Beyond tabulated utopias: Action and contradiction in urban environments

Twilight of the technocratic utopia

The Underground Man, the main character of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1864 novel Notes from the Underground (Запискиизподполья), likes to rant. Among other things, the Underground Man is upset about the ‘Crystal Palace’, Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky’s metaphor of the socialist utopia. In his 1886 novel What is to be Done (Чтоделать?) (Chernyshevsky, 1989 [1886]), Chernyshevsky envisages a socialist world where joyful work, communal living, gender equality and free love would flourish (Young, 2013). The beautiful, splendorous Crystal Palace in Sydenham Hill, built for the 1851 exhibition in London, was the perfect symbol for such a modern utopia. The Crystal Palace represented the triumph of human rationality and modern technology. In Chernyshevsky’s novel, it goes hand-in-hand with a rationally organised society in which individuals willingly buy into a collective, uniform dream of compulsory happiness. The Crystal Palace is the ultimate material vision of a form of utopian technocratic solutionism that assumes that human rationality suffices to organise the world according to human desire.

Dostoevsky’s Underground Man will have none of it. What absurdity is this utilitarian, universalist vision that denies human freedom and enslaves people? he asks. How can humans renounce human suffering, their sole source of consciousness? He comprehends the Crystal Palace vision but he despises it:

… new economic relations will arise, entirely ready-made and calculated with mathematical precision, so in a single instant every possible question will disappear, essentially because every possible answer will be found. Then, the crystal palace will be built. In short, the Kagan bird will come flying in. Of course, it is utterly impossible to guarantee (this is me speaking now) that then it wouldn’t be, let’s say, terribly boring (for what on earth will there be to do if everything is calculated and tabulated), but on the other hand, everything will be exceedingly reasonable. (Dostoevsky, 2014: 35–36)

According to the Underground Man, the vagaries of human life (what humans actually want to do) will always challenge the terms of reference of any collective, carefully calculated paradise, no matter how joyful and equal.

A similar undercurrent of disgruntled detachment runs in the critique of the multiple forms of utopian technocratic solutionism, the ‘exceedingly reasonable’ proposals that reveal a disease of modern urban thinking. Cities have become fashionable interlocutors in most proposals for future ecotopias. The objective of this special issue is to reveal the flaws of this kind of thinking. The special issue editors ask: ‘Why does everybody think that cities can save the world?’ This is a declarative question. It questions the idea of the city as a site where sustainability can be redefined. Let us put aside the ironic formulation ‘save the world’. The editors’ question demands a justification about cities’ potential contribution to understanding and redefining socio-ecological relations. It is a provocation to direct our attention to deeper analytical questions that help move away from naïve utopias. To what extent is ‘city’ a meaningful category? If it is a meaningful category, what about cities enables them to make a substantial contribution to environmental dilemmas? And how did cities become the darling trope of the international environmental policy regime? This last question, in particular, underscores the relevance of this special issue in the context of global responses to climate change.

Delivering a critique is as important as anticipating the direction of such a critique. The Underground Man’s critique of the Crystal Palace demonstrates the dangers of taking technocratic utopias to the extreme. He provides a literary example of humans’ unfathomability. However, all his actions evoke disgust or embarrassment. He concludes the book with a lamentation of his own shame. Is there no middle ground between the Crystal Palace and the moral rot of the Underground Man?

Queer, unpredictable, contingent and historically constituted urban ecologies constitute the cities we study and love. There are now hyperbolic claims to urban rationality, whether this is to build a new science of cities (Batty, 2013) or a global urban science (Acuto et al., 2018). Like the Underground Man, I am naturally sceptical towards any calculated and tabulated city (I doubt such a city exists outside anyone’s imagination). The fact that cities can never be completely planned is a source of comfort for me. However, abandoning ‘the Crystal Palace’ need not be an exercise of anger and abandonment or a celebration of human suffering and despair. Not-so-extreme scenarios are possible between the ‘exceedingly reasonable’ Crystal Palace utopia and the chaotic, free-for-all proposal of a society led by impetuousness and deceit. We can all identify contradictions at the core of every human action, the excess product of the encounter between human understanding and an unruly, unknowable world (Castán Broto, 2015). These contradictions, however, remain part of humans’ dynamic engagement with the world they inhabit.

To sweep all urban optimism under the carpet of reimagined neoliberal practices is a mistake. There is an ample spectrum of possibilities between the neo-cybernetic, paranoid visions of big data-controlled environments and the pastoral visions of self-sufficient urban communities. Critical perspectives are needed to reveal how technocratic utopias survive. There is a danger now that ideas of the green economy have reimagined ecological modernisation paradigms for a post-2020 agenda (e.g. New Climate Economy, 2014). Spatial fixes addressing the material consequences of capital appropriation endure (Loughran, 2018, this issue). Urban managers remain fixated on models of ‘best practice’, ready-made templates for action that are brought from context to context. Now, transnational efforts at delivering urban sustainability also focus on maintaining patterns for the circulation of ideas, technologies and people in cities such as Bogotá (Montero, 2020, this issue) or Rotterdam and Jakarta (Goh, 2020, this issue). Urban political ecology faces a challenge in taking a forceful body of critique and transforming it into something that can be put to work in contemporary cities. Lack of control over the city and its contradictions – the powerful engine of contingent urban forces – is as much a challenge for the naïve defenders of techno-rationalist utopias as for those who criticise them.

The papers of this special issue are concerned with ‘exceedingly reasonable’ utopias in environmental policy and planning that range from being useless to being harmful. All these papers take issue with universalising, uniform visions of good cities and good natures. This debate is not new (Guy and Marvin, 1999) but this special issue is timely because it takes issue with new ways in which universalising, uniform visions are emerging. Marvin and Guy (1997: 311) foresaw our current dilemmas when they warned against ‘a new shared vision which helps to “keep the faith” in the ability of the local arena to deliver a sustainable future’. They were concerned with the ‘buzz’ provoked by local governments’ sustainability actions and the idea that local governments, somehow, were able to take sustainability action in a manner that is ‘closer to people’. Questioning this vision, they dismounted the principles of the new localism paradigm of the 1990s. The task, 20 years later, is to identify in which ways those myths persist and what new myths have come to inform urban environmental policy.

Excavating the contingent

There is something particularly constraining about the reduction of urban areas to a particular model of city-based urbanism (Wachsmuth, 2014). Miller and Mössner (2020) explain how the reification of the city as an ideology fails to recognise the relational character of cities, particularly in the disconnection of cities such as Freiburg and Calgary from their regional contexts. Goh (2020, this issue) situates cities as part of more extensive international networks. Lauermann (2019, this issue) brings this argument to life in his study of cities’ proposals to host the Olympic Games. Lauermann argues that glossy strategic plans and documents for an international audience render urban policy-making visible. He claims that ‘speculative design enables strategic simplification in urban politics’. The international orientation of these projects leads to the integration of specific projects into the urban fabric, modelling best practices and disregarding urban politics. These wannabe Olympic cities become laboratories for new models of suburban sustainability and eco-cities.

Lauermann’s paper called my attention particularly because it references the case study of Jaca, the city where I was born. Jaca (‘Chaca’ in the disappearing local language) is a town of approximately 10,000 inhabitants in the north-east of Spain. He cites it as an example of the ‘ecological city’ model that pervades the narratives of wannabe Olympic cities. Jaca has presented an Olympic candidacy for the Winter Games on six occasions (1994, 1998, 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2014). These Olympic candidacies have had an enormous influence on the town’s politics.

The combination of its unique legacy of Romanesque art and its mountain landscapes have made Jaca a well-known, high-end tourist destination in Spain. Jaca also provides access and facilities to skiers in four resorts (Astún, Candanchú, Panticosa and Formigal) and has a well-developed hospitality industry. A large spherical glass structure greets the visitor at the entrance to the town. It is an ice rink. This is the only ice rink in Spain that has both a rink for leisure ice skating and a competition rink. The pavilion can host up to 2000 spectators, that is, one of every five of Jaca’s inhabitants. One could easily conclude that the size of this infrastructure is disproportionate for the size and needs of the town.

In a public consultation about the ice rink in 2017, the mayor of Jaca confirmed that the ice rink cost €28.6 million, exceeding the annual budget of the whole town (€21.7 million in 2016). The final budget was 2.3 times the original budget of €12 million. This budgetary excess relates to numerous problems during the construction of the rink. Several cases of litigation among the architects (the firm Coll-Barreu), the construction company (Vías y Construcciones), the local government and other affected parties remain unsolved. Additional municipal costs have only emerged after the completion of the project, including the costs for the management and repair of the refrigeration system and the excessive costs of cooling the rink during warmer months.

Explaining the conditions that legitimated the construction of such a large project in such a small town is not easy. It depends on the layering of historical factors, cultural identity and economic rationales as much as the contingent events that led to the implementation of this particular project. In line with Lauermann’s argument, the ‘Olympic dream’ provided a rationale for having an ice rink. Such Olympic aspirations shaped the manner in which the ice rink was commissioned and built. For example, its construction was rushed because the ice rink had to be ready for the European Youth Olympic Festival in 2007. Performing at this festival was seen as a condition to demonstrate proficiency to the Olympic committee that would decide on the candidacy to the Olympic Games. The new ice rink was opened for the Festival but then it closed and was not available for public use until the summer of 2008. The backlash was considerable, particularly among the fan base of Jaca’s Hockey Club who saw their club’s participation in the national league compromised. Public outcry followed the perception that the municipality prioritised an international event (the Olympic Festival) over the more mundane realities of the local hockey team.

Aside from Olympic dreams, the ice rink has become an indissoluble part of the town’s identity since its construction in 1972. ‘Jaca IS its ice rink’, a local friend tells me. In the early 1970s, Armando Abadía, the mayor of Jaca from 1968 to 1995, embarked the city on a wide regeneration programme. The legend goes that ‘Don Armando’ (as he was referred to during Francoist times) travelled to Madrid in 1969 to request a grant for a multi-sports centre. In Madrid, he met the President of the Spanish Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, who would go on to be the Minister of Sports under Franco and, later, the President of the International Olympic Committee (1980–2001). Samaranch explained to Armando Abadía that they lacked funds to build any multi-sports centre. They had, however, some other funds that could only be used to build an ice rink. Don Armando was happy to oblige. An architect from Zaragoza, Francisco Pérez Arbués, prepared an evocative project inspired by the mountains that surrounded the city. The ice rink of 1972 cost much more than budgeted but was also an enormously successful project that promoted the creation of Jaca’s Ice Club and introduced winter sports to generations of children such as me.

Jaca’s Olympic project is grounded on the popular success of the 1972 ice rink and the growth of the winter sports economy in the town. The first candidacy was presented to host the Winter Games of 1994. The whole town embraced the project. At the time, I was in my early teens. One day, I and two friends went to the local club office to volunteer to support the Olympic project. At the front desk, a well-dressed lady had little time to hear our proposal. ‘Can you speak English or French?’ she asked unexpectedly, as if these were necessary conditions to volunteer in the project. We did our best to show some understanding of English, probably as much as one would expect from somebody of our age and education. I still remember her face, her laugh and my embarrassment. The capacity to speak a foreign language established a divide between Jaca’s well-travelled and cosmopolitan elites and the much poorer children such as me who had grown up in the surrounding villages. The Olympic project was a discursive instrument for social ordering, in this case, to demarcate the boundaries that separated distinguished elites as a distinct group to which my friends and I did not belong.

Jaca’s love for Olympic sports continues, and the town has become a gateway to the Pyrenees for mountaineers and winter sports enthusiasts. The Olympic project, alongside the multiple constituent parts that give it meaning (new development projects, the ice rink and the hockey team), remains part of Jaca, the ‘Pearl of the Pyrenees’. In 2017, Jaca’s inhabitants flocked to the local theatre, the Palace of Congresses, to watch a short movie about the hockey dreams of a local child. The movie, called ‘Real men don’t cry’ (‘Los hombres de verdad no lloran’), ¹ portrayed Jaca as a city symbolically connected to the fate of the ice rink. The enthusiasm with which the movie was received reflects how the ice rink has come to symbolise the town’s futures, regardless of the outcome of the Olympic project.

In 2013, I conducted a research project in the north of Aragón about the impact of the 2008 economic crisis and how it had changed infrastructure management practices (Castán Broto and Dewberry, 2016). My interviews showed that local business entrepreneurs still present the Olympic project as a means to develop Jaca as a modern eco-city. In an interview with the former mayor of Jaca, who had commissioned the 2008 ice rink project, he explained how the new ice rink attempted to capitalise on the town’s ice history: ‘The best thing at that moment was the idea, an idea that later governments have taken advantage of to exploit that infrastructure, its promotion value and the way it helps to project a particular urban image that improves the local economy and investment’ (Interview, July 2013; my translation). This vision, in part or whole, was shared by most interviewees in Jaca, from the local businesspeople who saw the Olympic project as the only possibility for future development to the municipal workers who celebrated the high affluence of people who went to the ice rink and the city’s Ice Club.

Thus, in line with Lauermann’s analysis, the Olympic project is a means to develop speculative futures for the city of Jaca. It facilitates processes of social and political ordering that have inserted the small town of Jaca in wider circuits of knowledge production and capital circulation following narratives of sustainable urban futures. However, that is not all that the Olympic project is. The Olympic project is also shaped by the people in Jaca who see winter sports as an integral part of their identity and the ice rink as a need. Strategic projects to consolidate Jaca’s image as an Olympic city contend with the actual physical problems of building an ice rink, the social dynamics around the Ice Club, elites who have lost control of public spaces, a public that can access sports previously unfamiliar to them, maintenance issues and the changing flows of tourists. The Olympic project is a small piece of a large relational entanglement of visions, materials and practice that constitute the lived city of Jaca.

In conclusion, the Olympic project of Jaca cannot be entirely explained away as a technocratic utopia, that is, an exercise of rationalist speculation following detached sustainable ideas. The Olympic project is also embedded in contingent contexts of action and shaped by local politics and social demarcations, by contingent events and encounters and by the need to voice and suppress protests.

Different lenses of analysis (within and beyond the artificial boundaries of the city) help understand the multifarious nature of urban relations. In between the naivety of the Crystal Palace and the cynicism of the Underground Man, there is a wide range of possibilities for action and inaction. Scholars of urban political ecology cannot be satisfied with the academic force of critique. Critique needs to demonstrate its social relevance beyond academia, which invariably means engaging with the possibilities for progressive action opening up in urban spaces.

Challenges for urban political ecology

Sustainability quests are contradictory: warnings have been present since sustainability discourses were introduced into policy and practice (Lele, 1991). This collection of articles presents examples of how contradictions permeate environmental action. Arabindoo (2019) reflects upon attempts to implement renewable energy infrastructures in Indian cities and their invariable encounter with the territorial imperative of electricity as a state-making project. Miller and Mössner (2020) reflect upon the contradictions between achieving sustainability in the city and in its hinterland via the examples of Freiburg and Calgary.

Timothy Luke argues that contradictions are inherent in sustainability policy but also in any action-oriented agenda that attempts to deliver some form of ethical change (Luke, 2013). Again, sustainability is not a Crystal Palace, that is, a model for universal action to bring humanity together behind a single collective dream. Sustainability means encountering and accepting contradiction. Such contradictions are embedded in the dialectics that urban political ecologists have mapped in their work: rural/urban, natural/artificial, material/semiotic. From a Hegelian perspective, thinking of contradiction as an intractable encounter of opposite terms is unproductive; instead, the challenge lies in defining the terms in which such contradictions develop (Castán Broto, 2015). The greatest value of critical studies of urban environments and urban sustainability is to reveal how such contradictions work.

The research presented in this special issue helps to cast environmental crises as products of the social and economic organisation within and beyond cities. There lies the promise of urban political ecology: in the possibilities for critical analysis to open up contradictions, visualising them and examining how they relate to the contextual factors. Through encounters with the particular and with a clear emphasis on comparison as a means to understand urban processes across locations, these contributions challenge illusions of urban nature as something that can be apprehended (and managed) via grand theories of environmental planning and management. Rather than abandoning the city, the contributions tend to stay within the encounter of the global and the local, a strategy that both reveals the contribution of this collection to the growing literature on policy mobilities (McCann, 2011, 2013; Temenos and McCann, 2013) and engages with the crux of the political ecology tradition (Peet et al., 2010; Rocheleau et al., 2013). Cities themselves are performative. As Davidson and Iveson (2015) have argued, the city matters when it emerges as a site of political contestation and as a launch point for social and environmental justice struggles.

Do these ideas matter beyond academia? How do they matter? Experimentation happens everywhere. New futures are made and remade every day. Uncertainty remains a (creative!) reality of urban life. Speculative fiction is as good a predictor of the future as any economic forecasts. Every urban street results from the encounter between strategic projects and random acts of landscape appropriation. So, can cities (not save the world but) help reimagine contemporary socio-ecological relations? No, cities cannot. However, those whose lives happen in the city’s streets can. In fact, they do it every day.