Abstract
Urban Politics does not delineate a distinct politics of the urban. Rather, it asks us to reconsider the object of our urban political analysis. Drawing on Zizek’s conception of the ‘parallax’, the editors suggest an urban political discourse constituted by a multitude of perspectives which necessarily embrace a relational understanding of what we think of as urban and what we think of as political. Our focus is then to understand how a particular position is premised when assessing urban politics to identify the utility of different perspectives in which we view different urban political situations.
It is through this multidimensional perspective that the book is presented. It is organised into three sections: the city as setting, medium, and community. Each section conceptualises the politics of urban spaces through different orientations. For instance, ‘setting’ is not solely where urban politics is enacted. Setting also promotes a relational understanding of the place of urban politics through the multiscalar processes of city-making. The city as medium understands the various ways in which actors utilise the city to achieve particular goals. And the city as community not only examines social groups within the city, but also how the city constructs its communities. Each will be discussed in turn.
The section ‘city as setting’ is comprised of three topically disparate chapters. Katherine Hankins and Deborah Martin’s case study on the practice of strategic neighbouring in Atlanta contests the notion of neighbourhood as simply a bounded political community. Instead, they conceptualise the neighbourhood as a type of relational place which ‘embeds social and political-economic relations with affective and environmental features as “bundles”… [where] these bundles develop simultaneously agentically and structurally, as they are both individually experienced and socially expressed and lived’ (p. 25). In this sense, strategic neighbouring furthers social and political-economic rebundling of the neighbourhood, where place politics are constructed and reordered through various lived experiences. The authors argue, however, that the neighbourhood-as-political-unit often quells the ability of relational place-making to transcend the notion of neighbourhood-as-local. In the second chapter, Kevin Ward assesses the ‘new urban politics’ of economic development for place-making in cities. He suggests economic developmental place-making conceived in any given city is also partly received from the politics of other places. Thus cities assemble policy ‘splinters’ from elsewhere which spatially configure that particular city. He suggests, then, comparative urban studies must look at the implications of borrowed urban politics, for what happens in one place also matters to another place, potentially muddying the socio-materially of place. The final chapter in the section, by Elvin Wyly and Kathe Newman, performs a detailed analysis of American mortgage markets to illustrate the global context of foreclosures for a city. Their analysis ultimately finds that a particular urban politics of the local obscured cities’ systemic relationship with the global economy, leading to the locally experienced housing crisis of 2008. They argue that an urban politics of finance can not only help to illuminate the connection between global finance and urbanisation processes, but also present place-based alternatives for responding to these constraints.
The section ‘city as medium’ provides a set of chapters which identify how different agents produce particular urban politics. Kurt Iveson, for example, looks at who regulates graffiti in urban spaces. Specifically, who is responsible for policing the placement of graffiti in the urban landscape? Iveson draws his notion of ‘police’ from Rancière, where policing is not enacted by traditional uniformed actors, but rather refers to an assemblage of policies and actors who ‘allocate and contain particular bodies and behaviors to their “proper” places in the city’ (p. 85). Politics, then, is the disruption of the ‘proper’ place for things within the city. In terms of policing urban infrastructure for the ‘proper’ placement of graffiti, he finds that it is not just planning officials who police media-scapes, but more so other graffiti writers who expect a particular order and place for ‘acceptable’ graffiti styles. Policing graffiti, while traditionally central to legal authorities, is also performed by graffiti writers attempting to naturalise a particular aesthetic form in space (p. 96). Urban politics in this sense is the projection of countering claims for the proper placement of actors in cities. Seemingly the most traditional approach to urban politics in the book comes from Donald McNeill, who looks at agency in mayoral performance. He argues that mayors may in fact inhibit much power in changing the politics of a given city, in terms of economic or social processes, acting through the city for wide-ranging and perhaps multiscale purposes. John Carr concludes this section assessing politics through the process of planning. He draws on work from a case study of participatory planning in Seattle to depict how urban politics are enacted through legal mechanisms. In this instance, he argues that participatory planning was nothing more than a process through which the city not only placated neighbourhoods and concerned citizens, but ultimately reinforced the ideals of elites in power positions while obscuring their intentions. Thus, he argues participatory planning must be understood as a tool to make urban politics ‘go away’ (p. 126). It is through these three cases we see the city as a medium through which politics are constituted as the product of urban politicking.
The final section, the ‘city as community’, identifies very different constitutions of community in the city. While community has been a widely discussed topic in urban studies for decades, these chapters offer no firm definition either. Instead they look to uncover the implicit ways in which politics are constructed involving unseen perspectives or marginal groups in the city. Natalie Oswin depicts how the Singapore city-state has reinforced sexual norms through public programming. She draws on queer geographic theory to highlight not only the spaces of the city in which sexual politics are produced, but also through the actors reinforcing such politics. She argues for a queer approach to heteronormative sexual processes in the city to transcend what is missed through heterosexual versus homosexual distinctions. Jamie Winders also looks at how certain cultural perspectives are reinforced through the State, leaving out or excluding minority groups from inclusion in the community. She draws on ethnographic work in Nashville, Tennessee to illustrate how the City cannot see the Latino communities of east Nashville as distinct from a political, territorial unit. While the City ostensibly was calling for neighbourhood residents to be the arbiters of change throughout the city, Winders shows how the Latino community did not identify with the territorial boundaries considered authentic by the City. Owing to this misperception of neighbourhood and community, she argues that newer immigrant communities within the city must claim an institutional representation as a community to be represented within the urban political system which recognises ‘communities’ as a patchwork of territorial units. Susan Hanson flips a common notion of entrepreneurs as individualistic and detached from place with her survey study of small-business owners in Massachusetts and Colorado. She finds instead the propensity for entrepreneurs to have deeper attachments to place and the capacity for transforming place through volunteerism. It is thus through this connection with place, and working with the less empowered, that entrepreneurs can facilitate political power within cities. Mark Davidson reconsiders whether class is relevant in urban political discourse. He suggests that while some view the post-industrial, entrepreneurial city as one with less class antagonism, class is still quite relevant today. He argues that relevance of class has merely transitioned in meaning from the working class of the industrial city. Thus, it is imperative to understand how the city reproduces class antagonisms in its new urban forms. Finally, Matthew Huber draws on foundational environmentalist texts from the last 65 years to deconstruct the common sentiment of urbanisation as primary destroyer of ‘nature’. This nature-as-pristine discourse, where nature is imagined as antithetical to the urban, is then predicated on an ‘urban environmental politics against cities’ (p. 218). He argues that environmental politics must consider a denaturalised urban politics which understands how the unevenness of unsustainable practices are produced and received throughout society. That is, the urban cannot be seen as against nature as the two constitute one another.
The chapters in this book present fresh perspectives for understanding the political power within urban processes. Each chapter confronts certain contemporary urban processes as problematic, ultimately refocusing their object’s emphasis for analysis. While there is nothing illogical with this diverse approach in itself, the manner in which the chapters are connected seems tenuous. It is not so much through their groupings as ‘setting’, ‘medium’ and ‘community’, but through the theoretical context in which the editors associate each chapter. For instance, Zizek’s notion of the ‘parallax’ is a dominant theme which commences the book and is reinforced upon its conclusion. Yet it is never approached within any of the chapters themselves. Similarly, the editors also help position an understanding of urban politics through Rancière’s conceptualisation of ‘policing’. Here too, however, only one author works with this specific concept to articulate the importance of understanding the Rancièrian notion of ‘policing’. This may be the product of such a diversity of authorial perspectives, where the chapters do not collectively reinforce the larger theoretical positions of the editors and feel like separate pieces forced into these larger themes.
Despite this disconnect, there is little that disqualifies this book from enhancing urban political discourse. The collection is quite approachable, and will analytically inform relevant topical discussions in contemporary urban studies and offer extra readings throughout its pages to help ground its contentions. It is particularly apt for those interested in advancing their understanding of the complex realm of relational place-making. The purpose of this book, then, is to advance a multidimensional analysis of urban political processes today.