Introduction to Patrick Declerck

A philosopher, ethnologist, and psychoanalyst practising in Paris, Patrick Declerck is also a sharp critic of social attitudes in the Western world towards poverty in general and towards homelessness in particular. Declerck possesses a curious distinction among his fellow intellectuals in France: his is the only citation index to rise as the temperature falls. This is because, as Declerck observes in his lecture, the French government mobilizes its action plan for the homeless only once the temperature has dropped below 2 degrees centrigrade. Declerck attacks this plan for establishing what he calls a ‘thermal limit to the social contract’. This limit means that the predicament of those who are down and out in the streets of Paris appears unacceptable to the rest of society only when the temperature is low. At any other time, Parisian society and the French political establishment accept the suffering of the homeless as a ‘necessary’ evil. This acceptance, Declerck argues with passionate conviction, is part of the inner sadism with which mainstream Western societies treat poor and homeless people. Declerck bases his convictions upon rigorous research and continuous practical experience. He worked with homeless people in Paris for fifteen years, went down and out with the homeless for periods over a number of years, and—most important of all—helped found, in 1986, the first counselling and medical treatment service for the homeless in France. His book Les Naufragés (The Shipwrecked) (2001) combines these various experiences in a rigorous study of the homeless of Paris. The work, which has had a considerable impact in France but has unfortunately not yet been translated into English, is a testimony of Declerck’s experiences of living with the homeless, a narrative of their lives, and an account of the conversations he had with them. It is an effort to put homeless people and their plight ‘on the map’. It goes beyond a rigorous ethnographic description of the homeless of Paris to offer an explanation of how these people come to exist in our cities and why they remain in this position for so many years.

Introduction to David Harvey

David Harvey is one of the few global public intellectuals whose lifelong political and academic mission is the search for a more genuinely humanizing geography of everyday urban life. His relentless and thought-provoking engagement with the realities and contradictions of contemporary capitalist urbanization has long inspired those seeking to fight for an urban life free from the practices of social, political, and racial exclusion and the divisions that have been the hallmark of modern urbanization throughout the world. Harvey is one of the urban geographers whose intellectual influence has reached most widely across disciplines. With a Ph.D. in Geography from Cambridge University, he embarked on a lifelong intellectual and political trajectory that has transformed the ways in which urban theorists approach the capitalist city and in which activists seek urban, social, and political change. Already noted for the landmark publication in 1969 of Explanation in Geography, his epistemological and political attention soon turned to a more radical and Marxist understanding of the urban. This epistemological shift coincided with his transatlantic migration to the Johns Hopkins University, where he taught Marxist urban theory for the next fifteen years or so. The deep injustices that had just come to the boil in rioting US cities, combined with a rediscovery of the power of historical materialist Marxist analysis, resulted in the publication of Social Justice and the City (1973). Harvey’s theorization of the city, deeply embedded in the original writings of Marx, also draws on the radical urban theories and politics pioneered by Henri Lefebvre. For Harvey, cities are—and have always been—highly differentiated spaces of activity, excitement, and pleasure. They are arenas for the pursuit of unoppressed activities and desires, but also ones replete with systematic power, danger, oppression, domination, and exclusion. Exploring the tensions between this dialectical twin of emancipation and disempowerment has been at the centre of Harvey’s theoretical and political concerns. Questions of justice cannot be seen independently from the urban condition, not only because most of the world’s population now lives in cities, but above all because the city condenses the manifold tensions and contradictions that infuse modern life.

Introduction toJames D. Wolfensohn

James David Wolfensohn is a surprising figure. A wildly successful investment banker, he nonetheless found time to take up the cello in middle life; he would cross the Atlantic on Concorde, buying two seats so that his cello could fly with him. A corporate insider, he nonetheless identified with the world’s least fortunate; he took an interest in international family planning, the environment, and AIDS, even as he was merging and restructuring the world’s leading companies. Appointed to lead a World Bank known chiefly for prescribing macro-economic austerity, Wolfensohn distanced the institution from both macro-economics and prescriptions. He spoke the language of poverty-fighting groups such as Oxfam, and demanded social justice; and after his first press conference, the World Bank’s chief spin doctor, who was concerned that the Bank not be seen as ‘soft’, remarked that Wolfensohn had not been ‘on message’. ‘He’s the President,’ another official said. ‘I think you’ll find that is the message.’ Since that exchange in 1995, Wolfensohn has reshaped the Bank, a formidable, sprawling institution with nearly ten thousand employees and projects in about one hundred countries. The emphasis on macro-economic structural adjustment, which had dominated the Bank’s programmes since the start of the 1980s, was phased out; questions of governance— the transparency of political institutions, the level of corruption, the quality of judicial or media or civil society oversight—came to preoccupy the Bank almost as much as price signals and sound budgeting. Before Wolfensohn’s arrival, the Bank’s apolitical charter was thought to put these governance issues at least partially off limits. But in a speech in 1966, Wolfensohn denounced ‘the cancer of corruption’, and a taboo that had lasted since the Bank’s creation in 1944 was abruptly shattered. Wolfensohn’s focus on poverty and social justice come through strongly in his contribution to this volume. Before his arrival at the Bank, the institution was often vilified for technocratic elitism: its officials’ idea of ‘field work’ was a meeting with a finance minister in a five-star hotel, according to the critics. But in this lecture we find Wolfensohn recounting the life of a poor mother in a Brazilian slum, and explaining that the worst feature of poverty is ‘voicelessness’.

Introduction to Stuart Hall

Stuart Hall has inspired, influenced, and often provoked at least two generations of scholars and activists, across Britain and far beyond. He has held distinguished academic positions in both Cultural Studies (a discipline, or discourse, in whose making and remaking he has been a central figure) and Sociology. But his ideas and their impact have not been, and could not be, confined to any disciplinary mould, nor to the academic world alone. He has written on and been a significant and original voice in debates on popular culture, media and the arts, Thatcherism and the future of the Left, Marx and Gramsci, modernism and postmodernism, racial theories and race relations, concepts of diaspora, globalization, ethnicity, identity, and hybridity—and even that is just a near-random selection from among the themes that his work has addressed. His influence may be encountered, his name invoked, among artists and film-makers, especially younger black British ones, as well as academics. Strikingly, in a recent poll seeking to rank the ‘100 Greatest Black Britons’, Hall was the only living intellectual to feature at all prominently (at no. 10) among musicians, sportspeople, and TV personalities. This polymathic presence does not, however, extend to absolute ubiquity: it should be pointed out that the presenter of the once-popular TV show ‘It’s a Knockout’ was an entirely different Stuart Hall. Our Stuart Hall is, on the face of it, very much a ‘public intellectual’. This is a label more familiar in America than in Britain, and one which sometimes seems to mean ‘glib, media-friendly polemicist’. That is clearly not Hall at all, and perhaps the idea of the public intellectual fits him better if it is redefined: not (just) as someone who appears frequently in the public sphere, but as one whose efforts have always been directed towards defending and extending that sphere, its integrity, democracy, and inclusiveness. It is an ethical as well as a political endeavour. Hall’s lifelong adherence to it, no less than the subject-matter and intellectual power of his essay here, makes him an apt choice to open this collection of Oxford Amnesty Lectures.

Looking on the Bright Side

Responding is always an invidious business: unless you are in total empathy and sympathy with the viewpoint of the author, you run the risk of appearing simply churlish and grumpy. Of course, unless you believe, like the postmodernists, that there is no such thing as an objective statement, it is always possible to have arguments about the empirical truth, or otherwise, of what someone has written. But many pieces of writing are not like that: they represent what could be called a moral ordering of the world, with which you can agree or disagree according to your own such notions. And that is certainly true of the six lectures in this volume. How, writing for a volume in support of Amnesty International, could it be otherwise? Take two of the lectures, which conceptually belong together almost like peas in a pod, those by Stuart Hall and David Harvey. They are perhaps the best-known British Marxist intellectuals, even though David Harvey now teaches in the United States. And they would deserve that appellation even if they were not occupying a lonely niche, since they are among the very few unapologetic Marxists left. Stuart Hall emphasizes three key features driving change in our urban world: the uneven transition to a post-industrial economy and society, globalization, and migration. He asks: What are the chances that we can construct in our cities shared, diverse, just, more inclusive, and egalitarian forms of common life, guaranteeing the full rights of democratic citizenship and participation to all on the basis of equality, whilst respecting the differences that inevitably come about when peoples of different religions, cultures, histories, languages, and traditions are obliged to live together in the same shared space? This is a good question. But, if you know anything about writings in this tradition, you will know the answer in advance: ‘The promises designed to make the poor complicit with their global fate—rising living standards, a more equal distribution of goods and life chances, an opportunity to compete on equal terms with the developed world, a fairer share of the world’s wealth—have comprehensively failed to be delivered.’

Introduction to Richard Rogers

It is surprising how few architects have come to grips with the crisis that faces the contemporary city. Richard Rogers is an exception. Over the last thirty years or so, the buildings that have made Rogers famous have been, as much as anything, explorations of the principles that have concerned him: flexibility, modernity, inclusivity, and sustainability. At the same time, in his writings and public discourse, he has been a passionate advocate of the city as a place of social and intellectual interchange, a democratic and architecturally stimulating environment. This vision is rooted as much in the civic ideals of the Italian Renaissance—Rogers was born in Florence—as in the late twentieth-century avant-garde. Many of the changes to the public face of London that have taken place over the last decade—the opening up of the river and the pedestrianization of Trafalgar Square are two examples—were called for by Rogers in architectural proposals, writings, and public statements published since the 1980s. Architecture, he has argued, cannot be detached from social and political issues. Increasingly, his words have had a prophetic edge, befitting his senior status within the profession and the cultural life of the nation. As one of the best-known architects on the planet, Rogers, at least potentially, has the ear of both government and business, the twin agencies holding the future of the urban landscape in their hands. For this reason alone, what he has to say merits close attention. Rogers first came to international prominence with the opening of the Pompidou Centre in the Beauborg area of central Paris, designed with his then partner, Renzo Piano, in 1976. One of the key buildings of the twentieth century, it changed the face of the French capital, creating a new cultural heart of the city. Rogers’s banishment of services to external ducts, creating vast open interior spaces, was to become a trademark further developed in the Lloyds Building in London, completed in 1984. Both structures celebrate urban life and activity, although one is a public and one a private space. The Beauborg has been compared to a giant climbing frame.

Introduction to Patricia J. Williams

The brilliance of Patricia Williams’s work lies in her ability to use the personal to analyse the structures and institutions that affect our ways of living together. She has an unerring eye for the telling story which reveals to us our habits of being. As one of the foremost public intellectuals in the United States, she brings the qualities of a great and witty storyteller to her training as a lawyer, and tells us about ourselves. In her books The Alchemy of Race and Rights (1991) and The Rooster’s Egg (1995), she reveals the institutional racism that seeps through American society, corroding human rights on a day-to-day basis in ways both large and small. She shows how popular notions of racial difference are transmitted through American culture in myths about black single mothers and about America as a ‘colour-blind’ land of opportunity and hard work. She analyses the media’s sensational reporting of African-Americans in positions of authority and of crimes involving black people. At the heart of such myths and media sensationalism, she argues, is a crippling fear of the other which divides societies against themselves, to everyone’s loss and no one’s gain. It is this sense—that fear impedes and destroys civil rights and humiliates individuals on a daily basis—which drives the analysis she offers of American civil and urban society at this peculiar time of the ‘war on terror’ in her Oxford Amnesty Lecture. Beginning with the notion that America has a very particular notion of division within cities, one which is rooted in its own settler history where good and evil are seen to be battling for control, she then describes the present crisis as a structural problem masquerading as a personal one. Urban chaos is seen as ‘the result [. . .] of personal choice to side with darkness’. Consequently, the threat of terrorism within America is viewed as one that is to be confronted by ‘the project of rooting out the Evil-doers among us’. This is ‘an enterprise in which the application of due process and substantive justice is subordinated to a kind of secularized casting-out-of-demons from the Beloved Community’.

Who Should Foot the Bill

Should the urban poor be asked to pay their way out of poverty? Should transnational corporations be invited to profit from the plight of the urban poor? I fear that, if we use privatization to solve urban poverty, then we are answering ‘yes’ to these questions. In his impassioned and challenging contribution to this collection, World Bank President James Wolfensohn describes the World Bank’s Cities Without Slums action plan. This plan is in the process of upgrading infrastructures and services in urban slums globally. However, this plan and others like it seek in part to solve urban poverty by using the specific privatization technique of the public– private partnership. By harnessing the power of transnational corporations to solve urban poverty, such partnerships demand that the poor pay private companies for what should be their birthright: a basic social and economic infrastructure. In this response, I’d like to highlight three pieces for special attention: the lectures by Stuart Hall, David Harvey, and James Wolfensohn. Hall and Harvey’s account of the relationship between globalization, privatization, and urban poverty is very different from that offered by Wolfensohn. For Hall and Harvey, globalization impoverishes, while for Wolfensohn it is the key to solving the problem of urban poverty. With minor qualifications I will side with Hall and Harvey and argue that, while Wolfensohn’s position has important merits, it should be modified in significant ways. It seems to me that many of the problems of urban poverty are caused by globalization. The bill for eradicating urban poverty should be handed to the beneficiaries of globalization, not to its victims. I’ll start by fleshing out a recurring theme in all three chapters, the privatization of our cities, before giving some sense of how the privatization of urban infrastructure has come about over the last twenty-five or so years. Then I’ll turn to the lectures by Hall, Harvey, and Wolfensohn. The privatization of urban infrastructures started in the late 1970s in the United Kingdom. It was part of what Stuart Hall in his contribution refers to as ‘the privatization of public goods’.

Introduction

On a quiet corner of the rue des Écoles, a street close to the Sorbonne in the heart of Paris’s Latin Quarter, there stands today a statue of the sixteenth-century humanist, Michel de Montaigne, whose essays were read by Shakespeare and remain a landmark of European literature and thought. The statue is clearly intended to celebrate not only one of France’s great intellectuals, but also Paris itself, for beneath the seated figure of Montaigne are lines which read like a love-letter to the city: I do not want to forget this, that I never rebel so much against France as not to regard Paris with a friendly eye; she has had my heart since my childhood [. . .] I am a Frenchman only by this great city: great in population, great in the felicity of her situation, but above all great and incomparable in the variety and diversity of the good things of life; the glory of France, and one of the noblest ornaments of the world. These lines, taken from Montaigne’s third book of Essays (first published in 1588), acquire a sense of visceral urgency when one reads them in their context. In the 1580s, the long-running conflict between Catholic and Protestant extremists was tearing France apart, and Paris, a focal point of the conflict, was a divided city. This Montaigne makes clear in the sentence which, while it does not appear among the lines inscribed on his statue in the rue des Écoles, directly follows them in the text: ‘May God’, he says, invoking the God worshipped by Catholics and Protestants alike, ‘drive our divisions far from her!’ The passage inscribed on Montaigne’s statue, when it is completed by the sentence just quoted, provides a fitting epigraph to this book. Divided cities are the stage upon which fundamental political concepts—such as those of citizenship, democracy, and human rights—both find their origins and encounter their limits. Cities are some of the noblest ornaments of the human world because they are made and remade by many people of different kinds gathering in one place to organize a collective existence free from arbitrary violence.