A reposting of today’s blog by Raj Patel, the author of Stuffed and Staved and his new book The Value of Nothing.

“My friend Bill K recently sent three pieces about an idea that crops up in The Value of Nothing – The Right to the City. It’s the absurd notion that, within cities, people ought democratically to be able to control and manage the city’s resources.

The Right to the City is a necessary idea, particularly if you think that cities can harbour progressive and ecologically sustainable social change. Stewart Brand , in a Panglossian article seems to think that ’slums will save the planet’, but Mike Davis – an altogether more thoughtful scholar – does too. Sure, cities can be more ecologically and socially sustainable that rural communities, but that doesn’t happen by magic. Nor, as Brand seems to forget, is there anything terribly desirable about living in a slum. As he would discover were he ever to leave his houseboat visit one, most people would rather not live in one. And neither author spends as much time as he ought thinking about gender in the city. So where will the politics of sustainable urban change come from? The movements for the Right to the City can help answer that. More below the fold, and in the next two posts.

The Right to the City Alliance: Time to Democratize Urban Governance

Progressive Planning
Fall 2009

http://www.plannersnetwork.org/publications/2009_fall/leavitt_samara_brady.html

The Right to the City Alliance: Time to Democratize Urban Governance

by Jackie Leavitt, Tony Roshan Samara and Marnie Brady

In 2007, grassroots organizers in the United States formed the U.S. Right to the City (RTTC) Alliance as a means of taking their cities back from the coalitions of affluence that had formed during the 1980s and reframing the central scale of social struggle from the global to the urban. RTTC is one of the first mass formations to emerge from the previous era of sustained anti-globalization struggle stretching from the end of the Cold War through the election of George Bush, the attacks of 9/11 and the war on Iraq. Although it is a relatively new movement, RTTC holds much potential for re-centering and advancing the struggle for democratic urban governance. Planners Network has joined RTTC as a resource group….

it continues …The “right to the city” as a concept has captured the imagination of many involved with urban social struggles but it remains an underdeveloped social movement ideology. Below we provide an introduction to the alliance by briefly discussing some of the campaigns in which members in the Boston and New York City regions are engaged. We then attempt to draw out some of the key principles and issues which underpin these efforts and inform initiatives to develop national expressions and link these groups to others across the country and globe. Our data are drawn from interviews with RTTC members, participant observation and review of movement documents and campaigns.

The City as Battleground

What unites the various RTTC members can be traced to the conditions facing urban communities across the country. Recent decades have seen once abandoned or neglected central cities reemerge as central economic and political nodes in the global economy; as a result, struggles over urban space have intensified. Although member organizations were formed in response to highly specific local events, their struggles are defined by the need to defend urban neighborhoods from encroaching developers and gentrifiers, to confront apathetic, negligent or antagonistic officials and to grapple with the local, national and global forces that govern urban spaces in their interests. In doing so, RTTC organizations, as well as the broader communities from which they come, are engaged in an attempt to radically redefine and reclaim urban democracy. They are guided by a deeply held belief that they have a right to the spaces they call home.

City Life/Vida Urbana, based in the Jamaica Plains neighborhood of Boston, was founded in 1973 to fight disinvestment and over time it has expanded its tenant organizing to other parts of Boston. It pioneered the idea of an “Eviction Free Zone” and a “Community-Controlled Housing Zone” to resist evictions, make visible existing ownership patterns and identify where power was situated (see article in PN, pp. ). Other RTTC organizations were founded in response to more recent neoliberal policies, such as that established by the Los Angeles City Council when it approved “workforce” housing on an ad hoc basis but avoided investing major resources into housing for those of the lowest income. L.A. has exacerbated conditions for the poor by pursuing “glamorous” projects like entertainment complexes that ultimately demolished buildings, displaced tenants and reduced the housing supply for those most in need. In response, RTTC-LA has begun a campaign to develop a community-based housing plan. This involves tenant leaders surveying neighbors to document code enforcement violations based on their lived experiences; in the process, new leaders are emerging and survey findings are expanding the ways in which regulating code enforcement is tied to larger questions about power and the community….

…Linking Theory and Practice

As a movement and a theory, right to the city remains a work in progress.
Within and beyond the RTTC, individuals and organizations are involved in the difficult political work of generating a theory that is both rooted in both the day-to-day struggles and realities of people’s lives and capable of creating opportunities for radical, long-lasting, social change. While the debate will continue, looking at RTTC campaigns allows us to begin to identify some emergent principles.

Right to the city at its most elementary concerns the relationship between people and place. It is from here, arguably, that all other rights are derived from and, in turn, grounded in. Drawing from Henri Lefebvre’s original work from 1968, Le Droit a La Ville (Right to the City), right to the city is a political feature of the urban inhabitant, a new form of political belonging not rooted in national citizenship but in urban residency, from which it draws its political power. Issues related to residency have surfaced recently in immigrant struggles to get the vote in local and municipal elections and there is a history of undocumented immigrants gaining voting rights in school elections.

From this central principle, we can see in the actions and analyses of RTTC members and the alliance as a whole a subset of rights that gives a more defined form to the rights to the city. These are neither written in stone nor apply universally to all communities in all places, but they do allow us to move the process of defining the right to the city forward as grounded in actual struggle. Engagement with an ever-widening circle of social movements committed to deep transformation will only strengthen the frame.

…Linking Rights, Democracy and Planning

It is impossible to disentangle the discussion of rights from that of democracy, and perhaps right to the city is best understood as one of this generation’s attempts to breathe new life into government by the people, as the struggle for radical democracy and what some call deep democracy.
At the same time, the movement and theory must be grounded in the lives of real people and the concrete conditions of urban communities. Categories such as citizen and worker, while still relevant, are insufficient to contain and represent the multi-faceted struggles of urban inhabitants who are women, documented and undocumented immigrants, LGBTQ and people of color, many of whom may exist at the peripheries or even outside of the formal economy. New struggles for democracy, inside the city and beyond, will need to create political subjects and agendas that transcend these categories without losing sight of the particularities that shape their lives of urban inhabitants.

Central to RTTC campaigns and analyses is the idea that the struggle for democracy today requires a return to the concept of rights. Students may study ethics in some programs, but planners need to ask how prevalent this is in most planning programs and practice. What would planning look like if classes and practice began from the frame of rights? Along with academic, policy and other movement allies, RTTC is engaged in the process of revitalizing the rights struggle and re-raising unsettled questions in the context of new political challenges. Questions of inclusion, for example, are far from new, yet the attack on immigrant communities forces us to acknowledge that we still lack a powerful rights movement and institutions that can adequately protect them. Similarly, market-driven displacement, criminalization and unresponsive elected officials reveal the inability of even citizenship to safeguard peoples’ civil rights.
Finally, existing rights, those guaranteed to citizens and for which many documented and undocumented immigrants strive, fail to even address basic issues of human security, including housing, medical care and employment.
In all these instances, communities are once again coming up against the limits of the individualistic and formal political rights that mark the liberal democracies.

And if you like RTTC #1 then you should like RTTC #2

Tags: Doug Harvey, Jackie Leavitt, Marnie Brady, Raj Patel, Right to the City, RTTC, The Value of Nothing, Tony Roshan Samara, Urban Governance, urban planning