Planning in Divided Cities (Real Estate Issues)

Planning in Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Contested Space

Planning in Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Contested Space. Frank Gaffikin and Mike Morrissey. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-19218-7

Planning in Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Contested Space By Frank Gaffikin Institute of Spatial and Environmental Planning, School of Planning, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Queen’s University, Belfast Mike Morrissey Community Consultant

This edition first published 2011 Ó2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered office: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial offices: 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK 2121 State Avenue, Ames, Iowa 50014-8300, USA For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gaffikin, Frank. Planning in divided cities : collaborative shaping of contested space / by Frank Gaffikin, Mike Morrissey. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-9218-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. City planning–United States. 2. City planning–Northern Ireland–Belfast. 3. Urbanization–United States. 4. Urbanization–Northern Ireland–Belfast. 5. Belfast (Northern Ireland)–Ethnic relations. 6. United States–Ethnic relations. I. Morrissey, Mike, 1946- II. Title. HT169.U5G34 2011 307.1’216–dc22 2010049557 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDF [9781444393187]; Wiley Online Library [9781444393200]; ePub [9781444393194] Set in 10/13 TrumpMediaeval-Roman by Thomson Digital, Noida, India

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Contents Preface and Acknowledgements PART I

INTRODUCTION

1 Introduction Setting the Scene Outline of Structure and Argument

vii 1 3 3 5

2 Conflict in the Changing City Forms of Urban Division

13 19

3 Understanding the Urban Farewell to Keynesian–Fordist Industrialism and Welfarism? Globalisation and Neo-Liberalism Urban Regime Theory Beyond the First World lens Making Sense of the Debate

23 33 37 40 43 45

4 The Divided City Introduction Explanations of Division Ethnicity and Urban Conflict Ethno-Nationalist Contest The State of Conflict and Conflict in the State

53 53 58 66 79 82

5 Identity, Space, and Urban Planning Identity and Diversity Multiculturalism and Cosmopolitanism Space and its Contestations Policy and Planning Responses to Diversity

85 85 89 96 105

6 Collaborative Planning and the Divided City Shifts in Planning The Role of Collaborative Planning Development and Division

115 115 118 132

PART II

141

CASE STUDIES

7 Development Amid Division in US Cities: The Cases of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago Introduction Pittsburgh: History of Partnership?

143 143 146

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Contents

Cleveland—‘mistake on the lake’? Chicago: the ‘spectacular’ City Race and Division Divided City: Whose Regeneration?

158 168 170 181

8 Contested Space, Contested Sovereignty: The Case of Belfast Introduction: An Unresolved Sovereignty Contest Space and Political Violence Residential Segregation and Spatial Deprivation After the Conflict Profiling Segregated Spaces Segregation and Deprivation Summarising the Divided City Tackling Division and Deprivation: A Difficult Agenda Community Cohesion and Economic Austerity Moving Forward: The Role of Planning Facing the Future

197 197 203 209 212 215 219 220 222 224 228

9 Between Sovereignty and Pluralism: Other Divided Cities Divided Country—Divided City: Nicosia Divided Cities in Britain: Oldham and Bradford Promoting Community Cohesion in Oldham Bradford: From Ethnic to Shared Space? Conclusions

231 233 240 242 246 252

PART III CONCLUSION

255

10 Planning Amid Division: A Way Forward? Introduction: The Formidable Task The Paradoxes of Peace Building Planning Shared Futures in Divided Cities The Paradoxes of Planning in Divided Cities The Problem of Community From Community Development to Community Capacity The Role of Planning in Narrowing Contest Implications for Planning, Governance, and Capacity Final Considerations

257 257 258 260 263 265 266 270 272 275

Bibliography Appendix: Methodology Index

279 315 319

Preface and Acknowledgements Certain terms dominate contemporary social discourse. Among these are: globalization, diversity, governance, inequality and sustainability, concepts that are central to our concerns in this book. Both the pace and scale of social change across the world are pronounced, as is their spatial imprint on place and community. This is most evident in large urban settlements. When it comes to reversing the debilities of de-industrializing western cities, there has been much debate about the efficacy of not only economic agglomerations, flexibilities, and creative milieu, but also of social capital, networking, and inclusive and integrated partnership governance. The relationship among these factors in the Global North’s resurgent urbanism is more complicated and differentiated than usually acknowledged. Similarly, the massive urban change occurring in the Global South, and the related parlous state of many impoverished slum inhabitants, demand multifaceted appraisal. In both cases, socio-spatial transformations have generated new inequalities and dislocations, and these have often intersected with old animosities centred on ethnicity, religion, and nationality. Particularly when combined, the combustible impact of such visceral forces tests the resilience of many cities in today’s world. A central argument in this book is that urban planning and policy are concerned with the shaping of social space, and such space is at the heart of many urban conflicts, particularly those that connect issues of territory and identity. Thus, since these public interventions cannot be de-coupled from those related to conflict resolution, they have to demonstrate their relevance to deeply contested urbanism. As they grapple with the difficult links among inclusion, cohesion, and socio-economic well-being, their agenda has to prioritise the building of community capacity and connectivity. But, it has to start with a candid recognition of the significance of space in divided cities, and of the imperative to knit regeneration and reconciliation in the search for non-violent responses to grievance and contest. Knowledge production is a collaborative rather than solo project, and this book owes much to the ideas and arguments of many colleagues in both casual conversation and formal seminar. Included in these influences are the stimulating thoughts of friends in the Planning cluster at Queen’s University Belfast. In particular, Malachy McEldowney, Ken Sterrett, and Brendan Murtagh have been both informative and provocative guides over many years. Other colleagues at Queen’s University have also contributed their appreciable scholarship, including Liam O’Dowd, James Anderson, and Dominic Bryan. Wider afield, Ralf Brand in Manchester University and David Perry in the University of Illinois, Chicago, have both inspired us, and perspired with us, in many joint research tasks. Beyond academia, many accomplished

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Preface and Acknowledgements

people, with whom we have worked in the community, voluntary and public sectors over many decades, have helped shape our analysis, while anchoring our theoretical and conceptual edifices to ‘real world’ problems: Paul Sweeney, Brendan Boyle, Duncan Morrow, and Jackie Redpath, to name but some. Finally, the support and forbearance of our families have been invaluable.

Part I Introduction

Chapter 1: Introduction Outlines the core objective and key arguments, and summarises the key points in each of the chapters.

Chapters 2–6 These chapters form the conceptual and theoretical framework: understanding the contemporary city and the nature of its conflicts, and the specific role that urban planning and policy can play in addressing problems of division.

Chapter 2: Conflict in the Changing City Explains how the urban is changing—essentially how the global is becoming more urban and the urban more global, and the implication of these changes for conflict in cities.

Chapter 3: Understanding the Urban The key conceptual and theoretical debates in urban studies over recent decades, and where this leaves our understanding of what is happening in the urban arena at a global level.

Chapter 4: The Divided City Various theories and interpretations about the nature of ’the divided city’ and why there may be a proliferation of such contested cities in the future.

Chapter 5: Identity, Space, and Urban Planning A more detailed look at the links between identity formation, cultural collision, protectionist views of territory, and urban space in a transnational and cosmopolitan context. Planning in Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Contested Space. Frank Gaffikin and Mike Morrissey. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-19218-7

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Planning in Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Contested Space

Chapter 6: Collaborative Planning and the Divided City Given this spread of the urban, and growth of city conflicts, what is the role of planning and policy in addressing these divisions?

1 Introduction

Setting the scene The spatial focus of this book is on the urban, the settlement form which most of humanity now inhabits. While the conceptual focus is on ‘divided cities’, it acknowledges that in one sense all cities are divided, in that their ‘publics’ and stakeholders have differential access and vested interest, marked by distinctions of class, ethnicity, and gender. Accordingly, it distinguishes between two main forms of urban contested space. One is where dispute and antagonism relate to issues of pluralism, and concern rivalries about imbalances in power, welfare and status among distinctive social groups. The other kind is about sovereignty, where there are similar pluralist disputes about equity, rights, and social entitlement, but these are interwoven with an ethno-nationalist conflict about the legitimacy of the state itself. An example of the former explored here is Chicago, a deeply segregated city, where race is a stark fault line in both the city’s historical narrative and contemporary discourses, and has been persistently seminal in the configuration of its social space. So, for instance, when people think of the black American ghetto, Chicago comes readily to mind as the home of its epitome. By contrast, Belfast typifies the second form of divided city. In a strange contortion, they are both crucibles and instruments in the overall contest about nationality in these troubled lands. Here, the manifesto of the combatant group that claims to be subject to suppression and conquest (Catholics/ Nationalists/Republicans in Belfast) is not merely concerned about equity and security with regard to the dominant group (Protestants/Unionists in Belfast). Rather, their immediate equality agenda can be interpreted as a transitional ‘Trojan horse’ politics unfolding over time into the fundamental objective of what they proclaim as a liberated homeland. In short, particular conflicts in Planning in Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Contested Space. Frank Gaffikin and Mike Morrissey. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-19218-7

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Planning in Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Contested Space

such cities about equality and development get wrapped up in the more general conflict about the legitimacy of state ‘ownership’ and prerogative. The question of ‘whose city’ is inextricably part of a bigger quarrel about ‘whose country’. This significant distinction between cities divided on a socio-economic or ethno-religious basis, and those conflicted around sovereignty contests is often under-observed. Of course, the distinction makes a big difference. Often, advocates of city peace-building will speak about fostering a sense of common belonging, rooted in a politico-legal concept of citizenship. Yet, in the case of sovereignty disputes, citizenship is itself at the very source of the conflict. Thus, although both kinds of urban division tend to promote territorial segregation, each type demands its own understanding and intervention. Specifically, as illustrated in this book, the intricacies of sovereignty contests require a sophisticated synchronization of planning and policy around social inclusion, community cohesion, and conflict resolution. The challenge of this integrated approach is that pursuit of one strategy can amplify the difficulty in another. For instance, social inclusion programmes that attempt to redress inequities between contending groups can inadvertently provoke antagonism from one side that believes such redistribution is designed to disadvantage them. In turn, this perception that ‘the other side’ gets more can deepen the acrimony, thereby frustrating the promotion of inter-community cohesion. Yet, a durable peace demands that inclusion and cohesion are not mutually exclusive. Faced with such entanglement, it is tempting for planners and those charged with urban development to disclaim its relevance for their remit. It is easier for them to don the mantle of apolitical technical professionals, who are obliged to deliberately disregard these contexts in order to protect their detached impartiality. But, in this book, it is argued that such apparent ‘neutrality’ in the midst of urban conflict is a delusion. Moreover, without a conscious concern about its impact on the divisions, planning and policy can inadvertently accentuate rather than ameliorate such conflict. Indeed, many aspects of these disputes come down to sensitive issues of territory and space— particularly in cities caught up in sovereignty contests—and since planning is fundamentally about the shaping of social space, it is inevitably intertwined with these awkward dilemmas. Addressed more positively, it is argued here that planning can provide the spatial underpinning of all the relevant interventions to resolve such conflicts. But, to achieve such a mission, it has to be reconceptualised beyond the narrow ambitions of physical land-use planning. New forms of spatial planning offer a paradigm for the kind of sustainable, comprehensive, inclusive, and participatory approaches to city development that may open up this conceptual and operational transformation. While this is much easier said than done, there is urgency about this recasting, if only because there are portents of proliferation of urban contests in the context of a globalising and

Introduction

5

urbanising world that accommodates substantial social segmentation, new geo-political antagonisms, environmental degradation, and related resource rivalry. In extreme conditions, such features risk the partitioning of many cities into the fortified enclaves of the rich and powerful alongside the settlements of the economically precarious and the ghettos of the excluded. Any such stark socio-spatial separation threatens to promote deepening inequalities, create separate social universes, and foment violence—all of which can serve to not only impede solidarity of common citizenship, but also to inhibit democratic politics. The very sustainability of cities in such circumstances is suspect. Even short of this forbidding scenario, there is an imperative for a new planning that proactively addresses the challenges of the divided city. Given this central argument, the book attends to the case through the following structure.

Outline of structure and argument The book is divided into three main sections: the opening section, covering Chapters 2 to 6, addresses the conceptual and theoretical frameworks and the dilemmas for planning and policy in their interventions in this problematic terrain; the second section comprises three empirical chapters that offer analysis of case study cities (Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Belfast, Nicosia, Oldham, and Bradford); and the final section consists of a concluding chapter that connects the issues and arguments with the earlier theoretical considerations, and offers a paradigm for effective planning and policy in contested cities. Specifically, Chapter 2 deals with the nature of the changing city, within which the problems of division fester. Essentially, it emphasises that we live in an urban world. Since there is no longer a simple urban–rural dichotomy, the ambiguity of territorial identities and boundaries means that ‘the city’ cannot be articulated in definitive spatial terms. Rather, it is an arena that is being continuously reshaped through social construction and relations within a spatial form of peri-urbanised city-regions (Knapp et al., 2006). Many urban areas are seeking amalgamations and networks with proximate city neighbours to achieve a more potent development axis, based on scale, synergy, and other forms of collaborative advantage. However, the inflated rhetoric of such territorial cohesion still tends to exceed the reality. Importantly, the new Urban Age is not simply the rolling out of the Western urban experience over the last two centuries, which, for instance, featured a close link between urbanisation, industrialisation, and modernisation. Many current city expansions in the poorest parts of the world are unattended by economic opportunity and growth, thereby generating pronounced social inequities and tensions. As expressed by Soja (2000), just as the global is urbanising, the urban is globalising, and both the development and conflictive potential of contemporary

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Planning in Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Contested Space

urbanism lies in the interplay of these twin processes. The big urban changes are evident in the Global South. Accordingly, the proclivity for urban theorists to assume the urban experience of the developed world as normative is inappropriate. Rather, a new urban scholarship is demanded, one that acknowledges the dramatic demographics in the Global South, and which seeks an explanatory synthesis, based on what urban study in both first and third worlds can learn from each other. For instance, a notable condition of urbanism in the developing world—informality—contains relevance not only for our insight into places registering the most acute urban change, but also for ways in which such features find contested manifestation in first world cities. Urban conflict is not reducible to singular cause or type, and thus distinctions of divisions need to be drawn that respect the complexity and variation, while acknowledging that specific case studies contain permutations of these different types that inter-penetrate in unique ways. So, while the case studies focus mostly on the familiar urban milieu in advanced Western countries, they are framed in an appreciation of the changing global context and the dynamics generating potential conflict in areas like the Global South. Trying to understand these significant changes in the urban, Chapter 3 considers the key theoretical and conceptual constructs employed to understand urban change and development for around a half a century. The era in urban policy, in which they held sway, was concerned about a rational planning system, framed to decentralise jobs, investment and people from concentrated metropolitan areas, while providing incremental improvements to the built environment in the old cities. By the 1980s, the urban issue had changed. More fundamental questions were raised about the very viability of the city in mature economies, in the context of a radical shift in their political economies, and about the increased significance of expanding cities in the emergent economies in the context of greater globalization and urbanization. Thus, Chapter 3 explores the tentative remaking of urban and social theory to make sense of these ‘New Times’. Over recent decades, urban theory has sought sanctuary from both the positivism of nomothetic spatial science and the over-determinism of Marxist structuralism. Alongside general discourses such as post-modernism, and more specific explanatory schemas such as urban regime theory, there has been since the 1980s, a set of ideas such as structuration and post-structuralism. These accord human consciousness a more central role, while conceding that the latitude for human agency is constrained by both structural context and social contingency. One theoretical framework, accommodating the realist and complex dimensions of context and contingency, offers interpretation of the singularity and inimitability of a particular place within a broader causal analysis of a globalised social world. A central problem underlying all of this debate is its emphasis on the first world city, to the neglect of the significant ramification for an urban world of the emergence of intensive urbanization in the Global South, and of the increasing transnational character of urbanism almost

Introduction

7

everywhere. Such reconstituted urbanism exemplifies the interaction of the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ city, an interface that holds the promise of opportunity and cultural hybridity, but also contains the threat of accentuated conflict, and thereby reveals a great deal about the contemporary city. Within this theoretical understanding, Chapter 4 explores the nature of the divided city. Cities today are shaped by rapid global processes of unsettling socio-economic change, within a largely de-regulated market-driven environment and an exploitative system of unfair ‘free trade’: the de-industrialization of the West; the transnationalisation of a big slice of manufacturing to the Global South; the role of hypermobile capital; increasing migrant flows; the diffusion of an acquisitive materialist culture; and degenerated urban enclaves of concentrated poverty alongside the cosmopolitan spaces enjoyed by the beneficiaries of neo-liberal globalisation. In turn, such divisive patterns have provoked urban contest, and alternative forms of globalisation from below, expressed often in ‘the informal city’. In just under a 60-year period since the Second World War, across the globe, five times more fatalities have resulted from civil wars (16.2 million) compared with interstate wars (3.3 million) (Fearon and Laitin, 2003). Many of these have had, at their root, a protracted contest around ethnic identity, since over 90% of the world’s nations are multi-ethnic with the majority, over 60%, of all conflicts since 1945 involving intrastate group clashes (Bollens, 1999). Moreover, many such conflicts have a strong urban component. As presaged earlier, two main types of divided city are distinguished: the first where the conflict is centred on cleavage of class, race, religious affiliation and ethnicity; and the second, where these fractures and frissons and the state’s role in addressing related issues of pluralism and equity, are interpenetrated with durable disputes about sovereignty and the legitimacy of the state itself. In both cases, the concept of identity is assuming greater prominence in a period that encompasses what appears to be contradictory dynamics of uniformization and differentiation, reflected in both the extension of globalism and the resurgence of tribalism. The former offers the potential of multiple identities, but within a power structure that mostly privileges the images, artefacts, and idioms of neo-liberal capitalism. The latter offers retreat to forms of local bonding and cultural purity that contrast the intimacy and safety of familiar solidarities with the distance and dominance attached to global determinations. Identity finds spatial expression in territory, which itself is socially shaped. While in many instances, territory will be accepted as natural and authentic, it is when its legitimacy, meaning, and ownership are contested that the role of power in its determination is most clearly exposed. Chapter 5 examines the issues of identity, territory, and space further. While for many identity is more a state of on-going re-definition, in ancestral struggles, such as those of an ethno-nationalist kind, it can be fixed, singular, and primal. In a world marked by cultural relativism and collision, there is

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Planning in Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Contested Space

deep argument about the respective merits of universalist cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and cultural particularism in achieving social cohesion amid increasing diversity. Far from the anticipated de-territorialising impact of globalization, territorial sensibility remains potent, and plays an emblematic role in constituting a sense of identity, attachment, and rootedness in a world given more to impermanence and spatial–temporal compression (Kahler and Walter, 2006). Summarising the argument about space and its inherent contestedness in the ‘divided city’, it can be said that space has little or no inherent meaning. Rather, its meaning is socially constructed. Accordingly, specific spaces can be subject to diverse and contested readings. Moreover, social space is relational, in the sense that social interaction composes its content and image. Yet, space is not itself some kind of passive stage on which is played out the ‘theatre’ of social life. Rather, it is an active agent in the social formation of human settlement. It both reflects and changes the multiplicities of its users. In this way, it is largely dynamic, continuously being re-made and re-defined. Thus, its ‘meaning’ can change over time (Massey, 2005). Chapter 6 addresses the role of planning in contested space, highlighting that one crucial difference between cities partitioned on socio-economic or ethno-religious bases and those divided as a consequence of sovereignty contests, is that the latter typically contain more problematic features of contested space since the idea of indivisible territory minimises the scope for peaceful negotiation and compromise. Different models of urban planning and policy can operate in contested cities. But even ones designed to promote equity and conflict resolution can be entrapped in the complexity and contradictions of deep-seated struggles. Potentially, the new shift to spatial planning and the engaged and dialogic nature of collaborative planning offer pathways to a more productive role for such public intervention in cities marked by ultra-stratified identity politics and ethno-nationalist contest. Nevertheless, there are limits to a proceduralist view of collaborative planning, particularly in the highly fragmented circumstance of uncollaborative parties locked in mutual hostility and subject to power differentials. This suggests that a more agonistic model of planning is demanded. These theoretical, conceptual, and discursive chapters are followed by three empirical ones that scope across the sovereignty–pluralist distinction drawn earlier. Chapter 7 looks at three US cities, located in the Mid-West region, which have been subject to significant economic restructuring: Chicago, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. In exploring the divisions of these cities, largely rooted in the pluralist fractures around race, ethnicity, and class, the extent to which planning interventions pay heed to, and impact on, these conditions is addressed. While all three cities have pursued a development-led form of renaissance within at least a nominal framework of public–private partnership, the emphasis attached to a market-driven approach has been notable. Moreover, the form and role of the racial divide in each city has been

Introduction

9

different, and arguably has impacted on the outcome of their regeneration drive. One spatial rivalry that has featured in all three cases concerns the relative priority attached to the development of the Downtown over the neighbourhoods, particularly those communities where the concentration of race and poverty is most acute. Within this kind of common political–economic framework, what differences in strategy and outcome are apparent, and how do these relate to city divisions, particularly around the category of race? Chapter 8 deals with the sovereignty-contested city of Belfast. It argues that this ethno-nationalist dispute has seen a close correspondence between the spaces of the most acute deprivation and the spaces where conflict around identity and belonging has been most trenchantly fought. Accordingly, policies of community cohesion and social inclusion are both relevant interventions within a participatory spatial planning framework. But they have to be closely aligned and under-pinned by a deliberate conflict-resolution strategy. Specifically, programmes for compensatory regeneration and wider city-region development and those for inter-communal reconciliation need to operate as twin processes that are mutually reinforcing. Yet, it is acknowledged that the re-distributive attributes of social inclusion initiatives can unintentionally intensify divisions, thereby making the objectives of community cohesion even more intractable. Some of this conundrum is evident in the limited success of both conventional and innovative approaches to planning and development in the city in recent decades. The final empirical chapter covers both sovereignty and pluralist examples— Nicosia in Cyprus in the case of the former, and Oldham and Bradford in Britain, in the case of the latter. It attempts to highlight the different agendas that derive from this distinction—incremental political accommodation in the case of the former, manifested in gradual physical and spatial transformations; and emphasis on community cohesion and social inclusion in the case of the UK cities. However, despite this different emphasis, and the conceptual demarcations in the nature of the division, it also acknowledges some of the interface between these two types of city strife. Both places have experienced sectarian violence centred on contested identity and territory. For instance, inter-communal riots in Oldham and Bradford prompted public engagement about the roots of this upheaval, with considerable focus on contentious links between identity and territory. While clearly the ethno-nationalist hostility in Nicosia is rooted in a visceral dispute about sovereignty, it may be considered that the genesis of the ethnic hostilities in Britain is totally different. The distinction between the two may seem to be reflected in the more absolute and physical divide that separates Greek and Turkish Cypriots in Nicosia. However, the contrast may not be so unadulterated. For some of the Islamic protagonists in Britain, there is also a ‘sovereignty’ dimension—if only in their conviction that sovereignty belongs ultimately with the divine rather than secular authority, and that it has a global writ rather than a specific national one. Similarly, for some of the white adversaries, relevance is attached to a facet

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Planning in Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Contested Space

of English nationalism, whose sovereignty they perceive to have been compromised by the growing presence of ethnic groups with a presumed primary attachment to a foreign culture. This is not to infer that the two urban contexts replicate main aspects. Rather, without losing the important distinction between the sovereignty and pluralist disputes, it is to acknowledge that places from both kinds of contest can share some similar elements with respect to identity affiliation, inter-communal tension, and the linked issue of competitive access to urban space and resources. In conclusion, Chapter 10 draws the analysis of the case studies together with the earlier conceptual and theoretical considerations that frame the challenge of planning in divided cities. Beyond the main models of planning in contested space—the neutral, partisan, equity, and resolver approaches— there is a proposed new model that fits within creative versions of spatial planning and facilitates the kind of agonistic deliberation that may hold promise for conflictive cities. In this task, there is recognition of how incongruities among planning and policy agendas may derive from ontological, epistemological, ideological, and methodological disputes. Deep divisions in cities generate contest between protagonists about the reality of the context and content of the conflict; about the form and validation of knowledge that offers causal understanding; about the rival values and perspectives that inform the mission and behaviour of the adversaries; and about the methods of data collection and analysis designed to elucidate the actual situation. Thus, where cultural collision is acute and mutual trust is fragile, what can appear as rational and equitable to one side can appear as unreasonable and discriminatory to the other. Patently, we do not occupy an exclusively rational social universe. Even without endorsing the relativities of post-modernism, it can be said that emotion, intuition, and such like, also play their part. Thus it is that two very different world views can see ‘reality’ in very different ways, and this binary lens can become further entangled with a familiar pattern in city conflicts whereby one side’s expectation gives rise to the other’s enhanced insecurity and ‘bunker’ mentality. The closing chapter considers these dilemmas and offers an imperfect pathway to a more productive discourse. This book derives from the participatory action-research work of the authors over the last two decades, during which they have been intensively involved in the policy-making and evaluation component of urban/regional policy and planning, while also engaged at the meso and micro levels with regeneration and community agencies of various kinds. In particular, over the last five years, they have been involved with an international collaborative research project, known as Contested Cities and Urban Universities (CU2) that has sought to work through a strategic partnership between academy and various city stakeholders in co-producing knowledge about the nature of divided cities and efficacy of planning and policy responses. Other colleagues have contributed to this work and their ideas have helped us clarify our own thoughts in these pages. In particular, we would like to recognise Professor

Introduction

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David Perry, Director of the Great Cities Institute, University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC); Ratoola Kunda (UIC); and Dr Ralf Brand, University of Manchester, UK. Within Queen’s University, Belfast, our team has included: Professor Malachy McEldowney, who particularly led our research in Nicosia, and whose reflections we draw upon for that case study; Dr Ken Sterrett and Maelosia Hardy, whose primary research in Oldham and Bradford has assisted our two case studies in the UK, and Gavan Rafferty, who has worked on the issue of governance in divided cities.

2 Conflict in the Changing City

In considering the complexion of urban division and conflict, it is helpful to set the context of the contemporary city. Urbanity is changing markedly, reflecting shifts in economy, polity, diversity and demography, while its divisive and fractal character is putatively accentuated by related social and ethnic polarities. Since the concept of the urban realm is increasingly complex (Healey, 2007), it is no longer feasible to define it simply as human settlement outside the rural, ‘an inhabited place of greater size, population or importance than a town or village’ to quote a dictionary description (Merriam-Webster, 2005, p. 226). Thus, we have the idea of ‘metropolis’ to acknowledge that urban built environments in advanced economies have tended over the last five decades to stretch out beyond original municipal boundaries in variegated manifestations of sprawl (Downs, 1994), sometimes connecting together economically interdependent metropolitan areas in forms such as conurbation and metroplex. While the prevailing narrative in the industrial city since the 1960s has been one of decline and even death (Jacobs, 1961), like Mark Twain’s, its demise has proved to be exaggerated. Rather than degenerate, it has mutated into a more amorphous form, whereby the effective spatial unit of urban analysis extends beyond central cities to at least encompass the hinterland of suburban and ex-urban human habitat. As expressed by Knapp (2006, p. 61): Old dichotomies between centre and periphery, urban and rural, settlements and open space, are fading . . .Cities, suburbs, towns and rural areas grow increasingly together into a new poly-nuclear and fragmented urban patchwork. Indeed, some have identified this perimeter settlement as a distinctive urban form, known as ‘edge city’ (Garreau, 1991), that, particularly in the US, has Planning in Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Contested Space. Frank Gaffikin and Mike Morrissey. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-19218-7

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Planning in Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Contested Space

now configured to the final destination of a three-stage development: starting with the suburbanisation of people, largely involved in dormitory living and commuting to downtown; transforming further with the malling of America, which saw the re-siting of downtown retail and offices in satellite suburbs; and culminating with the relocation of substantial economic activity to the more autonomous ‘superburbia’ or ‘technoburbs’, where a sizeable share of metropolitans now reside, recreate, shop and work. Bloch (1994) refers to this ‘rise and shift to the periphery’ as the inversion of the metropolis, displacing the conventional centripetal and largely radial dynamics of development from the urban core outwards with a more tangled mosaic landscape. Linked to this concept is the description of that belt in the urban fringes just beyond ‘city limits’, where reside both farmers and households in a hybrid city-countryside known as the peri-urban (Cavailhes et al., 2004). Representing ‘the transitional zones between distinctly urban and unambiguously rural areas’ (Simon, 2008, p. 167), these diffuse interfaces manifest what some have labelled extended metropolitan regions. This pattern of low density urban expansion has also become evident in Europe, where urban compaction used to contrast favourably with the typical sprawl in the US. In Europe, growth in built-up locations peaked in the 1950s–1960s, since when the urban footprint has stretched into surrounding countryside, exemplified in the conglomerate development along the Rhone Valley down to the Mediterranean coast. In such formations, ‘development is patchy, scattered and strung out, with a tendency for discontinuity’ (European Environment Agency, 2006, p. 6). A mix of social circumstance and policy has spurred this dynamic, including: income growth, low commuting costs, low cost of agricultural land acquisition relative to brownfield development, and intractable inner city problems (ibid. 2006, p. 10–11): Indeed during the 10-year period between 1990 and 2000 the growth of urban areas and associated infrastructure throughout Europe consumed more than 8000 km2 (a 5.4% increase during the period). On a straight extrapolation, a 0.6% annual increase in urban areas, although apparently small, would lead to a doubling of the amount of urban area in little over a century. Historical trends since the mid-1950s show that European cities have expanded on average by 78%, whereas the population has grown by only 33%. A major consequence of this trend is that European cities have become less compact. These patterns are becoming evident also among the former ‘socialist’ cities of Eastern Europe. Though once spatially contained by a combination of centralised planning and mass use of public transit, they are experiencing acute pressure toward low density sprawl as incomes rise, new housing choices emerge, access to the private car extends, land markets are deregulated, and planning controls are eased.

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Others have characterised the new cityspace that combines dispersal and agglomeration as the post-metropolis (Soja, 2000, p. 250), expressed ‘as “the city turned inside-out”, as in the urbanisation of the suburbs and the rise of the Outer City. But it also represents “the city turned outside-in”, a globalisation of the Inner City that brings all the world’s peripheries into the center, . . .This redefines the Outer and the Inner City simultaneously, while making each of these terms more and more difficult to delineate and map with any clarity or confidence’. This explanation of reconstituted territoriality builds on Soja’s previous publication, Thirdspace (1996), in which he spoke of the exopolis, to capture a linked triple process of urban change—the demise of the traditional city, alongside the growth of outer cities, amid the growing influence of exogenous factors on all cities in a globalising world. Taking this spatial pattern further, the idea of ‘city-region’ suggests that individual cities have to be understood increasingly in their regional context. Thus, for example, European balanced development policies lean towards a polycentric network of urban areas in regional and sub-regional locales to optimise economies of scale and scope (Davoudi and Strange, 2009). Such multiscalar clustering raises questions about the ‘shifting territory’ of urban governance (Murdoch, 1997), and about how such composite urban areas can achieve smart connectivity in policy and planning. This is particularly so if the spatial unit is extended even further. For instance, Gottman’s concept (1957) of megalopolis originally referred to the 500 mile corridor in the northeastern US region, where a cluster of urban areas from Boston to Washington constituted a powerful economic and political zone in the country as a whole. Similar urbanised complexes have been identified in Europe, such as the ‘blue banana’ area that covers a vast tract of urbanisation and concentrated economy, stretching from Birmingham to Milan, and including London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Cologne, Frankfurt, Basel, Zurich, and Turin. Other less pre-eminent socio-spatial geometries in Europe include: the ‘golden banana’, a coastal ‘sun-belt’ corridor from Valencia to Genoa; the ‘Flemish diamond’, comprising an agglomeration of Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp and Leuven, with a total population of 5.5 million; and the Randstad in Holland, linking Amsterdam (finance, transport) to Utrecht (service sector), The Hague (government) and Rotterdam (port). This megalopolitan agglomeration, based on integrated strategic citynetworking, has been elaborated in the contemporary term, mega-region, to capture forms of urban settlements that grow beyond the metropolitan, noted not only for substantial population size, but also for significance in economic output and innovation. One study of these integrated sets of cities and surrounding suburban hinterlands identifies 40 mega-regions in the world, with output of more than $100 billion, that together produce two-thirds of world output, and 85% of global innovation (Florida et al., 2007, p. 4):

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As the distribution of economic activity has gone global, the city-system has also become global—meaning that cities compete now on global terrain. Urban mega-regions are beginning to relate to the global economy in much the same way that metropolitan regions relate to national economies. Thus, such mega-regions can network more together than to other parts of their own nation states. Indeed, for some like Ohmae (2000), these regionstates are almost replacing nation-states as the ‘natural’ business units, operating with modern telecommunication and transport, across political boundaries in what is supposedly an increasingly ‘flat’ and borderless world (Friedman, 2005). Such network power is seen as offering the synergy and nimble flexibility that can attend greater liberation from national polity. This is particularly so in the context of globalisation (Brenner, 1999), which has contributed to the reshaping of the city in many ways. One example is the emergence of ‘global cities’ (Sassen, 1991; Isin, 2000; Olds, 2001), marked not only by their role as command centres in the world economy, as nodal post-industrial production sites of global finance and business services, as concentrated sources of innovation, and as lucrative markets of elite consumption, but also by their mutual worldwide networking (Sassen, 2002). Critics of this tag (Huyssen, 2008, pp. 10–11) suggest that: the global city had become a slogan serving either to claim avant-garde status for certain, primarily Western centers of finance and services or to articulate ambitions elsewhere to join the urban upper crust. . .the conceit of the global city has itself become a way of reasserting Western notions of advanced modernity and urban developmentalism which ignores many vital aspects of urban life that fall outside its purview. Some insist that the current characteristics of the global city have been evident in embryonic form for around 150 years, and that their mature manifestation is simply a recently accelerated process layered on an existing integrative trajectory. As noted by Abu-Lughod (1999, p. 2) in respect of New York: ‘. . .even though the pace and scale of today’s globalized economy— and thus of the global cities that serve as its “command posts”—are faster and vaster, and the mechanisms of integration more thoroughgoing and quickly executed. . .the seeds from which the present “global city” grew were firmly planted in Manhattan during the middle decades of the nineteenth century’. Another aspect of this ‘global’ impact is the development of more mongrel cities (Sandercock, 2003), comprising greater diversity of ethnic populations due to factors like increasing migration patterns. In broad terms, this holds the prospect of either more pronounced conflict around the politics of identity and contested space, or the nurturing of cosmopolis, where pluralist engagement across crucial divides can fashion a creative combination of multiculturalism

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and cultural hybridity, within a framework of common citizenship (Kymlicka, 1995) and ‘a recognition of intertwined fates’ (Sandercock, 1998, p. 125). But, despite all the transformative re-patterning in the advanced economies, the most dramatic redefinition of the city is happening in the Global South. Since 1950, the human population has expanded from 2.5 billion to 6 billion, and 60% of this massive growth has occurred in urban areas, particularly in the developing world, where there has been over a sixfold increase in urban populace. As expressed by Gray (2002, p. 10): ‘People who are now over forty have lived through a doubling of the world’s population’. In 2007, an historic mark was reached, when 50% of humanity was designated as urban, compared with approximately 25% in 1950, and 10% in 1900. This epochal change augurs the Urban Age. Moreover, the projection is that by 2030, global urban population as a share of total population will reach around 60%, and a likely 75% by 2050. This accelerated urbanisation means that between 2001 and 2030, virtually all world population increase will happen in urban areas, and in the process, the world’s slum population will double to around 2 billion, thereby spiralling from 32% to 41% of the world’s urban population over this period (Tibaijuka, 2007). In 1975, only 27% of the developing world’s population was urban. By 2030, it will be 50% (Hinrichsen et al., 2002). Over a longer time frame, from 2007 to 2050, the world’s urban population will likely rise from 3.3 billion to 6.4 billion, an almost doubling increase that exceeds the expected increase of total world population over this period, reflecting substantial migration from rural to urban settlement (UN Population Division, 2007). One feature of this striking growth is the emergence of megacities, a phenomenon mostly concentrated in the Global South. Of course, large cities have existed for some time. Think of ancient Baghdad. But, in 2000, there were 388 cities in the world with 1 million plus residents. By 2015, the figure is estimated to rise to 554 such cities (Hinrichsen et al., 2002). Defining megacities as locations of 10 million inhabitants or more, of the top 10 such places in 2007, only two were in the advanced economies: Tokyo at 35.7 million and New York–Newark at 19 milllion. Moreover, by 2025, the big increases will have occurred in cities like Mumbai (from 18.9 million to 26.4 million), Delhi (from 15.9 million to 22.5 million), Dhaka (from 13.5 million to 22 million), and Kolkata (from 14.8 million to 20.6 million) (UN-Habitat, 2008a). Taking the case of Mexico City, its area has spread out from 9.1 to 1500 km2 from the start of the twentieth century to the present. Its populous, polluted, and multinodal form contributes to its reputed chaotic and dangerous cityscape. Hailed by some as a ‘monstropolis’, it ‘has grown in such a staggered and awkward manner that it seems to lack any sort of master plan, a city in which one can barely conceive one’s day-to-day survival’ (Canclini, 2008, p. 88). Such mammoth urban centres have been termed ‘primate cities’, referring to how their over-urbanisation reflects their society’s uneven development and locational inflexibility. For instance, the population of Thailand’s capital,

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Bangkok, was 6.7 million in 2000, 30 times larger than the next largest city (Gottdiener and Hutchinson, 2006). Given their size and diversity, their vulnerability to natural disasters associated with climate change, the immiseration of so many of their residents, and the resource rivalry involved in building physical and social infrastructure sustainably (UN-Habitat, 2008b), these urban giants face the potential of protracted social conflict. Taking this trajectory of the ‘endless city’ (Burdett and Sudjic, 2008) to an extreme prediction, it has been posited that time will see the creation of the ecumenopolis, whereby humankind will live in one continuous worldwide city. A bleak reflection of this intensified urbanism is the steep growth of what has been dubbed shadow cities, referring to the illegal squatter settlements that express an indomitable resilience and ingenuity among the world’s poorest. Creating makeshift incremental neighbourhoods outside the ‘asphalt world’ of the formal planning process (Neuwirth, 2005), such people live in the denied or invisible city, constituting a new paradigm of human settlement, a ‘zone of silence’ in terms of recognition, legitimacy and public debate (Global Urban Observatory, 2003). Davis (2006) characterises this proliferation of the precarious habitat of barricadas, favelas, and shanty towns as a ‘planet of slums’, a labyrinth of spatially concentrated destitution and related conflict. But, even within the Global South, significant poverty asymmetries prevail. An estimate in 2005 indicated that ‘in the least developed countries almost three quarters of the urban population were slum dwellers’ (UN Population Division, 2007). In summarising this conceptual confusion of the contemporary city— reflected in the various neologisms such as ‘the multi-nucleated metropolitan region, the polycentric urban region, the new techno-city, post-suburbia, the galactic metropolis, the city without, the postmodern urban form. . .’, Isin (1996, p. 123) concludes that the root characteristic is that of socio-spatial fragmentation and discordance within a global context. But, whatever categorisation is employed to reflect the urban mutations and differential geographic scale and reach, the important point to note is that the spatial and the social interpenetrate, and the intrinsic spatiality of social life, as Soja (2000, p. 8) reminds us, is critical to comprehension of contemporary urbanism: Urban spatial specificity refers to the particular configurations of social relations, built forms, and human activity in a city and its geographic sphere of influence. It actively arises from the social production of cityspace as a distinctive material and symbolic context or habitat for human life. It thus has both formal or morphological as well as processual or dynamic aspects. Given this changing definition of the urban, investigation of planning in the divided city—this book’s central focus—is predicated on an understanding that divisions in cities have diverse cause and form.

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Forms of urban division In the contemporary period, eight main forms of urban conflict have been argued: (1) Some insist that with the transformation over the last four decades in the mature economies—variously characterised as the shift to late capitalism, disorganised capitalism, post-industrialism, or the informational society—has come a more pronounced bifurcation of the labour market and a related acute socio-spatial segregation between rich and poor. In its starkest form, the flourishing gated communities of the wealthy and the languishing ghettoes of the underclass are deemed to constitute a dual or two-speed city that is inherently unstable and prone to conflict. Others suggest that this stark contrast is over-simplified. (2) With the massive and rapid growth of the urban in the Global South, due mainly to the ‘modernisation’ of the emergent industrial economies and the related influx from rural settlement, has come a strain on urban infrastructure and an accentuation of social inequality amid proliferation of informal development, whose legitimacy and welfare are deeply contested. Such confrontations risk rending whole urban regions, with potential for recurrent discord. (3) As a feature of globalisation, alongside the greater mobility of capital, labour, trade, and information, there has been an increasing migration pattern, particularly from less developed to richer economies. Such new demographic configuration brings greater ethnic and religious diversity to even formerly homogeneous societies, and since the new populations tend to congregate in kindred city communities, the urban has become a concentrated arena that tests humanity’s ability to live peaceably with difference. (4) A pre-eminent version of such ‘culture wars’ has been the global contest between militant Islam and other politico-religious systems such as the West. For some like Huntington (1996), in the contemporary world, the principal fractures that engulf large populations in caustic and violent dispute are linked to a ‘clash of civilisations’. In this view, the primary condition of world conflict is no longer rooted in the ideological tussle of the Cold War, but rather rests in the diversity of cultural and religious identity, particularly the major fault line that involves elements of Islam and their perceived enemies. While producing new macro-geographies, such as the provocatively designated ‘axis of evil’, this absolutist confrontation also hardens ancient enmities in specific cities like Jerusalem and Beirut, and sparks newer ones in cities like Baghdad. (5) The urban is likely to become increasingly the site of ‘new wars’. This is attributable to both the massive urban growth in the Global South, and the nature of modern warfare. Since insurgents are particularly susceptible

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to high tech precision weapons in open terrain, adversaries of the most powerful nations will increasingly seek the density and congestion of urban ‘cover’, both to merge with local non-combatants and to curtail the superiority of their foe’s advanced weaponry. Moreover, as illustrated in the case of Baghdad, as insurgents seek to erode the will of their opponents, such protracted attrition holds potential for igniting local inter-ethnic enmities. (6) The role of ideology and/or government systems can engender intentional socio-spatial fissures, and related discord. For instance, Berlin’s partition and ultimate physical carving was connected to a global ideological contest, while South African cities were submitted to a state strategy of mandatory racial segregation, discrimination, and subjugation. (7) Increased global economic activity and the related pressures on global warming have sharpened rivalries over sources of energy and communication access. This has led to speculation that many future wars will be ignited by struggles for oil, gas, and water, and in the longer term perhaps by conflicts for those parts of the planet most secure from devastations visited by climatic change. Again, such global contests will come to ground most acutely in specific cities, and the racial profile of the forsaken in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina illustrates the politically toxic capacity of such catastrophes. (8) The end of the Cold War was accompanied by the collapse of authoritarian regimes that had held diverse nationalities forcibly under a centralist polity. Moreover, the buttressing of surrogate and satellite administrations by the two main ideological combatants proved no longer tenable. Together with on-going de-colonialisation, such ‘liberations’ have defrozen old ethnic animosities and ushered in a new wave of ethno-nationalist contest. These new arenas of dispute about borders and sovereignty, such as the Balkans and Chechnya, join those nationalist cauldrons of more long-standing, such as the major conflicts of Israel–Palestine, Lebanon, and Kashmir–India–Pakistan, and those less significant geo-politically, such as Cyprus, Northern Ireland, and the Basque Country. There is a tendency for such macro quarrels to find most ferocious expression in the main urban centres, such as Jerusalem, Beirut, Sarajevo, Grozny, Nicosia, Belfast, and Bilbao. In short, much of the world’s urban divisions can be located within this typology. But the explanatory force of each ‘type’ can be debated. Moreover, specific conflicts comprise specific permutations of them. But, whatever the difference in context and form, urban conflicts share a linked set of issues: history, identity, territory, propinquity, legitimacy, equity, and security. In general terms, analysis of these contests tends to fall predominantly into four frameworks:

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The political (addressing the basis of legitimacy, and including arguments about governance and about whether pluralist democracy offers the most effective instrument for securing consensus and compromise between protagonists). The economic (examining the material basis for class and power inequities, seen to underpin the fissures). The cultural (emphasising the way rival norms, traditions, and claims of ethnic groups determine mutual antagonism, ranging from estrangement to active hostility). The spatial (the relational geographies that attend the conflict).

The view of this book is that all cities in the contemporary world are in some regard ‘divided cities’. Thus, it is important to make a differentiation about the type of division. Two main types will be distinguished here. The first concerns those disputes which are predominantly about pluralist issues of social class, status, power and equity, and the second concerns how macro disputes about state sovereignty become encapsulated most acutely in micro spaces in the main cities of the territories involved. Of course, in many cases, it is not such a simple dichotomy. In particular, those cities caught up in sovereignty conflicts also experience the socio-spatial fragmentations of pluralist quarrels, and it is the inter-penetration of these that shape the contingencies of particular situations. Similarly, it will be argued that causal frameworks are not reducible to the neat categories outlined above. For instance, the material impacts on the cultural and political, and is, in turn, influenced by them. In other words, cities are complex intricate arenas, whose social and spatial contours are moulded by multiple inter-connected dynamics, and these need to be deciphered further before consideration of planning’s distinctive role in addressing urban conflict. Given the main character of urban change and division outlined here, how are these features to be understood? The next chapter examines the theories that have dominated discourses about the city from the twentieth century, and their explanatory merit, while the subsequent chapter explores the main conceptualisations of conflict in cities.

3 Understanding the Urban

In the 1970s, the energy crisis and subsequent recession accelerated the process of de-industrialisation, as part of a transnational corporate restructuring within a deepening globalisation, all with a profound impact on urban socio-spatiality. By the 1980s, the very survival of the city in the developed market economies appeared to be problematic, as its very raison d’^etre was being recast in the wake of the substantial shake-out of industrial employment. Moreover, the marked socio-spatial changes seemed to qualify the interpretative relevance of conventional urban theory, which lacked a convincing purchase on that transformative period. Since then, the widening contour of urban studies has seen the increasingly interdisciplinary complexion of the genre. Contextually, there has been the contribution of public policy in addressing the way socially allocated capital was being reshaped, and the implication for the most deprived urban spaces. Political economy has offered insights into the urban impact of changing production regimes and the crisis in Keynesian economic management. The reorganised role of the local state following greater privatisation and centralisation of its former role has been a concern of sociology and politics. Responding to the de-regulation tendencies in development control of land use, urban planning has been impelled to a more pluralist conceptualisation beyond its social democratic roots. But perhaps the subject area which, in examining the new spatial forms derivative of all this change, has engaged the most integrated debate is that of economic and human geography. To take some examples of standard urban theory to illustrate their limitations, we can start with neoclassical location theory about the competitive operation of the land market. Concentrating on the cost–benefit estimation of optimal location and land-use allocation in particular built environments, with the purpose of identifying the favourable conditions and incentives that Planning in Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Contested Space. Frank Gaffikin and Mike Morrissey. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-19218-7

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magnetise profitable investment (Walker, 1980), most versions accorded great significance to distance. For instance, Christaller’s central place theory posited hexagonally shaped market areas, founded on two key concepts: threshold, which was a measure of the prerequisite minimum demand level to sustain a service, and range, which was the furthest distance a customer was prepared to travel to purchase. The empirical practicality of such modelling for maximum economic utility can be queried, as can its emphasis on description rather than explanation (Healey and Ilberry, 1990, p. 23): . . . . neoclassical approaches to economic geography can be criticized for seeking explanation at the level of the individual firm, farm, or office, for building abstract models in which real world decisions are treated as additional factors, and for ignoring the historical conditions in which firms are operating. In the 1970s, a more inductive exercise took hold, in a behavioural perspective which attempted to develop generalised spatial patterns from empirical investigation at the micro-level. Since focus was often on psychological penetration of individual values and motivations, it postulated imperatives besides profit maximisation, including security and satisfaction, and acknowledged the constraints on location decision making, imposed by the range of information and the scope for its application. As such, it strayed beyond a narrow positivism, with a greater potential for including subjective perceptions in the land-use calculus (Pred, 1974). A different perspective came with modernisation theory, a linear and evolutionist formulation, which posited that successful urban development was contingent upon the degree of exposure to, and diffusion of, metropolitan progressive ideas and values (Rostow, 1971). Variations of this theme are Tonnies’ (1957) dualistic distinction of gemeinschaft, resonant with traditional rural values, and gesellschaft, typical of modern urban society, and dichotomies in which the city is perceived as an environment at once liberating and isolating, in which informal ascriptive relations, and related solidarities, give way to more contractual ones, linked to achievement, rationality, individualism and mobility. By the same token, such change is seen to risk greater instability and conflict. Another variation in this urban analysis is found in terms of culture and ecology, tracing itself back to the Chicago School, which was concerned to research how such a large mosaic city, faced with rapid transformation, density, and heterogeneity, could adapt and endure. Leading figures in this team, like Park and Burgess, produced a theory of social ecology, a Darwinian construct of the city as a social organism, virtually subject to natural laws. In this model, urban space is seen to be shaped by a continual series of territorial manoeuvres, in which those ‘fittest’ social groups survive best in the struggle for best settlement. Burgess elaborated this proposition via his

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social mapping of concentric urban zones, whereby the inner circle denoted a Central Business District, rippling out to a suburban or satellite town belt. Least attractive was the ‘zone of transition’, bedevilled by disorganisation and cultural impairments. This dynamic of invasion and succession is appreciative of the decaying potential of the older parts of the urban core, a difference with the Alonso model, which takes a more ahistorical and idealised view of centrality and distance. For urban ecologists, then, the central focus was on the dynamic in the built environment, derivative of competitive individuals pursuing their consumer preferences in a largely market environment. It was the cultural dimension which most engaged another of the Chicago team, Louis Wirth (1957), for whom the urbanised culture of modern society strained to accommodate large numbers of people from mixed social groups in tightly packed spaces, consonant with civility rather than unruly dispute. A derivative of this theoretical strand lay in community studies, in which researchers often immersed themselves in a particular neighbourhood in ethnographical penetration of its specificities. By the 1960s, the pedigree of this approach was challenged by those like Pahl (1968, p. 293), who were convinced that it was social rather than geographical location which really mattered. He disowned as a fruitless exercise ‘any attempt to tie particular patterns of social relationships to specific geographical milieux . . . .’ Certainly, the neighbourhood case study method suffered from the conceptual ambiguity of the term ‘community’. Though textually rich, these studies also struggled to transcend the particularistic narrative, into accounts with more universal application. The most notable, such as the Lynds’ (1929) exploration of ‘Middletown’ US, or 30 years later, Young and Wilmott’s (1957) look at London’s Bethnal Green, testified to an enduring ‘quest for community’ in urban settlement. The latter study inferred that the modern city embodied an urban–rural continuum, in which ‘folk society’ cohabited with a system of secondary relations. Resisting the temptation to idealise the mutual support systems of the closely-knit neighbourhood, the study by Coates and Silburn (1970) of Nottingham’s St Ann’s found that shared adversity could equally instill conflictual relations, and it became an important contribution to the ‘rediscovery of poverty’ literature in Britain. By the 1960s, cultural theories were also being marshalled to explain urban deprivation in terms of communal pathologies. This merely reflected a central weakness of the whole perspective, namely its failure to separate cause and effect, to distinguish in other words, whether people’s value and behaviour patterns were responsible for their urban condition, or a response to it. Its attachment to culture as cause contributed to an environmental determinism, in which it was thought that where people lived greatly influenced how they lived. The architecture and planning that drew on this assumption were reflected in everything from Garden Villages to the post-war New Towns. In the 1960s, the outbreak of urban rioting in the US, and in European countries such as Britain and France, though diverse in its genesis, stimulated

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the reformulation of an urban theory capable of interpreting such conflict. An example was to be found in a neo-Weberian model, highlighting the organisation of social space, with a focus on the managerial and allocative roles of urban gatekeepers. This managerialist perspective, compared with the cultural, acknowledged more clearly the role of power in the constitution of the urban. However, its understanding of power was a pluralist one, premised on a diffusion of political influence throughout the social system, mediated by a representational state. It considered the contest to own and use scarce resources in contained social space involved inequalities and conflicts generated by state bureaucracy as well as by the market. The theory contained a useful reminder that organisations are governed both by rules and discretion, and the arbitrary element can be driven by both rationality and prejudice. By implication, the particular form the matrix took in any given distributive or conflict situation demanded intimate knowledge of the managerial decisionmaking process. The Weberian concern with bureaucratic power was obvious. But a central theoretical difficulty concerned the relationship between the polity and the economy, and a central empirical problem arose in the identification, ranking, and inter-relating of the urban managers. The risk for the researcher lay in accessing the ‘middle dog’, rather than the real power brokers. Conflicts could be characterised as ‘people versus the planners’, when the degree of autonomy exercised by the latter was strictly circumscribed. As such, it could artificially delimit disputes as being between the ‘middle dogs’ and ‘underdogs’. Questions about who decides what resources are scarce might get sidelined. There was also a constraint in seeing the urban as an enclosed arena, rather than locating it dynamically in the wider political economy. In response to such critiques, Pahl (1975, p. 284), for instance, recognised the significance of capitalist markets in shaping particular urban economies. However, he insisted that a general focus on the features of capitalism per se was less enlightening about urban Britain than a specific understanding of British capitalism, and its corporatist structures. Within this, the efficacy of a research focus on urban managers remains: Since the urban managers are the central mediators between urban populations and the capitalist economy and since they also serve to generate and maintain the ideology of Welfare-Statism, their role remains crucial in the urban problematic . . . . The search for a just city is self-defeating. As long as there are ‘modern big cities’ there will be a need for ameliorism and the allocation of resources by managers and gatekeepers. A different perspective—neo-Marxist in roots—tended in general to insist that urban conflict could only be understood if seen as integral to a more fundamental capitalist crisis. In its analysis of the latter, it could be separated into two main schools: those which concentrated on the global character of

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capitalism, and those regulationist theories, which gave primary consideration to the internal relations within the nation-state, and to how national economies regulated their capitalist development, including its spatial component. At critical periods of change, the regulationist perspective identified distinctive shifts in the mode of regulation. For instance, the contemporary period was portrayed in terms of a decisive move away from Fordist mass production to neo- Fordist flexible and de-centralised production systems, an issue revisited later in this chapter. The regulation approach identified the pressure for a correspondence between the stability and predictability urges of capitalism as a societal system, and the dynamic nature of it as a system of accumulation. While the regulationist view regarded capitalist adaptation to historical shifts as being open and spatially variable, the structuralist approach was predicated on the logic of capital accumulation, and though granting the state a measure of autonomy, tended to see it primarily as facilitative of the accumulation process. The early work of Castells (1977, 1978) reflected this emphasis. For him, with the exception of the ‘world cities’ housing the corporate headquarters of the multinationals, the modern city was not the location of the major points of production, which had flitted to more suburban and ex-urban destinations. Accordingly, the city in contemporary capitalism was best viewed as an arena of conflict about consumption, particularly collective consumption of social goods provided by a capitalist state to ensure stable reproduction of labour. In this respect, planning was not an instrument for the pursuit of the ‘public good’. It was a mechanism to bring some ordered opportunity to the capitalist pursuit of private gain (Castells, 1978, p. 3): . . . . the state increasingly intervenes in the city; but, as an expression of a class society, the state in practice acts according to the relations of force between classes and social groups, generally in favour of the hegemonic fraction of the dominant classes. Inevitably, the inequities of this planning system would invite confrontation with its victims, organised in new urban social movements, in a revitalised form of the class struggle. In short, conflict was endemic in the capitalist city. The claims of this theory were hardly modest. First, in its teleology, it suggested a universalist applicability to capitalist cities. Second, it covered all contingencies. It professed to explain the imperative for social intervention and its retreat. Welfarist planning was functional to capitalism because state provision of social and physical infrastructure subsidised the costs of production for the private employer; it legitimised the system by appearing to ameliorate its worst disparities and to hinge its modern development on meritocracy; it brought some method to what would be the madness of markets if left to individual capitalists; and it ‘soft policed’ the working class to manage their compliance. At the same time, the theory could appear to accommodate the fiscal crisis of mature capitalism, which subjected welfare

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to spending curbs. So in a convenient catch-all, the welfare part of welfare capitalism could be seen as both functional and expendable. Third, it conflated the many disparate elements of urban protest into a movement, whose claims for unity and radical identity no empirical urban study could corroborate. Harvey (1973, 1982, 1989) has emphasised over-accumulation as one of the decisive internal contradictions of capitalism. For him, private investment in the built environment has a self-interest in engineering obsolescence in a restless creation of new demand and opportunity for accumulation. Yet, the tendency to obsolescence can undermine the exchange value of previous investment. While this constant over-turning of the urban landscape also risks political opposition from disturbed communities, Harvey has argued that legitimacy is sought by ‘a Faustian bargain’ between capital and labour, whereby the working class is accorded some scope for private and public consumption where they reside in compensation for the alienation they experience where they work. But the bargain is never secure. Urban struggle persists. For urban political economists in the Harvey mould, it is essentially class struggle around the production and circulation processes of capitalism. Crises in over-production generate the conditions for the demise of vulnerable producers, and a related concentration and centralisation of capital, and its spatial re-grouping. More monopolistic control over price may reverse the tendency for the profit rate to fall, but in doing so, it poses a persistent pressure to dispose profitably of surplus value when production is operating at full capacity. In this characterisation of the central urban dynamic, working class opposition is inherent but secondary to the self-limiting tendencies within capitalism itself, whereby competitive individualism amongst capitalists produces a total effect ultimately counter-productive to the system. Saunders (1981, p. 241) has contested this analysis as tending to straitjacket the role of the state into one invariably supportive of the dominant capitalist class in the realms of both private production and social consumption. Thereby, such urban political economy has attempted a catch-all in seeking ‘to explain the production of the urban environment with reference to the interests of various fractions of capital (for instance in reproducing labourpower, extending markets, countering the falling rate of profit, legitimating capitalist social relations or redistributing surplus value between less powerful and more powerful fractions)’. Clearly, the later work of Castells (1983) has shifted somewhat from this structuralism, not only in according greater scope for proactive community interventions around issues of collective consumption, but also in more generally eschewing mechanistic explanations, while continuing to depict the independence of the political process as highly qualified. The other main school in this perspective is that of the urban praxis theorists, who have distanced themselves from what they take to be the reductionist, functionalist and determinist tendencies of structuralism. Alongside the imperatives of structure, they have accorded greater indepen-

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dence in activity and consciousness to the human agency. In their view, it is necessary to deploy this duality of constraints and opportunities for a comprehensive appreciation of the interplay of social forces and space. By duality, then, the urban praxis theorists mean that social structures are simultaneously outcomes and channels of human consciousness and praxis (Smith and Tardanico, 1987, p. 89). A significant weakness of these intrasocietal theories—even those of a neoMarxist variety—is that until recently they have tended to under-play the impact on urban form of the increasing globalisation of the economy. Certain intersocietal theories attempt to redress this neglect, associating uneven development within nation states in the First World with inequalities between the First and Third Worlds. A well-known version is dependency theory, identified with Frank (1969). It has argued the existence of an international hierarchy of capitalist exploitation, whereby the system of profit maximisation not only distributes resources from subordinate to ruling classes within particular societies but also from peripheral to core countries in the world economy. In his later writings, he qualified this dependency, acknowledging more the capacity for determination by local class forces, though he still characterised this scope in terms of dependent development. Variations on this perspective can be employed to explain the spatial dynamic of uneven development. For instance, the urban and regional inequalities within the EU can be understood in terms of the agglomeration and external economies available to those developed areas enjoying proximity to markets, suppliers and appropriate labour supply, supported by physical and intellectual infrastructure, and quality transport and telecommunications. Given such comparative advantages, favoured cities can capture more high-valued added activities, thereby reinforcing the economic imbalance relative to more peripheral places. At its simplest, this pattern has been represented as a dichotomy between locations for corporate headquarters and those for branch-plants, between city-regions with conceptual and control functions compared with those with merely execution ones. This process contains features of a cumulative causation model, which posits that regions with higher output levels tend also to have higher productivity and wage levels. In spatial terms, these clusterings create axes of prime-mover cities, whose rental capacities and multiplier impacts accommodate the fiscal means for further infrastructural development, which in turn, facilitates greater degrees of connectedness with each other. The other main perspective, which stresses exchange rather than production relations, is world systems theory, associated with Wallerstein (1980). According to this approach, the transnationalisation of capital has reached such a point that city-regional/national political economy can best be interpreted as an integral element in one world capitalist system (Friedmann and Wolff, 1982). In short, the global is the relevant unit of analysis. Adopting ideas

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Planning in Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Contested Space

from both these views, there have been attempts to designate a global hierarchy of cities, ranging from the so-called ‘world cities’ like New York, Bonn, Paris, Tokyo and London, which are home to the corporate headquarters of leading international corporations, to those like Houston, operating in a regional–national network (Smith and Tardanico, 1987). Some see in this differentiation a growing gap between the main urban agglomerations and the rest. As expressed by Dunford and Kafkalas (1992, p. 25): In recent years this gap between centres of control and the rest of the urban system has been reinforced as a result of the recent delinking of the real and financial spheres of capital (due to the overaccumulation of capital), the emphasis of the corporate sector on financial investments and the increase in the centralisation of capital. But the difficulty lies in specifying how complex inter-relationships of dominance and subordination among these global urban hierarchies are mediated and resolved. Healey (1991) has identified four approaches to the urban development process: . . . .

That of behavioural social science, which highlights the agents and their relationships; The estates management focus, which monitors the series of events involved; The neo-classical economic perspective, which emphasises calculations of rental yield; and The political economy approach, which addresses the structural imperatives in a class-based society.

These correspond closely to some of the key theorisations outlined. But is there any common ground shared by these main standard urban theories: neoclassical urban rent theory and its estimations of the utility of centrality; urban ecology and its selective, stratified and hierarchical urban construct based on a form of social Darwinism; urban managerialism and its Weberian focus on bureaucratic shaping of the urban as a socio-spatial system; and the Marxist emphases, for example, on dependent and core spaces, or on the city as a declining locale for production and a growing site for contradictions of overaccumulation, social reproduction and collective consumption? As indicated in the Table 3.1 the analytical focus of all the main urban theories have qualified explanatory power. Unravelling these contesting conceptualisations, some common characteristics can be identified. They all lay some claim to totalistic and universal insight and they all share some attachment to a modernist trajectory of progressive development. In unpacking these claims, it is contended here that contemporary urban complexities

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Table 3.1 Main urban theories. Urban theory

Analytical focus

Partial explanatory power

Neo-classical

Space shaped by price mechanism as accurate monitor of utility

Underestimates socio-spatial relations not determined by private self-interest economic calculus

Ecological

Urban as organism subject to social Darwinism — processes of selection, stratification and hierarchy

Underplays role of power

Cultural

The urban as a distinctive way of life

Cultural determinism demotes role of structure

Managerialism in socio-spatial system

Weberian focus on bureaucratic management and allocation of scarce urban resources. Focus on urban gatekeepers and stakeholders.

Assumes pluralist theory of power in corporatist state. Flawed in designation of urban managerial autonomy

Neo-Marxist

Urban as part of dependent or core space in global capitalism

Theory of the urban, or a theory of capitalism applied to the urban? Urban as arena of struggle over social reproduction: on the one hand, socialisation, on the other, collective social consumption, both putatively functional to capital. Urban as built environment shaped by contradictions of accumulation—underplays public as active agent

demote such perspectives from exclusive to partial revelation. Yet, it is important to recognise that these theories have not been simply the preserve of esoteric intellectual discourse within the academic enclave. Rather, they have informed public policy in much of the Western world. For instance, over the last four decades, the five main approaches to urban decline, social polarity, and related division have been rooted in this analysis: (1) Market failure: some neo-classical economists would suggest that stagnancy in mature urban spaces can be understood as a deviation from optimal ‘Pareto’ efficiency, whereby disturbance of ‘normal’ land and labour markets has disincentivised capital markets, producing disinvestment and under-development. A more favourable equilibrium will return with the liberation of competitive entrepreneurship, reduced transaction costs, redress of community disorganisation and dependency, and restoration of profit motive. (2) Environmental determinism: linked to an urban ecology, this posits that in the built environment, physical condition exercises foremost effect on

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social behaviour. As expressed by Coleman (1985), too often the false utopias of poor planning created inhospitable habitats for nurturing well-adjusted, civilised behaviour. From this prescription, priority is accorded to the demolition of decrepit public housing estates that by enclaving the poorest in grim conditions, have accentuated proclivity for conflict, while debilitating community capacity for socio-economic emancipation. (3) Cycle of deprivation: this view is associated with the concept of cultural disadvantage, which emphasises the role of ‘dysfunctional’ values and behaviour in creating inter-generational poverty and social marginality. The problem is not about more equitable resource allocation—as expressed in the pejorative maxim: ‘if the poor were given baths they would only put coal in them’. Rather, the answer lies in forms of social work, education, and community leadership that challenge ‘pathologies’ such as dependency, stunted ambition, and the predilection for immediate gratification. (4) Government failure: the emphasis here comes from a managerialist take on the poor coordination and silo tendencies within government, derived from Weberian concepts of efficient bureaucracy and related empirical study of ‘urban gatekeepers’. Since the features of this ineffective administration include proliferation of plans, fragmentation of leadership, and flawed service delivery, the solution lies in a ‘joined up’ approach that redefines urban management in terms of entrepreneurial ‘partnership’ governance. (5) Economic re-structuring: this explanation privileges the economic base and its structural transformation in mainly Marxist interpretations about the ‘logic’ of capital in class-based societies. From this materialist perspective, urban deprivation and conflict are inevitable features of the uneven development generated by the private market. While urban problems may be manifest locally, they are increasingly generated by a global capitalism. Ameliorative responses to the social repercussions of this inequitable system are mostly ‘gilding the ghetto’, an avoidance of the radical shift needed towards more public control of the commanding heights of the economy, within a redistributive politics. In essence, the lowly cannot be elevated unless the mighty are cast from their seats. Though the above approaches are not rendered totally redundant in the current period, their mainly exclusivist focus misconstrues the complexity of the contemporary city in the context of massive social transformation at a global scale. But, beyond eclecticism, correction of this over-simplified theoretical framework demands a plausible fusion of theoretical insights, a synthesis that derives from the key debates over the last two decades, concentrating on the material, cultural and spatial dimensions.

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Farewell to Keynesian–Fordist industrialism and welfarism? By the 1970s, most industrial countries had experienced problems in harmonising the requisite aggregate demand for economic growth and full employment with the control of inflation, currency stability and trade balance. Indeed, some came to face the perfect storm of stagflation, together with trade and budget deficits. Yet, the ascendant fiscal and monetary orthodoxy challenged the efficacy of ‘spending your way out of recession’. In this context, traditional Keynesian correctives were said to expand money supply, thereby fuelling inflation and currency devaluation, leading in turn to escalating interest rates and trade deficits, all fostering weaker investment and higher unemployment. Subsequent deflated economic activity boosted welfare dependency, particularly in the most mature urban-industrial spaces, thereby accentuating the fiscal burden. Critics charged that Keynesian ‘fine-tuning’ had proved to be not only more complicated and fallible than supposed, but also more about political art than economic science. In the case of an uncompetitive economy, its reflated aggregate demand would only serve to attract a higher level of imported competitor product. Moreover, Keynesian ‘stop-go’ tendencies debilitated planning for long-term strategic investment, while in a more international world, its national scope was becoming inexorably circumscribed. Rather than demand-side economics, a supply-side approach was preferable, one that emphasised availability of flexible labour and less regulated land and capital. The imperative for nations to become more competitive also scaled down to the obligation on individual cities to become more efficient performers in the remorseless contest that was global capitalism. From this perspective, there was no alternative to a systematic shake-out of unviable industrial capacity, a process of de-industrialisation that would leave a trimmer but fitter industrial base rooted in knowledge-intensive production, alongside a decisive shift to the service sector. Of course, this emphasis on services had been foreseen since the 1950s as an outcome of the re-composition of demand in a consumerist age. According to this argument, as affluence spread beyond the income used to meet basic material need, a growing share would be devoted to non-material products such as leisure and culture. Together with this ‘pull’ factor, the ‘push’ component of this transition was supposed to be the fairly unproblematic way that rising manufacturing productivity would displace surplus industrial labour into the more employment-intensive service sector. This is sometimes referred to as the ‘maturity thesis’ within a general modernisation framework (Rowthorn and Ramaswamy, 1997). A variation of this is a development ‘stages’ model, assuming a periodisation in the mature economies from agrarian to manufacturing to services, and ultimately to knowledge-based services. Though more output from less labour had been achieved in manufacturing,

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the same scope for productivity improvement in services was less obtainable. However, some considered that in the high value-added end of the services sector, surplus value would in time primarily derive from technocratic dominance and high-quality information rather than from productive labour (Bell, 1980). Such adjustment in the industrial world was linked to the emergent new international division of labour, whereby the decomposition of the production process permitted the most labour-intensive part to be re-located to developing countries, which competed then largely on the basis of low labour cost and protection. Importantly, this transferal was a function of not only the strategic restructuring by transnational corporations seeking comparative advantage, but also the pressure from those parts of the Global South able to leverage inward investment with inducements, such as access to their growing domestic market (Gaffikin and Nickson, 1984). Some saw in this attrition of traditional blue-collar jobs a regressive outcome of heightened social stratification, exemplified by fatalistic visions about the demise of the working class. But, while bidding farewell to the industrial proletariat, Gorz (1982) recognised their replacement via other employment, less favourably remunerated and protected. For instance, it was speculated that work-driven economic elites would more and more procure valuable leisure time through sub-contracting household chores to a new servile class for modest stipend, within a mushrooming informal economy. This picture of an increasingly dual city coincided with other putative features of the 1980s, including what some characterised as the debt production system of speculative and fabricated junk bond and hedge-fund capital. As outlined by Harvey (1990, p. 332): Casino capitalism had come to town, and many larger cities suddenly found they had command of a new and powerful business. On the back of this boom in business and financial services, a whole new Yuppie culture formed, with its accoutrements of gentrification, close attention to symbolic capital, fashion, design, and quality of urban life. Aspects of this ephemeral age provide part of the rationale for a new production regime of flexible specialisation, geared to this profusion of shifting niche markets. Rather than large plant Fordist bulk assembly production of formulaic goods at scale economies for the mass consumer market, the focus now was to be on segmented markets, scope as well as scale, more quality design, and more nimble ‘just in time’ batch production to efficiently catch the rapid turnover in trends and styles. However, this unrefined reading of the retreat from Fordist rigidities underplayed the differentiated cause and nature of the change. For some, it was a complicated interplay among four key factors: more fragmented consumption patterns, improved production technologies, imperative for more effective

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managerialism, and a more competitive global economy (Piore and Sabel, 1984; Lipietz, 1987). Related analysis explored the extent to which postFordism could offer an escape route for capitalism’s crisis of over-accumulation, and with what consequences for democracy and equity (Lipietz, 1992)? Some saw the altered environment impelling a corporate switch from being producer-led to being more market-led, with less hierarchical control teams better able to integrate research, development and production in ways that could deliver innovative design, quality, and reliability. For others, it was part of a variant spatial division of labour, whereby job shedding and company downsizing in specific localities could be attributed to differential changes in output and/or productivity, and both processes, in turn, could be linked to permutations of rationalisation, intensification, and technical innovation such as robotisation (Massey and Meegan, 1982). Alongside these disputes about whether the main driver lay in consumption or production, disagreement persisted about whether the overall alteration could be represented best as ‘neo’ rather than ‘post’-Fordism, in other words as an adjustment to, rather than a qualitative departure from, the previous production regime (Aglietta, 1979). For instance, Derek Sayer (1991) remained unconvinced about the incapacity of mass production to develop sensitive antennae about diverse markets. Moreover, some even questioned the ‘mythical geography’ of flexible accumulation as a new phase of capitalist development (Amin and Robins, 1990), emphasising its limited reach into some manufacturing heartlands. In considering how it reflected changes in relation between labour and capital, others situated the term within a wider ideological lexicon, designed to enfeeble working class defiance of demands for greater labour malleability and casualisation, by depicting these traits as now unavoidable. Arbitrating amongst this contesting literature, Harvey (1990) judged that, while post-Fordism, as a new technological–managerial system, contained a socio-spatial reality, it was far from hegemonic. In our view, this guarded appraisal befits the perplexing actuality, including the defective and fleeting Fordist presence in many depressed city-regions. The economic strains underpinning these re-alignments in the Keynesian– Fordist order also had a social manifestation, and prompted political demands for curbs on an extravagant public sector. According to the New Right critique, its wanton borrowing, in a ratchet effort to satisfy ever more bountiful definitions of need, actually served to crowd out the more efficient private sector from which wealth could best trickle to all in time. This fiscal transfer from the marketable to the non-marketable was achieved through punitive taxation on enterprise, thereby promoting levels of social consumption that eroded the work ethic. Moreover, the outcome was a government ‘overload’ that stretched the spendthrift state beyond its capacity to deliver even its core duties efficiently, thereby undermining the efficacy of planning in general. In short, welfare capitalism was seen to have exhausted the contradictions implicit in the term. Values of the former

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Planning in Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Contested Space

included: cohesion rooted in common citizenship; equality of opportunity, even if through positive discrimination; and collectivist social provision allocated on the basis of need. Such tenets risked the dilution of capitalist credos, including: competitive individualism; market demand rather than politically-determined need; emphasis on wealth creation over its distribution; and functional inequality. Whatever the variable geometry of such changes in economic management, production, and welfarism, taken together, they have been encased in wider concepts such as disorganised capitalism (Lash and Urry, 1994). This suggested that in this more disjointed world, it was not only labour that had become less collectivised and ‘organised’, with mass redundancies from the Fordist plants and attendant de-unionisation. Capital and government exhibited a similar tendency in the context of globalisation. For instance, corporate contraction and retreat in many sectors had enhanced the sovereignty of large private monopolies. However, the accentuated separation of ownership and control in these big corporations rendered flexible and flatter decision-making structures problematic. Yet, this very de-centralisation was seen as most compatible with innovatory strategising, better alignment between conception and execution, and enhanced corporate clustering and networking in value-added partnerships. More generally, the increased capacity of the former ‘periphery’ such as China and India to compete with the ‘core’ economies for trade, energy, and finance has brought its own dislocation, which will be considered further later in this chapter. These material changes were accompanied by those in culture and politics. In the case of the former, the ‘cultural turn’ in addressing the urban involved seeing the city as text with encoded meanings to be read discursively by different interpreters, rather than through a meta-narrative lens that validated one definite denotation. Moreover, in an environment in which culture would be increasingly ‘consumed’, there would be more diverse cultural idioms to appeal to splintered tastes, even if this differentiated product enjoyed less durability than previously. Multiplicity, heterogeneity, and cultural relativism marked the new urban world, and with this transformation came epistemological vacillation. Such was the ephemeral social terrain of the post-modern city. Post-modernist perspectives disclaim unitary and universalist concepts such as truth and meaning, contending that such abstractions cannot subsist separately from cultural interpretation and social contingency. Their critics charge that this deference to ‘multiple realities’—that stem, in part, from perceptions, emotions, and intuitions—challenges rationality, substituting ambivalence and sophistry for ‘authentic’ epistemology. If logic and cognitive understanding are, if not delusional or absolutist, then certainly conditional, contextual, and temporal (Willard, 1994), the scientific is rendered as little more than refutable discourse. Adherence to this relativism seems to guarantee irresolute textual analysis, a continual deconstruction in which

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denotative language, sublimation, and oblique reference are assiduously interrogated (Rorty, 1982). In retort, adherents insist that their renunciation of totalistic meta-narratives is not a pretext for atheoreticism, but rather an appreciation that a complex precarious world cannot be captured by discoverable social laws that permit easy prescription or prediction. Search for knowledge in an age of ambiguity demands a more reflexive approach, a re-think about the scope of science, while mindful of the enormity and velocity of contemporary change (Duderstadt, 2003). Unsurprisingly, a ‘knowledge society’ invites quarrel about the nature of knowledge itself. This greater uncertainty—or some might say, humility—about the scope of science and rationality conveniently coincided with a politics that was more sceptical about the state’s capacity to intervene effectively in economy and welfare. One reflection of this was a challenge to the role of urban planning, in terms of its perceived inhibition on market-led regeneration, and its presumption to be able to operate against the global grain of less regulated society (Ambrose, 1986).

Globalisation and neo-liberalism Over the last two decades, around two and a half billion people, from the former Soviet Union and Eastern bloc, China, and India have connected into a broadly capitalist economic system, and this merger has significantly augmented the process of global integration underway for some time. It is worth emphasising that in the case of China, the naked emperor under the Marxist garment is now essentially capitalist, though some insist that with residual attachment to socialist credos by some Party cadres and pressure from the disenfranchised, it is still both plausible and expedient to dress up its modernisation as market socialism (Nonini, 2008). As argued by Held and McGrew (2003), globalisation is an indeterminate concept that eludes simple synopsis. First, sceptics protest its very authenticity, insisting on its faint specificity and explanatory value; the existence of more ‘globalised’ periods such as the age of Imperialism, and the enduring autonomy of national dominion (Weiss, 1998; Hirst and Thompson, 1999). For instance, taking issue with the novelty of the globalising process, Abu-Lughod (1999) remarks that the main seeds of the global city that is New York were planted in Manhattan in the mid-19th century. Some sceptics see in the concept a political project to justify the global diffusion of capitalism as both inexorable and benevolent (Hoogvelt, 1997). Even among the globalists, various interpretations persist. While most agree about its principal features—the distended reach of transnational companies; round-the-clock round-the-world financial markets; the interdependence summoned by global warming’s environmental threat; the proliferation of

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common popular culture; new electronic infrastructure such as the World Wide Web; and such like—the causal and impact analysis differs markedly. Some stress the growing hegemony of market economics, with its implicit modernism, spiralling social inequity, and corrosion of national sovereignty (Sassen, 1996; Greider, 1997). Some highlight the de-territorialisation and ‘death of distance’ brought about by revolutions in information and communication, such as wireless technology (Caircross, 1997). Others repudiate these explanations as either partial or reductionist, substituting for their singular determinism the complexity of manifold factors in society, polity, and economy, not to mention theology (Castells, 1997). Besides its dismissal of extravagant claims about the terminal condition of both geography and history, this latter construal does concede a new age of greater connectedness and spatial–temporal compaction. But this is taken to engender ‘many globalisations’ (Berger and Huntington, 2002) that, far from imposing uniformity, continue to sanction cultural diversity, dissent, and resistance (Jameson and Miyoshi, 1998). In this multifaceted rendition, persistent pluralism and its ambivalences contradict fateful visions of a bi-polar planet trapped between the hegemonies of acquisitive materialism and religious fundamentalism, or as expressed by Barber (1995), between ‘McWorld and Jihad’. Rather, greater integration is seen as holding potential for differentiation, associated with unorthodoxy, heresy, resistance, and rival modernities. For instance, parts of the national state can perform as ‘protector of stakeholding communities (while other parts) are direct affiliates of global capital’ (Appadurai, 2001, p. 2); supposed closer economic bonding across the world actually pertains mainly among the leading OECD countries, with marginal participation by the poorest parts of the Global South; and the general dynamic of a shrinking planet contains its own paradoxes that provoke opposition, thereby rehabilitating the significance of both agency and locality. Thus, Huyssen (2008, p. 15) comments: ‘Rather than producing connectivities and flows equally between all regions of the planet, globalisation functions in horizontal clusters through and among which global, local, and regional dimensions are ricocheting with varying intensities and breadth’. Expression of this differentiated dynamic in the mature economies assumes an acute form. As indicated earlier, over the last four decades, their base economies have substantially shifted from industrial/manufacturing to post-industrial/service, a structural change that has had considerable bearing on demographic mobility, the relations of production, and the spatial and temporal characteristics of markets (Castells, 2000). With such restructuring, some argue that primacy has been attached to the entrepreneurial individual working within a framework of private property, profit, and de-regulated markets, with the state acting as institutional guarantor of such private realms (Harvey, 2005). As such, the nature of the state has been in flux, with changes in its scale and function, characterised best by a shift from government to governance. But increasingly this political dimension is also

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being framed within the related discourse about the ideological ascendancy of neo-liberalism and the attendant discourse about the mixed economy of welfare. This refers to the pervasive political culture since the 1980s that has elided with globalisation, and that professes the value of self-regulating markets and the corollary of minimalist government. This had led some to critique the current form, rather than the beneficial potential of globalisation. One such comes from Stiglitz (2006), who identifies five intrinsic defects: . . . . .

The skewed rules favour rich countries and corporations over the poor; Trade rules and international financial bodies like the IMF undermine the sovereignty of the economically weakest nations; Material values are privileged over wider social concerns, such as environmental justice; The paramount authority accorded to the market has accentuated social inequality within many countries; and The American face attached to globalisation has fomented resentment amongst critics of a consumerist West.

Disavowal of economic demand management and social protection finds institutional expression in a blend of a downsized state, free trade, flexible labour markets, enterprising individualism, all within a competitive logic. But its actual penetration into contemporary polity remains contestable. Arguments persist about its uneven application; whether it represents a new ‘regime’ of accumulation or a transitory disordered phase between the Fordist–Keynesian orthodoxy and a new regulatory era; or whether its high tide has ebbed in many places in favour of a more socially responsible Third Way capitalism between statism and marketisation. Nevertheless, its ubiquity has tapered the political space for collectivist manifestos around public value and social equity. Indeed, the global spread of these societal changes since the 1970s has deeply impacted material and cultural relations, so that the comprehensive deregulation, privatisation, and retreat of the state from many aspects of social provision have re-configured urban society in a fundamental way (Fainstein, 1990; Harvey, 2005). What distinguishes contemporary transformations from their antecedents are their amplified scale, pace and international disposition (Van Ginkel, 2003). In this regard, Castells (1997) suggests that the increasingly permeable form of borders, the erosion of old forms of political economy, and the greater synchronicity of relations are features of the compression of time and space consequential to the new production mode of information and communication. Conventional state interventions to manage aggregate demand in the national economy have become demoted, relative to new networks of relations—captured in the concept of the ‘Network Society’ (ibid.).

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But what does this generic canvas of contemporary social change mean for the functioning of specific cities? Perhaps in response to the perplexity and enormity of the global focus, recent decades have witnessed a notable growth in locality studies (Cooke, 1989). But reservations about the very concept have been expressed. In its attempt to delineate a particular space for research, how is its boundary to be distinguished from other spaces, such as local labour markets or local communities? Duncan and Savage (1989), for instance, remarked that locality was being deployed as a new jargon for case study area. Curran and Blackburn (1994) disputed the very existence of a local economy, as understood in terms of travel-to-work areas, local authority areas, or such like. They argued that even small firms related to the wider economy on the basis of their sectoral position, and linkages were determined less and less on the basis of location. For them, locality had only relevance in regeneration strategies where there were sectoral clusters, and thus an obvious mutual interest for networking. Others suspected that this fashion for locality studies could demote the role of theory, thereby jeopardising urban research by smothering it in a clutter of empirical detail (Smith, 1987). Harvey (1987) went further, contending that there had not just been the derogation of theory per se, but rather a pronounced strategic departure from Marxian theory within urban study. He attributed this in part to the ideological pre-eminence of neo-conservatism in the 1980s. For such critics, the eclecticism of some post-modernist discourses was not so much pluralist as promiscuous. However, some have called not for the retreat from theory as much as the adoption of an approach, which disavows the certitudes and totalities they associate with some versions of Marxism. For them, totalistic theory cannot be subjected to validation or falsification through the partial social reality of any given empirical study. A less rigid and axiomatic approach would permit more sophisticated appreciation of the variabilities in socio-spatial formations. The dominant theoretical contest has long been between positivism and differentiated forms of Marxism. Both are under strain. Paradoxically, as the world integrates, urban theory struggles to either offer convincing explanation about universal causes and patterns (grand theory), or to capture that which differentiates particular places (grounded theory). Instead, amid this theoretical wasteland, there is greater attachment to meso-theories like regime theory.

Urban regime theory Urban regime theory connects to the overarching regulation school. As indicated earlier, regulation theory has posited a shift in the regime of accumulation related to the transformation from a Fordist–Keynesian– Welfarist social model to one that is post-Fordist, liberalised, privatised and

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more market-driven. According to this new regulation mode, urban policy is informed less by government planning, interventionism and managerialism, and more by neo-liberal deregulation and public entrepreneurialism (Gaffikin and Warf, 1993; Rydin, 1998). Urban government has given way to urban governance, as local government’s fiscal constraint demands that city hall enters into alliances, coalitions and partnerships to secure the legitimacy for capital accumulation amid politically acceptable levels of social consumption (Painter, 1995). Within this paradigm, the economic is privileged over the social, as cities assume that their fortunes within a more competitive global order depend less on the regulatory capacity of their nation states and more on their own efforts to magnetise mobile transnational capital. While this urban regeneration agenda centred in the 1980s around place-imaging and a property-led emphasis on flagship downtown projects, by the 1990s it became more balanced with short-to-medium term community-based revitalisation and long-term investment in human capital, designed to attract jobs with highknowledge content. The theory seeks to transcend the long-standing discourse between pluralist and elite perspectives on power and decision-making, by attempting to accommodate both the legitimation imperatives of government and the accumulation drives of private capital (Elkin, 1987). This interdependence of public and private goals within both liberal capitalism and social democracy is seen to increasingly require collaborations, networks and partnerships, particularly between the private sector and government (Stone, 1989). While acknowledging some of the determinism that derives from capitalist logic, for instance profit maximisation, regime theory provides scope for the role of human agency and civic leadership. In this respect, far from being predetermined or at the automatic disposal of any particular urban interest, power is produced by deliberative action (Ferman, 1996). Furthermore, the theory argues that each distinctive power group in the urban arena—whether, government, business, educational or community interest—cannot as a solo player command sufficient influence to determine significant development outcomes. Indeed, such sectoral hegemony is deemed to be less and less tenable amid increasing social complexity. Rather, regime theory acknowledges the limited power of specific stakeholders and the corresponding imperative to pool resources to make impact in the contemporary city (Hall, 1998). Critics of regime theory charge that it has a simplistic perspective on the diverse roles of state and market, not only concentrating on economic and political elites, but also under-playing other key determinants of urban outcomes such as race (Kraus, 2004). Yet, it does mark a greater sophistication of contemporary political economy than growth coalition theory. This is concerned with how the private interest of the local financial, political, property, and media elite in the intensification of land use and the promotion

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of business growth is represented as automatically congruent with a common public interest (Logan and Molotch, 1987). However, one of its limitations stems from its projection of a simplistically polarised urban arena, divided between business proponents of accumulation and their ‘anti-growth’ adversaries. By contrast, within regime theory, different typologies have been suggested. For instance, Imbroscio (1998) distinguishes between: . .

.

Local-statist regimes, where local governments take public ownership and/ or equity stakes in business ventures. Community-based regimes, where community-based organisations and their housing and economic development activities have become a major part of local governance. Petty bourgeois regimes, where a dense network of small enterprises partners with government to form a coalition.

In a different characterisation, Stone (1993) refers to four types of urban regimes. . .

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Maintenance regimes try largely to preserve the existing urban form, for instance to protect its exclusivity, social cohesion, and place tradition. Development regimes proactively seek to champion development, if only to redress decline. These regimes deploy public incentives and subsidies, perhaps combined with de-regulation, to leverage private investment behind an agenda designed to achieve tangible objectives. In addition, progressive regimes emphasise the potential social dividend from development, in terms such as preservation, design quality, and positive discrimination, while seeking to minimise negative externalities such as environmental degradation. As Fainstein (1996) notes, the agenda for progressive regimes is around public participation in decision-making, developing indigenous enterprise, and linkage strategies that ensure that neighbourhoods are not neglected in the trend for prestigious downtown development. Finally, opportunity expansion regimes focus on the role of development in benefiting disadvantaged groups, which are seen to require capacity building and empowerment to participate effectively.

In an attempt to rationalise such various characterisations, Stoker and Mossberger (1994) have presented three overarching regime types: organic, instrumental and symbolic. .

The organic is similar to Stone’s maintenance regime and to the European perspective outlined by LeGales and Lequesne (1998).

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The instrumental is similar to Stone’s ‘development’ regime, Imbroscio’s ‘petty-bourgeois’ regime and the growth coalitions of Logan and Molotch (1987). Finally, the symbolic covers Stone’s latter two types, Imbroscio’s ‘community-based’ regime and the ‘social reform’ regimes identified by DiGaetano and Klemanski (1993).

However, in critiquing the relevance of regime theory to how urban governance might respond to urban conflict, several limitations are evident. First, in terms of comparative analysis, it can be seen as applicable more to the US than to Europe. The structure and funding of city government in the former are both weaker than typically found in the latter. Specifically in the US, reliance on a local city tax base is very different to the European situation where cities benefit from a more redistributive and national tax system. Thus, US city government may be under greater pressure to seek coalition partners to broaden its resource base. Moreover, the pre-eminence of the market is more established in the US, and thus the practice of public–private partnership is more developed. Second, the emphasis attached in regime theory to local action understates the extent to which such latitude is increasingly circumscribed by a globalising economy. In response to the first criticism, it could be noted that both the US and Europe have experienced the fragmentation of local government accompanied by fiscal stress, both of which factors have contributed in each case to city hall networking into wider alliances. However, significant ideological difference remains between a liberal capitalist US and a social democratic Europe. Yet, these distinctions are accommodated in the typologies within regime theory. For instance, deploying that of Stoker and Mossberger (1994), US cities can be characterised in terms of an instrumental regime, whereas European cities can be captured within the notions of a symbolic regime. Moreover, an important contribution of regime theory is its acknowledgement of the role of power and economy in shaping cities.

Beyond the First World lens As indicated in Chapter 2, the most remarkable urban change is stirring in the city-regions of the Global South, particularly those undergoing concerted urbanisation. To take one dramatic example, the number of residents in Greater Sao Paulo almost equals the total inhabitants of the continent of Australia. The contours of this urban revolution are related to 11 key issues that have assumed increasingly global character (Friedman, 2005; Perry, 2008; Katz et al. 2008): (1) The enormity of the transformation, if only in terms of the quantity of people involved, as detailed in the previous chapter, and the implication

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of this growth for extensive development of the built environment. The world’s urban population is now over three billion, the same as for the total global population in 1960. By 2015, there will be 20 megacities with more than 20 million inhabitants each, over half of which will be in Asia. As a remarkable example, Mumbai will likely have around 32 million people, a vast sprawl of humanity, a high share of which will be living in concentrated poverty, overcrowding, and poor sanitation. Overwhelmingly, the world’s population increase will occur in the urban; The unprecedented rapidity of the change, as indicated by the fact that in little over half a century the size of the global urban population has nearly quadrupled; The intensity of the urban experience, partly derived from the increasingly competitive environment that demands continual adaptability and higher productivity, as the earth ‘flattens’ under the footprint of levellers such as supply chaining, open sourcing, and off-shoring; and also related to The increased diversity, as migration and immigration uproot traditional cultures, and transnationalise the ethnic/racial/religious/cultural composition of urbanites almost everywhere, even in European cities like Dublin, once marked by their homogeneity; The hybridity evoked by the symbiosis not only of sundry ethnic cultures, but also by the synergism of multi-agency partnership in new forms of urban governance; The connectivity patterned by a more networked system of cityregions, itself hastened by the dynamics of globalisation and facilitated by the more computer-based technologies of modern transport and telecommunication; The informality that now characterises so much of the production of the urban, not only in the vast shanty towns, favellas and barriadas of the Global South, but also in the deprived enclaves of the rich world; The pressing concern about the sustainability of this more peopled and urbanised planet; The volatility of contemporary city life that demands a rethink about normative notions of stability, order and consensus, and the certainty and predictability that were taken to underpin a rational planning system. Rather, change and conflict are perennial; The ‘personality’ of each city that becomes even more important, as the convergences and uniformities produced by expansive globalisation inflate the value of particularity and differentiation; and finally The complexity of the new urban, as reflected in its multi-dimensional nature.

Much of the pressure and energy of this changing urban form are most clearly manifest in the Global South. Accordingly, urban theory is fortified when analysis of such ‘hyper’ urbanism is pivotal to urban study (Gaffikin et al.,

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2009), whereby we learn from the indigenous expertise and experience of residents and urban scholars in such cities, rather than learn about these cities through the conventional theoretical lens (Connell, 2007). A key precept here is not to differentiate the formal developed world from the informal developing world, but rather to appreciate the intersection between informal communities and formal institutions of state and market in both parts of the world (Chatterjee, 2004), and how the contested articulation of this in one part can assist investigators in making sense of the process in the other (Lietner et al., 2007). In other words, the informal—constituting those constituencies most excluded, or in a ‘state of exception’, from the ordered relations of market and state (Agamben, 1998)—cannot be dismissed as the condition of subaltern ‘outcasts’ in twilight zone habitats (Wacquant, 2008), but rather comprises a valid mode of urbanisation (Roy, 2006). Thus, informal urbanism can nest within the formal city, and the inter-penetration of both is fashioned via the growing significance of three population sets: first, of migrants to cities, most evident in the developing world; second, of immigrants to cities in both developing and developed worlds, and related diasporas communities; and third, of the ways the excluded in both places tend to be consigned to segregated precincts marked by deprivation and social insulation. These patterns, and their permutations, contribute to the creation of a transnational urbanism (Smith, 2001), a complex layering of a series of ‘newcomer’ urbanites, some with a fragile affiliation to their adopted polity, others keen to reprocess their identity to assimilate into their new urban environment, and still others trapped in cultural ambiguity. In turn, such enclaves can: defy the established identity of the host city; challenge social cohesion; generate a contested politics around social exclusion, legal citizenship, and the right to the city; and mobilise new ethno-spaces of diversity, imprinted by both resistance to, and engagement with, formal city authority.

Making sense of the debate We live in a terminal age. The end of Keynesianism, Fordism, modernism, Marxism, and indeed of history, have all been confidently proclaimed. Undoubtedly, the 1980s did witness a pronounced transformation of the urban built environment in the mature economies, as substantial in its economic significance as it was stunning in its recast skyline. Some contend that it was the decade ‘in which the industrial city finally shook off the last traces of its 19th-century self and mutated into a completely new species’ (Sudjic, 1992, p. 5). Viewed more globally, the transformation in the urban domain has been spectacular, and the impetus and opportunity for recreating the urban, though manifested most clearly at the level of locality, are now seen as operating in this wider transnational environment. These qualitative

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‘New Times’ (Hall and Jacques, 1989) of greater diversities and complexities, rooted in structural and international socio-economic change, have fundamentally re-patterned the urban, demanding a radical revision of urban theory. For one thing, determinist accounts of socio-spatial reconfigurations are misconceived. Locality and agency matter, even in an age subject to sweeping structural change in which space and time are being re-defined. For another, some of the key debates considered here remain inconclusive. While it seems that urban agendas in the mature economies are premised on a continuing residualisation of manufacturing and a related shift to post-industrialism, and that such sectoral realignment coincides with a decisive change in the form of production from Fordism to post-Fordism, it is less clear how the consequent politico-economic order seeks to shape the planning of social space. For instance, is it dependent on a post-Keynesian abandonment of traditional planning and spending as instruments to regulate inequitable distributions of market-based urban development? Similarly, are there fiscal and cultural problems associated with welfarism that inevitably demand a shift from a redistributive focus on socially allocated capital to an investment focus on de-regulated wealth creation within a new swashbuckling enterprise culture? If so, what impact does this have on social polarisation and the creation of a dual city, with its inherent conflicts? How far are such conflicts compatible with sustaining the legitimacy of the political economy? Back in the 1990s, many critics of this shift foretold the implant of American conflictual urbanism in European societies like Britain. But back then, it looked as if the obvious retort from the new political orthodoxy to queries about the efficacy of a more marketised society would have been affirmative. Yet, the early part of the new century has witnessed a dramatic challenge to this schema, with the credit squeeze triggered by the crisis in the US sub-prime housing market prompting the risk of meltdown in international finance and related bankruptcy of some major corporations. Subsequently, in the US and Europe, we have seen the return of socially interventionist government, designed to reflate a moribund global economy, via typical Keynesian instruments. Moreover, the share of GDP accounted for by welfare spending remains stubbornly high in most industrial countries, despite the inflated neo-liberal rhetoric. This begs the question about whether the predicted demise of the Keynesian–welfarist model has been, at least, premature. In answering the question about what to do about the development and divisions of the contemporary city in industrial societies, both academic discourse and the policy framework have been bedevilled by simplistic binaries: is the problem considered to be largely still an inner city phenomenon, or a more pervasive urban crisis? Should urban policies target spaces or the residents of those spaces, distinguishing between development of a place and development in a place? Should they emphasise rapid and prestigious property development or plan steadily for long-term economic development?

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In terms of form and process, are the strategies to be dependent mostly on the market or on the state? Is the development to be ‘top down’ and professionallyled, or ‘bottom-up’ and community initiated? Is priority to be accorded to decisive action by ‘experts’, even if at the expense of local participation and accountability? These dichotomously framed options under-estimate the complexity involved. We have a more humble grasp of that complexity now in part because we are hybrid creatures of modernity and post-modernity. The former has accorded us a cultural lens traceable to the 17th century Enlightenment, and a Newtonian understanding of reality. That ontology was connected to a new epistemology, an evidential means of knowing, based on testing and proof. Within this rational, material, and systemic universe, objective ‘natural’—and some later came to believe also social—laws were discoverable through causal analysis. In turn, these ‘laws’ seemed to offer the prospect of predictability and related increased human control over the external environment. But post-modernity has revealed that epistemology can be about more than the rational, and include other ways of ‘knowing’, such as the experiential. In a similar vein, metaphor and myth—powerful instruments in the narratives of identity politics—can hold truths for people even when they contain factual error or historical fiction. This potential for relativism and subjectivity is significant when we come later to consider the feasibility of universalist ideas such as cosmopolitanism. As expressed cogently by Borg (2002, pp. 15 and 17): The modern worldview is based on scientific ways of knowing: what is real is that which can be known through the methods of science. Epistemology (how we know) has become ontology (what is real). (p. 15) . . . . postmodernity is marked by the realization that modernity itself is a culturally conditioned, relative historical construction. The modern worldview is not the final word about reality any more than previous worldviews have been. (p. 17) In this respect, the post-modern perspective recognises that the theoretical constructs fashioned in modernity belie the chaos of current social reality. Thus, the issue is not about which scientific key magically unlocks pattern and order behind particular phenomenon. To mix metaphors, there is no such silver bullet. Rather, the whole modern scientific project itself can be considered overweening, since the enigmas of social life are not amenable to clear verification or tidy explanation. Put simply, reassessment of urban theory has been driven not just by the socio-economic upheavals since the 1970s, but also by the crisis in theory itself, involving a re-think about how we think, how we know, and how we see reality. Moreover, the problem of how to subject highly abstract theoretical propositions to empirical interrogation has been the basis of a central debate in

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urban research for some years. At one level, this is a dispute about how independent and purposive a category is the individual actor or how far the individual is to be seen in the Althusserian prescription as a ‘bearer’ of an allotted role in the production process, and as an actor in a scripted historical drama culminating inexorably in capitalism’s collapse. Few would contest that individuals are to some extent socially constructed and culturally determined. The argument relates to the balance identified in the familiar Marxist dictum that people can shape history, but not in circumstances of their choosing. So the dichotomy of theory and empiricism in urban studies in the recent period has re-opened polarised debates between determinism and voluntarism, universalism and localism, generality and specificity, and absolutism and relativism. In much of this discourse, the sub-text relates to how far the human agency is shaped by structure or how far structure can be proactively shaped by the human agency. As Gouldner (1980) recounts in The Two Marxisms, this debate has been pivotal to disputes between libertarians like Lukacs, Gramsci and the Frankfort Critical Theorists and those like Balibar and Althusser with their more prescriptive emphasis. An interesting attempt to elide this duality is found in Gidden’s (1976, p. 121) concept of structuration, in which he sees ‘social structures (being) both constituted by human agency, and yet at the same time (being) the very medium of this constitution.’ In this more dynamic appreciation of the intersection between structure and agency, the enabling and constraining aspects of structure are acknowledged, as are the determination and differential distribution of options for the agent. Giddens has elaborated how, for example, class structures become formed by both mediate structuration, by which social opportunities can be blocked for some by others, and by proximate structuration, associated with work hierarchies and residential segregations. Such processes not merely produce such social and spatial divisions, but these very divisions can reproduce conditions for their own perpetuation. While conceptually it is easy to appreciate this marriage, operationally it is difficult to witness its consummation. For some (Gray, 2002), the limits on conscious agency are substantial. They see a bewildering complex world, full of as much accident, enigma, chimera and ambiguity as pattern and clarity. From this perspective, human conceit that cognitive insight can ultimately command mastery over this mystery amounts to an insolvent faith. Accordingly, theories that purport to fathom the social world and thereby impute an ordered seamless unity offer little more than makeshift sanctuary for destitute thought. Disenchanted with the transient and disposable aspects of a modernity that indulges its fetish for the novel, humankind may seek refuge in meaning, attachment, and continuity. But it needs to relinquish its reverence for rationalism and the related delusion that the world and its history are graspable in a linear and codified narrative. Rather, the disconcerting reality is that most of our lives involve the unconscious muddling through with what turns up. Central to the deception that

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human maladies can be rendered susceptible to social progress is the misconception that there exists a cohesive and intentional force known as ‘humanity’. While such faith may make living with uncertainty more palatable, there is no such thing as humanity, even in a global age. There are only humans in a state of constant craving, struggling through their infirmities of resolve and reasoning. For Gray (ibid., p. 12), the pervasive jumble, chaos, and self-interest are captured in the frailties of contemporary geopolitics: At present there are nearly two hundred sovereign states in the world. Most are unstable, oscillating between weak democracy and weak tyranny; many are rusted through with corruption, or controlled by organized crime; whole regions of the world—much of Africa, southern Asia, Russia, the Balkans and the Caucasus, and parts of South America—are strewn with corroded or collapsed states. At the same time, the world’s most powerful states—the United States, China and Japan—will not accept any fundamental limitation on their sovereignty. At its most bleak, this view holds that all is vanity and self-illusion, and that the script for this human theatre is often more at ease with the imaginary than the real: ‘in order to help us live, the mind censors the senses; but as result we inhabit a world of shadows’ (ibid., p. 78). An alternative view, that does not discount the random or irregular, or indeed the downright inexplicable, in a disorderly cosmos, nevertheless cedes more scope to the purposive, and to the prospect of discovering causality through logical inquiry. And yes, the selfish gene can often trump the altruistic one. But, notwithstanding all of the human foibles identified above, the social world is seen as an imperfect though improvable construction, based on choice as well as chance. Within this debate, the charge levelled at those urban researchers intent on retaining high theoretical abstraction is that it can ultimately degenerate into a form of solipsism. The counter charge is that locality research is little more than geographical particularism. Into this dispute has entered the realist school, associated with Sayer (1984), whose central proposition is that reality is too complex to be comprehensively captured by any single abstract theory. The proper use of theory, permissive of falsification and revisability, is one that can subject the theory to ‘the real situation’ and does not deform reality to confirm the theory. Sayer distinguishes between the internal necessary and the external contingent relations. We can theorise the inherent and necessary components but how things actually materialise in reality will also be influenced by contingencies. While there exists an impartially knowable reality separate from the mind, discernment and cognition can play a crucial role not only in terms of perspective and insight, but also in constructing social reality. For instance, there is a familiar maxim that if people define a situation as real and act as if it were real, then it can become real in its consequence. Given such particularity, Byrne (2001, p. 42) insists that we

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should abandon the futile search for social laws that pertain universally and permanently, and instead embrace forms of knowledge production, contextualised in particular time and space: Whereas postmodern relativism is fundamentally an epistemological project, complex realism has ontological foundations. It is organized around the notion that the world is composed of nested complex systems with emergent properties and in which causes are complex, contingent, and due to mechanisms which can be considered to ‘lie behind’ the world in which we live, which we observe, and which we change by our actions. Complex realism is an anti-universalist programme. We can only know these systems locally—there are no universal laws. It is interesting that just when leading physicists rededicate themselves to the quest for the unifying ‘theory of everything’, in social science there is a retreat from such totalism. Here, some will be uneasy about the desertion of comprehensive theoretical landscapes for explanatory tenets that derive from particularist investigation. As mentioned earlier, one concern here is that such a local focus risks an ‘arid empiricism’, or an ideographic account, or at least an overwhelming set of specificity that buries any prospect for making sense of the wider social world. Others see in this trend the inevitable outcome of demoting the material bases of social life in favour of other perspectives, such as the cultural. Since the 1990s, the ‘cultural turn’ has revealed the politics of identity and the ways identity is assembled through performativity, while the amplification of a post-modern urbanism has projected ‘futuristic’ cities like Los Angeles as prefigurative arenas of what for much of the world remain embryonic urban forms and virtual spaces, exemplified by fluidity, diversity, and multiplicity. For all its denial of epistemological certitude, post-modernism is hardly modest in its claims for a purchase on contemporary social life. Certainly, its greater appreciation of plurality, differentiation and disposability is attuned with a fragmented world, where the reach, size and speed of global connection have been escalating. Nonetheless, while endorsing the pertinence and pedigree of such scholarship, it is contended here that a convincing theory of contemporary urbanism should discard the slanted cultural lens of Western-centrism, and its customary neglect of the insights offered by cities in the developing world. Given their demographic momentum, rethinking the urban condition should start there. And there we discover, as normal, circumstances of informality and the socio-spatial discriminations of restrictive citizenship that generate the resilience, and sometimes the insurgence, of the poorest communities. While such settlements may be marginal in terms of their income and power, and while their ‘informal’ nature may be dismissed as random, chaotic, even anarchic, they are not marginal to the functioning and understanding of the city. They are the city.

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Legitimising their consequential presence does not imply a depreciation of the ‘formal’ city as illusory. Nor does the ‘informal’ city merely offer illustration of sites of resistance, if only because such repressed constituencies exhibit both passivity and defiance in the face of uneven power. Indeed, concentration on resistance, embedded in an oppositional politics of identity or reaction to a status of exception, ignores the facet of engagement between these putative ‘outcasts’ and the formal state. Thus, cityscapes comprise multi-spaces, whose intersection provides the dialectic encounter between the formal and informal—between official and unofficial, orthodox and tacit knowledge, modernity and tradition, discernible and oblique power, inclusion and exclusion—that can engender conflict, but can also convert, often unintentionally, into the assorted hybridities that recurrently invent the everyday routine of city life. Such consideration leads appropriately into the next chapter, which addresses the nature and causes of urban conflict.

4 The Divided City

Introduction In the previous chapter, it was argued that no one theory can decode the complexity of the contemporary city, but that any credible interpretative framework has to grapple with key discourses about the current urban condition. These involve intersection of the following: globalization; the rise of the network society; multicultural engagement, tension and hybridization; putative polarization between rich and poor; new urban governance; sustainability; spatial re-formation of core and metropolis; association between formal and informal city; the relative impact of structural and agent determinants; and the crucial implication of the massive urbanization in the Global South (Dear, 2002). Furthermore, it was affirmed that much of urban theory suffers from an overshadowing First World focus, which itself is over-reliant on a US-centric lens. For instance in the US, typically Chicago and Los Angeles are recruited as seminal referents for debates about ‘the city’. Chicago is appropriated as a model of the modernist urban form, its land use patterns and economic agglomerations emanating from the central city to the wider metropolis, its hyper-segregation a spatial expression of the unrelenting salience of race, and its governance in all its frailty seen as validating the significance of local agency even in a global city. Indeed, this human determinacy is taken to be reflected in an urban renaissance that, however partial and socially inequitable, does include restitution of public space and reclamation of a viable central city. From this Chicago optic, civic ingenuity and dexterity carry at least latent influence over resistible global forces. By contrast, Los Angeles is projected as the epitome of the post-modern city, formless and centre-less in its random development, and whose fragmented sprawl reflects a post-Fordist Planning in Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Contested Space. Frank Gaffikin and Mike Morrissey. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-19218-7

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dispersal of people and economic activity that, in turn, produces fractured governance rendered incoherent and impotent by its balkanisation. Deepening social inequality, interacting with inter-cultural strains associated with migration and multiple identities of diverse ethnicity, elicits both resentment among the dispossessed and fearful fortification in enclaves of affluence. Public space is squeezed and cordoned. Demotion of the social state (welfarism) is juxtaposed with the elevation of the security state (surveillance and policing), as doom-laden apprehension about the unsustainable character of capitalist globalisation consumes speculation about any imaginable civic emancipation (Davis, 1990; Halle, 2004). These two cities are presented as alternative trajectories for urban futures, with a strong inference that Los Angeles prefigures the jumbled fractal development pattern of multiple cores that will likely typify the irregular settlement of the new type of city, networked through highways of both automobile and wired technology—the disorderly confluence of physical and cyber-space. But exactly how archetypal are these two cities for global urbanism? Interestingly, given its correspondence to old style ‘dependency’ theory, which charted the connection between imperialist capitalism and underdevelopment, the deterministic and ominous tone of the Los Angeles ‘school’ has been influential in shaping some urban scholarship in Latin America. For instance, a study of segregation in the dispersed megacity of Sao Paulo reveals the cycle whereby the toxic blend of extreme income disparity, racism, and the ‘disjunctive democracy’ of a society whose electoral politics is compromised by an authoritarian rule of law, leads to a recast social geography. Once located in the socially heterogeneous traditional centre, the wealthy have retreated to new luxury condominiums deposited amidst the sprawling favelas of the poor on the periphery. To protect their opulence against the rampant threat of crime, the rich have commissioned private security, comprising high walls, armed guards, video surveillance, and alarm systems. Thereby, physical proximity fails to induce social integration. Rather, the poor are considered a dangerous class, whose very contiguity is used to justify exclusion by apprehensive urban elites in their defensive enclaves. As described by Caldeira (2000, p. 1): The discourses of fear that simultaneously help to legitimize this withdrawal and to reproduce fear find different references. Frequently, they are about crime, and especially violent crime. But they also incorporate racial and ethnic anxieties, class prejudices and references to poor and marginalized groups. But this unilateral fortification and usurpation of the state’s monopoly of legitimate force creates contested space, as evidenced in the way the hip-hop movement in the city appropriates the walls as a canvas for their ‘subversive’ graffiti, not to negotiate inclusion as much as to validate their own separate

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identity. Interestingly, while this profusion of painted expression contests class inequality, given its male-dominated sexist authorship, it often bolsters gender inequality. Caldeira proceeds to argue that the same devices for withdrawal, exclusion, and privatising the public city have been adopted by the upper classes in cities as diverse as Buenos Aires, Budapest, Johannesburg, and Los Angeles. Thus, she finds that the research literature emanating from the Los Angeles experience resonates well with the uneven development, differentiated citizenship, and repressive policing underpinning Sao Paulo’s disparate and restrictive urban form. But, apart from the fact that the LA perspective does not share with dependency theory, the same conviction in the efficacy of collective action, its depiction of the stark segregation between the gated communities of the rich and the ghettoes of the poor is not corroborated empirically in other Latin American cities like Santiago. There, private developers, in valorising land on the poor periphery for the construction of residential complexes for the wealthy, have inadvertently provided new opportunities for social integration between rich and poor, in a society whose Catholic theology contributes to a cultural empathy with cross-class solidarities (Salcedo and Torres, 2004). It illustrates again that specificity rules. Clearly, division has a distinctive Brazilian accent, with a different pronunciation in Chile. Such contrasting readings of city text and context prompt the need to re-visit the meaning of ‘divided city’. As indicated in Chapter 2, the term ‘divided city’ remains as ambiguous as it is ubiquitous. For instance, a recent edited publication (Scholar, 2006) employs the expression in its title, yet fails to offer clear definition anywhere in its text. To take some other examples of its elusive meaning: in Hepburn’s (2004) distinction of ‘divided’ and ‘contested’ cities, the former can arise from antagonism between two or more ethnic or religious groups, while the latter relates to a more fundamental hostility about the ownership and control of the city. On this definition, despite enduring inter-communal rifts, no US city is truly contested. But more recently, Hepburn (2006, p. 1) offers a looser classification when he suggests that a contested city is ‘a major urban center in which two or more ethnically conscious groups—divided by religion, language, and/or culture and perceived history—co-exist in a situation where neither group will recognise the supremacy of the other’. In a somewhat similar vein, Kotek (1999) refers to fractured urban arenas caught up in border and sovereignty disputes as ‘frontier’ cities. Other scholars avoid such delineation. For instance, Wasserstein (2001), in addressing the struggle over the ownership of Jerusalem, simply describes the ‘Holy City’ as divided. This is at variance with Benvenisti (1987) who insists that since the schism in cities like Jerusalem is intensified by wider national conflict, they change from being merely ‘divided’ cities into ‘polarised’ ones. Introducing another concept, Kliot and Mansfeld (1999, p. 170), speak of urban ‘division and partition’, which they associate with conflict around the control of territory in the

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circumstance of segregation: ‘Partitioned/divided cities are almost always the consequence of the divisions of nations and partition of countries’. By contrast, Marcuse and van Kempen (2002) mostly deploy the concept of ‘partitioned’ urban space in reference to the US model of entrenched sociospatial demarcation. Calame and Charlesworth (2009) largely restrict their focus on divided cities to those torn by the ‘self-imposed apartheid’ of interethnic civil conflict. As one illustration of the inexact terminology, Bollens (2007) addresses one kind of divided city that is variously described in terms of cultural diversity in cities in multinational societies (p. 5), the city facing intense intercommunal conflict (p. 6), the city operating as a ‘platform for the expression of conflicting sovereignty claims’ (p. 6), the city ‘within ethnically tense and fragmenting states’ (p. 8), and the city coping with ‘societal uncertainty and multinational tension’ (p. 222). Unfortunately, he does not accord such variant categories precise distinction. In short, the literature lacks consensus and concision about such classification. Moreover, while preponderant attention is paid to fragmentation as a characteristic state of the contemporary city, it is clear that urban division is not merely perennial today, but is as old as antiquity. Thus, for example, Loraux (2006) scrutinises the role of memory in reproducing the divided city in ancient Athens, while Miller (2007) explores the divisions in English provincial towns in the 17th century, rooted in interplay of religion and politics. Some cast the roots of many present urban divisions in the more recent legacies of colonialism (Abu-Lughod, 1965), recalling the gaping split within the one urban area between the colonial town and the native town, often representing a quite exact concurrence of class, race, and space. Such historic patterns of urban division show that contemporary discourses about the splintered city that implicitly lament loss of past unity suffer badly from lapsed memory (Bodnar, 2006). But even focusing on current examples, plainly, variation in the form and content of urban fractures demands specification beyond catch-all terms like ‘divided’, respecting the fact that conflicts not only derive from different roots, but also assume different outcomes. Some are more durable and intractable than others. As pointed out by Barakat (2005), conflicts in places like Somalia, Sudan, and Liberia have endured for so long that the belligerence has become normative, with scant collective recall of pre-war society. Some, in places like Montreal and Brussels, are conducted peaceably, while others in places such as Belfast and Jerusalem have provoked brutal violence. Some operate with great visibility and are attached with geo-political significance, while others fester relatively unseen in the global spotlight. To assist in this more refined designation, Chapter 2 identified eight main conflictive circumstances in which city divisions can surface: (1) Emergence of the dual city in advanced capitalism is attributed to economic restructuring since the 1970s that has purportedly witnessed the

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upsurge of disconnected socio-spatial communities, associated with the haemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs, a subsequent ‘digital divide’, and related social debilitation of traditional working class community. Fast and vast expansion of urbanism in the Global South, coupled with intense pressure on urban space and resources, is producing sites of subordination, engagement and resistance, often most manifest in the ‘informal city’. Increasing mixed ethnicity and diversity are coming to ever more cities, courtesy of mass migration patterns linked to deepening globalisation. The main source of current geo-political conflict is the professed ‘clash of civilisations’ around issues of cultural and religious identity, most patently between sections of Islam and their opponents. Site of ‘new wars’. Given the massive urban growth in the Global South, and how in modern warfare combat forces are vulnerable to high tech precision weapons in open terrain, the enemies of the most powerful nations will increasingly seek the compactness and congestion of urban ‘cover’, both to blend with local non-combatants and to reduce the potency of their opponent’s sophisticated weaponry. The role of ideology and/or government systems can generate deliberate socio-spatial chasm. For instance, Berlin’s division and ultimate dissection was associated with ideological wars, while South African cities were subject to a state policy of forced racial separation and hierarchy. Global warming and related environmental degradation contain potential for resource wars around issues of energy, land, and water. Ethno-nationalist fissures are proliferating in the context of sovereignty changes that have attended both the end of the Cold War and the postcolonial experience.

Too often the literature around conflict in cities fails to denote the distinctions of such taxonomy. Of course, it could be argued that this particular one fails to capture all contingencies. For instance, it deliberately excludes reference to ‘the diffusion of terror as an urban phenomenon’, despite its particularly high register on political radar since 9/11 (Savitch, 2003, p. 103), and the extent to which cities are more susceptible to terrorism than rural areas, given the former’s better scope for impact and visibility (Beall, 2005). Such omission does not imply indifference to the significant urban impact that such violence has inflicted in terms of public safety, restricted use of urban space, and the surveillance culture it has invoked in the name of security. Rather, its deletion is due to three considerations: first, such urban terror can be viewed as linked to other conditions already identified above; second, it may be that urban terror has variable effect, bringing greater solidarity to some cities in common resistance, and potentially greater division to others, where population composition reflects in micro the wider struggle waged; and finally, some deem assessment of its impact as either premature or as indicating less durability

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than its accorded prominence would suggest. For instance, addressing the resilience of the American city ‘in the age of terror’, Eisinger (2004, p. 115) notes that apart from a temporary downturn in aspects such as tourist and business travel: Few lasting effects on city life are evident. It would appear that the fortunes of American cities are less subject to one time external shocks such as the terror attacks than to larger long-term forces in the economy and society. While specifying eight main frameworks for urban conflict, it is recognised that any particular dispute can be attributed to different combinations of these. For instance, is the current discord between Baghdad’s Shias and Sunnis to be ascribed to: the re-awakening of ancient ethno-nationalist enmity, fomented by the ‘new war’ of US-led invasion; to an intra-communal variant of the ‘clash of civilisations’; or to a war that was at least in part waged to secure access to affordable oil supply? Though most plausibly it is down to a fusion of these factors, it is difficult empirically to disaggregate them, and apportion precise responsibility. Similarly, while Berlin’s fissures in the second half of the 20th century were undergirded largely by ideological contest, first with Nazism and latterly with the rivalry between capitalism and communism, remnants of east–west splits persist since the fall of the Wall, alongside other features like the precarious presence of ethnic groups, and the emergence of neo-Nazi agitation (Verheyen, 2008). Likewise, the divisions in Johannesburg derive from both the legacy of that distinctive ethnocracy known as apartheid and more recent facets such as the accentuated social disparities of the new economy and the acrimony generated by immigration (Beall et al., 2002). In such a manner, many urban conflicts are due to an inter-linkage of local conditions and reproduced schisms from the wider world. But, given the deficient forensics of social scientific inquiry, such complex overlap seldom yields indisputable perspicuity. Properly, the particular permutation is always subject to argument. So, these eight categories are presented for interrogation rather than affirmation, and with this in mind, further consideration of the most frequently cited factors is instructive.

Explanations of division We inhabit a very unequal world. That inequality most patently concerns differentials in income, status, and power. But such disparities are embedded not just in class, but also, for instance, in distinctions around ethnicity, gender, and religious, cultural, and sexual preference. Since all cities contain residents belonging to combinations of such categories, all cities are divided. Moreover, around the issue of income in particular, social differentiation typically assumes a spatial impersonation, with neighbourhood segregation sometimes

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starkly formed in a mainly working class inner city, middle class suburb, and beyond to the landed gentry. But such separatist development can also take the form of the racial ghetto or the gay precinct, or in the case of communities like the Amish, distinctive religious settlement. Of course, some of these spatial detachments are more volitional and less socially disabling than others. In this respect, it is right to distinguish between imposed and intentional ethnic enclaves, between say, in the case of the US, the black ghetto and the Orthodox Jewish community (Varady, 2005). But Byrne (2001, p.105) is clear. Patterns of socio-spatial partition are outcomes of the modern industrial city: ‘In premodern cities rich and poor often lived in close proximity, sometimes at different levels of the same dwelling. The emergence of residential segregation in cities was one of bases of the political origins of modernity’. And, again, later (ibid., p. 128), he adds: Polarisation is now taking extreme forms in many cities of the world. The divides which exist within places are almost as great as those which exist on a global basis, certainly if we consider that inequality should be considered in relative terms. Postindustrial capitalism is unequal and the idea that we are experiencing a Brazilianisation of advanced capitalism seems to be pretty well exact as a description of the tendency of the social trajectory of advanced capitalist societies into the twenty-first century. While residential differentiation has long been considered part of the urban mosaic (Timms, 1971), the suggestion is that the socio-spatial divide has become significantly more acute, with some communities of the post-industrial city exiled to the edge of the new socio-economic system (Baum et al., 2002). But any interpretation of this ‘polarisation’ that encapsulates it in the notion of a ‘two-speed’ city, containing only extremity of wealth and poverty is oversimplification. Indeed, though this tendency to bifurcation in the advanced capitalist city has been explored often in the literature (Mollenkopf and Castells, 1991; Fainstein et al., 1992; Goldsmith and Blakeley, 1992; Massey and Denton, 1993; Hamnett, 1994; Sibley, 1995), closer examination reveals that any such assertion usually owes more to decree than to empirical substantiation. For instance, one collection of studies (Marcuse and van Kempen, 2002) tests the proposition that globalisation is universalising the US urban model. The latter is taken to comprise rampant spatial sprawl; intensified segregation between the bountiful citadels of privilege and the desolate enclaves of the excluded poor; and residualised public space and service, attendant upon neo-liberal policies of commercialisation and privatisation that have both re-scaled the state and hollowed out civic society. While their case studies reflect tendencies in this direction, their empirical evidence does not validate its prevalent application. Indeed, this stark depiction of the American city should itself be subject to greater circumspection. Nonetheless, any such

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reservation about the binary character of current urbanism scarcely tempers the argument of those who see a fundamental tension in the contemporary city. As elaborated in Chapter 3, some like Harvey (1989) see in capitalist urbanism an inherent conflict around issues of justice and empowerment if only because they are subject to contrary power imperatives: the state addressing the rights of common citizenship and inclusion; and the market promoting the rights of private capital and exclusivist acquisition. In many ways, this kind of dualism has long-standing pedigree in references such as: the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’; ‘upstairs-downstairs’; ‘how the other half lives’; the ‘tale of two cities’; capital and labour, and their rival relation to the means of production. Similarly, in wider economic geographies, contrasts are drawn between core and periphery, reflected for instance in Britain’s recurring development gap branded ‘the North–South divide’, and in the US, between the Rust-belt north and Sun-belt south. Another perspective here is that while such binary social cleavage may be applicable to strategic urban centres such as global cities, it carries less salience for the profile of many ‘ordinary’ cities (Amin and Graham, 1997). Yet, even in the case of global cities, some dispute the proposition that their particular reliance on the service sector invariably generates intense inequality. For instance, Hamnett (1996) argues that while such polarisation may be true in the case of major US cities, given their structural context, such as high immigration from low income countries and the relatively restricted American welfare state, it is less pertinent for cities in other political economies of advanced capitalism. Notwithstanding this qualification, Reichl (2007) insists that the ‘dual city’ thesis is unbefitting the case of New York City. Data analysis of income, poverty, housing, and crime for the 1990s, offers no confirmation of accentuated disparity between high and low income neighbourhoods in that global city. Rather, the more conspicuous contrast lies between the thriving areas in the core, and the relative stagnation across all income areas outside the core. Such empirical evidence of the flaws in the ‘dual city’ concept leads some to counter with a more differentiated social sedimentation. Thus, Logan et al. (2000) refer to a tripartite model of urban economy comprising: (1) a white formal core; (2) a mixed formal component; and (3) an ethnic/immigrant informal periphery. Marcuse (1989) goes further. Arguing that any concept of a ‘dual city’ mistakenly condenses a land-use hierarchy embodying complex convergence of social, occupational and spatial disparities, he splits the city into ‘residential’ and ‘business’ parts. Taking the former, he specifies five districts: . . .

The command and luxury city, hosting the wealthy and powerful; The gentrified city, accommodating up-market consumers, such as business executives and ‘yuppies’, in prestigious and conspicuously designed abodes; The middle class city, detached home to professional and affluent working classes, usually in leafy suburbia;

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The tenement city, residence to low paid and insecurely employed, servicing the command/luxury and gentrified cities, in spaces vulnerable to forms of gentrification and valorisation unfavourable to local populations; The abandoned city, the residual refuge of the very poor, the excluded, and the destitute.

Such spatial alignments derive largely from the investments and displacements involved in the market dynamics of the new urban economy, generating controversy and tenacity behind territorial disputes. But this private-led fragmentation into distinct urban quarters risks the differentiation of the public planning process, whereby land parcels are packaged in opportunistic pursuit of maximum profitable development. Not only is it inimical to holistic regeneration, it is presumptive that the socially excluded can be also spatially contained, stoically awaiting whatever ‘trickle down’ benefits accrue from activity in the more favoured quarters of what McKenzie (1994) dubs ‘privatopia’. While acknowledging that highly segmented urbanism demands such nuance, some still regard the advanced marginality endured by those most socially bereft as constituting a special form of inequality in the current period, a ‘new poverty’ captured in the terminology of the underclass debate that has its genesis in the US (Mingione, 1996). There, the most obvious spatial concentration of poverty is found in ‘extreme poverty neighborhoods’, defined as a metropolitan census tract in which the poverty rate is greater than 40%. Between 1970 and 1980, the number of poor living in such ‘ghettoes’ in the US’s 50 largest cities increased, in some estimates, by 66% (Nathan and Lego, 1986). Ghettoes are characterised not only by a concentration of space but also of race: they are mostly segregated settlements of blacks and Hispanics (Jargowsky and Bane, 1991). This persistent link between poverty and place is evident in the way the number of poor people living in high-poverty neighbourhoods in US metropolitan areas nearly doubled in the period 1970–1990 (Jargowsky, 1997). Particularly since the 1980s, with the combined impact of economic decline and the long-standing white flight and later middle class black exodus from the central city, the spatial character of poverty has become more urban (Downs, 1994). Of course, it can be argued that the tag of underclass is not a novice entrant into the vernacular of the poverty debate, but rather a new name for an old stigma, such as problem family, poorest of the poor, lower class, undeserving poor, ne’er do wells, and lumpen proletariat. For instance, Katz (1993, p. 8) notes the term’s continuity with similar metaphors for reservations of the deprived applied over the last 200 years: Stripped of their period features, nineteenth-century discussions of inner cities also sound remarkably contemporary. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers portrayed the undeserving poor as clustered in inner

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cities, where they formed slums that threatened to infect both the respectable poor and the middle classes. Nonetheless, others insist that the accentuated and transformed nature of deprivation since the 1980s merits this new classification. Thus, to neoliberals in the US, the persistence of an urban underclass derives from debilitating welfarism, which saps the ingenuity of habitual claimants, and facilitates moral laxity. This trail often leads to not only rising rates of illegitimacy and female-headed families, but also to the proclivity for low educational attainment, stunted ambition, an enfeebled work ethic, and potential drug abuse. In this analysis, it is the type rather than extent of poverty that marks the perdurable condition, as such families tend to congregate in concentrated spaces of acute impoverishment, depressed in culture as much as income. Given their incorrigible predilections, the ghetto hard core is seen to be impervious to welfare interventions, whose misguided ‘logic’ acts perversely to absolve them of self-responsibility and can even render their feckless pathway a rational choice (Murray, 1984). A contrary perspective comes from Wilson’s (1987 and 1993) contribution to this discourse, in which he construes the underclass as suffering persistent joblessness combined with social isolation, in neighbourhoods of intense deprivation, beset by depopulation. With its roots in structural racism and economic inequality, the contemporary ghetto is the beleaguered inner city home to those outside both the orthodox labour market and mainstream socio-political life. For Wilson, it is almost exclusively black, a focus shared by others like Glasgow (1981). Yet some studies have portrayed the US underclass in cross-racial terms. For example, Williams and Kornblum (1985) present a profile of a white and black underclass in cities like Cleveland and New York, and Moore and Pinderhughes (1993) assess the pertinence of the underclass label to Latinos in the barrio. Again, though some like Auletta (1982) identified a rural underclass in the southern state of Mississippi, for Wilson the underclass is not only a distinctively urban experience but also to a large extent is regionally demarcated in the Northeast and Midwest, a spatial designation broadly endorsed by Ricketts and Sawhill (1986) and Jargowsky and Bane (1991), among others. Wilson traces how migration flows to the large northern metropolitan areas and historic discrimination produced fragile connection to the formal labour market amongst urban minorities, whose vulnerability deteriorated in the 1980s under continued relocation of manufacturing jobs from central city to suburbs, a sectoral switch from manufacturing to services, a related substitution of knowledge for labourintensive production, and an exodus of jobs and investment from the northern ‘rustbelt’ to the southern ‘sunbelt’. Focus on African Americans acknowledges a distinctive legacy of slavery and subsequent systemic discrimination that is seen to create among some of its victims a conflictual response to societal institutions.

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For some like Gans (1995), the real problem is that the war against poverty has become deformed into the war against the poor, and in this ideological combat zone, the brand of ‘underclass’ imputes pejorative attributes to those more sinned against than sinning, conveniently converting victims into culprits. For him, its conceptual ambiguity permits neither rigorous calculation of the numbers involved nor precise policy prescription for its redress. Others note how it comprises variegated and depreciatory connotations— subjugation, passivity, disreputability, and menace—that remain unsubstantiated empirically (Jencks and Peterson, 1991; Morris, 1993). For instance, contrary evidence actually exists for prevailing claims, such as that the poor are more isolated than in the past or that the poor living in concentrated poverty are more politically disconnected than the poor living in more mixed neighbourhoods. Moreover, the notion that the ghetto poor are themselves unified and uniformly at odds with mainstream society is challenged in ethnographic studies such as Anderson’s (1999, p. 36), which distinguishes between the ‘decent’ and ‘street’ residents, and their divergent ‘codes’. While the former ‘share many of the middle class values of the wider society, but know that the open display of such values carries little weight on the street. . . (those from the ‘street’) are ‘highly alienated and embittered, they exude generalised contempt for the wider scheme of things and for a system they are sure has nothing but contempt for them’. Again, such demarcation has longstanding lineage in poverty literature, between neighbourhood families cast as either ‘respectables’ or ‘roughs’. Interestingly, the underclass discourse has been overwhelmingly American, experiencing an uneasy transatlantic crossing to Europe and other parts of the world. For instance, Murray’s attempt to identify its deleterious presence in Britain (1990, 1994) centred largely on a flawed interpretation of illegitimacy rates as a best predictor of a nascent underclass (Field, 1989). That is not to deny growing recognition within Europe in the last 15 years that a ‘new’ poverty especially afflicts mature urban centres, and is associated largely with worklessness and increasingly segmented labour markets attendant upon post-industrialism. Related factors include: the pressure on labour costs from the need to compete in global markets with developing countries; the relatively low pay and insecurity in many areas of the ascendant service sector; the bifurcation of the labour market under computerisation, between de-skilled manual jobs and high skill intellectual ones; the fiscal imperative to reshape socially allocated resources (Benington and Taylor, 1993); and the volatile impact on long-term interest rates from the de-regulated integration of global financial markets. For instance, Hutton (1995) speaks of the trajectory of the UK’s new economy towards a 30/30/40 society, in which the bottom 30% are the absolutely disadvantaged, unemployed and benefit-dependent; the next 30% constitute the insecure, those working part-time, casually, or on fixed-term contracts; and the remaining 40% comprises the privileged job-rich, typically enjoying real growth in post-tax income.

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Versions of this socio-spatial polarisation are evident in the Global South. For instance, in (post-) socialist Shanghai, new moral geographies of exclusion have taken the form of gated ‘civilised’ communities such as Vanke Garden City, private spaces in a dense public city designed to prohibit intrusion by rural migrants, perceived as dirty and dangerous peasants. In studying the ideological formation of this spatial expression of ‘moral hygiene’, Pow (2007, p. 1540) notes: While residents often expressed fear and worry about outsiders trespassing and ‘invading’ their private territories and defiling their pristine environment, their concerns are invariably targeted at the hordes of migrant workers that are now flooding into the city in search of a living. In the Global North, the premise since the 1980s that market reform would restore the vitality of depressed urban spaces has confronted the marginalisation of certain groups and communities, particularly those languishing in urban cores. Since it is important that such negative impacts be de-politicised, the ideological offensive of neo-liberalism is about legitimation as much as explanation. Typecasting an underclass becomes a convenient ploy. In the 1960s, explanations for such urban populations rested in the lower half of Figure 4.1 below: residual socio-economic dislocations were deemed to be largely a function of individual/cultural aberration, in the context of the affluent society and its putative embourgeoisement of the working class. In the 1980s, it was acknowledged implicitly that change was structural, as the Thatcher and Reagan projects concentrated on economic transformation, which their ideologies posited as necessary, painful, but transitory. In this model, the underclass comprised those least prone to apply themselves to the new supply-side imperatives: re-skilling; pricing into jobs; and such like. But,

Structural Ideology

Ideology

Economic

Social

Cultural

Cultural Individual

Figure 4.1 Models of the underclass.

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by the close of the decade with the onset of a new recession, the high tide of these policies had failed to elevate those most pauperised and excluded by these changes; and in the ebb flow, the legitimisation for this came in a new ideological ‘explanation’: the urban underclass was then projected as largely the product of structural change in the social fabric, such as the decline of family and other sources of social authority. In the 1990s, despite rhetoric of a more ‘compassionate conservatism’, Wacquant (1996, p. 121) could still refer to ‘the resurgence of extreme poverty and destitution (suggesting) that the metropolis is the site and fount of novel forms of exclusionary social closure in advanced societies’. Yet, evidence for linear growth in inequality is inconclusive, at least in the US, where between 1990 and 2000, the total number of poor living in high-poverty neighbourhoods dropped by one quarter, an improvement associated with strong economic growth and an unemployment rate that fell below 4% for the first time in 30 years. In 2007, 12.5% of the US population (37 million people) was below the poverty line. While non-Hispanic whites constitute the biggest group in poverty (16 million, or 43% of the total), the poverty population is unequally distributed towards minorities, embracing one in four African American and a similar percentage Hispanic (Simms, 2009). Since then, deepening economic crisis and rising unemployment carry grave implications for increased poverty. Accordingly, in these early years of the new century, we have travelled a substantial distance from the optimism of modernisation theories in the 1960s, with their prospective diminution of class and racial inequity, and related pacification of urban conflict within the frame of common citizenship. As expressed by Wacquant (2008, p. 18): Far from witnessing a resorption of poverty and an erosion of ethnonational affiliations, advanced societies have been plagued by the concurrent spread of ‘new poverty’ and the surge—or resurgence—of racializing ideologies often accompanied by violent conflicts directly involving youths in lowerclass neighbourhoods. Through all of these changes, the basic arguments about the paradox of penury amid plenty as a primary source of urban conflict change very little. As mentioned in the previous chapter, essentially they come down to two preferential theses for the neo-liberal/right in contradistinction to the two privileged by the liberal/left. In the case of the former, first there are variants of the ‘sub-culture of poverty’ perspective, the view that deviant attitudes and behaviour linked to dependency incapacitate the poor, obstructing their inclusion in the opportunity society. Second, it is contended that state benefits have engendered perverse incentives that unintentionally magnify the poor’s vulnerability, making it rational for them to choose welfare over work. Contrary to this emphasis on behavioural pathology, the alternative view suggests that poverty is an intrinsic outcome of an inegalitarian

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society, marked by ineffectual welfarism, meager labour protection, ethnoracial discrimination, and negligent state defence of the rights of common citizenship. Second, it is submitted that global capitalist restructuring disproportionately impairs those distressed urban spaces that accommodate the poorest. Within these broad structural and cultural accounts, further exposition is feasible. For instance, in the analysis of structural inner city unemployment, the relative impact of spatial mismatch (living far from where the new jobs are) and skills mismatch (lacking requisite qualification for the jobs created within physical access) can be apportioned. But, fundamentally, it matters a great deal as to whether poverty is viewed mostly as the consequence of self-degeneracy or societal inequity. For instance, it influences the extent to which certain behaviour on the part of some poor—such as welfare and tax dodging—is to be addressed within a framework of criminality and security or treated as a resistance and survival mechanism within the exigency of their condition. In the case of those operating in more serious legal terrain, this is not always so much ‘resistant’ behaviour as complicit behaviour, complicit in the sense that in the game of casino capitalism, whose ethics are set largely in the corporate boardroom and the financial headquarters on Wall Street, the ‘deviant’ poor can be said to play the hand that they were dealt. Far from being ‘outcast’ and marginal to the operation of the ordered economy, in this view, they actually partake in the accumulation process, responding enterprisingly, if also illegally and informally, to markets of the highest demand, which in the case of drugs like heroin and cocaine in the US is targeted at the white middle class in the suburbs (Perry and Gaffikin, 2009). Yet, this analysis poses related controversy. Countering the tendency on the part of the right to blame the victim by instead blaming the system does not attend to the brutish consequence of the most detrimental forms of anti-social behaviour within deprived communities, not only for society at large but also for other poor people. To absolve ghetto criminality by reference to the less spotlighted, but more substantial, white-collar criminality is to relegate its distressing repercussion in the ghetto itself; patronise its perpetrators with excuses for their aberrant behaviour; pardon its responsibility for the further debilitation of the poor through its aggravation of internal conflict; and disregard the pretext that it offers a security state to address poverty through punitive rather than remedial tenets. In all of this, the discourse about urban division around poverty and wealth is compounded by linkage to race and ethnicity.

Ethnicity and urban conflict From Greek antiquity (Hall, 1997) to biblical myth about the tower of Babel, what might be called the ‘Babel syndrome’ of the world’s tribal separatism

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inscribes a constant human narrative. Ethnic belonging rests on an assortment of mutual affiliation such as lineage, affinity with kith and kin, a close bond with specific territory, a sense of shared history and destiny, and common linguistic, cultural, racial and religious traits (Ignatieff, 1993). Clearly, such generality holds potential for confusion and repudiation of what constitutes the ‘ethnic’ (Kaufman, 2001). Ethnicity can be taken as the objective distinguishing characteristics. Whether these translate into a solidaristic ethnic group depends on the existence of a people with a subjective sense of their commonality and differentiation, and who attach meaning and significance to their shared traits and ancestry (Connor, 1994; Jenkins, 1997; Smith, 1999). But the extent to which membership of an ethnic group produces a particular individual’s ethnic identity, relates to how strongly the individual deliberately associates a sense of self with that ethnic tradition and mission, and is prepared to act accordingly. After all, people can construct their identity with limited or no reference to their ethnic background. This means, for instance, that not all conflicts that involve ethnic groups are primarily ethnic conflicts (Albert, 2008). In this respect, ethnic characteristics contain great complexity. They can be regarded as primordial, expressive, discrete, and immutable or as situationist and instrumental, involving the individual as an active agent in selective identity formation. Some aspects can be ascribed or chosen (Jackson and Penrose, 1993). They can evoke a compelling sense of mutual obligation or feeble attachment to group cohesion (Eller, 1999; Horowitz, 2000). Moreover, along with the multiple variables already identified, other aspects are discernible: the myths, symbols, and fictive narratives of past fortitude and heroic sacrifice (Kaufman, 2006); the duration of the common descent, and related sense of continuity and legacy; the fervent belief in being a ‘chosen’ people, a people set apart; the extent of inter-marriage, which may be seen to dilute the purity of the lineage (Gagnon, 2004); and a sense of common hostility to ‘the other’ (Petersen, 2002). Given these myriad aspects, it may be posited that the strength of ethnic affinity in any particular case relates to the number of these shared touchstone characteristics and to the extent of their application. But any attempt to weight some over others would certainly invite contention within the scholarship. More importantly, it is helpful to see ethnic identity as a shifting rather than entrenched formation, a relational and contested process of becoming rather than being, negotiated within power networks and the politics of recognition (Taylor, 1994; Ong and Nonini (eds), 1997). Thus, the reification of ethnicity as an essentialist and solidified element misses the extent to which it can be more about routes than roots (Hoon, 2006). What binds some can serve to exclude others, and discord about identity and territory can produce ethnic rivalry ranging in intensity from chronic friction to deadly quarrel. Given that history is inundated with narratives of invasion, conquest, subjugation and resistance on the part of one ethnic group against another, current boundaries for nation-states and relationships among their

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diverse ethnicities are shaped by this disputed colonial past. Two thirds of all independent states comprise three or more concentrated ethnic groups, and while most ethnic disputes do not involve violence, almost two-thirds of all violent conflicts contain an ethnic aspect (Toft, 2003). Since 1945, there has been a decisive shift from inter- to intra-state conflict (Marshall and Gurr, 2003), and one reflection of this is that since 1945, fatalities in civil wars have been five times greater than those in inter-state wars (Fearon and Laitin, 2003), while appreciating that such analysis is confounded by conceptual and empirical dilemmas of definition (Sambanis, 2004). Contrasting such belligerence to conventional war, Charlesworth (2006, p. 4) suggests that ‘these conflicts typically lack uniforms, leaders, rules, treaties, conventions and beginnings or ends. Their seeds are sown in the swampy terrain of cultural identity and its repression and reassertion’. Plainly, not all components of ethnicity carry the same violent potential. For instance, linguistic difference is not associated with armed conflict, whereas religious difference can be. But again, the relative extent of influence is not subject to calibration. In general, there is an ineffable and inestimable facet to ethnic identity, an emotive force that for some is visceral, making it a potent trigger not only of passionate celebration, but also of latent aggression. Whether in the Balkans, East Timor, Rwanda, Darfur, Chechnya, or Kashmir, the plethora of recent violent conflicts containing a redoubtable ethnic constituent reveals the fallacy about the ineluctable role of modernisation and globalisation in mitigating ethnic variance. Two related questions arise. Why is this ethnic contest still so prevalent and what determines whether or not it assumes violent expression? While ethnic conflict has been a perennial feature of humankind (Horowitz, 2000), six main explanations are offered for its current form and force (Lake and Rothschild, 1998; Wimmer, 2002; Min and Wimmer, 2003). First, there is persistent structural discrimination and inequality based on ethnic background that produces an enduring sense of common victimhood (Gurr, 1993). Second, there is the ‘imperialist legacy’ argument about the repercussions of empires even in a de-colonialising period, whereby current clashes in places such as Kashmir, Gaza and Chechnya reflect both the partisan purpose of previously imposed borders by the imperial power and an insurgency by historically subjugated people to reclaim the integrity of their homeland as an act of self-determination (Gall and deWaal, 1998). Third, the ‘diversity’ perspective emphasises the impact of greater migration in a globalising world in transposing the global to the local, spreading heterogeneity, and creating more transnational cities in the sense of their diasporic and multicultural affinities. Where such a mix assumes negative manifestation, decreasing uniformity combined with differentiated citizenship, inequitable outcomes of neo-liberal globalisation, migrants’ precarious belonging, and the xenophobia readily generated in economically parlous times, act as a lethal brew to foment scapegoating among the

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impoverished in this unforgiving competitive milieu. The upshot is greater inter-ethnic tension, particularly between perceived ‘native’ and ‘newcomer’ (Chua, 2003). Fourth, the ‘de-frosting’ thesis suggests that the authoritarian polity in former communist countries suppressed ethnic autonomy and nationalist ambition, which were aroused into raging reprisal and/or ‘defensive’ aggression upon the expiry of these centralist regimes, exemplifying the character of the ‘new wars’ in the global era (Kaldor, 2001; Petersen, 2002). Fifth, there are those who insist that behind some apparently spontaneous unrest and combat, rooted in ancestral enmity and primed by current crusade, lies the manipulating hand of ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’, keen to marshall fear and loathing for self-serving motives of power and/or greed (Carment, 2007; Collier, 2007). An example here would be Milosevic, who has been seen to have cynically embraced the banner of Serbian nationalism in the Bosnian conflagration to provide himself with a formidable political platform amidst the volatile disintegration of Yugoslavia. But the flaw here lies in any simplistic depiction of a passive and guileless citizenry readily duped by accomplished leadership. The more complex reality is that in the charged environment of a re-aligning state, where concession to secessionist claims could be taken by other Yugoslavs as setting troubling precedent for annexation and amputation, nationalist forces in Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and later Kosovo had an autonomous political and material presence (Burg and Sharp, 1999; Toft, 2003). For instance, Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence in 2008 was grounded in its demographic composition of mostly ethnicAlbanians—over 90% of its 2 million people—and the spatial concentration of Kosovon Serbs in enclaves mostly to the north. Finally, it is proposed that many of today’s ethnic contests are surrogates for a fundamental struggle between civilisations, based on cultural–religious collision, rather than the politico-economic confrontation between capitalism and communism that marked much of the last century (Huntington, 1996). The main form of this polarisation is supposed to entail sacred tradition and theocracy represented by Islamisation, versus liquid modernity and market-based secular consumerism, epitomised by globalisation—both in their own ways incompatible with pluralist democratic civil society. But, again, the reality is more textured and contradictory. Taking the Arab world as one example of Muslim differentiation, various responses to globalisation are evident. Militant Islamists see it blurring the provinces of believer and infidel, and instead seek their own form of universalism in a proselytising global Jihad, a religious–cultural identity politics that sees sovereignty as resting not with citizens or the nation-state, but with the divine. Others oppose it outright as a channel for hegemonic American culture and capitalism, imperiling their heritage and identity. More secularist elements embrace it, while still others crave a globalisation that is genuinely integrative and respectful of cultural and national difference (Moussalli, 2007). Accepting this divergence does not

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invalidate the significance of the Islam–West confrontation as an adverse context for hostilities in places like Bosnia, Iraq, and Palestine. Moreover, aspects of this antagonism are self-fulfilling, as in the branding of all Muslims with a common ethnic identity, that, in turn, holds potential for further igniting fission (Tibi, 2007, p. 225): A superimposed Islamic ethnic identity is constructed to supersede real local Islamic identities (Turks in Germany, Maghrebis in France) and create a diasporic unity of Islam in Europe viewed as an extension of Dar al-Islam. This provokes tensions between immigrants and settled populations in Europe as much as the European right-wing extremists do. Such patterns form part of a broader canvas, concerning the tenacious interplay of religion, secularisation, individualism and modernity, particularly amongst people rooted in values of communalism and tradition (Vanaik, 1997). As the world integrates, there is paradoxically an enhanced valorisation on that which differentiates. Thereby, globalisation has been twinned with a new tribalisation (Barber, 1995). While such ethnic/identity politics test the consonance between monolithic cultural politics and pluralist citizenship in a globalising age, the frictions generated are also inseparable from the inequitable outcome of global capitalism (Al Sayyad and Castells, 2002). Part of this outcome reflects itself in the flow of migrants from the periphery to the core, inducing varied responses from generous welcome to contentious dissension in those gateway cities that are the main reception centres. At its most negative, the reaction of the host population can be xenophobic, seeing the new entrants as an invasion of economic refugees, interposing the Third World into the First. On the streets, this hostility translates into familiar criticism of illegal border crossings, unlicensed street traders, the subversion of local customs and values, the under-cutting of local labour, and most recently, the association made between some migrants and the threat of ‘global terrorism’. In societies such as the US, there is the suggestion from some that the relationship between immigrant settlement and internal migration is extending city-regional spatial segmentation on the basis of race and ethnicity. The supposed pattern in gateway cities like Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Miami is that most of their relatively unskilled immigrants are caused to work for lower wages than those for the native unskilled, some of who are then priced out of their traditional local jobs, and motivated to become geographically mobile in search of alternative appropriate employment. Their exodus combined with the migrant influx is then seen to re-compose the racial and ethnic mix of the city’s residents, risking the deepening of segregation (Frey, 1999). Such analysis has been criticised by those who regard arguments about ‘demographic balkanisation’ as alarmist, and rooted in normative assumptions, like the equation of ‘American’ with whiteness, and segregation studies that appraise

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assimilation in terms of approximation with Anglo-Saxon culture (Ellis and Wright, 1998). Another aspect of this issue is the limited citizenship afforded to the undocumented immigrant. Taking the US as an example, its 9.3 million undocumented immigrants account for 26% of the total foreign-born population, and around 40% of this category in 10 states. Of this group, Mexicans comprise 57%, with another 23% coming from other Latin American countries. Close to two-thirds of undocumented immigrants (6 million) are working—representing 5% of all US workers—and two-thirds of these earn less than twice the minimum wage, in contrast to only one-third of all workers (Passel et al., 2004). Such exploited status can be read through Agamben (2005) use of the old concept of ‘state of exception’. He highlights the tension that while every modern citizen is supposed to constitute part of ‘sovereignty’, s/he is also vulnerable to state power, and thus to that same sovereignty of which they are a part. This marks the inherent ambiguity of a politico-juridical process that can both bind and abandon. Particularly, when individuals are disrobed of political status and reduced to what Agamben calls ‘bare life’, they can be placed in a legal black hole, a space of exception. Taken to its ultimate potential, this exile can de-humanise branded populations to the extent that the state’s punitive response to them is no longer defined as unfair, or even in extreme cases as criminal. Such precarious belonging has implications not only for propensity for urban conflict, but also for urban planning in general. If millions of residents are airbrushed from official data, how can their presence and needs be accommodated in the planning system? In cities in the Global South such as Bangkok, urban authorities fail to take illegal immigrants into account when adopting planning policy, with specific implications for access to services and to public space for celebration of traditional and religious festivals (Chantavanich and Vungsiriphisal, 2005). That is not to say that all cities adopt an approach of denial or rejection. In the US, for example, some like Chicago are cast as ‘sanctuary’ cities, which through their local ordinances and prominent role in national advocacy, pursue a more sympathetic course. To appreciate fully its significance for current urban conflict, migration needs to be contextualised within the global pattern of its considerable growth and changing flows in recent decades. Whereas in 1965 there were 75 million people living outside their country of origin, by 2002 the figure was 175 million, representing 3% of the world’s population, and involving an average annual growth rate of 2.3% compared with 1.8% for total world population (Kok et al., 2006). Not only does this figure exclude the estimated 15–30 million illegal migrants, it also fails to capture the pace of recent change, given that between 1990 and 2000, the migrant numbers increased by one-third (Balbo and Tuts, 2005). Some of this mobility is driven by economic hardship, and some by the upheavals of war. For instance, some 2 million fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos following the end of the Vietnam

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war in 1975. Mostly, the flow is from poor to rich worlds, and as such, it brings mixed blessings to the Global South. While it can involve a brain drain, it can also generate migrant remittances to home, amounting in some estimates to a greater sum than international development aid (Ellerman, 2003). But since the 1990s, significant flows between developing countries have become more apparent: such as those within Southeast Asia that concentrate toward Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and Karachi; from Southeast Asia to the Middle East; from the sub-Sahara, Mozambique, and Angola to South African cities like Johannesburg; or in the case of Latin America, from Paraguay and Bolivia to Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Overwhelmingly, these migrants are heading to the large urban centres, adding to their pressure (Balbo and Tuts, 2005). For instance, many African countries endure formidable economic and demographic strain. Rapid expansion in population and workforce is occurring amidst deteriorating agricultural productivity and a related exodus from impoverished rural settlements to burgeoning cities, whose own economies and infrastructures are too fragile to bear the heavier burden, leading in turn to greater urban tensions (Adepoju, 2001). Where migrations involve border crossing, as in refugee flight from conflict-torn Zimbabwe to South Africa, such tensions can assume an added tribal character. Karachi represents another example of a city that experienced massive demographic increase following independence, and where a substantial share of its residents are enclaved in informal settlements, an insecurity that contributed to serious ethnic riots in the late 1980s between Pathans and Biharis, recently repatriated Pakistanis from Bangladesh, and between Mohajirs and Sindhis (Tambiah, 1996). Other parts of the Global South have witnessed similar association. For instance in Asia-Pacific, workers are induced to leave places with labour surplus and slow employment growth, such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, and the Philippines, to seek better opportunity in places of stagnant or waning labour force growth and relatively buoyant economy, such as Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. But Indonesia’s economic downturn in the late 1990s gave cause to targeting Chinese Indonesians for violence in cities such as Jakarta. In total, around 1200 people were killed, thousands of houses and shops fired and looted, and many tens of thousands of Chinese families forced to flee to places such as Singapore and Hong Kong (Purdey, 2006). In Malaysia, immigration can be seen as potentially unsettling to its sensitive ethnic balance, while in Japan it can undermine myths about its mono-culture and homogeneity (Yoshino, 1992). In other words, conflict around ethnic implication of immigration is not peculiar to the Global North. Rather, the global picture of transnational communities demonstrates that the mythical uniform nation, offering ‘space for each race’, has long been at odds with reality. Indeed, taking a long view of 13 000 years of history, Diamond (1999, pp. 321–23) argues that today’s multi-ethnic states are simply restoring the diversity that once prevailed in many parts of the world:

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All but one of the world’s six most populous nations are melting pots that achieved political unification recently, and that still support hundreds of languages and ethnic groups . . . The great exception to this rule of the recent melting pot is the world’s most populous nation, China. Since territorialising unique identity is difficult even in places like China and Japan, which have long harboured a self-image of ethnic unity, the contested politics of belonging and recognition has become universal (Gutmann, 1994; Castles and Davidson, 2000). This brings with it redefinition of citizenship, including the notion of ‘flexible citizenship’ that may include dual status (Ong, 1999), within a more contentious understanding of national identity (Castles, 2000). Paradoxically, this transnationalism reflects the reshaping of the nation-state rather than its demise or de-territorialisation under a new borderless global order (Al Ali and Koser, 2002; Yeoh and Willis, 2004). But whether over time it will contribute to a more malleable and fluid sense of identity by way of greater multicultural hybridity, or an opposite hardening of national and cultural affiliation remains uncertain. Given the insecure status imposed on many new urban migrants, their use of informal social networks and diaspora ties back home is both a consequence and further buttress of their exclusion from formal political and cultural life. For some cast adrift, this ambivalent identity involves a continual reprocessing in their own minds about how transitory or permanent is their current residence and civic loyalty. Since speed of modern travel and communication offers a compaction of time-space, ‘home’ can be at once near and far. The ‘politics of return’ for those trapped in this ambiguity can be differentially de-coded—either as an ‘imagined’ place of home constructed from revisionist dreams about their place of origin, or it can translate the urban text of current abode into an informal version of Chinatown, Little Saigon or Korean Town (Smith, 2001; Gaffikin et al., 2009). Thereby, such transnationalisation of the urban can involve complex circuits of cultural response from migrant and ‘host’ city, so that, for instance, exclusion leads to alienation, which can lead to ethnic community formation rooted in cultural solidarity, a perceived separatism that in turn can lend some traction to xenophobic charges that newcomers have divided loyalties, that then promote further victimisation and consequent deepening disaffection. Confounding the tensions and resentments associated with migration is the prospect of a deepening environmental crisis, linked to the use of nonrenewable fuels that is itself linked to the globalised spread of industrial production. Climate change that brings added pressure on energy supply, food production, and access to fresh water—fundamentals for human survival— holds the potential for forms of conflict that inter-penetrate with, and thereby intensify, other sources of division. For instance, the strong correlation between the preponderance of oil supplies in Muslim-dominated countries may accentuate current strains between the developed world and elements

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of Islam. As noted by Gray (2007, p. 201): ‘ The risk is that resource war will be mixed with wars of religion and the otherwise far-fetched theory of clashing civilizations become self-fulfilling’. The geo-political implications in terms of security threat, and what is referred to as the planet’s human carrying capacity, are addressed in a Pentagon report, whose unsettling proposals gained little favour with the Bush administration (Schwartz and Randall, cited by Gray, 2007, p. 201): As global and local carrying capacities are reduced, tensions could mount around the world, leading to two fundamental strategies: defensive and offensive. Nations with the resources to do so may build virtual fortresses around their countries, preserving resources for themselves. Less fortunate nations, especially those with ancient enmities against their neighbours, may initiate struggles for access to food, clean water or energy. Detectable in such analysis is an apocalyptic tone about an ever expanding human race inexorably desolating the planet, and causing conflict in the process. But the research about the link between such environmental features as population density, land degradation, deforestation, desertification, scarcity of fresh water, and civil conflict is more qualified. Some studies (for example, Theisen, 2008) suggest that there is scant evidence to support the connection, and that the real determinants of domestic armed conflict are distributive issues such as poverty together with dysfunctional public institutions. Other investigations (for example, Hauge and Ellingsen, 1998) conclude that, even controlling for political regime type and levels of economic development, resource scarcity can increase the risk of conflict, though it is not as decisive a predictor of civil turmoil as local economy and polity. However, the environmental stress faced by some areas of the Global South will be exacerbated by the extent to which they become sites for the ‘new wars’ of the future (Hardt and Negri, 2004). Simply put, the intensification of urban growth in the Global South will increase the likelihood that ‘modern urban combat operations will become one of the primary challenges of the 21st century’, to quote a US intelligence source (Defense Intelligence Reference Document, 1997, cited in Graham, 2007). The argument here is that powerful nations, particularly the more democratic ones, are inclined in contemporary warfare to deploy the ‘shock and awe’ of aerial bombardment as a means of minimising their casualties and thereby securing political consent at home. In this new urban century, as a means of eluding the lethal impact of such precision weaponry in open terrain, the anticipated future enemies of powerful states like the US will take refuge in the city. Its compact and congested morphology can incapacitate the optimum use of modern weapons, thereby acting as a leveller between a high tech military and its lower tech, more informally organised adversary. Moreover, the city’s human density helps local combatants to blend with their social hinterland, the ideal context for

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waging a protracted guerrilla campaign that inflicts sufficient fatalities on the enemy, while inducing the occupying power to further alienate local residents. For the powerful nations, such attrition in urbanised battle space over time renders the conflict less tolerable to domestic political audiences (Graham (ed), 2004; Cowen and Gilbert (eds), 2008; Graham, 2007). Meanwhile, as in the case of Baghdad, the prolonged conflict can form a combustible milieu, in which sectarian strife amongst local factions is triggered, with devastating impact in terms of attempted ethnic cleansing and forced segregation. None of these conflict scenarios contains a simple pattern of predictability or immutability. As argued in the previous chapter, such lack of certitude does not imply that human intentionality can decide little. Without the pretence that the world is what we make of it, deliberative participation in the world can animate it with new prospects, beyond fateful resignation about the invincibility of circumstance. This is where Wacquant’s (2008, p. 191) central thesis that those trapped in a state of advanced marginality are to be considered outcasts understates the continued force of autonomous agency, and differential state formation across polities. He generalises that in advanced capitalist countries, neo-liberal globalisation and its post-Fordist/Keynesian expression has deproletarianised a whole stigmatised population, now relegated to blighted urban enclaves, there to mutually compete ever more intensely for the scarce resources of a retrenched welfare state. But his own empirical study of the American ghetto and the French banlieues demonstrates the significant particularity of each: ‘. . . the degraded cites of the French urban periphery are not ghettos in the sense of an ethnically uniform sociospatial formation based on the forcible relegation of a negatively typed population to a reserved territory. . . .’ What he refers to as the Parisian Red Belt contains a heterogeneous population in terms of ethnoracial composition, with a continual turnover and mix of population, and insofar as there is over-representation of immigrant groups, it is attributable more to their class than their ethnicity. Granting that race and its attendant discriminations do have an abiding, if not growing, presence in France, he insists that the identity of shared residence supersedes that of ethnic origin, with no banlieue considered the restricted terrain of any particular tribe. Counter-posing the durable spatial bisection of American urban impoverished into indelible Black Belts and the rest, he charts the deterioration from the cross-class communal black ghetto to the imploded hyperghetto, and how such racialised space is marked by pandemic violence and a ‘culture of terror’. In this characterisation, housing projects in places like Chicago’s Southside can resemble a war zone. Whereas persistent poverty in the US is overwhelmingly located in core central cities, the cites are mostly features of the French periphery. Whereas the ghetto demonstrates a retreat

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of public institutions related to downsized welfarism, a profusion of state intervention in Parisian cites like La Courneuve, risks, if anything, complicating service provision into myriad agencies that inadvertently atomise their clients. Finally, whereas political recognition in the ghetto is often mobilised around the ethnic entitlements of diversity, in France it centres on social claims for equality. So, despite his earlier stress on the determinacy of the neo-liberal city, he proceeds to identify a host of ways that urban politics still matter. But even allowing for his specificities, mostly this analysis relegates the poorest to a state of passivity in the face of a passive state in the case of the US and a mostly pacifying state in the case of France. In contrast to his use of terms like ‘marginality’ and ‘outcast’, Chatterjee (2004) emphasises how the activism of the excluded is central to the construction of the urban, and derives out of the state, rather than outside the state. Significantly, in the Global South, this activism of ‘political society’ is not always expressed through formal resistance, but rather through informal responses that bend and stretch regulation, and include transgressions such as squatting, street trading, fare dodging, and illegal land grabs. Such self-organisation not only violates the state’s preoccupation with property and order over social equity, but also penetrates the fictional claims of governance, revealing the less democratic reality that people are mostly governed. Here, Chatterjee acknowledges that the global spread of ethnic/identity politics is related in good part to the propensity of the modern state to abdicate dealing with the public as a citizenry and fraternity with common rights and prerogatives, instead controlling or caring for subpopulations to be targeted by selective interventions of security and welfare. In the face of such pervasive ethnic politics, and returning to the second question raised earlier, what makes some ethnic conflict violent? Beyond the very visible violent strife in places such as Israel–Palestine between Jew and Arab, the Eritrean–Ethiopian war related to the Badme region, the Kashmir dispute involving India and Pakistan, the various struggles in the former Soviet Union and the recurrent combat in Sri Lanka between Tamils and Sinhalese, there are multiple others that seldom make headlines. For instance, in the past decade, the Nigerian city of Jos, capital of the region known as Plateau State, has experienced repeated clashes between Christians and Muslims, in which hundreds have been killed, and thousands have had to flee their homes. Jos, a ‘frontier’ city between Nigeria’s mostly Muslim north and mostly Christian south, has been the crucible for tensions in the region, rooted in acrimony felt by indigenous mostly Christian groups against migrant settlers, mostly Muslim from the Hausa-speaking north. As such, it is an exemplar of the combustible mix of issues that hold potential for violence in simmering disputes: ethnicity, migration, religion, language, culture, economic rivalry, and territorial borders. In explaining why some feuds like this do ignite into armed battle, Toft (2003) maintains that the crucial determinant is whether the antagonists

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perceive the disputed territory to be divisible or indivisible. In short, territory can become a matter of life and death for both ethnic groups and the state. For the latter, territory is about protecting the integrity of its borders and the legitimacy of its sovereignty. With states that contain more than one ethnic region able and willing to secede, the fear is that concession could set a precedent that would ultimately invite further withdrawals and threaten its very existence. Alongside this, with the corrosion of central authority in a multinational state, fear can be aroused among some or all of the ethnic constituencies that their security is under greater threat from the other hostile competing groups, and this vulnerability may prompt some to see violent attack as their own best defence. Mostly, the state’s resistance to claims on part of its territory is not primarily motivated by the land’s intrinsic material worth, though, for instance, a country like Iraq would be reluctant to forfeit part of its oil resource through a tripartite partition based on ethno-religious difference. There may be an aversion to split up territory because of its spiritual significance, as in the case of Jerusalem. But mostly, the indivisibility issue for the state is the perceived connection between territory and survival, and in such circumstance, territory is not quantifiable and exchangeable. For the ethnic group seeking to advance its ‘self-determination’, Toft argues that its demographic numbers and concentrated settlement patterns are significant variables in bestowing both legitimacy and capacity. Particularly if the territory in question is considered by the group to be an ancestral homeland, or to hold sacred significance, critical to helping its authentic identity survive and thrive, it becomes a perpetual and indivisible component of that identity that cannot be negotiated away. Moreover, the rallying appeal of ethnic identity is not restricted to ancient quarrels, nor to invocation by charismatic leaders, nor to the socially disadvantaged, as evidenced in post-federal Yugoslavia, where violent pressure for secession erupted in the more prosperous regions first. Very occasionally, partition can offer some solution. For instance, the split in Czechoslovakia was rendered relatively amicable because the Czechs and Slovaks lived mostly in two distinctly separate parts of the country, and the stronger force of what became the Czech Republic could see economic advantage in the separation. By contrast, the ferocious struggle in Bosnia was attributable in good measure to the presence of multiethnic interest, the absence of one dominant group, and the vehemence of Serbian nationalism in affirming control over land containing ethnic Serbs. Based on such propositions, her study looks at Russia’s dealings with Tartarstan and Chechnya, and Georgia’s engagement with Abkhazia and Ajaria, and in summary, she posits (ibid., p. 133): The intersection of a state’s and an ethnic group’s bargaining positions over control of a disputed territory determined whether their dispute would escalate into violence. If both actors represent their interests over the

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disputed territory as indivisible, then violence is likely. If one or both do not, then violence can be averted. Addressing a similar question about the likelihood of violence in ethnically heterogeneous contexts, Laitin (2007) distils his analysis to the proposition that the chance of violence is high where the state is weak in providing essential public goods and security and at the same time, the disadvantaged minority groups are spatially concentrated. In another examination of the links between identity and violence, Sen (2006) locates the source of violence in people’s perception of each other in terms of singular affiliation rather than of multiple identities, an imposition often championed in his view by ‘artisans of terror’ (p. 4). He remarks on the rapid makeover in relations that such aggressive labelling can incite (p. 2): From my own childhood memory of the Hindu–Muslim riots in the 1940s, linked with the politics of partition, I recollect the speed with which the broad human family of January were suddenly transformed into the ruthless Hindus and fierce Muslims of July. While wary of the latent belligerence and zealotry in narrow communal solidarities, his appeal to the rich diversity embodied in everyone’s individuality misconstrues the extent to which certain attachments are blessed with primacy. For instance, for some fervent religious people, the faith is not just one aspect of pluralist identity. Encompassing everything, it is non-negotiable. From this standpoint, antagonistic perception of ‘the other’ is a necessary though insufficient basis for armed conflict. Bigotry alone without the means to impose its discriminations on a rival group is quite impotent. Rather, the most injurious intolerance derives from the equation: prejudice plus power equals racism/sectarianism. On this basis, black people in a white power world can be prejudiced but not racist. But the problem with this formula is that it downplays the transactional impact of chauvinism and its corrosive repercussion on mutual trust and fear within civic society. Indulgence for vilification against a particular race, ethnicity, or religion not only sours community relations generally, but also gives succour to the most recalcitrant, while dispiriting those prepared to invest effort and risk in mutual understanding and equity. Another distinction drawn here is between ‘racism’ and ‘racialism’, with the latter referring to an acknowledgement of difference in trait and tendency, without according a hierarchy or inequality to such divergence. Returning to Sen’s core thesis, it could be argued that it is not simply that an embittered singular identity causes violence. Sometimes, the latter can engender the former, as when the urgency of violence pressures the ethnic ‘bystanders’ to take sides. In this way, once detonated, violence carries its own explosive momentum. Such problematic considerations about cultural ancestry, religious affinity, autonomy of

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identity, imagined homeland, survival, rebellion, and negotiability have a particular purchase on protracted city conflict rooted in ethno-nationalist confrontation.

Ethno-nationalist contest In cohering four key concepts: group solidarity; territoriality; sovereignty; and political legitimacy, nationalism is typically constructed from an edited adoption and adjustment of images, symbols, and myths of ethnic identity. Roshwald (2006, p. 8) notes: As an ideology that seeks to create a broad yet cohesive framework for collective and individual identities alike, nationalism relies heavily upon the simplification and distortion of history, the propagation of beliefs about all-encompassing ties of blood and sentiment, and the disavowal of social, economic and cultural differences that contradict the all-important themes of unity and fraternity. Bollens (1999, p. 3) refers to the ‘ethnic contested city, where identity and nationalist claims combine and impinge significantly and consistently’ on the urban. As referenced earlier, the city can often be the intensive microcosm for the wider societal tensions and fragmentations, and their related diverse discourses (Soja, 2000). This is particularly so in circumstances where fundamental disputes over sovereignty are played out, often most intensively in capital cities like Nicosia, Belfast, and Jerusalem. But significant differentiations apply to such cities. The most partisan state response to such conflict has been captured in the concept of ethnocracy, a designation Yiftachel (2006, p. 3) employs to describe the Israeli approach: Ethnocratic regimes promote the expansion of the dominant group in contested territory and its domination of power structures while maintaining a democratic facade. Ethnocracy manifests in the Israeli case with the long-term Zionist strategy of Judaizing the homeland—constructed during the last century as the Land of Israel, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. In essence, this form of government favours Jewish citizens and immigrants over Arab citizens and takes an indulgent, if indeed not supportive, attitude to new Jewish settlements that de facto act to extend Israeli territorial claims. It uses instruments of state power such as planning to discriminate positively toward the protection of Jewish demographic advantage. In explaining the history and polity that shape this deliberate agenda of ethnic chasm based on relationships of domination and subjugation, Yiftachel (2006, p. 12)

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identifies the fusion of three structural forces of colonialism, nationalism and capitalism: (1) The creation of a colonial settler society, and the on-going strategic intent to foster immigration and new settlement; (2) The ideology of ethno-nationalism, with its congruence of territoriality and ethnic group survival, and its capacity to rally adherents behind appealing democratic banners of self-determination; and (3) The ‘ethnic logic’ of capital and class formation, whereby an ethnoclass hierarchy takes shape, with the indigenous Arab at the bottom, at worst, as an underclass. However, this configuration, designed to justify asymmetrical power and the ‘prominence of the ethnos over the demos’ (ibid., p. 276), is permanently insecure. For instance, at the economic level, ‘the accelerating globalisation of markets and capital movement has weakened the state’s economic power’ (ibid., p. 15), and thus its influence to determine distributive outcomes. Moreover, pressure to adopt the model of the minimalist state implicit in neo-liberalism could compromise the image of a state capable of both security and social protection, a change in materiality that could undermine state legitimacy. At the political level, there are on-going tensions between the reality of ethnocracy—with its autocratic and coercive character, expressed in selective allocation of rights, opportunity and power—and the superficiality of the formal democracy that is meant to accord equal resident citizenship. Accordingly, the basis for ethnocracy cannot be considered in simple reductionist terms. In cities like Belfast, the concept of ethnocracy in these terms holds little explanatory power. Here, the state’s declared role in shaping the city throughout the ‘Troubles’ has veered between claims for even-handed neutrality, via a technocratic apolitical planning system, and a limited compensatory model of positive discrimination informed by values of equity and diversity. Yet, the state’s republican and loyalist opponents have at times challenged the accuracy of this characterisation of the state as referee between two warring tribes, acting above the fray as champion of the disadvantaged. But, on the ground, space and territory have been central to the dispute. The spark for the Civil Rights Movement, which immediately preceded this period of conflict, was housing allocation, and the distribution of housing settlement remains at the heart of the divide. In Belfast, overall patterns of demographic decline— around one-third in the two decades since 1971—have over-arched the shifts in sectarian geography, whereby Catholic share of population has risen and Protestant share has declined to a point where a city that was once two-thirds/ one-third in favour of Protestant numbers is now closer to fifty/fifty. As this pattern becomes clearly reflected in the political composition of city government, the extent to which these demographic changes are voluntary or

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enforced becomes a central part of the on-going contest about ‘whose Belfast?’ This disposition on the part of both sides of the community to ‘read’ the changes in the city through their own political lens is captured well by Shirlow and Murtagh (2006, p. 68) in their description of the divergent message sent out by a particular territorial ‘re-alignment’ in the city in recent times: The departure in 2005 of the remaining Protestant community from the Torrens estate in North Belfast was a signifier of the incapacity to solve evident interface difficulties. The leaving of the last few residents was viewed through disparate forms of analysis. For the residents the impact of republican violence and intimidation had been the main catalyst that encouraged their departure. For republicans, the exit of the Protestant community had been negotiated and welcomed by those who had left. The hoisting of Irish national flags moments after the departure of these residents presented a form of space-claiming that intensified the loyalist/ unionist sense of decline and forced exodus. Such patterns of territorial contest and conquest are often most visible at the urban interfaces, described by Feldman (1991, p. 28) as ‘the topographic ideological sector that physically and symbolically demarcates ethnic communities’ and where periodic rioting functions as an instrument for establishing and sometimes extending ethnic turf. While these harsh ethno-spatial realities might seem to demand a more proactive government attempt to sponsor public dialogue about the mutual costs involved in such continued sectarian animosity, government might see such candid exchange as ‘shining too great a spotlight on division at a time requiring the rhetoric of healing’ (Neill, 2004, p. 200). Yet, these low-intensity struggles in Belfast cannot be air-brushed out of the soft-focused picture of a city deemed to exemplify a successful peace process, unless citizens and government want to substitute serious political discourse for the delusional language of contemporary tourism promotion. In assessing the dynamics of these spatial patterns, Boal’s construction of ‘the scenarios spectrum’ (1997) offers five futures for ethnic segregation and antagonism in contested cities like Belfast: assimilation, where difference is erased; pluralism, which permits positive accommodation and mutual respect; segmentation, involving continued separatism, though in the absence of competing sovereignty claims; polarisation, which characterises the ‘frontier city’; and finally, cleansing, which achieves homogeneity by compelling the exclusion of one source of differentiation. Extermination of diversity, taken to its most extreme, reveals the potential ferocity of ethnic slaughter. Since 1950, nearly 20 genocides have besmirched humankind, with the worst of them—in Bangladesh, Cambodia and Rwanda — accounting for over one million victims (Gray, 2002). Clearly, such carnage cannot be accredited to ethnic conflict alone. For instance, the tribal struggle between Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda can trace its imperialist

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roots to Belgian divide and rule that favoured the Tutsi. Its more recent basis lies in the resource war in an area disrupted by massive demographic growth in the previous four decades, tripling from 2.5 to 8.5 million (Ponting, 1999). As a grim riposte to Western conceit about the link between civilisation and modernity, millions of people have perished over the last three centuries not only from direct execution, but also from indirect killers such as disease, hunger, and slavery. Though marked by deliberate intense violence against a whole collectivity, genocide finds pale resemblance in other forms of violent ethnic conflict in demanding a numbed sensibility to the welfare of those outside the fold. As Hinton (2002, p. 6) explains, the targeted villain is the alien other: Genocides are distinguished by a process of ‘othering’ in which the boundaries of an imagined community are reshaped in such a manner that a previously ‘included’ group (albeit often included only tangentially) is ideologically recast (almost always in dehumanizing rhetoric) as being outside the community, as a threatening and dangerous ‘other’—whether racial, political, ethnic, religious, economic, and so on—that must be annihilated.

The state of conflict and conflict in the state In recent times, the media have projected manifold images of atrocities whose apparent causality lay in inter-ethnic enmity: the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur; the massacre in Srebrenica; the pitiless siege of Sarajevo; the battering of Grozny; and the stream of refugees in struggles such as the Congo, Kosovo, and South Ossetia. Conventional wisdom suggests that the combination of the above eight factors has led to increasing urban conflict in the world, particularly given the media attention devoted to terrorism, civil wars, and coups. However, the data suggest otherwise. Most conflicts are now fought within states. Of course, some of these intra-state struggles are ‘internationalised’, as is most obvious in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan. Taking the case of state-based conflict (where the state is one of the warring parties), there is evidence of reduced levels of conflict. For instance between 2002 and 2006, the number of state-based conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa— together with the Middle East, a particularly conflict-prone region—declined by 46%. Whereas in 2002, the region’s share of the world’s state-based conflicts was 40%, by 2006, it had reduced to 22%. Moreover, since the ‘new wars’ are largely restricted to low-income countries and engaged by poorly trained and equipped combatants, the average fatality rate per conflict per year has notably reduced in recent decades. While in 1950 it was 38 000, in 2006 it was 500 (Human Security Brief, 2007). With respect to non-state conflict, for instance intra-communal disputes and those involving rebel groups and warlords, these decreased from 36 to 24.

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In other words, compared with other periods, the current state of conflict in the world is not abnormally acute. Between 1960 and 1992 for example, there was a threefold increase in state-based conflict. The relative decline since is attributable to the winding down of anti-colonial struggles, and to the end of ‘proxy’ wars associated with the Cold War. Nevertheless, despite evidence of this kind, there is a widespread impression that certain forms of conflict like terrorism have increased. Here again, it depends on definition. In 2006, an astounding 79% of global fatalities attributed to ‘terrorism’ occurred in Iraq. Yet, in previous times, these deaths in Iraq would be regarded in terms of intracommunal sectarianism and resistance against perceived invasion, not as terrorism. If these victims are removed from the figures, then the threat of terrorism as a lethal source of spreading conflict takes on a much more modest complexion (ibid., 2007). None of this qualification is intended to downplay the devastation experienced in Mostar, Sarajevo, Basra, Baghdad, Beirut, Kabul, and such like victims of severed and scarred landscapes, nor to deny the significance for conflict proliferation of factors such as the new arms trade in small arm weaponry and anti-personnel land mines. Moreover, trying to measure the extent of discord through such data prompts a timely reminder that the absence of overt conflict should not be read as the absence of the basis for conflict. The peace of silent inequity is usually based on subjugation rather than durable conciliation. It should not take the tragedy of a Hurricane Katrina to unveil the racial discrimination behind the stark socio-spatial segregation in New Orleans. As noted by Rieder (2003, p. 11): The absence of manifest conflict may simply mean accommodation to injustice, indifference to inequality, or the exhausted inability to imagine striking back. Quiet riots, as Roger Williams once deemed them, are utterly compatible with a lack of surface indications of ‘fragmentation’, and they can be as damaging as less tranquil ones. This may be particularly apt for the massively expanding cities of the Global South. For instance, addressing the intensification of socio-spatial polarisation in Cape Town, Lemanski (2007) notes the multiple dilemmas facing recently liberated new nation-states, that while still trying to undo the colonial legacy—in the case of Cape Town, the imprint of a sturdy infrastructure of inequity—confront the challenge of balancing policies for global competitiveness with those for more equitable distribution in the domestic domain. Moreover, many such states in the early formation of a cohesive society have to deal with the diversities attending the increased volume and pace of migration. Thus, while the ‘divided city’ is a global phenomenon, its starkest manifestation lies in the informal and forbidding settlements that mark those urban spaces most mistreated by the world’s uneven development.

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In short, we live in an age that is at once subject to globalised uniformity and accentuated differentiation. One reflection of the latter is the growth of identity politics, which often takes a pronounced spatial form in the urban arena. The next chapter addresses these issues of identity and space within the framework of urban planning and policy.

5 Identity, Space, and Urban Planning

Outside of those seeking seclusion from the world in isolationist communities like the Amish, and in places like convents and monasteries, most of humankind increasingly will be obliged to engage with social difference. This has led to policy concern about how to promote togetherness in diversity even in places like the Netherlands that were once held as models of tolerant cosmopolitanism (Binnie et al., 2006). In turn, this is related to the flourishing of identity politics. As indicated in the previous chapter, understanding identity formation is an important part of urban conflict analysis. Anheier and Raj Isar (2007, p. 5) note that ‘we are in a time of intense ‘culturalism’, as cultural difference is consciously mobilised in a politics of recognition and representation. . .’ In this regard, the current prominence attached to the issue of ‘identity’ in the social construction of the urban demands that its configuration is linked to a relational concept of urban space. Accordingly, this chapter: explores the issue of identity further; locates it within an urban framework of territory and space; and examines the implication of this interpenetration for urban policy designed to address social cohesion and for planning in contested space, within a conceptual context of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism.

Identity and diversity As outlined earlier, identity can be: singular or multiple in form; ascribed or achieved; individually chosen or collectively imposed; varied in its fixity, and in the interplay of power and resistance in its formation. Since its configuration is a continuous process, its abiding character is one of transience. Moreover, expression of identity varies in different contexts. For instance, Planning in Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Contested Space. Frank Gaffikin and Mike Morrissey. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-19218-7

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on the principle that external force creates internal cohesion, the prospect of insecurity can entrench a sense of common identity among those who feel under threat (Amin, 2002; Zetter et al., 2006). In other words, conflict between groups can marginalise dissent within the protagonist groups, thereby engineering internal consensus. As indicated in the previous chapter, such conflict can take either violent or non-violent form. But conflict over identities and space cannot be erased, since in Harvey’s words (2003, pp. 84–86): ‘calmness and civility in urban history (is) the exception and not the rule. The only interesting question is whether outcomes can be creative or destructive.’ Clearly, ethnicity, identity and contestation in the city are closely intertwined. As expressed by Young (2003, p. 9), other identity variables such as class do not possess the ‘potential volatility of ethnic consciousness.’ While it is influenced by external environment and circumstance, identity formation entails the performance of agency. The significance of this personal resonance is apparent when there is an attempt to mobilise a contrived identity through marketing a hollow brand such as Cool Britannia in the case of Blair’s Britain (Muir, 2007). Identity can be overarching, or more modestly overlain with other associations. It can provide a compass to help navigation through the social options of everyday life, for instance generating solidaristic relations to counter social atomism and disconnection. Moreover, the process of its construction can take various forms. Thus, it can be about authenticity, about discovering an inherent self and meaning already largely scripted and rooted in nature and circumstance. It can be about replication, adopting the traits of others as a matter of compliment or convenience, or it can be existentialist, where existence is taken as a precursor of essence, and individuality is largely self-invented rather than inveterate. Between this prescriptive, imitative and creative mode of identity formation, and between the riveted and shifting nature of identity, lies the reality that the constitutive nature of social being involves an interactional process that is at once derivative from social context and dialogic (Taylor, 1991; Foucault, 1998; Appiah, 2005). For some, recognition of identity is distinguished from other responses, such as toleration, which ‘is associated with disapproval: we tolerate only that to which we object’ (Jones, 2006, p. 123). It can be argued that recognition demands acknowledgement rather than mere acquiescence, but that it does not automatically infer either concurrence or approval. Yet, ‘those who call for ‘recognition’ in relation to identity and difference intend it to convey something affirmative’ (ibid., p. 128). Some distinguish between a limited form of recognition, whereby the state accords a legal imprimatur for minority behaviour, even when it incites majority reproach as deviant or offensive, and a broad recognition of identity reflected in a readiness on the part of objectors to show respect for a different viewpoint or lifestyle. With regard to identity politics then, such sensibility combines tolerance and recognition in according legitimacy to an identity as a socially valid category. This

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identity-recognition in a pluralist society is meant to extend beyond an impartial approach to difference and also beyond equitable treatment of the individual as a fellow human despite her identity (Galeotti, 2002; Haddock and Sutch, 2003, as cited in Jones, 2006). Instead of involving selective endorsement by the state, following its inter-cultural appraisal of the merits of particular identities, this process adopts an instrumental value of diversity. In other words, it affirms cultures and identities for the worth they hold for their possessors. An alternative form of recognition elevates personhood over either a subjective or objective estimate of the identity per se. Expressing this view succinctly, Jones (2006, p. 139) remarks: . . . because I recognize you as a person (independently of any particular identity you possess), I ascribe value to whatever identity you have — not because I value that identity in and of itself but because respecting you as a person requires that I respect the identity that you embrace. But such arguments over-generalise the nature of ‘identity’. They indicate the problem of conflating lifestyle choices, beliefs and values, gender, sexuality, and ethnic belonging all under the umbrella term ‘identity’. Since some aspects of these are volitional and very transient, while others are more core to a person’s sense of self, denunciation of some traits is tantamount to dismissal of the person, whereas refutation of others may make little impact on the recipient’s self-esteem. Another distinction that can be drawn here is between ‘racism’ and ‘racialism’, with the latter referring to an acknowledgement of difference in trait and tendency, without according a hierarchy or inequality to such divergence. But when rejection assumes the severity of racist response, it is usually when there is a genealogical determinism and a belief in ‘racial hygiene’, involving a refusal to recognise culture and identity as variable, adaptable, impermanent and bridgeable. As opined by Fredrickson (2002, p. 170): ‘. . . racism exists when one ethnic group or historical collectivity dominates, excludes, or seeks to eliminate another on the basis of differences that it believes are hereditary and unalterable’. This is deemed to be different to the religious dogmatist, who casts the ‘other’ as heretic, apostate, or infidel, since possible conversion or assimilation renders such dissent eradicable. In other words, he is reviling or maltreating others for their conviction rather than for their intrinsic being. Finally here, the concept of identity also summons a potential tension between individual and collective rights, between the case for human rights that should apply equitably to every person and the proposition that all identity groups also should have equal status. As noted by many scholars (Gutmann, 1994; Bohman, 2000; Woodward, 2002; Appiah, 2005; Deveaux, 2006; Nicolacopoulos, 2008), important questions derive from this relationship. First, are all group rights to be internally assessed and indulged on their own terms without external appraisal of validity, on the assumption that

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non-members are disenfranchised from such evaluation? Second, should all identity groups be considered deserving of equal recognition and treatment? Should an identity group that shows intolerance to others be shown tolerance by society? For instance, is a religious movement like the Mormons that have had a history of barring black people from leadership positions to be treated the same as other religious fellowships that have not exercised such bigotry? Third, what about those identity groups—particularly religious ones—that rely on revealed truth that cannot be contested by the unbeliever? If some groups are accorded the privilege of being beyond critique, is this not biased against those groups prepared to submit their nostrums to open scrutiny? Yet, in a pluralist polity, is it feasible to invite such devotees to privatise their sectarian faith as a condition of their democratic participation in a secular state, based on deliberative rationality? Fourth, and more specifically in the case of historically subjugated groups, can only the victims of discrimination deliberate on the source and consequence of dominance? So, for instance, can only women determine what constitutes sexism against them? Can only people of colour adjudicate on white racism? Fifth, who has authority to speak on behalf of group rights? Taking the example of Belfast, it has been claimed that partisan flags and emblems in particular neighbourhoods cannot be removed because it offends ‘community’ sensibility. But in reality, these ostensible community verdicts have not been subject to local plebiscite. Rather, such opposition has tended to come as an edict from the more recalcitrant cultural gatekeepers and forms of dictatorial community ‘leadership’, some of which has association with local paramilitaries. Their claim to ventriloquise community opinion is actually a cover for partisan pronouncement and retrenchment of their local power. Sixth, what is the scope for personal autonomy within a group identity? Clearly, this depends on how democratic or despotic is the group’s decisionmaking structure. Where tribal chieftains or warlords are in ascendency, there may be an illiberal approach to individual dissent against the communitarian will. In extreme form, Appiah (2005) refers to a paradigm of ‘hard pluralism’, where the state is seen to comprise a set of identity groups, with a high degree of self-dominion. Clearly, such group autonomy can embed strict codes of internal conformity. Even where they concede a ‘right of exit’, such opt-out may only offer an uncompromising ‘love it or leave it’ alternative to dissidents. Contrasting this kind of sub-state repression with ‘soft pluralism’, he notes (ibid., p. 79) how the latter affirms that ‘concern for identity groups is not only motivated by, but ultimately subordinated to, the well-being of the individual and the bundle of rights and protections that traditional liberalism would accord her’. In other words, there can be a strain between the right of the group against the state and the right of the individual against not only the state, but also the group of primary attachment. In the model of hard pluralism, the state’s shield against such group coercion is compromised. Moreover, there are other interesting examples in states such as France, which

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believes that its secular and egalitarian tradition prohibits it recognising its citizens in terms of ethnic category. Paradoxically, its refusal to collect statistics on criteria of racial or ethnic origin, as distinct from its census data on nationality, has impeded its capacity to monitor progress of all sections of society, and it has only recently started to gauge diversity for this purpose. Seventh, incidents such as the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, a depiction that many Muslims found deeply offensive, highlighted the sensitive role for the state in arbitrating about valid public expression. But, if the state is obliged to protect all identity groups against the irreverent and satirical, does this stricture not risk suppression of free speech? Conversely, where such adjudication involves the sensitivities of groups that have been subject to victimisation, should special allowance be made on the principle that equality of treatment does not infer uniformity of treatment? Finally in this regard, where an identity group regards its culture as not only different but superior, how can that group regard the ‘other’ as worthy of equality? Where the state is compliant with such moral monism from supremacist groups, how can such facilitation be compatible with an equitable cohesive society? For instance, how would such principle play out with the caste system in a democratic India? Such questions indicate the complicated role of the state, and its instruments of urban policy and planning, in building cohesion in very stratified urban arenas, thereby inviting closer examination of routine concepts such as multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism Amin (2002: p. 11) distinguishes between multiculturalism and inter-culturalism, as he explains that the former ‘stresses cultural difference without resolving the problem of communication between cultures, or versions of cosmopolitanism that speculate the gradual erosion of cultural difference through inter-ethnic mixture and hybridisation’. But it could be argued that appeals to common citizenship, within which different cultural identities can nest, ignores the power relationships that determine the nesting arrangements. In the case of Britain, the apparent diversity and pluralism enshrined in multiculturalism disguises the extent to which varied ethnicity operates within a framework defined by a cultural majority that is taken as normative. In contrast to forms of multiculturalism that are said to reinforce separatist notions of difference by designating ‘ethnic minorities’ as distinct cultural communities (Hall, 2000; Vertovec, 1996), Longley (2001, p.12) argues for an understanding of culture that ‘is neither based on a minimalist multiculturalism of separatism nor an assimilationist denial of difference, . . . (rather) an interculturalism based on exchange, fluidity of identity and recognition of difference’.

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Yet, the fear among some sections of European society is that multiculturalism has gone too far, since in recognising difference, it has encouraged the accentuation of distinction at the cost of civic solidarity. This proposition has generated its own political paradox. While the liberal/left has generally championed cultural pluralism, a section of it has grown increasingly concerned that protection of social democratic values amid the putative neoliberal orthodoxy demands a sense of collectivity and common citizenship that is being compromised by the diminution of a mutual sense of identity. Accordingly, though the political left has generally been uncomfortable with nationalism, some are now turning to national identity as a framework for social unity. An example here is New Labour’s effort to construct a concept of Britishness that can bind multi-ethnic Britain (Muir, 2007). But the basis of a ‘progressive’ patriotism in many parts of Europe is inextricably entangled with a contested imperial past. Thus, the concept of nationalist fellowship is not always unambiguous foundation for conciliation and shared citizenship (Bragg, 2006; Goodhart, 2006). On a similar theme, Benhabib (2002) talks about the efficacy of a flexible citizenship and legal pluralism consonant with a deliberative democracy and rooted in egalitarian reciprocity among constituent identity groups. Membership should be voluntary, and offer free association and exit. Rather than emphasising the purity, homogeneity and immutability of each culture, delineated in its own irreducible exceptionality, she extols processes of signification and representation that are internally fraught with contested narrative and differentiation. In short, recognition of internal diversity, discrepancy and dissension provides the basis for a polyvocal, multifaceted dynamic. In terms of external relations, she suggests that instead of being captive within fixed and separatist contours, determined usually by devotees and ideologues, different cultures within a society should be involved in interlocution that generates continual boundary intersection, blurring and transfer. Without this adaptability, she perceives the risk of society being embroiled in constant cultural collision, marked by internal conformity and external animosity (ibid., p. 1): Culture has become a ubiquitous synonym for identity, an identity marker and differentiator . . . what is novel is that groups now forming around such identity markers demand legal recognition and resource allocations from the state and its agencies to preserve and protect their cultural specificities. Identity politics draws the state into culture wars. In part, the conundrum involves the tension stressed earlier between individualism and collectivism, reflected in two contending philosophies: liberalism, with its emphasis on the rights and freedoms of the individual; and diversity, with its emphasis on the rights and freedoms of group identities and cultures. In the face of these contrasting perspectives, Parekh (2000, p. 341) recognises:

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The commitment to a political community . . . does not involve sharing common substantive goals, for its members might deeply disagree about these, nor a common view of its history which they may read differently, nor a particular economic or social system about which they might entertain different views. Decocted to its barest essentials, commitment to the political community involves commitment to its continuing existence and well being. . . . In similar vein, addressing the dilemma of integrating religious traditions in a secular age, Voas (2009, p. 16) speaks of the ‘paradox of pluralism’ in that ‘we want everyone to be free to practice as they prefer, consistent with the same liberties for others—but we worry about religion becoming a source of social division’. In this sense, religious identity is both private and social. For Voas, this means that society has three options in dealing with religion as a communal interest and source of authority: incorporation, whereby religious groups are accorded official status like an ‘established church’ or recognition as social providers and gatekeepers for particular congregations—a separatism that can offer peaceful co-existence, but at the risk of solidifying social division; confinement, which restricts religious faith and practice to the private sphere within a general impulse for assimilation, uniformity, and equity; and conciliation, which also seeks integration, but through accommodation of public religious expression via continual negotiation and debate, with the proviso that such facilitation does not promote isolationism and segregation. But, in the pursuit of greater civic togetherness, it is important to note that the link between separatism and segregation is not axiomatic. The solidarities of separatist communities can be seen as a potential source of social capital that is compatible with wider community cohesion (Putnam, 1996, referenced in Zetter et al., 2006). Nevertheless, normatively, segregation is taken as a negative process that spatially concentrates and insulates opposing sides, accentuates their social distance, and operates to the detriment of the most disadvantaged populations in divided cities. As explained by van Kempen (2007, p. 24): When people live in separate neighbourhoods groups learn of each other by means of distant, indirect experience, through reading or through what they hear from their neighbours or see on television. Their knowledge is then based on shallow understanding, prejudices, and superficialities. More directly: radical segregation causes white suburban residents and inhabitants of ‘gated communities’ to be ignorant and even afraid of the population elsewhere, especially in the cities. This is not quite a good basis for tolerance, understanding, and living together. Still, some counter that there is no necessary link between the segregation of distinct communities and their integration into the wider civic community.

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Certain civic instruments such as the welfare state can have an equalising and integrating effect despite high levels of residential segregation. Indeed, some insist that urban policy in contested cities has an exaggerated focus on segregation and, ‘as long as these processes do not result in the development of static worlds apart . . . then policy makers should be less eager to intervene’ (Musterd, 2003, p. 639). However, as argued earlier, segregated areas in such cities often carry a territorial stigma as reservations that serve to contain and socially marginalise their relatively deprived populations further (Wacquant, 2008). Of course, social interaction across cultural diversity is not completely related to the spatial proximity of shared residence in a neighbourhood. Instead, some research into ethnic division and animosity in Britain has shown a complex picture of partial segregation, co-existing with practical accommodation of difference and everyday social mixing. Often expressed are positive sentiments about the benefits of living in a diverse neighbourhood in terms of appreciating other cultures and reducing fear and wariness of people from different cultural backgrounds (Hudson et al., 2007). In the latter study, the authors suggest (ibid., p. 113) that government policy should seek to reframe the notion of cohesion, understanding that: there is an overemphasis on residential segregation to the exclusion of the complex dynamics of separation/interaction in highly diverse neighbourhoods; the primary focus on ethnicity as the most salient social division that results in hindrance to cohesion is itself problematic and needs to be rethought; and the emphasis in cohesion policy on promoting shared British and/or local neighbourhood identity is too simplistic in the light of individuals’ multiple and shifting attachments. This would suggest that policy needs to accommodate a co-existent cohesion and separateness. By contrast, part of Britain’s recent policy can be read as a retreat from multiculturalism toward a more centrist, not to say coercive, summons to ‘ethnic minorities’ to conform to core tenets of a presumed ‘mainstream’ culture. This shift has occurred in the societal context of a slender affinity with cosmopolitan identity (Stone and Muir, 2007). In a recent publication, Amin (2008, pp. 3–4) reacts to this imposed normality partly through re-consideration of his own earlier reservations about the pluralist and inclusive credentials of multiculturalism, and partly through contextualising the recent directive approach in an emergent new ‘phenotypical racism’ that racialises everything: The war on terror/Islam has turned the judgements of racial phenotype into a war of outright condemnation of selected racial others, without the need for qualification or restraint. Britain’s bravado in the war on terror— sustained by vamped up surveillance, licentious arrest and detention, foreign invasion, and endless media commentary linking rogue states, Islam, and terrorism—has tainted even well-intentioned gestures to foster inter-cultural understanding and community cohesion, by reasserting the

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strangeness of the stranger. No longer are Muslims people from different racial, ethnic and national backgrounds, people getting on with their daily lives, members of disadvantaged, socially excluded, and vilified communities, subjects with complex and multiple identities, citizens with sophisticated antennae. Instead, the common Muslim has been conjured into existence, cast as a threat to national security, western civilization, and the modern secular state. Amin locates recent apprehension about diversity in the corrosion of demos and the general migration from public space and social life in a consumerist age that privileges privatism and individualism. For him, creating urban multiplicity that instils civic spirit, appreciates and embraces people of all cultural backgrounds, and provides equitable access to channels for traversing terrains of difference and dissent remains a commendable if vexing goal. It involves a cosmopolis that is at home with non-conformity, the unsettling, the eccentric, as well as being a wellspring of geniality that assures, restores, connects, excites, empowers, and mediates within a commonwealth of shared urbanism. While in societies like Britain there have been moves to establish citizenship tests such as proficiency in English and knowledge of national history, for Amin, if there is to be an eligible citizenship, then the stipulations should emphasise the civic literacy of empathy and mutuality. Nevertheless, such aspiration for inclusive plurality and civic magnanimity encounters censure about both its promise and prospect. Appiah (2005, p. 214) recognises that some critics of cosmopolitanism see it as a posturing sentiment indulged by the privileged to convey sophistication: ‘Cosmopolitan values, it has been said, are really imperial ones—a parochialism, yet again, puffed up with universalist pretensions; liberalism on safari’. He locates this pattern within the wider tendency for identity groups to claim a distinctive ‘culture’, a propensity that seems to be in inverse ratio to the cultural melange emerging with contemporary globalisation. You may wonder, he says (ibid., p. 117), ‘whether there isn’t a connection between the thinning of the cultural content of identities and the rising stridency of their claims’. Ensuing from this tendency, liberal forms of multiculturalism have tended to accord ‘cultural’ groups similar protections and freedoms that were previously the domain of the individual citizen, a pattern holding potential for ‘differentiated citizenship’ (Young, 2000, cited in Appiah, 2005). It is helpful at this point to explore further the two main meanings of cosmopolitanism: first, the idea that cultural diversity is an enriching opportunity to be embraced, even as it involves haggling and skirmishing as much as learning and loving across cultural boundaries; and second, the idea of global citizenship that acknowledges universal principles, within which we share responsibility for each other as fellow humans (Binnie et al., 2006). While the former emphasis concerns a ‘moral’ cosmopolitanism, with values about international distributive justice and concern for the distant stranger, it is

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the political import of the second aspect that derives from the original Ancient Greek word ‘cosmopolite’, and translated for the contemporary period, involves the creation of a multi-layered form of global governance (Held, 2003). Taken together, both facets presume a general disposition to transcultural engagement, global mobility, and internationalism in contrast to an insular, doctrinaire, not to say xenophobic, ethno-centrism. As expressed by Beck (2006, p. 6): ‘. . . the spaces of our emotional imagination have expanded in a transnational sense’. From this perspective, cosmopolitanism involves ‘ways of living at home abroad or abroad at home—ways of inhabiting multiple places at once, of being different beings simultaneously, of seeing the larger picture stereoscopically with the smaller’ (Pollock et al., 2002, p. 11). As such, it is predicated on empathy across cultural difference, and a fraternity based on the interconnectedness of people, bonded through their cohabitation of the planet. Interpreted as a civilizing force, it has a traceable societal presence from at least the Hellenistic age, in particular Stoicism, through the Roman and Christian eras, through to the Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment, and onto modernity. Of course, such a broad historical scan through its genealogy immediately reveals that for some at least, the raison d’etre of their universalism was the autocratic/theocratic propagation of their temporal/spiritual empire and the coercive dispersal of their writ. In other words, there is nothing inherently liberal and democratic about the universalist ideal. For instance, the current globalist project contains potential for both a diffusion of exploitative forms of capitalism and more egalitarian objectives around themes of ecological conservation, world equality, and inclusive human rights. With such scope for contrary outcomes, predictably debate persists about these two dimensions of cosmopolitanism—first, receptivity to cultural difference alongside equitable caring and sharing of the earth; and second, the formation of a new domain to democratise the transnational power invested in capital, media, and militarism. Posing some questions can best illustrate the conundrum. Is our duty to the stranger the same as that to a compatriot? In a competitive world, how can a nation’s interest be made compatible with that of rival nations, beyond some generality about sharing an interdependent future? Is the cosmopolitan ethos simply about choosing human mutuality over a patriotism that is often sullied by the partisan and prejudicial, or does it involve a more complex layering of both intercultural heterogeneity and attachment to the parochial and vernacular? Is cosmopolitanism to be seen in the context of a world ever more de-territorialised by increasing flows of people, trade, and capital, or has nationalism shown a resilience that cannot be so readily sublated (Hudson and Slaughter, 2007)? Addressed differently, given the growth in the nation-state from the Westphalian phase in the mid-17th century through to the more recent period of decolonialism, has the gradual dissolution of empire engendered an equivocal process of ‘self-determination’ at a time when global forces of capitalist

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hegemony are putatively constraining the autonomy of the nation-state, allowing some to argue that old imperialism has simply left the stage to its understudy, resplendent in American apparel? Can the ideal of an ecumenical approach to all civic cultures in a protean world be reconciled with the apparent reality that many faced with diversity retreat into the comfort zone of the familiar (Sennett, 1994)? In constructing a universalist model of civic plurality, is it feasible to disown elements of cultural imperialism short of collapsing into a post-modernist cultural relativism? Can channels for open international conversations among activist movements and non-government organisations—such as public broadcasting, the new digital media of cyberspace and university networks—potentially foster a robust cosmopolitan tradition, affirmative of comprehensive solidarity, diverse civil society, cultural hybridity, and responsible citizenship of the world community? Or, will the established institutions of globalism such as the World Bank, the IMF, and even the United Nations, persist in their broad compliance with transnational capital and the logic of markets, thereby crowding out the impulses of a civic internationalism? Finally here, is the edifice for more democratic global governance built on the delusion that there exists a self-conscious and purposive collectivity that we salute as ‘humanity’? Expressed in these terms, the over-riding question seems to be whether people can live with difference. But this may be the wrong question. Given the shrinking world and mass mobility of people across it, the reality is that ever more people are compelled to deal more and more with difference. One’s sense of self-identity is wrapped up in relation to the ‘other’, and the ‘other’ increasingly will be a stranger who stands outside one’s cultural familiarity. However, there is no final destination in this journey of discovery and encounter. This is the mistaken emphasis of many of the above questions. They assume cosmopolitanism as ideal outcome rather than a practical and messy process. They ask about what it takes to make people more accepting of difference, whereas the real test of true cosmopolites concerns their recognition of difference. That ‘difference’ has many complexions. It can be associated with a variety of contemporary features: identity politics, oppression, terrorism, nationalism, and so on. Taking nationalism as one example, the intrinsic nationalist impulse is about cultural dominance and exceptionalism. So, it is difficult for the nation-state to accept cultural forms that seriously compromise its sense of national cultural integrity. Accordingly, the multi-ethnic city is a site where the regulatory state and its ideology are problematised. In the same way, the objective of the inclusive city or the cohesive city is subject to contest both in concept and delivery. Expressed differently, cosmopolitanism is not about a clear outcome—whether that is inclusivity, equity, cohesion, multiculturalism, or whatever. Rather, it is a rich but deeply troubling category of the urban that concerns incremental struggle in an agonistic process involving continual negotiation and contingency (Perry, 2009).

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In considering these issues, it is worth recalling that many of these contradictory features were present in the colonial city. For instance, Prakash (2008, p. 196) describes the divided modernity of colonial urbanism in Mumbai, where though political order imprinted racial dominance behind the fa¸cade of a European cityscape, a dynamic city developed in contest with this uneven spatialisation: This city of mills and the Indian neighbourhoods were worlds apart from the European enclaves of the city . . . . In light of these sharp divisions, the idea of the cosmopolitan city, the ‘shining city on the sea’, appears as a myth. Yet . . . these sharply distinct and segregated realities were drawn together in the city’s public spaces, where communities and classes interacted in everyday life. Marketplaces, bazaars, civic and judicial institutions, commercial establishments, public open spaces, streets, tramways, and seashores were places of transactions across divides. Bombay’s cosmopolitanism is usually identified and proudly recalled in such public spaces. . . . Cities may be where strangers live together, but they are also spaces of collision and confrontation. This was eminently so in Bombay, where public space threw together groups with sharply divergent and contradictory experiences of modernity. The British sought to secure this public space of indeterminacy and confrontation with a spatial design and order intended to reproduce social and racial hierarchies. But again, such cross-pollinations are easier to sponsor in circumstances of inter-ethnic co-habitation than in conflicts centred on rival ethno-nationalist claims. In the latter, particularly in the acute form of ethnoscape, the dilemmas of contested space are typically more acute (Yiftachel, 2006).

Space and its contestations Appearing frequently in discussion about the ‘divided city’ are three terms— space, territory, and place—whose distinction has been subject to extensive debate within the literature (Macgregor Wise, 2000; Lash, 2001; Tuan, 2001; Valentine, 2001; Brenner, 2004; Delaney, 2005; Stilz, 2007). Starting with space, there has been growing agreement that it should be seen less in static Cartesian terms as an object, in one, two or three dimensions of distance, area, and volume, and more as a dynamic process of continuous social construction and re-definition. Establishing territory within space is a political process involving power relations in determining sovereignty and signification. Thus, territory holds the connotation of jurisdiction, administrative authority, and of an assigned area that is usually occupied and defended. The most often confused set of terms are space and place. Selection of various emphases in the literature suggests that: space can be thought of as nature, place as culture;

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space as void, place as habitable; space as abstract, place as concrete; space as mobility, place as relative stability; and space as wild and chaotic, place as more domesticated. While superficially appealing, these dichotomies are misleading. Certainly, there is an emphasis in familiar planning expressions such as ‘creating place’, ‘place attachment’, and ‘place marketing’ of place as human lived experience in a physical environment. On this interpretation, there is an inference that space is about capacity and chance, whereas place is about choice. But this is to ignore the fact that space is the primary category, with territory and place as two of its potential outcomes. In this understanding, place is a geographically-sited product of the social process of spatialisation (Perry, 2009). Granted, common usage does not make such distinction. Indeed, reference to a dictionary demonstrates the convoluted meanings attached to these three terms. Of course, such definitional ambiguity is further confounded by the argument that in a more fluid world, ‘place’ is less embedded, as more people operate less through channels of neighbourhood, city, and state, and more through networks of family, friendships and work relations that are increasingly less geographically bound, and indeed include the placeless ‘tech nets’ of virtual cyberspace. Disembodying people, electronic interaction through the Net is incorporeal. As explained by Mitchell (1999, p. 8): The Net negates geometry. While it does have a definite topology of computational nodes and radiating boulevards for bits, and while the locations of the nodes and links can be plotted on plans to produce surprisingly Haussmann-like diagrams, it is fundamentally antispatial. While this book adopts the classification of these terms outlined above, it also acknowledges the contested conceptions and perceptions involved. But what are the links between these categories and the earlier discussion about identity and social difference? First, place also has identity. Amundsen (2001, p. 10–11) identifies four elements typically present in a place identity (that distinguish one from another): . . . .

Spatial qualities such as location and infrastructure, communication, architecture and design. Characteristics of the inhabitants, e.g. values, customs, physical appearance. Social conditions and social relations between inhabitants. Culture and/or history seen as a unifying element that connects people.

In societies marked by deeply competing identities, places hold particular symbolic significance, and their fabric, meanings and identities become acutely politicised. Where these reflect themselves in violent conflict, their formulation and re-configuration become entrapped in strategies of protection

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and survival. Thus, the proclamation on a city wall in Northern Ireland that ‘you are now entering Free Derry’ redefines a familiar site first in terms of security, and later appropriates its local significance for a wider political project of ‘liberation’. But such particular patterns of ‘enclaving’ are part of a more universal human territoriality that Soja (1971, p. 19) defines as: ‘a behavioural phenomenon associated with the organisation of space into spheres of influence or clearly demarcated territories which are made distinctive and considered at least partially exclusive by their occupants’. Hague and Jenkins (2005) take this further when they emphasise how the construction of place identity involves a confluent relationship among sociocultural values, economic trends, the physical environment and government processes. From their comparative research, they concur with others (such as Healey et al., 1997; Herschel and Newman, 2002), to suggest that strategic planning has become a significant instrument in changing territorial identities. For them, the corollary is that more deliberative forms of governance and participatory planning processes are required to support the development of inclusive environments. From this literature, it can be seen that territory is not given or automatic. Usually, the reification of territory can make it appear unproblematic, rather than socially shaped and disputed. This exposes the intrinsic nature of power, which is not just defined as the ability to prevail despite opposition, but also entails the prevention of opposition in the first place by making the condition appear normative and immutable. But, while in many instances, territory will be accepted as natural, authentic and legitimate, it is when its validity, connotation, and possession are challenged that the pivotal relationship of dominance and subjugation is most lucidly revealed. As expressed by Delaney (2005, p. 11): to the extent that territory . . . appears to be self-evident, necessary, or unquestionable, it may obscure the play of power and politics in its formation and maintenance . . . . But, to the extent that it—or any given manifestation of it—is seen as contingent, socially constructed, ideologically informed, and, when push comes to shove, enforced by physical violence, then the forms of power which are inherently connected to territory may become more visible, and justifications, more clearly partial or partisan. Thinking of the relationship between territory and space, Delaney (2005) notes that not every enclosed space constitutes a territory, since the latter is distinguished by its capacity to signify, and the fact that the meaning it projects relates to social power. From an anthropological and global perspective, Barth (1969) agrees with this idea that territory is characterised not merely by bordered space, but that such enclosure typically delimits, and is delineated by, identity, and is further marked sometimes by provisos of

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selective admittance that in turn obligate protection of its integrity within the sanction of mandated power. In this sense, territory, with all its customary signage of access and prohibition—including in extremis such racist decrees as Whites Only—and physical manifestations of these rights of passage in the form of gates, fences, walls, and railings, can often materialise the typically intangible nature of power (Sack, 1986; Sibley, 1995). Some might insist that much of this connects to an old idea of territoriality, based on greater fixity and rootedness, whereas the fluidity and mobility of this more global age call for greater recognition of the permeability of boundary. Certainly, as discussed in the previous chapter in relation to the transnational city, the dislocation of many migrants and immigrants provides one example of not only the porosity of border, but also the discursivity behind spatial identity. Navigating beyond traditional nationalist demarcation, many such subordinated urbanites illustrate the liminality that attends the inter-penetration of identity, territory, nationality and space in the ambiguities of their daily social negotiation. In an even more generic framework, the link between say identity and territory has become more perplexing. As Donnan and Wilson (1999) note, citizenship and nationality sometimes now have to compete for allegiance with the individual’s alternative primary attachments such as ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and gender. Such splintered tendencies relate to a foundational question about what remains rooted in a world of constant flows and impermanence. Here it is clear that territory is not just about spatiality and physicality. Other inflections can be seen in its moral and cultural contours. For instance, Pow’s study (2007) of the proliferation of gated enclaves for the wealthier urbanites of Shanghai emphasises the ‘moralising’ of territoriality within the cultivation of a pristine public decorum, whereby the reputed vulgarity of dissolute peasant migrants renders them unworthy to inhabit urban spaces reserved for those cultured in the proprieties of civilised modernity. In this case, legitimation of an exclusionary territoriality is driven largely by discourses of moral disdain rather than the more familiar discourses of fear. Alongside these ‘moral geographies’, territory holds a complicated cultural dimension. For instance, Gupta and Ferguson (1997) dispute the assumed isomorphic relationship between national territory and culture, as if there is a set of discrete isolated cultures attached symmetrically to discrete states. For one thing, displaced groups like immigrants can have a cultural affiliation and imaginary that intersects with the customary beliefs, values, and social behaviours of both homeland and current locality. For another, the legacies of empire mean that for both coloniser and colonised there has been both cultural transfer and contest. As expressed by Huyssen (2008, p. 14): ‘The colonial or post-colonial city cannot be had without the metropole, but then the metropole wouldn’t have become metropole without the colonial city’. Then, there are those who reside in borderlands interfacing two or more territories, which experience some degree of cultural interaction and fusion.

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Finally, there are the cultural idioms that dominate globalised media that transcend territorial boundaries. Thus as Gupta and Ferguson (1997) emphasise, beyond the monopoly grid of physical territory, cultural distinction operates across manifold grids of association and propinquity, and is differentiated by factors such as class, race, age, and gender. Whether marked by pluralist or deeper sovereignty contest, city divisions and collisions manifest such cultural ricochets. Some of this is evident in Modan’s (2007) ethnographic account of change and gentrification in a multi-ethnic mixed class neighbourhood in Washington DC in the US, in which she elucidates the discourses of both personal and communal identity that shape the politics of place. In cities where the division is visceral around issues such as race, ethnicity and nationality, protagonist groups will seek to exercise their power to mark their turf, prevail in boundary disputes, defend interfaces, and implicitly characterise intrusion by their political opponents as trespass. In such circumstance, territory can function to accentuate identity and difference, and mark ‘membership’ over the status of the ‘outsider’ (Sack, 1986). Such discordant urban politics are contrasted with the ideal of an interconnected cosmopolitanism. Place and territory operate within space. Re-thinking what we mean by ‘space’ demands that we get beyond the common notion of an entity that is both physically grounded and socially fixed. In recent literature about public space in the diverse city, two very different models emerge: the first conceives it as display space where difference based on distinctive and closed identity can be affirmed, while the second suggests that it is relational space where a greater pluralism of identities and belongings emerges from constantly negotiated collaborations and contestations across divides. In this regard, Massey (2005, p. 9) argues three main propositions: . . .

Space is the outcome of interrelations. It is ‘constituted through interactions’. Space is an arena of ‘coexisting heterogeneity’, reflecting and changing the multiplicities and pluralities of contemporary society. Space is forever a work in progress, continuously being remade.

In this, she is challenging conventional understanding of space as associated with stasis, closure and representation, and instead is elevating concepts of change, openness, mix, difference, and relationality. Following Laclau (1990), she sees space not as a site but as an event. If taken not as a static entity, a passive stage on which social life and relationships are played out, but rather as a dynamic agent in itself, then it can be seen that its lack of social fixity is down to the fact that it is socially re-made in a continuous way. Its meaning and representation change with its designation and use, and thereby spaces can be re-imagined in ways that ‘challenge exclusivist localisms based on claims of some eternal authenticity’ (Massey, 2005, p. 20).

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For instance, the way this linkage of conflict and space permeates the routine of everyday life in contested cities is very manifest in the ethnoscape of Jerusalem, where Arab and Jew ‘live together separately’ (Romann and Weingrod, 1991). Thus, Misselwitz and Rieniets (2006, p. 26) refer to how the struggle over that city’s ownership has turned from one based purely on periodic military might to a permanent war of ‘cement and stone’. In other words, planned development persistently reconfigures the once stark fault line of Palestinian East Jerusalem and Jewish West Jerusalem into a more intricate web of enclaves and exclaves, underpinned by expansion of Jewish settlement to protect Judeo demographic ascendancy. But, in the face of such stark partitions, is the notion of ‘shared space’ to be taken as normative, and socio-spatial separatism to be regarded as universally deviant and problematic? In such circumstance, talk about creating ‘the shared city’ involves some indulgence in an easy but empty ‘signifier’—in other words, the ready use of a bland term that invites unanimous consent, but unravels when tested against the detailed reality of ethnic, religious, or ethno-nationalist rivalry and asymmetrical power relationships. All of these debates point to ‘shared space’ being a very differentiated concept, if only because all discourse about cityscapes imprinted with ethnic or ethno-nationalist contention reflects the enmities, mutualities and hybridities produced by parallel lives lived in intimate proximity. Changing the perception and social use of space in a city with longstanding fixed territories demands ambitious vision and proactive intervention that writes a new script, while appreciating the capacity for such scripts to become self-fulfilling. As expressed by Watson (2006, p.7): Stories of the city and its public spaces as dangerous, dead or dull, or as sites of exclusion, marginalisation and violence . . . contribute to, and produce, the very conditions that they describe . . .. But new stories of public space as life enhancing, exciting, safe and inclusive . . . can take us far in creating those spaces in just that way. Thus, it may appear sensible to build up reservations of shared space, first through the consolidation of public space. Dines and Cattel (2006) describe public spaces as a core feature of cities, offering the amenity for sociability and personal interaction, and whose presence and quality can be taken as a valid measure of the quality of urban life in general. Such public space, by definition, assumes a right of inclusion for all (Massey, 2005). However, a persistent narrative in recent literature about urban regeneration is that processes of privatisation and commercialisation of social life have compromised the public realm. Iveson (2007) categorises this as a ‘paradise lost’ analysis, while acknowledging that the language of retreat and retrieval can serve a purpose in setting an ideal of public space, around which a city politics of inclusion can be mobilised. He quotes Mitchell (1995, p.117) in this regard:

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By calling on the rhetoric of inclusion and interaction that the public sphere and public space are meant to represent, excluded groups have been able to argue for their rights as part of the active public. And each (partially) successful struggle for inclusion in ‘the public’ conveys to other marginalized groups the importance of the ideal as a point of political struggle. Public space holds scope for chance encounters among people of diverse traditions, and in such improvisations rests the opportunity for exchange and greater mutual understanding that can help dismantle barriers of mistrust and stereotype. However, before exaggerating this interactional role, it is important to acknowledge the argument of Amin (2002) that most public spaces are ‘places of transit’ that offer little meaningful or durable relationship between strangers. In places like Belfast, many notional public places such as parks are located in or aligned close to communities of a particular political hue. Accordingly, since the 1980s, considerable public investment in the city centre and waterfront has been rationalised in terms of its contribution to safe space, where the city’s many publics can meet and relate. While some now regard this ‘new’ Belfast as a cosmopolitan oasis, surrounded largely by the ‘old’ fortress Belfast of sectarian enclaves, the spatial splits in the city are more differentiated. Four main types of space can be designated: .

.

.

.

Ethnic space: reflected in the dominance of segregated communities, particularly in the working class parts of the city. Here, intervention has involved a mix of housing, regeneration and special assistance programmes but, most often on the assumption that most religious–political spatial demarcations are largely immutable for the foreseeable future, and that at the most volatile interface areas, ‘peace walls’ are an evil necessity. Neutral space: based largely in the city centre and waterfront, where public funding for expansion, modernisation, and re-imaging has been justified in part on the creation or consolidation of safe space open to both main traditions for employment, shopping, leisure, and residence. Shared space: taken as space that facilitates not just contact, but also engagement, across the divide, this is more rare in the city. Distinct places like integrated schools claim to be arenas for this deliberate dialogue on difference. But even some sites that are perceived widely in these terms have qualification. For instance, Queen’s University as a campus seeks to offer students an ‘integrated’ experience. Yet, there is a strong impression emerging that Catholic/Nationalist student residence tends to congregate in one area around the university, while Protestant/Unionist students tend to live in another. Cosmopolitan space: defined as space that is international in character and has no specific reference in terms of the local division, this is even more rare. Arguably, the ‘new spaces’—particularly areas like the Titanic Quarter

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along the waterfront—are conceived more in these terms. Attempts have also been made to re-define ‘old spaces’ like the seat of regional government (Stormont) and Belfast City Hall away from their partisan political past—for instance, by bringing a regular international flavour such as major concerts in the case of the former, and a European Christmas food market, in the case of the latter. Such a spatial typology bears relevance for other deeply divided cities. But, within such neat differentiation, there remains a great deal of contested space, where the imprints of history, memory, ‘sacred’ soil, conflicting land claims, displacement, and tribal territory confound the pluralism, negotiation and fluidity demanded for a more ‘shared city’. Here, Dodds et al. (2002, p. 23) ask: how do you ‘heal a city fabric physically rent by myth?’ But, notwithstanding this taxing assignment, cities can play a distinctive role in peace-building (Bollens, 2007, p. 8): Challenges regarding identity, citizenship, and belonging in a globalizing world will need to be addressed most immediately at the local level; our degree of progress at this grassroots level will either fortify or confine our ability to address these issues at broader geographies both within and between states. In general, the determination of how space is socially shaped involves the interplay between political and economic power on the one hand, and civic rights on the other. Purbrick (2007, p. 4) refers to the links among identity, space, and power: ‘to feel or know a space as enclosing or expansive, comforting or alien, empowering or oppressive, depends upon power relationships that are established both in and around that place’. But Harvey calls on citizens to remember that ‘the right to the city . . . is not merely a right of access to what the property speculators and state planners define, but an active right to make the city more in accord with our . . . desire’ (Harvey, 2003, p. 101). Yet again, such prescription refers mainly to ‘normal’ political contests, where common democratic and civic values are feasible. Such foundations of common belonging are least stable in the context of deeper ethno-nationalist conflict, which involves ‘colliding, irreconcilable claims of ownership’ (Sorkin (ed) 2002, p. 14). Such ethno-nationalist contests tend to see space deployed as an ethnic marker by the protagonists. For instance, the premeditated use of flags, emblems, graffiti and wall murals that epitomise such contested cities, serves not only to delineate the hostile ‘other’, but also to affirm tribal fidelity. In what Smith (1986) characterises as a process of ‘ethnic formation’, mythical historical narratives and symbols are marshalled to buttress nationalist projects (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000; Mann, 2000). Thus, ‘the political culture intentionally invests cultural landscape with contentious ideological

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messages—obvious and subtle mnemonic and didactic devices that remind citizens of their loyalties and responsibilities’ (Keirsey and Gatrell, 2001, p. 2). Such ethnoscapes convey the territorialisation of selective memory, emphasising the congruities of genealogy, custom and the historical continuity of the ‘ancestral’ motherland, which becomes ‘an intrinsic element of the community’s myth of origins and shared memories’ (Smith, 1999, p. 150). Though the almost ineffable attachment between people of similar pedigree and a particular place is often rooted in sentient rather than literal history (Connor, 1994), separate zones of belonging serve multiple purpose. Functioning as both enclave and exclusion, they facilitate control of the tribe (Sack, 1986), and safeguard the integrity of the pedigree, while expediently hosting ‘an alien other hovering on the margins’ (Sibley, 1995, p.108). But this is not to neglect the perceived advantages of such spatial concentration and prohibition, such as: group camaraderie, and cultural preservation (Peach, 1996); the cultivation of ethnic entrepreneurship (Boal, 2001); the economies of scale for viable local services; and some fortification against external threats (Murtagh, 1993; Murtagh, 1995). Five main characteristics of ethno-nationalist conflict can be proposed: . .

. .

.

Intensive: the coincidence of cultural/religious/national/ethnic identities provides a ‘compound’ effect that sharpens and deepens the animosities; Extensive: it is difficult to demarcate the pervasive contest from the wider social agenda. Permeating most aspects of social life, it crowds out space for civic society, and compromises the autonomy and integrity of any particular social issue; Persistent: with its ancestral roots, it displays durability, and partisan versions of history inform contemporary social cleavages; ‘Intimate enemies’ (Benvenisti, 1995): the problem is rarely reducible to solutions of greater contact and communication. While segregation and separation can promote ill-informed stereotypes and deformed perceptions of ‘the other’, often the protagonists know each other only too well in terms of behaviour and intent; Fluid: the very volatility of the conflict means it can change gear over time, and thus a textured appreciation of its dynamics can identify nuances and shifts even when the big picture appears immutable.

Aspects of these features may be apparent in city conflict around pluralist contest, whether based on socio-economic or ethno-religious or cultural distinction. But the ethno-nationalist disputes, involving sovereignty contest, demand a special deliberate policy mix of conflict resolution, community cohesion, and social inclusion. Moreover, it is clear that urban contests and their related socio-spatial divisions, whether rooted in pluralist or sovereignty dispute, require not only macro political resolution, but also a sustainable

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reconciliation built painstakingly on the ground, where planning and policy make visible impact.

Policy and planning responses to diversity Whether seen officially as a source of jubilation or tribulation, living with difference and dealing with related potential for sectionalism and conflict has faced many countries that have experienced increased diversity in recent times. For instance, over the last decade in Britain, there has been renewed policy concern about a fragmented society torn by the supposed growth in ethnic enclaves and unruly, estranged housing estates. But the analysis underpinning the policy for greater ‘community cohesion’ is confused. It is unclear whether the problem is seen to be rooted in the general eclipse of community, or whether some kinds of community are, if anything, too animated. While many desolate white working class districts are deemed to display a nihilistic disregard for ‘conventional’ politesse and ambition, some of the ethnic communities are seen to contain those who proclaim principles and affiliation contrary to the dominant political culture (Flint and Robinson, 2008). Thus on this score, some disaffected lack values, while others possess them in excess—though unfortunately the ‘wrong’ ones. Some communities lack unity and coherency, while others are internally cohesive, but derive this social adhesion in part from their common mistrust of, and even hostility to, the external orthodoxy. In short, understanding of cohesion stems from a jumbled composite of traditional themes about ‘community pathology’, the alienated underclass, and ‘radicalised’ Muslim youth. The risk here is that anti-social behaviour in so-called ‘sink estates’ can be drawn into the same policy discourse as peaceful political agitation by elements of Islam, a conflation that can justify concern that non-violent militants are being criminalised. The effect is to problematise certain populations, elevate religion and ethnicity over other pertinent categories such as class and gender, and invest undue confidence in the ‘curative power of community’ (Kearns and Forrest, 2000, p. 6), as government sources the solution in the redemptive capacity of ‘community cohesion’ (Robinson, 2005). Unsurprisingly, the policy that obtains from this interpretation largely recycles long-standing state intervention in poor urban precincts around improving community infrastructure and capacity. The additional component concerns the need to redress the spatial segregation that is seen to promote ‘parallel lives’ lived in social isolation from ‘the other’ community, spiralling into mutual mistrust that can foment into inter-communal enmity and even sporadic violence. Beyond creating more opportunity for crosscommunity engagement, the answer is seen to reside in the creation of new integrated housing complexes, diversified in tenure, social and racial

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mix—not very dissimilar to the policy impulse behind the HOPE programme in the US, referenced in the previous chapter. Overall then, Britain’s strategy for greater community cohesion includes: . . . . .

Encouragement for all to be involved in building a shared vision and sense of common belonging, in locality, city, region, and country; Dissemination of civic awareness and application of mutual rights and obligations; Celebration of diversity, within a legal framework of equity; Elevation of trust in local institutions to act fairly; and Promotion of social interaction among people of diverse backgrounds within workplace and neighbourhood; and specifically between recent arrivals and more ‘veteran’ citizens (Home Office, 2001, 2003, 2004; Commission on Integration and Cohesion, 2007; Communities and Local Government, 2007).

In short, policy objective is now designed to minimise the pattern of ‘parallel lives’, whereby people living in separate communities operate in mutual ignorance and sometimes fear. The Cantle Report (Home Office, 2001, p. 25) provides a new agenda for citizenship in a multi-ethnic Britain, one that engenders an inter-communal camaraderie ‘based upon a greater knowledge of, contact between, and respect for, the various cultures’. Elsewhere in the report, however, the aforementioned ‘problem’ in achieving this objective is accepted (Home Office, 2001, p. 70): Community cohesion . . . is about helping micro-communities to gel or mesh into an integrated whole. These divided communities would need to develop common goals and a shared vision. This would seem to imply that such groups should occupy a common sense of place as well. The high levels of residential segregation found in many English towns would make it difficult to achieve community cohesion. Increasingly, this approach to tackling segregation and supposed separatism is being tied in with another policy initiative about community empowerment and the reinvention of local government. This is said to include more focus on the role of citizen; de-centralisation of influence and responsibility from existing power centres to communities and citizens; improved resourcing of the Third Sector (the voluntary and community movement); channels for more civic challenge and debate; and encouraging people to regard political activity as consequential. This is in the context of a marked disengagement from electoral politics, with a low voter turnout of 59% in the 2001 general election, only slightly improving to 61% in 2005, compared with the historic high of 84% in 1950 (The Electoral Commission, 2005). Figures for local elections (35% in 2008) and for the poorest inner city communities are

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considerably worse again (Communities and Local Government, 2008). All of this effort for a more vibrant democracy is explicitly linked with ‘more interaction between people of different backgrounds and more emphasis on shared goals. Greater openness about decision making and greater involvement in those decisions can remove perceptions of injustice that can fuel extremism’ (ibid., 2008, p. 22). Seven main misgivings can be raised about this agenda. First, to what extent is it based on a ‘moral panic’ about ethno-religious fanaticism, or even hyperbolic rhetoric about a society ‘sleepwalking’ into deepening socio-ethno segregation? Some studies (Phillips, 1998; Johnston et al., 2002; Simpson, 2004; Dorling and Thomas, 2004; Burgess et al., 2005) suggest a counter narrative of growing acculturation by those communities with an immigrant origin. Summarising research by Poulson and Johnston (2006) covering the inter-census period of 1991–2001, Amin (2008, p. 1) notes: . . .even in places like Bradford, the percentage of Whites living in relatively mixed, but White-dominated areas increased . . . (and) in more multicultural cities such as London, there was a considerable fall in the percentage of Whites living in predominantly White areas . . .. As regards most large non-White ethnic groups, the trend has been towards living in mixed neighbourhoods, in which Whites, however, are a minority (i.e. areas of mixed non-White ethnicity). The trends, thus, are complex enough to disallow any simple segregation story to be told. Second, is there an unhelpful conflation of four distinctive issues: social distance among diverse groups; political radicalisation within militant Islam; growing political cynicism and erosion of electoral legitimacy; and the efficacy of community empowerment? While there is feasible conjugation between elements of such processes, a subtle policy needs to disaggregate the constituents in each case more forensically than at present. Third, is there policy coherence? For instance, a strategy to break down spatial segregation between diverse groups does not sit comfortably with a government penchant for the proliferation of faith schools, which may intensify social distance between ethno-religious groups. Thus, there can be a policy disjuncture between respecting diversity and ethnic autonomy (e.g. conceding faith schools) and achieving greater inter-communal social interaction. Fourth, is ‘community cohesion’ an obvious precursor to social cohesion in society at large? As argued earlier, policies designed to build solidarity and bonding capital in the local community may inadvertently accentuate the predicament of building bridging capital for wider civic mutuality. Fifth, while the mood music of urban deprivation is still playing audibly in the background, is the policy here intended to subordinate class-based disparity to cultural differentiation, and rather than promote greater equality to settle for a more modest and less measurable equality of opportunity?

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This consideration is part of a wider concern that the identity politics that marks contemporary public discourse is often detached from wider distributive issues (Yacobi and Tzfadia, 2009). Clearly, today’s more competitive urban economy holds potential for increasing rivalries among the most underdeveloped communities on the false basis of the perceived priority accorded ‘native’ or ‘newcomer’. Sixth, does the policy grasp the transformative implication of what Vertovec (2007, p. 1) calls Britain’s recent ‘super-diversity’, which is ‘distinguished by a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small and scattered multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants over the last decade’? This pattern of new migration from a much wider global reach than the usual former colonies has further diversified socio-cultural difference, has generated a much more stratified form of legal belonging, and has witnessed ardent connections with countries of origin and diasporas (Berkeley et al., 2005; Kyambi, 2005). To take the example of Britain’s Muslim population, it has produced an intra-religious mix of beliefs and practices within the one faith, thereby underlining the imprudent assumption that all followers of Islam share identical devotion. Finally here, is the overall policy for integration and cohesion premised on a normative take on what constitutes ‘British’, and the idea that more recent arrivals should assimilate to the clear and fixed culture of their ‘host’ society? Such a perspective places the burden of adaptation on the ‘newcomer’. An alternative perspective disowns the notion that Britain comprises a pristine indigenous population—essentially white and Christian, and tracing lineage back centuries—with everyone else cast as ‘ethnic’. While every culture is continually re-made through cross-pollination with others, this is particularly so in the case of a former imperial power. Talk of a ‘host’ society can lead at best to the advocacy of ‘hospitality’ to the stranger, and such inference of generosity can contain a paternalistic inflection rather than the democratic currency of co-citizenship. At worst, this ethno-centric approach can treat more recent settlers as alien, and worthy of some suspicion, particularly in an environment of heightened security alert. Such reservations indicate the ambiguities of ‘cohesion’. Gilchrist (2004) describes a cohesive neighbourhood as one where there exists a collective capacity to continuously manage the fluidity and configuration of myriad tensions and disputes among diverse communities. In this view, policy makers can proactively remove barriers that inhibit interaction, in part through the creation of social spaces and forums for conflict resolution, while tackling the multiple deprivations that typically align with many urban conflict scenarios. But the actual delivery of such a policy agenda is highly problematic, even where the dispute is simply inter-ethnic rather than ethnonationalist. Some of this intricacy is detectable in current debates about the compatibility between multiculturalism and community cohesion. Parekh (2000, p. 341) considers the need for divided cities to foster a sense of common

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belonging that is not based on ethnic or cultural roots but on ‘shared commitment to the political community . . . (involving) commitment to its continuing existence and well being’. Building this shared identity can be taken to entail three main strands: first, a robust set of equality, anti-discrimination, and hate crime legislation that demonstrates the state’s unequivocal protection of equity; second, improving socio-economic opportunity to tackle entrenched inter-ethnic disparity; and third, a cultural dimension to the promotion of cohesion, that prioritises proactive approaches to (a) greater interaction among diverse populations; (b) generating consensus around shared values; and (c) amplifying the mutual attachments and solidarities that can create shared identity. Many advocates of this composite strategy acknowledge its potential shortcomings: that increasing contact among diverse groups does not guarantee improved relations since it may be either too insubstantial to make any impact or too threatening to reverse the mistrust and anxiety that feed prejudice; that attention to cultural aspects can distract from redress of socio-economic inequality; that ‘shared identity’ may be misconceived as a master identity that surpasses all other components of a multiple identity; that the disquieting exclusivity behind some identity formation may stigmatise the outsider; and that the multiculturalism that respects diversity may be misconstrued as a separatist alternative to social integration (Muir, 2007). Such difficult policy issues around identity politics, multiculturalism, and related forms of urban stratification are becoming urgent for ever more societies. With the increase in transnational communities across the world, key reception urban centres are reconsidering migrant policy. In many advanced economies, public policy from the 1940s–1960s showed preference for their assimilation with the prevailing ‘host’ culture, though distinction tended to be drawn between those accepted as settlers and those registered as ‘guest workers’ with restricted citizen entitlement. By the 1970s, policy changed to at least a toleration of multiculturalism that was supposed to involve respect for principles of equity and diversity, though the ‘multiple identities’ were meant to bind under a prime allegiance to the wider society. More recently, the policy discourse splits between those concerned that multiculturalism has produced an incongruent collection of separate communities, with potential for at least low intensity cultural collision, and those who regard globalisation and related porosity of borders as demanding a more genuinely transnational and intercultural pluralism (Castles, 2000). Such multiplicity is most manifest in cosmopolitan urbanism, which though it offers the prospect of creating ‘the world in a city’, also generates a set of paradoxes. For example, insofar as the creation of ethnic quarters with related cultural attractions contributes to a city’s development as a visitor destination, the gentrification process that can accompany such makeovers can price many ‘ethnic’ residents out of the local housing market, thereby compromising the area’s authentic appeal. Similarly, while the contrast is

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often drawn between privileged elite cosmopolites traversing the earth and the immobile poor held captive in place, the status of such globe-trotters as genuine internationalists is itself contestable (Binnie et al., 2006, p. 17): . . . . the apparent stateless and almost free-floating cosmopolite is actually grounded in quite specific sites and places wherein encounters with diversity and the development of a cosmopolitan attitude are seemingly contained and limited. The question then arises of whether such people or class formations are in fact cosmopolitan at all, in that they simply encounter and interact with other ‘cosmopolitans’ sharing the same cultural and aesthetic values. Given these kinds of limitations, what then can instruments of policy and planning achieve for cities deep in conflict? Four models of planning and policy in contested space have been advanced: neutral, partisan, equity and resolver (Bollens, 1999, adapted from Benvenisti, 1986). The neutral approach is one that is purposely ‘colour blind’ to the contest, adopting a professional and technocratic response that purports to be apolitical and impartial in land allocation and use. For this approach, Bollens cites the example of Belfast. The partisan model entails a calculated state exploitation of planning and policy instruments such as zoning, infrastructure, and settlement to favour the ascendant group, often manipulating factors such as demography and spatial concentration as a means of sustaining advantage in the conflict (Mc Garry, 1998). An example often referenced is Jerusalem, where a mix of land appropriation, zoning, density regulations, erection of security walls, etc. is deployed to enhance the Judaisation of the city, a bias some suggest is linked to the macro Zionist project to create an ethnocracy (Yiftachel and Meir, 1998; Yiftachel and Yacobi, 2003; Yacobi, 2004). While the equity model applies to policy and planning that helps achieve socio-spatial justice between the warring factions, the resolver approach addresses the root causes of the conflict in a more radical, strategic, and proactive stance that places planning at the heart of conflict resolution. None of these models offers a panacea. The assumption behind the neutral approach that planners and policy-makers can airbrush out the conflict ignores their role in shaping social space and allocating public resources. For instance, since planning is concerned with land use and land itself is at the centre of these urban contests, planning is necessarily central, and thus its outcome is never neutral. Another version of this ‘neutrality’ is found in forms of planning that seek to sanitise local conflict with a veil of anodyne multiculturalism. In some cases, a contrived cosmopolitanism is appropriated by city managers as a brand in their place-marketing of their city as both global and unique. At its worst, this leads planners to package a safe version of cosmopolitanism in anaesthetised cultural zones, where instead of offering absorbing encounter with alterity, they end up reproducing the tamed edition

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in bland conformity with every other aspirant sophisticated city. At its best, cultural planning attempts to capture the city’s multiple identities in creating development opportunities to include whole communities, capitalising on arts and heritage, as well as local traditions, festivals and diversity of activities/leisure to bring together communities of interest across the ‘normal’ divide (Mercer, 1991). However, not everyone would agree with Ghilardi’s plaudits about the process, when he maintains that (2001, p. 4): ‘Cultural Planning is intrinsically more democratic, more conscious of the realities of cultural diversity and more aware of the intangible features of cultural heritage and patrimony’. Whatever the pretensions of this ‘neutral’ slant, patently the partisan model permits the dominant power to exercise distributive favouritism, thereby intensifying discord and grievance, and further eroding the state’s legitimacy as an impartial influence. Indeed in this scenario, planning and policy become significant weapons in the conflict. As such, they become part of the problem. On the other hand, equity approaches are complicated by the fact that equality, rights, and cultural recognition are intrinsic to the controversies in urban conflicts, are often championed by each side to endorse their partial perspective, and overall are awkward to unravel from the wider contest. Finally, the resolver model shares the deficiency of all radical agendas. If nothing much of significance can be changed until the whole arena is transformed, this aspiration for planning and policy to be in the vanguard of city peace-building could over-extend the capacity of the public realm. Despite their limitations, the equity and resolver models hold potential for relevant forms of planning in contested cities. Moreover, in Europe at least, there is an emergent agenda around a new approach to planning, with an emphasis on a more integrated participatory practice that may be very appropriate for attending to the particular challenges of urban conflict. Referred to as spatial planning, it transcends the narrow focus of land-use and physical built environment, addressing the creation of sustainable communities through visionary and integrative strategies developed through inclusive procedures from a formative stage. This more proactive, value-driven and action-oriented model acknowledges the need for a more inter-disciplinary perspective that comprehensively addresses the linked dimensions of the physical, social, economic, and environmental, while respecting local distinctiveness (Royal Town Planning Institute, June 2001). Thus, it affirms that public policy in general has spatial outcomes that need to be more clearly identified, and that planning involves a far-reaching remit of creating place. Albrechts (2004) locates this shift to spatial planning in terms of its greater capacity to address the imperatives for sustainable forms of regeneration within a delivery framework based on more evidence-based and democratic governance. In turn, this agenda connects with a wider discussion about how to develop new governance that moves beyond departmental silos towards

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a more collaborative and holistic practice (Stoker and Young, 1993; Sullivan and Sketcher, 2002). If taken seriously, it marks a significant departure from conventional planning, whose defects have been long recognised. For instance, Healey et al. (1982) have noted how planning has been disingenuously presented as an a-political activity legitimated by a culture of professionalisation that circumscribed it largely within the authority of technical experts operating a centralist decision-making system. Others have specified the shortcomings of a proceduralist planning method, based on systems analysis that moves mechanically from survey/data generation to forecasting to strategy to implementation and evaluation (Murray and Greer, 2000). This ‘predict and provide’ model can often simply generate self-fulfilling prophecy. Still others have referred to the tradition in planning of attempted rational imposition of order on a heterogeneous, random and fragmented urban arena, which is far from being an exclusively rational universe (Boyer, 1986). Those who perceive in the contemporary city-region the chaos and diversity best captured by complexity theory and non-linearity have disowned such reductionist and mechanistic approaches, advocating instead a creative and participatory approach that rehabilitates the scope of agency and locality. Other familiar critiques of conventional planning associated with the political left include: .

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Its fixation with the physical, with an inclination to slot in the economic, social, environmental, and cultural dimensions as after-thought, rather than blending these multi-faceted components in a concerted and sustainable way (Blowers, 1993); Its tendency to legitimate economic elites such as the development industry and related financial institutions despite its paternalist claims to mediate fairly amongst competing claims for land and property, based on the ‘common’ good (Reade, 1987); and Its related failure to counteract market-driven spatial inequalities and uneven development (Gans, 1968).

Of course, particularly since the 1980s, conservative and neo-liberal voices have expressed reservations also about the extent to which planning subverts market functioning, including its bureaucratic delays and hidden redistributive goals (Atkinson and Moon, 1994). In the new era of deregulation and privatisation, for some in the advanced economies it was seen as a delinquent relic of an old social democratic order (Gaffikin and Morrissey, 1990; Thornley, 1991). However, since the 1990s, greater recognition of ‘social fragmentations’ in many societies—deriving from many uncertain re-configurations, including the splintering of territorially-based relations, greater ethnic and cultural diversities, and the problematic links between local and global—has prompted advocacy for ‘planning by debate’. This sees planning as a process wedded to enterprising governance based on collaborative

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consensus-building that ‘would involve developing ‘conversations’ between stakeholders from different social worlds’ (Healey, 1997, p. 219). Such ‘inclusionary argumentation’, given to dispute-resolution rather than adversarialism, sees plan and policy making as interactive, dialogic, democratically negotiative and future-oriented. Recognising both the ‘soft’ infrastructures of decision-making and power-brokering—for instance, routine organisational forms and styles of discussion—and the ‘hard’ infrastructure based around more systemic attributes like formal laws and resource flows, adherents of this discursive form of collaborative planning stress the contribution of trust, reflexivity, and open exchange to the creation of new agendas in old struggles. With this promise in mind, the next chapter assesses the potential of collaborative planning to intervene effectively in cities riven by both pluralist and sovereignty contest.

6 Collaborative Planning and the Divided City

The previous two chapters have indicated the need to integrate conflict resolution, community cohesion and social inclusion in addressing the most exigent forms of urban division. Since it provides the spatial undergirding of these composite policies, planning also plays a crucial role. However, to be effective in redressing the debilities of contested space, it needs to be reconceptualized. In exploring how planning might be so re-framed, this chapter first summarizes the way planning has evolved to the current thinking about spatial planning. It then relates this in turn to the concept of collaborative planning, which has been suggested as the most effectual model for intervention in deeply fragmented cities. Arguing that agonistic planning may offer a preferable approach in the context of intractable and deadly conflict, the chapter explores its resonance in other related disciplines such as conflict resolution before concluding with the implications of this model for both development and governance.

Shifts in planning With regard to the form of planning in most developed societies since 1945, six models can be briefly identified to give an indication of the changing slant: (1) Top-down land-use planning: this is within the traditional genre, based on the rational objective approach and technical expertise of the professional planner. Largely about zoning and the physical aspects of the built environment, it tends to propose development priorities, leaving it to other public agencies and the market to dispose in terms of detailed projects. Mostly, the public are seen as passive, if beneficial, recipients. Planning in Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Contested Space. Frank Gaffikin and Mike Morrissey. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-19218-7

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(2) Advocacy planning: starting in the 1960s, this involves sympathetic planning experts serving disadvantaged and excluded communities by defending their interests (Friedmann, 1987). However, this championing risks paternalistic assumption about the incapacity of the powerless community to articulate on its own behalf. Moreover, in such representation of the disadvantaged, their authentic voice can get lost in translation. (3) Equity planning: starting in the 1970s, this derives mainly from the US, and refers to a process whereby committed government planners devote particular attention to the impact of planning outcomes on the most impoverished and excluded populations, using their assets and skills to leverage positive discrimination in their favour (Krumholz and Forester, 1990; Metzger, 1996). Although such redistributive endeavour is meant to work with an intimate knowledge of the beneficiary community, there is still an intimation of service and advocacy. (4) Participatory planning: since the 1960s, there has been wide validation for the direct involvement of people impacted by plans in those plans’ formation (Forester, 1999). Yet, dispute has persisted about how best to channel such inputs, and improve civic capacity for their expression. Broadly speaking, two approaches have dominated this discourse. One is learner-centred, bottom-up and suspicious about professional expertise, insisting that the community most affected by plans knows best, not only about their most effective contribution, but also about their own knowledge gap with respect to participatory planning. However, asking people what they don’t know is flawed, since: (a) people don’t always know what they don’t know; (b) they are reluctant to admit knowledge/skills deficits; (c) they may genuinely, though mistakenly, believe that they do know; and (d) given the anti-intellectualism in parts of the practitioner world across all sectors, they may assume that their experiential/tacit knowledge is superior to the formal variety. The second approach is more top-down, prescribing a suite of skills and competencies necessary for effective community building, against which the performance of any particular participant community can be measured. Even while acknowledging the disputatious character of planning, and the awkward presence of power relations, both of these approaches share anticipation of a final consensual outcome from the adversarial stakeholder engagements, and emphasise the importance of skills in facilitation and mediation for conflict resolution. (5) Spatial planning: as outlined in the previous chapter, this is on the agenda mostly only in Europe as an approach that is: visionary, inclusive, comprehensive, integrative, equitable and sustainable, and concerned about the spatial outcome of public and private investment. Though still in a very formative state of application, this offers an ‘official’ paradigm, within which collaborative and agonistic approaches to contested space can be examined.

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Finally, an ‘unofficial’ and more radical version of this inclusive approach can be conceived and it underpins the critique of collaborative planning pursued here: (6) Knowledge co-production for participatory planning: this model attempts to establish an equitable partnership between experts and activists in the co-production of knowledge needed for plan development and delivery. Not only does it stress processes such as enabling and empowering for all participants, it disputes that any particular source is the repository of superior knowledge. Rather than deliberative processes of linear argumentative debate and problem-solving, it leans towards a more recursive and agonistic approach of competitive, outspoken, and sometimes combative exchange, respectful of the real rivalries, hard choices, and exasperating trade-offs, and whose conclusion may yield both discord and concord. In shifting from an approach to inquiry and engagement based on Habermasian communicative action to one that encourages the savvy of improvisation and reflexivity in a capricious world marked by fluidity rather than solidity, it disowns any assumption about certainty and predetermination. As expressed by Kikoski and Kikoski (2004, p. 51): In the past, the purpose of inquiry was to learn answers and solve problems that emanated from the hard facts of an unchanging reality. In this 21st century, the purpose of inquiry may be to surface yet-to-be known possibilities from each individual’s intuition or tacit knowledge . . . . Postmodernism proposes that knowledge of a changing unfinished world is collaboratively or ‘socially constructed’ in conversation by humans. Reviewing the history of planning models, it is apparent that the traditional ones contain deficiencies. The rational–comprehensive approach, entrenched in classical science, considers that knowledge is out there, and once ascertained through meticulous and impartial analysis, can provide a predictive instrument for normative planning in the public interest. While rejecting this idea of value-free professionalism and supposition of an undifferentiated public, advocacy planning offers an adversarial approach that champions the most socially excluded. But its epistemology is still rooted in the authority and proficiency of the specialist, and its translation of the vernacular of people’s opinion into a professional vocabulary can both misrepresent and disempower. The more humble incremental planning model relinquishes the ambition of grand master plans in favour of practical and continual advancement in the technical facets of delivery, based on effective application of time, resources and data, and in the political facet of legitimacy, based on public deliberation and consent. All these standard approaches struggle to prevail over the predicaments that confront democratic planning in a very differentiated, not to say, divided world. Whether the more recent participatory and spatial

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models outlined above can fare any better can be considered as part of a wider appraisal of collaborative planning, and its potential in deeply divided cities.

The role of collaborative planning Collaborative planning—like the overarching concept of collaborative governance—denotes public policy decision making that is inclusive and based on dialogue among all stakeholders, producing ideally consensual outcome (Brand and Gaffikin, 2007). First, it implies the complementarity between traditional representative electoral politics and participative democracy; second, it is less reliant on legalistic formats of courts, tribunals, and public inquiries to arbitrate in the public interest; third, it is an intentional shift from market over-determination of socio-spatial development; and fourth, it disowns the claim that efficient decision making is best undertaken by professional experts within a bureaucratic and technical mindset. As an inclusive dialogic approach to shaping social space, collaborative planning appears to accord with certain features of contemporary society, at least in the Global North. These include: the post-modernist insights into the reduced certitudes and predictabilities of a complex world; the putative shift to new modes of partnership governance that acknowledges the imperative to ‘buy-in’ multiple stakeholders; the cross-fertilisations among these stakeholders, supportive of a creative milieu for remaking the world of work and attending to urban regeneration in a more globalised economy; and the supposed hegemony of neo-liberalism that some see not only in terms of de-regulating and privatising the public realm, but also of dismantling the split between state and market in ways that facilitate new synergistic partnerships. Recent thinking behind the efficacy of collaborative planning emerged out of ‘the neo-liberal, antiplanning morass of the 1980s’ (Allmendinger and Tewdwr-Jones, 2002, p. 214). But, in its conceptualisation and genealogy, it is linked to US researchers like Innes and Booher (2003), Forester (1999), and Friedman (1993), and in Europe, to Albrechts (2004), Davoudi et al. (1997), many of whom have long-standing scholarly interest in the related issues of public participation, conflict resolution, balanced city development, and effective urban management. Thus, many of these writers have extolled its virtue and heralded its advance: ‘collaborative planning is moving forward and spreading as a method’ (Innes and Booher, 2003, p. 24). In Britain, the paradigm shift in planning towards local development frameworks and spatial planning augurs this inclination to subsidiarity and what might be dubbed ‘democratic de-centralism’ in contrast to the orthodoxies of ‘command and control’ administration. The theoretical underpinning of collaborative planning embraces other related terms such as communicative, dialogic, argumentative or deliberative planning. These various names offer one indicator of its hybrid status as a theory, or it may be more accurate to describe it as a

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paradigm, normative framework, or as Harris (2002, p. 23) would have it, simply ‘a form of planning’. Despite their nuanced differences, all of these approaches share belief in the effectiveness of engagement and dialogue among all stakeholders. Participating as informed equals, in well-facilitated forums that optimise the trust and candour needed for an exhaustive examination of concerns and interests, such stakeholders are meant to employ rational persuasion. Assumptions about dispassionate rationality, ‘reasonableness’, fairness, and justice support the view that out of such critical but respectful exchange can emerge consensual decisions that are not automatically aligned with power differentials. Reason can trump power. In the words of Flyvbjerg (1996, p. 391), the intent of collaborative planning is ‘not to dissolve relations of power in a utopia of transparent communication but to play games with a minimum of domination’. In this way, it seeks to replace the argument of the greater force with the force of the better argument. In its ontology, collaborate planning sees the social world as a complex adaptive system ‘characterised by fragmentation, uncertainty and complexity’ (Innes and Booher, 2003, p. 10). While there is dispute about how organised or disorganised this complexity is, there is agreement that it is not totally chaotic and beyond shaping by intentional agency. So, typically, advocates of collaborative planning do not perceive the city in modernist reductionist or mechanistic terms, as a simple machine, but neither do they adhere to the ultra-individualist and relativist worldview associated with post-modernism. Emphasis is given to the contextual and contingent, and to the individual as a purposive social being rather than an atomistic one in pursuit only of instinctive self-gratification. Thus, it has affinity with structuration theory as developed by Giddens, with respect to the recursive relationship between structure and agency, and with the reflective and reflexive components of the theory of communicative action associated with Habermas. Space is seen in relational and dynamic terms rather than in the static Christallerian-Euclidean geometries (Brand, 2007). Similarly, time is more than a linear chronology or regular tick tocks on a clock. It is experiential, and therefore related to other factors such as culture. So for instance, in Belfast—a city where history can be a very animated ghost—murals depicting what some see as centuries of British oppression can make the narrative feel to be within living memory. In its epistemology, collaborative planning does not rely on some external ultimate veracity as if the social world is a closed system subject to predetermined laws discoverable through the pursuit of standard knowledge. Rather, it is exercised about many types of knowledge beyond the formal, such as the tacit and experiential. Accordingly, in Healey’s words (1997, p. 264): ‘there is no privileged, correct “rationality” . . . . all . . . . potential forms of reasoning have to be learned and given respect’. Here, it is not simply that say aesthetics is in the eye of the beholder. It is that beyond the conventional ways of knowing, there is a need to consider the neglected sources of knowledge and understanding that may lie buried in the informal, the

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invisible, the under-stated, the assumed, the immeasurable, or the inarticulate. Excavating such sources is further compromised by ‘the blinders’ (Innes and Booher, 1999, p. 418) that derive from conditioning and custom. But it is only by appreciating such sources of revelation, beyond the obvious and explicit, that we can grasp how ‘power is exercised through taken-for-granted norms and practices’ (Coaffee and Healey, 2003, p. 1982), and the prejudicial potential of the ‘common sense’ that seeps in sub-consciously through routine acculturation. Such considerations involve a shift from positivist to interactive epistemology, challenging the fixity of prevailing nostrums and ways of seeing, and extending the knowledge base (Forester, 1999) through engagement with a diverse social world. If these thoughts relate to how the world is, collaborative planning is also associated with ideology—about how the world should be. In general, it disavows the pretensions about value-free planning and the related fiction of an undifferentiated ‘public good’. As noted by Allmendinger and TewdwrJones (2002), collaborative planning contains both an explanatory and prescriptive element, and in its more manifesto mode, it is not merely given to a deeper democracy and a more explicit and proactive role in conflict resolution. Rather, its left-leaning emphasis is on giving voice to the most disenfranchised, highlighting issues of gender and diversity, and concepts such as environmental justice. Indeed, alongside other campaigning themes like sustainable development and human rights, it can be seen as a refuge for leftist ideas, attempting to re-legitimate socialist or at least social-democratic tenets in face of ascendant neo-liberalism. It also overlaps widely with notions of a ‘third way’ between old-style public intervention and the de-regulated market that putatively constitutes the philosophical underpinnings of the UK’s New Labour party (Giddens, 1998, 2000). In turn, these perspectives on ontology, epistemology, and ideology infer a congruent methodology. Beyond their references about the efficacy of a more flexible, nimble and adaptable planning process in a rapidly changing world, advocates of collaborative planning recognise the importance of engagement with the full range of stakeholders, preferably not in separate sessions for each silo interest, but rather in arenas that offer the prospect of discursive exchange across divides. Such processes are seen to involve more than standard mediation designed to mitigate, or to induce sufficient modest concessions around the table to tip the maths toward consensus. They require facilitation by the ‘critical friend’ (Forester, 1996), the ‘knowledge mediator and broker’ (Healey, 1997, p. 309) who can help re-frame dilemmas, thereby inviting the innovative thinking that can crack the conundrum. Further, they require inventive formats that encourage negotiative problem definition and solution rather than rival bargaining of fixed interests. Through such methods, it is claimed, potential exists for many conflicts to be re-conceptualised as ‘creative tensions’ that offer ‘win-win’ solution rather than ‘winner takes all’ or ‘zero sum’ outcome.

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However, it is in the methodology that the flaws in collaborative planning become most patent. First, within its own terms, it acknowledges the need for trust as the basis for productive non-hostile discourse among equals. Yet, in the case of conflict scenarios how is this trust to be built among the distrustful and between sides that are often distinctly unequal? What is the ‘big bang’ moment that creates the foundation of trust to secure the platform for mutual articulation (Brand, 2007)? An even more basic critique challenges the core canon of collaborative planning, whose scaffolding comes from precepts of deliberative democracy. The latter champions forms of partnership decisionmaking that are inclusive, reflexive and consensus-oriented in ways that extend access to, and legitimacy of, a more transparent and answerable form of governance. In this view, rational discourse among equals permits all participants to openly debate and grill others in a process facilitated impartially and founded on universal values such as justice, equity and democracy (Calhoun, 1991). Many facets of this proceduralist method are commendable: its recognition of multiple and diverse stakeholders partaking in an ever more complex, pluralist and unpredictable world; its integrative perspective on development; its implicit attachment to subsidiarity and the traditionally disenfranchised; and its aspiration for an active and informed citizenry in respectful interface to resolve dispute. But this deliberative and communicative polity encounters a stark ontological difficulty. As expressed by Mouffe (1999), the boundless public deliberation among all on all matters of common concern is conceptually unfeasible. Related to this is a defective appraisal of the significance of power and inequality, implicit in the assumptions about a public sphere for rational discourse as a viable channel for democratic consensus. Power disparities, an ontological presence acknowledged by many adherents of collaborative planning, cannot be dissolved or adjourned through logical argumentation, however respectfully conducted. Besides the practical problem of getting all stakeholder interests equally around the table, given the immense obstacle of power, the central objective of consensus may be not only over-ambitious (Hillier, 2003) but altogether misguided. Even if feasible in principle, the desirability of consensus in all circumstances is questionable. It may simply be a false conviviality that suppresses dissent or difference, a consensus purchased at the cost of containment. It can involve platitudinous affirmations, which sometimes are referred to as ‘empty signifiers’ since they offer low common denominators that apparently claim the assent of protagonists without exacting anything very specific in terms of commitment or concession. Moreover, since conflict is intrinsic to human relations, particularly in a very diverse world, social harmony is not the normative. Thus, critics of collaborative planning complain largely about the contradiction between its consensual premise and the conflictive realities of unequal economic and political power, ethno-religious rivalry and ethno-nationalist contest. For

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instance with respect to ‘pluralist’ conflict, it professes to offer the means to create the city that is at once globally competitive and inclusive of the most disadvantaged local communities, without explaining how the neo-liberal ideology that sets the contemporary framework for the former is compatible with the egalitarian ideology that promotes the latter. If markets are selfregulating, why fix what is not broken? On the other hand, if public policy is serious about dismantling disadvantage, it demands levels of redistributive welfare that contravene the hollowing out of the state implicit in de-regulated capitalism (Brand, 2007). Even allowing for the contingent and partial manner in which both ideologies are actually grounded in any given urban context (Hackworth, 2007), collaborative planning does not contain ready responses to how ‘rational debate’ can resolve this ideological contest. Moreover, as indicated earlier, post-modernist perspectives challenge the very notion of a rational universe, uncontaminated by human emotion, intuition, blind faith, and prejudice. And the role of emotion in conflict has long been recognised both in terms of its visceral cause and political impact. For instance, referring to the different approach to negotiation between blacks and whites, Kochman (1981, p. 40) comments on how whites typically seek to mollify the anticipated hostility of blacks by insisting that any such discomfiting dispositions are left at the door, a precondition that can be seen by blacks as reflective of existing unequal power relations: The requirement to behave calmly, rationally, unemotionally, and logically when negotiating is looked upon by blacks as a political requirement—and to accede to it in advance is considered a political defeat. Given these reservations, it may be argued that a more genuine respect for the diversities of contemporary society may favour a more agonistic kind of planning that accepts the discordant realities of living with complex difference. This then is the key paradox: advocacy of collaborative practice, rooted in values of cohesion, solidarity and inclusivity, operates in a world that can be seen as ever more individualist, socially fragmented, competitive, or in other words, uncollaborative. Thus, it may be less delusionary to settle for a ‘democratic art of governance, namely civil servants’ and planners’ ability to work productively with and within strife’ (Ploger, 2004, p. 72). Particularly in protracted and deadly conflicts, the impassioned and partisan aspects are not readily disarmed. From this perspective, it still remains feasible to change from a politics of antagonism, where the opponent is perceived as an enemy to be overpowered, to a politics of agonism, where the opponent is perceived as an adversary to be contested with, within a mutual acknowledgement of the right to differ. Thus, Mouffe (2000, p. 15) notes that ‘an important difference with the model of “deliberative democracy”, is that for “agonistic pluralism”, the prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions from the sphere of the public,

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in order to render a rational consensus possible, but to mobilise those passions towards democratic designs’. Thus, there is need to acknowledge the scope of the emotional, intuitive and the personal, permitting ‘the whole person to be present in negotiations and deliberations’ (Sandercock, 2000, p. 26). In similar vein, Gunder (2003) applauds the virtues of ‘passionate planning’. In this perspective, the disharmonies of rival ideas and their forthright expression are an immutable feature of an unrepressed pluralist polity. In the collision of passion and power, particular struggles will yield hegemonic outcomes reflective of the power relations, and will be invariably exclusive of some social interest. In short, the agreeability underpinning ‘collaborative’ decisionmaking presumes an unrealistic tractability in a discordant world where the gravitational pull is toward more combative contest. By contrast, it is argued that agonistic planning accepts the reality that outcomes of engagement may not be always consensual, totally inclusive, or prone to stability. For advocates of collaborative planning, many of these arguments are taken to caricature their position. While the typical focus of communicative action may be on commonality and accord, proponents insist that this does not entail mollification of conflict through restraining the provocative, and inhibiting outspoken expression of distinction and dissent. In her rebuttal, Innes (2004) has protested that proponents of consensus building have not naively invested faith in its capacity to deliver easy or durable harmony. Rather, often it leads to ‘second order effects such as spin-off partnerships . . . new ideas for use in other situations, . . . new institutional forms of planning and action’ (ibid., pp. 8, 9). For her, the reality of differential power should not dissuade effort at engagement across the disparities. For one thing, in an increasingly fragmented world, the incentive for the powerful to participate and to help achieve wider ‘buy-in’ for proposals lies in the beneficial security and certainty that derives from enhanced legitimacy; the reduced external costs of conflict; and the added value of new forms of network power and synergy that can attend collaborative partnership. Such motivations for the powerful offer leverage to the powerless, but not a panacea for their relative impotence. Honig (1993) and others who have outlined the contours of a contemporary agonistic politics, observe that the indispensable condition is for persuasive discourse that extends beyond ritualistic exchange of well-worn scripts and formulaic positions. It involves trying to get beyond the guarded comment and cagey verbal ‘choreography’ of positional debate to at least make protagonists more informative about the most fractious aspects at stake. And this yields another paradox: sometimes in building the peace, you have to disturb the peace. In this, agonism prefers the edginess of awkward encounter to the expedience of editing the contentious. Importantly, such argumentation within a forthright dialogic process acknowledges the persistence of dissent and contest. In this uneasy reality, concurrence can be often provisional and tenuous rather than reassuringly consensual and terminal, and the most disquieting divisions may remain intractable despite recurring exertion at

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resolution. Indeed, the multiple meanings and interpretative rivalries of a very diverse world offer a delicate foundation for constructing a solid context of shared norms, values, and perceptions (Mantysalo, 2002), and thus attempts to untangle the fictional and delusional from the factual can be beset by overconcession to relativism. For Connolly (2002, pp. 178–179), the efficacy of an agonist approach derives from its discomforting challenge to presumptive articles of faith, its acknowledgement of the contestability and fallibility of all ‘truths’, and the related vitality and volatility of its processes. This is apparent in the way the ambiguity of identity belies standard notions about social normality and unity. For him, identity formation involves an inherent agonistic dimension since it can be understood totally only in reference to that which it resists: An antagonism in which each aims initially at conquest or conversion of the other can now . . . . become an agonism in which each treats the other as crucial to itself in the strife and interdependence of identity/difference . . . . Sometimes one shows respect for another by confronting him with alternative interpretations of himself, sometimes by just letting him be, sometimes by respecting her as the indispensable adversary whose contending identity gives definition to contingencies in one’s own way of being. But in this agonistic approach to engagement, conflicting contentions have to compete to be compelling; and the dialogic process is itself transformative for participant relations, creating a ’sensing together’ rather than the conventional consensus, whereby debilitating antagonism can be re-fashioned into a more constructive encounter (Hillier, 2002, p. 289). Optimally, such processes can help to create relational empathy and some mutual meanings (Stewart and Thomas, 1995) without pretence about the quarrel’s complete dissolution. Within this ontology, there is recognition that knowledge is always partial, and indeed sometimes partisan, and that the pursuit of multi-perspective ‘truth’ is more about patient mapping through pathways than soft landing on a pre-determined destination. Since, unlike the typical paradigm of the ‘good’ deliberative democracy, agonism does not regard consensus as a regulative frame (Schaap, 2006) or stability as the normative state, it can better accommodate the protracted disarray that stems from disputed knowledge, multiple intelligence, proto-assumption and diverse perspective among interlocutors. As noted by Deveaux (2000), such a predicament is intrinsic in struggles around identity and difference that engender disparate conceptions of ‘the good’, and as Murtagh (2004) illustrates, are especially manifest when the task of creating place in contested territory confronts emotive attachment to ethnic space. By contrast, Habermasian inter-subjective communication, while repudiating many of the universalities that relate to totalising metanarratives, is still

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said to be tied to rational mutual awareness, and a normative take about the virtue and viability of consensus. Articulated through a proceduralist and testable rationalistic argumentation, this approach is widely taken to commend the cognitive and communicative power of the shared search for truth through reflexive and reciprocal debate. Herein lies a central paradox of this approach. The public sphere for this debate and deliberation is meant to be inclusive. Yet, since it is also predicated upon a competency for detached, disinterested, and public-spirited exchange, an impartial articulation that is not within everyone’s gift, it is intrinsically exclusive. However, this reading is one refuted as inaccurate by Habermas himself, who seems to see idealised linguistically-based understanding to be merely a channel for creating dialogic space that accommodates diverse voices, and thereby more difference and contradiction (1992, p. 140): ‘. . .linguistically attained consensus does not eradicate from the accord the differences in speaker perspectives but rather presupposes them as ineliminable . . . . The more abstract the agreements become, the more diverse the disagreements with which we can non-violently live.’ Despite his own rejection of a rationalist utopian worldview, his model of communicative action is often taken as one designed for consensus building, which from an agonistic standpoint can be a politically convenient contrivance for evasion when addressing contentious issues. For instance, it has been suggested that in the realpolitik, planners are expected to pursue ‘a consensus strategy [because it] is a way of avoiding turning questions of interests, representation, justice or power into political questions and community controversies . . . Consensus steering can thus be seen as a way of ignoring antagonism or suppressing strife, because this form of governance prevents public disputes from unfolding and becoming important in planning politics’ (Ploger, 2004, p. 78–79). While agonistic planning is not about abandoning the pursuit of consensus, it sees that ambition as secondary to the aim of at once fostering the optimum ventilation of a much differentiated plurality, and, at the same time, accepting the possibility of irreconcilable incompatibility. Thus, the quest for concurrence should not conceal the contestatory and combative character of planning politics, in which stubborn dispute about strategic spatial and resource distribution abounds. An agonistic planning approach offers multiple forms of communication and transaction, not just those expressed in the formal, dispassionate, disembodied speech privileged by deliberative democrats. But such criticism should not obscure the appreciable benefits of collaborative planning: its focus on sustainable and equitable development; its contribution to deepening representative democracy with more participative decisionmaking; its recognition that increased social diversity should be accommodated in a new pluralist politics; and the principle that divergent allegiances, however staunchly held, should be a challenge for conciliation rather than a pretext for violent conflict. Nevertheless, such benign intent for a more animated civic solidarity is based on suppositions that are hard to confirm

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empirically, including: adequate civic capacity to bear the inclusivity of an informed public; the trump card of rationality in contest adjudication; and the compliance of the privileged as regards participation in transparent discourses, when more unobtrusive avenues to decision-makers are accessible. Indeed, what the case studies here demonstrate is the modest power of rationality when confronted with the immodest rationale of power. In an attempt to achieve some synthesis between agonists and deliberative democrats, Dryzek (2005, p. 220) first admits the dilemma of crafting conditions for trustful and reasonable discourse amid incompatible claims of identity, where it appears that one identity can be authenticated mainly by the subjugation of another. He wonders how the necessary reciprocity is to emerge in either approach. In the agonistic process ‘the outcome is not agreement but rather relationships that combine continued contestation with deep respect for the adversary. . .’ While conceding that such engagement across contesting identities is more amenable to the robust confrontation that attends such rivalry, he appreciates that it carries its own risks. For instance, if sensitive contentions are underscored in such forthright clashes, the quarrel may be inflamed or congealed, and persistent collision on these terms may at worst generate disintegration, and at best yield impasse. Moreover, the indecision and continued exchange implied in the latter suggests pessimism about resolving deep difference that may be selffulfilling. Conversely, deliberative discourse that is cramped by dispassionate expression or rationalistic ontology, may evade rather than encounter the contrarian and disputatious. Significantly, Drysek reminds us that not all altercations among protagonists in a deeply divided society need to be toxic, and that a more textured appraisal of the codes and postures in such social relations can help mitigate their more lethal potential. Specific suggestions are advanced to optimise productive outcomes: ‘engagement is less likely to end in hostility if the focus is on specific needs. . .’ (p. 225); and ‘deliberative rituals and indirect communication (as opposed to confrontation) also have roles to play in reconstructing relationships’ (p. 225), for example, providing opportunity for small talk between partisans over a meal with no explicit reference to their main dispute. Nevertheless, he does query some standard consensual models for redressing conflict, such as consociational arrangements, since these are often derived from agreement among ethnic leaderships for macro coalitions among the blocs, within a framework for segmental autonomy, mutual vetoes, and proportionality. Instead of a ‘shared’ society, they tend to offer a ‘shared out’ society, whereby spheres of influence are marked in a balkanised carve up of respective ‘sovereignties’. Such ’analgesic’ accords can smother dissent from those outside the fold and solidify the sectarian cleavages. His alternative modus operandi for planners and public officials is their facilitation of a discursive democracy that is founded on an autonomous public domain and given to copious discourses that generate inventive alternatives, induce

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critical reflection, are non-coercive, and are capable of connecting distinctive experiences and epistemologies with more universal principles and themes. Elsewhere, Drysek (2002, p. 3) disavows the idea that deliberative democracy as a form of reflective communication in which participants are open to non-coercive persuasion is very different to more agonistic approaches. He resolves the difference by employing the term discursive democracy, which ‘should be pluralistic in embracing the necessity to communicate across difference without erasing difference, reflexive in its questioning orientation to established traditions. . .’ The important emphasis is on ‘oppositional civil society and public spheres as sources of democratic critique and renewal’ (p. 4). In similar vein, Martin (2005, p. 367) has been interested in a ‘theoretical middle ground between a Habermassian consensual intersubjectivity and postmodern agonistic subjectivity’. Rooted in a disposition to regard consensus as a natural outcome of rationality, the former does not do justice to ‘the irreducible centrality of dissent’ (p. 365). But the latter does not sufficiently acknowledge that engagement can embody both rationality and other forms of communication such as rhetoric, polemic, and narrative. What really matters beyond the labels of deliberation and agonism is whether exchange precludes the dissentient or whether it offers instead multiple perspectives and exposure of under-valued positions. Thus, for Martin, some of the dichotomous debate between the two approaches is spurious. The desired composite is for ‘. . .a democratic practice between consensus and conflict: a never-ending, inclusive, multi-faceted contest of discourses—of publics, counterpublics, and public opinions—producing both generally irreducible differences and particular shared discourses’ (p. 386). This is similar to the argument of Young (1996, p. 120). In her critique of the standard deliberative approach, she notes that: Deliberative theorists . . . . tend inappropriately to assume that processes of discussion that aim to reach understanding must either begin with shared understandings or take a common good as their goal. She advocates a more open communicative process whereby participants can ‘transcend and transform’ their initial positions by acknowledging both cultural differentiation and diverse forms of communication in addition to reasoned argument. For her, its efficacy rests on the extent to which: (1) encounters with difference clarify for participants the partiality of their position and perspective; (2) such engagement induces participants to translate expression of self-interest into a more convincing appeal based on principles such as equity; and (3) the penetrative probing adds value to the total sum of social knowledge in the dispute. But, in arbitrating the relative merit of deliberative and agonistic approaches for deep division, it is instructive to turn to the literature of conflict resolution.

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In a cogent summary of three main stages in dealing with protracted and deadly conflict, Ramsbotham et al., (2005) identify the following: (1) Interactive conflict resolution: this can involve a partisan and adversarial espousal of mutually exclusive positions. Marked by animosity and suspicion, the virulent exchanges are typically oppositional and dichotomous: right and wrong; us and them; either/or. While trying to keep claim and counter-claim at the level of verifiable empiricism, the main role of the facilitator is to expose the mutual detriment of this sterile script. (2) Dialogic conflict resolution: this is designed to move away from the preponderance of dispute and prejudice towards a comprehension of the history, culture and case of the other side. This involves interlocutors traversing from familiar to strange terrain. As a reflexive exchange that is both cognitive and affective, it should move from simple receptivity to a formative relational empathy. Building trust and openness, this process should then facilitate a mutual hermeneutics that goes beyond the judgemental toward an appreciation of the feelings if not the claims of the other. (3) Discursive conflict transformation: this is concerned to unveil the flaws and inconsistencies in the divisive discourses that enkindle violence so as to engender an integrative mode of engagement that re-conceptualises the conflict as a mutual problem. Such conversion should then provide the basis for mining below the exterior contest to the more subterranean interests that may offer the prospect of shared horizons, and problem solving through principled and creative negotiation. This approach is associated with an epistemology rooted in critical theory. Conventional wisdoms are subjected to re-appraisal in ways that expose common sense understandings of key positions as ideological rather than worthy of automatic endorsement on their own terms. As elaborated by Ramsbotham et al. (2005, p. 296), such discourse analysis pursues a transformative re-think beyond the ‘normal’ rational bargaining, or communicative problem solving or institutional development found in other approaches to peace-building. As such, it is trying to highlight: . . . .the embedded symbolic or representative orders, linked to differential access to resources, of which specific conflicts are taken to be a manifestation. Positivist or cognitivist assumptions about language as a transparent medium are seen to ignore the central role that language plays in the reproduction of the structures of domination and exclusion that generate and perpetuate violence. Thus, while the adversarial and dialogic processes may be useful as stepping stones, it is this more radical discursive approach—that many advocates openly associate with Habermas—which is said to be demanded for more

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fundamental and sustainable change. Importantly, this involves acceptance that there is no privileged truth, however hegemonic, but rather rival ontology and epistemology to be contested. But the rational bias of this approach is again apparent. As noted by Avruch (1998), in such processes, feelings and attitudes may be permitted ventilation, but only in order to get past the positional to reveal the more hidden logical interests around which the conflict’s resolution must ultimately centre. Instead, he stresses the salience of culture in conflict resolution, while still problematising the concept and its multiple meanings. In this, he distinguishes between a foundational generic culture that relates to universal attributes of human nature, and local culture that relates to the variability and particularism associated with diversity. This local culture is socially created and permeable rather than objectified as stable, homogeneous, consistent, and fixed to definite social boundary. Influencing both social and cognitive processing, it offers a lens through which is refracted perceived verity and valence. Developing Avruch’s (1998) work slightly, we can identify six common conceptual flaws about culture that impair analysis of its links to conflict: first, it is misconceived in narrow terms as habitual or socially acceptable conduct; second, that each individual is attached to, and partly formed by, only one culture; third, that a culture has both uniform composition, and consistent distribution within a group; fourth, that culture is ahistorical and unaffected by time; fifth, that it can be materialised as an independent agent outside of human intervention; and finally, that inter- and intra-cultural variation is often of modest consequence. Contrary to such limited appreciation, culture matters a great deal, including its relationship to rationality. Thus, the same situation can evoke varied phenomenological construal, demonstrating that we do not all reason the same. Culturally conditioned presuppositions and interpretative frames produce different mindsets that in turn pose problems in attaining shared definition of social situations. From a western tradition of social science, ‘our embedded rationality requires that we construct simplified models of complex reality in order to explain things. . . . We normally have little tolerance for the confusion of aggregate, mixed-up, unsorted, undifferentiated, unpredictable, and random data. We naturally move quickly to sort, order, and predict simplified patterns from the chaos of our daily experiences’ (Pedersen, 2006, p. 657). But conflict cannot be understood fully through a universal toolkit of analytical techniques. For instance, the approach to conflict resolution by Burton (1987) is rooted in the notion of universal needs, akin to the Maslow (1970) theory of basic human needs of survival, security, identity, recognition, and control. Such generalised paradigms underrate the significance of cultural relativism. As noted by Vayrynen (2001, p. 4): Conflicts are cultural events, evolving within frameworks of cultural norms and values which condition what is worth fighting for, what is the

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normal way to fight, what warrants conflictual action and what kinds of solutions are acceptable. In this regard, the agonist critique of that part of Habermassian deliberation that insists ideas should hold intrinsic merit without the surplus support of impassioned presentation or affectation can itself ignore the way candid expression can be a cultural issue. For instance, one type of Asian approach to conflict—nemawashi—prefers the ambiguity of an oblique and inexact exchange that affords scope for elasticity without any party losing face. While the contextual and situational are more crucial to some cultural groups than others, Markus and Lin (1999, p. 328) remind us that: What is invisible, taken for granted, or discounted in the analysis of behaviour in one cultural context may be focal and objectified in another. In particular, the analysis of conflict in cultural contexts other than those of the European American mainstream reveals the importance of an array of social and relational concepts such as face, honor, respect, sympathy, forgiveness, and interpersonal harmony. But such cultural focus does not necessarily imply the insolvency of Habermassian approaches. For one thing, Vayrynen acknowledges that there are different kinds of rationality. For instance, so-called common sense may not be so common. An instrumentalist rationality that emphazises a calculus about maximum utility for the parties concerned may underplay the cultural and emotive forces that prefer a ‘scorched earth’ solution over one that offers material gain. On the other hand, a discursive rationality may be able to cope with the contextual implications of cultural difference. In short, there are reasonable routes in the navigation of even profound inter-cultural sensitivities. To relate this back to the reservations held by agonists about the limits of the rational, it is arguable that the cultural and rational are not intrinsically at odds. People with deep cultural antagonism may still be open to persuasion through reasoned argument. But this is not the full extent of agonist misgiving. There is the deeper concern about the way many aspects of conflict—for instance, the chance, incongruity, futility—are not reducible to logical explanation. Moreover, there is the formidable context of the ‘all or nothing’ issue of sovereignty, where contending claims are mutually exclusive. The struggle for conflict resolution in such quandary is how to achieve a more conditional definition of sovereignty, when protagonists favour the more absolutist language of invariance and indivisibility. It is in these deadly intractable conflicts that the agonist disposition may have more traction than the deliberative virtues of impartiality, civility and reciprocity. For instance, it is here that reciprocity may be asymmetrical. One side may have to show readiness to alter assumptions and shibboleths before it can expect the

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other side to emulate. Furthermore, the agonist emphasis on immanence— the world of becoming rather than being—may open agendas to fresh thinking and breakthrough. Crucial here is the recognition that each side starts with a conviction of its own integrity. Thus, the summons to change for each is not about becoming like the other, but rather about becoming more like its own assumed virtue (Valentine, 2009). In summary here, it can be noted that there has been a prolonged dispute about how best to address conflictive relations—between deliberative processes of Habermassian communicative rationality, and a more empowered grassroots participation based on an agonistic pluralism, associated with Mouffe (2000). Succinctly expressing the difference between both, Beaumont and Loopmans (2008, p. 98), remark: The Habermassian ‘ideal speech act’, one that adopts universal and pragmatic linguistics in a way that aims to transcend specific contexts, is for her grounded on an outmoded utopian and authoritarian position that combines rationalism and universalism with a modernist philosophical creed. Only an irrationalist position sensitive to emotions and passions, which denies context transcendence, stresses decentred social identities and rejects a final reconciliation of values and truth claims in a conflictive polity can represent a truly radical and plural democracy. In this dispute, three central dilemmas persist. First, how much can be conceded to cultural relativism, anti-essentialism and contextualism, which disclaim the idea of universal truth and reality, while searching for normative meaning and value beyond the very particularistic? Second, how far can a disembodied rationalism be refuted in accommodating passion and emotion, while reaching for a common language and communicative ethics to foster guileless dialogue, inter-subjectivity and mutual empathy across deep divides? Third, how far can pluralist engagement around contest take effect when there are significant power differentials among protagonists? These questions will be re-visited in the conclusion. But here it can be re-stated that whatever particular form is adopted, urban planning and policy have to be part of the process. However, planning and policy have to address the many ways conflict—the reality and image of political instability and violence—can hamper effective development, and produce economic fall-out like high unemployment, which if concentrated on one side of a divided community can further feed political grievance. Even in areas coming out of acute conflict, development has to occur for a considerable period in a context of low-intensity violence. But, places of conflict are not cocooned from the world, and that world now operates in an increasingly competitive way. So, this raises the question of how planning can be part of a collaborative process that addresses the difficulty of development amid division.

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Development and division Clearly there is a crucial relationship between economic competitiveness and socio-political structures. For instance, in places of deep historical ethnonationalist contest, there is a connection between the area’s underdevelopment and the pre-eminent role of ethnically grounded social capital over civically grounded social capital. Simply stated, the economic virtues attributed to institutional thickness can be compromised when social structures are deformed by deep division. Yet, even areas locked in persistent conflict cannot totally escape the ramifications of the competitiveness agenda, which now represents a core policy framework almost everywhere. For one thing, there is the impact of globalisation on small, open economies, including the emergence of supraterritoriality spaces, global oligopolies, and transnational corporate networks. In addition, there is likely decreasing subsidy support for such regions, as their traditional sponsors come under increasing fiscal pressures. A usual feature of the weak economic performance that can attend acutely divided city-regions is the corollary of heavy public expenditure dependence. Whatever its desirability, the long-term feasibility of this arrangement is very fraught. For example, Northern Ireland has benefitted from subsidies from the UK, the European Union and the US. In the case of the UK, there is a perceived imperative to trim public spending, and in the case of the EU, its Structural Fund programmes are likely to be more selective with the vulnerabilities of the Euro-zone, and shifted east with the recent expansion of the Union. Similarly, places like Israel cannot indefinitely rely on the largesse of the United States, though its geo-political significance gives it greater leverage in this regard, compared with other places like Northern Ireland. In any case, such largesse can give rise to a grant culture, whereby substantial public and private energy is devoted to chasing the latest source of external funding, a diversion from the pursuit of sustainable enterprise formation, underpinned by strategic and long-term investment in research and development. Here, Northern Ireland offers a warning. Within its grant culture, a pervasive attitude of me tooism can further blight development effort. The sight of a marina or heritage centre in one part of the region can prompt another locality to claim its entitlement to a similar investment. In a region marked by socio-sectarian spatial segregation, this proliferation of local economic development and local peace and reconciliation strategies has tended to diffuse a strategic regional approach rather than enrich a focused region-wide agenda. Faced with this predicament, regions, burdened with a legacy of deeplyembedded division that has impeded development, confront a political dilemma. On the one hand, institutions created as part of any peace process need to be inclusive. By the same token, they are likely to contain parties with remarkably different approaches to economic and social questions. Obtaining a consensus about a programme of government and development that is not

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both fragile and the lowest common denominator is a formidable undertaking. Yet, innovative and dynamic development demands long-term strategies that are rooted in stable, yet entrepreneurial, governance. In addressing this dilemma, it is worth remembering that competitiveness is not reducible to output per head of population. Rather, a textured understanding of the concept allows for its integration with other dimensions such as networking, social capital and inclusive government institutions. Thus, social cohesion and reconciliation can be seen to be imperatives for a sustainable way forward, not as optional extras. Of course, many untested claims have been advanced about the symbiotic relationship between durable conflict and local development. For example: .

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The economy has been impaired by the division and disruption. If these end, and thereby give rise to an improved international image and goodwill, and the diversion of resources into improved social and human capital, a repressed economy will be liberated for massive growth. If such a take-off occurs, the equitable distribution of its benefits and peace dividend can accord the poorest communities a greater stake in society, thus diverting their otherwise disaffected youth from the appeal of violent paramilitarism or gangs. More reliance on well-educated human capital to place the area at the leading edge of high-tech and high value-added production can elevate the significance of education, itself an important pathway out of old ideas and shibboleths. A new focus away from political division towards the common pursuit of development will, in itself, bind the political factions into a new unity, or at least greater attention to the solution of economic and social ills will organically reshape politics along a more conventional left-right axis that over time dilutes the intensity of ethnic or ethno-nationalist contention; while finally, Within a more globalised world and its supra-state economic formations, we are in a more post-nationalist era, which renders the old contours of conflicts around identity and belonging less credible and engrossing.

Whatever of the accuracy of these propositions, some people hold to the faith that a new development agenda that invites high levels of civic participation and evokes a sense that the future belongs to those with the inventiveness to create it, can generate a positive energy to challenge the negative gloom of immutable division. This tends to assume that the very process of seeking an overarching and integrated schema for a city-region can motivate protagonists to perceive the cost of being in competition with each other, rather than collaborating within an agreed common planning and development agenda that works to their mutual benefit. However, such optimism underplays the problem of agreeing a strategic plan in a contested city/region, where bitter

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dispute about the equity of previous development plans impacts on contemporary discourse. Nevertheless, integrated approaches to development that tie together the social, economic, environmental, and cultural dimensions, reinforce the imperative for partnership both horizontally in terms of the collaboration of public and private sector agencies and vertically through the significant involvement of the community. On the other hand, the fragmented political loyalties that often accompany deeply divided societies can often imply that any settlement towards peaceful development demands multiple government positions to be distributed among the warring factions to ensure optimum inclusion. Such arrangements, designed primarily to permit multiple-party power sharing rather than the most efficient functionality of governance, can produce a profusion of departments that in turn can inhibit, rather than facilitate, joined-up government. The difficulties particularly associated with acute conflict are complemented by more general problems for development agendas in the contemporary world. For instance, it can be argued that the impulses of polity and economy are pulling in different directions in the new global age. In economics, the drive is to centralise within the security and scale of large blocs like the European Union and the North American Free Trade Association. Yet, in politics, the talk is of subsidiarity, and the drive is to decentralise, bringing government closer to the people in an effort to revitalise political legitimacy. In politics, the pressure for greater democratization and inclusion is faced with an economics that involves the magnification of transnational corporate and financial power, producing an expanded international arena for super-exploitation and unsustainable growth in a world where the ubiquitous market influences not only the economy, but also can subvert the democratic voice. For some, this exemplifies the twilight of sovereignty (Wriston, 1992), while others continue to attribute significant power to the national state amid a more global economy (Weiss, 1998). The view expressed in this book is one that acknowledges the universal reach of market determinants such as competitiveness, while affirming the continued efficacy of local action in a world that is not so determinist and predictable. The state is changed, but not erased (Cox, 1997). Thus, universal processes are mediated in particular ways that allow for historic specificity and contingency of space. Agency as well as structure remains relevant. However, this interplay of the local and global—glocalisation—has to acknowledge that local action is more problematic, requires new formulation, can no longer operate within the pretence of unconstrained national autonomy, but nevertheless remains potentially significant in shaping social outcome. The architecture of this new political economy is evolving, not fixed, and people can still make a difference (Camilleri and Falk, 1992). In such reconfiguration, the shift of public power both downwards and upwards can be under-pinned by the principle of subsidiarity. However, its

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effective operation relies on a fundamental challenge to the orthodoxy of hierarchical, bureaucratic, and technocratic administration systems. Partly, this demands a retreat from the culture of managerialism to embrace the culture of public entrepreneurialism. Partly, it demands new civic infrastructure that nurtures a political imagination beyond single-issue campaigns, and the capacity for sustained and strategic civic involvement at the local and regional level. Such objectives are easier to exhort than to deliver. This is where institutions of governance can make the difference. Leadership in divided societies can don an ethnic or civic mantle. Ethnic leadership addresses, and professes for, its own tribe, and its achievements are assessed at least in part by the reluctant concessions of its opponents. By contrast, civic leadership transcends the appeal of the partisan, constructing cross-community partnerships and networks that yield added value for all. In the wider debate about governance, the basis for renewal has been characterised as a shift from providing to enabling; from representation to participation; from producer to client focus; from exclusive technocratic expertise to incorporation of local knowledge; and from departmental silos to integrated cooperation. Following attempts in the 1980s across many parts of the world to marketise some public services, the more recent period may be seeing the shift from the colonisation of the public realm by private sector values to a greater inter-sectoral cross-fertilisation of ideas. Even where this is happening, the jury is out as to the motivation behind this pluralism, whether it is attributable to the downsizing of the state under fiscal stress, or whether it augurs a genuine redefinition of governance, enfranchising active citizenship and civic leadership (Cerny, 1990). Assuming the more positive potential, the diverse partnerships emerging in this new landscape of governance offer more inclusive scope for a wide set of stakeholders to collaborate for mutual benefit. Entailing a protracted process of building capacities and relationships, this inter-disciplinary and multiagency approach allows for the development of shared strategic visions, behind which structured collaboration can evolve. Of course, even in this favourable scenario for renewed democracy, tensions remain, for instance between the fragmentation that derives from the decomposition into slimmer administrative units and the compelling case for more joined up government. Specifically, in places of great conflict, peace is merely a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for regeneration. Rather, the task confronting everywhere in this increasingly interpenetrating world is to become less selfobsessed and parochial, to adapt eclectically good practice in governance and development from elsewhere, but to customise and democratise it in order to build a genuine stakeholder society. To optimise this potential in conflict-ridden contexts, four components need to be considered:

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The protagonists need to find a working accommodation within the whole of civic society rather than exclusively within the formal political arena. Peace can be negotiated at the t