Robert A. Beauregard
Although we can theorize abstractly, imagining ourselves doing so in a world free of material constraints, we cannot act abstractly (Flyvbjerg 2001). Action occurs – only occurs – in specific historical and geographical settings. In fact, it is precisely the material basis of action, and no more so than its consequences, that distinguishes action from mere intention. One can think in the abstract, but not act there.
This necessary connection between action and setting has particular resonance for planning, a necessity that comes as no surprise to planning practitioners. They know intuitively that what they do must make sense in relationship to what is possible. Any proposed instance of planning thus requires a specific reality that must exist for the intervention to be successful (Beauregard 1998). Conversely, how planners characterize that reality signals their intentions.
One way to understand the relationship between planning aspirations and the context in which those aspirations will have to be achieved is to consider the relationship between planning interventions and corresponding understand- ings of the city. How is what planners imagine as possible entwined with the city whose possibilities planners are attempting to unlock?
The purpose of this chapter is to reflect on the many ways in which the city is conceptualized and the implications this has for planning practice.
The theoretical framework is the interplay of representation and “an epistemo- logically mediated reality, constructed linguistically as well as materially”
(Walton 1995: 62; see also Mitchell 2002). The focus is a specific discursive construction – the adjectival city – and one of its most recent manifestations, the network city.
Numerous theorists and commentators deploy single adjectives – global, European, garden, spontaneous – to characterize the city. Doing so opens up 1111
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111
and closes down opportunities for planning intervention. To focus the discus- sion, I will address three of these consequences: (1) the potential for purposive intervention locked within the adjective, (2) the importance of intellectual and professional networks in providing lessons for planning practice, and (3) the way in which the network city enables planners to negotiate the disjuncture between specialization and synthesis.
The Adjectival City
In the late nineteenth century, scholars began to write about the city from a professional perspective. Faced with the city’s inherent complexity and the unavoidable differences among cities, they drew on adjectives to stabilize their understandings. Adna Weber, one of the first to systematically explore the processes of urbanization, carefully distinguished between commercial and industrial cities and among American, European, and Asian cities (Weber 1963).
For him, these distinctions were not just ready labels. They also served an analytic purpose by enabling comparisons and thereby organizing the evidence.
Of course, a phenomenon so complex as a city, and so variable across time and space, will be subjected to a variety of adjectives. The architect Sir Richard Rogers (1997), for example, conveys his sense of an ideal city by applying two adjectives: sustainable and humanistic. He further disaggregates the sustainable city into the just city, the creative city, the ecological city, the compact city, the polycentric city, and the diverse city. Because each adjective represents a different city (Low 1996), a different type of intervention is implied.
Any reader of the urban literature can quickly generate a list of such adjec- tives. In the early twenty-first century, “global” and “sustainable” are two of the most common, followed closely by “edge” and “world.” “Postmodern” seems on the wane and “tourist” and “postcolonial” ascendant. Those in area studies are quite adept at thinking about southeast Asian cities, European cities, and North American cities. Urban historians, of course, navigate across the centuries and between various eras from “medieval” to “colonial” to “postwar,” while the more economically inclined have left behind “industrial” for “post-industrial.”
City planners will remember “garden city” and urban designers can hardly avoid the “physical city.” “Third world city” and “mega-city” share a conceptual space (Robinson 2002), while numerous other characterizations – postborder, unruly, fantasy, informational, and captive – hover in orbit around the main adjectival planets.
One of the most important ways to think about these adjectives is in terms of their theoretical intent (Beauregard 2003c). Frequently, the chosen adjective refers to a particular theoretical stance or point of view. To write or speak of the “gated city” is to propose a critical perspective concerned with the erosion of public space, invidious spatial divisions, and social polarization, all wrapped up in a political economy of the city. The “postmodern city” has a similar theoretical thrust. Its use by such scholars as Michael Dear (2000) is meant to
Planning and the Network City
1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111p
portray a theoretical orientation at odds with the Chicago School of urban sociology and the tenets of human ecology. One reads the phrase and knows what to expect. Another example is Neil Smith’s (1996) “revanchist city.” The adjective itself contains his argument; the middle class in the US of the 1980s and 1990s mobilized neoliberal policies (e.g., zero tolerance policing) and gentrification to re-take the city from the poor, homeless, criminals, and racial- ized “others” who had taken it from them in the 1960s and 1970s. “Sustainable city” also signals its intent (Portney 2003). The sustainable city is one that can only be understood at the intersection of ecology and economy.
The primary theoretical function of these adjectives is to enable the theo- rist to manage the complexity of the city. This is where the network city is most powerful. Certain adjectives – unruly, wild, unfinished – point to the city’s complexity but suggest little in the way of a resolution. The authors of such phrases embrace the city’s unpredictability and resistance to theoretical discipline. Their intent is to turn their listeners and readers away from any expectation that one can make final sense of the city or interpret it as a purpo- sive totality. To say the city is unfinished or incomplete, however, is to suggest something different; a city that is changing as we speak of it, a city without a final destination. Such cities are only temporarily capitalist, post-industrial, or global.
Adjectives that have a clearer theoretical thrust are those that function as metaphors: the machine city and the organic city are two of the most common of these formulations (Donald 1999: 27–61; Ellin 1996: 241–69). Here we are encouraged to think of the city as being like a machine or like a living organism.
If the machine is an analogy for the city, we can think of the city as having parts, with each of those parts serving a purpose in a larger scheme. The function and technology (whether computer chips or gears) of the machine (the city) offer a logic for intervention. The city as organism operates similarly.
It has a heart (the central business district), a brain (its institutions), and arteries (highways, sidewalks). Consequently, the organic city is amenable to a medical intervention, as when blight is surgically removed from the urban core. These adjectives organize the city’s complexity and provide us with ways of thinking about how to act.
Such metaphorical characterizations were quite common in the first half of the twentieth century but have become less so as theorists have chafed at their simplicity and their functionalist and teleological qualities. What has become more common is the use of adjectives as synecdoche (Amin and Graham 1997).
While a metaphor asserts a similarity in a difference, in synecdoche the
“whole as a totality . . . is qualitatively identified with the parts that appear to make it up” (White 1978: 73). Thus, for example, the city becomes the “tourist city” or the “commercial city” or the “fortress city.” In each case, we are meant to understand that tourism or commerce or defensive spaces and activities such as gated communities and surveillance cameras do not constitute all of what exists in the city or the city’s sole function. Rather, these elements are put forth as the defining ones for a given time and place.
Robert A. Beauregard
1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111
By distilling the city into a single and pivotal element, the theorist can explore what is essential about the city, leaving aside what is less important.
Complexity is curbed, bounded. No expectation exists that the city will be considered in its messy totality. To the extent that an element is richly connected to others, our understanding is enhanced. If it is not, the adjective limits our perception and appreciation. In fact, this is one of the dangers of the adjectival city – the marginalization or suppression of an important quality (for example, gender relations) of the city (Spain 2002) or the stretching of the label to cover incompatible realities (Collier and Levitsky 1997).
It is in regard to the messy totality of the city that the “network city” is most important. The “network” adjective reduces the city’s complexity and rein- tegrates it in a way that makes the city intellectually and practically manageable.
Network City/Network of Cities
As an adjective, the term “network” is quite successful in negotiating the multi- dimensionality of the city. It simultaneously erases complexity and then re-introduces it in a more malleable form. The innumerable parts of the city, or the differences among them, are recognized and then connected to a larger whole – the network. Such a rhetorical move has theoretical power, making it one of the more attractive metaphorical constructions currently present in urban theory, if not (yet) a new paradigm.
In its ideal-type formulation, a network consists of a set of components, all linked to each other and functioning so as to achieve one or more common purposes (Castells 1996: 470–1). These purposes are utilitarian, based not on an organic or even teleological “essence” of the network but on the aggregate of member interests. Networks are self-organizing. Being a member of the network – whether as an individual, nonprofit organization, business, or govern- ment – is voluntary and each member contributes to the network based on their capacity and the predicted benefits. Efficiency is not a network quality.
Rather, what is valued is the collaboration, openness, adaptability, and creat- ive redundancy that enables the network to be innovative and to function regardless of fluctuations in membership and changes in member interests.
Ideal networks are often contrasted with hierarchies and systems. Asso- ciated with Weberian bureaucracies (Mouzelis 1967), hierarchies are viewed as rigid entities that channel authority, impede the flow of ideas, and stifle innovation; although Pumain (1992) argues that hierarchies are simply a special type of network. Systems are also contrasted with networks. They have a core function, strive for efficiency, and are tightly designed. To posit a system is to suggest not only a stable knowledge of that entity’s dynamics but also of its purpose. A system is focused; a clear path exists to a pre-determined goal.
Moreover, the actors in a system are less volunteers than employees, metaphor- ically speaking. In the ideal formulation, networks are neither hierarchies nor systems.
Planning and the Network City
1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111p
Leitner and Sheppard (2002) label this ideal-type formulation the pro- gressive interpretation of networks. They argue that the progressive network is centered in civil society and serves as an alternative to capitalist markets and strong states. They contrast it with a neoliberal interpretation in which networks are cast as mechanisms for shrinking the state and dispersing its powers while strengthening markets so that they become arenas of opportunity for individ- uals, governments, and businesses. Neoliberal networks rely on competition rather than cooperation, strategic alliances rather than serendipitous encounters, and professional models of network governance rather than mutual adjustment.
Innovation is meant to support competitiveness and flexibility so that capital can move quickly in and out of investment opportunities. Yet, as Leitner and Sheppard point out, it is the ideal type network, the progressive network, that dominates the discussion. Neoliberal intentions tend to be veiled.
The progressive interpretation is what one finds in writings on the world- wide web, nonprofit organizations, flexible workplaces, and professional networks (see, for example, Boyer (1999)). It is also the portrayal that pervades writings on cities, particularly by scholars who draw upon the “spaces of flows” made famous by Manuel Castells and who emphasize the purported revolution in information technology.
An interest in networks and cities, though, has existed for decades. It can be traced back to Walter Christaller and August Lösch and central place theory (Lampard 1968; Pumain 1992) and forward to the notion of systems of cities (Bourne and Simmons 1978) and world systems (Friedmann 1986).
Subsequently, the metaphor was given a boost by research into industrial districts (initially in the Third Italy and later in Silicon Valley) and their regional networks of firms (Castells and Hall 1994; Scott 1993). These themes combined to produce global cities and, when crossed with telecommunications (Townsend 2001), engendered a vision of the network city that seems to underlie most scholarly writings on this theme.
The story of the network city, however, must begin back in the late nine- teenth and early twentieth centuries with the first systematic probings of the city’s form (Choay 1988; Ellin 1996). These probings were as much practical as theoretical and became centered on the emerging professions, particularly city planners but also civil engineers, transportation specialists, and public administrators. Urban professionals began to conceive of the city analytically rather than holistically. In doing so, they disaggregated the city into a series of systems: water supply, sewage disposal, modes of transportation, housing markets, retail centers, and policing services among many others. These systems – not yet networks – enabled professionals to isolate parts of the city for inter- vention, thereby improving the city’s micro-manageability. At its apogee in the 1950s, this perspective gave rise to “plug-in” systems – components – that could be combined to create cities and their neighborhoods (Jencks 1973:
67–76).
The contemporary version of this perspective turns systems into networks.
The emphasis is shifted from centrally controlled and fixed activities and Robert A. Beauregard
1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111
technologies to entrepreneurial or consumer-driven activities suffused with a high degree of flexibility.
Graham and Marvin (2001) are well-known proponents of this perspec- tive. They write of the demise of the integrated city and its replacement by a splintered urbanism of unbundled infrastructure driven by risk minimization and profit maximization. The public telephone system of the modern era has been replaced by competing land-line and wireless telephone providers, Internet telephone capabilities, and telephone cards among the available options. This unbundling brings competition, but it also undermines public provision of services. The infrastructure of the city is increasingly “networked” rather than
“systematized.” For Graham and Marvin, flexibility and innovativeness are bene- ficial. Yet, the privatization of basic necessities and public goods is regrettable.
Not everyone is networked, and even when networked not equally so.
The network city is not only about what is happening within the city. It is also about systems of cities; that is, how the city is linked externally to other cities throughout the world. The foundational writings here involve world cities and the work of John Friedmann (Friedmann 2001; Knox and Taylor 1995) and others to identify the functional differentiation of cities on a global scale. In the earliest formulation, theorists distinguished world cities from regional cities and further divided regional cities into those at the periphery and those in the center, meaning the advanced industrial countries. The intent was not simply to differentiate but also to better understand how regional economies, and the world economy, were organized through the connections among different types of city-regions.
This investigation has its empirical roots in international trade, specifically the commodity chains formed by transnational corporations, immigration, and telecommunications (Knox 1997). A sense that a new round of globalization was under way in the 1980s spurred theorists to search out the mechanisms that were being created to tie together production and consumption, labor, foreign-direct investment, and financing. Out of this emerged the global city, the city whose nodal position in urban networks provided the command-and- control functions and financial and legal services that shaped global production, consumption, trade, and immigration (Sassen 1991).
Urban networks are not so voluntaristic or flexible as the ideal formu- lation implies. Cities such as New York, London, Tokyo, and Frankfurt have disproportionate control in financial markets. Washington is near-hegemonic militarily and a dominant player in diplomatic networks. Johannesburg, a regional city in Africa, holds sway in the world diamond market. Nevertheless, such networks are more or less open and while some cities wield greater influence than others, the networks, with exceptions, are without centralized control, despite having very powerful entities (for example, the World Bank, OPEC) engaged in organizing them.
What makes these networks open to new members is their purported syner- gism (Paye 1996). To the degree that innovation is one of the network’s most valued objectives, any city that can add to this capability will be welcomed.
Planning and the Network City
1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111p
Consequently, the notion that such networks exist takes a normative turn.
Networks became growth opportunities for cities (Beauregard and Pierre 2000).
Given the increasingly globalized nature of regional and national economies and given the shrinkage of central government supports, numerous theorists argue that urban economic growth is a function of the ability of a city-region to be competitive in global networks. There, such city-regions establish synergistic relationships, uncover opportunities, and are exposed to “best practices” (Leitner and Sheppard 2002; Tomlinson 2002). This can only occur if actors in the city- region recognize the importance of being competitive. That much of what occurs in markets and intercity networks, such as Eurocities, involves both competition and cooperation is elided in this formulation (Friedmann 2001: 127–9).
The global aspect of network cities should not blind us to an important regional or metropolitan formulation. This is the multi-nucleated metropolis that many theorists argue has displaced the nuclear metropolis with its single central city, an urban form that existed for over a century beginning in the mid- 1800s (Gottdiener and Kephart 1991). Office functions within edge cities have significantly challenged the older central business districts of these metro- politan regions. Central place functions have been dispersed. One interpreta- tion of these multi-nucleated metropolises is as networks of centers, each center servicing a sub-region but also dependent on all the others within the metropolis for the functions, such as corporate legal services, that it does not contain (Bingham and Kimble 1995).
Discursively, the network city takes the disparate parts of the city or the complexity of multiple cities and brings them together in a single entity, the network. Then, by positing the network as open, fluid, and innovative, complexity is re-introduced. The city is simultaneously unpredictable and organ- ized. Using the network metaphor, the urban theorist manages to embrace complexity (albeit one that has been tamed) yet avoid complexity’s debilitating tendencies.
Planning and the Network City
How we imagine the city opens up and closes down opportunities for planning.
Consequently, certain adjectival cities are more useful than others. For example, the “contemporary city” provides no direction for either analysis or inter- vention, while the “private city” suggests little need for, and even antagonism to, planning. Contrarily, the garden city, a characterization with particular histor- ical resonance, invites a series of integrated interventions and suggests the urban form that will be its ultimate outcome. Planners must imagine the city they desire before they can satisfy their urge to plan.
Three themes tie the adjectival city, and network city in particular, to planning. The first is the most general and concerns the potential for pur- posive intervention contained within the adjective. The second focuses on the importance of networks of cities for the sharing of planning ideas and tech- Robert A. Beauregard
1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111