by Björn Surborg
‘Reclaim the City!’—the statement that was at the centre of a panel session at the 2007 meeting of the Association of American Geographers in San Francisco is both a powerful call for action in urban research and activism as well as an intellectual Pandora’s box as to what is meant by the statement.
Has the city been lost, so that it needs to be reclaimed now? If yes, by whom for whom? Which city are we referring to? The postmodern consumer metropolis, the contemporary manufacturing centres of China and other Asian economies, cities ‘under siege’ by institutionalised or guerrilla armies([1. Catterall, Bob (2001) Cities under siege: September 11th and after. City 5 (3): 383],[2. Schwartz, M. (2007) Neo-liberalism on crack: cities under siege in Iraq. City 11 (1): 21-69]), or sprawling metropolises and cities of slums([3. Neuwirth, (2007) Squatters and the cities of tomorrow. City 11: (1) , pp. 71-80.])?
The session – sponsored jointly by City and the Urban Cultures and Consumption Research Group at the School of Geography at the University of Leeds – was introduced by City’s founder and editor Bob Catterall, also responsible for moderating the panel of speakers([4. Also on the panel was Paul Chatterton – long time member of the journal’s editorial board; Sir Peter Hall and Elvin Wyly, members of City‘s international advisory board, and Loretta Lees, whose work was reviewed in City]):
‘The focus of the panel session is the statement “reclaim the city!”, which is part investigation, part a call for action and part, if you like, a provocation. But not a provocation for the sake of provocation, but a provocation to think really hard and seriously about what is happening to our cities.’
Bob Catterall also pointed to the visual articulation of this theme in “El Inmigrante” – a mural by Joel Bergner (see above)”reclaiming” a wall in the Mission district of San Francisco. It shows an immigrant man who has left his partner, home and everything that is familiar to him, to arrive at the cold, spiritually empty place that is overly organised and churns out money (for the rich). Cities, large and small, have been the centres of social, economic and political action for thousands of years. They are the places where agricultural surplus is consumed to produce other goods and services. Yet, often the redistribution of wealth resulting from urbanization has created more misery than joy. A call to reclaim the city then is also a response to the boosterist claim that cities are resurgent([5. Beauregard, R. A. (2004) Are cities resurgent? A conference report. City 8: (3) , pp. 421-427]) – asking critically who they are resurgent for if it is not everyone, and why. Referring to the original idea in founding City that it should be entitled City! with the exclamation mark indicating an imperative (let the city be a real city!) Elvin Wyly restated the view that perhaps the true qualities of cities have to be affirmed and reclaimed.([6. This intention was set out in the first issue, launched in 1996, and then again in a 2006 issue “there is something more to the idea and reality of a city than that it is some kind of urban agglomeration. We have to address both its communicative (or indeed noncommunicative) reach and its ethical basis”; Editorial, 10(3) : 257]).
Then there are the concepts of neoliberalism, gentrification and privatisation – common lenses in critical urban studies – but what use can be extracted from these concepts for reclaiming the city?
Gentrification, Lorette Lees argued, has evolved from “a small scale urban process, pioneered by a liberal middle class who were interested in living with ordinary people, to being mass produced as a neoliberal gentrification blueprint around the world.” This highlights a central problem for reclaiming the city: displacement through gentrification is not a problem in one locale, where resistance and local democracy could easily react to specific challenges. The policy has been manufactured as a best practice for urban renewal and has thus become “common sense”, which, as David Harvey points out, is rarely the result of logical analysis, but simply what everyone believes([7. Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism Oxford University Press , Oxford; compare with Keil, R. (2002) “Common-sense” neoliberalism: progressive conservative urbanism in Toronto, Canada. Antipode 34: (3) , pp. 578-601]).
Pointing to exactly these kinds of manufactured belief systems, Elvin Wyly observed that “in a perverse way the market matters” in the sense that “neo-liberal political modelisation had very little market demand at its inception … but the market demand for anti-market, anti-capitalist messages is quite healthy”([8. He cited the work of Jamie Peck, (2006) Liberating the city: between New York and New Orleans. Urban Geography 27: (8) , pp. 681-713]). Hence, one of the greatest challenges is to translate this demand into concrete action for reclaiming the city, he continued. Some of the successes in tapping into the “market demand” for messages of social justice include examples from theory, direct action, creative performance art and many other forms.
Wyly’s comments came close to Lefebvre’s calls for a counter-discourse to hegemonic discourses, to reclaim the spaces of everyday life, which, through the bureaucratisation by the state and commodification by the markets have become the abstract spaces of capitalist production in the (post-)industrial city. Neoliberal “market” rhetoric is the hegemonic discourse which needs to be counteracted. So, “reclaiming the city” must be a process of reclaiming the spaces of everyday life from the abstracted spaces of the consumer society in the capitalist city. This means providing citizens with a meaningful space for social exchange, creative interaction([9. Not to be confused with Richard Florida’s call to create spaces for the so-called “creative class”. In this sense, it refers instead to non-class based, spontaneous and non-commodified creative interaction.]) and services beyond commercial activity.
Two different, but not mutually exclusive approaches to social engagement and action for reclaiming the city, were expressed during the session. Elvin Wyly suggested that there is a need for classification and a need to engage with the law; i.e. in order to have an impact on public policy on racial discrimination, for example, we need to ‘engage in the risky, but necessary’ activity of defining categories and show who is included in a group.
Second, Paul Chatterton talked about the need for a “politics of hope”, which he explained aims for more direct political control and less official government and more self governance. “It’s not [a hope] that the next government will be greener or that the UN will find a resolution to end the war, it’s about hope in ordinary people doing extraordinary things.” Alternatives were a central theme in Chatterton’s presentation, such that would be necessary to “reclaim the city”, or in his words to “retrofit the corporate city” so that a “solidarity economy” and a “sense of collectivity” could reshape current urban spaces. However, he acknowledged the acute challenges involved in the pursuit of such radical democracy, posed by existing Foucauldian power relations in contemporary (urban) society.
While Chatterton argued that social change would need to be brought about by a “movement of movements” and a full democratic process, Elvin Wyly’s main point was that social injustice would need to be attacked where it is created, namely, in the policy arena and other loci of power([11. As Theodore Adorno put it “genuine refutation must penetrate the power of the opponent and meet him on the ground of his strength; the case is not won by attacking him somewhere else and defeating him where he is not”; Adorno (1982), p. 5 cited in Sheppard, E. (2001) Quantitative geography: representations, practices, and possibilities. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19 , pp. 535-554.]). So urban research has its part to play in tackling injustice – but it should be linked to activist movements to ensure the democratic legitimisation of research, and to generate feedback through a democratic and collective process.
Meanwhile, Peter Hall cautioned against the use of the phrase “ordinary people” when talking about the “right to the city”, because it is not clear who these ordinary people are. He also raised concerns about the challenge of providing sufficient, affordable housing in the city, considering alternative means by which it could be organised. New forms of housing and ownership are thus required, as many residential (and other) properties in cities, specifically the inner cities are held for speculative purposes only without much intention of using them for people to live in. People who cannot afford to pay prices that exceed the profits made through speculation are unable to afford adequate housing in central areas, often gentrified ones and are thus denied the right to the city with all its services.
Directions for research
An important outcome of the session was that some common understanding about the reclaimed city emerged. Such a city would certainly be more egalitarian, more democratic and more communal. It is important then to emphasise what Loretta Lees said at the outset of her presentation: academics need to be “useful beyond the academy”. This would certainly have to be combined with Elvin Wyly’s emphasis on doing the hard empirical work that shows inequalities and injustice and getting this research out to a wider audience. Peter Hall suggested in this context that waiting for the revolution is unlikely a strategy leading to success in reclaiming the city; instead one should be aspiring to positions, where one can make a difference.
Globalization was also a key issue, in the context that action to reclaim the city needs to be coordinated, multi-local action; individual enough to cater to specific local problems, audiences and requirements in different cities, but as united as possible across territorial boundaries to undermine the forces of global capitalism.
By covering a wide range of perspectives and geographic locations, City addresses the implications for cities of a globalised while also exploring alternatives to the current status quo.
See full article here.
Björn Surborg is a graduate student and assistant teacher in Geography at the University of British Columbia (UBC)
Notes
