Where is Urban Politics?

We outline the rationale for reopening the issue of the spatiality of the ‘urban’ in urban politics. There is a long tradition of arguing about the distinctive political qualities of urban sites, practices and processes. Recent work often relies on spatial concepts or metaphors that anchor various political phenomena to cities while simultaneously putting the specificity of the urban itself in question. This symposium seeks to extend debates about the relationship between the urban and the political. Instead of asking ‘what is urban politics?’, seeking a definition of the urban as a starting point we begin by asking ‘where is urban politics?’. This question orients all of the contributions to this symposium, and it allows each to trace diverse political dimensions of urban life and living beyond the confines of ‘the city’ as classically conceived. The symposium engages with ‘the urban question’ through diverse settings and objects, including infrastructures, in‐between spaces, professional cultures, transnational and postcolonial spaces and spaces of sovereignty. Contributions draw on a range of intellectual perspectives, including geography, urban studies, political science and political theory, anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, planning and environmental studies — indicating the range of intellectual traditions that can and do inform the investigation of the urban/political nexus.     

Neighborhood as Spatial Project: Making the Urban Order on the Downtown Brooklyn Waterfront

This article argues for a reconceptualization of one of the most basic concepts in urban studies: the neighborhood. Traditionally neighborhoods have been understood as clearly bounded, quasi‐Westphalian containers or as ‘natural areas’ of urban community. But this approach is widely acknowledged to be under‐theorized. And it fails to account for the ways in which the production of neighborhood is inherently political and often conflictual. After reviewing the ways in which neighborhood has been used in urban sociology and urban planning, this article offers a critical conception of neighborhoods as ‘spatial projects’ on the submetropolitan scale. This approach captures the ways in which neighborhoods are not abstract spaces on a city map, but the uneven, unequal products of complex, ongoing struggles between various groups and institutions. This approach is developed through an ethnographic and historical case study of neighborhood formation in one part of Brooklyn, New York. The article concludes with a discussion of how the language of spatial projects refocuses urban research on the political and economic forces that produce neighborhood in the contemporary city.     

Technifying Public Space and Publicizing Infrastructures: Exploring New Urban Political Ecologies through the Square of General Vara del Rey

The aim of this article is to explore new ways of integrating technology, nature and infrastructures into urban public spaces. This is done through a case study, the design of General Vara del Rey, which is offered here as a model to explore a novel urban political ecology that calls into question dominant definitions of public spaces as self‐contained sites operating independently of natural and infrastructural spaces. Through the double movement of ‘the technification of public space’ and ‘the publicization of infrastructures’, the square aims to rethink the political ecology of urban public spaces by enabling the effective incorporation and participation of infrastructural and natural elements as active actors into the public and political life of the community. It is argued that the transformation of infrastructures into fully visible, public and political agents provides a useful model to address the growing proliferation of infrastructural and technological elements onto contemporary urban surfaces and to open up the possibility of new forms of civic participation and engagement.     

Is This What The Democratic City Looks Like? Local Democracy,Housing Rights and Homeownership in the Portuguese Context

This article analyses the creation of a normative framework for the democratic city during the regime change in Portugal in 1975—the answers that were given to the question, ‘What should a city be like in a democratic regime?’ While I critically discuss post‐democracy and its use of post‐foundational contributions, I review the post‐revolution Portuguese constitutional debate, contending that the call for democratization brought by urban popular organizations was answered with a political compromise that exchanged expectations of a participatory city for a commitment to a social rights city, enhanced with a promise of homeownership for urban popular segments. In light of this, in this article I question post‐democratic proposals, arguing that when this approach implicitly establishes equivalence between democracy and ‘the political’, it has difficulties in interpreting how the grammar of democracy is ‘organized’ in conflictual and contingent processes of democratic institutionalization. As an alternative, I contend that a critical debate concerning democracy and the urban must address how democratic expectations of emancipation have been translated into institutions and rights through interwoven and situated processes of politicization and depoliticization that allow both politicization of the urban and the production of consent .     

Beyond a Livable and Green Neighborhood: Asserting Control,Sovereignty and Transgression in the Casc Antic of Barcelona

During the past 15 years, the Casc Antic, a traditionally low‐income and immigrant neighborhood in Barcelona, has been the site of community‐based mobilization to revitalize abandoned areas and improve local environmental conditions. The organization of residents and their supporters is situated within a broader context of urban political and socioeconomic change — the transformation of the urban economy into a decentralized, global and technology‐ and service‐focused system, accompanied by rising socioeconomic inequality and displacement in inner‐city areas. To date, few studies in the urban environmental arena have been placed within processes of urban change and offer specificity on the purposes, intents and goals that poor and minority residents develop as they understand, resist and challenge their marginality. Why do residents of marginalized neighborhoods and their supporters organize to proactively improve livability and environmental quality? To what extent do the environmental struggles of marginalized communities serve as means to advance more complex political agendas in the city? Through the examination of neighborhood organization for livability in the Casc Antic, I analyze how activists use their environmental endeavors as tools to address stigmas attached to their place, control the land and its boundaries, and build a more transgressive form of democracy.     

The Urban,Politics and Subject Formation

In contrast to more traditional debates about voting patterns, local versus state administrations, and individual rights and participatory democracy, this article addresses the question of urban politics through an analysis of subject formation. By taking subject formation as the analytical focus, research questions about ‘politics’ shift from traditional ones about local or state government and the development of consensus, for instance, to ones about the constitution of subjects who are governed and govern themselves in particular ways. Using the emergence of two increasingly commonplace subject forms in contemporary China — urban professionals and volunteers — as examples, the article considers how modes of self‐regulation become political problems and also how subjects may be of the urban as well as located in the urban. The problematizations of socialist state planning have led to new governmental rationalities and technologies that not only produced new subject positions, but also new urban spaces, landscapes, economies and lifestyles. From this view, the article is an intervention into discussions about the ‘where’ of urban politics. It also argues that it is critical to examine politics as problematization and normalization if we are to understand what is at stake in the constitution of potential ‘communities of action’.     

Community Leadership and the Construction of Political Legitimacy: Unpacking Bourdieu's ‘Political Capital’ in Post‐Apartheid Johannesburg

Apart from local monographs and normative texts on community participation, research on community leadership constitutes a blind spot in urban leadership, urban politics, social movements and urban studies. This article, based on case studies in post‐apartheid Johannesburg, contributes to theorizing community leadership, or informal local political leadership, by exploring Bourdieu's concepts of ‘political capital’ and ‘double dealings’. Considering community leaders as brokers between local residents and various institutions (in South Africa, the state and the party), we examine how leaders construct their political legitimacy, both towards ‘the bottom’ (building and maintaining their constituencies), and towards ‘the top’ (seeking and sustaining recognition from fractions of the party and the state). These legitimation processes are often in tension, pulling community leaders in contradictory directions, usefully understood under Bourdieu's concept of ‘double dealings’. Community leaders are required, more than formally elected political leaders, to constantly reassert their legitimacy in multiple local public arenas due to the informal nature of their mandate and the high level of political competition between them — with destructive consequences for local polity but also the potential for increased accountability to their followers. We finally reflect on the relevance of this theoretical framework, inspired by Bourdieu, beyond South African urban politics.     

What Do Cities Have to Do with Democracy?

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.     

The Symbiosis of the Urban and the Political

Historically, the urban was the condition of possibility for the political, but the symbiosis of the two has been concealed by the rise of the state and the concomitant development of the social sciences. The effort to recover the connection by denoting a separate domain of ‘urban politics’ is self‐defeating, because it re‐instantiates an ontology of the political that consigns the urban to the domain of ‘low’ politics. The dominant ontology suggests that ‘high’ politics — the most serious politics or politics proper — is always in the domain of states and empires, and that everything else is subject to it. This view is constantly reaffirmed by the political theory that underpins the state system and the modern social sciences. Nevertheless, a different ontology of the political is always already implicit in the concept of the city, understood as a local phenomenon and a global way of life. To see the political through the city is to notice how proximate diversity stimulates self‐organization and self‐government, generates politics in and between authorities in different registers, and defers the sovereignty claims it produces. On this view, the urban is neither high nor low, but is instead the very form of the political, encompassing states and empires as much as anything else.     

Engineering Formality: Flyover and Skywalk Construction in Mumbai

This article investigates the engineering of elevated transport infrastructure in contemporary Mumbai. It argues that the conception, construction and implementation of flyovers and skywalks in Mumbai over the past 20 years has been part of elite efforts seeking to instil a more free‐flowing, predictable and regulated city. The techniques, routines, standards and visualizations comprising these engineering schemes have promised ways of reshaping the socio‐material configurations and everyday landscapes of Mumbai into a more knowable, functional and integrated realm. The article suggests that this can be understood analytically as a means of trying to establish and maintain ‘formal’ ideals, citizens and spaces in Mumbai against wider urban contexts perceived as increasingly ‘informal’. The article thus emphasizes the importance of exploring how the ‘informal’ and ‘formal’ are actively produced and imagined against each other through material practices and procedures, and the central role of urban engineering in attempts at reconfiguring the social and political dimensions of urban life.     

Don't Plan! The Use of the Notion of ‘Culture’ in Transforming Obsolete Industrial Space

How is the notion of ‘culture’ understood and used in planning the transformation of obsolete industrial space? This article analyses the evidence from a current planning project in Suvilahti, Helsinki. It shows that ‘culture’ is imagined and employed as an instrument capable of producing difference in urban space. The transformation of the Cable Factory in Helsinki and the subsequent consensus on the importance of ‘culture’ are shown to have influenced the planning of Suvilahti. On the one hand, planning is being carried out with a deliberate minimization of planning interventions and the promotion of the spontaneous, non‐planned practices of cultural producers: the future Suvilahti is imagined as a ‘cultural enclave’ and its community is characterized as a ‘living organism’. On the other, ‘culture’ is planned in terms of its supposedly positive effects on urban space. Planners do not want to interfere with the non‐planned character of ‘cultural production’, yet at the same time they express certainty about cultural production's positive spatial and socioeconomic effects. The transformation of Suvilahti is playing an important part in the large‐scale planning project to redevelop the old industrial harbour in Kalasatama, Helsinki. The changes in the nature of planning are analysed under the concept of cultural governmentality.     

Emerging Cultural Capital in the City: Profiling London and Brussels

This essay examines how the contemporary city is being redefined as a fundamental crucible in which new and emerging modes of cultural capital are being forged. Drawing inspiration from the links Bourdieu draws between physical and social space, we use comprehensive quantitative surveys from Belgium and the UK to explore the accelerating interplay between large urban centres and the generation of ‘cosmopolitan cultural capital’. We show a close association between urban sites and the location of residents with new kinds of emerging cultural capital. This appreciation allows us to understand the increasing prominence of large metropolitan centres, which stand in growing tension with their suburban and rural hinterlands. This process is simultaneously cultural, economic, social and political and marks a remaking of the nature of cultural hierarchy and cultural capital itself, away from the older model of the Kantian aesthetic, as elaborated by Bourdieu in Distinction, which venerates a ‘highbrow’ aesthetic removed from everyday life, towards ‘emerging’ forms of cultural capital that valorize activity, engagement and intense forms of contemporary cultural activity.     

Locating the Urban In‐between: Tracking the Urban Politics of Infrastructure in Toronto

In the urban studies literature, urban politics is usually considered in two distinct locations: the city (often understood in quite conventional centralist ways) and the suburb (understood as spatially peripheral and politically at odds with the central city). At the metropolitan scale, the two types of urban politics are discussed in relation to one another. More recently, the metropolitan scale of urban politics has been expanded to regional dimensions. We pose the question of location of urban politics from a specific deficit in the geography of centre, suburb and metropolis. We argue that in today's regional political socio‐spatiality, politics will have to be found ‘in‐between’ the old lines of demarcation. Following Tom Sieverts' (2003) advice to look at the ‘in‐between’ cities that are neither old downtown nor new suburb but complex urban landscapes of mixed density, use and urbanity, we reveal the political vacuum that is at the heart of the urban region today. Using the politics of infrastructure in Toronto as our empirical example, we will show that vulnerabilities and risks for urban populations in that Canadian metropolis' in‐between city are co‐generated by the failure of conventional political spaces and processes to capture the connectivities threaded through those places that are in‐between the centre and exurbia.     

Becoming a Slum: From Municipal Colony to Illegal Settlement in Liberalization‐Era Mumbai

This article argues that the transformation of a Mumbai neighborhood from municipal housing colony into illegal slum has been facilitated by the politically mediated deterioration and criminalization of its water infrastructure in the context of liberalization‐era policy shifts. These policy shifts hinge upon a conceptual binary that posits the unplanned, illegal and informal ‘slum’ as the self‐evident conceptual counterpoint to a planned, formal, ‘world‐class’ city. The story of Shivajinagar‐Bainganwadi problematizes this assumption by evidencing the deeply political and highly unstable nature of this binary — and thus insists upon an account of the shifting political and economic stakes imbued in these categories. The case of Shivajinagar‐Bainganwadi reveals that the neighborhood's emergence as an illegal slum has been mediated by the liberalization‐era politics that have come to infuse the neighborhood's water pipes — dynamics that have produced the illegality/informality of the neighborhood as a discursive effect.     

Futures of Crisis,Futures of Urban Political Theory: Flooding in Asian Coastal Megacities

Coastal megacities across Asia have experienced devastating floods in recent years. Studies project dramatic increases in populations prone to chronic flooding and potential permanent inundation of densely populated urban areas in future decades. The uncertainties presented by future flood risks disrupt prevalent state visions of globalization‐driven prosperity. The emerging reality of a shift in relationship between water and urban settlements has begun driving recalibration of power relations around a range of issues, including longstanding contestations over infrastructure delivery, housing, land rights and political representation. Flood mitigation efforts have played out in debates over displacement and eviction, and distributional concerns about the costs and benefits of these initiatives. This article develops a conceptual framework for assessing the implications of projections of flood risk for urban political theory. The article begins by identifying political contestations that emerge around the varied ways water intersects with urban processes—through dynamics of permeability, flow and drainage, aquifers and pipes, and coastal defense. It then explores how projections of the crisis of flooding have reshaped three contemporary debates in urban politics: those around property rights and the question of ‘informality’; around neoliberalization and financialization; and around the rescaling of the state. Finally, it briefly deploys this framework to examine the case of Jakarta.     

Legal Technologies of Primitive Accumulation: Judicial Robbery and Dispossession‐by‐Restitution in Warsaw

Among the ‘extra‐economic means’ that facilitate primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession, the law plays a prominent role. But works on neoliberal urban restructuring rarely engage with concrete legal technologies. Analysing judicial property restitution (‘reprivatization’) in Warsaw, this article grasps the machine of accumulation by dispossession at a moment of faltering and exposes the distinctive legal technologies behind its troubleshooting. It makes three contributions to critical urban studies. First, it demonstrates how judicial systems can steal political conflicts that obstruct the cycle of accumulation by dispossession. It thus introduces the notion of ‘judicial robbery’, a non‐legislated expropriation of common property through judicial engineering that simultaneously deprives the public of political agency. Second, it shows that seemingly neutral legal technicalities, usually sheltered from political debate, can become a key locus of urban politics. Third, it examines the agency, scope and spatial patterns of ‘dispossession by restitution’, the term I use for a locally specific form of accumulation by dispossession in Warsaw. Lastly, I raise the question of political struggle against primitive accumulation. Is the judicial robbery reversible? If we can reclaim property, can we also reclaim political conflicts that have been stolen by the law?     

Categorizing Neighborhoods: The Invention of ‘Sensitive Areas’ in France and ‘Historic Districts’ in the United States

This essay offers a reflexive return to two research projects to demonstrate the value of Bourdieu's emphasis on the symbolic for the analysis of contemporary urban transformation. Bourdieu's insistence that we track the social genesis and diffusion of spatial categories of thought and action directs us to the empirical study of the struggles between agents and organizations that promote and/or oppose these categories, as well as the political, economic and other interests animating the agents. A retracing of the parallel invention of the ‘at‐risk neighborhood’ (quartier sensible) coined for and targeted by French urban policy since the late 1980s and the emergence of ‘historic’ or ‘diverse’ neighborhoods touted by gentrifying residents, cultural organizations and real estate agents in the United States since the 1960s challenges misleading oppositions between materiality and representations that often underpin and cramp urban research.     

China's Urban Speed Machine: The Politics of Speed and Time in a Period of Rapid Urban Growth

China's urban transformation since 1978 is notable for both its scale and speed. Focusing on the dimension of speed, we propose the concept of the ‘urban speed machine’ to assess its role in shaping the politics and political economy of Chinese urbanization. We argue that in China speed must not be understood merely by means of measurable outcomes of change, but rather that speed is an essential and vital element embedded within China's specific processes and mechanisms driving urban growth. In this sense, speed is constantly at the forefront of local cadres’ considerations, since moving fast to achieve urban growth is an expression of political imperatives and pervasive city‐based accumulation strategies. The Chinese urban speed machine, as we conceive it, mainly involves three state‐dominated institutional arenas: the Communist party's personnel review system, the planning mechanism and local finance. We also discuss regional variability vis‐à‐vis the nature of speed in urbanization and in the differing responses to problems of fast‐city growth in recent years. This article's core contributions are to clarify the paramount importance of speed in the political economy of urban growth and illuminate a relational understanding of the politics of speed in China's urban change.     

Urban Politics as the Unfolding of Social Relations in Place: The Case of Sexually Transmitted Disease Investigation in Mid‐Twentieth‐Century Gay Seattle

Recent debates in urban politics stress the need to broaden conceptions of what counts as urban politics, as well as of where they take place. This means shifting attention to include more quotidian and prosaic social relations, including those taking place in spaces of civil society. We answer this call with a case study of the relations between an emerging gay male community in mid‐twentieth‐century Seattle, USA and the local public health department’s disease investigators (DIs). We focus on both the biopolitics and cultural politics of the investigation process, from the perspectives of both DIs and gay men. We point out certain tensions and paradoxes in these processes as a form of governmentality, and interpret them through a ‘noir’ cultural lens that is consistent with a notion of urban politics as the unfolding of social relations in place. We conclude by stressing how our findings and framework can augment urban political inquiry both intellectually and empirically.