Abstraction Beyond a ‘Law of Thought’: On Space, Appropriation and Concrete Abstraction

Butler, Chris

doi:10.1007/s10978-016-9186-z

Cited by 7 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…They worry that the right to the city has deteriorated into a rhetorical tool or mere catchphrase with little meaning; Andy Merrifield (2011) provides perhaps the strongest and most succinct critique of the right to the city, arguing that scholars should abandon the concept altogether. For Butler (2016), attempts to institutionalize the right to the city pose inherent limitations, considering law's role in the entrenchment of abstract space. Others call for a return to the concept's Lefebvrian roots for careful theoretical refinement (Souza 2010;Purcell 2002Purcell , 2013Kipfer et al 2012).…”

Section: Limitations Of the City Statutementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The role of law in both furthering and hindering movements' efforts to advocate for dignified social housing, for example, is a prevailing issue faced by housing rights advocates around the world. Butler (2016) argues that juridico-political relations represent "concrete abstraction"-a link between abstraction and embodied social practices. Juridical relations of private property since the Middle Ages have reified the abstract mode of spatial production (i.e., the production of abstract, as opposed to social, space).…”

Section: Rio De Janeiro Was At the Center Of The World's Attentionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Butler argues that the right to the city cannot be reduced to a formalistic juridical right. Instead, a right to the city that is true to Lefebvre's theory is an assertion of the entitlement of all inhabitants to collaborate in creative struggles to prioritize the appropriation of space for use values over its domination by exchange values and the interventions of a technocratic bureaucracy (Lefebvre 1996;Butler 2016). For Butler, attempts to institutionalize the right to the city pose inherent limitations, considering law's role in the entrenchment of abstract space.…”

Section: Rio De Janeiro Was At the Center Of The World's Attentionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Fine‐Tuning the “Right to Rio de Janeiro” from Above and Below: The City Statute in Pre‐Olympics Rio de Janeiro

Svoboda

2021

City & Society

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Brazil's City Statute enshrines the "right to the city" and the "social function of property" in its constitution. Brazilian scholars, however, identify barriers to achieving the law's agenda. Broader debates regarding the right to the city suggest the concept has been overextended beyond meaning, and that formalization of the right to the city betrays its radical Lefebvrian roots. This article is based on fieldwork conducted in Rio de Janeiro when widespread forced evictions were being carried out prior to the city's hosting of the 2016 Summer Olympics. Based on observations within eleven housing occupations, and sixty interviews with participants, leaders of social movement organizations, and local politicians, the article argues that the "constitutionalization" of the right to the city and the social function of property formed the basis for the politicization of dispossessed urban residents. The social function of property was a particularly salient concept for capturing the injustice of the planned relocation of the displaced poor to the urban periphery, while countless buildings sat underutilized in the city center.

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Section: Limitations Of the City Statutementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Rio De Janeiro Was At the Center Of The World's Attentionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Rio De Janeiro Was At the Center Of The World's Attentionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Fine‐Tuning the “Right to Rio de Janeiro” from Above and Below: The City Statute in Pre‐Olympics Rio de Janeiro

Svoboda

2021

City & Society

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“…The challenge is to think through the ways in which violence entails both practice and representations, while also keeping a critical geographic imaginary. Certain strands of extra-legal theory, and the interdisciplinary field of law and geography studies, reflect the emergence of new orientations towards questions of space, relationality, and the material (Butler, 2016). Much has been made of Foucault's (2004) notions of governmentality and biopolitics.…”

Section: The Violence Of Lawmentioning

confidence: 99%

The violence of planning law and the production of risk in Lima

Lambert

2021

Geoforum

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Counteracting law violation and the haphazard occupation of marginal land as an explanation for how risk becomes inherent to informal urbanisation, I demonstrate in this paper that hazardous conditions are an outcome of practices that seek to comply with planning law. Risk on the steep slopes of Lima is reproduced by unchanged and inflexible planning regulations and instruments, and not by their absence. Building on scholarship at the nexus of planning and informality, and borrowing from socio-spatial and legal geography, I argue that planning law and legal texts regulate the spatial layouts of human settlements in ways that produce concrete abstraction and exacerbate unintended outcomes.Using extensive case study research and ethnographic methods, I unpack three perverse spatial configurations on the peripheral slopes of Lima: the grid layout resulting in excessively steep access ways, electricity poles in the middle of staircases and dangerous evacuation routes. I demonstrate how manoeuvres of fragmentation, homogenisation, and hierarchical ordering, active in planning processes and legal texts, lead to material and corporeal violence that maintain dwellers in perpetual landscapes of risk.

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“…Space under capitalism is an abstraction that has “‘bec[ome] true’ in social, economic, political, and cultural practice ” (Stanek, 2008: 62–63). Therefore, under capitalism, the “submission of fragments of space to the universalising logic of exchange value” operates materially (Butler, 2016: 9). Further still, capitalist space is produced through the interplay of technocratic representation, the “complex symbols of its ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’” and everyday practice (cf.…”

Section: The Biopolitical Commonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The biopolitical commons: A revised theory of urban land in the age of biopolitical production

Conroy

2019

Planning Theory

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The literature on biopolitical production largely presumes that contemporary capital is parasitic, enclosing and capturing value that is autonomously and collectively produced across the urban landscape. In contrast, this article suggests that in particular contexts, planners—acting largely as surrogates for urban real estate capital—play an active role in the production of the urban commons for the sake of future enclosure. Using contemporary Chicago as a point of reference, it argues that such commons are (generally) produced in locales of racialized “ontological devaluation”—in spaces that have been historically marginalized under racial capitalism. Further still, this article develops a theoretical concept, the “biopolitical commons,” to name those spaces and practices that are produced for the sake of future racialized biopolitical accumulation—pulling together, in the process, research on biopolitical production and “abolition ecology.” Finally, this article concludes by posing a series of questions for future research on the biopolitical commons.

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Abstraction Beyond a ‘Law of Thought’: On Space, Appropriation and Concrete Abstraction

Cited by 7 publications

References 35 publications

Fine‐Tuning the “Right to Rio de Janeiro” from Above and Below: The City Statute in Pre‐Olympics Rio de Janeiro

Fine‐Tuning the “Right to Rio de Janeiro” from Above and Below: The City Statute in Pre‐Olympics Rio de Janeiro

The violence of planning law and the production of risk in Lima

The biopolitical commons: A revised theory of urban land in the age of biopolitical production

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