runs the risk of delaying the inevitable. Preferring evolution over revolution has the advantage of being risk aversive, but may occlude understanding and muddy thinking. The turn to urban political ecology is attractive because it overcomes an unhelpful dualism between cities and nature, but it does require much deeper relationships than hitherto with disciplines in the natural sciences. Calls for revolutionary change and a tabula rasa benefit from a certain clarity and boldness, but at times appear to be unnecessarily provocative and combative and, by calling for a new theoretical architecture, set forth a particular demanding remit that might confound many in the field. Claims for more modest and situated theorising are timely because they respond to critiques of the imperial tendencies of universal theorisations, but can suffer under-contextualisation and under-theorisation of causality. Finally, data-driven mappings of emerging flows and networks capitalise on historically new data capacities and geospatial technologies, but fail to grasp that, however neutral in appearance, all maps are underpinned by spatial ideologies. Given that its prescriptions are the most radical, we provide in the next section an extended discussion of the fourth response; the rise of scholarship on planetary urbanisation and calls for a revolutionary paradigm shift.

Urban studies and the age of planetary urbanisation

Writing in 1970, Henri Lefebvre opened The Urban Revolution (2003) with the rather outlandish claim that ‘Society has been completely urbanized’. In the remainder of the book he went on to both expand upon, and qualify, this statement through the explication of what he termed ‘planetary urbanisation’. Lefebvre’s basic premise was the urbanisation had evolved to play an ever greater role in capital accumulation and in society more generally. As summarised by Merrified (2013a: 911): ‘Urbanisation is not a highly developed manifestation of industrialisation, but – and this is the startling thing about Lefebvre’s “urban revolution” thesis – industrialisation has been a special sort of urbanisation all along’. Thus, Lefebvre posited a dialectical relationship between the hitherto unexamined centrality of urbanisation to capitalist reproduction and the increasing dominance of urban spatial forms to the organisation of social and economic life. While he considered the complete urbanisation of society to be an ‘illuminating virtuality’ at the time he was writing, he also saw it as moving ever closer to becoming a reality.

In a series of recent provocations, Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid use Lefebvre’s insights to confront head on what they consider to be an increasingly outdated and debilitating ‘methodological cityism’ within urban studies. Brenner and Schmid (2014, 2015) argue that ‘the city’ is a problematic category of analysis in an era now characterised by various forms of ‘concetrated’, ‘extended’ and ‘differentiated’ urbanisation. Urbanisation needs to be viewed as a planetary process entangled with and expressive of capitalist forms of growth, resource extraction and ecological destruction (Brenner, 2014). As Soja and Kanai (2007: 62) put it ‘More than ever before it can be said that the Earth’s entire surface is urbanized to some degree, from the Siberian tundra to the Brazilian rainforest to the icecap of Antarctica, perhaps even to the world’s oceans and atmosphere we breathe’. What is required is a collapsing of thinking in terms of city-ness and rurality, town and countryside, society and nature, fixity and flow, topography and topology, and a recognition that urbanisation is creating historically novel agglomerations, socio-territorial networks, socio-natural configurations, flows and spatialised assemblages, which defy easy capture, evade simplistic nomenclature and confound statistical aggregation. The implication is stark: we need to think afresh about what to do with the ‘field formerly known as Urban Studies’.

According to Brenner and Schmid, mechanisms of concentration or agglomeration (captured in the idea of ‘concentrated urbanisation’) continue to imprint monstrous built environments onto the surface of the Earth but these are no longer capable of being apprehended in terms of traditional models of the city and are perhaps better captured as post metropolis, megalopolis, mega-cities, urban galaxies and so on. But even these terms remain too coherent, underplaying the way that these agglomerations are drawing into their mesh ‘non-urban’ regions and populations far as well as near, dis-contiguous as well as contiguous, triggering processes that then extend and radiate changes in a haphazard manner. And as urbanisation unfolds across the Global South ever more original, foreign and uneven new agglomerations are emerging. Entangled and imbricated in urbanising processes, hinterlands cannot now be said to lie beyond the urban; they bear the stamp of the many agglomerations of which they are part and become constitutive of them. Mechanisms of globalisation would appear to be further undoing traditional city–hinterland relationships, creating new deployments, withdrawals and penetrations of global capital into hinterlands, and carving out new multi-scalar and multi-city–hinterland relations. Brenner and Schmid identify three pillars of this ‘extended urbanisation’: socio-metabolic transformations of nature, the thickening of the urban fabric, and enclosure and dispossession, which they describe as follows:

Extended urbanization involves, first, the operationalization of places, territories and landscapes, often located far beyond the dense population centers, to support the everyday activities and socioeconomic dynamics of urban life. The production of such operational landscapes results from the most basic socio-metabolic imperatives associated with urban growth – the procurement, and circulation of food, water, energy and construction materials; the processing and management of waste and pollution; and the mobilization of labor-power in support of these various processes of extraction, production, circulation and management. Second, the process of extended urbanization entails the ongoing construction and reorganization of relatively fixed and immobile infrastructures (in particular, for transportation and communication) in support of these operations, and consequently, the uneven thickening and stretching of an ‘urban fabric’ across progressively larger zones, and ultimately, around much of the entire planet. Third, the process of extended urbanization frequently involves the enclosure of land from established social uses in favor of privatized, exclusionary and profit-oriented modes of appropriation, whether for resource extraction, agrobusiness, logistics functions or otherwise. In this sense, extended urbanization is intimately intertwined with the violence of accumulation by dispossession (often animated and enforced by state institutions) through which non-commodified modes of social life are destabilized and articulated to global spatial divisions of labor and systems of exchange. (Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 167)

Dialectical relationships between processes of concentration, extension and differentiation are driven by capitalism’s so-called cycles of ‘creative destruction’ leading to what Brenner and Schmidt, following Lefebvre’s label ‘implosions/explosions’ in the urban fabric and city life. This is the process of gentrification that Wyly (2015) calls for us to imagine in expanded planetary perspective; a competitive process of capital accumulation in which spaces around the globe are transformed to ever ‘higher and better uses’. It is a circulatory vision that redefines the ontology of the urban from a distinctive space to a global process.

According to Brenner and Schmidt, if urbanisation is all-encompassing then there is nothing outside of the urban and so there exists no need for a field of urban studies. On the bases of this logic, they cast city thinking as a 20th century ‘spatial ideology’ which by dint of festishing a certain kind of urban, is being rendered obsolete by 21st century urbanisation processes and socio-territorial configurations. The fact that today there would appear to be so many urban concepts under stress comes as little surprise: existing cartographies are no match for the large-scale transformations which are occurring. Nevertheless both continue to see a future for the ‘field formerly known as Urban Studies’. Perhaps better titled ‘the field of urbanisation studies’, this branch of knowledge would seek to apprehend the geographically variegated, complex, hierarchical, multi-scalar and always processural socio-spatial assemblages and territorial configurations which are crystallising and dissolving today. To this end, they call for a new focus upon extended urbanisation and a new canon of work exploring the hinterland problematic. There is a need for an exploration of cartographic techniques, visualisation tools, and interpretive lexicons which might yield better insights into the contemporary urbanisation of the entire world.

The planetary urbanisation thesis clearly has a number of strengths. Its insistent suppositions are many, but may be summarised: process over form; the ontological inseparability of the urban and the non-urban; the ways in which complex socio-spatial processes of de-territorialisations and re-territorialisations are scrambling and eclipsing conventional cartographies of the urban; the need therefore to challenge city-centric epistemologies; dialectical and recursive relationships between processes of concentration, extension and differentiation; variegated interconnections and interdependences between peoples and places at multiple scales; mechanisms of concentration and extension as constitutive of and mediated by uneven geographical development at various scales; the importance of extended urbanisation; the need for critical genealogies of hinterland studies and hinterland thinking and a new tradition of hinterland studies; the dismantling of nationally based ’immediately adjacent’ city–hinterland relationships; new deployments, withdrawals, and penetrations of global capital into hinterlands and the politics of enclosure in hinterlands; and the salience of new geospatial technologies and modes of visualising urbanisation processes. All seem to be broadly congruent with contemporary thought within urban studies and perhaps to a degree can even be said to be uncontroversial. Even if the complete urbanisation of society is still not, nor possibly ever will be, an empirical reality, the concept nevertheless functions as an ‘illuminating virtuality’ that can clear the ground for new theoretical and epistemological entry-points to help the discipline grapple with the challenges posed by 21st century urbanisation.

Nevertheless, whilst in its infancy planetary urbanisation thinking has already attracted a significant degree of critical commentary and concerns over its merits and implications. A set of lively debates – or as Brenner and Schmid call them ‘dialogues’– has begun. Walker (2015) and Shaw (2015) argue that there is nothing especially new in the idea of planetary urbanisation; much of what it says has already been said elsewhere, at an earlier stage; clearly long ago colonialism put the entire resources of the world under the command of imperial cities. Meanwhile, for Davidson and Iveson (2015) one of the core reasons for retaining an analytic focus on the city is that it is a central spatiality in many people’s lived experience, perceptions and politics.

Others challenge the claim that growing awareness of the importance of extended urbanisation requires consigning the traditional focus on agglomeration to history. Amidst echoes of Castells’ and Saunders’ now legendary attempts to specify the functional significance of the urban as a category of process, Scott and Storper (2015) and Storper and Scott (2016) contend that cities of all shapes, sizes and location remain distinctive because they are worked on by two specific processes: the dynamics of agglomeration/polarisation; and an associated nexus of locations, land uses and human interactions. Postcolonial scholars of the urban such as Jennifer Robinson (2015), Eric Sheppard, Helga Leitner (Sheppard et al., 2013) and Ananya Roy (2015) have foregrounded the need to engage critically with the politics of universalism in urban studies. In exploring complementarities and dissonances between the planetary urbanisation project and recent postcolonial critiques of the Western centricity of urban studies they express concerns about the totalising ambitions of the former. Meanwhile, others such Peake (2015) worry about the implications of Brenner and Schmid’s project for our understanding of urban politics and everyday life, in that ‘political engagement [must be understood as] being the means through which understandings of reality can be held accountable’ (p. 5). Ruddick (2015) similarly, in a discussion of the relationships between planetary urbanisation and the Anthropocene discourses, sees a danger in totalising narratives of transformation that elide situated understandings and unequal responses. Davidson and Iveson (2015) also raise the importance of the justice implications of planetary urbanisation as currently conceived, highlighting ‘the democratic utility of the city to an emancipatory politics’ (p. 648).

Merrifield’s recent work (2013a, 2013b, 2014) has also explored how the dynamics of planetary urbanisation affect the grounds for urban political struggle, but finds within the planetary urbanisation concept a more positive resource than do Davidson and Iveson. Building on the foundations of the conceptual insights of Lefebvre’s ideas, Merrifield uses planetary urbanisation as a prompt to ‘resposition our vision and re-describe what we see’, to respond to the new urban condition with ‘a different way of seeing’ (2013a: 912, 911), as Angelo (2016) discusses. In contrast to others’ concerns that a global scale view of urbanisation obscures difference, Merrifield finds it a useful theoretical abstraction through which to consider how processes of uneven development and accumulation by dispossession are secreted across the global urban plane. He uses the term ‘Neo-Hausmannization’ to describe the ‘process that integrates financial, corporate, and state interests, tears into the globe and sequesters land through forcible slum clearance and eminent domain, valorizing it while banishing former residents to the global hinterlands of postindustrial malaise’ (Merrifield, 2013b: 11). This is manifest at the local, as various sites are unmade and remade to the syncopated rhythm of intersecting temporalities. For many people involved, this includes the convulsive tipping of precarious employment into unemployment, which Lefebvre saw as integral to planetary urbanisation (Merrifield, 2013b). As Wyly (2015) emphasises, employment aspirations and opportunities are being remade along with urban space thanks to the perpetuation and acceleration of a deeply naturalised process of capitalist (hyper) competititon.

Introduction to this virtual special issue

Having briefly surveyed the conceptual landscape of contemporary urban studies, we now introduce the papers chosen for inclusion in this virtual special issue. Our purpose is to highlight papers that disclose the variety of ways in which urban concepts have come under stress as dissonances between signifiers and signifieds grow ever wider. For the most part these papers work to sweat existing concepts and therefore illustrate the first two of the six responses identified above. But in so doing they provide at times glimpses of some of the remaining four and hint at concrete ways in which these alternative agendas might be advanced. We organise the papers selected for inclusion into three bundles dealing, respectively, with: complex urban systems, the hinterland problematic and governing cities in the age of flows.

Making sense of complex urban systems

There exists a long-standing tradition of urban scholarship which has sought to conceptualise, measure and model complex urban systems in which cities are undersood as necessarily always in relationship with other cities. Following the work of Walter Christaller from the 1930s, urban systems theory in the past often foregrounded flows and entanglements between centres and nodes located within hierarchical national settlement systems. More recent work, however, has placed attention on the emergence of global urban systems. Agglomerations will increasingly become part of the operational landscapes of other agglomerations at a distance, creating in the final analyses ‘urban galaxies’ which straddle and criss-cross the entire surface of the Earth. How might we think of these urban lattices and meshes? World city theory and global city theory has generated in its wake a huge literature which has sought to track interdependencies and intersections between cities that are performing key command and control functions and those performing financial services functions in the contemporary global economy. And so there already exists much work which will prove helpful in efforts to track the density, velocity, direction and metamorphoses of interconnections and interactions between places after the age of the city.

An example is the first paper of this virtual special issue. Peter Taylor, Michael Hoyler and Raf Verbruggen begin their 2010 paper ‘External urban relational process: Introducing central flow theory to complement central place theory’ (Taylor et al., 2010) with the claim that within urban studies, ‘central place thinking’ has effectively captured hinterland studies. Whilst Christaller’s formal central place theory seemingly fell from grace with the demise of the positivist and spatial scientific canon, in fact the notion that places relate to their hinterlands in terms of cascading interlocking hierarchies remains generative of much thought. Whilst not wishing to confine central place thinking to the dustbin of history, Taylor and colleagues draw attention to problems that inhere in its proclivity to think in terms of vertical hierarchies and bounded (often) national settlement systems. They point to the need for a parallel and complimentary ‘central flow theory’ that attends to complex non-hierarchical relations and networks. Whilst central place theory foregrounds the ‘space of places’ and examines how places create flows, central flow theory prioritises ‘spaces of flows’ and places under scrutiny the ways in which flows make places. The authors deploy the terms ‘town-ness’ to capture ‘local’ urban–hinterland relations and ‘city-ness’ to apprehend ‘non-local’ interurban relations. Every urban place is constituted through both town-ness processes and city-ness processes, albeit to different degrees. In this way, they offer a response to the epistemological limitations of the city and urban concepts, reinforcing the sense that even within the churn of planetary urbanisation, nodes of various sorts still exist.

Another assessment of the formidable methodological challenge of trying to render visible and intelligible the interdependencies, interconnections and webs that bind places together is provided by Ben Derudder. In ‘On conceptual confusion in empirical analyses of a transnational urban network’ (Derudder, 2006), he considers the difficulties that bedevil efforts to map the contours of a transnational urban network. He proposes a taxonomy of dominant conceptual and empirical approaches distinguishing, in the first case, between world cities (which emphasise network hierarchies which affirm uneven geographical development between the Global North and Global South) and global cities (which suggest enmeshings of agglomeration processes which scramble historical patterns of uneven geographical development). Second, in relation to global cities, he distinguishes between metrics examining corporate organisation (producer service firms, multinational enterprises) and infrastructure (telecommunications and physical transportation). He suggests that efforts to capture the operational landscapes of cities in the field continue to be hampered by: a lack of rigour in the employed terminologies; inappropriate discussions of results against the background of other concepts; the inadequate delineation of the urban area; and the limited analytical value of infrastructure-based analyses.

Some of these issues are explored further in the special issue he co-edited on ‘Systematic empirical analysis of inter-city relations at the global scale’ (Derudder et al., 2010) which argues that cities need to be ‘assessed as changing connective configurations in complex transnational networks defined by the circulation of commodities, capital, people and information’ (p. 1836). This includes the multitude of cities that, not being part of the so-called ‘World City Network’, are like the rural hinterland passed over by the pelotons of planes flying between major airline terminals; drawing as they do one of the iconic images of planetary urbanisation (flight paths) and leaving in their wake many of its constitutive global effects (including climate change).

Inter-city relations are also explored by John Allen who recognises that reconceiving cities as nodes in networks, and thus as the product as much as architect of flows and movements, begets a reconsideration of power. Certainly, genealogies of central place thinking are awaking to the meaning and implications of Christaller’s membership of the Nazi party for his central place theory. As part of his explorations of topological thinking and powerful assemblages (as opposed to power in assemblages) (e.g. Allen, 2011), Allen’s (2010) paper ‘Powerful city networks: More than connections, less than domination and control’ challenges the notion that cities possess ‘power over’ distant others as a consequence of the ‘concentration and mix of resources at their disposal’. Cities have no innate capacity for domination and control that allows them to preside over the affairs of those dwelling afar but instead derive power from their ability to ‘hold networks together and bridge connections’. Here hierarchical conceptions of sheer power (‘power over’) are less relevant than flatter conceptions of power to ‘make things happen’, exemplified by elite but low-profile intermediaries such as management consultants.

As Braun (2014) also argues in a piece on New York City, notions of sovereign power are less pertinent here than concepts of biopower and governmentality. Allen uses the cases of inter-personal collaborations and financial and ideational flows between the London and Frankfurt financial centres and the powerful ‘switching point’ of Sydney to examine how power works through subtle ‘modes of power such as manipulation and inducement’. Picking up on Allen’s analysis, (Wójcik, 2013) Wójcik highlights both the tenacious NY–LON financial axis within the global financial sector and the far-reaching cascading effects of the 2008 financial crisis when the flows between that axis failed. Overall, thinking of global networks in terms of assemblages or dispositifs enables power to be approached as at once centred and orchestrated, and decentred and diffuse, thus helping explain the mutual constitution of urban and international phenomena.

According to the planetary urbanisation thesis, places remain important sites of practice (the city as a category of practice) but in no sense can they be considered to be meaningfully bounded, coherent and homogenous (the city is no longer a category of process). In the end, places need to be understood as arbitrary cultural abstractions which emerge from but which fail to unveil and disclose the material realities of contemporary agglomeration processes and complex urbanising assemblages. The task is to understand the historical conditions that give rise to lay geographical spatial lexicons, and scalar imaginaries, and the recursive impacts of these processes of place making on global spaces of flow.

How communities imagine and bring to life places from the coincidence of flows from multiple hinterlands is the subject of Brenda Yeoh and TC Chang’s paper ‘Globalising Singapore: Debating transnational flows in the city’ (Yeoh and Chang, 2001). Here attention is given to the crafting of Singapore as a city state out of a high density of transnational relationships including: the transnational business class of highly mobile, highly skilled professional, managerial and entrepreneurial elites; low-waged unskilled and semi-skilled immigrants eking out a precarious existence in niches in the urban service economy; expressive specialists who enliven the cultural and artistic scene; and world tourists attracted by Singapore’s cosmopolitan ambience. Yeoh and Chang note that whilst materially Singapore is simply a node in global flows, it is being imagined as a ‘home’ distinguished by a strong sense of local identity and community, albeit an identity that is proudly ‘global’ and ‘cosmopolitan’.

The hinterland question

The hinterland question has occupied the attention of urban geographers, sociologists, economists and planners from at least the mid 19th century. This is evident in the land use models proposed Johann Heinrich von Thünen, in name from 1888 when economic geographer George Chisholm first identified it as a central concern of ‘commercial geography’, explicitly in the work of Walter Christaller, and later in Brian Berry’s Urban Geography. And so it comes as little surprise that there already exist a number of very substantial literatures that appear to speak to the notion of extended urbanisation and its enmeshing within other urbanising processes shaping peri-urban zones, rural backdrops, the countryside and even zones of wilderness. Many of these literatures pre-date planetary urbanisation thinking and conspire to reproduce the very distinction between the city and the countryside which this thinking is keen to transcend. But some recent work resonates more strongly with current concerns, in particular that which is seeking to understand the impacts of globalisation, transnational capital and extended urbanisation on the fate of the traditional hinterland, contradictory and competing imaginations of urban–rural relationships in different geographical contexts, and the politics of enclosure in the countryside.

The distinction between a city as a global city – wedded into a dense web or mesh of global flows – versus a traditional national based city–hinterland relationships is examined in Aparna Phadke’s paper ‘Mumbai Metropolitan Region: Impact of recent urban change on the peri-urban areas of Mumbai’ (Phadke, 2014). Phadke contemplates the consequences of the insertion of Mumbai into the ‘wealthy archipelago’ of global cities, ‘run by an alliance between the global merchant class and metropolitan governments’ for the cities peri-urban population and rural hinterland. She argues that the Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority’s (MMRDA) vision for Mumbai is creating arbitrary and hostile outcomes for local agricultural communities, whose spaces and places are becoming colonised, privatised and enclosed by creeping ‘edge city’ investments, high-end consumption outlets, international schools and attendant private utility land uses (water, electricity). The fate of peri-urban communities and immediately adjacent rural hinterlands now rests on the global city processes which create unpredictable ‘deployments, withdrawals, and penetration of capital’. Thus mechanisms of enclosure in the traditional hinterland become imbricated in the immersion of city regions into globalised hinterlands and operational landscapes.

The idea of the ‘city region’ itself carries implications. John Harrison and Jesse Heley’s paper ‘Governing beyond the metropolis: Placing the rural in city-region development’ (Harrison and Heley, 2015) examines the way policy makers’ adoption of a ‘city region’ lens obscures the interstitial spaces that lie between these designated metropolitan areas but that produce a large percentage of national wealth. Depending on their proximity to urban cores, some rural areas are included in city-region policies, but many are located on the fringes, and some are excluded from consideration altogether. Reimagining the ways in which hinterlands relate to the city-region project constitutes a political intervention. What is required is a departure from existing distinctions between the urban and the rural and from historical and bounded sub-regional classifications and the production of a new typology based upon the recognition that it is ‘no longer going to be acceptable to conceptualise the rural simply as an appendage hanging on to the coattails of the great modern metropolis’ (p. 1130). By highlighting the need for a more comprehensive view of space and flows, while questioning the intrumentalisation of hinterlands in most urbanisation theses, the authors simultaneously endorse and challenge the sort of thinking encouraged by the planetary urbanisation idea.

Some advocates of planetary urbanisation would argue that the primary power relation within the concept is the dependency of cities upon hinterlands. But which hinterland(s) any city is reliant on is unclear. Is the thickening of relations between cities and distant locales occurring in parallel with a thinning of linkages with more local hinterlands? In their paper ‘World city typologies and national city system deterritorialisation: USA, China and Japan’ Xiulian Ma and Michael Timberlake (Ma and Timberlake, 2013) address this question with respect to a number of world cities, categorised according to the role of states: market-centred bourgeois world cities (MWC) (exemplified by those in the USA), state-centred political bureaucratic world cities (SWC) (exemplified by those in Japan) and dual-role world cities (DWC) (exemplified by those in China). Drawing upon longitudinal data from 1993 to 2007, they argue that whilst over time MWCs weaken their ties with their national urban systems, there is no evidence that SWCs or DWCs are becoming ‘unhooked’ from or disarticulated with their traditional hinterlands. The implication is that not only do localised city regions continue to exist, but that states play a key role in shaping world cities’ hinterlands. Thus even though they might be subject to similar pressures to globalise, individual city regions experience different kinds of de-territalisations and re-territorialisations, illustrating the sort of varigated pattern that characterise planetary urbanisation but that are arguably lost in some of its academic renditions.

The role of difference is further underlined by Jamie Gillen. In ‘Bringing the countryside to the city: Practices and imaginations of the rural in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’ (Gillen, 2016), he argues that attending to how the rural exists within the urban in the Global South helps temper urban studies proclivity to fall prey to city-centric epistemologies. Claiming to discern a complex, blurred and fluid picture of the urban/rural binary among urban dwellers in Southeast Asia, Gillen’s study speaks to the virtues of provincialising city-ness by capturing the spatial lexicons of those from below. Referring specifically to the imaginings of rural migrants now dwelling in the city of Hanoi, Gillen examines the ‘folding of the countryside in to the city’ and the ways in which the pull of the rural ‘generates and governs specific arrangements of institutions, people and imaginations in the city; how it frames goal-setting; how the countryside factors in urban livability; how it serves as an imaginative spatial “fix” for the uncertainties of the urban environment; and how urban potential is useful in supporting the countryside and its ideals’ (p. 1, 4). Gillen is careful not to ‘deprive either rural or urban space of their meanings’ but does insist that migrants’ discourses be understood as more than ‘coping strategies enacted by people who are homesick for a rural way of life’ (p. 11). In fact these discourses upset and scramble ‘established understandings of the rural–urban binary, rural–urban relationality, rural-to-urban migration, (im)mobility and urban citizenship’ (p. 12).

Governing in the age of flows

As indicated above, no matter how much we trouble ‘the urban’ as a category of process or even category of analysis, it remains the case that the urban will exist as a category of practice for the foreseeable future, even as frustrated urban managers progressively lose traction over processes operating beyond their grasp and reach. As the mismatch between urban governance and globalising urbanisation processes grows, urban authorities will increasingly be pulled into alliances with other urban authorities and those at different scales (continental, national, regional, community, neighbourhood, etc.), performing contorted scalar gymnastics as they do so. By studying the ways in which urban practitioner communities are responding to processes which pay no respect to inherited bounded spatialities, it becomes possible to disclose the deterrirorialisations and reterritoralisations which mediate and complicate their labour, revealing ways in which they are both impotent and innovative.

Having to ensure undisrupted flows of goods and services into the cities dependent upon them is one of the greatest governance challenges in an age of flows. One policy response is to try to shorten value chains, reducing reliance on resources from a distance and deepening local ties. Kevin Morgan examines attempts by some cities in the Global North to decouple themselves from an exclusive dependency upon the conventional global industrial food system, in which ‘food of doubtful provenance flows into cities from placeless foodscapes’ (Morgan, 2015: 1385). Titled ‘Nourishing the city: The rise of the urban food question in the Global North’, his paper describes the resurgence of urban agriculture comprising inter alia ‘bee hives, urban chickens, front yard planting, community gardens, farmers’ markets, green roofs and wild flower meadows’ in the Global North (not only Global South) in the name of improving food security, among other things (p. 1385). Morgan uses the case of urban agriculture in the post-industrial city of Detroit to illustrate the validity of political ecology’s call to examine the simultaneously intimate and global physical basis of urbanisation. Morgan advocates for not only reimaginging ‘the city as a socio-ecological space in which the traditional dualisms – such as nature/society and urban/rural – are no longer allowed to obfuscate the real connections’ that exist, but for moving in practice from invisible and anonymous factory-based foodscapes to intensively local, visible and visceral foodscapes such as Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (p. 1390).

Even if local, such systems clearly remain shaped by (invisible) global processes. These processes include the threat of global climate change, which urban policy makers are increasingly responding to, intensifying the perceived value of urban agriculture and reinforcing ‘the city’ as a site of political and practical action as they do so. Both a driver and effect of planetary urbanisation, climate change is deeply entwined with questions about the urban, as papers in Urban Studies have highlighted including: the way meteorology and climatology have actually helped constitute ‘the urban’ as an analytical category (Hebbert and Jankovic, 2013); the key and dynamic role of cities in emerging transnational and multi-scalar climate governance networks (e.g. McGuirk et al., 2014); and the remaking of the urban (and global) fabric as infrastructure and planning is adapted to the physical and political impacts of climate change, including the imperative to reduce emissions (Rutherford and Coutard, 2014) and increase the resilience of governance itself (Boyd and Juhola, 2015).

Another route through which climate change impacts are affecting cities is via their effects on hinterlands, underlining the way planetary urbanisation involves more than a unidirectional city-to-country influence. One indication of climate change pressures in the hinterlands is the extent to which environmental deterioration is combining with other pressures (including neoliberalism) to encourage rural-to-urban migration. Lezlie Moriniere (2012) argues in his paper ‘Environmentally influenced urbanisation: Footprints bound for town?’ that this feedback from the environment onto urbanisation remains, unlike its inverse, poorly neglected. While we need to be wary of politically motivated apocalyptic images of climate refugees ‘at the gates’ (Bettini, 2013), or of cities as utopic climate enclaves, we also need to take seriously Moriniere’s general conclusion that ‘There are likely to be deep footprints bound for towns across the globe’, especially because ‘details on their size, shape, depth and orientation require much further untangling from the complex set of influences that have set them in motion’ (p. 447).

A quintessential planetary urbanisation ‘explosion’ out and away from cities is waste. But how discarded objects make their way from cities to distant locales is poorly visible or understood, in part because such processes of explosion have been dramatically intensified and complicated by neoliberal governance and finance capitals (Arboleda, 2015a, 2015b). Like Zafra-Gómez et al. (2015), Albert Fu examines the privatisation of waste management. His paper ‘Neoliberalism, logistics and the treadmill of production in metropolitan waste management: A case of Turkish firms’ (Fu, 2015) conceptualises the movement of nourishing resources into, and waste out of, cities through the lens of the ‘treadmill of production’. He outlines how, cheered on by neoliberal policies, an army of private Turkish waste management companies now not only manage waste produced by Turkish cities but profitably export their services to cities located in the Global South, including Lahore and Faisalabad in Pakistan. Fortifying the trend of global flows of waste from the Global North to the Global South, the result is that not only is waste whisked out of the sight of elites (at least as far as private waste management services function smoothly), but that those invisible others who previously relied on the now-exported ‘waste’ for resources and livelihoods (e.g. waste pickers) lose out, becoming further discarded by society.

Waste management (as well as the removal of urban livestock from the city) was one of the core issues underpinning the urban hygienist movement and the related modern ideals of cleanliness and purity. Today hygiene concerns are fuelled not by worries about mere dirtiness but global pandemics and biosecurity. Insights into the topological and topographical relationships between global networks, interconnections and flows, on the one hand, and the mobility of microbes, germs, pathogens and disease, on the other are provided by Harris Ali and Roger Keil’s paper ‘Global cities and the spread of infectious disease: The case of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Toronto, Canada’ (Ali and Keil, 2006). Connecting literature on world cities with epidemiological studies of epidemic diseases, they describe how the arteries and capillaries upon which cities rely are vulnerable to changing socio-natural relationships unfolding in seemingly disconnected sites. In the case of the SARS outbreak, it was agricultural practices in Guangdong province of rural China, illustrated further feedbacks from hinterland to city. Mediated by the rapid urbanisation of Guangzhou and the Pearl Delta, the virus was inadvertently released into a set of complex global movements, ultimately being trafficked through Beijing, Hong Kong, Taipei and Singapore to Toronto. The paper makes clear that if we are to understand the spatial diffusion of the disease, we need to understand both the complex social, economic and political causal pathways that global city networks create, and the way everday life and corporeal flows in one place can be intimately interwoven with socio-natural processes at work on the other side of the world.

Conclusion

Materially, practically and conceptually, the figure of a neatly bounded city space has long proven illusory. Our hope for this virtual special issue is to reinvigorate engagement with some of the promising lines of analysis – including the encompassing vision of planetary urbanisation – which urban studies the field, and Urban Studies the journal, has to draw upon as it faces the increasingly pressing question of what to do with the stressed category of the city. At once outdated and reified, the city is perhaps nonetheless a resilient ideal; one that promises to feature in our thinking no matter what direction scholarship takes, or what actual futures unfold. The critical imperative is to continue interrogation of human settlement not just human thought, for it is not only concepts that are under stress. Homo urbanus is an increasingly fractious species dependent upon an ever more traumatised global biota. The point, as ever, is to change this dangerous world for the better.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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