Abstract
Drawing on research from Colorado’s Front Range (the Denver/Boulder metropolitan area), this paper examines the validity of the ‘post-political’ hypothesis for explaining contentiousness and non-contentiousness in urban space. Examining major urban redevelopment efforts in Denver and a controversy over homeless people sleeping in public space in Boulder, we suggest that the literature on post-politics too narrowly circumscribes the realm of political action and in so doing loses analytical force and risks misunderstanding the nature of political engagement in the city. By contrast, a less circumscribed, more supple definition of politics allows for a better understanding of how the question of ‘Whose City?’– who the city is for – is always up for grabs. The appearance of post-political consensus, when it occurs, is itself a political achievement, the making of a hegemony, not an explanation.
Introduction
Do we live in a ‘post-political’ age? Are urban development and urban life marked by a post-political condition wherein fundamental questions concerning the inevitability of certain forms of political economy (capitalism) and governance (neoliberalism and its variants) give way before technocratic management of the development process? In other words, is deep dissensus (often called ‘politics proper’) a thing of the past, ruled out of order in a world in which every effort is made to include all stakeholders in planning decisions and in the everyday policing of urban space, as the post-political hypothesis contends? A growing critical urbanliterature suggests that we do live in a post-political age and suffer under a development process shaped by the post-political condition.
Our goal in this paper is to assess – and in fact to contest – this claim. Focusing on three cases from Colorado’s Front Range, we suggest that the announcement of the end, or the surpassing, of ‘politics proper’ and its replacement with ‘post-politics’ may be premature and therefore represents a theoretical error that limits our ability to understand the ways in which power coalesces and is deployed in urban space. On the basis of our analysis, we further suggest that adherence to the post-political thesis might be a strategic political error: by ruling out so much as not politics, the object of political struggle becomes hard to discern, and much that stands in the way of the sort of radical urban change proponents of the post-political thesis hope for is ignored or dismissed from the field of contention.
We begin by examining the post-political hypothesis. A close focus on the meaning and role of contention in urban space opens important questions about how we should understand just what politics is. The next section of the paper addresses these questions – and their implications – as they have been developed with respect to participatory planning. In the third section, we use three examples of politics and planning in the Front Range to evaluate what is left out of – or is made invisible by – post-political analyses. Instead, our analysis shows that dissensus – politics – is everywhere to be found, if not always in forms partisans of the post-political arguments might acknowledge. In the final section, we will argue that there are infirmities with the post-political hypothesis. It declares unimportant a whole range of political engagements that it deems not to be ‘proper politics’. In doing so it closes off the ability to see how and why some forms of consensus are supported, that is developed with the willing consent of (some powerful section of) the people. In other words, what some urban scholars call ‘post-politics’ is better understood as an achieved hegemony. Based on our analysis, we argue that contentious and ‘proper’, though sometimes subtle, politics operate in cities today. Much of it is over whose city the city is, and therefore over the fundamental constitution of the political and social order.
The analysis is based on interviews conducted in Colorado during the summer of 2010. The research on urban redevelopment and struggles in Colorado is part of a larger project examining urban change and the formation of ‘publics’ in the USA and UK. 1 For the analysis presented here, we interviewed residents in redevelopment areas, representatives of developers, planners, activists, homeless people, homeless advocates and shelter operators. 2 For the Boulder portion of the research, we also relied on recorded telecasts of city council meetings and conducted additional interviews for the University of Colorado student-produced film Whose City? (2012). Beyond the interviews, we collected extensive documentation and conducted reviews of Denver and Boulder newspapers to provide context.
What is post-politics?
The post-political hypothesis suggests that we have entered an era in which contention, or dissensus, particularly over fundamental ways of seeing, knowing and understanding the world, has been quieted through a consensus built among ‘stakeholders’, or those already presumed to have a stake in the existing order of things. ‘The post-political frame’, Erik Swyngedouw (2010: 215) argues, ‘is structured around the perceived inevitability of capitalism and a market economy as the basic organizational structure of the social and economic order, for which there is no alternative. The corresponding mode of governmentality is structured around dialogical forms of consensus formation, technocratic management and problem focused governance, sustained by populist discursive regimes’. Such populist regimes shape a politics geared ‘not [toward] replacing elites, but calling on elites to undertake action’ (Swyngedouw, 2010: 223).
The action undertaken is, presumably, action everyone – defined as every stakeholder – agrees on. The production of consensus thus displaces what is termed ‘politics proper’, which is ‘when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part’ (Rancière, 1998: 11, quoted in Swyngedouw, 2009: 607). Politics proper ‘arises when the given order of things is questioned; when those whose voice is only recognized as noise by the police order claim the right to speak’ (Swyngedouw, 2009: 607). In this line of reasoning, rooted in the influential work of Jacques Rancière (1994, 1995, 1998), ‘police order’ has a specific meaning; it is a function of le police, which is not merely the police department, but rather ‘all the activities which create order by distributing places, names, functions’ (Rancière, 1994: 173). 3 Politics proper ‘disrupts the order of being, exposes the constituent antagonisms and voids that constitute the police order and tests the principle of equality’. 4 Politics proper in this view, is the fundamental contestation of the world as it is. Post-politics is (at best) maneuvering within a set of uncontested givens.
Within a world marked by the post-political condition, difference and dissent are already accounted for – or at least managed. Participatory planning models are often pointed to as the epitome of post-political governance. In these processes, big issues – such as whether there should be development or redevelopment at all – are decided in advance and the role for the public and the participatory process is only to shape the design, not the fact, of that development. Consensus building through participation is, in this view, a form of conscription (Fainstein, 2000; MacLeod, 2013: 2211). Allmendinger and Haughton (2012), for example, argue that participatory planning has become the predominant planning paradigm in 2000s England. Despite the name, however, they argue that it has developed into a system that ‘is not so much an empowering arena for debating wide-ranging societal options for future development, as a system focused on carefully stage-managed processes with subtly but clearly defined parameters of what is open for debate… [It is focused] on delivering growth expedited through some carefully choreographed processes for participation which minimize the potential for those with conflicting views to be given a meaningful hearing’ (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2012: 90). 5 In post-political planning, ‘contestation and conflict is supplanted by consensus-based politics in ways that foreclose all but narrow debate and contestation around a neoliberal growth agenda’ (p. 91). In their view, therefore, ‘consensus … is a democratic problem, not the answer to democracy’s problems, since it renders fundamental disagreements near invisible, in arrangements choreographed by experts and managers to render them largely apolitical’ (p. 92). Planning is itself a process of conscription, a means for ‘achieve[ing] both “buy-in” and “lock-in”’ (p. 93). Planning becomes a ‘technique of consensual persuasion’ (MacLeod, 2011: 2648).
The post-political hypothesis (in general) and the argument that participatory planning is essentially post-political (more specifically) are important. The former helps make sense (to take just one example) of the ubiquity of ‘stakeholders’ in political discourse, in participatory planning processes, in global institutions such as the World Urban Forum (Kuymulu, 2014), and even in the discourses of social movements and community-based organisations. As Swyngedouw (2009: 609) notes, the rise of ‘stakeholderism’ (to coin a term) in significant part defines the post-political condition. It rearranges ‘the act of governing [into] a stakeholder-based arrangement of governance in which the traditional state forms (national, regional or local government) partake together with experts, non-governmental organizations and other “responsible” partners’. Stakeholderism thus creates ‘new forms of autocratic governance-beyond-the-state’. In fact, the language of ‘stakeholders’ derives from corporate governance practices (fundamentally as a way of dismissing class conflict on the shop floor or within the markets and environments that corporations operate in). It is a flattening language that assumes that all relevant interests are already accounted for and that they all have an equal say (De Koninck, 2007; Kuymulu, 2011, 2014). And yet it requires that each stakeholder comes to the table already agreeing on fundamental issues; they are not at stake, since they are already settled. In such a world partisanship or dissensus becomes an ill, and those who insist there is an alternative, are relegated to the fringe of acceptable political discourse, if not beyond it. From this perspective, the cultivation of consent among these same stakeholders helps explain the absence of fundamental dissent.
It helps to explain, for example, why the near-universal acceptance of participatory planning seems to lead to so little fundamental change; it seems rarely to slow gentrification, or to block the extension or widening of highways, or to preserve cherished open spaces. As Huxley (2013: 1538) argues ‘“Participation” has become a taken-for-granted aspect of almost all liberal democratic planning systems, and a particularly enduring ideal in planning education and practice’, and yet as she also shows, rarely does such participation rise to the level of citizen control (Huxley, 2013: 1532). Participation is limited and channeled towards pre-determined outcomes.
Yet the post-political hypothesis suffers from an overly limited definition of what counts as politics proper, as well as a failure to understand consent as fundamentally political. In so doing, it undermines its own ability to understand how consensus is won and whose interests it serves. It also fails to examine those political actions that seem to reaffirm the established order, because they do not count as politics proper. But if the process by which consensus is achieved is examined – rather than assumed – it becomes difficult to see how and why some forms of consensus are supported, and in fact are developed with the willing consent of people who might otherwise be expected to dissent. When these shortcomings are addressed, a different view of politics emerges. The current age is not post-political in the sense of politics no longer being present. Rather, we argue: (1) dissensus remains and must be addressed; (2) what gets called ‘post-political’ practice is better understood as an achievement that must be explained; and (3) the achievement of a hegemony (for that is what it is) often garners significant popular support. It is, in short, intensely political. This critique is better exemplified than asserted. Three cases from Colorado’s Front Range provide such an exemplification.
Post-politics on the Front Range?
Homeless people’s struggles in Boulder
Boulder, Colorado, which is about 50 km northwest of Denver, is by all measures a wealthy city. Home to the main campus of the University of Colorado, it is considered something of an outdoor-sports and tourist mecca, and is surrounded by an extensive greenbelt that keeps much suburban development at a distance. With the exception of some resorts in the Rocky Mountains, Boulder has the highest median house prices in Colorado.
It also has the second highest number of homeless people, the second highest rate of homelessness and the highest rate-of-increase of homelessness in the state. A 23 January 2012 point-in-time survey found 1970 homeless individuals in Boulder County (Metro Denver Homeless Initiative, 2012). 6 The count showed an increase of 920 people over the 2009 count, or nearly 90%; over the same period, the rate of homelessness increased to 6.4 per 1000 residents, up from 3.57. 7 While there is an extensive – and growing – shelter system in Boulder, and while agencies there have adopted ‘Housing First’ policies for addressing the needs of the most chronically homeless people, such infrastructure is insufficient to demand and is not keeping up with the rate of the growth of homelessness. In 2010, Boulder shelters had about 100 beds available each night for the general homeless population, once transitional and other longer-term options were accounted for. Any woman who applied for shelter was given it, leaving about 75 beds for homeless men. Shelters were turning away about 40 to 50 men a night, and some unknown number of others simply did not try to gain access to the lottery by which beds to men were allocated (Eckstein interview, 27 July 2010).
Many homeless people – mostly men – had no choice, therefore, but to sleep on benches near the library and city administration buildings or near the county courthouses (which is on the pedestrianised Pearl Street mall, the tourist centre of the city), or among the brush and clearings that edge Boulder Creek. The creek runs through the heart of the city and the path that borders it is an attraction for walkers, runners and bicyclists. Some homeless people (and their advocates) see sleeping rough to be almost a right in absence of other options. City officials, boosters and some residents and merchants, however, see the presence of homeless people along the Creek Path or in other public spaces as a nuisance. The law is on their side.
Two longstanding Boulder ordinances criminalise sleeping in public. The city’s anti-camping ordinance made it illegal to sleep under any sort of cover (such as a tent, blanket or sleeping bag, but also a bridge, or at a police officer’s discretion, a tree or bush canopy) between one hour after sunset and one hour before sunrise, unless a permit had been received from a city manager. 8 A companion ordinance made it illegal to sleep in vehicles on city streets. Violators of either law were ticketed or sometimes charged with misdemeanors; sentencing often entailed community service, sometimes jail time. The law was vigorously, if inconsistently enforced. Between 2006 and 2009, Boulder police issued 1651 citations for violating the anti-camping ordinance to 876 separate individuals (so approximately one-third of counted homeless individuals each year). Of these 876 individuals, 452 were also cited at the same time for some other quality of life offence. The issuance of citations is entirely at the discretion of police officers, and according to the city attorney, is usually prompted by a complaint from a business or property owner. For this reason, according to the city attorney, the anti-camping ordinance was not ‘an issue of homelessness; it’s an issue of regulating the behaviors that are causing us to get complaints from business and community members …’ (Testimony, City Council Hearing, 2 February 2010; Meltzer, 2010a).
A new organisation called HOME (Homeless Moratorium Effort, later renamed Homeless Organizing for More Equality), which was homeless-developed and homeless-led, spent much of the autumn, 2009, organising. HOME understood sleeping outside, with shelter, not only to be necessary, but a right and a confirmation of belonging (Testimony of Michael Fitzgerald, 2 February 2010). And the anti-camping ordinances were not only unjust; they were uneconomical. As one person who worked closely with the homeless in helping to organise HOME said, ‘jail costs way more than shelter, and shelter costs more than permanent supportive housing … [and] it became clear we were choosing a punitive option and choosing the most expensive option as well’ (interview 27 July 2010). HOME’s goal was to get the anti-camping (and anti-car sleeping) ordinance repealed.
In January 2010, HOME more-or-less ambushed city council. Appearing in their dozens, homeless residents used the open comment period of a regularly scheduled council meeting to make their voices heard and to ‘interrupt the natural order of domination’. They claimed ‘the right to speak’ and refused to be considered ‘noise by the police order’. Through personal testimonies as well as evidence demonstrating the futility (and expense) of the law, and through clear enunciations of the processes that had led them to become homeless and the means by which they strung together a strategy for survival, HOME impressed upon the councilors the unjustness of the law and questioned the fundamental political-economic order that made such laws seem a logical response to the presence of homeless people in public space (City Council Hearing, 19 January 2010).
Video of the council meeting makes it plain that many council members were quite shocked by what they learned from homeless residents about their lives, the rules of the shelter system and the effects of the anti-camping ordinances. They learned, for instance, that a city-sponsored programme to provide blankets to homeless people actually put those people at risk of citation or arrest. The council thus ordered a moratorium on the enforcement of the anti-camping laws and asked city staff to research the issue and provide alternatives. At a city council meeting two weeks later, however, staff recommended reactivating enforcement of the law. They argued it was an effective deterrent to unwanted behaviours. They also recommended that the city continue to work with volunteer shelter providers to address problems of homelessness and that the council support the ongoing process of writing a ten-year plan to end homelessness, which then was only in its formative stages, and the drafting of which included no participation by homeless people (Meltzer, 2010a). Council agreed that changes to the law should not be made until the ten-year plan was completed and there had been a chance to see how it ‘works’ (Urie, 2010e). If the councilors had been shocked two weeks earlier, they now seemed to have regained some composure. Indeed, they had more quickly come to their senses than that: three days after the original council meeting, they held a special closed-door council meeting to reconsider their directive to staff to implement a moratorium. Boulder’s mayor said this special meeting was necessary because the council had been ‘boxed in’ by the homeless men and women testifying at the hearing. Staff were now directed to not implement the moratorium. After all, as Councilman Ken Wilson later argued, ‘if the city lifts its restrictions on camping, tourists could camp out to avoid paying for hotel rooms. He said many people want to live in Boulder but cannot afford to, so they live elsewhere’ (Meltzer, 2010a).
These manoeuvers were ‘a slap in the face’ according to HOME organiser and homeless Boulder resident Michael Fitzgerald (Whose City, 2012). Yet unwilling to accept defeat, HOME and its supporters resorted to more direct action, including staging protests in front of the city’s administrative offices. Speakers at the protest averred that the main goal of the city was simply to make its visible homeless population ‘go away’ (Whose City, 2012). Simultaneously, three homeless men challenged tickets they received in court, claiming their issuance represented a form of cruel and unusual punishment. The judge quickly ruled against the cruel and unusual punishment challenge, leaving the men to fight their case on the basis of evidence as to whether they broke the law to avoid injury or death; the judge ruled they did not, even though temperatures dropped to −12°C on the day one was cited for sleeping in a sleeping bag (Snider, 2010; Urie 2010c, 2010d, 2010e). 9 The city council responded to the protests and court cases by expanding and strengthening the law and by eliminating a provision that had allowed the city manager the discretion to issue camping permits (Urie, 2010a, 2010b). In response to these developments, HOME staged a sleep-in in front of the public library on 15–17 May 2010. Among other things, the sleep-in highlighted the fact that the winter shelters had closed for the summer (leaving only 60 ‘legal beds’) while sleeping outside with protection of any sort remained illegal (Meltzer, 2010c; Whose City?, 2012).
As 2010 wound down and as the city council remained unmoved by either the protests or an ACLU suit seeking to have the anti-camping ordinance declared unconstitutional (Snider, 2010), HOME activists together with pro bono attorney David Harrison and a team of University of Colorado (CU) law students sought to take all anti-camping tickets to a jury trial. ‘We’re hoping maybe the municipal court gets tired of all its jury-trial days being camping cases’, Harrison said (Urie, 2010f). By late December they had won one acquittal and seen nine cases dismissed, with 11 more trials scheduled; by mid-April 2011, more than 30 cases were pending. The goal, according to a local homeless woman, Terri Sternberg, was to ‘make them look at whether this is really necessary’, especially given the costs to taxpayers of prosecuting each case (about US$1100). In addition, CU law clinic students and HOME activists saw the jury selection process as a key moment for political education. Advocates urged members of the public to attend the trials: ‘it might change their perspectives’, said one. After convicting William Olive for breaking the anti-camping ordinance, several members of the jury stayed around to talk with the defendant and his legal aid team, telling the defendant that convicting him was difficult. They did not like the law, but felt they had to follow it. ‘Olive, for his part, wasn’t angry or distraught over the loss of his case. But he was mindful of the movement that he’s become part of. “The more people who learn about it, the more you would want to get it off (the books), or change it,” he said’ (Urie, 2011a).
In February 2012, the city council changed the municipal code covering the anti-camping ordinance (as well as other public offences), lowering the maximum fine from US$1000 to US$500. This was no act of compassion. Lowering the maximum fine to US$500 eliminated the right to a trial by jury (Urie, 2012).
‘Politics proper’, even under Rancière’s restrictive definition, seems pretty easy to see in this case: dissensus is surfaced and the ‘visible order’ is continually disturbed; excluded voices have broken into the open and raised fundamental questions about the police order. Similar political action is common in the USA, for example in the work of Picture the Homeless (and other Right to the City Alliance members) in New York City, metropolitan Washington and elsewhere (Liss, 2011; Mayer, 2011), in homeless activists in St. Petersburg, Florida, seeking to develop and maintain an autonomous ‘tent city’ (Mitchell, 2013), or in any of the political occupations of parks, plazas, university buildings or abandoned spaces around the world.
But there is another important point. For homeless people in Boulder, the venue of activism shifted over time, from the city council chambers to public spaces to the courtroom. The adversarial nature of court proceedings, particularly jury trials, required dissensus, and thus opened up a space for politics. For some (cf. Allmendinger and Houghton, 2012: 98), the resort to courts and judicial review in relation to planning (and, we would add, law-making), is a partial confirmation that the planning (and law-making) process is post-political. Recall how the Boulder City Council held a special closed-door meeting because they had been ‘boxed in’ by the political demands of their constituents. The very venue of formal politics seemed to be closed to homeless people in Boulder. Yet, as they demonstrated, the political could be forced into new arenas. As even the most ardent adepts of the post-political hypothesis acknowledge, politics ‘can arise anywhere and everywhere’ (Swyngedouw, 2009: 607), even the controlled space of the courtroom, forcing those who wish to create a post-political settlement into extreme action, such as cancelling the right to a jury trial for those accused of public order crimes, or moving planning back behind closed doors (cf. MacLeod, 2013: 2213). To put this another way, the struggle in Boulder shows that we are always in the midst of ongoing and partial attempts to construct a post-political world in which it seems dissensus is impossible, but these attempts are necessarily fragmented – reactionary in the basic sense of the term. So, therefore, is opposition to such attempts often fragmentary.
La Alma/Lincoln Park, Santa Fe, and the South Lincoln Park Homes
La Alma/Lincoln Park is a neighbourhood just southwest of downtown Denver and contiguous with what has subsequently been called the Santa Fe Arts District and the Denver Design District. The South Lincoln Park public housing project of 270 units – at the heart of La Alma/Lincoln Park – is being remade as a mixed-income New Urbanist development called Mariposa, now branded as a ‘creative community with Latino Flair’ (Portell Works, 2010). No subsidised housing units will be lost; indeed they will be supplemented by 100 units of subsidised senior housing. Subsidised units will, however, be dispersed across the wider Santa Fe neighbourhood, a neighbourhood where ‘the term “gentrification” is appropriate’ and of ‘great concern’, according to a local artist-activist (Griggs interview, 29 June 2010). Within the South Lincoln Park redevelopment itself, more than half the housing will be sold at market rate (up to US$380,000 for a three-bedroom town house), with the goal of attracting ‘Metro Renters’ (students and other young renters), members of the ‘Industrial Urban Fringe’ (working class, mostly Latino, and from the nearby neighbourhoods), and ‘Metropolitans’ (singles and couples in their 30s, attracted from downtown) (Portell Works, 2010). For some in the neighbourhood, the South Lincoln Park redevelopment process represents a victory for good planning. The public planning process was intense and designed to be inclusive. Much written material concerning the project was prepared in four languages (Mai-Mai for Somali residents, Vietnamese, Spanish and English), and planners went door to door with translators to encourage residents to attend community meetings and planning charettes (Crangle interview, 3 August 2010).
David Griggs, the artist-activist quoted above, for example, thinks the planning process was ‘a really good example of a lot of interests – which maybe are not competing but parallel or just missing each other – have come together to recognize this great opportunity to redevelop South Lincoln and to do more with the redevelopment because of the need to improve South Lincoln housing’. South Lincoln’s redevelopment represents, perhaps, a better option than what happened in the adjoining Santa Fe Arts District. The Communications Director of the Arts District explained to us what happened there:
And it’s very interesting, because this was a very Hispanic area. Then the Metropolitan, Auraria [university] campus came in and displaced a lot of that.
10
That was really a bone of contention with them. And then, of course, here, the Art District comes. But see, a lot of these buildings that we have taken over were closed. This was a really non-happening area when we took over these warehouses and started making them really cool … The developers come in and try to buy up the property and make expensive condos and all of that kind of thing. That started happening, and they started tearing down these little houses, and we were all up in arms about that. Then the economy went down, so all these places … it’s abandoned.
One of us commented. ‘The economy put a stop to possible –’.
Yeah, [the crisis] put a major stop to it. And there’s still some places here, so we’re hoping to maybe put together a land trust or something to buy these up to keep them in arts, to keep these developers from developing. (Weaver interview, 23 June 2010)
Because of the economic crisis, she told us ‘this is the time to do it, if we can do it, get some financing, some funding put together to maybe put a hold on some of these spaces that are for sale’. For some in the area, then, the solution to market-based gentrification and a market-based slump is itself market-based: the creation of a land-bank. It is seen as a way to keep developers out and for preserving space for artists, the very people who were now making the area ‘really cool’. It was also a way of keeping the neighbourhood inclusive. That the poor and working class ought to be included in redeveloped space was a given for our interviewees; inclusiveness was a value to be promoted. Participatory planning was also highly valued.
The constitution of the political-economic order, however, did not seem to be questioned. The question instead, was given that order, how can space be preserved for the poor and working class? In some ways, this is a technical question to which land-banking and participatory planning was seen as a viable technical answer. Yet to the degree there has been effective participation, this must also be seen as a political victory. The production of planning materials in multiple languages and the involvement of translators in planners’ outreach have a history. Residents in the South Lincoln Park homes have been fighting for years to assure all communications from the Denver Housing Authority are translated into all relevant languages. As one resident said: ‘We had a flyer that came out when they stopped giving us zero rent [that is when rent formulas changed so all residents had to pay some baseline amount]. It had eleven different languages on it’. But for other communications, DHA claimed ‘it takes too much money’ to provide full translations. The resident averred: ‘But they pay their rent. Why can’t they get it in their language? That’s what I’m saying. It’s not fair. They live here, they pay their rent. When they want us to pay rent they put it in eleven languages. Every time now, they only put it in two languages’ (interview, 15 September 2010).
There is a deeply political argument here about the natural order of things. It is an argument about how and when ‘economics’ can be a tool to limit involvement. It is also an example of activists and residents working, if not always especially visibly, to challenge that order. Significantly, such disruption is framed through the order, not just against it, and in ways that include persuasion, not just outright contestation. Even as the Housing Authority and planners seek the full incorporation of residents, the partiality of the attempt opens up dissensus, or a questioning of the basis upon which incorporation is enacted.
Over time, residents have organised to cement their role in the operation of the housing project and the redevelopment project. When the plans for South Lincoln’s redevelopment were first mooted, there was no plan to guarantee rehousing in Mariposa for those displaced. Organised residents won the right to remain on-site during redevelopment if space permitted, or to be provided a right of first return if it did not. Residents also won the right to have their local elected residents’ council vet new and returning residents, in order to exclude those ‘who’s had too many calls, too many complaints’ or are involved in ‘drug activity. … That resident wouldn’t be allowed to come back’ (interview, 15 September 2010). Residents fundamentally reframed both how the Housing Authority understood the process of redevelopment, the meaning and logic of displacement, as well as the distribution of at least some of the power to affect those exclusions. They were able to do this without necessarily engaging in direct protest, rent strikes, but this does not mean the actions are not political. It makes them strategically different.
Residents in South Lincoln (as well as activists in the broader La Alma/Lincoln Park and Santa Fe area) take much for granted. The language of entrepreneurialism and the naturalness of neighbourhood change, for example, as well as the basic acceptance of economic and class difference in the landscape, is rife. So is the notion that homeowners have a different kind of (and maybe superior) interest in neighbourhoods than do renters or the homeless; so are notions of individual empowerment. But these assumptions are underpinned by a fundamental and quite profoundly different sense of what community is than might be found in the talk of ‘superficial’ incorporation that marks the post-political critique. Activist residents in South Lincoln Park homes are not naïve to the relations of power that govern their lives; they are instead strategically oppositional to and strategically cooperative with institutions like the DHA. Their consent must be won. Asserting the right to be heard – even through participatory channels – is disruptive to what might have been.
This sheds a particular light on the comments of one of the planners involved in turning South Lincoln Park into Mariposa. ‘Gentrification is going to happen’ in the neighbourhood, this planner told us (Crangle interview, 3 August 2010). ‘It is already happening. The terminology isn’t “mitigated”; it’s having “managed gentrification”. For us, it’s, how do we keep the residents that are there now comfortable through the change and following the change, and how do we allow a place for their kids that are growing up there now to make a choice to live in this neighborhood so that they can afford it, they’re welcome, they feel culturally comfortable. That is how you manage gentrification’. Managing gentrification is not simply a matter of reducing displacement; it is also a matter of anticipating contention and thus making accommodations. Those who already inhabit the neighbourhood have demanded not just the right to be heard, but to actually shape the project, and especially to retain their space in it. The consent of residents could not be assumed; it had to be cultivated and won. Planners engaged on-the-ground in the La Alma/Lincoln Park redevelopment have understood this (Crangle interview, 3 August 2010).
Similarly, the idea to create a land trust as a means to forestall gentrification now takes on a different light. It can be understood as an attempt to implement a form of commons within a struggled-over neighbourhood. Commons are a form of property and social relations that are not disconnected from property functioning as exchange value (the hegemonic form of property), but nonetheless operate on different principles. Like South Lincoln residents’ engagement with the planning process, it is less helpful to see this as post-political, and more helpful to see it as political right from the start. When viewed this way, then the attempt can be assessed – critically if need be – as a strategy and not merely dismissed. Perhaps it is an incomplete and not fully theorised attempt to create the sort of common world many progressive theorists pin their hopes on. Indeed, in a recent polemic, Andy Merrifield (2013) has argued that community land trusts might make a good prophylactic against the damage wrought by post-political planners working in cahoots with those he calls capitalist ‘parasites’– the people and institutions that control the property market. Land trusts might just ‘reinvigorate a fresh notion of the public realm’, as he puts it.
Stapleton
Redevelopment was in full swing at Stapleton, Denver’s former airport when the 2008 economic crisis hit. A planned redevelopment of 1900 ha, Stapleton is one of the largest planning efforts in the USA. Designed largely along New Urbanist principles, Stapleton’s first residents arrived in 2002; as of 2013, there were more than 17,000 residents. At build-out, Stapleton is expected to host a population of more than 30,000 in 12,000 single-family homes and 4000 apartments. One result of the economic crisis was a significant slowing in the rate of construction of rental properties and below-market rate single-family homes. Despite a legally binding agreement between the City of Denver and Forest City Stapleton (the primary developer) for the latter to build affordable housing, there were only 226 units of affordable housing available in June 2010, dispersed throughout condominium buildings and occasionally as part of mixed-use commercial areas. The problem, according to a Forest City representative, was that ‘we can’t get financing for them’. One result, according to this official, is that Stapleton is now racially and economically less diverse than when it first opened in 2002 (Gleason interview, 25 June 2010). Decreasing diversity is, in this instance, a function of the market.
The president of Stapleton United Neighbors (SUN), Steve Lawrence, was thus worried that Stapleton was ‘develop[ing] – some because of economics – into a yuppie or walled neighborhood that just doesn’t have walls or gates’. He added: ‘The whole affordable housing goal here has been missed by two-thirds’. There was a gulf between ‘the dream of the neighborhood and what it is becoming’. Like activists in Santa Fe and La Alma/Lincoln Park, therefore, SUN was proposing a land trust for affordable housing within Stapleton’s various neighbourhoods so that when there was ‘a financing market to build it’, Stapleton would ‘not end up with a segregated community of affordable units at the far northeast corner’, rather than the mixed neighbourhoods outlined in the development plan. Lawrence thought it was important for SUN to advocate for an integrated community: ‘Let’s stay with the plan that this is a well-integrated community where everybody gets to live and play’. Banking land for future affordable development was the means to this end, even as Lawrence agreed that affordable housing often gets built last (interview, 15 June 2010).
Affordable housing was not supposed to be built last. From the moment the closure of Stapleton Airport was announced in the 1980s, the City of Denver engaged in an intense planning process. Though professionally led and dominated, planning efforts were designed to assure popular ‘buy in’ (Palmberg, 2005: 39). The result was the creation of a ‘Green Book’– essentially a binding master plan – that laid out the overall vision of Stapleton, including sustainability and affordable housing requirements. The development of affordable housing was required to be holistically integrated into the overall development. But this has not been accomplished, as ‘the market’ has come to trump such mandates. SUN’s proposed solution to this condition– a land trust – could be interpreted as, in essence, a market-based (rather than political) solution to a market-based problem.
SUN’s advocacy and the whole planning process could be interpreted as post-political in the sense laid out by proponents of the hypothesis. From the beginning planners sought to incorporate the interests of the poor and working class. Participatory planning was an imperative, even as the boundaries of the political-economic structures governing development were not up for debate. How to include the poor – who as stakeholders are part of the established order – appeared to be a technical question demanding a technical answer.
When conflict arises in Stapleton, it too seems to be accounted for and to be treated as a fairly narrow technical problem. Recognising that cultural clashes of some sort might be inevitable in a project that seeks to mix classes, SUN is seeking to implement a mediation service to adjudicate disputes (such as between a resident repairing a car in a garage or driveway and neighbours who think that is culturally unacceptable) ‘before somebody calls … the city inspector’ (Lawrence interview, 15 June 2010). The goal is to resolve conflicting differences through consensus formation, though without necessarily addressing the reasons for conflict, such as a working people’s need to do their own car repairs. The assumption is that contention or antagonism is a function of misunderstanding or misaligned goals rather than a fundamental antagonism.
But such a conclusion about Stapleton being a post-political landscape is too hasty, even as Stapleton seems the most non-contentious of non-contentious spaces: a yuppie community without walls and gates, as Lawrence put it. Yet it is political there too, if not always in ways progressive scholars like to recognise as political. Stapleton is, according the SUN president, ‘the ultimate wired community … [and] we have a block captain and email tree to die for. If someone “out of place” is seen on the street, word gets out fast’. A presumably homeless person selling a street paper in front of the main square of shops might be tolerated, but ‘if somebody rings your bell at nine at night selling magazines, chances are they won’t get through a whole block before somebody calls the police and says … there’s some fella ringing doorbells, is it okay? Check it out’. This ‘is probably a disincentive to those groups if they only make it a block before the police come up and say, “Hi, just wanted to make sure you have you license to do this”’ (Lawrence interview, 15 June 2010).
If we define politics as only that which seeks to upend the dominant order, then we miss at least half the game: upholding or maintaining the dominant order is politics too. Stapleton residents, many of them anyway, cultivate close relationships with the police. SUN worked hard to establish a COP (Community Oriented Police) Shop in a storefront in the main shopping area, where residents ‘can do counter reports [i.e. report crimes or problems with neighbours], register your bicycle …’. It is a ‘full-service’ shop for ‘non-peace officer things’ where also ‘the local cops come in there and have coffee, so there’s a presence in the community, a welcoming thing’ (Lawrence interview, 15 June 2010). Residents cultivate a relationship with the police and with each other, as a means of instilling and upholding ‘common interests’ as Lawrence puts it – or as Rancière puts it, the police order. If this is not ‘politics proper’ then it is hard to know what is. It may not look like contentious, antagonistic politics at work in Stapleton, but there is no doubt that the implementation of a police order there is a political project, which the term ‘politics proper’ obscures.
Conclusion: Whose city?
Certainly the dialogue between revolutionaries and gradualists must continue and only those too complacent or too selfish to consider the plight of those less privileged than themselves can constitute the common enemy. … For the rest of us, the argument is not about aims but about the speed and methods of change. … Certainly we are moving into a future with greater potential for conflict, and the need for political organization seems evident. ‘Whose city?’ will depend on ‘Whose power?’
In the nearly 45 years since Ray Pahl so forcefully raised it, the question of ‘Whose city?’ has only grown more important. These years have shown that ‘Whose city?’ is not only a question of ‘Whose power?’, it is also a question of ‘What politics?’. Is the city governed by post-politics – by what Andy Merrifield (2013) in his recent appreciation of Pahl’s work called ‘non-accountable “post-political” middle managers, whose machinations are about as clear as mud’?
We have suggested that the answer is no, though not resoundingly so. To the degree that post-political middle-managers or elites own or govern the city post-politically, that is a political achievement, 11 a victory over never-ending battles, skirmishes and negotiations. Or, in other words, what scholars have lately been calling the post-political was much better labelled by Gramsci as hegemony. To call the city post-political is to risk ignoring how the police order is constructed and maintained, against all that would breach or reshape it. It is to ignore, for example, how participatory planning is used strategically to garner consent, to head off contention.
It is also to forsake a class analysis by homogenising all those in the city and not admitting how the police order might be supported by many ordinary people politically through their activism. To ignore this aspect of the political process is to ignore many of the ways in which contention does not arise in spaces where one might expect it, such as rapidly gentrifying neighbourhoods. Conversely, as Asef Bayat (2010) has argued, the experiences of daily life among the urban poor often creates a sense of identity and common knowledge that may be hidden from the gaze of ‘big politics’, but nonetheless provides the basis for mobilisations that fundamentally challenge the natural order. Overlooking the potential of what Bayat calls ‘nonmovements’ limits our ability to understand the ways that putatively spontaneous acts – such as those in Tunisia in 2010, Turkey and Brazil in 2013, as well as among homeless people in Boulder – are grounded in small acts of daily life and in what Lefebvre (1991) called ‘counterspaces’.
Politically, to dismiss moments that appear post-political is a strategic blunder. It is to equate politics that we do not appreciate for an absence of politics. Under such circumstances, progressive scholars will do little more than – to quote the conservative geographer Carl Sauer (1925) writing in a different but no less political context –‘bag their own decoys’. We will have no chance of answering Pahl’s dual questions of whose power and whose city if we overlook what politics are being waged or if we refuse to recognise politics in decisions to work within structural constraints. We will miss just what homeless people and activists in Boulder, public housing residents and anti-gentrification activists in La Alma/Lincoln Park, and maybe especially homeowners and developers in Stapleton are tilting their politics at, and why they are doing it that way. We will lose any opportunity to critically engage the content of their politics, thereby ironically enough becoming those who Pahl (1970: 257) called ‘too complacent or too selfish to consider the plight of those less fortunate than themselves’.
Footnotes
Funding
The research was supported by National Science Foundation grant ‘Collaborative Research: Public Life and Democracy in the United States and United Kingdom’ (BCS-0852442 and BCS-0852455).