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Inventions and Interventions: Transforming CitiesAn Introduction
Jenny Robinson Urban Stud 2006 43: 251 DOI: 10.1080/00420980500495812

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Urban Studies, Vol. 43, No. 2, 251 258, February 2006

Inventions and Interventions: Transforming CitiesAn Introduction

Jenny Robinson
[Paper received and in nal form, November 2005]

Cities are dynamic places: their internal complexity and external connections contribute to the on-going transformation of social life and economic activity. Moreover, at times, cities become direct objects for achieving the transformation of urban conditions or of wider political relations. Both inventions, dispersed and often spontaneous, and interventions, focused and usually directed, are constantly changing the nature of urban places. This collection explores the dynamics of urban transformation, attending to both the emergent dynamics of city life which alter the urban experience and more directed interventions attempting to achieve urban change. It does so in the context of a number of cities which face signicant challenges, including rapid political change, social division, economic stagnation, limited state capacity, declining resources and widespread poverty. Even so, the cities explored here also exhibit cultural vitality, economic innovation, social mobility, political ambition and creative policy-making. Their experiences speak to the demands of urban transformation in many different contexts and hopefully contribute to a wider understanding of the processes which might offer hope for the future of cities. In the process of exploring the dynamics of transformation in cities, this Special Issue also contributes to an emerging post-colonial trend in urban studies which sees an increasing

commitment to thinking about cities from a place outside the global core (Harrison, this issue; see also Dick and Rimmer, 1998; King, 1990, 2004; Mabin, 1999; Mbembe and Nuttal, 2004; Robinson, 2002; Myers, 2005). Within urban studies, many cities have been seen through an exceptionalist lens (Gandy, in this issue), marked primarily by their differences from those places which have been more privileged in the development of theories of urbanity. Whether the marker was poverty (Third World cities), political regime (colonial or socialist cities), relative levels of informality, or position within economic structures (developing or underdeveloped cities), these different cities have not gured strongly in understanding cities in general or thinking about what they might become. In reecting on the transformation of cities, through deliberate interventions or dynamic inventiveness, this Special Issue seeks to challenge this state of affairs. This is, in part at least, a necessity because the rapid transformation of urban areas has for some time now been strongly associated with cities usually marginal to broader theoretical initiatives: cities in postsocialist countries, in other contexts of political change, like South America and South Africa, in the rapidly urbanising Asian countries and in the dynamic if predominantly economically declining cities of Africa. In this sense, as the papers explore the inventions and interventions

Jenny Robinson is in the Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK. Fax: 44 1908 654488. E-mail: j.d.robinson@open.ac.uk. The guest editors would like to thank the Geography discipline at the Open University for their nancial support for the seminar where these papers were presented; and Ronan Paddison and Isabel Burnside for their exceptional assistance in the production of this Special Issue. 0042-0980 Print=1360-063X Online=06=020251 8 # 2006 The Editors of Urban Studies DOI: 10.1080=00420980500495812
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that transform cities, they also contribute to the formulation of a post-colonial urban theory, which is eager to engage with the full diversity of urban experiences across the globe. One of the many places where urban transformation has been high on the agenda in recent years is South Africa. A number of the papers in this collection take cities in South Africa as their starting-point, thinking through the experiences of cities like Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, as they theorise urban change. The rst paper in this issue by Boraine et al., provides an overview of urbanisation and urban policy in South Africa since the ending of apartheid. These cities are quickly placed alongside accounts of cities elsewhere. Some of the papers take cities across the African continent (Lagos, Nigeria and Douala, Cameroon) and in Europe (London, UK, and Berlin, Germany) as starting-points for their reections. Together, they press strongly for a new analytical narrative which will bring cities like Berlin and Lagos, London and Johannesburg, together (as Pile, this issue, explores). Our argument is that there is much scope for mutual learning across scholarly divisions which have long kept experiences in poorer cities from informing understandings of cities in wealthier contexts (something which Parnell and Robinson discuss, in this issue; and see Robinson, 2006). Accounts of poorer cities, though, have found themselves enmeshed in powerful, internationally circulating theories, so the experiences of wealthier, Western cities, along with the more general analyses generated in these contexts, remain a sometimes prominent, sometimes more ghostly presence in the analyses of scholars of poorer and more marginal cities. We are not suggesting, then, that entirely novel accounts of cities will necessarily emerge in different contextsindeed, the broader geopolitics of knowledge production in an unevenly globalised world make this unlikely; but the papers in this Special Issue are eager to explore the engagements and critiques which scholarship in these places offers, and to insist that starting somewhere else has the potential to transform urban studies.

Inventive Cities Urban scholars have long been fascinated with the idea that cities are sites of invention from Wirths argument that cities produce a distinctive new way of life, to economists who have suggested that cities can enable innovation and experimentation by rms. But what are the precise mechanisms by which cities support change? In what ways is the urban implicated in social, political and economic transformation? For scholars working in contexts where change has been rapid or dening of an epoch, these questions have come to the fore and inform the analyses offered in this issue. In many ways, transformation is a generalised condition of city life, part of the basic circumstances of urban existence. On the one hand, the particular spatial form of the city can establish the potential for transformation; and on the other, the ways in which the city is experienced and used as a space open up the opportunity for social relations to change, even as the physical form of the city might remain constant. First, then, we suggest that the spatiality of the city provides a basis for appreciating the city as a distinctive site of transformation. Even as cities represent a certain territorialisation of social, political and economic life, pro` ducing distinctive local milieux (Le Gales, 2002), they are also sites of circulation and openness (Amin and Thrift, 2002). In this sense, diverse urban contexts are linked together by the objects, people and meanings that circulate through them and sometimes travel directly from one to the other. One source of the transformation of cities, then, is their openness to external inuences (Pryke, 1999). Another is that, whether it be in Douala or Denver, cities assemble a multiplicity of these connections to elsewhere and there are opportunities for newness to emerge within cities as a result of the interactions and intersections they enable (Pile et al., 1999). Their openness and externality, along with their territoriality, combine to shape some aspects of their dynamic potential. Focusing on the circulations and external connections which make up cities, the

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authors in this Special Issue insist on the inventiveness of the places they are writing about. And rather than seeing the predominantly poorer cities explored here as excluded from the networks of global capitalism and culture, cities in Africa and Europefor example, are shown to be deeply entwined. As Pile (this issue) argues, the cultures of magic in London have been produced as a result of centurieslong histories of circulations through Africa, the far East, the West Indies and many other places. As he specically traces the case of Adam, a young boy whose murder in London was linked to African traditional medicine and witchcraft as well as global child smuggling rings, he suggests that It really matters where we think cities are. New cultural practices emerge in London, linking West African cultural practices with the historically magical qualities of the River Thamesfor example. These transformations, he demonstrates, are signicantly dependent on external connections but also quite distinctively about life in contemporary London. He aims to make the Western city strange unto itself by tracking through scholarship inspired by the African city and exploring themes which have long been excluded from the Wests representation of itself. Far from seeing the African city as over there, exceptional and different, a site of magic compared with the Wests rationality, he suggests that understanding Western cities, both in the past and in the present, requires an engagement with African experiences and scholarship and a recognition that magic is an important feature of both contexts. If the African city is already tied into globalised circulations which thread through and remake Western cities, then these circulations are also crucial to understanding the dynamism of cities in different parts of Africa. Starting in Douala and Johannesburg, Abdou Maliq Simone (this issue) traces some of the networks which keep these cities open to new possibilities. In the context of economic crisis and the unpredictability of political regulation, he suggests that city-dwellers are having to operate more resourcefully in underresourced cities. Part of this involves

keeping open the option to leave, making journeys to trade in different contexts, or keeping ows of resources and money circulating. So far from poverty disconnecting poor cities from globalisation, wider networks become essential to the expansion of future options, to the search for tactics for getting by such that African and non-African cities are entangled in unprecedented ways. These entanglements involve the circulations of international capital as well as the dynamic circuits of more informal economies. Matthew Gandy and Charlotte Lemanski (both in this issue) offer examples of the power of formal capitalist processes in shaping the lives of some of the poorest urban residents in Lagos and Cape Town respectivelythe oil industry and land developers tie in these cities to external networks which provide a broad framing for their future development. As all these different networkscultural practices, informal activities, global capitalfacilitate ows in and out of cities, they become vectors of invention, of newness, transforming life in cities sometimes in helpful ways, sometimes in ways that undermine and diminish the lives of citydwellers. But always they speak of the importance of elsewheres to the inventiveness of urban lives and livelihoods. As such diverse connections beyond the city are gathered together in particular urban places, cities offer the opportunity for forming new associations, opening up new futures. This is as true of the social life of cities, where difference and diversity enable the invention of new identities and new cultural practices, as it is of the economy, where diversity signicantly enhances the potential for innovation and experimentation (Duranton and Puga, 2000), but also resilience in the face of crisis (Douglass, 2001; Firman, 1999). The emergence of newness in the city as a result of intersections amongst differences is explored by Jo Beall et al. (this issue), who consider how newly democratised local government in Durban has engaged with contemporary traditional leaders who continue to play an important role in the political life of many urban residents. They argue that, far

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from being a redundant residue of archaic cultural practices, the role and functions of traditional leaders in the city are robust and are being revitalised as they remain popular sources of moral and political authority and are important in securing developmental outcomes. In a post-conict situation, protraditionalists and newly elected government leaders are having to negotiate hybrid forms of urban governance which respond to the emergent forms of political culture which citizens are crafting in local areas. The city, then, in drawing together these diverse political traditions, is offering a site for political inventiveness and the formation of new, hybrid political identities. Similarly, Phil Harrison (this issue) explores the intersections of difference in the city, this time in relation to development planning where rational Western-inspired planning schemes meet the unpredictability of the networks of survival and dependence which frame life for many poor people in Johannesburg. And Zayd Minty (this issue) offers a number of examples of urban art practices which, in confronting the racialised differences which fracture and fragment the city of Cape Town, hope to encourage the emergence of new post-apartheid urban identities. It is this hopefor the creation of nonracial, post-apartheid political and cultural identitieswhich has driven many aspects of efforts at urban transformation in South Africa (see Pieterse and Boraine et al., both in this issue; also see Harrison et al., 2003; Watson, 2002). Overcoming a segregated urban landscape, so characteristic of the apartheid city has, however, been rather more difcult than many had hoped in the immediate post-apartheid period. This is an important issue and one which requires that we pause to consider an important feature of urban transformation: it carries the past with it. Newness, one might suggest, usually enters the world entraining history, necessarily mediated and tainted. And in relation to the physical form of cities, the built form weighs heavily on efforts to remake the urban environment. As Pieterse (in this issue) suggests, South

African cities remain beacons of racialised inequality despite a decade of post-apartheid urban policy. Indeed, many commentators are concerned that government housing policies have unwittingly exacerbated the apartheid form of the city with new-build housing often remote from the city centre and reinforcing racial segregation (Bond, 2003; Harrison et al., 2003). Charlotte Lemanski (this issue) argues that even the development of racially mixed housing in conveniently located areas can carry with it the assumptions and practices of the past. A gated community in Cape Town, while including both wealthy and poorer residents, has been designed to ensure almost complete separation between the two racially distinctive groups. Lemanski asks whether this spatial form translates into social relations of exclusion or connection. Her paper very usefully questions any easy reading of social relations from segregated spatial form and, along with other researchers in the South African context (see for example, Oldeld, 2004), outlines the extent to which actual and potential interactions, and the perceptions of different groups, add up to some measure of connection across difference, despite spatial segregation. Thus, although new developments in South African cities, both private-sector and government developments, entrain the racial divisions of the past, they also gesture towards the emergence of new kinds of social and political relations. Much of this change is to do with how the city is lived and experienced, rather than with how it has been rebuilt. We consider this in the following section. So far we have suggested that the inventiveness of city life is as much a product of the internal complexity and diversity of cities as it is of the ows and networks which shape them. In considering transformation and cities, we therefore need to be attentive to the double face of the city, as exteriorised but also territorialised. The territorialised city highlights inventiveness as a result of the unique conguration of any given citys assemblage of different networks. The localised production of identities, meanings and economies means that engaging

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with a particular city can often create new understandings of urbanity and also new ways of responding to cities. Parnell and Robinson (this issue) discuss how policy-makers in Johannesburg have had to bring together a range of different ideas about urban development and economic growth in order to nd ways to respond to demands to redress apartheid inequalities and to support future economic growth. This means engaging with the wide diversity of activities there, from globalising high-tech and nancial-sector rms to informal and survivalist activities. It requires a creative imagining of the distinctiveness of this city, rather than simply the application of ideas ready-made from another context: neither aspirations to global competitiveness nor delivering basic development needs offer a sufcient way forward for this divided, unequal city (see Beall et al., 2002). Rather than being imagined as a global city, or simply a city in need of development, understandings of Johannesburg need to respond to its own unique conguration of activities and wider connections. Insights from both general urban policy, but also from international development policies, have been necessary to generate creative responses to the demands of this city. More generally in the South African urban context, Boraine et al. (this issue) show how South African postapartheid urban policy has been transformed by robust engagements with international urban and development policies, shifting government ambitions from the immediate post-apartheid task of redressing inequalities and overcoming the spatial inheritance of apartheid. Wider ambitions of sustainability, good governance, social inclusion and economic growtha common set of concerns of international urban policy-makers (see for example, Montgomery et al., 2004)now shape formal government policy. Nonetheless, as they consider the ndings of the 2004 State of South African Cities report, these authors also show that the specic dynamics of South African cities, faced with poverty, services backlogs, uneven migration patterns and the HIV/AIDS crisis, press

upon government and shift these wider policy trends. How individual cities are imagined and interpreted therefore affects broader strategies for transforming them, such as the interventions which various policy-makers and other agents of change might choose to make. More generally, cities invite transformation through their potential for imaginative reconguration, as their physical fabric and collective life are open to reinvention, even if their outward form remains difcult to change, or simply decays. As people move through and use the spaces of the city, they are able to appropriate the streets and buildings, monuments and natures to their own creative projects and dreams (Pile, 2005). Of course, in some contexts, people may be inured to the city, switched off, blase, routinised. But the possibilities for creative invention offered by the imaginative reuse of the city are important, perhaps especially in moments of political transformation. For in remaking the meaning of urban life, citydwellers transform the residues of past urbanisms, turning them to contemporary purposes. Zayd Minty (this issue) presents a number of examples of reimagining the city, in this case through the work of public artists in the city of Cape Town. One of the tactics he reports is that of bringing to the fore histories which have been previously subordinated, or hidden, from public accounts of the city. A striking intervention re-dressed the statue of the rst South African Prime Minister, Louis Botha, as a Xhosa initiate, or abakhweta, undergoing rites of transition to manhood. Previously excluded not only from public histories but literally from the city under apartheid laws, Xhosa migrants were here, if momentarily, portrayed at the heart of the citys public memorialisation. Many of the interventions he reports were temporary, passing into the ephemeral memory of residents. But in his view, these imaginative recongurations of the city were as important as long-term physical change for allowing the broader, previously excluded population to reclaim the city. The art works performed alternative possibilities for social interactions,

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senses of belonging and access to the public spaces of the city. Such imaginative reworkings of the spaces of the city can also be important for supporting the mobility required to make do in times of crisis, as Simone (this issue) discusses. The search for openings and opportunities is facilitated by moving across or beyond the city, or by reusing the physical infrastructure of the city, but it also requires constant shifts in perception and imagination if relationships with people and with objects are to be remade in new ways or put to different uses. The practices of piracy in which items are converted to many different uses, he argues, characterise cities where unpredictability and anxiety inform pervasive efforts to reconcile experimentation and cutting loose with maintaining some kind of collective association. Elsewhere Simone (2001) has suggested that associational life in these circumstances might become more eeting, temporary and ephemeral. Hence, collective interactions, shared projects and understandings might emerge in social gatherings and specic contexts, rather than across society as a whole. It is these associational practices which he suggests play a major role in making [African cities] work (Simone, 2004, p. 13). Matt Gandy (this issue) proposes, though, that such situations of deep economic and political crisis have made it difcult to sustain an effective public realm, in which mutual consideration and collective responsibility are feasible. This, he argues, lies at the heart of failings of urban policy in Lagos. He suggests that the oil culture in Nigeria undermined civic ethos and public life in the city and that building a sense of commonalityreimagining the social relations of the cityis crucial to overcoming the deep and entrenched polarisations which characterise Lagos. As these papers show, the imaginative reclamation and reuse of city spaces is an important component of the transformation of social, political and economic life. For policy-makers, the question then arises as to how this feature of city life and of urban

transformation might intersect with their more interventionist projects. More generally, the inventiveness of cities and city life presents substantial challenges of governance; but it also represents a set of opportunities for revitalising urban interventions, as the following section explores. Interventions in Question Many of the cities discussed in this Special Issue face some kind of crisis of governance. As Harris (this issue) discusses, even in the relatively well resourced cities of South Africa, many aspects of city life remain opaque to interventionist projects (see also Beall et al., 2002). Indeed, for many citizens getting by in the city requires that they keep out of sight of the state and transgress dened boundaries and laws (Simone, this issue, and see Simone, 2004). While much has been made in international policy circles of the need for good governance across Africa and other poor-country contexts, issues of corruption, graft and lack of resources need to be placed alongside the sheer difculties of managing cities characterised by large measures of informality and with substantial countervailing sources of authority. In some general sense, it is the inventiveness of city life which poses a serious challenge to urban governance. And in situations where mobility and uidity are crucial to survival, efforts to x and order social life might well be counter-productive. But the energy and dynamism of cities also offer opportunities for inventing new styles of governance. And this resonates across poor and wealthy cities alike. In a liberal tradition of government, where the ordering of urban life is thought to be best achieved without close intrusion on the liberties of subjects (see Osborne, 1996), a creative synergy between the motivations of individuals and the ambitions of government has long been seen as key (Rose, 1992). John Allen (this issue) considers how ordering a public space, like the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, is achieved through seduction, rather than exclusion or explicit regulation. Challenging the

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assumption that public spaces are becoming more regulated and surveilled in wealthy cities, he insists that the openness of the space offers the possibility of shaping a certain kind of experience, one which people enter into with enthusiasm. By tracing their own paths through the square, they engage in producing a public space ordered through enjoyment and seduction rather than policing and control. This ambient power works with individual motivations for participation to produce a public space that is nonetheless ordered and productive. For the inventive city, a style of government which engages with, facilitates and mobilises the diverse creativities and energies of individuals and collectives might seem most appropriate (see Simone, 2004, and in this issue). In relation to interventions aimed at transforming cities, Pieterse (this issue) argues for working with a multiplicity of sources of dynamism, rather than relying on technical, modernist forms of government policy-making and implementation. He calls for experiments of hope, fully engaged with the conicted politics of cities, which would enlarge the public sphere of debate about possible city futures and open up urban interventions to a wide range of actors. This would sustain a critique of formal state interventions and depend on engagements amongst economic actors, civic organisations and local intellectuals. Pieterses enthusiasm is for homebru or locally generated and alternative imaginations about how to improve life in the city. This analysis chimes with Gandys call (this issue) for a revitalised public sphere to ensure the possibility for collective urban provisioning, and the observations made by Parnell and Robinson (this issue) about the emergence of locally generated policy initiatives in Johannesburg. Working with the inventive potential of the city, drawing on its complexity and diversity, rather than attempting to control and order its unruliness, offers an important way forward for governance, both in cities in crisis and in cities where forms of governance are being remade in the wake of neo-liberalism (see Brenner and Theodore, 2002).

The inventiveness of the city, as we noted above in relation to the papers by Parnell and Robinson and Boraine et al. (both in this issue), also shapes interventions and urban policies through the contributions of wider connections and the specicity of individual cities. Urban policy, then, has the potential to draw together insights from a wide range of cities, from a diversity of contexts in order to enable creative responses to the particular congurations of economic activities and political concerns in particular urban contexts. External connections need not mean simply emulating policy developments in other cities; and locally informed responses do not need to eschew possible learnings from elsewhere. Appreciating the dynamism and inventiveness of cities, engaging with their external orientations and drawing on their distinctive, local forms and dynamic experiences, might then inform experiments in governance which work with cities and their citizens. References
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