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The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Right to the City. By Don Mitchell

Don Mitchell begins The Right to the City by suggesting that public spaces in the contemporary American city typically engender fear: fear of the homeless, drug users, loitering youths, and political activists. While the right to private property secures spaces of commerce and habitation for the bourgeoisie, the poor and those without property often have no recourse but literally to inhabit public spaces. The result, from the perspective of the bourgeoisie, is that public spaces appear disorderly and in need of regulation if anarchy is to be avoided. Drawing on Lefebvre and Raymond Williams, Mitchell asks who has the right to the city and its public spaces? How is that right determined both in law and in the streets? How is it policed and legitimized by the state? How has its legitimacy been upheld or undermined historically? Finally, how can struggles over the exercise of this right give form and substance to a progressive conception of social justice? Although many of Mitchell’s arguments are applicable to all contemporary cities, this is primarily an exploration of public space in the American city. The theoretical framework that Mitchell develops in Chapter 1 contributes significantly to the burgeoning literature in geography and elsewhere that explores Lefebvre’s idea of the right to the city. Like Lefebvre, Mitchell argues that the right to inhabit the city implies the right to housing and all that it necessarily entails. Although securing the right to housing is no guarantee that a fuller appropriation of the use values of city life by its inhabitants will follow, it is a necessary first step. This right must also be disassociated from the right to private property if urban space is to accommodate the everyday needs of urban inhabitants, rather than the needs of capital accumulation. Other rights, particularly the right to representation, from which the rights of free speech and of assembly derive, are also of critical importance in Mitchell’s formulation. Where Mitchell departs from Lefebvre and many other scholars on the Left is in positing that struggles to secure these and other rights actually produce spaces of representation in which demands for the right to the city and social justice become visible. The visibility (even spectacle) of struggle is crucial in spurring recognition of the legitimacy of such demands by the state. For Mitchell, the liberal state remains a significant (perhaps the most significant) actor in institutionalizing rights to protect the weak. When translated into law, rights become social practices that are backed up and enforced by the state. Chapter 2 provides an historical perspective and veracity to this formulation by examining how specific social struggles over rights to urban public space have led to transformations of laws of public space as courts have sought to adjudicate or eliminate conflict. Mitchell reviews two recent U.S. Supreme Court cases involving the rights to the city of two different groups: women who seek abortions and anti-abortion protesters outside abortion clinics and the homes of providers of abortions. Ironically, the decisions in these cases drew on a long history of case law that had more to do with controlling the dissent of workers than with regulating the sort of dissent that is exercised by anti-abortion protesters. Mitchell traces this history from its origins in struggles over the rights of the Industrial Workers of the World to speak on the streets from about 1910 to 1939, when the Supreme Court finally codified the right to speak in public spaces. But, as Mitchell makes clear, this ruling has not stopped innumerable jurisdictions from restricting or even eliminating that right. This point is brought out most #1753—ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY—VOL. 80 NO. 4—80406-reynolds_br