Peter Marcuse
Biographic Data
| ID | 249443 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Marcuse |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Marcuse |
| SIGNATURE | MARCUSE P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 80 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 810 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 75 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 5 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1971 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Wealth accumulation through home ownership: The painful myth of housing tenure, and what to do about it
While homeownership is widely associated with a bundle of individual legal rights, it must be seen in relation to its social and political implications. This piece aims to differentiate the meaning and value of homeownership and make room for alternative tenures. Community Land Trusts are one promising alternative model. I argue that there is a great need to develop alternatives to homeownership and eventually to decommodify housing altogether
Gentrifier
Gentrifier demystifies the idea of gentrification by opening a conversation that links the theoretical and the grassroots, spanning the literature of urban sociology, geography, planning, policy, and more.
Marcuse’s Concept of Dimensionality: A Political Interpretation
For the Repoliticization of Global City Research
After Exposing the Roots of Homelessness – What
I am deeply impressed by the contributions to this symposium and the debates that have led up to it, and happy that my little essay of more than 25 years ago fed into them. But at the same time I a
Depoliticizing urban discourse: How “we” write
Cooperatives On the Path to Socialism
Clarifying what Karl Marx thought of the role of cooperatives is useful, not to receive the "correct" answer to what that role will be, but to help think through what alternatives answers might be and how they might color today's expectations of the cooperative movement. If one sees a non-capitalist or socialist organization of society as ultimately desirable, then how should we answer the following questions in the present day: (1) Are co-ops in…
Gentrification, Social Justice and Personal Ethics
Gentrification, leading to displacement, is an increasingly recognized social problem. Individuals who are confronted with tight housing possibilities but have adequate incomes confront personal ethical issues on whether to act in ways that may contribute to displacement of lower-income residents, and researchers working on housing issues may be particularly concerned. In order to work out an ethical position, clarity is first needed on the diffe…
Critical Urban Theory versus Critical Urban Studies: A Review Debate
Critical urban theory and critical urban studies form the subject of two recent edited collections on approaches to the analysis and transformation of the contemporary capitalist city. In an exchange of commentaries by the respective editors and contributors, the introduction explains the genesis of each book and previews some of the key observations. Peter Marcuse then offers his assessment of Critical Urban Studies: New Directions , which is re…
Reading the Right to the City
The “Right to the City” is, for better or worse, a catchy phrase, and has been used with quite a diversity of often contradictory meanings. The article describes Lefebvre's own reading, a strategic reading, a discontented reading, a spatial reading, a collaborationist reading, and a subversive reading. It concludes with the suggestion of an alternate reading, a sectoral reading, consistent with the experience of the Occupy movement today. One sho…
Reading the right to the city. Part two: Organisational realities
Based on reports on Right to the City Alliances in Spain, Germany, France, Hungary, the USA, Portugal and Greece, this paper puts together questions on organizational issues that have been raised and suggests some hypothetical answers. The issues dealt with include target constituency, problem focus, organizational base, internal organization, strategies and tactics, historical setting, role of the state, motivations and guiding theory
Occupy Consciousness: Reading the 1960s and Occupy Wall Street with Herbert Marcuse
Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City
1. Cities for people, not for profit: an introduction Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse and Margit Mayer 2. What is critical urban theory? Neil Brenner 3. Whose right(s) to what city? Peter Marcuse 4. Henri Lefebvre, the right to the city and the new metropolitan mainstream Christian Schmid 5. The 'right to the city' in urban social movements Margit Mayer 6. Space and revolution in theory and practice: eight theses Kanishka Goonewardena 7. Critical dev…
ACSP Distinguished Educator Award
The tabooed after-life of 9 / 11
This paper makes three major points: 1 The interpretation placed on the events of 9/11, and specifically its use to ground a so-called ‘war on terror’, has been used to buttress conservative political power through restrictions on democracy. 2 Most major decisions about what to do to deal with the events of 9/11 have been made by, and in the interests of, a narrow segment of the population, those in positions of economic and political power. 3 Th…
Commentary: Post-socialist Property Rights: Whose Rights, to What and How
Justice et injustices spatiales
Le débat sur la justice et l'injustice est central et urgent dans les sociétés démocratiques, et la justice sociale est l'horizon de la plupart des politiques d'action sur les territoires. Mais le doute sur les grands récits explicatifs du monde a conduit souvent à relativiser tout discours sur la justice. Ce processus est renforcé par l'émergence de mouvements sociaux divers (féministes, écologistes, anti-racistes...) et par le développement du …
The need for critical theory in everyday life: Why the tea parties have popular support
Everyday life is where the results of the social, economic and political systems in which we live are manifest and directly experienced—where the societal shapes and is shaped by the individual. The everyday exploitation, oppression and discontent created by the prevailing system meet many forms of progressive, system‐challenging resistance. Most can be absorbed from above by the system, using both formal repression and a pervasive acquiescence‐i…
In defense of theory in practice
The relation between theory and practice is tricky. Sometimes theory seems irrelevant under the pressures of everyday crises; sometimes the problems of practice seem so overwhelming as to leave no room for theory. This paper argues that theory, specifically critical theory, is an indispensable part of effective practice, and in turn rests on practice for its understanding and analysis. Examples are given from several current struggles: homelessne…
The forms of power and the forms of cities: Building on Charles Tilly
Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice
Introduction (James Connolly and Justin Steil) Section 1: Why Justice? Theoretical Foundations of the Just City Debate 1. Planning and the Just City (Susan S. Fainstein) 2. The Right to the Just City (David Harvey with Cuz Potter) 3. Discursive Planning: Social Justice as Discourse (Frank Fischer) 4. Justice and the Spatial Imagination (Mustafa Dikec) Section 2: What are the Limits of the Just City? Expanding the Debate 5. From Justice Planning t…
A Critical Approach to the Subprime Mortgage Crisis in the United States: Rethinking the Public Sector in Housing
The subprime crisis rests on three pillars: the dependence on profit–making in the provision of housing; the absence of adequate public regulation; and the myths of home ownership. Fourteen recommendations for remedial action are listed
From critical urban theory to the right to the city
The right to the city is becoming, in theory and in practice, a widespread, effective formulation of a set of demands to be actively thought through and pursued. But whose right, what right and to what city? Each question is examined in turn, first in the historical context of 1968 in which Henri Lefebvre first popularized the phrase, then in its meaning for the guidance of action. The conclusion suggests that exposing, proposing and politicizing…
Cities for people, not for profit
The rapidly unfolding global economic recession is dramatically intensifying the contradictions around which urban social movements have been rallying, suddenly validating their claims regarding th
Urban policy and architecture for people, not for power
The form and meaning of cities change historically with changes in the political and economic structures in which they are embedded. Both economic and political relationships are critical; changes in one sphere do not automatically lead to changes in the other. The absence of the market relationships that so widely determine the shape of capitalist cities is not a guarantee that cities free of those relationships will be democratic. Further, even…
The Enclave, the Citadel, and the Ghetto: What has Changed in the Post-Fordist U.S. City
The author defines classic ghetto as the result of the involuntary spatial segregation of a group that stands in a subordinate political and social relationship to its surrounding society, the enclave as a voluntarily developed spatial concentration of a group for purposes of promoting the welfare of its members, and the citadel as created by a dominant group to protect or enhance its superior position. The author describes a new phenomenon, conn…
From critical urban theory to the right to the city
The right to the city is becoming, in theory and in practice, a widespread, effective formulation of a set of demands to be actively thought through and pursued. But whose right, what right and to what city? Each question is examined in turn, first in the historical context of 1968 in which Henri Lefebvre first popularized the phrase, then in its meaning for the guidance of action. The conclusion suggests that exposing, proposing and politicizing…
Cities for people, not for profit
The rapidly unfolding global economic recession is dramatically intensifying the contradictions around which urban social movements have been rallying, suddenly validating their claims regarding th
Dual city: A Muddy Metaphor for a Quartered City
The Ghetto of Exclusion and the Fortified Enclave: New Patterns in the United States
Three key developments are described: (a) the transformation of the earlier racial ghettos into excluded ghettos, class/racial ghettos of the excluded and abandoned, resulting from a combination of hyperpauperization and racism; (b) a qualitatively new phase of the totalizing suburb, in which "edge cities" are created combining residential, business, social, and cultural areas that are removed from older central cities and overlaid on earlier pat…
Sustainability is not enough
This paper critically reviews the concept of sustainability, especially as it has come to be applied outside of environmental goals. It suggests “sustainability” should not be considered as a goal for a housing or urban programme – many bad programmes are sustainable – but as a constraint whose absence may limit the usefulness of a good programme. It also discusses how the promotion of “sustainability” may simply encourage the sustaining of the u…
What's So New About Divided Cities
Reading the Right to the City
The “Right to the City” is, for better or worse, a catchy phrase, and has been used with quite a diversity of often contradictory meanings. The article describes Lefebvre's own reading, a strategic reading, a discontented reading, a spatial reading, a collaborationist reading, and a subversive reading. It concludes with the suggestion of an alternate reading, a sectoral reading, consistent with the experience of the Occupy movement today. One sho…
Gentrification, Social Justice and Personal Ethics
Gentrification, leading to displacement, is an increasingly recognized social problem. Individuals who are confronted with tight housing possibilities but have adequate incomes confront personal ethical issues on whether to act in ways that may contribute to displacement of lower-income residents, and researchers working on housing issues may be particularly concerned. In order to work out an ethical position, clarity is first needed on the diffe…
Young and Homeless in Hollywood: Mapping Social Identities
Security or Safety in Cities? The Threat of Terrorism after 9/11
A great deal is at issue in the handling of the threat of terrorism in the United States today. Restrictions on the use of public space are a direct consequence, at the urban level, of what is happening. But beyond that, and beyond the various abuses of civil liberties and common sense that have been involved in the governmental misuse of the threat after 9/11, the most serious misuse may be the sale of the threat as a threat to existential secur…
The city’ as perverse metaphor
Gentrification, homelessness, and the work process: Housing markets and labour markets in the quartered city
The relationship between work and housing is much more than a relationship between labour markets and housing markets. The nature of the work process — not just how much is paid or where jobs are located — influences the type of housing that is demanded and the type of housing that is supplied. The paper provides a few examples, and then uses two cases, gentrification and homelessness, to illustrate the contention that the linkage between labour …
Residential Alienation, Home Ownership and the Limits of Shelter Policy
There is greater public confusion over housing policy today than there has been in any comparable period in the last thirty years. The Nixon-Ford administration's wholesale program terminations and budget slashes only cloak the problem temporarily. Everyone agrees that the ostrich ought to get his head out of the sand, but few agree where he should go once he doel so. Housing allowances, at this point, seem to many the best answei; at least they …
Depoliticizing urban discourse: How “we” write
Urban form and globalization after September 11th: The view from New York
The attack on the World Trade Center will have a significant effect on urban development in New York City, not so much because it will change existing patterns, but because it will intensify them. The effect will come from the way leaders in the political and business community act after September 11th, more than from what the attack itself accomplished. Among the key effects will be a further barricading of spaces within the city, a concentrated…
A New Spatial Order in Cities
The targeted crisis: On the Ideology of the Urban Fiscal Crisis and Its Uses
Putting space in its place: Reassessing the spatiality of the ghetto and advanced marginality
Loic Wacquant’s writings from the early 1990s, here collected in substantially expanded form, made a significant contribution to the analysis of burning urban issues when first published, and are s
Housing Movements in the USA
Have conflicts around issues of housing given rise to ?social movements?, in the USA? Looking at the expectations for broad social change that have been attached to such movements in the recent past, the answer would have to be that housing alone has never provided the core of such a movement. However, an extensive review of the history of struggles around housing in the USA over the last two centuries suggests that housing issues can, under cert…
In defense of theory in practice
The relation between theory and practice is tricky. Sometimes theory seems irrelevant under the pressures of everyday crises; sometimes the problems of practice seem so overwhelming as to leave no room for theory. This paper argues that theory, specifically critical theory, is an indispensable part of effective practice, and in turn rests on practice for its understanding and analysis. Examples are given from several current struggles: homelessne…
A Critical Approach to the Subprime Mortgage Crisis in the United States: Rethinking the Public Sector in Housing
The subprime crisis rests on three pillars: the dependence on profit–making in the provision of housing; the absence of adequate public regulation; and the myths of home ownership. Fourteen recommendations for remedial action are listed
Neighborhood Policy and the Distribution of Power: New York City's Community Boards
The Beginnings of Public Housing in New York
Cooperatives On the Path to Socialism
Clarifying what Karl Marx thought of the role of cooperatives is useful, not to receive the "correct" answer to what that role will be, but to help think through what alternatives answers might be and how they might color today's expectations of the cooperative movement. If one sees a non-capitalist or socialist organization of society as ultimately desirable, then how should we answer the following questions in the present day: (1) Are co-ops in…
Social Indicators and Housing Policy
Residential Alienation, Home Ownership and the Limits of Shelter Policy
There is greater public confusion over housing policy today than there has been in any comparable period in the last thirty years. The Nixon-Ford administration's wholesale program terminations and budget slashes only cloak the problem temporarily. Everyone agrees that the ostrich ought to get his head out of the sand, but few agree where he should go once he doel so. Housing allowances, at this point, seem to many the best answei; at least they …
Mass transit for the few
Letters from readers
An Open Letter to Friends of Herbert Marcuse
Housing in Early City Planning
America’s Housing: Prospects and Problems, by George Sternlieb
Journal Article America’s Housing: Prospects and Problems, by George Sternlieb Get access America’s Housing: Prospects and Problems by George Sternliebet al. New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Center for Urban Policy Research, 1980. 562 pp. $20.00. Peter Marcuse Peter Marcuse Columbia University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume 96, Issue 2, Summer 1981, Pages 343–345…
The targeted crisis: On the Ideology of the Urban Fiscal Crisis and Its Uses
On The Feeble Retreat of Planning
The Beginnings of Public Housing in New York
Neighborhood Policy and the Distribution of Power: New York City's Community Boards
Perspectives on Homelessness
A Man for All Systems
Review of Life Begins at 65: The Not Entirely Candid Autobiography of a Drifter by Hans Blumenfeld.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
Gentrification, homelessness, and the work process: Housing markets and labour markets in the quartered city
The relationship between work and housing is much more than a relationship between labour markets and housing markets. The nature of the work process — not just how much is paid or where jobs are located — influences the type of housing that is demanded and the type of housing that is supplied. The paper provides a few examples, and then uses two cases, gentrification and homelessness, to illustrate the contention that the linkage between labour …
Dual city: A Muddy Metaphor for a Quartered City
Social, political and urban change in the GDR: Scarcely existing socialism
Letter From the German Democratic Republic
Wende is the term used in East Germany to describe what has happened here in the last months. The literal translation is "turn" or "change," and it can mean a bend in the road as well as a complete turn-around. Just what it was that changed, how big the change was, whether there were not indeed more changes then than one—one newspaper headlined its summary of the second 100 days since the fall of Honecker as "the Wende in the Wende"—and why the c…
Die Zukunft der “sozialistischen” Städte
Repeating history: Denazification, de‐stalinization, and the reworking of the past
Moral Indignation And Politics: The Debate Over The Stasi
(1993). Moral indignation and politics: The debate over the stasi. New Political Science: Vol. 12, No. 1-2, pp. 9-18
What's So New About Divided Cities
Transitions in South Africa: To What
South Africa is often compared with eastern Europe (as well as other African countries, and sometimes with Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Haiti, or countries elsewhere) as a country "in transition," moving in the direction in which all history moves, toward democracy and free private markets. But "transition" is not so simple or unidirectional anywhere:" the transition to "the new South Africa" is in fact a three-fold transition, from apartheid to "non…
Excerpts from the draft strategy and tactics document of the South African communist party (April, 1995)
In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II
Shorter reviews
Crush, Jonathan and James Wilmot (eds.) Crossing boundaries: mine migrancy in a democratic South Africa Smith, Michael Peter (ed.) Marginal spaces: comparative urban and community research, volume 5 Harrington, J.W. and B. Wharf Industrial location: principles, practice and policy King, Desmond Separate and unequal. Black Americans and the US Federal government
Political science (58 works) · Sociology (53 works) · Law (45 works) · Politics (31 works) · Economics (24 works) · Law (24 works) · History (21 works) · Philosophy (21 works) · Political economy (16 works) · Computer Science (15 works)