CityReads | Many Urbanisms at the 21st Century

楼市 2024-10-18 21:02 上海

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Many Urbanisms at the 21st Century

Cities are not only growing and expanding, but also stagnating or declining.

Murray, M. J. (2022).Many urbanisms: Divergent trajectories of global city building. Columbia University Press.

Source:https://cup.columbia.edu/book/many-urbanisms/9780231204071

Today, the Earth has become a planet of cities, with 57% of the world’s population (4.5 billion people) living in urban areas. The 21st century is the first urban century. The future belongs to cities, with an expected urbanization rate of 68% by 2050, nearly 7 billion people residing in urban areas.

However, urbanization is not evenly distributed. In some regions and countries, urbanization is accelerating, while in others it is slowing down. In the foreseeable future, 93% of urban population growth will occur in developing countries, with 80% of that growth concentrated in Asia and Africa. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, over 400 cities worldwide had populations exceeding 1 million, and 19 cities had populations over 10 million. In 1975, only three cities could be classified as megacities with populations over 10 million: New York, Tokyo, and Mexico City, of which only one was in a developing country. By 2017, the number of megacities had increased to 37. The United Nations estimates that by 2025, the number of megacities will approach 50, with the vast majority located in developing countries.

At the same time, one in every six cities globally is experiencing significant population loss. For example, the 2006 U.S. Census estimates showed that 16 out of the 20 largest cities in the 1950s had seen population declines, often substantial ones. In fact, urban contraction due to capital flight, disinvestment, reduced job opportunities, and population loss is a global dilemma. Over the past half-century, 370 cities with populations over 100,000 have shrunk by at least 10%.

Thus, at the beginning of the 21st century, an asymmetric urbanization phenomenon emerged, where highly unbalanced urban development patterns coexist with an expanding wealth gap, manifesting not only between cities but also within them. In the contemporary era of globalization, cities around the world have been drawn into an imbalanced spatial geography, with healthy, vibrant cities in developed countries aspiring to world-class status becoming key nodes in the global economy, while those failed cities unable to compete are bypassed and left behind. The ultra-rapid expansion of megacities is occurring so quickly that job opportunities cannot keep up with the increasing number of immigrants, existing infrastructure is overloaded and nearly collapsing, and municipal services are insufficient to adequately serve the new arrivals. Additionally, a new type of city has emerged—instant cities, which are fully planned urban areas built entirely from scratch. These cities first appeared in the Persian Gulf and have since rapidly emerged along the Asia-Pacific Rim, extending to the Indian subcontinent, other regions of the Middle East, Africa, and China. Instant cities are redefining the speed of urban construction.

Despite the diverse and heterogeneous trajectories of global urbanization, mainstream urban studies have generally failed to address the speed and rhythm of global urbanization, or to explore the relationship between rapid urbanization and incremental urbanization, as well as the contrast between sprawling megacities experiencing high growth and declining post-industrial shrinking cities. The book "Many urbanisms: Divergent trajectories of global city building " reflects on conventional urban theories, shifting the focus away from hierarchies, rankings, and success stories to adopt a perspective grounded in the diversity, heterogeneity, and unevenness of urban experiences globally, examining different urban experiences in a world filled with diverse cities.

This book is divided into three parts. The first part discusses conventional urban studies at a crossroads, criticizing both the mainstream urban studies' generic cities and convergence thesis, as well as the inadequacies of global south theory as an alternative urban theory. The second part analyzes the diverse pathways of global urbanization at the beginning of the 21st century, focusing on four types of urbanization pathways: post-industrial tourism and entertainment cities with world-class aspirations; declining post-industrial cities; megacities experiencing hypergrowth; and instant cities. The third part explores the future of urbanization, pointing out the duality of global urbanization.

This book revolves around three questions. First, how do we grasp the rapidly evolving reality of global urbanization at the beginning of the 21st century, and the diverse urban world that manifests in different forms in various places? Second, how can we recognize the interconnectedness of the contemporary urban world while acknowledging the diversity, uniqueness, and historical specificity of cities, and theorize global urbanization in light of widely disseminated urban practices that often produce similar patterns and outcomes? Third, how do we distance ourselves from theoretical approaches that rely on a priori conceptual frameworks and view urbanization as governed by a single universal logic, while also avoiding radical relativism that treats each city as a unique case, thereby irreducible and specific?

The book posits that urbanization is a complex, multifaceted, and sometimes even contradictory globalization process that progresses along multiple pathways, without a single prioritized or common endpoint. It challenges the notion of a singular urbanization process and disrupts the argument for phased urban development along predetermined linear paths. Urban transformation is neither linear, following recognized or predetermined directions, nor cumulative, being additive and irreversible. Urban transformation does not have a single, fixed endpoint. Understanding the starting point of 21st-century global urbanization involves recognizing the diverse trajectories of urban transformation, the heterogeneity of spatial forms, and the asymmetric patterns of aggregation and density. Breaking away from traditional modes of thinking about global urbanization requires an increased analytical sensitivity to gaps and lags, to bypassing and leapfrogging, and to accelerating and slowing down.

Although urban transformation is multidirectional and rhizomatic, it is not a chaotic and incomprehensible mess. In fact, patterns and common features can still be identified. Connections, networks, and flows link cities together; cities cannot be viewed as singular, closed, and isolated analytical units. These ties of connection operate asymmetrically, favoring some places while punishing others. The uncontrollable materiality of cities inspires rich theoretical imagination. The formation of urban theory occurs within the realms of politics, power, and practice, which emerge and explode from the diversity of urban experiences.

Four distinct trajectories of urban transformation

This book presents four distinct types of urban development that emerged at the beginning of the 21st century. The first type is competitive world-class cities, which are vibrant, healthy, and developed cities in the First World, serving as prototype examples of globalized urbanism and long relied upon by mainstream urban studies as sources of urban modernity thought. The second type is declining post-industrial cities, also known as "shrinking cities," which have failed to successfully transition to industries such as information technology, tourism, and entertainment. The third type consists of megacities of hypergrowth, previously classified as "Third World cities," which accommodate large numbers of impoverished workers struggling to find formal employment, with their daily survival dependent on informal jobs, informal trade, and self-built housing. The fourth type includes instant cities, which have emerged along the Asia-Pacific region and the Persian Gulf, characterized by comprehensive planning and design. These are known as "urban speed machines," representing a typical example of fast-tracked urbanization.

These four types do not encompass all the variations and mixed mutations in the urban world, but they do highlight different paths of urban transformation that are often overlooked, misunderstood, or inadequately theorized in mainstream urban studies. Each of the four paths of global urbanization possesses its own independence and should be treated as a distinct area of research. The complexity of these four urban types does not necessitate deductive verification against prior theories but instead requires the establishment of theories through induction, leading to a new understanding of global urbanization.

The first type of city includes those vibrant, competitive, and healthy urban areas that have successfully transitioned from reliance on industrial production and mass manufacturing as the primary engines of economic growth to a sustainable economy underpinned by service-oriented cultural and creative industries. These cities, characterized by high finance, information technology, start-ups, innovation centers, and digital media, have replaced traditional industrial cities based on mass production, developing a creative service economy and high-end consumption. This transition to a post-industrial information age is referred to by some scholars as "cognitive cultural capitalism," marking a significant turning point in thoughts about cities and global urbanization. These prosperous cities, with advanced facilities and modern services, attract extensive academic research. As the historical era of Fordist capitalism (mass manufacturing) gradually fades, these successful post-industrial cities that have leveraged emerging clean industries and risen as major financial service centers reliant on cutting-edge information technology play a dominant role in the global economy. These vibrant post-industrial cities—prosperous cities of the new era's postmodern urbanism—represent typical examples of globalized urbanism with world-class aspirations.

The second type, declining post-industrial cities, includes once-thriving cities that are now caught in an accelerating spiral of decline and destruction. One in every six cities worldwide is experiencing unemployment and population shrinkage. Urban contraction due to disinvestment, job decline, and population loss is a global phenomenon. Struggling cities are unable to attract people and investment, leading to stagnation and fiscal austerity.

The third type is megacities of hypergrowth. If the early 20th century saw cities like London, Paris, Chicago, and New York as the primary crucibles and living laboratories of modern urbanity, then the hyper-urbanism characteristic of the 21st century, marked by explosive urban growth and a sharp expansion of urban geographical boundaries, fundamentally alters the basis for understanding contemporary urban experiences and expectations.

The growth of megacities amplifies the dysfunction and social ills associated with modern industrial cities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As engines of capitalist growth and expansion, modern industrial cities possess a dark side characterized by crime, vice, environmental degradation, and poverty. The dirty building types of overcrowded apartment complexes and unsanitary slums mirror the capitalist modernity of affluent communities and upscale neighborhoods. The dysfunction of industrial cities has not disappeared; rather, it has mutated, diffused, and reappeared in different forms, such as slums, shantytowns, informal settlements, and illegal housing within megacities. These extremely expansive megacities appear as stark exceptions to orderly urbanization patterns. They host vast informal settlements, minimal formal job opportunities, crumbling infrastructure, and environmental degradation, creating unprecedented extreme spatial structures within these unplanned and unregulated urbanization clusters.

The fourth type, instant cities in the Asia-Pacific region and the Persian Gulf, exemplifies rapid urbanization characterized by super-fast construction, where new cities seemingly emerge out of nowhere. Instant cities demonstrate how urban builders are liberated from the constraints of gradually reconstructing existing cities, instead creating new city from a blank slate. Dubai and other cities in the Persian Gulf serve as initial examples of this type of urban development, but many similar new experiments have also emerged globally. Even when cities are often viewed as exceptional anomalies that deviate from traditional understandings of urban development as a slow, incremental process unfolding over the course of history, these well-planned and comprehensively designed "instant cities" seem to materialize without any intermediate steps, constructed entirely according to pre-established guidelines from scratch. Instant cities represent a brand new model of urban development, where gradualism no longer dominates, and the approach of "building from a blank slate" gains powerful momentum. This "instant city" model deliberately severs any residual ties to historicism, which was once a core concept of early classical tradition aimed at connecting urban space with historical pasts.

The Duality of Global Urbanization: Growth and Decline

The characteristics of global urbanization at the beginning of the 21st century are marked by an increasingly acute spatial polarization on a global scale, with expansion and growth on one hand and contraction and decline on the other, both interwoven in a complex and dynamic network. Growing cities and declining cities represent two sides of the same process within the world economy. Together, the forces of globalization, deindustrialization, and neoliberalism have spawned two types of post-industrial cities, embodying the dual nature of urban globalization transformation.

The first type is the revitalized post-industrial city, which has successfully transitioned from once-thriving industrial bases to high-tech industries and service economies of the information age, achieving new prosperity through culture-led urban renewal, gentrification, and tourism and entertainment facilities. The second type is the failing post-industrial city, which is caught in a downward spiral of neglect, abandonment, and decay, facing significant population decline, high unemployment rates, low skill levels among remaining residents, and extremely high levels of urban violence. These cities thrived during the era of Fordist industrialization in the early 20th century, but the socio-economic crisis of the 1970s, coupled with the accelerated globalization and industrial relocation, led to their decline. Deindustrialization, factory closures, and unemployment are the root causes of the social issues faced by their residents.

Cities are not only growing and expanding but also stagnating or declining. Urban shrinkage—also known as urban decline, abandonment, and neglect—is a unique path of urban development prevalent in the old industrial regions of Western Europe, post-socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, the rust belt in the United States, northern Japan, and elsewhere around the world. Shrinking cities need to be understood as an independent area of study rather than an anomalous phenomenon that deviates from expected urban transformation standards. In everyday usage, the term "shrinking cities" typically refers to metropolitan areas experiencing economic decline and restructuring, population loss, rising unemployment rates, fiscal austerity, and environmental degradation, accompanied by social issues of abandonment and decay, crumbling infrastructure, and vacant and derelict properties. Urban shrinkage results from multiple concurrent processes, encompassing various dimensions and impacts.

CityQuotes

1.“Cities are no longer just built; they are imaged. City designers, like others who observe the metropolis, image and re-image cities through the calculated use of media.”- Sam Bass Warner and Lawrence Vale, Imaging the City: Continuing Struggles and New Directions, 2001

2.“Shrinking Cities represent a fin-de siècle realization that modernity’s optimistic engagement with urban decline, as a reversible and episodic misfortune preying on good-planning deprived cities, was after all, a chimera.”- Ivonne Audirac, Introduction: Shrinking Cities from Marginal to Mainstream: Views from North America and Europe, Cities, 2018

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