Planetary urbanization: An urban theory for our time (original) (raw)
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In our engagement with Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid's thesis on planetary urbanization we argue that, while they have successfully marked some important limits of mainstream thinking on the urban, their privileging of epistemology cannot produce an urban theory for our time. Engaging in a symptomatic reading of their work, and with a focus on the implications of their limited mobilization of social ontology—or Lefebvre's ontology of the everyday—we ask what is occluded in planetary urbanization. In particular, we explore three areas of concern: the urban as the grounds for difference, centrality and the everyday; the omission of subjects of and occlusion of subjectivity; and the occlusion of a constitutive outside and its political capacities to remake the urban. The changing geographies and pace of urbanization over the past half century have been recasting urban theory, governance, and policy on a global stage. The second decade of the 21st-century is proving to be an especially momentous time for urban knowledge production in which the political stakes are enormously high, with the urban figuring as both cause and consequence of many contemporary planetary issues: the urban is both the instigator of and the solution to global climate change; it is the site of increasing inequality and the urbanization of poverty even as it is also a crucible for innovation and creativity; and it is ground zero for a new era of global governance. 1 Within this climate of different political possibilities for the urban, a number of competing, conflicting, and complementary geographical imaginaries have emerged to make sense of contemporary urbanization.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2018
This essay reflects on recent debates around planetary urbanization, many of which have been articulated through dismissive caricatures of the core epistemological orientations, conceptual proposals, methodological tactics, and substantive arguments that underpin this emergent approach to the urban question. Following consideration of some of the most prevalent mis-representations of this work within this special issue, I build upon Barnes and Sheppard's (2010) concept of " engaged pluralism " to suggest more productive possibilities for dialogue among critical urban researchers whose agendas are too often viewed as incommensurable or antagonistic rather than as interconnected and, potentially, allied. The essay concludes by outlining nine research questions whose more sustained exploration could more productively connect studies of planetary urbanization to several fruitful lines of inquiry that have been explored within postcolonial, feminist and queer-theoretical strands of urban studies. While questions of position-ality necessarily lie at the heart of any critical approach to urban theory and research, so too does the search for intellectual and political common ground that might help orient, animate and advance the shared, if constitutively heterodox, project(s) of critical urban studies.
Placing Planetary Urbanization in Other Fields of Vision
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2018
This is the introduction to a special issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space that stages feminist, queer, anti-racist, and decolonial engagements with the research framework known as "planetary urbanization." In the paper, the author's lay out the stakes of contemporary urban knowledge production and discuss the range of interventions collected as part of the special issue.
A new concept is animating debates on the urban question: planetary urbanization. What was only a few years ago no more than a preliminary hypothesis, significantly inspired by Henri ) conception of a worldwide 'urban revolution,' has now become a vibrant theoretical approach that is being applied across divergent terrains of urban research around the world. It is also provoking some intense, sometimes polemical debates on the appropriate conceptualization, methodology, site, scale and focal point for urban research today..
The constitutive outside of planetary urbanization: A post-foundational reading
www,nikolairoskamm.de, 2019
This text intervenes in the recent debate on planetary urbanization theory. It brings together a post-foundational reading of Henri Lefebvre's social theory with the spatially theoretical notion of a `constitutive outside´. Initially, I reconstructLefebvrès approach to totality (as a necessary reference point that never can be fully achieved) and show how it develops the planetary figure of total urbanization. Furthermore, I explore the nature of the constitutive outside that plays an important role not only in recent discussions on the planetary approach but is a key play on words in post-structuralist political theory. In my conclusion, I suggest considering the constitu-tive outside as an important area for further empirical urban research and as onto-theoretical core for a planetary urbanization approach in urban studies and planning theory.
City
Urbanophilia,' no less than 'urbanophobia,' can be found across the entire spectrum of ideological positions. Liberalism and more or less reformist Keynesian-inspired 'developmentalism' (desenvolvimentismo [Port.], desarrollismo [Span.]) have always glorified cities, to the point that the rate of urbanisation has been elevated to one of the main indicators of 'development.' However, critical social thought, especially in the Marxist context, has also been particularly 'urbanophilic.' It suffices to keep in mind the work of French neo-Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre, whose reflections of the 'right to the city' (Lefebvre 1991) and the thesis of a 'complete urbanisation of society' and the rise of an 'urban society' (Lefebvre 1983) became known worldwide.
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.