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作者

Caleb Althorpe Martin Horak

来源

URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW,Vol.59,Issue1,P.

语言

英文

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作者单位

摘要

IntroductionThe concept of the “right to the city” (RTTC), articulated by the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre more than fifty years ago, has come into widespread use both in academic circles and in the world of politics and policy. Strongly associated with urban-based calls for social justice and social change, it has become an umbrella term for many different demands (Mayer 2012, 63–64). It frames the goals of advocacy groups (such as the RTTC Alliance in the United States (Fisher et al. 2013)), the policy objectives of international organizations (UN HABITAT 2010), and even a piece of national legislation in Brazil (Fernandes 2007). Invocations of the RTTC generally share two core emphases: an insistence on the importance of the use value (as opposed to the capitalist exchange value) of urban space and resources; and the claim that the power to shape the city should belong equally to all its inhabitants (Purcell 2014; King 2020). The RTTC fuses a critique of the stark social inequalities that characterize cities under global capitalism, with a call to political mobilization framed through the language of rights. It is this synthetic character that gives the concept its broad appeal.Yet, the empirical success of the RTTC as a mobilizing frame for a socially transformative politics has been limited. In concrete circumstances, “claims for a “right to the city” are often strikingly specific regarding their thematic focus and the groups they speak for” (Blokland et al. 2015, 656–657). In addition, some scholars suggest the urban focus of RTTC claims may itself be limiting, “once the right-to-the-city frame is adopted, claims for local democracy and rights come into view while claims articulated on a larger scale move into the background” (Uitermark, Nicholls, and Loopmans 2012, 2548). Quite often, especially in the Global North, the RTTC frame is deployed to save some small oasis of noncapitalist urbanity for the benefit of relatively privileged protagonists, without regard for the global dynamics of capital on which that relative privilege is built (Mayer 2012, 64). When the RTTC frame has been taken up at broader scales —most often by international development organizations—it tends to be used to promote and re-legitimate preexisting developmental aims, thereby losing its critical edge. The RTTC in practice thus appears to be caught in a vice between two problematic alternatives: deployment as a slogan for fragmented, localized movements, or co-optation into dominant policy discourses. Given these realities, some scholars have argued that the RTTC is not (or is no longer) a useful frame, and that those who are concerned with a socially transformative urban politics should look to alternatives (Merrifield 2011; Uitermark, Nicholls, and Loopmans 2012).In this paper, we suggest that the limitations of the RTTC in practice should not lead us to declare its end as a useful framing concept for social transformation, but rather, to reconsider and clarify its ends—its ultimate normative purposes. We argue that there is unrealized power in the concept of the RTTC, a power located in a social vision that is grounded in Lefebvre's writings on the subject. This is a vision of a different urban society, in which inhabitants have the space to meet their needs through self-governed cooperation across social difference. While this vision is radically different from currently dominant urban relations, we argue it is in the current city that its foundation can be found. Our approach is not an attempt at Lefebvrian exegesis, but instead a response to the call by Goonewardena (2018, 467) to “tak[e] Lefebvre beyond Lefebvre.” We suggest that this view of the RTTC—as a call for a different sort of urban future—is both practical (since its potential is grounded in the realities of quotidian cooperation in today's cities) and inclusive (since it values heterogeneity and difference, and is open to all). As such, we suggest, it can serve as an integral basis for a broader urban-based politics of social transformation.In the initial sections of this paper, we consider the normative foundations of the RTTC through a critical engagement with current applications and conceptualizations, and a re-engagement with the ideas that Lefebvre originally articulated in Le droit à la ville (located in Lefebvre 1996). We argue that the power of the RTTC is not realized through legal rights guaranteed by the state, nor is it grounded solely in the moral and material claims of the urban dispossessed. Rather, building upon Lefebvre's treatment of the concept, the RTTC as we conceptualize it is, first and foremost, a right to create, engage, and participate in a differently constituted urban society. This “radical-cooperative” RTTC, as we call it, emphasizes that human material and social needs can be met by realizing the potential of the urban as a ground for collective action across social difference.Drawing on sociology and social theory, we suggest that despite the prevalence of inequality, hierarchy, and domination in contemporary cities, urban spaces—marked by the coincidence of social difference and physical closeness—can be a fertile ground for complex cooperation among inhabitants. The foundations for the positive vision of social cooperation across difference that underpins the RTTC, we argue, are found in the ubiquitous small-scale practices of cooperation that exist even in the highly unequal cities of today. While it can never replace state authority, self-managed cooperation has the potential to become a much stronger organizing principle in urban life than it is in today's cities. Part of the modus operandi of a transformative politics built upon the RTTC is to transform, through bottom-up practice, the current fleeting and discrete instances of collaboration into more stable and widespread patterns of self-managed cooperation, sustained by a “solidarity-in-difference,” through which inhabitants recognize and value each other as co-participants in the collective project of urban life.In the final sections of the paper, we turn to the question of what role the state might have, if any, in realizing this vision in the cities of today. We argue that pursuing a radical-cooperative RTTC involves expanding and diversifying spaces and sectors of urban life that are decoupled from global capitalism, in order for inhabitants to have the space to engage in self-managed cooperation. While contemporary global capitalism—which privileges competitive and inequality-reinforcing social relations—is buttressed by the state, we argue that the power of the state could and should be turned toward other purposes.By definition, self-managed cooperation cannot be brought into being by state action. However, if cooperative urban relations are going to expand beyond the margins of society—where they currently exist—and counterbalance the present dominance of social competition and exclusion in our cities, then they must be supported by the power of the state. Such state support, we argue, consists neither in legal “guarantees” of the RTTC, nor in a state-led redistribution of resources to the disadvantaged. Rather, what is required is a state whose policies and resources—at all state scales—constitute an enabling framework for grassroots practices of collective self-management, thereby allowing and encouraging a multitude of cooperative practices to flourish. Before elaborating on the radical-cooperative conception, we will critically review the two currently dominant applications of the RTTC that our conception responds to – what we call the “legalistic” and “radical-materialist” conceptions.