Andy Merrifield: Critique of Neoliberalism and the Right to the City

Andy Merrifield is the British geographer and essayist who has renewed the Marxist critique of the city with a literary style and an insistent question: what does the right to the city mean when urbanization no longer has an outside. Author of Metromarxism (2002), Magical Marxism (2011), The Politics of the Encounter (2013) and The New Urban Question (2014), Merrifield starts from Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey to argue that neoliberalism has turned the city into a rent-extraction machine, and that the answer cannot be merely to claim rights but to invent new forms of political encounter in urban space.

The New Urban Question: the parasitic city and neo-Haussmannization

The New Urban Question takes up Manuel Castells's 1972 title to update the diagnosis. If the urban question of the 1970s was collective consumption, housing, transport, services, the new urban question is the parasitic city: an economy in which elites no longer produce but extract, through land ownership, finance, privatisations and platforms, the value that urban life creates. Merrifield calls this neo-Haussmannization, after Haussmann's Paris: a global rebuilding of cities that expels the poor from the centres, fragments space and turns every neighbourhood into a financial asset.

Lefebvre revisited: planetary urbanization and the right to the city

His reading of Lefebvre is at once faithful and critical. Faithful because he adopts the thesis of planetary urbanization, the completely urbanised society Lefebvre anticipated in 1970, and the idea that the city is a collective work. Critical because he considers that the right to the city, as adopted by governments and agencies, has become an empty concept, a right to something that no longer exists as a bounded object. If the urban is planetary, Merrifield says, claiming the city means claiming everything, and another politics is needed.

The politics of the encounter: from Tahrir to Zuccotti Park

That other politics is the politics of the encounter. In The Politics of the Encounter Merrifield proposes replacing the logic of rights, which asks the state to recognise something, with that of assembly: bodies that coincide in the square, the street, the network, and in coinciding discover a power they did not have separately. The squares of 2011, from Tahrir to Sol and Zuccotti Park, are his example: they did not claim a specific right but exercised the city by occupying it. Merrifield acknowledges the fragility of those moments, but holds that they are the form urban politics takes when institutions have been captured.

Magical Marxism: imagination against complaint

Magical Marxism defends a Marxism of imagination against one of complaint: it is not enough to denounce the neoliberal city; other forms of life must be tried within it, cooperatives, occupations, commons, practices Merrifield calls affirmative. His critics reproach him for a romanticism that underestimates the power of state and capital, and a preference for the insurgent moment over the patient building of institutions. He replies that institutional patience produced the parasitic city, and that imagination is a political resource as real as a budget.

Merrifield's contribution to urban studies is to keep Lefebvre's question alive under new conditions. The neoliberal city is not only unequal but extractive, and against it the right to the city must become practice: encounters, commons, occupations, ways of inhabiting that do not ask permission. For those who plan or govern, his work is an uncomfortable reminder that the legitimacy of any urban policy is measured by what it does for those the city expels.