Revanchist City

To understand what is meant by the revanchist city, it is instructive to look back to the birthplace of revanchism: late-nineteenth-century Paris. [Page 666]Revanchists (from the French word revanche, meaning revenge) were a group of bourgeois nationalist reactionaries opposed to the liberalism of the Second Republic, the decadence of the monarchy, and especially the socialist uprising of the Paris Commune, where the working classes took over from the defeated government of Napoleon III and controlled the city for months. The revan-chists (led by poet-turned-soldier Paul Deroulede and the Ligue des Patriotes) were determined to reinstate the bourgeois order with a strategy that fused militarism and moralism and claims about restoring public order on the streets. They hunted down enemies (the Communards) with a noxious blend of hatred and viciousness, intent on exacting revenge on all those who had stolen their vision of French society from them.

In the 1990s, urban geographer Neil Smith identified a striking similarity between the revanchism of late nineteenth-century Paris and the political climate of late twentieth-century New York City, which emerged to fill the vacuum left by the disintegration of liberal urban policy. He coined the concept of the revanchist city to capture the disturbing urban condition created by a seismic political shift: Whereas the liberal era of the post-1960s period was characterized by redistributive policy, affirmative action, and antipoverty legislation, the era of neoliberal revanchism was characterized by a discourse of revenge against minorities, the working class, feminists, environmental activists, gays and lesbians, and recent immigrants. These were declared the “public enemies” of the bourgeois political elite and their supporters. New York City in the 1990s became an arena for concerted attacks on affirmative action and immigration policy, street violence against gays and homeless people, feminist-bashing, and public campaigns against political correctness and multi-culturalism. Just as the bourgeois order was perceived as under threat by the revanchists of 1890s Paris, in 1990s New York, a particular, exclusionary vision of civil society was reinstated with a ven-geance—an attempt to banish those not part of that vision to the urban periphery.

According to Smith, two important factors fuelled the fire of revanchist New York City. First, the economic recession of the late 1980s/early 1990s triggered unprecedented anger among the White middle classes; marginalized populations of the city soon became scapegoats, the supposed source of urban unease. Second, (re)productions of paranoia and fear by the media amplified and aggravated extant sentiments among middle-class voters seeking to affix blame for their perceived lack of safety in urban public spaces. It came as no surprise to many that, in 1993, Rudolph Giuliani was elected mayor on the promise of offering a better “quality of life” for “conventional members of society.” Smith pointed out that revanchism under Giuliani was sharpened by blaming the failures of earlier liberal policy on the marginalized populations such policy was supposed to assist.

Giuliani identified homeless people, panhandlers, prostitutes, squeegee cleaners, squatters, graffiti artists, reckless bicyclists, and unruly youth as the major threats to urban order and the culprits of urban decay. A particularly repressive attitude towards these so-called culprits, as exemplified by the well-publicized zero tolerance policies of the New York Police Department under Giuliani's administration, can perhaps be taken as the hallmark of the revanchist city. As the city's economy recovered in the mid-1990s, the crime rate dropped further (contrary to popular perception, it had been falling before Giuliani's tenure), public spaces such as Times Square and Bryant Park were privatized and commodified, New York City became a major tourist destination, and gentrification accelerated and diffused into neighborhoods bypassed by previous waves of the process. The fanfare of success attributed to a charismatic mayor squashed concerns over those who had to be swept away or incarcerated to allow these changes to take place.

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