Seventh International Conference on Urban History
European Association of Urban Historians

Athens – Piraeus 27-30 October 2004

THE   CITY  IN  HISTORY

PLACE  OF  POWER, AND  THE  SOCIAL AND  POLITICAL  CONFLICTS

The urban and the local can be conceived only in close relation to the city. Urbanization is a process which emerged along with the industrial revolution and the expansion of industrialization in a broader area around the traditional cities. Urban society is the complex social reality of modernity, which cultivates and spreads in space urban ways of life.

Until the 19th century, cities were developed as more or less integrated spatial entities, imposing on not juxtaposed to, the surrounding country and were points of maximum concentration for the power and culture of human communities. Cities are not only the place of production, exchange and social division of labor but also political institutions permeated with conflicts and at the same time expressing common concerns and meanings. They are a product of time, and through their complex orchestration of time and space, have become the material history of human societies and the nest of collective memory.  From this overall point of view the city is an artifice of civilization, crystallized over a long period of centuries.

The word “urban” comes from the word urbs that means the political city, which replaced the mainly economic entity – communitas in the beginning of the formation of humanistic culture. In the context of the limited town or city, local could be identified with material urban forms, in other words, with places perceived through social and personal experience. The historical cities of the European tradition still alive as infinitely transforming urban cores, enclosed a multifarious expression of urbanity, overturned during the take off of industry.

Henri Lefebvre has described the double process of industrialization and urbanization 

Industry can do without the old city but does so by constituting agglomeration in which urban features are deteriorating…Where there is a network of old cities, industry assails it. It appropriates this network and refashions it according to its needs. It also attacks the city, assaults it, takes it, ravages it. It tends to break up the old cores by taking them over. This does not prevent the extension of urban phenomena, cities and agglomerations, industrial towns and suburbs.1

Ever since, the city has clearly been in crisis. This continuous shapeless expansion of the urban and the uprooting of the local, radically transform them as terrains of social and political conflicts. If the historical city was a well defined context for resistance by the subordinated groups, against power, and the city remained the common object of contestation for both people and the authority, the new urban continuity disorients the grassroots struggles. 

Together with the explosion of the old urban cores and the great population increase, a new spatial geography was shaped,  based on class, gender, race and other social divisions, which over time became more extensive and complex. In some cases, the working class remained in deteriorated districts inside the old cities, described by Engels in the case of London. In other cities, for example Paris, after its radical transformation by Haussmann, the proletariat was pushed out of the centre towards the outskirts and peripheries. In some way the Paris Commune, in 1871, expressed the reconquest of the city by the revolutionaries and proved its persistence as the terrain of social and political conflicts.

From the 19th to the middle of the 20th centuries industrial capitalism expanded continuously, producing diffusion and dispersal within urban space. Suburbanization as parallel to, but not exactly the same process as, deurbanization, together with the gentrification of historical cores, were the results of the rapid circulation of capital and the generalized exploitation of space.

According to David Harvey : Under capitalism there is a perpetual struggle in which capital builds a physical landscape appropriate to its own condition at a particular moment in time, only to have to destroy it, usually in the course of crises, at a subsequent point in time. The temporal and geographical ebb and flow of investment in the built environment can be understood only in terms of such a process.2 

During this oscillating movement of capital, social divisions are not expressed in a permanent way in the cityscape and in the territories; instead they are transformed in space and time according to the exchange value of space.

After the second world war, commodities already overwhelmed urban space, which acquired a double function : it became a place of consumption, being itself a commodity alienated from use values. In the context of welfare state and the increase in the means of collective consumption, social demands pushed national and municipal authorities in European cities to confront the spatial disorder, the destruction of the historical cores and extreme social polarities.

During the prolific years of ’60 urban problematic was developed in the theoretical and practical fields as a result of the mass movements and the political uprisings all around Europe. Socio-political struggles of that period were urban struggles stemming from European urban societies and localized in historical and meaningful places.

Then cities became the scene of the rebelling masses – workers, students, scholars, women, emigrants and so on. Public space, being in the process of privatization and vehicle of consumption was converted into the political market of the new public sphere and the direct democracy of the street. New objects broadened the social problematic coming out of the city’s reality. Struggles against gentrification and demolition of historical districts, the occupation of empty houses, demonstrations in favor of urban infrastructure, spontaneous celebrations, the rejection of zoning, the demands of leisure, issues related to participation, self-management  and alternative ways of everyday life,  shaped a new agenda of conflicts and people’s rights.

So urbanity became the cohesive tissue of the new social and political collectivities; the urban and the local reemerged as contradictory terrains of  the socio-spatial reality of the city and the resistance.

As a place of encounters, focus of communication and information, the urban becomes what it always was: place of desire, permanent disequilibrium, seat of dissolution of normalities and constrains, the moment of play and of the unpredictable. This moment includes the implosion- explosion of the latent violence under the terrible constrains of a rationality which identifies itself with the absurd. From this situation is born a critical contradiction: a tendency towards destruction of the city, as well as a tendency towards the intensification of the urban and the urban problematic. 3

During the sixties and seventies a new relationship was created between the people and the city. Concepts like democracy, citizen, citizenship, transcended their typical character and acquired their true essence, deriving from the people’s active participation in common affairs and the political action.

Europe is the continent of strong cities, which means cities with strong identities. It is not due only to their gradual development over the centuries and the omnipotence of the past, despite their contemporary transformations. It is, also, due to the successive layers of popular resistance and their living presence within the urban context and the collective memory.

Neoliberalism attacked this urban reality, which was already wounded by industrial capitalism and quickly put into practice a radical restructuring of space. Apart from the different procedures of globalization in theoretical discourse, there are some common assertions and easily perceptible features of the “post” age in the cityscape.

Globalized capitalism, based on the globalization of capital and labor, intensified the international distribution of industrial production all over the world, resulting in abandoned and obsolete reindustrialized regions on the one hand and new spatial agglomerations on the other. By moving flows of labor, created by the overturning of traditional productive structures and wars in many countries, and intensifying the flexibility of labor, globalized capitalism pushed the existing social inequalities and spatial divisions of class, gender and race to the extremes.

Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen describing “new socio-spatial formations within the divisions,” find at least seven such changed formations defined by spatial and social characteristics: citadels, gentrified neighborhoods, exclusionary enclave, urban regions, edge cities, ethnic enclaves and excluded “ratial” ghettos4. In spite of the great differences between continents and countries, these forms of polarities, realized through material and symbolic means, characterize most cities of the world.

Paris, Rome, or Brussels are not, of course, Los Angeles or New York neither are Calcutta or Rio de Janeiro but, being under neoliberal policies, and far from welfare state interventions in social housing and equipment, quickly lose their existing social cohesion and the common sense of belonging.

Privatization is the motivating power of the new more complicated and stronger social divisions and the restructuring of space. Not only does it deprive the grassroots of public collective possessions, thus producing new forms of poverty, but it also detaches them from the tangible public terrain of community. Excluded in spatial enclaves and living under the individualized conditions of work and housing, in the virtual reality of the mass media, people have difficulty in coming into contact with each other and making common demands and collective resistance.

Privatization is a total, nearly absolute, process in the age of globalized capitalism, being, nevertheless, an evolution and enlargement of previous forms of exploitation. What seems to be a rupture in relation to the past is what Manuel Castells describes as the space of flows in its “Informational City”: The new international economy creates a variable geometry of production and consumption, labor and capital, management and information – a geometry that denies the specific productive meaning of any place outside its position in a network whose shape changes relentlessly in response to the messages of unseen signals and unknown codes. The emergence of the space of flows actually expresses the disarticulation of place – based societies and cultures from the organizations of power and production that continue to dominate society without submitting to its control5.    

Projecting this critical analysis, we come to the topic of power in discourse. Exploitation of labor and space had historically been expressed in direct means and political authority was visible in the cityscape. The uprooting of the decision– making  organizations and the imperceptible forms of spatial policies, in the era of international globalization, transform traditional ways of perception and interpretation as regards space, power and society. So social and political demands, and resistance, are determined by new data, depending less and less on the urban and the local.

On the other hand, social discrimination, and inequalities are directly expressed in the political marginalization of the grassroots. To belong to the urban society means to participate in the common terrain of either agreements or differences and conflicts. Neoliberalism destroys social cohesion, together with the continuity of the urban tradition, so ideas of democracy and citizenship lack any meaning. In the same way that human and social rights become typical for the majority of the people, the right to the city becomes abstract and meaningless.

It is not only a matter of justice but of civilization. The real goal of globalized capitalism, emerging out of the world market, is to transform contemporary cities into agglomerations of individuals lost in space. Deregulation in every economic sector, the breakdown of all barriers to trade, and the free flow of capital, lead to the deregulation and breakdown of political institutions and to the increasing privatization of the public sphere.

The reality described, especially of the major cities, affects the expression of grassroots uprisings. There is no doubt that the violent and destructive urban uprising of 1992 in Los Angeles, emerged out of a “police city” with extreme spatial and social polarities. No justice, no peace, or, the city of the rich must be burnt.

Cities in Europe do not confront the same problems as the huge overcrowded American and Asian ones, but it doesn’t mean that they are being globalized away from neoliberal policies and the USA’s hegemony. The above-mentioned features of the spatial influences of globalized capitalism, are common to all cities around the world.

Moreover, the new reality of cyberspace, having provided a new kind of impersonal and “etherialized” communication, removes the means of human contact from the city to the imaginary real world of cybercities. 6

So, according to Edward Soja : As a result of this unbounding and “reworlding” of cityspace, it has become more difficult than ever before to unravel its so – called “inner workings” – economic, social, cultural, political, psychological – endogenously, that is, from what is happening locally, inside its conventionally defined boundaries. The practices of daily life, the public domain of planning and governance, the formation of urban community and civil society, the processes of urban and regional economic development and change, the arena of urban politics, the constitution of the urban imaginary, and the way in which “the city” is represented, are all increasingly affected by global influences and constraints, significantly reducing what might be called the conceptual autonomy of the urban. 7

Are we being confronted with images of the disappearing city or the simulated urbanism of the city’s fragments? It is very difficult to realize the extent of the recent spatio-social transformations. In any case, an elementary resistance to the disarticulation of the city and everyday life is to restore the salvation of the city  to the political agenda. We urgently need to realize its new formations and meanings in close relation to the social context. Is the city going to exist in the future? We cannot be sure. Within a few decades neoliberalism can destroy in the collective oeuvre of human civilization, shaped over centuries. For the moment, let’s do what we have always been doing, remembering Manuel Castells and Henri Lefebvre.

At the same time, spatial forms will be earmarked by the resistance from exploited classes, from oppressed subjects, and from dominated women. And the work of such a contradictory historical process on the space will be accomplished on an already inherited spatial form, the product of former history and the support of new interests, projects, protests, and dreams. Finally, from time to time, social movements will arise to challenge the meaning of spatial structure and therefore attempt new functions and new forms   (Manuel Castells).8

To exclude the urban from groups, classes, individuals, is also to exclude them from civilization, it from not society itself. The right to the city legitimates the refusal to allow oneself to be removed from urban reality by a discriminatory and segregative organization   (Henri Lefebvre).9

In Florence, last November, we had to defend the meeting of the European Social Forum, against Berluschoni’s prohibition. The thousands of people, which overwhelmed public space, reviving historical social and political conflicts of the Florentines, against power, proved that urbanity and urban movements are still living and act on the terrain of the contemporary city.

         Bibliography

1,3.   Henri Levebvre, Right to the City

2.      David Harvey, The Urban Process Under Capitalism

4.      Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen, Globalizing Cities

5.      Manuel Castells,The Informational City : Information, Technology,    

         Economic Restructuring and the Urban-Regional Process

6.      M. Christine Boyer, CyberCities

7.      Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis

8.       Manuel Castells, The City and the Grass Roots

9.       Henri Levebvre, Space and Politics