Shaking Up the City

Ignorance, Inequality, and the Urban Question

Tom Slater

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520972643
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie urbaine

Shaking Up the City critically examines many of the concepts and categories within mainstream urban studies that serve dubious policy agendas. Through a combination of theory and empirical evidence, Tom Slater "shakes up" mainstream urban studies in a concise and pointed fashion by turning on its head much of the prevailing wisdom in the field. To this end, he explores the themes of data-driven innovation, urban resilience, gentrification, displacement and rent control, neighborhood effects, territorial stigmatization, and ethnoracial segregation. With important contributions to ongoing debates in sociology, geography, urban planning, and public policy, this book engages closely with struggles for land rights and housing justice to offer numerous insights for scholarship and political action to guard against the spread of an urbanism rooted in vested interest.

1 Challenging the Heteronomy of Urban Research

If you’re unwilling to muster the courage to think critically, then someone will do the thinking for you, offering doublethink and doubletalk relief.

Cornel West (2008, 9)

At a time when doublethink and doubletalk relief are very widespread, this book responds in the form of a double move. It addresses the causal mechanisms behind urban inequalities, material deprivation, marginality, and social suffering in cities across several international contexts, and while doing so, it scrutinizes how knowledge (and all too often ignorance) on these issues is produced by a range of urban actors (such as intellectuals, policy officials, journalists, planners, urban designers, think tank writers, and economists writing for popular audiences). The motivation for this double move is not only the urgent problem of widening urban inequalities, but also the striking deficit of collective intellectual reflection on the social and political organization of urban research. The allure of fashionable concepts and policy buzzwords (e.g., resilient cities, regeneration, smart cities, and placemaking), and especially the worries of politicians, business leaders, university leaders, and the mainstream media, has meant that urban scholarship often fails to call into question the prefabricated problematics and imposed categories of urban policy. This has led to analytic neglect of the changing balance of state structures and institutional arrangements that shape, and in turn are shaped by, the evolution of capitalist urbanization.

Throughout this book I offer many examples of urban buzzwords in action, but for now let’s consider placemaking, which has become something of a cottage industry among architects, “sustainable” urban designers, neoclassical urban economists, policy officials, and urban planning gurus. Many of those involved display a near-evangelical belief in the physical appearance and feel of neighborhoods, parks, and streets as the principal determinants of economic and social life in them (not vice versa), and that the way to address all existing and future urban problems is via engaging local communities in hands-on placemaking (i.e., facilitating urban design and functional use from the ground up). One illustration comes from New York City and the Project for Public Spaces (PPS), founded in 1975 to mobilize the visions of celebrated urbanists Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte vis-à-vis what makes for “livable” neighborhoods and “inviting” public spaces. Building on the commercial success of its 1980s transformation of Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan, PPS has grown into a hugely influential organization working in all fifty states in the United States, with a set of values that have spread very widely on a global scale (policy makers in multiple international contexts, too numerous to list, have jumped on the placemaking bandwagon). The PPS is guided by a conviction that “a strong sense of place can influence the physical, social, emotional, and ecological health of individuals and communities everywhere” (Project for Public Spaces n.d.). Upon reading some PPS pronouncements, it is easy to see why its notion of placemaking has traveled so widely: “When people of all ages, abilities, and socio-economic backgrounds can not only access and enjoy a place, but also play a key role in its identity, creation, and maintenance, that is when we see genuine placemaking in action.”

At first glance, such a scenario seems impossible to dislike. But on closer inspection, although placemaking is usually rolled out through a notion of people-centered inclusivity, what often emerges is a process that disavows the realities of politics and power in which it is embedded (Montgomery 2016). There are uncomfortable parallels with colonialism: in any context where placemaking is planned, what if there is a place already there, one to which residents might be deeply attached and might not want transformed? What if local communities take exception to external placemaking professionals arriving and engaging them in a process they never wanted in the first place? It is well documented that placemaking can be deeply undemocratic and dismissive of resistance and can amount to a strategy of placebreaking to serve vested interests (MacLeod 2013). On a structural and institutional level, who stands to reap the financial rewards that an attractive new place might bring, and at whose expense? Placemaking normalizes, if not naturalizes, the claims of particular institutions with profit interests in urban land and real estate and reframes them as if in the urban public interest. For instance, in 2017 CBRE (the world’s largest commercial real estate services company) and Gehl Architects authored a document entitled Placemaking: Value and the Public Realm, which opened with the following: “Placemaking happens when buildings are transformed into vibrant urban spaces that offer wellbeing, pleasure and inspiration. Its success can be measured by improved lives, greater happiness and, when done successfully, an uplift in property values.”¹

Furthermore, people’s experiences of urban life are not solely determined by the appearance and vibrancy of the public spaces they use. They are determined, to a far greater extent, by people’s ability to make a life in the city. Concerns over making rent (harder when there is an “uplift in property values”), feeding your family, accessing health care, childcare, and a reliable network of support are of much more immediate importance than the appearance and vibrancy of public spaces. For policy elites, embracing and trumpeting placemaking as a panacea for all urban problems is a very convenient way to sidestep the difficulties of addressing material deprivation. Grassroots struggles and social movements tend not to march to city hall with banners demanding placemaking as an end to their problems. Their cries and demands are for much more profound changes.

This book, therefore, articulates a critical approach to urban studies that guards against the subordination of scholarly to policy agendas and weds epistemological critique with social critique, with a view to opening up alternatives and formulating research-driven ideas, as a counterpoint to mainstream, policy-driven approaches to urban research. It goes against the grain of established research orthodoxies to dissect multiple aspects of urban division, to diagnose and challenge the hegemonic economic and political order of the metropolis, and to critique the categories of urban research that serve the interests of state elites and big business. This approach is nourished by a combination of abstract theory and concrete empirical evidence from multiple sources and across multiple urban contexts to critique existing conceptual formulations—while extending and advancing what I see as more helpful ones—vis-à-vis the themes of urban “resilience,” gentrification, displacement and rent control, “neighborhood effects,” territorial stigma, and ethnoracial segregation.

In the pages that follow, I take aim at a fast-moving and expanding target: the heteronomy of urban research. At first glance this may seem like abstruse academic jargon, but it is really rather simple: it refers to the condition of scholars being constrained in asking their own questions about urbanization, instead asking questions and using categories invented, escalated, and imposed by various institutions that have vested interests in influencing what is off and on the urban agenda. These institutions range from major arms of the state to philanthropic foundations, to university research centers, to urban design consultancies, to think tanks across the political spectrum. In the next section I provide a detailed example of heteronomy in action by focusing on the explosive growth of recent interest in “urban science” prioritizing “data-driven innovation.” But for now, it is important to note that the heteronomy of urban research is not a brand new development. It was present in rounds of twentieth-century urbanization, for instance during the Fordist-Keynesian era and its subsequent mutation into post-Fordist entrepreneurialism. But why has it expanded and intensified in the twenty-first century? Given the enormous pressures on university finances (which are the outcome not just of state disinvestment in higher education but also of the warped priorities of university leaders), scholars are under greater pressure than ever before to secure substantial external research funding, and it is frequently to government funding bodies that many apply. The result is the rise of policy-driven research at the expense of research-driven policy, and with it, decision-based evidence making at the expense of evidence-based decision making. Within the field of urban studies and in public debates outside it, what has been emerging for some time now is what we might call a vested interest urbanism. This book is a critical response in the form of an analytic intervention, one that is positioned against the prevailing political wind: the steady erosion of intellectual autonomy. This seems necessary because the moment that we cannot ask our own questions about cities due to the priorities of the state (which are all too often in dialogue with the priorities of big business), what we are doing ceases to be research and becomes propaganda.

The ethical problem of heteronomy versus autonomy has a long history that predates urban studies. In moral philosophy, the problem stretches back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who saw most of his contemporary philosophers as little more than rationalizers of self-interest and spent considerable time arguing that personal autonomy is achievable “only if citizens surrender part of their status as individuals and think of their social membership as essential, not merely accidental, to who they are” (Neuhouser 2011, 478). Rousseau’s famous liberal musings on the formation of this social contract informed the writings of Immanuel Kant, who argued that possessing autonomy of the will is a necessary condition of moral agency (his overriding goal being to explain what autonomous moral reasoning would look like). He argued that in contrast to an autonomous will, a heteronomous will is one of obedience to rules of action that have been legislated externally to it, and the moral obligations it proposes cannot therefore be regarded as binding upon the person(s) being obedient. Kant presented an understanding of heteronomy as something that precluded any sustained consideration of where such obedience stems from in the first place, which was, for him, a poor foundation for ethical reasoning.

Much more helpful in thinking through the political ramifications of autonomy and heteronomy are the writings of Pierre Bourdieu in the field of cultural production. Bourdieu analyzed societies as consisting of a series of fields in which people jostle for status and control vis-à-vis the economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital at stake in the particular field. For instance, Bourdieu (1993, 1996a) described the field of cultural production (arts, music, television, film, etc.) as having autonomous and heteronomous poles. Taking the example of the arts, he explained how, as they gain distance from political, economic, and religious dictates, they become rich in symbolic capital but poor in economic capital. Producers in the field struggle among each other to accumulate symbolic capital such as prestige, with those showing a deep commitment to art for art’s sake (or “restricted production,” as Bourdieu put it) gaining the most status. Such a commitment is “founded on the obligatory recognition of the values of disinterestedness and on the denigration of the “economy” (of the ‘commercial’)” (Bourdieu 1996a, 142). He argued that this was an inversion of practices occurring in the economic field:

In the most perfectly autonomous sector of the field of cultural production, where the only audience aimed at is other producers . . . the economy of practices is based, as in a generalized game of “loser wins,” on a systematic inversion of the fundamental principles of all ordinary economies: that of business (it excludes the pursuit of profit and does not guarantee any sort of correspondence between investments and monetary gains). (Bourdieu 1993, 39)

By contrast, Bourdieu defined the heteronomous pole of the field of cultural production as one that is ruled by commercial and business interests. To Bourdieu, heteronomous arts range from the “bourgeois arts,” which sell to and gain a following among more privileged social classes, to lowbrow commercial works, or “industrial arts.” These are poorer in status than the autonomous arts but much richer in economic capital (or in the potential to accumulate it).

Bourdieu’s student and collaborator Loïc Wacquant has expanded this understanding of heteronomy as deriving from penetration by commercial interests to include a consideration of penetration by the state.² When responding to and extending the argument of a paper I wrote many years ago on the eviction of critical perspectives from gentrification research (Slater 2006), Wacquant pointed to the “growing subservience of urban research to the concerns, categories and moods of policy- and opinion-makers,” where intellectual inquiry is “guided primarily by the priorities of state managers and the worries of the mainstream media” (2008a, 200–201). He offers several examples of this, including this particularly powerful one:

In France, the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium, political tensions around postcolonial immigration and the deterioration of public housing have fueled a wave of studies and policy evaluation programmes on “neighborhood mixing,” “community-building” and crime-fighting centered on working-class neighborhoods, but studiously avoiding the socioeconomic underpinnings of urban degradation, in keeping with the design of politicians to deploy territory, ethnicity and insecurity as screens to obscure the desocialization of wage labor and its impact on the life strategies and spaces of the emerging proletariat. (201)

As I demonstrate in several chapters of this book, what Wacquant calls “the common malady of heteronomy” (201) that afflicts urban research has strengthened over the years since he penned those words. A great deal of urban scholarship has not resisted the “seductions of the prefabricated problematics of policy,” nor has it advanced what Wacquant hoped for: “research agendas sporting greater separation from the imperatives of city rulers and carrying a higher theoretical payload” (203). Instead, political and media worries and the funding bandwagons they create appear irresistible to many urban scholars, especially the institutions that employ them. The moral philosopher Christine Korsgaard contended, “When you are motivated autonomously, you act on a law that you give to yourself; when you act heteronomously, the law is imposed on you by means of a sanction” (1996, 22). If we replace law with concept, her contention applies to much contemporary thinking about cities, and intervening in this state of affairs is what, I hope, animates much of the analysis in the pages of this book.

This is not to say that the pendulum between autonomy and heteronomy has become firmly and irretrievably stuck on the latter. Critical urban studies, as a multidisciplinary field combining multiple theoretical approaches and methodologies, is very vibrant and ensures that a tug of war is underway between autonomous and heteronomous approaches. It is simply that, at the moment, the heteronomous side is pulling harder. Helga Leitner and Eric Sheppard (2013, 516) provided a helpful definition of critical approaches to the urban question as “presaged on a vigilant examination and critique of the logic and assumptions underlying pre-existing mainstream theoretical accounts of cities, narratives of urban process and urban life, and the urban policies reflecting these.” In the same article they were quick to caution against “othering the mainstream,” which they felt might “undermine the vitality of critical urban geographic knowledge production” (517). They saw the mainstream as quantitative urban scholarship in the positivist tradition of validity, reliability, replicability, verification, and falsification, the knowledge produced by which, they felt, could not be glibly dismissed as lacking in radical potential, an argument subsequently extended by Elvin Wyly (2011) in a riveting essay tellingly entitled “Positively Radical.” I have much sympathy with this argument, and rather too many scholars identifying as critical are quick to shun quantitative analysis as positivist/empiricist number crunching without delving into the details or the findings that statistical analyses produce (the majestic work of the Radical Statistics Group over four decades being a case in point).³ I see the “mainstream” as something characterized not by methodology, but rather by an atheoretical, unquestioning embrace of the structural and institutional conditions (and concepts and categories) favored by city rulers and the profiteering interests surrounding them.

Over a decade ago, in introducing a special issue of the journal CITY entitled “Cities for People, Not for Profit,” Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse, and Margit Mayer (2009, 179) offered a helpful articulation of five core concerns of a critical urban studies:

• To analyze the systemic, historically specific, intersections between capitalism and urban processes;

• To examine the changing balance of social forces, power relations, sociospatial inequalities and political-institutional arrangements that shape, and in turn are shaped by, the evolution of capitalist urbanization;

• To expose the marginalizations, exclusions, and injustices (whether of class, ethnicity, “race,” gender, sexuality, nationality, or otherwise) that are inscribed and naturalized within existing urban configurations;

• To decipher the contradictions, crisis tendencies, and lines of potential or actual conflict within contemporary cities, and on this basis;

• To demarcate and to politicize the strategically essential possibilities for more progressive, socially just, emancipatory, and sustainable formations for urban life.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, and the authors acknowledged that fact, saying that critical urban studies is not “a homogenous research field based on a rigidly orthodox or paradigmatic foundation.” However, this list of concerns does help identify a distinctively critical branch of thinking about cities that “can be usefully counterposed to ‘mainstream’ or ‘traditional’ approaches to urban questions” (179). To this I would add that it can be usefully counterposed to heteronomous approaches, which leave unquestioned and sometimes even thrive upon the structural and systemic problems that lie behind the stubborn inequalities in cities of the twenty-first century. A clear example of an emerging heteronomous approach is the recent interest in “urban science,” to which I now turn.

THE FALSE PROMISES OF “URBAN SCIENCE”

In June 2018 the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) tweeted that it had “discovered a new kind of science” when announcing the launch of “a novel sort of program”: an under...