February 11. The End of the City? Place, Space, and Urbanization in the 21st Century
Theory
Neil Brenner, 2013. “Theses on Urbanization,” Public Culture 25(1): 85-114.
Henri Lefebvre, 1979 (2009). “Space: Social Product and Use Value,” chapter 8 in State, Space, World: Selected Essays, ed. Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden; trans. Gerald Moore, Neil Brenner, and Stuart Zelden. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Friedrich Engels, 1845 (1892, 1943). “The Great Towns,” chapter 3 in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, trans. Florence Kelley. London: Allen & Unwin.
Jane M. Jacobs, 2012. “Urban Geographies I: Still Thinking Cities Relationally,” Progress in Human Geography 36(3):412–422.
A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, 2014. “Latino Landscapes: Postwar Cities and the Transnational Origins of a New Urban America,” Journal of American History 101(3): 804-31.
Approaches to the Case Study: The Migrant Street
Suzanne Hall, Robin Finlay and Julia King, 2018. “The Migrant Street,” in The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City, ed. Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett, London: Sage Publications, pp. 464-477.
Suzanne M. Hall, 2015. “Super-diverse Street: A ‘Trans-ethnography’ Across Migrant Localities,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38(1):22-37.
Explore the street studies reported at Hall’s Superdiverse streets project: https://lsecities.net/research/data/cr/phase-1-super-diverse-streets-survey-comparisons-2015/en-gb#/
Workshop
We will discuss how national and international backgrounds of ownership, workforce, supply sources, and customer base of neighborhood firms helps to shape places along the lines suggested by Hall’s work.
The theoretical texts that frame this week’s readings and case studies (Brenner, Lefebvre, and Jacobs) opened up new territories of urban conceptualizations for us to explore. However, the abstract, fuzzy conditions and diverse contingencies that Brenner critiques (ANT, assemblage theory) also seem to be at the heart of how he believes one should conceptualize the urban in a global context. What can we agree on? The urban is no longer bounded by physical territory. Global flows of capital, people/labor, services and commodities mutually shape a multiplicity of sites. Does this mean that studying specifically urban questions means studying these mutually constitutive exchanges? Does that not fall under the aegis of ANT as a methodology? Because these phenomena of urbanization are critically informed by practices of capitalist development (not only flows of financial capital and currency, but also the political and social systems that have historically enabled its development and entrenchment), what would the socialist, “self-managed” city look like? I’m not critiquing Lefebvre’s vision, and understand it to be a question of ownership over both the means of production and social reproduction (in terms of the production of space), but feel nonetheless somewhat unsatisfied with his articulation of a “socialist politics of space.” Is this an ethics, rather than a practice? How might different social groups define self-management and use value, according to what values, customs, and norms?
Such questions might offer a segue into our readings on “super-diverse streets” and Sandoval-Strausz’s “Latino Landscapes.” I found the latter a refreshing challenge to common assumptions about urban change and cultural succession in these spaces. I wonder if this research, along with Hall’s, might serve to disrupt, unsettle, or perhaps redefine overdetermined conceptions of gentrification. Both Sandoval-Strausz and Hall et al point out that the migrant groups and individuals they are studying are successfully rejuvenating their urban spaces, taking advantage of rent/land value gaps and less stringent regulatory oversight to improve property and encourage economic activity. There’s a crucial racial/ethnic dimension to these stories as well, one that introduces nuance to our understandings of urban development within a capitalist political economy. When we turn our attention to Long Island City this week, I think we’ll find a rich and often contradictory set of practices in place that shape it: the legacy one-story warehouses and manufacturers lining the upland streets; the pending agreement with Amazon inflating real estate values in anticipation of big returns; the community tensions over this agreement; the deteriorating infrastructure around Anable Basin conditioning street activity and engagement; and the incumbent communities who have stabilized the postindustrial landscape before the “return” of capital.
In his essay “Space,” Henri Lefebvre argues that urban space is produced via the forces of capitalism. In fact, he claims that “space is a means of production: the network of exchanges and the flow of raw materials and energy that make up space also are determined by space” (188). Thus, Lefebvre sees the spatial arrangement of the city as a productive force, or capital, and the role of the state is to control space as a means of capital.
As I walked around Hunters Point on Wednesday, February 6th, I had Lefebvre’s point of view on my mind. The decision to build the Amazon HQ2 along the 11th Street Basin in Long Island City was made devoid of a democratic process. Both the City and the State worked together to propose a bid to Amazon, but this was not done in conversation with community-based organizations, or other community advocates. In addition, the City is giving Amazon $1.3 billion in tax breaks and the State is offering an incentive package of more than $1.5 billion. These are dollars that could be spent on other State or City programs, like building public park instead of the Amazon campus along the waterfront. There couldn’t be a clearer example of Lefebvre’s argument that space is a means of capitalist production and is controlled by the state.
I was also interested in the argument developed by Sandoval-Strausz in his article “Latino Landscapes: Postwar Cities and the Transnational Origins of a New Urban America.” In particular, I was attracted to his argument that American cities are shaped by transnational forces. In his article, he focuses on the transformation of the urban landscape in Oak Cliff, Texas as a result of Mexican immigration. He talks about how the immigrant communities shape urban planning by creating a walkable city where local shops are within walking distance of one another in the downtown area. He also described how the residents transformed the local park into the city’s main plaza. The story he tells reminds me of archival footage of New York City in the late 19th century when millions of European immigrants settled in downtown Manhattan, especially in the Lower East Side. The whole fabric of that neighborhood from the goods people could purchase to the houses of worship that were built, reflected the transnational culture of Manhattan.
– Rebecca Krisel
The ongoing debates on Amazon’s arrival into LIC shaped the lens through which I explored the neighborhood this week – like Rebecca, I am concerned about the process through which the decisions are being made and communicated to the communities most directly affected. This uncertainty, however, also made me think of this week’s readings and the theoretical underpinnings of the discussion around Amazon’s landing in LIC. The neighborhood already has visible signs of the neo-liberal veneer on an industrial past: as Brenner outlines in his discussion of Lefebvre, how do global corporations affect our understanding of the city as a “discrete space,” rather than just a “mask” for the “worldwide totality formed by capitalist urbanization” (Brenner 91)? In this sense, has the impact of Amazon’s arrival already been felt in the urban environment, in its sweeping influence of global digital commerce and delivery, only to be magnified and made more acute with physical dominance in the plans for HQ2? As Brenner also calls out, we must expand our frame of analysis of the impact of Amazon’s spatial expansion and who pays the economic and environmental price (Brenner 108).
We also saw with Sandoval-Strausz the influence a community has on the built environment, just as Rebecca too describes historical examples of (im)migrant communities in the LES – how will Amazon’s workforce and emphasis on digital networks expand concepts of environmental impact?
Saving “the City” from the Urbanists
– Ryan Brunette
There has been a lot of handwringing – in readings over the past two weeks – about whether cities exist and, if so, then about how they might be said to. In the course, a concept of “the city as a discrete, distinct, and territorially bounded unit,” (Brenner, 2013: 101) exemplified in the concentric zone model of Burgess, has been overcome by more soritical*, constructivist, and process-sociological approaches. So, the argument goes, the city-boundary isn’t definite, rather “it is to the space economy what a mountain is to the wider topography… in neither case can a line be drawn that separates it from its wider context.” (Scott and Storper, 2014: 7) The “unit-like” quality of cities is said to be an ideological effect of professional and political practices and strategies (Brenner, 2013: 109). The urban isn’t so much an object as a process, of urbanization, of the capitalist production of spatial agglomeration and extension.
These efforts go too far. The concept of “the city as a discrete, distinct, and territorially bounded unit” must be saved from them. We must do so, first, because the readings wholly elide precisely that feature of the city that makes it discrete, distinct, bounded. For “city,” notably the English term for the Greek πόλεις (polis), refers not simply to a process of socioeconomic agglomeration, or what have you, it refers to the city- or local-state, a political community, in modern times with a governing authority that definitely bounds social relations within its territorial line, regulates them, so directs their demands and struggles up towards itself, institutionalizing them in contradistinction with those social relations that lie beyond.
Robert E. Park may have known these realities better. He saw the city, quite correctly, not as a mystifying ideology but as an institution, “a mechanism… in and through which private and political interests find corporate expression.” (1915: 578)
Neil Brenner asserts that “Much like the nation-form, as analyzed by radical critics of nationalism, the urban-form under capitalism is an ideological effect of historically and geographically specific practices that create the structural appearance of territorial distinctiveness, coherence, and boundedness within a broader, worldwide maelstrom of rapid sociospatial transformation.” (2013: 104) Yet the appropriate analogy is surely not the nation-form, but the state-form. Despite prognostications to the effect that the state is in decline, due to the entwined “sociospatial transformation” of globalization, the state remains as a powerful political actor, the preeminent focus of political action and identity and, perhaps most importantly for academic purposes, a viable and frankly unavoidable unit for comparative isolation of descriptive idiosyncrasies and explanatory causal tendencies. The same, making the necessary alterations, with the local state as involving a territorial order.
Of course, I want to save the city for such comparative analysis.
At least, “the city” and “the urban” can be distinguished, not muddled up together, so that these urbanists and I can both retain the object of our apparently separate concerns.
The city, conceived as unit, will also, finally, and from the other direction, be vital for our understanding of contemporary developments in Hunters Point. A casual walk through the neighborhood on a weekend already reveals that its residents are mostly middle aged (in census blocks 1, 7, and 19, 48% are between 30 and 50 years of age), starting families (a further 9% are below the age of five, also note all the daycares), largely white and Asian (around 81%), and relatively wealthy (median earnings per worker are more than twice that of New York City as a whole). A large percentage, 77%, use public transport to get to work, many on the crowded 7-train, but otherwise their socioeconomic profile suggests that residents of Hunters Point will neither be the biggest losers from Amazon HQ2 nor the grassroots revolt that rejects it. To get to these we’ll need to move further out, into the wider Long Island City, up Vernon Boulevard towards Queensbridge and the Western hemisphere’s largest public housing developments; across Jackson Avenue, the Northern Boulevard, and onto the migrant streets of Jackson Heights; down Borden toward Sunnyside. Amazon HQ2, that is, is entangled in the broader city. In matters of power, needless to say, the residents of this broader city orient themselves primarily not to Anable Basin, not to the New York Metropolitan Area, not to global urbanization, but to the the government of the five boroughs at City Hall and to Albany.
* relating to so-called fuzzy concepts (i.e. the sorites paradox: at what point do grains of sand aggregate into a heap?)
If I thought before I acted, I would’ve changed that title to “Save the city from the urbanists!”, to be more actively tongue-in-cheek. And I would’ve written it more toward the title of Class 3, “The End of the City?”
I too had Lefebvre in my head as I walked Long Island City for several hours today, “capitalist and neo-capitalist space is a space of quantification and growing homogeneity, a commodified space where all the elements are exchangeable and thus interchangeable.”
Walking along the water south of the Eleventh Street Basin means traversing a remarkably homogenous collection of luxury condos and rental buildings that really have no sense of place within the larger neighborhood, but feel like a hundred different developments in cities I have been in.
During our post-class workshop last Monday, we identified Plaxall as the corporate owner of much of the area intended for Amazon HQ2. Walking the neighborhood, you see evidence of the longtime, third generation family owned plastic manufacturer everywhere. In its current form Plaxall is largely a real estate holding company. I posted a small gallery of pictures of my walk and you can see them here: https://myalbum.com/album/lzg5bIxk7wp0
Our reading, and Plaxall, and LIC, all came together at the Plaxall Gallery, a donated art space that Plaxall has lent to local artists. The former industrial space is in the footprint of what is meant to become the Amazon campus. As luck would have it, they were having an art opening this weekend.
It was interesting to see one exhibit that consisted of photographs of current and former local LIC artists from throughout the 90s and 00s. Many have lost their space as the neighborhood has transformed, from vacant and cheap former industrial spaces into high-end residential buildings. The irony was thick that all of this was being displayed in a donated space by Plaxall, the company who has taken a leadership role in striking the deal with Amazon (www.anablebasinlic.com/), a deal which if completed, would eliminate the very space I was standing in. As the gallery employee said when I asked her thoughts about everything, “it’s complicated.”
In the back of the gallery, I was struck by a mixed-media sculpture made from old garments. The artist, Shihui Zhou, is from China and her artist statement described her work as “leveraging her own cross-cultural experience” and “an exploration of human intersubjectivity…connections made between multitudes of people.” Suzanne Hall and Jane Jacobs would approve. A picture of the work is included in the photo gallery I linked to above.
Plaxall’s founders have long seen Long Island City as a future boon. Much of the real estate was purchased decades ago by previous generations of the Pfohl family. There seems to be a concerted effort in the area to mention the 70+ years Plaxall has been in the area, a staking of their credibility and exerting an aura of ownership to the area, as well as mentioning their local commitments and philanthropy. Cynically you might say it’s all been to placate the locals, readying them for this payout that is finally ready to come true.
Interestingly the family tried to create their own “tech incubator” back in 2012. It never happened. They also paid $100,000 for an old ferry from Rhode Island that they intended to use for a floating beer garden. The old ship still sits untouched in the basin, viewable from the Plaxall Gallery (www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20120817/long-island-city/floating-beer-garden-dropping-anchor-long-island-city/#slideshow-carousel).
I will let Henri Lefebvre end my response with this: “in conclusion, a transformation of society presupposes the possession and collective management of space by a permanent intervention of ‘interested parties,’ even with their multitude and sometimes contradictory interests.”
More on Plaxall and LIC:
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20140112/TECHNOLOGY/301129986/family-reinvests-in-long-island-city
http://www.licpost.com/questions-raised-over-plaxall-site-not-part-of-amazon-campus-in-state-run-rezoning-plan
-Adam Sachs
This week’s readings made me reflect back on my own experiences of living in cities like Istanbul, London, Zurich, Leeds and now NYC and my relationship with these cities. I will start with Brenner, Lefebvre and Engels readings first.
Historically the concept of cities was considerably linear in physical terms; bordered, surrounded and protected by the city walls offering safety, shelter and job prospects. Most people have an understanding of what a city is, which is often fed by the experience and landmark images of the city that we are exposed to over the time. In parallel, all these images provide a platform for people to define and identify the city accordingly to the collection of those images. It is not that these physical aspects of as city is unimportant however what makes a city a city is more to do with the social processes. The city does not express itself alone in physical forms such as buildings and landmarks nor a social institution that consists of courts, hospitals and schools constitute towards defining a city but what is significance about the cities is that it brings people together in a way that makes difference to the relationship between them and the city. Whilst most of these landmark images are easy to identify and attempt to provide an insight to their own unique identity, the concept of urban environment conjures up various images that might evoke similarity in physical terms yet it is much more difficult to stress the social significance. It is the ever-growing scale and the social significance of urbanism on human life (as well as ecology) that we are also tackling.
Sure this might all be echoing human geography perspective and even environmental psychology but this is exactly what makes “the urban” more significant. That it is a cross-and-interdisciplinary field to study and requires collaboration in practice. As citizens/ residents of a global city, we are in need of being recognised, our voices heard and feel belonging in order for us to thrive, give back to the community and engage.
Let me illustrate. Bradford is a post-industrial city in northern England (not far from Engels’ Manchester) that was once one of the richest cities in Western Europe (thanks to the textile industry and being close to the northern port cities) and it has been in decline since the latter part of the 20th century. Despite its amazing Victorian architecture and accommodating some corporate business HQs, the city fails to attract not only investment from the government but also new residents or even existing residents to engage. Back in 2012, the local government decided to invest in a water fountain feature in town square that would also become the UK’s biggest water feature, which cost the taxpayers a mere £24.4 million. Sure the city is nicer to look at and some may even say slightly more pleasant to walk around but that money could have been spent into youth and social welfare services. The city is in need and it is for the basic necessities of its own citizens, for them to feel part of, engage and give back- economically and socially.
Now looking at the Sandoval-Strausz’s paper, the similar race and ethnicity dimensions present itself here in Bradford (also being home to diverse cultures, ethnicities and immigrant communities due to its history) yet, we see more of an exclusion whether it is through social relations, or pushing the youth out of its impossible economy, or even built environment. Indeed building and protection of public spaces such as parks and plazas are vital to the health of urban life but in this specific top-down, managerial case it is almost as if the slightest opportunity of community engagement is painted over with the commission of a water feature and some more.
(here is a link about Bradford and its water feature: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/feb/05/life-britain-youngest-city-bradford-uk-unemployment)
Thanks for the link to the Bradford article. A useful comparison.
This week’s readings show the exciting “spatial turn” in social science and its continuous vitality. Although it may not yet a system, it was conceived and perceived from early capitalism in Engels’ survey to post-urbanization stage. Space itself is not only a site or container, but also a social product. The question then comes to “when” and “how” is space produced by “whom”? The concern on such “urban process” rather than “urban unit” is less contested and more meaningful.
The other question impressed me is from Brenner’s and Jacob’s articles. Although I cannot understand the concepts of ” planetary urbanisation” and “radically cosmopolitan urbanism” clearly, it’s inspiring to think about “the extended flowed network” and “concentration/extension of space” in urbanization and globalization process. When I am trying to do some comparisons between New York and Shanghai, I was confused about “what to compare” when going deeper into the real stories, as Jacobs said, I pre-hypothetically categorize the cities according to “the hierarchy of existing theories of globalized urbanism”, such as “North-South axial imaginaries” . Somehow, they are just like other “ordinary cities” and spaces “managed” by different “interest parties”.
As I mull over this week’s readings in comparison to last, I find myself mired (in good company, it seems!) What seems to be a foundational paradox of urbanism studies is that the only way to concretely talk about “cities” is in overly precise or abstract gestures. The only position that we have seen so far which speaks about cities in general, without a disclaimer stating the impossibility of such a task, is Lefebvre’s. So, this week, my musings start there. “Production of space rather than production in space:” the thought that the city is as mutable and consumable as the goods and services it renders is one that can provide a foundational structure to even the most contemporary instances of urban renewal. The space itself—who owns it, sees it, controls it—is a manifestation of the capitalist and political forces at work at that particular moment. For example, at our particular moment, the space of Long Island City itself is the spacial manifestation of the political structures that made Amazon choose New York (and specifically Long Island City) as its HQ2. Overlooking the Manhattan skyline—in itself a kind of possession– waiting to be filled up (even more) with commuters and daily workers and trendy coffee shops.
The city of New York, to borrow art historian TJ Clark’s phrasing, is available as an image in Long Island City. Perfectly framed across the East River, the iconic skyline is as much a consumable good to the future upper middle- to upper class inhabitants as the millions of shipments that Amazon makes a year. And Amazon is willing and able to pay for it. The social capital of building headquarters that endows your corporate employees with the ability to see (and photograph, and instagram) the city of New York.
We can also investigate theoretical links proposed by Lefebvre to the Sandoval-Strausz article on the (relatively) recent urban influx of international (primarily Latino) immigrants. Can we apply Lefebvre’s notion that ”the past has left its marks, its inscriptions, but space is always a present space, a current totality, with its links an connections to action” to the increasing re-urbanization of abandoned white bourgeoisie neighborhoods?
-Caroline House
Two theoretical questions came to mind from our readings this first week. First, there seems to be a tendency to contrast the network cities and multi-scalar, planetary urbanization of today with more static, self-contained cities of yore. To what extent do our post-modern urban theories rely on modern/traditional divide that has been problematized in other areas of social theory? I was reading Polanyi’s The Great Transformation for another class this week, and he notes the way that cities have long been nodes in international trade, marked by conflicts of local and long-distance interests. I don’t think Brenner would disagree with this point, but I think there is a tendency or opportunity to use these essential temporal contrasts, and I’m not clear on whether “cities” have changed, and thus we need a new theories of urbanization, or whether our theories have always been inadequate. To go back to Brenner, he discusses whether we are in a time of post-urban studies, where the field is just an artifact of “a phase of capitalist modernity whose sociospatial preconditions have now been superseded” (94). Brenner rejects Gan’s proposition, saying that such thinking would render us incapable of understanding why the concept of the urban occupies so much of public thought an discourse. In this way, Brenner does not seem to see the isolated unit of the city as an historical aberration but always as a cognitive project, that was no more reflective of the dynamics of urbanization 200 years ago than it is today.
My second question came from Lefebvre, Jacobs, and Sandoval-Strausz. Lefebvre and Jacobs both reposition difference into the study of the city, with Lefebvre presenting the practice or project of a socialist space of difference that cannot be reproduced through capitalist exchange, Jacobs urges us to consider sites of failure, absence, and mutation as much as we consider “successful” networks and information sharing. In what ways does Sandoval-Strausz’s contribution to Urban History and Transnational studies fulfill these two authors’ calls for attention to difference? The story of revitalization through latinization is in some ways a story of the failure of white-flight, the traditionally accepted narrative of doom is interrupted by a different pattern of migration into cities. The author’s critique of Sassen, Harvey, and Castells also seems in line with the attention to difference, calling for primacy of human communities in urban processes instead of capital markets. At the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder: what would the political economists think? Is Oak Cliff a “space of difference” (which Harvey, influenced by Lefebvre, has brought up before)? Or is it a space of production in the global economy? Can it be both?
Transnationalism at the Neighborhood Level
Sandoval-Strausz’s revisionist account of postwar American cities, specifically those whose decline has been arrested and even reversed by the Latino-centric influx from Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America and further south in the Americas, such as the Dallas neighborhood of Oak Bluffs he focuses on in his essay, is a welcome sequel to the previous scholarship on the urban decline led by racism-motivated white flight and the socioeconomic consequences of the industrial hollowing-out of the rust belt.
By tracing the source of the Latino influx in the much larger urbanization of Latin America in the postwar decades (25 million Latinos into the US, compared to 250 million Latin Americans into urban Latin America) AND highlighting the continuing ties of the new Americans with their places of origins (Dallas’ Oak Bluffs and towns and villages in Mexico’s Zacatecas state, for example), Sandoval-Strausz illuminates the themes raised by the theoretical literature critical of the static, location-specific assumptions of the city and the urban landscape.
However, he also complicates the abstract story deploying assemblage and network concepts with the significant local/neighborhood-specific impact of specific government policies (Mexican state and federal government funding matching and thus enhancing remittances used to improve local roads, utilities, infrastructure, etc. “back home”), the sociocultural habits and modes of habitation of Latinos (“preference” for walking, which certainly improves the prospects of commercial high street/retail revenue); family and social use of the enclosed outdoor perimeter of private property as a Latino twist on Jane Jacobs’ famous observation about the free neighborhood watch provided by Italian immigrants looking out windows and hanging out on sidewalks in Greenwich Village). I
think it is useful to use the term “diasporic” to describe the position of these Latinos and their “win-win” impact on both the places they came from (which are notably NOT places they left because their remittances and frequent return visits underscore their continuing ties) and the new American places they inhabit and, by so doing, transform from declining to thriving. Diasporic also then links this story to the broader global phenomenon that Sandoval-Strausz rightfully emphasizes at the end of his essay, and the need to flesh out the influx from “East Asia, South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East”.
If one of the takeaways from last week’s class was about the lack of power analysis in the work of the Chicago School, many of this weeks readings take the opposite approach. For Engles, Brenner, and Lefebvre, the city, and indeed all space, is a function of capitalism (Brenner and Lefebvre are explicit on this point, while Engles’ work is the historical foundation from which they can build their analysis). Power not only determines the function of spaces, it also creates the social relations that are ultimately necessary for its (re)production. The move from thinking about the city as a unit (i.e. static entity) and toward thinking about it as a series of processes, as Brenner advocates, means rejecting essence and instead emphasizing contingency and relationaltiy. It also allows for the possibility of change, in so far as once the relations that undergird capitalist space are identified, they can then be challenged and modified.
Up to now we have spoken about our case study as a site, i.e. as a physical place with discrete and identifiable boundaries. What if we started talking about it not as a place, but as a series of processes (labor, political, cultural etc.)? How would that change our approach to our chosen subject and what we learn about it?