With, against and beyond Lefebvre: Planetary urbanization and epistemic plurality

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss a number of recent efforts to critique, dismantle and problematize the categorical ontologies of ‘the urban’ and articulate an overarching epistemological framework for urban theory. Our intervention in these debates, which to date have focused primarily on Henri Lefebvre’s hypothesis regarding ‘planetary urbanization’, highlights the absence of an engagement with the long legacy within feminist urban scholarship of confronting and dismantling the categories of the ‘urban’ and ‘rural’. We argue that attending to this legacy foregrounds two conceptual and intellectual challenges that Lefebvre sets for us in his writings on the urban phenomenon. The first relates to Lefebvre’s arguments about the central role that a focus on difference and everyday life must play in understanding late capitalist urbanization and the urban condition. The second relates to Lefebvre’s articulation of the simultaneous problem and imperative of epistemological plurality within urban theory, including the role he ascribed to intellectual cooperation on the study of the urban phenomenon. We conclude by offering some thoughts on the importance Lefebvre attached to residual forms of difference – both lived and epistemological – in urban research and action, and by extension, probe some of the limits of Lefebvrian frameworks for understanding the contemporary urban condition.

Fragment urbanism: Politics at the margins of the city

“…And finally third, as the critique from a set of distinct positions has surely taught us -including, for instance, postcolonial, feminist, and queer debates -the ways in which the urban, city, or urbanization are conceived and take place demand at the very least some modesty, provisionally and openness to different perspectives and processes across different parts of the world (eg Buckley and Strauss, 2016;McKittrick, 2006;Morland and Willcox, 2005;Robinson, 2015;Roy, 2015b). Understanding urbanism demands plural, even contradictory positions, including multiple conceptions of the urban and the city.…”

Climate riskscapes in world port cities: situating urban‐cosmopolitan risk communities via Ulrich Beck's comparative tactics

“…By implication, urban scholars must navigate a landscape of methodological positions configured rather differently from what Beck had in mind, and one in which methodological nationalism is much less of a dominant presence (although it certainly exists and exerts itself in urban studies). Instead, as recent debates on 'planetary urbanization' (Brenner 2018;Buckley and Strauss 2016) have tended to highlight, the combination of 'methodological globalism' (Nederveen Pieterse 2013) and 'methodological city-ism' (Angelo and Wachsmuth 2015) plays a much more prominent role in urban studies. None of these methodological positions, however, will quite help articulate Beck's contribution to the conversation.…”

Untitled

“…Так или иначе, постгород рассматривается нами как ранее никогда не существовавшая пространственно-демографическая система, обладающая принципиально новыми онтологическими и феноменологическими признаками. Эта система (или «ризома») не предполагает деления на город и сельскую местность, однако она не предполагает и экстенсивное распространение тотальной планетарной урбанизации (что является достаточно популярной версией урбанизма в целом) (Brenner, Schmid, 2012Ruddick, 2015;Buckley, Strauss, 2016;Goonewardena, 2018). Сопространственности всякого конкретного места расселения в контексте продолжающихся технологических революций и постномадизма (Замятин, 2018) способствуют фрагментарности, очевидной неполноте любой территориальнопланировочной или управленческой политики.…”