Tag Archives: Urban Theory

Media practices and urban politics

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IMG_2858If you’re interested, here is a link to a paper called Media practices and urban politics: conceptualizing the powers of the urban-media nexus, by Scott Rodgers, Allan Cochrane and myself, which is forthcoming soonish in Society and Space. This is the last of a series of things we have written and convened together since 2007, emerging from Scott’s time at the OU on an ESRC Postdoc fellowship and stretching beyond that (remember those?). This includes a symposium on the theme of ‘Where is urban politics?’ and an earlier Debate section of the same journal, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, on ‘Media, Politics and Cities‘.

Here is the abstract for the latest piece:

“The spatial imaginations of media studies and urban studies are increasingly aligned, illustrated by a growing literature on what can be identified as the media-urban nexus. This nexus has attracted scholarly interest not only as a cultural phenomenon, but also as a site of emergent political dynamics. We suggest that literature on the media-urban nexus points to the always-already present conditions of possibility for a trans-local, relational urban politics. Current conceptualizations of the politics of urbanized media however tend to fall into one of two registers: conflicts over the access to and regulation of urban media spaces; or the silent politics media inscribe into the affective textures of urban life. Both tend to envision media as instrumental supplements to politics, over-estimating the powers of ‘media’ within urban living. Drawing on recent uses of practice theory in media studies, we highlight how thinking of media- in-practices provides a basis for more nuanced conceptualizations of the powers of the media- urban nexus. Fully realizing this conceptualization requires that the restriction of the insights of practice theory to everyday life be lifted. An expanded view of media practices is required, one which emphasizes the coordination between organized fields of communication and everyday urbanized media practices.”

Doing Research

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IMG_2576Today is the formal start date of my Leverhulme Fellowship, the start of 21 months of focused research time exploring the ‘urbanization of responsibility‘, facilitated primarily by funding to cover some of my teaching (I still have plenty of teaching, it seems, and other things to do, too).

Actually, I’m still not quite sure how to set about researching what is potentially a huge and diffuse topic. One reason for this is that it’s been more than a decade since I have worked on an empirical project all on my own. I’ve worked on projects where other people have been doing the bulk of the empirical work, and collaborated with others on the generation and analysis of empirical materials. So this feels a bit like starting out on a PhD, all over again, just without a supervisor (let’s hope it doesn’t drag on and on though).

The project is, rather obviously, about things ‘urban’, whatever that might mean. I’m trying to avoid being captured by some standard ways of approaching urban things. At the moment, I’m interested in approaching ‘the urban question’ along three more or less unrelated paths:

– by thinking about the potential of the notion of problematization as a lens through which to think about how things show up as ‘urban’ things (that is, not thinking of problematization as something one does as a (critical) analyst, but as the object of analysis);

– by thinking a little bit more about the concept of responsibility, subject to a great deal or moralistic commentary in and around geography-land it’s true, but I’m more interested in linking this to the first theme of problematization, as a way of thinking about the ways in which fields of action are configured;

– not necessarily linked to these two speculations, I’ve also found myself collecting various ‘things to read and/or re-read’ on the topic of documents, a rather obvious topic to some extent given the proliferation of reports and commentaries produced about cities and urban problems; I have in mind a range of work coming from various fields in which the status of documents has become a renewed focus of attention: my list includes the work of Richard Freeman, Matthew Hull, Lisa Gitelman, Leah Price, John Guillory. The list also includes dear old Foucault too, as well as Miles Ogborn; and Harold Garfinkel on the ‘documentary method’ in everyday life, which somehow seems an important supplement to these other more or less ‘post-textualist’ approaches.   

What do cities have to do with democracy?

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Scan 130330022-6Following 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.”

Where is Urban Politics? Symposium in IJURR

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DSCF4708Newly 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.”

Bite Size Theory: Keys to the City

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“Cities are workshops, not playgrounds.”

Michael Storper, 2013, Keys to the City: How Economics, Institutions, Social Interaction, and Politics Shape Development, Princeton University Press.

Bite Size Theory: A Companion to Marx’s Capital, Volume 2

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“It has also been a mainstay of my own argument that the absorption of surplus-value and of surplus product through the production of space in general and urbanization in particular has been crucial to sustaining capital accumulation.”

David Harvey, 2013, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, Volume 2, Verso.

Bite Size Theory: The New Science of Cities

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“… cities must now be looked at as constellations of interactions, communications, relations, flows, and networks, rather than as locations…”

Michael Batty, 2013, The New Science of Cities, MIT Press.

Bite Size Theory: Government of Paper

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“…. if you want to understand bureaucratic activities, follow the paper…”

Matthew Hull, 2011, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan, University of California Press.

See also the book symposium in Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.

Alternative Urbanisms

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SWSome colleagues and I (Gary Bridge, Graham Brown, and Paul Milbourne) have been awarded some seed-fund money, from the GW4 research consortium for a little project on the theme of Alternative Urbanisms. GW4 is an initiative across the ‘regional’ cluster of Universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter (everything around these parts gets branded ‘GW’, from research alliances to pubs). The Alternative Urbanisms project is one of a bunch awarded under the Building Communities initiative – basically, funding to enable people across the four institutions to make friends with each other and develop shared research programmes and ambitions. Our project starts from the established fields of expertise across these institutions in fields such as geography, urban and regional studies, and development studies, and is going to provide some space to think about the myriad ways in which, as the title suggests, alternative models of urban life are currently proliferating: from obvious ‘technical’ examples such as smart cities initiatives, to more ‘moralistic’ versions such as innumerable climate change experiments, and in particular, some more ‘political’ and/or contentious attempts to enact just, equitable and democratic forms of practice through urban spaces (whatever those might be – pipes and wires, municipal bureaucracies, suburbs, squatter settlements, etc, etc). In the spirit of the overall initiative, we will of course be making lots of train journeys.

Africa’s Urban Revolution: new edited book

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africa urbanI was in Cape Town a couple of weeks ago, visiting and talking to people in Geography at UCT and UWC and the African Centre for Cities at UCT – about urban things, related to the impending start of my Leverhulme fellowship on urban problematizations (as I’ve decided to start thinking about it). Inevitably, part of the trip involved bookshop ethnography – Cape Town has some great bookshops, in the sort of way that bookshops in other people’s country’s always seem exciting to academic visitors because, well, they tend to be full of local books difficult to find back home (or things you probably could if only you had noticed they had been published, like Gill Hart’s newish book Rethinking the South African Crisis). I was actually quite strong and did not buy too many – it was election week, so there were loads of new books on South African politics, including some excellent little books in the Jacana Pocket Series.

One book I didn’t buy, but was given (Thankyou!), was a new collection edited  by Sue Parnell and Edgar Pieterse, Africa’s Urban Revolution. It includes essays on a range of issues, from transport to violent conflict, religion to food security. There is lots of debate and discussion at the moment, in certain circles at least, about ‘southern theory’, southern epistemologies, ‘theorising from the global South’ (not least from this cluster of people – Sue is also co-editor, with Sophie Oldfield, of the new Routledge Handbook on Cities on the Global South). The collection is one element of a ‘knowledge experiment’, as Edgar has described it, based at the ACC to think through the distinctive, emergent politics of ‘southern urbanisms‘. This particular collection is notable because it is oriented to both academics and practitioners, an overlapping field of ‘thought’ that might be one the distinctive things about urban theorising from ‘the South’. It is not an example of ‘applied’ academic work, mind you – rather, it the essays demonstrate that key theoretical questions (just what is ‘urban’, or how does one conceptualise urbanization?), normative issues (are ‘slums’ things to be eradicated, upgraded, integrated?), and methodological dilemmas (what sorts of data are available about African urban processes, how reliable are they, what is their scope), are all central to contested practices of policy making, planning, design and management in African cities. I was struck in particular by the recurrent theme of data sources across the chapters – there is an interesting, if only implicit line running through the book that the politics of African urban life might be shaped in fundamental respects by what one might call a ‘governmentality deficit’, and in turn the sense that effective and accountable modes of surveillance (i.e. censuses, surveys, forecasts) might be central to the achievement of aims such as poverty alleviation, social justice, or substantive democratization.

The editors note that this collection is a kind of companion a collection from last year, Rogue Urbanism –that’s a more arty, cultural-focussed collection, it has colour pictures; the two aspects of the work curated, shall we say, at ACC come together nicely in the magazine Cityscapes.

Anyway, there is a launch event for the new collection next week, in Cape Town. I’m not going, I’m back in Swindon. But if you are interested in things urban, and in particular in ‘thinking problematically’, as somebody once said, about urban issues, then the portfolio of work coming out of the ACC node, or is it a nexus, is exemplary stuff.