CityReads│Guide for the Study of 21st Century City

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Guide for the Study of 21st Century City

The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City explores the conditions that have emerged or intensified since the start of the new decade to shape cities today.

Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett (eds). The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. SAGE. 2018.

Sources: https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/asi/the-sage-handbook-of-the-21st-century-city/book243355#contents

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2018/10/31/book-review-the-sage-handbook-of-the-21st-century-city-edited-by-suzanne-hall-and-ricky-burdett/

Image Credit: Krasnoyarsk, Russia (Alexander Vysotin CC BY 2.0)

Almost two decades into the twenty-first century – and at a time when a new digital revolution is gathering pace – it is not unreasonable to ask whether any new conditions particular to this century have arisen which would set contemporary cities apart from those discussed in the literature of the previous century, conditions which demand a re-engagement with what Manuel Castells called ‘the urban question’? This is addressed by The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City edited by Ricky Burdett and Suzanne Hall, both associated with LSE Cities , with the volume coming in at 700-plus densely written pages.

An international range of scholars engage with emerging urban conditions and inequalities in experimental ways, speaking to new ideas of what constitutes the urban, highlighting empirical explorations and expanding on contributions to policy and design.

The volume holds 37 individual essays, which is organized around nine overarching themes – Hierarchy, Productivity, Authority, Volatility, Conflict, Provisionality, Mobility, Civility and Design. These thematic sections together capture the volatile processes and intricacies of urbanization that reveal the turbulent nature of our early twenty-first century. The breadth of essays and themes is to be commended and furthermore ensures that the book responds to many of the challenges facing contemporary urban populations. Here three most central contributions from the volume are introduced.

One of the central essays – and arguably a text that unlocks the book – is Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s ‘Elements for a New Epistemology of the Urban’; readers are advised to start here. Like the Marxist geographers of the 1970s, Brenner and Schmid takes an approach which focuses not on the settlements themselves but on the socio-economic forces shaping them: ‘The essential task’, Brenner and Schmid write, ‘ is less to distinguish new urban forms that are putatively superseding earlier spatial morphologies than to investigate the historically and geographically specific dynamics of creative destruction that underpins patterns and pathways of urbanisation, both historically and in the contemporary epoch’ (63).

This is not social determinism. Urban systems, Brenner and Schmid argue, are both products of socio-economic forces and themselves a kind of inertial material force, refracting and sometimes redirecting the more volatile economic and institutional currents particular to a certain historical formation. Urban settlements on the one hand acquiesce to society, taking their shape from what are essentially external forces: the economic, the ideological and the social spheres. But they also involve powers of their own: locking social systems into socially and economically significant path dependencies, as for example in the case of infrastructure investments and the opportunities and dependencies these create (a problematic also explored by David Harvey in The Limits to Capital, 1982).

What, then, are the patterns of urbanization particular to our current era of post-crisis, late capitalism? Brenner and Schmid mention several: the creation of a ‘planetary’ scale of urbanization, of complete integration between urban systems and their suburban and rural hinterlands; the emergence of new corridors of urbanization; and the end of wilderness. Theirs is a multi-scalar and essentially boundless urban system: a geographical and material entity that spans the globe and that corresponds closely to the ‘World System’ theorized by Immanuel Wallerstein. It is this kind of city – a product of local conditions, but also planetary in reach; prey to external forces, yet itself a force to be reckoned with – which The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City explores.

One of the paradoxes of the planetary urban system is that it is concurrently the site of a great increase in economic possibility and social mobility – with millions of people lifted out of poverty in the so-called developing world in the last decade –  and the locus of significant and increasing inequalities, particularly in the developed world. In her essay on ‘Urban Economies and Social Inequalities’, Fran Tonkiss explores this issue, offering a useful taxonomy of the many forms that urban inequality takes on: ‘consumption and welfare disparities; uneven shares of insecurity and vulnerability; skewed distributions of risk and harm; inequities of opportunity, access and expectation; inequality of treatment and regard’. As is clear from the terminology, inequality is here related to the material and social structures of the city, space thereby becoming an active force in the distribution of insecurity and the sedimentation of hierarchies. This is not necessarily a new insight – the idea that inequality can be perpetuated by urban systems and their material structures has been explored by other theoreticians – yet Tonkiss’s essay offers useful nuance to the question and reframes it with respect to current urban populations and their struggles.

The relationship between urban systems and inequality is also explored by Mike Savage who, in his essay on the ‘Elite Habitus in Cities of Accumulation’, discusses different types of capital (‘economic’, ‘social’ and ‘cultural’, following Pierre Bourdieu) and their tendency to accrete in urban systems. Savage writes against modernist urban theories which, he argues, perceive cities as social mixing mechanisms: a type of settlement that has baked into its makeup transience and anomie. Counter to this position, Savage shows how urban land captures an increasing share of economic value – a trend that is particularly clear to those of us that live in London – and how this increasing centralisation of economic capital is, in turn, reflected in (and exacerbated by) concurrent increases in cultural and social capital.

The essays of the book prod at supposedly new phenomena – the planetary scale of the urban system, the idea that cities entrench as much they dissolve power structures – yet these ideas have in fact been explored before. The issues dealt with in this volume therefore are not new, but they are perhaps more acute than they were 50 years ago.

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