CityReads│How An Urban Theorist Sees Urbanization?
Against the backdrops and trends of planetary urbanization, a critical urban theorist proposes nine theses on urbanization.
Brenner, N. 2013. Theses on Urbanization,Public Culture 25(1):85-114
Source：http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/images/content/5/5/553559.pdf
The United Nations Human Settlement programmer (UN- Habitat 1996) has famously declared the advent of an “Urban Age” due to the world’s rapidly increasing urban population. In the early 21st century, urbanization has become one of the dominant metanarratives through which our current planetary situation is interpreted, both in academic circles and in the public sphere.
The planetary built environment—in effect, the sociomaterial infrastructure of urbanization—is now recognized as contributing directly to far-reaching transformations of the atmosphere, biotic habitats, land-use surfaces, and oceanic conditions that have long-term implications for the metabolism of both human and nonhuman life-forms.
Planetary urbanization shows several trends.
First, the geographies of urbanization, are assuming new, increasingly large- scale morphologies that perforate, crosscut, and ultimately explode the erstwhile urban/rural divide (see fig. 1). Urbanism as a way of life has been spreading outwards, creating urban densities and new “outer” and “edge” cities in what were formerly suburban fringes and green field or rural sites. In some areas, urbanization has expanded on even larger regional scales, creating giant urban galaxies with population sizes and degrees of polycentricity far beyond anything imagined only a few decades ago.In some cases city regions are coalescing into even larger agglomerations in a process that can be called “extended regional urbanization.”
Figure 1 As this satellite image of nighttime lights illustrates, the geographies of urbanization have exploded the boundaries of city, metropolis, region, and territory: they have assumed a planetary scale. Source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
Second, across each of the major world economic regions, spatially selective policy initiatives have been mobilized by national, state, and provincial governments to create new matrices of transnational capital investment and urban development across vast zones of their territories While these state strategies sometimes target traditional metropolitan cores, they are also articulating vast grids of accumulation and spatial regulation that cascade along intercontinental transportation corridors; large- scale infrastructural, telecommunications, and energy networks; free trade zones; transnational growth triangles; and international border regions.
Third, within this tumult of worldwide sociospatial and regulatory reorganization, new vectors of urban social struggle are crystallizing. The contemporary metropolis has become a locus of sociopolitical mobilization analogous to the role of the factory during the industrial epoch. For them, the metropolis has become the “space of the common” and thus the territorial basis for collective action under conditions of globalizing capitalism, neoliberalizing states, and reconstituted Empire. In many urban regions around the world, the notion of the right to the city has now become a rallying cry for social movements, coalitions, and reformers. The urban is thus no longer only a site or arena of contentious politics but has become one of its primary stakes. Reorganizing urban conditions is increasingly seen as a means to transform the broader politicaleconomic structures and spatial formations of early twenty- first- century world capitalism as a whole.
These trends are multifaceted, volatile, and contradictory, and their cumulative significance is certainly a matter for ongoing interpretation and intensive debate. At minimum, however, they appear to signify that urban spaces have become essential to planetary political-economic, social, and cultural life and socioenvironmental conditions. For those who have long been concerned with urban questions, whether in theory, research, or practice, these are obviously exciting developments. But they are also accompanied by new challenges and dangers — not the least of which is the proliferation of deep confusion regarding the specificity of the urban itself, both as a category of analysis for social theory and research and as a category of practice in politics and everyday life.
Writing in the late 1930s, Chicago School urban sociologist Louis Wirth famously delineated the analytical contours of urbanism with reference to a classic triad of sociological properties—large population size, high population density, and high levels of demographic heterogeneity. In the early twenty-first century, the urban appears to have become a quintessential floating signifier: devoid of any clear definitional parameters, morphological coherence, or cartographic fixity, it is used to reference a seemingly boundless range of contemporary sociospatial conditions, processes, transformations, trajectories, and potentials.
The city is everywhere and in everything. If the urbanized world now is a chain of metropolitan areas connected by places/corridors of communication (airports and airways, stations and railways, parking lots and motorways, teleports and information highways), then what is not the urban? Is it the town, the village, the countryside? Maybe, but only to a limited degree. The footprints of the city are all over these places, in the form of city commuters, tourists, teleworking, the media, and the urbanization of lifestyles. The traditional divide between the city and the countryside has been perforated.
The emergent process of extended urbanization is producing a variegated urban fabric that, rather than being simply concentrated within nodal points or confined within bounded regions, is now woven unevenly and yet ever more densely across vast stretches of the entire world. Such a formation cannot be grasped adequately through traditional concepts of cityness, metropolitanism, or urban/ rural binarisms. Nor can it be understood effectively on the basis of more recent concepts of global and globalizing cities, since most of their variants likewise presuppose the territorial boundedness of urban units, albeit now understood to be relationally networked with other cities via transnational webs of capital, labor, and transportation/communication infrastructures.
Paradoxically, therefore, at the very moment in which the urban appears to have acquired an unprecedented strategic significance, its definitional contours have become unmanageably slippery. The apparent ubiquity of the contemporary urban condition makes it now seem impossible to pin down.
Under these conditions, the field of urban theory is in a state of disarray. If the urban can no longer be understood as a particular kind of place — that is, as a discreet, distinctive, and relatively bounded type of settlement in which specific kinds of social relations obtain—then what could possibly justify the existence of an intellectual field devoted to its investigation?
1. The urban is a theoretical construct. The urban is not a pregiven site, space, or object—its demarcation as a zone of thought, representation, imagination, or action can only occur through a process of theoretical abstraction. Such abstractions condition “how we ‘carve up’ our object of study and what properties we take particular objects to have”. As such, they have a massively structuring impact on concrete investigations of all aspects of the built environment and sociospatial restructuring. In this sense, questions of conceptualization lie at the heart of all forms of urban research. They are not mere background conditions or framing devices but constitute the very interpretive fabric through which urbanists weave together metanarratives, normative-political orientations, analyses of empirical data, and strategies of intervention.
2. The site and object of urban research are essentially contested. Since the formal institutionalization of urban sociology in the early twentieth century, the conceptual demarcation of the urban has been a matter of intense debate and disagreement across the social sciences. Since that time, the trajectory of urban research has involved not only an accumulation of concrete investigations in and of urbanizing spaces but also the continual theoretical rearticulation of their specificity as such, both socially and spatially. During the past century, many of the great leaps forward in the field of urban studies have occurred through the elaboration of new theoretical “cuts” into the nature of the urban question.
3. Major strands of urban studies fail to demarcate their site and object in reflexively theoretical terms. In much of twentieth-century urban studies, cities and urban spaces have been taken for granted as empirically coherent, transparent sites of research. Consequently, the urban character of urban research has been conceived simply with reference to the circumstance that its focal point is located within a place labeled a “city.” However, such mainstream, empiricist positions cannot account for their own historical and geographic conditions of possibility: they necessarily presuppose determinate theoretical assumptions regarding the specificity of the city and/or the urban that powerfully shape the trajectory of concrete research, generally in unexamined ways. Critical reflexivity in urban studies may only be accomplished if such assumptions are made explicit, subjected to systematic analysis, and revised continually in relation to evolving research questions, normative-political orientations, and practical concerns.
4.Urban studies has traditionally demarcated the urban in contrast to putatively nonurban spaces. Since its origins, the field of urban studies has conceived the urban as a specific type of settlement space, one that is thought to be different, in some qualitative way, from the putatively nonurban spaces that surround it—from the suburb, the town, and the village to the rural, the countryside, and the wilderness. Chicago School urban sociologists, mainstream land economists, central place theorists, urban demographers, neoMarxian geographers, and global city theorists may disagree on the basis of this specificity, but all engage in the shared analytical maneuver of delineating urban distinctiveness through an explicit or implied contrast to sociospatial conditions located “elsewhere.”
5. The concern with settlement typologies (nominal essences) must be superseded by the analysis of sociospatial processes (constitutive essences). It is time for urbanists to abandon the search for a nominal essence that might distinguish the urban as a type of settlement (whether conceived as a city, a cityregion, a metropolis, a megalopolis, or otherwise) and the closely associated conception of other spaces (suburban,rural, wilderness, or otherwise) as being nonurban due to their supposed separation from urban conditions, trends, and effects. Instead, to grasp the production and relentless transformation of spatial differentiation, urban theory must prioritize the investigation of constitutive essences—the processes through which the variegated landscapes of modern capitalism are produced
6. A new lexicon of sociospatial differentiation is needed. The geographies of capitalism are as intensely variegated as ever: contemporary urbanization processes hardly signify the transcendence of uneven spatial development and territorial inequality at any geographic scale. However, a new lexicon of sociospatial differentiation is needed to grasp emergent patterns and pathways of planetary urban reorganization. Today spatial difference no longer assumes the form of an urban/rural divide but is articulated through an explosion of developmental patterns and potentials within a thickening, if unevenly woven, fabric of worldwide urbanization. Consequently, inherited vocabularies of settlement space, both vernacular and social- scientific, may offer no more than a working epistemological starting point for such an endeavor. They can only be rendered critically effective within a framework that emphasizes the perpetual churning of sociospatial formations under capitalism rather than presupposing their stabilization within built environments, jurisdictional envelopes, or ecological landscapes.
Such an approach has been pioneered with impressive systematicity by a team of scholars, architects, and designers at the ETH Studio Basel, leading to the development of the “urban portrait” of Switzerland illustrated in figure 7 .Crucially, the zones depicted on the map are conceived not as enclosed territorial arenas or as embodiments of distinct settlement types but rather as indicators of contradictory yet interconnected processes of sociospatial restructuring under conditions of ongoing industrial, labor, politico-regulatory, and environmental reorganization. They demarcate the geographic inheritance of earlier rounds of urban restructuring as well as the territorial framework in which future urban pathways and potentials are to be produced.
7. Urban effects persist within an intensely variegated sociospatial landscape. This endeavor must also attend systematically to the ongoing production and reconstitution of urban ideologies, including those that propagate visions of the city as a discrete, distinct, and territorially bounded unit, whether in opposition to the rural or nature, as a self-contained system, as an ideal type, or as a strategic target for intervention. While the critical deconstruction of such urban effects has long been central to the project of critical urban theory, this task has acquired renewed urgency under conditions of planetary urbanization, in which the gulf between everyday cognitive maps and worldwide landscapes of creative destruction appears to be widening. What practices and strategies produce the persistent experiential effect of urban social discreteness, territorial boundedness, or structured coherence? How do the latter vary across places and territories? How have such practices and strategies, and their effects, been transformed during the course of world capitalist development and under contemporary conditions?
8. The concept of urbanization requires systematic reinvention. Because of its attunement to the problematique of constitutive essences, the concept of urbanization is a crucial tool for investigating the planetary urban process. To serve this purpose, however, the concept must be reclaimed from the city-centric, methodologically territorialist, and predominantly demographic traditions that have to date monopolized its deployment. Traditional approaches equate urbanization with the growth of particular types of settlement (cities, urban areas, metropolises), which are conceived as territorially discrete, bounded, and self-contained units embedded within a broader nonurban or rural landscape. Additionally, such approaches usually privilege purely demographic criteria, such as population thresholds and/or density gradients, as the basis on which to classify urban development patterns and pathways. Urbanization is thus reduced to a process in which, within each national territory, the populations of densely settled places (“cities”) are said to expand in relative and absolute terms. This is the model that has been used by the UN since it began producing data on world urban population levels in the early 1970s, and it underpins contemporary declarations that an “urban age” is now under way because more than half the world’s population purportedly lives within cities. While such understandings capture meaningful dimensions of demographic change within an evolving global settlement system, they are limited both empirically (the criteria for urban settlement types vary massively across national contexts) and theoretically (they lack a coherent, reflexive, and historically dynamic conceptualization of urban specificity). By contrast, several previously marginalized or subterranean traditions of twentieth-century urban theory may offer useful conceptual elements and cartographic orientations for a revitalized theory of urbanization. The possibility that the geographies of urbanization transcend city, metropolis, and region was only occasionally considered by postwar urban theorists, but under contemporary planetary conditions it has an extraordinarily powerful intellectual resonance.
Figure 8 The currently popular notion of an urban age is grounded on the problematic assumption that urbanization can be understood primarily with reference to expanding city population levels.
Figure 9 In the early 1970s, Constantinos Doxiadis constructed a highly speculative vision of world urbanization that postulated the formation of large- scale bands of settlement girding much of the globe.
9. Urbanization contains two dialectically intertwined moments—concentration and extension. Urban theory has long conceived urbanization primarily in terms of agglomeration—the dense concentration of population, infrastructure, and investment at certain locations on a broader, less densely settled territorial plane. While the scale and morphology of such concentrations is recognized to shift dramatically over time, it is above all with reference to this basic sociospatial tendency that urbanization has generally been defined (see figs. 10 and 11). Considerably less attention has been devoted to the ways in which the process of agglomeration has been premised on, and in turn contributes to, wide-ranging transformations of sociospatial organization and ecological/environmental conditions across the rest of the world. Though largely ignored or relegated to the analytic background by urban theorists, such transformations—materialized in densely tangled circuits of labor, commodities, cultural forms, energy, raw materials, and nutrients—simultaneously radiate outward from the immediate zone of agglomeration and implode back into it as the urbanization process unfolds. Within this extended, increasingly worldwide field of urban development, agglomerations form, expand, shrink, and morph continuously, but always via dense webs of relations to other places, territories, and scales, including to realms that are traditionally classified as being outside the urban condition. The latter include, for example, small- and medium-size towns and villages in peripheralized regions and agroindustrial zones, intercontinental transportation corridors, transoceanic shipping lanes, large-scale energy circuits and communications infrastructures, underground landscapes of resource extraction, satellite orbits, and even the biosphere itself. As conceived here, therefore, urbanization involves both concentration and extension: these moments are dialectically intertwined insofar as they simultaneously presuppose and counteract one another.