Planning in Divided Cities

Frank Gaffikin, Mike Morrissey

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444393194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Does planning in contested cities inadvertedly make the divisions worse? The 60s and 70s saw a strong role of planning, social engineering, etc but there has since been a move towards a more decentralised 'community planning' approach.

The book examines urban planning and policy in the context of deeply contested space, where place identity and cultural affinities are reshaping cities. Throughout the world, contentions around identity and territory abound, and in Britain, this problem has found recent expression in debates about multiculturalism and social cohesion. These issues are most visible in the urban arena, where socially polarised communities co-habit cities also marked by divided ethnic loyalties. The relationship between the two is complicated by the typical pattern that social disadvantage is disproportionately concentrated among ethnic groups, who also experience a social and cultural estrangement, based on religious or racial identity.

Navigating between social exclusion and community cohesion is essential for the urban challenges of efficient resource use, environmental enhancement, and the development of a flourishing economy.

The book addresses planning in divided cities in a UK and international context, examining cities such as Chicago, hyper-segregated around race, and Jerusalem, acting as a crucible for a wider conflict.

The first section deals with concepts and theories, examining the research literature and situating the issue within the urban challenges of competitiveness and inclusion. Section 2 covers collaborative planning and identifies models of planning, policy and urban governance that can operate in contested space. Section 3 presents case studies from Belfast, Chicago and Jerusalem, examining both the historical/contemporary features of these cities and their potential trajectories. The final section offers conclusions and ways forward, drawing the lessons for creating shared space in a pluralist cities and addressing cohesion and multiculturalism.

•Addresses important contemporary issue of social cohesion vs. urban competitiveness
•focus on impact of government policies will appeal to practitioners in urban management, local government and regeneration
•Examines role of planning in cities worldwide divided by religion, race, socio-economic, etc
•Explores debate about contested space in urban policy and planning
•Identifies models for understanding contested spaces in cities as a way of improving effectiveness of government policy

Part I

Introduction

Chapter 1: Introduction

Outlines the core objective and key arguments, and summarises the key points in each of the chapters.

Chapters 2–6

These chapters form the conceptual and theoretical framework: understanding the contemporary city and the nature of its conflicts, and the specific role that urban planning and policy can play in addressing problems of division.

Chapter 2: Conflict in the Changing City

Explains how the urban is changing–essentially how the global is becoming more urban and the urban more global, and the implication of these changes for conflict in cities.

Chapter 3: Understanding the Urban

The key conceptual and theoretical debates in urban studies over recent decades, and where this leaves our understanding of what is happening in the urban arena at a global level.

Chapter 4: The Divided City

Various theories and interpretations about the nature of ‘the divided city’ and why there may be a proliferation of such contested cities in the future.

Chapter 5: Identity, Space, and Urban Planning

A more detailed look at the links between identity formation, cultural collision, protectionist views of territory, and urban space in a transnational and cosmopolitan context.

Chapter 6: Collaborative Planning and the Divided City

Given this spread of the urban, and growth of city conflicts, what is the role of planning and policy in addressing these divisions?

Chapter 1

Introduction

Setting the Scene

The spatial focus of this book is on the urban, the settlement form which most of humanity now inhabits. While the conceptual focus is on ‘divided cities’, it acknowledges that in one sense all cities are divided, in that their ‘publics’ and stakeholders have differential access and vested interest, marked by distinctions of class, ethnicity, and gender. Accordingly, it distinguishes between two main forms of urban contested space. One is where dispute and antagonism relate to issues of pluralism, and concern rivalries about imbalances in power, welfare and status among distinctive social groups. The other kind is about sovereignty, where there are similar pluralist disputes about equity, rights, and social entitlement, but these are interwoven with an ethno-nationalist conflict about the legitimacy of the state itself.

An example of the former explored here is Chicago, a deeply segregated city, where race is a stark fault line in both the city's historical narrative and contemporary discourses, and has been persistently seminal in the configuration of its social space. So, for instance, when people think of the black American ghetto, Chicago comes readily to mind as the home of its epitome. By contrast, Belfast typifies the second form of divided city. In a strange contortion, they are both crucibles and instruments in the overall contest about nationality in these troubled lands. Here, the manifesto of the combatant group that claims to be subject to suppression and conquest (Catholics/Nationalists/Republicans in Belfast) is not merely concerned about equity and security with regard to the dominant group (Protestants/Unionists in Belfast). Rather, their immediate equality agenda can be interpreted as a transitional ‘Trojan horse’ politics unfolding over time into the fundamental objective of what they proclaim as a liberated homeland. In short, particular conflicts in such cities about equality and development get wrapped up in the more general conflict about the legitimacy of state ‘ownership’ and prerogative. The question of ‘whose city’ is inextricably part of a bigger quarrel about ‘whose country’.

This significant distinction between cities divided on a socio-economic or ethno-religious basis, and those conflicted around sovereignty contests is often under-observed. Of course, the distinction makes a big difference. Often, advocates of city peace-building will speak about fostering a sense of common belonging, rooted in a politico-legal concept of citizenship. Yet, in the case of sovereignty disputes, citizenship is itself at the very source of the conflict. Thus, although both kinds of urban division tend to promote territorial segregation, each type demands its own understanding and intervention. Specifically, as illustrated in this book, the intricacies of sovereignty contests require a sophisticated synchronization of planning and policy around social inclusion, community cohesion, and conflict resolution. The challenge of this integrated approach is that pursuit of one strategy can amplify the difficulty in another. For instance, social inclusion programmes that attempt to redress inequities between contending groups can inadvertently provoke antagonism from one side that believes such redistribution is designed to disadvantage them. In turn, this perception that ‘the other side’ gets more can deepen the acrimony, thereby frustrating the promotion of inter-community cohesion. Yet, a durable peace demands that inclusion and cohesion are not mutually exclusive.

Faced with such entanglement, it is tempting for planners and those charged with urban development to disclaim its relevance for their remit. It is easier for them to don the mantle of apolitical technical professionals, who are obliged to deliberately disregard these contexts in order to protect their detached impartiality. But, in this book, it is argued that such apparent ‘neutrality’ in the midst of urban conflict is a delusion. Moreover, without a conscious concern about its impact on the divisions, planning and policy can inadvertently accentuate rather than ameliorate such conflict. Indeed, many aspects of these disputes come down to sensitive issues of territory and space—particularly in cities caught up in sovereignty contests—and since planning is fundamentally about the shaping of social space, it is inevitably intertwined with these awkward dilemmas.

Addressed more positively, it is argued here that planning can provide the spatial underpinning of all the relevant interventions to resolve such conflicts. But, to achieve such a mission, it has to be reconceptualised beyond the narrow ambitions of physical land-use planning. New forms of spatial planning offer a paradigm for the kind of sustainable, comprehensive, inclusive, and participatory approaches to city development that may open up this conceptual and operational transformation. While this is much easier said than done, there is urgency about this recasting, if only because there are portents of proliferation of urban contests in the context of a globalising and urbanising world that accommodates substantial social segmentation, new geo-political antagonisms, environmental degradation, and related resource rivalry. In extreme conditions, such features risk the partitioning of many cities into the fortified enclaves of the rich and powerful alongside the settlements of the economically precarious and the ghettos of the excluded. Any such stark socio-spatial separation threatens to promote deepening inequalities, create separate social universes, and foment violence—all of which can serve to not only impede solidarity of common citizenship, but also to inhibit democratic politics. The very sustainability of cities in such circumstances is suspect. Even short of this forbidding scenario, there is an imperative for a new planning that proactively addresses the challenges of the divided city. Given this central argument, the book attends to the case through the following structure.

Outline of Structure and Argument

The book is divided into three main sections: the opening section, covering Chapters 2 to, addresses the conceptual and theoretical frameworks and the dilemmas for planning and policy in their interventions in this problematic terrain; the second section comprises three empirical chapters that offer analysis of case study cities (Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Belfast, Nicosia, Oldham, and Bradford); and the final section consists of a concluding chapter that connects the issues and arguments with the earlier theoretical considerations, and offers a paradigm for effective planning and policy in contested cities.

Specifically, Chapter 2 deals with the nature of the changing city, within which the problems of division fester. Essentially, it emphasises that we live in an urban world. Since there is no longer a simple urban–rural dichotomy, the ambiguity of territorial identities and boundaries means that ‘the city’ cannot be articulated in definitive spatial terms. Rather, it is an arena that is being continuously reshaped through social construction and relations within a spatial form of peri-urbanised city-regions (Knapp et al., 2006).

Many urban areas are seeking amalgamations and networks with proximate city neighbours to achieve a more potent development axis, based on scale, synergy, and other forms of collaborative advantage. However, the inflated rhetoric of such territorial cohesion still tends to exceed the reality. Importantly, the new Urban Age is not simply the rolling out of the Western urban experience over the last two centuries, which, for instance, featured a close link between urbanisation, industrialisation, and modernisation. Many current city expansions in the poorest parts of the world are unattended by economic opportunity and growth, thereby generating pronounced social inequities and tensions.

As expressed by Soja (2000), just as the global is urbanising, the urban is globalising, and both the development and conflictive potential of contemporary urbanism lies in the interplay of these twin processes. The big urban changes are evident in the Global South. Accordingly, the proclivity for urban theorists to assume the urban experience of the developed world as normative is inappropriate. Rather, a new urban scholarship is demanded, one that acknowledges the dramatic demographics in the Global South, and which seeks an explanatory synthesis, based on what urban study in both first and third worlds can learn from each other. For instance, a notable condition of urbanism in the developing world—informality—contains relevance not only for our insight into places registering the most acute urban change, but also for ways in which such features find contested manifestation in first world cities. Urban conflict is not reducible to singular cause or type, and thus distinctions of divisions need to be drawn that respect the complexity and variation, while acknowledging that specific case studies contain permutations of these different types that inter-penetrate in unique ways. So, while the case studies focus mostly on the familiar urban milieu in advanced Western countries, they are framed in an appreciation of the changing global context and the dynamics generating potential conflict in areas like the Global South.

Trying to understand these significant changes in the urban, Chapter 3 considers the key theoretical and conceptual constructs employed to understand urban change and development for around a half a century. The era in urban policy, in which they held sway, was concerned about a rational planning system, framed to decentralise jobs, investment and people from concentrated metropolitan areas, while providing incremental improvements to the built environment in the old cities. By the 1980s, the urban issue had changed. More fundamental questions were raised about the very viability of the city in mature economies, in the context of a radical shift in their political economies, and about the increased significance of expanding cities in the emergent economies in the context of greater globalization and urbanization.

Thus, Chapter 3 explores the tentative remaking of urban and social theory to make sense of these ‘New Times’. Over recent decades, urban theory has sought sanctuary from both the positivism of nomothetic spatial science and the over-determinism of Marxist structuralism. Alongside general discourses such as post-modernism, and more specific explanatory schemas such as urban regime theory, there has been since the 1980s, a set of ideas such as structuration and post-structuralism. These accord human consciousness a more central role, while conceding that the latitude for human agency is constrained by both structural context and social contingency.

One theoretical framework, accommodating the realist and complex dimensions of context and contingency, offers interpretation of the singularity and inimitability of a particular place within a broader causal analysis of a globalised social world. A central problem underlying all of this debate is its emphasis on the first world city, to the neglect of the significant ramification for an urban world of the emergence of intensive urbanization in the Global South, and of the increasing transnational character of urbanism almost everywhere. Such reconstituted urbanism exemplifies the interaction of the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ city, an interface that holds the promise of opportunity and cultural hybridity, but also contains the threat of accentuated conflict, and thereby reveals a great deal about the contemporary city.

Within this theoretical understanding, Chapter 4 explores the nature of the divided city. Cities today are shaped by rapid global processes of unsettling socio-economic change, within a largely de-regulated market-driven environment and an exploitative system of unfair ‘free trade’: the de-industrialization of the West; the transnationalisation of a big slice of manufacturing to the Global South; the role of hypermobile capital; increasing migrant flows; the diffusion of an acquisitive materialist culture; and degenerated urban enclaves of concentrated poverty alongside the cosmopolitan spaces enjoyed by the beneficiaries of neo-liberal globalisation. In turn, such divisive patterns have provoked urban contest, and alternative forms of globalisation from below, expressed often in ‘the informal city’.

In just under a 60-year period since the Second World War, across the globe, five times more fatalities have resulted from civil wars (16.2 million) compared with interstate wars (3.3 million) (Fearon and Laitin, 2003). Many of these have had, at their root, a protracted contest around ethnic identity, since over 90% of the world's nations are multi-ethnic with the majority, over 60%, of all conflicts since 1945 involving intrastate group clashes (Bollens, 1999). Moreover, many such conflicts have a strong urban component.

As presaged earlier, two main types of divided city are distinguished: the first where the conflict is centred on cleavage of class, race, religious affiliation and ethnicity; and the second, where these fractures and frissons and the state's role in addressing related issues of pluralism and equity, are inter-penetrated with durable disputes about sovereignty and the legitimacy of the state itself. In both cases, the concept of identity is assuming greater prominence in a period that encompasses what appears to be contradictory dynamics of uniformization and differentiation, reflected in both the extension of globalism and the resurgence of tribalism. The former offers the potential of multiple identities, but within a power structure that mostly privileges the images, artefacts, and idioms of neo-liberal capitalism. The latter offers retreat to forms of local bonding and cultural purity that contrast the intimacy and safety of familiar solidarities with the distance and dominance attached to global determinations. Identity finds spatial expression in territory, which itself is socially shaped. While in many instances, territory will be accepted as natural and authentic, it is when its legitimacy, meaning, and ownership are contested that the role of power in its determination is most clearly exposed.

Chapter 5 examines the issues of identity, territory, and space further. While for many identity is more a state of on-going re-definition, in ancestral struggles, such as those of an ethno-nationalist kind, it can be fixed, singular, and primal. In a world marked by cultural relativism and collision, there is deep argument about the respective merits of universalist cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and cultural particularism in achieving social cohesion amid increasing diversity. Far from the anticipated de-territorialising impact of globalization, territorial sensibility remains potent, and plays an emblematic role in constituting a sense of identity, attachment, and rootedness in a world given more to impermanence and spatial–temporal compression (Kahler and Walter, 2006).

Summarising the argument about space and its inherent contestedness in the ‘divided city’, it can be said that space has little or no inherent meaning. Rather, its meaning is socially constructed. Accordingly, specific spaces can be subject to diverse and contested readings. Moreover, social space is relational, in the sense that social interaction composes its content and image. Yet, space is not itself some kind of passive stage on which is played out the ‘theatre’ of social life. Rather, it is an active agent in the social formation of human settlement. It both reflects and changes the multiplicities of its users. In this way, it is largely dynamic, continuously being re-made and re-defined. Thus, its ‘meaning’ can change over time (Massey, 2005).

Chapter 6 addresses the role of planning in contested space, highlighting that one crucial difference between cities partitioned on socio-economic or ethno-religious bases and those divided as a consequence of sovereignty contests, is that the latter typically contain more problematic features of contested space since the idea of indivisible territory minimises the scope for peaceful negotiation and compromise. Different models of urban planning and policy can operate in contested cities. But even ones designed to promote equity and conflict resolution can be entrapped in the complexity and contradictions of deep-seated struggles. Potentially, the new shift to spatial planning and the engaged and dialogic nature of collaborative planning offer pathways to a more productive role for such public intervention in cities marked by ultra-stratified identity politics and ethno-nationalist contest. Nevertheless, there are limits to a proceduralist view of collaborative planning, particularly in the highly fragmented circumstance of uncollaborative parties locked in mutual hostility and subject to power differentials. This suggests that a more agonistic model of planning is demanded.

These theoretical, conceptual, and discursive chapters are followed by three empirical ones that scope across the sovereignty–pluralist distinction drawn earlier. Chapter 7 looks at three US cities, located in the Mid-West region, which have been subject to significant economic restructuring: Chicago, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. In exploring the divisions of these cities, largely rooted in the pluralist fractures around race, ethnicity, and class, the extent to which planning interventions pay heed to, and impact on, these conditions is addressed. While all three cities have pursued a development-led form of renaissance within at least a nominal framework of public–private partnership, the emphasis attached to a market-driven approach has been notable. Moreover, the form and role of the racial divide in each city has been different, and arguably has impacted on the outcome of their regeneration drive. One spatial rivalry that has featured in all three cases concerns the relative priority attached to the development of the Downtown over the neighbourhoods, particularly those communities where the concentration of race and poverty is most acute. Within this kind of common political–economic framework, what differences in strategy and outcome are apparent, and how do these relate to city divisions, particularly around the category of race?

Chapter 8 deals with the sovereignty-contested city of Belfast. It argues that this ethno-nationalist dispute has seen a close correspondence between the spaces of the most acute deprivation and the spaces where conflict around identity and belonging has been most trenchantly fought. Accordingly, policies of community cohesion and social inclusion are both relevant interventions within a participatory spatial planning framework. But they have to be closely aligned and under-pinned by a deliberate conflict-resolution strategy. Spec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Case Studies
• Part III: Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Appendix: Methodology
• Index