Critical theory
and the city
Who benefits from the way our cities and regions are built, and could they be built differently? Critical theory asks both questions at once. This page explains where it comes from, what its main strands say, and how to use it in your Q3 work.
What is it? ↓Why space? ↓Six strands ↓Twelve ideas ↓In practice ↓Limits ↓Try it ↓Problem statement
Theoretical framework · Reflection
Key reading: Brenner (2009)
What makes a theory critical?
Critical theory began in Frankfurt. The Institute for Social Research opened there in 1923, and Max Horkheimer became its director in 1930. In an essay of 1937 he set out two ways of doing social science (Horkheimer, 1972).
Traditional theory describes the world as it is and tries to predict it, as a chemist describes a reaction. The researcher stands outside what she studies. Critical theory starts from a different fact: society is made by people, so people can make it differently. It asks why things are arranged as they are, whose interests the arrangement serves, and what would have to change for people to live more freely (Horkheimer, 1972; Bohman, 2014).
Traditional questions
How many homes are missing, and where? How fast can we build them? What will they cost? What does the demand model predict for 2040?
Critical questions
Why are homes built and traded as financial assets? Who gains from scarcity and rising prices? Who decided what counts as ‘affordable’? Which tenants are organising, and what do they want?
You need both. The first set measures the shortage. The second asks how it was produced, and by whom, which is where a planning problem statement usually begins.
Bohman (2014) sums up Horkheimer’s test. A theory counts as critical only when it does three things at the same time:
It explains what is wrong with the present situation, and why.
Ask: Why do rents in your region rise faster than wages?
It states openly the norms it uses to judge.
Ask: By what standard is this unfair: a right, a law, a promise in the plan?
It identifies who could change the situation, and how.
Ask: Which actors, alliances or instruments could change it?
The term has two meanings. With capitals, Critical Theory means the Frankfurt School and its heirs. In a broader sense it covers every theory that joins explanation to the aim of freeing people from domination; Bohman (2014) counts feminism, critical race theory and postcolonial criticism among them. This page uses the broad sense, because urbanism borrows from all of them.
Why the built environment?
Plots, streets, buildings and zoning rules last for decades. They fix social relations in place: who lives near whom, who owns the land, who travels for how long. That durability is one reason critical thinkers turned to cities from the late 1960s. Four ideas explain the turn.
Figure 1. Lefebvre’s three moments of space, simplified. Plans and maps work mainly in conceived space; daily routines (perceived) and meanings (lived) often escape them. Drawn for this page after Lefebvre (1991).
Read Figure 1 as a warning. A master plan, a zoning map and a transport model are all conceived space. They are necessary, and they are also partial: they cannot register the shortcut children take to school or what a demolished market meant to the people who used it.
Designs can also settle questions of power before anyone votes on them. Winner (1980) called this the politics of artefacts; Session 6 works with the idea.
Space is produced
Henri Lefebvre argued that every society produces its own space, and that this space is both a product of social relations and a tool for keeping them in place (Lefebvre, 1991). He separated three moments: space as people use it every day (perceived), space as planners, engineers and maps represent it (conceived), and space as people experience and imagine it (lived).
Ask: what does your plan see, and what do residents live that it cannot see?
The city absorbs surplus capital
David Harvey argued that capital flows into buildings and infrastructure when other investments stop paying. Building booms and property crashes are part of how capitalism works (Harvey, 1978). He later traced the pattern from Haussmann’s Paris to the 2008 mortgage crisis, and concluded that whoever controls this surplus shapes the city (Harvey, 2008).
Ask: where does the money for your region’s projects come from, and where do the returns go?
Growth machines
In many cities, landowners, developers, local media and politicians form coalitions with one shared interest: rising land values. Logan and Molotch (1987) call them growth machines. Their analysis turns on the tension between the exchange value of a place, what it earns, and its use value, what it gives the people who live there.
Ask: who in your region gains when land prices rise?
Planning has a dark side
Planning usually presents itself as reform. Yiftachel (1998) shows that it can also control people, in four dimensions: territorial (where groups may live), procedural (who takes part), socioeconomic (who gets resources) and cultural (whose identity is recognised). He calls planning double-edged: the same tools can include or exclude.
Ask: which of the four dimensions does your plan touch?
When is urban theory critical?
Brenner (2009) names four features that separate critical urban theory from mainstream urban studies, which tends to take the existing city as given:
- It is theory. It reflects on the city; it does not promise a recipe for action.
- It is reflexive. It knows that it comes from a particular place and time.
- It criticises instrumental reason. It distrusts knowledge that asks only how to do something efficiently, never whether to do it or for whom.
- It shows the gap between the actual and the possible. It keeps other cities thinkable.
Six strands, one family
Critical theory is a family with arguments inside it. Six strands matter most for urbanism. Open each card for the main authors, the core idea, what it asks of a planner, and where it appears in this course.
The Frankfurt School+Reason can become a tool of domination.Open
Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin.
Writing in exile during the Second World War, Horkheimer and Adorno argued that the Enlightenment’s promise of freedom had turned against itself: reason shrank to calculation, used to master nature and people alike (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002). Marcuse (1964) described a one-dimensional consumer society that absorbs its own opposition. Benjamin studied the shopping arcades of nineteenth-century Paris and read Haussmann’s wide boulevards partly as a defence against barricades (Benjamin, 1999).
Be wary of plans that present a political choice as a technical optimisation.
In this course: Session 6
Habermas and communicative planning+Better decisions come from better conversations, if power is kept out.Open
Jürgen Habermas; in planning, John Forester and Patsy Healey.
Habermas (1984) separates reason used to reach a goal efficiently from reason used to reach understanding between people. A decision is legitimate when those affected could accept it after a free and open discussion. His history of the public sphere traces where such discussion took place, and how commerce and mass media later hollowed it out (Habermas, 1989).
Forester (1989) showed that planners shape what people pay attention to, and can expose or reproduce misleading information. Healey (1997) built collaborative planning on these ideas: planning as building shared understanding among many stakeholders.
Consensus can hide power. Flyvbjerg (1998a) and Hillier (2003) argue that real planning never meets Habermas’s ideal conditions. Mouffe (1999) sees conflict between adversaries as the normal state of democracy and proposes agonistic pluralism instead.
Recognition and redistribution+Injustice is about money, and about respect.Open
Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser.
Honneth (1995) argues that people become full persons through three kinds of recognition: love in close relationships, equal rights, and esteem for what they contribute. Disrespect harms people and drives social struggles. Fraser (1995) agrees that recognition matters but insists that redistribution of resources matters as much, and that the two can pull against each other.
Fraser’s warning: a programme aimed at a ‘deprived’ group or area can bring resources while marking the people who live there as the problem (Fraser, 1995). Ask what a neighbourhood programme gives, and how it names residents.
In this course: Spatial justice
Political economy and the right to the city+The city is produced for profit; it could be produced for use.Open
Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells, David Harvey, Peter Marcuse.
Lefebvre published Le droit à la ville in 1968: a claim by city dwellers to take part in shaping urban life, and not only to consume it (Lefebvre, 1996). Castells (1977) analysed the city as a site of collective consumption, where housing, transport and services provided by the state become the object of urban social movements. Harvey (1973) brought social justice into urban geography and later turned the right to the city into a demand for democratic control over how urban surplus is used (Harvey, 2008).
Peter Marcuse (2009) asks three questions of the slogan: whose right, which right, and to what city? His answer for critical work is a sequence: expose, propose, politicise.
In this course: Session 2, Commons, Spatial justice
Foucault and the dark side of planning+Power shapes what counts as rational.Open
Michel Foucault; in planning, Bent Flyvbjerg and Oren Yiftachel.
Foucault was not part of the Frankfurt School and disagreed with Habermas, yet planners often read the two side by side (Flyvbjerg, 1998b). He showed how modern power works through knowledge, classification and spaces designed to make people visible, such as Bentham’s panopticon (Foucault, 1977).
Flyvbjerg (1998a) followed a plan to reduce car traffic in central Aalborg, Denmark, over many years. The local Chamber of Industry and Commerce, largely through informal contacts, reshaped it step by step. His conclusion: power more often defines what counts as rational knowledge than the reverse. Yiftachel (1998) turns this into a general account of planning’s dark side.
In this course: Session 7 (discourse)
Feminist, critical race and decolonial theory+Whose experience is treated as the default?Open
Among many: Patricia Hill Collins, Robert Bullard, Ananya Roy, Amy Allen.
In the broad sense, critical theory includes feminist, critical race and postcolonial thought (Bohman, 2014). Each starts from people that mainstream theory treated as exceptions. Bullard (1990) documented how waste sites and polluting plants in the US South were placed near Black communities, work that helped shape the environmental justice movement. Roy (2005) argues that the state produces informality itself: planning decides what counts as legal or illegal, and therefore who can be evicted.
Check who your categories, data and standards treat as normal, and who they leave out.
In this course: Feminist planning, Decolonial approaches
Twelve ideas to carry with you
These terms recur across the strands. Each card gives a short definition, a source, and an example of where you might spot the idea in a planning document or a street.
Emancipation
Freeing people from conditions that dominate them. The aim that makes a theory critical (Bohman, 2014).
Spot it: A plan that widens what residents can decide for themselves.
Ideology
Ideas that make a particular interest look natural or universal (Eagleton, 1991).
Spot it: “There is no alternative to market-led regeneration.”
Instrumental reason
Thinking only about means and efficiency, never about ends or who benefits (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002).
Spot it: A traffic model that optimises travel time and never asks whose trips count.
Immanent critique
Judging a society or policy by its own stated ideals (Benhabib, 1986).
Spot it: Comparing a city’s promise of ‘inclusive growth’ with who was displaced.
Production of space
Space is made by social relations and helps reproduce them (Lefebvre, 1991).
Spot it: A gated estate that turns income differences into walls.
Use and exchange value
What a place gives its users versus what it earns its owners (Logan & Molotch, 1987).
Spot it: A community garden sold as a building plot.
Right to the city
A collective claim to shape urban life, not only to consume it (Lefebvre, 1996; Harvey, 2008).
Spot it: Tenants demanding a say over a regeneration plan.
Communicative rationality
Reaching agreement by giving and testing reasons (Habermas, 1984).
Spot it: A design workshop where every claim must be justified to those affected.
Agonism
Treating conflict between adversaries as normal and productive (Mouffe, 1999).
Spot it: A plan that records the objections it did not resolve.
Recognition
Being seen and respected as an equal (Honneth, 1995; Fraser, 1995).
Spot it: A neighbourhood renamed in policy from ‘problem area’ to partner.
Power/knowledge
Power works through what gets counted, classified and called rational (Foucault, 1977).
Spot it: A map that labels a settlement ‘informal’ and so makes it removable.
Dark side of planning
Planning used to control territory, procedure, resources and identity (Yiftachel, 1998).
Spot it: Zoning that keeps one group out of a district.
Critical theory at work
Critical theory is often accused of criticising and nothing more. The cases below show it changing law, exposing decisions and reframing policy. Each card names the strand at work.
Brazil writes the right to the city into law
After years of campaigning by urban reform movements, Brazil passed the City Statute (Law 10.257) in 2001. It states that urban property must serve a social function, requires democratic management of cities, and gives municipalities instruments such as special zones of social interest and a property tax that rises year by year on land left empty or underused (Presidência da República, 2001; Fernandes, 2007). Fernandes (2007) also stresses how much depends on what municipalities do with these tools.
Lesson: a critical idea can become a planning instrument when movements, lawyers and planners work together.
Aalborg: the power behind the plan
Flyvbjerg (1998a) traced a plan for central Aalborg from its ambitious start to its implementation. The local business lobby, rarely visible in formal meetings, changed it step by step, and parts of the result worked against the plan’s own aims. The documents alone would never have shown this.
Lesson: study what happens to a plan after adoption, not only what it says.
Consensus or conflict at a consultation evening
Imagine a consultation on a regeneration plan. A communicative planner works to create fair conditions for discussion and aims at agreement (Healey, 1997). An agonistic planner expects lasting disagreement, records it in the plan, and keeps the decision open to challenge afterwards (Mouffe, 1999; Hillier, 2003). Both take participation seriously. They differ on what a good outcome looks like.
Lesson: decide, and say, which of the two your participation design aims for.
Haussmann’s Paris, read twice
Benjamin (1999) read the new boulevards as strategic: wide enough to defeat the barricade. Harvey (2003) read the same rebuilding as a way to put surplus capital and labour to work after the crisis of 1848, financed through new credit institutions. One project, two critical readings, each exposing an interest the official story left out.
Lesson: ask what problem a big project solved for those who paid for it. Session 6 continues the story.
Rotterdam: who is framed as the problem?
Since 2006 the Dutch Act on Extraordinary Measures for Urban Problems (Wet bijzondere maatregelen grootstedelijke problematiek), often called the Rotterdam Act, has allowed municipalities to refuse a housing permit in designated areas to newcomers without income from work. Rotterdam used it to make neighbourhoods more socially mixed. Van Gent et al. (2018) found that the population changed but the living environment did not clearly improve, and concluded that the Act limits the rights of excluded groups without clear benefits. In 2017 the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights found no violation of the freedom to choose one’s residence; five judges dissented (Garib v. the Netherlands, 2017; David & Ganty, 2017).
Lesson: Fraser’s warning in practice. A policy for an area can also become a judgement on the people who live there. Read the Act through Yiftachel’s four dimensions.
A critical reading in four moves
Take one planning document from your region and work through four moves. They follow Horkheimer’s test of explaining, judging and acting (Bohman, 2014), with description added as the first step.
What problem does the document name? What does it promise? Who wrote it, and for whom?
Which mechanisms produce the problem: land values, rules, budgets, ownership? Who gains and who loses?
Measure the document against its own stated goals, then against a norm you name openly, such as a right or a principle of justice (Benhabib, 1986).
Who could change it? Which instruments, alliances or alternatives exist? Expose, propose, politicise (Marcuse, 2009).
The moves match the five questions of the problem statement: what should happen is your norm (move 3), where it goes wrong is your description (move 1), and who decides is your explanation (move 2).
Criticising the critics
A critical theory should be able to take its own medicine. Four objections are worth knowing, because examiners and stakeholders will raise them.
Eurocentric progress?
Allen (2016) argues that the Frankfurt School’s belief in historical progress depends on a European and colonial view of history, and calls for its normative foundations to be decolonised. The decolonial page takes this further.
Critique as a reflex
Latour (2004) worried that critique’s tools, such as showing that facts are socially made, had been taken up by climate sceptics and conspiracy theorists. He asked critics to help assemble and care for what people are concerned about, rather than only debunk. Session 1 meets the same problem.
Strong diagnosis, weak design
Critical theory explains injustice better than it tells a designer what to draw. Fainstein (2010) answered with three criteria that planners can apply to a decision: democracy, diversity and equity.
Whose critique?
Black feminist and feminist scholars argued that critique centred on class left the experiences of women, and of women of colour in particular, out of view (Collins, 2000; hooks, 1984). The broad family of critical theories grew partly from this objection.
Which strand fits your problem?
Read each situation, decide which strand you would start with, then open the card. More than one answer can be defensible; what matters is that you can say why.
Rents rise sharply around a new metro station, and long-term tenants move out.Think first, then open +
Start with Harvey and with Logan and Molotch: who captures the land value that public investment created? Then ask Marcuse’s three questions: whose right, which right, what city?
Residents say the consultation was a formality: the decision had already been made.Think first, then open +
Compare the communicative ideal with what happened. Who set the agenda? Was disagreement recorded? Flyvbjerg’s Aalborg study shows how to trace power through a planning process.
A policy document calls a neighbourhood a ‘problem area’ and plans to change who lives there.Think first, then open +
Use Fraser and Honneth: does the policy redistribute resources, and how does it name the residents? The Rotterdam Act is a comparable case.
An informal settlement is cleared to build a flood defence.Think first, then open +
Roy asks who decided the settlement was informal. Yiftachel’s four dimensions show how a plan controls territory, procedure, resources and identity. The feminist and decolonial pages add further tools.
Then apply the four moves to one document from your Q3 region, such as a municipal or regional spatial vision. Write one paragraph per move. That page of notes is a strong start for your theoretical framework.
Where to start, and where it returns
The clearest short overview of what makes a theory critical. Free online.
Open the text →The right to the city as democratic control over urban surplus.
New Left Review 53 · via the libraryThe texts behind this page
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