Adrianne Sykes

“Dare we call it class struggle?”-David Harvey

“Black Lives Matter” (Black Lives Matter @ Public Theater New York City by Vladimir licensed under 2.0 Generic (CC By-SA 2.0).

“Jordan Neely” (https://hannahfaulkner.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/jordan-neelys-strangulation-death-on-the-new-york-subway-what.png).

            This week’s readings included “The Right to the Just City”, by David Harvey with Cuz Potter, “The Right to the City” by David Harvey, and “Whose City?” by R.E. Pahl. All three readings examined the concept of urban renewal, urban development, and social justice. According to Harvey, “the question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire” (Harvey, 2009, p. 23). From that quote, one can believe that he supports contractualism because contractualism is about a shared agreement among those who live within a city which is just. However, Harvey rejects many prior theories of social justice because he thinks they lack concrete and practical application to contemporary problems cities face regarding social justice. In both articles, “The Right to the Just City” and “The Right to the City”, Harvey posed that theories regarding social justice need to be useful to solve contemporary issues. He examined the role of neoliberalism and social processes’ impact on urbanization. In his article, “Whose city?”, Pahl discussed urban planning and renewal in Britain comparing it to America. More specifically, he analyzed the role of urban planning professionals in urban renewal. He believed the elite have the last say in influencing urban planners and architects in this process.

            I agreed with many of the authors’ premises in this week’s readings. In “The Right to the Just City”, David Harvey with Cuz Potter, Harvey stated that Thrasymarchus from Plato’s The Republic, may have been right. As much as I rejected Thrasymarchus’ definition of justice when reading The Republic, Harvey presented a compelling argument for this stance. He stated that “Thrasymarchus might have been right: justice is simply whatever the ruling class wants it to be. And when we look at the history of jurisprudence and of judicial decisions and how these have evolved in relation to political power, it is very hard to deny that ideals of justice and practices of political power have marched along very much hand in hand” (Harvey, 2009, pp. 40-41). Harvey then proceeded to present the concept of the territorial logic of state power and the capitalistic logic of power. State rights support the right of states to enact laws to protect their citizens. However, for those without proper documentation such as immigrants, transients, or the homeless the state has the right to marginalize or disregard them. The other, capitalistic logic of power involves property rights and individual ownership as well as the accumulation of capital through market exchange. Both logics are opposing sides of the same coin; linked together due to economic circumstances. “These two logics of power are often in tension if not outright opposition to each other at the same time as they must in some way fulfill and support each other lest social reproduction dissolve into total anarchy and nihilism” (Harvey, 2009, P. 42). The states guarantee the rights of those who own property because they are dependent on the tax base provided by those who own property which creates issues with social justice for those who do not own property. Both concepts explain how social justice is influenced by the elite who are allowed to dictate how services are rendered and cities are developed. What is good about the article is that it breaks down these two political processes and demonstrates how “Thrasymarchus’ theory could be correct. According to Harvey, Thrasymarchus’ theory that “each form of government enacts the laws with a view to its own advantage’ so that ‘the just is the same everywhere, the advantage of the stronger” (Harvey, 2009, p. 40). This viewpoint has been the essence of neoliberal policies throughout the world more specifically within the United States. Harvey’s evidence supports his premise that “the bundle of rights and freedom now available to us, and the social processes in which they are embedded, need to be challenged at all levels. They produce cities marked and marred by inequality, alienation, and injustice” (Harvey, 2009, p. 45). Class struggle is at the heart of the struggle to take back the right to the city which has been overwhelmingly encroached upon by neoliberal policies since the 1980s.

            Similarly, in “The Right to the City” Harvey provided an analysis of class struggle at the core of urban renewal. He describes how cities arose through geographical and social concentration of surplus production and how urbanization has always been a class phenomenon (Harvey, 2008, p. 24). In addition, he compares the urbanization of Paris in the 1800s and cities within the United States demonstrating the similarities. As a result of Bonaparte commissioning Haussmann to rebuild Paris, Paris became a tourist attraction to the world just like New York City where consumers were able to finance the city. In addition, both cities were built as a result of the elites’ control of urban developers and planners. He compared Haussmann to Robert Moses who resurrected Haussmann’s architectural style. According to Harvey, Moses prided himself in taking a meat axe to the Bronx, whilst displacing and bulldozing mostly African American slums in the city’s slum clearance programs during the 1940s. These examples demonstrate how the elite unjustly treated those when deciding who had rights and whose rights they could disregard.

            I appreciated Harvey providing a historical context to the concepts he examined and listing them under recognizable headings, for example, Urban revolutions, Girding the globe, making it easy to reference the material. Harvey’s suggestion for unifying the global struggle is to formulate a common demand that includes greater democratic control over the surplus that is produced through urbanization (Harvey, 2008, p.37). I think that this is a viable solution to the ever-increasing land grabs on a global scale that feed the accumulation of capital and greed for profits under neoliberal policies. At least it would be possible to redistribute the wealth as well as incentivize participation in the urban renewal process.

            Lastly, in his essay, “Whose city?”, Pahl explored the question of who’s responsible for the social issues that come with urbanization. He discussed the role of sociologists and urban planners in the urban renewal process in Britain and the United States. I agreed with his observation that “if the culture of poverty is defined as those cultural patterns which keep people poor, it would be necessary to include in the term also the persisting cultural patterns among the affluent which, deliberately or not, keep their fellow citizens poor” (Pahl, 1975, p. 191). What is good about this essay is that Pahl poses a question at the beginning of his essay, what is to become of the city? He eventually answers it with the statement, “the city is what society lets it be” (Pahl, 1975 p. 187 and p.194). The only limitation of this essay is the author’s failure to fully explain what is meant by “positive discrimination” in the last paragraph of the essay. Otherwise, this piece provided a detailed analysis of the role of sociologists and urban planners in constructing a just city.

            In conclusion, the right to a just city involves many concepts. The rights of the masses will come about through struggle against the powerful few who have taken over those rights to land, and other spaces on a global scale. Harvey posed a question of what the global masses should demand when they come together to demand their right to the city which is to demand the surplus from the accumulation through urbanization.Regarding this global struggle, Harvey stated” the opportunities are multiple because, as this brief history shows, crises repeatedly erupt around urbanization both locally and globally, and because the metropolis is now the point of massive collision-dare we call it class struggle?-over the accumulation by dispossession visited upon the least well-off and the development drive that seeks to colonize space for the affluent” (Harvey, 2008, p. 39). A struggle for the surplus can lead to the redistribution of resources and increased political clout among the masses. Lastly, the struggle for the right to a just and fair city must come from the masses in the form of demands for transformative policies that are more socially, politically, and economically inclusive.

References

Harvey, D (2008). “The Right to the City” New Left Review. (September-October) 53.

Harvey, D and Potter, C (2009). “The Right to the Just City” in Marcuse, Connolly, Novy, Olivio, Potter and Steil (eds.) Searching for the Just City: Debates in urban theory and practice. New York NY: Routledge 40-52.

Pahl, R.E. (1975) “Whose City?” in Whose City. Middlesex UK: Penguin Press.