Critical Urban Theory versus Critical Urban Studies: A Review Debate

Abstract

Critical urban theory and critical urban studies form the subject of two recent edited collections on approaches to the analysis and transformation of the contemporary capitalist city. In an exchange of commentaries by the respective editors and contributors, the introduction explains the genesis of each book and previews some of the key observations. Peter Marcuse then offers his assessment of Critical Urban Studies: New Directions, which is reciprocated by a commentary on Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City by Jonathan Davies, David Imbroscio and Warren Magnusson.

Full text

DEBATES AND DEVELOPMENTS
Critical Urban Theory versus Critical
Urban Studies: A Review Debate
PETER MARCUSE and DAVID IMBROSCIO with an
introduction by Simon Parker and contributions by
Jonathan S. Davies and Warren Magnusson
Abstract
Critical urban theory and critical urban studies form the subject of two recent edited
collections on approaches to the analysis and transformation of the contemporary
capitalist city. In an exchange of commentaries by the respective editors and
contributors, the introduction explains the genesis of each book and previews some of the
key observations. Peter Marcuse then offers his assessment of Critical Urban Studies:
New Directions, which is reciprocated by a commentary on Cities for People, Not for
Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City by Jonathan Davies, David
Imbroscio and Warren Magnusson.
Introduction
SIMON PARKER
The idea for this exchange of commentaries in Debates and Developments on two
recently edited volumes on critical urban theory and critical urban studies came from
Peter Marcuse, who had agreed to review Critical Urban Studies: New Directions, edited
by Jonathan S. Davies and David Imbroscio, for IJURR and thought it might be
interesting to invite the other editors to review the collection of essays that he had edited
with Neil Brenner and Margit Mayer, Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban
Theory and the Right to the City (hereafter Cities for People, Not for Profit). Davies and
Imbroscio kindly agreed to take up the challenge and to invite other contributors to offer
a response to the Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer volume, and Warren Magnusson, whose
own book Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City was the subject of a recent Debates
and Developments roundtable (IJURR 2013, Vol 37.2), agreed to offer a third
commentary. Given that Peter Marcuse was acting as the sole reviewer of the Davies and
Imbroscio volume, the three authors agreed to write relatively short interventions in the
interests of balance.
The Cities for People, Not for Profit chapters originated at a conference, ‘Right to the
City: Prospects for Critical Urban Theory and Practice’, held in Berlin in November
2008 in honour of Peter Marcuse, who was born in the city 80 years previously. The
conference was organized by the Center for Metropolitan Studies in Berlin, and a report
on the conference by Horlitz and Vogelpohl, ‘Something Can Be Done!’, appeared in
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IJURR in 2009. Several of the conference papers were subsequently published in the
journal CITY in the course of 2009, where the themes and issues raised provoked an
ongoing discussion within the pages of the journal and on its website.1Davies and
Imbroscio’s edited collection was also the fruit of a 2008 conference meeting, in this case
at the 38th Urban Affairs Association in Baltimore, the theme of which was ‘1968
Revisited: Cities 40Years Later’. Because the UAA is predominantly an American urban
studies association (albeit open to members from overseas) with a heavy bias towards
public policy and urban politics, it is unsurprising that many of the contributors to
Critical Urban Studies focused on the US political system.
As Jonathan S. Davies explains in his opening remarks on Cities for People, Not for
Profit (see below, p. 1912), ‘whereas our goal was to showcase a variety of critical
approaches in urban studies, Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer issue a rallying cry to the left
rooted in geography’. In their introduction, the Cities for People, Not for Profit editors
quote David Harvey, noting that ‘charting the path’for social transformation first requires
understanding the nature of contemporary patterns of urban restructuring, and then
analysing the implications for action (Brenner et al., 2012: 4) — a hermeneutic that is
clearly rooted in upper case Critical Theory and which is subsequently elaborated by
many of the contributors to the volume. The editors then provide a five-fold prospectus
for what work in ‘critical urban studies’ should seek to do, which comprises:
systematically investigating the relationship between capitalism and the urbanization
process; understanding how that urbanization shapes and determines socio-spatial
inequalities and politico-institutional arrangements; exposing the naturalization of
inequalities and injustice that result from capitalist urbanization, deciphering the crisis
tendencies, contradictions and lines of conflict that exist within contemporary cities; and
finally the prospects for socially progressive and sustainable alternatives to
contemporary capitalist urbanism (ibid.: 5).
According to Davies and Imbroscio, the UAA panel which subsequently formed the
basis of the Critical Urban Studies volume was partly an attempt to assert the vitality of
research in urban politics, especially in the areas of critical urban studies, countering the
claims of subfield irrelevance advanced by Bryan D. Jones and his co-authors in an
article for Urban Affairs Review (Sapotichne et al., 2007). Clarence Stone, in his
foreword to the Davies and Imbroscio volume (2010, vii), accepts that the subfield of
urban politics has paid insufficient attention to developments in ‘the mainstream study of
politics, particularly American national politics’ before admitting that ‘the mainstream’
has actually had little to say, for example, about how and why the 2008 financial crisis
occurred, its implications for America’s cities and how we should think about the
relationship between state, market and society.
Sapotichne, Jones and Wolfe endorse Stone’s urban regime theory for ‘causing the
area [of urban politics] to come back to the study of politics as something independent
of capitalism and to return to sensible on-the-ground empiricism’, while lamenting that
‘paradoxically’ the growing interest in regime theory within the subfield ‘caused the
barriers [between mainstream political science and urban politics] to be reinforced, not
destroyed’ (Sapotichne et al., 2007: 100). Such critics are unlikely to be persuaded that
these two volumes have anything new to offer ‘mainstream political science’, but this is
neither the prospectus nor the intention of the editors and their contributors.
If Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer’s volume has a central organizing theme it is precisely
to demonstrate the centrality of capitalism to the politics of the city and urban life, and
its consequences for social and economic inequality. While making no apologies for
advocating urban social justice, the editors strongly deny that this is a barrier to rigorous
social science scholarship. Equally, Neil Brenner is not seeking an accommodation with
mainstream urban sociology (nor, one assumes, with mainstream political science);
1 See ‘Cities for People, Not for Profit — Introduction’, available at http://www.city-analysis.net/2012/
04/18/the-%E2%80%98cities-for-people%E2%80%99-project/
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instead he values the contribution of critical urban theory for its groundedness in an
‘antagonistic relationship not only to inherited urban knowledges, but more generally, to
existing urban formations’ (Brenner et al., 2012: 11).
In his introductory remarks (see below, p. 1907), Peter Marcuse suggests that while
critiques of mainstream urban studies are amply covered by the individual contributions
to Critical Urban Studies, ‘it does less well in defining an approach that substantively
defines a new field of “critical” urban studies’ . That said, Boudreau’s essay is welcomed
for its Lefebvrian conceptualization of urbanity, while Davies’ work, according to
Marcuse (see below, p. 1908), with its argument that ‘partnerships’ are a mechanism
within urban government to sublimate class struggle, comes ‘close to the neo-Marxist or
Frankfurt School-based concepts of what “critical” means’. However, given that Davies
and Imbroscio intended their collection of essays to be more a ‘glory of the garden’
showcase of critical urban research than a manifesto, this is a charge that the Critical
Urban Studies editors would no doubt accept while insisting that ‘the call to arms’ that
was an explicit motive for the ‘Right to the City’ conference was not the organizing
principle for their own volume.
Warren Magnusson identifies some important differences between what might be
described as the urban critical theory aspects of the Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer
position, which centre on the latter’s broad affinity with Lefebvrian and Harveyian
notions of urbanization, commodification and spatial production spun through a
re-reading of Marx and Engels — see, for example, the editors’ reference to the neglect
of Engels’ study of industrialization and urbanization in Manchester in subsequent
mainstream sociology (Brenner et al., 2012: 9), and what Magnusson describes (see
below, p. 1915) as ‘the delightfully various investigations and speculations of French
thinkers like Bachelard, Badiou, Bataille, Barthes, Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Clastres,
Debord, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Latour, Lefort, Levinas, Levi-Strauss,
Lyotard, and Rancière’. Certainly there are resonances of this long-running conflict
between Marxist political economy readings of urban change and development, and
more poststructuralist and postmodernist interpretations (Bourdieu being arguably an
outlier from both traditions) in the epistemic repertoires of Cities for People, Not for
Profit and Critical Urban Studies, but I doubt the contributors to the two volumes would
see themselves as inhabiting completely separate camps in this regard — with many
critical urban scholars ready to acknowledge their debt both to Marx and Engels and to
Foucault as foundational to any critical urban theory.
On a final note, given that the issue of gender and the right to the city is an important
focus of several of the chapters in both volumes, it is regrettable that no female editors
or authors were able to participate in this ad hoc forum. Although the two collections do
feature several contributions from women scholars (including one of the editors of this
journal), considering that only two out of the 15 contributors to Cities for People, Not for
Profit and three out of the 11 contributors to Critical Urban Studies are female, a
newcomer to critical urban theory and critical urban studies might well form the
impression from these publications that radical urban theorizing is mostly a white,
Western, male preserve.
This would be a mistaken impression, however, since some of the most innovative and
suggestive critical urban theory and critical urban research has come precisely from
scholars who are more representative of the diverse geographies and identities of the
majority urban world, which is neither white, nor male nor Western. Here I am thinking,
for example, of the work of Jenny Robinson (2006) and Susan Parnell (Parnell and
Robinson, 2012) on ordinary cities and the particularities of progressive urban
development in Southern Africa, of intersectional urban researchers such as Zenzele
Isoke (2013), and of the edited collections on Asian urbanisms by Ananya Roy and
Aihwa Ong (2011) and by Edensor and Jayne (2012) on urban theory beyond the West.
This emerging body of work cannot easily be reduced to a conventional Lefebvrian
reading of the ‘right to the city’, or assimilated to radical critiques of global North
neoliberal urbanism. For although urban theories drawn from nineteenth-century Salford
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or twentieth-century Berlin, Paris, Chicago and Los Angeles still hold great explanatory
power, contemporary students of urbanism should also be encouraged to engage with the
critical and exciting research on cities that is taking place (as Robinson would argue) ‘off
the map’.
Critical Urban Studies: New Directions — Comment
PETER MARCUSE
Critical urban studies is a growing field in urban theory and analysis, with some really
excellent papers having been written recently, and this book is a welcome addition to the
field. But there’s a problem: what exactly is the field? The editors offer a very broad view
that defines it rather by what it isn’t than by what it is. The foreword, by Clarence Stone,
suggests the book belongs in political science, in which it supports the urban as an
important sub-field deviating from the mainstream of political science. What ‘critical’
means is not as clear. The editors themselves lay out two characteristics they see as
defining: a dissatisfaction with the orthodox and the mainstream, and a concern for social
justice (Davies and Imbroscio, 2010: 2). Indeed, virtually all of the chapters are stringent
critiques of some aspect of orthodoxy and the mainstream, and they are very valuable for
that purpose. But the second substantive focus, a concern for social justice, appears in
very different forms in the various contributions. It is, indeed, a unifying value
underlying all, sometimes explicit, sometimes felt. But it is rarely made explicit, or
explored as such, until the last four chapters, and thus in fact there are wide differences
in the book as a whole in just how far the ‘critical’ goes, once it has left the mainstream.
Thus, in reviewing the individual pieces, the contributions open up two themes: (1) the
shortcomings of specific components of ‘the mainstream’ of urban analysis (going,
incidentally, well beyond the bounds of just urban politics); (2) the exploration of the
issue of social justice as a substantive approach defining a specific critical alternative to
the mainstream. The book does exceedingly well at the first, and is highly recommended
for its specific analyses and frequent demolitions of existing, taken-for-granted,
orthodoxies; it does less well in defining an approach that substantively defines a new
field of ‘critical’ urban studies.
In what follows in this review, I will start by indicating the part of the mainstream that
the chapter critiques, and then, on the substantive social justice part of the critique, use
a distinction quoted by several contributors from a formulation of Michael Tietz: that
between micro, meso and macro analysis (p. 159). The distinction is often parallel to that
in policy discussions between efficiency-only critiques, liberal critiques (which tend to
be meso) and radical critiques (which tend towards the macro). But the micro/meso/
macro formulation may avoid some of the automatic value judgments associated with
terms such as ‘liberal’ and ‘radical’. The first half of the book, chapters 1 to 6, are
devoted, the editors say, to critical urban theory, chapters 7 to 11 to critical urban policy.
In the first chapter, Elvin Wyly seeks to rescue positivism from blanket condemnation
as a methodology and show its potential usefulness in a progressive urbanism supporting
the quest for ‘the radical city’ (p. 20). He speaks of the need for a ‘genuinely rigorous,
radical, and relevant urban studies’ (p. 11), terms which he has dealt with explicitly
elsewhere, but does not take further here.
In the second essay in the volume, Mara Sidney clearly sees critical urban theory as
a methodological approach in urban political science, and argues that constructivism and
interpretive analysis are or ought to be its hallmarks. Her renewed attention to these
concepts and exploration of their application in urban studies represents a useful
contribution.
Warren Magnusson’s following piece is also squarely in the realm of political science,
as is appropriate, since it is the discipline in which he works (as it is for Mara Sidney and
the co-editor David Imbroscio), but he seems to equate ‘urban’ with ‘critical’ within
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political science, as indeed his subtitle — ‘Seeing Like a City: How to Urbanize Political
Science’ — suggests. He implicitly assumes analysis at the city level is adequate for the
global level: ‘The market is a civic institution. To imagine it globalized, as classical and
neoclassical economists have done, is to imagine the city — or rather, certain aspects of
the city — projected onto a global scale. What has come to be called the global economy
is an urban institution’ (p. 51). No reference is made to the current literature on scale
(Brenner, 2004 e.g.). It is not until the last four chapters that even a question is raised
about the extreme spatial focus in some current urban studies. Social justice is not
mentioned, although ‘a city is much more complicated than a state’ (Davies and
Imbroscio, 2010: 53).
In chapter 4, by contrast, Julie-Anne Boudreau takes a very different position. Her
chapter is entitled ‘Reflections on Urbanity as an Object of Study and a Critical
Epistemology’. She begins with a careful definition of ‘urbanity’, very much in the mold
of Lefebvre, and says flatly that ‘urbanity . . . is a concept that cannot be restricted to
what happens in cities . . . urban society is not restricted to the physical space of the city’
(p. 55). She sees a critical approach as viewing the urban as ‘an indicator of societal and
political dynamics’ (p. 57). The chapter is focused on issues of research and
understanding. She says she is writing at the meso level, and ends with the conclusion
that urbanity can produce a ‘critical epistemology’ (p. 70) leading to an ‘examination of
the general conditions specific to a historical period’, which she speaks of as ‘situated
research (p. 56). The argument is strong and well made. But what those conditions are is
not elaborated upon. ‘Capitalist globalism’ is mentioned in a quote from Cindi Katz of
which she approves, but the chapter essentially is a call to move from the meso to the
macro level, without itself going there.
Jonathan Davies, one of the co-editors, contributes with chapter 5, ‘Back to the
Future: Marxism and Urban Politics’. Reversing the usual order, it goes from the macro
to the micro. It begins with a trenchant critique of regime theory and the network society
as inadequately reflecting the actual structures of power in society. He criticizes these
approaches for neglecting or underplaying class structures. ‘Social critique has been
appropriated to neoliberal discourse’ (p. 78), he writes, and his concern is of the lack of
social critique at the macro level of analysis. His concern is clearly with the social justice
implications of the theories he rejects, his goal an ‘egalitarian urban politics’ (p. 79). He
seeks to reclaim the role of the proletarian as agents of urban change, but casting the class
victimized by urbanization, especially in developing countries, as ‘the source of new
proletarian agency’ (p. 80) is open to question. He examines at the micro level how
British policies of ‘partnership’ have sublimated class conflicts, in language coming
close to the neo-Marxist or Frankfurt School-based concepts of what ‘critical’ means.
Going beyond the way ‘critical’ is used in the introduction as simply not mainstream, he
concludes that ‘critical sense . . . lends us a sense of incredulity toward the desirability
and sustainability of dominant social relations’ (p. 88).
By contrast, David Imbroscio’s contribution — ‘Keeping it Critical: Resisting the
Allure of the Mainstream’ — reverts to the less macro level of the discussion. If Davies’
focus is on the second theme of the book, which ends up being the macro issues of social
justice, Imbroscio’s is on the first, the inadequacies of the mainstream, set largely at the
micro level. In a discussion limited to developments within the discipline of political
science, he presents effective critiques of four key aspects of mainstream ideas
approaches, and sources his criticisms in the contributions of the ‘urban politics field’ (p.
89). It is a somewhat confusing presentation. He criticizes pluralism’s mainstream
position in (non-urban) political science (his first key point) and presents regime theory
as a product of urban approaches, calling it ‘the dominant mode of urban political
analysis’ (p. 91). Is it now the mainstream whose allure is to be rejected? And is the
criticism of pluralism confined to urban political science? That neglects an enormous
amount of non- and anti-pluralist work that is hardly limited to the urban. And why
should it be? Imbroscio explains that unlikely fact by the ‘propinquity character of urban
politics — the closeness of urban space where actors interact frequently and tend to be
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small in numbers’ (p. 93, original emphasis). One can deduce what happens at the macro
level best by looking at the micro? And what about scale transfer issues that Magnusson
also neglected? Imbroscio’s second key contribution in urban political science to the
critique of the mainstream is in its welcoming of Marxist analysis. But ‘Marxism [was]
. . . most emphatic in talking about society as an arena of conflict’(p. 94). Society, not the
propinquities of the urban. The third key precept Imbroscio attacks (properly and well)
is behaviourism: his argument is buttressed by citations only to eminent mainstream
political scientists that, to my knowledge, have little to do with the urban, and the
criticisms date back 25 years or more (p. 96). The fourth key point made in the chapter
is a criticism of mainstream political science’s claim to be value-free. Whether that
criticism originated in urban political science, or is absent from mainstream discussions,
is not demonstrated. Finally, Imbroscio ends by calling for ‘an urbanizing’of mainstream
political science. But if the defining characteristic of critical urbanism is that it is against
the (non-urban) mainstream, the call for the mainstream to reform itself either asks the
crocodile to eat its own tail, or to become an entirely urban crocodile. But then the critical
part of theory disappears completely, or results in internecine warfare among crocodiles.
Perhaps the metaphor can be interpreted differently, but on the face of it there is a
contradiction here.
Jeff Spinner-Halev opens the second part of the book (the first part deals with more
research-oriented and disciplinary problems) with chapter 7, ‘The Trouble with
Diversity’. It is a troublesome chapter. It tackles a difficult problem: democracy often
results in segregation, which has anti-democratic outcomes that undermine diversity.
Justice drops out of the discussion after the first page. The chapter then become an
argument about the role of the state in producing segregation; concluding it is not that
important, it observes that real diversity is not the choice of the majority, and it’s the
majority choice that creates segregation, not the state, so we should stop looking to the
state to end it. ‘Other solutions to urban poverty exist . . . that do not involve changing
residential segregation’ (p. 118); they should be pursued. In any event, the state,
presumably meaning anti-discrimination legislation, is the wrong way to deal with
segregation, because segregation existed before the state enforced it. It’s a very
ahistorical discussion; at one point it provides, as a counter-factual: ‘if the state did not
put forth residential segregationist policies starting in the 1930s . . . would the market
have allocated housing differently?’ (p. 110). So the factual is that the state started
segregationist policies in the 1920s? Certainly embedded racist choices among the
electorate are a serious problem in dealing with segregation, and highlighting the
problem is welcome in the interests of justice, which may be a higher-level goal than
diversity, as many critical urbanists argue. But arguing that because the state didn’t cause
segregation it has no (or only a secondary) role in reducing it is hardly what one would
expect to find in a chapter opening such a discussion. Indeed, if we accept such an
impoverished view of history and of democracy, isn’t critical urban theory, as opposed to
the majority mainstream, by definition anti-democratic?
The focus shifts to an illuminating history of racial attitudes and policies in the
United Kingdom in Yaminah Beebeejaun’s chapter, ‘Do Multi-Cultural Cities Help
Equality’. It moves from the ‘more modest vision of diversity’ (p. 119) as the presumed
goal of critical urban theory to its social justice orientation, closer to the concern for
equality in urban life. Emphasizing the role of the local state and the immigration
policies of the national state in influencing the segregation of ethnic minorities, the
chapter looks at UK public policies specifically targeted at residential patterns. Urban
planning plays an important role in the discussion, which takes up the move from
multiculturalism to social cohesion, criticizing both (although superficially very
divergent) as equally reinforcing myths of ethnic identity and their consequences. It is
a subtle argument, moving well towards macro-level concerns about the impact of past
colonial relationships and present state actions in stigmatizing ethnic minorities, even
while purporting to support their victims. Such policies do not reduce, but rather
reinforce, inequalities of power between groups.
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James DeFilippis and Jim Fraser’s following chapter, ‘Why Do We Want Mixed
Income Housing and Neighborhoods?’, continues the concern with residential patterns.
It begins with a classic macro question — why do we have the policies seeking mixed
income that we have? — and then goes on to critique them. The policies in question are
those favouring mixed-income housing and neighbourhoods (MIHN). It suggests the
reasons policy has favoured these has four variations on the theme of the benefits of the
poor mixing with those of higher-income: networking, social controls, role models and
improved services. But historical evidence is marshalled to show that MIHN doesn’t
achieve those purposes. Why not? Because the underlying problem is inequality; ‘the
quality and distribution of public goods and services . . . based on the class of the people
receiving [them]’ (p. 141). Putting social justice up front as the value to be served, and
stating that value with unusual forthrightness, leads (equally forthrightly) to the
conclusion that such inequality needs to be directly addressed. Moving from the macro
to the meso level, it then asks how spatial arrangements might help, points out the
barriers to making MIHNs real communities, and asks (for the first time in this book)
exactly what the role of space is in both creating and solving the problems to be
addressed. Limited, it finds, and dependent on other changes, because their ultimate
contribution would be to ‘mitigate the power relations between groups’(p. 46) and those
relations go well beyond spatial ones. At the micro level, then, it suggests that the
creation and organization of public spaces that help support not only spatial justice but
also democracy is one possible avenue for public policy. The other suggestion is a
surprisingly mainstream one, making MIHNs a vehicle for wealth accumulation and
(oddly) seeing shared equity forms of ownership, which have other real advantages, as a
means to that end.
Chapter 10, ‘Dispersal as Anti-Poverty Policy’, by Edward G. Goetz and Karen
Chapple, pursues the critical analysis of another approach to using spatial change as an
instrument for broader macro goals. Like the preceding chapter, it begins with a macro
discussion. Dispersal of the poor, specifically to the suburbs, has stated goals. It is ‘meant
to achieve a more just distribution of opportunities and resources across metropolitan
areas’ (p. 150). Leaving aside the question of who means it in this way, and what other
motivations may be involved in the broader direction of such policies, the chapter
proceeds with a detailed and compelling demolition of the mainstream notion that
dispersal is successful. The criteria used to measure success remain those stated goals,
and the policies are found (by reference to careful historical and empirical findings) to
have fallen far short. The key outcomes used include safety, social networks,
employment and economic security. The evidence on each is strong and well presented,
the extensive empirical research is carefully reviewed at the micro level: dispersal does
not in fact do what its mainstream proponents claim for it. This summary is what one
should expect from a critical urban theory:
Poverty in a specific neighborhood results from the confluence of macro-level (or structural)
forces, meso-level interventions (such as societal institutions and policies that shape
demographic change) and micro-level processes that operate on neighborhoods . . . emphasized
by the dispersalists . . . Structural change continues to shape poverty in place. At its root is
economic restructuring and globalization (p. 159).
The chapter then concludes with a discussion of what can nevertheless be achieved at
the micro level, concluding that ‘a purely spatial approach to creating equal opportunity
throughout the region may in fact be an unjust anti-poverty policy’ (p. 164).
Concluding the book in worthy fashion, Thad Williamson’s chapter, ‘Beyond Sprawl
and Anti-Sprawl’, focuses on the meso-level issue of sprawl, but in the same tentative
macro context as the preceding three contributions. It comes closest to using approaches
similar to those of Frankfurt School-inspired critical theory. Starting with a comment on
the role the language of sprawl itself plays in affecting attitudes and polices, the chapter
takes up (in effective argument and counter-argument format on each point) the positions
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that defenders of sprawl take, and demolishes each in turn. The argument is taken up that
sprawl provides a higher quality of life for its suburban residents; the counter-argument
questions the definition of sprawl used in that defence, its empirical validity, its failure to
consider alternatives, that it is justified because it results from the free choice of its
residents, that it is inevitable ‘in the absence of a dramatic shift in our political-economic
structure’ (p. 178). Two meso-level policies are suggested: a sharply reinvigorated effort
to help the least well-off places by tackling the political, social and economic
dysfunctions of our central cities and their ‘worst neighborhoods’ and ‘challenging
suburban zoning policies’ (ibid). But, he argues, these policies are at best (although he
doesn’t use the term) meso level. They only eliminate the market ‘distortions’ (p. 179)
that now exacerbate sprawl:
What is instead needed is direct public influence over investment and growth patterns . . . these
more radical steps would amount to a significant reconfiguration of the division of labor
between capital and the state, and would necessarily challenge one of the fundamental features
of capitalist societies (ibid.).
They do not address the macro questions, but even these limited meso policies would
help.
This is an ambitious book. Implicitly, it wishes to define a field: critical urban studies,
based on critical urban theory. Does it do so?
Not quite, but it comes close, by example, and raises key questions, many of which are
also dealt with in Cities for People, Not for Profit, which covers some of the same turf
as Critical Urban Studies.2Putting the two books together is productive. In a sense, the
former pushes to put the urban into Critical Theory, the latter to put the critical into urban
studies. Perhaps the one tries to bring the critical down to earth, the latter to root the
urban more firmly in the space of theory — to badly mix a metaphor. Looking at them
together — and both are eclectic in their contributions — raises a whole set of questions
which are good food for further attention, questions growing out of their common ground
of dissatisfaction with the existing mainstream. For instance, in skeleton form, in this
proposed field of critical urban work:
• Should it accept or reject the myth of the benevolent state? Should it examine policies
in terms of their explicit and stated purposes, or should it probe the forces that led to
their formulation and adoption?
• Should it examine what classes or other social divisions particular urban policies
serve, look at who the actors are, who benefits, who pays, or should it leave that to
others?
• Should it examine the cultural patterns and ideological assumptions prevailing in the
society and inquire as to their sources, or should it take their existence for granted in
proposing changes?
• Should it examine the history of the relationships involved and draw conclusions as to
causes and motivations and alternatives from that history, or confine itself to analysing
conditions as they actually are today?
• Should it place the issues in a substantive theoretical frame, relying on history and
exploration of alternatives to undergird evaluation, and make that frame explicit, or
should it take goals for granted?
• Should it take material interests as driving forces in the formulation of policy, although
influenced by and influencing ideology and culture, or should it accept ideology and
culture as external and autonomous and inevitable motivations for public action?
• Should it accept conflicts of basic interests, along class lines, however defined, as
external and inevitable, or look at other lines of interest, or should it seek for a possible
consensus and win-win solutions to major problems?
2 The work of David Harvey is of course seminal here.
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• Should it question the role of the market and examine its implications for spatial justice,
or should it take the necessity of the market for granted and focus on distortions and side
effects?
• Should it see space as representing a socially created societal structure, with its physical
aspects both a consequence of and a contributing cause for patterns of social relations,
or should it see spatial relations, with or without considerations of social justice, as the
central concerns of public policy?
• Should it define ‘urban’ in broad Lefebvrian terms, or equate it with the built
environment and legal boundaries of cities?
• Should it propose policies in terms of long-range alternatives, grounded in history and
contemporary potentials, or should it deliberately confine itself to immediately feasible
reforms of existing policies and practices?
If these two books and the field with which they are both concerned open up a broad
debate around such questions and promote more thoughtful action around their answers,
they will have served a major and constructive purpose.
Cities for People, Not for Profit — Comment
JONATHAN S. DAVIES
Cities for People, Not for Profit takes a very different approach from Critical Urban
Studies: New Directions (Davies and Imbroscio, 2010). Whereas our goal was to
showcase a variety of critical approaches in urban studies, Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer
issue a rallying cry to the left, rooted in the disciplines of geography. The book is very
welcome, especially in conveying a trenchant anti-capitalist message. It was published in
2011 when resistance to the ravages of the global economic crisis was at its zenith,
encompassing mass strikes, huge street demonstrations, occupations and the overthrow
of dictators. The mood of the book reflects the conjuncture of 2011, but now in 2014 a
dose of pessimism of the intellect is called for. The crisis endures, the austerity offensive
continues without much sign of success and yet on most fronts we are again on the back
foot. To borrow Marcuse’s poetic epilogue, we appear ‘mired just in some nitty-gritty’(p.
275). More bluntly, it looks like ‘this is class war from above and they are winning it’
(Tsianos et al., 2012: 448).
I focus here on an issue that looms throughout Cities for People, Not for Profit, but is
not explicitly addressed for the most part, that of ‘their agency versus ours’. Insofar as
‘our’ agency is concerned, the book admirably covers many tactics and strategies, from
interstitial struggles in states (Liss) and civil society (Rankin) to the need for global
transformation (Marcuse, in conversation with Flierl). Harvey and Wachsmuth take issue
with the alleged classical Marxist fixation on the factory-based proletariat, and instead
suggest that our agency resides in building a heterodox class formation uniting precariat,
proletariat and many other subalterns (p. 273). Since we do not live in a revolutionary
conjuncture, their medium-term goal is a left Keynesianism to save capitalism from itself
and enact out a radically redistributive programme.
But herein lies the problem. Whether a maximally redistributive Keynesianism would
save capitalism depends on which account of the crisis is most accurate. Classical
Marxists argue that for capitalism to recover, mass bankruptcy and write-down (capital
destruction) is required together with austerity — not Keynesian stimulus (Harman,
2010). But this matter aside, Harvey and Wachsmuth also beg the question looming in the
background throughout the book, namely what kind of power and agency might be
required if the left Keynesian option is indeed (temporarily) viable. Specifically, what
kind of agency would have to be marshalled against what kinds of state and corporate
powers? Given the fragility of the Western economy and the predicament of many
governing regimes, it is hard to see how the requisite coalitions could be forged and
installed to power without a kind of revolutionary impetus. In this conjuncture, in other
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words, isn’t left Keynesianism itself a de facto revolutionary demand? We witnessed
the violence with which the Occupy protests were dispersed, and (far more lethally)
how elements within the South African state machine massacred striking miners. It takes
little imagination to anticipate that resistance from within the Greek (and European) state
and capitalist class to a Syriza-like Keynesian regime would be fierce and
‘unconstitutional’. How would a left Keynesian government anticipate and neutralize
these forces?
One of the more bizarre deficits in contemporary governance theory (including many
critical approaches) is the tendency to elide state coercion. In my view, state coercion is
far better understood as an immanent condition of rule than as a reserve power ‘in the
shadows’. As Gramsci (1971: 171, cited in Davies, 2012: 2692) put it, elaborating his
theory of the ‘integral state’ (the dialectics of hegemony and domination in capitalist
modernity): ‘two things are absolutely necessary for the life of a State: arms and religion
. . . force and consent; coercion and persuasion; State and Church; political society and
civil society; politics and morality; law and freedom; order and self-discipline . . .
violence and fraud’.
The centrality of coercion to the governance of cities was graphically portrayed by
Stephen Graham (2010) in his account of the new military urbanism, where force
converges in, around and over the city; not only in the developing ‘frontier’ nations, but
also in the securitized Western ‘homelands’. Of course, the contributors know about state
violence (although those of a Deleuzian disposition may think of it as a ‘zombie
category’). Goonewardena makes the Lefebvrian point that the project of ‘modernization’,
contra ‘modernism’, is best understood as the union of ‘neo-dirigisme’ (authoritarian
statism) and neoliberalism (commodification) (p. 90). Yet, for all its strengths, the book
tends to evade state power and the spatial/scalar configurations of coercion that counter-
hegemonic forces would have to overcome. Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer comment in their
introduction (p. 7) that the transformative potential of social movements depends on their
positioning and resources vis a vis the positioning and resources of the hegemons. The
dialectics and points of collision are many, but a likely ubiquitous one would be the terrain
of force.
That Western states are prepared to forego democracy and use violence to drive
through austerity and dispossession is unquestionable. Yichfatel’s portrait of the struggle
for grey space in Palestine provides one gritty answer to the question of what to do about
it: persevere patiently in adversity, build, rebuild and build again. But even so, the matter
requires far more direct attention in critical urban studies than it has received to date. In
a conjuncture of setbacks, we face the question of what kind of counter-power will be
required to sustain gains in the next round of struggles. Harvey and Wachsmuth rightly
conclude:
capitalism will never fall on its own. It will have to be pushed. The accumulation of capital will
never cease. It will have to be stopped. The capitalist class will never willingly surrender its
power. It will have to be dispossessed. To do what has to be done will require tenacity and
determination, patience, and cunning, along with fierce political commitments born of moral
outrage at what exploitative compound growth is doing to all facets of life, human and
otherwise, on planet earth (p. 274).
We are decades beyond the social democratic gains secured in the postwar boom, and
in late capitalism not an inch is given without trenchant resistance. It is perhaps
significant that normative political theory is re-engaging the question of violence: on the
one hand as a legitimate and necessary condition of rule (Frazer and Hutchings, 2011);
and on the other as a legitimate and necessary form of counter-power (Medearis, 2005).
As we take up Marcuse’s tasks of ‘exposing, proposing and politicizing’ (p. 24), how to
mobilize counter-hegemonic force alongside counter-hegemonic ideas and counter-
hegemonic politics is a pressing issue, whether our priority is interstitial struggle,
resisting the militarization of cities or storming the fortresses of class power.
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Cities for People, Not for Profit — Comment
DAVID IMBROSCIO
When Jonathan Davies and I put together Critical Urban Studies: New Directions, our
aim was to have our contributors ‘identify an orthodox perspective in urban studies and
subject it to critique’ (Davies and Imbroscio, 2010: 2). What resulted was an eclectic mix
of essays that challenged received wisdom on a variety of important urban issues. Most
times in our volume, however, serious engagement with the crises of corporate capitalism
(and their urban manifestations) was only partial or indirect. In favorable contrast, the
Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer volume Cities for People, Not for Profit uses critical urban
theory to confront these crises head on, including a most admirable effort to map
‘possible pathways of social transformation’ (p. 3). Cities for People, Not for Profit is
therefore an essential book. Its many strong contributions advance the field of critical
urban studies considerably.
Perhaps what is most powerful about the volume’s take on critical urban theory is the
sharp conceptual distinction it draws between the ‘critical branch’ of urban studies and
the ‘ “mainstream” or “traditional” approaches to urban questions’ (p. 5). Our volume, by
contrast, was both less pointed and less systematic about this distinction. Drawing it
sharply, as they do, is particularly salutary because it helps us think more clearly (and
more fruitfully) about political practice.
For example, with this conceptual distinction resolutely in mind, their version of
critical urban theory is lucidly and compellingly able to explicate the ‘different
approaches to resistance and change [that] are . . . possible’ (p. 8). And, in doing so, their
approach squarely recognizes and faces up to the inherent limits of (what they deem) the
‘liberal progressive or reformist [that is, mainstream or traditional] response’ (ibid.) to
crises, best represented in the US by the liberal wing of the Democratic Party (and
President Obama — on his better days, at least). Using the case of the recent financial
crisis as an illustration, they astutely point out that the liberal progressive response
‘would focus on individual and “excessive” greed’, and attempt to curb such behavior by
simply ‘regulating the activities of . . . power-brokers’ rather than directing the expressed
popular outrage ‘at the system as a whole’ (ibid.). As a result, this outrage would be
‘eviscerated, and the right to the city shrivels to a right to unemployment benefits and the
public investment in urban infrastructure . . . with massive bailouts for banks being offset
by some minimal protections for small and middle-class borrowers of “viable”
mortgages’ (ibid.). In contrast, another approach to resistance and change is possible,
according to Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer: ‘outrage could . . . be directed against the
system as a whole; it could take a radical turn, in the spirit of Lefebvre’ (ibid.). Such a
turn serves to illuminate the keen insight that ‘a genuine right to the city requires the
abolition of the rule of . . . private capital . . . over the urban economy’ (ibid.).
Hence the Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer volume, among its multiple virtues, does the
field of critical urban studies a great service by explicitly diagnosing the goal towards
which critical urban practice must be directed. With this knowledge in hand, the next step
in the development of critical urban theory (and practice) is to move from critique to
reconstruction (or, as the title of David Harvey’s excellent contribution to the volume
screams: ‘What is to be done? And who the hell is going to do it?’). On this difficult,
complex — ultimately crucial — issue, the Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer volume, like
ours before it, offers little guidance (although some valuable preliminary work is found
in several chapters, including those by Slater, Marcuse, Liss and Harvey). Thus, going
forward, much of the future work of critical urban studies needs to be dedicated to better
understanding how we might, in their words, ‘forge a radical . . . alternative to the dismal,
destructive status quo of worldwide capitalist urbanization’ (p. 9).
Take, again, the specific prescription to abolish the rule of private capital over the
urban economy, something that, as Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer correctly point out, is
key to establishing a genuine right to the city. How might we actually begin to bring
about such an abolition? I believe that one potentially fruitful path worthy of continued
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exploration is the option of building, from the ground up, a variety of decentralized,
place-rooted and democratically controlled alternatives to the current corporate-capitalist
ownership structure of urban economies. These institutional forms and policy tools —
which in a recent book (Imbroscio, 2010) I have dubbed local economic alternative
development strategies (or LEADS for short) — include worker-owned companies,
cooperatives, municipal enterprises, community land trusts and financial institutions,
community-based corporations, etc., as well as a variety of localist economic
development measures (see also DeFilippis, 2004; Alperovitz, 2011). Partly as a
response to ongoing urban crises, LEADS are, quite surprisingly, beginning to gain a
strong foothold in the US (such as the recent effort in Cleveland to build a network of
cooperatives along the lines of the Mondragon model; see Alperovitz, 2011). In strategic
terms, the idea is to gradually build an alternative institutional structure that can, over
time, be the basis to mount a political and economic challenge to the current hegemonic
control of private (especially corporate) capital over the people of cities and urban life
more generally.
Finally, if this is indeed what is to be done, then we need to rethink the ‘slogan’(p. 39)
that forms the title of the volume. The problem with the notion of Cities for People, Not
for Profit is not that it is too radical; rather, quite the opposite: it is too conservative. It
assumes the ongoing hegemony of a corporate-capitalist economy, where profits are
wholly expropriated from the people. By building alternative economic structures in
cities, we may not be able to (paraphrasing Marx) sound the knell of capitalist private
property. Nonetheless, such structures do afford us the potential possibility of
expropriating the expropriators to a significant degree. This strategy for emancipatory
transformation implies that a new slogan would be altogether fitting — one that does not
assume the inherent incompatibility between the needs of the people and the generation
of profits. How about ‘Cities for the people’s profit’ as our rallying cry, and our demand?
Cities for People, Not for Profit — Comment
WARREN MAGNUSSON
Cities for People, Not for Profit is interesting, stimulating, sometimes challenging, but
ultimately rather myopic. It occludes most of what is happening in urban politics,
because it insists with few exceptions on a particular theoretical framework that derives
mainly from the political economy of the urban developed by Castells, Harvey and
Lefebvre, and to a lesser extent from critical theory of the Frankfurt School type. The
effect is to shunt aside most of the theoretical work associated with the collapse of
orthodox Marxism—Iamthinking especially of the delightfully various investigations
and speculations of French thinkers like Bachelard, Badiou, Bataille, Barthes,
Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Clastres, Debord, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Latour,
Lefort, Levinas, Levi-Strauss, Lyotard and Rancière, but the list could be lengthened and
diversified — and to impose an understanding of urban politics that — although
insightful in many respects — is at odds with most people’s experience. The divergence
is most notable wherever the state is in deep crisis — for instance in Aleppo, Mogadishu
and Goma — but it is evident also in places like Istanbul, racked as I write this by popular
protests triggered by a classic urban issue: plans to destroy a city park. I have only a
superficial understanding of politics in Istanbul, but everything I read suggests that it is
the authoritarianism of the present regime, rather than capitalist urban development as
such, that has prompted the mass protests. If so, we are ill-advised to rely on an analysis
that undercuts our efforts to understand things like authoritarianism by demanding that
we focus on the political economy of urban development and short-circuiting our efforts
to explore religious and tribal conflicts, criminality and gun-running, patronage and
corruption, nationalism, great power rivalry, and all the other things that appear under the
sign of the political by imposing a particular view of what the present situation demands
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politically. There is no grand theory and no particular focus that will enable us to
understand everything that we need to know and give us clear political answers.
What we need is a more open-ended approach that acknowledges the fact that urban
politics is highly diverse and inevitably situational. Part of the problem with our field is
that the statist conception of politics, to which all of us are drawn for some quite good
reasons, leads us to think of urban politics as the domain in which particular issues of
land use or local government are fought out, rather than as the domain of politics in
general. So, when the wave of protests that we now associate with the Arab Spring
occurred, or the Occupy movement and related anti-austerity protests developed, most
analysts — including most urbanists — were inclined to frame things in ways that put the
urban into the background. The same thing occurred during the upheavals of 1989–91 or
— to push it further back — 1968, 1917–18 or 1848. Everyone who reads this journal is
convinced of the importance of the urban, but most of us retreat to our familiar turf when
challenged about the larger issues of military conflict, rule of law, human rights,
religiosity, liberal democracy, ethno-cultural difference, and so on. Although urbanists
have been quite successful in challenging analyses that ignore the way that cities are
developed and redeveloped under the rule of capital, we have not been very successful in
getting people to re-think the categories that impede a more robust and inclusive analysis
of the politics of urban life. Such a politics is never merely local, and it encompasses
struggles within and between states. The urban is the whole within which every form of
contemporary politics occurs. Don’t we know that, and if so shouldn’t we be insisting on
thinking about urban politics in much more general terms, rather than deferring to the
idea that politics becomes something else — no longer urban politics — when armies or
national governments or international institutions get involved?
I emphasize politics, because everything we analyse as scholars is meant to contribute
to our understanding of it. The problem of politics is the problem of human action, both
individual and collective. It’s the problem that haunts us all, and properly so. As
urbanists, I think we share the belief that political understanding can only come from
serious engagement with what we can see and sense in the streets around us, and that we
have to be open to many things that surprise or confuse us which can’t easily be
explained by the standard theories, whether offered under the sign of the urban or
otherwise. What worries me about Cities for People, Not for Profit is that it tells me again
and again what I already know and what any competent student of urban political
economy (as we have come to understand it) could easily infer from well-known facts.
I already know that capitalist urban development works for profits, not people, and that
we are all worse off as a result of that. I also know that there are various efforts to change
things, some of which put issues of urban development at the centre. But, what that
amounts to in terms of the politics of the present is a still a puzzle to me because there
are so many other things happening simultaneously. We have to understand those other
things as well. We need:
1 A frame of analysis that actually addresses the fact that the world as a whole has been
largely urbanized and hence that both global and local politics are aspects of urban
politics rather than the other way around;
2 An openness to the rich variety of critical theoretical traditions, rather than a search
for the one true approach that will reveal all;
3 A willingness to admit our own ignorance and uncertainty, so that we are alert to the
full variety of urban experiences and not just the ones highlighted by our pre-existing
theories.
There is much work to be done, and we should not be constraining ourselves by
conceiving our field, our research or our political practice too narrowly.
Simon Parker (sp19@york.ac.uk), Department of Politics, University of York, Heslington,
York YO10 5DD, UK, Peter Marcuse (pm35@columbia.edu), Department of Urban
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Planning, Columbia University, Avery Hall Broadway and 116 Street, New York, NY 10027,
USA, David Imbroscio (imbroscio@louisville.edu), Department of Political Science,
University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky 40292, USA, Jonathan S. Davies
(jsdavies@dmu.ac.uk), Faculty of Business and Law, De Montfort University, The Gateway,
Leicester LE1 9BH, UK and Warren Magnusson (wmagnus@uvic.ca), Department of
Political Science, University of Victoria, P.O. Box 3060, Victoria, British Columbia V8W
3R4, Canada.
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