Twenty-First Century Urbanism ─ A New Analysis of the City

Instead of focusing on any one city, be it Chicago, Shanghai, Lusaka, Singapore, Paris, or Karachi, or one abstract analytical model, this book instead takes a multipronged theoretical and methodological approach to conceive of the city as an intelligent affective organism (a sentient being). It proposes that cities operate on a relational, mobile, and phenomenological basis through the mode of efficiency, calibrated by a profoundly complicated division of labour. Its starting point is that the city is a mobile unit of analysis, from its economic status to its demographic makeup, from its cultural configuration to its environmental conditions, and therefore easily evades our quantitative and qualitative methods of computation and comprehension. It is a moving target, and so the urbanist must have the tools to capture such mobility. It also calls for a willingness to suspend our thoughts, theories, presumptions, assumptions, and even our core beliefs regarding the urban, as the wiliness of the city, its sheer plasticity and its daunting resiliency, will quickly cancel out any such items. Rather than a purely relational model that risks simplifying the city by placing too much emphasis on trajectories between one city and another, rather than a purely autonomous city that carries with it the danger of reducing the city by restricting analysis up to the edge of its limits and not an inch beyond, rather than a purely efficient model that runs the danger of only being able to account for a meagre economic analysis, rather than a purely sentient model that is liable to anthropomorphize the city as a conscious creature composed of steel, mortar, and brick; rather than a purely phenomenological model that carries with it the danger of only notating those components of the urban which register upon the senses, this volume offers up the view that the city cannot be captured by any one mode of analysis but composed of the mobile, the relational, the efficient, the sentient, and the phenomenological with all of them cast in new theoretical configurations and bundled together into one methodological entity.

ROB SULLIVAN is a former lecturer in geography at the University of California Los Angeles and the author of Street Level: Los Angeles in the Twenty-First Century and Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography. His book, The Geography of the Everyday: Toward An Understanding of the Given will be published by the University of Georgia Press in the fall of 2017.