Preface

New Urban Worlds is primarily a polemic, an impassioned argument that stretches across diverse experiences, literatures and professional domains. It is a polemic because it tries to "call for things" even if all of the evidence is not yet in and often hard to come by. We call for the intersection of long-honed everyday practices of African and Asian urban residents with new forms of governing and with a strategic deployment of technological innovations of varying kinds. We desire to restore experimentation as a normative aspect of living in and running cities and want to think about how concretely to create space for such experimentation to be possible.

We are aware that, when you call for things, the immediate question is "How do you know enough about what is going on in order to call for something specific?" And, even then, should you reveal everything you know is going on, especially at a time when we are all being "read" in ways that we cannot control and often do not even know are taking place? But let us consider briefly what we think is going on - something about the fundamental conditions that drive the "calling" of this book.

If you are one of the scores of millions of residents across much of the urban "South" who cannot depend upon one specific job to earn your keep, who lacks sufficient documentation to secure a place to live over the long term, or who can't afford to get sick or into any kind of trouble, what is it that you pay attention to in order to know something about what to do? What happens if the people you rely upon for support or information are no longer available or suddenly turn against you? What happens when the skills you have to apply are also those of an increasing number of residents, and competition becomes increasingly fierce for opportunities? The question here is how can you best know what is going on and try to situate yourself in a position where opportunities might "come your way"? In other words, how can you be at the right place at the right time when there is no clear map available? We are convinced that these kinds of considerations dominate the minds and spiritual practices of most urban dwellers, yet much of what appears in both urban scholarship and policy prescripts seems oblivious.

In a not dissimilar way, researchers of urban life face difficulties when it comes to engaging with the largely makeshift complexion of many cities in Africa and Asia. The enormous transformations of the built environment and the enhanced possibilities of consumption that have marked even some of the most marginal of the world's cities should not detract from acknowledging just how dependent the majority of the urban residents of these regions are upon constantly putting together some workable form of income and inhabitation. The makeshift character of much of what this majority does is quite literally "make+shift," as pointed out by Vasudevan (2015).

Whatever they come up with is rarely institutionalized into a fixed set of practices, locales or organizational forms. This doesn't mean that relationships and economic activities do not endure, that people do not find themselves rooted in the same place and set of affiliations over a long period of time. Rather, these stabilities come from constant efforts on the part of inhabitants to redefine the boundaries and interfaces between work, leisure, home, neighborhood and elsewhere. It entails constantly addressing the questions "What spaces are relevant to me?," "What do I pay attention to and where?," "Who do I talk to and do things with?," "Who can I depend on and show things to?" In neighborhoods across the urban South, whatever is made, in terms of economic activities, buildings and social solidarities, then shifts in terms of its availability to specific uses and users, as well as its exposure to new potentials and vulnerability.

Drawing upon decades of work in poor, working- and lower-middle-class districts in urban regions across Africa and South-East Asia, this book attempts to weave interconnections among different ways of engaging and thinking about the complexity of how different urban actors decide and act within highly circumscribed and often uncertain contexts.

In methodological terms, it means that we locate our research and propositions within a relational epistemological force field that is anchored by two axes. The first axis stretches from surface knowledge to in-depth understandings of highly localized phenomena, including psychological interiors of actors. Surface knowledge references the insights that one can assemble from quantitative data sets that allow the analyst to consider scale, frequency, relationalities and patterns over time. Quantitative trends are crucial to appreciate the specificities of urbanization dynamics in diverse geographical scales in the early twenty-first century, when the very foundations of the economy, political systems and cultural reference points are undergoing profound change. At the same time, due to the "make+shift" character of these cities, it is equally important to expand dramatically in-depth accounts of the social drawing on relational ontologies (Pieterse 2015a). It is only by triangulating both depth and surface dimensions of contemporary urbanism that can we hope to get a purchase on what is actually going on.

The second axis of our epistemological force field stretches between applied theoretical concerns that we define, in contradistinction to philosophy, aesthetics and the poetic, as "grounded pragmatism." These denote theoretical rest-stops that store conceptual resources to support sense-making of different kinds of data, but also to instigate propositional concepts and experiments. This book draws on an eclectic mix of theoretical resources to anchor our sense-making of highly fluid contexts, but we have deliberately resisted getting into the nitty-gritty of competing theoretical frames or performing a review of the literature. The references offer the reader a comprehensive insight into materials we find most compelling. Moreover, we are not particularly interested in the academic game of theoretical one-upmanship that seems to dominate so much of urban scholarship these days.

In a nutshell, this epistemological force field allows us to adopt a research approach that seeks to articulate the generous engagement with the details of urban life with the power of re-description in order to understand what might be going on while keeping an eye on clarifying resonant propositions. Thus, the work we have done includes ethnographic and applied research, forging research, advocacy and policy-making networks, advising municipal governments and development agencies, and starting and running urban institutions dedicated to enhancing broad-based participation in making rules and plans. The language of the book then reflects these different viewpoints and engagements with different actors, sectors and cities. It is a language that covers different "musical scales" - i.e., styles and rhythms. It looks for different ways into cityscapes that always seem to be switching, pulsating and reshaping. Thus the analysis applied and the proposals suggested are experimental and provisional and invariably ask for patience to see the conceptual journey to the end. Our account reflects a need to be able to do things differently now. While massive and long-term transformations are of course necessary, this book attempts to make use of what exists now but is sometimes not seen, not read, and thus does not become a resource for deciding and acting. While we offer strategic visions for how to face the enormous challenges of impoverishment, urban growth during climate change, and the exigency of justice, we concentrate on mapping out the potentials of the immediate - the lived realms of the "make+shift" city.

Just like the processes through which urban actors decide and act, this task of reworking the immediate is full of twists and turns. This is in part because the urban is full of paradoxes. Clear differentiations between urban and rural, local and global, self and other, time and space, human and non-human, North and South, public and private - long critical vehicles of orientation - are simultaneously intensifying and waning, becoming more sharply drawn as they are also being folded into each other. In a world where there is so much to pay attention to, where each decision seems more urgent, imbued with greater significance, it is harder to make distinctions between what is and what is not important to pay attention to, what is salient or irrelevant. This means that decision-making gets simultaneously more complicated and frustrating. The constitutive nature and generative potential of paradox is foregrounded throughout the book.

The capacities of the poor to get by with little, and thus to be rendered either targets of development or manipulated pawns in a game of continuous displacement, may ironically suggest a conceivable future for everyone in light of carbonated dystopias that become more apparent every year that CO2 emission reduction targets are spectacularly missed. How is it possible to live through these seeming paradoxes? How is it possible to maintain the productive boundaries among places, between spatial exteriors and interiors, and among distinctive ways of life without being disabled by their paradoxical encounters? How to think the doubleness of things, of ways in which differences can move toward and draw from each other as a movement of justice...