Reading the Right to the City
Peter Marcuse
The “Right to the City” is, for better or worse, a catchy phrase, and has been used with quite a diversity of often contradictory meanings. The article describes Lefebvre’s own reading, a strategic reading, a discontented reading, a spatial reading, a collaborationist reading, and a subversive reading. It concludes with the suggestion of an alternate reading, a sectoral reading, consistent with the experience of the Occupy movement today. One should be careful which reading one uses.
Key words: Right To The City, 1968, housing, inclusion, Just City, Lefebvre
The historical background
It’s no accident that the discussion about the Right to the City emerged just when it did, or that it has become a hot formulation again just now.
To summarize, viewed from the USA and Europe, the critical milestones were perhaps:
1919. Unrest and failure of the classical Marxist revolutions in Europe, expected to arise semi-automatically out of the exploita- tion and immiseration of the working class and their understanding of their exploitation, led by the working class and party.
1933. Election of Hitler, resulting from that immiseration plus the insecurity of the middle class and the successful manipulation of cultural and ideological discontent towards fascism.
1946. Defeat of fascism, replaced by the welfare state, dealing with the same issues by concessions and the counter-manipulation of the promise of consumption and rapid technological advance (analyzed in works like One-Dimensional Man).
1960. Widespread unrest, led not by the working class but, at least in the USA, by those excluded from the welfare state, discri- minated against in recognition and benefits— primarily African-Americans, fuelled by revulsion against the ideological manipu- lation and emptiness of values of consump- tion, led by the discontented, supported by groups of the excluded, barely by the exploited, with tensions among them.
1970. Calming and suppression of the unrest, a period of prosperity and conformity/col- laboration with the system; rising public benefits and private consumption, globaliza- tion of production.
Today, 2008 – 10. Growing disillusionment, growing criticism of capitalism; financializa- tion; growing search for alternatives by the excluded, the exploited and the discontented.
A growing body of theory has analyzed
these developments. Key contributions
appeared in the aftermath of the unrest of
the 1960s, largely relying on new readings
of Karl Marx and including work of Henri
Lefebvre, critically paralleling analyses of
the Frankfurt School and particularly
1
# 2014 Taylor & Francis
Herbert Marcuse. It sought to go from
critique to the possibilities of fundamental social change.
But where to turn to find agents of such social change? Henri Lefebvre, facing that question, developed the formulation of the call for ‘the Right to the City’ as an answer.
What he meant by that was not always clear; I have dealt in several pieces with alter- nate reading of what he has written (Marcuse 2011). It is relatively clear that he continued to see the working class as important actors in efforts for social change, but as increas- ingly inadequate and often recalcitrant allies in efforts for change. Rather, he saw the motor force for change outside of the work- place, not in the factories or the offices, but in the experiences of everyday life of all kinds of people in their homes, in their schools, in their communities—and yes, in their cities.
The six readings of the Right to the City
Lefebvre’s own reading
For Lefebvre, the Right to the City is a politi- cal claim: a cry and a demand for social justice, for social change, for the realization of the potential that technological and human advances had made possible after the Second World War. It was a battle cry, a banner in a fight, not simply for the eradica- tion of poverty but for the abolishment of unjust inequality.
In a way, it was an ill-chosen formulation, because it was not intended to be taken lit- erally: not a Right in the sense of a legal claim enforceable through the judicial system, but a moral right, an appeal to the highest of human values. Moreover, it was not a right to the City, not a right to be included in what the city already was, but rather a right to a city that could and should be, to the city as a metaphor for a new way of life, one whose characteristics were directly related to the new processes of urbanization, which for Lefebvre encompassed a new way of life, of everyday life as well as of
government, or a social system as well as, even more than, a physical place, a particular built environment or legal jurisdiction.
For Lefebvre, the call for the Right to the City was a revolutionary call, a call produced by and justified by the urban revolution of which he wrote as a new stage in the historical development of civilization.
Moreover, it was not limited in any way to the physical city, but understood ‘city’ as a synecdoche for ‘urban society’. Lefebvre ([1970] 2003, 45) writes: ‘from this point on I will no longer refer to the city but to the urban’.
As he put it, the city
‘cannot be conceived of as a simple visiting right or as a return to traditional cities. It can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life as long as the “urban” [is a] place of encounter, priority of use value.’ (Lefebvre [1967] 1996, 158)
Lefebvre’s reading clearly implies the neces- sity for an analysis of the structures of power that hold back the transformation of life that he envisages. Lefebvre’s own analysis is essentially Marxist, even if it does not explore that analysis as intensively as, say, the New Left, Herbert Marcuse or David Harvey have. However, some such analysis is required to make it effective.
The strategic reading
In practice, the Right to the City banner has been picked up as the umbrella by a wide variety of groups suffering from the existing conditions of their lives in the new urban society: the very poor, the homeless, those dependent on welfare grants or charity, those discriminated against because of race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, mal- educated, the legal restrictions of citizenship laws and gender inequality. These are groups whose economic position does not give them the power, through the withhold- ing of their labor, to threaten the functioning of the economic system, and whose political
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power can be effectively reduced through the power of the 1%, despite their much larger numbers, in a democracy still subject to the disproportionate power of the rich. Realizing that they need to pool their efforts to have any influence at all, it was the basis for the formation of coalitions of those groups, most prominently the national and local Right to the City Alliance in the USA and abroad.
For them, the impulse of their action is initially simply to be included in the existing city, to obtain the benefits of existing city life from which they have been excluded: to obtain decent shelter in existing empty and warehoused living units, to get paid at least living wages in the already existing jobs, to be treated with the dignity and respect accorded as of right to all other citizens of the city, to be protected by the police that provides security for others, rather than being stopped and frisked routinely without cause.
The strategic reading of the Right to the City is not in contradiction to the Lefebvrean reading, but in a sense a step towards it, one with more limited claims but perhaps also more urgent ones.
Look at the members of that coalition in New York City, as an example.
The Right to the City Alliances in the USA and the Right to the City Alliance in New York City are both alliances of other, preexisting groups, 43 for the national,2 12 for the New York City Alliance. All of the member organizations of the two preexisted the formation of the respective alliances. They represent a wide range of interests: homeless, welfare recipients, ethnic and racial minorities, immigrants, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender), folk, service workers and environmental groups:
‘[The Right to the City Alliance] is a multi- issue national alliance of base building and grassroots organizations and allies working to advance an urban strategy to ensure the rights of low income people of color to urban places and spaces in our cities.’3
They cooperate closely with labor unions who are interested in cooperating with them, for example, the Service Workers’ International Union. The Alliances represent the deprived, both of material welfare and of dignity. However, they do not occupy positions immediately essential to the operation of the system that is oppressing them, as unions and their working-class members do— clearly less so than 50 years ago. Bringing Alli- ance member groups together with each other and then with organized (and unorganized, as in Workers’ Centers) workers is a matter of urgent strategic necessity. Both are materially deprived of material goods, but also of the dignity and respect which members of a just society should accord each other. They are, together, large in numbers but weak in econ- omic power, as technological advances, auto- mation and globalization permit the system normally to remain profitable without their active consent.
Bringing these forces together in a strategic alliance requires an analysis of the power relations that underlie its necessity, and that links those supporting the call together. In practice, that analysis certainly has to include a discussion of existing relations of power, and what changes might be produced within those relations as they exist. It may or may not press that analysis into specific examination of the possibilities of fundamen- tally changing those relations of power. How far the analysis then goes, and how convin- cing it can be made to the members of the Alliance, will determine whether it pursues Lefebvre’s own reading of the Right to the City or limits itself to intermediate goals that may or may not lead in that direction.
The discontented reading
For many of those not thus excluded, inclusion in the existing city was not enough. Lefebvre’s call was for a new and better city, new and better way of life. Many of those already included in the exist- ing city were discontented and profoundly
so. They felt their own potentials were con- stricted, their human values distorted, their aspirations for the future pushed into a quest for conspicuous consumption, their search for social support and solidarity defeated by the pressures of competition, competition for goals they did not share but were forced to pursue—and convinced to value by an extreme cultural and ideological apparatus, against their own deepest desires.
The discontented, in this reading, were those that were the activists of the New Left, about whom Herbert Marcuse wrote One-Dimensional Man: students, teachers, intellectuals, artists, idealists, those that felt themselves misfits in a society over which they had no control.
However, the analysis underlying the dis- contented reading does not suggest an overall path towards achieving its goals. No one argued that the discontented, while having the demand for the Right to the City, had the power to achieve it. Herbert Marcuse was explicit in saying that, while they might provide leadership, it required larger forces, in particular among the exploited and excluded, to achieve it. That in turn required changes from within those groups: to achieve a new society, new men and women are required. However, to support the development of new men and women, a new society was required—a paradox to which he proposed no solution other than its recognition. Lefebvre’s reading implicitly agreed with David Harvey’s (2008, 23) reformulation that the Right to the City included ‘a right to change ourselves by changing the city’.
In practice, the focus on discontent as the motor of efforts to achieve a Right to the City that will deal with its particular manifes- tation is likely to lead to a leading role for those most directly affected—not so much the exploited or excluded, but the students, artists, idealists, etc. who are generally mate- rially free to concentrate on such concerns. That leads to the dangers of elitism, to ten- sions among those sharing a material interest in the principles of Lefebvre’s reading of the
Right to the City. In terms of policy pos- itions, it is a tension between shorter and longer term goals; in organizing, between, in this case, members of the constituent groups with the Right to the City Alliance and their ‘allies’, often academics and intel- lectuals generally more in a position to elab- orate analysis and program details.
The spatial reading
Many read Lefebvre’s Right to the City call as one aimed specifically and literally at the city as a built environment, as physical space, and saw the call of the Right to the City as a call for designing and running a better city, a more beautiful city, and healthier and more environmentally sustainable city. Some were professionals, architects, urban designers, planners and geographers, who used the call for the Right to the City as support for calls for the better utilization of what they were trained to do, and wanted to do. Moreover, they saw their work as supporting and mod- eling what a Right to the City for all might look like, in the flesh.
In practice, the spatial reading is a narrow reading of the Right to the City. It appeals to specific disciplines, professionals, interests focused on the material built environment of the city, and often tempted to see such changes as dictating social patterns and deter- mining issues of justice and well-being by themselves. Some argue for what might be called a modeling approach, the development of model communities, model businesses and model spaces that might demonstrate in the flesh what is possible: spaces of hope, new economies. In more comprehensive struggles, the spatial reading may be one that is distract- ing from broader goals, one that is more likely to demonstrate alternatives for the dis- contented than to change the power relations that lead to exploitation and exclusion. Linked to analysis that includes a central place for consideration of issues of power and conflicting material interest, it can be a useful adjunct to movements for the Right to the City.
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The collaborationist reading
Then there is a reading which uses the call for the Right to the City as in fact support for their own efforts at mild reform, the refor- mist reforms of which Andre Gorz wrote and which are what matters about which liberal and conservative supporters of the welfare share content. To many, recalling Lefebvre’s own reading of the Right to the City, this is pure co-optation, a distortion of the radical content of the slogan. When the Right to the City becomes embodied in an officially adopted Charter of the City, adopted by public institutions, whether local, national or international, that have neither the power nor the desire to implement such rights, however defined, the fact that Lefebvre’s call recognized the inevit- ability of conflict and necessity for struggle is blatantly denied, concealed and made tooth- less behind a fac ̧ade of good intentions, rationality and quest for consensus.
Needless to say, a collaborationist reading interferes with, rather than promotes, mili- tant action to achieve in the real world of inequalities of power and conflicts of interest. A litmus test might be a view of the Right to the City as a right for all with consensus as the goal, rather than a redistributive and transformative approach to change.
The subversive reading
A very political reading of the Right to the City is however also possible, one that combines the thrust of Lefebvre’s own radical intent with the practical realities confronted by Lefebvre’s own reading, the strategic reading and the reading of the discontented. Such a subversive reading is implicit in, and has surfaced in, the Right to the City Alliance in the USA, in its search for transformative (see Marcuse 2013) claims and demands, for programs and goals that will both give priority to the immediate needs of the excluded, the ultimate goals of the discontented and the claims of those not (maybe not yet?) accepting the slogan or
understanding its content, but yet exploited by the same existing patterns from which the deprived, the excluded and the discontented suffer—specifically, the working class, labor, organized and not the very poor, the discrimi- nated against and the excluded.
The strategy here is implicitly founded on the same understanding guiding the Right to the City Alliances, as in community – labor centers etc. The key word used in this subver- sive reading is ‘transformative’: demands and claims action which can produce immediate results, but which point towards the radical goals of Lefebvre’s original work, and the related goals of the social movements and economic struggles that produced and have continued to inspire political protest move- ments throughout history.
The path ahead
The six different readings of the Right to the City suggest different strategies. A further possible strategy might be to work sector by sector, looking at sectors as wholes interdepen- dent with each other but having different pro- blems and different potentials for change. Such a strategy might focus on expanding exist- ing areas of public provision, as in police pro- tection, fire protection, public education, some forms of research and development, fighting privatization of public functions and pushing the desirability instead of expanding the public sector. Socialism one sector at a time (see Marcuse 2010), perhaps, or the long march through the institutions.
Revolution as such remains off the range of possibilities, force available to the elite is over- whelming, namely, Near East. However, the Occupy movement suggests another and further possibility: physical space not con- tested in its built form, not building physically a new city, but Occupying an old one with a new content. The slogan there after all is Occupy Wall Street, with both a spatial and an economic and political meaning. Building on the existing, keeping some of its usable forms, but changing the power relations that
determine how they will be used. That, perhaps occupying one sector at a time, seems to me a possible path ahead.
Notes
- 1 Marcuse (1972, 2005). While technology plays somewhat the role with Herbert Marcuse that urbanization plays with Henri Lefebvre, their fundamental analyses are largely similar.
- 2 See http://www.righttothecity.org/index.php/ about/member-organizations
- 3 See https://www.facebook.com/pages/Right-To- The-City-Alliance/211649047656?id=2116490 47656&sk=info
References
Harvey, David. 2008. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53: 23–40.
Lefebvre, Henri. (1967) 1996. “The Right to the City.” In Writings on Cities, edited by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, 63–184. London: Blackwell.
Lefebvre, Henri. (1970) 2003. The Urban Revolution, Robert Bononno, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1972. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press.
Marcuse, Herbert. 2005. In The New Left and the 1960s: Volume 4 of Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, edited by Douglas Kellner. Oxford: Routledge.
Marcuse, Peter. 2010. “Socialism One Sector at a Time.” In Crisis and Commonwealth: Marcuse, Marx, Manifesto, edited by Charles Reitz, 43–50. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Marcuse, Peter. 2011. “From Critical Urban Theory to the Right to the City: What Right, Whose Right, to What City, How?” In Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City, edited by Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse, and Margit Mayer, 22–41. London: Routledge.
Marcuse, Peter. 2013. “Beyond Immediate Proposals: Some Transformational Provocations,” available online at http://pmarcuse.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/370/
Peter Marcuse is Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at Columbia. Email: pm35@columbia.edu
