Geography’s Material and Intellectual Transformations

Mohsen Mostafavi: For the past few years, we’ve been working on a series of projects related to Japan and the future of urbanization. Some of this work is documented on the website Japan Story,¹ and we’ve also recently published a book called Sharing Tokyo: Artifice and the Social World.² One of the main tasks of this project is to help us understand and think beyond the spatial inequities that mark many privately owned large-scale projects in Tokyo.

What is your experience and reaction to the increasing “privatization” of contemporary metropolitan development? Do you see any lessons that can be learned from these projects?

Matthew Gandy: It is very interesting that you are looking at these questions from a Japanese perspective. I think that one of the features of urban studies, broadly defined, is the sense of a shifting urban archetype as we look at the way Paris, Los Angeles, London, New York, Lagos, Mumbai, and a number of other cities have periodically served as leitmotifs or analytical entry points for the field. I am curious to know how your focus on Tokyo, and other metropolitan regions in Japan, alters the intellectual coordinates for thinking about the urban condition.

The question of privatization is fundamentally about the power of capital to shape urban space. We need to examine how perturbations in the circulation of global capital are reflected through periodicities in the transformation of cities. Distinctive historical periods include the rebuilding of Second Empire Paris under Baron Haussmann and mid-20th-century New York under Robert Moses. We encounter a series of specific conjunctions between power, capital, and the transformation of urban space. Within that framework, of course, there are constant tensions around the definition of the public interest or the public realm. There are repeated crises in relation to housing, public services, and other dimensions. And part of the struggle within the urban arena that Manuel Castells and others have described is how these collective dimensions of urban experience periodically come closer to some degree of democratic scrutiny or control. In other words, how is this process of urbanization to be shaped or guided? And who is this urban process actually for?

Mohsen Mostafavi: Just to stay with that for a second, some of the transformations that are happening or have happened recently in Japan are in part linked to the increasing implementation of neoliberal policies at the governmental level. Do you see, or are you aware of, any places where there have been slightly different approaches than those of neoliberal policies? I am thinking of the formation of new spatial conditions or spatial experiences that manage to avoid some of the negative consequences of these large-scale proposals that we see in major metropolitan capitals.

Matthew Gandy: Yes, I think if we look more broadly, we have this impetus toward neoliberal urban policy, including the privatization of public services, utilities, and things of that kind. But in certain circumstances, things can stop or even move in the opposite direction. One example that I find very interesting is in Berlin, where the privatized water utility, following a citywide referendum, was brought back under public control, and there are similar campaigns in other cities and municipalities. The important point here is to recognize that neoliberalism is not an inevitable singularity in relation to urban space. There are multiple pathways through urbanization and modernity. In this respect, I have been influenced by the work of the American philosopher Andrew Feenberg on alternative modernities, who incidentally also studied Japanese society.³ By holding on to the idea that there are multiple pathways it becomes periodically possible to reconnect democratic deliberation with the urban process.

Mohsen Mostafavi: Today, Japan seems to exemplify the concept of a degrowth society. Cities like Tokyo, because of their size and their enormous population, at least for the time being, seem to be more immune to the consequences of depopulation. They have so many people coming in that you don’t notice that they are depopulating. But Japan is not the only country facing the combination of an increasing elderly population together with a low birth rate, a situation that is exacerbated by Japan’s immigration policies. The impact of these forces is much more evident in rural locations, away from the main metropolitan centers like Tokyo and Osaka, with growing numbers of abandoned houses and schools. How common are these demographic changes in other parts of the world and what is being done to address the issue?

Matthew Gandy: I think this theme of demographic decline and urban shrinkage is extremely interesting and presents different possibilities in terms of how to respond, especially in the context of increasingly reactionary political agendas in relation to migration and multiculturalism. In Germany, for example, some municipalities have explicitly stated that they are “safe havens” and will welcome refugees. And there are sometimes very interesting debates in these smaller towns about the idea that families and children will return to these communities so that old people can hear the sound of children’s laughter and so on. Communities can suddenly become full of life. I think this is a very important challenge to reactionary discourses about refugees and migration. Interestingly, the German urban sociologist Hartmut Häußermann raised these points some years ago in terms of regarding migration as a potential solution to the demographic decline of shrinking cities.

Mohsen Mostafavi: As a geographer, how much do you have to be conscious of the way in which productive ideas simultaneously can have the potential to spark opposite reactions in other parts of society? For example, the welcoming of migration might go hand in hand with the rise of certain demonstrations of racism or that kind of inflammatory response. I’m wondering whether the promotion of good ideas or positive, productive ideas must at some point anticipate its own opposite. And whether that’s something that’s thought about in contemporary social thought or geography?

Matthew Gandy: As academics we have responsibilities to do good research but also to be educators, to respond to and engage with important debates that are going on. Of course, there has been this drift toward not just xenophobic politics but also toward anti-metropolitan, anti-science, and anti-expertise sentiments. The status of the academic has never been more precarious than in recent years. But I think that we have to withstand these kinds of pressures, and specifically in relation to the migration debate we need to challenge populist or authoritarian political movements that try to blame marginal or vulnerable groups in society for problems that are structural in origin, such as increased levels of economic precarity and social inequality. I think there is a responsibility across not just the social sciences but also the humanities and other disciplines to come forward with very carefully reasoned counterviews and not to allow a false consensus to emerge.

Mohsen Mostafavi: At Harvard, we have devoted a part of our research to studying the city of Onomichi, a port city in the western part of the country with a long tradition of shipbuilding. Now, with those industries in decline, the city needs to find new ways to revive itself as a viable home for its decreasing population. As architects and urbanists, some of our proposals involve the greater provision of infrastructure and services for the community, including the elderly and the young. Enhancing the quality of life in the city of Onomichi seems to be the only way to not only support the local population but also to stop or reduce migration to larger cities that offer greater opportunities. This approach has the potential to make the city more attractive to internal migration as well as local tourism.

The Japanese Marxist philosopher Kohei Saito, in his book Marx in the Anthropocene, makes the argument for what he calls degrowth communism.⁴ What are your thoughts about the topic of degrowth and Saito’s position?

Matthew Gandy: I’m very glad you mentioned Saito’s work because I think that this is really making a major impact across geography, sociology, and other disciplines with certain parallels to the work of Andreas Malm. Within the social sciences and the humanities, I think there has been an element of impatience about not coming forward with more radical and conceptually innovative policy-oriented positions in relation to the global environmental crisis. What’s especially fascinating about Saito’s work is that he has gone back to Marx’s original notebooks, unpublished works, and other archival sources to refresh our understanding of Marx’s writing about the environment and his original articulation of “metabolic rift” in relation to capitalist agriculture, illuminating Marx’s wider concerns with deforestation, intensive farming methods, cruelty to animals, and so on. Saito provides a broader perspective of Marx’s original sense of a fundamental contradiction between capital and the biosphere by introducing a more broad-based set of very interesting conceptual ideas concerning what he terms “metabolic shift.” The core idea is that capitalism constantly seeks to delay or displace any constraints through measures such as nuclear-powered desalination plants or other types of technological fixes. Saito’s interpretation connects with some of the existing work in geography by Erik Swyngedouw and others in relation to the “socio-ecological fix.” Capital has a chameleon-like ability to absorb critique and alter its configurations without ever really addressing fundamental contradictions. I think what is important for Saito, Foster, and other scholars is the sense that these contradictions cannot be avoided forever. Indeed, these contradictions are much closer now in terms of global health threats, climatic disruption, and so on. The key challenges are now much more pressing in terms of what alternatives exist to an ever-expanding capitalist global system and whether we can address these ecological contradictions. Many environmentalists and eco-modernists suggest that this historical trajectory can be altered by a variety of market mechanisms and technological innovations. In contrast, Saito and others are saying that this clearly will not work. We need something much more radical. This is why the whole degrowth agenda is so interesting—it has multiple implications not just for the economy but also for the structuring of everyday life. The implications might be that we work fewer hours in the week and use that extra time doing other things, such as tending allotments or connecting with people. In addition to the nature of work there are spatial implications, too. Instead of urban space conceived as an arena for hyper-consumerism, we can focus on other, more life-affirming aspects. There are clearly spatial as well as political implications to the kind of arguments that Saito is making. I think it is an exciting moment in terms of the reinvigoration of some of the original works of Marx and the development of radical ecological critique.

Mohsen Mostafavi: This relates very much to the town of Onomichi. One of its key physical characteristics is how the main part of the town is next to a port, built on reclaimed land, and is juxtaposed with the more “natural” setting of a hillside dotted with houses and temples. Many of the houses become abandoned when their owners pass away. Others have become ruins with nature taking over the site.

In your own work, in particular the book Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space, you speak of “urban nature as a multilayered material and symbolic entity.”⁵ What do you see as the connections between your interests in urban ecology and the broader discussions of the opportunities offered by degrowth?

Matthew Gandy: Words such as “nature” or “ecology” are incredibly complex from the outset, and one of the things that I’m interested in is a kind of a double history of nature. On the one hand, there are a series of material transformations, including the return of nature to abandoned spaces and things of that kind. On the other hand, there is a changing historical dynamic in terms of intellectual thought in relation to ecology and nature. For me, a key analytical challenge is to try to elucidate the connections between material transformations and intellectual transformations. This is what I mean by a double history. One particular challenge I faced in writing my book is how to handle a vast and growing literature in relation to urban ecology and urban nature. Over the last 20 years there has been an explosion of ideas and literature on the environmental dimensions to cities and urbanization.

In order to make sense of the changing field I have developed a kind of working typology of four main perspectives in the literature. The first of these is what I call “systems-based approaches,” which are in many ways the dominant perspective in relation to architecture, planning, engineering, design, and other professional fields. In my book I also emphasize three other important strands: observational paradigms linked to natural history, including links to urban botany, urban ornithology, and a variety of direct encounters with nature in cities; the neo-Marxian-inspired urban political ecology that emphasizes contested dimensions to capitalist urbanization; and the more recent rise of interest in multispecies urbanism drawing on insights from multispecies ethnographies, the ecological pluriverse, and attempts to think through different ways of living with nonhuman others. What is especially interesting to me is the possibility of articulating some kind of conceptual synthesis between these different strands that can help us take these arguments forward so that if we’re interested in the multispecies city we can extend ethical questions beyond, for example, the feeding of garden birds to thinking about agro-capitalism and the production of food, which is where urban political ecology can be very helpful in terms of highlighting the circulatory dynamics of capital and the significance of extractive frontiers. In thinking about these four different perspectives, I remain uncertain whether the systems-based approach can be further elaborated or whether we need a complete break with that particular way of conceptualizing urban space. Just recently, however, I went to a very interesting workshop in Brussels organized by LAB [Louvain research institute for landscape, architecture, and the built environment] where possibilities for elaborating on systems-based models were widely discussed. A particular focus was whether the so-called Brussels school of urban ecology, associated with the ideas of the ecologist Paul Duvigneaud, might be extended through a variety of advanced modeling techniques drawing on new sources of quantitative data. A key dilemma remains, however, in terms of the conceptual limitations of systems-based understandings of capitalist urbanization as a series of material flows rather than a historical process.

Mohsen Mostafavi: Architects and urbanists design buildings and cities, but we are very conscious of the interrelationships between the physical and social worlds from a multiplicity of perspectives. In this context, we have tried to understand and incorporate into our work lessons from the Japanese philosopher Tetsuro Watsuji and his development of the Japanese concept of Fudo, or milieu, and the articulation of the concept of Umwelt, the environment understood from multiple perspectives, human and nonhuman, from Jakob von Uexküll.

In addition to your own work, others, including the British geographer Sarah Whatmore, have been interested in a broader understanding of “living cities” as what she has called the “living fabric of associations.” How might this expanded and shifting articulation of social relations, including multispecies relations, reframe our future speculations about urbanization?

Matthew Gandy: Let me briefly respond to this interesting influence of the Japanese philosopher Tetsuro Watsuji because it seems that the milieu idea emerges from the French geographer Augustin Berque’s attempt to bring some of Watsuji’s ideas to European audiences. We can see connections here with a certain kind of European tradition of phenomenology. This cross-fertilization of ideas between Japan and Europe is interesting. So perhaps the first point to make is that notions of phenomenology have become more influential across a range of fields, and they’ve been linked in certain ways with the neo-vitalist or new materialist impulse, which has been quite significant within geography, sociology, and other disciplines. Now what really interests me, because by and large I take a skeptical stance toward new materialist approaches, are these unresolved questions concerning the distinctiveness of human historical agency in relation to this radically expanded conception of agency and subjects. I think this is a very important intellectual focal point for these discussions about the contours of nonhuman agency within urban space. Consider, for example, recent contributions by the German sociologist Thomas Lemke or the Cambridge-based geographer Maan Barua. There is a very interesting discussion going on about the implications of an expanded philosophical framework that moves beyond the agency of the individual or collective human subject. And within my own discipline of geography, of course, the work of people such as Sarah Whatmore has made an important early contribution to these debates. A stimulus to critical reflection has been the return of nature to cities—consider, for example, foxes in London, coyotes in North American cities, and leopards in and around Indian cities. These emerging socio-ecological relations present all kinds of interesting questions and debates. An unresolved tension in the post-humanist impulse is how to handle ethical relations with nonhuman others within the terrain of public health and epidemiology. What are we to do if there is a perceived public health threat over the presence of rats in cities? In Paris, for instance, this has provoked extensive and increasingly polarized public debate. There is now an interesting debate about the possibility to move away from the use of culls or poisoned bait to get rid of unwanted nonhuman others within cities and turn instead to more ethical, humane, and technologically sophisticated alternatives such as the use of contraception for animals.

A related issue is that when we think about urban epidemiology and threats of disease, exacerbated by climate change, inadequate infrastructure, poverty, and other factors, and in particular aspects of aquatic ecologies and flood control within cities, we’re going to have to confront the increased threat of insect-vectors for disease such as mosquitoes. This is going to pose significant implications for urban design and urban planning. One of the terms that I find quite useful to work with is that of an affirmative biopolitical paradigm. In other words, the sense that, from a philosophical position, an insistence on “non-intervention” is very difficult to sustain and that we are faced with a series of very real dilemmas in relation to how, and under what circumstances, we do intervene in—or at least try to steer—biophysical or ecological processes, which of course extends to urban epidemiological questions. This notion of an affirmative biopolitical paradigm could in certain respects also be applied to plants and landscape design. There are some very interesting approaches to landscape design which allow unexpected or spontaneous floras to flourish in certain parts of urban space, a development that lies in stark contrast to the control of ecological processes elsewhere. This introduces a notion of temporality into architecture and landscape design because sometimes there is a public sentiment that certain sites should be protected and left alone, assuming that a flower-rich interstitial space such as a wasteland or railway embankment will simply remain the same. But this doesn’t happen in relation to void spaces since a space that is left alone will be transformed by its own dynamics. Many of these “urban meadows” will become urban woodlands over time which is a very different kind of ecological space. To have an enriched public discourse about these questions, I think it is necessary to move beyond the sense of non-intervention, toward a more critically engaged discussion about how to shape urban nature or urban ecological processes.

Mohsen Mostafavi: I’d like to ask you if you could somehow relate these ideas to the work of Raymond Williams. In your own work, the Natura Urbana for example, this mixing of nature and city, this idea that there is a hybrid moment when a landscape is inseparable from the artifice of the city, seems far away from Williams’s book The Country and the City.⁶ Even though he was at that time articulating these relationalities, the difference between the country and the city was still very distinct. Today this distinctness is disappearing perhaps. But when you visit a town like Onomichi or any small town, these differences between the metropolitan capitals and the idea of the market town, industrial small towns, regional cities, or regional towns remain.

What do you remember of Raymond Williams or what remains as part of his lineage today for people like yourself?

Matthew Gandy: Strangely enough, in my university lectures this term I have been referring directly to Raymond Williams’s book The Country and the City, dating from 1973, which I think is in many ways just as interesting as when it was first published. When we think about the work of Williams there are of course many elements, but I would like to briefly mention two ideas that are very important. One is his classic intervention in terms of the etymology of the word “nature,” reminding us that it is one of the most complex words in the English language. I think that holding on to this notion of etymological complexity is very important across the whole field of environmental discourse. We should always be thinking quite carefully about the polyvalent or shifting meaning of words and their relationship to ideological constructs such as national identity. The other idea I would like to mention is his zonal conception of interrelated landscapes. We find, for example, that the landscaped grounds of stately homes are set within the rationalized landscapes of agricultural enclosure that are in turn connected to the brutality of more distant plantation landscape under European colonialism. This multi-scalar conception of zonal landscapes is still very relevant when we consider the production of designed spaces in cities. One example is the High Line in Manhattan that has been widely praised as a kind of urban oasis but is actually more like the eye of the storm within accelerating gentrification pressures in Chelsea and adjacent Manhattan neighborhoods, that are in turn linked to global economic dynamics. A multi-scalar perspective à la Williams is very helpful in terms of articulating a critical design discourse in urban space.

Mohsen Mostafavi: You have been incredibly generous in your answers by situating your responses within the context of current scholarship. You’ve mentioned a variety of authors and their publications and their contributions. But in closing, it would be wonderful if you could speak a little bit about where geography is going today, and what are some of the key emergent directions or thoughts that you feel will be important pathways toward the future questions of urbanization.

Matthew Gandy: Yes. Interesting question. It’s strange because if you’re inside a discipline and you’re immersed in this almost endless stream of discussion it is sometimes hard to pick the key things out from the noise in terms of how a discipline is shaping or evolving. I have always read very widely beyond the narrow confines of geography. I mentioned Kohei Saito and Andreas Malm, who incidentally is a human geographer based in Sweden. I was excited, by the way, to see that one of his books has recently been made into a very impressive independent film, How to Blow Up a Pipeline.⁷ It is unusual, I would say, for an academic work to be made into a critically acclaimed and commercially successful film. In terms of influences or emerging influences, I would have to pick out the cultural theorist Sianne Ngai, based at the University of Chicago. What I find fascinating about her work, which connects incidentally to the critical neo-Marxian oeuvre of Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, and other scholars, is a sense that many of the conceptual terms or categories that we are using are highly anachronistic. We are working with an 18th- or 19th-century conceptual vocabulary to deal with fundamentally new challenges in the 21st century. Equally, in a similar fashion to Saito, I think Ngai is very particular about holding on to the very idea of critique. She has recently emphasized the need for a “post-post-critical” approach as part of a commitment to serious critical scholarship.

Mohsen Mostafavi: It’s interesting that you mentioned Ngai. We were recently talking about some of these aesthetic categories, for example in the context of Japan, and in particular—I use this very carefully—the notion of cuteness. In the context of certain cultures, there are many moments when things are appreciated specifically through the perspective of the aesthetics of cuteness.

What do you think about this question of aesthetic categories and their relevance to how we judge things and make decisions? How is that changing?

Matthew Gandy: Ngai has developed a novel conceptual lexicon, introducing the terms “zany,” “cute,” and “interesting,” as part of a wider challenge to the persistence of somewhat anachronistic aesthetic categories such as “beauty” and the “sublime.”⁸ In some of my recent work, in collaboration with my colleague Maroš Krivý, based at the Estonian Academy of Arts, I have been reflecting on the idea of the zany à la Ngai in relation to the performativity of work within the neoliberal academy. ⁹ It is interesting to consider, particularly in relation to architecture and landscape design, how intellectual labor has changed. I would bring in here critical legal scholars such as Zoe Adams who have explored the extent of unpaid overtime within fields of creative knowledge production.¹⁰ This is in addition to the various kinds of affective labor that are required within many professional fields, such as the specific intellectual milieu of the architectural or design studio. There are clear parallels here with what the economist Claudia Goldin refers to as “greedy jobs” that demand long hours and exacerbate existing inequalities in the workforce and wider society.

Mohsen Mostafavi: Matthew, thank you so much. It has been wonderful to hear you talk about all these different topics.