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A Global Urban Dialogue
On 30 November and 1 December 2023, a number of urban studies scholars gathered in Antwerp for what was called an ‘Urban Agency workshop’. Prior to this workshop, a dozen interviews with members of urban studies institutes at different universities were organised as part of a ‘Global Urban Dialogues’ webinar series. The text below is based on the 2023 workshop and explores the idea of a Global Urban Dialogue.
Author: T. Vanoutrive (University of Antwerp, Urban Studies Institute)
“Human thought is inherently dialogic. Ancient philosophers tended to be keenly aware of all this: that’s why, whether they were in China, India or Greece,they tended to write their books in the form of dialogues. Humans were only fully self conscious when arguing with one another, trying to sway each other’s views or working out a common problem.”1
Antwerp: Good morning, how are you?
Brussels: I’m good. Well, of course there are the usual issues,… you know, lack of affordable housing, crime, unemployment, political polarisation, pollution,…
Antwerp: The same for me. But I’m recovering. When we met in the 1980s, our situation was considerably worse.
Brussels: Not to mention what people said about us. In the libraries that are located within us, you can still find all these papers and books about urban doom, urban decay,…
Antwerp: … and if I remember these attacks. It really was a ‘hate literature’ on urban areas.2 The self- esteem of many of our fellow cities declined significantly.
Brussels: Luckily for you, you never suffer from a lack of self-esteem.
Antwerp: Because I do not have any reason to be ashamed.
Geneva: Please, no quarrels. Let’s try to have an urban dialogue.
Brussels: You’re right. If we keep on arguing among each other, we will not succeed in defending our right to exist.
London: What do you mean? Do we need to question our existence?
New York: Well my friend, I guess you know urban studies, you know, a herd of researchers that study cities.
London: Oh yes, I know them. Not that it’s clear who belongs to this group or not, but there are research groups, academic journals,… that self-identify as urban studies.3
New York: Well, these creatures write pieces in which they discuss whether we cities exist.4
Brussels: Our boundaries may be a bit vague, but is it worth spending our time discussing whether we exist? We dialogue, so we exist, no? Cities, like humans, only exist through their interaction with each other.
Paris: Whether we exist seems not the most relevant question, but isn’t the question what we actually are worth some consideration?
Antwerp: Maybe, but I’m convinced that we are multiple, we have different dimensions, we cannot be reduced to one single definition. The nature of cities is not easy to define. Some will emphasise density and how agglomeration economies generate higher levels of productivity which contributes to the centripetal forces that concentrate human activity in us. Others focus on how lifestyles, the way of living, social relations,… are different in cities, or on how the build environment is a distinctive feature.
New York: Sounds like very disciplinary focuses. And don’t they emphasise that the urban is a process. If I understand these urban studies scholars, which is challenging, they try to overcome monodisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity, and aim for transdisciplinarity or postdisciplinarity.
London: As in a unifying theory of the urban? A quick look at some of these urban studies institutes gives the impression that they prefer discussions of how there institutes are organised over generating valuable insights about the nature of cities. Their predecessors seem to be more concerned with the issues we struggled with, like urban poverty, crime and discrimination.
Brussels: Perhaps this preoccupation with what urban studies is, relates to the underlying mission of a significant number of these urban scholars and their allies.
Madrid: Can you clarify what you mean?
Brussels: Well, I was referring to the mission of challenging the state-centric view.5 The development of academic disciplines and academia the past centuries went hand in glove with the rise of the nation state. As a consequence, research is shaped by its role to serve national governments in governing a territory and a population. The mission of urban studies is to replace this by more urban lenses.
Madrid: This makes me think of a TV series in which Helsinki, Nairobi, Berlin, Tokio and some other characters named after a city destabilise a key institution of the national state, the central bank. But anyway, your point is that urban studies is the intellectual flank of ‘let mayors rule the world’ initiatives.
Brussels: To a certain extent they share a mission, but these self-declared critical urban researchers will of course deconstruct any initiative in the real world.
Paris: What’s interesting here is that some agency is attributed to us cities.6 I hope ‘urban agency’ is not a hollow phrase.
Manchester: Perhaps, that relates to the role of these urban studies institutes for us. What’s the reason that we have a conversation about these, to be honest, negligible networks. Do we owe our existence, our agency to intellectuals that study and theorise us?
Barcelona: The urban exists because urban studies exists? I would reframe it slightly. It are urban actors, urban social movements as well as urban researchers and many other agents that make cities. And that brings us to the crucial question: what kind of cities do we want to be?
Paris: Which in turn brings us to the right to the city. I will not mention in which city this concept was coined, but we arrive at a point where the nature of cities isn’t the most pressing issue, but how our citizens can shape us.
London: You mean that from an ethical point of view, it is human agency that matters, and not urban agency? I don’t know, even humans, among them urban scholars, discuss the rights and role of non- human actants.
Paris: Interesting, but I was wondering what role is played by knowledge, after all, these university researchers are seen as knowledge producers. Hence, I assume they have an idea how knowledge production can contribute to making us better cities, how different types of knowledge produce different cities,…
Barcelona: And how knowledge is, can, and should be coproduced with non-academic actors. Many of the insights, concepts and knowledge that are materialised in academic papers and books come from outside academia. The academics put their names on the books that report the knowledge, but the cities in which they are located, the urban areas they visit, these provide the basis for their work.
London: Urban researchers stand on the shoulders of cities, I would say.
Paris: Exactly.
Brussels: And to be honest, urban knowledge comes also from our counterparts elsewhere in the world. We started an urban dialogue, soon the leading world cities like London and New York came in, but so far we haven’t talked to cities in the Global South.
Kinshasa: Now I hear you speaking. Talking about urbanisation, the fastest growing cities aren’t in the Global North.
Antwerp: Fast-growing, obese you mean…
Geneva: Please! Let your toxic relationship in the past not hinder dialogue.
Kinshasa: In the past? We are still used as gateways for extractive practices in these postcolonial times.
Sao Paulo: Indeed, but please, do not see us as victims. What you call cities in the Global South have their own dynamics.
London: Indeed, we can learn a lot from you, like… like…, well, you know…
Sao Paulo: …like how we institutionalised the right to the city?
London: Yes! Thanks.
Kinshasa: And this relates to the broader question how cities need to be included in urban research. These urban scholars organise ‘global urban dialogues’, but did they invite a city?
Sao Paulo: It is as if we were sitting in a separate room, having our own dialogue,…
Kinshasa: … while claiming they have an urban dialogue. How pathetic.
…
Endnotes
1 (Graeber & Wengrow, 2022, p.209-210)
4 (Brenner & Schmid, 2015; Saey, 2007; Scott & Storper, 2015; Walker, 2015; 2016)
5 (Magnusson, 2013)
References
Brenner, N., & Schmid, C. (2015). Towards a new epistemology of the urban? City, 19(2–3), 151–182. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2015.1014712
De Munck, B. (2017). Disassembling the City: A Historical and an Epistemological View on the Agency of Cities. Journal of Urban History, 43(5), 811–829.
Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. (2022). The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity. Penguin Books.
Magnusson, W. (2013). Politics of Urbanism: Seeing like a City (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203808894
Saey, P. (2007). How cities scientifically (do not) exist. Methodological appraisal of research on
globalizing processes of intercity networking. In P. J. Taylor, B. Derudder, P. Saey, & F. Witlox (Eds.), Cities in Globalization: Practices, Policies and Theories (pp. 298–313). Routledge.
Scott, A. J., & Storper, M. (2015). The Nature of Cities: The Scope and Limits of Urban Theory: The nature of cities. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12134
Taylor, P. J. (2004). World city network: A global urban analysis. Routledge.
Van Heur, B. (2023). What, where and who is urban studies? On research centres in an unequal world.
Dialogues in Urban Research, 275412582311792. https://doi.org/10.1177/27541258231179214
Walker, R. (2015). Building a better theory of the urban: A response to ‘Towards a new epistemology of the urban?’ City, 19(2–3), 183–191. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2015.1024073
Walker, R. A. (2016). Why Cities? A Response. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40(1), 164–180. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12335
New Publication! ‘What, where and who is urban studies? On research centres in an unequal world’ by Bas van Heur (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
This paper poses the question of what the proliferation of urban research centres across the world means for urban studies as a field of research, what this tells us about the (uneven) geographies of urban knowledge production and circulation, and who are the key institutions and researchers involved. In other words: what, where and who is urban studies? Building on a minor tradition of bibliometric research in urban studies and related disciplines, the paper assesses the Scopus-registered 2011–2021 publication output of the more than 1000 researchers affiliated to 30 urban studies centres across the world. The analysis points to four main observations. First, urban studies output is published in an extraordinarily wide range of journals, representing work from research communities across the social sciences and humanities, engineering, natural sciences and medical sciences. Second, clear global hierarchies exist in knowledge production, but co-authorship relations are also shaped by geographical proximity and the multidisciplinary profile of each individual research centre. Third, English is the dominant language of academic publications, but other languages play important roles for individual centres at the level of co-authorship relations and journals. Fourth, the article provides evidence of a diverse and globally distributed landscape of mid-sized urban studies centres that contribute substantially to the top urban studies journals. Each observation is linked to a reflection on the potential role for research centres in creating a more equal playing field for urban studies.
The Urban Agency III network meets in Athens
The Urban Agency III network will have its first meeting in Athens on 23rd August to discuss current issues in urban studies and to plan the next steps for the network.
The Urban Agency III website is launched
We are pleased to launch our new website, to share our events, interviews and results.
