“Urbanization, we may conclude, has played a crucial role in the absorption of capital surpluses, at ever-increasing geographical scales, but at the price of burgeoning processes of creative destruction that have dispossessed the masses of any right to the city whatsoever…. The urban and peri-urban social movements of opposition, of which there are many around the world, are not tightly coupled; indeed most have no connection to each other. If they somehow did come together, what should they demand? The answer…is simple enough in principle: greater democratic control over the production and utilization of the surplus.” – David Harvey, “Right to the City”, p. 37
The concept of “right to the city” is deeply intertwined with the concept of “right to the environment”. There is a common problem of thinking of the environment as somehow separate from financial issues, economic policy, and the rest of the city. This problem builds from a “pristine” view of environmentalism that isolates it from complexities and from urban spaces. One of my favorite aspects of “environmental justice” is that it allows for this complexity and incorporates the general “right to the city” into its message and goal.
The idea of “greater democratic control over the production and utilization of the surplus” is interesting because I believe that green space has been commodified and become part of this idea of “surplus”. Because so many of the green spaces that exist in cities, particularly in the Bay, are not food-producing or spaces of work, they become something extra in our day-to-day experience. They are optional and recreational. There has long been a strand of environmentalism that focuses primarily on preserving “wilderness” and environments for recreational purposes, but this strand of environmentalism has often excluded people of color and been a privileged use of the environment. This doesn’t even touch on the Indigenous people who were forcibly displaced to make place for the “wilderness” in the first place.
Therefore, working in food and environmental justice not only brings green spaces into communities that do not have access to them, but also makes them highly functional and ties them to providing for the community. The concept of the right to the city in environmental terms entails intertwining green spaces with providing food, sustenance, work, and clean air for communities. In order to reach this understanding, however, we must forgo the “wilderness” and “pristine” version of environmentalism that still persists and replace it with a practical and just urban ecology.
Harvey also says: “We increasingly live in divided and conflict-prone urban areas…Under these conditions, ideals of urban identity, citizenship, and belonging—already threatened by the spreading malaise of a neoliberal ethic—become much harder to sustain” (34-35). One of the fundamental aspects of “right to the city” is a sense of belonging, and so it feels extremely important to involve green space in the sense of belonging. In the concept of “wilderness”, there is an inherent distancing of humans from the environment; a place is not considered “wilderness” if it is inhabited. There is a healing that can take place there, healing from conflict and whatever else is happening, but it is an isolated type of healing that is focused on removal rather than immersion and connection. I am instead interested in an involved, work-oriented relationship with the environment. The food justice and environmental justice movements often work to heal divided geographies and conflict-defined lives through connections with the environment. Thinking about this version of green space as representing a right to peace, a right to healing, and a right to just and fruitful work ties into the view of right to the city that environmental justice organizations envision.
It also feels important to say that I have been very influenced by UDL’s Democratizing the Green City initiative and conference in January 2016. The ideas put forward by the initiative have inspired me to think about urban greening, gentrification, displacement, and social injustice as all tied together. My experience this summer built on those concepts, and gave me a real sense of what fighting for the right to a democratic green city looks like.
Leave a Reply