Introduction

Over the last few decades in urban studies, a considerable critique and a vast opening of comparative urbanism arose out of postcolonial studies and Southern theory, challenging universal understandings emanating from European and North American cities. This critique energized a reconsideration of the need to construct global hierarchies of cities, the criteria for positioning on such hierarchies, and the desirability of policy making aimed to boost a city's rankings on them. This literature called into question the meaning of urbanism and the roles, functions, and shapes of urban areas, when accepted understandings for these derive from Euro-American contexts and all other cities are measured against them. This has led to an ongoing rethinking of how to do global urban studies. This is an exciting time for urban studies, but an unsettling time. Part of the excitement and unease rests with this rethinking going on around the field, but another part involves what is going on, on the ground, for urban areas. These two parts are inseparable: scholars are rethinking urbanism because urbanism itself is changing so quickly.

This book builds on the opening toward recentering global urban studies, through engagement with postcolonialism and global South thinking. I work toward empirical illustrations of how lesser-studied urbanisms in the global South relate to one another. The argument builds from postcolonial studies and Southern theory. The aim is an analysis of select urban regions that have mostly remained off the map of urban studies and perceived as disconnected from one another. I use the case study urban areas, and themes which link them, to engage debates in global urban studies about urbanism and urbanization – debates that have still largely been shaped by theories from the global North, even when empirical analysis extends to the global South.

My title is Rethinking urbanism, and my main interest lies with both meanings attached to the word urbanism: the more common understanding of it as a way of life, and the architecture and planning deployment of it as a spatial pattern or urban design. Urbanization is the multifaceted process creating urbanism – both cities and metropolitan regions. The study of urbanism and urbanization is staggering in breadth and complexity.

Introduction

Urban theory still has a ‘Southern’ problem, despite two decades of sustained critique of global-North-centered theories of urbanization. The problem may be different in different schools of thought, but most paths leave an enduring lacuna where global South intellectual understandings and conceptualizations of urbanization and globalization processes would otherwise drive scholarly analysis. In the previous chapter, indigenous, postcolonial, and Southern approaches and ideas helped to ‘re-member’ the historical geography of the urbanization process for Hartford, its ‘dis-membered’ indigeneity, its Blues epistemology, its people-as-infrastructure, its trans-territorial connections. The goal in this chapter is to explore an urban comparison across the global South, from southern China to two urban places in Africa (Dakar and Zanzibar), conceptualizing from outside global North frameworks when looking at land-use patterns in urbanization. I assess the utility of the intertwined Chinese ideas of chengzhongcun, chengbiancun, and chengwaicun, translated as a village ‘inthe-city’, ‘on-the-city-suburb-edge’, and ‘in the suburb’ in English, in scholarship analyzing rapid urbanization in China's Pearl River Delta over the last 40 years, for analyzing similarly rapid processes in sub-Saharan Africa over a similar period. The chapter ends with a segment exploring comparability for the terms and patterns in Port of Spain, San Juan, and Hartford.

This book aims to highlight the importance of Southern urban thinking and insights for developing a truly global urban studies. This importance resonates in many contexts – even in places conventionally mapped with the North – but it is surely evident when studying Chinese or Sub-Saharan African urbanization. Urbanizing processes in China and Africa are quite old, and quite planetarily far back in time, predating today's neoliberal globalization (which is itself far too often understood only from global North conceptualizations; see Carmody and Owusu 2016). There is ample latitude for detailing the specificities of globalizing processes over centuries, as Meier (2016) and Prestholdt (2008) have done for the Swahili coast. The Pearl River Delta (PRD) – including Hong Kong, Foshan, Guangzhou, Dongguan, Shenzhen, Macau, Zhuhai, Huizhou, Jiangmen, Zhaoqing, and Zhongshan, a collection of cities also identified as the Greater Bay Area (GBA) – has been a key node connecting China with the world for centuries.

Introduction

In June 2016, I was standing with a dozen US college students and colleagues on a street corner in Xiaobei, the ‘Chocolate City’ of Guangzhou, known for its African traders (Castillo 2014). My colleague, Xiangming Chen, and I were conversing with a Nigerian businessman, who told us he had come to Guangzhou to source molds for making plastic bottles for a Lagos water-bottling factory. We asked him what impressions he had of Guangzhou, as well as of Chinese investors and goods in Africa. He said, ‘there is good China and bad China. Many African countries get bad China and the West gets good China.’ Whether good or bad, he concluded, the reality is that ‘the whole world is made in China’.

This chapter focuses on this ‘made’ world, and specifically the urban world produced by the networks and interconnections of China's ‘go West/go global’ strategy and ‘Belt and Road’ initiative (Chen 2018), emphasizing urban sub-Saharan Africa. The concentration lies with infrastructure. Airports, seaports, railroads, highways, oil and gas pipelines, drainage networks, mining facilities, agri-business farmfactories, new cities, neighborhoods or housing developments, manufacturing factories, stadiums, and other infrastructure projects comprise the majority of investments from China in Africa, the rest of Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America (Xue et al. 2019). Chinese infrastructure investments are increasingly significant in the global North. By 2018, Cosco Shipping Ports and China Merchants Port Holdings, two major Chinese firms, controlled one fourth to one half of shipping in and out of Rotterdam, Antwerp, Hamburg, and Piraeus – four of Europe's seven largest seaports (Huang 2018). As of 2019, new trains for Boston's subway and surface rail network were produced by a Chinese firm in Springfield, Massachusetts. Chinese investments in other case study cities of the book – Port of Spain and Hartford, especially – are also becoming more significant. The Shanghai Construction Company built the performing arts center dominating the southern edge of Port of Spain's Queen's Park Savannah. A Chinese state-owned enterprise redeveloped Port of Spain's port (Inter-American Dialogue 2018). The New York-and China-based financial-technology firm Ideanomics purchased the University of Connecticut's former West Hartford campus in 2018 to build a US $283 million ‘Fintech Village’ there (Lurye 2018).

I want to begin this book with a personal explanation of what gave rise to its shape, and then a brief outline of that shape. The Martinican poet and writer Edouard Glissant, upon whom I rely at numerous moments in the text, insisted throughout his career that, in J. Michael Dash's (1995: 14) translation and rephrasing, ‘one must return to one’s place’, not in a desperate ‘longing for origins’ but in a ‘return to the point of entanglement’. In this book, I take that return to the point of entanglement seriously, on personal as well as academic-scholarly and political levels. I start from where I stand, as a professor of urban studies in Hartford, Connecticut, and I move on to some of my placeworlds, circling back frequently to Hartford and to Zanzibar, Tanzania, where I conducted my dissertation research and have returned on six subsequent research projects over the last 30 years.

When people first meet one another, one may ask, ‘where are you from?’ Like anyone, I have short answers ready for this occasion. But I am made up of entanglements. I am from the cities I have lived in; I am from other cities where I have worked, for this book and others. I am from the places where my ancestors lived. I am, like everyone, from the planet. My identity is constructed from links between urban areas whose identities are similarly intertwined, in relation. My ‘point of entanglement’ is the ever-shifting landscape of elsewheres and realms of debate in which I have lived and worked.

The urban areas on which I focus in this book are tied to one another without me, but my positionality is part of why I chose them as geographic sites for illustrating my arguments. I concentrate on these urban areas: Hartford; Zanzibar; Port of Spain, Trinidad; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Cape Coast, Ghana; Dakar, Senegal; and Shenzhen, Dongguan and Guangzhou in China's Pearl River Delta (PRD). I live and work in Hartford, where 34 percent of the population comes from Puerto Rico, with sizable Ghanaian, Trinidadian, and Chinese communities; this metropolitan area's industrialization and growth came from its ties with the US South, the West Indies, and Africa.

Introduction

This chapter applies global South ideas to an examination of planetary urbanization in an urban area conventionally located in the global North – Hartford, Connecticut. Southern concepts are highly relevant to understanding and remapping Hartford as a global urbanism. Developing an historical geography from indigenous, postcolonial, and Southern angles gives opportunities for detailing the specificities of planetarizing processes. Scholars need to look at longer-term processes producing planetary urbanization from elsewhere, to erase blind spots that universalizing theorizations produce (Dantas and Hart 2018). Global South approaches provide tools to see the making of urban areas like Hartford from margins that run parallel to and connect with Northern understandings.

It is still helpful to begin with those Northern understandings, to set the context for why Southern approaches are necessary. As of 2019, Hartford was the US's 47th-largest Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), with more than 1.2 million people. The city of Hartford is the MSA's core urban area, with around 125,000 people. In the late 19th century, it was the US's most prosperous hub of industrial wealth, but it fell into decline after 1960. Now, it is a shrinking post-industrial city surrounded by flat-lining suburbia (Myers 2014). Between 2010 and 2016, it was one of only four MSAs (with Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo) among the 50 largest MSAs in the US to be declining in population.

Deindustrialization and shrinkage began in manufacturing – first with the suburbanization of production, and then with out-migration to cheaper global regions, in the 1960s and 1970s (Walsh 2013). Some product manufacturing upon which Hartford built its industrial base, like typewriters, became obsolete, and Hartford did not become the manufacturing locus for replacement technologies (that is, for typewriters, computers). The initial blue-collar decline was balanced for a time by Hartford's continued strength in white-collar, high-end services, depicted in shorthand by the US census employment code FIRE: finance, insurance, and real estate. But the FIRE burned out; employment rolls in these sectors peaked in Hartford in 1988 – ‘the insurance city’ has been losing insurance companies, headquarters, and jobs for more than 30 years (Chen and Shemo 2013; Walsh 2013).

Twenty-first century Hartford presents a paradox.

Introduction

Urban studies has developed a vast interest in transnational urbanism in part for analyzing the confusing, contested, and sometimes hardto-see flows of human beings in the contemporary era. As with many developments within global urban studies, both the theoretical and empirical dimensions of this work are dominated by global North scholarly interests and trends. Literature on global, globalizing, or world cities has long focused on the transformative impacts of migration. On one hand, researchers highlight the importance of transnational elites, and, on the other, floating populations of marginalized global South residents in globalizing cities (Benton-Short, Price and Friedman 2005). An increasing area of interest resides with those in between.

Most literature on transnational migration and urbanism has centered on global South migrants’ impacts in global North cities. This has produced valuable outcomes, like Smith's (2005: 237) argument that new transnational migrants ‘forge… translocal connections and create the translocalities that increasingly sustain new modes of being-in-theworld’. Translocal is a useful term for both horizontal and vertical ‘relations across different locations’ in the contemporary era of globalization and planetary urbanization, because it ‘incorporates the tension and interplay between mobility and situatedness, movement and stability’ (Verne 2012: 17– 18). This chapter focuses on migrants’ translocalities, but by looking at what happens in global South urban contexts from which translocal migrants originate and to which they often return or circulate. It builds from scholarly analysis, but also from cultural works, since literature (the heart of postcolonial studies) and other arts provide vivid illustrations of Southern perspectives on these translocalities, on the ‘underside of our history’ essential to the continued ‘durability of our world’ (Mbembe 2017: 181).

What emerges across these diverse settings is something Glissant termed ‘the force of a people’, where each place becomes a ‘meeting space where all worlds intermingle, an anchorage point connected to all the elsewheres’ (Rosemberg 2016: 324). Glissant called this intermingling of places ‘creolization’: this is ‘a relation of resistance and of affirmation of difference, born in the Caribbean’, where ‘creolization is marked by the inherent violence of the slave trade’ (Rosemberg 2016: 325). Slavery and indentured servitude mark much of the narrative of creolization in this chapter, alongside colonialism. However, my emphasis lies in how these cities’ writers and artists seek to move beyond or come to grips with the colonial (and post-colonial) wounds.

Introduction

Analysis of urban politics is in flux within global urban studies. For years, the predominant focus of global North urban studies in analyzing urban politics resided with understanding growth machines and urban regimes (Logan and Molotch 1987; Ross and Levine 2012; Stone 1989). Recently, there has been a general change in focus from discreet units at scale (that is a city government) to a ‘relational’ approach, because ‘a bounded city perspective has become increasingly problematized with a growing recognition that socio-spatial relations have transformed as a consequence of globalization processes’ (Davidson and Martin 2014: 3). More attention is paid to relationships between cities or to how urban areas’ politics are networked than to how finite governments, local party politics, or elite machines operate to run a city. This stress on relationality ‘has highlighted the increasingly open, porous and inter-connected configuration of territorial entities’ in politics (Ward 2014: 48). Such insights led to policy research emphases on ‘the movement… of policies from one place to another and how… the processes of comparison and learning compared’ (Ward 2014: 51).

What does this work look like, viewed from the global South? How do urbanists from the global South or those focused on its cities approach these arenas of scholarship? As with the infrastructure turn, some Southern or Southern-focused scholars utilize or build from priorities or theoretical leads of Northern scholarship, even when critiquing those leads. But there are also alternative starting places for thinking about urban politics and policies from Southern and postcolonial perspectives. This chapter is focused on five arenas of policy mobilities: participatory budgeting, bus rapid transit, enclave urbanism, sister-city relationships, and climate change adaptation/mitigation. The emphasis resides with how the book's case study cities intersect with these arenas.

Urban politics and policies in flux

This book's case study urban areas display different and changing configurations of government and governance maps, a diverse set of issues surrounding global relationality, distinctive formal and informal political landscapes, and variations in relative capacities for devising and implementing urban policies. In this segment, these cities’ experiences with governance and politics are contextualized as part of the pervasive uncertainty currently about the roles of the public, private, and popular sectors in governance, governing, and politics in global South urbanisms.

Introduction

In 1927 and 1949, botanist Robert Orchard Williams produced compilations on the plants of two island colonies of Britain. In The useful and ornamental plants of Trinidad & Tobago and The useful and ornamental plants of Zanzibar & Pemba, Williams provided brief entries on these colonies’ botanical wealth. These books were encyclopedic tomes whose intentions were scientific and somewhat innocuous. This chapter subjects the broader colonial context of urban landscapemaking around them to a critical reading. The concentration lies with the actual work of landscape-making in the colonial regimes from the 1920s through the 1950s, shaping nature in urban Trinidad and Zanzibar in the interest of British colonial rule.

British colonialism's urban parks and gardens in both settings are the focus. This includes the botanical gardens that Williams oversaw in both colonies, and the roles these played in using space to shape colonial society. The chapter then travels through alternative landscapes and urban environments produced by the colonized peoples in both places, including into the post-colonial era. As one looks at the relation of cities to one another in this era, one certainly sees the roles of colonialism in producing urban space and nature in its interests in many parts of the global South. A wide variety of colonialisms impacted the urban landscapes of the global South, including the ‘corporate colonialism’ of companies like United Fruit Company in the Caribbean and Central America (Martin 2018). Regardless of this variation, nearly everywhere one also sees that ordinary residents reframed and reconfigured these landscapes into something different. Where colonial mindsets endured into the post-colonial period, they nevertheless were refracted into different urban environmental politics and urban cultures of nature. In both settings, the postcolonial urbanism is ‘thoroughly hybrid, [and] thoroughly corrupted’, and postcolonialism can be both ‘an urban condition’ and a ‘deconstructive methodology’ (Roy 2011b: 308). The post-colonial stories of urban nature in Trinidad and Zanzibar offer another manifestation of the ‘heterogeneous conjunctive symbiosis’ discussed in the previous chapter for Southern urbanism in the 21st century: divergent urban contexts grow, together, into postcolonial landscapes where the ‘particular’ and the myriad variety of particularities appear (Glissant 2009).

Rethinking urbanism means rethinking it from the ground up, from literal and metaphorical places ‘South’ of where urbanism has been previously defined. This book is reckoning with a world of interconnected cities linked to one another in a process of planetary urbanization, but which I have tried to see here, following Glissant, as a process of everchanging ‘relation’ between cities. Glissant emphasized the importance of returning to the ‘point of entanglement’, and I have attempted to do so in numerous ways in this book. Many scholars from Slater (1992) to Robinson (2016a) and beyond have stressed the centrality that learning from ‘elsewheres’ must assume in a cosmopolitan and truly global urban studies. With the growing literature of planetary urbanization pushing toward a more global urban studies, my aim here has been to recenter the discussion southward, with that ‘South’ reconceived.

This book asked what has been shaping contemporary urbanism and urbanization for the new urban planet, and what shapes urbanism and urbanization take. A half-dozen thematic starting places toward answers were suggested. Historical processes – from the ‘underside of our history’ – genocide and persistence, slavery and emancipation, and, perhaps most of all, colonialism and postcolonialism, remain central to the making and reframing of urban areas and urban environments. Along with colonial processes, the geographical patterns of land use planning and design and resistance to them form another starting place. Migration, translocality, and their cultural creations served as another. Infrastructure and trade joined flows of policies as further means for analyzing the urban planet.

Walsh and Mignolo (2018: 1) stress that ideas such as ‘pluriversal’ thinking or relationality are not means to replace one universalism with another; to claim to be ‘in possession of a decolonial universal truth would not be decolonial at all’. Thus, this book is not arguing for replacing what Glissant would call a Euro-American ‘mono-root’ with a different mono-root. Likewise, neither the thematic starting places nor my urban areas of focus could be considered comprehensive or all-encompassing. Thinking of ‘common pots’ as a way of reimagining the urban planet does not mean saying everyone fits in the same pot.

Fluidity and mobility flow through the chapters. This is literally the case for the cities examined, since all are or were port cities. But the fluidity is also metaphorical.