reading notes (Fall 2016)

This page contains reading notes for each class session. Groups of 1-2 students will upload text (and perhaps images, references and links) by TUESDAY before each week's session. Depending on class size, each student will volunteer for two or three sessions. Please sign up early in the semester. See the class webpage assignment page (updated link) for more instructions.

NOTE to students: all students registered in UP650 have editing access to this document; be sure to click "sign in" at the bottom of the page (using your UM account), and then click on the pencil icon above to edit. Format: take advantage of headers (for organization), and the ability to insert links, images, etc.

Chapter 12: The Geography of Capitalist Accumulation: a Reconstruction of the Marxian Theory

A general summary of the centrality of capital accumulation in shaping spatial development (and vice versa), Harvey explores how the dynamics of production, distribution, and demand place built environments in the perilous position of ensuring centralization of production even as overaccumulation places emphasis on further “time-space compression.” Harvey here introduces the contradiction between fixity and circulation that is central to understanding trends in urbanization in relation to capital overaccumulation.

Chapter 13: A Marxian Theory of the State

Moves beyond purportedly crude interpretation of the relationship between the state and capital in terms of an elite pact and develops a institutional sketch of the regulatory necessities of capital accumulation that are provided by governments. The most central of these are legal regulations and protections of private property, contract enforcement, and promotion of mobility (for capital, goods, and investment).

Chapter 14: The Spatial Fix: Hegel, Von Thünen and Marx

Traces how Marx is building on (yet comes short in outlining) a theory of the way “frontier development” or “external mobility” can momentarily resolve the “inner dialectic” of accumulation in a bounded space (national economy) that leads to the overaccumluation and eventual devaluation of internal capital, commodity, and labor values. He explores three iterations of a frontier development, each expanding the spatial scale of either consumption (through increase exports), production (by moving investment capital to productive use abroad), and labor (increasing the scale of the regulation of labor supply). The engagement with between Von Thünen, Hegel, and Marx revolves around the permanence of “frontier fixes” in alleviating the “inner dialectic.” Criticisms of Thunen are that he assumes labor is more mobile than it actually is (minor) and assumes that every country has a frontier like the US (major). Note Von Thünen’s famous equation for wages in an isolated state with a frontier, where natural wage (square root of) ap, where a is the essential subsistence needs of the worker and p is the product of his labour. An equilibrium can be maintained IF a frontier exists.

Chapter 15: The Geopolitics of Capitalism

Harvey focuses on the implications of the drive toward circulation on the part of capital. In this chapter, it is useful to distinguish between the circulation of capital, and the need for a quick turnover time for commodity exchange and capital investment. While these two are related (turnover time is quicker when infrastructure for circulation is extensive, they should be approached as separate). Think of turnover time as reflected in the rate of profit, and circulation as infrastructure, technological connectivity, capital and trade agreements, etc. The pressure for quick turnover time places pressure on circulation to expand and further “annihilate space with time.” Here Harvey introduces the spatial fix as a potentially internal process as well (not only occurring in “frontier areas”).

Chapter 16: From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism

Building on his chapter on Baltimore’s development initiatives, Harvey derives a theory of “entrepreneurial urban governance” that can be understood as a historical elaboration of his theory of the state. The move towards “public-private partnerships,” Harvey observes, reflects a move of municipal governments to become “facilitators for the strategic interests of capitalist development.” Here were are able to see multiple scales of “spatial fixes” at the neighborhood, central city, suburban, and regional scales. A key contribution is what he calls “zero-sum, inter-urban competition” which frames and narrows the option municipal governments have in ensuring the reproduction of labor (substance) of their residents. This chapters is useful in thinking up into the global level at attempts by the governments of impoverished countries to attract capital investment.

Chapter 17: Geography of Class Power

This chapter borrow heavily from Ch 14 (on Hegel, Marx, and Von Thunen). It makes a stronger effort, however to place it in the context of the general class struggle (i.e. workers of the world, unite) and the continued pertinence of the communist manifesto. It stresses the importance of geography and spatial relations, specifically in how a shrinking, more connected world with lower transportation costs can actually make worker collaboration more difficult. Workers are more different now than they were a century ago: i.e. there is a massive difference between a well-paid German machinist and a Bangladeshi garment worker. Especially for the latter, he stresses that a large percentage of the working world population lives in near-slavery conditions equal or worse to the urban slums of the European industrial revolution. He recognizes the concerns of doing country-specific socialization, but recognizes how in certain places it may be feasible, successful, and the only viable option, such as his example of Baltimore.

Chapter 18: The Art of Rent: Globalization and Commodification of Culture

Somewhat late, Harvey introduces the concept of “rent” as a drawn out unproductive extraction of money from holding a claim to a thing. Harvey elaborates the Ricardian and Marxian fixation with land rents to rents extracted from authenticity of cultural goods and experiences (in tourism). There are two tensions he identifies, (1) the necessity to make something authentic, but not so authentic that it escapes commodification or the designation of an exchange value. (2) the desire to extract the highest possible rents (entailing the consumption of an “authentic cultural good”) that then degrades the authenticity of the good (if everyone has a particular wine, or a cultural city center is gentrified. Here Harvey deploys a variation of the argument that capital, through its accumulation, erodes the basis for accumulation (in space, environment, labor, and consumption). Think f this chapter in relation to what we read by Walter Benjamin in week 1.

Oct 10 - Castells

Castells: the young, the middle-career, and the mature Castells (updated 2:17pm Oct. 8)

Castells introduces five key categories in the course of his career, which can be broken down according to his young work, his middle-career work, and his mature work.

Young Castells

In his young work (chapters 1-2), Castells introduces the concept of ideology to urban studies, suggesting that the prevalent perspectives in urban studies (think Chicago School)—the way the “urban question” has been examined hitherto—mystify real social relations; ultimately, he argues that urban context (ecology) does not matter so much as class structure (the relations of production, which are specific to the mode of production) in determining urban cultures.

Mid-career Castells

In his middle-career work (chapter 4), Castells argues that the relationship between class structure and inequality is not direct, but mediated. He proposes the concept of mass consumption, and explores the importance of the state in what we may denote “Keynesianism-Fordism.” Ultimately, the state accomplishes two functional requirements of capitalism: it represents the collective interests of the capitalist class by helping to reproduce labor power (especially via public housing programs), and it bolsters the rate of profit, which tends to decline, by investing in sectors that have lower-than-average rates of profit (e.g., housing, sports facilities, galleries) and leaving the more profitable activities for the full exploitation of private capitalists. Thus the state becomes a crucial mediating force between the class structure and the production of inequality. This serves to alter urban organization and form, and politicize the urban question. This arrangement oppresses humanity as a whole.

Mature Castells

In his mature work (chapters 6), Castells proposes the concept mode of development, that is, technology-based productivity levels within a mode of production. Modes of production (MoPs) and modes of development (MoDs) interact. MoDs are the organizational means to achieve the MoP’s structural principle of performance: under capitalism, to maximize profit. Yet Castells embraces neither technological determinism nor MoP teleology. Rather, MoDs, he argues, evolve according to their own logic: Technological paradigms first emerging from science and technology; when social change and technological change converge, a new MoD is adopted. The contemporary Informational MoD’s raw materials are information, and the product is the process.

Moreover (chapter 7), Castells elaborates and expounds the concept of the dual city, which has two characteristics: (1) growing numbers of middle class professionals and managers share the inner city with excluded underclass minorities, and (2) simultaneous growth and decline of industries and firms, especially at what he calls nodal points in the economic geography (the largest metropolitan areas where knowledge-intensive activities and jobs are concentrated).

Castells (chapter 8) also theorizes the network society constitutive of the Information Age, the rise of which has marked a transition from a space of places, in which time organizes space, to space of flows, in which space organizes time. Space, for Castells, is the expression of society’s time-sharing social practices. But the nature of space changes fundamentally with the transition to the network society: it need no longer be contiguous. However, the network society is only available to the cosmopolitan professional managerial class; since the mass of unskilled workers is excluded from the network society, the configuration threatens to produce parallel universes (we may say “parallel but non-contiguous spaces”). In architecture, the proliferation of postmodern design—whose content is acultural, ironic, and/or silent—is expressive of the simultaneous existence of the two social universes of the dual city.

In a seemingly policy-oriented statement (chapter 9), Castells elaborates several features of the culture of Information-Age cities. He rejects the idea of “global cities” in favor of networks and nodes as the decisive feature of contemporary urban forms; he therefore proposes the concept metropolitan region spatial form—comparable to Edge Cities, urban forms such as the San Francisco Bay area. Metropolitan regions tend to be loosely integrated politically. Moreover, a fundamental feature of contemporary urban life in metropolitan regions is the interaction between meanings that adhere to the space of places and those caught in the space of flows (the former being closely related to personal identity and the latter to transcultural placelessness). This interaction means that “cities cease to function as cultural integrators of diverse meanings”; instead, “segmented cultural identities become urban tribes” (p.382).

QUESTIONS

YOUNG CASTELLS:

What is wrong with the Chicago School?

What is ideology? What does it “do,” according to Castells?

What is meant by “structure”?

MID-CAREER CASTELLS:

How does Castells operationalize the rate of profit? Is he consistent with Harvey? Does he retain the labor theory of value?

Why does the state do what it does? Is it an instrument of the bourgeoisie? Is it something else? Does Castells differ from Harvey on this point? And, how do planners fit in?

Is mass consumption a bygone era? Is Castells’s analysis of it useful today?

MATURE CASTELLS:

Castells appears to draw a firm distinction between space and place. In so doing, he appears to reify place: place is related to personal identity, somewhat parochial vis-à-vis space and flow. Do you think Castells treats place fairly? Can place be more dynamic? What would Harvey say?

In his early work, Castells goes to great pains to discredit the thesis that place produces identity (chapter 2 passim, esp. p.40). In his mature work, he seems to casually accept that this had been the case (esp. p.382). What do you make of this? How would you explain this discrepancy? Has he abandoned Marxism? Is he now more sophisticated? Is he now missing the point?

IN GENERAL:

What is the difference between concentration and centralization of economic activity for Castells? Why does this matter?

Oct 17 - Lefebvre/Production of Space

Plan for the Present Work – Lefebvre

In this selection, Lefebvre introduces the core concepts and intellectual impetus of The Production of Space. Lefebvre aims to inaugurate a unitary “science of space” contra classical philosophical and contemporary semiological approaches to space. This unitary theory and science of space would illuminate the relationship between hegemony and space, between lived and real, and space's ties to and consequences for inhabitance. A science of space will demonstrate a truth of space by (1) representing the political use of knowledge, (2) implying an ideology concealing that use, and (3) embodying a technological utopia. Moreover, the science of space will facilitate a unity of the physical, mental and social, as well as reconcile those varied fields that aim to build or bridle urbanism and architecture. He undertakes this enterprise through an assiduous and expansive category-building exercise that positions himself and his analysis vis-à-vis preceding intellectual analyses of space, these ranging from Descartes to Derrida. In these initial sections, Lefebvre works to identify scholarly moorings for his effort, whether literary, philosophical or mathematical.

He begins with a critique of prior definitions and categories of space; Lefebvre’s aim here is to carve out terrain for social space relative to antecedents that manacled space as a mental construct or a concrete form. First, he presents and neutralizes Cartesian logics that promulgate space as an absolute. Lefebvre subsequently complicates Kantian notions of space which hold it to be an unstructured element of consciousness. He then contends that prevailing mathematical conceptions - founded on scientific precision - are insufficient because of non-correspondence between spatial concepts and reality, thus rendering space an aspect of cognition. Lefebvre turns to discursive assessments of space and explains how the codes produced to grasp space remain superficial. Linguistic and deconstructive approaches to space simplify it to a kind of message or language that may or may not exist prior to social space. In a later section, Lefebvre critiques a focus on discourse, "Non-verbal sets are thus characterized by a spatiality which is in fact irreducible to the mental realm" In place of a mere decoding of space, Lefebvre’s own spatial codes will be forced into dialectical interaction.

Still seeking an intellectual foundation, Lefebvre changes his focus to a recovery and annexation of Hegel and the concrete universal. The concrete universal is the dialectical relationship between the particular, the general and the singular, it is concerned with an object’s embeddedness in the world. Elements addressed this way are said to contain their opposite which in turn produces a concrete synthesis that negates the universal. Lefebvre relies on a triadic approach in order to dispatch with binaries that would reduce space to the categories of the mental and the lived. Inspired by Hegel but not replicating him, this early triad involves particular “descriptions,” general “logic,” and singular “places.” We see an elaborated conceptual triad emerge later on as a way to break a Manichean spatial “straightjacket.”

Keeping with Hegel, Lefebvre argues that space is the product of history and an end of history does not mean its curtailment or disappearance. Time produces the state and the aim of the state is to produce its own space to rule and occupy. As a consequence, time withers. He writes, “As for time, dominated by repetition and circularity, overwhelmed by the establishment of an immobile space which is the locus and environment of realized Reason, it loses all meaning.” In their work, Marx and others aimed to rescue time, but Lefebvre sees an opportunity in delivering space. In this current moment, Lefebvre has set his sights on space because (1) the state is consolidating on a world scale, (2) the rationality of the state provokes opposition, and (3) the working class continues its struggle. Positioning himself among Marx, Hegel and Nietzsche, Lefebvre wishes to use his text to “detonate this state of [spatial] affairs.”

Lefebvre’s primary argument is social space is a social product. Space is a social construction. For Lefebvre, this thesis is obfuscated by two widespread spatial illusions. First, the illusion of transparency - idealism - has its subscribers believe space to be wholly visible and apparent, elements are accessible and available. Second, the realistic illusion – materialism – promotes the view that elements have substantial lives that are hidden. Lefebvre’s thesis has four implications: 1) natural space is disappearing; 2) every society (each mode of production) produces its own space; 3) our knowledge of space is expected to reproduce and expound the process of production; and, 4) we are dealing with history.

Lefebvre periodizes the social construction of space in three prevailing forms. Absolute space marks the early phases of interaction of the conceptual triad. This construction involves fragments of nature and includes family, soil and language. Lefebvre then examines historical space, a relative space expropriated from nature and transformed into the space of accumulation. Finally, he turns his attention to abstract space. This form is the space of power produced by capitalism and neocapitalism, it entails a spatial economy that assigns value to certain relationships between people and place. Such space, for Lefebvre, is marked by consensus and is flanked by violence, with bureaucracy as its agent. He explains, “This space is founded on the vast networks of banks, business centres, and major productive entities, as also on motorways, airports and information lattices.” Although it aims for a sweeping homogeneity, abstract space also contains the makings of differential space, space that appears as contradiction and a form of resistance. Abstract space is never totalizing and complete and transitions in the dominant mode of production necessarily involve transformations in abstract space.

As mentioned above, Lefebvre introduces a conceptual triad as a way to get around the dualism marked by the lived and mental space of mathematics and philosophy. First, a spatial practice provides the practical foundation of the outside world and the space for the reproduction of social relations; these are the routines, routes, networks and patterns characteristic of daily life. Second, representations of space are the conceived forms of space associated with technocrats and planners. This is the space of knowledge, power and cognition. Finally, Lefebvre theorizes representational space. Imaginaries of inhabitance, art, memory and symbols occupy this last position in the triad. The three elements of the conceptual triad are not discrete and separate, social space is continually produced by the interaction of these moments. The triad is a dialectical model enriched by feedback loops. If you’re keeping up, these three spatial elements partially map onto Hegel’s notions of the particular, general and singular.

The Social Production of Urban Space – Gottdiener

Gottdiener provides an historical examination of the status of space within mainstream urban analysis. Beginning with the Chicago School and moving through to contemporary urban ecology, Gottdiener explains the limitations of viewing the city through the ecological lens. He argues, “I assert the important changes in spatial patterning and urban restructuring have occurred because they are functions of changes in the larger social system, not because they are products of processes internal to place themselves.” Today, spatial morphologies are the product of capitalist relations; contra the urban ecologists, a Marxian perspective explains patterns and events as products of larger social processes. I recommend reading this piece last owing to Gottdiener’s periodization of various schools of thought.

A Marx for Our Time: Henri Lefebvre and the Production of Space – Gottdiener

In this article Gottdiener discusses the significance of Lefebvre’s work and its powerful ramifications for urban analysis. He argues that Lefebvre paid close attention to how commodities existed both in space and time. Lefebvre realized that capitalism eventuated a material space that was a concrete abstraction similar to money and labor power. In Gottdiener’s reading of Lefebvre, he contrasts the “social space” of practice and lived experience with the “abstract space” of knowledge and power. Is this juxtaposition clear in POS’ introduction? Both involve Lefebvre’s conceptual triad of perceived, conceived and lived.

The Urban Question as a Scale Question – Brenner

Brenner tackles “the urban question” by reappraising it as a scale question inspired by Lefebvre’s work. He writes, “I I shall build on Lefebvre’s theoretical framework to explore various implications of contemporary re-scaling processes for conceptualizing the dynamics of capitalist urbanization.” He goes on to demonstrate the increasing importance of scale to urban analysis and the ways that Lefebvre’s theory has helped shape scholarship on questions of scale. The urban question is both the role of cities as sites for capitalist development and the epistemological techniques to understand cities. Contemporary urban analysis requires multiscalar methodologies to grasp cities and interpret the variety of sociopolitical forces transforming capitalist cities. Citing Smith, Brenner points to scale as a way to differentiate social relations as well as a method for constructing new social relations.

There is a Politics of Space because Space is Political – Elden

In this transcribed lecture, Elden outlines Lefebvre’s perspective on the production of space. He argues that Lefebvre has provided the tools to map “the spatiality of politics and history.” Elden notices that questions of time have been upstaged by issues of space; to ground his own efforts, Lefebvre pointed out there is a new scarcity of space. Elden summarizes Lefebvre’s conceptual triad and explains how space is a “realized abstraction,” a mental and material construct. He goes on to show that Lefebvre did not replace time with space but showed they are “interrelated and dependent on each other.”

No Salvation away from the Centre? – Lefebvre

Lefebvre compares two traditions relative to the city. The first is an anti-city tradition that views the city as the site for the deterioration of society. The second views the city as a site of culture and civilization. In Lefebvre’s view, the tension and contradiction between these views as harmed thinking about the city. It is in this interview that Lefebvre refers to “explosion and implosion” of the city. He states of Paris:

Yet at the same time it is split by the phenomenon of explosion and implosion. On the one hand, it is broken up into peripheries, into suburbs, some inner, some further out, in rigs where works and the excluded are relegated. And on the other, its centrality is becoming more pronounced. It has become the centre of decision-making, of information, of authority and knowledge.

He goes on to criticize Le Corbusier for being a catastrophic urbanist whose efforts inhibit the city as oeuvre, as collective undertaking. Moreover, he finds the liberal emphasis on circulation and mobility to be a threat to the life and experience of the city. Lefebvre also acknowledges relations between three different levels of intervention - architectural, city and territorial – and considerations of space need each. He then follows with a meditation on LA – a detestable but fascinating city – and its polycentricity, stating, “So what I like is Los Angeles for the fascination, Florence for the pleasure and Paris to live in.” Lefebvre closes by arguing for a centre to the city, believing that urbanity is lost with polycentricity.

The Urban in Question – Lefebvre

Lefebvre begins with a portrait of Paris in which the centre has become "museumfied" and managerial. That being said, he does recognize the growing urban struggle of his time but dampens enthusiasm by positioning private ownership as the dominant relation. At this point, the interviewer asks a critical question of Lefebvre, “How in concrete terms can we give inhabitants the means to intervene effectively?” Lefebvre answers with a call to address the contradiction between private property and collective interests. He then, somewhat abstrusely, calls upon urban solutions, and demands inventive or predictive urban perspectives oriented “towards possibilities, eventualities, the future.” Lefebvre envisions a knowledge and science of cities informing political, administrative and financial authorities. In closing the interview, he proposes a renewed recognition of urban questions in the university.

Urban Theory and the Urban Experience - Parker

Parker provides a fairly brief overview of POS and Lefebvre's career. I'd recommend skimming this for a quick summary of what you've already read.

Key Questions

What does a unitary theory of space provide urbanism and urban politics?

How does Lefebvre's approach to space compare with that of Castells'?

In Lefebvre's telling, how does space change and what are the consequences for society?

Why is it so important for Lefebvre to connect his work with Marx and Hegel?

What is the relationship between Lefebvre's treatment of space and his predecessors' treatment of time?

In ways can circulation and polycentricity be political or urban?

We know where Lefebvre stands, but is “urbanity” contingent on the presence of a centre?

What are “urban questions”?

What are some comparisons we can make between Harvey’s managerialism and Lefebvre’s?

What do we make of Lefebvre’s plea for future-oriented and predictive perspective on cities?

Who are the “practicians of space” and what role do they have in the administration of cities?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of a practician “science” or “knowledge of the city”?

What is the relationship between “urban questions in the university” and the “science of the city”?

Oct 24 - Global

[see also the class blog: "Visualizing the Global/National/Local"]

Friedmann, The World City Hypothesis

Definition

City is a spatially integrated economic and social system at a given location/region

Key Points

- Urbanization processes are linked to global economic forces in ways which are structural and spatial

- (division of labor)^f = structural change

world economy

- Change is mostly adaptation to external pressures

* Characterized by local historical patterns, national policies and social conditions

- Global capital uses key cities as connect-the-dots power ley lines

* Act as dissemination centers for regional/geographical ideology and control

- A city’s production structure and dynamics reflect its control function in global schema

- Cities mostly exist for capital concentration and accumulation

- The economic stratification of cities mirrors global trend

- Cities exist, by definition, in socioeconomic crisis and the burden is born by weakest denizens

Sassen, New Claims

Key Points

- City amplifies global trends in a way which reveals what otherwise may be hidden by abstraction and dispersal, particularly inequality

- She does point out that the global flows could not happen without place-bound infrastructure

- Also draws attention, though lightly, to the idea that what is produced has shifted to more abstract, but is still locally produced

* Part of new production is reproduction of global processes, eg legalities, to create a container for flows (which she calls circuits)

* Things like innovation and ideas are both produced and consumed locally

- Suggests the case that labor is major production of locality and that this labor is often disregarded in the "what makes it happen" equation

- In conjunction with 2nd piece, in which it is more explicit, states that precisely because the nation-state hegemony has been broken, space has been opened for new claims of space and place

* Specifically, local politics can now be produced and exported

Challenges

- Sassen seems to make somewhat contradictory arguments, explicitly asserting place-centrism even in a global economy, but never fully overcoming in her argument (and even sometimes supporting) the later Amin/Thrift argument that global flows are locally expressed, but are not locally bound

Smith, Power in Place

Assertions of premises being critiqued

- Culture = locality = community = place

- Borders of local are hard, rather than permeable, borders which feature idealized, timeless “insides”

- Change is engendered through external capitalist forces, rendering local without agency

- Role of locality = nexus of resistance or crushed core

- Petit narrative is wrongly leveraged as evidence of only those who can claim authenticity as “marginalized” and consequent postcolonial resistance

* local meaning-making is more "pure" than global meaning-making

Definition

Urban: “social space … for the interplay of diverse localizing practices of regional, national, transnational and global scale actors” where “meaning, power and social practice come into contact with more purely [local configurations] of networks, practices, meanings and identities.”

Counterassertions

- Culture is as transnational as capital

- Culture is not a homogeneous presentation of discourse, interpretations and time conflation, but rather a dynamic, contested, temporal soup of both flows and place

* local boundaries are highly permeable

* meaning is constructed both as informed by and negotiated through the micro and the macro

- Local-global interplay provides resources as well as limits

- “Globalization” itself is a temporal construct, not an inevitable, independent cosmic phenomenon

- Local is not hierarchically oppressed by global, but has power of transforming global

Challenges

- Is it really true that Harvey and Castells regard the local meaning-making as outside the global flows?

- Isn’t it really Harvey and Castells’ perspective that the challenge of global capitalization is about effect of force and time, rather than inherent opposition between local and translocal?

- What factors push some “cultures” toward local guarding and others toward global expansion?

Amin and Thrift, Distanciated Economy

Key Points

- Cities are no longer bound, but exist as an assemblage of sites of relative intensification to a distanciated economy

* Act as relay points for network dispersion

- "Cities" don't compete; firms compete, and firms can be anywhere, therefore local competition as place bound is now obsolete

- Cities are not closed economic ecologies, and therefore cannot attribute meaningful production to the local

* Assertion that local production and local consumption must co-exist for locality to matter

- The new role of cities has shifted from production to consumption

- Claims of cities as necessary local sites for tacit knowledge, innovation, relationship and other factors commonly attributed to importance of place are all demonstrably untrue and obsolete

- Because technology has now enabled us to dissociate from place, place has become obsolete

- Any perceived localities are just habit and have no discrete meaning in the global economy

- Well, except that some local circuits exist, but in sectors that aren't important enough to matter, like non-profits, entertainment, services and art

Challenges

- Amin and Thrift do not seem to understand the actual operation of global business and present a highly conceptual outline of business processes. Among many, there is an assertion that business culture is an amalgam of distributed practices instead of a produced export of its own; ironically, they cite the global codification of knowledge without understanding that those knowledge bases arose from place-specific constituents. There is also a choice to invalidate the significance of production in the entertainment, creative and local support sectors; this is particularly problematic in that it ignores completely the necessity of place-making for labor, even while authors give nod to the fact that entertainments of place are engaged by residents. By Amin and Thrift's argument, place actually becomes more relevant in an open ecology, because (by their argument) each node in the network takes on specialized function and redundancies are lost within the local system.

- When in history have cities ever produced all that they consume, or consumed all that they've produced, and so why is the argument that those two must occupy the local to validate agency of the local an legitimate argument?

- Although technology conceptually provides a mechanism by which cities can become unbound, cities continue to exist and, in fact, urbanization has increased.

Beaverstock, Smith and Taylor, Roster of World Cities

Key Points

- Continuing on the hunt for the ever perfected categorization of world cities, Beaverstock and crew define by selection criteria a world city in terms of a post-industrial site with intensified global capacity of selected services. Those services are accounting, advertising, banking, and legal services.

- Nothing much new to see here; general confirmation of the top tier, still fuzzy at the edges. Confirms, also, how asymmetrically these control centers have formed, located mostly in N America, W Europe and Pacific Asia.

- Lit review categorizes previous categories into world cities sorted by multi-national densities and influence, cities which embodied multiple forms of international labor divisions, cities which clump together interdependent global services, and cities which control lots of money flow.

Yeoh and Chang, Singapore

Key Points

- Cities are nodes and lenses for global processes

- Focuses on 4 examples of flows/transnationals in businesses, immigrant labor, creatives and tourists

- Policy of pro-immigration to support goal of oasis of talent (as defined by professional class)

* Interesting idea of elastic citizenship, living abroad but still valuing connection to place

* concern that importing upper echelon of workers traps local potential for being undeveloped

* requires legion of transient unskilled workers as precondition

- Uses tourism gateway as amuse-bouche for potential investors

* also position itself as regional gateway, referring tourists to surrounding locales through its airports, etc

- Uses arts as both draw and as cross-cultural mediator

- Several areas contested because of authentic vs Disneyland argument

- Government acts as major agent in negotiating the spatial confluence through place development

The City: Between Topographic Representation and Spatialized Power Projects - Saskia Sassen

This selection concerns itself with materiality and immateriality in the global digital era. Earlier authors have argued that digitization necessitates a departure from the material environs that have long characterized the city. However, Sassen contends that these same processes rely on an immense material infrastructure that spatializes a variety of power projects. Moving away from both topographic snapshots and disembedded processes, Sassen works to identify the ways in which the global city is simultaneously sited and distant, concrete and abstracted. Addressing prior analyses of digitization, she writes, “These are accounts that privilege the fact of instantaneous global transmission over the concentrations of built infrastructure that make transmission possible.” Globalization is not simply a narrative of deconcentration and decentralization but a series of transitions and admixtures that materialize novel inter-networked relations in the city that extend the local into the global. Sassen offers the concept of “circuits” for apprehending these interactions. Circuits allow for the tracing of activities as they jump borders and discontinuities, thus authoring fresh connections amongst linked localities. Sassen closes by speculating on new subjectivities formed along alternative circuits of global activity. Globalization is producing its spatialized and place-based, disadvantaged discontents. The city acts as a site of politicized engagement and encounter where discordant activities take on concreteness and tangibility.

Global City-Regions - Scott, Agnew, Soja, Storper

The authors introduce the concept global city-regions and aim to apply it to economics, politics and territorial thinking. Primarily, they are concerned with how city-regions have become key sites in the global economy and in global organization. The ascendance of the city-regions has precipitated the concomitant downgrading of the city as an “appropriate or viable unit of local social organization.” These transformations have affected regionalism, social organization, economics, governance and citizenship. Global city-regions now supply the substrate for the new global economy, acting as vital nodes of concentration and as centers for financial and production networks. Large-scale migration has provided city-regions with massive reserves of low-wage labor and played a principal part in increased heterogeneity, segmentation, and disparity. These influxes of population have transitioned once monocentric cities into polycentric regions exhibiting plural sites of activity and agglomeration. Novel morphologies and new social patterns have contributed to the advent of privatized and technocratic governance strategies. In the developing world, city-regions are portraits of increased productivity plagued by social asymmetries and entrenched hierarchies. Likewise, by exceeding national boundaries and becoming chief sites of membership, city-regions have modified the fundaments of citizenship.

Re-presenting World Cities – King

King approaches the world/global city as a representation and constructed cultural space. This means he is concerned with the “discourses, texts and metaphors” that give meaning to the city and its activity. The concept of transnationalism has a history driven by a business class, migrant population, tourists and cultural practitioners. King adds scholars and design practitioners to this list. Most immediately, the author recognizes how the world/global city has become representative of only one aspect of “the world”: the economy. Nevertheless, King is especially concerned with the variety of representational levels at which the world/global city is depicted, whether material, symbolic or cultural. Examining the world/global city as a constructed category allows King to explore the context, elements and values situated at the base of its formation. As a cultural category, the world/global city is deployed and employed in plural and multiple ways. Writing of the new era of metropolitan life, King states, “Globalization is seen to be the intensification of global connectedness, the constituting of the world as one place.” Yet such an ideal portrayal presents globalization as an even and totalizing process, disguising forms of differentiation. King explains, “Globalization seen in this way, does not result in homogeneity but in a deepening of particularity.” Global transformation is fragmenting the category of world/global city. To the economic and cultural perspectives on globalization King adds historical and political frames of post-colonialism and post-imperialism. At its core, King is occupied with the flows, identities and interactions enabled by the world/global city.

Geographers and ‘Globalization’ – Dicken

Dicken ruminates on the role of geographers in the ongoing investigation of globalization. He finds that geographers have not been heavily cited by prevailing accounts of globalizing phenomenon. For Dicken, globalization is a “syndrome of material processes and outcomes” that does not possess causal attributes. Globalization is not unprecedented but the degree of integration and intensification of economic relationships are both new. Seeking an analytic for examining the global economy, Dicken pays special attention to the “network” because it is both structural and relational. Using the network allows for an exploration of the decision-making, topologies, functions, operations and connections that characterize the global economy. Previous depictions of the global economy have relied on linear relations to capture complex interactions. These networks can be of capitalist classes, migrants, and global production. However, focus on networks poses the threat of examining the atoms of decisions rather than the wider structures, institutions and rules. Dicken closes with the view that globalization and the study of it provides both a challenge and opportunity for geographers.Geographers need to engage in real dialogue and move the field towards a status as the "world discipline."

Urban Assemblages: Territories, Relations, Practices, and Power - McCann and Ward

Policy has been observed jumping among cities, governing elements innovated in one locale and deployed in another context. McCann and Ward proprose the “assemblage” as a tool for understanding the formation and federated quality of policy in cities. They write, “First, not only are assemblages and territories constituted by elements ‘deducted from the flow,’ but we would want to argue that these assemblages, in turn, shape, reorient, and reconstitute wider flows.” Assemblages allow investigators to transcend binaries (fixity/mobility, global/local) and focus attention on the uneven consequences of the assemblage’s emergence. Assemblages have a link with territory, they create territories for the deployment of policy. Energy at the level of practices encourages scholars and academics to recognize how globalness and cityness are both performances and that policy is “made up.”

Megacities, world cities and global cities – Hall

Hall addresses world cities in light of globalization. First, he argues that megacities, world cities and global cities are not entirely new objects of knowledge. He then turns to a reappraisal of world cities relative the “informationalization of the economy, the progressive shift of advanced economies from goods production to information handling.” Understanding the urban informational turn means grappling with alterations of the economy in the wake of successive technological advancements. Hall focuses on the role of communication and transportation networks in the development of key economic spaces. He describes the economies of global cities as “divesting very large areas of economic activity – manufacturing, goods-handling, routine services – to other cities, regions and countries.” In global cities, financial and business services are blossoming, design services are booming, and company headquarters and government agencies are locating alongside them. Global cities evidence the paradox of job loss and job gain. These centralized industries also spawn cultural and creative activities, as well as opportunities for tourism. Hall changes focus here to discuss the relationships among global cities and lower strata of agglomerations. He closes with an examination of deconcentration’s effects on sustainable urbanization.

Nov 7 - Culture

Whose Culture? Whose City? from The Culture of Cities - Sharon Zukin

In this piece Sharon Zukin examines the role of culture as a means to control cities. She begins by developing her theory on the symbolic economy. Symbolic economy is determined by how space is produced as well as how the signs embedded in place signal how to use space (the production of symbols). The presence of the symbolic economy is not new, but Zukin states that a new form of symbolic economy exists, which is manipulated by a powerful class of “place entrepreneurs” made up of officials, investors, city advocates and business elites. She then discusses how the symbolic economy is leveraged as a means to develop an economic base and as a way to frame space. Zukin argues that accepting spaces without critically examining their representations of urban life contributes a movement towards an increasingly privatized public culture.

Cities and the Creative Class, from City and Community - Richard Florida

In this piece Florida advances the human capital theory, the idea that a set of skills increase a worker’s productivity and, therefore, a city is dependent on providing the right infrastructure to invest in these workers, to what he labels the creative capital theory. The creative capital theory remains based in the concept that cities must invest in their human capital, but Florida’s theory specifically focuses on attracting a specific person, with a determined skilled set, in a particular environment. Cities, he argues, need to focus on developing the 3Ts of economic development (technology, talent, and tolerance). Probably of most interest (and value as budding social scientists) are his methods. Florida uses a wide variety of indexes to compare against his data to support his theory. These include:

· Gay Index

· Bohemian Index

· Rubert Cushing’s data measuring social capital, human capital, and creative capital

· Also, he rejects Putnam’s thesis that his definition of social capital is still relevant for today’s cities.

Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation, from Public Culture - Teresa P.R. Caldera

Caldera’s piece is an case study on São Paulo, Brazil and a comparison of her findings with Los Angeles. Caldera examines the effect of walls in gated communities (enclaves) in Sao Paulo on the lives of every day people as a way to understand how space is used, appropriated, and controlled. Enclaves, she argues, give only an illusion of safety. The byproduct is a community of walled people that normalize inequality and segregation. Walls also contribute to the erosion of public space. Caldera’s argument is supported through a visual ethnography of the architecture and the physical objects that denote the use of space: defensible architecture, armed guards, closed public streets, etc. Her argument, to a degree, supports the notion of environmental determinism. Spaces, she states, that are purposely segregated affect our relationship to diversity and result in the negated rights of individuals to the city.

Questions:

How do cities foster the intangibles of tolerance and acceptance?

How are urban planners limited in their ability to shape how we experience cities?

What would it mean to not accept places based on their representations of urban life?

How does Lefebvre’s production of space fit with Zukin’s production of the symbolic economy in space?

When does relying on the cultural economy fail to revive cities?

Dear, LA v Chicago

Other Key Points

- "keno capitalism" is term to capture the apparent capital development of noncontiguous parcels

- Decentralized fragmented city; decentralized, fragmented ideology

- Post Fordist intra and inter node production overcomes industrial mass production model

- Like Merry, idea of space being restructured with privatization of security and barrier methods of stratification

* Privatopia

- "Disneyland" model of being intentionally representative in form without having organic content in place

- Extreme heterogeneity, with strong enclaves and newer immigrants groups acting as middlemen between established racial axes

- LA and region epitomizes Castells' space of flows

Merry, Spatial Governmentality v Gender Violence

This article was a bit of a mess, but appears to first consider the idea of a shift in how security is managed and its effects on spatial governance. Merry contextualizes a movement from paternalistic control and post-act punishment into crime prevention/deterrence/social order maintenance through self-management and spatial exclusion as an extension of a neoliberal ideology. While the correlation of neoliberalism and using spatial relationship for crime deterrence is not well articulated, the reasonable inference is that privatization of both space and security effectively enforces class stratification, creating artificial bubbles of order for the affluent and artificial concentrations of carcerality for the poor. One central example of this is a mall, which Merry portrays as a privileged site of consumption tailor-made primarily for the affluent or market participants, and which relies upon private security, expectations of self-management, high levels of surveillance and physical removal with behavioral breaches. Although Merry seems to offer a critical assessment of this shift, she then focuses on a possible positive application of this method of separation/removal strategy in the sphere of domestic violence. Citing restraining orders as a necessary and victim-advocated tool against abusers, Merry concludes that these spatial tactics of governance can be democratically distributed in a way which serves a democratic benefit.

Portes & Manning, Immigrant Enclave

- Lit review of immigrant trajectory ideas:

* Immigration, assimilation, socioeconomic rise

* Immigration/colonization through force, continued neocolonial policies keep group from assimilating,

~ leads to perpetual socioeconomic out/underclass

~ or, leads to political mobilization and resistance

* Voluntary immigration, reassembly into the lower rung of segmented labor market, get stuck there

- Common exceptions:

* Professional class immigrants tend to disperse, rather than ethnically concentrate

~ Also different in tendency to adopt cosmopolitan affects and “disappear” (flows culture)

* Refugees have more varied backstories and variable support entering the country, so the variation of process is greater

* Marketmen come in at higher level of economic ladder by becoming buffer commercial layer between existing dominant group and underclasses

- Enclave model differences:

* Closed group, aiming for solidarity and support, rather than assimilation and dispersal – high spatial concentration

* Protected labor – escape from dead-end secondary labor market, even if initial condition were similar, because of layers of compensation and support

* “microfinance” paradigm of network lending and support

* preferred sales markets

* mentoring and development of self-employment skills

* has some shared characteristics, but differs from middlemen in that enclaves produce

Parker, Chapter 7, Contested City

Chapter 7 is not so much about culture as power, although power arguably becomes the setting for the manifestations of culture discussed in Chapter 8.

Points of interest:

- Urban politics and general politics may be impossible to parse, because “the centre-local or centre-periphery distinction is political”

- Government : governance as religion : spirituality…government is structural and authoritative, while governance is social and consensual

- Sometimes, radically different agendas look similar; eg, succession sentiments among affluent enclaves to cut the larger social costs of carrying underclass and resistance to annexation as a minority claim to political influence

- Political economy views the state through the lens of a fulcrum of socioeconomic processes rather than a stand alone agent

- Urban regime paradigm combines aspects of pluralism and elitist perspectives by seeing both complexity of power at the local level even with admitted insider “movers and shakers”; it regards power as a social production, rather than social control

- Urban regime differs from growth coalition power base in that regimes do not always have business directed interests, and may be based on political or caretaker interests

- The state must be involved in market regulation as a requirement to perpetuate capital, but the tension and scaling of this interaction results in different outcomes, such as imposition of strong central architecture or autonomous regional models

- Neoliberal ideology shows up in assertions which are cast as increased rights for the individual and self-determinism, but which require increased responsibilities from those with few resources to take on those responsibilities

- Parker quotes Hamel saying that movements are too micro and therefore miss the chance to represent macro ideals and liberation potentials. As a side note, this conflicts with Sassen’s assertion that circuits allow local politics to become global exports.

- Marx didn’t adequately consider or anticipate the value of actors collateral to production in social change movements

- One view of social movements requires it to be place-based, since proximity is a major hallmark

Nov 14 - Nature

what is "nature"?

McHarg, Ian, “City and Countryside” and “The Plight” in Design with Nature

“City and Countryside:”

In this first chapter, McHarg compares the city and the countryside through the lens of the life experiences, starting with his pastoral childhood in the Scottish country near Glasgow. We can see echoes of Tonnies’ Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft, but McHarg much favoring the latter, starting with the premise that: “The world is a glorious bounty…” (1), so that there is more than enough to eat, but that the countryside is a far better way to consume. Glasgow is, “a memorial to an inordinate capacity to create ugliness…” (1), whereas the countryside, in a different direction, “was always exhilarating and joy could be found in quite small events…” (2). Here note an implicit nod towards Simmels’ concept of urban anomie.

McHarg is proud to be a landscape architect, Harvard-trained at that, who despises “the smear of Glasgow” (3) that bulldozes hills and destroys nature/country. He does not look too deeply into the effects of man on this country nature, such as by distinguishing between rows of pleasant hedges and meandering streams; both are placed in opposition to the potential ugliness of cities. Cities are not prima facie ugly here: “Every city has some testimony to perception, intelligence and art, there are oases of concern and creation” (5), and much beauty can be achieved even by small efforts, such as via a small pool surrounded by greenery in a New York City brownstone; William Whyte seems to be a McHarg acolyte by this measure. He proposes nature as necessary to life, in the city or country, as a means of preserving unity and sanity.

“The Plight”

He continues similar to the above, stating that: “it is the necessity of sustaining nature as a source of life, milieu, teacher, sanctum, challenge, and most of all, discovering nature’s corollary of the unknown in the self, the source of meaning.” (19). He continues disparaging modern cities, with many juicy quotes, i.e. “Call them no-place although they have many names. Race and hate, disease, poverty, rancor and despair, urine and spit live here in the shadows…” (20). Nature has been lost in cities, with the rivers that once fed them paved over (think Chonggyechon in Seoul). He focuses on the difficulty of preserving nature in a modernizing world, stating that, “Rural land persists around the metropolis not because we have managed the land more wisely but because it is larger, more resistant to man’s smear, more resilient…But it still wears the imprint of man’s toil. DDT is in the arctic ice…” (22).. This chapter is peppered with images of ugly, nature-free cities.

In terms of how to address this plight is in better integrating nature into cities, but that, “Our failure is that of the Western World and lies in prevailing values. Show me a man-oriented society…” (24). Historical Japan is presented as an alternative, a better, nature-oriented society, and in general, “the Orient is the storehouse of the art of naturalism.” (28)

Williams, Raymond, "Ideas of Nature" in Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays

In this incredibly well-written piece, Raymond starts by considering what is meant by nature. He references Burke who talked of “rude nature,” (aka wilderness) commenting that, “what is most striking is the coexistence of that common idea, a state of nature, with the almost unnoticed because so habitual use of nature to indicate the inherent quality of the argument.” (68) Nature can refer to the wild, McHarg does, but also to inherent qualities in people (i.e. human nature), and the two are linked. He admits the value of a single, unitary nature, where “The multiplicity of things, and of living processes, might then be mentally organized around a single essence or principle: a nature” (68), since “Just as in religion the moment of monotheism is a critical development, so in human responses to the physical world, is the moment of a singular nature.” (69)

This can be compared with the different, and still valuable, pagan concept of nature, with a number of different spirits, which Williams is more drawn to. He is somewhat confused by the concept of a personified nature, distrusting various “Nature is” statements, preferring “the idea of nature containing an extraordinary amount of human history.” (70) He points out the tension between the “real experiences of a providential and destructive ‘nature’ “ (71), i.e. bountiful harvest vs. drought. Overall he points out that even with a few examples, “we have a whole range of meanings [for nature]: from nature as the primitive condition before human society; through the sense of an original innocence from which there has been a fall and a curse, requiring redemption; through the special sense of a quality of birth, as in the Latin root…”(72).

Despite this, the push for simplifying ideas continued, leading to the idea popular in the 17-19^th centuries in Europe, for “the laws of nature in this quite constitutional sense, not so much shaping and essential ideas by an accumulation and classification of cases.” (73). As secularism increased, nature remained singular but “became an object, at times even a machine.” (73). Also, “What was worrying obviously, was that in his dealings with nature man might see himself as ‘Lord and Commander of these elements’ [Marlowe]” (74). Man has always tried to intervene, and where possible control, nature, and have become increasingly capable in this regard. He shows how this led to the more recent idea of nature as, “all that was not touched by man, spoilt by man: nature as the lonely places, the wilderness” (77). He disputes that many such true, untouched wildernesses exist, since “almost by definition, few people going to ‘nature’ go to them.” (77) A final, and more recent concept coming from this, is nature as fully split from man. This is however, impossible. Man always shapes nature, though “In our complex dealings with the physical world, we find it difficult to recognize all the products of our own activities.” (83) He references Marx in recognizing the dialectics between man and his surroundings, and this can be a mechanism for creation: “Out of the ways in which we have interacted with the physical world we have made not only human nature and an altered natural order; we have also made societies.” (84)

Cronon, William, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature

Cronon focuses explicitly on the wilderness, echoing some of Williams points and going farther, effectively stating that wilderness does not exist in any real way, and that it has become a dangerous concept for environmentalists, who have traditionally treated it as a “fundamental tenant.” He is not saying that he does not love these “wilderness” areas, but that “what brought each of us to the places where such memories became possible is entirely a cultural invention.” Traditionally, wilderness is meant in a derogatory sense, such as when evildoers are cast out into the wilderness in the bible, so that “In its raw state, it had little or nothing to offer civilized men and women.”

This changed fully by the end of the 19^th century, since “The wastelands that had once seemed worthless had for some people come to seem almost beyond price,” as with Thoreau. Wealthy people began to seek out “wilderness,” setting up luxurious, servant laden “camps,” and the national parks were established “on the heels of the final Indian wars, perpetrating “The myth of the wilderness as ‘virgin’” The American wilderness is a totally constructed concept, and “the trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject.” We can see again in here a link to the German school, where to escape the urban anomie one must go to the outstanding and majestic, rather than the simple pleasures and small beauty of nature. Cronon proposes that nature is always a combination of man and the wild. We must be able to “get on with the unending task of struggling to live rightly in the world – not just in the garden, not just in the wilderness, but in the home that encompasses them both.”

Questions:

What is Nature (Duh)?

How Does Nature Differ from Wilderness?

What Role Does Man Play in Shaping and Defining Nature?

water and the city

Gandy, Matthew, "Water, Space and Power" in Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City

In this chapter Gandy discusses the provision of water to New York City since its founding and breaks it into three eras. Throughout each era Gandy highlights the various power relations that have affected the provision of water. The first era – from the founding of the city to the 1840s – was marked by an unstable water supply. The period was marked by increasingly polluted ground water sources, reliance on wells which eventually became heavily polluted, exploitation through the development of private water companies, drought, and increasing vulnerability to fire. The second era – from the 1840s to the 1970s – is marked by an increasingly complex network of infrastructure projects, starting with the Croton Aqueduct, followed by the Catskills and Delaware water supply systems. This period was marked by an increasing use and reliance on technological innovations to supply water. It was also a period in which engineering and technocratic power dominated. This period is also marked by high degree of control by the City over the land in the watershed in order to protect its water supply. The third period goes from the 1970s to the present and is marked by fiscal problems and a growing inability to maintain infrastructure. There was also diminished control over the land in its watershed which was quickly being suburbanized and has resulted in increasing pollution from runoff. This period is marked by a growing conflict between the capital speculation in upstate areas and the long-term ecological viability of the watershed.

Karvonen, A, “The Dilemma of Water in the City” in Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City

In this chapter Karvonen distinguishes between two different periods in the build environment – pre-1960 and post-1960 – and shows how the management of water fundamentally changed. The example of water in the city – in the form of water supply, sanitary sewers and drainage – shows the changing relationships between nature, technology and humans. The first period pre-1960 was dominated by a rational approach to water management in which efficient conveyance was the prevailing mentality – water was a problem and needed to come into and out of the city as quickly and efficiently as possible. The second period, post-1960, show the rise of environmental concerns and subsequent regulation. The period was marked by a focus on water quality as well as having to deal simultaneously with the goals of quantity and quality.

Kaika, Maria, and Erik Swyngedouw. "Fetishizing the Modern City: The Phantasmagoria of Urban Technological Networks”

Kaika and Swyngedouw talk about urban infrastructure networks (water, gas, electricity, information, etc) and the ways in which these networks are perceived in the built environment over time. For them these technological networks act as the material mediators between nature and the city – “they carry the flow and the process of transformation of one into the other (p120).” They argue (as other authors do) that the goods necessary for sustaining life and the built environment which allows for their transport into the city are commodities since they are produced by transforming nature through human labor. The go on to distinguish between two periods of time – early modernity (mid 1800s to 1914) and high modernity (1918-1960). During the first period the display of urban infrastructure works was common as they were an embodiment of progress in the built form. “The more the urban environment was filled with networks, the closer humankind would appear to approach the final goal of emancipation and freedom from the ‘tyranny of nature’ (p125).” The second period was marked by a growing recognition that technology might not provide the freedom and progress it once promised. Modernity instead became associated with clarity of form, purity, functionalism and cleanliness. As a result, urban networks began to disappear underground. This marked a transition from a period of the city as flow and process to the city as a space for consumption.

Questions

Each of these three articles discusses distinct phases of the provision of water in the city. How are each of the phases they authors discuss similar? How are they different?

How does the politics of water (and other natural resources) play itself out in the city? Is water somehow unique among natural resources?

urban political ecology

Loftus, Alex, “Introduction: Emerging Moments in an Urban Political Ecology” in Everyday Environmentalism: Creating an Urban Political Ecology.

Loftus defines his task to “develop an immanent critique of everyday life” (ix), linking himself to other theorists like Marx and LeFebvre, as well as Harvey, Lefebre, and Benjamin, who developed their ideas by “immersing themselves in the quotidian tumult of their worlds.” (ix) He relies on Marx and to “understand the different ways in which subsequent theorists have built on this dialectical method as a way of understanding and changing the different worlds in which they themselves lived.” (xi) He mirrors and expands on Williams by stressing the inherent socio-natural dialect; each informs the other, and cannot be separated, going so far as to say “there’s no such thing as nature.” (xiv). Instead, there is “a mutual coevolution of nature and society as a changing ensemble.” (xv)

He stresses the use of Marxist praxis to allow for an ongoing conversation between theory and action, especially since “World-changing ideas emerge from everyday men and women” (xii). Part of this is gaining “an understanding of the production of environments.” (xiv) He rejects the Romantics who “reveled in the image of the isolated individual among the grandeur of nature.” (xv)

He seeks to use this his everyday praxis approach as a means to address climate change, saying “if we are serious about the ways in which the global environment is being shaped through coevolutionary processes, many of these [crisis] narratives are decidedly unhelpful” (xvi), both because they are disempowering and encourage a sense of powerlessness and because they “depoliticize the processes and relationships out of which climate change is produced.” (xvii) His ultimate goal, again is the remaking of the world through the techniques of creating new knowledge through everyday coevolutioin (“cultural praxis”) (xxiii), similar to what LeFebvre did with space.

Nik Heynen, and Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw. "Urban Political Ecology: Politicizing the Production of Urban Natures" in In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism

In this introductory chapter to their volume on urban political ecology they give us a crash course on the topic. For them cities are “dense networks of interwoven socio-spatial processes that are simultaneously global and local, human and physical, cultural and organic. They argue that there has been a failure of 20^th century urban theory to address or take account of ecological and physical processes. The suggest that 19^th century theory was more aware of this connection (think German School) while the Chicago School put forth a de-natured version of human ecology. They argue that cities, are both social and environmental, and that understanding political processes within them is important since it is these processes that produce and reproduce specific socio-environmental conditions. The authors point out that ‘environmental’ issues have always been a key component to urban change and urban politics (think about the readings on water). An important aspect of urban political ecology is that it explicitly recognizes that urban environments are controlled and manipulated to serve the needs of elite at the expense of marginalized populations. The concept of metabolism is also important – it was a metaphor used by Marx to analyze dynamic relationships between humans and nature that produce socio-natural entanglements. ‘Labor’ is the process through which the metabolic process is mobilized and organized. The authors also argue that uneven geographical development is largely due to the underlying economic, political and cultural processes inherent in the production of urban landscapes.

They also outline a ten point ‘manifesto’ for urban political ecology:

1. Environmental and social changes co-determine each other

2. There is nothing unnatural about produced environments such as cities

3. Physical and environmental change are not independent of specific historical, social, cultural, political, or economic conditions

4. All socio-spatial processes are linked to the metabolism of physical, chemical and biological components

5. Socio-environmental metabolisms produce a series of both enabling and disabling social and environmental tendencies

6. Processes of metabolic change are never socially or ecologically neutral

7. Social power relations in which metabolic processes take place are important

8. Questions of socio-environmental sustainability are political questions

9. t is important to understand social relationships and how these are mediated by and structured through processes of ecological change

10. Socio-ecological ‘sustainability’ can only be achieved through a democratic process

Questions:

Is political ecology different from more traditional conservation or environmental movements? If so in what ways?

In what ways are political processes important for understanding socio-environmental conditions?

What causes uneven geographical development in urban landscapes?

Nov 21 - Modernism, Modernization & Urban Development: International Perspectives

Holston, James. 1989. The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia.

Holston elaborates on the utopian character of mid-20th century modernist planning by exploring how its seven premises were aimed at bringing about an ahistoric social transformation away from capitalist society. In particular, the key interventions of “total planning” by the state and the subversion (though not elimination of) private property, modernist architects, thought was necessary to shock urban residents out of diseased complacency and into socialist communitarianism—a value-driven planning. Modernization espoused total environmental design, which reveals an environmental determinism, and a belief in a “succession” type mechanism in the dispersion of the modernist principle. In the second section, Holston shows how deeply embedded modernist pretension were in Niemeyer and Costa’s plan for Brasilia was, even if they refused to explicitly admit it. The question then arises, why did president Kubitschek, known for his economic modernization strategy, select an explicitly modernist (thus socialist) plan for the city. Holson then shows how the utopian ideology of modernist planning could accommodate capitalist and socialist intention. Both socialist planners and developmental leaders sought to “skip” steps on teleological paths toward socialist society and “high-mass consumption” respectively.

Scott, James. Seeing Like a State (Chapter 3. Authoritarian High Modernism)

Scott begins by identifying modernist-like intentions in nation states preceding the height of “high modernism” but suggests that underdeveloped administrative, military, and technological organization, kept states from implementing modernist projects (which Scott defines as the “sweeping vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be applied—usually to the state—in every field of human activity”). In other words, Scott identifies the convergence of administrative organization, the full power of the state, and a weak civil society, and finally the emergence of the welfare function of states, as the conditions that allow for the realization of experiments in total state planning. Expanding on Holston’s point, Scott stresses how modernist utopianism fits fascist and socialist intentions alike—by suggesting that both fascist Germany and to-be fascist revolutionary Russia embraced Taylorist industrial planning that reduced individuals to their “thermodynamics” as energy-dispensing laborers. Importantly, Scott extends Mitchell’s point about “the economy” to suggest how not only the economy, but “society” was isolated into a bounded object that could then be tinkered with by experts. The modernist pretensions of states, Scott concludes, are in profound tension with democratic liberalism and individualism, as they require the authoritarian organization of society and the denial of individualism--quite in contrast to Chicago-School planning concerns.

Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity.

Mitchell provides a narrative of the founding “representations” and practices that allowed for the rise of “the economy” as a territorially bounded object in colonial Egypt. There are two important processes that he emphasizes throughout the essay, calculation and separation. Mitchell traces calculation and separation across five important practices in Egypt: the property regime (and necessary map making), the urbanization of Cairo, the establishment of a single national currency (and the velocity of circulation it enabled), and Egypt’s “colonial condition.” Through calculation, Mitchell argues that spaces and relationships were striped from their social arbitrariness and replaced with imperfect (and differently arbitrary) models of organization (maps, villages, property relations, monetary exchange, etc). An effect of new “universal” forms of calculation was what Mitchell identifies as separation from the production of valid knowledge. By this, Mitchell means that the site of knowledge production was moved, often stolen and expropriated. The irony of these differently-arbitrary abstractions, notes Mitchell, is that they continually render the world more uncertain and more incalculable.

Robinson, Jennifer. 2006. Ordinary cities: between modernity and development.

Robinson sets out to (reluctantly) rethink post-colonial modernism(s) by mixing the approaches of “Provincializing” (historicizing self-proclaimed universal objects) and “orientalism” (revealing the “othering” that these purported universal claims entailed). While other authors note the modernist pretentions of fascist leaders, which often include grand architectural plans, the particular rise of modernism in urban planning has been less clear (though Mitchell shows the intersection between colonial administration and zoning). To both historicize and reveal the eventual orientalist bent of modernist theory, Robinson highlights the Chicago School’s interpretation of internal underdevelopment (in ghettos, immigrant neighborhoods, traditional community, etc). Key to the argument is that modernization theory always was about homogenizing historical time on the basis of underdevelopment and modernity, and that the development of these categories emerged out attempts to make sense of the unevenness of industrial urbanization in the west. For Robinson, fascination with developmentalist mentality marginalizes any city that is different from the dominant paradigm (global cities as “regulated fiction” with an “authorized image of city success). She wants to see a world of ordinary cities, which levels the playing field by creating a “category of one.”

Watson, Vanessa. 2002. The Usefulness of Normative Planning Theories in the Context of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Watson provides an overview of new planning frameworks that have emerged since the demise of modernist, rational planning, and explores their applicability outside of the Western context. The communicative planning paradigm (e.g. Forester, Healey, Innes) sees the planner as mediator, drawing from the idea that the process of discursive communication will ensure a just outcome in planning practice. Sandercock’s multicultural planning prioritizes the formation and recognition of multiple identity claims over material claims, and Fainstein’s “just city” paradigm focuses on the planners’ redistributive power in the welfare state. All of these theories espouse the redemptive potential of civil society and share a focus on process instead of outcomes through bottom-up strategies. Watson then outlines a series of difficulties with expanding these planning models in developing African cities due to certain characteristics of the built environment, identity politics, society and the state.