To Inhabit Well: Counterhegemonic Movements and the Right to the City

Abstract

A right to the city, understood as a conjoint claim to a right to inhabit urban space well, can be an effective starting point from which diverse urban movements can begin to build broad counterhegemonic coalitions for alternative urban futures. In this article, I argue that the right to the city supports the project of establishing relations of equivalence among members of coalitions––balancing relations of sameness/difference and interdependence/autonomy.

Key words:

• right to the city
• urban social movements
• autogestion
• urban politics

Notes

²In this article, I focus primarily on the question of equivalence rather than networks. The concept of networks is, of course, extensively debated (e.g., Castells, 1996; Amin, 2002; Hardt and Negri, 2004), and I have discussed networks in the context of equivalence at more length elsewhere (Purcell, 2009a). In that work, I make the case for imagining networks neither as purely centered and rhizomatic, as in Deleuze and Guattari (esp. 1987), nor as centered strongly on some stable entity, such as a political party (as in Gramsci (esp. 2000, 209)). Rhizomatic networks maintain relations of equality among elements of the network, but they lack a clear organizational structure that allows for decisive and swift action when conditions are right. Centralized networks can act more swiftly, but privilege some elements over others as leading elements. I have argued for an in-between network, one that is partly centralized, but in which the centers are not permanent, and they are not occupied always by the same element of the network.

³I suspect also that the right to the city can be useful for establishing equivalence in an anarchist context, but that claim is beyond the scope of this article.

⁴That claim might sound self-evident to us, but Gramsci was engaged in a real debate with a determinist Marxist position (e.g., Karl Kautsky), which held that the progress of capitalism would eventually proletarianize such a large majority of society that workers would not need allies to bring about a proletarian revolution.

⁵I use this unwieldy phrase instead of the more familiar “collective claims,” because I want to emphasize that the mobilized entity, the claimant of rights, consists of multiple bodies joined together (conjoint), rather than as a single, unified body (collective).

⁶In using this term, Lefebvre is making a clear distinction between the unique products inhabitants create and mass-produced commodities. Here, he is very close to Debord's (1983) analysis.

⁷To my mind, this claim can be generalized to become a claim to inhabit space well. While Lefebvre emphasized the particular importance of urban places, and while he wrote about a right to the city specifically, nevertheless his concept of the urban was much more expansive, and was never limited to the concrete geography of the city or the urban scale. Moreover, in other work (on the state, the countryside, and everyday life) his political vision for radical transformation was always meant for society at large, not merely for the city.

⁸That influence is quite limited in that they only have advisory power, but relative to other Superfund processes, the DRCC has had significant impact on decisions about the cleanup.