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Chapter 1
Introduction
The clarity, and conceptual rigour, with which we define our empirical focus, is not only essential from the standpoint of scholarly integrity, it orientates research, in subtle ways, to particular points in the empirical terrain; and thus serves to influence the type of inquiries likely to emerge out of the thematic focus. As Ward puts it: âDefinitions ⌠are important, not because they precisely demarcate the boundaries of a discipline, but because of the questions that they prompt us to askâ (2013: 77).
With that in mind, this chapter will set out in greater conceptual detail, the processes being signposted through the concept âurbanisationâ. Consideration will also be given to how these processes may be thought of as spaces where different forms of organisational deviance can occur, triggering censure from residents, social movements, governing authorities and other stakeholders. To that end, the chapter will begin by unpacking urbanisation as an organising concept, drawing on dialectical scholarly traditions. Urbanisation, from this vantage point, will be framed as a set of dynamic and contradictory processes that create, and recreate, in an uneven and convulsive fashion, built environments on a planetary scale. This uneven and convulsive planetary process, it will be argued, is tightly bound to the rhythms of global capitalism, and a system of governance which the latterâs rhythms are meditated through.
Once the process of urbanisation has been conceptually framed, we will go on to consider how the organisations and transactions that materially enact and manage this uneven, convulsive and at times destructive process, also operate within a normative terrain â itself a historical creation, with elastic fault-lines â which can generate, when contravened, resistance, censure and sanction. It will therefore be contended, that from a dialectical perspective, there is embedded in the urbanisation process, the active historical conditions for different social coalitions to direct heightened forms of stigma against targeted organisations and transactions, that inscribe upon them the quality of being criminal. Urbanisation, accordingly, is a contentious process in which a possibility exists that criminality may be inscribed on related illegitimate state and corporate activity; but if the possible is to be actualised, social mobilisation and censure must be successfully enacted, which of course occurs in a contested and uneven power terrain.
Having established the overarching conceptual framework for defining this bookâs focus, the potential types of illicit state and corporate activity that fit within this focus will be pointed to, drawing from a diverse range of literatures. Once mapped, the specific research backdrop for the bookâs methodological, theoretical and empirical contributions will then be outlined. In particular, attention will be turned to the geopolitical arena â Papua New Guinea â where the process of planetary urbanisation was studied; an arena where the impact of illegitimate stateâcorporate transactions on both âtownâ and âcountryâ, have become the target of social mobilisation, resistance and censure. The political-economic context of these illegitimate transactions will be outlined. Attention will then be turned to the particular way in which the case study methodology was employed, to inquire into opaque and covert stateâcorporate activity, with a view to generating theory that can more richly articulate the social relationships, regimes of power and institutional repertoires, underpinning forms of illegitimate urbanisation. In the subsequent chapters, the substantive discoveries that emerged from this research design will be presented.
Urbanisation, the built environment and global capitalism
âUrbanisationâ is one of the essential points of reference around which this book is organised. Like other foundational concepts at the heart of interdisciplinary inquiry, it is a contested category. This intervention rests on a particular conception of urbanisation initially formulated by Lefebvre, before being further refined and deepened by a number of urban theorists, with Neil Brenner and David Harvey being among the most important interlocutors.
Engagement with this tradition of urban thought was not an arbitrary decision. It was apparent from early fieldwork and a review of the cognate literature, that many of the criminogenic drivers underpinning urban change occurring within city hubs, could also be observed in the countryside. Therefore, a conceptual arrangement was needed which could underpin analysis into geographical spheres that have traditionally been viewed through the lens of dichotomy rather than unity. Complicating matters, core criminogenic drivers contained within the process of urbanisation were closely linked to land and property market activities. It was critical, therefore, that any conception of urbanisation as a planetary process, was also acutely sensitive to how its pace, trajectory and forms are conditioned by commercial activities structured around capitalist social relations. The dialectical tradition of urban theory developed by scholars such as Lefebvre, Harvey and Brenner, offered the most fertile landscape in which to grapple with these complex issues.
To begin, it is worth noting an important distinction advanced by Lefebvre, which differentiates between urbanisation and the built environment. Lefebvre (2003) contends that the built environment may be conceived of as an object, constituted through things such as factories, office blocks, apartment complexes, highways, railways, sewerage systems, gas pipelines, port facilities, dams, and so on. Urbanisation, on the other hand, captures the social processes through which this material environment is generated, organised, connected, maintained, transformed and destroyed (2003: 16). Therefore, just as a particular commodity â say, shoes or a television set â may be conceived as a temporal material articulation of a broader set of relations and processes, so to the vast material system of built life, despite its apparent permanence, is a temporal articulation of dense social processes captured under the umbrella term, urbanisation.
Urbanisation, conceived as a set of dense social processes that cultivate, organise, connect and transform the built environment, is clearly a phenomenon that transcends any one historical epoch. Nevertheless, Harvey, Brenner and Lefebvre each maintain it is important that attempts to understand the pace, trajectory and content of urbanisation are sensitive to the fact that these variables are deeply informed by historically developed social relations, which are peculiar to particular epochs. Accordingly, if urbanisation is to be framed as a dense set of processes which drive change within the built environment â cultivating it, giving it specific meanings, transforming its depth and breadth â then its pulse is the spatial rhythms of the capitalist political economy.
It is critical, therefore, to understand the different ways in which capitalism as a system tugs at, and drives urbanisation. To that end, as this system of political-economic life progressively emerged over four centuries, then expanded across the globe, it has been at times the erratic midwife for a vast transformation in the productive forces. This has shepherded concentrated forms of production that combine highly complex industrial instruments with collective labour processes, in ways that greatly expand our aggregate output relative to labour time (Marx 1976). This immense coming together on a global scale of raw materials, machinery, buildings, labour, work processes and technology â strengthened through increasingly rapid forms of communication and transport â has heavily rested on sophisticated systems of credit. The credit system enables the centralisation of capital needed to drive vast industrial enterprises, secure major infrastructural developments and facilitate international trade and investment (Harvey 2012). Because periods of dormancy for capital represent a cost, capitalism has also triggered revolutions in the means of transport and communication, which have collapsed time through the construction of built space, that facilitates the rapid movement of people, goods and information (Bukharin 2003).
This schismatic dynamism at the heart of capitalism is inherently married to expansionary tendencies. As the social stock of capital grows, it must find ways to valorise itself. There is thus an impulse to find new areas for profitable investment. This, on the one hand, can drive industrial innovation, leaps in new technologies and foreign investment, on the other it can also fuel market speculation, out of which bubbles grow.
Attached to capitalismâs schismatic dynamism are evidenced tendencies towards crisis, which have important implications for the built environment (Brenner 2013). These periods of crisis often prove particularly traumatic for working class communities, who witness their built environment being robbed of its purpose and vitality, during the downturn period. Future iterations of urban expansion that can breathe life into abandoned manufacturing districts and immiserated working class suburbs, frequently hinge on a process of âcreative destructionâ where existing built environments are demolished, rezoned and refashioned, so it is congruent with a new iteration of capitalist development (Harvey 1985).
This period of urban ârenewalâ often provides a crucial fix for capital during the post-crisis recovery period. For example, Smith argues suburbanisation in the United States helped enliven capitalism during the aftermath of the depressions in the 1890s and 1930s. He notes, âwith FHA [Federal Housing Administration] mortgage subsidies, the construction of highways, and so on, the state subsidized suburbanization quite deliberately as part of a larger solution to crisisâ (Smith 1982: 150). Also, whether it be the gentrification of inner-city tenements, or the branching out of suburbs, these moments of urban change are a vital stimulant for consumer demand, in addition to household indebtedness, which has a range of economic and disciplinary benefits for capitalism (Harvey 2012). That is not to neglect, however, the role which increased indebtedness and urban speculation can play stewarding in new periods of crisis, as the recent Global Financial Crisis visibly demonstrated.
Of course, the dynamic and often antagonistic way the different beats of capitalism, urbanisation and population syncopate, cannot be divorced from government (Brenner 2004; Harvey 1989, 2012; Tretter 2009). Indeed, as capitalist urbanisation inspires new built landscapes, socio-demographic configurations and forms of social contention, acute governance challenges emerge relating to public health, inequality, deprivation, unemployment, crime, environmental management, organised labour, decaying infrastructure, people movement, an aging population, and so on. It might also be noted, urbanisation is not a discrete process â it is an uneven mesh that intensively and extensively expands on a global scale producing multiscalar connections between emerging agglomerations of built life. The connections, flows and circulations â which include people, money, goods, information, energy, disease â that take place through this global built edifice must be managed through policy, law, investment and intervention. How regimes of government, at multiple levels, use political instruments to strategically manage the process of urbanisation, and the metabolism that takes place through built environments, is critical both to the pulse of capitalism and the particular historical ways in which capitalist forms of urbanisation unfold (Foucault 2007; Harvey 1985; Smith 2002).
With that in mind, the challenge then becomes one of conceptualising urbanisation in a way that is sensitive to the dynamic processes pointed to in the preceding discussion. Lefebvre, for instance, coins the metaphor âimplosion-explosionâ, which he borrows from nuclear physics, to help capture urbanisation as a dynamic, contradictory totality. Capitalist urbanisation, Lefebvre contends, involves the âtremendous concentration (of people, activities, wealth, goods, objects, instruments, means, and thought) of urban reality and the immense explosion, the projection of numerous, disjunct fragments (peripheries, suburb, vacation homes, satellite towns) into spaceâ (2003: 13).
Building on this foundation, Brenner (2013) argues that capitalist urbanisation can be usefully thought about in terms of concentration and extension. On the one hand, urbanisation coagulates into heaving interconnected cityscapes that intensively integrate vast industrial, commercial, residential, finance and leisure zones, through a complex nerve system of roads, railways, trams, telegraphs, fibre optic cables, and so on. It also bursts outwards, into rural spaces that have become hubs for resource extraction, food production, biofuels, recreation, tourism and other commodifiable activities. Both processes in Brennerâs conception are entwined and interdependent. He observes:
Framed this way, urbanisation is a differentiated totality which functions through interdependent moments of concentration and extension that take place on a planetary scale. The challenge then becomes to overlay this planetary heat map of urban change, onto geographically sensitive conceptions of global capitalism, in order to interrogate their complex relations and tensions.
Because concentrated and extended urbanisation is bonded to the geographically uneven rhythms of capitalist reproduction, it is an inherently unstable process. Urban theory, therefore, needs categories which are sensitive to the important role played by rupture and urban âregenerationâ. Indeed, as new iterations of concentrated and extended urbanisation emerge, driven by the turbines of uneven capitalist growth, they often must plough through the built legacies left by past episodes in urbanisation. This makes what Harvey labels âcreative destructionâ, an intrinsic feature of urban change (2003: 101). Harvey explains:
