Monika Streule

This paper introduces the concept of “bypass urbanism” to account for a process of urbanization that is reordering center-periphery relations of urban regions into new hierarchies. Bypass urbanism became visible through a comparison of large-scale urban transformations at the peripheries of Kolkata, Lagos, and Mexico City by zooming out and considering their impacts on the socio-spatial structure of the extended urban regions.

Bypass urbanism is not emerging from the construction of a singular new town or real estate project, but is the result of the simultaneous development of an ensemble of various independent but related projects. Therefore, bypass urbanism usually does not emanate from a coherent planning initiative, even less so from a hidden “master plan” at the hands of any single developer or state agency, but it emerges through a convergence of interests over large areas of land at the geographical periphery of urban regions that have been made available for new urban developments by various measures.

We understand bypass urbanism as a multidimensional process that includes material-geographical bypassing, the bypassing of regulatory frameworks, and socio-economic bypassing in everyday life. It results in the creation of exclusive and excluding spaces that enable middle and upper-class lifestyles, at the same time leading to the peripheralization of extant urban areas that are bypassed and neglected. The massive scale of bypass urbanism that we have observed represents a new quality of urban development resulting not in isolated urban enclaves or archipelagos, but in the fundamental restructuring of the extended urban region with far reaching and incalculable repercussions.

Sawyer, Lindsay, Schmid, Christian, Streule, Monika, Kallenberger, Pascal (2021) Bypass urbanism: Re-ordering center-periphery relations in Kolkata, Lagos and Mexico City. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 53.4, 675–703. DOI: 10.1177/0308518X20983818

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This paper explores and discusses the experimental, critical, and self-reflective use of differing methods in urban studies. In the context of frequent calls to investigate urban processes in a planetary and comparative perspective, the empirical groundedness of research is among the particularly complex challenges urban scholars are confronted with. The key question is: how can qualitative-empirical methods, like ethnography or qualitative mapping, be adapted to explore contemporary urban conditions?

This paper seeks to contribute to current debates by introducing a specific methodological design of a mobile ethnography that enables an analysis of large and heterogeneous urban territories, in three main ways: first, by offering a theoretically informed and empirically grounded transductive research design, second, by proposing a complementary set of cartographic, historiographic and comparative methods of which mobile ethnography is a part of, and third, by suggesting post- and decolonial methodological perspectives, both conceptually by engaging with Latin American urbanisms, as well as empirically by furthering collaborative ways of knowledge production.

To conclude, the paper stresses the need to continually develop new inventive methods for comparative urban research, for two main reasons: (1) to enable scholars to question established geographical representations and parochial imaginaries of urban space, and (2) to problematize methodological and theoretical dogmas with situated knowledge. By suggesting different representations of the urban, the paper thus emphasises how important it is to transductively entangle empirical and theoretical conceptualizations to further decentre urban knowledge production.

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Streule, Monika (2020) Doing mobile ethnography: Grounded, situated, and comparative. Urban Studies, 57.2, 421–438. DOI 10.1177/0042098018817418