The Urban Condition

Brendan Gleeson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136678554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This book will speak to the new human epoch, the Urban Age. A majority of humanity now lives for the first time in cities. The city, the highest invention of the modern age, is now the human heartland. And yet the same process that brought us the city and its wonders, modernisation, has also thrown up challenges and threats, especially climate change, resource depletion, social division and economic insecurity. This book considers how these threats are encountered and countered in the urban age, focusing on the issue of human knowledge and self-awareness, just as Hannah Arendt's influential The Human Condition did half a century ago. The Human Condition is now The Urban Condition. And it is this condition that will define human prospects in an age of default and risk.

Gleeson expertly explores the concept through three main themes. The first is an exploration of what defines the current human condition, especially the expanding cities that are at the heart of an over-consumptive world economic order. The second exposes and reviews the reawakening of forms of knowledge ('naturalism') that are likely to worsen not improve our comprehension of the crisis. The new 'science of urbanism' in popular new literature exemplifies this dangerous trend. The third and last part of the book considers prospects for a new urban, and therefore human, dispensation, 'The Good City'. We must first journey in our urban vessels through troubled times. But can we now start to plot the way to new shores, to a safer, more resilient city that provides for human flourishing? The Urban Condition attempts this ideal, conceiving a new urbanism based on the old idea of self-limitation.

The Urban Condition is an original, timely book that reconsiders and redeploys Arendt's famous notion of The Human Condition in an age of cities and risk. It brings together several important strands of human consideration, urbanisation, climate threat, resource depletion, economic default and critical knowledge and weaves them into a new analysis of the times. It also looks to a future that is nearly with us—of changed climate, resource scarcity and economic stress. The book journeys into these troubled times, proposing the idea of Lifeboat Cities as a way of thinking about the human journey to come

1 Dialectics of the urban modernity

DOI: 10.4324/9780203388174-1

The urban age has been declared. A chorus of expert and popular commentary welcomes a golden era of human prospect. A new conversation welcomes the fact that humanity is now preponderantly an urban species, Homo urbanis. The major transnational institutions bestow great significance on urbanisation as a force shaping human fortunes (OECD 2010; World Bank 2010; UN-Habitat 2009, 2012; UNICEF 2012). For the past half-decade, the United Nations (UN) has broadcast the message of a new urban ascendancy. The UN Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) enthuses, ‘A fresh future is taking shape, with urban areas around the world becoming not just the dominant form of habitat for humankind, but also the engine-rooms of human development as a whole’ (UN-Habitat 2012: v).

The bloodiest century in history gives way to an era of urban opportunity, but in a world unsettled by planetary-scale threats to natural and human orders. Ulrich Beck (2009) speaks of a ‘dialectics of modernity’, underlining the simultaneity of triumph and crisis in a world pervasively and continuously remade by capitalist modernisation. Beck casts us in an age of unprecedented global risk marked by an auto-genesis of threat that seems integral to capitalism itself: of world global society wracked by the agonies of ‘self-dissolution, self-endangerment and self-transformation’ (ibid.: 163).

The terrible and terrifying dialectic of modernisation was revealed continuously through the twentieth century, as the scale of the paradox reached ever upwards to the twin heights of accomplishment and extinction. In 1961, through the heavy pall of the atomic age, John F. Kennedy recognised that ‘The world is very different now. Man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life’ (in Watson 2012: 12). It was a moment of revelation that was both appalling and enthralling. Other moments of species insight were to follow: the dawn of a Silent Spring (Carson 1962) that masked the poisoning of Earth’s ecology; the first view from space of a finite world and The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972); later, recognition that centuries of carbon capitalism had squandered the planet’s ability to support life, potentially all of it (WCED 1987).

The modern conversation has fixed progressively on this great contradiction of human development. Narratives collide. Triumph is reread as calamity, and progress retold as regress. There were foretellings. Long before President Kennedy’s declaration, Marx and Engels scorned the boasts of the industrial bourgeois who, ‘like the sorcerer… is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells’ (Marx and Engels 1985 [1848]: 85–86). The urban age renews the contest between hubris and doubt. Urbanists enthuse for an epochal opening, whilst others, like philosopher Slavoj Žižek, see closure, Living in the End Times (2010), already sounded by the mounting testimonies of human and natural default. The spectre of apocalypse is hardly new, but its horsemen, as Žižek points out, have never been more terrifyingly present.

A struggle for species prospect, perhaps survival, has been widely recognised for some time. In 1992, a large congregation of the world’s leading physical scientists issued a global alarm_ the ‘Warning to Humanity’ pointed out that our species and the natural order were on a ‘collision course’ (Union of Concerned Scientists 1992). The long Promethean journey of modernity was to end disastrously. Evidence of rising global ecological dysfunction since that time seems to be bearing out the terrible prophecy. Even the sentinels of the global economy seem worried. In early 2013, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Christine Lagarde, colourfully warned that future generations would be ‘roasted, toasted, fried and grilled’ if global warming were not checked (Elliott 2013). In 2008, an article in Science by the felicitously named Grimm and co-authors stated that the city was where the battle for ecology would be won or lost (Grimm et al. 2008).

For the first time, the centre stage of human contest is urban. Much commentary would have us believe that cities are more than human stages: infernal machines at the heart of the crisis (e.g. Miles and Miles 2004). Grandly flagged statistics report their overwhelming contribution to global consumption and despoliation. Urban landscapes are said to consume around three quarters of the world’s energy and generate the same proportion of its greenhouse emissions (Urry 2011). Dobbs et al. (2012) estimate that global urban growth to 2025 will drive an 80 million-cubic metre increase in water demand and necessitate new built floor space equivalent to the an area the size of Austria. The hard spectre of the ‘consumptive city’ looms over the global environmental consciousness. This truism of the age neglects the dialectic of urbanisation, in which cities are simultaneously engines and artefacts of the underlying process of accumulation, of money, matter, bodies and ambition.

Cities also lie in other hearts – those of human imagination and desire. Our long love affair with the city has reached new heights. It will only continue and intensify. By 2050, it is expected that three out of every four humans will live in an urban setting. World population will have grown by around a third to number 10 billion (Urry 2011). In the developed world nearly nine in 10 people will be urban denizens, even as some national populations decline. The modern urban ideal was born in Europe and borne out(wards) in its new worlds. It was, as the French urbanist Henri Lefebvre (2003 [1970]) observed in La Révolution Urbaine, a spatial manifestation of industrialisation. Long before the recent assertions of an urban age, he recognised that capitalist modernity had reached the point where it was defined by ‘complete urbanization’. Lefebvre (2003 [1970]) contended that urbanisation was a motive force, not artefact, of capitalist accumulation.

Lefebvre declared La Révolution Urbaine in the wake of the serious disturbances of the 1960s, but his argument was historical and social scientific, not enclosed in the moment. Through the ever lengthening reach of industrialism and its spatial forms, the urban became a ‘ubiquitous’ feature of capitalist modernity. Marx and Engels (1985 [1848]: 84) were early to recognise this, observing in 1848 that ‘The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns’. The enormity of urbanisation meant that cities were more than strongholds of modernisation, becoming central to the process of accumulation itself.

A decade before Lefebvre’s declaration, Jean Gottman (1961) had marked the spiralling scale of urban evolution, embodied in modernity’s newest enormity, the megalopolis. Massive industrial urbanisation ‘could hardly have happened without such an extraordinary Promethean drive’ (ibid.: 79). This ‘immense experiment’ was later extended through globalisation to the remaining unexploited parts of the globe. The new worlds of North America and Australasia where nature lay unclaimed and uncosted beckoned the ‘Promethean endeavours that had long been confined to the dreams of European people’ (ibid.). There was recognition of threat, not just achievement, in his observations: As the frontier becomes more urban in its very nature… the vultures that threatened Prometheus may be more difficult to keep away’ (ibid.). Gottman’s megalopolis passed into popular recognition, but as safe diorama, cleared of the Promethean vultures that he saw circling its parapets.

Through the twentieth century capitalism absorbed and was ever more dependent upon ‘the urban process’ for its deepest necessities, social reproduction and, deeper still, value creation (Harvey 1985a). Subsequent evolution in the political economy, especially the rising dominance of finance capital, drives rising complexity of the relationship between accumulation and urbanisation. For Harvey, the recent and continuing global economic recession is a financial calamity of urbanisation (Christophers 2011). The urban process is simultaneously a key circuit for economic growth and an ever widening flank of system risk (Harvey 2010).

The process of urban completion continues, surging across a world connected by economic globalism, migration, technological coupling and common environmental peril. The Asia-Pacific is rapidly urbanising and is projected to host 54 per cent of the world’s urban population by 2050, with upwards of 750 cities of over half a million people. China’s ‘pell-mell urbanization’ (Harvey 2012a: xv) has emptied its countryside of half its population. More than 300 million of its citizens have shifted to cities since 1995 (Hamlin 2013). It is expected that by 2025 there will be more than 220 Chinese cities with populations of more than 1 million. Urbanisation continues apace in the megalopolises and new cities of South America and Africa (Urry 2011). UN-Habitat (2012: 25) states: ‘between 2010 and 2015, some 200,000 people on average will be added to the world’s urban population each day. Worth noting is that 91 per cent of this daily increase (or 183,000) is expected to take place in developing countries.’ As the same body notes, much of this means the growth of slums, not urban prosperity. Also aggregate growth in urbanisation hides many complexities in migration flows and change, including the prospect of urban shrinkage in parts of the world, especially Eastern Europe (UN-Habitat 2009).

The major global institutions now recognise that city governance and planning are pivotal concerns (UN-Habitat 2009; World Bank 2010; OECD 2010). Yet, Louis Albrechts (2010), senior planning scholar, finds urban expertise at a threshold (is it a cataclysm?) of possibility, facing millennial pressures for fundamental change in the face of complex, rapidly unfolding threats that have nullified its historical rationale and contemporary purpose. What worked to guide the courses of national urbanisation during the previous stages of modernity seems wholly inadequate in an era facing complex, fast-moving threats and disruptions at the planetary scale. The times beckon new wisdom.

The new urban commentaries

A parade of new popular literature noisily acclaims the arrival of the urban age. It springs not from the mainstream of contemporary urban scholarship (planning, geography, transport), but new and non-traditional quarters, including business studies, journalism and consultancy. How to type it? Lefebvre (2003 [1970]: 55) contemplated the term ‘urbanology’ to signal a unified urbanism, only quickly to dismiss it as a ‘dreadful neologism’. However, the term has been redeployed recently to describe the new commentaries that exult the urban age.¹ The cheerful sweep of these offerings tends to confirm the accuracy of this descriptor. Albrechts’s troubled ruminations are swept aside by a rapidly spreading excitement for urban possibility. The heralds of urbanology announce an era of new human possibility, of vast creative and economic potential liberated by urbanisation.

The banners of ‘revolution’ and ‘triumph’ have been unfurled by the leading urban enthusiasts. These offerings include The Triumph of the City by Harvard economist Ed Glaeser (2011), and Welcome to the Urban Revolution by the Canadian urban ‘practitioner and thinker’ Jeb Brugmann (2009). Arrival City (2010) by British-Canadian journalist Doug Saunders, exalts the rise of Homo urbanis and the cities where the newest urban migrants gather. Aerotropolis is ordained as The Way We’ll Live Next by Kasarda and Lindsay (2011). There is no room for urban apostasy – Cities are Good for You, chirps Leo Hollis (2013), inviting that we genuflect to The Genius of the Metropolis. Yet this dawn chorus neglects the darkening clouds of reaction and threat that gather on the new urban horizon.

The gloom of recrudescence contrasts with the bright motif of revolution. In knowledge and ‘expertise’, graves thought closed are reopening: positivism and its kindred ideologies (behaviourism, naturalism and determinism) are reawakening in new assessments of the urban condition. The sympathies of urbanology tend to lie with prosecutions that have failed the modern cause of human realisation – namely, neo-liberalism and behaviourism. Their preference is for entrepreneurial development of an urban process that is best explained as a law-bound, even natural, phenomenon. Wisdom repackaged, perhaps, but not new.

A new ‘urban physics’ is separately prosecuting the cause of scientism. It has discovered the magic work of ‘superlinear scaling’ at the root of all urban geneses (Bettencourt and West 2010). Here the tangled complexities of human society are refused and analysis relaxed back to the simple, discrete certainties of the natural order. Against the infuriating particularism of social enquiry, the new physics presents nothing less than a ‘unified theory of urban living’ (ibid.: 912). The shadow of a new ‘city ecology’ is cast on popular debates that neglect the well-essayed Darwinian errors of earlier Chicago School urbanism (e.g. Park et al. 1967 [1925]). The excited exhortations of the new urban commentaries are all the louder for the silence of critique. It is surely no accident that critical social science is a diminished force in contemporary human discussion (Sayer 2009, 2011). Lefebvre’s (2003 [1970]: 16) assertion that ‘there is no science of the city’ echoes like the rattling of ghostly chains.

In politics, neo-liberalism remains globally ascendant, if contested and discontented by its own contradictions (Harvey 2005, 2012a). As recrudescence of historically discredited economic liberalism, its emergence and political triumphs from the 1970s onwards seem remarkable. In recent years, neo-liberalism has survived repeated political censure, even at the highest levels (e.g. Rudd 2009), despite manifest contradictions and failings, especially and most spectacularly the global economic crisis that unfolded from 2007 (Harvey 2012a). ‘Neo-liberal urbanism’ remains steadfast (Hodson and Marvin 2010; Peck et al. 2009). In environmentalism, critique and progression seem stalled by an impressively adaptive capitalist political economy that continues to overcome natural barriers to realisation, such as ‘peak oil’ (Monbiot 2012).² Despite the stark material potency of contemporary capitalism, it continues to depend heavily, as it has always done, on ideological recrudescence for political continuity.

The Human Condition

More than half a century ago, political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1998 [1958]) essayed The Human Condition, whose modern form she traced to the polis of classical antiquity. The creation of a public sphere of human civil aspiration was an essentially urban act. The polis provided text and diorama to guide a later upwelling in human ambition, Western modernity. In Arendt’s assessment the human species continuously remade the conditions for its existenc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Dialectics of the urban modernity
• Part I The urban age
• Part II Spectres of nature
• Part III To the next world
• Bibliography
• Index