H
ow Cities Can Transform Democracy is a timely and thoughtful book that generates its own way of seeing our global urban moment. The book sets out some of the stakes and potential of global urbanization, including how we might individually and collectively inhabit and intervene in the urban condition. It is a welcome and lively plea both for greater democratic control in how we shape our cities, and to pay greater attention to how the city itself becomes a kind of engine for reshaping the political. The book asks us to listen to the city, to take more account of the myriad ways in which the hum and cacophony of urban life becomes folded into collective openings and possibilities.
If urbanization is impacting seemingly everything, from everyday life, economy, and culture to climate, the book asks, then where does it leave the potential for democratic renewal? If we cast activists and residents not simply as passive victims in the theatre of global urbanisation, but as actors rearranging the set, how might we think the making of urbanity? The book is hopeful in its responses, weaving together examples of progressive urbanism with a clear-headed argument for a reinvigorated urban democracy that is both multiple in form and potential, and which is already emergent all around us.
This is democracy not just of states, institutions and bureaucratic processes but as practices, ways of knowing and seeing, forms of interaction with the mundane spaces of neighbourhood, home, infrastructure, street, square, shelter, squat, community garden, or social centre: democracy, fraught and partial as it is, in the unfolding of urban collective life. If the urban is here a condition of possibility for the political, it is never a fixed form of urban, never a singular notion of the political, and – in its journeying from Barcelona, Berlin, and Naples, to Los Angeles, Cape Town, Preston and Glasgow – never rooted in a particular geography.
All of this is valuable and helpful to think with. In my own work, the book helped me place recent writing I’ve done on urban ‘forums’ – institutional arrangements whereby different constituencies come together – into a larger urban democratic context (McFarlane, 2023). The book also helped me think more about the politics of urban density, in relation to a project I’ve been working on over the past few years (e.g. Chen et al., 2023). It helped me think about the ways in which density becomes political, whether as a resource for urban democratic practice – through the simple fact of having a lot of people proximate to one another – or as a force, whether in a protest or in a political blockage, such as the Critical Mass cycling movement discussed in the book.
The book is useful example of how to approach to the urban through a ‘mid-level’ entry point. The focus on urban democracy operates between the macro geographies of global urbanisation and the micro-worlds of everyday life. The authors situate the discussion in a space of political possibility in which they continually ask what can be learnt from grounded cases for the larger project of urban democracy. This mid-level positioning is at once analytical and political, and so at the same time the narrative becomes a kind of roving spotlight seeking out situations that can be connected to larger resonances.
There is much to learn from and think with here. One issue it prompts is around the status of urban democracy as a normative position. As the authors know well, democracy is a thorny politics partly because of the ways in which it is has been co-opted in recent decades to serve largely neoliberal agendas. Since the early 1990s in particular, there has been a growing emphasis on pluralist forms of urban governance, decentralisation, partnership building, and community participation in urban development. When this has worked well it has opened urban infrastructures and services to community voice and preferences. But very often this shift has come hand-in-hand with, or been a straightforward cover for, forms of austerity and structural adjustment that have accompanied neoliberal logics of state welfare withdrawal (e.g. Raco and Brill, 2022). In these cases, what is presented by national and local states or agencies like the World Bank as a democratising project of participatory partnership building and empowering citizens to shape their neighbourhoods and cities, is in practice a neoliberal project of shifting state responsibility onto residents. In her work in Dakar, for instance, Rosalind Fredericks (2018) has shown how the state shifted responsibility for key aspects of waste collection to poor urban residents, especially community and NGO groups dominated by women, and did so in the name of ‘community’.
This too is a politics of global urbanization, and one often presented in democratic terms. Beveridge and Koch (2023: 148) write that “our lack of capacity to take control of the places we live in, to act collectively on the processes which shape our daily lives, is a democratic scandal”, but the case for the withdrawal of the state from key urban provisions, whether in the name of austerity, structural adjustment, or a neoliberal version of democratisation, has often been made in similar terms. When we advocate for greater urban democracy, how do we ensure a distinction from that kind of politics, and perhaps even embark on a politics of re-co-opting democratic discourse?
It's worth saying here that Beveridge and Koch link urban democracy to the Lefebvrian idea of the right to the city. In the book, democracy is positioned both a means to the right to the city, and the form through which the right to the city operates, i.e. campaigns for the right to the city are themselves processes of democratisation. Of course, the right to the city as a political idea has been explicitly used to counter a neoliberal vision of urban democratic participation. My sense is that it is probably more difficult to co-opt an idea like the right to the city than it is to co-opt an idea like democracy. In contrast to a neoliberal idea that communities should be responsible for their services and infrastructure, the right to the city is much more about residents coproducing the city including policy, planning, budgets, and urban cultures. It is as much about redistribution as it is about access to services. But at the same time the right to the city is left on the periphery of the book. How might democracy and the right to the city connect? Might the right to the city have provided an alternative framing for the book? Might doing so have chased off the cloud of co-opted democratisation initiatives?
Beyond the right to the city, there are a series of other political terms which emerge in the text where similar questions might apply. Terms like equality, justice, or insurgent citizenship, for instance – all ideas that carry a more explicit normative progressive agenda than democracy itself (for example in the work of James Holston (2009) or of Erik Swyngedouw (2018) to name just two who Beveridge and Koch occasionally engage with). I would be interested to hear more about how to differentiate these different terms and the specific political horizons and possibilities they point to. Again, I wondered whether these terms might be more useful than democracy in making the book’s case.
There is another related question I here, which is around the extent to which residents really want to be part of shaping their city. The book rallies against the managed and narrow ways in which residents are able to participate in the making of their cities – often reduced to tick-box planning exercise – and how passive and alienated people are often made in relation to their surroundings. The assumption is that residents want to participate more, to become more involved in decisions about their neighbourhoods and wider cities. This is an assumption I have sometimes made myself. But the longer I’ve spent doing research in cities, the more I’ve wondered about this, or at least about the extent of it.
There is no doubt that it is the case, of course, for many residents. But my hunch is that lots of people just want things done better and do not much care to be involved. They want the water, sanitation, transport, or local park to be properly maintained and managed, and perhaps don’t feel they have the time or energy to do that themselves, or even to get to meetings and discussions about it. Now, perhaps opening up more democratic channels for participation would lead to those people seeing the benefits and therefore getting involved. There is some evidence of that in cities across the world, thinking for instance of participatory budgeting in Brazil or community movements in Berlin, to name just two. Perhaps the more that participation seems possible, the more people see the point in doing it. Maybe, but how do we know that more participatory urban democracy is what most people actually want? And if people want more participatory cities – as but one form of democratisation – in what ways might they want that, and to what extent?
A final question, this time on the role of the state, and here I’ll pinpoint the UK state. Up util 2024, the Conservative-led UK state spent much of its 14 years undermining and cutting budgets from local authorities and public services, as Beveridge and Koch point out. The impact on the city in the UK means that now is surely a time to be arguing for a reinvigorated state. A bigger state nationally and locally investing more in communities and urban provisions and supports. And not just for the state in general, but for the state in particular regions and cities. We know that the impact of austerity, in terms of public services and related unemployment for example, was bigger in northeast England than many wealthier regions in the UK. In 2019, London had the highest GDP per head in the UK at £56,199, while the North-East had the lowest GDP per head at £24,068. Meanwhile, Birmingham City Council declared bankruptcy and, as Danny Dorling (2023) has shown in his work on inequality in the UK, the majority of children with a brother and a sister in England are now going hungry two or three times a month. The invigoration of urban democracy, for instance in the new municipalism from Preston to Barcelona, is partly a response to these kinds of conditions, as Beveridge and Koch argue. But alongside an argument for a reinvigorated democracy in and from the city, it is also a moment for full-throated arguments for the state. In other words, not either or, but both. How, though, might we think through that relationship?
References
Chen H, McFarlane C and Tripathy P (2023) Density and pandemic urbanism: Exposure and networked density in Manila and Taipei. Urban Studies 61(8): 1526–1544.
Dorling D (2023) Shattered Nation: Inequality and the Geography of a Failing State. London: Verso.
Holston J (2009) Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Fredericks R (2018) Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal. Durham: Duke University Press.
McFarlane C (2023) Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife. London: Verso.
Raco M and Brill F (2022) London. Agenda: Newcastle, UK.
Swyngedouw E (2018) Promises of the Political: Insurgent Cities in a Post-Political Environment. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Colin McFarlane is a Professor of Urban Geography at Durham University, UK. The central interest in his work lies in understanding urban life. He’s approached this from a variety of vantage points: a long-standing interest in how people come to know and learn the city; a concern with the fundaments of everyday provisions, especially sanitation and other kinds of often fragmented systems; and a focus on how people experience and perceive different kinds of urban densities. His most recent book is Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife (Verso, 2023).
