Living Just Enough for the City: Experiments in Urban Political Theory

Summary

In his 1973 hit ‘Living for the City,’ Stevie Wonder narrates the classic journey from countryside to big city over a four-on-the-floor funk rhythm. His protagonist, a poor boy from Mississippi, dreams of escaping the hardship and desolation of rural life. Leaving behind poverty and prejudice, along with his loving family, he takes the bus to New York in search of opportunity and self-discovery. The story ends tragically, as the boy is scammed, arrested, beaten, and left homeless.

This story of arrival, of hope and disappointment, is becoming universal, as human beings are now a primarily urban species. Millions of people have moved, and are moving, from the countryside to the city. Today, most of us call the city home. The city is also the context in which we come to understand ourselves, build relationships with others, and negotiate our collective lives. Many authors have recognised this transformation entails new political challenges, and thus place the city and urban life at the centre of an increasing number of academic discussions. What is less often acknowledged is how this move alters the way we think about ourselves, as well as politics and social life more broadly. Living for the city, to use Stevie Wonder’s phrase, entails a philosophical transformation as well as a physical relocation. 

Humanity’s move to the city challenges contemporary political theory, giving rise to distinctive problems, suggesting new ways of thinking, and calling for innovative methods. My primary motivation for placing the city at the centre of our political thinking, and for developing an urban political theory, is to better understand our contemporary political moment, to know where we are and how we got here. In turn, this opens new visions of where we could, and should, be going. This aim reflects Sheldon Wolin’s influential account of the purpose of political theory, which, he argues should help us to see the world from new perspectives and to develop greater political wisdom. To do this, the book brings together philosophical argument, original empirical research, insights from multiple academic disciplines, and creative works focused on cities and city life to better understand our contemporary urban condition.

This synthetic work, in turn, enables the speculative task of fashioning a distinctively urban political theory, which is guided by three experimental aims. First, to provide a theoretical analysis of some of the central political problems facing cities, such as the injustice of gentrification, the growing problem of displacement, and conflicts over the questions of citizenship and belonging arising in our increasingly global cities. Two, to contribute to the development of a situationist approach to political theory, as a distinctive form of grounded or realistic theory, in which urban experience serves as a first philosophy, leading to distinctive insights into the nature of contemporary politics and the prospects for positive change. And third, to demonstrate an innovative political theory methodology, beginning with practical problems arising in everyday experience, and incorporating personal reflection, participant observations, and artistic representations of the city to understand, critique, and improve our shared urban lives.

Living Just Enough for the City reconsiders key concepts in political theory, such as authority, justice, rights, and citizenship by using the city as both a site for theorising and a focal point bringing multiple political concerns together. Its central argument is that by using the city to get our bearings—in the sense of knowing where we are, as well as developing a distinctive urban disposition—leads to important insights into contemporary political life.

Full Description

Our current political moment is defined by uncertainty. For some, this gives rise to a fragile hope for change. But for many others, it leads to pessimism, about both our present and future. The uncertainty and pessimism surrounding much of political life arises, at least in part, from a fundamental tension between the ideas we use to think about the world and our experience of living in it. Within political theory, and in our wider political discourses, we are struggling to think the world differently, leading to a restless search for new ways of understanding and solving the problems of political life.

Living Just Enough for the City: Experiments in Urban Political Theory addresses the uncertainty and pessimism of our contemporary political moment by focusing on two organising questions. First, “where are we?” And, second, “where should we be going?” Framing these questions in spatial terms, I argue, opens up new ways of seeing the political world and provides important resources for pursuing positive change. Political theory has long focused on the sovereign state as the essential site for politics, and the nation as the privileged form of political community, shaping our understanding of legitimacy, justice, rights, and citizenship. And while much contemporary political theory challenges the territorial politics of the modern state, it generally does this by advancing a cosmopolitan account favouring the creation of a of state-like authority with global scope, committed to an account of political membership binding individuals together in world citizenship. The former vision of political life is antiquated, while the later feels unrealisable. In which case, where might we turn to answer these questions? In this book, I argue, we should start with the concrete reality of contemporary social and political life, we should start with our increasingly urban experience. We should begin in the city.

While lived experience is frequently invoked in contemporary political theory, Living Just Enough for the Citydevelops a distinctive account of the importance of starting with urban experience. The standard appeal to lived experience is linked to standpoint epistemologies, which focus on the way marginalised identities determine individuals’ experience of the social world and, thus, those identities, and the experiences they give rise to, become a source of insight into oppressive political orders. My appeal to experience is different, reflecting the pragmatist approach taken in the book. Pragmatism focuses on concrete experience because it places practical problems and solutions at the centre of philosophical inquiry. For political theory, this suggests we should start with the problems emerging in our actual lives, which give rise to specific conceptual questions and needs. On this account, we develop theoretical concepts to help us navigate the problems encountered in experience. And where our concepts do not address these problems adequately, we have grounds for re-evaluating them and reconstructing our theoretical understanding. Therefore, if the questions of where we are and where we should be going are important, then it suggests we should begin our inquiry in the political situations where problematic experiences emerge. 

Living Just Enough for the City argues the contemporary city provides the closest thing we have to a common political and social context. As humanity becomes an ever more urban species, the city, and the problems emerging from it, will be of increasing importance to political theory. Pragmatism insists on the contingency of both experience and theoretical inquiry, which means urban experience is not singular and the answers we find in a situated urban political theory are not universal. Nonetheless, I argue focusing on the city, in particular the global transition to an urban society, is a vital part of understanding our current moment, as well as its challenges and possibilities.

Focusing on the city addresses two central aims. First, it enables an examination of key political problems affecting cities. But this examination does not set out to solve urban problems through the application of theoretical principles; it is not a work of applied normative theory, in that sense. The examination of contemporary urban politics provides a critical challenge to core concepts in political theory, as issues of legitimacy, justice, rights, and community take distinctive form. The text works recursively, as reconstructing our philosophical concepts, in turn, improves our understanding of the practical problems of urban life, providing new angles of vision and greater insight into how we might address them. And this informs the second central aim of the book, which is to develop a distinctively urban political theory. By focusing on practical urban problems, such as gentrification, displacement, inequality, and the changing nature of cities, we gain insight into our broader contemporary political condition and the pressing conceptual and normative questions political theory needs to address.

Reflecting the distinct but related aims outlined above, the central thesis of the book is also developed in two parts. In analysing the political problems emerging in contemporary cities, the book develops four claims. First, cities demonstrate the need for a people-centred conception of legitimate political authority, in which urban pluralism is respected, and requiring governing institutions and political practices that can balance individual rights and protections with communal self-determination and the preservation of cultural diversity. Second, the urban democracy that legitimatises political authority in contemporary cities is dependent on the development of a broader democratising political ethos, which insists everyone matters and has a role in making the city. This ethos is justified by the way individuals and communities are shaped by city life, which exceeds our efforts to control and manage it, meaning the city imposes limits and burdens on us that we do not choose. Given the profound and intimate ways residents are affected and shaped by urban life, the city’s denizens have a right to reshape the city as far as possible, especially by acting in common, making political empowerment a central means for improving our cities. Third, because cities are defined by constant change, of both physical form and residents, the goal of making our cities more democratic should be pursued via a situated approach to normative political theory, which challenges conventional ideal theory approaches. The importance of this shift is illustrated by examining how urban injustice should be designated and diagnosed, using insights gained from the plurality and dynamism of urban experience. Fourth, and finally, a democratising urban ethos should express special care for the everyday aspects of urban life, and for the everyday people of the city. This care, and the democratising culture that inspires it, is realised through social practices such as cooperative ownership and production, the creation and preservation of common spaces, and the development of local democratic habits and rituals that sustain community and promote individual freedom. Developing this culture depends on reclaiming the city as a civic space, distinct from, and challenging elements of, a global urban society defined by economic exchange and bureaucratic administration. 

And, in analysing the emergent problems and possibilities of contemporary urban life to inform how we should think about politics and political theory, the book makes three further claims. First, focusing on contemporary urban politics illustrates the value of an approach to political theory starting with the problems revealed in experience and arising from the actual conditions of contemporary life. This approach rejects the use of pre-given ideals or focusing on privileged spaces and institutions of politics, in favour of a situationist approach to normative political theory that prioritises experience as the motivation for empirically grounded theoretical inquiry. Second, attending to the distinctiveness of urban experience encourages us to make greater conceptual space for uncertainty, including both its tragic and destructive, as well as its surprising and creative elements. Accepting uncertainty is fundamental to making space for hope, as a condition of caring for everyday urban life and the everyday people of the city, and of cultivating a democratising urban ethos. And third, attending to the constant flux of urban life, which is always defined by destruction and renewal, reveals how developing an urban bearing encourages a realistic and radical form of political meliorism, in which positive change is always possible, but never guaranteed, and where disappointment and loss are unavoidable but never final or absolute. Together, these two lines of inquiry provide insights into both urban politics and contemporary political theory, which open up new perspectives on our current moment, suggesting ways of thinking and doing politics differently.

Living Just Enough for the City develops what I call urban political theory, theorising about, and from within, contemporary urban life. In taking this perspective, it also develops an innovative methodological approach to grounded, or realistic, normative theory. The methodology adopted begins with an analysis of urban experience, focusing on the problems emerging within contemporary cities. Critical analysis of the problems we find in cities then gives rise to conceptual and practical questions. On one hand, this requires a reconstruction of key concepts in political theory. And on the other, it inspires inquiry into the actualities of contemporary urban politics. These linked inquiries then open the way for positive prescriptions about how to think and act differently in our global urban world. But the prescriptions developed are hypothetical and contingent, subject to being tested in practice and to constant revision as circumstances change. This pragmatist-inspired account of political theory as situated inquiry, in turn, takes up distinctive methods. Foremost of these is the use of urban experience, which is done through the use of auto-biographic reflection and non-fiction narratives drawing from the author’s original empirical research, using participant observation and unstructured semi-formal interviews, as well as interdisciplinary empirical research on contemporary cities and global urbanism. Lived experience is an important resource for understanding the problems of contemporary urban life, and for understanding the innovative ways city residents are actively addressing these problems already. Further, the situated approach taken makes use of creative artistic work on cities, primarily music, visual art, and films. Drawing on John Dewey’s aesthetic theory, I treat art as a form of inquiry and action, which is meaningful and intentionally intellectual, not in spite of, but because of the link to emotional experience. The works of art I draw from not only give a flavour of urban experience, but are themselves inquiries into the meaning of living in (and for) the city. The stories, artworks, and empirical examples used inform and support the more conventional theoretical arguments developed in the book. The methodology and methods adopted here reflect an element of urban experience itself; the density, speed, pluralism, and jarring juxtapositions felt moving through actual cities is incorporated into the method of inquiry. Finally, the approach taken also entails a stylistic commitment to include an urban aesthetic in the writing itself.

For further work on this project please see:

The Injustice of Gentrification, Political Theory, Vol. 51, No. 6 (2023), 925-954.

“A Band Aid on a Bullet Wound”: Cosmopolitan Desire in a Pluriversal World,’ in Human Rights at the Intersections: Transformation through Local, Global, and Cosmopolitan Challenges, edited by A.T. Chase et al (2023), 9-18. 

“Performative Rights and Situationist Ethics,” Contemporary Pragmatism, Volume 16, Number 2-3 (2019), 242-267.

“Developing a Situationist Global Justice Theory: from an architectonic to a consummatory approach,” Global Society, Volume 33, Number 1 (2019), 100-120.

“The Political Movement for a Human Right to the City,” in Critical Perspectives on Human Rights, Birgit Schippers ed. (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018).

“Democratic Moral Agency: altering unjust conditions in practices of responsibility,” in Moral Agency and the Politics of Responsibility, Tobias Debiel et al., eds. (London: Routledge, 2017), 21-35. (Open access version here.)