Urban Change and Citizenship in Times of Crisis

Volume 1: Theories and Concepts

Bryan S. Turner, Hannah Wolf, Gregor Fitzi, Jürgen Mackert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429557330
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Urban Change and Citizenship in Times of Crisis addresses the fact that in the beginning of the twenty-first century the majority of the world's population is urbanised, a social fact that has turned cities more than ever into focal sites of social change. Multiple economic and political strategies, employed by a variety of individual and collective actors, on a number of scales, constitute cities as contested spaces that hold opportunities as well as restrictions for their inhabitants. While cities and urban spaces have long been of central concern for the social sciences, today, classical sociological questions about the city acquire new meaning: Can cities be spaces of emancipation, or does life in the modern city entail a corrosion of citizenship rights? Is the city the focus of societal transformation processes, or do urban environments lose importance in shaping social reality and economic relationships? Furthermore, new questions urgently need to be asked: What is the impact of different historical phenomena such as neo-liberal restructuring, financial and economic crises, or migration flows, as well as their respective counter-movements, on the structure of contemporary cities and on the citizenship rights of city inhabitants? The three volumes address such crucial questions thereby opening up new spaces of debate on both the city and new developments of urbanism.

The contributions to Theories and Concepts offer new theoretical reflections on the city in a philosophical and historical perspective as well as fresh empirical analyses of social life in urban contexts. Chapters not only critically revisit classical and modern philosophical considerations about the nature of cities but no less discuss normative philosophical reflections of urban life and the role of religion in historical processes of the emergence of cities. Composed around the question whether there can be such a thing as a 'successful city', this volume addresses issues of urban political subjectivities by considering the city's role in historical processes of emancipation, the fight for citizenship rights, and today's challenges and opportunities with regard to promoting social justice, integration, and diversity. Consequentially, theory-driven empirical analyses offer new insight into ways of solving problems in urban contexts and a genuine approach to analyse the Social Quality in cities.

Part I

Philosophical and historical trajectories

1 The good city and its true costs

Planetary urbanisation through an Aristotelian lens

Michael Weinman and Boris Vormann

Introduction

We could think that the normative debate about the good city is in full swing. City rankings are populating lifestyle magazines, daily newspapers, and stern academic publications. To be sure, chief indicators foreground economic factors. But these rankings also go much beyond the cold facts of GDP growth or average household income to measure the liveability, sustainability, resilience, walkability, happiness and density of cities, alongside other desirable aims. But even though this lively discussion is happening and even though it addresses such a diverse set of objectives, more thoroughgoing analyses of what the good city should actually be are curiously absent from most of these dominant debates. As we will contend, these normative arguments tend to operate with an impoverished understanding of social relations beyond the city proper and therefore presume a rather shallow notion of the good life.

While metrics vary widely, these lists share a strong optimism in the prospects of urban development. As such, they resonate with broader discourses about the so-called urban century: more than half of humanity now lives in cities, and in the past decade, hardly a government report or consulting firm got around pointing out that this was somehow a good sign for all. In these discourses among urban planners, city branders and development economists, cities appear to us as the avant-garde of civilisational progress. A successful city seems to be equivalent to a successful society. To think that the good city and the good life are intrinsically interwoven – that it is impossible to think of a political constellation where citizens thrive absent robust and just urban development – is, for better and worse, to engage with a long tradition in Western political thought that grants prominence to the city. On balance and despite many well-noted differences, both the republican and liberal strands of political thought privileged the city in thinking about the good life for individuals and political communities be the latter ancient city-states, medieval principalities or empires, or modern nation-states.

Aristotle, we will argue here, serves as a crucial exemplar for this habit of thought, both in his articulation of the practical centrality of the city for political organisation and in his normative account of the good life for humans as a political life that is a life in and of the polis. He helps us transcend the narrowness of current debates – even though his work needs to be critically reread. In an era where urbanisation processes are no longer oriented towards the horizon of the city, but to regional, national, international and even planetary scales and where the relevant level of political organisation no longer maps onto the city, but neither onto the nation-state – we need to develop new analytical tools with which to measure a city’s success. For, how can one judge the extent to which a city is just and facilitates the good life, when we don’t take account of the planetary infrastructures, labour forces and externalisation processes that render islands of post-industrial progress (see Vormann, 2015; Kalt, 2019) possible in the first place?

We contend that Ash Amin’s call to rethink the allure of the good city as a possible site for an emancipatory politics beyond the horizon of the nation-state and global capitalism is most possible having adopted a modified Aristotelian commitment to a ‘non-parochial politics of place’ (Weinman, 2016, p. 59). Such a politics, as we elaborate here, seeks to articulate what it would look like for there to be a responsible and just regime that integrates the true costs of goods and services into the political and economic governance of the global flows of capital and people. Such a regime is a ‘politics of place’ because it resists calls for an untenable and undesirable world state or other super-governmental body; it is ‘non-parochial’ because it refuses to essentialise or naturalise existing forms of municipal, regional or national government.

Such a regime, we contend, bears a striking resemblance to certain formal and constitutional features of the polis as Aristotle understands it, for all the obvious material and practical differences between the ancient city-state and contemporary regimes. Principal among the similarities is the insistence of attending to the non-parallelism between the economic and the political relations implicit in life in a big city. For Aristotle, the life of virtue, as described in Nicomachean Ethics is possible only in a certain sort of political constellation: namely, the polis (Frank, 2005; Roochnik, 2016; Weinman, 2016). Among a number of other claims that are more or less objectionable, Aristotle, in Politics (1986)¹ advances three claims on which we want to draw here, through critical reconstruction rather than direct adoption.

First, that in the good city (polis), the regime (or constitution, politeia²) truly organises life in the city, because the life of each citizen (politēs) is co-constitutive with that regime (1274b30–1278b5). This intimate bond between a good city, a good citizen and a good regime is explicit in Aristotle’s Greek, with all three terms derived from the same root; we will unpack the intuition behind this view in the first section below.

The second claim Aristotle (1278b6–1281a40) advances is this: since the life of the good city proceeds only in and as the lives of its good citizens, there is always the problem of inside/outside; as a political unit the polis is all and only its citizens, but as an instrument for providing a good life, it involves many non-citizens. This, we will argue, is what makes this Aristotelian lens so telling for a discussion of planetary urbanisation, by which is meant, in accordance with an ongoing debate in urban studies, the full set of material processes that cut across various scales (from the local to the global) to facilitate the constitution and reproduction of cities.³

Finally, we will reconstruct an Aristotelian claim (1325b34–1326b26, 1328a22–1328b22) that what we define below as the actual implications of decision-making in the polis cut across the inside/outside divide. Crucial here is Aristotle’s enumeration of those things ‘among the things that are necessary for the city’ that in fact ‘belong to the city as its parts’, insofar as they are ‘counted as part of its works’. Getting this right is necessary if we are to address the question of justice adequately; for only in light of this accounting it is possible to establish the true costs of each public choice for citizens and non-citizens alike.

These claims will serve, respectively, as the backbone of each forthcoming section, in which we (a) adduce the Aristotelian principle relevant for our argument; (b) exemplify it with respect to the conceptualisation of the good city; and, finally, (c) interrogate it with respect to the phenomenon of planetary urbanisation. This is not to say that some kernel of Aristotle’s political thinking should serve as a rule to be unambiguously endorsed for thinking through the conditions of the good city today. This is surely not the case, for as Miller (1995, pp. 335–378) argues, Aristotle’s understanding of the fundamental unit of collective human experience – the polis – simply does not exist any longer and, as far as human probability allows one to say, will never again. This is also one of the central claims of the literature on planetary urbanisation which directs our analytical attentions to the material aspects of globalisation – such as commodity chains, resource extraction, consumption – to transcend the local aspects of city-becoming.

Moreover, as Yack (1993, pp. 279–280) claims, and as we will point out at different moments, what Aristotle expressly has to say is wrong, both descriptively and normatively from a contemporary perspective. But it does not follow from this concession that we do not still have something to learn from Aristotle in attempting to formulate what constitutes a good city in the current moment of increasingly inegalitarian capital accumulation. On the contrary, we intend to show that Aristotle’s underlying analysis of the ends of political life emphasises the misfit between the political constituency of the city and its regime and the wider community of all persons whose lives are implicated in the reproductive processes of the city. In this way, despite its ancient pedigree and the myriad ways in which it has little of relevance to offer, Aristotle’s thought provides new insights into the true costs of the maintenance of the good life in the contemporary big city.

What makes a city good?

In the opening moments of Politics (1252a1–1252a30), Aristotle argues that the polis is the most complete (or ‘perfect’) form of human community. For our purposes, several facts regarding the presentation of what is the fundamental truth of political inquiry for Aristotle are relevant. First, that the Politics begins by emphasising the way in which politics is not some separate domain of inquiry, but rather an element – perhaps the most important – of studying ethics. Next, that what argues for the polis being the proper level of analysis because it aims at the most ‘authoritative’ of goods, and, for this reason, is the most ‘all-encompassing’ of communities. Third, that the specific form of political community that is called polis is not only greater than other communities (like a household, or a business enterprise), but different in kind because only the polis (among human communities) is a natural whole.

This reading of Politics as both a coherent whole itself – see Simpson’s (1997) introduction to his translation for a decisive discussion of this interpretive controversy – and of a piece with the central argument of Nicomachean Ethics hangs on Aristotle’s view of the telos of the city and the necessity of the right constitution and citizens for the fulfilment of that purpose. This is the first of the three Aristotelian claims that we critically deploy here: the relation of citizen, city, and regime (politēs, polis, politeia), in which the nature of citizenship displays the nature of a city, and that of a city reveals that of a regime. On this understanding of the Politics, we may, having followed the analysis to the conclusion, look backward from the best regime to the true city and the true citizen. The ‘true citizen’ is defined with reference to a preliminary definition of citizen, which itself is gleaned from the experience of ‘true’ democracy.⁴ According to this definition, citizens are those among whom ‘it is given to some or all to deliberate and to judge’ (1275a31).

But what does this abstract formulation – of the good city as the one where the life of the city is determined as much as possible through the lives of its citizens as those who deliberate (in assembly, but also in everyday life simpliciter) and judge (in court, but also in everyday life simpliciter) – mean in practice? And is this vision one that we may, in any way, apply and endorse today? Aristotle (1275b1–1275b10, 1275b13) addresses this by testing his definition of citizenship in relation to the existing practices, which in this key respect is not so different from our own: as he observes, not only do what it means to deliberate and to judge differ from polity to polity, but also there are cities that have no ‘people’ (dēmos) at all in the relevant sense, nor an assembly for law-making, nor courts composed of citizens. Thus, Aristotle’s definition of citizenship will apply most of all to a democracy, where the largest portion of residents are citizens and those citizens join in the responsibilities of citizenship, and thus the life of the city.

Here we can see the two-fold sense of what it means to be ‘citizen’ that permeates Aristotle’s Politics: insofar as the work contains both a comparative analysis of existing cities and regime-types and an account of the best city and regime (the so-called ‘city of prayer’ described in Books 7 and 8), we can see both a descriptive use of the term ‘citizen’ based on existing political forms, whatever they may be and irrespective of the question of justice, and a normative use of the term, possessed of evaluative force and based on certain stated or implicit principles. This obtains today as well, where we can distinguish a normative use of the term ‘citizen’ as in the commonplace concerning the rights and responsibilities of citizens from a descriptive usage that often amounts to the same as the term ‘national’. The latter refers just to brute fact of belonging to a state, while the former refers to someone who partakes in the administration of political life, usually in our time through voting in elections, but also (in many cases) through serving in jury at court, and perhaps through other forms of political and civic engagement.

In this, we can begin to see both the promise and pitfalls of this Aristotelian view: the promise is the robust vision of what it means for the citizen who resides in the city to live well and why this contributes constructively to thinking about justice and the good life through the examination of the good city today. That vision holds the good life to be possible only within the most complete regime; such a regime is one in which the greatest number of citizens are most capable of virtuous life. Further, such a life is possible only under a regime of a certain kind, one where the greatest number of citizen-residents activate their individual capacities with two provisos: first, they act through a shared capacity for reasoned speech (logos); second, they do this as embodied beings, with real material needs – and wants – and emotional commitments, and not as ‘utility maximising individuals’ or some such abstractly formulated agencies. This Aristotelian conception of citizenship manifests in the practical commitment to extending the right to deliberate and to judge, publicly, as widely as possible, among those who share in the responsibility of maintaining the regime of the city.

At the same time, we can also see shortcomings. First, practically speaking, deliberation and judgement are not scaled to the city in our time; at least not primarily so. What are we to do with Aristotle’s model – other than simply discard it – if it tells us that the relevant standard for the good city is the virtuous life of its resident citizens in their capacity to deliberate and judge, when those two functions, which do remain salient for political life, are keyed primarily to the level of political forms much larger than the city/municipality? More starkly, the question is: how can this Aristotelian lens be relevant for contemporary accounts of the good city when Aristotle is imagining political life happening at the scale of populations of tens of thousands, or perhaps a few hundred thousand at the absolute uppermost limit, while our city, regional and national governments are many orders of magnitude larger than that?

Deeper, however, is the concern that Aristotle’s analysis is clearly guilty of Aristotle’s analysis is clearly guilty of what Hillary Angelo and David Wachsmuth (2014) have called ‘methodological cityism’ – that is, a myopic fetishising of local immediacy. Aristotle (1326b8, 1326b16) conceived of citizenship as being membership in a polis, in a political community that is ‘large enough to be self-sufficient’ but small enough that ‘the citizens must know one another’s characters’ (Aristotle 1326b16). On this point, for reasons developed below, our analysis must dissent from Aristotle on both descriptive and normative grounds. Aristotle is likely wrong, descriptively, that it is possible (let alone necessary for the good life) that the political community b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: cities between success and failure
• PART I: Philosophical and historical trajectories
• PART II: Urban political collectivities
• PART III: Towards urban complexity and social quality
• Index