Editorial: Where is the world at and where is it headed?

Abstract

‘In retrospect, the violence at le Carillon was only a foreshadowing of the credible carnage that would be unleashed at the Bataclan. But it stood out for me, because I knew the place and had spent evenings just like that one sitting at its tables. My horror, rooted in this sense of nearness, paled in comparison to what many others I knew were experiencing; these were streets they had walked for years, bars and restaurants they knew intimately. Some of them would later find out that their own friends and acquaintances were among the victims.’¹

Paris, November 13, 2015. Violence … carnage … horror. Elements of the experience of the citizens are easily identified as is their placement as victims, near and far, within the city and beyond it, and the cause of their victimage easily identified as the terroristic actions of ‘the aliens’, essentially displaced/misplaced within the city but with loyalties far beyond it. A neat formulation. But this spatialised and temporalised ideology freezes time and space. Are not some placements, nationality, race, both more substantial and ethical than others and, at other times in other spaces, less so? If so, where is the world at and where is/should it be headed?

Can we, scholars and others, grasp and convey all of this? What kinds of knowledge/scholarship, some of it not evident perhaps to some social scientific (scientistic?) observers, do we need, as we set out briefly the sources and forms of knowledge included in this issue? Where is the world at and heading towards, and what we can do about it? Questions raised to a new level of seriousness by the Paris attacks of November 13th, 2015, and, in new extended ‘other’ times, spaces, and motions, by their aftermath. Largely on the basis of material assembled in this issue, but not originally to that end, another exercise in transdisciplinary,² rather than multidisciplinary, readings and investigation is set out here.

The first section, the ‘near’ as of this writing and much but not all of the experience behind it, is that of the West, cities/ largely urbanised (though this is a suspect term that hides as much as it reveals) regions of the globalised North – Paris and London with an excursion to Chester, Pennsylvania and an extra one, foreshadowing our second section, to Kigali, Rwanda. The second section, the ‘far’, is that of some cities/largely urbanised regions of East Asia, mainly Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and Taipei in Thailand. The third and final section, ‘Beyond and Within (including the planet)’ returns to ‘alienated’ Paris, throwing in a little psychogeography, turning to 9/11, and to aspects of the earthy, sensual, sentient planet that the regnant school of unitary ‘planetary urbanisation’ knows not of.

‘Near’ (‘Far from Vietnam’?)

Before the Asian and concluding sections, the first one includes three papers referring in all to situations in Europe, particularly London, North America, and, with an extension to Kigali, Rwanda, Africa.³

The journey begins with Kate Shaw’s partly feminist and Shavian (GBS bows in and bows out with a hint of a mocking curtsy) guide to Marxist and other subsequent readings of ‘the urban question’. Both Shaw and Meagher engage with Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s new urban epistemology.

Kate Shaw provides a dynamic history of Marxist and Marx-influenced/inspired critical theory from Marx himself, through an occasionally Situationist-leaning Lefebvre, via Schmid and Kipfer, to Castells’ Urban Question and then to Brenner-Schmid and Merrifield on planetary urbanisation and the urban question, coming to an interim or alternatively terminal stop after Gleeson's The Urban Condition (2014) as she brings Harvey, Merrifield, and Gleeson together:

‘Unlike Harvey (2000, 259) for whom the world order is ‘unhinged’ by a stock market crash, and Merrifield (2014) whose revolution is precipitated by many global insurrections, Gleeson's (2014, 111) catalyst for ‘a terminal crisis of capitalist modernity’ arrives through climate change. A period of ‘dangerous transition’ (122) involving catastrophic events, dystopian warlordism and general death and destruction of society as we know it, reveals its ‘dark natalities’ (another concept from Arendt) in the form of a guardian state that will usher us through the night.’

But will there be a guardian state that will usher us through the night’? It is at this point that the cycle stalls:

‘We don't know—none of us know. We're hopelessly bogged, spinning our wheels in the mud of ‘necessary but impossible’ which rules out anti-capitalism in a capitalist society (Fogelsong 1986) but splatters well beyond that.’

But is it at this point that a feminist cavalry, the intelligent women, come gallopng over the horizon? Not quite. Some of them are men. And they are not galloping but rather perhaps edging (definitely not hedging) firmly but gently through the mud. And some of them – more women than men but this is not a simplistic, feminist triumphalism - pushing Shaw a little further than she is quite ready to go, recognise the mud as earth, the soil, rather than a slippery impediment. This is not the place for a roll call (Shaw calls them, hesitantly but surely) but one name/body of work/ way of being stands out. It is Doreen Massey who, as Shaw notes in her penultimate section, ‘The polymorphous dynamism of all things’: theorises space as:

the ‘dimension of things being, existing at the same time: of simultaneity’, recalibrating the urban question from time to space—evolving not just over the years but across the earth— and in so doing ‘presents us with the most fundamental of political of questions which is how are we going to live together’.

Moving on to the other two papers in this section, Pablo Sendra's ‘Rethinking urban space’ takes a few faltering but useful steps in this direction. His account of projects based on Richard Sennett's work and on assemblage thinking as applied/developed in two parts of London, Gillett Square, Hackney, and Stockwell Skatepark in Lambeth. Sharon Meagher takes more than a few in her ‘The Politics of Urban Knowledge’ her readings/of urban studies, which she sees as not fundamentally in crisis but in need of new metaphors or figurations such as those developed by her and others in Chester, Pennsylvania, USA and Kigali, Rwanda. But in her valuable roll call of knowledge exemplars – streetwalkers, nomads, weeds – stops short of Marx's mole who nevertheless needs this company.

Both Shaw and Meagher discuss Brenner and Schmid’s new epistemology but find little to excite them. Shaw, comparing Lefebvre’s ‘complete urbanisation of society’ with ‘planetary urbanisation', concludes:

‘Lefebvre’s ‘complete urbanisation of society’ usefully prefigures the contemporary concepts of globalisation and the ecological footprint; ‘planetary urbanisation’, on the other hand, comes across as an alternative term with not much more explanatory value than the concepts currently in use. The political and practical implications of this reworking remain unclear.’

And Meagher finds their new epistemology of little value when working in her own city of Chester, Pennsylvania or far-off in Kigali, Rwanda.

All the above constitutes a necessary direction, the way we should be heading, but not with enough guidance to the terrain we have to engage and engage with, where we are at. Two deeply significant papers take us to Taipei in Taiwan and to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. The value of the scholarship of these two observers is still not evident to social science with its still widespread scientistic myopia.

Far

‘What is going on in Vietnam can be seen throughout the Asian region and, indeed, much of it is no more than a description of where the world in general is at and by implication where it is headed.’ (Atkinson)

‘Standing in the rain at a busy intersection in Taipei, a homeless father of two is holding up a sign advertising local real estate … Among many absurdities and ironies entailed in this situation, the most striking is the fact that a homeless person advertises homes’ (Lisiak)

To look at the world from viewpoints in East Asia or elsewhere in the East/global South is still an unfamiliar move for Western/Northern scholars. And the value of the scholarship of these two observers is still not evident to some social scientific (scientistic?) observers. Not so here and now.

The words of the second of the two epigraphs opening this section were those of the author, Agata Lisiak, in her paper about the films of Tsai Ming-lian, ‘Making sense of absence … ’, describing a scene, repeated several times, in his film Stray Dogs (2013). Later in her paper, she quotes the director himself.

‘Ten years ago, I saw a man on the streets of Taipei, holding up a sign to advertise tour packages … Soon afterwards, this industry mushroomed, and human billboards could be seen everywhere, holding up signs that advertised real estate. More and more people had lost their jobs and taken up this new profession of holding up signboards for real estate companies. It was as if their time had become worthless.’. (Tsai Ming-lian)

A particularly significant point that he makes of the human billboards is that ‘it was as if their time had become worthless.’ A further point that has to be considered now is whether where we are heading to is in fact where much of the world already is, except that it is not only the time of many people that is becoming worthless, it is their lives, their very existence. A crucial aspect of this denial of worth is the absence of certain life/living supports, of movement, speech, home, and infrastructure. Cinematic portrayal helps us to ‘see’ these absences in contemporary urban life.

Adrian Atkinson demonstrates the value of long-engaged and widely-ranging and multidisciplinary, professional and ‘amateur’ (see Merrifield), formal and informal readings of Vietnam and, particularly, Ho Chi Minh City.

His subtitled ‘final dash’, as applied in a long paragraph (from his abstract), to Vietnam refers in part to such factors as:

‘Urbanisation is progressing in Asia at breakneck speed, producing almost overnight city regions sprawling vast distances into the peri-urban countryside. As they grow, in unplanned ways, so the problems deepen.’

So far the paragraph refers to experiences that will seem familiar to those of us in the Western/Northern ‘near’ to which we have been referring but now the paragraph moves on to what may seem, in our terms. a mix of ‘near’(familiar) and ‘far’(unfamiliar, except through television or film, or ‘travel’) characteristics⁴:

‘The provision of all manner of infrastructure lags increasingly behind with consequent problems of traffic gridlock, seriously inadequate sanitation and, in coastal cities, increasing flooding where the impact of climate change threatens to render whole urban neighbourhoods unliveable. Meanwhile super-rich minorities are emerging where, nevertheless, poverty is—temporarily—kept at bay and a vast mass of new middle classes are attempting to live the modern consumer life amidst rampant corruption that expresses itself particularly in massive oversupply of upper income housing that few can afford with whole developments remaining permanently vacant.’

But as the paragraph continues, Atkinson’s account has taken us into territory of which we can see familiar signs ‘near’ at hand but suppose/hope that these trends are not accumulating fast towards us. Unfortunately that possibility begins to look more like an actual reality as he takes us into

‘Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam is a typical case where currently a kind of euphoria is palpable where much of the population feel they have arrived in the modern consumer world. Whilst officialdom projects growth in all dimensions to be continuing into even the more distant future, one may be sceptical that this can, in reality, continue for much longer.’

That kind of euphoria, that ‘modern consumer world’, those ‘official’ projections of growth that begin to require more than a little scepticism are now ‘near’ at hand. What then?

The third and final section, returns to alien-ated, even alien-hated, Paris, throwing in a little (not enough) psychogeography, turning to 9/11, and to aspects of the earthy, sensual, sentient planet that the regnant school of unitary ‘planetary urbanisation’ knows not of.

Beyond and Within (including the planet)

‘An Algerian tried to study Paris, I said, an Algerian named AbdelHafid Khatib, and because he was an Arab he was harassed and imprisoned. Because he was an Arab he could not freely move through the city, he could not observe, he could not carry out a ‘dérive’ the way his comrades could.’

‘And none of them cared’ (Gibbons, 69)⁵

Khatib’s comrades were Situationists, including Guy Debord, engaged in psychogeographical studies in 1950’s Paris. Andrea Gibbons tells the story in her valuable essay ‘Salvaging Situationism: Race and Space’. Ah, so we’re into psychogeography are we? Surely at best an occasionally interesting sideline, where not a blank spot, one that serious socio-spatial scientists—with, it has to be said, their sometimes thin knowledge of even twentieth-century sociology and related fields—do not indulge.⁶ And, it seems, where even his contemporary psychogeographers chose to leave him, with his study of Les Halles incomplete. There was one exception, Michele Bernstein, the wife of Guy Debord, far ahead of him in this respect.⁷ Another ‘Intelligent Woman’ to be included perhaps in a future edition of Kate Shaw’s guidebook - to whose current edition we shall return.

Asking again the questions ‘where is the world at and where is/should it be?’, we return to Jonah Birch’s experience of November 13th, as summed up in our epigraph, this time to his subsequent visits to and beyond it, and to the conclusions he derives from them:

‘The Bataclan Theater, Le Carillon, Le Petit Cambodge — these venues may attract professionals, but they also cater to many other kinds of people … As for the Stade de France, it sits on the edge of Saint-Denis, one of the biggest of Paris’s banlieues, known for its large Arab and black immigrant populations and famous as a traditional stronghold of the left.'

‘Why would ISIS choose these as the targets of its violence? Such a random campaign of terror makes more sense if the aim isn’t just to exact revenge, but also to generate a wave of repression and militarization. The goal, at least in part, seems to be to further marginalize French Muslims and banlieue residents and exacerbate their isolation from the rest of French society.'

We must point up the contradictory tendencies that can be seen in ‘where we are heading' in much of CITY's work, with particular strength in this issue. On one side, there are the gentle hopes and, to some extent, expectations of the transitionists: and, on the other, the negative expectations of the apocalyptic schools, some of which are expecting a literal dead-end and others are expecting revolution.

Positive dimensions are indicated and examined in Sharon Meagher’s and Sendra’s papers and among the tentative cavalry emerging in the penultimate section of Shaw’s guide, with Massey’s aid: ‘The polymorphous dynamism of all things’, and in our previous issue, in Marcelo Lopes de Souza’s ‘From the ‘right to the city’ to the right to the planet’.

The negative dimension was clearly set out in CITY’s earlier explorations of 9/11 and its aftermath (as is explicit in episode 3 and the forthcoming episode 4 in Melissa Wilson’s interpretive chronicle of CITY’s holistic and cumulative project) and in Atkinson’s account of ‘the final dash’.⁸ The physical reality of that nil evaluation of human life symbolised by the human billboards, to which Tsai Ming-lian and Lisiak draw our attention, taken for granted in carnage on both sides, is now evident in 11/13 and its emerging aftermath.

The ‘far’ seems to becomes ‘near’ as what was near disappears - unless it is recorded, interpreted, and saved, challenged and acted upon, with/within and beyond. The moon is, as George Bernard Shaw and Kate Shaw have asserted, not made of green cheese nor is it, as one leading unilateral planetary urbanist has asserted, urban.⁹ That might be where it, the planet and ourselves, misled by inadequate epistemologies and paradigms, are heading, But it is not where we are at, or need be.

Notes

1 See Jonah Birch, ‘Turning Tragedy into War’, Jacobin 11.17.15.

2 Catterall, B. 2013. “Towards the Great Transformation: (11) Where/what is Culture in ‘Planetary Urbanisation’? Towards a New Paradigm.” City 18 (3): 368–379.

3 Time to see again this 1967 film, “Loin du Vietnam” (the original title).

4 A mix that will become familiar through such rare path-breaking work as Steven Graham’s “Luxified Skies: How Vertical Urban Housing Became an Elite Preserve.” City 19 (5): 618–645, and, as the quality of life in the West/North declines (perhaps at an increasing rate). See also, an outstanding example of critical sociogeography, Iain Sinclair, “Diary: Swimming on the 52nd Floor.” London Review of Books 37 (18): 37–39, 24 September 2015. The distancing of ‘near’ and far’ and the role of media is considered in Melissa Wilson's current episode (3) in this issue of her critical chronicle on CITY’s project: ‘City, space, media and the periphery’.

5 Andrea Gibbons in Salvage 2, November, 2015.

6 It should be noted that Debord was not the only leading intellectual to neglect or, worse, fail to acknowledge black radical scholarship. See Brady Thomas Heiner, “Foucault and the Black Panthers.” City 11 (3): 313–356.

7 Andrea Gibbons.

8 For the long-term, global dimension of Atkinson's analysis, see on the CITY official website, www.tandfonline.com/ccit. In honour of Adrian Atkinson's recent talk at TEDx Vienna's annual salon event, CITYx, Routledge have made Professor Atkinson's CITY articles, including ‘Urbanisation: A Brief Episode in History’ on which his talk is based, free to access for a limited time. In addition, we have made a collection of other CITY articles on the event’s theme “Where is Our Civilisation Heading?” free to access.

9 See Neil Brenner's inaugural lecture, ‘The Urbanization Question, or, the Field Formerly Known as Urban Studies’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK0_CY499Kg, 2 November 2011.