We’d be remiss if we didn’t point to Geoff Manaugh’s excellent Interview with Mike Davis: Part 1 and Part 2, in which Davis discusses interesting things like peri-urbanism:
“There are several different discussions here: one on larger-order urban systems – similar to the Atlantic seaboard or Tokyo-Yokohama, where metropolitan areas are linked in continuous physical systems. But then there’s this second debate about the spill-over into the countryside, this new peri-urban reality, where you have very complex mixtures of slums – of poverty – crossed with dumping grounds for people expelled from the center – refugees. Yet amidst all this you have small, middle class enclaves, often new and often gated. You find rural laborers trapped by urban sweatshops, at the same time that urban settlers commute to work in agricultural industries. This, in a way, is the most interesting – and least-understood – dynamic of global urbanization. As I try to explain in Planet of Slums, peri-urbanism exists in a kind of epistemological fog because it’s not well-studied. The census data and social statistics are notoriously incomplete.
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Interestingly, this has also become the terrain of a lot of Pentagon thinking about urban warfare. These non-hierarchical, labyrinthine peripheries are what many Pentagon thinkers have fastened onto as one of the most challenging terrains for future wars and other imperial projects. I mean, after a period in which the Pentagon was besotted with trendy management theory – using analogies with Wal-Mart and just-in-time inventory – it now seems to have become obsessed with urban theory – with architecture and city planning.
The ongoing crisis of the Third World city is producing almost feudalized patterns of large slum neighborhoods that are effectively terrorist or criminal mini-states – rogue micro-sovereignties. That’s the view of the Pentagon and of Pentagon planners. They also seem quite alarmed by the fact that the peri-urban slums – the slums on the edges of cities – lack clear hierarchies. Even more difficult, from a planning perspective, there’s very little available data. The slums are kind of off the radar screen. They therefore become the equivalent of rain forest, or jungle: difficult to penetrate, impossible to control.
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But, sure, this is a serious geopolitical and military problem: if you conduct basically a triage of the world’s human population – where some people are exiled from the world economy, and some spaces no longer have roles – then you’re offering up ideal opportunities for other people to step in and organize those spaces to their own ends. This is a deeper and more profound situation than any putative conflicts of civilization. It is, in a way, a very unexpected end to the 20th century. Neither classical Marxism, nor any other variety of classical social theory or neoliberal economics, ever predicted that such a large fraction of humanity would live in cities and yet basically outside all the formal institutions of the world economy.”
Thanks Geoff!
4 Comments
He didn’t predict it, but he named it. By 1970 Lefebvre was calling such slums ‘counterspaces’ and pointing out their strategic importance as THE challenge to hegemonic time-space of global capitalism, something he called ‘planetary’ capitalism….
I don’t know that Robert Neuwirth reads this blog or BLDGBLOG, but certainly it’s worth pointing people to Squattercity for details that may or may not fit Davis’ analysis.
Rob, it seems odd in retrospect to think in terms of totalising concepts like THE challenge to hegemonic time-spaces. It smells like nostalgia for Situationist habits of unilateral proclamation. Soon to be picturesque ruins, indeed! There’s an implied purity in such statements that seems constrained in retrospect.
I wonder what Lefebvre would make of today’s somewhat messier modes of thinking, and whether his thinking about cities would find more clandestine, fractal, or just plain subtle approaches.
For me, the sense of not knowing, of not having named the thing, is a big part of what makes it ripe with possibility. Nobody knows what’s next.
Even Foucault lectured in ‘67 on the Des Espaces Autres. I love Lefebvre but I think he would caution a reading of contemporary 3rd world slums as the challenge to neoliberal capitalism. Most are tied into the labrynths, but more subtely, he would caution the intoxicating Dionysian qualties of the slum. Careful to reject the self regulating barbarity of many slums. As Mike said, he has down most of this book without field research. I’m excited to read it nonetheless.
“It is, in a way, a very unexpected end to the 20th century. Neither classical Marxism, nor any other variety of classical social theory or neoliberal economics, ever predicted that such a large fraction of humanity would live in cities and yet basically outside all the formal institutions of the world economy.”
Yeah, maybe, but read some classical SCIENCE FICTION and you will see that beyond the “accademia” there were some heads who thought “out of the box” and are nowaday the real future seers on a societal level.