Chapter 23 - Grassroots Struggles for the City of The Many: From the Politics of Spatiality to the Spatialities of Politics

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Particularly during the last two decades of her career, Doreen Massey concerned herself with the politics and ethics in and of cities. In some ways this begins in her classic essay “A Global Sense of Place” (Massey 1991a), set in London’s Kilburn neighbourhood where she lived. Yet some prime interventions are the little-known critique (with Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift) of Blairite urban policy in the United Kingdom, Cities for the Many Not the Few (Amin et al. 2000), and her final monograph on London: World City (Massey 2007). These writings emanated from her own active engagement in London’s politics and policy-making, as a close advisor to “red” Ken Livingston, both as Leader of the Greater London Council until Margaret Thatcher abolished it (1981–6), and as the newly created Mayor of London (2000–8).

Yet, for all her interest in urban politics, Doreen paid relatively little attention to its raggedy edges of urban activism and social movements, such as more-than-capitalist urban commoning. From her writings, her interest seems to have been in empowering the rights to the city for the many by primarily engaging with formal politics. In this brief chapter, we critically interrogate the implications of her relational conceptualization of place and spatiotemporality, and of the politics of spatiality, for urban activism. Endorsing her argument that “you can’t [just] take a theory off the shelf and use it” (Hoyler 1999: 73), we write back to her theoretical reflections from our own studies of urban commoning in Los Angeles and Jakarta. From this perspective, we argue that spatialities and politics are dialectically interrelated, implying that her politics of spatiality should be extended to embrace the spatialities of real world politics (realpolitik). The chapter is organized as follows. We summarize those aspects of her rich body of sociospatial theory of particular relevance here (section 2), introduce the two urban commoning case studies (section 3), and critically reflect on and extend her politics of spatiality (section 4).