The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics

Kevin Ward, Andrew E. G. Jonas, Byron Miller, David Wilson, Kevin Ward, Andrew E. G. Jonas, Byron Miller, David Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317495017
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics provides a comprehensive statement and reference point for urban politics. The scope of this handbook's coverage and contributions engages with and reflects upon the most important, innovative and recent critical developments to the interdisciplinary field of urban politics, drawing upon a range of examples from within and across the Global North and Global South.

This handbook is organized into nine interrelated sections, with an introductory chapter setting out the rationale, aims and structure of the Handbook, and short introductory commentaries at the beginning of each part. It questions the eliding of 'urban politics' into the 'politics of the city', reconsidering the usefulness of the distinction between 'old' and 'new' urban politics, considering issues of 'class', 'gender', 'race' and the ways in which they intersect, appear and reappear in matters of urban politics, how best to theorize the roles of capital, the state and other actors, such as social movements, in the production of the city and, finally, issues of doing urban political research. The various chapters explore the issues of urban politics of economic development, environment and nature in the city, governance and planning, the politics of labour as well as living spaces. The concluding sections of the Handbook examine the politics over alternative visions of cities of the future and provide concluding discussions and reflections, particularly on the futures for urban politics in an increasingly 'global' and multidisciplinary context.

With over forty-five contributions from leading international scholars in the field, this handbook provides critical reviews and appraisals of current conceptual and theoretical approaches and future developments in urban politics. It is a key reference to all researchers and policy-makers with an interest in urban politics.

1

SPACES OF URBAN POLITICS

An introduction

Andrew E.G. Jonas, Byron Miller, Kevin Ward and David Wilson

The urban politics of the twenty-first century will be both a local politics and a global politics: the challenge to be faced by those seeking to analyze it effectively will be to hold both aspects together at the same time, without allowing either dominate as a matter of principle.

(Cochrane 1999: 123)

Introduction

The above quote from Allan Cochrane has proven highly prescient, probably more than Cochrane himself could have guessed at the time. Ignoring for the moment important disciplinary and theoretical differences in how urban politics have been examined, the last decade has seen an intellectual consensus – of sorts – emerge on the importance of understanding and analysing urban politics in a wider relational or ‘global’ context. This consensus has grown out of critiques of approaches which, in their efforts to identify the urban’s specificity, often restricted the analysis of urban politics to the jurisdictional territory of the city (i.e. municipal or local government). Yet the tensions and political conflicts that frequently punctuate capitalist society are not so easily contained within local territorial boundaries. Instead,

[t]he political processes at work in civil society are much broader and deeper than local government’s particular compass … Its boundaries do not coincide with the fluid zones of urban labor and commodity markets or infrastructural formation; and their adjustment through annexation, local government reorganization, and metropolitan-wide cooperation is cumbersome, though often of great long-run significance.

(Harvey 1985: 153)

Relational perspectives strive to move beyond such overly ‘territorialist’ readings of urban politics and examine the broader societal processes which shape the production, consumption, restructuring and political contestation of urban space.

Inspiration for relational thinking in geography comes from formative statements by the likes of Harvey (as per the above quote), Ed Soja and Doreen Massey, who have persuasively argued that wider social processes do not simply occur in space; instead, space makes a difference to how those processes operate (see, e.g. Massey 1994, 2005). However, given the variety of ontological positions from which the ‘difference that space makes’ has been explored, what this means for urban theory remains open to further interpretation. For example, some urbanists claim that urban politics are best understood as being the contingent effect of wider contradictions and conflicts in capitalist society; in other words, urban space does make a difference but only insofar as it alters the spatial configuration of wider social and political processes (see, e.g. Saunders 1981). For others – not least those who continue to draw inspiration from historical materialism – urban space plays a much more fundamental role in capitalist society. This is due to the ways in which actors with different material interests derive profits and income from the production and circulation of value through the built environment – the accumulation strategies of property capitals, for example, necessarily depend upon the production of particular urban spatial forms (Cox 2012). For these scholars, space – especially urban space – is of causal significance rather than merely contingent. In summary, within the broad category of ‘relational’ thinking, starkly different ways exist with which to approach the analysis of urban politics in respect of its necessary spatial attributes.

Whilst scholars continue to debate urban theory, urban social conditions have evolved and changed significantly. All sorts of new urban social movements and political struggles, ranging from the Arab Spring and Occupy to struggles for environmental justice and anti-austerity movements, have sprung up within cities across the world. The urban has become a vibrant and highly contested political arena for social struggle around issues of democracy, citizenship, identity and human rights. As much as we need to rethink the urban from a relational perspective, we must also recognize the importance of using evidence drawn from different cities to investigate how the territorial landscape of democratic politics is being transformed on an international stage through more or less globalized social and economic processes.

This Handbook aims to contribute to this wider intellectual project by investigating the diversity of spaces of urban politics within and between which socio-spatial processes of a more essential or ‘global’ nature do their work. As we embark upon this challenging and exciting task, we set out some general observations about the changing socio-spatial form and scope of urban politics. Thus, in this introductory chapter we examine three questions: What are urban politics? Where are such politics to be found? And what are some of the significant, newly emerging spaces of urban politics?

In addressing the first question, we suggest that the analysis of urban politics should continue to be about (1) struggles around the socio-distributional effects of capitalist urban development and (2) struggles for the recognition and inclusion of diverse citizen voices in urban political processes. Such struggles go to the heart of how global capitalism, operating in conjunction with neoliberal state interventions, deeply penetrate into many aspects of urban life to the point that our received understanding of the city as a democratic polity is being questioned. To turn a phrase from Agamben (1995), we want to restore some concrete substance to the ‘bare life’ of urban politics, which all-too-often has been abstracted from its spatial contexts and stripped of its contextual meanings and significance. One of the aims of this collection is to use a variety of examples from cities around the world to reveal the richness of urban politics in the current phase of globalization.

Second, the book makes a case for examining urban politics through a territorial lens in order better to grasp the place-specific effects of wider societal pressures and state restructurings. Much has been written of late that we are living in a post-national, post-territorial world in which globalization and urbanization have coalesced to produce a planetary space of neoliberal capitalism (Brenner 2013; Brenner and Schmid 2015); a space, moreover, which arguably functions at the expense of local and regional political differences and identities. However, we caution against a perspective that ignores the role of urban politics in differentiating processes of globalization and demarcating territory. Many of the chapters in this book demonstrate that urban political processes continue to shape territory as much as they connect it through globally extended social relations and networks.

This brings us to the third, and perhaps most important, objective. Our overall aim in this book is not to make a claim for the specificity of the urban as the space of politics. We do not suggest that society is in an era in which all political struggles are essentially urban struggles and that, consequently, struggles for democracy, social justice and equality are essentially struggles for what Lefebvre (1968) and his followers describe as the ‘right to the city’. Just as capitalist society is constructed in and around many different spaces and scales, so there are corresponding spaces and scales of politics. Some urban political struggles intensify processes of territorial differentiation and localization. Others, however, are more about globalization and the establishment of new scales of connection and flow between urban places. And still others are about the multitude of ways cities shape interaction and political mobilization, even when the grievance is not specific to the city (Miller and Nicholls 2013). In other words, urban political processes are always socially constructed and contested in and through a variety of places, spaces and scales, and they generate spaces of urban difference as well as those of flow and connection. The overarching aim of this collection is to provide some substance to the claim that struggles around and through different kinds of urban spatial formations generate a great variety of territorial politics.

What are urban politics?

Before we examine the socio-spatial characteristics of the ‘urban’ more closely, it is important to note that there has been much discussion amongst critical urban scholars over the years about the changing substance of urban politics. For Marxist scholars, the main concern might be summarized as follows: what do the tensions and conflicts that occasionally erupt inside cities say about capitalist society in general and the capitalist state in particular? Early answers to these questions concluded that the study of urban politics helps to expose the failure on the part of the state to support two things, the production of cities as optimal sites for industrial accumulation and the social reproduction of the working class in capitalism. This first conclusion was reached by David Gordon (1978) and Michael Stone (1978), for example, who assessed the ever relentless quest by capital and the state to create more entrepreneurial city morphologies. The second conclusion was reached particularly by Manuel Castells, who examined urban social movements in the 1970s and early 1980s (Castells 1977, 1978, 1983). While the first thematic focus in urban theory continues today, by the end of the 1990s Castells had abandoned his position and instead made a case for seeing the world of global capitalism as comprised of networks of interconnected urban agglomerations (Castells 2009). Nonetheless a consistent theme running through both foci is the central theoretical position of the ‘urban’ within wider social processes. The writings of critical urban theorists, including Castells and Lefebvre, both of whom have made a strong case for thinking seriously about the essential or causal attributes of urban space, continue to inspire scholars of the contemporary urban condition (Brenner and Elden 2009; Merrifield 2013; Ward and McCann 2006).

Acknowledging the problem of drawing territorial boundaries around otherwise unbounded social and political processes, urbanists eventually abandoned the collective consumption concept. If cities did – and still do – manifest all sorts of social tensions and struggles around housing, education, health and social provision, it became increasingly unrealistic to argue that such social considerations could be separated out from national or global political and economic processes. This did not mean that urbanization followed a single global trajectory since researchers quickly discovered that urban social conditions and the politics of welfare and development vary considerably from one country to another (Cockburn 1977; Dickens et al. 1985; Piven and Friedland 1984). Knowledge of differences in the spatial configuration of state institutions for urban development and collective consumption, respectively, remain important for explaining differences in the ways in which struggles around distribution and recognition emerge in particular urban contexts in capitalist democracies (Cox and Jonas 1993; Young 1990). And even if urban politics has altered its spatial appearance, perhaps its substance might not have changed quite as much as has been implied in discussions that were largely insensitive to geographical differences in state structures and political processes.

Nonetheless, towards the end of the 1980s urban scholars had reached the broad conclusion that the role of urban politics within wider distributional struggles in capitalist democracies was undergoing a decisive shift: promoting economic development through place entrepreneurialism had dramatically subsumed the once powerful drive to ensure social redistribution through welfare policy (Harvey 1989). The rise of this ‘New Urban Politics’ (Cox 1993) could further be explained in terms of the search for new forms of consumption and profitable urban development within a context of enhanced capital mobility on the part of finance capital and some branches of manufacturing industry. In seeking to attract such mobile investments, moreover, urban land-based elites behaved increasingly like a ‘growth machine’ (Logan and Molotch 1987), competing with each other to attract corporate headquarters, prestigious office buildings, international sporting and cultural events, creative industries and so forth, in their collective efforts to capture exchange value. At the same time, the jurisdictional space of local government was fast becoming occupied by new forms of local governance, including special assessment districts, business improvement districts and urban redevelopment authorities, which channelled scarce public resources towards increasingly controversial private-sector urban development projects (Cochrane 1993). In light of the relatively recent global proliferation and spread of such arrangements (Ward 2012), scholars are inclined to the view that urban politics in this global age of neoliberal-cum-hypermobile capitalism has become decidedly elitist, undemocratic, socially exclusive, and a threat to basic human rights and dignity (Harvey 2012).

At the same time, the very notion of urban politics itself began to move to a different conceptual terrain: to the world of the discursive. Important work by Beauregard (2003) and Fischer (2003) revealed that the notion of urban politics could fruitfully be extended to the arena of realities constructed and how urban issues were imaginatively set up for public consumption. Here the world of the discursive becomes a vital contested terrain for determining urban outcomes, i.e. who can control and manage how issues are understood is as important an act of politics as how the state, labour, and other actors and institutions regulate and respond to issues (Lovering 1995; Wilson 2004, 2007). In the process, discourses are identified as new, vital objects of investigation: as sources of power and persuasion, they ‘take over’ the world and define how it is understood by offering symbolic universes to produce realities for public consumption. It follows that to know, for example, how public resources are being distributed, how cities are being restructured and who is being provided state subsidies, one must know how competing interests build their best case for understanding these issues.

Nevertheless, there are still plenty of urban researchers who remain sceptical of claims that the substance of urban politics has irreversibly changed or, to the extent that it has changed, the precise direction. These critics broadly fall into two camps. First, there are those who argue for the value of examining a greater variety of spatial contexts in which urban politics operate, especially examples that draw upon evidence from cities in the Global South which are experiencing new social and spatial patterns of growth along with all sorts of newly emergent social and political tensions (Robinson and Roy 2016; Roy 2011). Second, there are those who suggest that too much theoretical emphasis has been placed on urban development trajectories in a few select cases, especially cities located higher up in the global urban hierarchy (Williams and Pendras 2013). Consequently, urban scholarship might be missing out on cases where alternative forms of urban development politics have emerged, such as cities where conditions of austerity have undermined political institutions formerly dominated by established growth elites or where left-populist political movements have gained some sort of a foothold in local government, as has occurred of late in Spanish cities like Barcelona. Such alternative forms of urban politics might be characterized as less growth-oriented and more redistributive and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Lists of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• 1 Spaces of urban politics: an introduction
• PART I Approaching the space(s) of urban politics
• PART II Spaces of economic development
• PART III Spaces of the environment and nature
• PART IV Spaces of governing and planning
• PART V Spaces of labour
• PART VI Spaces of living
• PART VII Spaces of circulation
• PART VIII Spaces of identity
• PART IX Spaces of utopia and dystopia
• Index