Abstract
What does it mean to have cities by design? In what ways is the city a social process? Fran Tonkiss shows how cities have a social life by applying and critiquing classical and modern urban sociological theories. By presenting multiple viewpoints on specific issues of urban life through the research of various global scholars, Tonkiss provides a thought-provoking examination of cities globally. Compelling and comprehensive arguments are made on how the city is created not only by professional ‘experts’ of design and planning, but also by the social actors that call a city their home.
To begin, it is necessary to understand ‘how crucial urban form is for urban process’ (p. 56). Cities grow in three ways: natural population growth (i.e., net birth rates), inward migration, and spatial expansion and consolidation incorporating peri-urban or rural population. It is from the patterns of urban growth that Tonkiss urges us to consider how ‘the weight of numbers becomes socialized in its spatial organization’ (p. 36). One way is to use density to ask questions such as ‘how are people, things and activities distributed in relation to each other? What effects do different modes of density have on urban environments, on social interaction and cohesion, on public order, on economic vitality, on individual well-being and quality of life?’ (p. 37). In other words, just ‘like different individuals, different cities do density differently, both in terms of how it is lived and how it is spatially organized’ (p. 48, emphasis in original).
To explain further the social life of cities, we must become aware how ‘in numerous expanding cities, old patterns of inequality endure – as access to land and property, gender inequity, ethnic and racial discrimination, and various forms of legal exclusion continue to divide urban populations – while newer patters emerge from the forms of economic and political restructuring than have run alongside recent urbanization’ (p. 69). Thus, when we think of ‘diversity by design’ we must consider the ‘production of urban mix’ to ask questions such as ‘at what scale should social or functional mix obtain? The building? The block? The street? The neighbourhood? Which population should be mixed? Residential? Commercial? Working? All of them?’ and ‘What relation, if any, exists between degrees of spatial mix and forms of social interaction? . . . Whose interests are served by the construction of social mix?’ (p. 85).
The ‘choices’ for urban residents are best created through the interactions between legitimized and delegitimized forms of urban informality whereby ‘informality is a category that reverses the usual colonialism of the urban imagination . . . partly or wholly beyond the reach of governments and more or less outside of the shadow of the law’ (pp. 92–93). Slum housing settlements of various degrees provide the oldest forms of informality, which then raises the issue of how ‘informality has a complicated relation to visibility.’ Tonkiss argues how ‘rendering the informality of the rich as part of the same urban world’ requires us to ask ‘why the informality of the rich is so often unseeable, unrecognized, legitimized’ (p. 96). In answering this question, the contradictions of informality become identified as: (1) organic settlement/slum, (2) self-help/abandonment, (3) social capital/racketeering, (4) temporary use/insecurity, (5) ‘looseness’/disorder, and (6) commonality/invasive publicness. All six contradictions represent a critique for the reproduction of power and privilege in which Tonkiss affirms that in contemporary city-making there must be both the informal and formal, ‘not an either/or’ (p. 112).
Another concern for contemporary city-making is ‘considering the city as a form of socio-nature – a complex ecology of human, built and natural forms that distributes, concentrates and transfers resources, risks, spaces, things, people and vulnerabilities’ (p. 115). Thus, cities are themselves ‘natural environments’ where patterns of ‘toxic urbanism’ can be described in relation to the impact of relative wealth. This in turn affects the amounts of production and consumption and the ‘geography of vulnerability,’ which ‘consign[s] the urban poor to lower-level but chronic situations of environmental risk’ (p. 123). In turn, ‘urban populations constitute critical masses for behavioural adaptation and environmental action’ (p. 171) to truly reflect and challenge how the urban environment is a distribution problem.
Part of addressing the urban form is to create infrastructure as ‘design politics’ in which ‘human resource remains the most basic and the most crucial element of the resource economy of a city’ (p. 140). Tonkiss wants us to consider infrastructure as urbanism and think beyond ‘technical qualities to consider its social and political life’ (p. 140). The ‘physical design of things . . . and the political design of services’ illustrate how ‘urban inequalities are expressed in differential access to infrastructural systems and goods’ (pp. 148–149) because infrastructures are becoming more privatized and exclusive. Thus, the people of the city must also ‘embody’ infrastructure where the city is a collective space. As Tonkiss asserts, ‘things mediate social relations and in turn embed social relations in concrete forms’ so that the ‘stuff of infrastructure keeps life together in the big city at the same time as it works to hold people, spaces and resources apart’ (p. 156).
Tonkiss concludes by arguing how ‘cities provide spaces for the enactment of both the formal and substantive rights of citizens’ where ‘if one is to defend a notion of meaningful, substantive citizenship, then one must also secure and defend the spaces in which it becomes possible’ (p. 175). After all, ‘as urban environments are marked up by delineations of public and private, so social actors are constituted through partial and conflicting rights to space that splinter urban citizenship’ (p. 175). The various ‘strategies for re-making the urban run counter to powerful logics of development and regulation in contemporary cities’ since they are spaces and places that ‘form an infrastructure of common life that provides sites of autonomy, creativity and collectivity in the making and re-making of cities and subjects’ (p. 176).
Tonkiss offered me, a newer migrant to New York City and a resident of cities of multiple sizes, a refreshing, multilayered approach for understanding cities. Tonkiss includes all people and parts of the city through a focused sociological analysis on the growth of the city (scale, density, and diversity), urban inequality, informality, urban environments, and urban infrastructure. Whether through an understanding of how transportation systems are part of social mobility or how changes in physical environment affect the social environment through the commodification of water, cities are simultaneously exhilarating and frustrating places to live in and learn about. Tonkiss challenges us to consider a possible city that accounts for the social relationship between the creators and inhabitants of cities in the quest for shared space.