MCFly co-editor Marc Hudson reports on a lecture by one of the Big Fish in urban theory.

Attention Conservation Notice: This article is more about urban theory than climate change per se, but then again, if you think the two aren’t intimately related, well, um, you’re wrong.

Professor Ash Amin has written more books than many people have read. This of course doesn’t automatically mean he has anything to say (he does), or that he is able, in the flesh, to put his case (he is). The basic question he posed last night was (I paraphrase) “How can the new global elite, freed from the chains of dependence and mutual obligation with the poor, be made to behave themselves?”

Amin started with an anecdote from a three-day seminar he attended last year, laid on by the King of Sweden (MCFly’s invite clearly went to our spambox). On the theme of “Growth, Equity and Sustainability,” there were 20-plus scholars, business types, policy makers there. In his presentation at that seminar, Amin had pointed out that the “unborn 3 billion” (1) will live in slums/squatter cities, and that sorting that situation is going to need more than autochthonous (“from below”) growth.

Amin reported that when he suggested there was an urgent need for housing tenure reform, better public services and a society of mutual obligation, he was accused of being pessimistic and not realising that inequality is the issue, not (absolute) poverty. He has clearly been mulling this over ever since.

Taking Marvin and Graham’s “Splintering Urbanism” he points out that mainstream visions of “the city” see and validate only a portion of the what is really going on. By his phrase “Telescopic Urbanism” he means a way of seeing the world that prevents people from seeing the true scale of world poverty. He then threw up some slides that anyone who has been to lectures about “globalisation” and so on sees a lot of; clusters of novel-shaped skyscrapers, gigantic shopping malls with brutalist and outsized public ‘sculpture’/temples to chrome and consumption, that he pointed out were a vision of cities “in the service of the knowledge/entertainment economy.” (sound familiar?)

He then talked about two recent popular books about cities, Doug Saunders “Arrival City; How the largest migration in history is shaping our world and Robert Neuwerth’s “Shadow City: A billion squatters, a new urban world”, drawing out their common themes and the tensions between them.

He pointed out that what he calls “concessionary urbanism” (poor people getting together en masse and, through persistence and organisation, applying enough pressure so that they aren’t treated like disposable widgets, but actually get access to such luxuries as food, clean water, sanitation, health, education etc) needs an enormous amount of effort, and is a battle that needs to be constantly refought. The two themes of concessionary urbanism, (heroic individuals, or, less commonly, ‘community capital’) underplay just what a slog this is.

His closing argument(2) was around the assertion of rights to the above-mentioned luxuries. Somewhere between old style socialist modernisation and capitalist brazenness, Amin asserted (or tentatively hoped), was the notion of “the right to the staples” of life. This was, inevitably, challenged in the Q and A by someone who thought “rights” to be a far too bourgeois concept to be useful. (3)

The Q and A was mostly, but not entirely, the usual mix of people citing Derrida this, or free markets that or that 19th century Enlightenment Prophet guy the other.

Footnotes
(1) The unborn 3 billion? Them that will take us from our current 7 billion to 10 billion or so by mid-century, unless the unexpected happens earlier than expected
(2) Which included a truly appalling anecdote about judges in Delhi giving the ok for slum clearance on purely aesthetic grounds (“the place the poor live in doesn’t look nice. We’re sending in the bull-dozers”)
(3) Me, I thought social democracy had been beaten to a pulp by the Chicago Boys and then finally drowned by Maggie and Ronnie. That is to say, I think we have an “agency problem” here…

Conflict of interest: I scoffed an awful lot of the free wine and nibbles (olives, nuts, crisps) afterwards. Snout in the sadly shallow academic trough and all that…

Concepts worth a look
Marvin and Graham Splintering Urbanism
Giorgio Agamben‘s “Bare Life”
Zygmunt Bauman Nomadic/Kinetic Elite
Lexy de Tocqueville’s “Noblesse Oblige” (well, alright, not just him)

Website worth a (close) look
cities@manchester