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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In a world of disruptions and seemingly endless complexity, cities have become central to thinking about the future of humanity. Yet the study of cities is fragmented among different silos of expertise, diverse genres of scholarship, and widening chasms between theory and practice. How can we do better?
Cities Rethought suggests that we need to remake the way we see and know cities in order to rethink how we act and intervene within them. To this end, it offers the contours of a new urban disposition. Its normative, analytical, and operational elements offer an opportunity for scholars, practitioners, and citizens alike to approach the complexity of cities anew.
Written collectively for a wide audience, the text draws from cities across the global north and south, speaks across diverse genres of ideas, and reflects on the lived experience of the authors as both researchers and practitioners. It is an essential text for anyone committed to knowing their own cities as well as finding ways to meaningfully intervene in them.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Endorsements
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue: A Note to the Reader
A collective enterprise
Notes
Acknowledgements
1 An Urban Disposition
Dear reader
Three elements
Putting the three together
How to read this book
And so
Notes
2 Normative Locations
What is the fabric of the city?
How do you consume a deleted future?
What kind of fight can you pick in the city?
What is the urbanity of the state?
What evidence matters for cities?
Taking stock
Notes
3 Analytical Redescriptions
Choosing our puzzles
Improving an estate
Upstream on the river
Repairing patchworks
The propensity of lychees
Spaces across the aisle
Amidst the numbers
Taking stock
Notes
4 Operational Moves
Mapping the operational ecosystem
Modalities of change in systems
Sensing a pulse
Evaluating our moves
Moving an idea within a system
Building a social imagination
A life in practice
Notes
A Parting Note
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Endorsements
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue: A Note to the Reader
Acknowledgements
Begin Reading
A Parting Note
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Urban fabric as textures.
Figure 2.2
Urbanization rate and GDP/capita for select world regions.
Figure 2.3
Protests lined the streets of New Delhi after an incident of sexual violence.
Figure 2.4
Regional distribution of employment in informal sectors.
Figure 2.5
Sciences of the street: standards and codes for tarmac, drainage, signage, paint …
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1
Shadwell ‘front line’, next to Tarling Estate, 1992.
Figure 3.2
Tarling Estate refurbished, as it was in 2023.
Figure 3.3
Lychee property rights in Guan Lan.
Figure 3.4
Intervention, in 2015, on the SDGs from the ISC on behalf of the Scientific Major …
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Praise forCities Rethought
‘This book is an extraordinary compass with which to navigate cities when they have never been more central to the future of humanity. A bridge between disciplines, geographies, and traditions, it opens up paths, stimulates curiosity, and brings together knowledges and publics so that we can creatively rethink cities and fall in love with them again.’
Judit Carrera, Director of the Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture
‘Reading this book is like being admitted into a fascinating conversation between some of today’s most engaged and inspiring urban thinkers. Their rich stories and deep reflections will encourage new sensibilities and ways of thinking by scholar-activists in cities around the world.’
David Dodman, General Director of the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS), Rotterdam
‘The endless journey for an equitable city demands a continuous process of learning, adaptation, and innovation, to imagine alternative paths to the usual responses. In this text, the authors build an analytical and practical roadmap that will allow us to draw a journey with greater clarity and certainty to improve our lives in cities.’
Alejandro Echeverri, TEC Monterrey Institute of Technology
‘This book invites us to cast aside what we know and critically reflect on emerging notions of “the urban”. It enables us to embrace concepts, practices, and materialities of the urban milieu in ways that go beyond the mundane.’
Taibat Lawanson, University of Lagos
‘A breath of fresh air. A repertoire of ways of thinking and acting in the city, and a provocative resource from which to develop our own routes to serving our cities. Cities Rethought inspires while remaining rooted in the rhythms of urban life, the realities of setbacks and frustrations amidst the possibilities, and the practicalities of big and small gains.’
Colin McFarlane, Durham University
‘Four globally leading scholars at the top of their fields harness vast swathes of theory and practical wisdom to provide an insightful, well-reasoned, reflective, inspiring, accessible, and empirically grounded tour de force which will shape urban knowledge production, policy, and practice for years to come – a rare and welcome thing indeed. This book punches way beyond urban studies and establishes itself as a must-read for everyone interested in how to live in a fractured and fragile urban world.’
Beth Perry, Director of the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield
‘This generous and deeply thoughtful book shows us the active work of thinking the city that is part of any serious project for changing it: work that is collaborative, critical, committed, and inventive.’
Fran Tonkiss, London School of Economics and Political Science
‘This book is a political intervention that is as inventive as it is provocative. It creates new ways of imagining and acting for those who live, work, and struggle in cities. Don’t let it lie there. Get it!’
Eyal Weizman, Founding Director of Forensic Architecture
CITIES RETHOUGHT
A New Urban Disposition
Gautam BhanMichael KeithSusan ParnellEdgar Pieterse
polity
Copyright © Gautam Bhan, Michael Keith, Susan Parnell and Edgar Pieterse 2025
The right of Gautam Bhan, Michael Keith, Susan Parnell and Edgar Pieterse to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is also available in an Open Access edition, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6562-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024936348
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Prologue A Note to the Reader
Every book has a biography. This one is no different. Its origin story is of a collective endeavour responding to the privilege and problems of working together as colleagues, peers, and friends in the years since 2017.
Individually, our four lives have been routed through very different biographical trajectories. We come from and work in different places, were trained in different disciplines at different times, and have charted very different paths. Collectively, however, we have come to realize that we have much in common. Core to what we share is a desire and (gratefully) a series of opportunities to work inside and outside the institutional boundaries of academic scholarship. Even when within it, we have been able to be gently disrespectful of the boundaries of disciplines and departments. We have lived lives of ‘research’ and ‘practice’ deeply enough to lose sight of the differences between them and focus more on how real life, cities, and all their problems bring them both together. We have all worked both deeply in particular places and across regions and countries. Through it all, we have sought to craft an enduring relationship with teaching, research, and practice that is curious, inventive, and productively disruptive while, like so many others, we struggle with real constraints and the inherent complexity of the world in general and the urban world in particular.
Our trajectories have taken us in many directions: emplaced work within China, India, South Africa, and the United Kingdom; moving into and out of both elected and appointed government positions; working and learning within the formal academy in four different continents; being part of urban movements as activists; becoming teachers; circulating in global fora on both the research and practice side; being part of large, international research projects as well as holding onto our individual creative practices. Much water, it feels, has flown under many bridges. These experiences have brought us to this text, but our readers will be relieved to know that the book is not about our personal urban journeys. It is instead about what finding our way through these different places, sites, times, and scales has taught us about living, coping, thinking, doing, and feeling within the contemporary urban.
We know that we write in a moment where even the usual complexity of the urban condition seems particularly vexed. The future is far from certain. Things feel like they are in a logjam of impossibility. Paradigms that have shaped much of our working lives feel shaky, language appears insufficient, categories appear limited. We feel this as learners, researchers, practitioners, and teachers, all at once and in different ways. At the same time, we know there is also emergence, newness, innovation, around us. As we sit to write, we think of this moment as ‘critical’ – that favoured academic word – not in its often misunderstood sense of something negative, but in the sense of it being timely, particular, and important. We are not fully able to describe this moment. Yet what we know – perhaps, more accurately, what we can feel in our bones – is that a new urban practitioner starting out today, as well as a seasoned player looking for a step change, needs to move and think differently. What this differently may look like – analytically, normatively, operationally – and how to get there is what we have tried to construct in this book.
We did not want to write another book about cities as objects of attention, or add one more urbanism to the lexicon of urban studies. Instead we thought that reflecting critically from the joys, difficulties, and commonalities that shaped our work might become a worthy subject for wider intervention. We hoped that this would resonate with the dilemmas of others, informing and disrupting the imaginations of those wishing to reflect on or reconfigure their own practice. Recognizing the plurality of folk embedded in and curious about the machinery of cities globally, we want to address those working within the academy, activist configurations, disciplines, and urban professions that are interested in moving beyond comfort zones of individual institutions of the similar to create communities of practice of the multiple.
This is not, then, a book to read for empirics, new urban theory, or for a survey of existing and emerging literature. You will find fewer endnotes attached to the text compared to the world of scholarship that has shaped us. We teach this scholarship to others in the belief that the rigour of thought of those who have gone before us has deep individual and collective value. We could not take this scholarship out of our language even if we tried. Our hope here, however, is to write a different kind of book. It is one that we anticipate will offer readers something else: a way to make their way to finding a sensibility rather than an argument, an approach rather than a methodology, a disposition rather than an ideological position. The tone and structure of the text, our writing choices in it, all stem from this. We hope that we have succeeded in finding something that both a lay reader, a young professional, a more experienced practitioner, and a curious scholar will all take something from. We recognize that this is not a ‘quick fix’ – cultivating a disposition is a lifetime’s work. Yet every step on the way, incremental as it may seem, has its rewards. The point, in some ways, is to begin, no matter where we end.
A collective enterprise
Across the text, those who know us might recognize who holds the authorial pen at different moments and most will discern, at times, a slight shift in styles within and across chapters. We hope not always. We have sought to smoothen but not remove the tonal variations among us, letting the individual have their place within the collective. While we concur that a new urban disposition is necessary and productive, how we have come to it and how we, and any readers, might operationalize it is not uniform. It is significant that this text is not a singular voice, but a collective one. Honing a dialogue among ourselves into this voice itself has been, and felt, enormously generative for us, as we hope it will for our readers.1
A brief note on our process. A series of encounters in 2022 and 2023 allowed the four of us to develop this book incrementally and collectively. Outside internal bilateral configurations, the one programme where all four of us worked together and inspired this collaboration was called PEAK Urban,2 a multi-country research project on the urban condition. The project consciously started from a recognition of the specificity of place and the importance of enabling a next generation to define their responses and modalities of working on these places. Unlike some major research projects, we did not start by trying to do the same thing in each of the locations where our work was based. Instead, early career and senior researchers were encouraged to collaborate in developing a multiplicity of peer-reviewed projects across the programme that were shaped by the umbrella of the PEAK Urban conceptual framing.3 Notwithstanding the extraordinary opportunities the programme offered to each of us, there were also inevitably challenges, dilemmas, and barriers throughout that we feel were less a product of research design or the friction of COVID than a symptom of something more significant about the nature and complexity of research in cities of the world in the 21st century.
Despite our roles in conceiving and driving the architecture of the programme, we felt still more than PEAK’s deference to interdisciplinarity or complexity was needed. Undoubtedly, PEAK made inroads into engaging cities in the round, drawing together methods as well as modes and practices from inside and outside the academy to ensure credible accounts of urban change. As fairly established figures in global academic hubs, we were able to facilitate opportunities for younger scholars to think carefully about their research position and challenge their research training. The programme crossed boundaries between city governance, publics, and scholarship; crossed locations of cities in very different parts of the world geographically; crossed disciplines of humanities, science, and social science. It did so in ways in which the goodwill of colleagues we want to acknowledge in this prologue smoothed the glitches of the border crossings.
Yet what are seemingly the commonplace axioms of contemporary research good practice – the interdisciplinary configuration, the co-production, the international collaboration, and the search to make a difference in the world – were also troubled terms. These sticky border crossings, in a sense, were moments of the translational that reminded us that moving knowledge, practice, and cultures is a freighted practice. Despite our best efforts, PEAK struggled hard to lift beyond an argument that collective approaches to the urban are imperative and, we believe, possible. In the pages that follow, we try to say more on how such collective approaches can be achieved through an alternative urban disposition. As we do so we wish to acknowledge one of the origins from where we began.
Collective writing in itself could be the subject of its own book. As this volume evolved, online and in person, we excavated common irritations, inspirations, and ill-formed concerns about the fragmented way we interfaced the city across our urban responsibilities. Yet through it all, nobody was moaning. We recognize the privileged opportunity our personal trajectories, training, institutional locations, and funding offered to link with scholars with very different backgrounds, expertise, and experience. In very many ways, we are ‘lucky urbanists’. But as with all endeavours, our practice was rarely without its own generic and particular failures and successes. So in this volume, we follow C. Wright Mills’ inspiration4 to make these private troubles into public issues to perhaps find architectures that might be shared with others working in, on, and with cities in different parts of the world today.
We hope that this book, in some small ways, through the articulation and debate of our notion of an urban disposition might lighten the load and illuminate the journey of others. That we offer it collectively is us putting our money where our mouth is – we consider each other one of the communities of practice that we urge our readers in this book to make. May you find and build yours.
Notes
1.
We follow a rich tradition of attempts at collective thinking and writing. For one wonderful articulation of this, see Nagar et al. (2016).
2.
For details, see
https://www.peak-urban.org/
.
3.
Working with the idea of the city as an open rather than closed system, where the parts of the whole interact with their environment through the exchange of energy, materials, and information, changing the structure of the constitutive parts of the system itself. PEAK drew on the idea that such systems-based urban analysis would need to range across
Prediction
(what modelling, institutional analysis, and ethnography or history have to say about prediction and projection in the city),
Emergence
(how socio-material systems generate new forms and structures to create an emergent urbanism),
Adoption
(how different disciplines and the city adopt different technologies from different knowledge traditions), and
Knowledge
(how to maximize knowledge exchange to build capacity in research institutions, cities, nations, and at the global level). Further details of the framework appear in Keith et al. (2020). A fuller articulation from the wider PEAK community can be found in the online teaching course called ‘Shaping Urban Futures’, available here:
https://www.coursera.org/learn/shaping-urban-futures
.
4.
See Mills (1959).
Acknowledgements
The list of those on whose endeavours we have depended is long, and as with any list there is a danger that omissions might accidentally speak louder than inclusions. That said, we would particularly want to recognize over 100 colleagues from PEAK Urban, a research collective funded by the UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund (grant reference ES/P011055/1), and from the Oxford Martin School Informal Cities project. The programme involved a partnership between research-based institutions in China, Colombia, India, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. In Beijing, the principal partner was Cao Guangzhong’s Centre for Urban Futures in Peking University; in Universidad EAFIT, Medellin, the two nodes of RISE (Research in Spatial Economics), led by Juan Carlos Duque, and URBAM, led by Alejandro Echeverri Restrepo; in Bangalore, the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, led by Aromar Revi and Neha Sami; and in the University of Cape Town, the African Centre for Cities, led by Andy Tucker. In Oxford, work was linked in the Transport Studies Unit, the Centre on Migration Policy and Society (COMPAS), and the schools of Data Analytics and Deep Medicine. Tim Schwanen, Neave O’Clery, Kazem Rahimi, and the coordinating team at COMPAS – Franciso Obando, Mikal Ann Mast, Rosaleen Cunningham, and Karla Maria Perez-Blanco – both stimulated and supported the project through its everyday pressures as well as the major challenges of a global pandemic and the wayward responses to it from governments and funders alike.
Personal thanks from Michael also go to the many who have been supportive over many years, before, during, and since the pandemic, including Les Back, Cathy McIlwaine, AbdouMaliq Simone, Karim Murji, Steve Pile, John Solomos, David Theo Goldberg, Sir Alan Wilson and Alex and Max. Gautam would like to thank his queerverse, which has sustained him with love and support; his intellectual home at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS, and the Associate Pawns in particular); the communities of practice and scholars within the Indian urban academic space, which create solidarities beyond job titles; the movements that have given him more than he could ever give back; and the Urban Fellows at IIHS, who are classroom, readers, and audience all at once. Edgar wants to acknowledge the Department of Science and Technology/National Research Foundation’s South African Research Chair, which enabled him to carry out the work for this book, as well as his generous fellow travellers in the expanded African Centre for Cities (ACC) family. For Sue, that same ACC family, the various welcoming committees in the UK, and, of course, Owen, enable the intellectual and personal juxtaposition of a life lived between Cape Town and Bristol.
1An Urban Disposition
As we write in the summer of 2024, conflict is rupturing everyday life in the Middle East, Ukraine, Sudan, the Sahel, and Azerbaijan. The human cost of each ripples into local, regional, and global effects, connecting to the food crises across Africa, energy costs in the United Kingdom, and supply chains globally. Inflationary pressures are everywhere. These events, in turn, play out in urban systems increasingly scarred by the effects of climate change and long-term destruction of complex biodiversity, fuelling migrations and radicalized political sentiments across all points of the ideological compass. Socio-economic inequalities have returned to peak highs, and wealth concentration sits across persistent vulnerabilities for the majority. Everyday violence against women, queer folk, and racialized and ethnicized bodies is deepening. Everything, everywhere, all at once. At the same time, governments, political parties, pundits, scholars, and urban residents alike seem less and less able to decipher the root causes of intensifying polycrises, let alone address their visceral manifestations.
What we do know is that many of the drivers of polycrises both originate and land in the urban. They do so in metropolitan cities and their peri-urban edges just as much as in small urban centres as well as strategic townships, nodes, and corridors. The available thinking and strategic approaches to city-making are clearly not adequate to address the speed, dynamics, and complexity of these multiple crises and their interactions. Never have cities been more central to thinking about the future of humanity, and yet rarely has the study of cities been more divided into different silos of expertise, diverse genres of scholarship, and widening chasms between theory and practice. How can we do better?
Paradoxically, one way to move forward may be to temporarily leave aside ‘the city’ as an intellectual and political starting point, even when this is – for some of us – our principal site or object of concern. The argument that the future is urban and that cities lie at the heart of global environmental and developmental challenges are positions we and others have spent much effort advancing in order to get urban problems up national and global political agendas.1 Yet here, we suggest, this city-centric entry point may benefit from a reset and a return to a more fundamental question: what should be our relationship to knowledge and praxis in a deeply complex historical moment? While we continue to hold on to the centrality of cities as pivotal sites where this question must be asked (and, given our expertise, where we will ask it), we hope what follows has the capacity to imagine change everywhere, including from, in, and for cities.
This book is not a monograph on ‘the city’. Our concern with ‘the urban’ is less as a subject of study than as a meaningful site within which we want to generate a new relationship between knowledge and contemporary life at a moment of global fragility. We want to try to remake the way we see, know, and engage with cities given the disruptive context within which we live and which future generations will inhabit. We want to do so to rethink how we act and intervene within them at a moment when a new direction feels both urgent and possible. This sense of possibility, ironically, comes precisely because the city is no longer the purview of urban scholars or specialist planning practitioners alone, but rather a strategic site where numerous professional domains and disciplines (from epidemiologists to coders, engineers to ecologists, agronomists to designers) are excavating their own patch with an eye on what is going on down the lane. They are increasingly doing so from and in a wider set of cities, across the global north and south,2 treating all locations as both critical and foundational to generating knowledge. In this moment, we have an opportunity to foster novel readings and narratives about how, from where, to what end, and with whom to intervene in cities. So how do we get there?
What we offer as a way to move away from a prescribed idea of ‘the city’ as a central object are the contours of a new urban disposition. A disposition draws from its etymological roots in describing a sensibility, a tendency of mind, or an orientation towards being in and understanding the world. It can be instinctive as well as cultivated, affective as well as epistemological, and the result, as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued, both of the imprint of individual and collective histories and social locations and of the resilience of individual agency.3 Dispositions are not immutable, and thus offer a chance to shift ways of perception and action. This shift is what we seek in this book. We are interested in building a disposition towards urban knowledge and practice – a different way of knowing that seeks to move beyond existing divisions of discipline, institution, and profession; that grapples with both the particularity of place and the necessity for ideas to travel; that is concerned as much with exploring, doing, and acting as with analysing, describing, and narrating; and that is temporally and locationally flexible as well as multi-scalar in application.
We are not seeking new urban theory, a different framework, a more diverse set of case studies, or the next technical fix.4 Quite the contrary. A disposition is neither a singular framework, ideological position, or theoretical paradigm, nor is it simply a technique, measure, or assessment. Instead, it ought to be transdisciplinary in terms of scholarship, plural in terms of the directions of its questions and conceptual formulations, and translational by design. For each of these, a sense of openness is crucial rather than an instrumentality or a desire for certainty. An urban disposition certainly produces knowledge towards change that one desires, but that change is, crucially, never fully pre-determined or a priori. Wielding a disposition is a way, in fact, to find – for oneself or collectively – what change for the ‘better’ could look like, how to understand what it would take to create change, and how to effectively move towards it in the messiness and complexity of our cities and inner worlds.
Such a disposition cannot be learnt by rote. It must be cultivated, honed, and refined in the current moment and then slowly built, part by part, over a lifetime of work, research, reflection, and practice. Such work can begin with an individual – a scholar, professional, or urban resident – but must soon find a collective articulation. This could be through institutional spaces such as social movements, political parties, academic faculties, or professional bodies, or even through formal or informal means of exchange in film, books, and art, or in debate and conversation that could build possibilities of acting in concert. Wielding an urban disposition is then as much about creating subjectivities and publics as it is about generating and applying knowledge. It can help build both an ‘I’ and the ‘We’ that can bear the weight of building the horizons we desire for our cities.
Making sure that a future world is more sustainable and fair rests on supporting those activities that will forge a collective sensibility that is better configured to deal with complexity, incommensurability, and competing imperatives amidst deep uncertainty. In this book, we offer the contours of such an urban disposition. In doing so, there is a claim to newness, but also, perhaps more accurately and usefully, to timeliness, given that much of our disposition draws from current and historical positions, methods, and scholarship. We attempt to redescribe, from this scholarship, an urban disposition that, while not prescriptive in the way that a theory, model, or code may be, offers elements that can be made legible, replicable, and defensible once its purpose is well articulated. This introductory chapter sets up the three central elements of our proposed urban disposition – the normative, the analytical, and the operational – and then the chapters that follow use them iteratively to speak of and from the contemporary urban condition.
Dear reader
Who is this urban disposition for? In the course of our collective writing, we returned to this question many times and in different ways. In the most general sense, we hope to offer this disposition to anyone with a curiosity about wanting to know their cities better so that they may go about understanding them differently and begin to imagine new ways of being, living, and working in them.
More specifically, however, we do imagine different kinds of readers. Some, we hope, will be those already immersed in urban scholarship, politics, and practice. Like we have ourselves been in so many moments in our own lives, we imagine these readers to be looking for a different way of knowing and moving in cities both familiar and new to them. Some among such readers could be looking to cross disciplinary aisles: an engineer who realizes that a well-built bridge does not automatically translate into mobility and wonders then what all building infrastructure must entail; a sociologist who wants to grasp the materiality, design, and legality of housing as much as understanding it as a social infrastructure; a hydrologist who wants to think about how to govern and distribute the water whose natural geographies they intimately understand. We hope to offer scholars, students, and researchers a way to scratch this itch, to move slowly and incrementally to keep expanding disciplinary boundaries of knowledge even as they continue to do the necessary and vital work of focused and deep enquiry within their own fields.
For other readers, a desire to think differently could, and often does, come from sustained and enduring experiences of practice. Some struggles are familiar to all urban professionals, from a mayor to a community activist, a data scientist to an academic researcher, a businessperson to a bureaucrat in local government. We have all grappled with wicked urban problems5 and felt our methods, instincts, tools, or institutional locations fall short. At times, we know why we ‘fail’. Yet, at others, we remain unsure. One part of our uncertainty is about knowledge – were we able to understand a problem fully across its dimensions, scales, and temporalities? Would we have done things differently if we had made our problem visible through another lens? Were we able to move with the problem as it morphed and changed over time? Could we take our deep learning and knowledge of one city, and translate or move it to thinking about another, newer location?
We offer a new urban disposition to all of these readers: city residents; scholars across all disciplines that speak of ‘the urban’; teachers and professionals of all stripes. The tone, length, and register of this book can (we hope!) bear the expectations of these different audiences, offering each a meaningful way through the text. As the queer theorist José Muñoz argued, the ‘we’ that is to create and inhabit the futures we desire is one that does not yet fully exist. We hope that, at the end of this text, some part of that we which is ‘not-yet-here’, as Muñoz described it, can begin to take shape.6
With this, we turn to the disposition itself.
Three elements
An urban disposition must articulate normatively where it begins and what motivates it, be able to think analytically about how cities actually work as well as about the nature of complex urban problems, and move operationally to point to how one could get to different desired ends. This triad – the normative, analytical, and operational – offers structure, method, and purpose to an urban disposition. That there are three elements is crucial, and the work of the disposition is to hold them together in different configurations that resist linearity. None is meant to come first, before, or after the other. Life, knowledge, and practice rarely allow such sequentialism.
What we seek is alignment between these elements, regardless of which resonates the most with different readers as a first entry point. One may be drawn to the operational first, and then think about the analytical and normative roots of practices. Alternatively, another may start with a strong normative set of values and seek analytical and operational paths to move towards them. Still another may be deeply analytically engaged with urban questions, only realizing or articulating their normative locations and operational implications over time.
Without such alignment, the disposition falls apart in ways familiar to all of us. Knowledge that is normatively driven but lacks the analytical rigour needed to give shape to values, motivations, and beliefs. Practice that is operationally efficient but lacks empathy or a value for dignity, or that seeks to ‘solve’ the wrong problem. Analytical frameworks that leave our understanding incomplete, ironically, by the neatness and singularity of their conceptualizations, or that offer us little by way of knowing how even to begin to think about what is to be done operationally.
In thinking with a new urban disposition, we hope to offer different ways to bind these elements together and then use them to think about the contemporary urban condition. We now move to each in turn, describing them briefly before each becomes a chapter in the text for deeper exploration.
Normative
Let us start with the idea of the normative. Working in cities, we are often fearful of clashing or divergent normative positions. We see them as a kind of dissensus, as battle-lines in values and ideologies that can make common purpose seem impossible. Yet in something as layered and dense as the urban, normative differences are inevitable and perhaps even definitional. We argue that fear must not make us seek consensus as a resolution, which can often disguise a flattening or silencing of different positions rather than an actual coming together. As the political philosopher Chantal Mouffe argues, consensus is neither necessarily democratic nor just,7 especially in the contexts of structural inequality that the urbanist Vanessa Watson once described as ones of ‘deep difference’.8 Yet surviving conflicting rationalities is itself deeply challenging, especially when we find ourselves ‘outside’ a dominant set of values that do not reflect our own.
For our disposition, what is important is not always what specific form the normative takes, that is, what values, desired ends, or foundational beliefs. What matters is for scholars and practitioners to make their normative locations apparent. In other words, to articulate the values and approaches that lie behind why they produce certain forms of knowledge, ask the questions they do, or choose the practices they deploy. Equally: what their hope is for how this knowledge or these practices move in the world, are applied, and what they offer different urban actors. As we discuss in chapter 2, this is no easy task. For each individual, let alone for a collective body, it is not self-evident what values one should hold, especially in a time of complex social, political, and ecological change, or what to do when those in power and authority seek to impose values rather than discover them.
Normative locations in urban contexts can be differentially configured at the household, street, neighbourhood, or city scale. They are, without doubt, deeply influenced by historical, social, and economic structures, locations, and identities. They shift over time in response to scarcity and trauma as well as joy and possibility. They are articulated both for the self and the other, the present and the future, the individual and the collective. To take just one example: how does one arrive at a normative position in thinking about urban ecological futures when those who will live those futures are not yet born? Acting on their behalf would mean prioritizing the cities of tomorrow over the present, perhaps even forgoing current consumption in ways that impact inequalities now rather than later. In whose image, then, are future cities to be made, and who should rightfully bear the present consequences?
