Visualizing the Planetary Urban

Why visualize the planetary urban?

At the beginning of the 21st century, urbanization is widely recognized as a major factor in the extensive social, economic and environmental transformations that have been reshaping life on the planet (Soja and Kanai, 2007). Within this challenging context, one of the most prominent debates in global urban studies today centres on the emerging paradigm of planetary urbanization. Inspired by the writings of Henri Lefebvre (1970 [2003]), in the early 2010s Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid embarked on an intellectual journey to highlight the limitations of the ‘urban age thesis’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2014) and move beyond this to develop a new epistemology of the urban. The agenda was born and cemented in a series of landmark publications (Brenner and Schmid, 2011, 2015; Brenner, 2013, 2014), supported by groups of researchers working as part of the Urban Theory Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and ETH Zürich, alongside other engaged scholars (most notably Merrifield, 2013; Sevilla-Buitrago, 2014).

The emerging paradigm of planetary urbanization is invested both in the theoretical and the epistemological redefinition of the urban as a condition that transcends the city, as well as in the establishment of conceptual and methodological toolkits that would allow for a systematic investigation of a generalized condition of urbanization without an outside. Central to the planetary urban thesis is the stated aim for new urban theory in which, in Brenner’s words, ‘the conditions and trajectories of agglomerations (cities, city-regions, etc.) must be connected analytically to larger-scale processes of territorial reorganization, circulation (of labour, commodities, raw materials, nutrients, and energy), and resource extraction that ultimately encompass the space of the entire world’ (Brenner, 2013: 103–4).

[Page 13]Alongside new theories and concepts, the emerging paradigm of planetary urbanization is also driving forward important developments as we think through how best to do planetary urban research. New methods of cartographic investigation, geospatial analysis and visualization are forming an important part of the work examining the planetary urban. While terms such as the Urbanthropocene (Luke, 2014) try to highlight the expansive reach and complex nature of urbanization processes, continuous technological advancements in remote sensing, data science and Geographic Information Systems promise that their unprecedented dimensions can be thoroughly understood, charted, and eventually adequately managed (Potere and Schneider, 2007; Solecki et al., 2013). As grasping the multi-scalar urbanization processes becomes increasingly important to questions of uneven social and ecological development, the proliferation of new tools and methodologies of visualizing the planetary urban offers exciting new potentials.

However, while technical and quantitative advancements in visualizing the planetary urban are necessary, they are on their own largely insufficient to fully grasp the complexities of urbanization processes, as long as they are limited by a particular conceptualization of the urban: a conceptualization framed around the condition of agglomerations in their various forms (city, metropolis, megalopolis), primarily focusing on their socio-spatial configuration (growth, expansion, economic and demographic performance) and their relationships with each other (networks of cities, polycentric urban regions). This conceptualization has led to a paradoxical condition. While the importance of the relationship of agglomerations to the rest of the planetary terrain is widely recognized, it is poorly understood. Moreover, when it is considered, it is often framed through an unproductive binarism, that of the urban world exercising some sort of influence over its rural surroundings (Seto et al., 2012; Seitzinger et al., 2012). A summary of this understanding is offered by an introductory statement of the UN-Habitat agenda on ‘the global context’: cities, although covering no more than 2% of the total land area, host the majority of the world population and contribute around 70% of world GDP. At the same time, they absorb over 60% of global energy resources, and generate more than 70% of greenhouse gas emissions and 70% of global waste (UN-Habitat, 2016). In short, the urban world is a small percentage of the earth’s surface where the majority of the population is concentrated (Burdett and Sudjic, 2007; UN, 2012), characterized by the ability to contribute economic surpluses (Glaeser, 2011; Florida, 2012), but also ecological deficits, which are sourced and spread upon a great external, rural world of sparsely populated areas of low productivity (Rees and Wackernagel, 1996; Seto et al., 2010).

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