Philosophy and the City

Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Perspectives

Keith Jacobs, Jeff Malpas, Keith Jacobs, Jeff Malpas

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781786604590
• eBook ISBN: 9781786604613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Social Philosophy

Philosophy has its origins in the city, and in the context of our own highly urbanised modes of living, the relationship between philosophy and the city is more important than ever. The city is the place in which most humans now play out their lives, and the place that determines much of the cultural, social, economic, and political life of the contemporary world. Towards a Philosophy of the City explores a wide range of approaches and perspectives in a way that is true to the city's complex and dynamic character. The volume begins with a comprehensive introduction that identifies the key themes and then moves through four parts, examining the concept of the city itself, its varying histories and experiences, the character of the landscapes that belong to the city, and finally the impact of new technologies for the future of city spaces. Each section takes up aspects of the thinking of the city as it develops in relation to particular problems, contexts, and sometimes as exemplified in particular cities. This volume provides an invaluable resource for students and scholars in Philosophy, Geography, Sociology and Urban Studies.

Part I

City Concepts

Places, Processes, Structures

Chapter 1

Capitalism, Form and the Philosophy of the Urban

David Cunningham

In his recent introduction to the mammoth 2014 collection Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, geographer Neil Brenner argues that almost all major twentieth-century approaches to the ‘urban question’ have taken as their ‘primary unit of analysis and site of investigation’ what he terms an ‘entity commonly labelled as the city’ (2014, 14). If the work of the Chicago School and their influential 1925 ‘mission statement’ The City, coauthored by Ernest Burgess and Robert Park, is identified by Brenner as perhaps particularly exemplary in this respect—certainly for urban sociology as a discipline—more generally, he argues, the epistemological frameworks dominant within urban studies have simply assumed as self-evident that their object of study should be ‘primarily, if not exclusively, . . . “city-like” (nodal, relatively large, densely populated and self-enclosed) sociospatial units’ (2014, 14). ‘[U]nderneath the tumult of disagreement and the relentless series of paradigm shifts that have animated urban theory and research during the last century, a basic consensus has persisted: the urban problematique is thought to be embodied, at core, in cities’, understood as fundamentally and qualitatively distinct from ‘a non-city social world . . . located “beyond” or “outside” them’ (2014, 15).

Brenner’s text is one of a series of recent accounts (see, for example, Brenner and Schmid 2013; Merrifield 2013) that—drawing, in particular, upon the writings of the French philosopher and social theorist Henri Lefebvre during the 1960s and 1970s, and upon his vision of an emergent planetary urbanization—have sought to argue that, in the face of an increasingly globalized capitalist modernity, the ‘sociospatial relations of urbanism that were once apparently contained’ within city-like ‘units’ have, as Brenner puts it in one evocative passage, ‘now exploded haphazardly beyond them, via the ever-thickening commodity chains, infrastructural circuits, migration streams and circulatory-logistical networks that today crisscross the planet’ (2014, 16). The consequence is that, as Edward W. Soja and J. Miguel Kanai put it in their own contribution to the Implosions/Explosions collection, ‘The Urbanization of the World’:

More than ever before, it can be said that the Earth’s entire surface is urbanized to some degree, from the Siberian tundra to the Brazilian rainforest to the icecap of Antarctica, perhaps even to the world’s oceans and the atmosphere we breathe. Of course, this does not mean there are dense agglomerations everywhere, but the major features of urbanism as a way of life—from the play of market forces and the effects of administrative regulations, to popular cultural practices and practical geopolitics—are becoming ubiquitous. To a degree not seen before, no one on Earth is outside the sphere of influence of urban industrial capitalism. (2014, 150)

It is these ‘new formations of a thickly urbanized landscape’ that have therefore become ‘extremely difficult, if not impossible, to theorize, much less to map, on the basis of inherited approaches to urban studies’ (Brenner 2014, 18).

Such accounts reflect a broader concern with dynamic processes of urbanization, as opposed to the apparently delimited object that is ‘the “thing” we call a “city”’ in recent urban studies (Harvey 2014, 61). And, at a broadly empirical level, among the most obvious consequences of this reorientation has been a shift of focus from the description of older city ‘typologies’—centred on those more or less ‘constant’ spatial forms that have been historically understood as characteristic of the ‘city’—to a focus on various infrastructural flows, logistics and networks as perhaps most constitutive of the ubiquity of the urban today. At the same time, conceptually, however, what has been principally at stake here are, I think, the ways in which, for Brenner and others, the ‘city’ has come to be constructed as an effectively transhistorical and quasi-anthropological category in urban theory more generally. Projected back from today into the ancient world of the polis or urbs, the essential form of the city—‘nodal, relatively large, densely populated and self-enclosed’—has in this way been fixed in place as a means of continuing to conceptualize the dominant social and spatial character of the urban present. Yet the consequence, Brenner argues, is an effective occlusion of the history of the ‘urban’ or of ‘urbanization’ as distinctive socio-spatial logics that, far from being reducible to or merely extending the form of the city, may in fact historically supplant and displace it and so ‘cast doubt upon established understandings of the urban as [itself] a bounded, nodal and relatively self-enclosed sociospatial condition’ (2014, 15). As a call to reorient the ‘discipline’ of urban studies, what Brenner terms the ‘unit of analysis’ thus shifts from ‘methodological cityism’ (focused on a ‘bounded’ settlement type, in which ‘the phenomenon of cityness is increasingly universalized as a settlement type around the world’) to a new conception or ‘vision’ of ‘urban theory without an outside’, focused on the ‘urban as an unevenly developed yet worldwide condition and process of sociospatial transformation’; one that is, formally, ‘open, variegated, multiscalar’ (2014, 22; emphasis added).

While such an urban theory without an outside may build upon ‘various concepts, methods and mappings’ from the latter half of the last century, as Brenner makes clear, it is, first and foremost, the work of Lefebvre that constitutes the principal influence, both in Brenner’s own work and that of others associated with his project including Andy Merrifield, Roberto Luis Monte-Mór and Christian Schmid (Brenner 2014, 15). Indeed, Implosions/Explosions begins by situating the very foundations of ‘the urbanization question’ in an extract from Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution, published in 1970 but only translated into English in 2003, and closes, too, with one of Lefebvre’s very final works, published in Le Monde in 1989, the essay ‘Dissolving City, Planetary Metamorphosis’.

Famously, the ‘theoretical hypothesis’ at the heart of The Urban Revolution—pitched somewhere between speculation and emergent actuality, or what Lefebvre terms a ‘virtual object’—is that ‘society has been [or is becoming] completely urbanized’ (Lefebvre 2003, 2; emphasis added; Brenner 2014, 17). The tendencies that Lefebvre observed in the late 1960s would, when ‘actualized on a planetary scale’, thus result in what Brenner describes as ‘a relentless, if fragmentary, interweaving of an urban fabric—a “net of uneven mesh”—across the entire world’ (Brenner 2014, 17; see also 36, 37–38). At its ultimate horizon lies a situation in which ‘urban practices, institutions, infrastructures and built environments are projected aggressively into and across the erstwhile non-urban realm, annihilating any transparent differentiation between city and countryside, and linking local and regional economies more directly to transnational flows of raw material, commodities, labor and capital’ (Brenner 2014, 17; Lefebvre 2003, 14). In Lefebvre’s own words: if the ‘urban fabric grows, extends its borders’, such a concept ‘does not narrowly define the built world of cities but all manifestations of the dominance of the city over the country . . . a vacation home, a highway, a supermarket in the countryside are all part of the urban fabric’ (Lefebvre 2003, 3–4).

In the essay that follows, I want to begin to consider what such an opposition between the ‘bounded’ or ‘self-enclosed’ city and the apparently limitless contemporary ‘urban fabric’—as a question of the urban ‘form(s)’ at stake in recent urban studies—might mean, then, for an attempt to think the urban ‘philosophically’ today. But, before doing so, it is worth sketching out a little further Lefebvre’s own appeal to the urban in this regard.

Philosophy, the City and the Urban

Although Brenner’s concern is as much conceptual or theoretical as it is empirical—a large part of the argument of his work concerns, after all, the problems of defining the ‘urban’ itself and the problems entailed by its more or less exclusive association with an inherited notion of the bounded ‘city’—perhaps understandably, he and the various contributors to Implosions/Explosions largely ignore, or steer clear of, Lefebvre’s own pivotal claim that, in seeking to ‘take up a radically critical analysis and to deepen the urban problematic’, it is neither sociology nor geography but philosophy with which one has to begin. Yet, in fact, in both The Urban Revolution and his celebrated essay ‘The Right to the City’, published two years earlier in 1968, Lefebvre is remarkably clear that, as against the more or less specialized domains of economic, political or social science—the ‘fragments of indigestible knowledge’ characteristic of what he terms a ‘fact-filled empiricism’—it is, above all, philosophers who have truly ‘thought the city’, who ‘have brought to language and concept urban life’ (Lefebvre 1996, 86; emphasis added).

One answer to the question of ‘why philosophy?’ lies, in this context, in Lefebvre’s own critique of a positivist ‘urban sociology or urban economy’ during the postwar period, which, as he notes, ‘present[s] itself as a counterweight to classical philosophy’ (Lefebvre 2003, 5, 16). Indeed, it was, from this perspective, the perceived need to overcome the fragmentation of such ‘specialized work and compartmentalized specialisms in the sciences of human “reality”’ (Lefebvre 2016a, 53) that largely explains Lefebvre’s own vigorous assertion that it must be philosophy that remains the starting point for any urban theory worthy of the name:

While it is true that the urban phenomenon, as a global reality, is in urgent need of people who can pool fragmentary bits of knowledge, the achievement of such a goal is difficult or impossible. Specialists can only comprehend such a synthesis from the point of view of their own field, using their data, their terminology, their concepts and assumptions. [. . .] The problem remains: How can we make the transition from fragmentary knowledge to complete understanding? How can we define this need for totality? (2003, 54, 56)

As he puts it elsewhere in The Urban Revolution, the ‘urban phenomenon, taken as a whole, cannot be grasped by any specialized science’ (53; emphasis added). As much to the point, as soon as it ‘attempts to extend its properties’, he argues, such positivism tends itself always to produce a covert and unreflective move from the specializations of ‘science’ to the more general terrain of ‘philosophy’, by virtue of its own necessary claim, ‘consciously or not’, upon this very ‘need for totality’, since it is, historically, philosophy which has ‘totality as fundamental interest for its own sake’ (Lefebvre 2003, 64). The result is that as ‘soon as we insist on’ totality, we cannot so much negate philosophy—as various positivisms might like to believe—as we must necessarily extend ‘classical philosophy by detaching its concepts (totality, synthesis) from the contexts and philosophical arc...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: City Concepts
• Chapter 1: Capitalism, Form and the Philosophy of the Urban
• Chapter 2: The Discourse of the City
• Chapter 3: The City as Wild
• Chapter 4: Urban Time and the City as Event
• Chapter 5: The Immanent City
• Part II: City Landscapes
• Chapter 6: Solar Le Corbusier
• Chapter 7: Escaping Mediocrity
• Chapter 8: Justice as the Urban Everyday
• Chapter 9: Gardens, Cities and Timescapes in South Asia1
• Chapter 10: A Vertical Melbourne
• Chapter 11: The City’s Other Face
• Part III: City futures
• Chapter 12: Beyond Differences of Race, Religion, Class
• Chapter 13: Cities Remade
• Chapter 14: The City as a Construct of Risk and Security
• Chapter 15: Philosophies of Commensuration, Value and Worth in the Future City
• Chapter 16: Multiplying Resistance
• Chapter 17: Urban Futures and The Dark Enlightenment
• Bibliography
• About the Contributors