2011 PROSPECTUS for Masters' Programme in Sustainable Development ('Urban Ecological Security'
| 31 July 2009
Simon Marvin and his associates are taking the urban studies community by storm with their work on splintering urbanisam, networked infrastructures, flow management and now their notion of 'urban ecological security'. AbdouMaliq Simone, renowned cultural theorist and documenter of African urban diversities, cultures and dynamics, wrote to me asking my view, and in particular his discomfort with the 'security' discourse that comes with this new writing. Herewith my response...
Hi, I am afraid they are right - as the ecological challenges mount, cities will be confronted with unbelievably serious threats that will have differential effects on the population. I seem to recall a 1992 movie called Freejack with Mick Jagger where the rich are able to buy the brains of people just before they die so that they can live forever in a dystopian world. Swop brains for 'greentech' and you have the plot that Marvin is trying to grab.
Marvin is on to something, but his mistake is to invoke "security" into the discourse. This creates the wrong impression, and reinforces the technicism that pervades his work. In my view, massive infrastructure investments could reinforce social empowerment if these investments were able to break away from the mezmerising logic of "megaprojects". What the green agenda is able to provide engineers, bureaucrats and bankers is an excuse to invest in megaprojects - these are easy to put together, manage and implement and their "bigness" obliterates the enormous risks. On this see Flyvberg's book on megaprojects as their discursive function, and also the Dag Hammarskold's 2035 scenario that demonstrates how all the big projects to save the planet cause more damage. Marvin is not onto this problem - he is equally mezmerised.
Where there is a connection between all your and the 'green agenda' is that the vast majority of urban struggles are in fact about ecological resources, goods and services - manipulating access to water, sewage, energy (biomass, fossil fuels), land, food. You have for long had a sense of the city as a set of "flows" mediated by the discourses that are conjured up to make sense of the contestations of these flows. You need to broaden out your sense of these flows - my favourite is the charcoal makers destroyed the African hinterland to bring energy to the expanding cities, thus destroy food supplies, water tables, and reinforcing rural-urban migrations. But they are also networks of poor entrepreneurs who used to be able to walk a bag of charcoal from forest to market, then they had to use bikes, now they need trucks, and because they need trucks bigger players become part of the story, and as the price of charcoal goes up, the wastelands left behind trigger new violent land battles - the Rwanda genocide was triggered by tree felling for charcoal, thus denuding the land of biomass, reducing nutrients, dropping food production, intensifying land battles, that then overdetermined existing ethnic conflicts and identities. You can tell similar stories about water - how many actual conflicts in Africa now are about water? Or primary resource flows as the new scramble for Africa brings in the Chinese, Indians, Malaysians, etc.
So back to urban infrastructure: my contention is that that in 15 years we will look back and in answer to the question: what did we invest in to get ourselves out ofthe global economic recession, the answer will be urban infrastructure. The question is: what kind of urban infrastructure? Is there an alterantive agenda that marries empowerment/capability building with infrastructure investments that are technologically configured not to empower bureaucrats who love to control highly centralised infrastructures, but rather to empower communities via decentralised systems that also enhance and replenish eco-systems rather than destroy them.