The Politics of the Encounter

Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization

Andy Merrifield, Deborah Cowen, Melissa Wright, Nik Heynen

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780820345819
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Globalisierung

The Politics of the Encounter is a spirited interrogation of the city as a site of both theoretical inquiry and global social struggle. The city, writes Andy Merrifield, remains "important, virtually and materially, for progressive politics." And yet, he notes, more than forty years have passed since Henri Lefebvre advanced the powerful ideas that still undergird much of our thinking about urbanization and urban society. Merrifield rethinks the city in light of the vast changes to our planet since 1970, when Lefebvre's seminal Urban Revolution was first published. At the same time, he expands on Lefebvre's notion of "the right to the city," which was first conceived in the wake of the 1968 student uprising in Paris.

We need to think less of cities as "entities with borders and clear demarcations between what's inside and what's outside" and emphasize instead the effects of "planetary urbanization," a concept of Lefebvre's that Merrifield makes relevant for the ways we now experience the urban. The city—from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street—seems to be the critical zone in which a new social protest is unfolding, yet dissenters' aspirations are transcending the scale of the city physically and philosophically. Consequently, we must shift our perspective from "the right to the city" to "the politics of the encounter," says Merrifield. We must ask how revolutionary crowds form, where they draw their energies from, what kind of spaces they occur in—and what kind of new spaces they produce.

CHAPTER ONE
The Final Frontier
Planetary Urbanization

Thus the heavenly spheres that encompassed the world and held it together did not disappear at once in a mighty explosion; the world-bubble grew and swelled before bursting and merging with the space that surrounded it.

Alexandre Koyré

If we cannot produce a new theory, and I agree it is not easy, we can at least find new words.… If we find new words we can hope to produce a framework of understanding. Without a framework, any means of instrumentality are futile.

Rem Koolhaas

I. Perspective and Prospective

Near the beginning of the “Perspective ou prospective?” chapter of Le droit à la ville, the Marxist urban studies godfather, Henri Lefebvre, alludes to the godfather of science fiction, Isaac Asimov. The comment is barely a paragraph long and Lefebvre doesn’t elaborate. Yet even in its brevity Lefebvre’s remark is intriguing, and it has intrigued me for a while now. In this opening chapter, I want to begin to develop what Lefebvre means here, at least what I think he might mean. Specifically, I want to use him for framing the theoretical and political dilemmas that confront progressives in our age of planetary urbanization. For in “Perspective ou prospective,” Lefebvre projects the urban trajectory of his day—1967, the centenary of Marx’s Capital—22,500 years into the future, into the sci-fi imaginary of Asimov’s magisterial Foundation series. The drama focuses on the giant planet-city Trantor with its 40 billion inhabitants, a thoroughly urbanized society of dazzling administrative and technological complexity, dominating a vast galaxy.

From outer space at nighttime, Asimov says, Trantor looks like a “giant conglomeration of fire-flies, caught in mid-motion and still forever.”¹ “Trantor’s deserts and its fertile areas were engulfed,” he says, “and made into warrens of humanity, administrative jungles, computerized elaborations, vast storehouses of food and replacement parts. Its mountain ranges were beaten down; its chasms filled in. The city’s endless corridors burrowed under the continental shelves and the oceans were turned into huge underground aqua-cultural cisterns.”² Canopied under a ceiling of millions of steel domes, like a colossal iceberg, nine-tenths of Trantor’s social life takes place underground in climate-controlled air and light, with programmed downpours. Nobody any longer recognizes day from night, whether the sun shone or not, and after a while few care. The countryside is but a fuzzy memory of ancient hearsay; only the Imperial Palace and Trantor’s Streeling University have real green space. Newcomers would tell you that the air seemed thicker in Trantor, the gravity that much greater, its sheer immensity unnerving.

Asimov gives us a brilliant vision of urbanization gone to the max, a veritable utopia-cum-dystopia. In mentioning Asimov under so suggestive a rubric as “perspective/prospective,” Lefebvre already recognized in the late 1960s the seeds of Trantor in our urban midst. With Asimov, he’s seemingly calling for us to open out our perspective on thinking about urban life, daring us to open it out onto the largest remit possible, to grasp the totality of capitalist urbanization wholesale and whole-scale, to live with that startling immensity, to make it our own. In so doing we might then be able to think more clearly about politics—about prospective, progressive politics under planetary urbanization.

Lefebvre wants us to know that such a modus operandi is nothing other than transduction, his method of launching the here and now into a future becoming, into a here tomorrow—and the day after tomorrow (as Nietzsche might have said).³ What kind of take on present reality can open up future reality and help us glimpse it as it moves onward, forward? By the time Lefebvre had published La révolution urbaine (1970), he began hinting at this new reality: not a sci-fi reality but something already here, now: “The complete urbanization of society,” he says, in his opener to The Urban Revolution.⁴ He’s being ironic, of course, but only slightly. Because, he adds, “This hypothesis implies a definition: ‘urban society’ is a society that results from a process of complete urbanization. Today, it’s virtual, tomorrow it will be real.”⁵ The progression/periodization is evident: we should no longer talk of cities as such, Lefebvre said in Le droit à la ville, urban society is more appropriate; yet in La révolution urbaine, he began thinking that we shouldn’t even be talking of urban society but of planetary urbanization, of the complete urbanization of society, of something that’s both here and about to come here soon. Trantor is here yet not quite here. But we can expect it any day now.

Fast-forward four decades. Asimov’s extraterrestrial universe seems closer than ever to home, closer to Lefebvre’s own terrestrial prognostications: planetary urbanization is creating a whole new spatial world (dis)order. For in 2006, the balance had tipped: the majority of the world’s inhabitants, 3.3 billion people, lived in urban agglomerations, not rural areas. By 2030, it’s set to be 4.9 billion, some 60 percent of the world’s population. By then, an extra 590,000 square miles of the planet will have been urbanized, a land surface more than twice the size of Texas, spelling an additional 1.47 billion urban dwellers. If the trend continues, by 2050 75 percent of the planet Earth will be urbanized.⁶ City-regions are now congealing into huge metropolitan agglomerations, like the planet’s hitherto largest, the thirty-five-million Tokyo-Yokohama megalopolitan region of “Greater Tokyo” (Yokohama is officially an “incorporated city”). In China’s ever-burgeoning terrestrial megaurban galaxy, expanding hinterlands around Shanghai and Beijing and in the Pearl River Delta contain urban forms of at least 40 million inhabitants.⁷

Shanghai is the planet’s fastest growing megalopolis, expanding a massive 15 percent each year since 1992, boosted by $120 billion of foreign direct investment that’s utterly reconfigured urban space. Half the world’s cranes are reputed to be working in Shanghai’s Pudong district;⁸ rice paddies have been filled with modern skyscrapers and vast factories; outlying farmlands now host the world’s fastest train links and the tallest hotel; and four thousand buildings with twenty or more stories have gone up since 1992, ensuring that Shanghai has twice the number of buildings as New York. With 171 cities of more than one million inhabitants, China itself since 2000 has commandeered nearly half the world’s cement supplies.

As of 2011, the number of metropolises globally with over a million inhabitants reached 479 (in 1950, there was only a handful).⁹ Now, there are twenty-six megacities with populations exceeding ten million people; nineteen of the largest twenty-five metropolises are found in the developing world, with 70 percent of the planet’s urban dwellers. Here’s the league table of the world’s ten biggest metropolises:

Tokyo, Japan	34,300,000
Guangzhou, China	25,200,000
Seoul, South Korea	25,100,000
Shanghai, China	24,800,000
Delhi, India	23,300,000
Mumbai, India	23,000,000
Mexico City, Mexico	22,900,000
New York City, United States	22,000,000
São Paulo, Brazil	20,900,000
Manila, Philippines	20,300,000

In a way, though, for any political urbanist these facts and figures aren’t so interesting; nor are they what’s at stake, either analytically or politically. The real point is that urbanization is increasing its reach everywhere, and that this everywhere now somehow reaches into the urban process and into our lives. Nowadays, in Louis Wirth’s faithful words, urbanism is “a way of life,” a way of life requiring a new way of seeing and a different structure of feeling. What Wirth said in 1938 still sounds smart: “The degree to which the contemporary world may be said to be ‘urban’ is not fully or actually measured by the proportion of the total population living in cities. The influences which cities exert upon social life are greater than the ratio of the urban population would indicate, for the city is not only in ever larger degrees the dwelling-place and the workshop of modern man, but it is the initiating and controlling center of economic, political, and cultural life that has drawn the most remote parts of the world into its orbit and woven diverse areas, peoples, and activities into a cosmos.”¹⁰ The urban, then, is apparently shapeless and seemingly boundless and formless, riven with new contradictions and tensions in which it’s hard to tell where borders reside and what’s inside and what’s outside.

Yet to bound something, to construe our field of vision as a container, is an inexorable human preoccupation, seemingly an inexorable human need: the need to restrict reality so we can cope, so we can comprehend. Hence the infinite array of concepts brandished to identify what this new “city” form might be: endless city, shrinking city, 100-mile city, global city, megacity, arrival city, indistinguishable city, incorporated city, and so forth. What’s interesting about these labels is that all try to follow Lefebvre’s lead and come to grips with the death of their object, or the death of the theorists’ subject—the city—knowing full well that something has happened, is happening, and that it’s hard to get an analytical grip on it. The city was once whole and solid, steel and concrete, there and only there. Now, “it” is slippery, and no longer an “it,” not responding to those old laws of gravity. What’s interesting here, too, is that every label, no matter how diverse, how insightful, how catchy, still struggles to retain the social scientific rigor of the term “city.”

Lefebvre wasn’t so convinced. Urban society, he’d announced in Le droit à la ville, “constitutes itself on the ruins of the city.”¹¹ In The Urban Revolution, he reiterated the claim, bolder and in louder decibels: “The city exists only as a historical entity”; it “no longer corresponds to a social object. Sociologically, the city is a pseudo-concept.”¹² For that reason, let’s stop using the term “city,” he urges, let’s change our terminology; let’s name the new object that isn’t a physical object in the usual sense of the term; let’s use instead the terms “urban society” or “urban fabric”; let’s try to identify a new theoretical and virtual object that’s in the process of becoming. The term “urban fabric” doesn’t narrowly define the built environment of cities but, says Lefebvre, hinting of Louis Wirth, it indicates “all manifestations of the dominance of the city over the countryside.” As such, “a vacation home, a highway, a supermarket in the countryside are all part of the urban fabric.” Meanwhile, “urban society” serves a theoretical need and, as we’ll see in chapters to come, frames a political ambition. It’s a hypothesis that represents both a point of arrival for a bigger perspective on an existing reality and a point of departure to study a new, emergent reality.

II. Blind Fields and Ways of Seeing

Urban society outstrips our cognitive and sensory facilities; the mind boggles at the sensory overload that today’s urban process places upon us. The problem is compounded if we continue to think “city,” if we perceive things through a “city” lens, through the notion of “objects,” “categories,” and “things,” perceiving them through the traditional language and concepts of industrial growth. We need to change our perspective, rethink the urban, says Lefebvre, in order to think prospectively, otherwise our epistemology will fumble in a veritable “blind field.” Urbanization isn’t a highly developed manifestation of industrialization, but—and this is the startling thing about Lefebvre’s “urban revolution” thesis—industrialization all along has been a special sort of urbanization, flipping on its head the traditional Marxist notion of the historical development of the productive forces.

Marx and Engels never gave us an explicit “urban mode of production,” Lefebvre says, but if we look closely at their oeuvre in a way they did: the city was itself a developmental force—the seat of modern industry, the division of labor, the reproduction of labor-power, and technological innovation. The rise of the industrial city wasn’t only vital for the expansion of the productive forces; it was also crucial politically for an ascendant bourgeoisie asserting itself in the passage from feudalism to capitalism. Marx didn’t know, could never have known, that urbanization harbors the logic of industrialization. Marx hadn’t seen that industrial production implies the urbanization of society, that mastering the potentialities of industry demands a specific understanding of the urban process. Beyond a certain level of growth, urbanization creates industrial production, produces industrialization, and furnishes fertile conditions for the latter, converting industrial contradictions into contradictions of the city, eventually posing anew the urban question, converting it into the question of planetary urbanization.

I’ve been thinking about how to define this shift in perspective. It’s maybe not so much a search for a brand new theory, as Rem Koolhaas says, but putting a new spin on an old theory (like Lefebvre’s), giving it a new vocabulary, making this theory more effective and affective. The best I could come up with is to describe this shift in perspective as a move away from an epistemology of cities toward an ontology of the urban. It’s no longer an issue of trying to develop a new theoretical understanding of cities under capitalism as it is about grappling with an affective being in a world that’s increasingly urbanized. It’s not a theoretical postulate out there but an ontological reality inside us, a way of seeing ourselves and our world. It’s something immanent rather than extrinsic. Thus another “way of seeing,”¹³ another way of perceiving urbanization in our mind’s eye, is to grasp it as a complex adaptive system, as a chaotic yet determined process. As a concept, even a “virtual concept,” the term “planetary” already connotes a perspectival shift and conjures up more stirring imagery, maybe even more rhetorical imagery, something seemingly extraterrestrial and futuristic. Already we are propelled into a realm in which our perceptual parameters are stretched, broadened, opened-out; somehow, four-dimensionality seems old-hat. “Planetary” suggests something more alive and growing, something more vivid than the moribund “global” or “globalization.” The use of the term “planetary” really charts the final frontier, the telos of any earthly spatial fix—an economic, political, and cultural logic that hasn’t been powered by globalization but is one of the key constituent ingredients of globalization, of the planetary expansion of the productive forces, of capitalism’s penchant to annihilate space by time and time by space.

The inner boundedness of the traditional city and of our traditional notion of the city form was prized open by the advent of the industrial city; by capitalist industrial production shedding its geographical and temporal fetters; by the development of new modes of transport; by the invention and reinvention of new technologies, products, and infrastructure; and by sucking people in when business cycles surged, only to spit them out when markets dipped. From being once absolute spaces, cities became relative spaces, spaces relative to one another in what would, in the second half of the twentieth century, become a global hierarchy, dictated by comparative economic advantage. This historical shift from the absolute to the relative preoccupied Lefebvre in his two great books from the 1970s: The Urban Revolution and The Production of Space.¹⁴ He had taken these circumstances as somehow revolutionary, revolutionary in the sense that Gramsci would have deemed it: as a passive revolution—pregnant with all things contrary, for sure, with progressive possibilities, yet counterrevolutionary nonetheless, a kind of revolution from above, one in which, as Marx said in the Manifesto, “the bourgeoisie had played a most revolutionary part.”¹⁵

So when Lefebvre urges us to reframe the city as “the urban,” he is urging us to abandon the standard frame, to reposition...