Introduction
This is a book about ways of thinking about cities and city life. Specifically, it is about the potential of cities to offer men and women the ability to comprehend and master the complex, multicultural realities of the modern world. It is also about the ways in which the city and its components—markets, governments, communities, public spaces, individuals' social networks—can thwart and limit this aspiration. More specifically, it is an analysis and a critique of the idea of the city in that strand of urban social theory that has looked to Marx for its theoretical and philosophical foundations. The book has two primary aims: first, to give an account of the intellectual history of an important discussion within progressive social theory and to place it in relation to wider developments in critical social theory, and, second, to suggest directions for a post-Marxian critical urban social theory that can give better answers to the pressing questions concerning identities, space, and social structure than those currently available.
Marxian urban theory (or Marxian urbanism, terms that will be used interchangeably) is above all a theory of modernity and the urban process in terms of the relationship between capitalist forms of development and the spatial patterning of the institutions of everyday life. This body of work is concerned with understanding the effects of money and power (capitalist investment and bureaucratic planning) on the everyday lives of those who live and work in the capitalist city. Its chief
Marxian urbanism's core thesis can be stated as follows: Because the modern city is one component of the larger capitalist social structure, the contradictions and antagonisms that emerge within and across urban space—which at first sight are organized primarily around neither economic classes nor production relations—are best explained in class terms. Conflicts over affordable housing, the fate of neighborhoods facing demolition, the distribution of resources among areas of the city varying by class, race, or ethnicity, and demands for greater community participation in local decision making express the contradiction pitting the interests of real-estate speculators, rentier landlords, and the local state in the greater commodification and valorization of land, housing, and space against the use values embodied in the homes and residential social networks of working people. By showing how the logic of investment and the circulation of capital shape urban political institutions and the spatial organization of everyday life in terms of the reproduction of labor power, and by demonstrating how urban conflicts, issues, and actors are in turn shaped by these urban processes, Marxian urban theory closes the gap between the apparent nonclass actors and issues and the purported class source of conflict.
Although the modern city is viewed as a mosaic of differentiated and overlapping spheres of communities, workplaces, and neighborhoods organized by status, ethnicity, and religion, Marxian urban theory rejects positions that claim that no one sphere has analytical primacy in the determination and explanation of social change, positions that abandon the idea of an objective set of social relations that structure forms of solidarity, consciousness, and identity. To do so would be to abandon the politico-theoretical implications of historical materialism in which the antagonisms that express a structural contradiction are linked to an emancipatory dialectical process of social change. Marxian urbanism thus retains the idea that class structure, identity, and interest formation are the central categories for understanding urban popular struggles and forms of power. As such, it is the perspective most strategically relevant to an emancipatory politics for the contemporary city.
This is the urbanism associated with the Marxian tradition, as well as that adopted by many other sectors of the Left, and it is the urbanism I challenge in this book. Focusing on the question of the identity of urban actors, I will argue against the primacy of class and for the limits of class—and for the limits of Marxian urban theory. It is important to emphasize, however, that the limits I have in mind are primarily theoretical, not empirical. My goal is not to provide empirical evidence of the prevalence of nonclass forms of urban collective action in a given situation. That such forms of action exist would not be very surprising, but it also would not be very illuminating, since it would not engage adequately with the Marxian assumption that nonclass forms of identity should be understood within a totality of displaced or disguised class elements. Rather, I argue that the patterning of social relations across urban space creates a fissure or dislocation—or as I will call it, borrowing a term from Jacques Derrida, “spacing”—within the very process of identification that forms the basis of group and individual identity. Because this spacing is constitutive of identity and is not the deformation of some prior essential identity (e.g., racial differences are not the fragmentation of a prior class unity but are constitutive of class), it thereby precludes the closure of identity around any single boundary or space.[1] The Marxian notion of class identity presupposes such a closure as a potential, if not an accomplished fact (that is, as a telos). The recognition of the constitutive nature of this dislocation undermines the claim for the analytically privileged status of class identity vis-à-vis other ones in the city.
I am not, it should be emphatically stressed, arguing against the relevance of class, if by this we understand a group that shares economic interests. Given the increasing inequality of economic resources and institutions, the organized collective action of subjects as workers pursuing economic justice is one indispensable element of a progressive political agenda. What I argue against is the idea, still retained by some sections of the Left, that class politics represents, or can in principal represent, the unifying category against the particularism and divisiveness of other identities. What I argue for is rethinking, not ignoring, class, rethinking the concept in the light of the social and theoretical developments of the last several decades that have brought the problem of coalitions to the forefront of both theoretical and strategic considerations. Stanley Aronowitz has summarized the concern of many who have realized that “the question for traditional socialism is whether it will be able to theorize its relationship to the new social movements” or be condemned to
Weaknesses in the economistic and reductionist assumptions of Marxian theory, including its urban subdiscipline, have become widely recognized and debated.[3] Less clear are the alternative conceptual tools that should replace them. The works of the three authors I consider in the following three chapters, Manuel Castells, David Harvey, and Ira Katznelson, represent the most important attempts to meet the objections discussed above. They have sought to get around the problem of class and workplace reductionism by proposing revisionist models of space and class. This attempt has not succeeded, and one of the primary goals of this book is to explain why this is so. A critical urbanism building on the democratic socialist tradition cannot be rescued from the difficulties associated with a Marxian mapping of urban space and the spaces of the subject. At the same time, as will become apparent, imagining a new perspective cannot abandon some key questions inherited from the Marxian tradition. The chapters that follow examine the inadequacies of the most important responses to the critique of class reductionism and go on to propose alternate ways of seeing identity, structure, and space that avoid these shortcomings.
IDENTITY, STRUCTURE, AND THE SPACES OF THE CITY
People dwell, but not in the way that they choose. This paraphrase of Marx's well-known observation captures well the three key themes that underlie this book.[4] The first concerns the distinct, but related, questions of subjectivity, identity, and agency; the second, the notion of space and its role in the patterning of everyday life; and the third arises from the acknowledgment that there are systematic constraints on action—that we are not free to make ourselves or act in the world just as we would wish. The debates over the interpretation of these three dimensions—identity, space, and structure—are far from settled. Their conceptualization and relations with each other are the subject of widespread controversy and discussion in contemporary social theory. They play such a significant role because they relate to the most significant themes and controversies facing our societies.
THE PROBLEM OF IDENTITIES
Several factors account for the fact that the problematics of identities, subjectivities, and agency are at the center of political and social discourse
This intensification of heterogeneity and difference—ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious—has raised many questions, particularly in the postcolonial context, where Europe is now decentered.[7] As the discourses and institutions of nineteenth-century industrialism and modernity, most notably the nation-state and class-based social movements and organizations, lose their structuring power over the lifeworlds of the inhabitants of neighborhoods, cities, and regions, questions over the integrative force of current institutions to embrace this apparent surplus of difference increasingly shape public discourse and debate. Between fragmentation and pluralization lies the anxiety over the figure of the universal, of the totality, pushing contemporary social thought to reengage with the question of identity.
The central motif in contemporary debates is without doubt the radical questioning of the foundationalist assumptions of philosophical and sociological discourses shared by both conventional and Marxian theoretical perspectives. This critique is by now widespread and well known, but its implications and ramifications for both theory and practice are still hotly debated and yet to be worked out. Nonetheless, several themes stand out. There has developed a greater sense that identities—who we are, personally, collectively—are best seen as self-reflexive projects of creating
The weakening of nation-states in the face of challenges from outside (the global economy) and from within their borders (identity politics), has put the status of democracy again in question. However, it has not eliminated the moral demand placed on all those who share a common territory and polity to enter into a public realm with some sense of unifying values and beliefs, however tentative and provisional. This democratic requirement sets the current experience of heterogeneity off from previous historical periods, when although differences did exist, the problems of forging a public sphere and a common destiny and of entering into a mutual conversation over the destiny of the groups involved were absent.[9] This normative imperative continues to influence and structure the problem of a multicultural democracy today. For example, neither the idea of a single, universalist notion of the good nor a fragmented politics of difference is an adequate response to the pressing problems of collective decision making and problem solving in the context of the recognition of the irreducibility of multiple identities.[10] As national governments minimize their regulative and welfare functions, this dilemma becomes increasingly an issue at the subnational levels of the city and the region.
One response to these dilemmas has been to adopt a perspective that takes complexity as the a priori feature of social identity. These approaches typically begin by deconstructing the so-called essentialist presuppositions embedded in political and cultural discourses so as to expose more clearly the fractured, overdetermined nature of identities, and they thus constitute many of the surfaces of emergence of the discourse around identity.[11] The meaning of home, the crossing of the border,
THE SPACES OF DWELLING
To dwell is to live in relation to one's environment, landscape, and community within a certain space. One dwells in the multiple spaces of one's subjectivity, but also in between them, on the borders, in between these spaces. One dwells in and on one's body. One dwells in the spaces between oneself and the image of the other. To dwell “means to inhabit the traces left by one's own living”[13] in a memory of a time and a place. Although to be modern means to reconcile oneself to a kind of homelessness, nonetheless, to be fully modern means to make oneself at home in the maelstrom and confusions of modern life. As I use it, “the urban” is the name of the locus of the “experience of modernity.” It names the everyday spaces of the city, the place of the encounter with diversity, strangers, the overlapping worlds of multiple allegiances, networks, and identities. The spaces of dwelling represent the second dimension examined here.
At the immediate empirical level, the spaces of the everyday are where people experience the world: homes, streets, neighborhoods, workplaces, public parks, “the city.” Through and within these spaces, people experience, concretely, the abstractions of capitalist modernity. Recent social history scholarship has shown, for example, the extent to which the solidarity underpinning the labor movement throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was crucially dependent in many cases upon the local communal bonds that tied together workers' experience in both the workplace and the residential community. These studies have shown that early working-class “culture” as a way of life depended on the articulation of the spaces of home, community, family, and workplace into dense social networks—a conclusion that eludes those aspatial perspectives that view the “point of production” as a unique source of identity for a working-class identity. As Marx and Engels saw, the emergence of the labor movement depended on the concentration of workers into factories and neighborhoods in which a sense of solidarity and common culture, beliefs, and interests could be articulated. Conversely, the decline of working-class organization and support (particularly in the United States) is in part due to the decentralization and diffusion of local communal networks by suburbanization and an increasingly differentiated
At the same time, recent theorists with sociospatial and philosophical perspectives on the city have argued that conventional ways in which space has been conceptualized are no longer adequate. Most important in this regard is the weakening of the local, bounded, physical space of the neighborhood or locale as the dominant scale for understanding individual and group identity, which the community-studies tradition took as its point of departure. The bounded community remains today as only one of a wider range of spaces that constitute identity and community. Inherited from the sociospatial conditions of nineteenth-century European and North American industrialization and urbanization, in which artisanal and working-class communities (as well as the nation-state) were spatially and socially bounded, this physicalist conception is no longer adequate for capturing the spaces of identity or power today.[15]
For many transnational, diasporic migrant communities, in contrast to those of the nineteenth century, individual and community identities are structured across multiple, sometimes contradictory spaces in complex patterns of imaginary representations and memory that suggest the need for a reconceptualization of identity and consciousness as fully constituted within fixed boundaries. For example, with reference to the Mixtec identity of migrants from Oaxaca, Mexico, to California, one writer has observed that the form that the new migration takes “erodes standard identities… and intersperses the self and other in interpenetrating spaces.”[16] But physicalist assumptions persist in the face of changing conditions. A recent ethnographic study conducted in the community-studies tradition examined the public interactions of blacks and whites and the factors reproducing racial segregation and identities in American inner cities. It failed to examine the part played by the electronic commercial media, advertising, and other representations in explaining the patterns of behavior, however.[17] This oversight resulted from an exclusive focus on the bounded institutions of the local neighborhood. What eluded its vision was the fact that the ways racialized bodies are represented “outside” the locale, in television, film, and music videos, could in many cases be variables influencing the identity of local residents that were as important as or more important than anything occurring within “the neighborhood.” Indeed, empirical studies employing social-network theory offer support for the idea of a loosening of the boundedness of the local
Many elements of contemporary social and geographic thought are extremely suggestive in this regard. Most important of these is the farreaching reconceptualization of the boundary and the border in terms of undecidability, ambivalence, and hegemony. The critique of the conceptual assumptions underlying the dualism of inside/outside, self/other, and so on, provides many new ways to overcome the traditional ideas of nonpermeable spaces. Robert Park's image of the early-twentiethcentury city as “a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate,” rooted as it was in assumptions from sociological objectivism, appears less and less relevant to a world characterized by identities whose primary ground is overdetermined, hybrid, and overlapping. This does not mean that identities cannot represent themselves in terms of rigid otherness or exteriority, or that, as in the case of racial or ethnic residential segregation, the promises of hybrid spaces cannot be violated. What it does mean is that such boundedness is not the expression of a preexisting identity constituted outside discourse, representation, or power but, on the contrary, the institution of a hegemonic closure and rejection of precisely those promises. The idea of spacing, rather than space, best captures these new modalities. Derrida has described spacing as “the index of an irreducible exterior, and at the same time of a movement, a displacement that indicates an irreducible alterity.”[19] Rethinking the city in terms of the interpenetrating and the undecidable—that is to say, overdetermined—spaces of gendered identities can help lead us to a cosmopolitan ethic, an openness to the other proceeding from the recognition of the stranger within us.
THE PROBLEM OF STRUCTURE
And yet, however more potentially fluid and open the identity choices seem to be, these choices cannot take place in a vacuum of unconstrained possibilities. Marx sought to account for the most important macrostructures that shape the possibilities of individual and collective action, and many observers have followed him in identifying the capitalist economy as the most significant framer of meaning and action. Marx's theory of the role of the capitalist economy in shaping consciousness, action, and the possibilities of social change was considerably more far-reaching than the important recognition that proletarianization was the most important phenomenon
Of course, the conceptualization of the economy and its relationship with forms of politics, culture, and ideology has been extensively debated over the last thirty years. Today, there is no question of maintaining a reductive topology in which the economy determines, even in a complicated way, a superstructure of social forms of life and institutions. Yet despite many cogent and compelling critiques of economic determinism, we cannot lose sight of the question Marx was attempting to answer. No serious account of obstacles to and possibilities of progressive social change can ignore the fact that there are powerful shaping macrostructures. Huge new agglomerations of capital and labor, finance, and resources are re-creating the cities and spaces within which we all must live. Far-reaching transformations and intensifications of the capitalist economy on a global scale and changing forms of state power are rearranging settlement patterns, labor flows, and intergroup relations into new forms of urbanism with important implications for political realignment, cultural-political agendas, new forms of inequality, and exclusion, as well as creating new opportunities for change.[21] Symbolic economies of commodified fantasy and desire such as the Disneyfication of New York's Times Square drive many political-economic projects of urban economic development.[22] Saskia Sassen and Susan Fainstein, for example, have demonstrated the way global economic forces have transformed major world urban centers and constrain local policy options.[23] These forces appear to possess an apparent quasi-natural objectivity that is difficult for localities and regions to escape. At the same time, they create conditions in which neighborhoods and localities seek to resist the local effects and contradictions produced by these large-scale changes.[24]
Nonetheless, it is no longer possible to conceive of the economy as the determining structure in the old manner. The disagreement arises over how to describe its contents in a manner consistent with the critique of economism and how to conceptualize the “objectivity” of the structures in a manner consistent with the critique of essentialism. The first remains an area of controversy, especially within the Left. An increasing number of historians, however, are arguing that the social transformations of the modern period, such as the creation of the nation-state, urbanization, industrialization, and the development of a market economy regulated and constituted through law and institutions, are best seen in terms of the mutually reinforcing logic of the economy and state power.[25] Rather than view the state as a reflection of the functional needs of the economy, they view both bureaucratization and commodification as structuring forces. Modernity is thus seen through the eyes of both Marx and Weber.[26]
The second and more complex issue is the way that the apparent objectivity of the structure should be conceptualized. Many critics of poststructuralism or postmodernist perspectives, including most Marxian writers, see the thoroughgoing deconstruction of the objectivity or the “real” as leading to the abandonment of structure for agency, in which identity, consciousness, and agency are “free-floating,” “unconstrained,” and so forth. Many discourse theorists do indeed give the impression of throwing out the structural baby with the objectivistic bathwater. Indeed, it is regrettable that few poststructuralist analysts of social and political institutions (in contrast to philosophers or literary critics) have engaged seriously with the debates in social theory over the links between identity and structure. Yet I do not think that the charge that certain postmodern positions imply a return to idealistic premises is valid. Despite the undertheorization of the nature of structure, especially in relation to political and economic institutions, it is best to read most variants of discourse theory as attempts to rethink the notion of structure and to deconstruct the identity/structure dyad in ways compatible with the critique of objectivism. Nonetheless, this venerable problem of social theory (the problem of linking the macro and the micro, or social/system integration) needs to be taken up by an anti-essentialist critical social theory.
Taken together, these three dimensions, identities, space, and structure, define the project of critical urban theory and give rise to four related sets of questions.[27] First, how are we best to conceptualize social actors and explain the variation of social action and collective identities
This book is an attempt to provide some answers to these questions. To do this, I focus on the Marxian tradition in urban theory because, although inadequate in many respects, it has been the most important response to this problematic. Accordingly, in the next section, I provide a brief overview of the contribution and limitations of this body of writing as a whole so as to provide the broader context within which the more detailed analysis of the work of the three major writers in the field should be read.
IDENTITIES, SPACE, STRUCTURE,
AND THE LIMITS OF URBAN THEORY
Mike Savage and Alan Warde have summarized the main contribution of urban sociology and related branches of thought over the last century as the elucidation of the interdependence of the social institutions that form everyday experience in their contextual spatial settings.[28] Marxian urban theory emerged in the late 1960s as the most ambitious and important attempt to reinterpret this tradition of urban theory within a critical, normative framework. (It is not surprising, therefore, that Walter Benjamin's sociospatial readings have recently been taken up with much interest by critical urbanists. Benjamin's work converges with the central concerns of critical urban theory to unmask and rearticulate the meaning and experience of everyday life—in the streets, in the arcades, and in the parks—within the dynamics of capitalist modernity.)
To understand the reasons behind the emergence of Marxian urban theory, it is important to recall the dominant perspectives on conflict and power in urban political life in the 1950s and 1960s in Western Europe and North America, which were largely articulated from within conventional political science and urban sociology.[29] Robert Dahl's Who Governs? published in 1961, which provided a powerful argument for the pluralist nature of the local political system (and, by implication, the national political system as well), quickly became the dominant analytical paradigm, both in the United States and in other countries such as
The eruption of social protest around a range of issues, from the new social movements to the “ghetto riots” in the cities of the Western world in the 1960s, clearly rendered these frameworks inadequate. As Claus Offe has pointed out, interpretations that viewed all movements occurring outside formal political channels as the irrational and expressive demands of anomic deviants were at odds with the characteristics of most of these movements.[30] For example, the modernist values and goals of racial justice, equality, dignity, respect for environment, greater local autonomy, and community participation in local decision making espoused by largely working-class and middle-class actors did not support the theories of “irrational” collective behavior or of urban life as consensual and nonconflictual. Especially with regard to urban conflict and urban movements, the dominant explanations simply did not expect the emergence of conflict.
Marxist theory seemed to offer a more promising framework for understanding urban conflict, and both political and theoretical interest in it revived in the 1960s. It differed from the prevailing orthodoxy by seeing conflict, antagonism, and contradiction not as a breakdown of the system but as being at the heart of society and social change. Although Marxism expected conflict, it had more trouble with reconciling two distinctive features of urban conflict with the theory of class antagonism. First, the arenas within which the urban crisis manifested itself and around which mobilization occurred have been typically outside the workplace, in the residential community. Second, the social actors involved in urban struggles were not only outside labor organizations such as trade unions, but they could not be described as occupying uniquely working-class positions,
Throughout Western Europe and North America in the postwar period, the dynamics of urbanization, real-estate investment, and speculation in city land caused the displacement of large numbers of poor and working-class people. It also brought an alliance of local government and real-estate capital, and in some cases local organized labor, into increasing opposition with local residents who mobilized to protect their homes and neighborhoods. Residents joined together to resist redevelopment, more often than not with little success. Although the participants could be classified as “workers,” they were acting as cross-class coalitions of residents or as consumers of housing and space. Because these urban conflicts were over consumption items such as the right to housing and over space, the right to inhabit a locale, their relationship to the class organizations such as trade unions (or also, as in France, the Socialist or Communist Parties) was either nonexistent or fraught with tension.[31] All this added up to new actors, new social contradictions, and new challenges for progressive theory and strategy.
Contemporary observers confirmed the sense of important socioeconomic and political transformations. Reflecting on the Paris student rebellions, for example, Alain Touraine spoke of “new class struggles in new areas of social life such as urban life, the management of needs and resources, of education, which nonetheless were not economic conflicts. Today the working class is no longer the protagonist par excellence of historical evolution.” Daniel Singer wrote that the French crisis (of May 1968) “does not confirm the extreme theories about the birth of a new revolutionary class taking place traditionally attributed to industrial workers, the proletariat. They suggest new splits, new cleavages, and new alignments reflecting new social contradictions.”[32]
As the “city” began to take shape as an object and terrain of political and ideological conflict, Marxian theorists and socialist politicians took up the challenges of interpreting these new historical realities. Henri Lefebvre, one of the grand old men of Marxist philosophy in France, spoke already in 1968 of “the right to the city” and pointed to the transformation of industrial to urban society as the most significant feature of contemporary social experience. The Situationists and Guy Debord (their best-known member) made the spaces of the city the canvas on which a new antipolitics could be imagined.[33] However, the urban challenge
We are witnessing increasing political intervention in the urban neighborhoods, in public amenities, transport, etc., and at the same time, the charging of the sphere of “consumption” and “everyday life” with political action and ideological confrontation [that require] new tools of intellectual work. We looked for these tools, mainly, in the Marxist tradition. Why there? Because we had to answer questions linked to topics such as social classes, change, struggle, revolt, contradiction, conflict, politics. These terms and themes refer us back to a sociological theory at the heart of which is the analysis of society as a structure of the class struggle. But this theoretical preference (or venture) poses particularly difficult problems for urban analysis. For here the Marxist tradition is practically non-existent and the development of theory must be linked to the historical recognition of the new problems posed by everyday life.[34]
The Marxian urbanists who in the late 1960s and 1970s began to work out a new paradigm at the confluence of Marxian and urban theory sought to meet the challenge by demonstrating the links between the sources of urban social contradictions in the class-contradictory nature of capitalist society and the manifestation of these contradictions in urban conflicts and antagonisms. This was necessary because the new urbanization seemingly had severed the link between capitalist structure and working-class agency that had been most apparent in the industrial city. At the most general level, the task was, first, to show how the dynamics of capitalist economic development create the institutions of urban governance and the patterns of everyday life, such as the separation between workplaces and community residential spaces,[35] and, second, to then show how these urban structures shape new patterns of group identity formation and conflict among urban actors. Because urban social movements typically embrace issues of consumption (e.g., affordable housing, transportation), political autonomy and community control, and other quality-of-life issues, and not issues involving production relations, this argument was necessary to close the gap between the class source of social contradictions and the nonclass effects of the urban crisis.
At the same time, all theorists turning to this problem recognized, in varying degrees to be sure, the need for a solution that did not simply reduce the urban to matters of class. Sensitized to the problems of totality and reductionism by Althusser, Marxian urbanists embraced the need
The physical and discursive separation of workplaces and residential communities is the hidden gap or fissure, the “spacing,” in the Marxian concept of class. The modalities of this fissure (or “lack”) form the subject of the chapters to follow. Here it is sufficient to point out that all three theorists that I examine below, the leading theorists of Marxian urbanism, take this separation between work and home more or less explicitly as the key problem to be solved. For example, David Harvey has described the goal of Marxian urban theory as the need “to illuminate… the vexing questions that surround the relationship between community conflict and community organizing on the one hand, and industrial conflict and work-based organizing on the other.” Ira Katznelson's argument in City Trenches proceeds from the observation that “American urban politics has been governed by boundaries and rules that stress ethnicity, race and territoriality, rather than class and that emphasize the distribution of goods and services, while excluding questions of production or workplace relations. The centerpiece of these rules has been the radical separation in people's consciousness, speech, and activity of the politics of work from the politics of community.” And Manuel Castells has observed that “while the forefront of the process of industrialization was occupied by the struggle between capital and labor to share the product and to shape the state, the backyards of the growing cities were the scene of a stubborn, often ignored resistance by residents to keep autonomy in their homes and meaning in their communities.” Castells concludes that “neither the assimilation of urban conflicts to class struggle nor the entire independence of both processes of social
Between the late 1960s and the late 1980s, emerging in several disciplines and in several national contexts, the Marxian approach in urban theory has made important contributions to our understanding of urban processes.[38] Several questions about cities that we would want to ask would seem difficult to answer without at least some Marxian approaches. These questions concern developments such as the historical patterns of urbanization and city growth that correlate well with large-scale epochal changes such as from feudalism to capitalism (at least in Western Europe and North America), the vast increase in global urbanization since the early nineteenth century, transformations in land use and social geography during the period of industrialization, and cycles of urban decay and renewal. Employing the concept of the reproduction of labor power, the Marxian approach has exposed the structural links between the production spaces of the workplace and the consumption spaces of the community and family and home. The classic distinction between use value and exchange value has been applied to local community, neighborhood, and housing struggles to suggest the contradiction that pits local poor, minority, and working-class residents against property developers and land speculators. Marxian analysts have shown how tightly knit, bounded communities, in the workplace and in the residential community, can create the solidarity required for class-based collective action. Marxian analysis has clarified the contradictory functions of the local state in reconciling consumption and quality-of-life issues with the need to encourage accumulation. The focus on the spatial dimension of the circulation of capital has helped urban theory move away from an evolutionary model of urban change to one that recognizes the role of crises in the rhythms of capital accumulation. This has contributed to explanations of phenomena such as gentrification and abandonment in terms of combined and uneven development, that is, as interrelated phenomena.[39] Moreover, understanding the spatial distribution of economic resources and investment illuminates the geography of inequality and justice as one aspect of the contradictory and crisis-prone dynamic of the capitalist economy.[40]
Despite these strengths, today the Marxian paradigm has lost much of its power. Whereas at its inception it set the parameters for critical urban analysis, by the 1990s, the picture had changed so dramatically
appears totally innocent of the issues raised in social theory by the feminist critique of Marxism, by poststructuralism and postmodernism, and politically by the collapse of communism. [We] must surely face up to current intellectual and political challenges, rather than ignore them. It is… the collapse of certainty, of the instability of meanings and values, of constant change and flux which have been brought back into focus. Surely a more adequate response… would involve relating issues arising from Marxist cultural criticism with the concerns of urban sociology and urban studies, and… breaking with historical narrative.[41]
In reviewing new directions in urban analysis Nigel Thrift makes some similar points. For example, of Sharon Zukin's influential work, he writes:
Strangely, for all the postmodern trappings of Landscapes of Power, it seems to me, rather like Harvey's (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity, to have taken remarkably little of the substance of postmodernism on board. Of course some might applaud this stance but more emphasis on work concerning issues like power and the self, consumption and subjectivity, and place as an absent presence, derived from poststructuralist tenets of various kinds, might have helped rather than hindered Zukin's case.[42]
While predictably useful in illuminating the economic dynamics that influence the spatial patterning of social life,[43] the Marxian branch of urban theory has had difficulty capturing the overdetermined nature of agency and identity, developing a nonreductive concept of state power and cultural representation, and breaking with an objectivistic notion of interests and social agency. Of course, these problems are not unique to Marxian urbanism, overlapping in considerable degree with the widespread debates within the Left and among social theorists over the last three decades. Yet, in addition to the problem of breaking with an objectivistic notion of geographic space, they remain the key unresolved questions facing Marxian urban theory.
The first problem presents itself typically in terms of relating workplace and community-based identities, for example, in trade unions and neighborhood organizations such as tenant organizations or movements for greater neighborhood autonomy from central and/or local government. The debate over the nature of urban identity vis-à-vis class has revolved around the question of autonomy or primacy. Urban identities are viewed either as a displaced manifestation of class identities or, where
The critiques of the reductionist views of the state and governmental action as derivative of the needs of capitalist economic relations are well known and do not need rehearsing here. As a variety of writers have pointed out, deriving the state and government policies from the functional needs of capitalist accumulation does not do justice to the interplay of the economy, the state, and the urbanization process. What is important in the present context is to recognize that for the most part, Marxian urban theory has embraced this reductionist conception of the state, and with it the notion that the principal structuring macroelement in social life remains the capitalist economy. Although economic determinism can be rejected, as an analytical point of departure, the problem of theorizing the relative autonomy of the state remains.
As far as the treatment of space is concerned, Marxian urbanism has tended to operate with a notion of bounded space similar to that of the community-studies tradition. However, the notion of absolute space, that is, as a container of social relations—while working well for some localities that are similar to the small, bounded, artisanal and proletarian communities of the nineteenth-century industrial city—is by itself inadequate to capture the dynamics of identification and social networks in contemporary conditions.
Marxian urban theory has thus inherited, however ambivalently, the answers given to the three questions of identity, space, and structure by the classic Marxian scheme: How should the range of collective identities be understood? What is the role of space in social relations? What are the key constraints and structuring conditions in social life? Katznelson has shown how, by building on Engels's early work on Manchester, the tradition of Marxian urbanism has answered the three questions in terms of linking the variations in working-class formation, the changes in the physical space of the city and in the social institutions of everyday life (the pattern of workplaces, homes, public spaces), and transformations in class structure and capitalist development.[44] Engels's account of how the spatial class structure of industrial capitalism and working-class neighborhoods permitted the sharing of ways of life (what we would today call social networks) pioneered a critical urban social theory by
The most important part of this legacy remains the three questions that lie behind the particular answers given by Marxian urban theory. The answers themselves—the primacy of class identity, a bounded, physicalist conception of space, and the primacy of the capitalist economy as the structure of modernity—are no longer adequate. What this suggests, then, is a shift in the terms of analysis and a concomitant transformation of the agenda of critical urban theory. I am proposing a perspective that can provide three new answers to the three old questions, answers that can capture identities that are more fluid, multiple, overdetermined, or “hybrid,” rather than reduced to class, provide a conception of space that can embrace the representational and imagined, as well as the physical dimensions of the urban with ambivalent, undecidable boundaries, and identify the repressive effects of “normalization,” surveillance, and overadministration of everyday life that result from the logic of bureaucratization, which now acts alongside commodification as an independent source of the dislocation of settled or sedimented social relations, identities, and cultural traditions. These three dimensions not only provide the architecture and key concerns of the present book, they also constitute the principal themes in current critical urban theory.
EMERGING THEMES IN CRITICAL URBAN THEORY
Since the high point of the influence of Marxian political economy within critical urban theory in the 1970s and 1980s, attention has shifted to what is typically viewed as the “cultural” terrain of constructing cities: symbolism, representations, the role of the electronic and other popular media in defining the city and its problems, the everyday practices of marginal and subaltern populations, such as maintaining oppressed migrants' home-style architecture and neighborhood associations, and so on. Some observers have interpreted this shift as the emergence of a new paradigm, resulting from broader developments in social theory, from which urbanism has usually imported its conceptual resources, that have given greater attention to the cultural dimension, the persistence of racial, ethnic, and other forms of identity politics that emphasize cultural goals and social recognition alongside questions of economic redistribution, as well as the waning of the “urban social movements” organized around local public-consumption goods as significant players in
Many of the consequences of this shift are positive and illuminating. From cultural studies, for example, urban sociologists, critical human geographers, and, to a lesser extent, urban political analysts have embraced semiotics and other methodologies of textual analysis, seeing the city as text and deconstructing the representations of the city, its contours, contradictions, and inhabitants, within dominant economic and political discourses.[46] Some writers have begun problematizing the role of the interpreter-analyst in representing/constituting the object of “the city.”[47] There has been much more explicit attention given to the problematics of space: how it should be conceptualized, what role it should play in our conceptual frameworks, the significance of the metaphorical dimension of spatial terms such as the “border,” “margins,” “fissures,” and “outside/inside” that play a large role in the new cultural politics of difference.[48] An important implication of these new perspectives is the deconstruction (loosely understood) of the city as a unified object: there are as many cities as there are interpreters of the urban text. At the same time, in the best works, questions of economic structure and the material distribution of resources have, appropriately, not been ignored but have been reread through the cultural lens. The economy is viewed as symbolically constructed, as are images and popular understandings of minorities, the poor, and the ghetto. As Christine Boyer suggested in Dreaming the Rational City, the city is better seen not only as a place within which power is deployed but also as the object and effect of power.[49]
Sharon Zukin, for example, has shown how the economic development strategies of the “global” city now depend as much on promoting symbolic and cultural institutions, such as museums, Disneyfied public spaces, and recreational park spaces, as on traditional economic institutions.[50] The strength of Zukin's analysis is the way it allows us to see that cultural representations are now part of the economic structure. For example, the urban revitalization strategies of U.S. cities in the face of depopulation and deindustrialization depend not simply on attracting labor, households, and capital but also on developing an attractive image through cultural and representational strategies that reflect inequalities of power defining “whose city” it is. In his most recent work, Castells has offered a new image of the city as a node within a global network or space of flows of information, complete with the “black holes” of the
They nevertheless come with several limitations, too. One is the poorly integrated relationship between what is viewed as “material” issues (economic relations, resources, and inequality) and cultural issues (meaning, ideologies, representations). The danger here is the opposite of the reduction of these two moments into a base/superstructure scheme. Instead, the sense of totality and determination in these newer writings hovers between leaving unelaborated and ad hoc the place of the macrostructure in the theory and falling back into a base/superstructure model, which after all never implied one should not take superstructural elements seriously, but only told us what these really “represented.” Although I cannot do justice here to the rich variety of these emerging perspectives, I would point to three main limitations of the current literature. First, the three-tiered agenda of linking agency, space, and structure in social theory is rarely explicitly taken up in the new writing. Indeed, with the rejection of reductionist and essentialist assumptions of past theory, this broader agenda also has been discarded. To an extent this reflects the
Second, there is an undertheorizing of bureaucratization as a structuring moment of contemporary urban life. Coherent notions of state power and its relations to the economy and forms of identity, culture, and tradition are inadequately developed. In this respect, much (although by no means all) of the new postmodern urban literature appears to abandon structure for agency. Where structure is accounted for, attention is focused exclusively on the economy, leaving the state as a residual or derivative aspect of the structure. Of course, it has now become widespread to reject the idea of locating a single source of power. Following Foucault, power is seen as dispersed, capillary, rhizomatic. But this should not blind us to the systematic aggregation and concentration of power into institutions that are relatively stable over time. (I return to this problem in more detail in Chapter 2.) The one-sided emphasis on agency results from, first, the absence of a more satisfactory notion of structure to replace the economic determinism derived from the Marxian model and, second, an inadequate deconstruction of the agency/structure dyad. To move from one pole to the other does not escape the framework within which both are constituted.
The third limitation concerns the absence of a vocabulary for the more elusive dimensions of the self, or the unconscious, in almost all recent formulations concerning the spaces of identity of the subject. Slavoj Ž izžek has pointed out how the postmodern fascination with the surface, in conjunction with a fear of all “depth models” of the subject, results in a neglect of the fact that the surface of a text (social, urban, film, biological) harbors a deficiency and a lack.[57] However, this is not the lack that a signifier would fill (for which the surface text would be the signified, or “stage of representation” to use Derrida's phrase) but a constitutive lack that nonetheless suggests that in the “surface” there is something that always escapes the eye.[58] Thus, in a pure postmodern politics of plurality and difference (as well as in economistic models of rational choice),
The recent work of Michael Peter Smith is a good illustration of the strengths and limitations of the new postmodern urban theory. Writing in the context of the United States, Smith aims to develop a postmodern urban social theory with three main objectives. First, the theory should be able to explain the more complex, fluid, heterogeneous nature of ethnic and racial formation and identity choices in the context of a globalizing economy and new patterns of international migration. Second, it should avoid reducing the dimensions of symbolism, meaning, and action to an effect of an objective context or structure. And third, it should thematize the power and role of the authorial voice of the social scientist in the representation of subjects' everyday experience.[61]
Smith rejects views that understand the behavior and identity of social actors solely in terms of the influence of external forces. Rather than locate the sources of power relations in “big structures” (to echo Charles Tilly's phrase), in the nation-state, the relations of production, or the global economy, postmodern ethnography focuses attention on power relations in the microlevels of the symbolic dimensions of everyday life. These power relations are embodied in representations, in a variety of discourses such as music, video, and film, in “concrete” practices such as the coping strategies of poor migrant households, and in communal forms of solidarity at the level of everyday, urban, space-time. These practices (the “weapons of the weak”) potentially can be expressions of opposition and resistance to capitalist reproduction at the global and local levels—a fact missed by a Marxism fixated on the organized class struggle. According to Smith, analysts should focus on the ways actors negotiate within and then modify
For Smith, postmodern ethnography is the appropriate basis of a new urban theory for two principal reasons. First, by operating with a poststructuralist theory of language, it can capture the flexible and multiple identities embraced by postmodern subjects. Second, by asking people to delineate and reveal the opportunities and constraints they face in making meaning of their lives, that is, by taking as its starting point the “constitution of subjectivity,” postmodern ethnography resolves the micro/macro, structure/agency problem. Because it assumes that “the context of social life is no less a social construct than the narrative texts of people's everyday life,” it permits the analyst to “read” the refracted presence of objective structures (the imperatives of the labor market, the administrative domination of the bureaucracy, the border police) straight out of the subjects' experiences. Smith recognizes that it is important to address the “objectivity” of social systems, but this is best approached through postmodern ethnographic methods, by which “the investigator can intersubjectively experience the lived contradictions of the larger social system as they are ‘imploded’ into the social relations and everyday life of the ethnographic subject.” Following Foucault, Smith maintains that “the distancing of grand theory from its subjects of inquiry objectifies and therefore masters.” By this he wants to say that any knowledge developed from the perspective of the observer, rather than that of the participant, reflects an authorial desire to “produce the real” and the power to do so.[62] Nonetheless, Smith insists that his proposal does not abandon the sociocritical power of theoretical discourse, unlike those social constructionists who react to functionalism by embracing voluntarism with no sense of constraints on action. For example, he suggests that we retain the analytical strategy of studying the variation in modes of resistance, accommodation, and agency to similar economic constraints and forms of social control.[63]
There is much to learn from this. Smith's arguments against foundationalist, teleological, and essentialist assumptions are persuasive. They
However, I would point to two main difficulties with Smith's approach. First, despite adopting certain poststructuralist ideas as a way of overcoming the essentialist assumptions of modernist and Marxian approaches, it is unclear how adequately these are integrated into his postmodern social theory. This becomes clear in the way Smith deals with what he sees as the essentialist consequences of viewing the terrain of the constitution of identity in terms of binary oppositions such as are found in race, gender, and Marxian class models.[64] In its place, he suggests we adopt the postmodern perspective that prioritizes the plurality of the different over the duality of the other. But this overlooks the fact that the significance of deconstruction lies precisely in its recognition that dualisms cannot be simply rejected, or left behind, which would amount to a false sublation. As Gayatri Spivak has noted, deconstruction does not eliminate the fundamental inherited categories of social thought but puts them “under erasure” in that we still have to think with these categories, even if it is against them and in a new way.[65] The deconstruction of the duality of the other opens what Derrida calls différance, a neologism that captures the way in which the subject, meaning, and experience are constituted by difference and yet by which presence, be it of the subject, meaning, or experience, is deferred.[66] From this point of view, the purely other and the simply different are symptoms or effects of a hegemonic operation that stabilizes the boundary between two entities that are initially overdetermined vis-à-vis each “other.” As Patricia Clough has pointed out in her critique of Smith, a “deconstructive criticism will not simply valorize ‘the plurality of the different’ over the ‘duality of the other’; différance points to the persistence of ‘othering’ in the writing and identity, the persistence of the productivity of the unconscious in writing and identity, even in writing the differences of identity.”[67] Smith is aware that his emphasis on the simply different risks falling into a pluralist framework. Yet his appeals to ideas such as “hegemony” and “articulation,” while welcome and provocative, are left undeveloped
Moreover, by claiming that (postmodern) subjectivity is socially constructed, Smith overlooks the unconscious dimensions, splits, and divisions that invest the “inter-subjective” realm of the lifeworld with ambivalent demarcations and contested boundaries.[68] Central to this problematic is the question of gender, not only as a subject position around which interests and group identity can be woven, but also in the fundamental sense that subjectivity is irreducibly gendered. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in the spaces of the city. The separations between and differential meanings associated with home, community, and workplace; the fact that the “right to the city” has always been differentially inscribed in a space where the “private” male gaze surveys the “public” streets (do women even now have the freedom of streets?); the entire series of connections that Sennett has shown to exist between the eye, the body, and the concrete spaces of the city—all these reflect internal demarcations of subjectivity, undecidable to be sure.
The second reservation I have with Smith's proposal concerns his notion of structure, which remains ad hoc and untheorized. In fact, Smith's attempt to overcome the problems of linking agency and structure by reading the presence of the structure of macro, global constraints from within the subject's articulatable experience comes up against similar problems experienced by phenomenologically based, interpretive sociology and by Althusserian structuralism, two earlier attempts to resolve the problem in this way.[69] Althusser, it will be recalled, proposed that rather than view the structure as an objectivity standing wholly outside the subject (this radical dichotomy forming the basis of essentialist notions of the liberal subject, itself standing wholly, ideally, outside of all social and historical determinations) we should interiorize the structure within subjects' consciousness and interpret the structure as “immanent in its effects.”[70] Although these formulations had far-reaching implications later taken up by writers such as Ernesto Laclau and Stuart Hall, they avoided, rather than resolved, the problem. Many critics saw these formulations converging with the notion of normative integration prevalent in sociological theory. The early work of Manuel Castells also attempted to overcome these subject/structure dichotomies by employing concepts derived from Althusser and Poulantzas. As we will see, their inadequacy explains in part his shift away from Marxian theory as a whole.[71]
Smith's notion of the immanence of the structure within language and immediate experience runs the risk of falling into the “hermeneutic idealism”
Smith's work thus illustrates well several of the key contributions, as well as the limitations, arising from the rethinking of Marxian urban theory. Elements of the answers I wish to give to the three questions posed at the outset about identity, space, and structure should now be clear from the preceding discussion. First, identities, agency, and subjectivity should indeed be seen as plural, but identities are also “hybrid,” that is, overdetermined, and structured by the unconscious desires in a relation of alterity to the other and the self. These elements I argue are best analyzed with concepts derived from the deconstructionist theory associated with Jacques Derrida, psychoanalytical theory, especially that of Jacques Lacan, and the political theory built around the concepts of articulation and hegemony most explicitly developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Against Marxian urbanism, I argue that this notion is incompatible with the Marxian assumption of the analytical primacy of class identity. It is equally incompatible with pluralist theories of interest groups, liberal theories of atomism and individualism, and economic models of individual strategic rationality. However, for the most part, the focus of what follows is concerned only with the critique of Marxian formulations.
Second, I follow Michael Peter Smith and others in adopting an expanded and transformed notion of space that includes, in addition to physical geography, the metaphoric and “imaginal” forms that are part of the symbolic “stuff” that form the experiential world of communities and individuals.[75] However, I suggest that the notion of space, which is associated with fixed boundaries even where it is pluralized, as in postmodernism, be replaced by that of “spacing,” a notion derived from deconstruction. The concept of spacing is better at expressing not static
Third, I suggest that the idea of structure as it is found in most Marxian as well as sociological treatments be transformed in two crucial ways. In its form, structure should be viewed not in terms of the exterior of a fully constituted subjectivity, the total, fully constituted context (e.g., the economy), but as a hegemonic totality that is unstable and whose ability to determine all the elements of the social is limited not by an essential kernel of subjectivity that stands outside of it (the existentialist position) but by a built-in lack or incompleteness. (Marx grasped this in terms of the limit placed on the needs of economy by the resistance of workers to exploitation but placed this contradiction within a higher-order totality without an internal limit.) We can further this conception by a selective use of the lifeworld/system distinction derived from the work of Habermas. That is, we can account for the character and content of the system as qualitatively distinct from the linguistically mediated dimension of the lifeworld. This does not however necessitate the adoption of Habermas's own interpretation of the lifeworld, where an ontological primacy is accorded to communicative action among all other forms of speech act. Habermas's theory of the lifeworld by itself appears too rationalistic and intentional. The analysis of language provided by deconstruction and psychoanalysis as a medium for the constitution of identities is in my view more satisfactory. Taken together, this adds up to a modified version of the lifeworld/system distinction combining a poststructuralist understanding of the lifeworld and a model of social structure derived from Habermas's interpretation of systems theory. By embodying both economic and state processes of commodification and bureaucratization, the Habermasian notion of “system” provides the only coherent answer to the question of the sources of reification of consciousness sought by Marx while at the same time breaking with economic reductionism and an essentialism of the subject. The “system” in this view represents the quasi-natural field of social relations that have been abstracted and regulated through the steering media of money and power and that fall outside the immediate intuitive grasp of subjects' consciousness. The historical development of the system is captured in the idea of increased system rationalization, an idea familiar from Weber's discussion of bureaucracy.
These alternative answers to the three questions of identity, space, and structure add up to an agenda for a critical urban social theory distinct from that found in both the Marxian tradition and current postmodern
I am aware of the ambitious nature of this proposed synthesis. Readers may have noticed that I have already used concurrently the language of French poststructuralism, Habermasian critical theory, and comparative social science. I have deliberately employed concepts from these perspectives so as to suggest the intuitive compatibility of many (but of course not all) of the concepts. This may appear at first glance an improbable approach. Has not much of contemporary critical social theory and philosophy centered on a debate between two opposing and seemingly irreconcilable camps, with theorists such as Foucault, Derrida, and Laclau on the one side and Habermas and Offe on the other? Let me not give the impression that the debate can be simply avoided. There are indeed, in my view, many unresolvable differences. My warrant for connecting the system theoretical notion of self-regulating systems (the market economy and the bureaucratic state) with a poststructuralist view of culture, identity, and language is that each contributes an element that up until now appears missing from the other's camp.
Some poststructuralist accounts appeal to the “anonymous” workings of the market as a source of dislocations but lack a correspondingly theorized account of the social institutions that have taken on systemic characteristics. While the economic reductionist notion of structure has been discarded, no alternative notion has emerged that retains the purpose of the Marxian idea of causality and determination while eschewing the specific foundational answer given by Marxism. The result is that poststructuralist accounts of social forms (as opposed to literary criticism, or philosophy) are highly institutionally underdetermined, with little
The objective of the book is to make this alternative three-tier framework for critical urban theory plausible. Another objective is to give an account of and evaluate three decades of Marxian urbanism. To achieve both, my procedure will be to provide close readings of the works of the three theorists who have grappled most extensively with the problems introduced above. My aim is to reengage with these writers in a critical dialogue so as to work out the alternative directions that can be read out from their work. One intellectual historian has described the rationale for this type of enterprise well: “We academics think and teach in terms of books. Critical discourse is dialogical in that it attempts to address itself simultaneously to problems and to the words of others addressing those problems…. [I]t is an enactment of the humanistic understanding of research as a conversation with the past through the medium of its significant texts.” Dominick LaCapra also adds, pertinently to the circumstances of urban social theory, “It is also an especially vital forum in a contested discipline that is undergoing reconceptualization.”[79] Thus, the book is Janus-faced: it glances back at the intellectual history of an important body of work to delineate its core themes and limitations, but it also looks forward, taking what can be learned and, where necessary, moving on.
The plan of the rest of the book is as follows. Taking the motif of the separation of workplace and community residence as a heuristic point of entry (an opposition that is then deconstructed), I try to show how the engagement of Marxism with the spatial dimension of cities plagues it with a quandary. Marxian urbanism is based on the Marxian class concept, which in turn is irreducibly tied to the workplace, but Marxian urbanism aims to make sense of urban phenomena that are not restricted to the workplace. The question faced by all Marxian theorists of the city, then, is how to think in a nonreductionist way the relationship
Chapters 1 through 3 each deal with the problem of the unstable class/urban relation from three distinct but related angles. Each respectively focuses on one theoretical weakness that afflicts Marxian urban theory (essentialism, functionalism, and androcentrism), employs a particular perspective of critique (deconstruction, Habermasian systems theory, and feminist labor history), examines the work of one author whose work is most illustrative of each of the three problems (Castells, Harvey, and Katznelson), and finally, proposes an alternative concept (articulation and overdetermination, system/lifeworld, and the gendering of space). It is best to keep this rather complex architectonic framework in mind when reading the somewhat intricate analysis of the individual chapters.[80] As a whole, the argument presents an interpretation of the “history” of Marxian urbanism—that is to say, its intelligibility—in terms of a complex, nonlinear movement built around a central blockage and hinging on the unstable relationship between the concepts “urban” and “class.”[81]
Chapter 1 introduces the core problem with an analysis of the work of Manuel Castells.[82] Drawing from the work of Derrida and Laclau, I use Castells's work to show how the essentialist assumptions underlying his interpretation of the class/urban relation creates an instability around which the discourse helplessly oscillates. Chapters 2 and 3 present two “subsequent” moments responding to the impasse created by this oscillation. The essentialist quandary could be solved in two ways: either by reasserting the logical coherence of class determination of urban processes and identities or, alternatively, by embracing the historicity and undecidability of the class/urban interrelationship. The former option is illustrated in the work of Harvey. However, I show that this solution is achieved only at the expense of a second shortcoming, namely, the functionalist reduction of the interpretation of social action to moments within the circuit of capital. Shifting the level of analysis, Chapter 2 examines the problem of functionalism from the perspective of Habermas's distinction between system and lifeworld in a way consistent with the critique of essentialism developed in Chapter 1. Chapter 3 examines the third and most provocative attempt to present an alternative, historically
The fourth and concluding chapter has three parts. After providing a brief summary of the main arguments of the preceding chapters, I address several possible objections that could be leveled at the alternative framework. In response, I argue that that rejecting economism does not, and should not, discount the market economy as a crucial shaper of urban space and of urban life. Then I argue that hybridity and spacing have important implications for everyday life, for city planning practice, and for the design of local political institutions. Finally, I illustrate these claims with two examples from the United States. First, I discuss the implications of the fragmentation of municipal or local government for the diversity of citizens' identities and social relationships and critique a form of liberalism that sees the solution to problems of urban diversity in a plurality of homogeneous enclaves. Second, I examine the place of “community” in recent approaches to urban design and city planning such as the New Urbanism.