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Splintering Urbanism���Globalisation, Infrastructure��� and the Politics of Cities���
Stephen Graham Newcastle University
1. Introduction : Urban ���Planning Paradigms in Crisis
• Modern urban planning founded on: - Euclidean, perspectival notions of space -Newtonian notions of time as a singular ‘container’ - Technocratic ideologies of ‘progress’ via electromechanical technologies -‘Bundled’ conceptions of the singular, integrated ‘unitary city’ ; and - Environmentally determinist concepts of urban form
2. Archaeology of the Networked Society :
The Modern Infrastructural Ideal 1850-1960
• This helped to forged the
‘Wired-Piped-Tracked Metropolis’
• Single, integrated street systems
• Standardised, public or private infrastructure monopolies regulated for universal service
Modern Urban Planning :���The ‘Unitary City’ Ideology
• Organic or systemic metaphors to shape ‘cohesive’, ‘integrated’, ‘ordered’ city. Spaces knitted by infrastructures
• Close-up spaces seen to relate more than far-off ones
• Authoritarian and technocratic power
• But completely ignored non-physical communication
The ‘Invisible City’: Assumptions of Shifts Toward Universal Access
• Via standardised, electromechanical systems
• Energy, water, sewerage and telephone systems increasingly invisible, ubiquitous, and taken for granted
• Bakelite phone ; standard electricity ; municipal streets…“Forgotten, background, frozen in place” Leigh-Star
But Modern Ideal of Networked City Always Ambivalent : Major Failings and Limitations…
• Never materially achieved • As much a discursive
construction as a material one • In many cases actually sponsored
fragmentation (Haussmann, Moses…)
• Masculinised, gendered, oppressive to minorities
• Failed to match growth • Exported to colonial cities as
spatial apartheid
3. These ‘Deep’ Conceptually Frameworks and Axioms of Urban Planning Increasingly
Untenable: Four Key Challenges: (i) Social and Cultural Pluralisation/
Polarisation (ii) Changing Political Economies of
Mobility, Infrastructure and ���the State
(iii) Distance per se No Guarantee of Meaningful Relations
(iv) New Sociotechnologies of Digitised Power ���
(i) Social and Cultural Pluralisation ���(and often Polarisation)
• Often bound up with widespread breakdown and ‘unbundling’ of monopolistic, universalistic, welfare and infrastructure regimes
• Withdrawal of many social and spatial cross-subsidies
• Growth of infrastructural consumerism and commodification
Beyond the Singular, Integrated ���Urban Public Realm
• Public private spaces : “malls without walls”
• Privatised streets and street governance
• Urban entrepreneurialism and branding
• Intensifying surveillance • Megaprojects : “city as
building” • Fragmentation of law
enforcement and security
(ii) Changing Political Economies of Mobility, Infrastructure, and States
• Increasing dissatisfaction with modern ideal
• Key element of neo-liberalism : Liberalisation, privatisation and increasing corporate influence
• Shift away from universal service monopolies and cross-subsidies (services as welfare entitlements)
• Concentrating on ‘glocal scalar fixes’ for powerful
• But very varied !
The ‘Unbundling’ of the Nation State ? “National borders have ceased being continuous borders on the earth’s
surface and have become non-related sets
of lines and points situated within each
country” Paul Andreu
(iii) Distance per se No Guarantee of Meaningful Relations
• Globalisation and ICTs : Widening range of ‘distant proximities’ co-exist with ‘proximate distance’ of city
• Links to far-off places or people may be more powerful than those to physically ddjacent ones
• “Overexposed city” ?
“The insertion of telecommunications into the city makes the development of spaces more complex and introduces today a third dimension into urban and regional planning [after space and time] : that
is the factor of real-time”
Lille Metropolitan Development Agency (ADUML) 1991
Not Some Cyberspatial Utopia, Dystopia or a Simple ‘Death of Distance’. Rather a Complex
‘Remediation’ of Urban Places
(iv) New Sociotechnologies ���of Digitised Power���
• “The connected mode of presence at a distance ” Christian Licoppe
• Growth of hidden, software-based mobility, interaction and transaction spaces
• ‘Friction free’ and truly ‘glocal’
• Challenge physicalist Cartesian, and visible preoccupation of urban planning
“Societies of Control”: Entitlements, Rights and ���Life-Chances Increasingly Encoded���
into Automated Systems… • The politics of code • E.g. electronic highways/
road pricing • Call centre queuing • Internet prioritisation • CCTV facial recognition • Airport biometrics • Post 9/11 surveillance
surge
4. The Combined Result :���The ‘Unbundling’ of Urban Territory ?
• Relations increasingly maintained through ‘capsules’ and networks
• Distanciated flows organised through infrastructure systems
• Support and sustain 24hr just-in-time and real time flows melding global economy, society, culture
• ‘Archipeligo economy’: extreme spatial divisions of labour ; ‘economies of conjunction’; ‘cherry picking’; urban entrepreneurialism
‘Glocal’ Bypass • Tunnel effects a Means
of bypassing ‘inadequate’ legacies of standardised, monopolistic spaces and networks : premium network spaces
• E.g. Heathrow Express
‘Local Bypass’ New ‘premium’
intraurban spaces and connections
e.g.electronically charged highways
• (Toronto, Melbourne, LA, San Diego…)
Connectivity, Urban Revanchism
and the Politics of Urban Fear
As non-local connections Intensify so too in many cases does the policing,
enforcement, and construction of local
boundaries
‘Technopoles’: e.g. Multimedia Super Corridor
5. To Conclude : Urban Places as “Translocalities” (Michael Peter Smith)
• Urban places are best seeb as dynamic socio-technical processes. Not as forms or bounded geometric spaces
• Superimposition of many space-times : result of countless, multiscaled, relational, continuous links with more of less distant elsewheres
• Sometimes these come together in making the ‘cogredience’ of a place ; sometimes they don’t
• Many of these ‘power geometries’ are invisible, diasporic and ‘glocal’
• Not Castells’ flows vs places ! Places made of, and through, flows! Global is always local.
But Urban Place Still Critical ! • Deliberately focusing on most extreme and visible
examples of splintering. Often much more subtle… • Evolution - Unbundling and continued power of
agglomeration : ‘compulsion of proximity’ in cities: ‘sticky places’ in ‘slippery space’ and rooted identity politics
• Cities still mixed and ‘co-gredient’ places. Limits on splintering : obduracy, inertia and continuity ; need to connect ; contestation ; ‘pure’ boundaries impossible ; ineffectiveness of disciplinary efforts ; resistance and insurgent citizenship (internal/external)
• Continuing power of local, national, international governance and planning
• So, the urban still the crucial political/social site
Implications for Urban Theory… • Must be based on multiple non-Euclidean conceptions of
space, time, the body, mobility, identity, citizenship, and the public(s)
• Need ‘relational’ theoretical bases • Conscious of “the discursive construction of urban
coherence” (Joe Painter) i.e. Urban ‘Coherence’ must be proven not assumed
• Must NOT reify ‘globalization’, ‘new technology’, or the ‘Network Society’ as steam rollers rolling over local places
• Recognise that rights, mobilities, privileges and denials are increasingly encoded into distant, arcane and opaque technological systems
Challenges for Urban Practice
• Resist the neoliberal impulse ! • i.e. Don’t simply churn our serial imitations of time-space
and mobility packages for affluent and powerful • Be aware that mobility and network improvements for
some will always compromise relative or absolute life chances of others
• Experiment with socially progressive and imaginative visions and strategies for cities in the ‘networked society’ whilst not becoming techno-obsessed !
• Challenge : To generalise improvement within splintering cities whilst being conscious of globalised divisions of labour
Challenge to create virtuous circles linking places and mobility systems/ICTs…
“Publics are no longer usefully envisioned as the open spaces
or free spaces in which diverse participants could gather -- the democratic spaces of the street, the square, or the town
hall. Nor can we simply pretend that equivalent ‘virtual spaces’ exist in some democratic cybertopia. Instead the
mechanisms for publics occurring in the context of the new infrastructures of mobility should be imagined in entirely
new ways”
Mimi Sheller
• (ii) The Connected City :
Creative Physical Planning for ‘Mobility Environments’:
addressing parallel mobilities (Bertolini), spaces and times
(iii) ‘Grounding’ the Network Society and Addressing ‘Digital Divides’:���New Spaces of Citizenship ?