Mega-Urbanization in the Global South

Fast cities and new urban utopias of the postcolonial state

Ayona Datta, Abdul Shaban, Ayona Datta, Abdul Shaban

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317754725
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The global south is entering an 'Urban Age' where, for the first time in history, more people will be living in cities than in the countryside. The logics of this prediction have a dominant framing - rapid urbanization, uncontrolled migration, resource depletion, severe fuel shortages and the breakdown of law and order. We are told that we must be prepared. The solution is simple, they say. Mega-urbanization is an opportunity for economic growth and prosperity. Therefore we must build big, build new and build fast.

With contributions from an international range of established and emerging scholars drawing upon real-world examples, Mega-Urbanization in the Global South is the first to use the lens of speed to examine the postcolonial 'urban revolution'. From the mega-urbanization of Lusaka, to the production of satellite cities in Jakarta, to new cities built from scratch in Masdar, Songdo and Rajarhat, this book argues that speed is now the persistent feature of a range of utopian visions that seek to expedite the production of new cities. These 'fast cities' are the enduring images of postcolonial urbanism, which bypass actually existing urbanisms through new power-knowledge coalitions of producing, knowing and governing the city.

The book explores three main themes. Part I examines fast cities as new urban utopias which propagate the illusion that they are 'quick fix' sustainable solutions to insulate us from future crises. Part II discusses the role of the entrepreneurial state that despite its neoliberalisation is playing a key role in shaping mega-urbanization through laws, policies and brute force. Part III finally delves into how fast cities built by entrepreneurial states actually materialise at the scale of regional urbanization rather than as metropolitan growth. This book explores the contradictions between intended and unintended outcomes of fast cities and points to their fault lines between state sovereignty, capital accumulation and citizenship. It concludes with a vision and manifesto for 'slow' and decelerated urbanism.

This timely and original book presents urban scholars with the theoretical, empirical and methodological challenges of mega-urbanization in the global south, as well as highlighting new theoretical agendas and empirical analyses that these new forms of city-making bring to the fore.

1

INTRODUCTION

Fast cities in an urban age

Ayona Datta

The world is entering an ‘urban age’, it seems. We are continuously hearing doomsday predictions about the impending global urban crisis where, for the first time in the history of humankind, more people will be living in cities than in the countryside. The global south is apparently entering an urban age at a faster rate than the global north. We continuously see impressive graphs, pie charts and simulations of this impending urban age presented by ‘experts’ from global consultancies. The logics of these predictions have a dominant framing – rapid urbanization, uncontrolled migration, resource depletion, severe fuel shortages, and the breakdown of law and order. We are told that megacities such as Mumbai, Johannesburg, Jakarta and others face severe urban crises in the near future. So, we must be prepared. The solution is simple, they say. We should see urbanization as an opportunity and not as a challenge. We must build new cities to reverse the doomsday predictions. And we must build these cities fast.

The notion of ‘urban crisis’ is not new to this generation. It can be argued that western cities have faced different forms of crisis in each decade. From industrial pollution in the 19th century to urban protests in the 1960s, peak-oil shortages in the 1970s, white-flight and inner-city decline in the 1980s, terrorism since 9/11 and more recently economic austerity since the financial crash, cities have been at the centre of diverse geopolitical crises in economics, culture and society. Consequently, cities have also been at the centre of some radical political, economic and planning ‘solutions’ to these crises, which attempt to reconceptualize the relationship between cities and nature, technology, culture, and society at large. A number of city tropes (such as garden city, radiant city, sustainable city, intelligent city, eco-city and smart city) have served to discursively, visually and politically sustain the utopian idea that urban planning can provide solutions to a range of social and economic crises (Datta 2012, Caprotti 2015). Building new cities under these tropes remains one of the most popular features of modern times.

Right now, across the global south, a ‘world of new cities’ (Moser et al. 2015, 74) is being conceived and built at an unprecedented pace. China and India have been leading this ‘urban revolution’ with hundreds of new cities under construction or at blueprint stage. In China, Dongtan remains one of the most cited new ‘sustainable’ cities of current times. In India, large-scale programmes of public–private partnerships in building new cities (such as Lavasa, GIFT, Dholera, Palava, Rajarhat and so on) has already captured the aspirations of its urban population. Across South-East Asia new cities have acquired such momentum that a ‘New Cities Summit 2015’ was hosted in Jakarta to discuss how ‘seizing the urban moment’ could locate cities ‘at the heart of growth and development’ (New Cities Summit 2015). Even cities in the so-called ‘fourth world economies’ (Shatkin 2007) such as Cambodia and Vietnam are showing increased engagement with new city-making. Across the Middle-East a number of new cities under construction have already begun to emerge as prototypes of a global urban future. For example, in the UAE, Masdar is repeatedly cited as an example of a sustainable, ecologically conscious smart city of the future. King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia, Qatar Knowledge City and Khabary Future City in Qatar, and Al-Irfan in Oman are just some of the examples through which Middle-Eastern countries are claiming to enter a post-carbon age. Across Africa, a continent that is arguably a ‘new’ entrant to the Urban Age, one that has so far been characterized by ‘rogue urbanism’ (Pieterse and Simone 2013), different countries are now aligning themselves clearly with urban growth economies. Eko Atlantic in Nigeria, Hope City in Accra and Modderfontein in South Africa are some of the cities under construction that are emerging as the new face of urban Africa. These new cities are characterized by a commitment to ‘building from scratch’ (Herbert and Murray 2015) and promoting a form of ‘privatized urbanism’ and spatial restructuring in city regions.

These new cities use the rhetorics of ‘crisis of urbanization’, the ‘impending Urban Age’, ‘sustainable futures’ and several other prophesies to highlight the urgency of their need. They are represented through impressive simulated walkthroughs, interactive maps, charts and graphs. They are conceived at a scale and speed unprecedented in modern times. They are part of massive masterplanning and mega-urbanization strategies of emerging economies. They incorporate all the modern features and amenities of global lifestyles, as well as the technology of physical and virtual connectivity for their future residents. These new cities are the focus of investigation in this book.

What is ‘fast’ in these new cities of the Urban Age? Why should we pay attention to the resurgence of new city-making across the global south? How are these new cities different from the earlier modernist city-making initiatives? How are they connected to the history of postcolonial urban planning and how do they project themselves as urban futures? In short, what is to be gained by examining these new cities?

In this book, we argue that speed is now the persistent feature of new city-making as a way out of crisis in the global south. Speed continues to be a prerequisite to conceptualizing and legitimizing these cities as ‘solutions’ to the crises of urbanization, migration and climate change. Speed builds upon the rhetorics of urgency but takes it further in producing a range of visions, imageries and fantasies of time–space compression that expedite the circulation of global capital and its materialization into new cities in different regions. It is through their claims to a speed of knowing and governing that these new cities aim to bypass the seeming ‘failures’ of existing megacities unable to cope with rising crime, pollution and population. It is through the speed of a global transfer of skills, technology and expert knowledge that these new cities strive to achieve their ‘potential’ as sustainable cities of the future. And it is by constructing earlier urbanization paradigms as ‘slow’ that the new cities claim to ‘seize’ the urban moment, ‘jumpstart’ their economies and ‘leapfrog’ into sustainable urban futures. The constructed binaries of speed and inertia now dominate the legitimacy of new cities as national ‘economic priorities’ across global south countries. We call these ‘fast cities’.

The terminology of ‘fast cities’ has so far been used to refer to rapidly growing cities – in other words, economically booming cities. Such cities are seen to be characterized by innovation, entrepreneurship and growth. Their description as ‘fast’ so far refers to their expansion as centres of commerce or economy and consequently their physical expansion beyond their pre-existing boundaries. A recent report in the US (Scott 2015) labelled New York, Seattle, Dallas and so on as fast cities since these were some of the top 10 ‘capitals of entrepreneurship’. Another report from Canada (Pembina Institute nd) characterized fast cities as those with the most efficient rapid transit such as Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary and Ottawa. ‘Fast’ cities have also for some time been synonymous with ‘start-up’ businesses that lead to rapid economic and spatial growth. Fast cities are arguably the success stories of a global neoliberal urbanism.

The ‘fast cities’ we examine in this book share similar features with those above. Yet they sit uncomfortably between neoliberal and postcolonial narratives of the urban revolution. Despite the highly celebratory nature of the connections between speed, growth and urbanization made by these new cities, urban studies has so far been slow in examining the role of new city-making in the recasting of postcolonial urbanism. The repetition and diversity of new cities across emerging economies indicate a new notion of ‘regulated time, governed by rational laws, but in contact with what is least rational in human beings: the lived, the carnal, the body’ (Lefebvre 2004, 9). Fast cities are produced from the geopolitical trajectory of a ‘city-in-a-box’ (Lindsay 2011), driven by ‘fast policy’ (Peck 2002) and ‘expert’ knowledge exchange across the world. They acquire global exchange value as the tropes of new urbanism, sustainable city, eco-city or smart city circulate across continents and countries, and metamorphose into new urban forms that embody the regional interpretations of a global neoliberal urbanism. In doing so, these new cities intensify and accelerate urbanization of city regions, articulating historical, social and political capabilities of the local by ‘mutating’ (Rapoport 2014) from their universal global form. Meanwhile, these new cities could be argued to be experiments in ‘worlding’ (Roy and Ong 2011) akin to a ‘Dubaisation of Africa’ (Choplin and Franck 2010), referencing other new cities such as Masdar and Songdo in the global south in attempts to rival their economic growth stories. In this mode of ‘assemblage urbanism’ (McFarlane 2011), cities in the global south are no longer held hostage to the transfer of policy, skills and knowledge from the west. Rather, new cities induce a frenetic urbanization that attempts to break away from earlier colonial forms of urbanization and masterplanning and establish a new postcolonial identity freed from the past. Yet this referencing often encounters the gritty realities of negotiating planning laws, land acquisition and local resistance when attempts are made to materialize them. When the speed of policy mobility, skills transfer and knowledge exchange collide with the regional and national processes of building the new city, ‘speed’ often turns into ‘inertia’. Postcolonial states then attempt to bypass inertia through new power coalitions of knowing and governing the city. In doing so, new cities recast historic colonial and postcolonial social divisions into a 21st-century mould of fast urbanism.

We argue that understanding these new cities requires an analytical lens of speed, time and scale that has so far been less evident in urban and postcolonial studies. For Lefebvre (2004), any analysis of urbanization must take into consideration the cyclical and linear notion of time. This has important implications for fast cities. For a start, new cities as a solution to ‘urban crisis’ highlight the marking, measuring and spatializing of a regulated and linear time. Global rhythms of urban crises also have their own measures of time – frequency, consistency, predictions, action, outcomes. These are predicated on the relative construction of speed – of urbanization, migration and climate change. Second, we suggest that fast cities re-open postcolonial insecurities around modernity, development and poverty, to the imperatives of speed. We see fast cities as articulating new state-expert power coalitions around speed that had earlier been indistinguishable from the dominant narratives of development and modernity in postcolonial urbanism. Fast cities present a particular coming together of what Roy (2011, 307) describes as ‘speed, hysteria, mass dreams’ in postcolonial urbanism. In other words, fast cities present a re-emergence of the postcolonial state desirous of distinction, differentiation and disentanglement from the colonial burden – a reinvention through new utopian imaginings of the city. Thus although they signal new urban futures, the fast cities we examine in this book are rooted in anxieties of postcolonial subjectivity that underline the vulnerabilities of the present. In doing so they become what Grosz (2001, 49) argues is more of a measure of the ‘status and permeability of the present than they are indices of transformation or guarantees of a present-to-be’.

A challenge for global urban studies?

Most of the new cities we examine in this book are still present on the drawing board or in construction sites. Measuring their ‘success’ or ‘failure’ remains a theoretical, empirical and methodological challenge. As cities without existing economic indicators, they cannot be measured for the fulfilment of the grandiose claims of tackling economic growth or rural migration. As new cities built from scratch, they cannot be measured through the actually existing models of governance. And as cities without citizens, they cannot be studied through the ethnographies of everyday urban life that characterize the rich urban sociologies of megacities of the global south. Nevertheless, it is clear from the handful of the initial phases of these cities built so far (mainly Masdar and Songdo) that they are struggling to achieve their target population and therefore failing to uphold the elaborate mythmaking around new city-building.

Why write an entire book on new cities, when they are but only a fraction of the urban development projects in the global south? How can we examine these new cities when they are still largely present in national growth policies, on the drawing boards of planners, on the webpages of IT consultancies, in glossy reports of growth coalitions, and in the desires and aspirations of citizens? How can we study a ‘thing’ that has not yet fully materialized, been lived in? How do we imagine their contribution to the combined urban futures in the global south?

In this book, we examine fast cities as a temporal moment in the spatialization of the current global crises. Focusing on this moment does not mean a rejection of history or continuity, but rather a way of thinking through postcolonial urbanism as a mode of succession of the forces of the past by outlandish claims to utopian urban futures. Although widely diverse in their temporalities of capital, scale and space, the rise of fast cities in the global south is a barometer of urban aspirations in postcolonial contexts. While acknowledging then that there are key differences in the historical, political, social and cultural processes through which these cities are marketed, materialized and inhabited, there are also important elements of comparison between them. A comparative gesture across these cities, then, begins with challenging hierarchies and permanencies and sees each of them as a form of geopolitically relevant temporality, a modality of becoming in local/regional contexts through distinct socio-political, cultural and economic time-spaces.

We argue, first, that any study of fast cities needs to take account of the transformation in the notion of speed, time and duration across spaces, places and scales of knowledge transfer, skills generation, policy mobility, conceptualization, implementation and governance. Thus, any examination of the accelerated growth of new cities in recent years has to take into consideration the experiments with speed in regional histories. For example, Chandigarh was constructed within a span of 10 years and Brasilia was built within a span of 41 months, both with a view to accommodating rapid industrialization and rural–urban migration. More recently, in the 1980s, the speed of construction of the first tallest building in China – the Shenzhen International Trade Center – earned the town the name ‘Shenzhen speed’ (Fen et al. 2016). Its rapid economic growth served to sustain this label and reinforce the myth that building big and fast was the route to economic growth. Shenzhen was also one of the key cities that inspired the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi who modelled one of India’s ‘first’ smart cities, Gujarat Industrial and Financial-Tech (GIFT), on its image – a city whose construction is to be completed in a span of five years. Understanding how a transformation in approaches to speed, time and scale in urban development is linked to the crisis of urbanization therefore becomes key to examining fast cities.

We are interested here in time and speed as ‘the time before time, the time of the interval, the time of non-time, . . . the “fate” of space’ (Grosz 2001, 111) and by extension, the fate of postcolonial urbanism. We examine new cities as a mode of temporality that is striving continuously to establish a universal language for the future, to stand for postcolonial urbanism as a rejection of its historical connection to colonial urban planning. We understand fast cities as a form...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Mega-Urbanization in the Global South
• Routledge Studies in Urbanism and the City
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustractions
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Fast Cities in an Urban Age
• Part I Fast Cities and ‘New’ Urban Utopias
• Part II Entrepreneurial States
• Part III Mega-Urbanization and Masterplanning
• Slow: Towards a Decelerated Urbanism
• Index