Cities, Politics & Power

Simon Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415365796
• eBook ISBN: 9781134214303
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Traditionally, the study of 'power in the city' was confined to the institutions of urban government and the actors involved in contesting and making political decisions in and for metropolitan societies. Increasingly, however, attention has turned to the function of the city not only as a centre of urban governance but as a major economic, social, cultural and strategic force in its own right.

Cities, Politics and Power combines this traditional concern with how the cities in which we live are organized and run with a broader focus on cities and urban regions as multiple sites and agents of power. This book is divided into five sections, with a short introduction outlining the argument and organisation of the text. Part two charts the development of the urban polity and considers the ways in which coercion and force continue to be used to segregate, oppress and annihilate urban populations. Part three critically examines the key collective actors and processes that compete for and organise political power within cities, and how urban governance operates and interacts with lesser and greater scales of government and networks of power. Part four then explores the ways in which 'the political' is constituted by urban inhabitants, and how social identity, information and communication networks, and the natural and built environment all comprise intersecting fields of urban power. The conclusion calls for a broader theoretical and thematic approach to the study of urban politics.

This book makes extensive use of comparative and historical case studies, providing broad coverage of politics and urban movements in both the Global North and the Global South, with a particular focus on the UK, USA, Canada, Latin America and China. It is written in an accessible and lucid style and provides suggestions for further reading at the end each chapter.

Part I
Introduction

1
Making sense of urban power

The aim of this book, as the title suggests, is to explore the relationship between cities, politics and power with the hope thereby of shedding light on how cities have contributed to the thought and practice of politics, how cities can be considered both an arena and a site of power, and why the study of the urban complex can help us to rethink and revise the ways we have traditionally thought about political power. But how to make sense of the relationship between such concrete, particular and abstract entities? Such an analysis requires a critical examination of the forms and processes of political power in operation at the urban level and how urban politics operates and interacts with lesser and greater scales of government and networks of power.

Politics, however, is not just a process-based or relational phenomenon; it is also situated within the urban lifeworld in often-unremarked ways (the maximum elevation of buildings, the location of pedestrian crossings, the maintenance of sewage systems, for example). We therefore need to explore the ways in which ‘the political’ is inscribed within the urban landscape and manifested at the level of the subject (individual, group, social). This requires us to look at how identity and representation are mediated through symbolic, ideological and informational strategies that both create opportunities for and impose limits on political life.

Thinking about the city as both an agent and a site of power also requires us to challenge some conventional understandings of what makes the urban, how the urban is distinguished from the ‘non-urban’, and even perhaps to reconsider the value – in social scientific terms at least – of thinking about the city as a bounded territorial entity to which defined populations, economic activities, institutional bodies, means of communication and cultural values correspond. It would be easy to assume that the increasing interconnectedness of nations, regions and cities has de-territorialised and de-localised the nature of politics and the organisation of politics and power in the city – leaving us with only the historical ruins of once proud civic democracies. Such a view requires qualifying, first because historically self-contained urban polities have tended to be exceptional and short lived, and second because while the agents of globalisation may see the world from the comfort of the club-class cabin, the vast majority of the world’s population, as Jenny Robinson reminds us, live in ordinary cities where ‘on the ground’ politics continue to matter a great deal (Robinson 2006).

The problem of urban power

With such a plethora of books and articles dealing with urban themes ranging from new regionalism to globalisation and neo-liberalism to gentrification it would seem that the question of urban power is not so much an absent as a ubiquitous feature of contemporary urban studies, and in particular the sub-fields of political geography, urban policy and politics, urban political economy, urban political sociology, urban anthropology, migration studies and so on. However, amidst all this diversity and intellectual effort it is surprisingly difficult to find articles or chapters, let alone monographs or edited collections, that deal with the question of urban power in its own right.

It was not always so. Back in the 1950s, Gerth and Wright Mills devoted the whole of the second part of Max Weber’s collected essays to ‘Power’ within which discrete essays on ‘structures of power’, ‘bureaucracy’, ‘charismatic authority’ and ‘the meaning of discipline’ were to be found. Browsing through contemporary scholarly articles that claim to address some aspect of ‘urban politics’ one quickly abandons any hope of encountering even as broad a conceptualisation of power as that contained in Weber’s short essay on ‘class, status and party’. This is not intended as a criticism of the intellectual credentials of these publications so much as a phenomenological observation: the study of power in the urban– metropolitan–regional–substate context has become divided into a series of discrete research fields each of which has a very good hold on a particular aspect of urban power but where a more synoptic view is palpably lacking.

The first task that confronts us when we take on the difficult subject of researching power in a particular social context is to frame the question. The political scientist would probably still begin with the set of questions asked by Harold Lasswell in 1936, ‘Who gets what, when, and how?’ The economic geographer, ‘Who works where and who makes and buys what and how?’ The human geographer, ‘Who lives where, when and how?’ The sociologist, ‘Who gets born, educated, married and dies where, when and how?’ The criminologist, ‘Who gets arrested or assaulted when, where and how?’, and so on. Of course it is perfectly possible to answer such questions empirically and descriptively, as the vast majority of studies do, without considering the problem of ‘urban power’ in the round. But nevertheless the ‘why question’ remains a consistent and unavoidable one for those who aspire to dig below the surface of the city’s phenomenality.

Politics is not just a question of resource distribution; it is also about how various forms of power constitute political resources in their own right. The personnel that constitute the decision-making and taking bodies – the who? in Robert Dahl’s quest for the sources of urban political power – are relevant to this investigation (Dahl 1961), but according to Max Weber, the more pertinent question is what governs? Or rather, what ensemble of social, economic and political forces constitutes the government of the state? Of the three types of power identified by Weber – economic, social and political – it was not as clear as it was for Marx that the former is more potent in the determination of human relations than the latter two.

Class and status can be just as empowering or restricting as the occupation of administrative or political office, and of course in the real world such categories inevitably overlap. Michael Mann draws a distinction between the state’s deployment of what he calls despotic or forceful power and that of infrastructural power, which sustains and regulates civil society (cited in Mörner 1993: 3). Because cities are centres of highly concentrated state infrastructure, most of the work of urban policy makers is dedicated to managing, maintaining and extending the machinery of the local and regional state. However, because there is a tendency to regard the provision and allocation of public goods in cities as essentially a techno-bureaucratic activity, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the power relationship between the (local) state and civil society remains disproportionately in favour of the former (Pahl 1970).

When we ask why cities have the social, economic, cultural and spatial characteristics that they possess and why there appears to be such huge variations in levels of income, segregation, human security, environmental quality and so forth, we must inevitably address aspects of the constitution of urban power. Scholars have sought to map and analyse the changing urban landscape in a variety of ways, the most well-established of which is the field of gentrification, closely allied to which is work on spatial segregation (principally though not exclusively in terms of ‘race’ or ethnicity). The second looks at the city as an agent of economic transformation that we could loosely group under the heading of ‘urban political economy’, which also includes work on the urban dimensions of globalisation and neo-liberalism. The third relates to the settlement and growth of cities, especially in relation to regional and international migratory flows and population displacements. The fourth deals with issues of inequality in terms of access to labour markets, types of occupation, remuneration, housing, health, education, utilities, amenities, culture and quality of environment. The fifth is concerned with the city as an arena of public policy and includes the study of different levels of government intervention and includes the organisations, pressures groups and parties involved in the policy process. The sixth is distinct from the last category in that it is interested principally in urban social movements and groups that are challenging of the status quo ranging from violent, hierarchical, paramilitary organisations to non-violent, loosely connected, alternative communities.

This list is not intended to be exhaustive and there are of course overlaps between the different research clusters that I have identified. What is generally lacking, however, is a critical treatment of the city that moves beyond the synchronic particularity of local power processes – i.e. ‘power in cities’ – to a fuller consideration of the systemic and structured means by which the possibility of urban society is maintained – i.e. the ‘power of cities’. Traditionally, much of the attention of urban researchers with an interest in urban power has centred on the institutions of government, and specifically the institutions of democratic control and organisation and the civil and political parties and interest groups that surround them. In recent years, however, there has been a shift of emphasis away from the study of formal (i.e. legitimate) authority towards a more open notion of political power that in Martin Bang’s words is ‘not to be identified by the terrain of the modern centralised state’ but which is indicative of ‘[a] more interactive, negotiable, dialogical and facilitative authority’ which is needed to help people govern themselves (Bang 2003: 8).

As the humanities and certain social science disciplines have become increasingly hostile to notions of hierarchy, essentialism, a priorism, positivism and naturalism, so a small but growing number of political scientists has begun to study and write about political society, not as a primordial and timeless inheritance, but as socially constructed and mediated, and where ‘knowledge and power are non-hierarchically intertwined qualities that emerge out of a recursive and interactive covering inside a given terrain, field, system or community’ (ibid.). This is not to deny that the business of politics continues to be conducted in and through institutions, which in the case of cities can often be identified in terms of different sites of government, legislative assemblies, judicial and legal apparatuses and political organisations with an interest in participating directly or indirectly in the decision-making process. Rather the argument of this book is that institutional politics is but one aspect of the complex of urban power, and that to understand what role political institutions contribute to the life of cities we have to be alive to the interactions between different terrains, fields, systems and communities of power as suggested above.

One advantage of the institutional approach is that the boundaries of the political are necessarily well defined (Peters 2004). Institutions are above all rule-governed bodies with formal systems for the recruitment of members and for the organisation of their internal and external affairs. Such rules are largely, if not always, transparent and subject to scrutiny – as are their processes of deliberation and decision-making. It may often be the case that the formal mechanisms of power to which institutions are expected to conform differ from those that actually exist, but at least the researcher can begin with a series of benchmarks against which to measure the deviation from formally established norms. This is what Max Weber understood by ‘legitimate authority’ (or domination) to which he contrasted the non-rule bound world of ‘non legitimate authority’ (nichtlegitime Herrschaft) found in the western medieval city.¹ This departure from traditional domination based on princely authority had its antecedents in classical society but only found full expression through the political articulation of popular collective agents such as the demos, the plebs, the commune, the popolo and so forth (Swedberg and Agevall 2005: 64–5).

Approaching Cities, Politics and Power

Given that authority is but one instance of power, how might we think about the realm of ‘the political’ in relation to the other forms of power that are articulated in and by cities? In attempting to survey the territories of urban power in the pages that follow I hope at least to signpost how some of these broader understandings of the political within an urban context might be tackled.

The volume as a whole is divided into five parts including this introduction and a conclusion. The second part of this volume explores how the ‘double helix’ of cooperative self-government and violent, coercive domination is intertwined in the history of urban development. Chapter 2 shows how the growth of urban society contributed to the formation of particular forms of organised power structures that differentiated towns and cities from rural societies. As these political formations assumed the more distinct forms of the social movements, organised interests and political parties that we recognise today, the nature of urban government changed from a broadly self-serving and self-selecting oligarchy to an increasingly legal–rational state that began to assume a diverse range of civic and economic functions.

It would be a mistake, however, to view the civic city as a natural and inevitable outcome of the ‘democratic evolution of cities’, and in Chapter 3 our focus turns to the uncivil city, which over the course of history has characterised much of the urban world, and which persists as the undemocratic, illiberal and intolerant face of many urban societies today. Indeed violence and conflict continues to be used as a key resource of power and domination in the control of cities in ever more terrible and ingenious ways. Examples drawn from cities in conflict highlight the ways in which both legitimate and non-legitimate force has reduced and is reducing the right to the city around the world. At the same time there have been many instances of grass-roots contestation that have changed the course not just of the history of a particular city, but very often of the nation or even the continent of which that city forms a part.

This theme is more fully explored in the opening chapter of the part dedicated to urban governance where the emphasis is chiefly on the modern period (from the closing decades of the nineteenth century to the opening decade of the twenty-first century). In Chapter 4 we examine the key roles played by political parties, organised interests and urban movements in the political life of cities. Political movements have long coincided with the development of the metropolis, and at times particular cities have come to symbolise a revolutionary combination of cultural, social and political attitudes and values, while at others they have acted as mediators between collective interests and the local and national state. The development of urban politics in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States provides a counterpoint to the emergence of grass-roots community-based urban movements in the Philippines and Brazil where political institutions are more ‘porous’ and urban civil society less regulated than in the metropoles of the Global North.

Chapter 5 seeks to explore the different modes of governance within and between cities by moving beyond the narrow framework of the question posed by Robert Dahl – ‘Who governs the city?’ – to the broader and more challenging question, ‘How are cities governed?’ The theories and approaches that have been developed by Dahl and his contemporaries in order to explain the workings of urban government in liberal democracies are explored and reviewed along with more critical perspectives that emphasise the structural determinants of urban power. The chapter then goes on to explore the varieties of governmental organisation by contrasting the operation of a complex globalised urban polity such as London with the rapidly evolving urban system that is the result of very different state–civil society traditions in mainland China and Mexico.

In Chapter 6 we explore the structural, scalar and global dimensions of the urban complex by charting the new forms of urbanisation that are associated with an increasingly integrated world economy. The rise of the ‘city–region’ and its policy response in the form of ‘new regionalism’ reveals how the familiar hierarchical location of the metropolis within a national–state system is breaking down and giving rise to new urban–regional agglomerations that are defying national and even continental borders. In the shift from a world economy and state system built on the certainties and social guarantees of Fordism and Keynesianism to an increasingly neo-liberal, competitive and ‘flexible’ regime of accumulation, the reconfiguration of the local and regional state has been accompanied by a global competition for investment, for skilled labour and for a bigger share of the global market in goods and services. If there were any doubt that cities have become global enterprises in their own right one has only to note the ever more lavish and increasingly desperate attempts by would-be venue cities to host future meetings of the Olympiad, the FIFA World Cup or to become a European Capital o...

Table of contents

• Routledge critical introductions to urbanism and the city
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction
• Part II The political life of cities
• Part III Urban governance
• Part IV Identity, communication and space
• Part V Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index