Postcolonial Urban Studies Research Articles

A 90th birthday tributeAnthony D. King: an appreciation

ABSTRACT The work of Anthony D. King is among the very best of recent urban and global studies. This essay is a tribute in appreciation of Tony King as a scholar, mentor, and friend. It discusses some of his major contributions in the fields of global cities research, colonial and postcolonial urban studies, as well as his views on knowledge and positionality in relation to the location within which he is embedded. It is a mix of anecdotal and analytical notes written as a tribute to a great teacher who has reached a milestone - 90 years old.

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.

THE ‘CITY’ AS TEXT

AbstractThis commentary develops a postcolonial critique of urban studies, which it distinguishes and delineates from postcolonial urban studies. To do so it mobilizes tools from postcolonial literary theory, regional and area studies, and an older tradition of thinking in the new cultural geography from which the invocation of ‘the city as text’ stands as a methodological guidepost.

Reading Variegated Dispossession in an Asian Megacity

ABSTRACT This paper reads multiple shades of dispossession in an Asian megacity. The multiple dispositions talk of dispossession as an instrument that limits the autonomy and the self-sufficiency in material and non-material dimensions. In that endeavor we emphasize taking a broader picture of dispossession while pursuing critical urban theory. Through unpacking four ethnographies in Kolkata, the essay looks into dispossession, and in that process displacement and accumulation, from multiple vantage points while stressing on urban as a process that lies at the cross-section of the global capitalist development. The essay intertwines it with postcolonial reading - assemblage and worlding as they enable nuanced and contextual reading of urban emergence, negotiations, and negations. The methodology through an extended ethnography arrives at a point that dispossession is a broader concept holding intense meanings that need to be read beyond abstraction and through quintessentially nuanced postcolonial urban studies.

‘We’re in Asia’: Worlding LGBTQI+ activism otherwise in Sydney

Building on recent work in postcolonial urban studies that has developed more genuinely plural approaches to urban theorising, this article poses the problem of ‘worlding’ in relation to urban LGBTQI+ activism in Sydney, Australia. Specifically, the article examines how Sydney is variously worlded as or against ‘Asia’ in public debate around LGBTQI+ politics and in the imaginaries of activists living in Sydney. These worldings are shown to be an important aspect of queer activisms and urbanisms in Sydney, and I argue that attention to this worlding can productively complement a renewed focus on place and specificity in queer urban literatures. While imagining Sydney or Australia as part of Asia is itself no guarantee of productive politics or of decentring epistemologies, the article argues that some of these worldings do provide an occasion and a provocation to think elsewhere and otherwise in ways that are responsive to the specific character of White Australia’s colonial pasts and presents, while also generatively (dis)locating Sydney beyond the ‘West’.

The three modes of existence of the pandemic smart city

ABSTRACT Working on the provincialisation of the smart city in South Africa and India, the members of our research team recently witnessed, as the Covid-19 pandemic spread across the five countries in which we live and work, the emergence of a ‘pandemic smart city’. Technologies, institutions, organisations and people we were observing and working with were repurposed, reshaped or reoriented in efforts to manage and mitigate the public health crisis. Drawing on work on ontological pluralism and on postcolonial urban studies, this introductory piece and the articles in this special issue argue that the management of the pandemic in cities of the Global South is closely intertwined with the three modes of existence of the smart city: the state-led, corporate-led and citizen-led smart city.

Subaltern Urbanization: Indian Insights for Urban Theory

AbstractThe concept of subaltern urbanization is about vibrant smaller settlements—outside the metropolitan shadow—sustainably supporting a dispersed pattern of urbanization. We propose a theoretical framework which draws on an empirical research collective using both large statistical and land‐use data sets and detailed case studies in non‐metropolitan Indian geographies. Anchored in postcolonial urban studies, it looks beyond the logic of agglomeration and questions our understanding of settlement hierarchies and the location of social and economic innovation processes, opening up an alternative reading of urbanization that could be valuable for other regions. Local agency is core to this concept, transporting the arguments of the ordinary and the subaltern beyond large cities. Our findings, apart from emphasizing the agency of smaller settlements, highlight their multiple local and translocal flows, shaping an autonomous external engagement that could exist independently of relationships with large cities. Further, even though the rural and the urban seep into each other, they do so organically, unlike the process in planetary urbanization. Additionally, the rural‐urban dichotomy remains performative, in that governance regimes influence the urbanization process. Appreciation of these dynamics can provide insights towards a better understanding of the system of human settlements, which is our goal in advancing this framework.

Competing for Jurisdiction: Practical Legitimation and the Persistence of Informal Recycling in Urban India.

How did informal garbage collectors, who had long provided the only door-to-door and recycling services in Delhi, manage to survive the introduction of formal garbage collection trucks? This question raises the larger problem of informal institutions-well-organized and socially recognized, but legally unauthorized and unregulated platforms for political and economic organization-have proven so persistent. I draw on evidence collected during 20months of ethnographic research in Delhi, focusing on participant observation with informal collectors during their neighborhood routes and interviews with 50 informal collectors. Bringing together political and urban sociology, postcolonial urban studies, and institutional theory, the paper frames competition over city garbage and recycling as a relational matter. I argue that informal workers preserved their jurisdiction through practical legitimation, depending on everyday actions and social expectations rather than explicit laws or beliefs to secure legitimacy. I demonstrate how status-based relations, here based on caste and labor migration, can confer legitimacy and provide a source of regulation, as actors set out and meet implicit expectations for appropriate actions, relationships, and social boundaries.

Competing for Jurisdiction: Practical Legitimation and the Persistence of Informal Recycling in Urban India

AbstractHow did informal garbage collectors, who had long provided the only door-to-door and recycling services in Delhi, manage to survive the introduction of formal garbage collection trucks? This question raises the larger problem of why informal institutions—well-organized and socially recognized, but legally unauthorized and unregulated platforms for political and economic organization—have proven so persistent. I draw on evidence collected during 20 months of ethnographic research in Delhi, focusing on participant observation with informal collectors during their neighborhood routes and interviews with 50 informal collectors. Bringing together political and urban sociology, postcolonial urban studies, and institutional theory, the paper frames competition over city garbage and recycling as a relational matter. I argue that informal workers preserved their jurisdiction through practical legitimation, depending on everyday actions and social expectations rather than explicit laws or beliefs to secure legitimacy. I demonstrate how status-based relations, here based on caste and labor migration, can confer legitimacy and provide a source of regulation, as actors set out and meet implicit expectations for appropriate actions, relationships, and social boundaries.

City profile: Wa, Ghana

The UN-Habitat III has placed secondary cities at the centre of the new urban agenda, given their roles in global development trajectories in the future. Wa, though a small city, is an important growth pole in North-western Ghana. Wa emerged as a trading town in the colonial era and since independence in 1957 has become a key growth centre in the development of North-western Ghana. However, the confluence of environmental vulnerabilities and pre-existing social inequalities resulting from centuries of colonial and post-colonial neglects, have led to increasing contestations and socio-ecological challenges. We profiled Wa through the lens of Southern urbanism and highlight its socio-economic, ecological and spatial development dynamics as an ordinary city of the Global South. The dynamics reflect a disconnection between capital and labour as well as contested resource flows, and these have implications for a transformative and sustainable urban future. Through this profile, postcolonial urban studies of the Global South must reconsider deepening empirical methods and theories in addressing this unique problem-space. A transformative and sustainable urban future of Wa remains counterproductive if postcolonial urban studies do not engage with unique paradigms of the Global South in understanding and planning cities of the South.

Deracinated Dispossessions: On the Foreclosures of “Gentrification” in Oakland,CA

AbstractThis paper challenges dominant geographies of urban theory by conceptualising the dynamics of displacement in Oakland through place‐specific histories of racial/spatial politics. It argues that the repeated transposition of a San Francisco‐based model of “tech gentrification” results inderacinated dispossessions, or accounts of displacement uprooted from grounded histories of racial violence and resistance. It also argues that, while urban scholars acknowledge the role of historical difference in contouring dispossessions in metropolitan versus postcolonial cities, this consideration should be broadened to account for the racial/colonial dimensions of urbanism in theUSas well. Treating Oakland as a “crossroads of theory”, this paper joins calls for a deeper engagement between postcolonial urban studies and critical race and ethnic studies from North America. Drawing upon the authors’ activist and empirical work, it contends that “thinking from Oakland” demands a foregrounding of racial capitalism, policing, and refusal.

Migrant margins: The streetlife of discrimination

The streetlife of discrimination emerges in the intersections of global migration and urban marginalisation. Focusing on livelihoods forged by migrants on four peripheral streets in Birmingham, Bristol, Leicester and Manchester, this article draws on face-to-face surveys with over 350 self-employed proprietors. Despite significant variables amongst proprietors, these individuals had all become traders on streets in marginalised parts of UK cities, and the article addresses whether ‘race’ matters more than class for how certain groups become emplaced in the city. Narratives of inequality and racism feature prominently in the proprietors’ accounts of where they settled in the city and what limited forms of work are available in the urban margins. Yet as significant to proprietors’ experiences of trade are repertoires of entrepreneurial agility and cross-cultural exchange. Through the concept of the ‘migrant margins’ the article explores the overlap of human capacities and structural discrimination that spans global and urban space. It combines urban sociological understandings of ‘race’ and inequality with fluid understandings of makeshift city-making that have emerged in post-colonial urban studies. Such combinations encourage connections between the histories and geographies of how people and places become bordered, together with city-making practices that are both marginal and transgressive.

Ciudades en un mundo de ciudades: el gesto comparativo

Las ciudades existen en un mundo de ciudades y estoregularmente invita a un gesto comparativo en la teorizaciónurbana. Sin embargo, desde hace algunas décadas los estudios urbanos han dividido analíticamente el mundo de las ciudades, por ejemplo, en ricas y pobres, capitalistas y socialistas, o en diferentes grupos regionales de ciudades, con poca investigación comparativa entre estas divisiones. El interés en realizar comparaciones entre diferentes ciudades se ha incrementado en la era de la “globalización”, en el ámbito de las actividades económicas y sociales, así como en las estructuras de gobierno que vinculan las ciudades con los flujos espacialmente extensivos de varios tipos y las redes intensas de comunicación. Sin embargo, los estudiosos de los temas urbanos han sido relativamente reacios a practicar el potencial de la investigación comparativa internacional, que se sitúa en el corazón de este campo. Cuando el interés en la globalización ha impulsado a los autores a explicitar ejercicios comparativos, tanto los recursos metodológicos como el prevaleciente paisaje intelectual y teórico han tendido a limitar e incluso a socavar estas iniciativas. Este artículo pretende, en primer lugar, entender por qué, en un campo intrínsecamente comparativo y con una urgente necesidad contemporánea de pensar mediante diferentes experiencias urbanas, ha habido poca investigación comparativa, especialmente las comparaciones que se extienden en la división norte-sur global o en contextos entre ciudades ricas y pobres. En segundo lugar, por medio de una revisión de las estrategias existentes para la comparación de ciudades, el artículo considera el potencial de las metodologías comparativas para superar sus limitaciones y para satisfacer las crecientes demandas de los estudios urbanos internacionales, y propiamente los estudios urbanos poscoloniales. Finalmente, se propone una nueva fase de investigación urbana comparativa, que es experimental, pero con bases rigurosamente teóricas.

From the city lens toward urbanisation as a way of seeing: Country/city binaries on an urbanising planet

In recent years, three superficially distinct urban subfields have made parallel efforts to incorporate the city’s traditional ‘outsides’ into urban research. Urban political ecology, American urban sociology and postcolonial urban studies have made, respectively, ‘nature’, the ‘rural’ and the ‘not-yet’ city the objects of self-consciously urban analyses. I argue that these interventions are analogous efforts to hybridise city/nature, city/country or society/nature binaries, and that they have a common cause. Each is a response to a persistent ‘city lens’ that remains pervasive in urban practice, and whose assumptions are an increasingly poor fit for contemporary urban environments. This lens, ground in the context of the 19th century metropolis, interprets the world through a series of binary associations hung on the basic assumption that the city can be defined against a non-urban outside. I develop John Berger’s (2008 [1972]) idea of ‘ways of seeing’ as a heuristic for understanding this situation and, using the case of nature, show how the city lens encourages practitioners and some scholars to romanticise, anachronise or generalise when confronting signs of the not-city in the urban. I conclude by evaluating the limitations of hybridity as a solution to the problems of the city lens, and by outlining an alternative approach. I advocate for turning this way of seeing into a research object, and argue for the importance of an historical and process-oriented examination of the ongoing use of these categories even as critical urban scholars attempt to move beyond them.

Accounts from behind the Curtain: History and Geography in the Critical Analysis of Urban Theory

AbstractThis article seeks to contribute to the debate on the proposal to decentre urban theory and to develop postcolonial urban studies, and on the related issue of the geography of the production and circulation of knowledge. It focuses on how scholars writing about post‐socialist cities explain why their sub‐field has so far contributed little to urban theory, and it proposes an alternative—historically informed—perspective on the issue. Based on an analysis of the ties and exchanges that existed between urban studies in Central and Eastern Europe and ‘West‐based' urban theory and research during the state‐socialist period, this article argues that the recognized current position of research on post‐socialist cities in relation to international urban scholarship has important historical parallels with the period prior to 1989. The article thus underlines the need to include a historically informed analysis of geography of knowledge production in critical thinking about urban theory and in the project of cosmopolitan urban studies. The capacities of researchers in different localities to contribute to this project are various and shaped by the history of the discipline. The conditions and perspectives in and from which researchers contribute to urban theory should therefore be taken into account if the project of cosmopolitan urban studies is to succeed.

Lacan on urban development and national identity in a global city: Integrated Resorts in Singapore

Lacanian psychoanalysis has been used in film, literature and other areas of social thought, but rarely in the domain of urban studies and human/cultural geography. Following its introduction by urban planners Michael Gunder and Jean Hillier, I apply the theory of the four discourses and the mirror stage of development to Singapore's urban development of the two Integrated Resorts at Marina Bay and Sentosa. The decision to allow gambling and build casinos was a contentious one and provides a point of departure for insight into the identity issues and planning decision making processes in Singapore. I critically analyse the rhetoric of the public debate from 2004–2005 to draw conclusions about the government's self‐perception of Singapore as a city‐state and the manifestation of this identity through the creation of cosmopolitan spaces as an attempt to project that identity onto its citizens. The aim of Lacanian psychoanalysis is to provide an understanding and recognition by analysis to enable a change of signifiers, values and ideology among the masters and the subjects to better represent the true needs and wants of the community. This reflective position enables a movement toward postcolonial urban studies and planning.

Actually Existing Comparative Urbanism: Imitation and Cosmopolitanism in North-south Interurban Partnerships

There is a renewed interest in comparative urbanism among human geographers. There is also a renewed interest in comparative urbanism among urban policy practitioners. This latter "new comparative urbanism" is identified in the paper as "actually existing comparative urbanism" and outlined using existing literatures on municipal internationalism and urban policy mobilities, in addition to empirical material from a research project on interurban partnerships involving British cities. A brief history of these partnerships is provided, focusing on North-South interurban partnerships in order to engage with the concerns of postcolonial urban studies. The main argument developed is that policy transfer in such relationships has been overwhelmingly from North to South, and that economic and democratic rationalities among Northern participants partially explain this pattern of "imitative urbanism." This study concludes by considering prospects for a more cosmopolitan urbanism.

African Reverberations of the Mumbai Attacks

In the wake of Mumbai terror attacks one is forced to reflect on the nature and representation of urban violence across the global South. It is clear that only certain kinds of violence and upheaval warrant attention in the public domain as reflected in the world’s globalized media. This observation immediately forces one to consider the deafening silence about the pervasive execution and symbolic order of terror in much of Africa. Indeed, 88 percent of conflict deaths between 1990 and 2007 in Africa received hardly any media coverage let alone analysis. Given that one is talking about 5.4 million deaths in Congo (DRC) alone, it is very difficult to fully comprehend the differential treatment of conflict, violence and death. Drawing on the rich perspective in postcolonial urban studies that cities can be read as targets, I seek to extend that work by bringing routinized violence, focused on social infrastructures and relations, into the analytical frame. Hopefully, the Mumbai attacks can at least open up fresh and more urgent avenues of theoretical work on the painful and extreme constitution of urban modernities in the global South.