On Marx’s human significance,Harvey’s right to the city,and Nussbaum’s capability approach

Abstract

In this article, I juxtapose David Harvey’s idea of the ‘right to the city’ and Martha Nussbaum’s central human capability of ‘control over one’s environment’, and I approach them from the perspective of their mutual convergence on Marx’s conception of human significance. In particular, I compare how Marx’s conception reverberates in Harvey’s right to the city as human right and in Nussbaum’s control over the environment as central human capability. I discuss how the language of capabilities through which the latter scholar articulates her political liberalism offers ‘important supplementations’ to the language of human rights through which the former scholar articulates his critical discourse. I conclude that the evaluative character of Nussbaum’s capability approach could advance a novel stream in planning theory centred on human development. To elaborate on such potential, I propose the notion of people’s ‘urban functionings’, and I discuss how this notion could provide new interpretative lenses through which to renew the idea of ‘right to the city’.

Keywords

human capabilities human significance Marx the right to the city urban functionings

Introduction

In order to excavate some essential differences between (neo)Marxist interpretations of contemporary socio-urban phenomena and emerging liberal approaches to the ‘situated dimension’ of human development, a good starting point is unveiling their points of convergence. In this article, I juxtapose David Harvey’s (2008) idea of the ‘right to the city’ and Martha Nussbaum’s (2003) central human capability (CHC) of ‘control over the environment’ as examples of these two, different, traditions, and I approach them from the perspective of their mutual convergence on Marx’s conception of human significance.

Exposed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844a), Marx’s conception of human significance as ‘constant dialogue with nature’, and as one’s transformative relation with it, is the terrain upon which the philosopher erected his vision of communism (1848) and grounded the analysis of capital (1867). Throughout history, this conception has constituted a meaningful moment of encounter along the course of development of worldviews and theories that, after having lingered on this Marxian tenet, have followed the most diverse directions. Harvey’s (2003, 2007, 2008, 2012) critical urban theory and Nussbaum’s (1997, 2002, 2003, 2011) political liberalism are examples of the variety of declinations that the reading of these Marxian tenets continues to find in the social sciences and the humanities.

The prominent critical geographer and the renowned liberal philosopher may seem a strange juxtaposition in planning theory. However, the comparison of some elements of their positions offers two opportunities. The first is to unveil the common philosophical underpinning of positions matured in the context of philosophical traditions generally regarded as irreconcilable. The second is the opportunity of retracing how such common underpinning, here constituted by Marx’s conception of human significance, developed into Harvey’s idea of the ‘right to the city’ as human right and into Nussbaum’s conception of one’s ‘control over the environment’ as central human capability (CHC). As we shall see, the languages that articulate these positions – the language of human rights, and the language of human capabilities – are, albeit ‘closely allied’ (Nussbaum, 2003), conducive to different evaluative perspectives on the relation between cities and their inhabitants. The former language is more and more prominent in planning theory (Davy, 2014); the latter has been discussed only sporadically (Basta, 2015a). Similarly, Harvey’s scholarship has been very influential in geography and urban studies, while Nussbaum’s philosophy is nearly unrepresented in the respective literature.

The reinterpretation of Marx’s positions in relation to contemporary urban phenomena constitutes an established theoretical stream in geography and urban studies (Marcuse, 2009; Marcuse and Imbroscio, 2014; Mitchell, 2003; Purcell, 2002, 2003). In Harvey (2007, 2008), Marx’s legacy underlies the interpretation of the social structure as inherently class-based, and of the dynamics of ‘production’ of the city as dynamics of capital accumulation and surplus absorption. Harvey’s critical discourse on the city poses the accent, consequently, on the collective agency of the social groups at the bottom of the social structure, and on ‘revolutionizing’ the dynamics of exclusion of urban populations from the capitalistic dynamics of production of urban spaces.

In Nussbaum (2002, 2003), the reference to Marx is limited to the philosopher’s conception of the ‘truly human functionings’ which give distinct significance to one’s existence in comparison to that of other beings. Her interests, therefore, lie in one’s condition of ‘incapability’ of functioning as a human being, and in the lack of human dignity that characterizes it. Her following inquiry investigates the political principles of coexistence which could secure the capabilities of people to live a life with equal dignity in a world of diversity (Nussbaum, 2011, 2013).

Albeit simplistically, it could be argued that what Harvey and Nussbaum have in common – and Marxist scholars and egalitarian liberals in general – is the emphasis on the idea of equality, and the consideration of (some form of) equality as a pre-condition of justice. Albeit what such equality should consist of remains a matter of dispute in the two respective traditions (Gosepath, 2007; Wei, 2008; Wolff, 2010), the inquiry on the rights (whether negative, positive, substantive or formal) which ought to secure a form of equality in society encompasses them. Both traditions endorse a conception of human beings as ends rather than as means for others’ ends, and aim at advancing societies able to prevent the indiscriminate concentration of power in the hands of few; the oppressed, poor and disadvantaged are therefore at the heart of both traditions.

This brings us back to the reverberation, in both Harvey’s and Nussbaum’s positions, of Marx’s conception of human significance. Such conception is presented in the first section of the article. The second section examines the line of continuity between it and Harvey’s idea of the right to the city. Here, Lefebvre’s original articulation is shortly recalled. The third section introduces Nussbaum’s capability approach (CA) and its mutual relation with Marx’s human significance. Here, I emphasize the different contextualization of such conception in her theory in comparison with Harvey’s one. In particular, I compare Harvey’s ‘right to the city’ as human right and Nussbaum’s ‘control over the environment’ as CHC, and I discuss how the language of capabilities offers ‘important supplementations’ (Nussbaum, 2003) to the language of human rights through which Harvey articulates his critical discourse. These supplementations consist, principally, of Nussbaum’s emphasis on ‘what people can concretely do and be’ in their living environment, rather than on the rights that people have, and of the overcoming of a class-based interpretation of society in favour of the diversity – of culture, gender, values and aspirations – that characterizes its members. The section continues with elaborating on how the evaluative character of Nussbaum’s CA could advance a novel stream in planning theory centred on human development.¹ To elaborate on such potential, I propose the notion of people’s ‘urban functionings’, and I discuss how this notion could provide new interpretative lenses through which to renew an idea of ‘right to the city’.

To start with, I introduce Marx’s most profound and influential intuition.

Marx’s intuition: human significance as transformative dialogue with nature

In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,² Marx (1844a) exposed the intuition that ‘man’ shall continue the transformative dialogue with the self and with nature without which, as individual and as species, ‘he is to die’ (p. 22).³ Marx’s philosophy is centred on this ‘dialogue’ as ‘transformation’; it is the estrangement from it, caused by the deprivation of the means to transform matter, and from transformed matter itself, to alienate man from (his) nature.

This idea of nature and of the dialogic relation that man shall maintain with it is the foundation of Marx’s entire philosophical edifice. Nature, for Marx (1844), is ‘man’s inorganic body’ (p. 22); it is anything which is not body. It is, in other words, matter – matter with which man’s body is in total continuity though, and on which the survival of his spirit depends. Labour, in the capitalist era, disrupts such continuity: by reducing the worker to a means for capital accumulation, capitalism separates man from his transformative – and, I would add, re-generative – relation with nature. The worker whose labour transforms matter through means he doesn’t own, at the sole end of accumulating others’ capital, is the dynamic of estrangement which condemns him to regress to an animal condition – to a material body utterly deprived of its spirit.

While Marx (1844a) acknowledges that man is also animal, he clarifies the difference between animals and humans by introducing his famous conception of human significance:⁴

it is true that eating, drinking, procreating etcetera are also human functions. However, when abstracted from other aspects of human activity, and turned into final and exclusive ends, they are animal. […] An enforced rise in wage […] would therefore be nothing more than better pay for slaves and would not mean an increase in human significance or dignity for either the worker or the labour. (p. 22; emphasis added)

Marx’s revolutionary worldview is centred on this intuition of the disruption of man’s vital transformative relation with nature through his reduction to a means of capital accumulation; an enterprise made possible by the concentration of the means of production – that is, of transformation – in the hands of few. This disruption, and the consequent separation of man from the inherent significance of his existence, has been at the root of slavery, and of the class-phenomena that perpetuate it, throughout history. To realize an historical era of human significance, in which the transformative relation with nature could return to be purposeful and un-alienating, man should therefore revolutionize the course of history. Such historical revolution can be achieved only through the exercise of collective agency; through a collective struggle, in other words, aimed at ‘reversing’ the societal structure up to re-conquer the common ownership of the means for transforming, ultimately, the matter and time in which man lives.⁵

The route that from this foundational Marxian position leads to Harvey’s ‘right to the city’ is retraced in the following section.

Cities and the new language of rights: Harvey’s ‘right to the city’

In order to discuss Harvey’s idea of the right to the city in light of Marx’s conception of human significance, here below I report its core statement as compared on The New Left Review in 2008:

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. (Harvey, 2008; emphasis added)

The term ‘transformation’ is central in this statement, and recalls Marx’s conception of human significance openly (and, arguably, intentionally). As well known, however, the infiltration of this Marxian tenet in Harvey’s ‘right to the city’ passed also through Lefebvre. In the late 1960s of the past century, the French philosopher proposed a radical interpretation of cities as, simultaneously, the realm and object of social revolution in the 20th century (Lefebvre, 1968 [1996]). Harvey’s articulation of the idea of the right to the city seems to merge, therefore, two worldviews: namely, Marx’s conception of the transformative dialogue that man must maintain with nature (thus, with the nature transformed to create cities), and Lefebvre’s interpretation of the ‘urban dimension’ of the human condition as the new cause of alienation of the masses. Harvey (2008) connects these two positions by signifying the idea of urban transformation as an act of self-transformation: in his words, the right to the city is the right ‘to change ourselves by changing the city’.

In both Lefebvre and Harvey, Marx’s analytical continuity between nature, matter and the capitalistic transformations that lead to ‘produce’ cities is clearly retraceable. The same continuity underlies their interpretation of cities as, simultaneously, the realm in which and the means through which the alienation of the 20th century takes form. In Lefebvre, in particular, the emphasis is on the growing misery of citadins confined within ‘produced spaces’ governed by ‘production times’: spaces and times, on my interpretation, in which human beings are progressively alienated not only from the city - but also from each other. An alienation so profound and divisive that only a collective action of transformation of the self, and of its ability to unite with others, can lead to re-conquer an idea of commune and to re-appropriate the city.

Not surprisingly, the concept of ‘transformation’ – both in its symbolic and concrete meaning – and the emphasis on collective agency recur in the following literature on the right to the city, and in Harvey’s writings specially. However, in Harvey, the notion of ‘right’ is more precisely qualified. The right to the city is ‘our most neglected human right’ (Harvey, 2008); additionally, such human right is a collective right. This invites to reflect on Harvey’s position from the perspective of what Nussbaum (2002) calls ‘the language of rights’ (p. 128). This is what I will do in the two following subsections. Keeping the centrality of the Marxian idea of ‘transformation’ on the background of my reasoning, I will explore two questions: Can the right to the city be qualified as human right? Can it be further qualified as collective right?

Is the right to the city a human right?

In a recent account, Attoh (2011) argued how the paradox of the literature on the right to the city is that, in it, ‘there has been little talks about rights themselves’ (p. 669). His question ‘What kind of right, we must ask, is the right to the city?’ is well considered, and it is starting from it that I intend to reflect on what grounds such right qualifies as human right.

First, the notion of human right relates to a conception of human beings as equal members of the human community and implies an idea of inherence, in each, of certain entitlements. The genesis of the modern conception of human rights dates back to the first attempts to define what Locke called natural rights, that is, rights ‘inherent’ in humans and ‘acquired’ by virtue of birth (see, for example, Nickel, 2014). Secular democratic societies endorse such conception of equality of human rights as determined by our common nature; it is such idea that impregnates the statement ‘Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, whatever our nationality, place of residence, sex, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, language, or any other status’ (United Nation Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948).⁶ Different from political rights, human rights are therefore the ‘invariable rights’ that every human being carries across all contextual and contingent variations.⁷

By qualifying the right to the city as human, Harvey proposes to account the right to transform the city among these ‘invariables’. This leads to two observations: the first is that Harvey seems to accept, ontologically, the existence of something called ‘human right’; the second is that the right to the city is somehow of ‘higher order’ than political rights. I will examine both points, starting from the last one.

Qualifying the right to transform the city as a right all human beings carry ‘by nature’, and that cannot be ‘suspended’ under any circumstances, poses some formal problems. The most evident one is the problem of whether such right transcends the formal condition of citizenship, and is therefore ‘superior’ to the rights attached to the individual in virtue of her political status. Think, for example, of the current debate on illegal immigrants: Do they carry the right of transforming the city ‘to their heart’s desire’ (Harvey, 2008) on equal basis with other citizens? Do they carry, instead, a ‘minimum right’ to the city, which excludes partaking in its transformations, but includes the right to shelter and to basic urban resources?

Among others, Purcell captured this problematic point. He observed that ‘In liberal democracies participation structures are linked tightly to formal citizenship in the nation-state’ (Purcell, 2002: 104). This implies that the status of citizen, or a surrogate political status, is pre-conditional to the exercise of the right of transforming the city. From a Marxist perspective, which assigns to the idea of ‘transformation’ the distinct meaning that I have exposed above, this is an undesirable contradiction. Purcell (2002) solves it by associating the right to the city to the condition of ‘inhabiting’ it. By so doing, he suggests that the right to the city is a substantive rather than a formal right: whoever, whenever and wherever is entitled to partake in urban transformations. The idea of citizenship that informs the right to the city is, therefore, an idea of substantive citizenship; it relates, in essence, to one’s situated condition of being citizen rather than having a citizenship to which a package of rights attaches (Davy, 2012; Davy et al., 2013; Lo Piccolo, 2010).

Such idea of substantive citizenship is, in my view, the same idea that permeates Harvey’s position. When thinking of Marx’s conception of human significance, it couldn’t be otherwise: if one accepts that the transformative relation with nature constitutes both the essence and the historical project of realization of human significance, one’s transformative dialogue with nature becomes one’s transformative dialogue with cities. Forcing a bit the similitude, one could say that Marx’s idea of human significance evolves, through Harvey, into an idea of one’s ‘urban significance’. Harvey’s claim that the right to transform the city is a human right follows nearly logically from it and justifies, in my reading, why Harvey may have opted for it.

While these passages clarify the connotation that the attribute of human assumes in Harvey’s idea of the right to the city, it remains to be discussed the author’s ontological position regarding human rights tout court. Albeit this point is disputed still,⁸ the historical method to which Marx had firmly committed – together with his materialistic perspective on ideological constructs – renders the association between a conception of human significance, and a related conception of human right, controversial.⁹ In Marx’s (1844b) words,

the so-called rights of man … are only the rights of the member of civil society, that is, of egoistic man, man separated from other men and from the community. […] none of the so-called rights of man goes beyond the egoistic man, the man withdrawn into himself, his private interest and his private choice, and separated from the community. (Emphasis added)

I reported Marx’s original words to emphasize how the philosopher refrained from acknowledging the existence of an order of rights superior to the social, political, structure. Differently put, Marx would have not subscribed the operation of realizing his conception of human significance through the recognition, and enforcement, of a set of human rights. Rights, for him, safeguard the bourgeois structure of society; they are generated by it, and serve to preserve it. ‘The rights of man’ are, in fact, divisive: they require the identification, thus separation, of subjects (whose rights?) and objects (what rights?) and the hierarchical ordering of subjects (the rights of the State, of groups, of individuals and so on). Rights, therefore, are the instruments through which the bourgeois social structure creates, and preserves, the condition of separation that the eradication of capitalism, and the advent of communism, would eliminate. In this sense, even imagining that Marx’s philosophy could accommodate an ontology of human rights, the philosopher Marx would still challenge the political value of rights tout court (on this point, see Mendus, 2014); for these rights serve to maintain, rather than abolishing conditions of separation, self-interest and self-defence.

Harvey (in Primrose, 2013), of course, is aware of this intrinsic ambivalence of the notion of right: ‘rights are always what I would call an ‘empty signifier’. The only interesting question is who fills them with meaning. Marx argues that […] between equal rights, force decides. This is true of claiming the right to the city’ (p. 17). This clarification supports my interpretation of the attribute of ‘human’, as used by Harvey ( 2008), as a way to fill the right to the city ‘with meaning’, rather than for expressing an ontological position; the meaning of the right to the city as the entitlement of realizing the cities in which we want to live, so to be the ‘kind of people we want to be’ (p.1), in the spirit of what Marx would call “human flourishing” (Harvey, in Primrose, 2013).

Walking along Marx’s footsteps, passing through Lefebvre and using the language of human rights constitute the stations of a journey that Harvey’s articulation of the right to the city conducted, I would conclude, across conceptual contaminations. His point of arrival is faithful to Marx’s intuition of the de-signification of the lives of human beings through the new geographies of exclusion designed by capitalism. The solution, for citadins confronted with its neoliberal turn, is embracing a substantive conception of citizenship - and becoming transformative agents united in the opposition to the new morphologies of power.

Before discussing Nussbaum’s different philosophical journey from the same point of departure constituted by Marx’s human significance, I would like to reason on Harvey’s further qualification of the right to the city as collective right.

Is the right to the city individual or collective?

As discussed above, Harvey claims that the right to the city is a human right – which means a universal, thus individual, right (on this point, see Moroni and Chiodelli, 2014). However, Harvey – and generally the supporters of the idea of the right to the city – is interested in one specific category of individuals, which are the powerless and the deprived. The right to the city is, in fact, primarily the right to lift from conditions of powerlessness and deprivation. The way to do so is joining forces, escaping the condition of individualism and isolation typical of urban life, and becoming a commune capable ‘to take back the control which they have for so long been denied’ (Harvey, 2008).

This brings us back to Marx, whose attentive analysis of dispossession as class phenomenon is indeed conducive to think in terms of collective rather than individual rights. The question, though, is: is the right to the city to be collective, or rather the exercise of this individual right to call for collective action? The doubt arises because, for a right to be collective, the object of right must be indivisible and/or the group holding that right having indivisible features. For example, ethnic minorities have the right to speak their language (whose existence depends on the group speaking it) and to preserve their cultural heritage in virtue of their belonging to that minority (whose survival depends upon its recognition). In a similar vein, workers have the right to be subject to the collective labour agreement of the respective professional category. This complements the ‘lower order’ of each individual contractual agreement with the ‘higher order’ of the rights of the whole category (which, note, vary significantly from one category to another).

Keeping this basic distinction between individual and collective rights in mind - and accepting, for a moment, the related ontological distinction - for the right to the city to be collective, the city has to be interpreted as indivisible object – that is, a common – and its inhabitants as an indivisible collective subject. Sometimes, Harvey (2008) articulates this latter interpretation:

But there are occasions when the ideal of human rights takes a collective turn, as when the rights of labor, women, gays and minorities come to the fore […] These struggles for collective rights have, on occasion, yielded some results. I here want to explore another kind of collective right, that of the right to the city.

Sometimes, he suggests that the idea of ‘collective’ relates to people’s agency, rather than to the nature of the right:

If different factions of the city have equal rights to the city, then we must examine the power relations between those who currently dominate and claim the right to the city and those who do not have power and wish to claim it back. (Harvey, in Primrose, 2013: 17; emphasis added)

Here, Harvey recognizes the equality of the right to the city from the side of different ‘factions’, thus groups and individuals, and emphasizes how its exercise from the side of opposed fronts shapes a problem of power. It follows that it is the agency of these ‘factions’ to be collective, rather than the nature of the right to the city; this is, in fact, equally carried by each of their members.

I am aware that these considerations, exquisitely philosophical, may seem irrelevant. However, I find them essential for positioning Harvey’s idea of the right to the city consistently with its underlying – and, in my view, more central – discourse on power. It is power, and its uneven distribution in relation to urban transformations, to generate the condition of dispossession which motivates Harvey’s (2008) call to the ‘exercise of a collective power’. Such conditions of dispossession and powerlessness are central in the idea of the right to the city; and they are, simultaneously, material and political. Harvey gives many examples of these conditions – from the dispossession suffered by the inhabitants of slums forcedly moved out for ‘making space’ to commercial developments, to the deprivation suffered by a growing segment of the urban population unable to afford higher and higher living costs. These ‘urban deprived’ are, therefore, the collective subject that the right to the city, ‘as both working slogan and political ideal’ (Harvey, 2008), wishes to inspire.

My suggestion, however, is that the qualification of this right as a collective right of the ‘dispossessed’ leads, conceptually, to some confusion. First, it risks to assimilate this ‘collective subject’ with specific social classes, which would conflict with the right to the city as human right (i.e. everybody’s right). Second, besides a collective subject, a collective right presupposes the existence of an indivisible object, but what is it? Are they public spaces? Is it the regulation of land uses? Is it the participation in all decisions affecting the urban form? Purcell (2002) opts for this latter interpretation: ‘all urban inhabitants would be entitled to participate equally on large-scale processes that affect the entire urbanized region’ (p. 104); Mitchell (2003) concentrates on public spaces; others concentrate on the abolishment of the rule of private capital on urban transformations as ‘key to establishing a genuine right to the city’ (Marcuse and Imbroscio, 2014: 1914).

These different perspectives on the ‘genuine’ subjects, and object, of the right to the city, reflect different positions in what became one of the most important debates in urban studies. It is not my intent to offer further perspectives, but only to signal that, from a philosophical viewpoint, the language of rights used to articulate them opens, rather than solving, several questions. Rather than solving them, I find more constructive to re-formulate these questions using another language: Nussbaum’s language of capabilities.

Cities and the language of capabilities: Nussbaum’s idea of human dignity

The political philosopher Martha Nussbaum has never discussed urban matters, nor matters of right related to the city. However, together with Harvey, she grounded some tenets of her philosophy on Marx’s conception of human significance, and developed an inspiring reflection regarding the CHC of ‘controlling the environment’ (Nussbaum, 2003). As such, her writings offer unexplored perspectives on some of the questions posed in relation to Harvey’s articulation of the right to the city, and provide an opportunity for re-framing some of the respective positions.

Nussbaum is one of the most prominent exponents of what, in political philosophy and development economics, is known as the ‘capability approach’ (CA). The relation between Amartya Sen’s original formulation of the CA and Nussbaum’s articulation was mentioned in a previous contribution (Basta, 2015a). While both Sen (1979, 1989, 2004, 2009) and Nussbaum connect human capabilities closely to human rights, in Nussbaum (2003) a more explicit distinction between them resulted in the identification of ten CHCs. The list was introduced to support ‘comparative quality-of-life measurement and [for] the formulation of basic political principles of the sort that can play a role in fundamental constitutional guarantees’ (Nussbaum, 2003: 40). Nussbaum’s (2011) political liberalism, however, does not endorse any ‘comprehensive doctrine about human life that covers not only the political domain but also the domain of human conduct generally’ (p. 3). Nussbaum’s inquiry, in other words, explores the ‘political principles that do not endorse the truth of any particular comprehensive doctrine of the good’ (p. 20); her CHC list was ‘explicitly introduced for political purposes only, and without any grounding in metaphysical ideas of the sort that divide people along lines of culture and religion’ (Nussbaum, 2003: 42).

In order to continue with my comparison between Harvey’s right to the city and Nussbaum’s CHCs in light of their common reference to Marx’s philosophy, here below I extract the 10th capability from the version of the list appeared in 2003:

10. Control over one’s environment. A) Political. Being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one’s life; having the right of political participation, protections of free speech and association. B) Material. Being able to hold property (both land and movable goods), and having property rights on an equal basis with others; having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others; having the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure. In work, being able to work as a human being, exercising practical reason and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other workers.

My objective from now on is to discuss the difference between this human capability – which relates to one’s living environment, and to one’s relevant rights – and Harvey’s core statement regarding the right to the city. To do so, I will follow the same structure of the previous section: first, I will introduce Nussbaum’s notion of ‘human functionings’, and I will connect it with Marx’s use of the same expression. Then, I will examine the use of the notion of ‘right’ in the context of the 10th human capability reported above, and I will reason on what perspective on the city such (different) notion may devise. Finally, I will propose my complementary idea of one’s ‘urban functionings’. Such functionings could constitute a novel evaluative perspective on urban transformations; paraphrasing Sen (2009), they could re-centre our discourse on what urban transformations ‘do’ to people, rather than on what rights people have in relation to urban transformations.

Before doing so, in the next section, I complete my comparative exploration of Harvey’s and Nussbaum’s relation with Marx’s conception of human significance.

From human significance, through human rights, to human capabilities

Albeit, in historical terms, this occurred only recently, democratic societies have conquered an understanding of human beings as inherently equal: all have equal worth, and equal dignity. However, even if we might take per granted that the corresponding entitlements – what we tend to identify with ‘rights’ – are ‘natural’, ‘human’ and ‘collective’, in political philosophy, these are disputed theoretical questions still. ‘One of them’, Nussbaum (1997) observes,

is the question whether the individual is the only bearer of rights, or whether rights belong, as well, to other entities, such as families, ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups, and nations. Another is whether rights are to be regarded as side-constraints on goal-seeking action, or as parts of a goal that is to be promoted. (p. 274)

Nussbaum (1997) observes that

The language of rights cuts across this debate and obscures the issues that have been articulated […] It is for this reason, among others, that a different language has begun to take hold in talk about people’s basic entitlements. This is the language of capabilities and human functioning.

Nussbaum’s conception of ‘human functioning’ replicates Marx’s one. Nussbaum recalls passages of Marx’s (1844a) Economic and Political Manuscripts in several of her writings, and identifies in them an important source of her reflection on human dignity (Nussbaum, 2002, 2003). The notion of dignity is central in the CA (Claassen, 2014) and in Nussbaum’s (2003) articulation specially: ‘we begin with a conception of the dignity of the human being, and of a life that is worthy of that dignity – a life that has available in it “truly human functioning” in the sense described by Marx’ (p. 40).

The accent posed on human dignity rather than on human significance mirrors the centrality that Nussbaum’s reflection accords to the person – the woman, the child, the elderly, the ordinary citizen and the persecuted one – rather than to Marx’s universal conception of ‘man’. Her following inquiry is oriented towards the political principles which would enable people to live a life with dignity in pluralistic societies wherein different conceptions of the good coexist. This, note, does not mean that she departs from Marx’s conception of human significance; however, it is on the political conditions that may enhance such significance in a ‘liberal society that aspires to justice and to equal opportunities for all’ that Nussbaum (2013) concentrates her scholarly effort (p. 3).

Albeit both Harvey and Nussbaum share such fundamental aspiration to justice, the latter’s positioning of Marx is, therefore, quite different from the former’s one. Harvey remains faithful to Marx’s analysis of dispossession as class phenomenon, and translates it into an idea of human right – a right, as we saw, that should be exercised collectively by those who are deprived of it. Such ‘collective’ subjects, in Harvey, are the powerless who share a demand of justice around which organizing their agency.

Nussbaum does not follow this typically Marxist rationale of reasoning at the scale of collective agency, nor the tendency of ‘clustering’ individuals into classes of individuals. She opts, rather, for reasoning on the concrete freedoms, and autonomy of choice, of each human being in a world of competing worldviews and diverse aspirations. This is reflected in the fact that, to translate Marx’s universal dimension of human significance in the phenomenal dimension of human dignity, Nussbaum does not opt for the language of human rights, but for the language of human capabilities. Her CHCs constitute a comprehensive – albeit fluid – list of one’s fundamental entitlements that ‘supplements’ one’s human rights. The fundamental entitlement is, as explained, to function as a human being, and to live a life with dignity; the recognition of the related rights is therefore instrumental, politically, for securing the corresponding capabilities. For example, one’s capability of participating effectively in political choices is the entitlement that the right to political participation ought to secure; similarly, being able to hold property is the entitlement that requires to secure property rights equally accessible to all.

Albeit Nussbaum opts for this distinction between human capabilities and human rights, she is not dismissive towards the human rights framework. As she explains, the CA ‘is closely allied to, but in some ways superior to, the familiar human rights paradigm’ (Nussbaum, 2003: 36). On my interpretation, however, more than ‘superior’, the CA is deeper. If one shares the intuition that the barriers erected against ‘truly human functionings’ throughout history, and the consequent deprivation ofhuman dignity, are at the origin of the gradual formulation and enforcement of an idea of right, rights appear for what they are: political instruments meant to protect one’s fundamental entitlement to function as a human being, rather than entitlements ‘in themselves’. Nussbaum’s CHCs are precisely the attempt to identify the functionings - that is, the ‘doings’ and ‘beings’ - that fulfil such fundamental entitlement, and to define the essential rights which would ‘enable’ them.

That clarified, I would like to continue with discussing Nussbaum’s approach in terms of its divergence, and converge, with Marx. An evident point of divergence is their position regarding the right to hold property; a right that, in the form of private property, would have no citizenship under condition of communism. Here, the prize of consistency with Marx’s worldview goes to those critical urban theorists who align with the ‘fundamental rejection of the prevailing capitalist system’ (Marcuse, 2009: 194), a system that, by allowing some to accumulate private property indefinitely, creates the societal pre-condition of dispossession of others.

The right to hold property and the right to accumulate private property indefinitely are not the same though. Nussbaum’s political liberalism accords political value to the former right. This stems from the observation of the dynamics of poverty, rather than from the observation of the dynamics of capital accumulation. Human development scholars documented surmounting evidence that holding property is a factor of bodily integrity, protection from abuse, social inclusion and political representativeness for the poorest people in the world, and for women living in archaic and oppressive societies specially (e.g. Alkire, 2002; Nussbaum, 2001). On my interpretation, these are at least part of the reasons why the capability of controlling one’s environment includes an explicit reference to the right to hold property – and why the liberal tradition á la Rawls, in general, endorses a conception of equality based on the equal access to basic means and opportunities, rather than on the shared ownership of the ‘commons’. While from the perspective of the orthodox Marxist tradition the right to private property is a sort of ‘historical compromise’, for scholars aligning with the various declinations of the egalitarian liberal tradition, the same right is essential for enabling one to protect herself, and her important ones, from poverty, vulnerability and abuse.

A related point of difference between Nussbaum’s and Marx’s positions – and, per transitive property, Harvey’s one – is the resulting primacy, in Nussbaum, of the individual on the collective. Nussbaum refrains from reasoning in terms of social classes, or of abstract ‘systems’ or ‘powers’, in order to reflect on the many failures of contemporary society. The typically (neo)Marxist language that divides society along the lines of capitalists and workers, or neoliberals and deprived, does never articulate her positions. These are, generally, propositive: ‘the societies we are imagining aim at human development, meaning the opportunities of people of living rich and rewarding lives’ (Nussbaum, 2013: 118). Moreover, ‘they pursue these goals for each person, considering that each person is an end, and none a mere means to the goals and ends of others’ (Nussbaum, 2013: 119; original emphasis).

This emphasis on the worth of each single individual is a crucial point of her distinction between rights and capabilities, and of her conception of capabilities as freedom:

The language of rights has value because of the emphasis it places on people’s choice and autonomy. The language of capabilities […] is designed to leave room for choice, and to communicate the idea that there is a big difference between pushing people into functioning in ways you consider valuable and leaving the choice up to them. (Nussbaum, 2003: 40; emphasis added)

In my reading, this ‘big difference’ captures the substantial difference between Nussbaum’s language of capabilities and Harvey’s use of the language of rights. The former articulates the expansion of one’s autonomy in choosing how to live a life with dignity; the latter articulates the ‘call to action’ of the dispossessed. This point allows me to conclude my comparison with some preliminary observations. The first is that Nussbaum and Harvey ‘encounter’ each other only when recognizing in Marx one of their inspirational sources, to then diverge towards entirely different directions. Nussbaum’s direction is exploring the political conditions that would enable people to live a purposeful life, and the principles and rules of coexistence which would secure these conditions, in the framework of a liberal society aspiring to justice. Harvey’s direction, and equal aspiration to justice, leads him to encourage a collective re-action to the (neo)liberal structure of that society, and to inspire citadins to reclaim the power that such society, in his view, denies them. As much as Nussbaum’s political liberalism has been equally critical towards a radically libertarian or, worse, neoliberal conception of the state, her sensitivity to the constellation of diversity – of gender, cultural background, values, social condition, beliefs, aspirations – which characterizes contemporary society impeded her to reason on anything else than the individual; and to reason, with authentic liberal spirit, on the spaces of freedom that would enable each individual to develop the own human capabilities in full.

At this point, it only remains to explore how this could inspire future developments in planning theory.

Capabilities as evaluative outlooks: exploring one’s urban functionings

Nussbaum titled the 10th CHC ‘control over one’s environment’. She identified its political form (being able to, and having the right of, participating effectively in choices affecting one’s environment), and its material form (being able to, and having the right of, holding property). The incipit ‘being able to’ that characterizes this human capability consists of the ‘supplementation’ that the respective language provides to the language of rights. Having the right to adequate shelter does not imply, for example, that a person is concretely capable of having one, or that the society in which she lives enforces such right concretely; nor, if so, that what is considered ‘adequate’ in that society is effectively so for her.

These are not linguistic nuances, and neither the re-formulation, into another language, of the distinction between formal and substantive rights. These are substantive evaluative foci, which can be reassumed in the consideration of what people ‘are concretely able to do and be’ (e.g. Robeyns, 2005), rather than on the rights that people have. When adding ‘in the city’, the spectrum of the evaluation of people’s ‘doings’ and ‘beings’ expands accordingly: it intersects social classes; it includes the ‘diversity of diversities’ of urban populations; it covers aspects of people’s relation with the urban space beyond the relation of ‘transformation’; it allows to understand that relation from the viewpoint of one’s gender, one’s culture, one’s age, or one’s impairments.

The spectrum of one’s rights does not convey the same understanding necessarily. In European cities, for example, everybody has the right to access education and take a means of public transport. However, if one is poor, and lives in the most degraded area of the city, these rights per se may not secure neither her ability to go to school, nor to take a bus. In the same vein, if one is rich, lives in a wealthy suburb of the same city, and has impaired mobility, her capability to take that same bus may be equally null. Neither her wealth nor her right to circulate will make her do so in concrete. Having equal rights, in other words, doesn’t mean achieving equal functionings.

Evaluating the concrete capabilities that people have to function in and through the city is the indication that we can derive from Nussbaum’s approach. Among basic human functionings – eating, drinking, procreating – and ‘truly human functionings’ – cultivating reason, loving, generating knowledge – we have to arrive to an understanding of what we may call one’s ‘urban functionings’. These are the functionings whose achievement depends on how urban spaces are designed, organized and governed. For example, to the human capability of ‘moving freely from place to place’, we could associate the ‘urban functioning’ of circulating, for example via public transport. The achievement of this vital functioning depends, for those disadvantaged economically, on whether the respective means are affordable; for a person with impaired mobility instead, the same achievement would depend on whether the same means are designed properly. To enable one person to circulate on equal basis with another, the respective transport service should therefore be managed, and designed, from a range of multiple perspectives that, by accounting for people’s diversity, pursues the objective of enabling them to function equally.

From a theoretical viewpoint, two problems would follow. The first is the spectrum of the diversity to be accounted for achieving the normative goal of enabling equal functionings in the city. In other words, one should establish the diversities of normative relevance, and distinguish them from those normatively irrelevant. Intuitively, one’s impairments are of normative relevance. Albeit it required an intensive social and political campaign, the so-called ‘architectonic barriers’ started to be removed in European cities since the 1970s of the past century (Ornati, 2004).¹⁰ Before such campaign started to bear some fruits, however, architectonic barriers were common impediments, for people with impairments, to function on equal basis with others: sitting on a wheelchair and taking a bus, or entering a building, were unthinkable freedoms until relatively recently. Looking at Nussbaum’s CHC list, the ‘impeded’ functioning, here, was that of moving – the ‘disabled’ capability of moving freely; the associated right, logically, the right of seeing architectonic barriers removed. It is the impeded functioning, I wish to stress again, that infringed a fundamental entitlement – and thus led to the recognition of the respective right. Such rights are truly ‘transformative’, therefore, when an impeded functioning ‘demands’ to enable certain human capabilities through their effective enforcement.

The second problem relates to the identification of the functionings with clear ‘urban relevance’. A way to identify them would be to dissect the CHCs – including the 10th – and to ‘extract’, from them, the functionings whose achievement depends, at least to a certain extent, on the urban space. This would be an interesting but didactic exercise, which I deem unnecessary to convey my message. A more fruitful way to proceed is continuing to reason through examples.

One other paradigmatic example is the functioning of inhabiting, and specifically of inhabiting houses commensurate to one’s fundamental functionings (and, I would add, dignity). There is an intuitive limit under which a house does not enable one to meet neither of these objectives: for example, because it is too small, too insalubrious, too far away from necessary services, or all of this. The recognition that inhabiting a house commensurate to one’s fundamental functionings vehicles other fundamental capabilities – for example, preserving bodily integrity, forming relationships, working productively – helps to explain why we need a policy of social housing. It is in the tradition of European countries to have more or less comprehensive ones; the Dutch government, for example, has a long tradition of intervention in the market aimed at balancing the stock of social housing against the free-market stock. Intervention does not consist of direct provision, but rather of partnering with citizens’ associations and private developers so as to guarantee the availability of affordable properties to young parents, older adults, and generally low-income inhabitants (see, for example, Van Straalen, 2014). Either ways, the diverse ‘impediments’ of these inhabitants of cities are recognized as relevant to the normative goal of enabling them to inhabit on equal basis with others, and thus to have equal dignity.

I would conclude that the systematic identification of the functionings that relate to one’s living environment – inhabiting, travelling, recreating, participating in political choices, being into nature, working, being healthy and so on – and of the concrete opportunities of people to ‘be and do’ these functionings – being concretely able to inhabit and recreating, having the concrete possibility of participating in decisions affecting the urban environment – may generate new evaluative approaches to the urban space, to its transformations, and to what these ‘do’ to people. Recent interdisciplinary studies endeavoured in this direction (e.g. Ryan et al., 2015; Stephens et al., 2015), providing encouraging evidence that the application of the CA to the practice of evaluation generates valuable insights of the ‘spatiality’ of people’s freedoms, autonomy, and dignity.

More empirical research is, of course, needed. Rather than to the respective challenges, however, the space left for this article is dedicated to draw some general conclusions on how so different ideas on the city – like the right to the city, and the ‘city of capabilities’ – may converge in the future practice of evaluation of the city.

Conclusion: can the right to the city and the city of capabilities complement each other?

It is very typical to conclude a comparison between two different perspectives by underlining the elements of complementarity between them. In Harvey’s and Nussbaum’s case, I would limit such complementarity to the languages through which these perspectives are articulated, which consists of one specific use of the language of rights in critical urban theory – in which ‘the city’ dominates the debate – and one distinct use of the language of capabilities in political philosophy and human development studies – in which ‘the city’ is not the privileged unit of analysis.

More interesting has been discussing the point of convergence of these perspectives on Marx’s conception of human significance. Despite such conception dates back to the 19th century, and some may argue that the very philosopher’s language had a different meaning then, my observation is that an idea of human significance reverberates in Harvey’s critical theory and Nussbaum’s political liberalism with equal clarity. From both perspectives, the city as one’s living environment can be considered the object of a substantive right; of the right, simply, of living with dignity, and in conditions of social inclusion.¹¹

However, while the right to the city and the capability of controlling one’s environment share the substantive nature of the rights that they intend to promote, I would conclude that it is the projects they engender to differ significantly. Harvey’s project is to inspire citadins to exercise collective power in such a way to contrast another, neoliberal, power; Nussbaum’s project is far from prescribing any form of (re)action to neither individual nor collective subjects against any real or supposed ‘system’. She dialogues with Marx at the sole purpose of advancing an idea of society grounded upon the recognition of people’s entitlement to live a life with equal dignity in a world of pluralism – a world, though, in which each human being should choose how to give significance to the own life freely.

Turning Nussbaum’s political liberalism into an idea of ‘city of capabilities’ is an operation quite distant from the original intent of her philosophy. Such attempt is solely mine. However, I found unveiling how such political liberalism roots in the same philosophical premises of the idea of the right to the city interesting for theoretical purposes, and inspiring for practical ones. The main inspiration relates to what we ought to evaluate when exploring how cities enable people to live – that is, the material and political spaces of dignity that citadins have beyond their class of belonging, worldviews and, ultimately, their willingness to embark on the enterprise of ‘transforming the city’ rather than on the enterprise of contributing to create a political system that could produce functional, and inclusive, spaces.

To the idea of the right to the city, I recognize force in conveying the message that such spaces mirror, too often, dynamics of aggressive capitalism insensitive towards fundamental human rights; and this is an important message. To become an instrument of change, however, my proposal is to articulate this message into another, deeper, language: the language of human capabilities.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Claudia Basta is Assistant Professor Senior of Spatial Planning at Wageningen University, which she joined in 2011 after having completed her post-doctoral studies at the 3TU Centre of Excellence for Ethics and Technology of Delft University. She co-chairs the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP)’s thematic group ‘Ethics, Values and Planning’, and is the Editor of the volume Ethics, Design and Planning of the Built Environment (with Moroni S, 2013, Dordrecht: Springer).

References

Alkire

(2002) Valuing Freedoms: Sen’s Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Attoh

(2011) What kind of right is the right to the city? Progress in Human Geography 35(5): 669–685.

Basta

(2015a) From justice in planning to planning for justice: A capability approach. Planning Theory. Epub ahead of print 13 February. DOI: 10.1177/1473095215571399.

Basta

(2015b) Invisible borders, tangible barriers: Europeans and their fear of ‘losing’ fundamental capabilities in the face of growing immigration from Southern Mediterranean countries. Paper presented at the Human Development and Capabilities Conference, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, September 2015.

Bobbio

(1978) Is there a Marxist theory of the state? Telos 35: 5–16.

Bobbio

(1997) Né con Marx né Contro Marx. Rome: Editori Riuniti.

Claassen

(2014) Human dignity in the capability approach. In: Düwell

Braarvig

Brownsword

. (eds) The Cambridge Handbook of Human Dignity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 240–249.

Davy

(2012) Land Policy: Planning and the Spatial Consequences of Property. Farnham: Ashgate.

Davy

Leisering

(eds) (2013) Exploring global social citizenship: Human rights perspectives. International Journal of Social Welfare 22 (Suppl. 1).

10.

Davy

(2014) Spatial planning and human rights. Planning Theory 13(4): 329–330.

11.

Freeman

(1994) The philosophical foundation of human rights. Human Rights Quarterly 16(3): 491–514.

12.

Gewirth

(1982) Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Application. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

13.

Gosepath

(2007) Equality. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/equality/ (accessed 1 February 2016).

14.

Harvey

(2003) The right to the city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27: 939–941.

15.

Harvey

(2007) Neoliberalism and the city. Studies in Social Justice 1(1): 1–13.

16.

Harvey

(2008) The right to the city. The New Left Review 53. Available at: http://newleftreview.org/II/53/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city (accessed 20 July 2015).

17.

Harvey

(2012) Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso.

18.

Lefebvre

(1968 [1996]) Le Droit à la ville. In: Kofman

Leban

(eds) Writings on Cities. Oxford: Blackwell, 147–159.

19.

Lo Piccolo

(2010) The planning research agenda: Plural cities, equity and rights of citizenship. Town Planning Review 81(6): i–vi.

20.

Marcuse

(2009) From critical urban theory to the right to the city. City 13(2–3): 185–196.

21.

Marcuse

Imbroscio

(2014) Critical urban theory versus critical urban studies: A review debate. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38(5): 1904–1917.

22.

Marx

(1844a) Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. The Marxists Online Archive. Available at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm (accessed 1 February 2015).

23.

Marx

(1844b) On the Jewish Question. The Marxist Online Archive. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/ (accessed 1 February 2015).

24.

Marx

Engels

(1848) The Communist Manifesto. The Marxists Online Archive. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm (accessed 1 February 2015).

25.

Marx

Engels

(1867) The Capital. The Marxists Online Archive. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/index.htm (accessed 1 February 2015).

26.

Mendus

(2014) Care and human rights: A reply to Virginia Held. In: Cruft

Liao

Renzo

(eds) Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 643–652.

27.

Mitchell

(2003) The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: Guilford Press.

28.

Moroni

Chiodelli

(2014) Public spaces, private spaces, and the right to the city. International Journal of E-Planning Research 3(1): 51–65.

29.

Nickel

(2014) Human rights. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights-human/ (accessed 2 July 2015).

30.

Nussbaum

(1997) Capabilities and human rights. Fordham Law Review 66(2): 273–300.

31.

Nussbaum

(2001) Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

32.

Nussbaum

(2002) Capabilities and social justice. International Studies Review 4(2): 123–135.

33.

Nussbaum

(2003) Capabilities as fundamental entitlements: Sen and social justice. Feminist Economics 9(2–3): 33–59.

34.

Nussbaum

(2011) Perfectionist liberalism and political liberalism. Philosophy & Public Affairs 39(1): 3–45.

35.

Nussbaum

(2013) Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

36.

Ornati

(2004) Architettura e Barriere. Storia e Fatti delle Barriere Architettoniche in Italia e all’Estero. Milan: FrancoAngeli.

37.

Primrose

(2013) Contesting capitalism in the light of the crisis: A conversation with David Harvey. Journal of Australian Political Economy 71: 5–25.

38.

Purcell

(2002) Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant. GeoJournal 58: 99–108.

39.

Purcell

(2003) Citizenship and the right to the global city: Reimagining the capitalist world order. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 273: 564–590.

40.

Robeyns

(2005) The capability approach: A theoretical survey. Journal of Human Development 6(1): 94–114.

41.

Ryan

Wretstrand

Schmidt

(2015) Exploring public transport as an element of older persons’ mobility: A capability approach perspective. Journal of Transport Geography 48: 105–114.

42.

Sen

(1979) Equality of What? The Tanner Lecture on Human Values. Stanford University, 22 May. Available at: http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/s/sen80.pdf (accessed June 2015).

43.

Sen

(1989) Development as capability expansion. Journal of Development Planning 19: 41–58.

44.

Sen

(2004) Capabilities, lists and public reason: Continuing the conversation. Feminist Economics 10(3): 77–80.

45.

Sen

(2009) The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

46.

Stephens

Breheni

Mansvelt

(2015) Healthy ageing from the perspective of older people: A capability approach to resilience. Psychology & Health 30(6): 715–731.

47.

Tuck

(1979) Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

48.

United Nations (1948) The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Available at: http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ (accessed 1 June 2015).

49.

Van Stralen

(2014) Private Property in Public Processes: How Public Stakeholders Strategically Interfere in Private Property Rights in the Public Interest in Regional Spatial Development Processes. PhD Thesis 5769, Wageningen: Wageningen University.

50.

Wei

(2008) From principle to context: Marx versus Nozick and Rawls on distributive justice. Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 20(3): 472–486.

51.

Wolff

(2010) Karl Marx. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/#5 (accessed 1 June 2015).