The Global Sociology Blog

Via the Guardian, this beautiful and ginormous graphic projecting urban populations and megacities (click on image for full view):

As the article notes:

“Chengdu made the headlines in Britain late last year when it exported two pandas to Scotland, and it is developing a reputation as the centre of Sichuan’s prized cuisine. But few in the west have paid much attention to the astonishing rise of Chengdu, despite a population (including its rural hinterland) of more than 14 million and its evident economic power and growing sense of self-confidence. Few have heard much either of cities like Ghaziabad, Surat or Faridabad in India, or of Toluca in Mexico, Palembang in Indonesia or Chittagong, the Bangladeshi port. Or of Beihai, another Chinese city on the northern coast. But this is likely to change. Each of these cities is among the fastest-growing settlements in the world. Their cumulative growth is set to usher in a new era of city living, changing the face of the planet. Beihai, which already has 1.3 million inhabitants, is set to double its population in seven years. The municipality of Chengdu will reach 20 million. Ghaziabad, now itself part of the urban sprawl of the Indian capital Delhi, is already home to nearly four million people.

Crucially, though experts estimate that the number of megacities of more than 10 million inhabitants will double over the next 10 to 20 years, it is these less well-known cities, particularly in south and east Asia, that will see the biggest growth. Predicting what the new era will bring is taxing economists, senior businessmen, security experts and strategists across the world.

Optimists see a new network of powerful, stable and prosperous city states, each bigger than many small countries, where the benefits of urban living, the relative ease of delivering basic services compared to rural zones and new civic identities combine to raise living standards for billions. Pessimists see the opposite: a dystopic future where huge numbers of people fight over scarce resources in sprawling, divided, anarchic “non-communities” ravaged by disease and violence.

Nowhere is this more evident than in India, where years of underinvestment, chaotic development and rapid population growth have combined with poor governance and outdated financial systems to threaten an urban disaster.”

Now go read Saskia Sassen’s The Global City and Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums. The future will be urban.

Via Urban Demographics:

Via Urban Demographic, this awesome visualization of urban growth for selected cities:

I know, I know, but I couldn’t help it.

Anyhoo, in her inimitable style, Saskia Sassen updates her ideas regarding global cities with different items.

First, the ‘smart city” and urbanizing technologies:

Lift 2011 – URBAN – Saskia Sassen from videosfing on Vimeo.

It is worth 30 minutes of your time on the topic of the city as strategic space.

As Sassen states:

“This notion of urbanizing technology is one of several along those lines that I have been working out for a while. The starting point was not necessarily cities. It was the notion that in interactive domains the technology delivers its capabilities through ecologies that include non-technological variables –the social and the subjective, the logics/aims of users, for example finance uses the technology with different aims from Amnesty international, etc etc. Again, I make this argument for interactive domains, not, say, data pipelines.

There is another condition present in the interactive domain, separate from the technology itself. At the beginning I studied how the logic of finance (a sector that is deeply embedded in digital networks and digitized spaces) is not the logic of the engineer and computer scientist and software developer who made the digital domain. The effect is that the user (finance) does not necessarily use all the properties that the engineer etc. put into it. I also looked at civil society organizations along the same lines. This helps explain why the outcomes never correspond to what we may have predicted based on the capacities of the technology.

Now I am looking at cities through the same lens. Users bring their own logics to these technologies. In the case of a city with its vast diversities of people and what makes them tick, the outcome can be quite different from what the designers expected. And this matters. This keeps the city alive, and open. When you embed interactive technologies in urban settings, it is important to allow for this mutating as diverse types of users bring their own logics to those technologies. If the technology controls all outcomes in a routinized fashion ((as if it were a data pipeline) there is a high risk that it will become obsolete, or less and less used, or so routinized that it barely is interactive. More like buying a ticket from an automaton: yes you have choices, but you can hardly call this interactive.

The key, difficult, and ever changing question is how do we keep technologies open, responsive to environmental signals and to users choices, including what may seem quirky from the perspective of the engineer. The city is full of signals and quirky uses: given a chance , it would urbanize a whole range of technologies. But this possibility needs to be made – it is not simply a function of interactive technologies as we know them now, and it needs to go beyond the embedded feedback capability. Open Source is more like it.”

And I especially find this important:

“Urbanity is a mutant. And this means it is made and remade along many different concepts/ideas/imaginations across the world. It can happen in sites where we, we of our westernized culture, might not see it. At night in working class neighborhoods of Shanghai bus stops become public spaces –that is urbanity. In some megacities the only spaces that the poor, often homeless have, are what during daytime hours we see as infrastructure: spaces where multiple bus lines intersect or end in. There are many many such examples of practices that destabilize the formal meaning of a space: this, again, takes making, and in that making lies an urbanity. I do think that urbanity is made; it is not only beautifully designed urban settings.”

In addition to these ideas, Sassen also recently wrote of the city as technology of war in the context of new wars and asymmetric conflicts:

“Cities have long been sites for conflicts – wars, racisms, religious hatreds, expulsions of the poor. And yet, where national states have historically responded by militarizing conflict, cities have tended to triage conflict through commerce and civic activity. But major developments in the current global era signal that cities are losing this capacity and becoming sites for a whole range of new types of conflicts, such as asymmetric war and urban violence. Further, the dense and conflictive spaces of cities overwhelmed by inequality and injustice can become the sites for a variety of secondary, more anomic types of conflicts arising from drug wars or the major environmental disasters looming in our immediate futures. All of these challenge that traditional commercial and civic capacity that has allowed cities to avoid war more often than not, when confronted with conflict, and to incorporate diversity of class, culture, religion, ethnicity.” (33)

Emphases mine.

More specifically, Sassen identifies three challenges for global governance that being played out in the cities:

1. New military asymmetries where the search for national security creates conditions of urban insecurity
2. Global warming and other environmental issues more likely to create major urban breakdowns
3. Urban violence as visible in Ciudad Juarez (gang and police violence) and Baghdad (military and insurgent violence as massive asymmetries)

It is not hard to see that over the past 20 years, much terrorist violence has taken place in cities, along with other forms of conflicts. Such conflicts can either push people to the cities (mass displacement) or expel them from urban environments (ethnic cleansing or the creation of ethnic or religious ghettoes). Such segregating practices are also used to separate the wealthy from the impoverished or downwardly mobile.

The important thing here, for Sassen, is that all these trends undermine the city’s ability to be a source of coexistence, diversity, and cosmopolitanism at a time or reassemblage of the state and global governance.

Read the whole thing.

One of the things that those of us who teach undergraduate sociology try to get across to our students is the idea that social structures shape behavior. It may seem obvious to us but in a highly individualistic and puritanical culture, our students are more used to looking at behavior in psychological or moral terms. So, simply stating the idea that structure shapes behavior goes against the grain.

One nice way of illustrating the “environments / contexts / structures shape behavior” idea is how (sub)urban ecology determines human interactions, actions and practices. After all, every French student that Baron Haussman designed Paris’s large and wide boulevard to prevent the riff-raff from erecting barricades and to make it easier for the cavalry to charge against popular demonstrations.

And via Karl Bakeman, here is another good illustration using the urban development example:

“Crappy urban development isn’t just ugly and noisy and dirty. It is turning out to be lethal.

One Toronto study looked at how the quality of a community’s streets can affect people’s health, factoring into drastically reduced life expectancy. It’s the focus of an article in The Globe and Mail that discusses how Toronto and other cities are segregated not just by race and income, but also by the quality of the built environment — and what that division means for residents’ health.

People living in less walkable, outlying parts of the city, with less access to green space and recreational opportunities, as well as healthy food, are at increased risk of obesity and diabetes:

The first Canadian study of its kind, published in 2007, the Diabetes Atlas investigated 140 Toronto neighborhoods over three years to examine the role of several factors — including community design, population density, access to healthy and unhealthy food — on the diabetes epidemic. Poverty and ethnicity were found to be key in the development of type 2 diabetes. The researchers also concluded that walking and transit times to recreation facilities in the city’s outlying neighborhoods were as long as 40 minutes and 20 minutes, respectively, each way. It takes only 30 minutes of walking or moderate exercise, combined with a healthy diet, to cut the risk of diabetes in half. But a walk through a bleak or potentially dangerous neighborhood is hardly inspiring, especially if the only nearby landmark is a highway …

We used to call them ugly, but now social geographers and medical practitioners label the disconnected sections of the city “obesogenic,” meaning environments that promote obesity.

“Obesogenic” is not a word I had ever heard before I read this article. But apparently it’s been around since about 1996. It makes sense that somebody would have coined it — the Centers for Disease Control reports that nine states in the United States now have more than 30 percent obesity rates.

How did we get there? Sheldon Jacobson of the University of Illinois has just released a study looking at the correlation between increasing automobile use and increasing obesity:

After analyzing data from national statistics measured between 1985 and 2007, Jacobson discovered vehicle use correlated “in the 99-percent range” with national annual obesity rates.

“If we drive more, we become heavier as a nation, and the cumulative lack of activity may eventually lead to, at the aggregate level, obesity,” he said …

The sedentary lifestyle that automobile use enables coupled with the prevalent role it plays in increasing the sprawl of our cities, towns and suburbs is the “societal price we pay for always being in a rush to get places,” Jacobson said.

“For the last 60-plus years, we’ve literally built our society around the automobile and getting from point A to point B as quickly as we can. Because we choose to drive rather than walk or cycle, the result is an inactive, sedentary lifestyle. Not coincidentally, obesity also became a public health issue during this period.”

Before the automobile became such a prevalent mode of transportation for the vast majority of Americans, “it took much more energy just to live,” Jacobson said.

The thing is, even if you don’t own an automobile, you live in a place that is built for them — because by now, every place is. As the Toronto study and others in the United States have revealed, it’s not just the autocentric suburban states in the so-called “Diabetes Belt” that have a problem. Residents of dense urban areas also suffer from high rates of obesity and diabetes, in part because of the lack of healthy food choices, in part because certain ethnic groups are more predisposed to diabetes, and in part because the streetscape is degraded and ignored. The problem is worst in parts of the city like New York’s Southwest Bronx — where neglected street infrastructure, pedestrian-unfriendly design, crime rates, and urban freeways make it unpleasant or unsafe to spend much time outside.”

Read the whole thing.

Via Urban Demographics, this very neat series of interactive visuals from the McKinsey Quarterly:

Global cities of the future: An interactive map – McKinsey Quarterly – Economic Studies – Productivity & Performance via kwout

Via Inhabitat: where’s Wall-E?

As the blog post notes,

“This unbelievable city piled high with trash is a real place called Garbage City, outside of Cairo in Egypt. It’s populated by a community of workers called Zabbaleen, who personally collect, sort, reuse, resell or otherwise repurpose Cairo’s waste. Recently several photographers have trained their cameras upon the city, and now we see what it would really be like to live in the aftermath of our own consumption.”

Get over there and check out the other photos.

UN Habitat has just published its State of African Cities 2010: Governance, Inequality and Urban Land Market. Globally, the 21st century is and will continue to be an urban century, but especially so in the periphery. As the report states:

“In 2009 Africa’s total population for the first time exceeded one billion, of which 395 million (or almost 40 per cent) lived in urban areas. Whereas it took 27 years for the continent to double from 500 million to one billion people, the next 500 million will only take 17 years. Around 2027, Africa’s demographic growth will start to slow down and it will take 24 years to add the next 500 million, reaching the two billion mark around 2050, of which about 60 per cent living in cities. Africa should prepare for a total population increase of about 60 per cent between 2010 and 2050, with the urban population tripling to 1.23 billion during this period.

Strong demographic growth in a city is neither good nor bad on its own. Experience shows that across the world, urbanisation has been associated with improved human development, rising incomes and better living standards. However, these benefits do not come automatically; they require well-devised public policies that can steer demographic growth, turn urban accumulation of activities and resources into healthy economies, and ensure equitable distribution of wealth. When public policies are of benefit only for small political or economic elites, urbanisation will almost inevitably result in instability, as cities become unliveable for rich and poor alike.

Around 2030, Africa’s collective population will become 50 per cent urban. The majority of political constituencies will then live in cities, demanding means of subsistence, shelter and services. African governments should take early action to position themselves for predominantly urban populations. In the early 2040s, African cities will collectively be home to one billion, equivalent to the continent’s total population in 2009. Since cities are the future habitat for the majority of Africans, now is the time for spending on basic infrastructure, social services (health and education) and affordable housing, in the process stimulating urban economies and generating much- needed jobs. Deferring these investments to the 2040s simply will not do. Not a single African government can afford to ignore the ongoing rapid urban transition. Cities must become priority areas for public policies, with investment to build adequate governance capacities, equitable services delivery, affordable housing provision and better wealth distribution. If cities are to meet these needs, municipal finance must be strengthened with more fiscal freedom and own-source funding.”

This growth is dramatically illustrated by the following graph:

By cities:

These policy recommendations are all well and good but one has to wonder how developing countries are expected to fulfill them, especially those relating to massive public investments in infrastructure and human capital, considering the history of structural adjustment policies imposed by institutions of global governance upon these countries. The state of urban Africa has everything to do with what Mike Davis calls being “SAPed”.

As Mike Davis states in Planet of Slums:

“Slums, however deadly and secure, have a brilliant future. The countryside will for a short period still contain the majority of the world’s poor, but that dubious distinction will pass to urban slums no later than 2035. At least half of the coming Third World urban population explosion will be credited to the account of informal communities. Two billion slum-dwellers by 2030 or 2040 is a monstrous, almost incomprehensible prospect, but urban poverty overlaps and exceeds slum populations per se. Researchers with the UN Urban Observatory project warn that by 2020, “urban poverty in the world could reach 45 to 50 percent of the total population living the cities.” (151)

But as Davis demonstrates, this is not something that just happens. This is the culmination of 40 years of global development policy imposed by the IMF and the World Bank, and that has been a massive failure, practically everywhere it has been imposed. Rural peasant families do not move to already overcrowded cities, with uncertain prospects just because it looks fun. Part of the structural adjustment policies (SAPs) involved removal of subsidies, tariffs and price control / support on agricultural goods. As a result, peripheral peasants became unable to compete with heavily subsidized American and European agricultural goods. So, when they can no longer make a living, they more to urban areas.

At the same time, SAPs also required the shrinking of the public sector, lay off of workers, diminution of state capacities, and the privatization of the most basic services such as health care and education. So, these new urban dwellers faced a situation of unemployment and lack of basic services at a time where the people already there were facing downward mobility. As always, along with the losers (those who ended up in the food riots), there were winners at the SAPs games: privatizers, foreign importers, organized crimes, traffickers of all kinds, military and political elites.

And unsurprisingly, there is a gender aspect to this:

“As male formal employment opportunities disappeared, mothers, sisters, and wives were typically forced to bear far more than half the weight of urban structural adjustment. (…) As geographer Sylvia Chant emphasizes, poor urban women under SAPs had to work harder both inside and outside the home to compensate for cuts in social service expenditures and male incomes; simultaneously new or increased user fees further limited their access to education and healthcare. Somehow, they were expected to cope. Indeed, some researchers argue that SAPs cynically exploit the belief that women labor-power is almost infinitely elastic in the face of household survival needs. This is the guilty secret variable in most neoclassical equations of economic adjustment: poor women and their children are expected to lift the weight of the Third World debt upon their shoulders.” (158)

And so, women went to work in economic development zones, in the formal sector, in the informal sector, in the illegal sector, anywhere there was a little money to be made… and then, especially in Africa, the AIDS crisis started (poverty-imposed prostitution for poor women was a part of the story).  No wonder the 1980s was called the Lost Decade.

But in the current context, it looks like we’re all in for more shock therapy.

The City and The City is the first book by China Mieville I have read. I got myself a Kindle copy when it got the Hugo Award. It is an awesome novel, and as usual, it is a great source for sociological analysis. At its most basic, The City and The City is a murder mystery coupled with a touch of conspiracy theory. But, as usual for sociologist me, the most interesting part of the book is the social context underpinning the story.

The story takes place in an unusual urban context of two city-states, Besźel and Ul-Qoma, that occupy the same physical space somewhere in Eastern Europe. The cities are divided between areas that are total (totally in one), alter (totally in the other) or crosshatched (in either). In areas that the cities share, citizens of either city have been socialized to unsense the other: to unsee, unhear, unsmell everything from the other city. And at the center is Copula Hall, the official border between the city and the city.

What this means is that when one is walking – or driving through – the streets of Besźel, for instance, one must NOT see, hear or smell anything from Ul-Qoma (and vice-versa). People from either city practice this constant act of dramaturgy of not sensing the other city that exists in the same physical space. Goffman would have had a field day with all the studied non-0bservance that takes place as people, more or less automatically and immediately unsee things happening in the other city. In fact, the entire social structure of both cities is based on that unsensing so much so that when things happen that make that almost impossible, social order is on the verge of collapse and extreme measures are taken.

So, this common space has two social structures, one for Besźel and one for Ul-Qoma, two different cultures, languages, food, clothing, etc. And it looks like Ul-Qoma (a vaguely communist country, boycotted by the US) is the more economically dynamic of the two.

In this context, people are expected to thoroughly respect the division between the city and the city. If they violate the separations, they breach. They are then spirited away by Breach, the mysterious force in charge of enforcing the division. No one knows what happens to people who have been taken by Breach. In this society, breaching is the most serious offense that deserves the most serious punishment (although what that is remains a mystery, for most part of the book). It is a given that, at some point, someone will breach and we, readers, will get to figure out what Breach really is and what it really does. Breach is perceived as a kind of omniscient Big Brother with the power to detect any breach and swing into action when that happens. Not breaching is a major fear for all the citizens of the city and the city.

Needless to say, the city and the city are themselves marked by social conflicts: each city has its own nationalist movement, strict supporters of the Cleavage (the separation between the city and the city) as well as its Unifs, the unificators, the movements promoting the reunification of the city and the city.

Throughout the book, we follow the detective in charge of solving the murder as he navigates the complexities of this intricate structure in the course of his investigation. He is from Besźel, but at some point is assigned to Ul-Qoma so that we get to compare the two cultures.

Ultimately, his own breach is what gives us an insight into the way Breach works and to the conclusion of the book, which one could read as a perfect manifesto for the social construction of reality or ethnomethodology as his Breach avatar explains to him:

“Nowhere else works like the cities,” he said. “It’s not just us keeping them apart. It’s everyone in Besźel and everyone in Ul Qoma. Every minute, every day. We’re only the last ditch: it’s everyone in the cities who does most of the work. It works because you don’t blink. That’s why unseeing and unsensing are so vital. No one can admit it doesn’t work. So if you don’t admit it, it does. But if you breach, even if it’s not your fault, for more than the shortest time … you can’t come back from that.”” (5664)

“Doing” the city and the city is a matter of minutiae of social interaction (accomplished and denied at the same time) and constitutes an enormous amount of interactive collaboration (also as necessary as it is denied). It is this architecture of interaction that sustains the dual social structure and collective underpinning of the city and the city.

A fascinating read.

Bad pun, I know (great book though)

One does not have to be an expert on Saskia Sassen to know that the city is at the heart of social change in the age of globalization, from global cities to planet of slums, a great deal of research has focused on how cities promote, or adapt to, social change and how cities are hubs of global social dynamics of class, inequalities, gender and ecology.

For instance, take this first item on the rise of “slow cities”:

“La municipalité est la première de France à adhérer à Cittaslow, le réseau international des “villes lentes”. Inspiré du slow food, le mouvement est né en Italie en 1999 et promeut une gestion municipale centrée sur la qualité de vie, l’économie de proximité, le respect des paysages…, en réaction aux zones commerciales et industrielles, à l’étalement pavillonnaire et au tout-voiture devenus l’ordinaire d’un urbanisme débridé.

Cette révolution tranquille compte de plus en plus de partisans. Cent quarante villes de 21 pays ont déjà adhéré à cette charte de 70 obligations. On trouve des villes lentes dans toute l’Europe, mais aussi en Australie, en Corée du Sud, en Turquie, au Canada…”

The slow city movement, with its international network Cittaslow, is inspired by the slow food movement. The idea is to promote local management focused on quality of life, local economies and ecology, as opposed to suburban sprawl and industrial areas that belt large European cities.

The idea is to give small towns and cities common development ideas and some support when faced with the behemoth of suburban and commercial development. And ideas are certainly numerous: public parks, urban renewal, development of farmers’s market, pedestrian-only areas, environmentally-friendly systems of water treatment, etc. This plugs into the de-growth movement.

At the same time at we witness a “slowing down” movement, the opposite exists as well: speeding up (something that has characterized contemporary globalization). For Ekaterina Yudin, this entails the possibility of a social crowdsourced city:

“There’s a new dimension in town. The physical spaces we inhabit are being transformed by cellspace technologies (also referred to as mobile media, wireless media, or location-based media), where data is constantly being delivered to and extracted from mobile physical space dwellers; for us, the result is an overlay of dynamic augmented data made possible by the always-growing and ever-more-connected network (Manovich, 2005).

The time has come for the virtual and physical to come together and the interplay of data is creating multi-dimensional and date-mined spaces; I know where you are, what you’re eating, who you’re hanging out with — and if I should check out your favorite lunch spot and have that sandwich you just melted over.

Yes, this is the power of today’s connected information culture – of being plugged into the social web enabled by our handy and ubiquitous mobile smart phones that are becoming the digital sensors of our physical spaces (why can’t a phone be just a phone?). In the time that we, the united citizens of the world wide web, got used to the idea of sharing previously private information about ourselves and our whereabouts publicly from our desktops and laptops, phone data speeds have expanded, device functionality has improved and access to the internet has transcended former boundaries where you could only connect to the ‘web’ through a computer. Now we’re not only getting online via a phone but we are no longer just connecting to the web when we ‘go online’ – we connect to people and the information they’re sharing, and more of the time we are connecting to social networking applications that dictate these fluid interactions today – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare, and the like.”

The difference here is that the slow city project is a collective one, territorially based. The crowdsourced city is individualized and deterritorialized (despite the fake territorialism of geolocation platforms), pretending to be egalitarian and democratic while it is in fact exclusive and unequal. There is a high price of entry to this realm: slum-dwellers need not apply.

And speaking of global migration, behold the arrival city:

“What kind of neighbourhood is Thorncliffe Park? It certainly is one of the poorest in Toronto: Family incomes average $20,000 and the poverty rate is estimated at 44 per cent.

It is also ethnically concentrated, with as much as 51 per cent of its population speaking an Asian language at home and only a small minority of pink-skinned Euro-Canadians in its buildings.

It could be described as an impoverished ethnic ghetto. Yet Thorncliffe Park is not seen that way – not by its residents, by the agencies and businesses within it, by the scholars who have studied it, nor by the city beyond it.

It’s a popular place with vacancy rates close to zero despite unusually high rents; in fact, there are long waiting lists for apartments.

The ex-villagers here have an amazingly consistent record of entering the middle-class, urban mainstream within a generation. They launch small shops and other businesses and send their children into postsecondary education.

The area’s poverty is not a sign of failure: It means that Thorncliffe Park, like many such neighbourhoods, is functioning as a highly successful engine of economic and social integration, churning people out as fast as it takes them in, constantly renewing itself with fresh arrivals.

This is one paradox of such places: The higher their apparent poverty rate, the more successful they are.

For much of the past century, Canada has been built on successful arrival cities – more by luck than by intent. But increasingly few are like Thorncliffe Park: There are too many like the isolated, violence-plagued Flemingdon Park in Toronto, or the destitute high-rise voids of Richmond and Surrey around Vancouver, or Peel Region adjoining Toronto.

In those neglected neighbourhoods, people are poor because they are trapped. In a thriving arrival city like Thorncliffe Park, they are moving onward.

The trick is to look not at the wealth of the residents but at their trajectories.

“Everyone in Thorncliffe, all are beginners, all are struggling,” says Seema Khatri, 42, who recently moved out of the neighbourhood to buy a house in suburban Don Mills.

She came from a village in Haryana in northern India. She spent several years in Thorncliffe, working at rudimentary jobs in a cosmetics factory and struggling to get her Indian educational credentials recognized.

The neighbourhood’s networks of arrivals, she says, helped her make her way.

“In Thorncliffe, when you go out, you meet with people who are also struggling. You talk to your neighbours at the deli. They exchange information.”

This is how it works in the arrival city.”

What makes the arrival city a major tool of social mobility and integration is linkage:

“The arrival city can be distinguished readily from other urban neighbourhoods, not only by its rural-immigrant population, improvised appearance and ever-changing nature, but also by the constant linkages it makes, in two directions, from every street, house and workplace.

It is linked in a lasting, intensive way to its far-off, originating villages, constantly sending people, money and knowledge back and forth. It finances improvements in the village, the care of older generations and the education of younger ones, while also making possible the next wave of migrations.

It is also deeply engaged with the nearby, established city. Its political institutions, business relationships, social networks and transactions are all footholds intended to give new village arrivals a purchase, however fragile, on the larger society.

The arrival city gives them a place to push themselves and their children further into the centre, into acceptability and connectedness.”

Social capital, and especially bridging capital, is what matters here. Read the whole thing.

The slow city, the crowdsourced city and the arrival city all point at different and contradictory effects of globalizing social conditions. They point to the increasing power of the civil society and social movements in pushing for social change not imposed from the top but they all involve different social actors, pointing to the multilayered nature of globalization.

That is, if the disemployed and disenfranchised masses (that would be the middle classes) don’t mess it up:

“The International Labour Organisation (ILO) has warned of growing social unrest because it fears global employment will not now recover until 2015.

This is two years later than its earlier estimate that the labour market would rebound to pre-crisis levels by 2013. About 22 million new jobs are needed – 14 million in rich countries and 8 million in developing nations.

The United Nations work agency today warned of a long “labour market recession” and noted that social unrest related to the crisis had already been reported in at least 25 countries, including some recovering emerging economies.

risis-hit Spain faced its first general strike in eight years this week as unions protested against the government’s austerity measures and labour reforms. The strike on Wednesday coincided with protests in Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Slovenia and Lithuania, as well asdemonstrations in Brussels by tens of thousands of workers from across Europe as part of a European day of action against public spending cuts.

“Fairness must be the compass guiding us out of the crisis,” said ILO director general Juan Somavia. “People can understand and accept difficult choices, if they perceive that all share in the burden of pain. Governments should not have to choose between the demands of financial markets and the needs of their citizens. Financial and social stability must come together. Otherwise, not only the global economy but also social cohesion will be at risk.”"

Full report here, video here, for a very Durkheimian analysis of how economic recession threatens social cohesion.

Via Chad Gesser, a really good interactive visual on global urbanizing trends:

1955:

BBC NEWS | | Urbanisation via kwout

2015:

BBC NEWS | | Urbanisation via kwout

The sociosphere gives us two good examples of analysis of usage of public spaces from a different perspective.

First, we have Italian sociologist and fellow socblogger Agnese Vardanega, with a photo slideshow on the different ways in which public spaces and public benches can be structured to shape people’s behavior and the strategies of resistance to such prohibitions and city ordinances that sitting / drinking / eating is not allowed.

This normative structuring of public spaces involves a form of Foucauldian bodily discipline. A common example is to have separators on public benches so that it is not possible (or at the very least, extremely uncomfortable) to lie down, and the targets are obviously homeless people. The idea is to make discipline bodies and make public spaces unfriendly to socially undesirable categories.

On the agency side of things, the Urban Ethnographer develops a typology of behaviors in subway dwellers depending on the way these people interact with the structured environment of the subway:

• Campers
• Close standers
• Door dwellers
• Lurkers
• Packers
• Pole huggers
• Sleepers
• Sprawlers
• Squeezers

I have met them all in the Paris subway… and that’s without mentioning the creeps of all sorts, y’know, the pukers, the guys who press their boners against you, etc.

“Riding the subway is a unique social experience. As mass transit, it is used by people of all cultures and backgrounds, and undoubtedly people have different notions of what are socially acceptable interactions. However, quite a few of the categories above can create uncomfortable situations as you find yourself in close bodily contact with strangers as a result of their actions. An alarming trend that has grown out of this is the rise of sexual harassment on the subways. In close quarters, people are groped, and according to the comments in response to the campaign, been ejaculated on and rubbed up against. One emptier trains, or when riding late at night, riders have reported men exposing themselves. It’s clearly a jungle out there. The Holla Back blog provides a forum where people can share their subway harassment stories—be warned if you visit the site that some of the stories are quite explicit. The MTA launched an anti-harassment campaign, but it remains to be seen how effective it has been.”

I am sure most women have experienced these. What is amazing is how much being such close proximity modifies the norms of behavior, beyond just having a bunch of people intruding into one’s personal space, how little direct confrontation there is against obvious behavior, and how much studied nonobservance everyone engages in.

When I moved to Paris, one of the very first lessons I learned was to not make eye contact with anyone, especially on the subway. This directive shapes a great deal of behavior. This was before iPods but there were walkmans available, also, newspapers and pocket books were common devices to avoid eye contact.

There is no doubt that the subway is a more threatening environment for women than for men and that behavioral strategies are gendered. In the Paris subway, creeps would target young women (either as a form of sexual harassment, but homeless people and obviously mentally ill people would do that as well because young women are the least threatening category to them). So, the no eye contact rule is especially crucial for young women.

For the record, I’m a door dweller, especially for the whiff of not fresh but different air you get at every station.

Sciences Humaines has a new issue dedicated to cities. It is filed in its geography area on the website but there is no doubt that urban ecology has been a topic of interest to sociology very early on as nexus of social dynamics, processes and practices.

Les nouvelles capitales du monde via kwout

Of course, a whole issue on the cities would not be complete without a contribution from Saskia Sassen, über-urban sociologist and foremost expert on global cities.

L’archipel des villes globales via kwout

It’s in French, of course, so I’ll provide a rough summary.

There is a tendency to imagine the global economy as a flat space (Friedman’s misguided flat world metaphor comes to mind) where one could neatly distinguish areas of prosperity and of poverty. It is misleading though. Rather than speak of the world economy, one should talk about a multiplicity of networks connecting different types of cities or regions. There are more than sixty financial networks and many oil networks coexisting with the  global geographies of industrial production. No single city is involved with all these networks. Mumbai, for instance, is part of the real estate investment network with London and Bogota. New York and São Paulo are core nodes in the global coffee trade. Shanghai dominates the network of copper. Despite this “division of labor”, London, along with a dozen of other cities, distinguishes itself by being connected to an unusually large number of  diverse networks.

In other words, the global economy reflects the complex geography of cities networks whose dynamics are not exclusively economic but also based on global migration, cultural exchanges, global civil society networks and others. The global urban networks are an integral part of the complex infrastructure of globalization. Conversely, global networks (such as finance or civil society) are becoming more and more urban, connecting urban dwellers. The more globally connected a city, the more power it carries within the world-system and within the division of labor within the world-system as there is still some degree of economic specialization. I would add that this idea of division of labor (rather than competition) is very reminiscent of Neil Fliegstein’s conception of markets as fields in search of stability… from this perspective, the global division of labor among global cities might operate as a conception of control.

Global firms select their localization based on the global city’s functional specialization and the firms’ objectives. At the same time, all global cities have common features, such as comparable architecture for their business districts (same hotel chains, for instance) but each city somewhat manages to keep its specific ecology. At the same time, global competencies do not fall from the sky and, along with specialization of global cities, there has been the massive development in jobs dedicated to services to private businesses to navigate the global landscape. The global city is the place where such competencies are developed and distributed across networks. These competencies are also distributed from the global city to its nation, thereby connecting the local, national and global levels. After all, most of the 300,000 multinational corporations have their headquarters still located in their country of origin. At the same time, MNCs find it useful to operate across global cities networks precisely because of the division of global labor. This functional specialization might determine where a firm will locate its operations.

The diversity and complementarity of global cities is a perfect illustration of the multi-polarity of globalization.

At the same time, there has been a price to pay for the development of global cities. Popular, low-class downtown areas may have been destroyed to make room for high-end business districts. This has contributed to urban segregation and stratification. Low-income populations and low-profitability firms have been relegated to the peripheries. At the same time, when the financial crisis hit New York City (along with the rest of the US and beyond), the losses to the city were massive in terms of unpaid real estate debt. And these losses have not been compensated by business revenues from MNCs. What seems to have been forgotten in the globalization frenzy of these cities is that they are better able to fulfill their global economic function when they rely on a strong middle class. Conversely, things do not work so well when cities are marred with major inequalities, between abject misery and ostentatious luxury. Apparently, businesses are reluctant to settle in highly unequal cities (Fliegstein is relevant here again as highly unequal cities might be a source of instability). This is why European cities have fared better than American cities in this respect.

For instance, Mumbai and São Paulo are two of the most powerful financial centers of the world. Yet, their status within global networks is hurt by the fact that they are characterized by social devastation. Cities leaders would be well-advised to learn from this rather than just try to attract extreme wealth from business elites.

How can a town or a city make sure that the sight of homeless people does not offend the good, hard-working citizens? Especially in these bad economic times when there might be more of them hanging around the cities of France? Easy, make it impossible for them to sit down where they normally would, but not obviously, of course. This mode of exclusion has to be stealth and not esthetically unpleasant.

That is what this series of photos over at Rue 89 shows. For instance, these discreet little spikes:

Or even these small pyramids:

Or the falling dominoes:

When it comes to making it uncomfortable for homeless people to sit down and take the load off, cities can be very creative. Do check out the entire series of photos:

Empêcher les SDF de s’asseoir : la ville ne manque pas d’idées | Rue89 via kwout

These devices clearly delimit who is a legitimate participant in the public space and therefore who is a legitimate urban denizen.

Customary sociological statement: good science-fiction is good sociology.

Disclaimer: I’m an idiot when it comes to short stories and novellas. I always feel like I am missing something or that something has been kept out of the story.

Metatropolis is an interesting project: five established science-fiction writers produce stories on a common theme with some, but not too much, overlap (AKA the shared-world genre). Initially, the project was released as an audiobook, then turned into a book (with a great cover design, in my opinion). John Scalzi is the editor and the author of one of the stories. The other authors are Jay Lake (whose story opens the collection), Tobias Buckell, Elizabeth Bear and Karl Schroeder.

All the stories take place in a post-affluence, post-fossil fuel future. The oil is finally largely gone. Environmental degradation has finally vanquished the unsustainable lifestyles of Western societies. So how do people live in what were the major structures of the post-scarcity world, the cities? In a way, it’s like all the authors sat down with Saskia Sassen and got the run down on global cities and global flows.

The basic premise of all the stories is to explore how people live and work as the major social institutions institutions and structures collapsed, including capitalism. What economic systems emerge out of the rubble? Which categories of people come out on top? What does the post-national, post-capitalist world look like? And what of the new technologies, the Web 2.0 stuff? What use are they in this context? What kinds of social solidarity.

Indeed, all the stories revolve around a character trying to find his/her place in this new world and navigate its omnipresent dangers, risks and insecurities. The stories depict a world of thorough surveillance society combined with some measure of anarchy as many groups successfully manage to create their own parallel realities, real or virtual. In all the stories, precarious conditions are the norm. Certainties are gone. The main characters hop from odd job to odd job without much direction. They are perpetual consultants based on their skills but always literally and figuratively out of place.

And so, each story proposes its own version of social structuring after the end of oil. In Jay Lake’s story, it’s the Cascadian neo-anarchist, living-in-harmony-with-nature commune. In Tobias Buckell’s story, it’s the eco-terrorist collectives reclaiming of urban space for sustainable, vertical agriculture. In Elizabeth Bear’s story, this reclaiming takes place partly outside of the city. In John Scalzi story, we see more clearly the return of the medieval, yet high-tech, zero footprint, city-state, sovereign and autonomous, and closed-off to The Wilds (everything outside of it) fighting off the “Barbarians at the Gate”. And in Karl Schroeder’s story, the new cities / societies take the form of alternate virtual realities.

All the stories are stories of struggle: the main characters struggle with the consequences of their past actions, struggle to find their place in this new world but are often nomads. Surviving doing odd jobs, they find themselves in the middle of power plays between different groups, often the remnants of the oil society who try to hold on to what is left, using the security company Edgewater (does that sound familiar?) to do their dirty work of cracking a few eco-freaks and anarchist skulls versus the urban renewal groups. Metatropolis is a world in flux. Old boundaries have disappeared (including boundaries between the real and the virtual) and the major societal struggles are between those who wish to erect new barriers and those who accept to live in a world of flows.

Which means, of course, that social inequalities have not disappeared. There are still privileged classes (those who have access to the remaining resources and hold on to them) and the disadvantaged masses, trying to figure out how to survive in the dislocated (literally and figuratively) world. In this context, the forms of solidarity that emerge are of the tribal or network type. Whatever security is to be found in the real world come from joining a tribe and in the virtual alternate realities, from plugging into networks. Indeed, in Karl Schroeder’s story, Manuel Castells’s network society has found it full incarnation (an inadequate term for virtual societies overlaid over the real one).

In other words, Metatropolis raises the perennial sociological question of the possibility of social order in the post-affluence, post-fossil fuel world and each other provides his/her specific answer. The city, in all the stories, remains at the heart of social structuration, albeit in a permanently conflicting and blurry way. These globally-connected cities truly are Saskia Sassen’s global assemblages.