City Futures

Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development

By Edgar Pieterse

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2008 Edgar Pieterse
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84277-541-7

Contents

Figures and tables, vi,
Acknowledgements, vii,
1 Introduction: deciphering city futures, 1,
2 Urbanization trends and implications, 16,
3 Mainstream agenda I: shelter for all, 39,
4 Mainstream agenda II: good governance, 62,
5 Reconceptualizing the political in cities, 84,
6 Informal everyday urbanism, 108,
7 Counterpoint: alternative urban development, 130,
8 Making a start towards alternative city futures, 161,
Notes, 177,
References, 189,
Index, 200,

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: deciphering city futures

With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire, or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made up of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

Nothing about cities in the twenty-first century is insignificant; the stakes are always high in pinning down what cities are, in thinking about what to do with cities and in acting on/in/through the city, especially if one wants to bring to life more liberating and just futures. For this reason it is extremely difficult to find a conceptual path that cuts through the vicissitudes of the city without losing one’s way in blind alleys and dead ends. Before I delve into what will come in the following chapters it is opportune to render explicit the coordinates that anchor the conceptual lens I use in finding my way through the maze of competing perspectives and experiences of the contemporary city.

In very broad terms the literature on the contemporary city in the global South can be divided between those who take an apocalyptic view and those who display an irrepressible optimism about the possibility of solving the myriad problems that beset such cities. For instance, Planet of Slums by the prolific urbanist Mike Davis provides a relentless catalogue of the utterly devastating conditions that characterize the daily lives of the majority of the world’s urban dwellers. At the end of this book one is left emotionally devastated but also virtually incapacitated because on every conceivable front of potential change, one encounters the superior cunning of an oppressive system that will simply reinvent the conditions of exploitation. The Davis book foresees an interminable state of exploitation as it awaits the ‘future of human solidarity [which] depends upon the militant refusal of the new urban poor to accept their terminal marginality within global capitalism’. At this end of the spectrum, scholars and policy activists insist that without addressing the framing conditions of the global economy it is not possible to solve urban poverty.

The register of urban implosion finds it difficult not merely to see victims – victims of corrupt governments (politicians and bureaucrats); victims of unscrupulous private firms that cherry-pick profitable services whilst leaving the poor to fend for themselves; victims of patronizing NGOs that neutralize militant resistance through their ameliorative ‘good’ works; victims of deeply entrenched cultural affiliations that get mobilized to exploit and abuse those considered inferior in terms of race, ethnicity and caste whilst allowing the real profiteers to get away with the loot; victims of (extreme) weather conditions due to bad locations in the city, which in turn link back to being powerless. In the fulcrum of compounded victimhood, it is almost impossible to imagine possibilities of resistance, liberation and empowerment. In contradistinction, scholars like Malcolm Jack treat the urban poor like a ‘blank figure’ with little awareness or reference to the conditions that must be endured while mainstream institutions get their act together and pursue a rational policy agenda that will, incrementally, fix the conditions of urban poverty bit by bit. This is maybe an unreasonable depiction of conventional apolitical policy-prescriptive studies, but it seems to me that unreflexive policy prescription in the wake of the impasse in development studies – or, more accurately, when development studies lost its innocence – is deeply problematic, for it reinforces a confidence among the powerful that has profound disempowering effects.

There is a third seam of analysis that attempts to work through the experiences and ‘everyday practices’ of the urban majority who draw the short end of the stick in contemporary cities. These commentators draw attention to the pervasive system of informalization – that is, partially outside of formal economies, conventional governance systems and enumerated areas – that flows from the unjust structures of opportunity in cities. However, instead of reading only marginalization and exclusion from the urban, these writers also point to the ways in which marginalization can be read differently as a zone of possibility and autonomy in various interstices of the city, even if in circumscribed ways. I do not want to get into the merits of this approach, but simply want to draw attention to the fact that unless the complex, dynamic, highly improvising and generative actions of the urban poor are acknowledged and explored, it is foolish to come to conclusions about what is going on in a city, or what may or may not work, either from an insurrectionary perspective or from a ‘policy-fix’ approach.

The importance of the informal register in reading the city is that it compels one to take a more provisional approach before one pronounces on either what is going on, or what must be done to improve the quality of life and freedom in the city. For, as AbdouMaliq Simone reminds us:

Cities are densities of stories, passions, hurts, revenge, aspiration, avoidance, deflection, and complicity. As such, residents must be able to conceive of a space sufficiently bounded so as to consolidate disparate energies and make things of scale happen. But at the same time, they must conceive of a fractured space sufficiently large enough through which dangerous feelings can dissipate or be steered away. Urban residents are thus concerned about what kinds of games, instruments, languages, sight lines, constructions, and objects can be put in play in order to anticipate new alignments of social initiatives and resources, and thus capacity.

Thus, today (if ever) it is simply inconceivable to approach or move through the city and its futures with irrevocable certainty about what is going on or what is needed to make the place better. Conceptual analysis and policy prescription must move with great care and reflexivity. Does this mean that one cannot perceive and engage with what are surely blatant deployments of dominating power over those with little material or political resources? Of course not; it remains perfectly possible and essential to uncover the multiple and complex circuitries of power in the city, but unfortunately this is unlikely to render a simple story line of domineering power where it is clear-cut who the perpetrators and victims are. This takes me on to another set of coordinates that shape the approach of the book.

Power and complexity

It is crucial to appreciate the constitutive nature of power and complexity in the city. Any analysis of urban conditions and future prospects must come to terms with the dimensions of complexity and the ways in which it is sutured by various dynamics of power. This opens the door, conceptually, to two central ideas of the book: radical incrementalism and recursive political empowerment. But first a few comments of clarification on the intertwined ideas of complexity and power, and particularly the tension wire that runs between these dynamics and that animates much in the contemporary city.

Following the work of anthropologist Emery Roe, one can link complexity to the reality of contingency which gives rise to incessant uncertainties and surprises in most development contexts. Of course such uncertainties coexist with structural factors that reproduce uneven spatial development patterns, but such factors do not explain or predetermine the fate of development ambitions and interventions. According to Roe, development issues are fundamentally ‘highly uncertain and complex [because] many, if not most, parties to these issues, including the experts, are in the grip of many unknowns, frequent surprise, and little agreement, where few involved know what really is in their best long-run interests, and where almost everyone is playing it by ear – and this includes the so-called power brokers.’ In more recent times complexity theory as a philosophical stream has also been deployed to capture the interactions of various physical, social, economic, political, ecological and cultural systems in urban spaces, producing an infinite number of unpredictable dynamics. Thus, for urbanist David Byrne, the city must be approached and explored as a fundamentally emergent and therefore open-ended reality:

Cities are plainly dissipative complex systems with emergent properties and evolutionary history. The identification of cities as dissipative systems matters a great deal because it describes the relationship between urban places, the ‘unnatural’ location of contemporary life within a ‘built’ environment and the natural systems of this planet. Cities are indeed complex systems but complex systems embedded within both the complex system of global economic and cultural relations, and the complex systems which compose the natural world.

What this mouthful suggests is that there are always so many variables at play in how cities function, unfold and incessantly become something different; it is important to assume a constitutive complexity, heightened by the rapidity of change in a globalized world, as central to the rebus character of cities.

On the other hand it is also fair to say that even if we are to appreciate the significance of complexity, uncertainty, surprise and therefore open-ended futures, or at least malleable futures, we cannot deny that power is at the heart of city development, because governance boils down to questions of control over decision-making about how resources are used in a sea of competing and different interests. Fortunately our thinking about power has evolved beyond mere notions of ‘who benefits?’, ‘who is getting exploited?’, ‘how badly are they exploited?’, to understanding the dynamic, capillary and decentred nature of circuits of power, which are always unstable and vulnerable to resistance and transformation. In response to Roe, and taking on board the insights about complexity, anthropologist Donald Moore offers a useful multifaceted approach to power:

Instead of simply mapping typologies of power [as Roe does], alternative perspectives could emphasize the practices through which power operates, the symbolic and material effects power produces, and its performance. In feminist cultural critic Judith Butler’s terms: ‘Performativity describes this relation of being implicated in that which one opposes, this turning of power against itself to reproduce alternative modalities of power, to establish a kind of political contestation that is not a “pure” opposition, a “transcendence” of contemporary relations of power, but a difficult labor of forging a future from resources inevitably impure.’

The reason I find these two lenses – complexity and power – useful is because they allow one to respond to the existing mainstream literature and more critical conceptual approaches to cities and begin to build something akin to a bridge between them. The complexity lens allows us to address the technical, technocratic and managerialist discourses and imperatives characteristic of the various literatures in the domain of urban management. Thus, Chapters 3 and 4 start with a critical engagement with mainstream policy discourses that seek to address the challenges of intensifying urbanization with respect to the managerial and technical complexity of the issues at stake. At the same time, this book stresses that technical solutions are often oblivious to power dynamics and by default are in fact profoundly political in their effects – a danger that is ever present as progressive-sounding urban policies continue to produce or perpetuate unjust and inequitable urban outcomes.

Radical incrementalism

The existential core of urbanism is the desire for radical change to bring all the good implied in the original utopian association of ‘the city’. This radical impulse stands in contrast to the necessary prudence and constraints of incremental change, which is the only way of intervening in conditions of profound complexity and entrenched power dynamics embedded in capitalist modernities.

We know that the current scale of human suffering and violence that flow from the profoundly unequal distribution of resources and opportunity is fundamentally inhumane and intolerable. Yet we also know that we cannot wish into existence an overnight revolution that will make everything all right in the world. At the same time it seems futile simply to work away at creating the right conditions for insurrectionary revolutions that will eventually bring to life a large-scale ‘militant refusal’ by the world’s urban multitudes, as intimated by Mike Davis. This leaves one with bringing change into the world through more discrete avenues: surreptitious, sometimes overt, and multiple small revolutions that at unanticipated and unexpected moments galvanize into deeper ruptures that accelerate tectonic shifts of the underlying logics of domination and what is considered possible. Radical incrementalism is a disposition and sensibility that believes in deliberate actions of social transformation but through a multiplicity of processes and imaginations, none of which assumes or asserts a primary significance over other struggles. This position may not resolve the existential struggle of urbanism, but it provides a means to confront the struggle and perpetually work one’s way through it, stumbling across what works and what does not. Stuart Hall captured this sensibility with great acuity: ‘are we not all, in different ways, and through different conceptual spaces … desperately trying to understand what making an ethical political choice and taking a political position in a necessarily open and contingent political field is like, what sort of “politics” it adds up to?’ This book takes this sensibility of ethical searching into the domain of urban change and renewal. Holding this sensibility in mind, I explore what I mean by recursive political empowerment.

Recursive political empowerment

Transformative change in cities cannot be bestowed by a (benign) state; nor can it take root simply as a consequence of good policy plus political will (whatever this overused and underspecified notion may mean). Transformative urban change that leads to the enhancement of ‘capabilities’ of the poor and abandoned requires agency by these very same constituencies, agency ideally inserted into a multidirectional meshwork of institutions and discourses that frame the functioning and reproduction of urban systems. However, the mobilization of these constituencies is not at all a straightforward matter, because ‘the poor’ and ‘the abandoned’ are never cohesive, or coherent, or homogenous in any way. Complex and shifting identities and group-based associations, embedded in dynamic cultural processes, render the urban majorities inherently fragmented and contested. Furthermore, neighbourhoods and associational circuits where the urban poor are concentrated are typically stratified by deep power differentials between those who control and channel resources in and out of these areas and those rendered dependent on such gatekeeping.

Engaging with these multilayered realities requires a degree of awareness and a (personal) decision to participate in structures and processes that can lead to an improvement in one’s lot. significantly, people’s sense of possibility is closely tied to culturally shaped assessments of opportunities and threats associated with participation. Such calculations, in turn, are intertwined with a sense of being and self in relation to place and particular communities. Thus, a viable notion of empowerment of the poor requires an appreciation that empowerment is fundamentally an individual process that deepens with time if individual efforts are consciously embedded in more collective forms of solidarity and mutual empowerment. The practice of Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI), explored in Chapters 3 and 6, illustrates this effectively. SDI explicitly seeks to build autonomy from the state and informal power brokers, whilst socializing their members into an alternative normative framework, which in turn becomes the basis of mobilization and legitimacy in their work.

Framing propositions

On the basis of these conceptual coordinates, the book is premissed on a number of propositions. First, in dealing with the myriad problems associated with urban development, the central problematic that must be addressed is urban inequality. This focus allows one to keep in view the ways in which the framing conditions of the increasingly integrated global economic system places severe limits on the radicalism of urban interventions and experiments. The economic vested interests that tie together urban elites across societal and national cleavages make it almost impossible to propose, let alone pursue with any modicum of success, alternative economic systems and initiatives. Yet, unless one is able to address and systematically reverse urban inequalities, the prospects of creating more just, inclusive and vibrant cities are bleak. Therefore, on the back of the more overtly ‘moral’ turn in global development forums and circuits (e.g. the Millennium Development Summit of 2000, which spawned the MDGs for 2015), there is an opportunity to use the (diversionary) focus on urban poverty to make linkages to the more fundamental conditions driving inequality that fall along various faultlines: class, race, ethnicity, caste, location, religion, ability, gender, sexual preference, age, and so on. This can become a key strategic plank in progressive coalitions and networks mobilizing to remake cities in the global South.

(Continues…)Excerpted from City Futures by Edgar Pieterse. Copyright © 2008 Edgar Pieterse. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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