Urban Peripheries and the Invention of Citizenship

摘要

Predictions of social and environmental catastrophe resulting from urbanization have never been in short supply. Their 19th-century versions presented urban problems as diseases of the social body and provided urban reformers justifications for the "Haussmannization" of cities throughout Europe and the Americas. These interpretations turned some urban populations into "dangerous classes" and targeted them for both scientific study and policing. Recently, a new round of books with alarming titles about city "slums" and their "billions of slum dwellers" feed an evidently large professional and popular appetite for apocalyptic descriptions of planetary degradation due to current urbanization.1 We have no doubt that many people live and work in miserable urban conditions, suffering brutally from segregation and pollution. We would argue, however, that the terms of this urban catastrophe genre-especially the lead term slum-homogenize and stigmatize a global urban population. It is not only that these terms immediately identify "billions" of people with hideous urban conditions. It is also that the stigma of slum leaves little space for their dignity and vitality. It squashes people into totalizing characterizations and, in that reductive way, reproduces an over-determination of urban poverty that has difficulty recognizing emergent spaces of invention and agency.