Cities for People, Not for Profit has, to date, moved through three stages: the original Berlin conference (2008), its publication in the journal CITY (2009), and its publication as a book. We set out some materials from that progress here as an introduction to the ongoing project.
A. From the Conference to the Journal Special Issue
(Extract from CITY Editor-in-Chief Bob Catterall’s introduction to the CITY session at the American Association of Geographers, 26 February 2012).
What struck me at the conference in Berlin in 2008 at which key aspects of ‘Cities for People, Not for Profit’ project were introduced was both the project’s cutting edge, and the spirit of camaraderie with which it was presented and discussed. I saw immediately that that cutting edge sharpened up and in a sense re-sculpted the critical commitment of our journal, CITY.
I felt that that camaraderie was contagious. There was a spirit of joyful comradeship that characterised the discussion at the conference and would spread if the project was shared with a wider audience.
From long exposure to the theoreticist travails and occasional internecine warfare of ’the left’ it seemed to me that some such combination of camaraderie with a cutting edge was essential if the left was to make an effective contribution to finding a way through our deeply troubled and possibly terminal times.
Neil Brenner, on behalf of the triumvirate, and I, on behalf of the editorial board of CITY, quickly came to the conclusion that rather than go straightaway for the book of the conference (which would probably lead to two or three years delay) we would go for preliminary publication in the journal CITY (which could be achieved in about six months) and eventually for a book with the same publisher.
And so it was! The spirit of innovation was continued in CITY’s partnership with the originating editors. First of all, in the choice of a cover (the controversial graffiti, ‘Middle Class Scum. Fuck off! Class War!’; photographed by Tom Slater in Hackney, London, in July 2006).
i. Cities for People, Not for Profit – Introduction
Excerpt from CITY Vol. 13 Issue 2-3 (2009), by Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse, Margit Mayer
The rapidly unfolding global economic recession is dramatically intensifying the contradictions around which urban social movements have been rallying, suddenly validating their claims regarding the unsustainability and destructiveness of neoliberal forms of urbanization. Cities across Europe, from London, Copenhagen, Paris and Rome to Athens, Reykjavik, Riga and Kiev, have erupted in demonstrations, strikes and protests, often accompanied by violence. Youthful activists are not alone in their outrage that public money is being doled out to the banks even as the destabilization of economic life and the intensification of generalized social insecurity continues. The Economist Intelligence Unit (2009, [1. Economist Intelligence Unit. 2009. ‘Governments under pressure: how sustained economic upheaval could put political regimes at risk’, 19 March http://viewswire.eiu.com/index.asp?layout=VWArticleVW3&article_id=954360280&rf-0 “How sustained economic upheaval could put political regimes at risk”]) recently offered the following observation:
“A spate of incidents in recent months shows that the global economic downturn is already having political repercussions … There is growing concern about a possible global pandemic of unrest … Our central forecast includes a high risk of regime- threatening social unrest.”
Similarly, the new US director of national intelligence has presented the global economic crisis as the biggest contempo- rary security threat, outpacing terrorism (Schwartz, 2009, [2. Schwartz, N. 2009. ‘Rise in jobless poses threat to stability worldwide’. New York Times]). Preparations to control and crush potential civil unrest are well underway (cf. Freier, 2008, [3. Freier, N. 2008. “‘Known unknowns: unconventional strategic shocks’”. In Defense Strategy Development , Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College. http://www.StrategicStudiesInstitute.army.mil/]).
In light of these trends, it appears increasingly urgent to understand how different types of cities across the world system are being repositioned within increasingly volatile, financialized circuits of capital accumulation. Equally important is the question of how this crisis has provoked or constrained alternative visions of urban life that point beyond capitalism as a structuring principle of political–economic and spatial organization. Capitalist cities are not only sites for strategies of capital accumulation; they are also arenas in which the conflicts and contradictions associated with historically and geographically specific accumulation strategies are expressed and fought out. As such, capitalist cities have long served as spaces for envisioning, and indeed mobilizing towards, alternatives to capitalism itself, its associated process of profit-driven urbanization and its relentless commodification and re-commodification of urban spaces.
It is this constellation of issues that we wish to emphasize with the title of this special issue of CITY, ‘Cities for People, Not for Profit’. Through this formulation, we mean to underscore the urgent politi- cal priority of constructing cities that correspond to human social needs rather than to the capitalist imperative of profit- making. The demand for ‘cities for people, not for profit’ has been articulated recur- rently throughout much of the history of capitalism. It was, for instance, expressed paradigmatically by Engels (1987, [4. Engels, F. 1987 [1845]. The Condition of the Working Class in England , Edited by: Kiernan, V. New York: Penguin.]; 1845) as he analyzed the miserable condition of the English working class in the dilapi- dated housing districts of 19th-century Manchester. It was articulated in yet another form by writers as diverse as Jane Jacobs (1962, [5. Jacobs, J. 1962. The Death and Life of Great American Cities , New York: Vintage.]) and Henri Lefebvre (1996, [6. Lefebvre, H. 1996 [1968]. “‘The right to the city’”. In Writings on Cities , Edited by: Lefebvre, H. 63–184. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Trans. E. Kofman and E. Lebas]; 1968) as they polemicized against the homogenizing, destructive and anti-social consequences of postwar Fordist urban renewal projects. It has been explicitly politicized and, in some cases, partially institutionalized by municipal socialist movements in diverse contexts and conjunctures during the course of the 20th century (Boddy and Fudge, 1984; MacIntosh and Wainwright, 1987, [7. MacIntosh, M. and Wainwright, H., eds. 1987. A Taste of Power: The Politics of Local Economics , London: Verso.]). Of course, both negative and positive lessons can also be drawn from the experience of cities under really existing socialism, in which top-down, centralized state plan- ning replaced commodification as the structuring principle of sociospatial orga- nization (see Flierl and Marcuse, this issue). And finally, the limits of profit- based forms of urbanism have also been emphasized in the contemporary geoeco- nomic context by critics of neoliberal models of urban development, with its hypercommodification of urban land and other basic social amenities (housing, transportation, utilities, public space) in cities around the world (see, for instance, Harvey, 1989, [8. Harvey, D. 1989. The Urban Experience , Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.]; Smith, 1996, [9. Smith, N. 1996. The New Urban Frontier , New York: Routledge.]; Brenner and Theodore, 2003, [10. Brenner, N. and Theodore, N., eds. 2003. Spaces of Neoliberalism , Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.]; Keil, this issue).
Most of the contributors to this issue of CITY seek to extend reflection on this same problematic in the current moment, in which the worldwide financial crisis of 2008–2009 continues to send shock-waves of instability and conflict throughout the global urban system. One of our goals in this collection is to contribute intellectual resources that may be useful for those institutions, movements and actors that likewise aim to roll back the contemporary hypercommodification of urban life, and on this basis, to promote alternative, radically democratic, socially just and sustainable forms of urbanism. Writing over 30 years ago, Harvey (1976, p. 314, [11. Harvey, D. 1976. Social Justice and the City , Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.]) succinctly characterized this challenge as follows:
“‘Patterns in the circulation of surplus value are changing but they have not altered the fact that cities … are founded on the exploitation of the many by the few. An urbanism founded on exploitation is a legacy of history. A genuinely humanizing urbanism has yet to brought into being for revolutionary theory to chart the path from an urbanism based in exploitation to an urbanism appropriate for the human species. And it remains for revolutionary practice to accomplish such a transformation.”
Harvey’s political injunction remains as urgent as ever in the early 21st century. In Harvey’s view, a key task for critical or ‘revo- lutionary’ urban theory is to ‘chart the path’ towards an alternative, post-capitalist form of urbanization. How can this task be confronted today, as a new wave of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2008; [12. Harvey, D. 2008. ‘The right to the city’. New Left Review , 53: 23–40.]) washes destructively across the world economy?
See full article here.
Neil Brenner is Professor of Urban Theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), Margit Mayer, Professor at the Freie Universität Berlin, and Peter Marcuse, Professor of Urban Planning at Columbia University in New York. Visit his blog here: http://pmarcuse.wordpress.com
ii. What is critical urban theory?
Excerpt from CITY Vol. 13 Issue 2-3 (2009) by Neil Brenner
What is critical urban theory? This phrase is generally used as a shorthand reference to the writings of leftist or radical urban scholars during the post‐1968 period—for instance, those of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Manuel Castells, Peter Marcuse and a legion of others who have been inspired or influenced by them (Katznelson, 1993, [13. Katznelson, I. 1993. Marxism and the City , New York: Oxford University Press.]; Merrifield, 2002, [14. Merrifield, A. 2002. Metro‐Marxism , New York: Routledge.]). Critical urban theory rejects inherited disciplinary divisions of labor and statist, technocratic, market‐driven and market‐oriented forms of urban knowledge. In this sense, critical theory differs fundamentally from what might be termed ‘mainstream’ urban theory—for example, the approaches inherited from the Chicago School of urban sociology, or those deployed within technocratic or neoliberal forms of policy science.
Rather than affirming the current condition of cities as the expression of transhistorical laws of social organization, bureaucratic rationality or economic efficiency, critical urban theory emphasizes the politically and ideologically mediated, socially contested and therefore malleable character of urban space—that is, its continual (re)construction as a site, medium and outcome of historically specific relations of social power. Critical urban theory is thus grounded on an antagonistic relationship not only to inherited urban knowledges, but more generally, to existing urban formations. It insists that another, more democratic, socially just and sustainable form of urbanization is possible, even if such possibilities are currently being suppressed through dominant institutional arrangements, practices and ideologies. In short, critical urban theory involves the critique of ideology (including social–scientific ideologies) and the critique of power, inequality, injustice and exploitation, at once within and among cities.
However, the notions of critique, and more specifically of critical theory, are not merely descriptive terms. They have determinate social–theoretical content that is derived from various strands of Enlightenment and post‐Enlightenment social philosophy, not least within the work of Hegel, Marx and the Western Marxian tradition (Koselleck, 1988, [15. Koselleck, R. 1988. Critique and Crisis. Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.]; Postone, 1993, [16. Postone, M. 1993. Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Re‐interpretation of Karl Marx’s Critical Social Theory , New York: Cambridge University Press.]; Calhoun, 1995, [17. Calhoun, C. 1995. “‘Rethinking critical theory’”. In Critical Social Theory , Edited by: Calhoun, C. 1–42. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.]). Moreover, the focus of critique in critical social theory has evolved significantly during the course of the last two centuries of capitalist development (Therborn, 1996, [18. Therborn, G. 1996. ‘Dialectics of modernity: on critical theory and the legacy of 20th century Marxism’. New Left Review , I/215: 59–81.]). Given the intellectual and political agenda of [the Cities for People, Not for Profit special issue of CITY, Vol 13. 2-3], it is worth revisiting some of the key arguments developed within the aforementioned traditions, particularly that of the Frankfurt School, which arguably provide a crucial, if often largely implicit, reference point for the contemporary work of critical urbanists.
One of the main points to be emphasized below is the historical specificity of any approach to critical social theory, urban or otherwise. The work of Marx and the Frankfurt School emerged during previous phases of capitalism—competitive (mid‐ to late‐19th century) and Fordist–Keynesian (mid‐20th century), respectively—that have now been superseded through the restless, creatively destructive forward‐motion of capitalist development (Postone, 1992, [19. Postone, M. 1992. “‘Political theory and historical analysis’”. In Habermas and the Public Sphere , Edited by: Calhoun, C. 164–180. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.], 1993, [20. Postone, M. 1993. Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Re‐interpretation of Karl Marx’s Critical Social Theory , New York: Cambridge University Press.], 1999, [21. Postone, M. 1999. ‘Contemporary historical transformations: beyond postindustrial theory and neo‐Marxism’. Current Perspectives in Social Theory , 19: 3–53.]). A key contemporary question, therefore, is how the conditions of possibility for critical theory have changed today, in the early 21st century, in the context of an increasingly globalized, neoliberalized and financialized formation of capitalism (Therborn, 2008, [22. Therborn, G. 2008. From Marxism to Post‐Marxism? , London: Verso.]).
Such considerations also lead directly into the thorny problem of how to position urban questions within the broader project of critical social theory. With the significant exception of Walter Benjamin’s Passagen‐Werk, none of the main figures associated with the Frankfurt School devoted much attention to urban questions. For them, critical theory involved the critique of commodification, the state and the law, including their mediations, for instance, through family structures, cultural forms and social–psychological dynamics (Jay, 1973, [23. Jay, M. 1973. The Dialectical Imagination , Boston: Little, Brown.]; Kellner, 1989, [24. Kellner, D. 1989. Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity , Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.]; Wiggershaus, 1995, [25. Wiggershaus, R. 1995. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance , Edited by: Robertson, M. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.). This orientation had a certain plausibility during the competitive and Fordist–Keynesian phases of capitalist development, insofar as urbanization processes were then generally viewed as a straightforward spatial expression of other, purportedly more fundamental social forces, such as industrialization, class struggle and state regulation. I argue below, however, that such an orientation is no longer tenable in the early 21st century, as we witness nothing less than an urbanization of the world—the ‘urban revolution’ anticipated nearly four decades ago by Henri Lefebvre (2003 (1970), [26. Lefebvre, H. 2003 (1970). The Urban Revolution , Edited by: Bononno, R. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.]). Under conditions of increasingly generalized, worldwide urbanization (Lefebvre, 2003 (1970), [27. Lefebvre, H. 2003 (1970). The Urban Revolution , Edited by: Bononno, R. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.]; Schmid, 2005, [28. Schmid, C. 2005. “‘Theory’”. In Switzerland: An Urban Portrait , Edited by: Diener, R., Herzog, J., Meili, M., de Meuron, P. and Schmid, C. 163–224. Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag.]; Soja and Kanai, 2007, [29. Soja, E. and Kanai, M. 2007. “‘The urbanization of the world’”. In The Endless City , Edited by: Burdett, R. and Sudjic, D. 54–69. London: Phaidon Press.]), the project of critical social theory and that of critical urban theory have been mutually intertwined as never before.
See full article here – from CITY (2009) Vol 13. Issue 2-3.
iii. From critical urban theory to the right to the city
Excerpt from CITY Vol. 13 Issue 2-3 (2009) by Peter Marcuse
Note: The quote below, by CITY website contributor Celine Kuklowsky, was a recent comment and not from the original “Cities for People…” special issue in 2009, but we’ve added it here as we think it highlights the continuing relevance and urgency of the question dealt with by Peter Marcuse in his original article on the activist / revolutionary notion of the ‘Right to the City’. The excerpt from his article continues below.
“…introducing the right to the city is really key to all this,… of course, critical urban theory is at CITY’s core… from a personal perspective, I see Cities for People… as being at the heart of our most important current struggles, as hyper-privatization and the withdrawal of the state steam ahead. It certainly is key to my own work … as an organizer for residents on 2 large council estates in the heart of Hammersmith & Fulham who are trying to take over their homes against the council that’s trying to demolish the estates and sell-off the land to the developer CapCo. We are struggling to take resident control over the estates and hold the land for the community in perpetuity. If you want to follow us our website is http://westkengibbsgreen.wordpress.com/ and we’re on twitter @PeoplesEstates
“…so this is also in fact, not just a battle for the right to housing, it’s about fighting for the right for working class people to live and play and exist IN the city as opposed to being pushed out like in the banlieues surrounding Paris, (a tendency that seems to be getting worse with time). Seeing the tremendous real estate prices and thanks to slacker social housing laws, the rich are socially cleansing the area of people that “aren’t fit” to live there (Hammersmith & Fulham council’s words). This is in fact, class war – as it says on the cover of the [2009 Cities for People, Not for Profit] special issue.” Celine Kuklowsky, CITY contributing website editor.
Right to the City
The Right to the City is both an immediately understandable and intuitively compelling slogan, and a theoretically complex and provocative formulation. What does the Right to the City mean? More specifically: Whose Right are we talking about? What Right is it we mean? What City is it to which we want the right?
Henri Lefebvre popularized the slogan in 1968, but he was more provocative than careful in its usage. The best definition he gave is:
‘… the right to the city is like a cry and a demand. This right slowly meanders through the surprising detours of nostalgia and tourism, the return to the heart of the traditional city, and the call of existent or recently developed centralities.’ (Lefebvre, 1967, p. 158; [30. Lefebvre, H. 1996 (1967). “‘The Right to the City’”. In Writings on Cities , Edited by: Kofman, E. and Lebas, E. 63–184. London: Blackwell.)
In other places he has it meandering through:
‘the right to information, the rights to use of multiple services, the right of users to make known their ideas on the space and time of their activities in urban areas; it would also cover the right to the use of the center’. (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 34; [31. Lefebvre, H. 1991. “‘Les illusions de la modernite’”. In La ville partout et partout en crise, Manière de voir, 13 , Edited by: Ramoney, I., Decornoy, J. and Brie, Ch. Paris: Le Monde diplomatique.])
So: whose right, what right and to what city?
Whose right?
‘Whose right’ is a complex question, and one as to which I think an expansion of the existing discussion would be worthwhile—useful both theoretically and in practice.
The question is a long‐standing one. Herbert Marcuse struggled with it (Marcuse, 1969; [32. Marcuse, H. 1969. An Essay on Liberation , Boston: Beacon Press.]). David Harvey (2009; [33. Harvey, D. 2009. http://www.counterpunch.org/weisbrot03062009.html]) recently called attention to it in today’s context:
‘I don’t think we are in a position to define who the agents of change will be in the present conjuncture and it plainly will vary from one part of the world to another. In the United States right now there are signs that elements of the managerial class, which has lived off the earnings of finance capital all these years, is getting annoyed and may turn a bit radical. A lot of people have been laid off in the financial services, in some instances they have even had their mortgages foreclosed. Cultural producers are waking up to the nature of the problems we face and in the same way that the 1960s art schools were centers of political radicalism, you might find something like that re‐emerging. We may see the rise of cross‐border organizations as the reductions in remittances spread the crisis to places like rural Mexico or Kerala.’
The analysis following is new, but I think it is consistent with Lefebvre’s, and certainly with my father’s. Lefebvre’s right is both a cry and a demand, a cry out of necessity and a demand for something more. Those are two separate things. I would reformulate them to be an exigent demand by those deprived of basic material and existing legal rights, and an aspiration for the future by those discontented with life as they see it around them, perceived as limiting their own potentials for growth and creativity.
The demand comes from those directly in want, directly oppressed, those for whom even their most immediate needs are not fulfilled: the homeless, the hungry, the imprisoned, the persecuted on gender, religious, racial grounds. It is an involuntary demand, those whose work injures their health, those whose income is below subsistence. The cry comes from the aspiration of those superficially integrated into the system and sharing in its material benefits, but constrained in their opportunities for creative activity, oppressed in their social relationships, guilty perhaps for an undeserved prosperity, unfulfilled in their lives’ hopes. The discussion of the role of art, and of an aesthetic revulsion against the results of the existing order of things, is relevant (Miles, forthcoming). For both, their one‐dimensionality eats away at their humanity, and from the same source, but it does it in different ways.
So that there is no misunderstanding, those deprived even of the material necessities of life are as entitled to, and in need of, the fuller life to which the alienated aspire as are the alienated, and the sources of dissatisfaction for both arise out of equally organic and essential human needs. ‘Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Morale’, as Brecht said; ([34. ‘First comes eating, then comes morality.’]) but both are necessary for a human and humane life. Where choices must be made, the demands of the deprived are entitled to priority over the fulfillment of the aspirations of the alienated.
To return then to whose rights are our concern, the demand is of those who are excluded, the cry is of those who are alienated; the demand is for the material necessities of life, the aspiration is for a broader right to what is necessary beyond the material to lead a satisfying life. But to make the discussion clearer, let me digress briefly to a schematic definition of terms.([35. Iris Marion Young’s ‘five faces of oppression’ may provide an alternate basis for the analysis I am proposing.])
An analysis in terms of material interests, in somewhat traditional class terms (see, for instance, in urban terms: Marcuse, 1989; [36. Marcuse, P. 1989. ‘“Dual City”: a muddy metaphor for a quartered city’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research , 13(4): 697–708.]) along lines of position in the relations of production (somewhat modernized), might be:
• The excluded (not in fact an accurate term, for they are in fact a part of the system, without the protections won by the working class for labor, but they operate at its margins).
• The working class, the materially exploited (including what is euphemistically called the middle class, i.e. white as well as blue collar workers, skilled as well as unskilled, service as well as manufacturing workers, but underpaid and producing profit for others)—together with the excluded, we may speak of these two groups as the deprived.
• The small business people (the individual proprietors, the small entrepreneurs, the craftsmen).
• The gentry (including the more successful small business persons, professionals, the highly paid servants of the multi‐nationals).
• The capitalists (owners and decision‐making managers of large business enterprises).
• The establishment intelligentsia (including much of the media, academics, artists and others active in the ideological aspect of the production processes).
• The politically powerful (including most of those in or aspiring to high public office).
Looked at economically, the cry for the Right to the City here comes from the most marginalized and the most underpaid and insecure members of the working class, not from most of the gentry, the intelligentsia, the capitalists.
An analysis in ‘cultural’ terms, along lines of relation to the dominant cultural, ethnic, and gendered society and ideology, might be:
• The directly oppressed (oppressed along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, lifestyle, often called the excluded, but excluded only in this ‘cultural’ sense, often included in an economic sense).
• The alienated (of any economic class, many youth, artists, a significant part of the intelligentsia, in resistance to the dominant system as preventing adequate satisfaction of their human needs).
• The insecure (a shifting group, varying with conjunctural changes, e.g. level of crisis, prosperity, including much of the working class and periodically some of the gentry).
• The hapless lackeys of power (including some of the gentry and some of the intelligentsia).
• The underwriters and beneficiaries of the established cultural and ideological hegemonic attitudes and beliefs. Looked at from this point of view, the demand for the Right to the City comes from the directly oppressed, the aspiration comes from the alienated.
See full article here – from CITY (2009) Vol 13. Issue 2-3.
B. The book: now subtitled ‘Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City’
From the early version on, it was undoubtedly a seminal collection and has been a major influence on editorial thinking in CITY. It has also provided a basis for dialogue with the editors of the original issue, and now with the updated and expanded version in book-form, that dialogue has become a project, ‘Beyond Cities for People, Not for Profit’. This was introduced in a session at the 2012 AAG conference and some of that discussion will be taken up in future issues of CITY. Meanwhile we publish three reviews of the book here from colleagues new to the book and to the project.
A key topic from each of the reviews will give some idea of the range of the discussion. William Tabb in his review, ‘Cities for people and people for systemic change’, gives particular attention to the contribution by Jon Lis, a co-founder of the Right to the City Alliance(USA). As Tabb points out, Lis is ‘unique [in the book] in asking if movement activists are serious about basic change whether they need to get into the messy business of actual politics’. Mark Davidson, in ‘The 20:12 express: destination?’, introduces theoretical perspectives new to much of the debate, notably Ranciere and Zizek, in order to explore ‘three simple questions: Who are ‘the people’? What does the removal of profit mean? What do the people want instead?’ Fran Tonkiss, in ‘The One-Dimensional City’ introduces Herbert Marcuse to the discussion, and ‘in thinking about the kind of politics opened up by this [the book’s] kind of critical urbanism’, and by contemporary social movements, puts forward the need to consider ‘a politics of opposition, of critique, and of refusal.’
Bob Catterall, CITY Editor-in-Chief
