Twenty-First Century Urbanism

A New Analysis of the City

Rob Sullivan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317005766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Aménagement urbain et paysager

This volume argues that the city cannot be captured by any one mode of analysis but instead is composed of the mobile, relational, efficient, sentient, and the phenomenological with all of them cast in new theoretical configurations and combined into one methodological entity. Rather than focusing on any one city or abstract analytical model, this book instead takes a multipronged theoretical and methodological approach to present the city as an intelligent affective organism – a sentient being.

It proposes that cities operate on a relational, mobile, and phenomenological basis through the mode of efficiency, calibrated by a profoundly complicated division of labor. Its starting point is that the city is a mobile unit of analysis, from its economic status to its demographic makeup, from its cultural configuration to its environmental conditions, and therefore easily evades our quantitative and qualitative methods of computation and comprehension.

Twenty-First Century Urbanism provides planning and urban design academics and students with a multifaceted approach to understanding the development of cities, encouraging the examination of cities through a myriad, non-linear approach.

1
The city

What?

Before we consider what methodological tools might best be used to probe the city, we must decide what exactly the city is. Though the contemporary city certainly isn’t the circumscribed entity that Louis Wirth famously defined in 1938, it still retains some of those basic qualities. And though the city itself may be a definitional antiquity, as many believe there is no such thing as cities in this era of sprawl, city-regions, global urbanisms, and planetary urbanism, it still makes sense to conceive of an agglomerative, dense, diverse, and bounded entity when considering the city from certain angles. Yet it also makes sense to disband the tight definitional constraints of the traditional city when conceiving of the city from other angles.

Here is where mobility and plasticity must come into play when considering this entity traditionally referred to as the city. Too much orthodoxy arises when urban thinkers insist on their own conceptual framework at the price of the exclusion of all other frameworks for viewing the city. Traditionalists– those who adhere to an agglomerative and bounded model of the city – do not seem to understand that their model does not have to be sacrificed if a more capacious model of the urban is assumed. Radicals– those who are pushing the model of extended or planetary urbanism – also seem to believe that only one framework can be utilized when thinking about the urban and that the model of the bounded city is useless, foolish, and obsolete.

All this seems to me to be a terribly false choice and more a struggle over intellectual primacy than a struggle over the truth about the nature of the urban. For the truth about the urban must be conceptualized in more than one way. And it makes sense to use different definitional frameworks to diagnose the city depending on what scale one is dealing with and upon what level of analysis one is beginning. In this chapter, I will argue for a both/and/and conception of the urban, one that enfolds various conceptions within it and embraces the alacrity required to move from one definitional mode to another or to use two or even three modes simultaneously. Along the way, we will probe the strengths and weaknesses of various modes, including the agglomerative mode, planetary urbanism, and the city-region. There are any number of concepts I won’t be addressing, including but not limited to edge cities, global cities, conurbations, the exopolis, technopoles, and so on, as this is not intended to be an exhaustive study as I would rather concentrate on demarking a few concepts rather than spreading myself over many.

First up: the city

There is a “widespread view,” according to Allen Scott and Michael Storper, “that cities are so big, so complicated, and so lacking in easily identifiable boundaries that any attempt to define their essential characteristics is doomed to failure” (2015: 1). Another way of putting this is that the old chestnut of the definition of the city which Wirth formulated – a dense, heterogeneously populated, concentrated space – has been found to be obsolete and thus, worthless (1938). Mega-cities such as Mexico City, Shanghai, Tokyo, Lagos, Mumbai, and Los Angeles so overwhelm the strictures of this definition with their massive spaces, sprawling landscapes, and polycentric natures that they rupture the traditional conceptual framework into a million bits. Given all this, “shouldn’t the inherited understanding of the urban settlement type be abandoned, or at least be radically reconceptualized?” (Brenner 2014: 16).

Against this demand, that the city “settlement type be abandoned, or at least be radically reconceptualized,” Scott and Storper push back, stating that “individual agglomerations in geographic space” should be distinguished one from another into entities that can still be called cities (2015:7). Supporting this, I would add that localized agglomerations still seem to exist, no matter how sprawling. Shanghai is quite distinct from Singapore; no one mistakes San Francisco for Los Angeles. And the “inherited urban settlement type” can still be easily distinguished from say, a mountain village. When I am in New York City, it is quite clear that I am not in New Paltz or Oswego or Lowville or Poughkeepsie or even Albany.

And the city itself is quite distinct from its region. San Francisco, for instance, has a density to it that the vast majority of the Bay Area does not. Even Los Angeles, for all its vaunted polycentricism, has a downtown, the density of which far outstrips other centers in the region. And of course, in all things municipal, the city remains quite apart from its surrounding environs. The City of Los Angeles and the County of Los Angeles are distinct entities, even though the latter envelops the former within its capacious geographical ambit.

When it comes to cities proper, at many levels they are extremely distinct. The City of Berkeley and the City of San Francisco have different city councils: there is no spillage or overlap whatsoever in this regard. The Oakland Police Department and the San Francisco Police Department are different entities, as is say, the sewage system of San Jose and that of Alameda. Changing our focus from California to China, cities are classified by the Chinese government into five administrative levels: “municipalities directly led by the nation (… 4 cities), subprovincial cities (…15 cities), other provincial cities (…17 cities) prefecture-level cities (…250 cities), and county-level cities (…368 cities)” (Long, Shen, and Jin 2016: 104). Those who believe that the coastal cities of China are simply one urban mass somehow must counter the Chinese government’s administrative fiat that they are actually quite distinct, at least at the level of the governmental unit. “Many cities have a particular administrative, legal, and historical status according to their local laws,” again a quite obvious statement but one that pushes against the idea of borderless cities (Jiang and Miao 2015: 296). Even a stalwart defender of extended urbanization such as Christian Schmid seems to agree with this, at least to a certain degree:

In different places, various models of urbanization have evolved.…The examples of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, of Milan, Rome and Naples, and even of Zurich, Geneva and Basel provide sufficient evidence to support this thesis.

(2014: 213)

In this context, Schmid is primarily referring to historical processes that shape cities in unique and singular ways, and so here we could add the historical and the geographical to the governmental and the administrative as forces that shape cities into unique entities and work against subsuming them into some sort of massive urban whole. In his analysis of Megalopolis, Jean Gottman accedes that there are numerous governmental levels that overlay the northeastern seaboard. And that they make it difficult to “realize” the area as one indivisible whole:

The New York metropolitan region, as defined for the purposes of the Regional Plan Association of New York, encompasses sections of three states, the totality of 22 counties, and some 1,400 local governments. Besides the state and local governments, a few interstate agencies are beginning to function, and above them all extends the multi-faceted and intricate structure of the Federal government. The concept of Megalopolis as one integrated system is difficult to realize, between the various components within the region: states, cities, counties, even townships.

(Gottman 1961: 740; emphasis added)

For critics to throw up their hands and say, “Pah, such distinctions are trite matters that no one cares about!” is not to deflect or defeat the argument but merely to admit that they do not have an adequate response to the existence of these quotidian mundane details that separate one city from another. For the reality of the urban landscape may be superseding the form of the city to a certain degree, but the city itself still retains many governmental and administrative functions which are more or less strictly circumscribed within its borders. So that, although to a certain degree it may be true that, as Schmid says, “Urbanization is a process that transcends borders and can scarcely be stopped by administrative and politically defined borders,” it does not follow that “borders are not a primary urban characteristic” (2006a: 171). Civic boundaries matter in the urban milieu and they can matter to an absolute degree. For instance, the rent control strictures of say, Berkeley, do not apply to Oakland, and this is precisely because of such borders and the difference they make in important daily matters such as taxes, police services (or the level of police abuse), environmental regulations, and so on.

And many economic agglomerations sit inside these governmental and administrative agglomerations as well. If I want to visit any of the major Hollywood motion picture studios, I must travel to Los Angeles, not Copenhagen or Ho Chi Minh City. If I want to peruse watches in the jewelry district of Manhattan, I better go to New York City and not to La Paz or Dakar. This is obvious to the point of being ludicrous, of course, but it needs to be said, as sometimes those pushing for a more wide-ranging definition of the city, or of discarding the term altogether, give the impression that since the urban is now planetary all things can be found everywhere and anywhere as the urban diffuses in a pervasive and omnipresent matter, when such is clearly not the case. So that the borders between cities and their differences are still quite clearly distinct, even when theorists deny their existence. Civic borders are still operational, as we have seen, and in multiple modes from zoning codes to mayoral campaigns. And cities are quite different, one from another. They are not meshed and webbed together into one indistinguishable whole, a mass of concrete and steel, freeways and strip malls. Travel from Singapore to Ho Chi Minh City, for instance, and it’s easy to note that the former is composed and orderly and clean, the latter noisy and chaotic and dirty. They aren’t merged; they are quite distinct.

To be fair, I should point out that those supporting planetary urbanism often underline its interior and exterior differentiations yet they also just as frequently discuss the urban milieu as if it is one undifferentiated mass. So that, for instance, Brenner admits that places such as “London, New York, Shenzhen, Mumbai, Lagos, and so forth…do still exist” but then qualifies it by asking: “what, exactly, are these places, aside from places on a map that have been institutionalized by governments and branded as investment locations by growth coalitions?” (2014: 16; emphasis added). This is quite a stunning statement. Think of it: there is nothing to New York City as a place except its institutionalization on a map by governments and its branding as a locus of consumerism. Gone, then is the New York of writers such as Kathy Acker, James Baldwin, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joel Rose, Joseph Mitchell, Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman, Henry Miller, Saul Bellow, and Norman Mailer. Gone is the New York documented by photographers such as Mary Ellen Mark, Joel Meyerowitz, Martha Cooper, Vivian Maier, and Weegee. Gone is the New York of people, of monuments, of life on the streets. All cultural artifacts are divested by Brenner as everything is reduced to governmental cartographical decrees and the capitalistic desires of growth coalitions. One begins to wonder why Brenner even studies the urban milieu if it is such a wasteland. And let me make it clear that I am not invoking culture as a way of waxing nostalgic for the city as a form that no longer exists but as a key to understanding the urban milieu. Even Lefebvre, who is claimed as the father of planetary urbanism, tells us that to understand the city cultural artifacts must be studied (1991). Brenner goes on to ask: “What distinguishes them [‘London, New York, Shenzhen, Mumbai, Lagos, and so forth’] qualitatively from within and beyond, say, the South East of England and Western Europe; the US Northeast and North America; the Pearl River Delta and East Asia; Maharashtra and South Asia; or southern Nigeria and West Africa?” (2014: 16). I will rebut this by stating that there is a clear qualitative difference between Moberly, Missouri and New York City. Mutatis mutandis, ditto all the rest of Brenner’s exemplars. End of argument.

Retrieving my main point, what I am claiming is that there is still a territorial imperative to the city and one that resists facile intellectual attempts to tear it down. “Territory is a portion of geographical space that coincides with the spatial extent of a government’s jurisdiction,” said Jean Gottman in 1975, a statement still true today despite the erosion of the global upon the local. Gottman adds that “It [territory] is the physical container and support of the body politic organized under a governmental structure” (29). Civic governmental structures and metropolitan forms of jurisdiction are still going strong, despite the rhetoric of those stating that the city is a husk and its nomenclature should be discarded.

Here we also run up against a problem of performativity. For it is not enough for a few urban thinkers to call for the end of the use of the word “city” as a descriptor for urban areas. For this to be a performative gesture, people in the street must adopt the new terminology while discarding the old. Nowhere do I see the slightest chance of this occurring. People seem quite content with the term “city.” Nowhere are the masses stating that they must catch a plane to another “urban agglomeration” or to a different slice of the “extended planetary urbanized” whole. Until something like this happens or even has the possibility of happening, all academic discourse about a new set of terms to denote the city is merely that: academic (Austin 1962, Rose-Redwood 2008, Sullivan 2011). That is, unless all this rhetoric is merely an inside game, strictly for academics, which I do not think is true, both for those advocating for the retention of the term or for those advocating for its abandonment.

Yet it must be admitted that to conceptualize the city in a traditional framework is to adhere to an antiquated model. The urban spills beyond its central agglomeration and it has ever since the market took up residence outside the city gates in the Middle Ages, creating new and “exterior” agglomerations as it did so. The city can only be understood as an autonomous unit from a limited set of perspectives. However, these are necessary perspectives and should not be abandoned: “For better or worse, cities have different histories, cultural mixes, national experiences, and modes of regulation of urban space. These must be taken into account in any nuanced analysis of the localization of global processes” (Smith 2006: 378). True, it may be “severe conceptual overreach” to “assimilate all forms of social and political action into an urban totality,” as Scott and Storper put it (2015: 13), but it is also the case that it is “severe conceptual overreach” to confine “all forms of social and political action” into a civic model based on agglomerative units that are overflowing not only into the suburbs but into the surrounding countryside and the hinterland as well. Yet and still, the city must be retained as a model, not only because it is still the scale at which much of the quotidian mundane events of daily urban life are organized around but also because it is an ongoing reality for billions of people on the planet. Those who live and work in downtown London are in and of the city: the built landscape, the social problems, the density of population, and the phenomenology of that which enters the senses – all these are at the level of the city.

Here an example from the San Francisco Bay Area that might suffice to illustrate my case that the city still matters. This is the rather notorious use of the so-called Google Buses to route tech workers from the City of San Francisco to their workplaces in the Silicon Valley. Here the city-region in the form of the Bay Area tech agglomeration is in conflict with long-term residents of San Francisco, who perceive rising rents as being directly tied to the “invasion” of the tech workers. So that the union of the region and the city is not always one where things mesh together seamlessly: in this case, the union has had more of a bruising quality than a soothing one. Finally, a city entity, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, ruled that the controversial buses could run their routes through the city, confirming the point that civic institutions aligned with territorial jurisdiction still make a difference (Rodriguez 2015). So that there are limits to the supersession of the bounds of the city by the forces of urban extension. Indeed, when Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid state that “Conceptualizations of the urban as a bounded spatial unit must…be superseded by approaches that investigate how urban configurations are churned and remade across the uneven landscapes of worldwide capitalist development,” they seem to neglect the fact that much of this churning and remaking is precisely catalyzed by municipal structures that are innate to modern bounded spatial units: urban planning departments, chambers of commerce, civic economic development forums, metropolitan public-private partnerships, and so on (2015: 166).

To retrieve the main point of this section is to simply state (or restate) that the unit of the city still coheres, especially in terms of municipal services and civic regulations, but also in terms of sensed experience: when I am in downtown Hong Kong I am not in downtown Chicago and I’d be quite disoriented if I believed otherwise. The urban, captured at a city or metropolitan level, still makes some sense. But only some sense. To gain a more complete picture of the urban, we need to add in other levels, and so we turn to the first of these, the city-region.

The city-region

I will spend very little time on the city-region, as it is the least controversial of the categories we shall consider. Those who still believe in the integrity of the unit of the city are generally amenable to the notion that cities may fit into a larger unit. Those advocating for planetary urbanism may have more of an objection here, as they sometimes claim that city-regions are merely contiguous parts of an all-encompassing, all-enveloping global urbanism. They might add that the very term “city” needs to be cut off from the portmanteau term and be replaced with “urbanized.” However, even given all this, the main point I wish to make here is that the adoption of the level of the city-region is necessary to understand what is occurring within the contemporary urban milieu. San Francisco as a city cannot be fathomed without a basic understanding of the San Francisco Bay Area and the role of San Francisco within that region just as London cannot be fathomed without an understanding of its role in Greater London as well as its role in Southeast England.

The plasticity required to keep b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The city: what?
• 2 The mobile city
• 3 The relational city
• 4 Efficiency and the city
• 5 The sentient city
• 6 Phenomenology and the city
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index