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7
Propositions on Our Urban PlanetThe
human condition itself became increasingly defined by the Urban Condition and
the habitation of Our Urban Planet.
Source:https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/our-urban-planet-in-theory-and-history/5E4E42B7A8D1F8747FB6448CA790C89D
Nightingale,
Carl H. (2024). Our urban planet in theory and history. Cambridge University
Press.
The
author of "Our Urban Planet in Theory and History" is urban historian
Carl Nightingale. In 2022 I introduced his book "Earthopolis: A Biography of Our
Urban Planet" (CityReads | Earthopolis). In "Our Urban Planet in
Theory and History," Nightingale participates in the debates on planetary
urbanization and critical urban theory (CityReads│How An Urban Theorist Sees Urbanization?; CityReads│When Lefebvre’s Hypothesis Becomes Reality). He
argues for expanding the concept of "urban space" to include spaces
that make cities possible and those made possible by cities, and to place
global urban history within the longer time frame of Earth Time. More
importantly, we need to introduce the crucial dimension of power, redefining
cities as spaces that humans produce to amplify the harvest of geo-solar energy
and deploy human power within space and time.The
book uses insights from "deep history" to propose an urban theory by
verb, explaining the many paradoxes of humans' 6,000-year gamble with
urbanization. It first discusses some basic concepts and then elaborates on
seven propositions for developing a theory of our urban planet. These seven
propositions are framed along three axes: space on the x-axis, time on the
y-axis, and power on the z-axis.Nightingale
believes that space includes urban space, non-urban space that makes cities
possible—referred to as urban hinterlands—and space that cities make possible,
called urban forelands. Urban hinterlands and forelands participate in
urbanization to varying degrees and can sometimes be classified as rural,
extractive, or infrastructural spaces. Urban hinterlands and forelands can also
encompass non-human biological ecosystems and geophysical spaces on Earth
ultimately created and governed by the Sun.The
seven propositions summarize these overlapping urban spaces—city + hinterland +
foreland, along with their thick + thin + threadlike spatial skeleton—as the
"Urban Condition," a specific spatial manifestation of the human
condition that first emerged with the construction of earliest cities. Urban
spaces reflect the human species, even as, over time, the human condition
itself becomes increasingly defined by the Urban Condition and the habitation
of the Urban Planet.Here
are the seven propositions by Nightingale.Proposition 1: Start Deep Not Total – Humans, Space, and
PowerMy
propositions focus on long time, framing the 6,000 years of global urban
history within the 300,000 years of “deep” human history and amongst the most
recent epochal shifts in the 4.5 billion years of planetary history as measured
by the Geological Time Scale. By contemplating humanity from our deep
historical origins some 300,000 years ago, these perspectives allow us to (1)
explore the roots of these plural singularities alongside their other
paradoxical features, (2) explore the limits of both universalizing and
differentiating epistemologies, and (3) treat dialectical interchanges between
relatively large and relatively small phenomena as crucial dynamics in human
history that apply usefully to global urban history and to a historical theory
of Our Urban Planet.Proposition 2: Energy In – Urban HinterlandsAll
projects of human space production, whether of cities or non-cities, require
human projects of energy harvesting from the planet itself and its governing
star.Cities
require enlarged concentrations of energy, most of it conveyed from non-cities
– thinner spaces for harvests, and more threadlike infrastructures for
transport to cities. These non-city spaces have always occupied far larger
spaces than even the largest cities, and they predate cities in time. They
became urban hinterlands whenever, and to the varying degree that, we began To
Enlarge and Concentrate – to thicken – the amount of energy in cities.The
changing spatial scope and the growing diversity of urban hinterlands mattered
immensely to the human condition over time. After 1500, as the World Ocean
replaced river valleys as the primary sourcing grounds and delivery devices of
city-making geo-solar energy, to be replaced again by deposits of hydrocarbon
after about 1780 CE, city-fueling hinterlands became planetary in scope for the
first time.Proposition 3: Cities and Power – To Produce and To AmplifyWirth
defined cities using three adjectives: larger + denser + more heterogeneous.Nightingale
believes that a theory of “the city” needs verbs. But which verbs should be
used? Carl Nightingale proposes three verbs to define cities: To Produce, To
Amplify, and To Deploy. These are "compound" verbs that encompass a
series of sub-verbs.As
such, it is worth embarking on our “urban theory by verb” by slightly modifying
Hannah Arendt’s view of cities as the “material origins of power” with this
general proposal: Cities are the products and the producers of especially rich
dialectical interactions of actions essential to the most amplified and
diversified deployments of human power in history.Proposition 4: Predictably Unpredictable – To DeployThe
production and amplification of human spatial power has only one sure “effect”:
We deploy that space and that power, and in predictably unpredictable ways.To
Deploy is best conceived not by a discrete set of component verbs, but as
overlapping ranges of action that stretch between pairs of conflicting
opposites. I sum these verb-spectrums thus: To Align through To Differentiate +
To Negotiate through To Conflict + To Distribute through To Appropriate + To
Narrate through To Counter-Narrate + and To Govern through To Disrupt. Deploying
spatial power requires combining many, often contradictory acts into strategic
projects whose unforeseeable collisions and outcomes set the unpredictable
conditions – within history – of cities’ complex dialectical relationships to
such power-deploying entities as states, social movements, accumulations of
wealth, knowledge production and dissemination, collective mobility, and
reproduction – and from there to the production of larger urban forelands.Proposition 5: Power Out – Urban ForelandsCities
are places where we harvest geo-solar energy to produce, amplify, and deploy
space and our power as a species on Earth. What comes next? (1) Our actions –
deployed through institutions, movements, or other large-scale collective
projects – take up space in themselves, within cities and beyond them, creating
Realms of Action. (2) Our actions require that we produce new human spaces and
sometimes destroy them, building Realms of Habitat. (3) Our Realms of Action
and Habitat, in turn, also transform extra-human spaces within and beyond human
space: Realms of Impact. (4) Those impacts, finally, are reflected in the
amount of human and extra-human life and death on Earth, a benefit or a cost
which also takes up space: Realms of Consequence. Our theories of cities may
have run their course, but we can still theorize the spaces that cities make
possible: urban forelands, and the Realms of Action, Habitat, Impact, and
Consequence.Proposition 6: Polyrhythmic Plotlines – Urban TemporalityCities
matter not just to space but to time.Cities
are also spaces where we bend time. We design them to allow us to produce
simultaneous and polyrhythmic changes in time of many sizes and shapes,
including continuities, self-propelling processes, disruptions, “resurfacings,”
“hauntings,” “entanglements,” and many unforeseeable contingencies and
“miracles”.Cities
gave us more power to bend time – and in more ways at once – than we possessed
before. The result was not the invention of history itself, but a more diverse
temporal counterpoint, filled with more simultaneous melodic shapes, time
signatures, and rhythms all proceeding at multiple tempos at once, from the
very small and acute to the most thrumming and enormous – all guided by our own
city-diversified, juxtaposed, amplified, and colliding projects of power.If
there is indeed a distinct urban temporality, my proposal for its theorization
starts with the city-making practices To Produce, To Amplify, and To Deploy.
Most verbs contain a temporal dimension, and each of these boxes contains acts
that, as they produce space and power, also occur in time, shape time, and help
explain time.Proposition 7: Morality Tales, Visions, and Miracles – Urban
FuturesSome
things we can know about cities, and some things maybe we can’t – the urban
future least of all. Cities remain a leap of faith, as they were when we first
gambled on the power that they gave us.Urban
theory is as old as urban history, and both are as old as urban
prognostication. Six millennia ago, at Uruk, the Sumerians divined the future
in the past in at least three ways that are still with us. They told morality
tales about the city and the country. They plotted out ideal godlike cities of
the future.As
Hannah Arendt, the great philosopher of power, counseled us in all matters of
the human condition, these collective projects must be conceived in the active
voice; they must begin again and again at each moment of the present. They must
be visionary. But they will always be contested, and they will always involve
leaps of faith. And they will always produce occasional miracles – both very
small and very large.Miracles
of space, time, power, and action, are also temporal phenomena with their own
very “deep” history of claims on the urban future.1. “The foundation of cities … is … the most important material
prerequisite for power.”— Hanna Arendt, The Human Condition![]()
2.“Today, as the power centers of a truly planetary Urban Planet, cities
place our own unequal communities in precarious command of Earth’s fertile
lithosphere, its watery hydrosphere, it Sun-moderating atmosphere, and the
entirety of its profuse halo of life.” — Carl H. Nightingale, Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet
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