Examination revision note - #1 (on utopia) [re: question 1]
Leonie Sandercock (2002) Practicing Utopia:
Sustaining Cities, disP - The
Planning Review, 38:148, 4-9, DOI:
10.1080/02513625.2002.10556791.
"Cities
are neither organisms nor machines. They are flesh and stone intertwined. They
are “built thought.” They are the containers of dreams and desires, hopes and
fears. They are an assemblage of active historical agents making daily choices
of how to live well";
"I’ve argued that in working towards more
sustaining cities, we need some
new models of planning practice which expand
the language of planning beyond the realm of instrumental rationality and the
system world, and speak about (and develop the skills for) organizing hope,
negotiating fear, and mediating memory, as well as developing the habits of a
critical/analytical mind. This transformed language would reflect the emotional
breadth and depth of the lived experience of cities: cities of desire, cities
of memory, cities of play and celebration, cities of fear, cities of
struggle";
Frank Cunningham (2010) Triangulating utopia:
Benjamin, Lefebvre, Tafuri, City, 14:3, 268-277, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2010.482268.
"The positive side of utopian thinking, that
which prompted Henri Lefebvre to ask ‘Who [of progressive thinkers] is not a
utopian today?’ (1996, p. 151), is its rejection of fatalistic or, as in the
case of too many urban planners, politicians and architects, opportunistic
acceptance of a status quo. Proactively, utopian thinking is implicated in the
formulation of radical goals. As David Harvey puts it: ‘[W]ithout a vision of
utopia there is no way to define that port to which we might want to sail’
(2000, p. 189). Critical urban theorists such as Harvey and Peter Marcuse react
to this situation by the dual exercise of exposing ways that existing urban
realities
support oppressive
and exclusionary social structures and practices while at the same time
projecting alternative visions. One challenge for the critical theorist is to articulate visions while
avoiding the negative potentials of utopianism. A typical strategy for doing
this is expressed by Marcuse. General features of a desirable future are
negatively identified by reference to oppressive characteristics of the
present—justice instead of injustice, community spirit instead of profit seeking,
and so on—while more concrete prescriptions are ‘left to the democratic experience
of those in fact implementing the vision’ (Marcuse, 2009, p. 194)";
"The critical theorist thus cannot avoid
a measure of utopianism. But this raises the core challenge to all utopianisms
that the more radical their visions are, the more vulnerable they become to
dismissal as unrealistic. Classic utopians were not much bothered by this
problem, since their aim was just to describe radically different futures
leaving it to others to figure out whether or how to try attaining them. But
this stance is not acceptable to the critical theorist who wants to contribute
to actual urban change";
"A key concept in Lefebvre’s approach to
utopianism is ‘transduction’, or the intellectual construction of possible
objects. Like Tafuri, he sees utopian visions as ideologically infused, but
they can also serve in an ‘experimental’
way to prompt challenges to existing structures,
functions and forms, thus also challenging the ideological rigidity of
exclusively structuralist, functionalist or formalist thinking (Lefebvre, 1996,
pp. 151–155)";
Examination revision note - #2 (on future
city, with special reference to smart city) [re: question 1]
Malene
Freudendal-Pedersen 1, Sven Kesselring 2,* and Eriketti Servou. 2019.
"What is Smart for the Future City? Mobilities and Automation" Sustainability
2019, 11,
221; doi:10.3390/su11010221.
"In today’s cities and regions, multiple mobilities—social,
technological, geographic, cultural and digital—are at the core of new types of
socio-material and cultural relationships and shape people’s everyday lives and
businesses in many ways [1,2]. The rapidly moving technological developments in
transportation and communication have changed cities’ pulses, their pace, and
reach. The urban scale is thereby an interconnected element of the global
“network society” [3,4], with new forms of social, cultural, and economic life
emerging. This increase in the amount and speed of mobilities has strong
impacts on ecological conditions, and, so far, no comprehensive sustainable
solutions are in sight";
"The “smart cities” discourse is frequently connected to a
sort of “engineering logic” aiming for optimizing the social layout, the urban
infrastructure and networks, and (at least) parts of human interactions [26,27]. Often, “smart cities” are considered as coded spaces
facilitating self-learning socio-technical environments grounded in IT and
artificial intelligence, where software is applied to facilitate the efficient
use of resources, space, infrastructure and energy, and to provide
user-friendliness and sustainability [28]. Alternatively, they are seen as assemblages of technologies
aimed at increasing competitiveness, administrative efficiency, and social
inclusion [26,29–33]. These ideas of the smart city have been strongly criticized for
being an enforcement of the “technocentric planning paradigm” [22,34] where the planning of movements in cities focuses mainly on
traffic, with “seamless mobility” as an almost unchallenged principle for an
efficient organization of societies [35,36]. Against the
background of the growing debate on smart cities, it becomes even more
important to integrate the human scale and the social and cultural practice
systematically in scientific analysis, planning, business models, and
collaborative work on the future of urban living and working conditions";
"The debate around “smart cities” is still very dynamic and
open and it lacks clear definitions and sharp distinctions. Some of the
prominent concepts in the field are currently the digital, the virtual, the
networked, the connected, and even the cyber city [26,41–43]. Beginning in
the early 2000s, many of these debates coincided with the increasingly powerful
discursive framing of smart cities [26]. For some authors, the smart city discourse is concerned with
developing and deploying new technologies in cities for a range of sectoral
objectives [44–47]. Others see the smart city as
an assemblage of technologies aimed at increasing competitiveness,
administrative efficiency, and social inclusion";
"From the early 2000s onwards, the smart city discourse has
become hegemonic in articulating solutions to the risks and unintended externalities
of increasing demographic trends that are caused by the urbanization of the
21st century and environmental concerns about climate change [48,61]. This is based within a regime of technological innovations and
the digitalization of society [65]. In this context, smart cities promise to solve urban problems
(such as environmental degradation, traffic congestion, inefficient services,
etc.) to increase economic prosperity. Citizen participation will be
facilitated by bringing together a range of innovative technologies,
infrastructure, and data management techniques";
"According to Hajer and Dassen (2014) [71], the formation of the smart cities discourse
revolves around five key characteristics.
(1) The dominant concepts are smart grids, big data, efficiency,
infrastructure, system, energy, monitoring, and information, which highlight a
“managerial take” on cities with the new possibilities of ICT tools being
applied to urban problems (ibid).
(2) Smart cities are typically discussed within “glue coalitions”,
which are new cross-over forums where business, government, and knowledge
institutes meet each other, but their enthusiasm has not penetrated into
academic debate. These forums function as discourse coalitions that reproduce a
particular way of seeing and perceiving society. Some representative examples
are the “Guggenheim lab” organized by BMW, the Crystal pavilion in London built
by Siemens to showcase the future of the smart city or the Inzell Initiative,
which is a cooperation between the State Capital of Munich and the BMW Group [71].
(3) The smart cities discourse is often being institutionalized
through liberal practices, such as public-private partnerships. As part of this
shift from public service and infrastructure to public-private partnerships,
the way in which consumers pay for their urban services is likely to change and
public works will be replaced by a “pay per” approach [57]. While this change might provide a fertile
ground for urban entrepreneurship, it ignores how cities work sociologically
and politically, and how particular understandings of smart cities relate to
the existing system of governance [72].
(4) Within the smart city discourse innovation gets approached
mainly as a technological matter. Often, its protagonists neglect the social
complexity of urban environments and the contested nature of regional and local
debates and decision-making. The move from problem to solution is frequently
made too fast and it leaves very little time for debate. In other words, the
conditions under which the future of sustainable cities has to be achieved are
not discussed adequately [71].
(5) Finally, the smart city discourse lacks historical sensitivity
and awareness. Case studies show that it often fails to articulate why things
are the way they are. Urry (2016) [73] points out that missing knowledge and awareness of historical
developments very often are the reason for failure
in urban and technology policies. This attitude reproduces the
technocratic planning regime of modernity, where positivist ideas, rationalism,
functionalism, and the universal power of generic optimal solutions based on
quantitative models were dominant";
Examination revision note - #3 (on divided
city) [re: question 4]
PETER
MARCUSE. 1993. "What’s So New
About Divided Cities?" International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research, Wiley.
"... the city may be seen as
divided roughly into the following quarter:
(1) Luxury housing, not really part of the
city but enclaves or isolated buildings, occupied by the top of the economic,
social, and political hierarchy.
(2)
The gentrified city, occupied by the professional-managerial-technicalg roups,
whether yuppie or muppie without children.
(3) The suburban city,
sometimes single-family housing in the outer city, other times apartments near
the centre, occupied by skilled workers, mid-range professionals, upper civil
servants.
(4) The tenement city, sometimes cheaper
single-family areas, most often rentals, occupied by lower-paid workers, blue-
and white-collar, and generally (although less in the United States) including
substantial social housing.
(5)
The abandoned city, the end result of trickle-down, left for the poor, the
unemployed, the excluded, where in the United States home-less housing for the
homeless5 is most frequently
located"
"These
felt divisions in the residential city are roughly paralleled by divisions in
the economic city:
(1) The places of big decisions include a
network of high-rise offices, brownstones or older mansions in prestigious
locations, but are essentially locationally not circumscribed; it includes
yachts for some, the back seats of stretch limousines for others, airplanes and
scattered residences for still others.
(2)
The city of advanced services, of professional offices tightly clustered in
downtowns, with many ancillary services internalized in high-rise office
towers, heavily enmeshed in a wide and technologically advanced communicative
network.
(3) The city of direct production,
including not only manufacturing but also the production of advanced services,
in Saskia Sassen’s phrase; government offices, the back offices of major firms,
whether adjacent to their front offices or not, located in clusters and with
significant agglomerations but in varied locations within a metropolitan area - sometimes,
indeed, outside of the central city itself.
(4) The city of unskilled work and the
informal economy, small-scale manufacturing, warehousing, sweatshops,
technically unskilled consumer services, immigrant industries, closely
intertwined with the cities of production and advanced services and thus
located near them, but separately and in scattered clusters,6 locations often determined
in part by economic relations, in part by the patterns of the residential city.
(5) The residual city, the city
of the less legal portions of the informal economy, the city of storage where
otherwise undesired (NIMBY) facilities are located, generally congruent with
the abandoned residential city";
Mehdiabadi,
Parisa Mard (2015). "Divided Cities," Agora Journal of Urban Planning
and Design, 118-126.
"Architecture is entangled in a web of political, social, cultural, and
economic powers. As a spatial practice, architecture has the capacity to
reallocate cultural powers and to constructively contribute to social change.
In divided cities, however, architecture is
misused as an ultimate method of containing and managing intercommunal
tensions. Giving physical form to fear and misunderstanding, these constructs
only sustain and exacerbate long-standing problems, since “physical partition
often affirms local assumptions about persecution and encourages one ethnic
community to antagonize another” (Calame, 2009, p. 5). Division of the urban
fabric destroys the essence of place, hinders communal identity and sustains
distrust as competing groups manipulate images of the city and historical past for
their own benefit. Intercommunal tension cannot and should not be addressed by
erecting of walls, fences, and no man’s lands, but rather through open dialogue
and exchange. Although divided cities are not prevalent in urban history, they
represent the power of architecture as a cultural agency and demonstrate how,
if misused, they can lead to urban dysfunction and permanent division";
"Historically, the purpose of city fortification has been
twofold: to provide passive security against external threats and to inhibit
the social assimilation that usually accompanies a dense and cooperative urban
environment. Although creating a wall around a city helps with the physical
definition of a community, it also has the power to divide because it draws a
distinction between those within and outside of the city. As Lewis Mumford
noted, “physical barricades have historically provided a functional separation between
civilized and uncivilized domains for resident communities” (Mumford, 1960, p.
54). The city boundary emphasizes social hierarchy and sustains prejudice and
mistrust among community members";
"Similar to city walls, permanent or temporary partitions
in divided cities are constructed out of fear and distrust among different
ethnic and/ or social groups. In the case of Cyprus, the Green Line is a de
facto international boundary between the self-proclaimed but unrecognized
Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and the Greekspeaking Cypriots in the
south. The partition line is about ten kilometers long and varies in width between
twenty meters and four meters as it runs through the urban and suburban
terrain. “We are destined to get worse, not better, for as long as there is the
concept of fear and siege. So if fear is, at the core, the most dangerous
emotion… then remove the fear. Now, how do you do that? Is it done by walls? Is
it done by education? Is it done by being inventive about how you share the
land? I’m not sure that I have any of the answers – plenty of the questions.” ...";
"As cities reflect local demographics in spatial form, each
city can be perceived on a continuum between perfect spatial integration and
complete segregation. As an example of a divided city, Nicosia, capital of
Cyprus, reflects total spatial segregation between its two ethnic groups. Intercommunal
rivalry in Nicosia frayed the normal urban functioning, resulting in a complete
schism along its east-west ethnic fault-line";
Marco Allegra1*, Anna Casaglia2 and Jonathan
Rokem3. 2012. "The Political Geographies of Urban Polarization: A Critical
Review of Research on Divided Cities" Geography
Compass 6/9 (2012): 560–574,
10.1111/j.1749-8198.2012.00506.x.
"In
the last few decades, a growing interest has surrounded the urban dimension of conflicts.
The concept of the ‘‘divided city’’, in particular, has been employed to
describe a wide range of political, economic and social cleavages in the urban
sphere and their spatial manifestation";
"The contemporary metropolis is
characterised by new forms of closure and exclusion (Wacquant 1996, 2008) and increasing
social, economical, and political fragmentation (Sassen 2001); it appears ‘‘to
be manifesting as an intensely uneven patchwork of dystopian spaces that are […] physically
proximate
but institutionally estranged’’ (MacLeod and Ward 2002). The body of academic contributions
on the subject of divided cities implicitly supports the guiding hypothesis of
this review article: that, in Haim Yacobi’s words, ‘‘in the present global context,
more and more cities are becoming polarized, ghettoized and fragmented in
surprisingly similar ways’’ (Yacobi 2009, preface). Yacobi’s observation points
to the problem of understanding what kind of conditions produce spatial
polarization and how different kinds of conflict intertwine in the same
cities";
"The
common emphasis on the idea of ‘‘divided city’’ hides a great variety of
definitions, approaches and methodologies, and covers a wide range of
investigations. The literature on world cities investigated how the process of
globalization and economic restructuring creates spatial polarization in the
urban structure (Castells and Mollenkopf 1991; Fainstein et al. 1992; Sassen
1991), while other authors focus on the ‘‘wounds’’ inflicted by economic asymmetries
and state-violence – as well as the processes of recovery of the urban systems
(Schneider and Susser 2003; Till 2012). Other contributions underlined how socioeconomic
and cultural cleavages result in phenomena of residential segregation (Massey
1996; Massey and Denton 1993; Philips 2007; Scho¨nwa¨lder 2007) or
privatization of urban space (Atkinson & Blandy 2006; Glasze et al. 2002,
2006; McKenzie 1994).
Violence
and fear are entangled with processes of social change in contemporary cities generating
new forms of spatial segregation (Atkinson et al. 2004; Caldeira 1996, 2000); in
turn, spatial inequalities tend to reinforce social inequalities (Skop 2006).
Many authors have interpreted this trend as the progressive demise of a more
integrated model of urban development in favour of a fragmented patchwork of
impoverished ghettoes and affluent enclaves (Davis 1990; Graham and Marvin
2001), while others have observed the delicate and often controversial role
played by urban planning and artefacts in framing the encounter of groups and
communities (Bollens 2009; Brand 2009; Healey 1997; Sandercock 1998; Yiftachel
1998)";
