European journal of American studies 10-3 | 2015 Special Double Issue: The City Édition électronique URL : https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11186 DOI : 10.4000/ejas.11186 ISSN : 1991-9336 Éditeur European Association for American Studies Référence électronique European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015, « Special Double Issue: The City » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2015, consulté le 08 juillet 2021. URL : https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/ 11186 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.11186 Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 8 juillet 2021. Creative Commons License 1 SOMMAIRE PART ONE Spatial Justice and the Right to the City: Conflicts around Access to Public Urban Space Introduction Aneta Dybska et Sandrine Baudry Urban Discourses in the Making: American and European Contexts Where the War on Poverty and Black Power Meet: A Right to the City Perspective on American Urban Politics in the 1960s Aneta Dybska Who Has the Right to the Post-Socialist City? Writing Poland as the Other of Marxist Geographical Materialism Kamil Rusiłowicz Segregation or Assimilation: Dutch Government Research on Ethnic Minorities in Dutch Cities and its American Frames of Reference Ruud Janssens Public Art: Transnational Connections “The cornerstone is laid”: Italian American Memorial Building in New York City and Immigrants’ Right to the City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Bénédicte Deschamps Performing the Return of the Repressed: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Artistic Interventions in New York City's Public Space Justyna Wierzchowska Competing Claims to Housing and Public Space: Fighting Displacement in the Contemporary City What Can Urban Gardening Really Do About Gentrification? A Case-Study of Three San Francisco Community Gardens Guillaume Marche Resisting the Politics of Displacement in the San Francisco Bay Area: Anti-gentrification Activism in the Tech Boom 2.0 Florian Opillard “Meet de Boys on the Battlefront”: Festive Parades and the Struggle to Reclaim Public Spaces in Post-Katrina New Orleans Aurélie Godet European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 2 PART TWO Sustainability and the City: America and the Urban World Introduction: How (Can) Cities Work Theodora Tsimpouki Real Cities Infrastructures of the Global: Adding a Third Dimension to Urban Sustainability Discourses Boris Vormann Dealing with the Past Spatially: Storytelling and Sustainability in De-Industrializing Communities Julia Sattler The Implementation of the URBAN Community Initiative: A Transformative Driver towards Collaborative Urban Regeneration? Answers from Spain Sonia De Gregorio Hurtado Imaginary Cities Urban Figures, Common Ground: JR and the Cultural Practices of Perception Petra Eckhard Space Over Time: The Urban Space in William Gibson’s Techno-thriller Novels Anna Krawczyk-Łaskarzewska Stanley Park, Literary Ecology, and the Making of Sustainability Georg Drennig European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 3 PART ONE Spatial Justice and the Right to the City: Conflicts around Access to Public Urban Space EDITOR'S NOTE Edited by Aneta Dybska and Sandrine Baudry European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 4 Introduction Aneta Dybska and Sandrine Baudry 1 In 1968 the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre defined the right to the city as a right to “urban life, to renewed centrality, to places of encounter and exchange, to life rhythms and time uses, enabling the full and complete usage of these moments and places, etc.”1 His idea caught on in the Western countries and, in recent years, has been widely used as a critical tool by American urban scholars. The study of urban dwellers’ access to space and greenery, as well as the uses these urban resources are put to, reveals the existing discrepancies between the American values of justice and equality on the one hand and day-to-day realities of urban life on the other. Since claims and demands for a more equitable living environment materialize in public spaces in the form of territorial conflicts, knowing who uses public space and how it is used can inform us on a multitude of aspects of contemporary American society. Among them are the relations between citizens and institutions in the making of an urban public, as well as the relations among citizens themselves. Contemporary2 scholars of the right to the city have elaborated on Lefebvre’s at times vague formulations and abstractions on the right to the city. Indeed, Mark Purcell argues that “Lefebvre’s urban politics of the inhabitant would not lead necessarily to any particular outcomes,” in that the indeterminate character of the right to the city makes it unclear who will be empowered, and to what degree. Purcell argues that Lefebvre’s conception of the inhabitant is limited to the working class, thus reducing the right to the city to anticapitalist resistance, whereas it is clear that such divisions as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation also are a ground for spatial exclusion and inequality.2 For example, Eugene J. McCann underlines the necessity of accounting for racial inequalities when applying Lefebvre's concept to North American cities.3 McCann reminds us that rights are not inherently positive, so that it is not enough to advocate for the right to the city; it is important to ask whose needs are being met, and to keep in mind that urban space will become more democratic through inhabitant participation only if we recognize the complexity and diversity of urban needs.4 In3 the capitalist city operating as a “growth machine”5 and driven by the incentive to accumulate capital with the privatization of land and real estate European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 5 development, conflict emerges over the exchange value and the use value of land by the broad urban public. Since commodification of urban spaces breeds social exclusion and surveillance, it is also thought to threaten the political and social needs of urban citizens. A functional public sphere is the cornerstone of the civil society, whose inherent nature is to “limit[] the power of state, but also contribute[] to the development of common political debate and cultural exchange, which informs and influences collective decisions, allowing for the negative and positive meanings of freedom simultaneously to develop.”6 Public spaces such as parks, squares, playgrounds have their antecedent in the agora of the Greek polis and serve to facilitate participation in egalitarian and democratic processes.7 Functional public spaces are spaces for representation where, as Mitchell explains, diverse urban groups such as immigrants, veterans, the homeless, the queer youth of color, and urban gardeners can legitimately constitute themselves as political subjects within urban and national polity.8 It is in the public space that the otherwise invisible groups can draw attention to social, economic, and environmental injustice as mapped onto exclusionary urban geographies: displacement of low-income tenants, privatization of parks and playgrounds, as well as discriminatory access to work, education, transportation, food, and health care. In4 its political dimension, the right to the city is contingent upon the existence of public spaces. Functional public spaces (the commons) constitute the foundation of urban democracy since they ensure the exercise of political freedoms by diverse urban actors. Geographer Don Mitchell makes a powerful claim in defense of the right to appropriate urban space: “in a society where all property is private, those who own none (or whose interests are not otherwise protected by a right to access private property) simply cannot be, because they would have no place to be.”9 The presence of the homeless in the public space is not voluntary, he insists. Unlike property owning individuals who voluntarily create a public outside of the private realm, the homeless pose a challenge to such a political order: their presence in public space is involuntary and permanent, and thus strikes at the political core of modern societies, that is, the division into the private/public realm on which the democratic system is built.10 To fall back on urban planner Ali Madanipour’s definition: Public space is a place of simultaneity, a site for display and performance, a test of reality, an exploration of difference and identity, an arena for recognition, in which representation of difference can lead to an awareness of the self and others, and to an examination of the relationship between particular and general, personal and impersonal. It is a place where many-sided truths co-exist and tolerance of different opinions is practiced.11 5 In recent decades, the right to the city has become the idiom of collective resistance against the sanitization of public spaces and their transformation into sites of socio- cultural exclusion and privilege. Cultural, economic, and ideological frictions play themselves out territorially, and space, rather than being a backdrop against which urban denizens articulate their demands, becomes an inseparable element of socio- cultural struggle. Thus public space can be looked at through the prism of inclusion and exclusion along the lines of gender, race, sexuality, religion, or home ownership. American city leaders and planners realized early on that public realm was indispensable for the citizens’ practice of their democratic right. For example, in 1872 New York City’s Union Square was planned by the authorities as an official place where the spirit of democracy would thrive precisely because it was designated as a meeting place, a public forum, a site of exchange of ideas and debate, an arena where conflicts European journal of American studies, 10-3 | 2015 6 would be fought out.12 A century after its design, Union Square Park shared the lot of many municipal parks that deteriorated during the 1970s fiscal crisis. Since the mid-1980s Union Square Park has undergone revitalization and gained new life with the opening of a farmers market as an anchor for commercial activity in the area.13 Today it is a subway hub with heavy pedestrian traffic and thousands of visitors.