(Re)locating the City
“Our criticism of these linguistic models is not that they are too abstract, but on the contrary, that they are not abstract enough, that they do not reach the abstract machine that connects a language to the semantic pragmatic contents of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social field [1]”
The edge of Hanoi…
Spending the previous summer in Hanoi I got a firsthand look of what the outskirts of the city look like in a rapidly expanding city. Hanoi is expanding rapidly outward, and upward as dense high-rise apartments (new urban zones*) spring up in what seems like every direction across an arguably still rural landscape, just an hour outside of the historic city center. During this time I also spent a lot of time thinking about what this means for the city’s future, how this process came to be, and who it will effect and how. They also provide a space to think about how contemporary planning addresses, or misses, certain aspects of the living experience of the city.
To give an example of how these new developments look, the one in which I stayed was literally planted into the middle of a field. A view from the window shows Hanoi’s skyline, and the expanse of farmland in between. This is the space otherwise known as the peri-urban zone, the zone that falls around the urban space of Hanoi.
Seeing the edge of the city, and the process of its expansion forces one to wonder what formal planning misses in overwriting urban context onto otherwise “undeveloped land”. Living here, where rural and urban don’t clash so much as co-exist makes me question the classic rural-urban binary perpetuated in city planning circles. For example, there is already community here, place already exists — and what withstands and shapes the expansion of the city merits consideration as much as the development goals for un-urbanised land. In short, it begs the question of how our understanding and (attempted) categorization of cities and urban is lacking when weighed against reality and why.
In the areas around the city one can see where the urban developments have disrupted already functioning fields of vegetables and water buffalo. At the same time one can see where the foundation is being laid for future buildings. Meanwhile the surrounding farms continue with mild interruption presented by shifts in the landscape. New classes of young professionals, starting families, occupy these places and make daily commutes to nearby workplaces or into the historic city itself.
Living here, I can testify to the importance of this space just as much, if not more, than the historic city center, the financial districts, etc. My new urban zone impacted and influenced the city just as much as many other places, it was interwoven into a system that included the outskirts of rural land as well. As new developments pop up, farmland is lost, and this in turn has effects that reverberate throughout the system. One gets little sense of this when looking at aerial views, maps, or even at data that would show a type of impact of how the city is shaping. If we think of even aerial views, they have little meaning without the added dimension of time to show the changes, but even this falls short of the reality on the ground that is missed in top-down-conceptions of a city.
*Vietnamese: khu đô thị mới
Thinking in rhizome…
Trying to unpack some of this, Deleuze’s concept of the rhizome points to some alternative modes of thinking to articulate the peri-urban space and the city itself. Deleuze criticizes the attempt to categorize and codify reality because it ultimately falls short to (it can only provide a small snapshot). Deleuze contrasts the rhizome to trees — which have an inherent hierarchical structure to them. Rhizomes are more chaotic, and dynamic. Deleuze details 6 principles of rhizomes in his volume A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. For example, they represent multiplicities, can be broken and put together without specific order, and are not well captures by structural and generative models[2].
Seeing where the city ends, and expands makes it easier to see the city as not a single fixed thing, in my case Hanoi. Patches of “urban” features spring up in the middle of fields of farmland, yet both still remain somewhat intact. They interact, they change one another, but one does not cancel the other out. Flows of people adapt but do not change when disrupted by new urban development. This part of the city escapes the neat categorization of what the historic city center might more easily display, and shows the place where the city line becomes irrelevant as the city gradually transitions into the farmlands around. Like the rhizome, parts of the city are connected repeatedly throughout the day as flows of individuals and goods travel to and from every end of the city.
So cities aren’t neat. But how does this actually impact the reality of how people understand their communities, and how does it impact the way we might plan the city. The theoretical framework of “a city” is lacking when you consider the grassroots experience of the city. Recognizing this deficit forces us to imagine and more concretely understand how top-down planning efforts, and superimposing plans onto a landscape may have unintended consequences as places and communities in turn push back up.
In the case of Hanoi, the new urban zones represent alternative or new urban centers in their own right. Each contains a certain number of services (gyms, stores, small schools, etc.). They are an intermediate point between Hanoi and surrounding areas, and in turn they re-shape and change the city’s identity. People moving to these areas, shifting the centers of activity to the outskirts (temporarily) indicate the fluidity of urban space. Financial districts, and downtowns are just as much affected as they effect.
This highlights some of the problems when we consider the current trend towards data driven solutions and empirical frameworks to capture urbanisms to an end goal. Currently there is a lot of conversation about how to reconsider and redefine indicators of development [in any form of the word] and what other factors should be considered. Thinking about urban spaces as wholly measurable might raise questions about where power should be restructured to create equitable outcomes, where data might fall short and why, how borders can change.
[1] Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 7. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
[2] ibid.