Polycritical city?

Housing crisis. Homelessness crisis. Climate crisis. Environmental crisis. Financial crisis. Debt crisis. Mortgage crisis. Supply chain crisis. Energy crisis. Cost of living crisis. Crisis of social reproduction. Crisis of care. Refugee crisis. Covid crisis. Opioid crisis. Health crisis. Water crisis. Air pollution crisis. Police violence crisis. Infrastructure crisis. Crisis of overaccumulation. Legitimation crisis. Urban crisis. The new urban crisis … .

This non-comprehensive list of crises describing contemporary urbanisation is not meant to diminish the seriousness of any of them, but to highlight their numerosity, depth, and pervasiveness. If 20th century urban studies, according to Taylor and Lang (2004, 951), ‘was relatively straightforward’ and characterised by an ever-present need to continuously theorise the urban condition through the production of new concepts such as ‘anti-city,’ ‘boomburb,’ ‘edge city’ or ‘exopolis,’ then 21st century urbanisation has made it necessary to refocus urban studies around the constant generation of new perspectives on urbanisation’s moments of crisis.

In a basic sense, the idea of crisis denotes a long-term problem, as opposed to an immediately resolvable conflict. But beyond that, the meaning of crisis as a diagnosis depends upon the theoretical framework and political project within which the diagnostician is operating. As Agnes Gagyi and Marek Mikuš and the contributors to their Special Feature on Swiss franc-denominated mortgages in Eastern Europe show in this issue, the politics of crisis can take many forms—some of which can become system-challenging, but most of which are system-conserving. Talking about and thinking the urban through the lens of crisis can be aligned with the intellectual tradition that Neil Brenner, writing in these pages, identified with ‘the search for emancipatory alternatives latent within the present, due to the contradictions of existing social relations’ (Brenner 2009, 201). Or it can be a form of what Marx and Engels scorned as ‘critical criticism’ (1956 [1845]), a passive moralism which seeks to identify problems without transforming the world. There is a certain irony in the fact that crisis is not necessarily a critical concept.

Crisis has long been urbanisation’s shadow, or its twin. Ancient understandings of the urban conceived of the city as an idealised model of order, but the modern sense of urbanisation has always been intertwined with the experience and perception of crisis. Raymond Williams argues that both the pastoral and the urban were envisioned in the wake of the destruction of agrarian life at the hands of early forms of industrialisation and financialisation, a process that spurred an inescapable social crisis as well as a ‘crisis of values … a deep and melancholy consciousness of change and loss’ (Williams 1973, 61). Since the 1950s there has been a specifically American understanding of a singular ‘urban crisis.’ Drawing on a long history of elitist, racialised anti-urbanism, this term originally referenced the conflicts and limitations of the Fordist-Keynesian city, before gradually shifting to a focus on the breakdown of the New Deal coalition and the emergence of neoliberal urbanism (Weaver 2017).

‘Crisis’ has its etymological roots in the historical practice of medicine and referenced a point where a decision must be made. To many observers, something about capitalist urbanisation has always seemed unwell. But as critical urban theorists have long known, crisis tendencies are baked into the system. ‘Crises are the real manifestation of the underlying contradictions within the capitalist process of accumulation’ (Harvey 1978, 111). In the capitalist city, crisis is a permanent, recurring condition with which urban ruling classes are always grappling in one way or another. But for urban disaster capitalists and others for whom a good crisis should never be allowed to go to waste, periodic manifestations of crisis are also an opportunity to destroy and profitably remake the cityscape (Madden 2021).

Today, talk of the crisis within global urban capitalism is ubiquitous. In one notable usage, a collection of downtown business interests, newspaper columnists and academic economists are promoting the idea that American cities face an ‘urban doom loop,’ where remote work, declining demand for office space, social service cuts, and middle-class flight threatens to initiate an unstoppable municipal spiral into fiscal and social chaos (Edsall 2022; Leland 2023). In Britain, invocations of the housing crisis are routine, raised by MPs including Jacob Rees-Mogg and Keir Starmer to reinforce their chosen strategies. More generally, the economic historian Adam Tooze has argued that the world has entered a state of ‘polycrisis’ (Whiting and Park 2023), popularising a term for complex problems with multiple intersecting causes and no simple solution. In use in various ways since the 1970s, polycrisis has been uttered by figures such as the complexity theorist Edgar Morin and the former European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. Now it is regularly discussed by investment advisors, management consultants and World Economic Forum attendees. In 2023, even the staunchest establishmentarians evidently have no problem talking about crisis.

How should critical urban scholars treat the most recent return of the discourse of urban crisis? Would it make sense to speak of a polycritical city? I think it would be a mistake for urban studies to adopt mainstream understandings of crisis. As it has most often been used, the concept of the crisis of the city is ultimately conservative and serves to limit the space for radical urban change, rather than enlarge it. The notion of ‘the urban crisis’ is frequently used in an explicitly reactionary and racist way both to stigmatise various minoritised urban communities and also to delegitimise redistributionist policies, rendering the concept itself meaningless (see Bayırbağ, Davies, and Muench 2017). Defenders of the residential status quo usually do not pretend there is no problem, but instead define the housing crisis as the result of overbearing regulation and enthusiastically use the term to argue for the further empowerment of landlords and other real estate capitalists (Heslop and Ormerod 2020). The urban doom loop is invoked by downtown power brokers and property owners seeking a bail out by the state (Walker 2023), as well as by anti-urban conservatives (e.g. Kotkin 2022) who want governments to double down on private car ownership and population dispersal. And there is a reason that polycrisis has become a central keyword for the Davos class, who use it as a renewed justification for a global system shaped by the alliance of economic elites and institutional technocrats.

But if critical urban studies should avoid uncritical versions of crisis, it definitely should not jettison the idea of crisis altogether. To ignore urbanisation’s crisis tendencies would be to obscure the political-economic, structural causes of urban immiseration. It would support the fantasy that small reforms can solve urban injustices. And it would scramble the connection between radical scholarship and the social movements with which it seeks to be aligned.

Instead, urban scholars need to think clearly about where crisis comes from, who it harms, and how the term is used. Better and more politically useful versions of the idea of the urbanisation of crisis trace the concept’s manifestations to identifiable tendencies of the current system. They uncover the interlinkages between seemingly separate appearances of crisis, such as the connections between housing crisis, climate crisis and racialised urban neoliberalism. And they show how urbanisation creates different experiences of crisis for different populations. When mainstream commentators talk about their fear of a ‘downward spiral, reminiscent of many American cities during the 1970s’ (Glaeser 2022, 5), they conveniently ignore the fact that manifestations of misery will and indeed already do coexist with extraordinary urban wealth. In contrast, a radical application of the idea of crisis would explain how these two aspects of capitalist urbanisation are mutually constitutive, in order to argue not for rescuing urbanisation but for transforming it.

Better usages of the idea of crisis also align critical urban knowledge with radical social movements. In a classic statement on the function of critical theory, Nancy Fraser wrote, ‘A critical social theory frames its research program and its conceptual framework with an eye to the aims and activities of those oppositional social movements with which it has a partisan though not uncritical identification’ (1985, 97). Crisis is a central concept for movements organising around housing, the climate, anti-racism, and many other urban issues. Critical urban scholarship can help support these movements by documenting, explicating and contextualising these versions of crisis, with the goal of fostering radical responses to them.

It is possible both to criticise the return of the discourse of urban crisis while also highlighting the crisis tendencies and violent contradictions within contemporary urbanisation. The urban doom loopers and Davos Jeremiahs want to turn the problems faced by finance and real estate into everyone’s problems. But critical urban scholars should recognise that there is no triumphant model of citymaking that needs to be saved from an exogenous crisis; the triumph of a massively unequal, ecologically and socially destructive form of urbanisation is the crisis. The point must be to use the idea of crisis in a critical, system-challenging way. There should be no doubt that urbanisation today is constituted by multiple intersecting crises. But crisis itself only becomes a critical diagnosis when it is used to demand radical systemic change.