Tactical Urbanism

I'm really becoming a fan of Neil Brenner. His book New State Spaces is both enlightening and frightening. But, he also runs the Urban Theory Lab at Harvard where they promote something called Tactical Urbanism, which basically starts with the assumption that global capital is entirely too powerful to challenge on their own turf, an assessment that I agree with. The power of global capital is really unreal. They can, more or less, force governments - from national to local and even sublocal - to create institutional arrangements favorable to the extraction of wealth from local communities. This is what gentrification is all about. The local government and economic development orgs are merely appendages of global capital, which is reshaping Birmingham in profound ways (outside agitators anyone?). The government can no longer challenge this power in any way. The only thing that can challenge this power are institutions of labor.

This could come in two forms. 1) A global labor movement confronting global capital on their own terrain. This is symmetric warfare. This is unlikely because of the difficulty in organizing so many different cultures, languages, etc and because unions have been virtually destroyed. 2) The other option is Tactical Urbanism, which basically means to create institutions of labor on the local level that produce small spaces where the rules of global capital don't dominate or, at least, are lessened. In theory, these would build wealth and grow to the point of being, if not a threat, a real alternative to institutions of global capital and the style of life that they promote. What MCAP does can be categorized as Tactical Urbanism. This is asymmetric warfare.

I think that this is important because it is not possible to lobby the government for any significant changes at this point in history. Cities are pitted against other cities in competition for investment, globally. Birmingham is in competition not just with Chattanooga and Jackson, but also with Acapulco and Timbuktu, which puts global capital in the position to dictate to governments, particularly city governments, how to set up their institutions. This is as much about the Violence Reduction Initiative (privately funded) as it is about Avondale (privately funded). This is also why local leaders are travelling the globe looking for investment capital.

I don't think that this can be understated. A far left party, Syriza won the election in Greece, recently. Greece, which is in debt, and thus in heavy need of global capital held a referendum on whether or not to reject global capital and default. The people voted to default. Nonetheless, Syriza capitulated and accepted all the terms of the banks. If a far-left government has to bend to the whims of global capital, why would our little city be any different? The only option is to use the government the same way that global capital uses the government - for resources. If we can get 5% of what global capital gets in terms of resources, we can build real alternatives.

Global capital has more power than any class of people have had in the history of the planet. We have almost no institutions with which to fight back. We must begin building them