Seeing Like a City

Ash Amin, Nigel Thrift

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781509515622
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Seeing like a city means recognizing that cities are living things made up of a tangle of networks, built up from the agency of countless actors. Cities must not be considered as expressions of larger paradigms or sites of human effort and organization alone. Within their density, size and sprawl can be found a world of symbols, bodies, buildings, technologies and infrastructures. It is the machine-like combination, interaction and confrontation of these different elements that make a city.

Such a view locates urban outcomes and influences in the character of these networks, which together power urban life, allocating resources, shaping social opportunities, maintaining order and simply enabling life. More than the silent stage on which other powers perform, such networks represent the essence of the city. They also form an important political project, a politics of small interventions with large effects. The increasing evidence for an Anthropocene bears out the way in which humanity has stamped its footprint on the planet by constructing urban forms that act as systems for directing life in ways that create both immense power and immense constraint.

1
Looking through the City

Facet

We can begin by asking what and where the city is. If cities exist as physical entities, they do so as sprawling miasmas giving rise to all kinds of influence radiating around the world. It is ill conceived to think of them as simply territorial formations, though the instinct to do so remains prevalent. Then, whatever their geography, they remain extraordinarily complex entities – a mangle of machines, infrastructures, humans, nonhumans, institutions, networks, metabolisms, matter and nature – where the coming together is itself constitutive of urbanity and its radiated effects. So, if cities have become world-making, striding out across the world, defining the character of human settlement, giving shape to the transformed nature of the Anthropocene, and providing the main impetus behind political economy (as we argue in this and the next two chapters), how and why this is so is not self-evident. The tendency endures to count factors – the presence or absence of key attributes – rather than to focus on the nature of the combinatorial ecology and how it forces reconsideration of the staples of urban agency and analysis (as explored in this chapter), the dynamic and vulnerabilities of the unfolding ‘Anthropocene’ (Chapter 2), and the meaning of what it is to be sentient (Chapter 3).

How, then, to assess the character of the city and its generative powers, which we see as world-making, sociotechnical, and a challenge to a disciplinary heritage when urban analysis is confined to specialist sub-disciplines such as urban studies, town and country planning, and architecture or urban design? Or this heritage barely alters its precepts in light of the hybrid urban processes remaking economy, society, nature, politics and culture. If the world significance of cities is increasingly acknowledged in scholarship and policy practice, it has yet to lead to any rethinking of the fundamentals of core disciplines in the social sciences. Economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, and even geography – the most spatial of these disciplines – have yet to consider how an ontology formed by urban specificities might require new intra- and inter-disciplinary composites of thought and method. In this chapter we argue that understanding cities requires knowledge practices that are distributed and combinatorial, thus calling into question established disciplinary and professional legacies. The proposition that knowing the world might require knowing the city in this way has barely altered thinking in the mainstream social sciences.

Business trip

Urban World

Let us begin with an audit of the world significance of cities.

First, only a small number of cities drive world economic growth (McKinsey Global Institute, 2012). According to the McKinsey Global Institute, by 2010, six hundred cities, accounting for no more than one fifth of the world's population, were generating 60 per cent of global GDP (Dobbs et al., 2011). They were largely from the North, with 380 of its cities responsible for half of global output. McKinsey calculates that, by 2025, the same number of cities will generate the same volume of GDP, but a third of the constituents from the North will have dropped out, replaced by 136 cities from the emerging economies, primarily from China (100), as well as a dozen or more from India. The top one hundred cities are expected to account for 35 per cent of GDP growth, a group composed of ‘middleweight’ cities (rather than today's ‘megacities’), many again from China and elsewhere in the South, propped up by the know-how and purchasing power of a sizeable new middle class. With the next four hundred cities expected to add only 6 per cent to growth, the world economy will depend on the state of six hundred cities: their quality of infrastructure and services, their ability to manage largely unplanned urban expansion and related problems of congestion, environmental stress and urban maintenance,¹ and their capacity to sustain growth, meet demand and satisfy needs. In other words, the economics of world prosperity will pivot around the supply and distributional conditions that make cities competitive.

Second, this economic might is shored up by other urban concentrations of power. The top-ranking cities, or, more accurately, their central business districts, are massive collections of knowledge, creativity and innovation, political and elite power, cultural and symbolic influence, and financial and infrastructural might. Together, they drive national and international life. Though the exact measure of this power remains elusive (due to nation-biased statistical limitations and because much of it courses under the radar in informal deals, closed boardroom decisions and hidden transactions), rankings of the global influence of individual cities are beginning to circulate. One of these is the A. T. Kearney (2012) Global Cities Index, which measures a city's engagement in business activity (e.g. corporate HQs, top service firms, value of capital markets), human capital formation, information exchange, cultural experience and political influence (e.g. presence of embassies, think-tanks, international organizations). The 2012 ranking, in descending order, lists New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Seoul, Brussels, Washington, Singapore, Sydney, Vienna and Beijing: familiar names fast being chased by many new ones from China and India, according to A. T. Kearney. Linked into common corporate, supply or transactional chains, and sharing elite interests (Khanna, 2011; Taylor, 2004), these cities exercise a network power that circumvents and displaces that exercised by traditional jurisdictions of state and polity, prompting Saskia Sassen (2012a: 5) to aver that ‘our geopolitical future…will be determined in good part through twenty or so strategic worldwide urban networks’. The state-centred discourses and tools of political science will need to change in order to grasp this nodal/network power (Taylor, 2013).

Third, these economic and political powers are neither mirrored equitably across the urban landscape, nor do they provide assurance of wellbeing within cities. In fact, they are part of a fabric of extreme inter-urban and intra-urban disparity. By 2050, 70 per cent of the world's expected nine billion people will be living in urban areas, a relentless rise from today's 50 per cent (UN-Habitat, 2008). Today there are over 450 cities with more than one million inhabitants, and they include twenty-one cities with between ten and 35 million people. The pace of growth is particularly marked in the developing world, whose cities – stretched in every respect – are projected to house 80 per cent of the world's urban population in 2030. Already by 2020, a billion of these residents are expected to be living in slums (ibid.). These ill-serviced and very often officially ignored or condemned settlements are set to become part of the normal urban landscape. They are zones of extreme poverty, marginality and deprivation, and day-to-day survival in an informal economy amounting to half the world's workforce of 1.8 billion people (expected to rise to two-thirds by 2020), according to the OECD (Jütting and de Laiglesia, 2009). In other words, in the contemporary city profoundly divided social worlds are co-located on a very large scale, with power and resources biased towards the elites and middle classes at the expense of poor majorities. This spatiality of extremes co-located and disparities amplified is still inadequately understood by all the social sciences interested in the dynamics of social differentiation and inequality.

Fourth, global environmental change is powered by, and is largely about, urban metabolism. As Burdett and Rode (2011, p. 10) observe, ‘occupying less than 2 per cent of the earth's surface, urban areas concentrate…between 60 and 80 per cent of global energy consumption, and approximately 75 per cent of CO₂ emissions’. Their energy demands are vast and ever-growing, as are their emissions, although the environmental footprints of individual cities vary considerably: ‘whereas cities in Europe, the US and Brazil, for example, have a lower environmental impact than their respective countries, cities in India and China have a much larger impact owing to their significantly higher income levels compared with national averages (op. cit., p. 11)’. The hazards of climate change, in contrast, are confronting all cities with punitive energy and food prices, weather extremes, flash floods and coastal erosions, vulnerable or failing infrastructures, debilitating levels of pollution and congestion, and a host of other risks and vulnerabilities. The close reciprocities between urban footprints and climate change, forced evolution towards a new wild (Pearce, 2015), and a generalized ‘onto-cartography’ in which nonhuman agencies have their say (Bryant, 2014), as discussed more fully in the next chapter, are generally underestimated in writing on climate change and environmental vulnerability. But, at the very least, the better management of urban metabolism, for example, through spatial infill, smart infrastructures, waste recycling and combined energy, might prove to be more critical for securing the future of the earth than hitherto imagined (IPCC, 2012; Institute for the Future, 2012; Lindsay, 2010).

Fifth, and paradoxically, the new urban centrality comes with no commensurate increase in the power of municipal authorities. The world over, city governments are hampered by fiscal and juridical constraints, are often captured by vested interests or held back by shortages of resource, capability or commitment, while national governments – with far greater powers and resources – often remain largely blind to urban centrality. In turn, any attempt to bolster municipal governance, for example, the World Bank's (2009) effort to get national governments to benchmark their policies through cities and to increase municipal powers, still confronts powerful nongovernmental forces with different designs on the urban. These include business coalitions for which cities are only transactional nodes, urban elites commandeering urban assets for themselves, various systems of provisioning and intelligence lying beyond public scrutiny and control, and illegal networks wresting the wrong kind of possibility from urban scarcity. If the world is run out of cities, it is with municipal authorities playing an adjunct role, dependent on alliances that compromise their autonomy and authority. Indeed, in recent decades, some city governments pressed by rising costs, falling central government subsidy, and fiscal constraints, have entered into interest-rate swaps with global investment banks to raise bond revenue, a form of speculative hedging that has left them saddled with crippling debt and empty coffers during the current financial crisis (Sassen, 2014).

Shoe tossing

Urbanicity

These symptoms of the urban age raise important questions about the nature of the dynamic of life compressed into, and run out of, two per cent of the earth's surface, a dynamic that may have something to do with under­standing the ‘throwntogether’ ontology of the city (Massey, 2005). This is an ontology of many kinds of gravitational force juxtaposed: metabolic networks, infrastructures and built forms, technical systems and institutions, diverse structures of authority, power and intelligence. This spatiality may be generative in its own right, as intimated by writing on the combinations of elite power, organized authority and social rights in global cities (Sassen, 2006); on the concentration of knowledge, sociality and interdependent firms in the economically most dynamic cities (Glaeser, 2011; Storper, 2013); on the sustenance and resilience provided by well-maintained and evenly distributed urban infrastructures (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Heynen, Kaïka and Swyngedouw, 2006; Amin, 2014a); and on the social webs of improvisation that enable survival in cities organized solely for the well-off (Simone, 2010; Venkatesh, 2014).

This ontology has been the focus of a ‘relational’ turn in urban studies in recent years imagining cities as a combinatorial force field (Amin and Thrift, 2002; Amin, 2007; McFarlane, 2011a; Farías, 2011; Simone, 2011; Taylor, 2013). Here the city i...