5 - Towards a citified research agenda for uneven development

Summary

For the purpose of this chapter, namely to indicate what research on the Janus-facedness of cities might look like, it is once again helpful to consult Braudel. Although he writes about capitalism from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, his work offers more than just insights into history. Braudel provides us with a method for a citified analysis of capitalism, a way of doing research in order to gain new insights into the functioning of uneven development. He draws our attention to the various “weapons of domination” which, in all their diversity, have two things in common: first, they all come from cities, are invented and produced there and orchestrated from there. Second, they all serve the economic interests of the dominant groups there (in the times that Braudel writes about, basically long-distance traders); their goal is to make value or surplus that people have produced wherever to “flow” into their city. Yet, Braudel (1984: 248) also urges us to pay attention not only to the cities themselves, but in particular to their networks: “It is with these connections, meeting-points and multiple links that we shall be particularly concerned, since they reveal the way in which a dominant economy can exploit subordinate economies”. At each node of the inter-city networks, there are different ways in which the appropriation of surplus is organized, according to the requirements of geographic or historical circumstances, and each way requires specific weapons. Braudel accordingly enumerates different types, namely “shipping, trade, industry, credit, and political power or violence”, each of them with its particular value (1984: 35). There is, however, one weapon that Braudel does not mention here, but which, as we have seen, he discusses at length elsewhere, namely the physical infrastructure of cities. Following on from this, in this chapter I use three examples to show how we can locate the production of uneven development in cities, first by looking at particular buildings, and second by scrutinizing particular capitalist practices (namely super-exploitation and monopoly formation) and the actors who exercise them, and what they have to do with the genius of cities.