Notes toward a genealogy of alter-urbanism

On the last Wednesday of November, I took a train up to London, meeting Paul at the Tate Modern, with the ultimate intent of attending a public Battlespace/s lecture, Feral Cities and the Scientific Way of Warfare. A tight bundle of peculiar and fascinating tangents from the mouths of Geoff Manaugh and Antoine Bousquet, the lecture was run under the aegis of the Complex Terrain Laboratory (blog) and publicised with the following description:

Contemporary political discourse on armed violence and insecurity has been largely shaped by references to spatial knowledge, simulation, and control: “human terrain”, “urban clutter”, “terrorist sanctuaries”, “failed states”, “core-periphery”. The historical counterpoint to this is to be found in the key role the successive technologies of clock, engine, computer, and network have all played in spatializing the practice of warfare. In this context, what implications do “feral” Third World cities, “rogue” cities organized along non-Western ideas of urban space and infrastructure, and “wild” cities reclaimed by nature, have for the battlespaces of today and tomorrow?

A substantial ramble follows beneath the cut. Brace yourselves!

For me, it’s all about funnelling (seriously, bear with me).  Coming from an undergraduate degree that combined Anthropology with International Relations (I’ll have to stop talking about how awesome it was soon, surely?), and having – as part of that – written on virtual economic spaces, the notion of an American homeland and the aesthetics and symbolic economies of the supposed “war on terror”, this Battlespace/s thing was a point at which the funnelling – in which my interests kept narrowing and focusing – is starting to ease off. I’ve been working for a while on the underlying suspicion that all these things have been linked, but I’ve been struggling to define and describe what the link is, and what – if anything - it means.

At first, I thought it was something to do with islands.  Circumscribed pockets of otherness in a sea of something else.  HM Fort Roughs.  Guantánamo Bay detention camp.  Bruce Sterling‘s Islands in the Net (a brilliant & terrifying image of supply-chain capitalism & the network economy, penned waaaaay back in 1988).

In the wake of Wednesday’s attacks in Mumbai, the mental soup / leaf mould seems to have taken a turn for the exothermic; rapidly gaining its own sense of energy … of momentum.  Bouyed by my current fascination with a 4-part drama set in the English Civil War (The Devil’s Whore, which inspired this rather nifty piece on English radicalism), I found myself reminded of a long-dormant plan to pen something on the parallels between the Czech Hussites of the 15th century (speculating on the movement’s potential trajectory, and ignoring its historical collapse into factionalism & infighting), and the Indian Naxalites’ plans for a Compact Revolutionary Zone, cutting a band through India’s east coast, and linking rebel strongholds in Andra Pradeshand Jharkand with the Maoist presence in Nepal (a presence which, following the conclusion of the Nepalese Civil War in Spring 2008, is now participating in electoral politics, with one of their own as PM).

But to pull myself away from that peculiar tangent, and get back to the intended purpose of this entry, there was something Geoff said about these urbanisms of the radically other that made me stop and think.  It was a question about the need to identify whether their emergence and growth represents something qualitatively new, or – alternatively – if we can recognise / assemble a historical context for the “feral” city.  And, on this point, I’m inclined to echo Jamais Cascio‘s reflexive desire to hit anyone claiming “this changes everything” on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.

Yeah, I’m looking at you, iPhone!

So, I thought it might prove valuable (or, at the very least, interesting) to take our man Manaugh‘s basic typology of the different forms of alter-urbanism (I’m not entirely convinced by the term, but can’t think of anything better), and try and bulk it out with some examples from history and fiction. Kind of like this and this, from Sterling.  A “genealogy”, building on Foucault‘s methods of studying … well … pretty much everything.

The List

In this article (Manaugh’s point of departure), Richard J. Norton describes the prototypical “feral city” as

a metropolis with a population of more than a million people in a state the government of which has lost the ability to maintain the rule of law within the city’s boundaries yet remains a functioning actor in the greater international system … [y]et a feral city does not descend into complete, random chaos. Some elements, be they criminals, armed resistance groups, clans, tribes, or neighborhood associations, exert various degrees of control over portions of the city.

Norton remains vague on whether (at the time of writing) such a place could be said to exist.  Indeed, he seems to admit that “[t]he feral city may be a phenomenon that never takes place”.  I’m attempting to assemble a list, including Manaugh’s speculations on ‘rogue cities’ (analogous to rogue states) and ‘wild cities’ (cities that have either been reclaimed by nature, or integrate their human inhabitants with a ‘wild’ natural environment).  I’m also intending to follow up on some specific examples from said list in their own dedicated blog posts.  So, watch this space.

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(Images courtesy of octal and mr lynch)

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