Pro-sewer: cities and the crisis of sewage

Consider these three recent stories in the UK, all of them to do with sewers and all from the same week in late March 2024.

“This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for,” Andy Mitchell, CEO of the Thames Tideway ‘super sewer’, told the BBC. The £5 billion Thames Tideway Tunnel runs 16 miles east-west 200 feet underground and is designed to reduce the more than 14 billion litres of untreated sewage that spills into the Thames each year. Due to come online this summer, the cost of the sewer will be paid in higher bills for Thames Water customers in the coming decades. 

A second moment. The Environment Agency releases data showing that the amount of untreated sewage spilling into rivers and seas in England has more than doubled. In 2022, there were 3.6 million hours of sewage spills from ‘combined’ sewers – those that carry both sewage and rain in the same pipes. 

And a third. The leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, argues that the government must declare a national emergency, and convene an urgent meeting of SAGE, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, to examine “the impact of sewage spills on people’s health. Only by treating the sewage scandal with the urgency it demands can we save our rivers and beaches for future generations to enjoy.”

Three moments in the same week: one celebrating a hugely expensive new sewer in London, one showing that despite the growing clamour of political and public debate sewage pollution is in fact getting worse increasing, and one calling for a national emergency to be declared. These moments highlight two key concerns. One is the urgency – emergency, even – in which action needs to be taken, set against the notoriously slow and eye-wateringly expensive work of building sewer capacity. The other is the question of who is responsible for reversing a damaging and worsening situation.

While regulations on water companies have toughened and they are now better monitored, the UK, like many other countries, lacks a comprehensive sewage strategy. The central government has not set out a new framework that combines state and private investment from water companies that are too often beholden to short-term shareholder profit over long-term environmental, social, and economic needs. 

It may seem an odd rallying cry, but we need a new imagination and public celebration of the sewer. When we think of technology and cities today we are likely to think of AI, robots, and the digital, but mundane and ageing infrastructure like the sewer are vital and increasingly so. Untreated waste exposes people and food supplies to pathogens, and damages local waterways, plants, animals, and habitats, both within and downstream of the city. River Action has found that areas of the Thames have 10 times the amount of E.coli bacteria for safety, and there is barely a river in the UK that is in good condition. 

It is a global story. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency states that cities with ageing sewer systems (typically those with ‘combined’ sewers that carry both waste and rainwater) increasingly violate the federal Clean Water Act. Philadelphia alone has had as much as 11 billion gallons of sewage per year emptying untreated into the city’s local waterways. In November 2021, the Canadian city of Merritt was ordered to evacuate following the flooding of a wastewater treatment plant. Cities are growing across the world, but at least a third of the global urban population lacks access to a sewer connection. Less than 20 percent of people living in urban Sub-Saharan Africa have access to sewers. In Kampala, Uganda, it’s one in ten residents; in Lagos and Mzuzu it is closer to zero. In Palestine, over 90 percent of sewage flows untreated into local areas, farmland, waterways, and aquifers, combining with trash, pesticides, animal waste, medical materials, and construction debris.

London sewer, beneath Fleet Street
(Matt Brown, Creative Commons 2.0 londonist.com/2010/08/a_trip_down_the_fleet_river.php)

Cities face a quadruple challenge that make a new focus on the sewer increasingly vital: urban growth, climate change, ageing infrastructure, and decades of disinvestment. The costs of not responding can be socially and environmentally devastating. Cities with inadequate removal of waste are more vulnerable to disease outbreaks, including cholera – which has experienced a serious comeback globally – as well a range of other infections that exacerbate dehydration, hunger, even stunt bodily growth, and keep people out of school or work. It is the poorest residents and neighbourhoods that are hit hardest, typically located on peripheral urban land more vulnerable to flooding. As a coastal city with poor drainage, Dar es Salaam, to take one example, has been hit by cholera outbreaks during heavy rainfall and floods, and with climate change the regularity and severity of flooding is likely to worsen. In the 2015 and 2016 outbreaks, 5000 cases were recorded. Given that the city’s poorer neighbourhoods are growing at twice the rate of the city more generally, the sanitation challenge is likely to become much before severe before it gets better, and Dar is not alone (I pull together some of these cases in Waste and the City).

Sewers are, to be sure, slow to construct, expensive, and often disruptive to build, particularly in busy cities. They often require large amounts of water, which does not suit dry and warm regions, while in places experiencing increasingly intense rainfall they can fill up and flood surprisingly quickly. There are also some good alternatives to sewers, particular in environmental sanitation or nature-based approaches. There are success stories of toilets turning waste into fertiliser on-site, or tiger worms processing human waste, or community business siphoning methane as fuel from decentralised local septic tanks. These approaches are valuable and have potential but often do not cope well in urban areas with high population densities. The sheer amount of waste, plus the impact of climate change, points inexorably to the need for bigger more widespread sewer systems. 

However expensive they are, sewers last and can save environmental and social costs for generations. Some estimates have the savings at as much as 7% of GDP over time, and in some cases, the cost of providing sewers is closer to that of other often less reliable options. Sewers are vitally important for health, environment, economy, and the future of cities. But cases like the Thames super-sewer notwithstanding, the investment is just not happening. Water UK, which represents the water companies, has said it will invest £10 billion in sewage infrastructure while at the same time acknowledging that £60 billion is needed. Addressing this requires a bold state vision that holds private companies to account and which is invests for the long-term. There are perhaps some signs globally that despite the costs and disruption, states are slowly beginning to wake up to the need to position the humble sewer more centrally in the political and public imagination. Given how long it takes to realise progress with sewers a new urgency is badly needed.

DenCity Comic: Stories of Crowds & Cities

What can a comic book tell us about urban density?

That was the question Jordan Collver and I posed in a call for proposals in May this year. We invited comic creators to pitch their interpretation of some of the key themes in a research project I have been leading on urban density (DenCity, funded by the European Research Council). We defined density broadly, from densities in homes and residential areas to those ‘on the move’ in transport, or temporary densities in public space, from busy city centres to festivals, sports or protesting crowds. The response was amazing, and an indicator of the sheer amount of talent that exists in the large and diverse world of comics. We settled on six submissions and then Jordan and I, as editors, met with the contributors to discuss the idea and its relationship to density, then later provided feedback on drafts.

For me, the purpose of the comic book was to explore different ways of representing and reflecting on density and its relationship to the city that go beyond the more scholarly forms in journal articles and books. I was intrigued by how the visual and narrative form of the comic might give a sense of the ‘life’ of density, including how it looks, feels and is differently experienced. Comics are a powerfully spatial medium. I was interested in how the comic form might reveal some of the ways in which place shapes density, and vice-versa, including how densities appear, are experienced, and are responded to in different parts of the city (from the city centre protest to the concert hall or urban beach front on a warm evening), and how densities in-place are shaped by social, economic and political geographies that often extend far beyond that particular site. And, finally, I was interested in extending the question of ‘what is urban density and why does it matter?’ to a different set of participants and audiences, and to see where that conversation went.

And now, the comic – DenCity: Stories of Crowds and Comics – is complete and available to download for free here! We are delighted with the finished product, which is complete in time for us to bring free printed copies to the forthcoming Thought Bubble Comic Convention in Harrogate, the largest comic art convention in the UK. The comic is an anthology of six short pieces, all of them showing very different styles of writing and art. It brings together contributors from across the world telling compelling stories of densities ranging from London, Sarajevo and New York, to Mumbai, Jakarta and Lima.

Cover, by Felix the Rover

The comic opens with this brilliant cover by Felix the Rover. Then, the first piece is by Myfanwy Tristram, Consensual Elevation, which brilliantly juxtaposes a Nick Cave concert and the thousands who gathered in London for the coronation of King Charles. In the next piece, In the Pursuit of Stardust, Kay Sohini takes us to Mumbai and beautifully explores how the city’s diverse densities reflect its inequalities, built transformations, and social aspirations.

In Uniting Against What Divides Us, Karrie Fransman embarks on a moving and powerful account of war, displacement, refuge, and the coming together of crowds in support of refugees. She vividly reveals how the protesting crowd might assemble in one space and time, but is the result of relations and concerns that cut across global space and events. Staying with the protesting crowd, Adam Allsuch Boardman examines the infrastructure that makes a protest, and its policing, possible. In Anatomy of a Protest Crowd, the material things that shape the crowd experience are brought to the fore, from the helmets, goggles and first aid kits of protestors, to the riot trucks, batons and tear gas canisters of the police.

Next, we move to Jakarta in Marco Del Gallo and Nadiyah Suyatna’s Blessing of the Sea. This piece combines the rapid and radical transformation of Jakarta’s built environment and its associated urban inequalities, with experience and fragmentation of traditional fishing communities, beautifully illustrated through the story of the annual sea festival of crowds of small boats, ‘Nadran’. The penultimate contribution, Under the Bridge, examines the policing of homeless ‘crowds’ during the COVID-19 crowd. As Aaron Eamer, Federica Mancin, Doug Lee, and Taylor Esposito powerfully show, pandemic restrictions meant that even relatively small gatherings of people could be seen as a ‘crowd’ that violated the rules, with sometimes heavy-handed policing in response. The final piece, Passenger King, turns to density and transport in Lima. Alberto Rayo and Sebastian Carrillo explore how density is ‘hard-wired’ by drawing attention to the role of transport infrastructure. They do so by literally removing the material substrate of dense mobility, primarily in the form of a bus that seems to have turned invisible.

The anthology ends with a short Reflection from me on some of the themes that emerge from the comic, including on the rhythm of density over time and how that impacts the urban experience, the politics of density, the relationship between density and inequality, the role of infrastructure in density, and ways in which off-line and on-line densities feed into one another (on which see Nusrat Subina Chowdhury’s Paradoxes of the Popular). My hope is that the comic provokes readers to think both about what density – in whichever form – means to them, and what a focus on density might tell us about the experience and nature of the city and urban living.

Comics have had a long and varied relationship to the city and the urban experience. They have been shaped in part by the modern urban experience, from soaring skyscrapers, visions of urban futurity, or in the potential of urbanism to provoke the imagination, to explorations of urban anxiety over crime, the nature of alienation, the experience of inequality or multiculturalism, or expressions of power and powerlessness. We might think of the role of New York in the Golden Age of Western comics in the 1930s and 40s, when so many mainstream characters emerged, or the march of urban modernity in Japan in Shigeru Mizuki’s Showa (see for example Michael Chabon’s novel and Mizuki’s four-volume history of Japan’s Showa period from 1929 to 1989). There is a long history of comic books telling stories of cities (see this edited collection for example), from Superman’s Metropolis to Batman’s Gotham and Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One (on which, see Michael Molcher’s I am the Law). The city is more than a context for these and other stories, it is an actor that produces aesthetic, dramatic, and social forms and commentary, and which pushes narrative forward (see, for just one example, the role of Chicago in Chris Ware’s comics).

The city crowd, both in its presence and in its absence, has played its role throughout that history, and some of those themes surface in the DenCity comic: hope, inspiration, joy, despair, inequality, social and spatial transformation, and more. The comic is a set of snapshots on a much bigger encounter between the city and the social, and how that relationship unfolds through different registers of art and storytelling.

Finally, a note of thanks. It was great to have the chance to work with such a talented group on this anthology and I thank them all for their ideas, conversations, enthusiasm and brilliant contributions. I am grateful to Martha Julian, Thought Bubble’s Festival Director, for her advice and for putting Jordan and I in touch. The comic would not have been possible without Martha’s initial support and enthusiasm: thank you. I owe a big final thanks to Jordan for all he has done to help make this happen; it has been a pleasure working with such a talented editor and comic creator. You can find out more about his excellent work here.

DenCity is a research project based at Durham University and funded by the European Research Council (773209). The research focusses on density in cities across the world, from London, Hong Kong, and Manila, to Toyko, Mumbai, and Dar es Salaam. I am grateful to the ERC for their support. (Disclaimer: the views and opinions expressed here and in the comic contributions are those of the authors only and do not reflect those of the European Research Council Executive Agency, and neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them).

Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife

I’ve wanted to write this book for a long time, so it means a lot to me that it has now been published. The book is an argument for positioning sanitation at the heart of the urban question. Below, I provide a brief overview of what I try to do in the book (it is published with Verso and if you are interested in it you can order a discounted copy from them or find it freely available at this link).

Sanitation, I argue, is fundamental to living and thriving in the city. Sanitation tends to get understood as either a technical engineering problem or as a set of health concerns, and while it is both of those things for sure, it is also very much more. Sanitation is important in urban social relations, livelihood, eduction, gender, race, ethnicity, age, and more. It is a networked politics of citylife, and not just one of toilets alone. In the book I argue that sanitation is about the right to citylife, and that it ought to be given greater space and urgency in urban political debate and struggle.

More than half of the global urban population is forced to live without safely managed sanitation. More than a billion people are forced to regularly defecate in the open and hidden spaces of the city, under bridges, at garbage grounds, by railway tracks, along riverbanks and shorelines. In 2016 alone, diarrhoea led to the entirely preventable deaths of more than 1.5 million people, over a quarter of whom were children under five. As the world continues to urbanise, it is the poorest neighbourhoods that are growing fastest, and it is here that the sanitation crisis is at its most acute. Cities are expected to grow by another 2.5 billion people by 2050, placing huge demands on already woefully insufficient sanitation, water, and waste systems.

Sanitation in the city is far more than simply the safe removal and containment of human waste; more, too, than managing the supply and demand of technologies. It is about governance and provisioning, but it is also about bodies and their wastes, broken and inadequate toilets and pipes, municipal officers and activists, places and political economies, cultural politics and people, microbes and legal rights. Sanitation erodes health, deepens the exploitation of especially women and girls, limits people’s ability to move around the city, keeps children out of school, stops adults getting to work, reflects and exacerbates local tensions around religion, race, or ethnicity, stunts bodily growth, curtails the nutritional value of food, acts as a vehicle of disease, becomes a fulcrum for urban protest and resistance – and so on. And climate change is intensifying the sanitation crisis in cities, particularly through flooding and drought.

I sought to make the book global in scope. After all, it is not only economically poorer countries that face growing sanitation challenges. In richer countries, climate change is rapidly exposing ageing infrastructure and years of disinvestment. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency states that cities with old combined sewer systems increasingly violate the federal Clean Water Act. In November 2021, the Canadian city of Merritt was ordered to evacuate following the flooding of a wastewater treatment plant. The water system was contaminated by sewage and deemed undrinkable even if boiled. In 2015–16 in Flint, Michigan, water contamination created a public health crisis caused by lead leaching into the water supply from ageing pipes. In Britain, the Environment Agency has said that not a single river, lake, or stream is known to be in ‘good status’, and public concern over untreated sewage spilling into rivers, waterways, and coastlines has grown in recent years. Away from sewage, there has also been a dramatic collapse in the number of public toilets in Britain, and there is no legal obligation on local governments to provide public toilets (and, thanks to years of austerity, little resource to provide or maintain public sanitation).

Sanitation has too often been pushed from the political and public imagination of cities and their futures. While city leaders have been grappling with boosterist discourses of smart cities and the emerging impacts of AI, the most basic and fundamental infrastructures beneath our feet have been crumbling. Meanwhile, city governments too often respond to the crisis in sanitation through a politics of ‘cleaning up’ the city that displaces the poorest, sometimes violently. In 2021, for example, the government of Pakistan embarked on a campaign of bulldozing homes and evicting residents who live along the city’s narrow waterways (‘nullahs’). The government, with the support of the Supreme Court, argued that clogged nullahs are the cause of floods during the monsoon rains. Activists countered that the main impetus for the evictions is to clear the way for new roads, and they called on the World Bank, which is funding water and sewage work in the city, to condemn the acts and remove support.

And yet, there is also a history of interventions in city sanitation that are welfarist and enabling, addressing sanitation poverty and inequality with ongoing commitment. As I argue in the book, these are instances of ‘affirmative sanitation’. In Salvador, Brazil, for example, 2,000 kilometres of small sewer pipes were built between 1996 and 2004 through state investment, connecting 300,000 homes. In Karachi, Pakistan, the Orangi Pilot Project of civil society organisations built a network of small sewer pipes, improving public health and local environmental conditions. In Kampala, Uganda, between 2003 and 2015 the government worked with civil society organisations to increase the amount of human waste being treated by thirty times. In South Africa, the eThekwini municipality cross-subsidised water costs for the urban poor and provided more than 80,000 households with toilets. Ethiopia reduced the numbers of people answering the call of nature in open spaces by more than half by 2015, following government prioritisation of public health. Across the urban world there have been thousands of small-scale interventions led by residents, activists, and practitioners, from toilet blocks that double up as community centres to eco-sanitation initiatives that generate fertiliser for growing food while reducing water use.

Across the book, I build the argument for addressing sanitation inequality through a focus on five key areas, which the book is structured around: people, things, life, protest, and allocation. Together, these operate as different entry points into sanitation as a networked urban experience. What I mean by that is that sanitation is always already an entanglement of people, infrastructures, services, wastes, microbes, political claim-making, and the political economies of provisioning and distribution (land, housing, spending, and so on). I end with an argument for urban sanitation forums that might be able to respond to its networked nature, and which could position sanitation more centrally in urban policy, planning, budgeting, and debate.

This is a topic that has been important to me since I did my PhD research in Mumbai in 2002-3. I hope it’s of interest and that it contributes to a greater focus on what I think is a vital but too often neglected part of urban life and change.

Call for papers

Intersections on the periphery: The Good City in a Time of Crisis

Cape Town, South Africa, 27^th – 28^th November 2023

Bangalore, India, 15^th – 16^th January 2023

The intersection of rapid peripheral urbanisation, profound climate impacts, and sharply growing inequalities has placed our existing conceptual frameworks and approaches in disarray. While we have a rich body of research examining each of these domains independently, we lack two vital understandings. First, how do we make sense of the intersection between these processes, particularly at the rapidly growing urban periphery? Second, what does understanding this intersection mean for working towards ‘the good city’?

Peripheral expansion has emerged as a dominant mode of urbanization today, reshaping urban lives, economies, socialities, and ecologies.  We identify four key forms of peripheralisation: one, as a result of deliberate intervention by state or private actors including corridors, magnet cities, new towns, or programmes of massive suburbanization; two, off-shoot growth from larger urban centres which might include expansionary real estate speculation on the urban edge; three, the formation of peripheries through often gradual settlement of and autoconstruction by new and typically lower-income migrants, and the diversity of activities that emerge in unplanned and underserved areas such as urban villages; four, the marginalization and lack of research on certain types of urban residents who exist at urban peripheries (Keil, 2017; Brenner and Schmid, 2011; Guney et al, 2019; Caldeira, 2017; Holston, 2009; Holston and Caldeira, 2008; Pati, 2022; Tucker and Hassan 2021; Tucker 2023).

This seminar series offers a platform for a series of open-ended conversations that will enable participants to ‘step back’ and reflect, in an open-ended, dialogic way, to make sense of this intersection between peripheral urbanisation, climate change, and inequality, and what can do about it.

We will hold 2 seminars of 15 participants each at the University of Cape Town and the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore. The first workshop in Cape Town will focus on different ways of knowing or understanding peripheral urbanisation. We invite a wide set of stakeholders and perspectives on the periphery, as well as scholars working with a variety of methodological approaches. In addition, we will start theorising the links between peripheral urbanisation, climate change and sharply growing inequalities in the first workshop.

In the second workshop in Bangalore, we will deepen the theoretical and conceptual work initiated in Cape Town, to think about ways of linking peripheral urbanisation, climate change, and inequalities, and what these mean for our ideas about the ‘good city’. For this workshop, we invite scholars whose work lies at the intersection of at least two of the above three trends.

Interested candidates can apply to only one workshop. Please indicate whether you wish to be considered for the first workshop (Cape Town), or the second workshop (Bangalore). The deadline to send in a 350 word paper proposal is 10 September 2023. Attendance will then be confirmed by 29 September 2023. Please send proposals and queries to peripheries.usf@gmail.com. 

Meals during the workshop will be provided for all participants. Where possible, local accommodation will be provided. We have a small amount of funding to support the travel of some participants to Cape Town / Bangalore. This will be used to prioritise travel for early career scholars. The remaining participants will be required to fund their travel costs for attending the workshop. Online participation will be considered for a small set of participants that are unable to travel. Funding for the workshops is being provided by the Urban Studies Foundation.

Let us know if you have any questions.

Open Call: City Crowds Comic

Can we tell the story of city crowds through comics? Crowds are central to cities. The commuting crowd, the Saturday night crowd, the protesting crowd, the festival crowd, the sports crowd, even the online crowd. There are crowded markets and overcrowded homes, crowded subways, squares, and parks. The different crowds of the city generate all kinds of experiences. People might find one crowd exciting or fun, or another overwhelming, exhausting, or claustrophobic. What stories might we tell of crowds in the city?  

We are assembling a comic on city crowds, made-up of a collection of short pieces. The call is for potential contributors to submit an idea of 1-4 pages in length. It is part of a research project based at Durham University and funded by the European Research Council (DenCity 773209). The research focusses on crowds in cities across the world, from London, Hong Kong, and Manila, to Toyko, Mumbai, and Dar es Salaam. Applicants are asked to connect their idea to one of more of five key themes below, although we are open to proposals on other themes related to crowds and cities. Applicants are invited to submit creative ideas that takes the topic in any direction they like. The contribution must tell a story about crowds and the city, and cannot be an illustration alone. Payment will be between £250-£450 per page.

1: The pandemic crowd. In the spring of 2020, cities underwent a vast programme of de-crowding. Being in a crowd could get you fined, or worse. Within the crowd, an invisible threat lurked. Some experienced intense anxiety around crowds, while others longed for the ‘buzz’ of the city. To some, even a small gathering felt like a busy crowd. But the pandemic crowd was not experienced equally. Residents in ‘slums’ in Manila or who drive buses in Mumbai or who work in construction sites in London, sometimes found it impossible to isolate from crowding, while wealthier groups could usually work from home. There are legacies too. For many the anxieties they held about crowds during the pandemic are forgotten and normality has resumed; for some being in crowds creates feelings of unease or even panic.  

2: The commuting crowd. In subways from New York to London and Tokyo, or buses from Mumbai to Paris, the morning rush hour can be a crushed crowd. Bodies thrown into tight proximities, unwanted intimacies and moments of frustration, laughter, or overwhelm. People both experience the crowd as one mass and develop their own relationship to it. Some escape into smartphones and music, others quietly endure, and still others find their tempers occasionally flare. On the regular commute, friendships are sometimes borne within the crowd. Strangers become familiar even as they remain unknown. Encounters might unfold that are mundane and unremarkable, or which can change the course of people’s lives.

3: The protesting crowd. This is a crowd that comes together with a clear purpose. These crowds can take on all kinds of atmospheres. They might be angry or joyful, sombre or whimsical, pained or excited, or all of these at once. They might have complex demands or simple calls for something to stop (or start). They can be volatile. The crowd might splinter as some groups pursue actions that others disagree with. They are policed, sometimes violently so. In some cities, they might be dicing with state intolerance and brutality. 

4: The overcrowded home. We tend to think of the crowd ‘out there’ in the city, but what if the home itself becomes a crowd? Hidden from view, but often with difficult and impoverished living conditions, the overcrowded home takes all kinds of forms. The ‘slum’ homes of extended families in tiny shacks in Mumbai or on rooftops in Hong Kong, low-income migrant homes in London, workers dormitories in Singapore, and more. The overcrowded home is a space of shared intimacies, where privacy is perpetually suspended. Multiple daily activities are improvised in often tiny spaces. Social and familial bonds can become frayed or enhanced, tensions might escalate and close support networks might be crucial to survival.

5: The toilet crowd. The global lack of toilet facilities affects people all over the world’s cities. In many poorer neighbourhoods, dependence on public toilets can lead to huge early morning queues to access what can be woeful facilities. A long queue for a toilet in a poor neighbourhood in Delhi might be dominated by men, with women and children shunted out and forced to find unsafe spaces such as under bridges, on in fields, or behind garbage grounds. The sanitation crisis impacts people in starkly different ways and extents, from refugee camps in Sudan or school children in Lagos to food delivery cyclists in London.

Please send your idea or any enquiries to the research lead, Professor Colin McFarlane, at colin.mcfarlane@durham.ac.uk by June 23^rd, 2023. The submission should include a description of your idea (max 1 page), two samples of your work, a link to an online portfolio (if available), a budget with a quote for the work, and a CV (max 2 pages). The submission will be an initial pitch that will be developed further in collaboration with the project, and the deadline for final work is October 27^th, 2023.

Please note that if the idea is to involve more than one person, it will need to have a complete team (eg we won’t accept ideas for scripts where there is no artist also involved) and the page rate will remain the same. Ideas are welcome on any city and not confined to the cities mentioned in this call. The final product will be free of cost and made available as a downloadable PDF and in paper copy at relevant events, conferences and conventions. More information on the DenCity project is available here: https://dencity.webspace.durham.ac.uk.

New book – Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds

Excited that my new book – Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds – has been published by University of California Press. This short blog on the book was originally posted on the UC Press website…

I was standing in front of two side-by-side pictures, both black and white images of houses on an ordinary street. When I stood back, I realised that the photos were in fact of the same house. One image of the house was intact, the other broken-up – fragmented in mid-demolition. It was the graffiti on the wall that made me realize this was the same building: ‘Don’t vote, prepare for revolution.’

These two photographs are part of an exhibition currently showing at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle, northeast England – The Last Ships, by Chris Killip. They offer glimpses of streets around the city’s River Tyne in the late 1970s, capturing the twilight years of shipbuilding, and the fragmentation of the area’s built and social worlds.

Walking out of the gallery, you might see a second set of fragments: the half-built network of elevated walkways in the city (see Figure 1). Developed in the 1960s under the city council leadership of the controversial T Dan Smith, the walkways separated motorway traffic below from pedestrians above, and were inspired by post-war modernist planning ambitions that led to large-scale redevelopment and demolition in Newcastle and beyond. Some of the walkways are still accessible, but they are generally not well used. Here and there they linger in mid-air as sections that come to abrupt and incongruous stops, fragments of another time and urban aspiration.

Figure 1: Walkway, Newcastle, photo by author

Cities are becoming increasingly fragmented materially, socially, and spatially. The key drivers vary from place to place, but there are some common causes of fragmentation, including exclusion from land and decent housing, leaving more and more people in insecure, rented homes; a lack of decent and affordable infrastructure and services, with the basics becoming more expensive for lower-income groups; and local and central states that either lack resource or political will to seriously tackle poverty and inequality (see Figure 2). But how is life lived in the fragment city? How are its conditions being contested? And what forms of knowledge, practice and possibility emerge when we examine the fragments of the city?

These are the questions which guide my new book, Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds.  In Newcastle, close to where I live, fragments tell all kinds of stories. These are the bits and pieces of the city that become caught up in stories of the urban change, politics, and everyday experience. I treat fragments not just as nouns, but as verbs — processes as much as things, with different kinds of meaning attached to them. Sometimes fragments are routine parts of urban experience, at other times they surprise and might even jolt new ways of seeing an urban issue or concern.

I focus on fragments and their interactions with residents, activists, artists, writers, and others. I explore not just material fragments, but fragments of knowledge too. These are forms of knowledge and ways of knowing that are typically marginalised by dominant cultures, actors, groups, and power relations, and which can present clues to different ways of understanding the urban condition and its possibilities.

The book itself is also an experiment with fragments as a form of written expression, with fragments of text that describe brief encounters with urban sites across the world. Each encounter acts as an evocation or provocation, with glimpses into conditions that collectively generate insight into the larger urban condition. I draw on and juxtapose research in several cities to argue that the relations formed around fragments can help us to understand what it means to be urban.

Figure 2: Housing infrastructure, Mumbai – Renu Desai, used with permission

In Mumbai, I explore how fragments of infrastructure become central to urban struggle, while in Cape Town I trace an example of how fragments become political weapons, contesting inequalities of class and race. In Berlin, I consider the controversy over the treatment of newly arrived refugees in 2015, largely from Syria, who struggled for periods with deeply inadequate provisions of toilets, food, and shelter. In Kampala, I discuss how a group of poorer residents make their way in the city, and how they cope with and seek to move beyond an urbanisms of fragments, while in Hong Kong and New York I reflect on the possibilities – and limits – of coming to know fragments through walking the city. Beyond these cases, the book draws in writing, activism, art and stories of urban change that include London, Los Angeles, São Paulo, Glasgow, and – to return to where I began – Newcastle. Paying attention to these fragments unveils resources for making sense of our increasingly urban world, and possibilities for making and remaking the city.

Density and its futures: COVID-19, the city, and the politics of value

Cities are density-producing machines, bringing together people, goods, information, and money. The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic subverted that very logic. Lockdowns entailed the greatest de-densification of urban space in history, especially of city centres. As cities began to ‘re-open’, a set of new architectures and regulations were set in train in efforts to manage densities, accompanied too by various relations, from anxiety to longing, for the ‘buzz’ of the urban crowd and everyday bustle of citylife.

At the same time, there is now much discussion of the potential production of new class-based geographies of density across city-regions, driven by changing patterns of labour and home ownership. The pandemic has focussed attention too on those most vulnerable to infection, especially poorer and ethnic minority groups, and intensified debate about the links between density and inequalities in housing and labour. Following an era of pro-density planning, policy and thinking, there is a new intensity to the debate about the merits of dense urban living.

In a new paper in Urban Studies, ‘Repopulating density: COVID-19 and the politics of urban value,’ I track the debate on density and COVID-19 and argue for a new politics of value. The debate on density has shifted from initial and largely erroneous claims that density was to blame for the spread of the virus – an imaginary of density-as-pathology – to a more nuanced geographical understanding of the urban dimensions of the crisis, focussed on certain spatial conditions, domestic ‘overcrowding,’ poverty, and race and ethnicity. At the same time, the focus on density of different kinds – including in the home, in the neighbourhood, in transit, and in public space – presents an opportunity for critical urbanists to develop a new politics of density. I argue that a useful way to think about a politics of value here is to focus on transformations in three inter-connected domains: governance, form, and knowledge.

To make this argument, I ask: how might we revalue density by conceptually repopulating it as a concept? While we are familiar with the ways in which the city is turned for financial value, cities also generate all kinds of value, from the politics of contesting state spending decisions, or socioeconomic experiments such as city participatory budgeting, to the wider postcapitalist economy of self-provisioning, gifting, caring. By value I am signalling a politics that attaches particular kinds of worth to density of different sorts. This attachment is shaped in relation to a population, understood through characteristics of composition, temporality and spatiality that instantiate different kinds of density.

The changing relationship between value and population is not a feature of the pandemic alone, but part of the variegated history and politics of density in the city. But the pandemic, by starkly revealing and catalysing the inequalities of cities, has generated a public debate about the pros and cons of dense urban living in the round, and presents a pivotal moment through which to shape – and repopulate – the larger density agenda.

The article is open access in Urban Studies here.

The urban poor have been hit hard by coronavirus. We must ask who cities are designed to serve

The enormous death toll in New York City, the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak in the US, led New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, to write that “there is a density level in NYC that is destructive”. New York is presented as a victim of its own population density, its inhabitants facing increased risks from compact housing and crowded public transport.

High density has been regarded as problematic in other badly affected cities such as Milan and Madrid. The pandemic has generated a whole set of anxieties about the post-coronavirus risks of living in dense urban areas.

It is a huge oversimplification to blame population density alone for the transmission of the virus. We need only look at the many examples of densely populated cities where authorities have been successful in managing the virus, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei and Seoul.

But it’s certainly true that, in cities as different as New York, Milwaukee, Birmingham, Mumbai and Nairobi, a pattern has emerged. In poorer neighbourhoods, people sometimes live in small homes they share with many generations of the family, or in buildings with shared kitchens, toilets, water access, or with narrow corridors or lanes. They are more likely to have jobs that cannot be done from home, doing the essential work that maintains and sustains urban life: public transport, healthcare, refuse collection, deliveries, or food service and supply. Those on the lowest incomes have found it hard or impossible to isolate at home.

Where high density and poverty collide

In the UK, areas of Birmingham and London with cramped living conditions have 70% more cases of the virus than the least dense areas of the country. In New York, the highest number of cases per capita are in areas with the lowest incomes and largest household size. In Milwaukee, African Americans make up a quarter of the population, living in often more densely populated areas, but in early April accounted for an astonishing 70% of those who had died.

Poorer neighbourhoods are more likely to have higher rates of pre-existing health problems, such as heart or lung disease, which can exacerbate the impact of the virus. In some poor, dense neighbourhoods, COVID-19 is just the latest in an ongoing struggle with health threats. In north-east Mumbai in India there are densely populated communities that have had to contend with infections such as multi-drug resistant TB, sometimes unable to afford both food and medicine. Now COVID-19 has introduced a new risk, while shutting off their livelihoods. At the same time, such residents often lack access to quality, affordable healthcare.

In these places, what author and urbanist Jay Pitter has called “forgotten densities”, the pandemic has had a disproportionate impact. The areas that have suffered – and continue to suffer – most are places where dense population is found alongside high rates of health, class, race, gender and socioeconomic inequality.

The problem is not with high population density per se, but with the imbalance between good quality urban provisions – including housing, services and infrastructure – and the population density of an area. This imbalance is not the natural order of things, but the product of active political choices and historical class, racial and gender inequalities that increase rates of poverty and poor health.

High-rise as a divider of class and wealth

Before the outbreak, building high-density cities was seen to bring many benefits. Want to tackle the climate emergency? Build compact low-carbon cities with amenities and jobs within walking distance. Trying to re-ignite your economy? Create clusters of talented people to enable “collision density” that will foster creativity and innovation. Aiming to build socially mixed communities? Develop dense housing ranging from low to mid and high-rise structures that cater to people with different incomes. Building dense towns and cities was viewed as a solution to all kinds of challenges.

But what seems a well-intentioned idea too often produces an enclave of middle class and wealthier groups in attractive, well-managed and well-serviced neighbourhoods – as presented in the idealised drawings beloved of architects featuring beautiful young (and often white) people in attractively designed public space between sleek new apartments. But outside these premium areas of high-density luxury lie expansive areas where poorer groups live, in under-provided neighbourhoods with often ill-maintained and sub-standard housing.

This exclusionary approach should be challenged and replaced by a new vision and politics of cities that is more inclusive and caring. The effects of COVID-19 have at once caused immense harm to those living in poorer areas, while also prompting those living in high-density luxury to reconsider city living. People now question whether they want to live cheek-by-jowl with others.

Does this mean that we should abandon efforts to build high-density areas in cities? While the pandemic lasts we will surely see people taking that position, but in the long run this would mean losing the benefits of dense urban living. Instead, we need a new conversation about city density. We need to ensure greater attention, investment and care towards areas of high population density where there are also high rates of poverty, where the inhabitants have been badly affected by the virus even as they provide essential labour for the rest of the city. We must also intervene through policy to prevent the creation of high-density areas that become exclusive enclaves of wealth.

It means, in short, that we should collectively think again about how to support and develop high-density neighbourhoods that are liveable and enjoyable for the majority in cities, and not just a few. That is no easy prospect. How we design and build our cities is a messy, politicised, and soul-searching process. Today our urban future is more uncertain than it has been in generations, and much remains to be fought for.

(I originally published this piece on June 3rd 2020 in The Conversation. Here is the original article).

Fragment Urbanism: Politics at the Margins of the City

I’m pleased to have published a new paper with Society and Space on ‘fragment urbanism’. The paper explores how the idea of the ‘fragment’ might be used to understand the nature and politics of urban life. The PDF is behind a paywall, but a pre-proofs Word version is available here.

Focussing on cities in the global South, I try to develop a particular account of fragment urbanism. I examine some of the ways in which the material fragments of the city act politically or become enrolled in urban politicisation. Central to this is an effort to approach fragments not just as the products of historical processes of urban fragmentation, but as generative in the politics of urban life and the city.

At its simplest, a material fragment is a detached portion or piece. In the city, this includes all manner of broken or inadequate objects and things, from insufficient infrastructure to the ruins of former factories and housing or discarded commodities. Bits and pieces that either demand constant maintenance just to work, or which constitute the remnants and leftovers of previous activities that are no longer operational.

Mumbai – one of the cities discussed in the paper

I develop two key conceptual starting points for the fragment urbanism I develop in the paper. The first is that fragments are always caught up in distinct forms of ‘whole-fragment’ relation. The second, following on, is that the politics of urban fragments are not fixed. Here, I identify three broad ways in which urban fragments are often politicized on the economic margins of cities in the global South: attending to, generative translation, and surveying wholes.

The rest of the paper is organised around these three forms of politics. I also reflect on some of the tensions and possibilities of shifting between these three forms, and argue for seeing each of these politics not in terms of one being ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than another, but as products of context, and specifically as forms of becoming driven by particular conditions and aims.

In the early discussions I set out how the term ‘fragment’ differs from more familiar vocabularies of urban fragmentation in critical urban theory, such as ‘splinter’ (thinking in particular of Steve Graham and Simon Marvin’s brilliant book, Splintering Urbanism). My focus is on how material fragments are drawn into different kinds of urban relations, so that they are not just the products of urbanization – not just nouns ‘there’ in the city – but verbs, processes that can be made and remade through different forms of politicisation.

3 Postdoc opportunities on ERC Urban Density Project

The application process for three Postdoctoral Research Associates on an Urban Density project is now open on the Durham University website (https://recruitment.durham.ac.uk/pls/corehrrecruit/erq_jobspec_details_form.jobspec?p_id=012908). Each postdoc is a full-time 3 year post. The deadline for applications is 16th May (12 noon GMT), and the plan is for the postdocs to be in place by September 1st 2018.

The project is funded through the European Research Council’s (ERC) Consolidator scheme – a short description is available here. It aims to develop a fresh approach to an enduring and central element of the city and urban life. It will examine how high urban densities – or ‘intensities’ -are lived and perceived in Asian cities, focusing on Mumbai, Dhaka, Hong Kong, Manila and Tokyo. In doing so, the project will explore several themes that cut-across different sites in urban Asia: urban markets, waste and informality, urban mobility, vertical densities, and ways of seeing and knowing intensity.

Detailed information on the roles, project, and what we’re looking for in applicants is provided on the application website (https://recruitment.durham.ac.uk/pls/corehrrecruit/erq_jobspec_details_form.jobspec?p_id=012908).

Please do let your colleagues and friends know about the opportunity! I’m keen to talk to interested applicants and to answer questions (email me in the first instance on colin.mcfarlane@durham.ac.uk). The start of the recruitment process is an exciting moment and I’m really looking forward to getting into the project with new colleagues!