Abstract
This commentary piece explores the genealogies of the revanchist city. In taking Neil Smith's invocation of ‘revanchism’ in the 1990s, the paper works both backwards and forwards in time. Here, the paper begins through an analysis of the desire to control and remove perceived disorder in early 20th century Chicago. This is followed by an analysis of how such ideals became embedded within the Chicago School of Urban Sociology, including its continued influence into the 20th Century. From here, the paper traces the linkages between, for example, The Ford Foundation, ‘broken windows’ policing, and revanchist practices. Finally, the paper looks at the links between the emergent ‘network state’ and revanchist practices. The central areas cleared of homeless people are now open for business. The dynamic geographies of culture, real estate capital, and revanchism seem perfectly synchronized. (Neil Smith, 1998)
The genealogy of revanchist practices is crucial to our understandings of how it emerged in 1990s New York and how it then landed in different ways in various locations (Smith, 2001). To a certain extent, the theory of revanchism is very much ‘of its time’. It perfectly encapsulated the approach of Giuliani in his desire to ‘clean up’ New York in the 1990s. Moreover, this sat neatly with the narrative of reclaiming New York in the post-crisis period. Yet, while much discussion centres around the outward diffusion of the New York revanchist approach (Ibid), there is also a deeper story of the intertwined nature of what would become labelled as ‘revanchism’ and longer-running urban discourse from at least the Chicago School of Human Ecology, up to, and including 1990s revanchism, and onwards to the tech-oriented urbanist dystopian ideals of today.
With this in mind, this essay is focused on tracing the genealogical origins of what came to be labelled as revanchism. Here, it is noted that a certain level of linguistic flexibility is required. At times, the direct links between, for example, the emergence of ‘broken windows’ policing and revanchist strategies (See Collings-Wells, 2022) are clear. Yet, there is also a less clear-cut story of revanchism that needs to be unearthed. In building on Barnett (2022), a genealogical framework is used both to understand the origins of the concept of revanchism and to understand the wider sphere under which different practices and labelling devices emerge. Smith's invocation of ‘revanchism’ served as a to link as-then existing urban policies and the past. In evoking the political realities of late-19th Century France and mapping them onto a gentrifying New York of the 1990s, Smith (1996; 1998) immediately carves open the myth of beautified urban landscapes through a retelling of an active and aggressive reshaping of urban space. At the same time, a genealogical framing also possesses the possibility of demonstrating both direct and indirect linkages between revanchist approaches and wider attitudes towards urban space. Below, these linkages are teased out through an analysis of a number of strands of urban theory and examples, running from that of the Chicago School of Human Ecology up to and including tech imaginaries of the 21st Century.
Genealogies on revanchism
Both popular and academic accounts of urban transformation continue to lean upon assumptions inherited from the Chicago School of Human Ecology (Burgess, 1928). While the Chicago School presented urban transformation as natural and sequential, within this process segregation and division were outlined as inevitable. For example, explicit within the early writings of Park et al. (1925) were notions of the ‘slum’, ‘underworld’ and ‘ghetto’ as standing like islands within the real and mental maps of the city. Yet, at the same time, the ‘zone in transition’ was portrayed as both a world apart from the CBD, and, at the very same time, as the next space of ‘invasion’ for business interests. This ‘invasion’ – or reclamation – would take these spaces back into the normal workings of society. As has been well articulated within previous debates, the natural metaphor of invasion and succession thus served as a foil for the wider political-economic forces that gave shape to the city (See Gottdiener, 1985; Logan and Molotch, 1987).
Importantly, the Chicago School authors were not only ascribing their own set of assumptions of ‘invasion’, but responding to set of processes and language happening on the ground. Pre-Chicago School interpretations of the ‘furnished rooms’ areas of Chicago give insights into the attitudes towards what would be labelled as areas of ‘vice’. Early – pre-Chicago School – authors, such as social reformers Breckinridge and Abbott (1910: 308), for example, were not shy of critiquing the tendency to delineate ‘obscure streets’ as places for the segregation of ‘disorderly elements’. As they note, already, by 1910, business leaders sought for the Chicago Mayor to approve an ‘invasion’ of business into areas associated with ‘disorderly elements’, which would be moved on and further segregated from the normal workings of society. Within their work, Breckinridge and Abbott (Ibid) differentiated between notions of disorderly groups and respectable slum dwellers (Ibid), a fact that would become ignored within the dominance of Chicago School approaches to understanding ‘vice’ and crime in the city. In directly overlapping into urban criminology, these ‘natural areas’ would form the focal-point of ‘social disorganization theory’, where the assumed intertwining of crime and the neighbourhood scale were enshrined in common perceptions of the city.
Crucially, the Chicago School approach would subsequently blend seamlessly into a wider social-pathological understanding of the city, which continued to shape wider approaches to the understandings of urban change. Here, framings of ‘slum’ and ‘blight’, became almost naturalized within urbanist thought and practice (Wyly, 2015). Throughout the 20th century, a significant amount of elite perspectives are dominated by the desire to reclaim urban space from those deemed to be out of keeping with the ‘normal’ order of things. For example, writing in the 1930s, planner, Ralph Picard stated: Within a few blocks of this room there are scores of crowded hovels, located on land worth ten times the so-called ‘improvements’ on them. Hovels that harbor the disease and crime and poverty of a typical city, occupying land that once bore the homes of fine citizens long since gone. Land that awaits “a creator of homes, a builder of cities, a developer of industries”. Land that awaits the vision of men who have “an obligation beyond those of ordinary commerce”. Men with an idea – a plan’ (Picard, 1939, p.1).
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Social pathology and ‘Broken Windows’
From the perspective of genealogical framings of the city, the overlaps between revanchism and the Chicago School are better understood in terms of their tendency towards labelling and blaming. More precise framings of linkages can be seen through, for example, connections between ‘broken windows’ policing and notions of social delinquency discussed by Collings-Wells (2022). Collings-Wells’ (2022) work notes how the Ford Foundation shifted from ‘urban liberalism’ in the 1960s to taking on a more hard-line approach to policing that would later crystalize under ‘broken windows’ policing. In unpacking this movement, they outline the manner in which: ‘Rooted in social-scientific theories connecting urban crime to black community “disorganization” and pathology, these early projects had sought to achieve a “coordinated attack” on delinquency, engineered through an integrated process of social service provision, remedial education, and community organization’ (Collings-Wells, 2022, p.742). Although yet to give way to the later more hard-line approach, it is hard not to see the lineage of Chicago School framings. Moreover, as noted by Lawton (2025), this language was central to the origins of Paul Ylvisaker's ‘gray areas’ programme, which sought to engage with impoverished urban areas (see also, Collings-Wells, 2021). Yet, as is also noted in the work of Collings-Wells (2022), the movement towards a focus on policing, which followed a liberal backlash towards involvement with community action, emerged at first out of a shift towards community safety in the late-1960s.
In further highlighting the links between urban liberalism and the later emergence of more hard-line approaches to urban policing, Ranasinghe (2012) highlights the overlaps between the emergence of Broken Windows policing and Jane Jacobs. Here, they place a particular focus on Jacobs notions of order and fear of crime in the city. As commented by Ranasinghe (2012: 65) ‘The concept of fear … is crucial to making sense of the ‘broken windows’ theory, for it is the foundation upon which the theory is developed’. As they further elucidate, the approach of Kelling and Wilson in their earlier work was focused on understanding the urban crisis through the experience of place – i.e., order and disorder. As such, the focus was on the manifestations of the crisis, not is causal nature. Jacobs notion of ‘order’ therefore becomes a useful pretext for ‘broken windows’, and Ranasinghe neatly outlines the direct influence Jacobs work would have on, for example, Kelling (Ibid). For Jacobs, fear and realities of crime were neatly intertwined. In the case of ‘broken windows’, there was a slight shift, with the focus placed on the fear of disorder. Never-the-less, such links are of note and the intertwined assumptions of the search for a look and feel of order within Jacobs urban imaginary would become a very real attribute of the gentrifying spaces of Western cities in the 1970s and 1980s. Smith's detailing of the link between the soft landscapes of gentrification and the hard-nose policies of revanchism thus places emphasis on the intertwined nature of ‘liberal’ and ‘post-liberal’ assumptions about urban space.
‘Networked Revanchism’
In his 1995 essay ‘Beyond Blade Runner’ (see, Davis, 1998), Mike Davis undertook a cutting analysis of the intertwined landscapes of Los Angeles, moving from the centre outwards, and depicting the various ways in which fear was inscribed in space. In so doing, Davis reworked Burgess famed ‘concentric zone’ diagram, adding in a few new ‘zones’ – ‘Drug Free Zone’, Gang Free Parks, Armed Response, and, finally, the affluent – read Burgess, ‘Bright Lights Area’ – areas as an ‘Urban Simulator’. At the time, he notes the increased potential role of technology, particularly in terms of monitoring people's movement across urban space. This updated Burgess diagram serves as a useful reminder of the continuity of logics of power that go beyond the lifespan of the Chicago School itself. It is also of note that although New York would emerge as the focal-point of Giuliani's hard-nose ‘broken windows’ revanchism, Davis work (1989, 1998) would place Los Angeles firmly at the centre of understandings of post-liberal urban landscapes (see also, DeVerteuil, 2019).
Move forward a number of decades, and Davis's tech-scapes are in full bloom. Yet, this is something far beyond the role of technologies in policing people's daily lives as they move around the city, but one of an all-encompassing shift in social realities linked to technology. If Los Angeles became the epicentre of imagined futures of the 1990s, the tech-imaginary of the 2020s revolves around goings on within San Francisco and Silicone Valley. The focus of such, however, is not only upon the places themselves, but more on the rhetoric emerging from within, and particular the more powerful contemporary actors operating within the Tech industry. This emergent discourse points to the manner in how such spaces reach beyond the boundaries of the city itself to an increasingly networked imaginary. In this vein, Woolston and Mitchell (2025, p.2049) ‘… argue revanchism is part of an interscalar, political movement in which the city is used as a symbol to articulate actors, forces, and ideas together into a historical bloc we call revanchist populism’. One only has to think of Gil Duran's analysis of Balaji Srinivasin – originator of the ‘Networked State’ concept. As is detailed by Duran, Srinivasin, is explicit in how such ideals would be grounded within a tech-oriented city such as San Francisco, where a new ‘tech-funded political faction’, called ‘The Grays’ would, in his mind, become the inheritors of the city. As noted by Duran, for Srinivasin, this group would operate like a quasi-police force, where retribution would be delivered both to unwelcome groups and those aligned with Democratic policies, labelled simply as ‘the blues’: ‘The grays must also privatize entire streets and neighbourhoods to keep out the riffraff – “addicts”, “hobos”, and of course, “blues”’. 2 Such imaginaries, seem almost to align with a 1980s image of Robocop, but, and it almost goes without saying, also chime with historical renderings of the ‘hobo’ as the person of fear to be removed.
Critics, such as Duran, have also demonstrated the wider influence of the tech imaginary on future urbanism. There is a particular rhetorical connection here whereby an increasingly powerful groups of individuals linked to tech companies have used their platform to rage against the city as it exists. Although locations such as San Francisco emerge as a form of testing ground, this is a much broader arena that operates at scales that are illustrative of a notion of an ever-widening ‘frontier’ within the Tech milieu (Wyly, 2015). Collectively, what emerges is a discourse ‘the city’ – un-named, but Western - that is ‘dying’ and must be escaped from. Various articulations have emerged of this privatized city (see Peck, 2025), ranging from ‘sea-steading’ to the ‘networked state’. What is shared by each of them, however, is a desire for tech elites to escape existing cities and begin a new ‘utopia’.
The ideal of the Network State has taken on a number of different forms, each one vying for further attention. One particular and illustrative example of this is the example of Praxis Nation, which was first mooted in the early 2020s, being backed by Peter Thiel, and thus gaining significant traction in the online world. Originally, Praxis was to be located within an undisclosed location in the Mediterranean Sea. As time has gone on, however, various locations have been mooted, including Greenland, which would become the launchpad to Mars. Furthermore, the precise look and feel of the imagined city has changed over a five year period. Earlier renditions were akin to a form of ‘New Urbanist’ imaginary delivered through an SEZ structure, where zones of the city were described using common urbanist descriptors, such as Notting Hill to describe the types of spaces to be created. Yet, over time, and notwithstanding the role of SEZ's in neoliberal approaches to urbanism, the specific imaginary conveyed about Praxis has become increasingly hardened. The narrative of Praxis – told largely via ‘X’ – is one of a ‘frontier space’, where a new city will somehow magically emerge: part-Mediaeval mysticism, part-neoclassical make-believe and part-Fascist-infused meme.
In a manner that is purposely made to seem like a form of insider language, Praxis Nation draws on Fascist and Nazi imagery to evoke a new spirit of the West. For example, in early 2025, and in the wake of the as-then newly aligned forces of Trump and Musk, Praxis placed a post on ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) stating “Western Civilization is Regaining its Vitality. Can you feel it?” 3 The post was accompanied by a montage – moving at rapid pace – which paid homage to a mix of classical, mediaeval and twentieth century images. Yet, this isn’t any ordinary imagery. It is a carefully curated to raise to prominence specific examples of Nazi and Fascist imagery. Nazi sculptor, Arno Breker's, ‘Avenger’ is placed front and centre – almost as a reminder as to the form of city that Praxis is seeking to emulate: that of Speer's Germania. In the same sequence of images, the reminders of what type of lived space is being conjured are then subsequently brought to life via scenes from Nazi-propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl's film ‘Olympia’. There is a deliberate play at work, where through a form of self-denial, Nazi propaganda is used in order to portray a shift ‘back’ to a lost tradition.
Any delusion that might exist about a separation of imagined cities and the actors to which they are linked are soon shattered by a closer look at Albert Speer and his actions. The link to Speer's Germania is of note in as much as it brings together an attempt to rekindle supposedly lost Western values, while marking the rhetoric of Praxis Nation as inherently revanchist. It is here worth a reminder of Albert Speer and his approach to Berlin Jews. As is summarized by Rabinbach (2006: 467): ‘In mid-September 1938, six weeks before Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), Speer proposed to Hitler the forced eviction of Berlin Jews from “large apartments” to make way for the relocation of the two hundred thousand “Aryan” Berliners displaced from 50000 apartments scheduled for demolition in connection with the construction plans of his organization the GeneralBauinspektion, or GBI’. This was a form of double-displacement in the interests of a form of Nazi-fuelled planned-Haussmanization of Berlin. As if to reinforce the severity of the displacement, Speer would draw upon the labour of displaced Jewish people in order to create his utopian city.
Speer, whose myth of a ‘good Nazi’ slowly diminished over time, is a perfect embodiment of the Tech-utopian project and historicized re-readings of the period. The penchant within the mediated world of, for example, Praxis is to perceive the ‘mighty’ Western values as something to be reawakened. Its visuals work in two ways, both seeking a form of performative spectacle and, on closer inspection, ensuring that it is clearly only for the establishment of a White-led frontierist approach to urban futures. 4 If built, a city such as Praxis would involve both the removal of those whose land is being taken, and, it might be assumed, also the labour of those being displaced. Yet, in the case of the techno-imaginary, the notion of a physical city is almost a side-story, where rhetoric is used to sway increasingly revanchist viewpoints across a networked space. It might not matter if the city is never built, and, it is unlikely that it ever will be. What matters is the rhetoric of revanchism and escapism, articulated through a constantly evolving network.
Conclusion: Grounding the myth
In this essay, I have sought to work both backwards and forwards between Smith's discussion of 1990s revanchism. Running throughout the last one-hundred years or more, there is a form of internalized disavowal of uneven development. Yet, a common trait emerges throughout. Rather than seek any form of reproachment to the circumstances under which uneven development occurs, the tendency is towards a game of ‘blame’ and reclamation of space for the supposed ‘proper’ organising of space. Smith's original engagement teases out the particular aesthetization of politics of 1980s gentrification. The path between ‘broken windows’ and post-liberal policing (Collings-Wells, 2021) are clear within this rise to prominence in 1990s New York. Yet, also visible at this time are traces of the Chicago School idealization of a moral landscape of ‘vice’, and Jane Jacob's notion of ‘civility’. Whereas the latter has been explicitly mapped to revanchist practices, the links to the former can instead be connected to the intertwined nature of theory and practice over the course of the 20th Century (see, Davis, 1998).
A key message of Smith's (1998) revanchist city theory was the manner in which landscape of the city is reclaimed from the supposed scourge that was perceived to have taken it over. There is a form of moral discourse at work, which perceives this ‘loss’ as something distinct and operating outside of the operation of the wider environment. This dynamic becomes more complex under the reality of an increasingly online world. In this vein, it is tempting to perceive the online rhetoric about the ‘Networked State’ as an isolated and somewhat esoteric moment – and, to a large extent it probably is. Yet, there is an extension here into the normalization of a new and hardened from of revanchism that has become ever-present in recent years. If Smith's revanchist city was one of a revenge against the poor as visible within the city, the new revanchism is one of a form of Fascist secessionism mixed with rhetoric of revenge – with anyone outside deemed open to such rhetoric. Unpack the online anonymity, memes, and hearsay and what is left is very little other a fragile façade. Yet, the rhetoric carries more weight than this alone and its presence is intertwined with a world where increasingly anti-immigrant sentiment and displacement are normalized. If Smith's (1998) invocation of Giuliani as ‘little Hitler’ or the ‘Mussolini of Manhattan’ was somewhat reflective of a ‘tongue in cheek’ approach of the time, the rhetoric of contemporary revanchist attitudes discussed here is illustrative of a form of normalization of hate that has emerged in contemporary online discourse. In this vein, Smith (1996; 1998) was prescient in ascribing a new form of normalization of revenge that would continue to be all too visible within the state of an increasingly online and networked urban society.
