Rights to the City: Mark Strandquist and Fill the Walls with Hope

Marissa Shea, 11 x 17
​https://www.marissashea.com

In The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) Naomi Klein argues that under neoliberal capitalism, large corporations and allied technocratic social planners opportunistically seize upon natural and human-made disasters, including wars, to remake local economic and social fields in their image. Ostensible "reconstruction" after invasion, earthquake or flooding often entails the severing of social safety nets; the annihilation of rent control, coherent working class neighborhoods and collective bargaining agreements; and the gentrification and "shopping mall-ization" of urban cores. Economic "shock therapy,' the widespread imposition of austerity measures,  is generally accompanied by enormous tax breaks for the wealthy and major corporations, and the weakening of social and legal protection for lower income communities.

It remains to be seen if Klein's diagnosis will hold true for US and global society in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.   The recently passed  two trillion dollar package to provide Covid-19 economic relief, the CARES Act, does moderately boost short term social welfare funding, but also, especially if certain oversight safeguards are over-ridden, may allow for staggering transfers of wealth upwards, to the wealthiest sectors of society. Here and abroad, emergency temporary security measures may be rendered indefinite, and autocratic systems may become much more deeply embedded.

Philadelphia street "wheat paste" posters

Against these tendencies are powerful calls for local level social solidarity and social action, uniting lower and middle income communities. Much of this struggle can be conceived of in terms of "rights to the city," a term coined in the late 1960s by Henri Lefebvre and revived by more recent progressive social activists. David Harvey (2008)  famously characterizes this aspiration: 

"The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights."

Three “Fill the Walls With Hope” posters,
courtesy of artists
(L-R) Bunnie Reiss, anonymous and Molly Crabapple

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the prolific artist-activist Mark Strandquist has been on the front lines of the struggle to secure rights to the city. He's well known for using art in  campaigning against mass incarceration, a social policy he has long argued hollows out inner city neighborhoods, especially in communities of color, undercutting educational and economic opportunities and fostering vicious cycles of violence, neglect, and despair.  

Mark and his community partners have responded to to the Covid-19 crisis by making continuous claims for rights to the city by ordinary folks, insisting that despair in the face of the virus  (and in the face of state and corporate takeovers of urban space) is just as great a danger as the viral infection itself. They've started a movement called, "Fill the Walls with Hope,"  with the aim of covering the city's public spaces with hopeful street art, including locally designed posters (downloadable from their website), encouraging responsible public health measures, local solidarity ,and creative action in the face of the crisis: "Safety is an act of solidarity." "Rent Freeze Now." "Standing apart means coming together." 

Melanie Cervantes

The visual logic of the campaign is clear: these walls don't belong to private corporations or to the state, but to all of us, to regular working people who seek to control their own city's destiny.  The graphics in the art tends to be designed rapidly, characterized by urban swagger and exuberant, in your face energy.  There's a joyous, rough edge to most of the imagery, bordering on the carnivalesque. Social distancing, in short, doesn't mean any of these advocates and activists are willing to cede social space to the powers that be. 

The campaign cleverly builds on the mass media and public recognition being given to frontline workers staying on the job during the crisis. As Strandquist remarks to reporter   Jessica Press (Philadelphia Citizen). “This is a

Jennifer Prough

moment when we, as a society, are seeing and naming many of the invisible laborers that maintain our world, and I think it’s an awesome opportunity for artists to name that and ensure that we’re fighting for their rights in this moment, as well.”  In the hands of Strandquist and his allies, art is a powerful technology of liberation, a constant reminder that, in the face of staggering failures in effective Federal government response, the struggle to save the city is going to be waged, at the end of the day,  by ordinary people and that they have no intention in turning their city over once the immediate battle is won. 

• See photographs of new public art posters all over Philadelphia

References

Harvey, David (September–October 2008). "The right to the city". New Left Review. II (53): 23–4