Professional Documents
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Cities or Urbanization?
Cities or Urbanization?
Cities or urbanization?
a
David Harvey
a
Professor of Geography , The Johns Hopkins University ,
Published online: 12 Mar 2007.
To cite this article: David Harvey (1996) Cities or urbanization?, City: analysis of urban
trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 1:1-2, 38-61, DOI: 10.1080/13604819608900022
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Cities or urbanization?
David Harvey
Professor of Geography, The Johns Hopkins University
The way we see our cities affects the poli- But judging superficially by the present state
cies and actions we undertake. Is our way of the world's cities, future generations will not
of seeing dominated and limited by an find that civilization particularly congenial.
obsession with 'the city' as a thing, one Every city has its share (often increasing and in
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Central cities throughout actual state of social and, even more emphatically,
continental Europe are, for race relations (for all the campus rhetoric on polit-
ical correctness) far worse now than it has been for
example, undergoing a several decades.
singular revival. But, on But is this a universal tale of urban woe I tell?
inspection, all this really Or is it something rather more confined to the spe-
signifies is that the same cific legacies of old-style capitalist industrialization
and the cultural predilections of the anti-urban
problematic divisions get Anglo-Saxon way of life? Central cities throughout
geographically reversed. It is continental Europe are, for example, undergoing
the periphery that is hurting a singular revival. And such a trend is not merely
confined to a few centres, like Paris with its long-
and the soulless banlieu of standing process of embourgeoisement accelerated
Paris and Lyon that have by all the grands prqjets for which the French are
become the centres of riot justly famous. From Barcelona to Hamburg to
Turin to Lille, the flow of population and affluence
and disaffection, of racial back into the city centres is marked. But, on
discrimination and inspection, all this really signifies is that the same
harassment, of problematic divisions get geographically reversed.
It is the periphery that is hurting and the soulless
deindustrialization and social banlieu of Paris and Lyon that have become the
decay. centres of riot and disaffection, of racial discrimi-
•••••••••••••••I
nation and harassment, of deindustrialization and
while 40,000 disappeared from Sheffield's steel social decay. And if we look more closely at what
industry alone in just three short catastrophic has been happening in the Anglo-Saxon world, the
years in the mid 1980s. Baltimore likewise lost evidence suggests a dissolution of that simple
nearly 200,000 manufacturing jobs from the late 'doughnut' urban form of inner city decay sur-
1960s onwards and there is hardly a single city in rounded by suburban affluence (made so much of
the United States that has not been the scene of in the late 1960s), and its replacement by a com-
similar devastation through deindustrialization. plex checkerboard of segregated and protected
The subsequent train of events has been tragic wealth in an urban soup of equally segregated
for many. Communities built to service now impoverishment and decay. The unjustly infa-
defunct manufacturing industries have been left mous 'outer estates' of Glasgow are interspersed
high and dry, wracked with long-term structural with affluent commuter suburbs and the now
unemployment. Disenchantment, dropping out, emerging socio-economic problems of the inner
and quasi-legal means to make ends meet follow. suburbs in many US cities have forced the wealthy
Those in power rush to blame the victims, the seeking security either further out (the urbaniza-
concerning one of the most powerful mental attrib- by main force and so never become real revolu-
utes of modem urban life) towards the degenera- tions. Having lost the fear of imminent revolution
tion of our cities leaves much to be desired. that so preoccupied the nineteenth-century bour-
But here, the difference between then and now geois, all that is left is an occasional shiver of
comes more clearly into play. For at the end of the media-instilled fear as the riots taking place on the
nineteenth century the ideal of some sort of aggre- other side of town play live on television screens in
gate human progress, though driven by the capi- terrifyingly comfortable living rooms.
talist passion for 'accumulation for accumulation's
sake and production for production's sake' (to use
Marx's felicitous phrase), seemed to have at least Corporations don't seem to
some semblance of a hopeful future attached to it
as capitalist industry became more organized and
need cities or particular
as the political economy of urbanization became communities any more. The
seemingly more manageable by reorganizations in upshot is to leave the fate of
urban governance (the London County Council
was set up in 1888 and Greater New York in
the cities almost entirely at
1898). As the fate of whole metropolitan regions the mercy of real estate
became more closely attached to the fate of suc- developers and speculators,
cessful capital accumulation, so bourgeois
reformism in city hall became integrated into
office builders and finance
hegemonic strategies for capitalist development. capital. And the bourgeoisie,
"The large urban centers,' Lees (1991, p. 153) cor- though still mortally afraid of
rectly observes, 'embodied modernity and the
future' and 'stood for industry, centralization, and
crime, drugs, and all the other
for rationality.' For all the populist and often anti- ills that plague the cities, is
urban rhetoric to the contrary, the coevolution now seemingly content to seal
(often dialectical and oppositional) of industrial-
ization and urban politics seemed set fair to dictate
itself off from all of that.
a happier future for city dwellers.
Compared to that the contemporary divorce, In recent years, the affluent also seem to have
manifest most dramatically in the dismal history of shed much of their guilty conscience. The extra-
massive deindustrialization, between highly ordinary impact of Harrington's The Other
mobile and compulsively 'downsizing' corporate America: Poverty in the USA when it was published
manufacturing interests and urban life, would, in 1962 (and the subsequent 'war on poverty' and
therefore, have looked most unusual to our fore- massive attempts to confront 'the urban critics' in
bears. The corporate enemy has largely moved out the United States) would not be possible in today's
of town and corporations don't seem to need cities world where tendentious biological explanations
ization was limited by a very specific metabolic cities trod relatively lightly on the ecosystems that
relation between cities and their productive hin- sustained them and were bioregionally defined.
terlands coupled with the surplus extraction pos-
• • • • • • • • i
sibilities (grounded in specific class relations) that
sustained them. No matter that certain towns and The recycling of city nightsoils
cities were centres of long-distance trade in luxu- and other urban wastes into
ries or that even some basic goods, like grains, salt, the hinterland was a major
hides and timber could be moved over long dis-
tances, the basic provisioning (feeding, watering element in that sustainable
and energy supply) of the city was always limited pattern of urbanization,
by the restricted productive capacity of a relatively making medieval cities seem
confined hinterland. Cities were forced to be 'sus-
tainable' to use a currently much favoured word, somewhat of a virtuous
because they had to be. The recycling of city night- bioregionalist form of
soils and other urban wastes into the hinterland organization for many
was a major element in that sustainable pattern of
urbanization, making medieval cities seem some-
contemporary ecologists
what of a virtuous bioregionalist form of organi-
zation for many contemporary ecologists (though What changed all this, of course, was the wave
what now looks virtuous must have smelled putrid of new technologies (understood as both hardware
at the time - 'the worse a city smelled,' notes and the software of organizational forms) gener-
Guillerme (1988, p. 171), 'the richer it was'). ated by the military-industrial complex of early
From time to time the hinterlands of cities got capitalism. For reasons that I have elsewhere elab-
extended by forced trade and conquest (one thinks orated on at length, capitalism as a mode of pro-
of North African wheat supply to imperial Rome) duction has necessarily targeted the breaking
and of course localized productivity gains in agri- down of spatial barriers and the acceleration of
culture or forestry (sometimes a short-run phe- turnover time as fundamental to its agenda of
nomenon that lasted until such time as soil relentless capital accumulation (Harvey, 1982:
exhaustion set in) and the variable social capacity 1989a; 1989b). The overcoming of spatial barriers
to squeeze surpluses from a reluctant rural popu- and the restraints of particularity of location
lation typically made the constraints on urban through the production of a particular space of
growth elastic rather than rigid. But the security of transport and communications (and the conse-
the city economy depended crucially upon the quent 'annihilation of space through time' to use
qualities of its localized metabolic support system, Marx's felicitous phrase) has been of enormous
in which local environmental qualities (the significance within the historical dynamic of cap-
breeding grounds of pestilences, plagues and dis- italism, turning that dynamic into a very geo-
eases of all sorts that periodically decimated urban graphical affair. Many if not all of the major
innovations has allowed a radical shift in the way once it was applied to cities in the nineteenth cen-
that space is organized and therefore opened up tury: a given head of water flowing down one pipe
radically new possibilities for the urban process. can provision no more than 5,000 people but that
Breaking with the dependency upon relatively same head of water when flowed around a net-
confined bioregions opened up totally new vistas work can provision twenty times that. This is a
of possibilities for urban growth. Cronon's study of useful general metaphor for urban growth possi-
Chicago, Nature's Metropolis, tells in this regard an bilities: the development of an interrelated net-
exemplary tale of how the rapid urbanization of work of cities drawing upon a variety of
that city in the nineteenth century was precisely hinterlands permits an aggregate urban grov/th
geared to the human realization of these new pos- process radically greater than that achievable for
sibilities with the effect that the footprint of the city each in isolation.
across the whole of the American Midwest and
Since the mid Sixties, to take another example
west became ever larger as its metabolic-ecological
of a phase in which innumerable innovations
relations changed and as it itself grew in a few
(including the necessary mathematical knowl-
years into one of the largest cities in the world.
edges) have bundled together to create a new syn-
And internally, as Platt (1991) so brilliantly shows
ergism of urbanizing possibilities, we have
in his Chicago-based study of The Electric City, the
witnessed a reorganization in spatial configura-
progress of electrification allowed the construction
tions and urban forms under conditions of yet
of radically new and dispersed urban forms.
another intense round in the reduction of spatial
Each round of innovation breaking the barriers barriers and speedup in turnover time. The 'global
of space and time has provided new possibilities. village' of which Marshall McCluhan specula-
The steam engine, to take just one highly signifi- tively wrote in the 1960s has become, at least in
cant historical example, liberated the energy some senses, a reality. McCluhan thought that
supply of cities from relatively inefficient and television would be the vehicle but in truth it was
highly localized constraints, at the same time as it probably the launching of the sputnik that pre-
freed local hinterlands from a chronic conflict over saged the break, ushering in as it did a new age of
whether to use the land for food or firewood (con- satellite communication. But, as in other areas, it
temporary students now find it very odd, for is less a single innovation than the total bundle that
example, that one of the closer rings of production counts. Containerization, jet-cargo systems, roll-
with which von Thunen surrounded his city in 77K on-roll-off ferries, truck design and, just as impor-
Isolated State of the early nineteenth century is tant, highway design to support greater weights,
given over to forestry). But the steam engine could have all helped to reduce the cost and time of
only accomplish its revolutionary role to the moving goods over space, while automatic infor-
degree that it was in turn applied to a field of trans- mation processing, optimization and control sys-
port and communications: the coal had to be tems, satellite communication, cellular phones
shunted around. It was and is, therefore, the total and computer technologies, all facilitate the
bundle of innovations and the synergism that almost instantaneous communication, collation
tral Los Angeles - the traditional industrial core of the city - bore the brunt of the decline in manufacturing
employment, losing 70,000 high-wage, stable jobs between 1978 and 1982.
At the same time these well-paying and stable jobs were disappearing from South Central Los Angeles, local
employers were seeking alternative sites for their manufacturing activities. As a consequence of these seem-
ingly routine decisions, new employment growth nodes of'technopoles' emerged in the San Fernando Valley,
in the San Gabriel Valley, and in El Segundo near the airport in Los Angeles County, as well as in nearby
Orange County. In addition, a number of Los Angeles-based firms, including Hughes Aircraft, Northrop, and
Rockwell, as well as a host of smaller firms, participated in this deconcentration process. Such capital flight,
in conjunction with the plant closings, has essentially closed offto the residents of South Central Los Angeles
access to what were formerly well-paying, unionized jobs.
It is important to note that, while new industrial spaces were being established elsewhere in Los Angeles
County (and in nearby Orange County as well as along the US-Mexico border), new employment opportu-
nities were emerging within or near the traditional industrial core in South Central Los Angeles. But, unlike
the manufacturing jobs that disappeared from this area, the new jobs are in competitive sector industries, which
rely primarily on undocumented labour and pay, at best, minimum wage.
LOS ANGELES
O U NT Y Major technopole
Q Minor technopole
CRAFT
SPECIALTY
INDUSTRIES Dominant
Garment Ethnic/Racial
• over 100 employees
Group
• 25-99
• 1-24
White
Jewelry | 1 Hispanic
A over 30
A 20-30
| | Black
A1-19 E%%j Asian
Furniture Sowrc* U.S. C«nsus. 1990 I H Mixed
Text and figure from Melvin Oliver, James H. Johnson and Walter FarreU's chapter 'Anatomy of a Rebellion...',
in Robert Gooding-Williams (ed.), Reading Rodney King, Routledge, 1993 (see also pp 190-2).
property and landed capital, statist capital, and is a far more populist search to take advantage of
agro-business capital - to take the most familiar capitalist produced possibilities no matter whether
factional breakdown of the capitalist class config- capital accumulation is going on or not, and often
uration (the other being local, national and multi- in the face of economic conditions that are just as,
national capitals) - have radically different needs if not more appalling than, those left behind. And,
as well as radically different ways in which to while one of the effects may be to create vast
explore the possibilities of exploiting the web of 'informal economies' which operate both as proto-
urbanization for purposes of capital accumulation. capitalist sectors and as feeding grounds for more
Tensions arise between the factions because they conventional forms of capitalist exploitation and
each have quite different capabilities for and accumulation (see Portes, Castells and Benton,
interest in geographical movement - varying from 1989), the explanation of the movement in itself
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the relatively fixed-in-space capital of property, can hardly be attributed to the machinations of
landed and 'local' small-scale capital and the some organized capitalist class action.
instantaneous capacities for movement of transna-
tional finance. Much of the creative destruction we
are now witnessing within the urban process has The massive forced and
to be understood in terms of such internal contra- unforced migrations of
dictions within the dynamics of overall capital
accumulation. But the other part of it comes from peoples now taking place in
the increasingly ruinous competition between the world will have as much if
places (be they nation states, regions, cities or even not greater significance in
smaller local jurisdictions) as they find themselves
forced to sell themselves at the lowest cost to lure shaping urbanization in the
highly mobile capital to earth. twenty-first century as the
powerful dynamic of
Alternative urbanization
unrestrained capital mobility
But the other perspective from which to view the
recent history of urbanization is in terms of pop-
and accumulation.
ular (if not 'populist') seizure of the possibilities
that capitalist technologies have created. To some The continuing flow of Asiatic and African
degree this is about the vast historical migrations populations into European countries and the Asi-
of labour in response to capital, from one region to atic and Latino flows into North America exhibit
another if not from one continent to another. That similar qualities producing some wonderfully
formulation basically made most sense in the instructive contrasts right in the heart of capitalist
nineteenth and even the early twentieth centuries cities. Within earshot of Bow Bells in London, for
(though there were always exceptions such as the example, one finds the extraordinary power of
flood of Irish overseas in the wake of the potato international finance capital moving funds almost
famine that may have been prompted by condi- instantaneously round the world cheek-by-jowl
tions of imposed agrarian capitalism but which with a substantial Bengali population (largely
was hardly a 'normal' migration of rural popula- unemployed in any conventional sense) that has
tion in search of urban liberties and waged labour). built a strong migratory bridge into the heart of
But the flood of people into developing country capitalist society in search of new possibilities in
cities is not fundamentally tied to the pulls of spite of rampant racism and increasingly low-
employment attached to capital accumulation or wage, informal and temporary working possibili-
even to the pushes of a reorganizing agrarian cap- ties. Here, too, the industrial reserve army that
italism destructive of traditional peasantries such migratory movements create may become an
(though there are many segments of the world active vehicle for capital accumulation by low-
where that process is very strongly in evidence). It ering wages but the migratory movement itself,
into even more sclerotic ways of thinking. largely governed by a dialectical way of thinking in
which (a) processes are regarded as in some ways
more fundamental than things and (b) processes
'Urbanists' face one common are always mediated through the things they pro-
duce, sustain and dissolve. Here is, I would sug-
problem: how to plan the gest, the first point of a radical break that must be
construction of the next made with late nineteenth-century thinking. For at
layers in the urban palimpsest that time, the predominant conclusion, in spite of
all the emphasis upon social relations and
in ways that match future processes, was that the city was a thing that could
wants and needs without be engineered successfully in such a way as to con-
doing too much violence to all trol, contain, modify or enhance social processes.
Olmstead, Geddes, Howard, Burnham, Sitte,
that has gone before.
••••••••••••••••••I
1 Locating 'the uiban' in social theory thinks of Saunders (1981) and more recently of
I begin with the touchy problem of how to situate Savage and Warde (1993) - press the view that the
the urban process in relation to other seemingly fundamental problems of society cannot be defined
more fundamental facets of social action. This as urban per se and that attempts to press the
problem is touchy in part because all manner of urbanization issue into service as the political-eco-
disciplinary rivalries and hierarchical presump- nomic or social touchstone of political-economic
tions within the organization of our own knowl- and cultural change are seriously misguided.
edge of the world are involved. In general those In my view this whole debate is erroneously
tend to relegate the 'urban' to the backwaters of specified and its premisses need to be dismantled
conceptual concern in social theory. Urban eco- if we are to get anywhere substantial in our con-
nomics, urban politics, urban sociology, and the templation of the dilemmas of societal change in
like, are all now regarded as relatively inferior sub- the twenty-first century. But the difficulty is deeply
jects within their respective disciplinary fields. embedded. It actually lies with the more general
Geography is the only discipline to have made the issue of how to construe the importance of space
urban one of its flagship departments and that puts and time in social action. If, for example, the
me in the awkward position of seeming to claim absolute Newtonian-Cartesian view (rendered far
some extra disciplinary credit if I argue, as I shall, less contradictory though no less contentious by
for the importance of understanding the urban Kant) - that space is separable from time and that
political-economic, social and cultural problems. space is a passive container of social action -
But there is a conceptual hiatus here. Do we holds, then the question of the urban can be quite
attribute the difficulties of contemporary life to the reasonably construed as merely the incidental and
contradictions of capitalism, to modernity (or its contingent geographical site of political-economic,
chaotic nemesis postmodernity), to the traumas of environmental and social processes unfolding in
industrialization (and postindustrialization), to the time. But the more we learn to think of what Henri
disenchantment of the world that comes with tech- Lefebvre (1991) calls 'the production of space' as
nological and bureaucratic rationality, to social an active social process, the less convincing such a
anomie bom of marginalization and alienation, to formulation becomes. If we stretch as far as the
massive population growth, or to that undefinable views of Leibniz and Alfred North Whitehead,
but nevertheless potent idea of a decline in religious that space and time are contingent upon process
beliefs and associated social values? Or do we and relational attributes of the world, then the
argue that there is something inherent in the city manner of production of spatiotemporality itself
form or the urban process, something special about becomes a vital component within the social
the urban experience, that gives a distinctive process. The beguiling idea that our forbears
colouration, form and content to the structuration unquestioningly accepted, that there is one and
of contemporary social, economic and political only one space and that it has homogeneous qual-
processes and pathologies? Again and again the ities, has then to give way to a much more com-
question has been posed, with most urbanists plicated idea. Whitehead reports on his
trolled and screened out with the big signs that say works of social solidarities, the power and dedica-
'no deviant behaviour accepted here'. tion of community organizations, and the
hundreds of voluntary groups working round the
clock to restore some sense of decency and pride in
Jencks thinks that even Los an urbanizing world shell-shocked by rapid
Angeles can be dissolved into change, unemployment, massive migrations and
all of the radical travails inflicted by capitalist
twenty-eight townships; Peter modernity passing into the nihilistic downside of
Hall can cheerfully assert the postmodernity.
fundamental truth that But community has always meant different
things to different people and, even when some-
London is indeed a collection thing that looks like it can be found, it often turns
of villages; and Prince Charles out to be as much a part of the problem as a
leads the way on this panacea. Well-founded communities can exclude,
define themselves against others, erect all sorts of
emotional charger with his keep-out signs (if not tangible walls). As Young
emphasis upon the urban (1991) has uncompromisingly pointed out:
village as the locus of urban Racism, ethnic chauvinism, and class devalua-
regeneration. tion, I suggest, grow partly from the desire for
community, that is from the desire to understand
others as they understand themselves and from
No matter; the idea of the urban village or of
the desire to be understood as I understand
some kind of communitarian solution to urban
myself. Practically speaking, such mutual under-
problems is both attractive and powerful (judging
standing can be approximated only within a
by the innumerable books and articles devoted to
homogeneous group that defines itself by
the subject). And it is so not only because of nos-
common attributes. Such common identifica-
talgia for some long-lost mythical world of inti-
tion, however, entails reference also to those
mate village life, ignoring the fact that most of the
excluded. In the dynamics of racism and ethnic
populist migration out of villages arose precisely
chauvinism in the United States today, the posi-
because they were so oppressive to the human
tive identification of some groups is often
spirit and so otiose as a form of socio-political
achieved by first defining other groups as the
organization. It also appeals because some myth-
other, the devalued semihuman.
ical social entity called 'community' can perhaps
be re-created in an urban village and 'community What is at work here is (a) a mythic belief that
spirit' and 'community solidarity' is, we are again a 'thing' called community can be created as some
and again urged to believe, what will rescue us free-standing and autonomous entity endowed
from the deadening world of social dissolution, with causative and salving powers (b) the belief
rebuilt in Bombay or Sao tute for the much more tricky problem of creating
a politics of heterogeneity and a domain of public-
Paulo appears little less than ness that stretches across the diverse spatio-tempo-
absurd. This is no way to ralities of contemporary urbanized living. As
substitute for the much more Young (1990, p. 227) puts it: 'If city politics is to be
democratic and not dominated by the point of view
tricky problem of creating a of one group, it must be a politics that takes
politics of heterogeneity and a account of and provides voice for the different
domain of publicness that groups that dwell together in the city without
forming a community.'
stretches across the diverse
spatio-temporalities 3 From urban ecology to the ecology of
of contemporary urbanization
urbanized living. The pervasive and often powerful anti-urbanism of
much of the contemporary environmental-ecolog-
ical movement often translates into the view that
A more dialectical view would have it that enti- cities ought not to exist since they are the high-
ties like communities, while not without signifi- point of the plundering and pollution of all that is
cance, cannot be understood independently of the good and holy on planet earth. This anti-urbanism
social processes that generate, sustain and also dis- is as odd as it is pernicious. It is almost as if a
solve them and that it is those social processes that fetishistic conception of 'nature' as something to
are fundamental to social change. By this I do not be valued and worshipped separate from human
mean to assert that the construction of a certain action blinds a whole political movement to the
kind of spatio-temporal form designated as 'com- qualities of the actual living environments in
munity' can have no relevance or interest (for it which the majority of humanity will soon live. It
often is, as Young asserts, a way to advance racist, is, in any case, inconsistent to hold that everything
classist and ethnico-religious exclusionism as well in the world relates to everything else, as ecologists
as, on occasion, a source of comfort and suste- tend to do, and then decide that the built environ-
nance in the face of adversity and a zone of polit- ment and the urban structures that go with it are
ical empowerment). But by abstracting from the somehow outside of both theoretical and practical
dialectic of thing-process relations, our vision of the consideration. The effect has been, however, that
possibilities for social action becomes so restricted understandings of the urbanizing process have not
asfrequentlyto be self-nullifying if not self-destruc- in recent years been well-integrated into environ-
tive to the initial aims, however well intentioned mental-ecological analysis.
(as, for example, in the case of trying to import the In this regard, it would at first blush seem as if
ideal of Christian base communities as panacea for our nineteenth-century forebears have something
the conditions of deprivation and marginalization to teach us of great significance. Was it not, after
(and not only the bourgeoisie) can and do still tion), ozone holes, biodiversity, and the like, they
appreciate. But it is also undeniable that this eco- point to serious issues that have relevance at a
logical vision, noble and innovative though it was global scale. Responses to these issues have pro-
at the time, was subsequently coopted and rou- found implications for urbanization processes.
tinized into real estate development practices ori- But these are hardly the most important issues
ented to the middle classes and that its definition from the standpoint of the masses of people
of the ecological was far too limited to match flooding into the cities of developing countries. As
today's concerns. And there is, to boot, more than a result complaints of bias in the environmental
a hint that what ought to have been a productive agenda being imposed from the affluent nations
tension between town and country was in fact are becoming more strident:
dominated by a nostalgia for a rural and commu-
nitarian form of life that had never existed except It is in some sense ironic that the immediate,
in the fertile imaginations of a bourgeoisie seeking household-level environmental problems of
to escape the aesthetic and social effects of its own indoor air quality and sanitation are often ignored
capitalistic practices. or given slight treatment by activist environ-
mental groups concerned with the environment.
In recent years, however, some attention has
Most of the international attention over the past
begun to be paid, particularly by environmentalists
ten years has been focused on issues of 'the com-
of a more managerial persuasion, to the question
mons', or those that threaten global tragedy. But
of 'sustainable' cities and more environmentally
the adverse effects of household airborne and
friendly forms of urban growth and change. But
water-carried diseases on child mortality and
the separation of urban from environmental
female life expectancy are of no less global pro-
analyses (and a cloying nostalgia for the rural) is
portions than, say, the destruction of tropical
still far too marked for comfort. The best that the
forests, and in immediate human terms they may
ecologists seem to be able to offer is either some
be the most urgent of all worldwide environ-
return to an urbanization regulated by the meta-
mental problems. Certainly, the immediate
bolic constraints of a bioregional world as it sup-
threats to the urban poor of hazardous indoor air
posedly existed in what were actually pestiferous
quality and inadequate sanitation exceed the
and polluted medieval or ancient times or a total
adverse effects of global wanning, or even vehic-
dissolution of cities into decentralized communes
ular pollution. (Campbell, 1989, p. 173)
or municipal entities in which, it is believed, prox-
imity to some fictional quality called 'nature' will While Campbell adds that 'of course, the world
predispose us to lines of conscious (as opposed to needs action on both these and other fronts', the
enforced) action that will respect the qualities of assignment of priorities and the potentially con-
the natural world around us (as if decanting flicting consequences of striving to meet different
everyone from large cities into the countrysides environmental objectives defined at radically dif-
will somehow guarantee the preservation of bio- ferent scales is perhaps one of the most singular
diversity, water and air qualities, and the like). and unthought-through problems associated with
mulation or populist appropriation) that realize this is the idea that the transformation of social
their own agendas. relations in urban settings has to be a continuous
The third myth is that coming up with the process of socio-environmental change, a long rev-
resources to confront urban problems depends on the olution that should have the construction of an
prior solution of economic development and popula- alternative society as its long-term goal.
tion growth problems. Opposed to this is the idea The seventh myth is that strong order, authority
that cities have always been fundamentally about and centralized control—be it moral, political, com-
wealth creation and wealth consumption and that munitarian, religious, physical or militaristic - must
getting things right in cities is the only real path be reasserted over our disintegrating and strife-prone
towards economic improvement for the mass of cities without, however, interfering in the funda-
the population. And in that I think we should also mental liberty of the market. Opposed to this is th e
include fundamental redefinitions of wealth, well- understanding that the contemporary form of
being and values (including those that affect pop- 'market Stalinism' is self-contradictory and the
ulation growth) in ways that are more conducive recognition that urbanization has always been
to the development of human potentialities as about creative forms of opposition, tension and
opposed to mere capital accumulation for the conflict (including those registered through market
selected few. exchange). The tensions bom of heterogeneity
Thefourth myth is that socialproblems in urban- cannot and should not be repressed, but liberated
izing areas are curable only to the degree that the in socially exciting ways - even if this means more
forces of the market are givenfreerplay. Opposed to rather than less conflict, including contestations
this is the idea that wealth creation (and redefini- over socially necessary socialization of mark<;t
tion) depends on social collaboration, on cooper- processes for collective ends.
ation (even between businesses) rather than on The eighth myth is that diversity and differena,
some individualized competitive Darwinian heterogeneity of values, life-style oppositions and
struggle for existence. The pursuit of social justice chaotic migrations, are to befeared as sources of dis-
is therefore one important means to achieve order and that 'others'should be kept out to defend the
improved economic performance and here, at 'purity' of place. Opposed to this is the view that
least, communitarian thinking and values do have cities that cannot accommodate to diversity, to
a potentially creative role to play. migratory movements, to new lifestyles and to
The fifth myth is that community solidarity can economic, political, religious and value hetero-
provide the stability and power needed to control) geneity, will die either through ossification and
manage and alleviate urban problems and that 'com- stagnation or because they will fall apart in violent
munity'can substitute for publicpolitics. Opposed to conflict. Defining a politics that can bridge the
this is the recognition that 'community', insofar as multiple heterogeneities without repressing differ-
it exists, is an unstable configuration relative to the ence is one of the biggest challenges of twenty-first
conflictual processes that generate, sustain and century urbanization.
eventually undermine it, and that insofar as it does The ninth myth is that cities are anti-ecological.
as urban says that the environmental politics must several participants at the American Academy of
pay as much if not more attention to the qualities Arts and Sciences/Library of Congress confer-
of those built and social environments as it now ence, Fin de Siede: Looking Back to the Future held at
typically does to a fictitiously separated and imag- the Library of Congress, November 1994.
ined 'natural' environment.
Note
It will take imagination and 1 Much of the text in this and subsequent para-
political guts, a surge of graphs derives from a series of interviews con-
ducted for the third of a series of BBC Radio
revolutionary fervour and Three programmes entitled City lights - City
revolutionary change (in Shadows, this one broadcast on 27 October
1993.
thinking as well as in politics)
to address these questions References
adequately. Campbell, T., 'Environmental dilemmas and the
urban poor,' in Leonard, H. J. (ed.), Environment
and the Poor: Development Strategies for a
It will take imagination and political guts, a Common Agenda, New Brunswick, N.J., Trans-
surge of revolutionary fervour and revolutionary action Books, 1989.
change (in thinking as well as in politics) to Castells, M., The Informational City: Information
Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the
address these questions adequately. In this regard,
Urban-Regional Process, Oxford, Blackwell,
at least, there is much to learn from our predeces- 1989.
sors for their political and intellectual courage Cronon, W . , Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the
cannot be doubted. But if the rhetoric about Great West, New York, Norton, 1991.
handing on a decent living environment to future Davis, M., City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in
generations is to have even one iota of meaning, a Los Angeles, London, Verso, 1990.
radically different collective thought process of De Certeau, M., The Practice of Everyday life,
some sort has to be instituted. A crucial prelimi- Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984.
nary is to find an adequate language in which to Engels, F., The Housing Question, New York, Interna-
discuss possible futures in a rapidly urbanizing tional Publishers, 1935.
Engels, F., The Condition of the Working Class in
world, a language that actively recognizes that
England in 1844, Oxford, Blackwell, 1871.
urbanization is both constitutive of, as well as con-
Guillerme, A., The Age of Water: The Urban Environ-
stituted by the ways such possibilities might poten- ment in the North of France, College Station,
tially be grasped. Texas, A & M University Press, 1988.
Harvey, D., The limits to Capital, Oxford, Blackwell,
1982.
Harvey, D., The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford,
course, 1845-1945', Journal of Urban History, than a book, right up-to-the-minute — and all for just £28.50 a year.
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