Table Of ContentROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:
URBAN PLANNING
Volume 7
URBANIZATION AND
URBAN PLANNING
IN CAPITALIST SOCIETY
URBANIZATION AND
URBAN PLANNING
IN CAPITALIST SOCIETY
Edited by
MICHAEL DEAR AND ALLEN J. SCOTT
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Preface to the 2018 Edition
Towards a New Era of Urbanization
and Planning
Since this book was first published, cities have proliferated and grown with
astonishing rapidity, and massive city-regions have emerged all over the
world. These processes have been underpinned by intensifying economic glo-
balization and the steady integration of major cities into far-flung networks of
cooperation and competition. Urban planning and policy concerns have
shifted dramatically from their former preoccupation with welfare and redis-
tribution, and are increasingly deployed as instruments for promoting com-
petitiveness, entrepreneurial effort, and economic development in a world of
deepening market relationships. Capitalism too, is adjusting in remarkable
ways when compared with the earlier fordist regime of accumulation that was
a major point of reference for a great many of the book's contributors.
In the twenty-first century, the technological bases of capitalism are
increasingly dependent on digital technologies of computation, information
storage, and communication, with major consequences for urban develop-
ment. In this context, human capital needs are increasingly focused on a wid-
ening diversity of cognitive and cultural skills. The blue-collar/white-collar
division of labor that was such an important feature of fordist metropolitan
development is being replaced by a re-stratification of urban society into a
privileged upper tier of formally-qualified workers, and a tier of low-wage
service workers often composed of migrants from more economically mar-
ginal areas. Women account for a dramatically rising percentage of the urban
labor force, leading to major shifts in both employment structures and the
character of residential space. As a consequence of these and other factors,
urban society virtually everywhere is becoming more and more bifurcated in
terms of social class and markedly more diverse in terms of the racial, ethnic,
and gender relationships inscribed on the urban landscape.
This developmental pathway has further generated new rounds of contra-
dictions and problems that threaten to engulf the social order, including global
warming and a deepening environmental crisis. It has also exacerbated and
intensified underlying structural problems such as persistent inequality and
poverty, and has elicited perverse forms of social control as exemplified by
record levels of incarceration that disproportionately impact minority
populations.
At the same time, urban theory has continued to mutate in a number of dif-
ferent directions. One notable contemporary line of debate revolves around
differences and similarities within the expanding planetary cohort of cities
that extends across both the Global North and the Global South. For simplici-
ty's sake, we may characterize the ensuing dilemma in this way: Is it possible
to advance a unified concept of the urban that is relevant to all cases in all
parts of the world, or must different concepts be developed by reference to
different geographical provinces, each with its own peculiar version of an
urbanization process? This question goes to the heart of urban analysis and
theory in the twenty-first century. Whatever the eventual outcome of this
debate, it has enormous ramifications not only for our understanding of capi-
talist urban dynamics but also for the potential and practice of urban politics
and planning.
In spite of these changes in the material and cognitive conditions of urban
life, the central themes of this book – commodity production, social reproduc-
tion, and planning in capitalist cities – remain as pertinent today as when they
first appeared. Their scholarly value resides not only in their detailed focus on
how things were in the particular historical episode of fordism, but also in
their function as pointers to a present-day analytics of urbanization and urban
remediation. In this regard, three overarching arguments in the book must be
emphasized. First, cities are embedded in a wider set of social relationships
that shape the form and character of intra-urban processes. Second, cities in
capitalism are by their nature social constructions that in various ways reflect,
support, and resonate with the dynamics of accumulation. Third, if cities
derive from a set of wider social relationships, they nevertheless are instru-
mental in the reproduction of society as a whole. Taking these arguments
together, we can say that the pressures of accumulation, as expressed in local-
ized systems of production, labor markets, occupational structures, trade, and
all the rest, are fundamental to understanding the fortunes of cities in capital-
ism. Additionally, these same urban-based processes determine the continu-
ing viability of the accumulation process over space and time.
Of course, urbanization always involves much more than the broad logic
of the capitalist economy. Each individual city is also a center of social and
political activities that can only be apprehended in terms of their own specific
and problematical logics, from neighborhood formation and institution-build-
ing to conflicts based on class, race and cultural differences. And once again,
such logics reverberate back onto accumulation processes via their effects on
material urban form and the constitution of the human subject.
Equally important is the book's emphasis on urban planning operations as
reflections of the predicaments and political imperatives that arise as these
complex kinetics play out in urban areas. Urban planning is always situated
within the framework of existing relations of authority and subordination in
capitalist society, and these relations regulate its identity and function. Hence,
Preface
planning cannot be innocently regarded as the identification and mobilization
of "good ideas," or some disembodied "public interest" in abstraction from
real urban conditions. Much of the apparatus of urban planning is posited on
securing the functional capability of cities as centers of accumulation. This is
not to say that creative approaches, innovation, and good design are unrealis-
tic or doomed to failure, but rather to insist on accurate recognition and
proper contextualization of the constraints that urban planning must always
face.
Urban studies nowadays is characterized by an accelerating and widening
flow of research publications, policy briefs, and conference proceedings that
together represent an extraordinary diversity of emphasis and perspective.
This is as it should be, given the essential complexity of cities and their
pivotal role as localized articulations of a globalized capitalism. By providing
an essential foundation for understanding the dynamics of the city in capital-
ism, this book remains a durable and relevant contribution to any understand-
ing of the urban question today.
Michael Dear and Allen J. Scott
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
November 2017
Urbanization and
urban planning in
capitalist society
edited by
Michael Dear
and Allen J. Scott
Methuen: London and New York
