Urban geography III

Abstract

Geologists are considering in earnest whether to mark the emergence of a new geological epoch – characterized by human impacts on the geology of the planet – as the dawn of the Anthropocene. In this third of three urban geography progress reports, I identify interrelated elements of what I call ‘Anthropocene thinking’ – non-linearity, reworked temporalities, and ontologies of systemicity – that invite the perceived need for ‘anticipatory governance’ and pervade contemporary urban theory and governance. This is exemplified, I argue, by two current trends in urban governance: the promotion of smart and resilient cities.

Keywords

Anthropocene resilient cities smart cities

Anthropocene (n.): the era of geological time during which human activity is considered to be the dominant influence on the environment, climate, and ecology of the earth. (Oxford English Dictionary, added in 2014)

I Introduction

In October of 2016, the United Nations convened a summit called ‘Habitat III’ to discuss how cities can ‘fulfill their role as drivers of sustainable development’ and ‘shape the implementation of new global development and climate change goals’.¹ Indeed, the perception of the promise of the scale of the city to meet the definitional challenges of the contemporary conjuncture seems hard to overstate. Cities have not only been crucial testing grounds and sites for the roll-out of neoliberal governance (Peck and Tickell, 2002), cities have also ‘emerged as key strategic sites through which climate change responses are being mobilized and attempts to govern climate operationalized’ (McGuirk et al., 2016: 146). As Wakefield and Braun note, ‘the city is now viewed as the most pressing and promising site for anticipating and addressing uncertain urban futures…the future of humanity is increasingly understood in terms of the city’s social organization and physical design’ (2014: 4).

Around the same time as the UN conference was taking place, a group of scientists advanced the proposition to the International Geological Congress that the 1950s should mark the advent of a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene. The subcommission on Quarternary stratigraphy defines the Anthropocene as marked by, among other things, changes to the chemical composition of oceans, soils and the biosphere which are attributable to anthropogenic perturbations including ‘colonization, agriculture, urbanization and global warming’.² The term’s origin story is well-worn by now; Nobel Prize winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen blurted the term out in frustration at a climate science meeting in 2000 in Mexico, and followed up with a piece in ‘The Global Change Newsletter’³ with Eugene Stormer, who had also proposed the term at one point. Since then, geologists have considered in earnest whether to codify the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch. Yet as science journalist Andy Revkin (2016) notes, the term has come to stand in for far more than an esoteric stratigraphic question. ‘The word’, he writes, ‘has become the closest thing there is to common shorthand for this turbulent, momentous, unpredictable, hopeless, hopeful time – duration and scope still unknown’.

The city emerges as the deus ex machina of the Anthropocene; the spatial and infrastructural form that can allow us to ‘have our cake and eat it too, to double down on industrialization’ (Townsend, 2013) by ‘redesigning the operating system of the last century’ (p. xii). At the same time, the patterns of thought that accompany the ushering in of the Anthropocene overlap with and are reflected in contemporary urban governance initiatives. In this third of three urban geography progress reports, I identify interrelated elements of what I call ‘Anthropocene thinking’ – non-linearity, reworked temporalities, and ontologies of systemicity – that pervade contemporary urban governance. This is exemplified, I argue, by two current trends in urban governance: the promotion of smart and resilient cities.

II Anthropocene thinking

While we have long appreciated the ability of humans to impact the ecology of the planet, the notion that we might leave a permanent, irreversible scar on the geology – ‘the great stone book of nature’ (Ansted, 1863, quoted in Szerszynski, 2012) – is rather new. This prospect is seldom met with ambivalence, but rather tends to evoke anxiety about the immediacy of climate crisis and the limits of received social formations, imaginaries, and ways of knowing to stave off catastrophe and confront emergent risks. Addressing these entirely new and unprecedented risks is thought to demand ‘anticipatory’ capacity, to act on a complex array of inputs and ‘manage emerging knowledge-based technologies while such management is still possible’ (Guston, 2014: 219; see also Quay, 2010; Tschakert and Dietrich, 2010; Serrao-Neumann et al., 2013). This forward-looking anticipatory logic marks a reorientation of the temporalities of knowledge; historical precedent and observation of past patterns are less useful for predicting future outcomes: ‘Common to all forms of anticipatory action’, notes Anderson, ‘is a seemingly paradoxical process whereby a future becomes cause and justification for some form of action in the here and now’ (Anderson, 2010: 778). Yet at the same time that history appears less relevant, the Anthropocene locates contemporary human experience in relation to the vast expanse of ‘deep time’ or geological time. ‘The irony of the Anthropocene’, as Farrier (2016) puts it, ‘is that we are conjuring ourselves as ghost that will haunt the very deep future.’

The practice of earth system science in the Anthropocene is disrupted by the erosion of clear baselines from which to make objective, scientific observations (Robbins and Moore, 2013), as well as the non-linearity of environmental change. A recent debate in the pages of Nature about how to think about ‘invasive species’ laid bare the uneasy relationship earth system scientists have to the prospect that ‘pre-Columbian’ nature might no longer serve as an ‘a priori baseline’ (Robbins and Moore, 2013: 8). Instead, some ecologists argued that ‘novel’ or emergent ecosystems had to be embraced as part of environmental management plans, rather than restored to an ‘original’ condition. This prospect incited what Robbins and Moore call an ‘ecological anxiety disorder’ resulting in part from the recognition that humans had negatively and – perhaps more disturbing – irreversibly changed the ecology of the planet, rendering the pre-Columbian baseline moot. A more recent paper in Nature raises concerns about the positive ‘feedback’ of warming temperatures in relation to changes in soil ecologies. Rising temperatures incite micro-organisms to increase their rate of respiration, a process that substantially increases greenhouse gasses and will likely ‘accelerate planetary warming over the twenty-first century’ (Crowther et al., 2016). This is but one example of the myriad positive feedbacks that intensify the effect of environmental change in an unpredictable and non-linear fashion.

There are clear analogies to this in the field of urban studies, wherein the analytical object is being rapidly transformed in an unprecedented way as cities grow at rates and to levels never before seen in human history (Davis, 2006; Brenner, 2014). The absence of any known baseline and the need to embrace ‘novel ecologies’ or constantly moving points of equilibrium create scientific and political anxieties. These anxieties are apparently calmed or staved off by the form of urban and environmental ‘legibility’ produced by so-called ‘big data’ (Shelton, forthcoming).

In response to these rapid and unprecedented paradigm-shifting changes in both the earth’s system and the earth’s cities, complex adaptive systems frameworks and ontologies emerge as ‘a theoretical reference point for the full spectrum of contemporary risk interventions’ (Walker and Cooper, 2011: 144). These frameworks are not testable hypotheses regarding the empirically identifiable possibility of a positive feedback relationship between social and ecological processes, but the proposition of general and generic ontological systemicity. We see evidence of this in the US National Science Foundation’s Coupled Natural and Human Systems program’s call for proposals, in which researchers are invited to fill in the blanks of a premade model of positive feedback loops (see Figure 1), or in the various models that characterize the resilience literature (see Figure 2). These models also posit generic and interchangeable systems that reach thresholds and follow common trajectories of change and evolution toward contingent and unknown futures.

Figure 1.

Image from the US National Science Foundation’s Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems program solicitation.

Figure 2.

Image from www.theresiliencealliance.org representing ‘panarchy’ to illustrate the phases of adaptive cycles of socio-ecological systems.

Thus the Anthropocene invites a reorganization of temporalities; the past cannot predict the future, but it will meaningfully shape the future. At the same time, immanent risk with no past referent requires the constant integration of new sources of information in an anticipatory posture. Complex adaptive systems replace linear models of change, cause and effect, and baseline referents, and become a generic ontology for all social, environmental and socio-environmental processes (Manson, 2001; Lansing, 2003). Complexity refers not to simply being ‘complicated’ but rather ‘to how systems exhibit patterns that emerge from interactions between individual components in unexpected and nonlinear ways’ (Meerow and Newell, 2015: 236). Cities come to occupy a particular place and set of possibilities in this conjuncture and their imagined ontologies intersect with Anthropocene thinking more generally. Enter the ‘smart’ and ‘resilient’ city as ‘pervasive idioms of global governance’ (Walker and Cooper, 2011).

III Smart cities

The term ‘smart cities’ has been something of a capacious and fuzzy term, referring variously to cities that have adopted ‘smart growth’ principals (Gibbs et al., 2013), cities that have invested in the knowledge economy, or some combination therein (Chourabi et al., 2012). Yet more recently, the term has come to stand in for the way that cities are increasingly managed by networked devices generating data, or as Kitchin (2014) puts it, the ‘pervasive and ubiquitous computing and digitally instrumented devices built into the very fabric of urban environments that are used to monitor, manage and regulate city flows and processes, often in real time’ (p. 2; see also Shelton et al., 2014). These devices, or the ‘internet of things’ (Zanella et al., 2014), communicate streams of data about traffic, public transportation, air quality, waste management, parking, energy consumption and so on. As people move throughout the city, they also create streams of data, through ‘volunteered geographic information’ (i.e. location data) and other ‘user generated content’.

How these data flow and are captured varies, but data streams are increasingly being sent to ‘city operating systems’ or data hubs in cities, which are effectively business process software repurposed by Microsoft, IBM and other tech companies for urban data management (Kitchin, 2015: 5). While urban governance has always been informed to some degree by data, the ‘smart city’ signals a shift from data-informed to data-driven urbanism (Kitchin, 2015). This transition is one from ‘small data’ to ‘big data, wherein the generation of data is continuous, exhaustive to a system, fine-grained, relational and flexible across a range of domains’ (Kitchin, 2015: 4). Cities are ‘becoming knowable and controllable in new dynamic ways, responsive to the data generated about them’ (Kitchin, 2015: 2). This understanding of the smart city is not divorced from previous iterations of the term that focus on the knowledge and ‘creative’ economy and sustainability. On the contrary, these are understood to be fundamentally linked as a desired outcome of data-driven urban governance (Thite, 2011; Hollands, 2008; Vanolo, 2013; Söderström et al, 2014).

The material implementation and discursive framing of ‘smart cities’ gives rise to a ‘complex socio-technical assemblage’ (Kitchin, 2016: 20) which Kitchin argues is deeply enmeshed at every turn in political and geographical processes. For example, the smart city phenomenon has corporate roots that reach beyond its articulation with tech-driven economic development (Rose, forthcoming; Söderström et al., 2014). The material infrastructure and imagery of the smart city is intimately networked with technology companies themselves. In 2011, IBM was granted the trademark for the term ‘Smarter Cities’ and tech companies have been at the center of creating and marketing smart city infrastructure (Rose, forthcoming). Rose (forthcoming) explores the ‘smart city’ that corporations call into being through their own visual marketing. In one case, a marketing film for Siemens called ‘Future Life’ represents the city in 2050 in a way that offers a ‘remarkably coherent vision of the urban future that awaits the adopters of smart technology’ (Rose, forthcoming). People are represented as a ‘mobile mass’ of bodies seldom in factories, workplaces are digital, and people often have a ‘digital prosthesis’ in the form of their smart phone or tablet that both transmit and receive data. Visualized in a way that the ‘urban crowd is equivalent to data flow’, these films depict images of ‘human beings being translated into data’. As Rose notes, ‘This is an affective spatiality that enrolls viewers of the film in pleasurably enacting the mobile untethered spatiality of digital visuality’. This locates viewers in ‘simultaneous spaces, multiple temporalities, and data-rich, simulated environments’ (Elsaesser, 2013: 228 quoted in Rose, forthcoming).

What these three definitions of smart cities (smart growth oriented, knowledge economy oriented, and networked, data-driven) amount to is a vision for the evolution of the post-industrial built form of the city as a networked ‘internet of things’ that facilitates the movement of data-generating ‘creatives’ (McLean, 2014). Smart cities have been breathlessly celebrated by policy-makers as moving beyond politics and ideology to ‘empirics’ and evidence-based urban governance by urban practitioners (see, for example, Government Summit, 2015). Yet, as Kitchin argues (see also Leszczynski, 2016), this is hardly the case: ‘While data-driven, networked urbanism purports to produce a commonsensical, pragmatic, neutral, apolitical, evidence-based form of responsive urban governance, it is nonetheless selective, crafted, flawed, normative and politically-inflected’ (2016: 1). This frictionless world of real time data flows feeding into algorithms presents itself as ‘non-ideological’ or:

politically benign and commonsensical; that big data urbanism is inherently a good thing, seeking to make it a city safer, more secure, efficient, productive, sustainable and so on, employing rigorous, technical practices that capture, process, and analyze vast quantities of transparent, neutral, objective data. (Kitchin, 2014: 79)

Or as Shelton (forthcoming) shows, rather than producing a better understanding of the city as it ‘actually is’, big data make the city more ‘legible’ in ways that are leveraged by the state and by capital, but also open up possibilities for citizen-led interventions, as well.

Leszczynski argues we should understand the making, marketing and proliferation of smart cities ‘as material-discursive projects of futuring, i.e. of anticipating particular kinds of cities-to-come’(2016: 1692). But what kinds of cities do ‘algorithmic urban governance’ (Introna, 2016) call into being? What kinds of futures does it seek to secure, what kinds of subjects does it produce? Indeed, as Leszczynski notes, these processes are not innocent, but rather are ‘making secure, resilient futures by circumscribing the horizon of possibilities to exclude potential scenarios deemed undesirable or deleterious’ (2016: 1692).

While smart city enthusiasts often point to the efficiencies gained by smart infrastructure as an inherent good, attentiveness to the forms of governmentality that urban algorithmic governance invite trains our attention on the kinds of subjects and geographies (Crampton, 2015) algorithmic governmentality (Introna, 2016) produces. Using mobile phone apps such as GhettoTracker and SketchFactor⁴ (see Thatcher, 2013) as examples, Leszczynski argues that these technologies

enact forms of algorithmic governmentality that prefigure and shape self-regulating subjects who willing[ly] position themselves within, and actively contribute to, an urban security calculus as a means of minimizing their own personal exposure to urban risks presented by risky bodies in risky spaces. (2016: 1697)

These apps aggregate user-generated feedback on the perceived ‘sketchiness’ of a neighborhood to enable users to avoid them. In so doing, users not only intervene in the future by preempting it in the present, but also actively create space ‘in a data-determined pre-future, before the contagion of data-latent disaffection may be projected forward in time and space’ (2016: 1692).

The apps are not the only way that volunteered geographic information (VGI) has been captured and marketed. Companies like Geofeedia sell access to data streams in order to enable clients to ‘stay ahead of topics, trends and situations with proactive insights and alerts from real-time location-based intelligence’.⁵ The American Civil Liberties Union reports that Geofeedia markets itself to law enforcement as a way to ‘monitor activists and protestors’ (ACLU, 2016; see also Graham, 2005). The use of VGI, and its circulation through the internet of things, functions to securitize the city against risk, even when that risk exists ‘only in speculative form as codified urban derivatives’ and amounts to the ‘algorithmic assembly of cities-to-come’ (Leszczynski, 2016: 1697). Thus the range of data collected, aggregated and algorithmically manipulated to predict or anticipate urban futures has the effect of calling these futures into being, more than predicting what they might become. Following Kitchin, Leszczynski, and Rose, these forms of city making – whether through infrastructure, representation and measurement under the guise of ‘smart cities’ and all that they entail – mirror and reproduce trends in Anthropocene thinking by governing the city as a complex adaptive system with unprecedented futures that must be predicted and mitigated in the present (see also Shelton, forthcoming).

IV Resilient cities

Contemporary smart cities are meant to be simultaneously adaptive, anticipatory, and responsive in real-time, and crucially, shock absorbing and resilient. Initiatives to foster urban resilience abound in the public and nonprofit sectors. The Rockefeller Foundation, for example, has recently poured half a billion dollars into promoting resilience in cities, an initiative that includes the funding of a ‘chief resilience officer’ in the first 100 cities included in the initiative.⁶ The Rockefeller Foundation’s initiative is just one of a nearly endless list of government and nonprofit initiatives, however, making urban resilience best understood as a ‘dispositif of government’, as Braun puts it. The notion of a dispositif calls into focus the reactive nature of government, as it

seeks to take hold of relations of force that already exist, ‘manipulating’ and ‘intervening’ in them, ‘developing’ them in particular directions, ‘blocking’ them, ‘stabilizing’ them, and ‘utilizing’ them. (Braun, 2014: 52)

Conceptualized in this way, the emphasis on resilience in urban governance can be understood as cohering and attempting to capture a range of pre-existing impulses and trends in urban governance. The ubiquitous push for urban resilience as an approach to urban governance both exemplifies and responds to the pervasiveness of Anthropocene thinking.

The academic literature that has attempted to understand and diagnose the myriad ways that ‘resilience’ is being mobilized to inform urban governance is vast, and a summary is beyond the scope of this article (for overviews on the use of the concept in relation to social systems see Adger, 2000; MacKinnon and Derickson, 2013; Cretney, 2014; Anderson, 2015; Weichselgartner and Kelan, 2015).⁷ Based on an extensive bibliometric analysis, Meerow et al. (2016) identify key tensions in the literature around the definition of urban resilience, including whether to understand the concept in terms of emphasizing ‘equilibrium’ or non-equilibrium, competing perspectives on the term’s value, and varying conceptions of how systems change. They propose a definition of urban resilience as:

the ability of an urban system – and all its constituent socio-ecological and socio-technical networks across temporal and spatial scales – to maintain or rapidly return to desired functions in the face of a disturbance, to adapt to change, and to quickly transform systems that limit current or future adaptive capacity. (2016: 39)

Relevant for our purposes here is the underlying ontology of resilience, the urban futures it engenders and the ideologies of urban governance and politics with which it articulates. Crucially, resilience talk centers and normalizes risk and prioritizes the ability to adapt to inevitable catastrophe. ‘The underlying ontology of resilience’, Evans and Reid (2013: 84) argue, ‘is actually vulnerability’. Reducing this vulnerability is secondary to developing the capacity to endure it. In this worldview, they argue, resistance is ‘politically debased’ to resilience (p. 85):

As such, the resilient subject is a subject which must permanently struggle to accommodate itself to the world, and not a subject which can conceive of changing the world, its structure and conditions of possibility. (Evans and Reid, 2013: 83)

Others have noted the apparent co-constitution of neoliberal ideology and governance and the resilient subject. Walker and Cooper (2011: 143) have argued that the logic of neoliberalism ‘is perfectly in accord’ with Holling’s (1973) theories of complex adaptive systems, and that its uptake in recent years is owed to its ‘intuitive ideological fit with a neoliberal philosophy of complex adaptive systems’. Nelson (2014), however, suggests a conceptual reframing of systems theory oriented toward socio-natural systems as a common. Whereas resilience theory tends to accept as given capitalist social relations, she proposes that it be taken up in a ‘subversive manner’. Fostering resilience toward this end would entail not the reproduction of the existing system after shock or crisis but rather toward the capacity for self-organization after system transformation (see also Anderson, 2015).

These authors all point to the way in which resilience as a ‘pervasive idiom of global governance’ (Walker and Cooper, 2011) has the effect of obscuring the social relations and structures that create the very conditions to which subjects are meant to become resilient.⁸ Like ‘smart cities’ initiatives, centering resilience as a normative good toward which cities ought to aspire collapses the political realm into the technocratic realm. Questions about how cities ought to be governed are supplanted with strategies for enabling cities to survive shocks to the status quo. Moreover, conceiving of the city as a complex adaptive system (see Meerow and Newell, 2015) rather than a contingent political formation naturalizes the received social formation. These trends in urban governance have been identified in a slightly different register as indicative of the tendency toward ‘post political’ urban governance (Mouffe, 2005; Swyngendouw, 2007; Davidson and Iveson, 2015).

V Urban politics in the Anthropocene

What is at stake for urban governance, politics and futurity in the Anthropocene? If both resilience and the ‘smart city’ operate as dispositifs of governance that are ‘combining diverse elements into new heterogenous formations’, what, asks Braun (2014: 51; see also Kitchin, 2015), is the ‘proper political posture’ to adopt in response? As Nelson (2014) points out, we cannot be ‘against’ resilience any more than we can be against the smart city as such.

This line of analysis is resonant with work of late that posits that urban governance has become ‘post-political’ (Mouffe, 2005; Swyngedouw, 2007, 2016; Paddison, 2009; Derickson and MacKinnon, 2015). While there is some disagreement as to what the term signals, both in its temporality and its meaning, the term can be understood to signal the way cities are governed as though there is consensus around particular normative goals. Davidson and Iveson (2015) posit four concepts around which urban governing consensus is derived: global, sustainable, competitive and secure. Crucially, the point here is not to emphasize the degree to which there is no contestation around these issues or to suggest that they are in any way not inherently political, but rather to point to an approach to governance which refuses to give standing to alternative governing objectives (see also Shelton, forthcoming).

Davidson and Iveson (2015) engage Rancière’s (2009) ‘method of equality’ as a way to ‘identify the practices and possibilities for politics across a multitude of urbanisms’ (Davidson and Iveson, 2015: 551). Rancière’s conception complicates the privileging of scales, spaces, or subjects as inherently political and instead compels an analytical focus on denaturalizing governing idioms and the way in which they work to obscure politics and subjects.

Work in other traditions has taken somewhat of a different path to respond to the political conjuncture characterized by the urban Anthropocene. Reflecting on the contributions of authors to a recent special issue on socio-natural transformation in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Braun (2015) notes that experimentation has become

the staging of encounters through which new possibilities for politics might emerge along with new political subjectivities. The conceit here is that by working with materials and material others we can potentially open ourselves to events that surprise and disturb, allowing the world to force thought. (2015: 241; see also Ogden, 2016)

Robbins and Moore (2013: 5) propose a refusal to privilege purity and an embrace of ‘the monsters created in a world where humans exert strong influence’. What these scholars are responding to is the fact of the Anthropocene: if there is no possibility of restoring ‘Edenic’ or pre-contact nature, how should we anticipate the future in ways that reclaim and rework, rather than merely respond to, forms of thought and shared ontologies that characterize and accompany the Anthropocene?

Finally, Heynen (2015: 839) calls for an ‘abolition ecology’ or one that can build ‘toward an approach more capable of articulating how cities have been produced through racialized logics that have been engineered into their building blocks, facades, plumes of dust, streams, forests, and air circulation’ in order to provide ‘revolutionary ideas’ that can resist reproducing the very systems that those engaged here have argued smart cities and resilience reproduce. If nothing else, the arrival of the Anthropocene signals the urgency of the task at hand.

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.

Notes

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