Editorial: ‘Planetary’ urbanisation: insecure foundations, the commodification of knowledge, and paradigm shift

Abstract

‘We've received an update this morning to say that Chennai is still being seriously affected by flooding due to further torrential rain. This has resulted in widespread disruption, there is no power, mobile communication is very badly affected with systems down and people unable to charge their phones and, internet connectivity is also very badly affected. Staff have not been able to come to the office, and given the conditions we have asked them not to try, when we have been able to contact them at all.’1 (Internal memorandum, 3.12.15) That was the situation as reported that morning in Chennai, India, in, December 2015 as the just completed issue of CITY, 19.6, awaited publication. In one sense there had been a breakdown in communications under adverse weather conditions – that was all. But in another sense, looking at what was to be and eventually was transmitted, the breakdown can also be regarded as more than that, as, on the one hand, an example of the fragility of our technological condition, an intricate array of communication systems and work patterns, at a time of increasing globalisation and acute climatic change, but also, on the other, of the fragility of our knowledge and understanding of our condition, and underlying this, despite easy talk (how easy will be shown later) about contestation, of reform versus revolution (now safely evaded through resilience?), the creation/destruction opposition (now safely amalgamated?), of ‘urban’ versus the rural and ‘the city’, of commodities and commodification, paradigms, and epistemologies … These are insecure foundations. There was and is a failure, almost a will not to, to engage with the fundamentals (including communication processes) of our disciplines and, indeed of the planet itself (that is when mainstream urbanists can admit to the possibility of its existence, of such a fluid association of living entities, a para-structure rather than an infrastructure). The title of that issue (19.6, see Figure 1) of the journal -momentarily lodged in Chennai through the apparent agency of a cyclone, rain, water, floods, deaths (nearing twice as many as those rightly mourned in Paris – the actual title extracted from one of the papers, ‘Where is the world at and where is it headed?’) signalled a further episode in the long-term commitment, over two decades, of this journal to grappling with such problems. The cover photo shows ‘a living ad’, a man struggling against the wind and rain, trying to stay on his feet and to hold on to his billboard. The film scene is a re-enactment of what the director, Tsai Ming-liang, had first seen ten years previously in Taipei, and then seen it ‘mushroom into an industry’ of homeless men advertising real estate. ‘It was’, he said, ‘as if their time had become worthless.’ It is the development of many such scenes coupled with the rising wealth and corruption of the estate industry and its clients that led former architect turned planning consultant and activist, Adrian Atkinson, after a generation of work in Vietnam and elsewhere to raise the question ‘Where is the world at and where is it heading?’ Where is the world heading? What is happening? Insofar as the theoretical and empirical basis of understanding such happenings is concerned there are signs of an absolutely crucial revival and development in red-green theory, a necessary part of a fundamental paradigm shift beyond (but not excluding) critical urban theory’s deliberate concentration on the social as distinct from the ‘natural’ environment. The bridging work here was particularly the still largely aborted discovery of late Marx (‘Russian Marx’ but not only that) by Teodor Shanin in the 1980s, and again by John Bellamy Foster at the turn of the century still, in a sense, struggling against the ‘critical’ zeitgeist. There are also signs of the potential in taking up the late work of Herbert Marcuse (to be considered in CITY later this year) as part of an equally crucial deepening understanding of culture/nature in Doreen Massey’s work and in some of the work associated with the Badiou-Zizek new communist/commonist movement (see section 4 below) and in Kate Shaw’s recent CITY roll/role-call (and also recent work by Hyun Bang Shin, Marcelo Lopes de Souza, Elvin Wyly, Mark Davidson and Sharon Meagher). The analytical moves here, drawing in part on readings of East Asian experience and on critical urban and ‘green’ theory, towards answering the posed questions, had been preceded only a week and a half earlier by ‘the Paris attacks’, and (traced in earlier issues) only weeks earlier by the journeys of Syrian and other refugees across Europe, ‘To “the city of refuge”’ (19.5, see Figure 2), and earlier, in the summer, by the stilling and reversal of the great Greek revolt, with its focus (perhaps an excessive focus) on Syriza, ‘We are here’ (19.4, see Figure 3), by ‘the troika’.