Urban Political Geographies

A Global Perspective

Ugo Rossi, Alberto Vanolo

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781446292402
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"Ugo Rossi and Alberto Vanolo take us on a journey around the ascent and crisis of urban liberalism, providing a clear and highly readable analysis of key issues and debates in the field of urban political geography."
- Ola Söderström, Université de Neuchâtel "It is in the city trenches that the crises, contradictions, and counterpolitics of neoliberalization are finding some of their most vivid and consequential expressions, where new worlds are being imagined, made, and unmade. This has yet to be mapped. But in Urban Political Geographies, we have a timely and astute field guide to this unfolding process."
- Jamie Peck, University of British Columbia

How can we think about the urban within a political and geographical framework? This compelling textbook scrutinizes urban politics through a theoretical and empirical lens to provide readers with a clear understanding of the relationship between political, spatial and economic issues relating to the urban environment.

Taking a truly global analysis, the book uses international comparative case studies from cities across the world including, London, Beijing, Austin and Vancouver. It draws on ideas and theories from human geography, politics, sociology, economics and development.

Engaging in style and thorough in its coverage of the key issues, the book is essential reading for students and scholars looking for a book that deals with contemporary urban debates from a political, economic and geographical perspective.

part one

POLITICS AS REPRESENTATION

1

Urban Development and the Politics of Representation

Key Issues and Themes

The production of urban representations and narratives is intimately linked to capital accumulation and economic development strategies being pursued by the politico-economic elites in a postmodernized urban environment. The politics of representation, however, is a contested field, one in which conventional representations are challenged and contested ‘from below’.

The crisis of Fordism as a mode of production has opened the way for the rise of a variety of representations and public discourses heralding the advent of the post-Fordist city in multiple forms.

The invention of the global city is at the heart of the globalization discourse. Over the years, this notion has travelled across the globe, being particularly successful in the East Asian context.

In recent years, the environmentalist discourse has been incorporated into the neoliberal policy agenda, which emphasizes the link between sustainability and economic development. Urban resilience is the emerging policy catchword in this context.

A critical understanding of the politics of representation has to take into account the fact that conventional representations and narratives arise from a Eurocentric view of human civilization and socio-economic processes.

1.1 Introduction: towards a political economy of representation

The geographies of urban politics can be analysed drawing on a line of enquiry intimately linked to the poststructuralist turn in the social sciences. According to this theoretical perspective, the dynamics and forms of the urban process (like those in other realms of social life) are to be understood not only as phenomena that are empirically observable in the way in which they actually appear, but also as socially and culturally constructed ‘discourses’ from which a number of different meanings originate. Observing the urban experience from this point of view is not a merely intellectual exercise but should be regarded as a way of unpacking commonly held views on cities and the pathways of urban development. Today, it is commonly accepted that discourses and representations have a performative role (see Hall, 1997). In the field of urban studies, this means looking at the ways in which architects, urban designers, policymakers and planners discursively frame and represent urban spaces, through planning schemes and regeneration projects, shaping the conduct of citizens and the organized actors along the lines of the dominant rationalities of government and economic development.

Representations originate not only from official documents of urban policy, but also from the mass media and a number of cultural and popular outlets. The intimate relationship linking the political strategies of urban development to the dynamics of capitalist accumulation, through the power of representations, has led critical urban scholars to creatively draw on the ‘tradition’ of studies dealing with the political economy of city and regions (Harloe, 1977; see the section dedicated to Harvey and Castells in Chapter 3). Today, therefore, investigating the political economy of cities and regions entails coming to terms also with the importance acquired by the politics of representation within the urban realm. Advocates of urban political economy have thus engaged with poststructuralist social theory, advancing an innovative ‘cultural political economy’, which seeks to combine the established methodologies of historical (and geographical) materialism with critical discourse analysis (Jessop, 2004a; Ribera-Fumaz, 2009).

Far from resulting in a pluralistic depiction of the urban experience, representational strategies stem from a highly selective and politicized process. In order to build consensus among its citizenry around the dominant development strategy, urban elites confine the image of the city to monistic representations: the post-Fordist city, the postmodern city, the global and entrepreneurial city and, in more recent times, the sustainable and resilient city. This chapter will outline the social and cultural context in which hegemonic representations of contemporary cities take form, underlining their relationships with existing politico-economic strategies pursued by urban elites, nation-states and supra-national organizations. Prior to this analysis, the chapter will look at the ways in which the image of the city has become an explicit target of government initiative, particularly through the invention of the so-called city marketing.

1.2 Governing the image of the city

As will be shown in Part Two (Chapter 3), mainstream approaches to city government have changed over the last three decades, most notably within the framework of the shift from the public-managerial and redistributive policies of the Keynesian decades, focusing on land use regulation and the allocation of public services, to the entrepreneurial turn of the neoliberal era, emphasizing the role of cities and regions as economic growth drivers. The struggle over the production of captivating images of the contemporary city has followed in the wake of this epochal change within the philosophy of urban policy. The commonly held view behind the emerging policy rationale is that cities are compelled to compete within the global arena in the attraction of a variety of resources and ‘competitive advantages’, including direct investments by transnational firms, the inflow of international tourists, the organization of hallmark events, the localization of the headquarters of world organizations (Lever and Turok, 1999).

In this context, cities devise allegedly ‘innovative’ strategies aiming to assert or just to consolidate their competitive positionality within national and international arenas. In doing so, urban elites adopt entrepreneurial styles of action and communication, publicly selling the city’s images and icons in the way private companies sell their commodities, even with regard to socially and environmentally relevant goals such as ecological development and social cohesion (Jessop and Sum, 2000). The production of images, discourses and urban representations thus offers a crucial point of observation for the analysis of contemporary strategies of urban development and related power relationships. Cities strive to re-connect themselves to the changing spatialities of global relationships and flows, making recourse to strategies of urban marketing and branding. Such efforts are intended to attract public and private investments and to infuse a dynamic mentality into local societies, open to competitive as well as collaborative relationships (Paddison, 1993; Kavaratzis and Ashworth, 2005).

What usually falls under the rubric of the ‘image of the city’ is a complex and variegated repertoire of representation devices, which includes: selected elements of the built environment (streets, monuments, buildings) being used as official urban brands; symbols and icons evoking the habits, routines, conventions and organizational structures regulating urban social relationships; the stereotypes associated with local culture as well as the popular accounts of city life featured in advertising campaigns of place marketing, in tourist guides, films and other cultural products. Although politico-economic elites tend to offer a monolithic image of the city, urban representations are constitutively plural, reflecting the different positionalities of social actors and groups and the uneven power relationships forging the urban political realm. There can be representations arising from the everyday experiences of those living in the poorer neighbourhoods of the city, which are usually confined to the status of ‘imaginary geographies’ of the city (Memoli, 2005); and there is, on the other hand, the production of dominant, allegedly shared, images of the city, which is the result of representations elaborated by the urban elites and imposed on city users and dwellers. Politico-economic elites propose optimistic representations of city life, downplaying weaknesses and contradictions, while emphasizing the competitive potentials of urban and regional economies and presenting urban communities as cohesive formations acting as ‘collective actors’ (Bagnasco and Le Galès, 1997; cf. the notion of ‘locality as agent’: Cox and Mair, 1991). The production of hegemonic representations of the image of the city, however, is likely to provoke the response of dissident voices and protest movements: for instance, popular coalitions in Denver and Toronto contested the image of the respective cities conveyed on the occasion of the Olympic candidature (in Toronto the slogan of the protestors was ‘bread not circuses’); in Mexico City local citizens denounced the inequities and false promises emerging from government’s discourse on efficiency and competitiveness at the time of the building of the new international airport (Levy and Bruhn, 2006).

1.2.1 Contested representations

Urban settings thus provide ideal conditions not only for the institutionalization of the representational process, in varying forms and modalities, but also for the development of grassroots movements contesting official representations in the name of ‘absolute’ democracy and a more egalitarian urban society (Part Three). The politics taking shape around the production of images and representations constitute a highly controversial and contested field. Energetic and optimistic visions are permeated by rhetoric and narrative devices opportunistically mobilized in order to assert a reassuring image of the city. This optimism can be expressed either in the form of banal slogans (‘Los Angeles, city of the sun’, ‘Milan, capital of fashion’) or through more sophisticated institutional processes, as occurs within contemporary strategic-relational planning initiatives based on accurate consultation and negotiation procedures involving organized actors and local communities (Jessop, 2001). The discursive tactics informing the planning processes are likely to appear even outrageous in the eyes of the powerless actors (the unemployed, the homeless, those living in deprived neighbourhoods, the unrepresented workers and undocumented migrants), in dictating a straightforward representation of the city as a place of opportunity, success, leisure, excluding what appears to stand in contrast to the reassuring picture of harmony and consensus. Nonetheless, despite expressions of dissent and resistance, the ‘positive’ representations of the city, and even of its problems and open questions, are assumed as being capable of generating a sense of community and civic pride (the so-called framing strategies theorized by Erving Goffman, 1974), which is crucial to the building of social consensus and the attraction of public as well as private sources of funding for megaprojects and hallmark events. This typically happens to be the case of those city councils presenting the candidature for the Olympic Games or as a European Capital of Culture (see Chapter 2), involving a wide variety of public and private stakeholders (Cochrane et al., 1996; Boyle, 1999).

The politics of representation frequently result in the generation and reproduction of seductive images reflecting the interests and the expectations of economic actors, particularly of those involved in the tourist sector. Conventional strategies of urban branding and the stereotypical images arising from them are aimed at attracting the global flows of tourists and those of other city users and visitors (Hoffmann et al., 2003). The representational process typically translates itself into a number of ‘selective narratives’ (Sandercock, 2003), targeting potential investors, visitors and occasional city users. This process, however, does not necessarily lead to the invention of ephemeral narratives: urban elites are usually committed to reinventing images and narratives which are already rooted in the social consciousness and the local everyday life. On the one hand, manifestly false representations are destined to fail; on the other hand, those characteristics of a locality which are unquestionably unattractive, such as polluting industrial plants and unsafe areas, are excluded from mainstream representations as they are regarded as unprofitable in terms of place marketing.

The politics of representation presupposes, therefore, a highly selective process aimed at identifying place qualities and potentials. This selective work entails a ‘linguistic politics’, which provides a discursive justification for the pursuit of regeneration policies in a variety of urban settings. For instance, Leela Fernandes (2004) has examined the ways in which the rise of an urban middle class in India has been accompanied by representations of the city praising the delights of consumerism and the irresistible attractiveness of city lifestyles, while a growing number of pubs, clubs, discos and fashionable shops have proliferated in the gentrifying areas of the large cities. In this context, the promotion of a vibrant and explicitly Westernized lifestyle has implied the adoption of a silent ‘politics of forgetting’, which has drawn a veil (or it has tried to do so) over an important dimension of the urban experience: the condition of the urban poor and particularly of slum dwellers. These embarrassing spaces and social groups are expelled from the urban experience not only at a symbolic level but also physically through the eviction of informal housing and the forced relocation of their dwellers outside of the boundaries of the city through projects of slum redevelopment. In some cases, these operations are presented as socially innovative initiatives, attempting to turn slum dwellers into active citizens and self-financed homeowners, even though the actual outcomes are rife with contradictions and unresolved problems (Mukhija, 2003). One of these slums, Dharavi in Mumbai, has been at the centre of lively public discussions in recent times, when the British film Slumdog Millionaire, directed by Danny Boyle (2008), proposed an image of the neighbourhood that some commentators (such as the famous writer Salman Rushdie, native of Mumbai) considered as unrealistic in telling the story of a young man of poor background becoming a ‘millionaire’ after participation in a TV quiz.

The politics of representation, in conclusion, is a controversial phenomenon, an aspect which is emphasized by the advent of globalization and the ‘society of spectacle’, where not only information circulates with increased rapidity and constantly changes in meaning, but where representations of local societies – as in the film just mentioned – can arise from the work of symbolic agents (filmmakers, novelists, journalists, essayists) originating from other contexts and ‘local cultures’. In this sense, the critical scrutiny of the urban politics of representation illuminates the dynamics underlying the production of the contemporary urban imaginary on a global scale. What ultimately results from this contested politics of representation is that cities are not fixed entities but are constantly evolving discursive objects. For this reason, it is worth looking at the trajectory of urban representations in the last few decades, starting with the crisis of the Fordist city and showing how this crisis has opened the way for the reinvention of the dominant image of the contemporary capitalist city.

1.3 From Fordism to post-Fordism: reinventing cities in a context of economic transition

The 1970s and the 1980s have been described by scholars, politicians and major economic players as decades witnessing profound changes in the structure and organization of Western economies and societies: an era marked by the rise of technological, social and institutional forces that have appeared to be radically different from those dominating the world in previous years (Amin, 1994). The incipient sense of ‘great transformation’ has been accompanied by the increasingly widespread usage of seductive catchwords and locutions such as ‘post-Fordism’, ‘post-industrial society’ and ‘new capitalism’.

1.3.1 Fordism and the golden age of the capitalist city

Cities and metropolitan areas have therefore played a central role in the recent process of economic and societal transition, experiencing structural changes in their spatial forms and socio-economic formations (Soja, 2000). In previous decades, Fordist capitalism had been the engine in the evolution of urban and regional processes. The rise of a regime of accumulation based on Tayloristic techniques of production (the assembly line), the generalization of a wage-based class structure, the diffusion of standardized patterns of mass consumption and production, the replacement of local cultures with commodified lifestyles, deeply transformed the dynamics and forms of urbanization, particularly in those cities in which urban economies were shaped by the presence of large industries. In the so-called golden age of Western capitalism, from the end of the Second World War to the economic crisis of the mid-1970s (Marglin and Schor, 1991), urban and regional spaces located in the ‘central’ areas of capitalist countries were organized so as to accommodate the needs of large industries (particularly in the automotive sector), to the detriment of agriculture and traditional manufacturing. The Fordist city has thus been shaped by economies of scale and agglomeration, by the homogenization of the built environment, by the prevalence of the nuclear family and by a str...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• About the Authors
• Foreword: the Athenian symptom by Ola Söderström
• Foreword: the nine lives of neoliberalism by Jamie Peck
• Foreword: politics between the lines by AbdouMaliq Simone
• Introduction
• PART ONE: POLITICS AS REPRESENTATION
• PART TWO: POLITICS AS GOVERNMENT
• PART THREE: POLITICS AS CONTESTATION
• Conclusion: Beyond Post-neoliberal Melancholia
• Glossary
• References
• Acknowledgements
• Index