Planning and the Multi-local Urban Experience

The Power of Lifescapes

Kimmo Lapintie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367644239
• eBook ISBN: 9781000572346
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Business

The starting point of this book is the observation that there is a discrepancy between the lived reality of human beings and the fabricated, planned, and governed 'reality' of the state apparatus at both the local and national level.

The book posits multi-locality as an emerging spatial configuration. The author draws from various theoretical sources, such as Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of state or royal science, the Nietzschean critique of idealism, Hägerstrnad's time-geography, Hintikka's theory of modalities, Lefebvre's urban society, Castel's network society, Foucault's concept of heterotopia, and Bhaskar's and Sartre's theories of presence and absence. He also discusses the implications of Faludi's post-territorialist critique of planning and governance, and of the failure to operationalise the concept quantitively, basing his arguments in the lived experiences of multi-locals as well.

The novelty of the book is how it analyses multi-locality from such a wide theoretical perspective: what is the nature and meaning of the different multiple and coexistent places for people, and how is this spatial transformation related to their mobility, everyday practices, and work. How does the presence and absence of places form their identity and their citizenship? He also addresses the inconsistency between multi-locality and traditional statistics and the planning and governance practices based on the assumption of unilocality and discusses the implications of this incongruity.

The book will be of interest to scholars in urban studies and planning theory, as well as practitioners developing more adequate practices replacing outdated ones.

1IntroductionRevealing the paradox

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003124443-1

The pandemic of 2020–22 did not only make life difficult but was also an interesting ‘reality check’ of our current ways of conceptualizing the city, mobility, and urbanization. Almost overnight, the dominant narrative of urbanization was turned upside down—or, to be more exact, it revealed itself as a narrative. Suddenly, all of the features that were part of the success story of cities—size, density, diversity, connectedness—also became part of their vulnerability. The compact city became the contagious city, and the Utopian urbanism faced a pandemic dystopia. It is actually interesting that such a Utopian narrative could develop in the contemporary world, which has rather been characterized by dystopian stories, such as nuclear war or climate change.

Consider the title of one of the most famous books of neo-liberal urbanism, Edward Glaeser’s ‘Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier’ (Glaeser, 2011). It does not only sound rather naïve in the light of recent events but also shows the main features of the urban narrative. But if the city has triumphed, who was the enemy? The countryside? Historically, this could make some sense: the bourgeois city did indeed triumph over the feudal system of large estates in the countryside. But more recently? Hasn’t the countryside been the weaker party ever since the industrial revolution? But perhaps the enemy is the nation state? There has indeed been a lot of pre-pandemic talk of ‘hollowing out’ or even ‘dismantling’ of the nation state, also by scholars of urban studies (Holliday, 2002).

For local politicians, the idea is alluring. For instance, in 2018 the Mayor of Helsinki declared, in a glossy leaflet, that ‘the city is the new state’. It turned out to be a premature declaration of victory. Clearly, it was the nation state that could adopt such hard measures as closing the borders or declaring curfews. The nation states still have the monopoly of legitimate use of force, and they are also ready to use it: the police and the armed forces enforced the lockdowns all over the world. This is something that cities could not have done, in spite of their image as engines of local and global economies.

Nevertheless, if we try to understand the ‘triumph’ as part of the urban narrative, we need to find an enemy. There needs to be fighting and hardships before the victory can be declared. The main character is usually sent on a journey and comes out as a different person after a series of difficulties and dangers. Correspondingly, the early industrial city with its unhealthy environment and social injustice, the problems famously described by Engels in his 1844 book on the Condition of the Working Class in England (Engels, 2005), can be seen as the enemy—in fact many popular stories do describe industrialization and the exploitation of both people and the environment as such an enemy. The triumph of the city would in that case mean solving these problems with better sanitation, better urban design, and the welfare state, since the socialist Utopias promoted by Engels have been out of fashion for some time. Some of these are also discussed by Glaeser, particularly clean water, but good urban design and strong welfare state are excluded from his Utopia. I shall return to his arguments later.

How could the urban narrative get such a dominant position in urban planning and politics, at the same time as the equally strong dystopian narrative of climate change prevailed? It was possible by arguing that the compact city is also an ecological city: shorter distances mean more pedestrians and cyclists, more public transport, and less car use. Less floor space per person means decreased CO₂ emissions from heating. The compact city is thus a win-win, a silver bullet, offering both economic growth through agglomeration effects and less CO₂ emissions and car-dependence. Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy became famous for their comparison of cities around the world, arguing that dense cities are less dependent on private cars and therefore more sustainable (Newman & Kenworthy, 1989). The argument was selective, however, since most of the other elements of sustainability were disregarded, such as higher consumption levels in cities, large peri-urban settlements around the compact and dense urban cores, and global flows of people, goods, and materials between cities.

Despite this, the urban narrative is persuasive for planners and politicians alike, and it is possible to build political coalitions around such a vision. As the planners of the city of Helsinki described it in their ‘Vision 2050’ from 2013:

The theme pertaining to urbanism and urban culture depicts Helsinki in 2050 as a markedly more dense, ecological and vibrant metropolis. According to the attractive living theme, Helsinki is a socially balanced, dense and functionally versatile city, in which homes, workplaces, schools and services are close to one another and can be accessed easily. All everyday services are within walking or bicycling distance.

(Helsinki City Plan, 2013, p. 5)

The keyword is, thus, density and its positive effects on urban life. The dystopian narrative of climate change is no counter-narrative, since the problem seems to be solved by compaction, even though it is a very slow policy option considering the urgency of mitigating climate change. But the pandemic narrative is entirely different: it hit at the heart of urbanization, and it did it very fast. Most people around the world faced its effects in a couple of months, which were not only health-related but also economic and social. It is, thus, a genuine counter-narrative, and as such it also revealed the urban narrative for what it is: a story and a Utopia.

However, this is not how urbanization and its problems are usually described. Many scholars within and around urban studies do not feel comfortable with concepts like narrative, which have their origin in literary theory and cultural studies. They want to be truth-tellers, not story-tellers. This is fair, but one may still ask whether urban studies and planning theory have benefitted enough from the textual or discursive turn that has proved to be useful in many social sciences and philosophy. Without necessarily committing oneself to the philosophies behind this turn, it makes sense to ask how words—and images—are in fact used in urban planning and politics. The fact that we are ‘doing things with words’ (Austin, 1962, p. 5) is, namely, self-evident already from the semantic point of view: when I say ‘I promise’, I am usually promising, not describing what I am doing.

Similarly, it is perhaps not enough to consider the ‘truth’ of stories like the urban or the pandemic narrative. They contain elements of truth, of course: cities do generate economic benefits and urban culture, but the possibility of pandemics resulting from density and connectedness is also a fact. Analysing them as narratives, in contrast, will make it possible to understand their selectivity and functions. Utopias clearly have different functions than Dystopias: the former are used to raise our spirit and lead us to a selected future scenario, while the latter are warning signs, kind of whistle blowing.

Narrative is, however, only one of the key concepts in the discursive turn, and it is often used rather loosely, embracing all kinds of meaningful linguistic elements. For instance, Emery Roe has developed an important theory and methodology of ‘narrative policy analysis’ (Roe, 1994), but he collected stories, scenarios, and arguments under the same concept of narrative. I would rather suggest that these different textual entities are analysed separately, since there are different methods and theories available for each of them. The implicit narratives or even ‘grand narratives’ told by ‘truth-tellers’ or ‘serious speakers’ as Foucault called them (Foucault, 1985b), are different from the openly constructed scenarios in futures studies, or the deliberately and painstakingly constructed arguments by which truth-claims are justified with evidence or reasoning in rational debates (Van Eemeren et al., 1996). And if the word ‘argument’ is taken in the sense that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca gave it (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1971), we also have the whole tradition of rhetoric at our disposal. These subfields are connected, for sure, but the connections are an interesting topic of research as such. There is a rich variety of methods and theoretical perspectives which can be taken to use, as soon as we get rid of the tacit assumption that there is an ‘invisible’ language telling us only what the cities and urbanization ‘really’ are.

The obvious counter-argument for such a discursive approach is that we would lose touch with the concrete reality of cities, their social, economic, and technical aspects. Actually, the opposite is the case, as I try to demonstrate: conceptual analysis will lead us directly into the corporeal existence of citizens and their activities, something that official statistics, routinely used in urban studies, can never reach. Thereby, we can develop a critique of both the ontology (the ‘reality’) and the epistemology (our established ways of constructing knowledge) of mainstream planning, politics, and urban studies.

In the 2010s, innumerable publications of planning and urban studies have started with the claim that more than half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas (e.g. Birch & Wachter, 2011; Shaw, 2018). According to the World Urbanization Prospects reports published yearly by the Population Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, figures have shown that urbanization has continued: in the 2018 revision the share of the urban population was already 55% (United Nations, 2019). Interestingly, however, the authors using this reference never pause to ask the key question: what do we mean by ‘live’? Even if the earth’s surface could be divided into two exclusive forms of land-use, urban and non-urban—in which case the urban would, however, be in the minority—what does it mean to say that people are either urban or non-urban? Naturally, these results are arrived at by combining national censuses and population registers, but before a closer look at them, let us first dive from the globe to the level of an individual human being.

Let us consider a man who has rented a small apartment at the centre of the city. In the morning, he takes the metro to the neighbouring city where he works at a university. After work, he usually buys some groceries from the local shop and perhaps meets his friends at a local restaurant, or sometimes goes to the movies. He can also decide not to go to the office but work with his laptop in a library or in one of the several coffee shops in the area. He uses his apartment mostly for watching the TV and sleeping.

The elements of his daily life, thus, seem to be very urban. He prefers the city centre for its urban buzz and services within walking distance: restaurants, theatres, libraries, coffee shops, museums, shops, and department stores. For this reason, he is ready to accept a smaller apartment without balcony, as well as the noise and poor air quality typical of busy streets. He belongs to the educated workforce of universities, which is an essential resource of successful cities, helping information-intensive businesses to thrive. He sleeps and works in two different cities, as many people do in metropolitan areas. He uses public transport to get from his apartment to the university campus and to other locations. Thus, we should expect him to be one of the ‘urbanites’ who, according to the United Nations (UN), comprise more than half of the world’s population. The only problem is that he does not live in the city. Is he dead then? A ghost?

Something less supernatural: every Friday, he takes his car and drives 200 kilometres to his villa in a rural municipality, where he spends his weekend with his wife. There he enjoys tending his garden, picking berries and mushrooms, or taking his boat to visit the nearby islands. The air is fresh and the sound of silence soothing. He may also extend the weekend and telework on Mondays and Fridays, giving his lectures and meeting his colleagues from Tuesdays to Thursdays. In this way, he gets the best of both worlds. In a word, he is both urban and rural, a multi-local resident.

However, the national legislation of his country and the corresponding population register only allow one permanent place of residence. In case he has two addresses where he actually lives as a corporeal human being (i.e. sleeps, cooks, watches the TV, etc.), he has to choose one of them as his ‘proper’ place of residence. It is called ‘permanent residence’ in statistics but, for him, both of the addresses are permanent (as much as any address can be permanent for mortal human beings). In addition to his own preference, the criteria accepted by the authorities for such ‘proper’ living are, for instance, work or family relationships. As he works in one city and his family lives in another, he can freely choose, probably optimizing his local taxation. Together with his wife, he has chosen the rural municipality as his ‘permanent’ residence. This is why he does not ‘live’ in the city, and thereby he is not included in the UN calculation of people who ‘live in urban areas’. In the city, he is indeed a living dead, a ghost, in that sense.

One might be tempted to try and solve this paradox by saying that there are simply two senses of the word ‘living’, one referring to being alive, as a corporeal human being, and the other referring to being registered as a statistical unit. This homonymy is not restricted to the English language only: the Italian vivere, the German Leben, the Swedish leva, the Russian жить, and the Spanish vivir can all refer to being alive or residing. Contemporary Finnish is an exception to this rule, since the word elää can only be used for being alive, while asua means residing. But the situation is more complicated than this, which can clearly be seen in the methodology of population statistics. This is how the UN describes the role of population statistics in politics, planning, and urban development:

With the increasingly potent data-processing power available to users of statistics, it is becoming critical to ensure that census data are exploited as comprehensively as possible. Detailed small-area statistics are imposing themselves as irreplaceable in pointing to the segments of everyday life that need to be improved in terms of living conditions, access to services, adequate infrastructure and fulfilment of essential human rights, such as the right to be registered or the right to vote.

(United Nations, 2017)

‘Everyday life’ is, however, hardly the life that the statistical units are living, but rather the corporeal human beings, the living minds and bodies. One might suppose that it is their living conditions that should be improved, and that they are the ones who should be provided with the services. It is the corporeal human being who needs health care, it is the mind-body of his children who need to be able to go to school. The right to be registered or vote are partly corporeal rights: only those with a live body can vote, but one may have a body all right but not the right to vote. Thus, it seems that the methodology recommendations by the UN are strangely confusing these two entities, the corporeal human being and the statistical unit, the registered person. This is highlighted in the expressed need to gather ‘detailed small-area statistics’ that would guide our investments in services and infrastructure and also planning. The smaller the scale, however, the less probable it is that the corporeal human being is located in this small area confined by the statistician, at any given time. If we go to the smallest scale that the recommendation refers to—the individual address—it is most probable that the corporeal human being is not found there. He is living his everyday life mostly somewhere else.

Reflections like this have always made me feel uneasy. Why is it that some distinctions (such as the essential difference between living and staying) are quite natural to me, but they are often conflated or ignored in much of the literature written in English. Now, as I am also writing in English, which is not my native language, I need to be careful not to lose these distinctions with such concepts as living, man, population, growth, citizen, etc. While I was writing this book, I came up with a newspaper article on the Estonian author Jaan Kaplinski, another speaker of a small and strange language (Saarikivi, 2021). His argument was that we are not only expressing our thoughts in a language but also thinking with it. One of Kaplinski’s essays was titled ‘What if Heidegger had been a Mordovian?’ Indeed, unlike Mordovians, most of our brightest minds (Heidegger, Hegel, Kant, Sartre, Foucault, Schopenhauer, Gramsci, etc.) have all been able to think and write in their own language, since they have had enough readers in their national context. When they have become famous, their books have been translated into English and to other major languages. There are always things which are lost in translation, but those who are interested can always go to the original sources. This is not the case with small language communities, where particularly academics are more and more forced to read, write, and speak in English instead of their native language—for obvious reasons, since science is global and we all want to make an impact on the whole academic community, not to mention the rewards that universities are given for international publishing (which means publishing in English). In these cases, things are not lost in translation but from thinking itself.

Nevertheless, most of us have started our thinking with our native language, and obviously its concepts, categories, and structures stay with us. What if, for instance, it is not simply a coincidence that in the Finnish language there is no concept that would allow us to conflate living as a corporeal human being with living as a resident? The word asua does not only mean residing but it is also the root for asettautua and asettua, which both mean to stop moving, finding a place where one can stay. The latter can also metaphorically mean getting rid of one’s radical ideas and restless life and start abiding by traditional norms. The noun asema (station) also refers to a place where movement is stopped, in the same way as the Latin origin of the English word means stationary and stay (statio, stare). The Finnish verb elää, on the other hand, does not refer to place at all. To the contrary: eläväinen means somebody who cannot stay still, and elävä is the opposite of kuollut (dead). When you are dead, you don’t move any longer. Living is moving.

Actually, this is not the only instance where Finnish is different from the major European languages in terms of space and place. The word planning with its Latin origin in planum is repeated in most European languages (planering, pianificazione, planung, pianification, planificación, planejamento) and connects the activity to land, to the plane surface where buildings are to be located. In Finnish, the corresponding word is suunnittelu, which means both planning and design. However, it does not refer to land at all, but to suunta (direction). Thus, literally it means deliberating or giving direction to movement or activities. If you stay in one place or in a (small) area, you don’t need directions. If we go into details, the word yhdyskuntasuunnittelu, which is usually translated as urban and regional planning, comes from yhdyskunta (community). As we know, communities can move, whether they are ants, bees, or tribal communities. Tribal communities of hunters or nomads are rare nowadays, but this does not mean that movement would have stopped—nowada...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Revealing the paradox
• 2 The epistemology of escape and predator epistemology: Knowing and failing to know multi-local spatiality
• 3 Modalities of power: What are the many places for their users, and who can use them?
• 4 Multi-locality as urbanization
• 5 The politics of territorialism
• 6 Political topology
• 7 The logic of presence and absence
• 8 Heterotopia of the body
• 9 The city of cyborgs
• 10 Conclusion: From places to lifescapes
• References
• Index