Unsettling critical urban theory

CITY, VOL. 16, NO. 4, AUGUST 2012 Unsettling critical urban theory Sharon M. Meagher I n this short paper I want to sketch out some preliminary ideas on the implications of the conceptualization of urbanization in critical urban theory for our understanding of the right to the city, specifically to the possibility and necessity of insuring the extension of the right to the city to those who still live in rural areas that are sites of resistance to the forces of urbanization. How can we conceptualize, understand and build networks of solidarity with people in such communities? Is such not necessary if critical urban theory is to have full relevance to many spaces and peoples in the global South, where much of this fight is taking place? While the right to the city is reasonably well theorized and practiced as (to use Peter Marcuse’s phrase) ‘a cry and a demand’ (Marcuse, 2009, p. 190) in many slum cities and favelas in the global South, what of those who are still fighting to resist dislocation from their rural lands to the growing urban slums? Here I can only provide the briefest outline of my argument in the hope that it will foster both dialogue and point to some future directions that both critical urban theory and our journal City might take. My argument simply is this: we need to critically analyze the ways in which our understanding of ‘the city’ and urbanization still depends on a hierarchical binary understanding of rural and urban, city and country, global North and global South—in spite of, or perhaps because of Lefebvre’s insistence (adopted by most in the critical urban theory camp) that the world is now urbanized. Further, such critical reflection is essential if we are to extend the scope of critical urban theory to connect with our comrades in the rural global South and move towards the realization of a radically new world (see Goonewardena, 2009, p. 217). In his essay in Cities for People, Not for Profit, Peter Marcuse cites Lefebvre in defining what a city is, and makes it clear that he intends to expand the scope of critical urban theory to include all peoples. Marcuse answers the question ‘what is a city?’ as follows: ‘Lefebvre is quite clear on this: it is not the right to the existing city that is demanded, but the right to a future city, indeed not necessarily a city in the conventional sense at all, but a place in an urban society in which the hierarchical distinction between the city and the country has disappeared. The demand of the landless farmer in the Amazon in Brazil is not met by giving him entrée to a favela in the middle of Rio de Janeiro.’ (Marcuse, 2009, p. 193) In her essay in the same collection published in City, Margit Mayer presents a powerful argument about the uses and abuses of the slogan ‘right to the city’, ‘distinguishing a radical Lefebvrian version from more depoliticized versions’ (2009, p. 362). She also raises a version of the question that I raise here, asking ‘whether the city, especially the city of the global North, really still represents the place that harbors the prerequisites for revolutionary forces of social change?’ (p. 363). In the first version of the essay in City, Mayer defers this question, but she takes it up in her revised essay in the published book collection. There Mayer acknowledges that Northern theories that call for local urban movements to build transnational networks might fail to understand the conditions in the South and also fail to recognize that the North is likely to ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/12/040476–5 # 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2012.696926 MEAGHER: UNSETTLING CRITICAL URBAN THEORY 477 benefit more from possible transnational networking than will the South. She further acknowledges that the urban poor in many global South cities are organizing in new ways that are not well documented in urban social movement research (Mayer, 2012, p. 79). Mayer’s revised analysis suggests the possibility that cities of the global South might provide resources for change that are critically important and cannot be supplied by theorizing either social urban movements or contradictions of capital as they coalesce in cities of the global North. However, her analysis still assumes that the metropoles are the locus of change. This claim is repeated throughout the volume. In their introduction to both City 13(2 – 3) and again in the book, for example, Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer identify common traits of critical urban theory, the fourth and fifth of which are that critical theory is concerned ‘to decipher the contradictions, crisis tendencies, and lines of potential or actual conflict within contemporary cities [my emphasis]; to demarcate and politicize strategically essential possibilities for more progressive, socially just, emancipatory, and sustainable formations of urban life’ (2009, p. 179, 2012, p. 5). This claim is repeated by Brenner in his answer to the question what is critical urban theory, arguing that one of the four propositions shared by most critical urban theorists is that ‘they are concerned to excavate possibilities for alternative, radically emancipatory forms of urbanism that are latent, yet systematically suppressed, within contemporary cities’ (2009, p. 204, 2012, p. 19). Let me be clear: I am not arguing against the claim that ‘cities operate as strategic sites for commodification processes’ (Brenner et al., 2012, p. 3) and therefore deserve our attention. David Harvey makes a compelling case for continuing theoretical focus and political attention on cities in his latest book Rebel Cities (2012). Rather, I follow Harvey’s reminder that while Lefebvre argued that divide between urban – rural was fading, we still see that it has ‘proceeded at a differential pace throughout the world’ (Harvey, 2012, p. xv). However, while Harvey acknowledges this, he then returns his focus to cities, and argues: ‘Though there are plenty of residual spaces in the global economy where the process is far from complete, the mass of humanity is thus increasingly being absorbed within the ferments and cross-currents of urban life’ (p. xv). Inarguably Lefebvre (and Harvey) are correct that we continue to live in an age of rapid urbanization. However, I am urging care in not moving too quickly to foreclose a distinction between urbanization and cities, particularly in thinking about cities as the sole places of resistance and promise for political change. Here I want to remind us of the resources for change that might be found in those ‘residual spaces’ that Harvey notes. While work on and in cities is crucially important, there are other theoretical and political resources to be found in communities around the world that are not yet fully urbanized, particularly in the global South. It only stands to reason that we must recognize resources for change everywhere, and not only in cities, if we take seriously Lefebvre’s claim that the world is urbanized and recognize (as most critical urban theorists in the Cities for People, Not Profit volumes do) that we are no longer talking about identifiable cities. Or, as Christian Schmid puts it, if we follow Lefebvre’s path from focusing on the form of the city to the process of urbanization. What constitutes the ‘urban’ and the ‘rural’ is itself in flux, but there are peoples who live in rural or not fully urbanized areas who perceive urbanization forces as a threat to their livelihoods and who have mounted viable resistance movements from which we all can learn. If we insist on cities as the locus of change and the places of promise, then have we not re-imported the hierarchy of city/country and urban/rural back into our analysis? Moreover, given that most rural peoples live in the global South, does not such a reinstantiation of that hierarchy also imply a favoring 478 CITY VOL. 16, NO. 4 of the more urbanized global North over less urbanized global South? Clearly, there exists no neat division between an urbanized global North and a rural global South. The global South is urbanizing at a remarkable rate. However, empirically, those spaces that have thus far resisted urbanization processes or where urbanization processes are incomplete are mostly spaces in the global South. Thus to speak of the ‘city’ when many peoples in the global South still do not live in one, but do confront the forces of urbanization, is to forget, through the usage of the verbal shorthand ‘city’, those peoples and their modes of resistance. Part of our difficulty stems from our indebtedness to Lefebvre and the fact Lefebvre himself repeatedly abandoned and returned to the language of ‘city’. However, it also stems from the fact that most of us buy into part of the modernization/urbanization project—we just want to de-couple it from capital (and perhaps also the state). And so our political imaginations are, in fact, linked to both historical movements located in cities (e.g. the Paris commune) and to the “urban promise” that cities were constantly offering and yet constantly breaking: the promise of liberty, opportunities for encounter, urban culture, and appropriation of public space’ (Schmid, 2012, p. 44). However, are not those promises grounded in the everyday life of city dwellers (particularly those who are citizens in the global North)? Moreover, is not this everyday life interpreted through the lens of hierarchical binary thinking—the city promises what the country never did. Nevertheless, are we then to conclude that the better life for peasants who work the land is grounded in an experience of (urban) everyday life that threatens the (everyday) way of life of peasants? How can we insure that the promise is grounded not only in the everyday life of the urban experience, but in the everyday life of the rural experience? Or, to put it in other terms, what work is necessary to realize the promise that the ‘future city’ is the oeuvre of ALL citizens? While the everyday life of the city reveals particular contradictions of capital and also points to some possibilities for change, we may find other modes of resistance and opportunity in the everyday life of rural peoples. And, by re-embracing urban/rural in a NON-hierarchical fashion, come closer to realizing the promise of a transformed world. In asking us to be clearer about claims of the right to the city, I am not engaging in the romanticization of ‘the rural’ or arguing for a ‘return’ to pastoral or peasant life. Those who call themselves ‘peasants’ whom I know personally—and here I limit my accounts to communities in rural Puebla, Mexico—recognize the encroachment of processes of urbanization in their communities and take what I have called elsewhere a ‘both/and’ strategy (Meagher, 2009). That is, they understand urbanization as a threat to ‘their way of life’ (Blaser et al., 2004) and resist those aspects of modernization while at the same time adopting those processes that they judge might benefit their communities and offer them a different future. The seeds for a better life and a better world are found both in their refusal of some urbanization processes and in their embrace of others. In addition, their resistance movements explicitly reject neoliberalism specifically and a capitalist political economy more generally. Indigenous women’s activist Rufina Edith Villa Hernandez of San Andrés Tzicuilan (Cuetzalan, Puebla) recently recounted the story of her community’s success at resisting hotel development that would have affected the local water supply and to the building of a Walmart that would have threatened local business (2012). However, she and her community do not resist all economic development; rather, they want development on their own terms. Rufina manages an ecotourism hotel that is for people, not for profit. One hundred women belong to the economic cooperative (Maseual Siuamej Mosenyolchicauanij) that owns the hotel. They have established environmental MEAGHER: UNSETTLING CRITICAL URBAN THEORY 479 standards, hold meetings and empowerment workshops informed by the pedagogies of feminism and the Freirean popular education movement, and make decisions communally on the basis of what they determine are the needs and interests of the community. While there are some problems and challenges with eco-tourism, they have no delusions that they are ‘free’ from the global economy. However, they do their best to negotiate strategies for engagement that encourage critique of urbanization and development processes that threaten their communities. Moreover, they draw much of their strength to resist from indigenous traditions that are themselves being reshaped by their experiences of resistance. In Huehuetla, Mexico, for example, communities have organized to demand better education for their children—an education that is both bi-lingual (in an effort to save their indigenous language Totonac from extinction) and bi-cultural. They fought for a hospital that offers both allopathic and indigenous medical treatment. Moreover, they have been successful—their demands on both counts have been heard and met! Traditional indigenous healers are paid through the State medical/insurance system just as are allopathic doctors and children can attend bi-lingual and bi-cultural schools from primary grades through college. The recently built Intercultural University of Puebla offers majors in sustainable development, agriculture, and language and culture preservation, and those majors draw on both indigenous knowledge and the latest research from universities in both the global South and North. Such an education provides the community’s children with some real choices about what kinds of work they want to do, how they want to live and where they want to live (Meagher, 2009). This analysis suggests that we may need to revise the questions with which I began: How can we conceptualize, understand and build networks of solidarity with people in rural communities? Does doing such necessitate yet another revolution in our conceptualization of ‘the city’ and ‘the urban’ as well as the processes of urbanization? If we are to follow Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer in understanding the right to the city in the broadest possible way as the cry and demand of all marginalized peoples, then perhaps the way to do that is not to privilege the city as the sole site of resistance, but to recognize—on equal terms—the knowledge and everyday life practices of both urban and rural peoples. There are peasant communities in the global South who are already doing this work. So perhaps our question should be: are the rest of us willing to listen and learn? References Blaser, M., Feit, H. and McRae, G. (2004) ‘Indigenous peoples and development processes: new terrains of struggle’, in M. Blaser, H. Feit and G. McRae (eds) In the Way of Development: Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects, and Globalization, pp. 1–25. London: Zed Books. Brenner, N. (2009) ‘What is critical urban theory?’, City 13(2–3), pp. 185–197, rpt. (2012) in N. Brenner, P. Marcuse and M. Mayer (eds) Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City. London: Routledge. Brenner, N., Marcuse, P. and Mayer, M. (2009) ‘Introduction’, City 13(2–3), pp. 176–184. Brenner, N., Marcuse, P. and Mayer, M. (2012) ‘Cities for people, not for profit: an introduction’, in N. Brenner, P. Marcuse and M. Mayer (eds) Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City, pp. 1–10. London: Routledge. Goonewardena, K. (2009) ‘Urban studies, critical theory, radical politics: eight theses for Peter Marcuse’, City 13(2–3), pp. 208–218. Harvey, D. (2012) Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso. Marcuse, P. (2009) ‘From critical urban theory to the right to the city’, City 13(2–3), pp. 185–197. Mayer, M. (2009) ‘The “right to the city” in the context of the shifting mottos of urban social movements’, City 13(2–3), pp. 362–374. Mayer, M. (2012) ‘The “right to the city” in urban social movements’, in N. Brenner, P. Marcuse and M. Mayer (eds) Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City, pp. 63–85. London: Routledge. Meagher, S. (2009) ‘Challenging the green revolution through both/and strategies: the case of indigenous women’s cooperatives in rural Puebla Mexico’, 480 CITY VOL. 16, NO. 4 Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, Las Vegas, NV, 25 March. Schmid, C. (2012) ‘Henri Lefebvre, the right to the city, and the new metropolitan mainstream’, in N. Brenner, P. Marcuse and M. Mayer (eds) Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City, pp. 42–62. London: Routledge. Villa Hernandez, R.E. (2012) ‘Presentation made to University of Scranton class ‘women and development in Latin America’, Cuetzalan, Mexico, 12 January. Sharon M. Meagher is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Scranton. Email: [email protected] Copyright of City is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.