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.