H
ow Cities Can Transform Democracy is a wonderfully thoughtful and provocative account of how we might reconceptualize, reimagine, and transform politics through cities. The city figures in the book as a generative site of the politics that incessantly generates new ideas and combinations. As the city can never be fully controlled by the state’s impositions, it comes to serve as a wellspring of alternative ways of living and being together. How Cities Can Transform Democracy breathes the optimism and excitement of the municipalist movements it studies, providing a breath of fresh air, or perhaps reprieve, in a political environment that seems to invite little besides pessimism. If nations are increasingly shifting rightwards, perhaps cities contain the seeds of a cosmopolitan and egalitarian politics?
Let me, first, discuss the ontology of urban politics in How Cities Can Transform Democracy. This is where the book is at its strongest; it provides an extensive review of the disparate literatures to offer an account of urban politics that emphasizes its democratic potential. The authors explain that democracy and the state are always in tension: as democracy is radically open and contingent, there will always be new voices, ideas, affects that challenge the state as it is and call for an alternative that should be. Here enters the city. The city represents political potential as it generates those new voices, ideas, affects. The city is inherently incomplete and dynamic, always existing in tension with the institutions that surround and encompass it. Urban self-organization and self-government then appear as the ultimate demos, constantly challenging the state in the name of democracy.
I find this appealing but I also have reservations. I feel that what the book provides is a vertical reading of politics where power and the state operate from above and democracy and self-organization emerge from below. Beveridge and Koch do this theoretically and explicitly when they identify urban self-organization as the harbinger of democracy and posit it as being in tension with the state. They also do it implicitly by selecting particular examples of self-organization: all the examples of self-organization they discuss feature people pushing for greater equality, inclusion, and democracy. In this reading, self-organization is pure and a force for good while the state is an inherently corrupt force of control.
At several places in the book, the authors speak of emergent urban publics and equate them with the demos. By equating specific publics and mobilizations with the demos, it appears as if the demos speak with one voice and challenge the state and status quo. Such a vertical reading is plausible in contexts where a pluriformity of bottom-up initiatives resist authoritarianism, racism, and neoliberalism yet it also has its limitations. It risks a form of epistemological populism, where the emergent demos represents the good people, positioned against the repressive elites. Such a perspective ignores the many examples of urban self-organization that are not necessarily progressive or inclusive. Think of mobilizations against shelters for refugees or the homeless; think of the neighborhood watch groups that are proliferating across the world. They share in common with the book’s examples that they are emergent and operate out of the purview of the state, yet they are different in terms of political orientation. Although Beveridge and Koch acknowledge that their examples are selective, the question remains how considering a broader range of emergent political projects might have qualified their account of urban politics.
The book is further somewhat ambivalent about the role of the state in self-organization. While in the beginning of the book, the authors suggest that self-organization represents the demos to the extent that it operates outside of and against the state, in the latter part of the book they acknowledge that the state is implicated in self-organization. And indeed it is. The state is in us, surrounds us, even in cases where people very assertively resist the state and try to operate outside of it. Even the squatters and Jackson cooperatives are not only orthogonal to the state. In some ways, they also represent embryonic states, with their own emergent rules, enclosures, and exclusions. In fact, the state itself is self-organized. If seen in this way, then we cannot equate the state with power from above and democracy with power from below (Uitermark, 2015).
An alternative understanding of the demos would say that it is by definition not unified, that is always contains many different voices, interests, affects. The urban demos, I would argue pace Beveridge and Koch, is by definition not unified; it is intrinsically diverse; it cannot and should not speak as one. I think in this context of Iron Marion Young’s vision of democracy as city life and her stress on differentiation and publicity, variety and eroticism (Young 1990). Her demos is not one that finds a voice and resists the state but one that emerges from uneasy and exciting relations between people who are not so much alike and may not particularly care about each other. Against this rather pragmatic and sociological understanding of urban politics stands Rancière who argues that democracy resides not in the bridging of difference but the instantiation of the political, based on the premise of equality (e.g. Rancière et al., 2001). At least superficially, Rancière’s notions of ‘the police’ and ‘the political’ correspond to Beveridge and Koch’s notions of ‘the state’ and ‘the urban demos’. While Beveridge and Koch (2017) have provided a powerful critique of the use of Rancière’s schema in the study of urban politics, the parallels between their approaches made me interested in a more detailed exploration of how How Cities Can Transform Democracy’s appreciation of emergent urban publics compares to the Rancière’s understanding of the political.
Whereas How Cities Can Transform Democracy provides an extensive account of urban politics, it has less to say on the second topic I would like to highlight: the role of the media. There is one brief mention, at the very end of the book, where the authors say that activists in Glasgow mobilized through clicks. Perhaps as a result of their interest in locating politics, the authors have stressed the material, the bodily, and the infrastructural, paying less attention to the digital and the representational. They have focused on the immediate and proximate, foregoing study of how digital technologies figure into place-making or allow for remote connections.
While I appreciate this focus, I think that considering the role of the media is important when studying urban politics, both empirically and conceptually. Empirically, digital infrastructures are an integral part of urban infrastructures and everyday life. People spend much more time on their smart phones and computers than they do in squares or the streets. The proliferation of digital technologies profoundly shapes movements. Mobilizations in the digital age have the capacity to grow much faster and wider than before. But while mobilizations grow faster and expand wider, they are also more vulnerable and often lack a firm grounding in places, organizations, and social networks (Tufekci 2017). If we want to understand the dynamics of kinetic energy—to use the authors’ appealing notion—we must include media, and more specifically digital technology, in our analysis.
There is also a more conceptual argument to make. Urban scholars still typically think of the media as more or less accurately representing social realities, implicitly seeing media as separate from the urban realm. Instead, I think we should think of media as integral to and co-constitutive of urbanity – part of the very elements and building-blocks from which urban place is produced (Rodgers et al., 2014). This does not mean that the city is only its representations, but it does mean that the media is one site, or rather a series of separate yet interlinked sites, where the city is constituted (Törnberg and Uitermark, 2022). Digital technologies further complicate how complexity figures into power struggles. Whereas in high modernity, authoritarian imposition could be contrasted with democratic emergence—as exemplified by the struggle between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs—in today’s digital modernity complexity, emergence, and self-organization are integral to strategies of state and corporate control (Törnberg and Uitermark, 2025).
As the democracies and cities it studies, How Cities Can Transform Democracy is generative, open, resisting closure. It is in this spirit that I raised two quite different questions: one about the book’s ontology and epistemology, another about the role of the media in urban politics. The question on ontology and epistemology concerns the role of the urban grassroots. Yes, it generates political projects founded upon principles of democratic self-rule. But if it does more than that—if it also generates projects founded on exclusion and serves not just as a challenger to the state but as an incubator of state structures—then this complicates a reading of cities as harbingers of democracy. Another question concerned the role of the media. If cities are increasingly connected through digital infrastructures and constituted through digital representations, then how does this affect mobilizations, the state, and ultimately cities’ democratic potential. It speaks for the book that it provokes these questions and pushes us to dig deeper into urban politics.
References
Rancière J, Panagia D and Bowbly R (2001) Ten theses on politics. Theory and Event 5(3):1–11.
Young IM (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Justus Uitermark is Professor of Urban Geography at the University of Amsterdam. His books include Seeing Like a Platform. An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity (with Petter Törnberg), On Display: Instagram, the Self, and the City (with John Boy), Cities and Social Movements (with Walter Nicholls), and Dynamics of Power in Dutch Integration Politics.
