List of Acronyms
Chapter 6: Social Movements
6.4 The city and the slum
There are now more people on this planet living in cities than in rural areas (Davis, 2006).
Over the last few decades, both the pace and scale of urbanisation has dramatically increased, particularly in the South - Dhaka, Kinshasa and Lagos, for example, are all 40 times larger now than they were in 1950. We now have megacities of over 8 million inhabitants, and hypercities of over 20 million people (or the entire urban population of the world at the time of the French Revolution) (Ibid).
The city is generally viewed as simply a physical space; but, in a Marxist understanding, the materiality of the city was created by, and interacts with, the economic base (i.e. relations and forces of production); and the materiality in turn creates, and interacts with, the superstructure (i.e. social relations and ideology).
Henri Lefebvre predicted that urbanisation would be central to the survival of capitalism, and would thus inevitably become a crucial focus of political and class struggle (Harvey, 2008).
Harvey shows how urbanisation is an inevitable and necessary function of capital, because cities allow for the absorption of surplus product. He argues that the housing sector has been an important stabiliser of the economy in periods of regional crises and crashes; but also that
surplus capital in a time of overproduction. Thus cities in the South have continued to grow rapidly even as economies collapse, “driven by the reproduction of poverty, not by the supply of jobs” as a result of neoliberal SAPs (Davis, 2006, pp.15-16).
However, as in all capitalist development, growth in the city has been (necessarily) uneven.
This is true within the cities of the West and in the South, as well as between them (Davis, 2006). Fanon argued that the colonial era would be over when there were no longer two zones for two ‘different species of men’ in one city (cited in Pithouse, 2006a, p.19), and clearly we are a long way from that. Much of the growth of cities in the South has been informal, rather than simply the investment of surplus capital, and since 1970, slums in South cities have grown faster than urbanisation per se, whilst in Africa, slums are growing twice as fast as cities (Davis, 2006); but some of the fastest growing slums are in Russia and the former Soviet republics. There are now over 1 billion people living in slums, and according to UN- HABITAT, the slum population is growing at the rate of 25 million per annum17. The majority of residents of such slums are poor, but life in slums is seldom without a cost, usually an up- front payment to gain initial access, and with ongoing rental frequently being extracted by
‘slumlords’, frequently politicians or members of the upper middle class). Slums are
frequently in hazardous or extremely marginal areas; on flood plains, steep hillsides, swamps, contaminated land, subject to landslides, floods, earthquakes, toxic industries, collapsing infrastructure and, most of all, fires (Ibid.).
Cities have become increasingly divided, with fortified, gated communities and privatised public spaces under constant surveillance, versus growing slums (Harvey, 2008). Increasingly, the rich are physically distanced from the poor, even right out of the city, with new high-speed roadways to allow for an easy commute into the core of the city (Davis, 2006):
Urban segregation is not a frozen status quo, but rather a ceaseless social war in which the state intervenes regularly in the name of “progress”, “beautification”, and even
“social justice for the poor” to redraw spatial boundaries to the advantage of
landowners, foreign investors, elite homeowners, and middle-class commuters. (Davis, 2006, p.98)
So the process has been a violent one: “A process of displacement and...‘accumulation by dispossession’ lie at the core of urbanization under capitalism” (Harvey, 2008, p.34). Davis (2006) estimates that within the Third World, every year hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of poor people are evicted, often as a result of high profile international events (the Olympics, the soccer World Cup), or to get rid of potential centres of resistance.
Urbanization, we may conclude, has played a crucial role in the absorption of capital surpluses, at ever increasing geographic scales, but at the price of burgeoning
processes of creative destruction that have dispossessed the masses of any right to the city whatsoever. (Harvey, 2008, p.37)
Coupled with this material reality is the city as a discursive space, as a place of hegemony.
Henri Lefebvre has argued that urbanisation is a hegemonic force, since “dominant ideas are...consolidated through the built environment of the city” (Loftus & Lumsden, 2006, p.103). The built environment thus serves acculturating purposes (Lears, 1985):
Elites try to manipulate hegemony, not simply by changing the physical environment of a settlement, but by reshaping the way in which people relate to that environment through their concrete, everyday, activities. (Kipfer, 2002, quoted in Loftus &
Lumsden, 2006, p.103)
Part of this is concealment of what really is. Kevin Lynch, in The Image of the City (cited in Jameson, 1984), says that the alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map, in their minds, either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find
themselves (Jameson, 1984, p.89), and Jameson (1984) shows how current urban architecture reflects postmodernist culture.
However, because the city is a discursive as well as material place, it is a site of struggle and of potential change, a terrain for challenging dominant ideas (Loftus & Lumsden, 2006, p.103); and a number of writers now suggest that the city is the most crucial site of struggle - Harvey (2008), for example, says the revolution has to be urban or nothing at all.
Manual Castells, in his influential The City and The Grassroots (1983), has argued that urban movements are critical agents of change, and his work has been seen by many as proposing a new historic agent. Castells says that it is in cities that people experience economic
exploitation, cultural alienation and political oppression most acutely: “Spatial forms....will be produced by human action, as are all other objects, and will express and perform the interests of the dominant class according to a given mode of production and to a specific mode of development. They will express and implement the power relationships of the state in a historically defined society” (p.311) - but will also always be resisted - for example, by urban social movements. So urban movements can create new cultural settings and urban ‘meaning’, creating an ‘alternative city’, a network of self-managed, ‘culturally meaningful’
communities. This will be different in different cities, because different histories of struggle for meaning have resulted in different meanings - so a colonial city has a different meaning than a Western capitalist one. Such movements must be resolutely autonomous. However, Castells argues, an urban movement can really only change the meaning of cities, not much else:
It cannot, however, be a social alternative, only the symptom of a social limit, because the city it projects is not, and cannot be, connected to an alternate model of production and development, nor to a democratic state adapted to the world-wide processes of power. Thus urban social movements are aimed at transforming the meaning of the city without being able to transform society. They are a reaction, not an alternative (p.327).
Stuart Lowe (1986) has shown how Castells thinking about the urban movement changed over time, from a formal structuralist position, which accorded economics a determinant position, and saw the working class as critical to any processes of change (i.e. urban social movements would need to articulate with the working class movement) to the more postmodernist
position of The City and The Grassroots, in which the working class had largely been replaced by individuals and social groups. Lowe argues that Castells is in fact very contradictory in his thinking in The City and The Grassroots, in arguing that urban movements can innovate social change, but not actually bring about change themselves.
Not surprisingly, given the statistics cited above, a number of commentators have accorded the slum, the shack settlement, a particular place in this struggle, rather than some more general urban movement. Ironically, the World Bank realised the violent potential of the slums fairly early on, arguing in 1990 that urban poverty would become the “most significant, and politically explosive, problem in the next century” (cited in Davis, 2006, p.20). Davis also predicts the eventual revolt of the slums. However, he argues, such a revolt would not
necessarily (and not probably) be progressive.
Many writers have disputed this analysis. Pithouse (2006a), for example, says that Davis is
“just plain wrong” (p.8) to claim no left politics in the slum, because the slum is “a site where subaltern autonomy can achieve critical mass enabling the production of political and artistic innovation of world historical significance” (p.9). Davis got it wrong, Pithouse argues,
because he fails to take into account “the humanity of shack dwellers” (p.7), and does not take
“the thinking of the objects of his research seriously” (p.8).
Žižek (2005, cited in Patel, 2006) has also disputed Davis’ claim:
One should resist the easy temptation to elevate and idealise slum-dwellers into a new revolutionary class. It is nonetheless surprising how far they conform to the old
Marxist definition of the proletarian revolutionary subject: they are ‘free’ in the double meaning of the word, even more than the classical proletariat (‘free’ from all
substantial ties; dwelling in a free space, outside the regulation of the state); they are a large collective, forcibly thrown into a situation where they have to invent some mode of being-together, and simultaneously deprived of support for their traditional ways of life. (Žižek, 2005, cited in Patel, 2006, p.87)
Colonial and postcolonial writers have also identified the radical potential of the slum, particularly because of the particular character of colonial capitalism. Fanon (1961) was very critical of the nationalist struggles for concentrating on a tiny portion of the population, i.e. the urbanised working class, skilled labour, and civil society, and distrusting the peasantry. He argued that this prevented them from becoming truly revolutionary movements, which, he
proletariat. Rather, colonised nations would need to rely on the uprooted peasantry on the fringes of towns:
It is with this mass of humanity, this people of the shanty towns, at the core of the lumpen-proletariat, that the rebellion will find its urban spearhead. For the lumpen- proletariat, that horde of starving men, uprooted from their tribe and from their clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneous and the most radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people. (Fanon, 1961/2001, p.103)
Mamdani (1996) has also identified the need to link the urban and the rural in the postcolonial state, and wonders what social forces can do this (p.297). He identifies the disenfranchised, beyond the reach of customary law and yet with few entitlements to civil rights; as Marx said of the working class, “Though in civil society, they are not of civil society” (cited in
Mamdani, 1996, p.297). Mamdani argues that these are migrant labourers and those in the informal sector. However, he cautions, there is a need to balance participation and alliance, rather than autonomy, because otherwise it is possible to justify and uphold the most undemocratic forms of central power. “One only needs to look at the experience of self- initiated squatter settlements in South Africa: many begin with an emphasis on participation and end up with a warlord” (pp.298-9).