Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

In our engagement with Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s thesis on planetary urbanization we argue that, while they have successfully marked some important limits of mainstream thinking on the urban, their privileging of epistemology cannot produce an urban theory for our time. Engaging in a symptomatic reading of their work, and with a focus on the implications of their limited mobilization of social ontology—or Lefebvre’s ontology of the everyday—we ask what is occluded in planetary urbanization. In particular, we explore three areas of concern: the urban as the grounds for difference, centrality and the everyday; the omission of subjects of and occlusion of subjectivity; and the occlusion of a constitutive outside and its political capacities to remake the urban.

This paper critically engages planetary urbanization’s claim that it generates ‘Urban Theory Without an Outside’. It argues planetary urbanization is part of the broader ideological terrain of urban studies whose textual field reifies the city, the urban and urbanization as objects and processes of analyses through a kind of ‘methodological urbanization’. The paper argues the conceptual and political value of delineating views from outside urban studies and planetary urbanization – in particular from domains like area studies – that unmoor the primacy of the city, the urban and particularly urbanization in understandings of socio-spatial processes across planetary space. It suggests how these perspectives can usefully act as ‘supplements’ indifferent to urban studies, reminding urban studies of the limits of its own forms of knowledge production in relation to socio-spatial process and city formation. To do this, the paper sketches an anti-colonial history of Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Brenner and Schmid’s planetary urbanization thesis has been a tipping point in recent debates regarding the conceptual directions of urban studies. Various interventions have raised questions about whether urban theories and concepts can, and indeed whether they should, be transferrable across diverse contexts, and which processes count as constitutive rather than merely the outcome of urbanization. While planetary urbanization opens up new questions for urban theory, critics have highlighted the problematic ways in which the epistemology may close off difference. In this paper, I argue for the need to take a provisional approach to urban theory, particularly in conceptualizing post-crisis urban transformations. Firstly, I put recent theories of planetary urbanization into dialogue with what I call provisional approaches to reflect on the relationship between theory and empirical context in addressing post-crisis urbanization and urban politics. I then argue that urban ruins offer a useful lens to consider these questions because of how theories of ruination emphasize the importance of place in the production of space. The ruin, unlike other forms of abstract space, is intrinsically dependent on local social and historical context in which it was produced. Following this, I draw on an analysis and discussion of ‘ghost estates’ and contestations over the reuse of vacant spaces in the period following Ireland’s crisis to illustrate how difference is generative of post-crisis urbanization and urban politics.

This paper argues that the ‘city’ as a political entity is significant in struggles over the ‘urban’, by identifying two moments of ‘differential urbanization’ in the Middle East. Our study in Iran and Palestine/Israel shows that the vision of the ‘city’ as a legitimizing space for political citizenship is at the heart of conflicting imaginaries: in Iran, ‘cities of revolution’ built through housing the poor around Tehran, and redistributive politics that stand on filling the ‘rural/urban gap’, and in Palestine, the new city of Rawabi as a city of Palestinian independence, where privatized urban development contrasts colonial spatialities with anti-colonial potentials. Thus, the right to the ‘urban’ involves claims for the ‘city’ that go beyond the capitalist logic of urbanization. This theorization points to a troubling gap in the planetary urbanization thesis, which moves from collapsing the ‘urban/non-urban’ divide into ‘concentrated’, extended’ and ‘differential’ urbanization to diminishing the role of distinct sociospatial configurations in claims over the ‘urban’. Our case studies show that examining the reconfiguration of inherited spatialities in the context of particular political regimes is imperative for epistemology of the ‘urban’ in its planetary stage. Urbanization otherwise remains an uninterrupted process towards a non-spatial ‘urban condition’.

This paper begins with the accusation of “totalization” that has been directed at Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s concept of “planetary urbanization.” In so doing, it first critiques the meanings typically attributed to “totality” and “totalization” by Brenner and Schmid as well as their critics, and then explicates the concepts of totality and totalization developed in the tradition of Hegelian Marxism, especially in the works of Georg Lukács, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Lefebvre, and Fredric Jameson. Following a review of some influential invocations of Hegelian or Marxist conceptions of totality in anti-colonial and socialist–feminist politics, the paper concludes by arguing that participants in the contentious planetary urbanization debate can best address their substantive concerns by working through instead of disavowing the concept of totality—especially the version of it proposed by Lefebvre, involving state and capital, “the urban” and the everyday.

This article confronts debates about extended and concentrated urbanization with Indigenous claims to time and space. It does so in part by discussing the degree to which notions of extended and concentrated urbanization allow us to understand the dynamics of pipeline politics in Canada, notably Indigenous claims leveled at infrastructure projects. It argues that Lefebvre-inspired research is both promising and insufficient in this regard. Their promises can only be realized provided one considers urban research as mediation (between everyday life and the social order), contextualize urbanization as a product of non-linear histories through which ‘city’ and ‘non-city’ are transformed or reinstituted as socio-spatial forms, and take seriously imaginaries that may not only contest but also refuse the expansion of the urban field. Meeting these conditions is not possible without resorting to other, non-Lefebvrean approaches that help us understand the settler-colonial aspects of Canadian urban history and grasp the inter-national dimensions of Indigenous politics. Finally, opening up Lefebvre scholarship to considerations of settler colonialism is impossible without the distinct relational theories of time and space that inform radical Indigenous theories (and some pipeline struggles). Indigenous claims in or against urbanization thus represent a limit case of urban research.

Urbanization today, now that it has become generalized, is mainly suburbanization in its manifold differentiation. As suburbanization becomes the form and suburbanism becomes the life of much of the urban revolution, we are entering an age of postsuburbanization. This means, for example, that the notion of suburbanization as dependent on one centre has to be discarded as the form and life of the global suburb take shape in a general dynamics of multiple centralities and decentralities. It includes a maturation of classical suburbia, a more splintered and fragmented urbanism. This paper reviews aspects of a Lefebvrian discussion around these issues and focuses in on the explosion and subsequent reassembly of “disjunct fragments” of the urban in a world of global suburbanisms. In so far as it challenges the traditional view of the central-peripheral urban dialectics, it intersects with debates on planetary urbanization. The paper ends with speculations on the horizontalization of sub/urban form and practice in a globalizing world.

The notion of planetary urbanization has recently mobilized different strands in the field of urban studies and has generated extensive debates. This emerging research agenda aims to revise inherited concepts and produce a new vocabulary of urbanization through the construction of an ex-centric perspective that dislocates the focus of analysis from its conventional center: the city. The idea of extended urbanization is thus an imperative concept for it operationalizes this theoretical decentering and permits the exploration of urban questions beyond city-centrism, while encompassing urban agglomerations. This article discusses the conception of extended urbanization. We examine its vital insertion into the contemporary agenda of planetary urbanization and present its original formulation in and from Brazil, developed by Roberto Monte-Mór in the 1980s. In order to foster a productive dialogue between these formulations, we discuss the contradictions embedded within the process of extended urbanization and highlight Monte-Mór’s main theoretical and empirical contributions – particularly regarding urban politics and extended citizenship in the Brazilian Amazon. We contend that extended urbanization as formulated in and from Brazil offers important developments and goes far beyond a mere interesting empirical case in and from Brazil. Instead, it illuminates contemporary questions regarding planetary urbanization.

In my engagement with the planetary urbanization thesis, I make three main interventions: (1) I emphasize the pioneering contributions that postcolonial and relational geographical approaches have made to planetary thought long before the recent planetary turn in urban studies; (2) I underscore the disconcerting ethico-political implications of planetary urbanization's will to map the “extended landscapes” of urbanization and its reduction of contemporary planetary condition to the imperatives of capitalist urbanization; and (3) I offer the deconstructive strategy of writing “under erasure” that puts both the city and urbanization under erasure to highlight the blind spots of planetary urbanization. Then to demonstrate the value of writing under erasure, I focus upon waste – as both material and semiotic artifact of capitalist urbanization – and offer a “supplementary reading” of Bangalore that sketches the multiple constitutive outsides of the city, which in turn make empirically evident the stakes of planetary urbanization's occlusions. I conclude by suggesting that proponents of planetary urbanization and urban studies more broadly embrace writing under erasure as a useful epistemological orientation to build better theories of the urban.

Neil Brenner, Christian Schmid and others aim to rejuvenate radical approaches to urbanization with their notion of 'planetary urbanization'. But while there is much to commend in this framework, it has met with strong critique from other radical urban studies scholars. In this commentary, I discuss the fact that although I initially set out to write an essay that would put queer urban studies into conversation with this new approach, I instead chose to stay on the outside of planetary urbanization along with many other scholars whose work is informed by queer, feminist, and critical race theoretical approaches.

This intervention contributes to feminist and queer responses to Brenner and Schmid’s ‘planetary urbanization’ thesis. I discuss the generative potential of their attempts to craft alternative urban research pathways and their critique of urban age discourse, a body of work that defines cities as static sites of ‘innovation’, ‘creativity’, and ‘sustainability’. However, echoing critics of the planetary urbanization approach, I contend that Brenner and Schmid’s research schema risks reproducing exclusionary analytical hierarchies by promoting a totalizing, ‘god-trick-like’ standpoint and ignoring marginalized feminist, queer, and praxis-oriented urban studies approaches. As a result, planetary urbanization ignores situated and relational knowledges and lived experience. Moreover, I question Brenner and Schmid’s efforts to bring order to what they perceive as ‘chaotic’ urban research. I then reflect on the feminist analytic tool kit I employ in my arts-based research in Glasgow, including performing with Fail Better, a cabaret that makes space for politicized artists and under-represented artists of colour, queer artists, and working class artists. I argue that planetary urbanization offers useful strategies for interrogating the globalized geo-economic processes propelling contemporary efforts to re-invent cities into sites of competitive creativity. But I also argue that this approach cannot account for the intersectional inequalities neoliberal regimes reproduce or uncover artists’ and activists’ efforts to forge solidarities. I conclude by calling for feminist, queer, and arts-based research journeys that embrace humility, dialogue, taking risks, and possibly failing in our efforts to chart alternative research pathways.

Feminist scholars, urban and otherwise, have painstakingly illustrated the way in which how we know is intimately related to what we can know, and that these knoweldges are always socially, institutionally, and geographically situated. The making and traveling of these knowledges is itself political, as are the vantage points purported to be achieved in various epistemological frameworks. The emergence of the planetary urbanization thesis takes on a particular and interesting valence when read against this body of feminist work and scholarship. In this commentary, I argue that the planetary urbanization thesis inverts the feminist intervention, coopting feminist conceptions of relationality and hybridity while evacuating them of their political – and, crucially, their epistemological – force.

This is an edited, curated transcript of the discussion that took place at a workshop on planetary urbanization in 2016. It is an effort to attend to the strategies that proved effective at sustaining dialogue across areas of theoretical disagreement. Precisely because an embodied conversation works differently than written papers exchanged between assumed theoretical adversaries, it might offer ideas for moving the debate forward. 'One hand clapping' is an invitation to engage beyond logic, to think beyond binaries, and to reflect on the change that can come from one side of a relationship

This essay reflects on recent debates around planetary urbanization, many of which have been articulated through dismissive caricatures of the core epistemological orientations, conceptual proposals, methodological tactics, and substantive arguments that underpin this emergent approach to the urban question. Following consideration of some of the most prevalent misrepresentations of this work within this special issue, I build upon Barnes and Sheppard’s (2010) concept of “engaged pluralism” to suggest more productive possibilities for dialogue among critical urban researchers whose agendas are too often viewed as incommensurable or antagonistic rather than as interconnected and, potentially, allied. The essay concludes by outlining nine research questions whose more sustained exploration could more productively connect studies of planetary urbanization to several fruitful lines of inquiry that have been explored within postcolonial, feminist and queer-theoretical strands of urban studies. While questions of positionality necessarily lie at the heart of any critical approach to urban theory and research, so too does the search for intellectual and political common ground that might help orient, animate and advance the shared, if constitutively heterodox, project(s) of critical urban studies.

In recent years, the concept of planetary urbanization has provoked a widespread debate. It is grounded upon a basic hypothesis: that the contemporary urbanizing world cannot be adequately understood without systematically revising inherited concepts and representations of the urban. It is therefore first and foremost an invitation to adopt a different perspective, one that decenters the focus of analysis and looks from an ex-centric position on the urban world. This article attempts to clarify some of the most pressing questions that have arisen thus far in the debate on planetary urbanization. It approaches the question of the power of the urban under conditions of planetary urbanization, and explores the nature and role of theory, in relation to urban practice as well as in relation to urban research. Through some reflections on the relationship between the abstract and the concrete in social theory, this paper discusses the much-debated question of “universalizing” and “totalizing” theoretical engagements, addresses the role of difference and specificity in urban research, and finally evaluates some first results of the various ongoing investigations of planetary urbanization.