New Urban Worlds

Inhabiting Dissonant Times

AbdouMaliq Simone, Edgar Pieterse

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780745691565, 9780745691558
• eBook ISBN: 9780745691596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

It is well known that the world is transitioning to an irrevocable urban future whose epicentre has moved into the cities of Asia and Africa. What is less clear is how this will be managed and deployed as a multi-polar world system is being born. The full implications of this challenge cry out to be understood because city building (and retrofitting) cannot but be an undertaking entangled in profound societal and cultural shifts.

In this highly original account, renowned urban sociologists AbdouMaliq Simone and Edgar Pieterse offer a call for action based fundamentally on the detail of people's lives. Urban regions are replete with residents who are compelled to come up with innovative ways to maintain or extend livelihoods, whose makeshift character is rarely institutionalized into a fixed set of practices, locales or organizational forms. This novel analytical approach reveals a more complex relationship between people, the state and other agents than has previously been understood. As the authors argue, we need adequate concepts and practices to grasp the composition and intricacy of these shifting efforts to make visible new political possibilities for action and social justice in cities across Asia and Africa.

1
Paradoxes of the Urban

Inhabiting the paradox

This is a book about stories, or, rather, about particular ways of telling them, or, in another sense, how to discover and unearth them. It is about story lines – lines that connect stories urban inhabitants tell about themselves, other inhabitants and cities near and far. It is about stories that cities seem to tell about themselves, about what needs to be done. What kinds of lines navigate through all of these different stories? How is it possible to draw new lines, lines that make unusual connections, but which allow us to see urban phenomena in different ways, and thus make different kinds of decisions? Such story lines are not straight and narrow. They often end up in such a way that they don't get their stories straight. But perhaps this is the only way to deal with a story of cities that is full of paradoxes.

Cities across Africa and Asia move toward and away from each other in significant ways. No longer, if ever, coherent actors in themselves, cities as social and administrative entities, nevertheless, attempt to posit themselves as dynamic engines of economic growth and social transformation. Urbanization, as a process once embodied by the city form, now takes on varying shapes and sizes, expanding cities into megalopolises, shrinking them into shadows of former selves, or articulating a vast range of places and resources in tight relationships of interdependency.

Cities become the venues for all kinds of countervailing tendencies: where narrowing and expansion, ambiguity and precision, dissipation and consolidation, embodiment and digitalization, movement and stasis are all intensified – and sometimes become indistinguishable from each other. Urbanization is something that seems increasingly to make itself, something independent from its once familiar function as an arena where different things were made, articulated and prompted into new synergies. Associations with density, social diversity, churn, and the circulation of disparate experiences through each other no longer seem to hold as key criteria for designating something as “urban.” Differentiations between local and global, public and private, exterior and interior, intensive and extensive appear to fold into and, sometimes, collapse upon each other. The very organization of meaning, with its boundaries of here and there, self and other, citizen and stranger, becomes both more pronounced and more subject to erasure. More and more the urban seems to be a confounding story (Amin 2013a, 2013b; Easterling 2014).

What does it mean to think politically within an urban environment of such seeming paradox? This is the question we attempt to address in this book, particularly by considering how urban politics and programmatic interventions might operate simultaneously through inventions at the level of municipal and metropolitan systems and through acupunctural interventions at the level of neighborhoods or districts. This double approach assumes that the conventional rules of the game – home and property ownership, formal taxation systems, standardized outlays of infrastructure – are inadequate to the realities in which urban life is actually lived. This is life not layered through orderly scales and sectors but, rather, assuming multiple spatial forms. As such, interventions, policies and mobilizations must be capable of resonating across disparate terrains and vectors of impact.

Some of the key theorists of urbanization – Robert Wirth, Lewis Mumford, Manuel Castells, Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid – all point, albeit in different formulations, to urbanization as both a process of intensive differentiation of people and things and the subsuming of singular human experiences, technical instruments and spaces of sociality to a continuous remaking of abstract worlds. In other words, urbanization makes things more specific and, at the same time, turns specific things into components of “machines” that appear to have no “real” body, no concrete being, but yet act as a powerful entity. Jennifer Robinson has gone beyond these formulations to develop modes of knowledge creation that, through creative acts of comparison, continually reconstitute a wide range of possibilities for what the urban is and can be.

As such, the city is always something to be remade according to new models, new possibilities of generating value (Sevilla-Buitrago 2015). Cities across Africa and Asia then share the problems of producing more spectacular built environments, accommodating large numbers of recent and usually poor residents, and managing vast and easily bubbled property markets (Watson 2009). Yet, composing these similarities can entail very different procedures and elements. They involve many different stories. When we say that we are going to deal with urbanization in Africa and Asia in this book, we know that these designations are shorthand. We know that we can never cover the intricacies of urbanization in these intensely differentiated regions with anything approaching comprehensiveness. Both Asia and Africa are not countries or stable territorial configurations. Rather, we use them here as signs of an evolving process of urbanization that both corresponds to and diverges from previous epicenters and conventional narratives. They are the backdrop for our stories, a way of narrowing down the lens of our considerations, and a way of pointing to a form of urbanization largely still in the making and thus potentially open to new forms of development and governance.

While cities and urban regions often act like unstoppable juggernauts in their pursuit of spectacular and easy profits, the messy details of how the particular spaces within African and Asian cities get to have the kinds of populations and characteristics they have draw on divergent histories and day-to-day encounters. Cities are arenas of action, and they vary as to how actions are considered, controlled and valued, and for whom certain actions are safe and legitimate. While cities may no longer embody the critical dimensions of urbanization, they remain powerful objects of imagination, sociality and governance (Derickson 2015; Hall and Savage 2016).

In some cities, sex is one of the few vehicles of free expression; in other cities it is full of routinized drudgery (Sheller 2012). In some cities, the household is the bastion of security and nurturance; in others, it may be a dangerous minefield. In some cities, vast populations are warehoused with little to do but are equipped with a basic, subsidized existence; in yet others, existence is an unrelenting scramble for advantage (Zeiderman 2016). In some cities, most residents have reasonable recourse to officials designated to manage problems; in others, problems are addressed simply by temporarily substituting alternative problems for the original ones.¹

Of course cities differ within themselves concerning the practices of everyday behavior – actions about friendship and enmity, care and sexual desire, the circulation and hoarding of knowledge, the camaraderie or isolation of work, or the togetherness or apartness of where and how people spend their days. The veneers of official description – the ways in which cities seem controlled, the rules and habits, the possibilities and restrictions – also tend to cover up many public secrets (Taussig 1999). They occlude ways of living that are not supposed to be taking place, but do so anyway. Of course, almost everyone knows that these transgressions are taking place, but they also know that it is more dangerous to acknowledge this reality. The dimensions of this duality are explored in greater detail in later chapters.

In this book we will often refer to cities and urban regions as a way to point both to how urbanization does not necessarily equate to the city and to the various formats of urbanization that seem either to exceed the familiar scale of the city or to take on hybrid forms (Painter 2012; Addie and Keil 2015). These hybrids might include various amalgamations of cores, peripheries, corridors, greenfields and extraction zones. The notion of regions has been used in many different ways. Regions point to macro-level articulations or points of orientation around particular physical terrains or modes of production, occurring within and among national states (Sassen 2010). Regions might refer to spatial distributions of similarity and covariance in terms of demographics, histories and politics that cut across clearly delineated scales (Crescenzi et al. 2012; Zhang 2014). Notions of “new regionalism” refer to administrative and political constructions of specific transnational or transurban regulatory frameworks of economic operation. They point to intensifications of particularity and clustering at sub-national levels (Agnew 2013; Jones 2002; Parr 2008), which seem to have become more salient to the logistics of globally articulated economic value chains. This discourse has also become more prolific with the policy focus on agglomeration economics as the key to prosperity (Glaeser 2012).

Each of these instances of the regional raises questions about the logics of coherence. To what degree are regions administrative artifacts, platforms of affective solidarities, basins of attraction, analytical or vernacular clusters of flows and linkages, or concretizations of specific political, economic or cultural relationships? How are they materialized through watersheds and other geomorphic features (Booth and Bledsoe 2009)? Whether they “actually” exist or are simply ways of materializing particular ideas about critical differences of various kinds is a seemingly moot concern. More importantly, what are the performative dimensions of what regions do in various circumstances and times? For the power of regions as constellations of emplacement lies in the way they both mediate between the stabilities of specific populations and ways of doing things and create more open-ended exchanges with larger surrounds (Brighenti 2016; Coward 2012).

The relationships between the forces of global capital and the locally expressed forces of intermeshed and messy encounters are not assignable to clearly distinct scales. It is not that global capital sits above a world of cities orchestrating its circuits below, apportioning things here and there in some kind of command-and-control fashion (Amin and Thrift 2002; Brenner and Schmid 2014; Harrison and Hoyler 2015; Lawhon and Patel 2013). Neither are the intermixtures of inclinations, styles and practices that make up a local vernacular simply confined within the administrative or cultural boundaries of a specific urban region. The articulations are marked by infidelity of scale and thoroughly indeterminate. The prolific dispersal of highly localized African popular urban music is but one visceral example.

We know well just how wage relations, the extraction of surplus, or the hoarding of capacity work their way into the blood, into what may be experienced as the DNA of contemporary urban individuals. We also know the peculiarities of how cities spill over their boundaries. In part, residents embody this spilling by moving across the world, making their performances visible through all kinds of media. It is also reflected in the human inclination to imitate, to coalesce on the basis of people taking things from each other. So what connects or divides cities is a moving target, something shifting all the time across and within geographical scales and times (Lingis 2000).

One thing that seems certain, however, is that substantial demographic changes will constitute proliferating axes of urbanization across African and Asia as a powerful epicenter of global urbanization. While the youth bulge may have peaked across most of the world, the youth population will continue to grow substantially in Africa and South Asia for the coming two decades, which means a key challenge is the provision of work, particularly in cities largely centered on both informal and industrial labor markets, now increasingly overcrowded (ILO 2013; Nayar et al. 2012; Thurow 2014). We explore this imperative in greater detail in chapter 2.

Catch-22

So much of urban Asia and Africa seems caught in a catch-22. The very spatial products and policies undoing long-honed practices of inhabitation are offered as the cure for their loss. Customary land arrangements, public guarantees, forms of tenancy and land- and building-use give way to condominiums, shop–house complexes, and all-in-one sub-cities, almost always fully sold in advance of completion, at least in the Asian context. The actual mechanisms of “full occupancy” often entail complex and shady financial manoeuvres. But there clearly is a market for investments, especially on the part of a younger generation of urban residents who often are able to mobilize significant portions of the sale price up front. In Asia, the periph...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1: Paradoxes of the Urban
• 2: Precarious Now
• 3: Re-Description
• 4: Secretions
• 5: Horizons from Within the Break
• 6: Experimentations
• 7: Epilogue: A Story About Stories
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement