The idea to study the discourse of RtC-groups evolved during a meeting of urban activists from Germany and Vienna, which took place in April 2015 in Kassel. As a member of a RtC-group since summer 2014, I was involved in the preparation and organisation of this event which brought around 60 activists together in workshops and discussion rounds.
Taking a peek at how these groups analyse their local situation in relation to wider contexts of political-economic developments in Germany and Europe and getting to know their concrete political practices, encouraged me to not only rethink our local activities, but also to inquire more in depth what it means to fight for a Right to the City nowadays in Germany.
With this paper I take a specifically positioned point of view and acknowledge the writing to be itself an act of generating meaning, having thus a political dimension. Being located in the field of critical post-positivist research, the idea of science to be a neutral process in the course of which objective knowledge is accumulated independently from the researching subject and the contexts it is embedded in, has to be rejected anyway. However, this does not equal the abandonment of the principles of scientific integrity such as
“objectivity, impartiality, systematicity, consistency, and so on” (Glynos and Howarth 2007: 191). Following a discourse-theoretical hegemony approach, academic knowledge-production must itself be understood as a crucial part of constantly (re-)creating discourses, truths and thus the conditions for the structuration of society. To account for the embedded character of any research, Glynos and Howarth even suggest to replace the term
methodology with research strategy since it captures more accurately “the ontological, normative, and sociological presuppositions framing [...] our research agenda“ (ibid. 201).
Since within the discourse-theoretical camp methodological questions are acknowledged as constitutively intertwined with ontological and epistemological ones (Bedall 2014: 202), the outlined theoretical framework cannot leave the research strategy untouched. It has to be reflected from formulating the research question to the method of collecting and interpreting data. Especially, because discourse theory does not offer - and repudiates the idea of doing so – a readymade toolbox of one-size-fits-all-methods (Bedall 2014: 202). Instead, the chosen methods of analysis have to be consistent with the ontological and epistemological premises of the theory and oriented towards the 'object' of study. The herein pursued theoretical approach is therefore considered to be a problem-driven, as distinguished from a method- or theory-driven approach (Glynos and Howarth 2007: 167). The chosen 'object' of research is furthermore not just out there to be discovered by the researcher, but emerges out of the process of problematisation itself. It comes forth, because a certain empirical phenomenon causes an initial irritation and hence catches the interest of the researching subject (Wullweber 2010: 45).
In line with this, the idea of objective causal explanations for social phenomena has to be dropped, since this would presuppose the existence of ahistorical or at least temporarily immutable laws which drive the course of human history and could be discovered by an inductive or deductive research process (Howarth 2005: 322, Wullweber 2010: 47). This, however, would contradict the ontological assumption of discourse-theoretical approaches as outline before. The aim is then rather to gain a better and different understanding of the articulated problem, i.e. in this case the contestation of the neoliberal restructuring of the German state by a specific kind of urban protest, thereby offering a narrative to make plausible the existence of the phenomenon.
In this context, it has been suggested to transfer the concept of articulation from the study of social practices to the mode of studying itself (Glynos and Howarth 2007, Howarth 2005). Social science explanations within postpositivist strands of theory thus involve “the articulation of different theoretical concepts together in a concrete empirical context, in an effort to provide a singular critical explanation of a problematized phenomenon” (Glynos and Howarth 2007: 180). The interpretation of empirical facts necessarily involves their contextualisation within the wider range of discursive structures and is dependent on the theoretical concepts the research is based on. Such interpretations are thus always contingent and contestable; no eternal truths are furnished (Howarth 2005: 321). Whether
however the formulated explanations meet the criteria of plausibility cannot be ultimately established – discussions among discourse theorists concerning this issue are still going on.
For the moment, “one can only say that the ultimate ‘proof of the pudding’ consists in the production of persuasive narratives” which offer a better understanding of the problem at hand (Glynos and Howarth 2007: 191) and are to a certain extent compatible with the respective hegemonic truth horizon (Wullweber 2010: 49). These more general clarifications regarding methodology in a discourse-theoretical framework have to be briefly translated in terms of the specificities of this paper, concretising the articulation of the problematised phenomenon.
The main body of analysis is constituted by the next two chapters. The first one deals with the specific spatio-temporal phenomenon of what I call the neoliberal rescaling of the German national state roughly from the 1970s onwards until today. In this first analytical chapter a historical context analysis is undertaken to trace the ideas, discourses and sedimented structures which constitute the current scalar constellation of the German state. These structures have to be understood as the historico-structural conditions giving rise to conflicts within urban space today including the contestation articulated by RtC-groups. The time frame corresponds to developments triggered by the crisis of the older regime of the national-centric Fordist welfare state in Western Europe. Neoliberal rescaling was one of the responses to this crisis in the framework of a newly arising hegemonic formation. An overview of the different steps of rescaling, which have been stabilised by institutionalisation in laws, the constitution and re-compositions of the federal system, will be given, to understand the current strategic selectivities with which urban actors are faced.
These comprise also the impact of neoliberal rescaling on the urban social fabric, framed as a crisis of social reproduction. This analysis, I contend, is necessary to establish the structural context in which urban protests emerge, to which they refer and with which they are dealing. Political agency in a specific spatio-temporal context cannot be separated from the respective hegemonic discourse formation, since it presents the grounds of possibility of this agency and at the same time the arena which is addressed.
The ensuing part takes the form of a discourse analysis in more narrow terms. It investigates the discourse around a Right to the City as it is practised by groups in Germany. The analysis is mainly based on semi-structured qualitative interviews and draws additionally on about 60 documents of different length taken from the groups' websites.
Texts such as a self-understanding or 'information about us' were included as well as calls to demonstrations, information leaflets, general reflections about the Right to the City and
reports about demonstrations and other events, published between 2009 and early 2016.4 Interviews have been chosen furthermore, since the documents and articles to be found online do provide a good overview on the publicly communicated political agenda of the groups and on some of their activities. However, these did not seem sufficient to grasp the motivations and reflections behind the eventually taken decisions. To understand the social practices, political identity and the groups' relation to broader politico-economic developments also requires the actors' self-representation. Compared to public documents
“interviews provide a less sanctioned, formalised or rationalised image of the world. The respondents provide individual, spontaneously phrased impressions of discursive patterns of interpretation […]. Through interviews knowledge can be generated about how individuals [...] construct meaning and identity” (Bedall 2014: 210, own translation). Since I was interested in how the groups articulate the meaning of their practices and how they link their struggles to the conditions which produce the problems they face, interviews seemed to be in line with discourse theory, seeking to “provide second-order interpretations of social actors’ own self-understandings and interpretations of their situations and practices” (Howarth 2005: 319). This way the discourse connected to the signifier of a Right to the City, the articulated antagonism and its fantasmatic dimensions can be made intelligible as an instance of micro-political practices of resistance.
I conducted seven interviews with fourteen activists from Jena, the Ruhr area, Cologne, Freiburg, Regensburg, Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg. Interview requests were sent to groups in fourteen cities - four of them did not reply, one was not active anymore, with two it was impossible to find a convenient date. The interviews lasted between 45 and 60 minutes and were connected each time with a visit to the respective city, only once the interview was conducted via skype (Hamburg). All respondents agreed to be recorded and quoted as part of their group. In order to broaden the range of groups incorporated in the analysis, websites were also consulted.5
The semi-structured interview guide contained different sets of questions targeting a) the motivation and reasons to found a group or a network (how do they problematise their social context, which critical developments do they observe, what mechanisms and actors are addressed, i.e. which antagonism is articulated); b) the focal themes of their work (what has been prioritised as the issues to act upon); c) their everyday work, the kind of
4 In order to limit the material to a processible amount, a cut was made after January 2016, the month in which also the last interviews were conducted.
5 Information about the interviews and references for the additionally used documents can be found in the appendix.
political or legal actions they undertake, including the scales of action and the question of their success; d) the social composition of the group (who is active and who do they speak to, including collaborations with other groups); e) their understanding of a Right to the City (what imaginaries do they connect to this slogan); f) their political identity (how do they understand themselves, also compared to other groups). The initial guideline was subject to changes after the first interview and emphasis on different blocs was modified according the individual groups' and activists' foci.
The interviews have been transcribed and together with the additional sources closely read to establish recurring kinds of articulations to be clustered further into categories, which are reflected in the structure of chapter 5. This clustering does of course not represent a simple move from element A to category B or vice versa. Ordering the distinct elements of the discourse under these categories can neither be framed as discovering objective truths in the empirical material and translating it to theoretical concepts, nor as matching unchangeable theoretical concepts with their empirical instances.
Instead, it has to be understood as an act of articulation itself to form a plausible narrative of the phenomenon under investigation.
The ontological and rather abstract considerations of discourse theoretical hegemony theory have been further concretised into small- and middle-range concepts.
This cannot happen in a purely deductive process where the more concrete concepts are straightforwardly deduced from discourse theoretical ontology since it is the historically-specific hegemonic struggles which are of interest and an investigation of structuration processes must take into account the actors' own interpretations. The assumption herein is that “institutions and practices are partly constituted by the beliefs and desires of social actors; that there is an internal relation between subjective meanings and actions” and that therefore the “set of shared, background practices” (Howarth 2005: 319) must be analysed to understand meaning-making processes. These actors-specific practices and beliefs cannot be grasped with the researcher's political ontology alone but have to be translated into political and social theoretical concepts to “redescribe the ontical level in terms of the distinctions brought about by that ontology” (Laclau 2004: 323). A close engagement with both – the theoretical groundings and the empirical material in a back and forth, i.e. a retroductive movement (e.g. Blaikie 2010: 87ff, Hauf and Belfrage 2015) seemed thus the most appropriate research strategy to be employed.
The starting point is the open question whether the RtC-discourse can be perceived as a fully developed counter-hegemonic project and whether it has the potential in a
hegemonic logic of politics to be part of radical transformation. The focus is thus less on the cohesiveness of the hegemonic formation embodied in the neoliberal rescaling of the German state and more on urban protest as part of the ongoing contestation of hegemony.
The concretisation of concepts to analyse the potentially counter-hegemonic project articulated by RtC-groups therefore takes up more space than concepts to analyse the neoliberal state project.