The Right To The City: A Verso Report

Verso Reports

by David Adler, Neil Brenner, Bradley L. Garrett

In 1968, the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre wrote “Le Droit a la Ville” (“The Right to the City”), which has become one of the most essential texts in radical geography and urban studies. It transformed the way we think about urban life and the right to make and remake our cities, and ourselves. Fifty years on, the question of who is the city is for, and why, is more urgent than ever.
In this special Verso report, some of the most important voices in the current debate on the right to city are gathered to debate what Lefebvre originally intended and what it might mean today within the neoliberal urban world. How these ideas help us to understand the contemporary struggle in housing; how to protest gentrification; the privatisation of public spaces; and the demand for places of self expression, and the security of home. The collection also explores how these ideas can be used in other fields—such as digital space and the Internet of Things.

Contributors include David Adler, Neil Brenner, Bradley Garrett, Andrea Gibbons, Huw Lemmey, David Madden & Peter Marcuse, Andy Merrifield, Anna Minton, Don Mitchell, Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi, Nina Power, Dubravka Sekulić, Joe Shaw & Mark Graham, and Alex Vasudevan.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Urbanism, Cities, Urban, Ebooks

296 pages, ebook

Published November 8, 2017

Reviews

[eve massacre · Rating 4 out of 5]

This free essay collection is an amazing kickstarter into thinking Lefebvre's idea of the right to the city further and from a lot different angles.
My personal favourites were:

Nina Power - The only good public is a moving public

Don Mitchell - Against safety, against security: reinvigorating

Huw Lemmey - The gay right to the city

Rebecca Omonira Oyekanmi - Just another number

I cried, I laughed, I frowned, I nodded, I was inspired to think on and get some action going in my own city - what more could such a book do?

Sadly I found the Informational Right to The City chapter a bit weak. I'd rather citizens one day own Google instead of just 0WN1ng it.
Free ebook here:
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2674...

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

This anthology of essays explores different aspects of an increasingly urgent problem: how to keep cities from blocking out all but the richest of their residents from the very characteristics that make cities the diverse, dynamic, communal spaces they've typically been. In other words, how do we as societies preserve what French philosopher Henry Lefebvre described as the people's "right to the city"?

Most of the essays in this book were published elsewhere first, and that makes for an uneven volume, as journalistic endeavors, op-ed pieces, academic studies and blog posts jostle for position. Several are quite good, especially a heartbreaking piece of reporting about an immigrant deported from London, leaving behind three children to whom he'd been a father figure. Likewise, an exploration of how San Diego, Calif., and other cities have increasingly narrowed the concept of public space by turning it over to private companies who can then restrict its use by the homeless or protesters who might "scare away" paying customers from nearby businesses and enforce those restrictions – which would be illegal under the Constitution if a government did it – using armed security.

And of course those homeless are often there because they can no longer afford housing within gentrifying neighborhoods where landlords use numerous tricks to skirt laws restricting their ability to jack up rents on and evict longtime residents in order to bring in newer tenants with bigger bank accounts. The book is timely, as these issues are only now rising to a broader public consciousness as affordable-housing crises take root in major cities across the world.

Overall, The Right to the City is educational and often infuriating while also too often mind-numbing. Skimming, especially the last two chapters about the so-called "digital city," was essential for my completing it. But, hey, it was a free e-book, so you won't hear me complaining.

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Andy Merrifield (Ch 1)

Just as they frack deep into the earth and power-drill profit from nature, ruling classes do the same to human nature, gouging value from different aspects of everyday life, and from the entire range of the public realm.

In Metaphilosophy, Lefebvre posited that totalisations, like global capitalism, always exhibit leakiness, have internal contradictions that both structure and de-structure. Totalisation can never be total; it always secretes and expels a “residual element,” its Other. There’ll always be people who don’t fit into any whole, who don’t want to fit in, who aren’t allowed to fit in. They’re the stuff left over after all the metrics are totted up. They’re the philosophical anti-concepts, an affirmation of remainders.

The right to the city is now about those who have been expelled—the residues—reclaiming, or claiming for the first time, their right to a collective urban life, to an urban society they’re actively making yet are hitherto disenfranchised from... In this guise, citizenship lies inside and beyond a passport, inside and beyond any official documentation. It doesn’t express a legal right bestowed by any institution of the bourgeois nation-state. We might even say that a revolutionary citizenship isn’t a right at all: it has to be struggled for, taken, recreated anew—not rubber-stamped. What we’re talking about is citizenship without a flag, without a country, without borders... So many people have been pushed off-limits that the horizon of limits has extended, creating an even larger social space for the concept of citizenship

Neil Brenner (Ch 2)

A genuinely open city would be one in which investment is channelled to serve social need rather than private gain; in which public institutions secure and protect shared, common resources from private appropriation;

To the degree that design interventions for an open city are restricted to formal, aesthetic elements or fetishize a narrowly consumerist vision of the public realm, their main impact may be to offer ideological cover for the urbanisms of injustice, displacement and exclusion that continue to be rolled forward aggressively in neoliberalizing cities and city-regions around the world.

Andrea Gibbons (Ch 3)

That we think about how we each connect to our home and through it to a vibrant hybrid culture and to a broad and welcoming community where we can grow old gracefully while space remains for our children and then their children. Ownership is not necessarily needed for any of this, rather secure tenancies and management structures that grant the ability to shape our spaces according to our needs and our desires, to try new things and fail and try again, to build and paint and transform. It sounds utopian until you remember we are conditioned to think of housing as assets to be managed, not spaces that should support our passions and our dreams. Knitted into communities, they should redefine sustainability and living well upon the earth. Examples shine all over this country, and many more across the world. We know how to do this.

David Madden and Peter Marcuse (Ch 4)

In his 1968 book The Right to the City, Lefebvre argued that industrial insurrection was not the only force for social transformation. An “urban strategy” for revolutionizing society was possible. Given changes to the nature of work and of urban development, the industrial proletariat was no longer the only agent of revolutionary change, or even the predominant one. Lefebvre claimed that there was a new political subject: the city dweller. More generally, Lefebvre invokes the politics of “the inhabitant,” a category that includes any worker, in the broadest sense, seen from the perspective of everyday social and residential life... From Lefebvre’s perspective, the right to the city is a “cry and a demand”; that is, part of social struggle, not an individual legal entitlement. “Right” is not used in its conventional legal sense, but in an ethical and political sense.

There are many routes towards decommodification. These include more and better public housing, rent controls, more secure tenancies, public ownership of land, public financing, limits on speculation, and the adoption or re-introduction of regulations on home finance mechanisms.

People do not only live in homes. They live in neighbourhoods and communities. They occupy buildings but also locations in a social fabric

Anna Minton (ch5)

Because property is now the global investment of choice, prices are so skewed to the demands of foreign investors that this could be termed a ‘super prime’ crisis. The sub-prime crisis in the US , which triggered the 2008 financial crash, saw the frenzied trading of credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations in very high risk mortgages break the relationship with people on the ground who were in no position to afford those mortgages. Today, what economists call the ‘exchange value’ of housing in London, and other cities, has entirely broken the connection with its ‘use value’; exchange value is the price of a commodity sold on the market while its use value is its usefulness to people. When it comes to housing, prices are failing to respond to the needs of most people, allowing the influx of global capital, often from highly dubious sources, to utterly distort the market and creating a crisis of affordability affecting all layers of society.

Lefebvre’s conception of the Right to the City was based around the everyday experience of people inhabiting the city, emphasising use value over exchange value. He believed that city space is contested and the struggle for social, political and economic rights is played out in urban space... In 2016, the concept was included for the first time in the UN ’s New Urban Agenda, the UN ’s new 20-year urbanisation strategy agreed in Quito, in Ecuador. This has enshrined the ‘Right to the City’ vision in the legislation, political declarations and charters of national and local governments. This was far from easy to achieve and followed very lengthy wrangling between national governments and civil society groups which came together under an advocacy platform called ‘Global Platform for the Right to the City’. Although the final wording was not considered perfect it was still seen as a significant victory for groups battling against gentrification, repossessions, the privatisation of public space and the criminalisation of homelessness.

Bradley Garrett (Ch 6)

London, like many cities around the world, is being reshaped by the creation of privately owned public spaces (‘Pops’). These legal niceties transform open-air squares, gardens and parks into spaces that look public but are not—they are owned and/or managed by private entities.... The largest Pops in the city, according to data I have been compiling with Guardian Cities, is of course the 2012 Olympic site, which will come as no surprise to those who claimed long ago that the real ‘legacy’ of the games would be one of hyper-gentrification. These out-sourced and sub-contracted games, with their aggressive compulsory-purchasing mechanisms, were a perfect catalyst for the privatisation of public space.

The power for corporate entities to not only impede certain activities but to bar the public access to ‘public’ space was upheld during the Occupy protest court proceedings. On 14 October 2011, an injunction passed ‘preventing persons unknown entering or remaining in or trespassing on [Paternoster Square]’. While Occupy may seem like ancient history, these proceedings were important because they set a precedent: protest would not be tolerated in open-air private space. It follows that what is at stake here is more than a lost ability to play ball games, take photos and drink street beers; what is being lost is our right to the city.

Alex Vasudevan (Ch 7)

Refugee and migrant solidarity has long played an important role within various squatter movements across Europe that have traditionally been anti-racist, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist and that have, as such, criticised the violent and increasingly militarised border regimes set up by their governments... In Spain, and in cities such as Barcelona and Madrid, the recent crisis has fostered a new commitment to the development of practices that seek to resist the forms of “precarious living” increasingly shared by migrants and local residents alike... The recent actions of squatters therefore point to forms of care, generosity and dwelling whose history is unthinkable outside the precarious conditions that they emerged out of.

Nina Power (Ch 8)

Who is this public? The one that silently demands “public art”, who mutely requests “public order”, who endlessly opines in the narrow voice of right-wing newspapers expressing some kind of locationless “public opinion”? And who is the other public? The public that desires and increasingly occupies space, the public that wants, expects and needs to be cared for in times of crisis, the public that believes in and aspires to the “good” but is never permitted to be the “good” public?... One of these publics is apparently unified in their outrage, right-thinking and eternal; the other is messy, unpredictable and prone to insurrection: one public must constantly be invoked to beat the other, yet the one that usually “wins” is a phantom and the one that loses, a reality obscured.

Don Mitchell (Ch 9)

We learn that private property is the foundation of all freedom, and even, by the time we go to university and sit through our first economics and politics classes, we learn that freedom is not just impossible, but in fact inconceivable, without private property. We learn to make important distinctions. We learn that “public” is the same as out of control: public spaces are the realm of criminal violence, homeless people, drugs, anarchy, terrorists; public hospitals are where one goes to find long lines and waiting lists; public schools “fail our children” (as American politicians like to put it); and public goods are, by definition, simply inefficient. The private, on the other hand, is the very definition of good: publicly accessible private properties are where profit is made, comfort and security provided; private property, because always efficiently allocated, works for us all; private wealth benefits us all.

Disney, for example, has become a large urban planner and developer, hired to remake whole streetscapes in Seattle and (most famously) to refashion New York’s Times Square in an image of spectacular, now “family oriented,” consumption. It has also created Celebration, a fully planned, fully private town in Florida ...All services are private, all laws and rules are written by Disney (and almost impossible to change by the residents) and all policing is geared toward maintaining not urban life but property values.

in Los Angeles, Universal Studios has built “City Walk,” ... where for a fee one can wander a perfect urban scene complete with a few—but not too many—picturesque beggars (who are City Walk employees, dressed up in costume and required to follow a script in their interactions with visitors). Strollers in City Walk are offered a carefully controlled, and therefore guaranteed never to be disappointing, urban experience. The long history of inducing fear of public space makes such developments seem not just logical, not just safe, but utterly desirable.

...this induced fear of public space, and this banishment of fear from controlled space that might just appear public, makes us want to have our fingers printed, our retinas scanned, our backpacks searched, and our credit limits preapproved. It doesn’t just make us want these, really; what it does is make us miss this kind of surveillance when we are not subject to it... the agents of “homeland security” probing into every aspect of our lives (and whisking to jail those who have the temerity to protest, and do research, against gentrification)...

David Adler (Ch 11)

Rent controls, anti-speculation laws, tenure rights—cities have tools at their disposal to disrupt the displacement tendencies of the market and weave a more collectively just urban fabric.
In the 1930s, President Lázaro Cárdenas—the revolutionary hero of the Mexican left—oversaw the establishment of thousands of ejidos, communal agricultural plots distributed to Mexico’s landless peasants. In the 1990s, however, amid his neoliberal crusade, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari eliminated the constitutional right to collective property. On the periphery of Mexico City, where ejidos are historically prevalent, communal land has been partitioned, privatised, and placed back on the property market.

Dubravka Sekulić (Ch 13)

David Harvey’s statement about the city replacing the factory as a site of class war seems to be not only an apt description of the condition of life in the city, but also a cry for action.
Digital commons had to start from scratch and define its own protocols of production and reproduction (caring and sharing). Therefore, the digital commons and free software community can be the one to turn to, not only for inspiration and advice, but also as a partner when addressing questions of urban commons. Or, as Marcell Mars would put it “if we could start again with (regulating and defining) land, knowing what we know now about digital networks, we could come up with something much better and appropriate for today’s world. That property wouldn’t be private, maybe not even property, but something else. Only then can we say we have learned something from the digital.”

Jo Shaw and Mark Graham (Ch 14)

The concept of an informational right to the city is useful in understanding the power of an informational monopoly like Google. Their control over a newly ubiquitous form of digital abstract space enables them to reproduce and control urban space itself. In this capacity, they have now joined—and in some cases, perhaps even superseded—the ranks of urban planners, developers and landlords from Lefebvre’s era in terms of their power over the city and its many problems. Similarly, this power is also masked by a newly dominant ideology of Google as technology serving the “general interest” of the city: we can “spread the love” if we “put our cities on the map!”. As such forces begin to re-shape the city, their power and ideology merits critical attention through the lens of Lefebvre, and his theory on the production of space provides a strong starting point.

[Libby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Minus one star for sending me into a panic about how to ever make the world a good and liveable place, but otherwise really interesting/varied/important stuff.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book-report that pays homage to Henri Lefebvre's "The Right to the City" and some other associated writings of his. I am 100% on board with Verso, I own a lot of their books, and I find their publishing of radical and revolutionary authors to be well above average. This offering is a bit tepid, though. Or at least much less revolutionary in its proposals and also much less critical of the current state of affairs in the world's cities than I had hoped to read. As is often the case with global problems, the cause is Capitalism and the subsuming of national governments to its control and mindless pursuit of more for less, or maybe more for fewer? Either way, each of these essays basically gets to that pint, some in more detail, some in less. A worthwhile read if one hasn't been following the decline of urban spaces, the rise of state surveillance, the proliferation of real estate collection by elites, etc. But if you already read about these things, as I do, then this just reaffirms, in not-always-engaging ways, that until Capitalism is destroyed, all we will get are scraps, and only those scraps deemed useless by those with the money and the power.

[Chavi]

I read this in accompaniment to Henri Lefebvre's The Right to the City, as this is an essay collection compiled in honor of its 50-year anniversary.

The essays gave me a lot to think about individually, but one thing I noticed is that these are much more activist-y than Lefebvre's original treatise. Almost everyone quotes the same one line out of Lefebvre's 60-page polemic, that of "the right to the city" being a "cry and demand." And in fact, while Lefebvre spends much of the 60 pages describing why we need a new philosophy of the city—in pretty abstract terms that encompass a much broader sweep of his work—over time, it's the title itself that has become the rallying cry.

The essays do touch on Lefebvre himself, but mostly use his work as a jumping off point to discuss the state of the city today, and the various issues, injustices and inequalities it perpetuates.

[Benjamin Eskola · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bit variable. Some interesting articles, although tending to be a little too abstract, and in a few cases the connection to the theme of the collection wasn’t clear. Others, like the one on free software, were pretty weak — any possibility of copying the free software model of using legal rights to protect commons must surely have to engage with the fact that free software hasn’t really been a broad success in actually doing so. (see, e.g., Wendy Liu’s writing on the subject.)

[Cecile Bourguignon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Top 3
- Against Safety, Against Security: Reinvigorating Urban Life
Don Mitchell
- Square for Sale. Cashing out on public space. Bradley Garrett
- The residential is political, David Madden and Peter Marcuse

[Sean Peeters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Changed how I see public space and urbanization. Read this, all nerds.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly good essays, though often traveling very similar topics due to the prompt.

Best:
- Re-imagining the Squatted City
- Against Safety, Against Security: Reinvigorating
- Just Another Number

[Eurethius Péllitièr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very insightful set of essays on the city. From the past, to thinking about what we need to do with space, including digital space

[John Cherkas · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's alright. A good set of essays about what it means to live and be part of the City as a construct.

[Beckett Zinn-Rowthorn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Didn’t read all the essays but this is a great collection adding concrete relevance to lefebvre’s theory.