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Part I
Comparative urbanism
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Part I.I
Arguments and observations
Introduction
The term urbanism has become quite commonplace these days, and in many ways a leitmotif for thinking about cities and urbanization across disciplines. Indeed, the term has offered a medium of conversation across multiple and adjacent disciplines interested in understanding and explaining the transformative changes in human habitats across the globe. Within the fields of planning and urban design, the term urbanism is conjoined with multiple qualifiers – more than 60, according to one inventory (see Barnett, 2011). But our hunch is that the number of various “urbanisms” is still growing. This is quite remarkable given that a few decades ago, the term was not as commonly used in the Anglo-American planning and design literature. The common usage today in the United States in particular, we believe, may have been triggered by the concept of “New Urbanism” and its subsequent popularity.
Remarkably, the scholarly definition of urbanism was first introduced by sociologist Louis Wirth (1938), who defined the concept as “a way of life,” different from the rural lifestyle common in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. Several decades later, with the spread of the postwar suburban growth, sociologist Herbert Gans (1973) claimed that suburban living represents a distinct departure from the original notion of urbanism and should also be considered a way of life. In the early 1990s, the protagonists of “New Urbanism” advanced some normative notions about the design of the built environment and an attendant lifestyle harkening back to the urban form and lifestyle of late-18th- and early-19th-century small US towns. Today, with the continuing expansion of urbanization worldwide, we might consider even “peri-urbanism” as a way of life.
The contemporary relevant literature has linked the concept of urbanism to multiple realities of our urban experience, encompassing the sensorium, form, social ecology, habitus, and identity of the city (Banerjee, forthcoming). Writers on urbanism have often seen urban design as a catalyst for change from the ground up, or as an agent of power in shaping the built environment to serve the interests of global capitalism. Consequently, urban design is viewed as squarely engaged in matters of social and environmental justice. This places significant pressure on the practitioners of urban design, and its scholarly inquiry. In the two chapters included in this section, Fran Tonkiss and Ananya Roy, accordingly, propose to redefine the charge of urban design in a comparative armature.
In her chapter, Tonkiss argues against a standardized – “one size fits all” – model of urban design remiss of the cultural, economic, historical, geographical, and social differences. Rejecting the “export model” of urban design in a globalizing world, where concepts, paradigms, and techniques are hatched in the Global North to be exported to the Global South, she emphasizes the role of endogenous design practice that translates such ideas across economies and cultures to fit local circumstances. The innovative practice and process of urban design, rather than the resulting urban form, is more significant here. She proposes five modes of innovative practices and processes of design in engaging alliteration – informality, incrementalism, improvisation, impermanence, and insurgency – and elucidates these concepts with appropriate and relevant examples. Her discussion of these concepts clearly suggests an alternative to the top-down planning and urban design that has shaped much of contemporary urbanism and the urban experience more generally.
The chapter by Roy expands the errands and challenges of urban design even farther by referring to the new debate on the global understanding of urbanism in a comparative perspective involving both theory and methodology. Resisting the current trend of globalizing notions of urban design and development based on Western, Eurocentric theories and methods, she proposes an alternative mode of interrogation based on postcolonial theories and black geographies. Instead of focusing on the cities of the Global South, Roy chooses Los Angeles as an example of displacement and dispossession of the communities of color, not unlike the “alterity” and subaltern status common in the colonial history of the Global South. In interpreting Los Angeles as a postcolonial city, she argues that the long history of occupation and expulsion in this city has led to resistance and social movements that may now offer a new vision of placemaking.
This is not the first time Los Angeles has been examined in the context of the Global South, or as a postmodern city. Journalist David Reiff (1991) has argued that the multicultural urbanism of Los Angeles makes it a candidate for being “The Capital of the Third World.” Earlier, Scott Ridley’s (1982) portrayal of a dystopic Los Angeles in his movie Blade Runner also suggested an emergent urbanism of the Global South. In the 1980s, geographers Edward Soja (1986) and Michael Dear (1998) – scholars of the then-emergent Los Angeles School – argued that the city’s polycentric, polyglot, multicultural urbanism is the new reality of a global city rejecting the earlier hegemony of the Chicago School model of urban spatial structure. In a similar vein, querying the positivist models of urban reality, Banerjee and Verma (2001) have argued that the sense of the existential reality of the “soft metropolis” can be best captured through appropriate metaphors, some of them ostensibly drawn from the Global South.
In her chapter, Roy proposes still another perspective, albeit a critical one, to capture an aspect of Los Angeles urbanism, previously neglected, in the context of a globalizing world. Here she suggests that this view of Los Angeles urbanism is relevant to urban design in three ways: to understand the racialized nature of displacement and dispossession in urban development; as an alternative perspective to the Eurocentric universalizing tendencies in contemporary urban development; and to appreciate the creative imaginations and practices of the solidarity and social movements of subaltern social groups. She implores urban designers to learn from what she sees as the “decolonial” imaginations of placemaking.
References
Banerjee, T. (forthcoming). In the Images of Development: City Design in the Global South. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Banerjee, T. and Verma, N. (2001). “Probing the Soft Metropolis: Third World Metaphors in the Los Angeles Context.” Planning Theory and Practice. 2(2): 133–148.
Barnett, J. (2011). “A Short Guide to 60 of the Newest Urbanisms.” Planning. 77(4): 19–21.
Dear, M. and Flusty, S. (1998). “The Iron Lotus: Los Angeles and Postmodern Urbanism.” The American Academy of Political and Social Science. 551: 151–163.
Gans, H. (1973). “Urbanism and Suburbanism as a Way of Life: A Re-Evaluation of Definition.” In American Urban History: An Interpretive Reader with Commentaries. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 507–521.
Reiff, D. (1991). Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Soja, E. (1986). “Taking Los Angeles Apart: Some Fragments of a Critical Human Geography.” Environmental and Planning D: Society and Space. 4(3): 255–272.
Scott, R. (1982). Blade Runner. Producers: The Ladd Company.
Wirth, L. (1938). “Urbanism as a Way of Life.” The American Journal of Sociology. 44(1): 1–24.
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1
Comparative Urbanism
Design in translation
Fran Tonkiss
Introduction
Thinking about cross-border movements in urban development and design frequently focuses on the “high end” of global urban processes – the typical forms created by the reproduction of capital across transnational space. A new international style of corporate headquarters, cultural centers, shopping malls, gated housing, and chain hotels marks the production of dispersed spaces in easily recognizable forms; whether in the premium brands of a coterie of “starchitects” or the banal gestures of the behemoths of Big Architecture. Less prominent spatial types play out around the morphology of back offices, call centers, and assembly and processing plants, where the routine service and production work of a transnational economy gets done. And at another level, the precarious infrastructures of sweatshops, workers’ camps, and waste landfills sketch out the geographies of exploitation and despoliation that are produced on the jagged edges of an international economy of “flows.” The iconic, the identikit, and the insecure are all spatial expressions of globalized urbanism. This discussion departs from such versions of homogenized, offshored, and extruded spaces to approach urban design as an art of incomplete translation. In their prevailing mode, orthodox urban schemes offer a kind of trade language for international design: limited in vocabulary, simplified in grammar, and geared to commercial exchange. These are powerful and pervasive models of spatial design and development, and their impact in shaping urban environments can hardly be understated. But it is also possible to think in different ways – and at different scales – about a transnational traffic in urban design that works through more idiomatic forms, and more minor practices.
In considering how spatial design travels between urban contexts, it is obvious enough to think about the duplication of dominant formats across disparate settings: from the common-language commercial developments seen in the serial reproduction of shopping malls, retail parks, corporate plazas, or gated residential compounds; to the signature moves of high-end international architects in museums and concert halls, stadium constructions, or airport buildings. There is nothing especially new in the replication of design styles in diverse locations, as histories of colonial architecture or of international modernism will suggest. But there is something particular about the scale, spread, and speed of contemporary design translations, enabled in various ways by digital technologies in design, the electronic outsourcing of routine design processes, the extended circulation of design imagery, and the increasingly transnational organization of the design, construction, and development industries (see McNeill, 2009; Sklair, 2017). Against such a backdrop, it can be professionally challenging to think about smaller-scale and lower-key exchanges of design ideas and idioms that are less capitalized and less high-profile, but nonetheless make urban space in inventive and persistent ways.
A critical impetus for focusing on these more muted design translations comes from a growing body of work in the field of “comparative urbanism.” The latter has emerged from postcolonial interventions calling for urban studies to work across an expanded and more diverse range of contexts; to redress a long-standing skew towards work on (and generalizations from) cities in the Global North; and to engage with the particular features, as well as the passing resemblances, of dispersed urban processes and forms. It follows that the tasks of urban comparison may have less to do with narrowly defined and tightly controlled contrasts between discrete urban cases, than with an engagement with urban connections, overlaps, and divergences open to a range of translations (see, among many others, Jacobs, 2012; McFarlane, 2010; Myers, 2014; Peck, 2015; Robinson, 2011, 2016a, 2016b; Roy, 2009b). Taking up such an approach to urban design means being sensitive to local and minor practices in specific spatial settings; to the circulation of techniques and typologies through less orthodox channels of urban exchange; and to the array of actors involved in the purposeful making of urban environments. It means being alert, moreover, to movements of design discourse and practices which interrupt the direction of urban travel from north to south, the rolling-out or trickle-down of corporate and cut-and-paste forms across transnational space.
My aim, in what follows, is to suggest several ways of thinking about urban design in this more open comparative frame that draw not on the design rhetorics of global urban development, but on the design idioms of less privileged spatial strategies. Rather than examining how iconic or airport or expat architectures come to be copied across very different urban sites in a kind of “design dumping,” I am interested in design practices which are less obvious in their physical outcomes and often involve translations from low-income to higher-income cities. Such migrations disrupt the standard logic that repeats, across a leveled-out “global” geography, object forms conceived in the design centers of the Global North. These alternative design principles have less to do with how built forms and spaces look, much less with the recognizable mark of any architectural style or corporate designer, than with the conditions of their production and use. This is to foreground design as a mode of practice rather than as primarily a question of form. In this chapter, I set out five ways for thinking about such design in translation; in terms of spatial practices that are informal, incremental, improvised, impermanent, and insurgent.
Informality
It is easy enough, within contemporary design discourse, to focus on major players, spectacular forms, and grand designs. But it is important to temper such an approach to spatial design and development with a sense of the more mundane and certainly more typical ways in which urban spaces are made and remade. The global architectural styles with which I began this discussion may take a disproportionate share of capital investment in built environments, as well as dominating mainstream cultural representations of urban design, but they account for only a limited – if powerful – field of spatial production. A very substantial share of urban form emerges from the work of nameless “designers,” unplanned development, and the everyday investments that shape informal urbanism. From the provision of urban housing to spaces of urban economic exchange to configurations of urban infrastructure: to a significant degree, basic morphologies of contemporary urban life emerge from non-expert practices of design, unregulated processes of development, and unofficial acts of planning (Roy, 2005; Roy and AlSayyad, 2004). This is well established in relation to poor-world urbanism; the necessary work of self-help spatial production that creates physical forms and meets urban needs in sites forgotten, ignored, or forsaken by the state and overlooked by mainstream markets. But urban informality is also characteristic of cities where state capacities are more developed and vigilant, capital more abundant, and planning systems more extensive.
Informality is endemic of contemporary urbanization: whether in the movement of populations, the building of physical environments, or the reproduction of urban economies, a major share of urban growth in the early 21st century is taking place outside the range of formal planning systems and the reach of government regulation. While it conventionally has been understood as an urbanism of the poor, inform...
