To whom does geography owe a future? Lessons from urban studies

Abstract

The stresses of the neoliberal academy relating to the precaritisation of labour and metricisation of research can often make it difficult in the present to envision a future of geographical thought and praxis which is capable of addressing the past and present epistemic injustices which human geography has inherited. Within the field of urban studies, the discourse of ‘urban futures’ has often been used to promise a more just and efficient future. This commentary takes the often-evoked notion of an urban future and considers how recent research in urban studies has sought to deconstruct the notion of the ‘urban’ in order to illustrate the complex and antagonistic present underlying such futures. Here urban studies has an analogous lesson for human geography more generally. Disaggregating the identity of ‘geographer’ from academic status and training can open up new practices for the co-production of knowledge beyond professional boundaries, which themselves can also aid in the creation of more just urban futures.

Introduction

Considering the possible futures of human geography in the twenty-first century, my initial response was to ask: what future? What kind of future can geographers expect, and to whom does geography owe a future? In thinking through these questions, I want to draw upon my own experience of investigating (through research) and reproducing (through teaching) a future urban geography in order to consider what human geography in general can learn from the praxis and theory of urban studies, and how these same methods can foster more just urban futures. The future which human geography owes to its subjects and practitioners requires a deprofessionalised and democratised practice of knowledge co-production.

While going through doctoral training in human geography in the UK, it has become something of a cliché to view the academy in general (and the student's place within it) as something with a limited or rapidly foreclosed future. Critical social sciences institutions in the Global North typically face insidious marketisation (Hall, 2015), metricisation of research (Zielke et al., 2023), and casualisation of labour (Maddrell et al., 2019). Many of these threats are particularly acute in relation to the apparently global scope of human geography, as geographers question the norms of international fieldwork (Williams and Love, 2022) as well as how borders, funding restrictions, and hegemonic (Anglocentric) citational politics have reproduced longstanding inequalities in the mobility of academic knowledge (Bhan, 2019; Ybarra, 2019). Geographers have questioned how academic researchers can disaggregate their work from colonial epistemology which structured the origins of geographical knowledge production (Oswin, 2020) and whether academic geography has the tools to do so (Esson et al., 2017).

My experience as a student of human geography has been that it is often hard to see a just future research and praxis that would be adequate to the task of addressing the epistemological injustices and institutional threats that we encounter when doing geographical work. Nonetheless, the academic discipline of geography owes a future to students who place their faith in the academy to further their knowledge of the planet and their ability to act. A future is also owed to colleagues and researchers facing precarity, whose uncertain present often forces them to suspend life in anticipation of a deferred future which may never arrive (Hughes, 2021). A future geography is moreover owed to those peoples and places who are made the objects of geographical enquiry; the communities and organisations which grant access and collaboration to geographers, and who entrust geographical methods and analysis with the co-production of knowledge.

A place in the urban future

Coinciding with these concerns about the future of geography, a discourse of ‘urban futures’ has emerged, invoked by entrepreneurs, policy-makers, consultants, and many urban scholars. At a time when it is often easy to succumb to pessimism about the immediate future of academic geography, the distant future of cities is invoked as something more hopeful. The promise of an ‘urban future’ is presented as a pathway to some kind of environmental or social justice which is absent in the present.

The city of Chongqing, in southwest China, where I completed my doctoral fieldwork, is a place which has been imagined as representing several different contradictory futures. In the years after the 2008 financial crisis, it was evoked as an alternative to neoliberal urbanism in the pages of Communist Party journals, as an expanding frontier for accumulation in Anglophone business papers, and as a new experiment in technology, architecture, and city life. The rapid expansion of the urban form and its vertical density gave rise to Orientalist discourses of a sci-fi and high-tech megacity which supposedly represented the urbanism of a future age (Roast, 2021).

During my fieldwork it was the capacity for geographical knowledge to break down the vision of an urban future, and to expose the half-formed transformations of the present, which offered me a path forwards in my research. Drawn from different contexts to my fieldsite, scholarship on urban political ecology and the ‘city lens’ (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015) aided me in disaggregating the urban processes at work in peri-urban sites of informal farming from the strict rural-urban binary which has predominated in urban theory and Chinese governance. Similarly, work in the tradition of comparative urbanism (Robinson, 2016) gave me insights into how new urban futures were being created at these peripheral sites of transformation rather than in the modern core. Other examples of recent urban geographical research provided a vision for how the co-production of knowledge could be embedded into urban knowledge and planning through close ethnographic work with communities involved in the composition of new urban futures from the ground up (Silver, 2014).

All of which is to say, the insights of urban studies provided me with the standpoint as a doctoral researcher that enabled me to disaggregate the many elements which went into composing an urban future and to illuminate the connections and conflicts underpinning them. With this in mind, we can consider how the insights of urban studies might help construct a more sustainable geographical thought and praxis and a more just urban future.

What a future geography can learn from urban studies

I want to suggest that urban studies is a field in which a more concretely hopeful future is being constructed by present geographical practice, and that this can be explained by way of analogy with recent critiques of the concept of the ‘urban’ itself. The examples of urban research mentioned above attempt to dissolve a concept of the urban derived from a select few sites in the Global North that focus on a narrow typology of forms of cityness based upon the locational (core vs periphery), the topological (vertical vs horizontal), the legal (planned vs informal), and the teleological (modernity vs development). The diversification of the languages through which geographical knowledge is produced and disseminated in order to expand the vocabulary of urban typologies (Ren, 2022; Zhao, 2020) and the critical expansion of the range of sites and institutions in which geography is practiced away from the paradigmatic locations favoured by established networks of academic production (Shin, 2021) are key areas of concern. Both of these tactics of contemporary urban studies show how forms of knowledge and practice previously excluded from academic geography can be incorporated, represented, and empowered in the production of knowledge (Bhan, 2019; Lawhon and Truelove, 2020).

These tactics also represent different attempts to dismantle the boundaries of what we mean by ‘the urban’ in so far as they question why certain forms of urbanism have been privileged in the study of human settlements, and what new frontiers of knowledge can be opened up by transcending these assumptions. These tactics can be instructive for the broader future of geography. There is much that geography in general can learn from urban studies in order to think through the increasingly marketised, precaritised, and gamified nature of the academy. Just as contemporary urban studies has sought to deconstruct and transform the category of the urban, so we should think about how the category of geographer can be transformed to produce new forms of knowledge production that go beyond formal academic and professional definitions.

Going beyond these definitions would mean disaggregating the identity of ‘geographer’ from the hierarchies and institutions of knowledge which have accrued around it. This would be to reappropriate the idea of being a geographer beyond association with a particular institutional status tied to higher education. There are many trained geographers currently excluded from institutional status by the failures of the academic job market, and many more people engaged in knowing and writing about the human environment who are doing geography every day without formal training. Contemporary research has examples of how geography can be practiced through the co-production of knowledge beyond the bounds of professionalisation, in alignment with other ways of mapping and transforming space (Maharawal and McElroy, 2018). Such knowledge can only be produced through diversified languages and sites of research, in collaboration with the residents who are living through the arrival of an urban future, but also in solidarity with growing numbers of educators and researchers denied a future within formal academia.