The Emancipatory City?

Paradoxes and Possibilities

Loretta Lees

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780761973874, 9780761973867
• eBook ISBN: 9781446237915
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

?The Emancipatory City is a wonderful addition to a growing literature on the public culture of the city. In these spaces, tolerance and intolerance, difference and indifference, transgressions, resistances, and playful spontaneity erupt to give texture to urban life. The book broadens our gaze and deepens our understanding of how cities enable people to express themselves and be free? - Robert A Beauregard, New School University, New York

Who are cities for? What kinds of societies might they most democratically embody? And, how can cities be emancipatory sites?

The ambivalent status of urban space in terms of emancipation, democratisation, justice and citizenship is central to recent work in urban geography, `new? cultural geography, critical geography and postmodern planning, as well as literature on urban social justice, public space and the politics of identity.

Seeking alternative and progressive visions of the emancipatory city through an exploration of the tensions and possibilities between the freedoms and constraints offered by the city, the authors of The Emancipatory City? build on this wealth of current perspectives to present an critical analysis of urban experience.

1 ‘The Emancipatory City’: Urban (Re)Visions

Loretta Lees

The city beckons to the dreamer in us, for in its vastness and diversity lies a world of fantasy, hope, occasional fulfilment and sadness, longing, loneliness, and the lingering possibility for community with our fellow travellers in the mystery of life … (Chorney, 1990: 2)

This book interrogates the prospects and possibilities of the city as a space or site for emancipation. For the thousands of new arrivals pouring every day into cities like London, Los Angeles, Sydney, Johannesburg and Mumbai, the city offers the same promise of progress and opportunity it always has to poor rural migrants. If intellectuals have sometimes reacted more ambivalently to the perils of that promise, the city, nevertheless, still lies at the heart of many utopian conceptions of democracy, tolerance, and self-realization. ‘A city’, Richard Sennett recently declared, ‘isn’t just a place to live, to shop, to go out and have kids play. It’s a place that implicates how one derives one’s ethics, how one develops a sense of justice, how one learns to talk with and learn from people who are unlike oneself, which is how a human being becomes human’ (1989: 83).

Such utopian hopes for the city date back to antiquity, but they are now more urgent than ever before. More than half of the planet’s population now live in cities and the proportion is growing rapidly (UN Centre for Human Settlements, 1996). Whether measured by the number and size of the very largest mega-cities of more than ten million souls, the extent of their cultural and economic reach, the density of their interconnection, or the weight of their ecological footprint upon the planet, the scale of contemporary urbanization is unprecedented. This century, even more than the last, will be an urban one in which the city is the measure of the civility and sustainability of society.

It is in this context that avowedly utopian dreams of an emancipatory city are so vital, if the urban future is to be cast with hope untarnished by fear. As contributors to the final part of this volume insist, the resources required are imaginary as well as material, and in this, those on the Left, in particular, have been somewhat wanting. Decades of suburban growth and inner city decline across much of North America and Europe have provided little for those who love the city to cheer about. While this has given urban studies plenty to do in terms of critique, the relentless focus on urban problems has tended to reinforce longstanding narratives of perverse and pathological urbanism. As John Gold noted some time ago, ‘The advocacy of alternative urban visions has all but ceased and, indeed, there is little active debate about the future city other than the projection of current doubts and anxieties into the near future’ (1985: 92). The prevailing mood in urban studies has become one of doom and gloom, even fatalism.

Urban studies needs a stronger normative and utopian dimension to complement its tradition of diagnostic critique. Urbanists no longer ‘plan the ideal city, but come to terms with the good enough city’ (Robins, 1991: 11). The decline of utopianism has left what Raymond Williams (1989) called the ‘resources of hope’ dangerously underdeveloped. As Merrifield notes ‘It is progressive urbanists who need to do the toughest thinking of all. Those of us on the Left who yearn for social justice, but who also love cities, find ourselves torn between the tyranny we see around us every day and the thrill that same tyrannical city can sometimes offer’ (2000: 485).

Urban utopianism is not entirely moribund, however. This volume engages with a recent resurgence of avowedly utopian thinking about the city (e.g. Baeten, 2002; Harvey, 2000). In recent years, urbanists, architects and planners have begun, once again, to embrace the urban, or at least selective elements of it, as the solution to problems rather than their source (e.g. DETR, 1999). Advocates of so-called ‘new urbanism’, for example, celebrate more dense and clustered forms of (sub)urban development as a way to counter soulless suburban sprawl and foster a greater sense of place and of community (see McCann, 1995). While critics complain that this neo-traditional appropriation of urban form without urban diversity or ethos will inevitably descend into gated communities of exclusion (e.g. Dowling, 1998; Ellin, 1996), it should not be dismissed out of hand as simply ‘anti-urban’. Such pessimism ignores both its politically progressive critique of unrestricted suburban development and the potential for enlarging its conception of the urban.

Much the same could be said about both the ambivalence and the unrealised potential of urban regeneration. In Britain, for example, the Government has committed itself to urban renaissance as part of a wider international discourse of the so-called ‘liveable city’. Critics complain that its Urban Task Force report amounts to a charter for exclusionary gentrification (e.g. Butler and Robson, 2001; Lees, 2000). But there is also much for urbanists to applaud in the Government’s hope that more and smarter urbanization can help resolve problems of social exclusion and cohesion in a more multicultural and globally inter-connected economy and society as well as environmental problems of habitat destroying suburban sprawl, congestion, air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions (Lees, 2003).¹

This kind of official planning discourse about the liveable city feeds off of and informs more academic claims about the emancipatory potential of the sites and sensuous experiences of the city, city living, and the cityscape. In the context of contemporary debates about the cultural politics of identity, many gays and lesbians, feminists, and anti-racists now embrace the city hopefully as a space of tolerance and diversity in which to realize alternative ways of being (Amin et al., 2000; Fincher and Jacobs, 1998; Keith and Pile, 1993; Sandercock, 1998; Wilson, 1991). Iris Marion Young (1990), to name perhaps the most prominent of these theorists of identity politics, has grounded her vision for cultural pluralism in urban spaces of ‘unassimilated otherness’ and an ‘ideal of city life as a vision of social relations affirming group difference’. Likewise radical critics are returning to the utopian traditions of Marxism to reconsider the urban and its contradictory potential as both the material manifestation of expanding capitalist domination and yet also as a creative process whose experience is the seedbed for forging something new (e.g. Harvey, 2000; Merrifield, 2002).

Whereas other contributors to this volume seek to explore and extend emerging ideas about an emancipatory city, my objective in this introductory chapter is to explain where they have come from. The city has long been celebrated as an emancipatory space/place in the social imaginary of the West. The old German saying, ‘city air makes men free’ (Stadtluft macht frei), refers to the fact that during the Middle Ages living in the city (for those to whom entry was granted) usually meant liberation from feudal master-servant relationships. Other ideas about the city as space for freedom, cradle for civilization, and seed-bed for democracy also go back to antiquity (Mumford, 1995: 21). That classical legacy is inscribed into the very etymology of the word city, which comes from the Latin civitas, which meant the body of citizens rather than the place or settlement type where they were gathered. There are also important Biblical traces in ideas of the emancipatory city. Figures as diverse as the Puritan founders of Boston and the Massachusetts Colony, the radical poet William Blake, and Brigham Young and the Mormons, found inspiration in the idea of the city as a New Jerusalem.

Despite the great antiquity of such ideas, it is primarily with the transition to capitalism and the rapid urbanization that it drove that the various contemporary strands of thinking about an emancipatory city emerge. As Williams (1983: 56) notes, ‘the city as a really distinctive order of settlement, implying a whole different way of life, is not fully established, with its modern implications, until the early nineteenth century’, when the city became an abstraction distinct from particular cities or forms of settlement.

For the most part discussion of the emancipatory city has been concerned less with the quality of particular places and urban environments, than with the city itself and the emancipatory potential of all cities. In this sense, then, it is steadfastly utopian both in the conventional sense of being concerned with an ideal city rather than an actually existing (or practically achievable) one, and in the literal sense of u-topian, of being focused on no-place in particular. This is different from the heterotopic focus on the potential for real places to be temporarily transformed into other places, ‘counter-sites … [in which] all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested’ (Foucault, 1986: 24). The contrast between the hetero- and u-topic imagination could easily be overdrawn, especially as the terms have sometimes been used interchangeably in recent work. Nevertheless the distinction is useful in highlighting the double-edged quality of emancipatory city talk. Abstraction from the particular and the actual produces the power to imagine better and more just worlds, but the utopian focus on no place raises important questions about how to realize those ideals in some place. David Harvey (2000) insists that the challenge of realizing an emancipatory city is a dialectical one of reconciling utopias of spatial form with those of social process. That may be so, but a prerequisite for any such effort is achieving some greater conceptual clarity about the often divergent ideals at play in debates about the emancipatory city.

To that end I want to highlight three distinct but related strands of thought. Utopian thinking involves not just an articulation of the ideal and the good, but also a diagnosis of present problems and usually some at least implicit sense of the means of overcoming them and of achieving those utopian ideals. While the three utopian strands I consider here share in common an understanding of the modern city as disruptive, they also open up some quite different problems and possibilities for change.

The emancipatory city and its others

It is difficult to overstate the intellectual legacy of early twentieth century social theorists such as Emile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel and their contrast between an urban society full of strangers and strange experiences and village communities in which everyone knows each other. Urbanization, explained the founder of the Chicago School of Sociology, Robert Park (1952: 24), was liberating but also unsettling: ‘the peasant who comes to the city to work and to live, is … emancipated from the control of ancestral custom but, at the same time, he is no longer backed by the collective wisdom of the peasant community.’ Louis Wirth (1938: 192) argued that urban growth created a new ‘way of life’ founded on Enlightenment values: ‘The juxtaposition [in the city] of divergent personalities and modes of life tends to produce a relativistic perspective and a sense of toleration of difference which may be regarded as prerequisites for rationality and which lead toward the secularization of life’. Urbanization has now become so pervasive as to be almost unremarkable, but echoes of these same constitutive oppositions between country and city, described so ably by Williams (1975), are found today in discussions of the emancipatory city. Elizabeth Wilson (2001: 67), for example, maintains that while ‘the distinction between town and country, the provinces and the metropolis is less stark than formerly … rural life is arguably still even more restrictive and lacking in opportunity for the poor (of both sexes) than life in cities’.

Though commonly represented in romantic and pastoral motifs as a spiritual alienation from nature and community, urbanization was also experienced as a material liberation from the realm of biological necessity. The city orchestrated the conquest of nature. As Matthew Gandy notes in this volume, the urbanization of water led to the conquest of disease, squalor, and human misery. It is testimony to the success of this victory over nature that, despite the continuing scandal of an estimated two million annual deaths in the developing world from preventable water-borne diseases (UN Water World Development Report, 2003: 16), academic debate about the emancipatory city has largely disregarded environmental issues.

Future discussion of the emancipatory city must take the matter of nature much more seriously as a subject of both practical policy and theoretical significance. Contemporary planning discourses of urban densification, containment, and growth control are mobilizing environmental considerations to promote more compact forms of urban development (Lees and Demeritt, 1998). While there is much for urbanists to applaud in this talk of sustainable urbanism, it often has an expert-led, technocratic flavour that serves to disempower citizens and discourage their participation in planning their own future. Somewhat different issues about citizenship are raised by the so-called ‘animal turn’ in human geography (Philo and Wilbert, 2000; Wolch and Emel, 1998). In highlighting the presence of animals in the city, this work raises important questions about how far the cosmopolitan dream of tolerance and rights to the city is to extend. For Whatmore (2003: 156) the move to bring animals into the cosmopolitan city does not just expand the ‘liberal figure of the individual rights-bearing person wholesale to a range of non-human creatures’ so much as explode this humanist category altogether and in the process raise far reaching questions about what a more relational ethics of being in difference would look like. This post-humanist perspective is the starting point for Susan Ruddick’s exploration in Chapter 2 of the monstrous as a potential figure of openness to difference and emancipation in the city.

If the imagined geographies of the city have long been understood through contrast with the country and traditional rural communities, radical socialists, perhaps more than any other group, have tended to take an optimistic view of the ‘emancipatory trajectory of urbanization’ (Short, 1991: 41–3). With his modernist faith in progress, Karl Marx believed that capitalism could be transcended by the very forces that it unleashed. The city played a two-fold role in Marx’s social theory. On the one hand, it was a fragmented material space created by...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the contributors
• List of figures
• Preface
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 The Emancipatory City: Urban (Re)Visions
• PART 1 CITIES OF (IN)DIFFERENCE
• PART 2 EMANCIPATORY PRACTICES
• PART 3 UTOPIC TRAJECTORIES
• REFLECTIONS
• Index