Shirey: James Scott and an Optical View of Habitat III

For James C. Scott, legibility is the central problem of statecraft. It is assumed that the central project of UN Habitat III (H3) and past versions of same, is meant to make legible and map the terrain of the 21st Century Urban form. Through its agenda reflecting problems defined, resulting research, funding, the reports it generates leading to public policies, it seeks to show a path forward in solving current and projected problems of the new urban age. The questionnaire directed to the nation-states follows the tried and true format of Habitat II and, in its generality, seems to seek to translate difference into a synoptic view of the urban. The question is how does H3 come to define or understand 21st Century urbanism? H3, one could argue, is yet another attempt at legibility and simplification, and the questionnaire constitutes a standard grid whereby the urban can be understood. It suggests what Scott points to as an "aerial view," a legible urban that can be manipulated from above. Such simplifications are likened to "abridged maps" that do not represent real places (or societies) but only those aspects of value to interested observers. But they are, Scott argues, 'more than maps because when linked to state power they would enable much of the reality they depict to be remade; they transcend description having behind them the force of law.'

One could qualify this point by insisting that the United Nations has little power to force its views on sovereign nation-states, which speaks to the notion of the relative power of bodies of global governance. Still one can also assert that these global bodies are largely the creation of the Washington Consensus and major multinational corporations and can therefore bypass the relatively weakened nation-states in

determining their global initiatives.
                                                                           
Scott, in Seeing Like A State,  "provides a distinctive optic" or way to view how this approach has been responsible for "huge development fiascos" in the Third World, and in many cases a "tragedy of well intentioned schemes". We might use Scott's analysis, characterized as the "pernicious combo of four elements", as a lens through which to view, with caution, mega projects such as H3. The four elements are as follows:

First is the "double edged sword of the tools of modern statecraft." What Scott is referring to is the likelihood that the same tools that establish legibility of the social to its benefit, can become the tools of despotism. So in the age of global capitalism and transnational corporations, with their many tools of technical control and militarist options, which edge of the sword do projects of legibility such as H3 serve?

Secondly, H3 epitomizes high modernist ideology with its emphasis on technocratic approaches, the rational design of social order, scientist ideologues, and an ideologically driven optimism towards comprehensive planning, human settlement and production. This is combined with a modernist aesthetic with preference towards large projects, little respect for the given or tradition, one always looking towards a new order. In its need to convert the social order, it could result in real reform or the perpetuation of past evils.  This modernist mind-set, no matter how well intentioned, sees everything as 'developing' and moving towards its biased sense of normality. It is this urge to homogenization, this capitalist epistemic, that has caused so much pain and global inequity.

Third, coercive state power is often enlisted to enforce these changes, especially during times of social upheaval i.e. war, revolution, or depression, often leading to an invocation of emergency powers and a repudiation of the past. We recall the history of World Bank projects in Africa and the attitude that resistance to such projects must be dealt with by coercive methods if necessary. We know the long history of nation-state actions and their enforcing of an interested, synoptic view on poor populations. To what extent will the goals or agendas of H3 tolerate this more coercive approach in the context of the growing extremes of global crises? 

Finally, 'prostrate civil societies', weakened and unable to resist, those included in point three, constitute the victims of this process. Scott's examples focus mainly on the rural., the implications of agrarian state planning with its disregard for local knowledges and the displacement of poor populations resulting in extreme suffering. But we need to consider

the impact on 21st Century urbanism where the once rural populations are mainly denizens of cities, the majority being poor and inhabiting slums. How will H3's agenda define this reality and will its developmentalist bias allow it to deal with these issues, or serve to aggravate the social schisms that are leading to two global realities, one for the elites, the other for the impoverished majority.

We might ask of H3 type agendas, liberalized and reform minded as they may be, why such schemes from atop legibility- mount fail? As with other modernist agendas, designed/planned social order is schematic and ignores essential features of the real, local and informal practices, and the very real conflicts and inequities on "the ground" upon which more 'formal' practices parasitically depend. Per Scott, this ignoring of local praxis is often the basis of failure, a case of power/knowledge from top-down defeated by the knowledges of bottom up. From Scott's point of view "an imperial or hegemonic planning mentality that excludes the necessary role of local knowledges and know how is doomed to fail."  Its also the basis of broad scale resistance movements, especially in developing countries of the South.

Is the approach of H3, of necessity, a formal deductive epistemic imposed, to the end of a legible, homogenization of the social, doomed to failure when dealing with the concrete realities that each urban situation represents? Does H3's approach to forming an agenda and a definition of the 21st century urban, proceed from this hierarchal perspective without regard for what Scott terms as “metis” and the mutuality of specific places? 

In this era, where the state is often in retreat, it is global capitalism, and the global bodies that capitalism has had a hand in creating i.e. the World Bank, IMF, WTO and yes the United Nations, that are likely to pursue these grand agendas. They have become the agents of homogenization with the nation-states often acting, though weakly, to defend local difference and variety, or defensively using claims of sovereignty and security as reason to resist global agendas. Still those same states are heavily invested in the global capitalist agenda and often colluding, against the interests of their own citizens, with these global power brokers. This leaves only various social movements to counter this reality, a resistance that can be blunted again by the UN's reformist agendas or co-opted by the many entities that seek to keep them divided.

In his volume of what he calls "fragments", Two Cheers for Anarchism, Scott makes some of his most pointed arguments against top-down approaches and specifically their egregious effects on democratic governance.  His main theme throughout is that the process of answering all social problems, using experts and their various technocratic approaches, constitutes a "depoliticization" of matters that are inherently of public interest,' taking vital issues affecting the life chances of millions out of the public sphere where they legitimately belong.' For Scott a healthy politic requires a mutuality of participation which is also the essence of the formation of its citizenry.  Its opposite, so characteristic, one might argue, of Habitat type programs, constitutes an 'anti politic machine...  often substituting a pseudo-scientific calculation for a healthy debate about quality.'  One might question whether H3 represents such a depoliticization, driven by experts and technocrats, in the interest of forces that see in a legitimate politics an obstacle to their agendas.

Sources:

Scott, James C.  Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Scott, James C. Two Cheers for Anarchism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Kuecker: Diagnosis Can Tho

In June 2014, the World Bank sent a team of urban specialists to the Vietnamese city of Can Tho.  The team was part of the World Bank’s Resilient Cities Program, which it started in December 2013.  They came to Can Tho to carry out what the World Bank calls a “CityStrength Diagnostic.”  With a population 1.25 million people Can Tho is the largest city in the Mekong River Delta.  Its population is growing at a rapid clip of 9.7%, has an 11.7% poverty rate, measures unemployment at 4.7%, and has a robust 11.6% GDP growth.  While 98% have access to electricity, only 62% have piped water, trash collection only happens in the urban core, while only one district has piped sewers (World Bank Group 2014, 20).

As the world’s urban population adds another 2.5 billion people by 2050, we know that secondary cities like Can Tho will be the primary location for the great demographic shift.  We also know that 90% of urban growth will be in Africa and Asia.  Understanding how the development community approaches projects in places like Can Tho can help us to develop an analysis of 21^st century urbanism, as well as thinking about the making of the Habitat III agenda. 

The World Bank’s June 2014 visit to Can Tho was the most recent in a series of international efforts at bringing resilience to the city.  Can Tho was one of 10 cities participating in the Rockefeller Foundation supported ($9.4 million) Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN)’s 7-year program (2008-2014).  The program’s main objective is to strengthen urban resilience to climate change.  ACCCRN has 3 broad goals:  capacity building, a network of learning, knowledge, and engagement, and scaling-up.  The program brings together a wide-range of protagonists in the world of international development, with the Institute for Social and Environmental Transition (ISET, http://i-s-e-t.org) taking a lead role, along with Arup’s International Development team.  Together they generated an Urban Resilience Framework (ACCCRN 2012).  ACCCRN serves as the network that brings together actors that constitute the field of power and knowledge that underpins ways of being, seeing, thinking, and acting within the making of Habitat III. 

The core epistemic advanced within the ACCRN network is the basic proposition that global south advances in development will be lost to climate change unless adaptation and mitigation are undertaken.  When looking at Vietnam, for example, ACCCRN states, “Since the early 1990s, Vietnam has significantly reduced its poverty rate, but these gains are now threatened by climate change, which will have serious impacts on agriculture, aquaculture and other key economic activities in the country” (ACCCRN n/d, 8).  About Can Tho, ACCRN states, “Although the city is accustomed to large-scale, long-lasting seasonal flooding of the Mekong River, sea level rise and upstream land use changes will exacerbate this threat. This will likely increase damage to crops and negatively impact livelihoods. Saline intrusion and water shortages in the dry season have also become more noticeable in peri-urban areas. Climate change stands to intensify these dynamics, leading to deleterious impacts for deltaic populations” (ACCCRN n/d, 8).  From this framing of the 21^st challenges facing Can Tho, the ACCRN team undertook its agenda of capacity building, knowledge production, and scaling-up.

When the World Bank team arrived in June 2014, it brought a well-planned schematic, a discursive framework for ordering Can Tho’s urban form.  This schematic is nested in the authoritative power/knowledge structure of a “diagnostic process,” one that has a 5-stage sequence.  This approach reminds one of taking the family car to the dealership for its check-up, where the mechanic does a “comprehensive diagnostic” of the car’s key systems.  “Diagnostic” is not a neutral word as it conveys a scientific, objective epistemic deeply embedded within modernity’s enlightenment tradition, the core belief that the basic laws of universe are knowable through observation and study, and that the knowability of the universe enables humans to control nature in the effort to eradicate human suffering.  It is the Cartesian instrumentalist view of nature that reduces to a metaphorical machine.  “Diagnosis,” interestingly, carries two core meanings.  It can mean the diagnosis of an illness or problem, but it also can mean the characteristic of a particular species, genus, or phenomenon.  When the World Bank came to Can Tho, its way of thinking, seeing, being, and acting embraced the first definition, which understands the second definition, the reality that is Can Tho, to be a metaphorical illness or problem that needs to be solved through the diagnostic process itself, in this case, the World Bank’s the 5-stages of its program.     

The World Bank’s diagnostic program begins with “pre-diagnostic data collection,” which focuses on rounding up previous reports and studies about the city and summarizing their contents for project participants.  This data collection is one of the key steps in the institutional reproduction of power and knowledge, as it legitimizes previous development efforts as well as adding authority to the current.  In the second stage, the diagnostic workshop is launched.  It has the main goal of “put[ting] the interests and priorities of different stakeholders into a holistic framework of urban resilience,” as well as showing the investment of top city officials (17).  This step builds the illusion of participation, as the local stakeholders are shoehorned into pre-existing structure of power and knowledge, one carried in the lap-tops and powerpoints of the World Bank, which is the diagnostic process itself.  Next, the project undertakes interviews and field visits.  These are designed to inform the World Bank’s external experts about the status of the city and to “qualitatively measure how well key systems are performing in relation to the characteristics of resilience” (17).  The diagnostic presumption is that a world of diverse urban knowledge derived from the lived experiences of urban inhabitants, the “what it means to live” in Can Tho, can be captured in field visits.  This “qualitative” data collection reveals the top-down, “seeing like a state” (Scott) epistemic of the ACCRN project that can be juxtaposed to the “other knowledge” of the urban grassroots.  This qualitative step in the diagnostic serves to silence the “other knowledge” while enhancing the illusion of participation, especially as the field visits translate into the glossy photos of locals engaging with World Bank team that show up in the diagnostic reports, often with a folksy box quote from an urban dweller that perfectly captures the epistemic generated by the diagnostic process.  The fourth stage is to prioritize actions that can enhance the city’s resilience, while keeping focus on how to integrate the different sectors of urban resilience.  Prioritization is the crucial discursive gesture, one that moves from creating knowledge through diagnostics to implementation of that knowledge, which constitutes the actualization of power through the implementation of urban programs.  In this instance, Arup International played the lead role in giving shape to the prioritizing stage, a step that added legitimacy to the process.  Rounding out the diagnostic, the fifth step calls for “debriefing and discussion” between the World Bank team and local authorities.  From the meeting, a publication is generated, one that defines the next steps for the local authorities to undertake, which sends the power-knowledge cycle into its policy implementation phase. 

The main conclusion reached by the World Bank diagnostic of Can Tho’s 21^st century challenges identifies two main threats:  flooding and uncontrolled urbanization.  The World Bank’s main recommendation is for city officials to “proactively [guide] urban growth to areas with lower flood risk, including the higher elevation areas near the urban core” (World Bank Group 2014, 68).  To accomplish these goals, the World Bank pinpoints the need for better coordination between city departments, the city and national governments, as well as Can Tho’s relationship with international non-governmental organizations.  The World Bank identified several priorities for Can Tho, which included:  “enhancing institutional capacity, collecting, sharing, and evaluating data, standardization of damager and loss assessment, incentivize transport to strengthen the city’s core.”  The bank also called upon city officials to “strengthen financial management” and “enhance financial-investment planning” (World Bank Group 2014, 68).  The World Bank’s recommendations serve to ensure Can Tho will need continued assistance, guidance, and tutoring from the development experts.  With the priorities and recommendations set for action, the next wave of experts from the international development community prepares to descend upon Can Tho.  The challenge of climate change will keep the urban resilience consultancy complex hard at work well into the future.

Sources

Asian Cities Climate Change Network (ACCCRN).  2012.  “ACCCRN City Projects.” Bangkok, Thailand. (August).

Asian Cities Climate Change Network (ACCCRN).  N/D.  Brochure. 

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

World Bank Group.  2014.  Can Tho, Vietnam:  Enhancing Urban Resilience.  CityStrength Resilient Cities Program.  Report # 92710.  (June).