Seeing from the ‘South’

It is well acknowledged that there exists an extreme parochialism from which urban studies has drawn its insight. Rubrics such as ‘world cities’ constituted by New York, London, or Tokyo, have long dominated both the empirical enquiry from which urban theory is built, and the urban imaginations of a much wider population (McGuirk 2015; Robinson 2005; Robinson 2006) As a result many cities have found themselves ‘off the map’ (Robinson 2002) with regards to their significance as places, or in terms of what they can offer to our understanding of the world. Despite this - and its role in producing almost all of the conceptual categories

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we associate with cities and the urban - the vast majority of what we would most likely consider to be ‘urban dwellers’, are located in parts of the world written out of scholarship on the city as a concept. Parochialism of this kind in western scholarship however is by no means unique to urban studies and, given the problematic relationship between the western academy and the project of colonialism, continued neglect of a much wider, more diverse world, presents a troubling status quo. Consider the following quote from Frantz Fanon in his 1961 text, Wretched of the Earth:

“It is a question of the Third World starting a new history of Man, a history which will have regard to the sometimes prodigious theses which Europe has put forward, but which will also not forget Europe's crimes, of which the most horrible was committed in the heart of man, and consisted of the pathological tearing apart of his functions

and the crumbling away of his unity” (ibid.315)

Critically decentring western historical revisionism requires us to embrace those, like Fanon, who have charted the fundamental problems that have emerged from western enlightenment thought. In reflecting on the work of Fanon, Gordon (2002) describes how the “the modern collapse of ‘Reason’ and ‘History’ into all things European” is representative of the very failure to engage with the self-deception of European’s beliefas to the ‘theodicy’ of their worldviews (ibid.10). Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) notion of histories 1 and 2 is used to represent this divide between dominant western narrations of the past, and those that fall outside of this trajectory and therefore offer a means of talking back to the project of westernisation. This is now experiencing an encouraging application through the prism of cities at a time where the universal assumptions of urban theory are being debated and contested (Derickson 2014; Sheppard, Leitner et al. 2013). As Achille Mbembe (2015) points out in a recent online piece, “the structural repetition of past sufferings in the present is beyond any reasonable doubt” and that these will not “die a natural death” but rather must be recognised for the powerful way in which they are sustained, with view to, ultimately, discovering an alternative beyond them. There is a “culture of theory” at stake that is foreclosed by entrenched Eurocentrism that overlooks “multiple concepts of the urban and alternative understandings of political economy” (Roy 2015: 1).

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Perhaps the first real challenge to this parochialism came from Jenny Robinson’s concept of ‘ordinary cities’ (2006). The idea here is that cities, irrelevant of geographical location, should be thought of as ordinary in order to promote a deeper understanding apart from any positioning on a hierarchy of global cities or through particular prisms that privilege their relative forms of ‘cityness’ (Legg and McFarlane 2008; Peck 2014; Robinson 2006). This, however, has evolved to become considerably more forthright in its critique and has incorporated more diverse elements of postcolonial thought, often meeting resistance as a result. As part of a recent collection on ‘Global Urbanisms and the Nature of Urban Theory’, (Robinson and Roy 2015), Anaya Roy provocatively asks ‘Who’s afraid of postcolonial theory? Robinson (2015) also describes a tendency to let one another ‘off the hook’ in regionalising the building of ‘theory’. Focusing purely upon cities in Europe and North America, and supplementing this by harvesting case studies from white settler colonies such as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, can no longer be seen as an acceptable means of navigating the postcolonial critique. Recognising the inherent differences in all cities and the opportunities for crossing borders and boundaries in the solving of problems, can only be opened up following a thorough decolonisation of urban studies (Derickson 2014; Roy 2011; Roy and Ong 2011). As Trouillot (2003) argues, ‘the west’ in no way represents a geographical space, but rather a project and an ‘exercise in global legitimation’ (ibid.). The most effective way to force ourselves to recognise this is to situate all of our critical engagement with it, and with western notions of ‘the urban’, from the very space that it has constructed as its longstanding Other - the global south. In this new approach, an implicit (and ubiquitous) ‘seeing from the west’, is replaced by a very explicit ‘seeing from the south’ (Miraftab 2009; Roy 2011; Watson 2009).

Through a process of challenging and reframing the questions of urban theorising, cities in previously ‘off the map’ locations have now begun to infiltrate the way we understand what the city is and how it is produced. Additionally, through modes of what Gayatri Spivak (1990) calls ‘strategic essentialism’, revolving around the shared challenges of the majority of the worlds cities, and yet left untouched by many urban geographers and urban studies theorists, the importance of these issues have been elevated in the discipline. A plethora of work, and some particularly useful collations of examples are to be found in relatively recent edited texts. The books Urban Theory Beyond the West (Edensor and Jayne 2011), and The Routledge

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Handbook of Cities of the Global South (Parnell and Oldfield 2014) in particular, provide extensive coverage of previously under engaged urban locations6_{. Their aim, in Edensor and} Jayne’s case, is to “contribute to broader theoretical agendas which highlight how making sense of urban life does not have to depend on pre-existing frameworks laid out by the western academy” (ibid.1). Likewise, Parnell and Oldfield wish to use their vast and diverse examples from across the global south to “alter one’s gaze on cities” in shifting the orientation of urban studies, and thereby contribute to “normalizing the use of southern cities as common reference points” (ibid.4).

Pushing this paradigm of thought into the mainstream is vital to ultimately facilitating an ability to learn from, for example, African studies engagement with the political realm, and speak back not only to theoretical conversations, but to situated questions and issues in different contexts across the world (Myers 2014; Sharp 2013). This is drawn on by Myers’ (2014) paper, which uses a lens from African urbanism to interpret social and economic divides in Hartford, Connecticut, USA. In a similar vein, the broader conceptualisation of ‘subaltern urbanism’ is used by Schindler (2014) to approach urban space in Flint, Michigan ‘inductively’, illustrating the pertinence of Ananya Roy’s thinking to this context. At a much grander scale, Roy (2011) cites the work of Rem Koolhaas on Lagos, Nigeria and how the inventiveness and entrepreneurial survival skills of its residents led him to conclude that the city is actually ‘ahead’ of much of the world in its interwoven complexity. Additionally, as Matthew Gandy’s (2006) work highlights, however we ‘theorise’ such cities in relation to the west or to any other part of the world, as a coherent entity, mega-cities like Lagos, sit outside the realms of historical understandings of urban ontologies. As a pre-cursor to such learning, the paradigm outlined here also makes possible the potential to look at the shared struggles of cities with the projects and governance strategies that they adopt by comparing across

6 _{These two examples represent the contrasting way in which those that have been situated outside of}

mainstream discourse can be represented in a way that separates them from the dominant paradigm. In this

case ‘global south’ represents a geographical characteristic shared by these cities, while ‘beyond the west’

groups together cities in terms of what they are not. A similar debate exists within identity politics and critical

race theory where the labels ‘non-white’ and ‘people of colour’ offer alternate ways of defining difference and

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what were previously ‘incommensurable’ parts of the globe (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012). Given my own cases, it is this that I am most interested in building upon here.