Cities

Unauthorized Resistances and Uncertain Sovereignty in the Urban World

Raymond Joshua Scannell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317262466
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Social Sciences

In Cities, Raymond Joshua Scannell examines how dramatic changes in the global economy and technology during the latter half of the twentieth century have radically restructured the city as a lived environment. Beginning with the impacts of globalisation on national and regional economies across the planet, Scannell investigates the rapidly changing and amorphous urban environments in which most people live. Cities traces how the actions of urban dwellers carving out lives for themselves are radically transforming paradigms of urban management and are overturning traditional assumptions about what constitutes urban rule and revolt. This exciting book insists on a new vocabulary for human settlements, one that looks centrally at the sort of behaviour that is often relegated figuratively and literally to the urban margins.

CHAPTER 1

THE SOCIAL CHAOTIC

There is perhaps an unwritten rule among Western observers of the so-called third world that, when discussing slums, one must define them by three characteristics: their filth, their overcrowding, and their youth. Put another way, journalists and academics who descend from places of comfort to document the supposedly Dickensian misery of those billions at the global bottom all too typically define their subjects by lack. The amenities that global elites have come to expect (such as running water, trash collection, electricity, and formal schools) are most obviously absent from slums and therefore most frequently noted. The ubiquity of the commentary, in turn, leads to slums being formally defined along this same conception.

There are a number of valid critiques of this form of commentary, which we could plausibly refer to as “epicurean urbanism.” The conceits of the observers are problematic, and their presentation of the “natives” they are observing often presents as academic imperialism. This critique is absolutely valid. That does not necessarily mean, however, that these epicureans have nothing useful to say. The amenities that epicureans most frequently find wanting are often those that communities desire and organize to obtain. It is also not wrong to point out the inherent injustice of poor communities being denied basic services available to middle classes and elites. Indeed, it is precisely this injustice that points to an axial (basic, grounding) conundrum of the globalized world. At no time in human history has the disparity of human experience between rich and poor been so pronounced as it is today, in late capitalism.¹ The honest history of neoliberal globalization has been one of unfathomable wealth accumulation on the part of the transnational elite occurring side by side with the collapse of living conditions and resulting hardship that most of humanity must daily endure.

Let us paint a picture: The ultrarich now have the capacity to charter private jets, which casually float by vast landscapes of poverty and hardship, in order to reach prime antipodal vacation spots, which so often sit adjacent to what many in the West think of as little more than concrete hells. Of course, for the vacationer, it is best not to think about it. Much better to relax and enjoy that next mai tai.

Increasingly, communities are also swallowed by expanding cities in which they had no intention of living. That urban agglomeration can exact a horrible human cost. Jeremy Seabrook’s In the Cities of the South focuses on people who came to the city not entirely of their own will but because of push factors such as poverty and drought or because they were swallowed by a city that expanded to encompass their community. His story of Fatimah, the impoverished former fisherman’s wife whose livelihood was squashed by the late-twentieth-century expansion of the Malaysian colonial city of Georgetown, is emblematic of the latter. After the village in which she and her husband lived was swallowed up by the asphaltization of the island, the Malaysian government moved her from her familial home to a concrete-block house a mere fifteen meters away, but in the midst of what had become, in her eyes, an urban wasteland. Her husband became heavily depressed and committed suicide, and her children got involved in economically informal and juridically illegal activity. They found themselves on the wrong side of the law and were arrested, leaving Fatimah alone. The coup de grâce was that the government moved the family into that crude concrete apartment and bulldozed their ancestral village in order to transform the beachfront into a tourist resort.²

Fatimah’s tale could be viewed simply as another horror story of the type deployed by those opponents of neoliberal globalization who seek to ground their arguments in appeals to what they hope to be commonly held ethical mores. However, it is also indicative of wider trends. The world is inhabited by people swallowed by cities. Rural migrants, lured by the often false promises of money and success, arrive in the city only to be ensnared in or sometimes enslaved by it. Others, like Fatimah, find themselves one day surrounded by a city in which they did not intend to live. Still others are born in the city and will die there, spending their lives doing whatever necessary to get by, in a place with too many people and not enough toilets.

It is tempting to look at the poor conditions in which so many people live and try to find a historical correlate. Many liberally minded urban observers, such as Mike Davis, Robert Neuwirth, and the United Nations-Habitat program, refer to Victorian England as the correlate to the apparent contemporary involution of cities across the world. The unstated assumption, of course, is that just as Liverpool transformed from a city we understand only through Dickensian descriptions of misery, plague, and death into a modern, regulated city with certain generally commensurate living standards, a poor Angolan city like Luanda can do the same. This position, while compelling at first glance, does not hold. Set aside for a moment the problematic implication that the so-called march of progress has made life a picnic for the working and impoverished classes in the first world. Consider, instead, the deeper reality that this march, which we call development, is a paper tiger. The conditions in which most urban dwellers must live are no accident, no hiccup on the path toward modernity.

Instead of being the symptoms of a miserable but inevitable stage of capitalist development, living conditions in these new, neoliberal urban spaces are born of an entirely different beast. Beyond the strictly economic transformations it has catalyzed, neoliberalism has eroded the sorts of social-bonding mechanisms upon which modern capitalist societies have particularly relied in order to function. As a consequence, the stability of communities and identities has been increasingly compromised, with consequences not only for those who live in the world’s poorest neighborhoods but for the global capitalist system itself. Thus, even in cities where capital investment is high and economies are growing—in other words, where there should be “positive economic development”—the pressures of the neoliberal metropolis make the formation of durable, manipulable social bonds precarious in the best of times and impossible in the worst, with sometimes disastrous and very often unsought consequences.

NAIROBI AND THE FALSE PROPHET OF PROGRESS

In December 2007, Kenya gave the lie to the capitalist development argument. High-minded publications such as The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, and many others had depicted Kenya in the first decade of the 2000s as a model of progress for the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. Its major cities, Nairobi and Kisumu, had substantial middle classes and its government was reportedly stable. Indeed, by most macroeconomic indicators, life there was on the up-and-up, and people could thank the free market for nearly all of it.

Yet, Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times reported on Monday, December 31, 2007, that “it took all of about 15 minutes on Sunday, after Kenya’s president was declared the winner of a deeply controversial election, for the country to explode.” Moments after the reigning president was declared the victor in the most hotly contested elections in Kenya’s short democratic history, Nairobi’s shantytown of Kibera (which in the wake of Robert Neuwirth’s Shadow Cities had gained some international notoriety) poured out of its ill-defined borders and gripped the metropolis in a wave of existential violence that did not subside for months. Countrywide casualty estimates counted over 1,000 dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. The circumstances surrounding the deaths often indicated a superabundance of rage.³

The eruption came as a shock to many in the established news media who had bought and propagated the idea that Kenya was the golden child of African countries. Reporters and editors from the Washington Post and New York Times could not understand why a country with economic growth rates of 6 percent and a seemingly “stable” democracy since the peaceful transition of power in 2002 could so irresponsibly throw it all away over something as routine as a contested election. The Economist noted that Kenya heretofore had been considered a beacon of liberal capitalism in Africa. England’s Financial Times, in a January 4 article by Kate Burgess and William Wallace titled “African Violence Reminds Investors of Continent’s Risks,” focused on the economic fallout from the disruptions and expressed surprise at the violence, noting that in recent years “investors have been inspired by the perception that democracy is taking root as the continent is enjoying unprecedented economic growth.” Notably, a Korean press, far removed from the conflict, mentioned it to explain why vacation flights to Nairobi had been cancelled.

Yet, those outlets that had paid close attention were not surprised. Africa News and the London Times were not taken off guard, as they had been closely covering the politically motivated violence and programmatic stoking of tribal enmity that had plagued the country in the lead-up to the elections. The Guardian was simultaneously unsurprised by the fact of the violence and horrified by its scope and scale.

Almost every newspaper discussed the rioting only through the lens of efforts underway to stop the mayhem. In so doing, they portrayed the commonness of street violence as though it were utterly aberrant to the quotidian experiences of the residents of Kenya’s cities. Yet this is not necessarily the case.

When Robert Neuwirth lived in Kibera in 2002, he did not enjoy himself.⁴ In contrast to his positive assessment of Rio de Janeiro’s Rocinha neigh-borhood,⁵ Kibera struck him as a place where life consisted of a varying assemblage of miseries, large and small. He noted that its residents used the phrase “push the week”⁶ for collard greens because they were sufficiently cheap that one might be able to eat enough to survive until the next time one could afford to buy food. The daily experience of deprivation that he saw stood in obvious contradiction to the internationally heralded economic progress that defined Kenya in the aughts.

The international press’s representation of the supposedly stable government as the tragic victim at the center of the recent riots conflicted with the reality of people’s lives. Note the story of Michael Obera, a civil clerk for the Nairobi city council, a presumably decent job, whose irregular paycheck was not enough to pay rent in any neighborhood outside the shantytown. Indeed, to toil in the civil service was not much more rewarding than to be a market hauler.⁷

A corollary to the poverty, Neuwirth notes, is a present fear of violence:

Kibera disappears in the dark because night is feeding time for thugs. Almost everyone in Kibera has had a run-in with them. Some simply snatch and run, then skillfully flee down the narrow alleys and disappear into the dark. They melt into the mud-lined distance almost before you realize that you have been robbed. Others wait until you’ve left your home so they can hammer a hole in your wall and remove everything you own. Still others—the most dangerous of the crew—carry spearlike knives called pangas. They will cut you to get what you have, and will cut you more if you don’t have enough. Some parts of Kibera and the other mud hut areas of town are so unsafe that you cannot walk from your hut to the latrine at night for fear of being mugged. So you either hold it until morning, or you use what Kenyans artfully but uncomfortably call “flying toilets.”⁸

There are a number of problems that Neuwirth’s florid language poses, and we cannot take for granted the sensationalism of his prose. Having said that, the reality of the commonness of the possibility of violence—that is to say, the way that such circumstances can weave their way into consciousness and sociality and take on a reality of their own that is a part of, but not wholly contingent on, materiality—is powerfully evident. In light of this, it is interesting that after the explosion of electoral violence, crime in the slum received special scrutiny in the press, which came to the realization that, for years, armed gangs had had de facto rule over various shanty neighborhoods, providing “security” to their residents in the absence of the state. As in other communities throughout the world, the governing void left by the municipal authority of Nairobi has been filled by groups of people who have carved out their own territories, which they run based not on laws laid down in a constitution or inherited from former European overlords but on regulations of their own creation.⁹

The obvious question, of course, is, Where is the state? If crime and violence are so rampant and widespread, why is there not an effort to quell it—or at least to maintain some discipline? Part of the answer is that the political structure itself has provided the glue that holds together the entire apparatus of misery.

As is true of many informal settlements around the planet, the majority of shantytowns in Nairobi occupy public land. As a consequence, the politicians and bureaucrats that run the municipal administration can double as illicit landlords, accepting payoffs from tribal elders or community leaders in return for allowing “temporary” illegal housing. This arrangement permits the poor a rudimentary living space but also prevents material improvements, institutes fetid conditions as a fact of existence, and generally renders life precarious. Nonrecognition of residents’ legal status and regular mass evictions also hamper the development of a sense of ownership and place.¹⁰ One can imagine the pent-up rage among those forced to live in such locales. Considering these difficult conditions, it is little wonder that in the wake of a bloody campaign for office, the outcome of which was contested and unclear but nevertheless promised that conditions would not improve, Kibera erupted, extending itself outward, leveling and lateralizing the “gateway to Africa.”

In places like Nairobi, the notion that underpins so much of the discourse around globalization and development stops making sense. As we have discussed, the West and particularly, but by no means exclusively, those institutions that champion neoliberal globalization tend to view the projects of capitalism and modernity as benign and ordering. Capitalism, the argument generally goes, leads nations that suffer out of their suffering and leads the oppressed toward freedom. It imposes, after some initial growing pains, order, rationality, and the joys of modernity on societies that lack it. It is a boon and the engine of human progress. Of course, the idea that the world as it stands is merely in a state of disequilibrium, suffering through growing pains on the march toward a stable and happy future, is not new. This attitude is the false promise of modernity itself, of the West, and of much social science. Yet, this problematic discourse makes several false assumptions about the world and how human communities operate, which we shall explore in the coming pages.

The reality, in the early years of the twenty-first century, is that Nairobi is the norm, not the exception. Growing unrest and chaos can be seen in cities throughout the world to varying degrees and in various ways. This is so because, rather than being in an unfortunate “state” of disequilibrium, capital by its nature produces disequilibrium. We can go so far as to say that capitalism can only function in states of intense chaos. It rides operational chaos and produces it, becoming its own cause and effect. The consequences of this are socially apparent in cities everywhere, even as the forms into which they coalesce are radically distinct. This book intends to suture together into a noticeable pattern the seemingly disparate instances across the planet. Global capitalism, as we have understood it, is eating itself and producing itself anew in difficult, metastable fashions.

PROTOCAPITALISM, CAPITALISM,
AND THE SOCIAL BOND

To speak as broadly as possible, our time is one of capitalism unleashed—and unbound. If we are to explore the driving forces of societies operating in today’s globalized capitalist system, it is important to lay out some of the theory that will underpin the analysis. A few of the most famous concepts formulated to help understand the contemporary forms of global capitalism are

• The liquid modern: Over the course of several works, Zygmunt Bauman has argued that neoliberal globalization has brought about a lique-faction of the social and political structures that, as recently as fifty years ago, organized the world. The retreat of the state from capital flows and resource management has forced the world’s inhabitants to find “local solutions for global problems.” He sees this as a prime causal factor in such horrors as genocides and uncontrollable violence in what he refers to as the “rhizomatic spaces of the world.”

• The second modern: German sociologist Ulrich Beck began arguing in the first decade of the twenty-first century that the social structures that once functioned as social risk management (institutions such as religion and marriage) have effectively lost much of their former cachet. Instead of increasing social stability, such institutions have become part of the problem. The answer, he argues, is not a reassertion of the old structures of modernity on the population but instead a realization that national solutions cannot be found for cosmopolitan problems.

• The postmodern: The catchall term the postmodern started coming into frequent use first in cultural and art studies in the 1960s, then later in philosophy and the social sciences. Whereas modernity was associated with the Industrial Revolution and the Progressive Era, postmodernity was associated with a dramatic shift in the structures that governed thought and life in the second half of the twentieth century. One of the first philosophers to announce the term, Jean-François Lyotard argues in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge that the so-called metanarratives of the Enlightenment (e.g., the “march of history”) are useless. The assault on such metanarratives and accepted notions of Enlightenment thinking would be a hallmark of postmodern thought. This book discusses in greater depth many postmodern concepts.

• The hyperreal: Along with Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard is one of the philosophers most closely associated with postmodernity. In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard advances the concept of hyper reality. According to him, society has ceased to pattern itself on anything that is demonstrably real. Instead, it employs a “generation by models of a real without origin or ter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: The Social Chaotic
• Chapter 2: The Urban Crisis and Mutation
• Chapter 3: Invisible Resistance, Survival Tactics
• Chapter 4: The Echo Chamber: Simulations, Simulacra, and Materiality of the Urban World
• Chapter 5: Beginning Again
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index