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ABSTRACT
In this response to Ananya Roy’s paper, I ask: who are the allies of feminist knowledge production about the urban? To explore this question, I specifically ask what feminist scholars may find of use in two books, namely Arrival Cities by Doug Saunders and Implosions/Explosions edited by Neil Brenner, that are representative of two major discourses on the urban, respectively, the “Urban Age” and planetary urbanization, currently favored by policy bodies and (some) academics. Their limited engagement with politics leads me to conclude with a call for a feminist mode of situated knowledge production to engage with (the limits of) urban theory and the urban as a site of praxis.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Bob Lake and Deborah Martin for the invitation to the AAG Urban Geography plenary session and to participate in the journal, to Ananya Roy for all the work she produces that continuously pushes the boundaries of what we think we know, and to Kate Driscoll Derickson for so splendidly taking up the gauntlet.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), established in 2015, are a set of targets relating to future international development that will replace the eight Millennium Development Goals. There are a total of 17 SDGs with 169 targets, covering a broad range of sustainable development issues that address the premise that poverty eradication is the greatest global challenge facing sustainable development.
2. SDG 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.
11.1 By 2030, ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services, and upgrade slums.
11.2 By 2030, provide access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems for all, improving road safety, notably by expanding public transport, with special attention to the needs of those in vulnerable situations, women, children, persons with disabilities and older persons.
11.3 By 2030, enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacities for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries.
11.4 Strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage.
11.5 By 2030, significantly reduce the number of deaths and the number of affected people and substantially decrease the economic losses relative to global GDP caused by disasters, including water-related disasters, with the focus on protecting the poor and people in vulnerable situations.
11.6 By 2030, reduce the adverse per capita environmental impact of cities, including by paying special attention to air quality, municipal and other waste management.
11.7 By 2030, provide universal access to safe, inclusive and accessible, green and public spaces, particularly for women and children, older persons and persons with disabilities.
11.a Support positive economic, social and environmental links between urban, peri-urban and rural areas by strengthening national and regional development planning.
11.b By 2020, substantially increase the number of cities and human settlements adopting and implementing integrated policies and plans towards inclusion, resource efficiency, mitigation and adaptation to climate change, resilience to disasters, develop and implement in line with the forthcoming Hyogo Framework holistic disaster risk management at all levels.
11.c Support least developed countries, including through financial and technical assistance, for sustainable and resilient buildings utilizing local materials.
4. Susan Parnell (Citation2014, p. 3) argues that Habitat III’s “New Urban Agenda” has the potential to change the normative base of how urban issues are understood and acted upon, depending upon which one of three scenarios wins out, in terms of: “seeing cities as one of many sites for sustainable development (alongside oceans, forests and farmlands); seeing cities as the … most important locations in which distinctive challenges of sustainable urban development must be supported; or even more radically, framing cities as the absolute drivers of all sustainable development in what amounts to an urban anthropocene.”
5. I understand Saunders’ concept of arrival cities to be a chaotic concept (Sayer, Citation1992). Saunders provides no definition of the concept, which appears to encompass both place and space. It is alluded to as a special kind of an urban space (p.3) and a transitional space (p.3). In terms of place, it can range from a single set of buildings (p.21), to an urban neighborhood (p.11), or a migrant suburb (p.19). It can encompass the slums, favelas, bidonvilles, shantytowns, urban villages, gecekondu, and the barrios of the global South, but also the immigrant neighborhoods, ethnic districts, and the banlieues of cities in the North. It is also a community—a tight-knit network of people (p.21), a repository of social capital (p.21). And it can also be understood in terms of the functions it serves (p.20), namely as a crucible of social networks that provide an entry to the rest of the city and to social mobility. What this variety of nomenclature highlights is its chaotic construction, i.e., a concept that is not rationally abstracted from other relations and objects. It does not “isolate ….a significant element of the world which has some unity and autonomous force such as a structure. A bad abstraction [it] arbitrarily divides the indivisible and/or lumps together the unrelated and the inessential, thereby “carving up” the object of study with little or no regard for its structure or form” (Sayer, Citation1992, p. 138). In other words, as a chaotic concept we cannot attribute casual powers (or liabilities) to arrival cities. And while they may share common properties, these cannot be interpreted as causally significant ones. The concept of arrival cities may well subsume different processes, related in ways that warrant their consideration under a common umbrella term, but lacking a concise definition; the notion of arrival cities does not yet appear sufficiently robust to constitute a coherent category. The idea that we intuitively know and can recognize what an arrival city is, that there is a universal set of characteristics that define it, just waiting to be discovered, is also problematic. There are huge historically constituted differences between arrival cities, differences that tend to be reduced to simple empirical variation, allowing Saunders to apply a universality to the concept of arrival cities, modified only through there being different varieties of the same thing, and in turn allowing a universal one-size-fits-all policy prescription for them.
6. The Planetary Urbanization Reading group was initiated by the City Institute at York University, Toronto. It emerged from discussions dating from Autumn 2014, when, following a model of slow scholarship (Mountz et al., forthcoming), we assembled a group of Greater Toronto Area scholars to meet once per semester at York University and the University of Toronto to spend a day closely and collectively reading key texts relating to planetary urbanization. It is culminating in April 2016 in a seminar with Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid as the keynote speakers. The Reading Group currently has more than 70 registered members and has developed an extensive and annotated reading list with discussion notes available upon request.
7. His discomfort arises from the term “mega” describing cities with a population of over 10 million, and yet mega is a metric unit denoting a factor of only one million.
8. Saunders believes in the ideology of the bootstrap, that in this “Urban Age” a free market in widely held private property and the provision of credit alongside strong state support through investment in infrastructure and people are the precursors to social mobility and a force for lasting progress. The inclusion of migrants into educational, social, and political systems, including citizenship, is as important as access to land and/or home ownership, welfare services, employment assistance, transportation, security, and communication networks.
9. The hokou system has been used to limit mass migration from rural to urban areas. It is based on the legal requirement of household registration, which gives the right to live in an area and have entitlement to goods and resources.
10. The formation of the self—the study of subject formation—can extend understanding of urban politics beyond conventional struggles over access to power and resources. In her work on urban subjectivity formation in Chinese cities, Lisa Hoffman makes the claim that: “Urban politics are located in these modes of subject formation, emphasizing that politics may be of the urban as well as in the urban” (Citation2014, p. 1,579). The constitution of new subjectivities is thus inherently political, not in the sense that they are party political or leaning to a particular ideology, but in that they focus on “self- and other governance” (Hoffman, Citation2014, p. 1,578) and can link to a variety of political positions. And hence their importance for studies of urban political possibilities.