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Peter Marcuse
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Peter Marcuse

1928–2022

American planner and lawyer whose whole body of work turns on one question: who is planning for.

Marcuse worked all his life on the border between law and urbanism, and held that planning is never technical: every plan distributes, and every distribution has winners. His distinction between the exclusion of the poor and the «walling in» of the rich remains one of the most useful tools for reading a plan.

Against an urbanism justified by competitiveness or attracting investment, he defended a criterion that is simple to apply: a city is just when the benefit goes to those who need it most, not to those who can best pay for it.

The son of the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, born in Berlin in 1928 and dead in 2022, Peter Marcuse was a lawyer for twenty years before taking a doctorate in planning and teaching at Columbia University, where he directed the urban planning programme. His 1985 typology of displacement, which distinguishes direct, pressure and exclusionary displacement, remains the tool with which what gentrification does to residents is measured, and his comparative studies of New York and Berlin joined housing research on both sides of the Atlantic.

Globalizing Cities (2000, with Ronald van Kempen) asked whether cities fragment alike under globalisation; Searching for the Just City (2009) and Cities for People, Not for Profit (2012) gathered critical urban theory; and his 2009 article on the right to the city asked whose right it is and to what city. In Defense of Housing (2016, with David Madden) was his last and most widely read book: housing is at once home and commodity, and the crisis is what happens when the commodity wins.

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