Seeing Like a City

Seeing Like a City Seeing Like a City Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift Drawings by Katarina Nitsch polity Copyright © Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift 2017 All images copyright © Katarina Nitsch 2017 The right of Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2017 by Polity Press Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6425-5 (hardback) ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6426-2 (paperback) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Amin, Ash, author. | Thrift, N. J., author. Title: Seeing like a city / Ash Amin, Nigel Thrift. Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016017516 (print) | LCCN 2016029541 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745664255 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 0745664253 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780745664262 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 0745664261 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781509515615 (mobi) | ISBN 9781509515622 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Cities and towns. | Sociology, Urban. | Human geography. Classification: LCC HT119 .A49 2016 (print) | LCC HT119 (ebook) | DDC 307.76–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017516 Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Sabon by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St. Ives PLC The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com Contents Acknowledgements vii Prologue 1 1 Looking through the City 9 2 Shifting the Beginning: The Anthropocene 33 3 How Cities Think 67 4 The Matter of Economy 99 5 Frames of Poverty 125 Epilogue 159 Notes 168 References 171 Index 190 Acknowledgements We are very grateful to Katarina Nitsch for agreeing to illustrate this book. Katarina, who draws human and nonhuman relations in the city, chose ideas in the text she was taken by. We left the choice of ideas and their exact locations to her, as we wanted to add an independent, visual, dimension to the book. We are delighted with the drawings. We also thank the three anonymous referees for their insightful comments on an earlier draft. Thank you too to John Wiley & Sons, Inc. for allowing us to republish parts of the article ‘Space’, which appears in The Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment and Technology. (Excerpts reprinted with full permission.) Finally, we are indebted to Jan Parsons for painstakingly assembling the book from disparate chapters and bibliographies. The book’s title Seeing Like a City has been used before, by Mariana Valverde, Saskia Sassen and Warren Magnussen. We borrow it here to encapsulate the worlding done by cities and the challenge to thought and practice posed by the ontology of spatial ‘throwntogetherness’, Doreen Massey’s captivating term for urban process. Doreen, a friend and inspiration, tragically passed away as we were penning the last lines of the book. Corner Prologue I want you to help me to find out what happened to us. Ballantyne, 2013, p. 15 It takes satellite images and maps of flows to convey a sense of the world significance of cities. They light up and map out the densities of settlement, the traffic of inter-urban flow, and the dependencies of hinterlands near and far on cities. Meanwhile, less graphic scholarship reveals that a small number of urban titans now drive world economic prosperity and creativity, that their elites possess formidable national and transnational power, that states and militias increasingly target cities for geopolitical advantage, that human behaviour is shaped in the habits of metropolitan dwelling, and that the history of the Anthropocene is predominantly the history of urbanization. This research and scholarship presents cities as forcing houses: centres of creativity, competitive advantage and human fulfilment (Glaeser, 2011), as sites of democracy or revolution rekindled (Harvey, 2012; Merrifield, 2013; Douzinas, 2013), and as ‘worldling’ sites that set a standard (Roy, 2014). It finds the urban everywhere, the tentacles of cities sustaining a new era of ‘planetary urbanization’ (Brenner, 2014) 2 Prologue and inter-urban networks and alliances driving global geopolitics and political economy (Taylor, 2013). This book locates itself in this same genre of writing. But it is also a reconsideration to compensate for a tendency in this genre to erase the territorial in its keenness to emphasize urban globality, or to reduce the new urban centrality to foundational forces such as capital accumulation (Brenner, 2014; Brenner and Schmid, 2015), or the spatial agglomeration of firms, skills and institutions (Storper, 2013; Scott and Storper, 2015; Storper and Scott, 2016). Instead, as a counterweight, the book looks to the agency of another kind of urban assemblage – the effects of things massed together that furnish the world through closely jaxtaposed or interwoven concentrations of humans, technologies and infrastructures providing much of the push. Our argument is that more than just spatial concentration is involved. It is the coming together of overlapping sociotechnical systems that gives cities their world-making power. Our aim is to get to the ‘citiness’ of cities; admittedly, a concept as elusive as the ‘humanness’ of humans, with many possible configurations and arrangements. Cities are spatial radiations that gather worlds of atoms, atmospheres, symbols, bodies, buildings, plants, animals, technologies, infrastructures, and institutions, each with its own mixes, moorings and motilities, each with its own means of trading living, and dying. What form of distillation is possible without violating the character of cities as ‘pluriverses’, to borrow William James’s (1977) phrase? It certainly cannot be one that reduces these pluriverses to systemic imperatives or spatial essences. Instead, the distillation has to get close to the combinational machinery itself, for example, the summative force of many entities, networks and sociotechnical networks intersecting and colliding with each other (Farias and Bender, 2011; McFarlane, 2011; Lancione 2014; Batty, 2013; Sennett, 2013). This is the kind of synthesis we attempt in this book, focusing in particular on the agency of sociotechnical systems. Building on our earlier book (Amin and Prologue 3 Thrift, 2002), we see the city as a machine whose surge comes from the liveliness of various bodies, materials, symbols, and intelligences held in relation within specific networks of calculation and allocation, undergirded by diverse regimes and rituals of organization and operation. We distil ‘citiness’ down to the combined vitality and political economy of urban sociotechnical systems, which we believe define the modern city. Together, the arrangements of water, electricity, logistics, communication, circulation and the like, instantiate and sustain life within and beyond cities in all sorts of ways: allocating resource and reward, enabling collective action, shaping social dispositions and affects, marking time, space and map, maintaining order and discipline, sustaining transactions, moulding the environmental footprint. These arrangements are more than a mere ‘infrastructural’ background, the silent stage on which other powers perform. The mangle of sociotechnical systems in a city is formative in every respect, regardless of its state of sophistication. This, at least, is our thesis. The project we want to begin in this book is to think again about urban vitality, but this time by understanding both its machinic qualities and the way in which it constantly creates new publics, publics that are new forms of here and there. So, for example, in addressing why and how some cities can be thought of as growth engines, we will decentre familiar accounts that privilege the presence of particular assets such as the concentration of skills and intelligence, firms and institutions, or untraded interdependencies, by focusing on supply infrastructures – the urban machinery that keeps stocks up and moving, capabilities replenished, and services flowing (Chapter 4). Similarly, we will explain the experience and mediation of mass poverty, ever more an urban phenomenon, as a problem of access to the means of survival, regulated by the terms of supply of basic public goods and by the very infrastructures of thought currently in place framing world urban poverty (Chapter 5). In turn, to explain urban social dispositions and affects, we will examine the formative power of hybrids of urban aesthetic, technological 4 Prologue intelligence and human dwelling, reworking the meaning of human being (Chapter 3). Finally, we will argue that the energy budgets of city sociotechnical systems and the other metabolisms they sustain lie at the heart of the urban ecological footprint, and the stresses of the Anthropocene in general (Chapter 2). The sociotechnical systems we wish to consider include first, the metabolic systems that service the city in ways without which collective life would be impossible – water, energy, sanitation, food and so on, each of which forms its own system of provisioning. Second, we want to consider the ways in which the city produces a sense of direction, both as a means of finding a way around an increasingly complex spatial order, and in the way that the city literally directs its inhabitants’ lives, allowing them access to, and egress from, some spaces, while simultaneously banning them from others. Third, we want to show how human identities and affects in the city are both coproduced and pumped around, with much of the work done by an urban landscape that has become increasingly sentient. Finally, we want to show how all of this infrastructural activity produces even larger effects. Over time, it mixes all manner of beings together in a way that can genuinely be regarded as evolutionary. The increasing evidence for an Anthropocene bears out the way in which humanity has stamped its footprints on the planet by constructing urban forms that act as carriers for life. Most books on the city, except those that involve ethnography, tend to start from the outside in; that is, they want to see the city as a whole and map aspects of it, or they want to see the city as an expression of a larger force. In contrast, we want to see the city from the inside out, not because we are looking for a false sense of intimacy but because cities work from the ground up. No matter how open and stretched the city may be, the combination of elements in each city varies in ways that are themselves constitutive, with the many elements of ‘infrastructure’, without which a city does not exist, becoming not just Prologue 5 incidental, but central to how and what cities are: a rough analogy might be that infrastructure is now the urban equivalent of the machinery of breathing. The ‘machinic’ quality of infrastructure, we wish to argue, drags in all manner of actors, only some of whom are what we might conventionally call human. Without an understanding of this ground-level hum, the city is shorn of a large part of its existence, and the central part of how it is able to reproduce itself as a place. Without this knowledge, we cannot understand the importance that cities have gained in our times, an importance that can only grow as infrastructure becomes ever more pervasive. Acquiring this knowledge requires making sense of the collectives formed and maintained by sociotechnical networks. It involves following these networks, rather than forcing the variegations at ground level into the received categories of theory or discipline. Generalizations have to derive from the reconstruction of the visible and hidden machinery of urban metabolism and organization, while accepting that they can only be provisional, given that the sociotechnical networks are themselves constantly reworked by their in-built technical and human intelligences. Thinking about the city in this aggregative and experimental way requires intellectual honesty, as we argue in Chapter 1, so that plural methods, intelligences and sensibilities can all be indexed, with the sciences and arts, and designated and lay experts, allowed equal opportunity to narrate the facts and stories of the sociotechnical city. Reconstructing the city ground-up requires making visible its hidden-in-plain-sight infrastructures and disclosing their force and performativity. This is an important political project. Why? First, because the mix of actors the infrastructure enables is itself an important part of human history, since it is through this mixing that different connections and possibilities become apparent, that different visibilities hove into view, and that different kinds of being can be invented. Second, because each of the tramlines of infrastructure contains its own 6 Prologue peculiar forms of cruelty as well as promise. We use the word cruelty knowingly, since we are talking here about machines that legislate who and what lives and who and what dies, and who and what lives in what form. Of course, the city has many infrastructural components, and we will touch on only some of them in this book. But we need to be clear that, in the final analysis, cities are systems for directing and for provisioning life in ways that produce immense combinatorial power and immense constraint. We are convinced that each of these infrastructures has its own pinch points, which themselves constitute political arenas. In other words, the understudied republic that is the infrastructure of the modern city can become the main focus of political action. This is our core argument. We are talking here about a politics of leverage, a politics of small interventions with large effects, a politics of locating pinch points, and a politics of urban life as a trickster assemblage of like and unlike. Matters of infrastructural tuning and adjustment turn out to be key, whatever the arena. We are talking about what we can make of the commons that we have built ourselves, but continue to reserve for just a few human and nonhuman elites (Heise 2008). In other words, we conclude in favour of an urban politics of fair access to infrastructure – and fair infrastructure – in this book. Other kinds of politics exist, of course, none of which we are devaluing. Instead, we attempt to set out a politics true to the machine that the city is, which is able to convert often quite small interventions into very large gains for the many, without necessarily touching on what some have come to regard as the only available levers of change, whether planning or political party or revolution. We believe that major shifts in life chance really can come from the proto-political stuff of infrastructure, when it is, however briefly, switched into being as a political force. The city is brimful of these moments of opportunity. Facet 1 Looking through the City We can begin by asking what and where the city is. If cities exist as physical entities, they do so as sprawling miasmas giving rise to all kinds of influence radiating around the world. It is ill conceived to think of them as simply territorial formations, though the instinct to do so remains prevalent. Then, whatever their geography, they remain extraordinarily complex entities – a mangle of machines, infrastructures, humans, nonhumans, institutions, networks, metabolisms, matter and nature – where the coming together is itself constitutive of urbanity and its radiated effects. So, if cities have become world-making, striding out across the world, defining the character of human settlement, giving shape to the transformed nature of the Anthropocene, and providing the main impetus behind political economy (as we argue in this and the next two chapters), how and why this is so is not self-evident. The tendency endures to count factors – the presence or absence of key attributes – rather than to focus on the nature of the combinatorial ecology and how it forces reconsideration of the staples of urban agency and analysis (as explored in this chapter), the dynamic and vulnerabilities of the unfolding ‘Anthropocene’ (Chapter 2), and the meaning of what it is to be sentient (Chapter 3). 10 Looking through the City How, then, to assess the character of the city and its generative powers, which we see as world-making, sociotechnical, and a challenge to a disciplinary heritage when urban analysis is confined to specialist sub-disciplines such as urban studies, town and country planning, and architecture or urban design? Or this heritage barely alters its precepts in light of the hybrid urban processes remaking economy, society, nature, politics and culture. If the world significance of cities is increasingly acknowledged in scholarship and policy practice, it has yet to lead to any rethinking of the fundamentals of core disciplines in the social sciences. Economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, and even geography – the most spatial of these disciplines – have yet to consider how an ontology formed by urban specificities might require new intra- and inter-disciplinary composites of thought and method. In this chapter we argue that understanding cities requires knowledge practices that are distributed and combinatorial, thus calling into question established disciplinary and professional legacies. The proposition that knowing the world might require knowing the city in this way has barely altered thinking in the mainstream social sciences. Business trip Looking through the City 11 Urban World Let us begin with an audit of the world significance of cities. First, only a small number of cities drive world economic growth (McKinsey Global Institute, 2012). According to the McKinsey Global Institute, by 2010, six hundred cities, accounting for no more than one fifth of the world’s population, were generating 60 per cent of global GDP (Dobbs et al., 2011). They were largely from the North, with 380 of its cities responsible for half of global output. McKinsey calculates that, by 2025, the same number of cities will generate the same volume of GDP, but a third of the constituents from the North will have dropped out, replaced by 136 cities from the emerging economies, primarily from China (100), as well as a dozen or more from India. The top one hundred cities are expected to account for 35 per cent of GDP growth, a group composed of ‘middleweight’ cities (rather than today’s ‘megacities’), many again from China and elsewhere in the South, propped up by the know-how and purchasing power of a sizeable new middle class. With the next four hundred cities expected to add only 6 per cent to growth, the world economy will depend on the state of six hundred cities: their quality of infrastructure and services, their ability to manage largely unplanned urban expansion and related problems of congestion, environmental stress and urban maintenance,1 and their capacity to sustain growth, meet demand and satisfy needs. In other words, the economics of world prosperity will pivot around the supply and distributional conditions that make cities competitive. Second, this economic might is shored up by other urban concentrations of power. The top-ranking cities, or, more accurately, their central business districts, are massive collections of knowledge, creativity and innovation, political and elite power, cultural and symbolic influence, and financial and infrastructural might. Together, they drive 12 Looking through the City national and international life. Though the exact measure of this power remains elusive (due to nation-biased statistical limitations and because much of it courses under the radar in informal deals, closed boardroom decisions and hidden transactions), rankings of the global influence of individual cities are beginning to circulate. One of these is the A. T. Kearney (2012) Global Cities Index, which measures a city’s engagement in business activity (e.g. corporate HQs, top service firms, value of capital markets), human capital formation, information exchange, cultural experience and political influence (e.g. presence of embassies, think-tanks, international organizations). The 2012 ranking, in descending order, lists New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Seoul, Brussels, Washington, Singapore, Sydney, Vienna and Beijing: familiar names fast being chased by many new ones from China and India, according to A. T. Kearney. Linked into common corporate, supply or transactional chains, and sharing elite interests (Khanna, 2011; Taylor, 2004), these cities exercise a network power that circumvents and displaces that exercised by traditional jurisdictions of state and polity, prompting Saskia Sassen (2012a: 5) to aver that ‘our geopolitical future . . . will be determined in good part through twenty or so strategic worldwide urban networks’. The state-centred discourses and tools of political science will need to change in order to grasp this nodal/ network power (Taylor, 2013). Third, these economic and political powers are neither mirrored equitably across the urban landscape, nor do they provide assurance of wellbeing within cities. In fact, they are part of a fabric of extreme inter-urban and intra-urban disparity. By 2050, 70 per cent of the world’s expected nine billion people will be living in urban areas, a relentless rise from today’s 50 per cent (UN-Habitat, 2008). Today there are over 450 cities with more than one million inhabitants, and they include twenty-one cities with between ten and 35 million people. The pace of growth is particularly marked in the developing world, whose cities – stretched