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    Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift – Politics in the urban world

    It is often claimed that the politics of the city is the politics of negotiating many communities in close proximity to each other. Revershing this common wisdom, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift claim that urban dwellers increasingly do not think of community in terms of defending their turf .


    The urban condition is the human condition. In 1950, one-third of the world’s population lived in cities, but by 2050, the figure is expected to rise to two-thirds, or 6 billion people. By 2015 each of the world’s ten largest cities will house between 20 and 30 million people.


    Arguably, even those people who are not included in these figures now owe most of their existence to the demands that cities place on the world economy. There can be no doubt that the last 100 years have witnessed a major shift in the world’s spatial organization. The question is: what difference does this make–economically, socially, culturally, and politically?


    The answer to this question partly depends on how one defines a city. This is a problem. If the city is everywhere and in everything, if cities no longer have defined edges, if many settlements no longer settle, how can we find an object to grasp? In turn, if cities are the parentheses in the flows of the world, if they are the sites of diversity and difference, and if much of their rationale derives from their connections with other places, how can we grasp an object that is so internally inconsistent? So, we have the problem of where the city is located and what it does.


    Recently, there has been a frenzy of research on this problem, much of which has concerned the exact nature of political agency when it is increasingly mediated by urban institutions. Classically, urban political agency has been thought of in three different ways. One has been to imagine the city as a place with powers arising from its particular nature. The second has been to make claims for the city as a community, and the third has been to argue that in some way cities bestow citizenship. All of these responses are problematic in some way. No one can deny the specificity of place, but increasingly, places overlap with so many other places that it makes it very difficult to say that they are truly concentrated in one location. The second response is even more difficult in light of the extraordinary diversity of impulse and orientation in any given city. And the final response confuses a political category with a place.


    Instead of jettisoning these classical interpretations, however, they should be redefined since they continue to have grip in today’s world. Indeed, many contemporary global political issues are linked to these three different formulations of urban political agency. For example, the urban spectacle of anti-war protest cannot be ignored in any consideration of global geopolitics. Moreover, the close juxtaposition of peoples and cultures from around the world in cities has to be placed at the heart of any politics of identity, belonging, and affiliation, while the sheer environmental effects of cities themselves produce both enormous problems and practices that international regulators still sometimes see as beneath them even when they are all around them. Cities matter politically, not merely as sites where the political occurs, but as part of the political itself.


    What is the Polis?


    There are three instances of urban political agency. The first begins with the question of place specificity. The sheer physical nature of the city–its bricks and mortar, daily routines, wires and wheels–allow many people to continue to think of the city as a bounded space. But all of these mundane things connect up with other spaces, physical and virtual. None of them are complete unto themselves. Think only of the porosity of the modern house, with its multiple inputs and outputs from all over the world (and indeed beyond if we include satellites). Think of the modern park, with people and plants from around the world. Think of a car drive through the city, which for many people is their key experience of place, involving a constant hum of world noise if the radio is on, but also many sensings of a passing landscape that is never entirely local (the concrete comes from another country, the street lamp comes from another city, the grass seed or turf from a distant countryside). The physicality of the here and now routinely contains the physicality of the there and then.


    Any understanding of the politics of place must therefore recognize the dependence on other places for sustenance. What we have around us cannot justify claims of authenticity and difference. For many people, this seems counter to their experience, but any defense of place, and especially of a place called home, has to recognize the distant links and flows that create cities. This includes even the most physical and immobile of things. Take the common planning disputes that cities abound with, such as those centered on the location of a new building or a new swimming pool. To say that the decision must take into consideration all local parties is now pretty much accepted, but this decision is still far from taking stock of the inputs of the so many distant others implicated in the matter of the building or swimming pool: who are the interested parties and how can their interests be represented? Some might see this as heralding a baroque form of politics in which decisions are continually bogged down in the varied claims of a huge polity. But we do not know this until we try, and moreover, it remains clear that we cannot assume that the claims of those proximate to the decision should have the highest priority.


    Rethinking what counts as local specificity includes recognizing the silent politics of place. A number of specifically urban political expressions exist: urban public art, for instance, brings issues already in people’s consciousnesses to the fore. Our political task is to call forward the way people negotiate the multiplicity of specificity, in an environment full of the various technologies that regulate bodies in a city.


    Over the last fifty years, these technologies have proliferated to the point where they now form a backdrop to nearly all urban activities and influence many choices that people make throughout the day. These are some of the most powerful forms of regulation and control, not least because they are generally below the level of public comment. They include mundane objects such as traffic signaling systems and the software embedded in virtually all forms of urban life, as well as more visible objects such as surveillance systems and government–the whole variety of prevalent ways to keep the population counted, accountable, and alert to itself. How can these forms of governance be brought back into the public realm, where they can be the subject of discussion and dissent and can be molded to new purposes? We must understand the varied technologies of regulation and control together in order to make sense of their combined effects, and in turn think about them more positively–as the basic structures of urban life without which there would be no orientation or circulation and no prospect for remedy.


    The issue of city as community remains. For many people and for a very long time, the language of community has been self-evident. Communities function as havens in a heartless world and mediate clashing interests, yet communities are also under threat. Somehow where you find yourself is home and must therefore be automatically privileged. And given that most people now spend most of their time in cities, the link between home and city is increasingly taken for granted. To be fair, no one assumes that the city represents all its communities, but it is often claimed that the politics of the city is the politics of negotiating many communities in close proximity to each other. As such, there is talk about how different ethnic communities should live alongside each other, there is talk of the goods and evils of segregation (from ghettos to gated communities), there is talk about ways in which difference can be bridged, there is talk about building community out of different communities. This debate has given rise to the concept of diversity that now dominates urban political and policy thought, a concept centered on the idea of community.


    But urban diversity might be interpreted less as a politics of community than as a politics of connectivity. Many communities have no choice. They are there because there was nowhere else to go or to belong. This kind of forced community is a community by default and though it may have strengths, these are often the strengths of the beleaguered and desperate, longing to break out of community. Second, there seems real reason to question whether most urban dwellers feel that they belong to a community. Many of them have a series of distributed allegiances, which may or may not be local. So, while it is true that many urban residents might band together to fight rezoning or a government project, this may be very far from being an act of community, not least because it often actively involves the exclusion of others.


    One might also question why people should have such power over their backyard. A politics of local community too often assumes that propinquity is a value in itself and automatically grants power, at the expense of the stranger and at the expense of local engagement in a wider political arena. The politics of community, moreover, rules out other local political possibilities. What we have in mind is a more agonistic politics that encourages disagreement, attempting at the same time to build consensus on issues of common concern by strengthening people’s diverse associations rather than focusing on their locality. In short, a politics of connection is growing as many urban dwellers increasingly do not think of community in terms of defending their turf.


    Who is the Citizen?


    Finally, we must consider the issue of citizenship, first by asking, ‘Citizen of what?’ In the past citizens were identified with cities, then more recently, with the nation-state. Now, with the advent of permanently urbanized space, we can see that citizenship is becoming identified with increasingly more spatial categories. For example, surveys show that people increasingly identify with the planetary scale (“citizens of the world”), the local scale, and a whole series of spaces in between. Although this tendency toward multiple spatial identification is stronger among younger people, more and more categories of people also lay claim to an identification with many spaces, such as cosmopolitans, immigrants, professionals, and many other ordinary folk whose lives are increasingly made through their multiple connections with the world. This suggests that people increasingly acknowledge the many spatial affiliations they have always had and are turning these into active political capital. We cannot yet speak of a new commons of citizenship arranged around an agreed set of wants and demands that form in many spaces at once. But, it is the case that the category of citizenship that was formerly locked into very particular spaces is now being chipped away at and parts of it are relocating.


    In this condition of citizenship, the urban is pluralized and distributed. First, the urban continues to house millions of dispossessed, dislocated and illegal people, for whom any idea of citizenship is off the radar. These are people without rights to the spaces they occupy. The city, with its myriad of spaces, can thus provide a resource to those stripped of citizenship to survive and sometimes prosper. The existence of a whole series of quasi-citizenships also provides some recourse for those without formal political identity; such people can still take part in many urban political activities and can generally find at least some means of political expression. Put differently, the city for them is the only place of acquiring some political capital.


    The urban can also act as a forcing ground for new claims, very often arising from varieties of citizenship juxtaposed. For example, the city locates people with an excess of citizenship, such as the international business elite, close to people with fewer possibilities, such as the low paid workers who do service for the former, and new challenges are created by this juxtaposition (e.g., a new politics of maids and masters increasingly drawn from around the world but with differentiated local capacity to influence, which links to new international political strategies, alliances, and movements, such as organizations campaigning for women’s rights). These urban environments help to reconfigure citizenship, with the urban as one key formative arena that any politics of citizenship at large cannot but take note of.


    This essay is a revised version of an article published in the Harvard International Review


    Further links


    World city research – resources


    21st century graffiti


    Special issue: cities in flux, recent articles
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