Abstract
In my engagement with the planetary urbanization thesis, I make three main interventions: (1) I emphasize the pioneering contributions that postcolonial and relational geographical approaches have made to planetary thought long before the recent planetary turn in urban studies; (2) I underscore the disconcerting ethico-political implications of planetary urbanization's will to map the “extended landscapes” of urbanization and its reduction of contemporary planetary condition to the imperatives of capitalist urbanization; and (3) I offer the deconstructive strategy of writing “under erasure” that puts both the city and urbanization under erasure to highlight the blind spots of planetary urbanization. Then to demonstrate the value of writing under erasure, I focus upon waste – as both material and semiotic artifact of capitalist urbanization – and offer a “supplementary reading” of Bangalore that sketches the multiple constitutive outsides of the city, which in turn make empirically evident the stakes of planetary urbanization's occlusions. I conclude by suggesting that proponents of planetary urbanization and urban studies more broadly embrace writing under erasure as a useful epistemological orientation to build better theories of the urban.
By no means is the rural the only or even a privileged constitutive outside [of the urban]. (Roy, 2015: 813)
The second section mobilizes the deconstructive strategy of writing “under erasure” and contends that waste – as both material and semiotic artifact of capitalist urbanization – is a powerful lens for elaborating a postcolonial critique of Bangalore and offering a “supplementary reading” that sketches the multiple constitutive outsides of the city, which in turn make empirically evident the blind spots of planetary urbanization and the stakes of these occlusions.
Planetary urbanization: Putting the urban “under erasure”
In seven provocative theses, Brenner and Schmid elaborate a “new epistemology of the urban” and argue that the processes of implosion-explosion have resulted in the urban becoming a planetary condition such that “the urban is no longer coherently contained within or anchored to the city” but extends far beyond it “crosscutting any number of long-entrenched geographical divisions (urban/rural, city/countryside, society/nature, North/South, East/West)” (2015: 155, 173). Yet, according to Brenner and Schmid, scholarly as well as neoliberal “urban-age” policy approaches to the urban, have failed to comprehend the “planetary formation of capitalist urbanization” (2015: 153) because these approaches remain tethered to inherited epistemological frameworks and continue to focus urban research upon the “city tout court” at the cost of systematically studying accelerating urbanization and the processes of implosion-explosion that are vastly expanding the terrain of the urban, and stretching the urban fabric across the planet to places, regions and landscapes far beyond the “city” to include “wilderness” spaces located in “remote” corners of the world. For Brenner and Schmid, these remote landscapes of “extended urbanization” are the crucial hinterlands or “operational landscapes” that cities (sites of “concentrated urbanization”) depend upon to meet their socioeconomic and socio-metabolic requirements. As such, Brenner and Schmid (2015: 162) call for the expanding terrain of the urban and not the city as such to be “analyzed and theorized centrally” within urban studies. In sum, under the rubric of planetary urbanization, Brenner and Schmid (2013, 2015) seek to fundamentally reorient the epistemological foundations of urban studies away from the overdetermined focus on cities tout court towards analyzing and theorizing the extended operational landscapes of urbanization.
However, Brenner and Schmid's (2015: 151) “radical rethinking of inherited epistemological assumptions” of urban studies traverses terrain long familiar to postcolonial and relational geographical approaches to socio-spatial dynamics. For instance, Enrique Dussel's (1998) astute postcolonial displacement of Eurocentrism has given us the “planetary paradigm of modernity” which shows that Europe's modernity is not the result of autochthonous dynamism but the “fruit” of Europe's management of the “center” and domination of people and places in distant colonial “peripheries.” The effect of Dussel's and other postcolonial scholarship's planetary spatial emphasis is – as Doreen Massey (1999: 24) points out – to spatialize and “rework modernity away from being the unfolding, internal story of Europe alone.” To spatialize modernity is to spatialize the urban, for modernity is indivisibly aligned to city life (cf. Robinson, 2006). Generally then postcolonial scholarship's spatial emphasis has long made it particularly attuned to the fact that the hinterlands of cities – especially of London, Paris and other capitals of the metropole – are not just adjacent but also planetary, and has demonstrated the centrality of distant, dispersed, discontinuous colonial peripheries secured through the violence of colonization and plunder to the prosperity and reproduction of the metropole (cf. Dussel, 1998; King, 1990).
Similarly, proponents of relational geographical approaches to space/place have shown that the specificity of places – such as the “world city” – is “constructed out of particular constellation of relations” which link a place to other near and distant places (Massey, 1994: 154). Relational approaches that make “relational comparisons” between places, trace the “multiple trajectories of socio-spatial change” and show how “spatially interconnected sets of practices” mutually produce often distant territories and places (Hart, 2002: 14). Relational approaches that emphasize planetary co-constitution of places have therefore continuously called into question “easy distinctions like inside/outside, near/far” (Warf, 2008: 75). Overall, in postcolonial and relational approaches, the urban has never been fixed or bounded and distant planetary places have always been understood to be the conditions of possibility for cities. Yet, the pioneering contributions of postcolonial and relational geographical approaches to planetary thought are barely acknowledged in Brenner and Schmid's scholarship on planetary urbanization. To paraphrase Deloughrey (2014), we must ask what it means to position contemporary theorists of planetary urbanization as originary pioneers of a planetary turn in urban studies?
Furthermore, the ambitious agenda of Brenner and Schmid (2015: 175) to bring extended urbanization into reflexive focus by developing a “new analytical and cartographic orientation” conjures up colonial mapping exercises where usually male European explorers sought to map the “empty,” “unknown” lands of the colonies and re-inscribe the purported terra nullius/terra incognita of the colonies with their ideologies. For example, arguing that iconic maps of the “urban age” such as the nighttime lights map 1 (that show lit up urban agglomerations of our planet at night) leave vast areas of extended urbanization in the dark, researchers at Harvard's Urban Theory Lab (UTL), which Brenner directs, have taken on the task of illuminating landscapes rendered dark (or terra nullius/terra incognita) by “urban age” proponents. 2 As part of this effort, UTL has subjected eight regions of extended urbanization (namely the Amazon, the Arctic, the atmosphere, the Gobi desert, the Himalayas, the Pacific Ocean, the Sahara desert, and Siberia) that are “dark” in the nighttime lights map to what Brenner terms “extreme stress” to show that these regions are in fact extended landscapes of urbanization that serve as crucial operational landscapes/hinterlands of lit up urban agglomerations. 3
While criticizing the deeply flawed visualizations of urban age proponents is certainly important, the vantage point and visualization techniques that UTL researchers have embraced to penetrate and illuminate the supposed dark regions results in the production of disabling, disembodied, aerial and “god's eye-views” of the extended landscapes of urbanization (see also Derickson 2018 and Peake, 2015). The aerial optic preserves the terra nullius/terra incognita imaginaries of urban age proponents – because in UTL's visualization, the extended urban landscapes, of the Amazon for instance, does not emerge as a landscape that has been constituted through a history of struggles, but as an unpeopled landscape on which the inexorable forces of capitalist urbanization bear down and leave a landscape pockmarked with ever thickening lines of infrastructures that serve the socio-metabolic needs of cities. 4 When UTL's aerial optic oversaturates the extended urban landscapes of the Amazon in this way, it effaces subjugated and critical knowledge(s) of indigenous people and other marginalized groups from fields such as indigenous studies, agrarian studies, political ecology, development studies, rural sociology which already study and provide richly textured accounts of uneven development of these landscapes and the attendant range of struggles that have emerged to contest enclosure, displacement, and plunder. Besides as UTL deploys its aerial optic and refines its cartographic depictions, it has made little effort to work with and understand how other spatial ontologies, such as indigenous spatial ontologies, might understand, visualize and map the landscapes that Brenner and Schmid reductively label as extended landscapes of urbanization. Thus, UTL like urban age proponents treats the extended urban landscapes as if they really are terra nullius/terra incognita awaiting cartographic illumination. The result of UTL's aerial “way of seeing” (cf. Cosgrove, 1985) a putatively urbanized planet is the re-inscription of a totalizing planetary urbanization ideology upon all landscapes and the constitution of the planet as a terra urbis 5 – where there is no “outside” to the urban and where the “the race for the ‘last instance” (to invoke Spivak, 1988: 274) is won by urbanization.
When Brenner and Schmid (2013: 21) controversially assert that there is “no longer any outside to the urban world,” their goal is to destabilize the problematic urban/rural binary “that has long underpinned the epistemology of urban concepts.” However, their move to destabilize one problematic binary unwittingly perpetuates disabling “impact model” (cf. Hart, 2002) narratives that paradoxically end up maintaining other binaries upon which logocentrism is predicated. To elaborate, for all its sophistication, the “new epistemology of the urban” essentially accords active primacy to the first term of the urban/rural binary when it declares that the urban is the “tissue of human life itself, at once the framework and the basis for the many forms of sociospatial differentiation” (Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 174). In this formulation, urbanization is the key driver of socio-spatial change and the rural (“non-urban”) is relegated to a largely passive surface that is impacted as urbanization unfolds. To be sure, Brenner and Schmid (2015: 178) refer to “collective insurgency by peasants, workers, indigenous peoples and other displaced populations” who contest planetary urbanization, but, in their dismal assessment, these struggles apparently cannot prevent the “non-urban” or the “erstwhile rural” from becoming “internalized” within and subsumed by the imperatives of capitalist urbanization. Brenner (2014: 16 emphasis in original), for instance has clearly asserted that the “non-urban realm is increasingly subsumed within and operationalized by a world encompassing – indeed world making – processes of capitalist urbanization.” In the end, such assertions imply that the “new epistemology of the urban” does not so much subvert the urban/rural binary but subsume the rural (the subordinate term of the binary) into the urban (the dominant term of the binary). As feminist urban scholars insistently caution us, other deeply disabling gendered binaries – such as masculine/feminine, production/reproduction, public/private – map onto the urban/rural binary (see Buckley and Strauss, 2016). To subsume the rural into the urban thus perpetuates deeply disabling binary narratives.
Rather than fully subsuming the rural into the urban, we must strive for deeper understanding of the urban's many constitutive outsides, including the rural, because they are what allow for radical alterity and radical undecidability (cf. Peake, 2015; Roy, 2015) within the urban itself. But planetary urbanization summarily dismisses the very idea of constitutive outside as having little analytical purchase. This dismissal implies that planetary urbanization does not abide by the moral and ethical imperative to name capitalism's and capitalist urbanization's “undigested and indigestible, unassimilated and inassimilable exterior that which falls outside its monstrously capacious system – even while capitalism [and capitalist urbanization] itself, even more insistently, seems to project the spectre of ubiquity, the appearance of a globe [planet] girdling ‘inside’ that is essentially and altogether without an ‘outside’” (Moore, 2011: 28). If the proponents of planetary urbanization responsibly listen and learn from subjugated knowledges they would find that even though capitalist urbanization may seek to totalize itself, to project the specter of ubiquity, and to internalize the “non-urban,” there are many constitutive outsides which compromise, redirect, mutate, and refuse the thrusts of capitalist urbanization. Only by allowing for the possibility of constitutive outsides to the urban will planetary urbanization be capable of confronting the epistemic limits of theorizing the urban and the contemporary planetary condition from within the space of capitalist urbanization.
In order to attend to constitutive outsides and the “trace of a perennial alterity” (Spivak, 1976: xx) that inheres within the putative terra urbis, I offer the deconstructive strategy of writing “under erasure” as a generative epistemological orientation for urban studies. The title of my commentary is inspired by Spivak's (2000) essay entitled Megacity. In the essay, Spivak argues that the rural is the “metaconstitutive” outside of the urban, and puts the megacity “under erasure” by striking the word out while still leaving it legible. Translating Derridas’ notion of sous rature as “under erasure,” Spivak (1976: xiv) explicates the deconstructive strategy of writing under erasure as follows: “to write a word, cross it out, and then print both the word and the deletion (Since the word is inadequate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it remains legible).” Spivak (ibid) goes on to note that “in examining familiar things we come to such unfamiliar conclusions, that our very language is twisted and bent even as it guides us. Writing under erasure is the mark of this contortion.” Writing under erasure thus uses a familiar word/concept because it is necessary but stays vigilant of the fact that it can longer be used in a familiar way because the terms premise must be called into question. Spivak has famously put the “economic” under erasure and observed that it is both imperative but also inadequate for understanding our world. Urban studies should embrace this useful deconstructive strategy to put both “urbanization” and the “city” under erasure.
First, it is important to put urbanization or “the urban as a process” under erasure because even the “city” – the paradigmatic form of urbanization – that is the focus of much of urban research exceeds capitalist processes of urbanization. In other words, processes before and beyond uneven capitalist urbanization are also important in determining and shaping the city, yet Brenner and Schmid's “new epistemology” focuses on capitalist urbanization tout court and elevates it as the “context of context” that ultimately constitutes and inscribes not just the “city” but all planetary space as well. Planetary urbanization, which faults sophisticated postcolonial urban theories for purportedly focusing on the city tout court must reflect on its own blind spots, namely: the reductionism of elevating capitalist urbanization tout court as the “context of context” shaping the urban and the contemporary planetary condition. Proponents of planetary urbanization and scholars of urban studies more broadly must put urbanization under erasure as urbanization is both indispensible and insufficient to understand the urban and planetary socio-spatial dynamics.
Similarly the city must also be put under erasure. Brenner and Schmid, rightly insist that there is no singular morphology of the urban nonetheless a methodological focus on the city is still relevant and urgent in order to understand not only how the interplay between concentrated, extended and differential urbanization is “repeated with difference” (Gidwani and Reddy, 2011: 1625) but also to study and understand the everyday lived dimension of urban life in the city – after all for Lefebvre “revolutionary potential [is] latent in the everyday” (Buckley and Strauss, 2016:628). Yet apparently since “radical theories of the capitalist city have already developed a relatively elaborate account of the interplay between concentrated and differential urbanization since around 1850,” Brenner and Schmid (2015: 168) contend that now it is the Landscapes of ‘extended urbanization’ - understood as fundamental conditions of possibility for the production of historically and geographically specific forms of ‘cityness’ – [that] must be analyzed and theorized centrally within any updated epistemology of the urban for the 21st century (ibid: 162).
The occluded geographies of operational landscapes of urbanization and the everyday practices and processes through which they come to be constituted in cities are highlighted when we pay attention to “waste” – as waste with its multiple mobilities, materialities, temporalities, and entanglements upends easy distinctions between inside/outside and near/far. Waste – to invoke Spivak – is thus good for “planet-think,” and in the next section, by way of an example, putting Bangalore under erasure, I focus upon electronic waste and municipal solid waste and offer a “supplementary reading” that sketches the multiple constitutive outsides of the city, which in turn make empirically evident the blind spots of planetary urbanization and the stakes of these occlusions.
Bangalore “under erasure:” Waste and the multiple constitutive outsides of India's IT capital
Waste is the material and semiotic artifact of capitalist urbanization and waste flows constitute one category of flows that do not belong to the “life process” of capital (cf. Chakrabarty, 2000) but are nevertheless determinate byproducts of capital accumulation and pose immanent limits upon it (Narayanareddy, 2011).
In Bangalore, the so-called “information technology (IT) capital” of India, the story that iconic IT entrepreneurs tell about the themselves and the IT city is: Visionary, ethical, self-made entrepreneurs enacted a transformational rupture with the past that brought India and its cities into a “new” modernity by building “Brand Bangalore,” which attracts global flows of capital and highly skilled “knowledge workers” transforming it into a knowledge economy driven “world city” comparable to places like Singapore. Yet, the grim underside of Bangalore's IT sector is the vast quantities of electronic waste (or e-waste) generated here annually making India's “IT hub” a leading “e-waste hub” of the country as well. My scholarship, which focuses on Bangalore's discounted waste flows rather than celebrated capital flows. posits that waste is a powerful lens for elaborating a postcolonial critique of urban capitalist formations and historicist narratives of Progress, and delineating a critical relational history of triumphalist, capital-centric narratives of Bangalore's emergence as a “world city” (Narayanareddy, 2011).
The voluminous quantities of e-waste generated in Bangalore as a byproduct of IT accumulation and the voluminous quantities of municipal solid waste generated due to changing consumption patterns of the city's burgeoning middle-class are sources of peril to urban life, and unless properly sequestered, contained, and processed, the unsightly images and fetid smells emanating from mounds of decaying waste not only blight the cityscape and diminish “Brand Bangalore,” they can potentially spawn dangerous pathogens, disease vectors, and leak toxins which can imperil capital accumulation and urban life itself. However, thanks to the indispensable labor of subaltern workers – particularly Muslim men and Dalit women – the crucial infrastructure necessary for moving and metabolizing waste materializes in Bangalore and prevents IT city's burgeoning waste from cannibalizing the conditions of production and compromising social reproduction of the city. Because waste-workers provide crucial infrastructure, I posit a relationship of supplementarity between circuits-of-waste and circuits-of-value, and assert that “disposable” waste-workers are the necessary supplements – the constitutive outsides – of the IT city, and demonstrate that Bangalore's knowledge economy is not only not self-sustaining but also “unbounded,” in that its very reproduction depends upon the IT city forging unequal relations with diverse actors such as waste-workers and messy connections to near/distant sites of waste disposal (Narayanareddy, 2011). Timothy Mitchell (2002: 291), drawing upon Derrida, observes the constitutive outside is “something both marginal and central, simultaneously the condition of possibility of the economy and the condition of its impossibility.” For Miranda Joseph (2002: 2), the Derridaean supplement allows for “supplementary reading” which Notes the void, the absent centre, of any structure, suggesting that a given structure cannot by itself be coherent, autonomous, self sustaining […] The structure constitutively depends on something outside itself, a surplus that completes it, providing the coherence, the continuity, the stability that it cannot provide for itself, although it is already complete.
A relatively recent survey shows that India's Muslim communities – widely stigmatized as “dangerous Others” and “enemy within” by Hindu nationalists – are amongst the most economically, educationally and socially disadvantaged communities in India, and their prospects of being productively employed in the country's “new” knowledge economy are abysmally low (Sachar et al., 2006). As such, a majority of India's Muslims are forced to hustle to find or create employment in the “informal” sector. The daily hustle of a section of underprivileged but entrepreneurial Muslim men in Bangalore resulted in them zeroing in on e-waste accumulating in the city's peri-urban IT enclaves as a potential source of livelihood (Reddy, 2015). Through tinkering and experimenting, they incrementally created extensive repair, reuse, recycling and material recovery economies that breathed new life into the obsolete electronics that they sourced from IT enclaves. But this work of remaking e-waste into value exposes waste-workers to dangerous fumes, carcinogens, and corrosive substances, which slowly breaks down their laboring bodies and effectively makes informal Muslim waste-workers the disproportionate bearers of the toxic burdens of electronic capitalism. However, since “the long dyings” that result from the “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011) of routine exposure are hard to quantify and unfold un-dramatically over the long term, the bodies of informal waste-workers waste away, while “ethical” knowledge entrepreneurs remain content to unburden themselves of e-waste that takes up expensive real-estate in their modern offices without any moral trepidations about the injustice of displacing its toxic burdens onto waste-workers.
In contrast to Muslim waste-workers who labor to dispose e-waste generated primarily by the IT sector, the labors of Dalit (“outcaste”) women – who are at the bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy and are considered “unclean” within the ritual order of Hinduism – are indispensable for cleaning the IT city as a whole. They make up the bulk of the municipal workforce (employed on a contract basis) that does the daily labor of sweeping city streets, and collecting, sorting, and transporting garbage from households (Narayanareddy, 2011). A brief account of the typical workday of Dalit women shows how their gendered labor is vital to the daily rejuvenation – and indeed to the very social reproduction – of the city. The workday of Dalit waste-workers begins early, with women tying scarves around the lower half of their faces – a flimsy shield against vehicular pollution and dust – and then hunching over, to do the debilitating labor of sweeping city streets with short brooms. After sweeping, they make rounds collecting garbage door-to-door from households. Before depositing the collected garbage at transfer stations, the women pick through this waste (that often contains hazardous waste such as used syringes, sanitary napkins, and broken glass) with bare hands (they are often not provided safety gloves) in an effort to salvage recyclables to supplement their meager pay (which is often subject to arbitrary deduction and delay). Any attempts to contest arbitrary deductions and delay by invoking the labor protections accorded to them under the law often result in punishment in the form of abuse from male supervisors, including summary dismissals. The daily vicissitudes of garbage workers not only includes routine harassment by supervisors and employers but also from society at large, re-inscribing caste oppression and their marginal status in society. And yet, without Dalit women's stigmatized labor, city streets would remain filthy, garbage would pile up and rot, severely undercutting the IT entrepreneurs' efforts to make Brand Bangalore an attractive destination to investors – a garbage-filled Bangalore would emerge as symbol of a stinking India rather than a “shining” India.
The brief but relatively “thick description” of waste-workers that I have just outlined as part of a supplementary reading of the IT city, challenges the capital-centric teleology of IT entrepreneurs, and the stories that IT sector tells about itself, by revealing how boosters of Brand Bangalore are constitutively dependent on “something outside” themselves, i.e. people and places that are on the “margins” of the IT sector “to provide the coherence, the continuity, the stability that it cannot provide for itself.” The supplementary reading that pays attention to the city's circuits-of-waste also highlights the fractal geographies of what Brenner and Schmid term the operational landscapes of the urban and reveals operational landscapes to be “within” as well as “outside” the “IT city”, to be “near” as well as “far.” Overall paying attention to waste upends easy demarcations that one may make between inside/outside, center/periphery, formal/informal, urban/rural, and nature/society. The thick description of circuits-of-waste also reveals that processes before and beyond capitalist urbanization such as the everyday practices of caste and ethno-nationalism are also important “contexts of contexts” and play a constitutive role in determining the worlds of waste and waste-workers. Having provided an overview of waste in Bangalore, we can now turn our attention back to planetary urbanization because the entanglements of waste lay bare the blind spots of planetary urbanization and will help us understand why the deconstructive strategy of writing under erasure is an eminently useful epistemological orientation for planetary urbanization and urban studies more broadly.
In the case of Bangalore and other Indian cities, capitalist urbanization is sorely inadequate to explain and understand why even in the 21st century, it is the case that predominantly “outcaste” Dalit women do the degrading work of cleaning India's material waste as well as ritually impure waste. The everyday practices of caste that put some bodies intimately close to (and often literally in waste, such as outcaste men covered in sewerage as they manually clean the sanitation drains of India's cities) imply that caste must be viewed as an important “context-of contexts” before and beyond capitalist urbanization in determining India's urban wastescapes. Capitalist urbanization is also inadequate to understand the (emergent) powerful new “politics of refusal” (Simpson, 2014) being articulated by Dalits in Indian municipalities as they mobilize and refuse to do degrading waste work, such as manual scavenging, that have been historically performed by them. Despite the importance of caste as “contexts of context” to understand such radical, potentially ruptural moments of refusal in India's urban fabric, planetary urbanization would elevate capitalist urbanization as the most important “context of context.” Planetary urbanization must thus put urbanization under erasure – putting urbanization under erasure would not preclude capitalist urbanization from being viewed as an important “context of context” but it would also imply that capitalist urbanization while imperative is also inadequate to understand the urban.
In addition to urbanization, planetary urbanization must also put cities under erasure. In Bangalore, e-waste long viewed as a hazard, is emerging as a new frontier of accumulation with large national and multinational waste companies with large capital endowments rushing to set up e-waste processing plants in the city. As e-waste is reimagined as a resource, these companies have sought to exclude Bangalore's Muslim informal waste-workers who have painstakingly built their businesses from obtaining e-waste generated in bulk in Bangalore's IT enclaves. Such “new enclosure” of e-waste has affected the city's Muslim waste-workers’ ability to acquire the very “raw materials” that they need to survive. Straining to maintain their businesses, Muslim waste-workers of Bangalore have sought to obtain “illegal” shipments of e-waste that is “dumped”6 in global South by the global North, which they then disassemble and rematerialize as value in their small shops by extracting metals and other usable materials from it. While it is only in the past decade that Bangalore's informal recyclers have started processing e-waste “dumped” by global North, other cities of global South have been processing substantial quantities of e-waste “dumped” from global North for much longer. In these disassembling economies of global South cities, waste-workers in addition to reusing, repairing, re-imagining the “dumped” e-waste have also been attempting to perfect the techniques for extracting a variety of metals (including the highly concentrated deposits of precious metals) found in e-waste. This implies that while the nimble hands of “disposable women” (Wright, 2006) of the maquiladoras of Mexico and the factories of South East Asia might assemble the electronic equipment used in much of the world, it is the nimble hands of “disposable” informal waste-workers in cities of the global South who disassemble and extract metals and other useful materials when these electronic equipment reach the end of their useful lives. Such mobilities and rematerialization of e-waste discarded by the global North in global South cities reveal that the extended (socio-metabolic) operational landscapes of cities of global North are not some distant wilderness areas but in fact global cities of the South such as Bangalore, Delhi, Dhaka, Accra and Guiyu, all of which have extensive e-waste disassembling economies. Indeed, these e-waste disassembling economies of global South cities are being re imagined as “urban mines” by policy actors who project that in the near future a consequential amount of the world's metals will be extracted from these above ground “renewable” urban mines whose “ores” will be continually replenished with new e-waste generated in the world (Reddy, 2016). Cities of global South are thus becoming sites of “extended extraction” of metals (cf. Labban, 2014). But planetary urbanization's aerial optic preoccupied with the search for extended operational landscapes of the urban out there in “remote,” “wilderness” areas fails to notice the internalization of extended operational landscapes within cities of the global South. As a result, planetary urbanization fails to understand that global South cities (where operational landscapes such as those for processing global e-waste are internalized) are simultaneously sites of concentrated, differential and extended urbanization. Cities too must thus be put under erasure because, even though they are not the only form that the urban takes, their roles are continually evolving with some cities emerging as important “operational landscapes” of other cities. Therefore, the everyday struggles “in” cities must continue to be “analyzed and theorized centrally” within urban studies. Planetary urbanization makes much of the Marxist insight that cities are things that result out of a process called urbanization, but it must also take into to account Doreen Massey's (1994: 155) rejoinder that “places [cities] are processes too” and cities must continue to receive critical attention in urban studies. Writing under erasure helps us to be attentive to cities and urbanization even as we recognize that the urban and the planet exceed cities and urbanization. Planetary urbanization and urban studies more broadly should therefore embrace writing under erasure as a useful epistemological orientation to aid us in building better theories of the urban.
Footnotes
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.