CityReads│Economic Geographers'Critiques on Three Urban Theories

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Economic Geographers’ Critiques on Three Urban Theories

Economic geographers, Michael Storper and Allen Scott, offer their critiques on three influential urban theories, namely, postcolonial urban analysis, assemblage theoretic accounts of the city, and the theory of planetary urbanism.

Michael Storper, Allen J Scott, 2016. Current debates in urban theory: A critical assessment, Urban Studies, 53(6): 1114–1136.

Picture source: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/5702sq/valley_of_the_lights_italy/

Economic geographers, Michael Storper and Allen Scott, offer their critiques on three currently influential urban theories, namely, postcolonial urban analysis, assemblage theoretic accounts of the city, and the theory of planetary urbanism.

They criticize (a) postcolonial urban theory for its particularism and its insistence on the provincialization of knowledge, (b) assemblage theoretic approaches for their indeterminacy and eclecticism and (c) planetary urbanism for its radical devaluation of the forces of agglomeration and nodality in urban-economic geography.

Postcolonial urbanism: Cosmopolitan but provincial

Much contemporary postcolonial research originated in cultural and historical studies where it has functioned as a critique of numerous blind spots in Northern traditions of theoretical analysis. Above all, postcolonial thinking, as represented, for example, by Said (1978) and Spivak (2008), demonstrates how diverse intellectual legacies of colonialism (ethnocentric biases and prejudices in particular) enter unconsciously into scholarly writings about the Global South.

Postcolonial scholars are also, and correctly, intent on showing that the claims of universality that Euro-American theory has often arrogated to itself are sometimes demonstrably false. These same lines of thinking and critique have recently become strongly influential in urban studies, which decry the application of urban theories constructed in Europe and North America to cities in the Global South.

Postcolonial commentators are especially dissatisfied with what they allege to be the pervasive modernist and developmentalist biases of urban theory as elaborated in the Global North, which consigns the cities (and societies) of the Global South to the status of underdevelopment and backwardness.

Modernism-developmentalism is further criticized by postcolonial scholars for its promotion of a teleological concept of cities in the Global South in which growth and change are alleged to be subject to evolutionary stages involving shifts from less to more modern and developed.

Postcolonial scholars have sought to correct what they see as imbalances and misrepresentations in Northern urban theories by means of two overlapping strategies. One is to call for more cosmopolitan forms of urban theory that take seriously the experiences of the cities of the Global South. The other is to insist on the irreducible core of idiosyncrasy that marks every city and to focus on the resulting play of empirical ‘difference' and ‘complexity’.

Michael Storper and Allen Scott discuss three major failures of postcolonial urban theory, namely, its exaggerated complaints regarding Euro-American epistemological bias in contemporary urban analysis, its highly selective critique of modernism-developmentalism and its strong methodological commitment to theoretically-unstructured comparativism.

There is an apparently unresolved tension in postcolonial studies between constant calls for a worlding of urban analysis on the one side and the equally constant affirmation of a North/South binary on the other, and even, in some cases, a tendency to favor a wholesale ‘provincialization’ of urban theory.

But there is much in common between the cities of the Global North and the Global South in regard to poverty, and that examination of the former has much to offer to scholars of the latter, and vice versa

The comparative gesture can be useful and interesting, but our point is that a more theoretically self-conscious pooling of data, experiences and investigative results is essential if urban investigations are to progress beyond localism, difference and the celebration of empirical complexity for its own sake.

Assemblage theory: indeterminacy and eclecticism

Over the last few decades, assemblage theory has emerged as a major genre of work in urban studies, as in the social sciences in general. Assemblage theory is first and foremost an ontological view of the world conceived as a mass of rhizomatic networks or finely grained relationships constituting the fundamental character of reality. These networks bind together unique human and nonhuman objects within fluid, hybrid mosaics forming more or less temporarily stabilized systems of interconnections representing the current state of the observable world. There are several variants of assemblage theory, but one of the most influential is actor-network theory, a body of ideas associated above all with the work of Latour (2005).

The main implications of assemblage and actor-network theory for urban studies is to see the city as an object which is relentlessly being assembled at concrete sites of urban practice, or, to put it differently, as a multiplicity of processes of becoming, affixing sociotechnical networks, hybrid collectives and alternative topologies.

This conception then leads to a descriptive, anecdotal and notably indiscriminate approach to urban investigation. Some scholar with apparent faith in the powers of inductive empiricism goes so far as to say that ‘we don’t know what we are looking for until we find it’. 

Brenner et al.  characterize this line of research as ‘naïve objectivism’ and point to its failure to distinguish between the significant and the insignificant in urban analysis. In other words, there are no theoretical guideposts in assemblage theory for telling us how tease out significant relationships or to distinguish between the trivial and the important. Everything is equally important (or equally trivial and unimportant).

Storper and Scott do not deny the possibility of certain important feedbacks between non-human objects and human society and it is emphatically not intended to repudiate the reflexive relations between technology, urban space and social life.

However, they certainly do have strong reservations about the capability of inanimate objects to ‘act’ as if whatever causal or generative powers they may possess were ontologically equivalent to sentient, purposive human behavior.

Assemblage theory radically privileges the activity of assemblage itself, seeing no wider forces that might determine what assemblages are possible or not possible; rather, it advocates a methodology of building the elements of social organization a posteriori from the ground up  and focusing on specific sites of daily life. The result is a largely indeterminate concept of the city as a complex, variegated, multifarious, open-ended, fluid, unique, hybrid, unruly, nonlinear, etc., etc. aggregate of disparate phenomena tied together in a haphazard mix of causal and contingent relationships.

The assemblage approach is potentially of positive value in certain kinds of ethnographic and narrative accounts of the city. But the principal problems of assemblage theory – the notion of reality as mere rhizomatic entanglements without underlying processes of structuration, the indiscriminate attribution of agency to things and the absence of concepts of human action – make this theory unable to detect urban dynamics, movement, change and causality in meaningful ways.

Planetary perplexities: is city an ideology?

Some urban analysts today, most notably Brenner and Schmid (2015), suggest that in the 21st century a radical blurring of the category of the urban versus everything else has come about, and that what were formerly identified as urban areas can no longer be distinguished from the rest of geographical space, conceptually or empirically. These are the central doctrines of ‘planetary urbanism’(Please refer to CityReads│When Lefebvre’s Hypothesis Becomes Reality).

The authors are doubtless correct to refer to an integrated planet-wide socio-economic system. They are also right to claim that the notion of a purely ‘rural’ realm occupying the interstitial spaces between cities is archaic and misleading. But we are at a loss to understand how these facts can lead to a claim that the idea of the city only persists as an ideological framing.

There is no rigid line that separates the urban land nexus definitively from the rest of geographic space, but rather a series of spatial gradations in which we move from the one to the other. This does not mean that the urban land nexus and its dynamics as identified above are illusions, just as neighborhoods, slums, industrial quarters, etc. do not dissolve away into an urban totality.

The city, in a nutshell, is in important ways an irreducible collectivity and, its peculiar character derives from its properties as a locus of agglomeration, gravitation and density as well as from its specific daily and weekly rhythms of life.

The nature of the city lies partly in the urban land nexus. It means an interacting set of land uses expressing the ways in which the social and economic activities of the city condense out into a differentiated, polarized, locational mosaic. This phenomenon emerges as the extensive expression of agglomeration, and is molded to significant degree by the behavior of firms seeking locations for production and households seeking living space (Please refer to CityReads│What Is the Nature of Cities?).  

Whatever the effects of the constitutive outside of the city may be, however these in no way undermine the theoretical notion of the urban land nexus as the critical constitutive inside of the city.

While postcolonial and assemblage-theoretic commentators have strong views about the conduct of urban research, none of them offers any coherent concept of the urban as such. Planetary urbanists for their part make strong claims about the deliquescence of the city as commonly understood and the assimilation of the urban into a world-wide space economy.

Each of them contains major blind spots and analytical distortions and that each has failed to offer a meaningful concept of urbanization with generalizable insights about the logic and dynamics of cities.

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