Introduction
Humanity is currently confronted by an extraordinary array of social, economic, political, and environmental challenges. Most, if not all of these, have a significant urban dimension. Accelerated and unbridled urbanisation exerts multiple and considerable pressures on ecosystems everywhere (Seto, Sanchez-Rodriquez, & Fragkias, 2010). Key culprits include deforestation and the loss of natural habitats, resource depletion, pollution of air, water and soils, and the greenhouse gas emissions that fuel the looming climate crisis. Meanwhile, the financial crisis and subsequent recession that shook global capitalism in 2008 not only harmed the most vulnerable urban dwellers but also originated in ruthless financial speculation over urban real estate (Harvey, 2012). The persistence and aggravation of extreme poverty are also closely tied to urban processes with an estimated 900 million people living in slums in what the UN defines as âdeveloping regionsâ: an increase in absolute numbers of 28 per cent between 1990 and 2014 (UN-Habitat, 2016, p. 58). In short, the collective fate of humanity seems to be bound up with that of urbanity. That is the fundamental recognition from which we proceed in this book.
Unfortunately, the trajectories of urban processes that currently prevail do not offer much hope in this regard. Decades of neoliberal urban policy regimes (in various guises) have produced a situation in which the course of urban development is more often plotted by capital than by urban inhabitants. With capital at the helm, cities become instruments for the generation of profits rather than places where people live. At the same time, urbanity is still haunted by the persistent ghosts of colonialism, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination that hamper the possibility of urban life forms that are truly inclusive, dignified, and just. Hopeful trajectories, then, are generally not to be found in the mainstream of urban thought and practice. Alternative imaginaries and ideas as well as practices and policies are urgently needed. Fortunately, these do exist, and it has been the mission of this book to seek them out and to ask how their realisation can be enabled. The purpose is to illuminate, theorise, and communicate the conditions, techniques, and strategies that enable urban alternatives to come to fruition and to critically examine their radical potential.
By placing the notion of âenablingâ front and centre, we have deliberately positioned the book between a diagnostic approach aimed at exposing current urban ills and a prescriptive approach aimed at figuring out what desirable urban futures may look like. Both of these approaches are in abundance elsewhere (e.g. Brenner & Theodore, 2002; Bridge & Watson, 2011; Datta & Shaban, 2017; Davis, 2006; MacLeod & Ward, 2002; Vasudevan, 2015a, 2015b). We seek to complement such work by establishing productive connections between the diagnostic and the prescriptive. This necessarily involves elements of both; if the enabling of alternative urban futures is our journey, then we need diagnosis to ascertain our current location and prescription to figure out where we are heading. What makes this journey exceedingly difficult is the fact that neither our current location nor our destination can be known with full precision. And to complicate matters further, we are not talking about a single journey but about multiple trajectories embedded in the complex contingencies of our interconnected urban worlds.
Implied in the recognition of these linkages is the key assumption that urbanity can be envisaged as comprising our shared social condition, whether we live in global cities, in small towns, in villages, in the countryside, or in any other spatial parcel. That is, contemporary human life across the planet is both defined and conditioned in significant ways by urban processes as they unfold in all their variety and particularity within and beyond places across all continents (Brenner & Schmid, 2015). Urban processes, in this view, comprise key targets for efforts to address and resolve the aforementioned set of interrelated crises. This engenders a challenging collective task of reconstituting the direction of urban processes in ways that engender new hope for urban futures. The task at hand has been phrased with both clarity and simplicity by David Harvey:
Not only is it vital to step back and think about what can be done, and who is going to do it where. It is also vital to match preferred organizational principles and practices with the nature of the political, social, and technical battles that have to be fought and won. (Harvey, 2012, p. 127)
We take up this task by deliberately emphasising the key question of how to make alternative urban futures possibleâhow to enable them, that isârather than simply spelling out what they might look like. In other words, we focus less on the destination and more on how to get there, on the grounds that knowing what needs to change is not the same as knowing how to make that change happen. These questions, however, cannot be completely separated. It is thus doubtful whether desirable destinations of urban futures can be fixed before embarking on journeys towards them. Whereas some measure of utopian thinking is indispensable in establishing orientations for political practice, it would be misguided to attempt to divorce the destination from the journey. In taking the process of enabling as our focal point, we want to stress that there can be no single destination, just as there can be no single route map for the journey, that is, urban alternatives are both imagined and realised through the process of their enabling. In this spirit, we have cast our net widely in order to capture a diversity of moments in which seemingly entrenched sociopolitical situations are sought to be overcome with the purpose of producing urban alternatives. In this introductory chapter, we begin by briefly outlining the diagnoses of the urban condition currently on offer, before turning to one of the new urban agendas that have emerged from these variegated views. We then go on to establish a shared point of departure for conceptualising urban alternatives. In the last section, we account for the specific entry pointsâthinking, governing, performing, and producing the urban differentlyâthat guide the four parts of the book. In this context, we also briefly introduce the individual chapters that make up each part.
Diagnosing the Urban Condition
One of the most divisive traits of urban literature in recent years has been the stark contrast between voices that proclaim the urban to be âtriumphantâ (e.g. Brugmann, 2009; Florida, 2011; Glaeser, 2011) and others who issue urgent warnings about its socially unjust, environmentally unsustainable, and broadly destructive character (e.g. Gleeson, 2014; UN-Habitat, 2016). These disparate perspectives, however, converge on the recognition that the common fate of humanity is bound up closely with the fate of urbanity. But whereas the former tend to position urbanity as the saviour-elect of humanity, the latter identify the reconstitution of urban processes as one of our primary common challenges (see Gleeson (2012, 2014) for a detailed critique of âtriumphalâ urbanism). It should be clear that we side with the view of the urban as a challenge to be faced rather than a salvation to be awaited. Yet, we also discern in the apparent gulf between such perspectives an important truth about the urban condition: if it is our greatest common challenge, then it is also our greatest common opportunity. The triumphal urbanists have focused one-sidedly on the prospects of the latter while turning the blind eye on âthe netherworlds that now harbour much of the human urban experienceâ (Gleeson, 2012, p. 934). We would thus be well advised to proceed from the identification of key challenges produced by current urban trajectories but without losing sight of the possibilities and opportunities that emerge through those very same processes.
We cannot hope to present a comprehensive and exhaustive account of key challenges and possibilities here. Instead, we offer a limited selection of challenge-possibility pairsâall emerging from recent urban scholarshipâthat we find particularly pertinent for the present volume:
- Exclusion and segregation. Challenge: Urban space is increasingly characterised by exclusions and segregations, sometimes physically manifest and violently enforced, sometimes hidden and internalised in everyday practices. Such urban exclusion and segregation are embodied by housing evictions and slum clearances (Brickell, Arrigoitia, & Vasudevan, 2017; Sassen, 2014), forcible removal of the homeless and other unwanted elements from public spaces (Iveson, 2014; Stuart, 2014), gated communities that shield the affluent from the urban poor (Atkinson & Blandy, 2006; Borsdorf et al., 2016), sharp divides between informal and formal urban settlements (UN-Habitat, 2016), and so forth. Rising levels of inequality thus manifest in urban spaces, where the aggravated contrasts between rich and poor and the sharp divides between included and excluded become most visible. Possibilities: Whereas informal urban settlements are presented by the UN purely as a challenge to be overcome (through formalisation), many such areas are situated in contexts where the partial autonomy from oppressive regimes cannot be viewed entirely in negative terms. Informality presents its own array of difficult issues around social justice, environmental protection, provision of basic necessities, and so on (UN-Habitat, 2016), but it also reflects opportunities for bypassing prevailing hegemonies, thereby allowing such areas to evolve beyond the effective reach of existing regimes. This is most obvious in cases of oppressive urban and national governments, but it also extends to broader hegemonies such as global capitalism which relies on the formalisation of urban economies in order to penetrate and extract surplus value from them. Informal urban settlements can thus be envisioned as enclaves where special conditions for the enabling of alternative urban becomings are present (McFarlane, 2011; Roy, 2011; Vasudevan, 2015b).
- Persisting poverty and increasing inequality. Challenge: Economic inequality is on the rise globally (Piketty, 2014), while extreme urban poverty persists despite being a top policy priority for decades (UN-Habitat, 2016). Poverty and inequality are inextricably linked and âthe problems of the global accumulation of poverty cannot be confronted (âŚ) without confronting the obscene global accumulation of wealthâ (Harvey, 2012, p. 127). Possibilities: The recognition that poverty cannot be eradicated without addressing inequality is becoming more widespread; even the New Urban Agenda of the UN acknowledges as much. This represents an opportunity for pursuing the development of non-exploitative social relations of production as a means for combating poverty. In other words, the proliferation of non-capitalist ...