Between equal rights force decides?

Abstract

This paper presents a sympathetic critique of a right to the city perspective that sets up a binary between city inhabitants who actively produce and appropriate city space for its use value as opposed to those who expropriate urban space for realizing exchange value. It suggests that this tends to gloss over the actual divisions among users of city space and their complicity with forces of capital and the state that constitute real limits for the urban revolution that the right to the city envisions. It then argues that an analytics of contested place-making, including practices of commoning, can both include the central conflict that is important to the rights to the city perspective and overcome the limitations of a rights framework.

Key words:

• right to the city
• place
• place-making
• urban commons
• commoning

Acknowledgments

An early version of this article was presented at the Mid-Term Conference on ‘Crisis, Resistance, and Rights’ of the Critical Political Economy Network (CPERN) of the European Sociological Association (ESA) in Vienna, Austria, in September 2014. I thank the participants for insightful comments and discussion.

Notes

1 Critical literature on the right to the city engages with the problematic individualist foundations of rights in capitalism/liberalism (Harvey 2008; Kuymulu 2013; Mitchell 2003). However, conceptualizing the right to the city in turn as a collective right does not overcome the problem. As Barış Kuymulu points out:

mobilizations around collective rights do not necessarily open a space for radical politics and such mobilizations do not automatically fall outside of the liberal tradition. As such, the problems implicated in collective individualism … are not easy to overcome by a simple resort to defining the right to the city in terms of collective rights as opposed to individual rights. (2013, 927–928).

The problem is exactly the collectivity and the internal relations it implies, which are often antagonistic rather than simply adding up to one interest and voice.

2 See also Blokland et al. (2015), Rogaly and Qureshi (2013) or Mayer (2013).

3 Empirically, it does not seem to be the case that the cry for a right to the city always comes from ‘the most marginalized and the most underpaid and insecure of the working class, not from most of the gentry, the intelligentsia, and the capitalists’ (Marcuse 2009, 191).

4 The right to the city formulation seems to fall prey here more generally to ‘contemporary theories of justice [that] assume, within any given space, a homogeneous, undifferentiated, universal public, a public that shares like desires and needs’ (Mitchell 2003, 31 in paraphrasing of Young).

5 Mitchell also refers to this passage and then notes with Harvey that this does not mean that one must give up on rights, but that ‘rights remain efficacious only to the degree that they are backed by power’ (2003, 20). In this vein also, Merryfield refers to Marx’s formulation in his critical assessment of the right to the city to emphasize that ‘pursuing the right to the city will necessitate and necessarily involve struggle and conflict. … It cannot be anything other than a politically effective confrontation’ (2013, 25). Both emphasize the political dimension of rights struggle, but do not mention the ways in which this might be about confrontation among various users of city space. The context within which Marx raises this point in ‘Capital’ of course also highlights the antagonism between capital and the working class very broadly defined rather than conflicts among the latter. However, my point is that it is imperative, in particular in the current political moment, to pay attention to the many ways in which such divisions among people identified with use value are articulated, to get a better sense of how and why current discontents with (neoliberal) capitalism are often not being channelled into an anti-capitalist politics.

6 Their perspectives are of course not identical. As Pierce, Martin, and Murphy (2011, 58) have noted, they differ for example in their portrayal of places as open versus closed, fluid versus durable. For me, such differences in qualities of place are not so much a question of the right place conceptualization as of place-making practices and processes that can render places relatively closed or open, durable or in flux.

7 As Harvey (2001, 2008) has argued, particularities of place have gained increased importance for capital in a contemporary context of increased mobility of capital in an effort to gain competitive advantage and capture monopoly rents. Much of entrepreneurial city governance in turn has sought to shape places attractive to such mobile capital, that is, to create the supply side conditions that would allow capital to make such use of the distinctiveness of place. See also Blokland et al. (2015).

8 As Vasudevan notes, the ‘“right to the city” is recast as a process of commoning’’ (2015, 332).

9 See Becker, Beveridge, and Naumann (2015, 85) for an explanation of this critical understanding and Moss (2014) for alternative perspectives on the commons.

10 See also Kuymulu (2013).

11 Such a struggle to preserve or expand the commons might also require a struggle for concrete rights such as a right to housing or water (see e.g. Mitchell 2003, 25, on the continuing importance of rights as an ideal and institutionalized framework through which to fight against neoliberal capitalism). My critique is not directed against such strategic use of a legalistic notion of rights that is targeting a specific dimension of enclosure. I rather take issue with the packaging of a more comprehensive vision of social change into a language of rights.

12 This also involves taking the political stance of those users of city space who do not agree with the substantive vision of the right to the city seriously as substantively different politics rather than treating their attitudes as problems of ‘repression’ or ‘sublimation’ (Marcuse 2009, 192).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katharina Bodirsky

Dr. Katharina Bodirsky is lecturer in the research cluster Social and Cultural Anthropology of the sociology department at the University of Konstanz and research associate at its center of excellence Cultural Foundations of Social Integration. Email: [email protected]