Urban geography I

Abstract

In the midst of what has been termed the ‘urban age’, two divergent approaches to understanding life in cities have emerged. In this first of three urban geography progress reports, I engage these two strands of urban theory, identifying key differences in their intellectual, political and geographical genealogies, and consider their political and epistemological implications. Borrowing from Chakrabarty’s concept of History 1 and History 2, I name these approaches ‘Urbanization 1’ and ‘Urbanization 2’. Urbanization 1 is exemplified by the planetary urbanization thesis that posits the complete urbanization of society, whereas Urbanization 2 is characterized by a more diverse set of interventions, united by a political and epistemological strategy of refusing Eurocentrism and ‘provincializing’ urban theory.

Keywords

planetary urbanization provincializing subaltern urbanism urbanization

I Introduction

Sometime in the next year or two, a woman will give birth in the Lagos slum of Ajegunle, a young man will flee his village in west Java for the bright lights of Jakarta, or a farmer will move his impoverished family into one of Lima’s innumerable pueblos jovenes. The exact event is unimportant and it will pass entirely unnoticed. Nonetheless, it will constitute a watershed in human history, comparable to the Neolithic or Industrial revolutions. For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural. (Mike Davis, Planet of Slums)

It is an auspicious time to be thinking about cities, or perhaps, more accurately, ‘the urban’. As we are relentlessly reminded, we have reached a geographic tipping point, in which the majority of people live in cities for the first time in human history (Champion and Hugo, 2004; Khanna, 2010; Madden, 2012; Satterthwaite, 2007; Schmid, 2006; Soja, 2000). In some ways, it is hard to know what to make of this demographic factoid, the seeming banality of which is borne out in Mike Davis’s description of the moment of transition, above. If the exact event passed unnoticed, however, the ‘urban condition’ that it symbolically ushers in has not.

The ‘urban condition’ or the ‘urban age’ is, for some, about something far more abstract, transformational and essential than a numerical demographic tipping point. Davis suggests the trend toward urbanization marks a ‘watershed in human history’. For others (Brenner and Schmid, 2014; Merrifield, 2013b; Schmid, 2014), this is just one of many expressions of the urban revolution or the ‘complete urbanization of society’ that Lefebvre predicted (2003 [1970]). This new condition has implications not only for the analytical object of the field of urban studies but for understandings of capitalism, industrialization and the possibilities of revolutionary politics unfolding at the ‘planetary’ scale. Yet for others, the political possibilities of urban life lie not at the cosmic scale of the ‘planetary’ but in those very embodied and everyday moments in Lagos, Jakarta, or the pueblos jovenes.

Borrowing from Chakrabarty’s (2000) concept of History 1 and History 2 (and see Sheppard et al., 2013), we might think of these divergent ways of theorizing the urban and associated political possibilities as Urbanization 1 and Urbanization 2. Urbanization 1 is encapsulated by the ‘planetary urbanization’ thesis (Brenner, 2014; Brenner and Schmid, 2014; Merrifield, 2013a). This thesis borrows and builds on Lefebvre specifically and Marxist political economy more generally, and attempts to theorize and understand what this ‘watershed moment’ as observed from a more-than-global scale means in relation to the history of capitalist development more broadly. Urbanization 2 is a predictably messier set of interventions that we might call urbanization ‘from below’, if such a claim didn’t reify the very hierarchical scalar frameworks these interventions are trying to undermine.

Following Chakrabarty, this line of thinking is better understood as plural, or Urbanization 2s. These studies draw on postcolonial theory, subaltern studies, and feminist theory to locate urbanization in and through the ‘unimportant acts’ Davis describes above, not only (or always) for their own sake, but as a political and epistemological strategy to refuse Eurocentrism and ‘provincialize’ urban theory that has been born out of observation of European and North American cities. These studies seek to ‘skirt’ (Roy, 2011), invert, and rework the capitalo-centric (Gibson-Graham, 1996) logic of Urbanization 1 to locate political possibilities in emergent subjectivities and livelihood strategies.

In this first of three progress reports on urban geography, I engage these two strands of urban theory in the ‘urban age’, identifying key differences in their intellectual, political and geographical genealogies, as well as considering their political and epistemological implications. While I want to resist the temptation to render these frameworks analytically or politically compatible (but see Karaman, 2012; Buckley, 2014), it should be noted that they are united by more than a mere conceptual interest in that which produces ‘the urban’. Like many conversations that overlap with the discipline of geography (but are never contained by it), each of these frameworks is substantively informed by epistemological traditions that are themselves rooted in and shaped by politics. In this sense, the debate unfolding in urban geography regarding how and from where we can and should know about ‘the urban’ and urbanization is in no way a new debate (Barnett, 2005; Castree, 2005; Gibson-Graham, 1996; Graham, 1990, 1992; Peet, 1992; Resnick and Wolf, 1992; Sayer, 1992).

What is new enough, however, is an engagement with the analytical method of ‘provincializing’ Europe (Chakrabarty, 2000; Lawhon et al., 2014; Sheppard et al., 2013) in relation to urban theory and politics at precisely the same moment that competing strands of urban theory emerge arguing in favor (if tacitly) of universalizing European capitalist urbanization. The move to ‘provincialize’ urban theory seeks ‘to reveal Eurocentrism as a specific articulation placing Europe at the end of history – with everything outside of Europe as an imagined space’ (Sheppard et al., 2013) whose inhabitants are condemned to what Chakrabarty calls ‘history’s waiting room’ (2000: 896). For Sheppard et al., these histories, or what they call geohistories, can ‘speak back’ to mainstream urbanism. Yet if mainstream urbanism can be understood as that which takes capitalism for granted, recent scholarship in geography suggests that urbanism with a more critical bent may also need to be provincialized.

II Urbanization 1: Planetary urbanization

In The Urban Revolution, Henri Lefebvre (1970) posited that the ‘complete urbanization of society’ was imminent, creating ‘a whole new spatial (dis)order’ (Merrifield, 2013a: 910). If Lefebvre was being slightly ironic, his predictions and methods of analysis have been taken up in earnest by a subset of critical geographers under the conceptual rubric of ‘planetary urbanization’. For them, cities – bounded, territorialized agglomerations – are no longer the proper empirical or theoretical object of urban inquiry; such territorial conceits are not so relevant in the age of planetary urbanization (Brenner, 2014; Brenner and Schmid, 2014; Madden, 2012; Merrifield, 2013b). The complete urbanization of society has ushered in the end of the ‘modern metropolis’ (Soja, 2014: 277). Urbanization has swallowed the ‘city’ and the ‘countryside’, and places are now but one node in the hyper-networked and all-encompassing process of urbanization. Urbanization, and the associated processes that produce and fuel it, can now be understood as the defining, essential and necessary processes through which all planetary life can be understood.

Brenner and Schmid (2014: 162) identify four trends over the past 30 years that are emblematic of this ‘socio-spatial transformation’: the rescaling of urbanization to massive urban corridors or ‘mega urban regions’; the blurring and dispersal of urban functions such as dense ‘downtowns’; the disintegration of the ‘hinterlands’ as they become the ‘back office’ in service to the needs of urban society; and the ‘end of the “wilderness”’. On the final point, it is worth quoting at length, as the quote encapsulates the escalation of the ‘urban’ as the primary essence that unites all planetary processes:

In every region of the globe, erstwhile ‘wilderness’ spaces are being transformed and degraded through the cumulative socio-ecological consequences of unfettered worldwide urbanization. In this way, the world’s oceans, alpine regions, the equatorial rainforests, major deserts, the arctic and polar zones and even the earth’s atmosphere itself, are increasingly interconnected with the rhythms of planetary urbanization at every scale, from the local to the global. (Brenner and Schmid, 2014: 162)

As Merrifield puts it, ‘the use of the term planetary really charts the final frontier, the telos of any earthly spatial fix – as an economic, political and cultural logic that hasn’t been powered by globalization but is one of the key constituent ingredients of globalization, of the planetary expansion of the productive forces of capitalism’s penchant to annihilate space by time and time by space’ (2013b: 6). ‘What’s getting affirmed here’, he continues, ‘is the urban as a single indivisible substance whose attributes – the built environment, transportation, infrastructure, population, densities, topographical features, social mixes, political governance – are all formal expressions of what pervades it ontologically’ (p. 9).

Analytically, the planetary urbanization thesis posits that the act of theorizing the urban and associated political possibilities is derived through empirical measurement and logical reasoning based on large-scale observation of trends. European capitalist development trajectories, patterns, and timelines, and associated European (male) thinkers (Catterall, 2014), are offered up as the now more-than-global vantage point for comprehending the condition that not only shapes life in cities but can be understood as meaningfully shaping life on the planet. The possibility of politics is discerned through deductive reasoning from the ‘condition’ of planetary urbanization (see Harvey, 1996). As Madden (2012) argues, drawing on Nancy and Lefebvre, ‘problematizing urban globality’ can ‘help us see anew the violence of global urbanization’ and ‘help us envision the possibilities for transformation that a urban world might still contain’ (p. 783). This political posture – that politics is best or appropriately conceived of through logic and analytical reasoning from an objective and a non-placed perspective – is at the heart of the epistemological/political divides that shape Urbanization 1 and 2.

While there is much to be said about the value of grand narratives and universal claims as foundations for informing and shaping a politics of the otherwise, this way of knowing and associated politics has always had a problem with understanding and accounting for difference (Gidwani, 2004). Difference, in this context, can be understood both as a lived experience of intersectional power structures as well as a recognition of the way in which that lived experience makes available different places and spaces from which to know. We see this blind spot manifested in the celebration of the universal potential of the mass protests of the Occupy movement and Tahrir Square in the writing of Merrifield, but we also see it in the ways in which his work ‘encounters’ – or more accurately, doesn’t encounter – Urbanization 2s.

Merrifield celebrates the ‘encounter’ as the mass protest enabled by social media and the internet, which has, in his estimation, in part fueled this complete urbanization of society. ‘The encounter’, he writes, ‘is like a twinkling, radiant cosmic constellation, an expression of a plurality of participants who conjoin within an open form, within a dynamic structured coherence, within a configuration that makes itself rather than simply lies there, preexisting, in a passive state’ (p. 33).

For Merrifield, Occupy and Tahrir Square are powerful examples in which ‘everybody’ can participate, don a Guy Fawkes mask to conceal their face, ‘but behind the mask, behind the disguise, behind the anonymity, demonstrators have discovered and expressed their true identities’ (p. 60). These protests, Merrifield posits, and their ability to form and multiply, are a function of what he calls ‘planetary urban society’ (emphasis in Merrifield, 2013b).

But if ‘planetary urban society’ is to mean anything whatsoever, particularly in relation to political possibilities and urban futures, we have to carefully consider what is at stake in re-telling the story of History 1 and fetishizing (in the Marxist sense) the ‘everybody’ in the square. Marx used the term ‘fetish’ to explain how commodities are presented for exchange in ways that obscure the complex (and political) processes by which that particular assemblage of materials (reworked nature) came to be in the marketplace. To date, the planetary urbanization thesis, particularly as put forward by Merrifield, pays little attention to power structures that are always present before, during and after any encounter. There is a lot of work to be done if the planetary urbanization thesis is to work out a praxis that does more than identify the circulation of elite governance strategies, the blurring of boundaries, and the possibilities of mass protests (of any kind). As Kanai and Kutz (2013) and Staeheli (2013) point out with relation to Tahrir and Occupy, a greater appreciation of the co-constitution of public space, mass mobilizations and the making of political subjectivities is needed if we are to really understand and interpret these moments.

Most immediately, the planetary urbanization thesis, as both a claim about an ontological condition and a framework for politics, needs to engage substantively with ontological, epistemological, and political questions raised by Urbanization 2s with regard to difference. ‘The point of attending to questions about the politics of ethnicity and race, citizenship, class or gender is not to map how such social axes are simply attributes attached to particular bodies participating in the urbanization process but to illuminate how the material production of urban built environments can depend on parallel production of complex inequalities and intersecting forms of social difference’ (Buckley, 2014: 342; see also Bonds, 2013; Derickson, 2014; Hankins et al., 2012). Contrary to Marxist conceptions of the city, Buckley’s work on social difference and urbanization in Dubai shows ‘the ways in which scales such as the home or the body are important to the day-to-day functioning of capitalist urbanization processes and how gendered, heteronormative, class- and ethnicity-coded practices of migrant segregation, policing and employment can be integral to the political economies of urbanization’ (p. 343). That is to say, difference is also an essential dimension of how urbanization happens, materially and otherwise.

But, as I show below, Urbanization 2s also argue that difference matters with respect to the social location of the knower, the geographies of the case studies, and the intellectual traditions from which knowledges emerge. In this sense, the planetary urbanization thesis has much work to do to ‘encounter’ urban trajectories from places and spaces beyond European and world cities, as well as bodies of thought beyond European male theorists. Indeed, as Catterall points out (2014), an astonishing amount of the planet itself is missing from the planetary urbanization analysis, and where it is featured at all it is ‘reduced to dehumanized and apparently nonsentient (mainly male, if gendered) actors and actants’ (p. 368).

III Urbanization 2s: Provincializing the urban condition

If Urbanization 1 posits capital and urbanization to be the mutually constitutive, dominant processes of the past, present and future, Urbanization 2s have a much messier and less cohesive story to tell. More accurately, Urbanization 2s posit that there is not a singular ‘urban story’ to tell, other than that to insist that there are many urban stories. This is not only an empirical claim that the narrative posited by Urbanization 1 is simply not comprehensive and thus not accurate. Urbanization 2s are refusing Urbanization 1 on epistemological-political grounds. Influenced by strands of post-colonial, feminist and subaltern studies, Urbanization 2s posit that the act of theorizing the urban and, by association, theorizing political possibilities, is fundamentally shaped and limited by the intellectual and philosophical traditions upon which they are based, and the empirical examples upon which they draw (Myers, 2011; Parnell and Robinson, 2012; Roy and AlSayyad, 2004; Parnell and Robinson, 2006; Simone, 2010; Watson, 2009; Wright, 2013). For these scholars, the intellectual and political work is to create linkages between places that hold promise for productive solidarities toward undecided and undecidable urban futures. Moreover, for many in this tradition, academic inquiry should be in deep, sustained conversation with those making the city in spaces of the Global South (see Schindler, 2014, for an attempt to apply this thinking to spaces in the Global North) – from urban managers to existing social movement actors.

Informed by the subaltern studies tradition, one strand of urban research that has emerged of late is that which Roy (2011) refers to (sympathetically) as ‘slumdog urbanism’. ‘Writing against apocalyptic and dystopian narratives of the slum, subaltern urbanism provides accounts of the slum as a terrain of habitation, livelihood and politics’ and is a ‘radical challenge to dominant narratives of the megacity’ seeking to confer ‘recognition on spaces of poverty and forms of popular agency that often remain invisible and neglected in the archives and annals of urban theory’ (p. 224; see also Bayat, 2000, 2007; Benjamin, 2008; Brillembourg, 2004; Cruz, 2007; see Amin, 2013, for critique). Work in this register tends to ‘privilege everyday lived urban life over research strategies that view cities from a distance, explicitly or implicitly working to disrupt mainstream global urbanism by attending to the tactics of survival and subversion resorted to by subaltern or subordinated populations’ (Sheppard et al., 2013: 897). This work locates agency, possibility and resistance in the habitus of slum dwellers. For example, in her study of two informal neighborhoods in Mexico, Lomard (2013) explores the way in which identities of residents are shaped in and through narratives of temporality that she argues demonstrate ‘time-bound tactics of resistance’ (p. 813). By foregrounding alternative temporalities of struggling, suffering, hoping and waiting, Lombard argues we can better understand the ‘dynamic character of particular urban places in terms of seeing them less as “transitional” and more as part of a progressive effort on the part of residents to construct a place in the city’ (p. 827).

Vital and useful though it may be, Roy argues that there are limits to these ‘itineraries of recognition’ that mischaracterize the meaning of ‘subaltern’. Drawing on the work of Spivak (1999), she argues that something of a slippage has occurred in conceptualizations and mobilizations of the term. Studies and work in this vein have tended to conflate the subaltern with political agency, places, and livelihood strategies, recognizing and valorizing a knowable and often entrepreneurial subject of ‘slum habitus’ recuperating the ‘figure of the slum dweller as a subject of history’ (2011: 228). Sympathetic to the work that offers a ‘correction to the silences of urban historiography’ (p. 230), she is nevertheless concerned with the way in which the ‘colonial wound’ (Mignolo, 2002) – or the violent process of colonization – remains centered in such accounts. ‘Such experiments cannot be read as a reversal of colonial power; instead they only demonstrate the brutal energy of the postcolony’, she argues (2011: 230).

Instead, along with Ong (2011), Roy is interested in analyzing the subjects and processes of urbanization as they negotiate and engender complex, interwoven and networked relationships to political economic structures, histories, identity, and agency that resist drawing on or being defined against the historical, geographical and subjective binaries of colonial/postcolonial, North/South, elite/subaltern. Importantly, however, Ong and Roy are interested in how these subjects and subjectivities are ‘worlded’ or become ‘projects that attempt to establish or break established horizons of urban standards in and beyond a particular city’ (Ong, 2011: 4). To resist ‘worlding’ through the colonial wound, she identifies four concepts that she considers promising attempts to ‘chart new itineraries’ (Roy, 2011: 231) of urban research and analysis: peripheries, urban informality, zones of exception, and gray spaces. These four concepts, each in their own way ‘extend and challenge the idea of “colonial difference” and thus the epistemic and political locations of subalternity’ (p. 235). In this sense, they can serve as ‘vanishing points [Mouffe 1993, Gregory 2010] at the limits of itineraries of recognition’ (p. 235).

Table 1.

Urbanization 1 and Urbanization 2s.

	Key words	Intellectual traditions	Epistemological traditions	Influential theorists	Key authors
Urbanization 1	Planetary urbanization	Marxist, regulation approach	Critical realism	Lefebvre, Marx	Brenner, Schmid, Merrifield
Urbanization 2s	Subaltern urbanism, worlding, ‘provincializing’	Post-colonial, feminist, neo-Marxist	Post-structuralism	Spivak, Chakrabarty	Roy, Chakrabarty, Ong, Peake and Reiker, Sheppard et al.

In this same vein, feminists and postcolonial scholars have, of late, considered the realm of the urban and urbanization processes to be particularly salient frames for ‘reimaging the world’ (Pratt, 2013: 124). Yet refusing to be ‘worlded through the colonial wound’ (Roy, 2011) and resisting a valorization of subaltern survival strategies for their own sake, while also taking difference seriously, requires new approaches to urban research and theorizing urbanization. As Varley (2013a: 125) puts it, the challenge is to ‘take on board the imperative not to assume unbridgeable difference without assuming and valorizing sameness’. This kind of ‘non-colonizing recognition of difference’, Varley argues, requires ‘an ethical principle of being open to both similarity and difference’ (p. 125). Urbanization 2, then, is an epistemological posture that aims to produce knowledge about life in cities and the processes of urbanization that are not understood in relation to trajectories of capitalist urbanization, either as a valorized difference or ‘pure externality’ (Valey, 2013a: 129). The objective, argues Wright (2013: 51), for scholarship of this kind is to ‘generate knowledge that supports the growth of progressive political subjects’ living in the midst of state-sanctioned violence, degraded environments, and precarious productive and social reproductive arrangements (see also Silver, 2014).

This epistemological posture orients scholars in this tradition to different questions than those that occupy Urbanization 1. Feminist and postcolonial scholars have long argued that mainstream and many critical ways of knowing and categories of analysis are embedded with, and in turn productive of, patriarchy, white privilege, and Eurocentrism. This critique has engendered a distrust of totalizing narratives on epistemological and political grounds – neither accurately reflective of the diverse experiences nor politically productive insofar as they draw on problematic categories. Instead, the intellectual traditions Urbanization 2s draw on have been far more interested in the ways in which the lived experience of difference, marginalization or subalterneity are productive of subjectivities, and how those various subjectivities might coalesce in ways that undermine and disrupt ways of knowing, governing, and being that reproduce a given power structure (Tadiar, 2009). In this sense, calls for theorizing from different geographical or social locations are more than simply calls to ‘add-other-and-stir’ – but are instead calls to expose and undermine the way even ‘critical’ knowledges rely on and are productive of an ‘other’ as its constitutive outside.

Answering these questions requires asking different questions in different ways, and key analytical methods and heuristic tools have emerged or been appropriated from allied debates to produce these alternative ways of knowing. One strategy familiar to feminist and postcolonial scholars is to resist binaries including Global North and Global South, modern/not modern, developed/developing, formality/informality (Datta, 2012; Fabricus, 2008; Lombard, 2013; Mehrotra, 2010; Varley, 2013b). Scholars have turned to notions of ‘invented latitudes’ (Simone, 2010), new contour lines and counter topographies (Katz, 2001) that either ‘skirt’ references to the North (Roy, 2011) or decenter the North as the modern, developed norm, inherently different from place in the South (Kern and Mullings, 2013; Shank and Nagar, 2013). These counter topographies are understood as holding promise to identify and nurture new solidarities and subjectivities, while troubling existing representations.

Kern and Mullings (2013), for example, explore neoliberal urbanism and gendered violence in Kingston and Toronto to demonstrate the ways that women’s lives in both cities are ‘being shaped by governing technologies that rely upon fear, insecurity and violence, real or imagined’ (p. 38). Similarly, Shank and Nagar (2013) use case studies from Minneapolis and India’s Sitapur district to identify ‘critical continuities between those sites and spaces that are analytically segregated from one another because of the dominant binaries of rural/urban and north/south’ (p. 105). Vasudevan (2014) attempts a ‘global geography of squatting’ that traces the way that key struggles, such as the trade-off between self-determination and legal recognition, play out in both the Global North and South as a way to remain insistently rooted in the ‘everyday efforts of the urban poor’ while simultaneously attempting to chart emergent possibilities for more just urban futures.

Finally, Urbanization 2s are concerned with the relationship between circuits of knowledge and their geographical location. As Pratt puts it, ‘where one theorizes from is hugely important. One attends to different things, different criticisms are relevant and varying interpretations open political possibilities in different moments in different ways’ (2013: 111). The emphasis on, and attention to, the geographical and social location of knowledge production stands in stark contrast to work in the tradition of Urbanization 1, where the standpoint of the knower is omniscient and more-than-global. Rather, Urbanization 2s emphasize attention to the geographies and circulations of knowledge, as well as to ‘knowledge’s politics’ (Jazeel and MacFarlane, 2010). Strategies for negotiating these complex geographies and the situated geographies of knowledge production include learning (Jazeel and MacFarlane, 2010), story-telling (Shank and Nagar, 2013), engagement (Parnell and Robinson, 2012), and collaboration (Ehrkamp, 2011). ‘I always remain outside of the nightmare – charged with the task of shaping how the story will be told. This is a familiar position; for those of us who write and organize from positions of relative privilege, the question of how we understand our proximity to violent structures is a determining factor in shaping our methods and strategies for engaging dominant terms’ (Shank and Nagar, 2013: 103).

IV Conclusion

As Buckley and Strauss (2014) point out, the planetary urbanization thesis offers a welcome deconstruction of the categories ‘urban’ and ‘city’. Yet, like much inquiry in the Marxist tradition, it has resolutely failed to ‘encounter’ scholarship that makes powerful claims about the importance of difference in ways of knowing and experiencing extra-local processes. Moreover, the planetary urbanization thesis has taken universalizing from the European experience to a new extreme, scaling the phenomena to a more-than-global scale. This scalar move begs questions not only from the perspective of the epistemologies of knowledge but also from the perspective of urban praxis. Who, exactly, can execute politics at the planetary scale, and at what cost?

Feminist and postcolonial scholars have asked a different set of questions that intentionally and explicitly identify and locate urban politics and praxis at the scale of the everyday, embedded in actually existing social movements and political subjectivities. The more promising strands of this work, however, train their focus on the inbetween spaces of everyday life as it shapes and is shaped by power structures, social relations, political economic processes, and geopolitical orders that are expressed at more-than-local scales. Heuristics like new contour lines and counter topographies are meant to enable work on urban lives, livelihoods and political movements that seek to engender ways of being that are neither shaped by, nor refusals of, capitalist, imperialist, and colonial processes. As Sheppard et al. (2013: 899) put it: ‘New urban research agenda we envisage must engage in constructive ways across multiple, overlapping differences with the goal of articulating knowledge commonalities – the basis for theorizing but also for ethico-political commitments’.

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