Some critical reflections on being critical: Reading for deviance, dominance or difference?

One of the most exciting aspects of the papers gathered together in ‘Cities for People, Not for Profit’ was the over‐arching desire to articulate a renewed vision for critical urban theory (see City 13(2/3), especially Brenner et al. (2009), Marcuse (2009) and Brenner (2009)). Across the collection, a distinction is drawn between an emancipatory ‘critical’ urban theory and ‘mainstream’ approaches to the city which naturalise existing forms of injustice. In this piece I offer some brief reflections on a couple of the key elements of this critical/mainstream distinction. I argue that critical urban theory offers a crucial corrective to mainstream approaches to social conflict, which tend to see difference from the ‘mainstream’ as deviance. But in order to offer a politically potent alternative to the mainstream, critical urban theory must do more than identify and critique those forms of domination and injustice perpetrated in the name of the ‘mainstream’. For in the end, reading the city only for dominance risks having the same political effect as mainstream analyses which read the city for deviance—both approaches tend to naturalise forms of domination which must be transformed and to obscure important forms of difference which can point the way to radical alternatives. Not only must we avoid reading difference as deviance, we must also find ways to identify, nurture and participate in ongoing collective efforts to make different and more just kinds of cities through the practice of critical urban theory. In developing this argument, I draw some of the contributions from ‘Cities for People, Not for Profit’ into dialogue with some of the contributions to City’s recent feature on ‘Graffiti, Street Art and the City’ (City 14(1/2) (see Figures 1 and 2).