Urban revolutions in the age of global urbanism (original) (raw)
Related papers
Introduction: Urban revolutions in the age of global urbanism
Urban Studies, 2015
This special issue, papers presented at an Urban Studies Foundation-funded conference in Jakarta (March 2011), examines the current ‘urban century’ in terms of three revolutions. Revolutions from above index the logics and norms of mainstream global urbanism, particularly the form they have taken as policymakers work with municipal officials worldwide to organise urban development around neoliberal norms. Revolutions from below refer to the multifaceted contestations of global urbanism that take place in and around cities, ranging from urban street demonstrations and occupations (such as those riveting the world in early 2011 when these papers were written) to the quotidian actions of those pursuing politics and livelihoods that subvert the norms of mainstream global urbanism. It also highlights conceptual revolutions, referencing the ongoing challenge of reconceptualising urban theory from the South – not simply as a hemispheric location or geopolitical category but an epistemologi...
Review of New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times, by AM Simone and E Pieterse
Every now and again, the emperor must be disrobed. Disciplinary debates – shaped by the clothes of a thousand emperors past – become stale, and detached from the empiri- cal realities they purport to describe. Over the past two decades, AbdouMaliq Simone, among a number of poststructural scholars, has dutifully disrobed the field of urban studies, preparing the ground for a new vocabulary of urbanism that is better able to convey the dissonant realities of emerging city life in the Global South. Gone are the confident and well-worn concepts of ‘gentri- fication’, ‘entrepreneurship’, and ‘public space’. In their place stand an array of chal- lenging and often indeterminate notions, including those of ‘secretion’, ‘resonance’ and ‘re-description’, which reflect the unfold- ing paradoxes of urban life in the majority world.
This article may be individually cited under its original titles: Boucher, N., (2008). Dream to Ride Out the World . . . and Beyond: Movement, Travel and Dream in Occidental and Indigenous Ontologies. Across urban studies there is an increasing preoccupation with the forms of articulation that link a multiplicity of cities across a region often known as the ‘Global South’. How do cities such as Jakarta, São Paolo, Dakar, Lagos, Mumbai, Hanoi, Beirut, Dubai, Karachi, for example, take note of each other and engage in various transactions with each other in ways that are only weakly mediated by the currently predominant notions of urbanism? What might be the lines of connection and how do different cities recognize and experience the textures of their different histories and characters? Six urbanists are assembled here to write in conversation with each other as a way to embody possible collaborative lines of inquiring about these issues.
City, 2011
This paper engages the debate between assemblage thinking as an emerging body of critical urban theory and the desire to contain it within a framework of urban political economy. I take critical urban theory to mean the broad intellectual engagement with the ways in which cities and urban spaces are implicated in practices of power. Assemblage thinking moves outside a strict political economy framework and embodies different ontologies of power and place, yet this is not a shift away from criticality. Such thinking connects disparate threads of current urban theory as it opens new modes of multi-scalar and multidisciplinary research geared to urban design and planning practices and therefore to potentials for urban transformation. To contain emerging assemblage theory under political economy is to neuter it and potentially produce conservative forms of practice. The framework of urban political economy brings enormous explanatory power to our understanding of cities and will develop most effectively if it does not consume its offspring. Assembling Theories This paper is a response McFarlane's proposal of assemblage thinking as critical urban theory and the counter from Brenner, Madden and Wachsmuth. McFarlane (2011) sets out three primary contributions of assemblage theory to critical urban theory. In sum he suggests that it reconfigures the methods and scales at which we conduct empirical research on the city to incorporate thick description and the microscale; it extends the notion of agency to built form and materiality; and it reinvigorates the urban imaginary, connecting critique into potential action. The response by Brenner et al. (2011) seeks to value such an approach for its new insights and methods, incorporating these within a political economy framework while rejecting any alternate ontology. Deleuze once described his critiques of earlier philosophers (Spinoza, Bergson, Hume, Foucault) as a form of 'intellectual buggery'-approaching them from behind to produce intellectual offspring they had never intended (Massumi 1992: 2). With that warning I want to discuss one of the more interesting and cited theoretical papers of the past few years: 'Theorizing Sociospatial Relations' where Jessop, Brenner and Jones (2008) identify four key approaches to urban thinking-scale, territory, place and networkand argue for their integration into what they name the STPN framework. These are presented as overlapping and interconnecting bodies of theory that can benefit from the synergistic effects of an integrative framework. This is a fascinating prospect so far as it goes but it does not go much beyond a collection of pre-formed parts and some suggestive connections.
Wiley-ISTE , 2019
Alternative Takes to the City presents the mosaic of relations and socio-spatial conditions which compose the plurality of contemporary everyday space(s) in cities, offering "a view from below". It proposes a multidisciplinary and gendered approach to the (relational) spatialities and temporalities of the everyday, of new mobilities and of global and local networks which constitute urban life in contemporary cities. The book raises an empirically informed theoretical proposition which springs from the multiplicity of everyday experiences, as a laboratory for understanding recent socio-spatial, political and ideological transformations. Each chapter takes forward the theoretical argument based on one or more examples of concrete cities, in order to unveil the complexity and diversity of the urban condition in changing conjunctures, in which local practices connect and collide with global developments.
Contradictions in urban activism in the context of neoliberalization
My talk deals with the CONTEMPORARY developments that force us to rethink USMs and the theoretical approaches to make sense of them. For this, I suggest a contextualized analysis that explains USMs in the specific geo--political context of the evolving rule regime, the neoliberal project, and, since the crisis, its own adaptive reinvention, which places different parts of the urban movement sector into different strategic positions, and therefore frequently in contradiction with each other. So I will talk first, on --sites of putative regulatory "solutions" (where new policy prototypes are developed and experimented with, which, if effective, will travel around the world) --sites of contradictions, conflicts, and opposition to such projects/"solutions" -i.e. the stuff that SMs react to and get involved in, which I will talk about in the second part of the talk.
Towards a new epistemology of the urban
New forms of urbanization are unfolding around the world that challenge inherited conceptions of the urban as a fixed, bounded and universally generalizable settlement type. Meanwhile, debates on the urban question continue to proliferate and intensify within the social sciences, the planning and design disciplines, and in everyday political struggles. Against this background, this paper revisits the question of the epistemology of the urban: through what categories, methods and cartographies should urban life be understood? After surveying some of the major contemporary mainstream and critical responses to this question, we argue for a radical rethinking of inherited epistemological assumptions regarding the urban and urbanization. Building upon reflexive approaches to critical social theory and our own ongoing research on planetary urbanization, we present a new epistemology of the urban in a series of seven theses. This epistemological framework is intended to clarify the intellectual and political stakes of contemporary debates on the urban question and to offer an analytical basis for deciphering the rapidly changing geographies of urbanization and urban struggle under early 21st-century capitalism. Our arguments are intended to ignite and advance further debate on the epistemological foundations for critical urban theory and practice today.