1. Splintering Urbanism
Globalisation, Infrastructure
and the Politics of Cities
Stephen Graham
Newcastle University

2. 1. Introduction : Urban
Planning Paradigms in Crisis
• Modern urban planning founded on:
- Euclidean, perspectival notions of space
-Newtonian notions of time as a singular ‘container’
- Technocratic ideologies of ‘progress’ via
electromechanical technologies
-‘Bundled’ conceptions of the singular, integrated
‘unitary city’ ; and
- Environmentally determinist concepts of urban form

3. 2. Archaeology of the
Networked
Society :
The Modern
Infrastructural Ideal
1850-1960
• This helped to forged the
‘Wired-Piped-Tracked
Metropolis’
• Single, integrated street
systems
• Standardised, public or
private infrastructure
monopolies regulated for
universal service

4. Modern Urban Planning :
The ‘Unitary City’ Ideology
• Organic or systemic
metaphors to shape
‘cohesive’, ‘integrated’,
‘ordered’ city. Spaces
knitted by infrastructures
• Close-up spaces seen to
relate more than far-off
ones
• Authoritarian and
technocratic power
• But completely ignored
non-physical
communication

9. The ‘Invisible City’: Assumptions of Shifts
Toward Universal Access
• Via standardised,
electromechanical systems
• Energy, water, sewerage and
telephone systems increasingly
invisible, ubiquitous, and taken
for granted
• Bakelite phone ; standard
electricity ; municipal
streets…“Forgotten,
background, frozen in place”
Leigh-Star

10. Social Democratisation : Diffusion Towards
(Near) Ubiquity in Networked Technologies

12. Technocratic Ideologies of ‘Progress’:
Bigger, Better, Faster

13. • Key part of
material and
discursive
construction of
modern nation
states

16. But Modern Ideal of Networked City Always
Ambivalent : Major Failings and Limitations…
• Never materially achieved
• As much a discursive
construction as a material one
• In many cases actually sponsored
fragmentation (Haussmann,
Moses…)
• Masculinised, gendered,
oppressive to minorities
• Failed to match growth
• Exported to colonial cities as
spatial apartheid

17. Topologies of
Infrastructural
Bypass

18. 3. These ‘Deep’ Conceptually Frameworks
and Axioms of Urban Planning Increasingly
Untenable:
Four Key Challenges:
(i) Social and Cultural Pluralisation/
Polarisation
(ii) Changing Political Economies of
Mobility, Infrastructure and
the State
(iii) Distance per se No Guarantee of
Meaningful Relations
(iv) New Sociotechnologies
of Digitised Power

19. (i) Social and Cultural Pluralisation
(and often Polarisation)
• Often bound up with
widespread breakdown
and ‘unbundling’ of
monopolistic, universalistic,
welfare and infrastructure
regimes
• Withdrawal of many social
and spatial cross-subsidies
• Growth of infrastructural
consumerism and
commodification

20. Beyond the Singular, Integrated
Urban Public Realm
• Public private spaces :
“malls without walls”
• Privatised streets and
street governance
• Urban entrepreneurialism
and branding
• Intensifying surveillance
• Megaprojects : “city as
building”
• Fragmentation of law
enforcement and security

21. (ii) Changing Political Economies of Mobility,
Infrastructure, and States
• Increasing dissatisfaction with
modern ideal
• Key element of neo-liberalism :
Liberalisation, privatisation and
increasing corporate influence
• Shift away from universal service
monopolies and cross-subsidies
(services as welfare
entitlements)
• Concentrating on ‘glocal scalar
fixes’ for powerful
• But very varied !

22. Increasingly Complex and ‘Rescaled’
Infrastructural Capitalism

23. The ‘Unbundling’ of the Nation State ?
“National borders have
ceased being continuous
borders on the earth’s
surface and have
become non-related sets
of lines and points
situated within each
country”
Paul Andreu

24. The Global
Border(ing)
Assemblage

25. (iii) Distance per se No Guarantee of
Meaningful Relations
• Globalisation and ICTs :
Widening range of ‘distant
proximities’ co-exist with
‘proximate distance’ of
city
• Links to far-off places or
people may be more
powerful than those to
physically ddjacent ones
• “Overexposed city” ?

26. “The insertion of telecommunications into the city
makes the development of spaces more complex
and introduces today a third dimension into urban
and regional planning [after space and time] : that
is the factor of real-time”
Lille Metropolitan Development
Agency (ADUML) 1991

27. Not Some Cyberspatial Utopia, Dystopia or a Simple
‘Death of Distance’. Rather a Complex
‘Remediation’ of Urban Places

28. Not a Process of
Dematerialisation or
Substitution !
Intensifying, Parallel
Mobilities

29. Electronic and Physical Mobilities
are Growing in Parallel…

30. (iv) New Sociotechnologies
of Digitised Power
• “The connected mode of
presence at a distance ”
Christian Licoppe
• Growth of hidden,
software-based mobility,
interaction and transaction
spaces
• ‘Friction free’ and truly
‘glocal’
• Challenge physicalist
Cartesian, and visible
preoccupation of urban
planning

31. “Societies of Control”: Entitlements, Rights and
Life-Chances Increasingly Encoded
into Automated Systems…
• The politics of code
• E.g. electronic highways/
road pricing
• Call centre queuing
• Internet prioritisation
• CCTV facial recognition
• Airport biometrics
• Post 9/11 surveillance
surge

32. 4. The Combined Result :
The ‘Unbundling’ of Urban Territory ?
• Relations increasingly maintained
through ‘capsules’ and
networks
• Distanciated flows organised
through infrastructure systems
• Support and sustain 24hr justin-time and real time flows
melding global economy,
society, culture
• ‘Archipeligo economy’:
extreme spatial divisions of
labour ; ‘economies of
conjunction’; ‘cherry picking’;
urban entrepreneurialism

33. Francois Ascher’s ‘Archipeligo Economy’:
‘Tunnel Effects’ and Infrastructural ‘Bypass’

35. ‘Glocal’ Bypass
• Tunnel effects a Means
of bypassing
‘inadequate’ legacies
of standardised,
monopolistic spaces
and networks :
premium network
spaces
• E.g. Heathrow Express

36. ‘Glocal Bypass’ : Fibre Networks

37. ‘Local Bypass’
New ‘premium’
intraurban spaces and
connections
e.g.electronically
charged highways
• (Toronto, Melbourne, LA,
San Diego…)

38. Local Bypass : Skywalk Cities…

39. Car Culture :
Capsularisation and Bypass

40. Albert Pope : Car Culture -
From Grids to Ladders…

41. Car Culture:
Intensifying
capsularisation
SUV Meets DVD

42. All Bound Up With : The Splintering City Sprawl and Polynucleation

44. Connectivity, Urban
Revanchism
and the Politics of Urban
Fear
As non-local connections
Intensify so too in many
cases does the policing,
enforcement, and
construction of local
boundaries
‘Technopoles’: e.g.
Multimedia Super Corridor

45. Global
Financial
Centres…
City of
London’s
‘Ring of
Steel’

46. …Malls, Theme Parks, Resorts,
‘Tourist Bubbles’…

47. Urban Revanchism
Suburbanisation of the Centre?

49. • …Gated
Communities…

54. 5. To Conclude : Urban Places as
“Translocalities” (Michael Peter Smith)
• Urban places are best seeb as dynamic socio-technical
processes. Not as forms or bounded geometric spaces
• Superimposition of many space-times : result of
countless, multiscaled, relational, continuous links with
more of less distant elsewheres
• Sometimes these come together in making the
‘cogredience’ of a place ; sometimes they don’t
• Many of these ‘power geometries’ are invisible,
diasporic and ‘glocal’
• Not Castells’ flows vs places ! Places made of, and
through, flows! Global is always local.

55. But Urban Place Still Critical !
• Deliberately focusing on most extreme and visible
examples of splintering. Often much more subtle…
• Evolution - Unbundling and continued power of
agglomeration : ‘compulsion of proximity’ in cities:
‘sticky places’ in ‘slippery space’ and rooted identity
politics
• Cities still mixed and ‘co-gredient’ places. Limits on
splintering : obduracy, inertia and continuity ; need to
connect ; contestation ; ‘pure’ boundaries impossible ;
ineffectiveness of disciplinary efforts ; resistance and
insurgent citizenship (internal/external)
• Continuing power of local, national, international
governance and planning
• So, the urban still the crucial political/social site

56. Implications for Urban Theory…
• Must be based on multiple non-Euclidean conceptions of
space, time, the body, mobility, identity, citizenship, and the
public(s)
• Need ‘relational’ theoretical bases
• Conscious of “the discursive construction of urban
coherence” (Joe Painter) i.e. Urban ‘Coherence’ must be
proven not assumed
• Must NOT reify ‘globalization’, ‘new technology’, or the
‘Network Society’ as steam rollers rolling over local
places
• Recognise that rights, mobilities, privileges and denials are
increasingly encoded into distant, arcane and opaque
technological systems

57. Challenges for Urban Practice
• Resist the neoliberal impulse !
• i.e. Don’t simply churn our serial imitations of time-space
and mobility packages for affluent and powerful
• Be aware that mobility and network improvements for
some will always compromise relative or absolute life
chances of others
• Experiment with socially progressive and imaginative
visions and strategies for cities in the ‘networked society’
whilst not becoming techno-obsessed !
• Challenge : To generalise improvement within splintering cities
whilst being conscious of globalised divisions of labour

58. Challenge to create virtuous circles linking places and
mobility systems/ICTs…
“Publics are no longer usefully envisioned as the open spaces
or free spaces in which diverse participants could gather -the democratic spaces of the street, the square, or the town
hall. Nor can we simply pretend that equivalent ‘virtual
spaces’ exist in some democratic cybertopia. Instead the
mechanisms for publics occurring in the context of the new
infrastructures of mobility should be imagined in entirely
new ways”
Mimi Sheller

59. (i) ‘Relational’ Strategic Spatial Planning and
Representational Innovation…

60. • (ii) The Connected
City :
Creative Physical
Planning for ‘Mobility
Environments’:
addressing parallel
mobilities (Bertolini),
spaces and times

61. (iii) ‘Grounding’ the Network Society and
Addressing ‘Digital Divides’:
New Spaces of Citizenship ?

62. (iv) ‘Recombinant’ Urban Design and
Locative Media Experiments

63. (vi) Visibility and Transparency: Urban
Place in the Digitising Economy

64. • Finally :
Must Not be
Afraid…
• …of utopian thinking…
• …of looking backwards
as well as forwards…