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The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth
The city is a paradoxical space, in theory belonging to everyone, in practice inaccessible to people who cannot afford the high price of urban real estate. Within these urban spaces are public and social goods including roads, policing, transit, public education, and culture, all of which have been created through multiple hands and generations, but that are effectively only for the use of those able to acquire private property. Why should this be the case?
As Margaret Kohn argues, when people lose access to the urban commons, they are dispossessed of something to which they have a rightful claim - the right to the city. Political theory has much to say about individual rights, equality, and redistribution, but it has largely ignored the city. In response, Kohn turns to a mostly forgotten political theory called solidarism to interpret the city as a form of common-wealth. In this view, the city is a concentration of value created by past generations and current streets, squares, community centers, schools and local churches. Although the legal title to these mixed spaces includes a patchwork of corporate, private, and public ownership, if we think of the spaces as the common-wealth of many actors, the creation of a new framework of value becomes possible. Through its novel mix of political and urban theory, The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth proposes a productive way to rethink struggles over gentrification, public
housing, transit, and public space.
As Margaret Kohn argues, when people lose access to the urban commons, they are dispossessed of something to which they have a rightful claim - the right to the city. Political theory has much to say about individual rights, equality, and redistribution, but it has largely ignored the city. In response, Kohn turns to a mostly forgotten political theory called solidarism to interpret the city as a form of common-wealth. In this view, the city is a concentration of value created by past generations and current streets, squares, community centers, schools and local churches. Although the legal title to these mixed spaces includes a patchwork of corporate, private, and public ownership, if we think of the spaces as the common-wealth of many actors, the creation of a new framework of value becomes possible. Through its novel mix of political and urban theory, The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth proposes a productive way to rethink struggles over gentrification, public
housing, transit, and public space.
- GenresAcademic
280 pages, Paperback
Published October 19, 2016
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September 7, 2019
Margaret Kohn's wonderful work of political theory has been on my shelf for a couple of years now, and all I can say is that I wish I had read it sooner. The title is a near-total misnomer--except in a very elliptical way, connected to Kohn's presentation of her arguments about cities in terms of pluralism, paradox, and experimentation, I don't see any way in which this book presents a parallel or sequel or response to Jane Jacobs's greatest work. But leaving that aside, I have no criticisms of this book whatsoever. I have quite a few disagreements with it, but that's different. Overall, what Kohn presents in The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth is a broad range of theoretical re-construals, a re-examination of a host of urban issues and questions in light of a new set of "urban imaginaries" (p. 6), and there wasn't a single one of these excursions that I didn't learn from, and more than a few of them I found deeply persuasive.
Her primary imaginary is the idea that the wealth of cities--meaning not just the commercial wealth which the transactions and businesses of urban conglomerations make possible, but also the huge density of connections, associations, opportunities, evaluations, and more which getting large numbers of people together both engenders and builds upon--is a "social property." This is not, strictly speaking, a socialist argument, though there are major parallels between what she proposes and socialist thinking. Mostly, though, she is making use of "solidarism," a 19th-century French republican argument about how all the goods of the city--public, private, social, economic, civic, etc.--are the "property" of the urban commonwealth. The multiplicity of these goods prevent any single formula of democratization or socialization; still, as she writes: "The government provides public transit, schools, urban infrastructure, and policing; neighbors foster community, aesthetics, and eyes-on-the-street; and businesses create opportunities for work, leisure activities, and consumption. Some of this social value can be captured and reallocated to solve the social problems of urban life" (p. 29). Don't be fooled by her use of "reallocation," though. Kohn is clearly not just a Rawlsian redistributist liberal, though her fundamentally liberal orientation to certain key questions (such as how to respond to spatial equality; she's somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of enclaves of citizens existing "together in difference," and hence is willing to defend gentrification when it results in a greater "social mix" of citizens, but opposes it when it doesn't--pp. 109-111) comes out occasionally. Mostly what she is is a lover of urban possibilities, and thus dives thoughtfully into Marx, Hayek, Locke, Hegel, Lefebvre, Machiavelli, Kant, and others as part of her quest to apply the solidarist ideal to questions of public spaces, mass transit, property rights, affordable housing, and much more. Her goals may be ultimately reformist rather than radical, but she attends to those goals in light of some genuinely radical challenges.
This book made me wish to subject my own city to a similar set of radical challenges, and see where an attractive theory like solidarism, which ultimately sees all those who dwell in urban spaces as "joint beneficiaries of a shared inheritance and trustees with fiduciary responsibility to others" (p. 200), might help us push back against those who see the rule of private capital and the dispossession of those who live in a city by those who own the deeds to the land within it as both efficient and inevitable. As a work of urban philosophical thinking, it stands with Marshall Berman's powerful All That is Solid Melts Into Air . It's really that good.
Her primary imaginary is the idea that the wealth of cities--meaning not just the commercial wealth which the transactions and businesses of urban conglomerations make possible, but also the huge density of connections, associations, opportunities, evaluations, and more which getting large numbers of people together both engenders and builds upon--is a "social property." This is not, strictly speaking, a socialist argument, though there are major parallels between what she proposes and socialist thinking. Mostly, though, she is making use of "solidarism," a 19th-century French republican argument about how all the goods of the city--public, private, social, economic, civic, etc.--are the "property" of the urban commonwealth. The multiplicity of these goods prevent any single formula of democratization or socialization; still, as she writes: "The government provides public transit, schools, urban infrastructure, and policing; neighbors foster community, aesthetics, and eyes-on-the-street; and businesses create opportunities for work, leisure activities, and consumption. Some of this social value can be captured and reallocated to solve the social problems of urban life" (p. 29). Don't be fooled by her use of "reallocation," though. Kohn is clearly not just a Rawlsian redistributist liberal, though her fundamentally liberal orientation to certain key questions (such as how to respond to spatial equality; she's somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of enclaves of citizens existing "together in difference," and hence is willing to defend gentrification when it results in a greater "social mix" of citizens, but opposes it when it doesn't--pp. 109-111) comes out occasionally. Mostly what she is is a lover of urban possibilities, and thus dives thoughtfully into Marx, Hayek, Locke, Hegel, Lefebvre, Machiavelli, Kant, and others as part of her quest to apply the solidarist ideal to questions of public spaces, mass transit, property rights, affordable housing, and much more. Her goals may be ultimately reformist rather than radical, but she attends to those goals in light of some genuinely radical challenges.
This book made me wish to subject my own city to a similar set of radical challenges, and see where an attractive theory like solidarism, which ultimately sees all those who dwell in urban spaces as "joint beneficiaries of a shared inheritance and trustees with fiduciary responsibility to others" (p. 200), might help us push back against those who see the rule of private capital and the dispossession of those who live in a city by those who own the deeds to the land within it as both efficient and inevitable. As a work of urban philosophical thinking, it stands with Marshall Berman's powerful All That is Solid Melts Into Air . It's really that good.
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