In ‘We have never been urban’, guest editor Sukriti Issar takes us back to the academic world in which in 2015 in the second decade of this somewhat unorthodox journal we published a major statemen...

The LA River. Photo: Andrea Gibbons.‘Iu0027m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan … Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up. Weu0027re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s and greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.’(Stephen Bannon, quoted in Blake (2016))‘Trump … talks a lot about walls … It’s an enclave mentality, a circling-the-wagons mentality that is going to continue to pillage and gather all the resources possible while there are still resources to gather – because I think they are all afraid of global warming even as they deny it with their last breath – and deny the humanity of everyone outside those gates. It is a familiar mentality. We’re seeing it all play out again in the military actions against Native American struggles for water at Standing Rock – they are fighting for all of us and the land itself and yet the government has brought in tanks.’(Andre...

‘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.’Footnote1 (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’.

“ … [F]uture urban worlds as gritty and half-decayed places ridden by extreme time-space compression, population explosions, environmental exhaustion and terrifying advances in technology (virtual realms, cyborg beings, hyper-surveillance and the like)Footnote1This ‘gritty’ and disturbing characterisation of future urban worlds is one that Stephen Graham puts forward at one point in the most recent of his wide-ranging studies of urban and technological futures, this one on the vertical dimension of cities.Footnote2 How else can we characterise ‘urban worlds’? Might we need to make use of speculative, utopian and fictional perspectives?If some of the characterisations, or perhaps just some of the characteristics, are deeply and increasingly disturbing, how might we set about reforming or transforming that/those world/s? Are speculative, utopian and fictional visions largely irrelevant, dangerous or obsolete---or almost or just beyond our reach on or at the edge? What then?We draw in this issueFootnote3 on descriptions and analyses, touching unevenly on these topics, on aspects of London, Europe, Jerusalem and Palestine, North America, Shanghai and the Gulf. We include a rural/ ‘developing’ area of Ecuador seen from a cosmic view of the planet as our ‘worlds’ begin to enter and sometimes resist, the ultimate in apocalyptic global futures, ‘black hole capitalism’.We present this critical editorial survey through examining four sets of scenes using a mixed spatial and cultural/economic classification: first, ‘At the Centre?’ second, ‘Alpha, Aliph. Aleph: Scenes from the South-East'; and the third, ‘On the Edge?’ concluding with ‘Utopian Reciprocities: From the Edge to the Centre (and back)’.

‘On November 8, the most powerful country in world history, which will set its stamp on what comes next, had an election. The outcome placed total control of the government -- executive, Congress, the Supreme Court -- in the hands of the Republican Party, which has become the most dangerous organization in world history.’ ‘Apart from the last phrase, all of this is uncontroversial. The last phrase may seem outlandish, even outrageous. But is it? The facts suggest otherwise. The Party is dedicated to racing as rapidly as possible to destruction of organized human life. There is no historical precedent for such a stand’ (Noam Chomsky, Monday, 14 November 2016)1 ‘[W]e need to think about those two things together—the rural and the urban— and we need to think about the ways in which people do this extraordinary job,. whether in the countryside or in the vast informal areas of cities, of making a living, of sustaining themselves, of getting by to an extraordinary extent.’ (Timothy Mitchell)2 ‘Donald Trump just...

‘[B]uffeted by economic catastrophe, vastly reconfigured by a sporting jamboree of militarised corporate banality, jostling with social unrest, still reeling from riots. Apocalypse is less a cliche than a truism. This place is pre-something.’This place could be Rio, was/is Athens/Greece, the Balkans and beyond, now Istanbul, perhaps could come to be true of Singapore? This could be, to take an apocalyptic view, so many places in the world. But surely not London?Economic catastrophe? No, not as yet, anyhow. A militarised, corporate and banal sporting jamboree that has reconfigured the place? Some such claims have been made about the Olympised fate of London and other similarly endowed and beset cities. Some truths here, then? Jostling with social unrest? A not too uncommon phenomenon, world-wide. Still reeling from riots? Apocalypse? Surely not?Can it be, taking the lack of precision of the term ‘pre-something’ as an invitation, rather than a windy nothing, in fact a challenge, to look for and into, critically nevertheless, unfamiliar phenomena, so as to defamiliarise such places/situations in London, and other such places, we shall discover signs of apocalypse as a truism rather than a cliché? But in different proportions, ambiences and totalities, in some cases perhaps with, signs of becomings, of ‘pre-something’, even of hope as well as disaster.The provocation, the invitation to observe, imagine, rethink, is there in the agoras as much as academe, in the streets and homes (where still, permitted) as much as their so often blocked dialogue. Is it in the antagonisms and occasionally unblocked openings between agora and academe, or in the labours of transdisciplinary knowledge or, of what Andy Merrifield calls amateurism, that we will find glimmerings of a de-scientised paradigm for science, for knowledge of the contradictory, shifting realities unearthed and emplaced in the local and global fantasies and realities of ‘the twenty-first century’.On this occasion we turn, then, to three places/situations, always with activists and activisms in mind, to ‘Singaporean “spaces of hope”’, to refugees and ‘Europe’s Last Frontier’, and back/forwards to London’s housing crisis itself.

Editorial: Trumped? Some groundingsAll authorsBob Catterallhttps://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2016.1261554Published online:21 December 2016Display full size‘On November 8, the most powerful country in world history, which will set its stamp on what comes next, had an election. The outcome placed total control of the government -- executive, Congress, the Supreme Court -- in the hands of the Republican Party, which has become the most dangerous organization in world history.’ ‘Apart from the last phrase, all of this is uncontroversial. The last phrase may seem outlandish, even outrageous. But is it? The facts suggest otherwise. The Party is dedicated to racing as rapidly as possible to destruction of organized human life. There is no historical precedent for such a stand’ (Noam Chomsky, Monday, 14 November 2016)Footnote1 ‘[W]e need to think about those two things together—the rural and the urban— and we need to think about the ways in which people do this extraordinary job,. whether in the countryside or in the vast informal areas of cities, of making a living, of sustaining themselves, of getting by to an extraordinary extent.’ (Timothy Mitchell)Footnote2 ‘Donald Trump just spoke in New York City, giving what was—aside from his customary ad libs and an extended section, resembling a wedding speech, that involved thanking and complimenting supporters such as Chris Christie, Ben Carson, and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus—a fairly standard president-elect address about unity.’ (Trump: “It Is Time for Us to Come Together as One United People”, Ben Mathis-Lilley, The Slatest, 9 November 2016)What, where, when are we to define and ground some commitments and actions that are central to humanity’s future (and to that of life on the planet)? Trump, in his ‘victory’ speech after the November election, saw some commitments and action emerging in a ‘Time for Us to Come Together’ in unity. Professor Mitchell, more than a year earlier, saw the need for us ‘to think two things together – the rural and the urban’ and about the ways in which ‘people do this extraordinary job, whether in the countryside or in the vast informal areas of cities, of making a living…’. Chomsky saw the fate of humanity as now ‘in the hands of the Republican Party, which has become the most dangerous organization in world history’.There are, of course, other views, including some recently established academic ones, with a take on what is going on across the planet. What hope do they hold? Not much, it would seem, if one were to judge by the writings of ‘planetary urbanist’ orthodoxies for whom Mitchell’s two ‘things’ seem hardly to exist. What they seem to see are two non-entities: in the form of a non-city condition, one without an outside. Those that might have been effectively opposed to the victors seem, then, to have cut the ground from under their (and our?) feet.Timothy Mitchell, Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University, thinks differently. Perhaps such a difference is in part a result of the geo-cultural spread of his ‘subject areas’? But is it also a result of his ‘thinking against the concept’ of these two things and bringing them together, across geo-cultural spaces, and grounding them?Footnote3 Not only has he been thinking but he has come to what is at least an interim stand.A situation of extraordinary continuing turmoil can be seen as characteristic of the now concluded but hardly politically and socially concluded US Election and, almost as evident, as still there behind the apparent new normality of the fundamentally troubled Europe of Brexit and of ‘Invasive’ refugees. Or rather still seen as marginal in terms of diagnosis and appropriate action?Our approach in recent work is moving towards considering these two events (taking the Brexit-refugee interaction as also one set of events – see Dimitris DalakoglouFootnote4) as just one. What happens when, as in a series of recent editorials, one applies an apparently only tangential subject of investigation to a mainly inadvertent, unintended collection of articles? Can such an experimental approach contribute, for example, to the development of a political/ideological/groundedFootnote5 dimension, actual and potential, necessary for deep-seated transitionFootnote6 rather than tokenistic or regime ‘change’?What time, what places, what situations are to be taken as a high priority, as ‘central’ to, but in need of grounding, such investigations, and interventions? Where, what, how (who/whom), when, why is ‘the centre’ or, with a more diverse and (necessarily) evaluative approach, are ‘the key centres’ to be comprehended so as to contribute to our understanding and effective action? Are they essentially and increasingly ‘urban’ –that non-city condition without an outside - as some suppose? How, alternatively, it might be asked, if citynessFootnote7 (or some kind of thought-together rurality and urbanity) is still a legitimate and realisable ambition and condition, do people do ‘this extraordinary job’ of making a living, sustaining themselves, getting by ‘to an extraordinary extent’? To expand and refine these questions, what are the meanings (see the titles of the two US papers listed under ‘close-ups’ below) involved in ‘getting by’ and, extending further, in getting on?These particular emphases inform what might be termed a philosophical and material reading of a wide range of situations, geographic and historical. As the interview in the paper makes clear this is in one sense a think-piece. However, Mitchell’s readings here are based particularly on readings of ‘Middle-Eastern’ and other experience - as his academic title at Columbia University suggests - and he ranges far beyond them. He and authors Abourahme and Jabary-Salamanca are moving ‘against the concepts’ and towards what one might call some kind of sensuous empiricism.In our ordering of the papers assembled here and the supplementary material included, we refer to five themes and areas of investigations: Garbage City to SkyscrapersTrump Triumphantes?Close-Ups (Norway, Ireland and Spain; New York and Oakland, USA)Vanities and IconiCities. New York and London)Garbage and Urbanity/Rurality: Marx Revisited

'[The] globalizing working class is now put into dialogue with what the science historian George Dyson has called the 'universe of self-replicating code,' in an intensifying global meritocracy. That's the playful, retail side of "Go Viral or Die Trying" -- but the harsh, wholesale warehouse side of it is a globalized precariat, downgraded by intensifying, accelerating neoliberalization and put into competition with robotics and the widespread elimination of jobs for human beings, struggling to find an audience, to 'go viral' and have a chance at … something.'Footnote1Is the somewhat sombre figure gazing inwards-outwards from a keyboard in an advertisement placed somewhere along the Delhi-Jaipur Expressway, also to be placed, as authors and scholars are increasingly, within 'a globalized precariat, … struggling to find an audience, to 'go viral' and have a chance at … something'? Is that something a matter of (apparently?) gaining a place within the 'intensifying global meritocracy'? But what is that? Where is that? Is this the nexus between 'the city' and literacy at which we have arrived, the 'cognitive capitalism' in which literacy 'reconstituted through partially automated constellations of quantification and commodification' serves, and is served by, planetary urbanisation? Is this the somewhere where something is found? Is this our scene?These questions arise here through a reading of Elvin Wyly's 'Where is an author?', subsequent discussion with him of this particular image and slogan, 'Go viral or die trying', followed up through the context(s) presented in this issue, beyond these to the historic associations of the slogan, and, beyond that, to 'the human condition' at this point in urban and planetary history. Notes1 Email from Elvin Wyly, 6 January, 2015.2 Particularly resonant photographs, are selected for most issues, often with invited comments from the photographer/author such as this one, that more than merely illustrating a point also open up the image and implicit meanings to further possibilities.3 Wyly, ibid.4 Ibid.5 Ibid.6 Mason, p. 32.

‘Urban residents are surrounded by discrepant infrastructural capacities … Being surrounded from all sides, and with such thick textures of surveillance and calculation, promises both the possibility of being really ‘pinned down’ and disappearing altogether.’ (AbdouMaliq Simone)11 AbdouMaliq Simone (this issue).We are surrounded, negatively, by infrastructural capacities or, positively, extended by them? Or perhaps both, surrounded and extended? If so, in what proportions? And is it/was it ultimately a choice, or series of choices, ones that can still be made, or not?And what are these externalities, contexts? Are they media/technologies or perhaps the one-time project of ‘the city’ now taking on the (increasingly alien?) form of urbanisation?Or, beyond that, is there the now marginalised realm of the country/nature? And, ‘space’? Are those realms, best characterised perhaps as ‘nature’, outside or inside us?If inside/outside, are we, somewhat paradoxically, surrounded by ourselves? Or by aspects of ourselves, whose inner/outer separation and possible distortion we need to recognise and address if we are to avoid ‘the promises [of] both the possibility of being really ‘pinned down’ and disappearing altogether’? Or … * * * *Such questions and some answers are suggested by our special feature in this issue on infrastructures, from which AbdouMaliq Simone's words are taken, by papers from three other substantial projects, one on urbanisation by Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, with a reply from Richard Walker, a second on Africa by David Simon, and a third on technologised and politicised realms by Stephen Graham, now looking into ‘urban air’.Introducing one of a series of particular temporal dimensions as explored in this journal, Melissa Wilson draws in part on a reading22 Melissa Wilson (2015), “City's Holistic and Cumulative Project (1996–2016): (2) Towards Millennium?” City 19 (4): forthcoming. doi: 10.1080/13604813.2015.1034590 of a particular period, looking into the early pages of City, an early stage of its project, as elites and ‘multitudes’, edged towards 2000, towards and away from ‘millennium.’Further investigations are undertaken in papers on the nature of smart cities as contexts, on a possible basis for social transformation in Poland, and on London's class structure and struggles. Only the third, Mark Davidson and Elvin Wyly's paper following, as does Chris Hamnett, our occasional series on London's class structure, is touched on here.We conclude with a return to Simone's thoughts on infrastructure's more than marginal role in social organisation and to a summing up and a polemical conclusion.

‘How does a global financial crisis permeate the spaces of the everyday in a city?’ This seems a precise question. But it is one that nevertheless needs analytical exploration in time and space as well as redefinitions both of the crisis and of land, labour and the city. The question is posed by the research group ‘crisis-scape’ in a brief statement about their film, ‘Future Suspended: from the Olympic spectacle to the dawn of the authoritarian-financial spectacle’. That characterisation is a touching-off point for explorations (in space and time) and for examination of aspects of the film and associated research. They are set out here on the basis of a presentation at their Athens Conference, of their film2, one ‘classic’ film, ‘Ulysses’ Gaze’ by Theo Angelopoulos, and of related work in this journal, as contributions to the development of an appropriate praxis, through some preliminary answers to the question: What is to be done?

'First, the working classes and bohemians were priced out … That was gentrification.Now comes plutocratisation: the middle classes and small companies are falling victim to class cleansing. Global cities are becoming patrician ghettos … Global cities are turning into vast gated communities where the one per cent reproduces.'11 David Manley and Ron Johnston were drawing on an article in the Financial Times (15–16 June 2013) in which the anthropologist and journalist Simon Kuper, concentrating on Paris but equating changes there with London, New York and Tokyo, quotes this tripartite characterisation from Saskia Sassen (not referenced).Seen as a series of accumulating stages, this characterisation–gentrification followed by plutocratisation followed by a third stage in which patrician ghettos are moving towards domination – is, to say the least, alarming. Concluding their careful analysis in this issue of London's changing class structure and residential mosaic, David Manley and Ron Johnston turn to the tripartite characterisation by Saskia Sassen of recent urban developments(s). The source in which they came across this formula was an article by the anthropologist and journalist Simon Kuper, in which concentrating on Paris he equates changes there with London, New York and Tokyo22 The application of this set of changes can be extended and is further intensified by taking up, as we did in our previous issue, Qin Shao's (2013 Shao, Q. 2013. Shanghai Gone: Domicide and Defiance in a Chinese Megacity. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. [Google Scholar]) work on Shanghai and Hyun Shin's (2014 Shin, H. B. 2014. "Contesting Speculative Urbanisation and Strategising Discontents." City 18 (4–5): 509–516. doi: 10.1080/13604813.2014.939471[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) related account of aspects of 'development' in China and elsewhere in which they deploy the notion of domicide..This characterisation and its implications are considered here on the basis of the studies assembled. Does the tripartite model stand up in this light? Or could it be that the various situations and analyses assembled point to a condition that is much more alarming? Whatever the intensity of this condition, is or are there a way or ways out? What do different analytic approaches have to contribute to understanding the situations and their possibilities? Are there any signs of emergence?That the condition is much more than alarming, in fact terminal, is argued in Adrian Atkinson's paper in which he looks at urbanisation as 'a brief episode in history', as it speeds into decline and self-destruction. Moving on to one of our three special features, 'Cities in the Arabian Peninsula', and taking up a paper on environmental costs of coastal urbanisation in the Arabian Gulf, one can see the biological dimension of this possibly terminal condition.The signs of an emerging alternative to decline and eventual collapse are discerned and documented in Atkinson's article and in the introductions to and papers in the other two special features. In both 'Assembling Istanbul' and 'Labour Resistance across Global Spaces', new directions are identified in, for example, the paper that each includes on Romani struggles, one in Istanbul and the other in Italy. Returning to London, a further paper from the Labour Resistance feature, on 'Precarious Workers', there are in the struggles of the cleaners signs of an alternative to Sassen's charted course of mounting progression/regression for urbanisation.

The present dominant paradigm in much writing on ‘planetary urbanisation’ with its exclusive emphasis on ‘ the urban’ and consequent neglect/denial of ‘the rural’, thereby of the planet itself, and its minimal deployment of the concept of culture and of the humanities, reflects the somewhat ramshackle condition of urban studies and socio-spatial sciences with their uncritical and undertheorised notion of interdisciplinarity (sometimes incorrectly labelled recently as transdisciplinarity). Where and what is the planet itself in much of the work on ‘planetary urbanisation’? Where featured at all it is reduced to dehumanised and apparently nonsentient (mainly male) actants. It cannot do justice to the nature of life on the planet and therefore cannot provide an adequate account or critique of planetary urbanisation. It is, in fact, in danger of becoming an accomplice in that imperial(ist) project. An alternative paradigm, outlined here, is one in which the biosocial and gendered nature of culture, including its relationship to agriculture and ‘the rural’, is central to its explorations of the full geo-spatial field and their implications for action. To achieve justice with and for sentient beings and the planet, that misrepresented biosocial entity has, first, to be earthed, materialised, gendered, and cultured. (subsequent episodes reconsider the city in this neglected context and then science as partly normative notions). This series, developing a multidimensional, transdisciplinary(rather than interdisciplinary) approach, providing some necessary infilling and new/old orientations to the now outmoded paradigm, sets out a claim for this new paradigm for the biospatial sciences and the humanities. It seeks, in this episode drawing particularly on Marx's studies of the Russian commune and beyond (in space and time), Chernyshevski's work, particularly his novel What Is To Be Done?, and on earlier work in the series, to contribute to the identification of a partly agrarian and fully ‘encultured’ path to the reclamation of the now acutely over-urbanised planet.