We live in an urban era. There is no shortage of statistics on rural to urban migration, urban population explosions, and urbanization-related resource shortages and inequalities. Mushrooming megacities have become harbingers of impending scarcity crises or wellsprings of hope for those who see opportunities for economic growth in young populations and the formalization of informal economic activities. Cities have become battlegrounds for competing visions: Redevelopment plans continue a long-established approach of displacing  the poor to make way for unaffordable, orderly developments, and new eco-smart cities desert established regions in favor of a brave new future in enclaves for the rich. Meanwhile, bottom up urban development and planning, led by community-based organizations and politically-invested architecture studios, seem to offer alternative paths forward in small-scale pilot experiments. And organic social realities and more-than-human ecologies emerge at the seams of top-down plans, contradicting fantasies of total control and offering  glimpses of different possible urban futures.  

These various developments characterize the contemporary condition of planetary urbanisms, which the creative projects and accompanying essays in this online exhibition dispatch explore. ‘Planetary urbanisms’ expands the concept of urbanization beyond the traditional city form, emphasizing how urbanization today is distributed and interconnected through global supply chains, telecommunication networks, and traveling development companies and ‘global city’ models.[1] It underscores rampant urbanization’s ecological entanglements, highlighting the wide-scale terraforming implications of the resource extraction, demolition, and construction that accompany urban development projects. These projects often dispossess and displace already marginalized communities, who bear the brunt of urbanization’s negative ‘externalities.’ Planetary urbanisms' inequities are the geopolitical inheritances of colonialism and the Cold War, a reality that simultaneously drives calls for more socially and ecologically-attuned approaches to urban planning and design, particularly those grounded in the experiences of the ‘peripheries.’ In its plural form, ‘planetary urbanisms’ acknowledges not just a dominant development paradigm but the diverse and sometimes contradictory narratives, imaginaries, and practices that shape urbanisms in the present and the planetary futures they have the potential to yield.

Planetary Urbanisms is the second of three installments of the online exhibition Reclaiming Futures, which showcases seven works by creative practitioners from around the world commissioned by the Against Catastrophe project; these practitioners critically examine how design, architecture, and technology are imbricated in producing catastrophic eco-social realities but also present tools with which to imagine and build more equitable, democratic, and sustainable worlds. Commissioned practitioners include Solveig Qu Suess, Antonia Hernández, Dele Adeyemo, Michaela Büsse, Paulo Tavares, Bahar Noorizadeh, and Yelta Köm and Agit Özdemir from the collective Arazi Assembly. Following an invitation to submit project proposals, the chosen works were developed over the last year and a half and in conversation with the curators and other commissioned practitioners.

Based on extensive research, the works run along thematic threads that interrogate resource management regimes and how neoliberal operations violently remake ecosystems and lifeworlds; planetary urbanization and urban lived realities; and contemporary state-led development and settlement policies, and activism and activist solidarities in response. Through a wide range of approaches—from design research and science fiction to forensic architecture and political organizing—these works not only witness and document such phenomena but also raise critical questions about urbanisms, developmentalisms, and environmentalisms from below. They foreground situated ecological knowledge and relations; contest official regimes for apprehending and managing nature; and reimagine value, the commons, and forms of social organization. The resulting projects are forward-looking in their engagement with futures, while centering the necessity of reckoning with inherited and ongoing injustices; they are socially committed while embracing the multiplicity of more-than-human ecologies and planetary futures.

Each exhibition installment, which focuses on a distinct theme, features a selection of projects from among the commissions; these are accompanied by essays by guest contributors, whose writing the creative practitioners felt resonated with their work. The essays shed further light on the topics, geographies, and questions broached in the projects presented.     

Planetary Urbanisms features commissions by Michaela Büsse and Dele Adeyemo. Michaela Büsse's short film Overcast explores the uncanny, haunting presence of the now largely abandoned Forest City, a man-made island in Malaysia created as a special development zone tied to the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative. Shaped by interactions with locals, Forest City staff and residents, and participants from Kelab Alami, a community-led conservation organization, Büsse’s film reveals not only the built environments left in disrepair as the project has come to be stalled and rescaled but also the unintended life worlds that have emerged in the wake of decay. Overcast ultimately invites reflection on the mismatch between techno-utopian visions for a green and smart future promoted by projects like Forest City and the sociospatial realities in which they are actualized (or fail to materialize). Dele Adeyemo’s two-film project reflects on interlinkages between  Lagos and the Niger Delta. Oil Pipelines to Sand Islands connects Lagos’s rapid rise and megaprojects like Eko Atlantic City to the violent extraction of Niger Delta resources and its underdevelopment, while Between Megacity and Delta follows indigenous spatial practices such as migrant fishing that physically link the two geographies and make subsistence in Lagos possible. Adeyemo’s  work offers a nuanced perspective on the catastrophes wrought by capitalist and colonial approaches to development, which mobilize crises like housing shortages to justify projects that throttle indigenous subsistence practices and end up intensifying inequality. Together, the films ask what possibilities emerge when we challenge dominant narratives of urban progress and rethink the potential of indigenous practices to open up alternative, anti-catastrophic urban futures.

The accompanying texts by May Ee Wong, Olamide Udoma-Ejorh, Gökçe Günel, and Orit Halpern expand the conversations and questions that Büsse’s and Adeyemo’s creative projects open up. They complicate the utopian-dystopian dyad that so often characterizes the future in planetary urbanism imaginaries and question established wisdoms and ‘best management practices’ around urban development, progress, and growth.

May Ee Wong considers two trends in planetary urbanisms: the explosive growth of catastrophe-ridden megacities, particularly in the Global South, and the rise of "Smart-Eco" cities, which claim to offer radically different urban forms but emerge from the same accumulation logics and reproduce if not exacerbate existing disparities. Honing in on questions of design and scale, Wong attends to the tensions between the global capitalist design imaginaries animating “Smart-Eco” cities and local material realities, showing how imaginaries diverge from on-the-ground conditions, which often entail social and ecological devastation, but also how the lifeworlds that emerge in projects’ wake always exceed design plans. Olamide Udoma-Ejorh details the range of visions through which Lagos’s future is generally thought - from the totalizing dystopian views of international development agencies to the techno-utopian ones of local policymakers enacted in tabula-rasa style megaprojects. Udoma-Ejorh ultimately advocates for adopting a more practicable protopianism, in which the future is seen as incrementally better, as building on what already exists, and as entailing both advancements and challenges. Protopianism resonates with the work that Udoma-Ejorh writes about which she has been doing as an urban activist with the Lagos Urban Development Initiative, an organization that prioritizes inclusive, localized urban projects over exclusive, capital-intensive ones.

Gökçe Günel challenges the presumed linearity of modernization and development by exploring couplings between war, infrastructure, and progress. Günel hones in on the floating power plants or ‘powerships’ created by the Turkish company Karadeniz Holding, which were initially deployed in Iraq as part of US-led ‘remodernization’ efforts following the wartime destruction of infrastructures by the American military or Iraq’s ‘demodernization.’ Günel shows how powerships not only reinforce global development narratives that cast the Global South as lagging behind the Global North and requiring ‘modernization’ (and assistance) but also how the forms that (re-)modernization efforts take emerge from and reinforce existing geo-political and political-economic forces. Powerships, which are now rapidly deployed in successive crisis contexts in the Global South, tell of new urban logistical formations that enable hedged risks and heightened profits, marking an instance par excellence of planetary urbanism as a distributed infrastructural condition. Finally, Orit Halpern’s text unpacks the political implications of the smartness paradigm that guides contemporary smart cities, tracing its roots to cybernetics’ reduction of behavior to statistical probabilities. Long held to be the site of politics, the city - in its ‘smart’ form - sees politics truncated to a problem of information; smartness advocates imagine democracy as achievable through ever more extensive data collection and computation, continuously refined by machine learning. But, as Halpern emphasizes, this translates into ‘political’ participation, not representation; replaces revolution as the driver of change with evolution; and involves learning stripped of social contexts and tasked with adapting to existing conditions that keeps returning us back to the status quo.

-Dr. Nadia Christidi & Dr. Özgün Eylül İşcen

[1] Planetary urbanism/urbanization is a concept that has recently gained momentum as a way to rethink the boundaries of the urban. It emphasizes the distributed geohistorical processes and infrastructural systems that underpin and expand urban life across the planet. While still evolving, the concept has sparked a wide range of interpretations and methodological approaches across various disciplines. See: Brenner, N., & Schmid, C. (2012). Planetary urbanization. In M. Gandy (Ed.), Urban constellations (pp. 10–13). Jovis; Brenner, N. (Ed.). (2014). Implosions / Explosions: Towards a study of planetary urbanization. Jovis; Kraft, S., Zhang, Z., & Aichinger, A. (Eds.). (2016). Planetary urbanism: The transformative power of cities (Vol. 223). ARCH+ Verlag GmbH. https://archplus.net/de/archiv/english-publication/Planetary-Urbanism/; Schmid, C. (2018). Journeys through planetary urbanization: Decentering perspectives on the urban. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36(3), 591–610. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818765476.