Kurt Iveson

Recovering the politics of the city From the ‘post-political city’ to a ‘method of equality’ for critical urban geography

This paper uses Jacque Rancières understanding of politics to ask what makes cities political entities. We review existing urban geography debates to identify some of the defining features of urban politics and then subject them to critical questioning: are they actually political? The paper seeks to develop existing interpretations of Rancières philosophy within geography to develop his ‘method of equality’ in order to recover the politics of the city. This identifies three necessary components of critical urban scholarship in order that it transcends critique and works towards making democratic politics possible.

The wars on graffiti and the new military urbanism

An ever‐expanding number of urban authorities have declared ‘war’ on graffiti. This paper explores the role the wars on graffiti have played in the creeping militarization of everyday life in the city. Wars on graffiti have contributed to the diffusion of military technologies and operational techniques into the realm of urban policy and policing. Furthermore, new Western military doctrines of urban warfare have sought to ‘learn lessons’ from the wars on graffiti (and other crime) in their efforts to achieve dominance over cities in both the global South and the Western ‘homeland’. The blurring of war and policing has deepened with the declaration of wars on terror. The stakes have been raised in urban social control efforts intended to protect communities from threats of ‘disorder’ such as graffiti, for the existence of even ‘minor’ infractions is thought to send a message to both ‘the community’ and ‘enemies within’ that there are vulnerabilities to be exploited with potentially more devastating consequences. Increasingly, there is a convergence around the notion that situational crime prevention strategies are crucial in combating both graffiti and terror threats, because even if graffiti writers and terrorists don’t share the same motivations, they do exploit the same urban vulnerabilities. The paper concludes with a critical reflection on what graffiti writers might be able to teach us about how to evade and/or contest the militarization of urban life.

Beyond city limits

With the publication of their piece ‘Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban?’ in City 19 (2–3), Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid hoped to ignite a debate about the adequacy of existing epistemologies for understanding urban life today. Brenner and Schmids desire to set urban research on a new course is premised on a wide-ranging critique of ‘city-centrism’ that they believe is holding back both mainstream and critical urban research. In this paper, we challenge Brenner and Schmids call for urban theory to shift from a concern with cities as ‘things’ to a concern with processes of concentrated, extended and differentiated urbanization. In their justified desire to critique ‘urban age’ ideologies that treat ‘the city’ as a fixed, bounded and replicable spatial unit, Brenner and Schmid risk robbing critical urban theory of a concept and an orientation that is crucial to both its conceptual clarity and its political efficacy. We offer in its place a conceptual and political defense of ‘the city’ as an anchor for a critical urban studies that can contribute to emancipatory politics. This is absolutely not a call for a return of bounded, universal concepts of ‘the city’ that have rightly been the target of critique. Rather, it is a call for an epistemology of the urban that is founded on an engagement with the political practices of subordinated peoples across a diverse range of cities. For many millions of people across the planet, the particularities of city life continue to be the context from which urbanization processes are experienced, understood, and potentially transformed.

Social or spatial justice? Marcuse and Soja on the right to the city

This paper offers a brief comparative reading of how Peter Marcuse and Edward Soja conceptualise the spatiality of justice and the right to the city. The work of both of these authors has been featured in City in recent issues, and while there are clear differences in their approaches, I argue that there are also points of convergence. In particular, both Marcuse and Soja insist that working towards the ‘right to the city’ is not only a matter of re‐ordering urban spaces, it is also a matter of attacking the wider processes and relations which generate forms of injustice in cities. In making this case, the paper provides an illustration of my belief that both Marcuse and Soja are right in arguing that a commitment to the ‘right to the city’ can serve as the ‘common cause’ or ‘glue that binds’ for radical theorists and activists across their differences.

Occupations, mediations, subjectifications: fabricating politics

The revolutions and protests that have spread across the globe since 2008 have been seen as a watershed moment. In this article we examine the relationships between urban space and politics that have emerged across these events. We draw upon the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière to provide a framework to understand some events of this period as political moments and, in addition, attempt to build upon Rancières work to trace out the geographical dimensions of politics. The paper concludes with a consideration of the counter-revolutionary projects enacted by current social orders.

Some critical reflections on being critical: Reading for deviance, dominance or difference?

One of the most exciting aspects of the papers gathered together in ‘Cities for People, Not for Profit’ was the over‐arching desire to articulate a renewed vision for critical urban theory (see City 13(2/3), especially Brenner et al. (2009), Marcuse (2009) and Brenner (2009)). Across the collection, a distinction is drawn between an emancipatory ‘critical’ urban theory and ‘mainstream’ approaches to the city which naturalise existing forms of injustice. In this piece I offer some brief reflections on a couple of the key elements of this critical/mainstream distinction. I argue that critical urban theory offers a crucial corrective to mainstream approaches to social conflict, which tend to see difference from the ‘mainstream’ as deviance. But in order to offer a politically potent alternative to the mainstream, critical urban theory must do more than identify and critique those forms of domination and injustice perpetrated in the name of the ‘mainstream’. For in the end, reading the city only for dominance risks having the same political effect as mainstream analyses which read the city for deviance—both approaches tend to naturalise forms of domination which must be transformed and to obscure important forms of difference which can point the way to radical alternatives. Not only must we avoid reading difference as deviance, we must also find ways to identify, nurture and participate in ongoing collective efforts to make different and more just kinds of cities through the practice of critical urban theory. In developing this argument, I draw some of the contributions from ‘Cities for People, Not for Profit’ into dialogue with some of the contributions to City’s recent feature on ‘Graffiti, Street Art and the City’ (City 14(1/2) (see Figures 1 and 2).

Locking Down the City (Well, Not Quite): APEC 2007 and urban citizenship in Sydney

Abstract This article critically analyses security measures put in place for the 2007 APEC Leaders’ Meeting in Sydney. Drawing on an emerging repertoire of international summit security techniques, APEC security authorities attempted to impose a range of spatial and temporal restrictions which were explicitly designed to marginalise dissent. These restrictions were premised upon, and designed to reinforce, a binary distinction between the ‘virtuous’ urban citizen (in need of protection) and the ‘unruly’ protester (from whom the virtuous citizens needed protection). However, these attempts to ‘lock down’ the citys public spaces during APEC did not go to plan. The article identifies and analyses three modes of political claim-making which sought to expand the possibilities for urban citizenship during APEC: complaint, protest and parody. The analysis suggests that while authorities may attempt to marginalise dissent by locking down urban space, their efforts also present a range of possibilities and opportunities for insurgent urban citizenship practices. In the case of APEC 2007, we show that humour and parody were particularly effective in re-politicising the city.

Propositions for more just urban public spaces

Across a diverse range of urban geographical contexts, the provision and governance of public spaces frequently generates conflicts of varying intensity involving urban inhabitants and urban authorities. A clear moral and philosophically based argument and evaluative framework is necessary for both critiquing and informing the positions that are taken in public space disputes. In this paper, we develop a model of socially just public space that could inform analysis of, and interventions in, these conflicts. In dialogue with the literatures on urban public space and on social and spatial justice, we offer five propositions about what makes for more just public space. The five propositions concern distributive justice, recognition, interactional justice and encounter, care and repair, and procedural justice. The application of these five propositions is exemplified through brief reflections on the politics of the street in New York City, and ‘broken windows’ style policing of graffiti.

Reporting on the unreported with Paul Mason: Scenes from Sydney, 2011

This article engages with Paul Masons 2012 book Why Its Kicking Off Everywhere: the New Global Revolutions from the perspective of a place where things have not quite ‘kicked off’ – Sydney, Australia. Through this engagement, I argue that Masons book provides a useful framework for interrogating the political dynamics of events in a range of places beyond those which feature in its pages. Mason emphasises the importance of relationships between alienated young people, the (sub)urban poor, and organized labour in the events he considers. I apply this frame to examine the potentials and limits of three events that took place in Sydney in 2011; a major union campaign against public sector cuts, the public launch of the community organising efforts of the Sydney Alliance, and the formation of Occupy Sydney. The article concludes with some discussion of the need to extend Masons work by paying more attention to the translation, as well as the transmission, of political repertoires from place to place.

Teaching Across the Divide: Physical and Human Geographies of Hurricane Katrina

This article critically reflects on our effort to ‘teach across the divide’, by integrating physical and human geography in a new first-year course. We achieved this integration by structuring our course around a series of key events, in order to draw out the interaction of ‘natural’ and ‘social’ forces. After setting out the intellectual and institutional reasons for integration, we illustrate our approach with reference to one of the key events covered in our course: Hurricane Katrina. Finally, we draw on our own reflections and student evaluations to consider the positive outcomes of our approach, and the challenges it poses.