Situating Knowledge and Action for an Urban Planet

A new concept is animating debates on the urban question: planetary urbanization. What was only a few years ago no more than a preliminary hypothesis, significantly inspired by Henri ) conception of a worldwide 'urban revolution,' has now become a vibrant theoretical approach that is being applied across divergent terrains of urban research around the world. It is also provoking some intense, sometimes polemical debates on the appropriate conceptualization, methodology, site, scale and focal point for urban research today..

The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City

Quality Innovation Prosperity

New forms of urbanization are unfolding around the world that challenge inherited conceptions of the urban as a fixed, bounded and universally generalizable settlement type. Meanwhile, debates on the urban question continue to proliferate and intensify within the social sciences, the planning and design disciplines, and in everyday political struggles. Against this background, this paper revisits the question of the epistemology of the urban: through what categories, methods and cartographies should urban life be understood? After surveying some of the major contemporary mainstream and critical responses to this question, we argue for a radical rethinking of inherited epistemological assumptions regarding the urban and urbanization. Building upon reflexive approaches to critical social theory and our own ongoing research on planetary urbanization, we present a new epistemology of the urban in a series of seven theses. This epistemological framework is intended to clarify the intellectual and political stakes of contemporary debates on the urban question and to offer an analytical basis for deciphering the rapidly changing geographies of urbanization and urban struggle under early 21st-century capitalism. Our arguments are intended to ignite and advance further debate on the epistemological foundations for critical urban theory and practice today.

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. The changing geographies and pace of urbanization over the past half century have been recasting urban theory, governance, and policy on a global stage. The second decade of the 21st-century is proving to be an especially momentous time for urban knowledge production in which the political stakes are enormously high, with the urban figuring as both cause and consequence of many contemporary planetary issues: the urban is both the instigator of and the solution to global climate change; it is the site of increasing inequality and the urbanization of poverty even as it is also a crucible for innovation and creativity; and it is ground zero for a new era of global governance. 1 Within this climate of different political possibilities for the urban, a number of competing, conflicting, and complementary geographical imaginaries have emerged to make sense of contemporary urbanization.

2012

Mevrouw de Rector Magnificus, Geachte Collega's en Gewaardeerde Toehoorders, I want to use this opportunity to reflect on the nature of the field of Urban Studies. In accordance with the international orientation of the field and in the presence of our own international staff, I will do so in English. My lecture will discuss the field of Urban Studies mainly from a purely academic point of view, the opportunities it offers but also some of its intrinsic challenges. It is a broad field and my words today will reflect my own views, my affection for the sort of broad historical-geographical scholarship of the likes of Lewis Mumford, Fernand Braudel, Peter Hall, John Friedmann, Richard Walker, or Gyan Prakash. I will refer to some of my own research, but I will also aim at what I consider to be the field of Urban Studies at large. My main argument is that the urban scale provides a critical lens on the social world, particularly in the present era of globalization. And while Urban Studies is evidently associated with the city, I will argue that the urban is about more than the city. The lecture is rather wide-ranging and will for the most part be situated somewhere between Amsterdam, the United States, and India, and I will appeal to your versatile imagination as we jump around the globe. The renewed attention to the field of Urban Studies is also driven by interested parties and stakeholders outside the academy, including government and the corporate sector. So I will include some remarks about the social relevance of the field and how we might position the Centre for Urban Studies inside and outside of the university. Inaugural speeches generally focus on the speaker's specific area of expertise but since my appointment is closely related to the Research Priority Area in Urban Studies and the establishment of the new Centre, I should also reflect on the general nature of the field, some of the big questions, and where it fits. As a result, there is quite some breadth to my lecture, maybe a bit unusually so, and I ask you to bear with me. Urban studies Let me start off with some general observations. There are two intriguing qualities of the field of Urban Studies that explain its appeal and at the same time 

Globalization, Modernity and Urban Change in Asian Cities, 2016

Cities have always been important to processes of globalization and global change, past and present. Cities were the loci of empires, at least going back to the period when the Romans declared urbis et orbis — the City of Rome and the Orb of the World are one. In the sixteenth century the City of Seville witnessed the return of the sailing vessel Victoria, carrying the first humans to circumnavigate the globe. From the nineteenth century to early twentieth century, the City of London was the centre of an empire that colonized more than a quarter of the total land-area of the earth. Following the Spanish Empire's use of the same epithet, London described itself as the metropole of an empire upon which the sun never set. While some writers give the impression that 'global cities' are a twentieth-century phenomenon and the movement of finance capital predominantly defines their global status, the globalization of all cities has been intensifying across a very long history. Nevertheless, while globalization and urbanization have been intertwined for centuries, there are a number of changes that suggest a qualitative shift across the last four or five decades. All of these developments have had a profound effect on social life. In this paper I want to examine each of these four domains of social life a little more closely and show that in each case there are no simple answers. Rather we are confronted by paradoxes, quandaries and cross-cutting challenges that require a different way of thinking about alternatives. First I want to draw out a few of these paradoxes. I will then use the same approach to suggest an integrated set of principles for making better cities. The approach taken here is called ‘Engaged Research’. It takes seriously the idea that social life is multifarious and cannot be reduced to the dominance of economic considerations nor to global imperatives. Because social life is complex, layered and changing, engaged research involves long-term exploration of the intersections of various conjunctural and contingent conditions of existence—cultural, economic, political and ecological.

2015

After more than a century of heroic urban visions, city dwellers today live in suburban subdivisions, gated communities, edge cities, apartment towers, and slums. The contemporary cities we know are more often the embodiment of unexpected outcomes and unintended consequences rather than visionary planning. As an alternative approach for rethinking and remaking today’s cities and regions, this book explores the intersections of critical inquiry and immediate, substantive actions. The contributions inside recognize the rich complexities of the present city not as barriers or obstacles but as grounds for uncovering opportunity and unleashing potential. Now Urbanism asserts that the future city is already here. It views city making as grounded in the imperfect, messy, yet rich reality of the existing city and the everyday purposeful agency of its dwellers. Through a framework of situating, grounding, performing, distributing, instigating, and enduring, these contributions written by a multidisciplinary group of practitioners and scholars illustrate specificity, context, agency, and networks of actors and actions in the re-making of the contemporary city.

Public Culture

The concept of the city as a territorial and political form has long anchored social thought. By the twentieth century, the city figured prominently as a laboratory for testing modern techniques of governance. In the twenty-first century this discourse incarnates anew in visions of future mega-and smart cities. Then, as now, cities-as signs of the modern-are the elephants in a room full of adjacent concepts such as the state, the market, citizenship, collectivity, property, and care. This issue picks up a thread from the 1996 special issue and 1998 book of prizewinning essays on Cities and Citizenship (edited by James Holston and Arjun Appadurai). The contributors focused on the role of cities in the making of modern subjects by attending to associations between urbanism and modernity and thus with imperialism, colonialism, and extraction. Now, we reconfigure that line of inquiry to consider Urbanism beyond the City while bearing projections of the future in mind. The United Nations projects that by 2050, two-thirds of the global population will live in cities or other urban centers. But this new density will be greatest in a small number of countries, none which are in the Global North (United Nations 2018). Yet even as cities take unprecedented forms without discernible limits, spatial theorizing continues to invest in a particular concept of the city and to expand that concept's reach into other areas of study, planning, and investment (Amin 2013). Spatial professions capitalize on the city's capacity for generating complex intersections of social, economic, and political forces. Theorists attribute a capacity to distinguish among divergent possibilities mingling unpredictably to the urban apparatus (Martin 2017). Even critical methods remain attached to the idea that cities-whether as infrastructures, instruments, or morphologies-anchor a very particular sense of social life. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994: 4) noted, philosophy coincides with the "contribution of cities: the formation of societies of friends or equals but also the promotion of relationships of rivalry between and within them." We position the concept of the city by treating it as a "friend" accompanying us through the journey presented in this special issue.