Imagining Cities

Sallie Westwood, John M Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351171182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1997, Imagining Cities gives students access to the most exciting recent work on the city from within sociology, cultural studies and cultural geography. Contributions are grouped around four major themes:

• 
  
  

• The theoretical imagination
• Ethnic diversity and the politics of difference
• Memory and nostalgia
• The city as narrative

The book considers the interplay of past and present, imagined and substantive, and links present and future in examining the idea of the virtual city. Here, the world of cyberspace not only recasts views of space and communication, but has a profound impact on the sociological imagination itself.

Part I

Theorising Cities

1

Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis¹

Edward W. Soja

Between the Watts riots of 1965 and what are now called the Rodney King or Justice riots of 1992, the urban region of Los Angeles experienced one of the most dramatic transformations of any comparable region of the world. For the resident Angelenos of the early 1960s a radically different, an ‘Other’ Los Angeles seemed to be developing beyond their control or understanding. And it would increasingly, over time, replace many more familiar urban worlds with shockingly new ones. Over the same period of about thirty years, a group of local scholars have been trying to make practical and theoretical sense of this radical restructuring of Los Angeles and to use this knowledge to understand the often equally intense urban transformations taking place elsewhere in the world. What I would like to do here is draw upon the work of what some, perhaps prematurely, have begun to call the Los Angeles School of urban studies, and to argue that the transformation of Los Angeles represents both a unique urban experience and a particularly vivid example of a more general sea change in the very nature of contemporary urban life, in what we urbanists have called the urban process.

Some have been so entranced by this urban restructuring that they proclaim it to be the most extraordinary transformation in the nature of urbanism since the origins of the city more than 6,000 years ago. Others, only somewhat more modestly, describe it as the second great urban transformation, after the tumultuous emergence of the nineteenth-century industrial capitalist city. I tend to see it as the most recent of a series of dramatic crisis-driven urban restucturings that have been taking place over the past 200 years. But however one interprets the magnitude of the current changes and sets them in a comparative historical framework, there can be little doubt that something quite exceptional has been happening to the modern metropolis during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Making sense of these new urban processes on the basis of how they differ significantly from the past thus becomes, in my view, even more necessary than tracing origins in an unfolding history of urbanization and urbanism as a way of life.

I have recently chosen to use postmetropolis as a general term to accentuate the differences between contemporary urban regions and those that consolidated in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The prefix ‘post’ thus signals the transition from what has conventionally been called the modern metropolis to something significantly different, to new postmodern forms and patternings of urban life that are increasingly challenging well-established modes of urban analysis. As will become clearer in my discussion of the six discourses, there are other post-prefixed terms and concepts packed into the postmetropolis, from the notion of post-industrial society so familiar to sociologists to the more recent discussions of post-Fordist and post-Keynesian political economies and post- structuralist and post-colonial modes of critical analysis. Before turning to these discourses, however, I want to make a few more general introductory observations.

First, as I have already suggested, the changes that are being described or represented by these six discourses are happening not only in Los Angeles but, in varying degrees and, to be sure, unevenly developed over space and time, all over the world. Although they take specific forms in specific places, they are general processes. Furthermore, these processes are not entirely new. Their origins can be traced back well before the last quarter of this century. It is their intensification, interrelatedness, and increasing scope that makes their present expression different from the past. I also want to emphasise that when I use the term postmetropolis as opposed to the late modern metropolis, I am not saying that the latter has disappeared or been completely displaced, even in Los Angeles. What has been happening is that the new urbanisation processes and patternings are being overlain on the old and articulated with them in increasingly complex ways. The overlays and articulations are becoming thicker and denser in many parts of the world, but nowhere has the modern metropolis been completely erased.

What this means is that we must understand the new urbanisation and urbanism without discarding our older understanding. At the same time, however, we must recognize that the contested cities of today and their complex relations between social process and spatial form, as well as spatial process and social form – what I once called the socio-spatial dialectic – are increasingly becoming significantly different from what they were in the 1960s. While we must not ignore the past, we must nevertheless foreground what is new and different about the present. Looking at contemporary urban sociology, this suggests that we can no longer depend so heavily on the ‘new’ approaches that flowered so brilliantly in the 1970s with such classic works as Manuel Castells’s The Urban Question (1977; French ed. 1972), David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City (1973) and the pioneering world systems sociology of Immanuel Wallerstein. These were, and remain, powerful and incisive interpretations of the late modern metropololis, Castells’s monopolville and ville sauvage, the ‘wild cities’ that consolidated during the post-war boom and exploded in the urban crises of the 1960s. But the late modern metropolis, to coin a phrase, is not what it used to be.

Many of the insights developed by these theorists and analysts are still applicable and, I must add, the radical politics they encouraged is still possible. My argument, however, is basically that the changes have been so dramatic that we can no longer simply add our new knowledge to the old. There are too many incompatabilities, contradictions, disruptions. We must instead radically rethink and perhaps deeply restructure – that is, deconstruct and reconstitute – our inherited forms of urban analysis to meet the practical, political and theoretical challenges presented by the postmetropolis.

Another preliminary observation complicates things even further. While urbanists continue to debate just how different the new metropolis is from the old and precisely how much we must deconstruct and reconstitute our traditional modes of urban analysis, the postmetropolis itself has begun to change in significant ways. Beginning in the eventful year of 1989 in Berlin, Beijing and other major world cities, and punctuated in Southern California by the Spring uprisings in 1992 and the postmodern fiscal crisis of Orange County in 1994, the postmetropolis seems to be entering a new era of instability and crisis. There are growing signs of a shift from what we have all recognised as a period of crisis-generated restructuring originating in the urban uprisings of the 1960s to what might now be called a restructuring-generated crisis. That is, what we see in the 1990s may be an emerging breakdown in the restructured postmetropolis itself, in postmodern and post-Fordist urbanism, and also perhaps in the explanatory power of the six discourses I will be discussing.

My last introductory comment refers to some recent developments in critical urban studies, an exciting new field that has grown from the injection of critical cultural studies into the more traditionally social scientific analysis of urbanism and the urban process. While I consider my own work to be part of this increasingly transdisciplinary field, I have recently become uneasy over what I perceive to be a growing over-privileging of what has been called, often with reference to the work of Michel de Certeau, the ‘view from below’ – studies of the local, the body, the streetscape, psycho-geographies of intimacy, erotic subjectivities, the micro-worlds of everyday life – at the expense of understanding the structuring of the city as a whole, the more macro-view of urbanism, the political economy of the urban process.

The six discourses I will be presenting are aimed at making sense of the whole urban region, the spatiality and sociality of the urban fabric writ large. They are precisely the kinds of discourses being hammered at by those micro-urban critics who see in them only the distorting, if not repressive, gaze of authoritative masculinist power, the masterful ‘view from above’. A primary tactic in fostering these often reductionist critiques of macro-level theorizing has been a kind of epistemological privileging of the experience of the flâneur, the street-wandering free agent of everyday life, the ultimate progenitor of the view from below. There is undoubtedly much to be gained from this ground-level view of the city and, indeed, many of those who focus on more macro-spatial perspectives too often overlook the darker corners of everyday life and the less visible oppressions of ‘race’, gender, class and sexuality. What I am most concerned with, however, is the degree to which such micro-level critiques have been unproductively polarizing critical urban studies, romancing agency and the view from below to the point of labelling all macro-level perspectives taboo, off-limits, politically incorrect.

The six discourses I will now turn to are, in part, an attempt to recapture and reassert the importance of a macro-urban tradition, not in opposition to the local view from below but drawing on insights that come directly from the significant work that has been done on the microgeographies of the city by a variety of critical urban scholars. Understanding the postmetropolis requires a creative recombination of micro and macro perspectives, views from above and from below, a new critical synthesis that rejects the rigidities of either/or choices for the radical openness of the both/and also. With this little plug for an explicitly postmodern critical perspective and after a more extensive introduction than I had originally planned, we are ready to begin examining the six discourses.

The six discourses are already familiar to most of you and, in one form or another, they weave through a large number of the papers presented at this conference of the British Sociological Association. I have discussed them before in a chapter in Postmodern Cities and Spaces, edited by Sophie Watson and Kathy Gibson, and they will be elaborated at much greater length in my forthcoming book, Postmetropolis.² I list them below with brief descriptions and a selection of sub-themes drawn from what will be six separate chapters in Postmetropolis.

1. FLEXCITY: on the restructuring of the political economy of urbanization and the formation of the more flexibly specialised post-Fordist industrial metropolis.
   • the primacy of production
   • crisis-formation and the Great U-Turn
   • the ascendance of post-Fordism
   • the empowerment of flexibility
   • getting lean and mean
2. COSMOPOLIS: on the globalisation of urban capital, labour and culture and the formation of a new hierarchy of global cities.
   • the primacy of globalisation
   • the ‘glocalisation’ process
   • the glocalization of discourse in New York and London
   • the vanity of the bonFIRES
   • reworlding Los Angeles
3. EXOPOLIS: on the restructuring of urban form and the growth of edge cities, outer cities and postsuburbia: the metropolis turned inside- out and outside-in.
   • paradigmatic Los Angeles
   • deconstructing the discourse on urban form
   • rosy reconstitutions of the postmetropolis: the New Urbanism
   • exploring the darker side of the Outer and Inner City
4. METROPOLARITIES: on the restructured social mosaic and the emergence of new polarisations and inequalities.
   • a new sociologism?
   • widening gaps and new polarities
   • the ‘truly disadvantaged’ and the ‘underclass’ debate
   • the new ethnic mosaic of Los Angeles
5. CARCERAL ARCHIPELAGOS: on the rise of fortress cities, surveillant
   • technologies and the substitution of police for polis.
   • cities of quartz: Mike Davis’s Los Angeles
   • further elaborations: interdictory spaces in the built environment
   • taking an Other look at The City of Quartz
6. SIMCITIES: on the restructured urban imaginary and the increasing hyperreality of everyday life.
   • the irruption of hyperreality and the society of simulacra
   • cyberspace: the electronic generation of hyperreality
   • simulating urbanism as a way of life
   • variations on a theme park
   • scamscapes in crisis: the Orange County bankruptcy

Rather than going over these discourses in detail, I will use what I have just outlined to select a few issues that I think may be of particular interest to a gathering of urban sociologists. Given the challenge of brevity, the critical observations will be blunt and stripped of appropriate (and necessary) qualifications. My intent is not to offer a well-rounded critical presentation of the discourses but to use them to stimulate debate and discussion about how best to make sense of the contemporary urban scene.

The first discourse, on the post-Fordist industrial metropolis, rests essentially on the continued intimate relation between industrialisation and urbanisation processes. In Los Angeles and in many other urban regions as well, it has become perhaps the hegemonic academic discourse in attempting to explain the differences between the late modern (Fordist) metropolis and the post(Fordist)metropolis. It has also entered deeply into the recent literature in urban sociology as a theoretical framework for understanding the social order (and disorder) of the contemporary city. In Savage and Warde’s book on British sociology, for example, there is a clear attempt to redefine and reposition urban sociology around this post-Fordist industrial restructuring.³

In some ways, this has been a peculiar embrace, for urban sociologists have contributed relatively little to the industrial restructuring literature and to the conceptual and theoretical debates that have shaped the first discourse. They have instead been content primarily with detailed empirical studies of the new capitalist city, leaving its theorisation and explanatory discourse to geographers, political economists and other non-sociologists. How can we explain sociology’s apparent retreat from playing a leading role in conceptualising the new urbanisation processes and the postmetropolis, especially given its pre-eminence in explaining the development of the late modern metropolis in the post-war decades?

Part of the answer may lie in a persistent if not growing ‘sociologism’, a retreat back into tried-and-true disciplinary traditions of both theoretical and empirical sociology. Even when seeming to reach beyond disciplinary boundaries for theoretical and practical inspiration, such sociologism tends to seek ways to make what is new and challenging old and familiar, that is, absorbable without major paradigmatic disruption or radical rethinking. I think something like this has been happening in sociology with respect to the new discourse on post-Fordist urban-industrial restructuring in particular, and more generally with many other post-prefixed discourses. One vehicle for this retreat back into the disciplinary fold in the face of new challenges has been the continued appeal, especially in the US, of one form or another of the post-industrial society thesis developed within sociology decades ago. Continued use of the term post-industrial is jolting to a discourse built upon the persistent importance of industrialisation and the production process. What has been happening to the industrial capitalist city is much more than the decay of manufacturing industry and a shift to a services economy. De-industrialisation has been occurring alongside a potent re-industrialisation process built not just on high-technology electronics production but also on cheap labour-intensive forms of craft production and the expansion of producer-oriented services and technology. These shifts, often to more flexible production systems and denser transaction-intensive networks of information flow, are creating new industrial spaces that have significantly reshaped the industrial geography of the late modern or Fordist metropolis. Continuing to see the new urban restructuring processes through the eyes of the post-industrial thesis makes it difficult to comprehend the more complex and still production-centered discourse on post-Fordist urbanisation.

Similar problems arise from continued attachment to the politically more radical traditions of urban sociology that developed in the 1970s and early 1980s, especially reflecting the pioneering work of Castells and others on urban social movements and the politics of collective consumption. Here too a lingering consumptionist emphasis makes it difficult to comprehend the production-centred discourse on post-Fordist urbanisation and industrial restructuring. That much of this post-Fordist discourse also centres around explicitly spatial concepts and analyses complicates matters still further, given the recent attempts by such British sociologists as Peter Saunders to de-emphasise space and spatial analysis in the conceptual frameworks of urban sociology. Such efforts have been particularly constraining with regard to the participation of sociologists in the wider debates on postmodernism and critical cultural studies, both of which have experienced a pronounced spatial turn since the late 1980s. But this takes me into another discussion that I cannot expand upon here.

Sociologists have played a much more important role in the second discourse, on globalization and world city formation. In some ways, despite their interrelatedness and complementarity, the first and second discourses have often developed in competition, each seeing itself as the most powerful explanation for the new urbanisation and urbanism. This constrains both discourses, but I will comment he...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Imagining Cities
• Part I Theorising Cities
• Part II Racial/spatial imaginaries
• Part III Nostalgia/memory
• Part IV Narrating cityscapes
• Part V Virtual cities
• Bibliography
• Index