A New Social Contract
Andy Merrifield, The New Urban Question
Pluto Press, 160pp, £15.00, ISBN 9780745334837
reviewed by Daniel Whittall
If we are to believe the McKinsey Institute, ‘the growth of cities in emerging markets is driving the most significant economic transformation in history.’ A growing ‘consuming class’, especially to be found in the cities of China and India, are the drivers of future economic growth. Over the course of the next 15 years, cities in the USA alone will contribute fully 10% of global GDP growth, though that fact might be met with some disbelief by the people of Detroit in particular. 600 urban centres – the City 600, as the McKinsey Institute fawns over them – generate 60% of global GDP. According to the UN, the urban population of Asia increased by 57.2% between 1950 and 2011, and from 2011 to 2050 it is presumed to increase by 54% again, whilst that of Africa will increase by 32.5% over the same period. That of Europe, meanwhile, will rise by 2% from 2011 to 2050. By 2050 7 out of 10 people around the world will, according to the World Health Organisation, live in urban areas.
For Andy Merrifield, such statistical illustrations of the global proliferation of urbanisation – what he calls, borrowing from Henri Lefebvre, ‘planetary urbanisation’ – are representative of a ‘positivist-empiricist tradition’ dominated by post-political experts and technocrats. Drawing on the writings of the American sociologist Louis Wirth from the 1930s Merrifield asks, ‘is urban studies a numbers game anyway?’ His answer, again derived from Wirth and from Lefebvre, is that ‘the influence cities exert on social life … is greater than any statistical population ratio might infer. The urban isn’t a physical entity delimited in space, but its very own cosmos, its very own “way of life”’.
What are we to make of this rejection of the importance of the fundamental empirical evidence about the scope and dynamics surrounding the contemporary expansion of cities? Surely the newness of any questions around the urban relates, at least in part, to the specific dynamics of urban growth, and their uneven geographical development? Merrifield’s response is that his is an attempt to tie together politics not with empirics, but with what he calls a philosophy of the city. Lefebvre, alongside Manuel Castells, Guy Debord, and David Harvey, are the primary intellectual and political influences behind Merrifield’s book, with Lefebvre himself referred to as ‘the last of a pretty extinct species – a … metaphilosopher of the city.’ For Merrifield, such a metaphilosophical enquiry into the dynamics of planetary urbanisation sees beyond the empirical evidence for the expansion of cities, and instead interprets the newness of the urban question today as something more to do with the role of the urban in contemporary social, economic, and political life.
It is Castells’ 1972 work La Questionne Urbaine – The Urban Question – that most clearly represents what Merrifield sees as the ‘old’ urban question. Castells saw the urban as a portion of geographical space within which the social relations inherent within the dominant mode of production themselves get produced and reproduced. For Castells, the urban question thus turned on the provision of what he called ‘collective consumption’, all those supposedly unprofitable services and infrastructures – healthcare, education, public housing – that were nevertheless essential if capitalism were to earn the consent of those whose labour power it required.
Castells’ focus on social reproduction seems antiquated in the face of the neoliberal austerity State, whose regulatory functions at the beck and call of capital proliferate all the while that its desire to ensure adequate social provision for its populous is drawn down. When Castells’ book was published, his blind-spot was the unleashing, only a few years later, of a neoliberalised mode of production that would begin to put to the sword not only the State’s provision of the means for collective consumption, but his own Marxism, too.
One urban scholar at work around the same time as Castells, but who ‘ushered in a harder-edged “revolutionary” theory,’ was David Harvey. Merrifield draws widely on Harvey’s work, especially his monumental 1982 work The Limits to Capital in which, amongst other things, Harvey attempted to analyse the dialectical entanglement of capitalism and space. For Harvey, the urban became not merely a site of social reproduction, but instead one in which the very mode of production itself was reproduced – a central location, as he put it in the more recent Rebel Cities (Verso, 2012), for the accumulation of capital.
Based on his interpretations of Castells and Harvey, supplemented with the inspiration of Guy Debord – of whom Merrifield writes, ‘his strange grip on my thinking about the world in part led me to quit my job as a paid-up academic, throwing in my lot with freelance wandering and writing’ – Merrifield frames what he sees as being the newness underlying the urban question today. ‘Items of ‘collective consumption’ were always ideologically loaded anyway,’ he argues. In the wake of the devastation wrought on Keynesian social democracy since the 1970s, Merrifield writes that ‘there’s no going backward to the good old days of the public sector, to the old paternal state.’
Merrifield’s critique of Castells and his deployment of Harvey’s work usefully frame the new urban question around the relationship between State, capital, and labour. That question, though never spelled out explicitly by Merrifield in quite these terms, is as follows: In the context of planetary urbanisation, what role do urban spaces, in all their diversity, play in the dynamics of capital accumulation, and what role does the abandonment of the incentive to provide the resources and services required by collective consumption play in in the corresponding impulse for anti-capitalist struggle?
By framing the question in the context of Lefebvre’s theorisation of planetary urbanisation, Merrifield suggests a particular definition of the urban. Planetary urbanisation ‘both unites and divides the world’. The new urban question is, in this sense, an ontological one – what does it mean to inhabit a truly urban world? To this end, Merrifield suggests that we ‘dispense with all the old chestnuts between global North and global South, between developed and underdeveloped worlds, between urban and rural, between urban and regional, between city and suburb.’ From such a perspective, ‘the globe is no longer demarcated through definitive splits between strict opposites’.
Postmodern theory has long contested the dualisms that modern thought so often takes for granted. Merrifield takes this perspective to its extremes. For him, the urban ought best be conceptualised as ‘a single substance whose attributes – the built environment, transport infrastructure, population densities, topographical features, social mixes, political governance – are all the formal expressions of what pervades it ontologically.’ Planetary urbanisation, in this sense – a sense directly derived from Lefebvre – is ‘a process that produces skyscrapers as well as unpaved streets.’
The world of planetary urbanisation is a world of urban centres and peripheries, no longer divided between North and South but unevenly distributed across the globe. Areas previously conceptualised as rural, but dominated by agribusinesses or energy firms in pursuit of the food or fuel that underlie urban growth, are, from this perspective, urban peripheries. The rural-urban fringe, in this sense, no longer exists at the boundaries of a particular city, but instead is differentially produced along diverse networks of urban production.
The very idea of the city thus itself dissolves. Whilst the city stands for the built environment, its conceptual utility ‘can no longer be acceptable for radical political urbanists.’ Instead, we should embrace the urban, which offers ‘a politically charged concept of citizenship that goes beyond nationality or flag-waving.’ The city stands for the bricks and mortar, whilst the urban itself represents ‘a political ideal … a new social contract around which citizenship might cohere.’
At the heart of these arguments sits a deep irony. For all that Merrifield urges us to get beyond the city and embrace planetary urbanism, his book is itself besotted with one city in particular. He remains both captivated and frustrated by Paris, and this engagement structures the conceptual apparatus on which his book is based. Debord and Lefebvre were both politically active in Paris, and Castells was Lefebvre’s student in Paris. Even Harvey, British-born and based in New York, wrote Paris, Capital of Modernity, on which Merrifield draws extensively, alongside the work of Eric Hazan, arguably the finest historian of Paris. For all that Merrifield embraces the urban, it is the sections of his book that focus on a particular city – revolutionary Paris in the 19th century, or Detroit in the 21st – that read best.
In his final chapter, Merrifield tries to escape from the paradox into which he has entrapped himself. No longer are we all to be understood as citizens of planetary urbanisation; instead, the forces opposed to capitalist urbanisation are divided into a series of abstract categories. ‘Secret agents’ devote their lives to a revolutionary cause; ‘double agents’ act in a revolutionary manner, but conceal their identities from society at large; ‘maggots in the apple’ represent the ‘huge mass of sub-, under- and unemployed workers’; ‘great escapers’ create ‘alternative radical communities and communes’; and ‘great refusers’ prefer ‘fight as a form of flight’.
It is the vacuous nature of these categories, and the difficulty presented by trying to imagine how they might usefully come together to represent an anti-capitalist alternative to the present mode of production, that most undermines Merrifield’s argument. To attempt to grasp the urban as a planetary phenomenon, one in which, for example, the difference between global North and global South no longer matter, is to understand the limits of Merrifield’s framework. To stand in Newcastle, centre of the most deprived ‘urban’ region in England in which a deindustrialised populous have been failed by the dynamics of the public sector and of collective consumption, and to comprehend the structural differences between it and a city like Dhaka, an urban centre for capital accumulation in which industrial employees lose their lives due to the fundamental structural failing of the built environment of the city in which they live, is surely to appreciate that these differences between the global North and South persist, and that an appreciation of them is central to any interpretation of the uneven geographical production of urban space.
Merrifield argues for a metaphilosophy of the urban. And yet, freed from the impulse to make sense of the empirical dimension of contemporary urbanisation, and possessed of a failure to appreciate the centrality that particular cities can play within any geographical imagination, even his own, Merrifeld’s political philosophy feels all too abstract. What would it mean to embrace some degree of empirics within the dimensions set by the new urban question? Perhaps it would require that we begin to take seriously the political economy of the modern city, and the materialist and postcolonial dynamics through which the production of urban space takes place. This is not what Merrifield provides, though his book presents useful pointers in this direction.
For Andy Merrifield, such statistical illustrations of the global proliferation of urbanisation – what he calls, borrowing from Henri Lefebvre, ‘planetary urbanisation’ – are representative of a ‘positivist-empiricist tradition’ dominated by post-political experts and technocrats. Drawing on the writings of the American sociologist Louis Wirth from the 1930s Merrifield asks, ‘is urban studies a numbers game anyway?’ His answer, again derived from Wirth and from Lefebvre, is that ‘the influence cities exert on social life … is greater than any statistical population ratio might infer. The urban isn’t a physical entity delimited in space, but its very own cosmos, its very own “way of life”’.
What are we to make of this rejection of the importance of the fundamental empirical evidence about the scope and dynamics surrounding the contemporary expansion of cities? Surely the newness of any questions around the urban relates, at least in part, to the specific dynamics of urban growth, and their uneven geographical development? Merrifield’s response is that his is an attempt to tie together politics not with empirics, but with what he calls a philosophy of the city. Lefebvre, alongside Manuel Castells, Guy Debord, and David Harvey, are the primary intellectual and political influences behind Merrifield’s book, with Lefebvre himself referred to as ‘the last of a pretty extinct species – a … metaphilosopher of the city.’ For Merrifield, such a metaphilosophical enquiry into the dynamics of planetary urbanisation sees beyond the empirical evidence for the expansion of cities, and instead interprets the newness of the urban question today as something more to do with the role of the urban in contemporary social, economic, and political life.
It is Castells’ 1972 work La Questionne Urbaine – The Urban Question – that most clearly represents what Merrifield sees as the ‘old’ urban question. Castells saw the urban as a portion of geographical space within which the social relations inherent within the dominant mode of production themselves get produced and reproduced. For Castells, the urban question thus turned on the provision of what he called ‘collective consumption’, all those supposedly unprofitable services and infrastructures – healthcare, education, public housing – that were nevertheless essential if capitalism were to earn the consent of those whose labour power it required.
Castells’ focus on social reproduction seems antiquated in the face of the neoliberal austerity State, whose regulatory functions at the beck and call of capital proliferate all the while that its desire to ensure adequate social provision for its populous is drawn down. When Castells’ book was published, his blind-spot was the unleashing, only a few years later, of a neoliberalised mode of production that would begin to put to the sword not only the State’s provision of the means for collective consumption, but his own Marxism, too.
One urban scholar at work around the same time as Castells, but who ‘ushered in a harder-edged “revolutionary” theory,’ was David Harvey. Merrifield draws widely on Harvey’s work, especially his monumental 1982 work The Limits to Capital in which, amongst other things, Harvey attempted to analyse the dialectical entanglement of capitalism and space. For Harvey, the urban became not merely a site of social reproduction, but instead one in which the very mode of production itself was reproduced – a central location, as he put it in the more recent Rebel Cities (Verso, 2012), for the accumulation of capital.
Based on his interpretations of Castells and Harvey, supplemented with the inspiration of Guy Debord – of whom Merrifield writes, ‘his strange grip on my thinking about the world in part led me to quit my job as a paid-up academic, throwing in my lot with freelance wandering and writing’ – Merrifield frames what he sees as being the newness underlying the urban question today. ‘Items of ‘collective consumption’ were always ideologically loaded anyway,’ he argues. In the wake of the devastation wrought on Keynesian social democracy since the 1970s, Merrifield writes that ‘there’s no going backward to the good old days of the public sector, to the old paternal state.’
Merrifield’s critique of Castells and his deployment of Harvey’s work usefully frame the new urban question around the relationship between State, capital, and labour. That question, though never spelled out explicitly by Merrifield in quite these terms, is as follows: In the context of planetary urbanisation, what role do urban spaces, in all their diversity, play in the dynamics of capital accumulation, and what role does the abandonment of the incentive to provide the resources and services required by collective consumption play in in the corresponding impulse for anti-capitalist struggle?
By framing the question in the context of Lefebvre’s theorisation of planetary urbanisation, Merrifield suggests a particular definition of the urban. Planetary urbanisation ‘both unites and divides the world’. The new urban question is, in this sense, an ontological one – what does it mean to inhabit a truly urban world? To this end, Merrifield suggests that we ‘dispense with all the old chestnuts between global North and global South, between developed and underdeveloped worlds, between urban and rural, between urban and regional, between city and suburb.’ From such a perspective, ‘the globe is no longer demarcated through definitive splits between strict opposites’.
Postmodern theory has long contested the dualisms that modern thought so often takes for granted. Merrifield takes this perspective to its extremes. For him, the urban ought best be conceptualised as ‘a single substance whose attributes – the built environment, transport infrastructure, population densities, topographical features, social mixes, political governance – are all the formal expressions of what pervades it ontologically.’ Planetary urbanisation, in this sense – a sense directly derived from Lefebvre – is ‘a process that produces skyscrapers as well as unpaved streets.’
The world of planetary urbanisation is a world of urban centres and peripheries, no longer divided between North and South but unevenly distributed across the globe. Areas previously conceptualised as rural, but dominated by agribusinesses or energy firms in pursuit of the food or fuel that underlie urban growth, are, from this perspective, urban peripheries. The rural-urban fringe, in this sense, no longer exists at the boundaries of a particular city, but instead is differentially produced along diverse networks of urban production.
The very idea of the city thus itself dissolves. Whilst the city stands for the built environment, its conceptual utility ‘can no longer be acceptable for radical political urbanists.’ Instead, we should embrace the urban, which offers ‘a politically charged concept of citizenship that goes beyond nationality or flag-waving.’ The city stands for the bricks and mortar, whilst the urban itself represents ‘a political ideal … a new social contract around which citizenship might cohere.’
At the heart of these arguments sits a deep irony. For all that Merrifield urges us to get beyond the city and embrace planetary urbanism, his book is itself besotted with one city in particular. He remains both captivated and frustrated by Paris, and this engagement structures the conceptual apparatus on which his book is based. Debord and Lefebvre were both politically active in Paris, and Castells was Lefebvre’s student in Paris. Even Harvey, British-born and based in New York, wrote Paris, Capital of Modernity, on which Merrifield draws extensively, alongside the work of Eric Hazan, arguably the finest historian of Paris. For all that Merrifield embraces the urban, it is the sections of his book that focus on a particular city – revolutionary Paris in the 19th century, or Detroit in the 21st – that read best.
In his final chapter, Merrifield tries to escape from the paradox into which he has entrapped himself. No longer are we all to be understood as citizens of planetary urbanisation; instead, the forces opposed to capitalist urbanisation are divided into a series of abstract categories. ‘Secret agents’ devote their lives to a revolutionary cause; ‘double agents’ act in a revolutionary manner, but conceal their identities from society at large; ‘maggots in the apple’ represent the ‘huge mass of sub-, under- and unemployed workers’; ‘great escapers’ create ‘alternative radical communities and communes’; and ‘great refusers’ prefer ‘fight as a form of flight’.
It is the vacuous nature of these categories, and the difficulty presented by trying to imagine how they might usefully come together to represent an anti-capitalist alternative to the present mode of production, that most undermines Merrifield’s argument. To attempt to grasp the urban as a planetary phenomenon, one in which, for example, the difference between global North and global South no longer matter, is to understand the limits of Merrifield’s framework. To stand in Newcastle, centre of the most deprived ‘urban’ region in England in which a deindustrialised populous have been failed by the dynamics of the public sector and of collective consumption, and to comprehend the structural differences between it and a city like Dhaka, an urban centre for capital accumulation in which industrial employees lose their lives due to the fundamental structural failing of the built environment of the city in which they live, is surely to appreciate that these differences between the global North and South persist, and that an appreciation of them is central to any interpretation of the uneven geographical production of urban space.
Merrifield argues for a metaphilosophy of the urban. And yet, freed from the impulse to make sense of the empirical dimension of contemporary urbanisation, and possessed of a failure to appreciate the centrality that particular cities can play within any geographical imagination, even his own, Merrifeld’s political philosophy feels all too abstract. What would it mean to embrace some degree of empirics within the dimensions set by the new urban question? Perhaps it would require that we begin to take seriously the political economy of the modern city, and the materialist and postcolonial dynamics through which the production of urban space takes place. This is not what Merrifield provides, though his book presents useful pointers in this direction.