“Can we find units of government that are “just right” – small enough to facilitate participation and yet large enough to exercise authority so significant as to make participation worthwhile?”
Robert Dahl, 1970, After the Revolution, Yale University 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.”
Via Thomas Gregerson’s Political Theory blog, I see that Robert Dahl died last week, aged 98. Dahl is one of my favourite thinkers about democratic politics, not least because he theorised on the basis of an analysis of contemporary conditions, because he thought of democracy as a way of doing politics, and also because he had a low-level geographical imagination – from debates about community power, investigations of democracy and size, contributions to debates about the boundary problem, through to considerations of the value of representation in democratic politics. None of this was expressed in the wobbly ontological registers that have served as the medium of convergence between political theory and spatial disciplines, and nor was Dahl a political philosopher like Rawls. But Dahl’s understanding of the political dynamics of democracy’s changing forms (see Democracy and its critics) is a much better ground for critical thinking than one finds in either of those fields, which tend to either look backwards to a canon or ‘upwards’ to perfect styles of reasoning for their points of reference.
New at the online journal La Vie des idées, here is an interview with Claude Lefort by Pierre Rosanvallon – actually from 2009.
Benhabib discusses Gezi Park protests, Turkish politics, and democratic disconnects.
My previously advertised co-authored paper with Gary Bridge, Geographies of Radical Democracy, is now published for ‘real’, in print, in the latest issue of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. We have been sent a whole load of off-prints of the article – a long time since I have received any of those, it’s quite quaint really. Let me know if you want one!
Here is the abstract, again:
“There is significant interest in democracy in contemporary human geography. Theoretically, this interest has been most strongly influenced by poststructuralist theories of radical democracy and associated ontologies of relational spatiality. These emphasize a priori understandings of the spaces of democratic politics, ones that focus on marginal spaces and the destabilization of established patterns. This article develops an alternative account of the spaces of democratic politics that seeks to move beyond the stylized contrast of poststructuralist agonism and liberal consensualism. This alternative draws into focus the spatial dimensions of philosophical pragmatism and the relevance of this tradition for thinking about the geographies of democracy. In particular, the geographical relevance of pragmatism lies in the distinctive inflection of the all-affected principle and of the rationalities of problem solving. Drawing on John Dewey’s work, a conceptualization of transactional space is developed to reconfigure understandings of the agonistics of participation as well as the experimental institutionalization of democratic will. The difference that a pragmatist approach makes to understandings of the geographies of democracy is explored in relation to transnational and urban politics.”
I was conferencing last week, at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in LA. I was involved in two sessions, the first a panel discussion, organised by Scott Rodgers and Rosie Cox, on the uses of social media by academics, including reflections on how blogging, tweeting, and Facebooking can be used to carve out some new spaces of communication with academic and non-academic audiences. The second was on the theme of ‘defining the contours of a new 21st century critical urban theory’, a series of paper sessions organised by Chris Baker and Justin Beaumont. I presented a paper to the title of Where is the action? in which I tried to articulate some of the problems, as I see them, with prevalent approaches to critical urban theory, and critical spatial theory more broadly, and to say too something about some alternatives ways of proceeding. My paper was an attempt to articulate the whole arc of an argument that links, in my head at least, a series of pieces on urban theory, democracy, on ‘ethics’, on ‘class’, and other themes which I have written over the last two or three years (and have therefore already trailed on this blog), as well as some thinking done while developing an online Masters CPD course on critical spatial theory. So, the paper is rather allusive, shall we say.
Anyway, in the spirit of the first of these sessions, I thought I may as well post up the paper I presented in the second session – it will also be linked on the Things to Read page. This is the written paper which I spoke to at the conference – it has no references, although I imagine it as full of invisible hypertext links to other things I have written and to lots of things other people have written. I guess I’m thinking that since I said this all out loud at the conference, there is no good reason not to share these thoughts with the anonymous audience that may or may not be out there reading this blog – and to share it in much the same spirit as one does a ‘live’ conference performance, as a work in progress, awaiting further elaboration, and open to comments and questions….
From my colleague Nick Mahony at the OU’s Creating Publics project, news of a series on the theme of Creating Publics, Opening Democracies at OpenDemocracy.
I have just begun reading a new book by John Parkinson, Democracy and Public Space (I came across it here). It combines theorising about key concepts – democracy, public space – with comparative analysis of the quality of democratic public spaces in major cities around the world. Parkinson argues that “democracy depends to a surprising extent on the availability of physical, public space, even in our allegedly digital world. It also argues that in many respects the availability of space for democratic performance is under threat, and that by overlooking the need for such space – or arguing against that need – we run the risk of undermining some important conditions of democracy in the modern world.”
That might not sound like an unusual argument to geographers and urbanists – it is common enough to find people in these fields arguing about the continuing importance of ‘real’ physical space for democratic politics. Parkinson’s argument is directed at democratic and political theorists, but opens up a dialogue with spatial disciplines too. He has some insightful comments about the limits of spatial theory when it comes to thinking about public space and democracy – he identifies two blind spots:
“The first is that all sorts of public activity are often treated as categorical and normative equivalents: that encountering members of the public in playful settings is normatively the same as engaging in binding collective decision-making, for example. The second is that the idea of democracy is either taken as a background assumption not worth exploring or is taken to be something roughly equivalent to freedom. In some work, this generates unintended irony. There are writers who decry the privatization of public space on the grounds that people can no longer ‘do what they want’ in it, which merely pits one liberal individualist claim against another without providing any reasons to choose between them. I shall spend some time in this book providing reasons – liberal reasons – to choose between some competing claims on the use of space but also argue that, for the most part, democracy is the means we use to make such choices, not something to which we can appeal to make the choice for us.”
I think he is pretty much spot on in both respects. His book also spends some time thinking through just what is ‘public’ about public spaces, what sort of value it is that defines publicness – it might be accessibility, or use of common resources, or common impact, or public role performance.
It will be interesting to see if the book gets any traction in geography-land – Parkinson’s conception of space is probably not wobbly enough, his mode of theorising about democracy and public space probably too ‘liberal’, his use of comparative empirics a little too conventional. These are all things I like about the book. Above all, it is a slow exposition of a performative theory of democracy that centres on practices, and spaces, of claim-making, and it takes time to think through the meaning of concepts and how they can be cashed-out empirically.
Further to my earlier ramblings about postcolonial theory, here is an interesting piece by Partha Chatterjee on the legacies and contemporary relevance of the subaltern studies ‘tradition’ (you can find more on this topic at the Cultural Anthropology site) . Of particular interest is his argument is the claim that there are now ‘two aspects of mass politics in contemporary Indian democracy – one that involves a contest over sovereignty with the Indian state and the other that makes claims on governmental authorities over services and benefits’. The emergence of the latter aspect, he argues, which follows from the extensive ‘reach’ of apparatuses of governmentality into the everyday lives of even the most marginal populations, requires a ‘paradigm shift’ beyond the classic analysis of subaltern resistance. Chatterjee is an interesting example of someone able to make use of ‘governmentality’ ideas while also acknowledging the distinctive qualities of actually existing democratic politics.
Pop Theory 