When asked why he never left the city, Socrates replied that “the country places and the trees won’t teach me anything and the people in the city do” (Phaedrus 230c-d). Fortunately, political theory has a lot to say about trees; green political theory is thriving! But political theory has not reflected so much on the city. There are notable exceptions, of course, and many others in social theory, urban theory, and geography have engaged the city as a contested conceptual field. But political theory does not typically engage the spatial conditions of our normative claims about justice, equality, rights, freedom, agency, and so on as an essential part of what we do, or reflect on the urban manifestations of conflict among these concepts. We regularly ask: Why or why not? By whom, for whom and when? But political theory too rarely asks these questions in the context of: Where? In the twenty-first century, “where” is increasingly becoming the city, especially the informal peri-urban sectors of the city, as the planet continues to urbanize at a rate of 36 million people each year.

I thought about Socrates as I read Margaret Kohn’s The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth because she demonstrates how much political theory has to learn from the city—the definitive laboratory for coexistence—where the confrontations between private and public, between power and justice, and between wealth are poverty are physicalized, and where the stark realities of urban injustice for so many people demand a new theory.

Kohn has been prolific on these urban conflicts over the past decade and a half, deploying critical and normative tools to expose the effects of privatization on our cities, neighborhoods, and public spaces. Her latest sophisticated and marvelously accessible book assembles a critical arsenal, drawn from political and urban theory, intellectual history, and the street itself, to contest the hegemonic neoliberal urban lexicon of markets, private property, individual rights, choice, efficiency, and economic development that drives practices of urban dispossession and exclusion in cities across the world.

Kohn recuperates a nineteenth-century French republican countertradition of social rights, called “solidarism,” through which she supplants the neoliberal imaginaries of the city as a “growth machine” or a “phantasmagoria for the creative class” with the alternative imaginary of an “urban commonwealth” (p. 6). She fuses this collective aspiration with Henri Lefebvre’s celebrated but somewhat curious idea of the “right to the city”—celebrated for its emancipatory potential, but curious for its seeming alignment with an individualist language of rights. The result is a social and collective idea of the city animated by the agency of those who build and inhabit it. In other words, Kohn’s argument is grounded in rights, but is extricated from an individualistic lineage oriented around private property and autonomy, where social welfare is reduced to the dehumanizing language of charity, suffering, and “bare life.” Her argument for urban justice is thus grounded in the agency of the dispossessed, and their social rights to share and codetermine the urban commonwealth. “How can you exclude people from sharing something that is, by nature, collective?” she asks (p. 7). Redistribution on this reading is not a response to an individualist moral failure but a just egalitarian response to a structural condition.

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. On the one hand, she seeks to deepen our understanding of urban injustice by refining our conceptual apparatus for talking about it. On the other hand, this conceptual clarity then becomes generative of “better arguments against dispossession,” not only for academic audiences but for “citizens,” too—both those who are “skeptical” and need to be convinced, as well as those who are “sympathetic” and can mobilize better arguments in sites of urban democratic contestation (p. 8). For Kohn, political theory brings together the abstract and the concrete, the universal and the particular, and becomes a “political tool” for real people in local places (pp. 198–99).

As a theorist who engages diverse urban knowledges to enrich normative claims about justice, equality, and citizenship, I found Kohn’s use of “vignettes” very effective. She employs “true stories of struggle over the right to the city” (p. 8), not as formal case studies to advance expert knowledge but to “help us see more vividly” (p. 8) both the injustice of dispossession and the diverse mechanisms for political resolution. The voices and experiences of the dispossessed and the resistant breathe empirical richness into her account, and help to ground her normative claims in the urgent realities of urban struggle—a method that some theorists have begun to call “grounded normative theory.” Stories about slum clearing in Mumbai illuminate the meaning of “social property” and the harms of reducing the claims of squatters to suffering bodies. Stories about the demolition of the Cabrini-Green housing project in Chicago illuminate “the right to occupancy” and contest official narratives that demonize public housing as sites of crime and urban decrepitude with the voices of the dispossessed, who instead describe demolition and coercive dislocation as a loss of community, family, and home, and a disruption of meaningful routines and embedded life plans. Stories about gentrification in San Francisco, Richmond, and Toronto illuminate the phenomenon of “‘bad luck” that demands an egalitarian policy response to socialize the costs borne by the dispossessed. Kohn’s account of transit justice is particularly rich, animating a central theme in her book: that gentrification ultimately privatizes public amenities, like parks, schools, streets, and transportation, effectively excluding those who can no longer afford rents, and denying their right to share and codetermine the commonwealth.

Kohn's rich normative arguments in the first two-thirds of the book are chastened, however, in the last third, as she notes the “glaring disconnect” (p. 135) between theory and practice, and how reluctant courts, policymakers, and publics have been to fight dispossession and protect social rights in this age of hegemonic neoliberal urbanization. Normative theory can take us only so far, she claims: Political theory needs to intervene into the praxis of resistance. This also means becoming better attuned to the cultural dog whistles of urban power. In this regard, I particularly appreciated Kohn’s account of the complicity of the creative class and “so much of progressive urban politics today” that seeks to activate latent playful, creative, and participatory neighborhood energies through ephemeral pop-ups, pocket parks, and “heterotopian” retrofits in industrial warehouses, like “art hubs” and co-working spaces. Instead of becoming a “rhizomatic countercolonization of the city,” these interventions end up catering to the expensive tastes of wealthy white professionals who wish to “both deny and enjoy capitalism” (pp. 183–85), and to enrich private developers who capitalize on these trends. In this sense, The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth is essential reading for those conflicted by their simultaneous critique of neoliberal dispossession and their desire to live and play in the gentrified neighborhoods of our cities.

The account ends with democratic contestation and the bottom-up collective agency and resistance of the dispossessed. Through a rigorous analysis of Occupy Toronto, as well as an illuminating vignette of a neighborhood conflict over a gentrifying San Francisco soccer field, Kohn helps to move the discussion of public space as a site of leisure, consumption, and random encounter to a site of contestation and dissent. Here, I would add that public space is also a site for the construction of public knowledge, and in the tradition of Paolo Freire, can be a tool for cultivating a solidaristic ethos in our cities and unbridling the political and electoral power of the young and the marginalized.

While Kohn also advocates for locally embedded forms of economic activity, such as worker cooperatives, local markets, and community development banks, she thinks that they are “partial” solutions (p. 196). While they serve to mitigate some of the worst effects of “extreme dis-investment” as the top-down public is retreating, she ultimately seeks to transform the structure of capital, and therefore refuses to surrender the power of the state to the winds of austerity. Institutions matter. The bottom-up cannot go it alone. As the radical Left and the radical Right seem to be converging today in their mistrust of government, Kohn demands accountable public institutions and urban policy that can “compel” a reallocation of social property. The greatest appeal of her approach is that it “incorporates both state-directed and more capillary forms of solidarity” (p. 196). I find this convergence hopeful, and a rich terrain for further critical engagement.