Ananya Roy

Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of being Global

Introduction F Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global PR … the skyline rises in the East. Rem Koolhaas O O Aihwa Ong U N C O R R EC TE D Cities rise and fall, but the vagaries of urban fate cannot be reduced to the workings of universal laws established by capitalism or colonial history. Caught in the vectors of particular histories, national aspirations, and flows of cultures, cities have always been the principal sites for launching world-conjuring projects. Today, urban dreams and schemes play with accelerating opportunities and accidents that circulate in ever-widening spirals across the planet. Emerging nations exercise their new power by assembling glass and steel towers to project particular visions of the world. Once again, as Rem Koolhaas (2004) notes, “the skyline rises in the East,” as cities vie with one another, and regional aspirations are superseded by new horizons of the global. In the 1970s, New York City was celebrated for its architectural constel- lation, which fostered a “delirious” culture of congestion. Koolhaas (1997) called New York “The City of the Captive Global,” one that unites the modern with perpetual motion. But by the early twenty-first century, the financial meltdown in the fall of 2008 (called the Great Recession) dealt a reversal of fortune for New York, London, and Tokyo. As these mighty cities struggle to retain their lead as financial powerhouses, Singapore and Dubai are emerging as centers of global finance. Meanwhile, China’s role as the banker of the world has made Shanghai and Hong Kong the shares-selling capitals of the world. While capitals of big economies remain crucial players, Asian economies have skyrocketed, and the Asian world has witnessed the stunning emergence Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, First Edition. Edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong.

Medieval modernity: On citizenship and urbanism in a global era

Abstract This paper examines forms of citizenship associated with contemporary urbanism. Focusing on three paradigmatic spaces: the gated enclave, the regulated squatter settlement and the camp, the authors argue that the landscape of urban citizenship is increasingly fragmented and divided. These geographies are constituted through multiple and competing sovereignties which, when territorially exercised, produce fiefdoms of regulation or zones of ‘no-law’. In order to understand these practices, the authors employ the conceptual framework of the ‘medieval city’. This use of history as theory sheds light on particular types of urban citizenship, such as the ‘free town’ or the ‘ethnic quarter’, that were present at different moments of medievalism and that are congruent with current processes. The ‘medieval’ is invoked not as an historical period, but rather as a transhistorical analytical category that interrogates the modern at this moment of liberal empire.

Paradigms Of Propertied Citizenship Transnational Techniques of Analysis

The American paradigm of propertied citizenship has far-reaching consequences for the propertyless, as in the brutal criminalization of the homeless. Activist groups, such as the anarchist squatter organization Homes Not Jails, have sought to challenge this paradigm through innovative techniques of property takeovers, invocations of American traditions of homesteading, and Third World tactics of self-help and informality. This study trains a transnational lens on both the paradigm and its subversions. Posing Third World questions of the First World, the author seeks to unsettle the normalized hierarchy of development and underdevelopment and explores lessons that can be learned from different modes of shelter struggles.

Praxis in the Time of Empire

In the time of war and military occupation, it is possible for planning to articulate an ethics of disavowal and refusal. However, when empire involves much more than war, when empire also involves reconstruction, renewal, aid, and democracy, then it is much more difficult for planning to opt out of this liberal moral order. Situated at the heart of empire, that is, in America, this article explores some of these dilemmas of praxis and thereby the limits of liberalism. Drawing upon Marxist theory, cultural studies, and postcolonial critique, it makes a case for an ethics of ‘doubleness’, one where benevolence can be recognized as Othering but also where complicity can be transformed into subversion.

Strangely Familiar: Planning and the Worlds of Insurgence and Informality

It is a privilege to introduce readers to this special issue of Planning Theory that deals with the themes of ‘informality’ and ‘insurgence’. The issue brings together two panels hosted by Planning Theory, one on ‘insurgence’ at the 2006 World Planning Schools Congress, Mexico City, and the other on ‘informality’ at the 2007 Association of European Schools of Planning Conference, Naples, Italy. Here we present some of the articles presented at those panels. But why do such themes matter for planning theory and why bring them together? What do the worlds of informality and insurgence, when placed in conjunction, contribute to planning theory? To answer these questions I must return to how the panels were organized and particularly to the role of Jean Hillier. For it is Jean who insisted that the Editorial Board consider and discuss themes that stretch the familiar boundaries of what currently constitutes planning theory. Insurgence, politics, social movements, citizenship, poverty, informal spaces were all part of the lively debates that thus unfolded, via a flurry of emails. At first glance, our self-defined mandate seemed simple – to bring into the fold of Euro-American planning theory unfamiliar issues, those related to urban planning in the developing world; to thereby expand the geographies of planning theory; to thereby make visible the cities of the global South and their particular experiences. This was to be a way to shake up the perceived parochialism of planning theory, a theory which derives from the experiences of North America and Western Europe but often exceeds its location and acquires universal scope, a theory that becomes the Theory. But in fact the enterprise was more ambitious and complex. For it was acknowledged and recognized quite early in the editorial board discussions that such themes, notably those of insurgence and informality, while rooted in the global South,

Who's Afraid of Postcolonial Theory?

Recent assertions of urban theory have dismissed the value of postcolonial critique in urban studies. This essay draws on postcolonial theory to demonstrate key flaws in such theoretical formulations. In doing so, it returns to the puzzle of how and why studying urbanism in the global South might matter for the reconceptualization of critical urban theory. Instead of a universal grammar of cityness, modified by (exotic) empirical variation, the essay foregrounds forms of theorization that are attentive to historical difference as a fundamental constituent of global urbanization. What is at stake, the essay concludes, is a culture of theory, one that in its Eurocentrism tends to foreclose multiple concepts of the urban and alternative understandings of political economy. A concern with the relationship between place, knowledge and power-a key insight of postcolonial critique-might make possible new practices of theory in urban studies.

Urbanisms, worlding practices and the theory of planning:

This special issue seeks to return the urban to the heart of planning theory. In doing so, it has three objectives. Firstly, it highlights particular urbanisms: how they are produced, lived and negotiated, from New York to Bogota. The articles thus draw attention to the multiplicity of urbanisms that constitute the contemporary world system, thereby disrupting the rather restricted analytics of global cities and world cities. Secondly, the articles pay careful attention to the forms of worlding at work in such urbanisms, demonstrating how the production of the urban takes place in the crucible of modernizing projects of development, regimes of immigration and governance and experiments with neoliberalism and market rule.Thirdly, this special issue seeks to explore the implications of such research and analysis for the field of ideas currently constituted as planning theory. How does the study of urbanisms allow a rigorous understanding of planning as the organization and transformation of space? How can planning theory make sense of seemingly unplanned spaces that lie outside the grid of visible order? In what ways is planning itself a worlding practice, such that models, best practices, expertise and capital circulate in transnational fashion, creating new worlds of planning common sense?

Ethnographic Circulations: Space–Time Relations in the Worlds of Poverty Management

This essay takes up the challenge of global ethnography. Using the case of poverty expertise and development capitalism, it presents an analysis of what may be understood as an ethnography of circulations. Building on the emergent research on policy mobilities, it calls for an ethnography of the apparatus or dispositif and its constitutive relations and practices. Here ethnography departs from ontologies of immersion and is instead concerned with critique as a mode of defamiliarization. Against the lament of anthropologists that such global ethnography may entail the loss of the subaltern, the essay presents a different ethnographic muse: middling technocrats who negotiate the apparatus of development and who embody the contradictions of market rule.

What is urban about critical urban theory

ABSTRACT This essay takes as its provocation a question posed by the feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser: “What’s Critical about Critical Theory?” In urban studies, this question has been usefully reframed by Neil Brenner to consider what is critical about critical urban theory. This essay discusses how the “urban” is currently being conceptualized in various worlds of urban studies and what this might mean for the urban question of the current historical conjuncture. Launched from places on the map that are forms of urban government but that have distinctive agrarian histories and rural presents, the essay foregrounds the undecidability of the urban, be it geographies of urbanization or urban politics. What is at stake is a critical urban theory attentive to historical difference as a fundamental constituting process of global political economy and deconstruction as a methodology of generalization and theorization.

Debate on Global Urbanisms and the Nature of Urban Theory

Urban studies is undergoing a phase of rich experimentation, with a proliferation of paradigms and exploration or invention of various methodologies inspired by the diversity and shifting geographies of global urbanization. In particular, there has been an effort to rethink the Euro–American legacy of urban studies and consider the relational multiplicities, diverse histories and dynamic connectivities of global urbanisms. Such a task is especially important at a time when significant urban transformations are underway in the global South. From the remaking of the developmental state at the urban scale to fierce struggles over land, housing and urban services to ambitious visions of the world-class city, these urban processes cannot be understood as simply a postscript to the urban transformations of the North Atlantic.