The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City 9781473907560, 2017930833

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Sara Miller McCune founded SAGE Publishing in 1965 to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community. SAGE publishes more than 1000 journals and over 800 new books each year, spanning a wide range of subject areas. Our growing selection of library products includes archives, data, case studies and video. SAGE remains majority owned by our founder and after her lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures the company’s continued independence. Los Angeles | London | New Delhi | Singapore | Washington DC | Melbourne

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SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road New Delhi 110 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483

Editor: Natalie Aguilera Editorial Assistant: Colette Wilson Production Editor: Sushant Nailwal Copyeditor: Neville Hankins Proofreader: Dick Davis Indexer: Cathryn Pritchard Marketing Manager: Susheel Gokarakonda Cover Design: Wendy Scott Typeset by: Cenveo Publisher Services Printed in the UK

Editorial arrangement © Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, 2018 Chapter 1 © Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, 2018 Chapter 2 © Susan Parnell and Jennifer Robinson, 2018 Chapter 3 © Ananya Roy, 2018 Chapter 4 © Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, 2018 Chapter 5 © Mike Savage, 2018 Chapter 6 © Caroline Knowles and Roger Burrows, 2018 Chapter 7 © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Chapter 8 © Saskia Sassen, 2018 Chapter 9 © Alex Schafran, 2018 Chapter 9 © 2012 Urban Research Publications Limited. Published by Blackwell Publishing. Chapter 10 © Fran Tonkiss, 2018 Chapter 11 © Alice Mah, 2018 Chapter 12 © Patrick Le Galès, 2018 Chapter 13 © Patrick Bond, 2018 Chapter 14 © Asher Ghertner, 2018 Chapter 15 © Kevin Fox Gotham and Wesley Cheek, 2018 Chapter 16 © Amita Baviskar, 2011 Chapter 17 © Austin Zeiderman, 2018 Chapter 18 © Christine Hentschel, 2018

Chapter 19 © Anna M. Agathangelou, 2018 Chapter 20 © Wendy Pullan, 2018 Chapter 21 © AbdouMaliq Simone, 2018 Chapter 22 © Colin McFarlane, 2018 Chapter 23 © Katherine Hyman and Edgar Pieterse, 2018 Chapter 24 © Ash Amin, 2018 Chapter 25 © Suzanne Hall, Robin Finlay and Julia King, 2018 Chapter 26 © Xiangming Chen and Curtis Stone, 2018 Chapter 27 © Victoria Redclift, 2018 Chapter 28 © 2013 Taylor & Francis Ltd Chapter 29 © David Madden, 2018 Chapter 30 © Talja Blokland, 2018 Chapter 31 © Sarah Nuttall, 2018 Chapter 32 © Richard Sennett, 2018 Chapter 33 © Rahul Mehrotra, 2018 Chapter 34 © 2013 Taylor & Francis Ltd Chapter 35 © Eyal Weizman, 2018 Chapter 36 © Keller Easterling, 2018 Chapter 37 © William Mann, 2018

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. At SAGE we take sustainability seriously. Most of our products are printed in the UK using FSC papers and boards. When we print overseas we ensure sustainable papers are used as measured by the PREPS grading system. We undertake an annual audit to monitor our sustainability.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930833 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-4739-0756-0

Our book is dedicated to students of cities. Our heartfelt thanks extend to the authors of our book, who have given their energy and imagination to this collection.

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Contents List of Figuresxi List of Tablesxiv Notes on Editors and Contributorsxv Publisher’s Acknowledgementsxxiv 1

Introduction: Urban Churn Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett

PART I  QUESTIONS OF DEFINITION: AN URBAN COMPENDIUM 2

The Global Urban: Difference and Complexity in Urban Studies and the Science of Cities Susan Parnell and Jennifer Robinson

1

11

13

3

Urban Studies and the Postcolonial Encounter Ananya Roy

32

4

Elements for a New Epistemology of the Urban Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid

47

PART II  HIERARCHY: ELITES AND EVICTIONS

69

5

The Elite Habitus in Cities of Accumulation Mike Savage

71

6

Reimagining Chinese London Caroline Knowles and Roger Burrows

87

7

Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty Matthew Desmond

104

PART III PRODUCTIVITY: OVER-INVESTMENT AND ABANDONMENT

141

8

Global Cities: Places for Researching the Translocal Saskia Sassen

143

9

Origins of an Urban Crisis: The Restructuring of the San Francisco Bay Area and the Geography of Foreclosure Alex Schafran

159

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10

Urban Economies and Social Inequalities Fran Tonkiss

187

11

Ruination and Post-industrial Urban Decline Alice Mah

201

PART IV  AUTHORITY: GOVERNANCE AND MOBILISATIONS 12

213

The Political Sociology of Cities and Urbanisation Processes: Social Movements, Inequalities and Governance Patrick Le Galès

215

Limits to South Africa’s ‘Right to the City’: Prospects for and beyond Urban Commoning Patrick Bond

236

Aesthetic Governmentality: Administering the World-Class City in Delhi’s Slums D. Asher Ghertner

256

PART V  VOLATILITY: DISRUPTION AND ADAPTATION

277

15

Post-disaster Recovery and Rebuilding Kevin Fox Gotham and Wesley Cheek

279

16

What the Eye Does Not See: The Yamuna in the Imagination of Delhi Amita Baviskar

298

17

Endangered City: Security and Citizenship in Bogotá Austin Zeiderman

314

13

14

PART VI  CONFLICT: VULNERABILITY AND INSURGENCY 18

19

20

333

The European ‘Refugee Crisis’ in ‘Our’ Cities: Vulnerability, Truth, and Ethics of the Surface Christine Hentschel

335

The Time of and Temporal (Un)Civility of the City: MENA Urban Insurgencies and Revolutions Anna M. Agathangelou

349

Violent Infrastructures, Places of Conflict: Urban Order in Divided Cities 376 Wendy Pullan

Contents

PART VII PROVISIONALITY: INFRASTRUCTURE AND INCREMENTALISM

ix

397

21

The Majority-world and the Politics of Everyday Living in Southeast Asia 399 AbdouMaliq Simone

22

Incremental Urbanism and Tactical Learning: Reflections from Mumbai and Kampala416 Colin McFarlane

23

Infrastructure Deficits and Potential in African Cities Katherine Hyman and Edgar Pieterse

429

PART VIII  MOBILITY: RE-BORDERING AND DE-BORDERING

453

24

City of Migrants Ash Amin

455

25

The Migrant Street Suzanne Hall, Robin Finlay and Julia King

464

26

Rethinking Border Cities: In-between Spaces, Unequal Actors and Stretched Mobilities across the China–Southeast Asia Borderland Xiangming Chen and Curtis Stone

478

27

Re-bordering Camp and City: ‘Race’, Space and Citizenship in Dhaka Victoria Redclift

28

The Essences of Multiculture: A Sensory Exploration of an Inner-City Street Market Alex Rhys-Taylor

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PART IX  CIVILITY: CONTESTATION AND ENCOUNTER

533

29

The Contradictions of Urban Public Space: The View from London and New York David J. Madden

502

535

30

The Public Life of Social Capital Talja Blokland

552

31

Johannesburg–Lagos: From the Speculative to the Littoral City Sarah Nuttall

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PART X  DESIGN: SPECULATION AND IMAGINATION

583

32

The Public Realm Richard Sennett

585

33

Urban Design: Beyond Architecture at Scale Rahul Mehrotra

602

34

Towards a Minor Global Architecture at Lamu, Kenya Lindsay Bremner

613

35

Forensic Architecture: Political Practice, Activism, Aesthetics Eyal Weizman

630

36

Designing Infrastructure Keller Easterling

653

37

A Latecomer Imagines the City William Mann

666

Index687

List of Figures 2.1 The great urban acceleration 18 3.1 Beneficiary lists (source: photo by author, 2015) 42 4.1 The three ‘moments’ of urbanization 54 4.2 Moments and dimensions of urbanization 58 5.1 Capital in Britain, 1700–2010 76 5.2 GBCS social capital: number of different contacts 82 5.3 GBCS social capital: status 83 7.1 Average annual count of evicted tenants; N = 24,211 tenants evicted from 703 block groups. Data are from Milwaukee County eviction records, 2003–7, and GeoLytics population estimates, 2003–7 111 7.2 Adults living in households appearing in eviction court. The black portion of bars represents adults listed on the Summons and Complaint; the striped portion represents adults not listed. Note the different scales. Data are from the Milwaukee Eviction Court Study, 2011 115 7.3 Milwaukee County fair market rent, welfare stipend, and minimum wage (140 hours/month). Data are from U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2009; Wisconsin Department of Children and Families, 2009; and State of Wisconsin Equal Rights Division, 2009 118 7.A1 Filed eviction cases and evicted tenants. Data are from Milwaukee County eviction records, 2003–9 138 7.A2 Evicted tenants by month. Data are from Milwaukee County eviction records, 2003–9 138 9.1 The Greater Bay Area (13-county version), with urbanized areas shown in grey (source: map created by author based on United States Census, 2010c)164 9.2 Places of work for Tracy residents, 2000 (source: United States Census (2010d); map by Hugo Lefebvre, reprinted with permission) 168 9.3 The gap between residential and non-residential construction: percentage of building-permit valuations that are non-residential, Walnut Creek and Antioch, 1990–2008 (source: Construction Industry Research Board, 2010) 169 9.4 Simple hierarchy of land use under Proposition 13 (source: derived from Coleman, 2005) 170 9.5 African Americans in San Francisco and San Joaquin counties, 1970–2008 (source: California Department of Finance, 2008) 174 9.6 Foreclosures per 100,000 population by county, 2002–08 (sources: California Department of Finance, 2008; California Association of Realtors, 2010; DataQuick News, 2010) 175 9.7 Poverty rates in San Francisco and Antioch, 1970–2010 (sources: American Community Survey, 2010; United States Census 1970–2000; 2010b)176

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9.8a & 9.8b Generation X blacks and whites in the Bay Area (source: United States Census 1990–2010; 2010a) 178 17.1 Evacuated house in “zone of high risk” (source: Photograph by author, 2009) 321 17.2 Cordon sanitaire surrounding the encampment in Third Millennium Park (source: Photograph by author, 2009) 325 17.3 Security checkpoint (source: Photograph by author, 2009) 326 20.1 Cairo, Tahrir Square, 8 February 2011 (Wikicommons, Ramy Raoof http://www.flickr.com/photos/38290178@N06)377 20.2 Manama, Pearl Roundabout, 14 March 2011 (Wikicommons, http://bahrain.viewbook.com/)378 20.3 Mostar, The Bulevar (Conflict in Cities) 386 20.4 Jerusalem, Damascus Gate Light Rail station (Conflict in Cities) 387 20.5 Nicosia, map of the walled city (Conflict in Cities) 388 20.6 Beirut, Martyrs’ Square and the memorial to the nationalist martyrs (Conflict in Cities) 391 23.1 Income distribution across class lines in Africa 432 23.2 Infrastructure endowments for African LICs/MICs compared to other global regions 434 23.3 Infrastructure spending needs by sector in US$ billion 435 23.4 Comparison of infrastructure spending in US$ billion 436 23.5 Four scenarios on the future of African cities 442 23.6 Dimensions of material reproduction of territories 445 25.1 Street interiors: Dimensions, divisions and texture of Alimah’s shop on Stapleton Road (Super-diverse streets, 2015) 466 25.2 Multiple journeys: A survey of proprietors on Stapleton Road and their multiple migratory routes (Super-diverse streets, 2015) 468 25.3 Diverse uses: Rhythms of activity on Stapleton Road over time (Super-diverse streets, 2015) 471 25.4 World to street: A survey of proprietors on Stapleton Road by country of birth (Super-diverse streets, 2015) 473 26.1 Yunnan Province and its economic zones and cities bordering Myanmar and Laos 485 26.2 The large and growing Myanmar community in Ruili 487 26.3 The China–Myanmar oil and gas pipeline 492 26.4 The disbanded spaces in the Lao border town of Boten 495 26.5 The planned route of the cross-border China–Laos railway 497 30.1 Public familiarity 562 31.1 Image inspired by Zoo City by Werner Diedericks (source: “Amira & Marabou”, by Werner Diedericks – Doodlewad Illustration) 571 31.2 ‘History’ 572 31.3 From the literal to the speculative - Lagos’s polluted sea water and the cover of Okorafor’s novel 574 31.4 Fabrice Monteiro, The Prophecy series (Fabricemonteiro.viewbook.com) 577 34.1 LAPSSET corridor (2030) (source: Lindsay Bremner) 619

List of Figures

34.2 Lamu port development map (source: Lindsay Bremner, after JPC & BAC/GKA JV. 2011) 34.3 Protocols for deterritorialisation (source: Lindsay Bremner, after JPC & BAC/GKA JV 2011) 37.1 Plan of the remnants of the Old River Lea around Old Ford and Stratford, 2010. Pencil on tracing paper and photographs (Witherford Watson Mann Architects, 2009) 37.2 Aerial perspective of the Lea Valley including projects from the Upper Lea Valley Landscape Strategy, 2010. Walthamstow Reservoirs, site of Walthamstow Wetlands is at the centre. Pencil and gouache on paper (Witherford Watson Mann Architects, 2010) 37.3 Model of the Olympic Legacy Masterplan, 2011. Card and graphite (Photograph by David Grandorge) 37.4 Elevated perspective of the proposed square at Elephant and Castle, 2014. Digital image (Witherford Watson Mann Architects, 2014)

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621 624 676

678 679 679

List of Tables   7.1 Household eviction rate by neighborhood racial composition   7.2 Gender differences in eviction rates   7.3 Tenants in eviction court   8.1 Total buying of properties in top 50 recipient cities   9.1 RealtyTrac US metropolitan areas with highest foreclosure rates   9.2 General revenue by source for California cities, 1972 and 2002   9.3 Racial change in Contra Costa county cities, 1990–2010   9.4 Change in median sales price in three zip-code areas, 1988–2009 23.1 African countries by urbanisation, fertility transition and economic development 23.2 Access to improved services in Sub-Saharan Africa 26.1 Urbanization in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) countries 26.2 Urban primacy in the GMS countries

111 112 113 153 161 172 175 179 431 434 483 484

Notes on Editors and Contributors

The Editors Suzanne Hall  is an urbanist and has practised as an architect in South Africa. She is Director of the Cities Programme and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research and teaching interests are foregrounded in everyday formations of global urbanisation, particularly urban migration in relation to increased mobility and discrimination. Through an ESRC award she has focused on migrant economies and spaces on urban high streets across the UK, engaging with ethnography, postcolonial perspectives of city-making, and visual methods. She is author of City, Street and Citizen: The measure of the ordinary (Routledge, 2012), and a research-based film on Ordinary Streets with Sophie Yetton (2015). Ricky Burdett is Professor of Urban Studies and Director of LSE Cities and the Urban Age Programme. He was curator of the Conflicts of an Urban Age exhibition at the 2016 International Architecture Biennale in Venice and contributed to the United Nations Habitat III conference on sustainable urbanisation in Quito. He was Chief Advisor on Architecture and Urbanism for the London 2012 Olympics and architectural advisor to the Mayor of London from 2001 to 2006. He was Director of the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2006 and curator of the Global Cities exhibition at Tate Modern in 2007. He is co-editor of The Endless City (2007), Living in the Endless City (2011) and Transforming Urban Economies (2013). The Contributors Anna M. Agathangelou teaches in Political Science at York University, Toronto. She is the author of The Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence, and Insecurity in Mediterranean Nation-States (Palgrave, 2004) and co-author with L.H.M. Ling of Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds (Routledge, 2009). She has also co-edited a special issue with Nevzat Soguk on the Arab uprisings and revolts in Globalizations (Vol. 8 (5), 2011). Ash Amin is Professor and Head of Geography at the University of Cambridge. He is also Foreign Secretary and Vice President at the British Academy. He writes about race, belonging, cities and political renewal. His latest books are Land of Strangers (Polity, 2012), Arts of the Political (Duke, 2013, with Nigel Thrift) Seeing Like a City (Polity, 2017, with Nigel Thrift), and European Union and Disunion: Reflections on European Identity

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(British Academy, 2017, co-edited with Philip Lewis). He is currently working on a project on mental health and the metropolis, led by Nick Manning at King’s College London. Amita Baviskar is Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. Her research focuses on the cultural politics of environment and development in rural and urban India. Her first book In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley and other publications explore the themes of resource rights, popular resistance and discourses of environmentalism. She is currently studying food and agrarian environments in western India. Her recent publications include the edited books Contested Grounds: Essays on Nature, Culture and Power; Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes (with Raka Ray); and First Garden of the Republic: Nature on the President’s Estate. She has taught at the University of Delhi, and has been a visiting scholar at Stanford, Cornell, Yale, SciencesPo and the University of California at Berkeley. She was awarded the 2005 Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies, the 2008 VKRV Rao Prize for Social Science Research, and the 2010 Infosys Prize for Social Sciences. Talja Blokland  is professor of urban and regional sociology at the Institude for Social Sciences of Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. Her research interests concern social theory, theories of community and urbanity, segregation and neighbourhood effects, urban poverty and its causes and consequences. Her books include Urban Bonds (2003), Urban Theory (2015, with Alan Harding), editor of Networked Urbanism (with Mike Savage, 2008) and of Creating the Unequal City (with Carlotta Giustozzi, Daniela Krüger and Hannah Schilling, 2016) and Community as Urban Practice (2017). Bloklands work seeks to use ethnographic as well as survey methods to explore issues of place, identity and sociability, especially in contexts of structural inequalities that find spatila expressions. Patrick Bond is distinguished professor of political economy at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Recent books include BRICS: An anti-capitalist critique (with Ana Garcia as co-editor, Pluto Press, 2015); Elite Transition: From apartheid to neoliberalism in South Africa (Pluto Press, 2014); South Africa: The present as history (with John Saul as co-author, James Currey, 2014); and Politics of Climate Justice (UKZN Press, 2012). Prior urban-oriented books include Unsustainable South Africa: Environment, development and social protest (Merlin Press, 2002) and Cities of Gold, Townships of Coal: Essays on South Africa’s new urban crisis (Africa World Press, 2000). Two forthcoming books about Durban, co-edited and co-authored with Ashwin Desai and Brij Maharaj, are City of Rascals and City of Rebels (Jacana Media, 2018). Bond received his PhD in economic geography from Johns Hopkins University in 1993 under the supervision of David Harvey. Lindsay Bremner is Director of Architectural Research at the University of Westminster, London, UK. Her work interrogates architecture as part of wider material and sociopolitical dynamics. This has included the project Folded Ocean, which investigated the spatial transformation of the Indian Ocean world and Geoarchitecture, an exploration into intersections between architecture, geology and politics. She currently holds an ERC grant for Monsoon Assemblages, a project researching three South Asian cities as monsoon ecologies.

Notes on Editors and Contributors

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Neil Brenner is Professor of Urban Theory at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, where he teaches classes on critical urban theory, urbanization and geopolitical economy. Brenner’s previous books include Critique of Urbanization (Birkhäuser Verlag, 2016), Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization (editor; Jovis, 2013) and New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford University Press, 2004). Forthcoming books include New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Is the World Urban? (with Nikos Katsikis; Actar, 2018). Brenner is currently collaborating with Christian Schmid on a long-term project on planetary urbanization. Roger Burrows  is currently Professor of Cities in the Global Urban Research Unit (GURU), School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University, UK. He was previously Professor of Sociology and Pro-Warden for Interdisciplinary Development at Goldsmiths, University of London. Wesley Cheek  is a Ph.D student in Tulane University’s City, Culture and Community program. He researches post-disaster reconstruction, in particular the rebuilding in the Tohoku region of Japan following the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. Wesley also is an instructor in Ritsumeikan University’s International Training Course on Disaster Risk Management of Cultural Heritage. A member of the Science and Technology delegation at the Third United Nations World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction, he has worked as a researcher for Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness’ Gulf Coast Population Impact Study as well as Ritsumeikan University’s study of shinto shrine festivals and disaster in Minamisanriku, Japan. He is author of the chapter “Lessons in Damage Mitigation to Cultural Heritage from the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami” in Architectural Conservation in Asia (Routledge 2016). His dissertation is entitled The Paradox of Community Involvement: Post-Disaster Reconstruction in Minamisanriku, Japan. Xiangming Chen is the Dean and Director of the Center for Urban and Global Studies and Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of Global Urban Studies and Sociology at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is also a distinguished guest professor in the School of Social Development and Public Policy at Fudan University in Shanghai. His (co)authored and co-edited books include The World of Cities: Places in Comparative and Historical Perspective (Blackwell Publishers, 2003; Chinese edition, 2005), As Borders Bend: Transnational Spaces on the Pacific Rim (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), Shanghai Rising: State Power and Local Transformations in a Global Megacity (University of Minnesota Press, 2009; Chinese edition, 2009), Introduction to Cities: How Place and Space Shape Human Experience (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012; second edition, 2017), and Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai (Routledge, 2015; Chinese edition, 2016). Matthew Desmond is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he joined the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow. He is the author of four books, including Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which

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won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Carnegie Medal, and PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. The principal investigator of The Eviction Lab, Desmond’s research focuses on poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality, and ethnography. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award. A Contributing Writer for the New York Times Magazine, Desmond was listed in 2016 among the Politico 50, as one of “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate. Keller Easterling is an architect, writer and Professor of Architecture at Yale University. Her most recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure networks as a medium of polity. Her work explores relations between infrastructure, space and politics as reflected in earlier publications, including Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005), which researched familiar spatial products in difficult or hyperbolic political situations around the world; and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999), which applied network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure. Robin Finlay is a social and cultural geographer with a specific interest in urban geographies of diasporas and migration researcher in human geography. He is lead researcher on the AHRC funded project ‘Muslim Young People’s Political Participation in Scotland’. Robin’s Ph.D. examined Moroccan diaspora formations in the city of Granada in southern Spain. He has worked as researcher at LSE Cities on the ‘Super-diverse streets: Economies and spaces of urban migration in UK Cities’ project. He also has government and policy research experience, working as quantitate researcher at the Migration and Borders Analysis team at the Home Office in London. Robin has contributed to teaching at Newcastle University, leading seminars at undergraduate and postgraduate level and lectures at undergraduate level. D. Asher Ghertner is Associate Professor of Geography and Director of the South Asian Studies Program at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA. He is the author of Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (Oxford University Press, 2015) an ethnography of mass slum demolition that charts the rise of a mode of governing space premised on urban aesthetics. His research more broadly explores informal settlements, technologies of displacement, the everyday state, and urban environmental politics in India. Kevin Gotham  is Associate Dean of Graduate Programs, Grants, and Research in the School of Liberal Arts (SLA) and Professor of Sociology at Tulane University. He has research interests in real estate and mortgage markets, the political economy of tourism, and post-disaster redevelopment. He is author of Crisis Cities: Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans (with Miriam Greenberg, Oxford University Press, 2014), Race, Real Estate and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900-2010 (SUNY Press, 2014, second edition), Authentic New Orleans: Race, Culture, and Tourism in the Big Easy (NYU Press, 2007), and Critical Perspectives on Urban Redevelopment

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(2001, Elsevier Press). He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on housing policy, racial segregation, urban redevelopment, and tourism. Christine Hentschel is Professor of Criminology at the Social Science Department at Hamburg University. She is author of Security in the Bubble: Navigating Space in Urban South Africa (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Her research is concerned with questions of vulnerability and uncertainty as they play out on urban grounds as well as rightwing populisms and emerging regimes of truth. Katherine Hyman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the African Centre for Cities, at the University of Cape Town. Her research interests evolve around the question of urban sustainability in cities of the global south through the lens of sustainable urban infrastructure, and the role of urban infrastructure as an intervention point for activating purposive sustainable urban transitions. Julia King is an architect and urban researcher and her work is concerned with housing, sanitation infrastructure, urban planning, and participatory design processes. She is based at LSE Cities, where she has worked on ‘Super-diverse streets: Economies and spaces of urban migration in UK Cities’ and is currently working on initiatives in India. She has won numerous awards including a Holcim Award (2011), SEED Award for ‘Excellence in Public Interest Design’ (2014), Emerging Woman Architect of the Year (2014) and the 1851 Royal Commission Design Fellowship (2017). She has taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture, Architectural Association and the CASS, Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design; where she recently completed her Ph.D. by-practice titled ‘Incremental Cities: Discovering the Sweet Spot for making town-within-a-city’ which looked at resettlement colonies in Delhi, India. Caroline Knowles  is the director of the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) and professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She writes about global circulations of people and things. Her most recent book is Flip-Flop: A Journey Through Globalisation’s Backroads, Pluto 2014. www.flipfloptrail.com Patrick Le Galès FBA, is CNRS research professor in politics and sociology at Sciences Po, Centre d’Etudes Européennes et de Politique comparée, co director of the research group ‘Cities are back in town’, Dean Sciences Po Urban School. His research deals with urban governance (research project WHIG: what is governed and not governed in large metropolis), inequalities, class and mobility, comparative urban studies. Publications include Globalising minds, roots in the city (with A. Andreotti and J. Moreno Fuentes: Wiley, 2015), Reconfigurating European states in crises, (ed. with Desmond King: Oxford University Press, 2017), Gobernando la ciudad de Mexico (with V. Ugalde: Forthcoming), and Les contradictions du Grand Paris, (Presses de Sciences Po: Forthcoming). David J. Madden teaches in the Sociology Department and the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His work is focused on urban studies, housing, and social theory. He is co-author, with Peter Marcuse, of In Defense of Housing: The politics of crisis (Verso, 2016).

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Alice Mah is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick and Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded project ‘Toxic Expertise: Environmental Justice and the Global Petrochemical Industry’. Her research interests lie at the intersection of urban and environmental sociology, political economy, and science and technology studies. She is the author of Industrial Ruination, Community, and Place (University of Toronto Press, 2012) and Port Cities and Global Legacies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). William Mann is an architect, and is a director of Witherford Watson Mann Architects, London. Working from the scale of the building to that of the city, the studio’s designs make the most of what is already there. They add judiciously to each place to maintain distinctiveness but transform the capacity for social exchange. Their best-known building, Astley Castle for the Landmark Trust, won the 2013 Royal Institute of British Architects Stirling Prize for its distinctive entwining of past and present. William has written on London’s edge landscapes, the hybrid urbanism of Flanders, regeneration and social engineering, self-build, and buildings’ nicknames for Archis, Oase and other publications. Colin McFarlane is Professor in Urban Geography at Durham University. His research examines the experience and politics of informal settlements, and has included work in several cities, especially Mumbai and, more recently, Kampala. He is interested in the ways in which cities are composed, lived and politicised on the margins of global urbanism, reflected in books and papers on urban informality, infrastructure, learning, densities, and smart cities. Rahul Mehrotra  is an architect, urbanist and educator, and is the Founder Principal of RMA Architects and Professor of Urban Design and Planning and Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Mehrotra has written and lectured extensively on issues to do with architecture, conservation and urban planning in Mumbai and India. He has designed projects that range from interior design and architecture to urban design, conservation and planning, engaging diverse issues, multiple constituencies and varying scales. Sarah Nuttall  is Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies and Director of WISER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the author of Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Postapartheid, editor of Beautiful/ Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics, and co-editor of many books including Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis and Loadshedding: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa. For five years she has directed WiSER, the largest and most established humanities institute across the global South. In 2016 she was an Oppenheimer Fellow at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University. Susan Parnell is Professor of Urban Geography and co-founder of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. She is currently Visiting Professor at LSECities. Her work is focussed on issues of urban change at the local, national and global scale. Edgar Pieterse is founding director of the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town and holder of the DST/NRF South African Research Chair in

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Urban Policy. His research and teaching gravitates around urban development politics, everyday culture, publics, radical social economies, responsive design and adaptive governance systems. He is consulting editor for Cityscapes – an international biannual magazine on urbanism in the global South. Edgar is co-author with AbdouMaliq Simone of: New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times (2017) and recent co-edited books include: African Cities Reader III: Land, Property & Value (2015), Africa’s Urban Revolution (2014) and Rogue Urbanism: Emergent African Cities (2013) Wendy Pullan  is Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies in the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. Her recent publications include: Locating Urban Conflicts (co-edited 2013) and The Struggle for Jerusalem’s Holy Places (coauthored 2013). She is Director of the Centre for Urban Conflicts Research at Cambridge. Victoria Redclift is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Surrey, where she works on the sociology of ‘race’, ethnicity and migration with a particular focus on citizenship and political exclusion. She is the author of Statelessness and Citizenship: Camps and the Creation of ‘Political Space’ (Routledge, 2013), which was shortlisted for the BSA Phillip Abrams Memorial Prize in 2014, as well as New Racial Landscapes: Contemporary Britain and the Neoliberal Conjuncture (Routledge, 2014 – with Malcolm James and Helen Kim). She won a Phillip Leverhulme Prize in 2014 and, along with an ESRC Future Research Leaders Grant for 2015, is currently conducting comparative research into experiences of citizenship among Bangladesh-origin Muslims in London, Birmingham and Los Angeles. Jennifer Robinson is Professor of Human Geography and Co-Director of the Urban Laboratory at UCL. She is author of Ordinary Cities (Routledge, 2006), which offers a critique of urban studies from the point of view of cities in poorer countries. Her work challenges the conventional divide between western and ‘Third world’ cities, and argues for a truly cosmopolitan approach to understanding cities. Her empirical research has been focused on South Africa, including studies of segregation and state power, and the politics of urban development. She currently works on methodologies for comparative international urban research, and on a comparative research project on city strategies and the circulation of urban policy. Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography and inaugural Director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin. She holds The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy. Previously she was on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. Ananya’s research and scholarship has a determined focus on poverty and inequality and lies in four domains: how the urban poor in cities from Kolkata to Chicago face and fight eviction, foreclosure, and displacement; how global financialization, working in varied realms from microfinance to real-estate speculation, creates new markets in debt and risk; how the efforts to manage and govern the problem of poverty reveal the contradictions and limits of liberal democracy; how economic prosperity and aspiration in the global South is creating new potentialities for programs of human development and social welfare. Ananya is the recipient of several awards including the Paul Davidoff book award for Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (Routledge, 2010). Her most recent book is Encountering Poverty: Thinking and Acting in an Unequal World (University of California Press, 2016).

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Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and a Member of its Committee on Global Thought. She is a student of cities, immigration, and states in the world economy, with inequality, gendering and digitization as three key variables running though her work. She is the author of eight books and the editor or co-editor of three books. Together, her authored books are translated in over twenty languages. Mike Savage is Martin White Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, where he is also co-Director of the International Inequalities Institute. He has long standing interests in urbanism, and its association with inequalities, and his recent books include ‘Social Class in the 21st Century. Alex Schafran Ph.D is Lecturer in Geography at the University of Leeds. A planner by training, he holds an MA in Urban Planning from Hunter College (CUNY) and a Ph.D in City & Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley. His awardwinning writing about planning, cities and regions has appeared in numerous professional and scholarly journals, including a forthcoming book from the University of California Press on segregation and foreclosure in the San Francisco Bay Area. Prior to pursuing an academic career, he worked for a decade as an organizer, advocate, policy analyst and planner for a variety of social justice organizations in New York and California. He is also currently Visiting Faculty at Sciences Po Bordeaux, at the Paris School of International Affairs, Sciences Po, Paris and Adjoint Assistant Professor of Planning at the University of Colorado-Denver. Christian Schmid is a geographer, sociologist and urban researcher. He is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich. Schmid has authored, coauthored, and co-edited numerous publications on theories of the urban and of space, on Henri Lefebvre, and on urban development. Together with architects Roger Diener, Jacques Herzog, Marcel Meili and Pierre de Meuron he co-authored the book “Switzerland: an urban portrait” a pioneering analysis of extended urbanization. He is currently collaborating with Neil Brenner on a long-term project on planetary urbanization, and he leads a project on the comparison of urbanization processes in Tokyo, Pearl River Delta, Kolkata, Istanbul, Lagos, Paris, Mexico City and Los Angeles, which is based at the ETH Future Cities Laboratory Singapore. Richard Sennett  is Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences, and University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. His research interests include the relationship between urban design and urban society, urban family patterns, the urban welfare system, the history of cities and the changing nature of work. His books include The Craftsman (2008) The Culture of the New Capitalism, (Yale, 2006), Respect in an Age of Inequality, (Penguin, 2003), The Corrosion of Character (1998), The Fall of Public Man (1996), Flesh and Stone (1994). AbdouMaliq Simone is an urbanist with particular interest in emerging forms of collective life across cities of the so-called Global South. He has worked across many different academic, administrative, research, policymaking, advocacy, and organizational contexts. Simone is presently Research Professor at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of

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Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Visiting Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London and Visiting Professor of Urban Studies at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. Key publications include, In Whose Image: Political Islam and Urban Practices in Sudan, University of Chicago Press, 1994, For the City Yet to Come: Urban Change in Four African Cities, Duke University Press, 2004, and City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads: Routledge, 2009, Jakarta: Drawing the City Near: University of Minnesota Press, 2014, and the forthcoming New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times, Polity (with Edgar Pieterse). Curtis Stone is a Foreign Expert, Editor for the English edition of People’s Daily Online in Beijing, China. He is also a Research Support Assistant at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois. His (co)authored works include Incorporating Civil Society: China’s NGO Strategy (Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2013) and China and Southeast Asia: Unbalanced Development in the Greater Mekong Subregion (The European Financial Review, 2013). He has written numerous articles on international relations and China-U.S. relations for People’s Daily Online. Alex Rhys-Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department and deputy director of the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. Fran Tonkiss is Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her work focuses on urban inequalities, urban development and design, social and spatial divisions in the city, and the socio-economic organisation of urban space. Her publications include Cities by Design: the social life of urban form (Polity, 2013) and Space, the City and Social Theory (Polity, 2005). Eyal Weizman  is an architect and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures and Director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a Global Professor at Princeton University. In 2010 he set up the research agency Forensic Architecture (FA), an independent research agency based at Goldsmiths, to examine historic and contemporary forensic practices in relation to articulations of public truth. His books include The Conflict Shoreline (Steidl and Cabinet, 2015), Mengele’s Skull (Sternberg, 2012), The Least of all Possible Evils (Verso, 2011), and Hollow Land (Verso, 2007). Austin Zeiderman  is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is an interdisciplinary scholar who specializes in the cultural and political dimensions of cities and the environment, with a specific focus on Latin America. His book, Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá (2016, Duke UP), focuses on how security and risk shape the relationship between citizens and the state in the selfbuilt settlements of the urban periphery. Aspects of Austin’s research have also appeared in a range of venues, such as Antipode, Environment and Planning A, Public Culture, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, American Ethnologist, openDemocracy, and the Guardian.

Publisher’s Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce or adapt material in this book: Chapter 4 adapted from: Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, ‘Towards a new epistemology of the urban?’, CITY, 19, 2–3 (2015): 151–182. © Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, 2015. Chapter 7 reprinted from: Matthew Desmond, ‘Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty’, AJS Volume 118 Number 1 (July 2012): 88–133. © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Chapter 9 reprinted from: Alex Schafran, ‘Origins of an Urban Crisis: The Restructuring of the San Francisco Bay Area and the Geography of Foreclosure’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Volume 37.2 (March 2013): 663–88. © 2012 Urban Research Publications Limited. Published by Blackwell Publishing. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 14 adapted from: D. Asher Ghertner, ‘Calculating without numbers: aesthetic governmentality in Delhi’s slums’, Economy and Society 39:2 (2010), 185–217. © 2010 Taylor & Francis Ltd. Chapter 16 reprinted from: Amita Baviskar, ‘What the Eye Does Not See: River Yamuna in the Imagination of Delhi’, Economic and Political Weekly (Review of Urban Affairs). 46 (50) (2011): 45–53. © Amita Baviskar, 2011. Chapter 17  adapted from: Austin Zeiderman, ‘Living Dangerously: Biopolitics and Urban Citizenship in Bogotá, Colombia’, American Ethnologist, 40 (1): 71–87. © 2013 American Anthropological Association Chapter 22 adapted from: Colin McFarlane, ‘Assembling the Everyday’, Chapter 2 in Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage. Wiley-Blackwell: Chichester, UK, 2011, pp. 32–59. © Colin McFarlane, 2011 Chapter 28 reprinted from: Alex Rhys-Taylor, ‘The essences of multiculture: a sensory exploration of an inner-city street market’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Volume 20, Issue 4: Ethnography, Diversity and Urban Space (2013): 393–406. © 2013 Taylor & Francis Ltd. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 32 adapted from: Richard Sennett, ‘The Public Ream’, Commissioned by the BMW Herbert Quant Foundation. © 2008 Richard Sennett. Chapter 34 reprinted from: Lindsay Bremner, ‘Towards a minor global architecture at Lamu, Kenya’, Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, Volume 39, Issue 3 (2013) 397–413. © 2013 Taylor & Francis Ltd. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 35 adapted from: Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the threshold of detectability. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. © 2017 Eyal Weizman.

1 Introduction: Urban Churn S u z a n n e H a l l a n d R i c k y B u rd e t t

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Urbanisation exceeds the numbers. No matter how provocative the varied predictions that, by 2050, two-thirds of the world’s human population will be urbanised, the volatile processes and intricacies of urbanisation surpass our expectations. In their introductory essay to our collected edition, Parnell and Robinson (2017) underscore that: ‘There is no common “urban” object.’ So too the city defeats quantifiable definition. The essays that comprise this book reveal the city as a capricious formation; a constructed and inhabited space emerging through incremental and abrupt compositions that stretch from backyards, to mayoral offices, to multinational speculators. They show how the formation of the urban constitutes profoundly asymmetrical arrangements of global economic power and political influence. They connect the shape and texture of the ‘urban’ of urbanisation to the planetary reach of capitalist accumulation and consciousness (Brenner and Schmid, 2017), as well as finer-grained possibilities for engaging in our shared humanity and vulnerability (Hentschel, 2017). Notably, the essays all evoke the tenor and pace of urban churn that signals the turbulent nature of our early twenty-first century. The ambition of this book is to capture the churn that churns, to give texture and theory to the macro and micro endeavours that profoundly re-form cities and citizens of the twenty-first century. The conceit of the ‘twenty-first-century city’ that outlines this collection is therefore intended to engage with the social, political and spatial resonance of brutality and inventiveness inherent in contemporary city-making (Simone, 2017). Much more a zeitgeist than a circumscribed period of time, many of the essays in this book are excavations of the future; provocations that link archaeology, atmosphere and anticipation. Nuttall (2017) affirms the possibilities for postcolonial understandings of the city through an appreciation of ‘longer historical time frames’ that reveal deeper processes of citymaking beyond Western modernity. Nuttall’s curiosity is also animated by a more speculative and imaginative interplay between animate and inanimate forms, challenging binaries of the urban/rural and physical/psychic. Resonant with this approach, and in bringing a section on ‘Design’ more explicitly into a book on ideas of urbanisation, we gain important contributions on what it means to make urban form, and to make urban analysis. In identifying the ever-changing dynamics of contemporary urbanisation and its granular associations, Mehrotra (2017) questions the efficacy of the urban design professions in tackling complex processes of urban churn, while Sennett (2017) reminds us of the participatory potential of the city as an open system that is frustrated by prevailing ideologies of urban planning. Weizman (2017) reflects on his practice of the forensic survey of buildings in cities under warfare. Doing a survey of blast impacts and building damage not only reveals ‘decay as a process of form making’, but also engages with the archive as a material repository of human activities and political rationalities. Thus our editorial project evolved from its original disciplinary container of ‘a handbook of urban sociology’ towards a more experimental space that transgresses strict disciplinary boundaries and categorical definitions. Our commitment in this collection, composed of architects, anthropologists, geographers, literary and cultural scholars, and sociologists, is to put side by side the variegated perspectives on what constitutes the urban. Our collaborators expand on their particular vantage points through divergent theoretical commitments and differing methodological protocols, drawing on varied geographies and ways of knowing.

North Mexico City, 2015, Aerial Archives / Alamy Stock Photo

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In writing this introduction in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the innards of the political and economic compact that maintain globalisation have been turned inside out, revealed in its raw forms. The city, not simply a mark on a map, but a series of human interrelationships across the planet, makes the stark extent of societal inequalities and discriminations visible in particular ways. It also generates and surfaces the potentials of resistance. By focusing on ‘the politics of humanity … crafted by radical global interconnections’, Roy (2017) differentiates the shape of the world from that of the globe, claiming the possibilities of our shared humanity as against the expansive scale of dehumanisation. Roy’s emphasis on ‘worlding’ highlights the progressive avenues advanced out of the #BlackLivesMatter and urban anti-eviction movements as scaled-up modes of resistance to racialised injustice and racism, demanding a reimagining of the figure of the human in urban life. This perspective, underscored by the range of essays in our handbook, further disrupts the Western formation of urban studies towards a wider animation of histories and geographies. It therefore fundamentally matters that many authors who have contributed to this book project have written from varied, yet not disconnected, frontlines of emerging urban conditions of protest and association. The significance of the ‘right to the city’ evoked by Lefebvre (1996) and advanced by Harvey (2008) endures. However, what constitutes a right to make the city, for whom, and under what conditions resources are available to configuring our city and our personhood is being severely contested. The ever-increasing range of urban claims to social justice, from Occupy to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Revolutions, the Umbrella Movement, and the #FeesMustFall movement, reveal the enormity of a groundswell against pervasive injustice. Authors in our collection view these global claims and the varied nature of their contestations about the right to access and shape the city, from differing ways of knowing the city. For Bond (2017), the presence of a remarkable frame of constitutional rights in South Africa is overwhelmed by the absence of distribution, where access to infrastructure for the marginalised remains a struggle. Hence, the urban poor deal in the most elemental claims for water and sanitation. Bond shows how guttural the nature of deprivation and insurgency is, and turns to larger possibilities of ‘commoning’ water provision, as a commitment to primary tariff reforms away from the market-based logic towards an ‘eco-social’ emphasis of the commons. Agathangelou (2017) casts a wider net still, exploring the ‘practical solidarities’ across different groups to provide care in the everyday life of the city, as well as strategic alliances and transnational processes of learning in the Tunisian, Egyptian and Yemini Revolutions. Our book is also written through the momentum of new processes of financialisation that have thrust outwards from the global financial crisis in 2008, reconfiguring urban land as reservoirs for vast exercises in global property speculation and dispossession (Sassen, 2017). Savage (2017) connects the systemic violence that abates the over-inflated landscape of London to the formation of global–urban elites or what he refers to as ‘an elite habitus in cities of accumulation’. Working within sociological understandings of class, and with reference to Piketty’s (2013) work on wealth inequality, Savage argues for a more differentiated knowledge of urban hierarchies. He connects the economic and cultural forms of citymaking of urban elites and reveals how elite formations profoundly skew the affordability and accessibility of both private and public space. This is echoed in Madden’s essay (2017) on the colonisation of public space through the lavish landscapes of new cultural precincts, on the one hand, and the proliferation of gated and guarded residential, retail and learning complexes, on the other. Desmond’s account (2017 [2012]) of the endemic evictions in Milwaukee highlights another dimension of revanchist urbanism pointing to enduring and escalating discriminations on the basis of race and gender. Here, the abject failure of

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regulation and state intervention in distorted property markets and social housing provision is revealed and urban poverty is reproduced. So prevalent is eviction in contemporary urban life that it now features as a prominent theme in urban studies (e.g. Brickell, FernándezArrigoitia and Vasudevan, 2017). The violent connections between accumulation and dispossession highlight the durable damage to family and social infrastructures, and the future of the city itself. Mah’s research (2017) on post-industrial decline provides an important cue for linking processes of regeneration and degeneration and the ways in which urban citizens are made redundant either in their places of home or in work. In tracing the ‘prototype of the divided, depopulated and deindustrialised city’ across Niagara Falls, Newcastle upon Tyne and Ivanovo, Mah reveals urban ruination as an urban political economy of global capitalism. Yet authors such as McFarlane (2017) show that the making of the city of and from the urban margins continues through a precarious yet persistent resourcefulness, precisely in cities where resources are severely limited. Both McFarlane (2017) and Simone (2017) share an engagement with ‘the plurality of constant incremental adjustments’ as a platform for the politics of everyday life. What Simone captures as ‘zones for the urban majority’ are ‘sensory, spiritual, cognitive, performative, and experiential environments in addition to being built and economic domains’, where the figure of the human is foregrounded in the constant recalibration of the city. In drawing the lens further outwards, questions arise as to how the majority city is configured as governable. Ghertner’s focus (2017) on ‘the politics of calculating, seeing and rendering knowable Delhi’s slums’ traces how the normative framework of the ‘world-class city’ in millennial Delhi obscures that of the majority city. Rather, the inherent processes and practices of the everyday are cast aside as deficient and replaced with ‘intelligible fields for intervention’. These include slum surveys and evaluative techniques to ascertain the aesthetic desirability, or lack thereof, of certain kinds of spaces, and certain kinds of citizens. Hyman and Pieterse (2017) further allude to the primary disconnects between a ‘new urban agenda’ and ‘the everyday real-politik of infrastructure investments, urban management, legal provisions and planning’ across the varied African cities. Crucially, their approach to understanding urban infrastructure requirements and systems is not framed as through deficit and deficiencies, but as ways of reading possibilities against the current flows of globalisation. Thus they focus on adaptive urbanisms and ‘the constitutive nature of informality in Africa’, exploring the potentials of affordability and low-carbon urban configurations. Questions of urban political authority and why it matters resonate throughout our collection, with Le Galès (2017) arguing for greater attention on relations between urban processes and modes of governance. The institutional nature of this intersection is made evident in how volatile ‘natural’ events unfold, in terms of how both authority and vulnerability are defined. Fox Gotham and Cheek (2017) explore how ‘disasters and their destruction are endemic social problems linked to the organisation of cities and the implementation of policies and socio-legal regulations’. In outlining the unfolding disaster of Hurricane Katrina, these authors explore the market-oriented formulation of disaster recovery, how inequalities are frequently reinforced in recovery efforts, and how uncertainly is intensified. Zeiderman’s essay (2017) on ‘zones of high risk’ – places categorised in relation to environmental threat – in the urban peripheries of Bogotá works within the political interstices of uncertainty. While technocracy defines and manages categories of risk, urban citizens claim relative rights to occupy vulnerable space. Zeiderman’s key question of ‘how difference matters to our understanding of contemporary urban politics’ is evoked through the emergence of less radical

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notions of urban popular politics. Struggles to access space and resources take the form of protracted mediations, as opposed to revolutionary processes of citizenship-making. If ours is an age of mobility, it is simultaneously an age of lack of fluidity. Despite the inordinate increase in the circulation of ideas, goods and services, the political barriers to human movement across the planet are being actively advanced. Assertive commitments to the building and maintenance of walls are a primary feature of violent social sorting and its inherent accommodation or dismissal of life and death. Pullan’s essay (2017) focuses on the long duration of ethno-national and religious conflict in cities in the Balkans and Middle East. Violence and boundary maintenance ‘dominate significant aspects of everyday life’. Redclift (2017) engages in the sustained formation of urban encampments through the unstable permanence of urban refugee camps in Dhaka, which absorbed migrants following the 1971 War of Liberation. Through the camp Redclift shows how ‘the city both unsettles the state prescriptions of belonging through how people pursue their everyday connections and ambitions, but also replicates “race”–class conflations which characterise urban life’. Border space is also the terrain of new mixings, and Chen and Stone (2017) focus on the recently opened border regions of China and Southeast Asia’s borderlands. These regional compositions of city formations allow us to see urbanism forming in previously isolated regions, and to think through the stature of small cities as spaces of transition and transnational exchange. While our collection of essays is written from the momentum of the ‘here and now’, it is by no means unmoored from the histories of domination and the prospects of our shared humanity. From varied vantage points, our book engages with the dramatic dynamics, disruptions and possibilities of twenty-first-century urbanisation, speaking to emerging ideas and highlighting empirical and methodological explorations. To understand the speed and impacts of this turbulent cycle of urban change, we have focused on the intense registers of urban transformations in the compressed decades of the new millennium, and the varied experiences of the city that reveal a range of urbanisms across the planet. It is the churn that churns – the volatile formations and capricious life-worlds of the urban – that have shaped our book. We focus on the relational processes of power to emerging urbanisms, simultaneously exploring modes of oppression and resistance, and dispossession and provisioning. The tensions within these processes have emerged as an important conceptual thread across the essays, revealing, for example, how authority is construed as both regulatory and oppositional; how productivity follows the seemingly contradictory yet sustained drive towards over-investment and abandonment. But in the same way that the world is not reducible to the globe, churn is not just propelled by power, and our essay collection engages in the changing physical, psychological and associational spaces of cities. The authors who have contributed to our book speak to the magnitude of apparently small configurations of texture, surface and dimension, and evoke the fault lines and possibilities of our shared planetary future. References Agathangelou, Anna (2017) ‘The Time of Temporal (Un)Civility of the City: MENA Urban Insurgencies and Revolutions’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. Bond, Patrick (2017) ‘Limits to South Africa’s “Right to the City”: Prospects for and beyond Urban Commoning’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. Brenner, Neil and Schmid, Christian (2017) ‘Elements for a New Epistemology of the Urban’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage.

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Brickell, Katherine, Fernández Arrigoitia, Melissa and Vasudevan, Alex (2017) Geographies of Forced Eviction: Dispossession, Violence, Resistance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Chen, Xiangming and Stone, Curtis (2017) ‘Rethinking Border Cities: In-Between Spaces, Unequal Actors and Stretched Mobilities Across the China–Southeast Asia Borderland’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. Desmond, Matt (2017) ‘Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage [first printed in American Journal of Sociology 118.1 (2012): 88–133]. Ghertner, D. Asher (2017) ‘Aesthetic Governmentality: Administering the World-Class City in Delhi’s Slums’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. Gotham, Kevin and Cheek, Wesley (2017) ‘Post-disaster, Recovery and Rebuilding’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. Harvey, David (2008) ‘The Right to the City’. New Left Review, 53(September/October): 23–40. Hentschel, Christine (2017) ‘The European Refugee Crisis in “Our” Cities: Conflict, Vulnerability, and Ethics of Surface’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. Hyman, Katherine and Pieterse, Edgar (2017) ‘Infrastructure Deficits and Potential in African Cities’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. Lefebvre, Henri (1996) ‘The Right to the City’ in Writings on Cities, selected, Edited by Kofman, E. and Lebas, E. pp. 63–181. Oxford: Blackwell. Le Galès, Patrick (2017) ‘The Political Sociology of Cities and Urbanisation Processes: Social Movements, Inequalities and Governance’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. Madden, David (2017) ‘The Contradictions of Urban Public Space: The View from London and New York’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. Mah, Alice (2017) ‘Ruination and Post-industrial Urban Decline’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. McFarlane, Colin (2017) ‘Incremental Urbanism and Tactical Learning: Reflections from Mumbai and Kampala’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. Mehrotra, Rahul (2017) ‘Urban Design: Beyond Architecture at Scale’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. Nuttall, Sarah (2017) ‘Johannesburg–Lagos: From the Speculative to the Littoral City’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. Parnell, Susan and Robinson, Jenny (2017) ‘The Global Urban: Difference and Complexity in Urban Studies and the Science of Cities’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. Piketty, Thomas (2013) Capital in the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pullan, Wendy (2017) ‘Violent Infrastructures, Places of Conflict: Urban Order in Divided Cities’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. Redclift, Victoria (2017) ‘Re-bordering Camp and City: ‘Race’, Space and Citizenship in Dhaka’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. Roy, Ananya (2017) ‘Urban Studies and the Postcolonial Encounter’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. Sassen, Saskia (2017) ‘Global Cities: Places for Researching the Translocal’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. Savage, Mike (2017) ‘The Elite Habitus in Cities of Accumulation’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. Sennett, Richard (2017) ‘The Public Realm’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. Simone, AbdouMaliq (2017) ‘The Majority World and the Politics of Everyday Living in Southeast Asia’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. Weizman, Eyal (2017) ‘Forensic Architecture: Political Practice, Activism, Aesthetics’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage. Zeiderman, Austin (2017) ‘Endangered City: Security and Citizenship in Bogotá’ in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: Sage.

The Structure of the Book

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We have organised our book around nine imminent issues including: Hierarchy; Productivity; Authority; Volatility; Conflict; Provisionality; Mobility; Civility; as well as the theme of Design. Through these themes, we address more familiar categories of analysis in different ways, analysing the city through intersections of causalities and conditions. Here the complex assemblages of the city are neither reducible to singular effects, nor to particular constituencies, but rather to the interplay of aligned and oppositional forces, infrastructures and inhabitations.

Introduction: An urban compendium 1 Hierarchy: Elites and Evictions

Through the analytic of ‘Hierarchy’ these essays focus on pronounced increases in extreme inequalities in income, resources and space, most notably evident in the widening gap between the richest and poorest of urban dwellers. The essays offer insights on how power formations and processes of accumulation intersect with processes of subordination and displacement, including prominent forms of racial forms of dispossession. 2 Productivity: Over-investment and Abandonment

‘Productivity’ focuses on how the city concentrates ideas, people and economies, and produces innovation while procuring abandonment and redundancies. We explore the organisations and processes through which urban speculation and obsolescence are made, highlighting emerging forms of inequality on grounds of class and gender. 3 Authority: Governance and Mobilisations

Here we are concerned with how authority is manifest in the urban, exploring both the withdrawal of the state from public services and the implications for welfare provision in the city, and the emergence of prominent and charismatic forms of urban authority. We explore the performativity of governance, and the social and political formations of coalitions outside of the state. 4 Volatility: Disruption and Adaptation

Crises resulting from natural disasters generate new forms of urban governance and technologies for the regulation and management of volatility and uncertainty. But the application of risk strategies differentially affects citizens raising questions of who is most likely to be regulated and under what risk regimes. 5 Conflict: Vulnerability and Insurgency

These essays explore differing aspects of conflict and vulnerability, by way of aggression and subterfuge, and with it differing forms of violence, organisation and care. The authors focus on ways in which cities are complicit in the reproduction of global and national violence, showing how humanity – or lack thereof – surfaces in the visceral and material dimensions of how bodies and buildings interact.

Merkato, Addis Ababa, 2015, Grant Rooney Premium / Alamy Stock Photo

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6 Provisionality: Infrastructure and Incrementalism

The provisional offers another view of precarity, in that it highlights the activation of everyday resources and imaginations in incremental forms of city-making, particularly evident were resources are limited. We explore state and citizen deliveries of infrastructure, and articulate its modes of governance and sociality. 7 Mobility: Re-bordering and De-bordering

‘Mobility’ captures the proliferation of flows of people and ideas across national, urban and human borders, accompanied by a host of emerging border restrictions. We analyse the city as hyper-diverse areas of intersection between those who move and those who are fixed, between a national imperative to assert borders and transnational, technological and cultural modes of border crossings. We explore state endeavours to promote and restrict mobility, engaging with the forms of city-making in diverse and transitional parts of cities where associations and anxieties emerge. 8 Civility: Contestation and Encounter

We explore ‘Civility’ as the shared and inventive forms of allegiance and resistance that collectively shape possibilities for public engagement, and for imagining alternative urban futures. Emergent public life further forms within contexts where public space is reduced by market and state interventions, as well as societal discriminations. 9 Design: Speculation and Imagination

Finally, we engage authors involved in the world of theorising and practising designbased interventions in the city, to explore what imaginations and orientations are required to intercede in complex urban scenarios, including processes of removal, regeneration and restoration.

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Part I

Questions of Definition: An Urban Compendium

Shivaji Nagar, Mumbai, 2014, Julia King

2 The Global Urban: Difference and Complexity in Urban Studies and the Science of Cities1 Susan Parnell and Jennifer Robinson

Introduction The study of the city is in a phase of theoretical reflection and experimentation. There is concern to build analyses of the urban that are informed by trends and experiences of urbanization across the world, accounting for the pace, scale and form of demographic and social change as well as the overall social, economic and ecological significance of the city in global or planetary change. For example, the desire in international policy circles to ‘leave no city behind’ and to generate useful guidance for development in what are now some of the world’s most vulnerable places is a powerful motive for ramping up urban research and for identifying key interventions that could shift cities onto a more sustainable path. There is a widespread consensus that to make sense of massive urban expansion, especially in Asia, and to illuminate lesser understood urban realities, such as those of Africa, the generation of some new concepts and approaches is necessary. Regardless of their philosophical points of origin or methodological commitments, initiatives to understand the significance of an urban world bring to the fore the tension between specificity (or difference) and universality in conceptualizing the urban and in drawing together empirical evidence, at the global scale, for innovation in policy and theory. In the field of urban studies, theory is now strongly shaped by the search for effective ways to understand the nature of the urban across a great diversity of outcomes (Parnell, Pieterse and Watson, 2009; Roy, 2009; Simone, 2011b; Robinson, 2016a; b). We argue that this concern needs to be further prioritised as policy makers seek to illuminate the drivers and outcomes of the global settlement transition. Acknowledgement that the composite trajectory of cities will influence the pathways of global change has hastened recognition of the importance of taking account of the cumulative ways in which varied sectors, actors, scales and temporalities shape cities and affect flows within and between cities. Interest in the urban applications of complexity and

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systems thinking is strengthening a developing ‘science of cities’ (Batty, 2013). Drawing on this emerging body of work, as well as on trends in urban studies more broadly, we suggest that the focus on cities as pathways of global change should also highlight the fact that much more needs to be understood about the specificity of urban experiences in differential and varied geographical contexts to inform both how generalizations about the urban are produced and how they are taken up by global policy makers. Of ongoing concern is that conceptual refinement of the urban condition takes place in a context where the resources for theorisation and interdisciplinary alignment remain highly skewed towards privileged centres and institutions whose national and regional geographical orientation and range tend to exclude urban realities (typically of poorer and more remote cities) that may (or may not) rupture existing generalizations and theoretical integration. In this chapter, then, we raise concerns that the welcome boom in global urban research runs the risk of compounding an existing geographical bias in theorymaking towards well-resourced centres. Furthermore, while in the discussion that follows we seek to open up conversations between urban studies and the emerging science of cities, as well as to promote interdisciplinary research which is potentially able to integrate insights across an array of processes and divergent urban contexts, we suggest that this should not gloss over significant conceptual and methodological disagreements and geographical complexities. We start from the premise that there is wider value, even an urgent necessity, in forging a bolder, legible and united, if critical, scholarly community of urbanists that is global in its composition and geographically encompassing in outlook. There are significant disjunctures and difficulties, though, entailed in any efforts at merging, harmonizing or synthesizing urban studies and a science of cities, as well as navigating significant differences within each of these fields. Nonetheless, stepping back from what have often been divisive theoretical debates between ‘critical theory’ and ‘science’ in order to expand academic capacities to engage urbanisation as a fundamental transition of our time is, we argue, a political as well as an intellectual project for which there is clearly an urgent need. In this chapter we make a first effort at opening up this conversation across the widening field of urban studies, highlighting some shared conundrums involved in developing a more global approach to urbanisation, and considering emerging formulations in both fields as to how knowledge production across urban diversity and complexity might proceed.

Global urban policy making and imperatives for urban research Especially on our minds as we write this chapter is the potential for scholarly engagement in global urban policy through processes such as those that surround the Sustainable Development Agenda, the New Urban Agenda or the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. The multilateral political focus on cities and the values and indicators that are given prominence through position statements and targets seem to imply that developmental claims such as ‘the right to the city’, or indicators such as maximum air pollution levels, might hold as easily for Lilongwe as they do for Oslo. The issue of how and why cities differ from each other and how much this matters in generating universal arguments and knowledge about the urban condition is, we argue, a shared challenge for all scholars concerned with a global framing of the urban, both in the science of cities

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and in urban studies. In policy terms, while expert knowledge may need to be consolidated and synthesised to generate a picture of global urban trends, it is important that this is done in ways that deal effectively with differentiation across the world of cities, as well as with uncertainties and contradictions, rather than brushing them aside. The broad field of urban studies necessarily confronts difference and divergence in urban experiences, and must grapple with the limited reach of conceptual insights at the same time as fostering broader conversations about the nature of the urban. We feel that the rich theoretical debates about how to manage these tensions might provide useful vocabularies for reflection in global policy debates. And for urban theorists, responding to the urgent needs of global policy challenges might be considered to be more pressing than it currently seems to be (see Mitlin and Satterthwaite (2013) for an important overview of these challenges in relation to urban poverty). However, while there is undoubted value in drawing out shared predicaments in generating knowledge about the nature, form and processes of global urbanization, and in stimulating cross-fertilization of academic and policy ideas, the potential lines of academic disagreement should not be trivialized. Nor should the desire to speak with one voice to ensure impact in global policy discussions detract from tough intellectual debates. The task of getting the academy to speak coherently to policy and practice cannot be done without regard for real intellectual and ideological differences that have long existed between datadriven ‘science of cities’ and critical urban theory (see e.g. Brenner and Schmid, 2014). In this chapter we propose to review the incipient potential for thinking across this divide in building global urban knowledge and theory, but also to chart lines of divergence. In particular, we are keen to flag that there is a shared concern with the relationship between wider theorizations or analyses of the urban and the specificity of cities (distinctive or differentiated urban outcomes). Both urban theory and ‘science of cities’ traditions confront this conundrum – theorizing across difference. Curiously, this has often been precisely the grounds on which divisive and critical debate has emerged between these two traditions, counterposing the universalizing tendencies of science with the more interpretive traditions of social science, alert to specificity and difference. We suggest that, in the light of the global and sustainable development agendas’ overt urban policy directive, there is now a renewed incentive for conversations to be had across what has conventionally been a chasm of disagreement. In the quest for more integrative analyses of urbanization at a global scale to respond to global policy developments, commensurability across different disciplinary views of cities of the world emerges as a significant challenge. Here there are multiple imperatives: first to harness and synthesize knowledge; second to acknowledge the limits of commensurability in assembling data on different processes; and third to protect against geographical exclusion in the event of data gaps, and to avoid gross generalizations that erase urban specificities. To date, the major cleavages and contradictions of competing domains of urban knowledge, found in the normative base, the methods of research and the metrics of evaluation of urban progress, have been largely eluded through the alignment of disciplinary and operational specializations; thus economists advise on city growth strategies, sociologists on urban race and youth issues, and engineers on how to build bridges. Fragmented urbanism is then reconnected through design, intuition or budgeting and political processes. But the rise of global policy and scholarly discourses now demand high levels of generalization (ICSU, 2011). Synthesis is required for national and global policy formulation and so a more holistic thinking about ‘the urban’ has come into play.

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The contemporary urban debate that purports to feed policy is therefore an inherently complex and interdisciplinary act, stimulated by opportunities for integration-based innovation, but bound also to confront competing rationalities and exclusions. At the point when synthetic conceptualizations of the urban are required, the intractable problem of specificity (or not) must thus be confronted. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the selection of indicators for the sustainable development goals that will work across all contexts (Simon et al., 2015). As we proceed to review below how both urban studies and the science of cities treat urban differentiation and urban complexity in the challenge of building global urban knowledge, our concern is to make clear that there is currently no theoretical consensus on how to do this. In urban studies these debates are more fully developed, and there are some emerging practical ways forward to support new kinds of knowledge production, notably in a reconfiguration of comparative urban methods. In relation to a science of cities we draw attention to silences, ambiguities and confusion about how to treat the question of urban specificity when data gaps hide or preclude inclusion of significant urban formations. Crucially we argue that in response to the imperative of greater global policy relevance for both urban studies and the emerging science of cities, knowledge about the urban condition needs to be made useful both within and across places – global analyses of the urban need to resonate with and be able to respond to specific local experiences. It is in this spirit, then, that we press for an expanded debate on conceptions of the 21st-century city that are synthetic in that they are globally relevant and transdisciplinary, but also responsive to the diversity and complexity of the urban experience. Nuanced analyses are needed that account for specificity and incommensurability and that confront directly the terms of theoretical differences and conceptual conflict. In seeking to take forward this conversation as a contribution to growing calls for a more tractable and unified scholarship on cities, the rest of the chapter is structured in two main parts. The first deals with the challenges of navigating the search for data and knowledge on urbanization at a global scale while data is both uneven and differentiated across diverse urban situations; it also considers the complexity and commensurability issues which arise in the strongly interdisciplinary bodies of work that are being drawn together as the ‘science of cities’. The second approaches in more detail how specificity, or difference, and wider conceptualizations, or issues of universality, are being treated in typically social science debates in what might be termed ‘urban studies’. The opportunities for debates and developments in each field to inform the other in initiatives to generate more global urban analyses are, we hope, opened up through this encounter.

The science of cities – commensurable urban abstractions beyond specificity? There is no doubt that over the last decade or so there has been a massive increase in urban scholarship from across the hard natural, engineering and medical sciences. New enquiry has included comparing and generalizing the workings of physical and natural processes within cities, such as flooding, nitrogen flows or air pollution (cf. Aerts et al., 2013), as well as detailing the composite impact of cities on global environmental

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change, largely through the study of demographic shifts, the changing burden of disease, global energy consumption and biodiversity loss (cf. Seto et al., 2012; Elmqvist et al., 2013). The focus on cities in the climate change debate is possibly the most important example of the interface of science and policy at the global scale (Rosenzweig et  al., 2010). An underlying narrative of a ‘great urban acceleration’ (Figure 2.1), and not just urbanization and the growth of cities, underpins the surge in the urban sensibility of core scientific disciplines, many of which had hitherto not concerned themselves much with cities or what went on in them. Viewed from the perspective of those policy makers who might wish to apply the knowledge of these scholars, what is startling is how little this work of scientists and that of social scientists, in the rubric of urban studies, connect to each other. More startling still is that closer inspection suggests that there may be contradictory policy implications emerging from within the scientific urban renaissance. The fact is that the world is now predominantly urban – and many scientists have noticed this. Growing recognition of the wider consequences of the urban transition have had a catalytic, and largely positive, impact on the use of scientific evidence to shift global and national policy on cities over the last decade, with the transition to renewable energy as a strategy to reduce carbon emissions produced by cities as possibly the best example of evidence-based urban transformation (Rosenzweig et al., 2010). Bolstered by composite (though not necessarily commensurable or spatially representative) evidence about the urban transition and the urban future, academics have been among the leaders in bringing the city, the built environment and a concern with spatial relationships and complex urban system dynamics into debates about Earth’s future sustainability (McPhearson et al., 2016; Bai et al, 2016). In practical terms, what this means is that scientists, rather than social scientists or even the design professions, have managed to alter the normative base of global policy makers by urbanizing the 2030 sustainable development agenda – ensuring that national policy formation and reporting includes an emphasis on cities and that local as well as national governments are identified as critical global urban actors (Barnett and Parnell, 2016). This dedicated urban policy attention, as witnessed by the Sustainable Development Goals, Habitat 3 and the Paris or Sendai Agreements, should be good for cities in general, although the precise terms of the urban vision are heavily debated within and beyond the sciences and the policy priorities of the multilateral urban agenda remain opaque (Cohen, 2015). There is, however, a real danger that despite the greater prominence of cities in general, some cities may in fact now slip further behind in the framing of urban opportunities and dilemmas – not least because of the influence of scientific modes of research that do not do enough to make visible unconventional, unrecorded and under-measured cities (Simon et al., 2015). There are two aspects to sharpening the urban gaze of science in this regard. The first is to make the science of cities spatially and analytically representative of the whole city and the whole world of cities. The second is to acknowledge the ontological limits of science in the study of the urban. A fundamental flaw in the contribution of science to a global understanding of cities is that data-poor regions are simply left out of graphic and statistical accounts of global development progress. Take West Africa, for example, where, excluding Nigeria, there are over 150 million people for whom there are almost no robust metrics at the national let alone urban scale. The data lacuna that is the reality of impoverished nations like Angola, Chad, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Republic of Congo and San Tome and Principe (http://qz.com/602406/

Steel Production

Private Consumption

Number of Cities

Figure 2.1  The great urban acceleration (Mc Phearson et al., 2016)

Primary Energy Use

Global GDP

Global Urban Population

Cement Production

# of McDonald’s

Urban Land Area

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why-is-central-africa-missing-from-so-many-maps) relates, as one might expect, to fundamental socio-economic data but it extends also to the global metrics that define city density, connectivity or urban well-being. Here, then, the problem is not just missing data but distorted categorization. Stronger awareness of the urban blind spots of science, including what is measured and whether it is measured effectively, is thus imperative – not only for the intellectual integrity of how cities are represented, but also to ensure that the urban poor of the world feature appropriately in the emerging science of cities. Failure to attend to these technical and conceptual deficiencies means that fundamental global challenges, like urban food security or climate mitigation, will remain illegible within this mode of analysis. Unlike traditional social science work on the city that has very diverse roots, there is relative epistemological cohesion in science, although it is not true that there is full theoretical interoperability across disciplines concerned with the city. The centrality of urban problems and opportunities that have been fostered by science, engineering and even economics are, however, typically framed either in terms of conventional modelling or, more recently, by complexity or systems thinking. Because the theoretical assumptions made by these largely quantitative and positivist scholars lend themselves to generalization and macro-scale analysis, working at the scale of the city or the settlement system is often seen as unproblematic, even desirable. The ability to provide comparative information that has (notwithstanding the points about missing data above) global coverage is also attractive for multilateral agencies seeking high-level abstractions and guidance on a general or global urban policy direction. One marker of the willingness of scientists to engage urban policy at this scale is the focus on cities in both Science and Nature in the lead-up to the UN’s major conference on Human Settlements (Habitat 3) that was held in Quito in 2016. The more general awareness of scholars in supporting the implementation of an urban Sustainable Development Goal is underscored by the emphasis on cities in new funding calls and the science programmes of international structures like Future Earth (Bai et al., 2016). Cities are clearly no longer terrae incognitae for hard scientists who, in taking an integrative and global approach to the urban, may be closer to finding the ear of global policy makers on how to transform cities than urban studies scholars, whose work is more often concerned with less tangible social processes in specific cities. Indeed, it is in navigating the search for global knowledge on cities and the specificity of local urban processes that the tensions between social and scientific urban research may be most apparent – and where a productive conversation between these two traditions may be most useful. Putting aside the well-established critiques of positivism, there are unintended pitfalls of the scientific turn for marginalized places, related to the way in which this kind of research is authenticated. There are well-established protocols (largely statistical but also geospatial) that are used to account for the robustness of the results presented in scientific papers by urban economists, engineers, ecologists and other powerful groups of urban researchers including epidemiologists (Newell and Siri, 2016). As is well known, undertaking large-scale sophisticated mapping and modelling is, if not impossible, then very difficult and time consuming in small, poor and data-deprived areas. The importance of the global urban data gap alone might discredit this mode of positivist research as a legitimate platform for robust global urban policy reflection. However, this difficulty has been at least partially addressed by the rise of big data and complex systems approaches, largely displacing linear modelling (Kitchin, 2014a).

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To deal with issues of scale and complexity most urban scientific research now engages systems thinking for the study of sustainable cities and is no longer only concerned with linear modelling. Complexity thinking highlights bimodal interactions, feedback loops in and across cities, urban resilience, tipping points of change and the interaction of different actors and systems within city governance (Bai et al., 2016). Assumptions about causality that inform the more sophisticated new complex systems work is, however, often drawn from patterns derived from peer-reviewed studies (often systematic reviews) of cities and city systems, which are geographically biased to northern examples. For cities off the global data or publication map the danger of oversight because they are not reflected in comparative data platforms or in the secondary literature is heightened by intense systems thinking research and especially by the shift to big data. Big data and smart data lie at the heart of the urban scientific renaissance, as this is not only where most new, raw urban data is located, but where there are optimal opportunities to make better information work (and pay for itself). The research of big data scientists entails more than just the pulling together of exceptionally large and complex information that can be analysed in new ways using powerful computations (Kitchin, 2014b). The analytical and operational power lies in the formulation of algorithms that sort and reveal patterns of flows in and through cities, based on assumptions about how cities work. The incorporation and adaptation of these patterns into packages, such as traffic systems or billing systems, is undertaken on the assumption that other cities will purchase them because the algorithms apply across many urban contexts. However, of key concern here is the extent to which poor African cities might be excluded from the conceptualizations of big data science, as revealed by an audit of Batty’s (2008; 2013) articulation of the practical value of an emergent ‘science of cities’. He describes how scientists pursue the manipulation and modelling of new varieties of data – particularly big data – generated by the monitoring of devices and people across the city based on the assumption of widespread, even universal, ownership of data-generating devices. While the use of cellular technology in African cities has been much publicized, the fact that consumers limit its use because of cost; have restricted coverage; and may share phones across a family or business means that the assumptions about information need to be heavily contextualized. Second, Batty (2016) points to ways big data can make urban environments sites of ever greater competition through modelling prediction and projection, but this presupposes that all economic activity is legal and legible on the Web – which is rarely the case in urban ‘slums’ where informal and/or illegal networks thrive on hidden information. Batty optimistically points to the potential to integrate diverse services and add value to how citizens participate in generating knowledge about their cities and use the same collectively collated information to reduce the price they pay for goods and services, but the chances of applying this web-based rationality to African cities needs dramatically improved connectivity to take hold. The rationalities of everyday African urban life may not ultimately prove more difficult to model than those of other urban places, but the danger is that big data science does not currently assume the need to engage with questions of geographical specificity; assumes that there is sufficient information about all cities to illuminate urban patterns in general; and assumes that the patterns that it does identify will enable action that necessarily enhances the quality of life of residents. It would be disingenuous to suggest that the global community is oblivious to the distortions of generalizing from over-researched regions of the world (Seto et al., 2012; Simon et al., 2015). To address the missing cities in science huge new programmes, such

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as those sponsored by Future Earth or the international science councils, have been put in place (cf. www.icsu.org/news-centre/news/top-news/icsu-signs-a-five-year-agreementwith-sida-to-support-integrated-science-in-africa). Notwithstanding major new investments, the scale of research and resources directed at urban Africa are insignificant in comparison with ongoing investments into what are already well-understood cities in Europe or North America. Thus, while urban research on and in Africa is advancing, the spatial knowledge gap on cities is growing. Thus, at the very moment that African cities’ expansion provides the critical entry point for a more engaged and holistic science, there is more than ever inequality in the distribution of research output (cf. Jeenah and Pouris, 2008). Ironically, because of the dominance of social science in the region, the overall gap in the outputs of African urban research relative to those of other world regions may be getting worse as cities elsewhere are no longer the object of only social research, but become the beneficiaries of the better funded science research grants that are reliant on data availability. We noted earlier that despite efforts to promote the apparent theoretical coherence of urban science, it is dangerous to assume that the results of the varied cohorts of science will generate congruent recommendations for urban management. Despite the common use of modelling, systems theory and big data by urban scientists there are important discrepancies and incommensurabilities across the different approaches and objects of urban scientists that make it hard for interdisciplinary teams to agree, even before they have begun to grapple with how and why the urban specificity of, say, African cities might be accommodated in generalizable urban research findings. For example, the focus on climate change and material flow typically point to the imperative of densification and high-rise construction, while a concern with biodiversity might place lower emphasis on absolute density. For biologists, although land use cover expansion is a concern, the hardening of surfaces and imperatives of keeping open corridors or vectors within a city for plants and animals would outweigh the rigid reduction in density levels. For urban health specialists the framing of the urban problem, although investigated in a similar quantitative scientific mode, will vary hugely according to how the concerns of infectious or non-communicable diseases were weighted. The significance of disciplinary divergence within the sciences is understood and there are efforts to reduce the way incommensurable findings are taken up and amplified by professional urban practice. In the well-organized and affluent centres of the north, scientific disciplines enjoy specialized access to professionals who work in cities and there are well-established sectorally specific science policy interconnections. But these professional communities then operate in specialist silos. The challenge of how to bring the different, often competing, elements of expert knowledge together has spawned calls for a more integrated science of cities and, especially at the global scale, better portals to ensure that scientists engage policy makers in distilling and prioritizing knowledge about cities in ways that cross disciplinary boundaries. The problem remains that in taking up this important issue of knowledge integration or transdisciplinarity, questions of the genesis, representivity and commensurability of the different forms of city information through which a science of cities might be constructed have not, hitherto, been a central concern. While on balance there is little doubt that the scientific expansion of the global community of urban scholars is a necessary and important step, there are nevertheless possible pitfalls that must be acknowledged. Looking to science, from our positions in the social sciences and from our empirical and conceptual reference points of African

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cities, we see three immediate difficulties locked into the rise of a scientific paradigm of cities. The first is that although part of the appeal of science is that as a method it delivers generalizable, verifiable and transferable knowledge, in the realm of urban knowledge this is not in fact the case: from a policy-making perspective the contradictory insights drawn from different areas of science are difficult to manage. The second problem is that the emergent science of cities consciously and unconsciously assumes a uniformity that derives from the selection of apparently comparable quantifiable base information. Through the algorithms and models that scale up and assess complex global processes of urban change, core assumptions are amplified. The end result is that political nuance, local context and bias in data selection can distort and delegitimize outputs at the local scale, making the results and insights of scientific analysis difficult to implement or promote, especially in places that are arguably in greatest need. In dealing with urban specificity, then, in relation to an emerging global science of cities, the critical issues are to do with complexity – ways to grapple with the interrelation of processes (of water, air, governance) – and difference – accommodating diversity and grappling with the legitimacy and relevance of information for local decision makers. These map directly onto the more theoretically articulated challenges being worked through in urban studies, suggesting some important openings for cross-fertilization, which we explore below. Practically, the tasks of synthesizing, attending to difference and building more qualitatively integrative and institutionally sensitive interpretations of specific urban areas, surely the strengths of social-science-inflected urban studies more generally, strongly indicate the value of and potential for engagements across these two fields. For all of its inherent and operational shortcomings, complex systems thinking has done the most (if not enough) to advance a transdisciplinary and global dialogue on cities. One reason for this, Bai et al. (2016) argue, is that systems thinking allows for specificity, requiring a relational approach to urbanization. In their terminology, this recognizes, first, that cities are located, embedded in surrounding environments and ecologies, and can be specified in geophysical space. And, second, that cities themselves have physical (i.e. built), social (i.e. interpersonal, institutional and cultural) and ecological architectures. Third, these urban architectures encompass related systems at smaller scales (e.g. neighbourhood, family) and are embedded in related formations at larger scales (e.g. state, nation, world). In sum, then, in this view, the systemic nature of cities is a consequence of the relationships between location and physical and social ‘architectures’ across scales, including within and between cities and with smaller and larger physical and social architectures. Keeping in view this complexity of the urban, and its differentiation across space and scale, then holds potential for the kinds of nuanced interpretations which can combine appreciation of the specificity and limits of both data and concepts while nonetheless seeking to strengthen wider analyses of urbanization. In this case, the instincts of systems theory and the science of cities join urban studies in searching for ways to understand the expanding complexity and reach of urbanization.

Urban studies: revisable conceptualizations and difference As with data-driven analyses of cities, then, scholars from a range of different traditions in urban studies agree that there is a need for a more global approach. Certainly there are

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different positions on this, and some stringent debate, but at the same time a number of initiatives have brought to light productive and interesting lines of analysis with potential for learning across theoretical divides (McFarlane, 2011; Brenner and Schmid, 2015; Robinson and Roy, 2016). Across these overlapping initiatives, the call for conceptual innovation and the desire to treat the geographical differentiation of the urban effectively add up to a new mode of urban theorizing. In this emerging theoretical landscape, concepts which travel are valued, but generally only insofar as they are treated as provisional and revisable, subject to interrogation based on different urban outcomes and different urban experiences. We suggest that the most innovative and suggestive insights might emerge from contexts which have not yet played a strong role in shaping urban concepts, or which have been seen as beyond conceptualization in some way, often treated as empirical fodder for pre-given theorizations, or as exceptions to wider theoretical analyses. To some extent, the cutting edge of urban theory is emerging on its former margins – the informalities which once marked the non-urban now define core urban qualities of association and emergence (Simone, 2001; Le Galès, 2011); the once exceptionalism of places like China is now central to conceptualizing the future of urbanisation (Wu, 2015). We explore these emergent theorizations here under the rubrics of: searches for theoretical integration (e.g. planetary urbanization); differentiations of knowledge (e.g. strategic regional and feminist/identity perspectives); and methodological revisions (e.g. ‘assemblage theory’ and comparative urbanism). Theoretical integration: A growing interest in the idea of ‘planetary urbanization’, drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s (2003 [1974]) suggestive hypothesis of the ‘complete urbanization of society’, has been inspired by the sprawling extension of many cities, generating enormous urban regions, or even urban galaxies, as Soja and Kanai (2007) would have it. In addition, the globalization of many urban processes has meant that flows and connections among cities are shaping the planet far beyond the physical extent of even these large urban settlements. Furthermore, in the dynamic processes of financialized globalization, it seems as if the urban form itself has become a key contributing element of global economic growth; certainly the social experience of the urban has become increasingly commodifiable for business and property developers (Schmid, 2011; Harvey, 2013). Core questions for urban theory no longer admit a reasonable answer: discerning where and what is the city becomes an impossibility (Brenner and Schmid, 2014; Brenner, 2013) and we are invited to seek to re-specify the theoretical content of the ‘urban’ and to develop new vocabularies of urbanization (Brenner and Schmid, 2015) in the face of the sense that the territorial term ‘city’ has become inadequate (Merrifield, 2013). In the global dialogue between disciplines concerned with the urban, and even more so in the interactions between the academy and global practice, these theoretical propositions concerning planetary urbanization are seen by some as hard to operationalise (Parnell, Crankshaw and Acuto, 2017), or requiring stronger attention to different contexts and different experiences of the urban (Parnell and Pieterse, 2016; Peake, 2016). As commentators on this approach, as well as its protagonists, have noted, the project of theorising the urban at a planetary scale confronts the challenge of thinking across a great diversity of urban processes and urban outcomes. In their seven theses on urbanization, for example, Brenner and Schmid include the suggestion that: urbanization under capitalism is always a historically and geographically variegated process: … [it] must be understood as a polymorphic, multiscalar and emergent

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dynamic of sociospatial transformation: it hinges upon and continuously produces differentiated, unevenly developed sociospatial configurations at all scales. (2015: 175)

What needs to be theorised as urban must therefore start with a multiplicity of forms, trends and interpretations of the urban condition around the world. Schmid, for example, concludes his discussion of specificity and urbanization with the suggestion that “the urban is not a universal category; it is a specific category that is always dependent on concrete conditions and historical developments” (2016: 305). Lefebvre himself, as Goonewardena et al. (2008: 297) observe, was sceptical of any ‘premature intellectual totalisation’, insisting on the necessary incompleteness of theoretical specifications and the importance of different contexts in building understandings of the urban. It is this sensibility which critics of this approach take forward, expressing concerns that in their ambition to recast urban theory, planetary urbanization theorists have a tendency to resort to a universalizing language about the urban, imply that there is no outside to urbanization processes, and depend on pre-given theorizations of capitalism, most familiar to writers in the global north, for example, to characterize these processes (Leitner and Shephard, 2016; Peake, 2016). Differentiations of knowledge: An important starting point for considering such criticism might be to agree that, in building analyses of different, specific experiences of urbanization, a contribution to theory and its transformation is being made. At times there is a tardiness or plain refusal to acknowledge this, which can make for awkward lines of engagement across different traditions. Scott and Storper (2015), for example, insist that an adequate theorization of the urban already exists, but would benefit from enhancement through attending to empirical variability; or, in the case of assemblage theory, there is the suggestion that this approach brings a purely methodological refinement rather than analytical innovation – see McFarlane, 2011; Brenner, Madden and Wachsmuth, 2011). The difficulty here is two-fold: on the one hand a classically reductionist manoeuvre might privilege only certain processes as objects of global urban theorization – cultural differentiation or institutional development could be seen to matter less than more spatially extensive economic processes, for example. Or it could be that different outcomes become only so much empirical variation on privileged, pre-existing analyses or models (pace Scott and Storper, 2015); in this case the limits to theoretical innovation are drawn quite tightly around existing knowledge. As Roy (2016) persuasively points out, to refute the conceptual or theoretical import of difference is to suggest that certain universal or abstract concepts which are concerned to characterize phenomena are inevitably generalizable (i.e. appear and apply everywhere). By contrast, we can insist that conceptualisations are always historically and geographically grounded; and that effective and useful concepts, wrenched from the multiplicity of historical processes in a specific context, can never encompass the whole of a given situation or phenomenon, and are unlikely to be relevant in all places. Roy rightly cites Chakrabarty’s seminal (2001) text, Provincialising Europe in support, but his manoeuvre is very complex analytically and has been subject to profound misinterpretations by some of the critical commentators we consider here. He asks us to see all conceptualisations of capitalism as necessarily bound to historical specificity – in his view there is no pure or original capitalism, broadcast from the “west”, for example, across the rest of the world. His characterisation of History ‘1’ and History ‘2’ does not counterpose universal (Marxist) theorizations of capitalism as a putative History ‘I’, in opposition to

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History 2 as pure difference. Rather, History 2 refers to the specific historical processes which are always shaping History 1, but also interrupting it (p. 64); they are dialectically intertwined: “any historically available form of capital is a provisional compromise made up of History 1 modified by somebody’s History 2” (p. 70. Does this constitute a rather ‘defanged’ approach to empirical difference, as Chaudhury (2012) argues, unable actually to challenge and lead to revisions in established theorizations? Perhaps, if the specificities and differences do not themselves become starting points for theorizing something other than capitalism, for example (Parnell and Robinson, 2012), or the historically divergent forms of capitalism are not attended to in conceptual debates. On this score, Lefebvre’s commitment to the fullness – inexhaustibility – of concrete totalities and the necessary incompleteness of all theorization in the face of empirical diversity resonates (Lefebvre, 2009; Robinson, 2016a). This points to the conundrums of urban theory-building in a world of many different cities (and indeed to this chapter’s central concerns): the necessary limitations of any concepts in the face of (a) difference and (b) complexity. Certainly, there will be numerous instances where a Scott and Storper (2015) ambition of enhancing existing theory through case studies will be sensible – valuable concepts can then be stretched and refined. But it is essential for global urban studies to be open to a much more thoroughgoing revision and expansion of inherited concepts based on the diversity of urban situations, many of which have yet to be considered in developing wider theorizations, as well as the wide range of urbanization processes at play in shaping any outcome. To take issue with Scott and Storper, who insist on being able to know (more or less) where the edge of the city arrives based on the functioning of the urban land market, already theorized based on the US case, we can observe that this risks fundamentally misconstruing the processes behind many major urban forms of the contemporary era where, as in Africa, the peri-urban rather than the city core is the frontier of everyday urban investment and value (Mercer, 2016). And Chinese urban processes, for example, driven by state decision making and territorialized administrative politics mean that urban extensions frequently leapfrog contiguous urban areas, producing highly discontinuous land markets, including densified rural areas and urban villages which have transformed the Chinese urban landscape (Hsing, 2010; Wu, 2015). To understand the urban land market as an outcome of a direct governmental developmental logic might well require some new explanatory starting points. It is, however, in relation to attending to the necessary complexity of urban experiences that we find the repertoire of concept formation stretched even more significantly by scholars concerned with questions of social difference. Linda Peake (2016), for example, proposes that feminist analyses, starting with women’s often brutalising experiences of urbanization, identify new starting points, as well as political motivations, for theorization; and Maliq Simone (2011a; 2016), in his provocative distillation of ‘black urbanism’, outlines what is an as-yet barely discernible voice within urban studies, black urban life, carved out in the hard-won constitution of associations, communal life and making a living, a rich reality of urbanism occluded by the conventional surface of racial analytics and practices. Relatedly, some scholars insist that the labour of knowledge production can be critically associated with positionality – to write as a white (northern) scholar, for example, is to produce knowledge which is inevitably marked and situated (Derickson, 2016). Collaborative opening to different subjects of urban theory (Roy, 2011; Ferenčuhová, 2016;

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Parnell and Pieterse, 2016), and the broad insistence on writing the urban differently from different place and subject positions, have been emphasized by a number of writers (Watson, 2009; Myers, 2011; Parnell and Oldfield, 2014). This does resonate with the intentions of Brenner and Schmid’s Thesis 7, in which the ‘urban as a collective project’ is an open determination, shaped by a multiplicity of struggles, across different contexts and political subjects (2015: 176–177). But this political instinct, their critics rightly argue, needs to stretch to the production of knowledge too, in which authorial reach and authority could be curtailed by acknowledging the veracity of claims, often disjunctive in relation to wider theories, made by the multiplicity of theorists and scholars of different urban processes and situations. As Robinson articulates, then: A vital and urgent consequence of any new geography of theorizing––comparative or otherwise––should be that the mode and style of urban theorization itself is transformed from an authoritative voice emanating from some putative centre of urban scholarship to a celebration of the conversations opened up amongst the many subjects of urban theoretical endeavour in cities around the world, valorizing more provisional, modest and revisable claims about the nature of the urban. (2016: 196)

Methodological revisions: How might such a spatially sensitive theorization of the urban proceed? Institutional development is imperative – new centres of urban theorizing, such as the Indian Institute of Human Settlements (Revi et al., 2015) or the African Centre for Cities (Parnell and Pieterse, 2016), and other networking and partner initiatives provide crucial resourcing for new subjects of theorizing. Fostering urban hubs in the regions undergoing rapid urban transformation is one way to presence new ideas and thinkers, to create new starting points for theorization and to decentre the excessively resourced northern voices in urban studies. Much pragmatic work is needed here, as despite strong intellectual interventions in this direction to date, the geographical basis of English-language scholarship remains narrow and the number of southern scholars whose work is known beyond their region in no way feeds the multiple reference points required for global generalization and theorization. In addition, a methodological divergence is required – where very different kinds of knowledge are valorized, possibly even finding ways to peer-review empirical and evidence-driven reports in core international urban studies publications. Innovation in the traditional metrics of scholarly assessment is vital to address the extreme deficiencies of insight and information relevant to many of the poorest urban areas. This is a point explored by Parnell and Pieterse, who insist that: it is inordinately difficult, using only established research methods, to research the African city and use the findings of research from Africa to destabilize urban theory formation. Either Africa must be ignored or the theory, method and data of urban studies must change. The former is not possible and so we need to better understand the barriers to finding appropriate new methods of (African) urban research. (2016: 241)

The challenge of getting reliable and insightful intelligence on cities, where there is no formal intellectual community which publishes and shares information publically, is a problem for policy specialists as well as social scientists and even the better resourced scientists working on cities. Thus along with ‘data gaps’ discussed in the previous

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section, gaps in conceptualization of the urban are pressing. Collaborative working from under-researched locations to foster a global reflection on ‘the urban’, drawing on potentially new lines of partnership and resources across the global urban scholarly community – social, scientific and policy oriented – would also significantly strengthen the transdisciplinary urban project. At the same time as an openness to new subjects and thematics of urban studies are called for, some different approaches to the analytical sticking points associated with theorizing the urban are also needed. An imagination in which weighty political economy abstractions jostle uncomfortably with difficult ‘empirical’ differences or insistently embodied knowledge, consigned to only represent variety or empirical observation, can set the tone for intractability in current theoretical debates. But as we have discussed in this section, this can be disassembled into a series of methodological and epistemological dilemmas facing all urbanists and requiring creative and new responses across disciplines. How can concepts be renovated, overthrown or invented across diverse urban outcomes? How can urban theory work effectively with different cases, with elsewhere? And how can the complexity of the urban be addressed through necessarily reductionist conceptualizations, confined to begin through an engagement with specific places and data sources, and yet called upon to grapple with the inexhaustibility of social and material worlds? Methodological innovations are in progress in the field, including reformatting comparison with a looser and more agile task of ‘thinking cities through elsewhere’ (Robinson, 2014; Robinson, 2016a); ethnographic research practices which provide a mode of operation attuned to inventing concepts and launching them into a wider world of analysis (Simone, 2011; Simone and Pieterse, 2017); and an insistence that concepts might run aground, finding their limits in their inability to encompass distinctive urban worlds (Jazeel, 2014). The three initiatives in urban theorization reviewed here (a search for theoretical integration; the differentiation of knowledge; and methodological innovations) share a common instinct with the systems theorizations with which we ended our discussion of the science of cities: to place the urban as a conceptualization (more or less) open to reformulation in response to both differentiated emergent forms of urbanization and the complexity, or opacity, as Simone (2016) would have it, of the urban. Here, the conceptual dilemmas shaping contemporary urban studies debates have some resonance with the more empirical conundrums of the search for globally relevant urban policy insights through a ‘science of cities’. As the instincts of Bai et al. (2016) confirm as ‘science of cities’ scholars reach for a vocabulary to characterize a multi-scalar and interconnected urban world, there is scope for grounding a project of strongly revisable urban theory or knowledge in the spatiality of the urban itself – in its profound multiplicity as elements of the urban are repeated, differently, across multiple locations (Jacobs, 2006); in its complex fullness as multidimensional urban worlds (Pieterse and Simone, 2017); and in its divergent but intimately interdependent forms, variously considered as identifiable territorializations articulated through the multiplicity of flows and interconnections across and within urban settlements (McCann and Ward, 2010; Bunnell, 2013); or, as planetary-scale urbanization processes formed through both concentration (agglomeration) and extension (spread; explosion; operational landscapes) (Lefebvre, 1994; Brenner and Schmid, 2015). In all these formulations of urban spatiality, any sense that we can easily identify ‘cities’ is dispersed.

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Thus, as we approach the urban in its necessary multiplicity, from specific places and observations, a range of wider conceptualizations, emergent or inherited, are available to reflect on urban experiences or outcomes. On the one hand, the reach of concepts beyond their initial locations is entirely an empirical matter – the urban is constituted through multiple circulations, trajectories and interconnections which stretch beyond any specific territorial outcome of urbanization processes, and thus needs to be conceptualized across multiple locations. But, on the other hand, it is also a matter of the potential reach of concepts themselves: as we approach different urban realities where numerous features are shared with other contexts, we can search for interesting and useful ideas from elsewhere to make sense of them. Thus, the interconnected but differentiated global urban condition invites us to think across distinctive territorializations of urbanization processes. The search for effective conceptualizations draws us across the world of cities, grounding a comparative imperative, alert to opportunities for inventing and revising conceptualizations of the urban. This reflects the potential of renewed comparative practices, able to meet the challenges of conceptualizing the global urban (Robinson, 2011; 2016a). Furthermore, as we confront the emergent complexity and ‘problems’ of this ‘urban manifold’ as it makes itself known to us in any particular situation (Simone, 2011a), new conceptualizations are demanded of us. Here the invitation is to invent new concepts, to generate understandings relevant to distinctive urban situations, which would be available to launch into a wider world of urban conceptualization, possibly to be put to work in new situations. In this vein, for example, the concepts of informality, so characteristic of many poorer cities, have generated a hugely productive approach to emergent urban social formations in many contexts (Simone, 2001; Le Galès, 2011; Schindler, 2013; Hentschel, 2015; Tuvikene, Neves Alves and Hilbrandt, 2016). There are quite some openings, then, for urban social theory to recraft itself in the face of the differentiated, changing and globalizing urban world.

CONCLUSION Our review of the current urban studies debates on conceptualizing global urbanization has indicated a range of resources for how urban knowledge might be considered both possible and revisable in the face of a highly differentiated, but also profoundly interconnected, globalizing urban world. Relatively isolated work in the emerging field of urban science research is facing challenges which resonate strongly with these more conceptual enquiries. The pragmatic demands of global urban development might, then, benefit from being integrated into, or entering into conversation with, a more spatially sensitive global urbanism. Our concern in bringing together these two areas of scholarship for reflection has been to demonstrate that as scholars concerned with a common urban world, there are shared dilemmas in finding ways to work with and think across a diversity of urban experiences. One conclusion is that for both fields of endeavour the characteristics of global urbanization set the terms for theorization and integration of knowledge: any search for integrating and universalizing insights must rest provisionally on differentiated and specific experiences of the urban, and must grapple with the multiplicity and complexity of any urban context.

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We conclude that working with the specificity of cities (territories), and the diverse flows and interconnections which frame urbanization across the planet, requires a modest approach to universalizing ambitions and a willingness to hold such analytical achievements as provisional, and revisable. Especially significant for both urban theory and a science of cities is our observation that, in addressing 21st-century urbanization, attention to the specificity (or not) of places within and across the putative ‘global south’ (notably Asia and Africa), weakly presenced in both theorization and data analysis, should be at the forefront of the revisionist project of urban research. However, we also insist that the planetary-scale challenges of urbanization, embraced unevenly in global policy-making forums, demand a more effective response from urban studies scholars, including interacting with multilateral policy makers as well as local-level institutions and actors. As the call is made from various international policy-making bodies to inform understandings of global urbanization processes, urban studies scholars could pay closer attention to the energies and achievements, as well as the limitations, of the emerging science of cities.

Note  1  Funding support from the ESRC DIFID Grant (ES/L008610/1), Workpage on African Urbanisation, is gratefully acknowledged; the views expressed are those of the authors.

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Robinson, J. (2011) Cities in a world of cities: the comparative gesture, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35: 1–23. Robinson, J. (2014) New Geographies of theorising the urban: putting comparison to work for global urban studies, in S. Parnell and S. Oldfield (eds), Handbook for Cities of the Global South, London: Routledge. Robinson, J. (2016a) Thinking cities through elsewhere: comparative tactics for a more global urban studies, Progress in Human Geography, 40(1): 3–29. Robinson, J. (2016b) Comparative urbanism: new geographies and cultures of theorizing the urban, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40(1): 219–227. Robinson, J. and Roy, A. (eds) (2016) Global urbanisms and the nature of urban theory, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Debates. Rosenzweig, C., Solecki, W., Hammer, S.A. and Mehrotra, S. (2010) Cities lead the way in climate-change action, Nature, 467(7318): 909–911. Roy, A. (2009) The 21st century metropolis: new geographies of theory, Regional Studies, 43(6): 819–830. Roy, A. (2011) Slumdog cities: rethinking subaltern urbanism, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35: 223–238. Roy, A. (2016) Who’s afraid of postcolonial theory? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40(1): 219–227. Schindler, S. (2013) Understanding urban processes in Flint, Michigan: approaching ‘subaltern urbanism’ inductively, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(3): 791–804. Schmid, C. (2011) Henri Lefebvre, the right to the city and the new metropolitan mainstream, in N. Brenner, P. Marcuse and M. Mayer (eds), Cities for People, Not for Profit, London: Routledge. Schmid, C. 2016. Specificity and Urbanization: A Theoretical Outlook, in R. Diener, J. Herzog, M. Meili, P. de Meuron, M. Herz, C. Schmid and M. Topalovic´ (eds), The Inevitable Specificity of Cities, Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers. Scott, A. and Storper, M. (2015) The nature of cities: the scope and limits of urban theory, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39(1): 1–16. Seto, K., Güneralp, B. and Hutyra, L. (2012) Global forecasts of urban expansion to 2030 and direct impacts on biodiversity and carbon pools, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109: 16083–16088. Simon, D. (ed.) (2016) Rethinking Sustainable Cities: Accessible, green and fair. Bristol: Policy Press. Simon, D., Arfvidsson, H., Anand, G., Bazaz, A., Fenna, G., Foster, K. et  al. (2015) Developing and testing the Urban Sustainable Development Goal’s targets and indicators – a five-city study, Environment and Urbanization, 28: 49–63. Simone, A. (2001) Straddling the divides: remaking associational life in the informal African city, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25: 102–117. Simone, A. (2011a) The surfacing of urban life, City, 15(3–4): 355–364. Simone, A. (2011b) City Life: From Dakar to Jakarta, London: Routledge. Simone, A. (2016) It’s just the city after all! International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40(1): 210–218. Simone, A. and Pieterse, E. 2017. New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times. Cambridge: Polity Press. Soja, E. and Kanai, M. (2007) The urbanization of the world, in R. Burdett and D. Sudjic (eds), The Endless City, New York: Phaidon; 54–69. Tuvikene, T., Neves Alves, S. and Hilbrandt, H. (2016) Strategies for relating diverse cities: a multi-sited individualising comparison of informality in Bafata, Berlin and Tallinn, Current Sociology. doi:10.1177/0011392116657298. Watson, V. (2009) Seeing from the south: refocusing urban planning on the globe’s central urban issues, Urban Studies, 46(11): 2259–2275. Wu, F. (2015) Planning for Growth: Urban and Regional Planning in China, London: Routledge.

3 Urban Studies and the Postcolonial Encounter Ananya Roy

What is increasingly perceived as the crisis of modernity and modern values is perhaps best understood as the crisis of the intellectuals whose self-consciousness was once served by these terms. Focusing on the role of intellectuals within modernity is an important way of drawing out the particularity that lurks beneath the universalist claims of the Enlightenment project which was, in theory, valid for humanity as a whole even if humanity was to be rather restrictively defined. (Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 1993: 43) Now Abdul grasped the need to disappear, but beyond that his imagination flagged. He took off running, then came back home. The only place he could think to hide was in his garbage. (Katherine Boo, The Beautiful Forevers, 2012: ix)

The encounter between postcolonial theory and urban studies is not new. However, in recent years, there has been an intensification of this exchange, with scholars drawing on various strands of postcolonial theory to challenge foundational epistemologies in urban studies. As a result, postcolonial theory has become a disruptive force, redrawing the canon of urban studies and sparking defensive moves against its interventions and interruptions. Instead of conducting a survey of such efforts and debates, in this essay, I stage a new encounter between postcolonial theory and urban studies. Recognizing the diversity and heterogeneity of postcolonial thought, I supplement the reliance on familiar interlocutors such as Chakrabarty, Said, and Spivak, with attention to the work of Paul Gilroy and the conceptual framework of ‘Black Atlantic.’ Such ‘roots and routes’ – to utilize Gilroy’s felicitous phrase – repeat the work already conducted by previous encounters between urban studies and postcolonial theory but also foreground methodologies that are especially urgent at the present historical conjuncture. While urban studies, including my own work, has often mobilized specific lines of postcolonial thought,

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notably subaltern studies, the Black Atlantic tradition requires an explicit focus on the global history of racialization. I argue that such a focus makes possible a renewed and distinctive examination of questions of personhood, including of the figure of the human, thereby expanding, and even departing from, the discussion of subalternity and subaltern geographies. Also in this essay, I examine the ‘urban turn’ in postcolonial thought. While recent scholarship emphasizes how postcolonial analysis ‘provincializes’ the Euro–American scope of urban theory, less attention has been paid to how postcolonial theory attempts to make sense of the urban, including the global urban. I argue that the global urban is a spectral presence in postcolonial theory. Using the case of the influential and familiar body of collective thought known as subaltern studies, I suggest that such conceptual dilemmas might be instructive for urban studies, clarifying normative commitments and sharpening theoretical enunciations.

Geographies and genealogies The 2015 Antipode Institute for Geographies of Justice was held in Johannesburg, South Africa and posed the question, ‘How do we occupy radical geography today?’ In a panel on ‘Capital, Disposability, Occupations,’ Gillian Hart spoke eloquently about how past moments of political struggle might speak to the present conjuncture. Drawing on Kristin Ross’s (2015) book, Communal Luxury, Hart drew attention to a moment of revolution and occupation that has been much celebrated in urban studies: the Paris Commune of 1871. Ross, she notes, provides new insights into the ‘praxis’ of the commune as a working laboratory of political invention, and is thereby able to demonstrate how these everyday practices and meanings generated a theory that was to live on well after the commune had ended and even reshaped the writings and ideas of Marx. Like Ross, Hart is keenly attentive to the ‘expanded temporalities and spatialities’ of the Paris Commune, including its working-class internationalism, manifested in an imagination of a worldwide federation of communes. Ross herself views the commune as ‘newly illuminated’ by the uprisings that have unfolded since 2011, ‘the return virtually everywhere of a political strategy grounded in taking up space, seizing places and territories, turning cities – from Istanbul to Madrid, from Montreal to Oakland – into theaters for strategic operations’ (Ross and Goswami 2015). Inspired by Ross, Hart too sees the Paris Commune as entering into the ‘figurability of the present’ (Ross and Goswami 2015), as speaking directly to struggles in many corners of the world, including South Africa. The Paris Commune of 1871 is a recurring trope in urban studies. It signifies the city as the site of revolutionary action, it grants recognition to the working classes as the subject of history, and it represents the dialectics of change that is central to theories of modernity. But this is, as Gilroy (1993: 44) has noted, ‘an innocent modernity,’ forged in a location that is ‘readily purged of any traces of the people without history whose degraded lives might raise awkward questions about the limits of bourgeois humanism.’ That such innocence can serve as the figurability of the present points to the powerful universalizing tendencies present within urban studies: the urge to read thoroughly discrepant and

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divergent territorialized struggle in a single register of the politics of occupation and the promise of internationalism. Hart’s argument though is not party to such innocence. In a closing move, she turns away from the Paris Commune to invoke other moments of revolution, such as the Haitian Revolution, that mark the limits of liberal humanism and reveal how ‘race and slavery are constitutive of the modern world.’ Fanon, she argues, has to be ‘an important partner if we are to read the Paris Commune in relation to the present.’ At the panel in Johannesburg, Hart was followed by Françoise Vergés. Before she gave her talk on the Indian Ocean as a cultural and social space of exchanges between Africa and Asia, Vergés responded to Hart’s discussion of the Paris Commune. As the commune was taking place in 1871, so unfolded in Algeria one of the most significant insurrections of the colonial era, notes Vergés. The French Army crushed the Paris Commune and then proceeded to crush the Algerian insurrection. Communards and Algerian rebels were both condemned to exile in New Caledonia, traveling in the same ship to the labor camps of the island. This, Vergés argues, was the first decisive encounter that the Communards had with French colonialism. It was, for some Communards, a moment of revelation and of shame. Indeed, Ross (2015) too makes mention of this encounter: Communards deported to New Caledonia were to experience directly the imperial context … it was only then and there that many of them came to realize that Thiers and the Versaillais had in fact been fighting on two fronts in Spring of 1871: the Commune in the capital (and, briefly, in a few other French cities), and the extensive Kabylie uprising in eastern Algeria.

For Vergés, these are the ‘unexpected’ and ‘connected’ geographies of struggle and pacification. They exceed the notion of expanded temporalities and spatialities, instead foregrounding the constitutive force of colonialism and imperialism everywhere, not just in the spaces and moments designated as the colonies. If we take Vergés’s intervention seriously, then the Paris Commune is not sufficient as the figurability of the present. We are required to keep Kabylie, Paris, and New Caledonia in simultaneous view. Following Gilroy (1993: 45), what is at stake is not the ‘corrective inclusion’ of other geographies and histories but instead an ‘inversion of the relationship between margin and centre.’ Seen from Algeria, the Paris Commune demands a genealogy that departs from that of ‘innocent modernity.’ It demands a genealogy that is attentive to urban worlds constituted through historical difference, specifically the violences of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. It demands an urban studies reconstituted through the postcolonial encounter.

The problem of Eurocentrism My interest in staging repeated encounters between urban studies and postcolonial theory is this: I wish to challenge the Eurocentrism through which urban studies, as a field of inquiry, have been constituted. Following Aamir Mufti (2005: 473), I see Eurocentrism to be ‘an epistemological problem.’ Mufti in turn relies on Dipesh Chakrabarty to explain this problem. It is worth quoting at length:

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I have in mind something like the set of issues Dipesh Chakrabarty points to when he speaks of the stumbling block that he confronts as a historian of India, namely, that something he calls Europe continues to function as ‘the sovereign, theoretical subject’ of all historical knowledge, so that histories that are supposedly ‘Indian,’ ‘Chinese,’ [or] ‘Kenyan’ … tend to become variations on a master narrative that could be called ‘the history of Europe.’ From historical periodizations to notions of causality and modes of production narratives, the structures of historical knowledge normalize and make normative the idea of Europe as ‘the scene of the birth of the modern’. (Mufti 2005: 474)

The master narrative to which Chakrabarty and Mufti refer is also of course the genealogy of ‘innocent modernity’ that Gilroy seeks to interrupt. There are several implications that follow from the framing of urban studies as a Eurocentric scene of innocent modernity. The most important of these for the purposes of urban studies is what Mufti pinpoints as the sheer impossibility of narrating the non-West by bypassing the West. Indeed, Mufti (2005: 474) concludes that ‘we are all Eurocentric in this sense,’ always telling the history of the non-West in reference to the master narrative that is Europe. This is a crucial point of discussion in urban studies where the call to ‘provincialize’ and ‘postcolonialize’ has been repeatedly misunderstood as geographic inversion: that is, to locate research in the cities of the global South or in the non-West. While Eurocentrism has an unmistakable geography, it is an epistemological formation whose presence pervades all geographies. This is why expanding the temporalities and spatialities of innocent modernity cannot suffice to undo Eurocentrism. Instead, what is needed is a worlding – the coordinates of Kabylie and New Caledonia that necessarily accompany Paris – to uncover the entanglements through which the master narrative of Europe is constructed and maintained. For urban studies, attention to Eurocentrism as an epistemological problem yields two propositions. First, it implies that the disruptive role of postcolonial theory is not so much to uncover the empirical details of cities outside the West as it is to serve as a method for interpreting and narrating the West, or rather ‘the stories the West most often tells itself about itself,’ Gregory’s (2004: 4) important phrase. Innocent modernity is one such enduring story, with recurring tropes such as the Paris Commune. Second, it implies that we must attend to, but can rarely transcend, the coloniality of knowledge. Here, I follow Carlos Vainer (2014: 52) who draws on the rich traditions of Latin American postcolonial thought, specifically Mignolo, to underscore that a persistent silencing is present within Eurocentrism – ‘the silenced history of European coloniality.’ Vainer usefully reminds us that ‘colonization and coloniality must not be confused. Colonization refers to a specific historical period while coloniality refers to one of modernity’s essential, permanent characteristics; the ongoing relationship which throughout modern history marks both the centre and the periphery.’ The decolonization of knowledge, which is the ambitious mandate that Vainer lays out for urban studies, requires a ‘radical change in the dominant culture, not only at the centre, but above all at the periphery.’ This point is worth making in its entirety because it counters the tendency in urban studies to think of Southern theory as a geographic inversion rather than as an epistemological disruption: This call is not a proposal to replace the self-centred dominant epistemology built in countries in the centre by another egocentric epistemology built in peripheral countries. To be clear, I am not proposing the replacement of a Eurocentric, monotopic

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epistemology by another one – a global southern one – also monotopic in nature, though centred instead in Latin America or elsewhere in the periphery. The deconstruction of the coloniality of knowledge must avoid all kinds of epistemological nationalism or chauvinism. Like Mignolo and Boaventura Santos (2004), in making this argument I propose instead that new decolonizing perspectives should be anchored, located, rooted and engaged in our particular contexts …. Based on a dialogical process, an epistemological approach with this sensibility needs to acknowledge and seek universality, while being cognizant of the fact that it will always be incomplete and limited; due to the fact that all knowledge inexorably has a location, and, consequently, is not universal. (Vainer 2014: 53)

Worlding In previous work, I have developed the concept of ‘worlding’ to tackle the problem of Eurocentrism in urban studies. A rich vocabulary in postcolonial thought, worlding provides an opportunity to discuss the global urban without deploying the language of globalization. Radhakrishnan (2005), for example, draws a distinction between worldliness and globality. For him, ‘globality is a condition effected by the travel of global capital,’ while worldliness is the state of ‘being in the world.’ While ‘being in the world’ is available to all locations in the world, globality is a ‘fait accompli in the name of the world.’ Worlding is ‘a perennial process of a lived and immanent contingency,’ while globality is a ‘smooth and frictionless surface where oppositions, antagonisms and critique cannot take hold’ (Radhakrishnan 2005: 184). I also mean worlding as a world picture or world view that is entangled with the global circuitry of capital, with ways of ‘being in the picture.’ In particular, Heidegger’s concept of the ‘worlding of the world’ is concerned with dwelling: ‘To dwell is … the experience or feeling of being “at home” in one’s world … it is the existential structure of being-in-the-world’ (Young 2000: 194, 202). In this way, worlding becomes a way of finding a privileged place, of being at home, of crafting the art of being global. Worlding is both a conceptual framework and a methodology. It indicates one possible encounter between urban studies and postcolonial theory. In my work with Aihwa Ong on inter-Asian urbanism (Roy and Ong 2011), and in my ongoing work on Southern theory (Roy 2014), I have elaborated on two meanings of worlding that seem especially relevant to urban studies. Here I return to those meanings but expand them through engagement with the ideas of Gilroy, especially his influential text, The Black Atlantic. Gilroy’s book decisively intervenes in the geographies and genealogies of modernity. In particular, he critiques the ‘innocent modernity’ that emanates from ‘apparently happy social relations that graced post-Enlightenment life in Paris, Berlin, and London’ and that is figured in the work of scholars such as Marshall Berman as the ‘intimate unity of the modern self and the modern environment’ (1993: 44, 46). As I have already indicated, Gilroy (1993: 45) rejects the ‘corrective inclusion’ of other geographies and histories and instead calls for an ‘inversion of the relationship between margin and centre.’ Once again, I must emphasize that this is not a geographic inversion. What Gilroy presents is a methodology for tackling Eurocentrism as an epistemological problem: to ‘take the Atlantic as

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one single, complex unit of analysis … and use it to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective’ (1993: 15). Here then is a way of thinking about the world, a worlding, which foregrounds connected but ‘fractal’ geographies rather than the unity and universalism of globality and modernity. I am especially interested in the temporal aspects of Gilroy’s intervention. In writing that ‘the time has come for the primal history of modernity to be reconstructed from the slaves’ points of view,’ Gilroy (1993: 55, 42) interrupts the ‘simple periodisations of the modern and postmodern.’ Racial slavery cannot be accommodated within the story that the West tells itself about itself. It is the silence through which these stories are constituted. It is also the silence through which it is possible to narrate the seemingly new crises of global capitalism and modernity as rupture and futurity. Gilroy thus notes: ‘It can be argued that much of the supposed novelty of the postmodern evaporates when it is viewed in the unforgiving historical light of the brutal encounters between Europeans and those they conquered, slaughtered, and enslaved’ (1993: 44). In this way, Black Atlantic gives us a dramatically different figurability of the present than the familiar tropes of urban studies, such as the Paris Commune. This, quite simply, is a methodology of historical difference. The field of urban studies is urgently in need of such methodologies. Worlding is one such provisional methodology. My initial use of the term worlding was inspired by Gayatri Spivak’s (1985: 262) call to study the ‘worlding of what is now called the Third World.’ Examining the ‘empire of the literary discipline,’ Spivak shows how the Third World is taken up as ‘distant cultures, exploited but with rich intact literary heritages waiting to be recovered, interpreted, and curricularized in English translation.’ At the same, there is a silence about such worlding connections in the literatures of European colonizing cultures, a sanctioned ignorance of imperialism and its cartographic inscriptions. As Spivak (1999: 212) comments in a footnote on Heidegger’s concept of worlding, ‘it is not okay to fill these outlines with the story of imperial settlement although Heidegger flirts with it constantly.’ She argues that it is imperialism that transformed the ‘uninscribed earth’ into a ‘represented world on a map,’ into the ‘worlding of a world.’ In urban studies, I interpret Spivak’s call as the mandate to understand the worlding practices through which our discipline and its maps have been constituted. I also see it as the imperative to world geographies and genealogies that have been silenced and disavowed. This has never been, and cannot be, an innocent project of representation, for it is perhaps only through imperialism/Eurocentrism that a ‘represented world on a map’ can be produced. It is this complex task of representation that is at work in Worlding Cities and its interest in ‘Asian experiments’ with urbanism. In presenting Asian worldclass cities as ‘worlding’ nodes, Ong and I analyze how the world economy is made from discrepant nodes, those that cannot be easily collapsed into the command and control map of financial capitalism and its global cities, a master narrative that has dominated urban studies. We argue that such a disjunctive understanding of urban transformations is necessary to unearth the workings of global regimes of value as well as formations of political meaning. But the worlding of the global urban in, and from, Asia is also meant to foreground the dilemma of what Vainer (2014: 53) calls ‘epistemological chauvinism.’ After all, the cartographic inscription that is Asian urbanism runs the risk of becoming a simple and simplistic geographic inversion, a regional essentialism, a corrective inclusion. Can ‘Asian urbanism’ not be read as the new scene of innocent modernity? As a methodology,

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worlding does not provide remedies for such dilemmas but it does make possible the transnational and intercultural perspective which Gilroy demands. It also stages an interruption in the teleologies of development through which global urbanization has been periodized and mapped. Thus, I have argued that to world urbanism from Asia, it is necessary to think about Asia not as a bounded geographical location but instead as connected geographies. Not only is Asia constituted through flows of capital, labor, bodies, models, ideas, and aspirations, but it is also a citationary structure, a world picture, a world view. It is through such hegemonic practices of worlding that Asia is represented and imaginations of Asian futurity are made possible. This is perhaps most evident in the ideology of the ‘Asian Century,’ which evokes a future of economic emergence in Asia but also relates different pathways of development to one another through models, benchmarks, and milestones. It is in this sense that Asia is a temporal project, requiring of us the question ‘When is Asia?’ instead of the more commonly asked question ‘Where is Asia?’ As a methodology of postcolonial critique, worlding is arrayed as much against such narratives of ascendance as it is against Eurocentrism. Put another way, it allows us to unravel the stories (rife with historical silence) that the West tells itself about itself. It simultaneously allows us to deconstruct the claims to futurity that are put forward in the name of Asia, the global South, the postcolony.

The spectral urban While there has been considerable debate in urban studies about the encounter with postcolonial theory, there has been much less discussion about the ‘urban turn’ in postcolonial thought. In this second half of the essay, I argue that this urban turn has been anemic and that the global urban is a spectral presence in the writings of the familiar interlocutors of postcolonial thought, specifically Spivak, Chakrabarty, and Chatterjee. However, I also argue that these conceptual dilemmas might be instructive for urban studies, clarifying normative commitments and sharpening theoretical enunciations. More broadly, I am interested in the spirit of auto-critique that accompanies postcolonial thought, notably in the collective project that has been subaltern studies. In various retrospective essays, these intellectuals have identified the ‘generative mistakes’ of their previous work (Chakrabarty 2015: 13), noting that reflecting on these mistakes allows new lines of theorization. It might be worthwhile for urban studies to adopt such an ethos and to consider generative mistakes that create openings of thought. But that is a provocation to be more fully pursued in another essay. The interlocutors of subaltern studies have indeed given thought to the city. In a series of writings on urban modernity, Chakrabarty has reconceptualized key tropes and figurations such as public space, sociality, community, and waste. However, I am interested in how subaltern studies might consider the ‘urban’ – not just the city – as a specific sociospatial and cultural formation, one that is related to, and yet distinct from, the nation, the object of much of their inquiry. Here, we glean little from postcolonial thought. In an essay titled ‘Megacity,’ Spivak (2000: 18, 23) presents ‘global-in-urban-space’ as a ‘spectralization’ produced by finance and electronic capital. In fact, the most interesting parts of her argument relate to the rural and its transformations under conditions of globalization. In both ‘Megacity’ and ‘Globalicities’ she insists on thinking about the rural

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as a persistent presence, even an ‘interdiction’ to global-in-urban space. Given the current interest in planetary urbanization, her intervention is worth noting: In an argument connecting only incidentally to globalization, but quite head-on to globalicities as global cities, Edward Soja has insisted that the motor of history as synoikismos or ‘homes together’ is urbanization as such. Speaking of the Amazon Valley as the rural, he describes its transformation into data of various sorts (pharmaceutical patenting, ecological databasing, and the like) as urbanization. Here, my argument has been, for some time now, that when we think of the virtualization and transformation of space to data, it is not the rural getting urbanized. City and country are both transformed from space to data, in structurally related ways. (Spivak 2004: 74)

In my recent work, I insist on paying attention to the mutual constitution of agrarian and urban questions, arguing that there are limits, as well as a constitutive outside, to the seeming urbanization of everything (Roy 2015). The not-urban cannot be simply read as the ‘rural getting urbanized.’ But the urban itself remains a spectral presence in Spivak’s writing, a reformatting of life by globalization but otherwise unknown. Indeed, to conceptualize the urban in this way – as postmodern, although that is not a term in use in subaltern studies – is to invoke nostalgia for a past era of urbanism, even innocent modernity. Take for example Chatterjee’s (2006) well-known essay ‘Are Indian Cities Becoming Bourgeois at Last?’ in The Politics of the Governed. Chatterjee outlines an urban past where a ‘dense network of neighbourhood institutions’ created ‘a participatory sense of urban community’ and where ‘unions provided an active link between the middle-class intelligentsia and the slum-dwelling workers.’ In contrast, contemporary urbanism is marked by ‘a proliferation of segregated and protected spaces for elite consumption, elite lifestyles and elite culture’ and the attempt to ‘reclaim public spaces’ by evicting ‘squatters and encroachers,’ actions ‘propelled by citizens’ groups and staunchly supported by an activist judiciary.’ Chatterjee explains this transformation as the adoption, in India, of ‘a new idea of the post-industrial city [that] became globally available for emulation’ in the 1990s. What we have here is what Gilroy would characterize as ‘simple periodisations of the modern and postmodern’ and perhaps even the master narrative that Chakrabarty pinpoints as the idea of Europe. I remind us of Mufti’s analysis of this master narrative: ‘From historical periodizations to notions of causality and modes of production narratives, the structures of historical knowledge normalize and make normative the idea of Europe as “the scene of the birth of the modern”.’ Spivak’s global spectralization or Chatterjee’s ineluctable bourgeoisification could be a page out of Eurocentric urban studies. Put another way, what is postcolonial about these postcolonial imaginations of the global urban? I argue that the answer lies in the enduring interest that subaltern studies have in the question of the subject. Thus, for Spivak (2000: 11), the pressing issue at stake in relation to the ‘megacity’ is the ‘subject of electronic secessionist culture,’ a ‘particular concatenation of subject/agent’ who displaces ‘the subject-structure of industrial capital.’ In his ongoing conceptualization of ‘the politics of the governed,’ Chatterjee (2012) pays considerable attention to the question of the subject in relation to the urban. For him, the bourgeoisification of Indian cities marks a shift from the ‘governmental administration of welfare for the urban poor,’ which ‘took it for granted that large sections of the poor would have to live in the city without legitimate title to their places of habitation,’ to ‘a

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surge in the activities and visibility of civil society’ seeking to ‘give the city back to its proper citizens.’ Chatterjee’s framework of political and civil society has, of course, been highly influential in urban studies. But for both Chatterjee and Chakrabarty, the question of the subject is a ‘generative mistake’ for subaltern studies. As Chatterjee has continued to wrestle with the question of subject/ agent, rethinking the mass-political subject and its subalternity, so Chakrabarty is posing new questions about the human/citizen. In the concluding sections of this essay, I build on these generative mistakes to open up some questions within urban studies. In doing so, I return to the work of Gilroy and also draw upon what Achille Mbembe describes as Fanon’s ‘metamorphic thought.’ Such explorations bring us full circle to the limits of liberal humanism, pointing us to geographies and genealogies that demand a different relationship between the figure of the human and the global urban.

The urban as a governmental category In an auto-critique, Chatterjee (2012: 46) notes that the figure of the ‘insurgent peasant’ as ‘mass-political subject,’ which was at the very heart of the intellectual project of subaltern studies, ‘needs to be redrawn.’ In particular, Chatterjee (2012: 46–47) draws our attention to the ‘deepening and widening of the apparatuses of governmentality,’ to how ‘the activities of the government have penetrated deep into the everyday lives of rural people,’ and to the ‘constant tussles of different population groups with the authorities over the distribution of governmental services.’ Note that he is silent on the matter of urban populations and whether or not they represent a distinctive ‘politics of the governed.’ Chatterjee’s reflection on the ‘generative mistake’ that is the concept of the subject in subaltern studies provokes a disjuncture that has direct relevance for urban studies. Specifically, he redraws subalternity as ‘populations produced by the classificatory schemes of governmental knowledge’ lacking the ‘moral claim’ of ‘citizenship’ and thus unable to ‘share in the sovereignty of the state.’ Contrast this with Spivak (2014: 9) who insists that ‘subalternity is a position without identity. It is an absence of access to the possibility of the abstract structures of the state …. It is an absence from the structures of the state.’ It is not my intention to reconcile these seemingly divergent views on subalternity. Instead, I am interested in how, taken together, Chatterjee and Spivak might give us a disjunctive understanding of subject/agent and how, in turn, this might make possible a rich understanding of urban politics. In previous work, I have called into question ‘subaltern urbanism’ as an ontology of radical autonomy and alterity. In recent work, I have also expressed skepticism about the ‘urban’ as a new political subject, or at least as a revolutionary political subject. Postcolonial thought, especially its insistence on revisiting the ‘generative mistake’ of the subject/agent, invites urban studies to rethink its own mass-political subject: the urban. Instead of the search for urban collective politics, and familiar tropes like the Paris Commune, it turns us toward a much more ambivalent reading of futurity. It also compels an ongoing engagement with the question of the subject in relation to the state. While neither Chatterjee nor Spivak take account of the specificity of the urban in that relationship,

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my recent research in India seeks to uncover how urban government comes to govern the poor, and how, in particular, the urban subaltern is styled, and self-styles, as beneficiary. During the last decade, the government of India has launched a series of ambitious national urban policies and programs. Of particular interest to me are those, such as Basic Services for the Urban Poor (BSUP) and Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY), which target the slum. If, previously, the relationship between government and slum had been framed as that between sovereign and encroacher, it is now being recast as government and beneficiary. From water and sanitation projects to slum upgrading, a plethora of benefits now flows from the state to populations. I argue that it is urban local government that mediates this relationship and that allows the urban poor to stake claims and register complaints as beneficiaries. In fact, each generation of programs engenders a new repertoire of claims and complaints, managed and negotiated by both local politicians and municipal officers. Put another way, I am arguing that the urban does not have a priori meaning in India as a governmental category. Instead, it comes into being through programs of government, through the populations classified and named by such programs, as well as by the tussles and claims generated through such mediations. These tussles and claims are a departure from what urban studies would expect us to find. There is no insurgent citizenship evident in the interstices of these programs, no rights-based social movements, no street politics of occupation and squatting. Instead, there are self-styled beneficiaries, keenly aware of the nature of benefits and the scope of government programs. BSUP, RAY, and other such programs are thus colloquialisms for them. I am arguing then that is through this collection of beneficiaries, the recipients of those functions designated to urban local bodies by the 74th Constitutional Amendment of India, that the urban comes to take shape as a governmental category. For me, the most poignant example of this relationship is this: project reports prepared by urban local governments to submit to the government of India, each accompanied by lists, photographs, and thumbprints of the urban poor, first cast as slum-dwellers and additionally cast as beneficiaries (Figure 3.1). How do we reconcile these lists of beneficiaries with Spivak’s insistence that subalternity is an absence from the structures of the state? It is my contention that we do so by considering the politics of futurity that might accompany such instantiations of the urban as a governmental category. That futurity cannot be easily celebrated as ‘a political strategy … seizing places and territories, turning cities … into theaters for strategic operations’ (Ross and Goswami 2015), as is the case with remembrances of the Paris Commune and other familiar tropes of urban revolution. Instead, it is a futurity that seems to be marked by what Spivak describes as ‘a position without identity.’ I want to suggest that urban studies has rarely been attentive to such figurations of the subject, perhaps because both ethnography and history lack patience with the lack of coherent political identity and voice. Yet, this is precisely the provocation that postcolonial thought puts forward: what are the multiple genealogies of the mass-political subject (Chakrabarty 2015: 15)? I find traces of this overlooked politics of futurity – that which does not fit the familiar formats of hope or uprising or rights or insurgency – in Katherine Boo’s (2012) important book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Based on several years of journalistic investigation, with overtones of an ethnographic ethos, the text presents itself as a novel, and indeed as cinema. Organized around characters whose lives are narrated with cinematic affect, this is a story set in a slum described by a young resident thus: ‘Everything around us is roses’ is how Abdul’s younger brother, Mirchi, put it. ‘And we’re the shit in between’ (Boo 2012: xi). It is in this urban context that Boo insists on having us think about ‘beautiful forevers,’

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Figure 3.1 Beneficiary lists (source: photo by author, 2015) of how the residents of the slum imagine and speak of better lives. There is Mirchi, who ‘did not intend to sort garbage … he wanted a clean job.’ There is Sunil, ‘an undersized twelve-year-old scavenger’ who ‘wanted to eat enough to start growing.’ There is Asha, ‘a fighter-cock of a woman who lived by the public toilet’ who ‘wanted to be Annawadi’s first female slumlord’ so that she could ‘ride the city’s inexorable corruption into the middle class’ (Boo 2012: xvii). But these futures remain suspended, as does the fate of the story’s main protagonist, Abdul, in ‘a suspended state between guilt and innocence’ as ‘his permanent condition.’ In the slum that cannot be the scene of innocent modernity, the periodization, the temporalities of the future are claimed but as a ‘position without identity.’ In a poignant turn of phrase, Boo (2012: 15) writes: ‘For all Mirchi’s talk of progress,

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India still made a person know his place, and wishing things different struck Abdul as a childish pastime, like trying to write your name in a bowl of melted kulfi.’ When I say that the future is claimed but as a ‘position without identity,’ I do not mean to suggest that the self-styled beneficiaries arrayed in the photo-galleries of local urban government projects or the residents of Boo’s story lack identity. Nor do I mean that this spectrality is the absence of politics. Instead, I mean that subalternity marks the limits of archival and ethnographic recognition. This, I believe, is Spivak’s challenge to the ‘generative mistake’ of the subject/agent in subaltern studies. Thus, more recently, Chakrabarty (2012: 7) has reflected on this generative mistake thus: ‘No ethnography of their everyday lives can access its object positively through the figure of the citizen.’ Postcolonial thought with its attention to the constitutive violence of citizenship, nationhood, and modernity carries the potential for allowing us to think beyond the figure of the citizen, to locate our thinking not only in the Paris Commune, but also in Kabylie, in New Caledonia. Those geographies and genealogies necessarily accompany narratives and aspirations of progress.

The human Urban studies is no longer about the city. Perhaps it never were. But especially now, at the historical conjuncture that is so often billed as the ‘urban age,’ urban studies has become a way of making arguments about the global human condition as well as about universal reason. This is why I care to stage encounters between urban studies and postcolonial theory. This is why it is necessary to extend the familiar repertoire of postcolonial thought as it enters into urban studies to take into account conceptual traditions such as Black Atlantic. In this final section, I argue that if urban studies is understood as this broader, more ambitious, endeavor, then the field of inquiry has to be concerned not only with the question of the subject, as posed by subaltern historiography and auto-critique, but also with the figure of the human, as posed for example in black radical thought. I see this as a horizon of politics that exceeds the urban as a governmental category or even the urban as revolutionary subject. Instead, to contemplate the figure of the human requires engagement with the ethics of freedom articulated by the long and entangled histories of anticolonial struggles as well as postcolonial democracy. This idea is powerfully expressed by Achille Mbembe (2011): The question this country is therefore facing today as yesterday is under what conditions can South Africa re-imagine democracy not only as a form of human mutuality and freedom, but also as a community of life. In order to confront the ghost in the life of so many, the concepts of ‘the human’, or of ‘humanism’, inherited from the West will not suffice. We will have to take seriously the anthropological embeddedness of such terms in long histories of ‘the human’ as waste.

If we take seriously Mbembe’s invitation to ‘retrieve the “human” from the history of waste,’ to insist upon humanism in a context shaped by ‘brutal forms of dehumanization,’ including ‘slavery, colonization, and apartheid,’ then it is not sufficient to work with ideas of human freedom associated with innocent modernity. As Mbembe notes,

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concepts of the human inherited from the West will not suffice. Instead, following Gilroy (1993: 56), what is needed is an ethics of freedom ‘constructed from the slaves’ standpoint,’ ‘new conceptions of selfhood and individuation’ that are ‘set alongside modernity’s ethics of law.’ But there is no easy passage from innocent modernity to such an ethics of freedom. It requires what Mbembe (2012), in homage to Fanon, describes as ‘metamorphic thought.’ Once again I quote from Mbembe: If we owe Fanon a debt it is for his idea that in every human subject there is something indomitable and fundamentally intangible which no domination – no matter in what form – can erase, eliminate, contain or suppress, or at least completely. Fanon tried to grasp how this ‘something’ could be reanimated and brought back to life under conditions of subjugation. (2012: 26)

Particularly noteworthy for the purposes of urban studies is the very specific ontology that Mbembe (2012: 25) pinpoints as the basis of Fanon’s metamorphic thought: ‘He had nonetheless sought this re-rooting of himself in African soil as a way of bearing witness on behalf of the entire human race, and, in particular, as a sacrifice in the name of the suffering body of humanity.’ Fanon’s legacy is not an abstract tradition, a grand theory to be mobilized to reshape the canon of urban studies. It is alive. It animates the extraordinary and everyday mobilizations that are spilling onto city streets and coursing through shack-dweller communities around the world. It provides moral compass to the insistent demand for humanity that is being voiced in opposition to the extrajudicial killings of young black men. Fanon’s ideas link the present historical conjuncture with the unfinished work of black power and black liberation, transforming social death into the ethics of freedom. Urban studies will have to pay careful attention to such movements, contemplating how #BlackLivesMatter is much more than a critique of dehumanization. It is an insistence on #LetsGetFree. And above all it is a politics of futurity where ‘a position without identity’ is turned into the figure of the human: #FundBlackFutures. This is the power of metamorphic thought. As Mbembe reminds us of Fanon’s ontology – its re-rooting in, and worlding from, the African soil – so such metamorphic thought can only come out of a postcolonial consciousness. One instantiation is what Katherine McKittrick (2011: 948) describes as a ‘collective history of encounter,’ ‘a difficult interrelatedness – that promises an ethical analytics of race based not on suffering, but on human life.’ That interrelatedness is what I have been repeatedly marking as historical difference. My current research is concerned with a poor people’s movement, the Chicago AntiEviction Campaign. Deploying a framework of human rights, the movement occupies foreclosed homes on the South Side of Chicago, thereby placing ‘homeless people in peopleless homes.’ Taking seriously the imperative of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign to defend human rights – and thus to emplace – I ask, as do Butler and Athanasiou (2013: 32), ‘Who or what holds the place of the human?’ For those persons who are already always dispossessed – by slavery, colonialism, imperialism, apartheid – on what ontological basis can claims to the city and the future be made? That ontological basis, I argue, is the figure of the human, but not the concept of the human which populates innocent modernity and its assumptions of freedom. This subject, usually always ‘a position without identity,’ is

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recovered from the history of waste, as human, through metamorphic thought, whether that is postcolonial critique or the struggles of poor people’s movements. I end with two provocations. First, if urban studies is to continue the work of making arguments about the global human condition and universal reason, then they will have to participate in the difficult passage of metamorphic thought. This politics cannot assume that the urban is necessarily political, nor can it work with the easy periodizations of the modern. Instead, it will have to ask this question posed by Butler and Athanasiou (2013: 27) in Dispossession: How might claims for the recognition of rights to land and resources, necessarily inscribed as they are in colonially embedded epistemologies of sovereignty, territory, and property ownership, simultaneously work to decolonize the apparatus of property and to unsettle the colonial conceit of proper and propertied human subjectivity?

It is possible to answer this question via the familiar formats of postcolonial theory, such as subaltern studies, and especially via the ‘generative mistakes’ that are attentive to subject/agent. However, the conceptual framework of Black Atlantic requires attention to the figure of the human, and thereby to a figurability of the present that defies the well-worn formula of the political, be it of governmentality or the urban barricades. Second, it is possible and necessary for urban studies to move beyond the methodologies of geographic inversion and corrective inclusion. Postcolonial theory, of all genres, disrupts and provincializes the innocent modernity of the West. But it is also keenly attuned to Eurocentrism as an epistemological problem, which indicates the sheer impossibility of narrating the non-West by bypassing the West. Gilroy gives us a way of relating non-West to West, by taking the Atlantic as a unit of analysis and thus writing a global history of racialization. This is not the effort to see Kolkata from Chicago or Chicago from Kolkata. Instead, it is the recognition of the global historical processes through which the two are inevitably entangled. It is also the politics of humanity, often spectral, often suspended, crafted through radical global interconnections. Thus, the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign, fighting foreclosures and defending human rights on the South Side of Chicago, draws inspiration from anti-eviction struggles in South Africa and elsewhere in the world. In 2009, as the movement was first taking hold, the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, located in Cape Town, published an open letter in The Nation addressed to ‘all poor Americans and their communities in resistance.’ In it, South African activists addressed the ‘privatization of land’ but also noted the racialized history of such dispossession: ‘Colonialism and apartheid dispossessed us of our land and gave it to whites to be bought and sold for profit.’ The letter clarified the purpose of the movement: ‘While our actions may seem like a demand for welfare couched in a demand for houses, social grants and water, they are actually a demand to end the commodification of things that cannot be commodified: land, labour and money’ (www.thenation.com/article/fighting-foreclosure-south-africa/). Here, in the connections that stretch from Cape Town to Chicago, are the geographies and genealogies that demand a different relationship between the figure of the human and the global urban. It is time for urban studies to catch up with such critical imaginations and practices.

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References Boo, K. 2012. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. New York: Penguin Books. Butler, J. and Athanasiou, A. 2013. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. New York: Polity. Chakrabarty, D. 2015. ‘Subaltern Studies in Retrospect and Reminiscence’ South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38:1, 10–18. Chakrabarty, D. 2012. ‘Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change’ New Literary History 43:1, 1–18. Chatterjee, P. 2012. ‘After Subaltern Studies’ Economic and Political Weekly XLVII:35, 44–49. Chatterjee, P. 2006. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia University Press. Gilroy, P. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gregory, D. 2004. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Oxford: Blackwell. Mbembe, A. 2012. ‘Metamorphic Thought: The Works of Frantz Fanon’ African Studies 71:1, 19–28. Mbembe, A. 2011. ‘Democracy as a Community of Life’ Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism: http://jwtc.org.za/ volume_4.htm McKittrick, K. 2011. ‘On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place’ Social & Cultural Geography 12:8, 947–963. Mufti, A. 2005. ‘Global Comparativism’ Critical Inquiry 31, 472–489. Radhakrishnan, R. 2005. ‘Globality Is Not Worldliness’ Gamma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 13: 183–198. Ross, K. 2015. Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. New York: Verso Books. Ross, K. and M. Goswami. 2015. ‘The Meaning of the Paris Commune’: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/kristin-rosscommunal-luxury-paris-commune/ Roy, A. 2015. ‘What Is Urban about Critical Urban Theory?’ Urban Geography, published online, December 2. Roy, A. 2014. ‘Worlding the South: Toward a Postcolonial Urban Theory’ in S. Parnell and S. Oldfield, eds. The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South. New York: Routledge. Roy, A. and Ong, A. 2011. Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Spivak, G.C. 2014. ‘Scattered Speculations on Geography’ Antipode 46:1, 1–12. Spivak, G.C. 2004. ‘Globalicities: Terror and Its Consequences’ CR: The New Centennial Review 4:1, 73–94. Spivak, G.C. 2000. ‘Megacity’ Grey Room 1, 8–25. Spivak, G.C. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Spivak, G.C. 1985. ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’ Critical Inquiry 12:1, 243–261. Vainer, C. 2014. ‘Disseminating “Best Practice”? The Coloniality of Urban Knowledge and City Models’ in S. Parnell and S. Oldfield, eds. The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South. New York: Routledge. Young, J. 2000. ‘What Is Dwelling? The Homelessness of Modernity and the Worlding of the World’ in M. Wrathall and J. Malpas, eds. Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

4 Elements for a New Epistemology of the Urban1 N e i l B re n n e r a n d C h r i s t i a n S c h m i d

A new concept is animating debates on the urban question: planetary urbanization. What was only a few years ago no more than a preliminary hypothesis, significantly inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s (2003 [1970]) conception of a worldwide ‘urban revolution,’ has now become a vibrant theoretical approach that is being applied across divergent terrains of urban research around the world. It is also provoking some intense, sometimes polemical debates on the appropriate conceptualization, methodology, site, scale and focal point for urban research today.. The guiding thread of our own efforts to theorize planetary urbanization is the exploration of an apparently simple but highly consequential question: To what degree do inherited conceptualizations, epistemologies and cartographies of the urban provide an adequate basis for grasping emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization? For reasons we have elaborated in our previous writings, we believe that a significant reframing of the urban question is today required in order more effectively to decipher, and to influence, the urban transformations and urbanization processes that are currently reshaping the planet. Specifically, we have questioned inherited, city-centric approaches, in both their mainstream and critical/radical variants (a) for reducing the urban to a nodal agglomeration or a territorially bounded settlement type and (b) for contrasting the latter to a putatively non-urban (rural, countryside, wilderness) ‘outside’ (Brenner and Schmid 2015, 2014, 2011). From our point of view, these long-entrenched metageographical assumptions regarding the urban are not a productive basis for deciphering the variegated patterns and pathways of contemporary urbanization, and their massive consequences for planetary-scale socio-spatial relations. Several patterns and pathways of urban restructuring of the post-1980s period have seriously destabilized such assumptions: • The creation of new scales of urbanization. Extensively urbanized interdependencies are being consolidated within extremely large, polynucleated metropolitan regions to create sprawling urban

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galaxies that stretch far beyond any single metropolitan region and often traverse multiple national boundaries. Such mega-scaled urban constellations have been recognized for over a century within the field of urban studies. In recent decades, however, such urbanized megaregions have been developing with unprecedented speed; they are also now more tightly interlinked across territories, scales and worldwide interspatial networks. The blurring and rearticulation of the urban fabric. The fabric of urban space is being at once expanded and blurred, as urban fragments are distributed extensively, if unevenly, across large-scale territories. Formerly central city functions, such as shopping facilities, corporate headquarters, multimodal logistics hubs, research institutions, cultural venues, as well as spectacular architectural forms, dense settlement patterns and other major infrastructural arrangements, are now being dispersed outward from historic central city cores, into erstwhile suburbanized spaces and hinterlands, among expansive catchments of small- and medium-sized towns and along major transportation corridors such as superhighways and rail lines. The reterritorialization of the hinterland. The long entrenched image of an urban region surrounded by a territorially contiguous hinterland serving the city core with food, water, energy and materials, and processing its waste, has today become obsolete. The erstwhile hinterlands of major metropolitan regions and national territories are increasingly being operationalized to serve specific functions within worldwide spatial divisions of labor – whether as back office and warehousing locations, global sweatshops, agro-industrial land-use systems, data storage facilities, energy generation grids, resource extraction zones, fuel depots, waste disposal areas, recreational areas or corridors of connectivity. Meanwhile, the metabolic supply and processing zones of the global urban system are becoming more industrialized, infrastructuralized and spatially distanciated from the metropolitan areas they support. In effect, the planet’s most industrially specialized hinterlands are no longer staging grounds for specific urban regions or even national urban hierarchies, but have come to serve as metabolic supports for the global metropolitan network as a whole. New corridors of urbanization. Accelerated by the unprecedented densification of inter-metropolitan networks, new logistical geographies are being established across major global regions, especially in East and Southeast Asia and Latin America, as well as in strategic corridors of Central Asia, Central America and Sub-Saharan Africa. These extended zones of logistical infrastructure require colossally scaled investments, including highways, canals, railways, waterways and pipelines, as well as nodal points such as seaports, airports, rail stations and intermodal logistics hubs, which are in turn coordinated via the undersea cables and satellite fleets of the Internet age. Here too, transport-based urban development patterns have long been recognized by urban theorists, but their planetary-scale consolidation, thickening and impact in the current period are historically unprecedented, as is their role in generating new infrastructural geographies of urban life. The end of the wilderness. Erstwhile ‘wilderness’ spaces are being transformed and often degraded through the cumulative socio-ecological consequences of unfettered worldwide urbanization or are otherwise being converted into bio-enclaves offering ‘ecosystem services’ to offset destructive environmental impacts generated elsewhere. In this way, the world’s oceans, alpine regions, the equatorial rainforests, major deserts, the arctic and polar zones, and even the earth’s atmosphere itself, are being more tightly intermeshed with the rhythms of planetary urbanization at every geographical scale.

The aforementioned trends and transformations obviously overlap and reinforce one another, albeit in place-, territory- and scale-specific ways. They are also, of course, always mediated through contextually specific regulatory–institutional arrangements, state and corporate strategies and everyday socio-political struggles. But their cumulative result has been to generate radically transformed planetary geographies of urbanization and urban restructuring that can only be bluntly deciphered on the basis of the traditional, singular vision of ‘the’ city as a nodal, bounded, singular and thus universally replicable

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settlement type (Brenner and Schmid 2014). Paradoxically, much contemporary debate on our putative ‘urban age’ continues to embrace such city-centric metageographical framings, even as they are being superseded in practice through the forward motion of socio-spatial and socio-ecological creative destruction that animates the contemporary formation of capitalist urbanization. It is for this reason that we have devoted extensive attention, in our previous writings, to the critique of contemporary urban ideologies, which at once express and obscure some of the key urban transformations of our time (Brenner 2016, 2014a, 2014b; Brenner and Schmid 2014; Schmid 2015, 2012). Unless we are able to acquire some critical distance from such omnipresent city-centric, and often city-triumphalist, urban ideologies, our collective capacities to decipher, and thus to influence, emergent urbanization patterns will be seriously compromised. Our argument is not that cities, or metropolitan agglomerations, no longer exist, or are no longer central sites and expressions of urbanization processes – of course they do; and of course they are. Our proposal, rather, is that approaches to urban theory that focus exclusively on agglomeration processes and/or intercity relations cannot adequately grasp their connections to a wide range of non-city conditions, processes and transformations that are increasingly essential to the spatiotemporal dynamics and metabolic circuitry of capitalist urbanization on a planetary scale. From our point of view, contemporary urban transformations encompass a much broader, if massively uneven, terrain of sites, territories and landscapes, including many that may contain relatively small or minimal populations, but where colossal infrastructural and socio-environmental metamorphoses are underway precisely in support of the everyday socio-economic activities, metabolic operations and growth imperatives of often-distant agglomerations. Such developments, we argue, require a much broader conceptualization of the urban that includes not only dense agglomerations, their jagged, dispersed perimeters, their proximate hinterlands and their long-distance networks of connectivity, but also the vast, increasingly planetary operational landscapes of energy, labor, food, water, infrastructure and waste – in short, of worldwide socio-metabolic transformation – that support what Chicago School urban sociologist Ernest Burgess (1967 [1925]) once laconically described as ‘the growth of the city.’ It is against this background, then, that we frame our core question in this chapter: If the urban is no longer coherently contained within or anchored to ‘the’ city – or, for that matter, to any other bounded settlement type – then how can a scholarly field devoted to its investigation continue to exist? Or, to pose the same question as a challenge of intellectual reconstruction: Is there – could there be – a new epistemology of the urban that might illuminate the emergent conditions, processes and transformations associated with a world of generalized urbanization? To confront this problematique, this chapter presents a series of seven epistemological theses, which are intended to offer a conceptual basis for deciphering emergent urban transformations. These theses are closely connected to our earlier critique of contemporary urban ideologies and to our developing theorization of planetary urbanization, but they are not intended to elaborate those analyses in any detail. Instead, our proposals are meant to demarcate some relatively broad epistemological parameters within which a multiplicity of reflexive approaches to critical urban theory might be pursued. We aim here, then, not to advance a specific, substantive theory of the urban, but to present a general epistemological framework through which this elusive, yet seemingly omnipresent condition of the contemporary world might be analytically deciphered, even as it continues to evolve and mutate before our eyes.

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This chapter is thus intended as a meta-theoretical exercise. Rather than attempting to ‘nail down’ a fixed definition of the essential properties of the urban phenomenon, it involves developing a reflexive epistemological framework that may help bring into focus and render intelligible the ongoing reconstitution of that phenomenon in relation to the simultaneous evolution of the very concepts and methods being used to study it.

Thesis 1: The urban and urbanization are theoretical categories, not empirical objects In most mainstream traditions, the urban is treated as an empirically self-evident, universal category corresponding to a particular type of bounded settlement space, the ‘city.’ While such empiricist, universalistic understandings continue to underpin important strands of urban research and policy, including contemporary mainstream discourses on global urbanism, we argue that the urban, and the closely associated concept of urbanization, must be understood as theoretical abstractions; they can only be defined through the labor of conceptualization. The urban is thus a theoretical category, not an empirical object: its demarcation as a zone of thought, representation, imagination or action can only occur through a process of theoretical abstraction. Even the most descriptively nuanced, quantitatively sophisticated or geospatially enhanced strands of urban research necessarily presuppose any number of pre-empirical assumptions regarding the nature of the putatively ‘urban’ condition, zone or transformation that is under analysis (Brenner and Katsikis 2014). Such assumptions are not mere background conditions or incidental framing devices, but constitute the very interpretive lens through which urban research becomes intelligible as such. For this reason, the ‘urban question’ famously posed by Manuel Castells (1977 [1972]) cannot be understood as a theoretical detour, or as a mere intellectual diversion for those interested in concept formation, or in the field’s historical evolution. Rather, engagement with the urban question is a constitutive moment of theoretical abstraction within all approaches to urban research and practice, whether or not they reflexively conceptualize it as such (Brenner 2013). Since the early twentieth century, the evolution of urban studies as a research field has been animated by intense debates regarding the appropriate conceptualization of the urban – its geographical parameters, its historical pathways and its key social, economic, cultural or institutional dimensions (Saunders 1986; Hartmann, Hitz, Schmid and Wolff 1986). In each framing, the urban has been equated with divergent properties, practices, conditions, experiences, institutions and geographies, which have in turn defined the basic horizons for research, representation and practice. Such demarcations have entailed not only diverse, often incompatible, ways of understanding cities and agglomeration, but also a range of interpretive methods, analytical strategies and cartographic techniques through which those conditions are distinguished from a putatively ‘nonurban’ outside – the suburban, the rural, the natural or otherwise. In this sense, rather than developing through a simple accretion of concrete investigations on a pre-given social condition or spatial arrangement, the field of urban studies has evolved through ongoing theoretical debates regarding the appropriate demarcation, interpretation and mapping of the urban itself.

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The urban is, then, an essentially contested concept and has been subject to frequent reinvention in relation to the challenges engendered by research, practice and struggle. While some approaches to the urban have asserted, or aspired to, universal validity, and thus claimed context-independent applicability, every attempt to frame the urban in analytical, geographical and normative–political terms has in fact been strongly mediated through the specific historical–geographical formation(s) in which it emerged – for example, Manchester, Paris and classically industrial models of urbanization in the midnineteenth century; Chicago, Berlin, London and rapidly metropolitanizing landscapes of imperial–capitalist urbanization in the early twentieth century; and Los Angeles, Shanghai, Dubai, Singapore and neoliberalizing models of globally networked urbanization in the last three decades. More recently, following some major postcolonial interventions (Robinson 2006; Roy 2009; Sheppard, Leitner and Maringanti 2013), many more urban territories have become starting points for urban concepts and theory building. This circumstance means that all engagements with urban theory, whether EuroAmerican, postcolonial or otherwise, are in some sense ‘provincial,’ or contextdependent, because they are mediated through concrete experiences of time and space within particular places. Just as crucially, though, conditions within local and regional contexts under modern capitalism have long been tightly interdependent with one another, and have been profoundly shaped by broader patterns of capitalist industrialization, regulation and uneven socio-spatial development. The recognition of context-dependency – the need to ‘provincialize’ urban theory – thus stands in tension with an equally persistent need to understand the historically evolving totality of inter-contextual patterns, developmental pathways and systemic transformations in which such contexts are embedded, whether at national, supranational or worldwide scales. In all cases, therefore, theoretical definitions of the urban and the historical– geographical contexts of their emergence are tightly intertwined. This proposition applies whether the urban is delineated as a local formation or as a global condition; the contexts of theory production must likewise be understood in both situated and inter-contextual terms. Any reflexive approach to the urban question must make explicit the venue of its own research practice (be it a specific place, an urbanizing territory or a broader socio-economic network) and consider the implications of the latter for its own epistemological and representational framework. Such definitional debates and theoretical controversies are not only derived from specific contexts of urbanization; they also powerfully impact those contexts insofar as they help clarify, construct, legitimate, disseminate and naturalize particular visions of socio-spatial organization that privilege certain elements of the urban process while neglecting or excluding others. These often-contradictory framing visions, interpretations and cartographies of the urban (as site, territory, ecology and experience) mediate urban design, planning, policy and practice, with powerful consequences for ongoing strategies and struggles, in and outside of major institutions, to shape and reshape urbanized landscapes. It is essential, therefore, to connect debates on the urban question to assessments of their practical and political implications, institutional expressions and everyday consequences in specific contexts of urban restructuring. Such a task may only be accomplished, however, if the underlying assumptions associated with framing conceptualizations of the urban are made explicit, subjected to critical scrutiny and revised continually in relation to evolving research questions, normative–political orientations and practical concerns.

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Thesis 2: The urban is a process, not a universal form, settlement type or bounded unit Across significant strands of the social sciences and the design disciplines, the urban has been treated as a fixed, unchanging entity – the city, or an upscaled territorial variant thereof, such as the city-region or the metropolitan region. However, even though the phrase ‘the city’ persists as an ideological framing in mainstream policy discourse and everyday life (Wachsmuth 2014), it is no longer possible to understand the urban phenomenon as a singular condition derived from the serial replication of a specific sociospatial condition (for instance, agglomeration) or settlement type (for instance, places with large, dense and/or heterogeneous populations) across the territory. By contrast, following Lefebvre’s (2003 [1970]) methodological injunction, we interpret the urban as a multiscalar process of socio-spatial transformation. The study of specific urban forms, types or units must thus be superseded by investigations of the relentless ‘churning’ or creative destruction of urban configurations at all spatial scales. This apparently simple proposal entails a series of far-reaching consequences for many of the core epistemological operations of urban theory and research. First, the urban can no longer be understood as a fixed, universal form. Apparently stabilized urban sites are merely temporary materializations of ongoing socio-spatial transformations. Such transformative processes do not simply unfold within fixed or stable urban ‘containers,’ but actively produce, unsettle and rework them, and thus constantly engender new urban configurations. As such, the urban is dynamic, historically evolving and variegated. It is materialized within built environments and socio-spatial arrangements at all scales; and yet it also continually transforms the latter to produce new patterns of socio-spatial organization (Harvey 1985). There is thus no singular morphology of the urban; there are, rather, many processes of urban transformation that crystallize across the world at various spatial scales, with wide-ranging, often unpredictable consequences for inherited socio-spatial arrangements. Second, the urban can no longer be understood as a specific settlement type. The field of urban studies has long been preoccupied with the task of classifying particular sociospatial conditions within putatively distinct types of settlement space (city, town, suburb, metropolis and various sub-classifications thereof). Today, however, such typologies of urban settlement have outlived their usefulness; processes of socio-spatial transformation, which crisscross and constantly rework diverse places, territories and scales, must instead be moved to the foreground of our epistemological framework. In such a conceptualization, urban configurations must be conceived not as discrete settlement types, but as dynamic, relationally evolving force fields of socio-spatial restructuring (Massey 2005; Allen, Massey and Cochrane 1998). As such, urban configurations represent, simultaneously, the territorial inheritance of earlier rounds of restructuring and the socio-spatial frameworks in and through which future urban pathways and potentials are produced. The typological classification of static urban units is thus considerably less productive, in both analytical and political terms, than explorations of the various processes of sociospatial creative destruction through which urban configurations are produced, contested and transformed. Third, the urban can no longer be understood as a bounded spatial unit. Since the origins of modern approaches to urban theory in the late nineteenth century, the urban has been conceptualized with reference to the growth of cities, conceived as relatively

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circumscribed, if constantly expanding, socio-spatial units. Such assumptions have long pervaded mainstream urban research, and they are today powerfully embodied in the discourses on global urbanism promoted by the United Nations, the World Bank and other major international organizations. In light of the above considerations, however, our analyses of urban configurations must be systematically disentangled from inherited understandings of cityness, which obfuscate the processes of ‘implosion–explosion’ that underpin the production and continual restructuring of socio-spatial organization under modern capitalism. It is misleading to equate the urban with any singular, bounded spatial unit (city, agglomeration, metropolitan region, or otherwise); nor can its territorial contours be coherently delineated relative to some postulated non-urban ‘outside’ (suburban, rural, natural, wilderness, or otherwise). Conceptualizations of the urban as a bounded spatial unit must thus be superseded by approaches that investigate how urban configurations are churned and remade across the uneven landscapes of worldwide capitalist development. In sum, the process-based approach to the urban proposed here requires a fundamental reorientation of urban research. No longer conceived as a form, type or bounded unit, the urban must now be re-theorized as a process that, even while continually reinscribing patterns of agglomeration across the earth’s terrestrial landscape, simultaneously transgresses, explodes and reworks inherited geographies (of social interaction, settlement, land use, circulation and socio-metabolic organization), both within and beyond largescale metropolitan centers.

Thesis 3: Urbanization involves three mutually constitutive moments – concentrated urbanization, extended urbanization and differential urbanization Inherited understandings of urbanization are seriously limited by their pervasive focus on the classic of ‘the growth of the city’ (Burgess 1967 [1925]). This is not merely a matter of empirical emphasis, but flows from a fundamental epistemological commitment – namely, the conceptualization of urbanization with exclusive reference to the condition of agglomeration, the spatial concentration of population, means of production, infrastructure and investment within a more or less clearly delineated spatial zone. Without denying the essential importance of such spatial clusters to urbanization processes, we argue that a more multifaceted conceptualization is today required which illuminates the interplay between three mutually constitutive moments: (i) concentrated urbanization, (ii) extended urbanization and (iii) differential urbanization (Figure 4.1). These three moments are dialectically interconnected and mutually constitutive; they are analytically distinguished here simply to offer an epistemological basis for a reinvented conceptualization that transcends the limitations and blind spots of mainstream models. Since Friedrich Engels famously analyzed the explosive growth of industrial Manchester in the mid-nineteenth century, the power of agglomeration has been a key focal point for urban research. Although its appropriate interpretation remains a topic of intense debate, the moment of concentrated urbanization is thus quite familiar from inherited approaches to urban economic geography, which aim to illuminate the agglomeration processes through which firms, peopleand infrastructure cluster together in space during

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Concentrated urbanization

Extended urbanization

Spatial clustering of population, means of production, infrastructure and investment

Activation and transformation of places, territories and landscapes in relation to agglomeration processes; subsequent uneven thickening and stretching of an ‘urban fabric’ across the planet

Differential urbanization Relentless creative destruction or ‘implosion–explosion’ of socio-spatial organization; production of new urban ‘potentials’ for the appropriation of extant urban configurations and for the production of radically new forms of urban space

Figure 4.1  The three ‘moments’ of urbanization successive cycles of capitalist industrial development (Scott 1988; Veltz 1996; Storper 1996; Krätke 2014). Obviously, large agglomerations remain central arenas and engines of massive urban transformations, and thus clearly merit sustained investigation, not least under early twenty-first-century capitalism. However, we reject the widespread assumption within both mainstream and critical traditions of urban studies that agglomerations represent the privileged or even exclusive terrain of urban development. In contrast, we propose that the historical and contemporary geographies of urban transformation encompass much broader, if massively uneven, territories and landscapes, including many that may contain relatively small, dispersed or minimal populations, but where major socioeconomic, infrastructural and socio-metabolic metamorphoses have occurred precisely in support of, or as a consequence of, the everyday operations and growth imperatives of often-distant agglomerations. For this reason, the moment of concentrated urbanization is inextricably connected to that of extended urbanization. Extended urbanization involves, first, the operationalization of places, territories and landscapes, often located far beyond the dense population centers, to support the everyday activities and socio-economic dynamics of urban life. The production of such operational landscapes results from the most basic socio-metabolic imperatives associated with urban growth: the procurement and circulation of food, water, energy and construction materials; the processing and management of waste and pollution; and the mobilization of labor power in support of these various processes of extraction, production, circulation and management. Second, the process of extended urbanization entails the ongoing construction and reorganization of relatively fixed and immobile infrastructures (in particular, for transportation and communication) in support of these operations, and consequently the uneven thickening and stretching of an ‘urban fabric’ (Lefebvre 2003 [1970]) across progressively larger zones, and ultimately, around much of the entire planet (see Thesis 5 below). Third, the process of extended urbanization frequently involves the enclosure of land from established social uses in favor of privatized, exclusionary and profitoriented modes of appropriation, whether for resource extraction, agro-business, logistics functions or otherwise. In this sense, extended urbanization is intimately intertwined with

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the violence of accumulation by dispossession (often animated and enforced by state institutions) through which non-commodified modes of social life are destabilized and articulated to global spatial divisions of labor and systems of exchange (Sevilla-Buitrago 2014). The moment of extended urbanization has been partially illuminated in classic accounts of city–hinterland relations, which have explored not only the making of operational landscapes to support population centers, but the ways in which the very process of metropolitan development has hinged upon massive, highly regularized inputs (of labor, materials, food, water, energy, commodities, information and so forth) procured from agglomerations as well as various types of non-city spaces, both proximate and remote (Harris and Ullman 1945; Jacobs 1970; Cronon 1991; for discussion see Katsikis 2015). More recently, accounts of extended urbanization have emphasized the progressive enclosure, operationalization and industrialization of such landscapes around the world – including rainforests, tundra, alpine zones, oceans, deserts and even the atmosphere itself – to fuel the rapid intensification of metropolitan growth in recent decades (Monte-Mór 2014a, 2014b; Schmid 2006; Brenner 2014a, 2014b; Soja and Kanai 2014 [2006]). Throughout the longue durée history of capitalist industrialization, the geographies of extended urbanization have been essential to the consolidation, growth and restructuring of urban centers. Rather than being relegated to a non-urban ‘outside,’ therefore, the moment of extended urbanization must be viewed as an integral terrain of the urbanization process as a whole. Thus, without abandoning the long-standing concern of urbanists to understand agglomeration processes, we propose to connect that familiar problematique to a wide-ranging set of socio-spatial transformations that have not typically been viewed as being connected to urbanization. Concentrated and extended urbanization are inextricably intertwined with the process of differential urbanization, in which inherited socio-spatial configurations are recurrently creatively destroyed in relation to the broader developmental dynamics and crisis tendencies of modern capitalism. Lefebvre (2003 [1970]) captured this distinctive tendency within capitalist forms of urbanization through the vivid metaphor of ‘implosion– explosion,’ a formulation that has been appropriated in diverse ways in recent years by critical urban thinkers (Brenner 2014a, 2014b; Schmid, Stanek and Moravánszky 2014). For our purposes here, rather than equate ‘implosion’ exclusively with concentrated urbanization and ‘explosion’ with extended urbanization, the metaphor offers a useful basis for demarcating a third, differential moment of urbanization based upon the perpetual drive to restructure socio-spatial organization under modern capitalism, not only within metropolitan agglomerations but across broader landscapes of extended urbanization. Consistent with the process-based conceptualization of the urban presented in Thesis 2, the differential moment of urbanization puts into relief the intense, perpetual dynamism of capitalist forms of urbanization, in which socio-spatial configurations are tendentially established, only to be rendered obsolete and eventually superseded through the relentless forward motion of the accumulation process and industrial development (Harvey 1985). Just as crucially, differential urbanization is also the result of various forms of urban struggle and expresses the powerful potentials for radical social and political transformation that are unleashed, but often suppressed, through capitalist industrial development. In this sense, the term differential urbanization underscores the doubleedged character of urban transformation: it radically and often violently transforms existing socio-spatial configurations, but it meanwhile may open up new options for the creation of differences, and thus for the further creative transformation of socio-spatial

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relations (Lefebvre 1991 [1974] 2003 [1970]). These urban potentials are usually seen as being produced and contained within large, globally networked metropolitan centers. However, with the intensification of extended urbanization, as defined above, this potential is now also being distributed to other places and territories, often in unpredictable, unexpected ways that are also radically reworking the politics of space that underpin and animate the planetary urban fabric (see Thesis 7 below). We reiterate that these three moments of urbanization under capitalism refer not to distinct morphological conditions, geographical sites or temporal stages, but to mutually constitutive, dialectically intertwined elements of an historically specific process of socio-spatial transformation. Just as distant flows of material, energy and labor underpin the everyday dynamics of large metropolitan agglomerations, so too do the growth imperatives and consumption demands of the latter directly mediate the construction of large-scale infrastructural projects, land-use reorganization and socio-cultural transformations in apparently ‘remote’ operational landscapes. As the urban fabric is progressively, if unevenly, stretched, thickened, rewoven and creatively destroyed, new centers of agglomeration (from mining and farming towns and tourist enclaves to logistics hubs and growth poles) may emerge within zones that previously served mainly as operational hinterlands (Arboleda 2015). The urban fabric of modern capitalism is thus best conceived as a dynamically evolving force field in which the three moments of urbanization continually interact to produce historically specific forms of socio-spatial organization and uneven development. A framework that reflexively connects the three moments of urbanization demarcated here may thus offer productive new interpretive perspectives not only on the historical and contemporary geographies of capitalist industrial development, but also on some of the socio-ecological conditions that are today commonly thought to be associated with the age of the ‘anthropocene’ (Crutzen 2002; for a critical discussion see Chakrabarty 2008; Malm and Hornborg 2014).

Thesis 4: The fabric of urbanization is multi-dimensional The epistemology of urbanization proposed above explodes inherited assumptions regarding the geographies of this process: they are no longer expressed simply through the city, the metropolitan region or interurban networks, and nor are they bounded neatly and distinguished from a putatively non-urban ‘outside.’ But this systematic analytical delinking of urbanization from trends related exclusively to city growth entails a further epistemological consequence – the abandonment of several major sociological, demographic, economic or cultural definitions of urbanization that are directly derived from that assumption. Thus, with the deconstruction of mono-dimensional, city-centric epistemologies, urbanization can no longer be considered synonymous with such commonly invoked developments as: rural-to-urban migration; expanding population levels in big cities; the concentration of investments and economic capacities within dense population centers; the diffusion of urbanism as a socio-cultural form into small- and medium-sized towns and villages; or the spreading of similar, ‘city-like’ services, amenities, technologies, infrastructures or built environments across the territory. Any among the latter trends may, under specific conditions, be connected to distinctive patterns and pathways of urbanization. However, in the epistemological framework proposed here, their

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analytical demarcation as such no longer hinges upon the definitionally fixed assumption either (a) that they necessarily originate within specific settlement units (generally, big cities), or (b) that they necessarily result from the replication of formally identical urban settlement types, infrastructural arrangements or cultural forms across the entire territory. What is required, instead, is a multi-dimensional understanding of urbanization that can illuminate the historically specific patterns and pathways through which the variegated, uneven geographies of this process, in each of its three constitutive moments, are articulated during successive cycles of worldwide capitalist development. To facilitate such an analysis, building upon Lefebvre’s three-dimensional conceptualization of the production of space (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]; Schmid 2005, 2008, 2014a), we distinguish three further dimensions of urbanization: spatial practices, territorial regulation and everyday life (Figure 4.2). These dimensions of urbanization co-constitute the three moments of urbanization demarcated in Thesis 3, and together produce the unevenly woven, restlessly mutating urban fabric of the contemporary world. First, urbanization involves distinctive spatial practices through which land use is intensified, connectivity infrastructures are thickened and socio-metabolic transformations are accelerated to facilitate processes of industrialization. Such spatial practices underpin the production of built environments within major cities as well as a wide range of socio-spatial transformations in near and distant zones in relation to the latter. Second, urbanization is always mediated through specific forms of territorial regulation that (a) impose collectively binding rules regarding the appropriation of labor, land, food, water, energy and material resources; (b) mobilize formal and informal planning procedures to govern investment patterns into the built environment; and (c) manage patterns of territorial development with regard to processes of production and social reproduction, major aspects of logistics infrastructure and commodity circulation, as well as emergent crisis tendencies embedded within inherited spatial arrangements (Brenner 2004; Schmid 2003). Finally, urbanization is always deeply embedded in everyday life. Whether within dense population centers or in more remote locations embedded within the broader urban fabric, urban space is defined by the people who use, appropriate and transform it through their daily routines and practices, which frequently involve struggles regarding the very form and content of the urban itself, at once as a site and stake of social experience. In this context, questions of social reproduction, ways of life and livelihoods also play crucial roles in the production of urban space. The qualities of urban space, across diverse locations, are thus mediated and reproduced through lived experiences, which in turn crystallize longer-term processes of socialization that are materialized within built environments and territorial arrangements. Clearly, this is a broad conceptualization of urbanization: it involves a wide-ranging, contradictory constellation of material, social, institutional, environmental and everyday transformations associated with capitalist industrialization, the circulation of capital and the management of territorial development at various spatial scales. We would insist, however, on distinguishing urbanization from the more general processes of capitalist industrialization and world market expansion that have been investigated by economic historians and historical sociologists of capitalist development (see, for instance, Arrighi 1994). As understood here, urbanization is indeed linked to these processes, but its specificity lies precisely in materializing the latter within places, territories and landscapes, and

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Recurrent pressures to creatively destroy inherited geographies of agglomeration and associated operational landscapes

DIFFERENTIAL URBANIZATION

Mobilization of state institutions and other regulatory instruments to promote, manage, accelerate or otherwise influence the ongoing reorganization of urban agglomerations and the broader fabric of extended urbanization

Governance systems oriented towards the socio-metabolic and socio-economic processes that support major urban centers and facilitate the thickening and stretching of an urban fabric across territories

The activation of places, territories and landscapes in relation to agglomerations; the subsequent creation, thickening and stretching of an ‘urban fabric’ connecting agglomerations to the diverse sites of socio-metabolic and socio-economic transformation upon which they depend

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Figure 4.2  Moments and dimensions of urbanization

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The reorganization of social routines, everyday practices and forms of life in conjunction with the creative destruction of built environments and the urban fabric at any spatial scale

The social routines, everyday practices and forms of life that emerge (a) as diverse places, territories and landscapes are operationalized in relation to agglomerations, and (b) as a broader urban fabric is thickened and stretched across territories and scales

The production of social routines, everyday practices and forms of life associated with the power of agglomeration

EVERYDAYLIFE

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in embedding them within concrete, temporarily stabilized configurations of everyday life, socio-economic organization and modes of territorial regulation. Capitalist industrial development does not engender urban growth and restructuring on an untouched terrestrial surface; rather, it constantly collides with, and reorganizes, inherited socio-spatial configurations. Urbanization is precisely the medium and expression of this collision, and every configuration of urban life is powerfully shaped by the diverse social, political and institutional forces that mediate it.

Thesis 5: Urbanization has become planetary Since the first wave of large-scale capitalist industrialization in the nineteenth century, the functional borders, catchment areas and immediate hinterlands of urban regions have been extended outward to create ever-larger regional units. Just as importantly, however, this dramatic process of metropolitan expansion has long been premised upon the intensive activation and transformation of progressively broader landscapes of extended urbanization that supply agglomerations with their most basic socio-economic and sociometabolic requirements. In contrast to inherited periodizations, which focus almost exclusively on cities and urban form, the framework proposed here would permit the dynamics of city growth during each period to be analyzed in direct relation to the production and reconstitution of historically and geographically specific operational landscapes (mediated through empire, colonialism, neocolonialism and various forms of enclosure and accumulation by dispossession) that supported the latter. For present purposes, we focus on the contemporary formation of urbanization. In our view, a genuinely planetary formation of capitalist urbanization began to emerge following the long 1980s, the transitional period of crisis-induced global economic restructuring that began with the deconstruction of Fordist–Keynesian and national–developmentalist regimes of accumulation in the early 1970s and continued until the withering away of state socialism and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These developments established some of the basic preconditions for the subsequent planetary extension of the urban fabric during the last two decades: the deregulation of the global financial system and of various national regulatory systems; the neoliberalization of global, national and local economic governance; the worldwide digital revolution; the flexibilization of production processes and the generalization of global production networks; and the creation of new forms of market-oriented territorial regulation at supranational, national and subnational scales. These realignments have created a new regulatory framework encouraging speculative urban investment, not only within the property markets and built environments of the world’s major cities, but also through the construction of vastly expanded urban networks and infrastructures of resource extraction, agroindustrial cultivation and logistical circulation, all of which have massively contributed to the accelerated enclosure of landscapes around the world to permit intensified, accelerated capital circulation (Harvey 2010). Aside from the reconstitution and thickening of networked connectivities among the world’s major metropolitan regions, which have received extensive attention within the global urban studies literature (Taylor 2004), several additional waves of socio-economic and socio-metabolic transformation of the post-1980s period have significantly rewoven

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the inherited fabric of urbanization, while also extending it into new realms that were previously relatively insulated from its wide-ranging imprints. These include: (a) a major expansion in agro-industrial export zones, with associated large-scale infrastructural investments and land-use transformations to produce and circulate food and biofuels for world markets (McMichael 2013); (b) a massive expansion in investments related to mineral and oil extraction, in large part due to the post-2003 commodity boom manifested in dramatic increases in global prices for raw materials, especially metals and fuels (Arboleda 2015); and (c) the accelerated consolidation and extension of long-distance transportation and communications infrastructures designed to reduce the transaction costs associated with the production and circulation of capital (Hesse 2013). Under these conditions, erstwhile ‘rural’ zones around the world are being profoundly transformed: various forms of agro-industrial consolidation and land enclosure are undermining smalland medium-sized forms of food production; new forms of export-oriented industrial extraction are destabilizing established models of land-use and social reproduction, as well as environmental security; and newly consolidated inter-regional migration networks and communications infrastructures are dramatically rearticulating the interdependencies between villages, small towns and larger, often-distant urban centers, contributing in turn to the production of new forms of everyday experience that transcend the confines of specific places. Amid these far-reaching socio-spatial transformations, the fabric of extended urbanization is meanwhile also being woven ever more densely, if still quite unevenly, across many relatively depopulated and erstwhile ‘wilderness’ landscapes, from the Arctic, the European Alps and the Amazon to Patagonia, the Himalayas, the Sahara, Siberia and the Gobi Desert, as well as through major zones of the world’s seas and oceans (Diener, Herzog, Meili, de Meuron and Schmid 2006; Gugger, Couling and Blanchard 2012; Urban Theory Lab 2015). While the ecology and topography of these landscapes may still appear relatively pristine or untouched by the footprint of industrial capitalism, such impressions are misleading. In fact, for several decades now, strategic places, grids, corridors and concession zones within such territories have been aggressively enclosed and operationalized, usually by transnational corporations under the legal protection of neoliberal and/or authoritarian national states and various kinds of intergovernmental organizations, to facilitate new forms of resource extraction, energy and agro-industrial production, an unprecedented expansion of logistics infrastructures, as well as various additional forms of land-use intensification and environmental plunder intended to support the relentless growth and consumption imperatives of the world’s major cities. Under contemporary conditions, then, traditional models of metropolis and hinterland, center and periphery, city and countryside, have been exploded. The urban/rural opposition, which has long served as an epistemological anchor for the most basic research operations of urban studies, has today become an increasingly obfuscatory basis for deciphering emergent patterns and pathways of socio-spatial restructuring around the world. The geographies of uneven spatial development are today being articulated as an interweaving of new developmental patterns and potentials within a thickening, if deeply polarized, fabric of planetary urbanization. The urban is thus no longer defined in opposition to an ontological Other located beyond or ‘outside’ it, but has instead become the very tissue of human life itself, at once the framework and the basis for the many forms of socio-spatial differentiation that continue to proliferate under contemporary capitalist conditions. Nor can the rural be understood any longer as a perpetually present

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‘elsewhere,’ ghost acreage or ‘constitutive outside’ that permits the urban to be demarcated as a stable, coherent and discrete terrain. Instead, this supposedly non-urban realm has now been thoroughly engulfed within the variegated patterns and pathways of a planetary formation of urbanization. In effect, it has been internalized into the very core of the urbanization process. This proposition may prove controversial, especially if it is misunderstood as a generalization that ignores the continued differences, whether in social, institutional, infrastructural or environmental terms, between large metropolitan centers and zones characterized, for instance, by low or dispersed population, minimal or degraded built environments and/or relatively poor communications and transportation connectivity. Our claim here, however, is not that ‘rural’ zones and ways of life have disappeared; on the contrary, such spaces still exist and may even play decisive roles in the social, political and economic life of many regions.. However, conditions within so-called ‘rural’ zones should not be taken for granted; they require careful, contextually specific and theoretically reflexive investigations that may be seriously impeded through the unreflexive use of generic spatial taxonomies that predetermine their patterns and pathways of development and their form and degree of connection to other places, regions and territories. Indeed, contemporary research on putatively rural regions has shown that many such areas are being transformed through and embedded within urbanization processes, precisely through the kinds of accumulation strategies, infrastructural projects and socio-metabolic linkages we theorize under the rubric of extended urbanization (see, for example, Diener et  al. 2006; Monte-Mór 2014a, 2014b; Woods 2009; Cloke 2006; Wilson 2014). Such studies strongly reinforce our contention that the inherited urban/rural distinction has come to obscure much more than it reveals regarding the entities, processes and transformations being classified on either side of the divide it purports to demarcate. Precisely against this background, the concept of planetary urbanization may offer a useful epistemological reorientation. Obviously, it cannot substitute for concrete research on specific zones of socio-spatial transformation. But it does open up an epistemological pathway through which the latter may be pursued in relation to broader questions regarding the increasingly worldwide, if deeply polarized and uneven, geographies in which even the most apparently ‘remote’ places, regions and territories are now inextricably interwoven.

Thesis 6: Urbanization unfolds through variegated patterns and pathways of uneven spatial development The emergence of a planetary formation of urbanization does not entail a homogenization of socio-spatial landscapes; it is not expressed through the ‘globalization’ of a uniform condition of cityness (or urban ‘sprawl’) across the entire planet; and it does not involve the transformation of the earth as a whole into a single world-city, akin to the Death Star in George Lucas’s Star Wars films or the planet Trantor in Isaac Asimov’s science fiction series, Foundation. On the contrary, as conceived here, urbanization under capitalism is always an historically and geographically variegated process: it is mediated through historically and geographically specific institutions, representations, strategies and struggles that are, in turn, conflictually articulated to the cyclical rhythms of worldwide capital

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accumulation and their associated social, political and environmental contradictions. Rather than being analyzed through mono-dimensional or formalistic interpretive frames, capitalist urbanization must be understood as a polymorphic, multiscalar and emergent dynamic of socio-spatial transformation: it hinges upon and continuously produces differentiated, unevenly developed socio-spatial configurations at all scales. The task for any contemporary urban epistemology is therefore to develop an analytical and cartographic orientation through which to decipher its uneven, restlessly mutating crystallizations. Capitalist urbanization might best be conceived as a process of constant, if contested, innovation in the production of socio-spatial arrangements – albeit one that always simultaneously collides with, and thereby transforms, inherited formations of spatial practice, regulatory coordination and everyday life (Schmid 2013). Under capitalism, urbanization is always articulated in contextually embedded socio-spatial formations, since it is precisely in relation to, and through collisions with, inherited structures of uneven spatial development that its specific patterns and pathways are forged and fought out. In this way, the abstract, universalizing processes of capitalist industrialization are materialized in historically and geographically specific urban configurations, which are in turn relentlessly transformed through the interplay of accumulation strategies, regulatory projects and socio-political struggles at various spatial scales. The consolidation of a planetary configuration of urban development since the 1980s is thus only the most recent expression of this intense variegation, differentiation and continual reorganization of landscapes. On the one hand, planetary urbanization is the cumulative product of the earlier longue durée cycles of urbanization that have forged, differentiated and continually reshaped the worldwide geographies of capitalism since the mid-nineteenth century. At the same time, this latest formation of urbanization has emerged in the wake of the post-1980s wave of global neoliberalization, financial speculation and accumulation by dispossession that has at once accelerated and intensified the process of commodification and, by consequence, the uneven extension of industrial infrastructures around much of the planet (Thesis 5). But, despite abundant evidence of accelerating urbanization and unprecedented worldwide interconnectivity, the production of planetary urban landscapes during the last three decades has not entailed a simple homogenization of socio-spatial conditions. Rather, the dawn of planetary urbanization appears to have markedly accentuated and rewoven the differentiations and polarizations that have long been both precondition and product of the urbanization process under capitalism, albeit in qualitatively new configurations whose contours remain extremely difficult to decipher. In an attempt to analyze these developments, contemporary urban thinkers have introduced dozens of new concepts intended to designate various putatively ‘new’ urban phenomena (Taylor and Lang 2004). While these endeavors productively underscore the changing geographies of the urban in contemporary global society, most have been focused too rigidly upon emergent urban forms that appear to have ruptured inherited socio-spatial arrangements. These include, for instance, purportedly new kinds of cities (global cities, megacities, edge cities, in-between cities, airport cities, informal cities and the like), regions (global city regions, megacity regions, polycentric metropolitan regions and so forth) as well as interurban networks, corridors and the like. However, within the epistemological framework proposed here, the constant search for such ‘new’ urban forms is an intellectual trap: it yields only relatively superficial insights into the

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modalities and consequences of the wide-ranging transformations that are unleashed through the urbanization process. Creative destruction is the modus operandi of capitalist forms of urban development; new urban geographies are thus constantly being produced through the dynamics of differential urbanization, whether within large urban centers or across extended operational landscapes. The essential task, therefore, 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 underpin the patterns and pathways of urbanization, both historically and in the contemporary epoch. Much work remains to be done to confront this challenge. A new vocabulary of urbanization is urgently required that would help us, both analytically and cartographically, to decipher the differentiated and rapidly mutating landscapes of urbanization that are today being produced across the planet (Schmid 2014 [2012]). While the shifting geographies of agglomeration must obviously remain a primary focus in such an endeavor, patterns of extended urbanization must now likewise be positioned centrally in any sustained effort to elaborate new concepts and methods for deciphering this emergent, volatile and still largely unfamiliar worldwide urban fabric.

Thesis 7: The urban is a collective project in which the potentials generated through urbanization are appropriated and contested The preceding theses have attempted to clarify in analytical terms some of the foundations for a new epistemology of the urban that could more productively illuminate both historical and contemporary geographies of capitalist urbanization than inherited frameworks. We conclude with a final thesis that underscores the essentially political character of such epistemological considerations. Here we build upon our previous discussion of differential urbanization (Thesis 3), which emphasized the relentless drive toward creative destruction under capitalism and the powerful potentials for radical socio-spatial transformation associated with it. Such potentials are an essential product and stake of urbanization: they are generated through the productive force of agglomeration and associated operational landscapes; they are often instrumentalized through capital and state institutions to facilitate historically specific forms of industrialization and political regulation, but they are also reappropriated, redistributed and continually remade through the everyday use and contestation of urban space. The urban can be productively understood as a transformative potential that is constantly generated through processes of urbanization. As both Georg Simmel and Henri Lefebvre paradigmatically recognized in different moments of twentieth-century capitalist development, this transformative potential inheres in the social, economic and cultural differentiations that are produced through urbanization, which connect diverse populations, institutions, activities, interactions and experiments in specific socio-spatial configurations (Schmid 2015b). The harnessing of such potentials is of central importance in the process of capital accumulation and in technologies of political regulation. At the same time, social movements struggle to appropriate such potentials for everyday use, social reproduction and cultural experimentation. In precisely this sense, the urban cannot be completely subsumed under the abstract logics of capitalist industrialization or

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state domination: it is always co-produced and transformed through its users, who may strive to appropriate its actualized or unrealized potentials toward collective social uses, to create new forms of experience, connection and experimentation – in short, to produce a different form of life (Lefebvre 1991 [1974], 2003 [1970]). The definition of the urban is thus not an exclusively theoretical question, it is ultimately a practical one: it is necessarily articulated through debates, controversies, struggles, uprisings and revolts, and it is ultimately realized in the pleasures, routines and dramas of everyday life. In recent years, many radical urban theorists have wrestled with this constellation of issues through explorations of Lefebvre’s (1996 [1968]) classic concept of the ‘right to the city’ (Marcuse 2012). Originally elaborated in the context of the political uprisings of the late 1960s in Paris, this slogan subsequently became an important rallying cry for political mobilizations, which have sought to connect diverse struggles that were related in some way to the urban question (for instance, regarding rights to housing, transportation, education, public health, recreational infrastructures or environmental safety). Since the long 1980s, the demand for the right to the city has become even more widespread around the world, and its political content has meanwhile been differentiated to encompass a variety of normative and ideological positions, policy proposals, movement demands and popular constituencies in diverse local and national contexts across the world (Schmid 2012; Mayer 2012). Given our arguments and proposals above, however, struggles over the right to the city must be fundamentally reframed – for, as David Harvey (2012: xv) notes, ‘to claim the right to the city is, in effect, to claim a right to something that no longer exists’ (for an analogous discussion, see Merrifield 2013). Clearly, struggles over access to urban resources in large cities – and over the collective power to produce and transform them – remain as fundamental as ever, and will continue to shape ongoing processes of urbanization around the world. However, under contemporary conditions of planetary urbanization, the classical city (and its metropolitan and regional variants) can no longer serve as the exclusive reference point for urban struggles or for visions of ‘possible urban worlds’ (Harvey 1996). Instead, a wide range of new urban practices and discourses are being produced in diverse places, territories and landscapes, often in zones that are geographically removed from large cities, but where new forms of collective insurgency are emerging in response to the patterns of industrial restructuring, territorial enclosure and landscape reorganization sketched above. From Nigeria, South Africa, India and China to Brazil and North America, new political strategies are being constructed by peasants, workers, indigenous peoples and other displaced populations to oppose the infrastructuralization and enclosure of their everyday social spaces and the destruction of their established forms of livelihood (Wilson 2014; Arboleda 2015). The politics of anti-gentrification movements and resistance to corporate megaprojects in dense city cores can thereby be connected, both analytically and politically, to mobilizations against land enclosure, large-scale infrastructures (dams, highways, pipelines, industrial corridors, mines) and displacement in seemingly ‘remote’ regions (on which, see Merrifield’s (2014) analysis of ‘neo-Haussmannization’). Rather than rejecting urban life, such mobilizations are often demanding a more socially equitable, democratically managed and environmentally sane form of urbanization than that being imposed by the forces of neoliberal capitalism. The concept of planetary urbanization proposed here offers no more than an epistemological orientation through which to begin to decipher such struggles, their interconnections across places, territories and landscapes, and the urban potentials they are claiming,

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articulating and constantly transforming. Such an investigation remains to be undertaken, but the epistemological perspective proposed here requires that it be framed in a manner that attempts to overcome the compartmentalization and fragmentation not only of urban spaces, but of urban struggles themselves, no matter where they are situated. Just as crucially, rather than being based upon inherited concepts and representations of the urban, such an inquiry would need to illuminate the manifold ways in which the users of urbanizing spaces produce and transform their own urban worlds through everyday practices, discourses and struggles, leading to the formation not only of new urban spatial configurations, but of new visions of the potentials being produced and claimed through their activities (INURA 1998). The urban is a collective project – it is produced through collective action, negotiation, imagination, experimentation and struggle. The urban society is thus never an achieved condition, but offers an open horizon in relation to which concrete struggles over the urban are waged. It is through such struggles, ultimately, that any viable new urban epistemology will be forged.

Note  1  This chapter is a substantially shortened and revised version of Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, ‘Towards a new epistemology of the urban?’, CITY, 19, 2–3 (2015): 151–182. © Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid.

References Allen, J., Massey, D. and Cochrane, A. (1998) Rethinking the Region. London: Routledge. Arboleda, M. (2015) ‘Spaces of extraction, metropolitan explosions: planetary urbanization and the commodity boom in Latin America,’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40, 1, 96–112. Arrighi, G. (1994) The Long Twentieth Century. London: Verso. Brenner, N. (2016) Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays. Basel: Bauwelt Fundamente/Birkhäuser Verlag. Brenner, N. ed. (2014a) Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis. Brenner, N. (2014b) ‘Introduction: urban theory without an outside,’ in N. Brenner ed. Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis, 14–35. Brenner, N. (2013) ‘Theses on urbanization,’ Public Culture, 25, 1, 85–114. Brenner, N. (2004) New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood. New York: Oxford University Press. Brenner, N. and Katsikis, N. (2014) ‘Is the Mediterranean urban?’ in N. Brenner ed. Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis, 428–459. Brenner, N. and Schmid, C. (2015) ‘Towards a new epistemology of the urban?’ City, 19, 2–3, 151–182. Brenner, N. and Schmid, C. (2014) ‘The “urban age” in question,’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38, 3, 731–755. Brenner, N. and Schmid, C. (2011) ‘Planetary urbanization,’ in M. Gandy ed. Urban constellations. Berlin: Jovis, 10–13. Burgess, E. (1967 [1925]) ‘The growth of the city: an introduction to a research project,’ in R. Park and E. Burgess, The City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 47–62. Castells, M. (1977 [1972]) The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chakrabarty, D. (2008) ‘The climate of history: four theses,’ Critical Inquiry, 35, 197–222. Cloke, P. (2006) ‘Conceptualizing rurality,’ in P. Cloke, T. Marsden and P. Mooney eds. Handbook of Rural Studies. London: Sage, 18–28. Cronon, W. (1991) Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton. Crutzen, P. J. (2002) ‘Geology of mankind: the anthropocene,’ Nature, 415, 23.

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Diener, R., Herzog, J., Meili, M., de Meuron, P. and Schmid, C. (2006) Switzerland: an Urban Portrait. Vols 1–4. ETH Studio Basel/Zurich: Birkhäuser. Gugger, H., Couling, N. and Blanchard, A. (2012) Barents Lessons. Lausanne: EPFL/Park Books. Harris, C. and Ullman, E. (1945) ‘The nature of cities,’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 242, 7–17. Hartmann, R., Hitz, H., Schmid, C. and Wolff, R. (1986) Theorien zur Stadtentwicklung. Oldenburg: Geographische Hochschulmanuskripte 12. Harvey, D. (2012) Rebel Cities. London: Verso. Harvey, D. (2010) The Enigma of Capital. New York: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (1996) Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, D. (1985) ‘The geopolitics of capitalism,’ in D. Gregory and J. Urry eds. Social Relations and Spatial Structures. London: Macmillan, 128–163. Hesse, M. (2013) ‘Cities and flows: re-asserting a relationship as fundamental as it is delicate,’ Journal of Transport Geography, 29, 33-42. INURA (1998) Possible Urban Worlds: Urban Strategies at the End of the 20th Century. Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag. Jacobs, J. (1970) The Economy of Cities. New York: Vintage. Katsikis, N. (2015) ‘From hinterland to hinterworld: territorial organization beyond agglomeration,’ Doctoral Dissertation, Harvard University. Krätke, S. (2014) ‘Cities in contemporary capitalism,’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38, 5, 1660–1677. Lefebvre, H. (2003 [1970]) The Urban Revolution. Trans. R. Bonnono. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Lefebvre, H. (1968) 1996. ‘The right to the city.’ In E. Kofman and E. Lebas eds. Writings on Cities. Oxford: Blackwell, 63–182. Lefebvre, H. (1991 [1974]) The Production of Space. Trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Malm, A. and Hornborg, A. (2014) ‘The geology of mankind? A critique of the anthropocene narrative,’ The Anthropocene Review, 1, 1, 62–69. Marcuse, P. (2012) ‘Whose right to what city?,’ in N. Brenner, P. Marcuse and M. Mayer eds. Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City. New York: Routledge, 24–41. Massey, D. (2005) For Space. London: Sage. Mayer, M. (2012) ‘The “right to the city” in urban social movements,’ in N. Brenner, M. Mayer and P. Marcuse eds. Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City. New York: Routledge, 63–85. McMichael, P. (2013) ‘Land grabbing as security mercantilism in international relations,’ Globalizations, 10, 1, 47–64. Merrifield, A. (2014) The New Urban Question. London: Pluto. Merrifield, A. (2013) The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Monte-Mór, R. L. M. (2014a) ‘What is the urban in the contemporary world?’ in N. Brenner ed. Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis, 260–267. Monte-Mór, R. L. M. (2014b) ‘Extended urbanization and settlement patterns: an environmental approach,’ in N. Brenner ed. Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis, 109–120. Robinson, J. (2006) Ordinary Cities. London: Routledge. Roy, A. (2009) ‘The 21st century metropolis: new geographies of theory,’ Regional Studies, 43, 6, 819–830. Saunders, P. (1986) Social Theory and the Urban Question. Second Edition. New York: Holmes & Meier. Schmid, C. (2015) ‘Specificity and urbanization—a theoretical outlook,’ in ETH Studio Basel ed. The Inevitable Specificity of Cities. Zurich: Lars Müller, 287–307. Schmid, C. (2014a) ‘The trouble with Henri: urban research and the theory of the production of space,’ in Ł. Stanek, C. Schmid and Á. Moravánsky eds. Urban Revolution Now: Henri Lefebvre in Social Research and Architecture. Farnham: Ashgate, 27–48. Schmid, C. (2014b [2012]) ‘Patterns and pathways of global urbanization: towards comparative analysis,’ in N. Brenner ed. Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis, 203–217. Schmid, C. (2013) ‘Afterword: urbanization as an open process,’ in Urban Think Tank ed. Torre David – Informal Vertical Communities. Zurich: Lars Müller, 384–387. Schmid, C. (2012) ‘Henri Lefebvre, the right to the city and the new metropolitan mainstream,’ in N. Brenner, P. Marcuse and M. Mayer eds. Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City. New York: Routledge, 42–62. Schmid, C. (2008) ‘Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space: towards a three-dimensional dialectic,’ in K. Goonewardena, S. Kipfer, R. Milgrom and C. Schmid eds. Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre. London: Routledge, 27–45.

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Schmid, C. (2006) ‘Theory,’ in R. Diener, J. Herzog, M. Meili, P. de Meuron and C. Schmid, Switzerland: An Urban Portrait. Vol. 1. Zurich: ETH Studio Basel/Birkhäuser, 163–224. Schmid, C. (2005) Stadt, Raum und Gesellschaft: Henri Lefebvre und die Theorie der Produktion des Raumes. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Schmid, C. (2003) ‘Raum und Regulation: Henri Lefebvre und der Regulationsansatz,’ in U. Brand and W. Raza eds. Fit für den Postfordismus? Theoretisch-politische Perspektiven des Regulationsansatzes. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 217–242. Schmid, C., Stanek, Ł. and Moravánszky, A. (2014) ‘Theory, not method – thinking with Lefebvre,’ in Ł. Stanek, C. Schmid and Á. Moravánszky eds. Urban Revolution Now: Henri Lefebvre in Social Research and Architecture. Farnham: Ashgate, 1–24. Scott, A. J. (1988) New Industrial Spaces. London: Pion. Sevilla-Buitrago, A. (2014) ‘Urbs in rure: historical enclosure and extended urbanization in the countryside,’ in N. Brenner ed. Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis, 236–259. Sheppard, E., Leitner, H. and Maringanti, A. (2013) ‘Provincializing global urbanism: a manifesto,’ Urban Geography, 34, 7, 893–900. Soja, E. and Kanai, J. (2014 [2006]) ‘The urbanization of the world,’ in N. Brenner ed. Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis, 142–159. Storper, M. (1996) The Regional World. New York: Guilford. Taylor, P. J. (2004) World City Network. New York: Routledge. Taylor, P. J. and Lang, R. E. (2004) ‘The shock of the new: 100 concepts describing recent urban change,’ Environment and Planning A, 36, 951–958. Urban Theory Lab (2015) Extreme Territories of Urbanization. Research report. Cambridge, MA: Urban Theory Lab, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University (urbantheorylab.net). Veltz, P. (1996) Mondialisation, villes et territoires: L’économie d’archipel. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Wachsmuth, D. (2014) ‘City as ideology: reconciling the explosion of the city form with the tenacity of the city concept,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32, 1, 75–90. Wilson, J. (2014) ‘Plan Puebla Panama: the violence of abstract space,’ in Ł. Stanek, C. Schmid and Á. Moravánsky eds. Urban Revolution Now: Henri Lefebvre in Social Research and Architecture. Farnham: Ashgate, 113–130. Woods, M. (2009) ‘Rural geography: blurring boundaries and making connections,’ Progress in Human Geography, 33, 6, 849–858.

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Part II

Hierarchy: Elites and Evictions

Johannesburg, 2006, Jennifer Bruce

5 The Elite Habitus in Cities of Accumulation Mike Savage

The 21st-century city is undergoing a profound transformation, one which is returning cities to a much older historical role, as centres where surpluses are extracted to, stored and circulated. Much urban analysis, however, remains locked into a Euro-American modernist paradigm which originated to comprehend ‘Fordist’ industrial cities. While there is an extensive critique of the dominance of Western urban paradigms, and a growing awareness of the distinctive character of urbanisation in the global south (see notably Robinson 2006, 2011; Simone 2004; 2009), as Jenny Robinson (2013) has argued, our quintessential modernist sensitivity to the urban remains largely intact (see, generally, Savage, Warde & Ward 2003; Parker 2004). This modernist framing leads to a preoccupation with the transitory, fleeting and ephemeral, with the result that it is bestowed with a fundamental ‘epochalism’ in which the present is seen as a distinctive epoch which has broken from past precedents (Savage 2009). Here, the city is forever the site of the new and emergent and is harbinger for the ‘future yet to come’. It is the quintessential site of a modernity that is always changing, renewing and extending itself, into late modernity, postmodernity, and all forms of neo-liberal capitalism. However, I argue here that this modernist framing of the city is problematic because it fails to grasp the historical residue of the urban as site of accumulation. Economic activity involves not only the production of goods and services which we consume on a daily basis, but also the generation of capital – wealth, infrastructure, devices and artefacts – which draw on prior assets. These are stored into the future and thus continue to operate tomorrow. Cities have long been central sites for such accumulation – as the legacy of urban cathedrals, temples, forts, palaces and marketplaces demonstrates very clearly. This recognition returns us to a more traditional conception of the city – as a site for diverse forms of historical accumulation. It is the steady accretion of accumulated capitals – the historical residues of previous forms of economic, social, cultural and political activity – which increasingly marks out the city in an era of massive and accentuating wealth.

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The fleeting and transitory encounter which is so beloved of urban theory needs to be placed in this wider context of sedimentation, consolidation and accumulation. I take my lead here from Thomas Piketty’s (2014) arguments that, in most nations, accumulated historical capital is increasingly important relative to national income, with the implication that the city’s role as privileged site for accumulation is becoming more important. It follows that contemporary cities are becoming more marked out from the surrounding hinterlands in ways which suggest that we are experiencing a new urban geography of elite centres contrasted with margins of dispossession. Here, building on the arguments of Suzi Hall and Mike Savage (2015), I will argue that there are distinctive urban processes that are volatile and exclusive – which we term the urban vortex – which increasingly demarcate the urban from its wider surrounds. And, pursuing the logic of this argument, the city is not a marker of a general future which awaits, but rather the crystallisation of a highly inegalitarian social order which forms the prime site for elite accumulation. Rather than elites being understood in terms of their mobility or through their lack of connection to place (as argued by Castells 1996/1997 or Bauman 2007), it is actually the ways that urban spaces are now part of an ‘elite habitus’ which is crucial. Cities, I will argue, are therefore defined fundamentally by their association with the wealth elites which increasingly proliferate in 21st-century capitalism. I first briefly explore the way that urban theory remains indebted to a modernist framing stretching back to the 19th century, but which persists today. I then introduce the alternative perspective that the city might best be understood as the site of accumulated capital through focusing on the three capitals that Pierre Bourdieu (notably 1985) lays out in this prominent and highly influential sociology: economic, cultural and social. In each of these cases I argue that the city plays an increasingly important role as the fundamental venue for the accumulating, storing and conversion of capital. In each case, I also argue, we can detect clear reasons why the contemporary city is increasingly differentiated from its hinterland. The final part of my chapter completes my analysis by emphasising how the contemporary city might be seen as the fundamental location of wealthy elites whose fortunes have so dramatically grown in recent decades. My chapter uses predominantly British research, especially that drawing on material from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey, with a particular focus on the distinctive character of London. There is no doubt that there are specificities to the British case and that the arguments I develop here cannot simply be applied in other contexts. As the heartland of industrial capitalism, seat of the British Empire, long-term site of extensive flows of migrants and settlers, and more recently the financial centre of an increasingly neoliberalised global order, London is highly unusual – though in ways which I will suggest might offer a distinctive analytical lens for exploring the contemporary urban condition.

Beyond urban modernism The rise of urban analysis is associated from the 19th century with debates about the emergence of industrial capitalism (Kumar 1978) and especially concerns with the fate of ‘community’ in an increasingly commodified and marketised world. The terms of this debate are highly familiar and need no emphasis here; they are quintessentially encapsulated in the gemeinschaft–gesselesshaft distinction developed by Tonnies, and drawn on

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by Simmel, Weber, and the Chicago School (see the general discussions in Saunders 2003; Savage, Warde and Ward 2003; Harding and Blokland 2014). Older communities, based on routine familiarity with one’s neighbours, and with strong social bonds, were seen to give way to fragmented and transitory social relationships. This mode of analysis set up the city as site of the new, characterised by the lack of traditional, ascribed social bonds which were held to be distinguishing features of traditional communal society. This way of thinking took place at the same time that artistic currents increasingly defined the city as the centre of cultural modernism which embraced its transitory and fleeting qualities (see, in general terms, Bradbury 1976), thus fusing a distinctive aesthetic, cultural and social sensibility which proved hugely influential throughout the 20th century. As Robinson (2013) notes, our intellectual resources to comprehend the urban remain locked in this modernist mindset formed in the early 20th century. Looking to the influences of this debate between Simmel, Marx and Weber, we can trace the persistence and, indeed, increasing vigour of this movement through the influential interventions of writers such as Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre and Manuel Castells. Despite political differences between these writers, they shared a common concern that the city not only was the prime site for modern alienation, but also could be the arena in which hope could be redeemed. This idea was expressed most notably in Lefebvre’s insistence on ‘the right to the city’. The urban here is dynamic – the quintessential, emblematic, representation of a transitory and disruptive capitalist order which can yet yield a more progressive and hopeful future. The urtext of this urban vision is perhaps Marshall Berman’s brilliant All that is solid melts into air (1983) with its profound elegy towards the urban as fleeting, as only graspable by being ungraspable, as forever doomed to be tragic site for hopes which ultimately can never be redeemed. Yet in Berman’s evocative account, we cannot but continue to invest our urban future with our dreams. This modernist interpretation was given increased vitality through its cross-fertilisation with Marxist political economy in the later decades of the 20th century and has become hegemonic. Many major intellectual currents in urban studies of recent decades have gained their power by seeking to pursue further this motif of the city as mobile, transitory and decentred, whether this be through Castells (1977) arguments regarding the city as a site of collective consumption, through critiques of the city as a demographic centre (Brenner 2013; Brenner and Schmid 2014), in the Los Angeles School of Soja (1989) and in Amin and Thrift’s (2002) call for a decentred analysis of urban politics beyond the public agora (see also Amin 2007; Sywngedouw 2011). Even important recent work arguing for the significance of urban formations in the global south and critiquing a focus on the European and American city as template of urbanism in general might still be seen as located in this modernist concern to understand the city in terms of its novelty and emerging forms (Simone 2004, 2009). The intellectual gusto of these moves are not in doubt, even though there is a somewhat repetitive, even predictable, thread to be traced here. However, such perspectives do not readily grasp the significance of the city as historical site, as the locus for accumulated resources. Ironically, this is true even for thinkers such as Walter Benjamin whose urban accounts are littered with the remains of historical memories, artefacts and sites. Even here the past is juxtaposed to the present, rather than seen as having an ongoing relationship to it, as in the form of a distinctive ‘urban tradition’ or the like. This observation forms the central plank of my chapter. Rather than focusing on the city as the quintessential site of capitalist synchronic ‘energy’, we might better return to

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an older vision of the city as the repository of accumulation, and hence the sedimentation of consolidated, historical, capital. This, of course, is the city of archaeologists and anthropologists, who have traced the emergence of cities several millennia ago in terms of their role as storage devices – in Anthony Giddens’ (1985) formulation as ‘power containers’. Today, I will argue, we can understand cities in rather similar ways, as fundamental sites for the location of stored and accumulated assets and resources which thereby set cities apart from their hinterlands and give them a distinctive role as repository of accumulated capital. We do not get a handle on this through our now dated modernist framing and need, instead, to change our angle of approach. Instead, it is the arguments of Marx, Bourdieu and Piketty which command our attention. For all these writers – though in different ways – the present needs to be placed in the context of longer term historical processes which constrain, shape and direct present dynamics. All three of these writers have used the concept of ‘capital’ to capture the way that past processes produce a residue which then becomes a reactivated force in the present. Marx’s concept of capital sees money as put into motion to augment itself. Marx thus notes that: The simple circulation of commodities – selling in order to buy – is a means of carrying out a purpose unconnected with circulation, namely, the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of wants. The circulation of money as capital is, on the contrary, an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits. (1973: II.IV.19)

Capital becomes an end itself, but as David Harvey (1972, 1975) has brought out in his work, one which needs an infrastructure for it to accumulate. Marx’s insistence on the process of capitalist accumulation leads us to take attention away from the fleeting, cross-sectional encounter which has been the privileged focus of urban analysis towards the long durée of embedded and accumulated history. The fundamental argument is powerfully laid out by Bourdieu, drawing critically on Marx: The social world is accumulated history, and if it is not to be reduced to a discontinuous series of instantaneous mechanical equilibria between agents who are treated as interchangeable particles, one must reintroduce into it the notion of capital and with it, accumulation and all its effects. Capital is accumulated labour (in its materialized form or its ‘incorporated,’ embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor. It is a vis insita, a force inscribed in objective or subjective structures, but it is also a lex insita, the principle underlying the immanent regularities of the social world. It is what makes the games of society – not least, the economic game – something other than simple games of chance offering at every moment the possibility of a miracle. Roulette, which holds out the opportunity of winning a lot of money in a short space of time, and therefore of changing one’s social status quasi-instantaneously, and in which the winning of the previous spin of the wheel can be staked and lost at every new spin, gives a fairly accurate image of this imaginary universe of perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity, a world without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity or acquired properties, in which every moment is perfectly independent of the previous one, every soldier has a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything. (Bourdieu 1985: 1)

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We might take from this argument the recognition that the city should not be seen as the site of the fleeting or chance encounter, or indeed simply of trade and commerce when this is seen to take place without an historical backdrop. We should not be distracted from this point by the role of global cities in extremely rapid financial trading (e.g. as with Castells 1996/1997). I will pursue this argument in a series of analytical steps by discussing how cities are increasingly significant sites for the accumulation of economic, cultural and social capital enumerated by Bourdieu. First, following Piketty’s lead, I will focus on how cities are the paramount site for accumulation of economic capital, and hence for the wealthy elites who have emerged as the principal beneficiaries of capitalist economic trends. I will, second, draw on extensive recent research on cultural capital to argue that the rise of ‘emerging cultural capital’ sees increasing intersection between urban location and the acquisition of capital. I finally turn to reflect on debates about social capital in the city as a means of arguing for the proliferation of networked social capital whereby ties with likeminded people proliferate. Today, the city is the prime site for all these capitals, as well as being the location in which they cross-fertilise and generate additional advantages. My arguments are inevitably syntheses of much more extensive research but will hopefully be enough to stake out my core position. In the last part of the chapter I will bring together my analysis of these.

Economic capital as an urban phenomenon Capital has historically been dependent on the surpluses derived from rent and other kinds of value extraction anchored in the extraction of products of agricultural land. Preindustrial, and even early industrial, elites were therefore a profoundly rural-based formation. The extraction of surpluses from systems of agrarian production operated through towns and cities as the sites from which trade was organised. Urban historians trace the rise of cities during medieval Europe to concerns by merchants and traders to free themselves from the hold of rural noble elites by claiming forms of urban autonomy. The resulting struggles which defined both urban and rural identities were both complex and multifaceted. Agricultural elites sought their own urban power bases, with urban aristocracies becoming a key force in many cities – in Europe, Asia and Africa – down into the 20th century. Monarchical court and religious assemblages dominated capital cities, even though in many nations these moved away from central urban locations in the early modern period (for instance, with royal courts moving out of Paris to Versailles; from central London to Hampton Court and Windsor; from Berlin to Potsdam; and so forth). The terms of this encounter clearly contrasted the city as ‘other’ to the rural ‘seat’ taken to be the fundament of accumulated capital. The urban social ‘season’, in which marriages were organised in a courtly swirl, thus took the aristocratic elite away from their normal rural seats. In many nations, and notably in England and the United States, a profoundly anti-urban current came to dominate, with successful industrialists purchasing estates in rural locations as a sign of their business success. The sustained power of garden city and utopian suburban movements represented very directly the significance of this sentiment that, although the city may be a site for transactions, it was not itself the

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basis for accumulated and stored privilege which depended upon a more rural and landed basis. Today, however, the city has now become a much more significant focus for the accumulation of capital – especially through investment in fixed urban infrastructure. This is the argument of Harvey’s (1975, 1982, 1985) ‘spatial fix’ where capital is necessarily invested in a fixed built environment as a means of addressing its tendencies for overaccumulation. Piketty’s (2014) hugely influential recent work offers a more empirical account which underscores this. Piketty insists that we should not fixate on short-term economic activity, but should instead recognise that the ‘fundamental law of capitalism’ is for returns on capital to be greater than the economic growth rate. By adopting a macroperspective in which economies are looked at in long-term historical terms, rather than through specific episodes of fluctuation, he is able to bring out the power of these longterm forces over a period of two centuries. A key part of his empirical demonstration is that the significance of capital tied up in housing is increasingly important. Consider, for instance, his account of capital in Britain which is reproduced in Figure 5.1. It shows, very clearly, that in pre-industrial Britain in 1700, when national capital exceeded national income by a ratio of 7:1, it was agricultural land which was the main source of this capital, with its share far exceeding housing and other domestic capital (such as in business). Piketty shows that the share of national capital tied up in agricultural land declines precipitously: by the early 20th century it had become miniscule, and by 2010 almost non-existent. By contrast, the share of capital tied up in housing, which had remained steady from 1700 till about 1950, began to rise in recent decades, so that it now is the main single source of capital. In 2010 the amount of capital tied up in housing exceeded the national income by a factor of 3:1. No wonder that the mortgage market is such a key

Value of national capital (% national income)

800% Net foreign capital

700%

Other domestic capital Housing

600%

Agricultual land

500% 400% 300% 200% 100% 0% 1700

1750

1810

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1880

1910

1920

1950

1970

1990

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Notes: National capital is worth about seven years of national income in Britain in 1700 (including four in agricultural land). Sources and series: See piketty.ens.fr/capital21c.

Figure 5.1  Capital in Britain, 1700–2010

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part of the economy. Furthermore, since capital tied up in housing is often bound up with location in prime urban sites where property values are highest, it is the city – and not the countryside – which becomes the fundamental spatial arena for capital accumulation (a point which Harvey in particular has emphasised). We can also see that capital tied up in housing even exceeds other domestic capital such as that tied up with business. It follows that a predominant focus on the city as a site of current economic activity or of corporate location – important though these unquestionably are – should be linked to an understanding of prime urban property sites as heartland for the accumulation of economic capital geared towards wealthy elites. The British case is not unusual. Piketty (2014) shows similar trends in the United States (his Figure 4.10), Canada (4.9), Germany (4.1) and France (3.2). Only in the United States is the capital tied up in housing less than half the total stock of capital in 2010, and even here its proportionate share has risen considerably. Several further points follow from this argument. Many cities have seen the relocation of their prime economic activity away from urban cores towards ex-industrial locations in recent decades. We can think of the closing of central urban markets, of the rise of elite business districts such as La Defense in Paris or the Docklands in London. The deindustrialisation of central urban locations has been a long-term urban phenomenon, as has the counter-urbanisation of populations towards rural and suburban locations. Such trends are a core part of the arguments of those emphasising the need for a ‘distributed’ model of the city which sees the core public centres which occupied the attention of earlier generations of urban sociologists as less significant today (e.g. Amin and Thrift 2002). But it is erroneous to see central urban locations as having become less significant – in terms of their property values they have generally become more marked repositories of capital than in the past. Recently (as in London, New York and Mumbai) urban cores have been subject to increased business as well as property investment. Indeed, one of the striking trends evident in London and other major cities is the way that central urban sites are becoming increasingly the venue for elite residents and property owners, with the ‘export’ of poor and middle-income populations to the urban peripheries (see for instance Cunningham and Savage, 2017). This development can be associated with the enhanced investment value of central urban sites, as well as with the redefinition of central urban locations as part of an elite employment and consumer infrastructure, characterised by a select array of venues which cater for well-heeled residents, visitors and tourists. This kind of central urban location can only with difficulty be interpreted as site of the ephemeral and unpredictable encounter with which we are familiar from urban modernist motifs. The encounters are generally predictable and entirely choreographed around a limited range of consumerist motifs, usually concerned with specific retail, tourist or culinary ‘experiences’. As writers such as Sharon Zukin (2010) have recently emphasised, attempts to claim any kind of authenticity for urban experience are considerably overstated as the elite habitus is stamped onto central urban living, leading it to be predictable, ordered and lucrative – at least for the elites.

The city as locus of cultural capital I now want to broaden my focus away from the accumulation of economic capital alone, since a purely economic analysis of the city misses the cultural aspects which have been

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central to the modernist motif. It is the alleged ‘experience’ of the city, in its sensuous and aesthetic qualities, which we need to address here. In extending our analysis of the significance of accumulation, the thinking of Bourdieu is essential (see, more generally, Savage 2011; Hanquinet et al 2012). Bourdieu argues that certain kinds of cultural tastes and practices become legitimised and seen as socially valuable – while others are denigrated – through prior historical processes of exclusion and legitimation. The city has always been a centre of cultural grandeur and display, of ‘conspicuous consumption’. However, from the Industrial Revolution onwards, as cultural capital became a more significant feature of the inheritance strategies of the privileged when schooling and education became more significant for access to the most desirable forms of employment, the relationship between the city and cultural capital became more fraught. Bourdieu saw cultural capital as fundamentally dependent on the ‘Kantian aesthetic’. Here cultural privilege depended on keeping a certain distance from everyday necessity – so that it could define itself as ‘universal’ and uncontaminated by pragmatic considerations. We might imagine the medieval monastery as the quintessential exemplar of this cultural capital: set in secluded rural retreats so that there was no distraction from the pursuit of God. Within this framing, the urban experience was identified as polluting, plebeian and disruptive, and increasingly so as cities increased in size and became home to a large urban proletariat. The kind of cultural capital which became enshrined in educational systems embraced the values of learning and cultivation which hence shied away from the melee of everyday life which could increasingly be conflated with the urban experience. Of course, this relationship with the city was complex, and it would be too simplistic to see cultural capital as quintessentially anti-urban. In fact a key aesthetic modernist repertoire was to show an interest in the urban experience, as a means of extending the writ of cultural capital into new and ‘risky’ territory. Indeed, this concern was central to the modernist motif which I discussed above. Furthermore, key cultural institutions – notably museums, art galleries, concert halls and academies –were generally located in urban centres, though mainly in distinctive cultural quarters which clearly demarcated them from the urban territories around them. This continues today with the expansive cultural quarters that segregate the Tate Modern from its poorer territories to the south, or with expansive gestures such as the ‘High Line’ connecting to the new Whitney Museum in New York. Nonetheless, if cultural capital was historically agonistic and ambivalent towards the city, recent trends, especially in the economically advanced cities of Europe and North America, have increasingly seen its becoming more directly linked to urban location. This trend is part of the remaking of cultural hierarchies. Over recent decades there is ample evidence that the classic highbrow aesthetic associated with the Kantian aesthetic is on the wane (see Bennett et al. 2009; Coulangeon and Duval 2014; Prieur and Savage 2013; Hanquinet et al 2015; Savage et al. 2015; Savage et al. 2017). This does not mean in any respect that cultural hierarchy has become more pluralist or less unequal – educational attainment, and the ability to perform well in the highly competitive educational arena, are more important than previously – but rather that the stakes have changed. What is now a marker of cultural capital is not a fixed appreciation of the historical canon, but rather an ability to show sophistication by navigating between different genres and forms, to mobilise large stocks of information and to display one’s embodied competences of these multiple formats. The American ethnographer Shamus Khan (2010) identifies this ethos as being one of ‘ease’, of knowing how quickly to ‘gut’ sources of knowledge to be able

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to synthesise quickly. Irony, sophistication and a distance from ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘snobbish’ culture are evident among younger, well-educated professionals. It is only when the Kantian aesthetics became less central to cultural capital that the aesthetic experience of city can be embraced more actively. Cities can now be lived and consumed as resources for cultural capital because the most privileged kinds of aesthetic no longer expect retreat from everyday life and immersion in a secluded environment. It follows that contemporary cultural capital openly and directly embraces the urban. Four empirical indicators of the growing power of urban cultural capital, significantly different from the ‘highbrow’ forms which preceded it, can be identified, as follows. The increasing dominance of the elite urban university. The older university model, linked to the monastic model, celebrated the scholastic retreat from everyday life. Oxbridge or the American ‘college town’ exemplify this ideal. Yet this has now been eclipsed by the increasing dominance of the metropolitan university. In some cases, as with Oxbridge in England, or Harvard/MIT in the United States, traditional universities can retain their elite position by virtue of their location in the hinterlands of large city regions. In the 2014–2015 QS world rankings, the most highly placed universities were those in metropolitan locations. Of the top ten world universities, four were in central urban locations (MIT, Imperial, Harvard, UCL) and another five were part of major city regions, an hour or less away from central urban sites (Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, Caltech, Princeton). Only Yale, from the top ten, languishes at some distance from a major urban location. There is a shift in the prominence of urban universities at the expense of those in more rural locations. We can put this point another way: it is now impossible for a city to claim prominence without having high-profile universities. The vitality of urban universities is itself part of the politics of contemporary urban boosterism. It is also evident that urban universities are central drivers of urban city centre redevelopment: they are increasingly important producers of the urban infrastructure. But we might also note, in keeping with our arguments about accumulation, that it is invariably the ‘old’ elite universities whose relative advantages over other universities are becoming more marked. Rather than new forms of expertise and knowledge allowing new universities to develop, it is the accentuated historical sites which are paramount. The role of the urban sporting complex. Contemporary forms of cultural capital mobilise interests in sport and physical exercise much more directly than in previous modes of cultural capital which were based on the Cartesian abstraction of the intellect from physical and corporeal activity (see e.g. Bennett et al. 2009; Prieur and Savage 2011, 2013). This shift generates a new urban sensibility, since sporting venues are quintessentially urban rather than national venues, so that these modes of cultural activity mark out an urban sphere. This is especially manifest in Olympic competitions, but is also profoundly marked through football stadia and the like. These developments have permitted the formation, for instance, of a framework of European cities (Manchester, Barcelona, Milan, etc.) which are characterised by successful European football teams, as well as the close overlap between urban style and sporting prowess (where David Beckham’s embrace of Manchester, Los Angeles and Paris was emblematic). The prominence of urban cosmopolitanism. Emerging forms of cultural capital are less oriented towards a national frame of reference than their predecessors. They are more likely to embrace ‘cosmopolitan’ interests and musical and artistic forms from a greater variety of locations. However, as demonstrated by Savage et al. (2005, 2011), this cosmopolitanism is not all embracing, but is focused on cultural production in other large

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metropolitan centres. It thus generates referential interest in the cultural forms of large cities elsewhere and champions elite urban cosmopolitanism. We see this amply demonstrated in the location of designer shops and fashion houses in high-profile urban locations which recycle apparently cosmopolitan idioms between select urban destinations. Urban kitsch becomes a cultural paradigm which becomes a marker of the city. When Harvey Nichols came to Leeds in the 1990s, it was seen as a marker of that city’s progress. The hegemony of urban gentrification. Under the older Kantian aesthetic, cultural capital was fundamentally distinguished from the urban – even when modernist currents involved a celebration of the ‘detached’ flaneur wandering in, but not entirely embedded in, the urban milieu. Architecturally, areas of highbrow cultural capital within urban locations evoked rural and ‘estate’ ideals to announce their symbolic separation from the city: consider Bloomsbury in London with its pastoral squares and extensive urban gardens. However, over the past 30 years we can identify a new mode of ‘cultured’ urban living which is more fully ‘at home’ within urban space. These are, quintessentially, gentrified areas of large cities in which warehouses, areas of previously working-class houses, etc., are identified as desirable areas. Zukin (2010) has recently identified this as the recovery of interest in the urban ‘authentic’, and Butler and Robson (2003) have emphasised how these new ethics of urban life are differentiated from what are seen to be more ‘staid’ and ‘respectable’ forms of middle-class culture. The four components above intersect with the accumulation of economic capital that we discussed earlier. Cultural ‘work’ in a location raises property prices and allows those with the cultural capital also to achieve economic rewards. This interplay between cultural and economic capital differs from earlier models in which cultural distinction was more separated from economic wealth. The politics of urban location now make this differentiation much more blurred. A new bohemia (Lloyd 2004) reconfigures the relationships between economic and cultural capital, as the presence of artists and artistic dynamism in urban areas tend to give an added value for those who want to embody a specific urban cultural capital. To put this bluntly, accumulated cultural capital is increasingly dependent on its prime sites in urban locations.

Cities, sociation and social capital Social capital is the last of the three accumulated capitals to consider. At the outset it may seem strange to see cities as the site of social capital, for they have usually been identified as sites of transience, anomie and the breakdown of ‘community’, and therefore the arenas of lost ‘social capital’. Transient and fleeting relationships are characteristically seen to be central to urban experience from the classic sociological arguments of Tonnies and Wirth, and as famously articulated by Simmel. These themes, of urban dislocation and anomie, have fed through to the debates on the decline of social capital and communitarian concerns about the fall of the urban public sphere (Putnam 2000; Blokland and Savage 2008). The dominant motif about the city is therefore that it is marked by the relatively weak accumulation of social capital, compared with that found in rural locations. However, there is increasing evidence that in fact the contemporary city might actually be the location for social capital, if this is understood to take a ‘bridging’ or ‘weak tie’ form.

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Much of the conventional literature on the ‘decline of community’ focuses on bonds of kinship and neighbouring arising from long-term residence. It is thus assumed that the greater mobility of urban life weakens such ‘primary associations’. In fact, this argument has always been contested, even in its own terms. Ample urban ethnographies have demonstrated the remaking of community ties amid the new migrant and settler communities which flock to cities. In this respect, cities are as much about the remaking of social ties as they are about their disruption. Even though urban communities can be highly divided, by class, ethnicity, religion and other identifications, their resilience is well attested. More than this, however, sociologists have become increasingly interested in the power of what Mark Granovetter (1973) identifies as ‘weak ties’ – those of acquaintanceship rather than deep familiarity. It is ties of this kind which can be used to mobilise information most robustly as theymaximise the range of sources one can get access to – Robert Putnam talks about it as being ‘bridging social capital’. However, this can take two rather different forms. Putnam appeals to the communitarian idea that bridging social capital allows us to know a range of people from different social locations, thus allowing us to gain greater contacts with a diversity of people. On the other hand, bridging social capital might also link us to lots of people rather like ourselves, but who are not necessarily living close to us. It is this kind of bridging social capital that might be seen to flourish in urban environments. It was Claude Fischer (1982) who first found an analytical way of registering the significance of urban social capital through his argument that cities allowed a way for people to elaborate social networks of like-minded people, so encouraging the generation of social networks which are based on homophily. Rather than being based on neighbourhood ties, where people mix with those living around them, regardless of occupation or status, urban location allows one to seek out those who have specific points of interest – based on shared lifestyle, occupation, orientation or whatever. This argument has considerable ramifications for understanding the accumulation of social capital. Cities become locations in which seeking out your own kind permit you to gain strategic resources which differentiate you from comparable people in other locations. An example of how cities might indeed be a distinctive venue for ‘bridging social capital’ can be seen in the Great British Class Survey (see Cunningham & Savage 2015). Figure 5.2 uses data from the GBCS which draws on the ‘position generator’ question which asks respondents to identify whether they were socially acquainted with members of 34 different occupations, ranging from high-status aristocrats and chief executive officers down through professional and white-collar jobs to manual and routine jobs. It was thus possible to distinguish both whether respondents knew a greater or lesser number of people from different occupations in various locations of the UK and whether they were more or less likely to know respondents with occupations of higher or lower status. Figure 5.2 examines the number of different occupations which are known, and shows that in rural areas people tend to have higher scores. We can readily understand this, insofar as if one lives in a relatively small-town environment, one might bump into people from different walks of life – ranging from the local postal delivery worker to the local bank manager. By contrast, in larger urban environments this range of social contact may be less likely. By contrast, Figure 5.3 is an inverse of Figure 5.2, showing that respondents are more likely to identify social contacts from occupations of a higher status in urban areas. The logic is easy to grasp: in busy and intense urban environments, we develop extensive contacts of those who we have some contact with.

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Figure 5.2  GBCS social capital: number of different contacts It follows that if cities are increasingly the location for prosperous professionals and managers, their contacts may also turn out to be similar kinds of people, and hence the average status of their contacts is higher. Figure 5.3 shows that this is exactly what we find in the British context, where London, in particular, but also Glasgow, Edinburgh, Sheffield and Birmingham stand out here. Clearly, it would be interesting to examine

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Figure 5.3  GBCS social capital: status

patterns in other nations, but it seems as if cities are sites in which the association attached to weak ties can, in a sense, be stored within a location in which numerous people are attached and can be mobilised when necessary social networks in cities have a powerful transactional role which means they can powerfully overlap to mobilise those with economic and cultural capital, so leading to overlaps and synergies between these capitals.

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These are not abstract geographies. In the June 2016 referendum which decided that the UK would leave the European Union, it was those urban spaces with high amounts of economic, social and cultural capital which voted to ‘remain’ (Savage 2016). Cityspaces appear increasingly differentiated from the areas around them, and this difference has great political importance.

Conclusion My argument here is that cities should not just be identified with sensory fleeting experience or sensation, important though this is to the urban experience. We also should see them as a repository of accumulated capital. I have pursued this argument through showing how not only economic, but also cultural and social, capital are increasingly associated with the urban locations. This analytical step allows us to see how in the early 21st century cities have become the site for those who have privileged stocks of capital, and more specifically are sites which allow convertibility between capitals. Cities are hence the prized and defining sites for elite formation today. This is a fundamental facet of what has elsewhere been defined as the ‘urban vortex’, as highly centralised, volatile and discriminatory urban processes (Cunningham with Savage 2015; Hall and Savage 2016; Savage et al. 2015). My argument can be summarised in four steps. First, the contemporary city is distinctive in all three of the capitals we have discussed – economic, cultural and social. In previous decades this was less apparent: much economic capital was associated with agricultural holdings; cultural capital was distant from the city; and social capital might have been greater in small-town environments. But in the 21st century, I have argued, there are good reasons for assuming that all three forms of capital, in their contemporary formats, now flourish in urban environments, so intensifying the association between cities and capital accumulation. Second, it follows from this that this co-incidence between the forms of capital permits spin-off and conversion between them in an urban context, so permitting the kind of ‘vortex’ processes which Hall and Savage identify. The contemporary city is defined by the potential for emergent effects as these three kinds of accumulated advantages intersect. There are abundant examples: elite urban universities; and buoyant urban housing markets, especially in prime locations. Third, it follows from these arguments that the hopes of ‘trickle-down’ economics are greatly overstated. Cities remain socially diverse locations, with very different populations endeavouring to get by and get on, many of whom do this to great effect. However, it is the way that those with the top resources can especially benefit which I emphasise here. We can thus anticipate increasing urban division and polarisation, in which wealthy elites pull away from the majority of urban dwellers who cannot rely on sedimented or accumulated resources. Urban housing markets which ‘lock out’ large proportions of the population who cannot afford the rental or ownership prices are a marked example of this trend. Fourth, just as a range of economists from Piketty to Stiglitz insist, we might thereby see cities as the prime venue in which ‘top-end’ elites congregate. It is abundantly clear that the past 30 years have seen the dramatic expansion of the ‘super wealthy’ who benefit the most from the accumulation of capital – which is indeed a process which they ‘drive’. And this group, we can argue, is quintessentially an urban elite class, one which is defined

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by its presence and role in wealthy global cities. Here we see a fundamental shift from previous centuries in which landed elites have been predominant. Urbanism today should not simply be understood as a process in which disparate and diverse populations mingle – it is also associated with the profound and far-reaching formation of an increasingly powerful elite class whose footprint defines contemporary capitalism. Cities today are thus very ancient, as well as highly dynamic and modern, phenomena. They are the arena in which old forces are most clearly manifested, and come to have huge significance on the present and future. This will colour the experiences and sensibilities of all kinds of urban residents and visitors.

References Amin, A. (2007). Re-thinking the urban social. City, 11(1), 100–114. Amin, A., & Thrift, N. (2002). Cities: reimagining the urban. Cambridge, Polity Press. Bauman, Zygmunt (2007) Liquid Modernity: Living in an age of uncertainty, Cambridge, Polity. Bennett, Tony, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde, Modesto Gayo-Cal and David Wright (2009) Culture, Class Distinction, London, Routledge. Berman, Marshall (1983) All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The experience of modernity, London, Verso. Blokland, Talja and Mike Savage (eds) (2008) Networked Urbanism: Social capital on the ground, Aldershot, Ashgate. Bourdieu, Pierre (1985) ‘The forms of capital’, in J. Richardson (ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, New York, Greenwood, 241–258. Bradbury, Malcolm (1976) The Cities of Modernism, London, Fontana. Brenner, Neil (2013) ‘Theses on urbanization’, Public Culture, 25, 1: 85–114. Brenner, Neil and Christian Schmid (2014) ‘The “urban age” in question’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38, 3: 731–755. Butler, T., & Robson, G. (2003). London calling: the middle classes and the re-making of inner London. Berg Publishers. Castells, Manuel (1977) The Urban Question, London, Edward Arnold. Castells, Manuel (1996/1997) The Network Society, 3 vols, Oxford, Blackwell. Coulangeon, Phillippe and Julien Duval (2014) The Routledge Companion to Bourdieu’s Distinction, London, Routledge. Cunningham, N., & Savage, M. (2015). The secret garden? Elite metropolitan geographies in the contemporary UK. The Sociological Review, 63(2), 321–348. Cunningham, N., and Savage, M., (2017). `An intensifying and elite city New geographies of social class and inequality in contemporary London’, City, 21(1), 25–46. Fischer, Claude (1982) To Dwell among Friends: Personal networks in town and city, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Giddens, Anthony (1985) A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism: The nation-state and violence, Cambridge, Polity. Granovetter, Mark S. (1973) ‘The strength of weak ties’, American Journal of Sociology, 78, 6: 1360–1380. Hall, Suzi and Mike Savage (2016) ‘Animating the urban vortex: sociological urgencies’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40, 1: 82–95. Hanquinet, L., Roose, H., & Savage, M. (2014). The eyes of the beholder: Aesthetic preferences and the remaking of cultural capital. Sociology, 48(1), 111–132. Hanquinet, Laurie, Mike Savage and Louise Callier (2012) ‘Elaborating Bourdieu’s field analysis in urban studies: cultural dynamics in Brussels’, Urban Geography, 33, 4: 508–529. Harding, Alan and Talja Blokland (2014) Urban Theory: A critical introduction to power, cities and urbanism in the 21st century, London, Sage. Harvey, David (1975) ‘The geography of capitalist accumulation: a reconstruction of the Marxian theory’. Antipode, 2: S.9–S.21. Harvey, David (1982) The Limits to Capital, Oxford, Blackwell. Harvey, David (1985) ‘The geopolitics of capitalism’, in Derek Gregory and John Urry (eds), Social Relations and Spatial Structure, Basingstoke, Macmillan, S.128–S.163. Khan, Shamus (2010) Privilege, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. Kumar, Krishan (1978) Prophecy and Progress, London, Penguin.

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Lloyd, R. (2004). The neighborhood in cultural production: Material and symbolic resources in the new bohemia. City & Community, 3(4), 343–372. Marx, Karl (1973) Capital, Vol. 1, London, Penguin. Parker, Simon (2004) Urban Theory and the Urban Experience: Encountering the city, London, Routledge. Piketty, Thomas (2014) Capital in the 21st Century, Yale, CT, Yale University Press. Prieur, A., & Savage, M. (2011). Updating cultural capital theory: A discussion based on studies in Denmark and in Britain. Poetics, 39(6), 566-580. Prieur, Annick and Mike Savage (2013) ‘Emerging forms of cultural capital’, European Societies, 15, 2: 246–267. Putnam, Robert (2000) Bowling Alone, New York, Simon and Schuster. Robinson, Jenny (2006) Ordinary Cities: Between modernity and development, London, Routledge. Robinson, Jenny (2011) ‘Cities in a world of cities: the comparative gesture’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35, 1: 1–23. Robinson, Jenny (2013) ‘The urban now: theorising cities beyond the new’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 16: 659–677. Saunders, Peter (2003) Social Theory and the Urban Question, London, Routledge. Savage, Mike (2009) ‘Against epochalism: numbers, narrative and socio-cultural change’, Cultural Sociology, 3, 1: 217–238. Savage, Mike (2011) ‘The lost urban sociology of Pierre Bourdieu’, in Garry Bridge and Sophie Watson (eds) Companion to the City, Oxford, Blackwell. Savage, Mike. (2016). ‘End class wars’. Nature, 537(7621), 475–479. Savage, Mike, Niall Cunningham, Fiona Devine, Sam Friedman, Daniel Laurison, Lisa Mckenzie, Andrew Miles, Helene Snee and Paul Wakeling (2015) Social Class in the 21st Century, London, Penguin. Savage, Mike and Laurie Hanquinet, with Niall Cunningham and Johs Hjellbrekke (2017) ‘Urban cultural capital’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, in press. Savage, Mike, Alan Warde and Kevin Ward (2003) Urban Sociology, Capitalism and Modernity, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2nd edition. Simone, AbdulMaliq (2004) For the City Yet to Come: Urban life in four African cities, Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Simone, AbdulMaliq (2009) City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the crossroads, New York, Routledge. Soja, E. W. (1989). Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of space in critical social theory. London, Verso. Swyngedouw, E. (2011). Interrogating post-democratization: Reclaiming egalitarian political spaces. Political geography, 30(7), 370–380. Zukin, Sharon (2010) Naked City: The death and life of authentic urban places, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

6 Reimagining Chinese London C a ro l i n e K n o w l e s a n d R o g e r B u r ro w s

Introduction The accelerating pace of cultural, socio-economic and technological change is now such that the academic social sciences often struggle to maintain viable conceptualisations of the realities of contemporary social life. This problem is nowhere more acute than in contemporary urban studies, where myriad complex, emergent and spatial processes collide in a manner that the social sciences find increasingly difficult to describe adequately, frame or represent analytically (Amin and Thrift, 2002a). Our concern in this chapter is to focus on, what we consider to be, one particularly acute instance of the social sciences not keeping pace with the emerging realities of contemporary city life: the changing role and significance of the global movement of both people and capital, with a Chinese lineage, for understanding processes of change in many cities across the world. One particularly clear instance of a city where the analytics have not kept pace with the empirical realities is, we argue here, London. Not only is China now the second biggest source of visa applications to the UK (with the great majority headed for the capital), but huge amounts of Chinese wealth, in its many forms, is set to re-sculpt the city – tendencies that are only likely to accelerate as ever-closer relationships are forged between current UK government policy and practice and the complex dynamics of Chinese economic growth (The Economist, 2015).1

An urban scale? Hitherto, studies of migration have tended to be framed at the spatial scale of the nation state. This is not to deny of course that state borders are crucial in the regulation of both

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migration flows and the movement of capital but – as we hope to demonstrate – a focus on the urban scale offers up new insights to the study of the mutually constitutive nature of both migration and city life. Why should this be the case? Although cities have long been conceived of as the territories of migrant habitation, they have often been conceptualised as little more than containers, reflecting larger scales of activity generated elsewhere (Alexander and Knowles, 2005). However, many contemporary conceptualisations of the urban condition have recovered the relatively autonomous agency of cities in generating the social processes they also ground. These conceptualisations stress, inter alia: continuous ‘city-making’, emergence and composition (Amin and Thrift, 2002a; 2002b; Swanton, 2010); interactions between architectural, material and human fabrics (Boutros and Straw, 2010; Ingold, 2000); and, crucially for us, the idea that cities are constituted in the multiple mobilities that converge upon them (Amit, 2007; Clifford, 1997; Ingold, 2004; Middleton, 2009; Urry, 2010 [2000]). Conceived of as junctions in a shifting matrix of local and trans-local routes (Knowles, 2014), cities can be conceptualised through the routine mobile habits of the residents, sojourners and temporary visitors who generate them. More than points of entry, exit and transit, more than places of long- and short-term residence (Smith and Eade, 2008: 5–7), cities are key social spaces grounding transnational practices and routing connected mobile subjects pursuing translocal connections and, indeed, disconnections. Trans-local migrant ethnicities are imbricated in urban space through everyday bodily encounters (Amin and Thrift, 2002b; Swanton, 2010) and through personal urban cartographies (Knowles and Harper, 2009). To paraphrase Swanton (2010: 450), this takes migration into the very fabric of the city and its visual economy, making possible a more fluid, emergent and provisional mapping of both new migrant ethnicities and cities. Cities then are crucial arenas in condensing the challenges we face in social scientific research on ethnicity and migration: places where lives are generated; where traces of elsewhere are registered in architectural, commercial, religious and other surfaces of emergence; as well as in bodies in motion on the journeys of everyday life. Human and non-human trajectories converge on cities, and tracing these reveals (otherwise hidden) ethnic-migrant lives, journeys and activities. For us cities are the appropriate scale at which to develop an analysis of migration. In cities, new sources of migration, new class hierarchies and ever-emerging forms of discrimination are made visible. The analysis of Chinese migration to the UK thus appropriately centres on London – the capital city – because it grounds more Chinese activities and migrants than anywhere else in the UK. In choosing the term Chinese London instead of the Chinese in London we intend an urban focus and a more inclusive analysis of trans-local processes routed through London than the study of migrant bodies alone can offer. London then both condenses Chinese Britain and displays its specificity as a (partly) Chinese city: a city that grounds and routes translocal journeys, of various kinds, that pass through China.2

Cartographies of Chinese London The Chinese are, of course, one of the world’s great diasporas. The World Bank identifies China as the fourth largest country of emigration in the world, with 33 million ethnic Chinese living outside of Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong by the end of the

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twentieth century (Skeldon, 2011), a figure likely to be closer to 50 million now. This definition of China and the Chinese is, of course, controversial, with Hong Kong struggling to maintain its (limited) Special Administrative Region (SAR) autonomy and Taiwan its independence in the face of Mainland efforts at incorporation. The Hong Kong Chinese (‘Hong Kongers’ as they often call themselves) and the Taiwanese have established important political and cultural differences between themselves and ‘Mainlanders’ in popular discourse, and there are, of course, substantial Chinese populations in both Singapore and Malaysia. The term Chinese in this chapter incorporates these complexities in order to refer to a multitude of ethnic, linguistic and cultural differences. Although a diaspora of this magnitude is impressive, it is but a small proportion of China’s (1.3 billion) population. Although historically the Chinese diaspora outside Southeast Asia has favoured the USA, Canada and Australia, these preferences are sensitive to regulatory conditions in these countries and, in recent years, this has opened up new routes to the UK, and London in particular, bringing the kinds of urban change this chapter details, and contributing to broader trends in the city, as it is further shaped by the requirements of wealthy people from all over the world living in and passing through London (Short, 2016). The social and built architectures of neoliberalism both absorb and are refashioned by movements of people and money through key cities. London is, clearly, one of these cities (Atkinson et al., 2016; Burrows et al., 2016). Despite the presence of Chinese sailors in Liverpool, Cardiff and London for over a hundred years, by the end of the Second World War there were less than 5,000 Chinese in the UK. A small number of arrivals from Hong Kong throughout the 1960s, both underwritten by the business of empire and restricted by the (1962) Commonwealth Immigration Act, generated chain migration into the restaurant trades as one of few openings, thus consolidating Chinese Britain in the public imagination. The number of recorded Chinese in the UK had risen to 156,938 by the time of the 1991 census (Cheng, 1996: 161) but had reached 379,503 – a population that is slightly larger than that of the city of Bristol – 20 years later (2011 Census). However, as we will discuss below, this figure is likely to be a significant underestimation of the actual population because of the numbers of undocumented entrants (Pharoah, 2009). Almost one-third of this number – some 124,250 – were based in London, with another 53,061 living elsewhere in South East England. The North West recorded a population of 48,049 and the West Midlands some 31,274. In England as a whole just 0.72 per cent of the population was recorded as Chinese. A more granular analysis of local authorities and districts reveals that the highest concentration was in Cambridge (with a population of 4,454 or some 3.6 per cent). Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Oxford, Exeter, Liverpool, Sheffield and Southampton – all urban areas with ‘Russell Group’ (the national nomenclature for supposedly elite) universities – also possess significant Chinese populations. This reflects the marketing strategies in China of many cash-strapped UK universities and the choices made by Chinese students. (Of this, more later.) These urban concentrations aside, the UK’s Chinese migrants are otherwise highly dispersed. The only local authority in England and Wales with no recorded Chinese residents was the Scilly Isles. At an even more detailed level of granularity, only 6.4 per of the 7,669 wards in the UK recorded no Chinese residents (2011 Census data). Some wards have a single Chinese resident, a couple, or what may be a small family or a small number of families or individuals. Single- and double-digit numbers in electoral wards are not uncommon. Thus Chinese migrants are an integral, if subtle, part of the fabric of

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the nation, dispersed through suburban and countryside locations as well as concentrated in the key cities and around the more prestigious universities. London, with a recorded Chinese population of 124,250 (1.52 per cent) (2011 Census), is very much at the centre of Chinese Britain. Unofficial estimates are higher, up to over 300,000, to account for the (uncountable) undocumented (Pharoah, 2009). Dispersed throughout all inner and outer London boroughs, the highest concentrations are in the City of London (263 or 3.57 per cent) and the boroughs of Tower Hamlets (8,109 or 3.19 per cent), Camden (6,493 or 2.95 per cent), Southwark (8,074 or 2.80 per cent) and Westminster (5,917 or 2.70 per cent). Although Westminster appears less important as a Chinese space than these other three London boroughs, at even more granular postcode level the data (2011 Census) reveal the highest concentration of Chinese residence in the country (26.2 per cent) in Soho’s China Town, a Hong Kong Cantonese/ Fujianese space and an icon of Chinese London established in the 1950s. While China Town still supplies Chinese food – in both its restaurants and grocery stores – rising real estate values are forcing (Hong Kong) Chinese businesses out, ironically, as we will see, driven in part by (overseas) Chinese investment. Chinese London is now primarily about new migrants instead of the settled UK-born. China-born migrants in London boroughs form, on average, two-thirds of the recorded ethnic Chinese population (2011 Census). The gap between UK- and China-born populations is highest in the City of London, Camden, Islington and Kensington and Chelsea, all some of the wealthiest parts of London (Atkinson et  al., 2016; Burrows et  al., 2016). And more of them are from the Chinese Mainland than from Hong Kong (2011 Census), reconfiguring the historic Hong Kong Cantonese connection. Canary Wharf – at the centre of the eastward extension of London’s financial district – also shows a significant proportion of Chinese residence (15.6 per cent). London’s now disappeared nineteenth-century China Town in East London’s Limehouse has the highest number (1,792) of Chinese residents, if not the highest concentration (12.3 per cent). Once occupied by Chinese sailors, Chinese students at Queen Mary, University of London and young Chinese professionals working in financial services have now reoccupied it. Limehouse is mid-way between London’s two financial districts in the Square Mile and its eastward extension in Canary Wharf, making it a perfect location in which to live. Old Chinese London geographies are thus reanimated by new lives and for new purposes. Chinese London is, as we will describe, a complex work in progress.

Some prevailing perspectives Being one of the UK’s neglected minorities is perhaps reason enough to make the Chinese the focus of a chapter. For the most part they are positioned as a small, successful and ambiguously racialised population, attributes which exclude them – in all but one respect, which we will come to later – from the ‘immigrant problem’ framework of both government policy and of much of the social sciences.3 At a practical, lived level, in absorbing migrants the city opens up new possibilities and perspectives in their lives and in the ways in which they are conceptualised and administered. Hitherto, it would be fair to say that the Chinese have been widely regarded as a ‘successful minority’, with Chinese children over-achieving educationally relative to the white British population, as

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well as establishing high rates of entrepreneurial activity (Cheng, 1996; Pang and Law, 1998; Parker, 1995). As Cheng (1996: 179) pointed out some two decades ago: ‘The Chinese are well educated, the proportion of college educated and above surpassing that of the white population. They have a lower unemployment rate and are disproportionately over represented in professional and skilled occupations.’ The same data, however, showed that in the 1990s 41 per cent of them were still working in catering (Cheng, 1996: 172). In general, academic studies have been relatively sparse: Broady (1958) produced an early empiricist account of the Chinese in London; Jackson and Garvey (1974) showed (perhaps unwarranted) concern for Chinese children in the pages of New Society; Watson (1977) discussed the Hong Kong Chinese in the catering trade; the Swann Committee Report (1985) – Education for All – mentioned Chinese children, but its concern settled on other lives inflected by racism in supposedly ‘under-achieving’ African Caribbean communities; and, in drawing attention to a Chinese Britain that was little exposed, much less understood, Parker (1995) and Song (1999) probed sites of everyday Chinese life and identity-making in restaurants with UK-born Chinese youth. As Parker (1995: 2) notes, settled Chinese migrants to the UK were left out of the ‘new ethnicities’ conversation, which focused on larger population groups from South Asia and the Caribbean. This was in part, undoubtedly, a question of low numbers. But there were other significant differences as well. The larger minorities, especially those of African Caribbean descent, were (and still are): targets of excessive policing (Hall et al., 1978; Keith and Murji, 1990); subject to having their communities raided (Gordon, 1986); subject to inappropriate social work intervention, which often misread family circumstances (Ahmed, 1981; Knowles, 1990); (mis)understood as educational failures (Carby, 1982; Jansen, 1990); problematized by health care agencies (Rack, 1981; Wallis 1981); and associated with wide-ranging sporadic public disorder often described as inner city ‘riots’ (Gilroy, 1982; Solomos, 1989). Meanwhile South Asians’ family practices were scrutinised and pathologised by immigration officials and local authorities (Alexander, 2005) and were accorded a generally problematic status by state and quasi-state agencies (Gilroy, 1987: 11). Not being the target of a regulatory apparatus marks a distinctive set of locations for Chinese Britain. Often regarded as a ‘model minority’ and living beneath official consideration carries a set of relative advantages: Chinese Britain then has, hitherto, been largely regarded as irrelevant rather than problematic. This assessment diverted official anxieties about ethnic segregation and the requirement of ‘integration’ away from the Chinese. These anxieties settled instead on South Asians and debate about whether the UK experienced residential ethnic segregation, and if so whether this was voluntary or enforced through mechanisms of racial discrimination, ensued (Rex, 1981; Smith, 1989). The disturbances in northern English towns in 2001 brought new (Labour Party) impetus to political demands for integration and rising anxiety about community cohesion identifying people of South Asian decent in particular as a ‘problem’. British Muslims bear the brunt of the authorities’ integration anxieties. These took a radical turn following the London bombings of 2005 (Arnold, 2012: 64), turning Muslims from poorly integrated subjects into potential ‘enemies within’, and the ‘legitimate’ targets of anti-terror tactics as conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq deepen, and integration becomes evermore freighted with nation-state loyalties. This coincides with a Europe-wide trend, with which the UK collaborates, towards compulsory integration – in English-language proficiency and knowledge of life in the UK – as

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a precondition for settlement and citizenship. While the Chinese are not the main targets of this ‘integration-anxiety’, they are inexorably drawn into its agendas on account of their presumed concentration in particular areas of the economy and on the judgement of some of their academic advocates that they suffer from isolation and lead largely ‘Chinese lives’ (Pharoah, 2009: 16).

New perspectives? Although the specifics of Chinese circumstances differentiate them from other minorities, particularly their relationship with the state, they are inevitably drawn into the dominant paradigm of the British post-war consensus on immigration: all migrants are problematic and the fewer and the more assimilated they are, the better. Thus aligned with other migrants as the targets of exclusionary and integrationist moves, Chinese migrants are also drawn into the dominant (political and academic) defence of migrants from these judgements. These cast them as victims of poverty, exclusion and isolation, circumstances to be addressed through various forms of improved service provision. This assessment of Chinese Britain is certainly exemplified in the circumstances of undocumented migrants and their traffickers. In The Changing Chinese Community in London, Lam et al. (2009) pursue this ‘darker side’ of the UK’s ‘successful minority’ exemplified in the tragic deaths of the 24 (undocumented and gang-driven) Morecombe Bay cockle pickers (in 2004), revealing an exploited, downtrodden and largely invisible Chinese population, demonstrating the salience of class and inequality in the politics of migration. In recent updates the circumstances of Chinese migrants (Pharoah, 2009) hint at both success and disadvantage, but persist in the old refrain of Hong Kong (Cantonese) origins routed through restaurants and long resettled in the UK. Police raids on Chinese homes and businesses in China Town reveal state suspicion that it harbours undocumented migrants. It is time, we suggest, for a subtler, more contemporary, portrait of Chinese Britain – Chinese London in particular – to be produced. The broad contours of this have already been hinted at in the crude statistical data discussed above. These data suggest that Chinese London is now predominantly from Mainland China and it is China born. To the bodies and cartographies of migrant Chinese London we must also add the aspirations of intending migrants. New visa applications show brisk Chinese–UK business. In the 1990s the visa section of the British Embassy in Beijing operated with a dozen staff; by 2012 more than 250 staff were processing 300,000 applications. ‘Before entry’ visa applications (of all types) for 2011 show that China, with 283,008 applications, ranks second only to India (top with 462,507 applications) while Hong Kong generated a further 8,574 applications. The changing role of China in the world has produced a new kind of Chinese migrant to the UK (Pharoah, 2009). It remains to be seen whether the eagerness of the UK government to do business with China produces a more permissive regime around Chinese migration. Currently there is little evidence of this. This Chinese London is not poor: it lives in ‘good’ neighbourhoods, and, if residence is any indicator of class and employment locations, it works in financial services and it attends the ‘better’ universities. In order to understand who these new kinds of migrants are, we need to understand the new architectures of UK immigration policy.

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The new architectures of UK immigration policy New and emerging cartographies of Chinese London are underscored by recent changes in the architecture of UK immigration policy. This has significant consequences, not least in consolidating a class bias in state productions of the ethnic immigrant. The new architectures re-embed old ones: UK border controls still implement the post-war political consensus that immigrants – even successful and supposedly well-behaved ones – are problematic and thus their numbers must be strictly controlled. But pulling in the opposite direction to the ‘closing door’ is the desire (of all OECD countries) to benefit from the supposed free good of a mobile global elite defined in ‘skills’ and ‘financial’ terms as innovators and investors. In adjusting the architecture of immigration policy to admit elite migrants, London is in competition with other cities across the USA, Canada, Australia and East Asia (Short, 2016). When it comes to Chinese migrants the free good of educated professional migrants conceals even bigger opportunities. These opportunities are artefacts of China’s growing economic and political influence: the prospect of large-scale Chinese investment in the UK; and the extension of business opportunities in Chinese markets to UK companies. Anxious to forge all sorts of connections with China, the UK business and border agencies must tread carefully through Chinese London. Such connections operate through interlocutors: through bilingual, talented, business-savvy people who know how to operate in both places. This takes us to the shaping of Chinese Britain through the new architectures of border control. From 2008 (fully implemented in 2011) the architecture of UK border control shifted from a focus on permanent migration for settlement to temporary migration, and from ‘unskilled’ to ‘highly skilled’ migrants. This evaluation of skill is, of course, misleading. All migrants are skilled in the sense in which skill involves a practical knowledge of the world and how to operate within it in navigating landscapes of new settlement (Ingold, 2000). But only some migrants’ skills count and only some skills transfer; this calibration of skill constitutes, in part, the racial grammar of global migration (Knowles, 2017; Knowles and Harper, 2009). The new rules, and the points-based system on the back of which they are implemented, explicitly favour wealthy, elite, migrants. ‘High-value migrants’ meet the criteria for what are now called ‘tier one’ visas issued to those who display ‘exceptional talent’. These migrants must be ‘internationally recognised as world leaders or potential world-leading talent’. They will be entrepreneurs who want to set up or take over a business; graduate entrepreneurs with ‘world-class’ innovative ideas or business skills wishing to establish businesses in the UK; investors who want to make a ‘substantial financial investment in the UK’, a provision aimed at so-called high-networth individuals (HNWIs) with a minimum of a million pounds to invest. ‘Tier two’ visas facilitate intercompany transfers ‘for employees of multinational companies’ wanting to deploy staff in their UK operations, and skills transfers to the UK from other countries through graduate traineeships. Ministers of religion and sportspeople, including those who fill football’s Premier League, are eligible for these visas. So, too, are a small number of skilled workers on a quota basis – the 2014–2015 quota was 20,700 – earning between £35,000 and £150,000. Those earning over £150,000 are not subject to quotas. While the thinking behind this shift to ‘millionaire migrants’ and migrants with elite credentials promotes London over competitor cities, it has social consequences in the lives of other migrants, particularly those who are long settled in the UK. These

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changes are yet to manifest themselves in our understanding of Chinese London as it shows up in the 2011 Census. But we can see that even in 2011 things were already moving in this direction, towards the prioritisation of privilege and wealth in recasting London’s ‘Chineseness’. Because net migration figures are so politically sensitive and must, under current political thinking, show a downward trend, the burden of restriction falls on other migrants. Migrants heading into the so-called unskilled end of the labour market – for example, in catering, which traditionally provides migrant starter-jobs for those whose skills and qualifications do not translate easily to new locations – are squeezed out as this channel closes. Migrants joining family already settled in the UK are subjected to increasingly stringent English-language tests and income checks that demand proof of (formal) income above £18,600 a year in support of family sponsorship – another squeeze on poor settled migrants. This reorientation shifts migration away from established directions of travel: from the post-colonies, and from claims of belonging and long-established association, to claims based on accumulated assets of various kinds. The new architectures of border control consign poor and ‘unskilled’ workers and those joining family to the mercy of traffickers, profiteers and exploiters of various stripes, and leave them travelling by unsafe methods. In cutting off legal channels of entry, the new border controls can only increase illegal migration. UK Border Agency raids on Chinese neighbourhoods harass undocumented migrants. Requiring health, social services and education agencies to check passports brings borders into everyday life and creates a class of sub-citizens in the city. The dilemma posed by Chinese migration to the UK is aptly summarised by the Border Agency magazine: (Spring 2012) ‘China is now the world’s second largest economy, but there are more failed asylum seekers in the UK than most other nationalities, and illegal migration from China remains a threat.’ The new architectures of border control polarise Chinese London: they privilege wealthier migrants and punish the rest, forcing them into undocumented channels. These polarities of the elite and the undocumented can only increase as the new architectures of border control become more fully manifest.

Circumstances in Beijing and Hong Kong There is more to Chinese London than migrants, however. Students, investors, tourists, money and buildings also constitute its complex cartographies and its social morphologies. These movements of people and money – and we will return to them later – have as much to do with circumstances in Beijing as they do in London, and it is to these circumstances that we now turn. These circumstances further underscore the significance of cities, this time from the perspective of the dialogues that are generated between them. Beijing has a population that exceeds 21 million – and rising – and condenses broader change processes throughout China. Among these rapid social changes – and despite the fact that all land is owned and leased by the state – cities have become engines of growth, they have developed speculative land markets (Park and Lee, 2012; Zhu, 2012) and housing costs have soared beyond incomes. Rapid urbanisation and industrialisation (Keith et al., 2013) and the far-reaching social changes accompanying them forge multiple uncertainties and imponderabilities in the lives of Beijingers. These circumstances

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opened China to multiple streams of globalisation imbricated in its society, cultures and economy, producing ‘an increasingly cosmopolitan life’ (Pieke, 2002: 6). New geographical and social mobilities within China, boosting the population of Beijing and other big cities through large-scale internal migration, also opened up the prospect of more distant mobilities. Sojourns overseas were made easier by the passport reforms of 2001 and 2002 and working or studying abroad was reinterpreted as a self-, and by extension a nationstate, development strategy and not as flight or disloyalty (Xiang, 2003). A growing middle class now seeks overseas education for its children and new tourist destinations for itself. Assets newly accumulated through privatisation and commercial opportunities bring new possibilities in new cities worldwide. They also bring anxieties, and these often centre on defending accumulated resources. China’s hybrid socialist–capitalist system contains no safeguards for private property (Keith et al., 2013). The unease this generates plays on the insecurities of the growing Chinese middle class, the wealthy elite and businesspeople operating at different scales, impacting on all forms of Chinese capital accumulation. Families with two or three properties in Beijing are suddenly millionaires, but they have no idea what will happen when the 70-year leases on their property expire, as all land is owned by the state. Preserving and transmitting even modest wealth to younger generations is problematic. A quota of US$50,000 per head per year can be legally transferred and families wishing to make a modest investment in a property, for example, might pool the allowances of friends and family. There are further conduits of capital transfer for bigger volumes. Until recently investments of under £10 million could go through a special channel at the Bank of China to a foreign account. Technically against the rules but frequently used, this has now been closed as a competitor bank complained to the government in a way it could not ignore, given its clampdown on corruption. Large listed Chinese corporations can also move money overseas for investment purposes. Complex authorisation systems surrounding this method have been simplified, but disclosure rules make it unattractive to cash-rich small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Black market routes have been working for many years. They are run by companies and well-connected individuals who take in renminbi (often abbreviated to RMB) – the official currency – and pay pounds into designated foreign accounts. These routes are risky and involve trust; there is no recourse to the authorities if they fail. Moving money from China is a complex and risky business, which needs further investigation in order to understand better the textures of Chinese London. Sending accumulated resources to safe havens offsets the risks of conspicuous consumption in China. Excessive – conspicuously displayed – accumulation can constitute evidence of corruption. The most spectacular example of this emerged in the trial of politburo member Bo Xilai, whose wife was given a suspended death sentence for the murder of UK businessman Neil Hayward in 2011. Hayward had brokered various foreign investments on behalf of the family, including the lavish lifestyle of their student–playboy son. Xi Jinping’s current campaign against corruption has led to a spate of convictions of major as well as minor officials in the Chinese Communist Party. New evidence is emerging from the ‘Panama papers’, leaked from Mossack Fonseca to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, of the extent to which China’s political leaders are implicated in seeking safe havens for their capital, placing it beyond the view of the Chinese public. In addition to wealthy business executives, eight current and former members of the Poliburo Standing Committee have relatives with a secret offshore

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account. Some 29 per cent of Mossack’s active companies worldwide are registered in China and Hong Kong.4 New regulation of receipts and hospitality has recently closed top restaurants in Beijing. Shifting money from China is a lively, lucrative and growing set of business opportunities for Beijing–London interlocutors. The situation in the city and SAR of Hong Kong is different of course. Private property has legal protection in Hong Kong, but this does not prevent ‘buy to let’ investors investing in London property – often cheaper than property in Hong Kong – for its steady rate of return.5 In January 2015 both authors attended an upscale property fair at the Hong Kong Mandarin Oriental Hotel marketing apartments yet to be built in London’s N4, Finsbury Park, area.6 Sales and letting were managed by London estate agents – flown to Hong Kong on rotation – at an estimated 8 per cent return on investment. Hong Kong’s housing market is subjected to similar pressures to Beijing’s, pressures created by a mismatch between supply and demand: 150 Mainland migrants a day are allowed into Hong Kong since it reverted to China in 1997, swelling the population in need of housing and raising housing costs well beyond wages. Hong Kong’s uncertainties arise from these factors as well as its eroding political autonomy in the face of Mainland ‘interference’ and, supposed, ‘swamping’ by new Mainlander arrivals. The Hong Kong media are awash with concerns that these political pressures and the new demographics driven by migration are changing the character of Hong Kong and eroding its political and cultural distinctiveness, as a particular kind of Chinese space, popularly regarded as more ‘sophisticated’ than the Mainland, making it just another part of China. Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement’s protests against Beijing erupted onto the streets in the spring of 2014. The ways in which this has changed Hong Kong reverberate through London. Numerous popular press and TV reports catalogue the uncivil behaviour of Mainlanders in Hong Kong as shoppers, tourists and as new residents. Including an analysis of ‘sending cities’ thus opens up sociological exploration of the ways in which migration is experienced in ‘receiving’ cities.

Students The Higher Education Statistics Authority (HESA) reports that, for 2013/14, the number of Chinese students studying in the UK far exceeds that of any other nationality, at 87,895 – up from 83,790 in the previous year. This figure is boosted by a growing number of school students taking up places in the UK’s independent school system, often seen as a passport to elite university entry. Chinese school students make up a full one-third of the 26,000 non-British pupils in the UK’s independent schools. Commentators report that 80 per cent of wealthy Chinese – with assets of £1 million and upwards – want to send their children abroad for education. These temporary migrants-in-education with stays of typically 2–5 years or so add a layer of aspiring youth from comfortable circumstances to the social fabrics of Chinese London. Xiang and Wei (2009) suggest that interest by the Chinese upper middle class in overseas education results from developments in the social polarities of contemporary China. The extension of university education to broader sections of the population increases demand and competition for places, especially in the most prestigious Chinese

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universities. At the same time, overseas education – the USA is a preferred destination, not the UK – provides distinction from outside of the Chinese system for those who are not part of its concentrated elite with close party connections and privileged positions in the new logics of wealth accumulation. Overseas education provides ‘a new elite with symbolic political capital’ (Xiang and Wei 2009: 514–15) and pathways to social mobility in the new China (Huijuan, 2008). The student fabrics of Chinese London – and some other cities (Kajanus, 2015) – deploy assets accumulated in this city to navigate the complexities of Chinese employment. Student temporary migrants activate other dimensions of Chinese London and reveal some of the discursive complexities connecting the UK and China that are routed through cities. Money moves with students; education is a socially approved avenue of family expenditure. A Chatham House Survey (cited by Xiang and Wei, 2009: 516) showed that Chinese students in the UK pay some £479 million in living expenses and £300 million in tuition fees. These significant sums have shaped the policies and practices of many UK universities (Iannelli and Huang, 2014) and impacted on UK cities in the provision of student accommodation (Smith and Hubbard, 2014) and commercial outlets for students’ money. Sometimes consumers of expensive MBA courses in London’s prestigious institutions, they may also be consumers of luxury cars, clothes and jewellery. Students constitute a conduit for China–UK business opportunities, for British companies wanting to access Chinese markets and for Chinese investments in the UK. Major London business schools – LBS, LSE and the Cass – all have a China Business Forum and active alumni networks. At an LBS China Business Forum networking day (in 2013) British luxury producers pitched to the Chinese market through the next generation of returning interlocutors for business in China. Similarly, highprofile Chinese business leaders and London-based Chinese diplomats brought assurances that existing barriers impeding foreigners from doing business in China are being removed. The China–Britain Youth Association, which draws together students and young professionals (aged 18–35), has branches in London, Oxford and Beijing. A matrix of China–UK business interests – The Britain–China Accountancy Association, the Chopsticks Club, the Association of Chinese Financial Professionals in the UK, Chinese Entrepreneurs Global, China-Dialogue, the Future Leaders in Asia Group – all ground student and young professional involvement. Add the Confucius Institutes springing up in British universities to promote the study of China and the Chinese language, and it is clear that Chinese London routes a matrix of mutual aid around specific types of commercial interests.

Property and infrastructural investments Property investment is not an uncommon way to support a Chinese student’s stay in the UK. Agencies in Beijing for example advise on just these aspects of ‘wealth management’, which are particularly attractive to the parents of intending students. This is but the tip of an iceberg. Chinese investment in London real estate markets is one of the key places where the logics of accumulation in London and key Chinese cities collide at all price points in the market. For many, London housing markets are another way of placing Chinese assets beyond the reach of the Chinese state.

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In 2013 Chinese investors accounted for 7.5 per cent of all foreign investment in the portion of the market under £1 million, a significant rise on 2010 figures. The estate agent Knight Frank contends that Chinese investors are making inroads into London’s high-end property market too. In 2013 Chinese buyers accounted for 4.2 per cent of all ‘superprime’ London sales, a significant rise from the year before. After Indians, Russians and the French come the Chinese, a reflection, perhaps, of the significance of the Chinese economic and business presence in London. These may be migrants, but they are just as likely to be absent ‘buy to let’ investors looking for a decent return on capital and occasional visitors, pointing to an invisible matrix of money washing through London. David Ley7 claims that London is unusual compared with Australian and Canadian cities in that money precedes and exceeds arrivals of migrant bodies. Not only are these capital transfers not contested by the UK state, but they are actively solicited – as they are from elsewhere across the globe – as London becomes an increasingly plutocratic city (Burrows et al., 2016).8 Chinese investors have also bought big stakes in infrastructure projects – in Thames Water and Heathrow Airport among others. The new built architectures of Chinese London are also coming into view on the city skyline. A billion-pound business park is being financed by Chinese investors at the Royal Albert Dock in East London; a hotel and apartment complex at Battersea in south west London – part of the business empire of Wang Jianlin of the Dalian Wanda Group – is being planned; Zhongrong has a £500 million plan to rebuild the iconic Crystal Palace; Henry Cheng Kar-Shun is making a major investment in the Greenwich Peninsula Scheme and parts of Knightsbridge; Convoys Wharf by the Thames in Deptford is now owned by Cheung Kong (Holdings) Limited, a multinational conglomerate based in Hong Kong with plans for a huge residential investment; and the Hong Kong tycoon Joseph Law owns the Goldman Sachs Building and a house in Euston Square. These developments are profoundly reshaping London.9 Built, human and financial fabrics – activated by investors, students and migrants, ‘new transnational actors’ exploring favourable ‘market relations in the global political economy’ (Milutinovic, 2008) – co-compose Chinese London in a multitude of ways, extending it beyond the once-iconic ethnic surfaces of Soho’s China Town and its red lanterns. As a new, more diffuse and less visible Chinese London arises, China Town is displaced as its restaurants and other businesses are driven out by rising rates and land values. Focusing on cities and on the circulations co-composing their ethnic migrant fabrics opens up sociology to diverse streams of trans-local activity moving along the same circuits as ethnic migrant bodies.

Reverberations in Beijing There are further reverberations in Beijing arising from these developments in London and these, too, speak to the viability of urban dialogics as a way of thinking about the connections between cities, which migrants and other transnational actors and capital transfers draw. The underlying logics that draw young Beijing and Hong Kong migrants to London also draw young Londoners to Beijing and to Hong Kong. Beijing’s ‘foreign’ population, for example, is around half a million, of which approximately 5,000 are from the UK.10 We have no breakdown by age and city of departure,

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but these young urban migrants are particularly visible in two Beijing neighbourhoods, through which we can read the city through their presence in it: in the western area of Wudaoko around Beijing’s universities where they learn Chinese and, possibly, teach English to Chinese who would like to access UK and US universities; and in the east of Beijing around the second ring road in the Gulou/Drum Tower area and immediately north of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, the political centre of Beijing. This second area is particularly interesting and a magnate for young trendy Beijingers and foreigners. The Gulou area contains what remains of the ancient courtyard houses – hutongs. An area in the process of regeneration, it is inhabited by poorer Beijingers with long-standing connections to it, and by wealthy entrepreneurs who are refurbishing the hutongs, converting them into chic hotels and trendy bars. It supports a hipster culture that resembles Dalston and Shoreditch in east London and Brooklyn in New York with its fixed gear bike shops, and with cafés, bars and microbreweries decorated in unfinishedlooking industrial aesthetic style. Here the young creative class sits, by day, with its Mac laptops, editing films and music, writing books and articles, devising dramas and art exhibitions – things no longer easily done in London because of the costs of living there and the low pay involved in interning as a route to future employment. And, by night, café culture turns into a bar culture offering the prospect of party time in Beijing. This is Beijing’s bohemia, and it is particularly legible to young people from cities like London: a decipherable niche in an otherwise overwhelming and opaque Beijing. Gulou provides conviviality and the prospect of an affordable freelance livelihood. And it provides access, of a kind, to the stream of urban life that passes through and lives in this neighbourhood. Crucially, its ‘old China’ aesthetic, created by local inhabitants and petty commerce, constitutes bohemia in Gulou, in much the same way as poorer ethnic populations and commerce do in London’s Shoreditch or Dalston (Davison et al., 2012). In Beijing it is possible to sip expensive cocktails and eat vegetable chips in a bar, while outside (local) people are using the communal street toilets. The visibility of life in the hutongs provides passing access to locals, as here, unlike the more private living spaces in the neighbourhood, Chinese life is lived in public view, offering a casual proximity to the broader stream of Beijing life.

CONCLUSION In this chapter we have argued that it is important to hold migrants and other global actors like students, investors, tourists and, we might add, shoppers11 in the same frame as cities. This offers a starting point in understanding the making of cities and the lives of ethnic migrants and other city residents through broader global processes. We have suggested that the sociology of migration would benefit from acknowledging a broader spectrum of trans-local assemblages and a more active urban focus in order to reveal otherwise invisible connections running through cities. The myriad ways in which different scales and types of capital as well as migrant bodies run through cities profoundly reshape them. And so it is with London. Second, we have shown that existing accounts of Chinese migrants in the UK, and in London in particular, need to be revisited and updated. Undocumented migrants, of course, do not show up in population censuses or in real estate and designer handbag sales

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figures, but their dead bodies do occasionally show up in the back of trucks reminding us of the complexities of Chinese London. These social polarities can only become more pronounced as the implications of the new architectures of UK border controls take a hold on London. It would seem to be important, for both the sociology of race and ethnicity and the sociology of migration, to develop more nuanced accounts of ethnic migrant cartographies and circumstances. Chinese migrants challenge existing frameworks and raise new questions. They are clearly not just victims of racialised border controls and systems of resource allocation: they are also successful global actors making decisions about where and how to live in the world and where and how to deploy accumulated resources. As the new architectures of border control come into force, as we are forced to recognise migrants’ diverse and privileged social locations, how might a gathering predominance of wealthy migrants refashion our frameworks for dealing with race, ethnicity and migration? What would a contemporary pro-migration politics look like that was not just instrumentally motivated by a business-grabbing global talent agenda? What will we do with the concept of the wealthy migrant? In what ways will it refashion the sociology of ethnicity and migration? Third, we have shown that a more open and dialogic account of migration, one that takes ‘sending’ as well as ‘receiving’ cities into account, reveals hitherto obscured connections between urban migrant geographies. Beijing and Hong Kong make sense of London and London makes sense of Beijing and Hong Kong. The imperatives of both places converge in the logics of accumulation in London property markets. And they converge in the funding of our universities by Chinese students in search of new ways to navigate China. Beijing and Hong Kong actors use London in navigating the uncertainties of contemporary life in China. London businesses of various kinds secure themselves through routes to China and the Chinese interlocutors who smooth the path with their knowledge, language skills and connections. Crucially cities and the connections between them, important vectors constituting globalisation today, are shaped through migration and the objects, money and reasoning that come with it. London is Chinese in ways that are not always apparent, but it is a (partly) Chinese city nonetheless, just as it is also France’s sixth biggest city by population.

Notes   1  This chapter is primarily based on a study funded by the ESRC between 2012 and 2014 under its Hong Kong Bilateral Programme (ES/J017272/1). It also draws on some material derived from another study funded by the ESRC between 2013 and 2015 (ES/K002503/1) examining ‘super-rich’ neighbourhoods in London. This support is gratefully acknowledged.    2  Of course London is, inter alia, equally a South Asian, Caribbean, Turkish and Nigerian city; indeed there is likely no elsewhere that does not pass through it in some fashion or another.    3  Knowles (2017) offers a more detailed elaboration of what follows in this section.    4  See https://panamapapers.icij.org/20160406-china-red-nobility-offshore-dealings.html    5  There is some evidence that significant investment is now also taking place in UK cities such as Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle – all places with significant (Chinese) student populations. About this, more below.    6  The cognitive geographies of London presented in the advertising materials for the developments foreground areas of affluence, shopping, tourist sites, airports and other transport hubs and an imagined ‘University of London’ that contains iconic images of buildings that are, in reality, widely spread across London. Other than the apartments being offered for sale, little in the way of images of the immediate area are presented. A representation of a tube map only includes a limited number of stations deemed necessary for a ‘London lifestyle’.

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   7  In a personal communication to the first-named author informed by his current research, building upon his earlier published work (Ley, 2010).    8  Symbolically, the Estates Gazette Rich List notes that a Chinese tycoon, Wang Jianlin, worth an estimated £10.4 billion, has recently knocked London’s wealthiest landowner, the Duke of Westminster, off the number one spot. Wang is closely followed by Henry Cheng Kar-Shun (£10.2 billion).    9  As they are, of course, in many other cities across the globe (Forrest et al., 2016; Graham, 2016).  10  See ‘Inflow of International Immigrants Challenges China’s Migration Policy’, available at www.brookings.edu/ research/opinions/2011/09/08-china-immigrants-shen  11  In exercising their new mobilities and spending power, Chinese tourists in London outspend others, spending $102 billion in 2012. In what the Daily Telegraph (5 October 2013) dubbed ‘Britain’s Beijing Bling Rush’, Chinese shoppers are described as ‘young and rich’ and involved in an ‘orgy of designer shopping’.

References Ahmed, Shama (1981) ‘Children in Care: The Racial Dimensions of Social Work Assessment’, in Juliet Cheetham, Walter James, Martin Loney, Barbara Mayor and William Prescott (eds), Social and Community Work in Multi-Racial Britain, London: Harper and Row, pp. 139–145 Alexander, Claire (2005) ‘Embodying Violence: “Riots”, Dis/order and the Private Lives of the “Asian Gang”’, in Claire Alexander and Caroline Knowles (eds), Making Race Matter, London: Palgrave Alexander, Claire and Knowles, Caroline (eds) (2005) ‘Introduction’, Making Race Matter, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 1–16 Amin, Ash and Thrift, Nigel (2002a) Cities: Reimagining the Urban, Cambridge: Polity Amin, Ash and Thrift, Nigel (2002b) ‘Guest Editorial, Special Issue: Cities and Ethnicities’, Ethnicities, 2, 2: 291–300 Amit, Vered (2007) ‘Structures and Dispositions of Travel and Movement’, in Vered Amit (ed.), Going First Class? New Approaches to Privileged Travel and Movement, Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 1–14 Arnold, Guy (2012) Migration, London: Pluto Atkinson, Rowland, Burrows, Roger and Rhodes, David (2016) ‘Capital City? London’s Housing Market and the Super-Rich’, in Iain Hay and Jonathan Beaverstock (eds), International Handbook of Wealth and the Super-Rich, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, pp. 225–243 Atkinson, Rowland, Parker, Simon and Burrows, Roger (2017) ‘The Plutocratic City: Elite Formation, Power and Space in Contemporary London’, Theory, Culture & Society, Forthcoming Broady, Maurice (1958) ‘The Chinese in Great Britain’, in Morton H. Fried (ed.), Colloquium on Overseas Chinese, New York: Institute for Pacific Relations Boutros, Alexandra and Straw, Will (2010) Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture, Montreal: McGill Queens University Press Burrows, Roger, Webber, Richard and Atkinson, Rowland (2016) ‘Welcome to “Pikettyville”? Mapping London’s Alpha Territories’, Sociological Review, published online first at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467954X.12375 Carby, Hazel V. (1982) ‘Schooling in Babylon’, in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), The Empire Strikes Back, London: Hutchinson, pp. 183–211 Cheng, Yuan (1996) ‘The Chinese: Upwardly Mobile’, in Ceri Peach (ed.), Ethnicity in the 1991 Census, London: HMSO, pp. 161–180 Clifford, James (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Boston, MA: Harvard University Press Davison, Gethin, Dovey, Kim and Woodcock, Ian (2012) ‘“Keeping Dalston Different”: Defending Place-Identity in East London’, Planning Theory & Practice, 13, 1: 47–69 Forrest, Ray, Wissink, Bart and Koh, Sin Yee (eds) (2016) Cities and the Super-Rich: Real Estate, Elite Practices and Urban Political Economies, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Gilroy, Paul (1987) There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack, London: Hutchinson Gilroy, Paul (1982) ‘Police and thieves’, in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), The Empire Strikes Back, London: Hutchinson, pp. 143–182 Gordon, Paul (1986) Racial Violence and Harassment, London: Runnymede Trust Graham, Stephen (2016) Vertical: Looking at the City from Above and Below, London: Verso Hall, Stuart, Critcher, Chas, Jefferson Tony, Clarke, John and Roberts, Brian (1978) Policing the Crisis, London: Macmillan

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Huijuan, Xue (2008) ‘Cultural Adaptation and Personal Capital Formation: The Experiences of Chinese Students in UK Higher Education’, Ph.D. Thesis, University of the West of England, Bristol Iannelli, Cristina and Huang, Jun (2014) ‘Trends in Participation and Attainment of Chinese Students in UK Higher Education’, Studies in Higher Education, 39, 5: 805–822 Ingold, Tim (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, London: Routledge Ingold, T. (2004) Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, London: Routledge Jackson, Brian and Garvey, Anne (1974) ‘Chinese Children in Britain’, New Society, 30, 626: 9–12 Jansen, Lionel. (1990) ‘Education, Pluralism and Access to Knowledge’, in Alrick X. Cambridge and Stephan Feuchtwang (eds), Anti-racist Strategies, Aldershot: Avebury, pp. 91–122 Kajanus, Anni (2015) Chinese Student Migration, Gender and Family, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Keith, Michael and Murji, Karim (1990) ‘Reifying Crime, Legitimising Racism: Policing, Local Authorities and Left Realism’, in Wendy Ball and John Solomos (eds), Race and Local Politics, London: Macmillan, pp. 115–131 Keith, Michael, Lash, Scott, Arnoldi, Jakob and Rooker, Tyler (2013) China Constructing Capitalism: Economic Life and Urban Change, London: Routledge Knowles, Caroline (1990) ‘Black Families and Social Services’, in Alrick X. Cambridge and Stephan Feuchtwang (eds), Antiracist Strategies, Aldershot: Avebury Knowles, Caroline (2014) Flip-flop: A Journey Through Globalisation’s Backroads, London: Pluto Knowles, Caroline (2017) ‘Reframing Sociologies of Ethnicity and Migration in Encounters with Chinese London’, British Journal of Sociology, doi:10.1111/1468-4446.12271. Knowles, Caroline and Harper, Douglas (2009) Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes and Journeys, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Lam, Tom, Sales, Rosemary, D’Angelo, Alessio, Montagna, Nicola and Lin, Xia (2009) The Changing Chinese Community in London: New Migration, New Needs, Final Report, http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/5540/ Ley, David (2010) Millionaire Migrants: Trans-Pacific Life Lines, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell Middleton, Jennie (2009) ‘Stepping in Time: Walking Time and Space in the City’, Environment and Planning A, 41: 1943–1961 Milutinovic, Svetlana (2008) ‘Chinese Transnational Entrepreneurs in Budapest and Belgrade: Seeking Markets, Challenging Globalisation’, in Michael P. Smith and John Eade (eds), Cities, Migrations and Identities: Transnational Ties, Comparative Urban and Community Research, Vol. 9, London: Transition Publishers Pang, Mary and Law, Agnes (1998) ‘The Chinese in Britain: Working Towards Success?’, International Journal of Human Resource Management, 9 (5): 862–874 Park, Wooyeal and Lee, Kihyun (2012) “‘I Want to Be Expropriated!” The Politics of Xiaochaquanfang Land Development in Suburban China’, Journal of Contemporary China, 21 (74): 261–279 Parker, David (1995) Through Different Eyes: The Cultural Identities of Young Chinese People in Britain, Aldershot: Avebury Pharoah, Robin (2009) Migration, Integration, Cohesion: New Chinese Migrants to London, London: Chinese in Britain Forum Pieke, Frank (2002) Recent Trends in Chinese Migration to Europe: Fujianese Migration in Perspective, Geneva: International Organization for Migration Rack, Philip H. (1981) ‘Asians and the Psychiatric Services’, in Juliet Cheetham, Walter James, Martin Loney, Barbara Mayor and William Prescott (eds), Social and Community Work in Multi-Racial Britain, London: Harper and Row, pp. 87–101 Rex, John (1981) ‘Urban Segregation and Inner City Policy in Great Britain’, in Ceri Peach, Vaughn Robinson and Susan Smith (eds), Ethnic Segregation in Cities, London: Croom Helm, pp. 25–44 Short, John H. (2016) ‘Attracting Wealth: Crafting Immigration Policy to Attract the Rich’, in I. Hay and J. Beaverstock (eds), International Handbook of Wealth and the Super-Rich, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 363–380 Skeldon, Ronald (2011) China: An Emerging Destination for Economic Migration, Sussex: Migration Policy Institute, www.migrationpolicy.org/article/china-emerging-destination-economic-migration Smith, Darren P. and Hubbard, Phil (2014) ‘The Segregation of Educated Youth and Dynamic Geographies of Studentification’, Area, 46, 1: 92–100 Smith, Michael P. and Eade, John (eds) (2008) Cities, Migrations and Identities: Transnational Ties, Comparative Urban and Community Research, Vol. 9, London: Transition Publishers Smith, Susan (1989) The Politics of ‘Race’ and Residence, Cambridge: Polity Solomos, John (1989) Race and Racism in Contemporary Britain, London: Macmillan Song, Miri (1999) Helping Out, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press Swann Committee Report (1985) Education for All, London: HMSO Swanton, Dan (2010) ‘Flesh, Metal, Road: Tracing the Machinic Geographies of Race’, Environment and Planning D: Space and Society, 28 (3): 447–466

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The Economist (2015) ‘The Osborne Doctrine: Britain is sleepwalking into a much closer relationship with China’, 26 September, www.economist.com/news/britain/21667935-britain-sleepwalking-much-closer-relationship-china-osbornedoctrine Urry, John (2010 [2000]) ‘Mobile Sociology’, British Journal of Sociology, 61, s1: 347–366 [originally published in British Journal of Sociology, 51 (1): 185–203] Wallis, Susan (1981) ‘Bengali Families in Camden’, in Juliet Cheetham, Walter James, Martin Loney, Barbara Mayor and William Prescott (eds), Social and Community Work in Multi-Racial Britain, London: Harper and Row, pp. 75–86 Watson, James L. (1977) ‘The Chinese: Hong Kong Villagers in the British Catering Trade’, in James L. Watson (ed.), Between Two Cultures: Migrants and Minorities in Britain, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp.181–213 Webber, Richard and Burrows, Roger (2015) ‘Life in an Alpha Territory: Discontinuity and Conflict in an Elite London “Village”’, Urban Studies, Online first 0042098015612983 No can delete. Xiang, Biao (2003) ‘Emigration from China: A Sending Country Perspective’, International Migration, 41 (3): 21–28 Xiang, Biao and Wei, Shen (2009) ‘International Student Migration and Social Stratification in China’, International Journal of Education Development, 29: 513–522 Zhu, Jiangnan (2012) ‘The Shadow of the Skyscrapers: Real Estate Corruption in China’, Journal of Contemporary China, 21, 74: 243–260

7 Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty1 Matthew Desmond

Ever since the earliest writings of the Chicago school, sociologists have pondered the movement of people across the metropolis. Invasion and succession, residential mobility and migration, instability and neighborhood change—shifts and sortings forming “the tidelands of city life” (Zorbaugh 1929, p. 3)—these have been central to the study of urban society and its problems. Social scientists have amassed considerable evidence that poor families exhibit high levels of residential mobility, moving, in most cases, from one disadvantaged neighborhood to another (South and Crowder 1998; Sampson and Sharkey 2008). Although we have sound theories that explain why people move out of the slum, parlaying higher earnings into residential advantage (e.g., Logan and Alba 1993; South and Crowder 1997),2 we know little about why so many people move within it. Increased residential mobility is associated with a host of negative outcomes, including higher rates of adolescent violence (Sharkey and Sampson 2010), poor school performance (Pribesh and Downey 1999), health risks (Dong et al. 2005), psychological costs (Oishi 2010), and the loss of neighborhood ties (Sampson, Morenoff, and Earls 1999). If residential mobility brings about such outcomes, then determining why poor families move as often as they do is crucial to our understanding of the root causes of social disadvantage and to the development of effective policy initiatives. While far from exhaustive, three explanations for high levels of residential mobility among the urban poor present themselves. The first has to do with neighborhood or housing dissatisfaction. As crime on a block is perceived to increase or as tenants grow weary of substandard conditions, they might seek out new places to live (Speare, Goldstein, and Frey 1975; Rossi 1980). Yet neighborhood dissatisfaction does little to explain why families move from low- to high-poverty neighborhoods or between highpoverty neighborhoods with similar levels of crime. Studies have shown, moreover, that African-Americans are less likely than other racial and ethnic groups to move because of neighborhood dissatisfaction (South and Deane 1993).

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Gentrification and neighborhood revitalization may also explain high levels of residential mobility among the urban poor. At the dawning of the 21st century, analysts warned of a “resurgence of gentrification” (Smith 1996; Wyly and Hammel 1999), including that ostensibly driven by middle- and upper-class African-Americans (Pattillo 2007; Hyra 2008). Even so, gentrification typically visits only a small number of poor neighborhoods and accounts for a small portion of moves among poor renters (Kasarda et  al. 1997). And although sociologists long have observed that gentrification displaces poor residents (Marcuse 1986; Logan and Molotch 1987), a number of recent studies have arrived at the opposite conclusion, finding gentrification to be associated with lower rates of residential turnover among disadvantaged households (Vigdor 2002; Freeman 2005; though see Newman and Wyly 2006). Some scholars have speculated that “gentrification brings with it neighborhood improvements” that cause low-income renters to make “greater efforts to remain in their dwelling units, even if the proportion of their income devoted to rent rises” (Freeman and Braconi 2004, p. 51). A third explanation has to do with slum clearance. Classic works of urban sociology and history—Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Gans’s The Urban Villagers (1962), Caro’s The Power Broker (1974)—have chronicled the massive and traumatic uprooting of poor communities dislodged midcentury under the banner of “urban renewal.” In recent years, municipalities increasingly have razed public housing units, casting their residents throughout the city (Goetz 2002; Bennett, Smith, and Wright 2006). Poor blacks have borne the brunt of this consequential transformation, as “local housing authorities have systematically chosen [to tear down] projects that, even by the standards of their own city, are disproportionately inhabited by Black families” (Goetz 2011, p. 1600). Yet, however impressive its scope and consequential its ramifications, the demolition of public housing throughout the United States accounts for a minute portion of residential moves among low-income renters (Stone 1976). And of course, the demolition of public housing cannot account for the high levels of residential mobility among the poor documented long before the arrival of the wrecking ball. Even taken together, then, neighborhood dissatisfaction, gentrification, and slum clearance cannot fully explain the high levels of residential mobility among the urban poor. It would seem, then, that scholars have overlooked important mechanisms driving residential mobility within inner-city neighborhoods. This article identifies eviction as one such mechanism. Eviction is perhaps the most understudied process affecting the lives of the urban poor. Although social scientists have examined eviction rates in supplementary analyses (Mayer and Jencks 1989), legal scholars have researched how counsel affects eviction court outcomes (Monsma and Lempert 1992; Seron et  al. 2001), and urban ethnographers have mentioned eviction cursorily (Stack 1974; Venkatesh 2000), we still know very little about it (Hartman and Robinson 2003). A mixed-methods endeavor that combines a quantitative analysis of eviction records and survey data with a qualitative analysis of ethnographic data gleaned from fieldwork among evicted families and their landlords, this study is among the first to empirically evaluate the relationship between eviction and urban poverty. To do so, it pursues four research questions. First, how prevalent is eviction? Second, where in the city do evictions occur? Third, are women disproportionately affected by eviction and, if so, why? Fourth, what are the consequences of eviction? Drawing on an analysis of eviction records from Milwaukee, a city of roughly 600,000, this article finds eviction to be a frequent occurrence. Even before the housing crisis

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began in 2007, thousands were evicted from their homes each year. Between 2003 and 2007, landlords evicted roughly 16,000 adults and children from 6,000 units in an average year. To place these figures in perspective, consider that the number of families evicted in Milwaukee in an average year is equivalent to the number of families forced out of public housing in Chicago, a city with approximately five times the population, over the course of a decade.3 Almost half of the city’s evictions took place in predominantly black inner-city neighborhoods, where one renter-occupied household in 14 was evicted annually. In black neighborhoods, women were more than twice as likely to be evicted as men. Findings from ethnographic fieldwork reveal how structural constraints, having to do with work, welfare, and housing costs, and interactional patterns, having to do with gendered reactions to receiving an eviction notice, place women from poor black communities at especially high risk of eviction. If incarceration has become typical in the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction has become typical in the lives of women from these neighborhoods. Typical yet damaging, for the consequences of eviction are many and severe: eviction often increases material hardship, decreases residential security, and brings about prolonged periods of homelessness (Crane and Warnes 2000; Burt 2001); it can result in job loss, split up families, and drive people to depression and, in extreme cases, even to suicide (Serby et al. 2006; Desmond 2012); and it decreases one’s chances of securing decent and affordable housing, of escaping disadvantaged neighborhoods, and of benefiting from affordable housing programs. In inner-city neighborhoods, it is women who disproportionately face eviction’s fallout.

DATA AND METHODS The multiple methods on which this article relies informed each other in important ways. Although I entered the field with a set of research questions to pursue, questions guided by current theories of urban poverty, these lines of inquiry flexed, waned, or amplified as the fieldwork progressed. Some research questions pursued here first presented themselves during my ethnography. They most likely would not have sprung to mind had I never set foot in the field. But it was only after conducting quantitative analyses of court records and survey data that I was able to understand fully the magnitude of eviction in the inner city and to document racial and gender disparities. The problem rendered clearer and more refined by aggregate comparisons, I returned to my field notes to identify the mechanisms behind the numbers, looking for repeated patterns while also paying mind to variation and diversity of experience. Working in tandem with one another, each method enriched the other. And each kept the other honest. Eviction Records I extracted legal records of court-ordered evictions that took place in Milwaukee County between January 1, 2003, and December 31, 2007. These records encompass all closed eviction cases and exclude open cases and cases dismissed because the court ruled in favor of the tenant or because the landlord and tenant reached an agreement. Milwaukee law permits landlords to evict tenants for breaching the rental agreement by falling

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behind in rent or by committing a number of other violations (e.g., property damage, drug distribution). Tenants renting on a month-to-month basis may be evicted even if they have not broken the rental agreement. The court records include all such evictions. Each eviction case involved at least one landlord and at least one tenant. And each included the full names of tenants and landlords, the address for which the eviction was ordered, and the judgment date. Addresses were geo-coded using ArcGIS and an associated road network database, producing an exact latitude and longitude for each case as well as a corresponding census location. It was then possible to merge the eviction records from one year with population estimates of Milwaukee County block groups from that same year. GeoLytics, a company specializing in creating customized data sets of demographic information, calculated population estimates by drawing on the 2000 census, county- and state-level annual estimates, actuarial tables, and immigration records. Block groups were selected as the unit of analysis because they are the smallest geographic area for which income and poverty information is reported. Milwaukee County is divided into 880 block groups, the average one housing 747 adults. For the purpose of these analyses, a “neighborhood” was defined as a block group, and its racial composition was designated, say, “white” if non-Hispanic whites accounted for at least two-thirds of neighborhood residents. By these criteria, in 2007 there were 193 black, 477 white, 35 Hispanic, and 175 mixed neighborhoods in Milwaukee. Roughly 13.5% of eviction cases (N = 4,661) did not merge with population estimates (they included no addresses, owing to clerical error) and were dropped, along with all nonresidential evictions (N = 253). This resulted in a sample size of 29,960 eviction cases—involving 32,491 landlords and 36,252 tenants—with complete geographic information. Because eviction records unfortunately did not include sex (or race) identifiers, two methods were employed to impute sex. First, a pair of research assistants assigned a sex to each person, based on first names.4 After additional court record and Internet searches, 3.7% of names not immediately recognizable as belonging exclusively to a man or a woman remained unknown. Unknown names were excluded from analyses that compared women and men. Supplementary analyses (one in which half the unknown names were designated male and half female; another in which all unknown names were designated male) revealed that excluding unknown names did not influence the results. Second, drawing on Social Security card applications for U.S. births, I compiled the 1,000 most popular names per decade from the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s (years adults ages 18–67 in 2003–7 were born).5 Then, I merged together the 1,000 most popular names for all five decades (resulting in 3,090 distinct names) and generated a “likelihood female” statistic by dividing the total number of girls with a name by the total number of all people with that name. If a name was distinctively female, it received a score of 1 (N = 1,564); if a name was distinctively male, it received a score of 0 (N = 1,304). The remaining 222 names received scores between 0 and 1, with names more popular among boys (e.g., Randy, Bobby) receiving scores closer to 0 and names more popular among girls (e.g., Sharon, Erin) receiving scores closer to 1. The likelihood female statistic was affixed to all names represented in both the Social Security Administration and eviction records. (Of the 8,261 distinct first names among evicted tenants, 6,063 were not found among the top 1,000 names of the five decades. These 6,063 names accounted for 8,793 tenants.) Coders estimated that 60.6% of evicted tenants were women. The likelihood female statistic based on Social Security records estimated that 60.7% were women. These virtually identical point estimates express a high degree of agreement between the two methods

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and bolster confidence in coders’ assignments. More details about the process of imputing sex from names can be found in the appendix. An annual household eviction rate was calculated by dividing the number of eviction cases in a year by the number of occupied rental units estimated for that year. Additionally, for each block group, I estimated the eviction rate for male and female renters by dividing the number of evictees of one sex by the number of adults of the same sex living in rental housing.6 With these statistics in hand, I could calculate risk ratios (by dividing the female eviction rate by the male rate) and risk differences (by subtracting the male rate from the female rate). All statistics were calculated for each block group for each year. The results were then pooled and annual averages calculated. Risk ratios and risk differences were calculated in three different samples. The first included all block groups with at least one female evictee and at least one male evictee. The second included only highpoverty block groups, where more than 40% of the population lived at or below 150% of the poverty line. The third included only “hypersegregated neighborhoods,” where at least 85% of residents belonged to the same racial or ethnic group. The primary strength of analyzing court records lies in the accuracy of the information. I learned during fieldwork that many tenants tend to have misguided conceptions of eviction. Indeed, some who clearly were evicted (their names appearing in the court records) did not realize as much. Just as epidemiologists have found ecological-level data on sensitive topics (e.g., alcohol consumption) to be much more precise than estimates gleaned from individual-level surveys (see Schwartz 1994), relying on court records resulted in a much more exact measure of the incidence and location of eviction than could be generated from survey research. But court record data also are limited. For one, they do not enable me to compare the characteristics of evicted and nonevicted households to determine if, say, women who fell behind in rent were more likely to be evicted than men who did the same. My claims drawing on these data, then, are relegated to comparisons of different neighborhoods. Moreover, while court data record the location of all documented formal evictions, they provide only a partial view of the entire population affected by eviction. For one, court records do not capture informal evictions—from illegal strong-arm lockouts to unofficial agreements—that occur beyond the purview of the court. Off-the-books evictions may account for a significant fraction of landlord-initiated moves. Joe Parazinski,7 a white building manager who lived and worked in the majority-black inner city—and who preferred paying tenants $200 to leave over taking them to eviction court, as the former option often was cheaper—once told me, “For every eviction I do that goes through the courts, there are at least 10 that don’t.” Moreover, because only leaseholders’ names appear in the eviction records, there is no way of knowing if, say, children, grandparents, or romantic partners were living with leaseholders at the time of the eviction. While those informally evicted remain beyond the scope of this study, it was possible to gain a fuller picture of all people affected by court-ordered evictions by collecting survey data.

Court Survey The Milwaukee Eviction Court Study was an in-person survey of tenants appearing in eviction court every weekday (save one) between January 17 and February 26, 2011. During this six-week period, 1,328 eviction cases were filed. In 378 cases, tenants appeared in court; of those, 251 were interviewed, resulting in a response rate of 66.4%.

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Brief interviews were conducted with tenants immediately after their court hearing. All tenants appearing in court whose name appeared on the Eviction Summons and Complaint—a court-issued document, printed on pink paper, listing the charges against them—and therefore would appear in the eviction records, were eligible. Tenants were asked about their current residence (e.g., rent, number of bedrooms), the outcome of their hearing (e.g., evicted, case dismissed), and their demographic information. Whenever possible, interviewers electronically scanned each tenant’s Summons and Complaint or copied its contents directly onto the questionnaire (N = 105). Doing so provided highquality data about the reasons for eviction, these being listed clearly on the document. If tenants did not have their Summons and Complaint or if they preferred interviewers not look at it, they were asked to provide the reasons they were called to court (N = 146). Additionally, the survey collected a roster of all adults and children in each household. Besides being asked to provide the race, age, and sex of all adults who lived with them, respondents also were asked about their relationship to each adult as well as if the adult’s name appeared on the pink papers. Survey data allowed me to look beyond leaseholders to see all people in a household exposed to the hardship of eviction. Although this survey encompassed but a fraction of families evicted in Milwaukee, its sample was large enough that meaningful insights could be drawn from it. More information about the survey can be found in the appendix. Fieldwork From May to September 2008, I lived in a poor, predominantly white neighborhood in Milwaukee: Green Street Mobile Home Park. From October 2008 to June 2009, I lived in a rooming house in the city’s predominantly black inner city. While in these two neighborhoods, I met several people going through an eviction. Eleven eviction cases became the ones I followed most closely and analyzed most completely. They involved five households evicted from the trailer park—two single white men, an older white woman with grown adult children, a white single mother of three, and a white couple with four children—and six households from the inner city: a single black woman, three black single mothers (one with six children, two with three), a single black father of two, and a black couple with two children. Over the course of my fieldwork, I followed these individuals and families throughout the eviction process, from the initial termination of tenancy to homelessness brought about by eviction. I spent thousands of hours with them in homes, churches, courtrooms, shelters, social service offices, and cities and towns beyond Milwaukee. I also established relationships with several landlords and building managers, including two landlords from whom I rented during my fieldwork. Six landlords who owned and managed properties in poor neighborhoods— three white and three black, all men with one exception—as well as two building managers, both white men, allowed me to spend time with them, helping them repair their properties, collect rent, screen tenants, and deliver eviction notices. (For a more detailed discussion of the fieldwork, see Desmond [2012].) Gaining entrée is among the most difficult and frustrating aspects of fieldwork. Entrée is not something one does only once at the beginning of the fieldwork. One does not walk into the field as one walks through a door. Rather, ethnographers must maintain entrée day in and day out, and trust and friendship, under the unusual (and objectifying) context of research, are often tenuous at best (Rabinow 1977, pp. 29–30; Duneier 1999, p. 338).

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Gaining entrée in one group is hard enough; harder still is the process of gaining access to a network of people entangled in antagonistic relationships, people who often dislike and distrust one another. While spending time with tenants and landlords allowed me to analyze eviction from multiple vantage points, it required that more effort be dedicated to gaining entrée and maintaining trust. Some tenants suspected I was working undercover for the police or for the landlord, whom they sometimes referred to as “your friend,” whereas some landlords refused to discuss the details of a tenant’s case. Access to one person often complicated access to another. Each case was unique, different people won over by different means, but generally by being persistent, stressing that my goal was to study eviction from different angles, and sharing my resources (e.g., car, cell phone), I eventually gained entrée into the lives of different players in the process. As time passed, both landlords and tenants grew used to my notepad and digital recorder, both of which I usually carried to record conversations and interactions, the same way you grow used to a friend’s cigarettes as she repeatedly lights up. Although sociological data can be found virtually everywhere, only a thin slice of material, that which conforms to conventional forms, typically counts as such. “Every researcher,” Bourdieu once remarked, “grants the status of data only to a small fraction of the given, yet not, as it should be, to the fraction called forth by his or her problematics, but to that fraction vouchsafed and guaranteed by the pedagogical tradition of which they are part and, too often, by that tradition alone” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 225). During my fieldwork, I collected a wide variety of evidence, conventional and otherwise, to bolster the validity of my observations. In this article, I supplement ethnographic observations with handwritten rent rolls, fair market rent estimates, and other data sources. And this being ethnography—that old method of immersing oneself into people’s daily routines and systematically recording social processes as they unfold in real time—I prioritize firsthand observations of social action over individuals’ accounts of it (Liebow 1967).

ESTABLISHING THE DISCREPANCY: RESULTS FROM THE QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS Eviction Records Analysis In an average year, Milwaukee tenants living in 3.5% of all occupied rental units—and 7.2% of those living in occupied rental units in high-poverty neighborhoods—were evicted. Landlords evicted an estimated 15,983 adults and children from 5,995 units in an average year.8 Of those, an estimated 7,352 people (46%) were from black neighborhoods, 3,197 (20%) were from white neighborhoods, 639 (4%) were from Hispanic neighborhoods, and 4,795 (30%) were from mixed neighborhoods. The yearly average eviction rate for renter-occupied households located in black neighborhoods was 7.4%, compared to 3.9% in Hispanic neighborhoods and 1.4% in white neighborhoods. These rates did not change dramatically after I limited the analyses to high-poverty or hypersegregated neighborhoods (see Table 7.1). The yearly average eviction rate in mixed neighborhoods in which blacks accounted for the largest racial or ethnic group was 6.2%, compared to 3.9% in majority-white mixed areas and 3.5% in majority-Hispanic mixed areas.

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Table 7.1 Household eviction rate by neighborhood racial composition Black

White

Neighborhoods

Rate (%)

Evictions

Rate (%)

All (N = 703) ……………… High-poverty (N = 195) ……. Hypersegregated (N = 483)…

7.44 8.23 7.61

2,759 1,561 1,652

1.36  .68 1.20

Hispanic

Evictions Rate (%) 1,187 9 561

3.93 4.11 3.24

Evictions 276 156  14

Note: Data are taken from Milwaukee County eviction records, 2003–7, and GeoLytics population estimates, 2003–7. Annual means are reported. Pairwise comparisons found significant differences (at least at the P < .01 level) in eviction rates between black, white, and Hispanic neighborhoods.

Within the eviction records, women were disproportionately represented among tenants, men among landlords. Between 2003 and 2007, women made up 60.6% (N = 21,975) of evicted tenants; men made up 34.4% (N = 12,473). Of the 32,506 evicting landlords represented in the records, 4,685 (14.4%) were women, 12,207 (37.6%) were men, and 14,763 (45.4%) were listed as companies. In white neighborhoods, women and men were evicted at fairly equal rates, whereas black and Hispanic areas saw significantly more women evicted than men. Figure 7.1 displays the average annual count of evicted women and men by racial composition of neighborhood. In an average year, 742 women and 763 men from white neighborhoods, 212 women and 119 men from Hispanic neighborhoods, and 2,155 women and 862 men from black neighborhoods were evicted through the court system. Each year, the average number of women evicted from black neighborhoods was more than double that of men

Figure 7.1  Average annual count of evicted tenants; N = 24,211 tenants evicted from 703 block groups. Data are from Milwaukee County eviction records, 2003–7, and GeoLytics population estimates, 2003–7

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from those neighborhoods and almost triple that of women from white neighborhoods. In black neighborhoods, women outranked men within the eviction records by a rate of 2.5 : 1; in Hispanic areas, women outranked men by a rate of 1.78 : 1. As displayed in Table 7.2, the average eviction rate of female renters was higher than that for male renters in black and Hispanic, but not in white, neighborhoods. In an average year, 1.05% of female renters and 1.14% of male renters were evicted from white Table 7.2  Gender differences in eviction rates Neighborhood Racial Composition Black

Mean Comparison Statistic (t)

Black and Black and White and Hispanic White Hispanic Hispanic

White

All Neighborhoods Female eviction rate (%) Male eviction rate (%) Risk difference (%) t-scorea Risk ratio t-scoreb Block groups

5.55 1.05 2.94 1.14 2.62 −.09 (27.17) (2.03) 2.32 .91 (22.90) (3.85) 191 480

2.51 1.16 1.35 (13.65) 2.57 (10.28) 32

42.02*** 19.03*** 29.15***

9.69*** 8.70*** 5.28***

8.32*** .09 8.33***

25.3***

1.67

19.26***

High-Poverty Neighborhoods Female eviction rate (%) Male eviction rate (%) Risk difference (%) t-scorea Risk ratio t-scoreb Block groups

5.86 3.05 2.81 (25.84) 2.39 (21.36) 153

.67 .75 −.08 (.72) .78 (1.73) 13

2.51 1.16 1.35 (13.39) 2.63 (10.15) 29

10.65*** 7.33*** 7.71*** 6.35***

10.25*** 8.93*** 9.01*** 3.40*** 5.78*** 8.46*** 1.48

6.53***

Hypersegregated Neighborhoods Female eviction rate (%) Male eviction rate (%) Risk difference (%) t-scorea Risk ratio t-scoreb Block groups

5.60 2.91 2.69 (23.31) 2.35 (19.50) 132

.92 1.03 –.11 (1.98) .84 (5.43) 348

2.29 .62 1.67 (4.02) 3.30 (2.51) 3

36.87*** 16.52*** 24.43***

3.27*** 3.33*** 1.28

2.26* .63 2.90**

21.77***

1.75

8.93***

Note: Data are from Milwaukee County eviction records, 2003–7, and GeoLytics population estimates, 2003–7. Annual means are reported. a W  ithin-neighborhood t-test of risk difference equals zero (if risk difference equals zero, it implies no gender difference). b W  ithin-neighborhood t-test of risk ratio equals one (if risk ratio equals one, it implies no gender difference). * P < .05 ** P < .01 *** P < .001

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neighborhoods. In Hispanic neighborhoods, 2.51% of female renters and 1.16% of male renters were evicted in an average year. The discrepancy was largest in black neighborhoods, where 5.55% of female renters and 2.94% of male renters were evicted in an average year. The eviction rate of female renters from black neighborhoods was 1.87 times that of male renters from those neighborhoods and 5.24 times that of female renters from white neighborhoods. This general pattern remained when comparisons were limited to high-poverty and hypersegregated neighborhoods. Each year in black and Hispanic neighborhoods, there were, on average, more than two women for every man evicted through the court system. While the average risk ratio was 0.91 in white neighborhoods, indicating (slight) male overrepresentation within the eviction records, it was 2.57 in Hispanic neighborhoods and 2.32 in black neighborhoods, indicating (substantial) female overrepresentation. Within-neighborhood t-tests (used to detect gender differences) found the mean risk ratios in all neighborhoods to be statistically significant. Between-neighborhood t-tests (used to detect differences across neighborhoods) demonstrated that the average annual risk ratio of black neighborhoods could not be distinguished from that of Hispanic neighborhoods; however, the discrepancy between the female and male eviction rates was significantly larger in these neighborhoods than in white neighborhoods. Comparisons of risk difference yielded similar patterns, with one important exception: The risk difference statistic for black neighborhoods was found to be significantly higher than that for all other neighborhoods, implying that the difference between the male and female eviction rates in black neighborhoods was greater than that in both white and Hispanic areas. Court Survey Analysis Table 7.3 displays the characteristics of tenants who participated in the Milwaukee Eviction Court Study: 74% were black, 18% were white, 5% were Hispanic, and 3% Table 7.3  Tenants in eviction court Variable

Women

Black White Hispanic Other

147 20 8 6

Receives housing assistance Lives with other adults Lives with children Age Rent to income ratio (%) Household income ($) Monthly rent ($) Rent and fees owed ($)

Men 39 25 5 1

Yes

No

14 96 155

236 155 94

Median

Min–Max

33 54 935 573 900

19–69 4–186 0–25,000 225–1,400 0–9,000

Note: Data are from the Milwaukee Eviction Court Study, 2011.

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were Asian or American Indian. With 147 respondents, black women constituted the largest group. The total number of black women exceeded that of all other groups combined. The age of respondents varied widely—the youngest was 19; the oldest was 69— indicating that eviction affects people at multiple points along the life course. The median age was 33. Not only were most respondents very poor—the median monthly household income was $935—but 94% of them received no housing assistance. Meanwhile, the average tenant paid $590 a month in rent. The majority of respondents dedicated at least 50% of their household income to rent, with a full third devoting at least 80% to it. Given this, it is unsurprising that 92% of respondents were summoned to court for missing rent payments. The median amount of back rent owed was $900. The majority of respondents lived with children, over a third of them women who lived with no other adults. Of the 353 children living in respondents’ households, 115 belonged to those that received judgments for eviction. The average evicted child was 7, the youngest 4 months old. Over 77% of these children lived in African-American households. And where did evicted families plan to go? Eleven were planning on staying with friends or family. Twelve had found a new place. Four were headed to a homeless shelter and two to a hotel. Two people had resigned themselves to the street, another to his car. But most evicted families—40 of them—simply did not know where they were going to go. Not all tenants appearing in court were evicted. Thirty interviewees (11.9%) had their case dismissed, 59 (23.5%) had to return to court on another day, and 90 (35.9%) settled their case with a stipulation agreement.9 The remaining 72 (28.7%) were evicted and ordered to vacate the premises in short order. That most tenants who appeared in court and participated in the survey did not receive an immediate eviction judgment should not cloud the fact that the vast majority of eviction cases processed by the court did. A default eviction judgment was entered for the 940 cases in which tenants did not appear in court, providing that the landlord or a representative was present. Of the 72 evicted tenants, 35 (49%) were black women and 13 (18%) were black men. Thirteen white men and four white women also were evicted, along with four Hispanic men and three Hispanic women. This pattern—black women outnumbering all other groups among the evicted—mirrors that identified in the eviction records. But does it hold once we account for other adults in the household? Ninety-six interviewees claimed to be living with other adults, 76 lived with one other adult, 15 lived with two, and 5 lived with three or more. These included 61 significant others, 54 kinsmen, 8 friends, and 1 caretaker. All adults living in households represented by this survey (N = 375), along with those living in the subset of households that received eviction judgments (N = 112), are displayed in Figure 7.2. The black portion of the bars represents adults who were listed on the Summons and Complaint; the grey portion represents those who were not (and thus who would not have appeared in the eviction records). It is notable that only 70 adults of a total 375, including 21 of 112 living in households that received eviction judgments, were not listed. Black men made up the largest group of adults not listed on the Summons and Complaint (N = 32), but black women were not far behind (N = 24). After all adults in the household, including those not listed on the Summons and Complaint, were accounted for, black women continued vastly to outnumber all other groups. They accounted for half of all adults living in households appearing in eviction court (188 of 375) and 44% living in households that received eviction judgments (49 of 112). The survey data suggest, then, not only that black women are “marked” by eviction at higher rates—collecting evictions on their records—but that they are exposed to the

Figure 7.2  Adults living in households appearing in eviction court. The black portion of bars represents adults listed on the Summons and Complaint; the striped portion represents adults not listed. Note the different scales. Data are from the Milwaukee Eviction Court Study, 2011

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hardship of eviction at higher rates as well. Black women are more likely to be evicted on paper and in practice. Summary of Quantitative Findings These twinned quantitative analyses have demonstrated, first, that eviction affected a significant number of Milwaukee households, especially those in inner-city black neighborhoods. Between 2003 and 2007, roughly 16 evictions occurred each day. Almost half of all evictions took place in black neighborhoods. This disparity—the clustering of evictions in predominantly black neighborhoods—reflects the overrepresentation of AfricanAmericans among the urban poor as well as their concentration in segregated and disadvantaged neighborhoods (Wilson 1987; Sampson and Sharkey 2008). In Hispanic and black, but not in white, neighborhoods, female renters were more than twice as likely as male renters to be evicted through the court system. In an average year in Milwaukee’s high-poverty white neighborhoods, one male renter of 134 and one female renter of 150 were evicted through the court system; in its high-poverty Hispanic neighborhoods, one male renter of 86 and one female renter of 40 were evicted; and in its high-poverty black neighborhoods, one male renter of 33 and one female renter of 17 were evicted. The survey results support the court records analysis, finding that among evicted tenants, black women outnumbered black men by 1.75 : 1 and white women by 6.13 : 1. Women from black neighborhoods made up only 9.6% of Milwaukee’s population but accounted for 30% of evicted tenants. The question is why. The following section draws on ethnographic data to identify several mechanisms underlying this discrepancy.

EXPLAINING THE DISCREPANCY: RESULTS FROM FIELDWORK Structural Constraints: Work, Welfare, and Housing Costs In poor black communities, women are more likely to work in the formal economy than men, many of whom are marked by a criminal record and unemployed at drastically high rates (Pager 2007; Wilson 2009). In Milwaukee, half of working-age (16–64) black men are out of work (Levine 2008). Most landlords will not approve the rental applications of unemployed persons or those with criminal records. In the office of Affordable Rentals, a major property management company in Milwaukee, a paper taped to the wall announces, “We reject applicants for the following reasons: … Felony drug or violent crime conviction within the last 7 years; misdemeanor drug or disorderly conduct crime charges within the last 3 years; non-verifiable income or insufficient income.” In innercity black communities, women are disproportionately represented in the formal lowwage service sector (Newman 1999; Collins and Mayer 2010) and therefore are able to provide the necessary income documentation when securing a lease. Verifiable income also may come in the form of public assistance, namely, welfare. Roughly 75% of Milwaukee’s welfare recipients are African-American, and virtually all of those are single mothers (Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development 2006). In highpoverty black communities, then, we should expect women’s names to be more likely to appear on an income check, on a lease, and, if things fall apart, on an eviction record.

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Stagnant incomes and rising housing costs.—Women from poor black neighborhoods not only are overrepresented on leases but also tend to have a harder time making rent than male leaseholders from similar neighborhoods. There are several reasons for this. First, although many men in poor black neighborhoods are excluded from the population at risk of collecting evictions on their records (lessees), those counted among this population often are better off than their female counterparts. In 1999, 81% of employed black men in Milwaukee worked full-time, compared to 75% of employed black women.10 And black men earned more: in 1999, the median annual income for full-time workers in Milwaukee was $30,174 for black men and $24,437 for black women. The difference is the equivalent of a year’s rent for a one-bedroom apartment at Milwaukee’s 1999 fair market rent.11 With respect to income, however, the biggest difference between male and female leaseholders in poor black neighborhoods is the fact that single mothers on ­welfare—with annual incomes of $8,076—number among the latter. Many women in inner-city neighborhoods not only have smaller incomes than men but also have larger expenses as well. Single-mother households make up roughly 58% of all African-American households in Milwaukee (Wisconsin Women’s Council 2006). Many cannot rely on regular support from their children’s fathers to help pay for school supplies, clothes, food, medical care, and other expenses related to raising a child (Cancian and Meyer 2005). To avoid child support orders, the non-custodial fathers with whom I lived in the rooming house worked in the informal economy and, when able, saved their money by hiding it in their room or even with me. It is important to recognize, too, that single mothers, given their children, must seek out larger and more expensive housing options than noncustodial fathers, who can sleep on someone’s couch or, as was the case with my housemates, rent an inexpensive room. Each of the fathers with whom I lived rented a room for $400 a month (utilities included), a good deal less than the two-bedroom units many single mothers I met rented for $550 (utilities not included). Welfare stipends have remained completely stagnant over the past decade, while the cost of housing has increased by historic proportions. In 1997, the fair market rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Milwaukee was $466. In 2008 it was $665. For a two-bedroom apartment, that number jumped from $585 in 1997 to $795 in 2008; for a three-bedroom apartment, from $733 to $1,002. During this 10-year span, welfare stipends did not change. The result is that the average cost of rent, even in high-poverty neighborhoods, is quickly approaching the total income of welfare recipients (see Figure 7.3). Since replacing Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1997, Wisconsin Works (W-2) has provided two types of monthly stipends: $673 for beneficiaries who work and $628 for those who cannot, usually because of a disability. Women resigned to low-wage work fare slightly better but not by a wide margin. Minimum wage in Wisconsin rose from $5.15 to $5.70 in 2005 and from $5.70 to $6.50 in 2006. If a woman working for minimum wage logged 35 hours a week, the estimated number of hours the average low-income single mother works (Edin and Lein 1997), she would have taken home $721 a month between 1997 and 2004, $789 a month in 2005, and $910 a month between 2006 and 2008 (before taxes). These increases are far outpaced by the climbing cost of housing (Wardrip, Pelletiere, and Crowley 2008). And yet, the last decade has witnessed federal spending on affordable housing programs decrease dramatically. Between 1995 and 2007, federal spending on low-income housing assistance fell by more than 20%—both as a share of all nondefense discretionary spending and as a share of gross domestic product. Today, the majority of

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Figure 7.3  Milwaukee County fair market rent, welfare stipend, and ­minimum wage (140 hours/month). Data are from U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2009; Wisconsin Department of Children and Families, 2009; and State of Wisconsin Equal Rights Division, 2009 poor renters do not benefit from federal housing programs (Pelletiere et al. 2008; Rice and Sard 2009). These structural conditions help explain why single mothers like Patrice Hinkston often must deliver to landlords upward of 80%–90% of their income check. Patrice, 24, is a black single mother of three who dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade. She and her mother, Doreen, 44 and a single mother of four, were evicted from a five-bedroom house in which they had lived for five years. Anxious to find subsequent housing, no matter the size or condition, Patrice, Doreen, and their children moved into a two-bedroom lower-duplex unit that rented for $550 a month. The unit was in a state of disrepair. Its back door would not lock; the kitchen window was broken; there were several holes in the dirty walls; its toilet and shower regularly remained stopped up for days; its walls, sinks, floors, and cabinets crawled with roaches; and it was located on a dangerous street littered with abandoned buildings and street memorials for murder victims: teddy bears, Black and Mild cigars, and scribbled notes lashed to tree trunks. Three adults and five children living in this small apartment made for overcrowded conditions. So Patrice and her three children moved into the upper unit of the same duplex, another two-bedroom apartment renting for the same price. Patrice worked part-time at Cousin’s Subs, which paid her $8.00 an hour. She made rent the first couple of months by relying on help from Doreen and by handing over to her landlord nearly all her paycheck. But after the manager at Cousin’s trimmed Patrice’s hours—Doreen could not stretch her disability check over the difference—the landlord evicted her, causing Patrice and her children to move back downstairs.12

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Fixed incomes and unexpected expenses.—Avoiding eviction often requires adjusting quickly to unforeseen expenses, such as medical bills or bail money, or a sudden drop in income, from public assistance sanctions or losing hours at Cousin’s Subs. Because such large portions of poor tenants’ incomes already are devoted to rent, a relatively small expense—a new pair of shoes, a taxi fare across town—can cause them to fall behind. Renters adjust to irregular expenses by working overtime, relying on social contacts, hustling in the underground economy, or making money in other informal ways (e.g., donating plasma). Chester Watson preferred the latter two options when funds ran low. Chester and his longtime girlfriend, Myesha Davies, both 33-year-old African-Americans, supported two teenaged children off Myesha’s welfare check. To help his family pay the bills, Chester often found odd jobs. He would assist elderly neighbors move, run errands for the neighborhood weed man, mate his pit bulls and sell the puppies, or ring up Joe Parazinski (his old building manager and friend) and help him with landscaping or property maintenance. Although women sometimes supplemented their income using similar tactics, many faced a series of difficulties when attempting to recover from unforeseen expenses. Many single mothers, for one, did not feel they could devote the time to work in the informal economy, given their child care responsibilities. Others were unwilling to sacrifice their dignity or to risk losing their children to Child Protective Services by participating in illicit trades. Mothers working in the formal economy, for their part, benefited little from putting in extra hours if doing so required paying more for child care. And for many, putting in extra hours simply was not an option their job would allow. But perhaps it was single mothers on welfare who faced the steepest challenge when attempting to bend their fixed income around emergency expenses. They could not work overtime, of course, and often the requirements of the welfare program—general equivalency diploma courses, life skills classes, trial jobs, community service—coupled with child care obligations, thwarted opportunities to earn money in the informal sector (see Hays 2003, pp. 33–61). Accordingly, when confronted with an unusual expense, single mothers already devoting the vast majority of their welfare stipend to rent had a difficult time making up the loss. Consider Arleen Belle, 38, a black woman and mother of six, whose income from welfare was $628 a month. Two of Arleen’s children—Jori (age 14) and Jafaris (age 6)—lived with her, two were in foster care, and two were grown. Like most of the single mothers I met, Arleen received little financial help from her children’s fathers. In the summer of 2008, the city condemned the three-bedroom single-family house in which Arleen was living with Jori and Jafaris.13 Caught in a desperate situation, she eventually moved into a two-bedroom apartment in the inner city. The rent was $550, or 88% of her income. A short while after moving in, her sister died, and Arleen contributed some money to the funeral expenses, falling a month behind in rent. The next month, she missed an appointment with her welfare caseworker and was sanctioned, her check cut by $500. Two months behind, she was evicted and took her two boys to a domestic violence shelter. Children.—Arleen would move from the shelter into a one-bedroom apartment in a large complex. But after the landlord learned that one of Arleen’s sons was responsible for two police officers paying a visit to his building—Jori had fled home after kicking a teacher at school—he forced her to leave, carrying out an informal eviction. This incident highlights yet another disadvantage single mothers face: that children can cost landlords money and cause them “headache,” a well-traveled term in the landlord’s vocabulary. Teenagers, especially young black boys like Jori, can attract the attention of the police.

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Tenants’ children can result in landlords coming under increased state scrutiny in other ways as well. Young children can test positive for lead poisoning—as a disproportionate amount of those living in poor black neighborhoods do (Jones et  al. 2009)—which in turn can lead to an abatement order from the Environmental Protection Agency (with a price tag in the thousands). Child Protective Services, too, can take an interest in a child’s health, which in turn can lead a caseworker to inspect a unit for unsanitary or dangerous code violations. And because landlords often turn away large families seeking one- or two-bedroom apartments, directing them to larger and more expensive units, single mothers oftentimes lie to landlords out of necessity, telling them, for instance, that they have only one child rather than three. Overcrowded and cooped-up children are hard on apartments. They stir the ire of landlords, not only by being a recurrent source of noise but also by defacing property. Far from acting as a mitigating factor in the eviction decision, then, children often are an aggravating one (see Desmond et al. 2012). Interactional Patterns: Gendered Reactions to Eviction Notices It is undoubtedly true that a large part of the overrepresentation of women from poor black neighborhoods among evictees is explained by the structural arrangements I have just described. But there are other dynamics afoot as well. Although most evictions, technically speaking, are the result of a failed economic transaction (nonpayment), economic explanations alone cannot explain why landlords with dozens of defaulting tenants extend leniency to some and withdraw it from others (Lempert and Ikeda 1970). Many tenants who could be evicted are not, an observation verified by a simple analysis of Green Street Mobile Home Park’s rent rolls. The trailer park, or simply, “the Park,” as its residents dubbed it, was made up of 131 trailers and a disheveled office, cluttered with papers and keys and a dripping air conditioning unit. The office served as a gathering place where tenants could jaw with Lenny Lawson, the laid-back, mustached building manager, or Susie Dunn, his chain-smoking assistant. After establishing a good relationship with Lenny, I convinced him to let me copy the rent rolls from April to July 2008. These documents demonstrated that the relationship between nonpayment of rent and eviction was anything but straightforward. In July, for example, 47 tenants were behind. The least amount owed was $3.88; the largest sum was $2,156. Many tenants who owed over a thousand dollars were not evicted while some who owed far less were. One of the latter was Larraine Jenkins, whose balance at the time of her eviction was $516. A 54-year-old white woman, Larraine received a monthly Social Security disability check for $714, out of which she paid $550 to rent a small two-bedroom trailer. But in June, already behind $366, she used $150 of her rent money to pay a defaulted gas bill, withholding the remaining $400. That same month, Jerry Warren, a 42-year-old white man who lived across from Larraine in an aqua-blue trailer he painted himself, was served an eviction notice, which he promptly balled up and threw in the face of Tobin Charney, his landlord, barking, “Tobin, I don’t give a shit about this fucking eviction! And Lenny, I don’t care how old you are. I’ll still take to whooping your ass something good!” A yelling match erupted, culminating in Jerry’s stomping back to his trailer. Jerry’s income was similar to Larraine’s (he also received disability), and his rent was identical to hers. And like Larraine, Jerry would make good on his debt soon after being served the eviction notice. But Larraine was evicted, and Jerry was not. The most curious

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thing about these different outcomes, I would learn, was not that Jerry was not evicted but that Larraine was. After all, Larraine did come up with the rent. Although she initially avoided Tobin after receiving notice that the sheriff’s eviction squad had been summoned—later telling me, “When I got that green piece of paper, I couldn’t deal with it. I was terrified by it, just terrified”—Larraine eventually approached him with the $400 she had withheld.14 “When can you get me the other $150?” Tobin was busy looking for a receipt book in the office. “Tonight, ok—” Tobin cut her off: “Okay. You give it to Susie or Lenny.” Susie took the eviction notice Larraine had been wringing in her hands. “You should go ask your sister for the rest,” she advised, picking up the fax machine’s phone and dialing a number she knew by heart. “Yes. Hello? I need to stop aneviction at Green Street Mobile Home Park,” Susie said to the sheriff’s office. “For Larraine Jenkins in W46. She took care of her rent.” Larraine sulked back to her trailer and began calling local agencies, none of which could help. “I can’t think of anything else,” she said blankly to the floor. Depressed, Larraine slept most of the following day. When she finally forced herself out of bed, she dialed a few more agencies and then family members. By the following week, she had convinced her younger brother, Ruben, to pay her balance. But when Ruben and Larraine approached Tobin with the money, they were rebuffed. “No,” Tobin said. “I don’t want your money. You’re out of here.” “But I have your money right here,” Ruben insisted. “I don’t want it. You’re out of here.” Two sheriff officers and Eagle Moving Company arrived that afternoon. “Some people we work with,” Lenny told me. “But if they keep bull-shitting and not making any attempt, then forget it. Five day out.… [With Larraine, it was] every month the same thing. Ain’t got no money. Start calling other places getting help. How many times can you do that?” Tobin and Lenny had had enough. But it is important to recognize that Larraine had nearly avoided eviction, as she had in the past, by borrowing money from a family member. Petitioning acquaintances, friends, or family members for help—a strategy on which many women relied—sometimes worked (though see Desmond [2012]). Indeed, the week after Larraine was evicted, a woman who owed double what Larraine did walked into the office and convinced Lenny not to serve her an eviction notice by telling him that her father-in-law was going to come through with the back rent. Working off the rent.—Meanwhile, Jerry’s confrontational response, belligerent as it was, aligned with Tobin’s pithy and brusque way. Property management is a profession dominated by men—recall that landlords in the eviction records outranked women almost 3:1—as well as by a gruff, masculine way of conducting business.15 Although unequal in status, male landlords and their male tenants, both having been socialized to the rhythms and postures of masculinity, often engaged one another in a way that made sense. Not only did Jerry confront Tobin immediately after being served, but he later would offer to clean up the trailer park and attend to maintenance concerns if Tobin canceled the eviction. Jerry had done some work for Tobin in the past, painting trailer hitches and winterizing pipes. Having proved himself a reliable hand, he had established a “working off the rent” option should money run thin. Whereas Larraine rang up social services and

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family members, Jerry went straight to the man who had initiated the eviction. Over the course of my fieldwork, I observed a good number of men avoid eviction by laying concrete, patching roofs, or painting rooms for landlords. I never once witnessed a woman approach a landlord with a similar offer. The reason was in part that women already taxed by child care, welfare requirements, and work obligations could not spare the time. But it was perhaps in larger part that many women did not conceive of working off the rent as a valid possibility. It was not so much that women lacked a handyman skill set—many men making household repairs learned as they went along—what they lacked, rather, was the belief that such work was “women’s work.” As a result, oftentimes a woman staring down an eviction did not conceive of herself as a marketable resource. The exception was when women traded sex for rent. I did meet men who were taken advantage of by land lords when working off the rent, putting in free labor only to be evicted anyway. When Lamar Richards fell behind, he begged—the word is accurate—his landlord to let him work off his debt. Lamar was a 48-year-old black man, who, after spending eight days in an abandoned house the previous winter on a crack bend, had to have his frostbitten legs amputated below the knee. Wheelchair bound, this single father of two teenaged boys received a monthly welfare stipend of $628. Lamar fell $310 behind in rent when, expecting to receive some additional funds that never came, he prematurely bought his sons shoes, clothes, and school supplies. His landlord, Sherrena Tarver, a 34-year-old black woman who owned 36 units throughout the inner city, credited to him $50 for cleaning out a filthy basement strewn with mildewed clothes, trash, and dog feces. To satisfy the rest of his debt, Lamar convinced Sherrena to let him paint one of her vacant units. It took him the better part of a week to finish the large two-bedroom apartment. On his final day, I pitched in. Lamar crawled on the floor, his light black skin freckled with white paint, his stubs blistering, painting and praying for strength. “Jesus, get me through the day,” he would sigh. Then, quietly resolved, he would lift his roller. When we finished, Lamar called Sherrena, who came straight over to inspect the work. After a swift march through the unit, Sherrena shook her head and began reprimanding Lamar. “I tried to work with you, and you disrespecting me with this motherfucking shitty ass job!” “What I did is worth way more than two-sixty,” Lamar yelled back. “I’m trying to get you outta my pocket. I’m crawling around on my knees painting for you. And you gonna do me like this?” Sherrena refused to credit Lamar a cent toward his debt. She would later file an eviction order against him. Ducking and dodging.—If women received no help from agencies, acquaintances, or relatives, they tended to practice avoidance (Babcock and Laschever 2003). This enraged landlords. “What I hate,” Joe Parazinski often said, “is when they duck and dodge me. If they don’t pick up the phone or answer the door, I’m puttin’ ‘em the fuck out.” If black women “ducked and dodged” more than their white counterparts, the reason was that their social networks tended to be far more resource deprived (see Heflin and Pattillo 2006). Whereas Larraine’s brother, Ruben, was a middle-class homeowner, all of Patrice’s and Arleen’s siblings were poor. Crystal Mayberry, a 19-year-old black woman who received disability at the time of her eviction, was raised in the foster care system and was estranged from her biological and foster families. Or consider Vanetta Evans, a black single mother (age 21) raising three kids on welfare. At the time of her eviction, Vanetta’s mother was homeless and her closest sibling, an older sister, also was on welfare. Just as black and

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white men alike tended to work off the rent, black and white women alike tended to seek help from social services, kin, new acquaintances, and friends when facing eviction. But because white women tended to be connected to more people in better positions to help, they were more likely to avoid eviction. I observed some men avoid their landlords after receiving an eviction notice, just as I witnessed some women confront their landlords after receiving one. But because of the powerful ways gender structures interaction (Ridgeway 1997), providing individuals with expectations about appropriate ways to act, a woman who aggressively confronted a landlord commonly was branded rude or out of line. This may be why Bob Helf-gott, a landlord of 20 years who owned dozens of properties in poor neighborhoods, believed lesbians to be difficult tenants. “The gay women,” he sighed. “That angry dike thing, it drives me crazy. Okay, they’re just terrible. Always complaining, … so they’re tough to deal with.” Likewise, not all men who responded heatedly to an eviction notice improved their situation. Consider what happened to Darius Jones, one of Joe Parazinski’s tenants. A single black man who had lost his job, Darius was handed an eviction notice by Joe and his boss, Mark Morris, a white retired gym teacher. Darius gave Joe and Mark a verbal lashing, slamming his door after telling them, “You’d better not fucking come ‘round here again.” After that exchange, Mark wanted nothing more to do with Darius and instructed Joe to push forward with the eviction.16 What matters, here and elsewhere, is not the style of interaction itself but the correspondence between style and social position. Direct confrontation with a landlord, especially should he be a white man, was for black men like Darius a more uncertain and risky matter than it was for white men like Jerry (Wacquant 2005).17 Nevertheless, many black men were able to avoid eviction by working off the rent, whereas many black women, should they receive no help from social services or social networks, ducked and dodged their way to eviction. Reporting a landlord.—Instead of ducking and dodging, some women confronted their landlord through an intermediary. I am thinking here of the times they reported their landlord to the Department of Neighborhood Services (DNS) for failing to address housing problems. Many low-income black women—who lived in some of the city’s worst housing stock, overwhelmingly were leaseholders, and often preferred to avoid direct confrontation with their landlord—relied on this service. But those who did greatly increased their risk of eviction, for there are few things landlords detested more than a clipboardin-hand building inspector scrutinizing their property for fine-generating code violations. Consider what unfolded one evening when Sherrena and I were driving through the inner city. Sherrena stopped to speak with a woman named Elizabeth, a new tenant she had allowed to move into one of her more run-down properties with a partial rent payment. A young black woman, Elizabeth was sitting on her stoop, hushing a colicky baby and talking with her mother. Upon seeing Sherrena, Elizabeth immediately began protesting. “My son is sick because my house is cold. I mean, the heat don’t come on, the window have a hole in it, and I’ve been waiting patiently.” As the conversation developed, Sherrena learned that Elizabeth and her mother had called DNS. Sherrena rebutted, speaking to Elizabeth’s mother: “That wasn’t right for you to do that because I was working with her.… Now, I’m willing to work with her, but she didn’t pay all of her rent this month either.… And now, I don’t have any other choice.” “Then fix the window,” Elizabeth’s mother replied. “… It’s too late now. The damage is done.” Sherrena shook her head and, hands on her hips, peered down at Elizabeth. “It’s always the ones that I try to help that I have the

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problems out of. And I’m not saying that you a problem, but it’s just that, somebody else is involved, and you the one living here. So it puts you in a spot.” “Well, let me ask you something.” Elizabeth’s mother stepped closer. “If this was your daughter and these were your grandkids, what would you do?” “I would have definitely made a connection with the landlord and not called the city.” A few more words were exchanged, and Sherrena stepped briskly back to the car. Once inside, she vented to me: “They have a lot of fucking nerve to act that way.… She already owed me four [hundred], now she owes me more, so I’m coming back to give her a fiveday [eviction] notice.” “You are?” I asked. “Mm-hm. Because she got somebody else in her business, when me and her had an understanding and an agreement.… Now I’m gonna have to deal with the building inspector, and I don’t like that.” “… Now, hold up, you weren’t gonna serve her a five-day before now?” “No,” Sherrena answered. “I was gonna work with her. But why should I work with her now?Because I’m gonna be out of more money dealing with the city now. I don’t have all of my money. If I had all of my money, I’d just have to choke it up. But, see, the lady now feels like shit.” “Who, the tenant?” “The mother.… Now she wants to say, ‘Please don’t take this out on my daughter.’” “But you’re going to.” “I sure am.” Sherrena filled out the paperwork that evening and returned after nightfall to Elizabeth’s apartment. Not stopping to knock, she walked straight through the open door and handed Elizabeth the eviction notice, saying, “Here you go. Have a nice evening. I hope you get some assistance.” Sherrena turned on a dime—from helping a down-and-out tenant to evicting her— once she learned a building inspector had been called. While Milwaukee law forbids landlords from retaliating directly against tenants who contact DNS, landlords may at any time evict tenants for other reasons (e.g., nonpayment)—a decision at which some would not have arrived had a complaint never been levied.18 Summary of Ethnographic Findings After conducting sustained ethnographic fieldwork among evicted tenants and their landlords, I was able to identify multiple mechanisms that help explain why in poor black neighborhoods women are evicted at such high rates. First, with respect to structural constraints, women from poor black neighborhoods are overrepresented in the eviction records because men from these neighborhoods are overrepresented in the criminal justice system and on the unemployment rolls. That is, unemployed and formerly incarcerated individuals, among whom a sizable number of low-income black men rank, are unable to obtain leases in their name, resulting in a disproportionate number of poor black women, who collect verifiable income, acting as leaseholders. If ends cannot be met—which often is the case, as the cost of housing has risen steadily during the past decade whereas low wages and welfare stipends have remained comparatively d­ ormant— it will be their name tarnished by eviction, a consequential blemish that can remain long after the hardships associated with an involuntary move have passed. In inner-city black

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neighborhoods, women not only are overrepresented on leases but also are disadvantaged in relation to male leaseholders from similar neighborhoods. Broadly speaking, they bring in less income but pay more in rent. Many women’s incomes, moreover, are fixed, making them especially vulnerable to unexpected expenses. And their children can cause landlords problems: damaging property, annoying neighbors, and attracting unwanted attention from state agencies. The combination of these factors increases the risk of eviction for women living in poor black neighborhoods, in general, and for single mothers among them, in particular, as those like Patrice and Arleen often have enough money to secure an apartment but not enough to keep it. These structural arrangements alone do not constitute a complete explanation, for despite first appearances, evictions are not simply the consequence of tenants’ “misbehavior” or landlords’ financial accounting, nor are they governed strictly by formal or deterministic rules. Evictions also are the outcome of interactions among people occupying different positions in social hierarchies and possessing different dispositions and interactional styles, conditioned by those positions (Lempert and Monsma 1994; Bourdieu 2005). Upon receiving an eviction notice, many men address the landlord directly and offer to work off the rent, whereas many women approach agencies or network ties for assistance. While the former strategy requires only that the tenant be willing and able to put in the labor, the latter works only when tenants are connected to people or organizations in positions to help. Because poor black women’s social networks tend to be far more resource deprived than those of their white counterparts, their eviction avoidance strategies often prove ineffective. And when tenants confront their landlord by reporting him or her to DNS—a service designed to protect the city’s most defenseless renters and one on which many poor black women rely—a circuitous process is set in motion whereby the city applies pressure to the landlord, who then applies it to the tenant. Summoning a building inspector can sway landlords from working with poor tenants, who often are chronically behind in one way or another, to evicting them. These considerations often force lowincome families to choose either living with roaches, lead paint, clogged sewers, exposed wires, no heat, broken windows, and other degrading and unsafe conditions or eviction.

CONSEQUENCES OF EVICTION What are the consequences of eviction? One is that those with an eviction on their record often cannot secure decent, affordable housing. A good number of landlords simply will not rent to them (Kleysteuber 2006). Bob Helfgott’s opinion is the rule: “Evictions are the number one problem that I will not take.… If you’ve been evicted in the last two years, I’m not gonna take you.” Affordable Rentals rejects all applicants who have been evicted in the last three years. I have even met a landlord who goes so far as to reject applicants with dismissed evictions on their record, saying, simply, “You know something happened, and I just don’t want the headache.” Not surprisingly, then, many evicted tenants look for months without securing a place to stay, their homelessness manifest in nights spent in shelters and on friends’, relatives’, or strangers’ floors or, sometimes, the street. When evicted tenants do find subsequent housing, they often must accept conditions far worse than those of their previous dwelling. Because many landlords reject applicants with recent evictions, evicted tenants are pushed to the very bottom of the rental market and

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often are forced to move into run-down properties in dangerous neighborhoods. After the city condemned the three-bedroom single-family house Arleen was renting—one nested in a working-class black neighborhood—she moved into an apartment complex teeming with drug dealers. Fearing for her children, she then moved into a two-bedroom lower unit of a duplex. Once evicted from there, she moved into a one-bedroom apartment in a complex considered a “nuisance property” by the city. After being informally evicted from that building, Arleen secured beds for herself and her two boys at a shelter outside Milwaukee and, after a two-month search, found a landlord who would rent her a dilapidated twobedroom apartment on a high-crime block. It was not long before she and her boys were robbed at gunpoint in that apartment, causing her to flee to another shelter (this one roughly an hour’s drive from Milwaukee). As Arleen’s case demonstrates, eviction almost always leads to increased residential instability and homelessness, as well as to a downward move: a relocation to a disadvantaged neighborhood and/or to substandard housing. It often was the case, too, that families lost many of their possessions after being evicted. Some could not afford to move larger, more expensive items (e.g., furniture, appliances) and could not take many of their possessions with them as they bounced from place to place. Others paid to store their things only to lose them later after missing payments. After Arleen was evicted, she took what she could to a storage unit, locking behind a bright orange aluminum door summer clothes, silk plants, bibles, three mattresses sunken and torn, a television and stereo, an armoire the people who lived in the apartment before her left behind after they were evicted, and window-mounted air conditioning units. Having cobbled together enough money for the down payment and security deposit, she paid $80 a month to store her things while searching for subsequent housing. (The sum of a few of these installments surely exceeded the material value of her possessions.) Four months later, however, Arleen would miss two payments after her eldest son lost (or stole) her money. Her possessions would be thrown out. Like many evicted tenants, then, Arleen would have to find not only new housing but also new beds, new clothes, and new furniture. Finally, recently evicted tenants also have a difficult time qualifying for affordable housing programs. The need for affordable housing has so outpaced municipalities’ ability to provide it that desperate families must wait years before even applying for aid. In Milwaukee, families looking to secure a subsidized apartment can expect to wait two to three years before the waiting list opens and another two to three years to secure a two-bedroom unit. In 2010, Milwaukee’s Section 8 waiting list comprised approximately 3,500 people who had applied to the program in 2006. If any were evicted while trying to make ends meet in the private market, that would count against them when the Housing Authority finally did review their case. Because the Housing Authority, with a waiting list in the thousands, counts evictions and unpaid rental debt as strikes against those who have applied for assistance, a negative mark can mean a rejected application. When Larraine applied for subsidized housing, she was denied because of “eviction history.”19

DISCUSSION The findings of this study have offered one answer for why low-income families move so much: they are forced to. In generating a rigorous (if conservative) estimate

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of the magnitude of eviction in Milwaukee neighborhoods, this study has identified eviction as a key mechanism driving high levels of residential mobility in poor neighborhoods. With roughly one in 14 renter-occupied households evicted annually, eviction is frankly commonplace in Milwaukee’s black inner-city neighborhoods. Determining why poor families move as often as they do is crucial to our understanding of the root causes of social disadvantage and to the development of effective policy interventions. More research dedicated to identifying the underlying mechanisms of residential mobility is sorely needed, as is more work that analyzes if the consequences of a nonvoluntary move are more severe than those accompanying a voluntary one. This study additionally has found women from black neighborhoods to be evicted through the court system at alarmingly high rates. If in poor black communities many men are marked by a criminal record (Western 2006; Pager 2007), many women from these communities are stained by eviction. The blemish of eviction greatly diminishes one’s chances of securing affordable housing in a decent neighborhood, stymies one’s chances of securing housing assistance, and often leads to homelessness and increased residential mobility. All these factors impel the reproduction of urban poverty. And in inner-city black communities, women are the ones who disproportionately bear the blemish of eviction and its consequences.20 In poor black neighborhoods, what incarceration is to men, eviction is to women: a typical but severely consequential occurrence contributing to the reproduction of urban poverty. Both the mark of a criminal record and the stain of eviction can attenuate one’s chances of securing decent, affordable housing.21 “I’ll rent to you as long as you don’t have a conviction or an eviction,” landlords repeated to prospective tenants. Moreover, the eviction of thousands of women from black neighborhoods not only contributes to their homelessness and poverty but also disrupts community stability, a disruption itself linked to higher crime rates and neighborhood disorganization (Sampson and Raudenbush 1999). High crime rates and social disorganization, in turn, are linked to increased levels of police surveillance and punishment. Similarly, the high incarceration rate of low-income black men not only attenuates their chances of achieving social inclusion and economic security (Western 2006, pp. 131–67) but also exacerbates the economic insecurity of black women by increasing their likelihood of being burdened by the blemish of eviction and by boosting the rate of female-headed households. These twinned processes, eviction and incarceration, work together—black men are locked up while black women are locked out—to propagate economic disadvantage and social suffering in America’s urban centers. Court record data demonstrated that women from black neighborhoods were overrepresented in the eviction records in proportion to their representation in the general population. Supplemental survey data found that black women disproportionately experienced the mark and the material hardship of eviction. But exactly how much of the discrepancy was attributed to discrimination tied to race and gender and how much to the poverty of black women? I cannot say. To address this question, new data are necessary. Survey data that would enable researchers to determine if women or immigrants or African-Americans are evicted at higher rates after accounting for socioeconomic status, eviction-warranting behavior, and other important considerations would produce much needed evidence regarding the degree to which discrimination affects the eviction decision. Such evidence could help promote and strengthen programs aimed at ensuring equal treatment under the law. After all, efforts to monitor and reduce housing discrimination

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have been almost wholly concentrated on getting in; we have overlooked discrimination involved in the process of getting (put) out. Housing and Poverty The study of housing traditionally has occupied a prominent place in the sociology of poverty and urban life. Following classic works of the 19th century documenting overcrowded and filthy housing conditions that arose in the wake of the Industrial Revolution—Engels’s The Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845), Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890)—an interest in housing grew after World War II, partially in response to the development and expansion of housing programs (Foley 1980). Major thinkers of midcentury, Wirth (1947) and Merton (1951) among them, as well as scholars contributing to the Chicago school of human ecology (e.g., Hawley 1950; Park 1952), dedicated attention to housing. And in the 1970s and 1980s, sociologists investigated the dynamics of tenement settlements, rent strikes, and property turnover (e.g., Lipsky 1970; Logan and Molotch 1987). Despite this rich tradition, many sociologists today overlook the importance of everyday housing dynamics to the study of poverty.22 Most urban ethnographers, for example, have neglected housing dynamics (though see Pattillo [2007]; Hyra [2008]), choosing instead to study topics such as youth violence (e.g., Anderson 1999) or the informal economy (e.g., Bourgois 1995). No one can deny the importance of these topics, but when we consider that not everyone living in a poor neighborhood is associated with gang members, dope suppliers, or parole officers—or social workers, pastors, or employers, for that matter—but that nearly all of them have a landlord, it becomes clear that generating fine-grained ethnographic reports of housing dynamics in disadvantaged neighborhoods is fundamental to developing a robust account of everyday striving and suffering in the central city. Housing dynamics are just as central to our understanding of poverty as are dynamics associated with families, crime, education, jobs, or welfare. The sociology of inequality and urban life would grow more complex and comprehensive if researchers devoted more attention to analyzing how housing is implicated in the reproduction of urban poverty. This study has taken but one step in this direction. What has not been overlooked in recent years, of course, has been housing policy. National attention directed toward public housing projects of the 1940s and 1950s “established much of the tone” for the sociology of housing at midcentury (Foley 1980, p. 463), and a strong interest in housing programs has continued to this day (e.g., DeLuca and Dayton 2009; Schwartz 2010). So established has housing policy research become that it is today virtually synonymous with the sociology of housing. Research on housing policy is extremely important, but in narrowing its focus to government-sponsored initiatives, this work generally neglects ordinary housing dynamics taking place in the private sector. Poverty scholars have much to gain from studying these latter dynamics, especially given the fact that the majority of poor families do not benefit from federal housing programs (Katz and Turner 2007; Pelletiere et al. 2008); that the federal government halted the expansion of public housing around 1975, shifting the responsibility of building and managing low-income housing primarily to nongovernmental corporations and individuals (Goetz 1993; Briggs 2005); and that, nationwide, municipalities increasingly are bulldozing public housing units and are refusing to build new ones, forcing even more poor families into the private sector (Oakley, Ruel, and Reid 2009).

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Policy Implications Nationwide, it is likely that millions of evictions occur each year (Hartman and Robinson 2003). Several steps could be taken to reduce this number. First, an expansion of aid to families experiencing a drastic but temporary loss of income could help thousands stay in their homes. Stopgap measures of this sort could prevent the eviction of those who lost their jobs, had their public assistance provisionally cut off, or experienced a medical emergency or family death. When Milwaukee tenants facing eviction were given access to emergency housing aid from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the city’s eviction rate fell by 15%.23 Second, increased access to free legal counsel would decrease evictions. One study estimated that more than 70% of U.S. households facing eviction receive no legal representation (Seedco 2009). Yet researchers have shown that tenants with counsel are more likely to appear in court and are significantly less likely to be evicted than their unrepresented counterparts, irrespective of the merits of their case (Monsma and Lempert 1992; Seron et al. 2001).24 The most powerful and effective eviction-prevention policies, however, are among the most powerful and effective antipoverty policies: tried-and-true affordable housing initiatives. The fundamental issue is this: the high cost of housing is consigning the urban poor to financial ruin. We have ushered in a sad and unreasonable moment in the history of the United States if thousands of poor families are dedicating upward of 80% and 90% of their income to rent. To millions of Americans living in poverty, the commonplace ideal of dedicating a third of one’s income to housing expenses is far beyond reach.25 If we do not wish to doom poor families to a hand-to-mouth existence, if we hope to prevent thousands from living one work-related accident or one welfare sanction away from eviction, then something must give. Exactly what and how and with what consequences are questions social scientists must pursue with conviction. Perhaps a solution within our current social and economic framework is possible. But perhaps it is time to reconceive altogether the most fundamental elements of housing in America. Whatever the case may be, there is no question that housing issues need to be elevated to a more prominent position on our scholarly and political agendas.

Notes    1  I thank Mustafa Emirbayer, Sarah Bruch, Jane Collins, Felix Elwert, Myra Marx Ferree, Peter Hart-Brinson, Chester Hartman, Robert Hauser, Colin Jerolmack, Shamus Khan, Matthew Nichter, Timothy Smeeding, Ruth López Turley, Adam Slez, and the AJS reviewers for their challenging and sharp comments on previous drafts. The University of Wisconsin Survey Center expertly carried out the Milwaukee Eviction Court Study; special thanks to Kerryann DiLoreto, Jessica Price, and John Stevenson. William Buckingham and Richelle Winkler at the University of Wisconsin Applied Population Laboratory, Barry Widera at Court Data Technologies, and Michael Curtis, Brandon Kenney, and Alexandria King offered outstanding research support. I am grateful for having presented this research at Duke, Harvard, Purdue, Northwestern, Rice, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin—Madison, the Institute for Research on Poverty, and the 2009 American Sociological Association annual conference. This research was supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Institute for Research on Poverty, the National Science Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Ford Foundation, the University of Wisconsin System Institute for Race and Ethnicity, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, and the Harvard Society of Fellows. Direct correspondence to Matthew Desmond, Department of Sociology, Harvard University, William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138. Email: [email protected]    2  When it comes to transforming economic capital into residential capital, the exchange rate is much steeper for AfricanAmericans (Logan et al. 1996). That human capital attributes alone cannot explain racial segregation has led scholars

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to document how many blacks are prevented from escaping disadvantaged neighborhoods by structural impediments such as characteristics of the housing market and racial discrimination (Massey and Denton 1993; Sampson and Sharkey 2008). Between 1995 and 2005, 4,851 families were relocated (with vouchers) from public housing units in Chicago (Wilen and Nayak 2006, p. 219), the archetypical case of public housing transformation. To calculate interrater reliability, both coders assigned a sex to the same set of 1,000 randomly selected names. Reliability was calculated using Cohen’s k (Cohen 1960). This test resulted in a k of .85, signaling very strong agreement (Gwet 2001). Felix Elwert conceived of, and generously helped to execute, this strategy. To generate estimates of male and female renter populations, I first constructed an estimate of the adult population living in rental units by multiplying the number of adults in a block group with the percentage of renter-occupied housing units. This required assuming that the distribution of adults within block groups was evenly spread across housing units. I tested this assumption by using census 2000 data to compare Milwaukee’s rate of rental to owner-occupied units with that of the population living in such units. The mean odds ratio of these two rates was .96, expressing near perfect proportionality. Then I generated an estimate of the number of men and women living in rental units by multiplying the adult rental population by the percentage of women and men in a block group. Doing so required assuming that men and women live in rental units at rates proportionate to their representation in the general population, an assumption verified by previous research (National Multi Housing Council 2009). All names are pseudonyms. I estimated the total population forced to move by court-ordered evictions by multiplying the number of eviction cases in a block group by the average household size of occupied rental units in that block group. Since there is good reason to suspect the size of evicted households to be larger than average—many evicted households are made up of single mothers with children—this is likely a conservative estimate. In these situations, tenants agree to vacate the premises or pay their debt by a certain date. If tenants satisfy the agreement, their eviction is dismissed; if they do not, landlords may file for a writ of restitution and evict them without having to return to court. Thus, some stipulation agreements will end in dismissal, others in eviction. All statistics in this paragraph are the author’s calculations, based on the 2000 U.S. Census. Calculated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), fair market rents are gross estimates that combine rent and utility costs. Used to determine payment amounts for various housing programs, HUD calculates them at the 40th percentile of each city’s rental distribution. In a previous month, Patrice had used her Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to pay back rent and avoid eviction. This widespread use of the EITC helps to explain why, every year, evictions are lowest in February, when the majority of EITC payments are issued (see app. Figure 7.A2), and perhaps why the majority of workers from inner-city Milwaukee claiming the EITC borrow on their credits through refund anticipation loans, paying steep fees to receive early payments (Quinn 2002). Tenants also sold food stamps to pay rent—$2 of stamps for $1 cash—even though getting caught could mean disqualification from the program. They compensated by going to food pantries or going hungry. I met several people who had rented a unit the city later deemed “unfit for human habitation.” I also learned of several cases in which landlords, a month or two after having their property so condemned, would remove the green plywood placards city workers had drilled over their doors and windows and would rerent the unit without addressing a single code violation. And I met landlords who purposely rendered their property condemnable (e.g., by cutting off the electricity) before placing an anonymous call to the city about their own property—a call that, in turn, resulted in officials removing the tenants, thereby providing the landlord with a free and expedited eviction. “I withheld my rent because I didn’t know if we were going to have a park to live in,” Larraine would tell her daughter over the phone. Larraine’s suspicions were not unfounded. At the end of May, the Common Council’s Licenses Committee voted not to renew the Park’s license, citing its high levels of police calls and property code violations and finding that its conditions posed an “environmental biohazard” to residents. The license would be granted after Tobin agreed to a list of demands drafted by his alderman. Landlords cannot avail themselves of familiar corporate euphemisms—“downsizing,” “quarterly losses”—nor can most of those who own and operate in poor neighborhoods elude their residents, which is why you will find in many landlords’ rusted “rent collecting” wagons or vans a pistol, baseball bat, or can of mace. The result is a distinct thickening of the skin—nearly every landlord I met recalled at some point undergoing such a callusing—the cultivation of a manly disposition that allows landlords more or less to accept social inequality, not as an abstract topic for conversation or as a problem to be solved but, simply, as “the way it is.” It is small wonder that, while other antiquated labels have been duly modernized (“secretary” to “office manager,” “stewardess” to “flight attendant”), “landlord,” appropriately feudal and paternalistic, enjoys wide use today. And small wonder, as well, that some of the most unabashedly masculine figures of the latter half of the 20th century have been real estate titans, from Robert Moses, America’s greatest evictor, to Donald Trump.

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 16  If black men were more likely to be evicted informally, this could help explain the overrepresentation of women from black neighborhoods within the eviction records. Yet my ethnographic data yielded no evidence to this effect. Many landlords, intimidated by their black male tenants, preferred evicting them through the courts—allowing the authorities to intervene, as it were—to handling it themselves.  17  Some men in poor black neighborhoods had no contact with landlords. There, women sometimes excluded from their rental application any mention of men who also would live with them (namely, romantic partners) for fear that doing so would result in their application being turned down on account of the men’s criminal background. A man living in an apartment without the landlord’s knowledge may have wished to offer to work off the rent—and his doing so may have helped to prevent the eviction—but the very act of making his existence known would itself have been legal grounds for eviction. 18  The Milwaukee Police Department also plays a role in exacerbating women’s risk of eviction, specifically through its ordinance regarding “nuisance properties.” As I have shown elsewhere (Desmond and Valdez 2012), this ordinance results in many renting women in abusive relationships being forced to choose between calling the police on their abusers (only to risk eviction) and staying in their apartments (only to risk more abuse).  19  As Vale (2000) has observed, throughout American history the poorest of the poor traditionally have not benefited from federal housing assistance.  20  This is especially distressing given the fact that black women experience less access to rental housing and often must devote more time, effort, and money to securing subsequent housing, relative to whites and black men (Massey and Lundy 2001).  21  With the proliferation of cheap tenant screening services, there is good reason to expect the mark of eviction (and of a criminal record) to become even more consequential in the coming years. The last 40 years have witnessed a widespread professionalization of property management. Between 1970 and 2000, the number of people primarily employed as building managers or superintendents more than quadrupled (Thacher 2008, p. 19). As the amateur landlord steadily has been replaced by the professional, tenant selection processes that previously relied on local networks have been supplanted by those based on record keeping, risk assessment, and background checks (Sternlieb 1969). This process is informed by tenant screening reports—provided by an estimated 650 companies—that list past evictions, landlord-tenant disputes, and court filings. Although these reports often are riddled with errors, landlords increasingly have come to rely on them (Kleysteuber 2006).  22  There are important exceptions (e.g., Briggs 2005; Newman 2005).  23  Author’s calculations based on Milwaukee County eviction records, 2008–9.  24  Additionally, to ensure that groups disproportionately affected by eviction, e.g., single mothers, are not systematically denied assistance, housing authorities should minimize the importance of applicants’ prior evictions.  25  Community Advocates, Milwaukee’s largest community-based organization providing housing assistance, now deems a residence “affordable” if it requires only 70% of a person’s income. The organization has concluded that locating a residence that would require only 33% no longer is possible. Indeed, a study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition (Wardrip et al. 2008) found no single American municipality or county in which someone working full-time for minimum wage could afford a one-bedroom home by dedicating only a third of her or his income to rent.

REFERENCES Anderson, Elijah. 1999. Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. New York: Norton. Babcock, Linda, and Sara Laschever. 2003. Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Bennett, Larry, Janet Smith, and Patricia Wright, eds. 2006. Where Are Poor People to Live? Transforming Public Housing Communities. London: Sharpe. Bezdek, Barbara. 1992. “Silence in the Court: Participation and Subordination of Poor Tenants’ Voices in Legal Process.” Hofstra Law Review 20:533–608. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2005. The Social Structures of the Economy. Malden, Mass.: Polity. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bourgois, Philippe. 1995. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. New York:Cambridge University Press. Briggs, Xavier de Souza, ed. 2005. The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute Press. Burt, Martha. 2001. “Homeless Families, Singles, and Others: Findings from the 1996 National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers and Clients.” Housing Policy Debate 12:737–80.

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Cancian, Maria, and Daniel Meyer. 2005. “Child Support: An Uncertain and Irregular Income Source?” Discussion Paper 1298-05. Institute for Research on Poverty, Madison, Wisc. Caro, Robert. 1974. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. New York: Vintage. Cohen, Jacob. 1960. “A Coefficient of Agreement for Nominal Scales.” Educational and Psychological Measurement 20:37–46. Collins, Jane L., and Victoria Mayer. 2010. Both Hands Tied: Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom in the Low-Wage Labor Market. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Crane, Maureen, and Anthony Warnes. 2000. “Evictions and Prolonged Homelessness.”Housing Studies 15:757–73. DeLuca, Stefanie, and Elizabeth Dayton. 2009. “Switching Social Contexts: The Effects of Housing Mobility and School Choice Programs on Youth Outcomes.” Annual Review of Sociology 35:457–91. Desmond, Matthew. 2012. “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor.” American Journal of Sociology 117 (5): 1295–1335. Desmond, Matthew, Thomas Ferriss, Richelle Winkler, and Weihua An. 2012. “Evicting Children.” Manuscript. Harvard University. Desmond, Matthew, and Nicol Valdez. 2012. “Unpolicing the Urban Poor: Consequences of Third Party Policing on InnerCity Women.” Manuscript. Harvard University. Dong, Maxia, Robert Anda, Vincent Felitti, David Williamson, Shanta Dube, David Brown, and Wayne Giles. 2005. “Childhood Residential Mobility and Multiple Health Risks during Adolescence and Adulthood: The Hidden Role of Adverse Childhood Experiences.” Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine 159:1104–10. Duneier, Mitchell. 1999. Sidewalk. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. Edin, Kathryn, and Laura Lein. 1997. Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Engels, Friedrich. (1845) 1892. The Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844. London: Swan Sonnenschein. Foley, Donald. 1980. “The Sociology of Housing.” Annual Review of Sociology 6:457–78. Freeman, Lance. 2005. “Displacement or Succession? Residential Mobility in Gentrifying Neighborhoods.” Urban Affairs Review 40:463–91. Freeman, Lance, and Frank Braconi. 2004. “Gentrification and Displacement: New York City in the 1990s.” Journal of American Planning Association 70:39–52. Fusco, Anthony, Jr., Nancy Collins, and Julian Birnbaum. 1979. “Chicago’s Eviction Court: A Tenants’ Court of No Resort.” Urban Law Annual 95:93–132. Gans, Herbert. 1962. The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans. New York: Free Press. Goetz, Edward. 1993. Shelter Burden: Local Politics and Progressive Housing Policy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ———. 2002. Clearing the Way: Deconcentrating the Poor in Urban America. Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press. ———. 2011. “Gentrification in Black and White: The Racial Impact of Public Housing Demolition in American Cities.” Urban Studies 48:1581–1604. Gunn, Steven. 1995. “Eviction Defense for Poor Tenants: Costly Compassion or Justice Served?” Yale Law and Policy Review 13:385–428. Gwet, Kilem. 2001. Statistical Tables for Inter-rater Agreement: Tables Providing Exact Critical Values for Testing Statistical Significance. Gaithersburg, Md.: StatAxis. Hartman, Chester, and David Robinson. 2003. “Evictions: The Hidden Housing Problem.” Housing Policy Debate 14:461–501. Hawley, Amos. 1950. Human Ecology: A Theory of Community Structure. New York:Ronald Press. Hays, Sharon. 2003. Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform. New York: Oxford University Press. Heflin, Colleen, and Mary Pattillo. 2006. “Poverty in the Family: Race, Siblings, and Socioeconomic Heterogeneity.” Social Science Research 35:804–22. Hyra, Derek. 2008. The New Urban Renewal: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House. Jones, Robert, David Homa, Pamela Meyer, Debra Brody, Kathleen Caldwell, James Pirkle, and Mary Jean Brown. 2009. “Trends in Blood Lead Levels and Blood Lead Testing among US Children Aged 1 to 5 Years, 1988–2004.” Pediatrics 123:376–85. Kasarda, John, Stephen Appold, Stuart Sweeny, and Elaine Seiff. 1997. “Central City Migration Patterns: Is Turnaround on the Horizon?” Housing Policy Debate 8:307–58. Katz, Bruce, and Margery Austin Turner. 2007. Rethinking U.S. Rental Housing Policy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Joint Center for Housing Studies. Kleysteuber, Rudy. 2006. “Tenant Screening Thirty Years Later: A Statutory Proposal to Protect Public Records.” Yale Law Journal 116:1344–88.

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Larson, Erik. 2006. “Case Characteristics and Defendant Tenant Default in a Housing Court.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 3:121–44. Lempert, Richard, and Kiyoshi Ikeda. 1970. “Evictions from Public Housing: Effects of Independent Review.” American Sociological Review 35:852–60. Lempert, Richard, and Karl Monsma. 1994. “Cultural Differences and Discrimination:Samoans before a Public Housing Eviction Board.” American Sociological Review 59:890–910. Levine, Marc. 2008. The Crisis Continues: Black Male Joblessness in Milwaukee. Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin— Milwaukee, Center for Economic Development. Lieberson, Stanley. 2000. A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Lieberson, Stanley, and Eleanor Bell. 1992. “Children’s First Names: An Empirical Study of Social Taste.” American Journal of Sociology 98:511–54. Liebow, Elliot. 1967. Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men. Boston: Little, Brown. Lipsky, Michael. 1970. Protest in City Politics: Rent Strikes, Housing and the Power of the Poor. Chicago: Rand McNally. Logan, John, and Richard Alba. 1993. “Locational Returns to Human Capital: Minority Access to Suburban Community Resources.” Demography 30:243–68. Logan, John, Richard Alba, Tom Mcnulty, and Brian Fisher. 1996. “Making a Place in the Metropolis: Locational Attainment in Cities and Suburbs.” Demography 33: 443–53. Logan, John, and Harvey Molotch. 1987. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Marcuse, Peter. 1986. “Abandonment, Gentrification, and Displacement: The Linkages in New York City.” Pp. 153–77 in Gentrification and the City, edited by Neil Smith and Peter Williams. London: Unwin Hyman. Massey, Douglas, and Nancy Denton. 1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Massey, Douglas, and Garvey Lundy. 2001. “Use of Black English and Racial Discrimination in Urban Housing Markets: New Methods and Findings.” Urban Affairs Review 36:452–69. Mayer, Susan, and Christopher Jencks. 1989. “Poverty and the Distribution of Material Hardship.” Journal of Human Resources 24:88–114. Merton, Robert. 1951. “The Social Psychology of Housing.” Pp. 163–217 in Current Trends in Social Psychology, edited by Wayne Dennis and Ronald Lippitt. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Monsma, Karl, and Richard Lempert. 1992. “The Value of Counsel: 20 Years of Representation before a Public Housing Eviction Board.” Law and Society Review 26: 627–68. National Multi Housing Research Council. 2009. Quick Facts: Resident Demographics. Washington, D.C.: National Multi Housing Council. Newman, Katherine. 1999. No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City. New York: Vintage. Newman, Katherine, and Elvin Wyly. 2006. “The Right to Stay Put, Revisited: Gentrification and Resistance to Displacement in New York City.” Urban Studies 43: 23–57. Newman, Sandra. 2005. Low-End Rental Housing: The Forgotten Story in Baltimore’s Housing Boom. Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute. Oakley, Deirdre, Erin Ruel, and Lesley Reid. 2009. Moved Out to Where? Initial Relocation Destinations of Former Public Housing Residents in Atlanta. Atlanta: Georgia State University, Urban Health Initiative. Oishi, Shigehiro. 2010. “The Psychology of Residential Mobility: Implications for the Self, Social Relationships, and WellBeing.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 5:5–21. Pager, Devah. 2007. Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Park, Robert. 1952. Human Communities: The City and Human Ecology. New York: Free Press. Pattillo, Mary. 2007. Black on the Block: Politics of Race and Class in the City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pelletiere, Danilo, Michelle Canizio, Morgan Hargrave, and Sheila Crowley. 2008. Housing Assistances for Low Income Households: States Do Not Fill the Gap. Washington, D.C.: National Low Income Housing Coalition. Pribesh, Shana, and Douglas Downey. 1999. “Why Are Residential and School Moves Associated with Poor School Performance?” Demography 36:521–34. Quinn, Lois. 2002. Use of Refund Anticipation Loans by Earned Income Tax Credit Filers in Central City Milwaukee Neighborhoods. Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, Employment and Training Institute. Rabinow, Paul. 1977. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Rice, Douglas, and Barbara Sard. 2009. Decade of Neglect Has Weakened Federal Low-Income Programs: New Resources Required to Meet Growing Needs. Washington, D.C.: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

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Ridgeway, Cecilia. 1997. “Interaction and the Conservation of Gender Inequality: Considering Employment.” American Sociological Review 62:218–35. Riis, Jacob. 1890. How the Other Half Lives. New York: Scribner. Rossi, Peter. 1980. Why Families Move, 2d ed. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage. Sampson, Robert, Jeffrey Morenoff, and Felton Earls. 1999. “Beyond Social Capital: Spatial Dynamics of Collective Efficacy for Children.” American Sociological Review 64:633–60. Sampson, Robert, and Steve Raudenbush. 1999. “Systematic Social Observation of Public Spaces: A New Look at Disorder in Urban Neighborhoods.” American Journal of Sociology 105:603–51. Sampson, Robert, and Patrick Sharkey. 2008. “Neighborhood Selection and the Social Reproduction of Concentrated Racial Inequality.” Demography 45:1–29. Schwartz, Alex. 2010. Housing Policy in the United States, 2d ed. New York: Routledge. Schwartz, Sharon. 1994. “The Fallacy of the Ecological Fallacy: The Potential Misuse of a Concept and Its Consequences.” American Journal of Public Health 84:819–24. Seedco. 2009. Housing Help Program, South Bronx, NYC. New York: Seedco Policy Center. Serby, Michael, David Brody, Shetal Amin, and Philip Yanowitch. 2006. “Eviction as a Risk Factor for Suicide.” Psychiatric Services 57:273–74. Seron, Carroll, Gregg Van Ryzin, Martin Frankel, and Jean Kovath. 2001. “The Impact of Legal Counsel on Outcomes for Poor Tenants in New York City’s Housing Court: Results of a Randomized Experiment.” Law and Society Review 35:419–34. Sharkey, Patrick, and Robert Sampson. 2010. “Destination Effects: Residential Mobility and Trajectories of Adolescent Violence in a Stratified Metropolis.” Criminology 48: 639–81. Slater, Anne, and Saul Feinman. 1985. “Gender and the Phonology of North American First Names.” Sex Roles 13:429–40. Smith, Neil. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification in the Revanchist City. London: Routledge. South, Scott, and Kyle Crowder. 1997. “Escaping Distressed Neighborhoods: Individual, Community, and Metropolitan Influences.” American Journal of Sociology 102: 1040–84. ———. 1998. “Avenues and Barriers to Residential Mobility among Single Mothers.” Journal of Marriage and Family 60:866–77. South, Scott, and Glenn Deane. 1993. “Race and Residential Mobility: Individual Determinants and Structural Constraints.” Social Forces 72:147–67. Speare, Alden, Jr., Sidney Goldstein, and William Frey. 1975. Residential Mobility, Migration, and Metropolitan Change. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger. Stack, Carol. 1974. All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Basic. Sternlieb, George. 1969. The Tenement Landlord. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Stone, Clarence. 1976. Economic Growth and Neighborhood Discontent: System Bias in the Urban Renewal Program of Atlanta. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Sue, Christina, and Edward Telles. 2007. “Assimilation and Gender in Naming.” American Journal of Sociology 112:1383–1415. Thacher, David. 2008. “The Rise of Criminal Background Screening in Rental Housing.” Law and Social Inquiry 33:5–30. Vale, Lawrence. 2000. From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Venkatesh, Sudhir. 2000. American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Vigdor, Jacob. 2002. “Does Gentrification Harm the Poor?” Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs 2002:133–82. Wacquant, Loïc. 2005. “Race as Civic Felony.” International Social Science Journal 181:127–42. Wardrip, Keith, Danilo Pelletiere, and Sheila Crowley. 2008. Out of Reach, 2007–2008. Washington, D.C.: National Low Income Housing Coalition. Western, Bruce. 2006. Punishment and Inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Wilen, William, and Rajesh Nayak. 2006. “Relocated Public Housing Residents Have Little Hope of Returning.” Pp. 216–36 in Where Are Poor People to Live? Transforming Public Housing Communities, edited by Larry Bennett, Janet Smith, and Patricia Wright. London: Sharpe. Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2009. More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City. New York: Norton. Wirth, Louis. (1947) 1967. “Housing as a Field of Sociological Research.” pp. 292–303 in Louis Wirth: On Cities and Social Life, edited by Albert Reiss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development. 2006. Wisconsin Works Chartbook: Program Overview, 1998–2003. DWSI-14868-P. Madison: Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, Division of Workforce Solutions, Bureau of Workforce Information. Wisconsin Women’s Council. 2006. The Status of Women in Milwaukee County, 2006. Milwaukee: Women’s Fund of Greater Milwaukee. Wyly, E., and D. Hammel. 1999. “Islands of Decay in Seas of Renewal: Housing Policy and the Resurgence of Gentrification.” Housing Policy Debate 10:711–71. Zorbaugh, Harvey. 1929. The Gold Coast and the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago’s Near North Side. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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APPENDIX Imputing Sex from Names Listed in the Eviction Records To impute sex from names, coders made two passes through the data. On their first pass, coders assigned a male or female designation to names they immediately associated with a sex. By and large, men’s and women’s names bear sharp differences in their phonemic designs, sounds, and endings. Female names are much more likely to possess more syllables and sounds and are more likely to vary the position of the stressed syllable (Slater and Feinman 1985). Names that end in a long e (e.g., Tiffany, Melody), l (e.g., Shauntell, Michelle), or schwa sound (e.g., Jessica, Shawanna) are common among women but rare among men. The most common men’s names, by contrast, end in a consonant sound (Lieberson and Bell 1992). Common masculine and feminine suffixes used in Spanish names (e.g., o suffix for men, a suffix for women) facilitated assigning a sex to individuals with Spanish names. Additionally, researchers have identified the tendency of immigrant families to select for their children widely recognized English names once popular among native whites (Lieberson 2000; Sue and Telles 2007). Distinctive and widespread gender demarcations such as these—and others as well, including suffixes (e.g., junior, senior) and gender-specific middle names paired with gender-neutral first names (e.g., Bobby Ann)—allowed coders to estimate sex with a considerable degree of accuracy. Because most names are familiar and common (the 1,000 most popular names account for roughly 90% of the population) and because there is strikingly little overlap between male and female names in North America (in the majority of cases, members of all major racial and ethnic groups employ gender-specific names [Lieberson 2000; Sue and Telles 2007]), the risk of mislabeling was minimal. On their second pass, coders revisited all unknown names (N = 12,241) and attempted to assign a sex to each by performing two steps. First, because for many people eviction was neither their first nor their last contact with the criminal justice system, coders conducted an additional court records search to determine if the name in question had other convictions and, therefore, criminal records that did include sex identifiers. If an additional court records search proved unsuccessful, coders performed a simple Internet search by plugging unknown names into popular naming websites. In some cases, the sex of a landlord whose name appeared multiple times in the eviction records was discovered through additional Internet and newspaper searches or through landlord connections established during my fieldwork. If no further information (or contradictory information) about the name was gathered after these searches, the name remained coded as unknown. Forty percent of unknown names were assigned a sex through court records searches and 32% after Internet searches, and 28% remained unknown after additional searches. Milwaukee Eviction Court Study Each day of the Milwaukee Eviction Court Study, interviewers received a court docket listing the day’s eviction cases. As small claims court got under way, two administrators would begin calling out cases, asking parties to approach the front of the room to be counted. As they did, interviewers identified all potential respondents: tenants who appeared in eviction court that day. After tenants returned to their seats, they were

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approached by an interviewer, who told them about the study and handed them an information card. Tenants were interviewed after their case was heard in front of a commissioner. On most days, two interviewers and a Spanish translator were present at the courthouse, taking attendance, keeping track of potential participants, and conducting interviews. The average interview lasted five minutes. Everyone who completed the survey was offered $5 as a token of appreciation. There are no partial completes and very little missing data. Of the 127 households appearing in eviction court that were not interviewed, only 21 refused to participate in the study. Most of the remaining 106 were taken to other rooms and did not return to the main courtroom, the location of the study. Ineligible cases included households for which tenants did not appear in eviction court (N = 940) as well as a small number of nonresidential evictions ( N = 10). In legal studies, there is an established tradition of in-court surveys, including those of housing courts (e.g., Fusco, Collins, and Birnbaum 1979; Bezdek 1992; Gunn 1995). One limitation of these studies, however, is that tenants who do not appear in court are not interviewed. This raises the question, Are tenants who appear in court different from those who default? Somewhat surprisingly, there is little evidence of this. One study (Larson 2006) has shown that one’s distance from court and the presence of legal counsel for property owners do not explain why tenants default. Additionally, the study produced mixed evidence that neighborhood-level poverty affects the likelihood of defaulting and offered no support for the hypothesis that “psychological costs” involved in managing stigma discourage tenants from appearing in court (p. 126). With respect to legal consciousness and competence, another study of housing court (Bezdek 1992, p. 581) “generated no clear basis for speculating that the no-shows had a greater or poorer awareness of the law’s provisions than those tenants who did appear.” Although tenants accused of nonpayment appear more likely to default (Larson 2006), 92% of tenants interviewed for the Milwaukee Eviction Court Study had missed rent payments (see also Gunn 1995, p. 396). And although tenants with counsel are more likely to appear in court (Seron et al. 2001), the vast majority of tenants who show up at court are unrepresented (Seedco 2009). These considerations notwithstanding, that tenants who did not appear in court eluded the scope of this survey remains an important limitation to bear in mind. Since survey data collected in 2011 were meant to inform patterns identified in eviction record from 2003 to 2007, one might reasonably wonder if renters represented in each data source were qualitatively different from one another. Could the subprime mortgage collapse and fore-closure crisis, which began in 2007, have altered the characteristics of the city’s evicted population? Although foreclosures would not have been counted among court-ordered evictions, we still might expect a spike in evictions to have occurred during the housing crisis and ensuing recession. If the spike was large enough, one might have good reason to believe that some types of people evicted in 2011 (e.g., the recently unemployed) might not have been evicted in, say, 2005. However, as Figure 7.A1 shows, the number of evicted tenants in Milwaukee actually fell during the first two years of the recession (2008 and 2009), even as the number of filed eviction orders increased slightly. Several factors may have contributed to this drop. Landlords with properties in foreclosure may have chosen not to invest the time and money to evict tenants only to have the bank take the building in the end. Others feeling the pinch may have been more willing to work with tenants who had fallen behind. Whatever the case may be, the crucial point for our purposes is that the recession years of 2008 and 2009 saw no spike in evictions. There is good reason to believe, then, that the city’s evicted population was not

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Figure 7.A1 Filed eviction cases and evicted tenants. Data are from Milwaukee County eviction records, 2003–9 dramatically affected by the recession. Of course, problems attributed to the economic downturn— unemployment, homelessness, financial vulnerability—are nothing new to the urban poor, who long have survived on the knife edge of economic subsistence. Theirs has been lifelong recession; for some, a recession of generations. A final concern has to do with the yearly cycle of evictions and the survey’s duration. Far from being consistent across months, evictions in Milwaukee follow a fluctuating

Figure 7.A2 Evicted tenants by month. Data are from Milwaukee County eviction records, 2003–9

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seasonal pattern. As the year begins, evictions are moderate. The number dips down during February but then begins to climb upward. After peaking in August or September, the monthly count starts to decline. As the city bends toward a new year, evictions begin to rise once more (see Figure 7.A2). In light of these considerations, one might ask, Is a sample of tenants appearing in eviction court in January and February an adequate representation of the annual evicted population? Although the number of evictions vacillates in a predictable manner throughout the year, the general composition of the evicted population remains fairly stable. Supplementary analyses (not shown) demonstrated that annual patterns within the eviction records were consistently manifest on a monthly basis, the first two months of the year being perfectly ordinary with respect to the location of evictions and the sex of evicted tenants. By itself, the survey would have underestimated the magnitude of eviction: the combined monthly average of evictions in January and February is below the monthly average for the entire year. However, as a supplement to a data set of eviction records that spans five years, the survey stands as a valuable source of information on the demography of the evicted population, the composition of evicted households, and the primary reasons for eviction.

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Part III

Productivity: Over-investment and Abandonment

Xintiandi, Shanghai, 2016, MARS Architects

8 Global Cities: Places for Researching the Translocal Saskia Sassen

Global cities are complex territories in a grid of cross-boundary geographies. They are not bounded units. Nor are these cities simply one step on the ladder of the traditional hierarchy that puts cities above the neighborhood and below the regional, the national, and the global. Rather, these cities are or are becoming one of the spaces of the global for actors as diverse as finance and civil society. They engage the global directly, often bypassing the national. Some cities may have had this capacity long before the current era. But today these conditions extend to a growing number of cities and to a growing number of sectors within cities; in my reading there are about a hundred global cities, including some best characterized as having developed a few global city functions. This can be read as a qualitatively different phase from earlier international periods. Insofar as the national as container of social process and power is cracking (Xu and Yeh, 2010; Shatkin, 2014; Rose et al., 2014; Ren, 2011; Taylor, 2004; Abu-Lughod, 2000; Beck, 2000), it opens up possibilities for geographies of the political that link subnational spaces across borders – for finance, for corporations, for museums, for social activists, and more. But it does so also for those without power. It signals the formation of a new type of transnational politics that localizes in these cities. And it signals the possibility that the much-talked-about idea of global civil society is actually partly enacted in localities deep inside cities, where even those who are immobile can experience themselves as part of that global civil society. Here I will focus on two aspects of this evolving process whereby the subnational, as instantiated in cities, becomes part of the global condition of our times. One is the making of this transformation: what it took and how it got constituted. The second is a major new process that is a consequence of this development: the increasingly aggressive buying of large, often significant buildings in these cities by both national and foreign corporations.(For a state of the art analysis on major cities in today’s world see Burdett and Sudjic, 2007; 2011; https://lsecities.net/publications/conference-newspapers/)

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Some of the dynamics producing these outcomes are urban, but others are not and merely find in the city one of the sites for their enactment. Either way, it suggests that cities are a type of place where we can carry out research about the global – ranging from ethnographies and architectural details (Hall, 2012; Buechler 2014; Venkatesh, 2013; Grubbauer, 2014; Duneier, 1999; Lloyd, 2010; Espinoza, 1999; Li et al., 2009) to largescale tracking of major trends (e.g., Burdett and Sudjic, 2011; Kourtit et al., 2014; Dean and Lovink, 2016; Body-Gendrot et al. 2009; Scott, 2001). The city is one of the nexuses where global trends materialize and become concrete conditions that can be constituted as objects of study. One effort in this chapter is to discuss briefly the process through which we can capture these emergent trends in their urban moment – the urban moment of a range of processes, many of which are not urban per se. Thus the effort is not a comprehensive examination of the vast scholarship on cities, mostly focused on familiar conditions. This approach is quite different from the ‘planetary urbanization’ concept developed by Brenner and Schmid (2014) and, though to a far lesser extent, from Storper and Scott’s (2009) argument about economic centrality. Brenner and Schmid extend the urban condition into endlessness. My concern goes in the opposite direction: the planetary is a fact, but as a concept it flattens the urban into a spatial condition: I argue that much built density today is not urban if it consists of vast private building complexes. We need to recover the diverse instantiations of the urban, its diverse power logics and its diverse struggles for recognition. If anything, these are only heating up, given that much built density is de-urbanizing and given the diminished ground available for cities due to the massive expansion of mining, land grabs, water grabs, desertification and flooding that marks our planet’s territory. As for Storper and Scott’s emphasis on economic centrality, I have long made this argument albeit with a very different definition of the city: I conceive of the city as a complex but incomplete system, and hence economic centralities generate their own versions of larger geographies, beyond cities. There is much more to be said about both sets of arguments, but this will have to suffice for now. The first half of this chapter examines a series of major economic dynamics that carry significant urban implications and hence call for the development of novel analytic elements. The second half focuses on extreme conditions in cities, starting with the urban potential of digital technologies and concluding with a section on the sharp rise in acquisitions of major properties in the top 100 cities receiving such investment worldwide.

The city as an object of study A growing number of cities across the world today are the terrain where some of the global conditions marking the twenty-first century hit the ground. Multiple globalization processes assume concrete localized forms, electronic networks intersect with thick environments (whether financial centers or activist meetings), and new subjectivities arise from the encounters of people from all around the world. Over the past 20 years, these cities have emerged as a strategic site for a whole range of new types of operations, some pertaining to the global economy (e.g., Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC); Burdett and Sudjic, 2007; 2011; Amen et  al., 2006; Harvey, 2007; Institute for Urban Strategies, 2015) and others pertaining to political,

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cultural, and subjective domains (e.g., Abu-Lughod, 1999; Fainstein 2011; Body-Gendrot et al. 2009; Ritzer, 2010; Weinstein, 2014; Watson and Bridge, 2011; Krause and Petro, 2003; Lloyd, 2010; Bartlett, 2007; Hall, 2012). As an object of study, the city has long been a debatable construct in the social sciences generally, whether in earlier writings (Castells, 1972; Harvey, 1985; Lefebvre, [1974] 1991) or in the post-2000 literature (Thrift and Amin, 2002; Ascher, 2004; Veltz, 2005; Xu and Yeh, 2010; Pullen, 2011; Chen, 2009; Institute for Urban Strategies, 2015; Brenner and Schmid, 2014; Storper and Scott, 2009; 2016). The concept of the city is complex, imprecise, and charged with specific historical and thereby variable meanings (e.g., Park et  al., 1967; Sennett, 1994; Paddison, 2001; Wellman, 1999; Musterd and Gritsai, 2013; Shatkin, 2014; Desmond, 2016). Today’s major global processes further add to these debates and complexity, resulting in a significant proliferation of global city research and cultural imaginaries. We can identify two major trends behind this variety of conditions; these are also the trends that organize this chapter. One is an insufficiently recognized major shift in state policy toward targeting particular subnational spaces for development and resource allocation – and away from the promotion of convergence in national territorial development that was dominant until the 1980s in much of the West. Since then there has been a shift toward particular targets; global cities and advanced high-tech districts have become two such targets. This shift toward privileging particular subnational spaces partly arises from globalization and the new information technologies. To this we can add a second critical trend associated and enabled by globalization and the expanding presence of the new information technologies in most domains of social life. It is the emergence of new cultural forms that cannot be contained exclusively within national framings, such as global imaginaries and cultural transnationalisms. Cities have turned out to be important spaces for enacting some of these novel cultural elements (e.g., Riemens and Lovink, 2002; Krause and Petro, 2003; Lloyd, 2010; Li et al., 2009; Ren, 2011; Malecki, 2014; Sennett, 2017; Hall, 2012; Weinstein, 2014; Body-Gendrot et al. 2009; Sassen, 2017a). These two major trends have significant implications for our analysis and theorization of cities in the twenty-first century. While these trends today may hold especially for major cities, they are directly or indirectly affecting a rapidly expanding range of diverse types of cities. Thus, a growing number of cities have emerged as one territorial or scalar moment in a variety of trans-urban dynamics. This is not the city as a bounded unit, but the city as a complex location in a grid of cross-boundary processes. Furthermore, this type of city is not simply one step on the ladder of the traditional scalar hierarchy that puts cities above the neighborhood and below the national, regional, and global levels. Rather, it is one of the spaces of the global, and it engages the global directly, often bypassing the national (Sassen, 2018: chs. 5–7). Some cities may have had this capacity long before the current era (e.g., King, 1990; several chapters in Gugler, 2004), but today these conditions extend to a growing number of cities and to a growing number of sectors within cities (e.g., Scott, 2012; Pullen, 2011; Eriksson and Hansen, 2013; Liu and Lin, 2014). This can be read as a qualitatively different phase. Furthermore, insofar as the national as container of social process and power is cracked (Xu and Yeh, 2010; Shatkin, 2014; Rose et al., 2014; Ren, 2011; Taylor, 2004; Abu-Lughod, 2000; Beck, 2000), it opens up possibilities for a geography of politics that links subnational spaces across borders. This points to the formation of a new type of transnational politics that

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began to localize in these cities (e.g., Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003; Bartlett, 2007), and to the possibility that the emergent global civil society long posited by a growing number of scholars (see, e.g., chapters in Glasius et al., 2002; Beck, 2006; Fainstein 2011; Nashashibi, 2007) is actually partly enacted in a network of cities. This type of perspective reintroduces place in the analysis of major non-urban dynamics. More precisely, it brings to the fore the challenge of recovering place in the context of globalization, the new information technologies, and the intensifying of transnational and translocal dynamics. But it also reintroduces place in the study of cities (e.g., Hall, 2012; Lloyd, 2010; Li et al., 2009). An obvious tradition of scholarship that comes to mind in this regard is the old school of ecological analysis (Park et al., 1967; Suttles, 1968; see also Duncan, 1959; Anderson, 1990). Robert Park conceived of ‘natural areas’ as geographic areas determined by unplanned subcultural forces. One might ask if their methods could be particularly useful in recovering the category place under current conditions.

Specifics of the current global urban age While the city never was a bounded closed space, and we have long had world cities (Hall, 1966), there is, nonetheless, specificity to the current urban phase. Even more so than in the past, many major cities are strategic sites where multiple trans-boundary processes intersect and produce distinct socio-spatial formations. So one could, for instance, argue that recovering place can only partly be met through the research techniques of the classic Chicago School of Urban Sociology. We need to go back to the school’s depth of engagement with urban areas and the effort toward detailed mappings. Fieldwork is a necessary step in capturing much of the global as it becomes part of today’s urban condition. Examples are the types of ethnographies done by today’s practitioners of the Chicago School (e.g., Duneier, 1999; Klinenberg, 2003; Lloyd, 2010; McRoberts, 2005; and many others) who use many of the techniques of that school, but are knowingly working within a different set of assumptions, notably less system driven and more marked by relational ethnography (Desmond, 2016; Hall, 2012). To some extent, it is the major cities in the highly developed world that most clearly display the processes discussed here, or best lend themselves to the heuristics deployed. However, increasingly these processes also emerged in cities in the Global South in the 1980s and continuing today (e.g., Santos et  al., 1994; Stren, 1996; Parsa and Keivani, 2002; Schiffer, 2002; several chapters in Amen et al., 2006; King, 1990; Parnreiter, 2002; 2015; Malecki, 2014; Burdett and Sudjic, 2007; 2011). The lesser visibility of these new global conditions in Global South cities is often due to the fact they are submerged in the megacity syndrome. Sheer population size and urban sprawl create their own visual orders. Understanding the role of cities in a global economy and, further, the capacity of urban research to produce knowledge about that economy, points to at least two sets of issues that need to be teased out. One of these concerns the extent to which these new types of electronic formations, such as financial markets, are indeed dis-embedded from social contexts. The second set of issues concerns the role of place for global firms and markets. In the late twentieth century, massive developments in telecommunications and the ascendance of information industries led analysts and politicians to proclaim the end of cities. Cities, they told us, would become obsolete as economic entities. The growth

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of information industries allows firms and workers to remain connected no matter where they are located. The digitizing of services and trade has shifted many economic transactions to electronic networks, where they can move instantaneously around the globe or within a country. Indeed from the 1970s onward, we saw large-scale relocations of offices and factories out of central cities to less congested and lower-cost areas. And we saw the growth of computerized workplaces that could be located anywhere – in a clerical ‘factory’ in the Bahamas or in a home in the suburbs. Finally, the emergent globalization of economic activity seemed to suggest that place – particularly the type of place represented by cities – no longer mattered much for users of digital technologies (Sassen, 2018). All these trends are happening, and they are becoming more intense. But they are only half the story of today’s global and digital age. Alongside the well-documented spatial dispersal of economic activities and the digitizing of growing parts of the sphere of consumption and entertainment, more and more cities show a growing concentration of a wide range of highly specialized professional activities, top-level management and control operations, and, perhaps most unexpectedly, a multiplication of low-wage jobs and low-profit economic sectors. More analytically, we might think of these trends as the development of novel forms of territorial centralization amid rapidly expanding economic and social networks with global span (Sassen, 2013; 2016; 2017a). Territorial centralization has, ironically, become a key systemic feature of major advanced economic sectors; such systemic features, as distinct from merely spatial distributions, are lost in notions of planetary urbanization. Urban sprawl is to be distinguished from the deep systemics functioning via urban centralities. (For detailed analysis and bibliography, see Sassen, 2018: chs. 3, 4, 5).

Strategic territorial nodes in a global digitized world The growth of centralized territorial nodes in an increasingly digitized world became the puzzle in the 1990s and onwards. The post-World War II trends toward dispersal in most of the West – whether at the metropolitan or transnational level – and the widespread conviction at the time that this was going to be the future, all went against the notion that the most advanced and richest sectors would need centralized territorial nodes – global cities and silicon valleys. And the rise of digital technologies further strengthened the dispersal view. However, by the 2000s the evidence showed precisely this: that firms and markets that operate in global settings require central places where the top-level work of running global systems gets done (Sassen 2016; 2017b). Furthermore, information technologies and industries designed to span the globe actually require a vast physical infrastructure containing strategic nodes with hyper-concentrations of material facilities. Finally, even the most advanced information industries, such as global finance and the specialized corporate legal and accounting services, have a ‘production’ process that is partly place bound (see, generally, Sassen, 1991 [2001]; 2014) Once these top-level and place-centered processes are brought into the analysis of the new global and electronic economy, contradictions emerge. It turns out to be not only the world of top-level transnational managers and professionals, but also that of their secretaries and the janitors cleaning the buildings where the new class works. Furthermore, it also turns out to be the world of a whole new workforce, often increasingly comprising

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immigrants and minoritized citizens, who take on the functions once performed by the mother or wife in the households of the older middle classes. The nannies, domestic cleaners, and dog walkers who work in these high-level professional households should be seen as holding jobs in the new globalized sectors of the economy. So do truck drivers and industrial service workers. We see the emergence of an economic configuration very different from that suggested by the concept of ‘information economy,’ finance, and the other top-level jobs. We recover the material conditions, production sites, and the lowwage workers that are also part of the most powerful sectors of the global economy. To understand the new globalized economic sectors, we actually need detailed examinations of a broad range of urban activities, firms, markets, and physical infrastructures that go beyond the standard images of global electronic networks and the new global professional classes (see also Knowles and Burrows, 2014; Savage, 2015; Sassen 2017a). These types of detailed examinations allow us to see the actual role played by cities in a global economy. They help us understand why there was a sharp growth in the central business districts of leading cities and international business centers of the world precisely when the new digital era was launched. Digital technologies and telecommunications infrastructures were introduced on a large scale in all advanced industries beginning in the 1980s. New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Paris, Frankfurt, Sao Paulo, Hong Kong, Sydney, Toronto, and many others, all saw these transformations that eventually spread to cities across the world. For some cities, this took off in the 1980s and, for others, in the 1990s. But all experienced some of their highest growth in decades in areas containing state-of-the-art office districts, the related high-end shopping, hotel, and entertainment districts, and high-income residential neighborhoods. These trends, which have continued to emerge in more and more cities, go against what was expected according to models emphasizing territorial dispersal; this is especially so when one considers the high cost of locating in a major downtown area. Complicating understanding and often getting most of the attention from the media and commentators was the visibility of older types of large firms leaving a city – large traditional banks, insurance firms, and the administrative headquarters of many large firms moved out of major cities in the 1980s. Far less visible and recognized at the time was the arrival of growing numbers of smaller, highly specialized and high-profit firms in the hollowedout downtowns of those same cities. These growth trends taking shape in central cities were not quite captured in the aggregate data. At the aggregate level it was losses that dominated, and it was difficult for the long-time experts of these cities to understand that besides losses of traditional firms, there were also new types of smaller, highly specialized firms that were coming to these cities. They were part of a new type of economic configuration that could not be captured through standard categories.1 This is not to say that everything in the economy of these cities was or has changed (see Sassen 2013 for a detailed analysis of finance and the advanced professional services). On the contrary, they still show a great deal of continuity and many similarities with cities that are not global. Rather, the implantation of global processes and markets has meant that the internationalized sector of the economy has expanded sharply and has imposed a new valorization dynamic – that is, a new set of criteria for valuing or pricing various economic activities and outcomes. This has had devastating effects on large sectors of the urban economy. High prices and profit levels in the internationalized sector and its ancillary activities, such as top-of-the-line restaurants and hotels, have made it increasingly difficult for other sectors to compete for space and investments. Many of

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these other sectors have experienced considerable downgrading and/or displacement; for example, neighborhood shops tailored to local needs are replaced by upscale boutiques and restaurants catering to the new high-income urban elite. Although at a different order of magnitude, these trends also took off in the early 1990s in a number of major cities in the developing world that have become integrated into various world markets: Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Taipei, and Mexico City are only a few examples. Also in these cities, the new urban core was fed by the deregulation of financial markets, the ascendance of finance and specialized services, and integration into world markets. The opening of stock markets to foreign investors and the privatization of what were once public sector firms have been crucial institutional arenas for this global articulation (Sassen, 2018: chs. 4 and 5). Given the vast size of some of these cities, the impact of this new core on their larger urban area is not always as evident as in central London or Frankfurt, but the transformation is still very real. The trends described here point to the emergence of a new kind of urban system, one operating at the global and transnational regional levels, but encompassing only particular segments of the diverse geographies in play (see, e.g., Wolford et al., 2013; Sassen 2017b). This is a system wherein cities are crucial nodes for the international coordination and servicing of firms, markets, and even whole economies that are increasingly transnational. And these cities emerge as strategic places in an expanding transnational political and cultural geography. However, most cities in the world, including most large cities, are not part of these new transnational urban systems. We are dealing with a set of fairly specialized and partial global geographies that cut across old divides – North–South and East–West – but include only parts of the cities and the countries involved (Sassen, 2014; 2017b). This is, again, one of the global features of today’s geographies of power that gets diluted into ‘urbanization’ in the planetary model of Brenner and Schmid (2014). The incorporation of cities into a new cross-border geography of centrality also signals the emergence of a parallel political geography. What we are seeing is a set of specific and partial rather than all-encompassing dynamics. It is not only the transmigration of capital that takes place in this global grid, but also that of people, both rich (i.e., the new transnational professional workforce) and poor (i.e., most migrant workers); and it is a space for the transmigration of cultural forms and the re-territorialization of ‘local’ subcultures.

A politics of place that is both local and global The cross-border network of global cities is a space where we are seeing the formation of new types of ‘global’ politics of place.2 These vary considerably: they may involve contesting corporate globalization or they may involve homeland politics. The demonstrations by the anti-globalization network have signaled the potential for developing a politics centered on places understood as locations on global networks. Some of the new globalizing diasporas have become intensive and effective users of the Internet to engage in this global politics of place around issues that concern them. This is placespecific politics with global span. It is a type of political work deeply embedded in people’s actions and activities but made possible partly by the existence of global digital linkages.

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Furthermore, it is a form of political and institution-building work centered in cities and networks of cities and in non-formal political actors. We see here the potential transformation of a whole range of ‘local’ conditions or institutional domains (such as the household, the community, the neighborhood, the local school, and health care entities) into localities situated on global networks. From being lived or experienced as nonpolitical, or domestic, these places are transformed into ‘microenvironments with global span’. That is, technical connectivity will create a variety of links with other similar local entities in other neighborhoods in the same city, in other cities, and in neighborhoods and cities in other countries. A community of practice can emerge that creates multiple lateral, horizontal communications, collaborations, solidarities, and supports. This can enable local political or non-political actors to enter into cross-border politics. The space of the city is far more concrete for politics than that of the national state system (Sassen 2015a; 2016b). It becomes a place where non-formal political actors can be part of the political scene in a way that is much more difficult at the national level. Nationally, politics needs to run through existing formal systems, whether the electoral political system or the judiciary (taking state agencies to court). Non-formal political actors are rendered invisible in the space of national politics. The city has the capacity to make visible a broad range of political activities – squatting, demonstrations against police brutality, fighting for the rights of immigrants and the homeless, the politics of culture and identity, gay and lesbian and queer politics, and the homeland politics that many diasporic groups engage in. Much of this becomes visible on the street. Much of urban politics is concrete, enacted by people rather than dependent on massive media technologies. Street-level politics makes possible the formation of new types of political subjects that do not have to go through the formal political system. These conditions can be critical for highly politicized diasporic groups and, in the context of globalization and Internet access, can easily lead to the globalizing of a diaspora. The city also enables the operations of illegal networks. The mix of focused activism and local/global networks represented by the variety of organizations involved creates conditions for the emergence of at least partly transnational identities. The possibility of identifying with larger communities of practice or membership can bring about the partial unmooring of identities and thereby facilitate a globalizing of a diaspora and a weakened radial structure with the homeland at the center of the distribution of the groups of a given diaspora. While this does not necessarily neutralize attachments to a country or national cause, it does shift this attachment to include translocal communities of practice and/or membership. Beyond the impact on immigrants and diasporas, the network of cities becomes a crucial building block for an architecture of global civil society that can incorporate both the micro-practices and micro-objectives of people’s projects (e.g., Sassen, 2015a; 2016b) without diluting the larger global geography (Bartlett, 2007; Beck, 2006; Donk et  al., 2005; Dean and Lovink, 2016; Body-Gendrot 2016). The possibility of transnational identities emerging as a consequence of this thickness of micro-politics is crucial for strengthening global civil society; the risk of nationalism and fundamentalism is, clearly, present in these dynamics as well. These processes call for the development of specific analytic categories. The transnationalization of economic activity is evident in a variety of the conditions examined here: the growth of global markets for finance and specialized services; the need for transnational servicing networks in response to sharp increases in international investment; the

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reduced role of the government in the regulation of international economic activity; and the corresponding ascendance of other institutional arenas, notably global markets and corporate headquarters. There is an emergent scholarship in urban sociology that has been focusing on these issues through the lens of global and world cities, discussed in this entry. Nonetheless, there are key questions that require more research. One of these, on which there is little agreement, is whether this multiplication of intercity transactions may be contributing to the formation of transnational urban systems, which might eventually partly bypass national states, especially in a context of globalization, deregulation, and privatization. These types of dynamics bring about a rather profound transformation in the character of the city as an object of study and in the character of the urban as a designator. For instance, the pronounced orientation to the world markets evident in such cities raises questions about the articulation with their hinterlands and nation states. Cities typically have been and still are deeply embedded in the economies of their region, indeed often reflecting the characteristics of the latter. And urban systems are meant to be national and to secure the territorial integration of a country. But cities that are strategic sites in the global economy tend, in part, to disconnect from their region and their national urban systems, thereby undermining a key proposition in traditional scholarship about urban systems – namely, that these systems promote the territorial integration of regional and national economies. A second bundle of issues concerns the tendencies contributing to new forms of inequality among cities and within cities. Both of these types of inequality have been part of the character of cities since their very beginning. But today’s conditions are sharpening these cross-border geographies of centrality constituted through the growing articulation among the advanced economic sectors and high-level professional classes of an increasing number of cities (Sassen 2017b; Ren 2011). On the other hand, cities and areas outside these new geographies of centrality tend to become peripheralized, or become more so than they had been. Similarly, within cities we are seeing a sharpening of divisions and new types of conflicts. A third set of issues concerns the emergence of a broad set of cross-border networks involving poor and generally disadvantaged or powerless actors. This is in turn producing a whole series of new and newly invigorated intercity geographies for both practices and subjective operations. This trend undermines a critical assumption about the urban poor – their lack of connection to larger networks and their lack of social capital. These are just some of the challenges that urban sociology confronts as we enter the twenty-first century. As indicated at the beginning of this chapter, most cities and urban populations are not affected by these trends, and hence much of the rich scholarship in urban sociology can handle vast stretches of urban reality. But we do also need to recognize the emergence of new foundational dynamics that, while minor in the larger urban landscape, do nonetheless call for our scholarly attention.

Who owns the city? One fact emerging from the prior section is that these global cities are strategic spaces for producing the instruments necessary for global economic activities. And one consequence

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of this strategic character is their rising value to a very diverse set of global firms. This has led to a massive scale-up in the buying of major commercial properties by national and foreign investors. In some ways this is not a new development. Already in the 1980s, I was tracking how foreign firms and some governments were buying properties in London and New York because these cities were becoming platforms to access major markets; indeed, many of those who bought in London saw it as a platform to access also major markets in continental Europe (Sassen, [1991] 2001: ch. 7). But today’s is a new phase. Most important is the fact that many of the properties acquired are not or only barely used. I see today’s trends as signaling that this is about acquiring urban land in major and minor global cities precisely because these cities have become strategic platforms for operating in the larger global economy. In my current research the focus is on the rapidly growing acquisition of major properties by both national and foreign firms in the top 100 recipient cities of these investments worldwide. What is different in the current phase is the scale of these investments, the vast globalizing of the destinations of these investments, and the frequent under-utilization of the properties. The data I focus on here covers the top 100 recipient cities that are destinations for corporate buying of high-end commercial properties. It includes only major acquisitions (e.g., properties with a minimum price of US$5 million in the case of New York City). From mid-2013 to mid-2014, corporate buying of existing properties exceeded US$600 billion in the top 100 recipient cities. This figure went up to US$1 trillion a year later, from mid-2014 to mid 2015. Table 8.1 shows the top 50 recipient cities in the mid-2014 to mid-2015 period. Many of these properties are not fully used, and some, in fact, stand empty. This does raise a question as to what it is that investors are after. I would argue that at its most generic, the buying of urban property is a mode of gaining access to a particular type of urban space and its embedded capabilities – high-level talent, infrastructures, networks, and more. In short, it means gaining access to the global city function. This is now a global trend, in a context where a growing number of cities are emerging as significant in the current and near future global economy. In short, investing in corporate properties in cities is perhaps an inevitable consequence of the enormous value attached to these advanced production sites; that is, to the global city function. An examination of the current trends points to a whole new phase in the character and logics of foreign and national corporate acquisitions. Let me note that I do not see much of a difference in terms of the urban impact between national and foreign investment. The key fact here is that both are large-scale corporate acquisitions. Four features stand out: • The sharp scale-up in the buying of buildings, even in cities that have long been the object of such investments, notably New York and London. For instance, the Chinese have most recently emerged as major buyers in cities such as London and New York (Sassen, 2015b). Today there are about 100 cities worldwide that have become significant destinations for such acquisitions; for instance, foreign corporate buying of properties from 2013 to 2014 grew by 248% in Amsterdam/Randstadt, 180% in Madrid, and 475% in Nanjing. In contrast, the growth rate was relatively lower for the major cities in each region: 68.5% for New York, 37.6% for London, and 160.8% for Beijing. • The extent of new construction. The rapid-growth period of the 1980s and 1990s was often about acquiring buildings – notably high-end Harrods in London, and Sachs Fifth Avenue and the Rockefeller

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Table 8.1  Total buying of properties in top 50 recipient cities (Q3 2014 to Q2 2015) Metro

Volumes (US$)

Growth*

1. New york 2. London 3. Tokyo 4. Los Angeles 5. San Francisco 6. Paris 7. Chicago 8. Washington 9. Dallas 10. Atlanta 11. Miami 12. Boston 13. Hong Kong 14. Sydney 15. Houston 16. Berlin 17. Seattle 18. Melbourne 19. Frankfurt 20. Phoenix 21. Denver 22. Austin 23. Shanghai 24. Amsterdam 25. Munich 26. San Diego 27. Madrid 28. Orlando 29. Stockholm 30. Hawaii 31. Osaka 32. Hamburg 33. Toronto 34. Singapore 35. Beijing 36. Brisbane 37. Philadelphia 38. Seoul 39. Nanjing 40. Minneapolis 41. Raleigh/Durham 42. Charlotte 43. Tampa 44. Portland 45. Milan

74,799,870,615 55,206,679,357 37,971,179,153 37,457,376,509 32,355,485,613 22,955,312,136 20,036,200,994 18,515,548,212 16,296,780,618 16,022,394,226 15,949,703,541 15,365,776,426 14,447,415,389 14,075,615,656 12,365,902,892 11,814,090,834 11,609,540,148 11,078,147,297 9,845,334,528 9,312,751,061 9,029,533,977 8,046,028,787 7,978,366,830 7,942,738,059 7,271,540,067 7,251,264,452 7,097,274,018 6,981,214,900 6,338,824,520 6,048,702,620 5,839,892,968 5,794,518,685 5,780,113,060 5,575,750,013 5,408,756,455 5,368,732,014 5,333,247,720 5,264,240,793 5,190,516,937 5,098,620,802 4,867,567,697 4,763,778,197 4,763,108,826 4,459,699,959 4,258,359,663

36.3% 13.4% 0.7% 14.4% 35.9% −0.2% 39.4% 29.5% 13.4% 60.7% 74.5% 43.2% 4.9% 7.9% −6.2% −6.2% 31.9% 33.1% 14.4% 53.5% 19.6% 45.3% −19.6% 13.3% 9.9% −0.3% 164.3% 55.1% −20.7% 48.5% 26.1% 23.7% −23.9% −24.4% −25.9% 39.2% −22.0% −16.0% 142.6% 64.1% 86.1% 46.2% 55.5% 91.5% 142.1% (Continued)

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Table 8.1  Total buying of properties in top 50 recipient cities (Q3 2014 to Q2 2015) (Continued) Metro 46. Dublin 47. Oslo 48. Manchester 49. San Antonio 50. Birmingham (UK)

Volumes (US$) 4,257,624,236 4,250,853,127 4,224,580,070 3,727,740,580 3,708,838,018

Growth* −3.7% 92.7% 25.2% 58.7% 27.4%

* Compared to previous 12 months

Source: Cushman & Wakefield, also based on information from Real Capital Analytics, Oxford Economics, Guardian News and Media Ltd., The World Economic Forum, Urban Land Institute.

Center in New York. In the post-2008 period, much buying of buildings is to destroy them and replace them with far taller, far more corporate and luxurious types of buildings – basically, luxury offices and luxury apartments. • The spread of mega-projects with vast footprints that inevitably kill much urban tissue: little streets and squares, density of street-level shops and modest offices, and so on. These mega-projects raise the density of the city, but they actually de-urbanize it. Thereby they bring to the fore the fact, easily overlooked in much commentary about cities, that density is not enough to have a city. • The foreclosing on modest properties owned by modest-income households. This has reached catastrophic levels in the USA, with Federal Reserve data showing that more than 14 million households lost their homes from 2004 to 2014. One outcome is a significant amount of empty or under-occupied urban land; at least some of it is likely to be ‘redeveloped.’

A further striking feature of this period is the acquisition of whole blocks of underutilized or dead industrial land for site development. Here, the prices paid by buyers can get very high. One example is the acquisition of Atlantic Yards, a vast stretch of land in New York City, by one of the largest Chinese building companies for US$5 billion. Currently, this land is occupied by a mixture of modest factories and industrial services, modest neighborhoods, and artists’ studios and cultural venues that have been pushed out of lower Manhattan by large-scale developments of high-rise apartment buildings. This very urban mix of occupants will be thrown out and replaced by 14 formidable luxury residential towers – a sharp growth of density that actually has the effect of deurbanizing that space. It will be a sort of de facto ‘gated’ space for housing. This type of development is taking off in many cities – mostly with virtual walls, but sometimes also with real ones. I would argue that the virtual and the actual walls have similar impacts on de-urbanizing areas of a city. This proliferating urban gigantism has been strengthened and enabled by the privatizations and deregulations that took off in the 1990s across much of the world, and have continued since then with only a few interruptions. The overall effect has been a reduction in public buildings and an escalation in large, corporate private ownership. The result is a thinning in the texture and scale of spaces previously accessible to the public. Where before there was a government office building handling the regulations and oversight of this or that public economic sector, or addressing the complaints from the local neighborhood, now there might be a corporate headquarters, a luxury apartment building, or a guarded mall.

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Conclusion: what is a city? These kinds of trends bring me back to the question: what is a city in the full sense of that word? One answer is that a city is a complex but incomplete system. It is in this mix that lies the capacity of cities across histories and geographies to outlive far more powerful but fully formalized systems – whether large corporations or national governments. London, Beijing, Cairo, New York, Johannesburg, Bangkok, to name but a few, have all outlived multiple types of rulers and of firms. Most of the powerful governments and firms that inhabited, and often controlled much of what happened in these cities, are dead. But the cities and their neighborhoods are still alive. If nothing else, it is a datum. It is also in this mix of complexity and incompleteness that rests the possibility for those without power to make a history, a neighborhood economy, and a (sub)culture. As the legendary statement by the fighting poor in Latin American cities puts it to power: ‘Estamos Presentes,’ we are present, we are not asking for money or favors, we are just letting you know that this is also our city. It is in cities to a large extent where the powerless have left their imprint – cultural, economic, social. It is mostly in their own neighborhoods, but eventually the imprint can spread to a vaster urban zone as ‘ethnic’ food, music, therapies, and more. All of this cannot happen in a business park, something that makes clear to what extent density alone is not enough to have a city. These are privately controlled spaces where low-wage workers can work, but not ‘make.’ Nor can this political making happen in the world’s increasingly militarized plantations and mines.3 It is perhaps only in cities where that possibility of gaining complexity in one’s powerlessness can happen, because nothing can fully control the diversity of people and engagements present in our large cities. It is in cities where so many of the struggles for vindications have taken place, and have, in the long run, partly succeeded. But this possibility to make a history, a culture, and so much more, is today threatened by the surge in large-scale corporate redevelopment of cities.

Notes  1  I have recently recounted what it was like to do this type of research in New York City in the 1980s when I was working on The Global City (Sassen, [1991] 2001).  2  Elsewhere (Sassen, 2012) I examine a broad range of sources that cover much of the literature on the rise of digital technologies over the past 20 years; see also Latham and Sassen (2005).  3  Though, in earlier periods, plantations and mines were such sites due to the massive concentration of workers. But today’s new types of militarized control make this far more difficult.

References Abu-Lughod, JL 1994, From urban village to ‘east village’: the battle for New York’s Lower East Side, Blackwell, Cambridge. Abu-Lughod JL 2000, Sociology for the 21st century, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Amen, MM, Archer, K & Bosman, M (eds) 2006, Relocating global cities: from the center to the margins, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD.

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Anderson, E 1990, Streetwise, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Ascher, F 2004, ‘Multi-mobility, multispeed cities: a challenge for architects, town planners, and politicians’ in A Font and Colegio de Arquitectos de Cataluña (COAC) (eds.), The explosion of the city: morphologies, observations and motions within recent territorial transformations in the South Europe urban regions, COEC, Barcelona. Bartlett, A 2007, ‘The city and the self: the emergence of new political subjects in London,’ in S. Sassen (ed.), Deciphering the global: its spaces, scales, and subjects, Routledge, New York. Beck, U 2000, The risk society and beyond: critical issues for social theory, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA. Beck, U 2006, Cosmopolitan vision, Polity Press, Cambridge. Brenner, N & Schmid, C 2014, ‘The “urban age” in question,’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 731–755. Burdett, R & Sudjic, D 2007, The endless city: the urban age project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society, Phaidon Press, New York. Burdett, R & Sudjic, D 2011, Living in the endless city: the urban age project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society, Phaidon Press, New York. Castells, M 1972, La Question Urbaine, Maspero, Paris. Chen, X 2009, Shanghai rising: state power and local transformations in a global megacity, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Cushman and Wakefield. 2014, Winning in Growth Cities 2014-2015. A Capital Markets Research Publication. London. Dean, J, Anderson, J & Lovink, G (eds) 2016, Formatting networked societies: information technology in and as global civil society, Routledge, New York. Desmond, D 2016, Evicted: property and profit in the American city, Crown Publishers, New York. Donk, WV, Loader, BD, Nixon, PG & Rucht, D (eds) 2005, Cyberprotest: new media, citizens, and social movements, Routledge, London. Duncan, O 1959, ‘Human ecology and population studies’ in PM Hauser and O Duncan Dudley (eds.), The study of population, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Duneier, M 1999, Sidewalk, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York. Ehrenreich, B & Hochschild, A (eds.) 2003, Global woman, Metropolitan Books, New York. Eriksson, RH & Hansen, HK 2013, ‘Industries, skills, and human capital: how does regional size affect uneven development?’ Environment and Planning, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 593–613. Espinoza, V 1999, ‘Social networks among the poor: inequality and integration in Latin American city’ in B Wellman (ed.), Networks in the global village: life in contemporary communities, Westview Press, Boulder, CO. Fainstein, Susan. 2011. The Just City. Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press. Glasius, M, Kaldor, M & Anheir, H (eds) 2002, Global civil society yearbook, Oxford University Press, London. Globalizations and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC). Retrieved from www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/gy/ research/gawc.html Glasius, M, Kaldor, M & Anheir, H (eds) 2002, Global civil society yearbook, Oxford University Press, London. Grubbhauer, M 2014, ‘Architecture, economic imaginaries and urban politics: the office tower as socially classifying device,’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 336–359. Gugler, J 2004, ‘Introduction’ in J Gugler (ed.), World cities beyond the west, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hall, P 1966, The world cities, McGraw-Hill, New York. Hall, S 2012, City, street and citizen: the measure of the ordinary, Routledge, London. Harvey, D 1985, The urbanization of capital, Blackwell, Oxford. Harvey, R 2007, ‘The subnational constitution of global markets’ in S. Sassen (ed.), Deciphering the global: its spaces, scales, and subjects, Routledge, New York. Institute for Urban Strategies 2015, ‘The global power city index, yearbook 2015,’ The Mori Memorial Foundation, Nikkei Printing Inc., Tokyo. King, AD 1990, Urbanism, colonialism, and the world-economy: cultural and spatial foundations of the world urban system, Routledge, London. Klinenberg, E 2003, Heat wave: a social autopsy of disaster in Chicago, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Kourtit, K, Macharis, C & Nijkamp, P 2014, ‘A multi-actor multi-criteria analysis of the performance of global cities,’ Applied Geography, vol. 49, pp. 24–36. Knowles, C & Burrows, R 2014, ‘The impact of impact,’ Etnográfica, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 237–254. Krause, L & Petro, P (eds) 2003, Global cities: cinema, architecture, and urbanism in a digital age, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ. Latham, R & Sassen, S 2005, Digital formations: IT and new architecture in the global realm, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

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Lefebvre, H [1974] 1991, The production of space, Blackwell, Oxford. Li, Z, Ma, LJC & Xue, D 2009, ‘An African enclave in China: the making of a new transnational urban space,’ Eurasian Geography and Economics, vol. 50, no. 6, pp. 699–719. Liu, T & Lin, GCS 2014, ‘New geography of land commodification in Chinese cities: uneven landscape of urban land development under market reforms and globalization,’ Applied Geography, vol. 51, pp. 118–130. Lloyd, R 2010, Neo-bohemia: art and commerce in the postindustrial city, Routledge, New York. Malecki, EJ 2014, ‘Connecting the fragments: looking at the connected city in 2050,’ Applied Geography, vol. 49, pp. 12–17. McRoberts, O 2005, Streets of glory: church and community in black urban neighborhood, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Musterd, S & Gritsai, O 2013, ‘The creative knowledge city in Europe: structural conditions and urban policy strategies for competitive cities,’ European Urban Regional Studies, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 343–359. Nashashibi, R 2007, ‘Ghetto cosmopolitanism: making theory at the margins’ in S. Sassen (ed.), Deciphering the global: its scales, spaces, and subjects, Routledge, New York. Paddison, R (ed.) 2001, ‘Introduction’ in Handbook of urban studies, Sage, London. Park, RE, Burgess, EW & McKenzie, RD (eds) 1967, The city, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Parnreiter, C 2002, ‘Mexico: the making of a global city’ in S. Sassen (ed.), Global networks, linked cities, Routledge: New York. Parnreiter, C 2015, ‘Las ciudades latinoamericanas en la economía mundial: la geografía de centralidad económica y sus transformaciones recientes,’ Economía, UNAM, vol. 35, pp. 3–22. Parsa, A & Keivani, R 2002, ‘The Hormuz corridor: building a cross-border region between Iran and the United Arab Emirates,’ in S. Sassen (ed.), Global networks, linked cities, Routledge, New York. Pullen, W 2011, ‘Frontier urbanism: the periphery at the centre of contested cities,’ Journal of Architecture, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 15–35. Ren, X 2011, Building globalization: transnational architecture production in urban China, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Riemens, P & Lovink, G 2002, ‘Local networks: digital city Amsterdam’ in S. Sassen (ed.), Global networks, linked cities, Routledge, New York. Ritzer, G 2010, Globalization: a basic text, Blackwell Publishing, Singapore. Rose, G, Degen, M & Melhuish, C 2014, ‘Networks, interfaces, and computer-generated images: learning from digital visualizations of urban redevelopment projects,’ Environment and Planning D, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 386–403. Santos, M, De Souze, MA & Silveira, ML (eds) 1994, Territorio globalizcao e fragmentacao, Editorial Hucitec, Sao Paulo. Sassen, S 1991 [2001], The global city: New York, London, and Tokyo, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Sassen, S 2013 ‘Global finance and its institutional spaces’ in K. Knorr Cetina and A Preda (eds.), The Oxford handbook of the sociology of finance, Oxford University Press, New York. Sassen, S 2014, Expulsions: brutality and complexity in the global economy, Harvard University Press/Belknap, Cambridge, MA. Sassen, S 2015a, ‘Digitization and work: Potentials and challenge in low-wage labor markets,’ Open Society Foundations: Future of Work Series. Retrieved from https://osf.app.box.com/s/qlnbrl95vm79720kpvuj3iqgs8ldhc00 Sassen, S 2015b, “Who owns our cities - and why this should concern us all.” The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www. theguardian.com/cities/2015/nov/24/who-owns-our-cities-and-why-this-urban-takeover-should-concern-us-all. Sassen, S 2016, “The Global City: Enabling Economic Intermediation and Bearing Its Costs.” City & Community 15:2 June 2016. Sassen, S 2017a “Predatory Formations Dressed in Wall Street Suits and Algorithmic Math” Science, Technology & Society 22:1 (2017): 6–20. Sassen, S 2017b “Embedded borderings: making new geographies of centrality” http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21622671. 2017.1290546 Sassen, S 2018, Cities in a world economy, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage (5th Edition). Savage, M 2015, Social class in the 21st century, Penguin Books, London. Schiffer, RS 2002, ‘Sao Paulo: articulating a cross-border regional economy,’ in S. Sassen (ed.), Global networks, linked cities, Routledge, New York. Scott, AJ 2001, Global city-regions, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Scott, AJ 2012, A world in emergence: cities and regions in the 21st century, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham. Sennett, R 1994, Flesh and stone: the body and the city in western civilization, Norton, New York. Sennett, R 2017, Making and dwelling, Allen Lane/Penguin, London.

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Shatkin, G 2014, ‘Contesting the Indian city: global visions and the politics of the local,’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 1–13. Storper, M & Scott, AJ 2009, ‘Rethinking human capital, creativity and urban growth,’ Journal of Economic Geography, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 147–167. Storper, M & Scott, AJ 2016, ‘Current debates in urban theory: a critical assessment,’ Urban Studies, vol. 53, no. 6, pp. 1114–1136. Stren, R 1996, ‘The studies of cities: popular perceptions, academic disciplines, and emerging agendas’ in M Cohen, B Ruble, J Tulchin and A. Garland (eds.), Preparing for the urban future: global pressures and local forces, Woodrow Wilson Center Press (distributed by the Johns Hopkins University Press), Washington, DC. Suttles, GD 1968, The social order of the slum, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Taylor, PJ 2004, World city network: a global urban analysis, Routledge, London. Thrift, N & Amin, A 2002, Cities: reimagining the urban, Polity Press, Cambridge. Veltz, P 2005, Mondialisation, villes et territoires: L’économie d’archipel, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris. Venkatesh, SA 2013, Floating city: a rogue sociologist lost and found in New York’s underground economy, Penguin Press, New York. Watson, S & Bridge, G 2011, The new Blackwell companion to the city, Blackwell, Oxford. Wellman, B (ed.) 1999, Networks in the global village: life in contemporary communities, Westview Press, Boulder, CO. Wolford, W, Borras, SM, Hall, R, Scoones, I & White, B 2013, ‘Governing global land deals: the role of the state and the rush for land,’ Development and Change, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 189–210. Xu, J & Yeh, AOH 2010, Governing and planning of mega-city regions: an international comparative perspective, Routledge, London.

9 Origins of an Urban Crisis: The Restructuring of the San Francisco Bay Area and the Geography of Foreclosure Alex Schafran Introduction: an urban crisis on the metropolitan edge ‘Urban restructuring must first be seen as crisis-generated.’ (Ed Soja, quoted in Soureli and Youn, 2009: 42).

Stories of suffering, decline and foreclosure on the edges of the American metropolis have now become as ubiquitous as the ‘bank-owned’ signs littering front yards from Antioch, California, toYuma, Arizona. From columnists like Timothy Egan to the editorial pages of The Economist, tales of the ‘gated ghetto’ and quotes from urban scholar Christopher Leinberger about the ‘next slum’ growing on the fringes of our urban regions are merging into a noticeable discourse of decline in the wake of an economic and social disaster (Leinberger, 2008; Egan, 2010; Semuels, 2010; The Economist, 2010). The attention paid to the metropolitan fringe is a critical reminder of what David Harvey (2009), amongst others, has noted: that this is ‘not a sub-prime mortgage crisis but an urban crisis’. As the foreclosure crisis in the United States morphed into a financial crisis-cum-global economic meltdown, popular attention moved away from the urban roots of this calamity to focus almost exclusively on securitization and Wall Street greed — no doubt critical features — while largely ignoring the role of such ‘urban’ factors as housing policy, racial segregation, metropolitan mobility and the conflation between the American Dream and homeownership. This is a critical error. To fully grasp both what happened and what will happen, we must think not simply about what Wall Street did to Main Street, but how, where and for whom we have built and rebuilt Elm Street, the quintessential space of American residential life. It would also be a mistake to root the urban nature of the crisis exclusively in the bubble years of 2002 to 2006. Much as Thomas Sugrue (1996) reminds us in his seminal

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work, Origins of the Urban Crisis, that the ‘urban crisis’ of the 1960s and 1970s — with its wave of abandonment, riots and the supposed decay of the American inner city — began not in 1965 in Watts or 1977 in the Bronx but in the cities, suburbs and factories of the 1940s, we too must look back over the course of a generation for the origins of this particular crisis. Although we cannot discount the importance of the deregulatory fervor of the Bush regime and the ‘supercapitalism’ (Reich, 2008) of the first decade of the new millennium, the story of this crisis must be told not from the point of this most recent moment of neoliberal restructuring, but from the 1970s, when the Keynesian era of postwar federally sponsored suburban growth morphed into the neoliberal era.1 Of late, urban scholars have reacted to the exclusive focus on Wall Street and Washington by asserting the role of the ‘urban problematic’ in our understanding of both the production and aftermath of the crisis (Crump et al., 2008; Bardhan, 2009; Burkhalter and Castells, 2009; Dymski, 2009; Wyly et al., 2009; Bardhan and Walker, 2010). They remind us that this story is not simply about a static problem, but one inherently linked to the ongoing restructuring of the American metropolis.2 While the foreclosure crisis is not a perfect analogy to Hurricane Katrina, the discursive power of the comparison is useful. Although we may argue (correctly) that there is ‘no such thing as a natural disaster’, and while the urban pain of Katrina was undoubtedly produced by racism, inequality and willful negligence, the storm itself was not. In the case of the mortgage crisis, persistent racialized inequality, predatory lending practices, capital mobility, policy failures (and utter negligence), and a general restructuring of the American metropolis not only produced a highly unequal geography of crisis — much as in New Orleans — but helped produce the storm itself (Crump et al., 2008; Hernandez, 2009; Wyly et al., 2009).3 It was the perfect calamity for a world in which the primary means of production had shifted from the industrial to the urban, a bitter fulfillment of Henri Lefebvre’s (2003 [1968]) prophecy of an ‘urban revolution’. What has emerged is a gradual understanding that certain places are at the center of this mess for a reason, and that much can be learned from the highly specific geography of the crisis. Much as postwar Detroit emerged as the (ongoing) exemplar of postwar urban decline, California, and its metropoli, have emerged as a critical center of the ‘Great Recession’ (Bardhan and Walker, 2010). Table 9.1 shows the ten metropolitan regions that bore the brunt of the initial wave of foreclosures in 2007, a list that clusters in three major areas — the Rust Belt cities of Ohio and Michigan, the Sunbelt cities of Nevada, Arizona and Florida, and California. Foreclosures in the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt can partially be explained by macroregional economic forces — the rampant speculative urbanism and real-estate-driven economy in one case, and the decline of the industrial economy in the other. The story behind the megaregions of northern and southern California (in bold and italics, respectively), by contrast, is largely about the internal metamorphosis of these two areas, which collectively account for more than one in ten Americans. This article illustrates how northern California in particular restructured over the course of the neoliberal era, and how this multi-scalar shift in demographics, policy and capital investment produced not only the specific exurban geography of crisis but underwrote the crisis itself.4 This holistic, historicized and multi-scalar approach to understanding the crisis in exurbia elucidates two critical lessons. The first is the historical realization that the way in which society at multiple geographic scales reacted to the urban environment and urban processes present at the end of the great wave of post war-suburbanization, modernist planning and the original urban

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Table 9.1 RealtyTrac US metropolitan areas with highest foreclosure rates, third quarter 2007 Rank

Metropolitan Area

 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10

Stockton, CA Detroit/Livonia/Dearborn, MI Riverside/San Bernardino, CA Fort Lauderdale, FL Las Vegas/Paradise, NV Sacramento, CA Cleveland/Lorain/Elyria/Mentor, OH Miami, FL Bakersfield, CA Oakland, CA

Source: RealtyTrac (2007)

crisis — an era which by the 1970s had produced a vastly segregated metropolis defined by a racialized urban/suburban dichotomy and a lack of faith in planning, particularly from higher levels of government, across the political spectrum — produced an even more sprawling and disjointed region and a new geography of race and class, which laid the urban underpinnings of the contemporary foreclosure crisis. One can conceptualize the foreclosure crisis not simply as the end result of the neoliberal era, but as the convergence of the unresolved urban crisis of the postwar era and the various reactions to it over the past 35 years. Rather than make modernist planning less authoritarian, racist and anti-urban and the regional urban economy less dependent on cheap suburbanization, we gutted planning and abandoned the ‘integrated ideal’ (Graham and Marvin, 2001) and other productive components of modernism, while failing utterly to restrict suburbanization in any reasonable way. Secondly, as a result of this history and the profound crisis it has produced, we must learn to see geography differently, especially from the left. For generations now, the general position of the broad left has been slow- or anti- or smart-growth, has been pro-city and anti-suburb. We have been obsessed with the ravages of gentrification while generally content to ignore suburbia entirely, except to decry it as exclusionary or banal or both. This particular geographic orientation may have been a good idea a half century ago, when the postwar wave of suburbanization was not yet complete, when the dream of homeownership and the American Dream were not so deeply intertwined, before core inner-city areas were rendered racialized ghettos and an entire generation of low-income families, African Americans and immigrants was left to pursue a suburban dream under conditions of fiscal austerity, subprime lending and massive collective disinvestment in infrastructure. But it is too late to change all that. We sprawled, and then sprawled again under even worse conditions. To be anti-sprawl or anti-suburbs now is to be against the homes and dreams of millions of working-class families, many from communities of color, in suburbs and exurbs around the United States. Yes, it should never have happened, but it did — we failed. Now we must pick up the pieces and learn to live and adapt in this new hyperdiverse, physically massive and politically dysfunctional universe where individuals and

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institutions simultaneously seek to restore things to an imagined past and push ahead into an uncertain future. This will necessitate doing things we may find u­ ncomfortable — completing incomplete and decidedly unurbane exurbs, restoring faith in the power of the federal state to plan and pay for infrastructure, and making peace with a growth machine to which we are now inextricably linked.

A brief history of northern California ‘…in California the lights went on all at once, in a blaze, and they have never been dimmed.’ (Carey McWilliams, 1999 [1949]: 25)

Depending on one’s level of cynicism, the location of the San Francisco Bay Area at the center of the foreclosure situation is either fitting or tragic or both, but it should hardly be surprising. From the heady days of the Gold Rush, when, as Carey McWilliams (1999 [1949]: 25) so eloquently noted, ‘the lights went on all at once’ and the rapid development of the state represented a ‘telescoping of events; a foreshortening of processes’, the Golden State and its cities have been at the center of both global capitalism and American urbanism and their myriad interlocking formations. It was not long before San Francisco arose from a tiny settlement on a windy outcrop into an ‘imperial’ metropolis, torn between being the next Rome or the next Paris (Brechin, 2006). If at first San Francisco’s power was built on the abundance of its hinterlands and the power of its internal industrial and financial capital, it quickly morphed into a regional metropolis, moving heavy and dirty industry over to Oakland and Alameda county and up the Carquinez Strait into Contra Costa and Solano counties from the late nineteenth century (Walker, 2004). Oakland grew as a streetcar suburb after the 1906 earthquake, followed by the steady growth during the twentieth century of a blue-collar suburban ‘industrial garden’ along the shores of the Bay from Richmond to Fremont (Self, 2003). This era of postwar growth was aided in no small part by the massive build-up of defense and defense-related industries during the war, bringing both massive federal investment and an influx of African American workers, mostly from Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. Filipinos also came in significant numbers during the war, helping to cement what had long been a relatively small but significant multiracial minority, with significant Chinese, Japanese, Mexican (or Californio) and Native American populations stretching back to the Gold Rush and before. The combination of war industry, foreign and domestic immigration and exclusionary housing policy helped produce a segregated metropolis that by 1970 saw the majority of African Americans confined to a handful of communities — Oakland, Richmond, East Palo Alto, Pittsburg, Vallejo and parts of San Francisco and Stockton — in what had become a sprawling region spanning between nine and fifteen counties.5 The defense industry also helped spur the growth of a high-technology sector, one which had been born and nurtured through post-gold-rush innovation, but which took off in one of the most famous economic transformations in history, building on the power of transistors, higher education and global markets to develop a knowledge-industry powerhouse. It was this simultaneous innovation in industry, urbanization and exclusion that helped set the stage for the story at hand. Not only did the Bay Area pioneer hydraulics,

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telecommunications and personal computing, but it was also at the forefront of the developer-driven streetcar suburb (Loeb, 2001)6 and can claim sole title to the creation of racially exclusionary zoning with the regulation of (the almost exclusively Chineseowned) laundries in Modesto and San Francisco in the 1880s (Warner, 1972; Bernstein, 1999).7 The twentieth-century Bay Area remained at the forefront of many if not most of the phenomena we associate with the contemporary American metropolis: edge cities (Garreau, 1991) and boomburbs (Lang, 2003; Lang and LeFurgy, 2006); significant exurbanization and suburbanization of communities of color and low-income communities (Frey, 2000; Lucy and Phillips, 2001); a gentrifying core (Godfrey, 1988; Solnit, 2002); and a restructured metropolitan economy centered on white-collar office work, high technology and knowledge production (Nelson, 1986; Saxenian, 1994; Castells, 2000). As entrenched fiscal crises assert their prominence in the contemporary urban problem, northern California is sadly determined to stay out in front (Kirkpatrick and Smith, 2011). Anti-Chinese sentiment is not the only force that linked the cities of the northern San Joaquin Valley, such as Modesto and Stockton, to San Francisco and the core of the Bay Area. Since the late nineteenth-century economic relationship that was built on truck farms and the canning industry to the beginnings of long-distance commuting a century later, the lines between the Central Valley and the Bay Area have always been fuzzy, even if the metropolitan imagination of San Franciscans does not extend far beyond its 49 square miles (Schafran, 2009). The linkage between the two areas has become critical with the transformation over the past three decades, during which commuting patterns and housing development have demanded the conceptualization of a ‘megaregion’, even if significant political and cultural differences remain (Metcalf and Terplan, 2007). The logic of the megaregion helps to define the loose boundaries of one axis of this examination. While most Bay Area residents (and virtually all regional-planning institutions) define the region as the nine-county area that largely rings San Francisco Bay, and some definitions expand the concept to include as many as 21 counties plus five more in Nevada (Metcalf and Terplan, 2007), this study focuses on the triangle formed by San Francisco, Merced and Sacramento (Figure 9.1), a 13-county region that is home to almost 10 million people, representing almost a quarter of California’s population. If our goal is to chart the production of an exurbia in crisis as part of the restructuring of regional race and class geographies, urban policy and urban capital, we must use a malleable definition of the region that recognizes the economic, social and historical linkages and not simply the formal geographies of politics and bureaucracy.8 The second axis lies in the exurban communities at the eastern edge of Contra Costa county, a sprawling county of 1.2 million inhabitants, which stretches from the shores of the San Francisco Bay to the edges of the Central Valley and includes the four communities affectionately known as ‘East County’: Pittsburg and Antioch, old industrial towns that were the industrial ‘back office’ during the height of the Bay Area’s cold-war machine (Walker, 2004; Anderson, 2005) and Brentwood and Oakley, agricultural towns that were key linkages in the truck-farm and train-line system linking the Central Valley to San Francisco and the canneries of the Bay Area. East County is now home to more than a quarter of a million people, following a massive suburbanization over the course of the past 40 years, a splintered merging of agricultural, industrial and urban areas under a post-Fordist economy and neoliberal policy regime, a coming together that left both Pittsburg and Antioch in and out of the region, as incomplete suburbs that were victims of an Eisenhower dream in a Ronald Reagan era.

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Figure 9.1  The Greater Bay Area (13-county version), with urbanized areas shown in grey Source: map created by author based on United States Census, 2010c

A restructuring in three movements The Bay Area at the end of the Keynesian era may have possessed the roots of its future superstar status, but in many ways it was a typical American metropolis. Whitecollar work and lower-income communities of color were largely centered on the core cities; residential developers were building out the suburbs for a mostly white and (newly) middle-class constituency; and the federal and state governments were investing in infrastructure and mortgage insurance to make this all possible. While diversity and industry existed in many places outside of the core, suburbs such as Livermore became the poster child for 1970s white middle-class suburbia in Bill Owens’ iconic Suburbia (1973). The past three decades have seen some profound shifts. Pockets of previously disinvested inner-core areas in Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco became gentrified, taking in children of the suburbs, while others remained mired in a caricature of urban poverty, with high murder rates for young men of color, poor schools and terrible rates of environmental health problems such as asthma. Many of these inner-core neighborhoods took in immigrants and refugees from all over the world, even as they sent many

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long-time residents over the hill in search of a better and safer life. Alas, over the hill was not available, as most of the second ring of suburbs were largely closed off owing to high prices and land-use regulations, so they landed in the burgeoning exurban communities on the edges of the Central Valley. In few other regions did ‘drive ‘til you qualify’ mean so much. This new flood of suburbanites was joined by suburban residential developers, who were also fleeing the build-out of the core and the restrictions of the second ring. In the meantime, venture capital was pouring into San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and commercial capital was building an edge city in the very same second-ring suburbs that had been at the heart of Robert Self’s (2003) ‘white noose’ in the greater Tri-Valley region. Meanwhile, the massive investments in transportation infrastructure that had laid the groundwork for both the creation of mass residential suburbanization and its subsequent reincarnation as a jobs center slowed significantly, leaving an exurban realm outside the major transit grid (the Bay Area Rapid Transport system, or BART) and, in some cases, such as Antioch and Brentwood, off the vaunted federal highway system. All of this occurred under a shifting policy framework across multiple scales. Smaller edge towns were either struggling with deindustrialization (for example, Antioch and Pittsburg) or the constant crisis of agriculture, and saw growth as a means to both a new economic and fiscal reality and a set of amenities — be they parks and pools or commercial consumption — that have become standards of American life. Their pro-growth politics provided a welcome mat for both residential developers and a new generation of residential consumers who couldn’t find space in the increasingly unaffordable and antigrowth core, where the new fiscal politics favored retail and commercial development over residential.

(Ad)ventures in capital ‘Look at the NAHB [National Association of Home Builders] roster — we had everyone who was on it.’ (long-time East County engineer, interview March 2011)

The brutal modernism of postwar urbanization was ‘successful’ in part because there was a coherence and coordination to the flows of capital. The suburban ‘spatial fix’ (Walker, 1981) of the postwar era was rooted in centralized support for transportation and mortgage infrastructure and the attempt to maintain the central city as a primary source of employment. But the sins of an earlier era — which left out huge swaths of the population based on race or class, or destroyed communities through freeway building — not only destroyed faith in the modernist project on both the left and the right, but left a fragmented and uncoordinated system of investment in the built environment. Residential developers and commercial developers emerged from this period operating in very separate and distinct worlds, sandwiched between an unbelievable torrent of venture capital on one side and a steady strangulation of public investment in infrastructure on the other. With policy weakened by a liberal illusion of home rule in the reality of fiscal austerity, it is little wonder that the end result is an increasingly fragmented metropolis where the edge is left out in the cold and parts of the center remain centers of poverty.

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Residential developers go over the hill After the heyday of building in the inner-ring suburbs along the Bay and the classic postwar suburbs of Walnut Creek, Pleasanton and Livermore, residential builders fled eastward over the hills — to eastern Contra Costa county (Antioch, Pittsburg, and so on) and the Central Valley counties of San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Merced and Sacramento. From a business perspective, their tried and true business model of single-family detached homes in new subdivisions was not set up for the demands of an older city and mature suburbs, which demanded infill development of multifamily, attached or mixed-use housing. Cities such as Antioch welcomed mass suburbanization in the face of declining industrial economies and an abundance of cheap land. If open space was a pull factor, mounting political risk in older suburbs was a major push factor. With the development of the slow-growth and anti-growth movements throughout California in the 1970s and 1980s, and the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, large-scale subdivisions of resource-consuming and low-tax-generating subdivisions became politically unpopular in the second-ring suburban areas that had room to grow. Meanwhile, eastern Contra Costa cities, the unincorporated areas such as Discovery Bay and Oakley, and the small farm towns in the Central Valley near major highways provided a welcome place where business could be done much as it had been done a generation ago, when many of the family-run companies started out. Southeastern Antioch, which would become a major epicenter of foreclosures in 2007, was urbanized in 1982, long before subprime became a household word, under one major developer-driven specific plan authorizing 15,000 new units of housing.9 Political risk meshed with economic risk at the core, where the only major sites involved reuse, often of industrial land, with significant environmental costs (and potential challenges under the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA). Although density seems to be the logical choice in these matters, large-scale residential builders do not simply switch models from stick-built detached housing to skyscrapers. Their network of lenders, subcontractors, investors and sales staff is set up to manufacture a specific type of product, and they will move their operations more readily than change them to suit new constraints, especially if it means only going over the hill. This does not mean that there was no risk involved in these new exurban markets; simply that they were trading political and economic risk for market risk. Just because you build something, does not mean that buyers will come. That is, unless high housing prices in the core, cheap gas and even cheaper debt make your product 60 miles and 2 hours in traffic away from the core more marketable. It is worth noting that the first true clouds on the horizon came not from default notices, but from the spike in gas prices in 2005, when a key lubricant that allowed this exurban shift (both of capital and demographics) to occur began to disappear. In the meantime, a different type of capital was pouring into the core — venture and stock-market capital in immense proportions. In 1999, at the top of the dot-com boom, the Bay Area received twice as much venture capital (5.5%) as the next largest metro area, and almost ten times the US metro average (Atkinson and Gottlieb, 2001). These approximately US $1.65 billion were not spread evenly throughout the Bay, but were concentrated in Santa Clara, San Francisco and northern Alameda counties.10 While this upsurge in investment initially had an impact on commercial rents in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, the profits and salaries earned from the growing tech ‘miracle’ quickly

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multiplied in the local real-estate economy as a new generation of dot-com millionaires and young twenty-somethings bought and rented Silicon Valley and San Francisco real estate to new heights. This venture money was soon followed by an upsurge of high-end residential building in the 1990s (lofts) and the 2000s (towers) in the heart of San Francisco. Capital flows functioned in tandem with the flows of subdivision investment on the outer fringes — as the core became increasingly unaffordable, the demand for market-rate affordable suburban houses for working and middle-class populations on the outer fringes only increased, especially from younger households who had not managed to buy during the earlier era. Commercial developers in Joel Garreau country This was not a two-party dance. At the same time, commercial/office capital and jobs were moving into the already established second-ring suburbs, creating the edge cities along the 680/580 corridors made famous by Joel Garreau (1991). White-collar office space, a mixture of corporate headquarters and back-office operations, grew in cities such as San Ramon and Pleasanton, while a mix of office development and retail gave a city of less than 75,000 people such as Walnut Creek enough commerce for a city of threequarters of a million people. While this movement of jobs initially aimed to take advantage of a labor pool of middle-class (mostly white) women, or the proximity of those companies who moved corporate headquarters to the high-income, CEO-living towns that were solidifying (and incorporating) in the immediate vicinity, it quickly interacted with the new geographies of residential capital to emerge as an employment hub for commuters now living over the Altamont Pass in cities such as Tracy. Figure 9.2 shows the commute patterns of Tracy residents. Other than those who work in the city itself, the Tri-Valley cities of Pleasanton and Livermore — both of which built significant office space and little housing during the 1980s and 1990s — are the two largest sources of employment. This is a new twist on the postwar pattern of bedroom communities — commuters from far-flung exurbs are commuting not to central cities but to the ‘edge cities’ in-between. The result of this two-part jump — commercial in one place, residential in another — is a reconstruction of a jobs/housing imbalance, previously a concern for cities such as Walnut Creek and Pleasanton, except this time in places such as Antioch too. Figure 9.3 shows the significant gap over the past two decades in the percentage of residential construction vis-àvis commercial construction inAntioch and Walnut Creek. For much of the 1990s, Antioch was building at less than one dollar in non-residential real estate for every ten dollars in residential value, compared to a roughly 50/50 split in Walnut Creek. This recreation of a jobs/housing imbalance farther out from the core had two major consequences. It exacted both human and environmental costs, as most of the new exurban communities, and many of the new jobs centers, were off the major transit grid, BART, which was built in the 1970s. BART extensions to Antioch and Livermore (but not over the hill into Tracy) have been planned for some time, but more than two decades after these shifts began in earnest, construction has still not begun.11 Real-estate capital moved at a much faster speed than public-transportation infrastructure during this era, and the result is a disconnected and disjointed regional commute-shed, with traffic on the Altamont Pass at 6 a.m.

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Figure 9.2  Places of work for Tracy residents, 2000 Source: United States Census (2010d); map by Hugo Lefebvre, reprinted with permission

The jobs/housing imbalance has also helped to produce a new regime of fiscal inequality, not between city and suburb, but between different suburbs. It is a trend scholars have noticed in the United States for the past decade (Dreier et al., 2001; Orfield, 2002; Fischer et al., 2004), as the geography of inequality in the American metropolis has been reshaped. Yet most scholarship has focused on poor, inner-ring suburbs developed during the heyday of infrastructure building, where the issue is maintenance in the face of poverty and austerity. In places such as Antioch, and therefore for the communities who relocated there over the past decade, it means coping with an incomplete suburbanization rather than a decaying one. Exurban towns and cities that suburbanized under the neoliberal regime have hit a crisis point before becoming full ‘citizens’ of the region. Public transit is woeful and not regional, as construction on long-promised BART extensions have not even begun.12 The widening of Highway 4, a legendary quagmire during peak hours, has not been completed and is dependent on locally raised money from developers’ fees as opposed to the federal and state largesse that built an earlier set of suburbs. Long commutes result from a dearth of local living-wage jobs, which, as a result of the vicious cycle of contemporary governance means a smaller tax base to support mobility or economic development. San Joaquin and Stanislaus county exurbs have no political voice whatsoever in the center of the Bay, regardless of where their residents labor on a daily basis. Clearly, this is not simply a result of capital shifting on its own, but part of a policy regime that has shifted considerably in its own right over the past three decades. Moreover, the impacts of these shifts cannot be understood without a sense of the underlying rules that

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Figure 9.3  The gap between residential and non-residential construction: percentage of building-permit valuations that are non-residential, Walnut Creek and Antioch, 1990–2008 Source: Construction Industry Research Board, 2010

have helped ‘fiscalize’ land-use policy and instituted a regime of development-fee-based urbanism. This shift in the way we pay for and regulate urbanization is what we turn to now.

Cracks in the Keynesian pavement ‘Because the state wasn’t stepping up, the locals had to be creative.’ (long-time Contra Costa engineer, interview July 2010)

The flow of different forms of capital around the greater Bay Area must be seen alongside a shifting policy framework in this fin-de-siècle barn dance. Policy is at the heart of many examinations of neoliberal urbanism (see, for example, Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Harvey, 2005; Hackworth, 2007), and the Bay Area certainly does not disappoint. But as in all places, the fragmentations and movements of the neoliberal era interacted with a specific local history, with the mobilities and inertia of people and capital, each with its own set of unyielding and unchanging ways. In the case of the Bay Area, three policy shifts — the fiscalization of land use under Proposition 13, a related shift towards dependency on development fees for fiscal solvency, and hyper-fragmentation of local infrastructure governance — merged with the continued prevalence of exclusionary zoning to help produce a slew of rapidly growing yet ‘incomplete’ communities on the edge of the region. Proposition 13 It is virtually impossible to tell a Californian story about the neoliberal era without beginning with Proposition 13, California’s notorious 1978 property-tax referendum, which

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capped property taxes (for all uses, not simply residential), created a two-thirds majority standard for new property taxes, along with a similarly difficult standard for all budgetary matters at the state level. One could argue that Proposition 13 (or Prop 13, to use the local parlance) is the ground zero for the production of the new urban crisis in California, and its role as the pivot from one urban crisis to the next makes perfect sense — after all, it is the culmination of predominantly white middle-class suburban homeowner myopia that emerged from the ashes of postwar suburbanization (Davis, 1990; Self, 2006). The same actors who in the 1960s were organized behind Goldwater and the gubernatorial campaign of Ronald Reagan, would ultimately send Reagan to the White House and complete the tectonic shift away from the embedded liberalism of the Keynesian era (McGirr, 2001). On the ground, Prop 13 was a key linchpin in the growing fiscalization of land use, whereby land-use decisions are not made according to traditional planning criteria — such as proximity to transit or infrastructure, community needs or environmental impacts — but based on their ability to contribute to the tax base of a municipality or county, depending on jurisdictions.13 Prop 13 thus led to a simple hierarchy of land use (see Figure 9.4) — you’d take a Kmart over a Kmart warehouse, even though the latter offered good union jobs, and both over any form of residential development, especially more affordable units (Coleman, 2005). Cities such as Walnut Creek and Pleasanton, which were well situated from a geographical point of view and had experienced the benefit of the postwar infrastructure boom (much of which came on line just as the era of infrastructure was ending in the late 1970s), could now make a fiscal argument for allowing commercial over residential development, obviating the need for more overtly exclusionary practices that were politically less palatable, even if the communities ultimately desired to retain their homogeneity.14 This shift of jobs was supported not simply by a convergence of policy at the state and local levels, but by planning logics at the county and regional level. The notion of maintaining a jobs/housing balance grew in importance during the era, as planners and traffic engineers sought to balance commute patterns and reduce congestion by adding jobs to residential communities. This was one of the core logics at play in the development of the Contra Costa Business Center, a two million square foot mixed-use development in Pleasant Hill, just north of Walnut Creek. Again, it seemed logical to remake the postwar suburbs into mixed-use communities. But rather than simply balance the commute

Figure 9.4 Simple hierarchy of land use under Proposition 13 Source: derived from Coleman, 2005

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patterns between city and suburb, this new development helped drain jobs from the city and provide an anchor point for exurbanization over the hills into Antioch and Tracy, cities that to this day have not been able to build anything resembling a balance, leading to commuting patterns like the one seen in the previous section. The new geographies of policy For all its importance, Prop 13 and the fiscalization of land use is only part of the story. Development and the new regime of impact and linkage fees, which became de rigueur in Californian cities during this era, are only necessary because of the steady retrenchment of the federal and state governments, especially on infrastructure. From the federal Clean Water Act to state highway funds, money was cut off, reduced or reconfigured — 75% grants became 55% loans. But rather than make government more ‘prudent’ or more ‘responsible’, this merely shifted the responsibility farther down the food chain. Wealthier towns could persevere, or attract high-end retail; older towns with good geography had both locational advantages and the infrastructure inherited from an earlier era — it was simply a question of maintenance. But for communities on the fringe, development became the sole way to pay for everything from new roads to new schools. The shift in revenue sources in cities across the state can be seen in Table 9.2 — less money from the federal and state governments and from property taxes, and an almost doubling of revenue from charges and fees. The result can be seen easily in eastern Contra Costa, where transit and road improvements are paid for not by 90% federal dollars (the way it was in most of the core), but by a development fee (East County Regional Transportation Fee) overseen by two different authorities — the East Contra Costa Regional Fee and Financing Authority (ECCRFFA) and the East County Transportation Improvement Authority (ECTIA), with responsibility for three projects, including the expansion of Highway 4 and the creation of a bypass through Brentwood, Oakley and Antioch. Instead of the integrated infrastructure of a generation ago, East County is the epitome of both physical and political ‘splintering’ (Graham and Marvin, 2001), as the individual cities fight amongst themselves for rateables while being forced into fractious partnerships such as ECCRFFA, which epitomize what one long-time local transportation engineer calls ‘institutional structures being formed in absence of the state’ (interview July 2010). The more things change, the more they stay the same The state is not only withdrawing from infrastructure, but also from planning. More importantly, what had once been a link between local planning, regional planning and federal infrastructure moneys was severed. In the 1960s and early 1970s, funds from the HUD 701 program helped pay for both planning and subsequent infrastructure and tied local municipalities to a regional plan. Both local and regional agencies, including the Association for Bay Area Governments (ABAG) and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), the two major regional entities at the time, received money to plan at both the regional and local level. If local plans conformed with regional plans, federal dollars were made available in the form of grants to build whatever the plan called for, be it parks or a new sewer system. During the Carter

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Table 9.2  General revenue by source for California cities, 1972 and 2002 Per Capita (2002 US$)

%

%

Source

1972

2002

1972

2002

Property taxes Sales taxes Other taxes Charges and fees Other   Total own-source revenue Federal subventions State subventions   Total general revenue

232 118 93 119 87 648 71 176 895

232 168 212 311 198 1,121 69 205 1,395

26 13 10 13 10 72 8 20 100

17 12 15 22 14 80 5 15 100

Source: Barbour (2007)

administration this program was gutted and replaced with Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), a new regime of block grants that made local cities more independent from the already fairly weak regional agencies, especially ABAG, which never truly recovered the influence it once had. Power instead shifted to the MTC, which controls federal transportation monies, the one true source of regional planning, and the Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), which, following the successful efforts to save San Francisco Bay from development, now has land-use jurisdiction along the shores of the Bay. Business leaders and some environmentalists made a major push for regional government in the late 1980s and 1990s, in an attempt to unify the major regional agencies: BCDC, which has formal land-use power over the Bay; Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC); the official Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), which has funding power over federal transportation monies (power that increased with major transportation-funding legislation in the 1990s and 2000s); the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD), which has a state mandate; and the largely powerless ABAG, whose main sources of power are annual growth projections and the Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) numbers, which attempt to enforce a more equitable distribution of low and middle-income housing throughout the region. The effort, Bay Vision 2020, failed at the last minute, falling short by five votes in the state senate after passing in the assembly (Bodovitz, 2003).15 The fiscalization of land use and the failures of yet another round of regional planning are only the most recent set of shifts in a tense relationship between the state and local governments, between local and county government, and between localities themselves, which stretches back to the founding of California. While there was a rash of incorporation in the Tri-Valley area (Dublin, Danville and San Ramon) in the 1980s, which helped solidify the human and economic geography of those places, defensive incorporation has long been a tool of local residents aiming to take full advantage of the California/ American ethos of ‘home rule’. The neoliberal version of fiscal austerity post-Prop 13 follows civil-rights era dust-ups over mandatory general-plan housing elements and fairhousing legislation of the 1960s, as well as conflicts over power and control between state and local governments over California’s role as a major innovator in urban planning

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legislation between the first and second world wars. Even as the rules changed, the game, and many of the actors, have remained the same. These pre-1970s roots of state-local fiscal tension point broadly to an important reminder about the realities of American urbanism seen through a historical lens. Yes, this is about neoliberalism, but more fundamentally, it is about liberalism — the fetishization of ‘home rule’ and the worship of property rights. Local entities fought to maintain the final say over land-use decisions, regardless of their impact on themselves or others, locking themselves into a fee-based Ponzi scheme dependent on ever-increasing property values, or an exclusionary system based on keeping prices high and demographics skewed. The end result is a troubling tapestry of inchoate communities — wealthier inner-ring suburbs with a politics of exclusivity and inertia, older cities with a sclerotic politics of infighting amidst polarizing wealth and poverty, and outer-ring industrial and agricultural towns whose developer/landowner growth machines saw rampant residential development as a path towards both economic growth and more local amenities in an increasingly competitive and cut-throat era.

Ships passing in the night ‘I’d say probably 4 to 5 years back, a lot of families had the opportunity to move out… and there was a mass exodus out to Fairfield, Tracy and Antioch.’ (long-time recreation supervisor, Oakland, interview May 2009).16

‘You can’t really blame them. It’s the American Dream.’ (store owner, Patterson, conversation July 2010).

Finally, there is the question of demographics. It would be an error to conceive of policy and capital as fixed objects independent of social relations, but it would be equally poor thinking to consider actual human beings and their movements to be equal to laws that get written and buildings that get built. It is for this reason that I consider the actual movements of actual people last — not to imply causation, but because the impact of this restructuring on individuals, families and communities lies at the heart of the matter from a normative perspective. A great deal has been written over the past few years about the increasing diversity of suburbs, the changing geographies of race and class in the American metropolis and the growing poverty in both inner-ring suburbs and on the urban fringe (see, for example, Lucy and Phillips, 2001; Murphy, 2007; Short et al., 2007; Vicino, 2008). This attention should come as no surprise, as it alters one of the fundamental dialectics most living Americans grew up with — that of the decaying inner city and the wealthier suburbs. We have also become aware in the context of this crisis of just how strongly these geographies of race and segregation correlate with racialized lending practices and the geography of the foreclosure crisis (Carr, 2007; Crump et al., 2008; Hernandez, 2009; Wyly et al., 2009). What is most striking about the foreclosure crisis in the Bay Area is how strongly the geographies of foreclosure coincide with the exurbanization of communities of color. A 2007 study in Contra Costa county showed that high foreclosure tracts had over 20% more African American and Latino residents than low-rate tracts (Perkins,

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2008). The reasons why communities from the inner core moved outwards are numerous and often anecdotal. They include pull factors such as homeownership, better schools, safer streets, family ties and smaller communities, as well as push factors such as high crime rates, bad schools, rising rents and changing cultural dynamics.17 What is critical here is that they did move, and the communities to which they moved are now struggling. Just as critically, race, class and age influenced whether you moved and where you moved, and it is this multiplicity of interrelated movements and inertias that has produced a new geography of inequality — a critical ingredient of the crisis itself. Out of the frying pan and into the fire The convergence of new racial geographies and the geography of crisis can be seen at multiple scales, even using the blunt tool of county-level analysis (see Figure 9.2 for orientation). As can be seen from Figure 9.5, African Americans have been leaving San Francisco in significant numbers over the course of the neoliberal era, the city losing almost half its population in arguably the greatest out-migration of blacks from a major US city in the last 40 years (Ginwright and Akom, 2007). The spaces in which these communities have grown, including cities such as Tracy, Lathrop, Manteca and Stockton in San Joaquin county, have been hammered by the foreclosure crisis (see Figure 9.6).18 This experience is shared by many Filipinos. Like African Americans, they too followed a path to the outer edges of the Bay Area and the possibilities of seemingly affordable homeownership ‘through the reality of debt’ (Stone, 2009), a path rooted in notions of citizenship and the American Dream linked to homeownership (Pido, 2009). This experience, which saw populations decline in San Francisco while almost doubling in the high-foreclosure counties of San Joaquin, Contra Costa and Solano (see Figure 9.8b), is reflected in this quote from a prominent local Filipino commentator:

Figure 9.5  African Americans in San Francisco and San Joaquin counties, 1970–2008 Source: California Department of Finance, 2008

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Figure 9.6 Foreclosures per 100,000 population by county, 2002–08 Sources: California Department of Finance, 2008; California Association of Realtors, 2010; DataQuick News, 2010 What do the cities of Vallejo, Daly City, Stockton and Las Vegas have in common? Aside from each being home to a Jollibee Filipino fast-food restaurant, all have large Filipino populations and the highest foreclosure rates in the United States. The dirtiest word in the Filipino community now, the new ‘F’ word, is foreclosure. While it affects all races and all communities throughout the United States, it is disproportionately crushing Filipino homeowners (Rodis, 2008).

A similar story can be heard at the city level, especially in a highly segregated county such as Contra Costa. Here we should consider the uneven rates of racial change between the wealthy second-ring suburbs of Walnut Creek and San Ramon compared to the exurban communities of Antioch, Pittsburg and Brentwood (see Table 9.3). Walnut Creek in particular remained overwhelmingly white, even as the city of Antioch, further east over yet another set of hills, went from being three-quarters white to having a non-white majority. Again, this differential became particularly troubling when the crisis hit these cities unequally. Pittsburg had a foreclosure rate almost ten times that of Walnut Creek.

Table 9.3 Racial change in Contra Costa county cities, 1990–2010 (%) % Non-Hispanic White

% Non-Hispanic Black

% Non-Hispanic Asian

City

1990 2010

Δ

1990 2010

Δ

Antioch Brentwood Pittsburg San Ramon Walnut Creek

75.9 64.7 47.4 83.3 87.8

−40.3 −10.4 −27.4 −34.8 −14.3

2.7 16.7 0.8 6.2 17.2 17 1.8 2.7 0.8 1.6

14 4.5 10.1 5.4 1.5 7.6 −0.2 11.5 15.3 0.9 9 35.4 0.8 6.6 12.4

35.6 54.3 20 48.5 73.5

Source: United States Census (1990–2010; 2010a)

1990 2010

Δ

% Hispanic 1990 2010

5.6 16.1 31.7 6.1 31.3 26.8 3.8 23.3 42.4 26.4 5.5 8.7 5.8 4.6 8.6

Δ 15.6 −4.5 19.1 3.2 4

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Inward and upward This outward movement of communities of color and the generally static second-ring suburbs were matched by a slow and steady — if uneven and incomplete — gentrification of core cities such as San Francisco. San Francisco over the past generation went from having a poverty rate twice that of Antioch in 1970 (14% compared to 7%), to one that is now roughly equal. The opposing trajectories are striking (see Figure 9.7). This story is visible at the county scale too: the number of children enrolled in free or reducedprice meal programs, a widely used measure of poverty, more than doubled in Stanislaus, San Joaquin and Contra Costa counties between 1988 and 2007, and in 2007 the number of enrolled children was higher than at any point in this 20-year timeframe. San Francisco, meanwhile, saw numbers 25% higher in 2007 than in 1988, but down 25% from their peak in 1995. A look at income shows the other side of the coin. While household incomes between the two cities are not dramatically different, Antioch’s larger households mask the impact of household earnings. If you look at the ratio of income between San Francisco and Antioch at the per-capita level, you will see that San Franciscans on average earn 1.71 times the average Antioch resident, up from 1.28 in 1970. This is unsurprising if you consider that San Francisco is now home to almost twice as many college graduates per capita than Antioch. Finally, there is the question of generations. Gentrification debates over the years have raged about the relationship between race and class in this now global phenomenon (Smith, 2002; Atkinson and Bridge, 2005), and San Francisco’s transformation has been well documented (Castells, 1983; Godfrey, 1988; Massey and Fong, 1990; Chapple and Strategic Economics, 1999; Hartman, 2002; Solnit, 2002).19 But what makes San Francisco’s class transformation so visible is the link between race and age — it is about young white people. In 1990, San Francisco had approximately 50% more white youth aged 10–19 than black youth. If you imagine a sealed city, where nobody migrated or died, the number of white and black residents in the age group 30–39 two decades later would remain the

Figure 9.7  Poverty rates in San Francisco and Antioch, 1970–2010 Sources: American Community Survey, 2010; United States Census 1970–2000; 2010b

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same, and the lines in Figures 9.8a and 9.8b would be flat.20 Instead, San Francisco now has more than twelve times (96,893 compared to 7,746) the number of whites than blacks aged 30–39. This gentrification generation is what leads to depictions of a white hipster San Francisco in Barry Jenkins’ film Medicine for Melancholy, a haunting film that gives voice to the growing importance of the cultural and generational factors that Ginwright and Akom (2007) find in their study of black out-migration in San Francisco. These demographic descriptions are very blunt and don’t begin to do justice to the complexities of movements and migrations at the city-region scale. But they do show very clearly that communities of color grew significantly in the exurban fringe during the neoliberal era, providing a significant chunk of the exurban demographic push which, when combined with the aforementioned changes in policy and capital, helped set the stage for Wall Street’s now infamous binge, and helped land places like Antioch and Lathrop in the pages of The New York Times. Moreover, these numbers demonstrate what Mary PattilloMcCoy (2002) calls the ‘limits of out-migration’ — the continuing racialized division between a white middle class, which manages to insulate itself from poverty and crisis, and communities of color, which cannot.

Making peace with exurbia ‘Communities like Antioch should get plaudits for what it has done over the past twenty years. Instead we are portrayed as tools of greedy developers. We have done our best to make a quality community with demographics that would challenge the UN, while places like Orinda [a wealthy, heavily restrictive suburb just over the hills from Berkeley] argue about what color the movie theatre should be.’ (long-time planner, East County, interview June 2010).

‘I don’t envy you. In order to talk about Antioch you have to talk about uncomfortable things.’ (long-time resident, East County, conversation March 2009)

There can be no doubt that predatory debt is at the root of this crisis, providing a widely consumed mega-asset for Wall Street to repackage and resell, aided and abetted by deregulatory fervor and a rigged bond-rating system. But we must remember that the market for bad loans was created by a policy and capital regime that failed to solve the long-running problems that defined the urban crisis of a generation ago: poverty, crime and inadequate education in poor inner-city communities; exclusion and independence in wealthy suburbs; affordability in a gentrifying core. This meant that many people, in particular in communities of color, either moved out to the fringes or remained in older neighborhoods, thus entering their second generation of abandonment, while wealthier places either encased themselves in legal aspic or rewrote their zoning codes to become fiscal and economic powerhouses through retail and office development while restricting housing as much as possible. These urban roots of the crisis run very deep and must be seen in the context of a regional-level restructuring, not solely in terms of the exurban spaces in which they manifest themselves.

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The restructuring-generated crisis has placed an entire generation of both families and cities in a very precarious place, whether or not they gorged on bad debt or unsafe urbanization, as they are now caught in a maelstrom that has resulted in a shift of wealth inwards, and hence upwards. With a handful of exceptions, places such as Antioch on the fringes of the region are now worth less in adjusted dollars than they were two decades ago (see Table 9.4). It is no wonder that tensions in these exurban realms run high, as both newcomers and old-timers have seen their towns grow by as much as 1,000% in size but lose more than 50% in value. These residents cannot look to a rapid transit system or in some cases even a proper freeway system to strengthen their connection to an incredibly wealthy metropolis, or to a state or federal government committed to building the basic infrastructure required for regions to thrive. No wonder they are now getting caught up in a discourse of decline, in talk of ‘slumburbia’ and the ‘next slum’ that is all too reminiscent of an earlier era of crisis (Beauregard, 1993).

Figure 9.8a and 9.8b  Generation X blacks and whites in the Bay Area Source: United States Census 1990–2010; 2010a

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As stark as the problems on the fringes may now appear, the true tragedy would be if only this debilitating urban lexicon of the Keynesian era made it through to the present day. The exurbs did not cause these problems on their own, and barring assistance they may go down the path of decay and abandonment predicted by the punditry. Rather, Americans must take two critical steps in their view of planning and geography, both of which have been made difficult and uncomfortable by past failures and ossified political lines. We need a new form of modernist planning, one capable of realizing the ‘integrated ideal’ to which Graham and Marvin (2001) wisely point as a core way in which we once conceived of infrastructure and urbanization, a paramodernism for the twenty-first century. And we must plan and think and work in all of the places of this absurd metropolis we have wrought, not only in the gentrifying ‘endopolis’, the city within (Schafran, 2009) that we on the left love to obsess over, even if it means growing in places where we previously opposed growth so that we can grow in new ways and right the wrongs of an unjust and segregated region. This geographic switch means confronting our longstanding conceptions of one of the contemporary era’s biggest urban bogeymen — sprawl — and the places such as East County that define it spatially in our imaginations. Sprawl is the United States’ version of Roy and AlSayyad’s conception of informality — not something that happens as a result of the failure of state intervention but rather a disorganized and dysfunctional system produced by the state as a fundamental means of the production of space and the creation of a new urban economy (Roy and AlSayyad, 2004). And much like the informal settlements of the cities of the global South, the sprawling suburbs are now social, geographic, architectural and human realities indelibly marked on our urban fabric, and we must plan with them and in them and not despite them. This doesn’t mean some sort of libertarian anti-planning screed or an environmentally blind critique à la Bruegmann (2005) — precisely the opposite. The only just way forward is to accept exurbia as a real place, as incomplete rather than inadequate, as a set of communities and spaces produced by the interaction of eras and scales detailed above, communities that must become better connected physically, politically and economically to the region and its cores, even if this growth should never have been allowed to happen in the first place. This will mean that especially on the left we must research and write about suburbia and exurbia in a way that recognizes these massive and far-flung communities as the primary home for most Americans, including most poor Americans, and as a place that is not going anywhere.21 We must get to know them in the way we know gentrifying neighborhoods and redeveloped waterfronts and the corporatized centers, and

Table 9.4  Change in median sales price in three zip-code areas, 1988–2009 (US$) City/Zip

Jan 1988*

Jan 2009

Gain/Loss

Antioch 94509 Danville 94506 San Francisco 94110

$198,721 $680,306 $317,774

$124,000 $790,000 $550,500

−60.3%  13.9%  42.3%

* Figures adjusted to 2009 US$; calculations by author Source: DataQuick (2010)

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most importantly, build better narratives that help us understand how they are related to urban restructuring more broadly.22 Yet knowing exurbia and making peace with its reality is not enough — if this crisis demands anything, it is a broad rethinking and reinvigorating of planning. A paramodern planning means coming to a logical détente as to a functional role for each level of urban governance, and making peace with the sins of the postwar era, the Tammany Hall era and every other historical nightmare of urban governance. The local/federal debates in the US must end, for history has shown clearly that they both failed, regardless of who was in charge. The federal and state governments must fund large-scale infrastructure, and we must believe in the possibility that we can produce a politics capable of making that infrastructure less racist, less invasive and more environmentally sustainable. Local governments must be empowered to have a voice in what gets built where, but they need to be encouraged to make good decisions by a sane fiscal infrastructure determined at higher levels, one which enables them to actually deregulate the micro scale (the street, public space, bulk and use and zoning in general) to promote inclusion while simultaneously refocusing on critical service provision (public safety, education, sewerage and water), which will always have a strong local or subregional flavor in America. Critical legal scholars have been arguing for a generation that we are misreading both the possibilities and realities of political scale, and it is only through exorcizing these historical demons and the ridiculous scalar ideologies that are our collective scar tissue that we can build a new governance structure capable of producing a more just metropolis in the twenty-first century.23 Paramodern planning also means infiltrating, co-opting and embracing the growth machine to ensure that what must get built in this post-urban revolution world in which the urban is the fundamental means of production — including a full BART extension to Brentwood and a true high-speed rail system connecting California’s urban centers — gets built where and how and for whom it should be built, not simply because it is the simplest way to extract capital from cheap land or fix capital during times of excess accumulation. A paramodern growth machine is one capable of embracing both the DIY urbanism of micro-enterprise and micro-agriculture and strong ethic of urban thrift while simultaneously being unafraid to build the transportation and fiscal infrastructure to provide for the middle-class dreams of the most diverse generation of citizens in history. This is the practical corollary to Wyly’s (2011) ‘radical positivism’, and the only true way to push forward from the fiscal and infrastructural crisis that is threatening to bring the entire system to a halt (Kirkpatrick and Smith, 2011). There are now more than a quarter of a million people in East County, and close to a million more in neighboring areas on the fringe of the Bay Area. These areas grew as bedroom communities, in imitation of their postwar inner-ring counterparts, but during an era when that model was no longer supported — now municipal governance is about shopping malls and office parks and other rateables, about paying your own way and being entrepreneurial. East County even has to pay for its own freeway, which is half built in one part and half rebuilt in another. It is no wonder that the suburban dream seems to be evaporating for so many, including the numerous immigrants and African Americans for whom the recent out-migration is the first true bite at the suburban apple. These communities are a part of us now, even if some regional pundits talk of ‘repatriating’ people from the exurbs back into the central cities much as their counterparts in the south fantasize about sending people back to the village. Moving out of this crisis will

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mean abandoning the nostalgic fantasy of a centralized urban region that never was and embracing the multi-centered, interconnected and complex megaregion that is northern California, a West-Coast Randstad with immense need and potential for true connectivity and a more just if dispersed geography of opportunity. Alex Schafran ([email protected]), Department of City and Regional Planning, University of California at Berkeley, 456 40th Street #17, Oakland, CA 94609, USA.

Acknowledgement The author would like to thank Deborah Lustig, David Minkus, Christine Trost and the ISSC 2009–2011 fellows for their detailed comments on and unfailing support with earlier drafts of this article. Teresa Caldeira, Ananya Roy, Richard Walker and Malo Hutson provided critical intellectual and methodological guidance from the beginning. Thanks are also due to conference attendees at ACSP and UAA who provided insightful and helpful comments at key moments. All errors remain my own.

Notes    1  Throughout this article, I deploy a simplistic yet useful dualism to describe the two major periods of urban development in the United States after the Great Depression. The Keynesian or Fordist era ran from the New Deal of the 1930s through the mid-1970s, when a massive ideological, economic and political restructuring ushered in what can be called the neoliberal era, following the growing influence of a set of policies emphasizing, amongst other things, free-market economics and federal devolution and retrenchment. I do this with full knowledge of what Peck and Tickell (2002) show to be the difficulties in separating out the policies and politics of neoliberalism and the historical context that it has come to dominate. It also remains an open question as to whether the neoliberal era is now over.     2  There is a large literature on urban restructuring, summarized by Soja (2000). An excellent working definition of the concept is provided by Soureli and Youn (2009: 36) in their interview with leading urban theorists in the discussion of the crisis: ‘The multifaceted processes driving the major transformations of city-regions (with particular emphasis on the past thirty years); constantly at work, with highly variable dynamics, affecting spaces unevenly and people unequally; with varying but quite open possibilities for changing its predominant directions; and conditioned upon struggles every day around the world’.    3  The argument here is not that there is no human agency to the production of the storm through global warming; it is simply that the production of the storm and the production of unequal impacts of the storm were not as directly linked as in the case of foreclosure. With foreclosure, the storm itself was produced by inequality, and particularly by both changing and unchanging geographies of inequality.    4  A note on method: This article is derived from a manuscript-length project, which uses an exploratory and inductive mode of research that borrows theory and method liberally from numerous sources endogenous and exogenous to social science, including history and journalism. The formal research was conducted in two dozen cities and towns in five counties across a broad swath of northern California from 2007 to 2010, and included key informant interviews with 70 long-time policymakers, planning officials, developers, academics and participant and non-participant observation in social and political settings, as well as innumerable informal conversations and interviews with local residents. While a few quotes from sources are presented for transparency’s sake, my interview process is more journalistic than ethnographic, and I do not engage in textual analysis of transcripts. The fundamental goal of this research is ­hermeneutic — a geographic and historical interpretation of multi-scalar urban transformation — and makes its case based on accumulated evidence acquired over years of research, a decade as an organizer and participant in urban politics and three decades of living in the San Francisco Bay Area, not on one particular set of interviews, statistical analyses or participant observations.    5  Hispanics were less segregated, although there was a significant community in East San Jose and in San Francisco’s Mission District.

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  6  Even though the earlier streetcar suburbs are often overshadowed by their more (in)famous descendents in the postwar era such as Levittown and Lakewood, they represented the more foundational moment for American urbanism, helping to produce modern zoning, subdivision law, the profession of city planning, an organized real-estate industry and most of the political power structures of American cities, including planning and zoning commissions (Weiss, 1987).   7  Actually, many point to Modesto as the site of the invention of zoning in the first place. San Francisco attempted to ban laundries first as a nuisance and fire hazard, but this effort was struck down by federal courts. Modesto ‘succeeded’ by splitting the city into two zones, thereby skirting both the 14th Amendment and the state constitution (Warner, 1972).   8  In addition to forcing global urbanism to consider Californian cities as key to understanding contemporary urbanism, Soja (2000) and the LA School theorists are also critical of the meso-level scale (the amorphous city-region) used in this analysis, a scale that is too often ignored by scholars trapped in a local/global framework. Gentrification scholars are particularly susceptible to this narrow framing.    9  Residential real-estate development is famous for family-run companies, even at the largest level. Only a handful of the largest developers are publicly traded companies. 10  This figure is based on the calculation of US $30 billion in national venture capital from the New Economy report. Other sources give the numbers as high as 40% of the US total — $14.6 billion of $36.5 nationally, a difference by a factor of almost ten.  11  A new commuter rail system, the Altamont Commuter Express — the Bay Area’s third separate system — became operational in 1998. Although it has been shown to reduce traffic (Terplan et al., 2009), both its geographical reach and ridership are very small compared to BART.  12  If you are a long-time resident of Antioch, you have been paying taxes on BART for 40 years and will be lucky if the service reaches you by the end of the decade. 13  Unlike states such as New York, where counties are weak and there is little to no unincorporated land, or Maryland, where there are few incorporated cities, California has a vibrant and shifting terrain of incorporated and unincorporated space, with each county making decisions about the extent of urbanization allowed in unincorporated territory.  14  This is not to say that old-fashioned exclusion is not still in play. The recent landmark decision in Urban Habitat v. Pleasanton struck down the City of Pleasanton’s cap on all residential development as being in violation of state affordable-housing policy.  15  Bay Vision 2020 is very much a top-down, elite-driven effort, not nearly as diverse as some of its founders thought it was. Its largely token representatives from communities of color helped spur the founding of what is now a prominent regional environmental-justice organization. This oversight is not uncommon in efforts for regional government/ governance and is viewed as contributing to the general failure of regional governance in the United States (Rast, 2006).  16  This quotation is from a participant in an ongoing study on youth violence and neighborhood change in one neighborhood in Oakland, California.  17  Ginwright and Akom (2007) point to reasons beyond economics for the migration, including cultural and generational factors. This is not meant to discount the importance of understanding why people move — the reasons are simply too complex to consider adequately in this article.  18  Migration patterns are notoriously difficult to track, and this should not be taken as a statement that African Americans have gone from one place to another, even if anecdotal evidence, existing research and ongoing investigations make a case for a link. The point here is that it doesn’t matter — African American communities are shrinking in places where property values are stable or increasing, and increasing in precisely those places that have been impacted by foreclosure. This finding alone is cause for concern.  19  See Lees et al. (2007) for an excellent examination of the vast gentrification literature.  20  This analysis uses annual United States census estimates.  21  The attempts at quantifying Americans by city and suburb are as inexact as the global obsession with urbanization figures, as they require a consensus on the definition of urban and suburban, which is not forthcoming. I would argue that urban form and access to services and transportation are better means of understanding (sub)urbanness, but for now we must rely on political definitions. As such, Brookings recently documented the watershed moment at which more poor people lived in the suburbs than in the city (Kneebone and Garr, 2010). 22  In America, this acknowledgement is far more important than any glocal angle, with a handful of famous exceptions. I recognize that this additional focus will be challenging, in part because much of the concern over gentrification comes not solely from the injustice produced but from the fact that many urban researchers are gentrifiers, and this is a process in which we are taking part and about which we therefore have deeply conflicting feelings.

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 23  See the work of Gerald Frug (1980; 1996; 1998; 2001), David Barron (2003), Richard Briffault (1990a; 1990b; 2000) and Richard Thompson Ford (1997) in particular for impressively nuanced and erudite considerations of the actual legal status of cities in the American context.

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Owens, B. (1973) Suburbia. Fotofolio, New York, NY. Pattillo-McCoy, M. (2002) The limits of out-migration for the black middle class. Journal of Urban Affairs 22.3, 225–41. Peck, J. and A. Tickell (2002) Neoliberalizing space. Antipode 34.3, 380–404. Perkins, K. (2008) The geography of foreclosure in Contra Costa county, California. Master’s thesis, Department of City and Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley, CA. Pido, E.J. (2009) The performance of property: suburban homeownership as a claim to citizenship for Filipinos in Daly City. ISSC Working Paper Series 2007–08.35, Institute for the Study of Social Change, University of California, Berkeley, CA. Rast, J. (2006) Environmental justice and the new regionalism. Journal of Planning Education and Research 25.3, 249. RealtyTrac.com (2007) US foreclosure market report, 3rd quarter 2007 [WWW document]. URL http://www.realtytrac.com (accessed 23 January 2010). Reich, R.B. (2008) Supercapitalism. Random House, New York, NY. Rodis, R. (2008) The ‘F’ Word, AsianWeek [WWW document]. URL http://www.asianweek.com/2008/11/18/the-fword/ (accessed 18 November 2008). Roy, A. and N. AlSayyad (2004) Urban informality: transnational perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. Lexington Books, Lanham, MD. Saxenian, A.L. (1994) Regional advantage: culture and competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Schafran, A. (2009) Outside endopolis: notes from Contra Costa county. Critical Planning 16, 10–33. Self, R.O. (2003) American Babylon: race and the struggle for postwar Oakland. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. Self, R.O. (2006) Prelude to the tax revolt. In K.M. Kruse and T. Sugrue (eds.), The new suburban history, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Semuels, A. (2010) From bucolic bliss to ‘gated ghetto’. Los Angeles Times [WWW document]. URL http://articles.latimes. com/2010/mar/30/business/la-fi-hemet30-2010mar30 (accessed 1 April 2010). Short, J.R., B. Hanlon and T.J. Vicino (2007) The decline of inner suburbs: the new suburban gothic in the United States. Geography Compass 1.3, 641–56. Smith, N. (2002) New globalism, new urbanism: gentrification as global urban strategy. Antipode 34.3, 427–50. Soja, E.W. (2000) Postmetropolis: critical studies of cities and regions. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. Solnit, R. (2002) Hollow city: the siege of San Francisco and the crisis of American urbanism. Verso, London. Soureli, K. and E. Youn (2009) Urban restructuring and the crisis: a symposium with Neil Brenner, John Friedmann, Margit Mayer, Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja. Critical Planning 16, 35–59. Sugrue, T. (1996) The origins of the urban crisis: race and inequality in postwar Detroit. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Stone, M. (2009) Housing and the financial crisis: what happened and what to do about it. Human Geography 2.1. Terplan, E., S. Jun, L. Miller and B. Yilmaz (2009) Job sprawl in the megaregion. Policy Paper Library, San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), San Francisco, CA. The Economist (2010) Hope at last [WWW document]. URL http://www. economist.com/node/15816636?story_ id=E1_ TVRTGGPG (accessed 1 April 2010). United States Census (2010a) Census of population and housing, 1990 and 2010: population by race and Hispanic status [WWW document]. URL www.bayareacensus.org (accessed 3 July 2011). United States Census (2010b) Census of population and housing, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000: households below the federal poverty line [WWW document]. URL www.bayareacensus.org (accessed 3 July 2011). United States Census (2010c) Shapefile of census-designated places (2010). United States Census (2010d) Census transportation planning package (CTPP 2000). Vicino, T.J. (2008) Transforming race and class in suburbia: decline in metropolitan Baltimore. First edition, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY. Walker, R.A. (1981) A theory of suburbanization: capitalism and the construction of urban space in the United States. In M.J. Dear and A.J. Scott (eds.), Urbanization and urban planning in capitalist society, Methuen, New York, NY. Walker, R.A. (2004) Industry builds out the city: the suburbanization of manufacturing in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850–1940. In R.D. Lewis (ed.), Manufacturing suburbs: building work and home on the metropolitan fringe, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA. Warner, S.B. (1972) The urban wilderness: a history of the American city. HarperCollins, New York. Weiss, M.A. (1987) The rise of the community builders. Columbia University Press, New York, NY. Wyly, E. (2011) Positively radical. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.5, 889–912. Wyly, E., M. Moos, E. Kabahizi and D. Hammel (2009) Cartographies of race and class: mapping the class-monopoly rents of American subprime mortgage capital. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33.2, 332–54.

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Résumé Les communautés vivant à la périphérie des métropoles américaines ont récemment suscité l’attention comme pôles de la crise des saisies hypothécaires et de ses conséquences. Cet intérêt pour la nature urbaine de la crise est opportun, car la métamorphose du fiasco immobilier en crise financière alliée à un effondrement de l’économie mondiale a détourné l’attention des racines urbaines de ce désastre. Cependant, pointer ainsi les périphéries comme sites de la crise cautionne l’idée fausse selon laquelle elles seules en sont la source, et non la restructuration urbaine dans son ensemble. Cette analyse opère à plusieurs échelons afin d’examiner comment trois facteurs entrelacés (démographie, politique et capital) ont chacun réagi au paysage de Bay Area hérité de la fin des années 1970, dans la région métropolitaine de San Francisco. Celle-ci a été affectée de façons nouvelles, laissant certains lieux florissants et d’autres aux prises avec les saisies hypothécaires, la situation conduisant à l’effondrement de l’immobilier et à une incertitude profonde de la métropole américaine actuelle. On peut envisager cette restructuration comme la convergence de la crise urbaine non résolue de l’après-guerre avec les diverses réponses données à l’époque néolibérale. Cela implique de réimaginer à la fois l’urbanisme et la géographie, en particulier de la part de la Gauche.

10 Urban Economies and Social Inequalities F r a n To n k i s s

Introduction: urbanising inequality Inequality has become a matter of renewed focus and concern in recent years, spurred by the evident widening of inequalities in both high- and low-income economies. A number of leading economists have led the debate and analysis in this area, focusing on long-run and more recent patterns of inequality, their systemic causes and forms of reproduction, and potential policy responses (see, most notably, Piketty, 2014; 2015; Stiglitz, 2012; 2015). In such a context, what might a sociological – and, specifically, an urban sociological – perspective bring to the contemporary study of inequalities? The discussion that follows takes up a social, relational and spatial approach to inequality, exploring dynamics of urban disparity in respect of both enduring and emergent factors, economic and ‘non-economic’ inequities. There is a powerful association in current rhetoric of a majority urban world with ideas of economic growth, development and dynamism, linking the increasing wealth of nations with the expansion of cities, particularly in China and India (Peirce et al., 2008). Across cities of the global north and south, however, worsening inequality is a feature of contemporary urbanisation. Viewed from an economic perspective, inequality can be seen less as an urban pathology than as a by-product of urban productivity – sorting people economically and spatially is after all one of the things cities ‘do’, and the most dynamic cities may do it in especially ruthless ways (see Behrens and Robert-Nicoud, 2014a; 2014b; Florida, 2015). Cities are where much of the business of economic growth is taking place (Glaeser, 2011); at the same time, cities are concentrating widening wealth gaps and sharpening spatial divisions. Deep disparities have long co-existed with cities’ economic and cultural dynamism, of course, and unequal cities remain powerful magnets for movements of people seeking economic and other kinds of opportunities. Taking a

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sociological approach to urban inequalities means going beyond a functional understanding of how the wealth of nations is tied to the inequality of cities, to consider some of the persistent force of disparities which are not primarily economic in character but which shape urban spaces, livelihoods and social lives in highly consequential ways. My concern here is to highlight how social inequalities structured around gender, race or ethnicity, and unequal legal and citizenship rights, remain basic to issues of distribution, occupation and recognition in contemporary urban settings. Current patterns of economic inequality also bring into focus certain emergent (or re-emergent) features: in particular, the stratification of urban economies around key sectors and skills, and the concentration of wealth at the top of urban income scales. The challenge is to think about the ways in which these economic outcomes take shape and make space beyond the curve of an income distribution; to consider how the urban economics of inequality intersect with social geographies of disparity and distanciation in the city.

The urban sociology of inequality An urban sociology of inequality has a critical contribution to make to theory and analysis in this field. Its primary insight, of course, is to place a focus on the social dimensions of inequality. This works in two ways. It highlights the shaping of economic divisions by and in the form of social relations, and it seeks to expand the concept of inequality beyond narrowly economic definitions. Some of the deepest and most persistent patterns of inequality, after all, do not derive from obviously economic factors. It is now some 20 years since the sociologist Charles Tilly (1999) wrote of the ‘durable inequalities’ that were generated around social distinctions which legitimise the unequal distribution of resources and opportunities between different groups across different contexts. While social stratifications around gender, race and ethnicity are often reproduced as economic disparities – and historically have been the basis for the most severe forms of economic exploitation, dispossession and exclusion – these are not principally categories of economic identity. Rather, they are social distinctions that make an economic difference, as gendered and racialised social relations are constituted and experienced in large part as unequal economic relations. Neither is there anything especially urban about such kinds of inequality, yet racial, gender and other social inequities are urbanised in more or less formal, and more or less legible, ways in specific spatial settings. Understanding inequality in sociological terms, moreover, goes beyond the distribution of income, assets and wealth to take in non-income inequalities: consumption and welfare disparities; uneven shares of insecurity and vulnerability; skewed distributions of risk and harm; inequities of opportunity, access and expectation; inequalities of treatment and regard. In his more recent work, Göran Therborn (2013) has conceptualised these multiple forms of inequality along three broad dimensions. The first is vital inequality – inequalities, as it were, of life itself: differential health outcomes, mortality rates and life expectancies, distributions of hunger and malnutrition, exposure to environmental and other types of somatic risk. Therborn’s second dimension is that of resource inequality: describing inequities in access to and command over economic and noneconomic resources, goods or capitals. Existential inequality, third, refers to disparities of dignity, autonomy, freedom, opportunity and self-determination – what Therborn calls

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the ‘unequal allocation of personhood’. These modes of inequality intersect in complex (and sometimes in very simple) ways, but the work of definition underlines how inequality is produced and expressed in material and non-material forms, is borne on the body and is carried in the person. Sociological approaches such as these treat inequality as a relational problem. They understand inequality not only in terms of measurable disparities between various segments of society (income gaps or differences in health or mortality outcomes, for instance), but in terms of more dynamic social relations between individuals and groups: from the everyday currency of social interactions to the circulation of social attitudes, ascriptions and norms; from hierarchies of relative social position to starker relations of exploitation and disempowerment. One standard political and policy response to issues of inequality over recent decades has been to suggest that these relativities are less important than absolute conditions: improving the situation of the poorest in any given social context is distinct from and should take priority over reducing differentials between the worst and best-off groups. Poverty, that is, is the chief problem; inequality is a secondary concern, if it is a concern at all. A focus on poverty has particular salience in urban settings, given that many high as well as low-income cities concentrate significant poor populations. While anti-poverty arguments may clearly have greater urgency, however, the either/or logic of this position is deceptive: poverty is itself a relative concept, and a relational approach more generally is alert to the social, economic and human costs of widening degrees of inequality. These can be harder to measure and harder to redress than income gaps. Alongside quantifiable indices of poverty or disparity there is a need to engage with a more complex understanding of social relations and social outcomes under conditions of inequality. Such a stance assumes that inequality has consequences for the organisation of social life and the patterning of social interactions that cannot simply be captured by numerical measures. A specifically urban sociology, finally, understands this relational quality in spatial as well as social terms. It places emphasis on contexts as well as conditions of inequality. Inequality happens somewhere – in social and spatial settings which extend beyond the twodimensional representations of income shares or Gini coefficients. Unequal incomes and opportunities are, precisely, distributed across material and social space, as well as across graphs and tabulations. To take an urban sociological approach to inequality is necessarily to take a ‘multi-dimensional’ approach, projecting patterns of inequality in three and four dimensions across space and over time. Economic analysis of inequality conventionally works within the frame of the nation state – this makes sense for measurement, comparison and policy purposes, but misses some of the core spatial dynamics through which economic and other inequalities are shaped. In conditions of accelerating urbanisation – and as many old and new cities grow more unequal – it is instructive to consider the ways in which urban environments produce and reproduce patterns of inequality. This means seeing urban economies as relational systems of action and interaction, and as spatial systems which distribute these interactions across uneven geographies of affluence and deprivation. It is quite a different thing to say that accelerated wealth at the top of the income spectrum is unproblematic so long as those at the bottom are not worse off, and to engage with the ways these polarities are lived in terms of spatial proximities and segregations: to understand that one person’s economic and social inclusion is premised on someone else’s exclusion from similar kinds of access; that achievement is defined in large part through the distance this establishes from others; or that social standing only

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makes sense in relation to others who stand in a lesser position (Therborn, 2013; see also Savage, 2011). Inequalities are produced and expressed through social and spatial modes of distanciation, separation and exclusion, from broad lines of urban segregation to legal and cultural demarcations around gender or race, and in the smaller logics of spatial ranking which see some go to the head of the queue while others go to the back of the bus. Cities concentrate spatial dynamics of inequality as large-scale patterns of urban order, through micro-geographies of segregation and separation, and in everyday manoeuvres of social exchange and aversion.

Enduring inequalities: gender, race and citizenship in the city While any discussion of contemporary urban inequalities requires us to think about the emerging vectors of disparity that are shaping urban contexts, it is equally important to stress the ways that more enduring patterns of inequality structure the social and economic lives of cities. The types of ‘durable inequality’ that Tilly (1999) outlined two decades ago remain critical for our understanding of urban inequalities, and are key to the ways social divisions play out in contemporary cities. His relational approach saw inequality as unfolding from interactions between people which produce advantages for some and relative disadvantage for others. Tilly’s work was critical of ‘competitive explanations of inequality’ (Tilly, 2001: 360) in which unequal outcomes result from variable individual capacities; such a model underpins economic orthodoxies that see labour markets as sorting individuals on the basis of skill, experience and aptitude, but might also be seen to inform broader social science perspectives on human capital as well as a larger politics of meritocracy. For Tilly, persistent and pervasive patterns of inequality, historically and crossculturally, cannot be understood in an individualised frame. Moreover, the conventional representation of inequality as a matter of gradation, in which individuals or groups are distributed across an income spectrum or over a series of social grades, belies the way that the most tenacious inequalities work: not by degrees but on the basis of more summary divisions. Durable inequalities, that is, are embedded in categorical distinctions which themselves may vary across time and space but have common effects in shaping relations of exploitation and enabling certain groups to monopolise social and economic opportunities. These unequal pairings structure social space, shape dynamics of interaction, and segment access to and control over material resources. ‘From a relational perspective’, as Tilly puts it (2001: 362–363), ‘inequality appears everywhere, but it rarely crystallizes into neat, continuous hierarchies somehow arraying whole populations into strata’. Where anyone ends up on an income curve or a social ladder has more to do with the side of an arbitrary binary on which they fall, than with any individual capacities or qualities. While Tilly’s work considers various historical examples, demarcations along lines of gender, race and ethnicity, and nation or citizenship, endure as especially powerful markers of inequality (see also Brubaker, 2015), and these constructs inflect urban inequalities in significant ways. Cities are telling contexts for considering the persistence of durable inequalities such as these, given that urban environments are also seen to have critical potential for redressing gendered and racialised inequities, and for affording urban rights and freedoms which do not depend on legal modes of entitlement. Cities, it would seem,

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have the capacity both to reinforce and spatialise categorical inequalities, and to provide spaces of autonomy, opportunity and inclusion across entrenched categories of division. These social distinctions, moreover, become readable in space at a number of scales: from the colour lines which striate the residential maps of contemporary cities to the formation of ethnic enclaves or the marking of refugee spaces; from gender shifts in daytime to night-time populations to routine exclusions and appropriations in public space. Gender remains the most basic determinant of inequality globally, and women are consistently more likely to live in urban poverty and insecurity. Urban women, of course, represent a diverse group living in very different urban conditions, but large-scale and persistent disparities around employment, income, education and skill, land and other assets, domestic and caring responsibilities, spatial mobility, physical safety and civic enfranchisement mean that recognisable patterns of gendered inequality can be traced across heterogeneous urban contexts. Women’s exclusion from property rights, from labour markets and control over household incomes and assets reproduces gendered inequality in urban as in rural economies, and is especially marked in low-income urban settings (Chant and McIlwaine, 2016). It is less often remarked that recent urbanisation trends have involved not only the growth, but the increasing feminisation of urban populations. Male in-migration to developing cities has tended to skew urban sex ratios towards men; while this still holds for Asian (especially South Asian) cities, women’s share of urban populations is growing across the global south, with women forming the urban majority throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, and their share increasing in a number of Sub-Saharan African cities (Chant, 2013: 11; Tacoli, 2012: 9–14). This demographic shift, moreover, has also seen the growth of female populations in two groups which are particularly vulnerable to urban disadvantage: women are far more likely than men to head singleparent households; and are increasingly over-represented in older age groups (Chant and McIlwaine, 2013; Tacoli, 2012: 14–15). While women’s employment share in developing economies has expanded rapidly in recent decades (Brouder and Sweetman, 2015; Chant 2013), this has gone with a growing informalisation of work; and while the number of men employed in informal economies remains much greater, women’s rates of participation in informal employment tend to be higher, including significant numbers of women involved in home-based informal labour (Tacoli, 2012). Chen and Skinner (2014: 220) estimate that more than 80 per cent of women’s employment in South Asia is in informal sectors, and almost three-quarters of women’s employment in Sub-Saharan Africa is informal. In contexts where women face fewer barriers to economic inclusion, gendered patterns of inequality remain pronounced. The most ‘feminised’ groups in developed world cities are those most likely to live in poverty – heads of lone-parent households and older people living alone. Women in developed economies have lower rates of employment overall; are more likely than men to have part-time or casualised jobs and to interrupt or limit employment due to caring duties; work at lower wage levels; have fewer pension rights and other income protections; are over-represented in lone-parent households; and are more likely to live alone in old age. In US cities, female-headed households have the highest rates of poverty in urban settings where gender intersects with ethnic and racial disparities to embed patterns of disadvantage around non-white women and their children. In European contexts, the profile of smaller groups subject to the starkest extremes of vulnerability, insecurity and precarity is gendered in distinct ways: with women at greatest risk of domestic violence and sexual exploitation; and men overrepresented among populations of ex-prisoners and rough sleepers (see Tonkiss, 2010).

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While cities may offer enhanced opportunities for women’s autonomy and access – to employment and enterprise, education, public space and civic participation – across rich and poor-world economies, urban violence against women and girls limits their spatial mobility, their economic and educational opportunities, their social freedoms and personal dignity (ActionAid, 2011; McIlwaine, 2013) – gender-based violence, that is, intersects in brutal ways across the vital, resource and existential dimensions of inequality. Cities typically are seen as sites of social diversity, yet they continue to sort and separate people around lines of racial and cultural difference – whether such segregations are understood as ‘voluntary’ or exclusionary (see Marcuse, 1997). Histories of racial division, oppression and discrimination have severe impacts on cities today; race is still the key factor for explaining urban inequality in US cities, as it is in South African cities (Adelman, 2015; Florida and Mellander, 2016; Mele and Adelman, 2015; Pieterse, 2009; Sampson, 2014a; Seekings, 2011). The worst extremes of urban inequality globally are to be found in a post-apartheid city such as Johannesburg, where incomes, wealth, land and other assets are concentrated in ways that remain scarred by historical patterns of appropriation and exploitation, even as urban space undergoes processes of desegregation (Crankshaw, 2008: Crankshaw and Parnell, 2004). In the United States, histories of exclusion and discrimination cast a long shadow over cities such as New York, Chicago and Detroit which evince both steep levels of income inequality and what are classed as ‘extreme’ degrees of spatial segregation between black and white residential populations – in spite of longer term (if somewhat glacial) spatial trends towards racial desegregation in the United States (Frey, 2011; 2015; Tonkiss, 2013: 70–72; see also Ananat, 2011; Logan, 2013; Vigdor, 2013). The intersection of income inequalities with spatial divisions forms part of a more complicated ‘social matrix of diversity’, as Robert Sampson has put it, in which ‘durable patterns of inequality lead to the concentration in the same places and among the same people, often over long periods of time, of multiple social ills such as exposure to violence, poverty, arrest, and incarceration—especially in segregated African American communities’ (Sampson, 2014b: 300). It is particularly striking that intersecting patterns of economic inequality and spatial separation are most pronounced in northern US cities which did not experience the formal segregations of the Jim Crow laws in the south, pointing to the complex interplay of segmented property and labour markets, ‘voluntary’ segregations and discriminatory exclusions in reproducing spatial divisions in contemporary cities. Moreover, the legal enforcement of racialised exclusions and disadvantage in the city can be seen to persist by other means. By 2010 Milwaukee, for example, had the highest levels of black–white segregation in the urban United States, in a context where low-income black neighbourhoods are subject to coercive control strategies by both law enforcement agencies and non-police actors. Drawing on eviction data alongside ethnographic fieldwork in this city, Matthew Desmond has written powerfully of the ways in which, as ‘incarceration has become typical in the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction has become typical in the lives of women from these neighborhoods’, working to reproduce urban poverty, insecurity and exclusion along gendered as well as racial lines (Desmond, 2012: 91; 2016; Desmond and Valdez, 2012; see also Alexander, 2012; Wacquant, 2010). Local patterns of formal and third-party policing, in the shadow of an ongoing ‘incarceration binge’ (Sampson, 2014b: 299), confound geographies of economic disadvantage with those of racialised pathology, while gouging ‘a legitimacy gap between the poor and the rest of American society’ (Western, 2014: 303).

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In making this argument about the delegitimisation of the urban poor, Western is drawing on T. S. Marshall’s classic suggestion that ‘citizenship has itself become … the architect of legitimate social inequality’ (Marshall, 1950: 9; see Western, 2014: 303), as stratified categories of citizenship produce and underwrite inequality in profound ways. Citizenship rights shape patterns of urban inequality in skewing labour and housing markets, rationing access to education, health and other services, and restricting legal protections and civic entitlements (Bayart and Biekart, 2009). Some of these processes work through simple distinctions between citizen and non-citizen, but uneven rights and resources attach to various modes of differentiated or partial citizenship. Sharp disparities exist between citizens and migrant workers in the city-states of the Gulf, for instance, as immigration regimes give legal force to forms of bonded labour in construction, domestic and care work, while more privileged non-citizens enjoy enhanced returns but few rights as ‘expatriate’ employees (see Davis, 2006; Malecki and Ewers, 2007; Nagy, 2006; Sönmez et al., 2013; see also Mahdavi, 2010). In the grey spaces of rich and poorworld cities, undocumented migrants, asylum-seekers and internally displaced people are among the most vulnerable urban subjects, in conditions cross-cut by legal insecurity, economic precarity and spatial marginality (see Bloch and McKay, 2016; Crisp et al., 2012; Darling, 2016; Fábos and Kibreab, 2007; Jacobsen, 2006; Marfleet, 2007; cf. Yiftachel, 2009a). The household registration system in China excludes many of its large internal migrant populations from the welfare and housing rights of urban citizenship even as the country’s urban expansion depends on this labour source, implicating many millions of city-dwellers in marginal modes of ‘transient urbanism’ with limited housing and employment opportunities and restricted social entitlements (Wu et al., 2014; see also He et al., 2010; Park and Wang, 2010; Solinger, 2006; Webster et al., 2016; Wu, 2009). Substantive social and economic inequalities are reproduced in cities in the shadow of formal legal equality. What we might call ‘spoiled’ or incomplete citizenships demarcate precarious urban and peri-urban populations whose legal or social rights to settlement, property, employment, welfare and other services are compromised or insecure; from Roma populations in and around European cities (Bancroft, 2001; 2005; Berescu, 2011; Cames, 2013), to the ‘ghettoized citizenship’ of Arab populations in Israel/Palestine (Yiftachel, 2011: 129; see also Yiftachel, 2009a; 2009b), to the economic displacement or social ‘dumping’ of welfare claimants, minorities, immigrants and refugees at the urban margins (Cheshire and Zappia, 2016; Kibreab, 2007; Millington, 2012), or the denizens of informal urban settlements whose irregular tenure status stratifies other rights to services, infrastructure, recognition and physical protection – positioning them in a liminal zone in which they are routinely at risk of ‘becoming illegal’ (Datta, 2012: 67; see also Heller and Evans, 2010; Holston, 2009; McFarlane and Desai, 2015; Webster et al., 2016; Weinstein and Ren, 2009). Shelter discrimination is a primary axis of urban inequality, and one in which resource disparities have acute implications for vital capabilities and for existential inequities of autonomy, dignity and personhood. Material inequalities around housing in these ways spill over into wider inequalities of opportunity, access and security, queering people’s life-chances within and beyond their housing environments. Shelter deprivation and tenure insecurity are basic vectors of inequality in low-income cities. But housing insecurity is also a growing basis of urban inequality in rich-world cities, given overheated real estate markets, poorly regulated rentier economies, and a retreat from public interventions in housing supply and control. Homelessness, insecurity and sub-standard housing

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remain stubborn (and often worsening) problems in middle- and high-income cities (see Madden and Marcuse, 2016; see also Dorling, 2015). In the sphere of housing, the legal organisation of economic inequality is structured around ‘paradigms of propertied citizenship’ which exclude ‘social groups that do not meet its propertied mandates and are therefore rendered marginal in the discourses and practices of citizenship’ – working to delegitimise the transient, criminalise the informal and outlaw the homeless (Roy, 2003: 464; see also Blomley, 2008).

New urban geographies of inequality Urban inequality conventionally has been seen to derive from the fact that cities concentrate large numbers of poor people. While many of the new urban denizens moving into expanding cities in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and China are drawn from the rural poor, current trends in urban inequality are also driven at the other end by the blow-out of wealth at the top. Worsening urban inequalities in the United States and Western Europe, as much as in the burgeoning cities of India and China, are fuelled by the concentration of wealth for those at the peak of income scales. It is of course crucial to recognise the variable ways in which inequalities are produced in different urban contexts – and the widely divergent degrees of inequality that exist between Johannesburg, London or Beijing – but it is also vital to stress those factors that work across simple distinctions between developed and developing world cities. These include the increasing returns to capital and to high-end service workers in finance and technology, diminishing returns to ‘ordinary’ labour, and – most notably – the hyper-concentration of wealth at the top (Massey, 1996; Savage, 2015). Thinking about urban inequality today is not just a question of why so many people remain poor in the city, but also about the numbers hanging on to an increasingly attenuated ‘middle’ and why a significant minority are getting very, very rich. Processes of rapid urbanisation in numerous developing countries have been accompanied by deepening forms of inequality: between rural in-migrants and more established urban populations; between propertied classes and those without property; between emergent strata of service workers and low-grade labour; between those with access to formal economies and those living and working in zones of informality. The restructuring of high-income urban economies – around service and knowledge industries, residential gentrification and global migrations – has also seen new and harsher contours of inequality take shape in cities. Patterns of urban decline in former industrial cities have created blunt disparities between struggling urban centres and their suburban hinterlands, even as the growing suburbanisation of poverty raises spectres of ‘slumburbia’ in crisis-hit cities (Schafran, 2013), and the austerity urbanism of European cities produces a ‘nouveau poor’ among the urban middle classes (Kaika, 2012). While the inequality of cities is produced in variable and contingent ways, there is a rather simple story to be told about one of the key drivers of urban inequalities in the twenty-first century. In his major work on Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Piketty (2014: 22) captures very clearly the shifting balance of economic returns between human and ‘nonhuman’ capital. He tracks the accelerated returns to private capital – money and assets, including equity and property – which has produced an expanding wealth gap

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across different national contexts and serves to concentrate extreme wealth at the top (see also Palma, 2013). This is not, on the face of it, a spatial story, but the formation of a super-rich is legible in geographies of elite location and consumption, as private wealth is seeded through urban property markets as well as in off-shore holdings and in the affordances of alpha boltholes (Atkinson et al., 2016; Beaverstock et al., 2004; Hay, 2013; Hay and Muller, 2012; Paris, 2013; 2016). Some of this capital is earned, but much of it is inherited, and substantial new private wealth has been diverted from state-owned enterprises and resources, in the private appropriations and allocations of the post-Soviet transition as well as from the liberalisation of property and business regimes in China. Alongside exaggerated gains to capital, contemporary urban economies are also structuring deepening inequalities around skewed returns to different types of human capital. Edward Glaeser and his colleagues have argued that worsening income inequality in US metros over more than 30 years can be explained by the uneven distribution of skill across urban populations, in a shifting economic context in which high-skilled workers in advanced services (including law and accounting, financial and information services, and management consulting) see increasing income premiums, and low-skill and less educated workers take a decreasing wage share from urban labour markets (see Glaeser et al., 2008; see also Baum-Snow et al., 2014; Behrens and Robert-Nicoud, 2014b; Choi and Green, 2015; Florida and Mellander, 2016). The growth in incomes at the top is shaping the urban map of inequality in distinctive ways, with cities with advanced finance and/or tech sectors witnessing steep rises in inequality over the last three decades. The rising tide of wealth in cities such as San Francisco or New Haven – ‘with its combination of inner-city poverty and hedge-fund entrepreneurs’ (Glaeser et al., 2008: 8) – has streamed steadily upwards, as a high-earning service elite pulls away from the rest both on income distribution curves and in social space. These patterns of socio-economic polarisation are particularly salient in some standout cities, but they capture a more general urban trend. While the gains to a certain class of urban workers have intensified in recent decades, urban America as a whole has seen the concerted ‘shrinking’ of its middle class. The middle-income population share – defined as adults earning two-thirds to double the national median income – fell in 203 of 229 US metropolitan areas surveyed between 1999 and 2014 (Pew Research Center, 2016). Over the same 15-year period the low-income population share (adults earning less than twothirds of the median) increased in 160 metros, while the upper income share grew in 170. Median household incomes grew in only 39 of the 229 urban areas that together account for three-quarters of the US population. This hollowing-out of the middle in US metros was pronounced not only in industrial cities (such as Springfield, Ohio or Detroit) which had been hardest hit by the loss of secure, well-paid manufacturing jobs in preceding decades, but also in otherwise booming urban tech economies (including San Francisco, again, San Jose and Raleigh, North Carolina) where job growth was polarised around high- and low-income services. The US experience speaks more broadly to patterns of urban restructuring and socioeconomic sorting. London is the richest region in the United Kingdom and it is also the most unequal. Both the UK’s highest earners and its poorest households are overrepresented in London’s urban population, with the city’s 90:10 wealth ratio calculated to be almost three times greater than that for the country as a whole (Aldridge et  al., 2015). Fewer than one in six British people live in London, but around a quarter of the top 1 per cent of earners and almost 40 per cent of the top 0.1 per cent do, with larger

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numbers living in the wider south-east region around the capital (Brewer et  al., 2008: 14). The city’s highest earners are concentrated in advanced and professional services, with finance, real estate, law and health accounting for a clear majority of London’s 1 per cent (Brewer et al., 2008: 16). A similar picture, too, emerges in China’s expanding urban economy, where growth in manufacturing, technology and services has stretched the wage gaps for higher and less skilled workers. The increasing returns to skill that Glaeser and his colleagues noted for US cities after 1980 have been paralleled in China since the 1990s, with higher skilled urban workers taking the greater share of income growth in China, together with intensifying wealth at the top for those groups who derive their income from capital rather than from labour (Liu et al., 2010; Meng et al., 2005; Pan et al., 2016; Whalley and Xing, 2014; Zhang et al., 2005). Thinking critically about urban inequalities, then, involves turning the lens on the urban rich as much as the urban poor. This departs from an analytical reflex in the literature on urban exclusions which makes poor people the object of study, if not exactly the problem. Accelerated wealth at the top, stagnation at the middle and growing precarity at the bottom all play their part in shaping patterns of spatial division which operate not only at the ‘low’ but at the ‘high’ end of residential geographies. The spatial expression of urban inequality typically has been associated with the concentration and marginalisation of the urban poor (see Fischer and Massey, 2000; Massey and Denton, 1998; Wacquant, 2007). These dimensions of the unequal city have not gone away, but it is important to be alert to the spatial contours that emerge around the concentration of wealth in the city. As income and consumption gaps are stretched at the top end of the scale, spatial divisions may be seen to entrench around geographies of affluence and the elective segregation of the rich in spaces of elite secession (Atkinson and Bridge, 2005; Atkinson et al., 2016; Beaverstock et al., 2004; Cunningham and Savage, 2015; Hay, 2013; Hay and Muller, 2012; Lees et al., 2014; Paris, 2013; 2016). The question is open as to whether redoubts of concentrated wealth will be subject to the varieties of moral panic or tactics of policy intervention which have gone to work on areas of ‘concentrated poverty’ in cities (see Gans, 2010). Under a competitive model of inequality, it seems, poverty may well be treated as a social problem and a spatial blight, but extreme wealth is taken to be a largely private matter.

Conclusion Viewed through an economic lens, urban inequalities can appear as probably unavoidable (and perhaps even functional) outcomes of the productivity of cities. Urban economies are organised around dense and extended market networks which routinely produce inequalities of income, consumption and access. The economics of urban competitiveness in this sense rests on a competitive model of inequality, in which the fittest thrive and the less competitive may barely survive (Behrens and Robert-Nicoud, 2014a). While dynamic urban economies tend to produce forms of inequality, however, intensifying inequality acts as a perverse barrier to both economic and human development in stunting people’s life-chances, closing down economic opportunities and stifling enterprise. Moreover, if one assumes that skill and innovation are the key resources for urban economic dynamism, this premise is seriously undermined when significant segments of

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an urban population have their access to education, employment, credit, market entry and other opportunities barred along lines of gender, racial or ethnic inequality, class disadvantage or lines of legal exclusion. And inequality, moreover, costs: whether via the costs of welfare spending to mitigate market inequalities, or – as is more often the case – in public and private spending to police and secure unequal cities. Taken to the extremes that are evident in many cities today, urban inequality produces variegated social landscapes of distanciation, segmentation and marginalisation. Yet cities remain primary contexts for human development and self-realisation, supporting social differences in conditions of functional diversity and practical co-existence. This urban balance is a tough one to maintain; it becomes harder as inequalities deepen, social distance widens, and spatial separations become starker, more highly secured and more heavily policed. Urban inequality, after all, is not only about numerical measures of disparity, but about relations of exploitation, expropriation and exclusion which take on more or less material and more or less enduring spatial forms. Emergent patterns of urban inequity are structured around economic immiseration in tandem with super-valorisation, landscapes of segregation and elite secession, and crude social divisions as well as legal exclusions. These go well beyond any narrow understanding of how economic inequalities are constituted and reproduced. The complexity of contemporary urban inequalities reflects and reinforces the complex problem that a city is, but such urban complexity includes the capacity not only to support economic livelihoods, or to make some people very rich, but also to sustain the collective social life in conditions of diversity which might be the basis for a more equitable urban ‘allocation of personhood’.

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Bloch, A. and McKay, S. (2016) Living on the Margins: Undocumented migrants in the global city. Bristol: Policy Press. Blomley, N. (2008) ‘Enclosure, common right and the property of the poor’, Social and Legal Studies 17/3: 311–331. Brewer, M., Sibieta, L. and Wren-Lewis, L. (2008) ‘Racing away? Income inequality and the evolution of high incomes’, IFS Briefing Note No. 76. London: Institute of Fiscal Studies. Brouder, A. and Sweetman, C. (2015) ‘Introduction: working on gender issues in urban areas’, Gender & Development 23/1: 1–12. Brubaker, R. (2015) Grounds for Difference. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cames, R. (2013) ‘Government by expulsion: the Roma camp, citizenship and the state’, Paper presented at RC21 Sociology of Urban and Regional Development, International Sociological Association, Berlin, 29–31 August. www.rc21.org/ conferences/berlin2013/RC21-Berlin-Papers/24-2-Cames.pdf Chant, S. (2013) ‘Cities through a “gender lens”: a golden “urban age” for women in in the global South?’, Environment and Urbanisation 25: 9–29. Chant, S. and McIlwaine, C. (2013) ‘Gender, urban development and the politics of space’, E-International Relations. www.e-ir.info/2013/06/04/gender-urbandevelopment-and-the-politics-of-space/ Chant, S. and McIlwaine, C. (2016) Cities, Slums and Gender in the Global South. Abingdon: Routledge. Chen, M. and Skinner, C. (2014) ‘The urban informal economy: enhanced knowledge, appropriate politics and effective organization’, in S. Parnell and S. Oldfield (eds) The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South. London: Routledge. pp. 219–235. Cheshire, L. and Zappia, G. (2016) ‘Destination dumping ground: the convergence of “unwanted” populations in disadvantaged city areas’, Urban Studies 53/10: 2081–2098. Choi, J. H. and Green, R. (2015) ‘Income inequality across US cities’, 22 December, SSRN. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2707439 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2707439 Crankshaw, C. (2008) ‘Race, space and the post-Fordist spatial order of Johannesburg’, Urban Studies 45/8: 1692–1711. Crankshaw, O. and Parnell, S. (2004) ‘Johannesburg: race, inequality and urbanization’, in J. Gugler (ed.) World Cities Beyond the West: Globalization, development and inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 348–370. Crisp, J., Morris, T. and Refstie, H. (2012) ‘Displacement in urban areas: new challenges, new partnerships’, Disasters 36/S1: 523–542. Cunningham, N. and Savage, M. (2015) ‘The secret garden: elite metropolitan geographies in the contemporary UK’, Sociological Review 63/2: 321–348. Darling, J. (2016) ‘Forced migration and the city: irregularity, informality, and the politics of presence’, Progress in Human Geography. doi:10.1177/0309132516629004 Datta, A. (2012) The Illegal City: Space, law and gender in a Delhi squatter settlement. Farnham: Ashgate. Davis, M. (2006) ‘Fear and money in Dubai’, New Left Review 41: 47–68. Desmond, M. (2012) ‘Eviction and the reproduction of urban poverty’, American Journal of Sociology 118/1: 88–133. Desmond, M. (2016) Evicted: Poverty and profit in the American city. New York: Crown. Desmond, M. and Valdez, N. (2012) ‘Unpolicing the urban poor: consequences of third-party policing for inner-city women’, American Sociological Review 78/1: 117–141. Dorling, D. (2015) All that is Solid: How the great housing disaster defines our time and what we can do about it. London: Penguin. Fábos, A. and Kibreab, G. (2007) ‘Urban refugees: introduction’, Refuge 24/1: 3–10. Fischer, M. J. and Massey, D. S. (2000) ‘How segregation concentrates poverty’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 23/4: 670–691. Florida, R. (2015) ‘The connection between successful cities and inequality’, CityLab 6 January. www.citylab.com/ politics/2015/01/the-connection-between-successful-cities-and-inequality/384243/ Florida R. and Mellander C. (2016) ‘The geography of inequality: difference and determinants of wage and income inequality across US metros’, Regional Studies 50/1: 79–92. Frey, W. H. (2011) ‘The new metro minority map: regional shifts in Hispanics, Asian and blacks from Census 2010’, Brookings Institution Report (August). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Frey, W. H. (2015) ‘Diversity explosion’, Milken Institute Review, Third Quarter/July: 67–83. Gans, H. J. (2010) ‘Concentrated poverty: a critical analysis’, Challenge 53/3: 82–96. Glaeser, E. L. (2011) Triumph of the City. New York: Penguin. Glaeser, E. L., Resseger, M. G. and Tobio, K. (2008) ‘Urban inequality’, NBER Working Paper No. 14419 (October). Cambridge, MA.: National Bureau of Economic Research. Hay, I. (ed.) (2013) Geographies of the Super-Rich. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Hay, I. and Muller, S. (2012) ‘“That tiny, stratospheric apex that owns most of the world” – exploring geographies of the super-rich’, Geographical Research 50/1: 75–88.

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11 Ruination and Post-industrial Urban Decline Alice Mah

Ruination and decline are enduring urban themes in popular culture, literature, history, and urban sociology. From classical ruins of ‘great’ civilizations, to bombed-out buildings in the aftermath of war, to abandoned factories and derelict cinemas, ruins have provoked reflection for centuries. There has been a surge of new interest in modern ruins in the twenty-first century. Coffee table books abound featuring ‘ruins porn,’ particularly the much photographed ruins of Detroit. It is easy to be critical of the phenomenon of the ‘dereliction tourist,’ the voyeur snapping photos of ruins where communities once thrived (Mah 2014a). Tim Strangleman (2013) rejects such a view, arguing that the trend in photographing industrial ruins should not be dismissed as mere ‘smokestack nostalgia,’ but analyzed in relation to the meanings and values of industrial heritage. Sociologically, this renewed fascination with ruins might also be interpreted as a collective longing for places outside of the logic of neoliberalism (DeSilvey & Edensor 2013; Martin 2014). As reminders of the past, ruins are invested with cultural meaning, value, and memory. Ruins, like dirt, are ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas 1966), with the potential to disrupt dominant narratives of development and regeneration. Yet Detroit, despite all the fascination with ruins and the hipsters doing urban gardening, remains a poor, racially divided, old industrial city. In a special issue of City and Community on the urban sociology of Detroit, Hilary Silver (2015: 100) argues that Detroit represents ‘a counterpoint to the ubiquitous model of the city as growth machine,’ a prototype of the divided, depopulated, and deindustrialized city. Silver (2015: 98) also reflects on the lack of recent sociological attention to post-industrial urban decline, noting that: the sociological study of deindustrialization and urban political economy more generally has largely gone into abeyance …. Urban sociologists may cite Sassen on advanced financial and producer services and Florida on creative industries, but revisiting the

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scholarship on Detroit reminds us that goods manufacturing was once the foundation of a healthy urban export sector.

Indeed, much scholarship within urban sociology on ‘post-industrial’ cities focuses on models for future urban development, rather than dwelling on structural issues of protracted industrial decline. The ‘creative cities’ model of urban regeneration proposed by Richard Florida (2005), a how-to guide for harnessing creative energies in a city, has remained a favorite among city planners despite criticism of its elitism and narrow repertoire of ‘creative’ fixes (Peck 2005). This essay argues that ruination and decline are integral processes within global capitalism, which unfold unevenly, with latent effects, across time and space. Drawing attention to the ‘slow violence’ (Nixon 2011) of ruination as a lived process (Mah 2012), I point to the need to go beyond traditional (and often Western-centric) urban sociological accounts. In particular, I argue for the importance of engaging across disciplines, including post-colonial anthropology and critical human geography, and across multiple scales, particularly the neglected dimensions of the global and the rural. Deindustrialization, urban decline, and labor strikes, key sociological themes in the 1970s and 1980s, have largely gone out of academic fashion, echoing the issues of the times. In the 1970s and 1980s, sociologists were still making sense of the changes that were occurring and the political and economic imperatives behind them. Factories were closing in rapid succession in industrial heartlands around the world, relocating around the globe in search of cheaper labor and resources. This was an era of powerful trade unions, and the beginning of their subsequent decline. Reflecting on the 1970s as a politically confused decade of class transformation, Cowie (2010: 18) argues that ‘[o]ne of the great constructs of the modern age, the unified notion of a “working class,” crumbled, and the new world order was built on the rubble.’ Ronald Reagan broke the US air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981, and Margaret Thatcher quashed the miners’ strike in 1984– 1985. The 1968 protests, the 1973 oil crisis, stagflation, the Vietnam War, and increasing social, racial, and political unrest all underpinned the end of the post-war consensus and the beginning of neoliberal times. In this context of upheaval, critical social scientists wrote about the social problems of capital flight, the crisis of the labor movement, and the uneven geography of capitalist development (Bluestone & Harrison 1982; Hobsbawm 1978; Massey 1984; Harvey 1982). In the 1990s and early 2000s, factory closures and labor struggles continued, but at a slower pace. Over these decades, studies have chronicled the struggles of factory workers and industrial communities who faced corporate abandonment, job losses, and toxic pollution (Dudley 1994; Milkman 1997; Cowie & Heathcott 2003; High 2003). However, wider debates within social sciences were shifting away from radical accounts about the conflicts between capitalism, labor, and community. Urban sociologists became more interested in understanding new themes, of globalization, information technology, networks, and mobility (Sassen 2001; Castells 2001; Urry 2007). More recent literature on deindustrialization, ‘beyond the ruins,’ tends to explore different kinds of questions, about the meanings of working life identity, cultural memory, and politics of a bygone era (Cowie & Heathcott 2003; Cowie 2010; High & Lewis 2007; Strangleman 2013). The relative abeyance of urban sociology on industrial decline (Silver 2015) echoes the fates of labor history and critical industrial relations, which have been marginalized as old-fashioned, out of step with the neoliberal era. In the aftermath of the US election of Donald Trump

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and the UK Brexit vote in 2016, lived experience of industrial decline has resurfaced as an urgent sociological issue, a theme that Arlie Hochschild (2016) poignantly explores in her ethnographic study of the American Right in southwestern Louisiana. Questions of urban political economy, ruination, and deindustrialization have nonetheless endured, particularly if one looks beyond sociology to the fields of urban geography and anthropology. David Harvey’s (1982; 2007) highly influential writings on ‘accumulation by dispossession,’ the ‘spatial-temporal fix,’ and the ‘uneven geography of capitalist development’ have shaped generations of researchers’ ideas on urban development, capital flight, urban social movements, and gentrification. Harvey’s ideas have particular relevance for thinking about the global political economy of deindustrialization. According to Harvey (1982), industries, people, and places are constantly abandoned in capital’s search for new sites and cheaper inputs, part of the logic of capital accumulation and uneven capitalist development. The anthropologist Kim Fortun (2012) highlights a similar violence underscoring modern industrial development. She argues that we live in an era of ‘late industrialism,’ which began symbolically with the 1984 Bhopal disaster, characterized by decaying and aging infrastructure and toxicity leaching out everywhere, into the soil, air, and water, traversing neatly defined boundaries set out in modern industrialism. Following a related line of critique, Ann Laura Stoler (2008) has written about ‘ruination’ and ‘imperial debris’ to describe violent processes of abandonment and dispossession within post-colonial politics and landscapes. Yet these literatures, straddling different disciplines and theoretical traditions, do not tend to come into conversation with one another. From the Western romantic tradition of the ‘ruin,’ to working-class memory and identity, to post-industrial regeneration, to a spatial analysis of the logic of capital accumulation, and to post-colonial toxic debris, perhaps this is not so surprising. In this essay, I aim to bring together some of the debates, while drawing on my ethnographic research, to re-conceptualize ruination and post-industrial decline. I conclude by arguing that urban sociology would benefit from engaging with wider interdisciplinary and inter-scalar study of complex issues of ruination and decline.

Ruination Sites and processes of ruination reveal a great deal about the societies that produced them. Of course, all material structures that are built will deteriorate over time and eventually become ruins. But not all ruins are equal; not all have the same meanings invested in them. Some ruins are the product of violence, disaster, and neglect: the waste left behind in the wake of capitalist development, imperialist dispossession, and war. Other ruins are less extreme, or, at least, their stories of ruination are less obvious on first glance: a forgotten old farmhouse; a boarded-up old café; a derelict bowling alley; a disused parking lot. In my comparative ethnographic research on the difficult lived experiences of urban industrial decline (Mah 2012), I make the distinction between industrial ruins, as forms, and industrial ruination, as a ‘lived process.’ ‘Where some people see ruins,’ I argue, ‘others see homes situated within painful processes of transformation’ (Mah 2012: 9). Ruination is not only material, it is also social. In exploring case studies of industrial

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ruination and urban decline in Niagara Falls, Ontario and New York, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, and Ivanovo in Russia (conducted between 2005 and 2009), I examined the contradictory legacies of ruination for people living with ‘post-industrial’ uncertainty and ambivalence, deeply attached to their communities and nostalgic about past prosperity, yet concerned about lingering toxic contamination and socio-economic deprivation, and skeptical of top-down plans for local regeneration. Fortun (2014: 312) marks the beginning of ‘late industrialism’ symbolically, with a site of ruination: in 1984, the year of the Bhopal disaster, with thousands killed by toxic gas used in the making of a pesticide produced to extend crop yields, but in a facility underdesigned for safety and, in 1984 year, already set for decommissioning. The market was saturated. Over half a million people were exposed; death figures remain contested, ranging from five thousand to more than twenty thousand. And the exposure continues. The Union Carbide factory in Bhopal hasn’t operated since 1984, but the waste produced by it remains on site, underground, and in open ponds. Nearby water wells, still used by local communities, have high chemical as well as bacterial contamination.

For Fortun, the enduring chemical legacy of the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, as a site of ruination, characterizes late industrialism, with its slowly decaying infrastructure and neglected toxic leaks. She describes the factory site, as it stood at the time of her writing (2012: 444), as: decrepit and eerie. The old control room is open-air and crumbling. The old piping configuration still stands, rusted; former Union Carbide worker T. R. Chouhan can still narrate its workings, pointing out the pathways and junctures leading to the reaction in Tank 610. On the perimeter of the site, an old waste disposal site still oozes chemicals. The smell is truly worse than shit. It is the smell of late industrialism. Children play and cows graze within it.

The portrait of the Union Carbide factory that Fortun paints is jarring, almost surreal. For all the fallout from the disaster, and the lessons it was supposed to have taught us, the site itself has been abandoned and continues to degrade and pollute. This parallels the impression one gets when visiting Love Canal, the site of the 1978 environmental disaster when a toxic chemical dump was discovered buried beneath a working-class residential community. Despite all the media attention that surrounded the disaster, and despite its leading place in the history of the American environmental justice movement, the present-day site of Love Canal is easily missed. On first glance, it looks like an empty school playing field, or a vacant lot awaiting development. The site is a vast field enclosed by a tall fence – the evacuated zone – surrounded by overgrown roads that end abruptly and derelict homes. There is a modest stone monument marking the history of Love Canal, which was built in 2003 on the 25th anniversary of the disaster, but it is difficult to find amid all the weeds. There are no warning signs about toxic chemicals. It was declared ‘safe’ by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2004 and officially removed from the list of Superfund waste sites. However, as in Bhopal, the ongoing toxic legacy of Love Canal continues, with reports of ill-health effects in neighboring Black Creek Village since 2011, and recent concerns emerging about the health effects of the relocated toxic waste from the original site (Subra 2016).

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In my research, flagship sites of industrial ruination symbolized wider themes of urban and industrial decline: the abandoned chemical factories of Niagara Falls, which continue to leak toxic chemicals into poor ‘fenceline’ communities; the proud and mournful ‘last shipyard of the Tyne’ in Newcastle upon Tyne, which finally closed after years of protracted decline in 2005; and the partially working, partially abandoned textile factories in the depressed post-Soviet industrial city of Ivanovo, Russia, which still holds onto its historical industrial and Soviet identities. Each site of ruination speaks to the trauma, uncertainty, and tenacity of lived experiences with painful post-industrial transformations. I have since developed the themes of ruination and post-industrial urban decline in relation to struggling port cities (Mah 2014b), focusing on Liverpool, Marseilles, and New Orleans, as former ‘great’ port cities of the ‘global age’ of empire (Miller 2012), which have subsequently declined, echoing similar fortunes of old manufacturing cities, but with different dynamics related to legacies of empire, merchant capitalism, and casual dock labor. Material and social ruination figured in this research, working alongside the idea of ‘global legacies,’ enduring forms, processes, or ideas of the ‘global’ that shape urban identity and politics. Symbolic sites of ruination in each case were the docks: the traumatic history of the Liverpool dockers’ strike of 1995–1998; the memory of a beloved dockworkers’ trade union hall that was destroyed during Hurricane Katrina; and the complex history of the docks at La Joliette, part of the Mediterranean noir repertoire of the city chronicled by the late Marseilles author Jean-Claude Izzo. In this research, I traced the connection between the twin legacies of economic and imperial decline, manifest both materially and socially in contradictory forms of urban identity, memory, and labor politics. These struggling port cities resonated with Silver’s (2015) idea of urban decline as a counterpoint to the city as a growth machine, but in the context of commercial capitalism (via the port) rather than a traditional manufacturing base. Stoler (2008) makes a distinction between legacies and ruination for thinking about the impacts of imperialism. She argues that the prevailing rubric of the ‘colonial legacy’ fails to capture the complexity of imperial formations and their effects on people. Instead, she advances the idea of ‘ruination’ as a way of thinking through the devastating and complex impacts of ‘imperial formations’ on social life. For her, the concept of ‘ruination’ is powerful because of its implications as both a noun, suggesting a material state of decay, and as a verb, suggesting an active process that is violent and corrosive. Stoler (2008: 195) explains the relevance of ‘ruination’ for thinking about the dislocations and destruction of imperialism as follows: Imperial projects are themselves processes of ongoing ruination, processes that ‘bring ruin upon,’ exerting material and social force in the present. By definition ruination is an ambiguous term; both an act of ruining, a condition of being ruined, and a cause of it. Ruination is an act perpetrated, a condition to which one is subject, and a cause of loss.

Interestingly, Stoler (2008: 194) acknowledges cultural definitions of ‘ruins’ that are romantic, melancholic, and nostalgic, but she rejects these in her critical framing of ‘ruination’ as violent and disruptive. These distinctions – between legacies and ruination, on the one hand, and the violence and melancholy of ruination, on the other hand – have a similar motivating force, to assert a critical edge. Yet they also highlight the tensions and contradictions present in

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both terms (legacies and ruination), which simultaneously conjure negative, positive, and ambivalent meanings. Viewed from a distance, the Union Carbide factories in Bhopal and in Niagara Falls might seem evocative, sites that speak to other times, stand apart from chain stores and highways, and have a certain apocalyptic beauty. They might even be sites of nostalgia; a former factory worker in Niagara Falls told me that he would prefer to have industry back, even at the cost of health (Mah 2012: 64–65). But one cannot ignore the violence of production and ruination invested in each site: of gross negligence, disaster, and death in Bhopal, and of slow-burning environmental racism, toxic contamination, and illness in Niagara Falls. The legacies of these sites are toxic and devastating, but they are also obscured through years of neglect and the continuation of everyday life. Ruination is temporal, with latent potential for continuing effects. Bhopal and Love Canal endure, in their original sites, but also in similar, less recognized sites elsewhere. As Caitlin DeSilvey and Tim Edensor (2013) point out, much recent scholarship has been on ruins that have been produced slowly, through years of abandonment and neglect, rather than quickly. And even in cases where the ruins were produced quickly, like the Bhopal disaster, the effects, and the processes of ruination, are felt slowly. This echoes Nixon’s (2011: 2) poignant observation about the ‘slow violence’ of environmental injustice: ‘a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.’ The concept of ruination has the capacity to extend beyond distinctions between the industrialized, deindustrialized, and newly industrializing world. It offers a critical tool for understanding interrelated forms of ruination within the modern era, including the post-industrial, the post-colonial, and the late industrial. These forms and processes of ruination can be material, evident in industrial and urban ruins: old train stations, housing estates, pipelines, and pocked roads; old factories and shipyards; barren brownfield sites of former industry; grand old imperial architecture and monuments; ramshackle houses and barns; deserted shopping malls and downtowns; and half-finished housing developments. Ruination can also be social, evident in lost jobs, poor health, anxiety, exclusion, and deprivation. The power of ‘ruination’ rests in its evocation of violence and injustice: that which is ruined, or falls into ruin, carries an inflection of despair and loss, but also its inherent contradictions, laden with different meanings and values. While ruination has a lot to offer, conceptually, for urban sociology, it also has limitations. Its ambiguity and melancholic allure are strengths but also weaknesses. It can be stretched too far; it is difficult to disentangle the violence and the melancholy; the conflicting values and meanings that are invested in them can be challenging to understand, beyond an abstract, impressionistic level. Much as both the concept and the phenomenon of ‘ruination’ illuminate problems of industrial and urban decline, particularly at the level of everyday experience, they also potentially miss wider questions of urban political economy. Furthermore, while ruination is often invoked in relation to urban processes, its spatial reach is far more extensive, stretching beyond urban boundaries into urban edges, rural spaces, and even into the jungle, as in the case of Fordlandia, Ford’s failed Brazilian jungle city (Grandin 2009). Monika Krause (2013) argues that urban sociology has a tendency to subsume multiscalar issues into the lens of the urban, obscuring the important role of the rural as a site of social and spatial relations. There is a tension, on the one hand, between the multiscalar nature of ruination and the scale of the city, and, on the other hand, between cultural and economic analyses of decline. What accounts for the enduring

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features of urban decline in ‘post-industrial’ cities? How can we make sense of Detroit? What about other places facing ruination and decline around the world?

Post-industrial Urban Decline We do not live in a post-industrial age. We still need ships and cars, sofas and computers. We still need material transport of food, fuel, and consumer goods, and the age of the Internet, with next-day delivery at our fingertips, only accelerates demand. Industry still matters, with insatiable demands for growth within global capitalism, although it perpetually moves and changes shape. Manufacturing is concentrated in areas around the world with cheap labor, land, and resources, but pockets of manufacturing activity still exist in Western ‘deindustrialized’ countries. Bell’s (1973) thesis of the coming of the post-industrial society predicted the transformation from a manufacturing-based to a service and knowledge-based economy. His thesis implies a particular pathway of economic development, whereby societies will industrialize, deindustrialize, and then become hubs of knowledge, information, and services. By aiming to describe a general societal condition, it ignores the fact that manufacturing still exists, more than ever before, but is concentrated in ‘developing’ countries. It avoids the question of the global political economy of manufacturing industry within capitalism. Although the post-industrial thesis has been widely criticized for its crude determinism and Western centricity (Walker & Greenberg 1982; Hutton 2004; Kumar 2009), its logic survives in concepts of the ‘information society’ and ‘knowledge economy’ (Castells 2001; Powell & Snellman 2004). Within the context of cities, the idea of the ‘post-industrial’ endures as a way of thinking about the urban redevelopment of old industrial cities. On a basic but important level, this is maintained at the level of ordinary language. Regardless of views on Bell’s thesis, the word ‘post-industrial’ has entered common usage, a shorthand way of describing former industrial cities, typically those that were reliant on one main industry, and that have struggled to find a new economic base within the service and knowledge economy. While London, New York, and Paris are post-industrial, having shed much of their manufacturing industry, they are rarely described as such because they are also global cities with diverse economies. Detroit and Manchester, however, are quintessentially post-industrial. Within common usage, the label of ‘post-industrial’ is also used to describe lesser known places, with persistent ‘post-industrial landscape scars’ (Storm 2014), including former mines and smelters, nuclear reactors, company towns, brownfields, and other old industrial landscapes. The post-industrial thesis also persists as a key premise behind urban development for old industrial cities. This thesis provides hope of urban recovery, once industry has disappeared, through shifting focus to the service sector. As Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison (1982) argue in The Deindustrialization of America, this shift results in an ‘hourglass economy’ with few jobs that generate middle income, but many jobs at the ‘top’ (high-skilled information technology and knowledge sector jobs that generate high income) and ‘bottom’ (low-skilled service jobs that generate low income). Indeed, in Newcastle upon Tyne and other ‘post-industrial’ UK cities, post-industrial urban development has meant more shopping malls, call centers, casinos, and night clubs (Richardson

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et al. 2000). Reflecting on the juxtaposition between industrial ruination and new urban developments, Sharon Zukin (1991: 5) observes that post-industrial places are ‘sharply divided between landscapes of consumption and devastation.’ Complementing the banal picture of landscapes of consumption, one of the main models of post-industrial promise is that of arts and culture-led regeneration. A handful of ‘successful’ models have been copied around the world: the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the Tate Modern in London and Liverpool are examples of post-industrial regeneration through major art galleries. The use of the Olympics, the European Capital of Culture, the Commonwealth Games, the World Expo, and the World Cup have also been cited as key catalysts of post-industrial urban development. Perhaps the best-known urban exemplar is Barcelona, which transformed its urban image, from industrial city to cultural gem, following the 1992 Olympic Games. Sara González (2011) has demonstrated how the regeneration models of Bilbao and Barcelona have travelled and mutated in global policy flows. The proliferation of waterfront developments also have key models that have circulated within urban policy, including Baltimore’s Inner Harbor development in the 1960s and the development of London’s Docklands in the 1980s, despite controversies over these projects in relation to gentrification (Mah 2014b; Ward 2011). Urban planners, developers, and municipalities have a limited repertoire of possible solutions to industrial decline. These models are based on assumptions that simply do not hold up in the majority of cases of old industrial cities: not all cities can be creative or competitive; not all urban development conditions are underpinned by conditions of economic growth (indeed many regeneration projects stalled or were abandoned following the 2008 recession); and physical regeneration alone cannot address the deepest problems of urban and industrial decline: stigmatization, toxic contamination, unemployment, poverty, and a lack of anything to replace the former industrial base. These models fail to take into account alternative forms of local regeneration, which could build on grassroots traditions of community solidarity and activism. Many people who live in struggling post-industrial cities have strong place attachment to their homes and communities, despite recognizing material and social problems related to ruination and decline. Strong attachment and loyalty to place, and community, are important resources that could be harnessed. Despite efforts to ‘plan’ gentrification processes in stigmatized areas such as the former working-class shipbuilding community Walker in Newcastle upon Tyne (Mah 2012), gentrification tends to work ‘best’ organically. In other words, the artists, musicians, and poets who flocked into the rat-infested warehouses of 1980s SoHo, attracted by cheaper rents, are difficult to manufacture or replicate. Models of post-industrial development do not travel particularly well, despite the way that they spring up in different iterations around the world (González 2011). Features of post-industrial urban decline – the loss of industry, socio-economic deprivation, deteriorating physical and social infrastructure – are evident in cities and regions across the globe (Ferguson 1999; Grandin 2009). However, there are important differences between places, not only economically but also culturally and politically. In my research in Niagara Falls and Newcastle upon Tyne, city planners were skeptical about the long-term possibilities for urban economic development based on services alone, but they accepted this path as, more or less, inevitable. However, in my research in Ivanovo, Russia, the city planners told me outright that they rejected the Western post-industrial model of development because it did not apply in their context. First, they said, they should redevelop industry, and while they planned to diversify the urban economy with some investment in tourism and services, they prioritized the redevelopment of the textile industry, despite its market

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failure. Nonetheless, traces of the ‘post-industrial’ vision of redevelopment could be discerned even in a city that proudly asserted its industrial and Soviet histories, in ‘Silver City,’ a former textile factory, that had been converted into a shopping mall along the river. The problem of the transferability, applicability, and mutability of Western models echoes Asher Ghertner’s (2014) critique of the way that the concept of ‘gentrification’ has been extended, and stretched too far, to look at geographies of displacement in Indian cities. According to Ghertner (2014: 1554), several assumptions within gentrification theory ‘overlook key features of urban change in contexts, like India, with property, planning, and legal systems different from the postindustrial geographies from which gentrification theory developed.’ Ghertner (2014: 1566) prefers Harvey’s more critical concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession,’ which ‘has been useful in pointing to the explicit role of state violence in opening new terrains for capital accumulation, [but] … has featured surprisingly little in the gentrification literature.’ Why then use the term ‘post-industrial’? Well, despite – or perhaps because of – its limitations and assumptions, ‘post-industrial’ is actually a useful term for thinking critically about problems of industrial decline. First of all, it highlights uncertainty because it still carries the ‘industrial’ label and does not point to any new direction, beyond the ‘post.’ In this sense, like the literature on deindustrialization, it is somewhat old-fashioned, but it persists within everyday vocabularies. Its reference to a recent industrial past is a reminder, even in the global, networked, informational age, of the significance of industry. It belongs to a generation of twentieth-century ‘posts’: post-modern, post-colonial, post-structural, postFordist – that beg the question of what comes next, especially when these phases too lapse into history – but which are, for better or worse, key terms that account for the ruptures of the past century. While Fortun’s (2012) ‘late industrialism’ is a compelling conceptual counterpoint to post-industrialism, I am not entirely convinced that, as a word, ‘late’ offers much more than ‘post.’ Second, the myth of post-industrial promise still dominates a great deal of thinking on the future of old industrial cities, even if it is not framed explicitly in these terms, and thus it is an important discourse. Finally, the ‘post-industrial’ city has entered common usage, without particular objection. In my research, residents of post-industrial cities preferred their cities to be described as ‘post-industrial’ rather than ‘in decline.’ It is way of describing quite a complex kind of city, which is not only found in the industrialized West: a city has lost its main industrial base and is attempting to find a new urban basis for social and economic life. It is more fitting, too, than euphemistic labels of the ‘creative city’ (Florida 2005), the ‘entrepreneurial city’ (Hall & Hubbard 1998), or the aspirational label (for example, of Manchester) of the ‘global city’ (Sassen 2001). With caveats included, post-industrial cities are worthy of scholarly attention. In particular, despite all the focus on renewal, the question remains as to why some cities, like Detroit, as Silver (2015) suggests, cannot seem to emerge from urban decline.

Conclusion Sociologically, there is an enduring interest in what gets left behind, in sites and processes of ruination and urban decline. In this essay, I have outlined some ideas about ruination and post-industrial urban decline, drawing together some insights from different disciplines and reflecting on some of my ethnographic research. Within this literature, there is

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a tension between different traditions of scholarship: between cultural studies and labor history; post-colonial anthropology and critical human geography; and between Western theories of post-industrial urban development and broader theories about industrial and urban decline. I would like to conclude by turning my attention to two missing scales of analysis within the urban sociology of ruination and decline: the global scale and the rural scale. Ruination and decline shape landscapes around the world, at numerous scales, and with varying degrees of violence. The first missing scale is that of the global, including the Global South, which demonstrates the fiction that we are living in a ‘post-industrial’ age. Much of the literature on ruination focuses on Western industrialized countries. The ‘imperial’ ruination that Stoler (2008) describes is one exception, the legacies of Bhopal that Fortun (2008) traces are another; and there is a wealth of anthropological literature on the toxic legacies of heavy industries around the world (Petryna 2013; Nash 1973). The global scale gives a fuller picture of the political economy, and the human costs, of ruination, including ‘sacrifice zones,’ where the burdens and risks of dirty industry affect the most marginalized people and places (Bullard 1993). The second missing scale is that of the rural, which is where much of the violence of ruination occurs, yet this is often neglected with our focus on the urban. The neglected scale of the rural is particularly true for sites of industrial ruination, where the most polluting industries are often located in rural areas, along rivers, set away from cities. One of the limitations of doing case study and ethnographic research, and of starting with theories of urban sociology that take particular cases as models, is the problem of generalizability. This is how the post-industrial can become a stand-in for all of society, when in fact it only refers to particular kinds of societies, assuming a particular trajectory of socio-economic development. This is how ruins can be studied with romanticism and melancholy, as sites of pleasure and disruption within neoliberal spaces, or as sites of reflection on former meanings of industrial work, without attending to the violence of ruination within global capitalism and modernity. Ruination and decline are enduring and important features of urban political economy and lived experience in places around the world. With their evocation of the past, and of violence and destruction, they are uncomfortable topics. They invite reflection in the immediate aftermath of disaster, following plant closures, industrial accidents, nuclear disasters, armed conflict, and hurricanes. But the immediacy wears off quickly; fatigue sets in, and attention shifts away from the ‘slow violence’ of everyday processes of ruination. As relics of bygone eras, ruins and debris highlight alterative kinds of spaces, outside of homogeneous zones of neoliberalism. However, derelict structures are laden with histories, of job losses, toxic contamination, and divided communities. This essay has argued that it is important to rethink concepts of ruination and post-industrial decline within urban sociology, through engaging across different disciplines, ethnographies and case studies, and scales of analysis.

References Bell, D. (1973). The Coming of Post-industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Books. Bluestone, B., & B. Harrison (1982). The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industries. New York: Basic Books.

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Bullard, R. D. (1993). Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots. Boston, MA: South End Press. Castells, M. (2001). The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, society, and culture (Vol. 1). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Cowie, J. (2010). Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last days of the Working Class. The New Press. Cowie, J., & J. Heathcott, eds. (2003). Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. DeSilvey, C., & T. Edensor (2013). ‘Reckoning with ruins.’ Progress in Human Geography, 37(4), 465–485. Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Dudley, K. M. (1994). The End of the Line: Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ferguson, J. (1999). Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Florida, R. (2005). Cities and the Creative Class. New York: Routledge. Fortun, K. (2012). ‘Ethnography in late industrialism.’ Cultural Anthropology, 27(3), 446–464. Fortun, K. (2014). ‘From Latour to late industrialism.’ HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(1), 309–329. Ghertner, D. A. (2014). ‘India’s urban revolution: geographies of displacement beyond gentrification.’ Environment and Planning A, 46(7), 1554–1571. González, S. (2011). ‘Bilbao and Barcelona “in motion”: how urban regeneration “models” travel and mutate in the global flows of policy tourism.’ Urban Studies, 48(7), 1397–1418. Grandin, G. (2009). Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City. New York: Henry Holt. Hall, T., & P. Hubbard (1998). The Entrepreneurial City: Geographies of Politics, Regime, and Representation. Chichester: Wiley. Harvey, D. (1982). The Limits to Capital. London: Verso. Harvey, D. (2007). ‘Neoliberalism as creative destruction.’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 610, 21–44. High, S. (2003). Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt, 1969–1984. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. High, S., & D. W. Lewis (2007). Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric J. (1978) ‘The forward march of Labour halted?’ Marxism Today. September: 279-286. Hochschild, A. R. (2016). Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. The New Press. Hutton, T. A. (2004). ‘Post-industrialism, post-modernism and the reproduction of Vancouver’s central area: retheorising the 21st-century city.’ Urban Studies, 41(10), 1953–1982. Krause, M. (2013). ‘The ruralization of the world.’ Public Culture, 25(2), 233–248. Kumar, K. (2009). From Post-industrial to Post-Modern society: New Theories of the Contemporary World. Oxford: Blackwell. Mah, A. (2012). Industrial Ruination, Community, and Place. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mah, A. (2014a). ‘The dereliction tourist: ethical issues of conducting research in areas of industrial ruination.’ Sociological Research Online, 19(4), 13. www.socresonline.org.uk/19/4/13.html Mah, A. (2014b). Port Cities and Global Legacies: Urban Identity, Waterfront Work, and Radicalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Martin, D. (2014). ‘Introduction: towards a political understanding of new ruins.’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(3), 1037–1046. Massey, D. (1984). Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production. Basingstoke: MacMillan. Milkman, R. (1997). Farewell to the Factory: Auto Workers in the Late Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Miller, M. B. (2012). Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth Century History. Cambridge University Press. Nash, J. (1973). We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines. New York: Columbia University Press. Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press. Peck, J. (2005). ‘Struggling with the creative class.’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29(4), 740–770. Petryna, A. (2013). Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Powell, W. W., & K. Snellman (2004). ‘The knowledge economy.’ Annual Review of Sociology, 30, 199–220. Richardson, R., V. Belt, & N. Marshall (2000). ‘Taking calls to Newcastle: the regional implications of the growth in call centres.’ Regional Studies 34(4), 357–369. Sassen, S. (2001). The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Silver, H. (2015). ‘Editorial: The urban sociology of Detroit.’ City & Community, 14(2), 97–101. Stoler, A. L. (2008). ‘Imperial debris: reflections on ruins and ruination.’ Cultural Anthropology, 23(2), 191–219. Storm, A. (2014). Post-industrial Landscape Scars. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Strangleman, T. (2013). ‘Smokestack nostalgia, ruin porn or working-class obituary: the role and meaning of deindustrial representation.’ International Labor and Working-Class History, 84(1), 23–37.

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Subra, W. (2016). ‘Interview, with India Holme.’ Toxic News, February. www.toxicnews.org Urry, J. (2007). Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity. Walker, R. A., & D. A. Greenberg (1982). ‘Post-industrialism and political reform in the city: a critique.’ Antipode, 14(1), 17–32. Ward, S. V. (2011). ‘Port cities and the global exchange of planning ideas.’ In C. Hein (ed.), Port Cities: Dynamic Landscapes and Global Networks (pp. 70–86). New York: Routledge. Zukin, S. (1991). Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Part IV

Authority: Governance and Mobilisations

Admiralty, Hong Kong, 2014, Samuel Wong

12 The Political Sociology of Cities and Urbanisation Processes: Social Movements, Inequalities and Governance1 Patrick Le Galès Cities, metropolises, are political beasts. Urbanisation processes are also political. Cities, metropolises, are the locus of many powers, including protest, but coalitions may bring together political capacity by extracting resources, mobilising different groups, implementing policies. The political sociology of urbanisation on the one hand, and cities and metropolises on the other, point towards thinking in terms of turbulence, riots, inequality and mobilisation, together with institutions, policies, governance, policing and relative social order. Urban sociologists are interested in collective action, inequalities, representations, beliefs, mobilisations, actors, institutions, organisations, devices and instruments, the legacy of the past, social differentiation, affects segregation and exclusion.2 The chapter argues that contemporary dominant approaches, paradigms and conceptualisations in urban studies have sometimes neglected the politics and sociology of contemporary urbanisation processes, except social movements. It suggests not only pursuing the analysis of social mobilisation, but also developing political sociological approaches and concepts to make sense of contemporary urban developments, particularly in a comparative perspective. Modes of governance make a difference for cities and metropolises. The chapter also argues that the focus on both cities and grand claims about urbanisation processes does not suffice. Cities are part of a world of cities, but also a world of states and large firms. In any metropolis or city, or more or less legal forms of urban space, various groups are in competition for land and space – the famous urban land nexus identified by economic geographers (Scott, Storper, 2015). They have to compete and/or to agree about rules to live next to each other, to include or reject other people. Cities are historically sites of dense interaction and exchanges structuring different hierarchies or undermining social order, creating different social worlds. Services are provided, housing is built, projects are discussed, developed and contested. Forms of incomplete democracy are at play – against authoritarian regimes, capitalist exploitation, large firms, oligarchies and technocracies.

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The participation of citizens in the political process is always partial, a mix of formal and informal activities. This is resolved through conflicts, rules, institutions, violence, power relations (i.e. political mechanisms) together with market and social mechanisms (Caldeira, 2000). Furthermore, some social order, however fragile and unstable, is established and forms of policing, however effective or corrupt, are taking place. Cities and large metropolises are not just reflecting inequalities, they become major engines producing inequalities (Harvey, 1989, Fujita, 2013). At the same time cities and metropolises are sites of cultural innovation, economic development, diversity and public policies, but also of insecurity, oligarchies, violence, political disorder, gangs, decline and transgression. One may define them in terms of accumulation and concentration (density) of individuals, groups, buildings, infrastructures, social relations (formal or informal), representations, organisations, institutions and political projects, ‘places of concentrated meaningful built environment where people live and interact, delimited bundles of social processes; (Therborn, 2011, p. 15), a multiplicator of exchanges against the backdrop of inequalities. Cities and urban regions are also political beasts which are more or less governed and regulated by policies, markets, informal arrangements, political elites, corporations, NGOs, community groups, families, institutions, social movements, state officials, churches or gangs and mafias. They are built, organised and managed by people, usually belonging to organisations and institutions, who have ideas about how to make them change, how to control and exercise authority, how to develop services and foster prosperity and quality of life, and/ or how to exclude various people. Most cities or urbanised areas are complex systems of representation and interaction between many types of human agents, groups, technologies and organisations in close proximity, combined with sophisticated physical infrastructure which is more or less governed and regulated (Davies Imbroscio, 2009). Urban sociology is now intellectually far more interesting but also more diverse, less positivist and more contested. Urban sociology as a specific sub-discipline has been, in part, dissolved into the wider world of ‘urban studies’ (Saunders, 1986). The surge of comparative analysis in different parts of the world is also increasing the urban sociological imagination and calling into question the use of sociological models. Sociology is about ways of thinking conceptually between observed facts, figures and historical developments. It is about bringing empirical analysis, various types of data and theoretical frameworks in line with elements of contexts (time and place). It is a theoretical and empirical science: models and theories are based upon the constitution and accumulation of knowledge, observations, measures and comparisons. Within urban studies, sociology, including political sociology, is now less central, as reflected in this volume, in favour of a wealth of stimulating and different intellectual traditions originating from critical human geography, anthropology, planning, interconnected history, gender studies, the sociology of science and technology, philosophy, postcolonial studies, etc. Many contemporary scholars from those disciplines stress different forms of urbanisation, the ever-expanding suburbs, the development of anonymously similar urban spaces (motorways, shopping centres, residential developments, areas of commodified leisure facilities, car parks, railway stations and airports, office blocks and leisure parks) and megalopolises. The dissolution of the city is taking place within a large fragmented, chaotic, unstable urban world ( Smart and Smart, 2003, Parnell, Odfield, 2014).3 That is usually not the case. Over the past decades, in many parts of the world – in Saõ Paolo, Mexico, Los Angeles, Djakarta, Milan, Johannesburg, Shangai, (including

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in medium-sized cities) – urban political elites of cities have often gained more resources, budgets, political capacity, policy resources, political legitimacy (elected mayors). These cities are characterised by all sorts of mobilisations, negotiations between groups, a huge amount of political activities and policies to deliver collective goods to some parts of the population, or failures to do so. There are also manifestations of corruption, war, predatory groups, violent ways to exercise authority, new consultation processes ‘to maximise minimum participation’,4 oligarchies in control and illegal and informal activities in close interaction with governments (Bhan, 2016). even if the limits and frontiers of cities and metropolises are incomplete and more or less institutionalised (Bekker, Therborn, 2011). Political mobilisation, conflicts and choices take place and matter for cities’ development and crisis. They are also organised by governments, institutions, power relations, capitalism and the day-to-day practices of inhabitants. More and more capacity and resources are pooled together in cities and metropolises, because of their economic dynamics, citizens’ mobilisations, the making of utility networks. Collective action capacities, sometimes organised in modes of governance, are strengthening, providing resources for autonomy and political authority. That may contribute to the reduction of inequalities and the improvement of the quality of life of inhabitants. More often than not, however, those capacities are used to protect the elites and their privileges, to strengthen the concentration of wealth for some groups or to exercise violence against other groups. Sometimes, too much fragmentation, too many inequalities and violence, and the lack of conflictsolving mechanisms prevent the building of collective action. This chapter suggests a non-linear conceptualisation of governance to make sense of urban transformations and the exercise of political authority. Cities and metropolises are sites of intense political activities that are progressively structured by governance mechanisms, policy implementation and policy failure, including in cities of the global South. Governance is about collective action, institutions, collective actors, protest and implementation. Analysing urban governance requires articulation of the question of what is governed – and not governed – and how, together with the question of who is governed in large metropolises. This includes looking at the ‘dark’ side of governance, namely corruption, clientelism and violence (Le Galès & Vitale, 2013). Governing is a two-way process. A lot depends upon the population which is governed. The chapter discusses the political dimension of cities and urbanisation processes, historical dynamics and the central relation between states and cities: the limits of political regulations. Finally, it argues that a revised non-linear conception of governance is useful to understand how authority is exercised.

Politics matters beyond urbanisation processes: historicity of urbanisation processes and cities The rise of large metropolises all over the world and the diversity of urbanisation processes question the classic understanding of politics as historically connected to the rise of forms of political authority, most importantly the state. Urban scholars are developing different strategies to identify contemporary forms of urban politics, ways to exercise authority, forms of political legitimacy, conflicts and conflict-solving mechanisms that would make the urban political world distinctive from existing forms of politics.

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Following Henri Lefebvre, urban geographers have stressed the fact that the rescaling of societies, capitalism, the state and the increasing urbanisation of the world appear to dissolve the metropolis within a vast urban world. However, this generalisation of the ‘urban way of life’ should not lead to the marginalisation of the question of cities and metropolises as an object of study – quite the opposite. Current academic debates underline globalisation processes, the rise of the world beyond the West, more relations and interdependence between cities. All this evokes similarly passionate debates at the start of the twentieth century when German sociologists Max Weber, Werner Sombart, Ferdinand Tönnies and Georg Simmel discussed the relationship between cities, culture, arts, technological developments and domination. They asked questions about the influence of a particular set of structural social, economic, political, market and cultural conditions – such as the ones characterising capitalism – on cities or on individual and collective behaviour, modes of thinking, ways of life or processes of cultural creation, the role of groups and communities in the economy. The rise of mobility and transnational flows within more globalised capitalist metropolises raises new issues about assimilation, social order, politics and culture in cities. Today’s urban sociologists are returning to those classic questions: what sort of way of life, socialisation and politics is being reinvented (in some cities or urban spaces), and what sort of differentiation processes are taking place between different urban worlds? Cities are also reshaped by local groups and cultures interacting, adapting or protesting against globalised flows. Urban sociology emphasises agency, collective action, political capacity, mobilisation, public policies (including planning, one policy among others) that in part shape the cities and metropolises. It does not underestimate individual action, its creativity as well as aggregated effect. But it does it in a relational manner, mobilising concepts, for instance the strategic action field (Fligstein & MacAdam, 2012), to deal with agency, skills and structure. Many urbanisation and transformation processes of cities are not short term, but have to be considered in a long-term perspective. Cities and metropolises evolve in relation to urbanisation processes but also in relation to past features, such as layers of built environment, social groups, land ownership, institutions, inequality, power relations between groups, and the legacy of colonial rules. The institutional legacy (property rights, the structure of courts) together with the resource legacy (from land to various assets) remain a central feature of politics in many cities and metropolises. Second, the tension between those who govern, including through public policies and plans, and those who are governed – protesting, organising outside the state, adapting to coercion or pressure – is essential for an understanding of the political dynamics of cities. States and cities However large, dynamic and dominating metropolises may be, the relation with the nation state is still a key variable (Fourchard, 2011,b, Hirst, 2005). The American comparative sociologist and historian Charles Tilly has argued that the relationship between states and cities is crucial for understanding urban transformations and state reconfiguration (Tilly, 1990, 2010). Similarly, the Swedish comparative sociologist Goran Therborn (2011, 2015) has forcefully argued that too large a part of urban studies focuses on the labelling of various type of ‘world’ or ‘global’ cities in relation to each other, with only a poor understanding of the relationships with the state. This is partly to be understood

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in the context of the ‘retreat’ of the role of the state and the rise of neoliberalism. In most parts of the world, large cities have become the engine for economic development and have become the national champions that states have to support to drive national economic growth instead of investing in and redistributing towards backward territories (Crouch & Le Galès, 2012). States have also become more active in welfare state terms in Latin America and Asia (Marques 2016). A trend towards decentralisation is also leading to more political autonomy for cities and regions (Rao, 2008, Falleti, 2010) and increasing capacity for urban elites who enter into conflicting interaction with the state. Authoritarian regimes also deploy considerable resources to reshape their capital and to exclude vast groups. In his analysis of the golden age of European cities at the end of the medieval period, Weber famously stressed the confusion and overlapping of power between the collapsing feudal order, the dynamics of cities of the first age of capitalism, the mosaics of political authorities, the Church, the lex mercatoria regulating exchanges, and the slow emergence of the state. He made a powerful argument, later used by Tilly in his analysis of states and cities. For Weber, European bourgeoisies of the first age of merchant capitalism had to defend, organise and promote their businesses and their cities against the rules of the Church, the landed aristocracy and the emerging power of the national states which aimed at taxing them and mobilising their resources for their own sake. For Weber, the end of the medieval period and the early days of the Renaissance mark the golden age of European cities. The overlapping set of political authorities (empires, city states, kingdoms, duchies, church states, etc.) allowed the collective organisation of cities and the making of regulations (lex mercatoria) to promote exchanges. No political authority could claim a monopoly on the exercise of political authority, of rights and of taxes. This was a crucial factor in supporting the political autonomy of cities and their accumulation of resources based upon flows, transactions and exchanges. Likewise, the same argument can be made for the current period characterised by globalisation processes, transnational forms of private and public authority (Genschel and Zangl, 2014), the erosion of nation states leading to a confusion of powers (Le Galès, 2014) and the increase in mobility and exchanges. When no political authority can claim a monopoly (which is never fully achieved in the first place) at a time of transformation of capitalism and of massive urbanisation of wealth production and consumption, one would expect, following Weber’s argument, to see more political autonomy for cities and metropolises and possibly the return of forms of city states. Contemporary cities and metropolises are part of states. However, networks and relations have increased and cities or metropolises are not only national but also increasingly ‘cities within a world of cities’ (Robinson, 2011), and also in a world of states, transnational organisations, private regulatory bodies, large firms, NGOs and medium-sized cities. The contemporary period is therefore marked by some confusion of powers with the erosion of nation states (Leibfried et al., 2015, Jessop, 2016, King & Le Galès, 2017), hence the emergence of growing urban centres with some autonomy – from city states to more empowered metropolises, namely Singapore, Dubai, Panama. Tomorrow, the new business metropolises imagined in different corners of the globe (South America, Gurgaon in India) may well be the consequence of globalisation processes and the confusing rescaling of state and authority. Moreover, this is changing the relationship between the major metropolises and the states, leading towards more autonomy for metropolises in close cooperation/competition with the nation state, but increasingly slightly less connected to

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the national society. The case of London springs to mind, but regular tensions between Shanghai, Hong Kong and the Chinese state, between capital cities and their state, encapsulate this process (Imrie and al., 2009). The state versus the city dimension also has a long legacy in the case of post-colonial cities. Colonisation was about the violent extraction of resources and the imposition of economically unequal relations. Colonial cities had to be run by representatives of the colonising state in a climate of threats, contested legitimacy, resistance, of unknowns, of risks and of violence. This introduced the rationale of the modern state through modern ways of exercising authority: rationalisation, infrastructures, plantations. In short, colonialism meant political control and economic exploitation – and a legacy of economic control by oligarchies. Over time, some of those colonial cities were also designed, planned, governed by the modern nation-state elite. Colonising elites progressively planned and restructured existing cities, ‘modernised’, ‘Westernised’, according to Spanish (Mexico), Portuguese (Rio), British (New Delhi), Dutch (Recife) or French (Algiers) ideas of a modern city. Water networks were created, major buildings, new neighbourhoods, or new cities were sometimes erected. Investments in transport to boost economic development or to increase political control were central to this strategy. In colonial cities, the protection of elites against potential revolt, uprisings and riots was always a central concern. Imposed by political authority, this has left a legacy of extreme inequalities between the elite part of the city, often protected, isolated or gated from the rest, and concentrations of poverty in all forms of shanty towns, slums, barrios, etc. The legacy of colonialism takes common forms that are present in many post-colonial settings, namely massive socio-economic inequalities (with little redistribution through tax or even inheritance tax), massive spatial inequalities, dense illegal settlements, high degrees of pollution, a lack of drinking water for an important part of the population, a lack of sanitation and sewerage, failed planning, corrupt policing, and a lack of governmental capacity to control the land or implement policies. A second legacy concerns the way through which authority is exercised – the use of violence, ways of policing, the eviction of the poor when land is needed for urban renewal, and police corruption.

The limits of political regulation The democratisation of the metropolis is always a conflicting process, not a linear one. There is a renewed body of research on various forms of urban governance, political participation, democratisation, trying to identify the limits of political regulations or taking for granted ‘planning failures’ and the ungovernability of the metropolis. Cities and metropolises are social and political laboratories for the making of the current world, with unstable political orders. Those metropolises and cities are the result of the interaction between those who govern and those who are governed. Agency and collective action are essential, but this is often a long-term story shaped by a heavy legacy of inequalities and institutions. Urban politics is to be understood, as Michel Foucault suggested, by looking at the actions and the activities of different groups, but also in terms of dispositifs and institutions. In other words, a debate opposes those scholars looking at the experience of individuals, at the metropolis as the result of multiple, fluid processes,

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interactions and mobilisations in which things change all the time, and others who emphasise the weight of structured inequalities, institutions, governance mechanisms, the materiality of some processes and their reproduction, the making of coalitions and relative political order. Urban sociologists have classically studied social movements (Castells, 1983, Brenner et al., 2012, Nicholls, 2008), protests, class struggles or gangs. They also looked at alternative or informal forms of politics ‘against the state’ and ‘beyond the state’ in order to question growth coalitions, public policies, urban spatial segregation, violence or politics. Several important intellectual traditions see politics everywhere – any social relation having some power dimension or including some politics – for example, the micropolitics of Foucault, power relations in the sociology of organisations, or the Latourian version of pragmatic sociology. These approaches prove particularly useful to make sense of urban events during turbulent times and periods of revolution or large-scale mobilisations that are not institutionalised in terms of either leadership (e.g. the anti-governmental urban mobilisations in Brazil in 2014) or organisation. In US or European metropolises, the killing of a young African American or immigrant young men immediately provokes some uprising spurred by social media. The rise of mobilisations beyond organisations is now facilitated by social media and small acts of mobilisation are easy to perform (Margetts et al., 2015). In this chapter, politics is analysed as a particular field of social activities specialising in governing and legitimising activities: that is, collective and competitive mobilisations that have become more or less institutionalised and autonomous from other social fields. Political sociologists and groups of geographers identify the relative autonomy of politics, but look at its interactions with social changes, culture and capitalism. The ‘community studies’ tradition – in particular in the American sociological tradition – developed either a pluralist conception of urban politics or sung the praise of the great democratic engagement of individuals in local communities, avoiding conflict, race relations or class struggle (Dahl, 1963). Urban politics became marginal in the United States and was revived in Europe (Judge et al., 1995). Marxist sociologists who became dominant in the 1970s were more interested in understanding capitalist processes of urbanisation, conflict, class struggle and social movements.5 Following on from that, urban sociologists have mostly looked at collective action, protests against urban projects and major developments or the displacement of populations. They have not often considered the governance of the urban population, the production of collective goods and redistribution. However, in some cities, the increased political capacities of local governments and coalitions have led to the stabilisation of inequalities (as in many European cities) or their decline, due to redistributive policies (e.g. in some Latin American cities, which still remain among the most unequal in the world). Sometimes that means increased capacity to extract resources for the benefit of governing elites and their coalitions. The first generation of Italian urban sociologists during the 1950s pointed to a very local analysis of modernisation processes, with land reforms, new infrastructures and welfare delivery, and uneven effects on different social groups. The kind of focus on class politics, policy offer and the community (in a Weberian sense) have structured a precise legacy on both political and economic sociology in the long run, and the Italian tradition of a sociological understanding of social and community mechanisms in policy implementation and resource activation (Pizzorno, 1960, Bagnasco & Trigilia, 1990; but see Burroni et al., 2012, Tosi & Vitale, 2016).

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The autonomy of a political field has been connected to the institutionalisation of the state. Historically, in various contexts, in relation to the making of political authority (later states), a specialised domain of activities has emerged around governing activities and the making of a political order. Those who govern specialise in conflict-solving activities, they take decisions which are more or less legitimate, they enact rules, and they have a particular type of legitimacy to sanction and use coercion. Politics is also about the conflicting debates for collective goals, the making of a community, the definition of the enemy, the protection of individuals, the mobilisation of different groups and coalitions to implement collectively defined goals. Politics is about conflicts, violence, debates, the use of coercion and then about creation of a fragile political order. One could define politics as an attempt to provide order, to rationalise, to solve conflicts between conflicting interests, to develop tools, devices and policies to deal with the plurality, movements and contradictions of social life and of capitalism. Political regulation is never just a functional answer to collective problems. It is always a process of construction of a fragile political order to limit the contradictions and conflicts within societies. But politics has a relative autonomy and political actors tend to work for the general interest (or the collective good) but also to accumulate resources, to reinforce their clienteles to stay in power and to extend the political domain (Favre, 2005). As Bachrach & Baratz (1962) mentioned in their classical study about anti-poverty policies, political action is undertaken not only to do (supply services and interventions), but also not to do: so to say, ‘to limit decision-making to relative non-controversial matters, by influencing community values, political procedures and rituals’ (p. 949). In his challenge to conventional understandings of politics, Bruno Latour, building upon pragmatic thinkers such as Dewey, Lippman and De Vries, stresses that politics is always related to particular issues; he calls this ‘Cosmopolitics’ (2007). For him, there is no such thing a ‘public’ or a ‘political community’. Ignoring inequalities or power relations, he astutely identified five stages of the political, distinguishing between the pragmatic conception of Dewey (the public and its problems), the classical thinking about sovereignty and the machinery of government operating in the name of the general interest leading to failure, the Habermasian conception of conscious and equipped citizens deliberating to solve problems, or the Foucauldian conception orienting the conduct of conduct in a routinised way. For him, in his deconstructivist interpretation, politics is always there but never defined. It is everywhere, so it is nowhere. Latour’s insight is stimulating and opens directions to think about politics in more fluid contexts. But his overall argument has proven rather less convincing in terms of empirical research. Pragmatist scholars like Latour neglect institutions – the rules, norms, stand, contributing to the collective action capacity or the reproduction of inequality. In many urban contexts, democratisation is at a low ebb even if one takes into account different dimensions and processes. Authoritarian and illiberal regimes have not disappeared and many metropolises and citizen groups have little political autonomy. Democracy is not the flavour of the day in several African countries nor in the Middle East. Chinese urban mayors have strong resources and capacity, but under the control of the Communist Party. Quasi-authoritarian regimes also keep a strict political control on metropolises and concentrate resources, as does the army in Cairo or Algiers, or the main political party in Phnom Penh, Istanbul, Douala and to some extent Singapore. Representative democracy, as eloquently argued by Manin (1997), was designed to include a bias in favour of elites with a fear of the unreasonable passions of the masses.

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Everywhere, the limits of democratic regimes are obvious in relation to policy failures. Political sociologists identify the decline in voting participation, the transformation of party systems, the development of politics beyond institutions, politicisation processes and depoliticisation processes. The English political sociologist Colin Crouch writes about ‘post-democracy’ (2004), the triumph of the media, the de-specialisation of political elites in relation to business, the media and banking interests, and the weakness of political debates. The democratisation of urban politics was related to the rise of social movements from the late 1960s onwards. What was once called ‘the new urban sociology’ – that is, the innovative Marxist and neo-Marxist urban sociology of the 1970s – demonstrated the importance of these social movements in structuring the city, the dynamics of social relations and urban change. Urban social movements have generally been defined as collective mobilisations (as distinct from political parties) of urban populations, directed at changing policies and at defending their interests, involving widely diverse actions and repertoires not institutionalised in political parties (Walton, 1998). As argued by Castells (1983), the urban dimension means, apart from the scale, that these movements relate especially to: (1) issues of collective consumption and public services; (2) issues of quality of life in the neighbourhood and opposition to planned physical changes; (3) demands for transparency and for democratic participation in urban government, and challenges to elected representatives and parties (Pickvance, 1995, p. 199); and (4) protests against the police and the discrimination of ethnic groups. Urban mobilisations and urban social movements are as important and diverse as ever (Hamel and al.. 2003); from the Occupy movement to mobilisations against privatised motorways in Santiago, against the eviction of informal settlements to make way for middle-class housing or shopping malls in Mumbai, Johannesburg or Rio, to mobilisations against refugees in European cities, to protests against the construction of a new airport in Mexico, against electricity cuts, against the rise of the price of bread in Casablanca, to mobilisations against the concentration of Airbnb apartment rentals in the old neighbourhoods of Barcelona and Berlin which decreases the housing stock available for the local population (Colomb, Novny, 2016). The democratic life of many metropolises relies upon conflicts and mobilisations about mixed neighbourhoods, the use of public space by drug users, inter-ethnic, religious, xenophobic and class conflicts (Katznelson, 1981). This includes both the most progressive and the most conservative interest groups and mobilisation agendas. Classic dynamics include contention for collective goods, reactive conflicts about urban planning issues, and the contentious quest for public recognition. Sometimes, those protests are against liberal or neoliberal policies, including austerity cuts. However, many forms of urban contention are rather independent of neoliberal policies, and are triggered by problems related to private property, race, contestation of the police, migration, eviction of poor neighbourhoods, religious conflicts lifestyles and individualisation, density, commuting and the use of public spaces and transport, the entre-soi (selfsegregation) of upper middle classes, territorial inequalities and equalisation claim-making, localisation of polluting infrastructure, or claims for access to services from water to education. They have been traditionally studied, overemphasising their progressive, emancipatory goals, while real-world mobilisations mix inclusionary as well as exclusionary claims. The democratisation of urban politics is giving rise to scores of initiatives. From budgetary participation in Latin American cities, to scores of attempts to mobilise neighbourhood

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groups and active participation of users in the self-governance of commons and localscale collective goods, from local referenda to social media. Latin American cities in particular have seen a lasting movement to democratise the policy process, fed by the mobilisation of social movements (Baiocchi et al., 2011). In those contexts, the particular trajectories of the state (shaped by attempts to develop a developmental state and following a period of military authoritarian regimes), the long-term domination of oligarchies inherited from colonisation and liberation wars, have created the conditions for powerful social movements and local mobilisations. Sometimes, as in Brazil, they became mobilised by a large left-wing workers’ party. Democratisation processes have also led to myriads of democratic experimentations at the urban level. Those experimentations have spread out, including in Europe, and have been supported by international organisations and NGOs in many cities. But the participation of inhabitants in public policy making and modes of governance most of the time faces powerful entrenched interest groups. Social media and new technologies may contribute to more citizen pressure on policy making, and more accountability. Post-political times? A very dynamic line of scholarship has emerged from the work of a group of philosophers and geographers mobilised by Erik Swyngedouw and his colleagues, framed in terms of ‘post-politics’. In parallel with political scientists and sociologists (whose work has not been greatly recognised by this line of scholarship), those scholars are interested in the limits of political regulations, the threats to democracy, the impact of inequality of democratic governance and the transformation of cities. Wilson and Swyngedouw (2014) describe a trend in which the political – understood as a space of contestation and agonistic engagement – is increasingly colonized by politics – understood as technocratic mechanisms and consensual procedures that operate within an unquestioned framework of representative democracy, free market economics, and cosmopolitan liberalism. In postpolitics, political contradictions are reduced to policy problems to be managed by experts and legitimated through participatory processes in which the scope of possible outcomes is narrowly defined in advance. ‘The people’ – as a potentially disruptive political collective – is replaced by the population, the aggregated object of opinion polls, surveillance, and bio-political optimization. Citizens become consumers, and elections are framed as just another ‘choice’, in which individuals privately select their preferred managers of the conditions of economic necessity. (pp. 16–17)

This group of critical geographers start from a convincing critique of the limits of democracy and elections in relation to the environmental question (Swyngedouw, 2009). They aim at identifying the ‘disappearance of the political in post-political arrangements’, in order to identify new possibilities and the return of the political. Building upon the work of a very diverse set of philosophers (moving on from Chantal Mouffe, and the debates between Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou), they hope to define what appears as ‘properly political’, without any conception of comparative historical trajectories or discussion of what actually constituted the political domain for several centuries in different parts of the world.

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One may lament that Swyngedouw and his colleagues make a poor caricature of contemporary politics – only defined in terms of ‘new public management’, ‘good governance’ or the transfer of ‘best practice’. This is misleading, as argued previously, because defining politics has put the question of conflict, violence, political competition at the centre of the analysis from the times of Machiavel and Hobbes to recent developments. The literature on ‘post-politics’ argues that normal politics is about depoliticisation, the reign of experts and the exclusion of citizens. This is a very biased view. For most political sociologists, what is at stake is precisely the never-ending tension between the attempt to create some political order – to create consensus, to euphemise conflict, to create forms of common good and general interests, to maintain the domination of some groups against social mobilisations, contestations, interest groups in permanent competition, violence and wars – and the implementation of policies that are always transformed and contested. The notion of a ‘post-political arrangement’ is a useful myth with little empirical substance. However, it is an interesting perspective for precisely studying processes of depoliticisation (that have always been at play), and that may be more salient in some domains and in some cities. Further, what is labelled ‘post-political’ or ‘depoliticisation’ is most of the time ‘politicisation’ in a different way, favouring different groups and promoted by some coalitions. The debate about post-politics is a philosophical discussion to ‘recentre’ the political independently from the question of what constitutes politics. In that sense, it is both a very exciting intellectual enterprise within a particular ontology and a prophetic view about politics defined around questions of the environment. It is anti-sociological. Postpolitics means that most of what does constitute urban politics is seen as irrelevant and contemptuous. However, public expenditure and public policies have been on the rise at the urban level in Latin American cities, European cities, Asian cities. That may lead to more inequalities and oppression. But often, it also translates into infrastructure, housing, access to water and energy, school and social services.6 Public policies may not pave the way for grand revolutionary transformations but, incrementally, they have improved the daily life of millions of inhabitants in the urban world and allowed the making of urban citizens. In that sense, the claim about depoliticisation is both a crucial avenue to explore and an overblown claim with limited empirical substance. In other words, the supposedly ‘consensual post-political arrangement’ is a straw man. The mantra about ‘the end of dissensus’, ‘the end of politics’, is contradicted by the actual dynamics of political mobilisations in many cities, by conflicts around taxation and corruption, religious conflicts, terrorist attacks, left-wing mayors providing services in Latin American cities, or the rise of the hard right in US and European cities. These are not signs of depoliticisation. Democratisation is never complete and depoliticisation is a series of processes that have to be conceptualised and examined empirically. The ‘postpolitics’ project builds upon Rancière’s view to ‘recentre’ politics away from policies around values of equality, freedom, democracy. It is a normative intellectual project that deserves much support, including the expectation of disruption to transform the existing political order, a crucial but rare case. From a sociological point of view, however, it is far more questionable, as policies are crucial – even small-scale and incremental – for bringing transformations to cities. The grand thesis about ‘the evacuation of politics’ and the question of ‘authentic or true politics’ has no other basis than grand, normative and fascinating philosophical claims and should be analysed as such. It bears little relation to contemporary urban politics and the transformation of metropolises.

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Policies, governance and the making of a contested and fragile political order: how ‘to keep the city in line’7 and to exercise some authority AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2010) careful writing on the ‘conudrum’ of urban development talks about African cities and Djakarta and provides a series of insights about the city as a lived experience, about the day-to-day strategies of residents to survive and act strategically, about informality as a resource for the population. The city is a ‘promise’ and those insights on informality are essential to move beyond the more positivist thinking about law and government. Differentiated unruly worlds have opened new avenues to reflect upon urbanisation, the metropolis and what Simone calls ‘cityness’: the coding of cities with their various designation of names, districts, functions, and zones; transport infrastructures which shape dominant ways of circulating through urban space: and the distribution of services and facilities that link together the provision of specific consumption needs – all are a means of structuring our urban experience.

These are efforts to ‘keep the city in line’: ‘buildings, layouts, provisioning systems and organizations that try to hold together and stabilize relationships between materials, environment, bodies and institutions’ (p. 3). In other words, one has to understand cities both from the point of view of day-to day-experiences, interactions, uncertain short-term rules as well as from attempts to structure, create social order, maintain domination and inequalities or trigger progressive transformations, to ‘keep the city in line’. Historically, urban sociology has been more interested in the social mobilisation side against the state and the use of state resources to organise the city for the benefit of elites and private developers. Many urban scholars have seen the state in terms of contention, and the Marxist tradition identifies state interests with those of the bourgeoisie. Urban sociologists accurately sharpened their critical thinking against technocratic urban planners, against urban regimes or coalitions between public and private interests, excluding poor populations or undocumented groups. They stressed a fundamental distinction between individual base and place-based policy In the public administration and policy analysis tradition popular in US planning and public policy schools or urban institutes, urban policy research became functional, looking for best practices, rankings, or endless descriptive comments on new policy initiatives. In the Chicago School sociological tradition, with the exception of the question of policing, governance or policies are considered marginal features of the city in the analysis of competition between groups, except in terms of ‘machine politics’ to allocate resources to clientele groups in exchange for political support. In the Marxist or post neo-Marxist tradition, urban policy is used by state elites to stabilise capitalism. Different levels of government, including urban governments, create the condition for the accumulation of capital and ideology, the latter a reflection of the dominant forces in society. The state first intervenes through public policy as guarantor of social order, namely through ideology and by regulating various social interests, as social order is an essential condition for real estate investment; it later intervenes in the accumulation phase, making land below market price or subsidies available to real estate developers. New markets are subsidised by the state; the state puts in place the conditions required for investment and, in

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some cases, speculation. There is indeed often close cooperation (as captured by the concept of growth coalitions (Logan and Molotch, 1987)) among financial interests, private developers and major public economic actors for the purpose of ensuring economic development. The state in this case does not disappear; indeed it organises the accumulation phase. Urban policy is analysed in terms of its role in protecting social order, to ensure the reproduction of the labour force and to establish the conditions for market accumulation. The argument is well known in the gentrification literature. Political themes, modes, slogans are indeed often used to justify urban policy in the interest of dominant classes. Critical urban studies have been central to underline the domination logics associated with institutions, the inequalities reinforced by government, the illusions of rational governance, the manipulation of democracy or the irrationality of policies (Marcuse, 2009). But even in the less ‘political’ approach in sociology, as in the case of the new generation of the ecological Chicago School of Robert Sampson (2012), one never finds a description of inequalities per se, a map of groups per se, or a critique of segregation and lack of opportunities per se. For Sampson, urban sociology is about the relation between the spatial organisation of the city and collective efficacy. The political point about collective goals remains residual. Another line of criticism stresses the limits of the rationalisation process associated with the state and urban policy, in particular the illusion of modernity, homogenisation and disrespect towards subcultures and minorities, public policy failures and the resistance encountered (Scott, 1998). Criticisms of the modernist project in cities underline the violence of the planning process, of urban policy, the displacement and exclusion of populations in the name of the common good – in modern terms, excluding the poor in the name of environmental quality in Indian cities, for instance (Baviskar & Ray, 2011), or policies making possible the gentrification process in the name of social mix (Bridge, Butler & Lee, 2012). In an urban world described as chaotic, as a fluid process, urban policy is bound to fail and to create stronger intended or unintended effects. One has to look to Weber and Foucault to find inspiration for new ways of analysing governance and public policies. In the neo-Weberian political economy model, the city is about the relative integration of organised groups and institutions, about collective action capacity (governance), interest groups, elected political leaders, agency and governance. Conflict-solving capacity, not just fragmentation and a myriad of groups, characterises cities. The city is also about public space, public services and planning in relation to citizens. The Weberian approach takes into account the autonomy of politics and bureaucracy but sees them as articulated to coalitions of actors beyond the state. Ray Pahl in his work on gatekeepers (1977) has shown how different actors in the local state control resources and allocation between groups, including housing. Cities and metropolises are stabilised (or ‘kept in line’ as suggested by Simone) by a set of organisations, linked to the state to varying degrees: hospitals, schools, universities, ports, and social and cultural centres. Social movements, associations, ethnic groups, churches, gangs, sometimes even families, are deployed in different organisations and help to shape – although always partially and with only occasional stability – a degree of coherence, more or less conflictual, more or less institutionalised, and a certain local social and political order (Caldeira 2015). Urban policies started with the institutionalisation of power in Babylon, Chinese cities, Cairo and Istanbul, Greek cities and the Roman Empire. Taxes were raised, some specialised experts and dedicated administrations emerged, ideas were put forward,

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protection, control and war were at stake, securing food supply or water was central, and elites invested resources to build, plan and develop cities and to control their population. Progressively, new ways to govern and to implement urban policies emerged in different settings: statistics, bureaucracies, planning, public–private partnerships to develop new neighbourhoods, forms of policing. The conquest, organisation and control of space became a classic task which states developed in the process of state-making and state institutionalisation. Contemporary urban policies include investment in key infrastructure, transport and utilities, regeneration of the city centre including a strong cultural drive and marketing, forms of planning, recreation of public spaces, high-profile urban projects and buildings, policing (controlling marginal groups, the poor) and maintaining public order, social policy, economic policy to promote innovation and support to firms, and finally policies to renovate neighbourhoods in crisis, as well as initiatives to develop sustainable development, to reduce waste and pollution and steer the behaviour of individuals and organisations towards much more sustainable behaviour. Urban governments play a key role in providing basic utilities and services such as water, health, sewage, street lighting, energy, social services, education, firefighters and transport and, most crucially, police. Over the last two decades, in Latin American cities, in Chinese cities, in South African cities, the massive building of infrastructure has been associated with the slow rise of the welfare state, of some provision of housing or the development of cash transfers that took millions of urban citizens out of poverty.

Ungovernable metropolis? A non-linear conceptualisation of governance The question about who is governed implies consideration of the supply side of governing and about who receives what kinds of services and public goods. Issues of school segregation, housing segregation, accessibility to downtown and city centres, inequalities in infrastructure, absence of legality and police control, or police violence and excessive discretion in some neighbourhoods – all these phenomena signal that part of the population of these large metropolises is not really governed. Who governs when nobody governs? Corrupt elite networks, sometimes. Churches, or other kinds of vertical networks, in other cases. Illegal organisations are also classic cases when they can run, arrange, and possibly govern, some sectors, some neighbourhoods, some part of the city. Processes of discontinuous and incomplete government and governance are always work in progress, but make crucial differences over time (Le Galès, 2011). For urban social scientists, ungovernability only reflects a positivist view of government. Societies are never fully governed. Research on the daily experience of hundreds of millions of poor inhabitants experiencing life in slums, the lack of access to basic collective goods and services connected to the predatory behaviour of political elites, corruption and incapacity to deliver policies have reinforced this conceptualisation of complex ungovernable cities, and for good reasons. In the Western world, few believe in the complete rationality of urban government as able to command and control what is going on in their cities: failures, informality, corruption, organisational chaos, inequalities (class, race, gender), globalisation pressure and lack of collective capacity to provide housing matter much more than usually thought. Gangs are also becoming global (Hazen &

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Rodgers, 2014). Decline or violence in relation to large-scale economic reorderings are on the cards in Detroit, Athens, Saõ Paolo and San Salvador. A good deal of the literature on urban governance (or ‘urban regimes’ or urban ‘growth coalitions’) identifies mechanisms for creating collective capacity to go beyond market and state failures (Jessop, 2002, Stone, 1989, Logan & Molotch, 1987, Le Galès, 2002, Pierre, 2005, 2011). Political scientists working on urban governance have rightly defined government/governance as the capacity to change urban society, on the one hand, and to raise democratic issues and the participation of inhabitants, on the other (Heinelt & Kübler, 2005), although they sometimes forget to show that it can equally be about the capacity to allocate money to their clientele or organise policies to exclude some groups. Public policy is always a choice of clienteles and victims. The broader question is the extent to which some form of political steering plays a role in the transformation of various urban worlds, of the organisation of services for the population. In particular, those large metropolises from the North and the South are not just chaotic irrational spaces. Services are provided to some groups, some districts: sewage, street lighting, gas and electricity, firefighters (Lorrain, 2014). Water systems are organised, some housing is built, schools are developed, new neighbourhoods are built, formally, informally and others may be legalised, some transport links are planned and built, elections take place, parties mobilise, some social assistance exists, conflicts arise about the use of land, the price of the bread, the development of a business district, about taxes or about laws. Protests take place, coalitions are put in place, corruption and clientelism structure relations, and various kinds of policies are tried out, including more neoliberalising policies. In very different kinds of large cities, health and social care services, as well as some form of welfare protection for the most vulnerable people, are empirically present, with debates on size, amalgamation and contracting out. Governance is only part of the story of those large cities, but it is not absent at all. Forms of urban governments, however incomplete and corrupt they may be, are developing in different parts of the world (Sellers, 2005) but not so much in India, for instance. Urban societies are more or less governed over different periods – hence the call for a non-linear view of governance. What is not governed in a classic governmental rational way may be more central to understand what works in a city. Koonings & Kruijt (2009) make an important point in their edited collection on megacities: they are becoming a site of deprivation and violence, and the lack of effective governance in the peripheries of those cities is a massive problem for the poor: ‘urban policies are of direct importance in a broad range of issues related to poverty alleviation and social inclusion. … Violence has become the alternative for “parallel” forms of order, control, resources distribution, legitimacy and identity’ (p. 2). In large cities, even more than in other contexts, policy failures are the norm, governments do not often achieve very much, inequalities remain massive, informal arrangements are crucial. Therefore, governance is not the one and only principal factor explaining urban change – it is an incomplete and discontinuous process. But the mode of governance and the capacity for steering collective action at the metropolitan level are two of the most relevant topics for understanding and explaining current metropolitan developments and to contribute to the life of millions of poor dwellers. In other words, there are actors that try to govern large metropolises, there are activities of governance and there are results – often very different from the objectives of the goals.

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Conclusion The pace of global urbanisation is leading to a renewed quest for the holy grail of urban studies: that is, the making of a ‘new’ urban science for the ‘new’ urban world. Looking for innovative conceptualisations and developing solid empirical research to make sense of the transformation of the world are central for social sciences. However, in some parts of the broad academic field of ‘urban studies’, the search for ‘newness’ has sometimes led to overblown claims. Some urban studies scholars, but also architects and urban planners, are fantasising a new urban world, apparently liberated from the classic constraints (of the state, of rules, of slowness, of the social substrate, of fixedness, of social conflicts, of inheritance from the past) and dazzled by the speed, fluidity and scales of urbanisation of Asian or African megalopolises, by a globalisation of innovative urban thought at the cutting edge of the cyberworld, and by the invention of new urban forms that are feasible due to new technologies.8 This, however, is partly an illusion. Many of those processes of urbanisation are regulated and governed, albeit to a greater or smaller extent. For example, in squatted/occupied spaces, there are interactions between squatters and police (Aguilera, 2011), while the self-governance or legalisation of informal settlements is a very political processes (Gilbert & Varley, 2002, Bekker & Fourchard, 2015). In some other cases where there appears to be no ‘governance’, ‘non-decision’ is a strategy. Urban sprawl and suburbanisation result from forms of regulations (Hamel & Keil, 2015) influenced by bankers and developers. What may appear as depoliticisation (for instance, technical discussion and indicators replacing a political debate) is often the result of political coalitions using invisible or technical instruments (standards, algorithms, budget formulae (Halpern et al., 2017 Raco 2016). This chapter has argued that the urban world is never stable, but that we need to conceptualise it as more than a world of fluid processes, day-to-day interactions, post-politics, overwhelming neoliberalism and fragile assemblages. In particular, it has emphasised the need to refocus on modes of governance: even incomplete, or chaotic (Gandy, 2006), they have long-term consequences for the inhabitants and governing failures may have severe negative effects (e.g. housing shortages, low levels of educational attainment, crime, low productivity, health). However, learning from political sociologists, and taking politics seriously as a specialised field of social activities, it is also clear that there is nothing inherently good about politics. The state apparatus may support violence and the extraction of wealth for the benefit of predatory elites. Political elites may try to expand political regulations in order to strengthen control or to extract resources from other social and economic fields for no other reason than the accumulation of political power. And even if politics is related to the construction of an order, political elites may have the contingent interest to engage in polarising (usually ethnic) conflicts and produce momentary urban disorder. As the chapter has stressed, the democratic question of citizens’ participation and the democratisation of political processes is central for the future of many urban spaces. There is a now a wealth of democratic experimentations that have taken place all over the world to complement various forms of social mobilisations and political participation. Social media are making many things (processes and developments) more ‘legible’ and ‘visible’, from police violence to the Panama papers. Due to transforming experiments and new forms of mobilisation, however tiny, as resources for collective action, policy implementation is always challenging existing interests, the forces of clientelism and

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corruption. In some contexts, in relation to national policies, millions of urban dwellers have come out of poverty, in particular in China and Brazil, for instance. Slowly, international NGOs and international networks are having an impact (not always positive) on heath, education or urban development in Pnom Penh or in different African cities. In Dhaka, the international campaign against labour exploitation and the dangers of old factory buildings is having an impact on labour laws and environmental norms. By contrast, massive poverty, eviction and the ruling of gangs or warlords still prevail in Somalia, in the large-scale slums of Mumbai, Cairo or Rio, in the social housing estates of Detroit, Glasgow, Paris or Moscow. A second issue is raised by the limits of political regulation. In many large cities, many services are provided by large firms. The rise of large transnational firms, associated with financial institutions, is probably the most important feature of contemporary capitalism. These large firms and financial institutions have become crucial in building all the infrastructure which is needed in many metropolises (Lorrain, 2014). They have accumulated a huge amount of resources, political and financial expertise, and technical solutions. The construction of huge utilities requires massive collective action and capacity and massive amounts of funding, engaging the resources of various urban regions for decades. These firms also have the resources to engage in profitable deals with political leaders. There is a widespread move by such firms to support transnational rules and to avoid local democratic decision processes or tax regulations. The rescaling of law contributes to undermining urban governance capacity and political processes. Many cities and urban regions are heavily in debt to financial services and infrastructure, dependent upon financial markets and with a poor capacity to raise tax on the richest groups and largest firms. Many scholars stress that the rise of financial capitalism and the making of an international liberal economic order are undermining political capacity; in other words, they are contributing to the shrinking of political regulations. The point has been vigorously made for the nation state in Europe and the United States (Schäfer & Streeck, 2013, Jacobs & King, 2009). It also applies to urban governments. The rise of digital cities (the digital skin of the city (Rabari & Storper, 2014)) is potentially leading to different ways to govern, to exercise political authority. Cities become concentrations of technologies, censors, data-producing devices, automatic instruments and algorithms. Urban governance is inseparable from the proliferation of tools and instruments which constitute management technologies that are invisible yet structuring. Beyond strategic or political decisions, it is the design and usage of instruments that steer the capacity of action in cities that are important. The production of big data leads to the development of automatic instruments to pilot cities, sometimes contracted out to large firms organising services and their delivery in the ‘most effective way’, as if there were no political choices: The smart city, driven by digital technology, is poised to replace the typical networked city of the industrial era, whose success was built on its hard infrastructure, from roads to water supply and sanitation systems, not only as a technological optimum but also as a social and political project. (Picon, 2015)

Many digital urban developments are already in place in many cities and influence the efficiency of flux, the aggregation of data. In relation to the sociology of science and technology, many questions are raised about the transformation of services, the provision

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of collective goods, the implementation of public policies, the new hybrid nature of logistics and utilities, the active role of prosumers in the coproduction of value and the sharing of planning knowledge – and the making of new bureaucracies, the privatisation of data, and different exclusionary processes (Hajer, Dassen, 2014). Two models are put forward: the classic ‘Big Brother is watching you’, where centralising systems are put in place to gather data, optimise management, develop even more top-down processes, the great fantasies of engineers and technocrats to rationalise unruly cities. In many way the hyperrational metropolis would no longer be urban! The second model stresses horizontal networks, bottom-up processes, innovation, a shared and collaborative economy, decentralised deliberation. Finally, the rise of big data is rapidly and profoundly transforming the rules of the game of governance. Myriads of apps or complex systems are elaborated in order to take decisions and to contribute to the governance of urban areas based upon complex algorithms. From Google to IBM, from Alibaba to Amazon, large firms are accumulating data to deliver services, to produce an infrastructure, and/or to control the population and its behaviour. The exercise of authority in the urban context has classically been in part different from the national level. The Canadian political theorist Warren Magnusson (2013) has developed a strong argument around the opposition between state political authority and the politics of urbanism organised more around horizontal networks, collective action, forms of deliberation (Hajer Wagenaar, 2003). Without too much reification of this opposition, there are attempts to create those forms of collective action and more deliberative forms of urban governance. The growing salience of the environmental question, the visibility of risk (earthquakes in Istanbul and Kyoto, Hurricane Sandy in New York, the rise of sea level, air pollution in Beijing, etc.), are stressing interdependencies and the need for collective action. Climate change may become, slowly, a major trigger to transform modes of exercise of political authority, including the creation of different modes of exercising some collective constraint.

Notes  1  This chapter owes much to the discussion within the WHIG research project (What is governed and not governed in large metropolises in Mexico, Saõ Paolo, Paris and London, and Milan). Special thanks to Eduardo Marques, Vicente Ugalde, Mike Raco, Claire Colomb, John Tomaney, Charlotte Halpern, Thomas Aguilera, Francesca Artioli and Alberta Andreotti. Special thanks also to Tommaso Vitale for his comments and day-to-day intellectual companionship on these questions. Thanks to the editors for valuable comments.  2  The chapter does not discuss the field of urban politics as it is mostly dominated by US pluralism following Robert Dahl and later Clarence Stone and the analysis of urban regimes. See Mossberger et al. (2012).  3  For a different view, see the global suburbanism project coordinated by Roger Keil (see Hamel & Keil, 2015).  4  The phrase is borrowed from the late English political scientist Paul Hirst.  5  Within the International Sociological Association, the research committee dealing with urban and local questions was the ‘Community Studies’ Research Committee. In 1970, the Marxist ‘young Turks’ of urban sociology created Research Committee 21 on the sociology of urban and regional development. This group (Enzo Mingione, Edmond Préteceille, Manuel Castells, Christopher Pickvance, Michael Harloe) then launched the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research in 1977.  6  The literature on political ecology has been crucial in underlining those dynamics (Swyngedouw, 2015).  7  Simone (2010, p. 3).  8  See Fourchard (2011a) for a critique of Koolhas.

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13 Limits to South Africa’s ‘Right to the City’: Prospects for and beyond Urban Commoning Patrick Bond

Introduction As political processes in South Africa become increasingly fluid, with the ruling party’s hold over municipal management increasingly tenuous, ideological questions are again becoming vital to pose. For example, is demanding the ‘Right to the City’ the ideal ­narrative for oppressed and otherwise excluded people as they relate to the urban process, given the liberal terrain on which rights are adjudicated? Or is a discursive strategy based on a collectivizing ‘Commons’ orientation preferable? Would an accompanying organizing strategy ideally have more of a national, not local focus (albeit one acutely conscious of global forces that compel cities to shrink their social policy horizons in favour of attracting foreign direct investment)? South Africa is a highly politicized society in which progressive movements outside the traditional national liberation movement are currently regrouping with unprecedented vigour, so how might a new South African left frame contemporary urban problems, particularly in terms of services such as water and sanitation that are so differentially applied across the cityscapes? Urban social change has occurred in fits and starts in South Africa, and with enormous implications for social reproduction. Dating back to the 1920s, after all, the anti-apartheid movement’s strengths were found in explicitly urban (and urbanizing) social and labour collectivities, unlike anti-colonial movements in the rest of the continent which mainly had a stronger rural base. After the state’s 1960s repression of civil society, urban trade unions began reorganizing during the 1970s and by the mid-1980s most cities had powerful ‘civic associations’ based in the black townships. By the early 1990s these formed a network of several hundred called the South African National Civic Organization (Sanco), and most civic leaders were also labour leaders. Sanco’s loose federal form experienced perpetual problems of movement coordination, yet nearly all the urban ­civics pursued an agenda that conjoined democratization, deracialization and developmental

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demands (Mayekiso 1996). These were in part reflected in the 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme adopted by the African National Congress (ANC) and its Alliance partners as a governance mandate, especially with detailed visions of access to decommodified housing and associated services. The various promises relating to urban restructuring were progressive and ambitious – but were nearly universally broken once the ANC took power (Bond and Khosa 1999). South Africa’s cities had, by the early 21st century, become deracialized, but like everywhere else, they faced re-segregation due to urban accumulation-by-dispossession (including sprawl and sporadic gentrification) partly driven by extreme real estate speculation (e.g. a 389 per cent property price increase from 1997 to 2008, more than double the world’s second and third highest bubbles, in Ireland and Spain) (Bond 2014). Superexploitative class-forming processes and class-exclusionary practices, including a new wave of migrant labourers, were the logical urban accompaniment of macro-­neoliberalism. The former Minister of Intelligence, Ronnie Kasrils (2013), termed Nelson Mandela’s 1990s deals with big business ‘Faustian Pacts’; they certainly represented a ‘selling of the soul’ and also the material interests of the ANC’s urban middle-to-lower-income constituencies. By the time of the 2016 municipal elections, residents of the largest cities were rapidly losing patience with the liberation movement in part because the ‘Faustian Pacts’ decisively limited prospects for urban justice and rational spatial restructuring. The limitations had already become clear during ANC negotiations with the apartheid regime from 1990 to 1994 – in which World Bank ‘reconnaissance missions’ shaped future urban policy (Bond 2000) – followed by Mandela’s 1994–1999 government and Thabo Mbeki’s 1999–2008 reign. There followed the era of Jacob Zuma, a populist who survived prosecution on more than 750 counts of corruption two weeks before his 2009 election, due to technicalities. In the process, the ANC’s commitment to its radical 1955 Freedom Charter was abrogated; nationalization of the mines, banks and monopoly capital was taken off the agenda, along with prospects for state intervention in shaping the urban form. Property rights enshrined in the 1996 Constitution prevented densification, much less thorough-going racial desegregation. The country’s urban form was tweaked using mega-projects in order to make cities more export competitive and tourist intensive (e.g. with vast airport, rail and port investments), to commercialize highway traffic (on the main roads around Johannesburg and Pretoria) or to construct new (white elephant) stadiums for the 2010 World Cup. Mega-projects also supported accumulation for leading construction firms: the underperforming Gautrain for elite travellers in the Johannesburg metropolis; the Lesotho Highlands Water Project supplying Johannesburg water; Port Elizabeth’s under-capacity Export Processing Zone at Coega; new s­ candal-ridden coalfired power stations mainly supplying the highly subsidized ‘Energy Intensive Users Group’ of three-dozen mining and smelting corporations; and the facilitation of ­post-1990 edge cities such as Sandton (Johannesburg) and Umhlanga (Durban). The construction industry rewarded the state for these generous contracts with a degree of corporate ­collusion and price fixing so extreme as to result in unusually widespread prosecutions and fines (Bond 2014). Reflecting this environment of cronyism, the main Johannesburg corporations engaged in such extreme capital flight that the Washington non-governmental organization Global Financial Integrity (Kar and Spanjers 2015) named South Africa the country seventh most prone to illicit financial flows in 2015 in absolute terms, with an average of nearly $21 ­billion in annual losses over the prior decade. The propensity to mis-invoice, transfer

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price or simply evade taxes was one reason that Johannesburg’s commercial elite was in 2014 considered the most corrupt corporate class on Earth according to the business consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers. Drawing on its survey, The Sunday Times labelled South African management ‘the world leader in money-laundering, bribery and corruption, procurement fraud, asset misappropriation, and cybercrime’, with 77 per cent of all internal fraud committed by senior and middle management (FM Fox 2014; Hosken 2014). In 2016, PricewaterhouseCoopers (2016) made the same calculation, finding South African corporates again leading the world in corruption, with a 69 per cent ­economic crime rate. Meanwhile, South African social policy and state services suffered cutbacks in financial ambition – for example, the main child support grant was reduced by 26 per cent in 1996 (from the then equivalent of $37 to $27/month) and steadily lost value due to underinflation annual increases (down to $23 by 2016) – even while many more people gained access (the number receiving monthly grants soared from fewer than 3 million in 1994 to 17 million two decades later, out of 55 million residents). As a result of such ‘tokenistic’ social policy, after two decades of liberation, Statistics South Africa found that, using a poverty baseline of approximately $1.50/day (in mid-2016 currency terms still terribly inadequate, about 50 per cent lower than the ‘upper bound poverty line’), the poverty rate was 53 per cent. When Josh Budlender, Ingrid Woolard and Murray Leibbrandt (2015) redid the calculations, they determined the rate to be 63 per cent, far higher than the 45 per cent level of 1994. Over the first two decades of freedom, market income inequality rose from a Gini coefficient level close to 0.6 to what the World Bank (2014) measured with 2011 data at 0.77, the world’s highest. Unemployment soared from 16 to 25 per cent from 1994 to 2014, and adding those who gave up looking for jobs brought the rate to 35 per cent (Bond 2014). At the same time, extremely high increases in fees for consuming basic state services (especially electricity and water) began to kick in, creating the conditions for intense urban unrest. Johannesburg was named by UN-HABITAT (2013) as the world’s ‘most unequal major city’.

Divergent double-movement responses Urban social movements did not respond to the neoliberal attack with a consistent ‘Polanyian’ double movement, mainly because of confusing political subjectivities. There were diverse philosophies, analyses, strategies, tactics and alliances in play. As Sanco’s mid-1990s demobilization unfolded while a series of neoliberal urban policies were adopted, violent ‘service delivery protests’ became ubiquitous, starting in Johannesburg and quickly moving as far afield as several small Eastern Cape towns during the late 1990s (Bond 2000). Sanco was by then so closely under the ANC’s wing as to be termed a ‘lapdog’, not urban ‘watchdog’, and the Congress of SA Trade Unions and the SA Communist Party also remained steadfast ANC allies. In the resulting void on the left, several ‘new social movements’ rose in the main cities from 2000 to 2003. There was a general expectation that they would muster the strength to network nationally, to increasingly cross-sectoral connections (e.g. AIDS, water and electricity), and to oppose the most extreme features of South African capitalism. These included social movements which rose against the state’s refusal to provide AIDS medicines to millions

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of HIV+ citizens (at the time, this cost $10,000 per person annually until the Treatment Action Campaign intervened in a 1999–2003 struggle); rural inequality (the Landless People’s Movement emerged in 2001–2002 to celebrate the next-door neighbour Zimbabwe’s ‘jambanja’ occupations); apartheid-era debt repayment and profit repatriation (with the Jubilee 2000 movement and its allies unsuccessfully demanding reparations from multinational corporations, taking the case as far as the US Supreme Court); environmental justice (in a series of discrete campaigns that were occasionally networked, increasingly against mining industry exploitation and urban pollution); and access to urban development (Bond 2002; 2014). One outstanding success resulted: AIDS treatment was, from 2004, provided free in state clinics, using generic medicines won in a spectacular global struggle against intellectual property rights, in what is the prime example of social Commoning aside from the Internet. However, most expectations about the new movements proved romantic and misguided (Bond, Desai and Ngwane 2013). Momentum from the three most fiercely anti-neoliberal urban movements – the Anti-Privatization (APF) of m ­ etropolitan Johannesburg, the Cape Town Anti-Evictions Campaign and the Durban Concerned Citizens Forum – could not be maintained, with only the APF lasting through the decade but then also suffering terminal decline due in part to what its former treasurer Dale Mckinley (2012) acknowledged were ‘egoism of leadership, often lax individual and organizational accountability and a failure to fully confront unequal gender relations as well as the link between a macro-nationalist discourse and xenophobic attitudes/­practices’ Understanding the political context was important, insisted Mckinley (2012): The experience of the APF at the community level was that Zuma’s politics created both short-term confusion and a variegated ‘turn’ away from independent movementcommunity politics and struggle towards institutionalized party politics and a creeping (Zuma-inspired) social conservatism. Together with the failures of the Zuma government to deliver on its legion of promises to the poor, this forced much of the APF’s constituency/membership (even more so than before) into a narrower survivalist mode and engendered a politics that easily gravitated towards a mode of individualism and entrepreneurial engagement.

That survivalist, entrepreneurial mode of atomistic activity in the cities is, however, sometimes celebrated by those most closely attuned to 21st-century urban processes. Most optimistically, AbdouMaliq Simone (2004: 407–408) uses Johannesburg’s inner city to frame his ‘People as Infrastructure’ argument, about the incessantly flexible, mobile, and provisional intersections of residents that operate ­without clearly delineated notions of how the city is to be inhabited and used. These intersections, particularly in the last two decades, have depended on the ability of residents to engage complex combinations of objects, spaces, persons, and practices. These conjunctions become an infrastructure – a platform providing for and reproducing life in the city … a specific economy of perception and collaborative practice is constituted through the capacity of individual actors to circulate across and become familiar with a broad range of spatial, residential, economic, and transactional positions.

The creative and often collective anarchy found in urban South Africa is also commended by leading scholars at the University of Cape Town’s African Centre for Cities (ACC),

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who anticipate that these energies can be nurtured and channelled by sensitive urban designers within the framework of a ‘developmental state’. This stance is in direct contrast to the traditional urban socialist perspective which denies the logic of such claims and instead seeks to overthrow what is perceived to be a neoliberal state. The South African state (from national to provincial to local levels), after all, mainly serves a power bloc conjoining multinational corporations with clientelist petty accumulators (‘tenderpreneurs’ in the local lingo). Rejecting such pessimism, two of the highest profile South African urbanists, Sue Parnell and ACC Director Edgar Pieterse, advocate a wider but more nuanced understanding of what a rights-based approach to development might entail in urban settlement policy and practice … deepening must be linked to rights-based advocacy to achieve better socioeconomic outcomes in our cities … we part ways with Bond, the Municipal Services Project and the one-dimensional service protest tactics of many of the civics who perceive the progressive agenda only in contradistinction to macro-economic policy and the impact of neoliberalism’s increasingly privatized service roll out. The allocation of free basic services to all households is a constitutional right in South Africa. Yet, even if they wanted to, City governments are unable to roll out service subsidies to the poor because they lack the institutional capacity to do so. For example, in 2001 the City of Cape Town came face to face with the extent of institutional barriers in its efforts to apply a uniform service subsidy ­allocation to the cities’ poor though a programme of indigent support. (Parnell and Pieterse 2010: 150–154)

According to this standpoint, by working within and around (not against) the state, it will be possible to meet urban residents’ needs via participation, institutional improvements and stronger cross-class alliances. Wits University planner Marie Huchzermeyer (2009: 3–4) argues that the South African Constitution mandates an equal right to the city …. Urban Reform in this sense is a pragmatic commitment to gradual but radical change towards grassroots autonomy as a basis for equal rights …. Three components of the right to the city – equal participation in decisionmaking, equal access to and use of the city and equal access to basic services – have all been brought before the Constitutional Court through a coalition between ­grassroots social movements and a sympathetic middle class network.

While condemning the global and local establishment’s appropriation of ‘Right to the City’ rhetoric, nevertheless Huchzermeyer (2013: 8) echoes Simone in drawing out Henri Lefebvre’s Urban Revolution approval of a culture in which ‘every place becomes ­multifunctional, polyvalent, transfunctional, with an incessant turnover of functions; where groups take control of spaces for expressive actions and constructions, which are soon destroyed’. Informal or shack settlements make a compelling example, she argues, and her main reference point for the ‘Right to the City’ is a well-known Durban- and Cape-Town-based shack-dweller organization, Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM). That movement boasts impressive accomplishments in defending its turf against vicious political and economic forces aimed at displacement (including success in an injunction against a provincial displacement law in the Constitutional Court), but also has been criticized for lack of organic agency (Steyn 2016), especially by an insider whistle-blower (Mdlalose 2014). The Durban AbM’s endorsement of the centre–right Democratic Alliance in the

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2014 national election was an indication not of ‘living Communism’ (Pithouse 2014) but instead of desperation alliance-building with the same political party that in Cape Town was AbM’s main enemy (that error led AbM to retreat from formal electoral politics in 2016, but it will hopefully continue to defend its members from the degradation so common in Durban). The danger, as Rod Burgess (1978) had pointed out long ago, is the neoliberal–populist transition from a dweller-control ideology to petty commodity housing, now facilitated by more urgent, yet uncritical rights talk and what Erik Swyngedouw (2008) concludes can readily become a ‘neoliberal tyranny of participatory governance’. Whether in shacks, townships, inner city slums or South Africa’s other stressed urban and peri-urban settings, there continued a great deal of uncritical promotion of the language and practice of urban human rights within South African constitutional boundaries. In reality, though, possibilities waned for constructing a genuine ‘Right to the City’ based on the individualist pillars of rights talk found in the Constitution. A related problem evident among the thousands of urban protests was the persistently localistic focus of most urban activists. For obvious reasons related to the way apartheid had used zoning boundaries as race-based barriers to mobility, the township or shack settlement remains the immediate terrain of struggle for most community activists, even though so much of the national budget and macroeconomic programme of export orientation can be blamed for so many of the country’s urban problems. (In contrast, only when #FeesMustFall student protesters took their demonstrations against high university tuition to the national scale, in October 2015, was the ruling party sufficiently shaken to concede to immediate national demands for a 0 per cent fee hike the following year.) What is also missing in South Africa’s urban political sphere, exemplified in the stories Simone tells of opportunistic daily practices, is a coherent ideology: specifically an urban, anti-racist, feminist eco-socialism that can transcend intra- and inter-urban competitive tendencies and generate the kinds of social movements and political parties that, for example, Southern European city protests appeared to have spawned in the 2011–2014 period. Yet in the years ahead, there is nevertheless a distinct possibility for utilizing the formal Commoning of South African activists’ water and electricity decommodification initiatives, especially in Soweto (the huge township on the edge of Johannesburg), for the purpose of developing models for broader political strategy. That will require the major intra-activist differences between localist–autonomist and eco-socialist forces to be openly, constructively negotiated as these struggles again come to a head once austerity is more forcefully applied (to illustrate, the Treasury cut its 2016–2017 water spending by 12 per cent in real terms, in spite of widespread drought). Clearing away the distraction of rights talk during contestations of neoliberal policy and capital accumulation is one step along that path, which, if the argument below is convincing, may lead from the ‘Right to the City’ to the Commons to eco-socialism.

Commoning as alternative to urban neoliberalism and constitutional liberalism Before delving further into the South African case, consider more of the tensions that have emerged between urban neoliberalism, liberal rights talk and radical Commoning in conceptual terms. Strategists of social justice have become more familiar with the notion

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of Commoning in recent years, especially following the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics awarded to the late Elinor Ostrom based on her book Governing the Commons (1990). On the left, there is awareness of the problem of Ostrom’s contradictions and ambivalences; after all, she laboured as an academic within the conservative discipline of ­political science in the United States, where she played a heroic role in contesting ­neoliberal Homo economicus dogma, in which rational actors are merely individually self-­interested. Ostrom thus was compelled to ask rather limited questions based largely on efficiency criteria, and so her legacy requires us to go ‘Beyond Ostrom’ (i.e. not ‘against’ but ‘through’). Scale is of great importance here, for the limitation of around 15,000 people served by a Commons (Ostrom’s highest level of collaboration) is obviously inadequate for the required societal-scale changes that will be required for the next mode of production, after capitalism is fully exhausted. David Harvey (2012: 69) sets out the problem in this way: As we ‘jump scales’ (as geographers like to put it), so the whole nature of the Commons problem and the prospects of finding a solution change dramatically. What looks like a good way to resolve problems at one scale does not hold at another scale. Even worse, patently good solutions at one scale (the ‘local,’ say) do not necessarily aggregate up (or cascade down) to make for good solutions at another scale (the global, for example).

The single most portentous site for societal reconstruction with scale politics as a central question is the giant metropolis that characterizes late capitalism. There are increasing struggles for social and economic justice, as well as ecological rebalancing, going on in cities across the world. To some extent these reflect the campaigns by political forces to influence what happens in a national capital city, but in a great many sites, the catalysing force that generates unrest is specific to the urban character of the site of struggle. As a result, the idea of a ‘right to the city’ as a rallying cry has gained popularity, for good reasons. It potentially offers a profound critique of neoliberal urban exclusion. In one field especially, namely water and sanitation services, the right is increasingly adjudicated in courts, and South Africa has had the most advanced case to date, one that lasted from 2003 to 2009. However, because of its intrinsic liberal limitations, it ended in defeat, reminding of the warning by Karen Bakker (2007: 447) that a narrow juristic approach to rights can be ‘individualistic, anthropocentric, statecentric, and compatible with private sector provision’. Attempts to expand liberal socio-economic rights through incremental strategies may offer victories at the margins, but some of the lessons of the 2009 defeat bear close examination in order that social movements do not make the ­mistake of considering rights as a foundational philosophical stance. Still, most urban radical activists have at some stage embraced rights talk, perhaps because there is propaganda value and mobilizing potential in accusing opponents of ­violating rights, and also as a result of the waning respectability of more explicitly socialist narratives. In 2004–2005, the ‘World Charter for the Right to the City’ (2005) was developed in Quito, Barcelona and Porto Alegre by networks associated with the World Social Forum. To illustrate using the case of water, its 12th article made the following points:

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RIGHT TO WATER AND TO ACCESS AND SUPPLY OF DOMESTIC AND URBAN PUBLIC SERVICES 1 Cities should guarantee for all their citizens permanent access to public services of potable water, sanitation, waste removal, energy and telecommunications ­services, and facilities for health care, e­ ducation, basic-goods supply, and recreation, in coresponsibility with other public or private ­bodies, in accordance with the legal framework established in international rights and by each country. 2 In regard to public services, cities should guarantee accessible social fees and a­ dequate service for all persons including vulnerable persons or groups and the unemployed – even in the case of privatization of public services predating adoption of this Charter. 3 Cities should commit to guarantee that public services depend on the administrative level closest to the population, with citizen participation in their management and fiscal oversight. These services should remain under a legal regimen as public goods, impeding their privatization. 4 Cities should establish systems of social control over the quality of the services ­provided by public or private entities, in particular relative to quality control, cost determination, and attention to the public.

Although one might argue that far too many concessions are made to water commercialization (i.e. supply ‘by private entities’), this is a reflection of the reality that too many activists confront: using weak liberal tools to pry concessions from neoliberal municipalities. The arguments above require reforms that pay close attention to both technical and socially just (if not necessarily ecological) considerations about water services, as well as subsidiarity and community control principles. But as part of a broader right to the city, can the right to water be recast in more radical terms set out by urban revolutionaries such as Lefebvre and Harvey? That framing, in Lefebvre’s (1996: 154) class-­ conscious understanding of community, meant that: Only groups, social classes and class fractions capable of revolutionary initiative can take over and realize to fruition solutions to urban problems. It is from these social and political forces that the renewed city will become the oeuvre. The first thing to do is to defeat currently dominant strategies and ideologies …. In itself reformist, the strategy of urban renewal becomes ‘inevitably’ revolutionary, not by force of circumstance, but against the established order. Urban strategy resting on the science of the city needs a social support and political forces to be effective. It cannot act on its own. It cannot but depend on the presence and action of the working class, the only one able to put an end to a segregation directed essentially against it. Only this class, as a class, can decisively contribute to the reconstruction of centrality destroyed by a strategy of ­segregation found again in the menacing form of centres of decision-making.

There is today, no one ‘class’ that can destroy class segregation. Still, at a time in South Africa (and everywhere else) when debate is intensifying about the alliances required to overthrow urban neoliberalism, as discussed below, we should heed Lefebvre’s suggestion about the centrality of the working class to these struggles. The broadest definition of that class is now appropriate, as contradictions within capital accumulation play out in cities, in the process generating a potentially unifying class struggle, as Harvey (2008) argues: A process of displacement and what I call ‘accumulation by dispossession’ lie at the core of urbanization under capitalism. It is the mirror-image of capital absorption

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through urban redevelopment, and is giving rise to numerous conflicts over the ­capture of valuable land from low-income populations that may have lived there for many years …. Since the urban process is a major channel of surplus use, establishing democratic management over its urban deployment constitutes the right to the city. Throughout capitalist history, some of the surplus value has been taxed, and in socialdemocratic phases the proportion at the state’s disposal rose significantly. The ­neoliberal project over the last thirty years has been oriented towards privatizing that control.

The right to the city is therefore not foremost about liberal constitutionalism, but as a vehicle for political empowerment, Harvey (2008) continues: One step towards unifying these struggles is to adopt the right to the city as both working slogan and political ideal, precisely because it focuses on the question of who commands the necessary connection between urbanization and surplus production and use. The democratization of that right, and the construction of a broad social movement to enforce its will is imperative if the dispossessed are to take back the control which they have for so long been denied, and if they are to institute new modes of urbanization.

Rights with neoliberal and liberal framings Contrast such radical analysis with a near-simultaneous technicist statement – in a 2009 booklet, Systems of Cities: Integrating National and Local Policies, Connecting Institutions and Infrastructure – from what many consider to be the brain of urban ­neoliberalism, the World Bank (2009), dating to the ‘New Urban Management’ policy of the mid-1980s (for the implications of this approach in South Africa, see Bond 2000). The Bank (2009) still bragged that ‘many developing country governments and donors adopted an “enabling markets” approach to housing, based on policies encouraged by the World Bank’. The core urban neoliberal policy strategy introduced more decisive ­property rights to land, cost recovery for water, electricity and municipal services, fewer subsidies within state housing institutions and expanded mortgage credit. On the latter component, private housing finance, the Bank’s earlier ‘hope has been that pushing this and other aspects of the formal sector housing systems down market would eventually reach lower income households’. But it did not work, the Bank (2009) finally admitted: Despite some successes, affordability problems persist, and informality in the housing and land sectors abounds. By the mid-2000s, it became clear that the enabling markets approach was far too sanguine about the difficulties in creating well-functioning housing markets where everyone is adequately housed for a reasonable share of ­ income on residential land at a reasonable price. The general principles of enabling markets are still valid, but must be combined with sensible policies and pragmatic approaches to urban planning and targeted subsidies for the urban poor …. Experience suggests that only a few regulations are critical: minimum plot sizes and minimum apartment sizes, limitations on floor area ratios, zoning plans that limit the type of use and the intensity of use of urban land, and land subdivision ratios of developable and saleable land in new greenfield developments.

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Unlike Harvey, the Bank has virtually nothing at all to say about ‘human rights’ (except property rights and ‘rights of way’ for new roads and rail), and nothing at all to say about urban social movements. The closest is the document’s reference to ‘community-based organizations’ which operate in ‘partnerships’ in Jamaica and Brazil to ‘combine microfinance, land tenure, crime and violence prevention, investments in social infrastructure for day care, youth training, and health care with local community action and physical upgrading of slums’. Civil society in its most civilized form hence lubricates markets (even though it is evident that microfinance is replete with literally fatal flaws, such as the 250,000 debt-related farmer suicides in India between 2005 and 2010) (Bond 2011). Such NGOs are well known, as Sri Lankan Jesuit radical Paul Caspersz (2002) puts it, as ladles in the soup kitchens of the so-called poverty reduction programmes of western capitalism. Or, to change the metaphor, the NGOs can opt to be the pegs holding up the so-called ‘safety nets’ of capitalism. This means that the NGOs can opt to look after the night soil of capitalism. It is the role that most NGOs, some noises they make to the contrary notwithstanding, have shown that they are most willing to fulfil.

If NGOs readily serve neoliberalism, then the Bank’s (2009) discursive strategy leaves states with more scope to support markets, because rapid Third World urbanization generates market failures: ‘The general principles of enabling markets are still valid, but must be combined with sensible policies and pragmatic approaches to urban planning and targeted subsidies for the urban poor.’ Recall that, from the late 1980s, the World Bank had conclusively turned away from public housing and public services as central objectives of its lending and policy advice. Instead, the Bank drove its municipal partners to enhance the productivity of urban capital as it flowed through urban land markets (now enhanced by titles and registration), through housing finance systems (featuring solely private sector delivery and an end to state subsidies), through the much celebrated (but extremely exploitative) informal economy, through (often newly privatized) urban ­services such as transport, sewage, water and even primary health care services (via intensified cost recovery), and the like. Recall, too, the rising barriers to access associated with the 1990s’ turn to commercialized (sometimes privatized) urban water, electricity and transport services, and with the 2000s’ real estate bubble. As a result, no matter the rhetoric now favouring ‘targeted subsidies’, there are few cases where state financing has been sufficient to overcome the market-based barriers to the ‘Right to the City’. These contradictions are especially important where social and natural processes overlap, such as in the water and sanitation sector. During the 1990s, the ‘Integrated Water Resource Management’ perspective began to focus on the nexus of bulk supply and retail water provision – in which water becomes an economic good first and foremost – but only to a very limited extent did it link consumption processes (especially overconsumption by firms and wealthy households) to ecosystem sustainability. Hence the rights of those affected by water extraction, especially those displaced by mega-dams that supplied cities like Johannesburg, have typically been ignored. This is where liberal rights talk appears so attractive. Since the United Nations (UN) Declaration of Human Rights, the idea that all individuals have certain basic human rights, or entitlements to political, social, or economic goods (such as food, water, etc.), has become a key framework for politics and political discourse. In appealing to human rights, groups and individuals attempt to legitimize their cause, and to accuse

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their opponents of ‘denial of rights’. As water is essential to human life, social conflict ­surrounding water is now framed in terms of the ‘human right’ to water. In this ‘culture of rights’, social groups use ‘rights talk’ as a blanket justification for the provision of water; in some cases, however, even popularly elected governments dispute their exact responsibilities for water provision and management. South Africa’s history is instructive. During apartheid, water was a relatively lowcost luxury for white South Africans, with per capita enjoyment of home swimming pools at among the world’s highest levels. In contrast, black South Africans largely suffered vulnerability in urban townships and in the segregated ‘Bantustan’ system of rural homelands, which supplied male migrant workers to the white-owned mines, factories and plantations. These rural homelands had weak or non-existent water and irrigation infrastructures, as the apartheid government directed investment to the white-dominated cities and suburbs, and also in much more limited volumes to black urban townships. After 1994, racial apartheid ended, but South Africa immediately confronted international trends endorsing municipal cost recovery, commercialization (in which state agencies converted water into a commodity that must be purchased at the cost of production), and even the prospect of long-term municipal water management contracts roughly ­equivalent to privatization. At the same time, across the world, commercialization of water was being introduced so as to address classic problems associated with state control: inefficiencies, excessive administrative centralization, lack of competition, unaccounted for consumption, weak billing and political interference. Across a broad spectrum, the commercialization options have included private outsourcing and the management or partial/full ownership of the service. At least seven institutional steps can be taken towards privatization: short-term service contracts, short/ medium-term management contracts, medium/long-term leases, long-term concessions, long-term Build (Own) Operate Transfer contracts, full permanent divestiture, and an additional category of community provision which also exists in some settings. Aside from French and British water corporations, the most aggressive promoters of these strategies are a few giant aid agencies, especially USAID, the British Department for International Development and the World Bank. As a result of pressure to commercialize, water was soon priced beyond the reach of many poor South African households, resulting in more than a million people (275,000 households) disconnected each year due to inability to pay by 2003 (Muller 2004; Bond 2006). The South African Constitution, however, included socio-economic clauses meant to do away with the injustices of apartheid, including, ‘Everyone has the right to have access to sufficient food and water’ and ‘Everyone has the right to an environment that is not harmful to their health or well-being’ (Republic of South Africa, 1996, s27(1)(b)). The Water Services Act 108 of 1997 put these sentiments into law as ‘the main object’: ‘the right of access to basic water supply and the right to basic sanitation necessary to secure sufficient water and an environment not harmful to human health or well-being’ (Republic of South Africa, 1996, s2(a)). Grassroots water activists seized on these guarantees to clean water and their discourses soon invoked rights talk. They insisted upon a social entitlement to an acceptable supply of clean water, amounting to at least 50 litres supplied per person per day, delivered via a metering system based on credit, not ‘pre-payment’. The surge in confidence felt by radicals when invoking the liberal rights narrative left their neoliberal critics bemoaning a new ‘culture of entitlement’ in which the government was expected to solve all social ills (Madywabe 2005). However, because the

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commercialization of water was initially viewed with great enthusiasm by the new South African government (Bond 2002), sites like Soweto became ideological battlegrounds. The shift to a market-based system of water access was protested in various ways, including informal/illegal reconnections to official water supplies, destruction of prepayment meters, and even a Constitutional Court challenge over water services from 2003 to 2009 which ended in an ignominious defeat for the activists.

Limits to Sowetans’ water rights and constitutionalism The objective of those promoting water rights should be to make water primarily an ecosocial, rather than a commercial, good. Including eco-systemic processes in discussions of water rights potentially links consumption processes (including overconsumption by firms and wealthy households) to environmental sustainability. However, the lead lawyers developing strategy in the seminal case, Mazibuko et al v. Johannesburg Water (which was adjudicated from 2003 to 2009; Constitutional Court of South Africa 2009), decided to maintain only the narrowest perspective of household water usage, since to link with other issues would have complicated the simple requests for relief. Hence, given the lawyers’ defeat, the most fruitful strategic approach may be to move beyond the ‘rights’ of consumption to ­reinstate a notion of the Commons which includes the broader hydropolitical systems in which water extraction, production, distribution, financing, consumption and disposal occur. The judges’ wariness of supporting social movements which requested even basic civil and political rights was on display on Human Rights Day, 21 March 2004. Just before the grand opening of the Constitutional Court’s new building in central Johannesburg, at the site of the old Fort Prison where Mandela had been incarcerated, APF activists called a march to demand their rights to water. They were specifically protesting against the installation of pre-paid water meters in Soweto by the French company Suez, which was running the city’s outsourced water company. City officials banned the peaceful protest on grounds of potential traffic disturbances – on a Sunday. The police arrested 52 activists and bystanders, some simply because they were wearing red shirts, and blocked travel of APF buses into Johannesburg. Neither the judges nor Mbeki – who attended the opening ceremony – uttered a word in the protesters’ defence, revealing the true extent of their underlying regard for civil and political rights. The country’s highest court had by then heard three major cases on socio-economic rights. The first, in 1997, led to the death of a man, 41-year-old Thiagraj Subramoney, who was denied renal kidney dialysis treatment because the judges deemed it too expensive. Inspired by the Constitution, Subramoney and his lawyers had insisted that ‘No one may be refused emergency medical treatment’ and that ‘Everyone has the right to life.’ Chief Justice Arthur Chaskalson replied, ‘The obligations imposed on the state by ­sections 26 and 27 in regard to access to housing, health care, food, water and social security are dependent upon the resources available for such purposes, and that the corresponding rights themselves are limited by reason of the lack of resources’ (Constitutional Court of South Africa, 1997). In part because Mandela agreed to repay apartheid foreign debt and because the South African state was cutting the corporate tax rate from 56 to 38 per cent from 1994 to 1999 (and then to 28 per cent by 2013), the ‘resources’ were not available. The day after the ruling, Subramoney’s plug was pulled and he died.

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The next high-profile Constitutional Court case on socio-economic rights was over emergency municipal services, in a lawsuit brought by plaintiff Irene Grootboom in her Cape Town ghetto of Wallacedene. Although she won, the outcome was not positive, for the Court decided simply that the 1994 Housing White Paper that was Housing Minister Joe Slovo’s last major initiative before he died of cancer was unconstitutional for not considering the needs of poor people. That document had as its main priority the ‘normalization of the market’ for housing in townships. By 2000, when the Grootboom case went to the Constitutional Court, the Slovo policy had left national, provincial and municipal housing authorities without a mandate and plan to supply emergency housing and associated services. The Court’s decision was, however, merely ‘negative’, for it slapped down existing policy for failing to meet constitutional standards. But the Court did not have the courage and self-mandate to prescribe the policies and practices that would be considered of minimal acceptability. As a result, Grootboom and her community remained as destitute as ever, and, by 2008, it was tragic yet also logical to read the headline ‘Grootboom dies homeless and penniless’, according to Pearlie Joubert (2008) reporting in the Mail&Guardian: Her legal representative at the time, Ismail Jamie, said the Grootboom decision was ‘undoubtedly one of the two or three most important judgements the Constitutional Court has made since its inception’. This week Jamie said that Grootboom’s death ‘and the fact that she died homeless shows how the legal system and civil society failed her. I am sorry that we didn’t do enough following-up after judgment was given in her favour. We should’ve done more. I feel a deep regret today,’ he said.

The third high-profile case was more encouraging. In 2001 the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) insisted that the drug nevirapine be offered to HIV-positive women who were pregnant in order to prevent transmission of the virus to their children. According to Harvard School of Public Health researchers: ‘More than 330,000 people died prematurely from HIV/AIDS between 2000 and 2005 due to the Mbeki government’s obstruction of life-saving treatment, and at least 35,000 babies were born with HIV infections that could have been prevented’ (Roeder 2009). One of the lawyers on the successful case, Geoff Budlender (2002), observed that this victory ‘was simply the conclusion of a battle that TAC had already won outside the courts, but with the skillful use of the courts as part of a broader struggle’. However, the limits of rights talk became evident in the fourth of the highest profile socio-economic rights cases, over the right to water. Activists in the Phiri neighbourhood of Soweto insisted upon a social entitlement to an acceptable supply of clean water, amounting to at least 50 litres per person per day and delivered via a metering system based on credit and not pre-payment meters. In October 2009, the Constitutional Court overturned a seminal finding in lower courts that human rights activists had hoped would substantially expand water access to poor people: Mazibuko et al v. Johannesburg Water. In the first ruling, Johannesburg High Court Judge Moroa Tsoka had found that pre-­payment meters were ‘unconstitutional and unlawful’, and ordered the city to provide each applicant and other residents with a ‘free basic water supply of 50 litres per person per day and the option of a metered supply installed at the cost of the City of Johannesburg’. Tsoka accused city officials of racism for imposing credit control via ­pre-payment ‘in the historically poor black areas and not the historically rich white areas’.

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He noted that meter installation apparently occurred ‘in terms of colour or geographical area’ (Bond and Dugard 2008; Dugard 2010a and 2010b; Danchin 2010). It was the first South African case to adjudicate the constitutional right of access to sufficient water. Johannesburg’s appeal was also joined by the national water ministry, and was based on the decision by Johannesburg officials, just a few weeks prior to Judge Tsoka’s decision, to retract the ANC promise of universal free basic water service. In the 2000 municipal election campaign, the ANC’s statement had been clear: ‘The ANC-led local government will provide all residents with a free basic amount of water, electricity and other municipal services so as to help the poor. Those who use more than the basic amounts, will pay for the extra they use.’ Initially, Johannesburg Water officials reinterpreted the ‘right to water’ mandate regressively by adopting a relatively steep-rising tariff curve. In this fee structure, all households received 6,000 litres per month for free, but were then faced with a much higher second block (i.e. the curve was convex upwards), in contrast to a concave-upwards curve starting with a larger lifeline block, which would have better served the interests of lower income residents. The dramatic increase in their per-unit charges in the second block meant that for many poor people there was no meaningful difference to their average monthly bills even after the first free 6,000 litres. Moreover, the marginal tariff for industrial/commercial users of water, while higher than residential, actually declined after large-volume consumption was reached. However, facing the lawsuit, and following the 2005 departure of the French water company Suez which set the original prices, there was scope for a slightly more redistributive and conservationist pricing system, and the 2008–2009 water price increases included very slight above-inflation rises for higher blocks of consumption. The impact of water price increases on consumption by poor people can be enormous. Durban’s ‘price elasticity’ – the negative impact of a price increase on consumption – was measured during the doubling of the real (after-inflation) water price from 1997 to 2004. For rich people, the price hike resulted in less than a 10 per cent reduction in use. In contrast, the impact of higher prices was mainly felt by low-income people (the bottom one-third of Durban’s bill-paying residents, in one study) who recorded a very high 0.55 price elasticity, compared with just 0.10 for the highest income third of the population (Bailey and Buckley 2005). Johannesburg and other cities’ data are not available but there is no reason to suspect the figures would be much different, and international evidence also bears out the excessive impact of high prices on poor people’s consumption (Strang 2004). Hence, ironically, as the constitutional ‘right to water’ was fulfilled through the state’s Free Basic Water policy starting in 2001, the result of price changes at higher blocks in Durban and Johannesburg was undermining access in practice. Further post-apartheid water deprivation for the poor alongside increasing consumption in the ­wealthier suburbs in turn created rising demand for more bulk water supply projects (including another Lesotho Highlands Water Project dam) which then must be paid for by all groups, and which will also have major adverse environmental impacts. However, the Constitutional Court’s October 2009 ruling vindicated Johannesburg Water and Suez, affirming that the original amount of 25 litres per person per day plus pre-payment meters were ‘reasonable and lawful’ because self-disconnections were only a ‘discontinuation’, not a denial of water services: The water supply does not cease to exist when a pre-paid meter temporarily stops the supply of water. It is suspended until either the customer purchases further credit or the new month commences with a new monthly basic water supply whereupon the

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water supply recommences. It is better understood as a temporary suspension in supply, not a discontinuation.

Activists in the Coalition Against Water Privatization (2009: 1) were disgusted with the Court’s logic: We have the highest court in the land saying that those poor people with pre-paid water meters must not think that their water supply has discontinued when their taps run dry …. Such ‘logic’, and even worse that it is wrapped up in legal dressing and has such crucial practical consequences, is nothing less than mind boggling and an insult both to the poor and to the constitutional imperatives of justice and equality.

The case was useful nonetheless in revealing the broader limits to the merely constitutional framing of socio-economic rights, one such limitation being the concomitant ‘­domestication’ of the politics of need, as Tshepo Madlingozi (2007) put the point. By taking militants off the street and putting them into courts where their arguments had to be panel beaten – removing any progressive and quasi-socialist intent (or even connections to ecological factors), for example – the vain hope was to acquire judges’ approval. Another critical legal scholar, Marius Pieterse (2007), complained that ‘the transformative potential of rights is significantly thwarted by the fact that they are typically formulated, interpreted, and enforced by institutions that are embedded in the political, social, and economic status quo’. Added Daniel Brand (2005), ‘The law, including adjudication, works in a variety of ways to destroy the societal structures necessary for politics, to close down space for political contestation.’ Brand specifically accuses courts of depolitizing poverty by casting cases ‘as private or familial issues rather than public or political’. In sum, following the Critical Legal Scholarship tradition, rights talk is only conjuncturally and contingently useful (Roithmayr 2011). Finally, Ashwin Desai (2010) offers some powerful considerations about the danger of legalism when building the South African urban social movements: If one surveys the jurisprudence of how socio-economic rights have been approached by our courts there is, despite all the chatter, one central and striking feature. Cases where the decision would have caused government substantial outlay of money or a major change in how they make their gross budgetary allocations, have all been lost. Cases where money was not the issue such as the TAC case or where what was being asked for was essentially negative – to be left alone – the courts have at times come grandly to the aid of the poor. And even to get some of these judgments enforced by the executive is a story in and of itself. I have no problems using the law defensively but when it comes to constitute the norms by which political advances are determined, it is extremely dangerous. By flirting with legalism, movements have had their demands become infected with court pleadings. We have heartfelt pleas for the observance of purely procedural stuff: ‘consult us before you evict us’. We have demands for housing, now become ‘in situ upgrading’ and ‘reasonable’ government action.

South African critics of the narrow liberal constitutional framing had, at least, a working alternative being practised in the township streets, which the state termed stealing (by ‘Izinyoka’ snakes), but which represents to the state’s critics a different phenomenon: Commoning.

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The ‘Right to the City’ and to the water Commons in South Africa Resistance strategies and tactics developed over time. Activists attempted to evolve what was already a popular township survival tactic on diverse fronts dating to the apartheid era: reconnecting water and electricity illegally, once it was disconnected by state officials due to non-payment. In 2001, 13 per cent of Gauteng’s connections were illegal (Bond 2002), and by 2016 Eskom announced that, in Soweto, the share of illegal electricity connections had risen to 80 per cent (le Cordeur, 2016). The most serious problem with informal Commoning, however, is that once the water infrastructure is tapped by township plumbers (many working for a small fee), leaks are exacerbated and water quality is sometimes compromised. Likewise, as electricity lines are Commoned using illegal connections, the capacity of the entire township system is stressed and the power supply regularly trips. Accidental electrocutions become more frequent as live wires criss-cross pedestrian pathways. The typical short-term response from a Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee activist is to show how training in water/electricity Commoning helps ensure insulation and relatively effective pipe repairs. Autonomist and localist activists are generally comfortable with the insurgent spirit represented in this kind of illegality, in contrast to socialists who see the need for wide-scale metropolitan planning and redistribution, for example through tariff reform that provides a minimal decent supply of water and electricity to all residents but that penalizes high-volume (hedonistic) users so as to provide surpluses for cross-subsidization. In this conception, the class struggle is over the shape and slope of the tariff curve, but the eco-socialist committed to both social justice and conservation (i.e. reducing wasteful demand for water and electricity) is fully aware that the state must be captured by socialists in order for such tariffs and other reforms to be implemented. (In contrast, autonomists usually do not trust socialists and would foresee a time when, if there is a state takeover, the autonomists would redouble their efforts to maintain the powers required for illegal township connections.) In the longer term, community-based leaders such as Trevor Ngwane (2009) point to a strategic approach that links society and ecology, that questions the bulk supply of water from Lesotho mega-dams and of electri­ city from coal-fired power stations, ‘eco-socialism’: Human beings are part of nature. Socialism should be humanistic. In today’s world this means there can be no genuine socialism unless it has an ecological component …. The climate crisis can only be solved if the profit motive is severely restricted or ­eliminated altogether. Capitalism is incapable of solving the ecological crisis because it is the main culprit …. How do we use today’s examples of struggles to advance the cause? Civil society is engaged in several that have potential: • The fight against ESKOM building more coal and nuclear power stations to make electricity – when so much of its existing supply goes to formerly-South African ­mining and metal corporations which send profits abroad; • Promotion and use of renewable energy as opposed to fossil fuels; • The struggle against dumping of waste (especially toxics) harmful to the environment and the people, e.g. garbage collection and cleaning of open spaces in townships and informal settlements; • The fight against pollution, e.g. Iscor on the Vaal, Engen in south Durban, the burning of industrial tyres on the East Rand, etc.;

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• The fight against capitalist marketing that promotes destructive mass consumption; • The fight against the use of the private car and the struggle for adequate and ­affordable public transport.

We must unify these struggles, and popularise our perspective and demands through making our slogans real: ‘Keep the oil in the soil! Keep the coal in the hole! Keep the tarsand in the land!’ Socialist, bottom-up ideological statements of self-empowerment were regularly made by the APF during its prime (prior to 2010) and member organizations such as the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (which remained strong at the time of writing in 2016). As attractive as a long-delayed ideological standpoint might appear, still, eco-socialists understand that each different struggle for a right to the city is located within a specific political–economic context in which urbanization has been shaped by, for example, access to water. The early ‘oriental despotism’ that Karl Wittfogel (1957) discovered would follow from an emphasis in the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ upon a strong central state’s control of the water works. That gave way, in successive eras of city-building, to the central square role of water fountains and street canals in medieval market cities, and to huge infrastructural investments in capitalist cities. Within the latter, the neoliberal capitalist city has adopted a variety of techniques that individualize and commodify water consumption, delinking it from sourcing and disposal even though both these tasks are more difficult to accomplish through public–private partnerships. The next logical step on a civilizational ladder of water consumption would not, however, be simply a Mazibuko-style expansion of poor people’s access (and technology) within the confines of the existing system. Acquiring a genuine right to water will require its Commoning, both horizontally across the populace and vertically from the raindrop above or borehole below, all the way to the sewage outfall and the sea. But to get to the next mode of financing, extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal of water requires a formidable social force to take us through and beyond rights, to the water Commons. In contrast, rights advocates argue that they still have the potential to shift policy from market-based approaches to a narrative more conducive to social justice, even in the face of powerful commercial interests and imperatives. Yet the limits of a rights discourse are increasingly evident. If the objective of those promoting a right to the city includes making water primarily an eco-social rather than a commercial good, these limits will have to be transcended. The challenge for South Africans committed to a different society, economy and city is combining requisite humility based upon the limited gains social movements have won so far (in many cases matched by regular defeats on economic terrain) with the soaring ambitions required to match the scale of the systemic crisis and the extent of social protest. The irony is that the upsurge of recent protest of a ‘popcorn’ character – that is, rising quickly in all directions but then immediately subsiding – screams out for the kind of organization that once worked so well in parts of Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. Moreover, there are ideological, strategic and material problems that South Africa’s independent left has failed to overcome, including the division between autonomist and socialist currents, and the lack of mutual respect for various left traditions, including Trotskyism, anarchism, Black Consciousness and feminism. A synthetic approach from the top down still appears impossible.

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Until 2014, for example, one strategic problem – capable of dividing major urban social movements – is whether to field candidates at elections. The matter was decided for the independent left by its main internecine competitor, the group around former ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, expelled from the ruling party for demanding mining nationalization in 2012, and, a year later, founder of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). By 2014, Malema’s party won an impressive 6 per cent of the national vote (more than a million people), mostly from the urban areas and sprawling Northwest Province shack settlements (in the wake of the Marikana Massacre there). Malema used some of  his most forceful (and entirely appropriate) racialized rhetoric regarding water and sanitation access by poor people in the 2016 municipal elections, in which the EFF won 8 per cent of the vote: What type of dignity is this, without a flushing toilet? All whites have flushing toilets in their houses, even those on farms in the bundus. You can’t get into a farm of a white person and not find a flushing toilet. Whites, all of them, have flushing toilets, even the hobos. (Mkokeli 2016)

Dignity is ultimately the outcome of a struggle in which not simply individual demands for rights, but collective solutions – for example, the full-fledged bulk infrastructure required for sanitation – are achieved, once political parties (perhaps the EFF) gain sufficient state power to answer the demands of social movements. The next generation of urban activists – including #FeesMustFall students who increasingly moved off-­campus to conduct militant politics in 2015–2016 – will have learned the prior movements’ ­lessons, and will have less and less satisfaction with constitutionalism as the courts ­protect property in times of stress, and as the police react to protest with more violence. From 1997 to 2013, there was an average of 4,000 protests annually, with ‘crowd unrest’ incidents tripling to nearly 2,000 annually from 2003 to 2013 (Alexander, Runciman and Maruping 2016). En route, the society is girding for degeneration into far worse conditions than even now prevail, in a post-apartheid South Africa more economically ­unequal, more environmentally unsustainable and more justified in fostering anger-­ ridden grassroots expectations than during apartheid itself. One of the central questions, once dust settles following battle after battle and activists compare notes, is whether the cadres persist with rights talk, or move through rights to the Commons, and then travel beyond Commoning to an ideology that is more robustly eco-socialist in character (Bond 2016).

Acknowledgements The arguments in this chapter have been presented to diverse audiences in urban communities, trade union halls, NGO offices, academic seminars, journals and books, as well as to comrades and colleagues in endless email debates – and all are thanked for their willingness to conceptualise these difficult experiences in ideological terms, especially given how the author rapidly shifted stances from pro-Rights Talk before 2009 to a ­profound sceptic since Mazibuko v. Johannesburg Water.

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Joubert, P. (2008), ‘Grootboom dies homeless and penniless’, Mail&Guardian, 8 August. Kar, D. and J. Spanjers (2015), Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries: 2004–13, Global Financial Integrity, Washington, DC. Kasrils, R. (2013), Armed and Dangerous, Jacana Media, Johannesburg. le Cordeur, M. (2016), ‘Eskom to waive Soweto users’ debt – on condition’, Fin24, 25 May, www.fin24.com/Debt/News/ eskom-to-waive-soweto-users-debt-on-condition-20160525 Lefebvre, H. (1996), Writings on Cities, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Lefebvre, H. (2003), The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Madlingozi, T. (2007), ‘Good victim, bad victim: Apartheid’s beneficiaries, victims and the struggle for social justice’, in W. le Roux and K. van Marle (eds), Law, Memory and the Legacy of Apartheid: Ten years after AZAPO v President of South Africa, University of Pretoria Press, Pretoria. Madywabe, L. (2005), ‘A compelling need for African innovation’, The Helen Suzman Foundation, Johannesburg, March 2. Mayekiso, M. (1996), Townships Politics, Monthly Review, New York. Mckinley, D. (2012), ‘Lessons of struggle’, South African Civil Society Information Service, 2 February, http://sacsis.org.za/ site/article/1197 Mdlalose, B. (2014), ‘The rise and fall of Abahlali baseMjondolo, a South African social movement’, Politikon, 41, 3, pp. 345–353. Mkokeli, S. (2016), ‘Inside the mind of Julius Malema’, Financial Mail, 15 June, www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2016/06/15/ Inside-the-mind-of-Julius-Malema-Ultimately-I-want-to-be-Number-One1 Muller, M. (2004), ‘Keeping the taps open,’ Mail&Guardian, 30 June, http://mg.co.za/article/2004-06-30-keeping-thetaps-open Ngwane, T. (2009), ‘Ideology and agency in protest politics’, Masters research thesis proposal, University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies, Durban. Ostrom, E. (1990), Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Parnell, S. and E. Pieterse (2010), ‘The “right to the city”: Institutional imperatives of a developmental state’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 34, 1, pp. 146–162. Pieterse, M. (2007), ‘Eating socioeconomic rights: The usefulness of rights talk in alleviating social hardship revisited’, Human Rights Quarterly, 29, pp. 796–822. Pithouse, R. (2014), ‘An urban commons? Notes from South Africa’, Community Development Journal, 49, suppl. 1, pp. i31–i43, https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsu013 PricewaterhouseCoopers (2016), Global Economic Crime Survey 2016: Adjusting the Lens on Economic Crime, Johannesburg, www.pwc.com/gx/en/services/advisory/consulting/forensics/economic-crime-survey.html Republic of South Africa (1996), Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Act 108 of 1996, Cape Town. Roeder, A. (2009), ‘The human cost of South Africa’s misguided AIDS policies’, Harvard Public Health, Spring, www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/spring-2009/spr09aids.html Roithmayr, D. (2011), ‘Lessons from Mazibuko: Persistent inequality and the commons’, Constitutional Court Review, 1. Simone, A. (2004), ‘People as infrastructure: Intersecting fragments in Johannesburg’, Public Culture, 16, 3, pp. 407–429. Steyn, I. (2016), ‘Intellectual representations of social movements in post-apartheid South Africa: A critical reflection’, Politikon, 43, 2, pp. 271–285. Strang, V. (2004), The Meaning of Water, Berg, Oxford. Swyngedouw, E. (2008), ‘Retooling the Washington Consensus: The contradictions of H2O under neo-liberalism and the tyranny of participatory governance’, Paper presented to the Centre for Civil Society, Durban, 3 July. UN-HABITAT (2013), State of the World’s Cities, United Nations Human Settlements Programme, Nairobi. Wittfogel, K. (1957), Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. World Bank (2009), Systems of Cities: Integrating National and Local Policies, Connecting Institutions and Infrastructure, World Bank, Washington, DC. World Bank (2014), Fiscal Policy and Redistribution in an Unequal Society, South Africa Economic Update No. 6, World Bank Group, Washington, DC. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2014/11/20339043/south-africa-economicupdate-fiscal-policy-redistribution-unequal-society World Charter for the Right to the City (2005), Porto Alegre, http://www.urbanreinventors.net/3/wsf.pdf

14 Aesthetic Governmentality: Administering the World-Class City in Delhi’s Slums1 D. Asher Ghertner

Introduction Urban government in millennial Delhi, a period of market triumphalism extending through the first decade of the 21st century, was marked by a conspicuous absence of accurate and up-to-date statistics and maps. Yet, governmental programs there, even without these standard instruments of ‘rational’ planning, were able to ‘conduct the conduct’ of the population (see Foucault, 2007). How? In this chapter, I explore the relationship between governmentality and calculation through an analysis of the politics of calculating, seeing and rendering knowable Delhi’s slums through various governmental programs from approximately 1980 to 2010. Such programs provide a useful lens for rethinking many of the epistemological assumptions that underlie thinking about the practice of government. Specifically, I show how governmentality can operate as effectively through aesthetic norms as it does through those ‘scientifically rational’ and statistical processes of knowledge assembly widely discussed in the literature. Attention to these aesthetic modes of governing is particularly relevant for the study of postcolonial contexts, where even if rigorous statistical knowledge exists, it is often missing, forged, or unused (see Hull, 2008; Roy, 2004). Government, ‘understood in the broad sense of techniques and procedures for directing human behavior’ (Foucault, 1997: 82), functions by constructing and making intelligible categories of knowledge that were previously unintelligible and authorizing those categories through expert ‘truths.’ By investing these intelligible categories (e.g., the rate of economic growth, the occurrence of a disease) with significance and problematizing them such that they appear to require improvement via technical intervention, governmental programs recruit the diverse desires of individuals into a shared normative framework. Such programs are effective to the extent that they produce governable subjects – individuals who evaluate and act upon the social world through lenses provided by

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government. An essential component of guiding the interests of target population groups is thus the joint exercise of crafting intelligible fields for governmental intervention and problematizing such fields so as to make certain ‘deficiencies’ emerge as improvable. The starting point for this chapter is to examine the calculative practices through which governmental programs construct intelligible fields for intervention. This follows from one of Foucault’s strongest methodological recommendations that power be studied through an ascending analysis, which requires attention to ‘the actual instruments that form and accumulate knowledge, the observational methods, the recording techniques, the investigative research procedures, the verification mechanisms’ (Foucault, 2001: 33–34). This focus on calculative practices demands attention to the diverse forms in which knowledge is used to craft grids of intelligibility: how governmental programs use carefully selected metrics to assign value and meaning to their targets. This means the calculative practices at play in any moment not only establish the technical requirements of government, but also form a calculative foundation of rule – the epistemological basis on which information is gathered, knowledge assembled, and ‘truths’ verified so as to guide and manage a population’s interests. Different calculative practices thus produce different calculative foundations, or epistemologies, of government; this is the relationship I explore herein. In the following pages, I look at the manner in which knowledge of slums in Delhi was collected and circulated in two different moments of urban improvement. Specifically, I show that each of these two moments relied on a different calculative foundation of government to render the slum intelligible: the first statistical and the second aesthetic. I begin in the next section by defining the primary calculative practice used to render the slum intelligible in the post-Independence period: the slum survey. In addition to its function as a technique of sovereign power used to know and control the territory, the slum survey since 1990 (the beginning of the first moment) took on the new governmental role of recruiting slum dwellers into alignment with the vision of a ‘modern,’ orderly city. That is, the slum survey became what Foucault calls a security apparatus: a governmental technology used to improve the population’s welfare and minimize ‘what is risky and inconvenient’ (Foucault, 2007: 19), in this case by using numerical representations to guide slum dwellers through programs of self-improvement. The slum survey in this first moment (∼1990–1999) thus followed the ‘rule of evidence’ and had the ‘scientificity’ Foucault (2007: 350–351) described in his lectures on governmentality, and resembled the statistical procedures for ‘turning the objects of government into numericized inscriptions’ (Rose, 1991: 676) widely discussed in the governmentality literature. In the third section, I examine how the calculative foundation of this first moment lost its functional efficiency, became ill-suited to secure the desired ends of government, and thus provoked a political response by opening a space for counter-conduct, an example of which I consider in the subsequent section. In order to re-secure the conditions for rule and overcome such counter-conduct, a new calculative foundation emerged around 2000 – the beginning of the second moment, which I call millennial Delhi (2000–2010) – that introduced a new regime of knowing in Delhi. In this millennial moment, driven by new incentives to liberalize India’s urban land market and transform public land into real estate capital, the visuality of urban space became the key metric of that space’s legal standing, which I describe in the fifth section. The slum survey continued to operate as a key governmental technology in this moment – only its mode of gathering and conveying information radically shifted. No longer implemented to accurately assess slum space, the survey became more of an aesthetic and

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narrative technique to train slum dwellers to see different types of urban space as either desirable or deplorable based on their outward appearance. This ‘aesthetic governmentality’ marked a shift in the calculative foundation of government away from scientific survey practices and toward an aesthetic normativity, which I detail in the sixth section. My goal in describing how the calculative practices of government shifted between these two moments is threefold: first, to demonstrate how the calculative foundation of government can change within an overall rationality of rule (e.g., slum removal); second, to argue that the calculative practices of government provide a particularly supple site, prone counter-conduct and thus larger reconfigurations of rule; and third, to identify a form of aesthetic governmentality in wide use in urban settings the world over, particularly in post-socialist and postcolonial cities defined dually in this millennial moment by rampant property-driven growth and thick, often unintelligible bureaucratic and propertymanagement systems. Delhi was not unique in transforming how it managed urban space in response to this set of conditions, as cities witness to intense land privatization and monetization pressures regularly had their systems of calculative governmentality challenged or transformed to facilitate property development and its twin, land dispossession. Much of the scholarly focus addressing such transformations, be it celebratory or ­critical, centers on land titling and digital land registration as means to improve the legibility of land for property development. Delhi shows how such legibility can be achieved not only through a reinvestment in and deepening of a calculative techne, but also through a wholesale shift to an aesthetic one. Management of public land, particularly that occupied by slums, became not hindered by calculative shortages of the sort bemoaned by inter­ national development institutions, but rather enabled by it.

Calculating slums – the slum survey In 1950, the government of India appointed a committee to address Delhi’s pressing social and demographic strains (Legg, 2006), which had been exacerbated by the doubling of the city’s population due to the flood of families arriving from Pakistan after Partition in 1947 (Pandey, 2001: 122). One of the committee’s main findings, which set the conditions in which the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), Delhi’s primary land management body, would take shape seven years later, was the need to increase the quantum of ‘scientific knowledge’ and calculative accuracy in building and regulating the city, especially its overly congested and unhygienic slum spaces (Sharan, 2006: 4906). This goal of forming a scientifically rational and ‘accurate’ description of the territory and population defined the calculative foundation of the government of slums for the first 50 years of independence. The primary calculative practice that backed this overall form of government was the slum survey. Slums in Delhi are areas with sub-standard housing whose residents do not formally own or lease the land on which they reside. Because the DDA is by far the largest landowning agency in Delhi, the majority of slums are located on land that it manages. The procedures for monitoring public land and encroachments thereupon are primarily the responsibility of the DDA’s and State Revenue Department’s field staff. The first step in such monitoring is the identification of encroachments. After field staff during regular field visits find that a particular portion of DDA land is unauthorizedly occupied, they are

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to (a) report such an occupation to the revenue collection officer charged with overseeing the given plot in the Revenue Department and (b) ‘keep a record of all such reports in the form of a register’ (DDA, 1987: 1). This register includes the nature of the encroachment, the existing use of the land, the Revenue Department cadastral number, the extent of the encroachment on the mentioned plot(s), the name of the encroacher, the number of occupants of the land, and the approximate date of encroachment. The revenue collectors then maintain estate-wise registers by recording the same information on a chart tabulated according to the cadastral map and also make further independent inquiries to determine the status of the reported encroachments (1987: 1). If the revenue collector confirms the received information, they forward it to the Estate Officer located above them in the Revenue Department. Before reaching the Estate Officer, who initiates proceedings against the encroacher, at least two independent field visits by two different officers from two different government departments are conducted to assess encroachments. By this point, however, the encroachment will only have been identified and registered. Before any particular encroachment case is disposed of, the Estate Officer must send a monthly report to a more senior officer to approve the reporting of the land-use scenario in his area. During this process, if ‘an Estate Officer is satisfied that a large number of squatters at a particular site remain unsurveyed, due to one reason or another, he may propose a special survey’ to this senior officer in which multiple encroachments are assessed together (1987: 3) – a third comprehensive survey. Concurrently, the field staff are to issue a ‘show cause notice’, along with a certified extract of the encroachment file and the Estate Officer’s order, to the encroacher by returning to the physical site and affixing the notice on the encroaching structure(s). During these steps, the guidelines state that: ‘Every care should be taken to see that the calculations are correct and the notices have been filled correctly and completely’ (1987: 4). Through this process the Estate Officer assembles a detailed ‘assessment register’ that consists of an up-to-date index of all encroachments. All of this sets up the calculative requirements for the sovereign’s knowledge and regulation of public land and encroachments thereupon. This system of land oversight – which has the ‘scientificity’ Foucault (2007: 351) discusses in his treatment of statistics and, following Porter (1995), might be described as ‘mechanically objective’2 – has been in place, roughly in this form, since the DDA was established in 1957. However, for much of this period, compiling such an accurate account of land occupation was difficult because slum residents viewed the slum survey as something to be avoided. As a technology of sovereign power, which functions by ‘laying down a law and fixing a punishment for the person who breaks it’ (Foucault, 2007: 5), the survey operated by defining a legal norm and penalizing those who did not comply with it. Slum residents outside this norm did all they could to avoid the survey or postpone its implementation before 1990. According to surveyors, some of their sabotage tactics included: removing public notices and then refusing to be surveyed on the basis of the absence of a written notice; disappearing on survey days; and bribing clerks and low-level field staff to void their names and locations from the survey register.3 Slum dwellers’ ability to continue land occupancy was contingent upon exclusion from government records, which undercut the state’s ability to collect accurate statistical summaries of the territory. Despite the regulatory requirement that the state maintain comprehensive knowledge over public land and prevent encroachments, more than 900 slum clusters were settled in Delhi by 1990.4 The task of regulating such complex settlements exclusively through

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penalties and laws proved too great for the administrative apparatus of the time. Thus, in 1990 the government transformed how it would implement the slum survey. No longer simply for the maintenance of control of land (sovereign power), it would be put to a different use: to render a picture of slums that could be diagnosed and improved upon. That is, knowledge of slums would no longer be used exclusively to form a centralized land database; it would also be put into circulation in an attempt to positively conduct the conduct of the slum population by creating new incentives and presenting clear depictions of how this population could be improved. It did so by directing calculations of the territory toward the constitution of a different type of slum subject: the slum dweller not just as an encroacher, but also as a citizen eligible for resettlement. This change in the character of the slum survey took place largely through the efforts of the government of V. P. Singh, India’s then new Prime Minister who in 1989 began implementing a range of social justice programs. Taking note of the burgeoning slum population in Delhi, Singh initiated the city’s first comprehensive slum survey to register and partially legalize slum dwellers (Mustafa, 1995). Making use of existing survey techniques, this four-month-long exercise enumerated every slum household in Delhi and issued what came to be known as V. P. Singh tokens. The purpose of the token was to provide slum dwellers with formal proof of residence, but the incentive for slum dwellers to participate in the survey and actively self-identify as ‘encroachers’ was tied to the introduction of a new governmental object: resettlement. The V. P. Singh token gave token-holding slum dwellers a permanent right to live in the city, defining all registered slum families as Delhi residents and formalizing their right to resettlement in case of eviction. At the time of a demolition, therefore, any slum f­amily that could prove it had resided in Delhi since before 1990 – most easily by showing a V. P. Singh token – was entitled to a government-issued resettlement plot. A complex mix of governmental rhetoric, popular history, and urban aspiration informed slum dwellers’ conceptualization of resettlement through most of the 1990s. Early, targeted slum resettlement actions carried out during Indira Gandhi’s rule as Prime Minister in the 1970s and early 1980s came to be viewed by slum dwellers as a best-case scenario. In these limited resettlement drives, slum dwellers were usually relocated within a 5 kilometer radius of their previous settlements and given well-serviced and relatively large plots, free of cost, on a permanent leasehold basis. Such resettlement sites have since been integrated into the surrounding residential areas, bearing little to no visual distinction with the neighboring, middle- and upper-class residential colonies. Due to financial and space constraints, the terms of resettlement were far less favorable by the early 1990s, and less than a third of displaced slum households were receiving resettlement plots by the late 1990s.5 Yet, the DDA still actively perpetuated the notion that resettlement was a positive process through media campaigns and the slum survey, as I discuss below. Since the introduction of resettlement rights in 1990, the slum survey has been initiated only after the DDA determines that a piece of encroached land is needed for a public purpose, at which time it issues a notice to the residents of the specified land alerting them that a survey exercise will be carried out on a forthcoming date.6 On that date, a survey team descends upon the settlement and sets up camp in a central area. Once the residents have assembled, the chief officer displays a map, tells residents what the intended use of the land shown on the map is, and states that this use has been hindered by the presence of the slum. Be it a school, public park, or road, the map shows the slum as out-of-place. The chief officer thus begins by depicting the slum as an illegal encroachment, clearly

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violating the official land use laid down according to planning procedures. In addition to highlighting the technical deficiency of the slum population, the officer describes a possible means by which residents can escape illegality: by following the procedures of the survey, the government will improve eligible slum dwellers by resettling them to serviced plots, thus removing their deficiencies and furnishing the conditions necessary for ‘normal’ urban life. Only by following the enumerative steps of the survey, residents are told, will resettlement be provided. The officer follows by describing the procedures for assessing resettlement eligibility. Residents have to collect all forms of their residence proof (e.g., ration cards, identity cards, voter cards, V. P. Singh tokens) and have them ready when the officers reach their houses. Next, they have to remain present at their homes so that their family can be registered, display their pre-1990 residence proof, demonstrate a legitimate (non-commercial) use of the land, and have their house inscribed with a survey number and recorded on a chart. Finally, they have to wait in line after the entire settlement has been enumerated and have their residence proof scrutinized by the chief officer, who adds the family to a list of those either eligible or ineligible for resettlement. In slums whose demolition is imminent, residents who are added to the former list (and thus deemed ‘improvable’) have to sign a piece of paper agreeing to the terms of resettlement, which include paying a sum of money and abiding by certain land-use and site development norms. These calculated steps aim to ‘render technical’ (Li, 2007; Rose, 1999) the complex ‘slum problem’ by depicting resettlement as a procedural, not political, exercise. Bracketing off the ­question of whether the slum should be removed or not, the survey concentrates attention on ­resettlement eligibility, the success or failure of which is placed upon the internal dynamics and practices of the slum population. During the course of the survey process, the survey team compiles preliminary ­summaries of households according to three categories: eligibile, ineligibile, and other. Residents become aware of these overall numbers as well as their own classification status. Households marked ineligible or other thereafter attempt to provide further proof or bargain otherwise to enter the eligible category. Community leaders are often called into this negotiation process, out of which some reconfiguration of the final numbers emerges. Because resettlement is something many residents desire – either over and above continued habitation in their slum or in recognition that they are better off being resettled than risking protest against the demolition – they see the act of being enumerated and registered as a positive technology, something worth struggling to attain, unlike the pre-1990 survey. The first effect of the post-1990 survey, then, is to draw slum residents into the practice of government by soliciting interest in the survey process. The survey’s second effect is to foster the slum population’s desire to be deemed permanent and legal by the state and public via resettlement. It does so by (a) identifying a deficiency within the slum (its violation of law, its lack of recognition by the state), and (b) depicting resettlement as an attainable means to remove that deficiency. In doing so, the survey also encourages slum residents to identify as eligible resettlees, encroachers, or other terms provided by government. Third, by bifurcating the slum population into eligible and ineligible categories, the survey divides the interests of the slum population. In the majority of instances, residents eligible for resettlement do not resist displacement, instead viewing it as an inevitable step in the city’s development: why oppose the demolition when they are the lucky few granted resettlement? This reduces the number of residents likely to directly oppose slum clearance.

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The sovereign exercise of enumerating the territory and its population thus changed roles in the 1990s (what I am calling the first moment of slum improvement) as it became wrapped up with resettlement. Whereas, before, slum surveys were supposed to take place whenever there was a land encroachment (to enforce a juridical norm), in 1990 the DDA began to try to work through the interests of slum dwellers to achieve a delicate balance between forced displacement and voluntary resettlement. Illegality thus became something not to be prohibited, but managed. However, while the new uses of the slum survey in this first moment of urban improvement were programmatically aimed at more effectively guiding the slum population toward voluntary dislocation, the survey’s authority rested upon its ability to both accurately assess slum residents’ residential history and location and convince residents that its metrics for evaluating slum space were the most relevant. By 2000, both of these requirements proved beyond the technical means of government.

Statistics’ loss of authority: unruliness in Delhi in the early 2000s The slum survey has governmental authority and effect, ostensibly, on the basis of an accurate knowledge of slum space. Like other instruments of scientific planning, it is expected to collate complex ground realities into simplified trends from which programs of improvement can be identified. However, securing this ‘level of functional efficiency’ (Legg, 2007) requires adhering to specific norms of accuracy and process. As Legg says, summarizing Hannah’s (2000) discussion of the functional requirements of statistics and mapping: A sufficient infrastructure had to exist to enable the ‘abstraction’ by which the complex world became accessible. Second, this world had to be subject to an efficient process of ‘assortment’ such that it was known through rigorous and reliable categories. Third, the information had to be ‘centralized’ and analysed by an active and efficient state. (2007: 154)

These technical requirements became increasingly difficult for the DDA to fulfil in the 1980s and 1990s. Compare the above prerequisites for functional efficiency with the actual condition of information in the DDA, as published in a DDA-commissioned review of its information management system: The information system in the DDA is characterised by a ‘data explosion’ at the lower levels and ‘information starvation’ at the higher levels of management. There is little consolidation or analysis being carried out at any level of the DDA. Even senior officers receive information in the form of raw data. In the absence of the data being processed and presented as information, officials are unable to use it as a decision-making tool, thereby defeating the very purpose for which the data was gathered.7

This shows that there is a certain administrative burden of statistical simplification, which the DDA had been struggling to surmount. Thus, despite a series of mechanically objective survey practices to monitor urban space – a type of calculation clearly ‘scientific in its procedures,’ which Foucault (2007: 350) considered ‘absolutely indispensable for

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good government’ – the DDA had great difficulty assembling information into a coherent calculability. More than this secondary step of translating data into a usable form, though, the DDA’s ability to collect accurate ground data in the first place was questionable. In 1986, the DDA commissioned its first-ever institutional review by an external body, the final report for which, as cited above, shows the absence of coordinated calculative practices. The report goes on to state that ‘Consultants observed that the present information system is characterised by i) missing information links between functional areas … and v) low reliability of information’ and noted that DDA data is generally typified by a ‘lack of accuracy.’ Related specifically to knowledge of land, the report found information inadequacies in areas including the ‘inventory of the land with the DDA,’, the ‘status of land development’ thereupon, and the ‘extent of land misuses.’8 Nonetheless, rule over slums until around 2000 continued to be exercised on the presumption of accurate statistics. By 2000, the governmental approach to surveying slums became part of the explicit governmental goal of turning Delhi into a ‘slum-free city,’ giving it a ‘world-class’ look, promoting an efficient land market, and converting the ‘under-utilized’ public land occupied by slum dwellers into commercially exploitable private property (DDA, 1997; Ghertner, 015). These were all part of the policies of economic liberalization initiated by the Finance Ministry in 1991 and concretely implemented in Delhi in the late 1990s (Ghertner, 2005; Jain, 2003). However, by this time, it had become clear to city leaders that the pace of slum clearance was insufficient to achieve these ends. The slum population had continued to grow after 1990, increasing from 260,000 families in 1990 to 480,000 by 1995, with the number of slum clusters during the same period rising from 929 to 1,080.9 To address the ‘menace of illegal encroachment’ and slums, middle-class neighborhood associations began turning to the courts in search of relief.10 Civic and environmental problems such as solid waste disposal, park maintenance, land-use violations, and ‘the problem of the slum’ previously administered through a complex mix of governmental and regulatory technologies were suddenly brought firmly into the domain of the judiciary in the late 1990s. The courts, noting how unruly the city was becoming, took cognizance of ‘the dismal and gloomy picture of such jhuggi/jhopries [slum huts] coming up regularly’ across the city and said that ‘on account of timely actions not having been taken, the Jhuggi clusters [slums] have been multiplying each year.’11 The courts began addressing this situation through a flurry of decisions in the late 1990s that rebuked the DDA for failing both to remove existing slums and to prevent fresh slums from coming up: the ‘DDA has not been able to protect its land.’12 The court’s initial response was to register its dissatisfaction with the ineffectiveness of the DDA calculative process and insist that the DDA ­follow its mandate of preventing fresh encroachments.13 It did so by ordering the DDA to ­better follow its own calculative procedures, requesting detailed information on occupied land in pending cases, and threatening to hold responsible officers in contempt of court. However, as the menace of slums persisted and the DDA (along with other accountable authorities) only partially adhered to the court’s orders, the court deemed the calculative efforts of the DDA a failure and began appointing its own special committees and court commissioners to do ground-level field assessments in place of the DDA.14 The court’s goal was to more efficiently implement the existing survey-based calculative practices.15 However, producing calculations capable of guiding the population and administering the law required extensive field knowledge of not only the current ground reality, but also

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the history of such spaces. These court-appointed surveyors ended up producing equally flawed calculations of the ground reality, as a civil writ petition contesting a court committee’s recommendation to demolish a slum in north Delhi pointed out: [I]t is apparent that the inspection and scrutiny performed by the Learned Court Commissioner appears, at best, perfunctory … [and contains] marked discrepancies about the area and size of the basti [slum] …. [The Committee’s report] is also ­incomplete, cursory and factually inaccurate. [The letter by the Court Commissioner] requests the Court to give directions for removal of encroachments without clarifying what are considered encroachments … further the Monitoring Committee also differs from the Learned Court Commissioner in its assessment of the size of the basti … the authorities appear to be unclear even to the extent and demarcation of the land area in question – the land of two Khasras [plots] (110, 111) are shown in the Revenue record as merely Government land, without designating a specific land owning agency.16

The petition concludes by saying the question of ‘urgent public use,’ which is the justification for the slum demolition, cannot even arise because ‘the dimensions of the land and its precise ownership are itself indeterminate.’ By 2000, through a combination of an increasingly complex and unruly ground situation and the inability of existing calculative practices to render that ground sufficiently intelligible to the courts and upper-level bureaucrats, the governmental goal of slum removal was opened to counter-claims.

Calculated counter-conduct One clear example of how political practices destabilized the prevailing calculative foundation of government in Delhi arose in 2003 in the context of a slum survey. Since the early 1990s, the Dilli Shramik Sangathan (DSS), a slum-based organization operating in West Delhi, had been actively following and contesting various attempts by neighboring property owners, local politicians, and the DDA to demolish the slums in which its members resided. In August 2003, the DDA entered two DSS-aligned slums and began a survey, indicating that the slums would be cleared in the near future. DSS, being made up of residents of these slums, had an intimate knowledge of the layout of the settlements and had even conducted its own survey of the settlements previously. When the DDA surveyors began the survey process, DSS workers recognized that the categories of eligibility for resettlement, the assumptions about the identity of the residents, and the calculative practices used by the government would not only require residents to accept resettlement as a best-case scenario, but also lead to the displacement of most residents without resettlement. DSS thus undertook two political actions. First, it directly intervened in the DDA survey process by following surveyors around and challenging the accuracy of their assessment of the ground reality. If a hut was locked and the DDA surveyor was on the verge of omitting it from the survey register, DSS workers told them who the residents were, for how long they had been living there, and confirmed their identity with neighbors. If surveyors wanted a truly accurate assessment, the workers told them, they would have

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to trust local knowledge or return later to confirm the status of the hut. This increased the administrative burden of the survey. DSS workers also convinced the surveyors to record all residents, even those who did not have residence proof or whose proof was dated after the resettlement cut-off date. Slum surveyors always rely on some amount of local knowledge, at least to get the lay of the land before initiating a survey. In this case, those local ‘helpers’ countered the legitimacy of the survey and declared the survey process inaccurate and insufficient to determine the eligibility of the residents. Second, DSS undertook a counter-survey by enumerating all the huts within the two slums. In addition to doing the slum survey ‘better,’ DSS workers went further by listing the number of family members and the names of the head of household of each generation leading back to the family’s arrival in the settlement, recording the hut’s precise location on a map of the slum, making copies of the relevant residence proof regardless of that proof’s date, and affixing past voter logs and children’s school records to the survey to show that the residents were deeply connected with the electoral and civic life of the city. They further appended to the survey notarized, government documents proving that the slums’ earliest residents had been brought to Delhi and settled by government contractors as workers to build the surrounding residential colony. All of this information was assembled in an attempt to prevent the erasure of complex settlement histories. DSS members then jointly, with the media on hand, delivered this counter-survey to the Commissioner of Land Management in the main DDA office, located above the district office that conducted the survey. The counter-survey, on the one hand, challenged the calculative practices of the DDA on its own terms by demonstrating the DDA’s inaccurate assessment of the slums. If the Land Department of the DDA is supposed to ‘maintain Ledgers of Accounts of the encroachers Estate-wise’ (DDA, 1982: 115), the DSS showed how this task had not been completed accurately. On the other hand, the counter-survey challenged the overall calculative foundation of government by questioning the metrics used to assess slum dwellers, the type of improvement (i.e., resettlement) they should receive, and the basis on which eligibility for resettlement/improvement would be determined (the 1990 cut-off date). The DSS counter-survey showed that the people living on these plots were not ‘illegal encroachers’ or ‘criminals’ but ‘workers’ and ‘city-builders.’ DSS was aligned at the time with a network of slum organizations called Sajha Manch, from which it received technical assistance allowing it to show that the DDA had failed on its own terms to accommodate the population growth planned for in the Delhi Master Plan. While delivering the counter-survey, its members claimed that the DDA’s failure to provide low-income housing was a political, not an implementation, failure by comparing (a) the Master Plan’s guideline for low-income housing provision for the year 2001 with (b) the actual housing stock built by the DDA.17 The DDA had failed to provide even 15% of the required stock, a fact DSS used to argue that the state itself was engaged in ‘­illegal’ acts, not slum dwellers. By reasserting the legal entitlements guaranteed to the poor through statutory plans and by demonstrating the calculative errors of the DDA ­survey, the DSS (armed with its own surveys and numerical representations) countered the DDA’s claim to exclusive, expert knowledge of the territory. Raising the threat of DDA corruption in the media and armed with its own claim to accuracy, the DSS threw its own ‘web of visibilities, of public codes and private embarrassments over’ (Rose, 1999: 73) the calculations of government. The result of the DSS’s calculative counter-conduct was that the slum survey was suspended and the demolition order was withdrawn.

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Governmentality studies have long suggested that the knowledge formed through governmental technologies can be ‘repossessed’ by populations of ‘the governed’ to contest the terms on which they are ruled (Kalpagam, 2000; Rose, 1999: 92), or, as Gordon (1991: 5) says, ‘the terms of governmental practice can be turned around into focuses of resistance.’ However, these studies rarely consider how tactics among ‘the governed’ can change the strategies of government, or how calculative practices can themselves become sites of struggle. The DSS counter-survey provides insight into how these tactics can shape larger strategies of rule, unsettling the very telos of government.

The rise of an aesthetic normativity The unruliness of slum space by the early 2000s arose because of technical difficulties in producing a governing intelligibility through existing calculative practices, on the one hand, and the politicization of those calculative practices, on the other. By this time, the courts had already intervened to try to reassert the existing calculative foundation of government, but with little success. With mounting pressure from commercial investors and the ‘normal,’ middle-class public to make Delhi look ‘world-class,’ the DDA and MCD turned to the courts to identify new strategies to ensure these ends. For example, the MCD submitted in the High Court that the problem of unauthorized constructions and slums is ‘mammoth in nature – and cannot be controlled by simply dealing under the existing laws or under the provisions of [Delhi’s] master plan’ (Biswas, 2006). Here, in a moment of crisis, government called upon the sovereign mechanism of law to impose order by any means necessary – in this case, by recalibrating legality and establishing a new calculative foundation of rule. The courts, through a series of decisions in the early 2000s, declared the existing procedures of governing slums too slow to make Delhi a world-class and slum-free city. In a 2002 decision, the court stated ‘it would require 272 years to resettle the slum dwellers’ according to existing procedures and that the ‘acquisition cost … of land … and development … would be Rs. 4,20,00,00,000 [US$100 million].’18 This set of conditions was intolerable, so the court began relying less heavily on the calculative procedure of the slum survey. Instead, it started using a surrogate indicator to identify illegality: the ‘look’ or visual appearance of space. In lieu of accurately assessing (i.e., creating paper representations that correspond to) physical space, a set of visual determinants began to be used to render slums intelligible and locate them within a new ‘grid of norms’: a world-class aesthetic defined by the overarching governmental goal of making Delhi a ‘world-class city.’ As part of Delhi’s world-class city-building efforts, public finances in the early 2000s were gradually shifted away from education, public housing, health care, and food subsidies toward large, highly visible infrastructure projects like the Delhi Metro Rail, more than 50 new flyovers, two new toll roads to Delhi’s posh, satellite cities, and the Commonwealth Games Village – prestige projects built ‘to dispel most visitors’ first impression that India is a country soaked in poverty’ (Ramesh, 2008). Similarly, building bye-laws and development norms were liberalized to allow for denser commercial development across the city. Along the same lines, various world-class monuments (e.g., the world’s largest Hindu complex, the Akshardham Temple) and commercial developments

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(e.g., India’s biggest shopping mall complex) in direct violation of the city’s land-use plan were deemed ‘planned’ and legal in order to facilitate Delhi’s ascent as a site of India’s biggest and best architectural feats (Ghertner, 2015). With the Chief Minister of Delhi declaring the preparations for the 2010 Commonwealth Games the government’s top priority, and with a frenetic buzz in the media since the early 2000s to ensure that Delhi’s appearance was appropriately ‘global’ before the Games, a shared aesthetic sense of how the city should appear quickly took shape – a world-class aesthetic. This governing vision was backed by more than media hype and city boosterism, however. It soon became both ‘the end and instrument of government’ (Foucault, 2007: 105) once the courts began tying law and order to it. In the early 2000s, the courts made widespread mention of Delhi as a ‘showpiece,’ ‘world-class,’ ‘heritage,’ and ‘capital’ city. In a landmark judgment from 2000, the Supreme Court stated: In Delhi, which is the capital of the country and which should be its showpiece, no effective initiative of any kind has been taken by the numerous governmental agencies operating there in cleaning up the city …. Instead of ‘slum clearance’ there is ‘slum creation’ in Delhi. This in turn gives rise to domestic waste being strewn on open land in and around the slums. This can best be controlled at least, in the first instance, by preventing the growth of slums.19

In 2001, the Delhi High Court made the barriers to Delhi’s world-class ambitions equally clear: Delhi being the capital city of the country, is a show window to the world of our ­culture, heritage, traditions and way of life. A city like Delhi must act as a catalyst for building modern India. It cannot be allowed to degenerate and decay. Defecation and urination cannot be allowed to take place in open at places which are not meant for these purposes.20

Here, the obstacles to Delhi becoming a ‘catalyst’ of modernity were defined as the nuisance-causing activities (e.g., open defecation) of slum dwellers (for whom the state had failed to provide adequate infrastructure for enclosed latrines). Court documents from this period show that the growing concern for the city’s worldclass appearance increasingly came to be expressed through a ‘bourgeois environmental’ discourse of cleanliness and pollution (Baviskar, 2003). Popularized through the phrase and public campaign called ‘Clean Delhi, Green Delhi,’ this discourse tied deficiencies in environmental well-being to the presence of slums, largely through the legal category of ‘nuisance.’ Before 2000, nuisance-causing activities like open defecation or unhygienic living conditions did not provide sufficient justification for demolishing a slum. Through the 1980s and 1990s, general slum-related public nuisances were legally considered the responsibility of the municipal authorities: slums were dirty because the state did not provide them with basic services. However, as I have argued elsewhere (Ghertner, 2015), the early 2000s introduced a new legal discourse that reconfigured the parameters and mechanisms by which slum-related nuisances were to be remedied. The juridical category of ‘nuisance’ is broadly considered any ‘offense to the sense of sight, smell, or hearing’ (Jain, 2005) and is as such directly linked with aesthetic norms. The legal treatment of public nuisance had until this time included only particular objects

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possessed or actions performed by individuals or groups that interfered with a public right. Aesthetically displeasing, annoying, or dangerous actions or objects could only be addressed by improving municipal services or fining individuals for their violation.21 The inability of the DDA and MCD to improve, clean up, or remove slums, as well as the court’s failure to efficiently provide order to the city by removing slums through existing procedures, led to a gradual reinterpretation of nuisance that made the appearance of filth or unruliness in and of itself a legitimate basis for demolishing a slum. This change took place by redefining the categories of nuisance such that not only objects or actions, but also individuals and groups, could be declared nuisances. This vastly expanded the range of procedures that could be administered to remove nuisance: no longer by stopping nuisances through imposing fines and penalties, but by displacing entire populations. Once the interpretation of nuisance was expanded to include categories of people or particular population groups, the legal (and calculative) basis for slum demolition was simplified. Demolition orders no longer required complex mapping and survey exercises to determine the nature of land use or demanded even the confirmation of land ownership in slum cases. In millennial Delhi (2000–2010), courts asked for little more than the demonstration by a petitioner (often a neighboring property owner) that the slum in question was (a) on public land (which is the definition of ‘slum’ and had never been a sufficient condition for demolition orders in the past), and (b) a nuisance to the public. This second requirement was most commonly done by furnishing photographs that showed the slum’s ‘dirty’ look: open defecation, overcrowded living conditions, stagnant water, municipal waste, etc. From 2002 until around 2010, when a new precedent was set, the courts considered such photographs sufficient evidence to confirm that the slum in question did not conform to the aesthetic and civic codes deemed ‘normal’ in Delhi and, in the majority of such cases, issued demolition orders. In the first decade of the new millennium, close to a million slum dwellers were displaced in Delhi, the vast majority due to court orders equating slum clearance with environmental and visual clean-up. This new aesthetic ordering of the city, in which the legality and essential features of space could be determined entirely from a distance and without requiring accurate survey or assessment (i.e., space can be calculated without numbers), marked a clear shift from the previous statistical foundation of rule. In this new, more aesthetic framework, the law, in conjunction with a variety of other aesthetic techniques (including the slum survey, discussed again below), crafted fields of intelligibility by disseminating standardized aesthetic norms, and spaces were known to be illegal or legal, deficient or normal, based on their outer characteristics. This new aesthetic foundation of government made ensuring security in the city technically less complex than before because it provided a clear visual grid for assessing the quality of space without requiring the rigorous inscriptive simplifications previously necessary to render such ground conditions intelligible. In the context of urban government, Foucault describes the security imperative’s primary focus as ‘a matter of organizing circulation, eliminating its dangerous elements, making a division between good and bad circulation, and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad’ (2007: 18). The law’s ability to clear unruly and displeasing spaces through this less technically rigorous calculative foundation accelerated the circulation of what Delhi’s governors consider aesthetically and economically ‘good.’ Thus, unlike the first moment of urban improvement described above, in which the law set the conditions for the slum survey to guide slum dwellers toward improved ends, the law in this second moment operated as

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the main instrument of improvement. However, the law is ill-equipped to directly access what Foucault (2007: 352) called the ‘mechanics of interest’ (e.g., the desire for resettlement among slum dwellers), the ‘fundamental target and instrument of the government of populations’ (2007: 106). Government thus had to deploy other techniques to ensure that the population’s interest was cultivated in the direction of the world-class aesthetic. This remained the task of the slum survey, which took on a new role in millennial Delhi.

Slum survey as aesthetic technology of government (2000–2010) No longer needed to assess the legality of slums, the slum survey’s previous juridicolegal function of knowing the territory was taken over by the visual technology of nuisance law in this second moment, what I am calling millennial Delhi. I attended three slum surveys in 2005–20066, during which I observed the surveyors’ limited focus on conducting a rigorous physical assessment of land and much stronger emphasis on instructing the slum population. The process of ‘rendering technical’ the ‘slum problem’ resembled that of the pre-2000 survey (described in the third section above) in that it began by contrasting ‘illegal encroachers’ with the ‘normal’ public that live in formal residential colonies. Surveyors, however, established the illegality of the slum not in reference to comprehensive register of all residents, but rather on the basis of the settlement’s appearance. The chief officer during all three surveys, after assembling the ­residents, began by describing the nature of urban development in Delhi. During the first survey I observed, the officer said: Today Delhi does not look how it used to. In ten years, it won’t look like it does today. Delhi is developing. It is cleaning up. Only the best people will live in Delhi. Soon, there will be no slums here. All the deserving people will stay, but everyone else will have to go. The international [Commonwealth] Games are coming to Delhi and people from all over the world – America, England, Japan – will come here and see our city. We all want Delhi and India’s name to grow. Look around; you see the Delhi Metro has come, all these malls have come. It is time for Delhi to rise. That is what we all want. Everyone must fit.22

The survey in this moment thus started by invoking the world-class aesthetic as the desired end of government. Over the course of the survey, individual surveyors located the slum and households being assessed in relation to this norm. For example, one surveyor told an angry resident, ‘In the whole world, no settlement that looks like this is legal,’ and suggested that the resident’s demand to remain settled at his current location was at odds with the interests of the rest of the city: ‘Can’t you see that nobody wants this type of slum?’ he concluded.23 The slum’s physical conditions thus were tied to a notion of illegality and were, in part, the deficiencies of the population that had to be corrected. These deficiencies included overcrowding, congestion, unhygienic living conditions, lack of property ownership, and other environmental and public health risks that slum dwellers’ ‘illegal’ residency was thought to impose on the land. During the course of the survey, surveyors spent as much time narrating the physical traits of the slum as they did producing the survey log. The survey thus became a

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type of narrative technique through which the surveyors constantly moved back and forth between describing the particular slum being surveyed and the problems with ‘slums in general.’ For example, one surveyor said to a group of women: This area has become a complete [traffic] jam. Delhi can’t function like this. Sarkar [government] will improve these areas, and you. Everyone will benefit. Look at Kali Basti [a nearby slum that had been resettled years earlier]. They have become such good people and the area is clean now.24

The survey thus operated by instilling a set of observational practices into the slum population. By constantly pointing to the aesthetic impropriety of the slum and referencing slum deficiencies to the aesthetic norm established by law, the survey process sought to train slum dwellers to see slum space through lenses provided by government. In this new form, the slum survey functioned not just to make individual slums visible and calculable. It also took visual attributes of slums and linked them to a particular normative category of space – illegal encroachment. A clear effect of the slum survey was that it made use of what slum dwellers already knew about their settlement – that it was dirty, congested, unserviced, different from private residential colonies – to produce a vision of slum space as illegal and lacking the characteristics necessary for ‘normal’ citizenship. Participants in the slum survey learned a way of seeing the essential traits of urban space and were, in the process, trained to conceptually link locations in the city that shared these same traits. That is, ‘slum space’ across the city, as a category, was rendered imaginable and intelligible through the survey. By offering resettlement in conjunction with producing this vision of slum space, the survey showed slum dwellers that the government was attempting to improve this category of space; that individual slum dwellers were part of a larger deficient population whose improvement was necessary for the city’s improvement; and that it was in their interest to cooperate with the survey process. Such effects could be produced because participation in the survey required residents’ active self-identification as ‘illegal.’ Waiting in line, being compliant with government officers and pleading with them to register your name, displaying your residence proof and being observed and inspected, accepting that the procedure and timing of your home’s demolition was something you neither control nor have a right to influence, and accepting your displacement as a gift from the government were all subjectifying practices that guided residents’ actions in predictable ways. As Dean says of the way in which population group’s ‘identity’ becomes a key target of governmental practice: Regimes of government do not determine forms of subjectivity. They elicit, promote, facilitate, foster and attribute various capacities [in the case of the slum survey, the capacity to be resettled], qualities [supplicatory, dirty] and statuses [illegal] to particular agents [slum dwellers]. They are successful to the extent that these agents come to experience themselves through such capacities …, qualities … and statuses. (1999: 32)

Therefore, as slum dwellers participated in the survey, identified resettlement as a bestcase scenario, and adopted the world-class aesthetic as their rationalization of change, they occupied a subject position that placed slums as out-of-place. Forced resettlement, through the survey, hence came to be seen not as the violent limit of sovereign power, but as the necessary action of an improving government.

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If slum residents did not initially accept the improving mission conveyed through the slum survey and denied that they were encroachers (and thus sought to challenge the grounds of the survey) on the basis of, for example, the fact that government officials or politicians willfully settled them, the surveyors could resort to the authority of the law, forcing residents to choose to self-identify as illegal and committed to the resettlement process or be demolished without compensation. The law, whether invoked explicitly or implicitly, hence structured the discursive field so that only certain actions appeared ­possible: slum demolition, forced resettlement, and, more generally, the end of ‘slum life.’ Sovereign power was used in this manner to set the conditions for improvement, while the slum survey declared ‘slum life’ a threat to the vitality and efficiency of the city. Interviews with slum-based organizers and residents confirmed that the vast majority of slums in millennial Delhi had undergone a survey along these lines at least once after the original 1990 survey, even when the survey was not followed by a demolition.25 This suggests that the slum survey had become a consistent governmental technology of guiding slum conduct. And that the survey had acquired more of an aesthetic function in disseminating observational dispositions, rather than the statistical function under the earlier calculative foundation of government, was confirmed by the fact that a comprehensive statistical summary of the size and distribution of Delhi’s slum population had not been reported since 1998. The government itself was unaware of the total number of slums in millennial Delhi and thus continued to report 1998 numbers as if they were valid through 2010. This change in the functional role of slum survey had significant implications for the politics of calculation. The evaluation of slums in the first moment of urban improvement (1990–2000) took place locally: knowledge of the territory was assembled as government officials walked through the narrow corridors of slums, a process slum residents could observe and in which they could intervene, as the counter-survey conducted by DSS and discussed above demonstrated. However, the main calculative practice of government in millennial Delhi was located in the courtroom when judges assessed the legality of slums through descriptions and photographs of the settlements’ surface attributes. Physical space, in other words, was no longer assessed through the complex inscriptive chains of the earlier moment, as correspondence between ‘paper truths’ and ‘reality out there’ could be confirmed through the aesthetic consensus that was the world-class city. This made governmental calculations less prone to local counter-claims. As a result, attempts to contest the slum survey, as DSS had done through its counter-survey, had vastly different effects in millennial Delhi than they did in the first moment of urban improvement. For example, during a DDA-led slum survey exercise in West Delhi that I attended in April 2006, another organization affiliated with DSS, called Nirman Mazdoor Panchayat Sangam, conducted a counter-survey along the lines of the DSS survey described above. In this case, however, after presenting the counter-survey, the officials responded swiftly by noting that the demolition was based on a court order and thus out of their hands.26 Knowledge of the slum was not based in this instance on the physical survey, giving Nirman counter-survey’s claim to accuracy limited effect because governmental edict was not itself founded on a claim of rigorous knowledge of the slum. The counter-survey’s influence on the overall terms of the demolition was that the DDA officials accepted a more diverse range of residence proof to establish residents’ resettlement eligibility, ­giving more residents the option of resettlement (something Nirman activists rightfully celebrated). The counter-survey’s overall effect, though, was not to challenge the demolition, but to facilitate the governmental exercise of enumerating slum residents.

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For most slum dwellers in millennial Delhi, resettlement became not only the most exulted path to improvement, but also the only such path for those unable to buy private land. The increasingly powerful hand of the sovereign state in ordering slum demolitions, combined with the aesthetic consensus that increasingly cast slums as self-evidently outof-place, made demolition appear increasingly inevitable. As public housing expenditure stagnated and land market liberalization drove up land prices, other options for tenure security gradually diminished. As a result, resettlement became elevated as a primary target of slum life, effectively conducting the conduct of large segments of the slum population toward this governmental goal. This is not to say that counter-conduct disappeared or that this new aesthetic governmentality was perfectly effective. Counter-conduct, though, had to be articulated on the terms of the world-class aesthetic, making new forms of ­aesthetic politics the core of future struggles over the right to the city (see Ghertner, 2015).

Conclusion In Foucault’s final lecture of Security, Territory, Population, where he lays out his concluding treatment of ‘modern and contemporary governmentality’ (2007: 348), he states: ‘The knowledge involved [in this governmentality] must be scientific in its procedures. Second, this scientific knowledge is absolutely indispensable for good government. A government that did not take into account this kind of analysis … would be bound to fail.’ He continues by saying that ‘government cannot do without the consequences, the results, of this science’ (2007: 350–351). As Delhi entered a period of millennial urbanism, defined by priorities of real estate development and urban beautification, its system of land management pertaining to slums faced a crisis of governance that seemed to fit Foucault’s assessment of failure. Up until this millennial moment, urban government was characterized by the ‘scientific,’ or ‘mechanically objective’ (Porter, 1995), survey of slum space. By collating the complex dynamics of slums into intelligible and easily manageable categories – those eligible for resettlement and thus improvable, versus those ineligible – the survey aimed to divide the slum population’s interest, reduce the like­ lihood of resistance, and depict slum demolition as a process of urban improvement. However, the slum survey itself became politicized through this process, leading to resistance not only to the terms of resettlement, but also to the calculative foundation of ­government. By conducting their own surveys, slum residents engaged in calculative counter-conduct, appropriating the calculative techniques of government and turning them against the existing governmental rationality. As a result, slum removal was a ­relatively rare occurrence, contrary to stated governmental aims. While global development experts suggest that cities adopt high-tech calculative instruments, such as machine-readable information, digital land cadastres, and Geographical Information Systems, to improve accountability and ward of such calculative crises (World Bank, 2004), millennial Delhi shows a parallel mode of governing that operates alongside, and sometimes supersedes, calculative governmentality. In response to slum unruliness in the late 1990s, a new calculative foundation of government emerged. No longer premised on the mechanically objective assessment of slum space, government would assess space based on outward appearance. Through a reinterpretation of the law of nuisance, a new aesthetic normativity – the world-class aesthetic – was established,

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against which urban space could be evaluated from a distance. In this millennial moment, if a space looked polluting and dirty, regardless of its relationship to the Master Plan, nuisance law deemed it illegal. In contrast, spaces that positively portrayed Delhi in its world-class pursuits, even if in violation of planning law, were deemed legal. Bypassing the need for rigorous physical survey, government in this moment assigned the slum ­survey a new role: aesthetically training slum residents to read the territory through the world-class aesthetic. The case of millennial Delhi thus shows an instance of the supersession of a statistical mode of government by a more aesthetic one. As Valverde (2011) argues, nuisance and other subjective criteria for evaluating urban disorder pervade modern systems of urban governance – even providing the underpinning of Euclidean planning and zoning. Millennial Delhi further suggests that we anticipate the inflation of such aesthetic modes of governance in contexts marked by contestation over or inefficient deployment of governmental statistics/maps combined with a strong normative sense of improvement – be it preparation for international mega-events, such as the Olympic Games, postcolonial anxiety about ‘catching up,’ or more general urban entrepreneurial imperatives characteristic of aspiring world-class cities.

Notes    1  This article is a modified version of D. Asher Ghertner (2010) Calculating without numbers: aesthetic governmentality in Delhi’s slums, Economy and Society 39:2, 185–217, reproduced with permission and viewable from the journal’s webpage at: www.tandfonline.com    2  For Porter (1995), mechanical objectivity consists of the repetition of standardized procedures of measurement, demarcation, quantification, and reportage that are typically required when the subjective discretion/judgment of ‘experts’ is questioned.    3  This information is compiled based on DDA survey instructions, DDA Annual Reports describing survey outcomes, and interviews with DDA staff in 2005 about slum surveys in this period.    4  MCD. 2002. Annual Report of the Slum and JJ Wing, 2001–2002.    5  Resettlement plots are now 12.5 or 18 m2 in size, depending on the date of one’s residence proof, whereas they were 50 m2 in the 1970s. Unlike old resettlement colonies located within the city limits, current resettlement plots are typically more than 30 km away from residents’ original jobs and homes, have access to far fewer public services than slums, have few local job prospects, and come with mere five-year residency (see Menon-Sen & Bhan, 2008).    6  These observations are based on survey instructions from this period, conversations with DDA surveyors in 2005 about their past experiences conducting slum surveys, and interviews with slum residents surveyed in the 1990s.    7  Tata Consultancy Services. (1986). Delhi Development Authority Organizational Review Study, Vol. 1, Proposed Management Information System, p. 4.6.    8  Ibid.: 4.2–4.4.    9  Okhla Factor Owners’ Association vs. GNCTD (Delhi High Court, 2002), Civil Writ Petition 4441/1994, final j­udgment.  10  Affidavit filed by Under Secretary, Ministry of Urban Development & Poverty Alleviation, in the High Court of Delhi, CWP 2253/2001.  11  Pitampura Sudhar Samiti vs. Government of India (Delhi High Court), Civil Writ Petition 4215/1995, order dated May 26, 1997.  12  Ibid., final judgment.  13  Ibid., order dated May 26, 1997.  14  For example, see the order dated February 16, 2001 in Samudayik Vikas Samiti vs. Government of India (Delhi High Court), CWP 6553/2000.  15  This is a component of what is regarded as ‘judicial activism’: when the judiciary takes over decisions that fall within the domain of the legislature or executive (e.g., see ‘Court steps on MCD turf’, The Times of India, New Delhi, March 24, 2006).  16  Civil Misc. Petition 6982/2007 (Dayavanti & Ors.) in CWP 4582/2003 (Delhi High Court).  17  See the Report of the Committee on Problems of Slums in Delhi, constituted by the Planning Commission, Government

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of India, June 2002: ‘DDA claims that 20% of the residential area [of Delhi] is earmarked for Economically Weaker Sections/squatter population under the integrated development project. DDA has not allotted any land to Slum & JJ Department [responsible for slum housing] during 1992-97 …. Prima facie, the allocation of land for the housing of the urban poor has been insufficient to meet the requirements, and below the proportion of their share [provided through the Master Plan]’ (29–30). Okhla Factor Owners’ Association vs. GNCTD (Delhi High Court, 2002), Civil Writ Petition 4441/1994, final ­judgment, paragraph 22. Almrita Patel vs. Union of India (Supreme Court), final judgment, Supreme Court Cases 2000 (2): 679, emphasis added. CWP 6553/2000 (Delhi High Court), order dated February 16, 2001. See The Indian Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, Section 133. Field notes, March 22, 2005. Ibid. Field notes, April 13, 2005. DDA Annual Reports show that, each year, fewer than 10% of the structures surveyed and given notice for encroaching public land are demolished. This is because the DDA initiates proceedings under the Public Premises (Eviction of Unauthorized Occupants) Act, 1971 only when it intends to use that land for a particular purpose. Field notes, April 14, 2005.

References Baviskar, A. (2003). Between violence and desire: Space, power, and identity in the making of metropolitan Delhi. International Social Science Journal, 55(1), 89–98. doi:10.1111/1468-2451.5501009 Biswas, S. (2006). Why so much of Delhi is illegal. BBC News. Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/ south_asia/4665330.stm DDA. (1982). Delhi Development Authority Annual Report, 1981-1982. New Delhi: Delhi Development Authority. DDA. (1987). Handbook for Use and Guidance of Damages Section. In Delhi Development Authority (Ed.). New Delhi: Delhi Development Authority. DDA. (1997). Delhi Development Authority Annual Report, 1996-1997. New Delhi: Delhi Development Authority. Dean, M. (1999). Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage. Foucault, M. (1997). Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 1. New York: New Press. Foucault, M. (2001). Society Must Be Defended. New York: Picador. Foucault, M. (2007). Security, Territory, Population (G. Burchell, Trans.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ghertner, D. A. (2005). Purani yojana ki kabr par, nayi yojana ki buniyad: Dilli Master Plan 2021 ki chunauti aur s­ ambhavnae [Building the new plan on the grave of the old: The politics of the Delhi Master Plan 2021]. Yojana, 24(7), 14–20. Ghertner, D. A. (2015). Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi. New York: Oxford University Press. Gordon, C. (1991). Governmental rationality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hannah, M. G. (2000). Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hull, M. S. (2008). Ruled by records: The expropriation of land and the misappropriation of lists in Islamabad. American Ethnologist, 35(4), 501–518. Jain, A. K. (2003). Making planning responsive to, and compatible with, reforms. Cities, 20(2), 143–145. Jain, A. K. (2005). Law and Environment. Delhi: Ascent. Kalpagam, U. (2000). Colonial governmentality and the ‘economy’. Economy and Society, 29(3), 418–438. Legg, S. (2006). Post-colonial developmentalities: From the Delhi Improvement Trust to the Delhi Development Authority. In S. Raju, M. S. Kumar, & S. Corbridge (Eds.), Colonial and Post-Colonial Geographies of India (pp. 182–204). New Delhi: Sage. Legg, S. (2007). Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities. Oxford: Blackwell. Li, T. M. (2007). The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Menon-Sen, K., & Bhan, G. (2008). Swept off the Map: Surviving Eviction and Resettlement in Delhi. New Delhi: Yoda Press. Mustafa, S. (1995). The Lonely Prophet: V.P. Singh, A Political Biography. Delhi: New Age International.

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Pandey, G. (2001). Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Porter, T. M. (1995). Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ramesh, R. (2008, January 8). Delhi cleans up for Commonwealth games but leaves locals without sporting chance. Guardian. Rose, N. (1991). Governing by numbers: Figuring out democracy. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 16(7), 673–692. Rose, N. (1999). Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roy, A. (2004). The gentleman’s city: Urban informality in the Calcutta of new communism. In N. AlSayyad & A. Roy (Eds.), Urban Informality (pp. 147–170). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Sharan, A. (2006). In the city, out of place: Environment and modernity, Delhi 1860s to 1960s. Economic and Political Weekly, 41(47), 4905–4911. Valverde, M. (2011). Seeing like a city: The dialectic of modern and premodern ways of seeing in urban governance. Law & Society Review, 45(2), 277–312. World Bank. (2004). World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for Poor People. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Part V

Volatility: Disruption and Adaptation

Mankhurd, Mumbai, 2013, Julia King

15 Post-disaster Recovery and Rebuilding K e v i n F o x G o t h a m a n d We s l e y C h e e k

Introduction The purpose of the chapter is to describe the sociological dimensions, major trends, and political–economic processes affecting the formulation and implementation of post-disaster recovery and rebuilding policies and programs in the United States and around the world. Post-disaster recovery and rebuilding activities lay bare the underlying power structures, logics of elite decision making, long-neglected injustices, and unacknowledged inequalities of contemporary cities. Sociological research on disasters has long focused attention on questions such as who benefits and who suffers from the implementation of recovery and rebuilding policies, what role do politics and institutional practices play in the social production of disasters, and how do larger political–economic processes and land-use patterns produce risk and vulnerability to disasters (Freudenberg et al. 2009; Gotham and Greenberg 2014; 2008). In this chapter, we focus on the sociological questions related to the logics and processes of post-disaster recovery and rebuilding in the context of the dramatic dynamics and disruptions of twenty-first-century urbanization. Drawing on recent disasters in the United States, we identify the risk-generating consequences of the application of neoliberal strategies to revitalize and rebuild disaster-impacted cities. Next, we focus internationally and examine the tensions and contractions associated with post-disaster recovery approaches that stress grassroots planning and community control versus approaches that emphasize corporate-driven and top-down bureaucratic management. We then discuss the inequality-reinforcing aspects of post-disaster recovery and rebuilding activities using examples from around the world. Finally, we critically engage the scholarship on the concepts of vulnerability, resilience, and sustainability to identify the problems and paradoxes of the use of these terms in the discourse of urban recovery and rebuilding. Overall, our aim in this chapter is to address the twenty-first-century mutations of post-disaster

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recovery and rebuilding policies in sociologically innovative ways, speaking to new ideas, highlighting empirical and methodological advancements, and engaging with contributions to policy. A fundamental assumption of our chapter is that disasters should not be seen as abnormal or atypical events but as predictable manifestations of contemporary socio-economic, political, and cultural processes that constitute and reproduce society. The work of Kathleen Tierney (2007), Susan Cutter and colleagues (2003), Ben Wisner and colleagues (2004), Greg Bankoff (2003), Eric Klinenberg (2002), and Mark Pelling (2003), among others, has shown that disasters result not only from a disaster agent or trigger event itself such as a hurricane, tornado, or earthquake, but rather from a combination of socio-economic, political, and environmental factors. These factors include, among others, deforestation, environmental degradation, land development in flood-prone areas, poverty and other forms of social inequality, low capacity for self-help among subgroups within populations, and failures in physical and social protective systems. Social transformations at regional, national, and global scales produce these conditions that make some groups vulnerable to disaster. If we extend this thinking, then cities and metropolitan areas cannot be adequately understood as simple sites or stages upon which disasters ‘produce’ their ‘impacts.’ Rather, disasters and their destruction are endemic social problems linked to the organization of cities and the implementation of policies and socio-legal regulations.

Political economy of post-disaster recovery and rebuilding in the United States Future scholars may well look upon the first decade of the twenty-first century as a crucial turning point in the history of US cities and metropolitan areas. In 2001, New York City experienced a major terrorist strike that killed almost 3,000 people and leveled the World Trade Center buildings in Lower Manhattan. The immediate consequences of the destruction included the loss of some 430,000 jobs, $2.8 billion in lost wages, the devastation of 18,000 small businesses, and damage to 32 million square feet (3 million m2) of office space. In the last three months of 2001 and all of 2002, New York City’s GDP plummeted by $27.3 billion, a precipitous decline that caused catastrophic job losses in the metropolitan economy (Government Accountability Office 2003). The US federal government provided $11.2 billion in immediate assistance to New York City in September 2001, and $10.5 billion in early 2002 for economic development and infrastructure needs. Less than a year after the attacks, the Bush Administration created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to strengthen US borders, provide for infrastructure protection, and establish a comprehensive disaster response system. The 9/11 attacks also provided the justification for launching the global war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq. Long term, 9/11 helped reinvigorate the military–industrial complex as defense spending skyrocketed by an annual average rate of 8 percent, after adjusting for inflation, from 2001 through 2008 (Kogan 2008). Overall, the linked events of 9/11, the war on terror, and the invasion of Iraq express US government efforts to militarize the everyday urban spaces of a newly ‘rebordered’ US national ‘homeland’ (Graham 2006). The discourse of ‘homeland

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security’, emphasizing endless threats from an almost infinite range of people, places, and technologies, is now pervasive and used to justify a massive process of urban securitization and restructuring. Less than four years later, on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the U.S. Gulf Coast causing over 1,500 deaths and estimated damages of approximately $150 billion. The hurricane caused catastrophic property damage along the Mississippi and Alabama coasts and flooded over 80 percent of the city of New Orleans, with some parts of the city under 20 feet (6 m) of water during September 2005. Approximately 90,000 square miles (230 km2) of the Gulf coast region were designated as federal disaster areas, an area almost as large as the United Kingdom. In New Orleans, Katrina flooded over 12,000 business establishments (41 percent of the metropolitan area’s total businesses) and 228,000 occupied housing units (45 percent of the metropolitan total). Moreover, Katrina forced the evacuation of 1 million residents from southern Louisiana and Mississippi including nearly everyone living in New Orleans and surrounding suburbs, the largest forced displacement of urban residents in US history. In the weeks after the storm, the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) distributed aid to over 700,000 households, including 1.5 million people directly affected by the storm (Brookings Institution 2005: 14–15; United States Senate 2009). In 2007, two years after the hurricane, of the more than 130,000 people that had applied for federal aid none had yet to receive any compensation for their flooded homes (Whoriskey 2007a; 2007b). As of July 2014, the US Census Bureau estimated New Orleans’ population at 384,320, or 79 percent of its 2000 population of 484,674. Ten years after Katrina, New Orleans has seen much physical rebuilding, but too many jobs pay low wages and many low-wage workers live in ‘wage deserts,’ areas with high concentrations of other low-wage workers (Nelson et al. 2015). In short, the 9/11 terrorist strikes and the Hurricane Katrina disaster have intensified uncertainty and unpredictability, exposed a new insecurity in US cities, and demonstrated how urban disasters can wreck havoc within the US political system and global economy. From these disasters, dramatic and widespread social, political, and economic transformations have spread and reverberated around the world to draw attention to a wide range of hazardous, evenly deadly, conditions that now face urban citizens. Books by Charles Perrow (2007), Stephen Flynn (2007), and Kathleen Tierney (2014) note that disasters have all increased in the United States in recent decades. Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, PL 100-707, signed into law November 23, 1988, constitutes the statutory authority that allows the president of the United States to declare a disaster and thereby initiate response activities among government agencies. The 460 Stafford Act presidential disaster declarations during the 1990s were double the number during the 1980s. This trend has continued during the last decade, with 1,374 disaster declarations from 2000 through 2010, triple the number of disaster declarations registered during the 1990s. In 2011, there were 242 disaster declarations, the most ever recorded in a single year (Federal Emergency Management Agency 2015). Rising numbers of disasters correspond to rising costs of disaster damage. Hurricane Katrina was the costliest storm in US history, and 2012 brought the second costliest disaster, Superstorm Sandy, caused $65 billion in damage as it tore through 24 states, leaving 160 dead and sending a 13-foot (4 m) storm surge through Battery Park in Lower Manhattan (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 2013). The Urban Land Institute’s 2014 report, Extreme Weather Events and Property Values, finds that the direct losses to real estate

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from disasters have tripled since the 1980s and now reach $150 billion annually (Peterson 2014; McNamara and Keeler 2013). Over the last two decades, political leaders and policy makers have embraced a neoliberal or market-centered ideology to formulate and implement disaster recovery and rebuilding policies. Neoliberalism stresses the beneficence of the so-called ‘free market,’ private sector implementation of state policies, and the deregulation of industry. While there are cross-national differences in definition and nature of implementation, neoliberalism generally refers to the underlying commitment by the public sector to helping private business grow and prosper. It is an entrenched and deep-rooted belief in the supremacy of the private sector in nurturing societal development, with the public sector adopting a ‘hands-off’ (laissez-faire) strategy whose principal obligation is to encourage private profit making through unregulated markets. Neoliberalism is market-centered ideology with a repertoire of policies and strategies that seek to privilege some policy initiatives (e.g., austerity, tax breaks, deregulation, etc.) while limiting and excluding others (e.g., direct outlay programs and redistributive policies). In the United States, examples of post-disaster neoliberal policies include the contracting out of FEMA services in response to Hurricane Katrina (Gotham 2013), the privatization of the Louisiana Road Home program after Hurricane Katrina (Gotham 2014a; 2014c), and the use of spatially targeted tax incentives to help business reinvest in disaster-devastated communities (Gotham, 2014b). While the United States represents particularly aggressive programs of neoliberal restructuring, other applications of neoliberal policies have occurred in Japan, India, and Indonesia through various privatization schemes. Nevertheless, the use and implementation of neoliberal ideas in the realm of post-disaster recovery has been highly uneven, both socially and geographically, and its institutional forms and socio-political consequences have varied significantly across different nations. One example of the neoliberalization of disaster recovery policy has been the increasing use and application of the enterprise zone model of economic revitalization as a strategy to revitalize and rebuilding disaster-impacted cities (Gotham and Greenberg 2008; 2014). An urban enterprise zone is an area in which governments implement various policies to encourage economic growth and development. Urban enterprise zone policies generally offer tax concessions, infrastructure incentives, and reduced environmental regulations to attract investments and private companies into the zones. The establishment of the New York Liberty Zone following the 9/11 terrorist attacks was the first time the US Congress explicitly targeted tax benefits to a disaster-impacted geographic ‘zone.’ The Liberty Zone included the 16-acre (6.5 hectare) World Trade Center site and surrounding urban neighborhoods and commercial districts (Graham 2007). Four years later, Congress drew on the Liberty Zone model to establish the Gulf Opportunity (GO) Zone Act of 2005 (Pub. L. No. 109-135) to provide tax incentives to businesses in designated areas in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas following Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma in 2005. Unlike the relatively delimited small-scale Liberty Zone, the GO Zone contained a heterogeneous mix of urban and rural communities spread across more than 60,000 square miles (155,000 km2) of territory in 89 counties and four states (Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi) (Government Accountability Office 2008). Like the Liberty Zone, the GO Zone program represented the application of the enterprise zone model and related tax incentives to stimulate community recovery, a policy orientation that reflected the long-standing belief that alterations to the tax code can be effective strategies for generating spatially targeted economic development and reinvestment.

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Since the 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina disasters, spatially targeted tax subsidies and related tax-oriented tools have become a popular form of federal assistance to disasterimpacted areas. In 2008, the federal government created the Midwest Disaster Area Bonds following severe tornadoes and flooding that affected seven states across the Midwest. Also in 2008, the federal government established Hurricane Ike Bonds to finance the rebuilding of areas affected by Hurricane Ike in Texas and Louisiana. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 expanded the qualification for tax-exempt financing in the form of Build America Bonds and Recovery Zone Bonds. In 2013, members of Congress introduced the Hurricane Sandy Tax Relief Act to create ‘Sandy Recovery Bonds’ and allocate private activity bonds for Sandy-affected areas, including $9.2 billion each for New York and New Jersey and $3.2 billion for Connecticut. While there were differences in the structure and organization of these programs, they all have been designed to target tax incentives to particular distressed spaces. The Liberty Zone, GO Zone, and recent disaster bond programs should serve as a cautionary tale for policy makers and political leaders considering spatially targeted tax incentives to revitalize disaster-impacted cities. Critical researchers have consistently shown that spatially targeted tax incentives alone do not provide for long-term and comprehensive recovery and, in some cases, slow community rebuilding and exacerbate the conditions of vulnerability, marginalization, and inequality in the years following a disaster (Bunker 2013; Clark and Rose 2007; Government Accountability Office 2008; 2003; Greenbaum and Landers 2009; Stoker and Rich 2006; Gotham and Greenberg 2014; 2008). In the case of widespread damage, places deemed as less desirable from an investment perspective will have few resources for small business recovery (Graham 2007). These problems are exacerbated as the size of the disaster recovery zone for tax incentives grows larger. As Gotham (2014a; 2014c; 2013) has pointed out in a series of articles on the GO Zone, spatial growth and expansion of a disaster zone can undermine the effectiveness of spatially targeted programs as businesses will seek out the least damaged areas in the zone to take advantage of tax incentives. Rather than promoting business recovery, disaster zones can limit recovery by steering businesses away from the most damaged areas if the disaster zone is too large and the tax incentive is not generous enough (Stead 2006; Stoker and Rich 2006; Gotham 2013). In the case of the GO Zone, the three eligible states with GO Zones generally allocated bond authority on a first-come, first-served basis without consistently targeting the allocations to assist recovery in the most damaged areas. Spatially targeted tax incentives tended to benefit large businesses in the least damaged areas with few tax benefits trickling down to small businesses in the most damaged areas. Though policy makers designed the program to stimulate small business recovery, GO Zone benefits went to large businesses located in areas least damaged by the hurricanes. Implementing post-disaster recovery and rebuilding through bond programs and other tax incentives tend to skew benefits toward large businesses and undamaged areas, and away from small businesses and heavily damaged areas (Gotham 2013; 2014a; 2014c). Moreover, research demonstrates that manipulations in the tax code have little effect in encouraging new urban investment, fostering employment growth, or targeting development to disaster-impacted areas (for overviews, see Stoker and Rich 2006; Stead 2006). Often, incentives are offered but little effort is made to ensure that the terms and conditions recipients are supposed to meet (such as job creation goals) are in fact met (Gotham 2013 2014a; 2014c).

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Core features of contemporary US post-disaster recovery policies Today, the political economy of post-disaster recovery and rebuilding in the United States is increasingly characterized by the several features. A first feature is the reframing of the post-disaster urban landscape as a ‘blank slate’ to apply new market-centered policies and regulatory strategies (Gotham and Greenberg 2014). Naomi Klein’s (2007) term disaster capitalism has become a popular concept for understanding the opportunities disasters generate for elected officials and policy makers interested in gaining rapid and uncontested control over particular spaces and communities. The social atomization, abrupt change, and instability left by disasters become a laboratory for implementing what Klein calls the ‘disaster-capitalism complex,’ in which many disaster-related functions including rebuilding cities can be performed by corporations at a profit. Central to this concern is the role of political power and institutional practices in framing disaster conditions, constructing disaster definitions and assessments, and shaping priorities for ameliorate action and post-disaster redevelopment. Another major feature has been the emergence of corporate firms and non-profit organizations to exploit disasters and crises as sources of investment and profit. In the weeks following Hurricane Katrina, FEMA entered into no-bid contracts – for example, contracts awarded without competitive bidding – with four multinational corporations: Fluor Enterprises, Inc. (Fluor), Shaw Group (Shaw), CH2M Hill Constructors, Inc. (Hill), and Bechtel National, Inc. (Bechtel). These contracts tasked the firms to provide and coordinate project management services for temporary housing with the cost of the contracts being $1.3 billion for Fluor, $830 million for Shaw, $464 million for Hill, and $517 million for Bechtel. The US federal government entered into contractual arrangements to reimburse the firms for funds they spent but did not define the terms and conditions associated with a contract or task order. Far from saving the government money and speeding recovery efforts, according to a Government Accountability Office (2007) investigation, FEMA’s reliance on the multinational corporations to provide disaster relief contributed to escalating costs, and widespread fraud, waste, and abuse resulting from control weaknesses and lack of accountability (see also Cray 2005). Finally, governments are increasingly relying on the private and non-profit sectors to perform core urban rebuilding functions and deliver disaster recovery aid and services. While state and local governments in the United States provide direct aid to disaster victims, the majority of programs and funding streams are dedicated to purchasing and managing disaster recovery services implemented by private sector organizations. In 2008, FEMA began outsourcing much of the agency’s logistics to private contractors who are now in charge of acquiring, storing, and moving emergency supplies. This arrangement, known as third-party logistics, reflects the agency’s perception that the private sector is better equipped to deliver resources and plan for disasters. The federal-level privatization of disaster provisions dovetails with state-level attempts to contract out emergency management operations to large retailers such as Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and other companies to provide water, ice, and critical supplies during crises (Phillips 2007). Thus, over the last decade, FEMA has increasing shifted from an agency that provides resources and services into a role of service purchaser and service arranger. Rather than delivering services, FEMA now finds itself managing contracts and a plethora of networks that stretch from the federal government into state and local governments and the private sector. Overall, privatization of emergency management services and disaster recovery

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policy constitutes a new regulatory project in which the state’s role has shifted away from providing aid to disaster victims and toward the management and coordination of services delivered by private contractors (Gotham 2014a; 2014c). In sum, in the United States, disaster response and emergency management are governed by the logic and principles of privatization, devolution of program implementation to subnational governments, and use of tax incentives to prime the private sector to take the lead in delivering disaster aid and jumpstarting rebuilding efforts. One limitation of this neoliberal approach is that the privatization of program implementation can lead to a socially exclusive form of rebuilding that can shield powerful actors and organized interests from democratic scrutiny and public oversight. Transnational corporations and large contractors are now positioned with well-organized legal teams and consultants to bid for and receive lucrative contracts for debris removal, production of temporary housing, and other disaster services. Importantly, the privileging of the private sector to deliver disaster aid removes public spending from the realm of democratic accountability and thereby creates a misallocation of funds that fails to address the risk-producing processes that contributed to the building up of pre-disaster vulnerabilities.

Tensions and contradictions of international disaster assistance Internationally, there is a fundamental tension between approaches that stress grassroots planning and community control over post-disaster recovery activities versus approaches that emphasize corporate-driven planning and top-down bureaucratic management of the recovery process. Often, important decisions regarding where and how to allocate resources for needy communities are controlled by external agencies such as the World Bank. As much research has shown, large NGOs may have altruistic and benevolent intentions but their actions have shown little interest in involving community residents in the design and implementation of disaster recovery policies. During recovery periods, residents often face more formidable barriers to effectively defining and communicating their collective needs (Erikson 2004 [1976]). They also tend to be excluded from participating in decision making related to the allocation of recovery resources (Kamel and Loukaitou-Sideris 2004). The mechanisms of exclusion and disadvantage that shape the disaster outcomes include institutionalized discrimination, socioeconomic exploitation, housing damage, and lack of access to insurance, emergency relief organizations, community- and faith-based assistance, and public and private rebuilding resources. In many cases, as disaster resources are distributed unequally among different social groups, the recovery process further accentuates the harsh divisions of class, race, gender, and place stratification (Mutter 2010; Wisner et al. 2004). A major disaster can alter pre-disaster forms of social organization and territorial development but also accelerate pre-disaster trends, including rising inequality, rigid patterns of residential segregation, and unequal access to political and economic resources on the basis of gender, race, and class. While rebuilding poor communities’ social infrastructure is typically a major priority for community organizations and activist groups, government agencies and outside private groups may view the removal rather than rebuilding of damaged structures as a priority, especially if profit is to be made in tearing down existing damaged structures

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and then building new structures. Scholars have long known that a displaced population that is unable to return to a damaged environment inhibits the long-term prospects for a robust recovery (Caye 2011; Dyson 2006; Jigyasu and Boen 2005; Lizarralde et  al. 2009). In addition, as neoliberal, market-centered, post-disaster rebuilding approaches have diffused internationally, much emphasis has been placed by government and private actors on implementing policies and practices emphasizing short-term recovery, speed of resource delivery, prioritization of physical infrastructural investment, and rapid restoration of the pre-disaster status quo. The problem with such approaches is that recovery planning and implementation tend to be piecemeal, uncoordinated, and ad hoc. Few resources and attention are focused on long-term and comprehensive rebuilding that is inclusive for community residents. Two examples are relevant. First, after the 1993 Marathwada Earthquake in India, 10,000 people were killed and 52 villages were badly damaged. Most of the houses that were destroyed were traditional homes built from stone and wood. A large group of key actors and organizations, led by the Government of Maharashtra and including the Government of India (GOI), NGOs, the affected villages, the World Bank, the Department for International Development (DFID) of the United Kingdom, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), were involved in the development and implementation of the project. A central pillar of the recovery project was a strong emphasis on quickly producing new housing. To do so, the World Bank and NGOs stigmatized traditional construction efforts and argued that the stone and wood used by villages to rebuild homes would be vulnerable to collapse in further earthquakes (Jigyasu 2002; Salazar,2002). This approach is part of a larger system of development that prioritizes speed and efficiency in housing production (Fernandes and Varley 1998; Gunewardena and Schuller 2008; Jessop 2002; Turner 1967). As the reconstruction process unfolded, communities mobilized in opposition to the contractor-driven reconstruction process since newer earthquakeresistant building materials replaced the conventional use of wood and stone for housing construction. Residents also opposed the new spatial layout of reconstructed villages as well. The temples and wells that villagers had gathered around for generations were not integrated into the new sites. Likewise, the fields that provided work for the people remained at the previous site, with no new arable land readily available. This created a daunting commute from the new communities. The village had grown and expanded through vernacular construction, reflexive to local needs. The new settlement excluded this dynamic. Claims were made that the spatial layout resulted in homes that were not suited to the climate and difficult to live in since they were not conducive to traditional village life. In the end, the spatial layout of the new villages was based on construction expediency and bore little resemblance to pre-disaster village life based on shared livelihoods and strong community identity. While the stone and wood continue to be used, since they are locally available and inexpensive, the traditional knowledge systems that supported the craft skills and indigenous training of local residents have disappeared (Jigyasu 2014; 2015). Second, the December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami resulted in heavy damage to nearly 135,000 homes in the Tamil Nadu state of India. The government of Tamil Nadu invited outside NGOs, aid organizations, and private entities to lead the reconstruction effort with a goal of rebuilding 135,000 units of housing. Originally entire villages were to be moved inshore, but this project was scrapped due to lack

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of available land and resistance from displaced residents (Barenstein and Pittet 2007). Several NGOs implemented rebuilding projects that unnecessarily removed shade trees and vegetation that were important to the daily life of the community. In addition, vernacular homes of thatched or tile roofs and open floor plans were removed and replaced with flat-roofed concrete homes with closed floor plans. Fortunately, there was an initial high rate of occupation since the NGO-constructed homes in Tamil Nadu were offered to the affected communities for free. Unfortunately, the constructed homes were closed structures that trapped heat and created unbearably hot indoor temperatures. The lack of porches and surrounding tree cover meant that there was little respite outdoors from the indoor heat. The confluence of external funding and decision making with a lack of local input and failure to use traditional construction methods worked together to contribute to a rebuilding process that, while producing occupied housing units, was antithetical to the indigenous culture. In traditional Tamil Nadu homebuilding, family members were the decision makers in the building process, with the women acting as the construction supervisors. Families mainly lived on the outside of their homes with the interior functioning as a storage area for possessions. National and international funding fueled the implementation of a technocratic housing policy that marginalized local building culture and fueled contestation over competing conceptions of how a home should function. Scholars have described the approach of inviting large international organizations to take the lead in reconstruction processes as the ‘infusion of aid’ model (Chang et  al. 2011). In theory, this donor-driven approach is supposed to leverage resources and efficiently distribute aid to areas that have sustained major damage and destruction. In reality, however, researchers have noted that this approach is fraught with unrealistic expectations, lack of clear assessment and evaluation procedures, and bureaucratic mismanagement and conflict that can lead to delays in getting supplies and resources to needy communities (Boano 2010; Chang et  al. 2011; Lyons 2009; Steinberg 2007). In Tamil Nadu, NGOs often took on tasks that were beyond their capabilities or implemented programs with little knowledge or understanding of local history and culture. NGOs working with state authorities used similar approaches in response to the Kobe earthquake in 1995 and in Choluteca, Honduras in response to Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Lack of clear leadership structures for making and implementing policy combined with a plethora of different organizations working in the disaster area led to inter-bureaucratic competition for scarce resources and access to land. Achieving the goal of community participation takes time and requires sustained interaction, strong leadership, and concerted planning and commitment. The infusion of aid model of reconstruction has had difficulty addressing these concerns. The above examples are illustrative of the tension between the extra-local – for example, national and international – funding of post-disaster reconstruction and local control over the implementation of rebuilding policies. One source of this tension is conflict between those organized interests seeking to align rebuilding goals and outcomes with neoliberal market strategies and other groups and interests attempting to preserve local culture and traditional knowledge (Ranghieri and Ishiwatari 2014; United Nations 2015). Other tensions include conflicting organizational and institutional goals, inconsistent implementation procedures, and disagreements over leadership and control of financing and resources. Typically, large international NGOs like the World Bank assume that the most effective and efficient approach to facilitate post-disaster reconstruction is to foster economic growth and development. Yet when the goals of

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reconstruction become intertwined with the goals of economic development, certain strategies and approaches invariably become prioritized over others. As has taken place elsewhere as part of modern urbanization, simple repairs of vernacular housing structures, for example, are often under-utilized by NGOs and government actors. Repairs by local craftworkers are difficult to quantify as developmental progress. The loss of the historical fabric of a community is likewise difficult to measure, yet the sense of continuity that it inspires for a community can lead to improved post-disaster outcomes (Lahad et al. 2011). Cultural continuity and coherence have been shown by scholars such as Erikson (1994) to be an essential yet often neglected element of post-disaster reconstruction and the recovery process in general. In addition, the element of cultural competence and preservation of traditional cultural knowledge are difficult to assign as a development goal. Top-down disaster recovery strategies emphasizing the restoration of economic growth and development are difficult to implement in disaster-impacted areas where traditional and informal housing arrangements are prominent. Many traditional buildings are built outside of code restrictions. Bringing them into compliance makes the cost of reconstruction too high for the local community to afford. This is especially true before a disaster when mitigation funding is scarce and international aid might not be available. Additionally, traditional and informal construction is often an ongoing process, with housing being continuously worked on, rooms added as additions as a family grows or money becomes available (Barenstein and Leemann 2012; Davidson et al. 2007; Lizarralde et al. 2009). Efforts to bring traditional and informal housing up to code which are required from most NGOs involved in disaster recovery are at odds with many indigenous cultures and thereby ignore a critical element of a community’s rebuilding approach. In the end, more economic growth and development is not a panacea for disaster recovery or for reducing vulnerability to future disasters (Mutter 2010). On the contrary, increasing economic growth and development expands the target of disaster trigger events – hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, etc. – by putting more people in harm’s way. This can be seen in areas such as Honduras, Belize, and Sri Lanka where tourism in vulnerable coastal areas was utilized as an economic driver, drawing low-wage workers (Gunewardena and Schuller 2008; Stonich et al. 1995). This was also the case in Haiti where unemployed workers flocked to cities for work and were housed in dangerous conditions (Dumas 2013; Margesson and Taft-Morales 2010; Zanotti 2010). Disaster vulnerability comes from increasing poverty and inequality, high population density, crowded living conditions, the location of residential areas near to hazardous industry, or in places exposed to natural hazard (Wisner et al. 2004). Economic growth and development, for example, incurs new risks from storms and flooding as a result of land pressure and new residential developments that disturb natural land drainage patterns (Bosher 2008; Lakoff 2010; Lee Bosher et al. 2009).Coastal development puts people in the bull’s eye of hurricanes while the loss of coastal wetlands removes an important land barrier that acts as a speed bump when storms come ashore. Overall, as the United Nations (2009) has pointed out, more people than ever live in harm’s way from earthquakes, droughts, floods, and other disasters, largely because of a surge in urban populations in both developing and developed nations (United Nations 2015; United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction 2005). Growing urban population and spreading urban development expand the target of vulnerability for hurricanes, earthquakes, and other catastrophes, thus making disasters a major urban problem (Revkin 2009).

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Vulnerability, resilience, and sustainability In recent years, the terms vulnerability, resilience, and sustainability have emerged as major terms to classify and categorize knowledge and information about post-disaster recovery and rebuilding activities and processes. As Gotham and Greenberg (2014) point out in their comparison of New York and New Orleans, ‘resilience’ and ‘sustainability’ have emerged as major descriptors of the post-9/11 and post-Katrina urban rebuilding process, while discourses of resilient and sustainable urbanization permeate public debates in New York and New Orleans to this day. The terms ‘sustainability’, ‘resilience’, and ‘vulnerability’ do not reflect static conditions or objective states of an uncontested reality. Rather, political interventions, newly created institutions, newly drafted policies and regulations, and so on may nurture some forms of resilience and sustainability (e.g., economic revitalization), undermine other kinds of resilience and sustainability (e.g., neighborhood social networks and community ties), and contribute to the long-term erosion of different kinds of resilience and sustainability (e.g., socio-economic, environmental, and so on). Consequently, some policies may produce resilience to particular types of disturbances (but not others), and promote the sustainability of certain urban qualities and communities (and not others), while also producing new vulnerabilities to hazards and institutional breakdown. In short, sustainability, vulnerability, and resilience are power-laden concepts whose definition reflects bureaucratic decision-making processes and institutional actions related to the production and control of knowledge about cities and urban life. Vulnerability The term ‘vulnerability’ represents the geographical, economic, political, or social susceptibility, predisposition, or risk factor of a group or community to damage by a hazardous condition. Cutter et al. (2003: 243) have outlined three main tenets in vulnerability research: the identification of conditions that make people or places vulnerable to extreme natural events, an exposure model; the idea that vulnerability is a socially produced condition, a measure of societal resistance or resilience to hazards; and ‘the integration of potential exposures and societal resilience with a specific focus on particular places or regions.’ Social vulnerability is partially the product of social inequalities – those social factors that influence or shape the susceptibility of various groups to harm and that also govern their ability to respond. Yet, social vulnerability to hazards and disasters also includes place inequalities – those characteristics of communities and the built environment, such as the level of urbanization, growth rates, and economic vitality, that contribute to the social vulnerability of places. Scholars such as Klinenberg (2002), Kamel (2012), and Kamel and Loukaitou-Sideris (2004) have demonstrated that those who were more vulnerable before a disaster are often given less of a voice in the reconstruction process, thereby possibly resigning them again to being on the margins of society. Today, disaster vulnerability is an urgent social problem that affects cities around the world and threatens basic social institutions that individuals and communities rely for growth and survival. John Mutter (2010) notes that systems of inequality and disadvantage translate into a hierarchy of places in which wealthier countries such as the United States can buffer the effects of major disasters on a national level, whereas small

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countries with weak government systems and economies can be devastated by disasters. Disaster risk is a global phenomenon that is increasing, intensively concentrated, and unevenly distributed. Countries with small and vulnerable economies, such as many small-island developing states (SIDS) like Madagascar and land-locked developing countries (LLDCs) such as Kazakhstan, have seen their economic development set back decades by disaster impacts. The magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile in February 2010 released almost 500 times as much energy as the 7.0 quake a few weeks earlier in Haiti. Yet the death toll in Haiti — the much poorer nation, with a GDP more than 20 times smaller than that of Chile — was almost 500 times larger, and the nation’s prospects for recovery do not look bright. In short, the relative socio-economic status of a nation is a major determinant of recovery, according to Mutter (2010). Poorer urban communities suffer a disproportionate share of disaster loss, are less resilient to loss, and have access to few social protections. Resilience Since the 1980s, ecologists and social scientists have applied a concept of ‘resilience,’ borrowed from the bio-natural world, to social and built environments, to explain how ‘systems’ respond to traumatic events. Resilience is the ability to recover after an impact or misfortune and adapt to the consequences associated with an instance of failure or systemic breakdown. While there is no single professional or technical definition for the term, resilience is increasingly being used to describe the inherent qualities or capability of organizations and communities to recover quickly and resume their activities after natural catastrophes (for overviews, see Cutter et al. 2008; Peacock 1997). In this context, resilience encompasses a wide variety of risk-mitigation strategies that seek to respond to vulnerabilities in communities and the built environment or to adapt to recent or anticipated risks associated with climate change (Bosher 2008; Adger et al. 2005). The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) defines resilience as: ‘The ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate to and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions’ (2009). Applying ‘resilience thinking’ to cities and communities requires us to think not only about ‘bouncing back’ from environmental, economic, and social crises, but about adapting to changing circumstances by ‘bouncing forward’ through the establishment of new and innovative policies, processes, and cross-scale interactions (Amaratunga and Haigh 2011; Tierney 2014). The high losses experienced by social disadvantaged groups – for example, poor people, women, racial and ethnic minorities, and the elderly – have traditionally been attributed to the lack of resilience of such groups to disasters. This ‘lack-of-resilience’ explanation tends to zero in on the attributes of individuals as the root cause of vulnerability, a blamethe-victim view that diverts attention away from underlying population dynamics (population growth, urbanization, migration) that increase exposure to disasters and contribute to the devastating impacts of traumatic events (Donner and Rodriguez 2008). Moreover, such a perspective frames the post-disaster ‘recovery’ of upper-class and affluent areas in terms of resilience of those communities, an explanation that obfuscates the central role that state policies and programs play in buffering affluent neighborhoods and groups from the harmful effects of disasters. In the United States, as Kamel (2012) and Kamel and

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Loukaitou-Sideris (2004) have pointed out, federal assistance programs are designed to favor well-off single-family homeowners and offer limited resources for long-term recovery. International scholarly work on how reconstruction plays out, and who is affected by it, has pointed out that children and women are often not equally considered in both disaster management and post-disaster reconstruction efforts (Babugura 2008; Delaney and Shrader 2000; Ranghieri and Ishiwatari 2014). Because post-disaster recovery processes are embedded in the socio-economic inequalities of cities and regions, they tend to reproduce prevailing racial and class structures that are the root causes of vulnerability to disaster (Wisner et al. 2004; Bolin and Stanford 1998). Sustainability A related if more varied discourse of ‘urban sustainability’ has also arisen over the last 40 years, and become heavily associated with recovery from disasters of all kinds. The call for sustainability originated within environmentalist circles in the 1970s and then was popularized through its usage by the United Nations as an integrative social–economic–environmental development goal in the late 1980s. In international disaster-mitigation discussions, sustainability is generally understood to mean the ability of the current generation to provide for their own needs without jeopardizing future generations’ ability to do the same (Berke et  al. 1993; Edwards and Turrent 2002; United Nations 2009). In this meaning of sustainable development, the goal is to foster adaptive capabilities, opportunities, and social–ecological practices that maintain and improve community and quality of life. As with the influential and resonant concept of resilience, the discursive and semiotic power of the term ‘sustainability’ lies in their denotative simplicity and connotative elasticity, allowing room for vastly different interpretations and articulations. ‘Sustainability’ is a utopian concept in the sense that it points to an ideal future state in which a balance between environmental, economic, and social needs has been achieved, and in which the planet has been liberated from environmental, economic, and social conflicts and constraints. In association with urban resilience, discourses of sustainability advanced through a series of international commissions and conferences as well as grassroots activism beginning in the late 1980s, in response to an understanding that mounting environmental, economic, and social crises were linked, at the local and global scale. By the late 1990s, sustainability had become a new, if contested, common sense in global policy circles. At the same time, the corporate sector and marketing consultants began to embrace the term to push for a new and potentially profitable movement in green industry, design, and consumption (Parr 2012; Welford 2013). Gotham and Greenberg (2014) have pointed out that the corporate embrace of sustainability discourse is a concerted political effort to de-link critique of the environmental crisis – and related economic and social crises – from that of capitalism more broadly. Indeed, the sustainability of capitalism has become a central neoliberal marketing claim to legitimize urban growth and spreading development. Rather than viewing sustainability as universal and inevitably beneficial, critical scholars such as Kathleen Tierney and Anthony Oliver-Smith (Tierney 2007; 2014; Tierney and Oliver-Smith 2012) assert that it is necessary to emphasize the ways in which policies often reinforce and perpetuate unjust sustainabilities as well as systemic risks and vulnerabilities to future disasters. Post-disaster housing in Indonesia after the Indian Ocean tsunami was unable to utilize local wood supplies as the ‘Green Aceh’ environmental

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sustainability law was passed after the disaster that severely limited forestry (Chang et al. 2011: 202). Due to this restriction, housing agencies were forced to import wood from overseas. Not only did this complicate sustainability goals by relying on globalized trade structures, but it also prohibited local economies from employing displaced residents in timber-related industries. Similarly, fishing communities in Sri Lanka existed in an area between environmental, community, and economic sustainability. The coral reefs that the fishermen had been using were damaged and depleted from years of use. Yet these were the sites where these communities desired to return. Their small-scale economy was based around local knowledge of the fishing grounds. Basing reconstruction around the fishing communities’ use of these reefs would serve the goal of community sustainability, at least in the short term, and possibly small-scale economic sustainability; however, environmental sustainability would not be enhanced. Thus, the local application of sustainability rhetoric, building forms, and development approaches is shot through with contradictions, conflictual dynamics, and crisis tendencies. On the one hand, cutting-edge architecture often utilizes high-technology techniques and equipment in order to lessen a building’s carbon emissions and ecological footprint. On the other hand, a ‘sustainable’ building or spatial design may be too expensive to maintain over time for poor and marginalized communities. As a result, sustainable technologies and structures invariably suffer the same planned obsolescence that affects other non-sustainable technologies and building forms. Moreover, the formulation and implementation of sustainable development practices, building forms, and technologies take place in a larger context of capitalist development marked by accelerating global inequality, environmental destruction and pollution, and endemic economic crises. In addition, sustainability entrepreneurial activities all rely on credit and financing systems that are now tainted by the omnipresence of speculative frenzies, pyramid schemes, and financial swindling, as noted by Aalbers (2012) and Gotham (2012a; 2012b), among others. Thus, neoliberal capitalism’s irrational and negative consequences offer a provocative and potentially fruitful lens to analyze the prospects and potentials of sustainability.

Conclusion Today, we can view the conflictual and contradictory nature of post-disaster recovery and rebuilding activities and redevelopment trends as symptomatic of a new era of globally coupled urban disasters. On the one hand, we daily witness confirmation of the famous prediction made by Henri Lefebvre: our planet is becoming progressively and irreversibly urbanized (Lefebvre 2003). Recent research has termed the growing interrelation of various forms of breakdown and ‘concatenated crises.’ Shocks or disturbances can emerge in different parts of the world, spread rapidly, interact with existing vulnerabilities, and have contagious effects in unpredictable ways (Biggs et al. 2011). The growing extension, magnitude, velocity, complexity, and volatility of global flows of capital and commodities increase the potential for such crises to spread and interact in novel ways. The global financial crisis of 2008, propagated by the consequences of the deregulation of the US housing market, quickly infected the banking sector in the developed world, ultimately affecting availability of credit globally and impacting urban residents in both developed and less developed regions. The oil price spike of 2007 and the food price

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crisis of 2008 are other examples of globally coupled crises that affected diverse cities and economic sectors. More recently, the massive earthquake and tsunami that battered Japan in 2011 killed over 19,000 people and unleashed the world’s worst nuclear crisis in a quarter century. Enormous risks and challenges lie ahead at the Fukushima plant and surrounding region, which could take 40 years to decontaminate. These crises and disasters draw our attention to the wide range of hazardous, even deadly, conditions that now face urban citizens. Yet cities are not merely localized arenas in which disasters or other crises become concatenated through systems that span the globe. Rather, cities have become central to the reproduction and mutation of disasters and crises during the last several decades. Understanding the drivers and consequences of the increasing interconnectedness, intensity, and proliferation of diverse crises through urban space is an essential task for researchers, policy makers, and global citizens. Evidence from the United States and around the world shows that the complex impacts of postdisaster recovery and rebuilding on the neighborhood and the household, on class, race, and gender, and, finally, on urban institutions, all require examination in their own right. The new urban realities that are emerging in post-disaster cities do not lend themselves easily to analysis by conventional approaches that aim for sweeping generalizations of change or that rely on aggregate statistical evaluations to recreate pictures of community and urban life. The general gets lost in the particular when we drop down to the street level. Thus, future work could incorporate a combination of mixed-method, generalized analysis and rich ethnographic accounts of everyday life. Doing so will help to provide novel and original insight into how local disaster recovery outcomes are shaped by events occurring far from the disaster site and how disasters themselves can impact and transform the structure and organization of global social–spatial relationships and networks of activity. In addition, comparative studies could address how different private and public actions can affect the formulation and implementation of post-disaster policies and programs. Comparison is not just a method of analysis, but a mode of thought that can challenge extant theories and fashion new theories of post-disaster recovery and rebuilding. McFarlane (2010; 2011) argues that comparative thinking can be a strategy ‘for revealing the assumptions, limits and distinctiveness of particular theoretical or empirical claims’ and ‘for formulating new lines of inquiry and more situated accounts.’ As a strategy of critique, comparative urban analysis depends, in part, on a ‘continuous process of criticism and self-criticism.’ Robinson’s (2006; 2011) call for a ‘comparative gesture’ is an invitation to consider a more nuanced, open, outward-looking, and inclusive research strategy than is typical within current urban paradigms or self-identified schools of research (e.g., Chicago School, Los Angeles School, and so on). Researchers could approach comparison with the idea that ‘history matters’ and that the particularities of place and time play a major role in influencing subsequent urban outcomes even in cities in the same nation. That is, understanding contemporary events and processes requires an understanding of historical trajectories in cities, comparing how these trajectories differ, and building insights from that basis. In sum, this essay has argued and demonstrated that disasters expose long-neglected injustices, underlying power structures, and pervasive socio-spatial inequalities. Moreover, disasters reveal processes and patterns of elite decision making and organized action that tend to go unnoticed when everyday routines are stable and secure. Just as disasters can reveal submerged disparities and antagonisms, the process of urban rebuilding and redevelopment provides a window into social power structures. Extant

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scholarship suggests that disaster-impacted cities are increasingly embracing neoliberal policy reforms as expedients to urban recovery. Yet, as scholars note, the forces of neoliberalization operate through political structures, state policies, and socio-legal regulatory strategies that have evolved in conjunction with contextually specific political–economic circumstances and socio-spatial struggles. Post-disaster recovery patterns and outcomes occur through a conflictual layering of preexisting patterns of urban development and institutional configurations with emerging national and local neoliberal policies and regulatory strategies seeking to rebuild disaster impacted cities. There is, accordingly, no pervasive, encompassing, or unitary neoliberalized restructuring process that has been imposed on or unfolded within cities. In short, place matters in the study of urban disasters because an analysis of why and how various post-disaster neoliberalization strategies emerge and develop will need to take into account where (and when) they develop and reveal their socio-spatial effects.

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Robinson, J. (2011). Cities in a world of cities: The comparative gesture. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35(1): 1–23. Salazar, Alex. (2002). “The Crisis and Modernity of Housing Disasters in Developing Countries: Technology After the Marathwada (1993) Earthquake.” in Proceedings of the International I-Rec Conference. Universite de Montreal. Retrieved April 13, 2016 (http://info.worldbank.org/etools/docs/library/156603/housing/pdf/housingdisasters.pdf). Stead, M. M. (2006). Implementing disaster relief through tax expenditures: An assessment of the Katrina emergency tax relief measures. New York University Law Review, 81, 2158–2191. Steinberg, Florian. (2007). “Housing Reconstruction and Rehabilitation in Aceh and Nias Indonesia — Rebuilding Lives.” Habitat International 31(1):150–66. Stonich, Susan C., Jerrel H. Sorensen, and Anna Hundt. (1995). “Ethnicity, Class, and Gender in Tourism Development: The Case of the Bay Islands, Honduras.” Journal of Sustainable Tourism 3(1):1–28. Stoker, R. P., and Rich, M. J. (2006). Lessons and Limits: Tax Incentives and Rebuilding the Gulf Coast after Katrina, Metropolitan Policy Program. Brookings Institution. Tierney, K., and Oliver-Smith, A. (2012). Social dimensions of disaster recovery. International Journal of Mass Emergencies & Disasters, 30(2). Tierney, K. J. (2007). From the margins to the mainstream? Disaster research at the crossroads. Annual Review of Sociology, 33, 503–525. Tierney, K. J. (2014). The Social Roots of Risk: Producing Disasters, Promoting Resilience. Stanford Business Books. Turner, John C. 1967. “Barriers and Channels for Housing Development in Modernizing Countries.” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 33(3):167–81. United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. (2005). “Hyogo Framework for Action.” Retrieved November 5, 2014 (http://www.unisdr.org/we/coordinate/hfa). United Nations. (2009). “UNISDR Terminology on Disaster Risk.” Retrieved (http://www.unisdr.org/files/7817_ UNISDRTerminologyEnglish.pdf). United Nations (2015). Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030. Retrieved on 8 June, 2017, www. preventionweb.net/files/43291_sendaiframeworkfordrren.pdf United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) (2009). Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction. United Nations. United States Senate (2009). Far From Home Deficiencies in Federal Disaster Housing Assistance after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and Recommendations for Improvement. Special Report Prepared by the Ad Hoc Subcommittee on Disaster Recovery of the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, United States Senate, 111th Congress, 1st Session, February. US Government Printing Office. Welford, R. (2013). Hijacking Environmentalism: Corporate Responses to Sustainable Development. Routledge. Whoriskey, P. (2007a, May 12). $2.9 billion shortfall seen in Katrina aid: Uncertainty plagues Louisiana homeowners. Washington Post, p. A2. Whoriskey, P. (2007b, May 13). Victims of Katrina file rash of lawsuits; Federal government faces more than 250,000 claims. Washington Post, p. A03. Wisner, B., Blaikie, P., Cannon, T., Davis, I., and Wisner, B. (2004). At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability and Disasters, Second Edition. Routledge. Zanotti, Laura. (2010). “Cacophonies of Aid, Failed State Building and NGOs in Haiti: Setting the Stage for Disaster, Envisioning the Future.” Third World Quarterly 31(5):755–71.

16 What the Eye Does Not See: The Yamuna in the Imagination of Delhi Amita Baviskar

In early September 2010, the citizens of Delhi were witness to an unprecedented sight in the centre of the city. Erased from view was the unremarkable green-brown plain dotted with fields, trees and huts where the river Yamuna usually flows in a small and sluggish stream. Instead, a shimmering sheet of water stretched out wide, obliterating the land, and lapping at the bottom of the old iron railway bridge. The 100-year-old reticulated bridge, a sturdy yet graceful monument to colonial engineering, suddenly appeared vulnerable as strong currents swept water dangerously close, causing trains and road traffic across the bridge to be cancelled. Close to the bridge were the submerged homes of poor squatters; a few thousand residents had been evacuated and housed in tents where they stayed for the next two weeks until the river ebbed. For many of them, temporary displacement was an annual event to which they were inured, an inescapable accompaniment to the experience of living by the river, eking out a slender livelihood from growing vegetables and melons on the riverbed. The sudden rise in the Yamuna had been caused by unremitting heavy monsoon rains in the catchment of the river in the lower foothills of the Himalaya. Although the annual rainy season always brings about a swell in the river, the ceaseless downpour of September 2010 had raised water levels to such a height that the protection offered by embankments and dams seemed suddenly shaky. With the river threatening to spill over the levees and reclaim its floodplain, the upstream state of Haryana had been forced to release large quantities to safeguard its barrages and embankments. In Haryana, a section of the Tajewala barrage had been washed away and more than 125 villages in Yamunanagar and Panipat districts had flooded as a result. This inundation across a huge expanse of farmland had dissipated some of the violent energy of the river in spate, an inadvertent boon that saved the downstream city of Delhi. Delhi had experienced floods before. In 1995, 15,000 poor families in low-lying areas next to the river were rendered homeless when the river approached the danger mark, but

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the rest of the city was untouched. In 1978, the worst floods in living memory, a million people were affected as the river reached its highest recorded level, submerging 70,000 hectares of land in the city. The raging floodwaters breached river embankments so that well-to-do north Delhi neighbourhoods such as Model Town and Mukherjee Nagar were under 15-20 feet of water for almost a week, with extensive damage to homes and property. People recall how they stayed up all night sandbagging their homes in the vain effort to stem the floodwaters; how unexpectedly and swiftly the water rose; how boats plied in city streets instead of cars and buses; how the army ferried supplies to stranded families on rooftops, rushing a pregnant woman to hospital in a motorboat just in time to deliver a baby; how the water left the walls sodden and stinking for many months after. With the passage of time, the memory of panic, disruption and anxiety had faded; the events of 1978 were now tinged only with the recollection of excitement and adventure. In comparison, the effects of the 2010 flood were minor and short-lived. Streets in low-lying areas stayed waterlogged for a week; people and vehicles had to wade through a foot or more of muddy water. For 10 days, the sewage and storm water drains flowing from the city into the river were shut to pre-empt a further rise in the river’s level, and residents in areas close to the river had to cope with smelly sewage backflow and toilets that would not flush. But soon the river returned to its former shrunken state, sewage once more flowed into it unabated, and the crisis of the floods had passed. Once more, the city had weathered another monsoon, another imminent flood.

Visibility and Place: Popular Perceptions What was then unprecedented about the 2010 floods was not the fact of their occurrence, but their visibility to the city at large. Previous floods had come and gone, but the only people who were aware of them were those directly affected – a tiny minority in a city of 14 million people – and the government agencies responsible for dealing with them: the Flood Control and Irrigation Department, the Delhi Jal Board (the city’s water supply, sewage and sanitation authority) and the Municipal Corporation’s Slum Wing (for managing squatter settlements). In the case of the 2010 floods, however, dozens of television news channels stationed their outdoor broadcasting vans to film the river, reporting minute-by-minute on the rising water, its proximity to the danger mark, the state of the railway bridge and the consequent dislocation of traffic, the plight of displaced squatters, and interviewing government officials and residents in floodthreatened neighbourhoods. In September 2010, when the Yamuna in Delhi was flowing 2 metres above its danger mark of 204.83 metres, the river had finally become newsworthy. The dramatised relaying of this event to the public eye was not only a result of the inherently spectacular character of the river in spate. It was also partly an offshoot of the growth of news media in search of new material to televise during its round-the-clock broadcasts. Since the onset of economic liberalisation in the 1990s that opened up television channels to private companies, the demand for reportage and features has risen. Imminent disasters and crises help fill the constant demand for news, and television, along with older forms of print capitalism, has helped produce not only the floods-asnews but also an urban public concerned by threats to parts of their city.

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Aiding the task of the news media in making the floods visible was a new, and notable, development on the right bank of the river: the Yamuna expressway. Completed in the summer of 2010, the concrete pillars of this gigantic four-lane highway march parallel to the riverbed, offering a high vantage point from which to observe a river that had hitherto been hidden from view. The broadcasting vans with their overhead satellite dishes and smartly-dressed correspondents reporting live from location joined curious onlookers crowding the edge of the expressway, gazing out at the spreadsheet of water below them. Without the expressway, the eloquence of the liquid expanse, the imperilled iron bridge, the treetops sticking out like miniature bushes from the water, would be invisible. Without the expressway, there would be nowhere to stand and nothing to see. Without the expressway, for most residents of Delhi, the river would cease to be.1 In the story of the Yamuna’s shifting visibility in the social and ecological imagination of Delhi, the expressway is an irony. Built to ease road traffic congestion along the city’s north-south artery, its construction was speeded up for the Commonwealth Games held in October 2010 (one of the main venues for sports events – the Indraprastha Stadium – lies at the southern foot of the expressway). The highway rides over the river’s western embankment, cutting through an unfamiliar landscape: the riverbed to one side, on the other the back view of a power station and the public gardens where rest the remains of India’s political greats – Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. There are no recognisable landmarks, no street-side vendors and shops, no passing pedestrians; only a broad stretch of concrete, speeding cars and big blue signboards announcing exits and destinations. The expressway, especially in the darkness of night, is a disorienting place. In fact, at first glance, it would seem to not be a place at all. Marc Augé uses the term “non-place” to describe “a space which cannot be defined as relational, historical, or concerned with identity” (2008: 63). Highway routes, along with airports and hotel chains, are part of a fleeting, transient and ephemeral world that people increasingly inhabit, spaces of “circulation, consumption and communication” (ibid: viii), where the link between individuals and their surroundings is established primarily “through the mediation of words”, even prescriptive “instructions for use” (ibid: 76-77). Augé contrasts non-places with “anthropological places” that create “organically social” relations (ibid), locating them at opposite ends of the spectrum of sociality and socialisation in terms of identity and history. Augé also points out that it is precisely their anonymity and streamlined ease of negotiation that makes non-places the site where desires and aspirations are increasingly located in a world “surrendered to solitary individuality” (2008: 63). This would certainly be true of projects like the expressway, which concretely embody the desires shared by the Delhi government and many of its citizens to make the city “world-class”, visually aligned with a modernist western aesthetic and physically engineered to move people as swiftly as possible by minimising the friction of having to engage with their surroundings (Mumford 1963). Richard Sennett calls this “the neutralised city” (1990: xii) where spaces are carefully orchestrated to remove the threat of social contact, especially between different kinds of people. So the fact that the expressway brought into view the river, however fleetingly, for the citizens of Delhi was an irony. In the “world-class” city, the Yamuna is an anomaly, an embarrassment even. Next to the expressway to supermodernity, it is an especially awkward presence. Urban eyes struggle to make sense of it: is it nature or culture? Both these socially-produced categories come with recognisable markers. If urban nature has come

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to be identified with manicured parks, the Yamuna is a wilderness of shifting sandbanks, grasses and crops. Nor is it explicable in terms of rural nature: it is neither forest nor intensively-cultivated farmland. For Delhi residents, the riverbed does not fit within popular notions of nature; only when it is in spate does the river seem to assert its biophysical power. And even then, the network of barrages and embankments usually succeeds in domesticating the river, rendering it into a human-made artefact, controlled and managed. The Yamuna in Delhi makes little cultural sense either. In a country where rivers are an intrinsic part of sacred geography, especially for the dominant Hindu majority, the Yamuna is curiously profane. To be sure, she has a place in the pantheon of river deities as the sister of Yama, the god of death and righteousness. The figures of Yamuna and Ganga flank temple entrances all over the country (Stietencron 2010). She is invoked along with Ganga in Vedic verses chanted during ritual baths. Her stepped ghats besides the temples of Delhi’s Jamna Bazaar are the site of Hindu funerary rites and other purificatory ceremonies.2 But the religious-cultural cosmos of the Yamuna is circumscribed to the Jamna Bazaar spot. Along the rest of her 22 kilometre-long flow through the city, the river is neither revered nor regarded as important to the cultural life of citizens. It may then be said that, for the citizens of Delhi, the Yamuna is a non-place. If history, identity and social relations are the hallmarks of an “anthropological place”, the Yamuna is perceived as being devoid of all these. In fact, the Yamuna is a non-place twice over since it also lacks the aspirational qualities that Augé attributes to places of supermodernity. The non-place that is the expressway snakes past the non-place that is the river, their twinned flows signifying the contradiction that lies at the heart of Delhi: the expressway is a concrete manifestation of the city’s futuristic vision, its world-class ambition brought into being; the river is a watery nothingness.

Microcosms of Nature-Culture Yet, the non-place that is the river in the city has accommodated small cultural worlds built around nature,3 microcosms that quietly continue around the year even as the rest of Delhi is unaware or indifferent to their presence. The ghats at Jamna Bazaar descend to the river on broad flagstones and the Yamuna licks at their feet, coaxing a red boat into the water. When the boat is midstream, a man flings a sweeping shower of grainy pellets around him. From nowhere come thousands of birds, circling and swooping in evertightening circles, plucking the pellets from the water and soaring away. The air is dense with the flutter of white wings beating at the autumn light, a dizzy wheeling that goes on and on until the food disappears. The birds go to roost and the moment ebbs away. The birds are Brown-headed Gulls. As he moors the boat, the man informs me that they come from Siberia. In the four months of winter, every morning and evening, he feeds them on behalf of his uncle, a well-to-do businessman in Shahdara, a suburb in east Delhi.4 “40 kilos in the morning, 60 kilos in the evening. Rs 3,000 a day, it costs Mamaji.” Why does he do it? “Bahut door se aate hain ye panchhi. Hamare mehmaan hain” (They come from very far away, these birds. They are our guests). For the businessman from Shahdara, the birds from Siberia are visitors to whom hospitality is due, and the river provides a place for fulfilling the religious obligation to feed itinerants as well as the charitable duty of caring for lesser creatures.5

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For people from the Walled City near Jamna Bazaar, the Yamuna offers a respite from urban congestion, from a life constantly crowded with people, sounds and things. I asked Satya Narayan, a middle-aged man who told me that he worked in a hotel, why he came down to the ghats. “Yahaan bahut khula- khula hai. Tasalli milti hai” (It’s wide open and spacious here. One gets reassured).6 We pay Rs 10 to a boatman to ferry us to the island that lies midstream. As we walk up, we unsettle the Black Kites that are warming themselves in the sunny sand. The large brown birds rise and hover, then snuggle back into the bed. In an odd way, it is reassuring to know that there are gulls and kites going about their business even as the city seethes all around them. For those searching for momentary peace, the river provides restful calm – a chance to catch one’s breath and gather one’s thoughts – in an urban place where open space is scarce. In October, the islands and western margins of the riverbank are covered with sprawling fields of vegetables that supply inexpensive and fresh food to the city. The silt of the Yamuna is fertile; cauliflowers and cabbages grow vigorously, with beds of marigold and roses behind them. In the summer, there are cucumbers and melons. Lines of migrant workers from eastern Uttar Pradesh bend and straighten, planting baingan and mirchi (brinjal and chillies). Water gushes from a borewell. “Bilkul meetha pani hai” (The water is absolutely sweet), declares a farmer.7 The groundwater recharged by the Yamuna may be sweet, but studies indicate that the vegetables it irrigates are likely to be contaminated with faecal bacteria and heavy metals such as lead and cadmium.8 Untreated industrial effluents and domestic sewage that discharge into the river in Delhi and upstream mean that, once the monsoon rain flow subsides, the river reverts to its undiluted state: still and stinking, foam-flecked and laden with the flotsam of the plastics packaging revolution. The water is black with filth. On the auspicious full-moon day of Kartik Purnima in October, I watch with awe as worshippers bathe in what looks like raw sewage. The guruji at the Bhishma Vyayamshala (gymnasium and wrestling school) on the ghats tells me phlegmatically that he takes a dip in the river twice a day.9 “There’s a difference between the eye and the mind”, he says. “The eye sees only the surface, the mind perceives true meaning.” There are enough people bathing on the ghats to support the guruji’s assertion that faith allows the mind to conquer matter. But not all the devout are willing to do so any longer. A little upstream of Jamna Bazaar lies Nigambodh Ghat, the main riverside cremation site in Delhi, a site steeped in Hindu mythology and, now, sewage. Apparently, many mourners, whose mind’s eye could not resolve the paradox of divinity and disgust, protested that Jamna-ji was too filthy to bathe in. The Delhi government, which in the late 1990s was led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp), came to their aid, installing an exclusive pipeline from the distant river Ganga to supply gangajal (holy water) for purificatory rites. As Anupam Mishra, a cultural historian of water, observed, “Ulti ganga beh rahi hai”.10 It is indeed an upside-down world when, instead of cleaning the river, the government prefers the short-cut stratagem of bringing in water from another river.

Pollution, Illegality and Ethnic Cleansing The annual rhythms of the Yamuna harmonised with the ebb and flow of farmers and labourers, the Hindu ritual calendar and charitable and funerary practices, and the desire

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of some city-dwellers for an open space. The banks also provided a space where dhobis from the Walled City could spread laundered clothes to dry in the sun. The riverbank functioned as an urban commons, with unwritten but nonetheless tangible norms about access and use, with areas being informally demarcated by function. Among these public functions, defecation ranks high. For large sections of the urban poor who live on or close to the riverbed, and who do not have access to sanitation, the wilderness of the riverbed is a vast open-air toilet where the occasional shrubs and rocky outcrops provide privacy. Early morning and late evening, under cover of dark, groups of women with veiled faces pick their way through little piles of waste to the more remote spots. Later in the day, men repair to the wasteland, armed with plastic bottles of water to wash themselves after they are done. To those who live there, these widely-practised, agreed-upon uses are by no means an infringement of the commons, though that is how they are perceived by wellto-do citizens who have access to toilets in their homes. Like rural commons – pastures, forests and streams – the riverbed too is a resource on which the poor depend more than those who own private lands. Unlike the rural commons, the poor do not gather fuel, fodder or berries here; instead, their chief usufruct is space for the conduct of a basic biological function, a space that is notably scarce in the city. However, defecation contributes to the sense of the riverbed as a literal wasteland, derelict and defiled. It evokes disgust, intersecting with the wider popular perception of the place as an abused, uncared-for non-place. The association in the popular imagination of the riverbed with poor people and their polluting practices was to play an important role in destroying perhaps the biggest and most vibrant cultural world on the riverfront. Ironically, this once-flourishing community was, in some ways, also a product of the wider popular perception of the floodplain as a non-place. That is, the settlement of the poor on the riverfront in the 1980s and 1990s, and their subsequent eviction in the 2000s, were both processes that derived from the marginality of this space. Their opposing tendencies indicate a historic shift in popular perceptions of how a non-place should be treated. As I shall go on to discuss, the subsequent phase of “reclamation” of the riverbed in the 2000s inaugurates the current moment of creating value via commodification, incorporating a non-place into the spaces of capitalist consumption. The year 1977 marked the end of a two-year period of political Emergency when the government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had suspended civil liberties and undertaken “welfare” programmes including forced slum clearance in Delhi, during which an estimated 7,00,000 poor people were evicted from their homes, their protests brutally suppressed, in a campaign led by the prime minister’s son Sanjay Gandhi (an unofficial power beside the throne) and Jagmohan, then lieutenant-governor of Delhi (Tarlo 2002).11 The strong public opposition to these excesses in the aftermath of the Emergency meant that disciplinary desires lay dormant for the next two decades. In the late 1970s, there was a spurt of construction in the capital with the immediate goal of building facilities for the Asian Games to be held in Delhi in 1982. This project, represented as one where national prestige was at stake, provided the grounds for the Delhi Development Authority or dda12 to violate its own master plan and suspend procedural rules in order to enter into dubious contracts with construction firms.13 The building of flyovers, sports facilities and luxury apartments (to house participating athletes, which later became homes for senior bureaucrats), brought to the city an estimated one million labourers from other states. Once the construction was over, these labourers stayed on, often in shanty settlements in the

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shadow of the concrete structures they had built, seeking other employment. In the early 1980s, their presence was tolerated and even encouraged by local politicians who secured for them water taps and ration cards. The populist governments at the centre were willing to allow the migrants some recognition, albeit of a limited nature. While their concern did not extend to the provision of low-cost housing or most civic amenities, it did give workers a temporary reprieve in the battle to create homes around their places of work. For the Asiad ‘82, a segment of the Yamuna’s floodplain was diverted to construct the Players’ Building, a hostel for athletes which could not be completed in time, and the Indraprastha Stadium, which soon fell into disuse. Thousands of workers who were involved in the construction of these buildings came to settle in the surrounding area which remained an open plain along the western embankment (pushta). During the 1980s and 1990s, the encouragement of Congress politicians and the studied indifference of the bureaucracy led to expanding swathes of settlement on the strips of no-man’s land on both sides of the river. By 2004, almost 3,50,000 poor squatters lived along the Yamuna in Delhi. There were a few farmers among them, but the majority were workers – small vendors, porters, rickshaw-pullers, masons, mechanics, artisans, factory workers, domestic help, security guards – who had built homes in the only centrally-located place that afforded them a space close to their means of livelihood. Over the course of more than two decades, they populated the land along the embankments, strengthening their shanty houses with brick, cement and even concrete, securing public water taps and electricity, starting schools and health clinics with the help of non-governmental organisations (ngos) and the state government. Concealed from public view, the low-lying land of the Yamuna Pushta had been transformed into a dense settlement of Delhi’s under-class – a squalid, illegal, but nonetheless vibrant cultural world. In 2004, defecation along the Yamuna by these settlers became the grounds for the demolition of their homes. The Delhi High Court ordered that the Yamuna Pushta bastis (working-class settlements) be removed because they were responsible for polluting the river and because they were encroaching on the riverbed. Both these charges were based on the selective use of facts. In 2000, court orders had already resulted in the closure of thousands of small industrial firms across the city on the grounds of water pollution (Baviskar et al 2006). However, even with the flow of industrial effluents reduced to 218 million litres a day, the river continued to be polluted by the unchecked discharge of domestic sewage, receiving an estimated 1,789 million litres a day of untreated waste water as it passed through the city (cpcb 2004; cse 2007). In a city that produces 3,267 million litres a day of sewage – more sewage than all the class II cities in India put together – more than half of all sewage goes untreated. Notably, this wastewater is generated by only half of Delhi’s 14 million population – those who live in “planned colonies, regularised colonies, resettlement colonies and urban villages” (cpcb 2004:1); the other seven million who live in illegal and unauthorised settlements like the Yamuna Pushta do not have access to drains and sewerage.14 So, by ordering the eviction of Pushta-dwellers on the grounds of polluting the Yamuna, the judiciary placed the burden of excrement produced by Delhi’s well-to-do sections on the working-class people of the bastis along the river.15 A similar shifting of blame was evident in the charge of encroachment. While it was indeed true that the Yamuna Pushta settlers were squatting on land that was legally owned by the dda (on the west bank) and the Uttar Pradesh Flood and Irrigation Department (on the east bank), far larger tracts of these two agencies’ lands along the river had been

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taken over by the government and handed over to private bodies in blatant violation of the master plan for Delhi which designated these lands as an ecological zone. Besides two power plants and disused sports facilities built in the 1980s, the Yamuna waterfront by the early 2000s was arrayed with an Information Technology Park, a sprawling metro train depot,16 and the gigantic Akshardham Temple complex which was retrospectively legalised by the Supreme Court over the protests of the landowning agency (Srivastava 2009). Also on the drawing board was the 2010 Commonwealth Games Village with high-rise luxury apartments. A shopping mall, housing for Delhi metro workers, and a bus depot were also waiting to be built. However, none of these projects were criticised for being located on the riverbed in direct contravention of the area’s land-use designation. In fact, the courts permitted all of them to go ahead. Only the settlements of poor workers were targeted for demolition.

Displacement and the Poor The consequences of the 2004 court order were devastating. Sanjay Amar Colony was one of a series of working class settlements that ranged along the Yamuna Pushta, the embankment along the western side of the river. The basti was no fly-by-night agglo­ meration of ramshackle huts. Over the course of more than 20 years, hundreds of brick and cement dwellings came to line the streets. Of the Pushta’s population of 3,50,000, an estimated 1,50,000 were displaced over the course of one week in June, with the rest to follow. When the bulldozers left, the Pushta resembled a bombed-out site. Homeless families camped out under the ferocious summer sun, wondering where to go, warily avoiding the police posted in the area to pre-empt any protest. Hundreds of people sifted through the rubble, trying to salvage their belongings. Mohammad Faim broke down and cried.17 “Nineteen years in this city”, said the whitehaired native of Siwan, Bihar, “and I have to return empty-handed. How will I show my face in my village?” Until a few weeks ago, Faim was known to everyone in his neighbourhood as “Prem Hotelwala”, the owner of a successful dhaba in Sanjay Amar Colony. The dhaba was patronised by rickshaw-pullers, small vendors and artisans, who lived in the basti and plied their trades and wares nearby in the bustling heart of the Walled City. It also supported Faim’s family of five until June 2004 when Prem Hotel and its customers’ homes were razed to the ground. In the ensuing fire, Faim lost everything but a few stainless steel plates and plastic jars. “At my age, what am I to do? Where will I go?” he asked. The Yamuna Pushta demolitions were part of a city-wide campaign of clearing squatter settlements that, between the years 2000 and 2004, displaced an estimated 8,00,000 people from the capital. Although sterilisation was not an “incentive” this time around, in some ways the 2004 demolition outstripped the dark days of the Emergency. For one, far fewer people were resettled. In theory, the Delhi government had a policy of offering land compensation to those who could offer proof of residence. Those who could demonstrate that they settled in the city before 1990 were eligible to receive, upon payment of Rs 7,000, a plot of 18 square metres in a resettlement colony on the outskirts of the city. Those who settled between 1990 and 1998 were eligible to receive a plot of 12.5 square metres. However, resettlement colonies such as Bhalaswa and Holambi Kalan to which the displaced were sent were little more than wastelands, with no amenities,

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20-30 kilometres from people’s place of work (Menon-Sen and Bhan 2008). Yet, despite the difficulties of relocating to such inhospitable places – losing employment, withdrawing children from school – people still grabbed at the chance to secure a legitimate home in the city. Unfortunately, many who qualified to receive resettlement plots did not get them. Only 16% of those displaced from Yamuna Pushta were given plots. The rest found their names missing from municipal lists. Thrusting forward his documents – ration card, voter identity card, government token issued in 1990 – Ram Kumar Sah expressed the anger and despair of most Pushta residents: The whole week I’ve been queuing outside this office and that, hoping some official will listen to me. But it’s hopeless. I’ve lived here for 25 years. I pushed my thela (cart) for miles, bringing bricks and mud to make this place liveable. I built my house with my own hands. All that hard work, and I get nothing at all? The government should just strangle us. At least that’s quick.18

Those who could not muster even these documents – a majority of residents – stood no chance of receiving any housing land. They were simply rendered homeless. Some scattered to the city’s periphery, living on rent in squatter settlements on the margins of Delhi, forced to again live precariously in the interstices of the law and the urban economy. The shift in popular perceptions and political equations from tolerating and even encouraging settlement in the 1980s and early 1990s, to the brute removal of squatters in the 2000s, was reflective of a new hardening of attitudes towards the city’s working class, an antipathy towards “informal” livelihoods and spaces on the part of an urban elite that had become disproportionately empowered by the liberalisation policies adopted in the 1990s, and that had the backing of the higher judiciary. This “bourgeois environmentalism” (Baviskar 2003, 2011) ignored the structural imperatives behind squatting on public lands to adopt a more hard line position against slum-dwellers. A high court judge remarked that resettling an encroacher on public land was akin to rewarding a pickpocket (Ramanathan 2006: 3195). But while the encroachers on Yamuna Pushta were deemed criminals in the eyes of the law, they saw themselves as being forced into that role. As Ramadevi pointed out, I sell vegetables, barely making enough to feed my four children. But I save every paisa so that they can go to school and make something of their lives. I can’t afford to pay a high rent for a place to stay. Nor can I spend Rs 20-30 on travel every day. That’s why I live here – gareeb aadmi aur kahan jayega? (Where else would a poor person go?)

The economics of everyday life in the city, of surviving when wages are low, dictate that people live close to their workplace. But this need goes unmet in Delhi’s real estate market that offers scant legal housing for poor workers. During 1994-2004, the dda planned to build 1.62 million dwelling units but built only 5,60,000, none of them within the economic reach of the poor.19 It was no surprise then that more than 23% of Delhi’s population lived in bastis like Yamuna Pushta. Standing by the rubble of his demolished home, Abdul Barik gestured to the squalor around him, “You think we want to live like this? We are also human. We also want to live decently, without fear of being harassed and uprooted. But there is no other option.” Under the circumstances, encroachment was not a choice but a compulsion for poor workers, their hope of securing a foothold in the urban economy. However, in the Court’s determination to clean the river by clearing its

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banks of poor squatters, the underlying political economy of housing in the city was ignored as was the complicity of the state in enabling settlement on the riverfront in the first place. The Court’s selective targeting of poor squatters while letting more powerful polluters and encroachers off the hook reflects the partial, and even distorted, environmental vision of Delhi’s well-to-do citizens. A characteristic feature of bourgeois environmentalism is its hostility to the poor in the pursuit of a “clean and green” environment, where the very presence of the poor is equated with pollution. “Cleaning” the Yamuna thus did not take the form of installing sewage treatment facilities but entailed the removal of working-class squatters from the riverbank. As Asher Ghertner points out, an aesthetic vision has been central to the liberalisation-era quest of making Delhi a “world-class” city: “According to this aesthetic mode of governing, …widespread in Delhi today, if a development project looks ‘world-class’, then it is most often declared planned; if a settlement looks polluting, it is sanctioned as unplanned and illegal” (Ghertner 2011: 280). This helps explain the differential treatment accorded to slums on the one hand and to luxury high-rises and stadiums on the other. Though the eviction of squatters cleared the riverbed, it did nothing to address the actual acute problem of water pollution. Meanwhile, projects that reflected the worldclass aspirations of the city’s elite were retrospectively legalised. In 2004, the Court-ordered demolitions were aggressively implemented by Jagmohan, former lieutenant-general of Delhi during the Emergency in the 1970s, in his capacity as minister for tourism and culture. Once cleared of the bastis, the Yamuna bank was to have been “beautified” with gardens, promenades and parking lots stretching down from the historic Red Fort to the river. The 2004 demolitions on the west bank of the river were followed by equally harsh evictions from the east bank in the summer of 2006. In June of that year, the homes of more than 50,000 squatters were razed to the ground. In what had, by then, become a familiar tragedy, most of those who lost their homes received no compensation. A small fraction were temporarily housed in shelters in Savda Ghevra, 40 kilometres away, and effectively lost their means of livelihood (see Baviskar 2012). By the end of 2006, the riverbank had been cleared of all those citizens whom the Court deemed to be “non-people” – those who failed to legally own private property and whose consequent dependence on the commons rendered them invisible as rightsbearing citizens. Denied access to housing and basic services by the government, and then condemned for this very lack, the eviction of working-class settlers and the destruction of their community reflected the consolidation of anti-poor hostility on the part of the judiciary, bourgeois environmentalists and state officials. In retrospect, it became evident that the hostile manoeuvres of demolition and displacement were a necessary precondition for the transformation of the riverfront as a place of value. The removal of non-people was essential for the reinvention of a non-place.

Commodification and the Creation of Value By 2007, selectively cleared of its encroachments, the Yamuna riverfront appeared to be terra nullius, an uninhabited place outside the realm of value, inviting investment.20 If the high court order evicting poor squatters seemed to indicate some concern for the

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polluted state of the river, no such environmental concern was evident when it came to permitting the construction of capital-intensive projects on the riverbed. In July 2009, a bench of the Supreme Court of India, headed by the Chief Justice, approved the construction of luxury high-rise apartments close to the Yamuna in east Delhi as part of a complex to house athletes and officials during the Commonwealth Games 2010. The 100-acre Games Village had been the centre of controversy since its inception, with an environmentalist ngo, Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan (yja, Keep Yamuna Alive Campaign), petitioning the high court in 2007 to stop construction since permanent structures on the floodplain would adversely affect its ecological functioning as an area crucial for groundwater recharge and accommodating excess flows during the monsoons.21 The construction was also challenged by farmers from Patpar, Mandavali and Shakarpur villages in east Delhi who participated in a year-long sit-in satyagraha at the proposed site of the Games Village to protest against the takeover of their land, first for the Akshardham temple and then the Games Village. Baljit Singh, general secretary of the Delhi Peasants’ Multipurpose Cooperative Society, showed documents dating back to 1949, granting co-op members the right to cultivate on the riverbed. “The sarkar talks about creating biodiversity parks, but we have been maintaining biodiversity for almost 60 years”, he said. ‘Just let us be”. However, the judges did not find any merit in the environmental arguments of the yja and the farmers. After reviewing the conflicting reports submitted by the Ministry of Environment and Forests and the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute, and examining the city master plan prepared by the dda, the Delhi High Court had set up a committee to monitor the environmental impact of the Commonwealth Games Village. However, it refused to halt construction, even though the yja argued that if construction continued, the project would be a fait accompli and any subsequent order against it would be meaningless. In response, the dda, as the agency in charge of the project, appealed against the High Court order in the Supreme Court, claiming that an environmental oversight committee would hamper work on a project of national importance which had to be completed on a tight schedule. The Supreme Court concurred with their view and, dismissing the environmental committee appointed by the High Court, allowed construction to steam ahead without hindrance. However, and most significantly, the Supreme Court did not justify its decision on grounds that the urgency or importance of the project superseded environmental concerns. The judgment stated categorically that all the arguments about the ecological value of the location were baseless: the place was not a riverbed or a floodplain. This authoritative pronouncement by the Supreme Court, an imprimatur for converting the riverfront to real estate, has sealed the fate of the Yamuna. No longer a non-place, it has become a frontier for get-rich-quick schemes (cf Tsing 2005), for speculation in a land market that has seen spiralling prices in the booming post-liberalised urban economy. Along with speculation have come sweetheart deals, with state officials colluding with private developers to profit from the transfer of public lands. The subsidy to builders included bailing out Emaar mgf, the Dubai-based real estate developer contracted to build the Games Village. Under a public-private partnership (ppp) arrangement, the dda allotted 27 acres of prime land for free to the company to build 1,168 luxury flats to house athletes and officials. Under the terms of the contract, the firm would sell two-thirds of the flats while dda would sell the remainder. After the financial downturn of 2009, the cash-strapped company appealed to the government for help and

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the dda responded by giving it an interest-free loan of $100 million, to be repaid in the form of additional flats.22 Among similar subsidies given to private developers, the case of the Akshardham temple complex stands out. Built on 90 acres of the floodplain, the sprawling site also includes a lake, extensive gardens with a musical fountain, an imax theatre, a food court, and a centre for Applied Research in Social Harmony. Commentators have characterised the complex as a religious theme park, a form of “Disney-divinity” (Srivastava 2009). Construction of the temple began illegally in April 2000, despite protests from farmers who were evicted from the land, and the Uttar Pradesh Flood and Irrigation Department which petitioned the Court arguing that 30 acres of land belonged to them but had been illicitly claimed and disposed of by the dda. However, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the temple, pointing out that most of it had already been built – an argument that was likely to have been influenced by the power of the organisation building it. The Swaminarayan sect is not only well endowed but well connected; the bjp-led National Democratic Alliance was ruling at the centre at that time and Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani was a personal friend of the sect’s leader. Projects such as the Akshardham temple and the Commonwealth Games Village – the term “village” suggesting a pastoral community, a low-rise settlement harmonising with its setting, when what has been built consists of multi-storeyed luxury apartments with a captive power plant – illustrate how the new development has been actively fostered by the government with massive subsidies being given to corporate organisations, not only through land being transferred at nominal rates but through interest-free loans and buy-back guarantees. Other capital-intensive projects have rapidly flowed in their wake. With the Akshardham temple acting as an anchoring point on the eastern bank and a network of flyovers and widened roads being built to accommodate the enhanced traffic parallel to the eastern riverfront, other concrete developments have followed suit. The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (dmrc) has located its Yamuna Bank station and extensive train depot within 300 metres of the river; Parsvnath Builders has constructed a shopping mall adjacent to the Games Village, and the remaining land along the river is earmarked for similar projects. The reinvention of the riverfront is proceeding apace. As one travels along the overhead metro line from central to east Delhi, crossing the Yamuna on the new metro bridge, one can look down on the patchwork of farms rapidly being replaced by grand buildings. In most citizens’ eyes, the transformation is a welcome one: finally, the neglected suburb of east Delhi, home to slums and middle class neighbourhoods, has a skyline to be proud of. And if this skyline swallows up the non-place that was the river, that is just as it should be, for in its place there is now a landscape of value, where the worth of a place can be measured in money and in the recognisable form of architectural excess.

Ecology, Commodity Aesthetics and the Flow of Value What, then, remains of the Yamuna as an ecological entity that lies outside the circuit of commodity value?23 Has the imagination of urban Delhi been completely colonised by the vision of the riverfront as a “world-class” space? Has the river been comprehensively transformed into real estate? As this essay shows, the line between water and land not

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only changes with the seasons – becoming especially blurred during the three monsoon months when the river swells to accommodate 70% of its annual flow – but has also altered over the years as successive embankments have gradually hemmed in the river and “reclaimed” land from its bed. Until the 1970s, the floodplain was regarded as wasteland, given over to seasonal cultivation by farmers’ cooperatives who leased land from the Flood and Irrigation Department. The very fact of landownership by that agency indicated that the primary purpose of this strip was related to the management of water in the city. Small-scale farming on the rich silt deposited by the river was not seen as inimical to the task of regulating water flows. The incremental construction of embankments in a piecemeal fashion to protect settlements along the river from occasional flooding eventually created a network of parallel lines that effectively restricted the river’s channel and allowed accelerated build-up on the banks. The major spate of construction along the river’s west bank before the Asian Games of 1982 was accompanied by the spread of squatter settlements housing the city’s working class that, with the encouragement of the government, kept expanding over the next two decades. Their subsequent eviction on the charge of pollution cleared the way for the construction of capital-intensive projects of urban infrastructure and elite consumption. These projects give material shape to Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit’s vision of riverfront development that mimics other “world-class” cities. Dikshit has frequently mooted the idea of channelising the river in a manner resembling the Thames in London and the Seine in Paris, with the river fitting into the cityscape as a site of recreation and leisure, with cultural performances and other modes of public consumption. This seemingly benign project of creating the riverfront as a public space, one that may forge a relationship between the river and the residents of Delhi, elides key issues, social and ecological. One, this space will not really be open to the “public” for the direction of its redistribution already shows that it favours corporate capital and private and elite public modes of consumption. Not only will these new spaces exclude most residents of the city but, in fact, have already done so – the land made available for the new developments has been taken from farmers and by evicting hundreds of thousands of poor slum-dwellers who had previously occupied that land. It must also be borne in mind that the Yamuna is not the Thames or the Seine. Its distinctive rhythms are harmonised to the Indian subcontinent’s seasons. With the bulk of its flow concentrated in the monsoons, the Yamuna is liable to breach its embankments if deprived of its present fertile expanse. While the floods in Mumbai and New Orleans (Kelman 2003) are recent examples of the hazards of building in a river’s floodplain, the residents of north Delhi and the Pushta have also experienced the risks of a swiftly-rising river. The vast stretches of riverbed revealed in the summer months may lure developers, but the line between land and water is swiftly dissolved once the rains come. As Mike Davis (1999) reminds us, nature is not a stable backdrop against which humans can orchestrate their affairs. That natural processes have their own dynamism and integrity must be borne in mind lest world-class ambitions founder on the fluvial bed of the Yamuna. The spatial and temporal flow of the Yamuna through Delhi shows the fluctuating fortunes of urban ecology as a concern in the cultural politics of the city. In 2009, the ecological value of the floodplain was comprehensively dismissed by the Supreme Court’s declaration that the area along the river was neither a riverbed nor a floodplain and could be incorporated into a regime of commodity value as real estate. However, the floods

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of 2010 challenged that assertion, reminding the city of the presence of a river in their midst, an ecological entity that could not be fully controlled and that demanded its natural due. In this essay, I have tried to show that the contestations over the Yamuna are not merely another inevitable instance of the enclosure of the commons, a historical accompaniment to the onward march of capitalism (Thompson 1977), or of “accumulation by dispossession” in an age of “new imperialism” (Harvey 2003). Though they do fit within the wider pattern of accumulation going on in contemporary India, the processes that have rendered the riverfront a place of commodified value are also anchored in a longer-standing set of aesthetic values associated with modernity (Glover 2008). These values made the riverfront a non-place inhabited by non- people, illegible as either nature or culture. Among the many intersecting ways of making nature recognisable as a place of value – spectacular scenery, charismatic mega-fauna, religious significance, national prestige – commodification is only one (Cederlöf and Sivaramakrishnan 2005; Davis 1995). It is the conjuncture with the period of liberalisation that has enabled the emergence of commodity aesthetics as the dominant form of imparting value to the river, allowing the Yamuna to be seen and imagined as a desirable place. However, the floods assert a contrary doctrine, reiterating the force of ecological limits, and emphasising that the floodplain of the Yamuna continues to be a place that defies commodification and thus defines the limits of capital.

Notes    1  George Berkeley (1710): “A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge” (proposition 45) argued that “The Objects of Sense Exist Only When They Are Perceived”, viewed on 20 June 2011 (http://philosophyeserver.org/ berkeleyhtml). This comment on perception and the production of nature is not to deny the substantive materiality of the river or, what the essay argues for, the fact that nature exceeds social categories and framings. I am grateful to Vinay Gidwani for helping clarify this point.    2  The Sanskrit term for a place of pilgrimage, tirtha, originally meant “ford” or “crossing place” and sacred riverbank sites like the Ganga at Banaras represent spiritual fording, the soul’s journey from the obstacles of this world to the next (Eck 1982). This metaphysical aspect of a river underlies the Hindu practice of using ghats or the built-up steps leading down to the water, as sites to cremate the dead.    3  On the mutual constitution of place and nature, see Raffles (1999).    4  Interviewed on 21 November 2007.    5  The two cow shelters close to the river, with their herds of infirm and injured cattle, offer a similar opportunity to the devout.    6  Interviewed on 23 November 2007.    7  Interviewed on 25 November 2007.   8  See the 2003 study “Heavy Metal Contamination of Vegetables in Delhi”, viewed on 25 June 2011 (http://old.cseindia.org/programme/health/pdf/ conf2006/toxins2_aggarwal2.pdf). Other studies on Yamuna water pollution in Delhi and critical appraisals of the efforts to clean the river can be found online at the Centre for Science and Environment website, viewed on 25 June 2011 (http://www.cseindia.org/taxonomy/term/5050). For an ongoing commentary on the Yamuna’s condition, with biographical musings and photographs, see Ravi Agarwal’s engaging blog, viewed on 25 June 2011 (http://haveyouseen theriver. blogspot.com).    9  Interviewed on 21 November 2007.  10  This Hindi aphorism is particularly apt on this occasion. Literally, it means that “The Ganga is flowing backwards”, or a state that violates the natural order of things.  11  In her book Unsettling Memories (2002), anthropologist Emma Tarlo persuasively argues that, during the Emergency, the state’s desire to discipline poor people’s lives in urban spaces extended to an invasion of their bodies as well. Tarlo shows that the project of urban beautification via slum evictions was linked to the project of population control via forced sterilisation. Displaced slum-dwellers were more likely to get resettlement plots on the edge of the city if they got themselves sterilised or if they could prove that they had “motivated” someone to get a vasectomy or tubectomy.

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In the archives of the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), several files pertaining to the allotment of individual housing plots included certificates of sterilisation to strengthen the claimant’s case. The body responsible for planning and regulating land use in the capital. This crisis narrative involving national prestige, tight deadlines and the imperative of creating major infrastructural and aesthetic changes in the city, which legitimises massive public expenditure without adequate oversight, was replayed in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games 2010 (Baviskar 2010). In 2004, Hazards Centre, an organisation researching urban issues from the viewpoint of working-class citizens, attempted to calculate the total quantum of liquid waste generated by areas equipped with sewage lines as well as those without. According to their report, 3,296 million litres of wastewater are released into the Yamuna in Delhi every day. Their analysis estimated that the Yamuna Pushta bastis contributed only 2.96 million litres a day (or less than 0.1%) to the total waste flowing into the river. Yet, the Pushta settlements were targeted for eviction while no action was taken against the pucca neighbourhoods that generated the bulk of domestic sewage. The regularity with which judicial attempts to address pollution in the Yamuna have targeted the wrong offenders while ignoring systemic problems and letting state officials off the hook, condoning failure despite more than Rs 13.56 billion being spent on the Yamuna Action Plan, indicates the anti-poor prejudice driving the recent judicial activism (Ramanathan 2006). The metro depot uses groundwater pumped from the riverbed and discharges waste, including chemicals used in train maintenance, directly into the river (Bharucha 2006). The most recent reports indicate that the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) has plans of building a theme park on 15,000 square metres of another riverfront station, Shastri Park. See report “DMRC Theme Park”, viewed on 30 July 2011 (http://www.ya-munajiyeabhiyaan.blogspot.com/). Interviewed on 13 April 2004. Interviewed on 12 April 2004. In 2008, the Delhi government announced that it had built 60,000 flats for the urban poor, a claim that was later found to be completely false. An enquiry found that, by 2009, only 7,635 of these flats had been built and another 5,227 were under construction. See “Lokayukta Ticks off Sheila for False Claim over Flats for Poor”, The Hindu, 19 July 2011, viewed on 19 July 2011 (http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-newd-elhi/article2249115.ece). The move of ignoring or exterminating original settlers and then claiming their land as one’s territory is, of course, a familiar story in the history of colonialism (Carter 1987; Wilmsen 1989). However, it continues in attenuated forms into the present, through time-tested tactics such as criminalising the poor for survival practices that are a product of state-imposed restrictions. Writ petition, viewed on 23 July 2011 (www.elaw. org/system/files/Petition+-+final+version.doc). For other documents related to Yamuna pollution and construction on the riverbed, see Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan, viewed on 23 July 2011 (http://www.yamunajiyeabhiyaan.blogspot.com). “DDA gives Rs 500 crore loan to Emaar MGF”, Economic Times, 13 September 2009, viewed on October 2009 (http:// economictimes.india-times.com/Features/The-Sunday-ET/Companies/Emaar-MGFs-32-flats-in-games-village-to-beready- by-October/articleshow/5004556.cms). This arrangement directly contradicted the urban development ministry’s previously held position that there was no provision for extending a loan to the contractor under the PPP model. See statement by urban development secretary, M Ramachandran, in “DDA might bail out Emaar”, Indian Express, January 2009, viewed on 7 October 2009 (http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/games-village-dda-might-bailout-emaar/408094/ ). For an instructive discussion of the contrast between the “commons” and “commodities”, see Bakker (2007) and Linebaugh (2009).

REFERENCES Augé, Marc (2008 [1995]): Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, 2nd edition (London: Verso). Bakker, Karen (2007): “The ‘Commons’ Versus the ‘Commodity’: Alter-Globalisation, Anti-Privatisation, and the Human Right to Water in the Global South”, Antipode, 39(3): 430-55. Baviskar, Amita (2003): “Between Violence and Desire: Space, Power and Identity in the Making of Metropolitan Delhi”, International Social Science Journal, 175:89-98. – (2010): “Spectacular Events, City Spaces and Citizenship: The Commonwealth Games in Delhi” in Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria and Colin McFarlane (ed.), Urban Navigations: Politics, Space and the City in South Asia (New Delhi: Routledge), 138-61.

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– (2011): “Cows, Cars and Cycle-rickshaws: Bourgeois Environmentalism and the Battle for Delhi’s Streets” in Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray (ed.), Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes (New Delhi: Routledge), 391-418. – (2012): “Extraordinary Violence and Everyday Welfare: The State and Development in Rural and Urban India” in Soumhya Venkatesan and Thomas Yarrow (ed.), Differentiating Development: Beyond an Anthropology of Critique (New York: Berghahn Books). Baviskar, Amita, Subir Sinha and Kavita Philip (2006): “Rethinking Indian Environmentalism: Industrial Pollution in Delhi and Fisheries in Kerala” in Joanne Bauer (ed.), Forging Environmentalism: Justice, Livelihood and Contested Environments (New York: ME Sharpe), 189-256. Bharucha, Ruzbeh N (2006): Yamuna Gently Weeps: A Journey into the Yamuna Pushta Slum Demolitions (New Delhi: Sainathann Communication). Carter, Paul (1987): The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (London: Faber and Faber). Cederlöf, Gunnel and K Sivaramakrishnan (2005): Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihoods, and Identities in South Asia (New Delhi: Permanent Black). CPCB (Central Pollution Control Board) (2004): Status of Sewerage and Sewage Treatment Plants in Delhi, New Delhi: CPCB. CSE (Centre for Science and Environment) (2007): Sewage Canal: How to Clean the Yamuna (New Delhi: CSE). Davis, Mike (1999): Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Vintage). Davis, Susan G (1995): “Touch the Magic” in William Cronon (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W W Norton), 204-17. Eck, Diana (1982): Banaras: City of Light (New York: Alfred E Knopf). Ghertner, D Asher (2011): “Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi” in Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong (ed.), Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global (Oxford: Blackwell), 279-306. Glover, William J (2008): Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Harvey, David (2003): The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Kelman, Ari (2003): A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press). Linebaugh, Peter (2009): The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (Berkeley: University of California Press). Menon-Sen, Kalyani and Gautam Bhan (2008): Swept off the Map: Surviving Eviction and Resettlement in Delhi (New Delhi: Yoda Press and Jagori). Mumford, Lewis (1963): The Highway and the City (New York: Harcourt). Raffles, Hugh (1999): ‘“Local Theory’: Nature and the Making of an Amazonian Place”, Cultural Anthropology, 14(3): 32360. Ramanathan, Usha (2006): “Illegality and the Urban Poor”, Economic & Political Weekly, 41(29): 3193-97. Sennett, Richard (1990): The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York: Alfred A Knopf). Srivastava, Sanjay (2009): “Urban Spaces, Disney- Divinity and Moral Middle Classes in Delhi”, Economic & Political Weekly, 44(26-27): 338-45. Stietencron, Heinrich von (2010): Ganga and Yamuna: River Goddesses and Their Symbolism in Indian Temples (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan). Tarlo, Emma (2002): Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in India (Berkeley: University of California Press). Thompson, E P (1977): Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (London: Allen Lane). Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt (2005): Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Wilmsen, Edwin N (1989): Land Filled with Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

17 Endangered City: Security and Citizenship in Bogotá Austin Zeiderman

Urbanization is increasingly understood as a planetary process, and as a result the ‘city’ is being called into question – both as the epistemological frame for urban analysis and as the normative space for political claims (Brenner and Schmid 2015).1 The field of urban studies is currently preoccupied with what Henri Lefebvre called the ‘planetarization of the urban’ (2014: 205), and in particular with its implications for his own notion of the ‘right to the city.’ To paraphrase a number of recent commentators: If the city can no longer be thought of as a territorially bounded type of human settlement, then what sense does it make to claim a right to it? Lefebvre’s provisional response, in one of his final publications, was to gesture toward a radical reformulation of his oft-cited refrain: ‘The right to the city implies nothing less than a revolutionary concept of citizenship’ (Lefebvre 2014: 205; Wachsmuth and Brenner 2014). While this line of thinking opens up horizons of political possibility, it also hinders understanding of vast areas of contemporary urban political life. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork on the politics of security and citizenship in Bogotá, Colombia, this essay argues that most popular urban politics is far less radical, and yet must not be ignored if we want to understand how cities function as political spaces. The details of this revolutionary concept of citizenship were never fully elaborated by Lefebvre. However, his convictions about the ‘complete urbanization of society’ (2003: 1) suggest that a reformulation of the right to the city would require the rejection of conventional categories of bounded territorial organization (such as the ‘city’ or the ‘nation state’) in light of the increasingly deterritorialized and unbounded nature of urban life.2 What comes in less for questioning, either by Lefebvre or by those who draw inspiration from him, is his call for grassroots democracy and selfmanagement (autogestion) to replace bureaucratic state institutions and the increasingly instrumental, technocratic nature of ‘urbanism’ (his derogatory term for what is often today called ‘urban governance’).3 This is a critical leitmotif of Lefebvre’s

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earlier writings on the right to the city (1996) and of his work on the state (2009). Likewise, in his urge to reformulate citizenship in the context of planetary urbanization, urbanism remains no more than a ‘gospel for technocrats,’ bureaucratic institutions are ‘the enemy of urban life (la vie urbaine),’ and grassroots democracy ‘must be reinstated’ as the emancipatory alternative (2014: 204). The state and the citizen remain diametrically opposed, hence the move toward a concept of citizenship that claims popular control over the entire urban process, now on a planetary scale.4 This no doubt resonates with moments of mass popular mobilization – from anti-austerity movements in Europe to Black Lives Matter in the United States – that confront globally hegemonic rationalities of governance and pursue more socially just alternatives by demanding the right to the city, either in name or in spirit (Brenner, Marcuse, and Mayer 2012). Where this line of thinking falls short, however, is in its ability to apprehend the majority of what constitutes popular urban politics today, especially in parts of the world where the speed and extent of urbanization outreach the provision of basic services for all. This is a bold claim, perhaps exaggerated to force us to consider whether the political potential of Lefebvre’s writing often exceeds its analytical utility and to allow us to apprehend terrains of urban political life that remain outside its purview. The following analysis of citizenship claims in Bogotá draws instead on Partha Chatterjee’s (2004; 2011) insights into colonial and postcolonial regimes of power in India, which resonate strongly with the practice of popular politics in many parts of the world today. Working with and against Michel Foucault’s (2007; 2008) genealogy of governmentality, and seeking to understand it from beyond the confines of Western Europe, Chatterjee traces the historical emergence of a widespread form of political life that sits uncomfortably alongside the work of theorists like Lefebvre.5 In what Chatterjee calls the ‘politics of the governed,’ popular mobilizations frequently do not formulate a revolutionary concept of citizenship, fundamentally challenge state authority and the rule of law, or seek radical democratic change. Instead, much political life in today’s cities – especially in the global South, but not only there – is made up of daily struggles between urban dwellers and state agencies over the distribution of municipal benefits, services, and infrastructures, such as housing, water, transportation, or electricity. Collective mobilizations around broader notions of justice and injustice do exist, occasionally demanding the right to fundamentally control the urban process through the universalizing frame of citizenship. But this is atypical compared to more incremental, less emancipatory political formations that do not coalesce around a transformative vision or strategy. Access to urban spaces, goods, and amenities is often the object of struggle, but grassroots democratic control over them is rarely the ultimate goal. And instead of seeking to generalize their claims to all citizens, whether at the scale of the city or beyond, popular mobilizations frequently demand exceptions to established juridical and political norms rather than major changes to them. A Lefebvrian response to such observations may be that processes of planetary urbanization have rendered irrelevant the ‘city,’ in the conventional sense, thereby requiring an expanded political horizon that has yet to be realized. Hence the move to see all popular mobilizations everywhere – not just in cities, but from the Arctic to the Amazon to the Himalayas – as potentially united in opposition to the form of urbanization ‘being imposed by the forces of neoliberal capitalism’ (Brenner and Schmid 2015: 177–178). But this move, while analytically seductive and politically

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gratifying, leads us even further away from the majority of political practice in much of the urban world. The following analysis of the politics of security and citizenship in Bogotá demonstrates the degree to which popular urban politics is shaped in mundane but fundamental ways by both governmental and nongovernmental mechanisms of regulation, protection, and distribution – most of which operate on an urban or national scale. Again, Chatterjee’s analysis is instructive. The majority of people in India, he argues, ‘are only tenuously, and even then ambiguously and contextually, rights-bearing citizens’ due to the conditions of illegality and informality in which they live and work (2004: 38). However, as ‘populations within the territorial jurisdiction of the state, they have to be both looked after and controlled by various governmental agencies’ (2004: 38). Thus, Chatterjee directs our attention to what he calls ‘political society,’ or the ‘site of negotiation and contestation opened up by the activities of governmental agencies aimed at population groups’ (2004: 74), which is where the lion’s share of popular urban politics takes place. What Lefebvre’s revolutionary conception of citizenship finds so unpalatable, and has such difficulty comprehending, is the degree to which technocracy, bureaucracy, and governmental management are central to contemporary urban political life. To challenge the approach to urban politics critiqued above, this essay draws on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Bogotá.6 It focuses on a moment in which urbanists and security experts from around the world were heralding the dawn of a new age, indeed celebrating the city’s ‘rebirth,’ and yet widespread preoccupation with danger remained. What concerned many, however, was not the direct experience of danger so much as how endangerment, or the more general condition of being threatened, often indirectly conditioned experiences of the city. While prevalent in the mundane routines of everyday life, a sense of endangerment also infused the domain of urban politics and government. It shaped how the state established and maintained its authority and legitimacy, how the government intervened in lives of its citizens, and how these citizens inhabited the city as political subjects. Given the constitutive relationship between politics and security in Colombia, whereby the right to life and protection outweighs other entitlements, threats of both human and nonhuman origin conditioned citizenship in particular and unexpected ways. The following analysis is based on fieldwork in the self-built settlements of the urban periphery of Bogotá and among the municipal government agencies active in these areas. It examines a resettlement program for families living in Bogotá’s zonas de alto riesgo, or ‘zones of high risk,’ which since 2003 has entitled populations deemed vulnerable to environmental threats to relocation subsidies from the municipal housing agency. By paying close attention to discourses and practices of government and popular political responses to them, the analysis provides insight into urban politics in places like Bogotá, where security is an overarching concern across the political spectrum. In this context, the governmental imperative to protect life from threats of both human and nonhuman origin reconfigures what it means to be an urban citizen and reshapes the terrain of political engagement for the urban poor: it is often in the domain of security and risk that they demand their rights and articulate their claims to citizenship. Highlighting how settlers of the urban periphery navigate securitized frames of recognition, inclusion, and entitlement, this essay describes a form of popular urban politics in which the rights of urban citizens are mediated by and predicated on the degree to which their lives are in danger.

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Security politics and the government of risk Armed conflict has haunted Colombia for over half a century. Violence in the countryside combined with economic shifts have forced millions to flee to the cities in what has become one of the world’s largest crises of internal displacement. This has led to the continued growth of self-built settlements throughout the country’s urban peripheries and created a highly vulnerable population of citizens who, for the most part, reside in precarious living conditions. Between 1950 and 2010, the population of Bogotá alone exploded from just over 700,000 to about 8 million. Much of this population increase took place in the mountainous southern half of the city in sprawling self-built settlements. When the municipal government began conducting technical studies of environmental threats in the late 1990s, the highest concentration of families in zones of high risk was in this area (Morales 2005). In fact, over 50 percent of the 10,715 properties located in risk zones in 2008 were in Ciudad Bolívar – the largest and poorest of Bogotá’s twenty localities.7 The imperative to relocate families from zones of high risk has focused on this area; from 2004 to 2006, for example, 90 percent (1,239) of the households resettled by the government were from this locality alone. The politics of security and the government of risk have reshaped the terrain on which the urban poor demand rights and claim citizenship. I began fieldwork in Bogotá prepared to investigate ‘neoliberal urbanism’ at work. After all, the resettlement program for vulnerable populations living in ‘zones of high risk’ for environmental threats, such as landslides and floods, was run by a public agency founded in 1942 to build housing for the working class according to a social welfare rationality. In its recent adaptation, the Fund for Social Housing (or Caja, for short) was adhering more strictly to neoliberal ideals: valorization of markets and their efficiency, skepticism about the role of the state, devolution of responsibility onto the community and the individual, privatization of public goods and services, and so on. The target of governmental intervention was no longer a social class, such as workers, or society as a whole, but individual households belonging to a narrowly delimited ‘at risk’ population. Since resettlement was ostensibly voluntary, however, the Caja had to educate members of this population to become rational, responsible, and prudent; that is, to desire and actualize their own relocation. As a result, thousands of settlers on the urban periphery, previously marginal to formal economic and legal institutions, were being thrust onto privatized markets for housing, credit, and utilities. In the process, relocation required them to become consumers, taxpayers, and debt-holders. Rather than improving lives and livelihoods, the Caja seemed to be shredding the social, economic, and cultural fabric of these communities and pushing them further to the extreme periphery of the city or even outside its municipal boundaries. And it was the World Bank that loaned the city of Bogotá substantial sums of money and subsequently praised the municipal government as a model of ‘good governance.’ While Bogotá’s recent effort to govern risk did at first look like a typical case of technocratic, managerial (in a word, neoliberal) urbanism, my first formal interview with two leaders of the Caja’s resettlement program challenged this initial assumption. Teresa was the director of the team responsible for relocating households in ‘zones of high risk’, while Yolanda was the manager of the Caja’s field office in the peripheral locality of Ciudad Bolívar, the hub of the program’s day-to-day operations. After the usual pleasantries, I asked them to tell me about their backgrounds. ‘We’re both government functionaries, public servants,’ Teresa began, gesturing to the bureaucratic officialdom of our

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surroundings. ‘But this was not always the case,’ she said. ‘I had the good fortune, the opportunity, to have participated in organizing 100 families to lay claim to land in Ciudad Bolívar. Tomárnoslo [to take it for ourselves],’ she paused to exclaim, and then continued: I organized the community to arrive at night, and we worked all night long to make sure that we could establish shacks and lay down pathways. The next day, we were ready for a fight when the police tried to remove the invasión [‘invasion’ has become a common name for the occupation of land by popular classes]. We weren’t going to let them kick us out; that was our barrio and we were the ones who built it. Yep, this was back in 1984. We won and the families stayed on the land, in part because the state didn’t really care about those hillsides. The authorities must have thought, well, how nice that the poor settled up there and left the flat part of the city to us.

Teresa then fast-forwarded to the present: ‘Twenty-five years later,’ she said, ‘this same area has been declared a “zone of high risk.” So now I have to show up not as the person who organized the invasion, but as the government agency that is coming to say to them: Señores, tumbamos y nos vamos. [Let’s knock it all down and get out of here.]’ Teresa did not specify with whom she had been working as a community organizer. Since many activists who helped during this period to build, defend, and eventually legalize peripheral urban settlements were allied with leftist movements – some that have since been criminalized and persecuted – I thought it best not to press. Her political commitments were implied as she explained how the struggles between different factions in Colombia’s decades-old armed conflict played out among the settlements of the urban periphery: ‘those guys from the M-19 who helped to settle a few people over here, los elenos [members of the ELN, the National Liberation Army] who staged the invasion of that parcel, the paramilitaries who came along and disoccupied it, the FARC who set up their militias there.’ ‘The root of the problem,’ she told me, ‘is the same as always: the distribution of wealth under savage capitalism and the absence of both agrarian and urban reform.’ Yolanda chimed in with a sigh: ‘Yes, the land reforms that we’ve never had.’ Then, laughing, she pointed to Teresa: ‘Es que ella es medio comunista, y yo, comunista y medio [She’s half communist, whereas I’m a communist and a half].’ I was puzzled. Was it possible that the person who once organized the building of settlements for the popular classes was now orchestrating their dispossession? Had Teresa gone through some kind of ‘neoliberal conversion?’ Or did she see a connection between her political activism in the 1980s and what she was doing now? Teresa’s account and the questions it raised would continue to stick with me. Perhaps what had changed from the 1980s to the present was not her commitment to improving the lives of the urban poor, but rather the available and legitimate means of doing so. While there is reason to see this form of urbanism as recognizably ‘neoliberal,’ clearly something else was at stake. To understand Teresa’s story and the many like it I would later hear, we have to situate them in relation to the politics of security in Colombia from the late twentieth century to the present. A turbulent history of conflict, violence, and instability continues to orient popular sentiments and political rationalities toward security as the ultimate pursuit. Since at least the 1980s, political authority, national unity, and social order have been framed primarily in these terms. The constitutive relationship between politics and security in Colombia has many implications. One is that the rights to life and to protection overshadow certain entitlements, such as the freedom of speech, and reconfigure others, such as the right to housing. Another is that elected officials across the political spectrum

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must position themselves within the national security landscape, such that the moderate and radical Left seek to promote their own versions of security in order to prevent the Right from monopolizing this key political terrain. Over the past three decades, a political consensus or governing pact has formed around the imperative to protect vulnerable populations from threats, of both environmental and human origin. As a result, risk management has become generally accepted as a governing framework that can encompass a range of objectives while insulating its proponents from the conservative establishment’s efforts to criminalize, persecute, or even annihilate anything resembling leftist ideology. In this form of urbanism, a series of mayoral administrations with varying political commitments and different visions for the future of Bogotá found an ostensibly neutral, ‘post-political’ way to address the social and environmental problems of the urban periphery and to build a political constituency among the urban poor. The politics of security in late twentieth-century Colombia have set the parameters by which contemporary urban life can be governed and lived. As a result, a technocratic, managerial form of governance – anathema to Lefebvre’s ideal – has become a strategic domain of urban politics. During our conversation, Teresa made a claim that would be reiterated throughout my fieldwork: that this form of urbanism was progressive and pro-poor. Like many of their colleagues, these activists-cum-functionaries joined the Caja during the mayoral administration of Samuel Moreno or his predecessor, Luis Eduardo (‘Lucho’) Garzón, both of whom represented the political party opposing the conservative political establishment and often espoused (though less frequently delivered) progressive social change. Although the resettlement program was established earlier, these mayors increased both its budget and the number of households eligible for subsidies, and praised it for attending to the problems of the city’s most underserved. While some officials were suspicious about the degree to which only the poor were seen to be vulnerable – in the concise words of one, ‘The mountains of the north [of Bogotá] are high-class, but the mountains of the south are high-risk!’ – my informants regularly stressed that protecting the lives of the urban poor from environmental hazards was a priority of the Left, and one that offered an alternative to the authoritarian doctrine of ‘democratic security’ that had been a hallmark of the Right for nearly a decade. Most situated the Caja’s resettlement program within a spectrum of approaches to security, and were keen to point out the differences between them. It became clear that security and risk were domains of political struggle over the authority to define terms such as ‘life,’ ‘threat,’ and ‘protection,’ and to govern the city accordingly. These domains shift over time, and people like Teresa position themselves knowingly and strategically within them.

A life at risk To appreciate how security politics and risk governance reconfigure the terrain of citizenship, consider the case of Liliana, a single mother of five who, from the age of 13, lived in a house built by relatives in the peripheral locality of Ciudad Bolívar. In May 2006, heavy rains sent an avalanche of mud crashing down onto a group of nearby houses.8 Four of Liliana’s neighbors, two adults and two children, were buried by the landslide. At the time of the tragic event, the municipal government was already in the process of

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relocating households throughout the city, especially those in the poor, hillside settlements of Ciudad Bolívar, to protect them from just this sort of disaster. However, since Liliana’s property lay outside the designated boundaries of the ‘zone of high risk,’ she had been excluded from the resettlement program. Unlike others in her neighborhood who had been declared ‘at risk,’ Liliana was ineligible for a government subsidy based on the constitutional right to vivienda digna (decent housing).9 Recognizing that her entitlement depended on her risk status, she sat down in October of that year to write a letter of appeal. Dear Sirs: The intention of this letter is to request a visit to the property I live in, where the floor is cracking. I cannot stay here or inhabit this property with complete tranquility, since I live with my 5 children who are minors; I am worried about the rainy season that we are presently in. God willing we are not going to fall down, that is, have a landslide, and God willing we won’t experience what happened to our neighbors in Caracolí, which resulted in 4 deaths. I beg you to do me the favor of visiting me to determine whether I am at high risk, or if I am not to tell me what procedures currently exist, and to subject me to them, as much for relocation as for the legalization of my property, since I am worried that the inevitable will happen, and I am worried about the life of my children. With nothing more to say and in anticipation of an affirmative response, I close this letter. Sincerely, Liliana

In her petition, Liliana expressed concern that she and her children were in danger. She appealed to God for protection from environmental disasters and feared their inevitability. However, Liliana’s plea was ultimately addressed to the governmental agencies responsible for risk management, the Directorate for Emergency Prevention and Response (DPAE), which designates ‘zones of high risk,’ and the Caja, which relocates families living within them. These agencies possess both the political–scientific authority to declare her ‘at risk’ as well as the legal responsibility to protect her life. Government technicians responded to Liliana’s letter and determined that the conditions of her property did, in fact, warrant its inclusion within the ‘zone of high risk.’ She then became a beneficiary of the Caja’s resettlement program. When we met, Liliana was living in a temporary rental apartment in another part of Ciudad Bolívar (the barrio of Sierra Morena) while she waited patiently for the process of purchasing her new home to go through. For Liliana and others like her, citizenship and the benefits it confers are mediated by and predicated on a governmental rationality that classifies subjects and manages populations according to the degree to which their lives are in danger. Her vulnerability determined whether she would be recognized as the bearer of certain rights. Liliana did not demand that the state recognize her within the political community of the city or the nation, or that it fulfill her entitlements on the basis of such claims. Although she appealed to God and begged her superiors for protection, Liliana’s petition ultimately implored the municipal government to recognize her as belonging to the population living in ‘zones of high risk’ (Figure 17.1). It was in these terms that she could establish herself as a worthy beneficiary of the resettlement program. Although this case deals with struggles over housing and access to urban space, a similar form of popular urban politics has emerged in other sectors: to become a citizen with rights, Liliana first had to be visible as a life at risk.

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Figure 17.1 Evacuated house in “zone of high risk” Source: Photograph by author, 2009

Following a liberal democratic paradigm, we could see Liliana’s petition as prefiguring an expansion of rights to the urban poor and a progression toward equal citizenship. We might acknowledge that most settlers on the urban periphery are not rights-bearing citizens in the fullest, most substantive sense, but then mistake her case for an example of the process by which members of this population struggle to be recognized as such. However, the resettlement program does not set out to provide ‘decent housing’ to everyone but, rather, to those living in ‘zones of high risk.’ And, while this constitutional right is shared formally by all citizens, it is dependent on the degree to which their lives are in danger.10 The right to housing is thus a privilege bestowed on members of a collectivity whose entitlements are grounded not only in shared membership within a political community, but also in their common condition of vulnerability. It is within this domain that the poor in Bogotá must define and execute their claims. By examining the relationship between citizenship and security in Colombia, and how these ideals have been fused over the past decade, we begin to understand why settlers on the urban periphery strive to become visible as lives at risk in order to be recognized as citizens with rights.

Landslides and death threats In Bogotá, the governmental imperative to protect the lives of vulnerable populations shapes how the urban poor engage in political relationships with the state. Whereas the resettlement program targets those exposed to nonhuman dangers, vulnerability to a convergence of threats makes one eligible for an even broader range of benefits. However, the forms of political recognition, inclusion, and entitlement linked to security are

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internally stratified along lines of gender and race. Take the example of Jairo, who spoke with me on a wooden bench in the newly built house he had received recently from the Caja. He had come to Bogotá with his family from Valle del Cauca in the 1980s and settled in Altos de Cazucá, a neighborhood on the periphery of Bogotá. He was incredulous, he admitted, when DPAE informed him that he was living in a ‘zone of high risk.’ ‘Supposedly,’ he told me, ‘the house we had been living in for over a decade was in danger of falling down.’ Having never experienced landslides or floods, and believing that the engineers who made this designation were wrong, Jairo’s family faced a complicated choice. They could enroll in the resettlement program and receive a subsidy for a new home or remain in place knowing that the local authorities could evacuate the area at any moment. Jairo’s skepticism about the government’s risk designation was familiar, as I had often heard similar doubts from those refusing to leave their homes. But Jairo had relocated, and so I asked him, ‘Why, if you were not in agreement with the risk assessment, did you decide to participate in the resettlement program?’ Jairo then leaned in close, his voice softening almost to a whisper: ‘I accepted it because I was displaced from there. There was raterismo y delincuencia [thievery and crime] at all hours of the day and night. Leaving the house was dangerous, and if you can’t leave the house to go to work,’ he said, ‘what can you do?’ Paramilitaries took advantage of the insecurity in the area by charging a vacuna, or ‘vaccination,’ which most people grudgingly paid in exchange for protection. ‘However,’ Jairo told me, ‘I was never in agreement with what the paracos [paramilitaries] were doing.’ And, as a well-liked and respected leader within the Afro-Colombian community in Altos de Cazucá, his opposition was particularly unwelcome to the paramilitaries. When they tried to get him not just to pay for protection, but also to collaborate with them and he refused, they told him to leave or he would be killed. Jairo then focused on finding a strategy for self-protection – ‘The first priority was to preserve my life,’ he told me – so he went for help. His first stop was the Caja’s field office, where he was encouraged to go directly to the police. The police then sent him to the Procuraduría, a government agency where citizens can report threats to their life through an official process known as denuncia, or ‘denunciation.’ After receiving Jairo’s denunciation, the Procuraduría declared him a desplazado (internally displaced person). Unlike others I had met, whose desplazado status did not qualify them for a housing subsidy because they had ‘invaded’ a high-risk zone, Jairo was already recognized as a legitimate beneficiary of the Caja’s resettlement program. Once officially classified as a member of the internally displaced population, he was expedited through the process of selecting and receiving a new home. In Jairo’s version of the story, the Caja enabled him to leave Altos de Cazucá before the paramilitaries followed through on their threats. But according to Carlos, a Caja social worker, Jairo had used and deceived the government for his own advantage. To ensure and hasten access to a resettlement property, Carlos told me, Jairo invented the story about his life being threatened. The Caja social worker referred to Jairo using a term I discuss further in a moment: ‘Este tipo es un vivo! [This guy is a vivo!]’ Carlos had no doubt that paramilitaries were active throughout the area and that those who resisted or opposed their territorial control were regularly threatened if not disappeared or murdered. Nevertheless he was suspicious of Jairo’s story. If Carlos’s suspicion was warranted, this scenario would be telling. It would show that threats to one’s life can be manipulated to strengthen claims made on the state and that

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accentuating one’s exposure to danger can ensure the distribution of entitled benefits. It would highlight that, among certain populations, the rights conferred by citizenship are mediated by and predicated on the governmental imperative to protect lives at risk. However, it is likely that Jairo was, indeed, threatened by paramilitaries and saw the resettlement program’s mission to protect his life from one kind of threat as an escape from one of an altogether different sort. Landslides and death threats are two forms of officially recognized vulnerability, and in combination they enabled Jairo to be recognized as ‘at risk’ and entitled him to governmental assistance. In the end, it was DPAE’s calculation of the probability of environmental hazard that offered him a more expeditious route to safety. But Carlos’s doubt also reveals how ‘vulnerability,’ as a securitized category of political recognition and entitlement, is also gendered and racialized. In Colombia, vivo is colloquial term derived from the verb vivir (to live). As an adjective, it means ‘alive’ or ‘living’ and can designate someone who is full of vigor, and it need not carry a pejorative sense (una persona viva is sharp-witted, clever, and astute). As a noun, however, it denotes a category of person who is opportunistic, manipulative, and selfish; to call someone ‘un vivo’ is to call into question his motives (and it usually does refer to men). The term is also frequently applied to costeños (a racialized marker of regional identity) or to Colombians of African descent more generally, who, according to durable racist stereotypes, are presumed by many whites or mestizos to be lazy, dishonest, and untrustworthy. Vivo often accompanies the verb aprovecharse, which means to take advantage of an opportunity or another person. Someone who falls into this category is a hustler and is presumed to have the power to make things happen and to get other people to act, often against their will. The category applies usually to men with guile, gumption, and cunning but who are inherently shady, scam artists, or deceitful tricksters. And it invariably sets up a gendered dichotomy between the predator and the victim – if el vivo is taking advantage of a situation and benefiting personally, there must be someone powerless, gullible, or vulnerable (mostly women and children) on the losing end. The imagined relationship between el vivo and los vulnerables, between masculine vitality and feminine vulnerability, frames the politics of security and citizenship in Bogotá. Assumptions about race and space complicate matters, since Afro-Colombians living in the predominantly white and mestizo capital city are inevitably presumed to be ‘displaced’ (in the more general sense of not being where they ‘belong’; that is, on the Caribbean or Pacific coasts). This compromises their ability to be recognized as members of the political community of the city, and therefore to qualify for housing subsidies from the municipal government’s resettlement program, whose objective is to protect the lives of urban citizens deemed vulnerable to environmental hazards. But while AfroColombians in Bogotá are understood as ‘out of place,’ this does not mean they are automatically considered deserving beneficiaries of the protections entitled to those officially recognized as forcibly displaced by the armed conflict. Both the resettlement program for ‘at risk’ populations and the protections granted to desplazados privilege those lives considered to matter more. In Colombia, the capacity of certain forms of life to survive, endure, or flourish – while others are abandoned, extinguished, or left to go extinct – is distributed unevenly according to racialized regimes of hierarchy and privilege. The gendered and racialized category of ‘vulnerability’ underpins the politics of security and the government of risk in Bogotá.

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Popular security politics Security politics and risk governance also shape how collective popular mobilizations unfold in the city.11 In April 2009, a group of desplazados occupied one of Bogotá’s prominent public parks in the historical center just blocks from City Hall and the Presidential Palace. The site of the occupation was the Parque Tercer Milenio (Third Millennium Park), which was a relatively underused expanse of open space and recreational facilities until close to 500 desplazados descended on it. They pitched tents and constructed makeshift shelters out of scavenged materials and, overnight, the park was turned into a veritable refugee camp. By early May, the number of desplazados had risen to 1,200, and their spokespeople were entering into negotiations with representatives from both the national and municipal governments. The demonstrators, it seemed, had succeeded at investing a governmental category, the displaced population, with a physical presence in the city, a common rhetoric for making claims, and a collective identity with which to engage the state. ‘Although our situations are different, our needs and demands are the same,’ said one of the occupants of the park.12 They demanded their rights to protection, housing, food, and employment, but first they had to be recognized as belonging to the population guaranteed entitlements on account of their vulnerability. The desplazados occupied the park to make their voices heard in ways reminiscent of other urban political movements. And yet their demands emphasized security over citizenship, the right to life more than to the city. The national government was reticent to acquiesce. The Justice Department announced it would pursue legal action against individuals promoting demonstrations by desplazados and would not privilege groups engaging in unlawful occupations of public space. The municipal government of Bogotá was more attentive to the situation, and by the end of May an agreement between City Hall and the desplazados was on the horizon. The mayor’s office was promising to make 800 jobs available to members of the group and was offering them temporary shelter while funds for additional support were sought. On the basis of these terms, 300 of the demonstrators agreed to relocate, and the municipal government was confident that the rest would soon follow. The media then began to spread allegations of a manipulative force behind the protest and reports of demonstrators being held against their will. El Tiempo published an account of a woman who ‘dared to denounce the leaders of the occupation … for forcing [the protestors] to remain in place.’13 The newspaper quoted her under the pseudonym ‘Nancy’ to protect her identity: ‘I am afraid. There could be a massacre here. They could come into my hut at any time and kill me for saying that the leaders of the displaced are obligating us to stay here. I want to get out of here right away.’ The article told the story of her displacement from the department of Tolima, where she was living until guerrillas forced her to flee. But it emphasized the insecurity she now felt during the occupation of Third Millennium Park on account of the ‘authoritarianism of her supposed leaders.’ The predatory dynamic allegedly present among the demonstrators extended to the relation between parents and children: ‘The children are already victims of displacement because of violence and now they are being used as a tool for making demands,’ warned Olga Lucía Velásquez, the state’s attorney for matters concerning youth.14 The distinction between el vivo and los vulnerables began to frame this crisis, and it seemed only a matter of time before the remaining occupants of the park would be removed by force. Then a crisis of global proportion hit Bogotá and changed the fate of the desplazados still struggling to make their demands heard. On July 13, Colombia’s National Institute

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of Health announced the appearance of gripa porcina (swine flu), otherwise known as the H1N1 virus. A few days later, health officials reported that 59 of the 185 cases throughout the country were in Bogotá, and that five of the seven deaths attributed to the flu had occurred in the capital city.15 The media then relayed a message from Bogotá’s Secretary of Health, Héctor Zambrano, in which he asked the citizenry to increase preventive measures: wash hands with soap and water, use masks if you have flu symptoms, avoid shaking hands and kissing if you have the virus, and go to the hospital if you have a persistent fever over thirty-eight degrees, a cough, and difficulty breathing.16

Zambrano expressed concern about the concentration of desplazados in Third Millennium Park, which, he feared, could become a ‘niche for the H1N1 epidemic.’ Although not a single case of swine flu had been detected among the displaced population, Zambrano said they ‘are highly vulnerable, both emotionally and physically, and their conditions of health and nutrition are not good. We are all aware that many efforts have been made, but these cases demand more forceful responses.’17 Whereas preventative measures for controlling the spread of the virus were directed at the general citizenry, disciplinary techniques were required for this population. Two days after the H1N1 scare began, 300 uniformed policemen installed a cordon sanitaire around the encampment (Figure 17.2). The ‘epidemiological barrier’ (cordón epidemiológico), as it was called, consisted of an inner ring of metallic fencing covered by an outer ring of heavy-duty plastic. The Secretary of Government, Clara López, justified the quarantine: ‘The H1N1 virus is a danger, it’s a time bomb, and the mayor has done the responsible thing in ordering the sanitary ring.’18 Face masks were handed out,

Figure 17.2  Cordon sanitaire surrounding the encampment in Third Millennium Park. Source: Photograph by author, 2009

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clean water was brought in, and a medical team of close to 200 began to administer daily checkups.19 At two o’clock in the morning, just a few hours after the cordon sanitaire was installed, the team conducted a thorough census to register each person in the encampment and to identify the most vulnerable among them. At the single entrance to the encampment, police set up a security checkpoint (Figure 17.3). Protected by a tent, four government officials operated two computers on which they recorded the identity of each protestor and monitored his or her comings and goings. Those passing through were required to show identification cards; those not registered as participants in the occupation were barred from entering. The cordon sanitaire thus blocked additional people from joining the demonstration and ensured that outsiders could not make contact with the desplazados. In addition, those on the inside worried that they would not be allowed to return if they left to search for food for their children or supplies for their camp. A woman called out from inside to members of the press: ‘How do you think we feel?’ Seconds later, she answered her own question: ‘Like prisoners!’20 The governmental logic being applied to the displaced population was now clear to those on the inside: ‘We are running a terrible risk and, when we leave to rummage for money or food, we obviously put the rest of the city at risk, too.’ With the containment strategy in place and the census conducted, Mayor Moreno held a press conference to discuss the way forward. He informed the media that the health department had examined the desplazados in the park, and had found approximately 130 people with acute respiratory symptoms. As Health Secretary Zambrano put it, there was ‘a high risk of contagion of serious illness’ because of the potential for these cases to become a focal point for the spread of the H1N1 virus.21 Zambrano said that 80 of the 130 cases were children and recommended their immediate removal.22 The mayor also warned that those in the encampment risked fire and electrocution because of the burning

Figure 17.3 Security checkpoint Source: Photograph by author, 2009

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of wood outside the huts and the electrical connections being used inside them.23 The convergence of multiple risks, Moreno informed the public, led the District Emergency Committee to declare a health alert in Third Millennium Park. This declaration, he concluded, ‘permits us to intervene and to take all necessary preventative measures in order to reduce risks to public health.’24 The mayor then ordered the unwell, as well as all minors, to leave the park. Moreno assured them they would be taken to hospitals, receive medical attention, and undergo constant monitoring. This decision, he reiterated, was a guarantee that the rights of these highly vulnerable persons would be defended, especially those rights pertaining to health and living conditions.25 Secretary López explained the situation in the same way: We are implementing the instructions of the Mayor and we are going to evacuate everyone with any kind of flu symptoms or sickness and direct them to the city’s network of hospitals, because it is our constitutional obligation to protect the lives and the integrity of these persons.26

The Mayor then appealed to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) for mediation, and hoped it could lead the national and municipal governments to a solution. UN representatives met with each agency involved and began to pursue an agreement that would put an end to the occupation. When only twenty-seven protestors responded to his plea, Moreno began to express concern that the demonstration would continue to grow and that the municipal government was powerless to stop it. In an article entitled ‘Time Bomb,’ Semana reported that between forty and fifty displaced families arrive each day in Bogotá and that the ‘instruction among them now is to join the occupation.’27 In response to these concerns, the mayor conceded that the ‘situation is getting out of hand’ and lamented that ‘we cannot close off the borders of the city.’28 As the pressure built, the figures of el vivo and los vulnerables came back into view. El Tiempo cited reports from visitors to the occupation who said that few sick people had responded to the government’s call to seek medical attention because ‘the leaders of the occupation threatened to kill those desplazados who wanted to leave Third Millennium Park.’29 Another article quoted a city councilwoman, Gilma Jiménez, who claimed to have discovered manipulative forces among the encamped: ‘There are professional opportunists here whose economic motivations have led them to become leaders to the detriment of the desplazados themselves.’30 Councilwoman Jiménez told the newspaper that one of the demonstrators had told her: ‘Our children are our shields. If the authorities remove them, the ESMAD [riot police] can enter.’ Although the police department stated its intention to avoid using force, this framing foreshadowed an act of removal. The UNHCR continued to mediate between leaders of the occupation and delegates from the national and municipal governments. By late July, negotiations were progressing. An agreement was being considered that would cover the estimated 2,000 desplazados gathered in the park at this time and provide them with long-term housing solutions, temporary shelter, employment assistance, food support, transportation subsidies, and security assurances. Just before midnight on July 29, the UNHCR announced that an agreement had been signed that would provide broad humanitarian assistance to the desplazados following their voluntary withdrawal from the park.31 On the morning of Sunday, August 2, four months after the occupation began, the desplazados called an end

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to their protest and started to break up their camp. They lined up at City Hall to receive subsidies and by early afternoon many had cash in hand. Some moved to temporary shelters, and others boarded chartered buses and trucks bound for their places of origin. As the remaining few packed up and went to collect their benefits, their leaders promised to occupy the park again if the agreement was not fulfilled within three months.32 In the days that followed, government officials reflected on the crisis that had just been resolved. Secretary López clarified that the agreement reached with the desplazados was not the result of their prolonged occupation of Third Millennium Park, which was illegal, but rather the necessary response to a public health crisis. ‘This agreement,’ she told the press, ‘is not a resolution that comes by way of an abuse of discretion [vías de hecho],33 but a health emergency that required the evacuation of the park in order to prevent unhealthy conditions and the extremely high risk [altísimo riesgo] of … an H1N1 pandemic.’34 On the one hand, Secretary López’s comments responded to concerns that the settlement would ‘open the door to new occupations,’ as one newspaper put it, by creating exceptional incentives for others to pursue extralegal means of making their demands heard.35 She assured the public that the government would ‘take measures so that this does not happen again.’ On the other hand, in insisting that the situation was a health crisis, and that it was ‘in that context that we signed the agreement,’ López revealed something else. It was by becoming recognizable not simply as victims of violence or members of the urban poor but as lives at risk that the protestors could succeed at having their demands met. Once they were identified as vulnerable, they could finally be recognized as citizens with rights.

Conclusion In conclusion, let us consider the wider implications of the politics of security in Bogotá for how we understand contemporary cities and urban life. The endangered city indexes a form of urbanism that crosses the boundaries of global North and South to shed light on a world of cities whose future is fundamentally uncertain. The entanglement of security and citizenship demonstrates how changing governmental rationalities and techniques recast the terms within which claims for recognition, inclusion, and entitlement can be made, and thereby reshape the political terrain of cities in fundamental ways. Understanding popular urban politics requires that we account for the specific regimes of power through which people struggle to live in cities and to make their cities livable. In Bogotá, it is often within the domain of security and risk that the urban poor individually and collectively articulate their demands. To become rights-bearing citizens belonging to the city, they must first be identifiable as vulnerable lives at risk and in need of protection. But the broader lesson here is perhaps not to be found in the particular ways in which security shapes everyday political practice in Bogotá – though for some that might be significant. Rather, what deserves emphasizing is, to put it simply, the degree to which the politics of the governed is a central feature of contemporary urban political life. Lefebvre’s revolutionary concept of planetary urban citizenship may be an attractive alternative. Its political potential notwithstanding, however, the concept has less analytical utility for understanding how popular urban politics is unfolding around the world today.

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Given the historical and political context in which Lefebvre was working, it is not surprising that his writing has limitations. Although he sought to transcend them by turning his attention to the ‘planetarization of the urban’ – an analytic with ambitious reach – his understanding of popular urban politics remained somewhat parochial and static. Lefebvre’s willingness to ‘interrogate and call into question the Western mode of thought,’ as he put it, was reserved for forms of urbanism that treat the ‘city’ as an instrument – for political and military rule, for religious conversion, for the reproduction of labor power, and so on (2014: 204). He did not apply the same scrutiny to normative Western political thought, liberal or radical, except to assert that urbanization patterns demanded a reformulation of the concept of citizenship that extends beyond the ‘urban,’ as conventionally defined. This led him to call for a fundamental revision of the territorial basis of citizenship – a demand that resonates strongly with contemporary immigration debates. But even so, a familiar picture remained of a globally hegemonic form of technocratic, instrumental urbanism opposed by grassroots democracy and self-management. The critical reflexivity demonstrated with respect to the ‘city’ did not extend as deeply into the political sphere. Analyzing the degree to which security constitutes the terrain of popular urban politics in Bogotá demonstrates that technocracy, bureaucracy, and governmental management are central to contemporary urban political life. It also shows that forms of urbanism that appear recognizably ‘neoliberal’ may come to mean and do unexpected things in different times and places. Moreover, it reveals how struggles for access to urban space, goods, and services are frequently waged and occasionally won by political formations that do not pursue a revolutionary concept of citizenship or demand popular control over the entire urban process, whether on the scale of the city or the planet. However, the injunction to pay close attention to the discourses and practices of popular urban politics in places like Bogotá is not to claim the uniqueness, peculiarity, or distinctiveness of ‘southern’ cities relative to their ‘northern’ counterparts.36 Our efforts are better focused on the mutations of popular urban politics in a world of cities whose histories and political economies are undeniably entangled with those of the West, and yet are also vastly different. On an analytical level, we can then ask whether and, if so, how that difference matters to our understanding of contemporary urban politics at large. And on a practical level, we can then engage openly and critically with existing political formations and their potential limits and possibilities.

Notes    1  Other variations on this argument have been made by Merrifield (2011) and Harvey (2012).    2  As Wachsmuth and Brenner note, Lefebvre was arguing that planetary urbanization had broken the long-established connection between the citizen (citoyen) and the city dweller (citadin) and was imagining a formulation ‘that would reconnect, but not conflate, citizenship and territorial organization, whether at the city scale or beyond’ (2014: 201).    3  For an extended discussion of Lefebvre’s notion of ‘urbanism,’ see Madden (2015: 297).    4  For Lefebvre, bureaucratic institutions were effectively stifling urban citizenship: ‘Everyone can see that the municipalities are subsumed under a statist framework (le modéle étatique); they reproduce at a small scale the customs of management and domination associated with the State’s bureaucratic hierarchy. City dwellers (citadins) see their formal rights as citizens (citoyen) reduced, along with the opportunity to exercise such rights’ (2014: 204–205). See Ferguson (2015) for an analysis of recent campaigns for rights and citizenship beyond the scale of the nation-state that do not denigrate the state and bureaucracy, but in fact see them as the institutional basis for entitlements.

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   5  Chatterjee brings together many of his arguments about political society in a 2015 lecture, ‘Governmentality in the East,’ delivered at the University of California, Berkeley: http://criticaltheory.berkeley.edu/events/event/governmentality-in-the-east/.    6  Over a twenty-month period from August 2008 to April 2010, I conducted both ethnographic and archival research in Bogotá on the politics of security and the government of risk. I returned for follow-up visits of between one and two months each in January 2012, December 2013, and August 2014. Some of the material presented here appeared initially in ‘Living Dangerously: Biopolitics and Urban Citizenship in Bogotá, Colombia,’ American Ethnologist 40, no. 1 (2013): 71–87. It also forms the basis of one of the chapters of my book, Zeiderman (2016a). For a related analysis in another Colombian city, see Zeiderman (2016b).   7  Ciudad Bolívar represents 27 percent of the land area of the city. It is home to 600,000 people, 53 percent of whom are in Estrato 1 and 40 percent of whom are in Estrato 2. Ciudad Bolívar is also the locality with the highest number of people with ‘unsatisfied basic needs’ (necesidades básicas insatisfechas). See Camara de Comercio de Bogotá (2007) and Poveda Gómez (2008).    8  ‘Una familia, sepultada por el lodo en Bogotá,’ El Tiempo, May 7, 2006.   9  Vivienda digna (or decent housing) is a right guaranteed by Article 51 of the 1991 Constitution.  10  Although the Constitution grants everyone the right to decent housing, according to the Supreme Court this right is not justiciable; it is unreasonable to expect the state to guarantee housing to all 40 million Colombians.  11  The following account is based on both ethnographic research and media coverage. Secondary sources consulted were the Bogotá daily newspapers El Tiempo and El Espectador, the weekly news magazine Semana, and the news broadcasters Caracol and Noticias RCN from July 2008 to September 2009. Due to difficulty accessing the participants of the demonstrations and the authorities involved, many direct quotations are taken from these sources.  12  Felipe Caro, ‘Su propio viacrucis viven 850 desplazados en la Plaza de Bolívar y el Parque Tercer Milenio,’ El Tiempo, April 10, 2009.  13  ‘Desplazados que siguen en el Parque del Tercer Milenio denuncian que los amenazan para seguir allí,’ El Tiempo, July 9, 2009.  14  ‘Gobierno pide a los desplazados del Parque Tercer Milenio no usar los niños para protestar,’ El Tiempo, July 14, 2009.  15  ‘Bogotá lidera contagios por nueva gripa,’ El Tiempo, July 16, 2009.  16  Ibid.  17  ‘Secretaría de Salud de Bogotá pide al ICBF proteger a niños desplazados del Parque Tercer Milenio,’ El Tiempo, July 13, 2009.  18  ‘En cuarentena Parque Tercer Milenio,’ Noticias RCN, July 15, 2009.  19  ‘Secretaría de Salud inicia intervención del Parque Tercer Milenio. Bogotá: Caracol Radio,’ Caracol Radio, July 23, 2009.  20  David Acosta, ‘Cordón sanitario en Parque Tercer Milenio hace sentir prisioneros a los desplazados que viven allí,’ El Tiempo, July 19, 2009.  21  ‘Declaran alerta sanitaria en Parque Tercer Milenio y anuncian retiro de los menores de edad,’ El Tiempo, July 22, 2009; and ‘Parque Tercer Milenio, en emergencia,’ El Tiempo, July 24, 2009.  22  ‘Cerca de 130 casos sospechosos de influenza tipo A en el Parque del Tercer Milenio,’ Caracol Radio, July 23, 2009.  23  ‘Emergencia sanitaria en el Tercer Milenio,’ El Tiempo, July 24, 2009.  24  ‘Declaran alerta sanitaria en Parque Tercer Milenio y anuncian retiro de los menores de edad,’ El Tiempo, July 22, 2009.  25  Ibid.  26  ‘Evacuarán del Parque Tercer Milenio a desplazados con gripa,’ Caracol Radio, July 23, 2009.  27  ‘Bomba de tiempo,’ Semana, July 25, 2009.  28  ‘Emergencia sanitaria en el Parque Tercer Milenio decretó la Alcaldía de Bogotá,’ El Tiempo, July 22, 2009; and Carlos Guevara and John Marcos Torres, ‘Cinco días tendrán los desplazados para desalojar el Parque Tercer Milenio, ordena el Distrito,’ El Tiempo, July 22, 2009.  29  ‘Emergencia sanitaria en el Parque Tercer Milenio decretó la Alcaldía de Bogotá,’ El Tiempo, July 23, 2009.  30  ‘Parque Tercer Milenio necesita medidas urgentes,’ Semana, July 23, 2009.  31  ‘Fin al drama del Tercer Milenio: Los desplazados saldrán este domingo,’ El Tiempo, July 31, 2009.  32  ‘Desplazados abandonaron Tercer Milenio pero prometieron regresar si Gobierno no les cumple,’ El Tiempo, August 3, 2009.  33  The original phrase was un proceso de vías de hecho, which, in the Colombian legal system, refers to a judicial decision that contradicts the constitution or the law. ‘Abuse of discretion,’ or a judge’s ruling that fails to consider established precedent or evidence, may be the closest translation available in English. In Colombia, however, the limit on discretion applies to all public servants and obligates them not to interpret legal statues in a way that challenges the rule of law. Secretary López was responding to criticisms that, by neglecting the responsibility to deal with the demonstration as an illegal occupation of public space, the government had normalized illegality. Instead, she invoked the public health

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emergency to justify a suspension of the rule of law. I am grateful here for the legal expertise of Meghan Morris.  34  ‘Alcaldes pagan tiquete a desplazados para que viajen a Bogotá, denuncia Secretaria de Gobierno,’ El Tiempo, July 30, 2009.  35  ‘Distrito pide responsabilidad de alcaldes: No permitirán más tomas de desplazados,’ El Tiempo, August 1, 2009.  36  For important responses to this charge, which has often been leveled at postcolonial urban studies, see Roy (2009; 2014). It should also be noted that Lefebvre himself flirted with the idea of a discrete ‘non-West’ in which his ideal conception of the city as a ‘dwelling place [demeure] of humans’ could be found (2014: 204).

References Brenner, Neil, Peter Marcuse, and Margit Mayer, eds. 2012. Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City. Abingdon: Routledge. Brenner, Neil, and Christian Schmid. 2015. ‘Towards a new epistemology of the urban?’. City 19 (2–3): 151–182. Camara de Comercio de Bogotá. 2007. Perfil económico y empresarial: localidad Ciudad Bolívar. Bogotá: Camara de Comercio de Bogotá. Chatterjee, Partha. 2004. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia University Press. Chatterjee, Partha. 2011. Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press. Ferguson, James. 2015. Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. Ed. Michel Senellart. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79. Ed. Michel Senellart. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso. Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. ‘The right to the city’. In Writings on Cities, ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, pp. 147–159. Cambridge: Blackwell. Lefebvre, Henri. 2003. The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 2009. State, Space, World: Selected Essays. Ed. Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 2014. ‘Dissolving city, planetary metamorphosis’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (2): 203–205. Madden, David. 2015. ‘There is a politics of urban knowledge because urban knowledge is political: A rejoinder to “Debating urban studies in 23 steps”’. City 19 (2–3): 297–302. Merrifield, Andy. 2011. ‘The right to the city and beyond: Notes on a Lefebvrian re-conceptualization’. City 15 (3–4): 473–481. Morales, Leonardo. 2005. El Banco Mudial y el Reasentamiento de Población en América Latina: Tendencias y Retos. Bogotá: The World Bank, the Interamerican Development Bank. Poveda Gómez, Narzha. 2008. ‘Reasentamiento de hogares por alto riesgo no mitigable en el marco del plan de rehabilitación y reconstrucción y desarrollo sostenible post evento de Nueva Esperanza.’ Draft. Bogotá: The World Bank, Fondo Global de Reducción de Desastres y Reconstrucción. Roy, Ananya. 2009. ‘The 21st-century metropolis: New geographies of theory’. Regional Studies 43 (6): 819–830. Roy, Ananya. 2014. ‘Worlding the South: Towards a post-colonial urban theory’. In The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, ed. Susan Parnell and Sophie Oldfield, pp. 9–20. Abingdon: Routledge. Wachsmuth, David, and Neil Brenner. 2014. ‘Introduction to Henri Lefebvre’s “Dissolving city, planetary metamorphosis”’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (2): 199–202. Zeiderman, Austin. 2016a. Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá. London: Duke University Press. Zeiderman, Austin. 2016b. ‘Submergence: Precarious politics in Colombia’s future port-city’. Antipode 48 (3): 809–831.

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Part VI

Conflict: Vulnerability and Insurgency

Cota 905, Caracas, 2003, Urban-Think Tank Archive

18 The European ‘Refugee Crisis’ in ‘Our’ Cities: Vulnerability, Truth, and Ethics of the Surface Christine Hentschel

Urban conflict can be seen as the struggle over how we share vulnerability and how we create, or refuse to create, modes of being in common in the 21st-century city. What connects us makes us vulnerable – not only when our transport networks or water systems become the targets for terror attacks (Coward 2015, Graham 2010, Collier and Lakoff 2015), but also in a more mundane sense of living together on troublesome, sometimes uncomfortable, urban grounds. It is in these ‘surfaces of contact’ that we negotiate what is ‘between us in the city’ (Coward 2012: 476). In this chapter I develop the notion of ‘surface ethics’ as a way of reflecting on how urbanites navigate through uncertainty and vulnerability on the material surface of the city. Ethics, here, does not mean having values, acting morally, or following humanitarian considerations. It is rather more practical, material, affective, and rarely coherent. Ethics, following Brian Massumi (n.d.), is ‘how we inhabit uncertainty, together’ and none of these five words can be taken for granted or remain stable in a given situation. Ethics becomes an opening, a nervous space of figuring out not only what we might be able to know, but also how to connect to what or who we do not know. On the scratchy surfaces of the city, these ways of dealing with uncertainty and vulnerability constitute themselves in a particular way. They are not simply backgrounds or contexts but also contain the very rules and tools for coming to terms with this uncertainty and vulnerability. How is it possible, I ask, with my eyes on the German city of Hamburg, that an issue as deep as hosting refugees in a 21st-century global situation of war and misery gets decided on the basis of a municipal building code dating back to 1955?

The surfacing of the ‘refugee crisis’ in ‘our’ cities Over the course of the summer of 2015 the ‘refugee crisis’ has surfaced powerfully in European urban publics. Not that there had been no crisis before: scholars and activists

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have long been denouncing the EU border politics towards migrants as one of ‘detention, deportation and “letting drown”’ (Jansen et al. 2015: xi, de Genova 2015, Hess 2012), with migrants on boats in distress ‘left-to-die’ (Heller et al. 2014, Basaran 2015, Strik 2012) and national politics managing immigrants under the ‘rubric of illegality’ (Hall 2015: 854). But with the dramatic scenes before our eyes – images of overloaded boats trying to reach our shores, migrants stuck in train stations, walking the highways, crossing wet or even mined borderlands, facing clueless or brutal border police – the seemingly distant and invisibilized crisis came to the forefront of public attention. The ‘refugee crisis,’ now officially declared by leading European politicians to be more significant than the Greek financial crisis, created a political urgency on all scales. At the EU level, the Dublin system,1 which had long been critiqued, now exposed itself as ultimately untenable; at the German national level, the refugee crisis has turned into a deep crisis of government and of radicalization, and on the municipal level, more and more towns and cities have declared limits on their capacities, with some Southern German cities, such as Munich, having received over 55,000 migrants within the first two weeks of September 2015 alone. The struggle for a way forward has become heated: What ‘distributive justice’ between the countries of Europe as well as between the German provinces and towns can be reached? How should asylum seekers who do not have the chance of recognition (like those traveling from the Balkans) and the refugees of civil war from Syria or Iraq be ‘divided?’ And what spatio-administrative forms are needed to register and begin to integrate the newcomers? In many German cities the crisis presents itself as one over space: where to find suitable vacant lots and buildings to host refugees; how to prevent hundreds from sleeping outside in front of our train stations or their provisional housing. Is it fair to repurpose school gyms or places of worship, and to temporarily confiscate vacant real estate even against the will of the owners? What about the fights breaking out in overcrowded camps, and the increasing hostility against migrants among the German population? Over the summer of 2015, the Pegida movement of ‘Patriot Europeans against the Islamisation of the West’, which had by then seemingly lost its drive, reached new popularity, with evermore extremist talk arising at their weekly gatherings, warning of Muslim men threatening ‘our women,’ of IS fighters disguised as needy refugees, or denouncing that ‘our homeless’ are sacrificed for the newcomers in the many conflicts over living space. A chronicle that collects right-wing incidents in Germany counted 528 attacks against refugee homes in the year of 2015 alone, of which 126 were arson attacks. Overall, 205 migrants were injured in these acts.2 Most of the right-wing violence happens in East German towns, where the bulk of the 288 anti-migration demonstrations has taken place and an increasing number of local migrant-friendly politicians receive threats. At the same time, numerous new initiatives declaring their solidarity with refugees have emerged, with neighbors collecting clothes or offering German-language classes, doctors donating their time to visit underserviced refugee centers, and volunteers organizing convoys to get migrants across the border into Germany or help them continue on to Northern Europe. Cities here become hubs in which intensified uncertainty and vulnerability come to the surface, and in which acts of violence and solidarity seem to unfold at a similar speed. It is within this very ambiance of help and hatred, of ‘we can do it’ and the toughening of the asylum law3, that this chapter analyzes a dispute over a refugee home in an affluent inner city district of Hamburg that had began a year before the heights of the events in the summer of 2015. It had spiraled into one of Germany’s most infamous cases of ‘the rich’

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trying to pull themselves out of solidarity – this at least was the general tone in the media. I will first follow the conflict’s peculiar framing through the municipal building code that dates back to 1955 and which defines the neighborhood’s special character as ‘residential’ and thus not suitable as refugee ‘accommodation.’ I will then reflect on the notions of ‘violation’, ‘mutuality,’ and ‘community’ that further came to structure the legal conflict, before asking, more generally, how the law marks and absorbs this conflict. I then share my wonder at the sudden change in the handling of the issue since September 2015, when the obsession with ‘residing’ was overlaid by a strange enthusiasm with ‘living.’ From here I develop my concluding thoughts on vulnerability as something we either encapsulate or enact as a shared urban concern.

The truth of a building code According to the City of Hamburg,4 61,558 refugees reached Hamburg in 2015, most of them fleeing from the civil wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Eritrea. About 21,000 of them were allocated to stay in Hamburg after their registration.5 The allocation follows the regulation of the decades-old asylum-seeker distribution key of the German Ministry for Migration, according to which each province receives a percentage of asylum seekers, and the City of Hamburg, which is also a province,6 is legally bound to receive 2.5% of the total number of migrants seeking asylum in Germany.7 While, in 2011, capacities to accommodate 400 refugee per year were sufficient, in 2015 accommodation for over 12,000 refugees was newly created, with more planned for over 10,000 refugees up to the end of 2015.8 Most refugee homes, especially those with the highest number and density of people, are located on the poorer outskirts of the city, with container or even tent camps hosting up to several hundred refugees, and, in the initial reception centers, up to 2,900 people. The search for vacant land and buildings is contested and the City has announced the construction of 5,600 apartments by the end of 2016, all of them planned on the city’s periphery.9 In the face of this overall imbalance, leading politicians continue to insist that every district, even those of the affluent, must do their share in welcoming refugees. Harvestehude is one of the wealthiest inner city neighborhoods in Hamburg. In 2014 the city government announced that an empty office building, the former district recruiting office, was going to be transformed into a refugee home and renovated to provide 23 apartments for 250 people. In October 2014 construction work began. Shortly after, three neighbors filed a complaint in the Administrative Court of the City of Hamburg, arguing that the housing for refugees did not conform with the land-use plan. According to this plan dating back to 1955, Sophienterrasse, the street in which the refugee home was designated, belongs to a residential area. The planned refugee shelter, the plaintiffs argued, does not qualify as a ‘residence’ in the sense of the building code. Indeed, they argued, the ‘commotion emitted by this building is fundamentally alien to such a residential area and incompatible with it’ (Administrative Court of the City of Hamburg 2015: 6). On January 22, 2015 the Administrative Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs; the reconstruction work for the refugee home was halted. Two major threads can be discerned in the argument, both speaking truth, as it were, through the urban surface. In the first thread, according to the judgment, the diversity

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of the way of life and expectations within the migrant population might lead to tensions in the refugee home and thus spill over to the surrounding area. In the judgment’s exact wording, ‘the number of collectively accommodated people of every age and including unmarried people as well as families of different origin and various lifestyles increases the possibility of disturbing the surrounding area with tensions’ (Administrative Court 2015: 16).10 These ‘social tensions’ are thought to be intimately interwoven with the so-called ‘tensions in legal land protection’ (bodenrechtliche Spannungen), a common notion in German building law that is part of an overall concern with how a particular building harmonizes with the character of a neighborhood.11 The concern over these tensions is legitimate, even independently of any actual harm, the ruling emphasizes. In fact, any resident in the neighborhood should be able to ‘prevent the invasion of an alien use and the concomitant but silent transformation of the area independent of a concrete damage’ (2015: 9). The neighbors would not even have to produce evidence of damage or threat to call on the right to preserve the neighborhood’s character (the socalled Gebietserhaltungsanspruch). Establishing an infringement of the building code itself is enough. In this logic of prevention, any tensions resulting from bad matchmaking or unplanned land use have to be averted; the transformation of an area can be legally claimed as a threat. The second thread running through the judgment is the meaning of residence – as distinct from ‘finding shelter’ or ‘being accommodated.’ Residence, accordingly, includes a number of features, namely ‘a permanent domesticity, the autonomous organization of the household and the domestic sphere as well as the choice of the location of the stay’ (2015: 13) – none of these criteria apply to the case of the refugees. More precisely, a permanent domesticity cannot be assured in the planned establishment for refugees, because their dwelling is not for the long term, since they are expected to move into their own apartment after the end of their stay. Furthermore, the ‘voluntariness of the stay’ and the autonomous organization of the household cannot be given. As the judge reasoned, ‘these groups are accommodated in shelters because of situations of hardship and because they do not have their own apartments’ (2015: 14). Choice and autonomy with regard to one’s household are thus not intact in the dire situations that the refugees are imagined to be in. Around the clearly defined notion of ‘residence,’ a circular logic revolves: the refugees do not have residence, which is why they cannot have residence. A remarkable repertoire of assumptions builds up the judgment’s ‘knowledge’ about the refugees’ ways of living, especially given the fact that the latter, whose destiny is negotiated here, do not figure at all in the debate, neither as (potential) inhabitants, nor through their possible advocates. Finally, the judgment states, there is a lack of domesticity, due especially to the absence of a ‘minimum of intimacy’ that ‘any domesticity is founded on’ (2015: 14). In particular, there are no arrangements provided for assuring that ‘only relatives or people who wish to live together’ are accommodated in one particular unit, which allows for the accommodation of strangers and single people in multi-bed rooms, and who also have to share their kitchen and bathroom. This, the court argues, is no intimacy, which means that there is no domesticity either, and consequently no residence – just accommodation. After the ruling of the Administrative Court, the City District appealed. The residents’ ‘exposure’ to the refugee home, argued the City, cannot outweigh the public interest of the need to find new refugee accommodation all over Hamburg (implying that the responsibility should stretch into affluent urban areas as well). Anger over the lack of empathy and

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the stubbornness of the locals with regard to their building code is expressed in numerous (social) media debates. Demonstrations were held to call for solidarity with refugees and to ‘name racism and expose the societal center.’12 A refugee-friendly organization in the neighborhood stated that the judgment was a pity, but that accusing the residents of racism was neither right nor the least bit productive.13 Public television channels joined in, with reports from the scene, looking, so it seemed, to scratch the surface truth of the ruling until its technocratic layers had been peeled away and ‘more plausible’ reasons for opposing the refugee home, such as the fear of strangers, unease with the poor or with ‘the many unbound men,’ could come to the fore. A satirical feature captures locals in a range of conversations on the street. They are asked what they think about city’s plan to build a refugee home: Elderly woman: ‘Impossible!’ Reporter:     ‘Why?’ Woman:     ‘Because they couldn’t feel at ease here, in the area.’ Reporter:    ‘Why? Isn’t it very beautiful here? Such beautiful buildings!’ Woman:     ‘They will be completely isolated there. In addition, when they want to buy something in this area, they wouldn’t even be able to afford half a pound of margarine!’14

We can recall such arguments from state rationales in apartheid South Africa and the Jim Crow laws in the United States: living close to ‘us’ (here: ‘our’ nice buildings, our expensive shops) is not good for ‘them.’ And it was within such racism disguised as concern for the others’ ‘feelings’ and ‘needs’ that many critics of the law case saw the ‘actual core’ of the issue. The plaintiffs may have convinced the judges, but for most media commentators the case was seen as a farce and an expression of a wider trend in German cities in which affluent neighborhoods tried to mobilize whatever technicalities they could to refuse to directly participate in taking in refugees, as many poorer neighborhoods and towns in Germany were having to do. How could the decision to welcome or refuse refugees in a global crisis of war be established on the basis of a municipal building code? This truth on the surface was difficult to accept for many. But, as I will show later, the surface is not just that which covers what is ‘really’ at stake. On the surface the matter of concern constitutes itself in a particular way. In that sense ‘surface and underneath’ are not opposites, as Nuttall (2009) holds, but are entangled, creating surfaces of touch and connection whose ‘depths’ do not begin underneath the surface but fold into it (Deleuze 1992).

Violation, vulnerability, and community On May 28, the Higher Administrative Court of Hamburg ruled a second time in favor of the plaintiffs. Apart from supporting the first ruling’s reasoning, the second court ruling brought in the term ‘violation’ (Verletzung), a notion not referring to the violence that the refugees possibly experienced on their way to Germany but to the violation of residents’ rights. Violated (verletzt), according to the judgment, are the residents’ rights to preserve the character of their neighborhood (Higher Administrative Court of the City of Hamburg 2015: 9). ‘Violation’ (in contrast to vulnerability) refers to an act that has already

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happened (i.e., the violation of the building code at the moment the construction permit went through as well as the continuous violation of the neighbors’ rights to preserve the character of their neighborhood). Whatever brutal acts of violence the refugees, whose voices we have not heard in the debate, encountered before they reached Hamburg, and whatever their ongoing vulnerability entails, the legally traceable violation of residents’ rights evoked here is more concrete: its subjects are present; and it already happened to their neighborhood. After the dividing notion of residence, the disjointed consideration of ‘our’ and ‘their’ violation further builds up the argument of why the refugee home does not fit. The second judgment also evokes the notion of a ‘community’ in which the neighbors are ‘bound together’ through the ‘determination of a surface for the use as residential area.’ By designating such a surface, ‘the property owners are bound as neighbors within the determined area to a community’ (Higher Administrative Court 2015: 8). And this relation of mutuality that the neighbors forge alongside what one could call a ‘surface of contact’ (Coward 2012: 472) needs to be balanced and should not be, the judgment continues, unilaterally suspended. As the plaintiffs’ lawyer explained to me in an interview, it is a ‘community of destiny’ legally bound by land or ground (bodenrechtliche Schicksalsgemeinschaft) – the term here used by the German Constitutional Court highlights the woven-togetherness over a long period of time and the responsibility that comes with it (Interview with Plaintiffs’ Lawyer, Hamburg, November 12, 2015). Finally, another detail concerning the meaning of residence comes to the fore. Residence not only is durable but also belongs to ‘a life that is led in a self-determined’ manner ‘in one’s own four walls’ (Higher Administrative Court 2015: 12). Together, these notions of mutuality and life in one’s own four walls work with a particular understanding of community, as neither ethnically nor religiously bound, nor as a community of sense, practice, resilience, or sharing (Hinderliter et al. 2009, Shindo 2015, Grove 2014). In the reasoning of the court’s judgment, the community happens in a mutuality of (self-determined) plot and house owners who are bound to one other through the very properties that touch on each other and through a commitment to keep up the character of their neighborhood. This framing of community feeds into the overarching legal argument seeping through the entire process. Taking all elements together, ‘living’, here, is divided into two modes: residing (= active, long-term, voluntary/self-determined, quality, individual, bound through property) and being accommodated (= passive, shortterm, not by choice/not self-determined, basic, collective, and potentially unsettling the mutuality of the residing). With this division the neighbors manage to argue that the refugee home does not belong in their ‘community’.

Law’s grounds The format of the law, the building code, to be precise, provides the argumentative frame for deciding whether 250 refugees can find refuge in this inner city neighborhood of Hamburg. So what is this frame? It would be a mistake to assume that the building code is simply ‘used’ to hide the ‘real’ (e.g., fearful, racist, classist) tendencies of the urban upper and middle classes; nor is the law just instrumentalized. The

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plaintiffs have successfully called upon the building code and the parties involved in the legal procedure have given in to its logic. Far from being ‘just’ the surface that hides the true agenda, the logic and format of the law have absorbed the conflict, and structured and fractured it. Matters of concern, to be sure, are never pure and rarely open issues. Here, the legal procedure before, during and after the court decisions has encapsulated the matter in a particular way: once inside the logic of the land-use plan, not all arguments made sense any more; the ethical potential got flattened into a yes or no of ‘residence.’15 The City of Hamburg navigated within the logic of the building code, as well, for example when it took up the argumentation around the duration of stay as a key qualifier to determine the refugees’ possible ‘residence.’ Building on the criteria for ‘residence’, the City argued that the refugee home was indeed very much a residential project, given refugees’ usual durations of stay (Verweildauer): only 29% of the accommodated people would stay in public shelters for less than a year and over 27% for longer than five years. Especially since the planned facility would house families and is located in a residential area, one could expect them to stay longer (Higher Administrative Court 2015: 8). In its attempts to define refugees’ living as residing, the City refers to the durability of the refugees’ stay, which, the City implies, will be facilitated by the spillover of the very ‘residential ambiance’ that would surround the refugee home. Here, the fear of the plaintive neighbors that the assumed ‘non-residential’ spirit might invade and spread over the ‘residential’ terrain is turned into the hope that the residential habitus of the surroundings may in fact imbue the refugee home with a sense of residence. And even after the City of Hamburg failed before the Court, it remained within the argumentative frame of the building code. It called a public meeting on July 8 to announce a change to the building code: the plot with and around the building in question was going to be altered in its designation from residence to ‘common purpose’ (Gemeinbedarf).16 The battle over marking the surface continued. In the legal procedure and the political measures taken in its spirit, both arguments and people disappear. To begin with, there is no space for arguments other than those that work on the distinction between residing and non-residing. The ethics of the surface is flattened; a wider horizon of debate around the meanings of sharing, justice, urban futures, and global responsibility has no room. Furthermore, in the technicalities of the code and the neighbors’ concern over exposure, people do not appear either, especially those who are supposed to move into the designated refugee home. Although the judges seem to know so much about the refugees’ way of living (e.g., that they lack autonomy, voluntariness, intimacy), with the City on one side and the plaintiff neighbors on the other, the refugees have not appeared in the legal battle; it is not their conflict. Even the residents do not figure through their wishes or needs, but speak through the right to have their neighborhood designated in a particular way, and through the rules for the surfaces they inhabit, namely ownership and mutual commitment on the basis of this ownership. The grounds of Harvestehude have their own rules, but letting those rules set the frame for the debate creates an imbalance: the residents can speak through their plots, buildings, residential styles, and the community these create, and through all of this they can, at least indirectly, make their claim. The incoming not-quite-residents, on the other hand, are not tied to any of these things; hence, even if they had been heard at court, they could not have mobilized a similar range of surface registers for their cause.

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The whirling up of events Two months after the City’s announcement of the projected new land-use plan that would resolve the issue,17 rumors spread in the local media that a compromise was in sight. Then, on September 17, the plaintiffs and the City called a press conference and presented the settlement of the dispute. Not 250 refugees would be hosted, but 190. The refugee accommodation would last until 2024 only; after that, apartments will be built on the terrain. Furthermore, it was agreed that 80% of the incoming migrants must be families and only 20% single persons. The change of heart, the plaintiffs’ lawyer held, had not been triggered by the current wave of refugees, but by the looming winter: ‘Winter is approaching and people must live [wohnen] in tents. Not using the available apartments [Wohnungen] in Sophienterrasse just didn’t seemed right to the residents [Anwohner].’18 Suddenly the same word (wohn-) was used to talk about refugees’ living in tents, the available apartments, and the inhabitants of Harvestehude. What had happened? It looks like the compromise surpasses the logic of the building code. Winter was approaching and with that a different matter of fact attaches to the meaning of ‘residence.’ ‘Winter’ is the scary horizon that journalists and politicians mark as the moment when housing, health care, clothes must be settled if we do not want to face a mass human catastrophe on German ground.19 A logic of exception has taken over, and it seems like the nine years of accommodation in Sophienterrasse were agreed upon as an interim solution, regardless of residence. But the mention of apartments being planned on the land after 2024 means that the area remains residential, but with just a nine-year humanitarian interlude of quasi-residence. In that phase, the accommodation must be made as much residence-like as possible – the agreement that 80% must be families could be interpreted in that sense. It is difficult to nail down the causes for the plaintiffs’ willingness to compromise. Like Eyal Weizman, one can read the novel events as part of a broader ‘field causality.’ A field causality, according to Weizman, does not delineate a direct linear relationship, with clear beginnings or ends, but captures ‘a thick fabric of lateral relations, associations and chains of actions’ (2014: 27). With field causality there are no simple human decision makers acting before backgrounds or in contexts. Rather, tracing what happens is a complex task of drawing connections between people, environments, artifices, and events. Without even seeking to work out this force field in detail, I want to point here to a number of public events over the preceding months and suggest that the change of heart we see in Harvestehude resonates with them. Just a few months earlier, in June 2015, the German public was divided over ‘the coming of the dead’: the symbolic burying of drowned migrants that the Berlin-based Center for Political Beauty had held in a spectacular act on the front lawn of the German Parliament building and that triggered hundreds of acts of ‘guerilla digging’ of graves across German cities, and then posted like trophies on numerous blogs.20 Part of the action of the group was a burial, held in a suburb of Berlin, of a Syrian woman who died in the Mediterranean and whose body was exhumed from a plot in Sicily, with the permission of her surviving family, who were seeking asylum in Germany.21 Tasteless, many commentators remarked; necessary ‘to explode the sealing off of European empathy,’ the organizers held.22 The German public had to accept that these bodies and thousands more who perished on their way to reach our European shores ‘belong to us’, the proponents argued; they are victims of our border politics. For some time, it seemed, these

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accusations of failed empathy and responsibility for the death of thousands melted into an ambiance of non-interest, apathy even – at least among a majority of the German public. The dead were far away, and when they came near, it was disgraceful. Then, over the course of the summer, something else was added to the maelstrom of events – something I would like to call a concern with the living, triggered by the live-ness of the crisis. Rather than acknowledging or not that the dead bodies were ours, the German public came to be addressed on new grounds: we were, as viewers at least, involved in breathtaking survival actions; we wanted those stranded in Budapest to make it across the border, we followed the adventures of those looking for the last few holes in the Hungarian–Serbian fence, and some of the courageous ones among us even organized cars to get a few refugees over the border into Germany. It was live! A remarkable shift happened. Within weeks, the issue moved from letting or not letting mass death change our minds and politics, towards embracing the living, even if just for one public moment of ‘yes we can’, à l’allemande. This double turn to the living and the liveness of events also underlies the non-enthusiastic or hostile acts that counter Merkel’s ‘we can do it’ with an ever louder ‘we don’t want to’ expressed in the countless protests, hate messages, and attacks on refugee homes. Something different was at stake now, a real, live transformation – for good and for bad. Then, at the end of September, another step in the changing reasoning came to manifest itself. The Senate of Hamburg amended the law for the ‘Protection of Public Safety and Order’ to allow the City government to secure private lots and buildings, or parts of them, for the purpose of accommodating refugees. This should happen for the ‘defense of approaching dangers to life and limb’ aimed, concretely, at preventing mass homelessness in the City.23 The City can claim these properties under the condition that they are currently not being used and that the capacities in the given accommodations are exceeded. The intrusion into the property rights is justified, the Senate argued, by the limited time frame of this emergency measure (right now, the law is limited until the end of 2017) and the necessary prevention of the danger of homelessness. A logic of emergency showed itself in this Bill. Perhaps we could also call it a shortcut to ‘ethics,’ as the concern with the living conditions of thousands of non-citizens in the City. Overall, the force field, in which the residents of Harvestehude and the City now acted, had become a different one than only a few months earlier. What fits or not was no longer the key question. Presence had become the truth of the hour.

On the live-ness of surface ethics So how are we to understand the ethics of the surface through the prism of the conflict over this refugee home in inner city Hamburg? Let me conclude by presenting six thoughts. First, surface ethics involves a moment of ‘surfacing’ (Simone 2011): that is, when an issue rises to public attention and becomes a ‘matter of concern’ (Latour 2005). Matters of concern both divide and connect – sometimes cross-cutting old or assumed solidarities and identifications. A collective challenge is here, calling to be addressed. This was the case with the refugee crisis deepening over the course of 2015. Such a coming into view always entails an element of exposure. Exposed, to be sure, are those seeking refuge, who are, by definition, without shelter and depend on others for it. But

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exposed (and exposing themselves) are also a range of actors whose attempts to hold the property value of their plot against a humanitarian urgency do not go unnoticed or unjudged. Second, if ethics is how we ‘inhabit uncertainty, together,’ as Massumi holds, it is also about how we recognize what kind of vulnerability is at stake and what exactly it is that we share in that. ‘Shared vulnerability,’ Peter Burgess writes, reflecting on Butler, ‘provides the foundation for our political community and for shared ethical reflexion on the meaning of political action’ (Burgess 2011: 78; Butler 2004). Yet the kind of surface ethics at play in the conflict here seemed more like an attempt to efface or, better, to truncate vulnerability by focusing on the urban ground with its own threads and violations. This was not the global matter of vulnerability in its urban formation, no search for a ‘political community,’ but an attempt to hold on to familiar ideas of caring for the neighborhood as a ‘community of destiny’, held together by property and regulated by an ancient building code. As the plaintiffs’ lawyer reflected, ‘I wouldn’t see what way of dealing with this issue there was other than the building law’ (Interview with Plaintiffs’ Lawyer, Hamburg, November 12, 2015). The exciting question for analyzing 21st-century urban conflicts is how seemingly settled and particularized notions of vulnerability might be opened up and give rise to a broader sense of vulnerability across assumed communities and identities. Ethics is a process of dealing with vulnerability that, however precarious, chaotic, and contested, might engender new imaginations of living together in the city. Third, thinking about such new imaginations taking shape at concrete surfaces of touch helps us to rethink relationality. As we learn from Martin Coward’s work on Nancy, we are not ‘bridging gaps’ when we encounter each other on urban grounds. In fact, there are no empty spaces between us, because we are neither atomized individuals nor ‘supposedly separated entities’ (Coward 2012: 276). Instead, we are ‘always already related’ (2012: 469) and the interesting question is how this relatedness is reforged, loosened, or reordered in situations like the extreme proximity of the provisional camps, the emerging political alliances of previously distant groups, but also the rising of ‘not-in-my-neighborhood movements’ and border fences all over Europe. In this age of intensified migration, cities become the concrete surfaces of touch in which modes of sharing, and refusing to share, are constantly being remade. We get here a sense of what it might mean when we do not simply encounter the stranger in the city, but that we touch (a plural kind of) alterity (2012: 274). What the ‘we’ is, is being transformed as well. Fourth, the urban surface is not just a surface of touch, but also a particular kind of witness. In his writings on forensic architecture, Eyal Weizman explores how buildings, environments, fences, scratches in roofs, or holes in walls can be made to speak publically, that is to give testimony about acts of urban violence that happened in the past. Urban surfaces are always marked, whether through land-use plans, or by more accidental and mundane traces. But reading past crimes in them is not all that these traces make possible. In the conflict over housing refugees, we also see a conflict over marking urban grounds as a way of speculating on the future. Marking a ‘community of destiny,’ for example, or unmarking the certainty of property in the name of preventing mass homelessness can thus be seen as truth claims about the future. However stiff and uninspired these acts of marking might be, they provide the terms of reference for what is and what is not possible in the city. But how urbanites mark, stamp, leave imprints upon each other, and how they are themselves marked or, indeed, touched, may take unexpected turns. In the case of Harvestehude we have seen how the dynamics can change when some of the

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legal and administrative marking repertoires become affected by different logics – made of empathy and urgency. Fifth, after a yearlong clinging to ‘residence’ as the dominant marker for what is at stake, something emerged that I want to call ethics as live-ness. The taken-for-grantedness of a ‘community of destiny’ or of a certainty over the meanings of residence is taken over by the ethical navigations of the here-and-now. There is something to the live-ness that exceeds all promises and plans, which is the possibility to create and form and make an impact right away. A kind of romance when the power of the moment is expressed by many. As a woman volunteer at the Hamburg train station who helps stranded refugees to continue their way to Northern Europe posted on Facebook: ‘I’m just coming home from my 11 hour shift and I can tell you that I am as happy as I haven’t been for a long time.’ At the same time, more and more movements are eager to highlight the ‘disastrous’ living situation for refugees all over the city, and demand equal rights for ‘all people living here, regardless of their legal status.’24 What shines through here is the question of bottom-up urban politics beyond immediate aid, spontaneous organization or paternalism – one that is concerned with rights and access to the city for all residents (Schwiertz and Ratfisch 2016: 32). Finally, cities are ‘oceans of hurt resulting from the undertow of the small battles of everyday life,’ but they are also ‘reservoirs of hope resulting from a generalized desire for a better future,’ Nigel Thrift writes (2005: 147). The case of Harvestehude – like that of many urban neighborhoods in conflict over refugee homes – provides us with a sense of the ethical maneuverings that set in when the devices of the lawyers and advocates are no longer suitable for dealing with the challenges at hand. Here it is the ‘incalculable, the unforeseeable, the passionate, zealous or perhaps even apathetic, that counts; the mobile, instable or fragmented stuff of our humanness’ (Burgess 2011: 5). The stiff city experiences moments of openness fueled by a historic juncture in which empathy and hospitality – and simultaneously frustration and hatred – appear to be the stuff from which new collective urban practices unfold. Cities are thus not only the places where we can witness how what connects us makes us vulnerable, but also where what makes us vulnerable connects us, perhaps differently.

Afterword On November 4 in 2015, I was at a public meeting in a school in Harvestehude, a few hundred meters from the designated refugee home. More than 250 participants flocked in. In the back, long lists were posted with participants for the 12–15 working groups organizing activities from language classes to tea kitchen, from sports to therapy. The head of the Hamburg-wide organization that runs refugee accommodation thanked the audience and began with: ‘You had to show a lot of patience.’ She did not say ‘until your refugees can finally come and settle,’ but it is implied. ‘But you used the time efficiently,’ she continued, pointing to the great number of working groups and other preparations. The 190 new inhabitants (‘Bewohner’), as they are called now, moved in by mid-January 201625. In a Powerpoint presentation the details of the ground plan of the building in question are explained in detail. The head of the ‘refugee help’ organization explained that parts of the garden around the house would not be used because these parcels would

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be too close to the neighbors’ yards, and that this had been part of the compromise. She continued with the high-tech garbage facilities, which will be tried for the first time in Hamburg, since ‘garbage collection, as we all know, is one of the biggest concerns residents usually have with refugee homes.’ General nodding, enthusiasm, a moment of wondering about what it might mean that ‘religion is private’ in the refugee home, as the head of the organization declared, and whether this suggests that we ‘cannot celebrate a Christmas party’ together with them, in their home. It remains to be seen if the obsession with residence will be slowly replaced by an openness about how to live and reside together on this urban ground. Meanwhile, a woman next to me, commenting on the long lists of participants signed up to the working groups (numbering, for example, 150 volunteers for teaching German lessons, 2½ months before the first inhabitants arrive!) remarked: ‘For sure, we will have the best looked-after refugees in the entire city of Hamburg.’

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Susanne Krasmann for her comments on earlier versions of this chapter, Angela Flury for her diligence in revising the English text, and Suzanne Hall for her wonderful editorial work.

Notes    1  Under the Dublin Regulation asylum seekers have to be registered and their application dealt with in the first EU country they enter, such as Italy or Greece. If they cross the border to another country after being fingerprinted they can be sent back to the former. Germany, which is surrounded by EU member states, has submitted most take-charge and take-back requests to other European countries; in 2013 the number was 32,796. On August 24, 2015 Germany declared it would make use of the treaty’s ‘Sovereignty Clause’ and assume responsibility for processing Syrian asylum applications for which it is not otherwise responsible under the criteria of the Regulation (see Fratzke, Susan 2015: ‘Not Adding Up: The Fading Promise of Europe’s Dublin System.’ Migration Policy Institute Europe: 10, available at www. migrationpolicy.org/research).    2  See ‘Mut gegen rechte Gewalt. Chronik flüchtlingsfeindlicher Vorfälle.’ https://www.mut-gegen-rechte-gewalt.de/ service/chronik-vorfaelle?field_date_value[value][year]=2015; www.proasyl.de/de/news/detail/news/2015_dramatischer_ anstieg_von_gewalt_gegen_fluechtlinge/. The BKA even counted more than 900 criminal acts against refugee homes, which is four times as high as in 2014. See www.tagesschau.de/inland/anschlaege-asylunterkuenfte-bka-101.html. All accessed March 16, 2016.    3  The German government agreed upon Asylum Package II in January 2016. Some of the new measures according to this law are: Individuals who cannot be granted asylum or be recognized as refugees, but cannot be deported for humanitarian reasons, are categorized as receiving ‘subsidiary protection.’ Their residence permit is initially limited to one year and their family cannot immediately join them and might have to wait up to two years. In addition, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria have been designated as ‘safe countries of origin,’ which means that asylum seekers from these countries are returned to their home countries ‘as swiftly as possible.’ As the official page of the Federal German government states, the goal is to speed up deportations. In addition there are plans to ‘explain the option of voluntary repatriation more clearly to asylum-seekers and to make it easier for them to make use of this option.’ Germany creates five national centers of registrations where applications are dealt with rapidly. https://www.bundesregierung.de/ Content/EN/Artikel/2016/01_en/2016-01-27-treffen-bkin-pm-laender.html; www.dw.com/en/gabriel-german-coalition-reaches-deal-on-new-asylum-laws/a-19010271. All accessed March 16, 2016.    4  The official population of Hamburg was 1,763,000 at the end of 2014.    5  www.hamburg.de/fluechtlinge-daten-fakten/#anker_2, accessed March 17, 2016.    6  The City of Hamburg is, like Berlin and Bremen, a province within the federal German system.    7  www.bamf.de/EN/Migration/AsylFluechtlinge/Asylverfahren/Verteilung/verteilung-node.html, accessed November 15, 2015.

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   8  See Mayor Olaf Scholz’s governmental statement before the City’s parliament: Regierungserklärung vor der Bürgerschaft, October 14. www.hamburg.de/buergermeisterreden-2015/4616488/2015-10-14-regierungserklaerung/    9  Drieschner, Frank, Kempkens, Sebastian and Christoph Twickel: Wo die Probleme Wachsen. Die Zeit, Hamburg: 4. October 15, 2015; see further: Freie Hansestadt Hamburg, Zentraler Koordinierungsstab Flüchtlinge: ‘Schaffung von Unterkünften zur Flüchtlingsunterbringung durch die Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg, 12.1.2016.’  10  All translations by the author.  11  Paragraph 34 of the German Building Code.  12  ‘Rassismus benennen, die Mitte entlarven’ Call to Antiracist Demonstration, March 29, https://harvestehude.noblogs. org/call-english/, accessed November 15, 2015.  13  ‘Flüchtlingshilfe Harvestehude’ – Refugee Aid Harvestehude. Press Statement, March 23, https://harvestehude.noblogs.org/call-english/, accessed November 15, 2015.  14  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FB7RMho0Is, accessed November 15, 2015.  15  What residence means was not for the first time developed here, but built on an established interpretation of the meaning of ‘Wohnen’ in an earlier ruling of the Higher Administrative Court of the City of Hamburg. OVG Hamburg, Urt. v. 10.4.1997.   16  www.ndr.de/nachrichten/hamburg/Sophienterrasse-Neuer-Plan-hitzig-diskutiert,sophienterrasse178.html, accessed November 15, 2015.  17  www.eimsbuetteler-nachrichten.de/sophienterrasse-jetzt-laeuft-alles-nach-plan-b/. Even if everything had worked as planned, the change to the land-use plan would have taken until April 2016. In an interview, the district mayor explained that the changed plan was meant as a sign that the City is willing to take on the fight (Interview with District Mayor, Hamburg, November 16, 2015). The lawyer for the plaintiffs explained to me, on the other hand, that his side would have brought a complaint to court against the this new plan as well.  18  Lawyer for the plaintiffs speaking at the press conference, quoted in Eimsbüttler Nachrichten, September 17, 2015.  19  Tylman, Rick: Looming Winter Poses New Danger to Flood of Migrants. The New York Times, October 23: 1.  20  http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201506222039-0024838 http://www.politicalbeauty.com/about.html; http:// unknownrefugees.tumblr.com/, accessed November 15, 2015.  21  www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/world/europe/migrants-funeral-in-berlin-highlights-europes-refugee-crisis.html?_r=0, accessed November 15, 2015.  22  Interview with Philip Ruch, leading artist of the group. ‘Ertrunkene vorm Kanzleramt.’ Die Zeit, June 18, 2015: 47.  23  Bürgerschaft der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg. Drucksache 21/1677. Entwurf eines Gesetzes zur Flüchtlingsunterbringung in Einrichtungen, September 22, 2015.  24  http://nevermindthepapers.noblogs.org/about/  25  They moved in as planned; the first results of a study on the acceptance by the new neighbours shows surprisingly positive results. See http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/gesellschaft/fluechtlinge-in-hamburg-harvestehude-die-vorurteilenehmen-automatisch-ab-a-1135421.html

References Administrative Court of the City of Hamburg 2015: Verwaltungsgericht Hamburg. Beschluss, January 22. Basaran, Tugba 2015: The Saved and the Drowned: Governing Indifference in the Name of Security. Security Dialogue 46(3): 205–220. Burgess, J. Peter 2011: The Ethical Subject of Security: Geopolitical Reason and the Threat against Europe. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith 2004: Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Collier, Stephen J. and Lakoff, Andrew 2015: Vital Systems Security: Reflexive Biopolitics and the Government of Emergency. Theory, Culture & Society 32(2): 19–51. Coward, Martin 2012: Between us in the City: Materiality, Subjectivity, and Community in the Era of Global Urbanization, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30: 468–481. Coward, Martin 2015: Hot Spots/Cold Spots: Infrastructural Politics in the Urban Age. International Political Sociology 9(1): 96–99. De Genova, Nicholas 2015: Extremities and Regularities: Regulatory Regimes and the Spectale of Immigration Enforcement. In Jansen, Yolande, Celikates, Robin and Joost de Bloois (eds.), The Irregularization of Migration in Contemporary Europe: Detention, Deportation, Drowning. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield: 3–14. Deleuze, Gilles 1992: Foucault. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

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Graham, Stephen 2010: Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails. New York: Routledge. Grove, Kevin 2014: Agency, Affect, and the Immunological Politics of Disaster Resilience. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32: 240–256. Hall, Suzanne 2015: Migrant Urbanisms: Ordinary Cities and Everyday Resistance. Sociology 49 (5): 853–869. Heller, Charles, Pezzani, Lorenzo and SITU Research 2014: Left-to-Die Boat. In Forensic Architecture (eds.), Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth. Berlin: Sternberg: 639–655. Hess, Sabine 2012: Gefangen in der Mobilität. Prekäre Zonierungsprozesse an den Rändern Europas. Behemoth 5(1): 8–29. Higher Administrative Court of the City of Hamburg 2015: Hamburgisches Oberverwaltungsgericht, Beschluss, May 28. Hinderliter, Beth, Kaizen, William, Vered, Maimon, Mansoor, Jaleth and McCormick, Seth (eds.) 2009: Introduction: Communities of Sense. In Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 1–20. Jansen, Yolande, Celikates, Robin and de Bloois, Joost (eds.) 2015: Introduction. In The Irregularization of Migration in Contemporary Europe: Detention, Deportation, Drowning. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield: ix–xxiv. Latour, Bruno 2005: From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik; Or, How to Make Things Public. In Latour, Bruno and Weibel, Peter (eds.), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 14–41. Massumi, Brian (n.d.): An interview with Brian Massumi by Mary Zournazi, https://archive.org/stream/InterviewWith BrianMassumi/intmassumi_djvu.txt Nuttall, Sarah 2009: Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Schwiertz, Helge and Ratfisch, Philipp 2016: Antimigrantische Politik und der ‘Sommer der Migration’. Analysen, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. Shindo, Reiko 2015: Enacting Citizenship in a Post-disaster Situation: The Response to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Citizenship Studies 19(1): 16–34. Simone, AbdouMaliq 2011: The Surfacing of Urban Life. CITY 15 (3–4): 355–364. Strik, Tinek 2012: Lost Lives in the Mediterranean Sea: Who Is Responsible? Report, Council of Europe, March 29. Thrift, Nigel 2005: But Malice Aforethought: Cities and the Natural History of Hatred. Transactions of the British Institute of Geographers. New Series 30, 133–150. Weizman, Eyal 2014: Introduction. In Forensic Architecture (ed.), Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth. Berlin: Sternberg: 9–32.

19 The Time of and Temporal (Un) Civility of the City: MENA Urban Insurgencies and Revolutions1 Anna M. Agathangelou

Introduction There is no shortage of accounts of the urban’s role in radical protests, in which workers and students unite with cries of ‘Change Life! Change Society!’ (Lefebvre 1991: 59; Castells 1983, 1977; Fainstein and Fainstein 1974). Scholars like Lefebvre, Soja (1989), or Harvey (2009; 2005) see space as a dynamic location out of which the modern world emerges. Harvey complicates our understanding by identifying three levels at which space operates: the absolute space of the state; the relative space at which social forces engage one another; and the relational space from which people and groups approach the world around them. Together, Harvey and Lefebvre show that urban space is a dynamic set of processes that can never be completely dominated by the state. Streets and plazas provide a pivotal space in which mobilization takes place; through these spaces, a movement is able to connect with the larger population and activate salient memories and collective ideas embedded within the urban milieu (Liggett 1995; Huyssen 2003). Simultaneously, while some of the urban insurgents were organized and made visible to the sleek security and military regimes within the city spaces of experimental colonial geographies, the capacity of other spaces sought to offer relative safety from the state and to provide organizational leadership that facilitates urban protests and revolts. This is not a new topic, and the related criticism takes several forms. Some thinkers look at the use of protests to transform urban communities held hostage to global (and imperial) capital (Harvey 1996: 168). Many note the importance of scale to urban protests (Piven and Cloward 1979; Bayat 1997). Others take a postcolonial approach to argue the importance of the vital relationships between material and aesthetic productions (Kwan 2013; Agathangelou 2013; Agathangelou 2011a, 2011b; Thompson 2012; Hou 2012), exhuming suppressed colonial and slave histories and archives and articulating the contradictions constitutive of these movements (McKittrick 2006; Mbembe

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and Nutall 2004; Simone 2004, 2001). While many writers elucidate the relationships between radical protests and bodies within urban spaces, some emphasize how workingclass peoples remain divided by the ‘city trenches’ of ethnic, racial, gendered (Tyner 2006; Katznelson 1981) and disability politics. Class relations, broadly speaking, also appear in urban forms in the production of spaces and in revolts and social movements. For example, in the Bolivian 2011 Cochabamba Indigenous protests, organizers systematically claimed ‘Black matters are spatial matters’; obligations to yield the sidewalk to the minority racially marked indigenous peoples as ‘trespassers, … circumscribed as being “out of place”’ (Puwar 2004: 8). Creating popular markets in urbanized population centers and outside the boundaries of the formal colonial economy, the Cochabamba offered a venue for economic and social interactions between townspeople and hacienda dwellers. In this way, they forged alternative spaces that were less constrained by colonial influences (Larson 1998: 114–115). Urban spaces provide the location where past struggles and present ones become entangled in mobilization against the state and global institutions of capital and their governance projects. To understand the phenomenon, it is important to consider the ways the political and the racialized gendered geography of the city become co-produced. I am not suggesting race and gender lack a geographical dimension; rather, knowledge becomes produced by allowing a division between gendered racialized nodes and governmentally privileged (i.e., universal) spaces. The racially gendered exclusive conventions of governance in the city point to a division between state and a global raciality-gendered geography that hierarchically positions people based on hierarchized notions of identity. Such a segregation is found in the colonial cityscape articulated by Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, as ‘a world divided in two’ and characterized by ‘mutual exclusion,’ where colonist and powerful, and native and powerless, appear as synonyms (Fanon 1961: 3, 4). When we treat state power, class, gender, and race as interchangeable and as the only sites of contestation, we lose the ability to perceive transformations in their relationship, even as we gain insight into the affective impact of a world so divided. We also lose sight of how events are structured. Even where geographies of power and race converge, for instance, separating them conceptually can facilitate understanding. It explains, for example, how participation in governance requires miming or performing the dominant and masculinized racial identity, with colonized and indigenous entrants wearing white masks. The conceptual split also allows us to reconsider how spaces of governance are racialized and how the meanings of spaces shift as citizens decide to claim them. Gilmore observes, ‘Starting from race and state yields, necessarily rather than additively, an analysis that cannot be complete at any level of abstraction without attending to gender, class, and culture in the simultaneous processes of abstracting and reconstructing geographies of liberation’ (2002: 17). As McKittrick recently put it, ‘a young girl can legitimately take possession of a street, or an entire city, albeit on different terms than we may be familiar with’ (2006: 48). Insurrections and protests in global cities ranging from Istanbul, to Chicago, to Cairo, to Johannesburg cannot entirely and as easily be read as an affirmation of the existence of an urban brutality or toxicity (Chen 2011) embodied in the governing premises of neoliberalism (Sassen 2010), such as interconnectedness, digital/virtual coordinations, or its critique. They may inquire into urban identity marginalizations, but they also inquire into configurations of different compounded forms of violence. The object of urban studies, then, should go beyond space or identity to consider the protest itself, acknowledging the

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claiming of the streets as including the poetics of rupturing our familiar notions of the city and pushing through decolonization acts to invent a new polis and a planetary political. In what follows, I look at the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region protests and the ways they transform social space in terms of urban governing. In addition to the attempts of the insurgents to produce a ‘new commons’ (Swyngedouw 2014: 173), their spatial activities demand we reconsider urban theory (Swyngedouw 2014), its objects of study, and its praxis (i.e., urban studies and its intervention in notions of the political and notions of the polis). We must also reconsider both the polis and the ‘human’ of that polis, including notions of democracy, citizenship, and the ways the re-centering violent events and their scopic devices produce perception according to inherited logics linking danger, disorder, and threat with an insurgent, anarchical bodied other. More specifically, I consider the extent to which the MENA events turn the city into a site of experimentation and invention. For the insurgents, albeit positioned differentially and hierarchically in the city, their legitimacy required the reanimating of a democratic process toward the ‘creation of the [self and] whole world’ (Mbembe 2010: 70), a spatial process whose times belong to all of us. The very creation of the world, of ‘we’ and of our lives which, as Mbembe (2010: 70) says, ‘still remain to be created,’ is based in the relationality of difference, not its erasure, even when this is always mediated by the imaginaries and embodiment of empire. No group and no person (i.e., the familiar calls of empire and its contingent generated suspicions), whatever the imagined urgency, have the right to overrule the process. Simultaneously, the insurgents introduced new modalities of intervening in those global processes that systematically re-configure space in urban development as imperial; I am referring here to the centrality of the enslavement and commodification of human bodies in the instantiation of global modernity. For example, by protesting the demolition of housing and displacement of citizens to create condominiums and office parks, the insurgents challenged the conditions under which transnational corporatisms and the targeting of urban space co-produce Manichean representations of cities as threatening and at risk, allowing military technologies and techniques to be applied as everyday disciplinary strategies of spatial policing and governance, as in the containment, control, and necropolitics of Africans and African Americans (Emmons and Solanga 2014; Ivenson 2010). Even when configurations of trans-corporatist and state power clearly converge with protests and insurgencies, however, urban studies frequently offer a calculated modality of denial. Instead of problematizing the familiarity, indeed the predictability, of such narratives, they mask them (Fanon 1967). I question this. The object of study of urban studies should be the moment when hegemonic power coincides with insurgency, that vertical singularity with horizontal heterogeneity, that interregnum and its multiple emergences. In what follows, drawing on analyses of the visceral poetics and decolonization practices of the MENA region insurgencies, I suggest urban notions that spaces are and ought to be enrolled into empiremaking by several different means, including bottom-up resistance, top-down ideological authoritarianisms/militarizations, administrative interventions, and consensual constitutionalism, were ruptured by the protests. Urban studies and their multiple iterations were also challenged around notions of the city and its role in the production of hierarchized masculinized’s and feminized’s lives and even the agents of innovation. The insurgencies brought to the fore how urban space and its use and abuse are more likely to increase the power of dominant centers of urbanism than that of the working class, migrants,

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the rural areas and lives etc. Of course, new designs and new institutional innovations will be needed to bring urban spaces and the city under effective democratic embodiment in our times. However, these revolutionary moments have multiple trajectories intertwined with multiple structural organizations2 that may converge with other movements, including the idea of ontologies of revolt/revolution as an indeterminate process. It is thus, crucial to acknowledge that mobilizations of radical analytics can only take place within the formation of power in which they now sit (i.e., the collapse of a consensus surrounding notions of identity and difference including authoritarian projects of socialism) and the ongoing problems of global capital. Like global capital relies on the city for its colonizing and capturing land and the displacement of people to continue in the world, the insurgents in different parts of the world rely on others to articulate and support along with them a particular view of the world, but in very different conditions. What are the conditions that allow the insurgents to radicalize the political and the polis including our dominant notions of the objects of urban studies? A central aspect of these conditions is the fragmentation and indeed, the collapse of a “univocal choice” (Bhabha in Fanon 2004: xvii) presented by the “dominant liberal consensus” (Povinelli 2013: 17) in the name of inventing a new polis and a new subject. Similarly, many of the insurgents, and as Bhabha reminds us, grapple/d to free from the “univocal choice” “projects of futurity” (ibid xvii). In this end, work to articulate a planetary vision stretching their inventions of new ‘modes of existence’ and subjectivities to reach beyond the region.

Whose city? In January 2010, people throughout the MENA region took to the streets in massive numbers (Harvey 2012; Applebaum 2011; Amin 2011; Mohammed 2011); protesters included unemployed young people, workers, women, and the homeless. The mass action generated connections with different populations and groups within the different cities in the region, and their mobilization produced a movement, a relational experience expressed in songs, iconographic messages, images, and visceral poetics. They reminded themselves and those powers dominating their definition and embodiment that their cities (i.e., Cairo) is a relationship between its constituent citizens (Morris 1992: 26) and their rural communities. All citizens are supposed to have a share in the configuration of the city, but its co-production with an authoritarian order of elites and capital, they told us, left much to be desired. The street (Sassen 2013) and the plaza turned into the site of contestation of hegemonic urban and imperial power as well as dominant dichotomizations of the urban from the rural. Caught off guard, radical theorists raised questions about the urban role of these acts, asking in what ways they were manifested through the space of the city and whether the radical interventions were revolutions, uprisings, or revolts (Coombs 2011).3 The notion of the city has been at the forefront of many studies, ranging from Aristotle’s idea of the polis to more recent conversations by urban theorists like Soja and Harvey. Morris says all citizens had a share in the ancient polis, which in its most developed form, was based on chattel slavery (1992; 26–27), something evaded in our genealogies of the co-configuration of the city and empire, of the city and modernity. Mignolo argues for the importance of renaming modernity; in his view, ‘modernity/coloniality’ speaks of

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‘now’ and ‘not yet,’ simultaneously, and these terms are often channeled ironically (2011: 93–94) in our definition and understandings of what a city is, its time and how it ought to be. Revolts and protests bring this to the fore, along with the ‘problem’ of being together – in the present (Nancy 2011). The modernity/coloniality that Mignolo problematizes is a pivotal practice of metropolitan spatial humanism: here is race, produced by phenotypes, the appearance of a difference coded as fixed, absolute, oppositional, and inherent; here is empire, produced in the staging of the metropolitan colonial encounter, which maps onto urban space the temporalities of now and not yet, the Manichean logics that cultivate some subjectivities while violently suppressing and terrorizing others; here are gender and sexuality, disallowed from the class-based dogmatism of the orthodox left, marked in advance as too vulnerable to the market, too vulnerable to power’s apparently novel and innovative timely flexibility. These forms of causal continuity, representation, and narrative are evidence of a sense-making at the heart of the Western, imperial imagination, wherein power divides and conquers through classificatory schema and concomitant rhetorics, which are seen as benign, natural, or evolutionary. The revolts in the MENA cities, from Tunisia to Egypt, Beirut and Istanbul, revealed multiple compulsions by different agents of the state, the market, and the middle and upper classes to make, smooth, and orient the city toward a particular dominant order, suppressing its differences and sequestering unnerving and embarrassing disparities. For insurgents, the streets became the site of a web woven from various class, race, gender, and anti-militarization protests, including a challenge of the repression of diverse expression and the unequal distribution of resources and wealth. At the same time, and on a different register, the protests highlighted openness to the what and the how of the city, to a questioning of experiences that follow neither the promises of advanced capitalism nor the certainties and determinisms of its critique and an honoring of concepts of disavowal amid the contingencies of a particular time. The insurgencies challenged the configuration of a city and a social order that draws extensively on private security and the military to ward off any elements that could challenge societal ordering based on market principles. They challenged notions of an urbanism (i.e., real estate development, military displacements), which allows the redesigning, and remaking, of the city, such as buying (expropriating) land to build gated communities in the process of making a new middle and upper consumerist and entrepreneurial class. In this respect, they challenged normative forms of urbanism and urban design as a governance device, bringing new institutions into life and into the city without considering all its citizens. A governance modality that reorders our sense of ethicality, inequality, democracy, and justice in the city and, indeed, in the world, without taking seriously all its citizens’ lives, is problematic. The insurgencies as a discourse suggested the city is not an even and egalitarian space: to some, the city is the site of ‘progress and improvement, beneficence and utility’ and, to others, of risk, displacement, terror, and domination. As an institution of governance, urbanism shapes forms of city life by influencing how people choose to, or are able to, live within it and the different products of capital related to it (Jasanoff 2006: 283–284). The MENA citizens highlighted how urbanism has been activated in global politics of imagining, embodying, and practicing notions of an exclusive city and a hierarchized order of privilege and wealth. The phenomenon of diverse peoples protesting together stretched our imagination and suggested new possibilities. Put otherwise, the protesters developed a relational sense of stretching beyond the city. Harvey says that, by attending to this relational space, we can

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access ‘the political role of collective memories in urban processes’ (2009: 140). The insurgent urban interventions may have been intensely local, but they also allowed a sharing of collective memories about space, testing whether their grievances made sense amid others in the city and whether their demands and approaches to making them here and elsewhere were sensible toward the emergence of embodied worldwide anti-globalization movements. In effect, the revolutionaries constituted the ‘street’ as a global space of contestation and the space of evidencing action and the possibility of creating new rituals (Sassen 2013; 2011). In the process of making the space live, the ostensibly ‘powerless’ (Sassen 2011) stretched their analytics and familiar insights about relational experience to spaces otherwise, a visceral movement made visible in their revolutionary posters, protest images, poetics which spread globally through digital technologies. Liggett suggests such images demonstrate a ‘memory of a time and place, a fulfilling way of life and also a dream for the future’ (1995: 252). They expressed the theories insurgents were testing out on the city, the assembling of theoretical principles based on their/others’ understanding of substantive democracy, equality, the relationship between the state and the citizen, the relationship of the market with workers, men, and women, geographical compositions, and the resulting obligations. Through relational space we can access the salient political interventions that make theory, memories, and radical practices come alive for a new generation. In effect, a temporal revolutionary movement can be stretched beyond its geographical and issue-based boundaries to link with others questioning spatialities of power, the seemingly uncivil society that prioritizes a minority’s life, neoliberal grammars and logics of segregation, and confronting key postcolonial predicaments. In the MENA uprisings more specifically, the ‘empirics’ of the streets (Sassen 2011) allowed a wide range of insurgents to engage with the spatial setting and employ analytic, embodied, and interpretive practices in their articulation and testing of a set of principles about how citizens ought to do politics, how the citizens ought to come together in solidarity to challenge different forms of militarized, infrastructural and ecological events. Some of their embodied and everyday practices and forged connections, albeit in times of colonial and imperial violences, lived beyond the moral and normative limits prescribed by the liberal social and urban constructs known as urban citizen. Many of us did not expect the MENA citizens to move to the streets en masse to protest the incivilities of the everyday that came in the form of economies of (de)valuation (i.e., loss of jobs, high unemployment) and their broader and devastating effects on the majority of the MENA societies, economies, and polities. In retrospect, however, the uprisings can be viewed as mobilizations of energies long bottled up and entangled with multiple traumatic dislocations, but also utopic possibilities that emerge from migrations of MENA citizens from soil to pavement, from anti-colonial struggles, and more recent socialist, Muslim, and other expressions of decolonization and anti-slavery. The struggle space of most of the protesters opposes the ongoing enclosure and to some extent the capital–military–police–media complex, questioning the familiar institutions of neoliberal markets, sovereign states, trans-corporatist institutions, the anti-corporatist rightwing Islamic populisms, and the intense emotion around anti-trans-Saharan immigrant campaigns. They disrupted the existing understanding and practice of the social and the spatial, including the move to reorient the state and allow a global market’s institutions to be the arbitrators of urban questions and problems. Not least, drawing on multiple

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methods, protestors challenged the state’s oligarchic governing, calling for a city that was guided by equality and substantive democracy, including access to services, a healthy environment, and a more democratic urban space. A politics may indeed emerge from all of this, and a close analysis of the triangulated relationship between the protest, the city, and the world may facilitate its emergence. But the process will not be easy. It requires opening up to question our dominant notions of difference and democracy, of mind and body, of race and empire, and of work and play. It will not be a politics of coherence, continuity, relevance, abstraction, and flow, but one of difference, underived and everywhere becoming.

MENA insurgencies and the (un)making of a postcolonial city Many explain the revolutionary movements in the MENA region in 2011 as either ‘novel’ events, unexpected and risky (World Economic Forum 2012), or the result of public authoritarianism under neoliberal regimes, triggered by rising food prices, high unemployment, and government corruption. Much of the literature rushed to contain the series of events within familiar narratives of ‘proto-political localized events’ (Swyngedouw 2015: 173). But as El-Ghobashy says, such narratives erase the nuanced unfolding of the ‘contingency of the event’ (2011: 1), focusing on its exceptionality and a linear understanding of temporality without accounting for the effects of ongoing urban connections to subterranean organization and insurrection as well as oppression or the systemic nature of growing inequality and poverty. Urban theory stretched itself after much challenge from feminist, African, and AfricanAmerican thought, and postcolonial impulses to include class-based urbanization in the theoretical accounts and political claims of blacks, women, indigenous, and other marginalized populations. In the process, however, many interpretive frameworks missed the move to the streets as founded on a notion of crisis of the postcolonial city and democracy: the crisis of sovereignty, the crisis in the sharing of power and territory among a global body of competing claimants. The strategy of the neoliberal market through its multiple agents and institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, ranging from corporations to the state, is to play upon this conflict and the fears it evokes, and to present to the city the solution of ‘reasonable force’ through law and order. From the vantage point of a set of epistemes and principles that argue colonial practice provides Western states with the authority to determine the extent of successful revolutions and, thus, to define the form of intervention required, the insurgents were not the makers of a revolt or the makers of urban knowledges, sensibilities and insights. Instead of accepting these premises, though, it is important to recognize that revolution and its related practices are simultaneously ontological, epistemological, and ethical and must be fought on all three registers. Much of this emerges from the 17th-century epistemes of modernity that produce a space of extension as a substitution for a space of localization (Foucault 1986: 23). A space that can be measured and ordered, precisely identified, and differentiated is a space under control. A subject who is extended everywhere, who is free of a body and so de-localized, is a subject involved in the continuation of such an expansion. The idea of infinite space and the infinite power of a sovereign subject are both part and parcel of the imaginaries and makings of the urban spaces of

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empire, turning those bodies whose expertise (i.e., in agriculture) and knowledge made possible urban and imperial spaces into threats that could enclose and limit the possibility of expansion and ongoing “innovation”. On December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a young fruit and vegetable vendor from Tunisia and a high-school graduate, reached a breaking point after being slapped twice across the face by a female police officer and having his goods confiscated from the pavement where he was selling them when he was unable to pay the bribe she demanded. She then proceeded to spit in his face and insulted his dead father. This intimate and yet public sexual working-class humiliation which accompanied the slap led to Bouazizi’s setting himself ablaze with paint thinner in front of the local governor’s office, dying two weeks later. Within a space where grievances and violence are intertwined and sexed relations are striated, a uniformed woman, a state representative, slapping a working-class man on a pavement highlights how in this very intimate moment space and subjects are constituted and ordered: through sexual and corporeal brutality, economic grievances, and state violence. It centralizes a crucial antagonism – the sexual gratuity of the violence fundamental to spacing mechanisms, including who has the right to the pavement for slapping, for work, for the use of force and even death. Khaled Saeed, a young Alexandrian who worked on computers, was killed by Alexandria police on June 7, 2001 for posting a video (www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjwBWUwAjE) showing police discussing how to distribute the seized property from a drug bust. He was in an Internet café uploading the video when two detectives ambushed him; he challenged them, saying that asking for his identification was outside their authority. For this, they attacked him, smashing his skull. They took him to the police station where they killed him. To avoid responsibility for his death, they threw his corpse in the street and claimed strangers attacked him. The deaths of Bouazizi and Saeed sent Tunisians and Egyptians to the streets, disrupting the idea that gratuitous bodily violence ought to be the organizing principle of making any space, order, and sexual, racialized class relations. Both deaths highlighted a crucial antagonism – the notion that all citizens do not inhabit the spaces equally. In both moments, the state/police met a subject/citizen with the force inscribed in the authority of the police. The deaths brought to the fore that the idea and political claim of neoliberal good egalitarian governance institutions and toward the workers is a fiction. The notion that the production and distribution of goods, including constitutional values and the rule of law, are distributed equally in the city is a lie. The death of Khaled Saed generated uproar in the streets, but Egyptians combined this with technology to create a site upon which to test the Mubarak regime and make politics democratic beyond liberalism. A Facebook page administered by Wael Ghonim posted the slogan Kullina Khalid Saed (‘We are all Khaled Saed’) along with a comment responding to the news that European governments were planning to freeze Mubarak’s bank accounts: Excellent news … we do not want to take revenge on anyone … it is the right of all of us to hold to account any person who has wronged this nation. By law we want the nation’s money that has been stolen … because this is the money of Egyptians, 40 per cent of whom live below the poverty line.

This commentary suggests the insurgents’ recognition of the entanglement of the state and neoliberal regimes; their struggle had to confront both at the same time.

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In fact, in Tunisia and Egypt, the shift from urban developmentalism to urban neoliberalism as the solution to accumulation problems, the unevenness of the social order, and political legitimacy appeared in multiple projects the respective governments used to address their urban problems. In ‘Egypt’s Collision Course with History’, Ali relates this history to Saeed’s death: The informal settlements within Greater Cairo lost their makeshift homes or poorly built basic redbrick apartment buildings in popular areas. They needed to be relocated quickly to avoid a potentially explosive social crisis that could have been politically damaging to the regime. (2010)

In the history of Cairo’s ‘development,’ the poor (Amnesty International 2009) were systematically forced out to permit real estate developers and construction companies to create gated residential compounds. This urban reorganization of space was further enabled by the sale of thousands of smaller land slots at market prices to upper- and middleclass individuals who could afford to build small villas or family houses. The state gained important revenue; the move also facilitated looking quickly to the market for solutions to housing and urban development. Mitchell says neoliberalism is a spatial project promising ‘prospects without limits’ (2010). Such prospects demand more expansion and snatching of land, segregation of zones, and displacement of bodies in spaces to make them flexible ontologically and ready for exploitation and force with impunity. The same socio-political and economic processes create new concentrations of wealth and resources on the one hand, and economic vulnerability and poverty on the other, with new urban spaces catering to and harboring these groups, producing a new social architecture. In Rule of Experts, Mitchell has a chapter titled ‘Dreamland’ – named after a housing development built by Ahmad Bahgat, a Mubarak crony. The IMF lauded Egypt ‘as a beacon of free-market success, the standard tools for measuring economies’ (Armbrust 2011), even as the poor suffered: ‘In reality the unfettering of markets and agenda of privatisation were applied unevenly at best’ (Armbrust 2011). The uneven distribution of wealth and resources, the economic grievances (not just grinding poverty), and the ‘erosion of a sense that some human spheres should be outside the logic of markets’ created a Cairo and an Egypt ‘of degraded schools and hospitals, and guaranteed grossly inadequate wages, particularly in the everexpanding private sector, turned hundreds of dedicated activists into millions of determined protestors’ (Armbrust 2011). In addition to relocating and remaking the middle and upper classes in the outskirts of Cairo, the state reoriented the social reproduction of these classes toward commercialization. By moving to the gated compounds, an ever-growing number of Egyptians aspired to replace their leverage as citizens with a more favorable commercial leverage as customers. The changing foundations of socio-political agency have thus been shaped by the dynamics of a new social model inside the gated compounds. There, citizens are co-constituting themselves with the neoliberal market as entrepreneurs, negotiating their urban well-being directly with commercial market entities, rather than with state institutions that can be held accountable. By handing over the reproduction of the middle and upper classes to the market, the state allowed the segregation of spaces even further. Marafi points to the multiple policies that relocated the poor and those dependent on the state (2011). She contrasts Al-Rehab

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City, where visitors and residents enjoy markets and commercial activities, with the larger city of Cairo, which now houses those who are economically vulnerable, socially and spatially stigmatized (e.g., Somalian and Sudanese refugees), and rendered politically marginalized in their daily practices. In 2009, the UN Arab Human Development Report estimated that 41 percent of people in Egypt were poor. These ‘figures of the errant’ stand outside the rest of the society: Seen as the invading silhouette of the decidedly peasant migrant from the provinces, the fellah (peasant) frightened and still frightens urban society. This designation also reanimates the classic Muslim opposition between the fellah and the hadari, the latter which signifies civilization, and urban and nomad communities. (Denis 2006: 10)

The local government is an increasingly dominant actor, deciding whether migrants can receive legal citizenship or are eligible for housing units. The spatial segregation feeds into and reproduces social distances between groups: some are increasingly socially and spatially isolated but yet able to move anytime anywhere as they live the dream of neoliberalism; others are left out with no infra-structures of support. These spatial segregations constituting the neoliberal dream (the new urban gated communities have names like Utopia, Qatamiya Height, Beverly Hills, Palm Hills, Jolie-Ville, Mena Garden City, Dreamland, and Paradise) consistently generate contradictions. Street protesters questioned whether the promises of relocation, including the making of and possible reproduction of the middle and upper classes, were secured. Did the relocation mean the resolution of security problems and inefficiencies of the state by the market? In the years to come, the inhabiting of the streets, post-2011 Arab insurgencies, will test whether the insurgencies against neoliberal and authoritarian regimes ruptured the attempts to intensify the market’s hold and authoritarian rulers on city life.

From urban critical theory to the insurgencies of the streets While critical urban theory helps us understand the shifts of spatial orders and regimes, it is currently, as many urbanists have told us, in a ‘crisis,’ along with the economic, social, political, and ecological ‘crises.’ But how might we rethink the relations between urban and world amid ongoing insurgencies and across fragmentations within and between global North and South to theorize urban life differently? What do the MENA insurgencies tell us about notions of work and the city, bodies (i.e., land, humans, nonhumans, animals), the world and how do they go about telling us that? Western ideological discourses, including urban studies, have obscured that systems of exploitation that predominate under Western hegemony are neither a natural nor necessary condition of capitalism. Certain studies of time and space imagine certain beings can be neither citizens of conquering entities nor subjects of their own history (Sze 2007; Escobar 2005; Yiftachel 1995). In this view, the colonized lead valueless lives and are available to be used and disposed of by those who possess ‘science,’ ‘reason,’ ‘civilization’ and models of paradigmatic metropolises (i.e., Paris, New York, Los Angeles, etc.). Naturalizing these fictions as givens allows their constitution as structuring ‘truths’ to articulate the relationships between notions and practices of the West and the non-West around the city

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and the political, politics and capitalism. Challenging these structuring truths is difficult, but the African or Asian city is not simply ‘a string of infrastructures, technologies, and legal entities, however networked these are. It also comprises actual people, images and architectural forms, footprints and memories; the city is a place of manifold rhythms, a world of sounds, private freedom, pleasures, and sensations’ (Mbembe and Nutall 2004: 360). Yet these cities often register in scholarship ‘as somehow apart from the world, or as failed and incomplete examples of something else’ (McFarlane, citing Mbembe and Nuttall 2004). Some postcolonial approaches to theorizing urban worlds use urban diversity as a way of critiquing and rethinking categories like the city, urban policy, planning, informality, relocation, democracy, and equality. Theorists like Partha Chaterjee address the methods through which postcolonial urbanist projects that operate in the name of reason (and never the body) are ‘seeking to find for “the nation” a place in the global order of capital …. [Accordingly], the historical identity between Reason and capital [is] an epistemic privilege, mainly development’ (cited in Roy 2011: 321). Roy argues the urban projects of ‘Reason’ are intimately connected to geographies of authoritative knowledge that designate cities of the global North as the ideal blueprint for the ‘underdeveloped’ cities of the global South (Roy 2011: 308). Simone (2004) speaks to the importance of reconsidering the fiction of ‘Reason’ in urban development and planning interventions to focus more on the needs of urban dwellers. Parnell and Robinson have more recently argued that ‘in a world of globalising cities, we need a greater range of theoretical initiatives to interpret processes of urbanisation – and we certainly need to diversify the starting points for developing our understandings of contemporary cities’ (2012: 494; see also Robinson 2006), citizens’ making world processes, polis’ imaginations, and claims to their own cities. Fanon’s work on anti-colonial movements provides valuable insight into the MENA insurgencies. His analytics on the zoning of colonized spaces and the dominant notions of time inscribed on them (Agathangelou and Killian 2016) by the colonizers as and on the anti-colonial revolution opens up the space for us to reconsider the production of time, knowledges of and about the urban and its infrastructures. Instead of simply assuming the urban and its infrastructures, a reading of Fanon’s notion of the ways race and empire collude to co-produce segregation of the colonial city and modernity’s order allows us to think how important it is to compare urban processes and notions of time inscribed on them in colonial and neo-colonial sites of the global South, working through how these processes operate on the ground at different times and then reconsidering the process from multiple frames and scales of reference. Such reconsideration highlights the challenge to assuming context and dominant categories such as revolution, protest, radicalness, and even fundamentalist urban politics are a given. The making of protests and radical interventions are themselves circumstances that generate and force into existence new notions of a polis and a politics, new theoretical analytics about the possibility of a polis otherwise. These insurgencies permit us to consider how urban theory might respond not just to a worldly urbanism, but to an increasingly important ‘off-worlding urbanism’ supported by efforts to inaugurate a post-global urban political economy and ecology. For Fanon, ‘in an initial phase, it is the action, the plans of the occupier that determine the centres of resistance around which a people’s will to survive becomes organized’ (1959: 32). He links the concept of spatiality to the segregation/zoning of rich

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and urban poor (Nord 1987), black and white, men and women (Fanon 1967). Much urban theory presumes that zoning at the urban scale has very particular physical and social characteristics; it subordinates through periphery, containment, and the difficulty of overcoming distance. It also assumes that zoning operates quite differently at a global scale. Fanon’s articulation of the urban segregation in Paris and Algiers allow us to question this division of local and global, including the notion of a linear understanding of time. Colonialism and its zonings are structuring events that bring together the three fundamental and now disjunctive scales of being: the space of the individual subject – its body, location, and psyche; the space of the group – the city, community, and region; and, finally, the space of the globe – the global institutions. Together, these provide the resources that can be incorporated into empirical analyses of ‘civil society’ and its economies of a valuation and ordering that is cellular. Zoning and ordering the world into civil and uncivil is a temporal performance, a temporal mechanism that pins down and filters individuals based on development and racialization, thereby demanding practices and multiple struggles to combat this form of violence that positions certain “backward” groups and territories for further violence. In short, Fanon’s critique of what is zoning and segregation allows us to stretch the familiar notions of the urban and its infrastructures. Urban critics have complicated the urban by theorizing the ‘infrastructure as people’ (Simone 2004). Simone’s notion of ‘people as infrastructure’ pushes us to focus on the everyday of people’s performances and expression of lives in the city. In emphasizing ‘economic collaborations among residents seemingly marginalized from and immiserated by urban life’ Simone challenges us to look at people’s inventions: how this infrastructure is ‘engaged in complex combinations of objects, spaces, persons and practices’ (2004: 407–408, 2001). African cities, Simone suggests, are sites of experimentation and sites of devising various kinds of entrepreneurial survival strategies. While ‘experimentation is necessary,’ Simone tells us, ‘not everything is to be experimented with’ (2010: 143). Simone’s city thus is one where people attempt to access it and its resources, to assemble its ‘fugitive materials’. Simone asks: What is it in the way these materials are collected that supports life or acts against it? It is not clear. What in this practice supports the tendency of global capital to make people and local networks fend for themselves and what operates in ways that global capital will never get? It is not clear. (2011: 144)

While the answers to the above questions are not clear, Simone tells us that we have an ‘impetus for experimentation’ in the global South city. Residents from different districts take small steps ‘to be in a larger world together in ways that do not assume a past solidity of affiliations, a specific destination nor an ultimate collective formation to come’ (2011: 151). Reassembling in the everyday may not be the reassembling of the insurgencies. It is nevertheless a recombination of objects, people, ideas, and bits of discourses that makes possible something new as well as the creation of new potentialities. In the MENA region, the structuring of the urban through spacing mechanisms segregated the educated youth whose jobs now were temporary and the working and middle class whose relocation to gated communities meant the reorientation and redistribution of resources and infrastructure to those spaces, with correspondingly less allotted to those

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living on the outskirts of Cairo or Tunis or Amman. This segregation requires a certain kind of contestation, a struggle able to test epistemological, ontological, and moral principles as well as problematize and forge new moral and polis spaces beyond the boundaries of the good that amorphous concepts of a time and a ‘polis’ delimit. Social pathologies of the neocolonial/authoritarian/neoliberal state and neoliberal institutions such as the market can be disrupted through combat, a process whose making in the present, also depends on interruptions, on rupturing and challenging continuities of that same present that dominate projects of urbanisms and city designs (Marriott 2011: 57). There is something, in this process and its writing that exceeds urban life. Both time’s and space’s inscriptions cannot be easily re-routed to something that is already “captured” or represented, something discoverable (i.e., the revolution). The protests and the multiplicity of imaginations of projects are shifting, always producing possibilities and making possible the emergences of protest that naturalized categories and urbanisms are always working to suppress or elide. Urban theorisations cannot easily elide nonchalantly that the time and spaces of revolt challenge and even rupture temporalities that take the narration of urbanisms and ordering for granted. Combat and struggle here cannot be reduced to a teleological process and a final meaning (i.e., revolution) and a new world. Rather, both the subject of combat and protests are themselves problems of time to remember both Fanon and Marriott here (Fanon 2004; Marriott 2011: 58). Many of the protesters in the MENA region were aware of the ease with which they could be mistakenly and in orientalist ways (Said 1978) read as simply irrupting against authoritarian regimes without a focus. However, the insurgents consistently undercut such easy readings that pegged the emergence of their movements as a response to the collateral damages of authoritarian regimes. Such easy readings that pegged them and associated violence and authoritarianism with a certain context evades their leadership in politics. The insurgents systematically showed how theirs was an energy that erupted all the while transforming into something self-directed to challenge a series of issues ranging from authoritarianism, to land grabs, to displacement and poverty. Even when these movements could not guarantee a continuance of the insurgents’ energy, the circuit of the entire movement provided us with an urban writing of this problematic origin of violence which gives no comfort. It is their poetry, their songs that create the circuit according to which the recursivity of this energy can be tapped and also challenge dominant linear notions of the revolution as an end to itself. The street revolts have generated the possibility of new revolutionary acts, that is, the intervention to make political spaces anew wherein a subject willing to be in solidarity with others worldwide is constituted, as s/he struggles to transform spaces, corporeal schemas, and the ontological conditions of existence (Bamyeh 2011). The MENA revolutions point to a practical urban solidarity as a major ethical principle, that reconfigures songs, poetry and any other words on a placard as the testimonial of revolutionary leadership mobilizing the courage to abandon the fictional of the social, to break with it and deconstruct it. Theirs was a courage that worked to invent poetries, songs, and other ideas that can rupture dominant notions of revolutionary agency and allow us to reconsider the question of transformation from the standpoint of all political networks in flux and in constant creation of the sites where new forms of recombination, new ways of poetically relating which cannot be re-discovered or returned to, but which must be created and inscribed anew.

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(Un)making temporalities and the normative city? Mumford asks, ‘What is the city? How did it come into existence? What processes does it further: what functions does it perform: what purposes does it fulfil?’ (1961: 3). For the first time in history (insofar as we know) more people live in urban regions than outside of them. For this reason, if for no other, it is imperative to recognize that the making of subjects of difference within and between cities at different moments has implications for how citizens count and how they recompose themselves in making political claims of urbanisms. Feminists and postcolonial theorists problematize the ordered city by arguing that its production is an attempt to master the other body as space and time (Scott 2016; Smith 2016; Miraftab 2009; Roy 2006; Stoler 2002). Space in planning and architecture is not about domesticating space, however, but a defense against the ‘terror of time’; the fantasy of art is that of creating a timeless reality, the stilling of time by creation (Harries 1982: 54; see also Ghertner 2015). The ordered city and the mastered body reside in the fantasy of the eternal and the immutable, the realm of the ideal where the ‘bite’ of space and time has been escaped, Central to Fanon’s critiques of slavery and colonization is the lived embodiment of space; in his view, the challenge of the recomposition of this space and the colonial order is pivotal for any decolonial project. In an analysis of Fanon’s work, Gibson comments that because the Europeans built their city ‘around the port … looking away from the Casbah toward the Mediterranean, [this] created implicit boundaries between it and the Muslim city that were keenly “felt by everyone”’ (Gibson 2013: 49, citing Cherki 2006: 42). This insight is significant on two registers: first, the European city (or imperial city) is not geographically distant from the colonized city; and, second, these cities are embodied with particular citizens of a certain religion or racialized positionality. Algerians were enclosed in the Casbah, and ‘vast slums, groaning with misery, cropped up in the interstices between established neighbourhoods’ (Gibson 2013: 49, citing Cherki 2006: 41–42). As Gibson’s commentary suggests, Fanon’s work stretches notions of the city by bringing back to our attention the familiar Manichaeisms that presume the division of the mind and the body, the distinctions between the slave/colonized and the worker, a hierarchization of humans based on skin or religion and, ultimately, who revolts, when and in what space. For Fanon, the structure and order of an empire, a theory, a discourse, colonization, slavery, building, a self, or an other are inherently vulnerable and prone to violence. When the fictional and ideal order projected by spatial hierarchized imaginaries is threatened, its familiar aggressiveness turns into a stratocracy, a government by armed forces: The symbols of social order – the police, the bugle calls in the barracks, military parades and the waving flags – are at one and the same time inhibitory and stimulating …. The settler-native relationship is a mass relationship. The settler pits brute force against the weight of numbers. He is an exhibitionist. His preoccupation with security makes him remind the native out loud that there he alone is master. (Fanon 1967: 53)

In Black Skin, White Masks (1967), Fanon evokes the skin as a marker of not only exclusion but also a kind of civil death that remains constant as a person moves through space (Wilderson 2003) as a person is an infrastructure. In Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon describes his and the colonized’s experiences in colonial Algeria, evoking how race is

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spatially contained in the settler colony – ‘a world of compartments,’ a ‘world cut into two,’ a world fundamentally divided into ‘opposed zones’ (see also Pithouse 2014; Agathangelou 2009). These zones are guided by different rules, and norms, including surveillance and policing. Each embodies spatial and corporeal racializations: one is clean, well lit, secured, and ‘a site of a certain kind of freedom for those [bodies] authorised to inhabit it’ (Pithouse 2014). The other is dark, dirty, a site of terror and criminality, a ‘site of constant physical containment and intimidation’ (Pithouse 2014; see also Agathangelou 2009; Kipfer 2004). In short, Fanon stretches the way we think and understand the city itself; on the one hand, he speaks of the spacings as regulatory and, on the other, of zonings as necropolitical. He zooms in on the black body to show how its production is based on historical, normative, and temporal determinisms to sustain in place how we come to know what is the urban, including the systems of thought/fiction enabling that knowledge, along with the dangerous social fantasy that different kinds of spaces are origins to violence and inhabited by different kinds of uncivil black and bodies of color and uncontained ecologies and species. The neo-colonial urban MENA spaces within which the revolts and protests emerged point to this hierarchized segregation of urban spaces and political economy of knowledge production and suggest how the colonial relations of power shape, change, and/or even problematize this. Rather than seeing these emergences as the content that proves their specificity to the neo-colonial and MENA region, however, I suggest we recompose, as they did with their poetries, their main aspects into new theoretical inquiries. Instead of rendering them into a passive object of urban studies’ analysis, I read the revolts as living and active spaces of testing and recomposing principles and notions of time, space, constitutions, democracy and work. Their poetries pushed our thinking by stretching notions of the city to include that of a polis and the insurgents as the engineers and testers of principles about a polis whose making does not depend on having slaves, subjected citizens, construction work, manual work, etc., at the bottom of the hierarchy. They challenge dominant notions of how and what kind of a city to produce, including what it means to be a free citizen in a democratic polis. As ‘conceptual levers,’ they open the major thematics of urban studies to question, including its methods, processes, and knowledge boundary making but above all challenge its temporal insights. Neoliberalism has had a devastating effect on a region whose major constitutive element is ‘rent’ (from oil, gas, minerals, and tourism) with a clan-based ruling class, and a political entourage and technocrats in the middle. As public revenue began declining in the 1970s, there were profound changes in the MENA region’s labor markets, people as infrastructure, and tax regulations. Until the late 1970s, the expansion of public employment contributed to gains in equality and income, including the increase of female labor. However, the 1980s were marked with declines in public employment, along with public revenue declines. By the 2000s, the entry of educated persons into public employment dropped dramatically, in Egypt, from 70 to 20 percent, with similar declines in Jordan and Lebanon. In Egypt, the shift away from public sector employment pushed young and educated citizens into contractual jobs where they faced insecurity and volatility (Agathangelou 2012: 458). Many were relegated to jobs as ‘vendors, transport and contract workers and in personal services’ (Petras 2011). In Jordan, workers shifted into the private sector and were forced to agree to temporary or no contracts. Meanwhile, the gated communities recruited neo-colonial mercenary contractors to secure their homes

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and control the unemployed/underemployed young workers, an increasing concern in societies where 50–65 percent of the population is under 25 years of age (Agathangelou 2012: 458; Washington Blog, 2/24/11, cited in Petras 2011). The emergence of new urban scales (i.e., collection of waste; financial crisis, failure of development, etc.) generated demographic class, racialized, and sexualized contradictions. The state started privatizing infrastructure. This cut off benefits and services to the underpaid youth but benefited cosmopolitan neighborhoods and ‘centers of foreign capital’ (Schwedler 2010: 3). These changing geographies ‘create[d] sites of inclusion, effectively creating different sets of rights and opportunities for different segments of the population’ (Schwedler 2010: 269). Many of the grievances of the MENA insurgents were animated by the urban transformations and infrastructure shifts (Moore 2014: 5) including composing and regulating illegality. Planners, for instance, drew on their discretionary ability to regularize certain colonies but not others by declaring which settlements were legal and which illegal, which will thrive and which will not be allowed to exist. The composing of legality and illegality is a temporal and a spatial technique of rule, or what Roy calls, ‘a spatial mode of governance.’ The redistribution of space did not provide the social contract of relief and richness promised by those in power. Egypt reformed its tax regime by shifting the fiscal burden onto lower income groups and vulnerable consumers, thinking it would bring in more money. This was not the case. The changes allowed the ultra-modern oil, gas, real estate, tourism, and shopping-mall sectors to avoid paying taxes, including clerical, tribal, and clan leaders. Petras comments: ‘The modern urban industrial working class with small, independent trade unions is banned. Middle class civic associations are either under state control or confined to petitioning the absolutist state’ (2011: 3). To paraphrase Petras, this is neo-colonisation and morbitity by invitation (cited in Agathangelou 2012: 458). In addition, neoliberal shifts in the name of ‘reforms’ such as deregulation, laissez-faire access to domestic markets, reduction of food subsidies to the poor, and elimination of state employment exacerbated existing power asymmetries, generating colonial and slave conditions in which class–clan regimes and foreign interests were served by a small native elite. Historical predicaments of colonialism and imperialism were manifested in the contemporary tensions between the governmental officials, foreign capital, and clan rulers who were able to work with the state to implement plans and urban planning development, and with real estate companies and foreign capital, generating wealth and further marginalizing street labor. Radical alterings of human spaces and settlements prepared the way for the development of a city and the possible change of a state-development accumulation society inscribed with a semblance of being ruled by its “innovative” citizens, with market grammars and practices fusing power and sovereignty. As labor became increasingly insecure, parastatal organizations surfaced, making the urban disparities and the distinctions of the legal/illegal more intensified. The desire to plan, build, and govern urban developments pushed officials to court private sector alliances with significant tax subventions, and changes in property rights enabled urban privatization policies in Amman, Alexandria, Aqaba, and Qina. The effects of these decisions and reorientations of resources and spatial investments changed the infrastructure dramatically, finding many citizens in precarious positions or unemployed (Agathangelou 2012). Ultimately, the de classé masses confronted the clientelistic oligarchies (Petras 2011), turning the street into a social, economic, and spatial locus of contestation of a

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slave-and-colonial-city power, starting by questioning the polis and the political. What is it? Who has the power to claim it? While the link to urban revolt and insurgent grievances is not causal, the revolts evidenced a challenge to a linear notion of time of revolution, including the link between shifting political geographies of the unemployed, the illegal, legal labor and households (oikos), social movements, and the understandings of inequality and fiscal decline. MENA region revolutionaries reoriented familiar praxical conventions and ruptured the image of Arabs as obedient and subjected. Standing ‘with a rock in one hand, and a cellphone in the other,’ they demonstrated that the world they had struggled so hard to make was not open to them (Ryan 2011). If all were to be ‘subjects’ (i.e., subjected), the modern polis would cease to be a polis. For many years, the rulers’ claims of being ‘authoritarian’ but ‘moderate’ and ‘responsible’ dominated the political, economic, and spatial landscape of Egypt. Mubarak’s negotiations with multinationals and the United States for military aid secured his power. He provided services such as ‘interrogating radical Islamists kidnapped by the CIA as part of the extraordinary rendition programme, maintaining the peace with Israel, tightening the siege of Gaza, [and] opposing the resistance front led by Iran’ (Shatz 2011). Such actions made it possible for US military aid to ‘continue to flow, at a rate of $1.3 billion a year’ (Shatz 2011). While Mubarak argued that his plans for development projects would benefit the majority, millions were left scrambling for jobs, food, and spaces to live in. Egyptians took matters into their own hands, showing that authoritarian leadership was not, in fact, able to ‘do the job’ (Shatz 2011). They took to the streets, unplugging terrorized and gendered subjectivities from sovereign apparatuses and neoliberal regimes. Seeing the wretched of the earth in practical solidarity in the streets transformed how people think about their own time, their revolutionary leadership, their relationship to their city, their relationship to others, and their own subjectivity. In coming together in the streets, these insurgents problematized familiar terms (i.e., dreamlands) and the categories planners draw upon to design urban plans and compose dominant projects of planning, ordering, and spacing of the city. In a Fanonian sense, it dislodged the common assumption that dominant notions and imaginations of historicism present for us (i.e., a linear structure of liberation), that the revolution is the “teleological outcome of what went before” (Marriott 2011: 54) and that change and transformation are the result of ‘little vanguards’ (Fanon 1959: 1). Meanwhile, in Tunisia, Ben Ali, like other African leaders, took over the violent practices of colonialists. Instead of working toward a national anti-colonial liberation movement, the ruling party developed authoritarian principles and became a base for Western capitalism. Here too, the recognition that the leadership was invested in the imperial and neo-colonial–neoliberal erections of capitalist urban market plans and accumulation regimes pushed people into the streets (Petras 2011; Mitchell 2010). The popular songs of Ben Amr told the Tunisian president that his people were dying; the people chanted these songs, unleashing an energy ‘bound to this profound human reality and to its socialist future, and not to the apparent omnipotence of great systems’ (Fanon 1959: 1). The economic terror of capitalism extensively supported by the United States and France came to the fore with Bouazizi’s self-immolation (Agathangelou 2011, 2012). How the insurgents inhabited the urban took different forms, with different impacts in different places. In Tunisia, the revolt triggered by Mohamed Bouazizi’s death and in what was considered a rural space had ripple effects on urban infrastructures, their mobility, and their affects. The protests forced President Ben Ali to flee to Saudi Arabia

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on January 14, 2011, allowing insurgents to test their principles, specifically how to overthrow undemocratic leaders who spent much time illegalizing their jobs and livelihoods, as well as come together to deliberate about the governing of their households, their cities, and their job sites. These protests also had a ripple effect in that they challenged divisions into local, national, and global scales and into Western and non-Western ones, legal and illegal, civil and uncivil. Rather than assuming that some inert quality or criterion makes the West the normative conceptual space and referent for urban studies and the making of radical protests, it is important to recognize the production of radical inventions in uneven, coconstitutive, translocal networks and processes that question the great divides inherent in theory and in notions of praxis, as well as in scalar divisions. Rather than seeing these protests as localized or global, as some in urban studies do, we need to recognize them as the sites of contestations and reinventions of both the polis and the world. The distinctiveness of the MENA insurgencies has less to do with ‘cultural’ grammars and more to do with the contingent outcome of specific translocal power fields. They conjure radical aspirations from some considered disparate times and locations to rupture the violence that inscribes their urban lives today. Protests erupted in Algeria (January 5, 2011) and Jordan (January 7, 2011) following the model in Tunisia. Seeing the many revolts, the Saad al-Hariri government in Lebanon collapsed (January 12, 2011), while protests occurred in Saudi Arabia (January 28, 2011) and Sudan (January 30, 2011). On January 25, hundreds of thousands assembled in Tahrir Square in Cairo and other cities throughout Egypt to demand radical reforms. On February 11, Hosni Mubarak resigned after 800 protesters were killed. In Libya, in the middle of February, the revolutionary movement escalated into NATO intervention in March, leaving thousands dead (Agathangelou 2012: 459). “Yemenis organized against the ruling regime in the third week of January; loyalists and the security forces of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, in office since 1978, shot hundreds of demonstrators” (Agathangelou 2012: 459). While these revolts did not produce a uniform notion of revolution, each provided an occasion to create new relationships, to form strategic alliances, and, at the same time, to make and transform existing terms of the polis and the political. In January 2011, protesters in Bahrain tested the street differently. The Bahraini youth called all Bahrainis ‘to take to the streets on Monday 14 February in a peaceful and orderly manner in order to rewrite the constitution and to establish a body with a full popular mandate’ (Zunes 2015). This call was significant, as it reminded Bahrainis about the same day ten years before when they passed a referendum on the National Action Charter and nine years before when the Constitution was ratified. In addition to making connections with past struggles, the Bahraini protesters tested the streets for possible connections with different citizens in Bahrain and beyond. Their untimeliness was a result of their “irruptive cutting of continuity” (Marriott 2011: 54). On February 4, 2011, and in solidarity with anti-government protesters, several hundred gathered in front of the Egyptian Embassy in Manama. Most were Shia Muslims, the majority of Bahrain’s population (Black 2011). Shia Muslims are part of the city; therefore, the Sunni imaginaries and constitutional embodiments see them as a threat, uncivil and ultimately untimely. Protests began on February 14. Bahraini government forces used tear gas, rubber bullets, and birdshot to break up demonstrations; 25 were killed, with many more wounded, when security officers opened fire on mourners (Al Jazeera, February 13, 2011).

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Despite the security forces, police and military interventions by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and Saudi Arabia, the protesters continued to materialize new beginnings in the streets. Their interventions “opened in return a movement of temporalization that is never simply present, or timely” (Marriott 2011: 54). Theirs was a revolution in flux and not only a weave of “traces and memories outside of time” (Ibid). Theirs was, in other words, a placing of the revolutionary irruptions in relation to themselves, an insistence that the condition of possibility of the radical and ethical acts of the revolution and its flux were inherent in the moment itself. The insurgents ruptured dominant notions of the market/neoliberalism and security/militarization. They exposed how the Bahraini authorities depended on the recruiting of Sunni foreign nationals from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Pakistan to suppress popular movements from the Shia majority (Guardian, February 17, 2011), and they revealed the labor regimes enacted by the Bahraini government at the expense of its citizens. They challenged the idea that the city was at risk (i.e., its infrastructures, communication networks, banks, and fenced citizens); instead, their own bodies and human rights were at risk from the continued temporal uncivility of their own government. MENA protests are continuing to unfold, albeit differentially. The myriad forms of organizing and political solidarities disrupt the idea that revolutionary violence is itself law-making and functional of political institutions and point to a second ethical principle: political solidarity ‘spreads’ to the next generation and puts into crisis civil society and the state as the purveyors of justice and substantive democracy (Tahrir Documents 2011). The movement to the streets expresses an ethic that trespasses dominant understandings of the ‘sense of the world’ (Nancy 2011), the community, and the revolutionary subject (Motha 2011). The Tunisian, Egyptian, and Yemeni Revolutions highlight that different communities live and work together, including the Muslims and Copts in Egypt who formed joint groups for food, sleeping, defense, and prayer. These practical solidarities are co-constituted with a certain notion of polis otherwise, including the possible constitution of bodies that may not be subjected to violence and terror.

Civil society and colonial/authoritarian states: the wretched come into being Drawing on Fanon, Mireille Fanon Mendès says: Man’s liberation is a universal fight based on the defence of private and public freedoms, the primacy of the general interest, the reduction in inequality, accountability of the elected, and the sovereignty of right (2011).

His nuanced understanding of revolution and the possibility that the struggle may be snatched by capital and geo-colonial–bourgeoisie powers is important. For instance, in the Tunisian Revolution, like the 1988 riots in Algeria, the ‘political crowds’ objected to the failure of the state to ‘honour its socialist-oriented identity [and yet] this leaning was sacrificed when the protest movement fused politically with the market-oriented economy of the Islamist movement’ (Khalil 2012: 9). Referring to the 1988 Algerian protests, Roberts asks: ‘What has this bourgeois Islamic Puritanism, with its essentially positive

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acceptance of laissez-faire capitalist political economy … got to do with the character and behaviour of social movements in Algeria and, in the first instance, with the outlook of the Algerian crowd?’ (2002: 6, cited in Khalil 2012: 9). Turning to Tunisia, Khalil asks similar questions to Fanon, but within contemporary spaces and places by considering the insights that revolutionaries have tested and gained from the practices and insurgent relations from multiple movements in the region and elsewhere, especially where Islam plays a significant role in the spatiality of social relations: In Tunisia, the return, legalization and support enjoyed by the main Islamist party … gives rise to the question of new definitions of political authority, of the people. …. The political crowds of the Tunisian revolution denaturalized the language used by the State, de-naturalized poverty, and de-naturalized an absolute character of secular, European, and republican models devoid of all real republican values. (Khalil 2012: 9)

Such uprisings disturb dominant constitutional and spatial understandings of democracy, freedom, authority, legitimacy, legality and illegality, civil and uncivil, and highlight Islam’s own history of revolt, along with its ‘moral economy,’ producing the expectation that states will act according to political, economic, ethical, and spatial republican principles in their design and ordering of their spaces. The MENA region’s seemingly spontaneous acts of decolonization became possible through the ability of different insurgents to ‘plug [themselves] into the social matrix to see how and where [they could] stand in terms of others in a [city] of unequal power’ (Marr 2012: 8) and how and in what ways they could inform and work with other not at the level of formalized theory, but rather by images, stories, rumors, gossips, fictions (Marr 2012: 3, citing Taylor 2002: 106). Men and women of the middle and working classes came together on the streets to question the gendered order of ‘imperialism and patriarchal/Islamic occupation’ that claims that women’s contribution to social planning and development are represented in economies of passivity and sacrifice (Midrashim 2012 cited in Agathangelou 2011). The insurgents turned Tahrir into a site of insurgent invention. Islamist firebrands, liberal secularists, students, farmers, lawyers and homemakers, many of whom had rarely if ever interacted before, came together and changed the square and the street. The presence of women, children, men, and transgendered people from diverse classes and backgrounds highlights that their interventions comprise the foundations of revolutionary practices and disrupt dominant temporal codes in economies and militarizations underpinning global governance. The major constituent elements of this new sense of the world and the new revolutionary subject disrupt sectarian, sexual, sovereign subjects as embodied in the street segregations that have consistently claimed time, class, gender, secularism, and sovereignty as able to ‘save’ or suture the de-ranged spatio-identities of those barred from the privileged groups and spaces. Revolutions as acts of temporal discontinuities, as new beginnings, as decolonization and de-slavery push asunder the linear temporal boundness of the structure of revolution and the boundaries of the struggle. The central ethical element of revolution is not the struggle for bread or the struggle against authoritarian regimes; it is the untimely movement of the ‘different’ subjects asymmetrically positioned in stratified systems of governance to eliminate all forms of oppression, militant suppressions, and theft. Indeed, these revolutionary expressions are evidence of a human dignity preparing

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humanity for the renewal of the urban destructions and demolitions (Fanon 1959: 1; see also Bamyeh 2011).

Untimely revolution and corporeal disruptions Bouazizi’s self-immolation and Khaled Saeed’s beating ruptured the world order’s dominant strategies of geo-colonial–urban power formation and revealed a simmering desire for transformation. Tunisians, Egyptians, Bahrainis, Libyans, Syrians, and Yemenis literally put their bodies on the line to claim the city as a democratic space where citizens can gather to deliberate and contribute to the ways the polis is to be organized and ordered. Unlike much of their leadership, the MENA protesters did not assume a linear progression and the West as the normative referent of and structure of liberation and transformation. They took to the streets when they realized their regimes’ gratuitous military and policy violence (i.e., Central Security Forces in Egypt) converged with the West’s liberal wars. They used all their time and technologies available to them to disrupt the terms of the geo-colonial and corporeally urban order and to disrupt the dominant practice of state–corporate collusive control of such tools. Using their own bodies as technologies of power disrupted the idea that they or their lands were untimely (out of this world) and were or ever could be subjected completely to the city. The slogans and chants of workers and farmers expressed a desire for liberation. Many workers and farmers met in Tunis after Ben Ali’s fall demanding the removal of the ruling party and the interim leader: ‘We have come to bring down the rest of the dictatorship.’ Agathangelou (2011: 463) argues that these farmers and workers challenged the necropolitical regimes of security and governance. In her words, Traveling through the night in a caravan of cars, trucks, and motorcycles from towns across the rocky region far from Tunisia’s luxurious tourist beaches, and in defiance of a curfew and ‘state of emergency,’ they turned their bodies and voices toward collective strife against the order that had systematically stolen their lands and lives.

These insurgents used the dominant order’s urban-security doctrines whose use to control and subject them to necropolitical strategies of governance against themselves. “In Egypt, people protested on blogs and designed banners and posters displaying Khaled Saaed’s corpse in the street. They also formed a community around opposition to police brutality and other government abuses (Agathangelou 2011: 463). The protesters were re-composing the praxical tradition of a Western modernity to a revolution that posits the possibility of configuring anew the effects of the geo-slaveand-colonial state and its corporeal powers. They were doing so by foregrounding corporeality, space, and state and civil society violences and the objects of violence. The emergence of these revolutionaries in the streets cast them as the central loci of contestation simply because they were precipitating a crisis in the times of the neo-colonial– neoliberal structures and their corporate and elite agents (ranging from businessmen to real estate agents to political leaders). In their chants, songs, and slogans, the MENA protestors employed the grammar of revolution, denying the juridico-grammatical

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injunction that “violence” (i.e., in the form of protest and contestation) is untimely and opposed to the state, the city, or the civil society. The resonant music flowing across the land and through bodies fed off and into the creative responses to police violence. Mayyasi and Salah write: I believe in nonviolent activism, [but] I do not advocate meekly bearing the blows from the regime’s thugs. We knew we had to defend ourselves. We broke up rocks, which are plentiful among Tahrir’s cracked sidewalks, to use as ammunition, and urged each other to break them smaller and smaller and to avoid aiming at the head. The CSF are still human beings, we reminded each other. (2016)

Faced with the police and military violence, Mayyasi and Salah remind us, the street protests and the music mocked this and the ordinary violence of the everyday, the violence against multiple forms of life including their bodies, their streets, and their ecologies all in the name of security. They reminded people that hierarchical ordering of desires and needs is a strategy that emerges from privilege: its ethical value is containment and suffocation, not the acknowledgement and affirmation of the ethics that emerge from practices of anti-slave and anti-colonial bodily solidarity. Drawing on the street and one’s own body as the fundamental site of contestation of the dominant global order requires one (in a Fanonian sense) to acknowledge the linearity of and captivity of certain distinctions in certain frames: one is always either for an order willing to slaughter some people in the name of spatial or other kinds of security and city-at-risk rhetorics and promises, or one is always seeking to transform its economic, social, political, and urban systems. The insurgents challenged this temporal structure of the political and liberation. Instead, they, in Fanon’s words, irrupted the temporal continuity of both the dominant and liberation structures of violence. They worked to ‘get as close as possible to the Revolution, to get ahead of the Revolution if possible, in short to be in on it’ (Fanon 1959: 81). As if responding to Fanon, women, children, the middle and working classes, citizens of different religious orientations, and rural peoples took to the streets. The youth (shabab) transformed their spaces and bodies and regrouped their forces: nothing and no one could make them retreat (Abourahme and Jayyusi 2011) from their own streets. Many younger people and women participating in the social revolts realized that systematic programs were required to articulate a different vision and practice of horizontal and participatory leadership, generating spaces for inclusive and egalitarian citizenship in institutions that had marginalized them through policies and social practices of marginalization and exclusion (Salah 2016; Abou-Habib 2011, 2012). In the streets of Tunis and Cairo, bodies turned into the infrastructures contesting those objects and technologies that systematically worked to segregate, discipline, contain, kill them, or let them die in the street. The acted truths constituted a grammar of revolution which inoculated them against the ‘terrorist’ epithets circulating in newspapers of Europe and North America: ‘We are not thugs,’ said Samer Abdul Razek, 29, who lost a friend Jan. 28 when he was shot in the head by a sniper. Razek, a student of literature, was bleeding from a stomach wound he suffered when hit by a rock thrown by security forces. ‘I want this government and military rule to end’. (Fadel and Mansour 2011)

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Ultimately, the politics of urban security and ‘protection’ and the problematic criminalization of the working class and protestors’ bodies were disrupted in a world profoundly shaped by the convergence of ‘primitive accumulation’ relations and a racialized gendered globality, with its accompanying political, economic, and sovereign relations (see Agathangelou 1997, 2004; Amin 1997; Fanon 1959: 12; Grovogui 2010, 2011).

Wrestling with the untimely ontologies of revolt for the making of a polis otherwise In Fanon’s vision, ‘the last shall be first and the first last’ (1967: 37). The present cannot be enslaved and colonized or scientifically controlled, even at the moment of imprisoning and slaughtering bodies and of enclosing streets and land for sale and generation of profits; yet many theorists and analysts, whether speaking for urban studies, political economy, international relations, financial markets, or radical interventionists, point to the desire of disposing of the temporal flow of global relations and events according to their systems of categorization. Perhaps the fundamental issue pending in the ways we understand time and urban revolts in urban politics and not fully addressed in theory or action is the temporal relation, the structure of liberation, the ‘decisive threshold for finite existence’ (Perone 2011) between politics and violence in the fabric of transnational history, institutional becomings, and insurgent moments. Experts of all kinds want to contain the intertwinements that disrupt this temporal relationship of the political and the violence that makes a modern city possible by systematically devising methods that can decide, predict and facilitate more control, authority, governing, and profits. In so doing, they clear out those who cannot be imagined as agents of time, as citizens, as they are presumed already structurally dead or ontologically impossible (Agathangelou 2009; Sexton 2010: 32) This decisive move allows them to reconstitute the threshold of finite existence by drawing on the energies and life of what is articulated as “sentient flesh” (and not a human or species deserving to live) to sustain feedback loops that inform and shape their affects and decision-making capacities. Even with so many attempts to erase them by naming them ‘failed revolutions,’ the recently unfolding revolutionary becomings, from the Middle East and North Africa, to London, Greece, the United States, and Canada, black lives’ matter movements, or expressions of them in the indigenous ecological movements against the building of pipelines in their communities and the multiple occupy movements, scream for our attention to the concrete conditions from which these practices emerge to express alternative temporalities of social relations, including the intimate disruptions of dominant and hierarchized relations of the polis. Abourahme and Jayyusi (2011) challenge us to distinguish revolutionary moments from revolutions as ongoing processes. A revolutionary moment is not the same as revolutions as an ongoing process. They are temporally different. This distinction is analytically crucial as it allows us to recognize what Fanon says in Wretched of the Earth about the importance and untimeliness of revolutions. While we cannot deny the emergence of new practical solidarities and new subjects or new clarities about the sense of the world, it is important to recognize that the structure of liberation depends on the creation and

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invention of new beginnings including the promise of a new writing. As Abourahme and Jayyusi make clear: The radical and utopian moment of the emergence of new political subjectivities has to be made distinct from the revolution as process where what had become fused as ‘the people’ starts once again to differentiate itself to conduct a war of positions over the meaning, the direction and upshot of the revolution. This process will unfold over a long historical period with as yet an indeterminate result. (2011: 628)

The tension between the revolutionary moment and the revolution as an ongoing process points to the desire to shape anew the political by calling forth these new beginnings in the multifarious social movements in ways that push us to de-fatalize the present by moving beyond pretensions to know the end in what appears in the insurgencies and protests of the MENA region. The arriving of these insurgencies, the “moments that materialize from out of their irremediable disappearance” (Marriott 2011: 54), brought with them the possibility of a promise to make and write the future of the polis and the political otherwise: a promise that the structure of liberation can be made beyond property relations, beyond sovereign and narrow segregated urban expressions, and beyond autocratic terror regimes whose notion of a city is one of subjection.

Notes  1  Some of these ideas were published elsewhere. See Anna M. Agathangelou (2012) The Living and Being of the Streets: Fanon and the Arab Uprisings. Globalizations, 2012, 9 (3): 451-466 and Anna M. Agathangelou (2011) “Making Anew an Arab Regional Order? On Poetry, Sex, and Revolution” Globalizations, 2011, 8 (5): 573-584  2  This idea emerged from conversations with Heather Turcotte on abolitionist histories/struggles.  3  Coombs defines revolution as the ‘announcement of affirmation of the systematic overhaul of existing socio-economic conditions, within which the popular mobilization plays an essential role even while it remains insufficient to represent the overhaul itself’ (2011: 139).

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Roy, A. (2011) The people who created the crisis will not be the ones that come up with a solution. Interview with Arun Gupta. November 30, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/30/arundhati-roy-interview Ryan, Y. (2011) How Tunisia’s revolution began, AlJazeera.com, www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/01/ 2011126121815985483.html Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. Pantheon Books. Sassen, S. (2010) A savage sorting of winners and losers: contemporary versions of primitive accumulation, Globalizations, 7(1–2): 23–50. Sassen, S. (2011) The global street, Huffington Post, October 4. www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen/the-globalstreet_b_989880.html Sassen, S. (2013) “The Global Street: Making the Political” in Anna M. Agathangelou and Nevzat Soguk (2013) Arab Revolutions and World Transformations. Routledge. Schwedler, J (2010) “Amman Cosmopolitan: Spaces and Practices of Aspiration and Consumption,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 30 (3): 547-562 Scott, F. D. (2016) Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counterinsurgency. Zone Books. Sexton, J. (2010) Ante-anti-blackness: afterthoughts, Lateral 1, www.lateral.culturalstudiesassociation.org/issue1/content/ sexton.html Shatz, A. (2011) After Mubarak, London Review of Books, February 17. Simone, A. (2001) On the worlding of African cities, African Studies Review, 44(2): 15–41. Simone, A. (2004) People as infrastructure: intersecting fragments in Johannesburg, Public Culture, 16(3): 407–429. Simone, A. (2010) City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads. Routledge. Smith, C. A. (2016) Slow death: is the trauma of police violence killing black women? The Conversation, July 11, https:// theconversation.com/slow-death-is-the-trauma-of-police-violence-killing-black-women-62264 Soja, E. (1989) Postmodern Geographies. Verso. Stoler, A. (2002). Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. University of California Press. Swyngedouw, E. (2014) Insurgent architects, radical cities and the promise of the political, in Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw, The Post-Political and Its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticization, Spectres of Radical Politics. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 169–187. Swyngedouw E. (2015) “The Political Art of Urban Insurgency”, in Bax, S., Gielen, P and B. Ieven (Eds.) Interrupting the City: Artistic Constitutions of the Public Sphere. Valiz - Antennae, Amsterdam, pp. 161-175. Tahrir Documents. (2011) How to revolt, www.tahrirdocuments.org/2011/03/how-to-revolt/ Wilderson, F. III (2003) “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society? Social Identities 9(2): 225-240. World Economic Forum. (2012) Risk report, www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GlobalRisks_Report_2012.pdf Taylor, C. (2002) ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, Public Culture, 14 (1), 91. Yiftachel, O. (1995) The dark side of modernism: planning as control of an ethnic minority, in S. Watson and K. Gibson (eds.) Postmodern Cities and Space. Blackwell, pp. 216–242. Zunes, S. (2015) America blows it on Bahrain, Foreign Policy in Focus, 30(3): 394–423.

20 Violent Infrastructures, Places of Conflict: Urban Order in Divided Cities1 We n d y P u l l a n

Despite the optimism of early 2011, by autumn the Egyptian Arab Spring had turned darker. For the revolutionaries based in Cairo’s Tahrir Square (Figure 20.1), the reverie of the early months had given way to frequent violence and the realisation that this was to be a protracted struggle not easily won. In the acclaimed film ‘The Square’ (Al-Maidan 2013), which documents the events of the Egyptian Revolution through the eyes of activists from 2011 to 2013, one of the key figures states there is now ‘war in the Square, not revolution’. It is a critical distinction not all Cairenes would have perceived or been sympathetic to, having believed that war was evident right from the early days. The activists had become attached to the Square and, through it, believed not only that they were able to feel the pulse of the city, but that ‘whoever holds the Square holds power’.2 Tahrir Square was fought over and occupied by the revolutionaries, the military and the Muslim Brotherhood with periods of heavy violence and relative quiet, all within the complexity of a three-way struggle to preserve or gain power. Filmed by Jehane Noujaim and her crew and some of the activists, ‘The Square’ depicts the close interfaces within the needs of everyday life, waging of political activism, and hostile clashes with the authorities. The setting of Tahrir Square and its surrounding streets depicts an urban backdrop so common and familiar that it evokes a sense that this violence could arrive on the doorstep of almost any city. During the two years portrayed in the film, Cairo slips repeatedly in and out of violence. Everyday locations and objects are conscripted into places of mass demonstration and protest, barricades, strategic viewing points, discussion groups, places of prayer, soup kitchens, first aid stations, hospitals. Alliances and associations are formed and broken. Yet to a good extent, urban life – working, meeting, shopping, being at home, being in the city – goes on in all of its expected and quotidian ways. Conflict was integral to the revolution and today the Square retains the memory and symbolic associations that represent dissatisfaction with the country’s leadership and the

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Figure 20.1  Cairo, Tahrir Square, 8 February 2011 (Wikicommons, Ramy Raoof http://www.flickr.com/photos/38290178@N06) attempts to replace it with something better (Said 2015). Violence also remains just under the surface of the Egyptian political system and society and the places inhabited by local residents; this thin skin has occasionally been ruptured with minimal provocation and then suppressed. In the example of Tahrir Square, conflict can be said to be relatively constant and ongoing; violence, in its forceful physical mode, is more episodic, having appeared, disappeared and re-emerged again. Yet, once present, the threat of violence remains ominous, and one of the concerns of this chapter will be how once violence becomes habitual and even regularised, it is often embedded in the structures of the city so that each violent episode retains an afterlife. In doing so, it is worth considering where places of more and less violence are to be found, to what extent they are recognisable and under which conditions they flourish. Prolonged conflict and episodes of violence are related, in Cairo or any other city. Both extend beyond limited periods of physical hostility to exist in memory and experience as well as in anticipation. It is not surprising to find that the terms ‘violence’ and ‘conflict’ are used interchangeably, in general discussion, by practitioners and in scholarly discourse, and very often little distinction is made between them. In the literature of humanitarian organisations where it is important to determine a chain of events in order to understand better ways of acting to alleviate suffering, conflict and violence are often seen causally (World Bank 2011: 11–12; ISS 2012; Serafin 2010). In scholarly literature, violence is regularly used for studies of economic inequality and widespread deprivation, whereas conflict often applies to well-defined political hostilities based upon diversities in multicultural and multi-ethnic societies.3 However, although violence and conflict are allied, they are not the same phenomenon. This chapter will focus on that complex ­relationship in an examination of the ideas and practices of conflict and violence as they exist in cities.

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The discussion will focus on ethno-national differences and hostilities and argue that conflict and related violence have become largely located in urban settings; hence we must examine these conditions in terms of cities. Conflict and violence are increasingly worldwide occurrences, but in this chapter the focus will be certain cities that have a long history of ethno-national and religious conflict in the Balkans and Middle East, including: Sarajevo, Mostar, Cairo, Manama, Jerusalem, Beirut and Nicosia. Significantly all of these cities, each in a different way, experience embedded conflict manifested in periodic violence – present and/or past. In each, conflict dominates significant aspects of everyday life. It is hardly an exhaustive list, but together these cities offer examples of different manifestations of ethnic conflict, some which have been visibly divided over long periods and others where fissures have been more hidden or concealed. Comparison is implicit rather than direct as each city has its own distinct causes and patterns of violence and conflict; nonetheless, in the broader conceptual areas discussed here, the common aspects of certain urban phenomena emerge and are worth noting.4 My primary intention is to examine how such factors figure as part of the urban fabric – in its architecture, spatial configurations, infrastructures, visible fields and material markings – and how this physical environment connects (or not) to social interaction. Too often such spatial concerns are assumed rather than described and their complexity is overlooked as they become secondary features in favour of a focus on social behaviour and interaction. Why Tahrir Square or any other similar place rises to such an iconic level of importance within a city experiencing high levels of conflict and some violence is not easily answered. In the uprisings of early 2011 referred to collectively as the Arab Spring, large squares became important as gathering places (Rabbat 2012; Said 2015). In Bahrain’s capital Manama, the Pearl Roundabout (Dawar al-Lulu) intersection changed from being a barren traffic island with a large solitary monument commemorating the pearling industry to take on the characteristics of a civic square during the revolution (Figure 20.2).

Figure 20.2  Manama, Pearl Roundabout, 14 March 2011 (Wikicommons, http://bahrain.viewbook.com/)

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In a city with few civic spaces, people needed somewhere to congregate to express their dissatisfaction, their differences and their demands. However unpromising and for only a brief period of time, the Pearl Roundabout provided a fundamental environment for the conflict; effectively, it became a place, a public ‘square’ rather than a traffic infrastructure, engendering civic experience and dissent (Bahrain Observer 2013).5 After dodging the traffic and the security services, demonstrators were seen to kiss the ground once inside the roundabout. Since then, and with the demise of the revolution, the Pearl Roundabout has been dismantled, effectively removing one significant vehicle for demonstrating Bahraini identity through the symbolism of what had become a public place of conflict. For Middle East watchers there was a particular paradox in that large public squares, like Cairo’s Tahrir, were not indigenous to local architectural traditions but were imported into the Middle East by European colonial regimes. In gravitating to these places local populations demonstrated the hybrid nature of space already present in their cities as well as the potential of such places to support not only new functions, but also new meanings forged in conflict. Such experience also points to the need to examine carefully the changing capacity of urban structures and spaces for conflict and violence and the relationship between these two conditions.

Changing conditions: new conflicts, new urban arenas Whether justified or not, cities are sometimes associated with dystopian traditions and, as such, the locus for violence. This may be because urban life is considered as a generator for certain behavioural problems, such as crime, gangs, delinquency and corruption. On the other hand, cities are also regarded as being on the receiving end of violence caused by wars, external attacks and confrontations between sovereign states. One further type of urban violence and conflict has to do with internal confrontations based upon questions of identity – ethnic, national, racial or religious differences that find themselves embodied in cities. This third area will be the primary focus of the discussion here, although it may overlap in some ways with the first two conditions. Until recently, ­so-called identity conflicts and violence were given little credence as being distinct urban phenomena; rather they were recognised only as symptomatic of overly authoritarian or erratically weak state sovereignty.6 However, two major changes in the latter part of the twentieth century have dislodged this thinking: first, the nature of conflict itself has altered; and, second, these new conflicts are increasingly rooted in cities. On the first change, various scholars and commentators have noted what appears to be the decline of large-scale wars in the twenty-first century, although most do not regard the world today as a less violent place.7 Using the traditional understanding of war as armed conflict between states or between governments and organized domestic armed groups, John Mueller (2009: 308) claims war has been replaced by ‘opportunistic predation waged by packs – often remarkably small ones – of criminals, bandits, and thugs engaging in armed conflict’. Mary Kaldor (2012) agrees we are witnessing major deviations but proposes a shift to ‘new wars’, which are blurring the distinctions between war, organised crime and large-scale violations of human rights. She points out a number of major areas that characterise new wars: rather than state armed forces, they are waged by

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combinations of regular armies, private security contractors, mercenaries, jihadists, warlords, paramilitaries, etc. (Kaldor 2013). New wars have a variety of characteristics: first of all, they are fought primarily in the name of identity politics rather than ideological or geopolitical interests. Rather than major battles, new wars are directed primarily against civilians to control and/or displace populations. And instead of state finance, new wars rely upon private funds, often from sources, like diaspora groups, that are global in scope. Kaldor stresses that new wars are ambiguous, falling into the vacuums formed by the erosion of what has heretofore been understood as legitimate, organised state violence, or what she calls old wars; these conflicts are inclusive and geographically diverse, and may involve such varied aspects as organised crime, ethnic cleansing, inner city violence and terrorism. Security controls have also altered in their responses, often becoming more fragmented and light-footed, resorting to informal rather than military undertakings. All of these changes point to conflicts that are at one and the same time local and global. Persistence and recurrence over time are key factors of new wars. I emphasise this particularly as a temporal characteristic that comes into play in urban conflicts. Kaldor (2013: 3) suggests that long-term economic and political benefits may be at the root of extended conflicts. This may be true, but, as well, new wars often exacerbate critical divisions in societies – whether economic, ethnic, religious or racial – and these undoubtedly contribute to persistent and/or intermittent conflict over long periods.8 No longer are wars declared, fought and resolved, then to lead to a period of reconstruction. New wars are characterised by peaks and troughs of heightened violence and relative peace over long periods. Significantly, this factor places the idea of ‘post-conflict’ into question. Kaldor rarely mentions cities, and urban centres do not figure in her arguments in an explicit way, although many of her studies of new wars are in cities. Moreover, she makes two points that do implicate cities with respect to new wars. First of all, she states that the wide geographical territories, from specific local struggles to global interconnectedness, shift new wars away the jurisdiction of sovereign states (2012: 4–7). With this observation, regions and cities come into focus in new ways. And second, Kaldor stresses that new wars tend to target civilian populations; non-combatants are the ones to suffer (2012: 8–9).9 This consigns conflicts to cities where most of the civilian populations reside. So, to summarise, we find urban conflicts, of long or uncertain duration, focusing on civilian populations, embedded in the identity concerns of nation, ethnicity or religion. If war has been the domain of sovereign states through most of the post-Enlightenment period, older traditions recall the ubiquity of the fortress or citadel in each urban centre. Some scholars suggest that once again war is not only returning to cities, but also becoming ‘the dominant metaphor in describing the perpetual and boundless condition of urban societies’ (Graham 2010: xiii; Virilio 2005). The interest in military urbanism may seem extreme or limiting with respect to the diverse range of factors that make a city, yet it is indicative of widespread concern for the colonisation of everyday urban life by military control systems and infrastructures so that ‘peace and war become less distinct’ (Graham 2010: 73). The blurring of military and civilian remits regards cities as persistent targets to be made secure, with the implication that cities are fragile and open to abuse, that in dangerous times everyday urban life must be sacrificed. Cities are not only targets; urban wars may come from within as much as without. From 1992 to 1995 Sarajevo was subject to repeated attacks by a mixture of state, ­renegade state and non-state militants who focused their firepower on civilians and

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civilian habitation. These were not distant warriors targeting a foreign city, but local residents – at one and the same time both civilian and militant – supported by their ­co-patriots. The Sarajevo siege rendered sectors of the city and its citizens subservient to and representative of particular identity struggles. During this time, extraordinary measures were taken to preserve daily life (Dona 2006: 318), producing an everyday intimacy of violence and necessity, where markets and water depots were attacked. One particularly dangerous street became called ‘Sniper Alley’ and many residents personally knew their attackers. As a city in a valley surrounded by hills from which the Serbian snipers aimed and shot, each part of the natural topography was well trodden and familiar to all, yet itself was transformed into a means of bestowing death. One Bosniak resident and ­survivor of the siege recalled that it was as if the battles took place ‘inside my hand’ (CinC interview 2010). In urban conflicts, civilian structures become integral to the fighting, not only ­strategically, but with the intention to cause disproportionate damage and long-term reconstruction. Known as the ‘Dahiya Doctrine’, the strategy emerged from Israel’s 2006 flattening of Dahiyeh, the Shi’a quarters in southern Beirut (IMEU 2012). Hezbollah’s rapid reconstruction of these neighbourhoods was a response in kind, making (re)construction a potent weapon, endearing the population as well as sending a message to Israel. Built structures have been regarded as players not only in reconstruction but in urban battles, themselves becoming combatants. Israel regular demolishes the family houses of Palestinians it regards as terrorists; resistance groups then rebuild the structures (ICAHD). Graham (2004: 204) reports the 2002 claim of Brigadier-General Efraim Eitam (ret.) of the Israel Defence Forces that Palestinian habitation is a ‘Jihad of buildings’. No longer simply passive recipients of violent acts, built structures were referred to by Eitam as agents: ‘we are dealing with use of urban areas as weapon, the building is a weapon’. Here, an officer of the army of a sovereign state is accusing not only the members of an occupied population, but the houses belonging to them, of fighting a war and causing conflict. Cities in the Balkans, Lebanon, Israel–Palestine and more recently in Ukraine, Nigeria, Iraq and Syria are not simply sites of conflict but highly contested. Their populations wrangle for spatial, political and cultural domination that they believe reflects their own identity; they interpret and promote it to legitimise their claims to the urban domain. Hostilities may have roots in sovereign states, but much of it is played out in cities where people live and claim physical places as uniquely their own; street corners, views, parks, courtyards, even smells and sounds are resonant with embodied experience to give the conflicts a particularly concrete aspect. A statement attributed to the mayor of Philadelphia after the urban riots of the 1960s in the USA tell us ‘from now on, a state’s borders run inside its cities’ (Virilio 2005: 15; 2012: 25). At the time such a statement would have been odd; today it has become an uncomfortable truth. New wars feed upon specifically urban conditions and cities have become arenas for conflict, fed by ethnonational and religious violence from within as well as without. The World Bank began its 2011 report on urban violence with the statement that ‘in many cases, the scale of urban violence can eclipse that of open warfare’ (ix). Urban conflicts are fluid and complex, often asymmetrical and not necessarily bilateral; all rely upon some form of violence to re-form the city. Hence, there is the conjunction of new wars and cities as the stage for many loosely related and disparate forms of violence that set a new agenda for many cities in the twenty-first century.

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Conflict and violence There is no simple way to measure violence (North, Wallis and Weingast 2009: 14) and it is extremely difficult to know whether cities are becoming increasingly violent.10 As the world’s population moves into cities, one might assume that conflicts will follow. And it is very important to remember that, throughout history, cities have been regularly formed on cultural fault lines; they have always been meeting grounds of diversity. There is little question that this has sometimes bred strife: as Peter Sloterdijk has noted, ‘more communication means above all more conflict’ (quoted in Zizek 2009: 50). Yet, at least to some extent, the means to deal with such hostility comes from within the problems themselves; conflict can be an ‘integrative force’, in the words of Georg Simmel (1971: 74–75), if only because ‘opposition is often the only means for making life with actually unbearable people at least possible’. Above all, it is important to remember that cities are by nature diverse, and without diversity a city is something other than a city. Following this fundamental understanding, it would be fair to say that conflict is part of the urban condition, not something that can be removed or banished. Conflict exists in most of our primary institutions; democratic systems of governance, judicial procedures, sport, and even many commercial transactions are adversarial. In  modern cities, many of these institutions may be state structures, or, increasingly, transnational or global, but critically, they are located in cities and it is cities, often capitals or large cosmopolitan centres, that give them a sense of place and identity. Over years, or even centuries, various protocols have been developed to facilitate the activities of urban institutions in ways that are constructive and fruitful, although not necessarily consensual. More broadly, North, Wallis and Weingast’s explanation of institutions as not only ‘the rules of the game’, but ‘patterns of interaction’ (2009: 15), indicates the importance of the habitual. In cities, over time, the habitual often adjusts to become hybrid, slowly incorporating more diversity, so that conflict figures prominently to be part of our urban lives. Unlike conflict, violence is normally considered outside the desired norms and shunned in institutions or in urban situations of any sort.11 This observation opens up the possibility that conflict and violence, rather than being complementary, may be oppositional. Conflict and violence as contrasting phenomena figure in the work of sociologist Michel Wieviorka, and his distinctions between them carry relevance here. In a study of violence in the post-industrial and post-Cold-War era, Wieviorka asserts that wellestablished structures for conflict in class struggle and geopolitics have broken down to be replaced by other conditions, such as criminality, race hatred and terrorism, that dominate new upsurges of violence (2009: 14). Conflict has not disappeared but appears to be spreading and diversifying, and without the unifying structures of class and the Cold War, it leaves individuals ‘up to their own devices’. This may take on violent forms. Significantly, he finds that conflict and violence derive from different structural modes, arguing that conflict and violence are ‘products of distinct or even contradictory logics’ (2009: 8). At the same time, he does not underestimate the complexity of the relationship between violence and conflict; he describes it not as an absolute distinction but as a spectrum ‘from completely institutionalized conflict to completely unbridled violence, [where] there is an endless vista of situations that are less clear-cut, and more uncertain or vague’ (2009: 25). Wieviorka regards conflict as being stabilised by institutional settings where negotiations can be carried out or modalities found

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(2009: 10), whereas violence is essentially a rupture or series of ruptures with a loss of ­reference points (2009: 16). The two conditions of violence and conflict are ultimately contradictory. Like Kaldor, Wieviorka is not particularly interested in cities; yet his framing of the contrasting relationship between conflict and violence offers modalities that are potentially urban. I would, however, qualify his comments with the caution that although the two conditions may be contradictory they are often not separate and may very well overlap or function reciprocally. The complexity that this creates both stems from and reflects actual urban situations; certainly comparative research over 10 years by CinC has shown intricate interactions between the two. In other words, we should avoid using violence and conflict interchangeably, yet we cannot ignore the interconnections. Conflict may be fruitfully understood within the idea of agon, the ancient Greek term for struggle or competition. Agon may incorporate violence, but within limitations and protocols to articulate it as a constructive practice with some form of productive output; this is alien to a solely negative result. The idea has persisted in history and found a place in modern political philosophy, particularly in investigations into the nature of demo­cracy as an adversarial but positive process (Wenman 2013; Mouffe 2000; 2005; Connolly 2002), placing ‘contestation at the heart of politics’ (Fossen 2008: 376). Elsewhere, I have argued that agon was a fundamental aspect not just of ancient Greek democracy but of the ancient polis, which itself exemplified the ability to maintain different and sometimes opposing identities within the whole (Aristotle 1984a: 1161b; 1984b: 1261a). Not only can agon, in the context of the city, be usefully considered at the root of many of our modern institutions where conflict is structured and channelled, but agon is specifically rooted in the city (Pullan 2015a). The notion of conflict that persists with a productive function is part of the urban condition. The possibilities inherent in the institutional nature of conflict, in its broadest sense, have been appreciated, but the terminology is confusing. Some studies posit different modes of violence, more positive or more negative, rather than regarding it as conflict (North, Wallis and Weingast 2009). Many have followed Walter Benjamin’s important observation that violence has a creative side, rendering it more scope than simply the negative characterisation of a ‘rupture’ (1978). Particularly in anthropology, violence is seen to have a foundational, often ritual, purpose. And in some research, violence and conflict are regarded through their capacity for institutionalisation. Although he does little to differentiate between conflict and violence in his study of ethnic hostilities in Hindu and Muslim cities in India, Ashutosh Varshney (2002) points to the importance of communal institutions in stemming violence. But beyond the semantic confusions, it is worth noting that positive and negative practices and outcomes may figure, and specifically in conjunction with cities, positive and negative forms emerge from within the urban institutions and structures. As much as is feasible, and for greater clarity, I shall refer to the more constructive conditions as conflict and the negative ones as violence. This distinction can be seen in many ways, but my main concern is how we can see and understand the different qualities of violence and of conflict specifically in cities. The role of institutions, recalling their characterisation by North, Wallis and Weingast as both rules and fluid patterns of inter­ action, is useful in terms of the urban structures that both initiate and perpetuate violence and conflict and are formed from violence and conflict. There are an enormous number of ways to consider urban institutions of violence and conflict, but in the remainder of

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this chapter I shall concentrate on just two: infrastructures and public places of encounter. Both of these have the advantage of being concrete examples of violence and conflict that affect urban conditions over time. When cities suffer ethnic, national and/or religious hostilities over long periods, division emerges as one of the most potent experience – in Jerusalem, Belfast, Nicosia, Beirut, Baghdad and others – in many ways taking on an institutional character to become a dominant part of civic life. Thus the long-term effects, to be found in built structures and their effects on socio-politics, are revealing. In addition to this, the urban fabric forms a setting or background for activities and may absorb and manifest violence and conflict. Thus, the examples I illustrate are intended to reflect a spectrum, as Wieviorka describes it, from institutionalised conflict to unbridled violence (2009: 21).

Infrastructures of violence Cities that experience long-term conflict and violence may be altered irrevocably by these conditions. At periods of very high violence, they may succumb to wide-scale and intense destruction as we see in Aleppo and other Syrian cities. However, over the longer periods typical of new wars, tangible evidence of hostilities can exist in construction as well as destruction: built structures, security installations and topographic alterations will form the contested townscape. These may be new structures and/or existing ones that have altered to take on specific long-term roles as the conflicts themselves become more enduring. As we have seen in the example of Cairo’s Tahrir Square, such structures and places are not devoid of human experience, and it is possible to say that human memory becomes embedded in the physical fabric. Johan Galtung’s idea of structural violence, where inequality and injustice are ­systematically built into the structures of society, may be manifest in social, political or economic terms and further justified by what are regarded as cultural norms (1969; 1990). Structural violence can also take on particular resonance in cities as an embedded and systematic physical manifestation often referred to as infrastructural violence. Galtung (1969) distinguishes between wars and post-war periods that breed inherently unstable personal violence and structural violence that tends to be stable in its institutions. However, with the emergence of long and persistent urban conflicts, it is possible to see a blurring of the two modes: infrastructural interventions, purportedly intended to offer stability, may result in highly unstable and violent situations within the urban topography and its associated civic life. This includes intra-urban fences, barriers, dividing zones and walls intended to separate warring factions, such as the so-called ‘peacelines’ of Belfast, the buffer zone of Nicosia, the dividing motorways of Beirut, the separation barrier in Jerusalem, and the many prefabricated walls erected in Baghdad. Such structures are used ostensibly for security in order to stabilise embattled ­societies, but although they may effectively separate hostile groups,12 over time they tend to consolidate ­violence within them by dividing cities. In other words, structural violence through the use of physical infrastructures becomes a key feature of urban conflicts and fundamentally changes cities. For developing and sustaining large modern cities, infrastructures are necessary requirements that always cause substantial change, with the inevitability that some form

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of violence to urban life will accompany their implementation and use. Dennis Rodgers and Bruce O’Neill (2012: 402) explain that this is because the infrastructure demarcates both literally and figuratively which points in urban contexts can and should be connected, and which should not, the kinds of people and goods that can and should circulate easily, and which should stay put, and who can and should be integrated within the city, and who should be left outside of it, for example.

Such a statement is not benign even though in most cities the advantages of infrastructures are normally claimed to outweigh any disadvantage incurred. However, in circumstances that are dominated by extreme urban strife, the situation becomes more acute when infrastructures, such as walls, roads and other transportation networks, demolitions associated with new construction, and even new public services are installed. In contested cities, infrastructures are not always fairly implemented without bias, often being used to further the interests of certain parties and consistently penalise other sectors of the population (Graham 2004; Pullan et al. 2007). This is particularly problematic with infrastructures identified as the result of so-called ‘dog-whistle’ policies, where alternative agendas are present but not immediately perceptible to most of the people they affect. Too often the neutrality of infrastructures is upheld by divorcing them from social and political contexts, and in urban conflicts the infrastructure may be used as a means of separating parties less for their own benefit than to police them more easily, or it may be employed to alienate certain groups from each other and to privilege one interest over another (Sibley 1995; Pullan 2013; Brown 2010). Walls and other forms of boundary are integral parts of cities, and in many cases they are essential organisers of urban space; without them we would be unable to orient ourselves. Historically, the ancient city wall not only protected the inhabitants in time of siege, but also denoted citizenship; in a broad sense it was a physical marker of inclusivity, of participation in the civic project, and gave unity to those who lived within its jurisdiction. Gateways were meeting places and sites of ritual entry and departure, and as such were physically differentiated to allow movement and a variety of functions that were necessary to promote transition. However, more recently, urban infrastructures that bear no more than formal resemblance to the old city walls have become increasingly prevalent. New walls and boundaries imposed in contested cities are there only to divide and segregate. Many have been constructed to separate embattled groups, often against the wishes of one or more sectors of the population. Today, the modular concrete wall, topped by razor wire and smeared with graffiti on its face, has become the iconic image of divided cities. Not intended to include transitional spaces, and without the capacity to incorporate different activities, these barriers are one-dimensional in function: they divide, exclusively and almost at any cost. Nearly always described as ‘temporary’, such measures usually become permanent fixtures of their cities. Acute urban dividers may be hidden or disguised. Major roads, inner city motorways and other transportation lines often act as efficient segregators of populations from different classes, wealth levels, ethnicities or race.13 In Mostar, the sixteenth-century Ottoman bridge, Stari Most, was destroyed in the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s and at the end of the fighting the international community focused on rebuilding it as a symbol of regenerative multiculturalism (UNESCO). Yet, it was not the river but the main road, known as the Bulevar, that was the dividing line between the two hostile communities of Croatians and Bosniaks (Figure 20.3).

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Figure 20.3  Mostar, The Bulevar (Conflict in Cities) A relatively simple transportation infrastructure, the Bulevar still remains war-­damaged with visible bullet holes and shell damage in many places along its length. Calame and Pasic (2009) claim that post-war reconstruction has eluded the Bulevar because, despite being the fulcrum of the city, it is no longer emblematic. Their opinion seems vindicated in the approach taken with the historic bridge, which captured the inter­national imagination. Its destruction was dramatically reported (Block and Bellamy 1993) and with the added advantage of a graceful structure and picturesque location the bridge could be considered to look like a fitting symbol of unity. The more mundane Bulevar remains pockmarked from battle, unreconstructed, and little effort has been made to provide meeting grounds for the estranged communities on either side.14 At a crucial point in the city’s topography, the neglected road perpetuates the fissure in the centre of Mostar and h­ arbours memories of war violence. Roads may be used to connect as well as divide and it is in this double action where the privileging of one group over another can be subtle but extreme. In Jerusalem, the inner city motorway Road 1 runs from Damascus Gate, the northern entrance of the walled Old City, northwards through the New City, following the former borderline that was noman’s land during the 1948–1967 division between Israel and Jordan. It was argued that this swath of open territory, where war damage had cleared a relatively open site, was the obvious place to lay a new road. Beyond expediency, broad and speedy Road 1 effectively redefines the old division between Israelis and Palestinians in West and East Jerusalem, and in its connecting function, it is one of the main vehicular links to bring Israelis from the illegal settlements in the north into the centre of Jerusalem (Pullan et al. 2007).15 Road 1 allows the Jewish settlers to live more comfortably on expropriated Arab land, consolidating that particular act of violence which defines much of post 1967 Jerusalem. The four- to six-lane divided carriageway is an example of an efficient but one-dimensional infrastructure that has become a central feature of Jerusalem, yet provides no ground for diversity or encounter in a badly ­contested city.

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The route of this inner city motorway has been reinforced by the Jerusalem Light Rail, an Israeli tram system that also connects the northern settlements to the centre (Figure 20.4). On its way, the tram passes through and stops at the Palestinian neighbourhoods of Shuafat and Beit Hanina, and in times of relative quiet is used by Palestinians; to some extent it may be understood as a space of encounter for Palestinians and Israelis (Nolte and Yacobi 2015).16 Some Palestinian Jerusalemites regard the tram as part of their right to municipal services and make use of it; others boycott it in resistance against Israel and its occupation of East Jerusalem. When violence in the city escalated in 2014, Light Rail stations initially became targets for attacks by Palestinians, who smashed and set them alight; some passengers were injured and killed (Baumann 2014). The Light Rail is a classic case of violence directed against an infrastructure that, superficially, appears as a neutral urban resource, but is actually part of a larger system that accentuates the political divisions and inequalities, of the sort described by Rodgers and O’Neill (2012: 403–404). Personal violence is directed at structural violence and whatever common ground for encountering conflict in a non-violent manner, such as the once-shared space of the tram carriages and platform, has shrunk to a point of almost non-existence. The attacks readdress the place of neutrality of the Light Rail and, although many would not condone the violence, bring to visibility an unjust system. Together, Road 1 and the Light Rail were established as standard city infrastructural systems, but at the same time they help to perpetuate segregation and impart varying levels of violence, depending upon the different populations, and on the city as a whole. In such a case, the urban and the political are completely intertwined, and violence is embedded at levels of policy, practice, resistance and symbolism. Major infrastructures like these refabricate large urban sectors with permanent effect. Nicosia offers a pertinent example of a city that is more peaceful than Jerusalem but

Figure 20.4  Jerusalem, Damascus Gate Light Rail station (Conflict in Cities)

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suffering an impasse to do with an infrastructure whose only purpose is to divide (Pullan 2015c: 233–238). The Nicosia buffer zone (Figure 20.5), officially closed to all except UN forces since 1974, cuts across the centre of the city, and the problem today is how the area might be reintegrated into both sides of the city. It follows the path of Hermes (Ermou) Street, the former high street and mixed commercial zone where, pre-closure, bilingual traders sold their goods and fraternised across ethnic divisions (Bakshi 2016). Today the buffer zone divides Nicosia as the international border between Turkish and Greek Cyprus. In recent years, bi-communal movements have emerged to develop ways of reuniting the city, many of which have been instigated by a younger and unilingual generation who now communicate with each other in English.17 Just as it is difficult to reinstate the fluency of language, it is even more difficult to knit the city together across a buffer zone that has produced a profound fissure in the urban fabric and life. Uninhabited for over 40 years, the infrastructure of division has created immense spatial discontinuities in what had been the most populated and vibrant part of Nicosia. The area that was once most alive is now referred to by locals as the ‘dead zone’ (Pappadakis 2005). Effectively, there is nothing of urban value in the buffer zone, so there is no reason why either side should engage with it as part of everyday life. Two rump cities – Turkish north Nicosia and Greek south Nicosia – have grown apart to face out to their hinterlands rather than inward in reciprocity with each other. Sociological studies show that over time fissures such as these encourage distrust when populations vilify the unknown other side (Sibley 1995), and in a situation like this, where in recent years Turkish and Greek Cypriots have lived in relative quiet, the buffer zone continues to embody violence in

Figure 20.5 Nicosia, map of the walled city (Conflict in Cities)

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its physical presence. If there is to be any substantial reintegration, part of the problem will be one of planning and design; it is not easy to reinstate a city centre, a point made clear by the valiant attempts and considerable failures of the joint Nicosia Master Plan (Petridou n.d.). The Nicosia buffer zone is an imposed and anti-urban infrastructure that in its present state remains uni-dimensional with no mediative capacity for the necessary encounters needed to open up a long divided city. Imposed urban barriers – whether walls, buffers zones, roads, transport systems, etc. – in the long term become permanent infrastructures that absorb and perpetuate violence. They contribute to a condition that I have called ‘frontier urbanism’ (Pullan 2011), where civilian populations confront each other in hostile city topographies and the spaces and structures around them are designed to support such urban violence. Such infrastructures not only reflect the violence that already exists in cities, but in their essentially closed and inert nature, they also sustain it. In other words, violence feeds upon violence. The infrastructures may not be the most deadly features of conflicted cities, but, once built, they endure; the Berlin wall is one of the few examples of demolition, but only after it had profoundly altered the city. Roads are even more permanent; we know from the survival of Roman roads that, once a major alignment is there, it probably will last for ­millennia. These deceivingly potent infrastructures are increasingly inserted into cities already ­vulnerable from high levels of conflict, where they quickly create new urban realities. Like the walls in Berlin and Jerusalem, they may become iconic, attracting graffiti and murals and sometimes political tourism, but because of their primarily one-dimensional, dividing and controlling function, they retain the violence with which they were created and usually do not become integrated into the city in any beneficial way.

Places of conflict When investigating cities that suffer high levels of conflict, identifying infrastructures of violence can be done with reasonable confidence. Probing places where conflict is ­present in more complex, nuanced and constructive ways, perhaps with intermittent outbursts of violence, is more difficult. Nonetheless, if conflict is indeed different than violence and if it functions as a more constructive part of the urban order, situations where conflict is present and distinct from violence are well worth ascertaining. One of the key questions to ask is how some urban spaces are sufficiently differentiated to accommodate diversity and openness. We have already seen that infrastructures of ­violence tend to be one-dimensional, and not only are they undifferentiated, but also they detract from the diversity and richness of the town around them. Although direct interaction between hostile groups or individuals is not usual in civic spaces, other forms of encounter that may be visual or simply a shared experience of the same place are important in cities where heavy conflict dominates. After all, in most cities we have very little direct interaction with strangers, even under conditions of peacefulness and goodwill. In conflict situations, some form of experience with the other – s­ eeing a face that does not look like your own, hearing another language – keeps a certain awareness and dynamic of urban diversity in play. Yet, when heavy conflict dominates a city, and with it the propensity to establish barriers and dividing infrastructures, there may also be the erasure of places of encounter between different ethnic, national, religious

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and/or racial groups in the belief that this will limit violence. Public places are often the first to be restricted, regarded as too dangerous, difficult or expensive to control and secure. Restricting orders are applied to squares, stop and search becomes an intrusion for selected groups and individuals, checkpoints are introduced to detain large numbers of people, trading in outdoor markets is limited, large festivals and political gatherings are cancelled, and police and military presence is substantially increased. While some of these measures may reassure an anxious public, very often they are applied in uneven and asymmetrical ways, using profiling which favours some sectors of the population over others; ultimately this can cause more antagonism. If the measures become enacted over a long period, they may irremediably change the nature of civic space, causing spatial discontinuities which permanently deform the physical fabric and the activities that take place within them. These discontinuities particularly affect mobility, obstructing well-used footpaths and vehicular routes, but at a more subtle level can disrupt the basic spatial qualities of a city (Pullan 2013): what connects, what does not, viewlines, scale and density. Ultimately this will impact upon how the space of the city ‘feels’ to its inhabitants and their perceptions of it. Encountering or avoiding people and places in the city is learned, whether consciously or intuitively, over long periods of time and spatial discontinuities caused by imposed barriers can have long-term or even permanent effects upon these deeply ingrained aspects of city life and being. They may also make the difference between whether civic spaces work effectively or not at all. In Cairo, for example, in response to the populist demonstrations of 2011, steel fences were built extensively along the streets in the central areas of the city to restrict and alter movement in public space. This has been interpreted as an excessive reaction of an overly authoritarian state (El-Shahed 2013). Although detouring around a set of steel fences may not seem like a high price to pay for apparently increased security, it is worth remembering that urban paths and routes normally develop over years, or even centuries, to link and populate key places in the city. They facilitate personal mobility and the ability to connect, for urban citizens to encounter each other beyond immediate family and neighbours, and for spontaneous spaces of interaction to materialise over time. Such movement facilitates not just social interfaces but trade and commerce, political involvement, religious life, tourism and, in a more general sense, the experience of the urban commons (Amin 2008). Movement is one of the most significant ways that we experience the continuity of a city. When established mobility is obstructed, as is common in cities that experience high levels of conflict, the urban space can become not only divided but fragmented. In short, the delicate balance of diversity and continuity of the city is at stake, and, with it, the richness that makes a city a city. Although regular encounters between diverse individuals and groups is essential for the identity of the city, the question here is what role does diversity play when it is conflictual and what is the capacity of urban places to absorb these conflicts sufficiently to establish some level of coherence that offers both identity and diversity? Just as segregation is damaging, undisputed inclusivity may also detract from urban variability. Inclusivity may be an important factor for producing constructive conflict in some urban settings, but it does not automatically lead to respect or harmony and may actually result in an overly regulated city. On the other hand, one of the main characteristics of high levels of ethno-national or religious conflict is that identity is deemed to be more important than broad urban inclusivity. A severe imbalance between the two is clearly problematic. Rather, reciprocity between them, with more fluid dynamics, may

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be more effective, being dependent upon the capacity for differentiation, the recognition of conflict through civic encounter, as well as a varied and reflective spatial topography throughout the city. These reciprocities may play a more significant role than undifferentiated inclusivity. Richard Sennett (1996: 141) refers to a ‘maturing’ experience of conflict, where cities should not be planned with the intention of bringing them order and clarity as a whole. Rather, he notes that cities should be planned for variety and change. To this one can add that the state of undifferentiated inclusivity is not normally standard throughout all urban experience, and particularly when conflict is at a high pitch, levels of inclusivity might need to be assessed against identity. The problem of inclusivity and identity arises in Beirut in the ancient and cosmopolitan crossroads known as the Bourj (Sahat al-Burj, also referred to as Martyrs’ Square, Figure 20.6). This meeting ground has survived war and destruction to embody the complex political and cultural differences that characterise Lebanon today (Khalaf 2006a). Since the long civil war (1975–1990), the Square has been left unreconstructed, lying mostly derelict between Sunni and Christian Beirut and far from Dahiyeh, the Shi’a centre in the south. As a repository of Beirut’s history, today its one remaining feature is a large monument to early Lebanese nationalist heroes (by Marino Mazzacurati, 1960) who were executed by the Ottomans in 1916, important to many Beirutis because these figures refer to an elusive unified Lebanon;18 it is a dream that represents what the country is not at present. The Square is too precious to leave to one community and Beirut is not sufficiently integrated to agree on a joint renewal. It demands attention and there has been a long ­succession of plans to redesign it (Khalaf 2006a; 2006b). No group has claimed it formally, yet the Square acts as a gathering place for memorable, often divisive, events. After the assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005, a number of demonstrations, some partisan, some for national unity, converged on the space over a series of

Figure 20.6 Beirut, Martyrs’ Square and the memorial to the nationalist ­martyrs (Conflict in Cities)

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days. In his 2006 study, Samir Khalaf (2006a: 15) calls the Bourj ‘a testing ground for collective mobilisation’.19 Beirut remains a city of enclaves and borders (Bou Akar and Hafeda 2011); since the civil war, the split between Sunni and Shi’a has become more pronounced with the construction of Dahiyeh, a full-fledged Shi’a city built by Hezbollah (Kastrissianakis 2013). The Bourj is thought by some to be the only place that is large and diverse enough to absorb all of the pressures of such a fragmented city as Beirut (Sarkis 2006: 21); the Square’s sheer emptiness in the centre of the city is an example of the spatial discontinuity that prolonged violence can bring. Moreover, it remains a place of recollection of painful memories. These have become part of the urban history of Beirut and the Bourj as an institution has become a place for dissent over unity or integration. Beirut may not be capable of more at this point in its history. There is no question that the worrying possibility of slipping into another war lies just below the surface of urban life, yet the demonstrations of conflicting ideas of the present Lebanon were openly staged in Martyrs’ Square to set agendas for the immediate future. The need for a differentiated urban structure, with the means to function as a place with conflicting meanings, experience and memories, is a complex requirement, but even in its very unreconstructed and contested state, the Bourj showed some capacity for the necessary diversity and flexibility. Size and scale certainly have impact in this very large open space and are daunting for those who would wish to refurbish it, although smaller adjacent spaces have been claimed by some communities. The western edge is firmly in the Hariri camp with the enormous Ottoman-style Muhammad al-Amin Mosque (built by Hariri and often referred to as the Hariri Mosque) and next to it the large tent that forms the temporary tomb of the assassinated Prime Minister. Although Ottoman references are increasingly common power symbols in the Middle East, the juxtaposition with the Martyrs’ Monument, distinctly anti-Ottoman in its sentiments, articulates the mixed and even confused messages that the Square conveys today. Nonetheless, it is the temporary structure surrounding the Hariri tomb that really conveys unfinished business. To date, no permanent construction inhabits the Square itself. In many ways the legacy of the Bourj is one of uncertainty as it sits on a knife-edge between narrow nationalist interests and the re-establishment of a contested but potentially inclusive civic place. Many Beirutis attest to its ongoing centrality and various groups remain sufficiently attached in order to play out their own role in the conflict; protest tents, graffiti, flags, posters, portraits of heroes have become part of the current urban fabric and confirm their presence (Brand and Fregonese 2013: 71–76). Although it remains derelict, the Bourj continues to be a central place for gathering in what has taken on institutionalised procedures in the city’s conflicts. In fact, in memory and urban ­significance the Square itself continues to be a primary institution in Beirut. It is relevant to consider the extent to which urban places, as long-time repositories of memory and experience, can be considered institutions. Although the Bourj lacks explicit ‘rules of the game’, clearly its ‘patterns of interaction’ and reliance upon the hybrid habitual embody a critical reflection of Beirut. To some extent the Bourj can reflect Varshney’s focus on institutions as a way of channelling conflict away from violence through everyday associations and practices that accommodate different aspects of the life of the city and particularly its diversity. The institutions need to be recognised and absorbed as important if incomplete urban markers. And if they are to exist in the city, they need the physical space in which to do so, in order to become institutions with capacity for regular

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participation. Specific associations and practices may find a home within them, so that conflict, along with other conditions, may occupy space inside the diverse urban topo­ graphy. Ultimately, urban citizens have the possibility to develop some common experience of such an agonic space. We might begin to think of these as institutions of the city. Unlike the inner city roads and motorways, referred to as infrastructural dividers in the previous section, not just formal city squares but streets, alleyways and incidental spaces also act as the primary terrain of everyday life to become, in certain circumstances, urban institutions. Such spaces are generally regarded as a significant requirement and feature of cities, and the capacity of streets to be diverse places also gives them the potential to accommodate conflict. In Jerusalem, as in many Middle Eastern cities, the market streets of the Old City define different communities, not only by separating them but also by ­providing places to draw them together in public life. Historically this was an important feature of how different ethnicities and religions interacted and lived in the same city (Tamari 2011; Klein 2014). It was not always peaceful, but the streets themselves were where everyday practices embodied the conflict that, in Simmel’s terms, makes some people bearable. Some of the commercial streets themselves take on an institutional character and like most markets they are politically charged, fostering debate and disagreement in cafés, shops, religious institutions. They are places of diversity that in some cases offer the means for empowerment of disaffected groups. This will engender conflict (Pullan 2015b). Without doubt the streets may become the focus for unrest, protest and sometimes violence; the street is political (Bayat 2010: 226–237). At the same time, the protocols of everyday life in these spaces are strong, and this also acts as a way of modulating and containing conflict. The public realm is always open to contest; this is inevitable and under certain circumstances can have a positive effect. If conflict is consistently present, and I would argue that overwhelmingly it does characterise the urban condition, then the physical fabric must be available to give it a home and help to channel it in constructive ways (Pullan 2015a).

Conclusion Perhaps most obviously, cities need inhabited places that are sufficiently differentiated to allow conflicts to emerge. This is true of all cities but particularly significant in those that are heavily contested. Violence will always be in close proximity and may figure as conflicts are engaged and played out. The difference between a reified and violent infrastructure and an open and flexible urban place is profound, yet between the two there is a peculiarly soft interface. For a short period, Manama’s Pearl Roundabout was a productive place of encounter where the problems of Bahraini society were articulated. But its suppression and destruction illustrate the fragility of such a space. The Jerusalem Light Rail is a dividing infrastructure embodying the occupation with the potential, in some circumstances, to be a more civilised place of encounter. Nicosia’s buffer zone replaced a thriving city centre as a dead frontier, revealing the difficulty of transforming an infrastructure back into a more agonic place that can contribute positively to urban order. The physical fabric of cities is sufficiently enduring to incorporate various forms of violence and conflict, sometimes over very long periods. This is both a weakness and a strength, and distinguishes it from more ephemeral human activity. The problem of

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spatial discontinuity, a result of serious physical ruptures caused by violence and ­unmediated conflict, can distort urban settings so as to make city topographies unrecognisable and in the worst cases irretrievable. In reflecting upon some of Paul Virilio’s (2000) ­perceptions of the representations of the first Gulf War, Annette Fierro (2011: 55-56) asks what h­ appens to violence, where does it go: ‘does it linger in whatever form it manages to leave its trace or does its painful residue simply disappear into the past’? With respect to cities, the answer to this is both: as the prime arena for conflict becomes increasingly urban, it is possible to see that the urban fabric is home to the past. As such it embodies a long-term history that colours the present and future. If this linear pattern is to be broken and adjusted to something more constructive, places for urban conflict are increasingly critical. Notes    1  Much of this chapter relies upon research carried out as part of the project ‘Conflict in Cities and the Contested State’, referred to hereafter as CinC. I am grateful to the Large Grants Programme of the ESRC for their generous support (grant number: RES-060-25-0015).    2  While the film has been criticised for portraying a one-sided view of the revolution (for a critique, see Fisher 2014), it is valuable for revealing life from inside the uprising and for showing different modes of the conflict with varying levels of violence.    3  In a special issue of Environment and Urbanization on ‘Conflict and violence in twenty-first century cities’, the editors state that 10 years ago there was the belief that urban violence could be overcome, whereas today conflict has become a problem primarily due to post-war situations (Moser and McIlwaine 2014). For a focus on conflict and violence in cities, see a special issue on ‘Religion, violence and cities’ (O’Dowd and McKnight 2013).    4  Some of these cities were researched in CinC, being some of the most contested cities in Europe and the Middle East (CinC; Pullan and Baillie 2013). Comparison and contextualisation were important concerns of this project, with the understanding that one can often learn as much from the differences between cities as from their similarities as long as one also questions which common themes inform more than one example.    5  Bahrain Observer is an opposition news source. The Pearl Roundabout attracted Bahrainis of both Sunni and Shi’a backgrounds.    6  There is a large literature in this area. One particularly relevant study considers the construction of dividing walls in relation to state sovereignty, although it does not distinguish between cities and states (Brown 2010).    7  Some scholars have described the twentieth century as the most violent ever (summarised well by Mazower 2002); Steven Pinker (2011) is notable for the opposite view.    8  Many examples are cited in CinC Briefing Papers 1–10.    9  Kaldor states that we know far less about civilian than military casualties.  10  Although recent reports suggest this (Moser and McIlwaine 2014).  11  Although not in ritualised situations, such as religious sacrifice.  12  This point is debatable in an age of technological surveillance. The symbolic and psychological effects may be more potent than any contribution to security.  13  This may emerge slowly over time or be imposed. Many examples from across the world have been cited (Nightingale 2012; Marcuse 2002).  14  One initiative was the Gimnazija Mostar, a bi-communal school reconstructed on a prominent corner of the Bulevar; yet the two curricula remain separate.  15  The suburbs built around Jerusalem on Palestinian land occupied since 1967 are referred to here as settlements; ­Palestinians call them colonies and Israelis know them as satellite neighbourhoods. According to international law, they are illegal.  16  Written information and announcements are trilingual, in Hebrew, English and Arabic.  17  For example, the Home for Cooperation (H4C), a community centre in a refurbished building located in the one part of the buffer zone, or The Prio Cyprus Centre for Bi-communal Research and Dialogue (PRIO).  18  The monument was removed for safe-keeping during the Civil War.  19  Khalaf’s book emerges from a report on the Bourj written by him in 2004 for Solidere, the company formed by Rafiq Hariri to rebuild downtown Beirut.

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Marcuse, P (2002) ‘The partitioned city in history’, in Of States and Cities: The Partitioning of Urban Space, ed. P Marcuse and R van Kempen (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 11–34. Mazower, M (2002) ‘Violence and the state in the twentieth century’, American Historical Review, 107:4, 1158–1178. Moser, CON and McIlwaine, C (2014) ‘New frontiers in twenty-first century urban conflict and violence’, Environment and Urbanization 26, 331–344. Mouffe, C (2000) The Democratic Paradox (New York: Verso). Mouffe, C (2005) On The Political (London: Routledge). Mueller, J (2009) ‘War has almost ceased to exist: an assessment’, Political Science Quarterly, 124:2, 297–321. Nightingale, C (2012) Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Nolte, A and Yacobi, H (2015) ‘Politics, infrastructure and representation: the case of Jerusalem’s Light Rail’, Cities, 43, 28–36. North, DC, Wallis, JJ and Weingast, BR (2009) Violence and Social Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). O’Dowd, L and McKnight, M, eds (2013) ‘Religion, violence and the city’, Space and Polity, 17:3, 261–269. Pappadakis, Y (2005) Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide (London: IB Tauris). Petridou, A (n.d.) ‘Nicosia Master Plan: A Bi-communal Initiative to change the image of the city’; www.thepep.org/en/ workplan/urban/documents/petridouNycosiamasterplan.pdf Pinker, S (2011) The Better Angels of our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity (London: Penguin). PRIO, The PRIO Cyprus Centre for Bi-communal Research and Dialogue; https://cyprus.prio.org Pullan, W (2011) ‘Frontier urbanism: the periphery at the centre of contested cities’, Journal of Architecture, 16:1, 15–35. Pullan, W (2013) ‘Spatial discontinuities: conflict infrastructures in contested cities’, in Locating Urban Conflicts: Ethnicity, Nationalism, Everyday Life, ed. W Pullan and B Baillie (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 17–36. Pullan, W (2015a) ‘Agon in urban conflict: some possibilities’, in Phenomenologies of the City: Studies in the History and Philosophy of Architecture, ed. M Sternberg and H Steiner (Aldershot: Ashgate), 213–224. Pullan, W (2015b) ‘At the boundaries of the sacred. the reinvention of everyday life in Jerusalem’s Muslim quarter’, in The Choreography of Sacred Space, ed. E Barkan and K Barkey (New York: Columbia University Press), 163–198. Pullan, W (2015c) ‘The migration of frontiers: ethno-national conflicts and contested cities’, in Nationalism, Ethnicity and  Boundaries: Conceptualising and Understanding National and Ethnic Identity Through Boundary Approaches, ed, J Jackson and L Molokotos-Liederman (New York: Routledge), 220–244. Pullan, W and Baillie, B, eds (2013) Locating Urban Conflicts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Pullan, W, Misselwitz, P, Nasrallah, R and Yacobi, H (2007) ‘Jerusalem’s Road 1: an inner city frontier?’, City, 11:2, 175–197. Rabbat, N (2012) ‘The Arab revolution takes back the public space’, Critical Inquiry, 39, 198–208. Rodgers, D and O’Neill, B (2012) ‘Infrastructural violence: introduction to the special issue’, Ethnography, 13:4, 401–412. Said, A. (2015) ‘We ought to be here: historicizing space and mobilization in Tahrir Square’, International Sociology, 30:4, 348–366. Sarkis, H (2006) ‘A vital void: reconstructions of downtown Beirut’, in Two Squares, ed. H Sarkis, M Dwyer and P Kibarer (Cambridge, MA: Aga Khan Program and Harvard University Press), 10–23. Sennett, R (1996) The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life (London: Faber and Faber). Serafin, A.(2010) ‘Urban violence – war by any other name’, Magazine of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent; www.redcross.int/EN/mag/magazine2010_1/20-23.html Sibley, D (1995) Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (London: Routledge). Simmel, G (1971) On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Tamari, S (2011) ‘Confessionalism and public space in Ottoman and colonial Jerusalem’, in Cities and Sovereignty: Identity Politics in Urban Spaces, ed. DE Davis and N Libertun de Duren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 59–82. UNESCO/World Heritage Convention, ‘Old bridge area of the old city of Mostar’; http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/946 Varshney, A (2002) Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Virilio, P (2000) A Landscape of Events, tr. J Rose (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Virilio, P (2005) City of Panic, tr. J. Rose (Oxford: Berg). Virilio, P (2012) Lost Dimension, tr. D Moshenberg (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e); first published in 1984 as L’espace critique). Wenman, M (2013) Agonistic Democracy: Constituent Power in the Era of Globalisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Wieviorka, M (2009) Violence: A New Approach, tr. D Macey (London: Sage). World Bank (2011), Violence in the City, April, 11–12; http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2011/04/14831166/ violence-city-understanding-supporting-community-responses-urban-violence Zizek, S (2009) Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books).

Part VII

Provisionality: Infrastructure and Incrementalism

Taxi Rank, Kampala 2013, Thomas Aquilina

21 The Majority-world and the Politics of Everyday Living in Southeast Asia AbdouMaliq Simone

Creating cities in-between the lines Many working- and lower middle-class districts in Asian cities have long been an array of rough landscapes, full of rough edges. The gates, the walls, the structures, the pathways, and so forth may have been propelled with a similar set of imaginaries and constructed with similar kinds of tools and labor, but the outputs resounded with a diversity that stood out by virtue of all the elements of commonality. What Holston (1991) long ago labeled auto-construction in these districts was the plurality of constant incremental adjustments, adaptations, and small innovations that not only reflected a heterogeneous social body, but was also itself a platform for intricate differentiations among people. These were sensory, spiritual, cognitive, performance, and experiential environments in addition to being built and economic domains. They were elaborations of various information and ways of connecting and disconnecting things. They were full of things, which because of their lack of fit, lack of seamless articulation, exerted different impacts on each other at different scales and with different processes (Chattopadhyay 2006, Edensor and Jayne 2011, McFarlane 2011, Caldeira 2012, Atehortúa 2014, Vasudevan 2014). In past work, I have designated these districts as zones for an urban majority (Simone and Rao 2012). The majority functions here as a composite term, not limited or even contingent upon establishing a demographic predominance. Rather, it refers to how an urban demographic is not simply a quantitative measure of individual bodies, but how a particular ‘count’ can be constituted through the ways in which bodies forge a plurality of collective aggregates, transactions, and intersections. Thus, people, places, materials, and values come together in various ways that create specific machine-like entities, drawing upon the densities of different everyday practices, perspectives, infrastructures, and interpersonal relationships to constitute specific economies of urban inhabitation.

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Thus, an urban majority is not simply a count of inhabitants who occupy a relatively stabilized format of residency called ‘the urban.’ The majority is also a multiplying of points of transaction with variously scaled forces of territorial consolidation and capitalist penetration whose dispositions may generate systematic conversions of space into homogeneous mechanisms of accumulation and more singular, uncertain ways of living and producing livelihood (Robinson 2013, Amin 2015). Sometimes residents were consciously attuned to the all of the interwoven bodily, physical, and chemical machinery at work. All of the exertions were performed in kitchens, workshops, streets, bedrooms, factory floors, storerooms, vacant lots, and all of the angles and interstices in-between. Sometimes, they paid attention to particular vistas, horizons, issues, and performances, and not others. This labor of paying attention was distributed across persons and networks, but also distributed across spaces and materials as well. The daily wear and tear of objects and people, all of the links and cuts, all of the decisions that had to be made – about who to devote time and resources to, about where to go, and where to buy – were also complemented by an entire world of inputs, effects, and relations where no explicit decisions were made. These may have been the by-products of the way people built things, put things together, but these things had a world of relations on their own, in conjunction with and in distinction to social practices. Information-rich environments were continuously re-supplemented and lived through. They gave residents many things to work with as a means of working with and on each other. In urban environments that are either overdesigned or mass produced, and where technical operations are limited to particular forms of cost accounting, risk analysis, and surveillance, the critical question is how urban majorities in these cities could now potentially take back the possibilities of creating information-rich environments for themselves, for rebuilding the abilities to use social relations as a means of collaborative action. In what follows I will attempt to discuss how a majority is assembled today, the complexion of urban spaces of this majority, and how the sensibilities of a majority are communicated and make themselves manifest. Most particularly, I explore how the popular districts of the majority straddle interstitial spaces, where cities are at one in the same time, affected by what takes place elsewhere and by an intensified reliance on their own singularities. I will end with a sense of concern about the vulnerabilities faced by popular districts today and the need to find ways to update the formats of collective life and relational literacies.

The sense of cities In every urban region of Africa and Asia, peculiarities abound. It is evident that cities in these regions move toward each other in significant ways. They share the problems of producing more specular built environments, accommodating large numbers of recent and usually poor residents, and managing vast and easily bubbled property markets. Yet, the composing of these similarities can entail very different procedures and elements. While cities and urban regions often act like unstoppable juggernauts in their pursuit of the spectacular and easy profits, the messy details of how the particular spaces within them get to have the kinds of populations and characteristics they have draw upon

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divergent histories and day-to-day encounters. Cities are arenas of action, and they vary greatly as to how actions are considered, controlled, valued, and for whom certain actions are safe and legitimate. If, as Brenner and Schmid (2015) argue, urbanization extends itself not so much through the imposition of the axiomatics of capital but through complex processes of instantiation, where the singularities of place and history are experimentally refigured into unsettled articulations with larger surrounds, what are urban processes in such interstices? What is between the peculiar, idiosyncratic features of cities and urban regions and urbanization at a planetary scale? For the constant rescaling of accumulation and dispossession, as well as the constant rearranging of levers, conduits, and mechanisms for affecting how resources and wealth are accessed, circulated, and leveraged do not definitively specify or control just how these features of everyday action in cities are composed. Of course what a city can be as a systemic entity in the end is largely contingent upon these structures of global capital. But again, the question is how we come to grips with what is in-between the predominant structuring forces – of resource access, distribution, and economic value – and the intermixing of different, locally shaped forces, capabilities, inclinations, styles, and opportunities that also stretch and constrain what it is possible to do for residents of any given background or status. No matter what formal structures, stories, powers, or institutions come to bear on what takes place, no matter how they leave their mark, there remains a constant process of encountering, pushing and pulling, wheeling and dealing, caring for and undermining that tends to keep most everyone ‘in play’ – able to maneuver and pursue, however limited this might be. This intermixing is not clearly virtuous or destructive. In fact, it is such pushing and pulling that shape the architectures of articulation that enable capital to shape-shift its way across new spatial parameters; it is also the means through which provisional, uncertain opportunities not under any particularly hegemonic thumb might be elaborated (Merrifield 2013). It also shifts attention away from the predominance of human inhabitation as the centering node of urban development or sustainability toward ways of valuing the multiplicity of encounters possible in urban contexts. The relationships between the forces of global capital and the locally expressed forces of intermeshed and messy encounters are not assignable to clearly distinct scales. It is not that global capital sits above a world of cities orchestrating its circuits below, apportioning things here and there in some kind of command control. Neither are the intermixtures of inclinations, styles, and practices that make up a local vernacular simply confined within the administrative or cultural boundaries of a specific urban region. We know well just how wage relations, the extraction of surplus, or the hoarding of capacity works its way into the blood, into what may be experienced as the DNA of contemporary urban individuals – just as we know that peculiarities of cities spill over their boundaries. In part, residents embody this spilling by moving across the world, making their performances visible through all kinds of media. It is also reflected in the human inclination to imitate, to coalesce on the basis of people taking things from each other. So the ‘in-between’ is also a moving target, something shifting all the time across and within geographical scales and times. Thus the communication I have in mind here is about the sensibilities that neighborhoods, enclaves, or districts convey to each other, ways in which their realities seep into varied imaginations, as well as the imaginations of the residents of these places themselves.

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So communication is a matter of how they, who are residents, and others, who are not, make sense of their respective positions and each other. It is about how residents make sense of the situations they both create and inherit, and what they do with that sense. This is powerfully reflected in terms of the ways in which residents accept or refuse particular conditions, the ways they design particular spaces of living, the ways they adamantly insist upon staying put in certain conditions or fleeing them, the ways they make something different from the affordances provided, the ways they pretend to be or do something and then do the opposite. All are matters of sense, of conveying a reality that rests between the encounters and intermixing of action and the structures of capitalist urbanization. But this communication also entails what Galloway et al. (2014) point to as excommunication – something that is not the mediation of different positions or different kinds of residents or districts. While the compulsion to divide, differentiate, and communicate differences is an unavoidable reality in the endurance of place-making, there is something in each communication that cannot be conveyed and something that remains outside of every communicative act. Between differences is a vast ‘middle’ of non-differentiation, where places and cities do not have to be either specific manifestations of a global logic of capitalist accumulation, the domains of ‘befores’ and ‘afters,’ stages in a continuous process of urban development, exemplars of best practices, or idiosyncratic intersections of the influences of geopolitics, cultural histories, locational advantages, or economic imperatives. This is a different kind of ‘in-between’ than simply an abstract space between macrostructural forces of urbanization and everyday experience. It is, as Galloway et al. (2014) put it, a full body without differentiation, a lover of intercourse without objective, a capacity to occupy a city full of ambiguities, where one never knows precisely what or where one is located. Take the district of Kampung Rawa in central Jakarta, near the Senen rail station, which historically was the point of call for many incoming migrants to the city. As the city’s densest district, it is crammed to the hilt with a mix of long-term residents, mostly eking out a minimal income, and newcomers attracted to the possibilities for acquiring and remaking cheap property. The residents in this district have lived with strong ties to block-by-block solidarities, invented kinship relations among neighbors, as well as strong ties to tricks, scams, and petty parasitism in every sector of daily life. Its residents are widely known for maneuvering their way across different styles of being in the city, switching back and forth among performances of religious devotion, gangland bravado, entrepreneurial acumen, and inventive social and political collaborations. Yet the district remains heavily redlined by all official institutions, and youths have a hard time getting even low-level jobs. The place is so crowded that most household members have to take turns sleeping, leaving some to roam the streets at all hours. At the same time, more renovations and physical adaptations are going on in Kampung Rawa than in almost any other part of the city, and on any given day the place can be repeatedly celebrated and vilified by the same mouths. Whatever objective readings could be taken of the conditions here, the sense its residents make of place seems to go in all kinds of directions. The words they use to identify themselves vary across a wide register, as does their assessments of the likely future. Is the place poor or not, safe or not, viable or not? Most residents can indeed provide detailed and reasonable answers either way, but the sense they make collectively remains something in-between, most prepared to act strategically no matter which way the answer goes.

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Resonating majorities The sense of an urban majority that I am trying to convey here is not one of a coherence or consolidation of individuals and groups based on consensual determinations of common interest. It is not adherence to a norm or an expression of loyalty to a particular figuration of political or religious interests. If there is a process of commoning (Hardt and Negri 2009, Moten and Harney 2013) it is engendered through a process of people, places, and things ‘feeling out’ each other, by operating in the same vicinity and where the implications of these operations inevitably exert a force which must, at least implicitly, be taken into consideration, to which adjustments are made. The full scope then of what any person or object can do is not fully identifiable within the confines of any specific boundary, even though boundaries of varying permeability and stability certainly do exist. Commoning is a process of resonance, of entities affecting each other, at various scales and degrees of reflexivity. In part, this notion of resonance is a simplification of what Alfred North Whitehead calls prehension, where the actual prehension of another actual object, or of its elements, changes the internal constitution (the mental and physical tendencies) of the prehended actuality. From this standpoint, prehensions also account for how actual entities acquire determination or completeness from an indeterminate process of mental and physical contagions, or from the intrusions of elements from other actual entities. Whitehead calls this process a ‘concrescence of prehensions … even if an actual object is what it is and cannot be another, it remains an unsubstantial entity. An actuality cannot therefore remain unchanged from the material corrosions of its parts; it cannot stop bursting into a sea of entropic chaos. (Parisi 2013, 59)

There are many routes into the ways in which districts attempt to generate fields of resonance among a diffuse dispersal of elements and flows. Again, resonance is the process of people, materials, and places ‘feeling each other out,’ of offering possibilities of proximity. In other words, it refers to their ways of associating with each other, of having something to do with each other, of acting as components in the enactment of operations larger than themselves and their own particular functions and histories. When things resonate with each other there is a connection that proceeds not from the impositions of some overarching map or logic, but from a process of things extending themselves to each other. This process of resonance is critical to urban development work. It is critical in that it points to mechanisms of gathering up much of what already exists and attempts to facilitate spaces and practices where chains of association can be actively enacted in ways that deal with the specificity of local conditions, resources, and challenges, but which also go beyond those local specificities to draw in and upon other realities at more distant surrounds. As was indicated above, there are many ways in which such resonance can be generated. At times the presence of important institutions or infrastructures will generate a series of multiplier effects, which themselves develop lateral connections over time. Such institutions could include military installations, markets, or transportation hubs. Settings not only have locational advantages. They also generate a plurality of values through the ways in which land – the physical platform of settings – is acquired,

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distributed, and used. In Jakarta, the staking, holding, and demarcation of land was a significant political device deployed by those who would constitute the initial significant consolidation of a de facto ‘citizenry’ to carve out intricate spaces of both accommodation and resistance to colonial rule. The Betawi, as these ‘original inhabitants’ were popularly referred to, used land acquisition as a means to organize household economies, populate areas through kinship relationships, and later ‘curate’ specific characteristics and compositions of local districts through subdividing land, not only to generate income, but to shape particular commercial specializations and political alliances. While for all intents and purposes land was owned, bought, and sold, these transactions avoided definitive registration procedures. Claims were to be honored, but any comprehensive alienation of land subject to overarching juridical procedures has been circumvented up until the present. As a result, disputes were frequent and resolution tedious. But the ambiguities of land status meant that it was difficult, at the district level, to ‘sweep up’ large land holdings into single functions. Contiguous strings of plots could take on very different functions and characteristics, which prompted both contestation and concerted efforts to explore various interrelationships among these differences. In staking their existence to the distribution of land, the Betawi would fold in different inputs of capital, expertise, as well as new residents coming from various parts of Indonesia, bringing with them particular artisanal skills (Kusno 2013). Following Indonesian independence, powerful institutions, such as various branches of the armed forces and major Muslim religious associations, assumed control of large land holdings, turning sawa – agricultural land – into important extensions of the urban core. The state also played a crucial role in land production, allotment, and provisioning. The state, following in the footsteps of colonial planning logics, sought to cultivate built environments suitable for an administrative class, using its power to acquire land in the public interest. The stitching together of a semblance of a coherent urban fabric in the Jakarta core necessitated intricate calibrations of differentiated land use and claimmaking procedures. The results of these calibrations at times created seamless transitions resembling normative zoning functions, planning grids, and road outlays. At other times, they produced an intensely folded landscape full of jarring transitions and idiosyncratic spaces. Open interfaces and withdrawn clusters often complemented each other. In-fills of land in some parts of the urban core created thickets of nearly impassable and dense neighborhoods that seemed to proliferate different kinds of authorities and living situations, while others maintained a more measured approach to differentiation, where land agglomeration allowed widened household plots and roads wide enough for cars. Jakarta’s turbulent political history during the last four decades of the 20th century, combined with its rapid growth and inward migration from different parts of the country, buttressed the tendency of households to diversify their connections to a wide range of economic activities. Formal jobs were coupled with small-scale entrepreneurship, artisanal domestic production, and the provision of short-term accommodation. In the long three-decade regime of Suharto’s mundane authoritative rule, which allowed few opportunities for individual expression, popular mobilization, or even reliance on stateguaranteed social supports, households and districts in Jakarta relied upon ‘quieter’ means of engineering collective life (Aspinall 2005). These means would rely upon exuding a visage of social conformity but would also inundate everyday district life

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with small disjunctive details – performances that would not signal excessive attention or alarm, but be sufficiently interesting to pay attention to as signals and incentives for households to trace imaginary, and often subsequently, concrete lines of connection between different activities in which they were engaged. As Susanto, a local block leader in the Tanah Sereal, indicated, ‘residents here were never content to just leave things alone. I mean they left each other alone, didn’t bother them too much, but most people were always trying to see what could happen if they just went a little bit out of their way to buy something unusual to sell on the street, or to hand out pamphlets about how to start businesses to people waiting by the bus stop, or to sit on the corner and make notes about everyone who passed by, or who counted every vehicle that passed on a particular street, or who went door to door offering repair things, or to invent machines for cleaning the water in the local canals, or to tutor the kids in the neighborhood about how to fix engines.

Residents would constantly talk about how unpredictable their neighbors could be, not in a bad or dangerous way. Rather, neighbors would often be seen hard at work trying to build something that probably would not work or last, talk to people they had no prior experience with, and demonstrate a keen interest in some particular aspect of neighborhood life – the passing of birds, the collection of unusual refuse, the composition of soil and streets, the loading and unloading of vehicles, or the rhythms of children’s games – that otherwise would pass unnoticed. On the other hand intricately interwoven built environments became critical sites of ‘noticing’ and differentiation. Contiguous plots often employed a wide array of materials, designs, and construction practices. It was as if neighborhoods exuded a distinct array of ‘plumage’ that served as lures for residents to pay attention to each other, to take note of how different kinds of skills and inclinations are embodied in these constructions and the various uses their residents make of them. A diversity of political sentiments and organizational capacities otherwise foreclosed to Jakartan residents during this era took on different forms of expression, and importantly incited continuous acts of mutual witnessing that were folded in to household initiative aimed at renovating, updating, or remaking their own economic and social activities. What could not take place as political performance could yet be enacted as sustained ethical practice, not by overt provisions of care-taking or discernible commitments to particular tenets of behavior. Certainly such provisions and commitments played a major role in everyday Jakartan life. But the kind of ethical practice I amplify here is one where residents accorded each other the space to veer off into different directions in terms of what they did with their time or disposable income, or conduct small experiments in income accumulation or working with others without residents rushing to conclude that these actions had or would have dire implications for their own lives. Because of the strong pressures for social conformity, the needs for everyday collaboration in making the material environment function, and strong values of social cooperation, local residents could not just leave each other alone. But within these relationships, the capacities of the relationships themselves could be stretched, new potentials could be discovered, and quiet yet effective efforts to reach beyond and exert impacts and acquire

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resources far beyond the boundaries of the district could be mobilized through this ethical practice of ‘giving each other space’ to incrementally initiate all kinds of small ‘deviation’ from the ‘standard operating procedures.’ Force exceeds the bounds placed on it. It leaks, radiates, and affects in ways that cannot always be anticipated and controlled. Thus any occurrence can ramify across another, affecting and being affected in ways that exceed whatever infrastructure is available. Volatility is a default position, and in this sense infrastructure is always built upon turbulence. This turbulence may be largely constrained but it does not go away, it is always there, as if nothing really happens, and that nothing really is a generic condition, indifferent to the absence of event (Laruelle 2008, Simondon 2009). In a similar way, these ethics of residents according each other sufficient space to initiate a plurality of small ventures and pilot projects were given time to see what might happen by residents acting as if nothing was really happening. As if there were no event to scrutinize, comment upon, accept or dismiss at the moment. Judgments were to be deferred. Of course, if residents were unable to find a way to make eventual use of what was proffered, or if initiatives prompted undo external scrutiny, the hoarding of opportunity, or were unable to see how diverging paths or apparent inequities had no longer term value for the district, various sanctions or dissuasions would indeed by applied. Not dissimilarly to what Susanto, the local block leader, said earlier, Yohannes Lubis, a bus driver, points out [in our district] we knew each other pretty well; we knew what to expect and everyone knew that if they got too much out of line they would get what was coming to them; people knew that they were in for big trouble if they were to steal and cheat or get violent, but what was always a little bit strange was the way in which people would do all of these little things that were just a little bit unusual, the way someone might stop someone in the middle of the street they didn’t know and simply tell them a little something about something taking place somewhere else, or the strange way they might decorate their door, or the way they might walk the streets in the middle of the night looking for god only knows what, or the way they might invite total strangers to sit and drink coffee with them in the front of the house. We always knew where we were living, but who knows for sure where that was because it didn’t have to be on the map we were used to.

Such ethical orientations then become a platform for resonance, for enactments of commoning, as residents try to find a way to each other that they know all too well but never completely. Residents then cannot simply rest with their assumptions, but must repeatedly re-stitch the relational fibers, and in doing so make new relationships, even if the surfaces of sociability may look the same. In Jakarta, the fact that the surfaces of things and built environments looked so radically different that they could lure a replenishing of residents’ mutual interest in each other marks the capacity for singular approaches to making life in the city. That residents might rehearse new opportunities for working together without necessarily looking as if this is what they were doing established fields of resonance. These fields thus assembled a kind of majority – a congealing of different performances and assets into a wide range of collective efforts that, most importantly, sustained the capacity for different ways of life to take place right next to each other.

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Performances of immunity Another example of the assembling of a majority is taken from Phnom Penh. It concerns a place and series of operations situated right in the center of the historic downtown, but whose history has largely been occluded from public view. I will get to this story, but only after some background material on the city itself. Phnom Penh until recent years was a city where residents spent a great deal of time flowing into each other, with the exception of the Khmer Rouge period, 1974–1978, where a large proportion of the population was forcefully evicted and then highly regimented reoccupation took place three years later. Whatever segregations were affected by the French protectorate, the cultivation of an educated elite, or the assignation of ethnicities to particular zones of the city, there had been ample space for residents to spread out, take note of each other’s lives, and mingle without excessive function or precaution in scores of improvised markets, eating places, entertainments, rituals, trades, and conversations (Osborne 2008). However regimented, manipulative, or parasitical the decade following the re-inhabitation of Phnom Penh might have been, the possibility of living in a city without much of an economy to keep it going outside of the resource infusions of the Vietnamese administrators required a relentless capacity of residents to see their possibilities in each other and to believe in the prospects that many small efforts to make-do could come together (Gottesman 2004). With the influx of more residents following the final cessation of the war in 1989 and the relocation of Cambodians from refugee camps on the Thai border, these entanglements of initiatives became even more important. In much of the world’s press, the city’s reputation during the 1980s was of a very sinister place, full of dark deals, of residents holding onto whatever space they managed to find against the incursions of others, or, likewise, the intensive exchanging of spaces, as well as nearly anything people could get their hands on. Despite these orientalist exaggerations, the city was a difficult place. This is why the adamant determination of many residents to start something small, stick to it, find a way to make it relevant to others, cultivate contacts that had other contacts that could facilitate getting hold of things or moving things, was all the more striking. When the city became more secure under the United Nation’s administration commencing in 1992, these initiatives began to have greater payoff and the times of mixture could be occupied more leisurely. It was a time when the promulgation of good governance was at its peak, as well as the exigency for the country to join the ranks of other Southeast Asian nations. The door was also opened to the influx of outsiders of all kinds and agendas, of hundreds of NGOs trying to restore the country to some normalcy and foreign investors looking to get in on the ground floor of the inevitable explosion of development. This historical moment amplified the productive dimensions of restlessness, the fact that even without the normal frameworks of urban normalcy, residents managed to sort themselves out through an intensive process of paying attention to each other. In interviews undertaken in 2007 by the Initiating Urban Cultural Studies in Cambodia Program (Center for Khmer Studies) of households across Phnom Penh, it was evident that even if there was a longing for the accouterments of security, contractual guarantees, stability of income and tenure, the widespread recognition of its unavailability at the time did not absolutely deter the city’s residents from living much of their lives in the midst of

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a myriad of ‘small chances,’ of encounters and witnessing, through which they learned more about what they had to do to make their residency more viable and how to affect others. Few were going to take any big risks, especially since the political and economic conditions were so uncertain, and it was not possible to know what recourse anyone had if anything went seriously wrong. But many residents have recounted that, during this time, it was important to learn from what others were doing, and that meant cultivating a way of paying attention that did not make them feel they were going to be crowded out or stolen from. Small chances were a matter of cultivating a continuously reworked ethos for conversing and engagement, small borrowings and confidences, of doing things together that incurred few obligations and expectations (Center for Khmer Studies 2007). While these are small things, they are manifestations of a restlessness of incessantly uncertain outcomes. It signals reliance upon things other than the imposition of authority or the assessment of stature and eligibility. It is a transformation of the importance of accruing merit, but without always knowing how to count it up or assign a quantitative value. In part, in trying to seek some kind of ideas for the intensity in which the governing elite punish the poorer of the long-term residents of Phnom Penh, it may be because of the persistence of this restlessness. While until recently formal political opposition had been substantially quieted, these are practices that are much harder to get a handle on, much harder to ‘put down’ directly, much harder to know exactly where they are going. For the past 20 years, Phnom Penh had been obsessed with land. Until the economic crash of 2008, land was the main economic game in town. Vast areas all around the region of the city were lined and marked with walls and borders signaling that they had already been tied down. Land was being used for all kinds of ridiculous dreams as well as standardized spectacles. During my different periods of fieldwork in the city over a 10-year period, nearly everyone I encountered talked about the price of land, about how it was imperative to get land at a good price to ensure your future. These conversations seemingly would drown out those of teachers, civil servants, health workers, and police – not only the poor – about how to sustain places of residence, sociability, trade, and public life. The conversations would drown out the entangled economic collaborations among traders and retailers that filled the city with affordable goods and services for the needs of the entire nation. Developers and government officials thought that these economies could be located at the periphery of the city or, better yet, replaced by large shopping complexes, fed by new industrial centers – this in a city highly dependent upon the preferential status accorded to foreign-funded garment production dependent upon cheap, young female labor. The presence of the United Nations Transitional Authority set up in 1992 to implement the Paris Peace Accords of October 1991 and disarm the warring factions that had waged civil conflict throughout the 1980s greatly inflated property values and was accompanied by hundreds of restaurants, bars, coffee shops, hotels, and boutiques, setting down the initial infrastructure for what was to be a growing tourist population. Even with the inflation of real estate, the city remained a comparatively cheap place to live, which attracted a wildly heterogeneous mix of the nefarious, the retired, the adventurous, the strung-out, and the entrepreneurial, who made their own mark on the city. Phnom Penh acquired a reputation as a place where anything could happen.

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The over 30-year rule of Hun Sen, the current Prime Minister, has basically worn down the Cambodian population. The longer the regime extends itself, the more resources it accumulates to enlist loyalties when sheer repression breeds resentment. But it is the effectiveness of the regime in closing down domains of publicity and civil action that has been key to the maintenance of control. Through the conversion of much of Phnom Penh into entangled instruments of speculation, rentier economy, and the gluing of political loyalty, the ordinary and quotidian venues of assemblage and mixture have been eroded, severely policed, or substantiated only for their entrepreneurial value. In 1999, the then Municipal Governor, Chea Sopara, launched a beautification campaign, as a particularly invidious way of cleaning up public space. Since the onset of this campaign it is estimated that nearly 150,000 residents of Phnom Penh have been evicted largely to distant periphery settlements with little infrastructure and far from work (Menzies et al. 2008). The long deferral of implementing the Land Law of 2001 in Phnom Penh, established to provide for the official registration of land and a cadaster, has enabled the state to continuously claim that any land not adjudicated can be implicitly titled in the name of the state, a practice that has allowed the state to effectively control large swathes of land (Cambodian Center for Human Rights 2013). The state’s holdings are designated as either state public or state private land in terms of earmarking holdings that are in the public interest – such as floodplains, public infrastructure, governmental buildings, and parklands – and therefore cannot be marketized. But in practice, these designations are fluid, particularly when government and municipal agencies vacate properties in the inner city, relocate to the periphery, and then sell off the former holdings for usually immense profits that generally end up in private pockets (ADHOC 2013). While temporary resolutions in lieu of completed registration procedures in the capital provide an instrument for enhancing the security of residents, they remain vulnerable to the absence of due process if anything goes wrong or in face of arbitrary land appropriations by powerful private interests. Overreliance on ‘family books’ as the primary evidence for continuous occupancy does not contain up-to-date information about the characteristics of residency, such as the way in which plots are expanded informally to house growing families, or the ways in which plots are subdivided to accommodate renters (Rabe 2010). Importantly, the decree does not address the differentiation between owners and renters, leaving the latter completely out of compensation and relocation deals (LICADHO 2008). Additionally, government receipts that are mandated for residents that are resettled are frequently marketized, making it difficult for some residents to secure the plots to which they are relocated (Mgbako et al 2010). In some instances the state breaks the unity of community resistance by allowing certain residents to sell off their plots at market value instead of being locked in by paltry compensation deals (Tudehope 2012). As of 2012, there was not a single documented case where individuals have received land title following five years of residence in a resettlement location. The game of real estate seems to proceed unimpeded. One square meter of land cost US$250 in 2004; three years later this price escalated eightfold (Löhr 2011). While the property market was affected by the global downturn, it has nevertheless proved resilient. In 2012, the Ministry of Land Management recorded that investments on construction had grown by 72 percent to US$2,109 million for 1,694 projects covering 6.5 million square meters, an increase from the previous US$1.2 billion for 2,125 projects covering 4.2 million square meters in 2011 (Cambodia Development Research Institute 2012).

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Much of the city has been converted into a massive construction site. Thousands of new units have been built and occupied by newly minted middle-class households and particularly the expanding families of Cambodian Chinese businesspeople. Many of them are preoccupied with institutionalizing and extending their presence in the city away from their long-term strongholds, and using the city as a platform to deepen and expand their regional networks (Verver 2012). Such entrepreneurial concerns have generalized a preoccupation with land values across different sectors as residents generate and strengthen networks of ties based on enhancing the circulation of information about land valuation, propitious locations, construction platforms, emerging backward and forward linkages in emerging residential areas (Percival and Waley 2012). Land not only generates speculation in terms of its marketing, but also becomes the vehicle through which a diverse range of anticipations, assessments, and calculations about economic activities is elaborated. (Paling 2012). Making information about land more proficient constitutes initial motivations on the part of businesspeople and professionals to participate in expanded networks of contacts that are then further elaborated in order to generate the economic articulations necessary to underpin most of the real expansion of the city. While these processes are of course not immune from the rentier activities that characterize the larger scale developments, they do have their own logics and integrity of operations not totally captured by the political game (Fauveaud 2012). For, they draw upon earlier iterations of more experimental efforts in order to create a version collective life in the present. The Tampa Block, in the historic center of Phnom Penh continues to bear witness to the formation of a majority in the city, even as in recent years its locational value has resulted in residents being offered enormous sums to vacate their apartments. Constructed in 1970, just at the end of the sweeping modernist make-over of the city, the Tampa Block is a four-story apartment building with over 250 official units set over an open courtyard at the anterior of the building that has been subsequently filled in by a mini-city of various constructions, including some large-scale, multi-story homes. The roof also once housed a thick mesh of informal constructions until its erasure by a suspicious fire some five years ago. Most of the apartment units are deceptively spacious and well maintained, even as overuse of the overall structure and the various bureaucratic impediments to effective collective maintenance contribute to accelerating dilapidation. This city within a city is completely withdrawn from public view. There are only four entrances to the complex, each centered on the four streets in which the building is situated. As the vast majority of its original inhabitants did not survive the Khmer Rouge experiment in enforced peasantry, its resettlement was based on a mixture of various historical and family claims, purchased and provisional documentation issued by various intervening authorities operative in the initial years of the city’s reoccupation, as well as outright appropriation. Initial claims and occupations were frequently sold, bartered, and invested in a variety of economic activities that could result in the relinquishing of the tenure, the subdivision of space for accommodation or fabrication and trade, as well as the consolidation of individual units. The extensiveness of physical and social modifications was amplified, given its withdrawal from the scrutiny of public observation, unlike areas in most other parts of the city. These were also modifications directly supported and subsidized by efforts to ensure a diverse mixture of retailing activities at street level. This was done to enhance the consumption needs of an interior undergoing substantial physical and managerial revision,

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but also to choreograph various performances via commerce to modulate the kind of attention applied to the residents living ‘behind the scenes.’ In other words, making particular commercial activities appear to belong exclusively to specific Cambodian Chinese economic clans, sharing commercial space with Vietnamese soldiers, traders, migrants, technicians, and retailers, or establishing bars and nightclubs that would expand trading hours for some economic activities, were all strategically performed so as to balance out the kinds of residents and economic backgrounds that would populate the block. As one of the largest residential units in the city at that time, and given the managerial difficulties inherent in ensuring the functioning of water, power, and sanitation in such a physically integrated complex during a period of scarce resources, settlement space was often ‘leased out’ as a means of generating sufficient funds to keep the building going. The various sub-contractual relationships that existed among various statuses of residents afforded different external actors limited vehicles of income accumulation through the operation of informal tenancy markets, such as those that operated on the roof of the complex. The entire operation functioned as a mixture of protection, compensation, and speculation that attempted to instantiate a secure framework of settlement. At the same time, any exclusive modality of inhabitation or income accrual proved difficult to institutionalize over time. Up until the early part of the past decade, the goods that appeared in Phnom Penh markets were almost completely imported from neighboring Vietnam and Thailand, and then increasingly from China. With the exception of a garment industry loaded with young, underpaid female workers, steady wage labor in the city was rare, and usually the purview of government functionaries. As these salaries were minimal, and the trading sector almost completely dominated by Cambodian Chinese, in addition to Vietnamese who largely controlled automobile, motorcycle, and machinery repair, as well as salons and bars, there were few opportunities for Khmer economic accumulation except through rent-seeking and dealing in land. For the Tampa Block, the entanglements of entrepreneurship modified and modulated the composition of residential forms and economic activities associated with the building. This happened not so much through their specific profitability or pricing but as modalities of association that could concretize what were essentially experimental relationships among residents that had few policies, legalities, and civic traditions to draw upon. While it could be argued that an overreliance on entrepreneurial entanglements diverted important energies away from the consensual agreements and shared responsibilities necessary to do the simple tasks of keeping the overall building in good shape, this sense of mutual obligation would require some recourse to the benefits of general citizenship, which still remain both formally and practically elusive in Cambodia. What is most important in this consideration of the ‘sustainability’ of the Tampa Block through years of economic hardship, political insecurity, urban renovation, and now neoliberalism on steroids, is what long-term residents clearly deemed as the need for performances of immunity. Immunity not only from all the ‘vultures’ waiting to pick off the complex, but also from all of the wildly outrageous sums of money being bandied about as enticements for residents to sell their apartments. For it made many residents think that something was ‘lurking’ over the complex, some enormous fantastic value that eluded them. A rather uniquely designed residential complex, driven initially by modernist imaginations of the possible insularity of residence in the midst of inner city commerce, had

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instead put together a social tapestry of residents not as bound by ethnic memories and networks as in other parts of the city. The Tampa Block continues to operate as a mixture of ‘solid families,’ nefarious operators, tricksters, small-time producers working with wood and metal, weavers, tailors, caterers of specialized food, and the labor that ran or worked in the downstairs eating halls serving particular regional specialities as well as generic dishes, and the retailers of both cheap and high-class products, along with money changers and lenders, numerologists, risqué salons, and all the services that made low-level but potentially obtrusive officials feel good about themselves. All of these are stitched-together performances operating through different logics and forms. These performed realities were actual, dissimulative, aspirational, and compensatory – all in a spirit of both confidence and interminable anxiety. The Tampa Block acted as if it were Phnom Penh in all of its complexities, but at the same time acted as if it were something fundamentally apart. This tension creates what to this day is a constant process of friction and negotiation.

Enduring but vulnerable relational literacies Similarly, cities across the world may move toward some kind of standardized ideal image; they may envy the spectacular transformations of Shanghai or Dubai. On the other hand, all of these cities are ‘just’ cities, neither more or less urban, more or less viable. For in addition to what they communicate to each other about their relative specializations and characters, each also exists as what the ‘other’ – which in this instance cannot be ascertained as a ‘different other,’ a ‘different kind of city’ – is not, which is a condition that cannot be really communicated, but which also cannot not be communicated at the same time. That they are all ‘just cities,’ without the need to say anything specific about what they are, that cannot be compared or evaluated, and that this ‘way of being’ a city imbues it with unanticipated possibilities and futures. The endurance of popular districts, however, should not detract from facing the real threats that impinge upon them. Particularly in cities across the ‘majority world,’ the persistent repetition of the supposedly proper images of middle-class attainment and overall well-being chips away at the convictions many residents may yet retain about their abilities to construct viable living spaces for themselves. Time becomes an increasingly precious commodity, particularly as maximizing consumption and skill sets remains a critical indicator of self-worth. A younger generation of urban residents is more eager to escape the obligations of tending for parents and kin, let alone neighborhoods where the ‘rules’ for belonging may become more stringent and politicized. A widening dispersal of interests and commitments is harder to piece together into complementary relationships and collaborations, and the kinds of efforts at repair and development that could be matters of volitional association in the past would now require more formalized, contractual deployment of labor. There is a widespread sense that these popular districts are finished, overladen with anachronistic business practices, excessive demands on people’s time, and altogether too enmeshed in uncertainty to prove dynamic in the long run. Indeed in some cities problems in the center are serious. Housing backlogs in Jakarta, Karachi, and Lagos can run

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into the hundreds of thousands, demanding substantial reallocations of core functions, employment locations, and mass-produced social housing – the financing of which would appear to necessitate wide-scale securitization of land, even as there are extensive swaths of under-utilized commercial and industrial buildings that could be redesigned for urban housing. Additionally, through the use of sophisticated number-crunching packages, a larger volume of relationships is made for us, instead of our trying to figure how things are connected. This figuring out of connections was one of the key skills and preoccupations of residents inhabiting popular districts. Now, parametric designs, which bring together different data sets related to water, finance, energy, transportation, housing, economy, individual and group behavior, and so on, modulate the variable relationships among them, and alter their properties as a result – for example, making water and energy and sanitation and financing and transport and municipal finance and economic development all impact on each other through recursive feedback loops. While opening up new vistas of knowledge, new unpredictable, unfixable relationships are also produced in the very act of trying to better control things. In other words, we live in cities where things are inevitably linked and related, which gets rid of the will to actually make things relate – to coax, induce, seduce, incentivize. To move on then means to go nowhere, as one is locked into, indebted to, being surrounded with all kinds of apparatuses – of recognition, security, legitimacy, correctness. Divisions are between those to whom interminable debts are required to stay in place – for not having the rug constantly pulled from under them – and those who are able to operate without any rug at all in almost any environment whatsoever. If a desire to figure out the relationships among things is diminished as a by-product of inhabitation in increasingly formatted and programmed environments, then the very incentive for substantiating relational knowledge – the knowledge about how to act and make use of varying kinds of relations – is undermined. However messy and untenable certain heterogeneous urban environments may have been, they were a context for the skilling of residents in the conduct of relations. These relations may not have been consistently generous, tolerant, or wide ranging, but they nonetheless were diversified. There was a mixture of sentiments and practices that co-existed, uneasily, and sometimes destructively, but which nevertheless generated the capacities of residents to ply the potential resourcefulness of what they lived with. Part of the work of being in the city entails a range of literacies that have to be honed over time. Part of the importance of everyday urban practices is that it constitutes a repository of urban learning, with important skills required in how to forge and conduct new relationships among people, places, and things. An important role for public policy then is how institutions can effectively pay attention to the logics and dynamics of the everyday in order to creatively animate a broader public awareness of the larger issues concerning the relationships between justice, redistribution, climate adaptation, and infrastructural change. Recasting urban life is then at the core of such a pedagogic, social learning project. If digital and new media are introducing new parameters for subjectivity, how do we think about new collective practices, focal and aggregation points, so that new cultural practices emerge? Rather than leaving the work of collective aggregation to consumption machines or fundamentalist traditions, we need to explore new social contexts, procedures, modalities, and institutions of social learning as ways of substantiating new ways of being together.

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References ADHOC. 2013. ‘A Turning Point? Land, Housing and Natural Resources in Cambodia in 2012.’ ADHOC, Phnom Penh, www. adhoc-cambodia.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ADHOC-A-Turning-Point-Land-Housing-and-Natural-ResourcesRights-in-2012.pdf Amin, A. 2015. ‘Animated Space.’ Public Culture 27: 239–258. Aspinall, E. 2005. Opposing Suharto: Compromise, resistance, and regime change in Indonesia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Atehortúa, J. V. 2014. ‘Barrio Women’s Invited and Invented Spaces Against Urban Elitisation in Chacao, Venezuela.’ Antipode 45: 836–856. Brenner, N. and C. Schmid. 2015. ‘Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban?’ CITY 19: 151–182. Caldeira, T. 2012. ‘Imprinting and Moving Around: New Visibilities and Configurations of Public Space in São Paulo.’ Public Culture 24: 385–419. Cambodian Center for Human Rights. 2013. ‘Land Reform.’ Briefing Note, March 2013, www.cchrcambodia.org/index_old. php?url=project_page/project_page.php&p=press_release.php&id=3&pro=LR&pro_id=12&show=show Cambodia Development Research Institute. 2012. ‘Cambodia’s Urbanization: Key Trends and Policy Priorities.’ Cambodia Development Review 16: 1–24. Center for Khmer Studies. 2007. ‘Living Capital: Sustaining Diversity in Southeast Asian Cities.’ Center for Khmer Studies, Phnom Penh. Chattopadhyay, S. 2006. Representing Calcutta: Modernity, nationalism, and the colonial uncanny. London: Taylor & Francis. Davies, W. 2014. The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, sovereignty, and the logic of competition. London: Sage. Doyle, S. 2012. ‘City of Water: Architecture, Urbanism and the Floods of Phnom Penh.’ Nakhara 8: 135–154. Edensor, T. and M. Jayne (eds.). 2011. Urban Theory Beyond the West: A world of cities. London: Routledge. Fauveaud, G. 2012. ‘À la recherche des savoirs urbains, les enjeux socio-spatiaux du marché du logement à Phnom-Penh.’ Péninsule 64: 123–154. Galloway, A., E. Thacker, and M. Wark. 2014. Excommunication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gottesman, E. 2004. Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge: Inside the politics of nation-building. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hardt, M. and A. Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Holston, J. 1991. ‘Autoconstruction in Working-Class Brazil.’ Cultural Anthropology 6: 447–465. Kusno, A. 2013. Housing the Margin: Perumahan Rakyat and the Future of Urban Form of Jakarta. Indonesia 94: 23–56. Laruelle, F. 2008. Introduction aux sciences génériques. Paris: Editions Petra. LICADHO/LICADHO Canada. 2008. ‘Dey Krahorm Community Land Case Explained.’ LICADHO Canada, Phnom Penh, www.licadho-cambodia.org/reports/files/118DeyKrahormCommunityLandCaseExplained.pdf Löhr, D. 2011. ‘The Cambodian Land Market: Development, Aberrations, and Perspectives.’ ASIEN 120: 28–47. McFarlane, C. 2011. Learning the City: Knowledge and translocal assemblage. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Menzies, N., S. Ketya, and D. Adler. 2008. ‘Land, Development, and Conflict: Urban and Peri-Urban Phnom Penh.’ Center for Advanced Study, Justice for the Poor Program at the World Bank, Phnom Penh, https://www.academia.edu/3758683/ Land_Development_and_Conflict_Urban_and_Peri-Urban_Phnom_Penh Merrifield, A. 2013. ‘The Urban Question Under Planetary Urbanization.’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37: 909–922. Mgbako, C., R. E. Gao, E. Joynes, A. Cave, and J. Mikhailevich. 2010. ‘Forced Eviction and Resettlement in Cambodia: Case Studies from Phnom Penh.’ Washington University Global Studies Law Review 9: 39–71. Müller, F.-V. and G. Züsdorf. 2013. ‘Old Policies – New Action: A Surprising Political Initiative to Recognize Human Rights in the Cambodian Land Reform.’ Paper prepared for presentation at the Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty, April 8–11. The World Bank, Washington, DC http://www.oicrf.org/pdf.asp?method=download&email=&ID= 11816&submit=Get+document Osborne, M. 2008. Phnom Penh: A cultural history. New York: Oxford University Press. Paling, W. 2012. ‘Governance Planning a Future for Phnom Penh: Mega Projects, Aid Dependence and Disjointed Governance.’ Urban Studies 49: 2889–2912. Parisi, L. 2013. Contagious Architecture: Computation, aesthetics and space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Percival, T. and P. Waley. 2012. ‘Articulating Intra-Asian Urbanism: The Production of Satellite Cities in Phnom Penh.’ Urban Studies 49: 2873–2888. Rabe, P. 2010. ‘Land Sharing in Phnom Penh and Bangkok: Lessons from Four Decades of Innovative Slum Redevelopment Projects in Two Southeast Asian Boom Towns.’ Paper presented at the policy workshop Examining The Places We Live:

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Slums and Urban Poverty in the Developing World. Washington, DC, April, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/ INTURBANDEVELOPMENT/Resources/336387-1272506514747/Rabe.pdf Robinson, J. 2013. ‘The Urban Now: Theorising Cities Beyond the New.’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 16: 659–677. Simondon, G. 2009. ‘Technical Mentality.’ Parrhesia, 7: 17–27. Simone, A. and V. Rao. 2012. ‘Securing the Majority Living through Uncertainty in Jakarta.’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36: 315–335. Tudehope, M. 2012. A Tale of Two Cities: A Review of the development paradigm in Phnom Penh. Phnom Penh: Sahmakum Teang Tnaut. Vasudevan, A. 2015. ‘The Makeshift City Towards a Global Geography of Squatting.’ Progress in Human Geography 39: 338–359. Verver, M. 2012. ‘Templates of “Chineseness” and Trajectories of Cambodian Chinese Entrepreneurship in Phnom Penh.’ Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 1: 291–322.

22 Incremental Urbanism and Tactical Learning: Reflections from Mumbai and Kampala Colin McFarlane

Introduction Urbanism is more event than thing, a great accumulation of occurrences, of the contingency of encounters, and shaped but not determined by powerful histories of political economy, cultural power, politics, and materialities of different sorts. Urbanites have no other option than to learn how to cope with, respond to, pre-empt, contest, and change the city they inherit. To inhabit urbanism is to learn how to inhabit. This is an experiential immersion in urban space–time, differentiated by economic, political, and cultural vectors that shape the form and capacity to learn. This chapter offers two interrelated conceptualisations of how learning features in the production and contestation of urban life: incremental urbanism and tactical learning. Incrementalism points to slow and gradual accretion – that is, a cumulative and shifting set of practised knowledge, rather than a kind of linear addition – whereas tactical learning is more defined and shifts in action based on new handles on what should or should not be done next, with the aim of improving conditions or stopping them from further deteriorating. Context – time and space – is not secondary to incremental or tactical learning; time and space are iteratively defined in fact by a sense of place and timing. For many urban residents living on the economic margins of the city – and those margins are absolutely not just about the ‘global South’, especially in light of entrenched austerity and for millions of refugees arriving in Europe – these forms of learning are vital to how life is lived. Understanding how learning operates matters to urban research. As Borden et al. (2001: 9) reflect in their introduction to The Unknown City, learning the city is first and foremost a ‘project of becoming’ through unfolding events and struggles over time and space, the city as ‘a conjunction of seemingly endless possibilities of remaking’ (Simone, 2004: 9). Learning is an ongoing process of sensing and making ways through changing urban worlds. It is, as we will see, radically differentiated by gender, class,

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ethnicity, age, religion, and other vectors, in ways that are vital to how learning is experience and to the possibilities it opens. And it is limited by the political economies and cultural politics of the city. It can be both a coping mechanism, as forms of incremental learning so often are, and a more explicit political intervention in the shape of tactical learning. Yet there has been surprisingly little attention to urban learning among ordinary people and groups in the city (for exceptions, see Chattopadhyay, 2012; Hansen and Verkaaik, 2009; McFarlane, 2011; Simone, 2004, 2014; Shove et al., 2007). In discussing incremental and tactical learning, however, I do not want to imply that there is a division of everyday/slow and occasional/fast learning. The two are not separate but always latent in one another, as we have learned from thinkers as different as De Certeau (1984) or Scott (1985). But if tactical learning often emerges through everyday forms of knowing, and vice versa, my central argument is not only that incremental and tactical forms of urbanism emerge from inhabiting the city, but that inhabiting or resisting or otherwise politicising the city involves a vital and often overlooked role for learning. I will illustrate my arguments through a series of examples, and through Kampala and Mumbai in particular.

Incremental urbanism In recent years I have conducted research on the making of different kinds of urban infrastructure in a range of urban contexts, especially Mumbai, Kampala, Berlin, and Cape Town. Clearly, there are a lot of vital differences between – and of course within – these cities. But what is clear is that in all of these cities, for many who make up the diverse category of ‘the urban poor’, whether they be living in informal settlements or in refugee camps in Berlin, infrastructure and housing are very often an incremental process of gradual manipulations within the urban environment – ‘tinkering’, to borrow from Mol’s (2002) writing in a different context, housing-as-a-verb, in Turner’s (1976) memorable description. Learning in these contexts occurs in relation to particular processes like getting access to sanitation, clothing vouchers, or extending or repairing the house, but given that there is often an overlap between these different processes, learning also occurs through the interrelation of these processes with another, ‘between the provisional and incessantly mutating practices required to viably “make do” in most African cities and a sense of order, if only temporary’ (Simone, 2008a: 13). Incrementally, an everyday architecture emerges that is embedded in the routines, activities, and temporalities of quotidian life, through the ‘interproduction of space, time and social being’ (Borden et al., 2001: 11). What is being learnt incrementally here is the different affordances of socio-material configurations over time, that is learning as a different way of seeing and living urban contexts, as an education of attention to the urban environment (McFarlane, 2011). As Cullen and Knox (1982: 285), drawing from Heidegger, argued in a searching paper on the self and the city over 30 years ago, ‘we do not discover the “usability” of things by observing them, or by observing them and establishing their properties – but by the “circumspection of the dealings in which we use them”’ (Heidegger, 1962: 102). Urban space is learnt by seeing not just people and materials but the possibilities of how they are and might become related in particular contexts. These ‘learnt objects’ are not just practically useful because of how they might maintain the present, avoid threats,

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or for what they might afford for new relations. They also play an active part in conditioning the possibilities of urban life. Dovey (2010) describes this processual multiplicity through a distinction between extensive and intensive multiplicity, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari (1980). An ‘extensive multiplicity’ is where the constituent parts are defined by their spatial extension and are unaffected by new additions, whereas an ‘intensive multiplicity’ is a multiplicity that can be changed by new additions: ‘A house, neighbourhood or city is an intensive multiplicity. When different people move in, new buildings or rooms are added, the sense of the larger place changes’ (Dovey, 2010: 27). While the shack, for example, is built, it is a practice more accurately described as dwelt. As habitat, the incremental shack or infrastructure is made through the current of precarious life activities. Notwithstanding its pejorative connotations, ‘slum dweller’ in this sense is the ubiquitous term that resonates. But this dwelling also offers a window into the city more generally: the city as an ongoing chain of socio-material translations that affords different possibilities at different times under deeply unequal conditions for urban learning. Incrementalism, as laborious and historical accretion, is central to learning, and is common to a whole range of urban processes and forms, from housing and policy to infrastructure and culture. As Graham and Thrift (2007) have shown in relation to the forms of hidden learning and adaptation that constantly occur on a daily basis in the maintenance and repair work of urban infrastructures, from roads and electricity to water and sanitation, it is through these often labour-intensive socio-technical processes of maintenance and repair that the urban world often appears to us ‘ready-to-hand’ (on infrastructure, see Graham and McFarlane, 2014). Or, as Simone (2008a: 28) has argued, cities, ‘no matter how depleted and fragmented, still constitute platforms for trajectories of incrementalism’: Houses and limited infrastructure are added onto bit by bit; the mobilization of family labor buys time for a small business to grow; migration is used as an instrument to pool together savings in order to start a new economic activity; mobile work crews are formed to dig wells, help with construction, or deliver goods until they make enough contacts to specialize on one particular activity.

We see this continuous effort, for instance, in the incremental urbanism that constitutes much of the daily life for people within economically marginalised urban spaces, especially women who tend to take on the majority of household construction and maintenance, as Neuwirth has written: ‘With makeshift materials, they are building a future in a society that has always viewed them as people without a future. In this very concrete way, they are asserting their own being’ (2006: 21–22; Pieterse, 2008). To take a quite different example, Borden (2001: 196) shows how over time urban skateboarders learn to improvise with urban objects in different ways through practical immersion – walls, benches, pavements, steps, and gaps can take on a ‘newness’ as they are creatively recast as objects of play or exploration. Borden shows how skateboarders learn to use everyday urban materials in different ways by seeing new possibilities in those materials. For instance, a public handrail is transformed from being an object of safety to becoming an object of risk as skateboarders jump onto and slide down it. Incremental learning here involves a simultaneous and co-constituting learning of both urban micro-spaces and the craft of skateboarding gradually over time, as Borden (2001: 190) relates in relation to sound and touch:

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the sound of the skateboard over the ground yields much information about the condition of the surface, such as its speed grip, and predictability … a sense of touch, generated either from direct contact with the terrain – hand on building, foot on wall – or from the smoothness and textual rhythms of the surface underneath, passed up through the wheels, trucks, and deck up into the skater’s feet and body.

Here, an embodied, experiential, and materialised form of urban learning emerges through repeated, incremental engagement with urban space – as Borden (2001: 193) puts it, the ‘skateboarder’s senses’ are ‘historically produced’. But incremental learning is not, of course, a process that should be celebrated. It is stratified, unequal, and controlled. Some groups, Simone (2008a: 28) continues, ‘are able to organize labor, money, and contacts to finish roads, complete water reticulation projects, or electrify their compounds and neighborhoods, while others languish’. It can, for instance in relation to water or sanitation provision, or in electricity or housing, represent an often desperate attempt to cope with severe hardship and poverty. Particular groups within impoverished settlements in Mumbai, for example, are forced to develop sanitation facilities that constitute nothing short of a public health disaster for those that use them. If incremental learning with people and materials is forced upon many people in contexts of state welfare abandonment, complex coordinating systems often emerge as coping mechanisms. For example, reciprocal exchanges form the basis of insurance systems through which people borrow, lend, buy, or sell between themselves. These survival strategies include reciprocity in relation to a wide variety of services, from employment to water provision, and are usually mediated through close family and friends (e.g. Gill, 2000; Lomnitz, 1977; Moser, 1996). Reciprocal systems emerge through incremental learning of urban change and negotiating networks of family and friends. While these systems are themselves often incremental, they are used in times of sudden change and stress to cope with risks of, for instance, losing income or water provisions, and can serve both to reinforce and place stress on relations with family or friends, and to manage a field of uncertainties. These uncertainties range from unexpected drops in water supply due to contamination and damage to surface-lying water pipes, to complete removal and destruction by the state or landlords, forcing people to develop alternative systems of supply. For example, the removal of water pipes by the municipal state in Rafinagar, Mumbai, in 2010, following a water ‘shortage’ that was blamed by elites on ‘illegal slums’, forced groups to utilise their personal networks and local knowledge to improvise reciprocal and, in many cases, far more expensive alternative private supplies (Graham, Desai, and McFarlane, 2013). In the face of such acts of destruction of infrastructure and housing – acts that remove, deny, or radically devastate urban dwellings that are all too common in many poor neighbourhoods in Mumbai – people draw on what they know to improvise alternative possibilities. In doing so, they draw on social infrastructure systems put in place over years that reflect an incremental learning of the sorts of vulnerabilities that cities might create and the kinds of coping mechanisms that people might put to work. As a form of incremental learning, reciprocity, to quote Simone’s (2008b: 200) important work, entails ‘everyday transactions’ that ‘facilitate, even at difficult and uncertain costs, the capacities of diverse urban residents to continuously make and adapt to conditions that keep the vast heterogeneities of urban life – its things, resources, spaces, infrastructures and peoples – in multiple intersections with each other’. Reciprocity is

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a multifaceted process through which marginalised groups learn as they adapt to, as Chatterjee (2004: 40–41) has put it, an ‘uncertain terrain by making a large array of connections outside the group – with other groups in similar situations, with more privileged and influential groups, with government functionaries, perhaps with political parties and leaders’ (on street hawkers in Mumbai, see Anjaria, 2016). These continuous, incremental efforts at urban maintenance and adaptation constitute porous learning assemblages, constantly drawing on and altering different urban knowledges, and sometimes being put to work in relation to new contacts, events, and possibilities (McFarlane, 2011; McFarlane Desai, and Graham, 2014). In order to illustrate these arguments, I will briefly turn to recent work in Kampala. Incremental learning in Kampala Kampala is the capital and largest city of Uganda, located on the northern shores of Lake Victoria. A city with an annual growth rate of 4% and over 2.1 million residents (UN-Habitat, 2011), Kampala is not a megacity, nor is it particularly prominent in the trajectories of global urban policy or research debate: 60% of Kampala’s residents live in over 30 informal settlements across the city, with 39% living below the poverty line (Uganda Bureau of Statistics, 2007). Life in the city, for many, is a shared experience of a lack of basic service provision, the ongoing threat of evictions, and multifaceted land and resource conflicts (Lwasa, 2011). For many, life is replete with uncertainties about now and the future, about how to be positioned in a way that limits vulnerability and provides opportunity, however slim, to get on. Namuwongo is a centrally located informal settlement to the southeast of the city centre. It is an industrial zone, partly built on a wetland and adjacent to a unused railway track leading to Port Bell (the port is one of the important elements of the redevelopment plans, although no work has started as yet). It has become a dense and diverse neighbourhood that sustains many different trajectories of urban life. In a city in which newcomers account for over 50% of the total population (Lwasa, 2011), Namuwongo has become a crucial space in which migrants are able to find cheaper sources of housing, connections to kin, and economic opportunities. An estimated 15,000 people live in Namuwongo (Mann and Andabati, 2014), with few services and infrastructure (such as road access), leading to patchwork combinations of formal and informal infrastructures such as energy and waste. In recent research with Jonathan Silver, and working with local resident–researcher Joel Ongwec, we aimed to examine the ways in which different residents in Namuwongo navigate the multiple topographies of city life. We found that residents in Namuwongo often weave together a range of skills and economic pursuits. For example, Jennifer has used her past experience as an elected chairwoman in the nearby town of Jinja, and her struggles as a widow to sustain a family and links to a range of individuals and organisations inside and outside the neighbourhood, to position herself at the centre of numerous forms of care and support that make a substantive difference to many people. These include her role in a woman’s group, established by her efforts and connected to international sponsors. The group activities include the making and selling of crafts for sale, providing often vital income. The group has set up a savings group which has allowed each member more regularly to obtain everyday essentials such as food or fuel when times are tough, through to covering exceptional needs such as funeral costs and, in some cases, saving towards a small business.

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Jennifer has worked with the local Pentecostal Church to build a new structure and then, later, sanitation facilities for collective use by the congregation. She helps her family members to start businesses. She seeks out sponsorship for Namuwongo children to attend school, and is a go-to person for many families needing help with education access. And then there is the more informal work of checking up with people, seeing how they are getting on, identifying problems, and providing contacts to help. Here, incremental learning is at once social and material, ranging from food and fuel to craft skill training, school access, and contacts for informal employment. It changes over time and takes different forms: financial, emotional, spiritual, material, and social. This is not simply altruistic labour on Jennifer’s part. She has positioned herself as locally important, and as such often benefits in a range of ways. These include small donations from parents for securing a school place for their children, through to selling her handmade beads to local and international contacts. The time and work that Jennifer puts in to creating and sustaining these social infrastructures through incremental learning reflects the wider global geography of urban reciprocity I mentioned above. Across Namuwongo, the forms of incremental learning vary considerably according to all sorts of variables: personal networks, income, gender, age, background, and so on. Compare Jennifer with the example of Amiri. Amiri is young and stylish, and understands the challenges many young people in the area struggle with. He lost both parents when he was young, and school did not work out well – he finished early and started to earn money by collecting and selling scrap materials in and around the local area. With the help of his uncle, he was trained as a carpenter, producing an impressive range of different wood products in his uncle’s workshop on the edge of the neighbourhood. Sometimes he leaves Namuwongo to go and work on sites across the city, including recently the large new Hilton Hotel being built in the city centre. He lives with friends in a tiny, rented dwelling in the ‘Soweto’ section, the densest part of the neighbourhood. Amiri’s relative security in his carpentry job is assured through his uncle. He has moved in and out of essential social infrastructures of care, from his early experience of losing his parents and becoming a waste-picker and later a carpenter. What he has learned he has learned incrementally through immersion not just in poverty and scant livelihood, but in the material worlds of trash and then, later, craft in the neighbourhood. He spoke of a growing realisation that he lives in an urban space in which support and reciprocity is vital, whether in finding employment through contacts, or looking out for each other when the police are in the neighbourhood. While Jennifer is able to draw upon a lifetime of experience, Amiri as a young man is only beginning to work out the coordinates of his own knowledge: his connections to networks of people, his abilities as a person in constructing and sustaining social infrastructures, and the limits of those infrastructures. Incremental learning is a placeholder. It names a set of resources that are both key to how people living on urban economic margins live and make their way in the city, and to how those resources are differentiated across different people. In the relative absence of state provisions, people have little choice other than to focus incremental learning into realms of basic social reproduction and labour, in the hope of surviving or carving out something else. In the next section, I consider how learning can operate as a tactic that explicitly seeks to address urban marginality and to make a significant, collective difference to conditions. I offer a conceptualisation of ‘tactical learning’ to name the process whereby learning can open new possibilities for urban life.

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Tactical learning Perhaps the most influential work in debates on tactics is that of De Certeau (1984; De Certeau et al., 1998) on the strategy–tactic relation. Strategy refers to the ‘calculus of force relationships’ sustained by a base of power once a subject becomes isolated (e.g. a governmental institution) (De Certeau, 1984: xix, 35–36). Strategy postulates a place that can serve as a delimited base and has independence in relation to its circumstances and others. A tactic is a fragment that manipulates events and turns them into opportunities – its operation lies in ‘seizing the moment’, hence De Certeau’s (1984: 39) emphasis on the ‘utilization of time’. A tactic is a ‘calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus’; unlike strategy, it does not demarcate an exteriority necessary for its autonomy: ‘The space of the tactic is the space of the other’ (1984: 37). Tactics ‘traverse’ and ‘infiltrate’ systems by playing out ‘the guileful ruses of different interests and desires’: ‘It must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected’ (1984: 34, 37). Tactics refer to the kinds of action that are possible once people have been marginalised by different strategies, and includes a range of everyday forms such as speaking, walking, reading, and shopping. De Certeau is concerned with the ways in which, in trying to get by in ordinary life, people use practical knowledge of how things work that can then be translated into different uses and contexts. In the conception of strategy and tactic, there is a risk of implying too rigid a separation of the official and the everyday. There is a latent potential too in De Certeau’s work of romanticising marginality (Iveson, 2007). For instance, he has surprisingly little to say conceptually about the spaces between compliance and resistance (Hansen and Verkaaik, 2009; Napolitano and Pratten, 2007). In this latter respect Scott’s (1985) contemporaneous work on ‘weapons of the weak’ in relation to everyday forms of peasant resistance is particularly useful. Scott’s (1985: 29) ‘weapons of the weak’ refers to ‘foot-dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so forth’. If this overlaps with the idea of tactics in that it is based primarily on forms of learning through dwelling, Scott is nonetheless concerned with more visible forms of resistance. As with tactics, these weapons often – though not exclusively – emerge through everyday forms of knowing: ‘[These forms] require little or no coordination or planning; often represent a form of individual self-help; and they typically avoid any direct symbolic confrontation with authority or elite norms’ (1985: 29). One example he gives is ‘the quiet, piecemeal process by which peasant squatters have often encroached on plantation and state forest land’ (1985: 32). These forms are ‘often covert, and concerned largely with immediate, de facto gains’ – forms that Scott explicitly refers to as ‘informal’, in contrast to institutionalised politics that are ‘formal, overt, concerned with systemic, de jure change’ (1985: 33). He elaborates on this throughout his book in references to ‘implicit understandings’ and ‘subcultures of resistance’ that are known but not always made explicit. Later, in his Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Scott (1990: xii) calls these multifarious processes the ‘infrapolitics of the powerless’. But Scott is also concerned with the ways in which resistance does not just emerge from everyday life, but can stand apart from and intervene in it. For Borden et al. (2001: 13), tactics are less about everyday life and take the form of more exceptional interventions, including ‘attempts to solve urban problems with housing programs, planning

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policies, and political agendas; and they may also be attempts to reconceptualise the relation between the city and the self …. Tactics aim to make a difference’. This both connects to and separates out from the discussion of incremental learning above. Tactical learning is a deliberate act of intervening in and contesting urban life conditions in order to open out a new direction. While it may emerge from the experience of incremental learning, part of its purpose is precisely to get away from the conditions that necessitate some of the forms of incremental learning described above around housing, infrastructure, or work. One useful reference point here is Hansen and Verkaaik’s (2009: 13) notion of ‘urban infrapower’: durable assemblages of resources and connectivity. Urban infrapower names three domains through which people interpret and act upon the city. The first is ‘sensing the city’, ‘i.e. reading, reproducing and domesticating the urban soundscapes, the visual overflow, the styles, smells and a physical landscape that can be read through everyday mythologies of past actions, heroes, martyrs, events, danger’ (Hansen and Verkaaik, 2009: 12). The second is ‘knowing the city’, ‘in the sense of decoding it, managing its opaque and dangerous sides, controlling and governing the urban landscape’ (2009: 12–13). This includes everyday incremental urban knowing that enables particular forms of infrapower, for example in relation to poor neighbourhoods: ‘Although popular neighbourhoods do appear to resist legibility, in James Scott’s (1988) sense as a gaze of the state, such spaces are nonetheless navigated and interpreted by their residents on a daily basis’ (2009: 15). Oftentimes, particular individuals become important in the connective tissue of urban learning. Such neighbourhoods are home to people who possess ‘superior knowledge of these densely populated spaces: the hustler, the hard man, the wheeler-dealer’ (2009: 15). This points to everyday modes of knowing the city, to the ‘performative competence’ of urban registers, and to the ‘urban specialist’ ‘who by virtue of their reputation, skills and imputed connections provide services, connectivity and knowledge to ordinary dwellers in slums and popular neighbourhoods’ (Hansen and Verkaaik, 2009: 16). The third domain is the capacity for ‘urban gestures’ and actions – registers of public performance that are known to people in specific neighbourhoods, whether as individuals or as crowds (2009: 13) – in other words, the role of gesture to facilitate learning by translating meaning between different groups. In Hansen and Verkaaik’s account, knowledge is positioned as neither ‘officially codified’ nor ‘concealed or secret’, but instead as a form of ‘brokerage’ with tactical purpose (2009: 20). Infrapower is always emergent, because it only shows itself in action or outcome, and is reinvented through action. The forms of learning that constitute infrapower only become forms of power when they enable opportunities – that is, become realised as tactics. The notion of infrapower is useful, then, in that it highlights a caveat in De Certeau’s tactics and Scott’s weapons of the weak by drawing attention to the fact that tactics and weapons must be learnt, that this learning emerges from inhabitation, and that it is itself vital to the operation of tactical power. As Hansen and Verkaaik indicate in passing at several points, those mediators who possess urban infrapower because they are ‘in the know’ need to have learnt these particular modes of knowing the city. But despite the useful emphasis here on infrapower as an emergent property of learning that has the capacity to intervene, I want to push this discussion further to consider how learning can operate as a tactical form of infrapower that can radically disrupt everyday dwelling. By way of example, I will draw on an urban social movement in Mumbai, the Federation of Tenants Association.

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Housing and tactical learning The Federation of Tenants Association, a male-dominated organisation led by predominantly middle-class housing activists, works to raise awareness of existing laws and regulations among marginalised settlements that protect housing rights. As one of the Federation leaders, Deshpandy, claimed in interview, the state has little interest in publicising these regulations because it threatens the ‘state-corporate development nexus’, so the Federation attempts its own publicity through large public meetings within popular settlements throughout the city. One site the Federation works in is Bharat Nagar, a predominantly Muslim settlement in central Mumbai. This old neighbourhood is under threat from predatory developers due to exponential increases in real estate costs in recent decades caused by the development of the nearby Bandra-Kurla financial and administrative complex. There have been accusations made by community members that the developers have used bribes and threats of demolition in order to get people to move from the land. The act of demolition is common practice within many popular settlements in the city that find themselves occupying land that has become lucrative. The often unpredictable demolition that many settlements live with constitutes the transformation of space by the state for (and often with) capital – in Wacquant’s (2008) terms, the militarisation of marginality by the neoliberal punitive state. It reflects the investment of the state in particular populations over others, an unequal biopolitical investment reminiscent of Ong’s conception of the ‘postdevelopment state’ marked by a graduated sovereignty that divides the population into different mixes of ‘disciplinary, caring and punitive technologies’ (Ong, 1999: 217). In the mid- and late 2000s the Federation was in communication with local leaders in the area and organised a mass meeting that sought to reach local people at large. That the meeting went ahead at all was remarkable: it was alleged by the Federation that the developer in question had tried to prevent the meeting by putting up posters stating that the meeting had been cancelled; then when word got around about the posters being false the developer put up new posters saying that the venue had changed. All of this ironically served to raise the profile event by raising interest. The Federation leaders, along with other NGOs (all male), each took to the stage to address the crowd, and a question and answer session took place after the speeches, lasting over an hour. The objective was to inform people about, first, the exact worth of the land given the steep rise in land prices in the area, and, second, the rights they had under Mumbai’s controversial Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) scheme to act as a collective developer themselves by forming cooperatives. The Federation’s work has shown that many people in the city living in informal settlements simply do not know about formal regulations: it is a movement predicated specifically upon a politics of learning. Learning here dramatises the nature of marginality as a constitutive outside: many of the tenants of this settlement live illegally and this is, of course, productive of their exclusion from security and services, yet some aspire in this instance to know the law in order to provide some access to a world of security and services. Around 3,000 people came to the meeting itself, almost everyone in the settlement. The meeting was sharply divided along gender lines, in terms of both the male leaders who confidently strutted the stage and the segregated audience that channelled the women to one side of the meeting space. The atmosphere was highly charged, especially during the long and animated speech by the Federation’s charismatic leader, a natural performer, who delivered an expressive, stylish, dramatic and at times crowd-rousing speech. As the

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meeting went on, more and more people were enthused by what they were hearing in the speech about collective ‘self-development’, which explicitly tapped into a Ghandist tradition of community-driven anti-establishment resistance. Speakers encouraged people to form cooperative housing societies, pointing out that this would allow them to develop the land themselves and exclude the builders. Federation leaders recounted stories of successful self-development schemes in other parts of Mumbai. One NGO leader traced the various steps that local cooperatives might embark upon: sorting your own accounts, organizing yourself without builders, dealing with contractors and payments on your own, etc. – here, tactical learning emerges as a chain of translation between legal and non-legal knowledges, with the notion of the ‘cooperative’ operating as a coordinating device. This ‘self-development scheme’ would involve cooperatives managing construction and selling some of the housing themselves and using the profit (after construction costs) to fund a cooperative bank account that would be used to manage building maintenance and pay for property tax. The tenants themselves would pay nothing. A few days later, the situation in Bharat Nagar became volatile, with some in the area grouping with the developer and some opting for the self-development cooperatives. Neighbours and families were quarrelling. The details and regulations themselves have caused anxiety, with people struggling to understand Mumbai’s complicated development system of floor space indices and transferrable development rights, and for some accepting quick bribes can be simpler and faster. If the Federation’s intervention provided a learning opportunity for rethinking the possibilities of urban housing and collective organisation, some were left daunted by the uncertainties of understanding legal information and the complications of forming cooperatives. In the weeks that followed, Federation leaders began smaller scale plot-based meetings in the area to help answer queries, and to try to persuade people to form plot-based societies. The future of the settlement remains uncertain. These plot-based societies were to function as coordination devices for tactical learning. As a form of tactical learning, the Federation’s work addresses urban marginality through the domain of the law, with the aim of extending the formal security that mainstream residential groups in the city experience to a neighbourhood with precarious rights. This learning is facilitated by key charismatic individuals who can perform to impressive effect a distinct regime of urban infrapower. The Federation is using formal, codified legal information, but – and this is crucial to the success of the movement – communicating it through everyday, informal registers. The charismatic leader mentioned above – who not only knows the formal laws of the city, but also knows the affective realm of gestures and speech that are necessary to put the law to work – demonstrates the near impossibility of prising the formal and informal apart. In addition, if at the centre of this movement there is learning about rights and procedures, that learning is not simply a process of encountering codified knowledge. Rather, the charismatic performance facilitates learning through the coordination of different domains, including the role of gesture and speech in public performance, the promotion of discourses of ‘self-development’, people’s capacities for patience in a hostile, fraught environment of threats from developers, the invocation of histories of Indian resistance, the desire for security of tenure, and of sharing stories of successful examples in collective tenure from other parts of the city. Learning through the Federation’s work in Bharat Nagar is an assemblage of multiple histories, knowledges, sites, materials, and groups, as well of emergent solidarities, fears, hopes, and uncertainties. It is an urban tactic of resistance

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that aims to advance the prospects of the urban marginalised, and which emerges through the translation of codified, legal knowledge through forms of sensing and gesture. The Bharat Nagar case also raises the question of the human politics of learning. One risk of an emphasis on assemblage is that the question of difference, namely differences shaped by class, gender, race, ethnicity, caste, religion, and so on, is pushed to one side in the analytical emphasis on distribution. Volatile situations such as these where there is uncertainty around housing – and we find this in both the Bharat Nagar and Namuwongo cases – can intensify social differences, so that the ways in which learning proceeds are structured by existing power relations. In Namuwongo, for instance, local chiefs, with ties to political parties and relative economic power, can shape decisions around which route to take in negotiations with state officials or in the shape of development interventions by NGOs or other external groups, and these decisions can in turn influence the kinds of learning that do or do not take place around domains like housing and infrastructure and their futures. In Bharat Nagar, differences around gender and specifically male power, as well as caste and religion, help shape the ways in which disagreements play out and decisions are made, usually in ways that entrench existing power relations and influence the kinds of learning that take place, including the question of who gets to be ‘in the know’ and who does not. Tactical learning is a socio-material assemblage, but one that is structured – and the same must be said for incremental learning – through the reproduction of social relations in the city and beyond.

Conclusion Incremental learning is an experiential geography of urban accretion. It takes a diversity of forms, from the bit-by-bit ways in which informal housing is added to or altered to meet new needs or possibilities, to pooling contacts and resources to develop new economic opportunities or building reciprocal exchange systems among family and friends. Incrementalism is a central process of urban life, an attunement of perception to what urbanism – in conditions of often extreme inequality – might enable and delimit, and to how people might negotiate it. Incremental learning names the everyday practicalities that constitute learning assemblages, and the perceptual fields that both are shaped by and in turn alter those practical enactments. Incremental urban learning involves acting within assemblages of multiple relations, between family and friends, sustained explicit infrastructural arrangements and systems of borrowing and lending, anticipating the movements of the city over day–night, week, and season, the legal and illegal, the modern and traditional, the new and the habitual. We see this in the example from Kampala. People learn to negotiate the polyrhythmic nature of urbanism through practice, experience, networks, and resources, but their capacities to do this are both highly circumscribed by the place of their lives in the city and highly differentiated across a neighbourhood and city. What this means is that, while incremental forms of learning are available to all urbanites as they learn cities (McFarlane, 2011), the kinds of incremental learning that occur – in the case of this chapter, working with social and material processes that produce basic infrastructures and services, for instance – emerge in dynamic relation to particular conditions of economic marginalisation, context, and social difference.

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In conceptualising the ways in which different groups address urban marginality, De Certeau’s (1984) tactics and Scott’s (1985) weapons of the weak are useful starting points, particularly when brought into dialogue with Hansen and Verkaaik’s (2009) account of urban infrapower as sensing, knowing, and gesture. Infrapower draws attention to the fact that tactics must be learnt. As Hansen and Verkaaik suggest, those mediators who possess urban infrapower because they are ‘in the know’ (such as the Federation leader discussed above) need to have learnt these particular modes of knowing the city. Tactical learning can emerge through incrementalism, but it also emerges through translation (e.g. of legal knowledge) and coordination (e.g. of housing cooperatives) that open alternative possibilities for urban life. Tactical learning is a variegated set of resources that responds to what Hansen and Verkaaik (2009) call the city’s ‘constitutive unknowability’ by performing a crucial role in how people resist in the city in often extremely difficult circumstances. The different forms of urban learning discussed in the chapter constitute, to borrow from Chattopadhyay (2009: 135), ‘an assemblage of fragmentary elements in space through which subaltern groups make room for themselves within a spatial structure that is not conducive to their existence’.

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23 Infrastructure Deficits and Potential in African Cities Katherine Hyman and Edgar Pieterse

The poststructural and postcolonial turns have compelled us to forgo teleological desires in thinking about the problematics of ‘development’ and ‘progress’ (Nederveen Pieterse, 2010). Yet, it is almost impossible for urbanists to shake off the humanist longing to read African cities as an early version of modern urbanism that is yet to come (de Boeck, 2013). This yearning has become heightened in the last decade as the economic fortunes of the African region have improved and cities were allowed to start playing a more central role in development scripts. Just a decade ago most African governments were, at best, aspatial in their development ambitions and, more often than not, anti-urban (Parnell and Simon, 2014). This manifested in formal anti-migration policies and massive under-investment in slum areas where the majority of urban dwellers reside. It also produced oppressive practices against informal businesses, unregulated housing and informal service providers – in short, the majority city in terms of population, economic activity, cultural production and institutional fabric (Myers, 2011; Simone, 2010). In 2016, the political and policy landscape looks significantly different. At a panAfrican level, the African Union and the Economic Commission for Africa actively promote ‘sustainable urbanisation’, encourage democratic decentralisation, and work with various financing institutions to enlarge the flow of finance to address the massive infrastructure deficits that place a brake on sustained economic growth and human development (UN-Habitat and ECA, 2015). However, there continues to be major disjunctures between this ‘new urban agenda’ and the everyday realpolitik of infrastructure investment, urban management, legal provisions and planning (ACC, 2015; Pieterse and Hyman, 2014). The historical, political and social dimensions of these disconnects make the African urban condition highly specific and unprecedented, especially if read against the changing spatial centralities and disjunctive flows associated with globalisation (Appadurai, 1996; Mbembe, 2016). The role of urban infrastructure systems, investment choices, technological ambitions and institutional requirements provides one insight into these dynamics.

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This chapter explores the political and policy imperatives of infrastructure development in African cities in order to make a case for the specificities of the African urban reality, alongside a plea for more fine-grained research and experimentation with novel hybrids that are rooted in emergent practices, but also consistent with the ideals of inclusive, resource-efficient, affordable and low-carbon imperatives. We root our exploration in the broader literature that problematises infrastructure as a black box in favour of the productive perspective that it is a socio-technical system (Graham and Marvin, 2001) that reflects, and is embedded in, the specific power relations that are best understood through a political economy lens (Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2011). With this in mind, two conceptual imperatives should dominate the African discussion on infrastructure and informality: affordability and achieving resource-efficient, lowcarbon urban systems through urban reconfigurations. However, these two issues remain underrepresented in the current literature. The aim of this chapter is to spell out both literatures and articulate them through a call for greater speculation about the dimensions of adaptive urbanism; that is, an approach to addressing infrastructure deficits that take cognisance of the constitutive nature of informality in Africa. It is assumed that informality takes on a variety of forms and manifestations depending on the economic structure of a city and country, and how it has come to be shaped by unique historical pathways in the pre- and postcolonial eras. The first part of the chapter introduce the specific dimensions of urbanisation in Africa followed by an overview of key trends in terms of infrastructure coverage, the scale of the deficits and the cost constraints in addressing those deficits. The next section explores the literature that seeks to make sense of how ordinary urban Africans cope with these deficits as they fashion their livelihoods and networks in their everyday lives. Here the work of Sylvia Jaglyn in particular is instructive and complemented with other accounts. Jaglyn (2014; 2016) makes apparent what most African urbanists take for granted and hence fail to theorise: African cities are reproduced through infrastructure networks, assemblages and patchworks that involve conventional infrastructure technologies provided by the state or privatised entities, and localised systems of provision that feed off, pilfer, extend or bypass the formal network in order to provide services to poor households on a piecemeal, day-by-day basis linked to the ebb and flow of incomes and desperation (Bayat, 2010). This body of work is both incisive and filled with potential that requires further (comparative) research and experimentation (Swilling, 2016). Thereafter, the third section explores recent perspectives on the infrastructural dimensions of sustainable transitions in the African urban context, and related to the political economy of dysfunctional urbanisation and uneven development. The final section is more speculative in vein: exploring four potential infrastructure scenarios for African cities as a means to set a research agenda and emphasise the importance of keeping the political economy of infrastructure investment choices firmly in mind.

African urbanisation Africa will remain predominantly rural for the next twenty years. According to official UN data, Africa is expecting to cross the 50 per cent urban threshold around 2035 (UN-DESA, 2015). This points to robust urban and rural growth for the foreseeable future

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(see Table 23.1), but also obscures enormous variation across the African continent. Indeed, the provocative argument of Krause (2013), that we need to analyse simultaneously the ruralisation and urbanisation of the world, applies in no small measure in the African context and has to inform ongoing efforts to excavate the spatial–historical specificities of continuous territorial change and flux. Conventionally these differences are best captured by the acute regional differences. For example, both North and southern Africa are well past the 50 per cent urbanisation mark, while East Africa has hardly entered the 20 per cent arena (UN-DESA, 2015). West Africa is a veritable mixed bag. Some prominent countries like Nigeria (largest African country by population) are past the 50 per cent tipping point, while Ghana reflects more the African average of 39 per cent. On this note, it is important to acknowledge the scholarly criticisms of the official data on urbanisation and associated projections (Potts, 2012; Parnell and Pieterse, 2014). We concur with the thrust of these critical perspectives that underscore the enormous diversity across Africa, the slowing down of urbanisation in some regions, as well as the unreliability of the underlying data sets (Potts, 2012). Furthermore, it is equally important to remain highly circumspect of statistical indices that create an impression that it is possible to draw neat distinctions between urban and rural areas, whereas in reality the livelihood imperatives of many African households require the capacity to keep a foothold in both. Furthermore, extended household and ethnic networks rely on the possibility and imperative to remain in motion between numerous settlements as part of larger trade and migratory systems, rendering the idea of distinct urban and rural settlements superfluous (Simone, 2004). Refreshingly, this critical literature is actively engaged with in Africa Economic Outlook 2016 (OECD/AfDB/UNDP, 2016: 153–159) which results in a novel typology to categorise African countries in terms of urbanisation dynamics, fertility transitions and level of economic development as expressed in the changing role of agriculture and the importance of natural resource extraction in the economy. This typology better reveals the diversity of conditions and trends across Africa, but of course still simplifies territorial dynamics and continuities within countries and across urban conurbations that stretch across national boundaries as is typical for West Africa. Apart from the five countries that fall into the diversifiers category, the vast majority of African countries reflect very low levels of wealth as reflected in GDP per capita Table 23.1  African countries by urbanisation, fertility transition and economic development

Urbanisation rate Fertility Gross national income per capita Human development index Number of countries

Diversifiers Early urbanisers Late urbanisers Agrarians

Natural resource based

40–60% 35–50% 18–30% 5 children