Toward the democratic reconstruction of the urban

In “Seeing Democracy Like a City,” Ross Beveridge and Phillippe Koch (2024) get two big things exactly right.

First, the essence of democracy is—or should be—rooted in the local, in the places where we live our lives, something facilitated, epiphenomenally, by urbanization. As Beveridge and Koch (2024: 13) write: Democracy “is always ultimately a relation between people in places, as they come together and attempt to define the common good and develop collective forms of organisation to achieve them.” “A citizen,” they continue, “is not only, or even primarily, a bearer of rights and duties, but a political person whose life and actions are rooted in the places where their lives occur” (Beveridge and Koch, 2024: 13).

Second, we, in the present time, face a massive democratic deficit, embedded within what they identify as “a political and democratic crisis” (Beveridge and Koch, 2024: 2). Given the first observation about the essence of democracy, the clearest and most distressing manifestation of this deficit—and what in their words “is surely an affront to democracy”—is “that we have, including in formally (liberal) democratic systems, so little capacity to control the places we inhabit, to act together on the processes that shape our daily lives” (Beveridge and Koch, 2024: 2).

Where Beveridge and Koch go astray is in their diagnosis of the problem. Their main villain is identified as “state-centred democracy,” a concept comprising almost anything associated with a conventional or normal (perhaps expressed today as “normie”) democratic politics, involving formalized political processes (such as elections and constitutional rules and political parties), the mobilization of mass social movements, and, especially, governmental and administrative institutions wielding state power. Although they sometimes hedge, Beveridge and Koch eschew—almost disdainfully—such conventional political activities and exercises of authority as at once inherently corrupted and morally impure, and, at best, barely democratic at all. They embrace this perspective even though, as they themselves recognize, “the state has … enormous capacities and resources and vast competencies to address social hardships in urban regions, such as poverty, mobility and energy inequalities, lack of health services, or affordable housing” (Beveridge and Koch, 2024: 2). In place of “state-centred democracy,” we should—in both our theoretic understanding of democracy and its real-world practice—substitute the informal, the self-organizing, the non-governmental and non-institutional, and—although they avoid the word, anarchistic—political activities of the “everyday.” Such a mode of political practice, Beveridge and Koch (2024: 2) argue, is purer and more authentic—in short, “a more democratic way of doing politics,” where the “institutions and formal procedures of politics are less important than the situated actions of urban collectives and the everyday lived experiences of urbanization” (Beveridge and Koch, 2024: 8).

This standpoint, I believe, presents a fundamental misunderstanding of our current predicament: massive democratic deficits, and generalized political and democratic crises (especially vexing bourgeois forms of liberalism and social democracy of the center-left) manifest and endure not because democracy is “state-centred” (formal, administrative/governmental, institutionalized, etc.). Rather, such deficits and crises arise from how “state-centred democracy” is currently structured. Two particularly pernicious features stand out as especially detrimental to the flourishing of contemporary democratic life: first, most of state power operates on a centralized scale, that is, at the level of the nation-state rather than being properly devolved to (democratically) empowered localities. Second, and even more problematic, the forces of capital dominate state power at all its scales. It is within these twin structures we find the true source of the corruption and oppression bedeviling ostensible democratic societies (cf. Alperovitz, 2011; Elkin, 2006; Imbroscio, 2010; Schragger, 2016).

On one level, Beveridge and Koch forthrightly recognize this structural reality. They begin with the query of whether the state—but “especially the nation-state”—is “still the most viable location of democracy in the context of urbanization?” while acknowledging that, under current conditions, “the democratic project collapses with the nation-state or the nation-state dismantles democracy to reclaim sovereignty” (Beveridge and Koch, 2024: 2). Likewise, they observe that “[k]ey economic players have sought and gained competitive advantage over democratic systems, which increasingly appear to have given up on addressing the democratic deficits emerging from capitalism,” while pointing to “decades of scholarship” detailing “the declining authority [of the state] with its subjects and [its] increasing subservience to the interests of global capitalism” (Beveridge and Koch, 2024: 2). But rather than prescribing a transformative new (or next) system project (see https://thenextsystem.org/) of reconstructing established institutions and processes to transcend these twin anti-democratic structures (centralization and capital supremacy), Beveridge and Koch want to go in a different direction—one admittedly adjacent, for sure; and yet, foundationally, quite distinct.

What is this direction? One struggles here with precision due to a profound tension in their analysis. On the one hand, Beveridge and Koch seem to not want to do anything (reconstructive). Rather, in reference to both this article and their recent book (Beveridge and Koch, 2022), they tell us that “what emerges from our engagement is not per se [a project] … to kick-start democracy anew. Instead, we offer different ways of knowing democracy….” Hence, “seeing democracy like a city” is “an epistemological move …, a change in the terms of reference, which enables us to expand and enhance what is usually thought of as democracy” (Beveridge and Koch, 2024: 3). On the other hand, their interest in the global struggle for “urban collective self-rule” or “collective self-government” (Beveridge and Koch, 2024: 1, 2) seems to go well beyond making a mere epistemic claim. “To see like a city,” they later tell us, is about “how urban collective life might be instrumental for reimagining and rejuvenating … increasingly challenged institutional arenas and processes for democracy.” There is, it seems, a world to win, after all: what they hope to “delineate” is not only “a path toward resisting injustice,” but also a “transforming [of] society,” in a seemingly wholesale (and reconstructive) manner (Beveridge and Koch, 2024: 8).

Yet if we assume the latter is their true aspiration, we are left with a deep dilemma. Namely, the (almost boutique, as opposed to mass) politics they insist upon—the political practices of the “everyday”—while purer and less corrupted, is also woefully inadequate to the massive democratic reconstructive task necessary to realize anything approaching what might rightly be called “urban collective self-rule.” This is not to say there is not much to admire, even venerate, in this politics: Urbanites, in the course of confronting the struggles of their daily lives, form solidarities and collectives in an endeavor to challenge the rule of the colossus—repressive state power as the footman of global capital—in a self-organized project to seize a justly-claimed “right to the city.” But, while pure and noble, its capacity to bring about transformational, emancipatory change seems chimerical (cf. Davies, 2013), and Beveridge and Koch adduce little evidence to suggest otherwise. What we are left with then is an unproductive romanticism that neither defies the colossus in sustained and consequential ways nor ameliorates the dismal conditions of urban life (except perhaps on the margins). Instead, at best, the political practices of the “everyday” offer a means of resisting injustice—a squat here, an occupy-style protest there—but rarely amounting to much either materially or in terms of power redistribution. In fact, prescribing a politics as such seems to betray a deeply post-structuralist deportment, rooted in a Foucaultian perspective, where (eternal) resistance becomes the most we can ever hope for. And true emancipation is, almost ontologically, unachievable given the immense power and domination woven into the very condition of human existence. If this is the sum total of what (seeing) democracy (like a city) looks like, our urban future is indeed grim.

If the politics of the “everyday” cannot ever hope to bring about actual urban collective self-rule, what might? As intimated above, two institutional projects of democratic reconstruction are imperative.

First, democratic power needs to be reclaimed and reconstituted on a localized level. Urbanization, as Beveridge and Koch emphasize, is already facilitating this transformation, largely epiphenomenally. But without the concomitant redesign of institutions to empower localities more robustly, only marginal democratic change is possible. Part of the problem here is that Beveridge and Koch are, ironically, ambivalent (or even reluctant) localists, despite their almost obsessive focus on the local: “[W]e do not suggest a shift to the local scale,” they tell us, “but rather an engagement with places and locales where practices of and for democracy emerge” (Beveridge and Koch, 2024: 15). In this vein, they project unease about the so-called “local trap” and related concerns about “communitarian” modes of associative democratic practice (Beveridge and Koch, 2024: 14), both being expressive of an underlying apprehension about the local as (potentially) exclusionary. Such a posture might satisfy an attractive normative commitment, but it enervates any serious aspiration for (their desired) “urban collective self-rule.” One cannot have it both ways—seeing the local as the very essence of democratic life, while fearing the exercise of localized democratic power.

The second institutional project imperative for democratic reconstruction aims to lessen the power of capital to dominate political life. Because their focus is on the political struggles of the urban “everyday,” Beveridge and Koch (2024: 12) see the making of urban space, and especially, “home and dwelling,” as the “key stake of democratic action.” More broadly, they see the “struggle for the city” as “the struggle to access, enjoy, and co-determine the common-wealth generated by urbanization” (Beveridge and Koch, 2024: 15; emphasis added). Standing in the way are extant “property regimes”—“instruments of power shaping social and political arrangements within society” that cripple “aspirations of urban self-government” (Beveridge and Koch, 2024: 14). While partially correct, this formulation (of how urban collective self-rule over the urban common-wealth can be realized) remains radically under-determined. For example, it is true that, as Beveridge and Koch prescribe, such property regimes can be “rearrange[d] or transgress[ed]” by the creation of Community Land Trusts or squatting—practices embodying the politics of the “everyday.” But realizing true urban collective self-rule over the urban common-wealth demands (much) more. For starters, local economies need to be restructured to liberate them from the whims of mobile global capital, and production processes and investment funding need to be locally anchored and thoroughly democratized (see Alperovitz, 2011; Guinan and O’Neill, 2020; Imbroscio, 2010).

Importantly, these institutional projects of democratic reconstruction require, not only moving beyond the narrow political purview of the “everyday,” but also the countenance (and eventual capture) of state power and its plethora of resources. Some of this path toward urban collective self-rule takes a nascent form in the so-called new municipalism, which in fairness Beveridge and Koch do briefly discuss and seem to (mostly) endorse. Emerging from this new municipalism, they note, is an “embrace of a contingent stance to the state, seen as neither friend nor enemy” (Beveridge and Koch, 2024: 7). This stance seems to me to strike the right balance between the oppressive reality of actually existing state power, something they justly highlight, and its democratic and emancipatory potential, something they find dubious. At the same time, Beveridge and Koch (2024: 3) also understand that “seeing democracy like a city decentres the state,” while “urbanization unsettles seemingly fixed boundaries between the state and society…, thus opening up the possibility of weaving a new democratic fabric encompassing both.” This is to say that, once properly decentred to the local—including both city-wide and, significantly, neighborhood levels—state power can take on an altogether different form, democratically melding with local civil society rather than standing apart from it.

Finally, it is also crucial to remember that the democratic wielding of state power need not be in service of a statist policy agenda (e.g. transfer payment schemes, bureaucratized social programs, traditional public housing, etc.). Instead, it can be a vehicle to remake the political economy in more fundamental ways, so that ownership and control are brought under popular (and collective) democratic power. One (albeit imperfect) model here was what Joe Guinan and Martin O’Neill (2018: 5) dubbed the “institutional turn” of the UK Labour Party under the leadership of Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and Leader Jeremy Corbyn. This initiative assembled “the tools and strategies to enable a [future] Labour government to pursue a bold transformation of the British economy organized around ownership, control, democracy, and participation” (another salient yet weaker example, but one with at least some potential to move in a similar direction, was the Bernie Sanders movement for a “political revolution” in the USA). Seen in this light, what Beveridge and Koch disparage as “state-centred democracy” becomes the means through which the kinds of institutions they rightly disdain and abnegate become redesigned in service of real democratic reconstruction.

Given that another key feature of Labour's “institutional turn” envisioned the decentring of economic and political power (Guinan and O’Neill, 2018), an approach in this vein seems much more fruitful for seeing democracy-like (and in) cities than Beveridge and Koch's focus on the virtuous but largely futile political struggles of the urban “everyday.” While the Corbyn–McDonnell Labour government spectacularly failed to win at the polls (as did Sanders), the prominence of such a policy agenda at the highest levels of state-centered democratic power nonetheless illuminates the possibilities on the political horizon for broader system change in late-stage, neoliberal capitalist regimes.