Urban Studies Inside/Out

Theory, Method, Practice

Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck, Eric Sheppard, Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck, Eric Sheppard, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526438096, 9781526438089
• eBook ISBN: 9781526455307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

At a time of intense theoretical debates in urban studies, the research practices underlying such theories have not received the same attention. This original and creative text interrogates the methodological underpinnings of contemporary urban scholarship, with reference to different global sites and situations, as well as to recent debates around postcolonial, planetary, and provincialized urban theories. Rather than reducing methodological questions to a matter of tools and techniques, it unearths the complex connections between theory, research design, empirical work, expositional style, and normative-ethical commitments.

Innovatively co-produced by faculty and graduate students from a variety of disciplines, Urban Studies Inside-Out it is comprised of three parts.

• Part I: An introduction to the field of urban studies and its changing theories, methodological norms and practices.
• Part II: Features a collection of methodological essays co-authored by graduate students, deconstructing the research designs, the methodological practices, and the modes of presentation and representation across recent urban monographs.
• Part III: Consists of informative keyword primers which explicate the key concepts and formulations in the field of urban studies.

This volume offers a welcome intervention within urban studies, and stands to make a valuable contribution for graduate students and researchers.

Part I Reorientations

1 Urban Studies Unbound: Postmillennial Spaces Of Theory

Helga Leitner

Eric Sheppard

Jamie Peck

Introduction: urban political economy, and beyond

Each of the urban monographs discussed in this book draws on one or more theorizations of the urban that have been in play since the turn of the Millennium. To contextualize the monographs, in this chapter we provide a brief overview of this theoretical landscape – an intellectual cartography of the current state of critical urban theory. In one way or another, the theoretical contributions to be discussed below each depart from a predominantly anglophone orthodoxy that dominated critical urban theory at the turn of the century: urban political economy. Before turning our attention to transformations in the field of critical urban studies over the past two decades, we provide a brief sketch of the state of the field at the turn of the Millennium, which is taken here as an inflection point of sorts despite some important strands of continuity. This represents a point of departure for the critiques and new lines of scholarship that have reshaped the field in the past two decades – the terrain explored in Urban Studies Inside/Out.

While the field of critical urban studies has always been characterized by a diverse and quite eclectic theory culture, by the notable absence of anything approaching singular methodological canon, and by a relatively open mandate for empirical inquiries, since the early 1980s its momentum and center of gravity were disproportionately shaped by urban political economy, notably (but not only) of a Marxian stripe. Never did this strand of work monopolize the terrain of critical urban studies, of course. A postmodern current, for example, had developed by the late 1980s (see Soja, 1989), although this too both engaged and took issue with the concerns of urban political economy. During the 1980s and 1990s, urban political economy became a dominant current or central tendency in the field, subsequently to become a locus for critique.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, as a critical project, critical urban studies were really made during the 1970s and 1980s, not least in the sway of a series of signal interventions from Manuel Castells and David Harvey (see Zukin, 1980; Brenner, 2009a). Influential lines of work that followed, many of them informed by various strands of (neo-)Marxist scholarship, would take up (and take on) the problematic of the capitalist city, attending in particular to the distinctive dynamics of capitalist urbanization, as well as to crises, conflicts, and contradictions rooted in specifically capitalist social relations. The ‘urban process’, as it would become known, was seen as an immanent and indeed active moment in the ongoing (re)production and transformation of capitalism, while cities were recognized to be on the front lines of struggles over social rights, collective services, industrial restructuring, exclusion, displacement, marginalization, and more, in ways that were variously indexed to, if never reducible to, the economic.

In retrospect, the ascendancy of urban political economy was not only framed by but also constituted through two especially important conjunctural moments, each with their own geographies. On the one hand, the ‘urban crisis’ of the 1960s, particularly in the United States, prompted a concern with racialized poverty, ‘redlining’, deindustrialization, and the flight of capital and middle-class residents to the suburbs. On the other hand, the macroeconomic turbulence of the 1970s was being linked to the emergence of new international divisions of labor, to the relocation of jobs and factories to the so-called ‘peripheries’ and ‘semi-peripheries’ of the world system, and to crises of North Atlantic Fordism.

Among the various trajectories of urban political economy that developed in the wake of these moments, two would prove to be especially influential. One was concerned with the politics of growth, the other with the implications of globalization. The catalytic notion of the ‘city as growth machine’ inspired a genre of critical urban studies focused on the actions and motives of growth elites, the turn toward entrepreneurial modes of urban governance, and the increasingly competitive political economy of place, as cities were reconstituted as competitive agents, hustling to attract investment and jobs, to defend and grow local tax bases in the face of economic uncertainty and the rollback of fiscal transfers, and to propagate new images and imaginaries evocative of more prosperous futures (Harvey, 1989; Leitner, 1990; Molotch, 1976). Subsequent work in this vein would run the spectrum between quite orthodox, institutionalist studies of ‘urban regimes’, where the focus would be placed on the network of relationships between elected officials and business elites, pretty much taking for granted the conditions of market-oriented economic development and liberal politics (Stoker and Mossberger, 1994; Stone, 1993), and a neo-Marxist strand of ‘regulationist’ urbanism animated by questions of ‘post-Fordist’ restructuring, the ‘rescaling’ of state capacities, and the emergence of new paradigms of socio-spatial regulation (Brenner, 1999a, 2009b; Jessop, 1997; Peck, 1995).

By the early 1990s, much of the work in urban political economy was being conducted under the sign of globalization – even though drawing on a more radical and politicized reading of globalization than that associated with mainstream notions of borderless worlds, (free) market integration, and the supposed erosion of nation-state power. The most conspicuous manifestation of this generative moment in critical urban studies came in the form of the ‘global’ or ‘world’ city, perched atop an increasingly hierarchical system of advanced global capitalism, the commanding heights of which were characterized by profound concentrations of corporate and financial power but also stark inequalities (Friedmann, 1986; Knox and Taylor, 1995; Sassen, 1991). The global cities rubric would provide the premise for new rounds of comparative urban studies, albeit typically focused on the highest peaks of the system such as New York, London, and Tokyo, along with inventive forms of network analysis, concerned not just with the attributes of top-level or ‘alpha’ cities but with the (re)configuration of intercity relations across the world system. In the process, not only did global connectivity, influence, and visibility become a ‘treasured theoretical quality’ (Beauregard, 2003: 192) in this, the ‘globalization decade’ of the 1990s; but so too would the seductive monikers of ‘global’ and ‘world-class’ urbanism become prized, aspirational categories, especially for a rising class of urban policymakers, gurus, and consultants. Manifestly at odds with the radical origins of this work, this instrumentalist and normative turn toward global boosterism was a byproduct of the increasingly hegemonic climate of entrepreneurial urbanism itself, with its fraught mix of competitive anxieties and promotional inclinations (Peck, 2014), but some parts of the (critical) literature were also amenable (or vulnerable) to mainstream appropriation, given their preoccupation with glitzy corporate capitals and the leading-edge operations of advanced capitalism, with the latest trends in cosmopolitan cultures and lifestyles, and with ranked league tables of urban ‘success’.

Rather more heterodox and varied than their predominantly Marxist predecessors from the 1970s and early 1980s, theories of urban political economy had come to occupy incumbent status by the end of the 1990s. They represented, in effect, a critical orthodoxy of a certain kind. This was an orthodoxy attuned, inter alia: to driving processes of urban restructuring and transformation; to the pervasive consequences of power asymmetries and socio-spatial inequalities; to various forms of class analysis, crisis theory, and capital-logic explanation; to the structural positioning of cities in relation to the capitalist world system; to the circuitry of corporate power; and to macroregulatory forces; to the prioritization of predominantly economic sources of causality, along with realist and materialist forms of abstraction; and to a reliance on research sites disproportionately located in the late twentieth-century ‘heartlands’ of globalizing capitalism. These predispositions and priorities, in turn, would expose the field-cum-project of urban political economy to critiques of economism and explanatory overreach, often the outcome of a propensity to extrapolate from drivers of transformative change, from moments of political economic crisis, and from ‘big stories’ about capitalist logics, orders, or epochs. Thus the stage was set for a series of turns in critical urban studies, marked by varying degrees of sympathy or antagonism to the ‘heterodoxy’ of urban political economy.

In the remainder of this chapter, we organize our overview as follows. The following section begins with the fundamentals, reviewing what remain essentially unresolved debates about what the object of study should be for urban studies scholarship: what is this thing we call ‘urban’ that we claim to study? Next we examine the main directions of diversification, beyond urban political economy and beyond western urban theories, that have characterized the past two decades: the turn to questions of culture, identity, and subjectification; of the geography of urban knowledge production; and of the more-than-human aspects of urbanization. In recent years, debates about urban theory have become unduly heated, as new generations of scholars seeking to shift the theoretical conversation have confronted older (established white, often masculine) generations. This runs the danger of creating an intellectual environment that many of today’s graduate students find uncomfortable – one where they feel forced to take sides in debates that they themselves have come to find limiting. In response to this, in the closing section of this chapter we seek to move beyond such impasses, toward a both/and rather than either/or approach to critical urban theory – the approach to which this book is dedicated.

What constitutes the urban?

What do we study when we claim to study the ‘urban’? Any scientific endeavor begins with the question of what our object of study should be. In the social sciences, such objects are typically social (e.g., crime), possibly temporal, or perhaps spatial – as in the case of urban studies. Spatial objects of study have evidently posed more problems for (non-geographical) social scientists than either social objects of study or the conventions of historical analysis. Even geographers have spilt much ink determining the spatial boundaries of their object of study – an obsession of regional geographers in the mid-twentieth century. While the question of what it is that constitutes a city might seem to be intuitively obvious, this is a question that has been debated as long as there has been critical urban studies, with no settled resolution in sight. In a definitive early contribution, David Harvey’s (1973) Social Justice and the City, the urban was simply any city, to be studied as a stand-alone object. Manuel Castells devoted a whole book to the question, writing that:

The delimitation of the urban remains ambiguous … one might judge such a problem to be purely academic and keep to an analysis … of space … [given] the historical relativity of the criteria concerning the urban. [But] what is space? … all space is constructed … consequently, the theoretical non-delimitation of the space being dealt with … amounts to accepting a culturally prescribed (and therefore ideological) segmentation. (1977 [1974]: 234)

Peter Saunders (1981) contended that the question of whether to approach cities through a spatial or a social lens poses a deep conundrum. Feeling that the former is limiting, he concluded that urban scholars should focus on social processes, which cannot be confined to spatial locations.

Now one might legitimately note that the same uncertainty applies also to social objects of study: certainly the question of what counts as crime, for example, depends on social conventions and definitions. Yet defining the urban has remained a puzzle for critical urban scholars, and if anything has gained increased attention, with a renewed round of debates prompted by ‘urban age’ rhetoric and smart-cities futurism, and by competing conceptions of planetary urbanization, ‘cityness’, provincialized urban epistemologies, and so forth. There is a long lineage here. In the 1960s, it was recognized that cities should be studied with respect to their hinterland – the region surrounding a city that is functionally connected to it (Berry and Pred, 1965). By the 1990s, increasing attention was being given to the study of national and international inter-urban systems (King, 1990; Knox and Taylor, 1995; Timberlake, 1985). Single-city studies remained staples in the field, to be sure, but these too were increasingly framed in ‘global’ terms (see Beauregard, 2003). In the context of deepening global integration and pan-urban interdependence – which is more than a matter of material linkages, being reflected also in forms of urban consciousness, ascendant ideologies, flows of ideas, practices, and much more – many have found it to be intuitively, practically, or analytically implausible to work exclusively within the city limits. Thus it has become less and less defensible to claim that it makes sense just to study what is going on within the boundaries of an individual city, as it were, in isolation (not least because borders themselves are social constructs).

Scholars from across the epistemological spectrum have sought to explode the border between the urban and the non-urban, even as they have variously retained a focus on urban issues. Writing from the post-structural perspective of performativity and non-representational theory, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift argue: ‘Time and again, the city is stressed as a site of localized flows and contact networks. Our argument … is that the city needs theorization as a site of local-global connectivity, not a place of meaningful proximate links’ (2002: 26–27).

Writing from a different post-structural perspective, that of actor–network theory, Ignacio Farías and Thomas Bender (2012) stake out a similar position. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s skepticism about the utility of any scalar units of analysis, they challenge the presumption that ‘cities should involve some stability of shape … entities … that can be positively identified and strictly delimited’ (Farías, 2012: 9).

These ways of reconceptualizing the urban reiterate Doreen Massey’s (1991) influential argument that events inside places can only be understood by studying how they are shaped by their interdependencies with events elsewhere – connectivity-based thinking (Sheppard, 2016). Considering London, Massey argues that the city’s openness to the world also implies a certain ethico-political commitment. Since London’s residents are dependent on, and prosper from, the actions of people in far distant places, they should be conscious of their responsibilities to the people and places affected by and affecting London:

the question ‘where does London (or any city) end?’ must at least address the issue of those recruited into the dynamics of the urban economy and society by the long lines of connections of all sorts that stretch out to the rest of the country and on around the planet. (Massey, 2007: 216)

Perhaps the most geographically ambitious challenge to the urban as a delimited spatial unit of analysis has come from within geographical political economy. Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid (2015) advocate for a new epistemology of the urban, under the rubric of planetary urbanization. Taking up Henri Lefebvre’s (2003 [1970]) prediction that capitalist society will become an urban society – the urban revolution – they argue that those interested in the urban, and urban transformations, cannot but study the world:

rather than witnessing the worldwide proliferation of a singular urban form, ‘the’ city, we are instead confronted with new processes of urbanization that are bringing forth diverse socioeconomic conditions, territorial formations and socio-metabolic transformations across the planet. (Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 152)

While attending to the material and representational condition of our contemporary globalized world, such attempts to dismantle or transcend the city as a coherent unit of analysis have generated debate and discomfort. After all, if the world is now urban why not study the world rather than the urban? The most recent trenchant critique of such attempts to eviscerate the urban–rural frontier has come from Allen Scott and Michael Storper (Scott and Storper, 2015; Storper and Scott, 2016). Writing from a tradition melding geographical economics with political economy, they insist that a specifically urban theory is necessary. Recognizing that cities are far from isolated from their surroundings, they nonetheless argue that what happens within cities is distinctive. Any theory of cities, they insist, must therefore be grounded in agglomeration economies and the urban land nexus – the land-use patterns around a central city generated by these economies. The geographical proximity enabled by cities ‘is crucial, for otherwise the time and distance costs of interaction would impede their operational effectiveness’ (Storper and Scott, 2016: 1116). Proximity itself is generative, from this perspective, enabling particularly urban relations and capacities. There is consequently a necessary role for the city, and for urban studies:

With a conscientiously delimited and focused concept of the city it is possible to identify how the urban generates specific kinds of social phenomena and sets them apart from non-urban phenomena. This is what provides a distinctive place for urban analysis in the academic division of labour. (2016: 1118)

Proponents of planetary urbanization are skeptical of such ‘methodological cityism’, on the grounds that it naturalizes ‘the city as the sole analytical terrain of urban analysis’ (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015: 21), but can urban studies afford to ignore cities altogether? Brenner and Schmid (2015) retain a place for the urban within their concept of planetary urbanization, presenting the dialectical triad of concentrated urbanization (analogous to the domain recognized by Scott and Storper), extended urbanization (spanning both the everyday activities and the socio-economic dynamics of urban life, at a planetary scale), and differentiated urbanization (basically the dynamics of uneven geographical development). Yet other urban scholars working in the tradition of political economy, and with this kind of dialectical epistemology, have nevertheless sought to question this approach. Mark Davidson and Kurt Iveson contend that ‘we might only be able to understand the planetary urban process thro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustration List
• List Of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part I Reorientations
• 1 Urban Studies Unbound: Postmillennial Spaces Of Theory
• 2 Doing Urban Studies: Navigating The Methodological Terrain
• 3 Urban Studies Inside/Out:A Guide For Readers And Researchers
• Part II Methodological essays
• 4 Constructing A Feminist Urban Political Economy: On Leslie Kern’s Sex And The Revitalized City
• 5 Dreaming And Scheming The ‘World-Class’ City:On Asher Ghertner’s Rule By Aesthetics
• 6 Fluid Assemblages:On Lisa Björkman’s Pipe Politics, contested waters
• 7 Constructing And Contesting The Banlieue:On Mustafa Dikeç’s Badlands Of The Republic
• 8 Frustrated Encounters:On Ahmed Kanna’s Dubai: The City As Corporation
• 9 Rescaling The Urban:On Neil Brenner’s New State Spaces
• 10 Ethnography In The Boundary Zones: On Robert Fairbanks’ How It Works
• 11 Ethnographic Exchanges: On Philippe Bourgois’s In Search Of Respect
• 12 Grounding The Housing Question In Land: On Anne Haila’s Urban Land Rent
• 13 Mapping Urban Governance: On You-Tien Hsing’s The Great Urban Transformation
• 14 Claiming Rights To The City: On James Holston’s Insurgent Citizenship
• 15 Visualizing Liquid Cities:On Matthew Gandy’s The Fabric Of Space
• 16 Writing The Heterogeneous City: On Abdoumaliq Simone’s City Life From Jakarta To Dakar
• 17 In Search Of Ordinary ‘Elsewheres’ In Global Urbanism: On Ola Söderström’s Cities In Relations
• 18 Urban Comparison, Quantified: On Michael Storper Et Al.’S The Rise And Fall Of Urban Economies
• Part III Reflections
• 19 Turning Urban Studies Inside/Out
• Part IV Resources
• Keywords
• Bibliography
• Index