Urban Common Property: Notes Toward a Political Theory of the City

This Cahier de la Faculté d’Architecture LaCambre-Horta aims to contribute to the scientific debate on the right to the city, exploring the variety of objects, processes, structures, and relations – both at the conceptual, abstract and theoretical level as well as at the practical, experiential, and material one – that this idea has inspired. The publication offers multiple analysis of the relations between this concept and its application in the urban planning domain, providing a number of examples on how the concept of the right to the city can give practical guidance on urban development. The focus is thus on policies, programmes and projects that aim to intervene in the diverse processes of urbanization and different forms of urban structures and urbanity present in the northern and southern countries, addressing issues of equity, rights, democracy, differences (socio-economic, cultural, etc.) and ecology. The publication aims to explore the socio-spatial relations embedded in alternative approaches – at policy, planning and design level – and emergent practices of urban regeneration, upgrading, development, and management activated by grassroots movements, government agencies or different actors/institutions. This is the reason why we decided to explore the idea of the right to the city within the dialectical confrontation of “social politics” and “urban planning”. The rationale of this Cahier rests on two main principles. First of all, cities are built on the basis of both semiotic and the material contributions, which means that both imaginaries and practices are fundamental in shaping the urban space, its physical form and technology, its socio-economic structure, the social and spatial relations, the subjectivities, the relations with nature, and the daily life reproduction. Second, as the neo-liberal hegemonic culture has emphasized the urban horizon and the city-level in all its physical, social and cultural aspects, the city is the place where oppositional discourses and practices take place. Alternative imaginaries can challenge prevailing worldviews, show the contradictions of the neo-liberal hegemonic project and propose various forms of alternative sets of norms, beliefs, ideals; while alternative practices emerge at various scales of contestation, springing from deprived and often marginalised local groups and places, but also as national projects: there is a need to analyse the variety of imaginaries and practices that in spite of, and because of, the hegemony of the neoliberal culture, are resilient or are emerging (see Boniburini infra).

2015

In this chapter, we propose to follow over several decades the long, turbulent politics of composing an urban order in both its social and material dimensions – a political task that involves debates and confrontations to determine the city’s forms and, more fundamentally, who could live there and how. At stake is a quest for emancipation and the art of governing difference, a dialectic where the city reveals both its liberating and oppressive dimensions. Exploring this dialectic will, in particular, enable us to follow the slow and ambiguous integration of 1970s’ critical ideals into the order of the contemporary city.

Contour Journal, 2020

The challenge of this special issue in finding words and coming to terms with contemporary city and contemporary politics is amplified by the difficulty to pin point what and where exactly a city is and how can we perceive political activities in its context. We might be better off asking: what is not city today, which place on Earth is empty of city-ness? This special issue presents four contributions that proceed from the panel City, Civility and Post-political Models of Freedom and Conflict panel held in November 2018 as part of the Scaffolds international symposium organized by ALICE lab from the Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne, supported by the C I.II.III.IV. A, the Kanal Centre Pompidou, and with the participation of several institutions and university departments from KU Leuven, ULB, TU Delft, and TU Vienna. Without pertaining to comprehensiveness, the present collection captures some points in the debate on city and civility informed by questions that originate in d...

Urban Studies, 2021

A theoretical account of the genesis and internal spatial structure of cities is given. The essence of the urbanisation process is described in terms of the following main developmental phases: (a) the emergence of relationships based on specialisation and interdependence in society; (b) the pre-eminent role of the division of labour within these relationships and its recomposition in dense spatial nodes of human activity; and (c) the concomitant formation of the networked intraurban spaces of the city. These phases are then contextualised within three intertwined dimensions of urban materiality, namely, an internal dimension (the internal organisation and spatial dynamics of the city), a socially ambient dimension (the relational structure of society at large) and an exogenous dimension (the geographic outside of the city). In light of this account, an evaluative review of what I designate ‘the new critical urban theory’ is carried out, with special reference to planetary urbanisation, postcolonial urban theory and comparativist methodologies. I argue that while every individual city represents a uniquely complex combination of social conjunctures, there are nonetheless definite senses in which urban phenomena are susceptible to investigation at the highest levels of theoretical generality.

2003

Smith (1996: 230-232) characterized the late twentieth century crusade for a "new urban frontier" as akin to the Wild West of nineteenth century America. In the last ten years, not only in the North American context but in Europe too, extending the boundaries of the urban frontier-economically, politically, and culturally-has galvanized powerful urban coalitions in the task of re-taking-both ideologically and materially-city spaces from the visible and symbolic elements of urban degeneration. The project of urban reclamation has not been neutral but has been formulated within a post welfare, neoliberal politics that has promoted a ideology of self responsibilisation within a climate of moral indifference to increasingly visible inequality. These ideological shifts have been fuelled by, and consolidated in, an evolving form of state ensemble that, as a rapidly moving target (Hay 1996: 3), has been largely neglected in criminological analysis. It is the contention of this paper that the agents and agencies of the neoliberal state are constructing the boundaries and possibilities of the new urban frontier while simultaneously engaging in a project of social control that will have far-reaching consequences for how we understand the meanings of public space, social justice and the parameters of state power.

Handbook of Urban Politics and Policy

Critical urban studies are very difficult to define, even if we restrict our understanding solely to English-speaking debates. It goes without saying that if we include in the conversation other intellectual worlds, the complexity of the field increases significantly. This is due to the diversity of understandings of what criticism should be. As a starting point, we can define criticism as the expression of a reflexive operation about urban reality. Any reflection also requires a (temporary) withdrawal from the relentless rhythm of everyday life. It requires a certain "distance"; even to momentarily extract oneself from the viscosity of the "real" and the material. But this cognitive (reflexive) operation is more convincing when it is also based on a sensitivity towards this "reality," i.e. on the capacity that our body has to feel, to perceive, to listen to the world. Criticism is thus not only an abstraction of reality, but also a sensitive gesture contributing to produce this reality. In short, in this chapter I argue that criticism can also be an immersive experience. But this is not the most common understanding of critical urban studies. Until the 1980s, critical social sciences have been marked by two opposite forms of thought: structural determinism influenced by Marx on the Left, and radical individualism influenced by Hayek on the Right. Both streams of thought sought to challenge and revolutionize mainstream social sciences that were developing in the twentieth century in order to consolidate the Keynesian and corporatist nation-state. They challenged the mainstream, but they remained based on scientific abstraction. As the hegemony of such modernist frame of thought and sociopolitical form of organization began to erode at the end of the 1960s with the rise of new social movements, colonial struggles, and profound global economic transformations, new critical voices made their way into social sciences under the label of postructuralism (including feminism, critical race studies, postcolonialism). After a review of the original strands of critical urban studies, this chapter delves into some of the contributions of feminist, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and decolonial and postcolonial approaches to urban studies. These perspectives push social scientists to explore the city differently. It involves theorizing objects that are often ignored in research on urban politics such as affective rationalities, ontological assumptions, or intimate interactions.

neighborhood action movement dedicated to creating a more ecologically sensitive mode of city living … with flowers on balconies, squares full of people and children, small stores and workshops open to the world, cafes galore, fountains flowing, people relishing the river bank, community gardens here and there." 5 To get from here to there entails "a right to change … the city more after our hearts' desire." As such, the "right to the city" must be "a collective rather than an individual right… to claim some kind of shaping power … over the ways in which our cities are made and remade." 6 I am in sympathy with this radical vision of the right to the city. I am grateful to Harvey for at least spelling out these political distinctions. However, for one thing, he doesn't discuss the middle class position.