Urban Theory Beyond the West

A World of Cities

Tim Edensor, Mark Jayne, Tim Edensor, Mark Jayne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136629754
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Since the late eighteenth century, academic engagement with political, economic, social, cultural and spatial changes in our cities has been dominated by theoretical frameworks crafted with reference to just a small number of cities. This book offers an important antidote to the continuing focus of urban studies on cities in 'the Global North'.

Urban Theory Beyond the West containstwenty chapters from leading scholars, raising important theoretical issues about cities throughout the world. Past and current conceptual developments are reviewed and organized into four parts: 'De-centring the City' offers critical perspectives on re-imagining urban theoretical debates through consideration of the diversity and heterogeneity of city life; 'Order/Disorder' focuses on the political, physical and everyday ways in which cities are regulated and used in ways that confound this ordering; 'Mobilities' explores the movements of people, ideas and policy in cities and between them and 'Imaginaries' investigates how urbanity is differently perceived and experienced. There are three kinds of chapters published in this volume: theories generated about urbanity 'beyond the West'; critiques, reworking or refining of 'Western' urban theory based upon conceptual reflection about cities from around the world and hybrid approaches that develop both of these perspectives.

Urban Theory Beyond the West offers a critical and accessible review of theoretical developments, providing an original and groundbreaking contribution to urban theory. It is essential reading for students and practitioners interested in urban studies, development studies and geography.

1

Introduction

Urban Theory Beyond the West

Tim Edensor and Mark Jayne

This book has two main aims: to reflect on the progress made in studying cities throughout the world; and to act as point of departure in a re-imagining of cities that takes seriously urban theory beyond ‘the West’.We respond to interdisciplinary concerns over the global disparities of academic knowledge and growing recognition by urban theorists of the need to appreciate the diversity of cities. To this end, chapters in this volume challenge core assumptions which frame urban theory and investigate the ways in which the study of cities has been dominated by parochial agendas, perspectives and assumptions. Accordingly, we contribute to broader theoretical agendas which highlight how making sense of urban life does not have to depend on pre-existing frameworks laid down by the ‘Western’ academy.

In this introduction we specifically focus on a range of exciting developments in urban theory that offer fruitful avenues towards such a project. Following Thrift (2000), who reminds us that ‘one size does not fit all’ and Robinson (2006), who insists on the imperative to look at the heterogeneity of urban practices, identities and processes, we demonstrate how a re-imaging of ‘the city’ is opening up the opportunity to contribute to broader intellectual debates that have largely bypassed urbanists. To be clear, urban theory has been slow in contributing to important advances in political, economic, social and cultural theories that have had a longer tradition of moving beyond theoretical agendas dominated by North American and European traditions. In these terms, urban theorists have tended to remain entrenched in conceptual and empirical approaches that have barely moved beyond the study of a small number of ‘Western’ cities which act as the template against which all other cities are judged.

Until very recently urban theorists have sidestepped any progressive engagement with labels such as ‘West’ and ‘non-West’ in contrast to disciplines across the social sciences which have challenged dualisms and typologies which fix particular spaces, such as ‘first, second and third worlds’, ‘developed’ and ‘developing’, ‘North’ and ‘South’, ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ and so on. With urban theory being dominated by a focus on a small number of cities mostly located in North America and Europe, imperatives to highlight the complex nature of urban life and thereby problematise these dualisms have not been forthcoming (see Chapter 5 and Chapter 18 for further critical discussion). As such, the possibility of making critical interventions into wider academic debates through championing an understanding of the increasing mixing of people, cultures and identities in most cities throughout the world has not been realized. For instance, while Dear and Leclerc (2003) highlight how the urban sprawl of Bajalta, from Southern California to Mexico, is a thoroughly postborder city, a transnational megalopolis that incorporates multiple shifting and intersecting spatialities in continual flux, a melding of ‘non-Western’ and ‘Western’ practices and processes, they fail to critically engage with the efficacy of such labels.

Urban theory has thus failed to systematically engage with such broader epistemological and ontological debates because of the persistence of situated theories that originate and reside in European and American academies – and resound through scholarly environments around the world as well. Such bias is also problematic given the salient historical context for many cities beyond ‘the West’ of colonial rule, where military, legal and governmental power held sway, ideological and cultural power was variously imposed, the urban fabric was often extensively redesigned, reorganized and divided into sections, and particular forms of development implemented and others discouraged. In Chapter 5, Chattopadhyay shows how the colonial city was a veritable laboratory in which policies of capitalist exploitation and state control were tested before being implemented, albeit usually in milder ways, in ‘Western’ cities. In addition to these extensive impacts, colonialism mobilized a series of discursive strategies through which space was claimed, contributing to a distorted geographical knowledge, the impacts of which continue to persist in contemporary imaginaries, not least in the ‘Western’ academy. For instance, Spurr (1993) highlights how colonizers variously aestheticized, classified, conceived as debased or ethereally insubstantial, idealized, naturalized and eroticized colonized urban spaces.

Disciplines such as anthropology, biology, history and geography were particularly complicit in proliferating these ways of understanding and classifying the ‘other’ in contrast to European identity. Studies of colonized spaces undertaken by ‘Western’ scholars tended to offer little or no mediation with local theorists.The lack of dialogue with colonized intellectuals assumed a universalist, scientific, rational expertise and a one-way flow of information built an imposing edifice of learning that added power and allure to European colonial society. Crucially, this colonial echo is still manifest in the contemporary marginalization of ‘non-Western scholars’ and their theoretical work in academic institutions, journals and textbooks. For example, Robinson (2003: 277) addresses the ways in which colonial approaches underpin persistent asymmetrical relationships across international scholarship, where ‘Western’ theorists ignore ‘non-Western’ thought but scholars throughout the world are expected to frame their work within ‘the authorized Western canonical literature’. She claims that a ‘very parochial scholarship has paraded the world in the clothes of universalism for some time’ (ibid.: 275) and that this parochialism is expressed in urban theory through the imbalance between conceptions of the Western metropolis, implicitly construed as more developed, complex, dynamic and mature, in contradistinction to the ‘non-Western’ city.

Such ideological colonial rhetoric foregrounds a process through which ‘advanced’ European notions of urban progress can banish disorder, and produce a vibrant economic and civic life that will ultimately mirror the cities of the metropole. Echoing these colonial assertions of urban advancement, recent studies of cities beyond ‘the West’ have disproportionately focused on the notion that progress can be measured by universal stages of urban development, a discourse that reinstalls notions of irreducible difference by identifying those cities that are deemed to be at an ‘earlier’ stage. Indeed, Robinson (2006: 5) suggests that many previous studies of cities beyond ‘the West’ were ‘doomed to be shipwrecked by developmentalism’, citing Gugler (2004) for his focus on a narrow range of particular valuations of world city-ness. Not only has urban theory been overly focused on ‘the West’ but development studies have also focused on ‘non-Western’ cities by categorizing them as ‘problems’ in relation to ‘Western’ understandings of urban life. This ‘developmentalism’ limits the ways in which city life is imagined and represented, and as Robinson (2006: 4) remarks ‘without a strong sense of the creativity of cities … the potential for imagining city futures is truncated’. She (2002: 543) further argues that ‘the explicit naming of the region or cities covered highlights the implicit universalist assumptions underpinning the often unremarkable localness of much writing on Western cities’. As Stenning and Hörschelmann (2008) emphasize, these assumptions also extend across European spaces regarded as less global or developed, such as post-socialist spaces, discussed in greater theoretical detail in a Czech and Slovak context by Ferenfuhová in this volume.

In a similar vein, Agrawal (2002) points to the tendency of scientistic codification, abstraction and separation of knowledge from its complex practical contexts as part of the way in which power structures knowledge production and consumption. Accordingly, Robinson (2003) advocates the need to de-colonize imaginations of city-ness in order to break free of the categorizing tendencies which dominate urban theory, suggesting that an emphasis on epochal or archetypal global cities has led to a dominant interest in the structural positions of cities (also see Bell and Jayne, 2009). A consequence of such ‘measuring’ has been that the distinctive ways in which actors and institutions are active agents in the making of cities have been ignored. Similarly, Panelli (2008) points to how geography is a ‘modern’ scholarly discipline that has historically contributed to Cartesian-based scientific knowledge and colonial politics, perpetuating the hegemony of Western academic knowledge through the sketching out of key fields and themes. The distortions of geographical focus continues to shape the scope of enquiry so that a ‘modern-day parochialism shape[s] its research agenda’ (Tolia Kelly, 2009: 2). As Dowling (2008) has indicated, the shaping and constraining of research are contextualized by the Western academy’s own place within a neoliberal global economy: it is itself politically governed. Panelli (2008: 802) also points to ‘the socially unequal peopling of geography departments, societies and publishing arenas’ and the complicity of the university in constraining the topics studied, grants awarded, and journals published in reproducing marginality in the social sciences.

The persistence of such universalist ontologies and epistemologies is discussed by Raewyn Connell in her book, Southern Theory. Connell focuses on how theories of highly influential figures such as Coleman, Giddens and Bourdieu are replete with over-general assumptions which highlight their locatedness within the Western sociological theoretical tradition despite their claims to universality. For instance, Coleman claims that individuals purposively and continuously act to pursue their own interests across social realms, very much like idealized neo-liberal subjects, Giddens conceives of an irresistible and pervasive modernity without considering the diverse forms this modernity takes, and Bourdieu entirely ignores the influence of the colonial conflicts in Algeria on the Kabyle at the very time he was studying and utilizing them as the basis from which to create a ‘universally applicable toolkit’ (Connell, 2007: 44). Connell also identifies a key failing of what she terms ‘Northern theory’ in making claims to universality despite its specific geographical, historical and cultural origins. Such approaches either marginalize or subsume ‘non-Western ideas’, codifying and contextualizing them from a ‘Western’ standpoint, but more typically, they are ignored entirely, as if the ‘non-Western’ space being theorized is blank, awaiting ‘Western’ unmediated interpretation. Lacking reflexivity, these conceptions are unable to assess the specific conditions out of which they emerge.

Such critique constitutes ‘a diverse range of responses to different colonialisms that have been differently experienced, encountered and dealt with in different times and places’ and a common motive has been to question the continued salience of colonial knowledge (Nash, 2004: 115). Postcolonial geographical theorists have thus identified the historical effects of colonial forms of power and knowledge of space and place and discuss how this continues to be re-imagined. For example, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) questions the uncritically challenged tenets of ‘Western’ theory, calling for European scholarly knowledge to be ‘provincialized’ so that its situated emergence out of specific cultural, geographical and political contexts can be recognized in order to challenge universalism and provide space for theories that originate from around the world.

Critical scholars have thus responded to the distorted ways in which ‘non-Western’ cities have been portrayed in metropolitan accounts. In analysing Lagos, Thomas Hecker contends that ‘Western’ social science has focused on ‘mechanistic accounts of spatial disorder, de-beautification, organized violence and crime, inter-ethnic strife, civil disorder, overcrowding, flooding, air and noise pollution, unemployment, widespread poverty, traffic chaos and risk-bearing sexual practices’ (Ahonsi, cited in Hecker, 2010: 258). Such doom-ridden representation falsely suggests that Lagos is on the precipice of a total meltdown. Similarly, for Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall (2004: 348), African cities all too often end up epitomizing the ‘intractable, the mute, the abject, or the other-worldly’ in scholarship excessively dominated by functionalist, neoliberal and Marxist approaches; or in contrast where Africa serves as a venue for specialists on folklore, tribal patterns and witchcraft.

Such unreflexive generalizations have not only impacted on the study of cities ‘beyond the West’ but have curtailed the exploration of urban spaces and places beyond city centres, and marginalized the study of small cities. For example, Bell and Jayne (2006, 2009) point to the woeful neglect of small cities by urban theorists who, in seeking to conceptualize broad agendas and develop generalizable models – relating to epochal urbanism and an urban hierarchy – obscure as much as they illuminate. Indeed, given that the urban world is not made up of a handful of global metropolises but characterized by heterogeneity, research into small cities challenges an urban studies orthodoxy that labels them as of ‘lesser’ significance (Bell and Jayne, 2006; Jayne et al., 2011). And the marginalization of cities beyond ‘the West’ is accompanied by a host of other distortions in urban research and theorization.

In this context, Nigel Thrift (2000) identifies four persistent myths about cities, two of which are relevant here. First, Thrift argues against the idea that cities are becoming globally homogeneous, for the actual diversity of the distribution of supposedly serial, homogeneous sites such as shopping malls and office blocks is more uneven than commonly asserted and in any case, the historical and cultural context into which apparently similar buildings and institutions are placed informs their adoption. Second, he draws attention to long-standing myths of urban exceptionalism. For example, Canclini (2008) highlights how within academic and popular discourse, certain cities have been celebrated and others pathologized. Berlin and Barcelona are identified as the epitome of ‘urban planning innovation’ whereas Mexico City is emblematic of uncontainable, polluted, unmanageable ‘monstrosity’. Similarly, Paris is held to symbolize early modernity per se, New York is seen as the apex of urban high modernity, and Los Angeles is commonly cited as the postmodern city. As chapters throughout this book show nonetheless, there are numerous forms of urban modernity, yet the epistemic privilege bestowed on particular cities is a particularly unhelpful impediment to exploring the distinctive qualities of cities.

Challenging Western-Centric Urban Theory

In thinking about how urban geographies might be reconfigured, Robinson (2003) echoes Chakrabarty (2000) in citing the need for scholars to acknowledge their own cultural and academic situatedness, and advises that ‘Western’ academic publishing should be more accessible to scholars around the world in order to counter what she calls the ‘knowledge production complex’. She further contends that by adopting richer cosmopolitan spatial imaginations and ignoring categorization, urban hierarchies and developmentalism, a more inclusive understanding of the diversity of ‘ordinary cities’ and a broader range of themes and topics will emerge to extend our understanding of cities that is ‘not limited to or fixated by the processes and places of the powerful’ (Robinson, 2006: 90).

Robinson (2005: 709) thus champions the development of cosmopolitan theoretical perspectives through comparative urban research, substantively absent in urban theory since the 1970s, ensuring that ‘there has been very little reflection on exactly how we go about speaking and theorizing across the very evident differences and similarities amongst cities’. Fortunately, a burgeoning interest in reinvigorating comparative urban research has recently emerged. For example, Nijman (2007a: 5) argues that there ought to be ‘no single comparative method but rather a plurality of comparative approaches; it is equally clear that there are no universal or permanently fixed categories’. Similarly, Dear (2005: 251) suggests that ‘since all ways of seeing are necessarily contingent and provisional, the best theoretical and applied urban geography will arise from a multiplicity of perspectives’ which also includes a focus on cities ‘in relation to their history and their networks’ (Legg and McFarlane, 2008: 6–8).

Working towards such goals and in order to adopt comparative approaches that provides a method of ‘fine-tuning a series of quantitative and qualitative comparative techniques’, Kevin Ward (2008: 406) outlines a ‘relational comparative’ approach to understanding cities which stresses interconnected trajectories and identifies:

how different cities are implicated in each other’s past, present and future which moves us away from searching for similarities and differences between two mutually exclusive contexts and instead towards relational comparisons that uses different cities to pose questions of one another

While we elaborate on the relational dimensions of this cosmopolitan approach later in this chapter is important here to note Ward’s (2010) argument that a relational comparative approach should theorize cities as dynamic aggregations of social relations and interactions that are often entangled with processes in other places at varying scales whilst recognizing grounded, local dynamics. In Chapter 8 Dennis Rodgers provides a fine-grained study of the highly distinctive national political factors that continue to impact on the evolution of Managua, Nicaragua, whilst suggesting how local processes and practices resonate with broader globalizing urban change, and in Chapter 7, Nora Libertun de Duren shows how the development of parks in Buenos Aries and New York was influenced by European urban design but also the imperative to draw urban and rural elites into the project of nation building.

Exemplifying such entanglements, and making theoretical, political and policy connections is Cindy Katz’s (2004) examination of processes of development and global change through the perspective of children’s lives in two seemingly disparate places: New York City and a village in northern Sudan in the 1980s and 1990s. Katz’s Sudanese study shows how a large, state-sponsored agricultural programme trained children for an agrarian life centred on the family, a life that was quickly becoming obsolete. She draws comparisons with working-class families in New York City, noting the effects on children of a constantly changing capitalist environment with the decline of manufacturing and the increase in knowledgebased jobs, in which young people lacking skills and education faced bleak employment prospects.

Taking a different approach to considering how ‘Western’ urban theoretical orthodoxies might be contested and supplemented, Raewyn Connell (2007) draws attention to how four theoretical bodies of literature can contribute to a more dialogic, complex understanding of social theory. She refers to the vigorous debates amongst African intellectuals about the values of reinterpreting forms of folk knowledge as a basis for a distinctive African sociology. Connell also explores critical Quranic arguments of Iranian Islamic intellectuals in response to the baleful influences of (neo)colonialism, Westernized elites and conservative religious authorities. She also points to the development of innovative economic concepts, dependency theories, feminist approaches and critical cultural studies from Latin America. And finally, she describes how Indian scholars emphasize the lingering entanglements between colonizers and colonized in contemporary culture. In particular Connell cites the deconstruction of authoritative histories by the subaltern studies group, the forensic insights of Veena Das into the production of powerful, official forms of knowledge, and the critiques of Ashish Nandy that focus on the acquisition of cultural distinction by (over)reacting to colonialist hyper-masculinity and exaggerating religious identity, in his investigation of the harmful effects that colonialism continues to perpetrate on local identities and cultures.

Other geographical accounts also provide valuable ways of understanding the structuring of cities that cannot be addressed by Western dominated theories. For instance, Singh describes how the sacred symbol of mandala, which integrates the cosmos and human, has been superimposed upon the urban form of Varanasi. The main pilgrimage centres and routes in and through the city are complexly woven into diverse cosmological narratives and meanings by the spatial practices of the visiting pilgrims and enacted through their ritual passage, constituting what he terms a ‘faithscape’ that is inscribed ...