Critical Urban Studies

New Directions

Jonathan S. Davies, David L. Imbroscio

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781438433073
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume revisits the tradition of critical scholarship characteristic of the urban studies field. Urban scholarship has had detractors of late, particularly in mainstream political science, where it has been accused of parochialism and insularity. Critical Urban Studies offers a sharp repudiation of this critique, reasserting the need for critical urban scholarship and demonstrating the fundamental importance of urban studies for understanding and changing contemporary social life. Contributors to the volume identify an orthodox perspective in the field, subject it to critique, and map out a future research agenda for the field. The result is a series of inventive essays pointing scholars and students to the major theoretical and policy challenges facing urbanists and other critical social scientists.

Part I

Critical Urban Theory

1

Elvin Wyly

Today, of course, there are no positivists. The positivist era is over, and everyone is a postpositivist. Yet, is it that easy?

—Robert C. Scharff, “On Weak Postpositivism” (2007, 515)

… most of the contemporary work on constructing new bases for social theory is not being carried out by self-described radicals…. For those of us who come from the Left, the bitter irony of our day is that self-described conservatives in some cases, and liberals (… in the continental sense) are probably now, on average, as effective at critical social science as are self-described radicals.

—Michael Storper, “The Poverty of Radical Theory Today” (2001, 159)

… a certain form of critical spirit has sent us down the wrong path, encouraging us to fight the wrong enemies and, worst of all, to be considered as friends by the wrong sort of allies.

—Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” (2004, 231)

Were this only a dispute about epistemology, I believe the debate would long since have ended and been declared a draw. But insofar as the quantitative-qualitative dichotomy is intertwined with the contest for disciplinary prestige and the relative valuation of different kinds of intellectual capital, the prospects for a negotiated truce are more problematic.

—Val Burris, “Fordism and Positivism in U.S. Sociology” (2007, 103)

The city is haunted. Urban studies shares the fate of so many other fields of inquiry trapped by “a positivist ‘haunting,’ ” reflecting “positivism's paradoxical power as a zombie-like refusal to stay buried” (Steinmetz 2005a, 3, 37). It refuses to die, “[d]espite repeated attempts by social theorists and researchers to drive a stake through the heart of the vampire,” George Steinmetz writes in his introduction to The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences [PoM] (2005a, 3). Because positivism has come to be associated with conservative hegemony and intellectual as well as geopolitical imperialism, its persistence threatens the possibilities for a progressive or radical urbanism of social justice. The “positivist demon advances and retreats unevenly within and across the human science disciplines, discards one costume for another to elude detection, but resists all efforts to exorcise it, once and for all, from the practice of social and historical research” (Burris 2007, 93, commenting on Steinmetz 2005a, 2005b, 2005c). Generations and centuries after Hume, Descartes, Comte, Durkheim, and the Vienna Circle, debate endures, and “for every observer who insists that renewing the positivism debate is beating a dead horse there is another who identifies a resilient ‘positivist empiricism’ ” (Steinmetz 2005a, 30).

Urban studies seems to have been spared the most violent epistemological clashes documented in PoM.¹ Even so, interdisciplinary community and a shared sense of purpose have not suppressed discussion of these important matters in relation to cities and urban research (Baeten 2001; Castells 2006; Fainstein 2005b; Markusen 2003; Storper 2001; Vigar, et al. 2005). The city of positivist hegemony has been challenged and transformed, with a radical pluralism of post-, anti-, and nonpositivist² urbanists committed to a diverse, cosmopolitan metropolis of knowledge and action. Yet positivism remains at the city center in order to serve the oppositional constitution of all. Positivist hegemony enhances the prestige of scientists who never need to use words like “positivism” or “hegemony.” And positivist hegemony is the only specter that can unite all of the diverse intellectual and political movements that have flourished over the past forty years: regardless of all of the profound differences among urbanisms of Marxism, feminism, humanism, phenomenology, postcolonialism, and post-structuralism, they all find common cause in the fact that none of them are positivist. Scattered across a large city of neighborhoods, nonpositivist epistemologies are forced to divide limited resources amongst divergent projects—turning inward to build local community strength, forging cross-community alliances with other nonpositivist neighborhoods, or sustaining the long-running siege on Positivist City Hall.

When nonpositivists unite against the singular positivist hegemony, however, they confront (and create) several risky paradoxes. In this chapter, I suggest that the specter of positivism that has energized so many oppositional movements is in fact a caricature of an historically contingent alignment of philosophy, methodology, politics, and practice. In the Fordist urbanism constructed across the American landscape from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, key developments in society, culture, technology, and the state did help to forge an organized nexus between positivist epistemology, integrated quantitative methodologies, and state-centric, conservative-leaning politics. This organized configuration, however, lasted only long enough to inspire the many diverse movements evident in today's pluralism of nonpositivisms. The tidy postwar nexus of epistemology, methodology, and politics came unhinged many years ago. Recognizing this collapse is essential if we are to grasp the opportunities to do important, worthwhile things in a genuinely rigorous, radical, and relevant urban studies.

Portrayals of Positivism

We must begin with clear definitions. Variations on the word “positivism” are widely used as convenient shorthand—as epithet noun and/or genealogical adjective—but the term has at least three distinct meanings (Riley 2007). Positivism can denote a commitment to societal progress, evolution, and development in the spirit of Enlightenment modernity. It can refer to the philosophical heritage of logical positivism from Comte to the Vienna Circle. Or it can describe a particular ensemble of organized, systematic research practices—what Steinmetz (2005c) diagnoses as methodological positivism.

The distinction between the latter meaning and the first two is crucial, and often ignored. Histories of science emphasize that methodological positivist practice—variations on the scientific method, the search for generalizable laws of causation, the stance of objectivity and fact/value neutrality—was built on the philosophical foundations of logical positivism, and the ontological, Enlightenment faith in human reason and rationality. Challenges to the mundane daily activities of positivist analysis, therefore, are usually woven together with foundational critiques of modernity, metaphysical realism, and the possibility of objective, value-free knowledge claims. When nonpositivists identify specific procedural or political problems in methodological positivism, they usually diagnose the failures with reference to the long, rich intellectual heritage of philosophy and epistemology. Consider the typical nonpositivist's reaction when confronted with a conservative, equation-saturated econometric analysis of laissez-faire urban equilibrium, produced by a researcher using federal government or private, corporate funding; the usual response is to dismiss the research as “positivist,” and to dispense with the need to disentangle the particular mix of explicit and implicit biases of politics, method, or research funding. For nonpositivists, the designation “positivism” has become so broad that it signals a nearly infinite array of concerns, preferences, and criticisms—ranging all the way from a dislike of specialized or impenetrable mathematical formulae, to skepticism toward the corrosive effects of money on research priorities, to foundational, ontological concerns over a hierarchical, heteropatriarchical rule of experts imposing the Western colonizer's worldview.

These moves put nonpositivists into intractable dilemmas. Deploying “positivism” and “positivist” as broad, multipurpose epithets presumes a particular configuration of knowledge, method, and politics. It discourages potentially productive alliances with scholars who are not perfectly aligned with each particular nonpositivist critique on each of these three axes. Careless use of the p-word alienates potential allies, while offering an easy target for those hard-core protagonists who really do embody certain aspects of the conservative-positivist alignment (see Berry 2002; Fotheringham 2006). Moreover, the shorthand use of positivism ignores the partial autonomy between contemporary methodological positivism and the centuries-long philosophical heritage of positivism. Positivists today do not describe themselves as such. Although nonpositivists routinely use the term as a generalized critique of mainstream research, “positivists” typically draw distinctions between good and bad science. Positivists also tend to use simple words with seemingly clear connotations—accuracy, precision, validity, and reliability—that infuriate critical nonpositivists while attracting a broader audience in the public realm. Nonpositivists must then confront insistent public demands to explain precisely what, in their view, “counts” as worthwhile knowledge, and how we are to avoid the descent to infinite relativist uncertainty. Mainstream, accessible discourse also puts nonpositivists in the position of chasing a “phantom” (Burris 2007, 93); “One would look in vain for a positivist manifesto signed by a prominent list of sociologists” (97), or scholars from any other social science.³ Manifestos from previous generations are often used as surrogates for what today's positivists refuse to say.⁴ When contemporary positivists place caveats and qualifications on a previous generation's bold, rigid axioms of objectivity and universality, nonpositivists resort to new labels such as “crypto-positivism” (Steinmetz 2005c, 276),⁵ or they seize on incremental reforms as prima facie evidence of unapologetic hegemony: “… if there is a kind of modesty … it is the kind of modesty characteristic of those whose preeminent power affords them the ability to reevaluate, revise, and ‘reconcile alternatives.’ … The diffuseness of the theoretical identity …” is “best read as a mark of hegemony …” (Hauptmann 2005, 227). Even the opposition to positivist hegemony is said to strengthen the binary thinking at the heart of positivist power.⁶

Let me be absolutely clear: This is not a defense of the positivist firmament. There is ample evidence that certain privileged positions are able safely to ignore crucial, critical questions—even to avoid entire vocabularies.⁷ Nonpositivists have demonstrated the dangers of treating individuals and societies as if they behaved according to the mechanistic laws of Newtonian physics, the inescapable interplay and constitution of subjectivity, values, and purportedly objective maneuvers of observation and measurement, and the corrosive corruption of certain types of funding circuits and conservative ideological networks. These and many other considerations require constant vigilance, learning, and self-criticism in order to sustain scholarship that has ontological integrity, methodological rigor, and political relevance to the cause of human understanding and social justice. Especially in the human sciences, epistemological and methodological pluralism are essential, and must be strengthened throughout the intellectual-pedagogical infrastructure.

Yet pluralism also means that certain kinds of what is routinely dismissed as “positivism” must play a role too. When specific allegations of problems with knowledge, methods, and politics are replaced by the casual, generalized use of “positivism” as an epithet, the move risks “guilt by association, whereby signs of any one of these symptoms is taken as grounds for confirming the larger malady” (Burris 2007, 98). At the extreme is an “ ‘explanation by association,’ wherein the thing (positivism) explained is allowed to shift among different meanings during a very complex and overdetermined explanatory story” (98). Post-positivist critique also suffers its own Cartesian anxiety: “It is perfectly possible to oppose the View from Nowhere, and even to criticize others for failing to understand its impossibility, and still do so … as if from Nowhere” (Scharff 2007, 509). If Comtean positivism is fatally compromised, so is what Scharff (2007) and S. Harding (2005) diagnose as weak post-positivism.

Naïve, uninformed empiricism should be held accountable. Orthodox methodological rules should be challenged when they leave no room for valuable, rigorous qualitative and interpretive methods. Compromised funding dependencies and biased definitions of what counts as policy “relevance” should be exposed, dismantled, and reconstructed (Slater 2006). But each of these radical projects should be pursued with clear, specific language documenting particular problems and (wherever possible) proposing specific suggestions for analysis, advocacy, and organizing. Using “positivism” as a banner to unite the diverse alliances and tensions of the nonpositivist movements of the social sciences and humanities made sense forty years ago. Today it is counterproductive.

Urbanus Unhinged

Contemporary debates among what historian Peter Novick (1991, 703) calls the “epistemological left,” took shape in the geographical and historical contingencies of the postwar United States, from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. During this period the epistemological left could be considered synonymous with the historical/political left. New social movements and intellectual dissidents challenged a positivism that seemed to have achieved a formal, institutional hegemony in the social sciences precisely at the moment when it died within philosophy itself, to be marginalized as “only a subsection of a subfield of a discipline” (Steinmetz 2005a, 31). For Steinmetz (2005c; see also 2007), postwar U.S. Fordism explains why positivism triumphed as an institutional apparatus despite “the long-term decline of positivism as a vital position in philosophy” (2005c, 276). Through its farreaching effects in organizing various realms of economy, society, and culture, Fordism helped to privilege and apparently validate a kind of social science that was “acultural, ahistorical, and individualistic with respect to its basic units of analysis and oriented towards general laws, replication, prediction, and value-freedom” (309). Meanwhile, the “Fordist security state” provided an enormous reservoir of funding, and an eager policy audience, for social science that was “packaged in a positivist format” (309).

PoM includes not a single mention of urban studies. Nevertheless, the bold theses of Steinmetz and many of the other contributors provide a valuable conceptual lens through which to gain a new perspective on the positivist debates that are so widely remembered and rehearsed within urban studies and urban planning. The basic story line goes something like this. By the mid-1960s it had become clear that urban research had moved decisively toward various incarnations of general-systems theory, neoclassical economics, and a search for universal laws of urban structure and urban process. Research practices were premised on rational-planning assumptions, detached objectivity, and privileged, hard-earned expertise. Great emphasis was placed on formal mathematical models, systematic urban inventories and social surveys, and quantitative measurement. Given the considerable expense of the new mainframe computer infrastructure required, the new wave of urban inquiry came to be closely associated with long-term state funding and certain types of policy-oriented research questions.

This brutal summary distorts and oversimplifies a very complex, turbulent period with its own conceptual ironies, currents of resistance and creative dissent, and shifting alliances among and within urban-oriented disciplines (for a small sample, see Hall 2002, 359–363; cf. Harvey 1973; Harvey 1969; cf. Berry 1972; Harvey 1972; Berry 2002).

Oversimplification is the point: Complex histories and contingencies from four decades ago are now remembered (or described in written histories) in simplified, ideal-typical form. Complexity is distilled to a concise collective memory that implies ontological essence and necessity. Consider the concise and eloquent urban historiographies that telescope through one contemporary urban analysis (Vigar, et al. 2005, 1395) of today's intricate multicultural cities undergoing repeated rounds of destabilizing changes:

Such transformations challenge the modernist principles at the heart of urban planning that tend to favour acting in a definable singular “public interest,” with rational “coherence” and urban public order impose...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• PART I: Critical Urban Theory
• PART II: Critical Urban Policy
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors