W
e are greatly indebted to all participants in this forum. We thank them for reading our book and taking part in this forum. Their engagements here, along with their huge contributions to urban studies in general, have provided us with so much knowledge and inspiration. Our book is an attempt to understand democracy through the “city” and the variegated processes of urbanization. The hunch that prompted the writing was that an urban democracy is already present, if in fragmented and partial form, and that this is a democracy otherwise, distinct though still intersecting with state versions. We ask, how does democracy become apparent in urban space and what do we learn about democracy when we look at democracy through these urban spaces? We detect an urban ontology of politics where the state no longer takes center stage, where practices situated in the urban everyday address and articulate urban publics often overlooked in national democracy as we know it. We try to go beyond simple description of these dispersed and maybe fugitive moments of democratic engagement. We argue that the places, practices and publics of urban democracy can help provide the empirical, epistemological and normative coordinates for democratic renewal.
It seems all participants agree that there is a need to rethink democracy and that looking at democracy through an urban lens is both necessary and inspiring. However, this shift also raises some concerns and problems. As Amarouche states, our approach to urban democracy builds on the insight that urbanization at the global scale “connects different regions and creates mechanisms that produce inequalities and exclusion, prompting people everywhere to organize and fight for the 'common good”. Hence the urban democracy we envision should allow us to cross geographies without proposing one model of how to govern urbanized places democratically. But Amarouche also rightly points to the tension between the urban and rural and how in a time of global urbanisation we need to think more about these linkages and relations across space and between places. The power relations at play here in global urban-rural interlinkages, including domination and dependence, are an additional aspect of political possibility, one which future research on urban democracy might usefully explore. The imaginative and prefigurative qualities of democracy that we put forward in the book might indeed help to forge coalitions between struggles across different places along the urban-rural continuum.
The vision of urban democracy we present in the book transcends the city proper, as Cacciotti highlights in her review. She notes the political potential of what is already out there in the city, the work already being done by urbanites to organize themselves more equally. This hope is in tension, Cacciotti rightly observes, with the very obvious absences of democracy in urban areas around the globe. While our book deliberately charts an optimistic course, one determined to lay bare the possibilities of an urban logic of democracy, there can be no doubt that serious questions regarding power and capacity to realize change remain. Indeed, what kind of power and how much of it can coalitions of urbanites, the urban demoi, build to counter existing power structures and the projects they advance? And how can these coalitions position themselves against – or within? – the state so that they are neither coopted nor simply ignored? These are some of the questions that McFarlane, Uitermark and Cochrane articulate in different ways and from different positions. McFarlane asks how and where we can draw a line between our vision of a de-centred state and empowered urban society and the simple withdrawal of the state from key urban provisions in the name of austerity and the shift of responsibility from the state to communities that often come with it. This is indeed a politically fraught area, of course. Cochrane points to the (re-emergence) of a violent and powerful state that shapes urban landscapes beyond recognition. Times of war in different regions of the world remind us of the destructive force that states have in their hands and the powerlessness of much of the urban population confronted with this force. Hostile and authoritarian politicians drawing on state power and right-wing movements are formidable and point to the importance of being similarly plural and expansive in building counter-democracy. A vision emerging from our book is that we might usefully think of an urban state as being embedded in urban publics, characterised by non-sovereign relations, of which the form and motif of public-commons partnerships might be instructive. But how might power for urban democracy be generated?
On a theoretical level Uitermark asks us to rethink our ontology of urban politics in order not to fall into dualisms that foreclose a proper understanding of the dynamics between an urban demos, singular and bottom-up, and “the” state, with its resort to coercive hierarchical power. We do indeed argue that the state can never be the harbinger or host of democracy, an argument which unites the strands of the radical democracy school, with which we align ourselves. By implication that might indeed suggest that democracy originates in urban society, but is it, then, as we detail it, really bottom-up, aiming to counter and turn over the top-down power of the state and capital? We would acknowledge that power remains under-theorised in the book, a cost paid in the service of delineating the urban logic of democracy. However, we would maintain that our arguments in the book point not to hierarchical visions of democratic power and struggle. Indeed, as we emphasise in the closing chapter of the book, the democracy we outline is characterised by its fragmentation, multiplicity and dissonance, and therein lies its contingency in the sense that we do not seek to privilege sites and sources of democracy, and we are very clear that urban publics (as detailed in chapter 5) are coming-togethers which do not constitute or amount to one urban demos speaking in unison. Instead, they are relational, spatially fluid forms; the vision is one of networked or, better perhaps, infrastructuring forms of democratic power on the horizon of global urbanisation.
Infrastructuring democracy might be seen to capture at least three meanings/ elements of the idea of infrastructure: 1) a politics aimed at democratising the underpinning foundations, or infrastructures, of collective urban life; and is at the same time shaped by the conditions of these infrastructures (cf. Karaliotas 2023; 2) this includes the turning of socio-material conditions towards the common good, of expanding and bedding in logics of repair in the built environment, in social infrastructures, of people (Simone 2004), the home (Lancione 2023) in technical infrastructures and so on. It is a democratic project emergent from and aimed towards the appropriation and reorientation of collective urban life away from alienation, inequality and exclusion; 3) it is also a process of building and doing, infrastructuring as a verb, of expanding and extending democracy in the social-materiality of the urban. It is a means of building power through creating democratic effects. Infrastructures of urban democracy do not centre on the state but extend through the social-political-materiality of the city.
The question as to how projects of democracy can deepen, spread and advance is of course one with no simple answer. Urban collective life can be a building ground for a reparative and rebellious democracy, if we see it and commit to it as such. Hence, reimagining democratic practices, publics and places might make alternatives visible that, in turn, make other futures possible. Epistemological moves like this seem ever more important as the venues that the state provides for democratic change become increasingly limited and opaque. Still, the force of a bulldozer cannot be stopped by imagining a different form of urban democracy. Our notion of democracy in urban life does not provide a means of confronting capital or state violence directly, as power here is seen as domination and authority. However, if we consider decentralized and embodied forms, infrastructuring forms of democratic power, urban collective life has the potential to effectively challenge capital and state violence. Capitalists and the state always land in situated places and interact with existing practices in order to exert influence. So, it is not just a matter of placing local power against global/national power, but of focusing on moments in which power is localized in urban space. The issue is what power can be gathered, what political resources can be attained and used in urban collective life in these moments to advance democracy.
Democracy through an urban lens does not provide a blueprint to make contemporary urban injustices and grievances go away. Democracy does not guarantee winning a struggle. However, the quest for political equality is surely the most ethical commitment we can make when organising politics and governance.
References
Karaliotas, L. (2023) Infrastructures of dissensus: repartitioning the sensible and articulating the political through the occupation of Greece’s public broadcasting service. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, (doi: 10.1177/23996544221150077)
Lancione, M. 2023. For a Liberatory Politics of Home. Durham: Duke University Press
Simone, A.M.M. (2004). People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg. Public Culture 16(3), 407-429. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/173743.
