The American city: history and development

Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space, author Don Mitchell presents a Marxist view of the city as a crucial public space. The encroachment of private ownership of public spaces has significantly restricted the "right to the city," a term Mitchell borrowed from Henri Lefebvre. Mitchell targets anti-homeless laws including bans on panhandling as infringements on essential civil liberties. Moreover, Mitchell points out the specific ways public spaces are being restricted and constricted. First, environmental alterations such as the erection of physical barriers are used to quarter off some spaces that should be designated as public. Second, behavior modification techniques are used to control the flow of traffic or the specific activities that are possible in a public space such as political protesting. Finally, stringent policing methods including surveillance cameras are stifling freedom in American cities. Mitchell argues that public space was itself "socially produced through struggle," and that through struggle citizens may regain social justice (8).

By definition, urban centers are heterogeneous public zones. Any number of interactions and transactions may take place within the city zone. Some of those actions are likely to cause alarm, annoyance, consternation, and even fear. Fear has been the primary tactic of restricting the rights of the city, notes Mitchell. Even before September 11, fear tactics were used to control homeless populations in cities like New York and reduce instances of loitering, panhandling, and picketing. Mitchell refers to "the fear of inappropriate users" to describe the underlying motive for legal changes that affect the urban environment. By designating certain areas as "business improvement districts," local governments can undermine core constitutional rights by declaring some parts of the city off-limits to persons or activities deemed unsavory.

Essentially, Mitchell argues that control over the city equals social control and in many cases, political oppression. Social control methods end up creating what can easily be called "a highly sanitized city and a fully deracinated politics," (Mitchell 9). Cities are becoming woefully suburbanized too, notes Mitchell. For example, urban cores now have actual indoor shopping malls: several blocks worth of private property in the middle of a city. The presence of private property in what should be a public space enables the restriction on who and what can exist in the city. Similarly, new real estate development plans are designed to control traffic flows both within and around them. Such structural elements are proposed as security measures but are actually thinly veiled attempts to eliminate disenfranchised populations from the political, economic, and social mainstream. By cutting off access to public spaces, city leaders are neutering the political rights of some citizens.

Mitchell squarely blames capitalism and neoliberalism as the primary causes for recent changes to city spaces. The city has become a realm controlled by the upper class, and not one created by the collective whole of all classes. As Mitchell puts it, the city was "created for us rather than by us," (p. 18). Not just homeless people are disenfranchised in the sterile city: so too are ordinary citizens who lack access to the ways and means to control public space. Thus, anyone who wished to hold a legal demonstration in a city risks arrest or other penalties for protesting in what should be a public space. The creation of special designated zones for political protest is usually done in the name of public safety or welfare. However, mandating that protests take place in a segregated area of the city contradicts the political purpose of protests. Some protests are designed to be effective in a certain geographic area such as in front of a city hall or in front of a specific retail outlet. The Supreme Court itself supports the rights of city elite to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable forms of public protest by placing effective limits on free speech. Those limits entail a legal distinction between "pure speech," "expressive conduct" and "behavior" (Mitcell 7)

Thus, Mitchell calls for "the democratization of public space" (9). Public space must become public once again, geographically and theoretically. Mitchell briefly mentions the Internet as a virtual public space facing similar threats as the physical city does. The same forces controlling physical spaces in the city are vying for power over the virtual spaces online. Mitchell especially targets consumerism as a driving force behind space stealing in both cities and online. Traffic, whether vehicular, pedestrian, or online, is diverted towards large-scale commercial enterprise. In cities as well as online, small businesses suffer, as does consumer choice. Banner advertisements online are akin to large billboards in cities: another blatant use of public space for private enterprise. Some business development zones actively restrict membership to their exclusive elite areas: which are open only businesses deemed desirable to the neighborhood. Capitalism and fear mongering are both changing the American city.

Mitchell spends a great deal of time explaining why the marginalized citizens of America, especially the homeless, are hit hard by the changes. However, the author also views the new restrictions as affronts to general civil liberties that ought to be guaranteed by the American constitution. Mitchell spends a good amount of time delving into the legal aspects of urban planning and development. Laws, many of which are local but some of which are federal as well, are cutting into civil liberties.

The city is a symbol of human diversity and also of democracy: the city is the polis. Therefore, "a right to the city must be at the heart of any vision of a progressive, democratic, and just world," (Mitchell 6). Public spaces must be preserved as such: parks used for demonstrations or sleeping, should the need of either arise. To make his point, Mitchell mentions a series of historical events that helped define the "right to the city" such as the Industrial Workers of the World March in the early twentieth century. The evolution of the urban center can be linked closely with the evolution of democratic politics in the United States and elsewhere. As Mitchell points out, the city was not necessarily conceived of as a place where free assembly could take place and freedom of speech exercised fully. The city should be legally construed as a shared collective space: a geographic zone that belongs to all citizens just as a tree in the woods would. If all citizens have the right to housing, then homeless people essentially deserve the right to find housing in a public space.