ABSTRACT
The world has changed considerably over the course of John Friedmann’s writing career, or more to the point here, our understanding of the urban world has shifted considerably during this time. One might imagine this to be due in some part to the influence of John’s career, as his writing has sought to explain the urban in its various manifestations. One would therefore expect our overall understanding of global urbanization to have improved over this period, given the attention it has received from John and other scholars. Yet in looking back at John’s work in the 1970s on the urban transition in “newly industrializing societies” (Friedmann & Wulff 1975) and comparing it to more recent writing on similar themes, one could be forgiven for concluding exactly the opposite. The Urban Transition was an extended literature review on what was then
labeled the Third World City, divided into “macro-studies” of urbanization processes and “micro-studies” on the nature of urban life. The multiple challenges facing the Third World City were seen as formidable, certainly, but not so daunting as to deter the authors from concluding the book with a “decision-framework” intended to guide urban policy. By the time The Prospect of Cities (Friedmann 2002) was published, some three decades later, the scale of these challenges had expanded such that John now wrote about city-regions instead of cities and emphasized the conceptual value of “the urban” over that of “the city.” This upward scalar shift was complemented, however, by a simultaneous trend in the opposite direction, focusing in on people and their neighborhood communities by looking at questions of citizenship and the “city of everyday life.” Evidently one may attempt to address the growing complexity of cities-or is it the growing understanding
of how complex cities are?—by either trying to simplify the synoptic view of the big picture, or, instead, by narrowing in on a smaller, bounded territory within the overall urban field. Another decade-and-a-half further along and John is not only grappling
with complexity, but with “hyper-complexity,” as indicated in the title of his, “Urban planning under conditions of hyper-complexity” (2014). The scale of the urban object has ballooned yet again, forcing John to articulate a new term, the “Urban Superorganism” (USO), which he defines as “a hypercomplex, high density, five-dimensional1 socio-spatial system” (Friedmann 2014). The urban, it appears, is an elusive thing. The more one stares at it, the more opaque it becomes. Opaque but simultaneously fuzzy, indistinct. One is left puzzled trying to understand where the urban leaves off and everything else begins. And when one tries to get inside it, to pick it apart or break it down into its fundamental components, its complexity only seems to increase. So, what has happened? Has complexity increased along with the size and
scale of cities, or is it our perception of complexity that has grown? To put it another way, was the city more “doable” back then, or were urbanists more naïve? In recent years, I have wondered about the city size debates that were still current when I was a grad student in the 1980s. Even by that time the notion of maximum city size-whether derived from presumed limits imposed by physical/infrastructural conditions or from pressures on urban social make-up arising from excessive crowding or scale, or both-had given way to concern for optimum city size, a more relativistic concept that rested on the belief that at some point in a city’s growth, its “diseconomies of scale” would begin to outweigh its “economies of scale,” thus indicating its point of optimal size. Such concerns for maximum and optimal sizes seem to have vanished into the ether as cities themselves (or rather, city-regions) have grown beyond their presumed maxima and optima. Have questions of city size now been superseded by concern for complexity? Or perhaps the fusing of urban horizons that spatially underpins the formation of USOs, and more conceptually, the planetary spread of urbanism, has simply made the issue of size irrelevant. In this respect, perhaps the main value of the USO derives from the understanding that it is also qualitatively different from that which preceded it. I will return to this issue by the end of this essay; first, however, it is useful to consider certain aspects of periurbanization as it is manifested in Asia, since it is through periurban processes that urban horizons are fused and USOs are brought into being.
