Planetary Urbanization Research Articles

Urbanization in (post-) New Order Indonesia: connecting unevenness in the city with that in the countryside

ABSTRACT This article explores the relationship between the uneven outcomes of development in Indonesian cities with exclusionary outcomes of capitalist development in rural areas. Combining concepts of planetary urbanization with critical agrarian studies, we show how sociospatial and socionatural differentiations in (post-) New Order Java result in the emergence of the Kaum Miskin Kota, a ‘stagnant relative surplus population’ residing in precarious flood-prone urban spaces. These forms of differentiation are dialectically related to rural enclosures caused by the creation of political forest and political water. Tracing such relations forms a good basis to connect rural- and urban-based social movements.

Everyday Life in Suburbia

In the present article we generate theory-based categories for analyzing everyday life in order to gain a deeper understanding of sociospatial change in the urban fabric. Here, the metatheoretical framework of Planetary Urbanization by Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid (2011; 2014; 2015) offers us a fruitful approach. Their epistemological approach allows us to focus at different dimensions of urban and suburban life in an active tension and to analyze them with regard to different, constitutive moments. We further develop the perspective of everyday life, which the authors treat rather marginally, with our own conceptual approach, which starts at the point of struggles involved in everyday life in order to trace the sociospatial change.

Future Cities as a system of systems: Its concept, mechanism and creation

<p indent="0mm">As information technology advances rapidly, cities have become more complex and irreducible. In the Anthropocene, the process of planetary urbanization continues to affect the health of the natural and social environment, and the future of cities has a profound impact on the future of mankind. The concept of Future Cities is based on the scrutiny of the urban evolution process in human history. Future Cities are different from agricultural cities as the containers of human settlement and industrial cities as the center of production. Based on interdisciplinary and rational thinking, research on Future Cities aims to establish a way toward humanity’s well-being and sustainable development. From the perspective of a system of systems, Future Cities cannot be regarded as a single system as is usual. They are a much more complex system involving many systems, and this concept needs to be understood and interpreted through systems thinking. The driving force for the change is the information revolution, which has changed the carrier of information from entity to data. Thus, information as a medium has improved its operational efficiency and strengthened the interaction and interoperation between the systems in Future Cities, which emphasizes “systemhood” than “thinghood”, and triggers the formation of a system of systems. When data-based information penetrates the urban space, the “information space” emerges, and Future Cities become a combination of physical-information-social space. The “information space” also opens a new dimension for systems and people in Future Cities. As for systems, technological inventions take place in the process of digitization and informatization, including human settlement systems, energy systems, traffic systems, health systems, and environmental systems. With regard to individuals, a human being becomes “human being + information terminals”, which in turn gives birth to new lifestyles and brings social innovation. Furthermore, because of the flow of information, the boundaries of different systems will blur and the gap between the systems and inhabitants will be bridged, and the well-being of humankind can be guaranteed through the precise matching of supply and demand. The creation of Future Cities requires not only bottom-up strength and self-organization but also top-down guidance and effective regulation. Urban problems need to be solved in stages from the aspects of technology invention and social innovation. When Future Cities revolve around the people themselves, people’s creation of the city will return to normal life, enhancing the sense of happiness and belonging. How to stimulate the vitality of people’s creativity, form a cooperative power distribution mechanism, and improve the city’s ability to self-organize and operate will be important issues for future urban society. Future Cities research is a combination of theory and practice, which should adapt to the characteristics of a system of systems. Based on the practical experience of urban strategic planning and system engineering, the research can form an “overall strategic group” for the design of the system of systems, to make full use of multidisciplinary advantages and diversified perspectives. The integration of future urban research will be an iterative process of resolving conflicts; this integration requires a long-term cycle of four main steps, including reaching consensus on basic concepts, revealing the formation mechanism, refining the characteristics of different systems, and integrating the system of systems. In conclusion, the concept of Future Cities explores how the city meets people’s needs for a better life. Against the backdrop of the information revolution, it is urgent to discard reductionist thinking, use systems thinking to understand the future city instead, plan and build Future Cities through continuous iterative practice, and realize the sustainable development of mankind.

Critical urban theory in the Anthropocene

Critical urban thinkers often imagine urbanisation and the Anthropocene as inevitably being companion processes. But is planetary urbanisation the necessary telos and spatial limit of life in the Anthropocene? Is urban resilience the final form of urban responses to climate change? Will (or should) the urban (as either spatial form or process) survive the upending impacts of climate change or adaptation? Or, if the Anthropocene is a time of deep environmental and epistemological upheaval without historical precedent, might even more recently created spatial concepts of the planetary urban condition themselves soon be out of date? This article raises these questions for urban scholars via critical engagement with a proposal to retire Miami – considered climate change ‘ground zero’ in the US and doomed by rising seas – and repurpose it as fill for ‘The Islands of South Florida’: a self-sufficient territory of artificial high-rises delinked from global infrastructural networks. This vision of an ‘urbicidal Anthropocene’, the article argues, suggests that the injunction subtending planetary urbanisation work – to relentlessly question inherited spatial frameworks – has not been taken far enough. Still needed is Anthropocene critical urban theory, to consider urban forms and processes emerging via climate change and adaptation, but also how such mutations may point beyond the theoretical and spatial bounds of the contemporary urban condition itself.

BRI and beyond: Comparative possibilities of extended Chinese urbanisation

AbstractIn terms of spatial imaginaries and as physical infrastructure, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) spurs new geographies of comparative urban study. Irrespective of whether it is the primary driver for developments carried out in its name, ‘the BRI’ is a label that serves to bring previously unassociated project sites and non‐place‐based infrastructural developments into comparative relation. This paper considers some of the possibilities presented by the BRI for comparative urban studies in – and from – Asia. Building upon insights from postcolonial urban studies, planetary urbanisation and inter‐Asia cultural studies, I sketch two key possibilities of the BRI as (comparative urban) method. The first concerns the BRI as a series of openings to much (spatially) wider and historically deeper forms of comparison. Second, I argue that BRI as method impels forms of urban comparison beyond conventionally territorialised units of analysis at a variety of scales, including both the city and the (area studies) region.

Comparison and political strategy: Internationalism, colonial rule and urban research after Fanon

Debates about comparative method have been at the forefront of English-language urban studies during the last two decades. In one sense, these debates simply derive from and help sustain the crucial labour process of urban research. In other respects, the rise of comparative method to foremost prominence has demonstrated theoretical differences in the field. The heat that some of these debates have occasionally generated (e.g. on scale, global cities, assemblage and planetary urbanisation) alerts us to the political stakes involved in comparison. These range from the micro-political dynamics of knowledge creation to various macrological considerations. In this paper, I deal not only with the political implications of comparative projects, I also raise the question: how do political strategies produce comparative perspectives? After a few observations about comparative debates in urban research and beyond, I zero in on Frantz Fanon’s tricontinental internationalism as a generator of a relational comparative outlook before discussing three intellectual engagements with Fanon’s legacy. These engagements are situated within the creole literary movement in Martinique, Indigenous radicalism in Canada and political anti-racism in mainland France. By highlighting the obstacles that stand in the way of translating Fanon’s internationalism, these engagements also underline the importance of understanding colonial rule and its legacies (including its urban dimension, which Fanon understood under the larger rubric of colonial compartmentalisation) in relationally comparative ways: historically and geographically distinct but inter-linked through broader processes, strategies and intellectual practices.

Planetary Cities: Fluid Rock Foundations of Civilization

Whereas recent framings of planetary urbanization stress the planet-scaled impacts of contemporary urban processes, we might also conceive of cities as being constitutively ‘planetary’ from their very outset. This article looks at two ways in which the earliest urban centres or ‘civilizations’ on the floodplains of the Fertile Crescent harnessed the deep, geological forces of the Earth. The first is the tapping and channelling of sedimentary processes, central to what Wittfogel referred to as hydraulic civilizations (1963). The second is the use of high-heat technologies to smelt and forge metals, which can be construed as a capture of igneous processes. What both sets of practices have in common is that they involve skilled intervention in fluid-solid phase transitions between solid rock and flowing particulate matter. Viewing cities as constitutively geological or planetary in this way can help us reimagine the challenges posed to urban spaces by looming transformations in Earth systems.

Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World, LiamCamplingAlejandroColásLondon &amp; New York: Verso. 2021. pp. xiv + 418. £20/$29.95 (hardcover). ISBN: 9781784785239

Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World, LiamCamplingAlejandroColásLondon &amp; New York: Verso. 2021. pp. xiv + 418. £20/$29.95 (hardcover). ISBN: 9781784785239

Requiem for a Rural Hinterland

Morocco provides an interesting framework for re-examining planetary urbanisation in relation to planning policies, which shape spaces that were considered “rural” until now. In Morocco, a country deeply affected by metropolitanisation, the agricultural areas on the periphery of major cities are undergoing rapid economic, social and landscape transformations. City growth is silently disrupting ways of life and economic activities, as well as rural-based social organisations. These changes are critical because Morocco is a country where agriculture and, more generally, “rurality”, is still vitally important. This explains why the relations between the city and the country are deeply affected by the regime’s contradictory new policies. These include: a neoliberal approach, which is undermining the political order for the sake of accumulation, draining the countryside and pursuing urban sprawl; and an authoritarian approach that is designed to preserve the social and political order and involves keeping a tight rein on the rural community, which traditionally supported the regime. To explore these contradictions, we examine the periphery on the east of the Rabat-Salé-Témara region, where the control of urban sprawl provides a particularly interesting perspective when analysing how the authoritarian state has developed in a context of laissez-faire regulation. When urban sprawl interferes with the limits between town and country and fragments peri-urban “grey spaces”, it becomes the focus of bitter negotiation between public and private actors, between social groups and between use value (for the rural population) and exchange value (for state-supported urban investors). The first part examines the power relations between the main actors involved in the urbanisation of Rabat’s grey spaces. The second part explores their impact on rural and farming communities in three successive phases. The first phase examines the recomposition of the state, with the new city model, using the case of Tamesna. The second phase examines the recentralisation of public action to consolidate the metropolitan influence, which involves the agency responsible for developing the Bouregreg Valley in a municipality on the outskirts of Salé. Finally, the third phase focuses on the challenges of reconfiguring state policies in response to the changes caused by urban spread. Here, we examine the case of two rural municipalities in the second ring: Shoul and Sidi Yahya des Zaers.

CRITICAL URBAN THEORY IN THE ‘URBAN AGE’: Ruptures, Tensions, and Messy Solidarities

AbstractThis symposium extends debates over Neil Brenner‘s and Christian Schmid's planetary urbanization framework as ‘a new epistemology of the urban’. The contributors find much that is provocative and productive in the planetary urbanization approach as it has been advanced thus far. They also have concerns about the ways in which this approach has the potential to limit the bounds of urban theory (intentionally or not). Thus the collection extends existing engagements (most notably via a 2018 special issue of the journal Society and Space) with planetary urbanization by scholars working in minor theoretical registers as an effort to offer positive critique in the context of elaborated alternatives. The intent of the collection is, in short, to offer reflections on urban scholarship in the ‘urban age’ that resist some planetary urbanization theorists’ call to pin down urban theory and instead might leave it open to ‘radical alterity’. The introduction, four research articles and one commentary that make up the symposium cover such topics as urban migrant labor, the multiple temporalities of urban development, caste and urban ecology, the politics of knowledge production, and theorizing as cosmopolitan practice.

PLANETARY URBAN INVOLUTION IN THE TOKYO SUBURBS

AbstractThis article explores how the encounter between different and unequally positioned trajectories of urbanization has resulted in extreme forms of migrant labor exploitation, recently identified as ‘human trafficking’. Specifically, it examines how a landscape of such exploitation developed in Japan between the late 1970s and early 2000s as Filipina migrants came to work in a growing sex industry for foreign women. In this article I bring a feminist ‘encounters approach’ to planetary urbanization theory to argue that this landscape of exploitation is the consequence of planetary urban involution, a dark dynamic produced through the frictive encounter of discrepantly focused urbanizations in Japan and the Philippines. In this process, as the excesses of postcolonial urbanization in the Philippines rub against those of urbanization in Japan, a former metropole, labor exploitation intensifies, involutes and grows tightly wound in tandem with contemporary geopolitical inequalities. Planetary urban involution thus evokes the grim consequences that occur as growing numbers of displaced and dispossessed postcolonial subjects are drawn into ‘developed’ and ‘globalized’ capitalist economies, where they are widely viewed as disposable workers. In this dynamic, power and domination are exercised at the interface of the discrepant configurations of desire and inequality produced through differently situated urbanization processes.

SPLANETARY URBANIZATION

AbstractIn this article I draw on ideas associated with minor theory to address the politics of knowledge that permeate the discourse and aspirations of planetary urbanization, and think through what is at stake in some of its broader claims. Existing critiques challenge the evacuation of agency, subjectivity and forms of difference in the planetary ambitions of the theory and call out its inattentiveness to lived experience. Here, I seek to further these critiques by addressing lived experience not as some ‘real’ against which all things are measured, but to find the political grounds where social actors are made and act on the shifting conditions of their lives. I excavate some of the social relations flattened or ignored in planetary urbanization's key propositions by drawing on three texts that allow us to imagine the planetary without foreclosure: a map from Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly‐Schapiro's Nonstop Metropolis; the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute as an almost forgotten alternative, and an example of urban research and practice that is at once intimate and global; and artist Zoe Leonard's pieces ‘Analogue’ and ‘You See I Am Here After All’. By drawing out some connections to and among these works in time and space, I reframe the planetary with reference to countertopography to reveal and spark consciousness of the makings, undoings, contingencies and possibilities of contemporary urbanization—global and intimate, planetary but lived.

POSTCOLONIZING PLANETARY URBANIZATION: Aníbal Quijano and an Alternative Genealogy of the Urban

AbstractThe success of the ‘planetary urbanization’ approach is built upon the work of Henri Lefebvre and his understanding of the achievement of a world that is fully articulated through urban relations. However, scholars inspired by this view have normally considered his work and the Euro‐American space as presumed starting points from which to observe the progression of planetary urban processes. This article proposes an alternative genealogy of planetary urbanization by looking at—both theoretically and empirically—the global ‘periphery’ of Latin America. Specifically, the article explores the early work of the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano at CELAC between 1966 and 1971. Framed within Dependency Theory, Quijano's reflections share strong similarities and consonances with some of the critical insights that Lefebvre would elaborate only a few years later. The article thus aims to ‘postcolonize’ the planetary urbanization approach by shifting its Euro‐American theoretical and empirical centres, opening it up to contributions that—due to geo‐cultural hierarchies—have traditionally been overlooked within the main Anglophone debates. In so doing, the article proposes to engage in a plural dialogue in urban studies that combines planetary urbanization with the postcolonial critique.

Afterword. The Consumer’s Society in the Era of the Post Globalization

The article tries a general overview of the contemporary changes in the global economy. First proposes a characterization of the present period of history, advancing some of his main explanatory elements. Next, summarizes the great economic, social, political and cultural changes, discussed on the long way of more than twenty years of research at an international level. Third, it remarks some concrete changes at an urban scale. Finally, suggests the possibilities of some differential urbanization processes, on the way of the planetary urbanization.

Urbanization, Touristification and Verticality in the Andes: A Profile of Huaraz, Peru

Mountain cities specializing in tourism increasingly aim at valorizing cultural and natural heritage to compete for global attention. In this context, the postmodern urbanization of mountains plays a decisive role: driven by touristification processes, it alters the sociospatial and economic configuration of mountain cities and their hinterlands, which are becoming vertically arranged “operational landscapes”, and profoundly changes city–mountain interactions. To foster sustainable development in urbanizing mountain destinations, it is crucial to understand these settlements’ embeddedness in both (1) nature and culture and (2) space and time. The Andean city of Huaraz is a case in point: an intermediate center in highland Peru, it is characterized by a strategic location in the Callejón de Huaylas (Santa Valley), influenced by Hispanic and Quechua culture and dominated by the glaciers of the Cordillera Blanca. Combining (1) a theoretical framework that considers planetary urbanization, touristification and vertical complementarity and (2) a case study technique inspired by urban environmental profiles, we trace the development of the city–mountain relation in Huaraz, focusing on the way in which the material and non-material dimensions of the surrounding mountains influence urban development. We conclude with a call for overcoming a set of three persisting dichotomies that continue to impair sustainable development.

Extended Spaces of Environmental Injustice: Hydrocarbon Pipelines in the Age of Planetary Urbanization

Abstract Hydrocarbon pipelines have emerged as a highly contentious political issue in recent years. In this paper, I conduct spatial regression analyses at national and regional scales to determine whether the locations of hydrocarbon pipelines constitute a systemic environmental justice issue throughout the contiguous US transmission pipeline system. National-level analyses show that counties with higher percentages of non-White residents are associated with more kilometers of hydrocarbon pipeline, whereas counties with a higher percentage of residents with a four-year college degree are associated with fewer kilometers of hydrocarbon pipeline. Regional analyses reveal further complexity, showing only degrees of consistency with national-level results. Situating these results within the emergent literature on planetary urbanization, I develop a multiscalar environmental justice framework that I call extended spaces of environmental injustice. Extended spaces of environmental injustice describe the places through which infrastructures of extended urbanization, which are built across vast geographical distances and operate to meet the material needs of urban society, materialize as spatially variegated environmental justice issues at the local scale. I conclude by arguing that the extended spaces of environmental injustice framework can open new pathways for research related to environmental justice and scale, both in analyzing the geography of existing infrastructures of extended urbanization and the construction of future infrastructure as efforts to decarbonize the economy manifest spatially.

The constitution of the city and the critique of critical urban theory

A theoretical account of the genesis and internal spatial structure of cities is given. The essence of the urbanisation process is described in terms of the following main developmental phases: (a) the emergence of relationships based on specialisation and interdependence in society; (b) the pre-eminent role of the division of labour within these relationships and its recomposition in dense spatial nodes of human activity; and (c) the concomitant formation of the networked intra-urban spaces of the city. These phases are then contextualised within three intertwined dimensions of urban materiality, namely, an internal dimension (the internal organisation and spatial dynamics of the city), a socially ambient dimension (the relational structure of society at large) and an exogenous dimension (the geographic outside of the city). In light of this account, an evaluative review of what I designate ‘the new critical urban theory’ is carried out, with special reference to planetary urbanisation, postcolonial urban theory and comparativist methodologies. I argue that while every individual city represents a uniquely complex combination of social conjunctures, there are nonetheless definite senses in which urban phenomena are susceptible to investigation at the highest levels of theoretical generality.

Rethinking Urbanization: A Transit-Information-Communication –Technology-Oriented Development Path for the Developing Countries and Post-Industrial Towns

This study explores a new path of urbanization to enhance the conventional economy-led urban development practice by conducting an urban quality of life (Uqol) survey. It analyzes the Uqol evaluation gap caused by demographic attributes between developing countries, developed countries, and post-industrial town. We adopted a mixed-methods research design, including a literature review and an Uqol survey, to suggest the transit-oriented-development (TOD) and information-communication-technology (ICT) based urban-rural development concept. The finding indicates a disparity of Uqol mean score rankings among the developing countries, developed countries, and the marginalized post-industrial town. It highlights the health, transportation, socio-economic, and technological development in the developing countries strongly desired. Furthermore, Kruskal-Wallis H-test and Mann-Whitney U-test results show significant differences in economy, technology-ICT, smart living, and lifestyle within education, profession, age, and country groups. It clarifies that the well-being gap is shaped by demography and exhibited geographically, which implies TOD-ICT advancement can break down geographical barriers for achieving sustainable growth in remote areas. Supported by the planetary urbanization theory, the human-technology-driven urban development process would facilitate the maturity and implementation of the proposed TOD-ICT-based urban-ruralism (UxR) concept for enhancing the future global urbanization process.&#x0D; Keywords : Human and Social Geography; Information-Communication-Technology; Urban Policymaking; Transit-Oriented-Development; Urban Quality of Life&#x0D; Copyright (c) 2021 Geosfera Indonesia and Department of Geography Education, University of Jember&#x0D; This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share A like 4.0 International License

Localising the ‘Characteristic Town’: A Socio-Spatial Framework for Understanding the Everyday Rural Urbanisation of China’s Hinterlands

The shift towards an urbanised world is generating profound social, economic, and environmental complexities. Agglomerating regions require new understandings to capture the socio-spatial restructuring of this planetary urbanisation. In China, top-down rural urbanisation policies such as the Characteristic Town, or tese xiaozhen, address urban-rural polarisation through a ‘one-town-one-characteristic-industry’ model aiming to generate localised rural economic development. Characteristic Towns have been criticised as only superficially addressing local challenges, imposing tabula-rasa developments that extend urbanisation into rural areas, excluding vulnerable groups. Within the mega-urban Yangtze River Delta corridor, the Smart Moulding Town in Huangyan-Taizhou’s hinterland is leading regional industrial upgrading processes, epitomising visions of politicians, planners, and developers. The urban-rural interface is undergoing a fragmented transition towards industrialisation while villagers adapt their local economies and everyday practices, generating new socio-spatial typologies for dwelling. This inductive research reveals the role of villagers in shaping, and being shaped by, top-down rural urbanisation programs. The multi-scalar theoretical framework is structured around private, collective, and institutional layers of dwelling, interrogated through Lefebvre’s spatial production theory. Uncovering hybrid urban-rural qualities and actor networks, the empirical findings illustrate that villagers’ micro-scale tactics are deeply embedded in trans-local industrialisation processes, redefining rural identities and defying top-down spatial compartmentalisation by negotiating informality.

Rethinking centrality

In this paper, I tackle the center-periphery dynamics under planetary urbanization by focusing on Gebze, the gigantic industrial city just outside of Istanbul’s administrative borders. Through an empirical study of peripheral urbanization processes in the Gebze-Istanbul axis, the paper engages with the planetary sub/urbanization debates and serves the triple purpose: (I) to emphasize the significance of peripheralization and the center-periphery dialectics to critique the predominant emphasis on centrality in urban and regional research which relegates the socio-spatial and political transformations of the peripheries to the background, (II) to offer an alternative approach to depictions of cities as sentient, anthropomorphic actors in a hierarchical and competitive Darwinian ecology, and (III) to contribute to planetary sub/urbanization debates by zooming in on some of the micro-spaces of peripheral Gebze during the extended urbanization process in greater Istanbul. Through a transdisciplinary methodology, the paper provides a local ontology by displaying how peripherality is constructed not merely from above and the center by the state or economic actors, but also by the people from below and the periphery, as it were, during their everyday rhythms, activities, negotiations, and coping. By resisting the merely expanded application of the term suburban, and instead taking seriously the complex web of governance, agency, defeat, organization, and exploitation within the lives of Gebze’s inhabitants, the article concludes that such phenomena make any universalizing claim about the urban or the suburban incomplete.