The Production of Alternative Urban Spaces

An International Dialogue

Jens Kaae Fisker, Letizia Chiappini, Lee Pugalis, Antonella Bruzzese

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138099784
• eBook ISBN: 9781351596640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Alternative urban spaces across civic, private, and public spheres emerge in response to the great challenges that urban actors are currently confronted with. Labour markets are changing rapidly, the availability of affordable housing is under intensifying pressure, and public spaces have become battlegrounds of urban politics.

This edited collection brings together contributors in order to spark an international dialogue about the production of alternative urban spaces through a threefold exploration of alternative spaces of work, dwelling, and public life. Seeking out and examining existing alternative urban spaces, the authors identify the elements that provide opportunities to create radically different futures for the world's urban spaces. This volume is the culmination of an international search for alternative practices to dominant modes of capitalist urbanisation, bringing together interdisciplinary, empirically grounded chapters from hot spots in disparate cities around the world.

Offering a multidisciplinary perspective, The Production of Alternative Urban Spaces will be of great interest to academics working across the fields of urban sociology, human geography, anthropology, political science, and urban planning. It will also be indispensable to any postgraduate students engaged in urban and regional studies.

1 Conceptualising the production of alternative urban spaces

Jens Kaae Fisker, Letizia Chiappini, Lee Pugalis, and Antonella Bruzzese

Introduction

In October 2016 a broad range of representatives and stakeholders convened in Quito for the United Nations’ Habitat III conference to create and adopt a New Urban Agenda, signalling their collective commitment to the initiation of no less than an urban paradigm shift. Full of sweeping declarations, the New Urban Agenda promises people-centred efforts that empower ‘all individuals and communities while enabling their full and meaningful participation’ while also ‘promoting equally the shared opportunities and benefits that urbanization can offer and that enable all inhabitants, whether living in formal or informal settlements, to lead decent, dignified and rewarding lives and to achieve their full human potential’ (United Nations, 2017: 7). Crucially, the declaration also acknowledges that current urban development trajectories do not generally point in this direction, hence the perceived need for a paradigm shift.

For us, the New Urban Agenda embodies at the same time a moment of hope and concern. On the hopeful side, it reaffirms the urgent need for a radical change of direction and amplifies this message by giving it a global and multi-facetted voice. The participation of an unprecedented breadth of urban stakeholders, including representatives of the least privileged of urban inhabitants, has made its mark on a declaration text that does not shy away from the affirmation that what ultimately matters most is the lived lives of urban dwellers and the future of the planet as our shared space of habitation. The text makes it clear that no other priority should be allowed to trump this, and even endorses the enshrinement in urban policy and legislation of the right to the city:

We share a vision of cities for all, referring to the equal use and enjoyment of cities and human settlements, seeking to promote inclusivity and ensure that all inhabitants, of present and future generations, without discrimination of any kind, are able to inhabit and produce just, safe, healthy, accessible, affordable, resilient and sustainable cities and human settlements to foster prosperity and quality of life for all. We note the efforts of some national and local governments to enshrine this vision, referred to as ‘the right to the city’, in their legislation, political declarations and charters.

(United Nations, 2017: 3)

We take heart from the recognition that things will need to change radically and from the endorsement of the right to the city as an indispensable ingredient in urban development going forward. But we also sense a worrying discord between the contents of the declaration and the actual urban realities we observe around us, both in our own everyday urban lives and as reflected in urban scholarship from around the world. This reminds us of the fact that lofty declarations are relatively easy to make compared to the immense difficulties of implementing them. We also note that, while the New Urban Agenda reinforces the view that cities are for people, it sidesteps the arguable corollary that they cannot simultaneously be for profit (Brenner et al., 2009). Instead it seemingly harbours the old belief that cities can function as human habitats and capitalist growth machines at the same time without detrimental implications for the former.

In this book we have sought to harness these mixed feelings of hope and concern in the pursuit of constructive and evidence-based scholarly visions of other ways forward in our collective production of urban space. Our concern equips us with a sense of urgency and reminds us continually that change does not happen by itself. Our hope reminds us that no effort is futile, even if it seems diminutive and inconsequential in the present moment. By focusing on the production of alternative urban spaces we have specifically sought out ‘spaces of hope’ (Harvey, 2000), but in every case we have been careful to address both sides of the proverbial coin by attending critically to the ways in which hope can so easily be turned to despair (and, hopefully, back again). In Spaces of Hope, David Harvey suggested usefully that:

The task is … to define an alternative, not in terms of some static spatial form or even of some perfected emancipatory process. The task is to pull together a spatiotemporal utopianism – a dialectical utopianism – that is rooted in our present possibilities at the same time as it points towards different trajectories for human uneven geographical developments.

(Harvey, 2000: 196)

By seeking out already existing alternative urban spaces, however imperfect and ambiguous they may be, our efforts in this book fall decidedly on the side of the present possibilities, identifying at least some of the seeds of change which potentially can be nurtured into broader trajectories towards radically different urban futures. This does not imply a rejection on our part of that other, utopian, side of the coin. We simply direct our efforts towards the teasing out of present possibilities from current realities, asking always if a wider transformative potential is present instead of simply praising the alternative for being alternative. Assessing that potential requires some utopian sense of what alternative urban futures might look like, but it is not our primary purpose here to develop those ideas. Instead we focus on the present-day urban realities from which they too will have to be realised.

This introductory chapter sets out key conceptual markers which are useful to keep in mind when reading the eleven empirically grounded chapters that follow. We seek to provide a shared point of departure in the form of an opening statement from which a cross-disciplinary and international dialogue can proceed and to which it can return. Three simple questions that all pertain to the title of the book provide our impetus: what do we mean by ‘alternative’? What do we mean by ‘urban’? And what do we mean by the production of spaces that are simultaneously alternative and urban? The answers loosely frame the subsequent chapters, but they are deliberately non-restrictive, necessarily partial, and ultimately open to discussion and contestation. Our aim is to chart alternative urban becomings in heterogeneous spatio-temporal conjunctures and to stage an open-minded dialogue between them. This is only possible if we eschew the temptation to set prohibitive boundaries. To the extent that the book can be accurately located in the academic landscape, its primary dwelling place is the field of urban studies. But it is hardly a sedentary text; it has many secondary homes and also makes explorative excursions from which it returns to look at its origins with fresh eyes. As such it attempts to embody the cross-disciplinary spirit of urban studies by acknowledging from the outset that its object of study cannot be adequately grasped from within the confines of any one academic discipline or, indeed, from any one point of view.

The current chapter follows a simple two-part structure. First, we consider the three questions posed above in a section that aims to clarify what we mean by the production of alternative urban spaces. Second, we use the conceptual markers thus arrived at to outline a set of guiding principles that serve to sharpen the focus of our empirical gaze. In this second part of the chapter we also introduce each of the three thematic parts that organise the book: (1) spaces of work, exchange, and consumption; (2) spaces of dwelling; and (3) spaces of public life. Individual chapters are briefly introduced along with an attempt at positioning each part vis-à-vis existing urban literature. Chapter findings, however, are not considered here but are thoroughly covered in Chapter 13, which both revisits each of the three themes and highlights how the chapters have also broken various other ground.

What is an alternative urban space and how is it produced?

We begin quite simply by attending in turn to each element of this composite term: alternatives, the urban, and the production of space. Guided by a principle of openness, the conceptions outlined below are deployed to engender elaboration, reinterpretation, and critique. As such they comprise what Bob Jessop (2008) has called abstract-simple entry points from which concrete-complex accounts and analyses can proceed. While the book as a whole cannot claim to be a fully fledged instance of the ‘strategic-relational approach’, we do find its epistemological principles useful for framing the kind of translocal dialogue that we seek: ‘Rather than seeking to resolve concrete-complex issues of practical action in specific conjunctures through abstract epistemological or methodological fiat, the “strategic-relational approach” leaves these issues underdetermined on an abstract-simple level and permits their resolution through appropriately detailed conjunctural analysis’ (Jessop, 1996: 127).

The following reflections and the conceptual markers they engender are all located at the abstract-simple level, but it is only through the conjunctural analyses conducted in the empirical chapters that concrete-complex accounts can be completed. The empirical exercise, to be sure, is not one of making findings ‘fit’ within rigid abstract frameworks, but can better be described as a movement beyond, acknowledging that to move anywhere it is necessary to start from somewhere. Our conceptual markers simply locate that somewhere and sketch possible directions of travel. The travelling itself takes place in subsequent chapters.

Alternatives: difference, possibility, and otherness

To articulate something as ‘alternative’ necessarily involves an assertion of difference in relation to something else. It also typically implies some kind of dissatisfaction with the present situation and an impetus to explore and demonstrate other ways forward. Assuredly, our mission in this book is not to somehow figure out what the alternative is. On the contrary, we seek, first, to identify and elucidate some of the various openings towards alternative urban futures that appear in current conjunctures, and second, to document and analyse the efforts undertaken to generate and utilise such openings. As to the exact nature of alternatives, we retain an agnostic and open-ended perspective which is nevertheless grounded in existing work on difference, possibility, and otherness.

The social sciences in general, and urban studies in particular, have produced numerous fields and traditions in which difference, otherness, and alternatives have been explored both theoretically and empirically. While we cannot do justice to the full breadth and depth of such work here, there is merit in outlining the most pertinent insights. Across a number of fields (e.g. subaltern and post-colonial studies, feminist and post-modern geographies) scholars have consistently and convincingly pointed out how academic discourse, even in its most critical guises, has often worked to produce monolithic and totalising world views that leave little if any room for difference and severely limit the space of political possibility within which (new and old) alternatives can emerge and come into view (e.g. Gibson-Graham, 1996). Post-colonial writers in particular have rigorously exposed the invariably partial and geographically situated origins of conceptual frameworks masquerading as universal and all-encompassing. Whereas the ills of eurocentrism, capitalocentrism, and other ‘centrisms’ are by now widely acknowledged, their various symptoms have by no means been eliminated. The basic task of rendering difference, otherness, and the possibility of alternatives visible therefore remains an important one.

Crucial as they are for ‘messing with the project’ (Katz, 2006), such interventions should not be used as excuses for rejecting out of hand any old approach to scholarship that aims ultimately at grasping totalities. As scholars such as Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja have forcibly demonstrated, it is possible to combine a sophisticated attentiveness and sensibility to difference, plurality, and indeterminacy without losing sight of the various totalities that emerge from the messy jumble of our world(s). One such totality is of course capitalism, and even if one takes an open stance towards the contingent hegemonies in relation to which urban alternatives are posed, it would be highly surprising if capitalism turned out to play no part at all in their (re)production. In the current day and age, we can point more precisely to the geohistorically variegated, evolving, and mutating processes of neoliberalisation as co-constitutive elements of contingent and localised hegemonic formations across the globe. We can, and must, do so without stipulating either that hegemony is always and only neoliberal (and capitalist) or that neoliberalism is somehow more foundational in constituting current hegemonies than other elements such as patriarchy, racism, authoritarianism, and so forth. In this way we can avoid a narrow focus on alternatives posed only in relation to urban neoliberalism (compare Cumbers & Routledge, 2004; Leitner et al., 2007; Purcell, 2008). In the messy realities of urban worlds, alternatives are rarely, if ever, posed solely in relation to neoliberalism and, in any case, neoliberal regimes manifest in vastly different ways across urban contexts (Brenner & Theodore, 2002). A crucial task in enabling translocal dialogue between urban alternatives is therefore to carefully unpack, in every case, the differential relations that warrant the label ‘alternative’; i.e. in relation to what exactly is something posed as an alternative?

It should be clear that our aim is not to celebrate difference and otherness per ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of maps
• Contributors
• 1. Conceptualising the production of alternative urban spaces
• Part 1: Alternative urban spaces of work, exchange, and consumption
• Part 2: Alternative urban spaces of dwelling
• Part 3: Alternative urban spaces of public life
• Index