Panel: Revisiting David Harvey s Right to the City Human Rights and Global Justice Stream IGLP Workshop on Global Law and Economic Policy Doha, Qatar_ January 2014 A Tale of Two Rights Vasuki Nesiah I, like David Harvey, live in New York city and as of last week we have a new mayor who campaigned on a lament that under our previous mayoral regime, that of our billionaire ex-mayor Bloomberg, the story of new york had become a tale of two cities not unlike Paris in 1848. He invoked a dickensonian depiction of the new york city of Bloomberg as one of winners and losers, of unprecedented accumulation of wealth and gross deprivation, of those who were empowered as cosmopolitan citizens of a shiny new global cities, and those who were marginalized and pressed into the global underclass. As Harvey notes, cities have arisen through geographical and social concentrations of a surplus product. But then how this surplus is accumulated and distributed is a question determined through the articulation of the dialectic between economic architecture and political struggle. Bloomberg and the czars of Wall Street, not unlike Napoleon and 1
Haussmann or a range of equivalent figures across the globe, articulated the dialectic between economic architecture and political struggle by both augmenting the crisis and managing it through a complex re-imagining of the city and its futures. As Harvey notes, we now have divided and conflict-prone urban areas the apparent formation of many microstates a story of dispossession or what invoking the other Marks we may refer to as planned misery Against this context, the right to the city that carried the election of de Blasio forward was the effort to bridge this gap, to bring the urban poor, minorities, migrants, the marginalized inside the city walls. To reinterpret the subjects of rights, to expand the numbers of those who have a right to the city and enable the mobilization of a range of privileges and autonomies enabling an empowered urban citizen the right to vote in local elections, to send your children to decent city schools, to access health care, affordable housing and a range of other important dimensions of urban services. Undoubtedly, these are all worthy goals that Harvey will support, but I think the real thrust of Harvey s essay is not a tale of two cities but a tale of two rights or rather, two approaches to thinking about rights. When Harvey talks about the right 2
to change, it is a right to be otherwise to liberal modernity. 1 In this sense it is turning human rights inside out, inhabiting its internal contradictions, not rejecting rights but locating rights in processes for social change that may well be incommensurable with the discourse and framework of rights. As Harvey notes, there is something about the city s claim to self-creation, and the relational and inter-subjective process of that creation which renders (in his words) The right to the city far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. Critically, the city in the era of capital is also one that is located in the value chains, the circuits of meaning and resources that accompany empire or, as Harvey puts it, in imperialist and neo-colonial endeavors. Thus I want to argue that Harvey s right to the city invites us to shift the question, from the tale of two cities to the tale of two rights, of two regimes of rights, to stances in relation to rights. To make this point rather polemically, the tale of two cities is located in human rights, as we know it vs. political claims that cannot be 1 See Elizabeth Povinelli 2 Rancière, Does Democracy Mean Something? Dissensus (Bloomsbury 2010), at 47. The explorations of this paragraph draw from 3
accommodated in that project. It is not about empowering the poor to capture more rent in the value chains that locate the city, but about undoing the formative linkages of urban value chains and the material and conceptual physics of value. Where does that leave us? It is governmentality not just governments that matters; thus much local government reform is rendered moot and ineffective because governments play such a diminished role in governance of the new global city; governments are themselves embedded in technologies of governance that exceed their own role. Markets are so vast that any local reform can have little valence against the global dynamics of trade law and open markets. What Harvey suggests is that cities are stages for a debate about democracy in particular, the tension between the notion of democracy as a form of government and democracy as a form of social and political life. Political theorist Jacques Rancière describes this tension as the democratic paradox. 2 From the Paris Commune to Occupy, from Cairo to Istanbul, Madris to Athens, people resisted the scaffolding of rights within received democratic institutions. Protests have 2 Rancière, Does Democracy Mean Something? Dissensus (Bloomsbury 2010), at 47. The explorations of this paragraph draw from Nesiah, Neelan Tiruchelvam Memorial Lecture, 2013 4
sometimes been catalyzed by the push to take back public space (land and other resources) that have been lost to unholy deals between democratic governments and private developers; or the austerity programs and neoliberal policies that have shaped city space. These protests reclaiming public space have often been the first step toward a wider effort to reclaim democratic space from democratic governments - not just protesting inequality but resisted the parameters of the political that are inscribed into dominant human rights discourse. As Mustafa Dikec, a Turkish scholar supportive of the protests in Istanbul, notes, By standing up against a democratically elected government, the protestors remind us that politics is the business of anyone and no-one in particular, with no privileged subject, specific time or pre-determined space. 3 This is the story of those occupying the streets in the name of the right to the city 4 A very different example of rights articulation but in a sympatico contradictory mode emerges from another example that many of you may be familiar with from the work of subaltern studies scholar Partha Chatterjee. In an article called Rights of the Governed, analyzing political organizing of squatters from Bangladesh and 3 Mustafa Dikec, Fraudulent Democracy and Urban Stasis, Society and Space Environmental planning D, http://societyandspace.com/2013/06/14/commentary-by-mustafa-dikec-fraudulent-democracy-and-urban-stasis-in-turkey/. 4 Rancière, Criminal Democracy, Chronicles of Consensual Times (2010), at 122 123. He notes that this defense of pastoral government is accompanied by a criminalization of democracy as continuous with totalitarianism. 5
Pakistan in Southern Calcutta, Partha Chaterjee has noted that although their squatting remains illegal, and their ability to continue living there will forever remain precarious, they have obtained welfare services and fought off eviction. They did this through the formation of a welfare association that successfully lobbied political officials; a welfare association that, ironically, springs from a collective violation of property laws and civic regulations 5. In other words, this is not our familiar human rights NGO fighting for title to property indeed it was not title to property, but lack of it that formed the social glue for an effective advocacy group in this diverse transnational community. I take the examples I have cited here as argument that the new global cities also require that we transform our conceptual architecture and the political aspirations that we attach to them. The categories of states and markets, civil society and the rule of law, are fundamentally inadequate to the task of rethinking the possibilities of justice. As Harvey notes, the concepts circulating do not fundamentally challenge hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logics, or the dominant modes of legality and state action. Thus continuing to peg reform into the categories of government, democracy and law does not meet the empirical ground with which we 5 Partha Chaterjee in Rights of the Goverened in Identity, Culture and Politics Volume 3, Number 2, December 2002 6
work, but more significantly, it also obscures the technologies of governance that shape urban spaces. The seductions of cosmopolitan modernity and the normative common sense of liberal political values augment the structural vulnerability of marginalized groups within cities. The right to the city that Harvey opens up requires that rights claims carry within their DNA, the possibility of their revision rather than their inevitable reproduction. 6 On this view, our aim when engaging with rights in the city should not be stability but changeability; not consolidating rights of the city s citizens but opening the city s doors. Invariably, a commitment to pushing against entrenched privilege and distributive injustice would call for the ability to think against the system and push against conditions that reproduce it. To somewhat irreverently paraphrase Amartya Sen, we are arguing here for a link between freedom and un-development; between freedom and the ability to undo the very systems that entrench maldistribution. 7 negative capability 8 as a challenge to the inherited structures of political engagement, even when they come in the form of human rights. 6 Roberto Unger, False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy, Revised Edition. London: Verso (2009). 7 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, Oxford (1999); This brief revisiting of Unger and Sen also draws on Nesiah Supra note 2 8 Supra note 6, at 279-280. 7