T
he city has an ambiguous and uncertain presence as space of radical possibility. In some versions of the story the city is presented as a site of anomie, of atomised individuals who pass each other by, with only the most superficial of social connection. The contrast with the community associated with rural existence (Gemeinschaft) is made explicit by classic sociologists like Tönnies, but is a familiar trope in popular thinking, too. A contrast is often drawn by politicians between the positive experience of living in small towns and villages where neighbours know and support each other and the problems of living in the city. Notions of inner-city crisis and even urban crisis are all too familiar.
By contrast, this book is a powerful statement of the potential and sometimes reality of the city as a (perhaps the) space of transformative – democratic – politics. The reader is forced to rethink how they view the relationship between politics and the state. It opens up the city as an imagined space, as well as one rooted in the material realities of the urban. The case studies of urban politics in practice succeed in highlighting what is possible, even as the authors reflect on the uncertainties and ambiguities around them. It is a manifesto for a different kind of politics, rooted in the urban experience.
The argument brings together theoretical insights and reflections on the practices of contemporary urban politics. In this context, urbanisation is understood as more than the inexorable spread of densification, captured in the sort of statistic that says over half the world’s population live in cities. Instead, the emphasis is on a process of urbanisation that is global and universal – in this understanding there is no ‘rural’ against which the urban defines itself. Instead, the urban is defined by a series of connections and relationships and relationships across space in which we are all enmeshed.
It is here that the city becomes such a key feature of contemporary life both in a material and imagined form. The city brings people together both because it requires them to live alongside each other whatever their other social identity may be and because it offers them a shared political space -.the basis of a citizenship in which politics becomes expressed through forms of collective self-activity, through everyday practice rather than or as much as formal electoral politics. Democracy is understood to be a series of active practices, across a range of sites, rather than simply access to a ballot paper on a regular – and regulated – basis.
A key message of the book is that it is possible – indeed necessary – to imagine a democratic politics that stretches far beyond the institutions of the state. The traditional framing of democracy through elections and forms of representative government is understood to be stultifying and limiting because it fails to recognise (and may even act to limit) the possibilities of urban democracy as it is expressed through a range of popular initiatives, campaigns and ways of living.
What matters is the emergence of a range of practices – from squatting to mass bike rides – which offer different ways of imagining how life might be lived. There is no attempt to construct any overall programme to which all urban citizens might be expected to subscribe or in whose name they might be mobilised. Indeed any such understanding would undermine the democratic vision being presented.
States have an uneasy and uncertain position in this political constellation. Radical urban democracy explicitly stands as an alternative to the state – seeing like a city, not like a state. But the continuing contemporary significance of states is acknowledged in two ways. First, they can work as obstacles, standing in the way of an emergent urban politics. They retain power that can be mobilised negatively. But, second, they are not monolithic but are themselves products of the social relations that define them. In some circumstances (the prominent recent example is Barcelona) they may offer spaces of interaction through which democratic initiatives can be taken further – working in, against and beyond the state.
The carefully chosen cases highlight the autonomy of the democratic forms that are being generated, emphasizing the extent which they may offer the possibility of radical democracy, even if they are not necessarily understood in that way by those who are involved in them The daily negotiations of the urban everyday may require uneasy forms of conviviality which help to underpin forms of democratic engagement.
The importance of the politics of everyday life is emphasised - sometimes transgressive, potentially transformative. In that sense the book is a manifesto and a fundamental challenge to state-based visions of democracy. It offers a powerful and optimistic vision.
Of course, the danger of all this is that it brings out my pessimistic side. Ross Beveridge and Philippe Koch are not blind to the pessimistic critique. They acknowledge that matters are rarely straightforward. But some big questions remain.
The first relates to the power of the state. While this is acknowledged in the book, its significance may be understated. After all, the state is still (or can easily be transformed into) an expression of armed power. Recent events in Israel and Gaza are only too powerful as examples. A second relates to the power of capital – who owns the city? That remains an issue – urban democracy has the potential to challenge, but it is only too easy to see how powerful interests may be able to reposition themselves in ways that undermine or incorporate those challenges. There is a recurrent danger that Lefebvre’s take on the transformative possibilities of a politics of everyday life may be co-opted in ways that position the city as little more than a site for the more mundane forms of ‘ordinary’ politics (a sort of micro pluralism). And, finally, it may be important to reflect on the extent to which urbanisation also has the potential to generate other forms of politics – the politics of hate, of pogroms, of exclusion.
The tensions are real. The democratic potential of the city runs counter to a range of other forms of political power. In many ways, of course, that is what makes this such an important book. It requires us to recognise the political significance of a series of activities that it is all too easy just to identify as aspects of everyday life – the ways in which people collectively work together to achieve particular ends which may individually appear relatively insignificant – not world changing. But together they offer a different way of thinking about a democratic future. It is in that sense that it is a manifesto, not for some new political party or political movement, but for a world of possibilities in which transformation from below is possible as a lived experience enabled by those already engaged it. That is what makes the book so exciting. It even offers an old pessimist like me some real hope for the future, precisely because of the way in which it roots that hope in the present.
Allan Cochrane is Emeritus Professor of Urban Studies at The Open University. He is particularly interested in understanding and exploring the ways in which the spaces of politics and policy are made up in practice, in ways that reflect relations of power within and beyond the state. It is in this broader context that his research has focused on a series of, mainly urban, sites through which it is possible to consider the workings of power, the possibilities of politics and changing forms of policy intervention.
