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s processes of dispossession have come to define cities across the globe, they have also deprived their residents of the opportunity to co-produce urban space. We might frame such exclusion as a problem of capitalist urbanization, but interestingly Ross Beveridge and Philippe Koch conceptualize the impediment to shape the spaces one inhabits as a scandal of democracy. Their insightfully book How Cities Can Transform Democracy takes its reader on a well-curated series of responses to that scandal. They include struggles in the everyday politics of home, the generative work of urban publics, and new municipalist engagements in European and US cities. The authors employ these cases to generate new thinking on doing democratic politics in the urban age.
Taking inspiration from traditions of radical democracy, the book fruitfully intervenes into current debates about the role of cities in our understanding of democracy. Beveridge and Koch propose to engage democracy as an open-ended project, not merely located in institutions, but performed in the everyday. One of the many pivotal contributions of How Cities Can Transform Democracy is thus its detailed thinking about the modes of doing democracy in situated practices. The triple analytic of practices, places and publics that the authors propose combines an analysis of democracy-making with a discussion of the urban as a medium through which politics takes shape, and a revitalized account of the publics that make up the urban demos.
Rather than a profound theoretical discussion or an ethnographic deep dive into these practices, places and publics, the authors frame the book as an intervention into current academic thinking and activist practice. In this moment of deep democratic crisis, I found it a pleasure to learn from a book that emphasizes potential, points to ways forward, and gets even pessimists to find hope in thinking the future of democracy. In this book review forum, five generative reviews – written by Maryame Amarouche, Chiara Cacciotti, Colin McFalane, Justus Uitermark, and Allan Cochrane – take up this invitation and dialogue with key openings the book provides.
First, the reviews engage closely with the book’s discussion of the urban demos – the publics, as they are doing democracy in urban collective live. Colin McFarlane reflects on the willingness of urbanites to engage in such efforts and wonders for how many urbanites that readiness exists. His review and, of course, Beverage and Koch’s book, inspires deeper thinking about how cities develop a demos that comes to understand itself as such, agrees on matters of shared concern and, in fact, takes collective action. Maryame Amarouche extends that question to inquire into how to think rural populations as well as more silent and more individual responses in these forms of democracy-making. Moreover, the reviewers note that cities not necessarily transform democracy to the better. Justus Uitermark and McFarlane probe the counter-thesis to Beverage and Koch’s collection of hopeful stories: Is the city not also inviting for anti-democratic practices? How does urbanization instigate forms of hate and exclusion? Uitermark points to the role of media and digital technologies in shaping urban collective live, potentially in this direction.
The forum also offers reflections on the Beveridge and Koch’s theorization of the relationship between national and municipal institutional levels. How Cities Can Transform Democracy builds on the claim that current literature places too much emphasis on thinking democracy in relation to political parties and national institutions. Yet, for Allan Cochrane, the authors’ desire to “overcoming the fixation on the state” leads them to underplay its power. Maryame Amarouche calls for the need to consider that nation-states may suppress emancipatory struggles. Colin McFarlane suggests thinking the current moment as in need of a reinvigorated life of democracy at both level – national and urban.
Finally, the book inspires hope. All reviewers in this forum greatly welcome the authors’ generous offer: a collection of much-needed imaginations for democratic futures, inspired by what is already present. Vis-a-vis thinking democracy as “on the verge of extinction”, as Chiara Caccorri puts it, the book’s hands-on conceptualization of urban democracy leaves open the possibility for emancipatory change. Allan Cochrane thus calls it a manifesto for thinking alternative urban worlds. In these times of democratic crisis, this is a bold project and a much needed one.
Hanna Hilbrandt is a Professor in Social Geography and Urban Studies at the University of Zurich. At the junction of social and cultural geography, and with a particular focus on the urban experience, her research focuses on the everyday politics of struggles, negotiations, and regulations through which global inequalities manifest themselves in cities.
