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ABSTRACT
In the contemporary American urban renaissance, formerly fringe efforts to produce place, conducted by longtime residents and “urban pioneers” alike, now shape mainstream urbanism. Gardening and bicycling are constitutive of contemporary excitement about the city, representing the reinvigoration of the urban neighborhood following the depredations of suburbanization. This paper draws on research in California cities to offer a sympathetic critique of these leading edges of progressive urbanism, arguing that advocates’ overwhelming focus on the local creates a scalar mismatch between the horizon of political action and the problems they hope to address. Even as supporters of gardening and cycling understand themselves as implicitly allied with struggles for the right to the city, their work to produce local space is often blind to, and even complicit in, racialized dynamics of accumulation and exclusion that organize metropolises. The result is a progressive urbanism largely disconnected from broader left struggles for spatial justice.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the staff of the Los Angeles Food Policy Council and Bike East Bay, among many others, for sharing their time, knowledge, and connections to other organizations in Los Angeles and Oakland, respectively. We would also like to acknowledge the participants in our “Towards a Regional Progressivism” discussion session at the the 2016 Urban Affairs Association Annual Conference for their insights on local and regional politics. Lastly, we are grateful to the three anonymous referees whose incisive comments were indispensable for improving the paper. As usual, any errors or omissions are our own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. As opposed to cycling for sport, though for obvious reasons many bicycle users practice both. Hereafter, “cycling” refers to bicycle use for transportation.
2. In doing so, we will conceptually distinguish between the urban left and “progressive urbanism.” If the former most closely identified with the Right to the City framework, the latter is the inheritor of Jane Jacobs, Donald Appleyard, and other progressive planners from the 1960s onward. Despite the fact that the two overlap in practice, we feel that, in many cities, a turning point has arrived, in which livability has become a key basis for urban economic competitiveness, leading to conflict with a more redistributive urban agenda. See Henderson for the concept of “progressive-neoliberal hybridization” (Citation2013) and a suggestive paper by Atkinson and Jorgensen (Citation2014) on the fragmentation of progressive planning.
3. In 2015, for instance, serious political fissures emerged within the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, with an ultimately unsuccessful reform slate linked to social and economic justice organizations like Causa Justa/Just Cause and People Organizing to Demand Economic and Environmental Rights (PODER) urging a shift toward a more community-engaged political strategy.
4. This is also a scale problem. An urban community garden or bicycle facility may appear to trouble the hegemony of “Big Ag” or “Big Auto,” respectively – whose interests shape state and national politics – while potentially reinforcing the arguably more decisive dominance of real estate capital for urban politics. See Logan and Molotch (Citation2007).
5. See Furness (Citation2010) for a broader history of such community bike spaces.
6. In cases where bicycle infrastructure is somewhat functionally regional, it tends to extend the “last mile” of access to transit networks. The new Bay Area Bikeshare system is an extreme example, connecting a handful of wealthy Silicon Valley cities to downtown San Francisco 40 miles to the north via the high-priced Caltrain commuter rail. In such last mile solutions, improved access is likely to be capitalized locally as rent.
7. Infrastructure development is by definition processual, and cannot occur all at once – we appreciate the reminder from one of our anonymous reviewers to address this point. Nevertheless, there exists a definite bias in bicycle infrastructure provision (particularly bicycle sharing systems) toward areas that will show immediate success, which tend also to serve wealthier and whiter constituencies.
8. This dynamic has long been recognized as key to the more marginal practices of gentrification, and the contradictory liberatory spaces they produce (Rose, Citation1984).
9. Celebrations of the economic savings of bike lanes over highways and bus rapid transit (BRT) over light rail systems are common, for instance.
10. On the contrary, quality of life has been historically a working-class issue, and in the United States especially the history of racism in apportioning livable existence in space makes quality of life absolutely critical to an antiracist urban politics.
11. It should be recalled, for instance, that in Logan and Molotch’s classic theory of the political economy of place, the structural contradiction is not between use-value and exchange-value per se, but between place-based use-values that can be capitalized and place-based use-values that are destroyed by capitalization (Citation2007).