“What seems interesting to me is to pull out the profound and serious thought that engages our historical destiny in the institutions that nonetheless give the impression of merely speaking the language of barbarism, archaism, and institutional idiocy”.
Michel Foucault, 2014, Wrong-Doing and Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, University of Chicago Press.
Following up on the earlier post about the IJURR symposium on the theme Where is Urban Politics? I thought I should plug my own paper in this collection. My piece is titled ‘What do cities have to do with democracy?’ (the answer is that ‘it depends’; you’ll have to read the paper to find out what exactly it depends on). I have been giving a version of this paper as my default seminar presentation for about 4 years now, so I’m not quite sure what I will talk about if and when I’m next invited anywhere, but I do hope that this extensive pre-release touring of the paper will boost sales.
This paper is actually the last in a cluster that I have written on themes such as political agency, urban problems, ideas of contestation, and the idea of ‘all affected interests’. When I finished this one (a while ago now), I realised that I really needed to write a book linking these together, since an 8000 word (or so) article is not enough space to elaborate the full sweep of the argument that I have in my head which connects these all together. So that’s what I am doing now, this summer, writing a book about democratic theory, notions of injustice, and the geographical imagination needed to develop open-minded inquiry into these themes – it’s preliminary title is Locating Democracy, contracted with the University of Georgia Press, in their Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series. I’m saying this out loud and in public as a way of imposing some external discipline on myself, to help me along in the task of actually writing the book.
Anyway, anyway, in the meantime, here is the abstract from the IJURR paper:
“The relationship between urbanization and democratization remains under-theorized and under-researched. Radical urban theory has undergone a veritable normative turn, registered in debates about the right to the city, spatial justice and the just city, while critical conceptualizations of neoliberalism present ‘democracy’ as the preferred remedy for injustice. However, these lines of thought remain reluctant to venture too far down the path of political philosophy. The relationship between urban politics and the dynamics of democratization remains under-theorized as a result. It is argued that this relationship can be usefully understood by drawing on lessons from avowedly normative styles of political theorizing, specifically post-Habermasian strands of critical theory. Taking this tradition seriously helps one to notice that discussions of urbanization, democracy, injustice and rights in geography, urban studies and related fields invoke an implicit but unthematized democratic norm, that of all-affected interests. In contemporary critical theory, this norm is conceptualized as a worldly register of political demands. It is argued that the conceptual disaggregation of component values of democracy undertaken through the ‘spatial turn’ in recent critical theory reorients the analysis of the democratic potentials of urban politics around the investigation of the multiple forms of agency which urbanized processes perform in generating, recognizing and acting upon issues of shared concern.”
“All my academic studies have shown that the people who successfully forge meaningful relationships to things are often the same as those who forge meaningful relationships with people, while those who fail at one usually also fail at the other, because the two are much more akin and entwined than is commonly appreciated.”
Daniel Miller, 1998, The Comfort of Things, Polity Press.
Newly available on the Early View site at the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, papers from a Symposium on the theme of ‘Where is Urban Politics?’ edited by Scott Rodgers, Allan Cochrane and me. This is one of those collections that has had a very long lead-time, going back to the AAG conference in Las Vegas in 2009. The Symposium has papers by Warren Magnusson, Lisa Hoffman, Doug Young and Roger Kiel, John Allen and Allan Cochrane, and me. The idea behind the collection is to give some expression to both the range of disciplinary approaches to thinking about urban politics (including political theory, anthropology, planning studies, as well as geography) and the range of sites and places in which urban politics can be found, not necessarily all of classically ‘urban’ ones either. Scott, Allan and I try to articulate this rationale in the introductory essay. Here is our pitch:
“Whether defined through its sites and spaces, through the particular sensibilities of the urban as a way of life, through the political problematization of phenomena as urban, or indeed through the activities of local authorities and democratic assemblies, what this collection of articles draws out is the enduring and maybe even expanding relevance of urban processes in learning to challenge, think about and develop new and better ways of living together.”
Pop Theory 