The city on the horizon

Abstract

In this commentary on Beveridge and Koch's ‘Seeing Democracy Like a City’, I draw their stimulating ideas into dialogue with Sydney's green ban movement – a remarkable enactment of urban democracy from 50 years ago whose legacy remains enshrined in the built fabric and in the political imaginary of my city. This dialogue is used to offer some reflections on elements of their argument concerning the role of institutions in urban democratic theory and practice, the historicity of the association between the urban and democracy, and the place of equality in democratic forms of organisation and self-governance.

In the early 1970s, urban politics got pretty wild in Sydney. As the decade began, the city was in the throes of a construction boom, with new office blocks shooting upwards in the central business district and plenty of apartment and house construction in the expanding suburbs. Developers were reeling in profits, and a conservative State Government was egging them on with sympathetic planning arrangements. Residents across the city were increasingly concerned about amenity – be it the loss of low-income housing and public spaces in the city centre, or the lack of services and infrastructure in the new suburbs. For their part, construction workers were also fighting for safety and security in an industry where new construction technologies were developing at a faster pace than safety regulations, and the precarity of moving from one short-term job to the next made it hard to fight back.

Then something remarkable happened. In 1971, a group of concerned residents in a relatively well-off suburb faced the loss of treasured green space on the foreshore of Sydney harbour to make way for new apartments. As a last resort, after letters to the press and petitions to members of Parliament failed to get any traction, the residents approached the unions who represented the demolition and construction workers that were to bulldoze the bush and build the apartments. Two of those unions – the Builders Labourers Federation, and the Federated Engine Drivers and Fireman's Association – gave the residents a sympathetic hearing. While these communist-led unions were far from natural allies of the residents of this middle-class suburb, they saw a shared interest in questioning the form and meaning of ‘development’ in their city. The unions promised the resident activists that if they could prove that they had the support of their community in preserving the bushland, an industrial ban would be placed on the work. A public meeting was hastily organised, and hundreds in attendance voted in favour of the ban. The unions held their own meetings, and workers too endorsed the ban. When the developer threatened to use non-union labour to proceed with the work, the unions responded with a threat to strike at every one of the developer's construction sites. A stalemate ensued – when it became clear that the union was serious about the ban, the developer eventually gave up. The bushland remains the property of the people to this day.

Inspired by this episode, resident activists and others from across the city began asking the union for similar interventions. Within 3 years, over 40 bans had been established through similar processes, holding up over AUS$3 billion of proposed development. Some of the bans were in defence of green space. Others were in defence of working-class housing, heritage, and liveability in the face of proposed demolitions for exclusive office and housing developments, freeways and the like. The bans came to be known as ‘green bans’, to denote their distinction from more traditional ‘black bans’ imposed by union industrial action (the classic account of the green ban movement remains Burgmann and Burgmann, 1998).

As well as acting together to put ‘people before profits’, green ban activists began thinking about what their experiences meant for politics and democracy. Prominent among the green ban movement's leaders and thinkers was Builders Labourers Federation Secretary Jack Mundey. Mundey had left school early and moved from rural Queensland to Sydney to try his hand at professional rugby league in the 1960s. He was politicised by his experiences of construction work and by emerging struggles over issues like the war in Vietnam, joined the Communist Party, and was one of the radicals who wrested control of the union from conservatives in the late 1960s. In a series of extended interviews and articles, Mundey defended the green bans not only for the causes they advanced, but also for the way they advanced them (Mundey, 1973, 1981). To him, the green bans were an example of ‘everyday democracy’ in action – a conception of democracy which ‘isn’t merely casting a ballot in a box every few years, but where people engage in every day democracy on any and all issues affecting them’ (quoted in Iveson, 2014: 998).

Interestingly, while the bans established their own ‘machinery’ for decision-making in the city, green ban activists did not necessarily imagine themselves or the authority they’d established as an exclusive alternative to the authority and agency of the state. Indeed, frequently at the time they spoke of the bans ‘filling the vacuum’ left by a state planning regime that seemed to put the needs of capital ahead of the needs of the people, and made no space for resident or worker agency outside of voting in elections. Not only did green ban activists call for more democratic state planning processes, but they also articulated demands for a state-owned construction and development company that could build for the public good instead of for profit, while also providing secure and safe employment for construction workers (Iveson, 2014). But before such proposals could be pursued, the radical leadership of the union was ousted through a combination of state deregistration of their union, a concerted campaign against the union by developers and their associations, violence and intimidation towards movement participants, and opposition within their union and the broader union movement. The green bans came to an end. But some 50 years later, the bans are still inscribed in the built environment, and in the imaginary, of my city.

In many ways, Sydney's green ban movement provides a wonderful illustration of Beveridge and Koch's (2024) powerful argument that when the urban process and the conditions of city life become the horizon of politics, new practices and understandings of democracy can emerge. ‘Seeing democracy like a city’, they argue, addresses the limits of state-centric forms of representative democracy. In the green bans, the manifest injustices and exclusions of the urban process were generative of a powerful alliance across diverse interests that sought to assert a role for everyday people in decision-making about the form and the meaning of the city. The green bans were the product of a very ‘urban’ alliance, in the sense that the city served as the stake and the shared horizon of a new form of democratic politics, and also as the site where diverse actors who were ‘thrown together’ by the ‘density, proximity and heterogeneity’ characteristic of urbanity could build a sense of common interests.

More than this, I think that the green ban movement also illustrates Beveridge and Koch's assertion of an urban democratic imaginary which de-centres but does not erase democratic imaginaries tied to the state form. In their view, it is necessary to avoid both the state-centrism of many mainstream conceptions of democracy, without seeking to place the state and its institutions outside of the political entirely (a fault they see in some post-foundational thinking about urban politics and democracy). Particularly compelling is their argument that thinking democracy through the urban can ‘unsettle seemingly fixed boundaries between the state and society … thus opening up the possibility of weaving a new democratic fabric encompassing both’. The green ban experience speaks to this argument in two ways. First, as noted above, while the everyday democracy of the green ban movement and thinkers was to be lived and enacted through the collective action of organised workers and residents, we might say that their alternative machinery prefigured a state form that was more oriented to the public good than to capital accumulation (on state prefiguration, see Cooper, 2017). And certainly, it was also clear that the green ban participants could ill afford to ignore the state – its police busted their picket lines, its courts prosecuted their activists and intervened in the affairs of their unions, its elected officials and planning departments approved the schemes that they were forced to oppose. Given this, it is not surprising that the union sought to find allies in the State and Commonwealth Parliaments – indeed, it was precisely when they managed to forge such connections that their most lasting victories were won, through state acquisition of land for the construction of public housing designed through a ‘people's planning’ process (Iveson, 2021).

But I also think this story of the Sydney green bans productively opens up further questions about Beveridge and Koch's conception of ‘seeing democracy like a city’. First, while Beveridge and Koch have much to say about the limitations of state institutions and the need to de-centre the state in the way that we think and do democracy, they have less to say here about the role of civil society institutions in the ‘diverse forms of political action and organisation in cities’ that are essential to ‘seeing (and doing) democracy like a city’. If the ‘imagined community’ of the nation has been institutionalised through the state and liberal representative democracy, how might the imagined community of the city be institutionalised differently? As they note, this is not simply a matter of re-scaling state institutions to the urban scale: ‘pre-existing, fixed and stable containers of politics such as administrative units or political institutions (e.g., municipalities or planning or statistical units) do not and cannot align with these forces, even as they retain political relevance’. So, how does the city emerge as a political force? This is not inevitable: ‘urbanized space does not inevitably become the city. It must be reclaimed and lived as a city to become one’. For anyone seeking to build this sense of common cause with their fellow urbanites, there are immediate questions about whether existing non-state institutions (unions, resident associations, identity- and interest-based associations, and the like) are up to the task of helping to build a more democratic form of urban self-governance (Ferguson, 2012). The green ban activists of the Builders Labourers Federation made a bet on the union form having significant political potential – and in many ways, their actions were as much a radical reimagining of what a union could be and do as they were a radical reimagining of what a state could be and do. They repurposed their union to assert both the material interests of members and the ‘social responsibility of labour’ through strikes in pursuit of a range of urban environmental issues, but this eventually came unstuck. To de-centre the institutions of state is not to dispense with the question of institutions in political organisation (Nunes, 2021). In Barcelona, as Beveridge and Koch note, new organisations and alliances like La PAH and Barcelona en Comú have been formed to experiment with new institutional forms for an urban democratic politics.

A second question that the green bans raise relates to the historicity of Beveridge and Koch's argument about the urban and its relationship to democracy. One of the great strengths of their work in this article, and in their recently published book, is their close engagement with recent debates about the mutating geographies of the urban process and the on-going relevance of ‘the city’. While acknowledging these mutating geographies, they resist the idea that the city must be completely de-centred from urban analysis, and argue that while the city has no universal or bounded form, it remains a significant ‘site’, ‘stake’ and imaginative ‘horizon’ for democratic theory and practice. Here, they are at odds with the likes of Merrifield, who argues that historical shifts in the global urban process have effectively rendered the ‘right to the city’ an artefact of another age that is now inadequate to the task of radical politics:

The right to the city quite simply isn’t the right right that needs articulating. It's too vast because the scale of the city is out of reach for most people living at street level; and it's too narrow because when people do protest, when they do take to the streets en masse, their existential desires frequently reach out beyond the scale of the city, and revolve around a common and collective humanity, a pure democratic yearning. (Merrifield, 2011: 478)

Personally, I continue to struggle to figure all this out! I can talk myself into the idea that we need entirely new spatial imaginaries for dealing with contemporary capitalist urbanisation, and yet I also find myself attracted to approaches which seek to de-centre capitalism in order to trace historical resonances and continuity in the experience and politics of urban life from antiquity to the present (my on-going fascination with the green bans being a case in point!). I’d certainly be interested to know Beveridge and Koch's reflections on this – their article and book simultaneously present an understanding of the urban which is very much situated in our contemporary conjuncture, while also bringing in examples from previous times (such as the municipal socialism of the early twentieth century). At stake in this question is if/how we can glean insights and inspiration from events like the green bans that transcend their particular times and places, or whether we need to entirely refresh our political theories and practices in light of contemporary developments.

A third question that I think the green bans raise relates to the political foundations of democracy as a particular form of politics. In work that has been a key inspiration for Beveridge and Koch, Magnusson (2011: 5) asserts that seeing politics through the urban is disruptive precisely because cities are constituted by multiple, over-lapping authorities and sovereignties whose ‘spatialities and temporalities differ and are sometimes completely incommensurate’. For him, this is what ‘seeing like a city’ does to the political. While Beveridge and Koch have taken this insight on board as foundational for their thinking, to me it felt as though the development of that line of argument from urban politics to urban democracy could benefit from further elaboration. Democracy is a particular form of authority, and there's no guarantee that the over-lapping and competing authorities of the urban political will tend towards the democratic – as the article is quick to acknowledge! If so, what's the conception of democracy which distinguishes democratic forms of authority and governance from others? Drawing on Marchant and others in the radical democratic tradition, they associate democracy with the denial of closure or completion, thus seeing its resonance with the experience and imaginary of the urban which is likewise never closed or complete. Democracy, they say, ‘is always mistrustful of authority, resistant to domination and primed to challenge established norms in society’. For me, democracy is all these things, but also has to be more – in our current conjuncture, ‘mistrust of authority’ and the ‘challenging of norms’ are on the rise, but not always in egalitarian formations! Equality is mentioned just twice in passing (I confess, I searched the document!), in the argument that democratic politics embraces contingency while ‘struggling for equality through the making of common causes’. From where I sit, we can and must be even more assertive about the egalitarian foundation of democracy (Iveson, 2022). As Rancière (1999, 2009) has argued, to see enactments of equality as the very foundation of democratic politics is not to say that the meaning of equality is fixed across time and space. Rather, new understandings of equality are invented as the idea is adapted to specific circumstances to name and address specific wrongs (Davidson and Iveson, 2015). There would have been no green bans if building and workers and residents had not believed that they had every bit as much right to govern their city as developers, elected politicians and planning professionals – had they not believed that they were equals, and that the prerogative of private property denied them their democratic rights to shape their city as equals.

In a recent effort to think through the relationship between cities and democracy, Amanda Tattersall and I concluded with the notion that the process of democratising cities is a collective exercise in learning – a shared commitment to democracy serving as an organising frame for bringing different stories and experiences and concepts into dialogue across space and time (Iveson and Tattersall, 2023). As someone with that political and intellectual commitment, the recent work by Beveridge and Koch here and in other publications has been so exciting and invigorating to encounter. My sincere thanks to them, and to the editors of Dialogues, for the opportunity to be in dialogue with them and to share some stories from my city – I look forward to more!