The Urban Problematic II

Abstract

This article provides a framework by way of introduction to the special section, ‘The Urban Problematic II’. It introduces a new selection of papers contributing to the continuing project of interrogating concepts, processes and practices associated with contemporary forms of urban life. The article focuses in particular on the problem of infrastructure in relation to questions of urban politics and especially remarks on the emergence of a kind of thinking in which the separation of notions of material infrastructure from those of the social or cultural sphere can no longer be usefully maintained. The essays in the section cumulatively address the issue of an emergent hybridity of urban elements: the virtual and the material, the social and the technical, the political and the instrumental, the vertical and the horizontal. The spectacle of contemporary political activism and dissent emerges in the transformation of social and urban space.

Keywords

communication contestation infrastructure material/immaterial media politics techniques verticality/horizontality urban theory

The Urban Infrastructure

This sequel to ‘The Urban Problematic’ (Bishop and Phillips, 2013) focuses on the critical interface between urban infrastructures and urban politics. Concerns about the urban infrastructure in relation to the needs of urban agents provide a common thread for the articles in this section. We can understand the functioning of infrastructures by taking them apart and examining the nature of the linkages by which their elements are connected. Michael Neuman’s influential infrastructure network theory remains necessarily open and inclusive, but it identifies some crucial infrastructural qualities:

Infrastructure is the physical network that channels a flux (water, fluid, electricity, energy, material, people, digital signal, analog signal, etc.) through conduits (tubes, pipes, canals, channels, roads, rails, wires, cables, fibers, lines, etc.) or a medium (air, water) with the purpose of supporting a human population, usually located in a settlement, for the general or common good. It consists of a long-lasting network connecting producers and service providers with a large number of users through standardized (while variable) technologies, pricing, and controls that are planned and managed by coordinating organizations. (Neuman, 2006: 6)

The twofold emphasis on connecting in the functioning of infrastructure (channelling fluxes and coordinating producers and users) demonstrates why infrastructure does not submit to simple definitions. The elements connected by infrastructure would be nothing without such linkages. Furthermore, the inevitability of mixing the different kinds of flux through many kinds of both official and informal infrastructural connections ensures a potential for increasing complexity.

In recent work, this potential has taken on an explicitly political flavour. For instance, on the outskirts of the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, there are urban communities that develop out of the illegal occupations of migrants and the poor. And in the Egyptian city of Cairo, occupations expressing forms of political activism help to reorganize public space both politically and structurally. These exemplary yet singular circumstances, treated somewhat differently by Ash Amin and Mona Abaza (in this issue), reveal nevertheless with some consistency the ways in which urban processes emerge thanks to a certain kind of rationality by which elements of urban life are connected. This is neither the representational rationality of planning nor the instrumental rationality of economic systems but one predicated on the contingent needs and the not always predictable wills of populations. To put it this way is to locate in the contingent demands of urban space a kind of rapport or complementarity of agencies and environments more often considered heterogeneous: the assemblage of infrastructure and social life; the cartographic complicity of the urban imaginary with urban space; and the mutual implication in urban scholarship of cultural analysis (connected to specific urban sites) and urban theory (urban historicity).

The urban infrastructure has been considered in several ways. The networks that both figuratively and actually exist beneath, below, or within urban structures, facilitating their connectivity, subsist beyond the most literal engineering terminology that is used to designate a more or less stable complex of systems. These include the utilities (gas, electricity, water, waste disposal), transportation (roads, railways, pathways, tracks, rivers and canals), telecommunications (telephone, broadcasting, cable and wireless, internet), community institutions (schools, hospitals, libraries, convention centres and so on, but also prisons and police stations), and larger sites of mass public passage (ports, airports, highways and bridges). But the urban infrastructure confounds its conveniently precise literal designation.¹ A reductively economic analysis of the relative conditions of urban infrastructures, when correlated with factors like rapid population growth and industrial development, provides relevant data for urban management concerned with the potential progress of a city (critical especially in the developing megacity regions of the globe). Predictably, for instance, population growth tends to erode infrastructural services as they become increasingly overloaded, and poor public infrastructures inhibit industrial profitability (Lee and Anas, 1991; Tabuchi, 1997; Bjorvatn, 2000).

As an extension of management concerns, in the so-called age of the war on terror, infrastructure becomes a security issue, focused on protection and captured ambiguously in the phrase ‘critical infrastructures’. Claudia Aradau has identified, in urban securitization studies, a tendency to divide the material infrastructure from the critical infrastructure, such that, ‘even when its materiality is acknowledged, critical infrastructure protection is nonetheless ultimately about social and political action and human life’ (Aradau, 2010: 492). The division identified here, between ‘technical positivity’ and ‘social practices’ (2010: 492), implies an emergent rethinking of materiality that in Aradau’s analysis concerns the specific though crucial issue of protection. ‘Infrastructure’, she concludes, ‘is not opposed to people, but is materialized in intra-actions between humans and non-humans, matter and meaning’ (2010: 509). The deliberate catachresis ‘intra-action’ indicates clearly enough that infrastructure becomes what it is not by interactions between humans and their infrastructural (or exoskeletal) prostheses but rather as descriptive of action itself, according to which the ‘human’ is regarded as in some sense already infrastructural, that is to say, originarily implicated in material networks and processes.

Aradau’s article, which contests the distinction between a discursive (semiotic, verbal, human) sphere and a material (infrastructural, technological, or natural) one, resonates with a range of increasingly influential writings concerned with the interface between urban studies and, in more general terms, aspects of social conflict. Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift have drawn attention to the role of ‘repair and maintenance’, suggesting that ‘prevailing cultural constructions, and imaginations, of the “infrastructure” that sustains modern societies, actively work to push repair and maintenance activities beyond the attention of social science’ (2007: 1). Developing an argument indebted to Heidegger’s phenomenology of the readiness-to-hand of things, they point out that: ‘Things are not just formed matter, they are transductions with many conditions of possibility and their own forms of intentionality. […] These things are often pluricultural, that is, they have become so common that they have come to play a role in the everyday life of almost everyone, weaving various different cultures together through their mere existence’ (2007: 3). The authors’ focus on the inevitable tendency for things to decay, to break down, to suffer neglect or deliberate destruction, allows them to bring the role of the otherwise neglected spheres of repair and maintenance into view, demonstrating through their examples that progress, learning, transformation (or transduction) and development occur precisely in these spheres: ‘the multifarious activities of repair and maintenance become not just secondary and derivative but pivotal’ (2007: 5; see also Graham, this issue).

Thrift has developed these thoughts in a rather more philosophical way by opposing the exemplary projective power of repair and maintenance to the widespread imaginings of urban disaster found not only in the contemporary media but also in many influential examples of urban writing. ‘Cities often bounce back from catastrophe remarkably quickly’, he begins by noting (Thrift, 2012). And this has to do with ‘the fact that Western cities are continuously modulated by repair and maintenance’ (Thrift, 2012: 20). Thrift does not of course deny the prevalence of the various kinds of disaster increasingly inflicted on urban spheres: war, terrorism, and war on terror, public dissent, neglect, overcrowding and so on. But one virtue of his approach is that it identifies (after Heidegger) an essential temporal dimension in the urban ensemble, projected towards a transducible future. And, in that case, even more than in Western cities, the megacity (and the postcolonial city, the cities of the Southern Hemisphere, and so on) can provide evidence of the elastic productivity of infrastructures in the face of specific types of social disaster. Jonathan Silver’s identification of what he calls ‘incremental infrastructures’, by which he means the ways by which ‘marginalized populations seek to construct or reconfigure urban systems’ (Silver, 2014: 788; see also Simone, 2013), imply, in his view, a ‘survival driven’ quality in the creative appropriation of infrastructural resources. But he also cautiously acknowledges ‘the potential emancipatory politics that the incremental may reveal … [in] such interventions as infrastructures in-the-making are adjusted, prefigured and transformed’ (Silver, 2014: 801).

Such cautiously celebratory treatments of the urban infrastructure come at a time when the return in recent work to questions of urban politics identifies, in widespread spectacles of urban dissent, a sense of movement motivated by contest for the urban public sphere. This interface between urban infrastructures and urban politics has a peculiarly contemporary feel, which to an extent represents the re-emergence of notions of spatiality in urban theory. The telling title of the recent Symposium, ‘Where Is Urban Politics?’ (Rogers et al., 2014), begins by ‘outlining a rationale for reopening the issue of the spatiality of the “urban” in urban politics’ (Rodgers et al., 2014: 1552). The diverse articles collected under this heading satisfy the editors’ intentional ‘pluralism’ but also represent a shared attempt to ‘bring fresh perspective to how the urban might become political’ (2014: 1558). Notably, from our point of view, the settings that come to the surface include infrastructural spaces, transnational and postcolonial spaces, and ‘in-between’ spaces (Young and Kale, 2014). Urban politics therefore tends to be mediated through the spatial connectivity of urban infrastructures.

Reshaping the City

The potential implied by this tendency has led to an upsurge in the events of urban protest, leading writers like David Harvey to recall the famous slogan of Lefebvre, ‘the right to the city’, to designate, over and above concerns with equitable access to resources, ‘the right to change ourselves by changing the city’ (Harvey, 2008). The power to, as Harvey suggests, ‘reshape the processes of urbanization’ implies both collective interests and a common sphere (see also Marcuse, 2009). An infrastructure, considerably more complex than notions of the ‘economic structure of society’ that Marx developed from readings of Hegelian legal philosophy, nonetheless shares some of those properties (Marx, 1996: 159–60). While we should grasp the ‘foundational’ role in its relativity (material productive forces of society), we can no longer depend on an objectively identifiable model separable from the legal and political superstructures that supposedly arise upon them. We therefore acknowledge a newer language (of assemblages, hybridity, modes of becoming, contingencies and topographies) that helps describe in the place of foundation an infrastructure not just of connectivity and displacement, but also of will and resolution: an infrastructure of communal intelligences. However, keeping faith with the Marxist conception, the role and agency of infrastructure remains grounded in productive necessities – as Ash Amin puts it, ‘the agency of the absences and presences of the very basics of urban provisioning such as water, electricity, sanitation, and low-cost housing’ (this issue).

Amin builds on an emerging kind of urban writing, which proceeds on the assumption that one ought not to make rigid distinctions between material and cultural (or immaterial) aspects of a city, as we discussed in the introduction to the previous Urban Problematic section. The material infrastructure and the social activities of an urban ensemble should be regarded, rather, in terms of hybrid developments, which Amin refers to as ‘sociotechnical assemblages’. It remains to be seen whether this kind of writing amounts to an ‘infrastructural turn’. Amin claims persuasively that it does and certainly the other articles in this section lend weight to the proposal.

These assertions about the infrastructural turn take on greater weight as the infrastructure of various electronic, IT and computational grids has for some decades now reconstituted traditional Westphalian notions of sovereignty. Tying sovereignty to cartographic lines becomes increasingly problematic with these grids as they reach directly into earth for the energy required to keep them running, and thus manifest a site-specificity. At the same time, and more apparently, they generate wide-ranging unmoored influences in their operation that traverses the globe that ignore all manners of local imperatives of governance and influence while manufacturing new ones. These systems are constructed by and constitutive of those who produce and use them while also being simultaneously proprietal and appropriable. Massive and powerful corporations have sprung up to produce these systems that challenge all kinds of traditional sovereignty claims while also being hacked and turned to the purposes of their users, legitimate or not. The relationship between the material and immaterial infrastructure begins to emerge with great complexity as multiply-scaled systems of computation and information gathering/generation feed cybernetically into urban processes that generate them and which are constituted by them (see Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack (forthcoming) as well as Abaza in this issue).

Mona Abaza identifies ‘the retreat of the state in public services’ as contributing to the ways in which manifestations of an ‘informal sector’ increasingly enter into determining roles in the reorganization of public space. Such reorganization out of the chaos of revolution, therefore, can begin to show up as a rather radical and political alternative to the kind of neo-conservative libertarian modes of urban reorganization with which we may be more familiar. An important strand of Abaza’s precisely illustrated argument involves the ways in which inventive forms of urban dissent circulate through the media of the moving image and are thus replicated in a variety of sites of urban rebellion. It has become quite tempting to celebrate the spontaneity of the uprisings and the ways in which these ‘leaderless groups without centres’ manifest a reorganization of spatial politics. Concerns with the political remain paramount in reconsidering the infrastructures of urban sites. Once we acknowledge the essential commonality of infrastructure and social agency, it becomes possible to identify the specific urban formations of a communal will and its correlative rationality at work.

We might therefore understand by ‘infrastructure’ the necessary conditions for an urban ensemble to function at an at least minimal degree, thus giving rise to more optimistic (or utopian) outlooks that at the same time indicate propensities for political corruption. The contrast between utopian and corrupt movements of the communal will requires careful analysis, because it problematizes not only the conservative (and conservationist) impulse in the establishment and maintenance of infrastructure but also the neoliberal gesture of reform through deregulation, which offers another stripe of governmental withdrawal from public domains by converting the civic to the profitably private. On the one hand, the spontaneous organization of dissent, described and pictured by Abaza, incontestably alters the contemporary experience of public space. The political will in these cases cannot be distinguished from the variety of modes it takes and particularly in the ‘blending of the virtual world and the instant events of all the square(s) in the Arab world’ (this issue). Part of this operates through the multi-media dispersal of staple communications of solidarity (‘text messages, slogans, songs’) and another part through the iconographic elements of the performative spectacle (‘gas masques, the Guy Fawkes V for vendetta masks and the numerous iconic martyrs’ face masks’). The complication here involves the conflicted grounds of these political gestures in the many occupations and actions replicated across divergent ideological interests. We are left therefore with a question about the transformative qualities of a public space that seem to have overtaken the more traditional mechanisms. Abaza identifies here ‘the decomposition of the mechanisms of established powers like academe, pundits, and [area] expertise’ (this issue).

The transformations that Abaza identifies have to do with a widespread and diverse reorganization of urban spaces, which we began to identify in ‘The Urban Problematic’ and which involves a challenge to the legibility of the contemporary city.² The challenge has much to do with the increasingly familiar kinds of contestation of public spaces that have cumulatively transformed this once stable terrain of regulated urban activities into battlegrounds, sites of occupation, demonstration, marches, looting, evictions, slaughter and revolt: active spaces of sometimes violent communal interaction on scales and in terms of regularity that seem to have been rarer, though by no means absent, before the turn of the millennium. Is this apparent increase simply another product of media technologies that both focus on the present and circulate events in the real-time of an evanescent present effectively eliding both past and future?

The Faculty of Power: Common Consensus versus Political Corruption

Urban sites have always been problematic. To varying degrees, they are simultaneously places where communities are formed, thus developing protean systems of value and practice, and locations of social unrest, of contested space, where tensions between opposing groups flare up as they fight them out.³ The current situation emerges less as an indication of a world transformed and more as an expression of political will amidst rapidly developing infrastructural conditions: the states of occupation, the vibrant canivalesque styles, the easy transformation of civic square to urban battle zone – these can best be read through the articulation and uncanny replication of diverse mediated interests. The ‘power of the street’, now open in an unprecedented way to heterogeneous communities, also implies the breaking down of traditional distinctions between army and police and where, by that gesture, armies (as well as militarized police forces) take further adversarial roles in civil practice and so the urban sphere as site of battle implies mobilizing the same technological gear to battle enemies at home and abroad. These conditions threaten to displace if not confuse contraries like ruin and renovation.

We can identify something of what may be at stake in these examples at points where they resonate with often quite diverse contemporary modes of political thought. Enrique Dussel’s Politics of Liberation builds a liberationist politics grounded at once on philosophical traditions referring to Marx, Hegel, Aristotle and so on, and on the need for a contemporary global understanding of politics predicated on the non-western experience of modernity – in particular that of the Americas (Dussel, 2011). Eduardo Mendieta characterizes the position in deceptively modest terms in his ‘Foreword’ to Dussel’s Twenty Theses, where he writes: ‘there is no universality but rather always a universal claim that is particularly and singly articulated’ (Dussel, 2008, x11). Dussel’s Twenty Theses (a much shorter volume than The Politics of Liberation) does indeed articulate in a first part the forms that the political will takes in its universal claims, only to show in the second part how particular articulations necessarily ‘begin a deconstruction’ of them in the move from abstract philosophy to concrete empirical politics.

The movement from abstract to concrete (again evoking Marx) nonetheless requires the establishment of the principles, which only then come to life in the ‘imperfect’ forms of political struggle: ‘when suffering becomes unacceptable and intolerable from the perspective of the [political] victims, oppositional social movements emerge within the empirical field’ (Dussel, 2008: 69). In this way Dussel can establish – as a primary principle – the notion of political power as ‘a convergence of wills towards a common good’ (Dussel, 2008: 15). The convergence of wills brings into play a single yet doubly articulated notion of the will-to-live (that is the phylogenetic will-to-live of the race and the ontogenetic will of the individual). Such an ideal assumes symmetrical participation on the parts of citizens, who therefore collaborate, through rational consensus, in the ‘possibility of uniting the blind force of will’ (Dussel, 2008: 14). The rationality through which the will expresses itself in such consensuses guides both sophisticated ‘rhetorical argument’ and ‘mythical stories, artistic expressions like theatre, or even the most abstract scientific formulations’ (Dussel, 2008: 15). These ‘mediations’, writes Dussel, contribute to what he calls the ‘faculty for power’, recalling the role of infrastructure, in the sense towards which we have been leading this term: ‘the community needs to be able to use mediations – technical-instrumental or strategic – that allow for the empirical exercise of this will-to-live through common or popular consensus’ (Dussel, 2008: 16).

If this conjures discredited enlightenment notions of instrumental rationality (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1972; Heidegger, 1977), it also indicates the ways in which a liberationist political theory identifies concrete possibilities in the event of empirical political struggle. Intelligence directed towards survival, defence, and disputes over ‘the right to the city’ (Abaza, this issue) cannot be distinguished from the technical-instrumental and strategic means through which the will-to-live is expressed, hence the necessary distinction between political power (the consensus of rational wills unified towards a common good) and the corruption of the political in practices of domination. Dussel’s account of the ‘fetishization of power’, which leads to the abstraction and then application of a fetishized will in various forms of domination, allows him to make a patiently prepared distinction between the political event and the corrupt practices of power against which a politicized community might be mobilized (Dussel, 2008: 31).

The ‘mediations’ that Dussel identifies as contributing to the ‘faculty of power’ include rather crucially those ‘artistic expressions’ that in one way or another embody or contest the various expressions of political rationality. A considerable literature concerning the still emergent phenomenon of the ‘creative city’ has become suggestive of what at first might easily have been criticized as the empty rhetoric of democratic governments (e.g. Tony Blair) but looks like having a wider and more deeply influential reach in the international context. Lily Kong’s article (this issue) reviews the considerable range of the literature as a way of establishing what might be at stake in the role of creativity in the building of urban ensembles. On the one hand a vibrant culture of production and reception of art remains pivotal in how we consider urban communities. Dussel’s liberationist politics depends upon it, of course, but also thinkers as widely dispersed as Antonio Negri, for whom the notion of the multitude requires the active productivity of a creative class (Negri, 2006), and Jacques Rancière, for whom the axiom of equality implies not only a will equipped with intelligence but also a capacity equal in all for artistic genius (Rancière, 1991). Kong’s review involves examining both the discourses of creativity (implying also the conditions on the ground for achieving kinds of creative culture in especially developing urban sites) and the merging of these discourses with those concerned with marketing cities, with circulation of finance, with commercial interests and with more general kinds of migration (of official and unofficial labour), and so once again the role of infrastructure comes to the fore. The question opens onto contemporary phenomena of various mobilities (technologies, people, finance, and so on) and therefore on the borders across which such mobilities inevitably transgress.

Needless to say, on the ground considerable difficulties remain in play. Not least are the operations of a polymorphous sphere of media activity, which Jeff Lewis has referred to as ‘the global mediasphere’ and which, as he argues, drastically magnifies the developments that contribute to the radical transformations that urban societies seem to have taken. Lewis identifies long-term evolutions – the rise of agriculture, apocalyptic religions, new economies and so on – that have simultaneously been transformed and accelerated by ‘the modern media and the global economy of pleasure’ (Lewis, 2010: 2). Sean Cubitt’s article, ‘Telecommunications Networks: Economy, Ecology, Rule’ (this issue), deals directly with infrastructural issues from the point of view of ‘an environmentalism of the poor’ as a way of correcting considerations that either privilege ecology or that are more focused on telecommunications infrastructures in the narrow sense. The integration of an explicit politics of environmental poverty into these otherwise well-established critical registers allows a more sustained interrogation of the ‘shifting agencies in telecoms provision’ (this issue). Expanding megacities particularly fall prey to diverse interests, as well as equally diverse representations and articulations of these interests, and thus pose great difficulties to any strategic legislation over telecoms provision.

Liquid Syntax and the Infrastructural Event

At the same time it is precisely here that the political comes into play. We can therefore consider the urban infrastructure, in conjunction with the urban political will and its rationality, in terms not of the robustness and solidity of material structures, but in terms of the capacity for simultaneously political and material transformation. The utopian tendency in urbanism may have been problematized by the radical transformations wrought upon the social sphere, but its re-emergence in a variety of settings (in political theory, in activism, occupation and dissent) establishes a genuine historical connection to diverse traditions. Tomoko Tamari’s article on Metabolism – ‘Metabolism: Utopian Urbanism and the Japanese Modern Architecture Movement’ (this issue) – reveals a somewhat neglected history in the Japanese movement in modern architecture known as Metabolism. The impulse behind metabolism (urban construction considered in a holistic manner, providing urban inhabitants with the infrastructural potential to adapt to their needs) seems very far from the practices at large in the contemporary city (especially in the vast and diverse megacities and mega-regions in the developing hypermodern urban sphere).⁴ Yet precisely these impulses can be discerned, as it were, from the ground up, in contested public spheres demonstrating a transformed conception of social space. In the dystopian atmosphere of alienated subjectivity and economic oppression such utopian impulses become all the more vital if not surprising.

Another radical architectural group from the same period called Archizoom emerged in Florence with projects that have proven prescient in relation to contemporary urban conditions. Political but without utopian idealism, their project ‘No-Stop City’ takes elements of consumerism and modernism to their logical ends. No-Stop City provides a grid of large expanses inhabited by tents, appliances, prefab bedroom interiors and motorcycles as far as the eye can see. As a project of emancipation, it participates in the systems it wishes to critique and through the weight of their own inoperable capacities renders them ineffective. No-Stop City literally deconstructs urban processes by providing a ‘catatonic architecture’ and urban design of blankness resultant from the mass-production of dwellings and interiors. Archizoom’s influence – though perhaps without the explicit political critique – has been registered in the ‘Anti-Design’ movement and Koolhaas’ writings on ‘junkspace’. It is hard not to see in Archizoom’s urban visions the contemporary conditions of many problematic urban sites, a set of projections politically similar to those of Metabolism but with a stronger even if unacknowledged and unintended contemporary influence.

The capacity for transformation at the political level remains theoretical – a utopian register or an abstract, formal, ideal – without the simultaneous flexibility of necessarily capricious infrastructural elements: official and unofficial modes of carriage as well as passage (vehicular transport, mass rapid transit and other mobile and variously motorized networks, as well as roadways, avenues, pavements, sidewalks, squares); telecommunications systems (including immediate networking capacities and the fluctuating relativity of electro-magnetic performances captured by big data); the restless rhythm of construction, dwelling, habitation, evacuation, and destruction that constitutes the process giving rise to shifting geographies always at odds with the imagined cartography of a place and its relations to other places. As Simon Dawes demonstrates in his article on forms of urban representation, ‘Representing the City: Non-Representation, Digital Archives and Megacity Phenomena’ (this issue), the imagined forms of urban space have a nonetheless determining role in how social interactions are formed. The account Dawes gives of the becoming malleable of urban space – thanks to the contemporary phenomena of digital archiving and unstable megacity topographies – suggests that the very idea of a city has changed: the merging of virtual and material existence and the prevalence of ‘malleable and provisional surfaces’ give rise to unpredictable transformation in the social sphere. The situation can be oppressive.

Another side of this ‘multimediated’ sphere and the process of ‘constant re-territorialization (Dawes, this issue) would be the one identified by Eyal Weizman in his ‘Lethal Theory’ (Weizman, 2006: 53–78), in which the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) regularly force their way through the fabric of the city in deliberate contravention of the city’s syntax: ‘soldiers used none of the streets, roads, alleys, or courtyards that constitute the syntax of the city, none of the external doors, internal stairwells, and windows that constitute the order of buildings, but rather moved horizontally through party walls, and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors’ (Weizman, 2006: 53). This strategy (its shorthand – ‘walking through walls’) implies not only that the city becomes the site and medium of conflict but also that this kind of movement involves a constant re-composition of spatial contours, the ‘liquid syntax’ of urban space itself: a transformation of infrastructure into reconstituted material for militarized advantage.

The uncanny repetition in this language of contemporary urban theory (particularly in the idea of re-territorialization) reveals that the potential for political power, celebrated by Dussel and exemplified in sites of protest across the globe, operates with the same if not greater ferocity in the hands of military strategists. Steve Graham’s article in this issue, ‘Super-tall and Ultra-deep: The Cultural Politics of the Elevator’, picks up on Weizman’s concerns with the combination of vertical and horizontal movements through cities with further questions (problematizing established accounts of geopolitical relations) concerning ‘the politics of accessibility’. In this article the question is posed through a vital infrastructural element of the contemporary city, the elevator. Graham notes that ‘vertically-stacked and vertically-sprawling cities [are] laced together by assemblages combining multiple vertical and horizontal transportation systems’ (Graham, this issue). Martin Parker’s article on skyscrapers (this issue) similarly explores the collective imaginary’s concrete expression of flight to the vertical that has become iconic of urban processes in modernity which are now contested on the grounds of the supposed liberational ideals that conceived them and the apparent dystopic replication of the skyscraper form in urban expansion. The infrastructure of freedom remains in the thrall and pull of the immaterial economic and political tumult in which it operates and is interpreted as operating.

Conclusion

We are a long way from the celebratory proclamations of Marinetti’s first Futurist Manifesto and Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, both cited by Parker, when we arrive at the hyper-verticality of Dubai, in which infrastructure becomes the only rationale for the existence of the city-state as a global node and explicitly constructed as such. As examined in Richard Smith’s ‘Dubai in extremis’ (this issue), the physical verticality of Dubai’s stunning architectural achievements reflect the political verticality of despotic imposition within the nation, itself reflective of the pre-2008 geopolitical despotism of the global capital of high-risk speculation, hedonistic luxury and plunder. The dictates and edicts of the ruling class in Dubai were and continue to be carried out by labourers who are indeed a far cry from Marinetti’s impassioned ‘great crowds in the excitement of labor’: migrant labourers instead trapped in bonded servitude and bearing the mark of brazen exploitation and the mobility of labour trapped in unidirectional flows of power. As with the contributions by Graham and Parker, Smith’s reading of Dubai fixes on the blatant semiotic allure of verticality to reveal the immaterial, cultural and political ramifications of infrastructural readings of the built environment as a complication of conflicting and competing sociotechnical apparatuses (see also Li, 2008; Zhu, 2007).

The ways in which new questions posed to infrastructure have come to inform these various responses to the current state of the city’s evolution suggests that there’s room for considerable further development. Discussions of infrastructure have tended towards the identification of chronically contested urban sites and thus they tend to gesture to the political tensions of such spaces. We might be tempted to say that ‘the political’ itself, in the urban context, constitutes itself through the operation of infrastructure. The key element here would be in the capacity for transformation, and correlatively the capacity for unpredictably effective disputes. It has become quite commonplace in urban and global scholarship (for instance in anthropology) to acknowledge, even to celebrate, among the spheres and flows of global transactions, the micro-event, the personal topography, the destabilizing detour through marginal spaces. A more focused approach to the politicized spaces of the contemporary city brings into view the perhaps more powerful expression of struggle over the right to the networks by which urban spaces are connected.

Figure 1.

Urban infrastructure. Photograph: John Phillips.

Footnotes

Notes

Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Art and Politics at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. He is co-editor of the journal Cultural Politics (Duke University Press), the book series Technicities (Edinburgh University Press), and editor of the book series Theory Now (Polity Press). He is author of Comedy and Critique in American Film, co-editor with Greg Clancey and John Phillips of The City as Target and co-author with John Phillips of Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology: Technicities of Perception.

John WP Phillips teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is Chair of the Executive Committee of the International Association of Philosophy and Literature and Series Editor of Textures. He has published on aesthetics, critical theory, deconstruction, linguistics, literature, mathematics, military technology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and cities. He is author of Contested Knowledge: A Guide to Critical Theory and co-editor of several volumes, including Problematizing Global Knowledge (2006) and City as Target (2012). Among recent activities he is co-author with Ryan Bishop of Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology: Technicities of Perception (2010).

This article is part of a Special Section on The Urban Problematic II, edited by Ryan Bishop and John Phillips. For extra material see: theoryculturesociety.org

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