Pluralizing global urbanism

We are collectively in the midst of an exciting and turbulent time for global urban enquiry. The ground, both empirical and epistemological, is being rapidly and often radically reshaped, and there is an increasing challenge to inherited and extant urban theory and method, with many former certitudes being unsettled. This cannot but generate anxiety (Roy, 2016) and a number of recent debates have coagulated around the saliency of established versus emergent approaches in global urbanization, the latter informed by postcolonial theory and other ascendant approaches.

As a globalization and development studies researcher interested in Southern Theory and influenced by postcolonial studies, I was initially circumspect about this debate. A number of recent responses (e.g. Walker, 2015) to thoughtful papers (Brenner and Schmid, 2015) have read like unseemly slap downs, and I think we should expect more from our senior scholars. I wager than more than a few of us prefer to participate in spirited café conversation, complete with academic rigour, rather than a bloody barroom brawl, and I think friendly dialogue and disagreement yields far greater fecundity.

This is the spirit in which I have considered van Meeteren’s piece. In this commentary, I reference similar recent debates where scholars similarly felt their arguments were misrepresented (Roy, 2016 vs. Scott and Storper, 2015; Chibber, 2013 vs. Spivak, 2014; Brenner and Schmid, 2014 and 2015 vs. Walker 2015; Robinson and Roy, 2015 vs. Scott and Storper, 2015). My paper is a reflection, not an adjudication, of this contested terrain. van Meeteren et al. (2016) expressly value postcolonial critiques and do not see the field as a contest between extant and emerging critiques but rather seek a rapprochement and engagement with postcolonial approaches in ways that do not see their own work misrepresented and thus pedagogically disenfranchised.

With a wry play on a subaltern studies trope in its title, the protestation of van Meeteren et al. is that actually existing contemporary global cities research (GCR) has been misrepresented by a number of postcolonial critiques. Starting with an influential and widely cited piece by Robinson (2002), the authors accept that its cogent critiques of a section of GCR’s research in the 1990s focusing on city league tables were valid at the time. Through a process of iterative misrepresentation, however, with each successive reprint, the authors argue that the once-legitimate criticisms successively lost colour and definition and a routinized simplification and distortion subsequently resulted.

The results, they charge, are overstretched truisms uncritically invoked in each successive paper. While GCR evolved, however, the subsequent postcolonial critiques, the authors argue, were not duly revised or updated. Providing five examples of static straw man criticisms, incorrect or absent attributions, hyperbolic portrayals of GCR, polemical shorthand and rhetorical stretching, as well as the casual characterization of GCR as a unified field or theory, the authors charge that otherwise legitimate postcolonial critiques have overlooked the diversity and trajectory of GCR and its critiques have effectively been stuck in an apparent time warp.

For van Meeteren et al., the postcolonial critique of GCR has overstated its performativity and understated its plurality. They argue that contemporary GCR is far removed from its vulgarized version of business consultant urbanists and aspirational city league tables, which has sometimes led to a conflation of neoliberal urbanism with GCR. The paper buttresses its claims with a comprehensive survey of the literature to illustrate the evolving diversity of GCR research.

Fair enough. No subgenre, school or sister-discipline is immune from (or exclusively guilty of) misrepresentation: it affects all schools of thought and I think postcolonial researchers are big enough to take any legitimate criticism in their stride and make amends. This problem also speaks to the nature of truisms and verisimilitude: rallying signifiers are by nature convenient polemical shorthand from which one can easily lose sight of the original context and/or rapidly evolving circumstances and burgeoning literatures. Especially in fields with proliferating papers, as scholars we all often rely on selective accounts and have to make strategic decisions about what to read and what not to read.

There is also the perennial problem of supersession and a body of research evolving, often haphazardly and with long cycles of academic review and publishing. Intuitively, I think at least a number of omissions can be accounted for this way, with a substantial part of the literature van Meeteren et al. do more carefully include in their corrective survey being published after the postcolonial critiques they cite as failing to specify their ‘other’ and thus constructing a straw man (see e.g. the more recent references cited on p. 12 in van Meeteren et al., this issue, including Taylor and Derudder, 2015).

To address this disjunction, the authors explore engaged pluralism (Barnes and Sheppard, 2010) and critical realism (Bhaskar, 1975; Pratt, 2013; Sayer, 2000, 2009) as an epistemological bridge between GCR and postcolonial approaches. I think this is a constructive proposal to facilitate dialogue between GCR and postcolonial perspectives. My suggestion is that as scholars we need to assiduously invest in academic cultural practices that incorporate careful reading and canny listening into our exchanges to achieve this engaged pluralism, and these require a corresponding affect of greater openness, magnanimity, patience and collaborative feminine sensibility to balance the more masculine impulses at play.

Reading this article has prompted me to consider a number of dilemmas in my own research on globalization (El Khoury, 2015), including the fact globalization may have been overtaken by climate change as the most important rubric for our times (as it should be, though one need not displace the other). My own research is increasingly informed by the insights of postcolonial theory, particularly in my work on Kerala, India, and I am grappling with the separatist versus subsumptive tensions and provincializing and universalizing impulses in postcolonial and established approaches, respectively. As an illustration of this subsumptive tension in current urban debates, Robinson and Roy (2015: 1) describe Scott and Storper’s 2015 response as seeking to ‘subsume the complex and heterogeneous urbanisms of the global South into an already existing, productive but universalizing, analysis of urbanization’.

Yet, I am sympathetic both to the need for a measure of theoretical generalization to make sense of ‘systemic regularities in urban life’ (Scott and Storper, 2015: 12) as well as wary, with Robinson and Roy (2015: 5), that one mode of generalization is being elevated above others, constituting a God-Trick (Haraway, 1988) that might, for example, misread theory as ‘merely’ ethnography. Agglomeration is not the only dynamic in urban processes, what about informality, marginality, multiplicity? (Parnell and Pieterse, 2015).

Postcolonial research has informed global urbanism beyond the critique of metonymic megacities, positionality and Southern cities as variations of a Northern blueprint (Roy, 2011). It is a way of thinking relationally and bridging the gap between academic research and lived realities in urban transformations. As Roy (2015) has affirmed in her work, the value of postcolonial approaches is to think relationally, not simply to add Southern cities and stir. The need to provincialize Northern theory (Leitner and Sheppard, 2015) and the welcome unsettling of the Euro-American urban experience as a normalizing template and aspiration for the Global South is an important part of this, with rapidly shifting contours generating attendant anxieties. This includes jettisoning the adherence to the comfort and certitude of universalizing conceits and God-Tricks.

Robinson (2015: 10) has recently argued that a welcome effect of emergent approaches has been that:

the mode and style of urban theorization itself is transformed from an authoritative voice emanating from some putative centre of urban scholarship to a celebration of the conversations opened up amongst the many subjects of urban theoretical endeavour in cities around the world, valorizing more provisional, modest and revisable claims about the nature of the urban. To achieve this requires not only methodological innovation, but also an open and respectful culture of theory production in urban studies.

Addressing the propositional side of the equation, the suggestion to valorize ‘more provisional, modest and revisable claims about the nature of the urban’ seems to me to align perfectly with the feminine sensibility and constitutes an appropriate Goddess Tactic. On the oppositional side of the ledger, speaking to Scott and Storper (2015), Robinson (2015: 2) addresses concerns that ‘the growing postcolonial and global urban theoretical agenda displaces earlier dominant approaches, or renders parochial and limited previously ambitious and universalizing theoretical agendas’.

It might be useful to consider the relevance of similar academic debates and quarrels as anxieties symptomatic of urban transformations, where currently the concept of the ‘global city’ and even ‘city’ itself is under question, marking a potential shift from the world city as the primary emphasis in urban enquiry in the past towards ‘planetary urbanization’ as an emergent theorization. It is significant that the idea of the city itself is being deconstructed, from Roy (2015) to Angelo and Wachsmuth (2015) to Brenner and Schmid (2015). Brenner and Schmid (2015: 156) question the urban age thesis and its city-centric narrative whereby the ‘fifty percent urban threshold’ “is repeated incessantly, mantra-like, in scholarly papers, research reports and grant proposals…[it] has become the most quoted, but therefore also among the most banal, formulations in contemporary urban studies…”. In fact, illustrating the two-way contestation, Brenner and Schmid (2015: 158) include postcolonial approaches in their critique of the attachment to an emphasis on the city as a ‘bounded settlement type’.

In earlier rounds of debate, it was the adjectives that described world cities that were interrogated and troubled. Now, it is the emphasis on the concept and methodologies associated with the city itself that are being challenged. So Roy (2016: 204) poses the question: ‘for whom is the city a coherent concept?’. The postcolonial critique challenged the ‘universal grammar’ (Mbembe 2001: 9) of cityness; now it is ‘methodological cityness’ (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015) that is being challenged. Methodological cityism is identified as the practice of continuing to privilege the city as a ‘lens for studying contemporary processes of urban transformation that are not limited to the city’ (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2014: 24). The persistence of the ‘impossible’ city (with indistinct borders) as a shorthand occurs even as ‘cityness’ is increasingly critiqued for its exclusion of other forms of urbanization such as megacities and polynucleated metropolitan regions (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015; Brenner and Schmid, 2015; Wachsmuth, 2014).

If the city, long the staple of urban studies, may itself be disappearing, anxieties can certainly be understood. Socio-spatial categories are in unprecedented flux. Everything is in flux everywhere, but particularly in urban studies, it seems! There is a great opportunity in terms of epistemic crisis and flux for creative ferment rather than fragmentation – if competing camps fruitfully engage in dialogue and actively listen to each other. Intellectual destabilization can pose a great opportunity or it can degenerate into balkanization. Brenner and Schmid (2015) demonstrate this is possible: while they see postcolonialism as an emergent framework and not yet a fully matured urban epistemology (p. 160), they posit a series of theses intended to contribute to a collective project connecting with conceptual innovations of postcolonial urban theory.

Navigating complex times especially requires the full complement of energies we can collectively muster as scholar-practitioners, and I argue this involves a shift from mostly masculine to more feminine modes of engaging. In a more balanced way of relating in relational approaches, a commitment to practices of collaborative learning, active listening and relational reading is required. In these recent exchanges, the gender (and generational placement) of many, though by no means all, of the major protagonists is not lost on me: Roy and Robinson are both women, Scott and Storper are both men. I think this is significant rather than incidental. Certainly, both male and female researchers deploy masculine and feminine impulses. Although the masculine energy has historically dominated, the feminine is arguably emergent. The key to balance is both individual and institutional: to successfully integrate the better aspects of both masculine and feminine impulses in our academic approaches as much as in ourselves. The processes of urban transformations may well require of us innovations in our modes of engagement. Subjectivities matter.

The masculine impulse demarcates, violently orders, universalizes, subsumes, singularizes. It tends to be monistic. The feminine impulse is about multiplicity, integration, fuzziness; it is more suggestive rather than rigidly directional, at once open yet private, bringing that which is hidden (or off the map) into the fold and helping to bring worlds into being. My suggestion is that an engaged versus polemical pluralism requires a corresponding affect of magnanimity, meeting others halfway, openness, generosity of spirit, in contrast to a closed affect that produces a turf-defensive, reactive, combative stance.

The value in this piece and related debates is that it has salutary lessons for all researchers, signalling a need to be cannier in how we engage. If we take seriously the conditions for and politics of knowledge that postcolonialism has traditionally been concerned with, any misrepresentations and failure to engage should as much be confronted as elitist and Eurocentric historiography and global city metrics. A friendly and generously spirited rapprochement in this shared field of enquiry should go a long way.

A postimperial urban theory is still emerging. Intersectionality especially requires working in tandem. With the common goal of pluralizing urban epistemology, an admixture of emergent and critical GCR insights can only enrich global urban studies and better make sense of ever-increasingly complex, contradictory and contingent relations in the socio-spatialities of global urbanization.