Right to the City

I can only remember a handful of jokes in sufficient detail to get a laugh. (Did you hear the one about the photon checking into a hotel?) One of my favorites is about a boy who didn’t speak. The parents were so excited to welcome their beautiful baby boy, and as he grew he met or exceeded every measurement—height, weight, responsiveness,--except for speech. Don’t worry, said the doctor, boys don’t speak as early as girls. The boy entered kindergarten, then first grade, then second, still silent. Don’t worry, said the teachers, he’s managing fine. He did well in school, was cheerful, and beloved by his more loquacious classmates, so by and by the parents accepted him as he was. Then one morning, just weeks before he was to leave for college, he said, “Mom, the toast is burning.” His parents looked at him in astonishment—a miracle! He speaks! “Son,” they said almost in unison, “all this time you haven’t said a word. Why now?” “Until now,” he answered, “everything was fine.”

Until now, everything was fine. We didn’t need to speak up. Now we ask when can we get back to normal? We ask because until now everything was fine. When can I get my hair cut? Eat at a restaurant? Go to a baseball game? Take public transportation? Get my nails done? Hang out on the stoop with my friends? Go bird-watching in the park? Walk down the street without being shot? Oh, sorry…This was supposed to be about Covid-19 and, you know, getting back to normal. Until that happened, everything was fine. Now it’s burning.

In Rebel Cities: from the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, David Harvey writes about the successive spasmodic expansions and narrowing of access to the benefits—spatial, political, social, cultural, and economic—of the city throughout history. He cautions, though, that we not romanticize some ideal state when there was such a thing as an a priori “city” independent of the heterogeneous actors who continually shape it. When we repeat the wish to get “back to normal” we fall into that trap—that somehow, until now, everything was fine, that there was a “normal.” When we envision that “normal” city as a sequence of leisure spaces designed for consumption by people of means, when we design public spaces without access to water, seating, and restrooms to anyone but paying customers, when we estheticize one population and criminalize others, when we fail to maintain public infrastructure, when we mistake our own experience for a universal one, we expose the limits of the lenses through which we have been looking. It was easy to stay silent as long as everything seemed fine to me.

The city, such as it is, is under constant construction—literal, physical, social, and cultural construction. It is assembled by each of its inhabitants—each of them—and the right to that city belongs to all. We shouldn’t be looking to getting back to normal but to making a better normal: an equitable, diverse, green, healthy city to which we are all entitled. Everything wasn't fine.