Annual UCL Urban Laboratory and CITY journal lecture: with Professor Margit Mayer
“Beyond austerity urbanism and creative city politics”
Supported by the Bartlett School of Planning.
2 October 2012 18.30 – 20.00
Archaeology Lecture Theatre
31-34 Gordon Square, UCL, WC1H 0PY
Editor’s Introduction: Moving On
In the first part of this series to move with/against/beyond ‘Cities for People, Not for Profit’ CfP (read more about the project here >>), we invited reviews from colleagues new to the book and/or the project, William Tabb, Mark Davidson and Fran Tonkiss. In the second we invited one of the original editorial critics of CfP to return to his initial response to the first version, as published in CITY, in his’ Cities for People, Not for Profit – from a radical-libertarian and Latin American perspective’ (2009, 13/4) but also to move on to a review of the subsequent book (2011). This response, ‘Marxists, libertarians and the city – A necessary debate’, together with an introductory suggestion that dialogue had been inhibited by an element of dogmatic resistance, was published in our previous issue (2012, 16.3).
In the third part of the series we published the first response to come from the editors of CfP, one by Margit Mayer. In a sensitive and helpful short paper (based on her contribution to CITY’s session at the 2012 American Association of Geographers in New York) she acknowledge that ‘a new phase of neoliberal capitalism seems to be on the horizon… Thus, the need to create connections and coalitions across the urban divide… and for critical urban theory to penetrate the obfuscations and help identify the real bases for our alliances …’([1. Discussed in the editorial of Issue 16.5.]). We also published an equally sensitive and helpful paper, ‘Unsettling critical urban theory’ (also based on a contribution to that that AAG session), by one of our editors, Sharon Meagher. In seeking to unsettle one of the hierarchical (or unilateral) binaries, urban/rural (incorporating, one should add, “modern/backward”), that distort much analysis from the global North, she brought good news, some at least, from the South.
In this fourth installment of the series, we invited Margit to set out and document her own position more fully. This takes two forms. The first is an outline of a paper she is to given as the fourth annual CITY-UCL-Bartlett School lecture (to be given at UCL on October 2nd 2012). The second is a selected bibliography of her work for the period.
Bob Catterall, CITY Editor-in-Chief
Note: This and the subsequent paper, as currently outlined, are discussed briefly in the editorial of Issue 16.5.
Beyond austerity urbanism and creative city politics
Preview of the fourth CITY-UCL-Bartlett School lecture; to be given at UCL on 2 October 2012.
by Margit Mayer
The talk looks at contemporary urban activism as it mobilizes around policies and conflicts characteristic of the comparatively privileged Western cities of the global North. It thus moves beyond ‘Cities for People, not for Profit’ by zeroing in on the specificities of urbanization processes and the reorganization of socio-spatial infrastructures, as well as their contestations, in one particular region of the ongoing, global and uneven development of capitalist accumulation.
By applying the framework of critical urban theory to the analysis of ongoing struggles in this region, it first identifies the particularities of neoliberal urbanism and its implications for (divisions and/or solidarities between) urban social movements (1), and secondly looks at the impact which the so-called Occupy movements that have rippled across cities in North America as well as Western Europe have had on urban protest (2).
1. As opposed to the previous Keynesian form of urbanism, when the Fordist city provided openings for struggles around improved collective infrastructures, neoliberal urbanism (thanks to intensified accumulation by dispossession) enhances socio-spatial polarization coupled with austerity politics, dismantling of social infrastructures, and stricter policing, while it also incorporates and harnesses many elements of urban alternative movements that feed cultural creativity and entrepreneurial activation. These dynamics create distances and sometimes collisions between more culturally oriented and more politically oriented activist groups, but also enforce affinities and solidarities between anti-privatization and anti-eviction struggles in the global South with those of (ethnically or migrant-based) organizing in the global North.
2. The effect of and responses to the 2008 financial meltdown have aggravated social marginalization and polarization processes, exacerbated the housing crisis in many regions of the world, and enforced systemic austerity politics. This catalyzed the15M movement in Spain, which inspired similar “real democracy” movements of Indignados across Europe, as well as the Occupy movement in North America. Their powerful resistance energy has, after the eviction of occupied squares and plazas, in many cities turned to urban neighborhoods and community struggles and infused these heterogeneous contestations with a radical critique of financial and political power and with direct-democratic and prefigurative organizing styles. In this process, distances and divisions between a (racialized) “global proletariat” and progressive or radical middle-class based activists may come to the surface and begin to be respected and bridged.
Note: Margit Mayer will also do a smaller seminar at the Bartlett School of Planning on 3 October. Details to follow Public lecture – all welcome. No RSVP necessary – first-come, first-served. Enquiries: urbanlaboratory@ucl.ac.uk
Mayer, M., (2010) Social Movements in the (Post-)Neoliberal City. Civic City Cahier 1. London: Bedford Press.
Mayer, M., Jenny Künkel, eds., (2012) Neoliberal Urbanism and Its Contestations – Crossing Theoretical Boundaries. London: Palgrave Publishers.
Brenner, N., Marcuse, P., Mayer, M., eds., (2012) Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City. London: Routledge.
A Selected Bibliography of Margit Mayer’s Work (2000-2012):
with Pierre Hamel, Henri Lustiger-Thaler, eds., (2000) Urban Movements in a Globalising World. London: Routledge.
with Neil Brenner and Peter Marcuse, eds., (2012) Cities for People, not for Profit. Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City. London: Routledge.
with Jenny Künkel, eds., (2012) Neoliberal Urbanism and Its Contestations – Crossing Theoretical Boundaries. London: Palgrave Publishers.
Articles:
“The Onward Sweep of Social Capital: Causes and Consequences for Understanding Cities, Communities and Urban Movements,” (International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27/1, March 2003, pp. 110-132.
“Urban Social Movements in an Era of Globalization,” in: Neil Brenner/Roger Keil, eds., The Global Cities Reader. Routledge, 2006, pp. 296-304.
“Manuel Castells’ The City and the Grassroots,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30/1, march 2006, 202-206.
“Contesting the Neoliberalization of Urban Governance,” in: Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck, Eric Sheppard, eds., Contesting Neoliberalism; The Urban Frontier. New York: Guilford Press, 2007, 90-115.
“To what end do we theorize sociospatial relations?,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26/3, 2008, 414-419.
“The ‘Right to the City’ in the Context of Shifting Mottos of Urban Social Movements,” City. Analysis of Urban Trends 13/2-3, July 2009, 362-374.
with Neil Brenner, John Friedmann, Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja, “Urban Restructuring and the Crisis: A Symposium,” Critical Planning, vol. 16, summer 2009, 35-59.
“Social Cohesion and Anti-Poverty Policies in US Cities,” in: Harlan Koff, ed., Social cohesion in Europe and the Americas/ Cohesión social en Europa y las Américas, Bern: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009, 311-334.
“Punishing the Poor – a Debate. Some Questions on Wacquant’s Theorizing the Neoliberal State, ” Theoretical Criminology vol. 14 no. 1, 2010, 93-103
“Social Movements in the (Post-)Neoliberal City,” Civic City Cahier 1, London: Bedford Press, 2010, 15-45.
“Neoliberal Urbanization and the Politics of Contestation,” in: Tahl Kaminer, Miguel Robles-Duran, Heidi Sohn, eds., Urban Asymmetries. Studies and Projects on Neoliberal Urbanization. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011, 46-61.
“Multiscalar mobilization for the just city: New spatial politics of urban movements,” in: Justin Beaumont, Byron Miller, Walter Nicholls, eds., Space of Contention: Spatialities and Social Movements, Ashgate Publishing Ltd 2012.
with Julie-Ann Boudreau, “Social Movements in Urban Politics: Trends in Research and Practice,” in: Oxford Handbook on Urban Politics, Oxford UP 2012.
