Critical Urban Theory, Common Property, and "the Political"

Desire and Drive in the City

Dan Webb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351736459
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Dan Webb explores an undervalued topic in the formal discipline of Political Theory (and political science, more broadly): the urban as a level of political analysis and political struggles in urban space. Because the city and urban space is so prominent in other critical disciplines, most notably, geography and sociology, a driving question of the book is: what kind of distinct contribution can political theory make to the already existing critical urban literature? The answer is to be found in what Webb calls the "properly political" approach to understanding political conflict as developed in the work of thinkers like Chantal Mouffe, Jodi Dean, and Slavoj Žižek. This "properly political" analysis is contrasted with and a curative to the predominant "ethical" or "post-political" understanding of the urban found in so much of the geographical and sociological critical urban theory literature. In order to illustrate this primary theoretical argument of the book, Webb suggests that "common property" is the most useful category for conceiving the city as a site of the "properly political." When the city and urban space are framed within this theoretical framework, critical urbanists are provided a powerful tool for understanding urban political struggles, in particular, anti-gentrification movements in the inner city.

1
Validating the City in Political Theory

Instead of the spectre of communism, it is the spectre of the urban, the shadow of the city that now haunts Europe.¹

Radical politics must begin from historical givens and conceive radical change not as the negation of the given but rather as making something good from the many elements of the given. The city, as a vastly populated area with large-scale industry and places of mass assembly, is for us a historical given, and radical politics must begin from the existence of modern urban life.²

The city, as an object of critical scholarly inquiry in the social sciences, has been largely confined to two disciplines: human geography and sociology. A quick glance at the Blackwell City Reader (an authoritative anthology of critical writings on the city) attests to this fact: out of the 55 authors included in the anthology, a plurality (16) are trained as or associated with sociology departments, followed closely (14) by geography. That sociologists and (human) geographers possess a strong interest in the city is not surprising considering their disciplines’ founding preoccupations. For sociologists, cities are the most intense site of human interaction and a hallmark of modernity, while for human geographers, cities are constructed landscapes that contain distinct spatial processes, and mark all sorts of social boundaries (gender, class, race) expressed in the built environment. While these disciplines possess innate characteristics that draw their practitioners to the study of cities, there has been an especially pronounced eruption in creative and innovative critical work on the city in sociology and geography since the “spatial turn” of the 1980s and 1990s.

However, an observation that some might find surprising is the lack of interest in the city on the part of political scientists, and especially political theorists. In terms of the Blackwell City Reader tally, only four of the 55 authors are (or were) practising political scientists, and only one is a bona fide political theorist (the late Iris Marion Young). On the other hand, perhaps this should not be considered surprising; after all, is it not the state that serves as the natural and primary object of study for political scientists, due to its ability to exercise sovereign power?³ And connectedly, is the city not a subsidiary body to the state and therefore lacks formal authority of any significance? The standard political science account is that the city is the site of the social, not the properly political.⁴The formal discipline of political science emerged and grew alongside the development of the modern state system, and it would seem natural that in the balkanized halls of the modern academy at least one discipline would come to devote its energy almost exclusively to the study of statecraft. Why not political science?

Indeed, political science has generally been occupied primarily with the study of the state – “national philosophism,” as Derrida calls it⁵ – but this concession does not hold for the entire discipline. Of all the subfields in political science, political theory has always fit the least comfortably with the others, due in large part to its philosophical origins and tradition, which spans over two millennia, and contains very little material that might be considered properly “social scientific” in character. In fact, most work in political theory (formal theory aside) possesses a flavour much more akin to that of the humanities than the social sciences. For example, it is much more likely for a political theorist to explore the depth of the human soul, than to quantify human behaviour via statistical models. In addition, this tradition began long before the rise of the modern state system, which is another way of saying that political theory existed long before the advent of modern political science. While Plato and Aristotle had a name for something approximating the state (the “nation,” in translation), their primary interests were in the politics of the city. The rest of this chapter outlines a brief history of political theory’s relationship to the category of the city, beginning with the Ancient Greeks and ending with the contemporary moment. It is not an exhaustive account, but instead highlights the central contributions particular theorists have made in producing the Western canon of political thought. Such an endeavour helps establish the theoretical context for reasserting the city as an essential category for thinking about politics from a critical political theory perspective.

The Ancient Greek Polis

Many political scientists will argue that the city in Ancient Greece should be considered simply a precursor or analogue to the state. Ultimately, the argument goes, the difference between modern states and cities like ancient Athens is primarily a matter of scale, after all, we commonly refer to these latter political units as city-states. From this perspective, the formal structure of the city and the state appear identical, as do their respective roles in creating rules regarding citizenship, commerce, foreign policy, and maintaining monopolies on the legitimate use of violence. But this obscures some of the strong normative dimensions peculiar to city life so strongly articulated by the likes of Plato and Aristotle. A brief glance at the works of the Ancients shows clearly that when the city marks the limit of legitimate political authority, the political experience of its citizens is qualitatively different, and the Greeks would say enriched, than those in larger political units that possesses multiple cities or nations, spread across a wide territorial expanse.

In this respect, when contrasting cities and states, the first consideration is, quite simply, the size of the polis. The political system of ancient Athens is routinely valorized (if not romanticized) because all citizens had the right and duty to directly participate in governing, suggesting that the dream of contemporary radical democrats – “direct” democracy – is feasible and functional if the political unit in question is confined to a reasonably small population. This sort of claim must, of course, always include the qualifier that the majority of the inhabitants of ancient Athens were not legally citizens and, therefore, its (direct) democracy was highly exclusive and required slaves and other oppressed and marginalized groups to function. This criticism will be dealt with in good time, but for now I am simply interested in highlighting some of the most important ideas about the city that inaugurate the canon of Western political thought, and the first is that physical or geographical size mediates the possibilities for types of rule.

While Plato was no fan of democracy, he does provide several comments regarding the importance of small-scale political organization, and certainly he never questions if the city should serve as the primary site of political power. He argues that the most important characteristics of the city are that it remain “unified” and “self-sufficient.” In a conversation with Adeimantus, Socrates illustrates this position:

And what, I said, will be the best limit for our rulers to fix when they are considering the size of the State and the amount of territory which they are to include, and beyond which they will not go?

What limit would you propose?

I would allow the State to increase so far as is consistent with unity; that, I think, is the proper limit.

Very good, he said.

Here then, I said, is another order which will have to be conveyed to our guardians: Let our city be accounted neither large nor small, but one and self-sufficing.⁶

By “unity,” Plato is referring to his famous definition of justice in the city – that all inhabitants accept their roles, and perform them well, without envy or resentment toward their fellows.⁷ Self-sufficiency, on the other hand, appears to mean that the city possesses all that is required for its inhabitants to live without concern for their security and wellbeing. For Plato, the self-sufficient city is a city without luxuries or unnecessary accoutrements. It therefore requires a severely disciplined society, devoted to the preservation of the city over all other concerns. Flowing from this condition, Plato argues that the city is also to be planned in an intensely rational manner, and should contain no spontaneous elements. This is another way of saying that every aspect of the city should be designed intentionally so as to ensure its unity and that it is not deficient in any necessity. For example, in Book II of The Republic he identifies the various types of workers necessary for creating a self-sufficient city, from servants to “neatherders.”⁸ Betraying his Pythagorean mysticism, in The Laws Plato actually provides a specific number that he believes represents the ideal population for a city: 5,040,⁹ roughly the size of Humboldt, Saskatchewan.¹⁰

Despite major differences in relation to his thoughts on the city, Plato’s most famous student – Aristotle – also expresses a great concern with the normative importance of the size of the city. In concert with his teacher, Aristotle asserts an explicit relationship between self-sufficiency and justice in the city by constructing an analogy between the just/self-sufficient man and the corresponding city. This perspective is intimately associated with the good life of the individual, in that

[h]e who has the power to take part in the deliberative or judicial administration of any state is said by us to be a citizen of that state; and, speaking generally, a state is a body of citizens sufficing for the purposes of life.¹¹

In the Aristotelian city, citizens live the good life only when they are not dependent on others, and when they have control over their own political affairs. At first glance, and contra Plato, Aristotle believes there is no direct relationship between the number of inhabitants of a city and its greatness, because the greatness of a city is a qualitative consideration, not a quantitative one. What matters, primarily, is the number of good inhabitants in the city.¹² Nonetheless, he prefers cities with smaller populations because, in them, citizens have a greater ability to know each other and thereby grow fond of each other. Ultimately, for Aristotle, not only are small cities preferable to large ones, but the desire for the latter betrays an inherently tyrannical predisposition, as he states: “those who value most highly the life of a tyrant deem that city the happiest which rules over the greatest number.”¹³

Perhaps the most important Aristotelian insight regarding the city is, however, connected to one of his central categories of the good life: friendship. For Aristotle, friendship stands at the apex of the hierarchy of virtuous human relationships, particularly those friendships in which two individuals desire good for each other.¹⁴ A city in which numerous friendships have grown and flourished is sure to be a good city, but not just as a result of the existence of virtuous relationships. On Aristotle’s account, not everyone has the ability to foster genuine friendships of equals, but only virtuous individuals, and it is these individuals who will also rule and choose rulers in the city. Therefore,

if the citizens of a state are to judge and to distribute offices according to merit, then they must know each other’s characters; where they do not possess this knowledge, both the election to offices and the decision of lawsuits will go wrong. When the population is very large they are manifestly settled at haphazard, which clearly ought not to be.¹⁵

It is the possibility of face-to-face solidarity in the reasonably sized city that allows for virtuous rule in the Aristotelian mould, a condition of existence largely absent in all contemporary representative democracies (at least at the national level of government).

Finally, the Ancient Greek perspective on the city was intimately associated with a teleological understanding of human nature. As Aristotle formulated, humans are by nature political animals, and as such require the polis to achieve their potential in this respect. For the Greeks, the good life was inextricably linked to the existence of a public sphere in which men could act in accordance with their political nature. Hannah Arendt elucidates this in her classic distinction between the private and the public: “The realm of the polis … was the sphere of freedom,”¹⁶ that is, the place where political life happens and the necessity of the private is transcended. She continues: “The law of the city state was … quite literally a wall, without which there might have been an agglomeration of houses, a town (asty), but not a city, a political community.”¹⁷ In other words, the community as defined and governed by law was embodied in the physical space of the city, and provided the conditions of possibility for human flourishing. The lessons political theorists can take away from this brief gloss of the Ancients is that size matters when it comes to conceptualizing formal political communities, but contra the physiological witticism, bigger is not necessarily better. The good life, to the extent it is based on a teleological conception of what it means to be human, requires an urban setting as the primary container of politics.

It is with this peculiar normative position regarding political life that the tradition of Western political theory begins. While the city qua ancient polis would never regain such a pre-eminent position in the canon of political theory as it did with the Greeks, the value of small-scale, or localized politics, consistently reappears in the thought of, more or less, every age. It is implicit in the localism of some of the iconodules of the Byzantine era,¹⁸ the localized patriotism of the Italian city-state of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (supported by Machiavelli’s opposition to the logic of sovereignty),¹⁹ the anti-monarchist and antienc...