The
city exists as a space and place of multiple meanings that are performed by
those concerned with it on a daily basis. It is a place of work and play, home
and holiday, prayer and education, relaxation and activity, and as such forms
part of the way people perceive themselves and who they aspire to be. David Harvey
adapts the idea of the right to the city from Henri Lefebvre, and asserts that
it should be both a working slogan for urban change, as well as the political
ideal backing it (Harvey 2008:40). However, how do these ideas translate into
action for people living on the margins? The right to the city is not a
simplistic concept, as will be elaborated on in this response, and the action taken
to address it thus cannot be simplistic either. The city is a constantly
changing space, and its meanings are contested on a daily basis because of that
change and complexity (Adebayo 2010:2). Harvey’s ideas on the right to the city
have sustainable merit, but arguably he fails to qualify how the
democratisation of urban resources will in any manner relate to a change in the
real value of urban life for marginalised people, and people outside urban
spaces too. In this response, issues of group identity, the criminalisation of
the urban poor and the way the city is conceptualised according to rights will
be explored against the backdrop of the right to the city.
Henri
Lefebvre conceptualised the right to the city as a right to life in the urban
space (Lefebvre 1996:158). This is more than the right to exist in the city,
but to enjoy what it offers, to have an impact on its daily processes, and to
benefit from and add benefit to its existence. Harvey adopts this idea,
emphasising its need to come from a collective approach towards changing people
by changing the city (Harvey 2008:23). He argues that the kind of life we want
to lead – including things like religion, relationships, and lifestyle – is
directly dependent on the kind of city we want to live in (Harvey 2008:23). No
two cities are the same, and self-identification can be impacted on by the
space in which people locate themselves.
But
cities are contested spaces. In a South African context, cities are not the
melting-pots they are painted to be in tourist brochures. They are places of
struggle for legitimacy between people who have historically experienced
exceptionally diverse ways of living – so diverse, in fact, that they could
come from completely separate worlds (Fanon 1963:38). Historicisation of urban
life is necessary to understand the depth of difference in people’s
experiences. In the South African situation, the struggle for legitimacy in the
contemporary city arises out of, among others, the lag between the expectations
of life in the post-apartheid state and the reality that has become apparent,
and the fact that much of the control of urban centres is not in the hands of
the masses or those who purport to represent them (Adebayo 2010:2).
Increasingly, those lacking the economic and social power to assert their
expectations are criminalised for diverging from the narrative of democracy and
urban privilege, as illustrated by the experiences of members of Abahlali
baseMdonjolo, a prominent South African shack-dwellers’ movement (Selmeczi
2012:500). The right to housing seems to have escaped being inalienable and is
now subject to issues of private property and zoning, effectively cutting off
the poor from channels of economic prosperity. This creates a psychological
condition including feelings of defeatism, hopelessness, resentment and anger
towards those in power: depoliticised and removed from public concern, members
of movements such as Abahlali come to find that attempts are made to silence
them from above (Selmeczi 2012:500). In denying them a voice, those in power
deny people legitimacy in their grievances. Their exclusion is a denial of that
right to the city because they are not given the scope to be a part of the
city’s configuration. Harvey asserts that it would be damaging to accept this
situation as normal – that the centres of wealth survive because they exclude
people just enough to keep them as a labour force while restricting them from
engaging with the many resources theoretically at their disposal within the
city (Harvey 2012:12).
Several
things can be seen here. Firstly, the right to the city affects social
organisation and the treatment of people in cities. Those without resources are
not given legitimacy because their status as citizens seems to be synonymous
with their status as consumers under the neoliberal gaze (Harvey 2008:26).
Also, their lives and experiences are not afforded historical weight, and the
absence of this historicisation denies them an entitlement to demand better
because their positions as poor are established as natural (Selmeczi 2012:499).
One finds from nature that what is natural is usually left alone, unless it can
be harnessed as a resource to an end: these are two states which the urban
masses experience in somewhat equal measure, where the fact of their poverty is
so naturalised that little is done to really
alleviate it, and the fact that they still – and only – have their bodies to
offer as a resource does not go unnoticed.
Harvey’s
ideas about group identity become problematic when used to understand the
various social movements that crop up as a response to and demand for the right
to the city. The urban poor may be markedly excluded from access to urban
resources but they are still people with agency and can find ways to circumvent
this lack of access (Bayat 1997:54). Abahlali’s experiences of government
treatment stimulates its aim to break away from lumping people together,
emphasising that while people share common grievances and situations, their
experiences naturally differ, and the impact this has varies from person to
person (Selmeczi 2012:508).
Bayat’s
writing on Iran during and after the revolution tells the story of an urban
poor that mobilised itself to provide what the government denied, creating an
autonomous community that found alternative ways of sustaining itself. This
included job creation where jobs were inaccessible or denied; creating
infrastructure where it was refused by the state for fear of legitimating the
unsanctioned occupation of urban land; and supplementing the community with
libraries, clinics and mosques (Bayat 1997:54). This all took place quite subtly,
encroaching on the urban space in a way that challenged the established idea of
civil society and the kinds of behaviours associated with good citizens. As
Bayat argues, the actions of the disempowered do not represent deviation or
lawlessness, but can be viewed as a normal attempt to maintain survival in a
space which makes it hard for them to do so (Bayat 1997:55). This represents an
alternative form of civil society as well – an attempt to carve out a space in
society for oneself in a civil, subtle manner, and the good citizen as someone
who creatively engages with the resources at their disposal to become an active
member of urban life.
Thus
Harvey’s ideas also become problematic in the way in which his work creates a
separation between the revolutionary and the passive urban poor. The urban poor
are not a homogeneous group and should not be studied as such, and their
avenues for exercising agency are not limited to full-blown revolution, as
Bayat has illustrated. The idea of ‘everyday resistance’ (Bayat 1997:56) holds
true with this as resistance is not rooted in party politics but rather in the
necessity of achieving a humane standard of living. The fact that the
marginalised people in cities are exhaustively treated as a common group
requiring a common solution speaks to the failure of authorities to recognise
the complexity of individual aspirations and livelihoods (Adebayo 2012:5). Adebayo
writes with focus on the establishment of the Reconstruction and Development
Program’s low-income housing initiative; she finds that the lack of integration
of the urban poor into city life has to do with their being housed in locations
separate from economic and social activity, with little regard for the
individual needs people have – for example, that one person’s place of work
might be deep in the city and the cost of the daily commute tightens the
monthly budget (Adebayo 2012:5). Resistance to this often comes in the form of
people renting out their RDP houses to others and moving closer to the city to
live in informal settlements.
Harvey
thus does not fairly justify why urban revolt is the only means to achieve the
right to the city, especially as revolt, if crushed, could have devastating
consequences for those involved and lead to regressive behaviour by authorities.
In the case of Dubai, Mike Davis writes of the dehumanising conditions of
barracks for migrant construction workers outside the grossly opulent city, and
the harsh punishment they receive in trying to achieve better treatment in the
workplace (Davis 2006:65-68). This includes arrest and deportation. Coupled
with that, workers are effectively banned from accessing the pseudo-public,
privatised spaces in the city like shopping centres and restaurants, are kept
invisible from tourists, and would sooner be dismissed and replaced than
afforded higher wages or better conditions (Davis 2005:67). Seen here, revolt
has little impact if the disempowered lack popular support and bargaining
power, and in the case of workers, can easily be replaced. They also lose
popular support because media coverage of these events – if there is any –
tends to once again homogenise the demands of the poor under blanket terms like
service delivery protests, as is used
in South Africa (Selmeczi 2012:505). What this homogenisation does is paint the
urban poor as irrational and criminal in constantly demanding things, even though at closer inspection
these things form part of the basic urban resources – adequate housing,
electricity, sanitation, education. It is questionable that media coverage is
usually directed at these protests and rarely at the experiences of everyday
life in the township – reports on these may certainly clue other citizens in on
the harsh nature of life on the periphery, and garner support, rather than
division.
Urban
revolt is too simplistic a concept because it assumes a certain level of group
identity among the poor that may not always be true. In order to consolidate
personal claims to the city, people are prepared to do what they have to as
individuals, even if it means excluding others in similar situations as them
(Bayat 1997:58).
Perhaps
the problem lies in assessing the right to the city as exactly that – a right.
Can one not reconceptualise the city in terms of the way people develop meaning
and purpose? By conceptualising it in terms of rights, we may also be
exercising limits; rights can easily be stripped as a means of social control,
or denied to certain people under the guise of particular rationales, as history
has taught us. Rights also come with ambiguous meanings; the housing provided
by the state is often not the kind of housing needed or wanted by the
beneficiaries (Harvey 2008:35). Perhaps the problem lies in the use of the term
‘city’, and Harvey’s interpretation of it narrows the scope of understanding.
The attempted development of eMacambini on Kwa-Zulu-Natal’s North Coast was met
with fierce resistance from the community which has called eMacambini home for
centuries (Machen 2008). The people refused to be moved to a small township,
refused to give up their cultural and ancestral homestead in its beautiful
location, asserting that their wealth lay in their ownership of land (Machen
2008). This is the same kind of rationale used by the wealthy elite in urban
spaces when refusing to relinquish their hold on valuable assets (Harvey
2007:36). However, used in this vein, the people of eMacambini were viewed as
being resistant to development, even when development itself was not geared
towards any significant improvement of their lives.
eMacambini
is not in a major city, but this example serves to show that the right to
self-determination may not solely rest on access to city life, to modernity in
the capitalist sense or democracy in the representative way that it is found in
most countries today. Even outside the urban centres the effects of capitalism
and urbanisation can still be felt. Importantly, the community leaders
challenged the fact that the South African ‘people’s government’ (Machen 2008),
led by the African National Congress, would allow their land to be seized after
they had successfully held it throughout the apartheid regime (Machen 2008).
This echoes the sentiments of Abahlali members who problematize the fact that
prior to liberation in 1994, the ANC would have fought with them to achieve
better housing opportunities, yet as the government in power it actively
criminalises their poverty and places of living (Selmeczi 2012:502). On the one
hand one finds a rural community fighting to retain its way of life against the
threat of development – on the other an urban population that has been excluded
from development itself. How does one reconcile the right to the city to these
differing accounts of life in the same province?
The
right to the city is the right to its life-force – its resources, playgrounds,
and social mythology. As contributors to the survival of the city, all citizens
should have a right to engineer the way it serves its purpose, even and
especially those who comprise the majority of the workforce. Movements such as
Abahlali certainly have adopted the right to the city as a set of ideas useful
in reclaiming their members’ right to
space based on historical marginalisation and their importance to the economy
(Selmeczi 2012:511). Deeper than that, they have asserted the humanity of the
marginalised in rejection of the dominant discourses which paint them as
deviant, reclaimed the value of their experiences by defining them as
knowledge, and actively exercised citizenship by denying voter support to a
government that criminalises their very existence. In this sense, Harvey’s call
for the right to the city to be a seminal – if not the seminal – way forward in constructing social organisation is
apt in the sense that it is an attempt at reshaping urban life to suit the
needs of the masses that are a part of it. By recreating the city people can
recreate themselves, redefine their aspirations and shape a different world
(Harvey 2012:4). However, one could argue that a sense of common humanity
precludes the right to the city as Harvey interprets it, and as such the need
to adopt the right to the city may even be unnecessary if that common humanity
prevailed.
The
right to the city as a political ideal is problematic in some senses because it
seems to contend that the only contentious spaces are urban, when development
threatens the livelihoods of many rural communities as well (Machen 2008). What
good is the right to a city when that city’s construction includes displacement
of its original inhabitants? Where do those people go? Harvey illustrates this
with reference to places like Seoul, where people were forcibly removed from
prime locations in the city to make way for development (Harvey 2008:34). He
notes the Haussmann effect, named after the man who designed Paris as it is
today: that the removal of people from one area by the elite simply reproduces
the problem elsewhere, as they are forced to move without provision for an
improvement in living standard (Harvey 2008:33). This constant circular state
does nothing to alleviate the problem, and often makes it worse.
It
can be argued, then, that the idea of the right to the city needs to be
reconfigured: that it needs to become a rallying point for the achievement of a
common humanity that surpasses place and space. Harvey asserts that adoption of
this principle is a step towards unifying the struggle movements in cities
across the world, and he is not incorrect in saying so; however, his emphasis
on the economics of urban exclusion bypasses the socio-political causes thereof
(Harvey 2008:39). The political and economic aspects weigh in on each other,
and should be treated as such. Instead of calling for the democratisation of
the right to the city as a means to constructing new experiments of
urbanisation, the very essence of urban life and democracy needs to be
evaluated if cities are ever to become spaces for people to live freely and
humanely. What kind of democratisation does Harvey mean to be put into effect
if democracy the way it is interpreted today has proven to be a smokescreen for
a damaging neoliberal agenda (Souza 2010:317)? As a working slogan the right to
the city has been seminal in the growth of movements such as Abahlali, and for
that it carries significance; but the varying interpretations of Lefebvre’s
original idea has led to a loss in the radical re-imagining of space which he
argued for, which does not merely make concessions to stimulate inclusivity but
actively aims to create an alternative, vastly different future that those
accustomed to capitalism cannot imagine (Souza 2010:317). As such, the right to
the city should be re-imagined as the right to a common humanity which
transcends space, place, and economics; a drive for humanity which becomes that
working slogan stimulating change, and a political ideal which allows people to
create themselves by recreating and reimagining the spaces in which they find
themselves – regardless of whether these are cities or not.
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Davis,
M. 2006. ‘Fear and Money in Dubai’ in New
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D. 2008. ‘The Right to the City’ in New
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