Ethical Cities

Brendan F.D. Barrett, Ralph Horne, John Fien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000280739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Pianificazione e sviluppo urbano

Combining elements of sustainable and resilient cities agendas, together with those from social justice studies, and incorporating concerns about good governance, transparency and accountability, the book presents a coherent conceptual framework for the ethical city, in which to embed existing and new activities within cities so as to guide local action.

The authors' observations are derived from city-specific surveys and urban case studies. These reveal how progressive cities are promoting a diverse range of ethically informed approaches to urbanism, such as community wealth building, basic income initiatives, participatory budgeting and citizen assemblies. The text argues that the ethical city is a logical next step for critical urbanism in the era of late capitalism, characterised by divisive politics, burgeoning inequality, widespread technology-induced disruptions to every aspect of modern life and existential threats posed by climate change, sustainability imperatives and pandemics. Engaging with their communities in meaningful ways and promoting positive transformative change, ethical cities are well placed to deliver liveable and sustainable places for all, rather than only for wealthy elites. Likewise, the aftermath of shocks such as the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic reveals that cities that are not purposeful in addressing inequalities, social problems, unsustainability and corruption face deepening difficulties.

Readers from across physical and social sciences, humanities and arts, as well as across policy, business and civil society, will find that the application of ethical principles is key to the pursuit of socially inclusive urban futures and the potential for cities and their communities to emerge from or, at least, ameliorate a diverse range of local, national and global challenges.

1
RATIONALE FOR ETHICAL CITIES

It looks, indeed, as if we are approaching a period of crisis in urban life; and Invisible Cities is like a dream born out of the heart of the unliveable cities we know. Nowadays people talk with equal insistence of the destruction of the natural environment and of the fragility of the large-scale technological systems (which may cause a sort of chain reaction of breakdowns, paralyzing entire metropolises). The crisis of the overgrown city is the other side of the crisis of the natural world. The image of ‘megalopolis’ – the unending, undifferentiated city which is steadily covering the surface of the earth – dominates my book, too.

Excerpt from a lecture delivered by Italo Calvino at Columbia University in March 1983 (Calvino 2004, pp. 180–181)

What is an ethical city?

When the words ‘ethical’ and ‘city’ are bound together, the intention is to promote collective deliberate ethics at the urban scale, as responses to the major disruptive forces impacting on cities, and to facilitate organised forms of urbanism that are ethically governed and conducted.

In the ethical city, collective, community-scale interactions are central in considering ethical and moral standards. For this book, community is defined in terms of shared values and reciprocity, rooted in society combining traditional ethics of justice and rights with feminist and environmental ethics of care, empathy, responsibility and common good. It requires direct democracy and expression of public will, amounting to a reinvented demos.

The ethical city implies inclusiveness and universality. It should not perpetuate ‘us’ and ‘them’. This is not the kind of community bound together by common enemies and a hatred or vilification of others – no amount of shared inward social support can justify or compensate for such an ultimately antisocial expression of the idea of community. In the ethical city, community is conditional to inclusiveness.

An ethical city is a place where plans, policies and projects are designed and delivered in such a way as to address core urban concerns in an integrated manner. These core concerns are:

• poverty and inequality;
• governance, democracy and social inclusion and
• sustainability and the climate crisis.

The ethical city concept is not centred upon individuals being ethical in cities. Instead, it is about the relations between people reflected in the common ground between the pursuit of individual rights and collective responsibilities as they address these core concerns.

An ethical approach to urbanism suggests common purpose and solutions. It is not about creating additional layers of bureaucracy to enforce ethical codes and forms of behaviour. Rather it is about connecting these core concerns to aspirations. In turn, this requires a radical repurposing of economic and political processes that facilitate the search for exploration and elaboration of alternative pathways towards a sustainable future and an economy that works for all.

Awareness, transparency and accountability are essential in any ethical city. Those in power are held to account. Corruption and malpractice are addressed through such means, as are social expectations and obligations. Social progress involves finding an appropriate balance between aforementioned individual rights and collective responsibilities. Residents in the ethical city hold each other accountable, so that doing the right thing for and by others and the planet is universally expected and practised. Acting without accountability is antisocial.

The ethical city is not an endpoint; it is an alignment, trajectory or orientation. Definitions of the ethical city should be refined by each community in a dialogue with those in power – local authorities, government agencies, politicians, ruling elites and corporations.

With these characteristics, there can be no blueprint for the ethical city. Every city, region or nation is different and must create its own ethical frame. Nevertheless, ethical cities must exhibit the following core characteristics:

• tackling the three core concerns in an integrated way: (1) poverty and inequality, (2) governance, democracy and social inclusion, and (3) sustainability and the climate crisis;
• respect for human rights, enshrined in independent accessible legal recourse;
• access to decent work, a living wage and a decent place to live and actively opposed to inequality as an antisocial phenomenon; and
• community engagement built upon a foundation of universal respect for human and non-human life and transparent, democratic, accountable and ethical governance.

Ethically oriented cities will ultimately be the ones that succeed in enhancing resilience, improving quality of life, creating productive economies and reducing the environmental burden for all residents.

Our concern is that, in the 2020s and 2030s, cities that fail to work towards these characteristics will become less attractive, less sustainable, more vulnerable to negative shocks (natural and human-induced) and continuously disrupted by mega-trends over time. They will become dysfunctional and antisocial, as individuals living in them prioritise narrow, short-term interests over those of their community and short-term profits over long-term prosperity (Barrett et al. 2016, p. 12).

In contrast, in the ethical city we anticipate a virtuous cycle, as sustainability is progressively improved, respectful participation by all is valued, encouraged and enabled and a fair go is afforded to all on the basis of rights, merit and effort. People will be drawn to such a city – clean, inclusive, low crime, democratic and rewarding. Following them will be ethical investors, in a high-principled spiral, driven by very different aspirations than the competitive, neoliberal city (Emanuele 2017).

In this book we expand on the ethical city concept and what it offers, providing a rationale for the elements summarised earlier. In our globalised world, where we add close to 1.5 million people every week to the urban population, the notion of a city, town or community as ethical is particularly apt. The word, ethics, derives from the Greek word ethos – the accustomed habitat or place to which one returns. It is the root of ethikos, is the ability to show moral character and, most fundamentally, ethics which defines the distance from what is and what ought to be. This distance demarcates a space where we have something to do (Certeau 1986, p. 199). Ethics is concerned with what is right, fair, just or good, not necessarily with what is most accepted as normal or expedient (Preston 2014). Ethics is also the source of our hopes, visions, aspirations and dreams. Philosopher Rosalyn Diprose (1991) defines ethics as somewhere that is an action. She argues that to project an ethos is to take a position in relation to others. This is echoed by Walter Jeffko (2018, p. 65), who describes actions as morally right if they promote a personal relation of persons, as opposed to an absolute ‘impersonal relation’ (without human warmth, feelings or care) of persons. Related to this, the feminist ethical standpoint requires that caring for others be taken seriously (Langlois 2011). The exercise of our human agency to care needs to be embedded in the social structuring of power, priority-setting and decision-making in the city (Bee 1994; Giddens 1984). Beyond human-centric ethics, ideas of environmental ethics direct us also to focus on respect for nature (Nash 1989). Our constant search for a better world is primarily ethical – an ever-expanding circle of human rights protected and injustices addressed. Without ethics there would be no progress since we and our institutions/governance structures would lack a vision to guide us (like a compass), be bereft of principles (our gyroscope) and found wanting of an instrument (our sextant) by which to measure progress. Such tools can help navigate around hedonistic, mean-spirited and corrupt forms of urbanism towards a pragmatism of the possible focused on sophisticated notions of justice, emancipation and collective well-being (Amin 2006).

How did we get here?

Contemporary late capitalism presents a perfect storm of anti-democratic and anti-system politics reflected in popularism, individualism, tribalism and nationalism undermining the viability of traditional institutions and their democratic foundations (Hopkin 2020; Eatwell and Goodwin 2018; Jeffko 2018). For the American political theorist, Wendy Brown, the rise of anti-democratic politics is neoliberalism’s monstrous offspring. Neoliberalism, she argues, has dismantled society and dethroned politics while extending the personal, protected sphere with its emphasis on individual freedoms (Brown 2019). It has effectively undermined democracy and created a situation in which political power is exercised by, and for, a part rather than society as a whole (Brown 2015). Moreover, political economist, Jonathan Hopkin, suggests that the rise of anti-system politics on both the right and the left directly opposes the institutions and practices of liberal and social democracy creating space for, and at the same time manipulated by, political entrepreneurs (Hopkin 2020). Five key negative impacts are associated with the rise of neoliberalism: (1) growing inequality, even within wealthy countries; (2) reduced wages and increased debt; (3) redistribution of profits from non-financial companies to the financial sector; (4) growth of personal financial insecurity, destruction of social capital and the resulting rise in crime; and (5) relentless commodification of social and biospheric life/life forms (Benatar et al. 2018, pp. 161–162).

Further, at the same time as demos has been disintegrating, communities in a sociological sense are elusive. The philosopher and sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, described the emergence of communitarian communities in the United States, for example, seeking to counter the negative impacts of overt individualism tied into the neoliberal project. These communitarian communities are essentially an extension of family with a strong emphasis on traditional moral values and functioning as islands of homely and cozy tranquillity in a sea of turbulence and inhospitality (Bauman 2000, p. 182). Elsewhere, new forms of community are emerging, many of which are essentially volatile, transient, single-aspect or single-purpose – a soup kitchen for the homeless, charity clothes giveaway outside the local football ground, community gardening for the lonely, etc. ‘Explosive communities’ or ‘carnival communities’, tied into events or spectacles (which appeal to similar interests in otherwise disparate individuals), offer temporary respite from the daily agonies of solitary struggles. The Anywhere but Westminster video series by the Guardian journalist, John Harris, traces the impacts of austerity and Brexit on people and communities across the UK and frequently remarks on how community groups respond to today’s challenges through events because they can no longer rely on politicians and government. These examples of Bauman’s explosive/carnival communities break the monotony of our separateness but, sadly, leave everything as is.

The challenge for the ethical city is to encourage city dwellers to rediscover community based on social inclusion, shared values and sense of place. This is easier said than done for two reasons. First, the term community has become increasingly pliable, infinitely malleable, combinable, interchangeable and often devoid of meaning (Poerksen 2004). Second, we could be criticised for employing a rather loose and potentially romantic notion of community, especially in an era when many find ourselves connected to virtual or geographically unbounded communities without ties to the physical places we inhabit. Hence, while we do not advocate a simple and potentially unrealistic model of what constitutes community today, we do think that there may be some characteristics that are universal around how decisions are made, how antisocial behaviour is handled and how people are empowered (Naess 1989).

Societal responses to environmental problems such as climate change often exhibit a range of characteristics that undermine collective action. First of all, there is the issue of Hardin’s ‘tragedy of the commons’ in situations where resources such as the atmosphere are shared but ultimately depleted or polluted as a consequence of collective action or lack thereof (Harding 1968, p. 1245; Wilkenfeld 2016, p. 5). Second, difficulties arise around attaining consensus on the problem and its solution as well as when mediating divergent goals of different community members. Third, major challenges surface, such as breakdowns in trust, when seeking to facilitate action where many are willing to direct and few to act (Smith and Mayer 2018, p. 141). Fourth, in contemporary politics there is often an emphasis on short-term appeasement rather than pursuit of principles based on long-term considerations and also...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Rationale for ethical cities
• 2 The right to the city
• 3 Ethics and the city
• 4 Who shapes the ethical city?
• 5 Assessment of the ethical city
• 6 Competitive, liveable and fragile cities
• 7 Relentless disruption
• 8 Building ethical cities
• 9 Transitioning to ethical cities
• Annex 1: issues covered in the city scan pilot survey
• Index