Recovering the politics of the city

I Introduction

In recent years, the fate of politics in liberal democratic societies has been the concern of a range of political theorists, including Zygmunt Bauman (1999), Wendy Brown (2003, 2011), Cornelius Castoriadis (1991) Colin Crouch (2004), Jürgen Habermas (1996), John Keane (2009), Chantal Mouffe (2005), Jacques Rancière (1999, 2006) and Slavoj Žižek (1999), among others. While there are important differences in the frameworks advanced by these thinkers, they share a concern that self-described ‘democracies’ are increasingly democratic in name only. Political choices, they suggest, are constrained by the constant invocation of necessity. In the face of externalized threats such as mobile capital, environmental calamity and terror, urgent action is required, not democratic decision-making. As Rancière (1999: 112–13) puts it, this has given rise to a situation where the power to govern is legitimized with reference to its own impotence:

At the end of the day, proof of the right of state power is identical to the evidence that it only ever does the only thing possible, only ever what is required by strict necessity in the context of the growing intricacy of economies within the global market. The legitimacy of state power is thereby reinforced by the very affirmation of its impotence, of its lack of choice faced with the world-wide necessity it is dominated by.

Drawing inspiration from this literature, a number of geographers have come to argue that the active cultivation of consensus in urban policy is indicative of a post-political or post-democratic form of urban governance (MacLeod, 2011; Paddison, 2009; Swyngedouw, 2007a, 2007b, 2009, 2011). Erik Swyngedouw’s recent work on what he calls ‘the post-political city’ has been particularly influential. He has argued that:

Late capitalist urban governance and debates over the arrangement of the city are not only perfect expressions of such a post-political order, but in fact, the making of new creative and entrepreneurial cities is one of the key arenas through which this post-political consensus becomes constructed, when ‘politics proper is progressively replaced by expert social administration’ (Žižek 2005: 117). (Swyngedouw, 2007b: 66)

II Post-political cities?

One of the defining tasks of critical urban geography since the 1970s has been the interrogation of policies and procedures that claim to be enacted in the interests of ‘the city’ as a whole. Studies animated by this goal have demonstrated the ways in which certain objectives and practices that claim to work on behalf of the city in fact work to privilege particular interests – capital over labour, men over women, white over black, straight over queer, adults over children and young people, and so on (see Imrie, 2004; Brenner, 2009). This privileging is most successful when the techniques and technologies of urban governance that support particular interests are normalized, such that particular ways of doing things become entrenched as the taken-for-granted. In this context, the appeal of the ‘post-political’ frame for interrogating urban policy and politics is not surprising, for this frame seeks precisely to identify and critique practices of ‘governing through a stage-managed consensus’ (MacLeod, 2011: 2632) whereby certain ends become ‘common-sense’ and disagreement from these ends is depoliticized (i.e. rendered as deviant rather than political).

Four influential and mobile policy agendas that could be characterized as examples of ‘post-political’ urban governance are projects to make the city competitive, global, secure, and sustainable. The endlessly-repeated mantra that cities must become more competitive in order to attract investment in a globalizing economy is perhaps the paradigmatic case. Across a range of cities, the need to become more competitive is frequently presented – sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes reluctantly – as a matter of fact. Actions taken on behalf of urban competitiveness are presented as actions taken on behalf of the city as a whole, which can only survive by out-competing other cities (Harvey, 1989). To attract developers, land-use controls must be relaxed. To attract employers, labour markets must be more flexible. To attract investors, infrastructure must be privatized. To attract skilled workers, certain facilities must be provided. The corollary is that anyone who complains about such measures is putting their own parochial interests ahead of the city’s interests. For Peck and Tickell (2002: 393) the status of inter-urban competition as an ‘extralocal rule system’ has been achieved through a pernicious feedback loop, in which governance strategies that are said to aid competitive standing in fact help to consolidate that very reality.

Similarly, the push by some policy-makers to ensure that their cities scale the heights of global city rankings is another instance of a policy discourse with post-political characteristics. This could be said to be a variant on the competitive city vision. A proliferation of league tables ranking cities in relation to each other is reflective of ‘on-going competitive struggle for position in the global network of capitalist cities’ (Short and Kim, 1999: 54) in which ‘achieving rising “world class” ranking becomes the metric against which to manage performance’ (McGuirk, 2004: 1029). Jennifer Robinson (2002, 2006) has demonstrated how this global city discourse tends to privilege a narrow range of economic and cultural activities which are considered to be ‘global’ and, consequently, neglect other kinds of economy and culture which do not fit the model. As such, a concentration on global city-ness can work to limit ideas about what constitutes a successful city; the discourse acts as a ‘regulating fiction’ (2002: 546) which is imposed extra-locally, through structural adjustment and development programmes, and locally, through the pursuit of place-marketing strategies.

Alongside the competitive city and the global city, the desire to secure the city against the threat of terror has also emerged as a powerful ‘post-political’ script. In US cities, for instance, terror talk has become so frequent it has now become banal (Katz, 2007), with the war on terror playing a significant role in extending all sorts of social controls beyond those previously enacted in the name of the war on crime/drugs/graffiti/etc. Beyond the US, Graham (2006: 257) argues that cities in both the Global North and South are being ‘re-imagined and re-engineered to address supposed imperatives of “national security”’. Such interventions have had a profoundly limiting effect on a series of democratic rights that were previously taken-for-granted. As Katz (2007: 350) has argued, ‘The common (non)sense constructed and assumed around terrorism (and terrorists) in all sorts of banal ways can be hailed at moments of crisis to authorize such things as a suspension of civil liberties or an open-ended and clearly never-ending “War on Terror”’. For Graham (2006), this consensus has had implications for the legitimacy of dissent, with a wide range of people now more easily rendered as ‘terrorists’ or ‘terrorist sympathizers’ by state and media agencies.

Alongside these agendas stands the idea of sustainability, an all-encompassing term that has been made to fit comfortably with ideas of competition, globalization and security in ‘post-political’ configurations of urban governance. Sustainability has increasingly become another naturalized term that acts to consolidate existing policy regimes (Davidson, 2010; Swyngedouw, 2007a). To some extent, the naturalization of sustainability has taken place by constructing yet another external threat to the city. In this case, the threat is to a perceived state of ecological balance where environmental crisis is viewed as a universal threat endangering the entire city. Ecological crisis threatens all and, as a result, sustainability objectives are beyond contestation. Sustainability therefore acts, in its policy-based manifestations, to transform particular antagonisms in the same way that the other terms do. Competition, a necessary behaviour for the city, is performed outside the bounds of political contestation. To the same extent, sustainability discourse obfuscates the fact that the universal threat emerges from the practices of particular populations. Within such a framing, it becomes very difficult to open a space for politicization: ‘we don’t need political debating, we need action!’ The result is often a collection of activities that do little to confront the difficult issues around, for example, the uneven geographies of energy production and consumption. What is more, these agendas can be chanted in chorus. They have become mutually constitutive: green technologies are associated with being competitive, creative and secure, and so on.

These visions of the city as ‘competitive’, ‘global’, ‘secure’ and ‘sustainable’ (and others like the ‘creative city’; Peck, 2005) are being pursued in ways that have placed substantial constraints on the scope of legitimate contention and deliberation. Across a wide range of cities, the pursuit of such urban policy agendas is accompanied by efforts to reduce urban politics to the expert management of necessity, in which the need to respond to certain objective realities is said to be beyond the realm of contentious democratic politics, and even beyond the realm of weaker forms of orderly consultation and participation. Good urban government is framed as the domain of experts who have the best understanding of the threats to be addressed, and the best capacity to respond (quickly) to changing external circumstances.

Let us be clear: we are not claiming that the pursuit of these visions in many cities around the world has put urban policy beyond any form of contestation. Nor have such visions been constructed in the same manner and consolidated to the same extent in all cities. But the presence of contestation and/or difference does not mean that it is incorrect to characterize urban governance as ‘post-political’ or ‘post-democratic’. In any given city there may indeed be scope for debate about which policies might help that city to become more competitive, more global, more sustainable, more secure, and so on. But challenging the underlying necessity and legitimacy of these visions is far more difficult. That is to say, attempts to contest these visions are often confronted with powerful forces of political closure (Purcell, 2008: 2). It is this active construction of consensus, and the active marginalization of dissensus, that the concept of the ‘post-political city’ can help us to identify and critique.

And yet there are reasons why we should be hesitant to embrace the concept of the ‘post-political city’. Our own hesitance stems from a concern about the performativity of the ‘post-political’ frame in critical urban studies. Characterizations of the city as ‘post-political’ may have the perverse effect of reinforcing, rather than undermining, the perception that ‘there is no alternative’ (Gibson-Graham, 2008; Iveson, 2010; McCarthy, 2013; Purcell, 2008; Robinson, 2006). Labelling cities ‘post-political’ risks treating depoliticization as a condition that has been realized, rather than a tendency that has taken hold. Worse still, the negative mobilization of the post-political concept could serve to further divide the arenas of critical theorization (as pure criticism) and political action. The post-political concept may confirm what Catherine Malabou and Slavoj Žižek identify as the political failure of critical theory (see Adorno, 1973): ‘What such a critical stance has failed to accomplish is the fulfilment of its own gesture: the radicalization of the subjective negative-critical attitude towards reality in a full critical self-negation’ (Žižek, 2012: 107).

If we want our scholarship to contribute to the democratization of cities, we must do more than identify and catalogue post-political tendencies in urban governance. We must also identify and help to foster the possibilities and practice of democratic urban politics. In this task, we believe that critical urban studies has much to gain from an engagement with the thinking of Jacques Rancière, for his work seeks to address the question of what makes politics political. We are not the first geographers to engage with Rancière’s work. But in what follows, and mindful of the concerns we have voiced above, our engagement with Rancière’s work is motivated by a desire to ensure that it is not reduced to yet another frame through which we critique dominance, depoliticization and inequality (see McCarthy, 2013). Rancière’s early academic career was served in Louis Althusser’s inner circle, contributing an important chapter to Reading Capital (Althusser and Balibar, 2009 [1968]). However, Rancière broke with Althusser during the fall-out of the May 1968 Paris protests. Looking back upon these events, Rancière felt the distance between Althusser’s Marxism and the popular protests was ‘almost laughable’ (Rancière, 2003). Much of Rancière’s work after this break has involved a powerful Foucauldian-inspired deconstruction of many of the analytical categories that were central to Althusser’s structural Marxism. In what follows, we outline Rancière’s particular approach to the critique of post-democracy and sketch out the underlying conception of politics that animates his work, focusing on what he calls his ‘method of equality’. Then we move to consider how his understanding of politics might help us to rethink and re-enact democratic urban politics.

III Rethinking politics with Jacques Rancière

From Rancière’s perspective, the active construction of consensus on goals such as competitiveness, globality, security and sustainability can be characterized as efforts to police the city. Rancière uses the term police in a particular way. Not unlike Foucault’s (1980: 170) understanding of policing ¹ as ‘the ensemble of mechanisms serving to ensure order, the properly channelled growth of wealth and the conditions of preservation of health “in general”’, Rancière understands the police as something akin to a hegemonic process that serves to assign social roles and positions, acting as an implicit social law that configures what can be done, said and made possible (also see Young, 1990: 40–42). Policing acts as social authority and designates social parts:

The police is thus first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise … Policing is not so much the ‘disciplining’ of bodies as a rule governing their appearing, a configuration of occupations and the properties of the spaces where these occupations are distributed. (Rancière, 1999: 29, emphasis in original)

The legitimization of authority is particularly important for Rancière, as he is critical of the extension of undemocratic forms of authority that pertain in settings such as the workplace, the family and the school. In these settings, authority is exercised by those with ‘titles to govern’ based on their wealth, their age, their gender, their educational qualifications, and so on (see Foucault, 1980). These titles to govern are undemocratic because they deny the equality of each with all. For Rancière, equality is at the heart of democratic politics. ‘If politics means anything’, says Rancière (2006: 45), ‘it means something that is added to all these governments of paternity, age, wealth, force and science, which prevail in families, tribes, workshops and schools and put themselves forward as models for the construction of larger and more complex human communities’. Instead, democratic politics is founded on a ‘primary limitation of the forms of authority that govern the social body’ (2006: 45). It therefore must be ‘founded on the absence of any title to govern’ (2006: 44), such that no group is granted the natural right to govern. This is why Rancière finds the notion of ‘consensus democracy’ a ‘conjunction of contradictory terms’ (Rancière, 1999: 95).

In critically interrogating the urban policy agendas we have identified above, we might use Rancière’s framework to ask: what forms of authority are sustained by their ‘distributions of the sensible’ and are these forms of authority democratic? Visions of the ‘competitive’, ‘global’, ‘secure’ and ‘sustainable’ city all tend to privilege hierarchical forms of authority. The competitive city model is premised on the order of the workplace, where the wealthy govern because their interests are positioned as universal. The sustainable city model is premised on the order of the school, where learned professors are the ones who can really understand the complexities of climate science. As such, they must propose suitable technical solutions to the problem. The secure city is almost a tribal order, in which tribes are understood to be pitted against one another, with disputes settled by force. In each case, the title to govern the city has a foundation in (sensed) hierarchies that exist within, and are constitutive of, the social body. They are not ‘political’ or ‘democratic’ in Rancière’s terms because they are not founded on the equality of each with all.

The next step in Rancière’s argument is crucial for the development of our own. As he points out, the universalization and naturalization of undemocratic and hierarchical forms of authority present a particular kind of problem for governments in self-described democracies, since titles to govern come into conflict with the founding notions of democratic politics. On the one hand, government is legitimated by its ability to find optimal solutions through the utilization of expert knowledge (Rancière, 2006: 79). This legitimacy claim is not based on a presumption of equality, but rather some other presumption that cannot provide a basis for democracy. Yet, on the other hand, government is legitimated through the ballot box: one person, one vote. Rancière therefore claims that the legitimacy of expert-led government depends upon the granting of equality: ‘the power of the best cannot ultimately be legitimated except via the power of equals’ (2006: 47). Equality must be verified every time a law is passed or a policy agenda instituted (2006: 48). It is precisely in the identification and verification of this equality that we can begin to recover the possibilities for a democratic politics of the city.

Rancière reserves the term ‘politics’ for a specific logic – a logic of equality – that disrupts the police order and its associated distributions and authorities. The democratic political operation is not a demand for equality, but rather a demand premised on the equality of each with all. That is, for Rancière, democratic politics takes place when the police order of society is confronted by a ‘part of those with no part’, a group of people who insist that they be taken into account not as subordinates with a limited (or no) part to play in society but as equals. As he puts it, ‘Politics lodges one world into another: the world in which we are all equal into the existing order which allocates parts based on some other principle (rule of the best, the strongest, the wealthiest, the cleverest, and so on)’ (Rancière, 2001: 24). Importantly, it is not so much that a pre-existing group is excluded and contests this exclusion. Rather, democratic politics consists of those actions that reject existing identifications through a process of political subjectification that generates identities outside of the existing police order. Politics is the ‘meeting point between police logic and egalitarian logic’ (Rancière, 1999: 34), a process through which ‘the count of part and parties of society is disturbed by the inscription of a part of those who have no part’ (1999: 123). Declarations and verifications of equality result in a political change that re-inscribes or re-configures the social, giving rise to a transformed ‘distribution of the sensible’.

Among the most important, and contentious, implications of Rancière’s approach is that while politics might take place anywhere (i.e. a small ‘p’ understanding of politics [see Sharp, 2007; Young, 1990]), it is certainly not in evidence everywhere on an everyday basis. Crucially, he argues that ‘the fact that there are always forms of power does not mean that there is always such a thing as politics’ (Rancière, 2004a: 51). For Rancière, democratic politics occurs through the staging of an equality declaration to generate a dissensus that can only be resolved through a re-inscription of the police order.

It is important to note that Rancière’s distinction between politics and policing need not be viewed as a militant preference for politics. Politics, he insists, can only exist in relation to police (also see Foucault, 1998; Mouffe, 2005). Indeed, politics is productive of new ‘distributions of the sensible’ that are forms of policing; we therefore aim for better, more democratic forms of policing that themselves are capable of transcendence via politics. Further, other social contestations that occur purely within the policed order do matter. Rancière’s point is not to elevate politics to being the only thing worthy of concern, but to present politics as a particular form of social action that acts on the policed order in a particular (democratic) way. As he (2009: 287) puts it:

If the distinction between politics and the police can be useful, it is not to allow us to say: politics is on this side, police is on the opposite side. It is to allow us to understand the form of their intertwinement. We rarely, if ever, face a situation where we can say: this is politics in its purity. But we ceaselessly face situations where we have to discern how politics encroaches on matters of the police and the police on matters of politics.

Alongside this critique of post-democracy, Rancière’s approach to politics also offers a way to address the limits of the ‘post-political’ frame that we previously identified. If we wish to avoid the conceptual and performative pitfalls of the ‘post-political’ critique, our critical scholarship can play an important role in tracing out both the non-presence of the presumption of equality and by identifying those times and spaces where equality declarations might be manifest and made into political practice. Rancière describes his own method as a ‘method of equality’, one which is ‘specifically aimed at detecting and highlighting the operations of equality that may occur everywhere at every time’ (2009: 280–1). The method of equality seeks out egalitarian articulations of alternative worlds within the world as it is, ‘locating another time in that time, another space in that space’ (2009: 282), whereby declarations of equality are tied to the conflicts between parts of a given society (1999: 39).

IV The ‘method of equality’ and urban politics

Armed with this conceptualization of democratic politics and Rancière’s ‘method of equality’, we now return to the task for critical urban scholarship that we identified earlier. If visions of the city such as the ‘competitive city’, the ‘global city’, the ‘secure city’ and the ‘sustainable city’ are examples of the tendency that Rancière identifies as ‘post-democracy’ – if they are perhaps even constitutive of that tendency, as Swyngedouw (2007b) suggests – then our goal is to identify and help foster the possibilities and practices of democratic urban politics. With regard to this task, we believe that the full implications of Rancière’s ‘method of equality’ for critical urban geographical scholarship have yet to be addressed.

So, where might we find democratic urban politics, and how might Rancière’s work help us find it? Others have productively engaged with Rancière’s thought in approaching this task. In Mustafa Dikeç’s (2007) reading of the policing of Paris’s banlieues, Rancière’s political philosophy is employed to understand how riotous outbursts were denied a politics by a French society that came to understand the banlieue residents as apolitical agents, outsiders who were incapable of democratic participation. As Dikeç (2007: 14) explains, throughout the 1990s the banlieues were framed in ethnic terms (i.e. foreign others) and, consequently, ‘as incompatible with – even threatening – the integrity of the republic’. The political project for Dikeç therefore becomes concerned with transforming the societal status of marginal spaces and peoples. Refusing to reduce the voices of the banlieue residents to noise, Dikeç (2007: 177) insists that ‘the youth in banlieues can be heard as equals manifesting their discontent, making a claim on the republic as part of the republic – not as barbarians at its gate’.

Others have used Rancière’s work in similar ways. Swyngedouw (2007b: 71) has argued that uneven capitalist development produces ‘spaces that, although an integral part of the “police” order, of the existing state of the situation, are simultaneously outside of it’. In a manner similar to Dikeç, Swyngedouw is arguing for a double-reading of urban marginality: that marginal spaces are constructed – in both material and ideal senses – by the wider society and, at the same time, placed outside of the same society. He continues by saying that we must see these as spaces where hope, freedom and desires are actively lived. And it is exactly these practices that require attention, recognition, nurturing and valorization. These are the spaces where the post-political condition is questioned, the political re-treated, and practices of radical democratization experimented with (2007b: 72). These excluded spaces therefore contain political potential.

Swyngedouw’s locating of political agency on the radical margins is echoed in other recent work on urban politics. For example, James Holston (2009: 246) has claimed that ‘although insurgent urban citizenships may utilize central civic space and even overrun the center, they are fundamentally manifestations of peripheries’. Holston’s central point is that although central spaces (i.e. the civic square) have political purpose, the politics of citizenship and equality emerges out of the periphery itself, where the marginalized are located in precarious living and working conditions. He argues that these marginalized people on the peripheries are engaged in a struggle to establish a city with a different order of citizenship that recognizes their place within it as equals.

This identification of equality claims as emanating from marginalized spaces makes a valuable contribution to the task of recovering urban politics. However, if we locate the politics of the city exclusively or even predominantly on the margins/peripheries, we fail to understand the full implications of Rancière’s ‘method of equality’. From its inception in this critique of Althusser, Rancière’s political philosophy has sought not to define and/or identify a preferred political agent or place. His work pushes against any notion that particular places and/or people are the proper spaces and/or subjects of politics (see Rancière, 1981). Indeed, locating politics in particular kinds of places is a disempowering and unproductive way to recover urban politics. Contra to the claims of some who have recently drawn upon Rancière to rethink urban politics from the perspective of the ‘post-political city’, we believe his method of equality demands a radically contingent, but no less politically radical, theorization of politics. Most importantly, Rancière’s approach to politics suggests that equality demands are not pre-given, but rather they emerge from practice and are made political in their verification through practice (Rancière, 1999: 139). He makes the political project not one of identifying the right spaces/people through structural analysis of urbanization. Rather, the project is concerned with constituting the requisite spaces for politics, continually enacting disagreement and insisting on the city as a community of equals. Politics, then, is more spectral than structural:

Unequal society does not carry any equal society in its womb. Rather, egalitarian society is only ever the set of egalitarian relations that are traced here and now through singular and precarious acts. (Rancière, 2006: 96–7)

This alternate approach to the task of recovering urban politics would think about the different ways in which urban spaces are produced and mobilized in the practice of politics. Below, we set out a tripartite framework for thinking through this urban ‘method of equality’. Our goal is to develop Rancière’s engagements with the city into a more coherent account of urban politics. This is not a straightforward task. Rancière’s various references to the city can disorientate. The jumbling together of events and situations may appear to have little to offer those concerned with contemporary urbanization. But this jumble can be collected up to demonstrate that politics is both historical and untimely, both particular and universal. Politics, Rancière (2009: 287) insists, ‘is always emplotted in historical configurations’. To make the connection between different historical and geographical events is to ‘draw the line of escape, the line of universalization’ (2009: 282) which insists that events have a multi-temporality and multi-spatiality that exceeds their particular context. The method of equality, then, ‘must implement, at the same time, a principle of historicization and a principle of de-contextualization’ (2009: 282). In tracing out the implications of the method of equality, we expand upon three ways in which Rancière employs the geography of the city in the political process: as a police order, as a space through which politics is staged, and as a community of emancipation. These three inter-related elements can help us begin to see the urban geography in politics and, crucially, identify the practices and possibilities for politics across a multitude of urbanisms confined by consensus.

V Conclusion

Focusing on these three political dimensions of the city provides a foundation for developing a ‘method of equality’ which can begin to move critical urban studies beyond negative critique. It contrasts with what we might call a ‘method of inequality’, which only ever seeks to identify and explain how inequality is sustained by the operation of class and other forms of power. This method of equality is starting to surface in some contemporary studies of urban politics (e.g. May, 2010; Ross, 2002; Schaap, 2009). Crucially, these studies focus not only on the construction of consensus, but also on the operation of dissensus that constitutes a politics in/of the city. They contain more than rousing concluding paragraphs on the need for politics, and trace how equality is enacted in specific times and places. As such, they help us to see how alternative cities have been, and can be, created.

Rancière’s understanding of politics therefore provides an approach that might help us respond to calls for urban geography to be more cosmopolitan in the spaces (and times) it takes into account (Robinson, 2006). Precisely because ‘there are lessons of equality that occur anywhere in various forms’ (Rancière, 2009: 283), a core task becomes ‘detecting and highlighting the operations of equality that may occur everywhere at every time’ (Rancière, 2009: 280–1). While the kinds of urban politics that may take shape in Sydney and Singapore, Lagos and London, Jakarta and Johannesburg will have important differences, research efforts that seek to highlight operations of equality which confront the existing distributions of the sensible can also help to identify the lines of escape which connect these contexts, and bring them into genuine and productive dialogue with one another. This is not an argument that all societal contestations are political across space and that we must work at ‘incorporating the significance of informal arenas of politics, silenced voices and mundane practices’ (Sharp, 2007: 385). Certainly, the method of equality may draw attention to ‘little narratives from the fabric of social history’ that are far removed from the grand spaces and times of conventional political history (Rancière, 2009: 281). But it does so with a view to understanding how contestation becomes political through a process of subjectification (i.e. becoming more than personal), how certain societal contestations manage, in vastly different spaces and societies, to transform police orders.

In contrast to others, such as Hardt and Negri (2000), Rancière is not inclined to see such political connections in terms of a universal subject (i.e. ‘the multitude’). Rather, he sees them in terms of a universal operation (a verification of equality). This political operation is, of necessity, a collective operation which involves ‘setting up a community by the fact of placing in common a wrong’ (Rancière, 1999: 27). But it is crucial that neither history nor geography is understood to have given rise to such parties in advance of politics. The ‘part of those who have no part’ is not, for Rancière, a structurally-predefined group of people such as workers or slum dwellers. Rather, such collectives are (per)formed through politics: ‘Parties do not exist prior to the conflict they name and in which they are counted as parties’ (Rancière, 1999: 26–7). Here Rancière’s political theory should not be viewed as antithetical to Marxism (see Rancière, 2007). Rancière’s work should be read as a project to think politics in and beyond capitalism. There are few social groups who are better examples of ‘the part of those with no part’ than today’s working classes (Dikeç, 2007; Swyngedouw, 2007b, 2009). However, Rancière’s post-Althusserian project began with the recognition that the working class is not a predefined and/or self-conscious entity (Rancière, 1981). The project of structural economic and social change has to therefore proceed from a different presumption, one that, for Rancière, begins with an identification of the moral legitimacy of democratic change (see Rancière, 1999) via the articulation of an equality demand by those whose equality is denied in the sensible police order (see Rancière, 1981, 2004a).

Politics cannot therefore be assigned to particular people and places. We must see the city as a space through which politics is staged, but one in which the stage is constantly being constructed and reconstructed. Politics is latent across the city, not just in its most peripheral and excluded spaces. To restrict ourselves to such an understanding would perform the same de-politicization as many are now seeking to remedy. We must therefore insist upon the necessity for disagreement within our politics. The consensus regime of urban governance that has installed an almost impervious liberal hegemony must give way to democratic disruption. Our insistence here is on the radical incongruence of many naturalized facets of urban politics with equality – whether this be the hierarchies of globalism and a recognition of equality across cities and citizens, the excusing of welfare provisioning cuts through a rhetoric of competition or the validation of class-based securitization through the construction of the tyrannical other.

Finally, we must grant a degree of sameness to the diverse constituents of the city (also see Katz, 2001; Staeheli and Kofman, 2004). It is not a presumption that all peoples are the same, but that ‘the equality of anyone and everyone is inscribed in the liberty of the people’ (Rancière, 1999: 123). The geographical task here is not to view all people as carrying equally valid claims, that the personal is always political in equal measures. In contrast, we must work towards creating an urban politics whereby all constituencies, and their grievances, have to equally answer to democracy’s founding principle. The demands of democracy can therefore be seen as geographically indiscriminate. Politics are not everywhere, but in all spaces and times there lies the potential for people to test existing social orders against the presumption of equality. The ‘method of equality’ is offered here as a means to produce critical urban geographies that make a contribution to such enactments of democracy in the face of urban inequality.