Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth

The city is a paradoxical space, in theory belonging to everyone, in practice inaccessible to people who cannot afford the high price of urban real estate. Within these urban spaces are public and social goods including roads, policing, transit, public education, and culture, all of which have been created through multiple hands and generations, but that are effectively only for the use of those able to acquire private property. Why should this be the case? As Margaret Kohn argues, when people lose access to the urban commons, they are dispossessed of something to which they have a rightful claim - the right to the city. Political theory has much to say about individual rights, equality, and redistribution, but it has largely ignored the city. In response, Kohn turns to a mostly forgotten political theory called solidarism to interpret the city as a form of common-wealth. In this view, the city is a concentration of value created by past generations and current residents: streets, squares, community centers, schools and local churches.Although the legal title to these mixed spaces includes a patchwork of corporate, private, and public ownership, if we think of the spaces as the common-wealth of many actors, the creation of a new framework of value becomes possible. Through its novel mix of political and urban theory, The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth proposes a productive way to rethink struggles over gentrification, public housing, transit, and public space.

"Margaret Kohn brings an exceptionally sophisticated theoretical understanding to bear on the bases of urban injustice and the potential for its remediation. Rather than simply engaging in a re exive call for greater democracy, she develops a complex theory of social solidarism from which she builds an argument for a right to the city in which all city users share in their commonly developed wealth."- Susan S. Fainstein, author of The Just City "Margaret Kohn is one of the very few scholars writing about cities whose work combines a sophisticated understanding of normative theory and the empirical dimensions of 'actually existing' urban life. In The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth she adeptly melds this combination with the best insights of critical urban studies to construct an innovative argument with radical implications for practice."- David Imbroscio, author of Urban America Reconsidered "This rich and engaging work deserves a wide audience."- Clarissa Rile Hayward, Washington University in St. Louis "[S]ophisticated and marvelously accessible...What makes Kohn's work so attractive, to both theorists and activists alike, is that she merges critical rigor with urgent solidartistic affinities for those struggling against urban injustice." - Fonna Forman, Perspectives on Politics

Margaret Kohn is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto.