The City as a Normative Political Space: Institutions, Relations, and Republicanism

Room – ALB G.019

Verena Frick (University of Göttingen); Nir Barak (Ben Gurion University); Daniel Guillery (LSE); Alessandro Piazza (Politecnico di Milano); Ben Rogers (LSE)

While mainstream political theory has long focused predominantly on the nation state, it has largely been silent about the city. Slowly, however, the city is gaining prominence in political theory, particularly concerning classic themes such as democratic innovations, citizenship, commoning, social movements, migration, environmentalism, and justice and inequality. As the world urbanises, and cities play a greater role in world affairs the city demands greater theoretical attention.

The workshop is thus guided by the assumption that the city is not merely a microcosm of the national community or a nation-state en miniature, but rather a distinct entity with its own governance structures, power dynamics, and forms of injustice. Building on this premise, it assumes that the distinction between ‘seeing like a city’ and ‘seeing like a state’ is essential for understanding how urban spaces shape political issues – particularly those surrounding political action, community, and social equality. This new perspective calls for a reassessment of our normative political theories in relation to urban life, moving beyond the mere application of established theories to urban contexts. It instead invites us to address the city’s distinct socio-spatial dynamics and examine how they shape the constitutive conditions of living together and acting politically in the city. By taking the socio-spatial character of cities seriously, and the values and relationships they make possible, our workshop aims at interrogating and, if necessary, revising established concepts and theories and developing criteria for making normative judgments about urban political practices.

We welcome papers that engage with city-focused analyses in contemporary political theory, exploring how prioritizing the political and institutional form of the city reshapes our theoretical frameworks. Contributions may address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Concepts:How does our understanding of fundamental political concepts such as freedom, community, citizenship, equality, solidarity or political agency change when ‘seeing like a city’?
• Theories:Which theoretical resources in (normative) political theory and beyond are particularly helpful to approach the city and city-related phenomena such as protest, segregation, residential displacement or exclusion? Among others, we welcome contributions that explore the implications for urban contexts of: a) Civic Republicanism: How far does the republican tradition offer a historical and conceptual grounding for thinking about the city as a space of active political engagement, self-rule, and collective freedom? b) Relational Egalitarianism: How can cities promote relationships of equality rather than entrenching social inequalities? What does it mean to design a city of equals? And how do urban spaces and institutions contribute to relational inequality?
• Problems:How do injustices, or other moral/political problems, look when seen from the city rather than from the nation state? In what ways do city organisation, infrastructure, planning, or politics generate injustice or inequality?
• Institutions:What institutional innovations are needed to mitigate urban challenges (e.g. democratic innovations, commoning) and what is the proper place of cities in the institutional fabric of democracy (e.g. issues of urban autonomy, regionalism)?
• Methods:What methodological challenges arise in the context of a political theory of the city, and what approaches have proved successful (e.g. grounded normative theory, ethnographic approaches to political theory, public reflexive equilibrium)?

Programme (Name in bold is the presenter; name in italics is the discussant. Everything in black is the general timetable set by MANCEPT for the workshops as a whole; everything in red is content of our particular workshop. In some cases, MANCEPT sessions are a little longer than the sessions we have scheduled, so our breaks are slightly extended.)