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Contributions from
the Column
Focus
Innovative milieus
“My real education was working in the slums“
Finding ways out of poverty
Energy efficiency for Rio de Janeiro
Split households
12/2004
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Innovative milieus
Cities provide the local bases for international linkages. This is where the virtual worlds of highly specified communication networks are anchored. Complicating matters, globalisation and urbanisation have certain features in common. They challenge the existing order, constantly frustrate planning and emphasise plurality. Tension is the norm, cannot be avoided, and must, therefore, be handled constructively. Not coincidentally, however, cities possess civilising qualities: their very existence depends on reducing levels of violence.
[ By Rüdiger Korff ]
Globalisation and urbanisation are two trends characterising the present. These two phenomena are closely linked because globalisation means that global networks emerge, which have their nodes in cities. The networks are heterogeneous, frequently based on competition and provide the stuff of which conflicts are made. At stake are cash flows, trans-national companies, international civil society, migrant groups, religious communities, multilateral politics and cultural interdependencies. Nor should one forget the challenges of organised transnational crime or global terrorism.
As the UN Report of 2001 “Cities in a Globalizing World” (Habitat 2001:75) correctly states, cities are strategic sites and will become even more so. This is where global interests seek to maximize profits, but also where local grassroots and civil society develop new claims to assert rights to liveable urban space.
Global cities
“Global cities” are defined as locations, which support international networking. They are under particular pressure and it sometimes even seems doubtful whether a global city can be treated as a single, coherent entity at all. There is a prevailing trend towards fragmentation because of the permanent competition of various norms and values, identities and social realities. This trend is exacerbated when populations organise in various local networks. On the other hand, the global networks use virtual habitats with far-reaching rules of largely homogenous quality. In this sense, financial markets or the United Nations, for example, command their own virtual cities – as do heroin or cocaine dealing. Such virtual contexts, are, in turn, locally embedded in real cities. They dominate some neighbourhoods but hardly affect others.
The traditional concept of “world cities” is passé. The notion referred to command centres with transnational significance and cosmopolitan culture. However, the hierarchy of various urban functions is no longer stable or permanent. Whereas the world city was viewed as control centre of the modern world system, the global city is integrated in distinctive global networks, none of which can automatically be assumed to be dominant, structuring or even yielding to the national government. Rather, we are dealing with distinct realities, which are compatible only to various degrees and sometimes even incompatible. Global cities are characterised by confusion, because their various realities can no longer be integrated into a single system.
Global cities, moreover, contribute to our planet’s environmental crisis. The size of airports is a good indicator of how global any particular agglomeration has become. On the other hand, air travel is a major, unregulated source of greenhouse emissions. Petrochemical fuels, on which most cities thrive, are the world market’s core commodity.
In addition, large urban agglomerations are often located on the most fertile land and thus there extension reduces agricultural production. Every urban centre depends on food from outside, stimulating not only traffic but also intensive production in the hinterland, which, in turn, has also become international. After all, the pineapples on display in Frankfurt’s supermarkets do not grow in Germany, nor can the citizens of Toronto consume domestically produced lemons and oranges. It must be considered, however, how sustainability of natural resources would be challenged, if instead of population concentrations, we had highly overpopulated rural regions in need of adequate infrastructure.
Cities have always served diverse cultures as arenas for encounter and exchange and, accordingly, also as arenas of conflict. This applies to contemporary global cities more than ever before. Nevertheless, they are more than just articulation nodes of transnational networks. In view of the fact that the world is divided into territorial states, cities also belong to national political systems, for which they normally play distinct and decisive roles. Fashion, trends and other types of societal change have always originated from cities. Modern representative democracy was born of the cities – key historical events such as the Storming of the Bastille and the Boston Tea Party provide the evidence. On the other hand, state institutions are based in cities, from the national tax administration to judicial authority. A further aspect is social stratification, because a nation’s elite usually lives in the major cities.
Of course, not all of a city’s people and communities are integrated in global networks. Social contexts with specific local histories, which differ from the realizations of global networks, are equally relevant. In the cities, local, national and global phenomena inter-relate. Executive managers with worldwide spheres of activity depend on their maids who – particularly, but not only, in poor countries – may hardly ever leave the household.
Traditionally, the urbanisation debate revolved around the experience of those nations that industrialised early. Empirical research normally looks at the agglomerations in Europe, North America and Japan, where the respective histories have national characteristics. In contrast, the development of Singapore, Kuala Lumpur or Jakarta resulted from colonialism. The dynamism of their growth was, from the outset, associated with global networks.
To this day, Third World cities tend to be much more diverse than most OECD cities. While nationalism served as a central mechanism to integrate the urban populations in Europe in the 19th century, similar efforts in the colonial cities were regarded as a threat and suppressed as effectively as possible. Consequently, it is still common to find urban cultures in which rural places of origin define identities. People relate to their “homeland”, which may be thousands of kilometres away and which some may not visit in their entire lifetime, rather than with the immediate neighbours they meet every day.
All cities have their own history resulting in particular features. Urbanisation becomes specific in each city, but is likely to also affect other regions, because cities never exist in isolation. They always belong to systems of various corresponding centres, because population groups pursue the same interests, or, at least, related interests. This typically is expressed in architecture, with the result that, even today, one can still find traces of the Northern Italian Renaissance in small town Germany.
Moreover, urbanism implies a civilising process. To exist in the long term, cities must curb violence, despite the diverse nature of their populations and their conflicting interests. Wherever that is not done successfully, cities become irrelevant fast. The connection between civilising and urbanism is based on two pillars. These are, firstly, the public sphere and political deliberation and, secondly, something I have described elsewhere as “locality” (Berner, Korff 1996). Locality ensures social control through personal contacts and interlinking institutions. It is not about communities or districts, but networks of relationships which are integrated through various activities. Locality arises from initiative and self-organisation and can hardly be orchestrated by administrations. Locality and public sphere complement each other. Otherwise, self-created and self-regulated interactions could not persist under the pressure of real estate speculation, official town planning, and other dominant societal forces.
The World Bank holds a similar view. Its Urban Peace Programme (Moser, Lister 1999, Moser, Shrader, 1999) zeroes in on strategies to reduce violence. The focus is on supporting local communities in an effort to increase “social capital” (defined as mutual trust which enables co-operation). In a similar vein, the UN (Habitat 2001: 227) says that violence erodes social capital, as it reduces trust and cooperation within formal and informal social organisations that are critical for a society to function.
Planning paralysis
The rapid growth of many cities makes building (rather than depleting) social capital particularly important. There must be scope for creative and cooperative improvisation, because local authorities are often strikingly overburdened. The enormous size of mega-cities with several million inhabitants makes it clear that comprehensive control and even planning are impossible. In many cases, civil servants do not even notice that new slums have formed within a few years, which may easily have more inhabitants than large German towns. Such developments make the demand for better planning obsolete from the outset. Too often, we do not really know what makes mega-cities tick.
It is clear that private enterprise steps in where profits are attractive. This applies to local businesses but also to multinational corporations. Well-known examples are provided in the construction industry – building homes, offices, factories and roads. But schools and hospitals are also operated privately. Without private bus, and in some places, even rail companies, traffic would collapse completely. Lucrative mobile telephone markets are expanding, where the conventional fixed-line telephone network has been overburdened for decades. Electricity and water supply offer opportunities, both for multinational companies smelling profit and for slum dwellers attempting to tap utility services for free.
It is not uncommon for clashes to occur with city authorities. What official regulations demand often makes little sense to the firm engaged or the people affected. Influential persons are often involved in the private companies, which helps to avoid official rules or to have them re-written. Whether corruption takes place or formal decision processes are adhered to, may make surprisingly little difference on the ground. Typically, very little attention is paid to the needs of poor people.
Nevertheless, urban life offers opportunities for economic, political and cultural participation even for marginalised people. This is what leads to rural-urban migration in the first place. Admittedly, it also means tough competition for housing space. There is ever-increasing demand for (cheap) shelter. At the same time, the public and private sector are neither interested in, nor in a position to fulfil the right to an “adequate shelter”, which the Habitat Conference demanded in Vancouver as early as 1976. The poor urban population can improve its fate only in the slums and often only using its own initiative – such as through locally-supported microfinance schemes to get legal access to land.
This kind of societal creativity in initiative and self-organisation is not limited to the production of housing. It is also visible in petty trading and the informal sector, which blossom in economic niches and continues to discover new niches. Among the fields of activity are waste recycling, domestic services or, of course, drug peddling. “Innovative milieus” are not only found in business high-rises, universities and research institutes. They are also prolific in slums, markets and even on garbage dumps.
Initiative, self-organisation and social creativity have political consequences. Communal self-determination and the building up of local organisations depend on democratic principles. Formal participation is relevant – but so is scope for informal improvisation. The relevance of grassroots activity is one reason for totalitarian and authoritarian regimes always looking at cities with great scepticism. Revolts and protest movements normally start in the urban centres. How political challenges are dealt with, on the other hand, sets precedents, which define what is normal and to be expected. This is institution building in practical terms. It happens spontaneously and unplanned – with long-term consequences far beyond the city limits. Periods of rapid growth, moreover, are particularly critical because they are, by definition, times of rapid change.
Conclusion
Things often happen in unplanned and disorderly ways in cities and agglomerations. Especially in poor countries, the living conditions are often anything but idyllic. Nevertheless, there is no alternative in the development process but to build on this difficult foundation. In spite of all the dirt, misery and hardship, urban environments offer prospects not only of survival but also of participation, democratic modernisation and civilisation (in the basic sense of reducing violent interaction). That people are flocking into the cities proves that these places are attractive in spite of their dismal slums, overflowing drains and congested traffic. It is telling that it is so rare, in poor countries, to see anyone return to their rural homes for good.
Globalisation accelerates the dynamics described above, while urbanisation is, at the same time, providing the base for making international networks ever more important. Both trends are interrelated. They imply that city life is gaining relevance in economic, political and cultural terms with the influence of specific urban settings potentially spreading far beyond the borders of the nation-state, without, however, making urbanisation more predictable or even more amenable to planning. On the contrary: the potential for conflict is growing.
Literature
Berner, Erhard and Rüdiger Korff, 1995:
Globalisation and Local Resistance:The Creation of Localities in Manila and Bangkok, in: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 19, No. 2.
Moser, Caroline and S. Lister (eds), 1999:
Violence and Social Capital: Proceedings of the ICES Seminar Series, 1997-1998, Urban Peace Program Series, Latin America and Caribbean Region Sustainable Development Working Paper No. 5, Washington: World Bank
Moser, Caroline and E. Shrader, 1999:
A conceptual framework for violence Reduction. Urban Peace Program Series, Latin America and Caribbean Region Sustainable Development Working Paper No. 2, Washington: World Bank
HABITAT, 2001:
Cities in a Globalizing World, Global Report on Human Settlements 2001,
London, Sterling: Earthscan
Prof. Dr. Rüdiger Korff
is a sociologist. He teaches South-East Asian Studies in Passau.
korff03@pers.uni-passau.de
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