The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City

Suzanne Hall,Ricky Burdett

• Editorial: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781473987869
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Geografía humana

The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City focuses on the dynamics and disruptions of the contemporary city in relation to capricious processes of global urbanisation, mutation and resistance. An international range of scholars engage with emerging urban conditions and inequalities in experimental ways, speaking to new ideas of what constitutes the urban, highlighting empirical explorations and expanding on contributions to policy and design. The handbook is organised around nine key themes, through which familiar analytic categories of race, gender and class, as well as binaries such as the urban/rural, are readdressed. These thematic sections together capture the volatile processes and intricacies of urbanisation that reveal the turbulent nature of our early twenty-first century:

• Hierarchy: Elites and Evictions
• Productivity: Over-investment and Abandonment
• Authority: Governance and Mobilisations
• Volatility: Disruption and Adaptation
• Conflict: Vulnerability and Insurgency
• Provisionality: Infrastructure and Incrementalism
• Mobility: Re-bordering and De-bordering
• Civility: Contestation and Encounter
• Design: Speculation and Imagination

This is a provocative, inter-disciplinary handbook for all academics and researchers interested in contemporary urban studies.

1 Introduction: Urban Churn

Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett

North Mexico City, 2015, Aerial Archives / Alamy Stock Photo

Urbanisation exceeds the numbers. No matter how provocative the varied predictions that, by 2050, two-thirds of the world's human population will be urbanised, the volatile processes and intricacies of urbanisation surpass our expectations. In their introductory essay to our collected edition, Parnell and Robinson (2017) underscore that: ‘There is no common “urban” object.’ So too the city defeats quantifiable definition. The essays that comprise this book reveal the city as a capricious formation; a constructed and inhabited space emerging through incremental and abrupt compositions that stretch from backyards, to mayoral offices, to multinational speculators. They show how the formation of the urban constitutes profoundly asymmetrical arrangements of global economic power and political influence. They connect the shape and texture of the ‘urban’ of urbanisation to the planetary reach of capitalist accumulation and consciousness (Brenner and Schmid, 2017), as well as finer-grained possibilities for engaging in our shared humanity and vulnerability (Hentschel, 2017). Notably, the essays all evoke the tenor and pace of urban churn that signals the turbulent nature of our early twenty-first century. The ambition of this book is to capture the churn that churns, to give texture and theory to the macro and micro endeavours that profoundly re-form cities and citizens of the twenty-first century.

The conceit of the ‘twenty-first-century city’ that outlines this collection is therefore intended to engage with the social, political and spatial resonance of brutality and inventiveness inherent in contemporary city-making (Simone, 2017). Much more a zeitgeist than a circumscribed period of time, many of the essays in this book are excavations of the future; provocations that link archaeology, atmosphere and anticipation. Nuttall (2017) affirms the possibilities for postcolonial understandings of the city through an appreciation of ‘longer historical time frames’ that reveal deeper processes of city-making beyond Western modernity. Nuttall's curiosity is also animated by a more speculative and imaginative interplay between animate and inanimate forms, challenging binaries of the urban/rural and physical/psychic. Resonant with this approach, and in bringing a section on ‘Design’ more explicitly into a book on ideas of urbanisation, we gain important contributions on what it means to make urban form, and to make urban analysis. In identifying the ever-changing dynamics of contemporary urbanisation and its granular associations, Mehrotra (2017) questions the efficacy of the urban design professions in tackling complex processes of urban churn, while Sennett (2017) reminds us of the participatory potential of the city as an open system that is frustrated by prevailing ideologies of urban planning. Weizman (2017) reflects on his practice of the forensic survey of buildings in cities under warfare. Doing a survey of blast impacts and building damage not only reveals ‘decay as a process of form making', but also engages with the archive as a material repository of human activities and political rationalities. Thus our editorial project evolved from its original disciplinary container of ‘a handbook of urban sociology’ towards a more experimental space that transgresses strict disciplinary boundaries and categorical definitions. Our commitment in this collection, composed of architects, anthropologists, geographers, literary and cultural scholars, and sociologists, is to put side by side the variegated perspectives on what constitutes the urban. Our collaborators expand on their particular vantage points through divergent theoretical commitments and differing methodological protocols, drawing on varied geographies and ways of knowing.

In writing this introduction in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the innards of the political and economic compact that maintain globalisation have been turned inside out, revealed in its raw forms. The city, not simply a mark on a map, but a series of human interrelationships across the planet, makes the stark extent of societal inequalities and discriminations visible in particular ways. It also generates and surfaces the potentials of resistance. By focusing on ‘the politics of humanity … crafted by radical global interconnections', Roy (2017) differentiates the shape of the world from that of the globe, claiming the possibilities of our shared humanity as against the expansive scale of dehumanisation. Roy's emphasis on ‘worlding’ highlights the progressive avenues advanced out of the #BlackLivesMatter and urban anti-eviction movements as scaled-up modes of resistance to racialised injustice and racism, demanding a reimagining of the figure of the human in urban life. This perspective, underscored by the range of essays in our handbook, further disrupts the Western formation of urban studies towards a wider animation of histories and geographies. It therefore fundamentally matters that many authors who have contributed to this book project have written from varied, yet not disconnected, frontlines of emerging urban conditions of protest and association.

The significance of the ‘right to the city’ evoked by Lefebvre (1996) and advanced by Harvey (2008) endures. However, what constitutes a right to make the city, for whom, and under what conditions resources are available to configuring our city and our personhood is being severely contested. The ever-increasing range of urban claims to social justice, from Occupy to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Revolutions, the Umbrella Movement, and the #FeesMustFall movement, reveal the enormity of a groundswell against pervasive injustice. Authors in our collection view these global claims and the varied nature of their contestations about the right to access and shape the city, from differing ways of knowing the city. For Bond (2017), the presence of a remarkable frame of constitutional rights in South Africa is overwhelmed by the absence of distribution, where access to infrastructure for the marginalised remains a struggle. Hence, the urban poor deal in the most elemental claims for water and sanitation. Bond shows how guttural the nature of deprivation and insurgency is, and turns to larger possibilities of ‘commoning’ water provision, as a commitment to primary tariff reforms away from the market-based logic towards an ‘eco-social’ emphasis of the commons. Agathangelou (2017) casts a wider net still, exploring the ‘practical solidarities’ across different groups to provide care in the everyday life of the city, as well as strategic alliances and transnational processes of learning in the Tunisian, Egyptian and Yemini Revolutions.

Our book is also written through the momentum of new processes of financialisation that have thrust outwards from the global financial crisis in 2008, reconfiguring urban land as reservoirs for vast exercises in global property speculation and dispossession (Sassen, 2017). Savage (2017) connects the systemic violence that abates the over-inflated landscape of London to the formation of global–urban elites or what he refers to as ‘an elite habitus in cities of accumulation'. Working within sociological understandings of class, and with reference to Piketty's (2013) work on wealth inequality, Savage argues for a more differentiated knowledge of urban hierarchies. He connects the economic and cultural forms of city-making of urban elites and reveals how elite formations profoundly skew the affordability and accessibility of both private and public space. This is echoed in Madden's essay (2017) on the colonisation of public space through the lavish landscapes of new cultural precincts, on the one hand, and the proliferation of gated and guarded residential, retail and learning complexes, on the other. Desmond's account (2017 [2012]) of the endemic evictions in Milwaukee highlights another dimension of revanchist urbanism pointing to enduring and escalating discriminations on the basis of race and gender. Here, the abject failure of regulation and state intervention in distorted property markets and social housing provision is revealed and urban poverty is reproduced. So prevalent is eviction in contemporary urban life that it now features as a prominent theme in urban studies (e.g. Brickell, Fernández-Arrigoitia and Vasudevan, 2017). The violent connections between accumulation and dispossession highlight the durable damage to family and social infrastruc...