CityReads│When Lefebvre’s Hypothesis Becomes Reality

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When Lefebvre’s Hypothesis Becomes Reality

Implosions/explosions: towards a study of planetary urbanization attempts to facilitate a paradigm shift in urban studies, from methodological cityism to urban theory without outside.

Neil Brenner (ed.) 2014. Implosions/explosions: towards a study of planetary urbanization, Jovis Verlag: Berlin.

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Lefebvre’s Hypothesis

Over four decades ago, Lefebvre opened La révolution urbaine with the provocative hypothesis that “society has   been completely urbanized. Although he viewed complete urbanization as a virtual object—an emergent condition rather than an actualized reality—Lefebvre suggested that the broad outlines of a complete formation of urbanization were already coming into relief during the 1960s in Western Europe.

Lefebvre characterizes the generalization of capitalist urbanization as a process of “implosion-explosion,” a phrase he introduced to illuminate the mutually recursive links between capitalist forms of agglomeration and broader transformations of territory, landscape and environment.

In the opening chapter of La révolution urbaine, Lefebvre uses the notion of implosion-explosion to describe the broad constellation of historical-geographical transformations that would, he believed, herald the onset of complete urbanization on a world scale—specifically, “urban concentration, rural exodus, extension of the urban fabric, complete subordination of the agrarian to the urban”. When this “critical point” is reached, Lefebvre suggests, the condition of complete urbanization will no longer be hypothetical.

When actualized on a planetary scale, Lefebvre suggested, such tendencies would entail a relentless, if fragmentary, interweaving of an urban fabric across the entire world, including terrestrial surfaces, the oceans, the atmosphere and the subterranean, all of which would be ever more directly instrumentalized and operationalized to serve the voracious pursuit of capitalist industrial growth.

When Lefebvre’s hypothesis becomes reality: towards a study of planetary urbanization

Henri Lefebvre forecast the situation of complete urbanization that is today apparently being actualized on a planetary scale, which requires a radical shift from the analysis of urban form to the investigation of urbanization processes. Inspired by Lefebvre’s works, Neil Brenner edits a book, Implosions/ explosions: towards a study of planetary urbanization, attempting to facilitate this paradigm shift in urban studies, from methodological cityism to urban theory without outside.

Lenz’s aerial photograph of the Tar Sands on this book’s cover takes us far away from the large, dense, vertical landscapes of cityness, into a zone in which the earth’s surface has been layered with a viscous sludge, traversed by muddy roads twisting around ponds filled with huge accumulations of toxic waste. Lenz’s image of the Tar Sands provides a fitting iconography for this emergent planetary condition. The evictions, enclosures and dispossessions continue, but now on the scale of the entire planet, well beyond the inherited built environments of earlier civilizations, leading to unprecedented social devastation and environmental destruction.

The book contains 34 chapters and is divided into seven sections followed by a brief Coda: foundations—the urbanization question; complete urbanization—experience, site, process; planetary urbanization—openings; historical geographies of urbanization; urban studies and urban ideologies, visualizations—ideologies and experiments; political strategies, struggles and horizons.

The contributions to this book build upon and extend Lefebvre’s hypothesis and subsequent analysis. They suggest various ways in which Lefebvre’s virtual object of complete urbanization is today being actualized, albeit unevenly, on a worldwide scale, as well as in specific territories, regions and places; and they explore some of the wide-ranging intellectual, social, political and environmental implications of this state of affairs.

This newly consolidated, planetary formation of urbanization has blurred, even exploded, long-entrenched sociospatial borders—not only between city and countryside, urban and rural, core and periphery, metropole and colony, society and nature, but also between the urban, regional, national and global scales themselves—thereby creating new formations of a thickly urbanized landscape whose contours are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to theorize, much less to map, on the basis of inherited approaches to urban studies.

In order to investigate the uneven implosions and explosions of capitalist urbanization across places, regions, territories, continents and oceans up to the planetary scale, this book assembles a series of analytical and cartographic interventions that supersede inherited spatial ontologies (urban/rural, town/country, city/non-city, society/nature).

From methodological cityism to urban theory without outside

The urban question has long been a flashpoint for intense debate among researchers concerned with the nature of cities and urbanization processes. Despite profound differences of methodology, analytical focus and political orientation, the major twentieth century approaches to this question have taken an entity commonly labeled as the city (or some lexical variation thereof) as their primary unit of analysis and site of investigation.

This foundational epistemological focus was canonized in the 1925 mission-statement of urban sociology by Chicago School founders Ernest Burgess and Robert Park, laconically but confidently titled The City. It subsequently evolved into a basically self-evident presupposition across diverse traditions and terrains of urban research. The major strands of mid- to late twentieth century urban studies have likewise focused their analytical gaze primarily on “city-like” (nodal, relatively large, densely populated and self-enclosed) sociospatial units.

This generalization applies to mainstream quantitative research on city-size distributions, central place systems and urban hierarchies; to the periodizations of capitalist urban development by radical political economists in the 1970s and 1980s; to the influential analyses of postfordist cities, global city formation and megacity expansion in the 1990s; and to more recent research forays on neoliberal cities, ordinary cities and postcolonial cities in the late 1990s and into the early 2000s.

Each of these influential approaches to the urban question has either (a) documented the replication of city-like settlement types across larger territories; or (b) used a modifying term—mercantile, industrial, Fordist-Keynesian, post-Keynesian, postfordist, global, mega, neoliberal, ordinary, postcolonial and so forth—to demarcate its research terrain as a subset of a putatively more general sociospatial form, “the” city

But underneath the tumult of disagreement and the relentless series of paradigm shifts that have animated urban theory and research during the last century, a basic consensus has persisted: the urban problematique is thought to be embodied, at core, in cities—conceived as settlement types characterized by certain indicative features (such as largeness, density and social diversity) that make them qualitatively distinct from a non-city social world (suburban, rural and/or “natural”) located “beyond” or “outside” them.

In effect, the epistemology of urban studies has been characterized by a deeply entrenched methodological cityism which entails “an analytical privileging, isolation and […] naturalization of the city in studies of urban processes where the non-city may also be significant”.

Morphological or population-centric approaches are extremely misleading lenses into the emergent dynamics of global urbanization. This process cannot be understood adequately either with reference to intensified population growth within the world’s largest cities, or simply as a replication of city-like settlement types across the earth’s surface. Nor, on the other hand, can traditional notions of the hinterland or the rural adequately capture the processes of extended urbanization through which formerly marginalized or remote spaces are being enclosed, operationalized, designed and planned to support the continued agglomeration of capital, labor and infrastructure within the world’s large cities and mega-city regions.

This city/noncity epistemology tends to obscure the processes of enclosure, dispossession and socio-ecological degradation that support the growth of cities, but that take place in putatively non-urban contexts, or what he refers to as ‘operational landscape’ . Such operational landscapes may not have the densities or population thresholds of cities, but nonetheless they have played strategically essential roles in supporting the latter, whether by supplying raw materials, energy, water, food or labor, or through logistics, communications or waste processing functions. 

Source:http://proof.nationalgeographic.com/2014/08/29/garth-lenzs-abstract-energyscapes/

We need a new understanding of urbanization that explicitly theorizes the evolving, mutually recursive relations between agglomeration processes and their operational landscapes. As such, this book proposes an ‘urban theory without an outside’ in which all of these variegated sociospatial morphologies – the hinterland, the landfill, the mine– are considered internal to contemporary processes of urbanization.

In so doing, this book aims to advance a hitherto largely subterranean stream of urban research that has, since the mid-twentieth century, cast doubt upon established understandings of the urban as a bounded, nodal and relatively self-enclosed sociospatial condition in favor of more territorially differentiated , morphologically variable, multiscalar and processual conceptualizations. This book aspires to supersede the urban/non-urban divide that has long anchored the epistemology of urban research, and on this basis, to develop a new vision of urban theory without an outside.

The key elements of this theorization are summarized schematically in Table.

This volume is intended to advance that project in the hope that a new understanding of urbanization may prove useful to ongoing struggles—against neo-Haussmannization, planetary enclosure, market fundamentalism and global ecological plunder; and for a new model of urbanization oriented towards the collective reappropriation and democratic self-management of “planetary space as the work of the human species.”

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