Rendering urban value(s) visible / What does it mean to say that urban theory is performative?

Joakim Forsemalm, Jan Jrnmark & Karl Palms Provocation paper for the Cities as value networks panel at the 56th IFHP World Congress, Gothenburg, 19 September 2012

The research project Cities as value networks, carried out under the auspices of the Mistra Urban Futures programme, sets out from the following narrative: Western industrial cities passed through three major phases between 1945 and 2010. The first two phases were characterized by the advent of mass motorisation and internationalisation. The impact of these forces led to a drawn out crisis in the traditional industrial cities, as a process of urban sprawl started at the same time as a large number of industries were closed down. The population of cities such as Stockholm and Gothenburg was halved between 1945 and 1975. The third phase started during the early 1980s. Today, this is the most interesting and important phase, as a large number of industrial cities have managed to make spectacular turn-arounds, which also generated a return to the urban centres. Consider the graph below, which outlines the population of inner-city Gothenburg.

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Urban value(s) The transitions mentioned above are often associated with the phenomenon known as gentrification, manifested by a pronounced increase in the valuation of the existing building stock. (cf. Lees, Wyly & Slater 2006) The valuation appreciation create a dynamic situation where it becomes possible to redevelop decaying industrial sites as well as outdated office buildings. In effect, however, the diversity of the cityscape may be seriously impeded if, for instance, alternative cultures are relegated from an increasing number of centrally located places in cities. The building valuations obviously reflect an economic value, but it has effects on other values safety, liveability, accessibility. Within social science, there are several definitions of value, starting from the labour theories of value of early political economists (Smith, Ricardo, Marx). Such approaches may define value in intrisic terms; value being equal to the amount of (societal) labour going into the production of a certain good. However, another take on value is that of Gabriel Tarde, who stipulated that value is a quality, such as color, that we attribute to things, but that, like color, exists only within us by way of perfectly subjective truth. (Tarde, Psychologie conomique, cited in Latour & Lpinay, 2010: 8) From this perspective, the economic valuation of a certain site or building is only one type of aggregate measure of the mass of subjective passions that are directed towards it from various actors. For Tarde, such economic valuations are all too simplistic to capture the full complexity of the economy. Prices are simply one form of valuemeter (Latour & Lpinay, 2010: 16), and say little about the values that cause individuals to attribute value to things. Instead, scholars who wish to grasp the urban economy are to assemble an composite view of all the subjective beliefs and desires that are projected onto certain sites or buildings. For instance, one may imagine alternative valuemeters that track factors such as good neighbours, a meaningful childhood for kids, or easy access to the supermarket. After all, while we know that the return to the cities may lead to higher rents and property prices, we still know little about what urban dwellers place value in. What, for instance, compels an urban dweller to move to a certain apartment in a certain part of the city? What is it in a certain neighbourhood that appeals to a shop-keeper? What attracts a property developer to a certain area? As ever-more phenomena are subjected to digital logging, storing, and data analysis, new renderings of the world can be produced. This develpment also changes the representation of urban 2 (6)

life. Indeed, there are now new tools for visualising urban values along with more established ones like GIS, SNA (social network analysis), space syntax etc. In a sense, urban spaces are ideal for such value-mappings, given that these spaces mean different things to different people, and given that these spaces are used in different ways by their inhabitants. Thus, can new forms of visualisation help researchers and planners to map the values of urban dwellers in novel ways can they become new forms of valuemeters? Moreover, can such renderings of the city be used as a tool to capture the the poetics of space or the politics of the city the conflicts in percieved values, and in the (potential) usage of space? Gentrification, speculation, valuation Another present-day tools data analysis and visualisation is Google's Ngram service. Famously, it allows users to search for occurrances of a certain term within an increasingly extensive corpus of scanned books. While the service may lack the methodical rigour of proper scientific inquiry, it can nevertheless generate interesting propositions. For instance, the following chart shows the frequency of the terms urban sprawl and gentrification.

The chart of the occurrances of the two English search terms may not be all that surprising. Descriptions of, and discussions around, urban sprawl are on the rise from the 1950s onwards, following the expansion of car-borne suburban living around Western cities. While the debate on urban sprawl peaks in the mid-1970s, the term nevertheless remains frequently used in the subsequent decades. Gentrification, on the other hand, was sparsely used throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The debate on the term rises sharply in the mid-1970s. In the early 1980s, it is more commonly referred to than urban sprawl, after which the occurrance rate of the term has continued to rise. Again, it is tempting 3 (6)

to relate the frequency of the term with the phenomenon that it purports to describe. After all, the urban sprawl was superseded with the middle classes' return to the inner cities; a process related to the upgrading of urban neighbourhoods, and consequent displacement of incumbant tenants. However, whereas the descriptions of urban sprawl seems to lag behind the mass exodus from the cities, the spike in descriptions of gentrification seems to be more aligned with the mass return to the cities. To what extent did the early case descriptions from London's Islington (Glass, 1964) or downtown New York City influence the subsequent urban development? To what extent have such accounts contributed to how urban dwellers speculate on the future trajectory of a neighbourhood? To what extent do such theories influence how properties and places are valued? The performativity programme: Taking it to the streets The point of this vignette is not to debate the merits of seductive graphs. Rather, the Ngram figure leads on to a number of questions regarding the role of urban studies: To what extent are urban actors led by theoretical descriptions of urban dynamics? Are urban theorists merely describing phenomena out there in the metropolises, or do these renderings end up becoming self-fulfilling prophecies? In other words, what does it mean to say that urban theory is performative? These questions have already been asked within the so-called performativity programme of economic sociology and economic anthropology, in the context of the economics discipline. (Callon, 1998; 2005; 2008; MacKenzie, Muniesa & Sui, 2008) As stated in an early text, this approach to the economy endeavours to transpose onto social science in general and economics in particular the main results of the anthropology of science and techniques (AST) which has hitherto been concentrated primarily on the natural and life sciences. (Callon, 1998: 28) The performativity programme explores the thesis that economics and social science do more than simply describe 'the economy' or 'society'. Social science also has a performative effect; it actively participates in the shaping the thing it describes (29). Using techniques previously deployed within Science and Technology Studies (STS), the programme thus posits that economics is no more outside the reality it studies than are the natural and life sciences. The performativity programme has been built on a number of case studies of how the substantive economy is made to follow the supposed universal laws stipulated by economics. In the case of Garcia-Parpet (2008), an economics-inspired local politician in France refashions a local strawberry market; in MacKenzie (2008), it is the work of 'entrepreneurial' economist Fisher Black that is 4 (6)

scrutinised. In the latter case, Black's economic inventions and entrepreneurship proved influential in the construction of derivatives markets, while at the same time aligning the market to Black's theory. Another example that could be raised is that of Adam Smith. As Timothy Mitchell notes, Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations as an attack on the power of [...] colonising corporations and formulated the idea of individual exchange in 'the market' as the program for an alternative. (Mitchell, 2002: 294) Thus, Smith's 1776 rendering of the invisible hand was not so much a description of the then-existing substantive economy. Rather, it was a speculative scenario, which since then has served as a blueprint for countless economy-engineering efforts. It is crucial to understand that in Callon's original presentation of economics as a performative science, economics entails more than the academic discipline of economics. Rather, he is interested in full range of disciplines, specialties, technologies, and forms of knowledge with which economic actors and their markets are equipped (MacKenzie, Muniesa & Sui, 2008: 4), in order to function in an orderly, market-like fashion. What would it mean to take this approach 'to the streets', or rather, to the urban economy? On a basic level, this would involve an interrogation of how speculations on gentrification guide the spatial actions of urban dwellers wishing to buy a home, entrepreneurs wishing to establish a business in a certain neighbourhood, or property developers wishing to acquire a property. Moreover, it would involve a study of how certain conceptions of the natural laws of urban economies are reflected in the establishment of institutions, technologies, heuristics and material architectures that form the 'prostheses' of the urban economy. Thus, the investigation would lead researchers towards the fields of governance, public administration and urban planning. Indeed, if there has been a shift towards entrepreneneurialism in urban governance (Harvey, 1989), would this shift have been possible without the 'gentrification proliferation' indicated by the Ngram graph above? Would this approach add anything to previous accounts of urban regeneration? To what extent has the notion of performativity already been adopted within urban studies? Beyond previous applications of the ANT toolbox (Faras, 2010), some classics within urban studies are indeed indepth accounts of the 'engineering' of the markets for re-generated urban space. Note for instance Zukin's (1982) exploration of the creation of the market for loft living; what would it mean to revisit such studies, integrating the Callonian notion of performativity in the argument?

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References Callon, M, (1998) The Laws of the Markets. London: Blackwell. _____ (2005) Why virtualism paves the way to political impotence, Economic Sociology - the European electronic newsletter. _____ (2008) What does it mean to say that economics is performative?, in D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa & L. Siu (eds.) Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press. Faras, I (2010) Introduction: Decentring the object of urban studies, in I. Faras & T. Bender (eds.) Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies. London: Routledge Garcia-Parpet, M-F The social construction of a perfect market: The strawberry auction at Fontaines-en-Sologne, in D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa & L. Siu (eds.) Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press. Glass, R. (1964) London: Aspects of change. London: MacGibbon & Kee. Harvey, D. (1989) From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: The transformation in urban governance in late capitalism, Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 71, No. 1. Latour, B. & V.A. Lpinay (2009) The Science of Passionate Interests: An introduction to Gabriel Tardes economic anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Lees, L., T. Slater & E.K. Wyly (2006) The Gentrification Reader. Abingdon: Routledge. MacKenzie, D. (2008) Is economics performative? Option theory and the construction of derivatives markets, in D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa & L. Siu (eds.) Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press. _____, F. Muniesa & L. Sui (2008) Introduction, in D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa & L. Siu (eds.) Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press. Mitchell, T. (2002) Rule of Experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press. Zukin, S. (1982) Loft living: Culture and capital in urban change. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

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