Harvey - Rebel cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution

REBEL CITIES

From the Right to the City
to the Urban Revolution

David Harvey

London New York

First published by Verso 2012

David Harvey

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

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eISBN-13: 978-1-84467-904-1

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harvey, David, 1935

Rebel cities : from the right to the city to the urban revolution / David Harvey.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-84467-882-2 (alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-84467-904-1

1. Anti-globalization movement--Case studies. 2. Social justice--Case studies.

3. Capitalism--Case studies. I. Title.

HN17.5.H355 2012

303.372--dc23

2011047924

Typeset in Minion by MJ Gavan, Cornwall

Printed in the US by Maple Vail

For Delfina
and all other graduating students everywhere

Contents

PREFACE

Henri Lefebvres Vision

S ometime in the mid 1970s in Paris I came across a poster put out by the Ecologistes, a radical neighborhood action movement dedicated to creating a more ecologically sensitive mode of city living, depicting an alternative vision for the city. It was a wonderful ludic portrait of old Paris reanimated by a neighborhood life, with flowers on balconies, squares full of people and children, small stores and workshops open to the world, cafs galore, fountains flowing, people relishing the river bank, community gardens here and there (maybe I have invented that in my memory), evident time to enjoy conversations or smoke a pipe (a habit not at that time demonized, as I found to my cost when I went to an Ecologiste neighborhood meeting in a densely smoke-filled room). I loved that poster, but over the years it became so tattered and torn that I had, to my great regret, to throw it out. I wish I had it back! Somebody should reprint it.

The contrast with the new Paris that was emerging and threatening to engulf the old was dramatic. The tall building giants around the Place dItalie were threatening to invade the old city and clasp the hand of that awful Tour Montparnasse. The proposed expressway down the Left Bank, the soulless high-rise public housing (HLMs) out in the 13th arrondissement and in the suburbs, the monopolized commodification on the streets, the plain disintegration of what had once been a vibrant neighborhood life built around artisanal labor in small workshops in the Marais, the crumbling buildings of Belleville, the fantastic architecture of the Place des Vosges falling into the streets. I found another cartoon (by Batellier). It showed a combine harvester crushing and gobbling up all the old neighborhoods of Paris, leaving high-rise HLMs all in a neat row in its wake. I used it as key illustration in The Condition of Postmodernity .

Paris from the early 1960s on was plainly in the midst of an existential crisis. The old could not last, but the new seemed just too awful, soulless and empty to contemplate. Jean-Luc Godards 1967 film, Deux ou trois choses que je sais delle , captures the sensibility of the moment beautifully. It depicts married mothers engaging in a daily routine of prostitution, as much out of boredom as of financial need, against the background of an invasion of American corporate capital into Paris, the war in Vietnam (once a very French affair but by then taken over by the Americans), a construction boom of highways and high-rises, and the arrival of a mindless consumerism in the streets and stores of the city. However, Godards philosophical takea kind of quizzical, wistful, Wittgensteinian precursor to postmodernism, in which nothing at the center of either the self or society could possibly holdwas not for me.

It was also in this very same year, 1967, that Henri Lefebvre wrote his seminal essay on The Right to the City . That right, he asserted, was both a cry and a demand. The cry was a response to the existential pain of a withering crisis of everyday life in the city. The demand was really a command to look that crisis clearly in the eye and to create an alternative urban life that is less alienated, more meaningful and playful but, as always with Lefebvre, conflictual and dialectical, open to becoming, to encounters (both fearful and pleasurable), and to the perpetual pursuit of unknowable novelty.

We academics are quite expert at reconstructing the genealogy of ideas. So we can take Lefebvres writings of this period and excavate a bit of Heidegger here, Nietzsche there, Fourier somewhere else, tacit critiques of Althusser and Foucault, and, of course, the inevitable framing given by Marx. The fact that this essay was written for the centennial celebrations of the publication of Volume 1 of Capital bears mentioning because it has some political significance, as we shall see. But what we academics so often forget is the role played by the sensibility that arises out of the streets around us, the inevitable feelings of loss provoked by the demolitions, what happens when whole quarters (like Les Halles) get re-engineered or grands ensembles erupt seemingly out of nowhere, coupled with the exhilaration or annoyance of street demonstrations about this or that, the hopes that lurk as immigrant groups bring life back into a neighborhood (those great Vietnamese restaurants in the 13th arrondissement in the midst of the HLMs), or the despair that flows from the glum desperation of marginalization, police repressions and idle youth lost in the sheer boredom of increasing unemployment and neglect in the soulless suburbs that eventually become sites of roiling unrest.

Lefebvre was, I am sure, deeply sensitive to all of thatand not merely because of his evident earlier fascination with the Situationists and their theoretical attachments to the idea of a psychogeography of the city, the experience of the urban drive through Paris, and exposure to the spectacle. Just walking out of the door of his apartment in the Rue Rambuteau was surely enough to set all his senses tingling. For this reason I think it highly significant that The Right to the City was written before The Irruption (as Lefebvre later called it) of May 1968. His essay depicts a situation in which such an irruption was not only possible but almost inevitable (and Lefebvre played his own small part at Nanterre in making it so). Yet the urban roots of that 68 movement remain a much neglected theme in subsequent accounts of that event. I suspect that the urban social movements then existingthe Ecologistes for examplemelded into that revolt and helped shape its political and cultural demands in intricate if subterranean ways. And I also suspect, though I have no proof at all, that the cultural transformations in urban life that subsequently occurred, as naked capital masked itself in commodity fetishism, niche marketing, and urban cultural consumerism, played a far from innocent role in the post-68 pacification (for instance, the newspaper Libration , which was founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and others, gradually shifted from the mid 70s to become culturally radical and individualistic but politically lukewarm, if not antagonistic to serious left and collectivist politics).

I make these points because if, as has happened over the last decade, the idea of the right to the city has undergone a certain revival, then it is not to the intellectual legacy of Lefebvre that we must turn for an explanation (important though that legacy may be). What has been happening in the streets, among the urban social movements, is far more important. And as a great dialectician and immanent critic of urban daily life, surely Lefebvre would agree. The fact, for example, that the strange collision between neoliberalization and democratization in Brazil in the 1990s produced clauses in the Brazilian Constitution of 2001 that guarantee the right to the city has to be attributed to the power and significance of urban social movements, particularly around housing, in promoting democratization. The fact that this constitutional moment helped consolidate and promote an active sense of insurgent citizenship (as James Holston calls it) has nothing to do with Lefebvres legacy, but everything to do with ongoing struggles over who gets to shape the qualities of daily urban life. And the fact that something like participatory budgeting, in which ordinary city residents directly take part in allocating portions of municipal budgets through a democratic decision-making process, has been so inspirational has everything to do with many people seeking some kind of response to a brutally neoliberalizing international capitalism that has been intensifying its assault on the qualities of daily life since the early 1990s. No surprise either that this model developed in Porto Alegre, Brazilthe central place for the World Social Forum.