![]()
1 Introduction
John Hannigan and Greg Richards
When news first broke of the fatal shooting of 28 foreigners at the Splendid Hotel in Quagadougou, Burkina Faso, most reporters had only the remotest idea where the West African city is located. Those who did depicted it as a dreary inland administrative centre â David Tang, the Financial Times of London's resident cultural sophisticate, includes it on his list of the world's worst cities, âdirty, dusty and rottenâ (Tang, 2016: 1) â popular mainly with a few hundred foreign civilians working for faith-based relief agencies. In fact, Quagadougou is a culturally vibrant city of 1.5 million people, a third larger than Birmingham, England's second most populous city. Ouagadougou is hardly unique. Recent urbanization along the Gulf of Guinea (West Africa) has been so rapid that the region will soon be comparable to the East Coast of the United States, with five cities over 1 million people, including one hypercity, Lagos Nigeria, with a population of 23 million (Davis, 2006: 5â6). Explosive urban population growth is not restricted to the African continent. In most countries, urbanization levels have reached record levels, with some world regions becoming more than 80 per cent urban (Brenner and Keil, 2006).
This âplanetary urbanizationâ or âurban ageâ trope has come to dominate how we think of cities. Since the late 1980s, Brenner and Schmid (2014: 312) note, the urban age thesis âhas been embraced with increasing frequency in international urban scholarship and policy research, often by influential thinkers and practitioners as a convenient metanarrative for framing a wide variety of investigations within or about citiesâ (Brenner, 2014). Arboleda (2014: 339) observes that the often heard claim that more than half the world's population now resides in cities has become a form of âdoxic common senseâ that determines the way in which questions regarding the urban condition are framed, both at multilateral agencies like the United Nations and the World Bank but also in âthe conceptual repertoires of political progressive strands of thought in urban studies'. While not disputing that the percentage of urban dwellers worldwide will soon be reaching epic proportions, Merrifield (2014: x) complains that academic experts and media commentators alike are engaging in âMalthusian fear mongeringâ which âobfuscates the class and power question surrounding our current urban question'.
Whilst urban commentators generally agree that we increasingly live in a âworld of cities', there is considerably less agreement on how to interpret and understand the contemporary urban condition. There are three interrelated points of contention.
One major fault line has developed around the degree of importance that should continue to be accorded to physical space as an organizing concept. In the classic human ecological model which dominated urban sociology and geography for its first half-century, the organization and physical layout of the city were treated as having a life of their own. Park and Burgess (Park et al., 1925) asserted that the city could be visualized as a series of concentric circles or zones rippling outwards from the core. As one moves further from the central business district, the land becomes more valuable, the housing more desirable and the population more assimilated.
When a political economy perspective finally mounted a successful paradigmatic challenge in the 1970s, physical space still held centre stage, albeit from a radically different vantage point. David Harvey (1973, 1975) asserted that urban space should be seen as a scarce resource that is distributed not by natural ecological processes, but rather by outcomes based on economic and political conflict rooted in class-based struggles (Hutter, 2007: 123). While agreeing that capital and class are regrettably missing from the human ecology paradigm, urban political economists differ widely on what an alternative treatment of space should look like. For example, Gottdiener and Hutchison (2011: 394â5) argue that neo-Marxist versions of urban political economy err in considering location merely as a container for economic processes. Their socio-spatial perspective identifies real estate interests and government intervention as missing elements in explaining how the built environment changes and develops.
Inspired by Lefebvre's triadic model of the social production of space, other urban analysts adopted a more explicitly constructionist approach. Representational space, the third element of the triad, allows for new forms of understanding in physical environments that otherwise seem to be fixed and controlled by economic and political elites. The possibility exists here for the imaginative re-use and remaking of the city, drawing on a different set of cultural and historical resources (Robinson, 2004: 172â3). In the introduction to their edited collection, Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City, Alev Ăinar and Thomas Bender (2007) describe what a new perspective on the city might look like. Rather than focus on a single, defined physical space with fixed boundaries, we are urged to visualize the city as a field of experience that is socially constructed by its inhabitants. Cities are thus the products of a collective imagination, albeit one that is grounded in material space and social practice. Significantly, collective narratives about the city serve to construct, negotiate and contest boundaries, a process that inevitably leads to ethnic, racial and class conflict. Theoretically, the challenge here is to combine political economy, whose emphasis is on conflict and inequality, with more recent cultural and linguistic approaches that interpret the city as âa space of performance, theatre and significationâ (Gotham, 2002: 1739). This can potentially lead to a more sophisticated form of urban scholarship which does not lose track of the city as a site of inequality and struggle.
More recently, the politics and use of urban space have been reconfigured by a global trend towards greater entrepreneurialism, more intense inter-urban competition and the promotion of place-specific development strategies (Ooi, 2004: 11). As Greg Richards points out in Chapter 4, the increasingly competitive global environment of cities âhas forced them to adopt different strategies to distinguish themselves and create competitive advantage in order to attract resources, talent and attention'.
One intriguing new treatment of urban space is captured by the concept of âgray space'. According to the Israeli political geographer Oren Yiftachel, in the early stages of the twenty-first century the structural dynamics of cities have pushed massive numbers of residents into gray space â political spaces characterized by mobility, informality, temporariness, marginality and extreme status and power disparities. This produces a structure that resembles âcreeping urban apartheidâ (Yiftachel, 2009: 92), wherein many urban residents âare regarded as unrecognized, illegal, temporary or severely marginalized in urban regions in which they live and workâ (Yiftachel, 2015: 730).
A second polarity within the urban literature aligns along the treatment of diversity and difference. Hannigan (2013) identifies and contrasts two opposing approaches here. The first, the economic and prosperity model, privileges economic productivity and competitiveness, cosmopolitan urbanity, cultural consumption, governance through private-public collaboration, creativity and innovation as growth drivers. By contrast, the rights, justice and emancipation model favours the informal economy, everyday urban practices, public infrastructures and spaces, citizenship rights, social equity and redistribution, social justice and democratic hope. Whereas the former treats diversity as a âlureâ with which to attract tourists, investors and âcreative people', the latter values urban difference in its own right as the portal to a liveable and just city. Merrifield (2014) situates this chronologically in a shift that occurred in the latter decades of the twentieth century. In the 1960s and 1970s the state primarily engaged in policies that promoted collective consumption items (housing, health, social welfare) vital for social reproduction. Under pressure from the fiscal crises and economic downturn during the 1980s, this changed. With ideological and material support from the state, financial and merchant capital actively dispossessed collective consumption budgets. Rather, it now engaged in âvalorizing urban space as a commodity, as a pure financial asset, exploiting it as well as displacing peopleâ (Merrifield, 2014: xii). After a brief interregnum, this spawned neo-liberalism.
In a pair of recent papers (Scott and Storper, 2015; Storper and Sco...
