Abstract
In The Urban Condition, Brendan Gleeson sets out a ‘contribution to the project of arousing and strengthening the intellectual and popular urban imagination’ (p. 15) at a time when some of the deepest contradictions of contemporary capitalism are being mobilised through cities and urban policy. It is a passionate and at times troubling set of essays, given the weight of the issues being discussed, and it builds to what for many will be a challenging conclusion as to future orientations: ‘all urban forms will express the underlying political economy of self-limitation’ (p. 144).
The book is organised into three sections: the first, ‘The urban age’, sets its sights on the range of popular acclamations of the potential of the city for a renewed urban prosperity, creativity and sociality. The second, ‘Spectres of nature’, takes issue with the flimsy hold that such commentators have on the nature of the threat to species and environment by capitalist development as we know it, and some of the shortcomings of contemporary urban planning practice. The third, ‘To the next world’, sketches out a tentatively optimistic critical social science project that integrates urban based research and critique aimed at addressing ‘the unbridled species ambition’ that is shaping cities (p. 10).
Gleeson’s starting point is with the outpouring of popular commentaries on the apparent virtues of cities: ‘The urban age has been declared. A chorus of expert and popular commentary welcomes a golden era of human prospect … Homo urbanis’ (p. 1). These works include Ed Glaeser’s (2011) The Triumph of the City and Jeb Brugmann’s (2009) Welcome to the Urban Revolution, and Gleeson is not the only urbanist to be troubled by how easily such facile readings of urban society become absorbed within mainstream thought. Several chapters are devoted to unpicking the intellectual underpinnings of these genres of urban thinking, and provide an excellent critique that students of the urban will find valuable.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the book is guided by a set of political and social theorists that understand the relation between the state, the urban and political power. The point of departure is Andrew Sayer’s advocacy of a critical social science; Hannah Arendt’s writings are clearly significant; David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre are key figures for Gleeson, but he also draws on the work of André Gorz, the pioneering eco-socialist who did much to shape – in the days when climate change was only a flicker in popular consciousness – a political agenda that might unite social equity with resource and inter-generational equity.
Ultimately, Gleeson leads us towards some very difficult and challenging places, both intellectually and materially. He advocates ‘an entirely new ideal of human flourishing … a new human fecundity to be found in lives freed from the universal authority of value’ (p. 133). As the world’s global cities head towards ever-bigger individual stresses even for the most fortunate there is a need to move away from a functionalist reduction of human value. Some in the green movement have long argued for a basic income scheme, which would have a massive impact on social inequality: Gleeson doesn’t go into this here, but I imagine it is where he might be going. He uses the metaphor of ‘lifeboat cities’, an idea that he had developed in a previous work, to convey the sense that he is not advocating a retreat from urban life, but rather towards an urban policy, economy and polity provided by a ‘guardian state’ that will provide ‘the centralized social coordination needed to confront and deflect the transition crisis’ (p. 128).
A note on style. Gleeson has a very distinctive voice – it is sharp, pithy and aphoristic. He makes a fine use of sub-titles: in many ways the book is a sum of many short sections, headed up by some arresting assertions and questions: ‘Renewal of critical urban imaginaries’; ‘Already dangerous’; ‘Beautiful waste’. There are no images, and little sustained empirical discussion, but there is an intense and conscious interest in metaphor: arks, lifeboats, storms (meant both literally and metaphorically I think). There is an overriding sense of threat and of the need for radical intervention: ‘The human condition is urban and the order that created it, capitalist modernity, is falling away in firestorms that endanger species prospect and compel us to immediate action’ (p. 132).
In short, this is a bold, ambitious manifesto for where critical urban social science should move. It is interesting that Gleeson shows that the idea of ‘city’ – which has become centre stage of contemporary political imaginaries – almost collapses under the interpretive burden placed upon it. His skewering of the more irritating urban cheer squad is welcome, and he washes away their words with panache. But as he says, ‘The urban age is a melancholic era’ (p. 31). To cheer up, we need to keep with critique: ‘A post-accumulative political economy is the premise for a new urban modernity’ (p. 133).