DAVID HARVEY

The design and planning of physical urban spaces is deemed crucial prior to the arrival of new migrations. How can architecture and urban development contribute to the integration of refugees and economic migrants in arrival cities?

 

Migrants and refugees bring with them a whole host of cultural presumptions, habits, religious beliefs and forms of sociality (e.g. of family and kinship).  While it is not the duty of any receiving country to replicate such conditions (an impossibility in any case when refugees come from multiple and very diverse backgrounds) some sensitivity has to be shown to the idea of creating footholds within an existing urban fabric for creative integration and self-management of the spaces in which people live and eventually find and create employment opportunities.  There is no formula for this, but close working with migrants and refugees on the ground and coming up with experimental designs can be exciting as well as challenging work.

 

You oppose two concepts when theorizing about the urban phenomena: The processes of urbanization and the Lefebvrian concept of “the right to the city”, which you claim as a freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves. Could you explain the differences between these two concepts?

 

The theory of urbanization is an attempt to show how the laws of motion of capital and capital accumulation are involved in city building.  The aim is the maximization of accumulation of capital (along with the maximization of land values and rent extractions) no matter what.  The trend is to create cities for people (particularly privileged elites) to invest in and not necessarily cities for the popular classes to live in.  The right to the city views this same process from the standpoint of the popular classes where the aim is to create decent living environments for all through democratic forms of governance.  Obviously these two visions clash and the struggle over the right to the city ensues.

 

You claim that urban development is intertwined with a social class struggle logic. Could you provide us of some examples of how this is reproduced in urban geographies?

 

The eviction of low-income populations from whole neighborhoods in favored locations to make way for megaprojects or higher value land uses favored by financiers, developers and construction interests is almost everywhere in evidence.

 

How has the 20th century European processes of urbanization, consisting of important migrations of population to urban areas, contributed to the erosion of local aesthetics?

 

I don’t see the intrusion of alternative aesthetic preferences and judgments as necessarily bad. Indeed, I find the local differentiations created through migratory movements far preferable to monotonous and boring developer urbanization.   The real estate development lobby often destroys character whereas anarchists, squatters and cultural workers along with immigrants often play a role in creating a much more interesting urban fabric.  It is not always so of course but here too it is the dynamics of open struggle that should be allowed to flourish.

 

The role of property markets seems to have played a role in urban plan designs. Has urbanism operated under the umbrella of these designs?

 

One of the biggest unsolved and underdiscussed aspects of urbanization is the role of property markets in general and private property markets in particular in shaping urban life.  I believe a great deal of effort must now be put into designing alternative property arrangements, common property regimes, and other ways of securing people’s rights in the city.

 

To date, migration policies are exclusively the responsibility of state, but some local governments are building transnational alliances to bypass the state’s competencies. Do you foresee a scenario in which the transnational alliances between urban centers overcomes the state-nation power?

 

I think transnational alliances at the local scale are an excellent idea but I don’t see this supplanting relations developing at broader scales and that will certainly involve some level of interaction like that of the state.

 

Would it be possible to incorporate the refugee and migrants voice into policy making decisions that concern migrations? Through which channels could this happen?

 

The self-organization of refugee groups should be a priority.  Assembly style self-governance would seem particularly well-adapted for such decision-making structures.

 

To what extent are the processes of migration aligned with the urbanization processes?

 

They are never “aligned” but always a productive, disruptive and potentially creative force.

 

Could these migrational processes be an opportunity to change social housing policies? How can social housing help in the process of integration of economic migrants and refugees?

 

The advent of a crisis of refugees and migrants creates many stresses at the same time as it offers opportunities to explore new forms of social housing, with the emphasis upon the nature of the sociality involved.  Training migrants in construction so they can self-build their own communal housing would seem a good idea.  Too often migration is seen as a problem whereas historically it has more often than not turned out to be a great opportunity.

 

“Smart cities” and “business parks” seems to dominate the new language of modern cities. What can we expect in the digital era of ICT in terms of urbanism?

 

I am all in favor of the kinds of explorations that improve the efficiency of movement and social provision in urban settings and the mining of big data sets and the pursuit of Smart city agendas is helpful.  Unfortunately, if this is all there is then the results will be disastrous.  Smart City thinking cannot get at the radical transformation of social relations and of practices required to turn our cities into eminently liveable environments in which everyone has the right to decent housing provision in decent living environments. Smart city thinking cannot challenge the habit of big capital to build cities to invest in but not to live in.  Smart city thinking leads to the illusion that solutions to global poverty and environmental degradation lie in new technologies.  This has never worked in the past and I see no reason why the pursuit of some techno-utopia will succeed in the future.  We need a right to the city movement grounded in an anti-capitalist ethic if we are to succeed in the quest for better urban living for all.

 

What does it mean to adopt a critical position towards urbanism theory?

 

Question the authority of received wisdom and conventional practices and make sure that the transformation of social relations in constructive ways is the central motif rather than technocratic and bureaucratic preferences.