Planetary urbanization: A view from outside

Abstract

Neil Brenner, Christian Schmid and others aim to rejuvenate radical approaches to urbanization with their notion of 'planetary urbanization'. But while there is much to commend in this framework, it has met with strong critique from other radical urban studies scholars. In this commentary, I discuss the fact that although I initially set out to write an essay that would put queer urban studies into conversation with this new approach, I instead chose to stay on the outside of planetary urbanization along with many other scholars whose work is informed by queer, feminist, and critical race theoretical approaches.

When I initially started working on this essay, my plan was to write a paper titled “Fear of a queer planetary urbanization.” My inspiration was Michael Warner’s Fear of a Queer Planet, an important 1993 edited collection aimed at taking queer scholarship out of the niche field of sexuality studies and connecting it with broader debates across social and political theory. I wrote in my abstract for the workshop out of which this special issue emerged that I would,

read planetary urbanization and sexuality studies literatures together to consider the possibilities and pitfalls of understanding queer politics as always and only urban politics, and to ask if we can achieve emancipatory queer alternatives when conceptualizing the urban as without an outside.

I proposed that project because I see synergies between the planetary urbanization and queer urban studies literatures. Both are of course utopian projects that strive for alternate urban and other futures. Further, they share some common empirical and conceptual concerns. Brenner, Schmid and other planetary urbanization theorists write to respond to what they identify as the central pitfalls within popular and scholarly thinking on urbanization today – methodological cityism, the perpetuation of a false and misleading urban/rural binary, an overemphasis on agglomeration and an accompanying under-examination of expansion, and an imprecise and incoherent notion of the “urban.” Within queer studies, much recent scholarship rethinks conceptualizations of the urban and urbanization on similar grounds, as evidenced for example by debates within queer literatures on metronormativity (Halberstam, 2005; Tongson, 2011), on the persistence of problematic urban/ rural binaries (Shah, 2015; Waitt and Gorman-Murray, 2011), and on the folly of focusing too much attention on “gay world cities” (Brown, 2008; Manalansan, 2015). Yet, I changed course. I may still write an essay that participates in these queer studies debates and, if I do, some of the insights of the planetary urbanization literature may help me to think through how queer politics around the globe has been respatialized in this “urban age.” But I will not frame it as a contribution to planetary urbanization debates, nor will I offer it as the importation of planetary urbanization approaches into queer urban theorizing. I think it is best for me to stay on the outside of this framework. In this essay, I explain why.

To begin to do so, I first want to look back, to a previous revolutionary moment in urban theorizing. In Social Justice and the City, which was first published in 1973, David Harvey states:

Our paradigm is not coping well. It is ripe for overthrow. The objective social conditions demand that we say something sensible or coherent or else forever (through lack of credibility, or even worse, through the deterioration of the objective social conditions) remain silent. It is the emerging objective social conditions and our patent inability to cope with them which essentially explains the necessity for a revolution in geographic thought. (2009 [1973]: 129)

He wrote these words as a renunciation and denunciation of the spatial science approach to the city that dominated urban studies at the time.¹ While spatial science offered theoretical sophistication, he argued, its efficiency orientation made it a scholarship of the status quo, a politically conservative handmaiden to capitalism. Cut to 2015, to Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s call for “a new epistemology of the urban” in order to address what they claim is an “intellectual fragmentation” within urban theory; a fracturing that they argue “limits the field’s collective capacity to offer convincing, accessible alternatives to the dominant urban ideologies of our time” (Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 159; see also Brenner, 2014). In something of a parallel with Harvey’s stance, Brenner, Schmid and others involved in advancing the planetary urbanization framework are justifiably frustrated by the widespread positioning of capitalism as “urban salvation” rather than “urban explanans” within popular and scholarly discourse (see Peake, 2016a). They argue against the technocratic and triumphalist approaches that dominate urban studies in this, the “urban age,” and they – like Harvey – push for a revolution in urban theory.

To be clear, Brenner and Schmid advance a distinct analysis that does not fall neatly back onto Harvey’s work. Their more-than-global approach to the urban and urbanization is a unique one that seeks to speak specifically to the contemporary period. They advocate a “turn” within urban studies to deal with their perception that, “in the early twenty-first century, the urban appears to have become a quintessential floating signifier: devoid of any clear definitional parameters, morphological coherence, or cartographic fixity” (Brenner, 2013: 90). Yet, as Brenner, Schmid, and others move forward with this project to “pin down” the urban, they make a sort of “re-turn” to Harvey. They draw heavily on his work, and that of other Marxist thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre and Neil Smith, even reprinting some of their “classic” texts in Brenner’s (2014) edited collection, Implosions/ Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, as a set of foundations. Indeed, one of the main aims of the planetary urbanization framework is to rejuvenate radical approaches to urbanization in response to and in light of contemporary urban realities. So that critical urban theory can be, in a sense, agglomerated and extended for greater impact.

The planetary urbanization project might also be characterized as a “re-turn” for the ways in which it has opened up old debates within urban studies around the politics of knowledge production. This “new epistemology,” this attempt to turn a purported “academic Babel” (Brenner and Schmid’s phrase, repurposed from Lefebvre) into a unified voice, has met with a wave of critique, especially from scholars working with feminist, critical race, and queer theories (see: Buckley and Strauss, 2016; Derickson, 2015; Meagher, 2015; Peake, 2016a; Shaw, 2015). Past disagreements echo within these critiques. For instance, Rosalyn Deutsche’s (1991) response to Harvey’s (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity resurfaces. Buckley and Strauss (2016) rehearse her sentiment that, “today, totalizing impulses are routinely manifested in indifference to feminism – to feminism’s difference from other social analyses, its internal differences, and its theories of difference” (Deutsche, 1991: 7, italics in the original; also see Massey, 1991). More broadly, the reactions to the planetary urbanization framework cited above carry a similar tone of fatigue and frustration to that which pervades Cindi Katz’s claim from 1996 that, “despite years of feminist, postcolonial, queer, and antiracist critique, and the rich, different productions of knowledge offered from these quarters, much social theory remains largely impervious to this work” (1996: 488).

I join this chorus of old and new critiques. Like others, I take issue with the attempt to consolidate “a new epistemology of the urban” and argue for the importance of epistemic plurality within urban studies. I write against a radical approach to urbanization that focuses predominantly on capitalist exploitation and class dynamics, and for a radical approach to urbanization inspired by Marxist insights as well as insights gleaned from other critical approaches such as queer, feminist, postcolonial and critical race theories. In short, I respond to the fact that while Brenner and Schmid seek to fix attention on their provocative claim that there is “no longer any outside to the urban world” (2014: 751; italics in the original), their work highlights and perpetuates the existence of the many outsides within critical urban theory.

It is frankly disheartening that this critique requires airing within contemporary urban studies. Acknowledgements of the partiality of Marxist-dominated knowledge production were frequently leveled in fields across the social sciences and humanities – including urban studies – throughout the 1990s. All the while, the cultural turn gathered pace, and scholarship – including urban scholarship – proliferated to demonstrate that while a diagnosis of the workings of capital is an important part of critical narratives, other social, cultural and economic logics, such as patriarchy, colonialism, racism, nationalism, and heteronormativity also require examination and critique. As such, there is by now a huge body of work on urbanization and the politics of difference on which urban theorists can draw. Yet, this literature goes virtually unengaged in the planetary urbanization literature and, indeed, in much of urban studies more broadly. Linda Peake, in a contribution to the journal Urban Geography, states: “It is still unclear to me whether feminism has arrived in urban theory or urban studies more generally. Or indeed, who our allies are in knowledge production about the urban” (Peake, 2016b). Further, Phil Hubbard, in his recent book Cities and Sexualities, states, “contemporary urban theory…says little about sexuality and instead sees the city as structured by capitalist processes of accumulation” (2011: 30). By contrast, postcolonial theory has enjoyed much greater uptake. Whereas the mainstream of urban studies has historically been overwhelmingly western-centric, there is now, as Jennifer Robinson puts it, a “commitment to producing an understanding of the urban which is potentially open to the experiences of all cities,” a new openness to “the world of cities” (2014: 57). Brenner and Schmid explicitly acknowledge and appreciate this body of work. They state:

Our own developing investigations of planetary urbanization partially overlap with the substantive research foci of postcolonial urbanism. Our work is likewise animated by an overarching concern to develop new ways of understanding emergent urban conditions and ongoing urban transformations. (Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 158)

Yet, they undermine its epistemic authority, arguing that postcolonial frameworks “contain certain intellectual hazards,” given their focus on “context” rather than on “the evolving, and increasingly planetary, “context of context” in which contemporary forms of neoliberal capitalist urbanization are unfolding across the North/South divide” (Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 162).

I want to stress that I find much to commend the planetary urbanization framework. This project is ambitious and erudite. It traverses multiple locales, discourses, literatures, and time frames, and has already inspired much important conceptual and empirical work (Angelo, 2016; Arboleda, 2015; Kanai, 2014; Wachsmuth, 2014; Wilson and Bayon, 2015). Brenner and Schmid’s call to challenge the increasingly hegemonic “urban age” discourse of supra-national policy making bodies, and the triumphalist and technocratic responses that the “apparent ubiquity” of the contemporary urban condition has prompted within certain corners of the field of urban studies is an important one. So is their call for urban scholars to attend to processes of extended urbanization, in both abstract and concrete ways. But the claim that critical urban theory ought to be trained on the “context of context” – i.e. capitalism – and the insistence that “the investigation of urbanization, the creative destruction of political-economic space under capitalism” must be “at the analytical epicenter of urban theory” (Brenner, 2013: 109) is a troubling line of argument, especially as it is made via selective engagement with the canon of critical urban theory. Capitalist exploitation is alive and well, and tethered to urbanization processes around the globe. Of this, there is no doubt. Unfortunately, other unjust and violent forces like patriarchy, colonialism, racism, nationalism, and heteronormativity are still kicking too. And, given the existence of vast bodies of literature across the social sciences and humanities by critical race, queer, postcolonial and feminist theorists showing us that all of these forces, including capitalism, are mutually constituted, the elevation of capitalism to “context of context” is a retrogressive move for urban studies. It would be fabulous if there were one planetary enemy, and if bringing all critics together to speak with one voice could combat it. However, urban injustice has no centre, and a progressive urban theory must not have one either.

Yes, as Brenner and Schmid note, “the terrain of the urban has…been subjected to a high-intensity, high-impact earthquake through the worldwide social, economic, regulatory and environmental transformations of the post-1980s period” (2015: 153). And, yes, as they continue, “in conjunction with ongoing efforts to decipher these wide-ranging transformations, the field of urban studies has also been experiencing considerable turbulence and fragmentation” (Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 153). But the fragmentation of urban knowledge production does not necessarily signal either that the field of urban studies has evolved into “academic Babel,” nor that “the fragmentation of urban realities in everyday political-economic and cultural practice is being replicated relatively uncritically within the discursive terrain of urban theory” (Brenner, 2013: 92). I say “necessarily” because these claims may be useful ones to make in relation to certain strains of mainstream urban theory and popular discourse (perhaps those triumphalist and technocratic narratives of the “urban age” that Brenner and Schmid identify as particularly problematic). They are not, however, fair charges to level against the strains of work that come together loosely to form the diverse field of critical urban theory. The meeting of the fragmentation of the world with the fragmentation of critical response is certainly a source of discomfort, and a reality that renders the field difficult to occupy. That is the point. We ought to be uncomfortable.² We ought to be committed to keep thinking rather than settling on an epistemology that aims to “pin down” that which is bound to always elude us, the truth of the urban. While, as Brenner and Schmid argue, we might usefully look to efforts by the dispossessed and excluded to occupy the urban as a source of inspiration (though not uncritically since not everyone has equal access to the public square), we cannot abide attempts to occupy the terrain of urban knowledge production.

This is why, although my critique of the planetary urbanization framework is a sympathetic one, myself and many others do not argue for merely bringing its outsides in to expand its “analytical epicenter.” This is why this paper is not “Fear of a queer planetary urbanization,” as I had originally planned. The political-epistemological divide between planetary urbanization and other critical urban theoretical approaches is simply too great. Thus, reading queer urban theory through the lens of planetary urbanization would do epistemological and political violence to the former body of work. Heteronormativity is not a subsidiary context to an overarching capitalism which is the “context of context.” Nor would it be helpful to argue for the elevation of heternormativity (or racism, or patriarchy, or… or… or…) to the status of “context of context” alongside capitalism. As Rosalyn Deutsche pointed out in response to David Harvey twenty-five years ago, a surface-depth model of social relations misses a great deal about the realities of lives lived on the margins.³ In contrast to base-superstructure models, even modified ones, which see capital as a hidden, guiding logic, poststructuralist urban theorists work from the premise that everything is on the surface, and everything is “real.” Thus we must grapple with the messy webs in which the material and the symbolic intertwine, and with the ways in which some subjects are rendered illegible and thus cannot occupy the public square. Yes, capitalism is everywhere. But so is everything else. And there are outsides – constitutive ones – all over the place. For these reasons, queerness cannot be “pinned down.” It must instead, in Judith Butler’s words, be “never fully owned, always only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes” (1993: 21).

I by no means think that planetary urbanization theorists and queer theorists should or must remain on the outs. But I am not going to do the translation work. I am tired of translating the insights of queer theory for a broader critical urban studies audience. I am tired of having to make a case for sexuality’s rightful place on critical urban theory’s map. Queer is, as Martin Manalansan, puts it, “an unsettling mode of analysis, one that disrupts and unsettles the blissful tidiness of the normal” (2015: 567), and many scholars over many decades have produced work that shows that heteronormative and capitalist logics are intertwined with processes of urbanization all over the globe, that the regulation of intimacy is a cornerstone of efforts to limit public spheres everywhere, and that queer thought and politics have much to contribute to any critical project to produce an emancipatory commons. But I have decided not to provide a road map of sorts explaining queer studies connections and disconnections with the planetary urbanization approach. Instead, I join with Cindi Katz, who twenty years ago urged Marxist theorists to “tak[e] seriously the knowledge claims of those working from nondominant positions” (1996: 488), and with Kate Derickson, who more recently urged planetary urbanization proponents “to ‘encounter’ urban trajectories from places and spaces beyond European and world cities, as well as bodies of thought beyond European male theorists” (2015: 651).⁴ I very much hope that the proponents of the planetary urbanization framework will be interested in exploring how queer theory, along with other critical lenses, might mess it up in productive and generative ways. I am also optimistic that a wide array of scholars working within the broad and vibrant field of critical urban studies will join the conversation to open up political and scholarly response to the “urban age.”

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the organizers of and other participants in the workshop at York University (Toronto, Canada) out of which this special issue emerged. It was a wonderfully productive and collegial two days of conversation. I also thank Michelle Buckley, Kate Derickson, Heather McLean, Linda Peake, Alex Vasudevan, and Darshan Vigneswaran for their critical engagements with previous drafts of this essay.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Natalie Oswin is an associate professor of Geography at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). She works in the areas of urban, queer, and postcolonial geographies. Her book Global City Futures: Desire and Development in Singapore is forthcoming in the University of Georgia Press series Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation.

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