Planetary urbanization: An urban theory for our time?

Abstract

In our engagement with Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s thesis on planetary urbanization we argue that, while they have successfully marked some important limits of mainstream thinking on the urban, their privileging of epistemology cannot produce an urban theory for our time. Engaging in a symptomatic reading of their work, and with a focus on the implications of their limited mobilization of social ontology—or Lefebvre’s ontology of the everyday—we ask what is occluded in planetary urbanization. In particular, we explore three areas of concern: the urban as the grounds for difference, centrality and the everyday; the omission of subjects of and occlusion of subjectivity; and the occlusion of a constitutive outside and its political capacities to remake the urban.

Keywords

Difference everyday planetary urbanization symptomatic reading Henri Lefebvre social ontology

The changing geographies and pace of urbanization over the past half century have been recasting urban theory, governance, and policy on a global stage. The second decade of the 21st-century is proving to be an especially momentous time for urban knowledge production in which the political stakes are enormously high, with the urban figuring as both cause and consequence of many contemporary planetary issues: the urban is both the instigator of and the solution to global climate change; it is the site of increasing inequality and the urbanization of poverty even as it is also a crucible for innovation and creativity; and it is ground zero for a new era of global governance.¹ Within this climate of different political possibilities for the urban, a number of competing, conflicting, and complementary geographical imaginaries have emerged to make sense of contemporary urbanization. Mainstream urban studies, still based on Western models of the city despite its investigations of both global and mega cities, has spawned both the Urban Age thesis, with its associated tropes of efficiency, sustainability, and equity, as well as critical approaches to the urban, including postcolonial (and comparative), queer, anti-racist, and feminist. In this article, we address the growing momentum of a relative newcomer to the stage, the ‘intentionally provocative’ (Brenner, 2011: 21) analysis of planetary urbanization popularized by Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid. Even as it critiques the Urban Age thesis, and, importantly, proposes an alternative vision, we argue that their discourse both illuminates and occludes our understanding of urbanization, leading us to ask: What is at stake in producing an urban theory for our time?

Though planetary urbanization stands as an ambitious attempt to describe the contemporary horizons of thought on the urban, we argue that it does not yet cross the threshold to new thinking. We contend that, despite good intentions and enormous effort toward breaking new ground, contemporary writing on planetary urbanization also seems largely to reproduce the terrain it is attempting to rework. As much as a new epistemological framework for the urban is desirable, it can only emerge through a reflexive engagement with questions of social ontology of the urban.²

For us a social ontology of the urban emphasizes that it is exactly the everyday struggles of people, of life as it is lived in relation to the urban (and beyond) that will shift the terrain of urban theory. To be sure, Brenner and Schmid (2014) have an ontology of the urban (which deconstructs the ‘fixity’ of the dominant urban ontology based on an epistemological framing of spatial containers) and from which their new epistemology arises. However, we argue that this addresses the spatial at the expense of the social and moreover is akin to what feminist sociologist Dorothy E. Smith criticizes, arguing that:

for every such concept, there is taken to be a something out there corresponding to it. The disappearance of people and activities is striking once we attend to it. Agency is assigned to conceptually constructed entities that lack determinant referents. It is left to readers to fill in for absence of specified referent or clearly defined meaning. (Smith, 2005: 56)

Our emphasis on social ontology, which builds on Marx’s concept as elaborated in The German Ideology, not only foregrounds the centrality of struggle over the everyday in shaping the urban (and the planetary) by bringing back people and their activities, but also renounces any idea of a clear boundary between ‘ontological struggle’ in the everyday and academic debates over the nature of ontology, which we argue are necessarily informed by these very struggles.³ Such a social ontological approach allows us to not only comprehend such everyday practice and transformations of its practitioners in relation to the formation and deformation of the urban, as well as its possible outsides, but also (paraphrasing Marx’s second thesis on Feuerbach), that the dispute over the ‘planetarity of urban’ that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.

Unless Brenner and Schmid address questions of social ontology in their engagement with planetary urbanization, they can only point towards the newly critical epistemological framework that they themselves desire. To borrow a felicitous phrase from Moten (2003), their writings are able to point to but cannot yet be the new urban theory that is needed.

The arrival of planetary urbanization: A new epistemology of the urban?

By 1970, the contemporary geography of urbanization had been put into motion, with greater numbers of people living in urban areas in the global south than in the global north, propelling the world into the ‘Urban Age’.⁴ 1970 was also the year in which Lefebvre first proposed a new global imaginary of the urban as a fabric that has thickened and extended its borders. In The Urban Revolution (1970), deeply influenced by the uprisings of 1968, Lefebvre presented a picture of urban modernity in crisis; the industrial city was being dismantled and replaced with ‘complete urbanization’. For Lefebvre, the process of urbanization transcended industrialization as the engine of capitalism in what he referred to as a process of explosion. In this emergent ‘urban society’, processes of concentration and dispersion could be understood as creating zones of agglomeration that implode, fragment, and destruct while also extending their infrastructural reach deep into previously remote areas (Brenner, 2014; Brenner and Schmid, 2014; Schmid, 2014; see also Keil, 2018).

Writing in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007–8, which amplified and intensified waves of social movements around the globe, Brenner and Schmid have reengaged Lefebvre’s thesis of complete urbanization. But, crisis and protest appear to play no constitutive role in their theorization of planetary urbanization. Instead, they highlight the need for a new epistemology of the urban, one capable of deciphering the rapidly changing geographies of urbanization under early 21st-century capitalism. To this end, Brenner and Schmid’s (2015) most elaborative offering ‘Towards a new epistemology of the urban?’ (posed perhaps appropriately as a question) usefully summarizes and systematizes the current status of their thinking on the urban in seven theses. These include: the formation of megacities and megalopolises; the densification of infrastructural networks, stretching across territories and continents, permeating oceanic and atmospheric environments; the restructuring of traditional ‘hinterlands’ through the creation of new economic spaces (e.g. export processing zones and data processing facilities); the spatial extension of large-scale land-use systems devoted to resource extraction, energy, and water and waste management; the transformation of vast ‘rural’ areas through the expansion of large-scale industrial agriculture, land grabbing, and territorial enclosure; and the commodification of ‘wilderness’ spaces, including the atmosphere itself, to serve the profit imperatives of a planetary formation of capitalist urbanization (Brenner and Schmid, 2015). The seventh thesis acknowledges struggle and revolt, but restricts their role to that of reaction formation to urbanization. Brenner and Schmid argue that through these processes urbanization has become a planetary form; there is no longer an ‘outside’ to the urban world. In fact, we contend that by focusing on ontological struggles around subject formation, which do not presume the subject arrives ready-made to the urban, a window is opened to the outside.

Their approach has also provoked critique with a chorus of scholars increasingly refusing the ‘urbanization of everything’ (Roy, 2016: 813).⁵ We acknowledge that in their interrogation of planetary urbanization, Brenner and Schmid have done important work on the ontology of the urban to mark the limits of mainstream thinking about the urban as fixed, by emphasizing process over form and highlighting the continuous capacity of capitalist urbanization to reshape spatial processes. They argue that these emergent forms challenge older conceptions of the urban—as a universally generalizable settlement type and a fixed, territorially bounded, geographically coherent unit—in a dichotomous distinction to the ‘rural’, its ontological other.⁶ Drawing on a critique of methodological cityism (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2014), they challenge the New Urban Age thesis for its purely citycentric approaches, which obscure the relationality of the urban, and for the methodological limits of its approach to measurement. Brenner and Schmid’s reformulation of the concept of the urban—specifically their attentiveness to the differentiation of form and the relations between different kinds of spaces (rural–urban, core-periphery) under the imperative of urbanization—also echoes Lefebvre’s forecast of complete urbanization. They explore the extensive infrastructures that support urban growth highlighting the importance of deriving empirical and theoretical inspirations from myriad socio-spatial constellations—towns, cities, conurbations, mega- and metacities—across the various divides that shape novel forms of urbanization. Schmid and his graduate students engage in comparative analysis of the variegated patterns and pathways of planetary urbanization, developing a new vocabulary to enhance our understanding and apprehension of the contemporary urban condition. Their turn to new methods of cartographic representation shifts our focus away from the city to the process of urbanization itself. As Brenner and Schmid (2015: 165) state, ‘the urban is a process, not a universal form, settlement type or bounded unit’. It is the process of urbanization in all its openness and ‘infinite variety’ that planetary urbanization has put on our agenda: this is not an insignificant contribution. Nevertheless, we read Lefebvre differently. Situating urbanization within a mondial [world-making] politics, we foreground social ontology and the constitutive role of subjects, subjectivity, and struggle.⁷

The limits of epistemology: A symptomatic reading

Our reading of the present conjuncture begins not with epistemology but with ontology.⁸ We consider the intensification of land use, connectivity and infrastructure, and social-environmental metabolism, to be what Merrifield (2014: 389) calls ‘formal expressions of what pervades [the urban] ontologically … that [which] is immanent in our lives’. Hence, we foreground questions about subject-production and pay attention to the contemporary restructuring of subjects in relation to the urban. In particular, we note the rise of ‘austerity urbanism’: the downloading, dismantling, and restriction of institutional supports for social reproduction—from nation to city, from city to household, and from global north to global south—enacted through the monetization and withdrawal of the basic infrastructures of survival. Coupled with resurgent right-wing nationalisms, the ensuing precaritization of employment, and indeed of all life, precipitates national and transnational migration and forced displacement, and is metastasized as slow (and fast) structural violence. If this is the planetary urbanization that is characteristic of our time, even on its own terms, it is one that forecloses the right to the city. Giving context for our engagement, Peake and Rieker (2013: 14, 16) note:

Whereas the modern city has been closely characterized by positive associations of key tropes of European and North American nation-states––people-making, the public, freedom—contemporary neo-liberal urban realities are marked by processes of disassemblage and reconstitution of the social—disintegration of family and community, the displacement of the poor, regulatory (and increasingly securitized) infrastructure, and violence … contemporary urban forms continue to inspire modernist hopes for a better life but no longer a priori define what this better life is and how it can be realised in the urban.

These are the conditions with which an urban theory for our time must contend. To develop such a theory, we engage Brenner and Schmid not through an oppositional reading, a mere reaction to their work, but rather through a symptomatic reading à la Althusser. We focus on the underlying presuppositions of planetary urbanization to determine what the work is unable to see and unable to say.⁹ As such, symptomatic reading is an interpretive strategy that does not treat omissions as ‘mere oversight’, as if what is overlooked can be remedied by greater acuity of vision. Every text constructs a field of visibility that simultaneously structures what it cannot see—there is a necessary relation between ‘the field of the visible and the field of the invisible … a non-vision inside of vision’ (Althusser, 1970: 4, 30). As Althusser (1970: 62) notes:

The original question as the classical economic text formulated it was: what is the value of labour? Reduced to the content that can be rigorously defended in the text where classical economics produced it, the answer should be written as follows: ‘The value of labour () is equal to the value of the subsistence goods necessary for the maintenance and reproduction of labour ()’. There are two blanks, two absences in the text of the answer. Thus Marx makes us see blanks in the text of classical economics’ answer; but that is merely to make us see what the classical text itself says while not saying it, does not say while saying it … there is something lacking and this lack is strictly designated by the function of the terms themselves in the whole sentence.

New objects and problems are not overlooked in a particular theoretical field of vision but are occluded by it. Reconstructing a text through a symptomatic reading requires a shift in terrain by identifying its points of occlusion, its theoretical unconscious, its lack, which is both present in and absent from the text. Through the identification of this lack in the classical economic text, Marx is able to change the terms of the problem, from labour to labour power, and with it the answer, an interrogation of the value of labour-power.

It is our contention that what Brenner and Schmid cannot see is ontological struggles around the everyday, connected to but not wholly subsumed by the processes of urbanization. While contributions that might force a radical shift in the terrain have been mentioned in the writings of Brenner and Schmid on planetary urbanization, they have been ring fenced, acknowledged only as particular instances of a general process. Brenner and Schmid, for example, take the stance that post-colonial approaches, imbued (as they see it) with ‘the trope of contextual specificity’ are thus only intelligible ‘in relation to the generality against which they are defined’ (2015: 161).

Indeed, feminist, anti-racist, post-colonial, and queer theories of the urban are most notably absent in recent attempts to develop a comprehensive urban theory (see, e.g. Brenner, 2009, 2013, 2014) and to shift it from its limiting foundations. Yet one cannot simply graft such substantial critiques on to an emergent epistemology of the planetary urban, as if they were missing pieces in a puzzle, nor simply can one add a series of overlooked voices to the ‘larger thesis’ of planetary urbanization. Nor is it possible to treat ‘overlooked voices’ as the material of thick description, whose role is to simply breathe life by way of example into abstract concepts. Our aim here is not to critique the omissions within contemporary writings on planetary urbanization as evidence of some moral failure on behalf of these scholars. As we have said, much important work has been done to chart the limits of mainstream thinking about the urban. We would rather read Brenner and Schmid’s work symptomatically, beginning with their occlusion of the generative capacities of an approach that begins in Brenner and Schmid’s (2015: 174) seven theses on urban theory that bring them to the following conclusion:

In our symptomatic reading of this article, we contend that, unlike classical economists who occlude by omission, Brenner and Schmid’s inability to see the generative capacities of ontological struggle proceeds through the following interconnected manoeuvres:

An overemphasis on changes in urban morphology. In the first six theses, Brenner and Schmid counterpose static and bounded conceptions of the urban with a constantly shifting morphology of urban form, insisting on the relational quality of urban processes as spatialization. However, despite their close and detailed attention to the proliferating morphological effects of urbanization’s turn toward planetarity, they seem to locate this dynamism in morphology itself, meaning we never really get a sense of the multiple, and often incommensurable, causes driving urbanization.

The occlusion of the social in a socio-spatial dialectic. Returning to Smith, the social is effectively erased, empty of the people and activities and the generative quality these bring to new spatializations, shifting forms and fabrics of the urban. A fully socio-spatial dialectic would admit a wider canvass.

The relegation of ontological struggle to the local. To the extent that Brenner and Schmid acknowledge struggles over the everyday, over the ontological nature of being, they are viewed as local, specific, contextual, and fragmented and thus not capable of a mondial politics. Their ‘contextual specificity is enmeshed within, and mediated through, broader configurations of capitalist uneven spatial development and geopolitical power’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 160). For Brenner and Schmid, these struggles over social ontology are neither generative nor capable of any sense of unification, or broader counter-hegemonic alliance.¹⁰

The overdetermination of ontological struggle through an epistemological framing. Brenner and Schmid establish a broad epistemological tent that functions as the interpretive schema for ontological struggles: ‘… our proposals are meant to demarcate some relatively broad epistemological parameters within which a multiplicity of reflexive approaches to critical urban theory might be pursued … Any rigorously reflexive account of the urban requires this meta-theoretical moment’ (2015: 163). We propose an inversion of this relationship: It is through generative, messy ontological struggles that new ways of seeing and being emerge, thereby reshaping epistemology.

Through these maneouvres, Brenner and Schmid reinscribe the urban as planetary. Urbanization is not only the planetary present, but destiny: ‘The urban has become a generalized planetary condition in and through which … humanity’s possible futures are simultaneously organized and fought out’ (Brenner, 2011: 206). Within this framing, to the extent that ontological struggles do become visible, they are only visible as urban––as a reaction formation to urbanization––rather than emanating from a range of positions, which are neither solely nor wholly urban. In our reading, these struggles are not responses to or an after effect of an urbanization, which proceeds in a linear or sequential fashion (first urbanization, then differentiation, and then response). They are the very ground upon which urban futures are fought out.

Changing the field of vision: Towards a social ontology of the urban

While Althusser’s method of symptomatic reading demonstrated Marx’s own exposure of classical economists as the revelation of an absence, our engagement of this same method reveals an overdetermining presence of the urban in Brenner and Schmid’s treatment of Lefebvre’s notion of planetary urbanization (see also Reddy, 2018). What if we were to put the term urban under erasure (sous rature, in the Derridean sense) at specific points in Brenner and Schmid’s texts? Freed from the insistence on the urban as an overdetermined presence, its erasure opens up different terrains of thought. Following on from a symptomatic reading we would argue that the unnecessary insertion of the term ‘urban’ at specific sites forecloses our capacity to see what is operative. In a re-examination of ‘Towards a new epistemology of the urban’, focusing on the following statements, we put the term urban under erasure:

differential urbanization is also the result of various forms of ~~urban~~ struggle and expresses the powerful potentials for radical social and political transformation. (2015: 168, our emphasis)

[Processes of urbanization] are generated through the ‘productive force’ of agglomeration and associated operational landscapes; they are often instrumentalized through capital and state institutions to facilitate historically specific forms of industrialization and political regulation; but they are also re-appropriated, redistributed and continually remade through the everyday use and contestation of ~~urban~~ space. (2015: 177, our emphasis)

[A] wide range of new ~~urban~~ practices and discourses are being produced in diverse places, territories and landscapes, often in zones that are geographically removed from large cities, but where new forms of collective insurgency are emerging in response to the patterns of industrial restructuring, territorial enclosure and landscape reorganization sketched above. (2015: 178, our emphasis)

Is it still possible, or necessary, to come to the conclusion that ‘an other’ is enfolded in the processes of urbanization, and therefore only rendered visible through it? Or does putting the urban under erasure cross a threshold to a different kind of conceptualization, whereby social struggles engage the urban—and indeed the new churning morphologies of urbanization—without being either wholly defined or subsumed by these processes?

We might ask, for instance, about the regional movements around precarious labor in southern Europe, or diasporic movements, which remain engaged in countries of origin, or pan-Indigenous movements against the incursion of resource extractive industries into their territories. To say that these struggles are caught up in the dynamics of planetary urbanization is not the same as saying that they are wholly subsumed by that process. As ontological struggles over what it is to be human and what is means to coexist on the planet, they are defined by other organizing frameworks, often already mondial in one form or another. To be sure, their mondial networks, interconnections, and alliances are less immediately legible as forms or processes of spatialization-urbanization (Brenner and Schmid’s preferential focus), but they are no less real for that, and no less impactful upon the shaping of urbanization.

Marx, unlike Brenner and Schmid, emphasized the generative capacity of social ontology. In the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx argues against the idea of ontology as a kind of anthropological essence of Being, derived from either an inherent unwavering biology or a speculative spiritual Substance. Ontology is not, a generic abstraction [that] is somehow 'inherent' (innewohnend) in individuals of the same genus, either as a quality they possess, by which they may be classified, or even as a form or a force which causes them to exist as so many copies of the same model (Balibar, 1995: 29). Rather, Marx (1998: 570) suggests ‘the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations’, implying that ‘social relations designated here are nothing but an endless transformation, a “permanent revolution”’(Balibar, 1995: 33). How do we engage Marx’s social ontology in relation to the urban? What provokes a shift in terrain?

For this we turn to Lefebvre, for whom the shift in terrain emerges from the conflictual nature of everyday experience.¹¹ Lefebvre’s argument provides critical support for our position that it is through the ontological restructuring of subjectivity––arising both in struggle and in the interstices of everyday life (Lefebvre, 1992)––that a new critical engagement of the urban arises, rather than through a pre-figurative epistemology.¹² In this sense, the urban itself becomes a site of production—an oeuvre. For us, this crucially implies that the forms of politics the urban subtends are not immediately knowable (perhaps not least by theorists trying to explicate them).

From the late 1940s to the early 1980s, Lefebvre tracked the production and transformation of everyday life, which he also termed the ‘residual’ (Lefebvre, 1947), as the moment in which the urban comes to underpin the reproduction of capitalism. As previously mentioned, Lefebvre (1970) looked back at the uprisings of 1968¹³ to formulate a concept of the urban revolution, which he invested with two senses. In the first sense, the urban revolution inverts relationships between the pre-capitalist rural and the ‘urban’ (in fact, the city), and subsequently the relation between capitalist industrialization and capitalist urbanization. The ‘rural’¹⁴ no longer produces the ‘urban’, but the reverse. Moreover, the urban is no longer merely an effect of capitalist industrialization. Once produced, the urban does not depend on industrialization for its own continuity; it becomes capitalism’s opening to different labour processes through a reorganization of socio-spatial relations (implosion–explosion, differentiation, etc.).

In a second sense, the urban revolution shifts the site of struggle from the factory to the everyday. At the very least, everyday struggles become as important as those over sites of production in industrial capitalism. It is this second sense that interests us here. Lefebvre alludes to the potential for a new politics of urban revolution, which can transform everyday life in all its aspects (everyday life is largely absent in the writings of Brenner and Schmid).¹⁵ First of all, these politics encompass an autogestion, which is an ongoing form and practice of self-management, as opposed to state-managed organization. Lefebvre (1969: 90) says self-management ‘indicates the road toward the transformation of everyday existence’, it ‘defines the meaning of the revolutionary process’. Secondly, for Lefebvre (1982: np, our translation) ‘The mondial [as opposed to the global] is at once the site and the scenario of the possible’. Mondialization, while a condition of possibility for globalization, also expresses an inversion of the relationship to globalization, which can only ever be a truncated expression of mondialization. As Kostas Axelos, quoted in Elden (2008: 82, emphasis in original) argues:

Globalization names a process which universalizes technology, economy, politics, and even civilization and culture. But it remains somewhat empty. The world, as an opening is missing. The world is not the physical and historical totality, it is not the more or less empirical ensemble of theoretical and practical ensembles. It deploys itself. The thing that is called globalization is a kind of mondialization without the world.

The present absences of social ontology, the everyday, subjectivity, a politics of revolution, and the constitutive outside in Brenner and Schmid’s work are not simply sins of omission. In the following sections, we ask in more detail what is occluded in planetary urbanization, with a particular focus on the ways in which Brenner and Schmid bypass Lefebvre’s ontology.¹⁶ In particular, we explore three concerns along with their political implications: the urban as a ground for difference; the omission of subjects and occlusion of subjectivity; and the occlusion of a constitutive outside and its capacity to remake the urban.

The urban as a ground for difference: Centrality and the everyday

In Brenner and Schmid’s planetary urbanization two of Lefebvre’s ontological concepts, those of the everyday and of centrality, crucial to understanding urban futures, fall away from their analysis. As we noted earlier, for Lefebvre the concept of everyday life was critically important and one of his longest standing projects. It is, as Trebitsch (1991: xxiv) argues: ‘… both a parody of a lost plenitude and the last remaining vestige of that plenitude’. Or as Kipfer (2018) states, it is the ‘contradictory “terrain” of banality and possibility, routine and imaginary’. For Lefebvre, the everyday forms the ground for the right to the city, rooted in a praxis of autogestion and a mondialization of politics. In other words, the everyday is the ‘shifting terrain’ from which a new political imaginary might emerge. This terrain of the everyday—as social reproduction—is also central to feminist scholars in that it is a contradictory realm of alienation and liberation (Katz, 2001; Mackenzie, 1989; Peake and Rieker, 2013; Buckley and Strauss, 2016). The everyday is the lived space in which all human life occurs—in which labour is reproduced and subjectivity is formed, i.e. where the formation of the self, itself a form of self-governance, and hence inherently political, and the reproduction of social relations converge (see de Simoni, 2015).¹⁷

While Brenner and Schmid (2015: 71) do recognize that urbanization mediates everyday life, their formulation of planetary urbanization vastly under-privileges the political dimensions of this process. In this sense, contra Lefebvre, they emulate Harvey, who despite treating urbanization as a strategic entry point to understand the capitalist mode of production, views ‘everyday life in a derivative way, as a repository of larger processes rather than a semiautonomous and contradictory level of totality, and an ultimate yardstick of Revolution’ (Kipfer et al., 2008a: 8). Brenner and Schmid have the same difficulty dealing ‘with the “lived experiences of people in history”’ (Kipfer et al., 2008a: 8). But what would it mean to make good on this demand—to deal effectively with the ‘lived experiences of people in history’?

In The Urban Revolution, Lefebvre (1970) addresses lived experience through everyday life and provides an explication of difference. It is important to note that difference for Lefebvre is not the social difference conceptualized by feminist and postcolonial scholars (as an expression of relational connectedness). Difference is produced through the differential process of the mediation of the everyday and the global levels by the urban. Here Lefebvre crucially distinguishes between minimal and maximal difference. As Kipfer et al. (2008b: 206) explain:

Hegemonic projects in an urbanizing world are thus best captured as ways of absorbing everyday life and ‘minimizing’ difference through the production of abstract space and linear time. In turn, oppositional projects become counterhegemonic to the extent that they connect revolutionary claims to decision-making and strategies that transform segregated, minimally different peripheries into quests for spatial centrality and maximally different, non-capitalist forms of everyday life.

It is in the unruly, generative, and uncontainable realm of the everyday that minimal differences morph into maximal differences. Modes of resistance, collective struggles, and the building of alternatives emerge, reassembling and transforming fragments of urban life, keeping the urban open to radical possibilities of emancipation and enabling Lefebvre’s notion of revolution (see also McLean, Derickson, and Oswin, 2018). In this light, we see difference not as an after-effect but as the constitutive basis of capitalism itself.

Lefebvre’s conception of the right to the city was predicated on a right to difference, to urban life, which hinges, in part, on a right to centrality (Lefebvre, 1967).¹⁸ He defined space by its form—its capacity to generate encounters, assemblies, and gatherings—which he conceptualized as ‘centrality’. Lefebvre, in The Urban Revolution, expands on the urban’s potential for radical emancipation through it being a site of centrality: it is through the centrality afforded by urban form that difference becomes productive (Schmid, 2014).¹⁹ While centrality, or form, cannot be directly read from urban locations, centrality for Lefebvre while ‘a facilitator of economic, social, political, and cultural development’ is also ‘a feature of a particular location’ (Stanek, 2008: 75). And yet in their rush to correct methodological cityism, Brenner and Schmid deny the city as a still obvious site of urban struggles, overlooking the enduring and novel ways it articulates with non-urban struggles. In arguing that ‘under contemporary conditions of planetary urbanization, the classical city (and its metropolitan and regional variants) can no longer serve as the primary reference point for urban struggles’ (2015: 177), they offer instead planetary urbanization as the only way these struggles can be made sense of (p. 178).

While the classical city has never been a singular reference point for social struggle, we cannot deny the meaning and relevance that cities still play as sites of centrality in everyday life. Towns and cities are not only the endpoints of the massive migrations and forced displacements that have been taking place across Europe and Africa. They are also where the right to difference and to survival can best be realized or at least fought for. Beyond erasing traditional city-based social movements from theoretical consideration (mobilized around issues of housing, transportation, education and other infrastructures of social reproduction), such a viewpoint also erases other city-centric, sometimes ephemeral, encounters and assemblages that may point towards alternative urban futures (what Derickson, 2018, channeling Rancière refers to as ‘ruptures’). We also note that the reference points of these struggles, while mobilizing centrality, go far beyond the coordinates offered by the urban.

In short, planetary urbanization is in danger of rendering the city’s connection to centrality obsolete, erasing both embodied and embedded struggles for the ‘right to the city’ and more expansive emancipatory imaginaries (see also Davidson and Iveson, 2015). In jettisoning form for process, Brenner and Schmid cannot address questions about centrality’s role in the creation of productive difference in everyday life.

The omission of subjects and the occlusion of subjectivity

Part of the challenge of reading politics into Brenner and Schmid’s formulation of planetary urbanization is that it is very difficult, not to say impossible, to locate either subjects or the process of subjectivation. To be able to develop an epistemology that is capable of a transformative politics we must return to a social ontology, not as a product of epistemological framing, but as it is shaped and reshaped in the everyday, in a manner that both literally and figuratively changes the subject. Lefebvre’s second sense of urban revolution necessarily draws into question processes of politicized subjectivation; we cannot, then, approach planetary urbanization as if ‘the urban subject’ arrives to the scene of the planetary already constituted. The possibilities of autogestion and mondialization require that we pay close attention to contestations over the shape, form, management, and inhabitation of the urban while not assuming that the collective subjects who engage in this contestation are adequately described or intelligible, let alone from a critical height that sees only the broad terrain of struggle, according to abstracted deductions.

We might offer so-called ‘empirical evidence’ of the widespread connected and expanding movements which effectively frame subjectivity in terms of the right to the city (e.g. Occupy, Black Lives Matter, SlutWalk, No One is Illegal, to name but a few in the contemporary conjuncture). These ontological struggles, far from local or particular, are mondial in their orientation; they provoke profound epistemological shifts around the constitution of the subject, generating new experiments in autogestion. The ‘multiple trajectories, contested nature, and messy paradoxical character’ (see O’Callaghan, 2018) of these struggles are omitted from planetary urbanization’s remit, in part, we argue, because of the occlusion of praxis and in part because of the curious lack of interest in situating planetary urbanization in the current conjuncture.

Perhaps the most startling evidence of this lack of interest is Brenner and Schmid’s blindness to the role of migration in shaping subjectivities. In sources ranging across the political spectrum, the role of migration is recognized as a major force of urbanization in the 21st-century: the latest UN report on urbanization estimates that ‘about 60 percent of the growth of cities in developing countries was due to natural increase, while the remainder was due to net migration and reclassification’ (UN, 2015: 24). Moreover, Harvey (2014: 60) has noted: ‘The massive forced and unforced migration of people now taking place in the world … will have as much if not greater significance in shaping urbanization in the 21st century as the powerful dynamic of unrestrained capital mobility and accumulation’. Brenner and Schmid’s recognition of the dynamics of spatial extension makes their blindness to migration puzzling, as network and infrastructure construction are intertwined with subjects’ mobile geographies, not only substantiating Simone’s (2004) claim that people too are infrastructure, but also overlooking the fact that in many places it is migrants and migration that underly processes of urbanization.²⁰

Hoffman’s investigations (2013, 2014) of Chinese cities further evidences how subjectivities are shaped through urbanization. She shows how urban politics are located in the constitution of new categories of subjects in Chinese cities giving rise to new modes of self-governance such as self-enterprise, volunteerism, and charitable giving. In the Chinese context, ‘This has produced particular kinds of cities (entrepreneurial, financially “efficient”) emerging in tandem with particular kinds of subjects (professionals and volunteers)’ (Hoffman, 2013: 1583). Moreover, the formation of the self may lead to a range of political possibilities—whether revolutionary or individualistic—raising the question of what is at stake in such processes. What Hoffman's empirically-based work reveals is that the politics of urban governance leads to the normalization of the self as cosmopolitan––however incomplete––producing subjectivities that are not only in but also of the urban. These politicized subjectivities cannot be pre-determined. In Brenner and Schmid’s account of planetary urbanization it is these processes of subjectivation, what Merrifield (2014) refers to as the ‘undergrowth’, that are occluded. It is only the ‘overgrowth’ of the urban that concerns them. And yet, for Brenner and Schmid it is this incomplete whole that forms the urban, the whole urban, and nothing but the urban.

The occlusion of a constitutive outside and its generative possibilities

What kind of category then is the urban? By advocating for an urbanization that has produced a fabric which now, albeit unevenly, blankets the planet, Brenner and Schmid posit that there is no longer an ontological space for an other, an outside:

The urban is thus no longer defined in opposition to an ontological Other located beyond or ‘outside’ it, but has instead become the very tissue of human life itself, at once the framework and the basis for the many forms of sociospatial differentiation that continue to proliferate under contemporary capitalist conditions. Nor can the rural be understood any longer as a perpetually present ‘elsewhere’ or ‘constitutive outside’ that permits the urban to be demarcated as a stable, coherent and discrete terrain. Instead, this supposedly non-urban realm has now been thoroughly engulfed within the variegated patterns and pathways of a planetary formation of urbanization. In effect, it has been internalized into the very core of the urbanization process. (Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 174)

Brenner and Schmid use the notion of ‘the urban without an outside’ to avoid marking the urban as a bounded terrain which would deny its relational connection to the rural (or to other concepts of territory). The urban and its ‘others’ are not seen as mutually opposite or self-evident, but as outmoded analytical categories all now subsumed by the urbanization process. To be sure, ‘other’ (non-urban) spaces still exist, but can no longer be conceptualized as constituting an independent and autonomous set of social relations (see Goonewardena, 2018).

We contend, however, that Brenner and Schmid are not clear on whether the non-urban still has an agency independent of urbanization: they declare that non-urban ‘spaces still exist and may even play decisive roles in the social, political and economic life of certain regions, for instance, in parts of Africa, Southeast Asia or Latin America’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 174). This lack of clarity may partially arise (we would argue) from the consignment of such disparate categories as the rural, the countryside, agricultural lands, hinterlands, deserts, forests, mountains, the wilderness, seas and oceans, unceded territories, and indigenous lands into this catchall category, rendering it a chaotic concept.

Sayer (1992) defines a chaotic concept as one that is not rationally abstracted from other relations and objects. It does not ‘isolate … a significant element of the world which has some unity and autonomous force such as a structure. A bad abstraction [it] arbitrarily divides the indivisible and/or lumps together the unrelated and the inessential, thereby “carving up” the object of study with little or no regard for its structure or form’ (p. 138). In other words, as a chaotic concept, we cannot attribute casual powers (or liabilities) to the non-urban as Brenner and Schmid appear to do. Rather, we need greater conceptual specificity. While chaotic concepts may share common properties, they cannot be interpreted as causally significant ones. The category of the non-urban may well subsume different processes, related in ways that warrant their consideration under a common umbrella term, but, lacking a concise definition, it is insufficiently robust to constitute a coherent category. A more robust understanding of the multiple causalities embedded in all that is collapsed into the non-urban demands closer attention to the historically and geographically constituted differences within this categorization. Planetary urbanization risks casting such differences as simple empirical variation allowing Brenner and Schmid to apply universality to the non-urban, modified only as different varieties of the same thing.

Despite Brenner and Schmid’s attention to historically changing relations, their analysis does not represent the non-urban as a dynamic geo-historical relation but as an epistemological object. While we agree that the rural may—for the most part—no longer exists outside the urban, we see this as a function of ongoing transformations in the social division of labour—not as an epistemological reinscription. Rural production, even when it is not capitalist, is mainly for the capitalist global market, i.e. its social relations are already subsumed by the so-called inside, namely urban capitalism. But we argue that ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are still being produced and reproduced through the social division of labour of specific localities in ways that are connected to extra-localities.

For instance, the socially coordinated actions of racialized, gendered, sexualized and colonized subjects in North America—e.g. Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and many more—are protecting and producing outsides. The actions of these movements are not simply reproducing the urban in a differential and referential manner. Is what they are demanding ‘an other urban’ or something else? The pipeline protests in North America, for example, which Brenner and Schmid would have us cast as urban have been shown by Kipfer (2018) to be irreducible to a set of demands for ‘a more socially equitable, democratically managed, and environmentally sane form of urbanization’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 178). Despite the threats posed by urbanization to ‘indigenous claims to land, livelihood and sovereignty, the “politics of refusal” advanced by advocates for indigenous resurgence targets not so much cities per se than the colonial-capitalist forms of space-time that govern North America as a whole’ (Kipfer, 2018: see also Derickson and Jazeel, 2018).

Jazeel (2018) argues that ‘it is from this outside that productive supplements to planetary urbanization’s theoretical logic can usefully be mobilized’. Put differently, the problem of an outside is a problem of social ontology. Both inside and outside are in process, being constantly formed and reformed through peoples’ social relations on an everyday basis and, as such, social ontology is inherently linked to geo-histories. The ontological questions we would ask are: What is outside or, for that matter, inside, and what are the processes that produce these entities? Where is the place within planetary urbanization for a consideration of the ‘residual’ (Strauss and Buckley, 2016) nature of the urban and hence its undecidability (Peake, 2016a, 2016b; Roy, 2016), the difference that is as yet unknown?

Conclusion

Brenner and Schmid’s important intervention into urban theory is one that is already widely acknowledged. While we recognize that they are still working towards a more complete elaboration of planetary urbanization, we still have serious disagreements with their thesis. In engaging in a symptomatic reading of Brenner and Schmid’s epistemological enterprise, we have pointed to a range of crucial occlusions. These are: the obscuration of ontology in an approach that proceeds from epistemology; the pivotal role of the everyday as a site of knowledge production about urban futures; the role of centrality in the production of difference in everyday life; the ways subjectivities shape and are shaped by urban processes (among others); and the generative possibilities of a constitutive outside. Urbanization is an open process determined through praxis, by actual people making the world they inhabit. While we expect Brenner and Schmid would be in agreement with this statement, their focus on epistemology as the site of a generative reimagining of the urban—at the expense of social ontology—limits the possibilities of planetary urbanization as the means through which we can produce an urban theory for our time. By destabilizing the imputed stasis of the urban, they have saved the concept from the hands of formalists and urban agers. But the ‘planetarity’ of urbanization can only ever be a speculative epistemological enterprise, one of many competing analytical frameworks. Planetary urbanization is not the only, perhaps not even the most crucial, mode from which we can conceive the emancipatory politics of a right to the city, a politics which foregrounds autogestion and mondialization. If there is to be an urban theory for our time it must not only engage but emerge from difference. It is not merely that we are asking that difference be acknowledged as a constitutive aspect of capitalism, but that we must recognize difference, struggles over social ontology and the everyday as the seedbed of struggle, the locus from which subjects are capable of transforming both themselves and the world in which they live.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid for their collegial engagement with us and all the participants of the workshop.

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) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article was presented as a paper at the 2016 workshop held at the City Institute, York University: Rethinking Urban Theory Through the Analytical Lens of Planetary Urbanization. This workshop was funded by a SSHRC Connection Grant #611-2015-0151.

Notes

Susan Ruddick is a professor in Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her thematic interests include continental philosophy and its relationship to geographic thought with emphasis on: the work of Deleuze and Spinoza on critical theory; the politics of affect; and shifting understandings of nature and the ‘post-human’. Her publications have appeared in Urban Geography; Antipode; Theory, Culture and Society; Public Culture; Philosophy Today; Dialogues in Human Geography; Society and Space. She translated and wrote the introduction to Pierre Macherey’s Hegel or Spinoza. Her current research focuses on urban-wildlife relations.

Linda Peake is a director of the City Institute at York University, Toronto, Canada. She is a feminist geographer with research interests on: gendered urban insecurities in the global south, specifically as they pertain to Guyana; whiteness and anti-racist practices; and feminist methodologies. She has numerous publications and has sat on a number of editorial boards of academic journals including having been the Managing Editor of Gender, Place and Culture and a founding editor of Social and Cultural Geography. Most recently she has joined the International Advisory Board of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

Gökbörü S Tanyildiz is a PhD candidate in Sociology at York University. His research interest is mainly in social theory—specifically, 18th- and 19th-century German social and political thought, 20th-century French critical theory, and historical materialism. Gokboru’s dissertation foregrounds a historical materialist conception of the body and sexuality. As an international student coming from Turkey, he also works on social movements and political-economy of the Middle East. Both in English and Turkish, his writings have appeared in edited scholarly books in the academic disciplines of geography, philosophy, and sociology.

Darren Patrick is a researcher, writer, activist, and PhD candidate in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. Darren's academic work focuses on trans*feminist and queer social movements, queer and feminist theory, autonomy, and urban politics. Darren's writing has appeared in The Guardian, Internazionale and in numerous academic journals and web-based, open access publications.

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