In defense of the city. Review of 'Common Ground in a Liquid'

Matt Hern lives in Vancouver, Canada. Vancouver has major endorsements like Expo 86, the Commonwealth games and as recently as 2010 the Winter Olympics and Paralympics under its belt, but on top of that with Melbourne, a business review recently granted the city has being a top example of a ‘livable city’. The darkside however is Vancouver has the lowest minimum wage, the highest rate of child poverty, chronic homelessness, the highest rents and housing costs in Canada (pg 207) and like every other city it’s the flux of capital which influences its development rather than its inhabitants.

Matt’s book isn’t really about Vancouver, though. Well it is and it isn’t. Matt is looking at the city he lives in and is drawing out parallels to other places he’s visited. By contrasting two different places in the world he is creating a lynchpin to look at and isolate themes one by one that affects us all where we live. And for the most part this works quite well.

But before he does that, he sets his stall out and thereby the tone of the book. Firstly he his resoundingly in favour of city dwelling, “the only chance the world has for an ecological future is for the vast bulk of us to live in the city.” (pg 9) Secondly he argues, “cities need to be full of solid, distinct and comprehensible places” (pg 9) and thirdly he calls for a rejection of global capitalism and neo-liberalism.

There are, he argues, possibilities of living densely, shortening unnecessary transport journeys, reducing our collective carbon footprint, and sharing energy and resources (pg 16). These are all ecologically sound, and are preferable to humans encroaching on what little is left of the natural world. So humans for the most part - can and should stay where they are. The task for city dwellers, and a key premise of the book is what adjustments can we make to the city to challenge the excess and power that prevails alongside the poverty and despair, but also overt any challenges that may come our way.

The book is based on nine essays covering a different city and a comparative insight. Six are in North America (I will include Hawaii), the remaining are in Greece, Turkey and Kurdistan. Laced with the essays are some pretty nice location shots to guide you. I wanted to gloss over some of the essays and prize out some of the bits I thought had significance for expansion. Some I didn’t take much from for a number of reasons; such as discussions on culture and vibrancy a la Montreal, or water stress in Moloka’i, Hawaii; others I thought raised quite important issues, be it gentrification and social stratification in Istanbul, law and order in New York, social capital and immigration in Fort Good Hope (an homogenous native settlement in Canada) and a look at the general mess that is Las Vegas. The essay on Thessaloniki was nothing short of blinding covering the use of common and public space and how it can be used to inform us about history particularly colonialism.

I could not give the book any real scope by delving into all these things in such a short space. So I wanted to start by picking out a piece on housing in Portland, Oregon and another on responses to globalisation in Diyarbakir, Kurdistan.

Portland is home to two million inhabitants. It’s highly regarded for its city planning which incorporates a very environmental ethos - so there are a mass of bike lanes and good public transport links. (pg126) But the knock on affect is people at the economic high end want a piece of the imagery and this puts stress on the demand for resources, especially key workers who need to live close to the city. (pg 130-1) This will be a familiar story to many, of gentrification.

The problem with this scenario is that grass-roots responses to this do not come easy, but Hern puts forward a few suggestions. We should be challenging market orthodoxy; firstly “the top end of the market has to be restrained aggressively and the bottom end has to be generously supported” (pg 132) and secondly, we need to push third tier housing, like co-ops and Community Land Trust’s (pg 139-40).

I am slightly uneasy with the first because, without being purist it could lend itself to the worse kind of reformist demands. The option of Community Land Trust’s sounded promising. Hern states that CLT is a movement gaining momentum in the states that tries to subsidies housing through owning the properties land, which sounds like a practical derivative of co-operative housing.

The next essay; Diyarbakir was once a major area for several empires from Byzantine to the Ottoman, but now it finds itself at the other end of the globalised economy. Hern assessing the options of the very destitute city wades his way through the offer of neo-liberalism’s ‘help’. Clearly by competing with other cities, and if the right incentives are there (i.e. profit), then investors will come. But there is a cost. Hern is explicit that markets are not the answer, despite what short term wins that can be gained.

“If we are going to talk about genuinely sustainable change in cites all over the world, we have to talk about genuine local democracy empowered to make real choices, not bound by market driven imperatives and debt-fettered discussion of privatisation and private-public partnership” (pg 177)

The genuine responses Hern calls for are for grass roots organising on the level of food security (such as perma-culture) and looking for a collective response to all kinds of shortages or the affects of ‘Economic Contraction’ as he calls it. Clearly this is on the terrain of moving beyond capitalism (with a few frugal hints to aid us along the way) which he echo’s in his conclusion, “I welcome capital flight with open arms” – as we all should, but be prepared for the bumpy ride.

Published in Freedom 2011