Planetary Struggles and the Production of Space: Discussing New Vocabularies of Urbanisation

Christian Schmid
Titular Professor, Department of Architecture, ETH Zürich

The urban world has fundamentally changed in the last few decades. A wide range of urbanisation processes are generating a multitude of urban outcomes, resulting in complex and often surprising urban territories, which are disturbing conventional understandings of the urban: novel patterns of extended urbanisation are crystallizing in agricultural areas, rain forests, and the oceans, provoking manifold social struggles and challenging inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded zone and a dense settlement type. 

This diversification of urban forms requires a differentiated view on the dynamics of urbanisation. The challenge is not only to analyse the multitude of urban territories, but also the various urbanisation processes that are transforming those territories and generating those forms. This means that the spatial units of analysis – conventionally based on demographic, morphological or administrative criteria – have to be reconsidered. Urbanisation processes do not simply unfold within fixed or stable urban ‘containers’, but are actively producing, unsettling and churning urban territories, and are generating new urban configurations. The essential task, therefore, is to investigate the historically and geographically specific dynamics of urbanisation processes. A new vocabulary of urbanisation is required that helps us to decipher these rapidly mutating urban territories and to facilitate discussions and common understandings of urbanisation.

These observations have sparked fundamental debates about the epistemology of the urban (Brenner and Schmid 2015). Starting from Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, we developed the concept of planetary urbanisation as a tool for better understanding the contemporary patterns and pathways of urbanisation. This planetary perspective inevitably calls into question familiar positions and understandings in urban studies. It requires decentring the analytical perspective on urbanisation, adopting an excentric position and leading careful analyses on the ground. In this contribution I discuss two research projects that explored various urbanisation processes and the related struggles across the planet.