Struggle, Urban Appropriation, and Cities of the Future

Abstract

The year 2020 was one of contrasts, and cities around the world have been changed as a result. In place of stability, coherence, and predictability (for whom these existed), inhabitants faced disruption, but amidst an eerie calm. In a world facing the unknown, however, came the rumblings of participation, appropriation, and empowerment-through marches, protests, and, in the United States, the removal of artifacts as representations of past injustices. Centering that appropriation in the process of struggle helps us see the radical side to the ideas, and the scholarship, focused on the right to the city. Urban appropriation is admittedly an ambiguous term. It could point to the act of making something private, and this is part of the story here. Yet, the urban appropriation essential in this evaluation lies in the assignment of purpose or identity, as consequence of contrasting needs, understandings, and memories. Through this experience this type of rights claiming takes place. Surrounding the process are discourses that install meaning. The books under review deal with ideas surrounding the right to the city, as will be explained, but also the struggles of appropriation within urban landscapes that are ever alive in growth and destruction. This urban flux means an ongoing envisioning of social, economic, and ecological dimensions of space. It is a wide-ranging endeavor, including the rich and the poor, the powerful and the vulnerable.In Barrio Boy (1971), writer and labor activist Ernesto Galarza referred to everyday life in the mixed-race barrios of early twentieth-century Sacramento as the hacer la lucha. This was the never-ending "daily match," as Galarza defined it, of balancing work, income, "rent, groceries, and the seasons." 1 It was an ongoing obligation of "the fight," or struggle, so to maintain the resources to perpetuate self and family. Described in each case a bit differently, this is nonetheless what the authors of three distinct publications evaluate-the perpetual action of groups of city dweller to maintain their own social reproduction in the shadow of the capitalist, now the "neoliberal," state. It is a struggle between commodification and the private, on one hand, and the 1004906J UHXXX10.