A View from Outside-In

It is 1973, and Social Justice and the City had just been published by Edward Arnold in London. I was a student at the University of Vienna in the Geography and Urban Planning program my fellow students and I were reading David Harvey’s Explanation in Geography (1969) alongside Dietrich Bartels’ Zur wissenschaftstheoretischen Grundlegung einer Geographie des Menschen (1968), Gerhard Hard’s Geographie: Eine wissenschaftstheoretische Einführung (1973), Peter Haggett’s Locational Analysis in Human Geography (1965). Theoretically and quantitatively oriented geographic research was just starting in the German speaking countries. My own dissertation was a causal analysis of the social, economic and spatial integration of guestworkers in the city of Vienna, using multi-variate statistical analysis to explain the factors and conditions that influenced their integration. Positivist social science, as it came to be called in English (rather than ‘critical rationalism’ as called by its proponents), was clearly on the ascendancy, replacing place-based hermeneutic approaches.

Yet, while undertaking critical rationalist analysis – testing and falsifying hypotheses – we were also reading the critiques launched against this by members and followers of the Frankfurt School that culminated in the so-called Positivismusstreit in der Deutschen Soziologie (a term coined by Theodor Adorno), between Karl Popper and Hans Albert (self-declared critical rationalists) and Theodor Adorno und Jürgen Habermas (the critical theorists). Critical rationalists insisted on the importance of testing and falsifying empirical hypotheses, viewing knowledge production as an ongoing value-free process toward a better understanding of the world we experience. Critical theorists highlighted the importance of uncovering existing power structures and social inequalities to promote social transformation, arguing that all research has a politics and ethics. They argued that values influence what we choose to study, our methods and interpretations of our findings, and that social science should concerned itself with social justice and advancing social change.

Why recall this old debate among German social philosophers? Social Justice and the City, published one year after Adorno’s book was reissued in its second German edition and the first English-language summary of the dispute was published by David Frisby, re-iterates the questions animated by this debate. Social Justice is divided into “Liberal Formulations” (the Popperian side, reflecting where David’s thinking was coming from), placed against “Socialist Formulations”, in which David aligned himself with the arguments of critical theorists and brought Marxist theory to bear on interrogating the city. Irrespective of whether he was aware of the German debate, he concludes with them that we cannot separate research from politics.

Discussing Social Justice and the City in their edited book Spatial Histories of Radical Geography: North America and Beyond, Trevor Barnes and Eric Sheppard suggest that the radical urban geographical theory advanced in Social Justice had been an outcome of David’s experience and observations in 1970s Baltimore. It was a tumultuous and fraught time in the city, characterized by violence, riots and destruction of the physical environment. This was also when David, together with Lata Chatterjee, started his research on Baltimore’s housing market, documenting spatially unequal disinvestment by landlords in low-income black inner city areas and local government policies code enforcement in these areas that incentivized disinvestment. The final report provided policy recommendations for the Federal Housing Agency that never were taken up. Interestingly, none of these empirical details appear in Social Justice and the City, which feels detached from this research and the urban context that spawned it. Yet, as David himself has acknowledged, “the travails of Baltimore formed the backdrop to my theorizing” (Harvey 2002, 170)—making this in turn crucial for the formulation of revolutionary urban theory in geography.

It is fair to say that Social Justice hardly registered in German speaking geography and the social sciences when it was published. One reason for this was the general lag with which knowledge produced at the time in the Anglo-American realm reached the European continent. Yet there was another reason for this early lack of enthusiastic response outside the Anglophone world.  The late 1970s in the German speaking European countries where a time of social liberalism with the central state actively addressing existing social inequalities, introducing a variety of social welfare programs, including housing education and health, which played an important part in decreasing social disparities/inequalities and social injustice.  Further, the abstract nature of the arguments advanced in Social Justice and the City bumped up against the positivism and strong empiricist orientation of German speaking Geography and Social Sciences more generally at the time, making its arguments less attractive.  Joe Doherty, reflecting on the reception of Social Justice and the City from “the periphery”, namely Tanzania, suggests that the book also initially had little take-up with the Tanzanian radical scholarly community in Dar es Salaam, concerned at the time with translating conceptions of Arican Socialism into a policy program. More generally, this calls out for not simply critical theorizing with a big “T” but theorizing that is in dialogue with the multiple practices in different places that seek to address social and environmental justice.

Based on the reviews I could find, reception of Social Justice and the City also was rather slow to gain attention in the Anglo-American realm. Nonetheless it has become a classic or Schlüsselwerk in critical geography and urban studies.  It laid the foundation for an emergent critical urban studies that seeks to understand urban form and urban life within the context of the larger political economic forces shaping its production. Mobilizing Marxist theory, the culmination of the book brings capital, class and the state to bear on explaining urban inequality and unequal spatial development. Indeed, this is where I ended up at the end of my dissertation on guestworkers in Vienna, albeit without Marxian theory: Understanding the social and spatial integration of guestworkers in Vienna requires examining the impact of capital and the state, specifically state policies facilitating or impeding their social and spatial integration. Such questions lay beyond the bounds of causal path analysis, and my own scholarship took a more qualitative and critical turn.

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The world has changed dramatically during the past half-century, yet the book remains relevant as an important reference point and license to engage in critical urban studies; indeed, citations have exploded since 2013, forty years after it appeared! In my view this influence was cemented by David’s numerous and highly influential subsequent contributions to urban studies, including such monographs as Paris, Capital and Modernity, The Condition of Postmodernity, and Rebel Cities. These publications have inspired multiple generations of geographers, urban scholars and activists. I am particularly fond of these later works because they go beyond simply engaging Marx’ Kapital to understand urban transformations, mobilizing Marxian theoretical tools to provide insightful critiques of capitalist housing and mortgage markets informed by the places that he has lived and worked in.

These latter books not only retain a materialist account and analysis of the ills of capitalist urban development; they also pay attention to the role of social movements in bringing about change as they envision alternatives of urban living and urban form – cities not just as a playground for capital but as sites of potentially revolutionary change. Not surprisingly, David presents the commons and commoning as an alternative to all-encompassing capitalist urban development. There is no question that capital – particularly finance and real estate – has shaped urban imaginaries and form and that individualism, consumption and capitalist enclosure have engendered increasing inequalities in wealth and access to such resources as land and living space. Yet detailed empirical research on cities, especially in the global South, suggests that these are not all-encompassing. For example, commoning practices exist within neoliberal enclosures in the informal settlements of Jakarta, and in many other cities across the globe. Not only is living space being reappropriated, but also social relations of cooperation, mutual aid and care are being nurtured, supporting livelihoods and sociality. These practices by urban residents, in particular those on the margin, contest enclosure and operate outside it, while also sometimes complicit in capitalist enclosures. They are not simply about fleeting collective action such as “Occupy Wallstreet”, discussed in Rebel Cities, but are persistent and resilient mundane everyday practices of ordinary people in ordinary spaces. My own take away point from this example is the importance of always interrogating the relevance of the concepts we work with in different contexts. This requires identifying on-the-ground practices exceeding our abstractions/concepts, simultaneously attending to practices and theories.

All this said, happy birthday, David, and I hope that you will continue to inspire myself and urban scholars across the globe with your writing for many years to come!

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