>The Surrounds (Simone 2022)
>Seeing Like a City (Amin and Thrift 2017)
>"The Metropolis" (Gordillo 2019)
>Lively cities (Barua 2023)
>"Racial Feralization" (Valayden 2016)
>"Productive tensions?" (Martinez et al. 2021)
>"Scale Critique for the Anthropocene" (Woods 2014 & 2022)
>"Who’s Afraid of Postcolonial Theory?" (Roy 2015)
>Ordinary Cities (Robinson 2006)
>The Production of Space (Lefebvre 1991)
>"Planetary Urbanization" (Brenner and Schmid 2011)
>"The Urban Question as a Scale Question" (Brenner 2000)
>"OUT IN SPACE" (Angelo and Goh 2021)
>Implosions/Explosions (2021)
A delightful way to enter my comps, this read was recommended by a companion as we walked past Victoria Park. Since moving to Vancouver in 2021, I've developed meaningful relations with city parks nearby where I've lived. First it was Chaldecott Park and West Memorial Park, where I'd go and read or take a phonecall or meeting and sit in the dugout or beneath the huge trees. When it snowed, my roommate and I tried to sled down the slight slope in West Memorial. Then it was Jonathan Rogers Park where the swing chains are super long and you can see the mountains if you swing high enough. Then Granville Park, a sunken park where the fog collects in winter, and where my friend and I would meet halfway between our apartments to catch up. She's moved away now but I still walk there to call her. There are many other parks across the city I frequent less often but are still very dear. Among them, Victoria park for me is a place to paint little canvases with friends in summer, a shady spot to read a book after walking there on a whim, a place to use the bathroom and walk in circles while I kill time before an appointment, a manifested encounter, and the destination of the trans march and dyke march (on different years) where I connected with friends and missed connections. Although I know Vancouver is unceded territory and that city parks occupy stolen indigenous lands, I hadn't dug deeper into the history or political ecology of the specific parks I use & frequent. I was therefore excited by this recommendation, and figured it would make a good introduction to my comps reading given that I read around the city (often in parks) and specifically have been attempting to read urban political ecology as an ethic through my urban practice(s) (see up my alley).
Four main chapters, written by four members of a family who's long lived at the corner of Victoria aka Bocce Ball Park, explore the tensions and joys of city parks on occupied land. A photo essay and set of poignant interviews with longtime park goers are folded between a critical introduction and overview of "the city park" as a colonial architecture, and an archival tracing of the land title of what is now the City of Vancouver's Victoria Park. Written by four white settlers who have lived in Vancouver for quite some time, On This Patch of Grass approaches parks from four entwined threads (3) which I summarize as use, regulation, parks as instruments of settler colonialism, and parks' open-ended nature which affords the possibility of their being remade. The book illustrates a serious and head-on working through of what it means to hold dear and meaningful those attachments to "public" lands that not only are stolen but mark settler occupation's continued cultural, ecological, and territorial dispossession. Park users are unequally policed, both by cops and members of the neighborhood community. "We want to tell part of the park's story here, to interrogate it as a place, a particular kind of urban subjectivity. But more than that, we want to use it as a vehicle for thinking about occupations, the uses of urban parks, the quasi-spiritual claims for the natural world and the history of this city" (9).
Throughout particularly the introduction (Chapter 1) and first chapter on city parks (Chapter 2), but also the last chapter on land titling (Chapter 5), I appreciated the presence of urban political ecology deployed to denaturalize, historicize, and politicize city parks. "No park is innocent...Parks, urban or not, are exactly as 'natural' as the roads or buildings around them, and they are just as political. Every park in North America is performing modernity and settler colonialism on an everyday basis" (2, see also 39). Tuning in not only to the collaborations and easy multiplication of use in Victoria Park but also the frictions between park users/uses, husband and father Matt Hern calls out the biopolitics of park theory as well as (or instantiated by) The City of Vancouver Parks and Recreation Board, which laud 'diversity' and 'accessibility' and, in the latter's case, reconciliation and Indigenous sovereignty, while determining acceptable uses (for instance, stalling a collaborate non-Indigenous and Squamish dance in Stanely Park due to settler-bureaucrats misunderstanding Indigenous protocols (32)) and quelling more rambunctious users. "The history of urban parks is one of landscaping and scenery, of utility and improvement, regulation and discipline" Mat Hern writes, "Parks claim to uplift people...they are the city-but-not-the-city..." (41). When I asked what it means to generate knowledge from within and as part of the city, these spaces of respite are not exempt (this becomes more obvious the moment they turn from uplifting to potentially unsafe milieus as I'm hollered at late at night). In other words, the VPL or the bus or "downtown" are no more "the city" than the scrap of park at the intersection of McLean and Charles where I sat reading this chapter on the "third bench", as two construction workers called it in their surprise that their were more benches than they had noted on a previous lunch break. With all its harmonies but its especially frictions, Victoria Park, Matt, Selena, Sadie and Daisy contend, is an exemplary (though not exceptional), lens to address the book's aims: "what I admire so much is the visibility in Bocce Ball Park. The politicization of the park and all its refusals are right there, unmistakable, irreverent. Rather than pacifying the city, this park highlights and amplifies it" (38).
In the last chapter, wife and mother Selena Couture traces the land title's changing hands using archival evidence from the Vancouver Public Library (VPL). What I found most remarkable was how she began the chapter by describing her bikeride home from VPL Central. Including the surrounding visual and affective detail, Selena itinerates her journey along Seymour Street, Dunsmuir, the Viaduct, Keefer Street, Keefer Place, Keefer Ave, Main Street, Hastings, Keefer again, Campbell, across Hastings, then onto Powell Street, across Clark Drive, on to Odlum, then up Grant Street, across Commercial Drive, and finally to the southwest corner of Bocce Ball Park where she dismounts at home. I can vividly imagine her route from downtown to east van. On the next page, we learn she's taken this route intentionally so as to ride along the streets named after the figures whose hand in the urbanization of Vancouver and the titling of Victoria Park she's about to elaborate. In beginning her chapter like this, she denaturalizes the names which too easily become, for settlers at least, "the background to our daily lives and are repeated in such everyday and mundane ways that they have little meaning attached to them anymore — other than as a way to mark an address" (115). To me, that's the start of generating a situated knowledge that thinks with place.
As a whole, I think this book directly attends to my question What of the structural can be seen in the everyday? in terms of taking an everyday site, composed of/by everyday activities, and denaturalizing, historicizing, and politicizing it to reveal how "that one square block articulates so many of the aporias [paradoxes or contradictions, points of uncertainty] of occupied urban land" (6). The authors take two simultaneously abstract and immensely, necessarily, concrete things — decolonization and city parks — and tackle their relation.
I'm still thinking this last analysis through but: The everyday reappears consistently throughout On This Patch of Grass. Of course, "We encounter parks in everyday and bodily senses" (2), but I picked up a on there being a larger sense in which 'the everyday' was both an affordance — how parks could be made through low-intensity refiguring of relations — and an obscurance to the very ordinary, micropolitical (not small, but rather relating to affect, as Barua clarifies), ways in which racial and colonial logics may work under the radar for white settlers in Vancouver. Parks are places where the "everyday work of biopolitics" plays out (29). Yet also, "everyday activities give us clues as to how we can share land in a decolonial sense" (5). Maybe a better question is after what else, or what more, can be seen/read in the everyday. Asking questions like What of the experiential is inflected, composed, or informed by processes not immediately perceptible? keeps these tensions in mind so as to not take city parks, for instance, for granted as a universal public good or accessible commons (33-34). It's a way to, like my creading question, tune perception to the non-phenomenological and sustain attention in practice (or in use) to what is not immediately perceptible for me but which composes parks as urban assemblages. I'm reminded of the paper "Can political ecology be decolonised? A dialogue with Paul Robbins" read last year for class. I believe the conclusion was no, not unless it's land back, but that doesn't mean you can't work in ways that are anti-colonial. While not about the community of practice that is political ecology, On This Patch of Grass seems to be using the tools of political ecology — tracking winners and losers as well as the persistent structures that maintain their disparity; narrating humans and nonhumans as dialectical; exploring contradictions; and making ontological claims while also attending to the epistemes from whence they are made (Robbins 2012, 87) - to possibilize decolonizing city parks: what if city parks were offered back to the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (44). While offering the land-title of Bocce Ball Park to the Nations whose land it is is not in my nor the Hern-Couture family's legal power, taking up urban political ecology as an ethic (rather than analytic) is a way to think seriously through settler-colonial architecture and the anti-colonial possibilities for remaking parks toward a decolonial future. And, to think these reworkings in practice - like Selena on her bikeride - refiguring relations in and through everyday activities (5) where before these tensions and potentialities may have gone unrecognized/un(der)considered. Thus, this book also responded to my question What are the colonial implications of my urban practices as a settler in Vancouver?
Seeing Like A City extolled the primacy/importance of infrastructure, arguing for the necessity of attention to and investment in urban infrastructure as a commons meant to benefit all. Amin and Thrift variously frame the city as a "machine" (), "as a sum of assemblages" (22), and "an infrastructural entanglement with considerable formative agency" (). They refer to "citiness" as "the combined vitality and political economy of urban sociotechnical systems, which we believe define the modern city" (3), where the sociotechnical systems considered are 1. urban metabolic systems, 2. mutual access choreographed by the navigation systems and infrastructure, and 3. human identity and affect as influenced by the (vital) urban landscape (4). "We want to see the city from the inside out" (4), they claim, and narrate citiness from the ground up. However, while the reader is assured "city never becomes City" (60), I found the book to rather imply city = City. I wished specific cities were explored, or attention payed to what specificity gives us and what it does not.
Opening with the core argument that "the infrastructure of the modern city can become the main focus of political action" (6), they conclude with a politics of infrastructure. "Modern" here and above initiates a division carried throughout the book between "modern cities" and the "developing world". (More on this in my summary of Ordinary Cities and Postcolonial Theory further down.) A politics of infrastructure, they argue, requires 1. visibilizing repair and maintenance work (recollecting artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles who Luke told me about) (84); 2. redesigning institutions which are no longer fit for purpose; 3. making intercessors for infrastructure (87); 4. changing infrastructures from tramlines to something that offers a sense of possibility (89); 5. a new vision of the world where all things form a constituency (90); and 6. injecting these into the interactions of everyday life.
Though their drawing from assemblage theory and some ATP gives space for the city to be more than the sum of its flows and infrastructure, again and again I got the sense that infrastructure, as ultimately the target of an exigent policy redesign, was something concrete, mediating the urban experience of space (51). "Infrastructure is a structure of contact that also defines what shows up as real at any juncture... It is the gross material of materiality" (). Additionally, though infrastructure is political as well as procedural (89), there were moments where I thought an urban political ecology analytic was in contrast—for example, the "natural sound" (52) of birds and such was contrasted to the mechanical noises of the urban milieu, and cities rendered as an "artificial environment" (43).
Planetary urbanization, mentioned once only and on the first page, is implicitly eschewed in favor of a more relational approach. Though not in the index, they appear to espouse the "urban age" thesis, indeed beginning their book "with an audit of the world significance of cities" (11).
I actually read the Martinez et al. (2021) paper “Productive Tensions? The ‘City’ across Geographies of Planetary Urbanization and the Urban Age” midway through writing this reflection, as it was really unclear to me how Amin and Thrift were approaching cities. I do believe it's more in an urban age vein, though the way they think about dynamicity even as they forward a policy agenda might portend the melding of the two.
However, Amin and Thrift do emphasize the extensive and intensive nature of urban infrastructure, framing the history of anthropocene as a history of urbanization (1) and dedicating an entire chapter to how "cities are one of the main products and producers of the Anthropocene" (34).
I actually noticed that multiple turns of phrase or conceptual framings articulated in Seeing Like A City (2017) which were taken up and extended by Lively Cities' "minor ecology of infrastructure": the focal shift from matter to materials (82), the idea of "meshwork" (116-119) and the idea of a lively city.
Overall, while Amin and Thrift clearly enjoyed writing this book and the illustrations were beautiful, theoretically, it fell short for me. I thought the way they used their citations held them back. For example, in discussing how cities think through eliciting and parsing feedback, they are quick to clarify that cities do not think in the same way as people. More so, they demonstrate the "noncorrelational thought" of, you guessed it, autistics. Then, and I kid you not, two sentences later they literally cite Erin Manning's Always More Than One—a lesser hyped but in my opinion beautifully sparse in comparison to later books, account of the more-than, choreography, and autistic perception. But how do they use it? To mark the multiplicity of "'scales and registers of life, both organic and inorganic' (Manning, 2013, p. 226), that resonate together in all manner of dispositional ways" (82-83). It just felt like they were not moved by their references the way Barua was, and used the most special and inspired works instrumentally. I don't know how you read Always More Than One and that's the standout sentence.
In this chapter, Gordillo draws on anecdotal experience of Las Lajitas' infrastructural and agricultural transformation from 2003 onwards (though its change was initiated by processes beginning in the 1980s and 90s) to elaborate the concept of "the metropolis". Over a period of 20+ years, Las Lajitas, Argentina, transformed from a rural town to hub of soybean processing involving both local/national and international corporations, stakeholders, and interests. Its transformation, Gordillo emphasizes, "did not involve the growth of a self-referential, bounded object. On the contrary, those assemblages of roads, machinery, vehicles, and silos were all designed to facilitate the transportation of soybeans and their industrialized derivatives to densely populated urban centers across the world" (68-69). The chapter then lays out how the rapid and intensive urbanization/industrialization/infrastructuralization in places far and disconnected from cities, places like Las Lajitas, is better understood not as the extension of a single city but rather as the part of the metropolis at work.
The metropolis is "not an extended version of 'the city'" (69) - an urban agglomeration or "conurbation" as repeatedly described in Seeing Like A City - but rather the assemblage of metabolic infrastructure (and more) through which an urban agglomeration reproduces itself and expands. While the metropolis cannot be grasped simply from a god's eye remove, the "planetary scale" is not entirely eschewed. Gordillo's chapter at once critiques and extends planetary urbanization, parsing totality from totalization: "the totality posed by planetary urbanization is crucial for thinking holistically about the Anthropocene" (73). A "nontotalizing totality" (76), the metropolis is presented as "a heuristic, concrete abstraction to name the materiality of the continuum that moves matter from one continent to another in order to reproduce and expand the metabolism of the largest urban agglomerations on Earth" (69, emphasis in original). Gordillo's attention to nuance and what a framework of planetary urbanization can offer resonates with the argument made by Martinez et al. (2021) to bring planetary urbanization into dialogue with the urban age thesis. However, while Martinez at al. (2021) suggested the city itself as a heuristic, Gordillo resists re-posing the essentialized city form.
In using the term Anthropocene, however, Gordillo is not centering/exceptionalizing human activity so much as describing the reality of there being no outside to climate and landscape change. He goes on to describe the "Metropolis as...infrastructure of the Anthropocene" (93) in that the metro-bolic infrastructure (my shorthand) described above is unevenly intensive, marking some "areas of the planet with a high density of infrastructures created to" feed the voracious metropolis (83). These high density areas Gordillo calls "zones of imperial extraction" (83). Not only are capitalism's free trade and neoliberal deregulation and privatizations "legal-territorial technologies" for creating and maintaining these zones, more and more, infrastructures and logistics are too (83). Thus, the metropolis is an imperial constellation (83).
This approach to infrastructure is markedly different from Amin and Thrift's in Seeing Like A City. Methodological cityism aside, in claiming "cities are one of the main products and producers of the Anthropocene" (Amin and Thrift 2017, 34), Amin and Thrift missed attending to the imperial nature of cities' (and the extensive and intensive infrastructure that exceeds their bounds yet reproduces them) toll on the environment goes unaddressed. However, there are were a couple potential points of resonance, or at least one: the commons. Though Amin and Thrift position infrastructure itself as "the essential urban economic commons", they do call for policy to recast it from a means of private profit to that of the equitable distribution of public services. This includes the design as well. Gordillo, on the other hand, assumes a commonplace understanding of what the commons is, and, through examples of local and state resistance to "legal-territorial technologies" (essentially Monsanto tried to stop and frisk trucks for patented seed as they left silos in Rosario but unlike surrounding countries, seeds cannot be made private property in Argentina), illustrates the metropolis as "a generative space of collective encounters that offers the potential to reinvent the commons" (71).
I found this chapter excellent to think through a reframing I wouldn't have otherwise encountered. For instance, Barua, while also critiquing planetary urbanization though for other reasons, defaults to using "the metropolis" as stand in for an extended city. Reflecting on this reading I think I'll re/read scale critique(s) for the Anthropocene next.
More than halfway through reading Lively Cities, I went without the book for a day and read this article on "Racial Feralization" because I thought it could elaborate the figure of ferality also employed used by Barua, as well as bring it into discussions of race and the deployment of racial logics to govern populations in terms more specific to the human. Though not an animal geographer myself, I have so much added appreciation and respect for Barua's insistence on the importance of attending to other than human lifeworlds in the city when I return to literature discussing similar figures but devoid of the nuance present in accounts that feature the more-than-human as at minimum present, active agents in co-constituting the urban fabric.
In this paper, Valayden suggests contemporary governance strategies wield/leverage potential risk of disaster, whose increased frequency and intensity results from planetary urbanization, as legitimation to deploy racial logics to order cities. "Racial feralization is racial governance in the age of planetary urbanization" (11). Unquestioningly taking planetary urbanization as the current state of affairs, he "argue[s] that racial feralization, as a conception of race, has reappeared as a problematic of government in the context of a risk-society..." (Valayden 2016, 3, emphasis in original). Furthermore, the stakes of the risk are existential. Valayden, along with "the majority of race scholars", contends that "the critique of race must take place through a critique of philosophical humanism" (2). Closely reading Foucault, he points to a pitfall of many interpretations that take 'Western episteme' "as an empirical reality" (2) rather than an analytic to understand how 'Man' is cohered and maintained (3). Valayden suggests "racial feralization" as a parallel discourse to modernity/coloniality, one which "refers to the ever present potential that humanity will slip back into and blend with nature" (3). "racial feralization is the future posited by the discourse of government where a catastrophic engulfment threatens the human form, and where decomposition and decay will reduce the planet to a volatile landscape of random violence. Racial ferality inaugurates a form of governance at the threshold of the future survival of the human race" (14) Racial feralization thus provides a counternarrative to the dominant discourse which assumes infinite progress and the one-day obsolescence of 'Man' (rather than seeing the overrepresentation of the former mentality tied to the impossibility of the latter (2)). Taken as "an analytic and not an empirical fact" (18), racial feralization is a way to understand how racial logics persist in (biopolitics operating on) fears of loosing the human/'Man' - and, therefore reveals philosophical humanism as never all that "self-assured" (3).
To note another particularly vivid passage:
"Racial feralization represents the threat that the human will be engulfed by nature, and that human life will be reduced to formlessness and random violence, devoid of any ability to create meaning in the world. That is, the symbolics of race, so central to modernity's self-understanding, would be undone by the impossibility of symbolization...racial feralization has been revived as a problematic of government ot extend the matrix of race ot populations surplused by neoliberal capitalism. Racial ferality acts as a principle of legitimation to govern the perceived exponential increase of catastrophic dangers in a risk society whose context is planetary urbanization" (18)
Valayden's unquestioning deployment of planetary urbanization as the organizer of our current world to me read ironically similarly to taking "Western episteme" as empirical fact. He also doesn't seem interested in delving into the construction of "disaster" or "natural disasters" for that matter. There was no specific populations described even though an array of examples come to mind. And, of course, no mention of how the "matrix of race" has been extended to nonhuman populations "surplused by neoliberal capitalism" (18) and those already in beastly positions.
Racial feralization is repeatedly posed as a "problematic of government", but I would have liked further elaboration of the "problematic" at hand. Indeed, I felt the same language was used repetitively to re-state the original claim. I was left confused as to how racial feralization was at once a "threat" and "analytic" - to me it seemed like Valayden was deploying it in one way, and governments were deploying it an other. Moreover, and maybe it's because I don't have a background knowledge of critical race scholarship, but it seemed "race" as a constructed category and "human race" as species slipped into one another.
(The feared dissolution of the human race as a species, not necessarily through dying out but through loosing coherence as an ontological category, reminded me of Simone's description of what he meant by "from extinction to abolition". Unfortunately and strangely Valayden, to my recollection, didn't so much attend to the nuance in extinction, not only as proffered by other scholarship but in the difference, within his own argument, between the dissolution of the human as a category distinct from nature and the dying out of the human species, conceivably similar or identical though those two feared fates may be. Again, this reiterates an absence of attention to those already in beastly positions.)
In Lively Cities, Barua explicitly attends to how racial logics been extended to nonhuman populations through anticipatory fears of the stranger. In chapters 3 & 4 of Lively Cities, where ferality features most prominent, Barua takes his analytic developed in the context of (trans-species Macaques ethologies in) Delhi to another postcolonial city, London, where he uses the figure of ferality to explore (and this, like any attempt to summarize this book, is an oversimplification) how the movement of more-than-humans in and out of the frame of lively capital and affective relations across species divides offers another way to meaningfully understand the material politics and practices of urban inhabitation and urbanization itself.
True to his mode of argumentation throughout the book, Barua articulates the feral in both major and minor terms. (Major ≈ canon, arborescence, human-centered, god's eye, top-down, etc.) Major connotations of the feral include breakdown, imageries/realities of predation by the rich, and apprehension of forms that exist as neither domesticated nor wild—those once domesticated that escaped and now live in-between,likened to loose animals or criminals ranging the otherwise ordered/orderly city. However, "as a theoretical category constituting the outside to capital, ferality becomes a productive entry point for a minor articulation of cities composed It is the major figure of ferality that Valayden pursues.
In the chapters on ferality, Barua is particularly interested in feral Parakeets—those that escaped or were released and which now proliferate London. Parakeets began being brought to Britain from South Asia and West Africa in the early 1900s as part of the exotic bird trade, though the current feral population of 8,600 breeding pairs (106) stem from escapes around 1969 (109). Feral parakeets have created an urban niche for themselves that, contra invasion biology and biotic nativism stoked sentiments, there is no evidence is negatively impacting "native" species. Actually, some species have changed their habits in relation to Parakeets. Though London's verdant and gregarious population of feral parakeets draws mixed sentiments from individuals, many enjoy feeding the birds, both at home at a bird feeder or outside. The affective relations Parakeets have developed with humans contribute to their infrastructural niche. Other contributors to their proliferation and thriving include the staggered bloom-times of urban flora, also introduced via imperial importation. Over generations, Parakeet's genetic and behavioral changes in relation to London's urban environment and flora and fauna mark a novel form of evolution and index Barua compellingly calls "recombinant urbanisms".
In Valayden's account, racism morphs, no longer legitimated through establishing people in hierarchies but forstalling catastrophe (12); "The symbolics of race - the categories that define fixity - are allowed to decompose through individualization and hybridization up to the point where this degeneration signals the threat of racial feralization" (Valayden 12) This - immediate connection to how xyz barua multiculturalism and diversity - more the norm... what becomes object-targe? One Londoner Barua talked to about the Parakeets said "I want to see bright people, in muted landscapes" (153).
Barua would therefore agree with Valayden on the bioplitical deployment of racial logics:
"Feralization enters discourse and practice as a problematic of government and allows various agencies to identify, name and govern a population in racial terms. In turn, it legitimizes the application of a number of techniques of sorting and technologies of control and care to those identified as feral" (Valayden 2016, 18)
though Barua would likely not agree with Valayden that planetary urbanization is responsible. Indeed, in the next chapters which I read after finishing this paper, Barua makes the case for viewing the pastoral as immanent to cities, and the urban question being just as much an agrarian one.
I read this in order to clarify my reading response for Seeing Like A City (2017), as it seems Amin and Thrift eschew planetary urbanization for a more relational approach, but then cite the urban age. So, my question is, are planetary urbanization and the urban age the same thesis?
To answer: definitely not! The urban age thesis emerged in 2007, when half the global population were deemed to be living in areas defined as urbanized. While urban age discourses collapse the urban and the city by emphasizing the latter as a political and economic driver, planetary urbanization de-centers "the city" as a discreet and bounded place, shifting focus instead to the "relentless modification of the socio-spatial conditions of the planet under late capitalism" (1013). Planetary urbanization recognizes urbanization processes as multiscalar and extensive, enrolling areas not discreetly urban. Thus, "By transcending the urban/rural dualism - a key assumption underlying the partitioning of urban and rural areas that sustains the urban age thesis - capital accumulation, state regulation, common resources privatization, or socio-environmental degradation are conceptualized as constitutive processes of the planetary urban condition, rather than socio-spatial qualities ascribed to specific types of settlements" (1016). Attention to areas outside city limits enrolled in processes of urbanization is required lest we fall into methodological cityism. Whereas the urban age framing persists in multilateral policy practice, planetary urbanization is increasingly a commonplace framework in academic theorizing.
Citing limited exchange between the two theses, this paper seeks to bring them into conversation. Planetary urbanization's transcendence of dualisms, the authors argue, risks missing local practices emergent when the city is approached as a political community. Finally, they suggest two pathways for "more-than-academic intervention" through "critical and strategic deployment of the city as a concept" (1018) or "heuristic" (1017). First,
"recognition of significant work that has been done to insert the experiences of Southern cities into global policy agendas, and the possibilities that this holds for further critical diversification of what is understood by 'urban' challenges in those agendas. Deeper appreciation of the diverse forms, trajectories and capacities of cities in the majority world (among academics as well as multilateral agency actors) is an important corrective in its own right to inherited, normative conceptions of 'the city' based on historical experiences in the North...Southern urbanism could infuse global urban policy with more critical accounts of contemporary urban conditions, including those associated with planetary urbanization."
And second, "foreground[ing] human dimensions of various geographies of urban transformation" (1019), re-valuing the city as a site of local political communities where the right to the city is, at a policy level, disentangled from the city-centric logics of provisioning markets and privatizing public assets (2017).
This work, of "disentangl[ing] the legitimation of specific urban normative imaginaries within the very discursive space that has engendered them", the authors suggest are "scholarly efforts" (1017). Does this reiterate an academic-policy divide, where the latter taking up theories of the former will 'get it wrong' without scholarly intervention?
Anyway, probably written more than enough reflection for this paper but it did absolutely answer my question and is a good point of reference.
Woods, Derek. 2022. "Scale Critique for the Anthropocene, Part Two." New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 107 (107): 155–70.
The first scale critique is one I was recommended a year or more ago, and have returned to a couple times since, most memorably in the third week of a geographical political economy course taken last fall after reading Eric Sheppard's (2002) "The Spaces and Times of Globalization: Place, Scale, Networks, and Positionality", Nagar et al.'s (2002) "Locating Globalization: Feminist (Re)readings of the Subjects and Spaces of Globalization", then Niel Brenner's (2001) "The limits to scale? Methodological reflections on scalar structuration" followed by Sallie Marston and Neil Smith's (2001) response. This paper has stuck in my mind as, while not directly referenced in my reflection then, instigated a curiosity at how "geographical scale" was taken to mean something self evident.
I read Sheppard (2002) and Nagar et al. (2002) to be discussions of positionality at different scales. While both Sheppard (2002) and Nagar et al. (2002) espouse positionality, Sheppard's is at the scale of 'territory' or 'territorial unit' whereas Nagar et al. focus on the scale of the body, household, and community. Sheppard (2002) believes that place, scale, and networks aren't enough to make sense of globalization in a moment when digital technologies are refiguring space by shrinking contact times. Drawing from feminist theory, Sheppard (2002) argues "connectivity across space/time requires attention to… positionality" (315). He uses "positionality to describe how different entities are positioned with respect to one another in space/time" (318, emphasis in original). Borrowing from physics, he suggests the 'wormhole' as a way of describing relationships between territories with similar positionalities. The wormhole transcends Euclidean space, folding space/time based not on proximity—a measure of physical distance—but on the "intensity and nature of interconnectedness…" (Sheppard 2002, 324). In contrast, what feminist analysis brings to economic globalization literature is the call to theorize from from below—that is, starting from the perspective of marginalized people and economic spheres (Nagar et al. 2002, 263). Nagar et al. (2002) go on to evince the often contradictory experiences women have as subjects of globalization. Across both papers, I found scale to be just too tidily constructed and delimited. Thinking with the readings from Week 2, I wonder whether 'body' and 'household' can so easily be scaled as bounded entities? The asymmetric porosity of home and work call into question the territorial unit of a household as being a discreet scale: when a wife brings her "'work'" to her husband's office, it is "hardly an invasion"; yet, when a husband brings his work home, he invades the household with the "sphere of paid work" (Massey 1995, 494). When is a body localizable as an individual actor and when does it interpellate a (domestic; professional) sphere? Both Sheppard's (2002, 318) definition of positionality and the contradictions playing out in everyday experiences suggest positionality has everything to do with scale. Indeed, I'd argue positionality is a scalar relation.
Though I was heartened in my expectation that Brenner (2001) would more explicitly account for the construction of scale, his blunt jab at Marston (2000) and subsequent provocations served only to intensify my feeling that something was missing. Brenner (2001) does three things. First, he critiques Marston's (2000) article on the social construction of scale in which she focuses on the geographical unit of the household to analyze the role of social reproduction and consumption on capitalism's scalar structuring. Brenner (2001) argues that other lexicons such as those of 'territory', 'locale' and 'place' would be better suited to describe the household, and that scalar concepts should be saved for discussions of relations and embeddedness. Second, Brenner (2001) differentiates between what he sees as singular and plural interpretations of the 'politics of scale'. The singular understanding, which he ascribes to Marston's (2000) study, focuses on a "self-enclosed geographical unit" where "scale is understood essentially as a boundary separating the unit in question — be it a place, a locality, a territory or any other spatial form — from other geographical units or locations" (599, emphasis in original). A plural 'politics of scale', by contrast, is concerned not only with the "production of differentiated spatial units as such, but…their embeddedness and positionalities in relation….The referent here is thus the process of scaling…geographical scale is understood primarily as a modality of hierarchization and rehierarchization through which processes of sociospatial differentiation unfold both materially and discursively" (600, emphasis in original). Brenner (2001) advocates for this plural understanding of the 'politics of scale' as he believes it appropriately captures the "determinate…positions [of geographic scales] as differentiated units within multitiered sociospatial hierarchies…" (600). Third and lastly, Brenner (2001) contributes eleven propositions for investigating 'scalar structuration', defined as a dimension of sociospatial processes that become vertically hierarchized into "distinct spatial units" (604).
What I found lacking across all papers (but especially Brenner (2001)) was attention to the presupposition of a singular scale analytic, facilitated in part by the collapse in meaning of 'scale' and 'unit'. Scale analytics is my provisional attempt at identifying the framework of intelligibility which relationally configures "distinct spatial units" (Brenner 2001, 604). Scale analytics orient so-called scale-units in scalar relation. For example, the following is the scale analytic of Google Maps which calls graphical elements (units) into relation by a framework of proportional distance: 
. I can rescale this scale by treating it as an image. In doing so, I impose an entirely different scale analytic, one of height and width measured in pixels. What of scale-units enrolled in multiple scale analytics at once? Brenner's fifth proposition edges towards to what I have in mind but defaults again to scales of positionality: "Each geographical scale is constituted through its historically evolving positionality within a larger relational grid of…sociospatial processes, relations and interdependencies. Consequently, the very intelligibility of each scalar articulation of a social process hinges crucially on its embeddedness within dense webs of relation to other scales and spaces" (606). I suggest a positionality of scales, nay, a positionality of scale analytics. This would allow for a multiplicity of scale analytics to exist simultaneously while remaining reflexively responsive to the politics of choosing one to frame intelligibility. A positionality of scale analytics.accounts for positionality both of relations between scale-units and how the relations themselves are an effect of the scale analytic which configures them. In this way, scale-units such as 'body' or 'household' are provisionally configured as "scalar articulation[s]" (Brenner 2001, 606) or "articulated moments in networks of social relations and understanding" (Massey in Sheppard 2002, 312).
In Pollution is Colonialism, Max Liboiron (2021) writes: "Scale is about what relationships matter within a particular context." Thinking with a scale analytic as a relational configuration—one of many possible frameworks of intelligibility which renders connections determinate in just such a way—I ask in response to Brenner's propositions for investigating scalar structuration through a plural politics of scale: Is naming "context" as that which relationally matters a scaling practice? If yes, might the "context of the context" then become a positionality of scale analytics?
The reason I suggest "urban everyday" as a scale analytic is because of this thinking. As I write in my List Overview, I turn to the "urban everyday" as a diffractive apparatus for investigating the infra/structural as it articulates in mundane events, encounters, and arts of inhabitation. Taking neither "urban" nor "everyday" for granted, I seek instead to think them through one another towards an understanding of their organization of a scale analytic.
Derek Woods' main argument is that the human "species" is not the subject of the Anthropocene. This kind of scaling up of human agency belies how patternings of relationality cohere differently at different scales, or zoom levels. This phenomenon, which occurs with abundance across every discipline, he calls "scale variance." Scale variance describes how "the observation and operation of systems are subject to different constraints at different scales due to real discontinuities" (133). It follows that "The scale-critical subject of the Anthropocene is not 'our species' but the sum of terraforming assemblages composed of humans, nonhuman species, and 'technics'" (134).
The opposite of scale variance is the smooth zoom effect (134) where "Scale is assimilated to measure" (135). By this latter statment, Woods is refering to when the scale itself is a unit of measurement (133). For example and like I described in my response above, when a literal scalebar that dictates measurement is taken to be continuously scalable. Moving "behond measure" "scale critique emphasizes disjunctures and incommensurable differences among scales. Scale variance refers to the thresholds that constrain biophysical, technological, and social becoming, thresholds beyond which scale effects influence how we observe systems and how they work" (135).
My main discontent with this first paper is that while Woods uses an animation of zooming in on the world by powers of ten while the human, panoptic vioce-over remains a constant scale. This might seem too technical but if you consider the "planetary digital zooming" enabled by ubiquitious interactive webmaps/interfaces like Google Earth where the human viewer does remain positioned at the same scale, staring at the screen, until more recently, such webmaps are full of disjuncture. By this I mean that the tile layers that underly them are sets of static images at discreet zoom levels which load as you zoom. If you play the below video, you can watch the tiles load around the periphery.
AND
Robinson, Jennifer. 2006. Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development. Routledge
In Ordinary Cities (2006), urban geographer Jennifer Robinson effectively argues for 'detonating' (6) the hierarchy of cities established by categorizations such as "first world" and "third world", "developed" and "developing", suggesting instead every city be recognized as ordinary. If every city is taken to be ordinary, then every city can be seen to demonstrate the dynamism, creativity, and innovation ascribed to modernity. Critically thinking through concepts of modernity and development/developmentalism (both of which are products of a colonial past" (4)), Robinson aims to lay out a post-colonial urban studies where difference is gathered as diversity, not incommensurability (6, 9, see also 41). Robinson suggests "a cosmopolitan urban studies" where theories are just as diverse as the cities they are applied to, recognizing that the incorporations of elements borrowed from elsewhere compose the urban imaginary of any given ordinary city.
Robinson begins her argument by "dislocating modernity", outlining the chronological and then spatial construction of its antithesis. Modernity, like eurocentrism in Ananya Roy's essay, is a story the West tells itself (20). However, there are some important narrators. Robinson traces how key words/concepts like "primative" and "traditional" were used by Chicago School urbanists Robert Park and Louis Wirth to conjure an Other to "the rational practices of a specifically urban (and Western) modernity" (21). The binary instantiated by these ideas circulated widely (amongst urbanists focused on the West). Greatly influenced by Park, Georg Simmel (who Park and Wirth draw from as well) argued that in cities, people develop a new sense of needing to stand out, to individualize themselves in manners not necessitated by folk or primitive life (25). Simmel's theory that urban inhabitants developed a blasé attitude to protect themselves against the overstimulation of the city (45) was of great significance to the work of Wirth.
Admirer and critic of Simmel, Walter Benjamin (27),
"explore[d] the concept of Western modernity by postulating a dialectical relationship between conceptualisations of the modern (here and now) and the idea of tradition, antiquity, or the primative. Benjamin offers a critical account of this relationship between modernity and tradition as produced within modernity itself...A dialectical imagination, then, insists on the co-presence and mutual interdependence of concepts of modernity and tradition." (28)
Robinson adeptly lays out the strengths and limitations of Benjamin's analysis, showing that while binaries are repeated, his dialectical approach (more akin to Simmel in this than Park or Wirth) enabled more comparative maneovers.
(I wasn't totally sure what Robinson meant by taking dialectics at a standstill - a mode of analysis she takes from Benjamin to apply in Ordinary Cities. I will reference The Arcades Project pg 925 though and return to this.)
Narrations by the Chicago School and interlocutors of a Western modernity set in mutually exclusive contrast to the primitive and traditional elsewhere/when didn't go unchallenged, simply unremembered. Robinson cites the comparative urbanisms of a handful of anthropologists who, from the 1940s to 1960, pushed back on the above narratives by locating the so-called tribal and traditional as already within the city and part of what it meant to be modern. Writing from Zambia (part of the Copperbelt), these anthropologists - collectively known as the Manchester School - advocated for an expanded "right to be urban" (49). From the refashioning of discarded clothing (85-88) to lampooning amongst urban denizens from different tribal backgrounds (48) to women singing dancing as a means of finding community across different cultural backgrounds but a shared urban experience (88-90), cultural/folk practices became reworked in the city. Building on their work, others, such as Karen Hansen (who describes the refashioning of clothes above), continued writing against Eurocentric binaries. Unfortunately, the efforts of anthropologists such as J. Clyde Mitchell, Arnold Leonard Epstein, and Max Gluckman of the Manchester School have been largely left out of histories of urban studies, something Robinson seeks to rectify in taking on their comparative mode of analysis to dislocate and multiply modernity towards postcolonial urbanisms.
Of course given the above, Robinson debates whether or not to keep modernity as a term - if it's even capable of being "rescued" (8). This connects to Ananya Roy's (2015) discussion of what postcolonial theory does, and why, contra recent (to the article) dismissals, it matters. She articulates these dismissals' fundemental "misreading of historical difference as empirical variation; an analytical confusion between globalization and universalization and between generalization and universalization; and the valorization of Eurocentrism" (203). Opening the essay by reflecting on the difficulty of fitting eurocentric urban theories to her dissertation fieldsite, Calcutta, Roy makes the case for postcolonial theory as a means to "think relationally about cities" (207). She writes:
"For me, postcolonial theory is a way of inhabiting, rather than discarding, the epistemological problem that is Eurocentrism. Postcolonial theory then is not so much a way of interpreting and narrating the postcolony as it is a method for interpreting and narrating the West, or rather 'the stories the West most often tells itself about itself', to repeat Gregory's (2004:4) felicitous phrase." (205)
In further refuting "universal grammars", Roy, following Partha Chatterjee, emphasizes that postcolonial theory (and Subaltern Studies particularly) is concerned with the "'critique of liberal historiography'" (Chatterjee qtd in Roy 2015, 202). This, to me, bears resonance to what Robinson is endeavoring in both writing critical comparative urbanisms back in to the history of urban studies, and dislocating modernity from a teleological future of a primative and underdeveloped past. Writes Robinson:
"We need to find ways to write modernity outside of the historical time of the West. The only way to do this is to ensure that there are grounds for appreciating and experiencing the modern without necessary reference to the West, or Western capitalism. This means disconnecting the social transformations and cultural valorisations indicated by theories of modernity from assumptions about progress, and from any fixed geographical referents. Decentring the West in thories of modernity means seeking to understand the sources and sites of social transformation wherever they may be and allowing for newness and innovation, along with their cultural valorisation, to emerge and exist anywhere." (18)
The inhabitation of "modern" is therefore a carefully considered, tactical decision. The term's continued importance, Robinson concludes, is in no small part because "modernity" has been taken up and appropriated by cities historically left outside its ambit. Cities are increasingly identifying what it means to be modern for themselves, without direct reference to a Western originary.
"Where accounts of modernity in poor places have emphasised mimicry and have seen modernity as undermined by tradition, by poverity and, expecially, by racial difference, I want to stress the centrality of appropriation to modernity everywhere and to insist that modernity is borrowed, invented and valorised in both wealthier and poorer cities." (66)
As evidence, Robinson draws on architectural forms across New York City and Rio de Janiero, showing how not only did stylistic influences on New York come from a range of cities elsewhere (68-73), but "viewed from Rio de Janeiro at various moments, New York might be considrered to have been rather backward, in its commercial commitment to the populist moderne style for example, and its slowness in embracing a more contemporary and critical international architecture" (73). "critiq[ing] the idea of modernity as mimicry" (79), Robinson echos the 2000 Brazilian 'Cannabalist Manifesto' and Argentine writer Borges in arguing for the creative ingestion, the appropriation and recirculation, of modernity (79). In an/other example of architechtural appropriation, the skyscraper, an icon of modernity, was appropriated by Kuala Lampur which built the Petronas Tower in 1996; as the tallest buildings in the world at that time, they were meant signal to global capital that Malaysia was a place to invest (79-82). Eleswhere, both Johannesburg's 2010 and 2030 plan at the turn of the century featured the Hillbrow Tower, a communications tower originally built in 1971 during apartheid. Robinson describes the meaning of Hillbrow tower along with the Brixton tower, also overlooking Johannesburg and which was the tallest in Africa before the Hillbrow tower was built, as the meeting of "high modernism and high apartheid" (147).
In one of the handful of theoretically sharp reversals throughout the book, Robinson states and then asks:
In some ways, these apartheid towers in their dated modernity can stage a 'dialectics at a standstill' for us, bringing the dynamics of contemporary urban policy crashing together with the histories of apartheid. They might challenge us to ask, for example, who is being excluded in these new imaginative configurations of Johannesburg's futures? Are racialized pasts perhaps being reinstated in an era that is ostensibly committed to a non-racial polity? But in many ways, the appropriation of these towers from the architects of apartheid to symbolise the future of an inclusive and dynamic city speaks more of the potential for icons of modernity to be appropriated at will and to carry ambitions of global success across the historical divide of apartheid and post-apartheid government." (147)
Hierarchies, then, established through assumptions that wealthy cities' greater contritribution to the world economy establishes them as more important sites of inquiry and innovation than poorer cities, contribute to a nonreciprical circulation of ideas wherein urban studies in the West are never expected to reference analytics developed in non-west cities, but the latter must always engage canon (168). It is necessary, Robinson argues, that urban theory and urban policy adopt a cosmopolitan urbanism where [xyz].
Elaborating on the "right to be urban" (49) she makes a compelling case for the "right to be modern" (77, 147).
In the second half of Ordinary Cities, Robinson critiques globalization and developmentalism in urban theory and urban policy, describing how the former leads to a focus only on wealthy cities driving the global economy and the latter, to an overemphasis in poorer cities to all that is failing while ignoring their vibrancy, regional importance and sigificant informal economies, and innovation. Both developmentalist and global- and world- city approaches to urban policy focus on either a small set of cities or a small part of cities to the detriment of the diversity of a world of cities. In contrast to global- and world-city framings, Robinson suggests urban policy focus on the city-regen level. This level of analysis, she believes, will bring the city back into view. (To me, the affordance of this scale specifically - and its definition - was in need of elaboration.) Though acknowledging the tensions and conflicts between the visions of different groups, she is in favor of city development strategies (CDSs): "The CDS initiative envisages an opening of urban policiy to the diversity of interests and activities in distinctive cities and imagines wide participation towards building a consensus visin for the future development of a city" (131). She makes the case for the importance of strategies aimed at both economic growth and innovation, as well as the redistribution of services; the latter is key in poorer cities where informal economic practices are a significant contributor to formal sector.
All in all, though absolutely riddled with copyedit errors and written in a style (so much) less dazzling than prior readings, I quickly warmed to this book because of its direct, if sometimes verbatum repetative, writing. I also tremendously respected the thoughtful cover design, and preface explaining it. Robinson shows skill in synthesizing and summarizing historical movements and moments - moving easily between broad connections and local specificity. Her comparative mode of reading reminded me of Barua, who also reversed the gaze as it were, taking an analytic developed in the concept of postcolonial Delhi and applying it to the postcolonial context of London's recombinant urbanisms. There were, however, many moments I wished for more clarifaction and elaboration. I also found her focus on the city, or city-region, didn't enable thinking through how the non-city, rural, agrarian, etc. is changing in response - how traditional ways of living and cultural practices not taken to the city change (or not). It was for this reason I liked Gordillo's account of the metropolis and attention to the making of extractive zones. While a comparative mode can trace trajectories from one city to another (170), those from city to "countryside" are perpetually (constitutivelly?) left out.
Furthermore, diversity in regards to the economy was left quite vague. The work of dislocating modernity from its (Western) originary and multiplying/plurilizing/diversifying it - showing "modernities that name themseles 'Western' are already appropriations and hybridisations" (78) — reminds me of the manoevres employed by J.K. Gibson-Graham (1996, 2006) to detonate capital C Capitalism. However, while Robinson mentions the "diverse economies" (114, 117, 142, 158, 166) and "economic diversity" (141) of ordinary cities, Gibson-Graham remain unreferenced throughout the book. Capitalism itself is unindexed, and appears only a few times in a taken-for-granted manner. What is meant by "global capitalism" (95, 102, 147) or "Western capitalism" (18) or "the global stage of capitalism" (147) goes unexplained. To me this is quite significant given "assumptions about progress" (18) are deeply read through a capitalist economic system. So, although modernity is refigured and relocated from a Western hegemony into an idea differentially cohered through circulating in and beyond cities, capitalism remains self-referential. When discussing Johannesburg's diverse economomy (there's even section devoted to it (see 161)), informality remains a nondifferentiated other to a diverse formal sector (e.g., 144). I just don't get how capitalism isn't interrogated as part of the idea of modernity. The diversity of urban economies Robinson references in regards to policy suggestions, then, seems really to be different kinds of "business environments" all in the formal economy.
Finishing my reading reflection in the VPL central branch.
This one took 2 weeks of steady reading. I can read dense texts but I really struggled with this one. I just don't have a grounding in the context or in discourses referenced. But, I will return to it again after I read my planetary urbanization literature. With time and maybe a second reading I could better grasp it. At least now I feel like I can read - if not fully understand - anything. And reading while not fully understanding is also a skill.
Citing the "far-reaching implosions and explosions of the urban at all spatial scales" - namely "the creation of new scales of urbanization", "the blurring and rearticulation of urban territories", "the disintegration of the hinterland", and "the end of the wilderness" (450) — Brenner and Schmid echo Lefebvre in claiming a contemporary state of planetary urbanization.
"Today, the urban represents an increasingly worldwide condition in which all political-economic relations, infrastructural geographies and socio-environmental landscapes are enmeshed.
This situation of planetary urbanization means, paradoxically, that even spaces that lie well beyond the traditional city cores and suburban peripheries...have become integral parts of a worldwide urban fabric...political-economic spaces can no longer be treated as if they were composed of discrete, distinct, bounded and universal types of setlement" (451).
(My summary of this is very quotes heavy as I'm still grasping what's being disucssed. I'll return and elaborate more in my own language later on.)
Also, what is the urban question?
In this paper, Brenner outlines the shifting nature of scale in relation to conceptualizations of urban spatiality under capitalist restructuring. He does so by tracing significant scalar rearragments and reterritorializations through the the 1970s, 1980s, and the 1990s (at the end of which he is writing).
"Build[ing] upon Lefebvre's thoretical framework" Brenner "explore[s] various implications of contemporary re-scaling process for conceptualizing the dynamics of capitalist urbanization in the late twentieth century. This essay elaborates two basic assertions: (1) that the problematic of geographical scale and its social produciton has become increasingly central to urban theory in the contemporary period of global restructuring; and (2) that Lefebvre's sociospatial theory contains a number of insights which are of crucial relevance to this problematic...for my purposes here, the concept of the urban question refers neither to a specific definition of the city nor to a particular approach to urban studies. Rather I understand the urban quesiton under capitalism as a double-edged sociopolitical problematic: it encompasses both the historical proces of capitalist urbanization and the multiple, politically contested interpretations of that process within modern capitalist society" (361-362).
The 1970s, Brenner shows, was marked by "the functional specificity of the urban" where "geographical scales" are "spatial expressions of social functions" (363). In other words, scale is defined by social function, where the "urban scale" was itself taken for granted as "the self-evident empirical centerpiece of the urban question" (364). Moreover, scales were understood to "operate as mutually exclusive rather than as co-constitutive territorial frameworks for social relations" (364).
The 1980s saw a shift "from scale-specificity to the production of space" following the first publication of Lefebvre's The Production of Space in 1974. Whereas the previous decade was specifically concerned with 'the urban' and processes at the 'urban scale', debates of the 1980s brought the supraurban into view. "Scales were no longer equated with unitary social functions but were viewed increasingly as material crystallizations of multiple overlapping political-economic processes" thouse "the historicity of geographical scales waas recognized only in a relatively limited sense" (365). Brenner describers the 1980s as an inversion of Castells' "conception of scales as the spatial expression of social functions" where "the social relations of captialism were now analyzed in terms of their distinctive patterns of agglomeration and territorialization on the urban scale" (365).
In the 1990s, "supraurban re-scaling processes" became an unavoidable reference to understanding the urban question. Writes Brenner: "If the urban question had previously assumed the form of debates on the functional specificity or scale-spacificity of the urban within relatively stable supraurban territorial configurations, in the 1990s the urban question is increasingly being posed in the form of a scale question" (366).
After outlining the shifting formulation of geographical scale across three decades, Brenner draws from Lefebvre's "notion of an 'implosion-explosion' of urbanization; his conceptualization of state spatiality; and his analysis of the politics of scale" (368) to articulate the necessity of multiscalar analyses and methodologies "for grasping...the role of cities as preconditions, arenas and outcomes of the current round of global capitalist restructuring" (375).
I appreciated this paper as an example ofactually engaging with primary sources. I have to think further about Lefebvre's differentiation of scale and level, where everyday is a level not a scale. As Brenner describes in footnote 12: urban and global operate simultaneously as levels and scales within lefebvres theoretical framework (368). What does this mean for Urban Everyday?
In this paper, Hillary Angelo and Kian Goh dismantle the three 'types' or registers of critique of planetary urbanization: empirical, epistemological, and theoretical. As two queer and feminist scholars for whom planetary urbanization features centrally in their work, Angelo and Goh take care to validate the political concerns of said critiques while effectively articulating the ways in which each counter fails at undermining the (intent of a) theory of planetary urbanization.
Angelo and Goh elaborate the three registers of critique leveled at planetary urbanization as follows. Critiques in an empirical register assume accounts relying on planetary scale commit universalizing abstractions which miss the concrete differences of localized particulars. However, as Angelo and Goh point out, "these scholars do not generally extend their analyses either to higher levels of abstraction or to larger geographic scales" (735). By disengaging from all but the immediate and specific, "this register of critique does not actually assess the primary object of its analysis: the global patterning of urban geographies" (735). Aligned with Gordillo's (2019, 76) framing of the metropolis as a "nontotalizing totality", Angelo and Goh argue that "the conceit of a planetary approach is to bring a 'totality' into view—not in order to homogenize or 'fetishize the oppressive ways of the world, but to negate them' (Goonewardena, 2018, 463). Critiques in the empirical registars have neither engaged with this core argument nor unearthed through their research other foundational processes that refute or seriously complicate the significance of planetary scale urban political-economic ones" (435). Critiques in an epistemological register call out planetary urbanization's seeming production of unsituated knowledges. Moreover, some scholars take problem with assuming a theory which, they argue, has gained salability because its theorititians and proponants are white male researchers occupying a systemically/institutionally privledged position. Critques of an epistemological register are thus political arguments (736) and while "political arguments are political strategies" (736), a political argument does not a sound argument make. While Angelo and Goh make clear their solidarity in commitment to "center[ing] feminist, people of color and queer embodied scholarship" (736) they take substantial issue with a politics that puts feminist and queer identities and perspectives "inherently... at odds with theories of large-scale processes" (736). I mean, yes, this seems like it should go without saying. Once again, "in rejecting a planetary urbanization framework on the grounds of its presumed erasure of grounded, embodied difference, its European history, and the whiteness and maleness of its primary adherents, feminist critics have not challenged the core theoretical provocations laid out in planetary urbanization theory" (736). Critiques in a theoretical register "attempt[] to reframe, extend or divert arguments in the planetary urbanization framework...[these scholars] re-read and extend Lefebvrian analysis, or bring in other theorists, or posit other forms of local and global domination" (736). Some theoretical critics argue for the consideration of other other planetary processes in relation to urbanization, and others still (who remain "outside our schema of critiques") reference "different notions of planetariness" alltogether. I will problematize this in a moment.
Though differing in angle and object of critique, all three registers identified by Angelo and Goh "share a core objection, which is to posit 'difference against abstraction'" (734). However, "they conflate two sets of questions: an ontological question of scale (how do we understand the relationship between small-scale, often local, and large-scale, often global, processes and phenomena?); and an epistemological question of theory-making (how and when do we move between the abstract and concrete in our analyses?)" (737). Drawing on their respective research in concrete places, Angelo and Goh demonstrate how their topics/conditions of study cannot fully be understood without recognition of urbanization processes occuring at a planatery scale. Indeed, far from limiting the extent to which difference matters in the study of a particular locale, planetary urbanization contributes a far less city-centric and Eurocentric understanding. If anything, planetary urbanization, they argue, "enforces a multiscalar perspective on urban processes and conditions and provides a view of interconnections among apparently disparate spaces and events" (742).
Let me circle back to the rendering of analytics which moreso embrace unknowability as outside their schema and so their generalized counterargument. This write-off to me signalled an insidious disengagement from world/ing views which would truly shake planetary urbanization. Angelo and Goh essentially dismantled the above empirical, epistemological, and theoretical critiques in the same fashion: by demonstrating how none actually engage the core arguments of planetary urbanization. Yet critiques that aren't based in reactionary, identity politics do exist and I read one of them last month: Maan Barua's Lively Cities (2023). Admittedly this was written after the publication of this paper, but I find it useful to consider whether its critique of planetary urbanization fits one of the above registers, and if not (well), what can be learned. Now Barua does level critiques in what Angelo and Goh would map as textbook empirical, epistemological, and theoretical registers: he critiques planetary urbanization as totalizing in its glossing over of the everyday and discrimination against thick description. Although he doesn't conduct a re-reading or extension of Lefebvrian analysis, Barua does offer a "different answer to neo-Lefebvrian calls for 'a new lexicon of sociospatial differentiation'", here referencing Brenner's (2013) Theses on Urbanization. "Contrary to neo-Lefebvrian critiques of thick description being an unreflexive conversion of everyday categories into analytical commitments, such description grounds processes of sociospatial differentiation in their richness and specificity, drawing attention to processes and scales missed out in calls for planetary analyses" (193). Yet Barua is not just positing difference against abstraction; he explicitly takes aim at the empirical, epistemological and theoretical tenets of planetary urbanization (see 192 onwards). He does this in two key ways relevent to this discussion: by articulating the urban formation as constituted by continually reinvented (195) pastoral (230), where "the urban and agrarian or pastoral are immanent to one another, lying on the same plane and working on one another from within" (193), and, by demonstrating how capital is not all encompasing. In both the postcolonial cities of Delhi and London, ferality marks lines of flight from capitalist commodification and terms of valuation. Indeed, Angelo and Goh themselves subsume modes of knowledge production that center planetary processes of colonialism and decolonization into just another way to "bring into view and challenge the dominance of capitalism and other global systems of domination" (Angelo and Goh 2021, 737). What if capitalism were not brought into view just for the sake of it? In other words, what is obscured by the impulse to read any other process, brought into view as a theoretical critique of planetary urbanization, as just another way to get at capital's restructuring of spacetime? Writes Barua: "Planetary urbanization occludes other economies, including those unfolding in pastoral spaces, that can elide being placed in the organizing structure that is capitalism" (233). He expands on this in the follwing chapter on surplus ecologies
Their schematic limitations aside, I found Angelo and Goh's paper immensly helpful in parsing common critiques of planetary urbanization. I could have easily put one of said critiques on my comps list, knowing little prior to reading beyond the general argument of planetary urbanization. In pushing back on critiques that claim planetary urbanization - in its abstraction - cannot attend to difference at the scale of everyday life, is hugely significant to my intended project. They ask: "What does it look like to use multiscalar urban processes to study phenomena at the level of everyday life?" As I theorize the Urban Everyday, I am committed to thinking through how processes not immediatly perceptable inform spatial phenomena. I found this paper also helpful in thinking further through difference. Difference here isn't in opposition to abstraction, to large scale processes or attention to such processes at a large scale. To understand how to produce situated knowledges that don't abandon attention to "broder underlying infra/structures that compose landscapes of encouter" (or however I reforulate what I was getting at), I think Derek Woods' concept of scale variance has particular relevence. As a reminder, "scale variance refers to the thresholds that constrain biophysical, technological, and social becoming, thresholds beyond which scale effects influence how we observe systems and how they work" (Woods 2014, 135). Scale variance describes how "the observation and operation of systems are subject to different constraints at different scales due to real discontinuities" (Woods 2014, 133). To me, the Urban Everyday is not simply a zooming-in to the local, the mundane, the habitual, the ordinary, or the social but recognizing how what is local, mundane, habitual, ordinary, and social is constituted or informed or composed by more than what appears immediately to be at work. The effort to attend to the more than is what I think is important when conducting work that preferences the immediate. What other scales, other formations, other processes are on the same plane?
not sure where this last idea is going but//
planetary urbanization as multiscalar - angelo and goh
anthropocene as terraforming assemblages - woods
urban infrastructure rather than geologic activity main driver of evolution > recombinant urbanisms - barua
metropolis as infrastructrue of the anthropocene - gordillo
infrastructure as material, politics of infrastructure centering humans as primary users and constructors - amin and thrift
trans-species relations and affect as infrastructure - barua
surrounds as infrastructural - simone