eFORUM (feat. Mariana Valverde) [☛ Event]

THE COMMONWEALTH AND THE PROBLEM OF SCALE
Mariana Valverde
Professor, Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto

As we speak, our university president, Meric Gertler, whose scholarly work has been on urban issues, is busy empowering Richard Florida and a big-data engineer to build (and perhaps run? the process so far has been quite secretive) a brand-new high-profile urban studies institute, for which a large private donor is being sought, as I understand it.

Articulating ‘creative cities’ discourses with ‘smart cities’ techniques in a way that is attractive to private donors is the standard neoliberal solution for cities’ research deficiencies. That approach has already given us a super-neoliberal one-person outfit, the Global Cities Institute (located in the Faculty of Architecture), which is devoted to studying the ‘indicators’ currently used to generate the rankings that incite cities to compete against one another (with public services being valued not for themselves but because they help cities in a transnational war of all against all whose object is to attract capital). While President Gertler has verbally expressed support for including critical social science in the new not yet named institute, there is no doubt, given who’s been named as leaders, that material resources as well as intellectual prestige and university media efforts will be heavily weighted towards neoliberalism – to the detriment of research on economic inequality, spatial inequality, racism, and, last but most relevant to the present occasion,  progressive urban theory.

Given this institutional context, the subtle critique of the Toronto organization Artscape and the Wychwood Barns project with which it is associated (p. 184) comes as a much needed breath of fresh air. As Torontonians know, the Wychwood Barns are heavily patronized by the creative classes including professors. It seems to me that honesty demands that we acknowledge the role that the professoriate has been playing in the phenomena that some call ‘creative cities’ but others would call the exacerbation of the divide between urban cosmopolitan elites on the one hand and the precariat on the other.

To continue applying Peggy’s ideas to the university, it should be noted that some universities are busy literally privatizing some assets, especially land. The University of Toronto, by contrast, does not sell land (though at least one affiliated college has done so) – but my ongoing research shows that its numerous ‘partnerships’ may well end up not only contributing to the larger socioeconomic inequalities inherent in ‘creative cities’ but also creating new internal inequalities – between professional faculties and the arts, and between highly paid tenured professors and indebted students. Why professional faculties are now housed in star-architect designed, expensive buildings that are subsidized by both taxpayer money and tuition fees, while the Geography department continues to languish in a 1950s cheap building, is the sort of question Peggy’s revival of a notion of ‘the commons’ and ‘the commonwealth’ could help us to ask. And if we were to do so we would have to begin by admitting that the university, legally, is a corporation – rather than a commonwealth or a cooperative.

So, why not down-scale the commonwealth a bit? With the concentration of left of centre theorists and researchers we have, we could just get on with building a university-scale commonwealth – as opposed to hoping against hope that a progressive ticket gets elected at city hall or at higher levels.

Before making my second point, I need to add here that Peggy does not merely distance herself from neoliberal-style trends and strategies. She also distances herself from the most visible alterantive to neolilberalism within urban studies – represented by largely British largely Marxist and almost universally male geographers, David Harvey being the most famous. In other fields (e.g. international development studies, gender studies) old fashioned globally scaled Marxist pronouncements about capital in general went out of fashion years ago; but in urban studies, orthodox Marxism lives on, complete with ground rent as the motor force of urban forms. The critique of Marxist urban studies is not spelled out in much detail, however. Perhaps Peggy does not want to undermine future coalitions (such as my imaginary coalition to make our university into a commonwealth), since Marxists and social democrats and anti-racist feminists and young anarchists would all be on the same side. But in relation to Marxist critiques of the shrinking commons, my sense is that Peggy is skeptical about efforts to revive Lefebvre’s musings on the urban and on cities. A more systematic critique of Lefebvre’s stream-of-consciousness remarks about ‘the right to the city’ would have been very timely, in my view. As it is I am not sure if Peggy agrees with me that eulogizing ‘the urban’ as the only site of creativity, progress, and playfulness is, in our day and age, problematic. The romantic and highly masculinist and abstract anarchist “soixante-huitard” spirit had its day, but today it is out of place and out of time. In 1968 nobody imagined that social inequality would suddenly start rising again a few short years later, with the Thatcher revolution. In 1968 one could invoke Rabelais and wax enthusiastic about the “ludic” potential of the urban – in blithe ignorance of the fact that for women and many racialized peoples, the Western urban is a site of danger as well as of pleasure. But not today.

My second point is about the specificity of ‘solidarism’. I agree that it is very important to reclaim non-Marxist forms of socialism and critical social thought. But I don’t see a need to exclude the many other, more or less social democratic currents that flourished before the rise of the Soviet bloc. Particulary relevant to the ‘commons’ project are Henry George’s views on land, property and taxation, which were hugely popular in his day (in the English-speaking world at any rate, where they seemed to fill the same need filled by in Germany by the Social Democrats). George’s key point is that land should not be privately owned, only buildings and products. Since rising urban land values are the source of so much of the ‘unjust enrichment’ that Peggy wants to diminish or eliminate, taking Henry George down from the library shelf would seem to be a good idea. And there are other more or less social democratic intellectuals and activists whose work is now sadly forgotten and who could be very useful in building a progressive alternative to both neoliberalism and orthodox Marxism.

One of many possible sources of such inspiration could be the cooperative movement, from which Canada’s own social democracy arose. The commons built by cooperatives may not be open to all — but co-operatives do help to fill the space Peggy has identified, the often forgotten space between individual and corporate private property on the one hand and state resources on the other.

Which brings me to my third and final point, in the form of a question: to what extent are the intellectual resources of the pre-World War I French thinkers of solidarity  suitable for us today — specifically, in a settler colonial state like Canada? Indigenous land claims are discussed in the book (pp. 67-71), but only insofar as they affect non-urban land. Now that some U of T officials have (belatedly) adopted the practice of acknowledging the complex history of colonial dispossession of a succession of peoples, from the Huron Wendat to the Mississauga, in this very place, I think it may be time to develop multi-scalar approaches  to urban justice. As I see it, we need to recognize that while Canadian courts have been somewhat willing to force governments to consult and accommodate about natural resource extraction in non-urban settings, urban space is ‘native land’ too, and those claims have not been seriously heard in any forum.

I want to emphasize that this comment is meant as a collective and individual self-critique – urban studies in general has remained woefully ignorant of the relevance of postcolonial and settler colonial studies in the urban setting. In my own work on city governance in Toronto, I too have signally failed to integrate that history and that perspective. But going forward I hope there will be opportunities to bring urban studies and postcolonial studies closer together.

To conclude:  European social democrats of the postwar period were heavily involved in the invention of ‘social and economic rights’, at the UN level and in domestic welfare state policies – as well as, usually in weaker form, at the urban scale (especially in regard to housing policy, though workers’ housing, even when built on a mass scale, was not to my knowledge ever considered a human right). European social democracy gave us many wonderful inventions, from solidarism to national health insurance. Rescuing some of these for use at the urban scale today is certainly a worthwhile task – and could indeed serve as a powerful alternative to the dominant creative cities thesis.

But – each city is located in a particular country, with a particular national government and limited by a national legal system. Those who are now living in Trumpistan are probably revising their political agendas and their priorities, since rights victories once thought to be ‘settled law’ are suddenly under attack. But we do not live in Trumpistan; we live in a more straightforwardly neoliberal context, with public-private partnerships coexisting very happily with discourses of diversity and tolerance. And while neoliberal urban strategies are pretty much the same around the world, the fact that we live in a settler colonial state, and have a particular ethical responsibility to particular First Nations, should figure very centrally in whatever deliberations begin to take place locally in response to Peggy’s important book.