![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
Structural changes in capitalism over the last four decades have facilitated the emergence of globalized sociospatial processes such as urbanization. Meanwhile, the scale of uneven sociospatial development has also been dramatically accentuated. We explore these issues by conceptualizing contemporary urbanization as a “planetary” process, but we also add mediating concepts to study changes on the ground. We illustrate how linkages between dispossession and urbanization can be discerned in countries of both the global North and South. We also show that the oft-made claims to overall efficiency gains from urbanization are a myth. Capitalist urbanization has two dialectically interrelated dimensions: “development” and “dispossession,” and this process cannot be adequately grasped to be an outcome of rural–urban migration leading to efficiency gains.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank two reviewers of this journal for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. We want to mention especially Professor Vamsi Vakulabharanam and other members of the Urban Studies Working Group at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, for their helpful comments and suggestions on the ideas presented in this paper. Many thanks as well to Marshall Feldman and Gary Dymski for organizing the panels on “Reestablishing a Relationship Between Heterodox Economics and Critical Urban and Economic Geography” at the Association of American Geographers’ Annual Meeting 2016 in San Francisco, where we also received useful comments on our ideas. The usual disclaimers apply.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Soja, “The Socio-Spatial Dialectic,” distinguishes between contextual and created spaces. Contextual space is a static conceptualization of space, that is, space that contains human society within itself. Contrary to this static conception of space, a dynamic conceptualization of space exists in the human geography literature. This view sees space as socially produced, called “created space” (Soja, “The Socio-Spatial Dialectic,” 210). Created space is an outcome of social interactions—the manner in which contextual space is “organized,” “used,” and “interpreted” (Soja, “The Socio-Spatial Dialectic,” 210). Virtual space also falls under the category of created space. We use this notion of created space or socially produced space in this paper.
2 Harvey, “The Urban Process Under Capitalism,” 101–31; Soja, “The Socio-Spatial Dialectic,” 207–25.
3 Soja, “The Socio-Spatial Dialectic,” 207–25.
4 Marx, Grundrisse, 472–73.
5 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban,” 151–82.
6 Jedwab et al., “Demography, Urbanization and Development,” 6–16; Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban,” 151–82; Brenner and Schmid, “The ‘Urban Age’ in Question,” 731–55; Brenner, “Introduction: Urban Theory Without an Outside, ” 14–30; Fox, “Urbanization as a Global Historical Process,” 285–310.
7 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban,” 151–82.
8 Ruddick et al., “Planetary Urbanization,” 387–404; Khatam and Haas, “Interrupting Planetary Urbanization,” 39–55; O’Callaghan, “Planetary Urbanization in Ruins,” 420–38.
9 Goonewardena, “Planetary Urbanization and Totality,” 45–47.
10 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban,” 151–82.
11 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology,”163, emphasis in original.
12 Harvey, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” 22–44.
13 Sherman, “Primitive Accumulation in the Cultural Commons,” 176–88.
14 Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development; Bhattacharya, Capitalism in Post-Colonial India.
15 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban,” 151–82.
16 Brenner, “Introduction: Urban Theory Without an Outside,” 25.
17 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban,” 151–82.
18 Harvey, “The Urban Process Under Capitalism,” 101–31; “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” 22–44; see notes 13 and 14.
19 Jedweb et al, “Demography, Urbanization and Development?” 6; UN-Habitat, “Urbanization and Development: Emerging Futures.”
20 Glaeser, “A World of Cities,” 1154–99.
21 Lewis, “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labor,” 1–32; Mills, “An Aggregative Model of Resource Allocation in a Metropolitan Area,” 197–20.
22 Harris-Todaro, “Migration, Unemployment and Development,” 126–42; Lucas, “Life Earnings and Rural–Urban Migration,” S29–59.
23 Schultz, The Economic Organization of Agriculture; Gollin et al., “The Role of Agriculture in Development,” 160–64.
24 Barrios et al., “Climatic Change and Rural–Urban Migration,” 357–71; da Mata et al., “Determinants of City Growth in Brazil,” 252–72.
25 Davis and Vernon Henderson, “Evidence on the Political Economy of the Urbanization Process,” 98–125.
26 Glaeser, “The Economic Approach to Cities.”
27 Fox, “Urbanization as a Global Historical Process,” 285–310; Fay and Opal, “Urbanization Without Growth.”
28 Motiram and Vakulabharanam, “Understanding Poverty and Inequality in Urban India since Reforms,” 44–52.
29 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology,” 165.
30 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban,” 151–82.
31 Qadeer, “Ruralopolises,” 1583.
32 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology,” 165.
33 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology,” 165–66.
34 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology,” 165–66.
35 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban,” 151–82.
36 See Goswami, Producing India, for both a trenchant critique of “methodological nationalism” as well as a practical demonstration of the insights that can be gained from a historical sociology attentive to the question of the constitution of spatial forms.
37 Lin, “Changing Theoretical Perspectives on Urbanization in Asian Developing Countries,” 5.
38 In this paper, we cannot elaborate further on the extensive empirical evidence that refutes many of the key claims of modernization theory. See Lin, “Changing Theoretical Perspectives on Urbanization in Asian Developing Countries”; Fox “Urbanization as a Global Historical Process”; Potts, “Debates about African Urbanization, Migration and Economic Growth: What Can We Learn from Zimbabwe and Zambia?” and Marx et al., “The Economics of Slums in the Developing World,” for such direct empirical refutations.
39 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology,” 166.
40 It should be pointed out, in this context, that theorists of space and society have always emphasized both the need to recognize the “contemporaneity of difference,” and the fact that thinking spatially can allow for such a recognition. See Massey, “On Space and the City,”167.
41 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban,” 151–82.
42 The origins of the thesis of planetary urbanization can be found in the writings of Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, and today its most staunch advocates are Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid.
43 Ruddick et al., “Planetary Urbanization,” 389.
44 Brenner and Schmid, “Planetary Urbanization,” 13.
45 Marx, Capital, Volume III, 333.
46 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology,” 166.
47 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology,” 166.
48 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban,” 151–82.
49 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology,” 167.
50 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology,” 167.
51 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology,” 168.
52 See Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban,” 151–82; Smith, “Gentrification and Uneven Development.”
53 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology,” 168.
54 Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution.
55 Brenner, “Debating Planetary Urbanization,” 577.
56 See notes 8, 9, and 5 above; Schmid, “Journeys through Planetary Urbanization,” 591–610.
57 This assertion is based on the traditional conceptual approach towards the urban, discussed above.
58 Ruddick et al., “Planetary Urbanization: An Urban Theory for Our Time?” 389; Khatam and Haas, “Interrupting Planetary Urbanization,” 440.
59 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban,” 151–82.
60 See note 18.
61 Castriota and Tonucci, “Extended Urbanization,” 515.
62 See notes 12 and 13.
63 Harvey, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” 34.
64 Harvey, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” 35, emphasis added.
65 Harvey, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” 36.
66 Harvey, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” 36.
67 Massey, “On Space and the City,” 157.
68 Karak, “Neoliberalism and the Formation of the English Premier League,” 588–94; “Accumulation by Dispossession,” 615–32.
69 Data source: Appendix 3 of Li, China and the Twenty-First-Century Crisis.
70 From an urban, infrastructural point of view, the privatization and deregulation of the transportation system during the 1980s was crucial. See Glancey, “Exit from the City of Destruction.”
71 Subsequently, Karak, “Neoliberalism and the Formation of the English Premier League,” has argued that the theory of “Social Structures of Accumulation (SSA)” can also be used to locate the formation of the EPL within the modalities of the structural changes that characterized the move to neoliberalism. Specifically, he has suggested that two changes during the neoliberal era emphasized by the SSA literature—the change in the nature of state intervention and the increasing independence of financial capital—capture the same structural changes as Harvey’s twin concepts of privatization and financialization respectively.
72 Karak, “Accumulation by Dispossession,” 615–32.
73 See note 12.
74 See note 13.
75 Goldblatt, The Game of Our Lives, 4–15.
76 Goldblatt, The Game of Our Lives, 4.
77 Although we cannot elaborate upon it here, it is significant that the technological innovations that Sherman, “Primitive Accumulation in the Cultural Commons,” identifies as being intrinsically associated with a progressive commodification of the means of communication during the twentieth century in the United States—the telegraph, the radio, the television, and the internet—are all included in the technological changes that Harvey, “Cities or Urbanization?” identifies as allowing for radical shifts in spatial organization and spatial interconnections under different regimes of capital accumulation.
78 Conn, “Bribe upon Bribe upon Bribe.”
79 Conn, “Bribe upon Bribe upon Bribe.”
80 Conn, “The Beautiful Game? Searching for the Soul of Football.”
81 Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labor, 121.
82 Jacobs, “Negotiating the Heart,” 129.
83 Jacobs, “Negotiating the Heart,”139–41.
84 Jacobs, “Negotiating the Heart,” 140. The need to be attentive to changes in the labour process within “services” had also been emphasized by Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labor: Social Structures and the Geography of Production, 169, who pointed out that neoliberal restructuring affected all office-based work through automation, and even public sector services such as the NHS through speed-up. In the case of new financial practices, even the actual spaces of work changed significantly.
85 Harvey, “The Urban Process Under Capitalism,” 101–31.
86 See note 12.
87 Harvey, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” 38.
88 See note 68.
89 See note 86.
90 “Rangers” is a paramilitary force which is directly under the command of a serving military officer of the Pakistan Army. Pakistan’s military is the most powerful state actor in the country and it has a stronghold over the country’s economy and politics (see Khan, “Political Economy of the United States-Pakistan Relationship”).
91 Anwar, “State Power, Civic Participation and the Urban Frontier,” 601.
92 Anwar, “State Power, Civic Participation and the Urban Frontier,” 601.
93 Anwar, “State Power, Civic Participation and the Urban Frontier,” 608.
94 Anwar, “State Power, Civic Participation and the Urban Frontier,” 602.
95 Anwar, “State Power, Civic Participation and the Urban Frontier,” 609.
96 Hall, “Divide and Conquer,” 23–46; Whiteside, “Crises of Capital and the Logic of Dispossession and Repossession,” 59–78; Byres, “Neoliberalism and Primitive Accumulation in Less Developed Countries.”
97 See note 12.
98 See note 14.
99 Fox, “Urbanization as a Global Historical Process,” 285–310.
100 See note 14.
101 Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development, 58.
102 Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development, 58.
103 We have doubts about the extent to which Sanyal’s understanding of capitalism as identical to the wage-labour relationship (and hence his notion of need-based self-employment as necessarily noncapitalist) is adequate, especially for grasping the history of capitalist development in non-European spaces. The literature about this debate is vast. For an approach to the history of capitalist development in India that is at odds with Sanyal’s formalistic understanding, see Banaji, “Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry: Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century.” For a critical review of recent historical literature about the relationship between capitalism and slavery that also focuses on the question of the extent to which the history of capitalism can be written only in terms of the exploitation of legally defined “free” or “wage” labourers, see Clegg, “Capitalism and Slavery.” The reasons why we nevertheless insist on an attempted synthesis of Sanyal’s insights with the concept of planetary urbanization are twofold. First, we recognize and identify with Sanyal’s critical impulse: to theorize the contemporaneity of difference within a framework of global capitalism. Second, as we elaborate further below, we also acknowledge the empirical validity of the insights regarding postcolonial urbanization that Sanyal and Bhattacharya, “Bypassing the Squalor: New Towns, Immaterial Labor and Exclusion in Post-Colonial Urbanization” have generated, and the political implications that follow from them.
104 Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development, 57–59. Within Marxian literature, there has always been a fierce debate about the role of “extra-economic coercion” in the processes of enrichment and separation. That is, it has often been argued that enrichment and separation should count as primitive accumulation only when they occur through noneconomic coercion. Due to space constraints, we cannot elaborate on this issue here. Interested readers might want to refer to Bhattacharya, Capitalism in Post-Colonial India: Primitive Accumulation Under Dirigiste and Laissez Faire Regimes, who has dealt with it in greater detail. We follow Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality, and Post-Colonial Capitalism, Bhattacharya, Capitalism in Post-Colonial India: Primitive Accumulation Under Dirigiste and Laissez Faire Regimes, and Harvey, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction” to acknowledge the role of both market forces and extra-economic coercion as constitutive of dispossession.
105 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban,” 151–82.
106 Roy, City Requiem, Calcutta; Bhattacharya and Sanyal, “Bypassing the Squalor,” 41–8; Mallik, “Land Dispossession and Rural Transformation,” 51–71.
107 Bhattacharya and Sanyal, “Bypassing the Squalor,” 41–8.
108 Bhattacharya and Sanyal “Bypassing the Squalor,” 41–8. In a related vein, Sanyal, in Rethinking Capitalist Development, has made an argument regarding “welfare governmentality,” that is, the countermechanism that tends to reverse the effects of primitive accumulation. He has argued that in order to sustain mass democracy, political elites develop a system of political patronage among the marginalized to gain electoral support. In effect, the state acts as a mediating party and transfers some of the surplus from the “accumulation economy” to the “need economy” for the subsistence of the poor. This provides the marginalized with some access to means of production to engage in petty commodity production. Thus, postcolonial capitalism is a complex interaction of capital and noncapital (the need economy), where the engagement of the poor in informal activities is also conceptualized in terms of political patronage offered by elites to gain and sustain electoral support.
109 Sassen, The Global City.
110 Bhattacharya and Sanyal “Bypassing the Squalor,” 45.
111 As one key analytical lens of our paper is that of “planetary” urbanization, it should be mentioned here that the creation of “New Towns” oriented towards global capital through state-backed privatization projects was quite common in certain regions of England and Wales since the mid-1970s. See Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labor, 211–15. A comparative approach that delineates the similarities and differences between New Towns in developed and developing countries can be an interesting project in itself.
112 Shaw, “Peri-Urban Interface of Indian Cities,” 129–36.
113 See note 28 above; Boyce, The Political Economy of the Environment.
114 Goonewardena, “The Country and the City in the Urban Revolution,” 218–31.
115 Roy, “What is Urban about Critical Urban Theory?” 810–23.
116 Mallik “Land Dispossession and Rural Transformation,” 51–71.
117 Roy, City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty.
118 Roy, City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty.
119 Vakulabharanam, “Growth and Distress in a South Indian Peasant Economy During the Era of Economic Liberalization,” 971–97. For a recent and brief account of the extent of the agrarian crisis in India, the recent political initiatives by farmers in Western India against it, and the political action necessitated by the present conjuncture, see Sainath, “A Long March of the Dispossessed to Delhi.”
120 Dawn.com, “Bahria Town Karachi.”
121 Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development.
122 Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban,” 151–82.
123 See notes 12, 13 and 14.
124 See note 121.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Danish Khan
Danish Khan is a PhD-candidate and teaching assistant at the Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Massachusetts, USA.
Anirban Karak
Anirban Karak is a graduate student and teaching assistant at the Department of History, New York University, New York, USA.