Urban Studies Introduction: Urban revolutions in Urban ......of global urbanism that take place in...

Special issue editorial: Urban revolutions in the age of global urbanism

Urban Studies2015, Vol. 52(11) 1947–1961� Urban Studies Journal Limited 2015Reprints and permissions:sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/0042098015590050usj.sagepub.com

Introduction: Urban revolutions inthe age of global urbanism

Eric SheppardUniversity of California at Los Angeles, USA

Vinay GidwaniUniversity of Minnesota, USA

Michael GoldmanUniversity of Minnesota, USA

Helga LeitnerUniversity of California at Los Angeles, USA

Ananya RoyUniversity of California at Berkeley, USA

Anant MaringantiHyderabad Urban Lab, India

AbstractThis 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. Revolutionsfrom above index the logics and norms of mainstream global urbanism, particularly the form theyhave taken as policymakers work with municipal officials worldwide to organise urban develop-ment around neoliberal norms. Revolutions from below refer to the multifaceted contestationsof global urbanism that take place in and around cities, ranging from urban street demonstrationsand 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 main-stream global urbanism. It also highlights conceptual revolutions, referencing the ongoing chal-lenge of reconceptualising urban theory from the South – not simply as a hemispheric location orgeopolitical category but an epistemological stance, staged from many different locations but

Corresponding author:

Eric Sheppard, Department of Geography, University of California and Berkeley, Bunche Hall, Los Angeles CA 90095, USA.

Email: [email protected]

by guest on July 21, 2015usj.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://usj.sagepub.com/

always fraught with the differentials of power and the weight of historical geographies. Drawingon the insights of scholars writing from, and not just about, such locations, a further iteration inthis ‘southern’ turn of urban theorising is proposed. This spatio-temporal conjunctural approachemphasises how the specificity of cities – their existence as entities that are at once singular anduniversal – emerges from spatio-temporal dynamics, connectivities and horizontal and verticalrelations. Practically, such scholarship entails taking the field seriously through collaborative workthat is multi-sited, engages people along the spectrum of academics and activists, and is presentedbefore and scrutinised by multiple publics.

Keywordsconjuncture, global, positionality, revolution, urbanism

Received April 2015; accepted May 2015

Introduction

It has become commonplace to observe thatthe 21st century is an urban century. With theurbanisation of the Global South, it seemsthat the globe is completing what Lefebvre(2003[1970]) dubbed the ‘urban revolution’and Brenner and Schmid (2012) call ‘planetaryurbanization’: the urbanisation of everything,everywhere. Indeed, from their beginnings cit-ies have been bound up with revolutions, largeand small, fast and slow. The emergence ofcities as a novel form of settlement (in whatwe now call the Middle East, Asia and LatinAmerica); the rapid urbanisation of

industrialising, capitalist Europe (and subse-quently North America) during the 19th andearly 20th centuries; the unprecedented rapidurbanisation of the postcolonial world duringthe last three decades: each of these simultane-ously reflected and reinforced revolutionarysocietal change. In the process, cities becameexperimental spaces for top-down initiativesof societal engineering and transformation, oflocal and global resonance – but also keyspaces for grass-roots contestations and alter-native visions seeking to transcend dominantgovernance regimes (Figure 1).1

This special issue takes up these interre-lated vectors of societal revolutions fromabove and below, but also explores thepotential of a conceptual revolution in urbantheory, one that challenges the presumptionthat urban theories and policies, developedsince the 20th century in the North Atlanticregion, suffice for making sense of the urbanand improving urban living everywhere.

Revolutions from above index the logicsand norms of mainstream global urbanism.This mode of urbanism ‘explicitly or impli-citly relies on cities in North America andWestern Europe as the norm. It bears theimprint of previous rounds of dominationand capital accumulation, when Europeancolonial authorities sought to remake Asian,African, and Latin American cities along the

Figure 1. Students occupy Indonesia’s ParliamentBuilding, demanding the end of Suharto’s rule,Jakarta, May 1998.Source: By permission of the photographer Eddy Hasbi.

1948 Urban Studies 52(11)



lines of emergent principles of the Europeanurban planning’ (Sheppard et al., 2013: 894).During the last three decades, this teleologi-cal imaginary has come to be dominated byneoliberalisation, emphasising market-ledsolutions to problems faced by capitalist cit-ies, with inter-urban competitiveness becom-ing the key to economic growth andprosperity. The conjuncture of urban elites’desires to live in global cities modelled in theimage of London, New York or evenSingapore, with supra-national institutions’promotion and propagation of global urbannorms and city governments’ facilitation offast policy transfer, has intensified this nor-malising vector.

Revolutions from below refer to the multi-faceted contestations of global urbanism thattake place in and around cities. The mostvisible of these are actions subverting urbanspaces for subaltern purposes, transformingthem into venues for popular unrest, resis-tance and revolution. Again, these havetaken different forms, with both local andglobal aspects. The moment when we con-ceived this special issue was one of spectacu-lar revolutions. The initial conflagrationswere in postcolonial societies: the 2011 socialmobilisations across the Middle East andNorth Africa threatening autocratic regimesand demanding political change. In a dustytown close to Tunis, young MohammedBouazizi, trying to survive as an informalvendor, had his unlicensed vegetable cartconfiscated. Such tense confrontations hap-pen daily in metropolises where ‘informal’merchants risk dispossession as governmentsexperiment with strategies to valorise ele-ments of urban street life, but his responsehad global consequences. Immolating him-self in protest, he ignited the imagination ofthousands belonging to what Elyachar(2005: 27) has called the ‘generation of struc-tural adjustment’. Triggered by the diffusionof this urban revolution to Egypt, Yemen,Bahrain and Libya, related social

movements emerged in many cities.Throughout 2011 and 2012, urban space wasbeing transformed into sites of revolt in citiesas diverse as Mumbai, Durban, Manila,Madrid and Tel Aviv, and the ‘Occupy WallStreet’ phenomenon spread from New Yorkto cities worldwide. While we do not suggestthat these varied protests were all part of asingular global process, we read these con-testations as responding, in diverse anddivergent ways, to the urban confrontationsand humiliations triggered by neoliberal glo-bal urbanism: forced evictions, disposses-sions and housing demolitions, among manyothers. They also were bound up with alarger critique of corporations and the globalfinancial system, both as driving forcesbehind these humiliations and more gener-ally as undermining democratic urban gov-ernance. Whether or not globalisingcapitalism was the immediate object of pro-test, these revolutions were directed againstthe vectors of power put in place throughglobalising capitalism and the state.

Revolutions from below also include manyless visible and localised events: the quotidianactions of those finding ways to live that sub-vert norms of global urbanism. In citiesacross the globe, unions of informal workers,federations of shack dwellers and poor peo-ple’s movements directly challenge globalurbanism and its exclusions. Various scholarshave conceptualised revolutions from below,as acts of ‘insurgent citizenship’ (Holston,2008), as forms of ‘occupancy urbanism’(Benjamin, 2008) or as the often unseen andunrecorded ‘street politics’ (Bayat, 2009) thatclaim and transform space.

Conceptual revolutions refer, here, to thechallenge of reconceptualising urban theoryfrom the South – by now an active area ofurban research (Edensor and Jayne, 2012;Parnell and Oldfield, 2014). In his importantintervention Provincializing Europe:Postcolonial Thought and HistoricalDifference, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000: 8–9)

Sheppard et al. 1949



notes that European historicist thought hasoften consigned non-Western nations to the‘waiting room of history’: ‘we were allheaded for the same destination . but somepeople were to arrive earlier than others’. Soit is, perhaps, with the discipline of urbanstudies, where the mantle of urban moder-nity too often has been denied cities in theGlobal South. Thus Robinson (2002) notesa persistent division within urban studiesbetween the study of ‘global cities’ (repre-sented as command and control nodes of theglobal economy) and of ‘megacities’ (repre-sented as concentrations of underdevelop-ment). Focusing on global cities obscuresthe ‘differential and dynamic developmentalpathways’ (Olds and Yeung, 2004: 489)through which cities come into being.Emphasising megacities as a ‘planet ofslums’ (Davis, 2006) similarly obscures howthese cities are also complex and contestedformations of urban modernity: places of‘inventions and interventions’ (Robinson,2006a).

Recalling that cities were invented withinwhat we now call the Global South shouldremind us how problematic it is to reduceurbanisation to a European transformationthat then diffused across the world (the rev-olution from above imaginary). FollowingLeitner et al. (2007) and Sheppard et al.(2013), we take seriously the notion that theimagining of alternative urban futures restsat least partly upon new and transformedunderstandings of the urban condition.Rendering the familiar as strange is thus animportant challenge in the age of globalurbanism.

The papers in this special issue originallywere presented at the Urban StudiesFoundation-funded Urban Revolutions in theAge of Global Urbanism conference inJakarta, March 2012. The participants andthemes of this conference reflected a longergenealogy. They were an outgrowth of con-versations among a network of urban

scholars, from different parts of the globe,participating in a series of conferences andworkshops that we were involved in co-con-vening: Inter-referencing Asia: UrbanExperiments and the Art of Being Global(Dubai, 2008), The Making of Global Cities(Minneapolis, 2008), Making Global Citiesand the Global Economic Crisis (Shenzhen,2010) and Provincializing Global Urbanism(Asolimar, CA/Philadelphia, PA, 2011 2 aSocial Science Research Council-sponsoredDoctoral Pre-Dissertation FellowshipWorkshop).

In the spirit of provincialising globalurbanism, we conceived of this network-in-making as a means for bringing togetherscholars (university faculty, researchers, acti-vists, graduate students) studying and writ-ing from cities located in the Global South/post-colony, not just North Atlantic scho-lars writing about such places. Inevitably,this is a particular network involving a smallminority of such scholars and activists,shaped by our personal connections, partici-pants’ ability to communicate in Englishand their availability. We deliberately uti-lised postcolonial cities as venues, wageringthat visiting participants’ direct experienceof these places would trigger different kindsof engagements with urban theory. Weworked with local organisers, encountereddifferent cultures of conference organising,and created opportunities for local scholars(particularly students) to participate.Seeking to remain acutely aware of how thegeographies and hierarchies of our network-in-making shape knowledge production andits politics, this has been an effort to re-conceptualise urban theory. The GlobalSouth, or the post-colony,2 become not sim-ply a hemispheric location or geopoliticalcategory but rather an epistemologicalstance, one that can be staged from manydifferent locations, but always fraught withthe differentials of power and the weight ofhistorical geographies.




An age of multiple globalurbanisms?

Although nurtured by longer conversations,this collaborative project was born in 2011,

in the midst of what seemed to be a time of

revolution. Across the Middle East and

North Africa, social mobilisations were

threatening autocratic regimes and demand-

ing political change. By the following year,

austerity protests and movements of dissent

were flourishing in the North Atlantic, from

‘Occupy New York’ to the Indignados in

Spain. Social and political transformations

were underway in the streets of cities around

the world; we were interested in how study-

ing and conceptualising such processes could

enact transformations of research and the-

ory within urban studies. As Allegra et al.

(2013: 1675) argue, such ‘contentious times’

are an opportunity to ‘rethink cities’: ‘to

develop a critical approach based on the

observation of the nexus between an event

(a punctual expression of dissent) and a site

(the urban environment in which the former

takes place)’. Jakarta provided just such a

site. Jakarta, where a violent 1998 uprising

was organised against the authoritarian

regime of Suharto and its close alliances with

transnational capital and the IMF’s structural

adjustment policies (Figure 1), represents the

prehistory of today’s Cairo or Tunis. Meeting

here thus pushed us to situate our rethinking

of cities within a longer, complex history –

not only of global capital and its circuits, but

also of revolutions from below (from the aus-

terity riots of Buenos Aires to the people’s

power revolution of Manila).From Jakarta, we convened a set of dia-

logues connecting various locations in theGlobal South – Brazil, India, South Africa,Singapore, Egypt and China. These South–South dialogues were not meant to projectthe Global South as a coherent geographyand singular history. Rather, followingSimone (2010: 10), we think of the South as

an ‘invented latitude’, one that makes usattentive to ‘shared colonial histories, devel-opment strategies, trade circuits, regionalintegration, common challenges, investmentflows, and geopolitical articulation’. Suchlatitudinal analysis allows us to rethinkEuroAmerican urban theory, and provideswhat we hope are some novel insights intourbanism and urban politics. This is anexample of what Vanessa Watson (2009), inthe pages of this journal, has described asthe charge of ‘seeing from the South’. It isalso the work of what, again in this journal,Steve Pile (2006: 306) has described as ‘pro-vincializing the West’. Following Pile, we re-envision Western cities as a ‘strange case’ inan age of global urbanism.

Today, as a renewed military dictatorshipconsolidates its iron grip in Egypt, the opti-mism about ‘networks of outrage and hope’(Castells, 2012) may have to be reconsidered.Nevertheless, as Nezar AlSayyad and MunaGuvenc (2013: 1) argue in their essay in thisvolume, that riveting moment makes possi-ble new analysis of ‘the geography of urbanuprising’. Focusing on Tunisia, Egypt andYemen, they argue that this geography mustbe understood not only as physical space butalso as virtual space. Virtual practices, theynote, are the ‘new types of performances’ (p.11) at work in social movements, expandingthe ‘old repertoire . based on street demon-strations, vigils, rallies and public meetings’.But AlSayyad and Guvenc (p. 3) also remindus that the so-called Arab Spring was pre-ceded by ‘five decades’ of ‘other social pro-tests’, especially struggles of the labourmovement. Relatedly, in a paper originallypresented at the Jakarta conference, SalwaIsmail (2013) challenges dominant narrativesof the Arab Spring by foregrounding ‘thepolitics of the urban everyday’. She drawsour attention to the ‘infrastructures of oppo-sitional action’ that were developed in thepopular quarters of Cairo, where informallivelihood is widespread and distinctive




modes of community organisation werehoned in the context of a prolonged era ofstructural adjustment and political violence.Her work is a call to rethink urban politicsand its imagined figure of the ‘oppositionalsubject’ (Ismail, 2014: 271).

We see this task of reconceptualising theoppositional subject of urban politics asimportant and urgent. Writing against thecontinued fetishisation of the ‘male indus-trial worker as the revolutionary subject’,Richard Pithouse (2012: 486) foregroundsthe ‘urban poor living outside of wagedemployment, be it in the ghetto or the shacksettlement’. This, he emphasises, is not aromanticisation of the emancipatory poten-tial of such oppositional politics. He showshow, in contemporary South Africa, theshack settlement has been the site of move-ments such as the Landless People’sMovement and the Unemployed People’sMovement, but also of violent ‘xenophobicpogroms’ (Pithouse, 2012: 485). Note howPithouse conceptualises the significance ofthe shack settlement for a rethinking of citiesand urban politics:

This is not because of any ontological differ-ence amongst the people living there, orbecause life there is entirely other at the levelof day-to-day sociality. It is because it is a sitethat is not fully inscribed within the laws andrules through which the state governs society.Because its meaning is not entirely fixed it isan unstable element of the situation. Theunfixed way in which the shack settlement isindexed to the situation opens opportunity fora variety of challenges – from above and frombelow, democratic and authoritarian, in thename of the political and tradition, and fromthe left and the right – to the official order ofthings. (Pithouse, 2012: 486)

The relationship between the urban every-day, oppositional politics, and social andpolitical transformation is also evident in theessay in this volume by Teresa Caldeira andJames Holston. Their concern is with

‘participatory urban planning’ as a ‘newvision for ordering urban space’ and a newmode of ‘governing the city’ in Brazil (2014:2). With a focus on the master planning pro-cess in Sao Paulo, they examine how urbanpolicy has become a space to ‘counterentrenched social inequalities’ (p. 2). Suchurban policy came into being, they note,because of the ‘insurgent movements’ of theworking classes across Brazilian cities.Urban residents ‘built these cities physicallybrick by brick and also socially by organis-ing into insurgent movements to fight forhousing, property, infrastructure and ser-vices; to fight, in other words, for the rightto the cities they were making’ (p. 2). Theybecame urban citizens and in doing so trans-formed the very terms of democratic citizen-ship in Brazil.

Caldeira and Holston situate the emer-gence of participatory urban planning inBrazil at a distinctive historical conjuncture:the entanglement of democratisation andneoliberalisation in the late 1980s. Seeingthese as ‘coincident and contradictory’ proj-ects (p. 4), they analyse both the context andlimits of insurgent urban citizenship. Here,as in Egypt and South Africa, it is necessaryto hold in simultaneous view revolutionsfrom above and revolutions from below. Thecontemporary revolution from above, asHall et al. (2013: 5) note in the Kilburn man-ifesto, entails a ‘restructuring of state andsociety along market lines’ and ‘the redistri-bution from poor to rich’. Yet, as they alsonote, ‘neoliberalism never conquered every-thing’ (Hall et al., 2013: 6). It is in this spiritthat we pay attention to the revolutions frombelow.

Yet, even as revolutions from below offervitally important disruptions of the order ofglobal urbanism, that order requires contin-ued analysis. In their essay in this volume,George Lin et al. (2014) investigate rapidcontemporary urban development in Chinaas a revolution from above is not reducible




to neoliberalisation. Examining the commo-dification of urban land, they argue that thecentral-local reshuffling of state power isvital. Local governments are crafting landmarkets – the leasing and transfer of land userights – in order to create sources of munici-pal revenue. In making the role of the statecentral to this urban revolution, they invite usto conceptualise its role as much more com-plex and varied than the land grabs that havedominated the urban studies literature. Lin etal. (p. 3) argue that Chinese urbanisation is ’aparticular variety of neoliberalism in whichincreased marketization and commodificationof land-based resources have taken place, notto undermine state power capacity but ratherto function as a means for local governmentsto contest the rescaling of state power’.

It should be obvious by now that we arearguing that the analytical theme of ‘urbanrevolutions’ not only makes possible arethinking of the relationship between pro-test and urban space but also that of thebroader question of global urbanism. This isthe conceptual revolution we have in mind.It is interesting then to read Lin et al.’s essayon neoliberal urbanism in China alongsidethat by Tim Bunnell in this volume. As Linet al. reframe the analysis of neoliberalisa-tion, so Bunnell (2013: 8) calls for urban stud-ies to move beyond ‘EuroAmerica-centredantecedence and neoliberalisation fromabove’. Studying how cities in Asia referenceone another, Bunnell argues that the effects ofsuch inter-referencing cannot be reduced to aneoliberalism on the move. Instead, as in thecase of Brazil, neoliberal city-making is deeplyentangled with developmental states.Bunnell’s (p. 11) call for a conceptual shift iscompelling: ‘Recognition of extended historiesand alternative genealogies is another way inwhich to think about urban policy models asmore-than-neoliberal or, indeed, as not neces-sarily neoliberal at all’.

Such a shift, we believe, also makes possi-ble a transnational understanding of

urbanism and urban politics in the GlobalNorth, as is the case with the essay in thisvolume by Nik Theodore (2014). Tracingthe ‘continental travels’ of the methodologyof popular education, Theodore (p. 1) showshow strategies of organising in the GlobalSouth are being deployed and adapted toorganise immigrant day labourers in US cit-ies. In the process, seemingly ‘unorganisable’contingent workers become oppositionalsubjects, producing transnational repertoiresof political practice. A similar story unfoldsin the essay by Biju Mathew (2014) in thisvolume. Studying labour organising strate-gies in the taxi industry in New York,Mathew (pp. 5, 15) shows how a ‘predomi-nantly Third-World immigrant workforce’,implicated in precarious relationships ofindependent contractorship, has developedcategories, concepts and practices of mobili-sation that depart from the ‘collective bar-gaining contract’. Like Theodore, Mathew(p. 15) emphasises how ‘shared histories ofpolitical struggles and material living condi-tions’ extending to the Global South(Mathew’s phrase is ‘Third World’) makespossible such organising frameworks. Atstake, here, is an understanding not only ofnew conditions of contingent work and newpractices of politicisation but also of globalurbanism itself. As Theodore (pp. 14–15)notes, the ‘global visions’ emanating from‘sites of popular resistance’ are quite differ-ent from the global travels of ‘tried andtested models’. They are ‘a relational geogra-phy of social-movement activism’. Theyrequire, in our opinion, a relational under-standing of such global processes.

In calling for a conceptual revolution, weare keenly attuned to how difficult it is toforge relational geographies of knowledgeproduction. As we draw inspiration fromthe transnational worlds of social move-ments, so we acknowledge the stubbornboundaries and hierarchies of the global uni-versity. Thus, in her essay in this volume,




Sophie Oldfield (2014: 1) poses the challengeof urban research and theory that is pro-duced with activists in ‘multiple sites in andbeyond the academy’. If we are to stage aconceptual revolution in urban studies,exploring such relational knowledge prac-tices seems important and urgent. These alli-ances are not easy to create and maintain –‘not utopian, nor easy’ is how Oldfield (p.12) puts it. But they are necessary, sheargues, if we are to generate new ways oftheorising the ‘urban as political terrain’:‘multifaceted and scaled, these practicestrouble universal or singular stories of urbanrevolution and its politics that too easilydominate the theoretical and analytical reg-isters of social movement and urban politicalscholarship’ (Oldfield, 2014: 12). Indeed, tocall into question the universals of globalurbanism requires ongoing work in urbanstudies. We follow Carlos Vainer, also avaluable participant in the Jakarta confer-ence (2014: 53), in noting that such workcannot simply replace ‘a Eurocentric, mono-topic epistemology by another one 2 a glo-bal southern one 2 also mono-topic innature, though centred instead in LatinAmerica or elsewhere in the periphery’.Instead, we endorse his call for ‘new decolo-nizing perspectives’ that are ‘anchored,located, rooted, and engaged’, and acknowl-edge ‘that all knowledge inexorably has alocation, and, consequently, is not universal’.This is the foundation for destabilising thetaken-for-grantedness of northern theory.

New iterations of urbantheorising: Toward a spatio-temporal conjunctural approach

As Johannes Fabian (1983) and several post-colonial scholars since have demonstrated, acognitive revolution in the thinking of timebegan in the 17th century, as ‘Europe’ gra-dually formed its self-image as the geopoliti-cal and epistemic centre of what it perceived

to be the ‘first’ world-system (Dussel, 1999).These discursive moves presented geographi-cally disparate societies and people as tem-porally backward. This ideological ruse,which the philosopher Charles Taylor (2001)labels ‘a cultural theory of modernity’, saw aparticular ‘European’ experience with atten-dant ideas, institutions and ideals displaced,via colonialism and its afterlives, into theuniversal – the Truth of history, as it were –that beckoned Europe’s Others, the non-West. In Europe’s newly ascendant temporaland geographical imagination, geographicplacement was transformed into temporallocation, reframing difference as deficiencyrather than empirical diversity. With Europenow firmly installed in the present, its con-ceptual sentinels of ‘culture’ and ‘reason’were put in service to mark what is lackingin the non-West. This confirmed the non-West’s present as Europe’s past, whenEurope was still in the process of maturing.The implication, now copiously documen-ted, was that Europe’s stewardship becameindispensable for the non-West to mature asEurope had, giving fillip to a series of spur-ious (if not outright racist) templates, fromsocial Darwinism and cultural evolutionismto modernisation theory and development.No object of knowledge escaped this strait-jacket of history and geography, now tabu-lated as stages of growth. Within theemergent field of urban planning, cities inthe non-West were rendered as inferior anddecidedly degenerate by comparison withcities in the West, themselves now anointedas the regulative ideals worthy of emulation.

There were dissident voices, of course,arguing that cities in the non-West were dif-ferent, rather than simply upstream in a civi-lisational flow of time toward Europe as itstelos. Radhakamal Mukerjee’s innovativeforays on rural and urban habitations inIndia (1940, 1951) are paradigmatic. His‘cultural and processual approach softenedthe geographical and climatic determinism’




of thinkers such as Friedrich Ratzel,Frederic Le Play and Edmond Desmolins bybringing them into engagement ‘with adetailed application of ecological thinking toIndia (and Asia more broadly) from theIndian point of view’ (Celarent, 2013: 1736–1737). Subsequent interactions with theScottish sociologist and city planner, PatrickGeddes (who was to become the first profes-sor of sociology at University of Bombay in1917), added new layers to Mukerjee’shuman ecological approach. The so-calledManchester School of Anthropology, underthe founding supervision of Max Gluckman,was another example. As Richard Werbner(1984), Bruce Kapferer (1987) and JenniferRobinson (2006b) have shown, among oth-ers, this Manchester School sought to under-stand social problems in British CentralAfrica as products of colonialism, disruptingthe ruling temporal dichotomy of ‘tradi-tional tribal’ versus ‘modern industrial’forms of livelihood. They demonstrated thatmigrants and labourers in African cities werecreative agents, drawing on behaviours andresources from both systems to meet thedemands of the specific social situations theyencountered. The Manchester School’s keenempirical research thus revealed African cit-ies as ‘spheres of articulation’ rather thanoccupants of a readily apparent stage oftransition. Ultimately, though, Mukerjee’senvironmentalism and the ManchesterSchool’s structural-functionalism both fellprey, for different reasons, to equilibriumframeworks that fail to give adequateaccount of the social reproductive and trans-formational dynamics of cities. This had theunintended yet ironic effect of reinforcingthe hegemony of a temporal scheme inwhich Europe retained its vanguard status.

We recognise such early, albeit proble-matic, efforts to carve out ‘new geographiesof theory’ (Roy, 2009) for understandinghow cities work as important precedents forcontemporary efforts to craft a southern

turn in urban theory. In many respects, thiswas a project of social anthropology, geogra-phy and sociology that sought fidelity to theempirical particulars of place. By showinghow these particulars problematise the uni-versal prognostications of northern urbantheory, this project did stalwart work inunsettling Europe’s pieties.

Over the past decade, a new iteration oftheorising has sought to ‘provincialise’northern urban theory from the perspectiveof the South. This has involved demonstrat-ing that modernisation never quite operatedin the teleological manner proposed bynorthern theory. It also shows how, onceEurope is ‘provincialised’ and its modernityceases to be understood as telos, ‘the ques-tion of rank is de-developmentalised, andthe stark status differentiations of the globalsocial system sit raw and naked, no longersoftened by the promises of the ‘‘not yet’’’(Ferguson, 2006: 186). In her influentialsalvo at northern urban theory, Robinsonacknowledges the contributions of theManchester School; for its proponents ‘therewas not a progressive dichotomy betweentribalism and urban modernity . Rather,tribalism and urbanism each shaped andreinvigorated and, in some very practicaleconomic as well as personal ways, dependedon the other’ (2006b: 49). Their contribu-tions to urban theory, she argues, lay in their‘sense of city life as mobile, diverse, activelyassociational and concerned with makingpersonal connections that reflect dynamicways of living in cities’ (Robinson, 2006b:52). This emergent complexity of urban lifealso is captured in AbdouMaliq Simone’sinvocation of concepts such as ‘people-as-infrastructure’ and ‘cityness’. Such commit-ment to the generation of mid-level conceptsalso is witnessed in Roy’s (2005) renovationof the term ‘urban informality’. These mustbe read as efforts to reverse the historicalgradient of power-knowledge, whereby themetropolitan North produces ‘theory’ for




which the peripheral South supplies‘empirics’ that re-animate this theory’s value.In sum, this iteration of southern theoryseeks to de-colonise – and in so doing pro-vincialise – the universals of northern urbantheory (cf. Sheppard et al., 2013). It oftengoes the extra step of trying to produce aconstellation of alternative universals (cf.Comaroff and Comaroff, 2011), asking:Why not understand cities in the Northusing concepts fabricated in and for theSouth?

While obviously sympathetic to thesemoves, we use this collection as the occasionto continue the work of crafting urban the-ory, prompted by the ‘moment of revolu-tions’. The task at hand is not simply morenuanced and finer-grained urban historicalgeographies. In her declarative introductorychapter to the influential edited collection,Geography Matters! A Reader, Massey(1984) lists four key tasks that confront geo-graphical investigations of cities, as places:(1) the theoretical problem of analysing theunique, since geography studies variation;(2) grasping the generality of events and thewider underlying processes without losingsight of the individuality of their form ofoccurrence; (3) the dialectical intertwining ofthe particular and the universal; and (4)explaining uniqueness without effacing inter-dependence, and vice versa. Massey’s injunc-tions admirably sum up the challenges forsouthern theory. To avoid the dead-end ofreplacing, as Vainer (2014) says, one monolithicepistemology (northern urban theory) withanother (southern urban theory), we advocatefor a new iteration of urban theorising.

Seeking to move beyond a North–Southdualism, we argue that urban theory must gobeyond the city as unit of analysis, to under-stand how what happens ‘in’ cities is shapedby broader processes (Brenner and Schmid,2015; Sheppard et al., 2013). These processesare spatio-temporal and are expressedthrough multiple spatialities. In terms of

spatialities, it is important to acknowledgehow multiscalar processes condense in par-ticular places, in particular ways. But it alsois vital to pay attention of the uneven con-nectivities that long have characterised glo-balising capitalism: How the conditions ofpossibility faced by, and the nature of, citiesreflects (too often reinforcing) their unequaland unevenly empowered positionality withrespect to the global system (Amin, 2002;Sheppard, 2002). Avoiding the temptationsof ‘methodological cityism’ (Brenner andSchmid, 2015) also means attending to howintra-urban heterogeneity and inequalityreflects unequal ways in which the inhabi-tants of places are connected across spaceand scale (Massey, 2005, 2007). In terms oftemporality, we emphasise how contempo-rary differences and inequalities reflect the(to date) ineradicable after-effects of coloni-alism (and its supplementary logics: e.g. slav-ery, orientalism and racism). But is it alsovital to attend to shorter-term dynamics –the ways in which processes come togetheraround cities with particular force, anduneven impact, during particular momentssuch as those of economic and political cri-sis. In this view, cities are social formationsstitched together by the threads of ‘contin-gent necessity’ (Gidwani, 2008): a spatio-temporal conjunctural approach to theoris-ing cities. One of the motivations for explor-ing the analytic leverage of this approach isprecisely that it affords a way to think aboutthe composition (and re-composition) offorces and elements – local and trans-local,and of different temporal provenances – thatenter into the making of cities and urbanrevolutions.

Whereas Scott and Storper (2015) empha-sise a universal intra-urban process (agglom-eration), and Peck (2014) presents universal(northern) political economic theory as con-fronted by particularistic southern postcolo-nial alternatives, we find ourselves closer toBrenner and Schmid (2015: 164): ‘all




engagements with urban theory, whetherEuro-American, postcolonial or otherwise,are in some sense ‘‘provincial’’, or contextual,because they are mediated through concreteexperiences of time and space within particu-lar places’. Yet this conjunctural approach isnot reducible to the uneven geographicalurbanising imprint of globalising capitalism,modified by context; it takes seriously more-than-capitalist processes: those of colonial-ism, racialisation, gendering, etc. These arepresences that mark capitalism’s edges andfailures to deliver, as well as potential sourcesfor disrupting capitalism from below.

Such spatio-temporal conjunctures mighthave included the collision of colonial lawsgoverning business and commerce with cus-tomary local economic practices (e.g. Bayly,1988; Birla, 2008); disease and epidemicsconfronted with early 20th-century projectsof urban hygiene and social reform (e.g.Geddes, 1915; Goubert, 1989; Joyce, 2003;Reid, 1993; Sharan, 2014); Ford Foundationsponsored Master Plans for cities such asNew Delhi in the 1960s (Sundaram, 2011);urban uprisings and revolutions of the kindspreviously noted; and, most recently, theglobal financial crisis and the rush to ‘specu-lative urbanism’ (Goldman, 2011).

Spatio-temporal conjunctural thinkingemphasises how the specificity of cities –their existence as entities that are at once sin-gular and universal – emerges from spatio-temporal dynamics, connectivities and rela-tions, both horizontal and vertical. This iswhy thinking from Jakarta and its historicalgeographies proved an important way for usto conceptualise the urban revolutions of2011.

The financial–urban conjuncture

To illustrate this approach, we highlightthemes emerging from the conjuncture of thenew regime of finance and its crises with newforms of urbanisation and mass revolt – the

moment of the Jakarta conference. Behindthe spectacular revolutions of 2011 are pre-histories of structural adjustment, financiali-sation and dissent. Two recent conjuncturesare particularly relevant: The 1997 Asianfinancial crisis and the 2008 Wall Street/Cityof London global economic crisis.

Leading up to the 1997 Asian financialcrisis, as rapid entries and exits destabilisedcurrency and property markets, urban policyencouraged speculative capitalism as thebasis for the urban economy. A surge of netprivate capital flows (more than US$90 bil-lion) into short-term speculative investmentsin South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia,Thailand and the Philippines in 1996 (Mah-Hui and Chin, 2010) reversed just a yearlater; private capital fled the scene of thecrime, with a net turnaround of more thanUS$105 billion. Across the region, property,stock and currency markets collapsed. Foodshortages triggered food riots, job cuts ledto union mobilisations, and the streets of theregion’s major cities were jammed with pro-test. The IMF stepped in with demands ofpublic- (but not private-) sector austerity,triggering sharp cutbacks in access to publicservices and goods and more protests. Themore actively involved the IMF became, themore the ‘Asian contagion’ spread, withpushback from populations also in China,Russia, Argentina and Brazil, whose govern-ments had experimented with deregulatedfinancialisation and were sucked into thewidening crisis. Indonesia was perhaps worsthit. By May 1998, after his seventh election,Suharto confronted widespread protests.When troops fired into a university crowd inJakarta, killing six students, the streetsexploded and Suharto was forced to resign.Soon thereafter, South Korean cities alsowere brought to a standstill by a nationwideunion-organised strike.

By contrast, throughout much of Africabanks were neither allowed to experimentwith risky financial tools, nor able to




wantonly lend far more than their holdings;the Asian tsunami barely touched Africa’scities. Yet by the time currencies rebounded,with countries such as Malaysia reinstatingmore stringent regulations on the ebb andflow of global finance capital, new specula-tive instruments of finance and new forms ofderegulation of finance capital were clearinga path to Western Europe and the USA, andeventually to African sites for land specula-tion and more. Emboldened and left undisci-plined, global financial firms consolidatedpower through large-scale investments intourban real estate, stock markets and localcurrencies, increasing their investments whiledramatically shortening their commitmentsto stay invested.

Uneven circuits of finance were carvedout by the 2000s, based on highly differen-tiated government strategies that articulatedwith domestic politics, opening up new fieldsof possibilities. Many SE Asian countries,for example, passed legal and bankingreforms to improve financial regulation andsupervision, reduce debt, and increase sav-ings throughout the economy down to thehousehold scale. Governments limited short-term investment practices, directing nationalbanks to shift funds from speculative intothe (longer term) productive side of theeconomy.

This shift, combined with urban-basedsocial programmes focused on public hous-ing, underwrote a recovery particularly insuch cities as Bangkok, Seoul, Kuala Lumpurand Jakarta, which are both national capitalsand pivotal sites for industrial production.

By 2008 a global financial crisis had bro-ken out, centred this time in the heartland ofglobal finance capitalism. Again, this crisiswas uneven in its geographical impact; placesbadly hit by the 1998 crisis, such as Jakarta,were left relatively unscathed after 2008.

Reflecting upon both financial crises asconjunctural moments, it is possible to iden-tify how these shape particular cities in

differentiated and interconnected ways. Forexample, even as urban protests catalysed bythese crises created obstacles for capitalaccumulation in some cities (e.g. Jakartaand Seoul after 1998, Cairo and Tunis after2008), a disturbing politics of ‘asset hunting’entailed inter-urban flows of finance capitalinto urban land speculation elsewhere (e.g.Madrid and Chicago after 1998, Istanbuland Bangalore after 2008). Such urban landspeculation, converting urban commons andrural peripheries into urban real estateassets, has triggered rapid wealth accumula-tion by elite minorities, even as urban majo-rities face a loss of affordable housing insome cities, and mass displacement in oth-ers. The dialectics of urban revolution andspeculative urbanism thus have unpredict-able, volatile and life-altering implicationsfor urban residents. With cities shaping andshaped by spatio-temporal conjunctures, inways that cannot be reduced to prototypicalNorth–South or ‘global-city’ metrics, asobering reality comes into view that shouldwean urban theorists away from universaland developmentalist accounts of urbanchange.

The aspiration for collaboration

As we have already outlined, this collectionemerges from a network-in-making. Of glo-bal scope, connecting very different places,unequally resourced institutions and dis-tinctly positioned researchers, such anetwork-in-making manifests the veryuneven geographies that we seek to analysethrough networked research.

For example, logistically, assembling theresources to convene a global network inplace for several days – for face-to-face inter-actions necessary for rich engagement – itselfis difficult. The Urban Studies Foundation isunusual in its willingness to support thiskind of interaction: state funding agencieslean strongly to supporting national-scale




research (or national participants in interna-tional networks), and large foundations havetheir own agendas, positioned from the usu-ally wealthy countries where they haveaccrued their wealth. Otherwise, we havehad to rely on smaller grants and in-kindcontributions from participating universities.

The face-to-face conversations can alsobe fraught, seeking to cut across very differ-ent theory and academic cultures, with dif-ferently empowered participants within andbetween these cultures (including the powerto access and provide the financial resourcesfor convening scholars), and running upagainst the constraints of language. Bothimplementing a lingua franca (usuallyEnglish) and simultaneous translation havedistinct disadvantages (cf. Belina, 2005;Rodriguez-Pose, 2004; Timar, 2004; Vaiou,2004). Mutually respectful disagreement isessential, and conflicts can be productive,but might also be disabling, particularly asdifferent theory cultures rub up against eachother to generate friction.

We recognise that the spatio-temporalconjunctural approach advocated for aboverequires access to far-reaching knowledgeand perspectives. As such, it can only bepursued dynamically through collaborativework that is multi-sited, engaging peoplealong the spectrum of academics and acti-vists, and is presented before and scrutinisedby multiple publics. For this to work, urbanscholars have to both realise and interrogatethe aspiration for collaboration. We hopethat such an aspiration becomes an openconceptual space, one that can inhabit andeven transform the uneven geographieswithin which it is necessarily embedded.This too might be a revolution of sorts.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from anyfunding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. Our use of ‘revolution’ is deliberately expan-sionary – going beyond the Marxian sense of‘Overthrow of an established government orsocial order by those previously subject to it’to embrace ‘Alteration, change; upheaval;reversal of fortune’ more generally (OxfordEnglish Dictionary: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/164970?rskey=275jyn&resul-t=1#eid, accessed 12 May 2015). Even withrespect to the former definition, we argue thatthe events triggering such revolutions are gen-erally unpredictable, often rooted in grass-

roots practices overlooked by authoritiesprior to, for example, the Arab Spring. Thusstudies of such revolutions from below shouldinclude attention to ‘‘‘non-movements’’– thenon-deliberate and dispersed but contentiouspolitics of individuals and families to enhancetheir life chances’ (Bayat, 2013: 588–589).

2. On the distinction between these, seeMbembe (1992).

References

Allegra M, et al. (2013) Rethinking cities in con-

tentious times: The mobilisation of urban dis-

sent in the ‘Arab Spring’. Urban Studies 50(9):

1675–1688.AlSayyad N and Guvenc M (2013) Virtual upris-

ings: On the interaction of new social media,

traditional media coverage and urban space

during the ‘Arab Spring’. Urban Studies DOI:

10.1177/0042098013505881.Amin A (2002) Spatialities of globalization. Envi-

ronment and Planning A 34: 385–399.Bayat A (2009) Life as Politics: How Ordinary

People Change the Middle East. Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press.Bayat A (2013) The Arab Spring and its surprises.

Development and Change 44: 587–601.

Bayly C (1988) Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars:

North Indian Society in the Age of British

Expansion, 1770–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.Belina B (2005) Anglophones: If you want us to

understand you, you will have to speak under-

standably! Antipode 37: 853–855.Benjamin S (2008) Occupancy urbanism: Radica-

lizing politics and economy beyond policy and



http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/164970?rskey=275jyn&result=1#eid




programs. International Journal of Urban and

Regional Research 32: 719–729.Birla R (2008) Stages of Capital: Law, Culture,

and Market Governance in Late Colonial India.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Brenner N and Schmid C (2012) Planetary urba-

nization. In: Gandy M (ed.) Urban Constella-

tions. Berlin: Jovis, pp. 10–13.Brenner N and Schmid C (2015) Towards a

new epistemology of the urban.City 19: 151–182.Bunnell T (2013) Antecedent cities and inter-

referencing effects: Learning from and extend-

ing beyond critiques of neoliberalisation.

Urban StudiesDOI: 10.1177/00420980135058 82.Caldeira T and Holston J (2014) Participatory

urban planning in Brazil. Urban Studies DOI:

10.1177/0042098014524461.Castells M (2012) Networks of Outrage and Hope:

Social Movements in the Internet Age. New

York: Polity.Celarent B (2013) Book review: The Dynamics of

Morals by Radhakamal Mukerjee. American

Journal of Sociology 118(6): 1736–1744.Chakrabarty D (2000) Provincializing Europe.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Comaroff J and Comaroff JL (2011) Theory from

the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving

Toward Africa. Boulder, CO: Paradigm

Publishers.Davis M (2006) Planet of Slums. London: Verso.Dussel E (1999) Beyond Eurocentrism. In: Jame-

son F and Miyoshi M (eds) Cultures of Globa-

lization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

pp. 1–30.Edensor T and Jayne M (eds) (2012) Urban The-

ory Beyond the West: A World of Cities. Lon-

don: Routledge.

Elyachar J (2005) Markets of Dispossession:

NGOs, Economic Development, and the State

in Cairo. Durham, NC: Duke University

Press.Fabian J (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthro-

pology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia

University Press.Ferguson J (2006) Global Shadows: Africa in the

Neoliberal World Order. Durham. NC: Duke

University Press.Geddes P (1915) Cities in Planning: An Introduc-

tion to the Town Planning Movement and to the

Study of Civics. London: Williams.

Gidwani V (2008) Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian

Development and the Politics of Work in India.

Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota

Press.Goldman M (2011) Speculative urbanism and the

making of the next world city. International

Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35(3):

555–581.Goubert J-P (1989) The Conquest of Water: The

Advent of Health in the Industrial Age. Trans.:

Wilson A. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press.

Hall S, Massey D and Rustin M (2013) After neo-

liberalism: Analyzing the present. Soundings:

A Journal of Politics and Culture 53: 8–22.Holston J (2008) Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunc-

tions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Ismail S (2013) Urban subalterns in the Arab

revolutions: Cairo and Damascus in compara-

tive perspective. Comparative Studies in Soci-

ety and History 55: 865–894.Ismail S (2014) The politics of the urban everyday

in Cairo: Infrastructures of oppositional

action. In: Parnell S and Oldfield S (eds) The

Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global

South. New York: Routledge, pp. 269–280.Joyce P (2003) The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism

and the Modern City. London: Verso.Kapferer B (1987) The anthropology of Max

Gluckman. Social Analysis 22: 2–19.Lefebvre H (2003[1970]) The Urban Revolution.

Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota

Press.Leitner H, Peck J and Sheppard E (eds) (2007)

Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers.

New York City: Guilford.Lin GCS, Li X, Yang FF, et al. (2014) Strategiz-

ing urbanism in the era of neoliberalization:

State power reshuffling, land development, and

municipal finance in urbanizing China. Urban

StudiesDOI: 10.1177/0042098013513644.Mah-Hui ML and Chin L (2010) Nowhere to

Hide: The Great Financial Crisis and Chal-

lenges for Asia. Singapore: ISAS.Massey D (1984) Introduction: Geography mat-

ters. In: Massey D and Urry J (eds) Geography

Matters! A Reader. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, pp. 1–11.Massey D (2005) For Space. London: Sage.




Massey D (2007) World City. Cambridge: Polity.Mathew B (2014) The neoliberal firm and nested

subsumption: Labour process transformationsin the NYC taxi industry. Urban Studies DOI:10.1177/0042098013519830.

Mbembe A (1992) Provisional notes on the post-colony. Africa 62(1): 3–37.

Mukerjee R (1940) Man and his Habitation: A

Study in Social Ecology. London: Longman,Green & Co.

Mukerjee R (1951) The Indian Working Class. 3rdedition. Bombay: Hind Kitabs.

Oldfield S (2014) Between activism and the acad-emy: The urban as political terrain. Urban

Studies DOI: 10.1177/0042098013515942.Olds K and Yeung HW-c (2004) Pathways to glo-

bal city formation: A view from the develop-mental city-state of Singapore. Review of

International Political Economy 11: 489–521.Parnell S and Oldfield S (eds) (2014) The Routle-

dge Handbook on Cities of the Global South.London: Routledge.

Peck J (2014) Cities beyond compare? Regional

Studies 49: 160–182.Pile S (2006) The strange case of Western cities:

Occult globalisations and the making of urbanmodernity. Urban Studies 43(2): 305–318.

Pithouse R (2012) Thoughts amidst waste. Jour-nal of Asian and African Studies 47(5): 482–497.

Reid D (1993) Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Reali-

ties and Representations. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.

Robinson J (2002) Global and world cities: Aview from off the map. International Journalof Urban and Regional Research 26: 531–554.

Robinson J (2006a) Inventions and interventions:Transforming cities. Urban Studies 43: 251–258.

Robinson J (2006b) Ordinary Cities: Between

Modernity and Development. London: Routle-dge, new edition.

Rodriguez-Pose A (2004) On English as a vehicleto preserve geographical diversity. Progress inHuman Geography 20: 1–4.

Roy A (2005) Urban informality: Toward an epis-temology of planning. Journal of the American

Planning Association 71(2): 147–158.

Roy A (2009) The 21st century metropolis: New

geographies of theory. Regional Studies 43(6):

819–830.

Scott AJ and Storper M (2015) The nature of cit-

ies: The scope and limits of urban theory.

International Journal of Urban and Regional

Research 39(1): 1–15.Sharan A (2014) In the City, Out of Place: Nui-

sance, Pollution and Dwelling in Delhi, c. 1850–

2000. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Sheppard E (2002) The spaces and times of globa-

lization: Place, scale, networks, and positional-

ity. Economic Geography 78: 307–330.Sheppard E, Leitner H and Maringanti A (2013)

Provincializing global urbanism: A manifesto.

Urban Geography 34: 893–900.Simone A (2010) City Life from Dakar to Jakarta.

New York: Routledge.Sundaram R (2011) Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s

Media Urbanism. London: Routledge.Taylor C (2001) Two theories of modernity. In:

Gaonkar DP (ed.) Alternative Modernities.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 172–

196.Theodore N (2014) Generative work: Day

labourers’ Freirean praxis. Urban Studies

DOI: 10.1177/0042098014523071.Timar J (2004) More than ‘Anglo-American’, it

is ‘Western’: Hegemony on geography from

a Hungarian perspective. Geoforum 35:

533–538.Vainer C (2014) Disseminating ‘best practice’?

The coloniality of urban knowledge and city

models. In: Parnell S and Oldfield S (eds) The

Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global

South. New York: Routledge, pp. 48–56.Vaiou D (2004) The contested and negotiated

dominance of Anglophone geography in

Greece. Geoforum 35: 529–531.Watson V (2009) Seeing from the South: Refo-

cusing urban planning on the globe’s central

urban issues. Urban Studies 46: 2259–2275.Werbner R (1984) The Manchester school in

south-central Africa. Annual Review of Anthro-

pology 13: 157–185.




Urban Studies Introduction: Urban revolutions in Urban ......of global urbanism that take place in...

Documents

Transcript of Urban Studies Introduction: Urban revolutions in Urban ......of global urbanism that take place in...