Multi-Scalar Metropolisation. Challenges and Opportunities of Plural Urban Reconversion Processes in the Métropole Aix-Marseille-Provence

Marseille is broadly considered a postindustrial city in crisis, which has failed to achieve a functional reconversion and a change of narrative in the age of globalization. Over the last two decades, however, processes of regionalized and integrated metropolisation have had an impact on the city’s urban renaissance prospects. This paper identifies three central projects, which symbolically represent and concretely articulate different axes of Marseille’s metropolisation processes: Euroméditerranée (1995-*); The European Capital of Culture Marseille-Provence 2013; and the institutional creation of the Métropole d'Aix-Marseille-Provence. This paper proposes to approach metropolisation as a multi-dimensional phenomenon. Drawing on the three aforementioned cases, we analyze the different territorial-spatial scales affected, as well as the various geographic scales of governance stakeholders involved. Reflecting on their scopes of impact respectively, the aim of the study is to investigate the challenges and opportunities of multi-scalar metropolisation for Aix-Marseille-Provence, and to discuss to what extent this conflictual plurality might (not) be promising for a consensual metropolitan integration in the future.

The Man Who Struck the Judge with a Fly Swatter: Justice and Performance in Contemporary Kazakhstan

This article investigates a series of events that occurred in Quaragandy, a postindustrial city in northern Kazakhstan in the mid-2010s. These events led to Evgenii Tankov, an established lawyer, hitting a judge, Arai Alshynbekov, with a fly swatter during a routine court session. This research demonstrates that Tankov's act was not a flash of rage or a real attempt to harm the judge. It was, instead, a calculated strategy in which a political statement was concealed if not sheathed within the form of a grotesque performance. Tankov knew he would be judged for disrespect towards the court: and yet he used his subsequent trial to demonstrate the moral and intellectual impasse of Kazakhstan's judicial system. This article claims that as a performance, Tankov's case is useful because it allows one to re-think the genre itself. Moreover, it argues that the form of the trial per se became a genre of political agency in contemporary Kazakhstan. As an example of political praxis, this case allows one to question the ways in which non-political actors produce and affirm their identities and create new forms of political agency in a reality in which political behavior is bounded by a postsocialist authoritarian state.

Indian Urbanization

Even as late as 2008, over sixty years after Indian independence from British colonial rule, only 30 percent of India’s population lived in urban areas. Not surprisingly, the rural loomed large in the young nation’s postcolonial imagination over the 20th century. Scholarly attention to Indian cities took a sharp upward turn in the new millennium. A constellation of social, economic, political, and cultural forces came together in this “urban turn.” The International Monetary Fund–mandated economic reforms of 1991 over time brought cities to increasing policy prominence as nodes for national and transnational capital flows. At the same time, the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act provided statutory status to urban local bodies as the third tier of elected government in India, after the central government and states. Together, the unfolding of these changes created a profound shift in the political economy of Indian cities. Equally powerful transformations reconfigured the sociocultural landscapes of Indian cities starting in the 1980s and 1990s. The English-educated middle classes had been influential in the politics and cultures of Indian cities since colonial times. However, a sustained period of economic growth in the 1980s and the rise of skill-intensive and eventually globalized services sector economies in the following decades allowed this increasingly urban middle class access to new forms of material and symbolic consumption. Globalized aspirations and assertions accompanied and informed the rise of this class. While the liberalization of import controls brought consumer goods from around the world into Indian marketplaces, the incursion of cable television and in time, the internet, brought exposure to global norms of consumption. Alongside these emerging cultures of consumerism, new global imaginaries of the postindustrial city shaped both popular and policy visions of ‘world-class’ cities. Yet vast swaths of urban India remain outside the ambit of elite discourses. More than four in five urban workers, according to recent data, are informally employed (i.e., they lack even basic job protections). As many as half or more urban residents in many Indian megacities live in unplanned settlements. Some of these shortages of housing and basic services were encoded into colonial planning paradigms. But the cleansing and beautification campaigns that create and maintain world-class cities also drive processes of immiseration as poor groups are pushed out of prosperous city centers. The interplay of these social, cultural, economic, and political transformations and contradictions over the last twenty-five years or more have inspired a vast and burgeoning scholarship on Indian urbanization.

Horror Cities

In both art and politics, the deindustrialized city would seem to have taken on the qualities of the “unrepresentable,” a traumatic experience that can only be recorded by its attendant silence, or of depoliticized representation in genres such as “ruin porn.” Despite or perhaps because of this, the postindustrial city is ubiquitous within the genres of scifi/speculative, fantasy, and horror cinema, appearing consistently as backdrop, symbol, animus, and even in some cases, character. Given the wide literature on horror film, haunting, and traumatic memory, this article suggests we read the emergence of the “horror city” as a representation of the political unconscious of this historical conjuncture. Many films refer back to older mythologies of imperial and racial conquest, but also by doing so represent the symbol of modernity—the city—as travel back to a traumatic past. Yet within this return to history, there is a contest over allegory. Contrasting neoconservative narratives of films like The Road (dir. John Hillcoat, US, 2009) and the slasher film Hostel (dir. Eli Roth, US/Germany/Czech Republic/Slovakia/Iceland, 2005) suggests that the future has not vanished but rather has been spatially dislocated to the peripheries, as the modern site of production returns to inflict pain only on those unaware of its existence. And perhaps more radical still, two independent films, Vampz (dir. Steve Lustgarten, US, 2004) and Hood of the Living Dead (dir. Eduardo and Jose Quiroz, US, 2005), suggest that the abandoned city is still a site for the basic labor of human reproduction even as the infrastructure of full employment has vanished. As a counternarrative to both “ruin porn” and the “horror city,” these low-budget films offer the deindustrialized city as a site of mutuality and political contestation rather than a mystified object of horror and abjection.

Ruins of pre-gentrification: Schrotthäuser and urban standstill in a postindustrial city

The Goetheviertel is the poorest district of Germany’s poorest city, the postindustrial harbour city of Bremerhaven. However, for many local inhabitants it is also the city’s most beautiful district with its 19th century architecture and central location, and any visitor of Bremerhaven would agree: this district is ripe for gentrification. Gentrification has been anticipated for the district at least since the 1980s when the city declared the Goetheviertel to be an investment area. Investors from all over the world bought property in the district, but, as many inhabitants underline today, they never really invested into the maintenance of their houses. The results are postindustrial ruins of a special kind: ruins of pre-gentrification. These ruins are former apartment houses whose ongoing decay materialises not just the general postindustrial decline of Bremerhaven, but results from the continued failure of the realization of gentrification. They are ruins of failed anticipation. As many of the people living in the district, these houses might still await a better future, but, statically speaking, time has run out for them. Their deterioration has deemed them scrap (‘Schrott’-) houses that are legally uninhabitable. They epitomize the standstill in urban renovation that dominates both district and city. However, this absence also produces spaces for those that are usually excluded from a gentrified future. The scrap houses’ material qualities therefore maintain the current district inhabitants’ local futures by delaying the gentrification everybody continues to foresee. This article maps their temporal agency in order to scrutinize social sciences approaches to the production of time. Whilst discussing recent contributions to the anthropological literature on time and infrastructure, I present these houses with their specific material properties as active partners in the co-production of time in this particular district, and its potential futures.