Dignity,mega-projects,and the problem of scale

Grossmann and Trubina (2022) make a refreshingly original contribution to urban geography, proposing both an important empirical concept – dignity, and its spatialization – and a reordering of epistemological priorities for the field. They show that, too often, geographers have focused on negative normative analysis, on calling out the powers that be and critiquing forms of indignity such as ‘marginalization, discrimination, stigmatization, humiliation or exclusion’. While such critique is often necessary, it limits the conceptual horizons of urban theory. Collectively, we invest far more effort into identifying problems than evaluating solutions. But if urban life is viewed as merely an endless parade of indignities, we risk treating minorities and marginalized classes not as citizens capable of exercising rights but rather as subjects unable to cast off the yoke of ‘disgust, aesthetic rejection, abjection, or pity’ (Grossmann and Trubina, 2022).

Their intervention offers an alternative, a ‘positive horizon’ for normative theory which recognizes that ‘one's chance to refuse imposed identities and roles strongly depends on availability of positive visions’. Their provocation is to be more hopeful – and thus more creative – in the way we research urban problems. They are not suggesting that indignities are unimportant, but that critique of indignity is insufficient without accompanying scholarship on better alternatives for enhancing dignity.

In the following commentary, I extend the notion of dignity in one direction: on the problem of scale. It is worth noting that both of Grossman and Trubina's case studies – mega-events, and large housing estates – might be categorized as ‘mega’ scale urban processes. It is no coincidence that these examples are both extremely big and represent profound challenges to the dignity of urban citizens. There is an inherent conflict between the micro-scale of the individual and community – where the lived experience of dignity occurs – and the much bigger scale of the mega-project – where much contemporary city-making occurs. Governance for the micro-scale is inherently skeptical of big urban transformations, prioritizing individual rights to the city: to home, to neighborhood character and aesthetics, to the everyday use of the street and public space (as seen, e.g., in critical planning scholarship built on the legacy of modernist critics like Jacobs (1961) or Hall (1980)). In contrast, governance for the mega-scale values big picture thinking and economies of scale, where the common good (no doubt a highly contentious term) might trump the dignity of individual residents or communities. Reconciling these scalar conflicts – and finding ways for dignity to be respected during mega-scale urban transformation – is a foundational problem in the ‘urban age’ of rapid and global mega-urbanization (UNHabitat, 2010).

Individual dignity, mega-project ambition

There is a long tradition of critical research on mega-urbanization (Lauermann, 2018). Many normative positions in this literature can be traced to a critique of ‘Hausmannization’ and other modernist urbanism (Merrifield, 2014), an era of city-making when the landscape was viewed as a tabula rasa and the dignity of people who stood in the way of the bulldozer was, at best, an afterthought (Scott, 1998). The colonial hubris of modernists like Hausmann and Le Corbusier often led to ‘great planning disasters’ (Hall, 1980) – projects that were socially progressive in theory but financially and functionally problematic, soon to be abandoned as white elephants just like the mega-events that Grossman and Trubina document. Such ‘dysfunctional urbanism’ (McNeill, 2005) or ‘unicorn planning’ (Rebentisch et al., 2020) is not only a waste of resources, but a challenge to the very principles of urban democracy, as project boosters undermine public trust with ‘strategic misrepresentation’ that over-promises benefits and under-estimates costs (Flyvbjerg et al., 2002). Just as importantly for the question of dignity, these mega-projects often created ‘unurban urbanization’ (Jacobs, 1961) – overly-regulated landscapes where diverse and dynamic urban places were replaced by unlivable and unloved spaces, the sort of bleak uniformity that slowly robs a community of dignity like in the large housing estates Grossman and Trubina describe.

So big is bad, at least in the traditional view of critical urban theory. For certain kinds of mega-projects and in certain historical contexts, mega-scale development does indeed threaten dignity through displacement and community erasure. But the story becomes more complicated in light of new kinds of mega-urbanization, especially in the ‘new urban utopias’ (Datta and Shaban, 2017) of the post-colonial global South and global East.

The main change has been demography. As population growth and migration lead to an ever-expanding geography of mega-cities and their attendant operational landscapes (Brenner and Schmid, 2014), city leaders need to scale up the infrastructures of collective consumption, and quickly. Some have fallen back on the same flawed utopianism of the modernists, building entirely new cities (Moser and Côté-Roy, 2021), often with a myopic focus on ‘smart’ (Datta, 2015) or ‘world class’ (Ghertner, 2015) urbanism that echoes older colonialist impulses – boosterism that values the potential of the new and global over the dignity of the old and local (Bunnell et al., 2018). Others, however, have taken a more nuanced approach to mega-project planning, recognizing the necessity of building at economies of scale while still doing the careful, deliberative work of participatory and community-engaged planning.

While certainly imperfect, these new experiments avoid the easy path of simple rejection and look instead to ways in which mega-projects could be better. This may mean, for example, exploring ways to integrate participatory practices within mega-event planning (Kassens-Noor and Lauermann, 2017) or build participatory mechanisms into the development of smart city software and hardware (Cardullo et al., 2019). These experiments also view mega-projects as vessels for a more diverse range of political agendas – not only neoliberal, but also developmental, or post-colonial, or even progressive. New infrastructure mega-projects, for example, have been framed as more inclusive form of globalization (Liu et al., 2018) or a means for the post-colonial state to reassert its authority in the wake of Western-imposed neoliberalism (Schindler et al., 2021). There is a sense that traditional theories through which mega-projects have been thought are insufficient for the ‘new urban worlds’ emerging in booming Asian and African mega-cities (Simone and Pieterse, 2018), where a dignity-based approach to mega-urbanization is both an opportunity and a necessity.

This is not to say that mega-projects can actually achieve new utopias – the disastrous legacy of the modernists has made it abundantly clear that they cannot. Rather, the approach here is more pragmatic. Cities need to be built on a very large scale, and failures of the past do not necessarily preclude success in the future. The lesson for mega-project builders is that good planning means not only minimizing social harm (the focus of much existing critical urban theory), but also maximizing social benefit (by attending to the sort of questions that Grossman and Trubina pose) (Friedmann, 2000). Balancing the two – harm and benefit – requires a dignity approach to be woven throughout the project life cycle, from design of original plans to management of legacy institutions. Dignity-oriented scholarship could identify opportunities for enhancing participation and representation within mega-project planning, from making the process more substantively participatory – for instance by minimizing the role of external consultants (Vogelpohl, 2018) or vendors (Rebentisch et al., 2020) – to paying heed to how everyday planning protocol and language influence who feels welcome to participate – for instance in the management of focus groups (Soh and Yuen, 2006) or the development of agendas for public meetings (Beard and Sarmiento, 2014). This kind of scholarship could also evaluate methods and materials for planning dignity into the built environment, with careful attention to how design shapes access to public space (Rosenberger, 2020), how technology mediates social interaction within and between buildings (Shilon and Eizenberg, 2021), and how spatial planning can unleash multiple kinds of displacement that operate across multiple temporalities, from direct removals to more indirect erosion of community cohesion (Easton et al., 2020).

Conclusion

The right to the city includes both negative and positive rights, to borrow terminology from liberal political philosophy (Berlin, 2006). Urban geographers need to be attentive to both negative rights – the freedom from indignity – and positive rights – the right to define and experience dignity, and to be recognized as not only a subject of injustice but also as an urban citizen with hopes, dreams, and agency. Making sense of the two kinds of rights requires us to take seriously the perspectives of historically under-researched groups, and to ‘foster inclusive modes of community-building (e.g. political institutions, modes of speech and dialogue, methods of cultural learning and sharing) and…adjudicate social disagreement and difference (e.g. institutions and cultures of democracy)’ (Davidson, 2020: 311).

The lesson here is to think more directly about the kind of city we want to inhabit. The goal should not be simply to critique indignities, though that will always remain an important intellectual task and moral obligation. The goal should also be to analyze normative frameworks of dignity and evaluate means for achieving it. From the vantage of critique, the future is often an abstraction: something that can only be planned after we finish the revolution. But to paraphrase Marx's oft-quoted thesis, the point is not just to interpret the city, but to change it (Legacy, 2021).