Warren Magnusson

The Symbiosis of the Urban and the Political

Historically, the urban was the condition of possibility for the political, but the symbiosis of the two has been concealed by the rise of the state and the concomitant development of the social sciences. The effort to recover the connection by denoting a separate domain of ‘urban politics’ is self-defeating, because it re-instantiates an ontology of the political that consigns the urban to the domain of ‘low’ politics. The dominant ontology suggests that ‘high’ politics — the most serious politics or politics proper — is always in the domain of states and empires, and that everything else is subject to it. This view is constantly reaffirmed by the political theory that underpins the state system and the modern social sciences. Nevertheless, a different ontology of the political is always already implicit in the concept of the city, understood as a local phenomenon and a global way of life. To see the political through the city is to notice how proximate diversity stimulates self-organization and self-government, generates politics in and between authorities in different registers, and defers the sovereignty claims it produces. On this view, the urban is neither high nor low, but is instead the very form of the political, encompassing states and empires as much as anything else.

Critical Urban Theory versus Critical Urban Studies: A Review Debate

Critical urban theory and critical urban studies form the subject of two recent edited collections on approaches to the analysis and transformation of the contemporary capitalist city. In an exchange of commentaries by the respective editors and contributors, the introduction explains the genesis of each book and previews some of the key observations. Peter Marcuse then offers his assessment of Critical Urban Studies: New Directions, which is reciprocated by a commentary on Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City by Jonathan Davies, David Imbroscio and Warren Magnusson.

Socialism and Monotheism: A Response to Jenson and Keyman

We wrote our paper as a plea to the Canadian Left to question its assumptions about the nature of politics. What we said was provocative, but by no means sectarian. Indeed, what seems to have annoyed some people is that we refused to exempt anyone from the need for rethinking. Our theoretical strategy was to underline both the bourgeois and the theological origins of common political assumptions. We were hoping to encourage intellectuals on the Left to press Marxs critique of bourgeois thought a step further by subjecting his own ontology and epistemology - which were very much of his own time and informed by a specifically Western intellectual heritage - to rigorous questioning.

Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space

Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space. By Margaret Kohn. New York: Routledge, 2004. 256p.

Economic Crisis, Trade Unions and the State

85.00 cloth,

The search for political space : globalization, social movements, and the urban political experience

22.95 paper. In her first book, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (2003), Margaret Kohn analyzed the spatiality of early working-class activism in Italy and developed a sophisticated argument about the conditions for democratic empowerment. In this book, she shifts her attention to the United States. Aside from one chapter on the Wobblies, the focus is on the present. In both books, her emphasis is on the way in which the space for political engagement—“public space”—is constructed, sustained, controlled, or foreclosed. Her overarching theme is that theorists of democracy have paid far too little attention to the spatial conditions for democratic interaction. As she attempts to show in the present book, the privatization of public space—that is, the transformation of once-open downtowns into privately governed business improvement districts, the creation of privately governed gated communities in the suburbs and elsewhere, and the colonization of once-public space by private businesses—tends to insulate people from direct, physical encounters with people who are “different” or who may be attempting to persuade them to think otherwise about political issues. The trend toward privatization is particularly pronounced in the United States, and Kohns concern here is to show us why we should be concerned about it, as democrats.

A Political Space: Reading the Global through Clayoquot Sound

Collection of contributions from a Volkswagen Foundation funded research project on trade unions, industrial relations, and economic crisis.