#planetary urbanization

‘Well, I take refuge with the intelligent women. As for the front bench male politicians, I can point out the moon in the heavens to them; but I cannot persuade them that it is anything more than a piece of green cheese.’ (G. B. Shaw 1949, n.p.)

Introduction

The ‘urban’ became an issue for Marx through the French Revolution. Marx regarded the revolution, which after some years of turmoil abolished feudalism and installed a republic from 1791 to 1799, as singularly urban as well as bourgeois (the reason for its failure). The republic ended in a coup led by Napoleon Bonaparte on 9 November 1799 (which in the new republican calendar was 18th Brumaire VIII). Half a century later a second revolution was quashed after three years in a coup by Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon's nephew) who proclaimed himself emperor. In 1852, Marx wrote The 18th Brumaire, in which he famously said ‘History repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.'

In the same year Louis Bonaparte engaged Baron Haussmann to resolve what Harvey (2012, 7) argues was the crisis of ‘unemployed surplus capital and surplus labour side-by-side' that provoked the second revolution in the first place. Haussmann did this by setting up ‘a Keynesian system of debt-financed infrastructural urban improvements' (Harvey 2012, 8) that absorbed all that labour and capital in the massive rebuilding of Paris. This great display of capitalist urbanisation was a ‘primary vehicle of social stabilization' (Harvey 2012, 7): demolishing the slums, dispersing the working class, creating straight boulevards that would be much more difficult to barricade than the winding alleys, making, theoretically, future revolutionary attempts that much more difficult. Alexis de Tocqueville (1971, 169) observed that ‘the insurrection was everywhere contained, but nowhere tamed'. Harvey (2012) explains that the subsequent crash—a result of ‘the overextended and increasingly speculative financial system and credit structures' on which all this construction was based—created the conditions for ‘one of the greatest revolutionary episodes in capitalist urban history’ (8).

The Paris Commune was a co-operation of communists, anarchists, socialists and libertarian republicans committed to workers’ control. In March 1871 they took to the streets, banished the conservative government to Versailles and established their own council for Paris for two months—in which time they put a moratorium on unpaid rents, separated the Church from the State, made all Church property State property, excluded religion from schools, postponed debt obligations and abolished interest on the debts, among other things—before the French army shot 147 leaders against the Communard's Wall, killed a further 30,000 citizens, arrested 30,000 more and regained control.

The Commune continues to be celebrated by scholars who liken the reach of the 1968 Paris revolts to the potential of 1871, though Marx was more equivocal. He wrote a number of works in the early 1870s on why the Commune was a good effort but could never succeed, with the withering assessment that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes' (Marx 1871). Further, he suggested that gaining the necessary political power couldn't be achieved at the barricades, but required a gradual build-up of political and industrial strength (though this is the subject of much argument. Marx said different things at different times). What is incontrovertible is his analysis of the fundamentals of the system that he argued so powerfully needs to change.

In Das Kapital Marx developed the following framework:

Vol. 1: Capitalist process of production

Vol. 2: (1) Reproduction of the means of production

           (2) Reproduction of labour power, with three sub-categories:

wages

unproductive consumption (housing, education, healthcare, etc.)

ideology: compliance to the dominant order, accepting all this as normal and natural; this is the way it is, and it can only be like this.

Marx's revolution was a proletarian revolution premised on the working class taking control of the means of production and, crucially, the reproduction of the means of production. Both he and Engels were scathing of anarchist alternatives and what they called petty-bourgeois socialist policies of reform because, as Engels (1872) argued in relation to the housing question,

‘it is not that the solution of the housing question simultaneously solves the social question, but that only by the solution of the social question, that is, by the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, is the solution of the housing question made possible’.

With the magnitude of the solution of the ‘social question’ amplified by the foreclosure of any use of ready-made state machinery, what was to follow was never very well explained, though plenty of political philosophers since have had a go.Marx's analysis of capitalism spawned a long line of Marxist scholars including, to name just a few in critical social theory and urban geography, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells, Peter Marcuse, Harvey Molotch, John Logan, David Harvey, Neil Smith, and a contemporary crop that includes Neil Brenner, Christian Schmid, Andy Merrifield, Stefan Kipfer and, in a continuing critical tradition, Doreen Massey, Chantal Mouffe, Saskia Sassen, Margit Mayer, Ananya Roy and Jennifer Robinson.We turn to Lefebvre as it was he who, drawing on Marx, coined many of the key terms in use in critical social theory circles today. In the following discussion of Lefebvre's ideas and adaptations of those ideas, some of his successors are brought in through their commentary on each other to convey a sense of the growing discourse.

Lefebvre, the urban revolution and the right to the city

Henri Lefebvre was a Marxist philosopher forced from his university post after the Nazi invasion of France, and who lived out the Second World War as a resistance fighter in the south. He became a heralded intellectual of the French communist party, but as the Cold War closed in he chafed at the party's resurgent Stalinism (Smith, in Lefebvre 2003). By the late 1950s he was, as Marcus (1989) puts it, ‘a communist in name only and a situationist lacking only the name' (146).

‘Instead of examining institutions and classes, structures of economic production and social control, one had to think about “moments”—moments of love, hate, poetry, frustration, action, surrender, delight, humiliation, justice, cruelty, resignation, surprise, disgust, resentment, self-loathing, pity, fury, peace of mind—those tiny epiphanies, Lefebvre said, in which the absolute possibilities and temporal limits of anyone's existence were revealed.' (Marcus 1989, 144)

Lefebvre came to focus on the need for creative activities: those specific needs, to be added to basic anthropological needs, ‘which are not satisfied by those commercial and cultural infrastructures which are somewhat parsimoniously taken into account by planners' (Lefebvre 1996, 147). Through these specified needs, he said,

‘lives and survives a fundamental desire of which play, sexuality, physical activities such as sport, creative activity, art and knowledge are particular expressions and moments, which can more or less overcome the fragmentary division of tasks. Finally, the need of the city and urban life can only be freely expressed within a perspective, which here attempts to become clearer and to open up the horizon. Would not specific urban needs be those of qualified places, places of simultaneity and encounters, places where exchange would not go through exchange value, commerce and profit? Would there not also be the need for a time for these encounters, these exchanges?' (Lefebvre 1996, 147–148; emphasis in original)

The Situationist International formed in 1957, building on the tradition of the French surrealists and dadaists: their work constituted a series of negations of modern society, a critique of alienation, appropriation, consumerism, commercialisation—not so much a precursor to postmodernism as stemming from the same social and cultural context. Unlike many postmodernists, Situationists were passionately critical of the world in which the accumulation of images had become even more important than accumulation of commodities. Through the creation of ‘situations’ they unleashed free and spontaneous creativity that led to small revolutions in everyday life. They used artistic practices such as detournement (diversion, subversion, corruption) which involved, for example, the creative alteration of advertisements, and derive (drift) which referred to ‘locomotion without a goal’: an exploration of the city on foot to investigate its ‘psychogeography’ and find those symbolic, highly charged places that produce particular emotions or which resonate with some desire, subverting the passiveness of the ‘society of the spectacle’.

Lefebvre's theory of moments converged with the Situationists’ creation of ambiance. In the late 1950s they began ‘a sort of unfinished love affair' (Kofman and Lebas, in Lefebvre 1996, 13): ‘in an atmosphere of passionate oneness we would talk far into the night … we drank … sometimes there were other stimulants … it was more than communication, it was communion' (Lefebvre 1975). Together Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Asger Jorn, Raoul Veneigem and other Situationists invented the notion of urban struggle as a rejection of ‘boredom’ in favour of the ‘festival’. All are credited with having inspired in different ways the French student revolts in May 1968, which profoundly unsettled the order of the post-war boom (Lefebvre having resumed teaching after the war at Nanterre, a university campus which along with factories and social housing projects had been exiled to the outskirts of Paris).

NEITHER GODS NOR MASTERS

EVERYTHING DISPUTABLE MUST BE DISPUTED

(Situationist slogans, 1960s)

Lefebvre and the Situationists built on the proto-revolutionary moment of the Proclamation of the Paris Commune in 1871. Lefebvre later called the actors of May 1968 the ‘new Communards’. As in 1871, students, workers and immigrants asserted their radical claims by attempting to reclaim the historic centre of Paris from the urban fringe where they had been relegated by the dominant urban strategies of the time—Haussmann's urban renewal projects in the 1850s and 1860s, and the state-sponsored ‘clean-up’ of the remaining popular Parisian quarters a century later. Lefebvre argued that, as in 1871, the claim to the city in 1968 was in part an attempt to transform the relationship between the socio-spatial centre and the periphery.

The Situationists considered ‘urbanism'—what we today call urban renewal or gentrification—‘a rather neglected branch of criminology' (Kotanyi and Vaneigem 1961, cited in Marcus 1989, 139). They said:

‘Modern capitalism dissuades people from criticising architecture with the simple argument that people need a roof over their heads, just as television is accepted on the grounds that people need information and entertainment. People are made to overlook the obvious fact that this information, this entertainment, and this kind of dwelling place are not made for them, but without them and against them. The whole of urban planning can be understood only as a society's field of publicity-propaganda—that is … as the organisation of participation in something in which it is impossible to participate.' (Knabb 1981, cited in Marcus 1989, 139)

Lefebvre and Debord agreed that the Paris Commune had created, even just for a few months, a city ‘free of planning, a field of moments, visible and loud, the antithesis of planning: a city that was reduced to zero and then reinvented everyday' (Marcus 1989, 147). They looked to play, spontaneity and festivity as ‘necessities of daily life, oppositional forces—to bureaucratic planning. Above all, they sought to understand that moment when people gain insight into the rationalised and alienated patterns of their everyday lives' (Sadler 1998, 44)

BOREDOM IS ALWAYS COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY

(Situationist slogan, 1960s)

But, as with many passionate affairs, the breach between them came down to praxis. Lefebvre thought the Situationists were romantics. They thought he was insufficiently revolutionary. They thought art on the level of utopia was life itself. ‘“Realised art” was a Situationist catchphrase; what it meant was “realised life”’ (Marcus 1989, 147).

I TAKE MY DESIRES FOR REALITY BECAUSE I BELIEVE IN THE REALITY OF MY DESIRES

LONG LIVE THE EPHEMERAL

(Situationist slogans, 1960s)

Lefebvre, more pragmatic, thought their utopia was art, only. He wrote:

‘The Situationists propose not a concrete utopia, but an abstraction. Do they really believe that one fine day, or one decisive evening, people will look at one another and say, “Enough! To hell with work, to hell with boredom! Let's put an end to it!”—and that everyone will then step into the eternal Festival and the creation of situations? If this happened once, at the dawn of 18 March 1871, this combination of circumstances will not happen again.' (Lefebvre 1967, cited in Marcus 1989, 142)

Lefebvre argued that revolutionary transformation requires the working class to take charge of ‘planning and its political agenda … Until then transformations remain superficial, at the level of signs and the consumption of signs' (Lefebvre 1996, 179). But the Situationists were deeply suspicious of organised politics and into anarchist self-management and autonomy. They accused Lefebvre of ‘failing to go beyond the present order' (Kofman and Lebas, in Lefebvre 1996, 13)—and of plagiarising their work, which he did. They criticised him for ‘failing to appreciate the revolutionary potential of their own tactic of creating “situations” as opposed to what they saw as Lefebvre's more passive stance of experiencing “moments” when they happened to arise' (Harvey, in Lefebvre 1991, 430).

By the mid-1960s they had parted ways, but Harvey says that the Situationists’ critique played a crucial role in Lefebvre's continuing development: that the ‘moment’ as Lefevbre initially conceived it was purely temporal, and that his later work on urbanisation and the production of space introduced a ‘spatio-temporality’ more akin to the ‘situation’ (Harvey, in Lefebvre 1991, 430). During the events of 1968, Lefebvre ‘came to recognise the significance of urban conditions of daily life (as opposed to narrow concentration on work-place politics) as central in the evolution of revolutionary sentiments and politics' (Harvey, in Lefebvre 1991, 430):

‘The significance of the outbreak in Nanterre—a suburban university close to the impoverished shanty-towns of the periphery—and the subsequent geography of street action in Paris itself, alerted him to the way in which these kinds of political struggle unfolded in a distinctively urban space.' (Harvey, in Lefebvre 1991, 430)

Lefebvre (1996, 180) called for, ‘apart from the economic and political revolution (planning oriented towards social needs and democratic control of the State and self-management), a permanent cultural revolution'. The right to the city, he argued in response to the Situationists, ‘signifies the constitution or reconstitution of a spatial-temporal unit, of a gathering together instead of a fragmentation. It does not abolish confrontations and struggles. On the contrary!' (195). Indeed Lefebvre clearly rejected ‘reformist measures to ameliorate urban problems' (Deutsche 1990, 122) but he also advocated a level of organisation that requires interaction with the State. Deutsche says that while Lefebvre's analysis of the spatial exercise of power as ‘a construction and conquest of difference' is thoroughly grounded in Marxist thought, it ‘rejects economism and predictability, opening up possibilities for advancing analysis of spatial politics into realms of feminist and anti-colonialist discourse and into the theorisation of radical democracy' (Deutsche 1990, 122).

The articulation of the right to the city doubled as a right to difference. Kipfer and Schmid, two writers on Lefebvre, suggest that the concept resonated with radical political aspirations then and now:

‘This is particularly true for those movements that combined particular, situated concerns with a quest for general social transformation and in the process articulated specifically urban contradictions of the post-war period. Among the latter movements were radical African-American rebellions against ghettoisation … worker–student alliances and post-workerist movements in Italy, gay and lesbian movements for liberation in North America, and youth, squatting and counter-cultural movements across the advanced capitalist world.' (Kipfer and Schmid 2004, n.p.; emphases in original)

Kipfer and Schmid (2004) argue that these claims to the city had significant effects both on processes of urbanisation and on subsequent attempts to theorise these processes:

‘while often defeated, these claims nonetheless produced (unintended) effects. They stimulated urban reforms (in housing and urban planning), underwrote decolonisation, redirected urban development patterns (through historic preservation or providing an impetus for gentrification), or produced a more general cultural opening … ' (n.p.)

More broadly, Kipfer and Schmid (2004) state:

‘movements for the right to the city led to a significant radicalisation of geography, urban sociology and urban studies in metropolitan universities, a radicalisation that included not only urban marxism but also extended to the development of radical urban literatures centred on feminist, anti-racist/imperial and queer concerns’. (n.p.)

Movements for the right to the city simultaneously fought against and contributed to gentrification, and that particular paradox continues. Since publication of The Right to the City the historic centre of Paris has been further gentrified, involving large-scale exclusion of the ‘popular classes' and causing Lefebvre's translators, Kofman and Lebas, to assert that ‘more than ever it is necessary in the context of urban transformation to affirm rights against exclusion from the city' (Lefebvre 1996, 41):

‘The domination of a culture of the same and the exclusion of the more marginal, is most evident … Specific rights, such as those of housing, thus conjoin with the more abstract and generalised calls for the right to the city for those whom the market and the State have expelled from centrality.' (Kofman and Lebas, in Lefebvre 1996, 42)

‘Take back the city' was the slogan of Italian social movements in the 1970s, in Zurich in the 1980s it was ‘We want the whole city!' (Schmid 1998, 190), in Amsterdam in the late 1990s it was ‘Save the city'. Such movements have often centred on claims to cultural and community space—that is, places occupied and appropriated by them, which in turn have become symbols of the contest between use value and exchange value.

‘Autonomous cultural spaces played central roles: as meeting places, as counter public spheres and as centres of struggles to create a different city. The result of these struggles [in Zurich] was the transformation of Zurich into a much more open and urbane metropolis.' (Schmid 1998, 190)

More commonly the struggles occur through organised resistance than spontaneous situations, though the two are iterative, with the latter often a spark for the former.

‘Social action—protest, the bringing of lawsuits and other legal actions, the active taking of space—has been the fulcrum upon which the right to the city has been leveraged, both in its actual (limited) practice and in the way it can serve as a beacon for a more open, more just, more egalitarian society.' (Mitchell 2003, 10; emphasis in original)

In 2001, a world charter of the right to the city was developed at the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. It states that ‘the city is a culturally rich and diversified space that belongs to all the inhabitants' (Choike 2004, n.p.). The European Social Forum in London 2004 confirmed the charter and observed that neo-liberal policies mean that the public realm of the city is forever decreasing, ‘increasing the necessity for citizens to reclaim rights to the city' (European Social Forum 2004, n.p.). Popular awareness of the shifts in thinking since the 1960s, the diminishing diversity in the central city, and the expanding claims of marginalised groups to their right to the city are combining to increase the pressure on governments to retain places for economically marginal urban inhabitants. The social and economic inequities and cultural and environmental atrocities fuelled by the ‘one per cent’ and deeply exposed by the global financial crisis have catalysed a linking of right to the city networks, which now support and provide the rationale for popular mobilisations all over the world.

In many very real ways, daily struggles and campaigns are being linked to wider ambitions and possibilities for social change. Lefebvre seemed to walk that tightrope: his writing allows for uncertainties and ambiguities, for different strategies in different contexts, for mistakes and for trying again.

Castells and the urban question

Manuel Castells was Lefebvre's doctoral student. His seminal book The Urban Question (Castells 1972) built on the growing Marxist critique of urban studies to show that the urban is historically relative, meaning the field lacks a coherent object. Castells proposed therefore that urban be defined not just as the sphere of the capitalist process of and reproduction of production, but the sphere of reproduction of labour power: wages, collective consumption and ideology. The purpose of struggle and contest, then, especially through urban social movements, was to challenge injustice not only in the workplace but in the arena of collective consumption (provision of housing, schools and healthcare) and ideology. Further, he argued that the field of urban studies had itself become a kind of ideology that masked social relations with environmental determinism, clearly linking to Lefebvre and the Situationists’ critique of urbanism and paving the way for a fruitful line of argument.

Andy Merrifield (2014) summarises Castells’ urban question as:

‘what might constitute this reality we call “the urban”? And what, from a Marxist standpoint, is “urban politics”? How is the urban a distinctive object of analysis as well as special arena of political struggle? How, in other words, can you define the urban as a specific theoretical and political question?' (14)

He goes on to explain Castells’ understanding of urban politics thus:

‘an intervention in this reproductive process, and intervention made by the state, on the one hand, funding these public goods, orchestrating urban planning and policy, figuring out the whole ideological and material organisation of space and social conditions of the reproduction of labour-power; and, on the other hand, interventions made by ordinary people, who collectively contest state intervention, who engage politically with the state in its organisation, in its management and mismanagement of collective consumption. Enter urban social movements, citizen alliances and grassroots groups who're relatively autonomous from ideological party politics. Activism henceforth cuts across class lines and unfolds not at workplace but in living space, in the neighbourhood, in the realm of reproduction—or, better, in the realm where reproduction meets production, that vast and intimate arena Lefebvre termed “everyday life”.' (Merrifield 2014, 15–16)

A problem for Castells, says Merrifield (2014), is that publication of this thesis coincided with the end of modernism and the welfare state, and with the spawning of the neo-liberal era in which the state withdrew from funding ‘collective consumption items, so vital for social reproduction, so functional for capital, so necessary for the overall survival of capitalism' (xii). Instead, the state began to ideologically and materially sponsor capital.

‘The biggest drawback of Castells’ old urban question is his passive rendering of the urban, that the urban is a spatial unit of reproduction rather than a space which capital productively plunders: capital now actively dispossesses collective consumption budgets and upscales land by valorising urban space as a commodity, as a pure financial asset, exploiting it as well as displacing people. This is precisely where neo-Haussmannisation raises its ugly political–economic head.' (Merrifield 2014, vii)

With a clear debt to Smith's (2002) observation that urban development is the ‘centrepiece of the city's productive economy, an end in itself, justified by appeals to jobs, taxes, and tourism … an increasingly unassailable capital accumulation strategy for competing urban economies' (443), Merrifield argues that Castells’ concept of the urban should be reframed not only as the sphere of reproduction and where reproduction meets production, but as the realm and object in and of itself of capitalist accumulation. This advance marks a consolidation of neo-liberalism, in which the urban is the site of everyday life and subversion, the sphere of collective consumption and struggle, and the realm and object of intensifying capitalist production.

Merrifield on planetary urbanisation

In The Urban Revolution Lefebvre ([1970] 2003) posed the complete urbanisation of society, what he termed ‘planetary urbanisation’. Within this conceptualisation, Merrifield (2014) interprets,

‘we need to dispense with all the old chestnuts between global north and global south, between developed and undeveloped, between city and suburb … from this standpoint, frontier lines don't pass between any North–South or urban–rural divide, but reside “within the urban itself”'. (4)

The urban here is the space of unequal distribution of resources, uneven development, commodification and exploitation—what Merrifield calls neo-Haussmannisation (xii). Merrifield (2014) says that Lefebvre saw urbanisation:

‘ … not simply as bricks and mortar, as high-rise buildings and autoroutes, but as a process that produces skyscrapers as well as unpaved streets, highways as well as back roads, by-waters and marginal zones that feel the wrath of the world market—both its absence and its presence. This process involves dispossession of land, of sequestering the commons and eminent domain. The urban signifies a new kind of “dependency”, justifying cultural, technological and economic obsolescence in rural economies. In the 1970s the peasant sociologist Andrew Pearse spoke of the expansion of an “Urban-Industrial-Complex” into the world's rural areas, which sanctioned agricultural production through an urban reward system. Today, we'd have to rename that complex an “Urban-Financial-Complex”, with a reward system that penalises and disciplines agricultural production, doing so planetarily, doing so from multiple centres of urban corporate power.' (5)

The complete urbanisation of society engages Merrifield because of its expansion of the urban's revolutionary potential: ‘The signs of the urban are signs of assembly … both form and receptacle, void and plenitude, super-object and non-object, supra-consciousness and the totality of consciousness', says Lefebvre (2003, 118–119); now, says Merrifield (2014), there is a whole world to occupy:

‘Critical urban theory and philosophy must comprehend and create a new terrain for political interventions—for militant, revolutionary politics—in a process that is itself revolutionary. Indeed, “the urban” is revolutionary, Lefebvre says, and, as such, the revolution will be urban. That in a single line summarises the gist of The Urban Revolution.' (10)

With the realm and object of capitalist accumulation now planetary, so is the process of neo-liberal urbanisation. This is where Brenner comes in.

Brenner on the urban question

Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid are largely responsible for advancing Lefebvre's conceptualisation of planetary urbanisation, and their route into this is through the urban question. Here is Brenner (2000, 362) on the subject:

‘The notion of a distinctive “urban question” was first popularized through Castells’ (1972) influential work in the early 1970s and has subsequently been debated at length among critical urban researchers (Dear and Scott 1981; Saunders 1986; Katznelson 1993). However, for my purposes here, the concept of the urban question refers neither to a specific definition of the city nor to a particular approach to urban studies. Rather, I understand the urban question under capitalism as a double-edged sociopolitical problematic: it encompasses both the historical process of capitalist urbanization and the multiple, politically contested interpretations of that process within modern capitalist society. On the one hand, the urban question refers to the role of cities as sociospatial arenas in which the contradictions of capitalist development are continually produced and fought out. On the other hand, the urban question refers to the historically specific epistemic frameworks through which capitalist cities are interpreted, whether in sociological analysis, in public discourse, in socio-political struggles or in everyday experience.'

In this formulation, the urban question refers to the historical process of capitalist urbanisation, and the multiple, historically specific, politically contested interpretations of that process. How is this different to Lefebvre and Castells’ understandings? Mainly, in the elaboration of Castells’ naming of the urban as historically relative, and in the greater emphasis on historical and geographical contingency with the clear and productive influence of feminist poststructuralist thinkers such as Julia Kristeva, Nancy Fraser, Judith Butler, Leonie Sandercock and J. K. Gibson-Graham (to name just a few).

Brenner (2000) explains:

‘My starting point is the methodological premise, implicit in Lefebvre's writings on urban theory, that the urban question assumes radically different historical and geographical forms within each configuration of capitalist development. On this basis, it can be argued that the meaning of the urban question is currently being systematically redefined in conjunction with processes of global capitalist restructuring. As Scott and Moulaert (1997, 267) likewise note:

“Each generation, it seems, defines the urban question after its own fashion, as an articulation of social challenges, political predicaments and theoretical issues reflecting the current conjuncture of urban society … [T]he dynamics shaping contemporary cities (and, as a corollary, the nature of urban problems) have shifted significantly since the 1970s, calling for new conceptual tools and new forms of political mobilization.”

I shall propose that the urban question is today increasingly assuming the form of what Lefebvre (1976, 276) once aptly termed “the scale question” (la question d'échelle). This situation, I argue, presents new methodological and political challenges for critical urban theory.' (362)

So the urban question is linked here to the ‘scale question’, and from this point Brenner and Schmid start to make the urban much, much bigger.

The urban age

Brenner and Schmid (2012, 2013, 2015) take as the starting point for their ‘rescaling of the urban’ a critique of the contemporary notion of the ‘urban age'—that ubiquitous popular conception that more than 50% of the world's population now lives in cities. They argue that the 50% figure of the urban age thesis is completely arbitrary and dependent on what criteria are used, and that it is a meaningless measure:

it is empirically untenable (a statistical artefact)—based on out-dated and arbitrary criteria;

it is theoretically incoherent (a chaotic conception)—based on the absence of a theoretical rationale for these criteria.

Brenner and Schmid's analysis suggests that there are profound political and practical implications from the way the urban is defined; this then leads to an argument derived from a reading of Lefebvre's ‘complete urbanisation of society’ that renders urban boundaries meaningless. As so many of the planet's resources are plundered in the interests of capitalist urbanisation, Brenner and Schmid (2013, 2015) suggest, it makes little sense to maintain an arbitrary distinction between the urban and the ‘non-urban’. They make a series of propositions—what they call ‘epistemological guidelines' (Brenner and Schmid 2013, 19)—that follow from this critique, which are then developed in a piece in City (Brenner and Schmid 2015) into seven theses.

There has been much response to the revived planetary urbanisation thesis (see Davidson and Ives 2015; Meagher 2015; K. Shaw 2015; Walker 2015) so we won't revisit those arguments here. Suffice to say that, while there is broad agreement that the urban age thesis is based on flawed empirical and theoretical methodologies and premises, the implications that flow from the critique are somewhat overdrawn. In their rejection of one reading of the urban, Brenner and Schmid replace it with another in a language of absolutes, with their reading somehow more ‘scientific’. The arguments for exploding accepted definitions of the urban are based on a series of straw men, as current understandings within urban studies and social theory (and even beyond) do not limit the urban to being easily bounded or fixed and, notwithstanding Brenner and Schmid's claims to the contrary, do recognise cities as polymorphic, dynamic, varied, complex and contingent. Similarly, the claim that the urban should be seen as process rather than form seems unnecessary; clearly it is both, in many different ways.

Lefebvre's ‘complete urbanisation of society’ usefully prefigures the contemporary concepts of globalisation and the ecological footprint; ‘planetary urbanisation’, on the other hand, comes across as an alternative term with not much more explanatory value than the concepts currently in use. The political and practical implications of this reworking remain unclear. Nevertheless, its revival has prompted re-examination of the urban question, which so far has been productively complicated to point not only to processes of capitalist urbanisation and their multiple interpretations and contestations, but in particular to their historically and geographically specific manifestations. So, where does all this thinking take us? What does it say about the possibilities for social change?

Merrifield's ‘new’ urban question

Merrifield cares about action. His book, The New Urban Question (Merrifield 2014), rejects Castells’ ‘old’ urban question outright (he refers to Castells at the time he wrote his influential book as a ‘spritely 28-year-old') and replaces it with a (his) new one. The new urban question is this: what of urban politics in the face of this ‘neo-Haussmannisation'—this global strategy that necessarily ‘produces its Other, powers a dialectic of dispossession and insurrection, an accumulation strategy as well as a rebellion waiting and plotting in the wings' (xiii)?

‘In the “old” urban question, scholars like Castells looked toward the urban to resolve the problem of building a social movement. Now, we need to build a social movement to resolve the problem of the urban (xiii) … The new urban question signifies nothing less than the battle to invent another, upgraded notion of “collective consumption” (xviii) … It isn't workers of the world who unite, who have a world to win, as Marx announced in the Manifesto; it's more that people have a whole world to occupy, to occupy as their own living space, their own sphere of reproduction.’ (10)

Merrifield is not taken with Lefebvre's ideas of interaction with the state, however, nor with social action as ‘protest, the bringing of lawsuits and other legal actions' (Mitchell 2003, 10). Neither does he hold with the notion of legal ‘rights’. This is a telling passage:

‘To uphold one's rights concretely means, then, to engage with the law, to get a gifted lawyer to interpret the letter of the law, to do so in a creative and progressive manner; to have him or her use the law not as a singularity but as a form of jurisprudence, as a philosophy of law—what should the law be?—as a law that takes a stand, that isn't neutral, that understands the link between “facts” and “values”, between the legal system and moral justification. As critical legal scholars like Roberto Unger are wont to say, the law is slippery, contradictory and indeterminate and, accordingly, “full of transformative possibility”. That said, assaulting and infiltrating ruling-class power institutions, like its judiciary, like its system of law and order, means both a stretching and a breaking of the law. Rebellion necessitates something unlawful in the eyes of rulers, something that transgresses their public order and civic code. In lots of instances, established laws are, in Plato's Thrasymachus's blunt terms (cf. The Republic Book I), written by and for the powerful; justice, in other words, is merely “what is advantageous to the stronger”, what benefits the stronger and what is then enshrined as the accepted wisdom of the courts. Rebellion, conversely, utters the collective language that these laws are wrong, that we do not abide by them, that we will smash or amend these laws through organised, collective political engagement. It is the latter, law-breaking politics that interests me most in The New Urban Question, breaking bourgeois law to affirm popular democratic desire.' (Merrifield 2014, xvi; emphases in original)

He's quite clear that ‘insurrection—or Rebellion, upper-case “R”—cannot remain pacifist: violence inevitably enters the fray where dispossessed people see their rights flagrantly trampled on' (xv). By all means, says Merrifield, stand up for legal rights—focus on the

‘specific grievance at hand, be it rent and lease hikes, problems of housing displacement, denial of public access to a particular urban space, police abuse, public “disorder” prosecutions, pre-emptive arrests of demonstrators … [but] the other option, should this option fall on deaf ears, as invariably it does, is to open out the issue, mobilise politically, organise a campaign of Rebellion, en masse, a mass urban political movement, expressive of democratic yearnings’. (xvii)

While Merrifield maintains that the two routes—the ‘homing in legally and opening out politically' (xvii)—are not mutually exclusive and indeed can go together concurrently, he is dismissive of alternatives to militant, revolutionary action. Eurocommunism, the ‘democratic road to socialism' in the 1970s in continental Europe (16)—of which Gramsci was the most famous proponent—receives a special serve, perhaps because Castells came around to it too; Merrifield calls Castells’ (1978) book City, Class and Power his ‘Eurocommunist moment' (17). The withdrawal of the welfare state and onset of neo-liberalism in the 1970s precipitated a change of tack for Castells—and Merrifield's cruel but fascinating account is that the withdrawal of state funding for basic items of collective consumption left Castells and his urban social movements irrelevant, making defensive demands for public resources long since privatised.

‘The latter is now a fait accompli. There's no going backward to the good old days of the public sector, to the old paternal state, to the providential state that seemed to care about people. This shock of recognition, painful as it is, closely follows the Marxism of The Communist Manifesto, a Marxism that moves with capitalism's melting vision that gets inside this vision. It doesn't live in denial of this state of affairs: it is a Marxism that revolutionizes itself by revolutionizing the urban. As Harvey himself said in the closing lines of Social Justice and the City, a book now over 40 years young: “It remains for revolutionary theory to chart the path from an urbanism based in exploitation to an urbanism appropriate for the human species. And it remains for revolutionary practice to accomplish such a transformation” [Harvey 1973].' (Merrifield 2014, 19)

And so it remains, for theory and for practice—150 years after Marx, 100 years after the beginning of the Soviet experiment; 150 years after the Paris Commune, nearly 50 years after 1968—revolutionary theory has not charted the path to an urbanism appropriate for the human species; the practical transformation is further away than ever. This ‘no going backward’ line seems painfully patronising, as though campaigns to introduce progressive taxes, nationalise public assets, build more public housing, ensure government investment in public infrastructure, introduce or protect or reinstate universal healthcare and education, etc., are all just so 20th century. The welfare state has been dismantled indeed—though as Ananya Roy illustrates so clearly, middle-class welfare is alive and well—but is the old form of the welfare state the only expression of socialism or social democracy? Is that it: welfare state or revolution? If the ‘homing in legally’ option is destined to fail (though it has probably produced more meaningful changes for more people in the last five decades than the ‘opening out politically’ route) why entertain it at all? Is Merrifield hedging his bets? To his credit, Merrifield is explicit about the process of the revolution. In The New Urban Question, in a chapter titled ‘Urban Jacobinism' (the Jacobins were the most violent of the French revolutionaries) he explains how it should be done.

The insurrection needs to ‘force those Parliamentary doors open, smash them down if necessary, so that “the people” gain access' (Merrifield 2014, 68). It needs to keep out ‘counter-revolutionary economic and political forces … ruthlessly shut them out if necessary' and Merrifield (2014) discusses a ‘legitimate violence responsive to the everyday violence initiated by the forces of law and order … ' (68). The other part of Merrifield's ‘revolutionary simultaneous equation’ is that, after the revolutionary agitators have done their work, the visionaries among us—‘people with big plans and grand convictions' (69) will lead us to the ‘new social contract [that] needs drafting, initially in pencil, before getting definitively rubber-stamped in ink in the streets, in the new and necessary citizens’ agoras we've yet to invent' (78). We get a description of the agora, but still not of what we're fighting for. Harvey (2000) had a go at that in the epilogue to Spaces of Hope, ‘Edilia’, and that particular utopia sank without a trace.

Merrifield gets as close as he can to how and what for in his discussion of Ken Cockrel, a Detroit lawyer and staff member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in the 1960s. Almost unwittingly it would seem, this passage makes clear the possibilities and limits of Merrifield's prescription. Cockrel is to Merrifield what Towards Cosmospolis’ heroes are to Sandercock (1998): inspirational people who ground and make real the possibilities. Cockrel had become a Detroit city councillor. After a long and difficult battle within council, he decided not to stand for re-election. Merrifield (2014) tells us: ‘He went back to practising law … and began considering running for real power, for Mayor of Detroit, a longstanding dream' before he died unexpectedly of a heart attack (97).

What's this? Real power—in the office of the Mayor? For all Merrifield's talk of revolution, here is an admission: radical electoral politics at the pinnacle of his realpolitik. Certainly, Cockrel's people had other methods too: union action, community organising, coalition building, but for Cockrel, you had to ‘start out by running everything in this city' (cited in Merrifield 2014, 96) and city hall was the place to do that. Tragically, Merrifield's most incendiary heroes do not have real power: Occupy doesn't have real power, the Indignados don't have real power, when they look like they might they get shot. Real power lies behind the edifices, in the existing structures—Cockrel was right.

Merrifield argues for one thing but delivers another, and what he does give us looks a bit like left Eurocommunism. What part of the following in Bob Jessop's authoritative account would Cockrel have deviated from?

‘Leftwing Eurocommunists tend to view the transition as a long series of ruptures and breaks, based on a national-popular, broad democratic alliance involving new social movements as well as class forces and organised in a pluralistic manner, committed to a fundamental transformation of the ISAs [Ideological State Apparatus—schools etc.] as part of the democratisation process, and concerned to restructure the state and economy so that there is extensive democracy at the base as well as an overarching, unifying parliamentary forum.' (Jessop 1985, 296)

Curiously for Merrifield, given Jessop's interest in Eurocommunism, Jessop is a key proponent of the approach that proves to be Merrifield's escape route: Regulation theory, which emphasises the importance of periodising history, and seeing different regimes of governance as carrying their own modes of regulation. This concept is developed by Merrifield (2014) in the afterword to The New Urban Question:

‘ … while Regulationists have never directly discussed the urban question, it's perhaps not too hard to project their analytical devices onto the plane of urbanisation itself, to frame our current global urban condition as a regime of accumulation and mode of (de)regulation that could best be described as parasitic … ' (118) 

… parasitic and therefore short-lived. The afterword emphasises the necessity to view neo-liberalism as the ‘curiously novel mode of urbanisation we have in our midst' (119). It is important indeed to view neo-liberal capitalism as historically specific, temporal and temporary.

Despite their differences, Merrifield and the Eurocommunists converge in their agreement for a plurality of approaches:

‘ … tactical flexibility is crucial in securing the provisional, unstable equilibrium of compromise(s) on which depend accumulation, political power, and ideological sway. At the same time this plurality of tactics creates a margin of manoeuvre for subaltern forces to pursue their own “economic-corporate” demands. This may pose threats to the successful implementation of the dominant accumulation strategy, national-popular political project, or national-popular ideology.

However, if these interests are pursued within the framework of the dominant strategy (thus moderating the demands of all), it is more likely to contribute to the equilibrium of compromise.' (Jessop 1985, 356)

But here we are back at Marx's admonition of the Commune, with a warning against working with/in the existing framework. We've moved forward in our understanding of the urban, at least, as unstable and out-of-equilibrium. The most recent contribution in this arena is from Gleeson (2014) with The Urban Condition.

The urban condition

Gleeson's recent book draws on Brenner and Theodore's (2005) ‘Neoliberalism and the Urban Condition' and Arendt's (1958) The Human Condition to define the contemporary urban condition as perilously over-consuming. While framed by the language of the urban age, Gleeson's take is closer to that of Brenner and Schmid's with a powerful critique of the glib optimism of the ‘urbanologists’ and their environmental determinism and technoscientific solutions. He confidently pulls apart the triumphant conceptualisations of sustainable/compact/smart city solutions and shows they're based on spatial fetishism and ecological fallacy. A Marxist analysis of urbanism's ‘reactionary potential of professional conception and aspiration' concludes that anyway ecological fixes don't work, and that planning in particular ‘has set the horizons of its ambitions too far from its ground of influence' (Gleeson 2014, 78). Gleeson's object is to consider prospects for a new urban dispensation and ‘plot the way to new shores, to a safer, more resilient city that provides for human flourishing' (n.p.). We're hanging on his every word. But first he must take us through troubled waters.

Unlike Harvey (2000, 259) for whom the world order is ‘unhinged' by a stock market crash, and Merrifield (2014) whose revolution is precipitated by many global insurrections, Gleeson's (2014, 111) catalyst for ‘a terminal crisis of capitalist modernity' arrives through climate change. A period of ‘dangerous transition' (122) involving catastrophic events, dystopian warlordism and general death and destruction of society as we know it, reveals its ‘dark natalities’ (another concept from Arendt) in the form of a guardian state that will usher us through the night.

‘The guiding values of state guardianship must be the “lifeboat ethics” of which Lovelock (2009) speaks: a trinity of social values—restraint, sacrifice, solidarity. Importantly, the creation of this state means the suspension of capitalism, at least as we have known it.' (Gleeson 2014, 125)

The solution is ‘lifeboat cities’ (from Gleeson's 2010 book of the same name) which carry the guardian state through its transitional period to ‘localised socialisation … a social ecology of restraint … ending commodity relations … decommodification and re-localisation' and the generation of ‘a vast new species enterprise: the creation of wealth without value' (Gleeson 2014, 135). With that, we're back again to nothing short of economic or environmental catastrophe or global insurrection to bring us to the inevitable overthrow of the dominant strategy. In Gleeson's frame yet another abstract utopia is conceived, with even less direction on how to get there than from Harvey and Merrifield.

This is the clincher. All these theorists, these fine thinkers, are talking to each other in the language of recycled ideas. They tell us there is no alternative, yet at no point do we feel their sense of the terrible violence these prescriptions entail. Even if we share their ideals, we may not agree with their methods, and we are no closer to their realisation. It is a tradition in Marxism, isn't it, to tell us what is legitimate and what illegitimate in political practice. Why are these pronouncements any more authoritative than Thatcher's? Even if there is a major rupture, there are no guarantees that afterwards will be better. We don't know—none of us know. We're hopelessly bogged, spinning our wheels in the mud of ‘necessary but impossible' which rules out anti-capitalism in a capitalist society (Fogelsong 1986) but splatters well beyond that.

The possible-impossible

Marx, Harvey, Merrifield and Gleeson prescribe, foretell, if not the impossible, at least that which has not yet been achieved on any significant and lasting scale. Lefebvre was less absolute, putting the problem in more subtle terms. His utopianism sidestepped the more pejorative connotations of ‘utopia’, and the tendency to imposed universalism, by employing the notion of ‘transduction’ in a ‘reflection on the possible'—a way of introducing a constructive dialectic between the possible and the impossible. ‘In order to extend the possible, it is necessary to proclaim and desire the impossible. Action and strategy consist in making possible tomorrow what is impossible today' (Lefebvre [1973] 1976, 36). This at least we know we can do.

Helpfully, Pinder (2013) says of Lefebvre's problematic:

‘Experimental utopia was a term Lefebvre presented while assessing a new city designed by Ernst Egli and others in the Fürtal valley, near Zurich. The concept referred to “the exploration of human possibilities, with the help of the image and the imagination, accompanied by an incessant critique and an incessant reference to the given problematic in the ‘real'” (Lefebvre 1961, 192). He introduced it alongside transduction as a contribution towards a new vocabulary and methodology that might avoid two pitfalls in conceiving the possible: one that entailed projecting the future based on circumstances already accomplished, registering and extrapolating from the given; the other a priori construction and an abstract utopia, which attends to ideal cities disconnected from specific situations.' (37)

These two pitfalls, again:

Projecting the future based on circumstances already accomplished, extrapolating from the given; that is, ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes'; and, ‘if these interests are pursued within the framework of the dominant strategy … it is more likely to contribute to the equilibrium of compromise'. Setting our sights too low, where the change we seek is necessary but impossible.

Conceiving an abstract utopia, which attends to ideal cities disconnected from specific situations; that is, the generalised, universal revolutionary programme; and, there is no alternative but a massive rupture catalysed by wholesale insurrection and/or economic or environmental collapse. Aiming too high: Lefebvre's problem with the Situationists, and our problem with Marx, Harvey, Merrifield and Gleeson.

Pinder (2013) again:

‘The importance that Lefebvre attached to the disjuncture between the actual and the possible is characteristic of much critical urban theory that seeks to recover and reappropriate possibilities embedded or repressed within current conditions (Brenner 2012, 19). In Lefebvre's case, this demanded a historical understanding of conditions of possibility as well as opening them up to what could be (Elden 2004, 243). Powerful forces limit or suppress what seems possible, constituting it in terms of current conditions and presenting what is beyond them as unrealistic and utopian in the derogatory sense. Lefebvre argued that to realize the possible in the form of the urban “we must first overcome or break through the obstacles that currently make it impossible” (2003a [1970], 17). Hence the importance of the “possible-impossible”, as he argued: “Political analysis of a situation has no bearing on the ‘real', in the trivial and most frequently used sense of the term, but on the dialectical relationship of the three terms: the real, the possible, and the impossible, so as to make possible what appeared to be impossible” (ibid.: 145). Yet he also cautioned: “Any analysis that approaches the real must accept political opportunism. Any analysis that diverges and moves too close to the impossible (toward the utopic in the banal sense of the term) is doomed to failure” (ibid.).' (34)

The possible, here, is the synthesis of real-impossible: the possible becomes real, and from there enters into a new dialectic. This is how change happens; and this fluidity, defined by historical and geographic contingency, is the thing. Of course, lots of people know and practice this every day.

The polymorphous dynamism of all things

On the back of this quick review, the contemporary urban question has become something like this: if the urban is both the realm and object of capitalist production, reproduction and contest in all their contradictions, and if that realm and object under what we call neo-liberal urbanisation now constitute no less than the entire planet, what of urban politics in the face of this global strategy that necessarily produces its Other? Merrifield has that dialectic as dispossession and insurrection; accumulation strategy as well as rebellion plotting in the wings. But what if the Other is not the waiting insurrection, but realised alternatives, the possible impossibilities already conceived and in the process of being made real?

This is not to invoke the over-reaction to the Marxist TINA that produces appeals to ‘rethink’ a problem by dissolving its terms and seeing this as a real alternative. Gibson-Graham's (1993) ‘Waiting for the Revolution, or How to Smash Capitalism while Working at Home in Your Spare Time' denies the explanatory power of the word and leaves us with ‘as many capitalisms in the Marxist community as there are people' (11)—not especially helpful. Neither is Brenner and Schmid's (2015) quest to rethink the urban likely to help urbanologists realise the inequities in the processes they champion. As Catterall and Wilson (2014) observe, ‘It is not by “re-thinking the city” that we can reclaim the city and the planet.'

Constructive critical urban and social analysts engage with the question of ‘what is the urban?’ by focusing on multiplicity, temporality and what they can do in the moment. They think of the urban as a site and result of capitalist development that brings people together where they act collectively: through co-operation and contestation, imagination and compromise, policing and rebellion, coming together and coming apart, inclusion and exclusion. John Allen and Allan Cochrane see the urban ‘as a node, around which sets of social and political relations are organised, drawing together activities, people, policies and ideas', neither bound nor unbounded, ‘both placed and not placed, localized and globalized' (Rodgers, Barnett, and Cochrane 2014, 1557). Doreen Massey (2013) theorises space as the ‘dimension of things being, existing at the same time: of simultaneity', recalibrating the urban question from time to space—evolving not just over the years but across the earth—and in so doing ‘presents us with the most fundamental of political of questions which is how are we going to live together'. Robinson (2011) similarly foregrounds thinking across different urban experiences, with the familiar emphasis on multiple ways of seeing and understanding the urban and its possibilities. Recognising the tendency in critical urban studies for ‘an urban theory on a world scale', she allows that such a theory:

‘could, then, potentially draw more cities into shared fields of analysis, and be characterized by multiple, frequently unsettled and hopefully unsettling conversations about the nature and the futures of cities in the world. This style of theorizing would be neither a parochial universalism nor a uniform global analytical field but a rich and fragmented array of on-going conversations across the world of cities.' (Robinson 2011, 19)

These ongoing conversations yield different ideas, data, revelations of how people resist, find routes for themselves and their communities, fight, die, live and link-up. Understanding capitalism and the urban, indeed, as ‘uncentred, dispersed, plural and partial' rather than ‘unified, singular and total' (Gibson-Graham 1993, 17) produces a different set of responses to ‘what to do?’ A recent small book edited by Gibson, Rose, and Fincher (2015) titled Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene, in which the editors ‘refuse to foreclose on options or jump too quickly to “solutions”' (vii), contains story after story of real alternatives. Gardening and food sharing initiatives (Cameron and Pekin 2015), ecologically beneficial small farming (Roelvink 2015) and large-scale agricultural and irrigation practices (Mathews 2015), traditional use of local birds of prey to clean carrion (Van Dooren 2015)—all are connected by the principle of

‘wu wei, the way of least resistance, which can be understood not simply as the giving up on one's own ends in deference to the ends of others but rather as tailoring one's ends to those already in train in one's environment’. (Mathews 2015, 39)

Chosen carefully, the way of least resistance can be a strategy of resistance to the dominant frame. Slipping under the radar can be a canny tactic—real people making new lives while they grow to the point that they cannot be ignored.

Stuart Hodkinson (2012) sees within the urban the ‘anti-capitalist commons’ that, while part of the ‘quest for an alternative world in which commons and communing can be generalised at the expense of capitalism' (425) yet has various contemporary manifestations. A common housing movement is an ideal as well as a reality in the form of squats, co-ops, non-market self-builds, community land trusts and so on. Hodkinson (2012) is clear about the limits and possibilities:

‘actions to commonise public and private housing cannot by themselves mean the end of capitalism and thus the end of the housing question, but they can help to circulate and expand the commons to improve life in the present and provide the basis for post-capitalism in the future’. (441)

The presence of alternatives does not necessarily preclude further impossibilities from becoming real.

Customer-owned credit co-ops and ‘community economies’ initiatives (Gibson-Graham and Miller 2015), engagement in anti-gentrification struggles and action research (Slater 2012, 2013), support for the land rights of first peoples and indigenous communities (Sandercock 2010; Porter and Barry 2015); advocacy for some kinds of informal practices and ways of being (Roy 2012; Tonkiss 2012), for linked-up urban politics (Mayer 2013) and sites of respectful encounter (Fincher and Iveson 2008): all this is work that helps make the impossible possible. Saskia Sassen (2011) conceives of the use of space ‘where new forms of the social and the political can be made', and speaks to protestors ‘who may not have gained power, they are still powerless, but they are making a history and a politics' (574). These scholars make strong normative claims and apply their research and action to the realisation of alternatives now. The researchers and activists working in this space are too many to be summarised here, and they do not directly address the urban question, so they're not the subject of this paper. But they're important because they do engage with the underlying concepts of the urban question, which coalesce into the question of how to bring about social change. They address the practices of such change, encouraging and supporting the creativity that leads to those small revolutions in everyday life, and they are getting somewhere. They do this practically, as well as theoretically.

Conclusion

The urban question has evolved, with successive generations indeed defining it after their fashion to reflect the social challenges of the time. Some accretion has occurred too, with critical Marxist scholars—in particular, Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells, David Harvey, Neil Brenner, Christian Schmid, Andy Merrifield and Brendan Gleeson—building on each other to produce a compilation that almost suits the moment. This is that question: if the urban is the realm of capitalist production and reproduction in all its contradictions, and the realm of contest in its multiple, historically specific interpretations, and simultaneously the object of capitalist accumulation; and if this process that we call neo-liberal urbanisation now colonises no less than the entire planet, what does this mean for urban politics? The question has been expanded to include an intrinsic dialectic of dispossession and potential insurrection; accumulation strategy as well as rebellion waiting and plotting in the wings, with the latter components of the dialectic—insurrection, rebellion, revolution or catastrophe—inevitable but as yet still unrealised. The question, now staggering under its weight, still doesn't have an answer.

Critical urban and social scholars with a less structuralist bent are engaging with the question of how to bring about social change. They point to the multiple ways in which urban politics and real alternatives are already being made, and to the normative and ethical methodologies that support the continuing emergence of these politics and alternatives. They say we do what we can in the contexts we have. The contexts change over time and place; the outcomes are rarely predictable. Critically, they argue that it should be the work of research and action to keep open and never preclude the possibility of the impossible becoming real. For this work to matter, it keeps in sight the core of the urban question, which is the site of everyday life. The utility of this theory is that it moves these researchers and activists to crystallise the possibilities.

In their fixation on the urban as planetary and beyond, including the earth's atmosphere and even further out to space (Brenner 2011) and in investing this universalised realm with such unrealised potential, perhaps the proponents of this way of seeing are missing the everyday—realised life; art on the level of utopia? Perhaps the Situationists were right in the microcosms at least, the small revolutions—under their very noses. We can leave the first and last word on that with G.B.S. (a famous gradualist, it must be said):

‘Well, I take refuge with the intelligent women [loosely speaking]. As for the front bench male politicians [structuralist sociologists?], I can point out the moon in the heavens to them [the real, the here and now]; but I cannot persuade them that it is anything more than a piece of green cheese.' (G. B. Shaw 1949, n.p.)

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