CityReads│Why Is the Urban Age Thesis Flawed?

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Why Is the Urban Age Thesis Flawed?

The urban age thesis is a flawed basis on which to conceptualize contemporary world urbanization patterns: it is empirically untenable and theoretically incoherent.

Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, 2013. The urban age in question International Journal of Urban and Regional Research,1-25.

Professor Neil Brenner, The urban age in question: towards a new epistemology of the urban, Dean's Lecture Series 2015, Melbourne School of Design, The University of Melbourne.

Picture source: Jeroen Beekmans / The Pop-Up City (popupcity.net)

The urban age thesis is today repeated with monotonous regularity across diverse discursive, institutional and political terrains, including by some of the most influential urban intellectuals of our time. Indeed, countless additional examples of this seemingly omnipresent discursive trope could be enumerated from international organizations (including the UN, the World Bank and the World Health Organization), research reports by governmental and nongovernmental agencies, international scholarly journals, magazine and newspaper articles, as well as from planning, design and consultancy documents, conference dossiers and public presentations by politicians, developers, architects and urbanists around the world.

The urban age appears, in short, to have become a de rigueur framing device or reference point for nearly anyone concerned to justify the importance of cities as sites of research, policy intervention, planning/design practice, investment or community activism. Much like the notion of modernization in the 1960s and that of globalization in the 1980s and 1990s, the thesis of an urban age appears to have become such an all-pervasive metanarrative that early twenty-first century readers and audiences can only nod in recognition.

In their paper, The urban age in question, Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid criticize the urban age notion. They argue that the urban age notion is ideological. Although ideological discourse is not “false consciousness”, it expresses a popular need to find a “cognitive map” for understanding and influencing a rapidly changing world. They consider the notion of 50% threshold is more misleading than it is revealing. We should throw it out.

Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid critically examine the urban age thesis by interrogating the traditions of urban theory and the cotemporary ideologies of the global-urban condition. The urban age thesis still does not resolve the main methodological and theoretical conundrums of urban theory. Then they outline an alternative towards a new epistemology of the urban.

Genealogy of the urban age thesis

The analysis of the world’s urban population has been wrestled with a fundamental empirical and theoretical problem: how to determine the appropriate spatial boundaries of the areas whose populations were to be measured. Demographic approaches attempt to solve this fundamentally spatial problem by converting it into a numerical one—how many inhabitants are required, within a predefined jurisdictional unit, to justify its classification as ‘urban’? Thus emerged the debate on urban population thresholds (UPTs), which began in the 1930s and persists up to the present.

Kingsley Davis was one of the earliest contributors to such debates.

He ventured a definition of ‘genuine urbanization’ as a situation in which ‘a substantial portion of the population lived in towns and cities’. This notion was formalized as:

‘U = Pc / Pt’(U = urbanization; Pc = population of cities and Pt = total population).

On this basis, he proposed a primary definition of cities as places containing a population of 100,000 or more, and a secondary one based on a smaller population threshold of 20,000. Then he and his colleagues produced some of the first estimations of world urban population since 1800, as well as some forecasts regarding future trends.

A half century prior to the urban age declarations of UN-Habitat and the LSE-Deutsche Bank team, Davis confidently proclaimed that ‘the human species is moving rapidly in the direction of an almost exclusively urban existence’. A decade later, he was even more specific in his prediction:‘At the 1950–1960 rate the term “urbanized world” will be applicable well before the end of the century’.

The spatial essence of Davis’ conceptualization was succinctly captured in a map produced by the UN’s Division of Economic and Social Affairs.

The UN applies Kingsley Davis’ territorialist approach to world urbanization

While contemporary urban age metanarratives are grounded upon updated data, they have reproduced in nearly identical form the underlying conceptual orientations, geographical imaginaries and representational strategies associated with this methodologically territorialist model of world urbanization from the 1960s.

Critique

The urban age thesis is a flawed basis on which to conceptualize contemporary world urbanization patterns: it is empirically untenable (a statistical artifact) and theoretically incoherent (a chaotic conception).

Foremost among these is the continued lack of agreement on what needs to be measured, and at what spatial scale, in analyses of world urbanization. Across national contexts, including in the UN’s data sets, there is no standardized definition of the urban unit. The same problems of data compatibility and boundary demarcation that vexed Kingsley Davis and his colleagues in the 1950s and 1960s remain completely unresolved in the urban data sets that have been assembled regularly by the UN Population Division.

The world’s major source of published international comparative statistics on urban population—the United Nations—is still using essentially the same “spectacles” as it adopted half a century ago. The wildly divergent criteria of urbanity used by national census bureaus have profoundly skewed the UN’s estimations of the world urban population. The scale of the world’s urban population is strongly influenced by the urban criteria used within the largest population nations such as China, India, Brazil or Nigeria.

As of the 2001 revision of World Urbanization Prospects, 109 UN member countries (38%) used administrative criteria as the sole or primary basis for their urban definitions. population size was used as the sole or primary criterion for 98 national urban classifications (34%) — but UPTs varied quite widely across national contexts, from as little as 100 in Uganda, 200 in Iceland and Sweden, or 400 in Albania up to 2,000 in Angola and Cuba, 5,000 in Botswana and Zambia, and 10,000 in Benin and Italy. For example, Mexico is 74% or 67% depending on whether UPT of 2500 or 15000 is used.

There are two main strategies for confronting these questions. The first involves recognizing the limits of extant UN data collection techniques, abandoning the notion of a rigid 50% global UPT, and postulating a broad trajectory of rural-to-urban sociospatial reorganization across all or most states in the world system, thus yielding aggregate evidence of an ongoing world-scale transition.

A second, potentially more radical strategy involves abandoning the UN’s approach to data collection with its dependence on state-centric sources, and elaborating new, spatially disaggregating approaches based on remote sensing techniques.

If the empirical edifice of the urban age thesis is unstable, its theoretical foundations are obsolescent, having been eroded through the dramatic forward-motion and geographical reorganization of the urbanization process. The basic problem is the de facto sociospatial fluidity and relentless dynamism of the urban phenomenon under modern capitalism.

Contemporary declarations of an urban age replicate this methodological opposition by embracing the identical conceptual framework and geographical imaginary that Davis had relied upon — in particular, the core assumption that global settlement space can and must be divided neatly into urban or rural containers. On this basis, the thesis posits an ineluctable shift of population, in both relative and absolute terms, to the urban side of this dualism.

The urban age theory is methodologically territorialist in so far as it assumes the territorial boundedness, coherence and discreteness of the spatial units in which social relations unfold. Urban age theory conceptualizes urbanization primarily or exclusively with reference to the concentration of population within cities or urban settlements.

There are three blind fields in the urban age thesis: settlement fetishism, urban-rural opposition/continuum, and distributional model of urban transition.

Settlement fetishism: all spaces in the world are differentiated among distinct settlement types that are universally replicated.

Urban-rural opposition/continuum: all spaces in the world are either urban or rural, or must be classified someplace on an urban/rural continuum.

Distributional model of urban transition: spatial change entails the redistribution of population according to ontologically fixed settlement types (urban/rural); the specificity, coherence and discreteness of the types are not impacted through such transformations.

Alternative: towards a new epistemology of the urban

Neil Brenner proposes three strategies to establish the alternative urban theory.

Strategy 1: Abandon the notion of threshold but continue to explore urban population levels (critical demography).

Strategy 2: use geospatial data (ambient population density, urban land cover, nighttime lights, impervious surfaces, land use to develop more nuanced delineations of urban settlements.

mapping as a terrain for critique and theory development.

Strategy 3: explode the theoretical categories and invent new conceptual mappings of the worldwide urban condition.

A series of epistemological guidelines is outlined in the end (Neil Brenner elaborates the nine theses on urbanization in another paper, please refer to CityReads | How An Urban Theorist Sees Urbanization?).

The urban and urbanization are theoretical categories.

The urban is not a unit but a process of transformation.

The sociospatial dimensions of urbanization are polymorphic, variable and dynamic.

Urbanization involves both concentration and extension.

Urbanization has become a planetary phenomenon.

Urbanization constantly produces new differentiations.

A new vocabulary of urbanization is needed.

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