| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. By Don Mitchell. (New York: Guilford, 2003. x, 270 pp. Paper, $23.00, ISBN 1-57230-847-8.)

Don Mitchell's The Right to the City is an often compelling but unevenly realized exploration of contemporary rights politics and their relationship to public space. Mitchell defends rights discourse against its critics on the left with an impassioned and erudite brief on behalf of a renewed progressive protest politics in the tradition of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Berkeley free speech movement (FSM). The "right to the city," Mitchell argues, should remain a core objective of social justice movements, because the constriction of public space has become a wedge in larger attacks on civil liberties, on the economic victims of capitalism (especially the homeless), and on progressive politics of all sorts. Following the introduction and defense of rights as a legitimate political language for the Left are case studies: Supreme Court decisions regarding free speech, the Berkeley FSM, the People's Park controversy in Berkeley in the late 1980s and 1990s, and anti-panhandling and other anti-homeless laws. Throughout, Mitchell is concerned with how battles over public space reflect struggles for a just and democratic polity.

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