Cities and Nature

Olpadwala and Goldsmith make a number of compelling points in their article "Sustainability of Privilege", especially on the systemic problems present in the social layer of Commoner's 'onion' (attempt at an illustration below). In Commoner's model, ideally, the importance of the natural world should be taken into account by each consecutive layer, thus sustaining the natural core. However, because the relationships are inverted in reality, the social and political layer is self-serving, leading us in the wrong direction with economic goals that create unsustainable technologies and degrade the ecosystem. Negative behaviours such as excess consumption are driven by social norms, which perpetuate environmental damage. The authors write, "no genuine attenuation of environmental damage is possible without corresponding social change", arguing that structural and systemic barriers must be removed in order for localised, grassroots change to take root. Historical precedent shows times when the problems of the present seemed insurmountable, such as the Urban Manure Problem predicted in 1894 or the fear of running out of coal. It’s hard not to see the problems of today as truly insurmountable compared to those of the past, though, considering that our social norm demands consumption at a scale never before seen. In addition to grassroots change in consumption patterns, it is also necessary to solve much larger, macro-level problems, especially concerning energy and emissions. The authors quote the idea that one way to deal with environmental degradation is to convince the rich that it is in their own self interest to change things. How depressing this sounds! I prefer economic approaches that influence human behavior, such as high gas prices and carbon taxes. This is an effective way for the social and political system to better orient the inner layers of Commoner's onion towards nature (though the political will required to implement such policies could itself be seen as an insurmountable problem of the present).

Urban space and culture

I really enjoyed Markusen and Schrock this week. For all the focus planners may place on getting a particular big business into town, it is easy to lose sight of how that business will impact on re-spending within a city, and thus growth, over the long term (for example, Walmart may employ local people, but they will have incentives to spend their income inside Walmart, which sends money outside the city). I live in a city that is replete with "Buy Local! It makes a difference" signs and the sheer volume of the signs, I have to admit, made me cynical - I will be happy to support local businesses if they sell products I want, but I do not want to feel obliged to spend locally to prop up businesses whose value lies only in their localness. This article made me rethink the idea that local-orientation is far more complex than the parochial exercise I had taken it for. The ideas about worker location as just as important (if not more so) than industrial location particularly resonates. I often wonder how a certain New York glass company will attract the best and the brightest young workers to a relatively remote upstate New York location in the long term, particularly considering that young  technology professionals - at least according to Florida's analysis - tend to concentrate in metro areas that rate highly as centers of diversity and creativity.

Political Agglomerations

Holston and Appadurai's article is dated. It's difficult to read a 1990 article from the perspective of immigration policy of the Western world as it stands in 2013 without a very large grain of salt! The distinction between "formal" and "substantive" citizenship (the former to mean a certificate and the latter a series of rights a person exercises on a daily basis), is interesting, but I think the authors are speaking far too generally and make no compelling argument linking cities and citizenship. It is not at all true to say that "legally resident noncitizens, and even legally resident ones, often possess virtually identical socio-economic and civil rights as citizens". I have been an immigrant in the UK, and now the US, since 2007, and in neither country have I had "virtually identical" rights as citizens. In the UK I had access to healthcare and I had the right to work (and occasionally even vote), but I had no recourse to public funds should I become unemployed, even though I was contributing taxes. In the US, I was not allowed to work at all when I first arrived as an H-4 dependent. Many people who are US residents, but not citizens, may have different rights to members of their own family. As visa systems crack down on even middle class skilled workers, citizenship is very highly sought after. The relationship the authors try to illustrate between citizenship and the city is awkward in this reading -at the same time the authors argue for a citizenship based on a more localized scale, their article is not anchored enough to make this argument compelling - referencing such disparate cities as London, Los Angeles, Sao Paulo, Paris, Bombay. The claim that the urban poor unite to fight for rights to the city contradicts Davis' argument in "Slums" that one of the major problems with the growth of informal settlements is the inability for urban fringe dwellers to coordinate collective action, in contrast to the urban center dwellers of previous eras.

Contested Cities

David Harvey asks, “why is it that we tend to think of the built environment of cities as somehow or other not being the environment? Where did that separation come from?” This is an excellent question. In a similar vein, I want to ask why we think of homeless people or ‘anti-social behavior’ is seen as somehow not belonging to the city. Ten years ago I was living in Elizabeth Bay, the densest suburb in Sydney, historically populated by single working women who occupied studio apartments in buildings now highly prized for their Art Deco features. Elizabeth Bay borders Sydney’s red light district, Kings Cross. Shortly after I moved there, the City embarked on a major upgrade project in the area. Brick sidewalks were replaced with high-grade granite and peppered with brass plaques commemorating Kings Cross’s colorful history. Well before I decided to study planning, the newly-installed exclusionary seating (with the third armrest) made me deeply uneasy. The area was famous for its ‘seediness’ and street life, yet the new development was excluding the very people that gave the area its identity at the same time it celebrated the area’s notoriety. Whilst the area has gentrified rapidly since, the homeless population has not entirely dissipated - instead, a smaller population has concentrated along the granite street. I’m pleased that King’s Cross has not completely lost its grit, even despite the decade-old high grade polishing which shows that exclusionary measures aren’t always successful, I think to the area’s benefit.

(An aside)

An article in today's paper sums up the first half of this class nicely. It is the tale of two tire factories in France, one doomed to failure due to a powerful union who will not agree to conditions designed to make the plant more competitive, the other with a future because its workforce is more amenable to change. The prevalent theme: a European country trying to save its industrial base in the face of global economic forces that necessitate massive increases in efficiency (car sales in Europe are the lowest in 20 years) and flexible workers; an objective at odds with a labor force used to the generous conditions of the welfare state. In the context of the theory we have been reading, this story feels like a clash of centuries: the union workers symbolising mid-20th fordism, the restructuring factory acknowledging the reality of 21st century neoliberalism and the global market. I enjoy the juxtaposition of this sad tale of the economic reality of globalisation with an advertisement for a luxury hotel in Miami, the page as a whole symbolising the inequalities created by capitalism on a global scale.

Segregation, Disinvestment and Decline

Now that we are in a century of unprecedented urbanization, much of the literature related to cities, makes use of the phrase "if present trends continue". For example, "if present trends continue, sometime early next century more than half of the world's population will be classified as urban rather than rural" (David Harvey, writing in 1997). This prediction proved to be accurate. Hollander and Nemeth discuss the forces behind population decline, which variously include globalisation, suburbanization and the natural economic cycle. I’m particularly interested in the cyclical idea. Though there is little doubt that Detroit is a shrinking city, it has been a shrinking city for over half a century now. Though the future certainly does look bleak if present trends continue, there are many examples of cities that have turned around despite similarly bleak predictions, such as Seattle thanks to a whim of Bill Gates. If we had a crystal ball to look into future of rust belt cities, I wonder whether the first nature advantages that became redundant in the 20th Century might prove to be drawcards once more, as climate change threatens powerful coastal cities such as New York. It is important to remember that whilst Detroit may be shrinking, it is also persisting.

Megacities and Cities of Slums

Mike Davis argues that, in many parts of the world, the absence of large-scale infrastructure projects, suburbia, or powerful manufacturing sectors has forced large swathes of the population into poverty. With the American frontier long closed and postwar waves of migration a relic of the 1950s, in the 21st Century the job of absorbing the excess labor of capitalism has fallen to largely peripheral informal settlements. Furthermore, as Davis points out, “today[’s] surplus labor … faces unprecedented barriers - a literal ‘great wall of high tech border enforcement - blocking large-scale migration to the rich countries.” As the UN’s 2003 report Slums concludes, the insurmountable problems of the Third World have largely been created by the First, through SAP policies that ground economies and public services to a halt. Now, despite a context of drastically decreased worldwide labor mobility, even those who are able to travel to the world’s global cities find the doors to work increasingly closed. Those who manage to defy border controls must eke out a living in the informal economy and live in fear of deportation. Reality TV shows in the UK, US and Australia trivialise the encounters between border control staff and people attempting to enter illegally, where the implied hero is the border control officer and the villain the refugee. Considering the history of First World economic policies that have created this situation, a more truthful representation would see these roles reversed.

Global Cities / World Cities

As Allen J. Scott writes in Globalisation and the Rise of City-regions, “... some reconsideration of the everyday notion of citizenship is itself long overdue. An alternative definition of citizenship, one that is more fully in harmony with the unfolding new world system, would presumably assign basic political entitlements and obligations to individuals not so much as an absolute birthright, but as some function of their changing involvement and practical allegiances in given geographic contexts.”

While this sentiment makes sense to anyone (myself included) who has grappled with the visa systems of the nation states at the helm of so-called global cities, it is clear that in the decade since this article was written that, if anything, regulation of the non-citizen workforce has become increasingly strict, even polarised. The United Kingdom is an example of a nation characterised by two extremes: mobility of people on the one hand obligated by membership of the EU, and tight regulation on the other that excludes all but the most highly skilled international citizens from working in the UK. What is free movement of peoples across the EU but an extension of entitlements and obligations predicated on birth? This is a regional mobility that can hardly be viewed as global. In terms of equity, the EU allows people of all skill levels and economic means, at least theoretically, to live and work anywhere in the union. For non-EU citizens, though, such rights are only granted to those professionals at the top level of command. Thus, mobility itself is an unequal process in the context of a supposedly increasingly globalised economy. It is clear that the political agenda of nation states favours a distinctly regulationist approach over otherwise neoliberal trends when it comes to mobility of labor at a global scale.

Uneven geographies of capitalism

David Harvey argues persuasively that geographic space is not a passive victim of globalisation but an active player in capitalist processes. I was grateful for his clarification of what is meant by ‘contradictions of capitalism’: the idea that physical infrastructure (such as factories and roads) is built to save on time (through distribution channels), only for technological innovation and shifting competition to render these physical structures obsolete. Central to Harvey’s argument is the idea that the built environment is both dynamic and immobile, which he illustrates in terms of jumbo jets: supposedly dynamic, but shackled by the need for airports, runways, and profitable routes. The idea that capitalism leaves a trail of crumbling infrastructure in its wake forgets the many ways in which remnants of capitalist obsolescence have found new relevance in the postindustrial world - the Highline Park being an obvious example - but more subtle reappropriations exist too. Canals, which quickly found themselves obsolete by the expansion of railways in the UK, have been utilised in recent years for laying fibre optic cable. The connectivity we have all come to rely on in the internet age belies the persistence of the complex physical infrastructure required to maintain it. As the capitalist production of space continues increasingly unevenly, facilitated by the minimal intervention of neoliberal governments, it remains to be seen how easily the physical infrastructure of post industrialisation will be repurposed in the future.

Urban Agglomeration

Last semester, I learned that the economic rationale for the mysterious persistence of cities (agglomerations) in the communication age could be explained simply by the massive externalities created by the generation of tacit knowledge. Of course, this rationale applies to growth-generating cities such as New York or Boston, rather than cities experiencing economic decline; the idea being that tacit knowledge is gained through the proximity of people and firms (where constant innovation generates increasing returns to scale) whereas knowledge that can be replicated can also be outsourced (and thus dispersed) to regions with cheaper labor. This week’s readings demonstrate that explaining capitalist economic growth in the context of the wider political and social forces that shape cities is far messier exercise. For example, Joe Painter discusses the nascent application of regulation theory to urban theory, and attempts to define the “Mode of Regulation” of post-Fordism using examples from local government in Britain. Crudely, this involves a shift from centralised, process-driven ‘Fordist’ government to something more decentralised, outcome-driven and neo-liberal. It is easy to see why regulation theory appeals to urban theorists for supposedly taking account of political and social change, but its premise that the instabilities of capitalism are ironed out by forces that are neither conscious nor accidental and usually unintended (Modes of Regulation) surely renders the task of definition extremely difficult, and makes me wonder how this theory can be usefully applied.

Urban questions and epistemologies

When I was 15, one day in English class our teacher asked the question of an entirely female classroom, “who here would describe themselves as a feminist?” Everyone looked confused and hesitated. The teacher looked shocked. “What if I told you”, she said, “that a feminist is somebody who believes in equality between the sexes?” All hands shot up. It was the first time the concept of feminism had been succinctly explained, and ever since I’ve been deeply annoyed by women who don’t describe themselves as feminists because they either don’t understand the concept, or don’t wish to be seen as political. Australian supermodel Miranda Kerr caught my attention most recently for stating in an interview that she was not a feminist. While celebrities declaring themselves not to be feminists is irritating, I would expect better from sociologists. I was very surprised to learn that only 5 out of 26 female academics in the Chicago school interviewed by Mary Jo Deegan would agree with her assessment of the Sociology Department as highly patriarchal in outlook and practice, despite the clear evidence Deegan presents in her critique of the School’s “dark era”. If women in all professions are to move closer to equality, surely the lesson of this article is that, at the very least, they should not be complicit in their own exclusion.

Urban Imaginations

It is easy to think of 20th Century planning purely in terms of Modernism, itself strongly related to images of urban renewal such as high-rise housing, highways, and segregated city functions. Parker argues that movements espousing traditionalism are not as far removed from Modernism as we might assume. For example, Le Corbusier’s famous imaginings of dense residential apartment blocks surrounded by open space take ideas from the garden city (density, parkland, healthful fresh air) to their logical extreme. New Urbanism espouses anti-Modernist ideals of dense, walkable, mixed-use urban centres, but as Parker argues, it is “anti-metropolitan in practice” (p. 66). Like many of the goals of utopian visions that preceded it, New Urbanism’s lofty ideals of inclusiveness and infill have been thwarted by the influence of economically powerful groups, and are instead segregated places characterised by homogeneity and privilege (an insularity further reinforced by private governance). This shifting ideal of where and how people aspire to live reflects a constant tension between the core and the periphery of cities, but is also very much a product of interventions by people with means (the bourgeoisie, the policy-maker) prevalent in this week’s readings who shape city space.