Critical Urbanism has a Taylor Swift problem. Well, actually it has multiple Taylor Swift problems. Let Taylor Swift explain…

Before we get into Critical Urbanism’s Taylor Swift problems, we probably ought to describe what Critical Urbanism means. This is something of a challenge because at this point there is a LOT of it, especially within academia, where devotees of Critical Urbanism have been successful in producing a frankly incredible amount of verbiage. I’ll leave folks like Neil Brenner and colleagues to more fully describe Critical Urbanism from the inside. But in general the idea is that cities “are major basing points for the production, circulation and consumption of commodities” and their problems are largely reducible to the problems of capitalism writ large. A prominent sub-theme is that these problems arise when we prioritize and govern around markets and their “exchange values” rather than the putatively opposing “use values” that sustain everyday life. When it comes to housing, the abstractions and academic jargon of Critical Urbanism have been distilled into likely more familiar slogans, including “homes not commodities” and “housing for people, not for profit.” How do we get rid of commodification and profit? For many Critical Urbanists, the only real path lies through revolution.

So what’s the problem posed by Taylor Swift? Let’s start with the simplest. Taylor Swift is really popular. And she got that way by writing and singing compelling songs, mostly about personal relationships. Put differently, she makes good stuff that reaches and sustains people in their everyday lives. In critical urbanism terms, that suggests her music has “use value” to people. What about “exchange value”? It’s fascinating to think through theories of property related to Swift’s songs, but however you think about it, both she and a variety of others have been able to leverage the popular use value of her music into making a lot of money (I know I just bought a couple of CDs*). There’s a lot of complexity in how this actually works for her, but we’re already troubling the notion that we can or should draw a sharp line between use value and exchange value in how we govern or what we prioritize. In practice they tend to be intricately connected rather than diametrically opposed. But there’s a further challenge in Taylor Swift’s popularity. After all, her songs about relationships are more popular than songs about overthrowing capitalism. The Critical Urbanists already know this, of course. But not all of them have picked up on the irony. Pushing for a revolution is asking people to shake off the lives they already know. In its radical form, Critical Urbanism prioritizes the exchange value of a whole new political economic system over the use values that sustain life now. Taylor Swift doesn’t do that. When she tells people to “shake it off,” she’s urging them keep doing what they’re doing even in the face of criticism. And they love her for it. No doubt some folks are happy to exchange what they’re doing now for revolution, but it’s a good bet more would rather listen to Taylor Swift.

Wait, it’s not entirely clear that all Critical Urbanists actually want revolution. To their credit, many have been trying to contribute to policy solutions that might make things better for people under the systems we have now. Also the popularity of love songs is not a specifically Taylor Swift problem, is it? Fair enough.

But when I say Taylor Swift is both popular and good, I mean she’s really, really popular and good. And this is actually another problem for much of Critical Urbanism. Indeed, it probably would have been a problem for me, too, in my younger, college DJ days. Now, I’m all too happy to listen to Taylor Swift (just ask my poor partner), but back then I wanted edginess and stuff that sounded different. Mainstream wasn’t cool. In hindsight, that means I rejected a lot of good music outright, often in favour of stuff that was kind of bad. What does all this have to do with Critical Urbanism? I think many Critical Urbanists attempting to constructively contribute to the discourse about how to fix cities look kinda like me in my college DJ days. There’s a rejection of good explanations, sometimes just for being too mainstream. I see this most often in rejection of supply and demand explanations, especially as they pertain to housing. By contrast, marginal theories even loosely connected to processes of commodification (or even better, financialization) can seem to offer new and edgy explanations. They sound cool, at least at the moment. The problem is that mainstream economics has pretty good explanations for why and how market dynamics produce high prices. It’s what economists have been studying for a long time (just like housing has been financialized for a long time). That’s not to say economists don’t have blind spots, or that explanations beyond supply and demand, including a variety of elaborations (especially concerning market power) aren’t also useful. And policy really, really matters – there’s no such thing as a housing market in isolation. But if you want to contribute to discussions about bringing down market housing prices – rather than simply advocating for revolution – then it helps to appreciate and engage with the explanations for market dynamics we already have. Yes, explanations of high prices and rents rooted in supply and demand dynamics are mainstream. But they’re also pretty good. Just like Taylor Swift.

So that’s two problems, but this still isn’t specific enough Taylor Swift content you say? Fine. Then let me add one more problem. Taylor Swift famously started as a country singer-songwriter before moving into pop music. A lot of her songs feature parallel moves from small towns to big cities. Perhaps the most poignant of these is her early hit, Mean, which deserves credit for inspiring this post. The song catalogues a variety of bullying kids often experience in their everyday lives. But it’s the chorus that really gets me.

Someday, I’ll be living in a big old city
And all you’re ever gonna be is mean
Someday, I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me
And all you’re ever gonna be is mean
Why you gotta be so mean?

Here is Taylor Swift’s simple reminder that for many people, cities offer solutions rather than problems. They offer people a means of escaping bullies (sometimes including their own family members); a means of growing big, of finding other people like themselves and banding together. Cities also offer a means of achieving success in diverse ways; of turning your life story around. A lot of people want to move to cities. I want my research to contribute to helping them do so.

For all its shortcomings, the market distribution of housing offers a way in to the city. It allows people to move. Too often Critical Urbanists position themselves as hostile to these movers. After all, its the use values of existing residents that need to be protected from exchange. Indeed, some of the leading lights of Critical Urbanism have openly suggested capping urban growth and limiting movement outright.** These policy prescriptions are often justified in terms of preventing displacement, and we can all agree that forced moves are generally bad. But welcoming newcomers to cities need not force out existing residents. We just have to enable cities to grow so we can build enough housing for everyone. Here Critical Urbanism’s tendency to prioritize the “right to remain” while undercutting analysis of supply and demand leaves them with little to offer those just looking to move somewhere better. In the words of Taylor Swift, “why you gotta be so mean?”

None of this is to suggest Critical Urbanism has no value, and it’s worth noting that my values are at least adjacently aligned on many issues (I think Taylor Swift should pay a lot more in taxes in support of a more robust and caring social welfare system). But Critical Urbanism has come to dominate many academic journals and sub-fields without fully wrestling with some of its big problems. Thinking about the field in conjunction with Taylor Swift usefully collects together at least a few of these problems. How do Critical Urbanists reconcile their valorization of use values over exchange values with their big ask: to exchange people’s current ways of sustaining themselves for an entirely new political economic system? Can Critical Urbanists usefully contribute to policy discussions about improving access to market housing while dismissing key insights about how markets work? Do Critical Urbanists believe in a right to move? If so, how do they productively integrate that right with a right to remain in place?  If not, can they justify discarding the right to move to kids growing up bullied in small towns?

These might be problems Critical Urbanists can solve and questions they can answer. And maybe they already have (did I mention the incredible amount of verbiage they’ve produced?) I’d love to see responses, preferably with lots of ridiculous Taylor Swift references. But for now, I suppose I need to calm down.

*- I bought the Evermore and Folklore CDs, mostly because I really got drawn into Taylor Swift fandom through her collaborations with members of The National, as befits my middle-aged “sad dad” and former hipster trajectory. I honestly don’t think I qualify as a full Swiftie in any form, but I like a lot of her music and had a fun time writing this post.

**- See, for instance, Harvey Molotch’s (1976) celebratory suggestion that after the death of growth machines, “Local governments will establish holding capacities for their regions and then legislate, directly or indirectly, to limit population to those levels” (p. 328), from his foundational “The City as a Growth Machine” article (AJS 82(2): 309-332). Apparently one of my old theory profs hosts an ungated version here.