Untamed Urbanization edited by Adriana Allen, Andrea Lampis and Mark Swilling (Total pages 337)

Published by Routledge Publication, London

By Dr. Joy Karmakar, Lecturer, Department of Geography, Serampore College, Hooghly

One of the significant challenges in 21^st century is to understand the trajectories of urban development and how it influences on the urban anthropocene. Recently published book “Untamed Urbanization” by Adriana Allen, Andrea Lampis and Mark Swilling tries to discuss this question through re-politicize the relationship between urban development, sustainability and justice. Authors argued that taming is a process that can take many forms in the urban context. This process recognized as a set of attempts by urban intermediaries through envisioning, discourse-building, planning and funding strategies to enforce a certain order, logic and coherence on complex dynamics. These processes are too opaque, seemingly directionless and therefore excessively uncontrollable to offer the basis for purposing outcomes. Moreover, the book explores the tensions emerging under real circumstances, as well as their potential for transformative change. The book raises concern about purpose of cities to the people and depicts the same as place of unique opportunities for sustainable innovations. The whole book is based on different case studies from both global north and south. Through the case studies, writers try to integrate socio-ecological perspectives on the contemporary challenges of urban development globally. In doing that, writers’ note that theorizing urban change and contemporary challenges without an ‘axiological discussion’ it is purposeless. It provokes new epistemological engagements not only to diagnose the urban crisis but also re-address the actions taken earlier to solve the crisis. Such, ‘actions’, range from those impacted at the individual and household level to those institutionalized through planning framing.

Major Ideas in the Book

In the book four broad ideas of urban studies are discussed and contextualize through case studies. At first in the following paragraph these broad ideas would precisely be discussed. The case studies would be discussed in the next. The first concept focused in the book is the urban trajectories with different perspectives. Urban trajectories are being captured in the book as long historical cycles which have interrelated socio-economic, spatial, institutional and ecological dynamics. Authors argued that these dynamics are inter-connected and depends on the conceptual lens used to comprehend them, with each lens phasing out of sight some of these key dynamics in favour of a particular dominant concern or interest. Moreover, it shows that long cycles of economic development transform the ecological systems within which they embedded at local, regional and global scales. These long cycles and multiple scales interact in context-specific ways. Over the past century and a half, paradigms for reducing the complexity of the urban phenomenon have come and gone, but what remains are the irrepressibility and irreducibility of context. Therefore, authors contended that we have to consider different angles to understand urban ecological change in the era of urban Anthropocene. The second broad idea that the book envisaged is the urban development polarity and political and cultural construction of discourse. To explain urban polarity it focuses on the idea of opposition between agency and structure highlighting the fact that human conduct is purely shaped by forces and actors that people neither govern nor comprehend. Therefore, writers argued that human agency interacts with the broader forces and pressures. Discourse however have the capabilities to include or exclude through support of rational planning, urban growth and competitiveness, the smart city, the informal city, the slum city and so forth. Third idea that the book projected is on the disruption of hegemonic planning. It raised question regarding the influence of urban planning and noted that current focus of the urban planning is the sustainable urban future. Lastly, the idea is about accepting the alternative ideas and discourse that exists in variety of forms and at different levels. It also recognizes that emerging narratives are challenging the marginalization and re-invoking citizens’ right to the city. It creates new space and tensions to bring about transformative change.

Focusing on Some Case Studies

There are several case studies presented within each of the broader concepts discussed. There are five cases focused on effects of urban anthropocene. The first chapter argues that urban modernity tamed the nature by reducing the nature into flows conducted by urban infrastructure. Urban infrastructures hold the key because the global technology companies (GTCs) focuses on fiscal expenditures and private investments to stimulate economic growth. However, In the sprawling under-serviced and sub-serviced sectors of the urban global South, households and communities have started to develop their own institutional forms for managing access to ongoing supplies of basic urban services (in particular water). The underlying social processes can best be referred to as incremental urbanism because access to services is not determined via connections to formal networked infrastructures. It is worthwhile to underscore here that conventional approaches to delivering services to urban dwellers use gigantic networks of centrally controlled interlocked wires, pipes, roads and other infrastructures to manipulate the vast and varied flows of resources that enter into, circulate within and exit from cities in support of particular conceptions of city living. Moreover, it has argued that mounting investments in urban infrastructures will, more than likely, shape the dynamics of the second urbanization wave, and determine how a transition to more sustainable urban metabolic cycles is conceived and executed by key actors. It has also been pointed out that the prevailing nineteenth-century infrastructure governance paradigm needs replacement. Network approach may be the possible solution but it is still at an early stage within the mainstream engineering professions. Likewise, the GTCs are marketing their smart city solutions, and in the cities of the global South ‘coproduction’ platforms have started to emerge that could potentially herald new forms of polycentric urban governance. The Second chapter presents a case of rapidly transforming urban infrastructure in the peri-urban interface of Kolkata. It also emphasizes the method of co-production of urban services by organized social movements and state agencies instead of privatized urban services. Case study of East Kolkata Wetland, which purifies the waste water of Kolkata, re-establishes the fact that urban modernity shifted from taming to outright destruction of nature. Author argues that global discourse on urbanization and sustainability centered on the ‘ecology of cities’ rather than ‘ecology in cities’. Therefore, critical exploration and examination of the complexities of taming and untaming becomes essential to recognize and understand the complex making and remaking of the urban anthropocene at multiple levels, including the different visions of the different actors in the social hierarchy regarding ‘preservation’, ‘restoration’ and most importantly ‘improvement’ of city and its natural environment. In third chapter author argues that the taming discourse of the ‘smart city’ promises an era of innovative urban planning. It traces the urban planning history from ‘sanitary movement’ to modern city and noted that information and communication technology (ICT) drives the new discourse of city, aiming to make cities safer, cleaner and more efficient. The optimism of this new taming discourse is captivating, but requires critical interrogation like policy-makers need to reflect on the social consequences of the rules they adopt. For example, smart meters and smart grids might serve citizens, but privilege companies as argued by the author. In fact history of urban planning and development shows that taming of the city is to prepare for fundamental changes in city and popular smart city idea is one such effort. Chapter four investigates the relationship between city size and environmental impact using the example of GHG (Green House Gases) emissions. If the importance of industry is the basic mechanism affecting the scaling of emissions with city size, policies will need to ensure emission-efficient industry and a tendency for more consumption of services than goods, to make cities more sustainable. It further noted that replacing local industry by imports to save emissions will not solve the problem on a global scale. The next chapter sheds light on the crucial issue of food security in the context of South African urban areas and related consequences on the role of cities in the food system, and the processes that enable active city resident participation in the urban food system. Four interconnected global, yet locally experienced, transitions considered in this chapter. These include the second urban transition, the food system transition and the nutrition transition. Fourth, driven by the preceding transitions, is the emergence of alternative urban food governance innovations. These governance strategies are diverse. It is clear from the international and South African cases that city government has a critical role to play in urban food system governance. In fact, city governments have a unique ability to bring different groups together, through funding and their legal mandate, to ensure participatory processes. As an accountable entity (at the local government scale) for the progressive realization of the right to food, cities are explicitly required to play an active role in such processes.

The following chapter six examined the men and women workers’ narratives about their ways of achieving and perceiving security and protection. In doing so it presents a case for a broadening of the conceptual approach on which rests the social protection reform led by international financial institutions in Colombia as in the global South at large. The case study focused on some major debates in urban studies which include the polarity between agency and structure and how human and non-human living beings possess active agency within wider socio-ecological dynamics of change.  Case of Bogota pointed out that urban areas in the global South are becoming the testing ground for new social configurations of social protection, which are of havoc relevance for people and agency in general, not only for the poor. These reconfigurations factually respond to the new logic of privatization and commodification of individual and collective security.  Chapter seven seeks to understand the strategies adopted by the urban poor in responding to the challenges of a twenty-first-century dynamic Lagos megacity. It clearly identified that the poor in Lagos have been able to develop certain adaptive traits which can be recognized, replicated and regulated for enhanced urban development. Some communities are clearly proactive in their response to climate change vulnerability, in that rather than waiting for government aid they initiate self-help strategies to address local challenges. An example is Iwaya, an indigenous community and informal settlement located along the Lagos lagoon. Despite the constant threat of eviction by the Lagos State Government, residents of Iwaya have been able to harness the traditional leadership structure for community development and climate change mitigation and adaptation. The following chapter also focused on the urban poor but in the context of peri-urban areas of Mexico City. It identifies the key dimension of their social and livelihood vulnerability. Chapter ten presents Accra’s unregulated and market oriented sanitation strategies and their problems and opportunities. Part I and II of the book traces the trajectories of urban anthropocene and presents nuanced understanding of complex dynamics, situating praxis between totalizing narratives on the one hand and the mundane realities of people’s lives on the other.

Challenging Hegemonic Planning and Alternative narratives

Last ten chapters of the book divided into two parts (part III and IV), the first part focused on new planning strategies which challenge the hegemonic planning discourse while rest of the four chapters stressed on the unconventional ideas beyond the limits of the contemporary disciplining practices that produce and shape urban development processes. Chapter eleven pointed out that the sustainable development debate has become a protagonist among new urban discourses. Moreover, the author emphasized that a more critical and reflexive attitude is needed to examine the new understanding of urban development and the discrepancies between sustainable urban planning theory and development practice. Author argues that new urban discourse helps to emerge new participatory spaces for governments, social groups, networks and organizations. Recent experience shows that massive urban development projects, driven by government and private partnerships, have developed intelligent buildings, communication networks and sophisticated green infrastructure, creating isolated areas of prosperity and development. At the same time, local actors and communities are embarking on emergent projects that are less dependent on traditional planning interventions to improve urban conditions by transforming difficult sites, deprived zones and conflicted areas through alternative forms of delimiting and using spaces, often through unexpected and untamed actions and spontaneous uses. Likewise, both the cases of Mexico City and Ethiopia address the conceptual shifts in contemporary urban planning and stressing on the public participation, such as ‘community planning’. While case of Ghana outlines the potential for land being returned to public use as a means of promoting sustainable urbanization and case of Ireland invokes the idea of just city or right to city in the context of policy frameworks advocated by supranational organizations such as UN-HABITAT and the European Commission. Therefore, this section tries to advocate the bottom up urban planning with complete public participation as well as more just city from the perspectives of the vulnerable groups. George’s approach to sustainable development throws up complex distributional issues which are hardly acknowledged in the dominant discourses on sustainable development. This approach emphasizes on the commodification of land as the source of all social and environmental crises unlike other heterodox approaches that emphasize corporate production in their critique of orthodoxy, George saw sustainable development first as returning land to common property. So, contrary to the view that private property in land is necessary for sustainable land use, Georgists (followers of George) argue that it is private property in land that causes unsustainable land use and urban development.

From public participation to creation of space chapter fifteen uses the concept of hegemonic masculinity to outline how women (particularly black women in Harrare) controlled and contained in specific urban spaces, yet find ways and means to negotiate and create space. The next chapter underscores that there is a serious lack of adequate knowledge regarding the ‘quotidian details’ of how those considered ‘poor’ actually make a living in our cities despite all the challenges they face. For example, the understanding of favelas as urban depositories of cheap labour for the formal city proves very limited when confronted with the complex dynamics of life in a large city such as Rio de Janeiro. Case of downtown area in Buenos Aires city examines the clash between the mutually encroaching practices and aspirations of real estate developers, upper-and middle-class urbanites, working-class women and men, and slum dwellers. While the case of Cape Town scrutinizes the transformative potential of a diversity of social experimentations that playfully seek to overcome the material and narrative Apartheid legacy of fragmentation and segregation.

Therefore, the book tries to cover the range of contemporary issues on urban planning and development and it enriched by the various case studies from different parts of globe. It is remarkable that this book criticizes the contemporary urban development and planning practices and sometime suggests an alternative way to deal with the problematic areas. There are few publications which address such wide range of issues related to problem and perspective of contemporary urban planning and development. However, some flaws needs to be mentioned. The book singularly focused on class (especially on urban poor) in the analysis of contemporary urban planning and development problem. Role of urban governance in dealing with urban planning and development has been explored very briefly. However, public space, gender, urban poor and their livelihood has dealt substantially.  Nevertheless, untamed urbanization has successfully been able to find and capture the contemporary urban planning problems across the different continents in the globe.