Whose city?

from Ray Pahl’s critique of

the Keynesian city to the contestations
around neoliberal urbanism

Margit Mayer

Abstract

It is instructive to look at Pahl’s Whose City? from today’s perspective, though

urban development and governance, in fact the very definition of the urban, have
fundamentally transformed over these last 50 years. Comparing and contrasting the
meaning of Whose City? then and now allows for a critical reflection of the changes
neoliberal restructuring has wrought on urban landscapes and various stakeholders
struggling over (the definition of and access to) the city. Such comparison helps
to shed light on the (changing) role of urban sociology and urban theory in these
transformation processes in general and on the ways in which critical urbanism has
changed in response to these processes in particular.
Keywords: Keynesian city, neoliberal city, urban governance, urban movements,
urban sociology, critical urbanism, right to the city

Looking, from today’s vantage point, at Ray Pahl’s essays from the late 1960s
published in Whose City? (in 1970), both similarities and differences jump out
in the contestations over who cities are supposed to be for, who is running
them and in whose interests.1 Recent years have seen big protests, in cities
around the world under the banner ‘The City Belongs to All!’ over devel-
opments such as downtown upgrading, rising rents, displacement, evictions,
and the privatization processes underlying all of these. Across Europe, the
same question is being asked with increasing intensity: Berliners demand to
know ‘Whose city is Berlin?’,2 thousands of Belgrade citizens have repeatedly
taken to the streets under the slogan ‘Belgrade is our city!’,3 demonstrations in
Hamburg insist that ‘The city belongs to all!’ – but all too frequently such
demands are violently rejected by police forces protecting the interests of real
estate owners, developers and gentrifiers. Such contemporary contestations
show that the question Pahl raised almost 50 years ago, in the context of Fordist
Britain, is still – or again – highly relevant, but the urban situation, the prob-
lems, and the answers look rather different than in the 1960s world of Anglo
Fordism.
The Sociological Review, Vol. 00, 1–18 (2016) DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12414

C 2016 Sociological Review Publication Limited.

Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street,
Malden, MA 02148, USA
Margit Mayer

When Pahl raised the question ‘Whose City?’ he was interested in finding
out how the owners – the capitalists and managers – of the city kept reproduc-
ing this ownership, kept appropriating rents and profits from the city: through
what mechanisms and methods did they make it their city? He identified the
various ‘urban managers’ who, employed by state authorities and local mu-
nicipalities, got to allocate the distribution of public goods and services, and
the ways in which they did this. Thus Pahl could show how this ‘urban man-
agerialism’ produced territorial inequalities and social exclusions, which was
a breakthrough for critical urban sociology at the time. When today’s urban
movements raise the question ‘whose city?’, they don’t inquire into the ways
and means with which the obvious owners reproduce their ownership, but they
demand – in challenging this appropriation – that the city should belong to
those who inhabit it. Wherever this slogan is raised today, it expresses not only
a growing, shared sense of exclusion from decision-making about and access
to the city, but also scandalizes the dispossession urban residents experience:
while they realize in more and more urbanized regions around the world that
it is they who produce the city, they experience being dispossessed of their
creation by powerful alliances of finance capital, global developers, corporate
landlords, property speculators and a local state more often in service to these
global players than to the local population.
Why would it be instructive to look at Pahl’s Whose City? when urban
development and governance, in fact the very definition of the urban, have
fundamentally transformed over these last 50 years? This article argues that
comparing and contrasting the meaning of Whose City? then and now allows
for a critical reflection of the changes neoliberal restructuring has wrought on
urban landscapes and various stakeholders struggling over (the definition of
and access to) the city. Such comparison helps shed light on the (changing)
role of urban sociology and urban theory in these transformation processes in
general and on the ways in which critical urbanism has changed in response to
these processes in particular. Contemporary analysis of the question who the
city belongs to has come to see urban governance in terms of an interactive field
made up of institutional actors as well as residents’ mobilizations. Therefore,
and not only because the contemporary appropriation of the slogan ‘Whose
City?’ by urban movements encourages us to include them in the analysis,
it seems productive to focus not only on city managers and their bosses, but
also on their challengers. Finally, the article thereby illustrates the usefulness
of a reflexive approach that situates knowledge – whether Pahl’s of urban
managerialism or contemporary theorizing in critical urban studies – in the
(changing) historical conjunctures of their emergence and their obsolescence.

Urban theories and contestations in Pahl’s 1960s

When Pahl originally explored how it is that the city is not the residents’ but
the capitalists’ city, his answer was very much shaped by the specific historical
moment: high Fordism and its incipient erosion. It was equally shaped by the

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orientation and assumptions of the then prevailing urban sociology – which

Pahl simultaneously sought to challenge. While his analysis of the Keynesian
city, with its emphasis on bureaucrats, planners and their city bosses as respon-
sible for the (mal)distribution of local resources, captured the logic of urban
managerialism, his later call to shift our focus to the rich, ‘[t]he glamorous
wealth creators in finance, IT, the media and so forth . . . whose galloping in-
comes and bonuses inflate property prices and services’ (2001: 881–882) begins
to point at the decision-makers behind the mid-level managers, and also in
the direction of a critique of the neoliberalizing city. While thus tracing the
changing ‘owners’ of the city, from the Keynesian to the neoliberal era, Pahl
remained, in and for both eras, the sociologist who would reveal the real power-
holders and decision-makers. He did not, however, include in his analysis the
challengers who use the question ‘Whose City?’ as a battle cry for all people’s,
not just rich people’s, access to and shaping rights to the city.
Pahl was part of a generation of radical urban scholars who were disen-
chanted with the urban sociology hegemonic at the time, dominated as it
was by functionalism and the Chicago School themes of urban ecology, ur-
ban ways of life, and disconnected from urban economics. This approach no
longer seemed adequate to the ‘new urban sociologists’ or writer-activist Jane
Jacobs who contributed significantly to the emerging new sociology at the time
(cf. Pickvance, 1976; Lebas, 1982; Jacobs, 1961). They felt that the many urban
problems that emerged with the crisis of Fordism could not be resolved with the
tools of technocratic planning that was so essential to Fordist urbanism. These
critical sociologists had developed an ambivalent relation to the Keynesian-
welfarist and social-collectivist institutions, which – while often autocratic and
exclusive – did hold a potential for redistributive justice. Thus, Pahl explicitly
embraced welfare statism, but he problematized the role of the ‘urban man-
agers’ and their ideologies shaping the urban environment and responsible for
the uneven distribution of local resources.
While this neo-Weberian perspective, so well articulated by Pahl (on the
basis of his first-hand experience and disillusionment with the planning pro-
cess that he got to participate in as sociologist adviser to various regional
plans developed by government bodies), was widespread in Britain, in other
European countries, especially in France and Italy, where the social strug-
gles of the 1960s and 70s were strongest, critical urban scholars evolved more
neo-Marxist orientations. Foremost amongst them was Manuel Castells (1972,
1973) who saw class relations and conflicting class interests behind the unequal
access to urban resources, and suggested seeing the city in terms of class strug-
gle over collective consumption. Thereby urban protest movements came into
his view and he foregrounded their struggles in his analyses (eg 1973). In Pahl’s
Whose City?, by contrast, there is no mention of mobilized actors who chal-
lenge the uneven effects of urban policies and development plans, even though
such mobilizations did take place in Britain at the time, if not as widespread as
in France or Italy. Particularly prominent were the UK tenants and squatters
movements, which protested local authorities’ housing policy and addressed


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a dire housing need by direct action while also exploring and practising alter-
native life styles challenging Fordist norms (eg Kay et al., 2007 on the tenants
movements; Bailey, 1976 and Reeve, 2005, 2009 on the squatters movements).
Also movements around welfare benefits, the so-called claimant unions, were
quite visible within the terrain of urban activism at the time (eg Rose, 1973;
Harrison and Reeve, 2002).
Where Pahl and Castells converged was in their rejection of the possibility
of rational planning as a solution to the urban problems of their day. They both
criticized (along with other ‘new urban sociologists’) prevailing urban sociology
and called for a reinterpretation of core concepts such as urban, urbanism and
urbanization (cf. Pahl, 1970: 5–6; Castells, 1972). In contrast to the hegemonic
urban sociology, they were concerned with patterns of inequality and exclusion
and the institutions producing them. Especially their critique of planning, their
idea ‘that planning must be social was really radical at that time. It was a thing
done by engineers’ (Pahl, quoted in Milicevic, 2001: 765).
Thus, both Pahl’s and Castells’ positions reflect the specific historical con-
text in which they emerged and were operating: the Keynesian city, which
represented the climax of a very direct relationship between the urban scale
and social reproduction – where the state, in all the Western countries, had
taken over a large part of social reproduction and social investment in the
urban realm, in more or less authoritarian, more or less technocratic fashion.
In this context it made good sense for critical scholars seeking to transcend
the traditional Chicago School themes, to define the urban in categories of col-
lective consumption (for which a Marxist approach was helpful, as chosen by
Castells) or in terms of the distribution of resources through urban managers
(for which a Weberian perspective emphasizing the role of bureaucracy and
the distribution of life chances was helpful, as chosen by Pahl).
The urban movements of the time also reflected this historical context: they
were either triggered by or responded to the norms and standardization of the
Fordist-Keynesian city, its functional zoning, suburbanization, urban renewal
programmes, and the resulting ‘inhospitability’ of urban space (Mitscherlich,
1965). Central for the movements in all these Western cities was the ‘repro-
ductive sphere’ with its issues of ‘collective consumption’: movement demands
challenged the cultural norms as well as the high price and insufficient quality
of public infrastructures and services. The movements demanded – as did soci-
ologists such as Pahl and Castells – not only improved institutions of collective
consumption, but also more participation in the decision-making about their
design so they would actually meet people’s needs. Social movement scholars
observed that the Fordist city had contradictory implications for the move-
ments: while its bureaucratic and top-down authoritarianism provided cause
for grievances, its Keynesian-welfarist disposition, the expansion of the infra-
structures of collective consumption and state-underwritten social reproduc-
tion met not only material needs of urban residents, but also provided op-
portunities for movements to flourish, particularly where social-democratic
governments allowed for political openings (cf. Mayer, 2009).

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In many cities, the movements developed progressive alternative projects of

their own, generating vibrant infrastructures of community, youth and cultural
centres, alternative production and feminist collectives, autonomous media,
and other self-managed projects. But in spite of the breadth of the mobilizations
and the vibrancy of the movement cultures at the time, it was not possible
to join the movements made up of the culturally and politically alienated,
primarily young activists, with movements of those who were discriminated
by or excluded from the ‘blessings’ of the Fordist model; to join, in Marcuse’s
words (2012), the ‘discontented’ with the ‘dispossessed’.
Looking back at the critical scholarship of the late sixties and early seventies,
Pahl described those Fordist days as an era ‘when the public sector was larger,
taxation more redistributive and economic growth slower . . . ’ (2001: 880). As
he saw it, the professed goal of urban policy back then was to compensate
for the inequalities created by capitalist urbanization: cities, because of their
size and density, represented a concentration of public works, and the point
of urban policy was to cope, through rational planning of infrastructure and
provision of housing, health and education, with the collective demand for
goods and services not provided by the market. ‘[T]he issues I raised in Whose
City? . . . were generally received sympathetically by all political parties. There
was a greater sense of common decency . . . a pragmatic One-Nation Toryism,
which was offended by too great contrasts between the public and the private
at that time’ (Pahl, 2001: 880).
In such conditions one could indeed hope, as Pahl did, to make a contri-
bution towards a more ‘just’ urban system by focusing on the distinctiveness
of urban resources, allocated through the bureaucrats, professionals and their
political bosses in the public sector. Back then, one could assume that ‘the way
these urban resources were allocated could reduce, reflect or reinforce the
inequalities already established through inheritance and by the labour market’
(Pahl, 2001: 779). Unlike the radical movements of the time which both
benefitted and suffered from the top-down Fordist welfarism, Pahl embraced
what he saw as benevolent welfare statism, as a way to enhance redistributive
justice – maybe anticipating that its promise would soon need to be defended
against the looming roll-back neoliberalism waiting in Thatcher’s wings that
was to dismantle all notions of allocative redistributive justice.

Contemporary neoliberal urbanism: Whose City? today

Since the reflexive approach informing our analysis requires us to interrogate

the constantly changing urban conditions, it is crucial to understand the dynam-
ics of contemporary neoliberal urbanism. This section summarizes its features
and thereby reveals the complexities and contradictions, which any answer
to the question ‘whose city?’ would need to address in the current configura-
tion, and which become quite manifest in the contemporary urban movements,
which the last part of this section will highlight.


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Margit Mayer

After several rounds of neoliberalization – roll-back, followed by roll-out,

followed by a post-crisis round of austerity urbanism4 – urban conditions have
fundamentally transformed. As many urban scholars have shown (eg Brenner
and Theodore, 2002; Peck et al., 2009 and 2013; Künkel and Mayer, 2012; He
and Wu, 2009; Geddes, 2011), urban policy-making hinges no longer primar-
ily on the institutions of the elected state and its bureaucrats, but ever more
on business, real estate and developer interests, the point of urban policy has
become to facilitate the unfettered operation of ‘the market’. Urban services
(what is left of them) have become increasingly privatized, and city govern-
ments the purchasers rather than providers of services. The question ‘whose
city?’, while raised more loudly and by more and different groups, has taken on
new meanings, and the practical as well as theoretical answers look increasingly
complex.
The latest round of neoliberalization (where the neoliberal project has been
discredited by the 2008 crash and the stagnant growth rates that followed, as
well as delegitimized by social movements but still not weakened) is charac-
terized by a devolved form of extreme fiscal constraint: except in flourishing
wealthy cities, municipalities are adversely affected, many of them have there-
fore developed an advanced form of austerity politics, which not only disman-
tles Fordist social welfare infrastructures, but grinds away at what has survived
the repeated rounds of cut-backs and neoliberal restructuring.5 Contemporary
neoliberal urbanism thus denotes a complex configuration involving the lo-
cal adaptation of neoliberal regulations, such as the enforcing of low wages
and insecure working conditions, restrictions of tenants’ as well as workers’
rights, debt as both enabler of continuing habitual levels of consumption and
as disciplinary technique, as well as specifically spatial adaptations of neolib-
eral tenets, such as increasingly uneven spatial developments. The politics of
neoliberal urbanism have been characterized by the deliberate valorization of
real estate and public space, creative city policies, as well as punitive (austerity)
policies. Drawing on the work on recent urban restructuring and transforma-
tions of urban governance in the process of neoliberalization mentioned above
as well as work on austerity urbanism (eg Oosterlynck and Gonzáles, 2013;
Peck, 2012; Schipper and Schönig, 2016), four dimensions in particular can be
distilled as characteristic features of contemporary neoliberal urbanism (for a
more elaborate presentation of these features see Mayer, forthcoming).

1. The overarching political strategy shaping the city continues to be the

pursuit of growth first. That is, city officials do whatever they can to
accelerate investment flows into the city and to improve their position
in the interurban rivalry. They prioritize ‘highest and best use’ as the
criterion for land use decisions, roll forward gentrification and create
(frequently privatized) spaces of elite consumption and sanitized areas
of social reproduction, thereby transforming the built environment. In-
creasingly, non-central areas are also subject to such upgrading, leading
to changing relations between central cities and their peripheries. An

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effect of such growth-chasing projects, heated by international property

speculation, have been exploding property prices, which in turn have
led to surges of evictions, social displacement, and a new homeless cri-
sis. While global city hot-spots attract international investments, most
ordinary cities face tightening budgets, which prevent city leaders from
implementing the type of big projects and urban spectacles they previ-
ously used to radiate the message of success to investors and tourists.
Cash-strapped cities have turned to locational politics that rely more on
low-cost, symbolic ways to play up the local flavour and to attract cre-
ative classes that help culturally upgrade their brand. The search is on
for innovative, low-budget, especially culture-led, ways to mobilize city
space for growth. Frequently, sub-cultural and dissident movements are
instrumentalized in these upgrading programmes: clever city officials and
real estate capital see them as branding assets useful in building an image
of ‘cool cities’ or ‘happening places’ (Mayer, 2016a).
2. Neoliberal urbanism has also been defined by officials’ adoption of en-
trepreneurial forms of governance in ever more policy areas, where they
try to make use of presumably efficient business models, privatized forms
of governance and public–private partnerships. Municipalities have been
aided along in these moves to outsource and out-contract their projects
by disseminators of policy intelligence such as the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the
OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) (cf.
Theodore and Peck, 2011). Under conditions of slow growth, however,
municipal treasurers become wary of failed projects and speculation ru-
ins. As funding streams from superior levels of government have dried
up for more and more localities, but municipalities need to do ‘more with
less’, they are turning to ‘the markets’ – not merely for funding specu-
lative projects, but even basic infrastructure, that is, urban governance
structures have become more and more financialized.
These processes of entrepreneurialization and financialization signal a
transition to a new mode of urban governance. In contrast to the previ-
ous Keynesian mode, which sought to secure the consent of the governed
through tripartistic, corporate and long-term designs, these novel modes
of regulation are less transparent and often not democratically legiti-
mated, and produce hegemony – if at all – by making flexible, small
and constantly changing concessions to different groups, primarily to
middle class-based and upwardly mobile groups. In the trend towards
an increasingly ad hoc and informalized political process, out-of-town
investors, global developers and corporate flippers have come to play
ever stronger roles – though it has been local politics that, by adopting
entrepreneurial strategies, has allowed them this role.
These entrepreneurial governance strategies, their lack of public trans-
parency, and their strengthening the hand of outside investors have given


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rise to all kinds of struggles over the (erosion of) representative democ-
racy and over the exclusion of ‘expendable’ groups from the city (cf.
Brenner et al., 2012; Smith and McQuarrie, 2012).

3. Intensified privatization of state assets, public infrastructures and services

is another key feature of neoliberal urbanism, which keeps being pushed
to new levels. Initially, privatization transformed the traditional relation
and boundary between the public and the private sphere by rolling back
and reorganizing the socially oriented institutions of the public sector;
now, as collective infrastructures are exposed to the market, privatization
has actually turned into financialization (cf. Hodkinson, 2012; Rolnik,
2013). In this raiding of public coffers, often by government-sponsored
private companies, urban resources have been turned into options for ex-
panded capital accumulation by dispossession (cf. Merrifield, this issue).
With marketization and financialization extended to ever more areas
of the reproductive sphere, real estate markets have become even more
commodified, and the provision of housing has – via mortgaged home
ownership as well as via rent – become a crucial frontier of capital’s ever
expanding push for value maximization. While finance has always played
a central role in (re)developing urban infrastructures, neoliberalization
has transformed the built environment itself into a mechanism for value
capture by finance as a mode of accumulation. The integration of finance
and urban space in turn rendered real estate increasingly ‘liquid’ by con-
verting it into a tradable income-yielding asset (Gotham, 2009). Housing,
too, has become a tradable asset in speculative moves on global financial
markets – from luxury housing to public housing stocks – where new fi-
nancial players (private equity firms, hedge funds, and other ‘alternative
investment funds’) discover ‘underperforming’ buildings and set out to
‘optimize’ their value (cf. Beswick et al., 2016).
These various new enclosure strategies have triggered a broad spec-
trum of contestations: protests against rent increases, blockades of evic-
tions, rallies at banks and auctions, and occupations of vacant buildings
(cf. Hodkinson, 2016). Privatization of (semi-)public spaces has also been
challenged, occasionally in the form of situationist-inspired guerrilla and
other actions scandalizing their role as spaces of surveillance and con-
sumption (cf. Eick and Briken, 2014). And the privatization of utilities
has evoked movements that sporadically succeeded to force local author-
ities to re-communalize them with popular referenda (cf. Becker et al.,
2015).

4. Finally, the tool kit for dealing with intensifying social polarization has
been ‘upgraded’. Since Pahl diagnosed, in 2001, tendencies towards so-
cial and socio-spatial polarization as extremely dangerous because of the
loss of social cohesion they entail, they have only intensified as a re-
sult of the three strategies just listed. While during the roll-out phase of

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neoliberalization, territorial concentration of ‘social exclusion’ was ad-

dressed with the toolkit of area-based revitalization and activation pro-
grammes (cf. Mayer, 2003), such programmes have been severely cur-
tailed and superseded by a novel two-pronged policy. Its prongs are, on
the one hand, attrition and displacement policies, and on the other more
benign programmes designed to incorporate select impoverished groups
and areas into upgrading efforts.
The ‘benign’ prong gets applied to decaying social housing districts or
(ex-)industrial areas, which city officials deem to have some develop-
ment potential. Thus, previously stigmatized ‘problem areas’ have be-
come locations for urban spectacles and (development) projects, with
local authorities claiming that such upgrading strategies will benefit the
residents of these areas. While not directly displacing poor or unem-
ployed residents with immediate force, such programmes lead not only
to the revitalization of such blighted neighbourhoods, but also induce a
gradual residential shift. For example, in the deindustrialized district of
Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg the municipality achieved an upscale transfor-
mation by means of exhibitions and festivals (cf. Birke et al., 2015). Sim-
ilarly, ‘social mix’ policies that have been widely (re)adopted in order to
tackle urban deprivation, are praised by politicians for ‘breaking up con-
centrations of poverty and providing neighbourhoods with a middle-class
voice’ (Bridge et al., 2014: 1133), while being strategically employed in or-
der to undergird efforts to attract growth, investors, creative professionals
and tourists. Such ‘benign’ incorporation ‘works’ only where valorization
processes, that is, a rise in property values and investments, are promis-
ing. Once they ‘succeed’ in attracting the desired clientele – frequently
by marketing the ‘wild urbanism’ and exploiting the rough working-class
milieu or chic ‘indigenous authenticity’ – the poor and vulnerable popu-
lations who have lived there are eventually forced out (eg Mayer, 2008:
324–325).
The other prong, increasingly favoured under conditions of austerity
urbanism, consists of repressive and criminalizing measures and instru-
ments. It entails punitive strategies that criminalize unwanted behaviours
and groups, as well as attrition and displacement policies that evict and
banish the poor, pushing them to further outskirts or into invisible inter-
stices of blight within the urban perimeter. Many communities of colour,
informal workers, homeless people, the undocumented, and increasingly
the new austerity victims, as well as protest movements and urban ‘rioters’
are exposed to this repressive side of neoliberal urbanism. Traditionally
vulnerable groups, the ones Wacquant (2008) labelled as ‘urban outcasts’
and groups unwanted in the core retail districts such as street youth or
panhandlers, have been surveyed, controlled or banished for some time.
Now the new austerity victims, who are increasingly losing out in labour
as well as housing markets, confront this non-benign part of the tool
kit as well: more extensive surveillance, more aggressive policing, and


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generally more stigmatizing, repressive and expelling treatment. Feher

(2015) describes increasingly brutal ways of ‘disposing of the discredited’
that have become characteristic of neoliberal governance. Measures to
‘disappear’ people without assets, who are of no use to austere neoliber-
alism, range from making them statistically invisible, via harassing them
‘to death’, all the way to pushing them out of and/or not letting them in
to gated Europe.

All of these currently popular instruments and policies have implications for
the ways in which urban resistance is formed and they structure oppositional
groups’ room to manoeuvre. In contrast to Keynesian policies, they have con-
tributed to broadening the constituencies of urban protest, particularly since
austerity policies have moved to the foreground, which hurt not only tradition-
ally vulnerable groups, but increasingly also broad sectors of middle classes
with cuts and reductions in services, dispossessions through foreclosures and
other forms of indebtedness. This expansion of the urban disenfranchised has
provided the basis for campaigns bringing together more different types of
discontented and dispossessed groups than previously possible. But in spite of
the similar experiences of dispossession, shared anger over predatory banks
and corporate landlords, and widespread frustration with unresponsive local
authorities, differences continue to exist and often hamper the emergence of
unified strong movements.
While earlier urban movements confronted mostly city politicians and their
local growth machines, today’s activists are dealing with additional and distant
adversaries: unelected technocrats, especially financial technocrats, as well as
global investors and developers, who are behind the financialization of property
markets and push for big development projects. Unlike the business-dominated
regimes attacked in the past, today’s adversaries such as banking institutions
are increasingly headquartered in other countries. In addition, many move-
ments witness de-democratization processes in various spheres as well as sus-
pension of civil rights, which increasingly affect their own practice, and they
face more and new forms of repression.6 Also, growing numbers of movement
organizations lose state funding or legal status as recognized associations, or
lose public support as they become criminalized – and thereby suffer from
shrinking resources, opportunities and open spaces for their activities.
While neoliberal urbanism has thus produced a growing and differenti-
ated spectrum of ‘dispossessed’ groups, these do not, in spite of many shared
grievances, automatically share positionalities and interests. For example, some
movement groups become privileged in the context of a politics that seeks to en-
hance the ‘creative potential’ of cities. So-called alternative and (sub)culturally
active urban movements have seen their niche existence nurtured by ‘breeding
ground’ or ‘interim use’ policies (Colomb, 2012; Owens, 2008; Pruitt, 2013), and
some of the ethnic and migrant-based activism in the informal sector has bene-
fitted from new diversity-based integration strategies that frequently come as
part of the creative city package (cf. Rodatz 2012). In many cities, formerly

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dilapidated neighbourhoods that have been spiffed up by squatters and today

feature music scenes and hip clubs and beach bars, have become key to official
city marketing discourses (eg Scharenberg and Bader, 2009 for Berlin). Such
creative city policies benefit both empty city coffers and precarious creative
workers or groups whose talents can be harnessed for cultural upgrades of
the city, but who cannot afford the high costs of renting central city space.
While thus beneficial, these policies also hijack movement knowledge, civil
society experience, and poor people’s survival strategies for purposes of urban
restructuring and enclosure. The appropriation of practices and principles that
used to be disavowed by mainstream politics – such as self-management, self-
realization, and other unconventional or insurgent creativity – has become not
only more easily feasible, but a generative force in today’s neoliberal cities. In
this process, the formerly insurgent principles often lose the irritant edge they
used to entail in the context of the overbearing Keynesian city with its top-down
administration. In today’s neoliberal urbanism they frequently morph into
essential ingredients of (sub)local regeneration programmes, whose participa-
tory structures are designed to encourage activation and self-responsibilization
rather than actual political empowerment of disadvantaged groups.
While such creative city policies have on occasion opened up new space
and new resources for some movements to flourish, the simultaneous poli-
cies of attrition, austerity and criminalization restrict and suffocate (protest)
movements of more vulnerable urban residents who are increasingly robbed of
opportunities to voice their needs. These urban outcasts face more stigmatizing
and repressive treatment, which in turn deepens the divides among the differ-
ent groups locked out of or exploited by the neoliberal city and dispossessed
in its crisis management.
It is the interplay of both of these tendencies that is at the root of the
disparate make-up of today’s urban activism in Western cities. The claim that
the city should be ‘for all’ has, in this environment, frequently taken on the
language of rights; different urban movements as well as theorists have sought
to bridge the fragmentations among the afflicted by invoking Lefebvre’s ‘right
to the city’.

Theory and practice: from Whose City? to The Right to the City!

As Harvey (2006: 28) has observed for movements in the neoliberal age in
general, social activists have increasingly shifted to ‘rights discourses’. The
slogans and mottos of urban movements have adapted this shift to social justice
discourses by invoking the ‘Right to the City’, and critical urban scholars have
seized on the concept as if it might be the analytical key for deciphering urban
contestations in the neoliberal age (cf. for many Attoh, 2011; Iveson, 2013;
Kuymulu, 2013; Marcuse, 2009, 2014).
While most of the Right to the City (RttC) groups and initiatives refer back
to Henri Lefebvre’s definition of ‘the right to the city [is] like a cry and a
demand’ (1967: 158), in fact movements under this banner have comprised


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Margit Mayer

a great variety in terms of practices and goals. On one end of the spectrum,
groups and organizations are working to get charters passed that seek to protect
specific rights (plural) in order to secure participation for all in the city (as it
exists); on the other end, more radical movements seek to create the right to
a (more open, genuinely democratic) city through social and political agency
(cf. Mayer, 2012). While the networks that have coalesced under the motto of
the ‘Right to the City’ are more heterogeneous than earlier urban movement
alliances, they rarely manage to bridge the gaps sketched above. Typically,
activist networks nowadays consist of some combination of the following:

- radical autonomous, anarchist and alternative groups and various leftist

organizations;
- middle-class urbanites seeking to defend their accustomed quality of life;
- disparate groups that share a precarious existence, in the informal sector,
the creative industries, or youth with uncertain career prospects;
- artists and other creative professionals which may cut across these
backgrounds;
- frequently, local environmental groups fighting harmful energy, climate,
or development policies;

The marginalized and excluded, ‘people of color’, transfer recipients or the

homeless have so far not been very present in the coalitions that have formed in
northern European cities – in contrast to southern Europe and North America.
But even in the former, in recent years novel, not so familiar movement actors
have entered the stage, for example refugees who have marched, squatted and
gone on hunger strikes in cities from Amsterdam to Vienna;7 senior citizens
and retired tenants have struck for affordable rents and community centres;8
anti-eviction coalitions have organized massive blockades to prevent tenants
or foreclosed home owners from getting forced onto the street.9 When in the
wake of 2011 the Occupy and Indignado movements diffused from central city
squares to more peripheral neighbourhoods, the assembly model and direct-
democratic practices of decision-making spread, and non-traditional ‘urban’
protests emerged in peri-urban and ex-urban terrains. But also without any
intervention by city activists, new protests have bubbled up in the peripheries of
city regions, sparked by the acceleration of environmental and social problems
that accompany extended urbanization (cf. Mayer, 2016b).
A movement sparked by tenants in a former public housing district in Berlin
represents an interesting instance where an action repertoire resonating with
urban and occupy movements was kicked off by non-traditional groups. Low-
income, mostly Turkish migrants and families on welfare who called them-
selves Kotti & Co (after the central square around which their social housing
complexes are concentrated) in May 2012 erected a gececondu in the mid-
dle of Kreuzberg, invoking the informal settlements sprouting overnight in
Turkish cities, in protest of the rising rents in their (previously social) hous-
ing complexes.10 They were soon supported by neighbours and activists, who

12 
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 The contestations around neoliberal urbanism

would bring food and volunteer for night shifts, and by academics, who helped
organize a conference to pressure the local authorities. While the welfare of-
fice demands that the tenants find cheaper housing on Berlin’s periphery, the
protesters formed alliances across large swathes of the city region by orga-
nizing joint actions with other tenant groups, anti-gentrification activists and
squatters.
The protests of groups such as Kotti & Co, which have also invigorated other
groups that so far have not been part of the urban movement scene, reveal that
50 years after Pahl posed the question Whose City?, it is being answered in
new ways. New, because both, the ‘city’ and the ‘who’ it belongs to (and who is
excluded) have changed, while the struggle over it has become more conflicted
and more fierce.
The meaning of ‘the city’ has changed both empirically and theoretically.
Lefebvre already wrote in 1967, ‘[the right to the city] can only be formulated
as a transformed and renewed right to urban life . . . thus from this point on I
will no longer refer to the city but to the urban’ (1967: 158). Since urbanization
has gone planetary, people’s struggles against dispossession, predation and
expulsions – not only in what we traditionally call cities but equally in what
appear to be peri-urban, ex-urban or rural areas – are, in fact, connected
and increasingly making common cause in their resistance against (extended)
neoliberal urbanization (Brenner and Schmid, 2011; Merrifield, 2013; Mayer,
2016b).
The ‘who’ has equally become extended: Rather than wrestling merely
with the ‘urban managers’ and their ways of allocating urban resources, to-
day’s urban movements and their intellectual allies challenge a conglomer-
ate of powerful actors who have and exercise ‘the right to the city’. Marcuse
identified them as: ‘the financial powers, the real estate owners and specu-
lators, the key political hierarchy of state power, the owners of the media’
(2012: 32). Those who do not now have it, and who among them might lead
the push for the right to the city, is what should concern us today, Marcuse
argues.
Those who now ‘have the right’ are turning cities, particularly their down-
towns, into exclusive citadels for the very rich, strategically aided by the various
instruments the neoliberal urban policy toolkit detailed above offers them.
They are the same owners and power holders who turn landscapes of extended
urbanization into sacrifice zones, polluting and contaminating soil, water and
air with their industries. The residents of all these zones, all who are under
threat of displacement and expulsion, under threat to lose their right to ‘the
city’, are stepping up and intensifying their protest and resistance (eg Lerner
and Brown, 2010). The Occupy and Indignado movements have in many places
strengthened and conjoined such protest, put the demand for ‘real democracy’
on the agenda, as well as delegitimized the predatory capitalists as they
concentrate their wealth in fewer and fewer hands, exacerbating inequality to
a degree not seen before. Pahl may have been anticipating a movement such
as Occupy in 2001 when he wrote: ‘Perhaps the anger against unrestrained


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Margit Mayer

global capitalism is the only significant urban movement of our times’

(2001: 882).
Going beyond this wondering assessment by Pahl, today’s activists as well
as critical urban theorists have evolved a (right to the city) perspective which
does not limit itself to questions of material and distributive changes, but also
highlight forms of symbolic representation and recognition, importantly also of
groups that did not used to be on the radar of urban nor social movement schol-
ars. From the favella dwellers of Latin American cities, the informal workers
of African and Asian cities, to the descendants of migrant guest workers, or the
refugees that arrive in European cities – and those who are blocked from enter-
ing and warehoused in detention camps – scholarship is increasingly directing
its focus to the everyday and political contestations around the recognition of
these expelled and excluded groups fighting for their ‘right to the city’ and their
space within right-to-the-city networks (cf. Gebhardt and Holm, 2011). At the
same time, new research that follows up on Lefebvre’s claim of planetary ur-
banization (such as Schmid, 2011; Brenner, 2014) unpacks the links between
local urban movements and the worldwide struggles for the global commons
that are carried out ‘by peasants, small landholders, farm workers, indigenous
populations . . . across the variegated landscapes of extended urbanization’
(Brenner, 2013: 108).
Since Pahl first explored the ways in which local authorities and their ur-
ban managers appropriate and shape cities according to their own rather than
residents’ interests, both the ‘who’ and the ‘city’ have become thoroughly re-
defined. While Pahl could show how the ‘urban managerialism’ of the Fordist
city produced territorial inequalities and social exclusions, today’s answers to
his original formulation have become rather more complex. This complexity
has been revealed by linking the analysis of urban (governance) restructur-
ing with that of movement mobilizations, that is, by considering institutional
actors and urban protesters as constituting one and the same field of conflict.
Those who own and run ‘the city’ today are no longer only traditional city
bosses and their managers, but also global finance capital and other corporate
players. And the object of contestation, the city itself, has been redefined as
access to ‘the urban’ more in the shape of a global commons than to some
central area walled off by insurmountable (and clear) boundaries. At the same
time, urban social movements have turned the question ‘whose city?’ into a
battle cry for reappropriating what ‘the one percent’ is increasingly denying the
‘99 percent’: the ‘right to the city’, which stands not only for the right to ‘the
city we want’ but also for the right to representation and recognition of all
who are being disenfranchised and dispossessed by the process of (extended)
neoliberal urbanization.

Center for Metropolitan Studies, Received 1 December 2015

Technical University Berlin Finally accepted 13 July 2016

14 
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 The contestations around neoliberal urbanism

Notes

1 I would like to thank Ray Forrest and Bart Wissink and the Urban Research Group at Hong
Kong City University for inviting me to present an early version of this article in October
2013.
2 In 2013, 28 September was a Germany-wide day of action under the motto ‘The city
belongs to all!’ with demonstrations in Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Freiburg, Hamburg, Cologne,
Potsdam and Berlin, cf. http://kritische-geographie-berlin.de/?p=664, for Berlin cf.
http://linien142.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/wem-gehort-berlin-aktionsdemo-28-september-
2013/. Also see the 2014 movie Rent Rebels, http://rentrebels.tumblr.com/film
3 http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/serbs-protest-demolitions-uae-investment-
project-39784044
4 The phases of roll-back of the 1980s (reacting to the limits of the Keynesian city); roll-out of the
1990s (addressing some of the problems created by the rolling-back and austerity measures
of the first phase); and, starting with the dot.com crash of 2001, a third round, in which
urbanization became a global phenomenon thanks to the integration of financial markets to
debt-finance urban development around the world to rekindle new growth, are well described
in Peck et al. (2009), austerity urbanism in Peck (2012) .
5 For more detail on the following four characteristics of neoliberal urbanism, cf. Mayer (2013).
6 For example, the Spanish safety law ‘Ley Mordaza’ was passed in July 2015 to clamp down
on the assambleas, eviction blockades, and protests near government institutions, that is, the
forms of activism that had been characteristic of the anti-austerity and real democracy move-
ments sweeping across Spanish cities. Demonstrators participating in unauthorized protest
near ‘sensitive’ locations can now be fined with sums as high as €600,000 (Minder, 2015).
7 Cf. http://asylstrikeberlin.wordpress.com/ and http://refugeesrevolution.blogsport.de/
8 See http://palisaden-panther.blogspot.de, http://www.taz.de/!96737/
9 http://zwangsraeumungverhindern.blogsport.de
10 The large housing estate (with several thousand units) was built in the 1970s, originally
as council housing. When, in the 1990s, almost 50 per cent of the apartments owned by
municipal housing associations were privatized, this policy included the area south of the
square Kottbusser Tor. Meanwhile, rents in this area have jumped to levels higher than those
demanded on the ‘free market’ (cf. Kaltenborn, 2012).

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