Abstract
Does relying on ‘time’ as the key variable that defines a particular format of city-building across the Global South, offers a new perspective through which to understand and critique urbanization? The latest volume in Routledge Studies in Urbanism and the City attempts to answer this question. In doing so, it also demonstrates how the proposition of fast urbanism engages with existing urban theories and urbanisms such as assemblage, splintered and speculative urbanisms.
Fast projects and plans contrast sharply with slow delivery—resulting from delayed land acquisition, land protests or loss of investor’s confidence—(Datta, 2015). Forced, physical expulsions and deliberate social non-inclusions are expressed in this volume as primarily temporal phenomena. The book argues that ‘fast cities’ are often new master-planned settlements conceptualized over a couple of years and implemented from scratch over a couple of decades leaving little room for social or environmental engagements that underpin sustainable urban development. Fast urbanism appears to provide the means for physically by-passing existing cities, which are often plagued by chaos, environmental degradation and poorly serviced settlements. They avoid sociopolitical accountability to existing citizens and instead of erasing historic differences they often create new social inequalities. Although they aspire for transformed urban futures, fast cities are shown to be rooted in ‘anxieties of postcolonial subjectivity that underline the vulnerabilities of the present’ (p. 4). Finally, fast cities materialize at the regional scale across the Global South, scaling up to economic and/or industrial corridors.
The reviewed volume uses a rich collection of six case studies to chart Asian, African and Middle Eastern responses to contemporary challenges associated with rapid urbanization. It is divided into three thematic sections. The first section explores redevelopment projects in Africa as fast urbanism, explicating the social dangers of African new city plans and critiquing the Masdar City Project. The second section untangles case cities through the lens of entrepreneurial urbanism—Songdo City in South Korea, the Qatar Foundation’s Education City in Qatar and Rajarhat, Kolkata in India. The third section considers master planning in Jakarta, capital of Indonesia and Lusaka, capital of Zambia, as the instrument for perpetuating or re-aligning political aims of city-building. It concludes with a political analysis of eco-cities in China.
The recurring lenses for critiquing fast city production are sustainability or the lopsided emphasis on economic returns on private investment, and overshadowing social and environmental concerns; speed or the by- passing of many years of contest, negotiation and struggle on which democratic urban development is to be founded; and land speculation. The cases highlight the different methods through which citizens produce fast urbanism—by aspiring for ‘worlding’ cities (Roy and Ong, 2011) or planning cities as a grand attempt at fantasy creation but falling short of realizing urban-scale utopias (Watson, 2014) and instead creating politically negotiated systems of infrastructure assemblages (McFarlane, 2011) or splintered urban realities (Graham and Marvin, 2001). The aim of this thought- provoking assemblage of writings on the mechanics and status of new city-making is to render visible nuances of current mega- urbanization projects. By utilizing criticality, the volume lays bare all that is imagined, and much that is impossible to achieve through fast urbanism, to guide future interventions across planning, policy-making and community- organizing in the Global South.
In the second chapter, Murray argues that satellite cities, encountered today in much of Africa’s new city-making, are little more than large-scale infrastructure projects at different stages of materialization. Several chapters are thus pre-emptive of the socio-spatial impacts should the plans and projects beyond the first few fast cities materialize. The next chapter, by Watson, critically examines the socio-spatial inequality, which has emerged in African cities, to be reinforced by the new master plans. A very different set of values and priorities is recommended to those that prevail, or rather dominate, the city planning and building milieu. The speed in African new towns is more related to the pace of impact on the economically disadvantaged and geographically isolated through the preparation of constructing satellite towns than through the actual building of new utopias. Watson warns of the potential social discord from the diversion of public funds towards new cities, away from dealing with a growing young, unemployed and disillusioned population.
Critical writing on smart cities often takes the normative goal of sustainability as a starting point, critiquing the use of the goal of sustainability to camouflage surveillance and control agendas or the reduction of the larger goal to measures of efficiency and optimization. This book too, gives sufficient attention to questions of sustainability as espoused in the eco-city and smart city tropes. For example, the Masdar City Project (Chapter 4) is tackled from the dual lenses of speed and sustainability, with the proliferation of eco-city as the leitmotif, propelled through fast dynamics. The entire process of city-making is attributed to the economic interests of the Masdar initiative and its business partners, with negligible attention paid to ecosystems or ecosystem services. The author questions whether the designers or conceptualizers of the city imagined that when given sufficient time, business relations would evolve into social relations, which are at the core of the urban living. The author alerts city planners and developers to the dangers of replicating the Masdar model in other emerging cities of the Global South.
In the second section of the book, which starts with Songdo City (Chapter 5), H. B. Shin notes that Songdo’s development echoes the experience of India, particularly the way smart cities have been promoted. Evidence of particular development choices are used to build the argument that despite the rhetoric of smart and eco-city, Songdo is in fact a continuation of the Korean developmental state; promoting its own version of globalization. The project is centred on the premise of preferential treatment for privileged stakeholders by creating and sustaining a zone of exception, which is the fast city. The three cases in this section on the entrepreneurial state argue against fast urbanism by depicting it as an extension of pre-existing legacies of the nation states which pursue them. Songdo City, Qatar Foundation’s Education City and New Town Rajarhat, Kolkata are thus, seen to perpetuate the existing and unsustainable levels of spatial segregation and social displacement. Each case ends with a call for a rethink of planning and city-building strategies, in order to produce more just and sustainable strategies.
The final section on mega-urbanization and master planning opens with the case of Jakarta’s expansion and links with additional theories such as growth machine theory and urban regime theory. By situating Jakarta’s mega growth in the global urban age, urban planning is shown as shaped by diverse actors and complex power relations extended across space and time. The chapter focuses on the production of the master plan using the case of Lusaka, Zambia. Here, capitalist agendas of the SEZ, real estate actors, and manufacturing plants interact with regional power structures and institutions for planning, guiding and controlling development (Watson, 2013). What translates on the ground is a combination of the terms of engagement between the forces of globalization, practises of local actors and the strategies aimed at countering and engaging with these (Shatkin, 2011).
The authors attempt to re-theorize city- making in the Global South, by observing the ways in which it seeks to engage with discourses around sustainability, sustainable development, and city smartness and translates them into master plans and smart city proposals. While reading this volume, I could visualize co-existing conceptualizations of the city under construction, some static while others dynamic—the sharp and spatial dichotomy of the centre versus periphery; the uninterrupted, smooth and inevitable regional expansion of city towards hinterland; and the urban fabric created through land use transformation and negotiated through transportation networks. In all the models of new urban expansion studied the common element that the authors critique is that of a city-level normative where neighbourhood and ward-specific issues disappear.
The case of Lusaka debunks the garden city and the myths which are perpetuated through associated tropes and designed elements (e.g., eco-corridors, wind turbines, foliage on and around buildings), which are conveniently applied wherever the environment agenda can be enhanced alongside the development agenda while engaging superficially with the social. Additional trends highlighted in Lusaka are the rhetoric of low capacity among local officials and planners, which somehow justifies the role of ‘external experts’ associated with international development agencies. The third angle explored is that of discourses around sustainable development and sustainable urban form, separating cities from their regions and attempting to draw inspiration from established models such as Gaborone or South African cities. Murray disparages the developmentalist urban discourse which places India and other cities from the Global South as less modern than cities of the North and Europe. The book, thus adds to many aspects of unsustainability which gets embedded in local mindsets as not only spatial problems of expanse, sprawl, congestion, unplanned, and underserviced cities and material issues of badly designed infrastructure, or risks emanating from climate change but, most importantly, as gaps in institutional and individual capacities to govern effectively.
The cases imply that fast urbanism is also enabled by the speed with which malleable policy ideas around sustainable development travel globally and are translated and applied in different political contexts. The authors argue that multiple external agents (discursive and material) direct and frame both the requirements for and subsequent production of a new master plan. In Lusaka, the new green city paradise is used by developers and promoters to bring in global experts, claiming low capacity among local officials. In China, the development project is motivated by a desire to acquire the latest foreign urban model, imported from the West. The lack of clarity around what exactly an eco-city, a garden city or a smart city is, implies that its conceptualization can be moulded to the needs of local developers and state actors. The authors also suggest that Chinese and Indian smart cities gravitate towards the complexity of local politics while in the Global North they are challenged on the basis of their design, delivery and ecological credibility.
In conclusion, a more careful use of time or deceleration is promoted in order to attend to justice, rights and democracy through considered processes of citizenship—inclusion, consultation and deliberation. Time, not to be maximized through speed and efficiency of smart city-making but time needed in the making of and belonging to owned cities. The editors are careful not to suggest universal recommendations, insensitive to the range of complex and varying sociopolitical contexts of Southern cities. Instead, they leave the reader with four provocations (or guiding principles)—slow urbanism (promoting local sustainability, although it is not necessarily apolitical), slow governance, democratizing the commons (acceding that the urbanization question is largely a land question) and imagining alternative utopias (which are radical and socially just).
In sum, this should be a highly engaged volume for urban scholars across planning, human geography and sustainable development, especially for those interested in the progression of theory-building on urbanization. The volume brings together established and emerging researchers, testing existing urbanisms and offering a new lens to critique city-building as a form of land transformation in the Global South.