Cities are the principal spatial landscapes of modernity, the privileged sites where the great social forces that have shaped humanity for well over a century (if not more) – industrial capitalism, state-making, and globalization – have been played out in dramatic fashion. The experience of living in the key metropolitan centers of global capitalism served as the wellspring for novel experiments in urban design, for path-breaking innovations in building typologies, for enduring achievements in art and architecture, for bold advances in infrastructure, and for critical engagements with civic life and public culture. Writers and scholars have looked upon cities as their source of inspiration for ideas, theories, and utopian imaginings about the social world around them.Footnote 1
The origins of the modern metropolis can be traced to the mid- to late nineteenth century at a time when the explosive growth of industrial capitalism fundamentally reshaped the core areas of the capitalist world economy. For more than a century, the growth and development of the leading industrial cities of North America and Europe served as the basic template – and the source of ideas – for understanding the evolving contours of urbanization on a global scale. In all its variations, modernization theory offered perhaps the clearest and most unblinkered vision of the desired future and a sign-posted road map on how to get there. As a self-fulfilling and self-justifying approach to understanding the human condition, modernization theory belongs to that small family of theoretical interventions that – to borrow from Arjun Appardurai – “both declares and desires universal applicability for itself.”Footnote 2 The point of departure for modernization theory was the historically specific experience of so-called Western cities located in the industrialized heartlands of the capitalist world economy. As both theory and practice, modernization attached itself to the grand meta-narrative of anticipated progress along a well-marked pathway. These modern-industrial cities served as the benchmark for measuring and promoting “development” as the singular, linear route toward the ultimate achievement of the coveted end point of modernity.Footnote 3
At the dawn of the new millennium, the conjoined processes of deindustrialization, decentralization, and unfettered suburban sprawl have called into question the idea of the modern-industrial metropolis as the paradigmatic exemplar of late-twentieth–century urbanism. As the twentieth century came to a close, the emergence of wealthy metropolitan centers of global finance (like London, New York, and Tokyo, along with a host of second-tier rivals) at the commanding heights of the capitalist world economy signaled a decisive shift in thinking about cities on a world scale. These leading financial hubs were able to commandeer the lion's share of global wealth through their management and control over the global flows of capital, commodities, and ideas, and to simultaneously oversee the dispersal of manufacturing and industrial production to faraway sites scattered around the world. What came to be called “global cities” quickly became the new standard for making sense of urbanism on a scale, where so-called “globalizing cities” with world-class aspirations were ranked in hierarchies of importance marking their connections to global flows of finance and corporate enterprise.Footnote 4
At the start of the twenty-first century, the accelerating pace of urbanization on a global scale has brought into sharp relief the shifting balance of city-making as a global process. The explosive growth of urbanization has been concentrated in the peripheral zones of the world economy, as the geographical footprint and population size of such megacities of hypergrowth as Kinshasa, Lagos, Karachi, Cairo, Jakarta, Mexico City, Manila, Mumbai, Delhi, Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai has dwarfed even the “big cities” of Europe and North America. These shifting patterns of global urbanization have called into question the idea of holding onto the leading “world-class” cities of Europe and North America – defined as a bounded and largely unitary entities in conventional urban theories – as both the paradigmatic modern metropolises, and the starting point for theorizing about transnational urbanism.Footnote 5 The conjoined forces of globalization have increasingly penetrated urban life around the world. The transnational flows of finance, commodities, labor, images, communication, and ideas have integrated existing cities into vast urbanized systems of production and consumption. As such, the once reigning idea of the city as a kind of bounded living organism, characterized by an internally coherent civic life and by clearly demarcated boundaries between center and periphery, and structured by clear relationships to the region, nation, and wider world, appears anachronistic and obsolete.Footnote 6
Understanding the Modern Metropolis
At the start of the twenty-first century, cities around the world are being made and remade at a faster pace and at a greater scale than at any other time in history. Yet the current discussions about the future of urbanism are mired in an intellectual impasse that is, at best, several decades out of date and rooted in largely Western-centric (e.g., North American and European) preoccupations about urbanization. As a general rule, debates over urban futures have remained trapped in a conceptual paradigm that has stressed the allegedly powerful and instrumental role of large-scale property developers, policymakers, and urban planners in implanting order and coherence in largely unruly and disorderly urban environments. Yet at the present moment, the everyday realities of urban life are largely shaped by a very different set of unregulated, quotidian practices that operate outside the sanctioned authority of official policymaking and planning initiatives. Despite the complexity and novelty of the contemporary urban condition on a global scale, old models rooted in an abstract idealization of the modern metropolis and the attendant rational and efficient (“highest and best”) use of space continue to largely frame debates about how cities should be planned, managed, and governed.Footnote 7
The intensity of fast-paced urban transformation in such rapidly growing cities as Mumbai and Lagos, and São Paulo and Mexico City, has outpaced the capacities of urban planners and policymakers to anticipate those spatial frictions associated with unplanned and haphazard growth, let alone manage and regulate existing built environments. Entirely new patterns of urban growth on a global scale have given rise to novel challenges concerned with sustainability, livability, and social inclusion into the mainstream of urban life that have never been seen before. Planning and design professionals have not been able to adequately conceptualize and implement spatial strategies that are capable of effectively adapting to unpredictable change at a time when everyday urban dynamics are both volatile and uncertain. Instead, they often choose to fall back upon unidimensional, rigid, and anachronistic canons of conventional urban policy and planning discourse that have largely failed to respond to “the social and environmental exigencies of twenty-first century urbanism.”Footnote 8 These once-regnant models, instruments, and paradigms appear antiquated when set against the backdrop of unregulated urban environments and informal practices. The unruly disorder that characterizes those megacities of hypergrowth has in so many instances proved impossible to subject to the protocols of the paradigmatic “planned city” of formal regulations and orderly space.Footnote 9
In his essay “Whatever Happened to Urbanism?” the celebrated architect Rem Koolhaas has criticized architecture and urban planning for focusing too much on an idealized model of the classical modern city, for failing to understand the rapidly changing patterns of global urbanism, and for a lack of ideas about how to deal with the contemporary challenges of the accelerated pace of urbanization on a world scale.Footnote 10 Taken together, these observations provide a useful point of departure for rethinking the principal tenets of mainstream urban studies scholarship. Dispensing with the conventional fixation on ideal-types and paradigmatic exemplars of leading (and lagging), or developed (and developing), cities as yardsticks through which to evaluate and judge urban “progress” on a global scale enables us to see more clearly the kinds of ruptures, breaks, and discontinuities that characterize global urbanism at the start of the twenty-first century.
At present, the global mega-urban condition encompasses a variety of discordant realities, from the glittering generic city-state of Singapore to the favelas climbing up the hillsides around São Paulo, and from fortress-like luxury enclaves of northern Johannesburg to the sprawling slums of Mexico City. As a general rule, globalizing cities with world-class aspirations have experienced relentless pressures that either incrementally corrode, or spectacularly destroy, the existing built environment – and, correlatively, undermine the social fabric of urban life. These inexorable processes of disintegration and transformation have produced highly uneven, hybrid urban landscapes where new luxury enclaves are juxtaposed against impoverished zones of broken-down infrastructure, overcrowded streetscapes, and self-built housing. In cities as diverse as Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro, concentrations of extreme wealth (often enclosed and fortified) coexist in close proximity to vast informal markets, neglected buildings, and sprawling squatter settlements. New business districts or upscale residential neighborhoods on the fringes of Shanghai, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, or Beirut, or “new towns” and satellite cities on the edges of Lagos, Phenom Penh, Ho Chi Minh City, Cairo, or Mumbai, consist of similar building typologies: large-scale, distinctive, monochromatic assemblages of look-alike buildings – with the occasional iconic landmark structure –surrounded by a cordon sanitaire of “barrier landscaping” and designed to be set apart.Footnote 11
This kind of city building conforms to a form of deliberate intervention that relies on a drastic intrusion into the metropolitan landscape that has little to do with the existing scale and texture of the built environment of established neighborhoods, streetscapes, and residential communities, and has displayed scant regard for cultural heritage. Mega-projects, superblocks, and spatially separate enclaves disconnected from their local contexts are the hallmarks of this new brand of hybrid, aggregate, and disjointed urbanism. This kind of city building has produced discontinuous ruptures in the urban social fabric, or what some have called the “Archipelago City.”Footnote 12 To be sure, this concept “archipelago city” conjures up a spatial image of globalizing urbanism as an assemblage or odd assortment of fragments, each with their own distinctive and pronounced identities and mutually exclusive rules of engagement.Footnote 13 The production of “new towns,” satellite cities, and special development zones at the edge of existing built environments resemble fragmented islands of social activity, separated by indeterminate and marginal spaces that are inhabited by the urban underclasses. In this sense, the “archipelago city” is the prototype of global urbanism at the start of the twenty-first century: polycentric urban landscapes consisting of a patchwork of enclaves, autonomous zones, and sequestered “microcities” scattered across vast and expansive metropolitan regions.Footnote 14 These dispersed spatial patterns represent the antithesis of modernist design and planning principles that yearned for spatial coherence, connectivity, and rational order.Footnote 15
The “archipelago city” masks the deeper realities of a kind of supply-side, speculative urbanism, directed at creating new property markets rather than responding to existing demand. City building under the dominance of real-estate capitalism represents one side of the urban future. In aspiring world-class cities, the social and political demands of propertied middle-class residents have revolved around a defense of up-to-date and reliable infrastructure, “protected” spaces of social congregation, good governance, and social order. It is in the name of these values (grounded in an alleged attachment to ‘propriety’ and ‘civility’) that new experiments with privatized modes of urban governance are put into motion. It is also in the name of these values that calls arise to banish the underemployed urban poor – and their messy brand of disorderly “informal” urbanism – from city streets and from public gathering places.Footnote 16
Aggregate Urbanism: Enclaves and Modularity
The hallmark of modernist city building has been its engagement with state-driven, comprehensive, and holistic master planning. Modernist planners sought homogeneity and predictability by imposing a material and spatial order that was intended to “rationalize” all aspects of urban social life. As an exemplary expression of physical determinism (or the idea that the design of the built environment could adequately address and resolve social problems), modernist planning confidently projected an imagined future “without contradictions, without conflict.” In short, it uncritically assumed a “rational domination” of this imagined future “in which its total and totalizing plan dissolves any conflict between the imagined and existing [state of affairs] in the imposed coherence of its order.” Its failure to include – “as constituent elements” of its master plans – the ambiguities, indeterminacies, and conflicts of actual social life undermined this imagined future.Footnote 17
The collapse of the modernist fixation on comprehensive, holistic master planning – that is, integrating the constituent parts into a rationally ordered and coherent whole – has given way to alternative, piecemeal approaches to city building that primarily rely upon market-led redevelopment and entrepreneurial interventions as the primary mechanisms for reshaping the built environment. Spurred by the latest wave of capitalist globalization and neoliberal urban policies, city building at the start of the twenty-first century has increasingly come to resemble a distinct kind of “modular urbanism” (or “aggregate urbanism”) where the proliferation of stand-alone, cocooned enclaves spread haphazardly across metropolitan landscapes and deliberately set apart from the surrounding urban environment have produced mosaic-like patterns of urban growth and development. While the fracturing of urban landscapes into distinct enclaves is not new in cities around the world, what distinguish the global patterns of fragmentation at the start of the twenty-first century is the entrenchment of spatial exclusivity and the durability of social inequalities.Footnote 18
With its grid-like pattern, rigid hierarchical differentiation, and spatial demarcation of distinct functional specializations, the structured “city of form” constituted the dominant mode of urban production for at least the past century. Because of its important functional role, this “city of form” still commands our urban imagination, despite its gradual disappearance as the primum mobile behind city building. The continued association of urbanism with structured form accounts for some of the “blind spots” in mainstream urban theories. As Albert Pope has suggested, “Our understanding or imagination of the [contemporary] city runs counter to the urbanism that is currently being produced.” In other words, the ways that mainstream urban theories have thought about the growth and development of cities does not coincide with the actual social production of urban space and the contemporary logic of city-building practices. Despite its increasing obsolescence, the city of structured form has continued to dominate conventional thinking about urbanism. The inability of conventional mainstream thinking about cities to keep abreast of what is happening on the ground has limited our understanding about the actual patterns of urban transformation and the emergence of unstructured urban morphologies. The continued use of such pejorative terms – backward (or failed) urbanism, slums, sprawl, decline, informality, and the like – provide ample testimony to the failure of mainstream urban studies to think about urbanism in ways other than the presumption that incremental growth is the sine qua non of progress and that the pathways of urban transformation are linear and lead in the same direction.Footnote 19
At the start of the twenty-first century, the “gridiron metropolis” (to borrow a term from Albert Pope) – or “an urbanism of mechanically structured form” – has given way to the unstructured space of the contemporary megalopolis. The replacement of the structured “city of form” with the unstructured “city of space” has effaced what was for at least a century the wellspring of urban modernity – the centerpiece of the modern urban experience – into something as “outmoded as the medieval hill town.” Unlike the structured “city of form,” the unstructured “city of space” has “no intrinsic subdivisions, no topographical ruptures of fissures, and no obvious breaking points.”Footnote 20 As the dominant mode of spatial organization, “aggregation” (whether layered vertically or attached horizontally) has become the underlying structuring logic of global urbanism at the start of the twenty-first century. What distinguishes “aggregation” from comprehensive master planning is that the object of spatial design is not the urban landscape as a connected, relational whole, but the single aggregate unit. Put in another way, the unstructured space of the contemporary megalopolis consists of the repetitive aggregation of various spatial typologies that construct a tentative (and ever-evolving) whole that is constantly in flux and never finished. This kind of urban production is not random or arbitrary, but rather conforms to underlying patterns of agglomeration and/or accretion.Footnote 21
If the modern metropolis of the industrial capitalist age represents the quintessential structured “city of form” (with its ordered legibility and recognizable patterns), then the contemporary megalopolis resembles the unstructured “city of space.” As a term coined by the Scottish geographer Patrick Geddes in the 1920s (and later popularized by Lewis Mumford and Jean Gottman), the idea of megalopolis has come to signify an entirely new form of urban development that originated in the second half of the twentieth century. As the ties that bound ex-urban peripheries to dominant centers were loosened, the centrifugal force of urbanization pushed outward, producing new kinds of dispersed, polycentric networks, or sprawling conurbations no longer tethered to the gravitational pull of a historic downtown core.Footnote 22 The resulting “urbanization of suburbia” – or peripheral urbanization – cemented these dispersed patterns of discontinuous urban growth, thereby putting into motion new kinds of formless urbanism.Footnote 23
With the coming of the megalopolis, the structured logic of the “city of form” gave way to the explosive growth of unstructured urban space. Unlike the structured “city of form,” the unstructured “city of space” has no innate coherence and no clearly demarcated distinctions between “inside” and “outside.”Footnote 24 New patterns of urban production that once would have engendered a cityscape dominated by structured form instead gave way to one dominated by unfamiliar and unexpected kinds of unstructured urban space. In turn, these new haphazard patterns of unstructured urban space have unfolded upon a continuous, seemingly infinitely expandable field – where the logical outcome resembles a seemingly never-ending city without obvious boundaries.Footnote 25
The expansion of the contemporary megalopolis has created “‘exterior’ spaces tethered to loose aggregations of polycentric forms.” In short, these new cities of tomorrow consist of an ever-expanding succession of asymmetric urban forms occupying a vast field of amorphous and indifferent space. As a kind of embryonic urbanism only in its formative stages, the contemporary megalopolis expands to no appreciable cumulative effect – it is no more than the sum of its parts. In a nutshell, this kind of aggregate urbanism “refuses to add up to anything coherent or legible.” The contemporary megalopolis is unable to sustain a cumulative urban whole, remaining instead a seemingly random aggregation and spatially discontinuous collection of fragments always in motion.Footnote 26
The expansion of aggregate urbanism on a global scale has triggered new hybrid forms of modernity that arise in the tension between the global flows of capital, commodities, and information on the one hand, and overcrowded streetscapes, broken-down or nonexistent infrastructure, and inadequate regulatory regimes on the other.Footnote 27 In distressed megacities of hypergrowth, the steady accretion of upscale urban enclaves that have seemingly appeared out of nowhere, like alien spaceships, has produced highly uneven spatial landscapes increasingly divided between upscale sites of luxury and vast zones of deprivation. Unencumbered by the visible signs of distressed urbanism within which they are incongruously set, these sequestered islands of privilege are at once functional and efficient, that is, they both serve the purpose of concentrating the key elements of a comfortable and safe-and-secure urban life in a single space, and they operate without the frictions, inconveniences, and unpredictability of the everyday modes of life which surround them.Footnote 28
These patterns of enclave urbanism have called into question the classical portrait of the so-called Third World City – mired in ‘underdevelopment’ and backwardness, and defined by what it lacks. The caricatured image of deadening homogeneity – characterized by slums and informality – is far too flattened out and simplified to capture the emergent realities on the ground. As the signifier of monochromatic urban distress and deprivation, the prototypical Third World City has literally ceased to exist as an actual place, replaced by a hybrid assemblage of sequestered luxury enclaves (or privileged sites for the wealthy) surrounded by vast territories of deprivation and neglect.Footnote 29 It is here where the utopian dreams of escape into cocooned laagers of privilege and convenience come face-to-face in uneasy tension with the everyday, “do-it-yourself” (DIY) urbanism of the struggling urban poor.Footnote 30
The New Transnational Urban Imaginary: The “Business Consultancy City”
In what Ash Amin has termed the “business consultancy city,” mainstream policymakers have worked energetically for the past several decades to propose emerging “globalizing cities” as potential engines of the new knowledge economy, as catalysts driving innovation and creativity for corporate enterprise, and as powerhouses for productivity growth and consumer demand.Footnote 31 In the contemporary Urban Age, global city-regions have returned to the economic calculus, fueled by a rising tide of celebratory accounts theorizing cities as the emergent centers of competitive advantage and as the wellsprings of future prosperity.Footnote 32 Just as rapidly industrializing cities of the late nineteenth century (with their sprawling factories and manufacturing sites, expanding middle class with consumerist aspirations, and the largely unregulated spirit of entrepreneurialism) became the driving force behind the development of industrial capitalism, mainstream policymakers have once again at the start of the twenty-first century turned their attention to so-called “cities of the third wave” (and the attendant “creative economy,” ‘‘cognitive-cultural economy,” and ‘‘cognitive capitalism”) as the source of future global economic growth and the expansion of opportunities for upward mobility in the postindustrial world economy.Footnote 33
This story of the renewed economic centrality of cities is a familiar one.Footnote 34 In mainstream urban thinking, the vitality of cities has long depended upon a mixture of ingredients, including an “abundance of supply-side readiness,” entrepreneurial dynamism, advantageous locational agglomeration, and knowledge (creativity and innovation) clustering, which, taken together, are the keys to creating opportunities for jump-starting market-led growth.Footnote 35 As a general rule, the new urbanology has positioned itself as offering a progressive agenda for betterment, when in fact this approach is actually very much entrenched within neoliberal ideology, with a vision firmly aligned to cities as launching pads for private initiative, individual self-betterment, and entrepreneurialism.Footnote 36
Yet the Panglossian glow of this new celebratory urbanology seems strangely out of touch with the seamy side of global urbanism as it actually exists.Footnote 37 Despite widespread evidence that impoverished living conditions (with limited opportunities for regular work) have become durable features of urban life around the globe, urban optimists like Edward Glaeser, Jeb Brugmann, and Doug Saunders have tended to look upon deprived zones of cities as wellsprings of creative innovation and entrepreneurial zeal – that is, places “rich with possibility and insight.”Footnote 38 This blinkered gaze yields strange pronouncements. As Glaeser has argued, ‘‘There's a lot to like about urban poverty.” With distressed cities like Detroit in mind, he makes the surprising (and unsubstantiated) claim that ‘‘cities don't make people poor; they attract poor people.’’Footnote 39 This claim certainly does not hold true for Detroit. In seeking to advance the claim that urbanization by itself is a largely self-optimizing process, Glaeser has argued that ‘‘cities are expanding enormously because urban density provides the clearest path from poverty to prosperity.’’Footnote 40 Framed within such a totalizing, universalizing, and law-bound view of urbanization, it is not hard to sense the rigid specter of (deterministic) naturalism in this recent wave of triumphalist urbanology.Footnote 41
The Evolving Terrain of Global Urbanism
What has changed over the past three decades is that this robust evocation of urban competitiveness and vitality is no longer confined exclusively to the so-called “emblematic North,” but also includes globalizing cities from the “aspiring South.”Footnote 42 Besides the familiar litany of first- or second-tier global cities (like London, New York, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Paris, Toronto, Chicago, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, and Stockholm), scholars and policymakers have identified such globalizing cities that fall outside the conventional core areas of the world economy as Shanghai, Mumbai, São Paulo, Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Istanbul as new engines of growth. Urban theorists attached to the Global Cities and World Cities paradigms have traced the cutting edge of growth – industrial and nonindustrial – to a specific set of characteristics of urban composition and global connectivity rather than “to the national economic and political environment.” It should not be surprising, then, as Ash Amin has put it, that “these cities have also begun to act like a Hanseatic League,” forming cooperative alliances and collaborative partnerships, sharing ideas about “best practices,” and, on the whole, “generalizing a new ontology of future prosperity from their collective experiences.”Footnote 43 As a general rule, cities around the world – ranging from globalizing ones with world-class aspirations to those “loser cities” in need of a large dose of remedial intervention – have increasingly undertaken strategic visioning exercises designed, inter alia, to improve the quality of life for their residents, to promote economic growth, and to ensure long-term sustainability. A host of policy experts, international development organizations, and independent consultants have actively promoted these comprehensive plans for city futures as tools for urban redevelopment and competitive advantage. These strategic initiatives “share remarkably similar analyses, conclusions, and policy ambitions.”Footnote 44
In the new mantra of success, key watchwords like creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurialism have become rhetorical platforms for measuring upward mobility in the ranked hierarchies of aspiring world-class cities.Footnote 45 Competitive cities are those that have become entrepreneurial because they have jettisoned the old managerial styles of governance in favor of supply-side, market-driven growth. In those successful “competitive cities” in the post-industrial “knowledge-based” age, city-building efforts – both materially and symbolically – have been increasingly directed at creating urban landscapes amenable to wealthy residents, conspicuous consumption, and the so-called creative classes. The prescriptive formula for success rests on “an agglomerative dynamic involving enterprising subjects, consuming populations, and enabling environments” that promise to deliver both global integration and local prosperity.Footnote 46 Mainstream urban geography has traced this dynamic to what might be called economies of proximity (associated with the colocation of interrelated industries, producer services, and knowledge clusters) combined with opportunities for synergies through association and networking. What adds further to the mix of competitive urbanism is a range of other features, including signature architecture (designed by internationally acclaimed “starchitects”), “smart buildings,” attractive amenities, high-end consumer cultures, information hubs, innovation districts, start-up business incubators, and streamlined transportation services (refurbished airports, train stations, and high-speed transit corridors) linking the various enclaves that constitute the new postindustrial knowledge, service, and tourist-entertainment economies, while deliberately bypassing abandoned and distressed zones of the urban landscape.Footnote 47
The visual projection of the vibrant city of socioeconomic promise is a highly selective, circumscribed view of urbanism that brings only certain spatial locations into focus: brand new high-rise office complexes ensconced in revitalized central business districts (CBDs), free enterprise zones, upscale shopping malls, entertainment locations, innovation districts, transport and communications hubs, universities and other centers of creativity, gated residential communities, and the kinds of high-end amenities that accommodate the privileged employees and consumers of the creative-entertainment city. The residents who “live, work, and play” in the creative-entertainment city bring qualified skills and training, aspire to upward mobility, are cosmopolitan in outlook, and are highly mobile.Footnote 48
This one-sided vision of urban life – an approach which Ash Amin has called “telescopic urbanism” – focuses only on places that offer the potential and opportunity for future prosperity, while it simultaneously ignores everything else, “above all the myriad hidden connections and relational doings that hold together the contemporary city as an assemblage of many types of spatial formation, from economically interdependent neighborhoods to infrastructures, flows and organizational arrangements that course through and beyond the city.”Footnote 49 This kind of “telescopic urbanism” conveniently and deliberately overlooks the everyday lives of ordinary people who inhabit the “multitudinous city,” or what Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic have aptly described as the “endless city.”Footnote 50 Seen through this optic, those mundane and prosaic spaces – that is, the ordinary and indistinct terrains occupied by urban dwellers who are simply “making do” in a social world defined by survivalist economics – just “blurs out of focus,” glossed over as an annoying encumbrance that appears “out of place.” If modernist urban planning, with its utopian aspirations that sometimes over-engineered its flawed promise of shared well-being, took an interest in the blighted and neglected parts of the city and gestured at the socioeconomic integration of the urban poor through master plans for public housing, work programs, social welfare, and mass transit, then the entrepreneurially inclined visionaries of the “business consultancy city” share no such pretensions and have no such aspirations.Footnote 51
By validating only those activities and places that offer the potential to become engines for an imagined future prosperity, telescopic urbanism effectively naturalizes what is in effect a cauterized urbanity – a condition that Rahul Mehrotra has identified as “one city yet two separate worlds.”Footnote 52 This blinkered optic rests on the premise that the world-class aspirations of city builders, on the one side, and the mundane interstitial spaces of the urban poor, on the other, have little or no bearing upon each other. In short, it buys into the pretense that these “separate worlds” are hermetically sealed, distanciated environments more or less cut off from one another. This kind of telescopic urbanism is largely immune to seeing the city in relational terms, that is, as a holistic, interconnected entity constituted out of mutual dependencies and uneven modes of exploitation. Trapped in its own self-perpetuating mythologies of trickle-down economics, this entrepreneurial vision of the city is largely disinterested in the structural conditions that reproduce immizeration and impoverishment. There is no pretext here of calling for productive integration of the marginalized urban dwellers living in informal, makeshift housing into the mainstream of urban life. In a fashion similar to the nineteenth-century social construction of the “deserving poor” versus those social outcasts beyond redemption, the constricted vision of telescopic urbanism sees only a surplus humanity divided between those left to their own logics of survival by means of self-animated microentrepreneurialism and those who cannot be helped, best kept cordoned off and out of sight, left to inhabit the depleted zones of bare life.Footnote 53
To paraphrase Michael Sorkin, the discourse of urbanism that imagines cities only as disaggregated collections of sealed containers rather than as relational assemblages of interconnected parts “participates in a functionalist fantasy of rationalized relations in which a set of predictabilities is offered as a hedge against dysfunction.”Footnote 54 This kind of functionalist urbanism – the default discourse of mainstream urban studies ― “imposes a similar fantasy of prophylaxis,” looking to contain what it cannot control. This functional way of thinking falls back upon the belief that scientific rationality (that is, the application of abstract reason) is the normative remedy that can replace the dysfunctionality of the disorderly city with rational order. In short, it denies the underlying realities of the urban social fabric: “the tractability of its edges,” its porosity and permeability, where borders represent opportunities and not barriers.Footnote 55
Telescopic urbanism treats the multitudinous city – the hybrid spaces of everyday urbanism – as another world, an anomalous curiosity, an annoying encumbrance, a distressed zone of indistinction, and a dumping ground for (toxic) waste. Two analytic framing devices dominate the discussion of what Amin has referred to as “the existential improvisation in the interstices of the ‘endless city.’”Footnote 56 The first points to an uplifting narrative of bootstrapping self-help, a rhetorical position that justifies a laissez-faire, noninterventionist “hands-off” approach to resolving urban impoverishment. This idea rests on the mistaken view that state interference is the root cause of persistent poverty and that overregulation has held the poor back from taking advantage of their own inventiveness and creative energies. The second calls for a strategy of containment. This revanchist approach calls for encouraging alliances among business enterprises, municipal authorities, and middle-class residents “to define and police the boundary between the clean and safe city” with its productive potential and global connectivity, and “the dirty, illegal and threatening city which hinders progress.”Footnote 57 This strategy of containment also includes allowing powerful coalitions of key stakeholders “to reclaim the faltering and stretched infrastructure of the city” – its transportation and communications networks, its water and electricity supplies, its sanitation and waste disposal systems, and its shared public spaces – by either outright privatization or by surreptitiously extending their own informal (sometimes illegal or corrupt) practices to secure privileged access to serve their own narrow interests.Footnote 58
Contradictory Spatial Dynamics of Global Urbanism
At the start of the twenty-first century, uneven spatial landscapes are associated with growing socioeconomic inequalities. In the headlong rush to make cities competitive in the ranked hierarchy of alleged urban success, city boosters have disengaged from discussions about how to ensure that urban landscapes function as arenas for the performance of active citizenship and about how to incorporate marginalized residents into the mainstream of urban life.Footnote 59 Reshaping the built environment in response to the private demands of “growth coalitions” and large-scale property developers has meant that any serious consideration of the general public interest is lost.Footnote 60
Despite widespread and long-term efforts at obfuscation, denial, and wishful thinking, urban theorists and planning experts across the political spectrum have come to acknowledge that too many work-seekers chasing too few wage-paying jobs in fast-growing cities has generated all sorts of informal practices around self-built housing and survivalist economics.Footnote 61 More than a decade ago, in its first concerted effort to calculate the slum population of the world, UN-Habitat painted a rather grim picture. The researchers who produced the highly influential Slums of the World forecast that by 2030 at least half of the world's urban population – a figure itself accounting for two-thirds of all humankind – would exist on or under the poverty line, living in slum-like conditions, largely in and around the cities of the so-called Global South. This report indicated that while only 6 percent of the population of the (so-called) “developed world” at the start of the twenty-first century reside in urban slums, the average figure for distressed cities in the “developing world” was 43 percent, with staggering figures for virtually all cities of sub-Saharan Africa (72 percent), impoverished cities of Latin American countries (such as Belize, Bolivia, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Peru), along with a host of rapidly growing cities in Asia and the Middle Eastern countries (all above the 50 percent threshold).Footnote 62 The verdict of the report was unequivocal: “slum life was, and would remain, a life of multiple deprivations, and few rights and reprieves, with inhabitants spending all resources and energies on sheer survival.”Footnote 63 In this sense, slum life was little better than bare existence, that is, a condition tantamount to social death.Footnote 64
To be sure, there is considerable disagreement in the scholarly literature as to whether terms with negative connotations – such as “slums,” “favelas,” “barrios,” and “ghettoes” – are appropriate signifiers for indicating the ubiquitous and durable presence of impoverished living conditions, primarily in the mega-cities of hypergrowth concentrated in the (so-called) Global South.Footnote 65 Regardless of how one works around such terminological disputes, what is beyond question is the sheer magnitude of worldwide urban poverty and the structural impediments that prevent jobless residents from securing regular wage-paid employment, from acquiring decent housing, and from gaining access to requisite social services – all necessary steps for incorporation into the mainstream of urban life. What these realities bring into sharp focus is the apparent paradox of asymmetric co-dependency between formal economic activities and the entrenchment of informality in many globalizing cities, where “concentrations of ‘placeless’ capital” sit incongruously side-by-side with informal settlements, which provide cheap labor close to centers of power and production.Footnote 66
Unlike a border that signifies a territorial edge or dividing line, a boundary references a malleable and mutable relationship.Footnote 67 Identifying the complexity of the boundaries separating so-called formality and informality divide requires a kind of “forensic examination” that penetrates deeply into the substrata of the urban social fabric at the places where the formal and informal collide and mutate, blending into hybrid concoctions that defy simple classification.Footnote 68 Informal settlements function as more than just convenient places of residence: they are also vital life-worlds that accommodate socioeconomic livelihoods, small-scale entrepreneurship and everyday commerce, cultural production, associational life, social interaction, religious worship, political activities, and play. In this sense, informal settlements are inextricably connected – in socioeconomic, infrastructural, and legal terms – to their surrounding or adjacent urban circumstances in varying relationships of dependence.Footnote 69 The social and political complexities associated with such volatile juxtapositions partly explain the inability of the planning professions to arrive at credible and sustainable solutions that can effectively uplift informal settlements and unleash the creative potential slum-dwellers.Footnote 70
At the start of the twenty-first century, globalizing cities with world-class aspirations are trapped in a whirlwind of material and visual contradictions that coalesce in highly uneven spatial landscapes of “incredible pluralism.”Footnote 71 These polarizing dynamics have produced very different and distinctively fragmented social worlds occupying the same physical space. In the contemporary age of globalization, luxury enclaves of overproduction and excess often exist side-by-side with ordinary spaces catering for urban dwellers who struggle to “get by” with inadequate infrastructure and services, indecent housing, and precarious work. This strange juxtaposition of self-enclosed islands of wealth set within rough-edged landscapes of despair challenges our received normative notions of urban modernity. The steady proliferation of sequestered redoubts that cater for wealthy and privileged residents seeking to emulate “first world” amenities of the global economy has produced fragmented urban landscapes marked by visual spatial inequalities. While the basic ideal-typical template for enclave urbanism may have originated in the leading cities of North America and Europe, it is a model for city building that has spread to cities everywhere. In globalizing cities with world-class aspirations, the sheer magnitude of luxury enclaves has rendered the conventional distinction between “first-world” and “third-world” cities obsolete, analytically suspect, and irrelevant.Footnote 72
Sometimes following in the footsteps of leading world-class cities and sometimes jumping far ahead, city builders in aspiring world-class cities have often adopted a tabula rasa approach to urban redevelopment, preferring to demolish the existing built environment and start from scratch rather than engage with the messy process of retrofitting incommensurate spaces.Footnote 73 The hallmark of this kind of new urbanism at the start of the twenty-first century consists of the abrupt implantation of upscale enclaves that have little or nothing in common with the scale, texture, and fabric of existing neighborhoods. This approach favors abrupt rupture over incremental accretion, that is, starting afresh instead of slow and piecemeal adaptation through a gradual process of organically overlaying usable building typologies onto dis-used or outmoded ones.Footnote 74
While city builders in globalizing cities with world-class aspirations slavishly chase after the holy grail of favorable competitive advantage, new experimental practices have generated novel kinds of everyday urbanism that is at once spontaneous and transgressive, and incremental and stealthy.Footnote 75 In seeking to capture these contradictory dynamics, the urban theorist Rahul Mehrotra has distinguished between what he has called the “Static City” and the “Kinetic City.” With its roots in the modernist ethos of rational order and spatial coherence, the Static City gestures toward permanence, durability, and monumentality. Its built environment consists of such lasting materials as concrete and steel, glass and brick. Represented as two-dimensional space on conventional city maps, the Static City is constructed in conformity with the prescribed rules of conventional planning practice and in accordance with sound engineering principles – and firmly embedded within formal regulatory regimes of urban governance. With its high-rise buildings and signature architecture, the Static City offers the visual aesthetics of late modernity.Footnote 76
In contrast, the Kinetic City is impermanent, ephemeral, and spontaneous. It is a fluid city of perpetual motion – temporary in nature, haphazard in design, and disorderly in appearance. The Kinetic City is flexible and elastic, and by constantly reinventing itself, it is less a grand vision of what a city should be than a more-or-less random collection of small adjustments that occur not all at once but incrementally over time. Its oversaturated street densities and informal economies produce a sort of three-dimensional land use that collides with the one-dimensional zoning that characterizes the Static City. The Kinetic City consists not of the monumental architectural conceits of the privileged and wealthy, but the mundane architecture of everyday necessity and convenience characterized by incremental building and impermanent structures. The indeterminate spaces of the Kinetic City support the lives and livelihoods of those who use them, and hence, they hold associative values and convey meanings in their local context. The fragile built environment of the Kinetic City rests on an emergent architecture of contingency and malleability that adapts to its circumstances. Patterns of everyday use and occupation determine the form and perception of these indeterminate spaces. The microlevel collaborations and associational life that emerge from the indeterminate spaces of the Kinetic City typically take the form of informal spatial and entrepreneurial practices that in turn generate different (and sometimes conflicting) ideas about density and land use. The Kinetic City represents an everyday urbanism that conforms to its own local logic often at odds with the modernist fixation with rational and efficient order and with “highest and best use” of buildings and property.Footnote 77
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Kinetic City is not necessarily or exclusively the city of the poor, the damned, and the dead.Footnote 78 More appropriately, it constitutes “a temporal articulation and occupation of space,” which “suggests how the carefully demarcated spatial limits – both material and symbolic – of formal urbanism are expanded and stretched “to include formally unimaginable use in dense urban conditions.”Footnote 79 Nonconforming uses and high densities in the Kinetic City reshape the social fabric of urban space. Its built environment consists of discarded materials, recycled and reused in myriad ways. The Kinetic City consists of a haphazard assemblage of places and connections that appear chaotic and incomprehensible to the untrained eye. What often seems like a completely random, disaggregated, and improvised world can actually reveal, upon closer inspection, deliberately planned and structured activities that are linked with very “elaborate organizational networks.”Footnote 80
The nonconforming and self-organizing dynamics of the Kinetic City defy simple classification. Spaces of inventiveness and opportunity almost always intersect and blend with spaces of exploitation and despair. The Kinetic City represents a type of “stealth urbanism” – at once spontaneous and improvisational.Footnote 81 This kind of everyday urbanism is fashioned by urban dwellers outside the elite property-owning domains of the formal modernity of state institutions and their conventional regulatory regimes. Instead, it conforms to a kind of “pirate modernity” that has to slip under the legal regulatory armature of the city “simply in order to survive.”Footnote 82 The Kinetic City is characterized by small-scale tactics of encroachment that amount to an unofficial “planning from below.” These small acts of transgression and appropriation invariably cut again the grain of comprehensive, top-down strategies of control and containment. The do-it-yourself (DIY) urbanism of the Kinetic City is virtually impossible to manage and contain, let alone predict and measure.Footnote 83
Asymmetric Urbanism
The explosive growth of urbanization on a global scale has not only produced new centers of global power outside the core zones of the world economy but also exacerbated spatial divisions and social inequalities in cities everywhere. While rural-to-urban migration may have once offered the promise of amelioration and the opportunity to start afresh, life conditions in the sprawling megacities of hypergrowth have deteriorated for large segments of expanding urban populations. Simultaneously, conventional planning models – with their comprehensive master plans, the installation of ever-expanding infrastructure, and the basic provision of social services – have failed to adequately respond to the contradictory pressures of contemporary urbanism. Both the gentrifying impulses that have produced new luxury enclaves and the tactical urbanism of self-built housing have bypassed and ignored conventional regulatory frameworks, thereby undermining municipal efforts to impose conventional spatial planning rules. It is in this sense that informal practices – that is, activities that take place outside of official sanction – often appeal to the exemption or the “exception” in order to claim legitimacy without appealing to formal regulatory regimes.Footnote 84
Contrary to the roseate projections of free-market advocates of globalization, structural imbalances in the distribution of requisite resources both within and between cities have only become greater over the past three to four decades. Income disparities, socioeconomic divisions, and spatial inequalities have sharply increased not only in leading world-class cities at the core of the world economy but also in the rapidly expanding megacities of hypergrowth.Footnote 85 The proliferation of luxury enclaves in globalizing cities with world-class aspirations has proceeded in tandem with the expansion of vast zones of material deprivation. This polarization between enclaves of luxury and zones of hardship has accelerated the asymmetric imbalance at the core of twenty-first-century urbanism.Footnote 86
Looking at globalizing cities as hybrid assemblages of territorial fragments that are incongruously layered over existing urban landscapes enables us to better understand the blurred, fuzzy lines of contemporary asymmetrical urbanism with its contradictory logics and irregular patterns. The unavoidable pressures of globalization have fundamentally reshaped the trajectories of urbanization on a world scale. The increasing concentration of global flows – of finance, people, and ideas that insinuate themselves into the social fabric of cities everywhere – have reinforced socioeconomic inequalities.Footnote 87
Exploring the borderlands between the Static City and the Kinetic City enables us to expose uneven landscapes of contradiction where two distinct kinds of urbanism collide and overlap – one of difference/unevenness and one of juxtaposition/similarity.Footnote 88 The conflict between the planned city of the modernist imagination and the unplanned city of everyday use is reenacted at the crossing points between the Static City and the Kinetic City. The excess of overproduction in the Static City appears as so much ruin and waste. Yet the reassembly of this cast-off detritus becomes the building blocks of the Kinetic City, where the recycled “leftovers” create a kind of secondhand urbanism that insinuates itself in the interstitial spaces of the urban landscape. These largely invisible, asymmetrical connections reinforce the spatial unevenness of urban landscapes. The never-ending processes of reshaping and reusing of indeterminate spaces, voids, and unclaimed spaces blur the boundaries between the Static City and the Kinetic City. These recycling dynamics enact an odd mirroring effect linking the Static City and the Kinetic City in a mutually dependent but strangely choreographed inequality.Footnote 89 Compressed into an organic fabric of overlooked and forgotten spaces of the urban landscape, the Kinetic City constantly modifies and reinvents itself. By recycling discarded waste and retrofitting abandoned detritus, it “leaves no ruins.”Footnote 90 Often operating out of sight, this kind of intensive, recycled urbanism is emblematic of how informal settlements and self-built housing in fast-growing cities are expanding much more rapidly than the historic urban cores they abut and surround, creating different sets of rules for engagement with local development, and blurring the distinctions between formality and informality.Footnote 91 Salvaged materials and reclaimed spaces constitute the core of opportunistic urbanism.Footnote 92
The inability to plan and regulate the Kinetic City merely heightens the contradictions in the enclosed islands of concentrated wealth and privilege. In those globalizing cities with world-class aspirations, the steady accretion of new finance centers with global reach, upscale shopping and entertainment meccas, and gated residential communities has reshaped urban landscapes in ways unimaginable two to three decades ago. These building typologies are the visual expression of global integration. The steady profusion of roseate master plans for new mega-projects, the unveiling of glimmering images of high-rise business districts, and steady stream of strategic visioning exercises are emblematic of the one-dimensional imagination that planners, policymakers, and hired consultants bring to bear on decisions of future development.Footnote 93 These calls for remaking the city encapsulate the dreamscape of large-scale property developers seeking to achieve (and optimize) their global aspirations. City builders have locked onto schemes that call for a radical transformation of the physical fabric of urban landscapes. They regard these interventions as most fruitful and immediate way of reconfiguring urban landscapes in order to bring them into conformity with aspiring world-class cities seeking to advance in the rank order of importance. The construction of new airport gateways, high-rise office complexes, corporate business centers, high-speed motorways, bridges and flyovers, and convention centers form the critical building blocks that enable the Static City to announce its “coming-of-age” as a globalizing city. This unbridled optimism for a roseate future of prosperity and international recognition is matched by lingering anxiety about the disorderly effects of permanent poverty.Footnote 94
