The City and The City and Urban Inequality

In introducing the notion of inequality and the urban, I begin with a metaphor drawn from China Miéville’s 2009 novel The City & the City (Anderson, 2015). Miéville’s novel centres around two twin city-states, Besźel and Ul Qoma, which occupy the same geographical space. These two cities are inextricably intertwined at the street-level, with buildings, streets, and squares all arranged in an interlocking mosaic. Some areas even exist as ‘crosshatched’, whereby one side of a road or one half of a building may belong to one city while the other belongs to its neighbour. Despite this material and spatial intimacy, the two cities are intensely bordered through legislation, violent policing and self-regulation (à la Foucault’s governmentality; Han, 2017).

Kate Derickson delineates current approaches to urban theory into two broad approaches (2015). This section explores the logic of what she calls ‘Urbanisation 1’, which posits “capital and urbanization to be the mutually constitutive, dominant processes” through which urban inequality can be understood (2015: 651). In explaining this view, I focus less on the more recent work of Niel Brenner et al on ‘Planetary Urbanisation’ and more on their main influence: Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution begins with the hypothesis that society is “completely urbanized” (1970: 1). By this he means that cities exist as the central components in a world-spanning network of capitalist agglomeration by which material and value (“people, activities, wealth, goods, objects, instruments, means, and thought”; 1970: 14) are extracted and drawn inwards. He uses the metaphor of ‘implosion-explosion’ to refer to the dual processes by which the concentration of capital in urban forms (implosion) is reflected in the material transformation of peripheral territory into sites of extraction (explosion). An iconic example of this used by Brenner is the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, which have been radically transformed through processes of extraction that ultimately feed back towards cities. The inherent relationality of this approach is stressed by Sue Ruddick’s expression of ‘parasitic urbanism’, which would understand such a place as a “creatively destructive” ‘para-site’, where the urban centre feeds off of a periphery for growth (2015: 1116, 1122).

While there are obvious historically founded reasons why the South figures materially and imaginatively as a ‘colonial’ periphery and the North as a core , it is perhaps more suitable in the context of the ‘Urbanisation 1’ framework to nuance these geographical labels (drawing on postcolonial and world-systems theorists; Jazeel, 2021; Heynen, 2015). As Ananya Roy (a “key author“ in the ‘Urbanisation 2s’ stream according to Derickson) suggested in a lecture at Newcastle SAPL in 2013, “the Global South is of course not just in the South - it is everywhere”. The North and even the city itself can be understood as possessing intensely “fractilized” boundaries, as nested layers of space (from global to national to municipal to street scale) each divided into areas of ‘implosion’ and ‘explosion’ (Ruddick, 2015: 1116; Lefebvre, 1970). A particular city borough may be an overall site of ‘implosion’ and metabolic accumulation of capital while still containing buildings (which themselves can be divided at the room level) that are para-sites of ‘explosion’ and the extraction of material, labour, and rent (Heynen et al, 2005; Heynen, 2015). The Brandt Line, once imagined as neatly sweeping up and down between continents, dividing North from South, accumulation from extraction, and implosion from explosion, thus becomes scrambled and non-linear, snaking down every street and creeping along corridors.

~~~

Critiques that geography has been possessed by a “bizarre fetish” for the physical and grounded have been present since at least 2000s (Anderson & Wylie, 2009). However, urban theorists have generally managed to act on this criticism through a long-standing attunement to the social and immaterial nature of cities and an understanding that goes well beyond purely technical considerations of ‘solid’ infrastructural arrangements of pipes, pylons, and roads (Swyngedouw, 1996; Graham & Marvin, 2001; Simone, 2004; Amin & Thrift, 2016). As part of this, theorists have also sought to dismantle the modernist notion of an apolitical ‘networked city’, pointing towards how urban settlements have never been provisioned for through a single ‘central network’ (Coutard & Rutherford, 2015). Instead, cities are a shifting arrangement - always ‘in-the-making’ - of heterogeneous and overlapping infrastructures, a “socio-technical system” that augments the available technology with contextual practices of “management, regulation, cost recovery and customs” (Coutard & Rutherford, 2015: 11; McFarlane, 2011). These situations are ridden with power and fractally stacked in scale: from macro-scale state electricity provision to community-level customs around waste dumping to individual micro-scale instances of ‘jury-rigging’ and rainwater collection. The importance of embodied human activity within socio-technical systems is not to be understated. AbdouMaliq Simone provides the rhetoric of ‘people-as-infrastructure’ to describe the complex “conjunction” of collaboration and improvisation that emerges through people continually adapting to new needs and demands (2004). Simone’s ethnographic example of the Abidjan transport depot paints a rich picture of improvisation, as people rapidly shift role between “steerers, baggage loaders, ticket salespersons, hawkers, drivers, petrol pumpers, and mechanics” with the outcome of maximised efficiency in spite of the absence of a formal organisational structure (2004: 410).

Between these different manifestations of the central conceit of a socio-technical system, one can see a Deleuzian notion of ‘bricolage’ emerge, whereby material and bodies are constantly rearranged into new configurations (Deleuze, 1977; while Colin McFarlane draws on Deleuze in his 2011 paper on assemblage theory, I find that the rhetorical emphasis on ‘bottom-up’ creativity offered by the term bricolage more grounded and appropriate). These situations are marked by an intense potentiality and multiplicity, as autonomous actants operate in ways “previously unimaginable” in order to construct a lasting community for themselves or simply make a wage for the day (Simone, 2004; Amin, 2014; Coutard & Rutherford, 2015: 7). This can be summarised by the work of Charlotte Lemanski and Ash Amin’s, who understand infrastructure as a ‘lived’ process of ongoing contestation and reciprocal meaning-making that helps to forge a situated “politics of citizenship and power” (Amin, 2014: 516; Lemanski, 2020).

Post-script:

This was assembled (or "bricolaged") from some plans I'd written to plonk into my undergraduate final exam essays should the relevant topic arise. A friend doing a project on an interesting topic and wanted to have these plans available on the internet to cite, hence me putting them here.