Public Seminar debates the vision of M4BL;
Vikerkaar raises tenants’ consciousness;
dérive resists the social-spatial order;
Soundings redefines relations between city and state;
Revue Projet focuses on France’s poorest;
and Il Mulino says COVID–19 shows where Italy fails.
Public Seminar
Week of 12 June
(USA)
Public Seminar debates the vision of M4BL
In the wake of protests that have put racial violence at the forefront of the news, Public Seminar has gone from reaction to reflection, writes editor Claire Potter. ‘Our authors are re-engaging the intellectual production and vision of the Movement for Black Lives and immersing us in their vision for structural change.’
Elite self-centredness: Musa al-Gharbi asks elites to stop ruminating on how white people experience racism in themselves and others, and focus instead on the ‘behaviours, institutional structures, and allocations of resources’ that reproduce violence. ‘The tension is that the professional-managerial class in the United States skews liberal, especially on “cultural” issues like race … However, we are also among the primary beneficiaries of systemic inequality. We are heavily invested in “the system” and complicit in its operation.’
Structural racism: Peter Dreier recalls that today’s protests are the culmination of ten years of organizing and resistance: ‘M4BL has helped explain to white Americans that what they are seeing in those videos is not simply the actions of rogue or poorly-trained cops but structural racism. A majority of white Americans now believe that black Americans are not treated fairly by the police and the criminal justice system.’
Regime change: John Stoehr argues that white Americans are starting to see their country as black Americans see, live, and die in it: ‘“Regime change” is usually what the United States does to other countries. But our history can be understood, perhaps best understood, as one regime changing into another every forty years or so, beginning with a period of flowering, then mainstream acceptance, and then a period of decadence, decay, and illegitimacy, usually amid some kind of crisis.’
Defund the police: Micol Siegal argues that reform is not enough and that the police must be dismantled: ‘The police are the people who inflict the state of exception on those whom it deems unworthy of rights. As things now stand in America, they get the deadly last word. What that means is that in order to be effective, the demands protestors make need to move towards a world without police.’
Reform, don’t abolish: Abolitionist movements catalyse transformation but have been historically prone to fracture and division, writes Sidney Tarrow. ‘With a broad swath of public opinion outraged over the persistence of African American deaths at the hands of the police … surely there are reform issues around which the progressive and moderate Left and independent voters can unite without raising the provocative banner of “defund the police.”’
More articles from Public Seminar in Eurozine; Public Seminar’s website
Vikerkaar
6/2020
(Estonia)
Vikerkaar raises renters’ consciousness
Housing is a crisis from which many other crises spring, write the editors of Vikerkaar. The financialization of housing markets across Europe deepens inequality and inflates asset prices, leaving a generation in precarity. Construction exacerbates climate change — the cement industry alone accounts for 8 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Housing pressures are also catalysts of social mobilization — of rent strikes, movements to eradicate homelessness, and attempts to invent more sustainable forms of construction. With rents increasing around the world, tenants’ consciousness might be the new class consciousness.
Gendered domesticity: Unlike in the West, private home construction in the Soviet Union was highly regulated, writes Ingrid Ruudi in an article on modernism and gendered domesticity. State socialist gender politics reflect both the ingenuity and the double standards of a society committed to gender equality in public, while leaving patriarchal norms in place in private.
‘Dwellings from the 1960s–1980s have an abundance of all sorts of auxiliary spaces, partly as a way to get around official limits to “useful space”, but also a reflection of the DIY-culture of the time … caused by deficits of groceries, consumer goods and services. Even urban dwellings often include spacious greenhouses and storage spaces for various winter staples: vegetables, fruits, and preserves. Of course, all this gardening demanded extra labour, primarily from women, who could work hours equivalent to holding a second job.’
History and capital: Luxury development on the Belgrade waterfront captures the contradictions of transnational capital flows as well as those of twentieth century urban development. Milos Jovanović tells of developers who seek to clear refugee settlements in order to build a luxury high-rise funded by arms sales to the Syrian government, evoking late Ottoman modernization to justify the razing of historical districts built amidst the no less contested urban politics of the late-nineteenth century.
Streetscapes to sustainability: Andres Sevtsuk analyses the vibrant streetscapes in London’s Soho and Tartu’s post-Soviet housing projects; Benjamin Bradlow outlines a vision of sustainable urban planning based on Lula’s Brazil; Andres Kurg recovers cybernetic dreams of socialist housing; and Eik Hermann rethinks the philosophy of single-family homes.
More articles from Vikerkaar in Eurozine; Vikerkaar’s website
dérive
4–6/2020
(Austria)
dérive resists the social-spatial order
‘Despite efforts by municipal authorities to open up the democratic process, protests movements have been increasing,’ writes Lukas Franta in an issue of dérive devoted to the praxis of urban democracy. Citizens are assigned not just a social position, but also, through city planning, a spatial one. ‘The marginalized are those who have no political, economic or institutional power because of their position in the social-spatial order: the unemployed, precarious workers, migrants, the homeless.’
Coalition: Arguing for an ‘agonistic’ understanding of urban democracy, Franta discusses the potential for alliances across social groups. ‘Connections and cooperation form when parts of society feel materially or ideologically threatened by austerity or urban development policy.’ Broad coalitions can ‘democratize urban societies from below and create space for self-organization and self-management in the city. Anti-hierarchical protests and citizens initiatives can be catalysts for democratic innovation.’
Co-optation: ‘Participatory processes often serve to contain dissent and conflict,’ warns Lisa Vollmer. Experience has taught campaigners to develop strategies for avoiding co-optation, ranging from boycotting official channels to disrupting or appropriating participatory processes.
Citizens’ initiatives must also acknowledge that radical self-determination is not for everyone. The feeling that decisions regarding matters of housing are best left to government is justified, particularly since ‘self-management is much less easy for people with low levels of economic capital’. Given distrust in public institutions’ commitment to the common good, tenants’ groups need to demand that welfare provision is de-centralized and made accountable. ‘Public institutions should be reclaimed for social purposes and democratized.’
Communication: Residents’ feeling that they are not being heard, and that powerful interests will always win the day, can also be caused by poor communication on the part of planners, writes Alexander Hamedinger. If the object and the aim of the process is defined in advance, without the participation of citizens, dissatisfaction will result. Conversely, planners must communicate legal and institutional parameters in order to avoid raising impossible hopes.
More articles from dérive in Eurozine; dérive’s website
Soundings
74/2020
(United Kingdom)
Soundings redefines relations between city and state
Soundings explores how the ‘new municipalism’ can revitalize the political imagination. ‘It has the potential to re-empower localities: to involve diverse people in decision-making about their lives’, the editors write.
Localism: Òscar Garcia Agustin discusses ‘progressive localism’ in Catalonia aiming ‘to shape localisms in contested and solidaristic ways, and to link place-based politics and global processes’. Barcelona’s left municipalism recaptures sovereignty at city level, developing autonomous spaces of organization and multi-level governance, and redefining the relationship between city and state politics in the distribution of water, energy supplies, housing rights and sanctuary for refugees.
Despite its trans-local and transnational potential, the 2019 European elections in Spain showed that the new municipalism is not ‘exempt from electoral logic’. Far from it: municipalities are vulnerable to neoliberal policies and, in Spain, ‘governments of change’ lost the elections everywhere except Cadiz.
New humanism: A conversation between Palermo mayor Leoluca Orlando and Tunç Soyer, mayor of Izmir, mediated by philosopher and transnational activist Lorenzo Marsili, places municipal co-operation in the context of migration, authoritarian populism and climate crisis. Orlando argues for a mobilized vision of ‘new humanism’, because all have the right to choose which group or community they belong to, migrants included. ‘I have the same right — to decide my state, to decide my identity without limits of border or of blood.’
Autogestion: Bertie Russell’s analysis takes us to Manchester via Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the ‘right to the city’, an ‘active process of replacing the state’ through citizens taking responsibility for governing themselves.
Russell presents a five-point-plan for a new municipalism, including coordination between elected representatives and citizens committed to transforming the city and making economic decisions; public ownership of utilities and services; and transformative city experiments such as municipal-cooperative farms to provide food to schools. Russell reinterprets what Lefebvre called ‘autogestion’ (bottom-up organization) to involve ‘the recognition that contestation over the form of the state is foundational to any concerns over its function’.
More articles from Soundings in Eurozine; Soundings’ website
Revue Projet
6–7/2020
(France)
Revue Projet focuses on France’s poorest
In Revue Projet, Bénédicte Florin and Pascal Garret’s portray France’s grey economy of metal reclamation, in which marginalized immigrants — particularly Roma — as well as impoverished French citizens wander the country’s cities daily in search of scrap. ‘There’s a lot of competition among the junk collectors’, says one collector, a Romanian who came to Paris in 2009 and lived in a shanty town before being rehoused by the authorities. ‘If you’re out collecting every day you can see everybody working their shift, all the time.’
The labour of these small recycling operators in gathering, dismantling, sorting, and selling scrap metal plays a major role in the lucrative market for waste products, write Florin and Garret. ‘Stigmatized in a variety of ways and excluded from the social system, they remain essential to the successful functioning of a flourishing global recycling industry.’
And yet, criminalization of ‘ragpicking’ is increasing. ‘Has the time not come to change the paradigm with regard to these workers, who collect otherwise waste material, and play their part in the circular economy?’
Poverty: The 1980s and ’90s saw a move in France towards discouraging reliance on benefits and rewarding the working poor, writes Nicolas Duvoux. The policy proved counterproductive, with low uptake and a creeping expansion of the benefits system to ever wider target constituencies. The Macron government’s counter-poverty strategy brings in a raft of new measures aimed at preventing intergenerational poverty and providing early support for those at risk — but their effectiveness may be compromised by conflict with other policies. While wealth redistribution in France is relatively generous, reforms by successive governments mean that it remains a fragile achievement.
Healthcare: A series of photographs by two nurses on the front line of the battle against coronavirus offers a powerful insight into the conditions necessary to ensure safety within the hospital environment, and the importance of social bonds of solidarity among healthcare workers in a time of unprecedented pressure. In an accompanying interview, photographers Pauline and Émeline discuss life in the nursing profession and their belief that photography can play an important role in opening it up to the public: ‘we want to show our work without imposing any particular narrative on it.’
More articles from Revue Projet in Eurozine; Revue Projet’s website
il Mulino
2/2020
(Italy)
il Mulino says COVID–19 shows where Italy fails
The coronavirus pandemic took Italy and Europe by surprise ‘not because it was unpredictable, but because we were inattentive,’ write the editors of Il Mulino. It has become apparent that free-market society disincentivizes the prevention of catastrophes. Despite the rediscovery of the public good, optimism about a more equal and sustainable future is premature: critique of the neoliberal consensus still meets fierce ideological resistance.
Work: The reluctance of Italian businesses to slow production has put collective health in danger, write Antonio Aloisi and Valerio De Stefano. A hyper-hierarchical working culture has dismissed remote work, which requires flexibility instead of rigid schedules to be effective.
However, even a more meaningful transition to smart work should not overshadow the toll of the pandemic on those who cannot work from home, as well as on precarious workers forced to go to their workplace even when ill. Their individual insecurity has huge repercussions on public health.
School: The pandemic-induced transition to distance learning has revealed organizational weaknesses in the school system and its legal framework. In Italy, where broadband reach is still uneven, ‘there is a risk that social inequalities, which school is supposed to reduce, are increased,’ writes Mauro Piras. The solution should not be to drop distance learning, but to make it inclusive. The reduction of the infrastructural gap needs to accompany transition to teaching methods that privilege active participation and interaction.
Sovereignism: Anna Maria Cossiga re-reads philosopher and anthropologist Ernesto De Martino’ posthumous The End of the World (1977), an investigation of cultural representations of the apocalypse. De Martino argued that social groups, no matter how secularized, attribute a sacred dimension to their cultural achievements, and react to crises by seeking shelter in their founding values. Contemporary sovereignism, Cossiga writes, is just such a ‘political religion’. Meant as a bulwark against the perceived disintegration of the world, the return to origins only ends up falsifying history.
Also: A dossier on public debt looks at ties between politics and economy, interrogating the impact of national debt on sovereignty and Italy’s relationship with the EU.
More articles from il Mulino in Eurozine; il Mulino’s website
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