Διαθέσιμο και στα Ελληνικά ΕΔΩ. An interview with anarchist urbanist Jere Kuzmanić, from Split, Croatia. He is a researcher, PhD candidate, and department member at the Polytechnic University of Catalunya in Barcelona. He participates in scientific and activist research projects with a particular interest in social and environmental justice, direct action and cooperation in urbanism and urban ‘degrowth’. The questions were prepared by Yavor Tarinski.
Yavor Tarinski: Nowadays there is a lot of talk about Right to the City, with different people and tendencies meaning different things. But in their majority, the voices around this concept agree that urban dwellers should have more say regarding their urban environment. You’r work corresponds with this spirit, when you are talking of the anarchist roots of urban planning. Can you tell us more about them?
Jere Kuzmanić: Indeed, contemporary demands for active citizenship as a form of articulation of new political subjects for the 21st century are very present both theoretically and practical context of urban struggles, cooperative and solidarity economy, housing movements, Right to the City activism, etc. However, this demand for more autonomy and control over the built environment is not new; in fact, it has been long present in polemics within and about self-organised dynamics of the urban working class since the beginnings of industrialisation and urbanisation that resulted in experiences of rent strikes, land occupations and self-help housing culture of informal settlements around the whole world. It was also present in late 19th century debates of anarchist geographers such as Elisee Reclus, Charles Perron, and Pjotr Kropoktin, who are the reason why the anarchist theory, unlike Marxist that was conceived primarily in circles of political and social philosophy, was from the very beginning very spatial (federations of small communities, integration of agriculture and industry through Kropotkinian integration of labour, cities as the composition of independent neighbourhoods at the same time dependent of provision from countryside, questioning property, etc.). Subsequently, some of these ideas were very influential among some of the key pioneers of the idea that the cities should be planned to achieve a better quality of life for everyone, embedded in people like Ebeneezer Howard, Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford. This hypothesis is presented in geographer Peter Hall´s seminal book on the history of urban planning, Cities of Tomorrow (1988). Hall stated that many of the first ideals of the twentieth-century urban planning movement “arose from the anarchist movement, which flourished in the last decades of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th century. That is true for Howard, for Geddes and for the Regional Planning Association of America, as well as for many derivatives in the European continent” (Hall 1988, 4). Moreover, Hall noted another key area of anarchism’s influence: bottom-up urbanism. “Built forms of cities should”, writes Hall, “come from the hands of their own citizens; that we should reject the tradition whereby large organisations, private or public, build for people, and instead embrace the notion that people should build for themselves. We can find this notion powerfully present in the anarchist thinking (…), and in particular in Geddesian notions of piecemeal urban rehabilitation between 1885 and 1920 (…). It resurfaces to provide a major, even a dominant, ideology of planning in third-world cities through the work of John Turner – himself drawing directly from anarchist thinking – in Latin America during the 1960s” (Hall 2014, 9)
My particular research, done as PhD with prof. Jose Luis Oyon and prof. Marta Serra from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia is focused on the curious fact that all these figures and experiences were strongly connected and influenced each other beyond our common knowledge. It is well documented in the works of some historians such as Federico Ferretti how many of these figures mentioned above were biographically connected, exchanged letters, made visits and collaborations and actively co-developed their ideas on how the territories can be a result of self-managed and grassroots actions done by well-informed, well-organised citizens who practically activate their knowledge on their surroundings, neighbourhoods, cities and regions. Less is known about how the active exchange of post-war architects on regional, decentralist, and vernacular principles that shall be implemented through various schools of urban planning was influenced and connected to these same ‘anarchist’ roots. These ideas have a continuous evolution from the 19th century, over the regionalist movement in the UK and USA at the beginning of the 20th century, and the generation of post second world war architects and planners who started to implement participation and citizen control in their projects like Giancarlo De Carlo and John Turner in the UK and South America. It finally proliferated in various theoretical and political concepts in works such as the Italian territorialist school of Alberto Magnaghi, the critical urban theory of Mike Davis, and especially the work of Murray Bookchin, for whom we could say that he closed the entire circle with the geographers of 19th century when connecting the regional scale of rethinking political autonomy and urban struggles around municipal power with the much broader framework of social ecology.
YT: How does core anarchist principles, such as direct and unmediated participation in decision-making, mutual aid, and refusal of authority, correspond to urabism and city planning theory? Can you also expand on the crucial concept of dweller-control and give examples of such practices?
JK: In the research, I have a specific focus on the post-2nd World War generation of geographers, architects, and planners that combined practical and theoretical work between Italy and the UK to advocate for full citizen control in urbanism, the concept on which Bookchin, in his trilogy on cities, implicitly builds the platform for libertarian municipalism (1974, 1987). This generation defended not only guided and occasional participation in architectural design but also the full-scale dweller control, direct and complete involvement of the user in the process of planning, building and inhabiting the built environment. This, of course, was not a new idea. All of them defended autonomous action by citizens seeing them as able to renovate, build and transform their houses and public spaces based on the historical fact that people took care of themselves through self-help building and grassroots mutual aid since forever and for these authors, one of the best examples were the medieval European cities that were prime examples of that kind of ‘organic’ spatial order.
The concept of dweller control was a fundamental principle among some influential figures of community-led architecture in the 20th century, such as John F. Turner, Walter Segal, Colin Ward, and Giancarlo De Carlo. Over the span of several decades, they met and exchanged ideas, with notable focal points of intellectual cooperation, such as the Italian circle of architects and planners, which, beyond De Carlo, included Ludovico Quaroni, Riccardo Mariani and Carlo Doglio. Together, between the UK and Italy, they collectively shaped and individually implemented dweller control as a guiding principle in their respective fields. Among the more known examples are participative schemes for working-class neighbourhoods in Terni and Mazzorbo done by De Carlo during the 1970s or Walter’s Segal’s micro-neighbourhoods in the Lewisham district of London from the 1980s. Not-so-common references would be extraordinary experiments of ‘slingshot urbanism’ (Proli 2017) of autonomous ‘development plans’ and ‘communal inverted strikes’ in 1960s rural Sicily by Doglio and Camilo Dolci, or Do-It-Yourself New Towns promoted by Colin Ward in UK’s Lightmoore, Telford.
These collaborations happened in parallel with the intentional transnational efforts to advance a particular vision within the planning discipline. Post-World War II, these architects viewed urban planning as a “revolutionary tool” for grassroots social change, advocating citizen-controlled urbanism to empower local communities and challenge state authority. Their approach was influenced by regionalist and anarchist thinkers like Reclus, Kropotkin, and Morris, as well as the planning ideologies of Geddes and Howard. One of my favourite quotes is by Doglio, in which he defines active society as an organized group of individuals who is “capable of expressing autonomous tensions towards innovation and development, but also of respect and care for traditions and shared places, and a capacity for self-organization and collective synthesis, based on generalized values of cohesion, trust and cooperation”.
YT: What space is left for such libertarian principles in contemporary cities?
JK: Today, with a temporal distance, we can evaluate their efforts within the framework of social ecology that allows us to redefine the built environment as made by political subjects who tend to employ mutual aid, self-initiative, collaboration and direct action to achieve social reproduction, relative individual freedom, and regulate sufficiency. What one encounters in a complex web of illegal plotlands, autonomous territories, allotments, squats, land occupations, participative planning schemes, neighbourhood direct actions, eviction self-defence tactics, community-based social services, self-built housing, and children-made wooden shacks is a radical multiplicity of local, situated knowledge on how we carve the space for ourselves in this world.
I know that the world is full of these examples of self-organised social action, but I will stick to Barcelona, which has a long history of urban plans made by neighbours in opposition to planning schemes by authoritarian city administrations. They are known as Pla Popular schemes, and from 1970 till the 1990s, there were a dozen of them made in neighbourhoods of La Verneda, La Pau, or the most known one is of Santa Coloma, coordinated by Xavi Valls. This change of scale of what we consider autonomous social action, from usual examples of squats, autonomous social centres and community gardens into a whole neighbourhood’s organising to create self-made urban plans, is to me particularly interesting. Still, one should keep in mind how these emerge from communities that rely on the core principles of direct action and self-reliance when, on a smaller scale, it becomes necessary to change the everyday lives of most vulnerable citizens, migrant women, older people, kids and people without papers. Today, I participate in a new self-made urban plan: Pla Popular de Barris de Muntanya. In the same area where we are making a plan, some months ago, independently of our making of a self-made plan, the neighbours of Vallcarca built their own bus station for line 87 out of scrap wood and some leftover construction materials, cutting through the small wall on the public street. The intervention happened right after the summer, probably after the residents got tired of waiting on the slope next to a metal pole sign in the hot sun with no shade and no place to sit, in conditions that affected most the older neighbours of this hilly working-class area. This peculiar miniature of subversive urbanism happened in the neighbourhood known for self-built housing and resistance to real-estate speculation, specifically the construction magnates Núñez i Navarro (ex-FC Barcelona president), who bought off a large part of the historic core of the former semi-rural outskirt of Barcelona to redevelop it into luxury housing (Antunes et al. 2020). In the continuous struggle for preservation of Vallcaraca, which ‘will be rural or it will not be’, residents use diverse forms of direct and social action, such as occupations of empty plots, squatting, housing cooperatives, and autonomous social centres.
YT: Can you reflect on the importance of genuine public space for urban environments, especially in light of ongoing attempts of bureaucracies and companies to turn it to the private sector?
JK: I think this last example shows well how cities’ open spaces are complex networks of social and economic relations, and the ‘public’ character of space is under constant pressure to become a commodity that prioritises economic relations over social ones. In Landauer’s terms, I think our task when it comes to public space is to create different relations towards it and to defend it as infrastructure for horizontal social ties against the constant threat of commercialisation and speculation, but also over-administration, beautification and smoothening of all that does not fit ‘the image’ of the economically potential city. This means that strong neighbourhoods with active grassroots initiatives, festivities, social spaces, and self-defence instincts will always know how to use public space for their needs. These relations are continuously built day by day.
There should be more awareness of how much neighbourhood relations are at the core of successful social movements. From Hamburg to Athens, from Barcelona to Bologna, there are fewer and fewer of these cities that have ‘autonomous’ neighbourhoods.
One of the activities we did as part of the Pla Popular de Barris de Muntanya was organising Fiesta Ta-Ta-Xin, which got its name after the old dance moves typical among the working-class immigrants who first started to self-build illegal houses on top of this hill. Their culture of self-reliance is now reflected in our efforts to rebuild the network in the neighbourhood that fights against touristification, speculation and gentrification. The fiesta was, of course, happening in a public space over a whole day with people from various local groups. Members of neighbourhood associations together with squatters and people from social movements organised a full day of activities for all types of residents in the area. I see it as a possible example of how different relations to public space can be defended through social action.
YT: What is the importance of housing for a vibrant and participatory urban environment, in light of right-to-housing movements worldwide?
JK: Housing is the political struggle of our generation. The society we live in more dominantly relies on the economy of real estate exploitation and rent extraction. Therefore, the new language, one of property, exclusion, housing precarity, family inheritance, social segregation and environmental justice, defines what opportunities people have in terms of self-realization. There is a recent brutal saying among Croatian youth that describes well how housing shapes young people’s perspective: ‘Alive parents, dead capital’. Where we live defines our social position as much as what we do for a living. However, much of this discussion is often cornered into a debate on the Right to be housed, as guaranteed through abstraction and bureaucratization of access to living space by state or more or less regulated market. Much of the housing debate is imagined only as an issue of the amount of social and affordable housing available in society, subsidies and loans, state and local policies and, in most ‘progressive’ contexts, cooperative paths for building housing units.
What I have learned from this extraordinary group of authors, especially from Colin Ward, who wrote several very illustrative books on issues of housing (Tenants Take Over, Housing: Anarchist Approach, Cotters and Squatters, Talking Houses, etc.), is that the concept of Right to housing acts as inter-mediator that distances the final user from genuine autonomy and control of the process of housing ourselves. What does it mean? We shall not (only) speak of housing as something that is provided through public administration or market dynamics. Instead, we should (also) seek a third path, the one that increases the freedoms of people to house themselves, as they did historically, with the means of self-build, with structures that are more adaptable to life cycles and non-nuclear living groups, with economic relations that have their geographical and social parameters strongly connected to social structures that tenants can freely rely on. There should be more debate about how to regain this ‘freedom to build’. Obviously, this returns the ball into the field of what is known as ‘land question,’ the question of access to resources. How is land on which we can build managed and provided? What are the property relations in the city, and how can they be radically challenged? How can tenant associations have more power over large housing estates, and how can maintenance of housing units become part of the social and financial autonomy of the final user? How much control shall the market and government be given over our living conditions? This is where De Carlo pins well urban planning’s potential for reshaping social conflict: “Urban planning can become a revolutionary weapon if we rescue it from the blind monopoly of the authority and we turn it into a community organ of research of social life and its real necessities.” I know this sounds a bit abstract, but I encourage readers to read works by Colin Ward, Giancarlo De Carlo, John Turner, Hassan Fathy, Dolores Hyden and others who imagined housing as part of the foundation for people’s autonomy.
YT: What are your thoughts in relation to the political project/strategy of Libertarian Municipalism, that is being advocated for by Social Ecologists and social movements? What are the prospects for it in an age of rising far-right sovereignism and environmental collapse?
JK: As I mentioned above, the work of Murray Bookchin has its role in a holistic image of how libertarian movements see the relationship between humans and their environment. He appears as a marginal reference in my research as his eclectic and interdisciplinary work remained relatively independent from the group of authors I am studying. I think Bookchin’s ‘urban’ trilogy, in which he develops the idea of Libertarian Municipalism as a grassroots alternative to state-centred management of urban space, is one of the must-reads of contemporary political urban theory. He refers a lot to Mumford and Kropotkin, and indeed, the first publishing of his work in the UK was in Ward’s journal Anarchy at the end of the 1960s. Articles published there were the core of his Post-scarcity Anarchism book. The two kept reading and respecting each other, although they disagreed on many matters. However, I think they have more in common than not. This especially applies to their relevance in 21st-century and contemporary urban studies in the context of complete self-destruction of state democratic farse and ideological schizophrenia in which we are all embedded together with our Planet , which we seem not to be able to take care of as our home.
I appreciate the municipalism of Bookchin’s radical stream more than what recently emerged as municipalism of local city politics in cities like Barcelona or Zagreb. All that happened in Barcelona and how it was outvoted by big capital shows us that representative democracy’s internal architecture is not interested in true municipal autonomy—far from that. That is why, in search of libertarian versions of municipal governance, we shall look into more fine-grained scales of autonomous social action; I advocate neighbourhoods being the correct scale, or even smaller, street communities, suburban informal settlements, kids gangs and university occupations, the allotments in between train lines, and other rooted community efforts like one of Vallcarca in Barcelona or Jinwar village in Rojava. Indeed, besides seeking deeper into urban communities, we shall shift our focus to more rural autonomous territories, Rojava and Chiapas being the most developed examples. Still, there are many other places where the self-organisation culture has been channelled into municipal bodies, as J.C. Scott presents in his books. An interwoven layer between social history and the present in almost any place that is continuously settled offers clues on where to look for more autonomy in a built environment. Ward optimistically points to this pluralist shift in everyday, interstitial change: ‘[O]nce you begin to look at human society from an anarchist point of view you discover that the alternatives are already there, in the interstices of the dominant power structure. If you want to build a free society, the parts are all at hand’ (Ward 1973, 14).
This is why, in my research, I give special attention to this aspect of continuity of influence because if we understand the history of self-organisation (and dweller control of built environment as one aspect of it) not as archipelago of isolated experiments but an interconnected layer of our social history we might understand that we have much bigger political project in our hands, with its proper knowledge, memory, successes and failures connected to very roots of how our living spaces have been made for centuries. Such a view blurs the dichotomies of urban and rural, central and peripheral, solid and metabolic. It reframes urbanism not as a binary opposition to uncontrolled urbanisation, as most modern urban planning theories set the stage, but as a multitude of planning cultures in the complex social ecology of the built environment.
