This book delves into a question that has become increasingly prevalent over the past decade: Who shapes our cities? For over a century the answer to this question included a range of usual suspects, dependent on the global context. In the Modern era of the Global North, cities were usually shaped by governments, giving way over the decades to powerful private interests. The inflexibility of this order has prompted some of the most influential urban theorists of the twentieth century such as Jane Jacobs, Jan Gehl, and William Whyte to reappreciate individual agency in the Modern city, and Kevin Lynch to argue for a more democratic urban environment in which citizens can achieve a better āfitā for their needs (Gehl 1987; Jacobs 1961; Lynch 1984; Whyte 1988). In the Global South cities have been shaped by a far more complex interplay of governmental and non-governmental organizations, politicians, and citizens. Conversely to the perhaps overly ordered environment of Western cities, informal cities in developing countries have often struggled to maintain a physical, social, and economic infrastructure for their populations, prompting concern among global organizations such as the United Nations and the World Health Organization. The status quo between Northern rigidity and Southern informality has increasingly been uprooted from the bottom up, shaking up global distinctions. This book explores the various new ways in which our urban environment is transformed by new stakeholders, challenging the publicāprivate hegemony in Western countries, while bolstering a new urban order in the Global South.
This book expressly bridges current bottom-up theories and their implementations across the globe. First, it compares the main schools of thought on bottom-up and informal urbanism by introducing a dialogue between key thinkers in the field of urban planning, architecture, sociology, and anthropology. Rather than picking sides in the increasingly crowded landscape of urbanisms, this book surveys their differences and similarities. Furthermore, it compares and contrasts the bottom-up initiatives that fulfill the unmet desire for spontaneity and serendipity in the orderly city with the order and ordering of informality in the overwhelmed city. The new agency of bottom-up urbanism can complement and describe the urban condition across the globe. By connecting the intellectual positions of bottom-up urbanism and the geographical positions of informality, the book provides an unprecedentedly detailed and comprehensive perspective on agency in the contemporary global city.
New Urbanists and New Urbanisms?
The question of agency in cities is as old as their order itself. Commonly accepted as a manifestation of power, the ordering of urban environments has consistently reflected the relations between rulers and citizens. While famous for the order of the gridded castra, Romans were unable to keep their capital city from devolving into a notoriously overcrowded and unsanitary hotbed for dissent. When London burned down in the seventeenth century, institutional structures could not prevent citizens rebuilding to largely the same structure, despite visionary plans and legislative support. Efforts to structure the city were only successful in small doses, from Parisā Place Royale to Londonās Covent Garden, or on more or less virgin land, such as Romeās restructuring under Pope Sixtus V and Amsterdamās new canal districts in its Golden Age. An inner-urban leap in the scale of urban order involved new and largely undemocratic power structures, prompting Hausmannās restructuring of Paris under Napoleon Bonaparte, and the construction of the Viennese Ringstrasse under Joseph IIāarguably the onset of urban modernity (Abrahamse 2011; Berman 1980; Morris 1972; Mumford 1961). This shift prompted the first pushback among urban observers and scholars, such as Charles Baudelaire who described the lingering inequality behind Parisā new spatial order (1869), or Camillo Sitteās reappreciation of the bottom-up āartisticā order of medieval squares as opposed to Viennaās new technocratic urban order (Sitte 1889). Sitte was one of the first urban observers to discover the āorganized complexityā behind the emergence, evolution, and functioning of the urban environment as a self-organizing process, anticipating the human and urban ecologies of Geddes (1915), Park and Burgess (1925), the urban manifestos of Jacobs (1961, 1969), the pattern language of Alexander et al. (1977), and Contextualists like Rowe and Koetter (1984: 128ā129; Shane 2004).1 Meanwhile, the Structuralist movement that started in Europe in the 1960s acknowledged the different dynamics between individual, collective and institutional agency (e.g. Habraken and Teicher 2000). As Chapter 2 by Jeffrey Hou in this volume explains, bottom-up urbanism can almost read as a counter-narrative of our conventional history of Western urban development.
Urban agency has taken a decidedly different shape outside of Europe. In the fever of North American urbanization, the speculative forces that shaped the city commonly considered any spatial ordering beyond the perceived neutrality of the grid as a burden to progress. American urban planning has surprising roots as a bottom-up effort of urban beautification, originating in local art and civic societies, only later taking root as the Progressive start to professional city planning and urban reform (Peterson 1976; Talen 2015). While the urban grid arguably originates in prehistoric India and China, top-down urban order often has colonial underpinnings in the Global South, from the sixteenth-century Laws of the Indies imposed on many Central and South American cities (Morris 1972: 302ā306), to Lutyenās New Delhi (Hall 2002: 198ā206; Ridley 1998), and Geddesā designs for many other Indian cities (Tyrwhitt 1947). Even in the post-colonial era, many countries continued to look toward the West for urban order, with Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Wright inspiring or building projects in South America and the Middle East, followed by Doxiades and a slew of internationally active architectureāengineering conglomerates. Today, the renderings for new African, Middle Eastern, and Asian middle-class developments are frighteningly difficult to distinguish, as the Generic City is emerging across the globe (Koolhaas and Mau 1995; Murray 2017). Resistance has grown against these top-down or ātop-upā visions of urban order, as explained in Chapter 17 by Nezar AlSayyad and Sujin Eom. By and large, these external orders have had relatively little impact on the overwhelmed cities in the Global South, as the majority of urban growth still happens outside formally designed global enclaves in the form of rapidly expanding informal settlements. Rather than responding to local or national authorities, most cities in Latin America, Africa, and Asia are shaped by a growing influx of individual agents responding to global forces of migration and opportunity (Burdett and Sudjic 2007). In the Global South, the formally designed and planned city is the counter-narrative against a domination of informal urban development.
Urban informality has become an increasingly salient topic in contemporary scholarly and professional debates on the city due to the fact that these counter-narratives have grown in importance. The division between formal development in the Global North and informal development in the Global South has started to blur. An increasing number of scholarsāsuch as Margaret Crawford...