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Introduction

Nova Lima, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

‘[T]he tremendous concentration (of people, activities, wealth, goods, objects, instruments, means and thought) of urban reality and the immense explosion, the projection of numerous, disjunct fragments (peripheries, suburbs, vacation homes, satellite towns) into space.’

(Lefebvre 2003: 14)

When it comes to how and where we dwell, work and have fun, we live in times of rapid change. Few periods in history, barring the industrialization of Europe, the urbanization of Latin America and the suburbanization of North America, have seen as much change as the period we are currently going through. We can assume that urbanization marks the moment of our shared experience as planetary citizens. The United Nations' World Urbanization Prospects (United Nations 2014) estimates that while in 1950 a total of 746 million lived in urban environments, by 2045 more than 6 billion are expected to be urbanized. This development has been widely understood now to be shaping global development goals in what some have referred to as the Urban Age (Burdett and Sudjic 2007; 2011; Brugmann 2009). Such thinking has been subject to some serious methodological criticism as scholars have pointed out that we ought to think less of people in cities than people in urban society, less in categories such as global and megacities and more in terms like ‘planetary urbanization’ (Brenner and Schmid 2015; Gleeson 2014; Ren and Keil 2017).

While these critiques are incisive and important, the current book aims at an intervention on a different terrain. The notion of an urban age suggests in its core a move of urban populations from more dispersed into denser environments for residence, work and recreation. This move towards more compact spatial patterns for work and life is certainly borne out by the world's ‘final migration’ to move to the ‘arrival cities’ of the twenty-first century (Saunders 2011). The global migration of millions of first time urbanites in less developed countries is mirrored by a distinct move towards re-urbanization in industrialized countries that had been going through half a century of de-industrialization, suburbanization and urban decline. What is more, these processes have been welcomed and normatively prescribed by planners and urbanists responding to challenges of climate change and sustainability that are said to be met more readily in compact, denser cities. While such processes of re-urbanization, densification and compactness are real and imagined features of the urban age, this book occupies itself with questions of urban growth that are better understood if we take into account tendencies towards urban expansion, de-centralization and suburbanization. As we will explore in a sequence of historical, conceptual and thematic chapters, much of the urban age is, at closer inspection, rather a suburban age. We live on a suburban planet. This observation is supported by statistical evidence that shows, as has the work of Shlomo Angel and colleagues (Angel, Parent and Civco 2010; Angel, Parent, Civco and Blei 2010) among others, that the growth of cities' populations and activities is characterized by a disproportional expansion of those cities' territory. In other words, as the world urbanizes, cities also become less densely populated, their spaces less intensively used.

It is expected that in 2030 urbanized land on the planet will cover 1. 2 million square kilometres. That is twice as much as in 2000. Urbanization at this incredible rate must give everyone pause. This ubiquitous trend will imply significant consequences for climate change, biodiversity and so forth (Seto, Güneralp, Hutyra 2012). In the near future, another three billion humans will have to be housed.1 Most of the future inhabitants of the earth's crust will be living in entirely new cities that run the spectrum from Corbusian nightmares to ‘broadacre’ campuses and squatter camps and many more of those who already live in cities will move to those new, mostly suburban environments, too. None of them, perhaps with the exception of the odd historicizing Chinese new town, will look like nineteenth-century Manchester or Paris, or the heart of Amsterdam or Barcelona (Swilling 2016). Two aspects stand out in this perspective: first, this projected urbanization will be extremely unequal, with China and Africa absorbing the lion's share of global urbanization during the next generation; second, we can expect that the majority of the urban expansion we face in the next generation or two will not mirror the current trend towards re-urbanization, widely celebrated in the urban North, but will continue to be extensive in nature. This will take wildly different forms in places such as China or Turkey, where more dense, high-rise type suburban developments are driven by large-scale state-sponsored programmes and (most of) Africa or India, where we see continued and continuous lower density suburbanization prevail (Bloch 2015; Gururani 2013; Mabin 2013; Wu and Shen 2015; Wu 2013). At the same time, there will also be additional suburban extension of cities in North America, Europe and Australia, where half-hearted growth controls can barely withstand the tide of further sprawl – residential, commercial and industrial –, often now driven by aggressive infrastructure development, including airports, private motorized transportation and public transit that now reach the far corners of the commuter shed and extend the urban region (Addie and Keil 2015).

The notion of an urban planet is not new. Manuel Castells, for example, notes as early as 1976 that American elites were operating on the assumption that an urban world had dawned. He quotes Senator Abraham Alexander Ribicoff, who observed : ‘To say that the city is the central problem of American life is simply to know that increasingly the cities are American life; just as urban living is becoming the condition of man across the world ….’ (quoted in Castells 1976: 2–3). Ribicoff emphasizes a qualitative, rather than a mere quantitative shift towards urban life: ‘The city is not just housing and stores. It is not just education and employment, parks and theaters, banks and shops. It is a place where men should be able to live in dignity and security and harmony, where the great achievements of modern civilization and the ageless pleasures afforded by natural beauty should be available to all’ (quoted in Castells 1976: 3). Henri Lefebvre, had preceded Castells by a few years to announce the coming of an ‘urban society’. In his book La revolution urbaine, first published in English in 2003, Lefebvre predicted that society was going to be irreversibly urban as the production of urban space was becoming the central process through which capital was accumulated and the reach of the city extended far beyond its immediate physical borders through metabolic relationships that spanned the world (Lefebvre 2003).

In the half-century that has passed since these early premonitions of an urban world, many have jumped on the bandwagon of pronouncing the onset of the urban age. An entire industry of Lefebvre scholarship has sprung up to celebrate the possibilities of claiming the Right to the City in an urbanized world. Most recently, perhaps, the declaration of an epoch of ‘planetary urbanization’ has been the most influential mode of carrying Lefebvre's message forward (Brenner 2014). In this wave of urban enthusiasm for the revolutionary potential of urbanization and sharp critique of mainstream urbanism, the idea that cities both ‘explode’ and ‘implode’ as expressed in the epigraph at the top of this chapter has gained ground to describe that processes of densification ‘here’ stand in direct relationship with processes of de-centralization ‘there’. An ‘oscillating growth dynamics’ (Keil and Ronneberger 1994) has been characteristic of the waves of urbanization that have swept the world's metro areas: as the centres gain in population and economic activity, so do the peripheries. When the Frankfurt Airport at the city's edge expands, so do the activities of the financial industry in the core. As the fringe of Toronto is stretched into the fields abutting the protected Oak Ridges Moraine (Gee 2017), the condominium towers in the inner city mushroom into the sky. As Los Angeles makes one attempt after another to anchor a resident population in its gentrifying downtown (Dillon 2017), its desert frontier continues to be pushed out indefinitely despite the (subprime) crisis writings on the wall.

John Friedmann, the great American planner, has used the terms ‘prospect of cities’ and ‘the urban transition’ to point out the irreversible inevitability of the world turning urban (2002). The urban transition is the unstoppable movement from the rural and agricultural to the urban. Already in the 1960s, he saw the urban field as the spatial form of the urban transition: ‘It is no longer possible to regard the city as purely an artifact, or a political entity, or a configuration of population densities. All of these are outmoded constructs that recall a time when one could trace a sharp dividing line between town and countryside, rural and urban man. ’ (Friedmann and Miller 1965: 314). This transition is, of course,...