Is cyborg urbanism a definitive reality of our times or can there be any outside of it?

By: - Nalin Khare

Cyborg Urbanization is the assemblage of things which is shaping the city. A thing cannot be understood of its relations it has with other things. We always live in 2nd nature we are co-creating each other. 2nd nature is the movement human civilization touches nature, there is no nature, we are co-creating each other. For example: the process of making a pencil involves cutting of wood from trees and making pencils. When we talk about the urban nature, we talk about the backend of urban planning. Processes and networks that lead to urbanization, Backend of urbanization. Urban environment embedded in socio-economic inequalities.

There is no absolute sense of being. Everything is inter-connected and sustains on the relationship between resources. There is nothing “Purely” social or natural about the city, even less a social or a natural; the city is both natural and social, real and fictional. Natural doesn’t exist in isolation or remains in pure form. Humans have interrelated, touched and influenced nature and vice-versa.

When we talk about the Marxist Political Ecology, He says that Human action affects the ecology. Since we are exploiting nature at a very fast pace, the climate change is occurring. The capitalism which is the mode of production, the capacities in which people are shaping the nature around us (socio-nature). The dynamics of social relations produce nature and society’s history. According to Marx, Human social production action are the primary actions and hence in the nature and society relationship, the human actions are the dominant actions which shape the nature (nature doesn’t shape the human activity much). Humans are the ones influencing the socio-nature demographics.

If we take the post structural approach, around the fact that what the environment is doing to humans. Environment has its own agency too. While the nature provides the functioning the dynamics, the dynamics of the social metabolism produce natures and society’s history. Not everything is determined by the structure. Eg; poor quality of water has ill effects on people. Access to claim water is available to rich and unclean caters to the poor people. Water was available to everyone in the form of lakes and ponds where it was in its natural form. Now water comes from tap which is economist and its taxed water.

When we say Urban Political Ecology, it is an integrated and rational process that helps us to untangle the socio, ecological and political process that forms uneven urban landscape.

The urban middle class is the biggest consumer of commodities and the poor people who belong from the lower casts are usually the rag pickers and are the ones who have to deal with waste. Hence, there is a play of politics The people who deal with waste in terms of its value and being sold involves usually the upper caste people.

Urban metabolism is how the urban landscape processes the different aspects of the various materials used in the city. The process through which social landscape is demo graphed, the process through which man through his occupation mediates, regulates and controls. For eg: We are producing and consuming several things in a society and after consumption the process through which urban landscape and nature process waste, etc.

Even Landfills are a classic way of understanding cyborg urbanization, when we had visited the landfill, we came to know the process of how the waste is dealt with it. The owner of the place had contracts with industries and hotels for giving them the waste. The process of segregating the waste is a three-part process, first the waste is brought down by the workers, it is kept at one place and then it is taken to the room where the women segregate the waste. So, if you see, from the time of guests in a hotel sign the feedback form and mark tick on the cleanliness section of the hotel to people segregating the waste of landfill, cyborg urbanization is very much taking place we are in that 2nd nature. And not only human life, even cows feed on waste. So, it’s not just human life but life in general.

Taking reference from the article The City as a Hybrid: On Nature, Society and Cyborg Urbanization, by Erik Swyngedouw. Even in his article he has mentioned Marx saying: Marx emphasized the "natural" roots of social evolution in both Grundrisse and Capital. It is evident that a materialist approach must inevitably conform to an outlook that maintains "nature" as an essential component of the "metabolism" of society. Social relations function inside and through the metabolism of the "natural" environment, resulting in the transformation, alteration, and creation of new socio-natural forms in both society and nature. The history of both nature and society is created by the dynamics of social relations, although nature serves as the basis.

Of course, reconstructing the dialectics of historical socio-natural transformations and their contradictions was not the exclusive goal of classical Marxism. It also emphasized the bourgeois scientific and social conception of "nature" and asserted that "underlying" causes might reveal the "true" Truth. However, Marxist analysis tends to reproduce the very issue it was meant to critique by focusing on the labor process itself. Specifically, it preserved the material foundation for social activity by reducing nature to a background for the development of social relations, especially labor relations, and relegating "natural processes" to a domain outside of society. Paradoxically, this is virtually the same as the bourgeois ideological conception of nature as something that exists outside of society yet is nevertheless integral to it. To put it succinctly, society and nature are both products, making them flexible, transformative, and transgressive. Smith contends that the idea of a pristine nature—or, in Lefebvre's view, "first nature"—becomes more problematic as historical socio-nature creates entirely new "nature" over space and time, as well as as the number of hybrids and quasi-objects increases. Smith does not imply that all non-human processes are socially produced.

Taking reference from Gandy, M. (2005). Cyborg urbanization: complexity and monstrosity in the contemporary city. International journal of urban and regional research, 29(1), 26-49.

The physical infrastructure that connects the human body to extensive technology networks is arguably the most prominent example of how the cyborg places focus on the material interface between the body and the city. If a cyborg is a cybernetic entity, a machine-organ hybrid, then urban infrastructures might be thought of as a network of interconnected life support systems.

In the modern home, for instance, the provision of water, warmth, light, and other necessities has made the house into a complex exoskeleton for the human body. Modernist divisions between nature and culture, as well as between the organic and inorganic, can become hazy when seeing the home as a "prosthesis and Pro prophylactic" space (Vidler, 1990: 37). Furthermore, the modern city is run by an extensive web of interconnected networks, pipes, and wires that extends beyond the walls of the individual homes. These interstitial areas of connectivity that exist within individual buildings spread throughout the city to create an incredibly intricate and multilayered multi-layered framework.

Taking reference from The Urbanization of Nature: Great Promises, Impasse, and New Beginnings by Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw

The metropolis, the biggest socio-natural work of collective production, has always served as the arena and combat zone for "accumulation by dispossession," as defined by David Harvey (Harvey 2003: 137). The marketization and dispossession of socio-natural objects, such as water, air, carbon dioxide, technological natural infrastructures, and genetic code, have been expanded by the recent politics of neoliberalization from public spaces, parks, and collective environments. These objects are now part of the commodified quasi-object category and are vulnerable to unbridled capitalist speculation.

The establishment of a new urban policy framework, which included the environmental issue into urban policies using the rhetoric of "sustainability" and the logic of ecological modernization, made this drastic political-ecological reordering possible. The contemporary practice of "sustainable development" tends to ignore issues of justice and equality in favour of a new policy framework that supports market-led, technocratic approaches to "greening" capitalism (Gibbs 2000; Mol and Spaargaren 2000; Heynen et al. 2007). This is in contrast to the groundbreaking academic argument about "sustainable development," which frequently incorporates the social sector as an integral part of the sustainable development "triad" (see Whitehead 2007). In order to fix, Save the Planet creates intricate, market-driven, and most likely impractical "protocols" (such as Kyoto) or fosters the development of new green capital investment sinks. The environmental dilemma is now one that mobilizes a variety of political energies as "sustainable development" turns into a market logic that creates new channels for capital accumulation (Castree 2008; Himley 2008). As Swyngedouw (2009) notes, the urban environmental issue has in fact played a role in the establishment of a highly selective "pluralization" of the state, wherein specialists, non-elected officials, and private actors are being integrated into the governance, implementation, and financing of sustainable cities. These new forms of governance have come under fire recently for "naturalizing the political," overemphasizing the influence of business elites, and downplaying democratic and accountability concerns (Swyngedouw 2009). A substantial amount of scholarly work has also described how the new materialities and financial assemblages regulate resource management in metropolitan areas. reconstruct entitlement and exclusion maps, rearticulate patterns of control and access along class, gender, and ethnic lines, and rewrite the socio-spatial choreographies of the flows of water, garbage, food, etc. On the other hand, these same combinations of capital, environments, cities, and people have also given rise to a wide range of conflicts and rivalries.

In the same text there is a section which talks about Urban-sociological environments and the struggle for justice. These movements transform complaints into "action repertories," "create collective identities," and "impact mechanisms of injustice." An example of how social movements can effectively oppose the neo-liberalization of urban environments is the Cochabamba people's victorious campaign in Bolivia against Water International and the city's water utility's privatization (Olivera and Lewis 2004).

But there is still little in the way of academic discussion of the fight for socio-environmental justice. While there is a lot of research now available showing how the physical environment of a place—such as manufacturing, air quality, and toxic sites—affects the daily inequality that people confront (Sze 2006), little is known about how These location-specific physical settings have the potential to either support or obstruct collective action (Leitner et al. 2008).

According to Nicholls (2009: 80), people's "sense of place" influences their "normative evaluations of who to cooperate with, who to dispute, and what battles are worth fighting for."

Consequently, it is impossible to comprehend socio-ecological movements without considering how they are embedded in certain socio-spatial contexts. Our attention must be drawn to place as contested, scaled, in flux, and relational in order to comprehend their geographies. In fact, scale affects the dynamics of social and environmental movements just as much as location does. Power dynamics are constantly rearranged both within and between various political scales since these movements are a part of a constantly changing political landscape. The increasing, albeit still restricted, interconnectivity of place-based urban socio-ecological movements and the globalization of environmental politics serve as examples of this.

In fact, scale affects the dynamics of social and environmental movements just as much as location does. Power dynamics are constantly rearranged both within and between various political scales since these movements are a part of a constantly changing political landscape. The increasing, albeit still restricted, interconnectivity of place-based urban socio-ecological movements and the globalization of environmental politics serve as examples of this. Many of these urban socio-ecological initiatives continue to be inward-looking and locally oriented, which keeps socio-environmental inequalities from becoming universally recognized as "Not in My Backyard" or "Not in Anyone's Backyard." The majority of urban socio-ecological movements are primarily reactive rather than proactive, which begs the difficult questions of why "resistance"—a code word for opposition to ecological degradation, diminishing socio-ecological amenities, and the privatization of common "resources"—is the movement's preferred approach, why this "resistance" rarely results in a demand for change and the creation of equitable socio-ecological urban conditions, and why the idea of possible alternative urban natures remains powerless.

When we talk about Cyborg Urbanization and development together. Until now we have understood what is cyborg urbanization. When we talk about development, development is formed by humans. In the current capitalist state in which we are living, every human being wants to capitalize which means development will keep on happening in every field whether, its technology, a specific industry etc. When we look at developed, developing and under-developed countries, a question should arise which is “If development arises a lot of problems in waste, then is it that a developing country would handle their waste well? Or is there something else? Because if developed countries are using the under developed and developing countries to dump their waste then there would be a way in which the countries affected can use to come out of it. Who is to blame? Who are the rogue imposters? This is where the issue's worldwide scope starts. Shipments of plastic garbage containers to be "recycled" in underdeveloped nations are frequently more cost-effective for rich nations than handling the waste locally.

In the end, the irony is regardless of the distance, this trash eventually finds its way to Spaceship Earth, the only planet known to humanity. Long-term harm to the global ecology will result from this imported garbage, even though its immediate negative consequences are felt most keenly locally. This also has a negative effect on the statistics reports which are made after rigorous and very intensive study. If we have to make sure that if not remove then at least reduce this problem everyone has to come together which is a very idealistic approach but also the only approach because here we are dealing with a matter which will not go anywhere, waste will always be on the surface of earth. Cyborg Urbanization is a reality and it seems to me that there is nothing more outside of it, so I feel that the policy-makers have a real task on their hands and the people a much more difficult task of obeying to it in order to at least reduce it. However, before all this takes place the people should understand that what they are dealing with here is a very severe situation and need to think for the future generation and the current generation to think for themselves because of the exploiting of the nature is happening at a very fast state.

“The recovery of sprawl to vibrant places is literally our generation’s greatest challenge”

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