Revisiting the Right to the City, Rethinking Urban Environmentalism: From Lifeworld Environmentalism to Planetary Environmentalism

Margaret Haderer

doi:10.3390/socsci9020015

Abstract

In the environmental politics literature, cities are commonly framed as key sites for a shift towards greater sustainability and urban grassroots initiatives, such as food co-ops, urban gardening initiatives, repair cafés, and libraries of things, are commonly portrayed as such a shift’s key drivers. This paper develops a critical perspective on both common portrayals. It does so by drawing on critical urban theory, especially Lefebvre’s Right to the City. First, inspired by Lefebvre’s critique of city-centrism, the paper argues that the scope and limits of urban environmentalism hinge not only on the goals pursued but also on how the urban is framed. Urban environmentalism may mean mere lifeworld environmentalism: the greening of cities as if there were (relatively) bounded sites. Yet urban environmentalism may also mean planetary environmentalism: the mapping, problematization, and transformation of unsustainable urbanization processes that underpin given sites and lifeworlds, but also operate at beyond the latter—at a societal and planetary scale. Second, inspired by Lefebvre’s reformulation of right claims as a transformative political tool, this paper takes issue with environmental practices and discourses that present society’s niches, cracks, and margins as a key fermenting ground for radical environmental change. Since not only institutional but also bottom-up pursuits of more sustainable nature-society relations often remain stuck in mere lifeworld reform, this paper foregrounds heterodox right claims as an underexplored modus operandi in active pursuits of and discourses on radical environmental change. Heterodox right claims mean the active appropriation of dominant political languages, such as the language of right, while seeking to change the latter’s grammar. What this may mean in the realm of environmental politics, will be spelled out at hand of the example of claims to a right to public transport.

Highlights

In recent years, especially cities in the Global North seem to have turned into vibrant sites for acting on socio-ecological challenges, such as climate change, resource exhaustion, biodiversity loss, and socio-ecological injustices
By bringing environmental sociology and politics into conversation with urban theory, this paper seeks most importantly to spark greater reflexivity on how the urban is framed in environmental discourses and interventions, that is, greater reflexivity on epistemologies of the urban
Depending on how the urban is understood and framed in given interventions and discourses, urban environmentalism may mean mere lifeworld environmentalism, but it may mean planetary environmentalism

Summary

Introduction

Especially cities in the Global North seem to have turned into vibrant sites for acting on socio-ecological challenges, such as climate change, resource exhaustion, biodiversity loss, and socio-ecological injustices. (for a critique of this reduction, see Angelo and Wachsmuth 2015), but conceived of and framed as a product of and producer of unsustainable societal and planetary processes, pursuing urban environmentalism may mean more than lifeworld environmentalism: namely, the mapping, problematizing, and—ideally—reconfiguring of urban(ized) life and (some of its) economic, socio-metabolic, socio-ecological, and socio-cultural implications that underpin, but clearly operate beyond the boundaries of any given city.

Urban Environmentalism and Its Drivers

Framing Political Claims as Right Claims

Conclusions