REVIEW: URBAN POLITICS NOW

[Forthcoming from the Journal of Architecture]

Urban Politics Now: Reimagining Democracy in the Neoliberal City.

Edited by BAVO (Gideon Boie and Matthias Pauwels),NAi Publishers, 2008

How does political change occur? Does it stutter along in a series of incremental developments, accidents and setbacks, creeping so slowly that we barely notice its happening? Or does it leap forward in a sudden rush, carrying everything along with it?

The construction of our cities and institutions can take years, decades, centuries – storming them can take hours. Urban politics might be said to operate at two speeds: the glacial and the revolutionary. Space is slow, it is built in sections over time, it accumulates and is used, it is worn, eroded and repaired -new spaces scraping into old . Events on the other hand are quick. A decade’s preparation in the contraction of an instant and though protests, riots  and demonstrations all take place on a spatial stage, their appearance is fleeting and violent.  After all, what are the years it took to construct the Bastille compared to the moment in which it fell?

There is an irreconcilable tension between these two types of politics. The slow activity of spatial development carries a micro-political force. It is barely detected. It is usually technical at first and only understood politically in hindsight. Evolving by accretion and the fortuitous linking up of circumstance, spatial change is intermittent. Innovation is always being filtered through the sieve of cultural expectation.

By contrast radical politics operates in time, its language is not spatial but event-based. It operates by interruption, not via continuity. But is the desire for a radical politics nothing more than a romantic longing carried in the breasts of those who harbour memories of 1968 and an under-developed reality principle? Is radical politics an impossibility? Is its impossibility precisely the point?

Urban Politics Now: Re-Imaging Democracy in the Neoliberal City is a collection of essays solicited by the Dutch urban theoretical office BAVO. The thirteen contributions from authors like Slavoj Zizek, Edward W.Soja, Neil Smith and Yannis Stavrakakis – though all taking different positions – gather round a shared sense of political impasse that they take to be characteristic of contemporary urban life. Each essay attempts to build a case against the suffocation of emancipatory urban politics under neoliberalism.

According to the editors, unless societies’ inherent antagonisms and structural conflicts can be made visible – even at the cost of the current social order – then we are no longer in the realm of politics. The post-political therefore describes a space of political operation structured by choices relating to micro-political procedures, administrative apparatuses and technocratic management. Operating wholly within the shrunken coordinates of neoliberalism, political agency is constrained to nothing more than a shadow play where decisions can only tinker with the edges of a system whose core ideological structure remains inviolable.

The ambitions of this volume are considerable: to explore the potential of an urban politics that might throw into doubt the very coordinates of the political space we have inherited. Signalled by a series of adjectives that precede the word politics, like: ‘radical’, ‘proper’, ‘true’, ‘genuine’, is an attempt to distinguish between the speed and localized effects of micro-political activity and the right to another register of political change that must hang like a guillotine over the entire system.

At the heart of this argument is an understanding of ‘genuine’ politics as discontinuous, as a fundamental rupture or interruption that works to shatter the slow movement of barely discernable political transformations as they occur via local intervention, negotiation and regulation. We can detect in the use of the adjectives described above more than a little longing or nostalgia for a winner-takes-it-all political era. Marx’s ghost hides everywhere between the lines and unfortunately any defined sense of what might actually constitute the ‘properly’ or ‘genuinely’ political remains somewhat spectral.

Despite the aspiration to produce counter strategies and get one’s hands dirty, there is little concrete evidence of either in the volume. For example, in the essay ‘False Freedom: The Construction of Space in Late Capitalism’ by Freidrich von Borries and Matthias Bottger, we find a description of the use of guerrilla marketing by Nike and Comme des Garcons. These techniques invert the traditional marketing strategies of mass visibility with stealth tactics that aim to secretly infiltrate social groups through key members and garner influential (because invisible) support.

The essay recites the – by now – well worn notion that capitalism can recuperate any resistant strategy. Given this reality, the authors present brand hacking as a potential counter strategy that is subversive  (if still susceptible to recuperation by corporate marketing). If one ever needed a more telling symbol of the utter futility of the academic left one might find it here. From universal calls for mobilisation (Marxism), to particular support for specific groups (post-colonialism/feminism), to arguments over oppressive language (political correctness) and finally to replacing logos on trainers, the downgrading of ambition is staggering/funny/heartbreaking, depending on where you stand. If this is subversion – we’re screwed.

The essay falls victim to a pattern which is often repeated throughout the book, in which complex deadlocks and constraints are clearly presented for most of the essay until the need to present a counter strategy takes hold. At this point, usually a page from the end, we are left with clarion calls for justice, less consumption, better access to life’s necessities etc., as if this had never occurred to anyone. Surely getting ones hands dirty means more than hiding behind noble language. One is left hoping for some creative, lateral thinking, but by the conclusion all we find are well-meaning ambiguities.

These ‘what about the children?’ moments aim to mobilise evidence in an argument against which one can take no position. In politics this equals: fair distribution of resources, more justice, less poverty. Similarly, in the current language of urban design, who doesn’t wince at the sound of totally debased terms like creative city, competitive city, inclusive city, global city, connected city, sustainable city. But it is precisely the tacit agreement that these terms are inherently good and beyond question that makes them meaningless, let alone useful, as markers of a political position.  Similarly in this volume, constant references to the late-capitalist-neoliberal-police-order become exhausting frustrations to thought and to careful decomposition of problems.

In an essay entitled: ‘Revanchist City, Revanchist Planet’, Neil Smith presents a characteristically comprehensive account of the impact of zero tolerance policing and its revanchist characteristics. Smith’s contribution is notable for exploring the global trade in techniques of control and security. One of Smith’s main examples is the revanchist tendencies in Brazil, where extremely brutal police retribution has led to the deaths of ‘as many as 9,898 people between 1999 and 2004′ (p. 35) in Brazil’s two largest cities.  According to Smith, revanchism operates to define strict constraints on inclusion in the social order through both the externalisation of threat against a perceived other who must remain excluded and punished, and by a pervasive climate of anxiety directed towards those on the inside, where ‘the larger goal is a galvanisation of ontological fear and a form of social control that exceeds what the law actually allows’ (p. 37). The most compelling part of Smith’s argument is an attempt to universalise the problematics of revanchism by exploring the consistencies and regularities across different conflicts in different countries. Smith’s article is exceptional in this sense in that it is able to draw on careful research across a variety of contexts in order to link up Palestinian resistance in the occupied territories to the death squads of Rio de Janiero or the policing of Bombay. To connect the flow of security technologies between the New York Police Force, the Israeli Defence Force and the United Kingdom’s Office of Home Security is to work contrary to the demand that we only treat each case in its specificity. This careful researching and stitching together of diverse narratives indicates a promising avenue of research where much useful work remains to be done.

There are some other valuable contributions. Slavoj Zizek’s essay, ‘Some politically incorrect reflections on urban violence in Paris and New Orleans and related matters’ is an exploration of the problem of political recognition. Drawing on the work of Jacques Ranciere, Zizek’s essay accounts for the episodic examples of urban violence in modern cities by countering the standard leftist argument that these events are evidence of these communities’ lack of rights, poor employment opportunities etc. For Zizek, urban violence, as witnessed in Paris, has no content. It is not directed towards the fulfilment of a political program. It makes no demands except the demand to be recognised. By impressing itself into the minds of the broader community and entering into mass circulation via media outlets, these events make no declaration except to say ‘we exist’ – the meaning of these events lies precisely in their meaninglessness. Urban violence becomes a desperate (if impotent) acting out for awareness in the face of mechanisms whose blindness accords the people involved no recognition. In the words of Ranciere, they are the part with no part. ‘They were neither offering a solution nor constituting a movement for providing a solution; their aim was, on the contrary, to create a problem, to signal that they were a problem that cannot any longer be ignored. This is why violence was necessary’ (p. 14).

Erik Swyngedouw presents a clear and methodical case for the evaporation of dissent in contemporary urban governance. Though it falls prey to some vague clichés about in-between spaces and multiplicities in its conclusion, it works very well as a summary of thinking in the field.  He argues that that whilst the city is ‘alive and thriving – at least in some of its space – the polis, conceived in the idealized Greek sense as the site for public political encounter and democratic negotiation, the spacing of (often radical) dissent and disagreement and the place where political subjectivation literally takes place, seems moribund’. The loss of this idealised possibility leaves us with a ‘neoliberal governmentality that has replaced debate, disagreement and dissensus with a series of technologies of governing that fuse around consensus, agreement and technocratic management.’

Swyngedouw clearly marks out the topography of the post-political landscape: the entrance of a managerial logic into all aspects of life, the reduction of government to administration where decision making is seen as a question of expertise and not of political position, the diffusion of governance into a host of non-state actors, the brand management of urban space, the predominance of consensual understandings of political action, the particularization of political demands, and the termination of social agendas in planning.

To what extent is this account describing strictly contemporary phenomena? Certainly the rise of technical matters of administration in contemporary governmentality have their precedents in the health and housing reforms of the nineteenth century, as does the influence of various non-state actors, foundations, lobby groups etc. Similarly, the prevalence of managerial or organisational logics can be traced back to a spatialisation of measures to do with regulation of population and mobility. What is recent however, is the conceptualisation of city governance as a practice of managing the aesthetics of investment space. In this fierce competition with other cities, city governments become curators of their own image as they coordinate  aesthetic strategies in a desperate attempt to divert currents of global financial capital.

But what about the question of dissent? It is argued here that the space for genuine dissent is in some way excluded or outside our present system of government. Those who dissent are not treated as an opposition or competing claimant, they are just invisible or unnamed. In this condition the system operates internally according to a humanitarian ethics of negotiation and radicalizes its outside as evil – both gestures equally depoliticizing.

Genuine politics for Rancière would be the demand of these outsiders to be taken seriously as legitimate partners in discussion. Beyond the very specificity of their demands lies the more powerful event of being included and named as equal. By posing this struggle in aesthetic terms Rancière produces a sort of challenge to experiment with creative forms of resistance on the problem of visibility. Edward W. Soja offers us some brief clues as to what this might look like in his contribution entitled: ‘Postmetropolitan Psychasthenia: A Spatioanalysis’. In his conclusion Soja briefly describes the formation of a unique collective of previously disparate groups that were all in some way dependent on public transport in Los Angeles.  “The BRU (Bus Riders Union) is not a formal labour union but rather an organisation of the ‘transport dependent’ working poor led by an innovative group of activists associated with the Labour/Community Strategy Center. In 1996, the BRU brought a lawsuit against the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) that linked civil rights to the geography of transit use in Los Angeles. It was argued that a particular class of transit-dependent bus riders were being discriminated against by the policies and investment patterns of the MTA… .” (p. 92)

The production of this coalition of transport users marshals legislation associated with discrimination to make a case for spatial justice in which questions of distribution, access and mobility are taken as evidence. The case was won and almost all of the demands of the BRU were granted, though the judgement was eventually amended to require future cases to demonstrate discriminatory intent. However, as an experiment in a new form of political representation that cuts across traditional divisions between workers and users, the BRU case is notable because it shows that producing an assembly of diverse groups – that can coalesce around a specific issue – new vectors for political affiliation can be drawn up.

As Slavoj Zizek has continually pointed out, contemporary cynicism is such that the old Marxist assumption that people will automatically act upon being presented with the truth of their predicament is wrong. We know, we just don’t care. Though one must sympathise with the ambitions of the editors in this volume – the time is ripe for ambitious urban agendas – any valuable contribution is going to have to go beyond another exhumation of capitalism’s road kill. Anything else only works to strengthen the deadlock and sense of incapacitation that the editors describe in the introduction:

By both criticising the ruling neoliberal urban order and formulating counter strategies or even a counter project, these essays subvert today’s division of labour – typical for today’s post-critical climate – between thinkers and doers, between theory and action, between those who ‘merely’ criticize from the sideline and those who make their hands dirty and ‘constructively’ work towards making a difference. The essays, on the contrary, show that now more than ever there is a need to do both, that is, to offer both a critical analysis of the ever cleverer ways in which the ruling neoliberal order instrumentalizes and domesticates the urban field and manipulates genuine values such as democracy to its own advantage, and use this analysis as the backdrop for suggesting a way out of the current deadlock. (intro)

Simply signposting the (countless) sins of neo-liberalism will do little to draw near the horizon of what the editors describe as a genuine political possibility. Lists and examples of urban injustices like uneven development, gentrification, and zero tolerance policing make for an appropriate corrective to the historical account of capitalist development but fall short of any transformational consequence.

There is no more purely political gesture than to state that something is beyond politics, and what is seemingly beyond politics at this moment is the hegemony of neoliberalism – global financial crisis notwithstanding. By constraining political agency to action within the confines of a given political landscape, we exclude the contours and limits of this landscape as a site for political action. The system itself must be up for grabs. As Frederic Jameson puts it in his essay ‘Is Space Political?’ with regards to these two conceptions of politics : “…two very different dimensions come into play here, neither of which can be sacrificed without serious damage to thought and experience, but which cannot be simply synthesised or unified either.”These two dimensions and their attendant difficulties must be retained, that is, to work pragmatically through the realities of the situations we find ourselves in and always to reserve the right to change the very conditions of possibility that structure our political choices. The relationship between micro-political activity and ‘radical politics’ is difficult but must form two different if not complementary parts of any political agenda.

However, the very idea that radical politics demands or even operates according to a single decisive act that transforms/shatters the coordinates of political space needs to be questioned. In this desire for ‘the event’ we potentially fall victim to a conception of political change that obscures the complex precursors to revolution. Very often the arrival of the event is a belated one that satisfies our need for explanatory clarity without ever illuminating the spatio-temporal opacity of its precedents or aftermath – the fall of the Bastille being the prime example.

The question of what might constitute ‘radical politics’ in spatio-temporal terms must therefore be attended to, Further it must be attended to in such a way as to draw out the differences between these two sets of belief in the speed of political change. While the first belief concludes that until a total systemic realignment occurs (such as a revolution, overthrow of capitalism) the only worthwhile position one can take vis-avis the urban is negative critique (of the sort we find in the work of Tafuri). The second belief – admitting of less fear in its adversary – involves a conception of political change that occurs through archipelagos of counter-hegemonic resistance, pockets of change that will spread like contagion through the city.  It is this account of urban dynamics, in its variable propagations and contractions that seems to be missing here. Any volume that is presented as a conjunction of the political and the urban must be able to move beyond the notion of the idealised polis as its spatio-politcal exemplar. So while this volume effectively tracks many of the political deadlocks that gather under the name ‘neoliberalism’, it is less effective in understanding their spatial consequences for urban environments. So while many of the authors reiterate the importance of a ‘turn towards space’ as the subject of political investigation, space seems – in this volume at least – to resist most efforts of effective capture or successful analysis. The problematic that is repeated here was never more succinctly encapsulated than in that famous pronouncement of Le Corbusier; is it ‘Architecture or revolution’.  Or revolution, and then architecture?

Adrian Lahoud

See also Frederic Jameson ‘Architecture and the critique of Ideology’ in Architectural Theory since 1968 Ed. K. Michael Hays MIT Press Cambridge Massachussets 1998