Various Issues in Urbanisation
Urban social-ecological systems
The world is urbanizing at an unprecedented rate. In the near future it is prospected that urban landscapes converted for approximately 2,7 billion more people will be built. This is equivalent to the size of South Africa. Such urbanization, coupled with increasing inequalities, changing migration patterns, shifting diets and a growing urban middle class pose increasing demand for resources generated by the biosphere. People in cities, as elsewhere, must deal with an uncertain future due to globalization, climate change and loss of biological diversity.
India’s modernity
The expansions of the Indian economy after the globalisation reforms of 1991 have seen the rapid growth of cities and towns. This process bypassed many of the formal models of 1950s urban planning, which based urban settlement on zoning and formal title. Para-legal, and ‘pirate’ urbanism has been distinctive of most Indian cities which exist largely through complex forms of tenure rather than titled private property, porosity rather than visibility. This ‘pirate modernity,’ has shown itself to be dynamic, and further aided by low cost technological communication networks. New liberal arguments in India have suggested that informationalisation be transformed from tenure to title, cash to banking, invisibility to visibility. The main strategy for this has been informational infrastructures and biometric enumeration of the population.
Can the experiences of innovative informal/pirate modernities in Asia point to a new arrangement of beyond purely property -based economies? Or can we update older models of the liberal normative information commons with a new conceptual architecture that accounts for sections of the population standing outside property or the classic commons? These would include looser, but unpropertied forms of knowledge exchange as seen in informal production in India. In short, what kind of questions does India and China’s emergence pose for a social theory of modernity beyond property?
Google Urbanism
A digital strategy for urban value extraction
GoogleUrbanism (GU) is a city management strategy making use of Google’s insatiable hunger for capitalization of ‘attention’ and quality data. Proposed by strategic urban designers/architects Nicolay Boyadjiev, Harshavardhan Bhat, Kirill Rostovsky and Andréa Savard-Beaudoin, GU intends to create a mutually beneficial relation between the commercial interests of tech companies and the city as political and social entity. Cities more often than not have serious trouble to provide and maintain the public services they’re supposed to deliver and companies like Google are developing new business models in exploiting the overlap between physical and digital space. But those tech platforms are already profiting from the digital data and attention of users in the physical world. The GU team proposes to set new terms to this currently one-sided relationship by adding ‘public space’ in the equation between Google, users and data, framing it as the formal physical ‘site of extraction’ of this digital value.
The whole idea behind GoogleUrbanism is that every time Google makes money in public space, the public space gets something back and reinvests it in itself.
Remove annoying regulations - Privately run cities
Google’s mother comapny, Alphabet, does take cities seriously. Its executives have floated the idea of taking some struggling city – Detroit? – and reinventing it around Alphabet services, with no annoying regulations blocking this march of progress.
Google Urbanism - as the project is called - portends to use Alphabet’s data prowess to build profitable alliances with other powerful - i.e. financial - forces behind contemporary cities, from property developers to institutional investors.
Toronto has recently chosen Alphabet to turn Quayside, a 12-acre undeveloped waterfront area, into a digital marvel. This might uncover whether Google Urbanism will transcend or accommodate the predominantly financial forces shaping our cities.
Alphabet’s weapons are impressive. Cheap, modular buildings to be assembled quickly; sensors monitoring air quality and building conditions; adaptive traffic lights prioritising pedestrians and cyclists; parking systems directing cars to available slots. Not to mention delivery robots, advanced energy grids, automated waste sorting, and, of course, ubiquitous self-driving cars.
Alphabet essentially wants to be the default platform for other municipal services. Cities, it says, have always been platforms; now they are simply going digital. “The world’s great cities are all hubs of growth and innovation because they leveraged platforms put in place by visionary leaders,” states the proposal. “Rome had aqueducts, London the Underground, Manhattan the street grid.”
Amid all this platformaphoria, one could easily forget that the street grid is not typically the property of a private entity. Who determines the rules by which different companies get access to it? Would cities be saving energy using Alphabet’s own AI systems or would the platform be open to others? Would Alphabet support “urban net neutrality” as actively as it supports net neutrality of the conventional type? In reality, there is no “digital grid”: there are just individual Alphabet products. Its bet is to furnish cool digital services to establish complete monopoly over data extractivism within a city. What passes for the efforts to build the “digital grid” might, in fact, be an attempt to privatise municipal services.
Alphabet’s long-term goal is to remove barriers to the accumulation and circulation of capital in urban settings – mostly by replacing formal rules and restrictions with softer, feedback-based floating targets. It claims that in the past “prescriptive measures were necessary to protect human health, ensure safe buildings, and manage negative externalities”. Today, however, everything has changed and “cities can achieve those same goals without the inefficiency that comes with inflexible zoning and static building codes”.
For Alphabet, these constraints are no more: ubiquitous and continuous data flows can finally replace government rules with market signals. Aaway with the rules, tests and standards, let the sovereign consumer rank the service and low-scoring ones will soon disappear on their own. Google Urbanism means the end of politics - Instead it wants to mobilise the power of technology to help residents “adjust”.
Alphabet can ‘democratise’ space by customising it through data flows and cheap, prefabricated materials. The problem is that Alphabet’s ‘democratisation’ of function will not be matched by the democratisation of control and ownership of urban resources. The “input” into Alphabet’s algorithmic democracy is “market demand” rather than communal decision-making.
Instead of democratising ownership and control, Alphabet promises participation, consultation and new ways to track the vox populi – measured automatically via Alphabet’s extensive sensory network.
In cities, market demand is precisely what leads to the privatisation of public space. Decisions are no longer taken in the political realm but are delegated to asset managers, private equity groups, and investment banks that flock to real estate and infrastructure searching for stable and decent returns. Google Urbanism would not reverse this trend, it would accelerate it.
Alphabet understands the real audience for its cities: the global rich. For them, the narratives of data-driven sustainability and algorithmically produced lifestyles are just another way to justify rising values of their property portfolios.
Rodrik’s trilemma
According to the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, it is impossible to have full national sovereignty, democracy, and globalization simultaneously.
Rodrik’s argument is that too much globalization erodes the sovereignty of democratic nation-states, by increasingly subjecting them to economic and financial forces that may not correspond with the wishes of the domestic majority. By this logic, an authoritarian state may function better in a globalized world, because it is unconstrained by, say, electoral concerns.
With less globalization, democratic decision-making within the nation-state would be less constrained by external forces – particularly financial markets – meaning that its scope would be wider. Globalization and democracy, without the nation-state, is also possible, though Rodrik is skeptical about whether democratic institutions could function on a global scale.
Today’s widespread disillusionment with government is partly a backlash against globalization, which has seemed to impose itself on nation-states. But another reason for the disillusionment may be that citizens feel disconnected from their national governments.
Rodrik’s political trilemma have been on stark display in Catalonia, where the tension between local democracy and the nation-state is even more acute than that with globalization. Indeed, many Catalans are more frustrated with Spain’s national government than they are with either globalization or the EU. The same can be said of Scotland vis-à-vis the United Kingdom.
Cities are the centers of innovation and progress, as the promise of agglomeration, economies of scale, and positive spillovers attract high-performing firms. Citizens feel close to their municipal governments and proud of their cities, but their pride in their identity does not have the damaging qualities of nationalism.
As the nation-state cedes some of its power to regional, state, or municipal governments, the trilemma weakens. Both democracy, with its concomitant sense of belonging, and globalization, driven by cosmopolitan cities open to the world, can thrive, without causing any country to lose sovereignty. 1
There are serious risks. As successful metropolitan areas attract a growing share of a country’s capital, skilled labor, and innovative capacity, rural areas, in particular, are likely to face economic decline: fewer job opportunities, closure of hospitals and schools, and deteriorating infrastructure.
Have we reached the phase of (financial) capitalism where cities start to disconnect both from their nation-states and from their rural hinterland? Is the spectre of Paul Romer’s ‘Charter Cities’ - closed localities escaping the (nation-state’s) demanding regulations and restriction, living in symbiosis with similar other cities - all self-sufficient - leaving the rural world behind? May be time has come for nature to take back the rural districts and move each and everyone of humankind away and into such glorious cities?