CityReads│The Urban Question Debate

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The Urban Question Debate

The New Urban Question, Andy Merrifield debates on the old and the new urban questions from and for the perspective of the critical urban tradition that developed out of Marxism in the 1970s.

Andy Merrifield, 2014. The new urban question, Pluto Press.

Source: http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745334837#

In his book, The New Urban Question, Andy Merrifield debates on the old and the new urban questions from and for the perspective of the critical urban tradition that developed out of Marxism in the 1970s, as pioneered by the likes of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Manuel Castells.

What is the old urban question?

The old urban question was conceived in the 1970s by one of its proponents, Manuel Castells. Its definition was relative to socialized goods and services, relative to public goods and services provided by the state. Castells labeled them items of "collective consumption", goods consumed in common, consumed collectively, like housing and schools, hospitals and mass transit. They are socialized goods functionally important in the reproduction of labor power.

The raison detre of collective consumption is to produce literate but compliant people, those who kowtow without too much fuss to the dominant order. The urban question became a question of how the state managed this state of affairs, how it orchestrated collective consumption, how it planned and funded collective consumption, kept its own political legitimacy with its constituency over collective consumption. The urban was a "spatial unit" of this social reproduction of labor-power.

Urban politics included two strands: interventions by the state and interventions by ordinary people in the state's intervention. The state thereby mediated class and social struggle, diffused and deflected it, displaced and absorbed it, insofar as it intervened between capital and labor within the urban context.

Urban politics is the collective political intervention in the process of labor reproduction, an engagement wherein urban social movements battle over retaining collective consumption, even try to self-manage collective consumption.

Critique of Castells’s urban question

The urban question of Castells is now the old urban question. Defining the urban as a spatial unity of collective consumption no longer holds.

Castells's urban question is now an archaic urban question: the stakes and arenas of struggle have changed markedly since his day.

Castells knew it himself; and this became one reason—an erroneous reason—why he felt he needed not only to abandon his old urban question (and The Urban Question), but also Marxism to boot.

Castells identified a new political subject: urban social movements. As the 1970s unfolded and gave way to the 1980s, urban social movements sprang up in continental Europe—as elsewhere—contesting the state and demanding continued investment in collective consumption, continued investment in working people.

Castells’s thesis began to crumble in the face of the inexplicable: collective consumption items, so vital for social reproduction, so functional for capital, so necessary for the overall survival of capitalism—how could it possibly be that the state would desist from funding them?

The biggest drawback of Castells's old urban question is his passive rendering of the urban, that the urban is a spatial unit of reproduction rather than a space which capital productively plunders: capital now actively dispossesses collective consumption budgets and upscales land by valorizing urban space as a commodity, as a pure financial asset, exploiting it as well as displacing people. This is precisely where neo-Haussmannization raise its ugly political-economic head.

What is the new urban question?

One of the biggest debates in the 1970s was about the nature of the urban. What is urban? What is a city?

The city plays a special order under capitalism. It was important in the birth of capitalism. The city assumes a twin role: an engine for capital accumulation and a site for social/class struggle. It is crucial for the expansion of capitalism and for overthrowing capitalism.

In The Urban Question, Castells wondered what is this concept "urban"? Why urban sociology and not simply sociology? Castells was trying to figure out the specificity of the city, for both theory and politics, and it's a question we might still want to ponder.

Urban as a single substance includes many attributes--the built environment, transport infrastructure, population densities, topographical features, social mixes, political governance, which are all the formal expressions of what pervades it ontologically. The "city" is an attribute of the urban. These attributes are how the urban looks and how it can be seen and known. The urban isn't out there, necessarily observable and measurable, but is immanent in our lives, an ontology not an epistemology, not a transitive attribute of our society but the immanent substance of our society.

We should stop using the term city, Lefebvre says, and adopt the terminology" urban society". Urban society is built upon the ruins of the city. We should leave behind the form of the city and embrace the apparent formlessness of urban society.

Theory and politics are central planks of the new urban question.

Empiricism and positivism cripple our ability to understand more fully the major component of this new urban question: neo-Haussmannization.

The incessant media hype and “expert” yapping about exploding urban populations, about the fact that x many people will be living in urban settlements in y number of years and that the percentage of urban dwellers will soon be reaching epic global proportions, obfuscates the class and power question surrounding our current urban question.

Neo-Haussmannization signifies a new riff on an old tale of urban redevelopment, of divide and rule through urban change, of altering and upscaling the urban physical environmental to alter the social and political environment. What happened to mid-19th Paris is now happening globally, not only in big capita cities and orchestrated by powerful city and national political-economic forces, but in all cities, orchestrated by transnational financial and corporate elites everywhere, endorsed by their respective national governments.

They create a global orthodoxy, one that's both creating and tearing apart a new urban fabric, one that clothes the whole wide world.

Neo-Haussmannization produces its Other, powers a dialectic of dispossession and insurrection, an accumulation strategy as well as a rebellion waiting and plotting in the wings.

The urban is revolutionary, and, as such, the revolution will be urban.

The old urban question looked toward the urban to resolve the problem of building a social movement. The new urban question builds a social movement to resolve the problem of urban.

Theoretical explication of the new urban question is a deeper insight into what's happening to our urban world, how it is used as an accumulation strategy by wealthy, powerful people, how they produce spatial and social inequalities.

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