CityReads│New Vocabulary to Understand the Urbanization Process

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New Vocabulary to Understand the Urbanization Process

Informed by postcolonial critiques of urban theory and on the epistemologies of planetary urbanization, a team of researchers propose new vocabulary to understand the urbanization process.

Christian Schmid, et al., 2018. Towards a new vocabulary of urbanisation processes: A comparative approach, Urban Studies, Vol. 55(1) 19–52.

Source: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0042098017739750

Picture: Shinjuku, Tokyo

A research team from Future Cities Laboratory, Singapore-ETH Centre (FCL) and the Chair of Sociology, Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich is carrying out a research project ”Patterns and Pathways of Planetary Urbanization”.  It calls out the need of new concepts and terms in order to decipher the differentiated and rapidly mutating landscapes of urbanization that are being produced today. Based on postcolonial critiques of urban theory and on the epistemologies of planetary urbanization, they introduces and discusses the theoretical and methodological framework of a collaborative comparative study of urbanization processes in eight large metropolitan territories across the world: Tokyo, Hong Kong/Shenzhen/Dongguan, Kolkata, Istanbul, Lagos, Paris, Mexico City and Los Angeles. They discuss some of the new comparative concepts that we developed through this process: popular urbanization, plotting urbanism, multilayered patchwork urbanization and the incorporation of urban differences.

In the paper, they have argued for opening up the field of urban studies to conceptual experimentation so as to respond to various challenges posed by contemporary urbanization. The goal is meant as a proposal and an invitation for further debate, reflection and conceptual experimentation.

This research paper criticizes the shortcoming of the convention concepts pertaining to the urbanization process. There is only a very small number of well-established and clearly defined process-based concepts allowing for the analysis of urbanization. By far the most widely applied and debated concepts are‘gentrification’, ‘suburbanization’ and ‘informal urbanization’. However, these concepts form a very restricted and limited toolset for analyzing and deciphering the wide variety and the heterogeneity of urban situations developing constantly all over the planet. Secondly, they are nevertheless rooted in Western debates, experiences, inspirations and imaginations. A third shortcoming of these concepts is their one-dimensional conception, which privileges only one aspect or factor as decisive for their definition. A fourth issue is the loss of precision and relevance through generalization. much difference risks becoming unconceptualized, and we might be left with concepts without difference and difference without conceptualization.

How planetary perspective and the postcolonial critiques can contribute to the analysis of urbanization process?

Urbanization today has a planetary reach, and a planetary perspective is necessary in order to grasp these new urban tendencies and phenomena. This approach thus implies a fundamental shift from a centric perspective which starts the analysis from a real or virtual center of a‘city’and then stretches out in order to define its boundaries to identify the ‘relevant’ urban region or agglomeration; instead, it adopts a decentered perspective trying to understand the wider urban territory, and to identify the various urbanization processes that are shaping this territory.

To put this postcolonial move into a ‘planetary’ perspective means to assert that every point on the planet might be affected by urbanization processes in one way or another and thus could enable important insights into the urban process.

Following Lefebvre, three basic dimensions of the production of (urban) space can be distinguished: (1) the production and transformation of material elements and structures (perceived space); (2) processes of territorial regulation and representation (conceived space); and (3) socialization and learning processes (lived space).

The first aspect is the material transformation of a territory. Urban processes unfold under specific regimes of territorial regulation that include various forms of representation, models of urban governance,  and market- or state-led urban strategies on all possible scales. Urban processes always entail the disruption, dislocation, and re-orientation of the inhabitants’ urban experiences and everyday lives.

New vocabulary to understand the urbanization process

popular urbanization

Mexico City, Lagos, Istanbul and Kolkata were shaped by very similar dynamics. They all were at least initially low-income peripheral neighborhoods with moments of self-production of urban space, strong political organization, and incremental processes of construction, which in some cases developed a great capacity for adaptation to the needs of its inhabitants.

The term urbanización popular was borrowed from the Latin American debates. Popular urbanization relates to the ways in which people establish themselves in the urban environment through collective processes of appropriation and production of space.

It is characterized as: (1) the material transformation of the urban territory with strong participation of the inhabitants; (2) the access to the land and the capacity to fight and negotiate successfully for (relatively) favorable territorial regulations; and (3) collective experiences in everyday life and popular struggles for recognition.

Historically, popular urbanization can be understood as an alternative pathway to the process of mass housing urbanization that started for instance in Hong Kong and Paris about at the same time when popular urbanization first emerged in Mexico City and Istanbul.

Plotting urbanism

Plotting urbanism is mainly defined by three different characteristics: first, the relationship to the land is based on a territorial compromise that allows for the conflict-ridden co-presence of multiple systems and scales of regulation and land ownership regimes. Second, market mechanisms and commercialization intervene into the process in a fundamental way, which also creates specific social relationships between landlords or rentiers, who often still live in the area, and their tenants. Finally, the process proceeds in a piecemeal and incremental way, plot by plot without overarching planning, which creates a great variety of local situations. 

Plotting urbanism refers first to the piecemeal and speculative land development or densification of extant settlement areas. This process ‘plotting urbanism’ in order to stress the fundamental role of the plot, but also allowing some allusions to the strategic and dubious inferences of‘plotting’ in the sense of scheming for individual gain.

Plotting accommodates rapid population increase, and usually results in highly dense spaces with low architectural and urban qualities. Because of its piecemeal and uncoordinated character and the prioritization of individual gain over public good, the resulting living environment is often deficient in common facilities and public spaces, even if there might be a vibrant public life. Cases can be found in Istanbul, Kolkata, Lagos and Shenzhen.

Multilayered patchwork urbanization

The simultaneous presence of multiple logics that are determining the urbanization of the territory, whereby no single logic becomes dominant, resulting in a complex patchwork of more or less disjointed urban fragments. This situation is usually generated through the historical succession of different models of urbanization through which layer after layer of the urban fabric is produced and superimposed, without erasing earlier layers. This leads to an overlapping of historical patterns of urbanization, and a multiplicity of spatial orientations and temporal rhythms. Such territories are therefore characterized by a strong functional, social, and spatial heterogeneity. It emerges in some of the outskirts of Paris, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

Incorporation of urban differences

Incorporation of urban differences designates the commodification and domestication of place specific social, cultural, material and symbolic elements. It refers to the incorporation of unique – and potentially subversive – elements into spaces of hegemonic power and thus also touches the very core of recent civil protest occurring in urban centers all over the globe.

This process encompasses not only the sale of parcels of land, and the reservation of exclusive locations for certain privileged population groups, but social space itself becomes a commodity and is bought and sold. As a consequence, urban space becomes the very general object of production, and hence of the formation of surplus value. Shimokitazawa, Tokyo is a revealing example.

The commodification and incorporation of urban differences, whereby differences become integrated into dominant market and state logics and are gradually homogenized, thereby fundamentally altering everyday life and urban experience.

The state often plays a key role in this process; in many cases it not only supports the process through all sorts of policies and measures to upgrade, control and police such places, but even advances and guides it in order to transform the entire urban area into a more mainstream place.

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