This symposium opens with a simple yet perplexing question: what is the urban? It brings together a range of internationally renowned scholars in an effort less to provide answers to this question than to frame a problem that has yet to be fully constituted. What language do we need to speak about the urban? What spaces and politics does it produce? Does the urban have a history of its own? An ontological specificity? If so, what lies outside of its domain? Can we speak of the modern ‘rural’—the deterritorialized pastoral spaces of agrarian life, reterritorialized as machines of resource production and circulation—as in fact already urbanized? How does a site like Iowa allow us to understand and reimagine the ontological contours of the urban? As satellite imagery and remote sensing technologies pierce ever deeper into the natural world, translating its remoteness into maps of resource concessions to be distributed as future commodities, can we even say that ‘nature’ itself has, to some degree, been urbanized?

Katsikis abstract.  If urbanization is a ubiquitous condition that renders inherited spatial taxonomies (like the town, the city, the suburb), or dichotomies (like the town – country, or the urban – rural) obsolete, what are the new spatial categories that can be utilized in order to investigate this condition? Although it is argued that urbanization is a universal condition, this does not imply the existence of a homogeneous, symmetrical landscape. It rather incorporates very different and very asymmetrical geographies and patterns of, both socially, and ecologically uneven development. In order to start grasping these complex configurations, this presentation introduces a series of composite geo-spatial taxonomies, which aim to offer a matrix for classifying the terrain of ‘Planetary Urbanization’: On the one hand ‘agglomeration landscapes’ are the geographies where agglomeration economies, and in general agglomeration externalities and dynamics can unfold. On the other hand, ‘operational landscapes’ are the geographies that are connected to land extensive and, or, geographically bound operations that are impossible to cluster. A series of hybrid landscapes emerge as these two ‘extreme’ categories blend together in different ways around different areas of the world.