Urban Democracy and Capitalism

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Table of Contents

Introduction
What is the Polis?
Who is the Citizen?
Fraser, Struggle over Needs
References

Introduction

The urban condition is the human condition. In 1950, one-third of the world’s population lived in cities, but by 2050, the figure is expected to rise to two-thirds, or 6 billion people. By 2015 each of the world’s ten largest cities will house between 20 and 30 million people. Possibly, even those people who are not included in these figures now owe most of their existence to the demands that cities place on the world economy.

There can be no doubt that the last 100 years have witnessed a major shift in the world’s spatial organization. Recently, there has been a frenzy of research on this problem, much of which has concerned the exact nature of political agency when it is increasingly mediated by urban institutions. Classically, urban political agency has been thought of in three different ways. One has been to imagine the city as a place with powers arising from its particular nature.

The second has been to make claims for the city as a community, and the third has been to argue that in some way cities bestow citizenship. All of these responses are problematic in some way. No one can deny the specificity of place, but increasingly, places overlap with so many other places that it makes it very difficult to say that they are truly concentrated in one location. The second response is even more difficult in light of the extraordinary diversity of impulse and orientation in any given city. And the final response confuses a political category with a place.

Instead of jettisoning these classical interpretations, however, they should be redefined since they continue to have grip in today’s world. Indeed, many contemporary global political issues are linked to these three different formulations of urban political agency.

For example, the urban spectacle of anti-war protest cannot be ignored in any consideration of global geopolitics. Moreover, the close juxtaposition of peoples and cultures from around the world in cities has to be placed at the heart of any politics of identity, belonging, and affiliation, while the sheer environmental effects of cities themselves produce both enormous problems and practices that international regulators still sometimes see as beneath them even when they are all around them. Cities matter politically, not merely as sites where the political occurs, but as part of the political itself.

What is the Polis?

There are three instances of urban political agency. The first begins with the question of place specificity. The sheer physical nature of the city–its bricks and mortar, daily routines, wires and wheels–allow many people to continue to think of the city as a bounded space. But all of these mundane things connect up with other spaces, physical and virtual. None of them are complete unto themselves. Think only of the porosity of the modern house, with its multiple inputs and outputs from all over the world (and indeed beyond if we include satellites). Think of the modern park, with people and plants from around the world.

Think of a car drive through the city, which for many people is their key experience of place, involving a constant hum of world noise if the radio is on, but also many sensing of a passing landscape that is never entirely local (the concrete comes from another country, the street lamp comes from another city, the grass seed or turf from a distant countryside). The physicality of the here and now routinely contains the physicality of the there and then.

Who is the Citizen?

Finally, we must consider the issue of citizenship, first by asking, ‘Citizen of what?’ In the past citizens were identified with cities, then more recently, with the nation-state. Now, with the advent of permanently urbanized space, we can see that citizenship is becoming identified with increasingly more spatial categories. For example, surveys show that people increasingly identify with the planetary scale (“citizens of the world”), the local scale, and a whole series of spaces in between.

Although this tendency toward multiple spatial identification is stronger among younger people, more and more categories of people also lay claim to an identification with many spaces, such as cosmopolitans, immigrants, professionals, and many other ordinary folk whose lives are increasingly made through their multiple connections with the world. This suggests that people increasingly acknowledge the many spatial affiliations they have always had and are turning these into active political capital.

We cannot yet speak of a new commons of citizenship arranged around an agreed set of wants and demands that form in many spaces at once. But, it is the case that the category of citizenship that was formerly locked into very particular spaces is now being chipped away at and parts of it are relocating.

In this condition of citizenship, the urban is pluralized and distributed. First, the urban continues to house millions of dispossessed, dislocated and illegal people, for whom any idea of citizenship is off the radar. These are people without rights to the spaces they occupy.

The city, with its myriad of spaces, can thus provide a resource to those stripped of citizenship to survive and sometimes prosper. The existence of a whole series of quasi-citizenships also provides some recourse for those without formal political identity; such people can still take part in many urban political activities and can generally find at least some means of political expression. Put differently, the city for them is the only place of acquiring some political capital.

Fraser, Struggle over Needs

Fraser seeks to problematize Habermas’ notion of ‘public space’. She views this as necessary in order for critical theory to actually deal with the public because “Habermas’s concept of the public sphere provides a way of circumventing some confusions that have plagued progressive social movements and the political theories associated with them” in part because of a tendency for socialist progressives to conflate issues like the state apparatus and the public sphere.

By referring to “private” as “everything that is outside of the domestic or familial sphere,” Habermas conflates “the state, the official economy of paid employment, and arenas of public discourse”. This is in part because he primarily views the public sphere simply as a “theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk”.

According to Habermas, the idea of a public sphere is that of a body of “private persons” assembled to discuss matters of “public concern” or “common interest.” This idea acquired force and reality in early modern Europe in the constitution of “bourgeois public spheres” as counterweights to absolutist states.

These publics aimed to mediate between society and the state by holding the state accountable to society via publicity. At first this meant requiring that information about state functioning be made accessible so that state activities would be subject to critical scrutiny and the force of public opinion. Later it meant transmitting the considered “general interest” of “bourgeois society” to the state via forms of legally guaranteed free speech, free press, and free assembly, and eventually through the parliamentary institutions of representative government.

Thus at one level the idea of the public sphere designated an institutional mechanism for rationalizing political domination by rendering states accountable to (some of) the citizenry. At another level, it designated a specific kind of discursive interaction. Here the public sphere connoted an ideal of unrestricted rational discussion of public matters. The discussion was to be open and accessible to all, merely private interests were to be inadmissible, inequalities of status were to be bracketed, and discussants were to deliberate as peers. The result of such discussion would be public opinion in the strong sense of a consensus about the common good.

According to Habermas, the full utopian potential of the bourgeois conception of the public sphere was never realized in practice. The claim to open access in particular was not made good. Moreover, the bourgeois conception of the public sphere was premised on a social order in which the state was sharply differentiated from the newly privatized market economy; it was this clear separation of society and state that was supposed to underpin a form of public discussion that excluded “private interests.”

But these conditions eventually eroded as non-bourgeois strata gained access to the public sphere. Then “the social question” came to the fore, society was polarized by class struggle, and the public fragmented into a mass of competing interest groups. Street demonstrations and back room, brokered compromises among private interests replaced reasoned public debate about the common good. Finally, with the emergence of welfare-state mass democracy, society and the state became mutually intertwined; publicity in the sense of critical scrutiny of the state gave way to public relations, mass-mediated staged displays and the manufacture and manipulation of public opinion.

References

Fraser, Nancy. 1992. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy” in Habermas and the Public Sphere (Craig Calhoun, ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 109-142.

Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, trans. Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christiane Wilke (London: Verso, 2003).

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Urban Democracy and Capitalism

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