Debate: City Spaces and Systems: When Protecting Turf May be Justified

I. AUTONOMY AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN CITY SPACES

Monaghan offers two stylized urban policy regimes that capture the various normative impulses associated with the problems of turf: “market urbanism” and “collective control.” For market urbanists, “cities develop according to individual choices in a basically free market. Cities must raise revenue somehow, but they won’t have zoning policy, restrictions on floor-area ratios, mandatory parking minimums, preservation districts, and so on. This is to deny the neighborhood or local community all privilege, instead seeing the city as a competitive, individualist market for property claims and territory formation.”⁴ This regime attempts to disrupt turf-making, and the unjust and/or coercive forms of exclusion that come with it, by making it easy for anyone to exercise a veto through their purchasing decisions and freedom of movement. Territory will be created by those who want to make it but is only ephemerally enforceable in the face of a dynamic and changing urban environment, which policy does nothing to stop and indeed aims to support.

In contrast, for the regime of collective control, neighborhoods are understood “as essentially connected to a people who have a sense of place-based community. This rejects the competitive individualism of market urbanism in favor of organizing the city according to the decisions of the place-based collectives who make claims to local territory …. enforcing collective control over local territory requires giving a group a set of specific political powers.”⁵ This regime attempts to protect the ability for people to establish and maintain territory in the face of market processes that may undermine it illegitimately. Of course, in doing this it concedes a certain tendency toward turf, since these mechanisms can be used to exclude or marginalize people and interests within these territories.

These regimes are meant to serve as models that explicate political impulses in debates over urban governance and policy, which orient the normative conclusions of the theorists who implicitly rely on them.⁶ They also capture the practical stakes of these normative orientations. Thinking of cities in terms of market urbanism leads to an emphasis on the problem of turf as fundamentally resulting from over-zealous and problematic community constraints on individuals. This focuses the normative theorist toward worries about gatekeeping, recommending efforts to remove zoning or land use restrictions, lower veto points in construction approval processes, and generally reduce requirements for construction and purchase, in order to ensure that spaces better reflect the interests of, and are more accountable to, those that occupy them. Collective control models lead toward a normative emphasis on community autonomy, and thus prescribes mechanisms to help secure and bolster groups’ abilities to govern themselves (and their space) in the face of unfavorable conditions. This leads to advocacy for community hearings and approvals requirements, local ward prerogatives over land-use decision-making, and heightened zoning restrictions.

In the next section I will suggest that the shortcomings of each approach can be understood in a different way. It’s not just that market urbanism tends to protect territory less than we might like, or that collective control has a tendency to harden territory into turf. It’s that neither model fully attends to the role such localized spaces play in cities generally. If we think of urban space not just in terms of its potential to facilitate (as territory) or hamper (as turf) individuals’ interests and freedom, but also in terms of its function as part of a broader urban system, then we can ask the question of when different sorts of spaces are relevant or necessary for maintaining or achieving a well-ordered city.

II. URBAN SPACES IN URBAN SYSTEMS

Using a systemic logic to understand the urban spaces Monaghan discusses helps us see different sorts of normative concerns that are at stake The argument that cities ought to be understood as systems has been made by many.⁷ Cities conceived of as systems are often too swiftly and problematically analogized to organisms and biological systems, but this is not necessary for approaching cities as entailing systems.⁸ Bettancourt captures this well in contending that cities are best understood as systems not because of some intrinsic organic quality they have, but because they are at a scale that produces heterogeneity, and that the components of this heterogeneity are interconnected, mutually affecting, and tend toward unintended change.⁹ Understanding cities in terms of systems, then, merely requires recognizing that cities have emergent properties not borne by their component parts, and which are not produced intentionally by their citizens. Given this, the existence of such phenomena does not require strong metaphysical assumptions or, say, violating methodological individualism.¹⁰ Nor does it require equating the city’s functionality with its justness. We can ascribe a systemic quality to a city, noting its patterns represent a kind of equilibrium, and still note that the equilibrium is suboptimal or unjust. Put differently, a system approach to cities does not displace normative assessment, but rather aids in it by drawing attention to emergent phenomena that might otherwise be missed in a focus on more local phenomena.

If we understand cities in terms of systems in this manner, neighborhoods present themselves as an important part of such structures, as urban sociologists and planners have emphasized the functions they play in a healthy city. This is perhaps most evocatively and influentially discussed by Jane Jacobs, who Monaghan favorably cites throughout his article. Jacobs discusses the “uses” of city neighborhoods as “mundane organs of self-government … in its broadest sense, meaning both the informal and formal self-management of society.”¹¹ Crucially, their function in this way derives from two qualities they possess. First, neighborhoods are not autonomous “self-contained or introverted units,” since “the lack of either economic or social self-containment is natural and necessary to city neighborhoods.” Second, neighborhoods reflect a partiality: they are more responsive to the concerns and wants of their residents than those outside them.¹² This understanding of city space as contributing to the realization of communities that are neither autonomous units nor mere collections of individuals is summarized well by Jacobs: “neighborhoods in cities need not supply for their people an artificial town or village life, and to aim at this is both silly and destructive. But neighborhoods in cities do need to supply some means for civilized self-government. This is the problem.”¹³

Non-autonomous neighborhoods contribute to self-government, for Jacobs, by marshalling their partiality toward the creation of goods and activities that are necessary for urban self-government in general. Jacobs famously explains how city streets create a specific sort of sociality that facilitates the public goods of safety, trust, and citizenship (the assimilation of “children into reasonable responsible and tolerant city life”).¹⁴ Such goods are produced neither in a rational top-down manner by city hall, nor by citizens consciously aiming to produce such lofty and necessary goals in small-scale villages; rather they are the outcomes of people navigating their neighborhood spaces in ordinary and pedestrian ways (pun intended). This is captured more generally by Rapoport as neighborhoods’ unique ability to make a large, ever-changing, and potentially daunting urban environment feel chosen by those live there.¹⁵ It is precisely their orientation of the mundane aspects of residents’ individual pursuits that enables neighborhoods to serve as an interface between the diverse lives and aims of individual city dwellers and the shared public thing that is the city.¹⁶

Instead of repairing to models of organisms or machines to make sense of urban systems, my preferred model is to think in terms of “playing fields.” As I’ve argued elsewhere, playing fields refer to larger-scale systems that are composed of mid-level organizations or institutions (not individuals); such organizations exhibit partiality – that is, they pursue their own particular ends –and position individuals within to aid in such pursuits, but still contribute some socially desirable end by virtue of systemic imperatives and incentives.¹⁷ Competitive markets, which discipline and orient profit-seeking firms toward greater social efficiency, are an example. By conceiving of things in this manner the playing field schema is meant to aim theorists away from emphases on group level autonomy (as if organizations were self-governing bubbles in a vacuum) or social accountability (as if organizations were a mere extension of the body politic), instead focusing on how the particular structure and parochial aims of meso-level bodies are oriented from without to realize social aims (e.g. urban safety or socialization). Neighborhoods are of course not the discrete entities that firms of universities are. Still, the model is helpful in drawing attention to how neighborhoods help realize normative objectives in cities indirectly and precisely by virtue of the fact that they are not doing so in a rational top-down manner, but by orienting the partiality of residents. This helps re-articulate the flaws of market urbanism and community control models in a different manner. By focusing on trying to hold existing oppressive structures in neighborhoods more accountable to the people who are subject to them (as market urbanists do) or trying to render such communities more autonomously governed (as collective control does) both models miss that these spaces are irreducibly heteronomous – governed by both the particular people living within, and the laws and economic incentives coming from without, urban neighborhoods.

III. TURF AS A RESPONSE TO UNJUST URBAN SYSTEMS

I have thus suggested that city spaces generally, and neighborhood spaces in particular, ought to be understood as important parts of urban systems, which contribute to the functioning of the cities they are a part. Furthermore, the reasons why such urban spaces can serve this function is that they are heteronomous – they are governed and affected by both an internal partiality of their residents and the external structuring of their pursuits (through law, economic incentive, and the built environment) by the cities they constitute. This is, I think, grist for Monaghan’s mill, helping account for both why establishing territory is important and why certain mechanisms for protecting it in the face of a city’s natural dynamism create harmful turf, upending the functioning of an urban system.

That is, the point so far is to say Monaghan’s insight travels and can sensibly be articulated in a systemic register. The merits of doing so are that it further articulates the shortcomings of the “collective control” impulses of many political theorists but in terms of a socio-political understanding of cities: the problem of collective control isn’t just that it can tend to harm individuals’ rights and interests, but that it does so on behalf of a misunderstanding of the social and political role that neighborhoods are meant to play in a self-governing democratic city –as if they were “self-contained introverted units” of cities. That neighborhoods are elements of the “self-management of society” does not mean, as Jacobs teaches us, that we ought to treat neighborhoods as polities writ small, to be governed democratically like small colonial towns. Rather, they are sui generis parts of larger political systems, which need to be treated as such.

The upshot of such a perspective is that it suggests an additional normative dimension of urban space, which is not just whether it is constituted justly or unjustly, but whether and how it contributes to larger structures and patterns that may themselves be just or unjust. To refer to the Mad Men epigram at the start of this article, the ticking and functioning hum of the urban system may be a clock, but it can also be a bomb. When it’s the latter – when the system tends toward injustice – this alters our assessment of different forms of urban space, given their place in contributing to this emergent state of affairs. This is where the potential normative merits of turf become more obvious and allow for a more charitable interpretation of collective control. When larger structures and patterns of social life tend toward marginalization or inequality, establishing turf may be a necessary (or at least less obviously unjust) means for resisting or correcting such larger dynamics.

This insight helps to explain why we might have different intuitive responses to turf claims made in distinct historical and social contexts. Consider three instances of urban space-making. First, the 1890 erecting of a Robert E. Lee statue on Richmond’s Memorial Avenue (eventually to be torn down 130 years later). This was, in both intent and reception, an assertion of racial turf, a way of asserting the status of descendants of the confederate aristocracy as Richmond’s political economy shifted from the racial feudal order of the Antebellum period to the financial and commercial economy of the post-reconstruction era.¹⁸ Second, the renaming of avenues in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the late nineteenth century from numbers (e.g. 11^th Avenue) to their current names (e.g. West End Avenue). This was largely the result of property-owners’ and real estate developers’ efforts to pre-empt the more informal and “crass” names the existing shanty-dwellers were giving the numbered avenues by endowing them with more dignified names; the goal was to facilitate the eviction of the current inhabitants to make the space amenable to development for richer inhabitants.¹⁹ Third, in a similar vein, the renaming of streets and parks in Harlem, like Marcus Garvey Park in 1973 or Malcolm X Boulevard in 1987. This was meant as a way of both honoring achievements of Black Americans but also, importantly, to bolster the status of Harlem as a historically important Black space in New York City.²⁰

These are all examples of space-making claims that tend toward turf, asserting ownership or authenticity of some group within some space in a way that renders others marginal in some fashion. It should be noted that they lack the formal coercion that characterizes the most egregious forms of turf, yet I bring them up as illustrations because, intuitively, they seem to have different normative statuses, with the latter seemingly to be an either benign or positive example of turf-claiming, especially in contrast to the first, explicitly racist, form of turf creation. The point isn’t just to be pedantic by focusing on marginal cases, but rather to show how these distinctions clarify something important about the normative status of turf. The Richmond example of turf-making in favor of white supremacy is establishing turf on behalf of a legacy that justice demands be dismantled; the Harlem street-naming activity is establishing turf in an effort to dismantle that legacy. This suggests a different argument for claimants of collective control, which would go something like this: “Perhaps it would be ideal that no zero-sum claims be made on city space, so that everyone’s ability to claim territory could be respected. However, in most cities, many spaces are already inhospitable, or contribute to intolerable inequalities, to specific groups of people. Claiming turf – not just territory – is important as a way for such groups to assert themselves against such conditions.” What is crucial here is that this defense of collective control doesn’t rest on the normative imperative of neighborhood autonomy and the foundational right of communities to resist interference from without; rather it rests on a broader claim of extant injustice, and the idea that collective control and turf-protecting are means of responding to it.

Critics of gentrification, and those who defend “the right to the city,” do a disservice to their own ambitions on this view when framing their claims in terms of a right to democratic control. In contrast to those who ground criticism of gentrification in its trespassing of community’s right to autonomy, the wrong of gentrification or the good of community is better grounded in a broader claim about inequality or marginalization with regards to the groups whose space is in question.²¹ If we think about the case of the upper west side of Manhattan, and developers’ attempts to rename streets in order to develop the area, we can imagine the inhabitants might try to resist this by making this space inhospitable to upper class people, claiming it as turf for working class residents. While we might debate the merits or wisdom of such a strategy, the point here is that the rationale for doing it would be as a response to an unequal distribution of political power and economic heft; absent such means, such turf-claimers might say, the prevailing dynamics will create turf that excludes them.

This sort of dynamic is famously depicted in Spike Lee’s 1989 classic Do The Right Thing, where Buggin’ Out confronts a nameless white character who, wearing a Larry Bird jersey, runs over Buggin Out’s sneakers on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant.²²

Buggin’ Out : You almost knocked me down, man. The word is “excuse me.”

Bike-rider : Ah, excuse me, I’m sorry.

Buggin’ Out : Not only did you knock me down, you stepped on my brand-new white Air Jordans I just bought, and that’s all you can say is “excuse me”?

Bike-rider : What, are you serious?

Buggin’ Out : Yeah, I’m serious, I’ll fuck you up quick two times. Who told you to step on my sneakers, who told you to walk on my side of the block, who told you to be in my neighborhood?

Bike-rider : I own this brownstone.

Buggin’ Out : Who told you to buy a brownstone on my block, in my neighborhood, on my side of the street? Yo, what you wanna live in a Black neighborhood for, anyway? Man, motherfuck gentrification.

Bike-rider: As I understand it, this is a free country, a man can live wherever he wants.

Buggin’ Out: A free country? I should fuck you up for saying that stupid shit alone.

Buggin Out here is making a claim, impotently and arguably misguidedly, to Bedford-Stuyvesant being a specific sort of turf, a Black neighborhood. To the bike-rider’s response that he owns property and therefore has a right to be there (we later learn he is a Brooklyn native), Buggin Out’s claim is simply that these freedoms are not real, or at least, not real for everyone. Buggin Out’s justification for Bed Stuy being Black turf (not merely territory) is the broader racial inequality that marks New York City – an inequality that asserts itself in both small and tragic ways throughout the film. We can think of similar sorts of arguments regarding, for instance, the creation of traditionally gay and queer neighborhoods like Chicago’s Boystown or San Francisco’s Castro. These are spaces that are claimed for some and not others, justified because of the oppressive and dangerous nature of the rest of the city for sexual minorities.

Of course, such claims are importantly not dispositive or categorical; Monaghan is still right that turf-making comes with inherent pathologies that must be taken seriously and may (often) outweigh the political utility of such tactics. Indeed, with regards to queer neighborhoods, many have noted how their maintenance can easily facilitate racist gatekeeping and class-based gentrification, undercutting their emancipatory rationale.²³ In the Harlem street-naming case, there was resistance to renaming Fifth Avenue to Marcus Garvey Boulevard, precisely because many residents didn’t think the racial coding of the street was worth losing connection to the prestige that Fifth Avenue generally evokes.²⁴ The point, then, isn’t to completely redeem turf or all claims to turf’s justifiability. Rather, the point is simply to note that when we think of urban space not just in terms of the way it emanates from, or hampers, individual choices and decisions in an ideal-theoretic manner, but the way it fits within broader non-ideal social and political structures, there’s reason to think about turf as having redeeming qualities that need to be taken into account. Furthermore, these redeeming qualities can be taken into account without recourse to idealized claims regarding the good or right of community control.

IV. CONCLUSION: RE-ASSERTING THE POLITICAL

I have attempted to offer a friendly intervention into Monaghan’s discussion of turf and territory. My argument has been that though he is right to be concerned about the establishment and protection of turf in cities, and that often non-malign motivations stemming from community control can contribute to the creation of malignant turf, there are instances when turf might serve a legitimate social and political purpose. Perhaps more importantly, I have suggested that this becomes more apparent when we view the city in systemic terms, with neighborhoods and urban spaces understood as playing a role in such systems. When we do, the possibility that systems are misfiring and reinforcing injustice becomes a live possibility, as does the potential for carving out spaces meant to empower those who bear the burden of those injustices.

I’d like to conclude with a more general thought that is slightly presumptuous on my part as it involves reading something into Monaghan’s work that he doesn’t say explicitly. Though skeptical of various common types of urban policy interventions, Monaghan’s argument does not deny the need for government or politics in city life. Indeed, elsewhere he has quite convincingly shown the problems of a libertarian approach to urban environments.²⁵ There is, however, I think a more general skepticism about the need or role for democratic politics.²⁶ The reason, I think, is made clear in his argument regarding urban space: an over-emphasis on this normative goal in cities tends to create turf, which then tends to marginalize and oppress. To make the city more territorial –so people can pursue their lives through cityscapes in which they feel at home – and less turf-like –so our at-homeness doesn’t comes at the cost of others’ –we ought to try to depoliticize our cities in this way as much as possible.

The implicit reservation on Monaghan’s part is, I think, understandable. To the extent that emphases on democracy in the city tend to default to claims about the importance of local autonomy and community control, they do appear as just so many attempts to try and undo or stymie the diversity and dynamism of cities, as well the positive economic and liberatory byproducts of respecting this diversity and dynamism. But if instead of viewing neighborhoods as a polities writ-small we see them as parts of an emergent system, we can capture both the importance of protecting against the closure of urban space – since this is a key part of how such spaces contribute to a healthy and functioning city – and the possibility of democratic empowerment – as the means by which a city monitors, assesses, and revises the desirability of this systemic integration. What such a view suggests, however, is that sometimes these spaces are plausibly enlisted in democratic contests over city injustice, which is why we might respond to various sorts of turf claims differently and more sympathetically than others.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Jake Monaghan and Jennifer Forestal for their help in the conception and execution of this article.

COMPETING INTERESTS

The author declares that he has no competing interests.