City’s holistic and cumulative project (1996–2016)

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Notes

1 The term is used here more generally than the way it is deployed by Amin (2013); he describes two specific dimensions of telescopism – that of urban elites focused on policies of global competitiveness and top-down developments, and that of human development professionals who focus on bottom-up/self-help strategies for the poor without seeking to make connections to city-wide planning authorities; an absence of linking on both sides of the spectrum.

2 ‘Los Angeles, in spite or even because of its urban tensions, is viewed as the city (or region) of the future, where high tech and a relaxed lifestyle coalesce to produce a sense of a city going places riding the technological waves of the future. Over time this might well mean that it will strengthen in other creative areas such as fashion or design.’ Peter Hall, from his book Four World Cities cited in Catterall (1996b), 190.

3 The first five issues were published independently by Bob Catterall during 1996 and 1997 after which there was a break until 2000 when the journal was relaunched with Routledge as an academic journal while retaining its distinctive identity as a wide-ranging critical and unorthodox intellectual journal.

4 See Adrian Atkinson (1996), Nicholas You (1996b), Gary Lawrence (1996), Akhtar Badshah and Janice Perlman (1996), George Monbiot (1996a, b), Karen Bakker (1996) in Vol. 1: 3-4; Jo Beall (1996), Nicholas You (1996a), Alisdair Rogers (1996) and Monica Feria (1996) in Vol. 1: 5–6.

5 See Paul Corrigan, Alain Lipietz and Will Hutton (1997); Richard MacCormac, Ian Ritchie and Michael Keith (1997); Alison Ravetz (1997); William Lim (1997) and Barie Shelton (1997) in Vol. 2: 7.

6 See, for example, contributions to the feature London and the UK: Microcosm or special case? In 1: 3-4, from Girardet; Mike Franks; Brian Anson; Monbiot; Bakker; Michael Edwards; David Hall; Peter Hall; Nicky Gavron; and Ladipo; Jude Kelly on theatre, and on Northern England from Dan Hill and Justin O'Conner; Alan McGauley; Ian Taylor; Max Farrar in 1: 5-6; on Dublin from Kevin Honan and Bristol from Erik Geelhoed in 2: 7, and Edwards again in 2: 8.

7 See Paulo Fareri (1996); Oguz Isik and Melih Pinarcioglu (1996) In Vol. 1: 3-4; Kevin Robins and Asu Aksoy (1996) in Vol. 1: 5-6; Robins (1997) in Vol. 2: 7 and Aksoy and Robins (1997) in Vol. 2: 8.

8 See Michael Safier (1996) in Vol. 1: 3-4.

9 See Sonia Mikich (1996) in Vol. 1: 3-4.

10 See Sean Sutton (1996) in Vol. 1: 5-6.

11 Others on this theme included William Gibson (1996) in 1: 5-6, and Safier (1997) in 2: 8.

12 See Vol. 2: 7 (1997) for contributions from Castells, Stephen Graham and Alessandro Aurigi, Suzanne Moore, Frank Webster, Adrian Atkinson, Stephen Marks, David Ladipo, Sophie Watson.

13 See Vol. 2: 7 (1997) for contributions from Herbert Girardet, David Kingsley and Eric Geelhoed.

14 In an interview with Manuel Castells, reflecting on his politically active days in Spain where the movement he was part of managed to bring about city wide change it was, he explained, also because of this important link between people and institutions; further good examples include an excellent analysis of the housing movement in the Netherlands, Uitermark (2009) and Paul Chatterton's (2015) recent book Low Impact Living provides another detailed experience of how their group LILAC managed to bring about the UK's first low cost, cooperative and sustainable housing project in which crucial links were made between citizens and community on the one hand and experts, professionals and officials on the other.

15 Archeological evidence even shows that such problems on a smaller scale were met with relatively sophisticated and organised responses (Atkinson 1996, 5), indeed humanly scaled planning actually enabled participation, so crucial for social sustainability.

16 See: Gibson, W. 1984. Neuromancer; 1986a. Count Zero; 1988. Mona Lisa Overdrive. London: HarperCollins; 1993. Virtual Light. London: Penguin; Catterall, B. 1994. “Cyberpunk Rides Again? From Los Angeles to Hong Kong in Search of Human Futures. An Interview with William Gibson” Regenerating Cities, No. 6 January.

17 For example: Atkinson and Viloria (2013); Richardson (2012); Bliss (2011); see also the series of urban and peri-urban agriculture from 2012 to 2013 in issues 16 (6), 17 (1, 2 and 3).

18 Atkinson (2014) cites Catterall (2013b): “inspired by the work of anthropologist David Abram, in his Becoming Animal, who expresses ‘a commitment to a kind of radical immanence—even to materialism (or what I might call matter-realism) in a dramatically reconceived sense of the term)’, Catterall writes: ‘[t]his is a key element, as I see it, in the rediscovery of sensuous materialism, partly lost (perhaps more by his readers than by the author) in much of Marx's work . . . The concern of this series is . . . with what lies beyond “capitalism's urban future”, the planet itself, the “wild-flowering Earth” . . . I argue that we have reached a stage in urbanisation, planetary urbanisation, in which the grasping of a paradox becomes necessary: “understanding urbanism and acting on/against planetary urbanism can no longer be advanced by exclusively urban studies, or, put more extremely: to understand the urban, include the rural”. Such a project cannot be advanced by the mere addition of animals and the rural. For an adequate theoretical basis sensuous materialism, radical immanence or matter-realism are required. Planet Earth's future is threatened not only by (post?)-religious, cultural, economic, social, “modern” forces but also by insufficiently radical critiques of “planetary urbanism”.’

19 In particular the importance of Adrian Atkinson's work in City.

20 Sukumar traces this alternative in the work of both Blake and Goethe; see also Bookchin (1994) for a sophisticated elaboration of the difference between the conventional reasoning of Newton and Descartes, versus the dialectical reasoning he traces in the work of thinkers from Heraclitus to Hegel.

21 Communicative reach; ethical basis; economic activities and structures; and cultural significance as a focus for collective dialogue and situated enthusiasm (Catterall 1996a, 1).

22 Bakker quotes the remarkable statistic that 60 percent of Department of Transport staff in the UK worked on roads while only 1.5 percent of staff worked on public transport (148).

23 In particular the contributions of Mike Franks and Brian Anson to issues 1 (3-4) and 1 (5-6).

24 Interestingly, the etymological root of the word to dominate apparently comes from dominus, the term for an elite urban dwelling in the Roman Empire, while the fragmented settlements designated for the poor were called insulae, implying their separation and indicating a very long history of this monocultural form, which has now reached global proportions.

25 Iraq-Turkey crude oil pipeline; Batman-Dortyol crude oil pipeline; Ceyhan Kırıkkale crude oil pipeline; Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan crude oil pipeline; Nabucco-West or Turkey-Austria gas pipeline – not including various other existing pipelines.

26 The Rise of the Network Society (1996), The Power of Identity (1997), and End of Millennium (1998); only the first two books were published at the time of the special feature in City.

27 Under the subtitle ‘Bridging the chasm’ in the first editorial of City this holistic, transdisciplinary vision was set out ‘[w]e are academics, architects, community activists, film-makers, journalists, people who have worked in or with local government, planners - a scattering of like-minded people and networks across a number of countries. We extend the dialogue to include other members of these groups and beyond, for examples, to other artists and cartoonists, to property developers and social entrepreneurs.’

28 While info-workers – valued within this cultural paradigm – have acquired a name to distinguish them, while non-info-workers, or ‘matter’ workers if we may call them that(?) have not yet been given a distinguishing name; today they are negatively defined as ‘unemployed’, denying and erasing from collective memory the wealth of knowledge or information that is, in the words of Einstein ‘alive in the consciousness of men,’ and which he deemed the essential kind; (see Midgley, M. 1989. Wisdom, Information and Wonder. What is Knowledge, for an insightful discussion of the difference between living and ‘dead’ knowledge).

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Melissa Wilson

Melissa Wilson is a biologist and political scientist, lives off grid and works with permaculture projects for social-ecological resilience in Portugal; she co-edits the City website www.city-analysis.net.