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

Social Democratisation : Diffusion Towards (Near) Ubiquity in Networked Technologies

Technocratic Ideologies of ‘Progress’: Bigger, Better, Faster

• Key part of material and discursive construction of modern nation states

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

Topologies of ���Infrastructural ���

Bypass

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 !

Increasingly Complex and ‘Rescaled’ Infrastructural Capitalism

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

The Global ���Border(ing)���Assemblage

(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

Not a Process of Dematerialisation or

Substitution ! Intensifying, Parallel

Mobilities

Electronic and Physical Mobilities��� are Growing in Parallel…

(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

Francois Ascher’s ‘Archipeligo Economy’:��� ‘Tunnel Effects’ and Infrastructural ‘Bypass’

‘Glocal’ Bypass •  Tunnel effects a Means

of bypassing ‘inadequate’ legacies of standardised, monopolistic spaces and networks : premium network spaces

•  E.g. Heathrow Express

‘Glocal Bypass’ : Fibre Networks

‘Local Bypass’ New ‘premium’

intraurban spaces and connections

e.g.electronically charged highways

•  (Toronto, Melbourne, LA, San Diego…)

Local Bypass : Skywalk Cities…

Car Culture :��� Capsularisation and Bypass

Albert Pope : Car Culture -��� From Grids to Ladders…

Car Culture: Intensifying capsularisation SUV Meets DVD

All Bound Up With : The Splintering City - Sprawl and Polynucleation

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

Global Financial

Centres…

City of London’s ‘Ring of Steel’

…Malls, Theme Parks, Resorts,���‘Tourist Bubbles’…

Urban Revanchism ���Suburbanisation of the Centre?

• …Gated Communities…

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

(i) ‘Relational’ Strategic Spatial Planning and Representational Innovation…

•  (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 ?

(iv) ‘Recombinant’ Urban Design and Locative Media Experiments

(vi) Visibility and Transparency: Urban ���Place in the Digitising Economy

• Finally : Must Not be

Afraid…

•  …of utopian thinking… •  …of looking backwards

as well as forwards…