| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 59

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York and London: Guilford Press 2003)

DON MITCHELL's The Right to the City makes an original contribution to an expanding literature on contested access to urban public space by employing the concept of locational conflict. A human geographer a t Syracuse University, Mitchell argues that "space, place, and location are not just the stage upon which rights are contested, but are actively produced by — and in turn serve to structure — struggles over rights ... In a class-based society, locational conflict can be understood to be conflict over the legitimacy of various uses of space, and thus of various strategies for asserting rights, by those who have been disenfranchised by the workings of property or other 'objective' social processes by which specific activities are assigned a location." (81)

Mitchell's book is influenced by Henri Lefebvre's writings, particularly the 1974 groundbreaking study La production de l'espace, and Le droit à la ville (1968), the inspiration for Mitchell's title. In the first of the six chapters, Mitchell draws from Lefebvre's insistence on the right of all citizens to inhabit the city. He argues that the problem with the bourgeois city is that it is "not so much a site of participation as one of expropriation by a dominant class (and a set of economic interests) that is not really interested in making the city a site for the cohabitation of differences." (18) Because property rights imply the power to exclude, groups without property become alienated from political power. This leads to violence because disempowered groups are denied access to public space. (17–21) Laws are enacted to counteract violence and to protect citizens, but they also limit their rights. Limiting rights is geographical, and especially so for homeless people who are denied the right to housing, as well as access to public space. With the explicit aim of establishing urban order, current neo-liberal practices reduce the democratization of public space.

Locational conflict is a very useful concept. With clear thinking, its generality extends to present-day protests over globalization and democracy. Mitchell gives concrete examples of disparate struggles for spatial empowerment and establishment responses, particularly in stringent control and policing of public spaces. Chapter 1 opens with references to three very different events: "wilding" or young men attacking joggers in New York City's Central Park in the 1980s; explosions in Atlanta's Olympic Park in 1996; and the terrorist bombings in New York City on 11 September 2001. (13) Perhaps Mitchell could explore the meaning of security and orderliness and consider significant differences in these violent incidents. Mitchell makes much of the history of Hyde Park, where working people forced their way in 1866 to hold an assembly for the right to vote. Mitchell sees in the anti-democratic reaction to Hyde Park the idea that public space is associated with unruly behaviour or uncontrolled space. He uses various secondary sources, newspapers, and court decisions as evidence, but his failure to justify the selection of these particular examples of locational conflict is a methodological weakness.

Chapter 2 considers specific groups who have taken to the streets to secure their rights, including a discussion of the 1994 Madsen and Hill court decisions that upheld certain provisions in the injunction against anti-abortion protesters in Melbourne, Florida, as well as of various US labour disputes. I find his treatment of women and the working class problematic and lacking clarity. Mitchell could reassess his observation that "anti-abortion activists did not lose much — and certainly not as much as Justice Scalia claims — in these decisions" (75) in light of the current backlash restricting women's access to abortion. His disparate selection of restrictive speech and assembly ordinances in response to Industrial Workers of the World [IWW] street protests and anti-picketing ordinances in California could be linked to issues of contemporary labour struggles in the context of increased corporate concentration.

Mitchell's treatment of locational conflict in the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement in Chapter 3 is the most successful. Here he argues that the university administration validated the dominant values of the political community by deploying specific politics of regulation to nonconformists, anarchists, and communists, movements that militated against "the dictates of a class- and race-based society that refuses to grant blacks, workers, and students those rights that were supposedly the very foundation of its existence." (85) In this chapter he shows how the space itself structures the struggle and how the struggle for space itself is negotiated. His inspiration may be Lefebvre, but he could more rigorously apply Lefebvre's class analysis and spatial theory. People's relations to the means of production and to state intervention are causal factors in locational conflict. The stark class, gender, ethnic, and racial divide of US cities is played out in public space in complex ways worthy of more careful examination.

The absence of a clear and consistent socio-political analysis renders this book increasingly frustrating and scattered, especially after Chapter 4, with the central issue of the homeless in Berkeley's People's Park. Here Mitchell draws from Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man and the distinction between the public and private realms. (132–133) He acknowledges the blurring of distinctions, yet falsely creates a contradiction between a desire for security and people's interaction, entertainment, and unconstrained social differences.

Chapter 5 refers to Peter Goheen's investigation of the negotiation of public space, but Mitchell does not provide a detailed analysis of the negotiation. Who are the powerbrokers involved in the laws designed to get the homeless and other disempowered groups out of the park? Are retailers and other business leaders motivated, as Mitchell suggests, by a desire for "superficially pleasing landscapes"? (184–190) In his treatment of public space "zoning" in Chapter 6, Mitchell once again employs a cultural explanation, but he does not adequately ground his analysis in specific material and class relations. He does not actually demonstrate how the structuring of public space is or could be important to achieving better social housing. Are not the most liveable and enjoyable cities those that coalesce differences and celebrate culture and entertainment in the streets and in other public spaces, as well as provide the homeless with amenable shelter and support services? Even among capitalist cities, there are some that tolerate dissident political groups and the homeless more than others.

The lack of cohesion in the book suggests the need for a deeper political analysis and a broader historical framework. Few would disagree that people should have the right to redress their grievances and debate political positions in public space, but Mitchell does not answer how and why the homeless and others are most threatened. For instance, he does not delve into the roots of the homelessness crisis: the increasing impoverishment of North American cities, including state cutbacks in public health care that have forced psychiatric institutions to exclude or discharge patients in need of care onto the streets and other urban public spaces.

Mitchell's passionate defence of rights of access to urban public space is admirable, but the book's effect is limited by theoretical weakness. Overall, Mitchell does not finish what he sets out to do and does not position himself very clearly. He does not examine the real or imagined threat of democracy to capitalist accumulation, and why social exclusion and the destruction of public space are winning. The contemporary vision of the rational and technical city conflicting with everyday practice and political protest is firmly grounded in historical research. For instance, Christine Stansell and Mary Ryan have examined the regulation of working women's and children's social life in the streets and in other public and semi-public spaces of 19th- and 20th-century US cities. In Taking Back the Streets and in Red City, Blue Period, Temma Kaplan has analysed contested class, gender, and national struggles for access to public space. Mitchell pursues a limited investigation of the zoning of urban public space and the laws established to protect state and corporate power. The monograph does not sufficiently investigate the causes, consequences, and remedies of this anti-democratic thrust in our public spaces.


Kathleen Lord Mount Allison University

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