URBAN SPACE, POWER, AND THE EXTINCTION REBELLION IN BRISBANE
JOANNA HORTON
Drawing on the work of David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre, this essay analyses local efforts around two protest campaigns seeking to assert a “right to the city” in Brisbane. I will first examine “Break the Boundary”, a 2016 protest designed to assert the right to urban space and prefigure an alternative vision for city life. I will link this to the more recent Extinction Rebellion (XR) protests in Brisbane, arguing that these too can be understood as an attempt to claim a “right to the city”, and that XR is closely linked with the city as the space where democratic life-ways are reproduced (Dovey 2001, 67) and where the possibility of transformative change emerges. The city is central to rebellions past, present, and future.
While it is beyond the scope of this paper to trace the emergence of urbanism as “the marriage of industrialism and capitalism” (Tornaghi 2017, 294), it is sufficient to note the city’s historical role as a “modern factory”—i.e. the site of both capitalist power and major class struggle. Henri Lefebvre argued in The Right to the City (1968) that the industrial proletariat was not the only agent of social change, or even the predominant one—the new political subject was the city dweller. The city is not only the site of “accumulating economic and social tensions associated with neoliberal projects” (Jessop 2002, 455) and the struggles emerging from these tensions, but also the object of struggle itself. Many protest movements have emerged from an impetus to assert a right to the city. Such a right is “far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization” (Harvey 2003).
What does it look like to assert such a right? In 2016, a group called “Right to the City Brisbane” blocked off roughly 100 metres of Russell St in West End, and used the space for a street protest-cum-party called “Break the Boundary”. This was designed as a prefigurative attempt to embody a political ideal (Soborski 2019, 82), in this case—the right to the city. Although the affective experience of ‘breaking the boundaries’ of a city was powerful, it quickly ran up against the realities of state power: organisers were taken to court over contravening traffic regulations. The existence of the state as “another instance of the private … in relation to the commons” (Wilson and Swyngedouw 2014, 306) is a crucial reality for urban protest movements to reckon with.
Several years later, XR emerged as another Brisbane protest movement focused on disrupting urban life. Rather than prefiguring the future, XR is focused on confronting the state directly, demanding net zero emissions by 2025. There are many valid critiques of XR (see “Out of the Woods", 2019), and particularly its claim that the fundamentally political issue of climate change can be addressed by going “beyond politics”. However, its rapid growth as a worldwide direct action movement cannot be discounted. I argue that XR can also be understood through the lens of the ‘right to the city’, and that its tactics of urban disruption raise crucial questions about who and what the city is for. Such disruption is, arguably, key to urbanism itself—as Dovey (2001, 66) notes, democracy and citizenship are “quite literally ‘embodied’ in the flows of everyday life and patterns of behaviour (including public mischief) in public space.” The importance of urban space to XR has even been recognised by the courts, which imposed bail conditions on Brisbane’s XR activists forbidding them from entering the city centre.
Finally, while there is a strong link between XR and the concept of the “right to the city”, it is important to remember that such a right is not predetermined, but contested:
The financiers and developers can claim it, and have every right to do so. But then so can the homeless and the sans-papiers. We inevitably have to confront the question of whose rights are being identified, while recognizing, as Marx puts it in Capital, that “between equal rights force decides”. The definition of the right is itself an object of struggle, and that struggle has to proceed concomitantly with the struggle to materialize it. (Harvey 2012, xv)
It is a mistake to view this struggle as apolitical, or to underestimate the state’s power to combat it. However, the tenacity of urban protest movements indicate that the city will continue to be a site of contestation—both the locus and object of struggle—and that this struggle will intensify as the urgency of climate change accelerates.
References:
Dovey, Kim. 2001. "On Politics and Urban Space" in Jennifer and Butler-Bowdon Barrett, Caroline (ed.), Debating the City: An Anthology (Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales and University of New South Wales: Sydney).
Harvey, David. 2003. "The right to the city", International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27: 939-41.
———. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (Verso: London and New York).
Jessop, Bob. 2002. "Liberalism, Neoliberalism, and Urban Governance: A State-Theoretical Perspective", Antipode, 34: 452-72.
Out of the Woods. 2019. "Exinction Rebellion: Not the Struggle We Need, Pt. 1", Accessed 10 October https://libcom.org/blog/extinction-rebellion-not-struggle-we-need-pt-1-19072019.
Soborski, Rafal. 2019. "Prefigurative Politics in Anti-Neoliberal Activism: a Critique", Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 2019: 79-92.
Tornaghi, Chiara. 2017. "Urban Agriculture in the Food-Disabling City: (Re)defining Urban Food Justice, Reimagining a Politics of Empowerment", Antipode, 49: 781-801.
Wilson, Japhy, and Erik Swyngedouw. 2014. The Post-Political and Its Discontents (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh).