The city as medium – Wakabayashi

Mikio Wakabayashi writes:

“The cultural role of a city results from the fact that the city is a medium. It is a place governed by norms, rules and cultures, enabling heterogeneous people to live together.” (p.8)

“The spatial order of an urban settlement is not only a geographical order, but also an order of communication and representation. The city exists as a complex of the social medium, which is spatial, communicative and representative. To dwell in such a milieu is, on the one hand, to live in the corporeality of the spatial world, and, on the other hand, to live in the world of meanings that are transmitted by the social media, which construct the urban environment. In this sense, the city matches perfectly the term “media”, as the plural of “medium”.” (p.9)

“…as Choay (1969) argued, in most pre-modern (pre-industrial) cities, elements of the urban environment were interrelated in the context of normative codes and rules, which in turn were acknowledged by inhabitants and planners, and were also connected with all other social systems, such as political power, knowledge, economy, and religion. It seems, then, that cities may be regarded as systems of communication and information, in other words as “semiotic systems”.” (p.10)

“Cyberspace and the cybercity are a “mirror” that projects the negatives of the physical or real city, because they are created as a result of needs and desires that have grown from a lack or dissatisfaction regarding physical or real cities and society.” (p.14)

Ref: Mikio Wakabayashi (2002) Urban space and cyberspace: Urban environment in the age of media and information technology. International Journal of Japanese Sociology 11, pp.6-18

cities: ‘the intersections of multiple narratives’

“Doreen Massey describes cities as ‘the intersections of multiple narratives’, a nexus of distinctive and coexisting stories.” (p.1)

“But when does a city become a global city and is this the same as a ‘metropolis’? And what of the ‘modern’ city? In one of its main uses, emphasizing the economic, technological and social character of urban development, the ‘modern’ city was the ‘industrial city’, with nineteenth century Manchester as its pre-eminent example. In the related sense deriving the modern from the Enlightenment tradition of rational scientific and human progress, the example would be late nineteenth century Paris. Other European cities (and this is a Eurocentric tradition), such as Vienna or Berlin, though of lesser stature and with their own distinctive characters, followed this second modern type. But both types were then decisively outdistanced by London at the end of the nineteenth century. The term ‘metropolis’ had been used earlier in the century to help comprehend London’s growing size and its national and international function, and by the 1840s it had emerged ahead of manchester as ‘the Empire’s commercial stronghold and as the world’s financial capital’. By 1890, London was the largest city the world [-p.5] had known with a population of 5.5 million, and easily qualified for the description, ‘A modern big city of international importance’ as Andrew Lees glosses the related term ‘Weltstadt’. London was, however, a distinctively imperial capital, at ‘the heart of the empire’ in C.F.G. Masterman’s pointed title of 1901, whose every advantage, especially its ports, maintained its commercial, administrative and political hegemony in the world. Schneer prefers on these grounds to describe the London of 1900 as an ‘imperial metropolis’. And this helps emphasise the type of global city London was – one whose pre-eminence was founded on a commanding economic and political position and depended on the mechanisms of military, ideological and administrative power. Globalization in this case, therefore, or this kind of globalization, implied conquest and exploitation, and the ideological processes of conversion, assimilation and subordination. The term ‘metropolis’ (from Greek ‘mother city’), further implied that London performed a co-ordinating role in the nexus of power and control that defined Empire. Arguably, the shape and style of the city as well as its major forms of employment supported it in this role. Thus, in the 1900s, London employed 20,000 colonial administrators, while colonial investments enabled the wealthy to settle in the West End and to enjoy its developing communications systems, theatre and new department stores (Selfridges opened in 1909, Heals in 1917). The very physical appearance of turn of the century London – the use of ‘Edwardian’ or ‘classical baroque’ for buildings in Whitehall and elsewhere and the construction of Kingsway as an imperial avenue from the Strand to Holborn – played its part too in asserting the merits and magnificence of Empire.
Other European cities developed as variations on this model of world or imperial global cities. New York, however, introduced a new type. For it was not a political but a commercial capital, and was above all a cultural city in which the famous symbolic verticality of its skyscrapers, the ambitious iron work of its bridges and its elevated transport system conveyed a sense of the modern as ‘newness’ in the here and now. By the 1920s, new York was ‘the type of the modern metropolis’, a model which spoke of the present and of an imagined future society in a way London, Berlin or Paris did not. This symbolic role was part, we have to recognize too, of New York’s own global identity: the shape of things to come, calling other older nations and their citizens to a new future.
Saskia Sassen suggests this future has come to pass, after a fashion at [-p.6] least. For ‘the agglomeration of high rise corporate offices we see in New York, London, Frankfurt and Tokyo… has emerged as a kind of representation of advanced city form, the image of the post-industrial city’. But this homogeneity of urban forms in the economic sectors of cities worldwide, is intersected, Sassen adds, by other tendencies in outlying districts associated with the traditional working class and new immigrant communities ‘beyond the central urban core’. Thus finance capital and old labour, white middle class and immigrant poor, coexist in uneasy juxtaposition and Sassen goes on to detail the disparities as well as the connections between these groups and neighbourhoods.
“How is this different from an earlier New York? In terms of its general structural morphology it is not different. Like other global cities, New York continues to exhibit tensions throughout the period between homogenization and decentralization, between the transnational and the local, or between rationality and pluralism There are differences in scope and scale, however, bordering on a difference in kind. For in the later period globalization has produced a different ‘World Order’ in which the technologies of power are controlled by an ‘electronic herd’ (Friedman, 1999), rather than Tammany Hall, and the instrumental rationality which served mid-century capitalism has shifted from the boardroom to the faceless, indeed placeless, information and finance networks or ‘flows’ which circuit the globe. The last two decades have seen the undermining if not erosion of the manufacturing base of the first generation global cities, the widely noted expansion of the service sector, the growth of uniform consumer outlets, the recruitment of workers in all sectors to short term contracts and the extremely rapid development and inescapable penetration of information and media technologies.
These are the features of ‘post-Fordism‘, so named because of the passing of a way of work and of life embodied in the production techniques, work practices and controlling influence of the magnate Henry T. Ford over his workforce and their families. Fordism presents a model of monopoly capitalism, or of early to mid-century modernity: the emblem of a productivist economy before the swing into predominantly consumer societies. In post-Fordism the rock-like associations instilled by the Fordist factory regimen between class, masculinity, workplace and hours of work, and of women and the home, have proved porous, while our social, ethnic, sexual and psychic lives have been further moulded by media technologies. The world is in the home: by way of the PC monitor or TV screen, or, what might be the [-p.7] same thing, is nowhere particularly. The effect, as many writers and commentators have noted, is dramatic, especially in the city, where these developments have produced a sense of new possibility and self-invention alongside a sense of unbelonging and an urban mentality of fear, paranoia or nostalgia..” (pp.4-7)

“…from the beginning of the century… The metropolis was thought to be without balance and harmony, a landscape of physical and psychic extremes in which the modern citizen was subjected to the mayhem of the city’s ungoverned, shapeless sprawl, or to the tedium of its unrelieved sameness. Either way, the metropolis appeared to spell the end of community. Both the imagined national and collective class communities were in a sense defined by these conditions but constituted themselves outside and against them.
At least one further kind of community of a different type did emerge from within these conditions, however: the artistic community comprised of a temporary and fragile alliance of emigres who, as Williams puts it elsewhere, shared the medium of their art and the divergent project we have come to know as modernism. The artistic medium, which centrally held their interest, was reworked to express an altered mentality and simultaneously register the time of a new modernity. For if realism was the representational mode of the earlier type of community and experience of synchronous time, new modes were required to capture the experience of the anonymous crowd and multiple times of the metropolitan scene.” (p.18)

“But if community depends on sameness, what, in a world of mobile peoples and circulating commodities, where local, national and global intersect, remains the same?” (p.22)

“Certain key and recurrent terms […] – estrangement, collage, hybridity, syncretism – begin to offer a common vocabulary for reflexive modern and postcolonial communities and for the mixed discourses of a reflexive aesthetic.” (p.23)

Ref: (emphases in blue bold mine) Peter Brooker (2002) Modernity and Metropolis: Writing, Film, and Urban Formations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan

John Berger on the city that teaches a way to be

John Berger (God, I loved this book):

“Only somebody who has lived in the streets of a city, suffering some kind of misery, can be aware of what the paving stones, the doorways, the bricks, the windows signify. At street level – outside a vehicle – all modern cities are violent and tragic. The violence of which the media and police reports speak so much, is partly a reflection of this more continuous but unregarded and older violence. The violence of the daily necessity of the streets – of which the traffic is a symbolic expression – to obliterate (run over) even the recent history of those who have lived and live in them.” (p.96)

“Initially [Ralph] Fasanella’s paintings of Manhattan do not appear in the least tragic. And this is the first way in which they are accurate. Because tragedy, too be felt aas such, requires a temporary exemption from daily life – a compassionate leave – which the modern city does not grant.
His paintings are accurate in many ways. There’s the typical sky of New York, very high and distant and yet its light indistinguishable from that reflected off the waters from the Bay, [….] Or the specific way in which the density of the working population makes itself felt there. The island of Manhattan is a gigantic metaphoric model of the compression of an immigrant ship that has moored and [-p.97] never left.” (pp.96-97)

“A modern city, however, is not only a place, it is also in itself, long before it is painted, a series of images, a circuit of messages. A city teaches and conditions by its appearances, its facades and its plan. No city more dramatically than New York which served for at least fifty years (1870-1924) as a unique landing-stage and breaking-in ground for millions of immigrants who had come from distant villages or ghettoes or small towns.
The city demonstrated to the newly arrived what they had [-p.98] to forget and what they had to learn. Nobody planned what New York taught. Its lessons were by example. In being what it was, it laid down its laws. At a profound level, Fasanella’s paintings are about some of the lessons which the look of the city taught as law.” (pp.97-98)

“Objectively space exists in Manhattan. It is a scarce and enormously valuable commodity. Sometimes Fasanella puts up a hoarding which ironically announces: SPACE TO LET. Yet this commodity, this space, is not inhabitable, except in purely physical terms. What has evacuated it? What makes the family kitchen no more than a cupboard off the street?
The answers are not only those which first spring to mind: overcrowding, poverty, insecurity. These phenomena existed in the countryside, yet a peasant house could still remain an enclosure, a refuge. What destroyed, invaded, the interior of the tenement home were even more basic economic processes. The home was not a store: on the contrary, the store was where you had to purchase each day the wherewithal to live. The wherewithal was paid for by so many hours of wage-labour. The time of the city – the time of wage hours – dominated every home. There was no refuge from this time. The home never contained the fruits of labour, a surplus, of either goods or time. Home is no more than a lodging house.” (p.100)

Ref: (italics in original; emphases in blue bold mine) John Berger ‘Ralph Fasanella and the Experience of the City’ pp.96-102 of About Looking, but I didn’t record which edition!

More urban change questions

More interesting questions about humans and cities and nature…

“What is the relationship between humans and nature? How does this question play out in the specific micro-environments of cities?” (p.71)

Ref: Nicholas Low, Brendan Gleeson, Ray Green and Darko Radovic (2005) The Green city: Sustainable homes, sustainable suburbs. Routledge, Abingdon and New York; and UNSW Press, Sydney

urban change questions

These questions are posed in the context of sustainable urban development, but I think them both interesting and relevant to fictional concerns (perhaps especially those of urban fantasy and fiction more generally?):

“Ultimately,” write, “the green city will reflect a rather different future for work. On this topic there are some very large questions: can a future of cities competing against one another in world markets be reconciled with a benign future for the environment? What are the limits of competition and how can they be enforced? Does economic growth itself have limits? How can growth be steered into environmentally benign forms of production? What forms of governance are required to regulate world markets in order to guarantee social security and environmental conservation? How do culture, place and climate influence work patterns, and consequently the physical accommodation of work?” (p.132)

Ref: Nicholas Low, Brendan Gleeson, Ray Green and Darko Radovic (2005) The Green city: Sustainable homes, sustainable suburbs. Routledge, Abingdon and New York; and UNSW Press, Sydney

Steampunk – ok I think I get it

My partner asked me to define steampunk and I got stuck when he said, ‘so, like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea‘. I realised I couldn’t offer a ‘clear’ ‘definition’ and wasn’t sure how the genre wrote its own history, so… I got my hands on Henry Winchester’s Steampunk… easy to read, lots of direction on how to explore the genre (across genres), beautiful art, thank you thank you…

‘Push past the artificial boundary of time to ask the real questions: What does it mean to be human? What are we going to do with all this technology? How can we create the future we want and need?’
James H. Carrott (quoted p.14)

“Steampunk is such a wide and varied term that it’s quite difficult to nail down, but in a nutshell it’s a way of looking at the future based on the collective imagination of the past. The past in question is generally defined as the period of Queen Victoria’s rule in Britain, from 1837 until 1901. During this time the Industrial Revolution caused huge social and economic change, and steam-powered factories and vehicles completely changed the face of the Western world. However, steampunk doesn’t just take ideas from this period – it also raids other parts of history, such as Wild West conflicts and 1930s Art Deco.” (p.10)

“As we look back through time, it’s easy to see things that we could now consider ‘steampunk’ – the design of the submarine in Disney’s movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), or the premise of Ronald W. Clark’s novel Queen Victoria’s Bomb (1967), in which a nuclear weapon is created during the Victorian Era. But steampunk as we know it today began primarily as a form of literature in the early 1980s. Its analogue, mechanical nature was intended as a riposte to cyberpunk’s tales of the digital and the binary, and a big part of steampunk’s attraction remains the way in which it rejects sleek modern technology in favour of something more primitive.” (pp.10-13 (pictures only on pp.11,12))

“There remains a great divide in the steampunk world between those who simply embrace its unique aesthetic, and those who delve into its rich literary trappings. It’s best summed-up by Reginald Pikedevant’s humorous song ‘Just Glue Some Gears On It (and Call it Steampunk)’, in which he states that: ‘Calling things “steampunk” to try to sound cool makes you look like a bloody fool!’ It’s an incisive view into what steampunk has become to some people, transferred from a well-informed and meaningful discourse into the mere act of applying a layer of fake brass to an everyday object and, indeed, gluing some gears on it.” (p.14)

“The Industrial Revolution changed everything in the Victorian era – including fashion. The sewing machine was arguably as important an invention as the car or the steam engine, and huge factories could pump out hundreds of items of clothing a day. It became critically important for the ruling classes to be well dressed. However, this revolution was contrasted with a prudish attitude towards what women could wear….” (p.21) “The Victorian era saw the beginnings of a shift in gender politics towards women.” (p.21)

“Of course, if you dress in a purely Victorian style you’ll be mistaken for someone from the nineteenth century. The word ‘punk’ was added to steampunk for a reason, and the late-1970s movement pioneered both music and fashion. Key to the latter was the idea of recycling items found in charity shops, and customizing second-hand clothes with rips and badges. It parallels the steampunk movement nicely as both are based on ideas of taking something from the past and retrofitting it to create something modern and eye-catching.” (p.24)

“Despite being such an aesthetically-based movement, steampunk’s roots lie primarily in literature. It plucks elements of classic novels by Dickens, Shelley and Wells and stirs in modern facets, or says what could have only been whispered in Victorian times. Steampunk is, in a way, a set template onto which authors can apply their own ideas and build upon those of others. One author may write about the role of women in Victorian society by creating a superpowered heroin, whereas another may comment on the class system by envisaging a race of clockwork robots who do humans’ dirty work.” (p.32)

Apparently, the phrase was coined by K. W. Jeter, who “forwarded a copy of Morlock Night to the influential science fiction magazine Locus, accompanied with a letter. ‘Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term for Powers, Blaylock and myself,’ he wrote. ‘Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like “steam-punks”, perhaps.'” (p.44)

Cityscapes

One thing that does interest me is the apparent importance of cities to this genre. Hadn’t put two and two together there. Certainly, Winchester places the subtitle ‘Cityscapes’ at the forefront of his whole discussion; in this he writes: “Our journey begins a long time ago, in a place familiar yet different: London in the Victorian age. It was a time of great change, of tectonic shifts that changed the face of the earth. But this isn’t London as you or anyone remembers it. This is a London that’s been mutated by the obsessions of the modern age. It’s a London in which empires never fell, in which vampires came to occupy the throne, in which steam powers just about everything.” (P.9)

Further on, he notes: “Victorian London is the setting for the vast majority of steampunk, but it’s not the only one – some stories take place in a far-flung, post-apocalyptic future, whereas others take place in an alternative version of the present day. As a genre it fits broadly into science fiction, which predicts tomorrow based on today’s technology, but the twist is that it’s predicting tomorrow based on yesterday’s technology. Steampunk also pulls in many other genres, such as the romance, mystery, adventure and horror novels, all of which are blended to create interesting and exciting tales.” (p.32)

“Strange cities certainly took a hold on steampunk in the early 2000s. Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines (2001) applies Darwinian thought to the evolution of cities themselves….” (p.50)

“Metropolises are an ideal setting for steampunk illustrations and artists can go to town (literally!) on background details.” (p.97)

‘The punk in steampunk is partly nineteenth century adventure, which was not self conscious, crossed with twentieth century characters who are self-conscious.’ Tim Powers
(quoted p.42)

Reference: Henry Winchester (2014) Steampunk: Fantasy Art, Fiction, Fashion and the Movies. London: Flame Tree Publishing

NB websites the book refers us on to include:

http://www.steampunk.wikia.com
http://www.ministryofpeculiaroccurrences.com
http://www.steampunkscholar.blogspot.co.uk

http://www.steampunklab.com
http://www.steampunkworkshop.com
http://www.thesteampunkhome.blogspot.co.uk

http://www.steamcon.org
http://www.steampunk.synthasite.com
http://www.steampunkworldsfair.com

http://www.steampunkcostume.com

http://www.littlesteampunkshop.co.uk

http://www.steamwords.wordpress.com (though Winchester notes that KW Jeter is more active on Twitter @kwjeter)
http://www.jamespblaylock.com
http://www.theworksoftimpowers.com

http://www.philip-pullman.com
http://www.multiverse.org
http://www.nealstephenson.com / @nealstephenson
http://www.stephen-baxter.com
http://www.chinamieville.net
http://www.philip-reeve.com
http://www.stephenhunt.net
http://www.ekaterinasedia.com
http://www.gailcarriger.com
http://www.scottwesterfeld.com
http://www.gdfalksen.com

Also note, The Libratory Steampunk Art Gallery (in Oamaru) http://www.localist.co.nz/l/giznva

Measuring human space

Suggested titles from Claude-Henri Rocquet

“…given the task of making budding architects understand that human space cannot be truly measured unless it is oriented in accordance with the cardinal points of the human heart, I had no better allies than Bachelard of La Poétique de l’espace and the Eliade of The Sacred and the Profane.” (p.vii)

Ref:  Mircea Eliade and Claude-Henri Rocquet (c1982) Mircea Eliade Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet. translated by Derek Coltman. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, London.

Architecture is not just about how to build, but why

“Historically, architects do “swirly squirrelly” things on buildings. The more evolved made shapes based on sacred geometries in order to evoke the gods; others, such as the Victorians, designed details to echo needlework and fretwork. There are numerous examples where seeming oddities had meanings relevant to the culture and metaphysics of the times. Today, modern man, in search of a soul, is asking just such questions: Why am I on the planet, and what am I looking for in my inner world? What are my myths (secular-humanist or otherwise), and how can my building be designed with them in mind?
Those questions may be asked repeatedly, and even if unanswered, will begin the first, key Socratic step. Somewhere in the asking workable answers will arise. Without inquiring, nothing arises, except perhaps someone else’s weakened answer: That’s usually when the tastefully uninspired design unfolds. When an architect or a client starts to address these questions, they open up a huge new world, one called the mythic or the metaphysical world. Architecture is not just about how to build, but why; and how do we build something that stirs us? Thinking about such considerations is the beginning of the poetry of designing diverse, meaningful architecture.” (p.28)

Ref: (emphases in blue bold mine) Travis Price (c2006) The Archaeology of Tomorrow: Architecture and the Spirit of Place. Earth Aware: San Rafael, CA

Maps that know you

I like the metaphors in this concept… and the way our emotional experience of the city is being made visual…

Hal Hodson, in a recent New Scientist, writes: “Google is using social media to transform our relationship with maps.”

“At its annual developer conference last month, Google announced that it would be using data from users’ social-media friends to alter their personal maps. A preview version of the new-style maps is rolling out around the world right now. At first it will result in nothing more than restaurant recommendations. But it will eventually lead to a highly augmented way to navigate, based on a hidden world of data representing the emotions, movements and actions of other people.”

“A family driving through new York City as part of a road trip needs a slightly different map than a lone tourist on the way to the Statue of Liberty, for example. Such context plays a central role in defining what information we need from a map, says Georg Gartner, president of the International Cartographic Association. ‘Experiences and emotions – and those of my friends – are all part of that context,’ he says.
Gartner’s research group is working on a system that embeds emotional information into maps. Called EmoMap, it uses smartphones to gather people’s emotional responses to their immediate environment, with individuals ranking places on comfort, safety, diversity, attractiveness and relaxation. The results are compiled into a ‘heat map’ and overlaid on the maps of OpenStreetMap. This method would allow people to plot the most comfortable walking path through a big city, for instance, or show the safest route home, as judged by strangers.”

“Maps built on Google’s wider range of data would allow for the popularity of different routes, areas, and destinations to be tracked over time.
[Founder of travel-mapping company Jetpac, Pete] Warden ultimately sees map personalisation as Google’s way to put its massive caches of geographical data to use, ultimately through future versions of Google Glass. ‘Google conquered ideas and culture with search, now it’s trying to organise and index the physical world,’ he says. ‘Glass and Maps are different lenses to view the world with.’

Ref: Hal Hodson (8th June 2013) Maps that know you. New Scientist 2920, p.22

The right to the city – Marcuse

Considering the global crisis in its historical context, Peter Marcuse poses the question:

“What does the Right to the City mean? More specifically: Whose Right are we talking about? What Right is it we mean? What City is it to which we want the right? Henri Lefebvre popularized the slogan in 1968, but he was more provocative than careful in its usage. The best definition he gave is:
‘… the right to the city is like a cry and a demand. This right slowly meanders through the surprising detours of nostalgia and tourism, the return to the heart of the traditional city, and the call of existent or recently developed centralities.’ (Lefebvre, 1967, p. 158)
In other places he has it meandering through:
‘the right to information, the rights to use of multiple services, the right of users to make known their ideas on the space and time of their activities in urban areas; it would also cover the right to the use of the center’. (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 34)
So: whose right, what right and to what city?” (p.189)

According to Marcuse, “Lefebvre’s right is both a cry and a demand, a cry out of necessity and a demand for something more. Those are two separate things. I would reformulate them to be an exigent demand by those deprived of basic material and existing legal rights, and an aspiration for the future by those discontented with life as they see it around them, perceived as limiting their own potentials for growth and creativity.

“The demand comes from those directly in want, directly oppressed, those for whom even their most immediate needs are not fulfilled: the homeless, the hungry, the imprisoned, the persecuted on gender, religious, racial grounds. It is an involuntary demand, those whose work injures their health, those whose income is below subsistence. The cry comes from the aspiration of those superficially integrated into the system and sharing in its material benefits, but constrained in their opportunities for creative activity, oppressed in their social relationships, guilty perhaps for an undeserved prosperity, unfulfilled in their lives’ hopes.” (p.190)

“Looked at economically, the cry for the Right to the City here comes from the most marginalized and the most underpaid and insecure members of the working class, not from most of the gentry, the intelligentsia, the capitalists.” (p.191)

“The right to the city is a claim and a banner under which to mobilize one side in the conflict over who should have the benefit of the city and what kind of city it should be. It is a moral claim, founded on fundamental principles of justice, of ethics, of morality, of virtue, of the good. ‘Right’ is not meant as a legal claim enforceable through a judicial process today (although that may be part of the claim as a step in the direction of realizing the Right to the City). Rather, it is multiple rights that are incorporated here: not just one, not just a right to public space, or a right to information and transparency [-p.193] in government, or a right to access to the center, or a right to this service or that, but the right to a totality, a complexity, in which each of the parts is part of a single whole to which the right is demanded. The homeless person in Los Angeles has not won the right to the city when he is allowed to sleep on a park bench in the center. Much more is involved, and the concept is as to a collectivity of rights, not individualistic rights. The demand is made as a right not only in a legal sense but also in a moral sense, a claim not only to a right as to justice within the existing legal system but a right on a higher moral plane that claims a better system in which the demands can be fully and entirely met.” (pp.192-193)

“What city?” Marcuse asks, replying: “Lefebvre is quite clear on this: it is not the right to the existing city that is demanded, but the right to a future city, indeed not necessarily a city in the conventional sense at all, but a place in an urban society in which the hierarchical distinction between the city and the country has disappeared.” (p.193) … “And in fact not a city at all, but a whole society. The ‘urban’ is only a synecdoche and a metaphor, in Lefebvre (1967, pp. 158, 45)….” (p.193)

“The principles that such a city would incorporate can be set forth in general. They would include concepts such as justice, equity, democracy, the full development of human potentials or capabilities, to all according to their needs, from all according to their abilities, the recognition of human differences. They would include terms such as sustainability and diversity, but these are rather desiderata in the pursuit of goals rather than goals in themselves. But there is a limit to how much benefit can be gained from trying to spell those principles out in clear terms today. Such a city is not to be predicted in detail, as Lefebvre often said….” (p.193)

“What all but the most old-fashioned utopian proposals …have in common is a rejection of the idea that the most desirable future can be spelled out, designed, defined, now, in advance, except in the most broad principles. Only in the experience of getting there, in the democratic decisions that accompany the process, can a better future be formed. It is not for lack of imagination or inadequate attention or failing thought that no more concrete picture is presented, but because, precisely, the direction for actions in the future should not be preempted, but left to the democratic experience of those in fact implementing the vision.” (p.194)

“A critical urban theory, dedicated to supporting a right to the city, needs to expose the common roots of the deprivation and discontent, and to show the common nature of the demands and the aspirations of the majority of the people. A critical urban theory can develop the principles around which the deprived and the alienated can make common cause in pursuit of the Right to the City. How to politicize most effectively that common ground? We already have sectors of society where the commonality is visible, where action for people, not for profit, is the rule.” (p.195)

Ref: (italics in original, emphases in blue bold mine) Peter Marcuse (2009): From critical urban theory to the right to the city, City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 13:2-3, 185-197

ABSTRACT: The right to the city is becoming, in theory and in practice, a widespread, effective formulation of a set of demands to be actively thought through and pursued. But whose right, what right and to what city? Each question is examined in turn, first in the historical context of 1968 in which Henri Lefebvre first popularized the phrase, then in its meaning for the guidance of action. The conclusion suggests that exposing, proposing and politicizing the key issues can move us closer to implementing this right.

Reference is to: Lefebvre, H. (1996 [1967]) ‘The Right to the City’, in E. Kofman and E. Lebas (eds) Writings on Cities, pp. 63–184. London: Blackwell.