4 Ordinary Cities

Anant Maringanti

I.   Introduction

Beginning in the mid-1990s, attempts have been made to level the field for the study of cities across different contexts. While global cities in the developed world have taken up most of the attention in the study of cities, and their urban experiences are effectively treated as a synecdoche for urban experience generally, the new theorizations have located themselves in the megacities of the third world, or in smaller cities. Ordinary cities is not a framework that is shared by the diverse scholarship that has emerged in this context. Rather, it is a unifying conviction and a rallying point for a multiplicity of research agendas. This module will guide the reader through the idea of an ordinary city, the need for such a concept, and some examples from the diverse literature it has engendered.

II. What is the Ordinary City?

The specific concept of ‘ordinariness’ originates in culture studies, in the work of Raymond Williams (1960). Williams caused a shift in the discipline when he argued that understanding of culture cannot emerge merely from interpretations of high art and classic literature. Rather, it must comprehend larger ‘structures of feeling’ that are articulated across high and popular culture. Culture is not a niche of creativity, but ordinary, and articulated through a variety of media. In a similar manner, the concept of ‘ordinariness’ applied to urban studies has attempted to effect a shift away from the overbearing analysis of particular “extra-ordinary” cities to produce theory on urbanisation and urbanism. “The Ordinary City” (Amin and Graham 1997), a paper by Ash Amin and Stephen Graham, first elaborated this position in urban studies. Their point of departure is a ‘rediscovery of the city’ proclaimed by certain major strands of urban scholarship that highlights. While many commentators believed that advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) would create a global village and make urban agglomerations redundant, by the late 1980s, and in the 1990s when “Ordinary City” was written, the persistence of urban agglomerations, and in fact preponderance of the urban form had led to this ‘rediscovery’. Amin and Graham take on three particular strands of this literature pertaining to: cities as nodes in a global network, cities as motors of national economies, and cities as hubs of creativity. They point out that in each strand, a particular set of activities and processes are privileged as key urban assets and projected as the markers of a city’s significance in the world or global economy. This projection, therefore, is based on a relational understanding that takes only particular aspects of the urban such as the presence of advanced producer services, or the presence of particular kinds of professionals. Thus, this rediscovery and revalorization of cities is based on a remarkably narrow set of urban assets which are valued highly in what can be called the hegemonic formation of global capitalism. Amin and Graham propose a different approach to urban assets. They remark that none of these perspectives actually take into account the city as a whole, and thus, they actually misunderstand the ways in which urban assets are created, or assembled, or procured. They call for a shift away from focusing on highly valued assets, to appreciating and assimilating the multiplicity of urban spaces. The ordinariness of the city is not an allusion to being mundane, but to being fundamentally pluralistic. They call the ordinary city a multiplex.

      Take Hyderabad, for example. Hyderabad has emerged as a key metropolitan centre in India following what is called the IT boom. The state government of Andhra Pradesh, led by Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu liberalized the state economy sufficiently to attract large multinational corporations to set up shop in Hyderabad. Most of this investment and development took place in the outskirts of Hyderabad which were christened Cyberabad. The IT companies were followed by pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and banks. Around the facilities of these companies, large gated communities and commercial districts have emerged. These developments in Cyberabad have taken centre stage in how Hyderabad is represented and understood. This projection ignores the centuries long history of the rest of Hyderabad, it ignores the relationships between Cyberabad and the rest of the city and region from where the infrastructural labour for the area is obtained. It avoids the complex ways in which resources and political will are mobilized in favour of Cyberabad, as opposed to the rest of the city. For a nuanced understanding of Hyderabad, one cannot begin and end at Cyberabad. While the city is a theatre of accumulation, capital accumulation is not the only game in town.

Privileging capital accumulation, or something like finance capital or other advanced producer services results in particular ‘extra-ordinary’ cities being placed at the top of a discursively created hierarchy of cities, as the key nodes on the map of the world. They are the ‘world cities’, while other cities stay ‘off the map’. The consequence of this discourse of world cities resonate in theory and policy, where findings and learnings from the extra-ordinary cities get transposed and transferred to other spaces. Thus, erasing differences, and blinding theory to a larger world of urban experiences.

III. The Problem with Identifying Extra-Ordinary Cities

The privileging of particular cities is a result of specific urban assets and activities receiving greater validity in a global discourse. So New York, London and Tokyo take centre stage for being crucial nodes of the global financial markets and for housing several top firms involved in advanced producer services. Similarly, Paris or Milan make the cut for being cultural centres. There are three problems with exceptionalizing particular cities. Firstly, such claims are often ‘eurocentric’ and privilege a narrative of modernity that has been put forth from readings of the history of Paris, or London. By accepting these readings as universal, the resulting understanding of modernity misses out on the messy ambiguities of modernization in other  parts of the world. Thus, such claims are actually quite parochial assertions to being extra-ordinary. Secondly, it sets up a teleological progression, or rather a sense of competitiveness for other cities to emulate the model. Thirdly, it renders invisible the other narratives of urbanization and modernity emerging elsewhere by treating them as singular narratives. Thus, such research re-enforces certain hierarchies of attention that favour extra-ordinary cities, and leave ‘Other’ experiences outside the overarching narrative.

The framework of ordinary cities seeks to abandon these hierarchies and labels, and to treat all cities as ordinary cities. It uses the concept of the multiplex to illustrate the coevalness of very different geographies among and within cities. The concept of coevalness is used to denote what feminist geographer Doreen Massey has called ‘radical simultaneity’. That is, radically different geographical conditions, and historical features can be obtained across space at any given time. From this preface, the influence of post-colonial perspectives on such a framework for urban studies must be quite evident. However, this is merely the ontological premise, or rather the refusal to claim an ontological closure and reduce the multiplex.

The epistemological innovation of ordinary cities research is to look at not just the economic and cultural assets of cities, but the city as a whole. In fact, ordinary cities research has pointed out the difficulties in actually identifying the key urban assets, because all elements of urban space are so inter-linked. The challenge, then, is how to understand the city as a whole? But first, it is necessary to elaborate a little further, the need for such an ontological and epistemological shift.

IV. Modernity and Development

Part of this need arises from the peculiar history of urban studies. Cities have classically been seen as a modern form. Urbanization as a process has long been understood as concomitant to industrialization, that engine of modernization. Although this association has been unbundled, famously by the pioneering spatial thinker Henri Lefebvre, the idea of cities as a modern form has persisted. Thus, in the history of urban studies, writings on Paris, London, and later New York, dominate. These centres often seen as being at the heart and also at the avant garde of modernity have established a privileged place in the canon of scholarship on cities. Until the mid-20th century, these cities were also the largest cities in the world. But in the aftermath of decolonization, third world cities have burgeoned. Third World cities like Bombay, Shanghai, Jakarta, grew larger than the old metropoles. However, this third world urbanization was not given the same credence. While the historical evolution of Paris is a textbook case of urbanization, the historical evolution of Bombay is unplanned, haphazard, and only given credence as a problematic.

Jennifer Robinson (2006) brings out this point cogently in her book Ordinary Cities. She deconstructs the binary of modern cities and developing cities. While cities in the West are purported as modern, and case studies of urbanization and urbanism, third world cities are problems that need developmental intervention. Thus, there is a remarkable power asymmetry in urban studies itself. Some cities, viewed as properly modern, are the authentic articulations of urbanism, while the rest are a subaltern in this process. They do not fit into the meta-narrative of urbanization. They are, somehow, urbanization gone awry.

Robinson calls for an abandonment of this binary, and for a more cosmopolitan analysis of cities. One that averts the trope of historicism or parochialism veiled as universalism.

Two concepts in particular are useful to anchor an ordinary cities perspective: viz. informality and subalternity. As Robinson points out, the third world city, in urban studies was long represented and studied as a chaotic and unintended city. The southern megacities, bursting at the seams, with little correspondence to master plans, largely received attention as objects of developmental intervention and not authentic urban experiences. However, powerful challenges emerged to this kind of representation. In its most extreme articulation, Mike Davis (2007) in his book Planet of Slums heralds a future where the slum, and its form, will be the form of urban modernity. Similarly, several other scholars such as the anthropologist James Holston (2008), and the geographer Ananya Roy (2009) turned to informality not as an exception or aberration, but focused on it as a new norm in urban modernity. Understanding informality as an articulation of modernity brings us to the second concept of subalternity. Modern cities, urban studies, and discourses of urban planning heavily privilege the formal sector of cities. Part of this privilege has to do with the visible influence and international relationality of the formal sector. Part of it has to do with the availability of data. However, this privilege, in a situation where the formal sector is actually a tiny proportion of urban reality, further renders the informal sector invisible, and relegates its contribution to urban history to the margins.

V.  Understanding Ordinary Cities

So far, we have looked at two aspects of ordinary cities research. Firstly, it requires an epistemology that can deal with the multiplicity of cities. Secondly, it valorizes the subaltern urbanism that has largely been neglected in the history of urban studies. So how does one grapple with multiplicity, and how does one tell a subaltern history without falling into the usual traps of eurocentrism?

Robinson’s cosmopolitanism is a solution, but an idealistic one. One that still locates itself off the map and sees relationality from nowhere in particular. To understand the city as a whole, we need a different kind of relationality, one that emerges from somewhere. Places are singular, but places are also constantly undergoing various forms of ‘worlding’ (Roy 2009). And with an eye on these tendencies of places to be local and global simultaneously, one can find a different kind of relational approach. What Maringanti calls a ‘worm’s eye view’, rather than a bird’s eye view. A relational understanding that derives from specification of very material interconnections and embodied practices (Maringanti 2013).

However, these are merely orientations. In addition, Bunnell and Maringanti (2010) argue that in the prevalent hierarchy of attention to cities which favours world cities, most students hailing from or interested in the cities which are ‘off the map’, are simply unable to speak, and articulate their experience as a part of the wider discourses on global urban reality. The ingenuity of ordinary cities research is that it becomes a rallying point for very diverse research agendas to find common ground, and share insights from what would normally be valued as a singular case study.

Let us illustrate the above perspective using an example of Bholakpur, a historic neighbourhood in Hyderabad, India. Throughout the 20th century, it was a major node in the national and global leather industry and its inhabitants mostly poor Muslims and Dalits employed therein. Throughout the uncertain history of the leather industry, and through its eventual collapse, the neighbourhood and its inhabitants have constantly reinvented themselves. With the diminishing value of the animal skins markets, they turned to other kinds of scrap. Over a couple of decades, Bholakpur became the central node in the city for waste recycling. This history of Bholakpur is crucial to Hyderabad’s development and waste infrastructure. It is a significant element in the history of leather trade in India and international competition in the leather market. Conventional perspectives would, at best look at Bholakpur as a scrap market and think of waste recycling interventions. A less nuanced approach would simply consider it a slum. In most cases, a neighbourhood such as Bholakpur would not even be on the map of urban studies. But thinking of Bholakpur as an ordinary neighbourhood in an ordinary city, the stories of the informal scrap markets carry insights about global processes and practices. Just one example being how the formal sector and informal sector are engaged in an unequal exchange. The informal sector absorbs and processes large amounts of waste produced by the formal sector and produces renewed commodities. It breathes value back into waste and does so for very low returns. These renewed commodities or raw materials re-enter the formal circuit to be assembled into new commodities which are exchanged for significantly higher returns. A study of Bholakpur’s scrap markets then opens up an interrogation into the very nature of the relationship between the formal sector, or capital, and the informal sector, or the slum.

VI. Conclusion: Criticism of Ordinary Cities

From the discussion above, one can see that ordinary cities research has raised four charges against GaWC (Globalization and World City (GaWC) Research Network) research: viz. synecdoche, parochialism, ethno-centrism, and occupying inordinate space in the discourse on cities. Responses to these charges were quick and vociferous. Richard Smith’s (2013) counter-criticism labelled the majority of ordinary cities literature, apart from Amin and Graham, as ignoratio elenchi, i.e. having missed the point. He says that ordinary cities critics have confused the evidence of absence for the absence of evidence—meaning that they confuse the deliberate and strategic partiality of GaWC research to command and control functionality, for a deliberate avoidance of other characteristics of cities. He argues that the purpose of GaWC research is quite specific to understanding economic specialization and therefore charges of ethno-centrism or favouritism towards Western/Nothern cities are misplaced. He also denies that GaWC research has re-enforced the neo-liberal agenda to encourage competition between cities to vie for world city status. He points out that the foundation of GaWC perspectives in world systems theory attests to its neo-Marxist thrust which actually tries to call into question these very processes and also casts a strong doubt on the ability of cities to move upward in the hierarchy. Another criticism of the ordinary cities research is that it props up GaWC research as a strawman mistakenly attributed the aforementioned qualities (Van Meeteren et al. 2015). It is argued that the setting up and subsequent dismissal of this strawman allows ordinary cities researchers to polemically further an agenda, which is labelled as a conservative one, to postcolonialize urban studies. Responses to these criticisms have argued that while the intentions and personal motivations of researchers or a collective of researchers might not identify with the charges raised against GaWC research, as a part of the larger discursive formation and holding an influential position, the charges are significant and must be taken into stride (Maringanti 2013).

References

• Amin, Ash, and Stephen Graham. 1997. “The ordinary city.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 22, no. 4: 411-429.
• Bunnell, Tim, and Anant Maringanti. 2010. “Practising urban and regional research beyond metrocentricity.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34, no. 2: 415-420.
• Davis, Mike. 2007. Planet of Slums. New York: Verso.
• Holston, James. 2008. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Maringanti, Anant. 2013. “Ordinary entanglements in the world city.” Environment and Planning A 45, no. 10: 2314-2317.
• Williams, Raymond. 1960. Culture and Society: 1780-1950 Garden City. New York: Anchor Books.
• Robinson, Jennifer. 2006. Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development. New York: Routledge.
• Roy, Ananya. 2009. “The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory.” Regional Studies 43 (6): 819–30.
• Smith, Richard G. 2013. “The ordinary city trap.” Environment and Planning A 45, no. 10: 2290-2304.
• Van Meeteren, Michiel, Ben Derudder, and David Bassens. 2015. “Can the straw man speak? An engagement with postcolonial critiques of ‘global cities research’”. Working Paper.