Dublin's New Mayor versus the Right to the City

dublin | miscellaneous | opinion/analysis Friday February 26, 2010 11:11 by Mick O'Broin

The announcement of new legislation to create a directly-elected mayor of Dublin is yet another sign of the increasing political importance of the city a globalised world.

The New Dublin Mayor versus the Right to the City

New legislation which will create a directly elected Mayor of Dublin city signals the recognition of the increasing political and economic importance of the city. The city is not the only space of growing importance; recent decades have seen the emergence of the European, global and regional scales on the political scene. This represents a shift away from the nation-state as the mode of organising politics and economy. For social movements based in Dublin, this is a timely opportunity to think about the significance of the city in a globalised world.

In many respects today’s social movements have a particular appreciation for the ‘politics of scale’ and the declining significance of the nation-state. Today’s movements emerged from the alter-globalisation movement, a movement which clearly perceived the necessity of politicising the global level. Over the last four decades capital has increasingly occupied the global terrain, and an institutional network has emerged to support the development of global capitalism (The World Bank, WTO, IMF etc.) Some elements of the alter-globalisation movement (the section which can perhaps rightly be called the ‘anti-globalisation movement’) opposed globalisation in nationalist terms, lamenting the decline of national sovereignty. Many, however, sought to respond in more positive terms through, for example, experiments in global social movement institutions such as the World Social Forum and the European Social Forum. This allowed social movements to ‘jump’ the nation-state level, which had become a cul-de-sac for the left.

Glocalisation

Whatever about the successes and failures of the alter-globalisation movement, activists recognised that they could not solely focus on the global level. The importance of understanding the connection between the global and the local, captured in the sociological term ‘glocalisation’, became the refrain of the movement. In this sense, local struggles are not to be seen as separate from, or an antidote to, global ills; the local is a constitutive component of the global.

But we weren’t the only ones linking the global and the local. The last decades have seen the emergence of a network power which decentres the nation state and binds together local, regional, national, international and global actors (Brenner, N. 2004. New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood). In these new ‘governance’ arrangements the nation-state is no longer the ‘be-all and end-all’ of politics. A more complex political terrain has emerged populated by institutions and agencies operating and linking together a variety of ‘scales’.

More than any other ‘scale’, the city emerges here as a glocalised space. Cities have been the site of a bewildering array of new forms of capitalist accumulation and power. On an economic level, the city has been at the heart of both property lead growth and financial capitalism. As property has become key to growth every square inch of Dublin has become a valuable commodity. In a world where ‘consumerism, tourism, cultural and knowledge-based industries have become major aspects of urban political economy’(quote from David Harvey’s The Right to the City, download here davidharvey.org/media/righttothecity.pdf ) we have seen the reduction of virtually the entire city to a playground for property speculators and shoppers. Social movements have not been particularly good at either describing or politicising this process. The IFSC, for example, represents a kind of ‘no-go-zone’ for social movements, and most activists (including myself) remain unaware of the new forms of accumulation and exploitation being hatched therein.

Global Cities

Several cities, however, have been subjected to plenty of research. Researchers have described the incongruous interplay between ‘third world’ style exploitation and ‘turbo-capitalist’ accumulation that characterise today’s global cities; London, New York, Los Angeles, Madrid, Dubai, to give a few examples (see Sasskia Sassen’s The Global City; Mike Davis’ City of Quartz; Observatorio Metropolitano’s Madrid: La Suma de Todos?; for a useful English language review of the later see transform.eipcp.net/correspondence/1204745057#redir). In this context, the very distinction between third and first world looses meaning, with sweat shops operating next to skyscrapers (Hardt and Negri. Empire). Contemporary cities are characterised by various forms of post-industrial production, leading some researchers to characterise urban transformation in terms of a shift from the ‘industrial city’ to the ‘biopolitical metropolis’ (Hardt and Negri. Common Wealth). This transformation of urban accumulation and exploitation is also linked to new strategies of control.

In this regard, we’ve seen the proliferation of novel networked governance arrangements in the city (See Swyngedouw on the Post-political City in Urban Politics Now: Re-imagining Democracy in the Neoliberal City). Partnership arrangements, local agencies, NGOs, development corporations (and a long etc.) have taken over much of the work we would once have associated with the state. ‘Welfare’ is no longer an exclusively national concern; today it’s the ‘community’ rather than the ‘population’ which is likely to be the object of welfare policies. Some of Dublin’s urban communities contain a massive array of agencies and organisations, such that even people working in those organisations have difficulty navigating the new terrain of governance. Social movements have to some degree recognised the role of community development, NGOs and partnership in the massive depoliticisation we have become accustomed to, but have yet to draw a clear map of the new ‘para-state network’(an issue of the journal Interface www.interfacejournal.net/2009/11/interface-issue-2-civil-society-vs.html) contains some interesting information on the Irish case. A variety of critical articles on community development and partnership in Ireland appear in Community Development Journal, Vol 37, No 1. For an audio recording of a discussion organised by Better Questions on Community Development go to indymedia.ie/article/95699). While we’ve had difficulties understanding how these mechanisms operate, we’re light years away from understanding how to jam them. We’ve also seen the proliferation of mechanisms of segregation, surveillance and fear in the control of urban life (Mike Davis. City of Quartz). Emmanuel Rodríguez (Crisis and Reinvención en la Ciudad Contemporánea) describes the culmination of these changes as follows:

“..new means of socio-spatial segregation, rigidification of racial and gendered borders…urban management through generalised racial and social fear, the constitutive precarity of metropolitan life, and the brutal decomposition of ethical and material frameworks of an acceptable existence…”

As has too often happened, the state has been much better able to respond to the new global terrain than social movements, developing a wide variety of mechanisms to enhance the economic power of ‘city-regions’ while hi-jacking fear of globalisation to attack the notion of citizenship. Although full details of the new Dublin Mayor role have yet to be announced, the fact that it is to be an elected position indicates recognition of the political importance of the city. The elections will no doubt be little more than a legitimisation exercise in which ‘citizens’ chose between a number of candidates who compete to convince us that Dublin ‘needs to be competitive in an increasingly unstable global context’ while peddling unsubstantiated claims that this can somehow be allied with concerns around social matters. But the elections will serve an important ideological function which reinforces Dublin as a political and economic scale and reinforces the domination of neo-liberalism over that scale. No surprise, then, that the Dublin Camber of Commerce have championed the cause of a directly-elected Mayor:

“Just as great companies need a strong leader…‘Dublin Inc.’ needs a directly elected Lord Mayor” (See www.dublinchamber.ie/press.release.asp?article=701)

The Right to the City

If we are to challenge this we’ll have to begin to articulate an alternative view of the city. The politics of space is not simply about controlling a particular space, it is both challenging the way spaces are defined. Feminists understood this well when they politicised the ‘private’ sphere and attacked the distinction between public space and private space. Workers understood this too when they transformed the factory from a productive space to a political space. If cities are the factories of the 21st century, will we be capable of shifting them from productive to political spaces? This would mean re-imagining the city as a place which is not over-determined by competition, consumption and fear. It would mean thinking about the inhabitants of cities as more than consumers, home-owners, tax-payers. In this regard the idea of the ‘right to the city’ could be a useful starting pointing for the politicisation the city. As Harvey (The Right to the City) says, this isn’t about the right to what already exists, but the right to transform the city:

“The right to the city is, therefore, far more than a right of an individual to access the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our hearts desires…changing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities…”

Moreover, what would happen if social movements where to address themselves to Dublin City Council? The city council is a much weaker, divided and politically inexperienced entity than the national government. In addition, it seems to me that the more localised scale of the city and city council could make for more effective social movement interventions.

For those who consider themselves to be on the left and still fantasise about taking over the state, this is another reminder that the nation-state can no longer be the ‘be-all and end-all’ of politics. To those of us who have never been particularly interested in the state as a mechanism for emancipation, this is an opportunity; an opportunity to rethink the global city in terms of local and global cooperation and solidarity. Yet as the plans for a new Mayor of Dublin proceed, with the various parties and the communications industry dribbling over the prospect, it remains unclear whether social movements will be able to politicise the global city.