Both David Harvey and Mark Purcell make compelling arguments for why we ought to take the idea of a “right to the city” seriously when thinking about re-enfranchising the urban subject. Despite both coming from a geography background, these authors take up the right to the city problem in different ways. In his piece from 2008, “The Right to the City,” Harvey emphatically historicizes the process of urbanization within the development of global capitalism. He insists on the right to the city being taken up by a broad, urban, global working class as a means of resistance to transnational capitalist hegemony. In “Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant” (2002), Purcell takes more of a cautioned and nuanced approach to the idea of a right to the city, emphasizing the fact that the expansion of human rights to include a right to the city “is not inherently liberatory” (Purcell, p. 103). He does acknowledge that the right to the city allows urban dwellers to think beyond the state and participate more broadly and democratically in the creation of urban space and life.
The significance of participatory urban political engagement is acknowledged by both authors but is imagined very differently. Harvey, continuing in the tradition of Henri Lefebvre, thinks that the way in which the right to the city must be enacted is through working class control over the production of city life–mainly through material control over land use, distribution, and design. Purcell, however, thinks about enacting the right to the city not just through material control, but through a reevaluation and renegotiation of social relationships. Whether the social relationships that exist under capitalism are all that removed from the material conditions under which they arise is certainly up for debate, but I think it is still helpful to distinguish in Purcell’s argument his interest in expanding the imagined points of entry and engagement of urban dwellers with the multiple marginalizing forces that have negatively affected their ability to control and inhabit the city.
While there is much to consider when putting these texts in dialogue, I want to focus on the idea of scale. The discourse on local and global in both pieces does important work in recognizing the transnational nature of our current economic and urban realities. Harvey argues that the interconnectedness of a chronically chaotic transnational capitalist economy has allowed capitalism to sustain itself by shuffling risk and surplus capital caused by uneven development around the globe (Harvey, p. 29-30). This connectivity has also made the problem of disenfranchisement in urban life a global phenomenon that can be recognized across borders. “This has to be a global struggle,” he writes, “for that is the scale at which urbanization processes now work” (p. 39). While acknowledging that this is indeed a daunting situation, he suggests that it is actually a source of strength, as the failure of one system can easily trigger the downfall of others. With a new kind of “creative destruction,” Harvey envisions a global urban uprising that, armed with the praxis of a right to the city, may lead to revolution and the destruction of capitalism.
Purcell asks us to think carefully about transnationalism and the consequences of shifting the scales of participation. Expanding the politics of the inhabitant at either the global or local scale as an alternative to the national hegemonic (Purcell, Figure 1, p. 106) would seriously complicate the production of urban life far outside the bounds of what the city may be currently understood as. The “countless contingencies” (p. 104) that would seriously affect the outcomes of a right to the city in practice are important to consider and are swept under the rug in Harvey’s inspirational yet imprecise analysis.
Last year, I wrote and did research in public parks in Shanghai and Beijing. My project was inspired by the idea of a right to the city and its vast, transnational potential. Revisiting the topic now, I think my admiration for the concept endures but is tempered by the same set of concerns that Purcell dwells on. Looking for proof of the right to the city–or at least an idea of what it may look like–exposed just how empty the term can be. Filling in the right to the city through research and close engagement and interrogation of the term is an important exercise because it helps build concrete meaning and utility for when it is deployed. I hope this summer at Cooperation Jackson I will have the opportunity to contribute to this project by thinking about the right to the city as an idea and practice.