Already in 1975, the sociologist Ray Pahl ironically asked: “Whose city [is it]?” Without a shadow of a doubt, many would answer it is ‘their’ city, and definitively, not ‘ours’. Corporate, financial, and state power are strongly intertwined. So much so, that European cities are increasingly developed as sites of capital accumulation and business-oriented hubs, while they are experiencing lower habitability and increasing processes of segregation, gentrification, and exclusions. If the global city is the territory where some win and others lose, citizens seem to be losing the battle. As Andy Merrifield puts it, long ago “citizens raised the white flag of conciliatory surrender and began to participate in what Guy Debord called the ‘mass psychology of submission’” or what Henri Lefebvre anticipated in 1968 as the “destruction of urban society”. Yet, when the absence of democracy weighs too heavily on citizens, people often decide to act collectively. It is in the framework of the current ‘urbanization of neoliberalism’ (Brenner & Theodore, 2002) that notions such as the ‘right to the city’ (Harvey, 2003, 2012; Lefebvre, 1968) and ‘radical democracy’ (Heindl, 2020; Laclau & Mouffe, 2001 [1985]) have gained currency and inspired urban struggles globally. From these perspectives urban transformations are likely to come from communities through collective action by strengthening ways of participatory democracy. The question of how these theoretical approaches are mobilized to struggle against urban injustice and exclusions will be addressed in this Blockseminar. To do that, we will focus on the neighborhood scale as a territory of struggle and space of resistance to recover access to urban resources, the most precious of which being housing. We will talk more about the ‘neighbor’ than the ‘citizen’ and the ‘neighborhood’ than ‘citizenship’. We will illustrate these discussions drawing mostly, but not only, on the empirical case of a neighborhood in Bilbao, Spain, subjected since a decade to an urban renewal plan that is triggering gentrification processes and is perceived as a form of urban violence by its residents. The Zorrotzaurre Masterplan is a joint venture of the Zaha Hadid architecture office, the Bilbao City Council, the Provincial Council of Bizkaia and the Port Authority of Bilbao. In this process of ‘urban improvement’, the targeted neighborhood and its neighbors have become hostages of the business prospects and the commodification of their territory. Against this backdrop, this seminar will be an exercise of collective reflection about the uses and abuses of urban planning and about how social mobilization, activism and urban resistance can contribute to shape a more participatory democracy.
The course will be conducted in English; willingness to read and communicate in English is therefore expected. A written essay/assignment is required in addition to the active participation in the course.
References:
Brenner, N., & Theodore, N. (2002). Cities and the geographies of “actually existing neoliberalism”. Antipode, 34(3), 349–379.
Harvey, D. (2003). The right to the city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27(4), 939–941.
Harvey, D. (2012). Rebel cities: From the right to the city to the urban revolution. London, New York: Verso.
Heindl, G. (2020). Stadtkonflikte: Radikale Demokratie in Architektur und Stadtplanung. Wien, Berlin: mandelbaum verlag.
Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (2001 [1985]). Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics (2. ed.). London: Verso.
Lefebvre, H. (1968). Le Droit à la ville. Paris: Anthropos.