Abstract
Elizabeth Sweet’s book, Disassembled Cities, reflects on urban neoliberal economic, social, and spatial impacts and emerged from a symposium on Cities Across the Globe held in 2013 and matured in subsequent years. The book’s contention is that, as cities are pulled into neoliberal assemblages, local disassembling processes create spaces and societies in constant crisis, and yet, people propose and practice alternatives, reassemble lives, livelihoods, and places. It focuses on “[t]the interrelationship between predatory capitalism’s disassembling dynamics and local efforts to reassemble lives and livelihoods” (p. 5). The focus required “a disassembling of totalizing theories” (p. 6) and the authors work with a “disassembling and assembling” conceptual frame.
The book is composed of fifteen chapters in four parts. Iván Arenas and Elizabeth L. Sweet analyze the themes of each section in a very insightful, theoretically grounded review chapter before the case study chapters. Part I, The Promises and Perils of Urban Theory Under the Shadow of Globalization, is the introduction. Arenas and Sweet explain in chapter 1: Divided cities are manufactured, produced through multiple violent forms of assembling and disassembling, including through the physical and social displacement of marginalized populations by bulldozers but also by laws of eminent domain, redlining, rents and gentrification, economic and social segregation, debt regimes, un- and under-employment, non-livable wages, exclusions from opportunity, and punitive policing practices, among other technologies guided by neoliberal predatory policies. (p. 11)
The neoliberal logic relies on a compact corporate-state network of enduring formation, but composed of moving elements (discourses, practices, ways of thinking, habits of acting) contingently interconnected and weaving in and out of scales, with people participating in both the production of these assemblages and their possible undoings. The book is not a totalitarian, deterministic critique of neoliberalism, however. In chapter 2, for instance, Imeokparia defends the role of the private sector in stimulating property development and investment in local communities and cautions that absent a fierce struggle to transform capitalism, we’d need a political imaginary unified in principle while differing in practice (p. 21).
Part II, Transformation of Self and Space, explores the conversions of subjectivities and places under neoliberalism, offering case studies of youth service provision in the United Kingdom; an “eco-city” project in Lagos, Nigeria; and intersectional, feminist responses to crisis in Barcelona, Spain. The case study of youth service provision presented by McGimpsey and Youdell in chapter 4 focus on “mapping late neoliberal assemblage” in the analysis of youth service provision in the United Kingdom. The authors provide a methodology of “assemblage ethnography,” which accounts for the components of assemblages, the relations between components, the combinations that take place in diverse arrangements, and the assemblages that these interactions produce (p. 40). Of note are the diagrams provided, which are suggestive of movement and transformations in time of dis- and re-assembling processes. This is intriguing and promising, yet underdeveloped and underused. More interpretations of the diagrams offered (and perhaps even application of the heuristic tool to other case studies) would have been helpful.
In chapter 5, Acey analyzes Eko Atlantic, a chic, land reclamation project off the coast of Lagos, Nigeria, as an extreme case of climate adaptation apartheid. This is the largest scale “eco-city” project in Africa, among dozens, leading to disassembling processes akin to greenwashing, green neoliberalism, and green gentrification. The state investment in the project amounts to a war on the poor, instead of a war on poverty. The project is bound to cause more flooding, erosion, and storm surges in unprotected and low-income areas. Yet another iteration of elite capture of formal planning, which continues to create distinctions between the “modern city” and those left out, ongoing since colonial times in Nigeria. As the population of African cities is expected to triple by 2050, paying attention to how these processes of assemblage and disassemblage evolve at the intersections of poverty, sustainability, climate justice, and global capital in the twenty-first century (58–59) is urgent and consequential. Chapter 6 (and others in the book) includes the perspectives of activist scholars “walking the walk.” Valdivia and Ortiz Escalante offer a practical view of disassemblage in the context of their work on Barcelona, Spain, where they show how capitalism linked with patriarchy in disassembling processes destroys social and spatial relations, pushes people to the margins, and produces inequalities to the detriment of people centered policies. In doing so, they uncover the system’s cracks and empower feminist reassembling strategies.
The introduction to Part III, Militarization and the Spectacle of the (In)Security State, discusses how the transformation of the orientation of the state from welfare to security has also radically transformed space, exacerbating urban segregation, criminalizing the poor and disadvantaged, and increasing police and militarized violence. Architecture, urban design, and planning act as disciplinary mechanisms, territorializing divisions. Under this regime, prisons, gated communities, slums, foreclosed homes, and homeless encampments are not exceptional spaces, but the rule. Surveillance, policing, and militarization ensure that the resilience of the poor does not become resistance and the consumptive nature of public life and spaces is preserved. Arenas, reflecting on the context of Oaxaca, Mexico in chapter 8, offers a harsh criticism to the persistent fiction, in his view, of an articulation between democratic politics and public space (p. 84). I myself, among other planning scholars, have been a proponent of such articulation (Irazábal (2008) 2015). Yet, Arenas poignantly asks, “what kernel of truth underlies this articulation and its hold on our imagination of city spaces and democratic political practices? What is at stake if this foundational fiction is disassembled?” (p. 48). This articulation is not given and should not be fetishized, Arenas reminds us, but is only actualized through struggle. Arenas details neoliberal racial practices and the reassembling of commons and community some Oaxacans pursue under and despite those logics. However, resistance is met with further militarization. The criminalization of the poor masks their exploitation for profit through evictions, enclosures, and urban renewal projects. This is a sober invitation “to illuminate how politics and publics are actually articulated (or often disarticulated) in city spaces rather than how we wish then to be. . . . [to] recognize rather than romanticize the limits of these articulations” (p. 99).
Clarno (chapter 9) argues that Israel has created an apartheid regime in Palestine by disassembling it into “100 Palestinian nations” (p. 103) and treats Palestinians as disposable population with differential incorporation into Israel’s apartheid assemblage. Clarno considers this a settler colonial and racial project that incorporates some Palestinians into their own oppression. Perversely, some of the only jobs available to Palestinians are in constructing houses for Jews on Palestinian land or as security guards for Israel. “I hate myself, but I have no choice” said one interviewee (p. 108). Even these job “opportunities” do not exist in Gaza, as the 2021 war demonstrated, “one of the most extreme versions of engineered disposability on earth” (p. 108). Palestinians challenge this regime thought a culture of steadfastness (sumoud) to remain present rather than succumb to displacement and dispossession. Clarno also claims that, at a global scale, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) is a node in a growing assemblage against global, neoliberal apartheid. Betancur and Ortiz Arciniegas (chapter 10) tackle another city model of great visibility from the Global South: Medellin, Colombia, contesting the perception of miraculous recovery and “social urbanism” that prevails in accounts of the city’s recovery, producing a “seductive hypnosis” (p. 126).
Finally, Part IV, Disassembling Democracy and Urban Planning, incisively claims that neoliberal destructive configurations are altering and puzzling our political imagination of democracy, citizenship, and urban planning (p. 141). This part includes case studies from Mumbai, India; Ulan-Ude, Russian Siberia; Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Chicago, USA. Arenas and Sweet wrote the introduction before the pandemic, which has opened a historic opportunity to rekindle our political imagination, for which this book can become an inspiration. In chapter 12, Bedi discusses how in Mumbai women in poor neighborhoods, traditionally thought to be absent from important politics of city making, can be central political figures in negotiating neighborhood-level land use processes, finding brokering power in the disordered urban spaces they live in. In chapter 13, Sweet and Chakars do not limit the analysis of disassembling phenomena to contemporary neoliberal regimes, as most other chapters do. They focus on how the Buryats, a Mongolian indigenous people, have reassembled their identities and practices under three Russian regimes. In chapter 14, Grinberg and Machado evocatively examine the dreams about the future of young people living in Buenos Aires’ slums. Finally, in chapter 15, Córdova and Wilson analyze disassembled neighborhoods in Chicago, with an emphasis on youth joblessness, stressing the need to involve them in designing and implementing solutions.
The book’s “disassembling and assembling” framework will prove particularly productive for urban studies and planning analyses during and after the current pandemic, which has caused, and continues to cause, a dramatic disassembling of urban dynamics across the world and has also opened unprecedented opportunities to reimagine the reassembling that may follow. The book can help raise awareness of current conditions and spark inventive processes for more sustainable and just futures in academic courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels in fields interested in societal and urban studies.
