Emergent Agitation: Knowledge as Urban Politics
Deepa Naik & Trenton Oldfield
{Chapter can be download here}
The Urban Age is upon us. In less than two generations, over 75% of the world’s rapidly growing population will live in cities. Most of these people will endeavour to establish work and create a sense of home in massive urban conglomerations: mega cities, such as Mumbai, Shanghai, Lagos and Dhaka, and hundreds of huge, often interconnecting, urban developments. At the same time, some existing cities will shrink as people and finances move elsewhere. [i] These unprecedented statistics have critical implications for our planet, as well as undeniable potential.
Out-of-step
Statistics provided by Ricky Burdett (see ‘City-thinking For City-building’) highlight the scale, pace and immediacy of this rapid urbanisation. Crucially, Burdett argues that there is ‘an opening’, an ‘out-of-step’, between the knowledge at hand and the knowledge needed by ‘city builders’. Why is there this condition of being out-of-step, especially at a time of increased emphasis on understanding urban realities? A study of the forums (exhibitions, conferences, festivals and publications) where official knowledge on cities is produced and exchanged reveals a stark reality: ‘invitation only’ policies and high fees, among other factors, limit participation to a narrow group of professionals and academics.[ii] In parallel, educational institutions teach a selection of predictable texts. This has resulted in increasingly self-referential circuits of knowledge. It is, ironically, as if the events and aftershocks of 1968 had never ruptured the disciplines concerned with the built environment. While cities are expanding, official ‘gateways’ into urban discourse are reducing.
And yet, a vast body of knowledge exists and is being expanded by vigorous, unexpected and heterogeneous agents, and cells of new knowledge are continuously surfacing. Unsurprisingly, this knowledge is generated and shared most often ‘from the ground up’ by those that inhabit the city, those that work alongside them and those thinkers within governments, think tanks or private companies that have not been seduced into only promoting and enabling the notion of ‘erase, stretch, relinquish’.[iii] The sites propagating new knowledge are most often outside of ‘the urban industry’, and the agents of these new possibilities and practices seem to come together around shared notions of complexity, texture, rigour and potentiality. Is it not time for a re-understanding and re-formulation of the disciplines and, above all, of the participants involved in making space? Is it not time for urbanism to undergo a transformation similar to that of sociology opened up through cultural studies, or art history re-examined in the light of visual cultures? This is not a moment to bemoan or to react against the current structures that are thought limiting and limited, but an opportunity to produce new conditions.
Following Alinsky, the need to act arises from recognising ‘the world as it is’. Research data from UN-Habitat and Urban Age make explicit the significant implications of urbanisation on people’s everyday lives. Statistics detailing the number of tall buildings constructed in Dubai and the accelerating concentration of financial and political power in a handful of cities are set against ‘stomach dropping’ and clearly unacceptable levels of poverty, injustice, monopolisation, collusion and exploitation. Our discussions with those working both within and outside spatial practices made it clear that the out-of-step between official knowledge and on-the-ground realities was causing burning frustration for many. Personal and professional experience in a diversity of arenas[iv] brought us in contact with sites of relevant, critical knowledge and practice. These sites are often independent but also include clusters of research groups and leaders within innovative companies pushing out beyond their institutions. We were constantly working alongside people with remarkable ideas and projects that we thought colleagues in other fields should know about. These were not binaries, but missed opportunities resulting from a perceived isolation from each other. Like Jemma Basham, Ricky Burdett and countless others, we recognised the urgency, desire and mutual need for barriers to be broken down, for ideas to be made accessible and for an expanded dialogue to begin. It was clear to us that a platform was needed – one that would circulate these multiple fields and sites of knowledge. Encouraged by colleagues and associates, we set out to create a platform that would demonstrate the potential of coming together.
On-site
While traditional notions of power are no doubt being re-thought, ‘the city’ is certainly no art gallery and no playground (much as some would like to imagine it that way). Anybody who suggests otherwise is likely to have never had their home or livelihood threatened, nor worked alongside built-environment professionals. They might be revealing their sense of resignation, their incapacity to act, or perhaps protecting their benefactor’s income stream. Clear and un-romanticised understandings of the dynamics of power are more pertinent than ever as people increasingly assert their right to agency in their lives. While cities attempt to consolidate their capital and influence, diverse bodies including transnational corporations, NGOs, citizen groups and popular movements compete for power.
Every movement and action in a city is a negotiation, each square foot belongs to a profit-making spreadsheet, every design is reviewed, every notion of ‘citizenship’ is contested. The work of Michel Foucault[v] and Gayatri Spivak[vi] provides a useful lens to question power-knowledge mechanisms, along with the exclusion and marginalisation of certain groups resulting from the maintenance of power within the urban industry. The question of how we might approach these realities, as significantly more people demand agency in their cities, has been guided by the practices of both Saul Alinsky[vii] and Paulo Freire[viii].
The openness of visual cultures and the work of theorists such as Stuart Hall, Irit Rogoff and Nicholas Mirzoeff[ix] have also been enormously influential in our thinking. Arguing for an engagement with a range of approaches and disciplines, these thinkers persistently allow us avenues in considering how to propose the city as a site of knowledge and potentiality. Writing about the A.c.a.d.e.m.y exhibition[x], Irit Rogoff asked: “Where are the unseen possibilities that already exist within these spaces – the people who are already working there and who bring together unexpected life experiences and connections … the paths outward which extend beyond the museum, the spaces and navigational vectors which are unexpectedly plotted within it.”[xi] It is this curiosity and continual questioning how spaces and knowledge can be unbound from established limits and expectations that have informed our thinking. We know that language frames thought and the usefulness of visual culture can also be demonstrated by a consideration of shifting terms such criticism, critique and criticality, potentiality and actualisation; terms that alter in convergence with the changing conditions they seek to address. The significance of this is not to deepen an understanding of a fixed object of study, in this case ‘the city’, but rather to create the possibility of prising open the field, making its complexities explicit, and allowing for unexpected actors to propel ideas forward.
Ricky Burdett’s pursuit to build ‘a knowledge and practice bridge’ between social- and political-science thinkers and built-environment professionals, firstly through his students, and more recently through the research-led Urban Age Project, has also been motivating. His approach emphasises that cities are not only a theoretical notion but also remarkable sets of statistics with social and political implications. Cities are here ‘now’, and there are endless practical realities that elected and employed decision-makers must address throughout a working day. Ricky Burdett also wants to ensure that when political decisions are made the decision-makers are informed of the issues at stake. His articulation of the extent of practical failures, alongside the limited array of professionals involved in developing policy and productions of space, has been another motivating factor.
Surfacing
Who are the people and what are the activities already contributing to this shifting consciousness? Our project started with questions raised via an open call for participation. Individuals and groups from across Europe and beyond, whose central reference in their work or thinking is ‘the city’, got in touch. With the help of our steering committee, we considered various propositions of where and how we could make the most worthwhile and provocative contribution. The resulting four prime areas of production for This Is Not A Gateway are salons[xii], festivals, publications, and a library and archive[xiii].
This Is Not A Gateway’s festival was inaugurated[xiv] with the aim of making visible the shifting approaches to urbanism and the wider participation in creating cities. Though we welcome further understanding of what is evidently wrong, who and what are out-of-step, the festival was not set up to produce a collision by revealing corruption in official regeneration practices, questioning academic reading lists, detailing the absurdity of highly sponsored architectural institutions and their opulent, self-congratulatory and simplified events; nor was it intended to reveal the widespread frustration felt towards artists who turn up on public housing estates insisting that participating in publicly funded projects is ‘good’ for local residents. The focus was on opening up the field, providing public opportunities for offering rigorous and constructive alternatives, and stimulating multi-party participation in forging new sets of questions.
Constructed on a micro-budget and volunteer hours, the festival was bound together by an ethos of peer-to-peer learning, inter-disciplinary exchange, initiating networks and DIY urbanism. It sought to make apparent the most current questions being explored by emerging urbanists. An architectural magazine correctly described it as ‘not your usual conference’[xv]: it was entirely free, it was held outside of institutions, the programme was primarily participant-led, and the majority of activities were organised by women and ethnic minorities.
While research and instinct suggested there was need and desire for such an event, it was unclear whether anybody would come to the festival. Both the attendance and contributions across the three days were much more than we had anticipated. The curious public that came along included community workers, activists, artists, regeneration managers, theatre directors, students, writers, journalists, local councillors, government policymakers, think-tank researchers, gardeners, chairs of resident associations, as well as established built-environment professionals and theorists. Unfortunately (and embarrassingly), we neglected to collect any statistics. While observations and anecdotal evidence are inadequate, we feel comfortable to suggest that over 500 people attended across the three days and, though most were based in London, we know that people travelled from Croatia, Germany, Poland, Denmark, Italy, Switzerland, Romania, Netherlands, France and Australia to attend.
The festival was held in the offices of designers, architectural firms and charities, with a wonderfully busy café as the central hub, and there was a vibrant atmosphere apparent from the very start that signalled a stimulating and fruitful interaction. There was also a pervasive sense of productive agitation as the surrounding neighbourhood of Dalston Junction was, and still is, in the throes of ‘express speed gentrification’, accelerated not least by the development of a new railway line and the 2012 Olympic Games.
The impetus for founding This Is Not A Gateway was a need to articulate the shift currently apace within our rapidly transforming cities; one that is changing the way cities are being thought through, studied, researched and produced, resetting both the questions that inform urban space and those who are framing them. As the urban industries are prised open, this approach will encourage the engagement of the multiple agents shaping space. It is our hope that there will be no more than five editions. This Is Not A Gateway will then, we hope, be redundant, ‘surplus to requirement’, as it will have contributed towards advancing an approach that will be taken on board, become ‘second nature’.
Critical ideas, articulated cities
Critical Cities is the first of This Is Not A Gateway’s publications. It builds on projects, films, exhibitions, discussions and workshops from the festival and preceding salons. Without a doubt, the most difficult part of producing the book was editing the content and unfortunately we were unable to include each activity. As a result, the book does not act as a comprehensive record, detailing each project or idea that arose during the year and a half of activity. Instead, by bringing together a collection of critical papers, visual essays, conversations and actions, we hope to begin articulating where the new sites of knowledge are surfacing, who the agents are and what the potential might be.
It was important for us to produce a book, as books remain a cornerstone of cultural production. The development of new technologies such as print-on-demand means the production and circulation of books has even greater potential. The majority of the contributors to Critical Cities have not been published before. The authors inhabit a number of fields: practicing architecture, open-source software writing, academic teaching, filmmaking, community organising, law, journalism. Publishing this book allows their ideas to circulate to new audiences. The book is divided into four sections: Legalities of Space, Home & Migration, Public Memory and Creative Destruction. These section 'titles' arrived only after we reflected on the programme and once we read all the contributions. They indicate the pressing areas of concern being considered and expanded upon by emerging urbanists at present. The sections offer a lens to enter the material. The themes do not create rigid boundaries and many of the essays can be read through the filter of another title.
In the course of our work, including publishing this book, it has become apparent that the sense of an an ‘out-of-step’ is experienced not only by the gatekeepers within the urban industry but also by myriad others: architects questioning why their field has been limited and tempered; managers of regeneration schemes questioning why existing culturally significant buildings are demolished and replaced with shopping centres; activists questioning how increasing poverty margins are condoned in the development of cities; NGOs questioning why official urban conferences continually exclude their propositions; academics questioning how the study of ‘cities’ moved out of geography and became a genre in itself; artists questioning the everyday and individual experience of urban life; local politicians questioning the implications of global migration flows on their jurisdictions; real-estate financers questioning the sustainability of their financial transactions. Clearly, as we enter the ‘Urban Age’ there is something of a state of expectancy, of suspense and awkwardness resulting from the proliferation of questions in a diversity of sites. This sense of being ‘unsettled’ acts as a catalyst – it is that which propels people to agitate, to reframe questions, to produce new possibilities.
[i] For more information see, Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic (eds), The Endless City (London: Phaidon, 2008).
[ii] Since 2007 we have been collecting data on urban forums, including price, professional fields and communities represented, gender and ethnicity of speakers.
[iii] ‘Erase, stretch, relinquish’ is introduced here as a term to summarise both the thinking and the actions leading built-environment decision-making processes. Rather than re-using existing building and making use of the ideas put forward by local residents, buildings are demolished. ‘Erasing’ is understood as both easier and more efficient. Demolition produces an empty canvas suitable for an alien ‘typology’ to land. The new typology ‘stretches’ all aspects of the site including size, height and programming – the main aim being to ‘stretch’ the profit margin for the developer and the tax revenues for the local authority. ‘Relinquish’ is the stage when almost everyone that has benefited from ‘stretching’ moves on: the developer either sells the site or passes on management responsibilities; the local authority no longer owns anything and struggles to answer who does own what or why none of the facilities promised have been built; and the neighbours ‘relinquish’ or resign themselves to the fact that their neighbourhood will never be what it could have been.
[iv] Our professional and voluntary experience has spanned academic work, regeneration project management, activity on committees and boards, education projects on housing estates and in local schools, regeneration initiatives and public art commissions.
[v] See for example, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment (Paris: Gallimard, 1977).
[vi] See for example, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press: 2005).
[vii] See for example, Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A pragmatic primer for realistic radicals (New York: Vintage, 1989).
[viii] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2007).
[ix] See for example, Kuan-Hsing and David Morely (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996); Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: geography’s visual culture, (London: Routledge, 2000); Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.), Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 1999).
[x] A project that posited the museum as a site of learning. A.C.A.D.E.M.Y: Learning from the Museum, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (16 September – 26 November 2006).
[xi] Irit Rogoff, ‘Turning’, e-flux Journal #0, www.e-flux.com/journal/view/18 (accessed 18/08/09).
[xii] The informal salon discussions culminated in post-salon essays, some of which are produced in this publication. The salons were kindly hosted by art and architecture collective, public works. The generosity and support in sharing their studio enabled us to hold the salons outside institutions and bring in new audiences.
[xiii] We aim to launch the online Library and Archive in the next two years. It will make available the polarity, scale and heterogeneity of work being produced across the globe ‘on cities’. The search engine will produce material from different disciplines and different voices.
[xiv] The inaugural festival was held in Dalston, East London, from 24-26 October 2008. Over 40 events including discussions, workshops, exhibitions, film screenings and a walk were held across 12 venues.
[xv] Jaffer Kolb, ‘Open Gate Policy’, Architectural Journal, 28 June 2008.