Urbanisation is not and has never been entirely about cities. Beginning with the earlier colonial practices of spatial planning and its projections onto the supposedly “open” spaces of newly settled land, and continuing as a project to establish one continuous global system of social, political and economic control, “the urban” has now decisively eclipsed the city, encompassing the entirety of our planet—such that we can even talk about the urbanisation of the oceans. [...]
I describe the urban as a fundamentally new way to organise and control space, and what happens in it—a political technology that emerged sometime in the nineteenth century in Europe. By this term, I mean to describe two parallel processes we see happening in this period: on the one hand, the broad reorganisation of space across a range of major cities in Europe and, on the other, the deployment of new administrative, legal and political means by which to manage the people who had come to occupy these spaces. [...]
What I suppose I would like people to know about Cerdá is that, in my view, he provided the first and perhaps clearest account of the urban as it arose around him in Europe. This reading requires a bit of interpretive generosity since Cerdá’s project was of course not an “account” per se, but rather a proposal for a space yet to come—a space which he believed he had invented outright. Although he did invent the term urbanización, I see his work as more of a diagram that reveals how space, movement and the control of bodies could be planned for the first time.
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