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September 2002

ISBN:
1-58367-060-2
$18.95 paper


ISBN:
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$50.00 cloth

192 pp.

Urban Studies/Politics

DIALECTICAL URBANISM

Social Struggles in the Capitalist City

by Andy Merrifield

“Dialectical Urbanism shows a fruitful direction for the Marxism of the future. Exploring the collision between abstract capitalist space and concrete human place, Andy Merrifield offers a fresh vision of the totality of modern life.”
— MARSHALL BERMAN, City University of New York, author of Adventures in Marxism and All That Is Solid Melts into Air

“Intellectually stimulating, morally passionate . . . .”
— PETER MARCUSE, Columbia University, author of Missing Marx: A Personal and Political Journal of a Year in East Germany

Life in the city can be both liberating and oppressive. The contemporary city is an arena in which new and unexpected personal identities and collective agencies are forged and at the same time the major focus of market forces intent on making all life a commodity. This book explores both sides of the urban experience, developing a perspective from which the contradictory nature of the politics of the city comes more clearly into view.

Dialectical Urbanism discusses a range of issues, conflicts, and struggles through detailed case-studies set in Liverpool, Baltimore, New York, and Los Angeles. Issues which affect the quality of everyday life in the city—gentrification and development, affordable rents, the accountability of local government, the domination of the urban landscape by new corporate giants, policing—are located in the context of larger political and economic forces. At the same time, the narrative constantly returns to those moments in which city-dwellers discover and develop their capacity to challenge larger forces and decide their own conditions of life, becoming active citizens rather than the passive consumers.

Merrifield draws on a wide range of sources—from interviews with activists and tenants fighting eviction to government and corporate reports—and uncovers surprising connections, for example, between the rise of junk bonds in the 1980s and urban improvement schemes in a working-class neighborhood in Baltimore. This lively and many-sided narrative is constantly informed by broader analyses and reflections on the city and engages with these analyses in turn. It fuses scholarship and political engagement into a powerful defense of the possibilities of life in the metropolis today.

Table of Contents

Chapter One — Dialectical Urbanism and the Metropolitan Spirit
Chapter Two — Canned Heat: Class Struggles Around the Built
Environment in Baltimore
Chapter Three — Them and Us?: Rebuilding the Ruins in Liverpool
Chapter Four — The Urbanization of Labor: Living Wage Activism in Los Angeles
Chapter Five — Disorder and Zero Tolerance: The Dialectics of Dystopia
Chapter Six — Lepers at the City Gate: Single Room Occupancy and New York’s Housing Crisis
Chapter Seven — Two-Fold Urbanism: A Negative Dialectic of the City

About the Author
ANDY MERRIFIELD teaches in the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University in Worcester, Massachussets. He is co-editor of The Urbanization of Injustice (NYU Press, 1997). His writings have appeared in The Nation, Monthly Review, Rethinking Marxism, and New Left Review. He recently moved from London to New York City.

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