One hand clapping: Notes towards a methodology for debating planetary urbanization

Day 1

Rajyashree Reddy: I wanted to ask you to reflect on what you think is the spatial ontology of scholars who approach the urban through queer theory or postcolonial scholarship. Is it the same spatial ontology that you are proposing? And the second question I wanted to ask you regards the question of there being no outside. The clarification that you offered to us today is that there is no outside to the urban conceived as a spatial form or spatial metaphor. Except in your writings, because you place so much emphasis on urbanization as a process, there is a danger of suggesting that there is no outside to the urbanization process. I am wondering if you could reflect on that a little more.

Natalie Oswin: I have a different way of thinking about the outside. What I have been concerned about is, yes, is there an outside to the urban and to urban studies but, also, what about outsides within urban studies? How do we position urban theory as a collective project and the role of the outsides within that? There are multiple outsides within urban theory. In addition to the question of who is the urban subject there is the question of who is the urban theorist. And that’s a question that is incredibly important especially as we talk about producing knowledge about the urban that will circulate within our institutions and beyond, will circulate in our classrooms and will determine job ads and shape the kinds of positions that come up. So who is the urban theorist and how does that relate to the urban subjects within urban theory?

[…]

Darren Patrick: The translation project is already a point of tension for what seems to be at stake in the collective conversation happening here. We’ve been doing a lot of translation today – affectively, politically, linguistically, conceptually – and there has also been a lot of non-translatability. We’ve animated the idea of planetary urbanization’s capacity for a certain form of recognition, whether it be of a kind of political struggle, particular subjectivities, or other kinds of position. It brings me back to, not ‘the’ queer question, but ‘a' queer question, which is Judith Butler’s question: is what we desire always recognition? What is it to be internal to the debate or external to the debate, to be recognized within the debate or not to be recognized within the debate. … What does it mean to be ‘at home’ in urban theory?

[…]

Tariq Jazeel: Can I come in? I disagree on one point: I don’t think a lot of translation has taken place. I think we need more of that pondering over untranslatability. I’m thinking of Emily Apter’s recent book, Against World Literature. It’s about the politics of untranslatability, those moments of untranslatability that give you glimpses into difference, into the supplement, the residue, call it what you will: irreconcilable difference. I disagree with you, Neil, I don’t think you need a better theory of the rural. I think what we need to do is think through how the rural doesn’t survive but enters as that which cannot be translated, cannot be understood. I think it’s those moments of theoretical irreconcilable difference that give us glimpses of quite otherness that we need to take seriously.

[….]

Natalie Oswin: In answer to Neil’s question, of what [of planetary urbanization] lands and what doesn’t land. For me what lands really well in this work is the critique of the urban age, which I think is an incredibly important critique because it is a hegemonic discourse. You lay it out really really well and it’s a discourse that we need to engage with in terms of policy circles, in terms supra national policy, and within pockets of urban studies that have become so dominant: work on smart cities, work on techno-scientific approaches to the city, the city as salvation. So that totally lands for me. Where it doesn’t land, where I had trouble translating it for my own purposes is where you use words like ‘pinning down’ urban theory. As we’ve talked about a lot today, people are raising terms like supplement, undecideable and difference-not-yet-known, and it’s not about simply folding in. It’s not as simple as adding in. Because gender, sexuality, race are supplements. There is a divergence between your attempt to pin down the urban and a lot of other critical theory.

[….]

Geraldine Pratt: I am thinking of Gill Hart’s lecture [the Progress in Human Geography lecture delivered at the 2016 Annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers: Hart, forthcoming]. She positioned herself in the middle of this debate, trying to find her way through the two extremes of what Kate Derickson (2015) has termed Urbanization 1 and Urbanizations 2. Gill laid out what she believes to be some of the theoretical and political stakes. I wonder if some of what she laid out has relevance here. One stake that I understood Gill to be laying out for assessing various approaches is this: is it a method of working that does or does not articulate diverse struggles [with the former being the desired objective]. That resonates for me. I’m wondering what are the other stakes that need to be on the table to think about why we care about all of this.

The quotations above are just snippets from an hour-long conversation, which signpost some of the movement that took place the first day. The discussion began with an insistence on various outsides to the planetary urbanization framework and untranslatability across processes, perspectives and spatial forms. The term ‘outside’ was used to signpost a number of different perhaps interrelated concerns. It was used to express processes beyond urbanization. It was used to name an othering of particular categories of urban subjects and theorists, and it was used to open up the issue of accountability to constituencies outside of the academy. Untranslatability was claimed as both a residue and a suspicion about being incorporated through a liberal mode of recognition.

The discussion might have got stuck there were it not for a move to parse critique to find common ground, first, in a shared critique of instrumental knowledge and, second, our mutual implication in what Schmid (in a statement that cannot be included here) termed the academic industry.

Day 2

The concluding discussion on the second day began once again with elaboration of critiques of planetary urbanization: with the way the rural is conceived, for instance, and the neglect of migration, social reproduction and feminist epistemologies. Eventually two challenges emerged that were in large part about the process of knowledge production and methodologies for theorizing across difference.

Susan Ruddick: First, I wanted to thank you guys. You’ve been very open. I really welcome and want to thank you for that. I do see a tip of the iceberg [of agreement] but there are quite big differences underneath. I think that there is still an implied telos in the idea of planetary urbanization in the way that you take on difference and the way that you use ‘context of context’ to allow for [and contain] a certain amount of variation. I think that the distinction in the room is that there are people who see differences as more generative of possible political trajectories, of possible endings, or different kinds of resistance to capitalism, who see it more in terms of aleatory materialism not dialectical materialism. Even going back to Sylvia Federicci, when she talks –against Marx – about the rise of capitalism as a counter revolution against very revolutionary movements in feudalism; there is a feeling of openness in that history that is both terrifying and exciting at the same time.

The idea of returning to rural sociology or certain earlier texts in feminism to try to open thinking around difference and social ontology I think its great but I also worry about the way it can function as a kind of erasure of contemporary knowledges. [My comments are informed by the fact] that I’m working with a scholar who teaches in indigenous studies. We’re reading western philosophy in relation to indigenous philosophy and we have been doing this for two years. Mostly what I’m learning is to shut up and listen. Because I want to jump in and make connections. This is not a criticism of you. It’s more to say that this co-production of knowledge is a really scary and fraught process. I think that we’re beginning that process in this room and it makes me really hopeful. But allowing to sit with … I know in my conversations with [my colleague] I have this impulse: I want recognition and mastery. I am really excited about the way that this conversation has opened up with all of its prickly edges that we are not trying to shy away from and [at the same time] we are not trying to lascerate each other. I think that there is a strategy in the production of new knowledges that this opens up.

Ute Lehrer: I want to ask a provocative question. When I opened the book Implosions/Explosions and I looked at the table of contents and could not find … How many women are in there? [A chorus of participants: There is one co-author.] Exactly. One co-author. We’ve all been raising our hands and saying. ‘what about this’ and ‘what about that’, but actually it starts with the knowledge production. You have been pushed to be more inclusive, to try to find different ways of knowledge production that would integrate the gender question, the race question, difference in general. If you were doing the book again, how would you do it?

Geraldine: Can I come back to … ? Sue, I loved your methodology of reading together with someone else. Slowly. And listening. So I would like to come back to the question of what you [Neil and Christian] would like to learn from the discussions that have taken place here and about a methodology of a slow sitting together. Even something like social reproduction: there are lots of different ways of thinking capitalism and patriarchy and race together. You say you want to think about social reproduction. But how do you intend to think about it? Thinking about a process of how to think about something like social reproduction in relation to planetary urbanization is interesting to me.

Tariq: It was really instructive and useful to hear [Neil and Christian] talk about what this space and these two days have enabled in terms of a discussion around theory and how you’ve missed that in your respective departments and institutions. That opens a broader conversation around theory, the role of theory, the value of theory, theory culture, how we come at theory. One of the phrases that has been pushed around the last couple of days and has made me sit up and think a bit is theoretical framework. I have a [negative] reaction to that phrase. One way of sidestepping the conversation about the particularities of planetary urbanization [would be to] open up a broader conversation about the role of theory – theory’s relationship to politics. Theory’s relationship to politics is something that we all grabble with. How do we turn theoretical conversations outward? How do we orient theoretical conversations to what we in geography call ‘the field,’ to communities and spaces beyond the university. […] How do certain kinds of knowledge formations enter into the academy as theory and what becomes of them? What is the value of discussing planetary urbanization for those of us who have been brought into this discussion? We could ask the same question about the value of discussing postcolonial theory. [This kind of discussion about theory and politics] might provide more common ground.

[….]

Michelle Buckley: I am thinking a lot about intellectual generosity. I’m wondering if you might leave now and feel like you need to throw in the kitchen sink and create this vast thing that neither one of you is going to be very happy about – nobody is going to be very happy about. I’d rather flip it around a bit and, instead of thinking of how to include social reproduction or subalternity, I’d rather ask you this question. In talking to folks about the work I do, I say, ‘This is a paper about feminist urban theory.’ Or Natalie might say she works with queer urban theory. What kinds of qualifiers would you put to the urban theory you do? I wonder if a pathway forward is not about expanding out but ceding ground. Consider: who has to put qualifiers around the kind of urban theory they do? And what about if, instead of talking about that, we could get back to a point Roger [Keil] made yesterday. Common ground may be found more productively through thinking about the large political orientations that we have, the political projects around which we might be able to productively contribute together through different epistemological veins. One is the urban age discourse. From our different places we might come together to confront that collectively in different and potentially synergistic ways. The other one is taking a good hard look at the politics of knowledge in the academy. In what ways could we rethink the ways we use the discussant in day-to-day practice at conferences, for instance. I was at a wonderful sleepy 8 am feminist session [at one meeting] where there were all these grad students doing the most amazing feminist urban theory. It was so great. I felt so privileged to be the discussant. But I was the wrong discussant. I would love to see, Neil, what you would make of that session. What if we had unwitting and unwilling discussants? So I wonder if we need to flip it around a bit and think of shared political projects instead of shared epistemological ground.

Darren: The idea of mapping our institutional locations is already a very powerful suggestion. I think that the idea of inclusion troubles me a bit because it does have a liberal legacy in the space of the university, in particular. Sara Ahmed’s reflections on this are quite powerful. In [her book] On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, she looks at the operations of diversity work as an institutional mandate and explores the many ways that new terminologies are often invested in trying to ‘get over’ things that are not yet over or trying ‘to over’ things that are not yet over. So, I would like to suggest that there is a meaningful and mattering difference between the gesture of inclusion–which, despite being well taken, needs to be approached quite carefully–versus the gesture of incorporation which is a metabolic gesture of which we should be somewhat wary. This is all to say what we do matters and where we do it from matters.

Raj: The reason why I am hearing the push for inclusion [in this discussion] is because of the opening statements of planetary urbanization. When you made the opening intervention the suggestion was that the urban studies field is too fragmented. What you are suggesting is that the fragmentation is so problematic that we cannot easily work with fragments. But I don’t think so. And so the reason why there is this push for inclusion and why we see [your framework as] totalizing as readers is because of this idea that fragmentation is so problematic. It’s not I think.

Final reflection

What came out of this extended conversation, so partially rendered here? Was there any evidence of deep listening and movement in thought? Writing about ‘the brick wall’ that remains intact even when public commitments have been made to diversity, Sara Ahmed (2012) notes that getting even well intentioned people to the table does not necessarily make this wall disappear. Despite scholarly fascination with and rhetoric about various mobilities, universities as institutions and intellectual communities can be remarkably fixed in practice and thought.

For me, a particularly notable moment occurred when Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid located themselves in their institutional contexts. Each situated himself as working and teaching in an elite institution within professional schools of urban and architectural design, institutional contexts that are dominated by techno-scientific agendas. They ventured that these worlds at least in part shape their intellectual engagements and attunements. This moment was notable because they did something that is rare for those in positions of privilege: they marked and situated their knowledge contexts and potentially their own knowledge production, intimating or at least opening the possibility that there might be limits to what they can and do see.

Workshop participants offered different approaches to working with this observation. What is striking about the suggestions offered by Sue Ruddick and Michelle Buckley is that they grounded their suggestions in the actual, specific labour of knowledge production: meeting with a colleague over a long period of time to listen and learn rather than demonstrate mastery and expect recognition; and ceding ground to other knowledges and ways of knowing. Michelle Buckley’s image of the unwitting and unwilling discussant is a nicely disruptive one that invites a commitment to conversations across different knowledge communities towards a more substantial common project. She draws our attention to the fact that this likely requires moving outside our immediate research circles and the hierarchical conventions of the academy industry in sometimes inconvenient and uncomfortable ways. More than merely a focus on issues such as social reproduction or racialised urban-hinterland relations, these are perhaps some of the most important lessons coming from feminist, queer, post colonial and indigenous studies and they are about the process of knowledge production itself. It is important to stress that what is being offered is more than critical pluralism at a theoretical level. What both Sue and Michelle are gesturing towards are embodied practices of producing knowledge over time through sustained relationships of reciprocal exchange.

If there is to be moment in which to attend to how we might speak most effectively across different communities of thought, surely it is now. If there is to be a moment to articulate and appraise the stakes of disagreements between critical scholars, which prevent effective alliances and solidarities around common projects and critiques, so too surely it is now. The stakes that divide the critics of planetary urbanization from its proponents would likely benefit from fuller elaboration and reflection; this workshop provided some illustrative moments and concrete suggestions for how to carry that conversation forward.