Cities of the Global South

"[...] the discourses surrounding the architecture of global cities [are] often as spectacular as the architecture itself, resounding with terms like the 'Bilbao effect', the 'icon' and the 'starchitect'. Architectural works and architectural criticism are both highly polemical and normative, obscuring a scholarly understanding of why the architecture of the global city emerges in this way. Such an explanation must be traced to the specificities of the consumption, the production and the market-making of architectural services in the context of globalization. Datu's chapter, then, notes how architecture is shaped by how it is consumed by global city constituencies, by how it is produced by professionals coordinating across global distances and how all such groups must make markets meet at the global scale [...]"

I write this in February 2022, heading into our third year of Covid in Canada. Ottawa, our capital, is blockaded, as are many of the provincial capitals and our busiest border crossing with the United States in Windsor Ontario (more on this later). Covid 19 is winding down its Omicron phase; at this point, 35,118 Canadian citizens have lost their lives, and we are fast approaching our World War II fatalities of 44, 090. Our American cousins, including my late Aunt Irene and Uncle Ted's children and grandchildren from Massachusetts, are living through what can only be described as an apocalyptic moment: to date, officially, 906,603 Americans have died. They have long since passed both their military and civilian deaths from the Second World War: 418, 500.

The Cities of the Global South Reader adopts a fresh and critical approach to the field of urbanization in the developing world, which has seen significant shifts in its thematic and geographic focus since it first began to be defined in the mid-twentieth century. This Reader is thematically structured and pulls together a diverse set of readings from scholars across the world to provide both early conversations as well as new and emerging debates to reflect the diverse trajectories of urbanization processes in the context of the restructured global alignments in the last three decades.

The report reviews international literature to assess findings on sustainable street trading management, and reflects on the paucity of theories, ‘models’ or fine-gained documented initiatives on this topic. It then explores dimensions of street trading management systems experienced internationally and nationally, and extracts lessons for the City of Johannesburg. A third section of the report analyses the nature and challenges of street trading management in the City of Johannesburg, and the rise of private management of street trading at area level in a context of unsustainable municipal approaches. The final section makes a number of recommendations for ways forward in the current Johannesburg context.

This paper looks at two monumental structures built in Delhi in the past two decades- Qila Rai Pithora and 108 foot Sankatmochan Dham, a hanuman temple in Karol Bagh to understand how various discourses around city planning, middle class aesthetics, popular forms of religiosity, questions of inhabitation of space, histories and myths come together to configure these spaces. In doing so, it moves beyond the usual explanation of hinduisation of city spaces and opens up more ways of looking at spatial politics.

REIMAGING LUTYENS' DELHI examines the present day situation of the landmark historic plan for the new capital of India by the British architect Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944), completed in 1931. The original plan has been considerably modified in ad hoc fashion over the past two decades due to real estate pressures related to the large growth of the city and region during this period. Yet much remains of enduring value within the plan such that consideration of preservation measures is crucial, while recognizing that Lutyens' composition has entered an era of transformation. The four " provocations " presented in the book aspire to address the contradictions between preservation and development. Developed by post-professional students, faculty, and experts at Columbia University in collaboration with local partners in Delhi, each urban design proposal examines a typical condition between the center and periphery of Lutyens' Delhi. They are the Bungalow Zone; the Janpath; the remnants of Baoli, Hauz, and Nullah; and the adjacent Kidwai Nagar neighborhood. They are proposed with the hope of making a positive contribution to the debate on the future of the past for this world landmark in urban design.

Although not a recent phenomenon, megaproject building is currently enjoying renewed popularity in large cities across the world. Policy-makers are undertaking major investments in the form of large-scale urban development projects to position their metropolitan cities on a global scale and to scale-up urban infrastructure to meet basic needs of housing and transportation. The aim of this special issue, of which this article is the introduction, is to examine this trend, with a focus on four cities: Cape Town, Durban, Delhi, and Lima. On the basis of empirical case material, the articles analyse the challenges that megaprojects throw up for urban sustainability and discuss the peculiar issues facing cities characterized by extreme social inequalities, limited mobilisation of community groups and growing pressure on governments to implement neoliberal urban development policies. They illustrate how institutional contexts and specific policy instruments in conjunction with territorially grounded social dynamics give rise to distinct patterns of megaproject development. The articles engage critically with recent literature that has postulated the emergence of a new paradigm of megaproject building. The research is an outcome of work conducted in the framework of the “Chance2Sustain” project, funded under the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme.

O curso tem como objetivo instigar a imaginação geográfica dos estudantes, mobilizando para isso problemas e conceitos caros à disciplina e oferecendo instrumentos analíticos para o exame de diferentes  configurações geopolíticas do Sul Global. Além disso, buscar-se-á, dentro do possível, destacar a produção e o pensamento original de geógrafos brasileiros, africanos e asiáticos. Com isso, um dos postulados caros a este curso é que as chamadas “Geopolíticas do Sul” não se restringem às estratégias dos espaços meridionais, mas também devem incorporar em sua definição o campo da epistemologia, da teoria e dos saberes geográficos produzidos no Sul Global.

Dividido em dois blocos o curso inicia com um debate sobre a formação do pensamento geográfico e suas relações com a política dos impérios coloniais (momento épico de projeção do Norte sobre o Sul) e termina examinando as disputas de poder em cenários macro-regionais contemporâneos do Sul Global. Com isso, especial destaque será dado às dinâmicas do hemisfério austral, que se caracteriza por uma maior dispersão das massas continentais, devido à maritimidade expressa na confluência dos três oceanos, e é majoritariamente definido em termos tropicais, podendo oferecer alguns desafios comuns tanto para a análise quanto para a política.

1. No primeiro bloco do curso, intitulado "Geografia e Política", a história do pensamento geográfico é apresentada de modo assinalar seus problemas teóricos fundadores, autores chaves e análises pioneiras, evidenciando o estreito vínculo existente entre a construção da geografia enquanto ciência e a formação dos Estados modernos. Partindo da célebre afirmação de Friedrich Ratzel - "espaço é poder" -, conceitos caros à disciplina serão introduzidos e debatidos: mapa, natureza, paisagem, território, fronteira, poder marítimo, poder terrestre, posição, região e escala.

2. Na segunda parte do curso, intitulada "Geopolíticas do Sul", serão examinadas distintas situações geográficas no chamado Sul Global, considerando a disposição concreta dos territórios, seus recursos,  conflitos de interesse e a projeção de cenários futuros. Especial atenção será dada às dinâmicas geopolíticas sul-americanas e africanas, bem como aquelas centradas nas margens oceânicas do Atlântico Sul, do Índico e da bacia do Pacífico.

This article appraises past and contemporary imaginings of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) as a global war city. While the largest city in Vietnam seems to embark on the road to becoming the next great Asian city, I recognize the incredible challenges this place faces to overcome the material destruction consequent from military colonialism.  Saigon’s hindered capacity to quickly turn into another “global city” has much to do with First World assumptions of modernity as it does with the impact of historical violence on the Third World. Critiquing the discourse of global cities through the concept of “global war city,” I recognize the messy forms of urbanization fostered under war-time and postwar political economies, which continue to bear upon our modern understanding of the global.

This short paper examines the population growth of selected  large cities (with over 5 million inhabitants) from across the world, and comes to some surprising (if the media are always to be believed) conclusions.  For instance London (which once led the way for giant cities in population contraction and decline) added the third largest number of people to it's population between 2000 and 2010 (Jakarta and Johannesburg were the top two respectively).  Indeed, London added just under twice the population growth of the period that Mumbai did. 
This paper shows that very rapid growth in municipal city growth (growth in municipal city areas) in the developing world, in both Asia and Latin America, has largely come to an end, and switched into reverse in many instances.

A participação no planejamento urbano é, há décadas, defendida como uma forma de democratizar a produção e a gestão das cidades. Espaços de planejamento participativo também são muito criticados por seu caráter superficial e instrumentalista. Estas duas forças – de cooptação e de transformação – são frequentemente abordadas na maior parte das análises críticas sobre o tema. Apesar de não necessariamente equivocadas, leituras binárias sobre a participação
comumente dificultam a identificação de vozes, sujeitos, saberes e processos mais complexos que compõem as cidades. Partindo desta crítica, esta pesquisa propõe um olhar periférico, normativo e decolonial sobre a participação. Busca-se evidenciar aqui as contribuições dos territórios periféricos para uma leitura pós-binaria do planejamento urbano participativo. A pesquisa investiga como diferentes espaços
participativos em territórios periféricos se relacionam e se influenciam mutuamente, e como este processo pode caminhar rumo à cidades mais justas. Em sua etapa teórica, a tese aborda o tema da participação de forma transdisciplinar e na teoria crítica de planejamento urbano. Em sua etapa empírica, a pesquisa utiliza como caso de referência a favela da Rocinha no Rio de Janeiro - Brasil. O caso foi estudado a partir
de métodos mistos de coleta de dados, que incluem observação participante, entrevistas, pesquisa documental, etnografia digital e aplicação de questionários. O caso da Rocinha evidencia um processo de co-produção urbana extremamente conflitivo, mas ainda assim repleto de sinergias participativas e lições democráticas. Neste território, os atores, saberes e espaços de planejamento urbano são cada vez mais híbridos, interrelacionados e, portanto, de difícil encaixe em binários simplistas.

Drawing on fieldwork in the slums of Ahmedabad, one of India’s prominent megacities, this chapter examines the strategies that slum-dwellers employed to secure their housing rights in response to the local government’s eviction drives. It addresses two different types of collective action initiated by the powerful amongst them to negotiate with external agencies. One was claiming their housing rights through redress with an NGO and the opposition party. The other, particularly evident in absence of institutional support, was the search for co-operation from their neighbours through coercive means, often with the aim to obtain more compensation than would be available to them, by providing inaccurate data on their households and neighbourhood. This chapter concludes by stressing that the powerful members of a slum community can mobilise an ‘illegitimate’ means of survival when they are at risk of eviction and deprived of access to ‘legitimate’ channels of claim-making such as NGOs.

آگاهی‌یافتن از خط آسمانِ در حال تغییر در جهان، نه تنها توجه ما را به مراکز کلانشهری نوظهور معطوف می‌کند، بلکه خلل‌پذیری برخی از فروض کلیدی در مطالعات شهری را نشان می‌دهد. شهرهای در حال صعود در به اصطلاح شهرهای جهانیِ جنوب، کنترل‌های انضباطی که شهرها را طبق یک تقسیم جهانی از سرمایه‌داری جهانی و مناطق پسااستعماری  ترسیم می‌کنند به چالش می‌کشند. در حالی که شهرهای مقتدر جهان مانند نیویورک، لندن و توکیو برای حفظ رهبری خود به عنوان مراکز قدرت مالی مبارزه می‌کنند، سنگاپور و دوبی به عنوان مراکز بازار مالی جهان در حال ظهور هستند. در همین حال، جایگاه کشور چین به عنوان بانک‌دار دنیا موجب شده شانگهای و هنگ کنگ به پایتخت عرضه سهام دنیا تبدیل شوند. در عین حال که پایتخت‌های اقتصادهای بزرگ همچنان نقش‌آفرینان کلیدی هستند، اقتصادهای آسیایی به سرعت در حال صعود هستند و آسیا شاهد ظهور شهرهایی با اهمیت بین‌المللی بوده است.
فصول این کتاب با کنارهم گذاشتن دیدگاه‌های میان‌رشته‌ای، به صورت‌های مختلف مفاهیم و روش‌های مربوط به مطالعات شهرهای جهانی موثق را بازطرح‌ریزی می‌کنند. به جای در نظر گرفتنِ شهر به عنوان یک فضا یا گره ثابت، کلان‌شهر به مثابه‌ی عرصه تجربه‌کردن در نظر گرفته می‌شود که در آن کنشگران و نهادهای مختلف راه‌هایی جدید به سمت جهانی‌بودن الهام می‌بخشند.

In the first of a series of global reports on COVID-19, Laura-Zoë Humphreys shows how the disruption of person-to-person media distribution networks has affected urban sociality in Havana, Cuba. https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2020/06/copying-and-covid-19-havana/

The current scenario in most cities in India indicates that there is no cohesive structure to the urban development underway. While many cities have master plans to control and regulate urban development, cities are also sites for state/centre/internationally funded infrastructure projects, and for investments fueling development in the city/city region driven by national policies or state level policies. The general expectation of the public is that all urban development initiatives would be coordinated efforts undertaken by urban planners and through spatial plans. However, the reality is that there are several parallel interventions initiated by multiple institutional and other actors without much synchronization and outside of spatial planning mechanisms. The paper locates spatial planning within the dominant mode of socio-economic planning in India and attempts to understand why ‘non-spatial’ policy and spatial planning are not integrated by focusing on the case of planning in Mumbai.  The paper uses a combination of methods ranging from analysis of plan documents, a study of institutional architecture and interviews with state planners at Mumbai, Maharashtra and Government of India and draws on the author’s personal experience as an urban planner working with the state planning establishment from the ‘outside.’

Continents are being reimagined and reconfigured economically and socially during these early years of the 21st century. This reimagining of the place of continents outside the Global North in a new world order is epitomised by Jim O'Neil's evocative BRIC acronym: Brazil, Russia, India, China. Africa too is being reimagined and problematised, seen less as a poor, war-ravaged postcolonial backwater and more as a significant player in the world economy and society. The realisation has dawned that South America, Africa, and above all, Asia are not simply sources of raw materials and markets for the Global North but powerful drivers of the world economy in their own right. Apart from their fabulous natural resources and market potential, the continents of the Global South are important because of their cities (Miraftab and Kudva 2014). Indeed they hold most of the world's mega-cities. Globally, cities are seen rightly as the driving forces of national and continental economies and societies, although their destructive capabilities are well recognised. For three decades the concepts of the global city and the postcolonial city in the context of planetary neoliberal capitalism, have been the subject of much academic debate and controversy. For continents and cities in the Global South, this is a challenging but exciting period indeed, so the book Asian Cities: Colonial to Global is certainly timely. Overall the book is a good read, incorporating a collection of empirically-centred chapters that present a wealth of contemporary and historical detail. Acknowledging the impact of colonial histories on the present is a notable feature of all the chapters. Bracken has assembled a highly knowledgeable, diverse range of authors, from highly-respected academics to emerging scholars. And he is to be commended for allowing what might be called the Asian voice to speak about Asian cities. Each chapter begins with an abstract that is useful and necessary in this kind of collection, where readers will dip in and want to know quickly, for a given chapter, whether they should read on. Over the last decade, there has been a growing academic focus on the cities of the Global South, especially Asia. This book will complement others such as Perera and Tang (2012) and Wong (2013). All the chapters are well researched and written, avoiding the use of convoluted language one sometimes encounters in postcolonial academic writing. There are some excellent empirically grounded chapters that are cognisant of local and global histories. Certainly, the contributions by Zhou and by Martin are the standout chapters in the book. Some of the prose is elegant and incisive, for example: New Songdo should be understood not only as a budding 'global city' or a straightforward real estate project, but also as a meaning-making project.

The resurgence of interest in smart cities recently is captured in the many images promoting technology-mediated, connected cities devoid of contextual significance. An odd feature of these representations is 'spacelessness'... Digital renditions of glass-clad skyscrapers and superhighways appear to float in an abstract realm that is assumed to be malleable enough to adapt to any environment. These photo-shopped images are reminiscent of the technological determinism present in early (Information and Communication Technology) ICT debates with regards to city planning, where the tyrannies of space were assumed to be rendered insignificant through access to the cyber realm. This hypothesis has been disproven many times as the spatial manifestations of the digital divide are uncovered and renewed inequalities are manifested in the knowledge economy.   
This chapter explores manifestations of the smart city at a local scale and argues that engagements with space, directly or indirectly, are integral to how technology is appropriated by those acting from the margins and is therefore of meaning to planners working in the global South. Three dimensions of this relationship are explored through reference to a number of examples. The first refers to grassroots efforts to render the margins more visible through online mapping and geo-referenced data capture. The second dimension then explores how this information can empower and enable local communities to engage powerful stakeholders, with the third exploring the extent to which this makes input into spatial governance. In the same way that a 'killer app(lication) represents the core value of a technology, this chapter concludes on ways through which an engagement with the spaces of the 'real' smart city can serve as a means to unlock and enable livelihoods and thereby enable more inclusive planning processes.