In David Harvey’s The Right to the City he explains the production and contestation of inequality in cities through a Marxist lens, blaming the dominance of capitalism, private property, and profit as that in which robs humanity of its rights. Harvey argues that citizens living in urban areas have lost the ability to use their collective power to form the very cities they live within. Citizens no longer have the liberty to create the city. This has been a fundamental neglection of human rights.
Harvey explains that the notion of surplus production and reinvestment has paralleled the growth of urbanization. The need for profit is inevitable in the realm of capitalism, and thus the elite is in constant need of a readily available unemployment base and accessible raw material. The barriers to capitalism—low profit rate, loss of surplus commodities, inflation, massive unemployment—have been evaded by urbanization as it has become a venue of absorption for the surplus value created by the capitalist machine. Neoliberalism has led to intense individualism, and thus a loss of solidarity and human socialization. The rich elite hold power and urban areas have become devoid of “belonging.” Global urbanization is coupled with a citizenry lacking autonomy, leading to the loss of the human right to make one’s own home within the city. Unjustly, we are left with a lack of agency in the utilization of the surplus created by neoliberalism, and instead, we are further controlled by the corporate elite.
Prior to Harvey’s Right to the City, the French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre coined the idea of the right to the city. Lefebvre’s critique was influential for Harvey and was foundational for Harvey’s essay The Right to the City. In Mark Purcell’s Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant, he analyses Lefebvre’s work in an attempt to argue that the right to the city is in fact a developed plan for the citizenry to take back the urban space, despite the many critiques that denounce the right to the city as an undeveloped solution for injustice. Purcell explains that the right to the city is not a completed solution for the problems of urbanization, but rather a gate way for the inhabitants of the urban area to create their own completed solution—a city that they have agency within. Purcell’s essay serves the purpose of examining what Lefebvre demands in his right to the city, and the potential consequences that could stem from an attempt at urban restructuring.
Purcell explains the problems that prompted the right to the city: rescaling, political competition, and a shift from government to governance. Thus, fragmentation of the citizenry follows, and urban inhabitants have diminishing agency in the decisions that shape their lives. Purcell explains Lefebvre’s concept of spaces: perceived space, lived space, and conceived space. It is those who are living in the city—the urban inhabitants—that are able to claim the right to the city. The right to the city includes the rights of participation and appropriation.
Lefebvre’s right to the city leads to an unknown outcome, and Purcell examines the challenges that could pursue. The upending of political hierarchies over decisions about space provide the citizens with a voice in the decisions that affect their homes. However, this creates complex and more fluid participation and the outcomes are undetermined. Additionally, the division of participation into sub-urban scales could lead privileged neighborhoods to exert their power in decision making, furthering segregation and injustice. While these consequences of the right to the city may develop, and decisions may take longer to be made, the right to the city overturns the injustice of power-over relations and provides the citizenry with the autonomy that they have been increasingly devoid of in the wake of capitalism.
With the current ever-growing power of capital, the urban inhabitant has no power to push back against the structures in place. Lefebvre and Harvey suggest a way in which to resist this injustice. The right to participation provides urban inhabitants with the power to create the urban space. It is with this power that inhabitants will be able to construct a city that addresses the needs of all inhabitants. What that looks like, will only be known when the participation begins.
Rebecca Amato says
EPIC right to the city discussion! More to come. 🙂 I think we need to be careful and maybe a bit more precise about terms. Capitalism does not = neoliberalism. Capitalism is an economic system, while neoliberalism is a political economy rolled out through government policy. And neither neoliberalism nor capitalism are the same as urbanization. It may be important to remember that Lefebvre is writing before neoliberalism was imagined, so his demand begins with political revolution built on radical participation. Harvey, on the other hand, is writing not only decades after neoliberal regimes have been established, but also at a moment of neoliberal failure (i.e. the 2008 financial crisis). He is very explicitly calling for an end to neoliberalsim, but he’s not quite-yet calling for an end to capitalism. Purcell is, I think, less sanguine about Lefebvre than you suggest. He is also writing critically in the midst of neoliberal dominance and explains why so many have turned to the “right to the city” as an alternative, but he still wants A LOT of details ironed out. That said, he invites us to do the work necessary to theorize a true right to the city. I hear you theorizing it as anarchist collectives building solidarity across difference. But I wonder what conflicts you can see arising in such a landscape and how the right to the city might or might not work as a framework?