Urban geography II: Materially important cities

I Introduction

We are increasingly aware of the climatic changes that are threatening the future of cities, everyday landscapes and political and economic research agendas. This has generated a number of challenges for existing urban theory, which have been met with a wide range of fascinating conceptual and theoretical innovations, along with new fields of empirical research. This report reviews recent literature that charts new ground in understanding how the ‘material turn’ of recent years has generated an interest in how earth, water and other elements form the production of space. It tracks this through three themes: the concept of extractivist urbanization, which links new forms of capital and finance vehicles to the material alteration of both labour, commodities and topography; the relationship between ports, corridors and the circular economy, and debates around how the commodity chains and consumption spaces that structure urban life might be rethought and the emergence of a ‘climate enclavism’ where cities are stratified on the basis of deploying technology to ‘terraform’ or gentrify urban space that is topographically resilient to the worst projected ravages of climate change.

II Extractivist Urbanization: Stone and Servers

In his recent book Stone, Tim Edensor (2020) provides an extensive reading of how Melbourne’s urban identity has been shaped, literally formed, by a complex interaction of excavation and landfilling, quarrying and mining. This work is emblematic of a wide interest in how the materiality of cities is structured by a technopolitical drive towards the tunnelling and underground excavation of territory (e.g. Garrett et al., 2020; Grafe and Hilbrandt, 2019; Kearnes and Rickards, 2017; Woon and Dodds, 2022). This has moved in parallel with the growing deployment of ‘extraction’ as a keyword of growing significance in contemporary urban analysis, and which I suggest has three elements.

First, we can identify a growing evidence base of how the digital footprint of the contemporary ‘knowledge society’ is as extractivist in nature as, say, minerals engineering. In her review of the literature on cloud-based computing and servers, for example, Furlong (2021) notes the ‘green smoke screen’ of this ‘cloudfrastructure’, identifying how server-based software and artificial intelligence platforms give an impression of lacking a carbon footprint, despite their huge energy usage. Indeed, their very existence appears to allow for even smarter ways of extracting things: time, labour, resources and nature (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2017: p. 189). Taken as a whole, the entire notion of the ‘start-up economy’ could be seen as a means of extracting value wherever it can be angel-invested, ventured and bootstrapped. Mezzadra and Neilson are keen to show that data mining is as extractive as its verb implies:

“The expanding panoply of practices in data mining is an important register of the pervasive penetration of extraction into spheres of human activity that lie beyond the familiar domains of mining and agribusiness. From security to social media, purchasing patterns to financial practices, the collection, storage and analysis of massive amounts of data enable correlations that at once are highly individualized and sort populations into a range of diverse categories: drivers, pedestrians, consumers of tuna fish, potential terrorists, mortgagees, viewers of Brazilian soap operas and so on.”

And so, the mining towns that sprung up to withdraw minerals from the upper layers of the earth are now joined by mining cities, based on their ability to control and regulate the flows of global cryptocurrency and data analysis. Jamieson (2021) makes an important epistemological bridge by pointing out the importance of the extraction of quartz in the production of silicon chips, thus ‘inviting the possibility of a granular analysis of the flow and aggregation of “big data”’ (p. 289).

A second important extractivist agenda has emerged: that of investment grade climate assets, where profit is extracted from the expertise embodied in post-carbon financial practices. Scholars have tracked the emergence of a global landscape of interurban investment and consulting networks, banks, policy institutions and development agencies who are forcing a new development paradigm (Christophers, 2018). Many of these organizations are focused on creating new sources and pathways for large-scale investments (Long and Rice, 2019: p. 999), as with the World Bank, which has propagated ‘green structural adjustment’ practices (Bigger and Webber, 2020: p. 48). As pension funds and individual investors look for climate proof assets, so governance regimes around these place-based environments have tightened, which may have negative consequences for those who have been attached to those localities for centuries. As Bigger and Webber (2020) argue: “The gears for rendering cities around the world investable in the name of climate resilience are turning” but these discourses mask the need for ‘tracking billions in return oriented capital into the Global South for resilient infrastructure’. (p. 47). Drawing on examples of how World Bank funding was applied to flood mitigation programmes in Jakarta, they illustrate how this huge global capital broker was able to establish norms, regulations, tools, financial products and networks to monetize ‘resilience’ projects across Asia. Similarly, Long and Rice (2019) suggest that the ‘forms of carbon management and climate resilient infrastructures that underpin the logic of climate urbanism, together, are creating global investment assemblages that can promote and finance cities as sites of climate governance’. (p. 999). The apparent role of neo-liberal calculative norms in these programmes is underscored by the significant ‘philanthrocapitalist’ private sector wealth driving resilience agendas (Webber et al., 2020). Many of these business models are based on pure financial return, which inevitably will lead to ‘cherry-picking’ the most monetizable urban assets for resilience-proofing. As Fleming (2019) suggests, ‘We need to dismantle the philosophies of neoliberalism and philanthrocapitalism that underwrite many urban development projects and withdraw support for disruptive urban tech startups’. (n.p.).

Third, we can also note that there is an uneven geography of ‘terraforming’ that sees the very matter of ‘ground’ being excavated, filled, transported and transformed, both through primary extraction and through the burial of waste and spoil (Dixon et al., 2018; Kearnes and Rickards, 2017). Jamieson (2021) uses the term ‘granular geographies’ in his attempt to capture the specific nature of Singapore’s place as a consumer of sand, both through landfill and through concrete production, highlighting how its ‘phase transitions’ between solid and liquid impacts on its place in the commodity chain. While public attention is often directed to the ‘best practice’ by which global cities might deal with waste and materials, there are many other parts of the world’s urban territory which are far enough away from global policy circuits to effectively act as dumping grounds for extracted, waste, materials. Meanwhile, the former sores of the industrial sites of the global North are aestheticized and repurposed. As Edensor notes in his Melbourne study:

“the voids plundered for stone and clay serve as already existent sites that offer spaces in which to dispose of unwanted material. Yet this is not the end of the process, for once they have accommodated the city’s building rubble, these sites must be rendered secure, safe and attractive, refashioned into terraforms that often seek to disguise their histories of both quarrying and landfill.” (2020, p. 88).

Moreover, while the regurgitation of city voids is an important area, we also can see how cities are not closed systems, and metabolically dispose of their spoilage to a point where the ocean has been urbanized, drawn into the networks of production and waste disposal in many ways. Similarly, the world’s soils tell a story of this urban footprint: arguably, investment in soil science (e.g. Granjou and Phillips, 2019) is as important an element of urban science as any smart city initiative, given the overwhelming consumption of agricultural produce by urbanists. Rare earth minerals, of course, remain a massive and hotly contested source of the terrestrial futures of smartphones, space travel and new materials (Klinger, 2017).

III Ports, Corridors and Circular Economies

The next major area of concern is how cities act as concentration zones of extracted and traded goods, as well as waste-generating machines. The concept of the circular economy is still reaching academic maturity (see Brandão et al., 2020 for an overview). The extensive outputs of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, ranging from policy reports to educational materials, has provided a substantial impetus to disseminating ideas of circularity and full life cycle analysis of how goods and services are produced, consumed, and disposed of. However, there is a sense that despite its clear importance, the circular economy moment forms part of ‘actually existing’ capitalism, where new metrics and assets emerge that increase the potential for capital investment.

The role of cities in adding to the already destructive extractive and manufacturing process is seen in its huge demand for packaging suitable for disaggregation into individual shops and warehouses, ranging from polystyrene chips through to the largely unnecessary ‘shelf-ready’ boxes and packets contrived to stimulate consumer demand. This has a disproportionate impact on the global South, which for Millington and Lawhon (2019) requires research to understand the relationality of ‘multiscalar wastescapes’ especially involving transfers between North and South. As bioeconomic sinks, therefore, cities emerge as enigmatic players in the global economy. For Taylor Buck and While, the bioeconomy is not just agrarian, but also urban: ‘cities are beginning to be seen as a major bioeconomic opportunity due to their inherent characteristics… [such as being]… the source of concentrated, but undervalued, environmental and ecological wastes’ (Taylor Buck and While, 2021: p. 189).

To fully understand these processes, it is exciting to contemplate the revival of what was once a mainstay of urban, economic and transport geography: the study of ports. By considering the range of geological, oceanic, riparian and maritime impacts of the movement of goods and the logistics industry, the aquatic-terrestrial materiality of landscape emerges as a defining element of these urban economic geographies. For example, in his study of dredging practices, Gustafson (2020) shows what is at stake for ports and their position in supply chains:

“Because port cities are the primary sites for dredging, the urban stakes of sedimentation are high: a port must dredge deeper and wider fairways for increasingly larger vessels, but a port unable to effectively manage sediment either in their shipping channels before dredging or by effectively circulating and dispersing it after dredging stands to lose preferred access to global shipping routes, thereby altering the spatial structure of global urban shipping networks and jeopardizing the political economic future of their city.” (p. 1102)

In this context, there is an opportunity to revisit the intense outpouring of work on commodity chains in the early 2000s using an optic based on circular economies and life cycle analysis. Commodity chain work (e.g. Hughes and Reimer, 2004) ranged from conventional economic geographies of important and export through to deeply engaged ethnographies of specific products. More recent scholarship, such as Koshy et al.’s (2021) account of the massive, digitally enabled, expropriation of rural land supply chains within India’s urban consumer economy, highlights the intensity with which digital platforms are now transforming chains, making over-consumption structurally embedded in contemporary economies.

Taken together, a revitalized geography of ports and goods which examines how an assemblage of goods – which would include packaging, components and casings – are fabricated and delivered is an important agenda for contemporary urban geographers. The investigative geographies generated by, for example, Crang et al.’s (2013) study of the recycling chains of used clothing and shipbreaking are increasingly urgent, and could be tracked through how these items are sited through warehousing and other forms of storage. The urban technopolitical organization of supply chains, from building materials to vaccines, is a mainstay of the production of contemporary urban life.

This draws attention to the ‘corridors’ that structure these chains. Scholarship on the Chinese government’s recent Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) provides a spotlight for understanding their geopolitical significance. Williams et al. argue that the Initiative combines ‘established spaces of global finance (e.g. Singapore and London) and extraction (e.g. oil fields of the Arabian Gulf) with historic and revived spaces of ancient trade (e.g. Mombasa and Khorgos–Almaty) and new spaces of extraction (e.g. the Arctic)’. (2019, p. 129). The geopolitical aims of megaproject infrastructure are thus defining urban development strategies and spatialities in ways that will map out the futures of artefacts ranging from rare earth minerals to new museums (Klinger, 2017; Lin et al., 2019; Sidaway et al., 2020; Winter, 2020).

IV New Climate, New Urban Forms

Finally, there has been a noticeable wave of innovation in adaptive or resilient urban design, engineering and architecture in recent years. The establishment of ‘green’ or ‘sustainable’ urbanism has become normalized in the urban policy of many of the major cities of advanced capitalism. There have been waves of ‘how to’ technical publications on topics such as water-sensitive urban design, landscape ecologies and green building, many of which guide designers on ways in which the built environment can be adapted to enhance ecological or sustainable practices. Unsurprisingly, proponents of urban political ecology have generated critique that deconstructs the relationship of capitalism to these emerging forms of urban nature, which increasingly take the manipulation of topography as a key object of analysis.

First, there is the concept of Anthropocenic ‘enclavism’ (Hodson and Marvin, 2010) which captures a utopian-dystopian dialectic of protected urbanity and mass exposure to precarity and crisis. Public attention has been triggered by a perception of impending crisis, as a number of important cities around the world begin to flood with increasing, and alarming, regularity. There is a growing interest among theorists in the spectre of semi-inundated cities, a long-standing trope of science fiction and disaster genres (Dobraszczyk, 2017). Miami, particularly, has drawn the attention of Ariza (2022) and Wakefield (2021a). The latter describes different scenarios circulating around the ‘retirement of Miami’, a series of local discourses and activities which interpret how the city's existing urban fabric, prone to both mundane and extreme flooding events, is now seen as inadequate to withstand sea-level rise. These scenarios include planning for the city as a series of interlinked islands, rather than seeking an expensive retrofitting of infrastructure to hold back the water. This is quite a profound rethinking of the city: ‘in Miami, a new urbicidal future is being imagined. Rather than secure existing land formations and urban boundaries against sea rise as resilience approaches seek to do, this vision promotes pre-emptive destruction of an iconic-but-seen-as-doomed modern urban form’ (p. 13). Wakefield also charts the socio-economic disadvantage that capital switching would bring into these plans and scenarios.

Understanding such processes, which Wakefield refers to as ‘Anthropocene islandization’, requires a conceptualisation of the complex interplay of private interests, unsuitably scaled urban governance structures and rapid socio-economic changes that prevent a technical fix. The challenges of adapting coastal megacities to climate change can be seen in plans for the relocation of Jakarta’s government centre to Borneo (Goh, 2020; Wade, 2018), or the social fragmentation and inequality that accompanies infrastructure planning in Manila (Meerow, 2017). There are debates in Australia about government support for encouraging populations, especially aspiring house-buyers, to relocate out of increasingly over-priced city housing markets. Following repeated and ferocious river-based flooding in many smaller towns and villages, cities are held up as being the place where, by building and protecting higher lands, economies of scale and urban density can best withstand climate-related inundations.

Second, climate-driven urban policy shifts will have far-reaching implications for urban politics, that will generate new sites of contestation. For example, the new geographies of urban inundation pose the threat of a ‘green gentrification’ process, where previously less attractive districts emerge as locationally safer from climate-induced hazards (Anguelovski et al., 2018). This may also have a racialized dimension, as Bigger and Millington (2020) show in their discussion of austerity in North American cities, where sustainability policies often ignore the social and racial inequity that exists in cities, and indeed may exacerbate it. Similarly, the likely growth in numbers of climate refugees may in turn deepen conservative, segregationist politics (Long and Rice, 2019). As Angelo and Wachsmuth (2020) show, the verdant, ‘natural' ‘green’ and socio-technical ‘grey’ of dense, public transport focused urban sustainability policy and discourse are both ideological, deployed in politically and socially complex ways within contemporary urban politics (see also Knuth et al., 2021; Wachsmuth and Angelo, 2020).

Third, there is the ‘green building’ as the resilience product of global architectural firms and engineering consultancies. These actors play an ambiguous role in climate urbanism. In his study of “a green climate adaptation, stormwater management and regeneration project” in Copenhagen, Tubridy (2020) takes issue with the ‘ideologically charged visions of socio-natural transformation put forth by designers in the context of green, resilient approaches to climate adaptation and infrastructure, despite their importance in reinforcing the dominance of the green planning orthodoxy’. (p. 143). He demonstrates how the adoption of ecologically sensitive urban design is also ‘subtly intertwined with entrepreneurial objectives and is likely to lead to the exclusion of low-income residents and migrants from new green amenities’. (p. 134). Similarly, we can see how Knuth’s (2016) study of a major new office building in downtown San Francisco provides an insightful account of the embedded finances of such buildings, where ‘initiatives to retrofit, certify and market green buildings’ (p. 627) generate new asset classes.

V Conclusion

This short review has drawn attention to the growing body of scholarship that deals with the materiality of cities in the context of significant on-going material and topographical change. Despite attempts to shift the dial on a decarbonized urban policy, the sunk costs of development trajectories in different countries and cities have baked in a long, repetitive, mundane process of on-going extractivism. There is a growing critical mass of studies which have rewritten the status of cities less as coherent spatial formations, but more as the concentration point of either the consumption of extractivist commodity chains, or else their point of logistical management and financial brokerage. In many of the accounts cited here, cities are visible but in unfamiliar ways (e.g. Dawson 2019). The Belt and Road Initiative, for example, can be understood as ‘a vision for global urbanization based on node/corridor infrastructures that ground – or materialize – global flows of capital, are sustained and countenanced by the metabolic transformation of dispersed environments’ (Williams et al., 2019: p. 133).

A recurring theme has been the elision of labour and resource extraction, as well as the impact of neo-liberal thinking on the financing of adaptation and mitigation of climate change impacts on the urban. This body of work requires an examination of conventional urban theory, and particularly its ontological basis. It must include a materialist analysis, which may include the forensic tracing of stone and rock, particularly important for First Nations Peoples. Stone (Edensor, 2020), iron and increasingly the rare earth materials that constitute important elements of new economies are building blocks of future economies. This might encourage us to think of cities as bioeconomic machines, following on Taylor Buck and While’s (2021) work. This is hardly a new metaphor, but it should be clear that urban planning zoning into ‘residential’, ‘industrial’ or ‘retail’, for example, could be rewritten as ‘low energy efficiency housing area’, ‘bioeconomic combustion district’, ‘fast consumer consumption zone’ and so on. This, of course, can conceivably be extended to commercial space travel, which opens up yet further horizons of extractivism with as yet unknown consequences.

Consequently, the power of the discourse of climate urbanism is such that it becomes a totalizing narrative that squeezes out other equally compelling social challenges. As Long and Rice note:

“Under climate urbanism, the social problems that existed in the era of sustainable urbanism (i.e. social inequity, segregation and marginalization) are not addressed, but rather re-cast under a new moral imperative that trivializes their salience against the threat of planetary environmental collapse.” (2019, p. 1003)

The future will probably include command and control cities such as Singapore, replete with green-walled skyscrapers, co-ordinating the financing of a mix of World Bank green assets. Other cities might specialize in developing a competitive edge in financing the world’s remaining dirty assets, carving a niche in ethically unpleasant trade that corporate social responsibility and regulatory standards precludes global North cities from handling.

Finally, geographers, with their sensitivity to natural processes, land politics and socio-spatial inequality will generate new frameworks for urban theory. We can see, for example, how Nelson and Bigger (2022), Robin and Cástan Broto (2021), Wakefield (2021a, 2021b) and Long and Rice (2019), to name but a few, have built on urban political ecology to set out how material urban space might be framed in a new, climatically sensitized future scholarship. And there is deep terrain to be excavated: one that requires ‘earth scientists, social scientists, archaeologists, urban planners and civil engineers’ to work together on the city as landform (Dixon et al., 2018: p. 122) or marine biologists, consumption sociologists and urban governance theorists on how the water-based city might be freed from plastic waste (Hawkins, 2021). Exciting, scary, troubling, materially important urban geography.