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City: analysis of urban trends, culture,

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The one-dimensional city

a
Fran Tonkiss
a
Department of Sociology, LSE, Houghton St., London, WC2A 2AE,
UK
Published online: 23 Apr 2012.

To cite this article: Fran Tonkiss (2012): The one-dimensional city, City: analysis of urban trends,
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 CITY, VOL. 16, NOS. 1 – 2, FEBRUARY – APRIL 2012
The one-dimensional city
Fran Tonkiss
O
n the day that Occupy London’s
appeal against the eviction order
from its St Paul’s encampment was
rejected in the UK Court of Appeal, a
spokesman for the Corporation of the City
of London summed up the problem: ‘Peace-
ful protest is a democratic right but the
camp is clearly in breach of highway and
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planning law.’ The bathos of the statement
is to the point: democratic principle is one
thing, but the city’s obligation to keep the
highway clear cannot be gainsaid. The
agonism of protest is quieted by the anaes-
thetic of the by-law.
In the politics of occupation and eviction
the always complicated relations between
property, protest and access are particularly
charged—these are conflicting ‘rights’ to the
city that splinter urban citizenship into
various categories of rentier and squatter,
speculator and dissenter, householder or tres-
passer. Cities for People, Not for Profit
(Brenner et al., 2012) is concerned with how
cities stage these conflicting rights as specific
contests over space, in the politics of enclo-
sure and foreclosure, development and dis-
placement. The text goes to work on that
ground where cities as centres of delirious
accumulation and ratcheting inequality are
also sites where movements for social and
economic justice gain traction. The Occu-
piers couldn’t get over the threshold at
Goldman Sachs in London, but there is a
clear sense that they are living (though
rather differently) in the same city: one that
contains, if not exactly the seeds of its own
destruction, then certainly the conditions
for its own disruption—and perhaps the
outline of its re-making.
There are some immediate, and fairly easy,
criticisms that can be made of this collection.
Some people won’t like the title—or
ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/12/01– 20216– 4 # 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2012.678046
slogan—but it captures a basic call for the pro-
duction of urban spaces that are responsive to
‘human social needs’ rather than over-deter-
mined by logics of ‘profit-making and spatial
enclosure’ (p. 2). It doesn’t follow that a call
for social needs to take priority in the ways
we make, govern and live in cities rules out
profit-seeking altogether, but it does highlight
the skewed urbanism that results when the
order of priority runs in the other direction.
Moreover, the contributions, with a couple
of exceptions, have a definite focus on the
rich world cities of Western Europe and
North America. The editors are straight up
about this, but it’s noticeable that two of the
essays that do push the arguments further are
Katherine N. Rankin’s compelling piece on
planning and critical development studies
(2012), and Oren Yiftachel’s on the ‘gray
spaces’ of colonisation in Israel/Palestine
(2012). My interest here is less in tapping the
text for weak spots, than in thinking about
the politics opened up by this kind of critical
urbanism, and by the contemporary social
movements that press the claims for certain
rights to the city. These can be thought
about in terms of a politics of opposition, of
critique and of refusal.
The city without opposition?
Cities for People takes its cues for under-
standing contemporary cities in the ideas of
the (somewhat receding) urban past. Its key
point of reference is Henri Lefebvre’s 1968
work on Le droit á la ville, but reading
these essays against the background of
recent urban mobilisations, my thoughts
kept turning to another moment in the criti-
cal social theory of the 1960s. Four years
before Lefebvre’s intriguing piece appeared,

Herbert Marcuse published One-Dimen-
sional Man (1964), his argument against the
conformity, co-optation and social control
of advanced industrial societies, both capital-
ist and state socialist. To turn back to these
forty-something texts now runs the twin
risks of ‘fetishism’ and ‘decontextualism’
(Frisby, 2001, p. 15), aiming off more
current urban problems. The question is
how far the past in which they wrote can be
seen as a past to our various presents. Mar-
cuse’s analysis of what technocratic systems
did to social subjectivity, the flattened-out
‘one-dimensional’ figure of over-work and
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over-consumption, seems still to speak to
the condition of post-industrial cities in
which consumption has become both the
primary accumulation strategy and the chief
mode of social inclusion. He wrote of a
‘society without opposition’, of the paralysis
of criticism in the face of mechanisms of
control and compliance that were only
‘more effective’ in being ‘more pleasant’.
It was in this spirit, perhaps, that some
detractors claimed the St Paul’s branch of
Starbucks did good business keeping the
Occupiers supplied with granola bars and
soy lattés, and it remains true that the main
routes of protest marches in a city such as
London may be measured out in opportu-
nities for take-out coffee.
On the other side of what was the Iron
Curtain much has altered since 1964, and
time-lapse translation doesn’t work so well,
but the idea of a society without opposition
retains its bite—not least because forms of
opposition have appeared so defeated under
actually existing post-socialism. But then a
Russian winter followed the Arab Spring
and long Athenian summer, in reaction to
the ballot-stuffing and post-mortem voting
that marked Russia’s parliamentary elections
in December 2011 and presidential elections
of March 2012. Thousands took to the freez-
ing streets of Moscow and St Petersburg, and
many hundreds to the well-below freezing
squares of Kaliningrad, Ekaterinburg, Volgo-
grad and Murmansk. These gestures of oppo-
sition, and the repressive policing to which
TONKISS: THE ONE-DIMENSIONAL CITY 217
they were subject—effective, not pleasant—
raise stark questions about what right (if
any) people have to occupy urban space
with intent, and the possibilities of opposi-
tion in contexts where none is to be tolerated.
Whatever else Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’
might be taken to entail, this was imagined as
something more than the right to consume.
He highlighted the contemporary production
of cities as both objects and sites of consump-
tion—a tendency that has only intensified
over time: as Christian Schmid puts it, many
urban centres now ‘survive due to their sim-
ultaneous role as places of consumption and
consumable places’ (2012, p. 54). Marcuse
père wrote in 1964 about the generative
power of false needs, the logic of getting
and wanting that by 2008 had realised an
economy of debt for many and hyper-con-
sumption for some, and by 2012 had degener-
ated into a spiral of very real needs—for
housing, for work, for food. Homelessness,
worklessness and hunger are worsening fea-
tures of the cities of what was once called
the advanced capitalist core, as well as of
cities of transition and development.
For Marcuse fils, writing in the current col-
lection, ‘the commodification of housing is
the underlying problem’ (2012a, p. 223) in
cities skewed by the imperatives of profit.
It’s certainly one of them. Peter Marcuse
points to a ‘permanent housing crisis’ that is
also pervasive—from growing precarious-
ness, abandonment and foreclosure in the
rich world economies to chronic shelter
deprivation, forced eviction and enclosure in
the cities of the poor. The double life of
housing as a basic human need and over-
heated commodity became toxic in cities of
‘privatised Keynesianism’ (Crouch, 2009)
where housing debt and consumer credit
have been relied upon to sustain levels of
demand in the domestic economy. The ‘con-
sumer riots’ in London and other English
cities in the summer of 2011 are only the
most photographed evidence for an argument
that the promise of consumption has become
a very insecure basis for social control and
compliance.
 218 CITY VOL. 16, NOS. 1 – 2
Cold comfort critique
If the permanent crisis in housing is a basic
condition of cities organised for profit, it is
one that has been engineered in specific
ways. David Harvey with David Wachsmuth
points to the way that ‘financial institutions
collectively controlled both the supply of,
and demand for, housing’ (Harvey, 2012,
p. 269) through debt-financing of developers
on one side and households on the other.
It has become very clear, in the permanent
crisis of housing and the continuing crisis of
finance, that what we are dealing with is a pol-
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itical economy—a set of economic arrange-
ments put into place by and reproduced
through political strategies. The more usual
order of play, however, has been altered:
where once it might be argued that political
elites prosecuted certain economic strategies
in pursuit of social interests, we now see
economic elites overseeing political strategies
more directly. Harvey with Wachsmuth puts
this well: ‘The ruling class rather than the pol-
itical class that acts as its surrogate, is now
actually seen to rule’ (p. 270). This is visible
in the corporate capture of the US Treasury,
Goldman Sachs alumni running Italy as well
as the European Central Bank, the suspension
of democracy in Greece for the sake of the
French banks, and more generally in govern-
ment by the ratings agencies for the ratings
agencies.
Harvey presumably can take little satisfac-
tion from the knowledge that his sustained
analysis of the role of rent and land values
in capitalist accumulation and crisis looks so
right in this moment. He is also right to see
the crisis as a ‘class event’; to refer again to
an earlier moment in critical thought, this
seems a straightforward instance of what
Ralph Miliband (1989) called ‘class struggle
from above’. It is also an unusually embodied
moment in struggles of this kind, as key
agents of financialisation take their seats at
the summit table, in parliaments and in
senate inquiries. It seems strange, in this
context, that Occupiers and others are
accused of not specifying just who or what
it is they are standing against.
The politics of refusal
A common criticism of the Occupy move-
ment internationally has been the lack of a
substantive agenda, an unwillingness to
outline ‘concrete’ alternatives to the forms
of accumulation, expropriation and maldistri-
bution that they oppose. It is easy but obnox-
ious to compare the Occupiers unfavourably
to the clarity of Tahrir Square: it being one of
the dubious benefits of dictatorship to have
obvious targets and, at least initially, plain
demands. The reaction to the Occupy move-
ment even (or especially) among liberal
opinion is not surprising—protestors are
routinely dismissed as indulged children of
the bourgeoisie or, in this case, as bored
back-packers—but the anger of some of
these responses was striking.
Almost 50 years ago, Herbert Marcuse
argued against the positivist fix of normal
sociology and social critique, arguing
instead for a ‘great refusal’, a commitment
to negative thinking as a means of resistance
to a society without opposition. Marcuse
looked to the marginal and the minoritarian
as a kind of anti-vanguard for this politics
of refusal. However, it turns out now the
minority, the maxed-out, the mad—what
Peter Marcuse (2012b, p. 34) calls here the
‘deprived’ and the ‘discontented’—might in
fact number somewhere around 99%.
In spite of pat dismissals of the various Occu-
piers, the larger discontent with worsening
income extremes, the socialism of the rich
and state-subsidised kleptocracy goes well
beyond the tents.
Refusal is a start. Lefebvre’s claims for ‘The
right to the city’ is not exactly the European
Convention on Human Rights, but a lack of
definable rights translates nonetheless into
definite mobilisations—for access, against
eviction, for livelihoods, for voice—that
work against one-dimensional cities for
 TONKISS: THE ONE-DIMENSIONAL CITY 219

profit, and show how hard it is to maintain
and secure a city without opposition.
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Abingdon: Oxford. Email: f.tonkiss@lse.ac.uk