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Constructing Community
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Constructing Community
Configurations of the
Social in Contemporary
Philosophy and Urbanism
Brian Elliott
Lexington Books
A division of
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
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Published by Lexington Books
A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.lexingtonbooks.com
Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2010 by Lexington Books
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Elliott, Brian, 1969–
Constructing community : configurations of the social in contemporary philosophy and
urbanism / Brian Elliott.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7391-3966-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-3968-4 (electronic)
1. Communities. 2. Public spaces. 3. Power (Social sciences) 4. Democracy. I. Title.
HM756.E45 2010
307.76—dc22
2010020214
⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
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For Gabrielle—aurora vesperis
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xi
PART ONE: THEORIES OF COMMUNITY

1 Habermas and Dialogical Community 3
2 Singular Community 27
3 Dissenting Community 49
PART TWO: URBANISM AND COMMUNITY

4 New Urbanism 77
5 Postmodern Urbanism 105
6 Dialectical Utopianism 131
Bibliography 155
Index 161
About the Author 165
vii
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Acknowledgments
My interest in the built environment goes back some time, but shaping this
interest was made possible through various collaborative activities. Working
together with Hugh Campbell in architecture, Douglas Smith in French, and
Gillian Pye in German, all at University College Dublin, showed the poten-
tial of cross-disciplinary initiatives. The framework of Istanbul Fragmented
hosted by Istanbul Technical University and directed by Ipek Akpinar gave
my appreciation of city planning a more comprehensive scope. My friendship
with Ferda Keskin and my graduate teaching in visual and urban studies at
Istanbul Bilgi University provided a convivial and fruitful environment to ex-
plore issues of urban politics. More recently, getting involved with the work
of the Center for Intercultural Organizing, directed by Kayse Jama, allowed
me to understand firsthand what constructing community looks like. Finally,
the support of my wife, Gabrielle Buvinger-Wild, allowed me to maintain my
enthusiasm and faith in the importance of this project. All that is worthwhile
here is due to her. The research for this book was made possible by a gen-
erous grant awarded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and
Social Sciences.
ix
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Introduction
Appeals to community are to be found everywhere in contemporary discourse,

but they rarely amount to more than some vague appeal to an identifiable
social group. In many cases it is easy to suspect that the community in ques-
tion might not even exist as a social reality. We hear appeals to the “global
community,” although in reality this designates highly complex groupings of
national governmental representatives who rarely agree on policy let alone
act in unison. The media speak of the “Muslim” community, while we real-
ize that the estimated 1.2 billion people who ascribe to some form of Islamic
faith can hardly be seen as an undifferentiated mass. Like other key terms that
abound within our everyday political vocabulary, “community” has a highly
ambiguous and problematic meaning.
Seminal texts in sociology from the last decades of the nineteenth century
were much concerned with community. Among these a study by Ferdinand
Tönnies titled Community and Civil Society (in German, Gemeinschaft and
Gesellschaft) exerted considerable influence.1 For Tönnies, the social condi-
tions of preindustrial agrarian life were productive of genuine community.
Under such conditions a profound social bond between families extending
across generations meant that the individual was deeply embedded in a
specific place and group. Industrialization and mass migration to rapidly ex-
panding cities broke up these rural communities and produced the anonymity
and instrumentality of urban society. In this new context relationships were
based more on contingency and individual choice and lacked the generational
continuity of true community. Thus, the birth of the industrial metropolis is
seen as the death of genuine community.
As many more recent accounts insist, this image of community essentially
amounts to nostalgia for an idealized rural idyll and consequent demonization
of urban life. With unprecedented concentrations of people within the cities
xi
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xii Introduction
of industrialized nations in the nineteenth century came immense pressure for

social and political change. National governments quickly recognized that re-
shaping the urban fabric was a necessary condition for controlling such pres-
sure. Within a few years of the popular political protests that swept Europe in
1848, Emperor Napoleon III charged the Prefect of Paris, Baron Haussmann,
with the task of massive urban renewal to ensure that popular insurrection in
the city would remain a thing of the past. While the ostensive reasons given
for the destruction of 20,000 older dwelling units and construction of 43,000
new ones were to improve traffic circulation and improve sanitary condi-
tions in the central city, the desire for social and political control was clear
enough.2 Haussmann’s urban reconstruction set a pattern of attempted social
engineering that professionalized modern urbanism would repeat throughout
the twentieth century. Yet all this work rested on an article of faith: environ-
mental determinism or the idea that changes to the physical environment will
bring about predictable alterations in social behavior.
My task in this book is to offer a critical analysis of the interrelation be-
tween community and urbanism in contemporary liberal democracies. This is
an immensely complex topic but I will tackle it here within relatively narrow
parameters. In the first part of the book I examine influential theories of com-
munity that have arisen within European philosophy over the last three de-
cades. In the second part I consider parallel approaches to community within
urban theory and practice over the same period. What binds the two parts is a
basic assumption, namely that community and place are intimately connected
such that the one cannot be adequately understood without the other. While I
hope that the accounts of philosophical theories and urbanist practices are in-
formative and engaging, my overall purpose is not to present a neutral survey
of contemporary approaches to community. Instead, the underlying intention
is to advocate a particular understanding of community, one that turns on
collective, grassroots oppositional action. While it draws on certain current
theories and practices, the model of community put forward is far from the
orthodox position, which favors nonoppositional dialogue between civil so-
ciety on the one hand and corporate or bureaucratic powers on the other. My
argument against this orthodoxy is simple: dominant institutions and agents
of power will never work to redress social inequalities and injustice through
reasonable dialogue alone. Instead, grassroots organizations need to devise
effective forms of nonviolent direct action that are initially local but capable
of broader application.
Thus I understand community in terms of collective action beyond insti-
tutionalized frameworks of discussion. It is no coincidence that the idea of
community as dialogue has become an orthodoxy during a period when the
“third way,” centrist model of politics3 has successfully argued that there is
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Introduction xiii
no fundamental conflict between social justice and the workings of the free
market. Even now, in the wake of massive handouts of state money to global
banking institutions whose actions led directly to widespread home repos-
sessions and unemployment, we witness this orthodoxy reestablishing its
aura of unchallengeable commonsense. Nothing demonstrates more clearly
the disregard for the basic welfare of liberal democratic citizenry than the
blatant attempt to avoid financial regulation while unemployment continues
to rise and material conditions for most become increasingly intolerable. By
contrast, history shows that real steps toward realizing the goals of social
justice were only ever achieved across liberal democracies when concerted
grassroots efforts confronted established political powers and obliged them
to facilitate progressive social change. My hope in writing this book is that it
will make some contribution to continuing this tradition of constructing com-
munity as and through dissent.
NOTES
1. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, ed. J. Harris, trans. M. Hollis
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
2. For an extensive and insightful analysis of Paris in the nineteenth century cf.
David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003).
3. The principal theoretical elaboration of this model is found in Anthony Giddens,
The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). For
a trenchant critique of this model and the Clinton/Blair centrist approach to politics
cf. Alex Callinicos, Against the Third Way: An Anti-Capitalist Critique (Cambridge:
Polity, 2001).
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Part One
THEORIES OF COMMUNITY
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Chapter One
Habermas and Dialogical Community
The mature work of the German social theorist Jürgen Habermas attempts
to bring together insights from a rich diversity of movements and figures in
twentieth-century philosophy. The most salient movements are Critical Theory,
American pragmatism, hermeneutics, and contemporary analytic philosophy.
From the first of these Habermas inherits a concern for social justice and
sources of resistance to oppressive political structures and powers. At the same
time, drawing from the other three movements, Habermas strives to produce
a robust and credible theory of intersubjective knowledge and understanding.
A central question that arises out of Habermas’s theory is thus: how are un-
derstanding and social justice related? Under the headings “communicative
action” and “discourse ethics,” Habermas essentially located the work of social
justice and resistance to oppressive power within linguistic understanding.
In this first chapter I will argue that Habermas’s theory involves two funda-
mentally questionable moves. First, the notions of language and dialogue are
extended beyond any credible bounds, in such a way that any basic distinction
between language and action becomes blurred. Secondly, the significance
attached to linguistic understanding leads to a downplaying of important and
arguably intrinsic features of understanding that are nonlinguistic in nature,
most notable its aesthetic and emotive dimensions. As I will argue throughout
this book, the goals of social justice cannot plausibly be achieved exclusively
through efforts to reach understanding through rational dialogue. To insist that
justice can be attained through rational discourse alone is to ignore the social
fact that language is first and foremost a tool of hegemonic powers.
As will become clear in the course of this first part of the book, an overvalu-
ation of language is common to both the dialogical and the singular model of
community. My basic argument in view of this is the following: the valoriza-
tion of language or discourse leads to a one-sided and ultimately implausible
3
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4 Chapter One
understanding of community. My point is not that linguistic practice plays no

role in the construction of community, as it manifestly does. Rather, the argu-
ment is that the tendency to assimilate all forms of practice to something dis-
cursive and linguistic in nature yields an unduly narrow account of community
and of social relations more generally. In particular this narrowing has grave
consequences for reaching an adequate understanding of practices of political
resistance. As we will see, Habermas’s notion of communicative action tends
to reduce significantly resources for political contestation and resistance. As
many critics have pointed out, communicative action is regulated in general by
an imperative of consensus formation. For Habermas, the appropriate means
for dealing with political disputes is a form of argumentation that, while inclu-
sive, insists in advance that all participants in a discussion seek convergence of
opinion. While this may be a useful manner to resolve issues where significant
common ground is already in evidence, it has little relevance where parties to
a discussion have widely divergent perspectives on specific matters. There are
numerous examples in modern history of marginalized groups that were able
to advance a cause only by the use of nonviolent means other than reasoned
argument. In general terms my critical point will be that Habermas’s notion of
dialogical community offers a merely formal, “managerial” notion of conflict
resolution and social cohesion. By this I mean that it looks to resolve disputes
through identifying a convergence of interest between conflicting groups. As
such, Habermas’s theory is of use in cases where a significant degree of con-
vergence has already occurred. In common with other critics, however, I do not
believe that this theory retains much value in cases where profound differences
are in evidence. In other words, communicative action assumes a high level
of social-political homogeneity and so breaks down in the face of significant
social heterogeneity. As a consequence the usefulness of Habermas’s theory for
highly pluralistic and diverse contemporary societies is limited. In what follows
I will first sketch out the basic features of Habermas’s theory and then set out
my critique in more detail.
COMMUNICATIVE ACTION
What is widely considered Habermas’s magnum opus, The Theory of Com-

municative Action (henceforth TCA), was originally published in two vol-
umes in German in 1981. English translations of the two volumes appeared in
1984 and 1987 respectively. The timing of the work’s appearance in English
is significant insofar as it coincides with an intensified intellectual reception
of postmodernism and deconstruction. Confrontations between Habermas
and various representatives of a broadly construed postmodernist movement
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Habermas and Dialogical Community 5
became almost a matter of course in the mid-1980s. The most celebrated

instances involve the French thinkers Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida,
and Jean-François Lyotard. Although it is the least commented on within
academic literature, in chapter three Lyotard’s counter-position to Habermas
will be considered in detail. My own concern is not with the confrontation
between Habermas and postmodernism insofar as it amounted to an internal
academic issue about what is or is not valid theory, genuinely rigorous phi-
losophy, etc. While the debate with Habermas in the 1980s mostly turned on
interpretations of modernity, rationality, and the means and aims of theory,
the question animating discussion here concerns by contrast the fruitfulness
and plausibility of opposed theories of community. As is often the case in
such extended theoretical confrontations, what are claimed at the time as
significant differences turn out to mask important affinities in retrospect. The
task at hand will thus involve attempting to identify which profound differ-
ences remain between the various configurations of community considered.
In the second volume of TCA Habermas offers a general description of his
project that provides a good point of departure. It is worth quoting at length:
Up to now we have conceived of action in terms of dealing with situations. The

concept of communicative action singles out above all two aspects of this situa-
tion management: the teleological aspect of realizing one’s aims (or carrying out
one’s plan of action) and the communicative aspect of interpreting a situation
and arriving at some agreement. In communicative action participants pursue
their plans cooperatively on the basis of a shared definition of the situation. If a
shared definition of the situation has first to be negotiated, or if efforts to come
to some agreement within the framework of shared situation definitions fail, the
attaining of consensus, which is normally a condition for pursuing goals, can it-
self become an end. In any case, the success achieved by teleological action and
the consensus brought about by acts of reaching understanding are criteria for
whether a situation has been dealt with successfully or not. . . . It is constitutive
for communicative action that participants carry out their plans cooperatively in
an action situation defined in common. They seek to avoid two risks: the risk of
not coming to some understanding, that is, of disagreement or misunderstand-
ing, and the risk of a plan of action miscarrying, that is, of failure. Averting the
former risk is a necessary condition for managing the latter. Participants cannot
obtain their goals if they cannot meet the need for mutual understanding called
for by the possibilities of acting in the situation—or at least they can no longer
attain their goals by way of communicative action.1
Two features of communicative action immediately stand out, namely its co-
operative and consensual nature. Furthermore, these two features have a rela-
tionship of dependence: cooperation is only possible on the basis of foregoing
consensus or agreement on the situation faced. The point is also made that such
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6 Chapter One
consensus may be either implicitly assumed or explicitly worked out. While

the final sentence of the quotation reiterates the dependence of cooperation on
consensus it also implies, significantly, that practical goals can be attained by
means other than communicative action. One final aspect of this description of
communicative action is important to highlight in light of what follows, namely
its aversion to the “risk” of misunderstanding. In an important and intrinsic
sense Habermas’s model of social practice aims at the elimination of misunder-
standing. While this may seem at first glance an admirable and unobjectionable
aspect of his theory, recognition that social diversity necessarily brings with it
“failures” of mutual understanding may raise doubts as to the plausibility of
communicative action. It may be countered that Habermas’s point is simply
to insist that effective action requires mutual understanding, for if there is no
agreement on what is to be done how can a group set about doing something?
As I will go on to argue, however, collective action may in certain cases require
consensus on the situation to be tackled, but it need not. Arguably, more sponta-
neous, less reflective instances of collective action have no need of any implicit
or explicit act of consensus. Take the example of a group of theater actors or
musicians that are improvising: one person makes a certain move, speech, or
sound and another follows in a nonpredictable way, another takes up the de-
velopment, and so on. Here we undoubtedly have a case of coordinated, “suc-
cessful” group action, but there is no foregoing agreement beyond the minimal
one of each person willingly participating in the practice of improvisation. No
doubt it could be objected that agreeing on the general context of action is pre-
cisely the case of “consensus” in question. Admittedly, in the example given
each participant will have originally learned how to participate appropriately
within such a context. But the question remains whether the capacity for spon-
taneous collective play, of which theatrical or musical improvisation is a fairly
sophisticated type, is originally and in all cases subject to a foregoing consensus
about the situation of action. I will come back to this point, but for now let us
continue to explore the general features of Habermas’s theory.
Contrary to the impression given by certain contemporary critics and on
occasion by Habermas’s own formulations, the theory of communicative
action does not insist that convergence is somehow hardwired within the
mechanisms of collective practice. On the contrary, the drive to consensus
that regulates communicative action is shown to exist only in opposition to
what is termed strategic action. According to Habermas, the communicative
versus strategic action opposition is not merely conceptual in nature. Rather,
it represents an either-or of actual social practice. He remarks:
I do not want to use the terms “strategic” and “communicative” only to desig-
nate two analytical aspects under which the same action could be described—on
the one hand as a reciprocal influencing of one person by opponents acting in
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a purposive-rational manner and, on the other hand, as a process of reaching

understanding among members of a lifeworld. Rather, social actions can be
distinguished according to whether participants adopt either a success-oriented
attitude or one oriented to reaching understanding.2
While here the distinction between communicative and strategic action is

explained in terms of different intentional attitudes and expected outcomes,
Habermas’s further elaboration highlights rather the cause or motive of ac-
tion. Accordingly, communicative assent (Zustimmung) is said to be ratio-
nally motivated, whereas strategic accord (Übereinstimmung) is subject to
nonrational compulsion. As Habermas notes:
A communicatively achieved agreement has a rational basis; it cannot by im-

posed by either party, whether instrumentally through intervention in the situ-
ation directly or strategically through influencing the decisions of opponents.
Agreement can indeed be objectively attained by force; but what comes to pass
manifestly through outside influence or the use of violence cannot count subjec-
tively as agreement. Agreement rests on common convictions.3
The communicative/strategic distinction is maintained in one form or another

throughout Habermas’s subsequent texts. The questions and objections to
which it gives rise are numerous: can individual and collective agents al-
ways tell when they are freely consenting rather than being manipulated or
compelled? Isn’t it the case that any actual decision or position reached will
involve a combination of both strategic and communicative action? Doesn’t
Habermas’s appeal to “rational motivation” imply that there is some universal
human faculty of reason that is at play across all possible situations? It will
be useful to keep these objections in mind as I develop further a sketch of
Habermas’s theory.
THE IDEAL SPEECH SITUATION
A feature of communicative action that has been the subject of much discus-
sion is the notion of an ideal speech situation. Habermas freely admits that
such a situation can never be realized in practice and operates instead as an
“(often counterfactual) presupposition.”4 It is important to bear in mind that
the notion of communication in question is really restricted to forms of lan-
guage that are relevant to issues of validity and truth. Habermas’s theory as
a whole rests on the assumption that moral action, insofar as it is governed
by social norms, exhibits a strong affinity with practices within specialized
domains of knowledge such as the empirical sciences. The affirmation of
such an affinity is made at the cost of separating communicative action off
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8 Chapter One
from two other domains of practice: on the one hand instrumental or strategic
action within the area of technical knowledge, and, on the other hand, from
what Habermas calls “dramaturgical action” within the arts.5 Habermas thus
separates out ethics and science as genuine truth-seeking activities from tech-
nology and art that are taken to possess no genuine powers of discovery. It is
against this backdrop that Habermas offers the following remark:
Only in the theoretical, practical, and explicative discourse do the participants

have to start from the (often counterfactual) presupposition that the conditions
for an ideal speech situation are satisfied to a sufficient degree of approxima-
tion. I shall speak of “discourse” only when the meaning of the problematic
validity claim conceptually forces participants to suppose that a rationally
motivated agreement could in principle be achieved, whereby the phrase “in
principle” expresses the idealizing proviso: if only the argumentation could be
conducted openly enough and continued long enough.6
Here what is ideal about communicative action is specified: the openness and
longevity of discussion. Further comments from the second volume of TCA
make clear that the notion of communicative action implies a potentially in-
finite and unbounded community of action. This lack of limitation relates to
both the potential number of agents and topics involved:
[P]articipants in communication encounter one another in a horizon of un-

restricted possibilities of mutual understanding. What is represented at the
methodological level as hermeneutics’ claim to universality, merely reflects the
self-understanding of lay persons who are acting with an orientation to mutual
understanding. They have to assume that they could, in principle, arrive at an
understanding about anything and everything.7
If the ideal speech situation refers to the openness of communicative action in

the sense of being open to tackle any possible topic of contention, there is a
further sense of openness involved. This is an attitude of open-mindedness as
opposed to one of dogmatism that would consider a particular truth as settled
once and for all. Habermas insists that agreements reached through commu-
nicative action imply an anti-dogmatic openness to revision:
[Communication] does not exclude a fallibilistic consciousness. Members know

that they can err, but even a consensus that subsequently proves to be deceptive
rests to start with on uncoerced recognition of criticizable validity claims. From
the internal perspective of participants of a sociocultural lifeworld, there can
be no pseudoconsensus in the sense of convictions brought about by force; in a
basically transparent process of reaching understanding—which is transparent
for the participants themselves—no force can gain a footing.8
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In fairness to his account as a whole Habermas does identify empathy as a

further feature of the ideal speech situation. An empathetic attitude is taken to
be a precondition of what is called “the ideal taking of roles,” that is, the abil-
ity to see a situation from the point of view of another participant in a discus-
sion. The notion of sympathy or empathy plays a broader role within modern
Western philosophy. For example, it is key within Adam Smith’s The Theory
of Moral Sentiments and more generally within Scottish Enlightenment moral
philosophy in the mid-eighteenth century. In the twentieth century, Edith
Stein’s 1916 investigation On the Problem of Empathy stands out amid other
analyses offered around the same time by her teacher Edmund Husserl and by
the heterodox phenomenologist Max Scheler. In the text of an interview from
1990 Habermas is careful not to allow his admission of an emotional attitude
into the ideal speech situation to challenge or contradict his earlier insistence
on the paramount role played by rational motivation:
[Testing our moral point of view against all others] would scarcely be possible
without that generalized sympathy which becomes sublimated into a capacity
for fellow feeling, and points beyond our emotional ties to those closest to us,
opening our eyes to “difference.” . . .
Of course moral feelings, despite the cognitive function which they fulfil,
cannot monopolize the truth. In the last analysis it is moral judgements which
span the gap that cannot be filled in with emotions. In the end we must rely on
moral insight, if everyone who has a human face is to have a claim to moral
protection.9
In the same interview Habermas identifies three specific features of the

ideal speech situation: nonexclusion, evidentiality, and noncoercion. Whereas
the first and last features appear more strictly moral in nature, the second
points back to the fact that communicative action is viewed as something
akin to a scientific process of arriving at a position on the basis of the best
available evidence. However, this analogy with empirical science raises a
problem. The development of modern science can be viewed in general in
terms of its departure from the intrinsic conservatism of common sense as-
sumptions. By contrast, the theory of communicative action explicitly draws
on the resources of common sense. This is shown by the way Habermas uses
the notion of the lifeworld to mean something like a naturally arising social
organization. Within any lifeworld, mutual understanding is to be found as
an unproblematic background of collective action. To the extent that this is
the case, however, there is no need to adopt anything like the experimental
attitude to knowledge and truth. I will explore this tension between common
sense and scientific understandings of truth in the next section.
Before concluding this section it is important to note that Habermas came
to acknowledge some problems with the notion of an ideal speech situation.
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10 Chapter One
In the same 1990 interview he reaffirms his idea of “an unlimited com-
munity of communication [unbegrenzte Kommunikations-gemeinschaft].”10
However, while insisting that “the community of communication, unlimited
in social space and historical time, is an idea which we can approximate to
in actual conditions of argumentation,” Habermas concedes that the formula
“ideal speech situation” “can give rise to misunderstanding, because it is too
concretistic.”11 By this Habermas seems to mean that the conditions regulat-
ing communicative action should not be grasped through envisioning some
ideal scenario. To do so would imply something like two worlds of discus-
sion: the imperfect state of actual communication and some potential state
of perfection. Habermas wishes to avoid this kind of split between real and
ideal communication by insisting that ideal norms in each case regulate ac-
tual communication that aims at mutual understanding. Rather than an ideal
speech situation, then, it would be more accurate to speak of implied precon-
ditions of genuine communicative action.
THE LIFEWORLD
In the previous section we encountered the notion of the lifeworld in the

sense of the horizon of understanding common to a particular community.
Originally the idea of the lifeworld (in German, Lebenswelt) was developed
in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in the early
decades of the twentieth century. In general terms the phenomenological
sense of the lifeworld relates to the structured organization of experience that
both precedes and makes possible explicit empirical knowledge and reflective
insight. In the second volume of TCA Habermas makes clear that he does not
use the term in its technical, phenomenological sense. Instead he embraces
what he calls an “everyday concept of the lifeworld”:
[It is by means of the lifeworld in its everyday sense] that communicative actors
locate and date their utterances in social spaces and historical times. In the com-
municative practice of everyday life, persons do not only encounter one another
in the attitude of participants; they also give narrative presentations of events
that take place in the context of their lifeworld. Narration is a specialized form
of constative speech that serves to describe sociocultural events and objects.
Actors base their narrative presentations on a lay concept of the “world,” in the
sense of the everyday world or lifeworld, which defines the totality of states of
affairs that can be reported in true stories.12
Habermas’s reference to narration as the form of communicative action within

the shared horizon of everyday life is noteworthy. Many initiatives to improve
social relations and understanding both within and between communities pro-
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mote opportunities for narration. Being able to tell an individual or collective

story, especially where traumatic experiences are related, is widely believed
to have therapeutic potential. By linking it with narration Habermas is making
clear that a lifeworld, although specific to a social group or community, is not
communicatively closed to other communities. Further elaboration clarifies
another key feature of the lifeworld, namely its role in social integration:
The symbolic structures of the lifeworld are reproduced by way of the continu-
ation of valid knowledge, stabilization of group solidarity, and socialization of
responsible actors. The process of reproduction connects up new situations with
the existing conditions of the lifeworld; it does this in the semantic dimension
of meanings or contents (of the cultural tradition), as well as in the dimensions
of social space (or socially integrated groups), and historical time (of successive
generations). Corresponding to these processes of cultural reproduction, social
integration, and socialization are the structural components of the lifeworld:
culture, society, person.13
If narration, as the form of communicative action intrinsic to the lifeworld,

thus serves social integration, it is important to recognize that this process of
integration does not happen in an unproblematic manner. If there is widespread
acknowledgement of the need to construct situations of narration this sug-
gests that such situations do not always arise as a matter of course. Precisely in
cases of heightened tension and conflict the possibilities of narration diminish.
Habermas’s configuration of the social as a lifeworld where social integration
is achieved through networks of communicative action rests on what he calls
“three fictions”: “(a) the autonomy of actors, (b) the independence of culture,
and (c) the transparency of communication.”14 Contrary to the impression given
by certain critics, however, Habermas explicitly recognizes that the lifeworld
of communicative action is only one side of actual community integration. He
refers to the other side as system integration, by which he means primarily the
bureaucratic power of states and the economic power of markets:
In capitalist countries the market is the most important example of a norm-free

regulation of cooperative contexts. . . . Thus I have proposed that we distinguish
between social integration and system integration: the former attaches to action
orientations, while the latter reaches right through them. In one case the action
system is integrated through consensus, whether normatively guaranteed or
communicatively achieved; in the other case it is integrated through the non-
normative steering of individual decisions not subjectively coordinated.15
What is referred to here as system integration essentially escapes the immedi-

ate intuitive grasp of the individuals and communities affected. Whereas social
integration through communicative action occurs in a way that is transparent
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12 Chapter One
to the participants, the economic system operates with a “hidden hand,” to use
Adam Smith’s celebrated phrase. It is important to note further that for Haber-
mas the relationship between social and system integration is conflictual. As
we shall see in more detail in later chapters, many of Habermas’s critics make
their task too easy by neglecting to acknowledge the tension between com-
municative action and what he calls the “steering media” that produce system
integration. As we have seen, Habermas is open about the fact that features
of communicative action such as transparency are fictions that relate to social
relations only insofar as they viewed from the one-sided perspective internal to
a specific lifeworld. Thus, Habermas is not claiming that modern society as a
whole can be viewed as a field of unimpeded and transparent communication.
Taking up the idea of a “colonization of the lifeworld,” Habermas insists by
contrast that social integration is under constant threat from the powerful and
pervasive influence of money and power:
The transfer of action coordination from language over to steering media means
an uncoupling of interaction from lifeworld contexts. Media such as money and
power attach to empirical ties; they encode a purposive-rational attitude toward
calculable amounts of value and make it possible to exert generalized, strategic
influence on the decisions of other participants while bypassing processes of
consensus-oriented communication. Inasmuch as they do not merely simplify
linguistic communication, but replace it with a symbolic generalization of re-
wards and punishments, the lifeworld contexts in which processes of reaching
understanding are always embedded are devalued in favor of media-steered
interactions; the lifeworld is no longer needed for the coordination of action.16
As is clear from this remark, the dynamic tension that exists between com-
municative and strategic action is closely related to the conflictual rela-
tionship between social and system integration. Habermas also recognizes
that as capitalism has developed historically, system integration has made
ever-greater inroads into lifeworld communication. This is his version of the
Marxian idea of reification, according to which social relations are rendered
thing-like as a result of the reduction of living labor to its capacity to produce
a certain quantity of marketable goods. Habermas also retains a version of
the further Marxian idea that capitalism brings about intensified “contradic-
tions” between the organization of production and social relations. Thus he
claims that in situations of economic crisis the resources of lifeworld com-
munication are called upon to maintain social equilibrium, thereby bringing
about “social pathologies.”17 These various points are summed up succinctly
when Habermas remarks: “Between capitalism and democracy there is an
indissoluble tension; in them two opposed principles of societal integration
compete for primacy.”18
10_368_03_Ch01.indd 12 7/28/10 12:37 PM

In the following section Habermas’s move from the dialogical-ethical per-

spective of communicative action theory to the explicitly political standpoint
of his model of “deliberative democracy” will be considered. It is important
to note, however, that this move constitutes an extension rather than an aban-
donment of his earlier theory. That is, communicative action is taken to be
the key mechanism of any modern democracy for maintaining a vital civil
society. For the purposes of what follows it is also necessary to recognize that
Habermas’s concept of communicative action in essence attempts to draw out
the common ground between what he takes to be the two basic paradigms of
modern Western politics: the “organized labor movement” and the “bour-
geois emancipation movements.”19 That shared ground basically comes down
to maintenance and protection of a robust public sphere that makes freedom
of speech and association a genuine reality. The key question that animates
many critiques of Habermas’s theory is whether communicative action can
be considered a sufficient condition for vibrant democratic societies. In later
sections of this chapter I will consider some of these critiques. Before this
can be done, however, a preliminary clarification of Habermas’s sense of
deliberative democracy is necessary.
DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY
Over a decade after the appearance of TCA Habermas published a further ma-
jor work titled Between Facts and Norms (henceforth BFN). The basic task
of this later study is to consider in detail what follows from the assumption
that “in the age of a completely secularized politics, the rule of law cannot
be had or maintained without radical democracy.”20 In seeking to trace the
internal link between law and democracy Habermas also attempts to address
earlier criticism of his recourse to the notion of an ideal speech situation.
More specifically, he endeavors to “refute the objection that the theory of
communicative action is blind to institutional reality.”21 Drawing out the
role that the law plays in social integration allows Habermas to give a more
plausible account of how communicative action works in practice. From his
earlier work it is clear that such action ideally takes the form of face-to-face
exchanges between individuals or groups committed to arriving at consensual
agreement. As we saw, however, this can only happen against the backdrop
of an extensive consensus that is already in place. Whereas communicative
action depends on a commitment to pursue shared agreement that is rational
and voluntary, legal constraints work through a combination of assent and
compulsion. One of the basic goals of BFN is to make a compelling case for
the intrinsic connection between the rule of law and modern democracy. This
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14 Chapter One
involves demonstrating that legal frameworks are both subject to popular as-
sent and yet sources of legitimate collective constraint. In this way the juridi-
cal order can be grasped as the relatively stable manifestation and result of
extended communicative action.
Whereas TCA laid the foundations for what Habermas went on to call
“discourse ethics,” BFN locates itself explicitly within the sphere of politics.
Accordingly Habermas now adapts the specified conditions of communica-
tive action to what he calls “deliberative democracy.” Following R. A. Dahl’s
Democracy and Its Critics he enumerates five aspects of legitimate demo-
cratic deliberation:
Such a procedure should guarantee (a) the inclusion of all those affected;
(b) equally distributed and effective opportunities to participate in the political
process; (c) an equal right to vote on decisions; (d) an equal right to choose
topics and, more generally, to control the agenda; and (e) a situation that al-
lows all participants to develop, in the light of sufficient information and good
reasons, an articulate understanding of the contested interests and matter in need
of regulation.22
Such an account of democratic procedure centers on an observance of rights

and opportunities that is a commonplace of contemporary political discourse.
While each of the features listed is unobjectionable when stated abstractly
and formally, conducting actual deliberation along these lines would obvi-
ously encounter something that remains conspicuously absent from the
description, namely existing positions of relative power. In the context of
political deliberation background influences from such “steering media” as
corporations may play a role, but it is arguably the “symbolic capital” (i.e.,
perceived social standing) of the deliberative agents themselves that mostly
proves decisive. This is an important point of criticism and I will return to
it. At this point, however, it is necessary to note that Habermas’s notion of
deliberative democracy places most stress on the need for a vital civil society
made up of a diverse plurality of localized associations. Only insofar as it is
sensitive to the concerns of such groups can political decision-making claim
to be genuinely democratic in nature:
Resonant and autonomous public spheres of this sort must in turn be anchored
in the voluntary associations of civil society and embedded in liberal patterns
of political culture and socialization; in a word, they depend on a rationalized
life-world that meets them halfway. The development of such lifeworld struc-
tures can certainly be stimulated, but for the most part they elude legal regula-
tion, administrative control, or political steering. . . . But the conditions lie in
lifeworld contexts that limit from within the capacity of associated citizens to
organize their common life for themselves. What ultimately enables a legal
10_368_03_Ch01.indd 14 7/28/10 12:37 PM

community’s discursive mode of sociation is not simply at the disposition of

the members’ will.23
In this remark Habermas appears to be making two distinct points: first, that
spontaneously arising civic associations constitute the lifeblood of demo-
cratic political culture, and second, that modern democratic societies require
organizational structures beyond those provided by such associations. The
gap between civic associations and democratic organization is filled by what
Habermas calls the “public sphere.” The public sphere, Habermas explains,
“refers neither to the functions nor to the contents of everyday communica-
tion but to the social space generated in communicative action.”24 Elaborat-
ing on his notion of the public space produced by communicative action,
Habermas remarks:
For the public infrastructure of such assemblies, performances, presentations,

and so on, architectural metaphors of structured spaces recommend themselves:
we speak of forums, stages, arenas, and the like. These public spheres still cling
to the concrete locales where an audience is physically gathered. The more they
detach themselves from the public’s physical presence and extend to the virtual
presence of scattered readers, listeners, or viewers linked by public media, the
clearer becomes the abstraction that enters when the spatial structure of simple
interactions is expanded into a public sphere.25
In light of the key concerns of this book this comment on the nature of the
public sphere is extremely significant. Its basic meaning seems clear enough: as
the conditions of modern society become more complex on account of increas-
ingly extensive communications media, the space of social integration comes to
rely less and less on concretely situated locales of face-to-face encounter. It is
important to recognize that this account of the modern public sphere is under-
stood as a matter of sociological fact by Habermas. It is not intended as a value
judgment, either positive or negative. Due to the highly advanced complexity
of communications media that permeate modern societies, communities arising
under such conditions may be called imagined in the sense Benedict Anderson
uses in his work Imagined Communities. Anderson holds that “all communities
larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these)
are imagined.”26 The main concern of Anderson’s inquiry is the nation-state
as a historical and sociological collective. The nation, he says, “is imagined
because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their
fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each
lives the image of their communion.”27
Anderson’s analysis of the emergence of modern national communities offers
a historical account of precisely the kind of public sphere that Habermas has in
mind when speaking of deliberative democracy. An underlying conviction is
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16 Chapter One
shared by the two theorists, namely the idea that a specific synthesis of language
and technology realized in Europe from the early eighteenth century onward
brought about the modern public sphere. For Anderson it is the explosion of
print media, exemplified by the institution of the daily newspaper, that makes
possible the modern configuration of national community:
[The ceremony of reading newspapers] is performed in silent privacy, in the lair

of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs
is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose
existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.
Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily inter-
vals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically
clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?28
Although Habermas’s concept of communicative action gives the initial

impression that it looks to face-to-face encounters as the ultimate source
of social integration and cohesion, deliberative politics is seen as arising
through the interaction between spontaneously formed associations within
civil society and the formal institutions of national and regional governance.
For Habermas, in modern societies, direct face-to-face dialogue must cede
the task of social organization to the more abstract institutions of the state:
“[T]he communication structures of the public sphere relieve the public of the
burden of decision making; the postponed decisions are reserved for the insti-
tutionalized political process.”29 This indicates that there is a significant gap
between deliberative democracy and the idea of direct democracy. While the
deliberative model sees a high degree of political representation as inevitable
and desirable, direct democracy calls for extensive popular participation in
political decision-making. Habermas’s idea that the lifeworld of a particular
community necessarily places limits on “the capacity of associated citizens
to organize their common life for themselves,” indicates that other organiza-
tional sources are required to construct community.
In political terms Habermas favors the model of social democracy that
regulated the restructuring of his native West Germany after the Second
World War. Accordingly, he looks to institutionalized state structures to
perform the vital executive functions of deliberative democracy. He remarks:
“[I]t is advisable that the enlarged knowledge base of a planning and super-
vising administration be shaped by deliberative politics, that is, shaped by the
publicly organized contest of opinions between experts and counterexperts
and monitored by public opinion.”30 Though it would be a mistake to see
Habermas as an uncritical defender of large state bureaucracy, it is evident
from such a comment that he is willing to concede only a consultative role
to communities at the grassroots level. As we shall see, a major practical
10_368_03_Ch01.indd 16 7/28/10 12:37 PM

problem with many governmental and municipal attempts to engage public

opinion stems precisely from the fact that popular participation often ends
at the consultation stage. In this and later chapters I will argue that genuine
political community must involve the power not simply to deliberate but to
actually shape a shared environment of action. Without such power the kind
of popular deliberation outlined by Habermas risks becoming a tokenistic
operation of public relations on the part of state agencies.
DEMOCRACY AND INCLUSION
As we have seen, on both the ethical and the political level, communicative
action cites inclusion as a condition of legitimate deliberation and decision-
making. In Habermas’s sense inclusion relates to all those affected by the
matter to be decided upon. Obviously, the scale of inclusion will vary accord-
ing to the scope of the issue concerned. The very notion of inclusion tends to
involve identifying specific “communities” as affected parties. For example,
deliberations on local policing might recognize a need for consultation with
recognized leaders of certain ethnic minority groups. While broadly support-
ive of Habermas’s theory of communicative action and his vision of delibera-
tive democracy, Iris Marion Young worries that the emphasis on consensus
can lead in practice to exclusion of certain groups’ concerns:
Too strong a commitment to consensus as a common good can incline some or

all to advocate removing difficult issues from discussion for the sake of agree-
ment and preservation of the common good. Sometimes these difficult issues
matter deeply to one group because they perceive themselves as suffering a basic
injustice, but they are sources of deep disagreement because others in the society
perceive rectifying the alleged injustice as coming at too great a cost to them.31
Taking what is arguably a more empirical and realistic approach to political

deliberation than Habermas, Young draws an important distinction between
external and internal exclusion.32 External exclusion simply involves leaving
affected groups and individuals outside decision-making processes and bodies.
As such, it is, as Young notes, the form of exclusion that receives most practical
and theoretical attention. Internal exclusion is more subtle and by its very na-
ture less conspicuous. Such exclusion occurs when certain affected parties are
admitted to forums of deliberation but their claims and contributions are either
ignored or not granted equal respect to those of other speakers. As mentioned
earlier, such internal exclusion often occurs due to inequalities of symbolic
capital or social status. While communicative action clearly entails an obliga-
tion to lessen or eliminate external exclusion, its idealizing tendency induces
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18 Chapter One
blindness to internal exclusion. In other words, communicative action simply

assumes that all affected parties will be recognized as competent deliberative
agents. Accordingly, once admitted to a deliberative forum, all parties are as-
sumed to generate agreement to the extent that they advance arguments that
convince others in virtue of their rational and reasonable content. In common
with other critics, Young objects to this restriction of legitimate deliberation to
dispassionate, rational argumentation. Even if we assume an ideal case where
problems of external exclusion are eliminated, such a restriction will generate
internal exclusion in situations where speakers are perceived as arguing in a
nonrational manner. Taking the diversity of modern pluralistic societies seri-
ously, Young argues, obliges us to extend the bounds of legitimate deliberation
to include impassioned and rhetorical modes of speech:
Thus we rely on rhetoric to construct and respond to the many particular and
diverse publics appearing in modern mass democracies. Some who describe de-
liberative democracy give a misleading picture of a process in which the whole
polity is present to itself as a single public discussing its problems and coming to
decisions. Modern mass democracies are necessarily decentred, however, com-
posed of overlapping and interacting publics distanced in space and time. Some
publics are organized around marginalized social positions; others are interest
groups or publics sharing particular values or culture. . . . In so far as the many
sub-publics in a large and free society themselves sometimes must communicate
with one another to solve problems or resolve conflict, however, rhetoric aims
to help translate across them.33
It is important to note that Young is not opposing rhetoric to communicative

action here but making a case for inclusion of both within a plausible account of
deliberative democracy. As we shall see in the next chapter, other critics view
rhetorical speech as an intrinsic aspect of political discourse that Habermas’s
model is unable to acknowledge. The common ground of such critical positions
relates to Habermas’s insistence that legitimate discourse aims at not just par-
tial and local but rather universal agreement. In his account of discourse ethics
from 1983 Habermas characterizes the universality of valid norms as follows:
“All affected can accept the consequences and the side effects [the norm’s]
general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone’s
interests (and these consequences are preferred to those of known alternative
possibilities of regulation).”34 In BFN Habermas attempts to establish common
ground between the liberal and republican theories of democracy (established
by Kant and Rousseau respectively) by reaffirming his commitment to the uni-
versalizability principle in the context of deliberative democracy:
[I]f discourses . . . are the site where a rational will can take shape, then the
legitimacy of law ultimately depends on a communicative arrangement: as par-
10_368_03_Ch01.indd 18 7/28/10 12:37 PM

ticipants in rational discourses, consociates under law must be able to examine

whether a contested norm meets with, or could meet with, the agreement of all
those possibly affected.35
Precisely because Habermas’s defense of universal validity in ethics and poli-

tics has provoked fierce debate since the early 1980s, it is important to note that
he is arguing in favor of procedural as opposed to substantive universality. In
other words, his concern is for universal rules governing legitimate discussion
and deliberation and not for a universally shared viewpoint within any com-
munity of discourse. The common critical point made against Habermas that he
assumes rigid social homogeneity as a condition of communicative action must
be treated with caution and subject to qualification. As we have seen, Habermas
is quite aware of the diversity of democratic civil society and he seeks to defend
this diversity from the homogenizing affects of “colonization” by money and
power. Nevertheless, the doubt remains as to whether Habermas’s insistence
on universalizable norms of public discourse does not place undue restrictions
on “legitimate” decision-making. A first step in confronting this doubt can be
made by endorsing Young’s idea of facilitating local publics:
Political communication in mass democratic societies hardly ever consists in all
the people affected by an issue assembling together in a single forum to discuss
it. Instead, political debate is widely dispersed in space and time, and takes place
within and between many smaller publics. By a “local public” I mean a collec-
tive of persons allied within the wider polity with respect to particular interests,
opinions, and/or social positions.36
Young’s idea of local publics and her approach to deliberative democracy more
generally are motivated by her concern for historical instances of grave social
injustice and marginalization. In such cases deliberative democracy regulated
by the principle of universal rationality or reasonableness would not have
proved effective in bringing the concerns of oppressed and marginalized com-
munities onto the political agenda in the first place. Taking racial and gender
discrimination as significant areas of popular political concern, for example,
it is clear that attempts to achieve social justice could not have come about
through Habermas’s strictly defined mechanism of communicative action. This
is because the oppressed groups would be excluded from the outset as insuffi-
ciently “rational” discursive agents. Being excluded from the official processes
of political decision-making obliges oppressed individuals and groups to seek
other avenues of expression such as public rallies, protests, and forms of direct
action. In her earlier work Justice and the Politics of Difference (henceforth
JPD) Young suggests that Habermas’s appeal to universality indicates that he
subscribes to what she calls the “idealist fiction” of political impartiality. She
identifies specific forms of oppression generated by this fiction:
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20 Chapter One
Widespread commitment to the ideal of impartiality serves at least three ideo-

logical functions. It supports the idea of the neutral state, which in turn provides
some ground for the redistributive paradigm of justice. It legitimates bureau-
cratic authority and hierarchical decisionmaking processes, defusing calls for
democratic decisionmaking. And finally, it reinforces oppression by hypostatiz-
ing the point of view of privileged groups into a universal position. Instead of
impartiality, I argue, we should seek fairness, in a context of heterogeneity and
partial discourse.37
Simplifying Young’s critique we might say that the principle of universaliz-

ability implies a notion of impartial judgment, which in turn supports the
oppressive ideology of political paternalism. Principled opposition to such
paternalism would take the form of local community self-determination.
Young herself opposes self-determination to domination and defines it posi-
tively as the ability “to participate in determining one’s action and the condi-
tions of one’s action.”38 If one thinks of what Young calls here the conditions
of action as significantly involving the physical environment or space within
which an individual or group acts, then political self-determination can be
grasped as the ability of a community to shape its own context of action. In the
final section of this chapter I will offer some preliminary comments on what
the political project of constructing community in this sense might mean. In
so doing the positive and credible aspects of Habermas’s notions of commu-
nicative action and deliberative democracy can be brought together under the
title “communicative power.”
COMMUNICATIVE POWER AND PLACE
Following Hannah Arendt’s theory of democratic politics that sees democratic

community as arising out of a vibrant sphere of open public discourse, Haber-
mas attempts to integrate a certain notion of power into his conception of de-
liberative democracy. Such power, according to Habermas, is generated by the
cooperative interrelation between civil society and democratic state institutions
subject to the rule of law. Here the law is understood as making possible the
transformation of communicative action into legitimate political power:
The concept of the political in its full sense also includes the use of administra-
tive power within the political system, as well as the competition for access to
that system. This leads me to propose that we view law as the medium through
which communicative power is translated into administrative power. For the
transformation of communicative power into administrative has the function of
an empowerment within the framework of statutory authorization.39
10_368_03_Ch01.indd 20 7/28/10 12:37 PM

As we have seen, Habermas sees political legitimacy as arising out of com-

municative interaction between spontaneously arising groups within civil
society and state institutions of democratic decision-making. While he
clearly views grassroots initiatives as vital for official political deliberation,
Habermas thinks that the genuine ability of localized communities for self-
organization is strictly limited. While it is incontestable that the material
conditions of developed democratic societies bring about highly mediated
social relations, I think that Habermas is wrong to place severe restrictions
on the potential for localized self-organization within democratic societies.
One of the basic claims that I wish to advance in this book is that any cred-
ible account of community must acknowledge the pivotal significance of
a community’s empirical situation and location. The fact that Habermas’s
social theory offers an account of ideal conditions of communication that
abstracts from the concrete site of community is a significant shortcoming of
his approach. Rather than simply rejecting Habermas’s notion of dialogical
community out of hand, however, I will attempt to salvage aspects of it to
produce a more credible and arguably more realistic account of community.
I will attempt this by bringing in Iris Marion Young’s examination of social
relations under contemporary urban conditions.
In a chapter of her JPD, “City Life and Difference,” Young critiques
the model of community endorsed by what is called communitarianism. In
a manner that echoes the critical position of Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio
Agamben considered in the next chapter, Young asserts that communi-
tarians propose an ideal of community that “denies and represses social
difference.”40 She further claims that the communitarian view privileges
face-to-face encounters as the paradigmatic case of authentic social rela-
tions. While she is sympathetic to the communitarian critique of liberal in-
dividualism, Young thinks it is a mistake to see the alternative in the form
of local community autonomy. In the context of city life she maintains
that such a configuration of community is neither realistic not desirable.
Inspired by Richard Sennett’s influential study The Fall of Public Man,
Young goes so far as to assert a basic opposition between the model of
local autonomous community and the modern urban condition. “Appeals
to community are usually antiurban,”41 she remarks. Young identifies four
features or “virtues” of what she calls a “normative ideal of city life”:
(a) social differentiation without exclusion, (b) variety of social groups,
(c) eroticism in the sense of exposure and attraction to surprising encoun-
ters, and (d) publicity in terms of public space open to all.42 The final fea-
ture highlights the key role played by public space in the maintenance of
a vibrant culture of collective democratic expression and communicative
power. Young notes:
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22 Chapter One
Politics, the critical activity of raising issues and deciding how institutional
and social relations should be organized, crucially depends on the existence of
spaces and forums to which everyone has access. In such public spaces people
encounter other people, meanings, expressions, issues, which they may not
understand or with which they do not identify. The force of public demonstra-
tions, for example, often consists in bringing to people who pass through the
public spaces those issues, demands, and people they might otherwise avoid. As
a normative ideal city life provides public places and forums where anyone can
speak and anyone can listen.43
While Young concedes that her ideal of urban life may appear “laughably
utopian” in the face of actual urban conditions of increasing segregation,
crime, and neglect, she insists that it is useful for envisioning the positive
potential of city life to address issues of social justice. Young further advo-
cates robust municipal and regional urban planning informed by a vibrant and
pluralistic public sphere. She sees these two elements of democratic society
as mutually supportive: municipal bureaucracies construct spaces of public
urban encounter and expression, while urban communicative power works
to determine institutional decision-making. While regional urban planning is
taken to be an effective means to counteract oppression and marginalization,
Young is adamant that deepening localized community autonomy would not
advance the goals of social justice:
Greater local autonomy would be likely to produce even more exaggerated

forms of the inequalities than current decentralization produces: the concentra-
tion of needy people in those locales that provide the more extensive social and
welfare services, putting an increased burden on them which their productive
and resource base cannot meet, while other municipalities turn their backs on
what they do not consider their problem.44
In other words, Young thinks that local community autonomy would rein-
force and extend urban marginalization by lessening the opportunity and ne-
cessity of inter-communal encounter. In this she shares Habermas’s concern
that a political program of intensified decentralization would undermine the
social solidarity afforded by the democratic constitutional state. Young thus
echoes Habermas’s contention that the resources of any local community for
organizing itself at the grassroots level are limited. Developments in Western
democracies over recent decades amply illustrate the negative social impact
of reducing or removing governmental resources from marginalized urban
communities. Against this backdrop simply leaving such communities to or-
ganize themselves without state and municipal intervention would constitute
a dereliction of collective responsibility for social justice and material equal-
ity. The recent history of municipal urban planning shows, however, that in-
stitutional intervention tends to benefit disproportionately those communities
10_368_03_Ch01.indd 22 7/28/10 12:37 PM

which are already materially and socially privileged. To point to just one such
instance, David Harvey shows how municipal urban policy in Baltimore,
Maryland in the 1980s and 1990s involved huge sums of public money being
diverted into private development projects while impoverished communities
witnessed increased segregation and deterioration of the urban fabric.45
In her more recent book, Inclusion and Democracy, Young tackles directly
the issue of urban exclusion, which in the context of U.S. cities often takes the
form of ingrained racial segregation. While she acknowledges the role eco-
nomic inequality plays in urban segregation, Young’s primary concern here
as in her earlier book is with communicative inequality. As a consequence,
both the undesirable effects and the remedy of segregation are conceived in
terms of a more or less vibrant sphere of public discussion. While the notion
of “differentiated solidarity” that Young advocates appears to concede more
positive social potential to local community self-organization, her broader vi-
sion of democratic political community still centers on the task of construct-
ing and maintaining a space of open public discussion:
A public space . . . is one to which anyone has access, a space of openness and
exposure. The physical open spaces of public streets, squares, plazas, and parks
are what I have in mind with the term embodied public space. . . . [Such spaces]
importantly contribute to democratic inclusion because they bring differently
positioned strangers into one another’s presence; they make concrete the fact
that people of differing tastes, interests, needs, and life circumstances dwell
together in a city or region.46
While it is difficult to find fault with this vision of urban social space as an
idealized abstraction, as with Habermas’s notion of the ideal speech situation
the question arises: what does it tell us about the reality of contemporary social
conditions? When Young holds that segregation “reduces the living commu-
nication differently situated economic groups have,”47 again the statement is
unobjectionable. Still, it can be asked: why highlight “living communication”
as the key index of social justice? Though Young’s approach is both theoreti-
cally nuanced and arguably more sensitive to empirical conditions, ultimately
her conception of social justice shares with Habermas an idealizing theoretical
bias that tends to reduce political action to institutionalized communication.
Both Young and Habermas attempt to sketch a model of deliberative
democracy that avoids perceived weaknesses in traditionally opposed con-
figurations of democratic society offered by the state-welfare and liberal in-
dividualist models respectively. In so doing they seek to reaffirm the liberties
of civil society against state oppression while insisting that state institutions
represent the public good in opposition to the vested interests of money and
power. The one form of autonomy neither is willing to recognize as desirable
in its own right is that of local community. This is curious. For Habermas
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24 Chapter One
it is simply unrealistic to think that highly mediated contemporary societies

could be capable of self-organization; for Young, all projects of local orga-
nization will necessarily regress into dogmatic self-enclosure and exclusion.
My own view, by contrast, is that localized community self-organization is
not only possible but is currently a growing reality across liberal democratic
societies. Contemporary urban communities in particular are demonstrating
in practice rather than theory that significant social and political projects can
be conceived and realized without lapsing into malignant and exclusionary
identity politics. While such communities are both envisaged and maintained
through genuine communicative action, their significance and impact is
primarily due to their ability to construct the conditions of their own action.
Thus, while the idea of dialogical community identifies a necessary condition
for community construction, taken in isolation it produces a one-sided and
inadequate account.
Turning in the next chapter to theories of political community that em-
phasize difference and singularity rather than identity and universality will
allow this inadequacy to be better framed and analyzed. But only when we
look beyond such theoretical oppositions can a well-rounded configuration
of community be attained. This involves recognizing that the construction
of community does not begin and end with acts of communication. Just as
importantly, genuine community must be grasped as self-organizing in the
sense of determining the environment of its own realization and development.
Only when constructing community involves shaping the environment of
collective life can it be said to be truly democratic. Configuring democracy
on the model of communicative action, by contrast, reduces the struggle for
social justice to a claim to have a place at the negotiating table. This will not
suffice, however, for the simple reason that in actual political discussion the
terms of debate tend to be set in advance to favor vested interests and pow-
ers. As we shall see in the next two chapters, genuine communicative power
requires recognizing the power of different communities to invent and main-
tain their own means of expression. Only when such freedom of expression
entails freedom to construct the space of community will the long shadow of
political paternalism be dispelled.
NOTES
1. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume Two: Life-

world and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 126–27.
2. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume One: Reason
and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press,
1984), 286.
10_368_03_Ch01.indd 24 7/28/10 12:37 PM

3. Habermas, Communicative Action I, 287.

5. Habermas, Communicative Action I, 334. Habermas offers the following
account of dramaturgical or expressive action: “Dramaturgical actions embody a
knowledge of the agent’s own subjectivity. . . . Expressive knowledge can be expli-
cated in terms of those values that underlie need interpretations, the interpretations
of desires and emotional attitudes. Value standards are dependent in turn on innova-
tions in the domain of evaluative expressions. These are reflected in an exemplary
manner in works of art” (Communicative Action I, 334). The connections made here
between expressive speech acts, emotional attitudes, and art clarify how Habermas
consciously separates off the sphere of communicative action from emotive and
aesthetic expression. In an insightful and important essay on Walter Benjamin from
1972, Habermas appears more willing to concede social and political relevance, albeit
of a strictly mediated kind, to artistic expression. In connection with Benjamin’s idea
of redeeming the injustices endured by the oppressed in the past through the construc-
tion of “dialectical images” Habermas remarks: “I of course think that a differentiated
concept of progress opens a perspective that does not simply obstruct courage but can
make political action more sure of hitting its mark, for under historical circumstances
that prohibit the thought of revolution and give one reason to expect revolutionary
progress of long duration, the idea of the revolution as the process of forming a
new subjectivity must also be transformed. Benjamin’s conservative-revolutionary
hermeneutics, which deciphers the history of culture with a view to rescuing it
for the upheaval, may point out one path to take” (Habermas, “Walter Benjamin:
Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique,” in Philosophical-Political Profiles,
trans. F. Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 129–63). It is clear that, by the
time The Theory of Communicative Action appeared, this was not a path Habermas
had chosen to take. As the confrontation with poststructuralist thinkers deepened in
the 1980s, Habermas’ criticized what he saw as Jacques Derrida’s attempt to erase
the essential difference between poetic (“world-disclosive”) and communicative
(“problem-solving”) language. While he makes clear his opposition to such “lev-
eling,” Habermas does acknowledge “the special status that both philosophy and
literary criticism, each in its own way, assume as mediators between expert cultures
and the everyday world” (cf. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1987, 207). The constitutive role that the aesthetic dimension plays
in the construction of community is expressly acknowledged in the work of Jacques
Rancière, and this can be seen as an important marker of the distance between the
dialogical and the dissenting models of community. A precursor of Rancière’s posi-
tion is to be found in the late work of the Critical Theorist, Herbert Marcuse (cf. An
Essay on Liberation, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, 23–48).
7. Habermas, Communicative Action II, 149–50.
8. Habermas, Communicative Action II, 150.
9. Jürgen Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Haber-
mas, ed. Peter Dews (New York / London: Verso, 1992), 269–70.
10. Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity, 252.
11. Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity, 260.
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26 Chapter One

20. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse The-
ory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1996), xlii.
21. Habermas, Facts and Norms, xl.
22. Habermas, Facts and Norms, 315.
26. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London / New York: Verso,
2006), 6.
27. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6.
28. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 35.
31. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000), 44.
32. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 55.
34. Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT, 1990), 65.
35. Habermas, Facts and Norms, 103–4.
37. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1990), 112.
40. Young, Justice, 227. For a concise and influential account of the communitar-
ian position see Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: The Reinvention of Ameri-
can Society (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
41. Young, Justice, 236.
42. Young, Justice, 238–41.
45. See David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2000), 133–56.
46. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 213–14.
10_368_03_Ch01.indd 26 7/28/10 12:37 PM

Chapter Two
Singular Community
In the previous chapter I considered Habermas’s conception of community in

the context of his theories of communicative action and deliberative democ-
racy. Following Young’s line of criticism, I argued that the notion of dialogical
community was inadequate for two principal reasons. First, it neglects issues
of what Young calls internal exclusion, whereby individuals and groups are
granted less legitimacy in a context of discussion as a result of perceived in-
ferior social status or mode of address. Secondly, the need for concrete places
of shared discussion and social expression is downplayed within Habermas’s
model of community. In the face of Young’s insistence that dialogical commu-
nity needs to be more sensitive to issues of social difference and diversity, the
idea of singular community considered in this chapter would appear to offer a
more credible model. This latter model grasps community as something that
precedes any effort to achieve rational agreement through argumentation and
discussion. It also holds that it is a mistake to think of community in terms of
shared identity. Instead, community should be understood as something more
fundamental than any acknowledged commonalities. As such, the singular
configuration of community appears to go beyond Habermas’s theory in pre-
cisely the manner called for by Young. That is, it offers a social theory in line
with the concerns of the “politics of difference.”
In this chapter I will consider the work of two influential and highly re-
garded contemporary European philosophers, Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio
Agamben, insofar as they outline closely allied theories of community. The
intellectual-historical background that informs the work of these contempo-
rary European thinkers is complex and I will not attempt any comprehensive
reconstruction of it here. It is worthwhile noting, however, that they are
key figures of much broader attempt to reinterpret the Marxian tradition of
social theory in the aftermath of twentieth-century European totalitarianism.
27
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28 Chapter Two
The writings of Nancy and Agamben have been influential across different
disciplines in the humanities and social sciences in recent decades and they
provide a useful counterpoint to the more mainstream and dominant theories
of liberal politics that abound within academic literature. It is in that spirit
that I approach their work here. The model of singular community provides
useful resources for addressing some of the shortcomings of the theory of
dialogical community outlined in the previous chapter. To arrive at a credible
and satisfying account of community, however, it will be necessary in chapter
three to go beyond both models.
INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY
Nancy’s work The Inoperative Community from 1986 begins with the dra-
matic assertion that the key phenomenon of modernity is “the testimony of
the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community.”1 The
term “conflagration” is chosen deliberately in order to evoke the image of
bodies burnt in the name of the Nazi genocide. In this way Nancy makes clear
to the reader from the outset that his understanding of community is situated
against the backdrop of historical catastrophe. Contrary to initial impressions,
however, as Nancy’s analysis develops it becomes clear that he does not view
community as something lost. In fact, he is only too aware that the tendency
to grasp community as something like a lost idyll preceding the mass indus-
trialization and urbanization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a key
motif of much modern culture and theory. For Nancy it is important to resist
this nostalgic attitude toward community, as such nostalgia is implicated in
the nationalist politics of modernity. As he remarks: “Until this day history
has been thought on the basis of a lost community—one to be regained or
reconstituted.”2 This tendency to see community as something lost and to be
recaptured constitutes what Nancy thinks of as the idea of community as work
or project. Against this tendency he insists: “A community is not a project
of fusion, or in some general way a productive or operative project—nor is
it a project at all.”3 For Nancy, community is fundamentally misunderstood
when it is taken as something to be produced through purposive collective
action. At first glance this seems a highly counterintuitive claim and begs
the question: what, other than collective action, gives rise to and maintains
human community? Nancy’s answer to this question is both startling and
simple: nothing preceding community causes community, as community is the
original situation of all human existence. The mistake of modern theory and
practice alike for Nancy is to assume that there must be in each case some
event or project that founds community. Such projects, from the modest level
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Singular Community 29
of local urbanism to the grandiose plans of “nation building,” always assert an

initial lack of community. One way to understand Nancy’s counterposition is
to see him as denying that there can ever be a radical absence of community.
In other words, community is not constructed by dialogue or any other means
for the simple reason that it must be in place before any act of construction
can begin.
Nancy’s idea that community cannot be produced and is thus “inoperable”
draws on two key sources. The first of these is Marxism. As with Habermas
in The Theory of Communicative Action, Nancy is writing as a leftist thinker
during a protracted crisis in Marxist theory and politics. The final collapse
of the Soviet Union was merely a matter of several years away when he
published The Inoperative Community, and Nancy’s approach to political
philosophy is heavily influenced by the sense that the communist alternative
configuration of society had run its course. This exhaustion of communism,
however, by no means signifies that its basic concern for social justice has
been satisfied. Quite to the contrary, Nancy echoes Jean-Paul Sartre’s phrase
from 1960 that proclaimed communism as “the unsurpassable horizon of our
time,” when he notes that totalitarianism constitutes “the general horizon of
our time, encompassing both democracies and their fragile juridical para-
pets.”4 Nancy feels that one significant reason why the communist alternative
failed relates back to its definition of the human as a productive being. In The
1844 Manuscripts, for example, Marx asserts that “the social character is
the general character of the whole [revolutionary] movement: just as society
itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him.”5 In this early
text the idea that society is something produced by collective work already
assumes central significance for Marx. Drawing to a significant degree on
Hegel’s analysis of work or labor as human transformation of the material
environment, Marx makes the social nature of humanity a function of pro-
ductive capacity and action. This is just one side of a dialectical relationship,
however, the other being that process whereby the material environment
determines specific social formations and relations. The key thing for Nancy
is that in Marxism society and community are derived from production. Once
this premise is granted it is a relatively easy step to the further contention
that a more just society can similarly be realized through altered relations of
production. For Marxism, revolutionary politics takes the form of a collective
project to overcome social alienation. Nancy’s underlying objection to such
a project is that it covers over the profound sense in which community is al-
ways at work and can never, even in the most abject of conditions, be totally
destroyed. In fact, Nancy’s critique of what he takes to be communism’s false
image of human existence as something produced has a much broader exten-
sion and relates to all varieties of communitarianism. He asserts:
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30 Chapter Two
[There is no communist or communitarian opposition] that has not been or is

not still profoundly subjugated to the goal of a human community, that is, to
the goal of achieving a community of beings producing in essence their own
essence as their work, and furthermore producing precisely this essence as com-
munity.6
As we shall see, however, while critiquing his image of community in terms

of production, both Nancy and Agamben wish to reaffirm Marx’s concern
for social justice. Here they attempt to identify a notion of a future com-
munity that would be just in the sense of existing beyond all notions of a
historical project to be realized by a particular social, ethnic, or national
group. This is the idea of a “community to come” that will be tackled later
in this chapter.
While Marx’s account of the origins of social structure is a key focus of
critique, Nancy’s positive conception of community cannot be adequately un-
derstood without addressing a further, arguably more fundamental influence.
This is the work of the twentieth-century philosopher, Martin Heidegger. As
is evident throughout the writings of both Nancy and Agamben, Heidegger
represents a key reference point. At first glance this is curious, given that
Heidegger was notoriously reticent to draw social and political conclusions
from his work throughout the fifty years of his active career as an academic
philosopher. It is all the more striking in view of the fact that the only no-
table exception to this reticence was Heidegger’s explicit alignment of his
thinking with German National Socialism in the 1930s. A question that lies
at the heart of all so-called “left Heideggerianism” is whether that explicit
alignment expressed an inherent political tendency of Heidegger’s thought. In
overtly positioning their own configurations of the social within the context
of Heidegger’s thinking, both Nancy and Agamben imply a negative response
to this question. I will return to this issue toward the end of this chapter. For
now it is a question of understanding in more precise terms what the idea of
singular community takes from Heidegger.
SINGULARITY
In his magnum opus from 1927, Being and Time, Heidegger sets out to do
nothing less than offer a radically new philosophical account of human ex-
istence. According to Heidegger the key dimension of human existence and
understanding, as the title of his work suggests, is time. Whereas we com-
monly think of time in terms of a shared measurement of events, Heidegger’s
concern is for what phenomenology calls “lived time.” Lived time is time
from a first-person perspective, the time within which immediate experience
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and everyday life take place. Though such time is, according to Heidegger, al-
ways understood on some level within human existence, it very rarely comes
to view as an object of attention and concern as such. For this reason theory
and science, Heidegger argues, have failed to give an account of lived time
and have instead merely formalized what he calls “clock time” and passed
this off as the true phenomenon. As a consequence Heidegger sees his basic
task as bringing about a “destruction” of the traditional theory of time in order
to reveal a more original dimension of experience. In the opening sections
of Being and Time Heidegger gives an initial indication of the basic features
of existence. One such feature is what is he calls “mineness” (in German,
Jemeinigkeit). This feature of existence is closely related to another, whose
German term sounds similar and offers similar difficulties of translation. The
term Heidegger uses in this case is Jeweiligkeit, which has the basic mean-
ing of “in each separate case” and contains a root element (the German word
Weile) that corresponds to English “while” in the sense of an indeterminate
period of time. Though this is not the place for detailed examination of the
interpretations of Heidegger offered by Nancy and Agamben, it is important
to note that there are close affinities between Heidegger’s notion of Jewei-
ligkeit and the idea of singularity employed by the later thinkers. Assuming
such an affinity, singular community can be initially understood to involve
the experience of shared historical time. So understood, singular community
includes the following features: an experience of time’s all-inclusiveness and
inescapability; a fundamental sense of time as mortality or what Heidegger
calls “finitude”; finally, and perhaps most significantly, an understanding of
time as collective destiny.
While it is crucial to acknowledge the significance of Heidegger for the
notion of singular community it would be a mistake to understand Nancy
and Agamben as merely repeating Heidegger’s analysis of existence. For
while they attempt to think through certain elements of Heideggerian thought
it can equally be said that they strive to extend it to areas where Heidegger
remained conspicuously silent. Most importantly for the present context, Be-
ing and Time has virtually nothing to say about collective existence. What
little it does say is nevertheless crucially important for understanding the
idea of community shared by Nancy and Agamben. In the closing sections
of Being and Time Heidegger proposes a notion of collective or communal
historical existence (or “Dasein” in Heidegger’s German usage) under the
title “destiny”:
[Dasein’s] historizing is a co-historizing and is determinate for it as destiny. This

is how we designate the historizing of the community, of a people. Destiny is
not something that puts itself together out of individual fates. . . . Our fates have
already been guided in advance, in our being with one another in the same world
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32 Chapter Two
and in our resoluteness for definite possibilities. Only in communicating and in

struggling does the power of destiny become free. Dasein’s fateful destiny in and
with its ‘generation’ goes to make up the full authentic historizing of Dasein.7
The notion of collective existence as destiny remains underdeveloped by

Heidegger in his early work. It can be followed through to his encounter
with Nazism in the 1930s, but that cannot be my concern here. What is of
direct relevance is the very fact that Heidegger characterizes community as
something essentially beyond the control of those involved. In basic terms,
Heidegger’s account of existence in Being and Time is regulated by two fun-
damental and complementary concepts: projection (which Nancy connects
with “work”) and what is called thrownness or facticity. Whereas projection
relates to the future projects that singular existence concerns itself with,
“thrownness” denotes that side of existence which escapes both individual
and collective control. Thrownness refers above all to the fact that each of
us is powerless with respect to our condition of mortality. In view of this we
might say that singular community in Heidegger stands for a collective effort
to confront the destiny of death. Nancy echoes this understanding when he
remarks: “Death is indissociable from community, for it is through death that
the community reveals itself—and reciprocally.”8
In all his texts from the late 1970s on, Giorgio Agamben also demonstrates
a significant debt to the work of Heidegger. His more recent work has close
affinities with that of Nancy and similarly centers on the notion of singularity.
In The Coming Community from 1990 Agamben initially tackles the concept
of the singular as it was analyzed in medieval scholastic philosophy via the
notion of quodlibet ens (“whatever being”). For Agamben this seemingly
abstract concept holds the key to breaking down the opposition between
the individual and universal that continues to regulate political and social
thought. He remarks:
The Whatever in question here relates to singularity not in its indifference with
respect to a common property (to a concept, for example: being red, being French,
being Muslim), but only in its being such as it is. Singularity is thus freed from
the false dilemma that obliges knowledge to choose between the ineffability of
the individual and the intelligibility of the universal. . . . In this conception, such-
and-such being is reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies
it as belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the
Muslims)—and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple generic
absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself.9
This passage makes clear a further criticism of Marxian thinking, namely its
configuration of the social in terms of class membership. While Marx’s notion
of the proletariat as the class that embodies the possible end of all class distinc-
10_368_04_Ch02.indd 32 7/28/10 12:39 PM

tions can be understood to point toward something like the idea of singularity
in question, Agamben insists against this that “today we would have to say that
there are no longer social classes, but just a single planetary petty bourgeoisie,
in which all the old social classes are dissolved.”10 This claim may appear rather
facile and manifestly false if it is taken to mean that the current global situation
is one of universal property ownership. More charitably, we can understand
Agamben as following a well-established line of poststructuralist criticism of
Marx in insisting that the idea of a majority industrial working class as a po-
tential vehicle of radical social change has no credible contemporary currency.
In agreement with Nancy, Agamben insists that singularity must be understood
in stark opposition to any form of social identity, be it that of the individual,
group, or class: “Whatever is the figure of pure singularity. Whatever singular-
ity has no identity, it is not determinate with respect to a concept, but neither is
it simply indeterminate; rather it is determined only through its relation to an
idea, that is, to the totality of its possibilities.”11
Two key problems emerge when the concept of singularity proposed by
Nancy and Agamben is initially confronted: first, it remains indeterminate
and largely characterized in terms of what it is not; second, it seems to un-
dermine resources for political action and resistance through collective ac-
tion. Further consideration reveals that for both thinkers a response to these
problems is proposed through bringing to light the role language plays in
constituting community. Given that singularity stands in stark opposition to
identity, it follows that language within singular community cannot be seen
as essentially productive of identity. Instead, language must be viewed as
resisting the tendency toward social identification. Although the idea of lan-
guage as resistance seems to indicate a basic affinity with Habermas, we will
see that in fact the idea of singular community cannot be readily reconciled
with the notion of dialogic community discussed in the previous chapter.
THE LANGUAGE OF SINGULARITY
The third chapter of Nancy’s The Inoperative Community is titled “Literary

Communism” and comes closest to offering an explicit account of the rela-
tionship between singular community and language. In the previous chapter
I referred briefly to the postmodernist critique of Habermas. There are two
central points raised by this critique of immediate relevance to the present
discussion, one that relates to the idea of historical development according to
rational progress and another relating to the notion that the concerns of social
justice can be best served by instituting contexts for dialogical consensus-
formation. Both those sympathetic to Habermas’s project and those opposed
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34 Chapter Two
to it claim that it asserts too close a tie between consensus and social justice.
Iris Marion Young, as we saw, insists that the social conditions of liberal de-
mocracy mean that imposing any imperative for consensus will lead to unjust
exclusions and to bolstering dominant social groups and identities. She fur-
ther believes that Habermas conceives of political and social discourse in too
rationalistic a manner, excluding thereby impassioned and rhetorical forms
of address as invalid. In making this criticism Young is not fundamentally
questioning the idea that dialogue is a key factor in producing social cohe-
sion and furthering social justice, she is simply pleading for a more generous
understanding of what dialogue can legitimately involve. Nancy, by contrast,
wants to break with any model of language understood as rational argumen-
tation and agreement. In making this move he claims that the real challenge
in linking language and social justice resides in moving beyond any model
of linguistic intersubjectivity. He calls this move “interrupting the myth” of
dialogue:
There is a myth of the dialogue: it is the myth of the “intersubjective” and

the intrapolitical foundation of logos and its unitary truth. And there is also
the interruption of this myth: the dialogue is no longer to be heard except as
communication of the incommunicable singularity/community. I no longer (no
longer essentially) hear in it what the other wants to say to me, but I hear in it
that the other, or some other (de l’autre) speaks and that there is an essential
archi-articulation of the voice and of voices, which constitutes the being in
common itself.12
This quite different sense of dialogue, which Nancy goes on to call simply
“facing the other,” is understood to have no content or message that might
be conveyed from one speaker to another. In a word, there is no negotiation
of mutual understanding in singular dialogue. Here Nancy shows himself to
be a direct inheritor of the poststructuralist understanding that seeks to sever
the connection between language and the intentions of a linguistic subject or
agent. A key tenet of this understanding is that language is not to be grasped
as a neutral tool through which subjects achieve understanding or bring about
a change in other subjects or the material world. Beyond this rejection of the
instrumental understanding of language, however, the idea of an ethics of
writing emerges that directly challenges Habermas’s notion of discourse eth-
ics. In line with this idea Nancy insists that dialogue is intrinsic to singular
community despite the fact that for him dialogue has neither task nor func-
tion. He further follows Jacques Derrida’s lead in insisting that language and
dialogue should be not be grasped according to the paradigm of the present
voice—whether interiorized or externalized—but instead as a silent recogni-
tion that others are present. What is at stake here is a sense of acknowledg-
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ment or recognition of the irreducibility of each speaker to any set of explicit

identifying characteristics. If acts of identification are taken to be the basic
function of language, then all linguistic practice will entail violence and in-
justice from the perspective of singular community. Nancy, however, wishes
to retain the resources of language but insists that language as writing can
offer a configuration of the social that suspends and interrupts all symbolic
violence through identification. This writing constitutes what Nancy calls
“literary communism,” which, he says:
defines neither a politics, nor a writing, for it refers, on the contrary, to that
which resists any definition or program, be these political, aesthetic, or philo-
sophical. But it cannot be accommodated within every “politics” or within every
“writing.” It signals a bias in favor of the “literary communist” resistance that
precedes us rather than our inventing it—that precedes us from the depths of
community.13
The communism that Nancy here equates with writing stands in direct oppo-
sition to any model of community based on mutual understanding, such as the
one proposed by Habermas. Nancy makes this point unmistakable when he
remarks that “we understand only that there is no common understanding of
community, that sharing does not constitute an understanding . . . that it does
not constitute a knowledge, and that it gives no one, including community
itself, mastery over being-in-common.”14
Agamben agrees with two key contentions found in Nancy’s writings:
first, that language is key to attaining an adequate account of community,
and, second, that the predominant notion of language as a tool of understand-
ing, knowledge, and consensus must be rejected. In The Coming Community
Agamben claims that what Guy Debord famously called the “society of the
spectacle” in the 1960s points toward a certain destruction of language. He
notes:
It is clear that the spectacle is language, the very communicativity or linguistic

being of language. This means that a fuller Marxian analysis should deal with
the fact that capitalism . . . was directed . . . principally toward the alienation of
language itself, of the very linguistic and communicative nature of humans, of
that logos which one of Heraclitus’s fragments identified as the Common. The
extreme form of the expropriation of the Common is the spectacle, that is, the
politics we live in.15
Here Agamben makes clear that for him, as for Nancy, the capitalist configura-
tion of the social centered on production brings about the dissolution of singu-
lar community through the destruction of language. The imperative of capital-
ist development, Agamben contends, “drives the nations of the earth towards
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36 Chapter Two
a single common destiny [which] is the alienation from linguistic being, the
uprooting of all peoples from their vital dwelling in language.”16 Agamben’s
earlier work from the late 1970s and earlier 1980s already centers on this idea
of the destruction of community through the destruction of language. Here
Agamben’s interpretation of the German Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin ex-
erts a decisive influence. For instance, in his work Infancy and History from
1978 Agamben takes up Benjamin’s notion of the “destruction of experience”
set out in the latter’s 1933 essay “The Storyteller.” Agamben’s analysis echoes
Benjamin’s essay, when he remarks: “Modern man makes his way home in the
evening wearied by the jumble of events, but however entertaining or tedious,
unusual or commonplace, harrowing or pleasurable they are, none of them will
have become experience.”17 As Agamben’s analysis unfolds, the connection
between this destruction of experience and language becomes clearer. Here
Agamben grasps the notion of “infancy” literally, that is, as an initial state
of speechlessness. The key point for Agamben is that this speechlessness or
silence remains essential to the mature speaking adult, such that silence is the
ground and condition of all acts of speech. Maintaining a link with this state
of infant silence is what, according to Agamben, makes experience possible:
“In terms of human infancy, experience is the simple difference between the
human and the linguistic. The individual as not already speaking, as having
been and still being an infant—this is experience.”18 The implication is that the
tendency to see language and linguistic capacity solely as a means for achiev-
ing mutual understanding actually results in a key element being covered
over. For Agamben the fundamental thing is to grasp language not in terms
of something actually conveyed or produced but rather as a pure potentiality
of “communication.” In his more recent work Agamben reaffirms the connec-
tion between community and language without content. Thus in an essay from
1995 titled “The Face” Agamben remarks:
If what human beings had to communicate to each other were always and only
something, there would never be politics properly speaking, but only exchange
and conflict, signals and answers. But because what human beings have to com-
municate to each other is above all pure communicability (that is, language),
politics then arises as the communicative emptiness in which the human face
emerges as such.19
Here Agamben is working with a notion of “pure language” derived from one
of Benjamin’s early essays.20 This idea of language without content that, as
Agamben says, communicates language or communicability as such, is not
readily comprehensible. This is hardly surprising given that a basic indeter-
minacy is asserted as intrinsic to this idea of language. What can be said with
some certainty, however, is that Agamben follows Benjamin’s lead in con-
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necting “pure language” with social justice and historical redemption. This
brings us to an idea of political messianism that is closely connected with what
Agamben calls the “community to come.” Taking up Derrida’s idea of deferred
presence, the notion of the community to come insists that, rather than a project
to be realized, community is something that holds people together precisely in
virtue of the fact that it can never become something like a finished product.
Speaking formally, one might say that singular community is more like a pro-
cess than an object, feature, or stable condition. This notion of the community
to come will be considered in more detail in the final section of this chapter.
Having followed the idea of singular community in Nancy and Agamben
thus far, it may be objected that such an idea offers an extremely vague and
dissatisfying account of community. What, if anything, can this idea illuminate
in relation to actual historical or contemporary communities and their various
struggles for social justice? Though many valid objections can be made against
the theory of dialogical community, its basic characteristics are at least readily
identifiable. In the case of singular community, by contrast, Nancy and Agam-
ben seem to offer little more than a list of what it is not. To some extent such
criticism is justified. It is necessary to recognize, however, that the models of
dialogical and singular community are responses to quite different questions.
Whereas Habermas is primarily concerned to show how social cohesion under
the conditions of modern liberal democracy is embedded in mechanisms of
linguistic exchange, the idea of singular community seeks to account for social
existence at a deeper level. That is, it strives to indicate what makes any social
organization at all possible. In this way the model of singular community offers
something like a social ontology or an account of what it is to be social in any
case. Even if this distinction is granted, however, one may remain dissatisfied
with the paradigm of singular community. In my view, although the idea of
singular community succeeds in drawing attention to aspects of the social un-
derplayed in Habermasian dialogical community, its indeterminacy constitutes
a major shortcoming. In the next section I will explore this issue with respect to
the specific problem of community and space. My basic contention will be that
Nancy and Agamben fail to offer a plausible account of how place and space
are crucially involved in any actual instance of community.
SPACES OF COMMUNITY
In the final section of the previous chapter I looked at the relationship be-
tween communicative power and place. Iris Marion Young’s insistence on
the importance of public space for articulating group concerns was consid-
ered in light of Habermas’s comparative lack of concern for actual sites of
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38 Chapter Two
effective communicative action. A basic contention of this book is that space

and place are essential to the existence and understanding of community.
More precisely, the claim is that community cannot be accounted for in the
absence of a genuine place of collective action. Place and collective action are
abstractions when taken in isolation, but together they constitute the essential
elements of any satisfying and credible model of community. From this it fol-
lows that any approach to community that neglects the issue of space suffers
from a serious shortcoming. In view of the scope and concerns of this book it
can be said, in general terms, that theory tends to accentuate action in isola-
tion from space, whereas urbanism and architecture are predisposed to view
space in the absence of spontaneous collective action on the part of inhabit-
ants. As was shown, Habermas’s notion of the ideal speech situation indicates
that space is not given its due in his account of dialogical community. The
theory of singular community, by contrast, strives to resist an understanding
that turns on collective action and agency. What happens to place and space
within this model?
Insofar as the idea of singular community is closely allied to writing and
literature it might be assumed that space remains of little significance to it.
Indeed, there is a marked suspicion of attempts to link community and space
in the sense of an identified territory or place of action. In light of the under-
lying shared concern of Nancy and Agamben to remain mindful of the more
recent failings of identity politics, this suspicion is hardly surprising. To take
only the most obvious example of German National Socialism, the mythical
notion of a national territory and historical homeland constitutes a key motif
of Nazi politics. Almost inevitably, national and ethnic disputes involve ap-
peals to a territory belonging to a certain group or people as part of a putative
historical destiny. The linkage between ethnically based nationalism and
claims to national territory no doubt lies behind Nancy’s following remark,
where he indicates that the process of modern urbanization has undermined
the connection between community and some proper place of inhabitation:
In place of communion there is no place, no site, no temple or altar for community.

Exposure takes place everywhere, in all places, for it is the exposure of all and of
each, in his solitude, to not being alone ( . . . in our great metropolises, where more
and more different “communities” exist side by side, intersect, pass each other by
and intermingle, the exposure to not being alone, the risk of face-to-face encounter,
is constantly becoming more diverse and more unpredictable . . . ).21
It is important not to misunderstand Nancy’s denial of any proper place of

community as indicating some kind of nostalgic regret. Rather, the sense
of exposure he speaks of is taken to be the positive and genuine experience
of community as such. As the previous quote indicates, Nancy contends that
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the contemporary state of social life under the conditions of mass urbaniza-
tion should not be understood with respect to proper places assigned to certain
communities. One can easily identify good grounds for such a contention. Any
rigorous attempt to constitute community in practice according to localization
tends to have one of two results: either social difference is suppressed through
enforced assimilation to an official norm, or such difference is made visible
through spatial segregation. As neither homogenization nor segregation is in
line with a genuine concern for social justice, the obvious response seems to
be to sever community from any notion of proper place. In an important article
from 1992 titled “La Comparution / The Compearance,” Nancy explicitly links
the Marxian paradigm of productive community with the traditional notion of
the polis as a place of collective activity. It is from this perspective that he cri-
tiques Marx’s model of politics as collective praxis within the “polis”:
[The “realization” of politics is for Marx] the polis, coextensive to the whole of
the real life of the community. But this coextension can be understood in two
ways. Either the polis is in the end the same as the sum or the combinatorial of all
the [human] activities . . . or that which is here called “polis” represents something
that does not let itself be confused with any combination of activities.22
Once divorced from any sense of the site of collective activity, Nancy con-
cedes, the polis can come to stand for the space of singular community, that
is, a sense of the “in-common” that precedes any actual social activity. In
this sense only is Nancy willing to see the polis as a place of what he calls
“compearance,” namely the appearing together that is constitutive of human
existence as such. At the same time, Nancy insists that “polis no longer signi-
fies the ‘city’ except in a historical fashion.”23
This shifting of the site of community away from the city is shared with
Agamben. In his best-known work, Homo Sacer from 1995, Agamben claims
that the historical paradigm of the social has shifted from the city to the
camp. At the centre of Agamben’s analysis in Homo Sacer stands the follow-
ing contention with respect to the Nazi death camps: “[We must] regard the
camp not as a historical fact and an anomaly belonging to the past but in some
way as the hidden matrix and nomos [law] of the political space in which
we are still living.”24 The immediate source of this contention is Benjamin’s
resonant remark: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of
emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”25 Benjamin’s
remark is written in the year of his death (1940) and directed explicitly at
those “opponents of fascism” who wonder how the political situation realised
by Nazism could still be possible in the twentieth century. A similar intention
motivates Agamben’s notion of the camp and his efforts to account for such
contemporary global phenomena of mass suffering as enforced migration and
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40 Chapter Two
displacement. In basic terms, for Agamben the camp is the site of what he
calls “bare life,” that is, human life stripped of the social identity and judicial
protection accorded those who are acknowledged as citizens of a sovereign
nation-state. Agamben contends:
The growing dissociation of birth (bare life) and the nation-state is the new
fact of politics of our day, and what we call camp is this disjunction. . . . The
camp is the fourth, inseparable element that has now added itself to—and so
broken—the old trinity composed of the state, nation (birth), and land.26
What Agamben proposes in Homo Sacer is in essence a correlation between

a widely acknowledged social phenomenon—actual statelessness—and
something like a generative schema—camp. Presumably, in proposing this
correlation Agamben is adhering to the poststructuralist tenet (one shared
by earlier thinkers such as Heidegger and Benjamin) that causal explanation
is inadmissible within philosophical-historical analysis. Thus, the argument
is not that the paradigm of the camp in any way materially determines or
causes bare life in the form of statelessness to exist. Nevertheless the notion
of camp appears to be offered by Agamben as something more than a mere
conceptual framework or heuristic device. Instead, it seems that Agamben
grasps the idea of the camp as a destiny in the sense that Heidegger uses this
term when speaking of the historical status of a people or community. Ac-
cordingly, through his understanding of camp as some kind of modern politi-
cal destiny Agamben brings space and community together but at a certain
price. Agamben’s analysis risks running afoul of what the theory of singular
community is precisely trying to avoid, namely reaffirming the totalitarian
understanding of community in terms of a fatalistic connection between a
particular form of social organization and a specific schema of place. In this
sense Nancy’s attempt to escape the myth of community would be counter-
acted by Agamben’s sense of the camp as community’s space.
In a recent article Philippe Mesnard has taken Agamben’s analysis of the
Nazi death camps in Homo Sacer to task for failing to acknowledge the his-
torical complexity of these sites of oppression. In essence Mesnard accuses
Agamben of mystifying the social reality of the camps by abstracting them
from their concrete historical context:
By striving to locate in “the camp” what he calls the “very paradigm of political
space,” Agamben erects an insurmountable frontier around concentration camps
which become, in fact, isolated from their surrounding society, and turns them
into an exclusive “outside.” Consequently, Agamben fails to envisage the global
system which surrounds the camps, and included numerous social and economic
interfaces present in the entire territory of the Third Reich.27
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Mesnard elaborates on his criticism by claiming that Agamben’s treatment

of the camps is symptomatic of his broader approach to politics as regulated
by “the exclusive sign of a paradigmatic absolute” and amounting to a “radi-
cal vision of politics” he sees as shared by Nancy.28 He also contends that
Agamben “radicalizes Heidegger’s ontology” by positing what he calls an
“essentialist monocausalism.”29 Finally, Mesnard offers a important explica-
tion of what Agamben’s inheritance of the Heideggerian perspective amounts
to when he insists: “A theory of passivity cannot dispense with a theory of
action, unless it openly advocates a mystical posture, which Agamben’s
thought does not.”30 Agamben’s reception of Benjamin’s messianism sug-
gests, however, that mystical accents are evident within his approach to
community, namely in his appeal to an indeterminate “coming community.”
Indeed, one might contend that any approach to oppression that proclaims a
form of resistance without determinate material means amounts to a de facto
mysticism. We are thus confronted with a crucial question: does the model
of singular community, in playing down both collective activity and the en-
abling potential of concrete (as opposed to generalized and schematic) place,
yield anything other than an indeterminate sense of shared passivity? In other
words, does singular community offer any credible resources for resisting
oppressive power and contributing to social justice? The following section
confronts this question directly.
RESISTANCE AND THE “COMMUNITY TO COME”
In The Inoperative Community Nancy makes an explicit connection between

singular community and resistance:
Community is, in a sense, resistance itself: namely, resistance to immanence.
Consequently, community is transcendence: but “transcendence,” which no lon-
ger has any “sacred” meaning, signifying precisely a resistance to immanence
(resistance to the communion of everyone or to the exclusive passion of one or
several: to all the forms and all the violences of subjectivity).31
Everything turns here on the “in a sense” qualification. Nancy, as we saw,

states that the figure of community constituting “the general horizon of our
time” is none other than immanentism or totalitarianism. This contention is
shared by Agamben. It follows that singular community must be understood
in some emphatic sense, that is, as community in opposition to how commu-
nity is generally understood and realized. This recourse to a sense of commu-
nity exclusively determined in negative ways demonstrates once again a close
affinity with Heidegger’s mode of thinking. A logic of negation is employed
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42 Chapter Two
by Nancy’s whenever he evokes community in an emphatic sense. Thus he

speaks of “[C]ommunity ‘as such’: that is to say, neither substance nor ac-
cident nor subject nor object nor communion nor combination.”32 Having
reduced out from Marxian communism all concrete diagnoses and injunctions
Nancy retains only the vaguest appeal to radical change, an appeal that argu-
ably leaves out all specific means identified by Marx with respect to historical
social struggle:
[C]ommunism is the paradoxical sign which at once signals the end of the whole
world and the transition into another. . . . Another world will have opened itself
in the new stricture—albeit obscure—of community. Between the two there will
have been nothing—nothing but the pale, derisory, fleeting evasion of a “civili-
zation of the individual” (or of the “person”), liberal without liberation, humane
without the means of wresting man from man to expose him to “that of which
the foundation does not reside within him,” as Schelling put it.33
This passage amply illustrates a certain troubling reduction of Marxian com-

munism to an indeterminate messianism. While Nancy would insist that he is
simply interpreting communism in a manner that allows us to see its political
promise shorn of its productivist bias, without a materially and historically
grounded theory of praxis, Marx’s social theory is left without credible means
for tackling concrete cases of oppression and injustice. Recalling the previous
section, the inadequacies of Nancy’s analysis can perhaps best be summed up
by saying that he attempts to reconfigure community in the absence of any
concrete historical determination of place, where place is understood as the
material context of praxis.
In my view the notion of singular community is profoundly character-
ized by what has been called “radical passivity.” In a book bearing that title
Thomas Carl Wall identifies what is to be understood by this notion:
We are arguing that the point to which each thinker we examine leads us is the
point of communicativity as such, insofar as this point is itself an interruption
of communication. That is to say, communicativity pulverizes discourse. It gives
nothing to be thought; it gives no message to which we might listen but, in ef-
fect, says: there is (il y a).34
This explanation of radical passivity in terms of the incommunicable source

of all acts of communication and common existence makes clear once again
the negative logic underlying the approach to community shared by Nancy
and Agamben. I have suggested that this approach fails to provide any basis
for effective opposition to oppression. However, once the implications of the
figure of radical passivity are made explicit, a much more damning potential
critique begins to emerge, namely that this figure readily lends itself to the
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ideological support of oppressive power itself. According to this critique the

schema of bare life that regulates the thought of Nancy and Agamben alike
starts to look like a philosophical elaboration of the central wish symbol of
totalitarian oppression.
In his exploration of “the common,” Antonio Negri subjects Agamben’s
thinking of community to precisely this line of criticism. His summary of
where the notion of radical passivity leads is striking in its lapidary formula-
tion: “This thinking of the common, in the anxiety of the awaiting of the other
(as in Levinas), results in mysticism.”35 The text of an interview with Negri
in the year following the publication of Empire levels perhaps the gravest ac-
cusation at the figure of bare life or radical powerlessness that stands at the
heart of Homo Sacer:
From a logical standpoint, it is possible to think all this: the naked bodies of the
people in the camps, for example, can lead precisely in this direction. But this
is also the point at which this concept turns into ideology: to conceive of the
relation between power and life in such a way actually ends up bolstering and
reinforcing ideology. Agamben, in effect, is saying that such is the nature of
power: in the final instance, power reduces each and every human being to such
a state of powerlessness.36
For Negri and Michael Hardt in Empire the lesson of totalitarianism is not
that it may be resisted from some indeterminate situation of radical power-
lessness but rather that the oppression itself was a reaction to the manifested
power of productive cooperation. They remark:
Through their monstrosities of reducing human beings to minimal naked life,

fascism and Nazism tried in vain to destroy the enormous power that naked life
could become and to expunge the form in which the new powers of productive
cooperation of the multitude are accumulated. One might say in line with this idea
that the reactionary deliriums of fascism and Nazism were unleashed when capital
discovered that social cooperation was no longer the result of the investment of
capital but rather an autonomous power, the a priori of every act of production.37
Another way of expressing this criticism is to say simply that power works
as a differential, that is, always in terms of more or less power accruing to
particular individuals or collectives in relation to others. It follows from this
that absolute power is a fascist delirium precisely because it is empirically
impossible. But equally, absolute powerlessness must be seen as an ideologi-
cal fiction, a fiction particularly useful to institutions of oppressive power.
Despite the appeal to an ethics of singularity beyond any traditional ethics
of identity or exclusion, Nancy speaks of injustice as absolute.38 Such abso-
lutizing of suffering is closely connected to its decontextualization which,
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44 Chapter Two
whether intended or not, has recourse to a figure of absolute powerlessness

that is empirically speaking impossible. Again, such recourse actually renders
philosophical discourse incapable of addressing suffering in the singular and
leads inexorably to a manner of speaking that is tokenistic and emblematic,
as when Nancy refers to “a body of hunger; a tortured body; a broken will;
an emptied look; a mass war grave; a ridiculous, frustrated condition; and
also the dereliction of the suburbs, the wandering of migrants.”39 Whatever
the intentions of such a description, it is hard not to see in it a grotesquely
simplified allegory of contemporary reality. Returning to Mesnard’s critique,
he identifies in Agamben a similar tendency to recapitulate the visual clichés
of suffering rather than draw out the complexities and contradictions of the
historical site of the camp:
Concentration camps were characterized by generalized terror, rather than abso-

lute terror, but they were also complex systems of power strata linked to others
by “grey areas.” . . . Agamben’s “muselmann” [the figure of absolute bare life in
the camps] . . . acts as a screen and becomes one of these phenomena whereby
reality is reified into its own representation.40
The point of this criticism, I take it, is not to downplay the historical signifi-
cance of the Nazi camps but rather to insist that the model of radical passivity
that regulates Agamben’s analysis merely succeeds in mystifying rather than
illuminating these singular sites of suffering. A further point is that made by
Negri, namely that this model actually strengthens the ideology of oppressive
power through its suggestion that resistance is somehow to be found within
the very condition of absolute powerlessness. Once suffering and injustice are
grasped as phenomena that are necessarily locally situated and produced by
concrete inequalities of power (rather than through an abstract opposition of
absolute power and powerlessness), resistance to oppressive power can simi-
larly be understood in terms of concretely situated productive counterprac-
tices. If this means that resistance to oppression looks like a project or work
of some kind, then this is simply a reflection of how movements of resistance
actually arise and organize themselves. As a consequence, resistance cannot
be adequately understood apart from any instances of “work” in the sense of
cooperative praxis. The injunction against work or project that characterizes
the approach to community shared by Agamben and Nancy rests on the as-
sumption that all appeal to production reinforces the traditional understanding
of commonality in terms of exclusive identity. But if work in general denotes
transformative action with respect to the material situation of human life,
social transformation cannot be plausibly grasped in the complete absence of
work. Accordingly, the attempt to grasp social transformation as something
brought about not through material practices but rather through the interces-
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sion of an indeterminate shift in destiny amounts to ideological mystification

and can lead only to collective despair.
BETWEEN DIALOGICAL AND SINGULAR COMMUNITY
The previous section focused on some serious shortcomings of the theory

of singular community put forward by Nancy and Agamben. This critique
may give the impression that there is little or nothing positive to salvage in
the model of singular community, but that is not what I want ultimately to
suggest. It is important to recognize that, within contemporary philosophy,
Nancy and Agamben offer one of the most sophisticated, resonant, and
fruitful models of community. As such it contains invaluable resources for
articulating widespread contemporary concerns about identity politics. In
many ways the model of singular community directly inherits Marx’s vision
of a future social life freed from class divisions and conflicts. More specifi-
cally, Agamben’s recent work offers an analysis and critique of the central
tendency of contemporary politics to create segregated spaces for refugees,
asylum seekers, and migrants more generally. His idea of the paradigm of the
camp thus constitutes a significant and compelling extension of Foucault’s
earlier work on places of discipline and punishment. The key problem with
the model of singular community, as I see it, is its insistence on viewing
community in the absence of collective action. This problem is underscored
by a certain move toward a messianic understanding of social redemption,
which for both thinkers is closely connected to a notion of language as pure
communicability.
As indicated in the introduction, the two parts of this book are organized
dialectically. This means that the first two chapters stand in a relation of
opposition that is to some extent overcome in the final third chapter. The
advantage of this overall structure is that theories and practices of community
can be critiqued without being rejected as false. In making the transition to
the theory of dissenting community it is thus important to indicate explicitly
which features of the models already considered are to be retained. In Hab-
ermas’s approach it is the idea of noninstitutionalized community organiza-
tion that is of most value. Although it was shown that both Habermas and
Young were only willing to concede limited possibilities of localized social
organization, nevertheless their general position promotes community plural-
ism and self-determination. Their further opposition to political paternalism
and centralization is vital to the positive account of constructing community
that will be developed in part two of this book. In the case of singular com-
munity, Nancy and Agamben can be understood to radicalize Habermas’s
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46 Chapter Two
opposition to social homogenization. They insist that community should be

grasped at the level of bare existence, and thus prior to all specific forms of
social organization. However, whereas Habermas outlines a particular means
of constructing community (communicative action), singular community
insists that in any situation community already exists. The obvious objection
to this is that all genuine questions and problems of community relate not to
its mere existence but to its specific quality and character. For contemporary
inhabitants of a deindustrialized midwestern city in the United States, for
example, it would hardly address issues of social justice to say that, despite
all material deprivations, they still possessed community at a profound level.
To respond in this way would be more likely to look facile and callous than
deeply insightful and responsible. Dialogical and singular community can
also be contrasted in the following way: the former offers a mechanism for
socially just communication through criteria of inclusion, whereas the lat-
ter insists that all individuals must in some sense be included in community
from the outset in order for anything like Habermasian communication to be
possible. Finally, it can simply be said that the theory of singular community
rejects the very idea of community construction. For Nancy and Agamben,
this idea lies at the heart equally of the tradition of utopian socialism and of
the dystopian realities of twentieth-century totalitarianism.
In turning in the following chapter to the theory of dissenting community I
intend to bring together Habermas’s notion of generating community through
collective action and the idea of resistance to be found in Nancy and Agam-
ben. Focusing on the work of the contemporary French philosopher Jacques
Rancière, I will argue that community within liberal democracies should
be understood in terms of explicit or implicit opposition to institutionalized
hegemonic powers. While Habermas recognizes to some degree this opposi-
tion of community to established political and economic power, he looks
to parallel institutions of organized discourse to defend specific communi-
ties against such power. However, recent history and contemporary reality
demonstrate that, when invited to become “dialogue partners” in official
decision-making, local communities are more often pitted against each other
or simply brought in to do lip service to the idea of public participation. In
an important sense, then, a credible model of constructing community will
need to account for an essential element of resistance to prevailing powers.
The model of singular community hints at such resistance but remains vague
on how it might articulate itself in concrete cases. In the following chapter I
will attempt to incorporate into the model of dissenting community the idea
of what Henri Lefebvre and others have called “the right to the city.” In es-
sence this involves an extension of what is usually understood as basic human
rights to include the material freedom to use and codetermine the nature of
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public space. The argument behind this claim is simple: without the genuine
right of a public to play a role in shaping its shared material environment,
all other rights lack a concrete basis. For example, if the right to proclaim
certain political views in the form of spontaneous public demonstration is
denied, any claim to possess freedom of speech and conscience is liable to
degenerate into something merely formal and empty. In the absence of public
space as a forum for collective action human, civil rights are in effect limited
to the private sphere or, in the extreme case, to individual conscience. For
social justice to be a political reality, therefore, spaces of public dissent must
be created and defended from the desire of official, hegemonic power to limit
or remove them. The theoretical model that accords with this idea will be
explored in the next chapter.
NOTES
1. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor and trans.
Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 1.
2. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 9.
5. Robert Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978), 85.
7. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Rob-
inson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), 436
9. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Micheal Hardt (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1–2.
10. Agamben, Coming Community, 63.
17. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience,
trans. Liz Heron, (London / New York: Verso, 2007), 16.
18. Agamben, Infancy and History, 58.
19. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Bi-
netti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 96.
20. Cf. Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,”
in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael
Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 62–74.
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48 Chapter Two
21. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 143–44.

22. Jean-Luc Nancy, “La Comparution / The Compearance: From the Existence of
‘Communism’ to the Community of ‘Existence,’” trans. Tracy B. Strong, in Political
Theory 20, No. 3 (August 1992): 371–98, 388.
23. Nancy, “La Comparution,” 390.
24. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 166.
25. Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, eds. How-
ard Eiland and Michael Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 200), 392.
26. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 175–76.
27. Philippe Mesnard, “The Political Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben: A Critical
Evaluation,” trans. Cyrille Guiat, in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 5,
No. 1 (Summer 2004): 139–57, 148–49.
28. Mesnard, “Political Philosophy,” 149.
31. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 35s.
32. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 377–78.
34. Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben (New
York: SUNY Press, 1999), 9–10.
35. Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (New York / Lon-
don: Continuum, 2003), 192.
36. Antonio Negri (Interview with Cesare Casarino), “It’s a Powerful Life: A
Conversation on Contemporary Philosophy,” Cultural Critique 57 (Spring 2004):
151–83, 174.
37. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2000), 366.
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Chapter Three
Dissenting Community
The theories of dialogical and singular community represent what I would

like to call configurations of the social. By this I mean that they offer a
complex image of what society is or should be. As with most such images
they exhibit a certain synthesis of descriptive and prescriptive elements. The
notion of configuration implies that social organization is never something
merely natural or given, but instead shaped by collective action and other
causes over time. Social configuration is neither individual nor for the most
part conscious. For Habermas configuration happens at the level of the life-
world, whereas Nancy and Agamben view it as something that accompanies
human existence under any conditions. What is common to these positions
is the idea that social configuration provides the background for collective
action and understanding. At the same time it is important to recognize that
configuration is itself an activity: each individual is initiated into a certain
schema of social life through a gradual process of socialization. As with a
natural language, there is no particular agent or group of agents identifiable as
the ultimate source of a specific social configuration. This lack of determinate
source can give the impression that there is something inexplicable or myste-
rious about the origins of social organization. Many seminal sociological and
anthropological studies from the early twentieth century appealed to some
sense of the sacred when explaining the original structure of community.
As we have seen, Agamben retains this connection between community and
the sacred. According to his account, the political construction of segregated
areas where the rule of law is suspended brands contemporary community
as “sacred” in the sense of being at the mercy of state institutional power.
Habermas, by contrast, seeks to demystify social configuration by situating it
within a lifeworld that is primarily articulated by communicative action. As
shown, communicative action is a socially transparent enterprise of collective
49
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50 Chapter Three
rational dialogue. Habermas thus invites us to grasp social configuration as a

thoroughly comprehensible process of reaching mutual understanding. At the
same time he concedes that areas of opacity enter into communicative action
as a result of the influence of the steering media of power and money.
Both dialogical and singular configurations of community involve a notion
of intrinsic resistance. This takes the form of opposition to bureaucratic and
financial power in the former model, and to totalizing identity-based forms of
the social in the latter. Dialogical community offers a notion of social justice
predicated on communicative inclusion regulated by state institutions, whereas
singular community pursues justice largely in opposition to the state. In this
chapter and throughout the book more generally I wish to combine these two
understandings and propose an idea of community resistance predicated on
localized self-organization. While neither model of community considered
explicitly rules out this idea, the communicative approach places definite re-
strictions on it and singular community harbors a degree of suspicion toward
it. In my view the dialogical model unduly restricts community construction
in two key ways: first, by insisting on rational discourse or argumentation as
the sole source of legitimate decision-making, and second, by underestimating
both the capacity for local self-determination and the degree to which official
institutions are swayed by external, “non-rational” forces. These shortcom-
ings indicate a basic neglect of how established power relations predetermine
decision-making processes. The widely experienced and reported grassroots
disenchantment with political institutions within mature liberal democracies
can in large part be traced back to recognition of how these institutions are in-
fluenced by power and wealth to the detriment of any credible popular rule. In
the United Kingdom, for instance, the devolution of power away from a single
national parliament in the case of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland came
in response to political discontent. At the same time, however, the UK gov-
ernment has sought to bolster the sense of loyalty to British national identity
by insisting that applicants for naturalization attend citizenship classes. In this
way it is hoped that the values and notions assumed to be held by native citi-
zens will be absorbed through an explicit process of inculcation. Yet it is not
difficult to recognize the fear of social disintegration that motivates such pro-
grams. These fears, constantly reiterated by politicians and media commenta-
tors alike, can result in giving a veneer of respectability to more virulent forms
of xenophobia. Furthermore, what underlies such state-sponsored attempts to
construct community is a simple assumption, namely that state institutions are
the ultimate source of social legitimacy.
In their different ways both dialogical and singular community challenge
this assumption. In the former it is argued that the legitimacy of state law and
regulation rests upon genuine mechanisms of popular assent. If state bureau-
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Dissenting Community 51
cracy remains impervious to popular opinion and sentiment then it loses its
democratic legitimacy. Singular community takes a more radical stance. It
insists that state power will always work toward establishing an exclusionary
national identity and mission. It is not difficult to come up with examples of
how the name of liberal democracy has been invoked by powerful states in
recent decades in order to justify grave instances of domestic and international
injustice. In such cases the idea of democratic society and its unquestionable
moral superiority are assumed in an entirely uncritical manner. It is striking
that such abuses of the notion of democracy almost invariably characterize it
as something to be defended from threats rather than in terms of positive tasks
relating to social justice. Again, recent events have made us all too aware of
the extent to which this stance can justify erosion of traditional democratic civil
liberties for the supposed sake of defending the state from hostile powers.
In the concluding chapter of the first part of this book I turn to a further
stream of recent social philosophy that directly challenges uncritical and
oppressive misuses of liberal democracy. Initially I consider the work of
Jean-François Lyotard and his idea of the “differend.” More recently, Jacques
Rancière has extended and refined Lyotard’s line of thought by insisting that
democratic political culture is necessarily one of opposition and disagreement
between rival factions and stances. Over the same period Chantal Mouffe has
elaborated her own version of politics as “agonistics” within Anglophone ac-
ademia. There is a clear line of development evident throughout the work of
these thinkers over the last thirty years. What I wish to add to the discussion
is the idea that such a notion of democratic politics and society requires more
concrete consideration of local organization and place. If something like
genuinely democratic community or “radical democracy” is to be possible,
two basic conditions must be met: first, there must be articulate and effective
local communities, and second, there must be places where such communities
can determine their own context of action and present themselves to others.
As indicated in the previous chapter, most theory concerns itself with the for-
mer condition to the relative neglect of the latter. In the final sections of this
chapter I take up the idea of a “right to the city” first formulated by the French
urban theorist and activist Henri Lefebvre in the 1960s and recently adapted
by the critical urban sociologist David Harvey. The notion of the right to the
city holds that genuine democracy must entail a popular right to shape and
use public space. This is contentious for the obvious reason that other agen-
cies, largely those of local government, claim that the use of public space is
subject to their ultimate or exclusive control.
As will be set out in detail in the second part of this book, there has been
a distinct tendency within liberal democracies over recent decades to restrict
public access to ostensively public space. Often lying behind this process is
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52 Chapter Three
some instance of the innocuously termed “public-private” partnership. A cur-

rent case that illustrates a typical process has arisen in Portland, Oregon. The
stadium of the city’s baseball team, the Portland Beavers, is to be redesigned
and enlarged to enable its future use as a soccer venue. A previous reconstruc-
tion of the stadium involved the city selling bonds to finance the project. Al-
though that investment has yet to pay for itself, the City of Portland recently
agreed to invest a large amount of urban renewal money to partly finance the
redevelopment of the site. This decision was reached as the municipal budget
was under extraordinary pressure and in the immediate wake of significant
layoffs of public employees. In the course of the decision-making there was
the familiar scenario of high-flying private financiers exerting pressure on
public officials to bypass or truncate proper processes of public consultation.
Public concerns at the use of public finances were summarily brushed aside or
countered by the insistence that the project will create jobs. Whether the huge
sums of municipal and urban renewal money called for will generate a net gain
in jobs relative to other possible schemes is not a question readily raised by
either the private or city government backers of the plan. The notion of dis-
senting community examined in this chapter seeks to offer a credible social
model that makes effective opposition to such sidelining of public participation
an essential part of any genuine democracy. In outlining this model I wish to
counter the common suspicion that grassroots democracy is either unfeasible
or undesirable or both. Dissenting community appeals to Habermas’s call for
the maintenance of a vibrant civil society but rejects his idea of universal rules
of rational decision-making. In opposition to Mouffe I will argue that dissent
implies local determination and profound diversity within civil society, not
merely a plurality of political parties or geopolitical positions. To a great extent
I grasp dissenting community in terms of a desirable shift from how liberal
democracies look today, with their large state bureaucracies and diminishing
civil liberties. I believe that this balance has to change, so that more power is
given to democratic society at the local level and less is ceded to or seized by
regional and national government. While my stance undoubtedly has a utopian
dimension, at the same time I believe it follows distinct tendencies evident in
contemporary liberal democracies. In part two I will examine such tendencies
in detail and in so doing attempt to demonstrate the viability of the model of
dissenting community through concrete contemporary examples.
LYOTARD AND THE “DIFFEREND”
Although his intellectual and political activities stretch back to the 1950s
Jean-François Lyotard is primarily known as the author of The Postmodern
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Condition that originally appeared in 1979. This controversial work, subtitled

“A Report on Knowledge,” attempted to characterize how postindustrial
democratic society was developing in the face of an expected explosion in
information technology. Three decades on we are now in a position to appraise
many of Lyotard’s predictions concerning the development of the “knowledge
society.” For our more limited purposes the focus here will be on Lyotard’s key
contention that postmodern community will be increasingly characterized by
a combination of social heterogeneity and local determinism. Early on in The
Postmodern Condition Lyotard takes Habermas’s theory of communicative ac-
tion to task for essentially promoting a functionalist understanding of society
that erodes resistance to bureaucratic and market oppression. “The ideology of
communicational ‘transparency,’” he contends, “goes hand in hand with the
commercialization of knowledge.”1 In direct opposition to Habermas’s theory
of communication Lyotard proposes two methodological principles: first, that
“to speak is to fight,” and second, that “the observable social bond is composed
of language ‘moves.’”2 Lyotard’s notion of the language “move” indicates that
linguistic action intrinsically involves opposition to established positions. This
means that genuine communicative action is taken to be essentially transforma-
tive or “strategic” in Habermas’s terms. Lyotard remarks:
These “moves” [within a language game] necessarily provoke “counter-

moves”—and everyone knows that a countermove that is merely reactional is
not a “good” move. Reactional countermoves are no more than programmed ef-
fects in the opponent’s strategy; they play into his hands and thus have no effect
on the balance of power. This is why it is important to increase displacement
in the games, and even to disorient it, in such a way as to make an unexpected
“move” (a new statement).3
Whereas Habermas’s theory sees communication as regulated by a desire to

reach a position of consensual stasis, Lyotard views dialogue as a process of
continuous disequilibrium. Lyotard appeals to a certain understanding of sci-
entific inquiry to back up his view. According to Thomas Kuhn’s celebrated
idea of “paradigm shifts,” advances in science come about when a dominant
theory is supplanted in a revolutionary rather than incremental manner. The
key example is the shift in theoretical physics from a Newtonian mechanical
model to an Einsteinian quantum framework. What this brings about is a case
of radical incommensurability, that is, untranslatability of the old language
of physics into the new. In a parallel manner Lyotard rejects Habermas’s
assumption that all meaningful discourse is regulated by one set of rules of
legitimacy. To presuppose universal rules of discourse is, he argues, to pre-
clude the possibility of radical innovation or change. Considered from a po-
litical perspective such a position is not merely conservative it is “terrorist”:
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54 Chapter Three
By terror I mean the efficiency gained by eliminating, or threatening to elimi-

nate, a player from the language game one shares with him. He is silenced or
consents, not because he has been refuted, but because his ability to participate
has been threatened (there are many ways to prevent someone from playing).4
It is this notion of being excluded through silence or enforced consent that

Lyotard takes up again in his later publication The Differend. The idea of
the “differend” refers to instances of dispute where opposed parties have no
common language to express their respective claims. In such cases, Lyotard
argues, we are confronted with radical heterogeneity or incommensurability.
While it may be objected that such cases are exceptional, Lyotard insists that
incommensurability characterizes all discourse to varying degrees. From this
perspective, any theory of communication (such as that proposed by Habermas)
that proposes universal rules of exchange fundamentally fails to understand
how meaning is in practice restricted to local determination. Lyotard explicitly
places his account of the differend in the context of a court of law:
I would like to call a differend the case where the plaintiff is divested of means
to argue and becomes for that reason a victim. . . . A case of differend between
two parties takes place when the “regulation” of the conflict that opposes them
is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other
is not signified in that idiom. For example, contracts and agreements between
economic partners do not prevent—on the contrary, they presuppose—that the
laborer or his or her representative has had and will have to speak of his or her
work as though it were the temporary cession of a commodity, the “service”,
which he or she putatively owns.5
In common with Nancy and Agamben, Lyotard has a manifest Marxian ori-
entation and here Marx’s idea of the ruling class generating the ruling ideas
is clearly echoed. In the example used there is an obvious implication that
the worker is obliged to accept the employer’s terms of negotiation, not on
account of any superior argumentative or discursive power but rather due to a
manifest power imbalance in the relationship. Of course, the Marxian rejoin-
der is that a genuine community of workers would generate power enough
to overwhelm any confederation of employers. In common with Nancy
and Agamben, however, Lyotard rejects Marx’s notion of the revolution-
ary potential of an organized proletariat within industrialized society. More
straightforwardly, we might say that Lyotard is simply interested in describ-
ing how discourse actually functions under the conditions of contemporary
liberal democracy. In this context, he insists, weaker parties will suffer injus-
tice not because of any lack of argumentative skill, but because their mode
of expression is not recognized as legitimate. Looking back to chapter one,
the differend would thus be a case of what Young calls “internal exclusion,”
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that is, being admitted into a negotiation context but excluded from within
this context on formal grounds (for not speaking the right kind of language,
speaking in an improper manner, etc.).
In the concluding, explicitly political section of The Differend Lyotard
focuses on what he calls different “genres” of discourse: narrative and delib-
eration. In view of his definition of the postmodern condition as “incredulity
toward grand narratives,” it comes as no surprise that he sees contemporary
social conditions in terms of the predominance of deliberative discourse. It
is important to distinguish Lyotard’s sense of deliberation here from that
at work within the theory of deliberative democracy following Habermas.
Lyotard understands deliberation in a “critical” sense, that is, he grasps it as
making visible radical differences between narratives. Whereas narrative is
taken to be exclusive to a specific concrete community and thus closed off
to other communities, deliberation articulates the differences that separate
narratives. Simply expressed, narrative generates social identity, deliberation
social heterogeneity. Lyotard insists that differences between narrative identi-
ties generate litigations rather than differends:
The universalization of narrative instances cannot be done without conflict. Tra-

ditions are mutually opaque. Contact between two communities is immediately
a conflict, since the names and the narratives of one community are exclusive of
the names and narratives of the other. . . . [This does not represent] a differend,
since we have the same genre of discourse on each side: narration. It is thus a
litigation over the name of times, places, and persons, over the senses and ref-
erents attached to those names.6
As is clear from Lyotard’s further remarks, what he has in mind here are
disputes between narratives of national community. Such disputes are classic
examples of contested social identities. Lyotard’s point seems to be that nar-
ratives of national identity cannot, by definition, be shared. To this it might
be objected that history demonstrates a movement from more particular to
more universal narratives of community. For example, the project of a fully
integrated European Union represents the overcoming of national differences
and a further step along the way toward an actual cosmopolitan government
and community. To this Lyotard objects: “Internationalism cannot overcome
national worlds because it cannot channel short, popular narratives into epics,
it remains ‘abstract.’”7
Whatever the merits of Lyotard’s position on something like a credible
international community, his key point is that a differend is generated not
when one narrative identity stands opposed to another, but when the “idea
of freedom” is opposed to the “narratives of legitimation.” Following Kant,
Lyotard takes freedom to be an “idea of reason” that regulates human action
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56 Chapter Three
but can never appear as a real object of human experience. A narrative of

legitimation, such as the one offered by Habermas for example, assumes by
contrast that any socially valid notion or position can be measured against all
others. But this idea of a common measure, Lyotard insists, in effect destroys
the human desire for emancipation and social justice by following the logic
of commercial exchange. According to this logic everything must have a
determinate price, and, if it does not, it can have no social value. The impli-
cation is that Habermasian communication theory merely succeeds in further
assimilating social struggles to the terms of economic efficiency. In this sense
Habermas is offering nothing more than ideological support to already pow-
erful market imperatives:
Thus, the economic genre of capital in no way requires the deliberative political
concatenation, which admits the heterogeneity of genres of discourse. To the
contrary, it requires the suppression of that heterogeneity. It only tolerates it to
the degree that the social bond is not (yet) entirely assimilated to the economic
phrase alone. . . . If this is one day the case, political institutions will be superflu-
ous, as national narratives and traditions already are.8
What is striking about the confrontation between Lyotard and Habermas is

the fact that from quite similar premises they draw strictly opposed conclu-
sions. For Habermas agrees with Lyotard on the point that the powers of bu-
reaucracy and the market threaten social values and justice. In Habermasian
terms such power opposes strategic action to the communicative action of
rational discourse. Habermas, like Lyotard, appeals to freedom to distinguish
properly social action as opposed to strategic coercion. But the key difference
resides in how freedom and hence social justice are conceived. For Haber-
mas, communicative action regulated by universally valid rules of rational
discourse offers the means for attaining social justice, whereas Lyotard insists
that justice will often require precisely the invention of a new “idiom” to at-
test to a specific historical injustice. Here Lyotard’s principle of postmodern
“local determinism” becomes clearer. To do justice to a case of suffering, the
wrong done to a victim calls for the creation of new “moves” in a “language
game” or, most radically, a new language game.
Consideration of other texts from the same period (the early to mid-1980s)
make clear that Lyotard took the artistic avant-garde as exemplary for the
creation of new idioms. As with scientific paradigm shifts, Lyotard under-
stands the avant-garde as an effort to question constantly the terms of artistic
production and reception. Thus the central question for the avant-garde does
not concern the production of novel works of art but rather new ways of
approaching art as such. The discontinuity that characterized the intense ex-
perimentation in European art from the 1910s to the 1930s is understood by
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Lyotard to indicate a mode of action oriented toward the unpredictable. This

has political consequences insofar as it breaks the spell of social continuity
produced by capitalist production. For whereas such production imagines a
future of ever-expanding production and market saturation, avant-garde art
interrupts serial production and gives rise to the question: what, if anything,
will succeed this? In other words, Lyotard takes modern art as a paradigm of
social discontinuity, experimentalism, and utopianism. In turning in the next
section to the work of Jacques Rancière, this bridging of politics and aesthet-
ics and its connection with the model of dissenting community will be spelled
out more explicitly.
RANCIÈRE AND THE POLITICS OF DISAGREEMENT
While the contemporary French thinker Jacques Rancière insists that his ap-
proach is distinct from that outlined in Lyotard’s earlier work, the affinities
are striking. Above all, Rancière is concerned with drawing out a radically
participatory politics from the modern tradition of democracy. He challenges
thinkers such as Habermas who insist on the need for widespread institutional
mediation between the public and official decision-making by contending
that any democracy worthy of the name must strive for genuine rule of the
people. To a great extent, however, Rancière agrees with Nancy and Agam-
ben that credible collective action cannot be ascribed to readily identifiable
groups or communities. Following Lyotard’s critique of Habermas’s notion
of rational legitimation, Rancière insists that genuine democracy precludes
the possibility of deciding once and for all who is entitled to determine legiti-
mate decision-making. In his work Disagreement from 1995 Rancière echoes
Lyotard’s earlier account of the differend when trying to account for what
might be called the deep structure of democratic discourse:
The problem is knowing whether the subjects who count in the interlocution
“are” or “are not,” whether they are speaking or just making a noise. It is know-
ing whether there is a case for seeing the object they designate as the visible
object of the conflict. It is knowing whether the common language in which they
are exposing a wrong is indeed a common language. The quarrel has nothing to
do with more or less transparent or opaque linguistic contents; it has to do with
consideration of speaking beings as such.9
Rancière’s basic argument is that democratic politics is fundamentally

distorted and misunderstood within the framework of rational deliberation
aiming at consensus. In light of the tendency of liberal democratic political
parties over the last decade and a half to adopt this framework in the form of
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58 Chapter Three
supposedly non-oppositional “third way” politics, Rancière insists that what

is at work here is not democracy but what he calls “postdemocracy.” Con-
tending that the program of postdemocracy aims at effacing all traces of gen-
uine popular rule in favor of a bureaucratic institutionalization of decision-
making, Rancière claims that it constitutes an attempt to reduce democratic
politics to what he calls provocatively the “police.” He remarks:
Postdemocracy is the government practice and conceptual legitimization of a

democracy after the demos, a democracy that has eliminated the appearance,
miscount, and dispute of the people and is thereby reducible to the sole interplay
of state mechanisms and combinations of social energies and interests. . . . This
is the actual meaning of what is called consensus democracy.10
By contrast, democracy properly understood “sets up communities of a very

specific kind, polemical communities that undermine the very opposition of the
two logics—the police logic of the distribution of places and the political logic
of the egalitarian act.”11 Despite the polemical rejection of consensus theory it
is striking how Rancière to a great extent agrees with Habermas’s analysis of
the chief danger faced by liberal democracy, namely a reductive rationalization
of democratic decision-making. As we found when considering Lyotard, how-
ever, agreeing on a diagnosis does not imply agreement on a credible response.
Habermas in effect stakes everything on the prospect of refining universally
valid criteria for legitimate democratic decision-making. As he thinks institu-
tional mediation necessarily accompanies social complexity, it follows that the
space granted to direct community determination at the grassroots level must
diminish as liberal democracies develop. Rancière argues that such a move
violates the basic goal of democratic politics, namely attaining greater social
justice in the form of material and symbolic equality. For him the egalitarian
core of democracy can be fostered “only through a forcing, that is, the institut-
ing of a quarrel that challenges the incorporated, perceptible evidence of an
inegalitarian logic.”12 This leads to a definition of democratic politics and com-
munity that reverses Habermas’s appeal to the criterion of rational legitimacy:
Democracy, then, is the specific power of those who have no common title to
exercise power, except that of not being entitled to its exercise. Democracy is
the disrupting of all logics that purport to found domination on some entitlement
to dominate. There are many such logics, but through various mediations they
can be reduced to two: those of birth and wealth.13
So understood democratic community is essentially opposed to all forms

of material and symbolic privilege. While the principle of egalitarianism
certainly carries with it a form of political utopianism, it is important to
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recognize that Rancière does not envisage any kind of end point along the
lines of the postrevolutionary state assumed by traditional Marxism. Instead
democracy entails a constant struggle against established power and rule.
In this light the model of dissenting community common to Lyotard and
Rancière attempts to grasp democratic society from the perspective of those
lacking institutional power. As such it has evident affinities with the attempts
of Marxism and Critical Theory to challenge the official narrative of political
history and view it from the perspective of the oppressed.
At the same time, the idea of dissenting community seems to be open to
the obvious criticism that it offers no criteria for determining legitimate rule.
Following such a model in practice would only, it could be argued, lead to
social fragmentation and political anarchy. I think that this fear is misplaced
and that, in fact, the history of liberal democracy shows that it is indicative of
the kind of paternalism that was urged time and again against measures which
subsequently became celebrated as milestones in democratic social progress.
A further point can be urged against the charge of anarchy. Popular resistance
and dissent are necessary in democratic societies precisely because certain
individuals and groups tend to consolidate their relative power advantages.
While traditional democratic divisions of power provide some safeguard
against hegemony within the workings of local and national government,
state and party politics as a whole make their own claims to exclusive demo-
cratic legitimacy. Drawing on the tradition of collective civil disobedience
and popular challenges to state power, Rancière’s configuration of com-
munity accords a basic right of dissent to liberal democratic societies. In an
interview from 2000, the popular agency implied by dissenting community is
described as follows:
The demos is not the glorious, imaginary body that is heir to the sacrificial
royal body. It’s not the body of the people. It’s the abstract assemblage of “or-
dinary people,” who have no individual title to govern. It is the pure addition
of “chance” that comes to revoke all ideas of legitimate domination, all notions
of “virtue” destining a special category of people to govern. Democracy is the
paradoxical government of those who do not embody any title for governing the
community. So the double body of the people is the difference that separates a
political subject from any empirical part of the social body.14
This account of dissenting community shares the same concerns about iden-
tity politics that characterize the model of singular community outlined in the
previous chapter. At the same time, however, I think it offers a more plausible
theory of democratic resistance. On the one hand, it maintains a crucial link
between community and collective practice and, on the other hand, it ac-
knowledges that communities always face the challenge of opposing specific
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60 Chapter Three
established powers. As is clear from the quote above, Rancière rejects the
logic of sacrifice and victimization that characterizes in particular Agamben’s
version of singular community. In my view this is crucial, as it leaves the way
open to grasping resistance not as a merely reactive stance but rather as a col-
lective determination of the positive material conditions of everyday life.
MOUFFE AND DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITY
Chantal Mouffe has developed a political theory that exhibits many affinities
with the model of dissenting community common to Lyotard and Rancière.
In numerous studies Mouffe has articulated a radical and detailed critique of
Habermasian deliberative democracy for an Anglophone audience. In recent
decades, Mouffe argues, party politics across liberal democracies has adopted
a consensus model that has gradually replaced or significantly mitigated the
traditional rivalry between right- and left-wing camps. Whereas many theo-
retical commentators in the liberal tradition have celebrated this development
as a move toward more effective political decision-making, Mouffe contends
that the very core of what she calls “the political” has been lost along the way.
In common with other thinkers such as Nancy and Rancière, Mouffe recog-
nizes a distinction between “politics” (understood as particular policy making
and actions of political agencies) and “the political” (understood as the deep
social structure that makes political action possible). Just as Rancière sees
the drift toward the middle ground as a sign that politics has been reduced to
“the police” (that is, bureaucratic management), Mouffe argues that appeals
to consensus politics indicate an abandonment of “the traditional struggle of
the left for equality.”15 She remarks:
[A]gainst the two dominant models of democratic politics, the “aggregative”

one that reduces it to the negotiation of interests and the “deliberative” or “dia-
logic” one which believes that decisions on matters of common concern should
result from free and unconstrained public deliberation of all, I have proposed to
envisage democratic politics as a form of “agonistic pluralism” in order to stress
that, in modern democratic politics, the crucial problem is how to transform an-
tagonism into agonism. In my view the aim of democratic politics should be to
provide the framework through which conflicts can take the form of an agonistic
confrontation among adversaries.16
Mouffe justifies in part her advocacy of “agonistic pluralism” through insist-

ing that the political culture of liberal democracy “requires the creation of
collective identities around clearly differentiated positions as well as the pos-
sibility to choose between real alternatives.”17 She contends that the eclipse of
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recognizably distinct party political positions frustrates the basic need within
democratic culture for genuine opposition. As traditional party allegiances
recede, she argues, more extreme forms of identity-based politics emerge as
something like a repressed underside of consensus politics. In this way, the
successes of far-right parties in Europe over the last two decades, for example,
can be explained. Although in most cases such electoral successes have either
been mitigated through the formation of alliances with more mainstream par-
ties, or subject to exclusion on constitutional grounds, Mouffe’s argument is
that they arise as a result of a more generalized suppression of party-political
opposition within liberal democracies.
Complementing this claim is the idea that genuine democratic society re-
quires “identification with democratic values.”18 This appeal to identification
is a significant marker of distance between Mouffe and the other advocates of
dissenting community considered. Lyotard and Rancière explicitly insist that
democratic pluralism makes all forms of social identity and political agency
problematic. In this they are in line with the idea of singular community that
rejects the notion that community must be predicated on shared identity.
While Mouffe echoes Lyotard’s account of postmodern democratic society
in terms of its unlimited plurality of different “language games,” she invokes
the further Wittgensteinian notion of “form of life” (in German, Lebensform)
to account for a shared democratic culture. Approaching democracy in this
way gives rise to Mouffe’s central concern for ways to inculcate a sense of
democratic citizenship. She notes:
Democratic individuals can only be made possible by multiplying the institu-

tions, the discourses, the forms of life that foster identification with democratic
values. . . . On the other side, deprived of the possibility of identifying with
valuable conceptions of citizenship, many people are increasingly searching for
other forms of collective identification, which can very often put into jeopardy
the civic bond that should unite a democratic political association. The growth
of various religious, moral and ethnic fundamentalisms is, in my view, the
direct consequence of the democratic deficit which characterizes most liberal-
democratic societies.19
Despite her polemical stance toward Habermas and deliberative democracy

more generally, Mouffe’s insistence on the key role played by identification
with democratic values and views indicates a distinct affinity with the idea of
“constitutional patriotism” advocated by Habermas in his more recent work. In
The Inclusion of the Other from 1996 Habermas makes the following comment:
Only a national consciousness, crystallized around the notion of a common an-

cestry, language, and history, only the consciousness of belonging to “the same”
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62 Chapter Three
people, makes subjects into citizens of a single political community—into

members who can feel responsible for one another. The nation or the Volksgeist,
the unique spirit of the people—the first truly modern form of collective iden-
tity—provided the cultural basis for the constitutional state.20
While recognizing in this manner the historical origins of the modern nation-
state, Habermas insists that the contemporary concern to preserve social and
cultural pluralism means that it is necessary precisely to not look upon de-
mocracy as constituting a certain “form of life.” Instead, Habermas argues, a
national constitution must remain strictly neutral toward cultural difference.
A central problem for both Habermas and Mouffe is where to draw the line
between democratic difference and nondemocratic difference, that is, forms
of political diversity that legitimately make up a vibrant social and cultural
democratic milieu and those groups, views, and actions that threaten to un-
dermine the core values and institutions of liberal democracy. In attempting
to draw this line Habermas has more credible theoretical resources to draw
upon, namely his theory of communicative action that offers explicit criteria
for fair discussion and decision-making. Mouffe’s rejection of the Haber-
masian model means that she denies herself any appeal to such criteria of
argumentative inclusion. Thus, while she insists that democratic citizenship
involves conflict between adversaries “who recognize the positions of oth-
ers in the contest as legitimate ones,”21 Mouffe offers no explicit means for
determining what constitutes “legitimacy” here. Again, while Mouffe seeks
above all to defend pluralism within democratic society, she concedes that
“some limits need to be put to the kind of confrontation which is going to be
seen as legitimate in the public sphere.”22 Merely insisting, as she does, that
these limits are political rather than moral or rational in nature fails to offer
any significant clarification and her argument appears at best vague and at
worst circular.
Failure to determine criteria of legitimacy within democratic debate leaves
Mouffe’s appeal to a shared democratic political culture effectively without
content. The problem with Mouffe’s version of dissenting community, in my
view, is that it assumes democratic society must be united around common
values but insists that no rational grounds can be given for the adoption (or
refusal) of these values. As a recent critique puts it:
Although we may wish to expose an immanent contradiction between liberal

democracy’s professed goals and its actual practice, we still need some form
of justification of these goals, otherwise we succumb to a logic that suggests
we adhere to the values of any society we happen to be brought up in—liberal
democracy for the liberal democrats, fascism for the fascists, communism for
the communists, and so on.23
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In this light, Rancière’s contention that democracy entails the constant rene-
gotiation of what “legitimate” democratic rule entails seems more credible
and consistent. In effect, Rancière is saying that democratic community is
formed and reformed through the permanent contestation of official rule.
Those members of democratic society who are directly involved in such op-
position have nothing in common among themselves other than the common
“enemy” of official rule. Mouffe, by contrast, tends to identify democratic
society with the diversity of official democratic institutions and parties, and
her basic concern is to ensure that such parties offer genuinely opposed views
about desirable public policy.
In so identifying democracy with party politics Mouffe again defines a
position that is ultimately closer to Habermas than Lyotard or Rancière.
Whereas the latter provide a model of democratic politics that emphasizes
the potential of civil society to contest official norms and actions, Mouffe
and Habermas are clearly concerned with maintaining democratic diversity
within “legitimate” bounds. In a more recent elaboration of her position this
concern for curbing certain challenges to official versions of liberal democ-
racy becomes strikingly evident:
A democratic society requires the allegiance of its citizens to a set of shared

ethico-political principles, usually spelled out in a constitution or embodied in a
legal framework, and it cannot allow the coexistence of conflicting principles of
legitimacy in its midst. To believe that, in the name of pluralism, some category
of immigrants should be granted an exception is, I submit, a mistake which indi-
cates a lack of understanding of the role of the political in the symbolic ordering
of social relations.24
Here Mouffe offers a clear endorsement of Habermas’s idea of constitutional

patriotism, namely the notion that a democratic political community can only
exist in virtue of some implicit or explicit consent to act according to a national
constitution or nationally mandated judicial framework. While Habermas ar-
gues in Between Facts and Norms that individual liberty and the rule of law
are mutually implicating and reinforcing, Mouffe’s contention at the beginning
of The Democratic Paradox is that the connection between liberty and law is
not necessary but “only a contingent historical articulation.”25 When she warns
in her later work that the “enforced universalization of the Western model [of
democracy]”26 can only lead to more resistance on the part of oppressed non-
Western societies, one would expect this to entail a certain skepticism toward
national constitutions and the rule of law within politically dominant liberal
democratic states. On the contrary, however, the extended quote cited above
appears to echo the kind of unreflective defense of Western liberal democ-
racy that has become second nature to political representatives of powerful
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64 Chapter Three
democratic states. Invoking the fear of an ethnic minority group pleading for
special treatment or conditions engages in precisely the kind of xenophobic
rhetoric for which right-wing parties and groups are properly criticized.
Mouffe’s insistence that genuine democratic community entails a shared
understanding of a certain way of life means that her version of dissenting
community hinges ultimately on collective identity. While Mouffe’s explicit
motivation is the defense of democratic pluralism, this concern appears to
counteract the proclaimed need for an egalitarian principle. Rancière, by
contrast, holds fast to such a principle in his formulation of the “democratic
scandal,” namely that “there will never be, under the name of politics, a single
principle of community, legitimating acts of governors based on laws inherent
to the coming together of human communities.”27 By drawing a line between
democracy and nondemocracy but offering no criteria or procedures for such
a distinction Mouffe naturalizes and reifies democratic community. Her
account of disagreement and negotiation within democracy does not differ
materially from that of Habermas and his followers on the descriptive level.
At the same time, however, it lacks the prescriptive dimension that makes the
Habermasian position credible as a nondogmatic and inclusive procedural
configuration of democratic community. In effect, Mouffe grants superior
political legitimacy to state institutions relative to individuals and groups
operating at a grassroots level, but outlines no mechanisms that would estab-
lish this legitimacy. She thereby seems to ascribe a basic benevolence to the
institutional workings of democratic politics. However, such an assumption
flies in the face of widely acknowledged and documented oppressive uses of
state power within contemporary liberal democracies. Dissenting community
in Mouffe can thus be characterized by two key moves: first, thinking of
democracy as a particular form of life; second, seeing national party politics
as the only legitimate means of organizing and framing democratic dissent.
As indicated, these two points are at odds with the model of dissenting
community shared by Lyotard and Rancière. I consider this model both
more desirable and radical in nature. It is more desirable, as it holds out the
prospect of genuine social change through localized community efforts. So
understood dissenting community would not simply allow for the “tolerance”
of existing cultural and social differences, but also give rise to the active
creation of materially different collective modes of existence. This model of
community is also more radical for the simple reason that it resists the pater-
nalistic tendency of state institutions to determine what is best for a national,
regional, or local population. While traditional liberalism seeks to defend
civil society’s freedom from state interference, its view of liberal democratic
society focuses on individual liberty rather than on material contexts of col-
lective action. In the following, final sections of this chapter I will take up
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the idea of the “right to the city” in order to offer a more concrete image of
what the collective action of dissenting community might look like. Talk of
rights is the cornerstone of liberalism, and this is often complemented by the
notion of the rule of law central to the republican tradition. In what follows,
however, the right to the city is not understood as something ceded or guar-
anteed to civil society by nation states whether singly or in union, but rather
as a material power of localized community self-determination won by dissent
from national, regional, and municipal democratic government. In exploring
the idea of the right to the city, certain conclusions will be drawn from the
discussion of differing models of community and bridges built in anticipation
of the consideration of urbanism in part two of this book.
THE RIGHT TO THE CITY
Today Lefebvre is chiefly known for his 1974 publication The Production of
Space. On the eve of the series of strikes and popular protests that swept across
Europe in 1968 Lefebvre formulated an urban manifesto titled Le droit à la
ville (“The Right to the City”). This notion has in recent years experienced
something of a renaissance within more left-leaning critical urban sociology
and has even been taken up in a recent report compiled under the auspices of
UNESCO.28 In a book taking its title and inspiration from Lefebvre’s 1968
text, Don Mitchell begins by reformulating Lefebvre’s original concern:
The question that drives this book is the question of who has the right to the
city and its public spaces. How is that right determined—both in law and on the
streets themselves? How is it policed, legitimized, or undermined? And how
does that right—limited as it usually is, contested as it must be—give form to
social justice (or its absence) in the city?29
Lefebvre’s original text articulates the idea of a right to the city in terms of
collective participation. In a recent article Mark Purcell gives the following
account of Lefebvre’s basic position in The Right to the City:
The right to the city imagines inhabitants to have two main rights: (1) the right
to appropriate urban space; and (2) the right to participate centrally in the
production of urban space. In advocating the right to appropriate urban space,
Lefebvre is not referring to private ownership so much as he referring to the
right of inhabitants to “full and complete usage” of the urban space in the course
of their everyday lives.30
It is the notion of a right to produce urban space collectively that concerns

me most directly in this study. While the complementary idea of usage is also
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66 Chapter Three
significant, it is insufficient in my view for constructing a compelling image

of urban community. In fact, a tendency to view inhabitants as primarily us-
ers of local amenities and services implies a certain passivity in relation to
the urban environment. Such a stance is convenient to institutionalized urban-
ism and government, who may then unproblematically present themselves as
service “providers.” From this point it is then a short step to assuming, with
little or no official consultation, what urban communities need.
Let me at this point recall Young’s two aspects of social justice: self-
development and self-determination. The second of these is said to consist
in “being able to participate in determining one’s action and the condition
of one’s action; its contrary is domination.”31 If it is assumed that concrete
material and social circumstances always involve certain forces and insti-
tutions that strive for domination, self-determination must take the form
of resistance to domination. That is, social justice must be grasped as a
function of struggle. Young, following the spirit if not the letter of Haber-
mas’s dialogical model, conceives of this struggle as happening exclusively
within institutional frameworks. As made clear in chapter one, Young
views attempts to achieve social justice at a more spontaneous, grassroots
level as motivated by an image of community that is “wildly utopian”
and “anti-urban”32 in character. While I am sympathetic to Young’s no-
tion of city life as “the being together of strangers,” in my view she fails
to appreciate the degree to which the strangeness in question is often a
manifestation of profound social alienation. Again, while Young is right
to insist on the need for genuine public space to make democratic politics
possible, she fetishizes difference when she speaks of the erotic attraction
that is experienced in chance urban encounters.33 Recent research within
critical urban geography has accentuated, in contrast, how urban popula-
tions within liberal democracies have become increasingly segregated along
racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines.34 Segregation implies precisely that
there is pronounced social difference without places of genuine interaction.
Widespread municipal support for gentrification and the erosion of gener-
ally accessible public space strongly suggest that Young’s characterization
of social justice in terms of “the institutional conditions for promoting self-
development and self-determination”35 is inadequate. To look for a credible
model, I contend, we must admit a more profound sense of community
self-determination than Young is willing to concede.
In his 1970 publication The Urban Revolution Lefebvre offers an account
of the urban condition that turns on the idea of political contestation and
struggle. Following a wide-ranging study of the material and conceptual his-
tory of city culture, Lefebvre arrives at the following determination of what
is at stake:
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[T]here is nothing harmonious about the urban as form and reality, for it incorpo-
rates conflict, including class conflict. What is more, it can only be conceptualized
in opposition to segregation, which attempts to resolve conflicts by separating ele-
ments in space. . . . We could therefore define the urban as a place where conflicts
are expressed, reversing the separation of places where expression disappears,
where silence reigns, where the signs of separation are established.36
When Lefebvre speaks here of “expression” he means primarily collective

acts of protest, rather than something resembling Habermasian dialogue. In
naming expression as the basic feature of the urban condition he also does
not mean action that occurs within institutional or governmental frameworks.
Quite to the contrary, he insists:
[T]he incompatibility between the state and the urban is radical in nature. The state
can only prevent the urban from taking shape. The state has to control the urban
phenomenon, not to bring it to fruition, but to retard its development, to push it in
the direction of institutions that extend to society as a whole, through exchange
and market, the types of organization and management found in business.37
Here we encounter again one of the central features of Agamben’s account

of singular community, namely its opposition in principle to the model of
political community promoted by the nation-state. In most cases of urban
development within contemporary liberal democracies municipal govern-
ment is the principal mediating agency. If governmental institutions can be
viewed as basically detrimental to the cause of social justice, then their vir-
tual monopoly in determining urban development must be seen as worthy of
urgent critical attention. The essential point here is that institutional agencies
operate according to imperatives that are precisely not in the genuine interests
of an egalitarian model of social justice. Given this, dissenting community’s
primary object of resistance can be nothing other than the combined powers
of market capitalism and governmental bureaucracy.
The latest attempt to reconfigure Lefebvre’s approach to urban politics
has been made by the critical urban sociologist David Harvey. Referring to
prominent cases of governmental land seizures in economically developing
and developed nations, Harvey identifies a combination of dispossession
and displacement that lies “at the heart of urbanization under capitalism.”38
He also points out that the quality of urban life has “become a commodity,
as has the city itself, in a world where consumerism, tourism, cultural and
knowledge-based industries have become major aspects of the urban political
economy.”39 The upshot of this domination of city planning and development
by business interests and their government allies is that the right to the city is
“restricted in most cases to a small and economic elite who are in a position
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68 Chapter Three
to shape cities more and more after their own desires.”40 For our purposes
here the question is how the model of dissenting community holds out the
prospect of challenging such domination. As I have suggested, a credible
account of community needs to combine two key things: first, clear criteria
of democratic inclusion, and second, a robust notion of collective activity
and self-determination. While the paradigm of dialogical community offers
important clues in relation to inclusion, dissenting community, draws out the
positive potential of the need to resist institutional and governmental domi-
nation highlighted in Agamben’s notion of singularity. In order to map out
my own position in more detail I return again to Young’s account of urban
social justice.
URBAN COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
In Inclusion and Democracy it is clear that Young has mitigated her harsh cri-
tique of the very notion of community put forward in her earlier study Justice
and the Politics of Difference. Whereas the earlier text tended to view urban
life and community as effectively mutually exclusive, in her later work she
proposes an ideal of what she calls “differentiated solidarity.” While assuming
“respect and mutual obligation,” differentiated solidarity “aims to balance val-
ues of generalized inclusion and respect with more particularist and local affir-
mation and expression.”41 While Young acknowledges that in many contexts
“solidarity” might be used interchangeably with “community,” she proposes
a sense of solidarity that entails social distance and the lack of any “unifying
fellow feeling.” In the absence of such positive commonality she gives the fol-
lowing account of what constitutes “the moral basis” of solidarity:
It is that people live together. They are together in a locale or region, whether
they like it or not. Because they are together, they are all affected by and relate
to the geographical and atmospheric environment, and the structural conse-
quences of the fact that they all move in and around this region in distinct and
relatively unco-ordinated paths and local interactions.42
What strikes me about this description of solidarity is twofold: first, that it

makes no reference to activity, but only to collective passivity (being “af-
fected by”); and second, that it offers a curiously neutral image of what it
means to “live together,” suggesting that social solidarity consists in nothing
more than merely moving around some demarcated geographical area. Un-
wittingly, Young does not in fact offer here a compelling picture of solidarity
but in fact its opposite, social alienation. This is all the more curious, given
that Young’s explicit concern within the chapter of her work under consider-
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ation is to offer a model of urban living that would be effective in overcom-

ing residential segregation. While her diagnosis of the causes and effects of
segregation is compelling, her resistance to any form of community that goes
beyond what she calls an “openness to unassimilated otherness” renders her
proposed antidote to segregation unconvincing.
What Young seems to rule out in principle is the potential for a well-
defined urban community to act in solidarity with others. Young’s idea of
solidarity really turns on a cognitive-ethical attitude, namely mutual respect.
In this she shares what might be called the liberal prejudice of Habermasian
discourse theory that tends to replace political action with ethical stances.
When tackling the concrete issues of urban segregation it is certainly impor-
tant to consider mental attitudes between separated groups, but it is surely at
least equally important to deal with the material and symbolic actions that
reproduce separation in the first place and propose credible modes of active
resistance. In fairness to Young, she does tackle the issues of rent control and
affordable housing. But the real question, in my view, is how such measures
to promote social justice are to be brought about. It is Young’s answer to this
question that I find least convincing. As indicated by her account of solidar-
ity, Young is thinking of urban life at the regional rather than national level.
Here “regional” refers to a city together with its extensive metropolitan area,
in addition to possible common climactic, ecological, and economic determi-
nants. Most importantly, on the political level the regional model “calls for
participatory decision-making institutions at this local level which are deeper
than those that now exist in many cities and towns.” Young continues:
The model constitutes these local governments as autonomous in the sense

that their citizens through their political institutions have the right to decide
the form and policies of social services including schools, within the limits of
equal respect and non-discrimination by them. . . . Regional government creates
intergovernmental institutions of local government co-operation to render ser-
vice provision high quality and efficient across a region and access to services
offered in one locale should not be restricted to residents in one locale.43
Once again, the problem here is not with the principles but with the practice.
Young insists that regional governance should be subject to a principle of
popular participation, but how will this be carried out in practice? It is help-
ful to recall here Rancière’s account of democracy as a social order where
political legitimacy is constantly subject to dispute. On this understanding
pursuing social justice necessarily involves opposition to official powers,
which in this case means municipal government. The key point here is that
democratic participation is not credibly thought of as some unproblematic
translation of popular will into institutional action. On the contrary, it is clear
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70 Chapter Three
that institutions tend to frame and interpret popular input in ways that suit
their own functional imperatives. If, as Rancière contends, democracy sup-
plies no stores of common sense on how social and political conditions are to
be determined, then it follows that actual political action can only take place
through constant struggle and contestation. On these terms simply assuming
the benevolence of state and regional government with respect to their nomi-
nally represented publics is naïve in the extreme.
Young concludes her account of regional democracy by recognizing that,
as a matter of fact, “metropolitan governments are even more likely to re-
duce democratic participation and accountability.”44 She therefore makes an
important concession to the idea of dissenting community by acknowledging
that the cause of social justice will only be advanced to the extent that “the
political pressures of organized citizens” are brought to bear on regional gov-
ernment. In making this move Young tacitly admits that the internal tenden-
cies of government institutions are actually opposed to genuine democratic
determination of social conditions. Despite this, her ingrained opposition
to community self-organization prevents her from viewing any solutions
that would not be ultimately provided by governmental institutions. This
resistance to community self-determination stems from Young’s underlying
sympathy with Habermas’s model that sees social justice as arising out of the
establishment of institutionalized criteria for inclusive and fair dialogue. As
dissenting community highlights, the problem with such an approach is that
it presumes a neutral starting point that takes no account of given positions of
relative power. On the level of concrete political practice, therefore, Young’s
approach is purely aspirational. In the face of manifest imbalances of power
between democratic government and progressive social groups within civil
society, merely setting out universally valid criteria of discussion can only
strengthen the status quo. The question is thus twofold: first, on what terms
can government and civil society enter into genuine communication, and,
second, how can civil society stage its dissent from governmental policy and
action?
As recent events and research have shown, the shift of liberal democratic
party politics over the last two decades toward a centrist consensus has
brought with it an increasingly symbiotic relationship between government
and business. While dialogical community acknowledges the dangers of
money and power, it operates on a level of generalization that renders its
approach unconvincing as a means for tackling systemic domination and
oppression. The model of singular community offers a profound critique
of any configuration of the social according to collective identity. In doing
this, however, any account of collective agency is also left behind. The third
approach considered here, dissenting community, offers a more promising
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approach. It maintains the critique of any universalizing theory of political

action, but at the same time offers a convincing case of how excluded and
marginalized groups can resist through reconfiguring the very terms of debate
and action. Without this ability to “invent new idioms,” as Lyotard refers to
it, any disempowered group would be forced to negotiate on terms set by op-
pressive agencies. Historical instances demonstrate, that the construction and
successful deployment of models of social organization that offer alternatives
to those promoted by dominant powers is key to advancing the cause of social
justice. Harvey recognizes this when he remarks:
The question of justice falls squarely into the middle of the tension between
particularity and universalism and does it in such a way as to make it impossible
(politically as well as theoretically and empirically) to remain securely lodged at
either end of that polarity. The effect is, to put it mildly, deeply curious. Justice
appears to be a foundational concept that is quite indispensable in the regulation
of human affairs. . . . Yet the foundational concept is held to have no foundation
save as an arbitrary effect of arbitrary power in particular places and times.45
Rather than attempting any further elaboration of my theoretical approach

here, in the second part of this study I will adhere to Harvey’s further pro-
posal that it is most effective to consider social justice within actual historical
and exemplary contexts of urban life. Accordingly, part two further analyzes
the three models of community identified in the contexts of recent influential
approaches to urban planning and development. Here I initially tackle the
“New Urbanism” that came to prominence in the 1980s. New Urbanism, I
argue, can be viewed to a great extent as the dialogical model of community
converted into an architectural and planning mode of practice. As such it car-
ries with it many of the key problems and inadequacies of that configuration
of the social. The chapters of part two are paired with those of part one: New
Urbanism corresponding to dialogical community, postmodern urbanism to
singular community, and dissenting community to “dialectical utopianism” (a
notion developed by Harvey). It is thus in the final chapter that I attempt to
sketch a positive account of how social justice could be realized in practice
within the cities and towns we live in today.
NOTES
1. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,

trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Minnesota University
Press, 1984), 5.
2. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 10–11.
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72 Chapter Three
3. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 16.

4. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 63–64.
5. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van
Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1988), 9–10.
6. Lyotard, The Differend, 157.
9. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose
(Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999), 50.
10. Rancière, Disagreement, 102.
11. Rancière, Disagreement, 100.
12. Jacques Rancière, “Introducing Disagreement,” trans. Steven Corcoran, An-
gelaki 9, no. 3 (December 2004): 3–9, 5.
13. Rancière, “Introducing Disagreement,” 5–6.
14. Jacques Rancière, “Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Approaches to Democratic
Disagreement,” (Interview with Solange Guénoun and James H. Kavanagh), trans.
Roxanne Lapidus, SubStance 92, no. 2 (2000): 3-24, 19.
15. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, (London / New York: Verso 2000), 6.
16. Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 117.
20. Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, eds. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De
Greiff (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1998), 113.
23. Jules Townshend, “Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemonic Project: The Story So
Far.” Political Studies 52 (2004): 269–88, 282.
24. Chantall Mouffe, On the Political (Routledge: London / New York: 2005),
122–23.
26. Mouffe, On the Political, 87.
27. Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steven Corcoran (Verso:
London / New York: 2005), 52.
28. Alison Brown and Annali Kristiansen, “Urban Policies and the Right to
the City: Rights, Responsibilities and Citizenship,” http://unesdoc.unesco.org/
images/0017/001780/178090e.pdf (March 2009).
29. Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public
Space (New York: The Guilford Press, 2003), 4.
30. Mark Purcell, “Citizenship and the Right to the Global City: Reimagining the
Capitalist World Order,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27,
no. 3 (2003): 564–90, 577.
32. Young, Justice, 233, 236.
10_368_05_Ch03.indd 72 7/28/10 12:41 PM

33. Young, Justice, 239–40.

34. Cf. Loïs Wacquant, Urban Outcasts (London / New York: Verso), 2008.
36. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bonnono, (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 175–76.
37. Lefebvre, Urban Revolution, 180 (translation slightly modified).
38. David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (September–
October 2008): 23–40, 34.
39. Harvey, “Right to the City,” 31.
40. Harvey, “Right to the City,” 38.
45. Harvey, David, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996), 332.
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10_368_05_Ch03.indd 74 7/28/10 12:41 PM
Part Two
URBANISM AND COMMUNITY
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Chapter Four
New Urbanism
In the first part of this book three distinct theoretical approaches to com-
munity were analyzed in detail. The model of dissenting community was
put forward as a theory combining the strengths of dialogical and singular
community and offering the best framework for understanding local demo-
cratic practices of resistance and social justice. The second part of this book
is an attempt to draw out the theoretical models of community considered
by situating them within the context of contemporary urbanism. This move
has a straightforward rationale, namely that the experience of community is
intimately tied to particular forms of organization of a shared environment.
Whether made explicit or not, theories of community favor certain kinds of
spatial arrangement and such arrangement constitutes a concrete mode of
political organization. While philosophy and urbanism are rarely brought
together in this way, a case could easily be made that the tradition of Western
philosophy has offered a highly spatialized politics from the beginning. After
all, the founding text of the tradition, Plato’s Republic, is nothing if not the
sketch of an ideal urban community. But the history of philosophy is not my
concern here. Instead, I will explore three prominent approaches to urbanism
that have shaped discussion and policy across liberal democracies in recent
decades. As already indicated, the following three chapters represent a further
attempt to analyze the models of dialogical, singular, and dissenting commu-
nity, this time from the more concrete perspective of urban planning. Bring-
ing the organization of urban space into our discussion of community helps
to spell out in more vivid terms the political consequences of the theoretical
models considered in part one.
This chapter discusses an influential contemporary movement known as
New Urbanism. As we shall see, New Urbanism exhibits many features that
ally it with the dialogical theory of community. Its strengths and weaknesses
77
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78 Chapter Four
are also similar in nature to those of Habermasian communication theory and

deliberative politics. More surprisingly and controversially, New Urbanism
also retains many traits of earlier modernist urbanism, in particular a faith in
the socially efficacious nature of urban design. After setting out the central
shortcomings of New Urbanism in this chapter, the following chapter will
consider postmodern urbanism. Here concern for singularity, metaphor, and
context characterize the understanding of urban experience. Problems paral-
lel to those identified in the analysis of singular community arise in connec-
tion with postmodern urbanism. Most importantly, such urbanism offers no
obvious context or means for collective grassroots resistance to oppressive
power. Accordingly, the book ends with a chapter setting out an approach
to urbanism that attempts to bring together the potential for collective action
promised by New Urbanism with the sensitivity to singularity and differ-
ence of postmodern urbanism. Here I take up Harvey’s notion of “dialectical
utopianism” as a model of urbanism that hinges on the basic idea that the
built environment and collective life are mutually determining. While this
idea taken in isolation may not seem particularly novel, it goes a long way in
dispelling many of the inadequacies and dead ends that are generated by other
theoretical and practical approaches to community.
Finally, in order to provide a common thread and empirical grounding
for the various analyses of this chapter I will focus on the example of urban
planning and architecture in Portland, Oregon. Portland has been widely rec-
ognized as an exemplary model of sustainable planning since the creation of
its Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) in 1979. More recently the city has be-
come a national and international flagship for Transit Oriented Development
and Smart Growth. As we shall see, Portland’s approach to municipal and
regional planning has been directly influenced by New Urbanism. A recent
“visioning” project conducted by the city, however, reveals some of the dem-
ocratic shortcomings of the approach to planning adopted. The problem is
one encountered and considered already in the first part of this book, namely
that of genuinely democratic participation. While the polemical writings of
New Urbanist protagonists suggest that this movement makes a clean break
with earlier modernist models of urbanism, a basic assumption of the intellec-
tual superiority of the urban designer remains central to the planning process
within New Urbanism. It will also become apparent that there is a consider-
able gap between the stated intent of New Urbanism to foster social diversity
and the actual results of New Urbanist developments. While the leading fig-
ures of the movement insist that it possesses no inherent political ideology,
a growing tendency to appeal to free-market mechanisms renders this claim
highly questionable. Ultimately, a certain essentialism seems to underpin the
New Urbanist model of community, despite claims that it is pragmatically
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New Urbanism 79
oriented and sensitive to specific contexts. Accordingly, further resources for

an approach to urbanism that makes local determination and genuine social
diversity credible must be gleaned from postmodernist sensitivity to singular-
ity on the one hand and the paradigm of dialectical utopianism on the other.
Only in the latter case is a robust balance between environmental determin-
ism and the claims of social justice made credible and possible.
NEW URBANISM: ORIGINS AND BASIC IDEAS
The movement of New Urbanism arose in the early 1980s and had developed
a fully fledged platform by the mid-1990s. At its third congress in 1996 the
movement issued a charter that proclaims its basic values and goals. The first
paragraph sets the general tone: “The Congress for the New Urbanism views
divestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separa-
tion by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands
and wilderness, and the erosion of society’s built heritage as one interrelated
community-building challenge.”1 The charter stresses the idea that urban de-
sign is essentially an activity of constructing community. The tone of the char-
ter also strongly implies that the task at hand is the reconstruction of a sense of
community that has somehow been lost: “We are committed to reestablishing
the relationship between the art of building and the making of community,
through citizen-based participatory planning and design.”2 As we shall see,
New Urbanism has been subject to much criticism for what many commenta-
tors view as a variety of environmental determinism. Such critics insist that the
New Urbanist formula—fix the built environment and the community will be
restored—is simplistic and contradicted by historical examples. Certain pas-
sages of the charter, however, suggest that New Urbanism endorses a more
dialectical understanding of the relationship between urban design and social
development. For example, it states: “We recognize that physical solutions
by themselves will not solve social and economic problems, but neither can
economic vitality, community stability, and environmental health be sustained
without a coherent and supportive physical framework.”3 On the basis of such
comments New Urbanism seems to be making the fairly minimal claim that
changing the built environment is just one feature of constructing community.
Urban design would then be a necessary but not sufficient condition for viable
community. As will become apparent, however, this apparent modesty of ambi-
tion is not easily reconciled with the actual practice and writings of the central
figures of New Urbanism.
By common consent the key spokesperson and representative of New Ur-
banism is Andrés Duany. Together with his wife, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk,
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80 Chapter Four
Duany operates the architectural firm DPZ, which has undertaken some of
the most ambitious and high-profile New Urbanist developments to date.
The earliest example of such developments was the construction of Seaside
on the Florida coast beginning in 1983. Seaside was built as a prototype
of “Traditional Neighborhood Development” (TND) at a time when New
Urbanism was commonly known as “Neotraditionalism.” In the most recent
extensive account of their work and program, Suburban Nation: The Rise of
Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, Duany and Plater-Zyberk
insist that Neotraditionalism is “nonideological to its core.”4 The absence of
any ideological tendency, they insist, allies their approach to urban design
with common sense:
The commonsense nature of the New Urbanism bodes well for its future. The
fact that it was not invented, but selected and adapted from existing models, dra-
matically distinguishes it from the concepts of total replacement that preceded
it. It took many years and many failures for planners and architects to reach this
point, but so many new inventions have fared so badly that designers have been
forced to put some new faith in human experience.5
The other prominent practitioner and proponent of New Urbanism, Peter

Calthorpe, echoes this verdict in relation to earlier urbanist projects, deeming
modern architecture “a complete and utter failure” aesthetically, socially, and
environmentally.6 Calthorpe remarks: “The idea that you bring history back into
architecture is fine. I think it’s very healthy. More often than not, history links a
community together and we need every shred of common linkage we have.”7
One key early source of New Urbanism’s program to reconstruct community
is Jane Jacobs’s celebrated study The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Originally published in 1961, Jacobs’s work is an impassioned protest against
the then-dominant practices of urban renewal under the guise of inner city “slum
clearance.” Focusing primarily on New York, Jacobs examined urban develop-
ment in the United States at a time when the flight from the urban core and the
dominance of the car-centered suburban lifestyle was beginning its long and
essentially uninterrupted period of dominance. In the introduction to her work
Jacobs singles out Le Corbusier as the key proponent of the modernist form of
urbanism. For Jacobs such urbanism basically embodies an antipathy toward
community and promotes a ruthlessly individualized vision of urban life:
Le Corbusier was planning not only a physical environment. He was planning

for a social Utopia too. Le Corbusier’s Utopia was a condition of what he called
maximum individual liberty, by which he seems to have meant not liberty to
do anything much, but liberty from ordinary responsibility. In his Radiant City
nobody, presumably, was going to have to be his brother’s keeper any more.
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New Urbanism 81
Nobody was going to have to struggle with plans of his own. Nobody was going
to be tied down.8
The most disturbing and destructive aspect of modernist urbanism for Jacobs
is its desire to recreate the urban fabric in its totality. Such a desire demon-
strates an insensitivity to historical context and, more importantly, to the
social ecology of the individuals and groups that inhabit specific neighbor-
hoods within the city. As Jacobs spells out in the final chapter of her work,
“The Kind of Problem a City Is,” this tendency toward total reconstruction
rests on a basic misunderstanding of the nature of the urban environment. For
Jacobs the city is a complex organism and planning interventions that hope to
be truly supportive of urban community must work with this complexity and
resist the temptation to impose inflexible, monolithic solutions:
Cities happen to be problems in organized complexity, like the life sciences. . . .

Cities, again like the life sciences, do not exhibit one problem in organized com-
plexity, which if understood explains all. They can be analyzed into many such
problems or segments which, as in the case of the life sciences, are also related
to one another. The variables are many, but they are not helter-skelter; they are
“interrelated into an organic whole.”9
This approach to the city as an organic whole stresses another aspect of

the opposition to modernism that is adopted by New Urbanism. Modernist
urbanism understands the urban environment in terms of functional sepa-
rations. Accordingly, areas of residence are to be separated from areas of
manufacturing and bureaucracy, and individual dwellings are to be separated
from arteries for traffic circulation. While there were more pressing concerns
for public health relating to industrial activity in the cities of the wealthiest
countries prior to the 1960s, the shift to a largely deindustrialized, service-
based economy meant that such worries could be balanced by other factors
conducive to vibrant urban life. Jacobs stresses the need for both vibrant
neighborhood commerce and lively streets frequented and viewed by neigh-
borhood residents. This recognition of the street as quite literally the lifeblood
of the urban environment is central to the approach of New Urbanism, which
has developed highly detailed plans and codes to provide street patterns that
enhance a sense of community.
According to Jacobs there are four key features of the urban environment
that directly contribute to social vibrancy and diversity: mixed use, short
blocks, mixed age, and concentration. In combination these features basically
generate reasons for people to go to a certain street or locale and opportunities
for encountering others at that location. The influence of this simple list of
key urban design characteristics is evident throughout the work of the New
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82 Chapter Four
Urbanists. For example, in Suburban Nation Duany and Plater-Zyberk offer

a similar inventory of the traits of desirable urban streets: meaningful destina-
tions, safety, comfort, and interest. But whereas Jacobs stresses that the exis-
tence of such features is conducive to vibrant urban community but is not a
magic formula for its creation, New Urbanism adopts a more strident tone:
To begin with the obvious, community cannot form in the absence of communal
space, without places for people to get together to talk. Just as it is difficult to
imagine the concept of the family independent of the home, it is near-impossible
to imagine community independent of the town square or the local pub. . . . In the
absence of walkable public places—streets, squares, and parks, the public realm—
people of diverse ages, races, and beliefs are unlikely to meet and talk. Those who
believe that Internet web sites and chat rooms are effective substitutes vastly under-
estimate the distinction between a computer monitor and the human body.10
This remark comes from a chapter tellingly titled “The Physical Creation of
Society.” As noted, the Charter of New Urbanism concedes that urban design
is not a panacea for the problems of contemporary social and economic life,
but the tone of such passages as the one just cited suggest a more comprehen-
sive claim. New Urbanism in many ways retains the core belief of modernist
urbanism that design alone can create community. Such a belief might be
called the key dogma of traditional urbanism and amounts to a robust form of
environmental determinism. As indicated in many places, I consider such de-
terminism both unrealistic and undesirable. It is unrealistic on account of the
catalogue of failures ascribable to urban planning, and it is undesirable due
to the fact that it offers an image of society that accords little or no signifi-
cance to localized collective action. As it operates within New Urbanism and
elsewhere environmental determinism acts as a justification for the supposed
superior intellectual ability of urban designers. Expert knowledge is invoked
as grounds for political, social, and even ethical superiority. From this posi-
tion any attempt at popular community involvement is apt to become a mere
public relations exercise. This concern will be addressed in detail toward the
end of this chapter. Before turning to the political and social consequences
of New Urbanism, however, further clarification of the precise nature and
aspirations of its model of urban community is needed.
THE TRADITIONAL NEIGHBORHOOD

DEVELOPMENT (TND) AND THE PUBLIC REALM
As is evident from the last quotation, Duany and Plater-Zyberk emphasize the
crucial role played by public space in the construction of community. This
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New Urbanism 83
offers an obvious initial affinity with the paradigm of dialogical community.

A central concern of Habermas’s social theory, as we saw, is the preservation
of robust civil society and grassroots organization in the face of threats from
corporate and governmental power. Young’s work goes a step further and
highlights the need for physical public space as essential to a credible model
of deliberative democracy. Her idea of public space accentuates its ability
to allow spontaneous encounters between different types of people. Young
explicitly endorses the position of Richard Sennett in his celebrated work
The Fall of Public Man. Originally published in 1977, Sennett’s study offers
an extensive critique of what Peter Calthorpe calls “communities of interest.”
Such communities are groups of people brought together on account of cer-
tain basic affinities of perspective or sensibility. They exist wherever people
share a sense of having common feelings and ideas about how best to live.
For Sennett this kind of affective community is fundamentally negative as
it tends to exclude whoever is perceived as basically different to the group:
“Community feeling formed by the sharing of impulses has the special role
of reinforcing the fear of the unknown, converting claustrophobia into an
ethical principle.”11 Most importantly for the present discussion, this model
of community is at odds with any approach to urban life that strives to make
enhancement of social diversity a key goal. Writing in the mid-1970s, Sen-
nett sees a growing tendency for increased separation within the city between
different urban groups founded on a sense of exclusive identity. Such a
tendency, he argues, threatens to make the social life of cities fundamentally
“uncivilized”:
The city is the instrument of impersonal life, the mold in which diversity and
complexity of persons, interests, and tastes become available as social experi-
ence. The fear of impersonality is breaking that mold. . . . It is the very fear
of impersonal life, the very value put upon intimate contact, which makes the
notion of a civilized existence, in which people are comfortable with a diversity
of experience, and indeed find nourishment in it, a possibility only for the rich
and well-bred. In this sense, the absorption in intimate affairs is the mark of an
uncivilized society. 12
As we saw, for Young, genuine social diversity is dependent on the existence

of viable public space. She defines public space as a place “to which anyone
has access, a space of openness and exposure,” and says she has in mind pub-
lic streets, squares, plazas, and parks as prominent examples of “embodied
public space.”13 In practice, however, appearance in and use of such public
space is dependent on an array of social factors. Typically, a certain group
will consider itself to have greater legitimacy or ownership with respect to a
specific public place. Deliberative democracy and New Urbanism share the
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84 Chapter Four
belief that negotiations of competing claims to common resources can be

conducted in a fair and transparent manner. In fact, they both tend to give
the impression that the existence or creation of a common place of encounter
is sufficient for social conflict to be overcome and pragmatic consensus to
be established. Accordingly, Duany and Plater-Zyberk appeal to the material
environment as something that should be viewed in an unproblematic way
as a basic common good. But this appeal to commonality barely conceals
an understanding of social diversity as something to be compensated for or
somehow corrected:
Citizens can begin by understanding how much their environment affects—or,

in fact, generates—their quality of life. Once this relationship is recognized,
it becomes obvious how we can best serve our own needs by improving our
physical surroundings. In an increasingly diverse nation, in which our social,
intellectual, and spiritual realities can be as varied as our genealogy, the physi-
cal world is the one thing we truly share. All the more important, then, that we
work on it together.14
One of the basic tenets of the Traditional Neighborhood Development, pio-

neered in Seaside and later in the Kentlands project within the commuter belt
of Washington D.C., is the creation of distinctive civic and public buildings.
Such buildings might include a community center or the local post office.
The charter declares: “Civic buildings and public gathering places require
important sites to reinforce community identity and the culture of democracy.
They deserve distinctive form, because their role is different from that of
other buildings and places that constitute the fabric of the city.”15 The accent
here is on the task of design to provide “the physical definition of streets and
public spaces as places of shared use.”16 This emphasis on spatial definition
is basic to the TND, as is the call to reestablish a sense of hierarchy between
public and private space. Both of these features again indicate an affinity with
Habermasian communication theory, which sees community as arising out of
convergence on matters of common concern and the ability of public dialogue
to transcend individual concerns and perspectives. Put most simply, New
Urbanism and communicative action theory share a model of community that
rests on the identification of unproblematic common goods. Although New
Urbanism in practice is forced to confront empirical inequality and injustice
in more direct ways, it nevertheless tends to dismiss systemic economic and
social factors as merely contingent elements to be overcome by good design.
While New Urbanism appeals to a model of urban life that can often seem
anything but socially progressive, it is important to acknowledge that many
aspects of the TND have become accepted within both the design community
and municipal government across the United States and beyond as the best
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New Urbanism 85
option for urban growth models. While the creation of denser urban or sub-
urban developments with greater mixture of use, better public facilities, and
improved access to public transit have met with much public enthusiasm, the
fact remains that many New Urbanist projects are situated away from the very
urban areas that are said to have undergone an erosion of community in recent
decades. Anthony Flint, in his study of urban planning and the problem of
sprawl in the United States, draws attention to the fact that the average home
price at Seaside rose from $65,000 to around $1 million between 1983 and
2002. He reports Duany’s response to this trend: “Yes, they are expensive.
They are outrageously expensive. That’s why there needs to be more of them.
. . . It’s a matter of supply and demand. People are desperate to live in places
like Kentlands, as an alternative to lifeless, mindless, frustrating sprawl”.17
Duany has tended to focus his attention on the building and zoning codes that
facilitate suburban sprawl in the United States, rather than on the economic,
social, and political conditions that gave rise to the exodus of the middle
class from American cities from the 1950s on. While the popularity of his
developments with those who can afford to live in them is not in question,
the pretensions of the TND as a viable model for enhancing urban life and the
public sphere across the economic and social spectrum are highly question-
able. Contrary to the insistence that New Urbanism is politically neutral and
allied only with common sense, there is ample evidence to suggest that it has
profound affinities with the kind of free-market, center-left politics that pre-
dominated in the 1990s. This is telling, as the “third way” politics of Clinton
in the United States and Blair in the United Kingdom has been aligned with
the model of consensual, dialogical community propounded by Habermas.18
Flint notes: “The movement gained credibility during the Clinton adminis-
tration when Henry Cisneros, head of the U.S. Department of Housing and
Urban Development, embraced New Urbanism in the redevelopment of failed
public housing towers, a program known as Hope VI.”19
Thus far our discussion yields a mixed picture. On the one hand, New
Urbanism advances changes to planning which have proven to be genuinely
conducive to community cohesion. Creating public space and insisting on the
need for a neighborhood to have a recognizable center, as well as providing
for improved coherence of streetscapes, are all factors that make for better
urban life. On the other hand, appealing to free-market mechanisms to en-
sure that such urban design is made available to all is not credible. As both
proponents and critics acknowledge, when measured against the criterion of
social justice and inclusion the best that can be said about New Urbanism
is that it is yet to prove its point. As we saw, the charter of New Urbanism
makes explicit reference to the need to address “increasing separation by race
and income.” Yet the verdict of an array of studies into the social effects of
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86 Chapter Four
TNDs is that they have exacerbated rather than ameliorated such separation.
Certainly, the early projects of New Urbanism were largely aimed at those
strata of the American middle-class who had reliable earnings above the na-
tional average. Many in fact bought properties as second homes to avail of
the pleasant natural setting. As Vincent Scully remarks in relation to Seaside
and Windsor, another coastal TND in Florida:
So the rich, who can choose, choose community, or at least its image. How
much more must the poor, who must depend upon it for their lives, want com-
munity? If Seaside and the others cannot in the end offer viable models for that,
they will remain entirely beautiful but rather sad. Perhaps they will in fact do so,
because human beings are moved to act by symbols, and the symbol is there.20
THE TRANSIT ORIENTED DEVELOPMENT

AND REGIONAL PLANNING
Along with the notion of the TND put forward by Duany and Plater-Zyberk,
the another key idea of New Urbanism is Peter Calthorpe’s Transit Oriented
Development (TOD). As Calthorpe explains in The Next American Metropo-
lis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream from 1993, his early work
focused on environmental and sustainability issues relating to planning. What
was missing, he says, was sufficient concern for urban form and design. As
the introduction to his 1993 study makes clear, Calthorpe’s distinctive con-
tribution to New Urbanism is an effort to bring together environmental and
social sustainability:
This book is about the ecology of communities. Not about the ecology of natural
systems—but about how the ecological principles of diversity, interdependence,
scale, and decentralization can play a role in our concept of suburb, city, and re-
gion. It is about communities more diverse and integrated in use and population;
more walkable and human-scaled; communities which openly acknowledge and
formalize the decentralization at work in our times. These principles stand in
stark contrast to a world dominated by specialization, segregation, lack of scale,
and centralization.21
The notion of community ecology suggests that urban design should be un-
derstood as an exercise promoting physical conditions in which social diver-
sity is able to flourish. Whereas the plans of DPZ have tended to involve the
creation of relatively isolated suburban developments modeled on traditional
American villages, Calthorpe’s projects tend to be conceived from the per-
spective of the greater metropolitan area or region. Although the scale used
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New Urbanism 87
may differ, however, the same issue of environmental determinism is clearly

at stake for Calthorpe. He remarks:
Social integration, economic efficiency, political equity, and environmental

sustainability are the imperatives which order my thinking about the form of
community. Each of these imperatives has causes and implications beyond the
physical form of community, but community form remains a central expression
of and reinforcement to the underlying culture.22
As we have seen, promotion of social diversity is an explicit goal of com-

munity planning within New Urbanism. In the case of TNDs, however, the
assumption that market mechanisms based on increased supply would make
such developments readily available to people from all socioeconomic groups
has so far proven false. In a later work Calthorpe distinguishes between what
he calls “communities of interest” and “communities of place.”23 To a greater
degree than Duany and Plater-Zyberk, Calthorpe acknowledges that the orga-
nization of political decision-making plays a central role in determining the
quality of contemporary urban community. In line with the notion of urban
community as a kind of social ecosystem, Calthorpe believes that a basic
problem afflicting contemporary urban planning is an excessively centralized
bureaucracy that remains insensitive to local needs and concerns. To avoid
the twin dangers of intractable central government and localized NIMBY
(“not in my back yard”) tendencies, Calthorpe proposes organization at an
intermediate level:
Part of our inability to come out of our special-interest cocoons and address the
massive changes in our time is that our politics operate at the wrong scale. Frus-
tration with centralized public programs has reached a watershed, while local
action seems unable to deal with many of our most challenging problems. We
are stranded between national solutions too generic, bureaucratic, and large, and
local solutions too isolated, anemic, and reactionary. No wonder people become
cynical and detached. We live simultaneously at the regional and neighborhood
scale but lack a political structure to take advantage of their opportunities.24
As the title of Calthorpe and Fulton’s most recent extensive study—The Re-
gional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl—indicates, the preferred scale
for urban planning is the region. The immediate reason for tackling planning
at the regional scale stems from the fact that most of the U.S. population is
found in urban clusters on the eastern and western seaboards, which typi-
cally take the form of interconnected metropolitan areas. Calthorpe adopts
the metaphor of the network to convey how community operates at the re-
gional level. He also likens the urban network to the Internet and insists that
a common language is necessary to the success of regional organization and
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88 Chapter Four
planning. “The region’s common ground,” he remarks, “can be built from its
open space systems and its cultural diversity, from its physical beauty and its
economic character.”25 In his earlier study Calthorpe says that regional plan-
ning should “shape the overall distribution of development, coordinate transit
and circulation, balance jobs and housing in an economic fashion, administer
regional pollution controls, and set limits to protect open space resources.”26
It is against this backdrop of regional planning that the TOD is proposed. In
addition to the regional scale, the basic features of the TOD are: availability
of public transit, walkability, mixed housing forms and prices, conservation
of natural habitats, focus on public spaces, and concentration of development
in existing neighborhoods along transit corridors. Calthorpe brings these
features together to offer a general description of the TOD: “Defined by a
comfortable walking distance, the TOD is made up of a core commercial
area, with civic and transit uses integrated, and a flexible program of hous-
ing, jobs, and public space surrounding it. The densities and mix of these
primary uses, though controlled by certain minimums, is determined by the
specifics of each site and economy.”27 Calthorpe does not claim any original-
ity for the notion of the TOD and insists that the principles underlying this
vision of planning “are simply a return to the timeless goals of urbanism, in
its best sense.”28 The central question in the present context is whether this
restoration of traditional planning has actually been effective in overcoming
the insularity ascribed to “communities of interest” and created genuinely
diverse, vibrant social contexts.
THE TOD IN PRACTICE:

THE CASE OF PORTLAND, OREGON
Portland, Oregon, has enjoyed a reputation as one of the most livable U.S.
cities since the 1960s. This reputation was given a planning dimension in
1979 with the establishment of Portland’s Urban Growth Boundary (UGB),
following sustained efforts by Oregon Governor Tom McCall that led to
the creation of an Oregon UGB in 1973. While the early 1980s witnessed
a decline in economic activity and population growth, by the early 1990s
anticipated pressures on the UGB had led Portland Metro to initiate its plan
called Region 2040. This plan was significantly determined by two factors:
opposition to a proposed new highway in the western suburbs of Portland
led by an advocacy group called 1000 Friends of Oregon and the state of
Oregon’s Transportation Planning Rule. The latter mandated towns and cities
of more than 25,000 people to reorient transportation policy to include more
pedestrian friendly and mass transit options. Between 1991 and 1997 1000
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New Urbanism 89
Friends initiated a project called Making the Land Use, Transportation, Air
Quality Connection (LUTRAQ) in order to propose a viable alternative to the
proposed bypass development. The group called on Calthorpe to advise and
help draw up an alternative plan, and a detailed account of his involvement is
given in The Regional City. He notes of the project in Portland:
[T]he vision was to create interconnected neighborhoods and districts designed

for the pedestrian as well as the car. Portland had many older, highly valued
“streetcar neighborhoods” that possessed the qualities of TOD. The LUTRAQ
alternative proposed three types of TODs, each walkable and mixed use but at
varying densities, given different locations.29
The LUTRAQ study hinged on the creation and gradual expansion of a light-
rail system. In its initial phase this involved constructing a rail line from
downtown through the western Portland suburbs of Beaverton and Hillsboro,
where the overall population underwent a fivefold increase in the 1980s
(in both cases from around 10,000 to 50,000). According to Calthorpe, the
LUTRAQ alternative performed better than the bypass proposal by every
measure: proportion of nonautomobile trips, levels of congestion, air pol-
lution, greenhouse gases, and energy consumption.30 Since its initial phase
was completed the light-rail system has become a highly visible feature of
Portland’s urban landscape. A further line running through inner north Port-
land is widely assumed to have brought with it significant urban regeneration
and enhanced property values.
Among the urban design case studies detailed by Calthorpe is one relating
to Orenco, a village of 200 inhabitants at the time of the study in the early
1990s. Orenco lies at the heart of Portland’s “Silicon Forest,” along the line
of the light-rail between the populous suburban centers of Beaverton and
Hillsboro (Fig. 4.1). As Calthorpe notes, Orenco was in effect a new devel-
opment rather than a redevelopment project and “represented the challenge
of turning a simple single-use zone into a mixed-use neighborhood.”31 The
eventual construction of Orenco Station as a TOD offers some illuminating
insights into how the community ideals of New Urbanism fare in practice. A
study led by Bruce Podobnik at Portland’s Lewis and Clark College between
2000 and 2002 involved resident surveys at Orenco Station and two other
neighborhoods in inner Northeast and Southwest Portland. Interviewing in
each case hundreds of households the results of the study reveal a mixed ver-
dict on the actual achievements of the TOD. On the positive side, survey data
show that improved access to public transit had lead to increased transit use,
with around 70 percent of those interviewed saying they chose this option
of transportation more often than they did in their previous neighborhood.
However, this improvement needs to be seen in perspective. In terms of
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90 Chapter Four
overall rates of transportation mode, around 66 percent of Northeast Portland

residents and around 71 percent of Southwest Portland inhabitants reported
using a car, truck, or motorcycle, compared to around 75 percent at Orenco
Station. Podobnik therefore concludes that “adult residents of Orenco Station
are not more likely to rely on mass transit for their regular commute than
adult residents in either of the other two comparison communities.”32
The other key measure examined by the study relates to the reported sense
of community cohesion. Here the Orenco Station development appeared
to fare somewhat better. Responses to questions relating to neighborhood
friendliness, sense of community, and participation in formal and informal
community groups reveal higher levels of satisfaction and involvement than
those recorded in the other two neighborhoods. On the issue of the perceived
sense of community, for example, 78 percent of respondents from Orenco
Station said they felt there was an improvement over their previous neigh-
borhood, as contrasted with 46 percent in Northeast Portland and 31 percent
in Southwest Portland. Podobnik takes these results to provide sufficient
evidence for concluding that Orenco Station has succeeding in achieving the
key New Urbanist goal of community building. He remarks:
My research demonstrates that Orenco Station has succeeded in fostering an un-

usually high level of social cohesion within the community. Moreover, the ex-
tremely high satisfaction ratings given by Orenco residents to their community’s
physical design suggests that high-density, multi-use developments are quite
capable of competing in a market place dominated by more traditional, diffuse
suburban neighborhoods. . . . Overall, this study lends support to the assertion
that new urbanist communities can foster more socially and environmentally
sustainable lifestyles within American cities.33
However, while residents at Orenco praised the sense of community cohesion,

Podobnik points out that this may have been attained at the cost of social diver-
sity. Noting that the initial demographic profile of the development “provided
an almost ideal breeding-ground for the emergence of exclusionary attitudes,”
he concedes that “the setting was right for the development of a strong us-
versus-them mentality within the new urbanist community.”34 The survey
revealed that 65 percent of Orenco residents were happy with ethnic diversity
levels although at the time the neighborhood was 95 percent white. Another
significant finding was the fact that 62 percent of those surveyed were either
explicitly opposed to the construction of more affordable housing or expressed
reservations about it. Confronted with such attitudes Podobnik concludes:
“Overall, it is becoming increasingly clear that a key area of monitoring is the
extent to which strong bonds of solidarity generated within new urbanist neigh-
borhoods can translate into exclusionary attitudes towards non-residents.”35
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New Urbanism 91
When I visited Orenco Station one Saturday morning in June 2009 my

experience offered further informal evidence to back up Podobnik’s findings.
Immediately adjacent to the light-rail station was an undeveloped, extensive
raised plot surrounded by three-story condos. After two blocks one arrives
at the village “center,” in this case a six-lane road lined with the develop-
ment’s commercial units (Fig. 4.2). Beyond the main intersection one arrives
at “Central Park,” a large, rather stark and, when I was there, all but deserted
amenity (Fig. 4.3). Surrounding and beyond the park are single-residence
two-story houses that to a great extent conform to the typical New Urbanist
building code: traditional designs, mostly with front porches, and garages
behind or to the side, accessible via separate alleyways (Fig. 4.4). Talking to
a local man in his late 20s who happened to be walking by I asked him what
he thought of the neighborhood. He said it was a perfect place for a young
family: quite, with plenty of green spaces and solid property values. When I
asked him how he got around he said he didn’t consider public transit a good
option for family trips and relied exclusively on private transportation. On
my way back to the light-rail I stopped to ask a man in his early 20s what
he thought about the neighborhood. He told me he didn’t actually live there,
but found the “cookie-cutter” houses and general feel of the location far less
attractive that the option of living in one of Portland’s vibrant inner-city
neighborhoods.
These casual impressions gleaned from my trip to Orenco Station under-
score both the findings of Podobnik’s study and a more general critique to
be found in the literature on New Urbanism. While many features of New
Urbanist design are acknowledged as a significant improvement over the
formerly dominant modernist urbanism that fostered sprawl from the 1950s
on, the fact that much New Urbanist work has been done on previously unde-
veloped “Greenfield” sites means that any social equity potential of the new
approach to urban design has remained largely untapped.
The question is whether the tendency for New Urbanist practice to pro-
duce socially homogeneous, unrepresentative suburban enclaves is merely
a contingent outcome that will be corrected over time or something more
intrinsic. I suspect that the latter is the case and, as with Habermas’s theory
of communicative action, a formally attractive ethical stance is profoundly
compromised by a disinclination to tackle the actual mechanisms of power
and vested interest. Again, as with Habermasian deliberative democracy, the
problem lies with the idea that institutionalized procedures of negotiation
will somehow by themselves produce greater empirical equity and social
justice. In reality, as economic developments in the most affluent countries
have shown over the last few decades of free-market-oriented politics, those
sections of the population enjoying higher levels of material and social capital
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Figure 4.1. Orenco Station near Portland, Oregon. Residential buildings with parkland.
Photo by author.
Figure 4.2. Orenco Station. Central street with retail units.

Photo by author.
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Figure 4.3. Orenco Station. Central Park.
Photo by author.
Figure 4.4. Orenco Station. Traditional homes with garage access via back alleys.
Photo by author.
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94 Chapter Four
tend to consolidate their advantage. Thanks to the creation of a climate of

political consensus across liberal democracies according to which progres-
sive, redistributive taxation is universally condemned by the political class
and popular media, governmental approaches to social justice are restricted
to formal innovations focused on improving the apparent efficiency of bu-
reaucratic functioning. In this context, the explicitly “nonideological,” free-
market approach of New Urbanism has proven attractive to government in
the United States, presumably because it accords with the underlying political
consensus. In the remaining sections of this chapter I examine in more detail
some of the key points of criticism leveled at New Urbanism in light of its
model of community.
CRITIQUE OF THE NEW URBANIST MODEL OF COMMUNITY
David Harvey, whose notion of dialectical utopianism provides the focus for
the final chapter of this book, offers a short but incisive appraisal of New Ur-
banism. The gist of Harvey’s critique is that New Urbanism is fundamentally
nothing new in relation to the modernist paradigm it claims to replace. He con-
tends that what is crucially retained is the notion that design or what he calls
“spatial form” is capable of directly producing certain social characteristics
and processes. In this chapter I have referred to this position as environmental
determinism. In common with Harvey I oppose to such determinism the no-
tion of a dialectical or mutually determining relationship between the mate-
rial environment and social life. We have seen that key documents of New
Urbanism make gestures in the direction of a dialectical understanding, though
it nevertheless remains attached to the idea in both theory and practice that de-
sign directly determines community. In the following chapter further details of
the crisis that befell modernist urbanism will show the extent to which a deep
skepticism with respect to the urban designer’s agency stood at the center of the
emergence of postmodernism within the architectural community.
Fundamentally, Harvey believes that New Urbanism offers a compensa-
tory ideology of democratic community in the absence of any model of trans-
formative practice. Aligning New Urbanism with the communitarian theory
that gained prominence in the 1990s through the work of Amitai Etzioni,
Harvey sums up his criticism in the following way:
The darker side of this communitarianism remains unstated: from the very ear-
liest phases of mass urbanization through industrialization, “the spirit of com-
munity” has been held as an antidote to any threat of social disorder, class war,
and revolutionary violence. “Community” has ever been one of the key sites
of social control and surveillance, bordering on overt social repression. Well-
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New Urbanism 95
founded communities often exclude, define themselves against others, erect all
kinds of keep-out signs (if not tangible walls).36
In part Harvey is here echoing concerns relating to social exclusion within

community formation voiced by Sennett and repeated by Young. At the
same time, however, Harvey recognizes the positive potential for progressive
political struggle that can be generated by constructing community when
“coupled with the politics of place.”37 This idea of a politics of place centers
on grassroots struggle and was touched upon in chapter three in connection
with Lefebvre’s notion of the right to the city.
A recent collection of essays edited by Tigran Haas titled New Urbanism
and Beyond: Designing Cities for the Future offers a useful survey of the
current state of debate surrounding the movement. Emily Talen, for example,
raises a concern that has often featured in critiques of New Urbanism—the
creation of affordable housing. Talen singles out affordability as the most im-
portant social issue relating to urban design and insists that the New Urban-
ists’ disinclination to tackle politic issues directly means that their projects
are bound to be “palatable to a conservative constituency.”38 She sums up her
criticism thus: “Politically conservative developers are welcomed with fan-
fare [by New Urbanists] while policy activists working from the left are non-
present.”39 In a similar vein Jill Grant, who has published an extensive study
of the movement,40 complains that “New Urbanist projects rarely reflect the
class or ethnic diversity of the wider society.”41 Claiming that New Urbanist
developments have gained market success at the cost of social equity, Grant
remains open but skeptical toward the pretensions of New Urbanism to be
able to enhance genuine social diversity:
The challenge of building affordable, diverse, and inclusive communities demands

much more than good urban form. Mix is a necessary but not sufficient condition
for achieving good community. Social integration requires concerted action to
create opportunities and accommodation for all community members. These ambi-
tions may be beyond the ability of designers to deliver through good planning.42
Grant’s critical position strongly suggests that the promise of New Urbanism
with respect to social justice can be made a reality only by combining features
such as accessibility to public transit and finer grained urban networks with
genuine grassroots agency and political clout. Only through this combination
will community conditions be truly democratic and genuine social diversity
fostered. In practice New Urbanism has mainly sought to recapture the le-
gitimacy of design agency within the planning process, rather than find new
means of community self-determination through local empowerment. This
is not to deny that a certain commitment to public consultation is present
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96 Chapter Four
within the theory and practice of New Urbanism. But such consultation is
“design-led,” meaning that urban designers present selected “stakeholders”
with pre-given parameters and models of choice. It is highly questionable
whether such a process constitutes genuine public participation at all. If it
does not then, in this respect, New Urbanism will have failed to improve on
its modernist predecessors, who sought in their own way means of involving
the public in construction and design. In the following section of this chapter
I examine the charrette system of design consultation favored by New Urban-
ists. This examination reveals some telling parallels with the Habermasian
model of communication and deliberation.
THE CHARRETTE AND PUBLIC

ENGAGEMENT IN NEW URBANISM
The charrette has been employed in many cases of New Urbanist planning
and development in order to achieve broad consensus among recognized
stakeholders in a planning and design process. As a planning methodology
the charrette has been granted canonical status as defined and disseminated
by the National Charrette Institute (NCI) based, presumably not by chance,
in Portland, Oregon. The NCI defines its charrette model as “a designed-
based, accelerated, collaborative product management system for all aspects
of community planning including sustainable community plans, regional/
comprehensive plans, transportation/infrastructure plans, and development
plans.”43 The NCI-endorsed charrette involves three phases—a preparatory
phase, design charrette proper, and implementation phase—and it is stressed
that all three stages are indispensable to a successful process. In particular,
the NCI underscores the need to maintain effective stakeholder involvement
at the implementation stage in order that broad-based support for decisions
persists beyond the consultation period. The benefits of the charrette as a
decision-making tool are said to be its efficiency in terms of time and money,
greater chances of implementation, and promotion of trust between citizens
and government. The NCI puts forward highly detailed prescriptions in con-
nection with the charrette process, including specifications that it should take
place over a four- to seven-day period and involve three feedback loops,
ensuring that the plan constantly evolves.
In many ways the formalization of the charrette under the auspices of the
NCI is one of the most obvious indications of how New Urbanism is regu-
lated at the deepest level by something akin to Habermasian communication
theory. The charrette is precisely an attempt to put the consensus theory of
deliberation and “procedural rationality” into action. To be fair to Habermas,
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New Urbanism 97
his theory of communicative action actually assumes that consensus arises as

a spontaneously occurring background of everyday communication. In this
way consensus is more an unconscious condition of understanding within the
lifeworld than a result of consciously constructed frameworks of negotiation
such as the charrette. Nevertheless the affinity is striking. In an article that
considers public participation in planning processes in the UK, Tim Richard-
son and Stephen Connelly note the influence of the “communicative turn”
spearheaded by the work of Habermas in the 1980s.44 They see the Habermas-
inspired paradigm of “rational planning” as characterized by political plural-
ism, communicative rationality, the centrality of the planner, and the achieve-
ment of unforced consensus.45 Their assessment of communicative planning
is ultimately critical, though they do not reject it outright. Accordingly, in
place of what they consider the ideal consensus endorsed by Habermas, they
propose “pragmatic consensus” as a more credible and salutary goal within
the planning process. The danger of pursuing the former, they insist, is that
any attempt at public participation becomes “blind to local power outside of
communication . . . and therefore to the influence of power on policy devel-
opment, the possibility of distortion of the policy process, and even more
fundamentally therefore to the possibility of empowerment.”46 The implica-
tion of this criticism of the consensus model of planning and, by extension,
the charrette method, is that it is insufficiently sensitive to expressions and
changes of relative power within the context of negotiation. As noted in chap-
ter one, Habermas views communicative action on the one hand and strategic
action involving power and influence on the other as mutually exclusive.
While he has come under sustained criticism for advancing such an opposi-
tion on a theoretical level, the question in the present context is whether the
communicative approach can nevertheless prove useful for fostering genuine
community involvement in planning and urban design in practice.
In an article from 2002 that surveys the state of debate concerning New
Urbanism, Cliff Ellis remarks: “The charrette method may not be perfect,
but when executed properly and followed up with other citizen participation
methods it can produce outcomes that are both fair and of high quality. The
goal is a proper balance of professional expertise and community input.”47 A
more recent study, however, suggests that this balance may often favor the
professional designers at the expense of the directly affected community. So-
phie Bond and Michelle Thompson-Fawcett carried out extensive interviews
with people involved in the Wanaka 2020 visioning process in New Zealand
in 2002. Their interviews with various stakeholders including local commu-
nity representatives and government officials revealed widespread discontent
with the extent to which the New Urbanist perspective ruled out alternative
approaches. They remark: “The use of a single canon and set of principles
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98 Chapter Four
excludes other perspectives and alternative visions of places and spaces that
may be equally sustainable. Those who are not persuaded by New Urbanist
rhetoric do not have the opportunity to envision or consider other forms of
sustainable urbanism.”48 They trace this exclusion of other options within the
visioning process back to an inherent tendency of the design-led charrette
method to prioritize the expert knowledge of design consultants: “Certainly,
the design emphasis reveals a rational and instrumental belief in the role of
the expert in producing design solutions, given a specific set of informa-
tion.”49 They sum up their findings as follows:
Certain characteristics of the charrette process are inherent—the design em-

phasis, the guiding urbanist principles, the intense timeframe and the rigorous
testing of different proposals through multidisciplinary collaboration . . . While
there is no question that the charrette is design-focused, and it is accepted that
this is a strength, it is suggested the claim that it is a method of “citizen-based
participation and design” may overemphasize its participatory capabilities.50
In the final chapter of this book I consider in detail a more recent visioning
exercise carried out in Portland, Oregon, between 2005 and 2007. In this case a
much more community-led methodology was used. This meant that the process
required more time and resources but the sense of grassroots involvement in
shaping the eventual vision was much greater than seems to have been the case
in Wanaka. But even in this case, as I will show, the painstaking exercise of
community inclusion was to a significant degree subsequently undermined by
government bodies and design agencies asserting dominance at the implemen-
tation stage. Returning to the charrette, we should recall that one of its professed
merits is efficiency in terms of time and resources. Accordingly, the charrette
is meant to work by gathering a representative cross-section of affected parties
together with urban designers and other sources of technical knowledge. This is
in line with one the requirements set out within Habermasian discourse ethics,
which insists that all legitimate decisions be reached under conditions where
everyone significantly affected by the outcome is included in discussion. The
mere presence of interested parties, however, is not enough—they must be af-
forded genuine opportunities to voice their concerns. As noted by Young, there
is further scope for exclusion within a forum of discussion according to the
level of legitimacy accorded to certain modes of address. As a consequence,
dispassionate, analytical discourse tends to be seen as more worthy of attention
than emotive, rhetorical, or personalized interventions.
The question is whether the charrette is an effective means of realizing the
explicitly stated goal of New Urbanism to promote community involvement
and social diversity in urban planning. The movement’s ostensive desire to
transform urbanism into “community design” hinges in great part on its ability
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New Urbanism 99
to canvass and implement public input effectively. While the study of Wanaka
2020 revealed widespread dissatisfaction with a visioning process led by de-
signers, Richardson and Connelly suggest that what lies behind such shortcom-
ings is the deeper-rooted disinclination of communicative rationality to grapple
with the reality of local power structures. As we know through everyday
experience, contentious issues are rarely if ever discussed on a level playing
field. Typically institutional and wider societal attributes accord each speaker
more or less “symbolic capital” and thus legitimacy in the context of discus-
sion. If the parallel between Habermas’s theory and New Urbanist practice I
am advancing is justified, then it would be reasonable to assume that similar
problems arise in the context of the New Urbanist charrette as were identified
in connection with the theory of communicative action. Certainly, both profess
a concern for social inclusion and democratic pluralism. For New Urbanism
this is shown through the tendency to insist that the movement is not against
sprawl as such, but simply wants unfair systemic advantages given to the sub-
urban sprawl option removed. Once planning codes are reformed to reestablish
parity, New Urbanists argue, a more sustainable and livable urban environment
will naturally ensue. Flint reports a comment made by Duany: “We’re going
to drive the market—the percentages are so high for people who want to live
this way, we don’t have to force anyone to do it. We just have to be allowed
to do it.”51 As is apparent, this is akin to Habermas’s central claim that, once
the distortions of strategic and instrumental thinking are removed, any rational
discussion will arrive at unforced consensus or truth for the affected group.
However, as Bent Flyvbjerg remarks in his study Rationality and Power in
connection with Habermas’s theory of rational communication:
Rationality is context-dependent, the context often being power. Rational-

ity is penetrated by power, and it becomes meaningless, or misleading—for
politicians, administrators, and researchers alike—to operate with a concept of
rationality in which power is absent. This holds true for substantive as well as
communicative rationality. Communication is more typically characterized by
nonrational rhetoric and maintenance of interests than by freedom from domina-
tion and consensus seeking.52
In this light it appears that, without significant modifications, the charrette

methodology favored by New Urbanism is no more credible an approach to
democratic inclusion in practice than Habermas’s model of communicative
action in theory. Crucially, what they share is a disinclination to acknowledge
the way localized networks of power determine the search for a transparent
and fair process of consensus building. This is compounded by a tendency in
both cases to assume uncritically a certain paradigm of rational discussion. In
the case of the New Urbanist charrette it is clear than designers are regarded as
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100 Chapter Four
repositories of expert knowledge, whose intellectual and technical superiority

with respect to the broader public entitles them to lead and steer the process of
discussion. In Calthorpe’s words: “[In regional planning] the public at large is
educated in regard to what choices they have and what the trade-offs are for
those choices. More often than not, the public has an opportunity to learn about
and consider choices that it didn’t know it had.”53 Such comments indicate that,
far from a being the departure from the earlier modernist paradigm indicated
by the name, New Urbanism in fact reasserts the modernist presumption of
the rational superiority of the planner relative to the public affected. As Bond
and Thompson-Fawcett insist: “[Local government] leaders consciously need
to avoid reinforcing the local hegemony, and instead pay particular regard to
difference in their community.”54 Adopting the charrette method of public
consultation may use up less public resources, but its efficacy in advancing the
goals of genuine public participation and social diversity is far from proven.
NEW URBANISM AND COMMUNITY
Whatever its shortcomings New Urbanism deserves more theoretical attention

in view of its pervasive contemporary influence. That influence is particularly
pronounced in the United States and the United Kingdom, although other
examples could be cited to demonstrate that key elements of New Urbanism
have become something of a global currency at this point. Like all resonant
movements certain aspects of the New Urbanist ideology have become natural-
ized common sense. Accordingly, few people will express opposition to urban
redevelopment that aims to “retrofit” older buildings and mix in pedestrian-
friendly street structures and aesthetically pleasing public spaces. But the ques-
tion I have attempted to broach in this chapter is essentially social rather than
technical in nature, namely, what kind of community does New Urbanism seek
to construct? In approaching this question I have measured New Urbanism
against the aspiration of its own charter, which speaks of combating “separa-
tion by race and income” by means of “citizen-based participatory planning
and design.” What has emerged, however, is that New Urbanist developments
have if anything exacerbated such separation by building ex-urban enclaves of
economic and ethnic homogeneity. With its embrace of the charrette method of
consultation this failure to foster social diversity has been compounded by a re-
assertion of the intellectual superiority of “community designers.” As I argued
in part one and will elaborate on in the following two chapters, community
can never be adequately grasped either in theory or practice in the absence of
local grassroots political struggle. History at the local level readily reveals that
urbanist intervention has predominantly taken the form of institutional agen-
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New Urbanism 101
cies changing the built environment in ways that were at best indifferent to the
genuine concerns of local populations. This has been the case for two simple
reasons: either it was a question of exploiting economic potential (for example,
in cases of gentrification), or of meeting concerns of social unrest (as has hap-
pened following successive waves of urban disturbance in the United States
and Europe over the last four decades).
While it may be tempting to hope that more benign and enlightened pub-
lic policy might work against this legacy of urban planning, I believe that
the current climate of political pragmatism that predominates across liberal
democracies means that this hope is unwarranted. Instead, as I will argue
in the final chapter, genuine community building must come from winning
adequate resources for local self-determination through opposing the inher-
ent tendency of government and corporate powers to accumulate rather than
disperse capital. If, as the abiding ideology of free-market capitalism insists,
individuals are naturally inventive in meeting their own needs through ex-
ploiting environmental potential, then communities should be afforded the
freedom to shape their own material setting collectively. As it is, the profes-
sion of city planning from the time of Haussmann in mid-nineteenth-century
Paris to the present day has largely sought to impose urban visions on inhabit-
ants. As with many historical efforts at progressive grassroots action, the key
today lies in seizing the pervasive official rhetoric of public participation and
finding ways to make governmental policy at a local level truly accountable.
This can only come about, I believe, through open nonviolent confrontation
between grassroots organizations and government, rather than accepting the
facile belief that public and governmental interests, when subject to rational
analysis and negotiation, will automatically coincide. In practice, of course,
such confrontation requires the construction of coalitions that succeed in
identifying genuine concerns common to different groups. To this extent a
certain manner of pragmatic consensus is in fact needed at the grassroots
level. Whether such consensus can be formed without grassroots organiza-
tion replicating the structures of dominance that characterize the relationship
between democratic government and their constituents is a key question for
any model of radical democracy. In the following two chapters I explore this
question further within the context of contemporary urbanism.
NOTES
1. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation:

The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: North Point
Press, 2000), 260. Among its representatives the movement is known as the New
Urbanism. I avoid this rather presumptive use of the definite article.
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102 Chapter Four
2. Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck, Suburban Nation, 261.

6. Scott London, “The City of Tomorrow: An Interview with Peter Calthorpe,”
scottlondon.com/interviews/calthorpe.html (Fall 2002).
7. London, “City of Tomorrow.”
8. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Modern
Library, 1993), 31.
9. Jacobs, Death and Life, 564–65.
11. Richard Sennet, The Fall of Public Man (London / New York: Penguin, 2002),
310.
12. Sennett, Fall, 339–40.
13. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 213–14.
14. Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck, Suburban Nation, 240–41.
17. Anthony Flint, This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 63–64.
18. Cf. Mouffe, On the Political, 35–63.
19. Flint, This Land, 68.
20. Vincent Scully, “The Architecture of Community,” in Peter Katz, ed., The New
Urbanism: Toward Architecture of Community (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994),
221–30, 230.
21. Peter Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the
American Dream (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), 9.
22. Calthorpe, American Metropolis, 11.
23. Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton, The Regional City: Planning for the End
of Sprawl (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2001), 3–4.
24. Calthorpe and Fulton, Regional City, 4.
32. Bruce Podobnik, “The Social and Environmental Achievements of New
Urbanism: Evidence from Orenco Station,” http://legacy.lclark.edu/~podobnik/
orenco02.pdf (7 Nov. 2002), 10.
33. Podobnik, “Achievements,” 1.
10_368_07_Ch04.indd 102 7/28/10 12:43 PM

New Urbanism 103
36. David Harvey, “The New Urbanism and the Communitarian Trap,” Harvard
Design Magazine no. 1 (Winter/Spring 1997), http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/
publications/hdm/back/1harvey.pdf, 3.
37. Harvey, “The New Urbanism,” 3.
38. Emily Talen, “The Unbearable Lightness of New Urbanism,” in Tigran Haas,
ed., New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities for the Future (New York: Rizzoli,
2008), 77–79, 78.
39. Talen, “Unbearable Lightness,” 79.
40. Cf. Jill Grant, Planning the Good Community: New Urbanism in Theory and
Practice (London / New York: Routledge, 2006).
41. Jill Grant, “The Challenges of Achieving Social Objectives,” in Haas, New
Urbanism, 80–85, 85.
42. Grant, “Challenges,” 85.
43. National Charrette Institute, http://www.charretteinstitute.org/charrette.html.
44. Tim Richardson and Stephen Connelly, “Reinventing Public Participation:
Planning in the Age of Consensus,” in Peter Blundell Jones, Doina Petrescu, and
Jeremy Till, eds., Architecture and Participation (New York: Spon Press, 2005),
77–104.
45. Richardson and Connelly, “Reinventing,” 83.
46. Richardson and Connelly, “Reinventing,” 84.
47. Cliff Ellis, “The New Urbanism: Critiques and Rebuttals,” Journal of Urban
Design 7, no. 3 (October 2002): 263–93, 281.
48. Sophie Bond and Michelle Thompson-Fawcett, “Public Participation and New
Urbanism: A Conflicting Agenda?” Planning Theory and Practice 8, no. 4 (2007):
449–72, 463.
49. Bond and Thompson-Fawcett, “Public Participation,” 456.
51. Flint, This Land, 76.
52. Bent Flyvbjerg, Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1998), 227.
53. Calthorpe, Regional City, 114.
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10_368_07_Ch04.indd 104 7/28/10 12:43 PM
Chapter Five
Postmodern Urbanism
The idea of the postmodern has been in circulation since the 1940s but first
became a more general cultural focus in the 1980s. As with modernism, my
approach to postmodernism is restricted to its immediate relevance for the
relationship between urbanism and community. Even within urban theory,
however, there is a wealth of material that I will not engage with here. Ideas
such as the multiplicity or deferral of meaning (derived from literary theory)
and collage (derived within the visual arts), which are often taken as key
markers of postmodern urbanism, will not be considered. In line with the
overall structure of this book I will instead confine my discussion to one
salient function or aspiration of postmodern urbanism, namely that it seeks to
heighten our awareness of the singularity of place.
It can easily be objected that such an approach offers too limited a perspec-
tive on postmodern urbanism. While I am aware that this is a valid objection
it is equally true that there is no comprehensive agreement on what such
urbanism essentially entails. Current assessments of postmodern urbanism
confirm this impression by including a wide and often bewildering variety of
architectural and urbanist movements from New Urbanism to Deconstructiv-
ism. For my purposes here I wish to accentuate the contrast between post-
modern urbanism and New Urbanism. In my view postmodern urbanism is
best understood as an attempt to draw out the social and historical layerings
that attach to any urban site. As shown, New Urbanism also appeals to his-
tory but looks for the underlying robustness and repeatability of traditional
urban forms. By contrast, postmodern urbanism more often highlights what
is singular and incomparable in the historical urban artifact. While New
Urbanism, as we saw in the previous chapter, largely retains the modernist
faith in the ability of environmental change to overcome social pathologies,
postmodern urbanism indicates an alternative form of therapy, in the form of
105
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106 Chapter Five
a collective historical catharsis. Rather than striving to elevate and improve

everyday life, the postmodernist approach aims to grant a certain dignity to
the mundane. Viewed from a postmodern perspective, therefore, urbanism
should not and cannot be about constructing or producing community from
scratch, but rather about offering material contexts in which communal ties
and history can be collectively marked. The aspiration is that, through such
commemorative markers, urbanism will be transformed from an assertion
of dominant power to an empowerment of democratic inclusion. The main
problem with such a perspective on the practical level, as we will see, is that
it tends to dissipate the material means of resistance to oppressive power.
Without such means the concern for social justice cannot lead to real change.
Thus, as was shown in chapter two, the appeal to singularity ultimately leaves
grassroots community without adequate resources of dissent. In the absence
of such resources postmodern urbanism amounts to an assertion of singularity
and difference at the expense of genuine community and solidarity.
THE EVERYDAY ENVIRONMENT AND POPULIST URBANISM
Following the structure and approach of this book, postmodern urbanism will
be considered here insofar as it is aligned with the model of singular commu-
nity examined in chapter two. Before postmodernism became an explicit and
pervasive tendency of theory within literature and the human sciences in the
1980s, it arose as a countermovement in architecture and urbanism in the late
1960s and early 1970s. One text above all is recognized as the seminal work
of postmodern architecture and urbanism, namely Learning from Las Vegas
coauthored by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown, and Steven Izenour and
originally published in 1972. Based on a series of study trips and design
studios, this work celebrates the unplanned vitality of an urban landscape
devoted to ephemeral pleasure that stands in stark opposition to the paradigm
of orthodox modernist urbanism. The underlying claim advanced is that Las
Vegas represents a genuinely inclusive manner of urban composition:
But the order of the Strip includes; it includes at all levels, from the mixture of
seemingly incongruous land uses to the mixture of seemingly incongruous ad-
vertising media. . . . It is not an order dominated by the expert and made easy for
the eye. The moving eye in the moving body must work to pick out and interpret
a variety of changing, juxtaposed orders.1
Learning from Las Vegas presents the shift away from modernism as a transi-
tion from formalism to symbolism. The emergence of modernist architecture
in Europe in the 1920s involved a sustained polemic against the use of or-
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Postmodern Urbanism 107
namental and figurative elements. In a move that becomes a recurrent motif

across many texts and works, postmodern architecture and urbanism are said
to involve a reassertion of the need for symbols to constitute a genuinely col-
lective materialized language. In the words of Learning from Las Vegas:
When it cast out eclecticism, Modern architecture submerged symbolism.

Instead it promoted expressionism, concentrating on the expression of archi-
tectural elements themselves: on the expression of structure and function. It
suggested, through the image of the building, reformist-progressive social and
industrial aims that it could seldom achieve in reality. By limiting itself to stri-
dent articulations of the pure architectural elements of space, structure, and pro-
gram, Modern architecture’s expression has become dry expressionism, empty
and boring—and in the end irresponsible.2
This critique of modernist urbanism had already been advanced in Venturi’s

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture from 1966. Here the underly-
ing emphasis on populism is already in evidence, in the form of an inclusive
“both-and” logic directly opposed to the “either-or” of modernist formalism.
Somewhat surprising, however, is Venturi’s choice of T. S. Eliot as a key
intellectual inspiration for his notion of “the difficult whole” architecture and
urbanism should strive to attain. After all, Eliot is a canonical representative
of high modernism and not renowned for his passionate embrace of exuberant
popular culture. What Venturi seems to find in Eliot, however, is a notion of
cultural holism that includes rather than rejects the reality of fragmentation.
As the title of Venturi’s text suggests, the key task in architecture and urban-
ism is maintaining complex and contradictory material parts within a relation
of dialectical tension. This alone would be sufficient to distinguish postmod-
ern urbanism clearly from New Urbanism with its drive toward urbanistic
congruity and equilibrium.
COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND SINGULAR PLACE
It is important to acknowledge that, unlike New Urbanism, postmodern

urbanism did not arise as a conscious movement. There is no postmodern
urbanist manifesto issued by a core group of practitioners. This makes the
task of identifying the figure of community implied by such urbanism con-
siderably more difficult. In line with my connection of postmodern urbanism
and the idea of singular community, however, a preoccupation with place and
collective memory emerges as key. In the same year that marked the publi-
cation of Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture another
important early document of the move away from architectural modernism
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108 Chapter Five
appeared in Europe. In The Architecture of the City, Aldo Rossi, in common

with Venturi, asserts a kind of popular urban spirit against certain tenden-
cies of modernist urbanism. Rather than focus on any spontaneous mixing of
styles, however, Rossi underscores the importance of the traditional European
city as an embodiment and repository of collective history and memory. He
notes: “One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people,
and like memory it is associated with objects and places. The city is the lo-
cus of the collective memory.”3 A significant aspect of the urban locus and
its power to contain collective memory is, according to Rossi, the specific
natural setting chosen for a city. Accordingly, a central task in the study and
practice of architecture and urbanism is taken to be an appreciation of the re-
lationship between human behavior and the natural environment, or between
psychology and ecology. Whereas the embrace of industrial technology in
modernist architecture and urbanism looks to the economies of scale afforded
by the serial production of building materials to bring about a comprehensive
social transformation, Rossi seeks to recapture a sense of the uniqueness of
the city considered as a supreme work of art. Accordingly, he focuses on
what he calls the “singularity” of the “urban artifact,” by which he means the
individual building as well as the city as a whole. Ultimately, urban singular-
ity arises out of a complex conjunction of natural setting, civic events, and
collective memories. So conceived, the city as singular place becomes a vast
urban monument:
[The outlines of the concept of locus] delineate the singularity of monuments,

of the city, and of buildings, and thus the concept of singularity itself and its
limits, where it begins and ends. They trace the relation of architecture to its
location—the place of art—and there its connections to, and the precise articu-
lation of, the locus itself as a singular artifact determined by its space and time,
by its topographical dimensions and its form, by its succession of ancient and
recent events, by its memory.4
To the extent that the natural location is seen as essential to the founding
and continued vitality of the urban environment, the singularity of the city is
derived from what is already there prior to construction. This can neverthe-
less be seen as a dialectical process, whereby the natural environment and
urban construction mutually determine each other. Underlying Rossi’s text
is a heightened sense of the precariousness of urban integrity and continu-
ity. The clear implication is that the global tendency of modernist urbanism
to erase and rebuild the urban context on a massive scale is destructive of
architecture’s crucial ability to maintain social continuity across generations.
As modernist architects gradually succeeded in directing urbanism away from
a concern with figurative styles and toward the largely functional tasks of
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engineering, it also brought architecture into close proximity to modern tech-

nological production. This meant, among other things, that urbanism came to
be increasingly subject to the imperatives of mass production and commod-
ity obsolescence. In other words, cities were to be built more economically
through the use of standardized materials and totally rebuilt at regular inter-
vals. While a leading figure such as Le Corbusier never renounced the idea
that architecture was a high art striving to convey spiritual meaning, modern-
ist urbanism came to mean in practice urban renewal schemes that favored
such things as efficient traffic circulation over the continuity of fragile urban
communities. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, local organized
opposition to urban renewal had arisen across liberal democracies. What was
at stake in these early struggles could be characterized as the right of urban
communities to determine the environment that contained their own singular,
collective history.
In Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, David Harvey reflects
on the role the appeal to the singularity of place has played in many cases
of localized struggle. While remaining alert to the warnings of Sennett and
Young that defense of local communities can often degenerate into exclusion-
ary affirmations of identity, Harvey recognizes the importance of a sense of
place through reference to the cultural theorist Raymond Williams and his
notion of “militant particularism”:
Ideals forged out of the affirmative experience of solidarities in one place get
generalized and universalized as a working model of a new form of society
that will benefit all of humanity. That is what [Raymond] Williams means by
“militant particularism” and he sees it as deeply ingrained into the history of
progressive socialism.5
For Harvey the key thing is the transfer of local struggle to some more gen-
eralized political opposition movement. In the absence of any generalizing
tendency the defense of singular place risks degenerating into regressive
parochialism, that is, into forms of collective practice that merely seek to
assert forms of identity in isolation from the surrounding social and material
environment. In words that echo Habermas’s social theory, Harvey notes that
the increased penetration of technological rationality into the contemporary
lifeworld gives rise to “resistances that increasingly focus on alternative
constructions of place (understood in the broadest sense of that word). The
search for an authentic sense of community and of an authentic relation to
nature among many radical and ecological movements is the cutting edge of
exactly such a sensibility.”6
Harvey is certainly correct in asserting that the notion of place has come to
occupy an ever more central place within liberal democratic politics at every
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110 Chapter Five
level. Given that the social ideology common to liberal democracies involves
an imperative to view oneself as a unique, singular individual, it seems natural
that we should seek out and foster singular places of collective inhabitation.
The immediate obstacle encountered by such a desire for singular place is that
it is no less subject to the mechanisms of commodification than anything else.
Accordingly, a glance at the urban futures projected by any number of con-
temporary cities will demonstrate a desire to highlight and create “iconic,”
“signature” buildings and structures. Part of the present Comprehensive Plan
for Portland, Oregon, for example, stresses that the city has yet to exploit the
iconic potential of its bridges (a popular name of the city is “Bridgetown”).
Enhancing the visibility of current bridge structures or constructing new
bridges is thus seen as vital for the national and international image of the
city. That such an approach to urbanism conforms to a key strategy of product
placement that accentuates and fetishizes uniqueness is clear.
It is thus important to remain conscious of how easily appeals to the sin-
gularity of place can play into the hands of municipal government and corpo-
rate business eager to promote an attractive image of a city without genuine
concern for social justice and equality. This does not mean that the effort to
acknowledge and accentuate the singularity of place is without potentially
progressive consequences, just that those who support this effort should be
under no illusions about the ever-present possibility of its being co-opted and
reconfigured by dominant institutions of power. When Robert Stern claimed
in 1976 that the challenge confronted by any postmodernist urbanism was that
of “recapturing the affection of architecture’s very disaffected constituency,
the public,”7 few would have questioned the sentiment. But if the source of
this very disaffection was to a great extent the high-handedness of architects,
urbanists, and municipal planning authorities, the solution presumably called
for some kind of shift in the power balance in favor of urban communities at
the grassroots level. While the idea of an inclusive, pluralistic approach to the
urban environment seems attractive in theory, in practice the eventual reality
of postmodern urbanism was quite different.
POSTMODERN URBANISM IN PRACTICE
It is important to stress that postmodern urbanism remained largely an

aspirational program for the best part of a decade after the publication of
Learning from Las Vegas. In that work an appeal to construct postmodern
“ugly and ordinary” architecture opposed to the “heroic and original” works
of modernism carried with it, as we have seen, an appeal to a pluralistic and
inclusive idea of community. Like early proponents of architectural modern-
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ism, advocates of postmodern architecture proclaimed that the architectural

profession was out of step with the popular spirit of the time. It is clear that,
in its early stages, postmodern urbanism involved a passionate defense of ev-
eryday culture that resonated with broader social changes. Learning from Las
Vegas marked a significant attempt to recognize that the contemporary built
environment was not something either to be shaped according to professional
architecture’s austere principles or simply condemned as so much aestheti-
cally worthless detritus. But such a move contained from the outset a telling
ambiguity between acknowledging the existence of the material environment
created by untrammeled commodification and affirming it. In succeeding
decades, as it developed into a recognizable approach to urban planning,
postmodern urbanism encountered significant corporate and municipal ac-
ceptance but widespread popular disaffection.
In the wake of a prolonged period of theoretical existence, postmodern ur-
banism came out in the first half of the 1980s as an unambiguous and pivotal
champion of corporate culture. While Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building, con-
structed in Manhattan and completed in 1984, canonized postmodernism as a
key corporate style, Michael Graves’s Portland Building (Fig. 5.1) from the
same year marked the conspicuous entry of postmodern architecture into the
civic realm. Commissioned by the city of Portland, the novelty of the decora-
tive features that adorn the exterior of the Portland Building certainly make
it stand out amid the surrounding, mostly bland modernist structures (Fig.
5.2). As Graves himself notes, external decoration is considered essential
for conveying the symbolic meaning of the public structure: “A significant
architecture must incorporate both internal and external expressions. The
external language, which engages inventions of culture at large, is rooted in
a figurative, associational and anthropomorphic attitude.”8 The description of
the Portland Building offered by Graves highlights its sensitivity to context
as well as its civic significance:
The Portland Building was a design-build competition sponsored by the city of

Portland, Oregon. Located on a 200-foot square downtown block, the building
will house the city’s municipal offices. This particular site offers a rich and
special setting characterized by the adjacent City Hall and County Courthouse
buildings on two sides, and the public transit mall and the park on the other two
sides. The design of the building addresses the public nature of both the urban
context and the internal program. In order to reinforce the building’s associative
or mimetic qualities, the facades are organized in a classical three-part division
of base, middle or body, and attic or head.9
The emergence of Grave’s design as favored by those who judged the architec-
tural competition certainly did not lead to swift public acceptance, but rather
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112 Chapter Five
popular discontent that Portland was to become a testing ground for postmodern
experimentation. Nevertheless, Portland’s mayor at the time, Frank Invancie,
boldly claimed that the building would become the city’s Eiffel Tower, herald-
ing the rebirth of a city that had been badly hit by economic recession in the
late 1970s and early 1980s. Noting its ironic if not ominous year of completion
(1984), Brian Libby sums up popular reception of the Portland Building:
Unfortunately for Michael Graves, the building has, despite its iconic status,
been largely panned in the two decades since it was completed—not just by the
critics of postmodernism but also by ordinary Portlanders. Gloomy, cramped
office spaces have made it unpopular with tenants. Government employees there
call in sick more often than those working in other buildings. Cracks have ap-
peared in upper floors, requiring new bracing.10
Although the structure offers iconoclastic gestures and a degree of stylistic

singularity, as noted the Portland Building has remained disliked by city
workers and Portland inhabitants more generally. Reports in local newspa-
pers indicate that those who work in the building often complain of lack of
light (the Pacific Northwest is not known for sunny winter months) and ques-
tions have been raised about the quality of materials used.11
Figure 5.1. Michael Graves, The Portland Building.

Photo by author.
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Figure 5.2. The Portland Building. Decorative Features.

Photo by author.
While the public outcry against the building could be seen as parochial
or conservative on the part of Portlanders, the more likely cause of the reac-
tion is a keen sense that such architectural gestures make a poor substitute
for political action that is effective in addressing issues of genuinely popular
concern. Even on the immediate aesthetic level, Graves’s building gives a
fortress-like impression that suggests a desire on the part of municipal au-
thorities to keep the public out rather than invite them in (Fig. 5.3).
It is instructive to compare the controversy surrounding the Portland
Building with the protracted struggle to create Pioneer Square around the
same time (Fig. 5.4). In the latter case opponents of an open public space
in the center of Portland’s downtown insisted that it would quickly become
a magnate for undesirable, antisocial behavior. At the same time, a group
of municipal politicians lead by the same Mayor Invancie argued that the
project would have negative economic as well as social consequences. Ul-
timately it was a grassroots initiative called Friends of Pioneer Square that
salvaged the project by raising $750,000 through a paving-stone sponsoring
scheme. The contrast between the Portland Building and Pioneer Square is
stark and telling. While the former was city led and opposed at the grassroots
level, the latter garnered much popular support despite municipal efforts to
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Figure 5.3. The Portland Building with City Hall in the Foreground.
Photo by author.
Figure 5.4. Pioneer Square. Portland, Oregon.

Photo by author.
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derail the proposal. An example such as the Portland Building makes clear
that postmodern urbanism in practice did not follow through on its inclusive
and populist rhetoric.
As Nan Ellin remarks with respect to the work of such architects as John-
son and Graves: “Keen to exploit the power symbolism, corporate clients
have commissioned ‘star’ architects to design buildings which confer status
and corporate recognition and which help to ‘sell’ their corporate identity by
providing a colorful package for it as a commercial artist would do for other
products.”12 Such an appraisal strongly suggests that the aspiration of post-
modern urbanism to facilitate a socially inclusive built environment remains
far from being borne out in practice. Instead, structures such as the Portland
Building materially and symbolically represent intensified separation be-
tween community at the grassroots level and institutionalized power. Such a
situation raises concerns graver than those connected to developments in New
Urbanism, insofar as the corporate sympathies of postmodern architects often
amounted in practice to the direct takeover of public urban space. If, as many
commentators suggest, postmodern urbanism has played a significant role
in facilitating the dominance of corporate and municipal power over public
space, then such urbanism must be seen as opposed in principal to anything
resembling grassroots, self-determining community.
THE POLITICS OF POSTMODERN URBANISM
Surveying postmodernism at the end of the 1980s Mary McLeod notes that
the radical gestures of earlier theory had not been fulfilled in actual practice.
In agreement with other commentators, she charts a rapid decline of the op-
positional stance of the 1970s into a wholesale capitulation to hegemonic
economic and bureaucratic forces in the following decade:
A passivity vis-à-vis economic and political power has continued to be one

of the major reasons for the leftists’ unease with postmodern architecture. . . .
With amazing rapidity, postmodernism became the new corporate style . . .
postmodernism began to flourish in the boom economy of the early 1980s.
Architects seemed to stop writing and theorizing; most reacted hungrily to the
opportunities to build.13
In the context of a conference attended by architects and leading intellectu-

als associated with postmodernism (including Lyotard and Derrida) held at
the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1985, Kenneth Frampton
anticipated McLeod’s point. “By the early 80s,” he remarked, “it was clear
to me that, as far as the American architectural establishment was concerned,
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116 Chapter Five
a reactionary cultural operation was consciously under way and had been
in the offing, ever since Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in
Architecture.”14 Echoing a common criticism of New Urbanism considered in
the pervious chapter, Frampton castigates postmodernism in architecture for
its superficiality and indifference to genuine social concerns:
There is a marked tendency, in American postmodernist architecture in par-

ticular, to reduce architecture to surface images—to a kind of gratuitous and
supposedly reassuring mise en scène, to a scenography oriented towards market-
ability, social control and towards an optimization of building production and
consumption.15
Accusing postmodern urbanism of generating social control through the

embrace of productive efficiency basically amounts to the claim that, from
a social perspective, the actual operation of postmodernism within the urban
context marks no significant change over the earlier modernist approach.
Indeed, one could go further and insist that, despite its populist rhetoric,
postmodern urbanism actually constitutes an abandonment of any genuine
concern to improve the urban environment in socially progressive ways.
But how did the desire, widely expressed in the 1960s and 1970s, to re-
connect the public with architecture and urbanism become transformed into
the crass corporate orientation of the 1980s? One obvious reason, mentioned
by McLeod and others, is the turnaround in economic conditions follow-
ing the recession period induced by the oil crisis in the second half of the
1970s. Viewed in terms of national politics, the early 1980s also witnessed
the transfer of power in both the United States and the United Kingdom to
market-oriented conservative parties and leaders. Hence the title of McLeod’s
article, which clearly implies a significant accommodation of architecture and
urbanism to the overtly political conjuncture. As Fredric Jameson remarks in
the introduction to his key study on postmodernism:
Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which,
in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relation-
ship. It will therefore not be surprising to find the extraordinary flowering of the
new postmodern architecture grounded in the patronage of multinational business,
whose expansion and development is strictly contemporaneous with it.16
Insofar as postmodern urbanism is closely connected to a concern for singu-

larity and heterogeneity, however, we can assume that it also seeks to defend
the idea of irreducible otherness. While this is already an extremely difficult
notion to grasp on an abstract level, how such an idea could be given material
form within urbanism appears even more problematic. In part one I consid-
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ered Young’s politics of difference and in particular her understanding of ur-

ban public space as a context in which openness to “unassimilated otherness”
might be encountered. In response to Young’s approach I objected that she
idealizes public space, insofar as any actual physical environment always car-
ries social features that attract or repel certain individuals and groups. While
Young attempts to bring together Habermas’s concern for rational communi-
cation with more radical philosophies of otherness, the postmodern apprecia-
tion of community as singular remains deeply suspicious of all attempts to
grasp the social in terms of communicative dialogue. It generally sees in such
attempts an effort to destroy difference and reassert homogeneous identity
based on a supposedly universally valid rationality. The difficulty that arises
out of this defense of singularity on the practical level, however, is that cer-
tain group identities have to be established, provisionally at least, in order for
collective action of any kind to be possible. When the two seminal strands
of postmodern urbanism are recalled, the political implications in both cases
appear overwhelmingly negative: Rossi’s notion of singular place can easily
degenerate into reactionary localism and Venturi’s populism can be readily
transformed into socially damaging commercialism. As ever, Harvey sums all
this up with great precision and insight:
Postmodernism has us accepting the reifications and partitionings, actually

celebrating the activity of masking and cover-up, all the fetishisms of locality,
place, or social grouping, while denying that kind of meta-theory which can
grasp the political-economic processes (money flows, international divisions of
labour, financial markets, and the like) that are becoming ever more universal-
izing in their depth, intensity, reach and power over daily life.17
In other words, as argued in chapter two, the theory of singularity when trans-
lated into social practice offers no means of opposing oppressive power and
supporting progressive resistance. While the original impetus toward local
self-determination that characterized early opposition to municipal urban re-
newal schemes in the late 1950s and early 1960s was salutary, postmodernist
architecture and urbanism as practiced since the 1980s have seemed intent on
reasserting the professional power of “urban designers” through an intimate
alliance with municipal and corporate bureaucracies. Such a situation does
not generate, as promised by Venturi, an urbanism for the people, but at
best urbanism practiced by benign paternal authority. More often, however,
postmodern urbanism has been explicitly opposed to the manifest interests
of local communities. As was illustrated in the previous chapter and will be
expanded upon in the next, the problem is ultimately one of the power dif-
ference that exists between communities at the grassroots level on the one
hand, and municipal and corporate institutions on the other. What the 1980s
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118 Chapter Five
witnessed was an attempt on the part of municipal and national governments

to regain the initiative they lost in the wake of efforts to assert local grass-
roots self-determination in previous decades. This attempt involved forming
a close alliance with the corporate sphere, giving rise to the “public-private
partnerships” that now characterize almost all major urban projects handled
by local or national governments. While involving large amounts of public
financing such as funds set aside for urban renewal, collaboration between
municipalities and private business necessarily renders many decisions and
details relating to urban development inaccessible or at best opaque to the
wider public. Every major city across liberal democratic countries has a tale
to tell of such ventures that ignore or sideline popular input, run significantly
over budget, and fail to fulfill their promised role within the local neighbor-
hood. This situation is expressed well by Micheal Dear in his article “Post-
modernism and Planning”:
The postmodern city is a deliberate mutation engendered by a bureaucratic

state and a corporate civil society. Both spheres are driven by economic return,
in fiscal or in profit terms. The postmodern city has become a mutant money
machine, driven by the twin engines of (state) penetration and (corporate) com-
modification.18
If this description is accurate then it is fair to say that postmodern urbanism’s

concern for singularity in theory has by no means translated into modes of prac-
tice that genuinely promote equality and social justice. Indeed, postmodern ur-
banism in practice has actually made social division more acute by failing to of-
fer resources for popular resistance to the combined forces of state bureaucracy
and corporate strategy. In line with this view, it is curious and noteworthy that
the founding text of such an urban model, Learning from Las Vegas, remains
silent about the obvious commercial reasons for the studied city’s existence.
The very practice and habits of gambling offer readymade metaphors for the
social pathologies induced by commodity capitalism: the lottery of social status,
the irrational hope that—against the odds—one can prevail over others through
a random process, the ecologically unsustainable nature of an isolated desert
city. To the extent that postmodernism rejects earlier critical cultural theory that
claimed to distinguish, in the spirit of Marx, the mere ideology supportive of
social practices from the actual deeds of social actors and institutions, it removes
a valuable source of resistance to the realities of commercial exploitation and
advanced commodification. According to Jameson, the difficulty of adopting a
plausible critical position in theory and practice is intimately tied to the reality
of the postmodern condition itself. But it is precisely in the area of the built en-
vironment, he argues, that one can come to develop models of resistance to the
social and political effects of postmodernity.
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DISORIENTATION AND
SEPARATION IN THE POSTMODERN CITY
Lyotard, whose notion of the differend was considered in the discussion of

dissenting community in chapter three, is principally known for his 1979
work The Postmodern Condition. As already noted, Lyotard specifically tar-
gets Habermas’s theory of dialogical community and denounces it as socially
regressive and reactionary. In close connection with his own theory of lan-
guage in terms of dissent rather than consent, Lyotard advances an account of
the postmodern that centers on what he calls “incredulity toward metanarra-
tives” and “local determinism.”19 These two features of the postmodern stem
from a more general sense that any claim to universality is out of step with
the everyday realities of “late capitalist” society. The subtitle of Lyotard’s
study is “A Report on Knowledge,” and he initially claims that postmodern
knowledge “refines our sensibility to differences and reinforces our ability to
tolerate the incommensurable.”20 This virtue of a heightened appreciation of
difference and singularity is, as we saw, a key claim made by early propo-
nents of postmodern urbanism. But recognizing the reality of heterogeneity
and plurality within postmodernity in no way entails making a positive judg-
ment about it. Maurice Culot and Leon Krier make this point quite clear when
they uncompromisingly remark:
There is thus nothing to be “learned from Las Vegas,” except that it constitutes
a widespread operation of trivialization, a cynical attempt to recuperate and
accommodate the leftovers of the greatest of all cannibalistic feasts, a desper-
ate attempt to give the profession of architecture a final justification of its bad
conscience: to make believe in its social utility despite its lack of project.21
Krier, who later become a key mentor both to early New Urbanism and to
Prince Charles in his attempts to revive the traditional urban structures of the
English village in the UK, represents what ultimately became a neoconserva-
tive rejection of postmodernism in architecture. The critique of postmodern ur-
banism by leftist cultural theorists has been both more involved and nuanced.
In “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology”22 Jameson initially poses the
question whether it makes sense to speak of space as ideological. Rejecting
the idea that architecture can carry political values in any immediate way,
Jameson nevertheless follows Henri Lefebvre in asserting the progressive
social value of utopian architectural and urbanist schemes. While he is willing
in this article from 1982 to view postmodernism as representing an aesthetic
that is original and genuine distinct from that of high modernism, by the time
his extensive study Postmodernism was published almost a decade later his ap-
proach had become decidedly more critical. Here, in addition to the claim that
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120 Chapter Five
postmodernism represents an abolition of the modernist dichotomy of high

and low culture, Jameson characterizes the postmodern in terms of a profound
absence of historical consciousness. Postmodern theory is accordingly caught
up in a deeply conflicted or at worst contradictory task, namely “to take the
temperature of the age without instruments and in a situation in which we are
not even sure there is so coherent a thing as an ‘age,’ or zeitgeist or ‘system’ or
‘current situation,’ any longer.”23 Jameson views his own theory of postmod-
ernism as an effort not merely to add more descriptive details to what was by
then already a confusing amalgam of ideas, but rather to suggest how a certain
concept of the postmodern can allow for a critical position with regard to the
social reality of postmodernity. In his own words:
If we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall

back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference,
a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable. At
any rate, this has been the political spirit in which the following analysis was
devised: to project some conception of a new systematic cultural norm and its
reproduction in order to reflect more adequately on the most effective forms of
any radical cultural politics today.24
Following Foucault’s lead Jameson takes the period referred to as “late capi-
talism” to be marked by the dominance of space, as opposed to the prevalence
of time taken to be the main reference point during modernism. In opposition
to earlier celebrations of the vibrancy of the postmodern urban environment,
Jameson speaks of “the complacent eclecticism of postmodern architecture”25
and remarks that the postmodern city “has deteriorated or disintegrated to a
degree surely still inconceivable in the early years of the twentieth century.”26
He then proceeds to outline the underlying claim of his study:
I am proposing the notion that we are here in the presence of something like a
mutation in built space itself. My implication is that we ourselves, the human
subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolu-
tion; that there has been a mutation of the object unaccompanied as yet by any
equivalent mutation in the subject.27
Jameson then offers a description of the postmodern experience of space in re-

lation to the Bonaventure Building designed and developed by John Portman in
Los Angeles. According to Jameson’s account, this building strives toward the
status of a total environment: cutting itself off from its surroundings through the
use of mirrored windows, possessing inconspicuous rather than monumental
entrances from the adjacent streets, and disorienting the pedestrian who moves
about inside the structure. The overall character ascribed to the postmodern
experience of space is disorientation or bewilderment: the building does not
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allow itself to be “read” by the observer, but rather induces movements in the
human body that remain largely without reason or structure for the mind. For
Jameson, the effect of what he calls “postmodern hyperspace” reflects an “in-
capacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational
and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as
individual subjects.”28 Above all he stresses that his description should not be
understood as one “reading” of the building among others, but rather indicates
a truly historic shift in the way space is experienced: “[W]hat we have been
calling postmodern (or multinational) space is not merely a cultural ideology or
fantasy but has genuine historical (and socioeconomic) reality as a third great
original expansion of capitalism around the globe.”29
Jameson’s idea that certain changes have occurred within the material
environment that have as yet not been matched by social and cognitive
transformations is something familiar to students of Marx. Following the
lead of Critical Theory, Jameson is simply carrying this idea over into the
“superstructural” sphere of cultural production. However, as noted, Jameson
does not simply invite his readers to revel in the disorienting effects of the
postmodern space. Instead, he seeks to find methods for dispelling such ef-
fects by experiencing them in a modified manner. His account of this goes
by the name of “cognitive mapping,” and, as the name suggests, the point is
to find a means for recovering a shared sense of direction under the cultural
conditions of postmodernity. Cognitive mapping involves
a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing [the

space of multinational capital], in which we may again begin to grasp our
positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act
and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social
confusion. The political form of postmodernism, if there is any, will have as its
vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social
as well as a spatial scale.30
Within his lengthy considerations in the conclusion of his work Jameson con-
cedes that cognitive mapping (a notion first proposed in at article from 1984)
“was in reality nothing but a code word for ‘class consciousness’—only it
proposed the need for class consciousness of a new and hitherto undreamed
of kind, while it also inflected the account in the direction of that new spa-
tiality implicit in the postmodern.”31 In other words, in the spirit of Walter
Benjamin, Jameson attempts to retrieve politically redemptive potential
from the preeminent material sites of contemporary global capitalism. But
is this attempt at theoretical alchemy—transforming the base matter of the
postmodern environment into the gold of progressive political conscious-
ness—ultimately credible?
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122 Chapter Five
In his account of postmodernism Harvey, also writing from the position

of cultural Marxism, puts in question Jameson’s basic claim that there is
a wholesale break within postmodernism from its modernist precursor.
Harvey insists that representatives of postmodernism stake their claim to
novelty by caricaturing modernism and, rather ironically, playing down
the pluralism of the modern movement. More particularly, Harvey notes
how “modernists found a way to control and contain an explosive capitalist
condition.” He goes on: “They were effective, for example, in the orga-
nization of urban life and the capacity to build space in such a way as to
contain the intersecting processes that have made for a rapid urban change
in twentieth-century capitalism.”32 Harvey sees essentially two faces of
postmodernism: one that stems from the radical theory of such thinkers
as Derrida and Lyotard, and another, gaining prominence in the 1980s,
that “seeks a shameless accommodation with the market” and ultimately
amounts to a “reactionary conservatism.”33 As we have seen, the trajectories
of key representatives of postmodern urbanism demonstrate a transition
from the former to the latter. Instead of looking for redemptive potential
in postmodern urbanism like Jameson, Harvey sees the practical results of
postmodernism as unambiguously negative and regressive. He makes his
point unmistakably clear:
Worst of all, while it opens up a radical prospect by acknowledging the

authenticity of other voices, postmodernist thinking immediately shuts
off those other voices from access to more universal sources of power by
ghettoizing them within an opaque otherness, the specificity of this or that
language game. It thereby disempowers those voices (of women, ethnic and
racial minorities, colonized peoples, the unemployed, youth, etc.) in a world
of lop-sided power relations. The language game of a cabal of international
bankers may be impenetrable to us, but that does not put it on a par with the
equally impenetrable language of inner-city blacks from the standpoint of
power relations.34
The underlying complaint against postmodern urbanism is thus that, rather

than helping to unmask mechanisms of social separation and provide re-
sources for resisting them, in theory and practice it actually heightens a sense
of collective alienation and powerlessness. Most importantly, the postmodern
politics of difference undermines any sense of collective identity needed to
make group action genuinely effective in changing material conditions. In
the final analysis the response to postmodernism by Jameson and Harvey
poses the same basic problem: how can progressive collective action effec-
tively resist the intensified social oppression and injustice evident within the
postmodern city?
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URBANISM AND UTOPIAN DESIRE
In their work since the 1980s a remarkable instance of common ground has
become apparent between Jameson and Harvey. This commonality takes
the form of an appeal to renew a utopian spirit within progressive political
thought. Although evidence of interest in the idea of utopia is to be found
already in Jameson’s Postmodernism and earlier works, his most recent ma-
jor study makes it the centerpiece. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire
Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions from 2005 is divided into two main
parts, the first devoted to more directly theoretical concerns and the second
analyzing classic texts of twentieth-century science fiction. In the first chap-
ter Jameson makes an important distinction between utopia as program and
utopia as impulse. The former, also called “systemic utopianism” includes
revolutionary political programs and practices, projections of new spatial
totalities, and “those self-conscious Utopian secessions from the social order
which are the so-called intentional communities.”35 The utopian impulse, by
contrast, relates to “political and social theory, for example, even when—es-
pecially when—it aims at realism and at the eschewal of everything Utopian;
piecemeal social democratic and ‘liberal’ reforms as well, when they are
merely allegorical of a wholesale transformation of the social totality.”36 In-
terestingly, Jameson places the individual building in the latter category and
comprehensive city planning in the former, remaining thereby in line with his
earlier analysis of the ideological function of the postmodern Bonaventure
Building. Jameson sees the utopian impulse—those cultural artifacts where
utopianism and ideological distortion are most intimately intertwined—as the
most pervasive (though largely unconscious) form of utopia in late capitalist
society.
Despite his Marxian perspective, Jameson does not side in any straight-
forward way with utopia as program and its concern for social totality. The
stated reason for his misgivings in relation to systemic utopianism is that “it
is a mistake to approach Utopias with positive expectations, as though they
offered visions of happy worlds, spaces of fulfillment and cooperation.”37
This leads Jameson to ally progressive politics with a spirit of utopia that
stresses the openness of the future rather than definite material means to
reach a desired social reconfiguration. In the present context the key point is
that Jameson’s sense of the utopian bears a close resemblance to the notion
of indeterminate radical change that lies at the center of the idea of singular
community in Nancy and Agamben. Accordingly one can say that Jameson
attempts to bring Marxian revolutionary politics in line with the notion of
singularity developed by Nancy and Agamben. This seems to me a mistake
and one that is perhaps most materially evident in architecture and urbanism.
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124 Chapter Five
For when Jameson speaks of what he calls “Utopian form” as challenging

the status quo “by forcing us to think the break itself, and not by offering us
a more traditional picture of what things would be like after the break,”38 he
has recourse to the same discourse of indeterminate otherness and transfor-
mation that characterizes the theory of singular community. No matter how
devoid of organized progressive politics contemporary liberal democracies
may appear, it can only promote domination to reduce the utopian heritage of
revolutionary socialism to mere indeterminate “interruption.” The real power
of political utopianism stems, by contrast, from its ability to offer a credible,
intelligible, and desirable picture of future society and pointing to the cur-
rently available means to realize it.
Admittedly, what remains difficult about all utopian political frameworks
is the prior formation of collective agency as a crucial part of the material
means needed to bring about change. This gives rise to the following ques-
tion: in a state of universal alienation how can a collective agency emerge
that will restore community more generally? In other words, the absence of
genuine political community requires that such community already exist in
order to bring about the desired social transformation. For his part Jameson is
aware of this key practical problem and approaches it by acknowledging the
utopian character of all transformative social action. Bearing in mind what
Jameson says about the identity of cognitive mapping and class conscious-
ness in Postmodernism, it is worthwhile noting what he had written a decade
earlier in the conclusion of The Political Unconscious:
The preceding analysis entitles us to conclude that all class consciousness of

whatever type is Utopian insofar as it expresses the unity of a collectivity;
yet it must be added that this proposition is an allegorical one. The achieved
collectivity or organic group of whatever kind—oppressors fully as much as
oppressed—is Utopian not in itself, but only insofar as all such collectivities
are themselves figures for the ultimate concrete collective life of an achieved
Utopian or classless society.39
In my view, here Jameson is indicating an intrinsic connection between genu-

ine community and utopian projection. He speaks of “figure” and his mean-
ing is closely allied to what I called “configuration” in part one. The common
notion is that community is never something natural or determined, though
neither does it exist on some ideal level separated from any actual material
setting. More than philosophical theories of community, models of urbanism
reflect this combination of vision and reality that makes up any configuration
of the social. What Jameson is alluding to in the previous quotation is the
sense in which any model of social transformation is made possible by means
of “a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing,”
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as he would put it in Postmodernism. While for Jameson the task is one of

decoding and so subverting the oppressive nature of postmodern space, the
configuration of that very space is equally utopian insofar as it projects a
possible future city completely shaped by the dominant powers of corporate
capitalism.
SINGULARITY AND THE LIMITS OF URBANISM
What, then, could be left to say about the progressive potential of urbanism
in the wake of postmodernism? Perhaps the notion of singularity can, after
all, be useful in helping to dispel the paradox in which utopian political
praxis seems to be tied up. Harvey rehabilitates political utopianism in a
manner that is more directly useful for my attempt here to set out a credible
account of progressive urban community. As we have seen, Harvey takes up
the notion of “militant particularism” developed by Raymond Williams. This
notion bears a certain resemblance to what the architectural theorist Kenneth
Frampton called “critical regionalism.” As Frampton explained at the ICA
conference in 1985:
[B]y critical regionalism I do not mean any kind of specific style, nor of course
do I have in mind any form of hypothetical vernacular revival, nor any kind of
unreflected so-called spontaneous grassroots culture. Instead, I wish to employ
this term in order to evoke a real and hypothetical condition in which a critical
culture of architecture is consciously cultivated in a particular place, in express
opposition to the cultural domination of hegemonic power. It is, in theory at
least, the critical culture, which while it does not reject the thrust of moderniza-
tion, nonetheless resists being totally absorbed and consumed by it.40
Frampton remains vague about what this would actually look like as a practi-
cal approach to urban development, though he makes clear that it would be
quite distinct from New Urbanism’s neotraditionalism or postmodernism’s free
variation of historical styles. As Lyotard notes in a response to Frampton and is
evident in the analysis of the previous chapter, the idea of the region emerges
here to challenge modernism’s program of universalism. As well as suggesting
ecological boundaries, the notion of the region figures in much contemporary
urban thinking and practice in the United States and elsewhere, and is central
to Calthorpe’s transit-centered version of New Urbanism. On an imaginative
level it is evident that regions can prove attractive for utopian projections, as
in Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel Ecotopia that envisages the secession of the
Pacific Northwest from the rest of the United States and its transformation into
a radically ecological and egalitarian society. However, it seems more credible
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126 Chapter Five
to identify the individual city or even the urban neighborhood as the key scale
of resistance in the manner indicated by Frampton. Exactly how place can act
as a means of resistance to oppressive power is something that will be consid-
ered in more detail in the following chapter. For now, I wish to conclude this
analysis of postmodern urbanism by following Harvey one more step along the
line of his argument for political utopianism.
In Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference Harvey’s extensive
and varied analysis is preoccupied with the following question: “how is it
that ‘the partial and the local’—spatiality (in some guise or other)—is now
so frequently appealed to as the locus of residual forces that can exercise real
power over the trajectory of social change?”41 He goes on to outline a position
that will later be called dialectical utopianism:
Material practices transform the spaces of experience from which all knowledge
of spatiality is derived. Theses transformative material practices in part accord
with discursive maps and plans (and are therefore expressing both social rela-
tions and power) but they are also manifestations of symbolic meanings, my-
thologies, desires. The spatialities produced through material practices (be they
frameworks for living, for communication, for work, for symbolic activities
and rituals, for enjoyment) also constitute the material framework within which
social relations, power structures, and discursive practices unfold.42
The basic dialectic here is between social and spatial practice. In other words,
social action shapes places and places shape social action in a reciprocal loop.
Accordingly, any attempt to accord political action to one without the other
will constitute an abstraction. As I have remarked several times, practitioners
within architecture and urbanism tend to see what Harvey calls “spatial form”
as an exclusive social determinant. We saw this dogma clearly at work in the
environmental determinism of New Urbanism, but it is also apparent in the cel-
ebrations of “inclusive architecture” by postmodernist architects. On the other
hand, social theory tends to view transformative practice largely in isolation
from concrete place. A key premise of my whole approach here is that social
action and place need to be viewed together. While this seems simple enough as
an abstract principle, difficulties arise once we begin to consider how this might
work in concrete situations. As we have seen, constructing local community can
easily produce exclusionary attitudes that are anything but socially progressive.
At the opposite extreme, however, appealing to a liberal democratic cosmopoli-
tan spirit glosses over the material and symbolic inequalities that characterize
contemporary society. Thus, Harvey’s question arises: how to make place a site
of effective struggle for social justice? In part an adequate response to this ques-
tion involves what Harvey calls the production of “secret mappings of otherwise
intractable processes and events by appeal to a certain imaginary.”43 At the same
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time, however, Harvey cautions that such mappings, insofar as they are derived
from aesthetic theory, require a conversion to “discourse,” which explicitly
confronts the workings of powerful social institutions. Based on the evidence
brought together in this chapter, postmodern urbanism with its appeal to singu-
lar place fails to constitute a credible discourse in this sense. For that reason it
remains in effect an ideological elaboration of the status quo rather than offering
any realistic strategies to challenge the current balance of power.
Nevertheless, I think Harvey is right to suggest that postmodernism rep-
resented a necessary challenge to modernism’s strident internationalism and
universalism. Early on at least it attempted to continue the spontaneous oppo-
sition to the practices of modernist urbanism that had broken up and alienated
so many urban communities in the 1950s and 1960s. Insofar as postmodern
urbanism more generally is motivated by the effort to bring together social
plurality and spatial singularity it genuinely reflects the reality of a postindus-
trial society that is no longer easily divided into opposed classes. According
to Harvey, the experience of contemporary urban life is generated by a con-
tinuous, difficult intersection of local and global dimensions:
[W]e live in a world of universal tension between sensuous and interpersonal

relations (including those of domination and repression) in place (with intense
awareness of the environmental qualities of that place) and another dimension
of awareness in which we more or less recognize the material and social con-
nection between us and the millions of other people who have, for example, a
direct and indirect role in putting our breakfast on the table.44
Whether architecture and urbanism can be used as means to approach or ex-

press this basic tension is the question broached in this part of the book. The
answer that has emerged thus far strongly suggests that these areas of cultural
practice are not sufficient to do this. In a lecture given at the opening of an
exhibition on architecture in 1981 Habermas pointed out the key symptom of
utopian urbanism’s failure to address the issues of social justice: “to this day
it has not been possible to integrate social housing projects and factories into
the city. The urban agglomerations have outgrown the old concept of the city
to which we gave our hearts; that is not the failure of modern architecture, or
of any architecture at all.”45 Diagnosing the condition of postmodern urban-
ism as arising from “compensatory needs” expressive of a neoconservatism
that is content to leave social conditions unchanged, Habermas claims that
the resources of architecture and urbanism have simply been overtaken by the
mechanisms of advanced global capitalism:
The utopia of a preconceived form of life, on which in an earlier period the

sketches of Owen and Fourier had been based, could not be brought to life.
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128 Chapter Five
And this was due not only to a hopeless underestimation of the complexity
and changeability of modern lifeworlds but also to the fact that modernized
societies with their systemic interrelationships extend beyond the dimensions
of a lifeworld that could be measured by a planner’s imagination. The current
manifestation of a crisis of modern architecture derives less from a crisis in
architecture than from the fact that architecture voluntarily allowed itself to
become overburdened.46
I find myself in agreement with this assessment insofar as it is directed to-

ward postmodernism in architecture and urbanism. But the key issue stems
more specifically from the pronounced formalism of certain approaches to
the urban environment in the twentieth century. Habermas is right to insist
that the social complexity of contemporary urban life is not amenable to any
one program of urban form, but he is wrong to dismiss all utopian urban
practice informed by “alternative mappings” of the material environment. To
trace social formation and thus community back to mechanisms of rational
dialogue in an exclusive manner is precisely to leave out of account the more
visionary and imaginative processes that are necessary for significant social
change of any kind. As argued in chapter three, the struggle to make social
justice a material reality requires above all collective practices of dissent, not
institutions that promote reasonable consent. While neither New Urbanism
nor postmodern urbanism have proven to be convincing resources for the
achievement of social justice, they at least serve as a reminder that shaping
the urban environment cannot be a matter of indifference to this achievement.
In the final chapter of this book I sketch a positive model of urban and social
transformation in accord with Harvey’s notion of dialectical utopianism.
What this model attempts to show in some detail is how the idea of dissenting
community might look in practice.
NOTES
1. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las
Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2001), 52–53.
2. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning, 101–3.
3. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2002),130.
4. Rossi, Architecture, 107.
5. David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996), 32.
6. Harvey, Justice, Nature, 302.
7. Robert Stern, “Gray Architecture as Post-Modernism, or, Up and Down from
Orthodoxy,” in Architecture Theory since 1968, 242–45, 243.
8. Carol Vogel Nichols, ed., Michael Graves: Buildings and Projects 1966–1981
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1985), 11.
10_368_08_Ch05.indd 128 7/28/10 12:44 PM

9. Nichols, Buildings, 195.

10. Brian Libby, “Reevaluating Postmodernism,” Architecture Week, http://www.
ArchitectureWeek.com/2002/0605/culture_1-1.html (5 June 2002).
11. See, for example, Jeanie Senior, “What’s Not to Love about the Skyline? A
Lot, It Seems,” Portland Tribune, http://portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story
_id=30852 (15 June 2005).
12. Nan Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism (New York: Princeton Architectural Press,
1999), 251.
13. Mary McLeod, “Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmod-
ernism to Deconstructivism,” in Hays, Architecture Theory since 1968, 680–702; 685.
14. Kenneth Frampton, “Some Reflections on Postmodernism and Architecture,”
in Lisa Appignanesi, ed., Postmodernism: ICA Documents (London: Free Association
Books, 1989), 75–87, 76.
15. Frampton, “Reflections,” 86–87.
16. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism (London / New York: Verso, 1996), 5.
17. Harvey, “The Condition of Postmodernity,” in Spaces of Postmodernism, eds.,
Micheal J. Dear and Stephen Flusty (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2002), 169–76, 172.
18. Michael Dear, “Postmodernism and Planning,” in Dear and Flusty, Spaces of
Postmodernism, 162–69, 167.
19. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
(Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1984), xxiv.
20. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, xxiv.
21. Maurice Culot and Leon Krier, “The Only Path for Architecture,” in Hays,
Architecture Theory, 350–55, 353.
22. Fredric Jameson, “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology,” in Hays, Archi-
tecture Theory, 440–61.
23. Jameson, Postmodernism, xi.
24. Jameson, Postmodernism, 6.
31. Jameson, Postmodernism, 417–18.
32. Harvey, “Condition of Postmodernity,” 171.
33. Harvey, “Condition of Postmodernity,” 172.
34. Harvey, “Condition of Postmodernity,” 172–73.
35. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and
Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), 3.
36. Jameson, Archaeologies, 3–4.
37. Jameson, Archaeologies, 12.
38. Jameson, Archaeologies, 232.
39. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (New York / London: Routledge,
2002), 281.
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130 Chapter Five
40. Frampton, “Reflections,” 78.

44. Harvey, Justice, Nature, 315–16.
45. Jürgen Habermas, “Modern and Postmodern Architecture,” in Hays, Architec-
ture Theory, 416–26, 424.
46. Habermas, “Modern and Postmodern Architecture,” 423.
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Chapter Six
Dialectical Utopianism
THE IDEA OF DIALECTICAL UTOPIANISM
In the previous two chapters the social configurations behind New Urban-
ism and postmodern urbanism were analyzed and critiqued. In keeping
with the general method and concerns of this book, my intention was not
simply to reject these varieties of urbanism but rather to show that certain
aspects of them offer valuable clues for arriving at an appreciation of the
urban environment and an approach to urban practice that furthers the goals
of social justice. While New Urbanism’s charter calls for more local deter-
minism and efforts to address systemic urban inequality and disadvantage,
its relationship to political and corporate institutions means that in practice
its egalitarian aspirations are gravely compromised or simply given up.
For its part, a key strength of postmodernist urbanism is that it promotes
sensitivity to local differences and can thus be aligned to some extent with
the pluralist politics of inclusion advocated by Young. In truth though,
the postmodern approach never produced a model of urbanism capable of
resisting oppressive uses of power. Despite an attractive ideology of inclu-
sion and populism, in practice postmodern urbanism led to little more than
individual examples of corporate and civic architecture that rarely achieved
the original goal of reconnecting professional architects and urbanists with
liberal democratic civil society.
In the final chapter of this book I offer a positive sketch of how certain
urban practices can aid the struggle for social justice. What I advance here
follows the model of dissenting community outlined in chapter three. There I
brought together Rancière’s idea of democratic politics as permanent struggle
about who has the right to rule with Lefevbre’s notion of the right to the city.
In this chapter I return to these ideas in an attempt to adapt them to a general
131
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132 Chapter Six
approach to urban practice inspired by Harvey’s analysis of contemporary

cities. Such an approach is useful in combating the naïve environmental
determinism that characterizes New Urbanism in particular and professional
urbanism more generally. Thus, while it is true that collective behavior can
be modified through changing the built environment, changes to this environ-
ment themselves result from collective projects and desires. Modernist urban-
ism and New Urbanism are motivated by a common drive to standardize or
normalize urban behavior. The oppositional political stance of dialectical
utopianism, by contrast, seeks to challenge such standardization and create
spaces where alternative, more progressive forms of grassroots community
organization can emerge.
The question I tackle in this chapter is thus: what would the theory of dis-
senting community look like as urban practice? I give my answer to this ques-
tion the title “dialectical utopianism” in the sense proposed by David Harvey.
In Spaces of Hope Harvey introduces this notion in the following way:
The task is then to define an alternative, not in terms of some static spatial form
or even some perfected emancipatory process. The task is to pull together a spa-
tiotemporal utopianism—a dialectical utopianism—that is rooted in our present
possibilities at the same time as it points towards different trajectories for human
uneven geographical developments.1
As noted in the previous chapter, Harvey’s variety of utopianism differs from

that advocated by Jameson precisely in its appeal to practices “rooted in our
present possibilities.” Harvey also explicitly rejects the postmodernist logic
of “both-and” and insists that a dialectical approach to urban practice must
resolutely confront the “either-or” of collective decision-making. Harvey and
Jameson are nevertheless united in a belief that progressive politics cannot
exist without some sense of utopianism. After all, to believe that society must
change in profound and systemic ways requires some collective sense of how
things could be radically different. As representatives of the Marxian tradi-
tion both Harvey and Jameson are committed to challenging the neoliberal
orthodoxy that has established itself across liberal democracies in the last
three decades. According to this orthodoxy, repeated countless times across
mass media every day, there is no intrinsic conflict between progressive poli-
tics and the dictates of the capitalist market. The basic either-or in question
for dialectical utopianism is: giving corporate capitalism free rein or making
material changes that will advance the goals of social justice. For progressive
change to be possible it is necessary to devise forms of collective practice to
bring about such changes. While the next section offers a theoretical model
of such practice, subsequent sections consider that model in the context of
concrete movements and situations.
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Dialectical Utopianism 133
COMMUNITY IN ACTION
In part one I repeatedly claimed that the theories of dialogical and singular
community unduly restrict the sense of collective action considered consti-
tutive of social configuration. In both cases this tendency takes the form of
rendering action ultimately linguistic in nature. Thus, when Young complains
that Habermas’s theory of communicative action is unrealistic, she simply
pleads for a broader notion of what constitutes legitimate communication
rather than challenging the very restriction of action to modes of commu-
nication. A common criticism of Habermas’s theory is that it is unrealistic,
insofar as it expects consensus between rival parties to discussion to emerge
in a way that excludes the workings of oppressive power and coercion. While
this criticism is relevant and warranted it does not really get to the heart of
the problem, namely that linguistic practice is only a certain limited sphere
of human action. If one reflects on how key historical moments of political
progress have occurred in modern liberal democracies, it is not plausible
to think of them as merely the result of linguistic acts or transformations.
While constitutions and declarations are naturally looked at as significant
documents of political change, the acts of material and social transformation
that preceded and succeeded them should not be forgotten or sidelined. No
doubt the rights-based nature of liberal democratic institutions of justice has
played a large part in this tendency to substitute the word for the deed of
social change. Certainly, as long as social justice remains a purely theoreti-
cal or procedural question, this ideological distortion has a good chance of
remaining unchallenged. As soon as actual material conditions within the
urban environment become the focus, however, this illusion is more likely
to be dispelled. For no amount of dialogue or redefinition can in itself alter
the inequalities manifest in contemporary cities across liberal democracies:
phenomena such as disparities in social services and public school provision
to different inner-city neighborhoods, gentrification caused by untrammeled
real estate speculation, and the influence of corporate business lobbyists and
middle-class homeowner associations on municipal urban policy and funding.
As argued in part one, the question of social justice cannot be restricted to a
concern for who participates in an apparently fair and open public discussion.
In reality mere conversational participation in no way guarantees fairness. A
key implication that follows from this is that a credible model of community
centered on the concern for social justice must break out of the restriction of
social action to communicative action. In order for fair discussion to arise in
liberal democracies, unjust inequalities of material power and privilege must
first be tackled. It is at this point—before communicative action can begin in
earnest—that genuine collective praxis occurs.
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134 Chapter Six
In his Critique of Dialectical Reason Jean-Paul Sartre developed a detailed

theory of social action within a broadly Marxian framework. In this work
Sartre draws a distinction between what he calls the “series” on the one hand
and the “fused group” on the other. In simple terms, the series is a random
collection of individuals lacking any unifying project or reason for being
together. Sartre’s main example is of people waiting for a bus: each person is
essentially interchangeable with any other and, beyond a certain background
understanding of latent rivalry, there is no connecting thread that binds the
individuals. In the fused group, by contrast, each individual as such suspends
his or her individuality in the name of a common action and goal. In this
case, rather than a random collection of persons we encounter a group uni-
fied through a shared sense of purpose. As an exemplification of the fused
group Sartre offers a description of the events surrounding the storming of
the Bastille as a key collective act of the French Revolution. The choice of
this example bears out one of Sartre’s central points vis-à-vis the fused group,
namely that it is a short-lived, intense state of collective practice. A key fea-
ture of the fused group underscored by Sartre is the dissolution of the more
usual sense of acting as an individualized self. In the fused group:
I could not take the group as a community-subject of which I am the object (the
means, for example). . . . I come to the group as its group activity, and I consti-
tute it as an activity in so far as the group comes to me as my group activity, as
my own group existence. The characteristic of the tension of interiority between
the group (apart from me) and myself inside it is that in reciprocity we are simul-
taneously both quasi-object and quasi-subject, for and through each other.2
Sartre thinks of the series and fused group as mutually exclusive. In fact, the
latter can only arise through the suspension of the former. He also identi-
fies the fused group with community in an explicit way: “The reality of the
praxis of a (fused) group depends on the liquidation . . . of the serial, both in
everyone and by everyone in everyone, and its replacement by community.”3
My main reason for turning to Sartre’s idea of the fused group is that it offers
an appreciation of community not in terms of common thought, belief, or
conviction (as in the dialogical model), but rather as common action. Such an
appreciation, I contend, is more relevant and fruitful for an inquiry concerned
with realizing the goals of social justice under the conditions of contemporary
urban life. That is, the theory of the fused group is a model of community
that centers on transformative material rather than linguistic action. While it
appeals to a sense of spontaneous collective freedom, Sartre’s model of com-
munity does not neglect the realities of acting within a context of pre-given
restrictions. In other words, the idea of the fused group offers a genuinely
dialectical theory of community.
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On a purely theoretical level many objections can be raised against Sartre’s

model of community. First, it has recourse to many questionable dualisms:
the fused group is said to constitute as “internal” social relation, whereas the
series takes the form of an “external” relation of indifference; everyday coop-
erative activities are dramatically distinguished from explosive, revolutionary
action; and urban life is said to give rise naturally to the isolation of the series
as opposed to the intimacy and immediacy of the fused group. Bearing these
points in mind, Jameson is no doubt correct to insist that Sartre’s distinction
between the series and fused group is far from original and, in fact, follows
the well-worn path of Tönnies’s celebrated differentiation of Gemeinschaft
(community) and Gesellschaft (civil society) from the end of the nineteenth
century. A second point of potential criticism relates to the very notion of
fusion as a key trait of genuine community. As we saw in chapter two, the
model of singular community unreservedly rejects the idea of community as
fusion or fused identity and in fact grasps fusion as the key characteristic of
totalitarian configurations of the social. While there is some justification for
this suspicion the theory of singular community goes too far and removes
the basis for any credible account of collective action. Indeed, according to
the model of singular community such action becomes in itself suspect along
with any notion of constructing community through social praxis. Finally, a
theorist such as Habermas would be apt to insist that Sartre’s theory of com-
munity remains attached to a notion of everyday life as somehow degraded,
as something to be overcome through a radical transition to truly revolution-
ary group action. From a Habermasian perspective the model of community
proposed by Sartre is naïve insofar as it sees social transformation as arising
out of spontaneous group action operating beyond objectively distinguished
institutions of decision-making within liberal democracies. In other words,
the key shortcoming of Sartre’s theory of action would be its failure to rec-
ognize the high level of social and political complexity and differentiation
confronted by any group dedicated to social change under contemporary
conditions.
While there is some truth to all these objections, I nevertheless believe
that Sartre’s notion of the fused group is useful for constructing a convincing
model of community. In light of the concern for social and political pluralism
that lies at the heart of efforts to realize social justice, it is certainly difficult
to accept Sartre’s idea that effective social action requires a “liquidation” of
otherness and the constitution of collective agency as homogeneous. Yet,
all that Sartre seems to mean by this is that community exists only in and
through common identity of purpose. It does not follow from this that Sartre’s
sense of community involves the existence of a sort of collective substantial
identity, that is, an immersion of individuals into a constructed and sanctified
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136 Chapter Six
collective entity such as the nation-state. In the face of the historical specter
of totalitarianism it is important to distinguish the collective action necessary
for any significant social change from the collective passivity involved in the
perpetuation of a repressive national regime. Only in the absence of totalitar-
ian rule is actual community possible as a form of self-determination through
collective social action. The best that can be achieved under extremely repres-
sive conditions are acts that represent symbolically the permanent possibility
of community. The core of intuitive truth that lies at the heart of Sartre’s
model of community is that transformative social action involves the tempo-
rary suspension of those differences of purpose that typically distinguish indi-
viduals under the conditions of liberal democracy and often generate relations
of mutual competitiveness. This is a difficult truth, insofar as such differences
are intimately caught up in the process whereby each person identifies herself
in any social context. In Marxian terms this is the central problem of identify-
ing a revolutionary class that would bring about social transformation. While
Marx remained attached to the idea that such a class would of necessity be
universal in nature, the material conditions of contemporary social democra-
cies call for more localized construction of community.
GUERRILLA GARDENING AS SOCIAL ACTION
In chapter three I cited Henri Lefebvre’s idea of the modern city as the pre-
eminent site of social conflict. In the context of challenges to the dialogical
model of community I also had recourse to Rancière’s view of democracy as
a form of political organization that involves a constant struggle over what
constitutes legitimate rule. Putting these two ideas together and considering
them in relation to a theory of community centered on collective action and
social justice, I now turn to some contemporary movements and initiatives
that serve as powerful examples of how such community might look in prac-
tice. In chapter three I also drew particular attention to Young’s notion of
self-determination and interpreted this as equivalent to Lefebvre’s idea that
any “right to the city” must entail a community’s practical right to shape or
produce its own material environment. While professional urbanism through-
out the twentieth century made various gestures in acknowledgment of such a
right, the balance of evidence clearly indicates that institutionalized urbanism
has been far from democratic in the sense in question. Of course, individual
cases of urban policy and development have to be placed on a spectrum
of positions insofar as they afford more or less popular participation. It is
also true that the advocacy planning movement that emerged across liberal
democracies in the late 1960s and early 1970s marked something of a high
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point in such efforts at local participation. Subsequent developments, by con-

trast, have largely involved a retreat from genuine popular involvement and
a consolidation of bureaucratic decision-making. Despite this turn of events
there are many present signs that grassroots initiatives of different kinds
are attempting to make something like a right to the city a material reality,
whether in cooperation with or independently of municipal authorities. The
concrete initiatives considered in this and following sections offer examples
of dialectical utopianism insofar as they are attempts to materially reconfig-
ure the urban environment in ways that go against the grain of neoliberalism.
That is, on often very local and modest scales, they contest the dominant and
often oppressive shaping of cities by municipal and corporate powers. Most
importantly, they do this principally not by instigating dialogue with other
“stakeholders,” but rather through forging communities centered on dissent-
ing material practices.
The first recent initiative I would like to consider is guerrilla gardening. A
quick survey of websites dedicated to this movement reveals that it is pres-
ently thriving across many liberal democracies, most notably in the United
Kingdom and North America. Richard Reynolds, who has also published a
book outlining the goals and tactics involved in the practice, manages an im-
portant website dedicated to this movement.4 The first two of twelve guerrilla
gardening actions enumerated on the website involve identifying empty and
disused patches of public space and setting up an evening or nighttime date
to convene with friends to carry out clandestine gardening activity. The secre-
tive nature of the practice is an integral part of guerrilla gardening, insofar as
it is carried out largely in defiance of municipal or private neglect and indif-
ference. Central to many groups is also the use of “seed bombs”: parcels of
seeds compacted with soil that can be thrown into inaccessible plots of land
and left to germinate. The history of the movement is generally traced back
to the Green Guerilla group that started up in the Lower East Side of New
York in 1973. The website of the group (greenguerillas.org), which is now
an official nonprofit organization that helps coordinate activities in over 600
community gardens, describes the early efforts as follows:
The Green Guerillas tapped the time, talent, and energy of their members. They
took on projects as varied and interesting as the city itself—they threw seed
“green-aids” over the fences of vacant lots, installed window boxes, planted
flowers in tree pits—and helped people transform city-owned vacant lots into
community gardens that serve as botanic gardens, vest pocket parks, urban
farms, and as expressions of art, ecology, and culture.5
While it is significant to note that the movement began during a period when
official urbanism was under sustained attack arising out of popular discontent
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138 Chapter Six
across liberal democracies, its resonance today is certainly intensified by a

clear trend toward individual and collective food cultivation and small-scale
urban farming. Although guerrilla gardening can involve explicitly politi-
cized action, what is generally called community gardening is arguably the
movement’s most socially conspicuous and significant result to date. Com-
munity gardening fulfils a variety of tasks intimately connected to social jus-
tice: it helps consolidate neighborhoods often subject to systemic municipal
neglect; it brings individuals of different races and ethnicities together in
the context of collaborative activity; and it provides fresh, nutritious food to
families that might otherwise struggle to meet weekly grocery bills. At the
same time, however, community gardening can prove to be little more than
a further symptom of the inequality and separation that arises out of gentri-
fication, when more economically and socially privileged incomers make
temporary use of plots left vacant as a result of earlier urban decline. As with
any group formation, a particular instance of community gardening can either
facilitate social diversity and equality or constitute an exclusionary appropria-
tion of space within an urban neighborhood. What can be positively claimed
for community gardening in most cases, however, is that it puts some brake
on excessive urban redevelopment and provides a visible space of community
activity. In a manner similar to organized squatting it sends out a clear mes-
sage that local communities can find good uses for places that are left vacant
or neglected by municipal authorities or private owners. Finally, guerrilla
gardening as a political practice makes evident certain grey areas that exist
between legal and illegal community activity. While many guerrilla garden-
ing activities are technically illegal insofar as they involve the use of land that
is not owned by the groups in question, municipal authorities will often turn
a blind eye as long as no obvious safety issues or overt challenges to prop-
erty privileges arise. At the same time, such tolerance can be seen as implied
consent to infringe property rights, thus raising the possibility of more radical
challenges to such a central aspect of capitalist social organization.
Don Mitchell’s account of the events surrounding People’s Park in Berke-
ley, California, in the late 1960s and early 1970s clearly shows that guerrilla
gardening can take the form of a much more pronounced political struggle.
Following the University of Berkeley’s demolition of a group of buildings
deemed a center for countercultural subversion, the empty lot that resulted
fulfilled the minimal role of providing extra parking spaces near the campus
for almost two years. In April 1969 around 3,000 people converged on the
site to convert it into People’s Park. The group accomplished the transfor-
mation of a barren parking lot into verdant parkland over a single weekend.
The subsequent reaction by the university chancellor ordering the area to
be fenced off and constantly protected by local police eventually led to
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prolonged riots and confrontations with police and security forces. This fol-
lowed accusations by a certain Governor Reagan claiming that the creators
of People’s Park were in fact well-armed subversives and orders authorizing
the use of tear gas and other extreme anti-protest tactics. As an important an-
tecedent of the guerrilla gardening movement, the struggle in Berkeley amply
demonstrates that in cases where the private ownership and usage of urban
land is actively contested by grassroots groups, the full force of a municipal
authority’s power can be turned against the putative source of democratic
legitimacy—the people themselves.
Guerrilla gardening, most especially when it becomes self-consciously
part of a broader political struggle, is a contemporary instance of social re-
configuration in accord with Lefebvre’s original idea of a right to the city.
In opposition to both contemporary urban design in New Urbanism and the
reality of corporate-funded postmodern urbanism, this movement strives to
transform the city into what Lefebvre envisaged—a popular work or oeuvre.
Such localized, grassroots reworking of the city stands opposed to both the
environmental determinism assumed by most official urbanism and the ide-
ology of iconic singularity central to postmodern approaches to the urban
environment. As the growth of guerrilla gardening over the last four decades
shows, each struggle is local and unique and yet the practices of dissent de-
ployed are capable of modified repetition within new contexts. In this way the
movement also satisfies the description of “militant particularism,” insofar as
it constitutes a local struggle capable of generalization. Finally, guerrilla gar-
dening can be described as utopian in the sense that it is guided by and seeks
to realize a different city for a different way of life. Amid all the present po-
litical rhetoric surrounding the notion of sustainability, it also points toward a
way of organizing local production and consumption that could be freed from
the drive toward surplus and waste that characterizes current globalization.
SOCIAL JUSTICE AND MUNICIPAL POWER:

THE CASE OF PORTLAND 2030
Lefebvre’s original essay on the right to the city was written shortly before
the massive popular protests that broke out across Europe and beyond in the
spring and summer of 1968. In comparison to such times the explicit militancy
of a contemporary grassroots movement such as guerrilla gardening is muted
at best. Community garden initiatives are much more likely to seek accommo-
dation or cooperation with municipal and corporate powers rather than overt
confrontation. Such a desire for reconciliation is indicative of a general political
climate across liberal democracies in accord with the Habermasian model of
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140 Chapter Six
dialogical community. Many advocates and practitioners of guerrilla gardening

would argue that changing municipal ordinances that govern permissible land
use is key if the movement is to make more profound changes to the way local
communities shape their own material environment. In other words, systemic
and structural change brought about by municipal government is seen as a nec-
essary precondition for realizing community self-determination. In this section
I consider a genuine and wide-ranging municipal initiative in Portland, Oregon
to involve citizens at the grassroots level in shaping the future of their city.
Initiated by Tom Potter, mayor of Portland between 2004 and 2008, Port-
land 2030 took the form of a visioning exercise along the lines set out in
chapter four. As we saw there, such exercises typically attempt to arrive at a
unified picture of how citizens would like their city to look several decades
into the future. The approach can be more or less visionary, depending of
whether the data to be collected are primarily quantitative or qualitative in na-
ture. While quantitative data gathering and collation involves less of a drain
on time and human resources, qualitative data collection has the advantage of
indicating more nuanced and finely grained alternative futures. Shortly after
taking office Mayor Potter announced his intention to launch the visioning
project and the planning process for community consultation ensued between
December 2005 and April 2006. Public engagement occurred in two phases,
the first from April through September 2006 and a second between January
and April 2007. On the basis of responses to standardized questions given by
over 17,000 residents, condensed reports were published in two documents
in October 2007 and February 2008. It is worth stressing at the outset that
Portland 2030 is to date one of the most ambitious and extensive visioning
exercises carried out in the United States or elsewhere. In the spring of 2009
the initiative was distinguished by winning the American Planning Associa-
tion Award for Public Outreach.
The municipal framework for organizing the visioning process was known
as visionPDX. It should be noted that visionPDX was particularly successful
in reaching out to underrepresented groups within the city. Such work laid the
foundations for a number of important grassroots coalitions in Portland that have
since become effective and visible advocates for various social justice causes.
The initial statement of intent given in the October 2007 Community Engage-
ment Report describes visionPDX as a “city-initiated, community-led project
developed to create a new vision for Portland, both for its municipal government
and for the community at large.”6 As we shall see, the phrase “city-initiated,
community-led” is key to the stated intention of the exercise as well as to its
political credibility. As the report also notes, results of the visioning process
were meant to feed directly into the Portland Plan, the urban planning strategy
that will guide decision-making by Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustain-
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ability through the next two decades. The initiative clearly intends a high level
of continuous public involvement in actual urban development in the city for the
foreseeable future. In fact, the report boldly aligns itself with the notion of “com-
munity governance,” according to which “ownership of community problems,
solutions and opportunities . . . rests with the entire community.”7
The mode of operation adopted for public engagement involved the iden-
tification of “trusted community-based organizations and leaders to leverage
existing relationships.”8 Some sixteen social justice and minority groups were
questioned about how they saw the impact of their activities on their immedi-
ate community and what separated them from other community organizations
and municipal authorities. In addition, interviews were conducted with a
further twenty “key strategic partners and stakeholders,” including neighbor-
hood and local business associations. The report makes clear that the goal
of directly involving grassroots groups was to mitigate common mistrust of
municipal government and a suspicion that the city’s invitation to community
involvement would not generate tangible results. By building relationships
of trust with grassroots organizations, visionPDX laid solid foundations for
a much more effective general outreach exercise. Conversely, the danger
involved in this method was that the credibility of these organizations might
be compromised if the city of Portland eventually failed to follow community
wishes at the implementation stage.
The Portland 2030 document released in February 2008 organized the
results of survey responses into five key areas: building, economy, environ-
ment, learning, and society.9 It also identified topics that demonstrated broad
consensus and brought these together as “Portland’s values” relating to
community connectedness and distinctiveness, equity and accessibility, sus-
tainability, accountability, diversity, creativity, and safety. It is worthwhile
noting that this effort to identify common values across a huge variety of
responses indicates that a certain consensus understanding of community was
assumed by the visioning exercise. While it may seem pragmatically justified
to make such an assumption, earlier discussion of genuine problems with the
dialogical model of community should be borne in mind with respect to the
visionPDX process. As the consideration of the Wanaka 2020 visioning pro-
cess in chapter four showed, public consultation driven by a presumption of
underlying consensus naturally favors established and powerful participants
over other groups and individuals who possess less symbolic capital within
a discussion. To be fair, the Portland 2030 document does acknowledge
that responses also identified areas of disagreement, where “more conversa-
tion and problem-solving” were needed to arrive at a clear line of progress.
However, understanding disagreement as a merely temporary social phe-
nomenon that can be overcome by further discussion only serves to confirm
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142 Chapter Six
the dialogical bias at work. The alternative model of dissenting community

I seek to defend in this chapter holds, on the contrary, that disagreement is
in fact the central and permanent feature of any democratic society. This fol-
lows from the simple and basic premise put forward by Rancière concerning
the nature of democracy, namely that it is a form of political organization
whereby the source of legitimate rule is constantly contested. According to
this understanding, in a democracy it is precisely the nature of “popular rule”
that remains permanently subject to contestation. From this it follows that
any municipal power or community organization operating under democratic
conditions is involved in an unremitting struggle to gain or retain recognized
political legitimacy.
In order in ensure that the Portland 2030 exercise represented a genuine ex-
pression of views across a socially diverse spectrum, a voluntary “Vision into
Action” (VIA) Committee was formed largely through an open application
process. As the Portland 2030 document states, those forming the committee
“were asked to serve as individuals rather than representing particular orga-
nizations or perspectives.”10 The request to transcend individual commitment
to particular groups and causes once again indicates that something like the
Habermasian ideal speech situation was aimed at. As we saw, the problem
with such an assumption is that it tends to produce artificial agreement around
topics that in reality involve hard choices between alternative approaches and
actions. A group within the VIA Committee produced a set of four survey
questions that were deliberately open-ended rather than limited in terms of
possible responses. These questions asked respondents to give details relating
to what they valued most about Portland, immediately desired changes, how
the city would ideally look in twenty years time, and how such a situation
might be achieved. In accord with the idea of community governance that
seeks to shift the initiative away from municipal bureaucracy to grassroots
self-organization, the document stressed that the questions were formulated
“to get the broad view of people’s values and concerns and then later deter-
mine how the City and its partners could address them.”11 When considering
both visionPDX reports as a whole it is clear that to a great extent the VIA
Committee sought to reverse the original order of priority. Whereas the ini-
tiative stemmed from the mayor and city council, the engagement process
attempted to convert it into a community-based and “owned” project. To a
great extent this seems to have been successful, especially with respect to
underrepresented ethnic minority and immigrant groups. The VIA Commit-
tee and subsequently formed coalition were also successful in convincing the
city council to fund an annual grant scheme of $200,000 to $250,000. Be-
tween 2006 and 2009 these funds were disbursed to many social justice and
minority groups on a competitive basis. In this way, this visionPDX initiative
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had immediate positive effects for many of the groups identified in the com-
munity engagement process as being left out of official networks of support.
Despite the real achievements of VIA in gaining credible grassroots input
into the municipal initiative, local media tended to take a more skeptical or
overtly critical line on the visioning exercise. The generally implied line of
criticism was that visionPDX was heavy on vision and light on action. To
a certain extent at least, this impression was a symptom of a broader media
representation of Mayor Potter as insufficiently pragmatic in his approach to
municipal policy. An article in the freely distributed Portland Tribune, for
example, expressed concern over the fact that $1.2 million of city money had
been spent in producing nothing better than a “vague utopia that everyone
wants.”12 The Oregonian, a broadly distributed local newspaper, ran a story at
the end of Potter’s term of office (December 2008) that devoted space to the
Portland 2030 process. The article characterizes visionPDX as one of Potter’s
many well-meaning but politically naïve initiatives, “a more-than-$1 million
survey of what people want from government, [that] seems more symbolic
than substantive.”13 It further insists that such surveys are predestined to be-
come so many neglected dusty files and that the 17,000 citizens interviewed
fell well short of Potter’s ambition to reach at least 100,000 Portlanders. Such
media appraisal is in fact highly tendentious and fails to appreciate the real
gains made by grassroots organization in the city as a direct result of the vi-
sionPDX process. Following a well-established tendency of mainstream me-
dia to focus on personalities at the expense of substantive policies, Portland’s
local newspapers portrayed the visioning exercise as Mayor Potter’s private
utopia rather than focusing on the real needs of politically underrepresented
groups identified by and in part incorporated into VIA.
In the face of significant budget cuts, the city of Portland made the decision
in the spring of 2009 to remove all structural and grant funding allocated to
VIA. There was no public consultation involved in this decision and the newly
created Bureau of Planning and Sustainability failed to offer any official jus-
tification for the move. This made for a somewhat melancholy, though in part
defiant, celebration of VIA grant recipients I attended in May 2009. The event
was held in City Hall in the presence of Mayor Sam Adams and three city
commissioners, who spoke of hard but necessary cuts and how the visionPDX
process was now evolving into its implementation stage. The clear implication
was that, in the minds of the city council, the Portland Plan no longer required
direct input from the grassroots networks that had been formed at a result of
the visioning exercise. Thus, as far as municipal decision-making is concerned,
the $2 million of public money spent and thousands of hours of volunteer time
dedicated to framing, eliciting, and analyzing Portland’s community vision
have ultimately produced the dusty shelf of files many feared would mark the
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144 Chapter Six
end of the exercise. The argument offered by the Portland City Council that
VIA had always been a transitional body is belied by the fact that the stated
intent of Portland 2030 was to ensure community input at the consultation and
implementation stages. The latest iteration of the Portland Plan issued by the
Bureau of Planning in October 2008 states that the urban planning stage will
extend through 2011. Portland City Council’s talk of a transition turned out
to be inadvertently accurate. Shortly after the decision was made to remove
municipal funding the Regional Research Institute at Portland State University
agreed to act as VIA’s fiscal sponsor. It is quite possible that severing direct
ties with municipal government will actually allow the VIA coalition a more
credible position from which to challenge and influence city decisions relating
to social justice and equality. Whatever its institutional context, however, the
political significance of Portland 2030 will ultimately be decided not by the
existence of a database but rather by collective grassroots action to address is-
sues raised in VIA’s reports.
As things currently stand the very existence of the Portland Plan is in ques-
tion insofar as drastic cutbacks have been made at the Bureau of Planning
and Sustainability. Since Mayor Adams came to power the focus of urban
renewal and development has shifted to large corporate projects such as the
creation of a professional soccer stadium and construction of a large confer-
ence hotel. Such a shift is always attractive to elected officials who wish to
gain a reputation for “getting things done.” No elaborate conspiracy theory
is required to see how diverting public money to essentially private construc-
tion projects will endear municipal leaders to the business community and
win support from local media for putatively creating jobs. While it certainly
helped to promote ties between underrepresented grassroots organizations,
the Portland 2030 initiative also demonstrated the fragility and limitedness
of efforts to bring about significant social change through local or national
government. In my view, a basic lesson to be learned from visioning exer-
cises is that the struggle for social justice must be initiated and maintained by
grassroots groups themselves. Given the fact that large corporations operating
within liberal democracies have massive resources at their disposal to influ-
ence government decision-making at every level, grassroots organizations
have to consolidate and demonstrate their social and cultural capital in order
to garner popular support sufficient to counteract the socially regressive
tendencies of corporate power. This requires that these organizations view
their relations with government bureaucracy as largely antagonistic in nature.
Concessions must be won from government through hard campaigning that
publicly demonstrates the need for specific changes to meet concerns for
social justice. As current events on the national political stage in the United
States amply show, even modest and deeply compromised reform in such ar-
10_368_09_Ch06.indd 144 7/28/10 12:46 PM

eas as health provision and ecological protection will be subject to concerted

and vitriolic counterattack from an alliance of business interests, conservation
media, and reactionary community organizations. In such a context, simply
expecting government bureaucracy to decide in favor of progressive change
is a sure path to inaction and despair.
RECLAIM THE STREETS AS URBAN DISSENT
The model of dissenting community I am proposing in this final chapter

follows the approach to urban politics put forward by Henri Lefebvre. In
the late 1950s and early 1960s Lefebvre was closely associated with the
artistic-political collective called the Situationist International (SI). In the
first few years following its inception in 1957 the SI was closely involved in
direct action against urban renewal projects across Europe that often centered
on an attempt to facilitate high-speed traffic circulation at the expense of
neighborhood integrity. Around the time of the founding of the Amsterdam
chapter of the SI in 1958, for example, that city was faced with proposals to
fill in most of the historic canals and introduce a network of highways into
the urban fabric. Popular pressure to retain the pedestrian friendliness of the
environment eventually succeeded in making municipal authorities step back
from such plans. The situationist approach to the city initially involved the
creation of “psychogeographical” mappings of the urban environment. Such
mappings were meant to suggest how the orientation of everyday life toward
its urban setting could be fundamentally transformed from a functional to an
experimental or playful mode of experience. The best-known written produc-
tion of the SI, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle from 1967, speaks of
official environmental planning and urbanism as a concerted effort to create
a consistent physical setting for universal passive consumption:
The capitalist production system has unified space, breaking down the boundar-
ies between one society and the next. This unification is also a process, at once
extensive and intension, of trivialization. Just as the accumulation of commodi-
ties mass-produced for the abstract space of the market inevitably shattered all
regional and legal barriers . . . so too it was bound to dissipate the independence
and quality of places. The power to homogenize is the heavy artillery that has
battered down all Chinese walls.14
The preceding chapters made clear that, despite manifest and profound dif-
ferences, New Urbanism and postmodern urbanism share a concern for the
“independence and quality of places.” While the former channeled this con-
cern into a narrow and ultimately socially regressive set of practices of urban
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146 Chapter Six
development, the latter failed to transform its critique of modernist urbanism

into a set of alternative, truly progressive practices. As shown, the backlash
against modernism as articulated by these two movements has in fact resulted
in an even greater degree of complicity between urban development and rapa-
cious market-driven forces. The situationists, by contrast, did devise forms
of collective urban practice that confronted the mechanisms of commodity
capitalism. These were principally the dérive or experimental urban drifting
and detournement or subversive hijacking of clichéd media images, artworks,
and texts. Situationist tactics and the underlying polemic against mass passiv-
ity are much in evidence in the contemporary Reclaim the Streets movement.
As with guerrilla gardening, Reclaim the Streets (RTS) is a thriving global
movement across liberal democracies that can be traced back to foundational
localized events. In this case the catalytic context was a protest camp set up
to oppose an extension of the M3 motorway in Twyford Down, southern
England. Protesters remained at the site from December 1991 through the fol-
lowing December. Eventually they were removed by private security guards
and the section of the highway was completed, despite outstanding questions
concerning its legality within the framework of environmental protection laws
in the United Kingdom and European Union. The Twyford Down protest was
the longest collective action staged against road construction in UK history
and marked the beginning of broader opposition to the then-Conservative
government’s “Roads for Prosperity” policy, a strategy that promised “the
biggest road-building programme since the Romans.” Whether one took this
aspiration for Hitlerian hubris or Monty-Pontyesque absurdity, the most im-
mediately palpable effect was organized grassroots political action on a level
that had been not seen since in the UK since the National Union of Minework-
ers had opposed mass pit closures in the mid-1980s.
While the initial road construction protests out of which the movement
grew were prolonged oppositional actions launched in response to official
policy decisions, by the mid-1990s the activities of RTS had taken the form of
spontaneous urban carnivals where traffic would be stopped and vibrant street
life allowed to break out for a limited period. Such events have occurred on a
regular basis since then across many liberal democracies, including the United
Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. As
the UK website for RTS relates, this temporary conversion of everyday bore-
dom and control into urban festival has a pointedly political purpose:
It’s about reclaiming the streets as public inclusive space from the private ex-
clusive use of the car. But we believe in this as a broader principle, taking back
those things which have been enclosed within capitalist circulation and return-
ing them to collective use as a commons. . . . Ultimately it is in the streets that
power must be dissolved: for the streets where daily life is endured, suffered
10_368_09_Ch06.indd 146 7/28/10 12:46 PM

and eroded, and where power is confronted and fought, must be turned into the
domain where daily life is enjoyed, created and nourished.15
The resonances with the counter-urbanism of the SI are obvious. Especially

in its early years at the end of the 1950s the situationist mission was essen-
tially concerned with an urbanism of pleasure. Just as the situationist dérive
sought to undo the collective functional response to the urban environment,
the RTS event is an attempt to subvert normal collective behavior in the city.
Although active opposition to cars is the immediate purpose of RTS, beyond
such opposition lies the positive task of transforming the functional road into
the living street: “The road is mechanical, linear movement epitomised by
the car. The street, at best, is a living place of human movement and social
intercourse, of freedom and spontaneity.”16 The RTS website also makes
clear that the movement’s broader task is one of placing community before
commodity through the creation of genuine public space. The following state-
ment is a virtual paraphrase of the earlier passage taken from The Society of
the Spectacle:
The privatisation of public space in the form of the car continues the erosion
of neighbourhood and community that defines the metropolis. Road schemes,
business “parks,” shopping developments—all add to the disintegration of
community and the flattening of a locality. Everywhere becomes the same as
everywhere else. Community becomes commodity—a shopping village, sedated
and under constant surveillance. The desire for community is then fulfilled else-
where, through spectacle, sold to us in simulated form. A TV soap “street” or
“square” mimicking the arena that concrete and capitalism are destroying. The
real street, in this scenario, is sterile. A place to move through not to be in. It
exists only as an aid to somewhere else—through a shop window, billboard or
petrol tank.17
Finally, the movement explicitly endorses the practice of nonviolent direct

action, again in accord with the SI’s privileging of concrete urban interven-
tions over any elaboration of social or political theory. As with situationist
militancy, it is a question of overcoming mass apathy and acquiescence
through collective action, rather than attempting to reformulate the terms of
debate between civil society and bureaucratic power:
RTS is about encouraging more people to take part in direct action. Everyone
knows the destruction which roads and cars are causing, yet the politicians still
take no notice. Hardly surprising—they only care about staying in power and
maintaining their “authority” over the majority of people. Direct action is about
destroying that power and authority, and people taking responsibility for them-
selves. Direct action is not just a tactic; it is an end in itself. It is about enabling
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148 Chapter Six
people to unite as individuals with a common aim, to change things directly by

their own actions.18
In the context of the United States RTS came to prominence in November 1999
when a celebratory group occupied Times Square after setting up a decoy for
local police in Union Square. In Dialectical Urbanism Andy Merrifield refers
to the RTS movement as “neo-situationist” and relates how the “zero tolerance”
urban policy of the major of New York at the time, Rudy Giuliani, ensured that
the RTS revelers were driven away by law enforcement officers within an hour
of occupying the square.19 Merrifield also makes a direct link between the RTS
movement and protests at the World Trade Organization in Seattle at the end of
the same month. As in the United Kingdom where initial protests against road
building crystallized into a more radical movement in reaction to the passing of
the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act in 1994, events in the United States
five years later were provoked in large part by increasingly repressive bureau-
cratic control of urban space. That such oppositional direct action should occur
primarily in the large cities of liberal democracies is to be expected insofar as
these are the places where multinational corporations and government bureau-
cracies are most in evidence. As Merrifield remarks: “Cities are now the nerve
centers of globalization and of globalizing capital, and equally play a crucial
ideological and political role within this system.”20
What distinguishes RTS from both guerrilla gardening and municipal vi-
sioning exercises is that it takes the form of an open confrontation with corpo-
rate and government power. Contrary to what the UK website of RTS claims,
such confrontation will never eliminate power. The best it can hope to do is
reconfigure power relations in such a way that certain ingrained inequalities
are gradually undermined. The strength of a movement like RTS is that it
makes collective opposition to bureaucratic urban control public and demon-
strates in deeds rather than words that another way of urban life is possible.
Ultimately, as with Sartre’s fused group, the carnival must end and everyday
productive life recommence. As with the traditional festival, however, the
short-lived overturning of normal life serves as a reminder that differences of
power and social standing are always subject to the assent of citizens. In my
view, the value of the situationist-inspired RTS movement is that it publicly
demonstrates an alternative mode of urban life through collective action. It
thus goes beyond consensual approaches, whether practical in nature (com-
munity gardening) or dialogical (visioning). Throughout liberal democracies
right now there are clear signs that many individuals and groups are devising
ways that challenge the established patterns of behavior engendered by com-
modity capitalism. The well-canvassed disinterest in official politics evident
across liberal democracies does not necessarily entail disenchantment with
local political action. To the contrary, the wealth of current initiatives points
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to a more mature and progressive form of democracy that is geared toward

local self-determination. Taken as a whole, such actions and movements are
indicative of a contemporary spirit of urban utopianism.
DIALECTICAL UTOPIANISM
AND CONSTRUCTING COMMUNITY
In the course of the twentieth century utopianism in various guises elicited

extreme enthusiasm and repugnance. Of all arenas in which modernist utopia-
nism had brought about change it was arguably within the urban environment
that the most fervent opposition rose up against it from the late 1950s on. A
further half-century on we now confront a situation in which the majority of
the global population lives in an urban context. Of course this context differs
hugely in different parts of the world. For all the visible signs of material de-
privation evident in the cities of developed countries, one does not—not yet at
least—encounter the massive sprawling shantytowns typical of almost every
large conurbation in the developing world. In this book I have focused exclu-
sively on social configurations projected by theory and practice originating in
and largely intended for relatively affluent liberal democracies. Within such
a limited context I have attempted to show that dominant approaches to com-
munity exhibit serious shortcomings and limitations. The model of dialogical
community, while it has much potential for pragmatic and local application,
excludes what I would call the utopian aspect of organized collective life. In
doing this it takes for granted and naturalizes what is in fact the dominant
social utopia of contemporary liberal democracies—incremental and con-
sensual progress. For its part singular community rejects the very idea of
construction, taking the social bond as something given before all action and
dialogue. At the same time it attempts to substitute the idea of gradual reform
and progress with a vague appeal to sudden radical social transformation.
As I have argued, this indeterminate notion of change is neither intellectu-
ally credible nor practically useful. Bringing some of the more fruitful and
cogent aspects of these two models of community together with important
supplementary elements, I have elaborated the idea of dissenting community
in theory and practice in order to point toward an approach to contemporary
urban life that is both visionary and practically relevant. In alignment with the
recent work of Harvey I characterize this approach to community as dialecti-
cal utopianism.
In the context of his discussion of dialectical utopianism Harvey proposes
that any actual community be understood as “an enclosed space (irrespective of
scale or even frontier definitions) within which a certain well-defined system of
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150 Chapter Six
rules prevails.”21 Constructing community, he notes, involves producing such a

rule-governed space. The ever-present possibility of overturning social norms,
however, means that “communities are rarely stable for long.” While Harvey
is opposed to Benedict Anderson’s notion that community is essentially a col-
lective imaginary construct, he holds that utopianism is useful for considering
alternative sets of rules that might govern social organization. Convinced that
local communities of interest inevitably degenerate into exclusionary social
formations, Harvey holds that the key to progressive community action lies in
its ability to attach to a broader task of opposition to oppressive power. In a
passage already cited in part he remarks:
[T]he re-making and re-imagining of “community” will work in progressive

directions only if it is connected en route to a more generalized radical insur-
gent politics. That means that a radical project (however defined) must exist.
The rule-making that ever constitutes community must be set against the rule-
breaking that makes for revolutionary transformations.22
Harvey, as noted above, proposes a utopianism of social process rather than

one of spatial form. This in no way entails, however, that he considers models
of the built environment as a matter of indifference for progressive politics.
On the contrary, he is acutely aware of how the physical environment frames
social action. He paraphrases Marx’s famous remark: “we can always aspire
to make our own historical geography but never under historical and geo-
graphical conditions of our own choosing.”23 This statement indicates that a
truly material utopianism begins with social conditions as they are and takes
these conditions as a datum against which to measure how things might or
should be.
For Harvey, to understand social change dialectically is to relate the
particular to the universal and vice versa. Dialectical utopianism thus signi-
fies both a way of relating local community concerns to a broader struggle
against oppression and inequality and an embedding of the concern for social
justice in an effort to reshape the immediate material environment. Without
the movement toward universalization, community action will be unable to
address more profound and systemic causes of injustice. But this does not
mean that dissenting community simply folds back into the kind of universal-
ity intended by the model of dialogical community. In the case of dialectical
utopianism universality does not stem from rules relating to consensus forma-
tion, but rather from “the moment of political judgement, commitment, and
material praxis.”24 In other words, such utopianism relates to the manner in
which instances of collective action take on meaning beyond their immediate
context. Community gardening and RTS activities have clearly demonstrated
that alternative ways of shaping the urban environment can quickly become
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exemplary, spawning broader movements for change through their imagina-

tive hold rather than via any process of rational persuasion. Such networks of
progressive action are contemporary instances of Sartre’s fused group—com-
munities in deed rather than word.
In the final chapter of Spaces of Hope Harvey elaborates on what he
identifies as the figure of the “insurgent architect,” a form of agency that
aims to shape the urban environment according to the notion of dialectical
utopianism. Surprisingly for a committed Marxist, Harvey looks to the UN
Declaration of Human Rights as a key historical document that might be
reformulated to create something like a manifesto of dialectical utopianism.
With reference to Article 14 of the declaration he sets out what he calls the
“right to the production of space.” Such a right would coincide with Lefeb-
vre’s original notion of a right to the city that stands at the heart of the idea
of dissenting community, in this case framed in a global context. Harvey
describes it as follows:
If, for example, labor had the same right of mobility as capital, if political
persecution could be resisted (as the affluent and privileged have proven) by
geographical movement, and if individuals and collectivities had the right to
change their locations at will, then the kind of world we live in would change
dramatically. But the production of space means more than merely the ability to
circulate within a pre-ordained spatially structured world. It also means the right
to reconstruct spatial relations (territorial forms, communicative capacities, and
rules) in ways that turn space from an absolute framework of action into a more
malleable relative and relational aspect of social life.25
Here the intimate connection between the ability of a community to shape its
own material environment and the broader task of achieving social justice is
brought into sharp focus. While potential instances of the former are without
number, the key question is whether they might all be regulated by a common
goal of opposing oppressive power and combating inequality. As I have at-
tempted to show in this chapter and throughout this book, traditional liberal
rights to association, expression, and conscience are insufficient to constitute
material freedom in the absence of a right to place. In an obvious and im-
mediate sense, the social organization generated by capitalist production rests
ultimately on the appropriation of land and real estate. As researchers such
as Harvey have demonstrated so powerfully in recent decades, the gradual
displacement of large-scale industrial production by service, culture, and en-
tertainment industries across liberal democracies has made the managing and
promotion of cities a central preoccupation of governmental and corporate
powers. Such a shift was already recognized by the situationists, who by 1960
were already speaking of a total reshaping of the modern city according to the
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152 Chapter Six
logic of commodification. As both research and everyday experience readily

show, in recent decades traditional urban public spaces have become increas-
ingly subject to direct national, municipal, or corporate control. In the name of
safer streets and neighborhoods and the control of putatively subversive forces,
official urban reorganization has inexorably eroded the actual public practice
of the freedoms of association. At the same time, governments in many liberal
democracies have moved to curtail such freedoms through new legal statutes.
Whether it is the right to strike or the right to publicly protest, the increasingly
strident message of hegemonic power has been the same: public space is closed
to all public activities other than those sanctioned by government and business.
In the face of such a situation it is tempting to agree with Agamben’s stark as-
sessment that we are in fact living through something equivalent to a permanent
state of emergency, a kind of international martial law.
While the idea of dissenting community does recognize something akin to
Agamben’s idea of a profound opposition between governmental control and
genuine social existence, it locates redemptive potential in the permanent pos-
sibility of alternative collective practices. Collective grassroots self-determi-
nation can come neither through mere reasonable dialogue nor through appeal
to indeterminate change. The one can lead only to complicity with oppressive
power and the other to collective quietism and despair. The alternative pro-
posed here—dissenting community—is an attempt to be realistic about the
necessity of struggling against established power while insisting that effective
opposition requires well-designed forms of counter-practice sensitive to local
conditions. Such an idea remains true to the utopian slogan that another world
is possible but insists on keeping such utopianism firmly located within the
present conditions of urban life. If another world is possible then this can only
come about through collective transformation that starts at a local level and
then captures a broader collective imagination. Localized dissent will only con-
struct genuine community if it can find a public place capable of demonstrating
its wider significance. Such places are not given, they are made.
NOTES
1. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 196.

2. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason (Volume One) (London / New
York: Verso, 2004), 373.
3. Sartre, Critique, 387.
4. Cf. http://www.guerrillagardening.org.
5. Cf. http://greenguerillas.org/GG_ourprograms.php#helpingcommunity.
6. City of Portland / visionPDX, Community Engagement Report, October 2007,
http://visionpdx.com/reading/engagement_report.php, 6.
10_368_09_Ch06.indd 152 7/28/10 1:58 PM

7. Community Engagement Report, 6.

8. Community Engagement Report, 12.
9. City of Portland / visionPDX, Portland 2030: A Vision for the Future, http://
visionpdx.com/downloads/final% 20vision%20document_Feb.pdf (Feb. 2008), 13 ff.
10. Portland 2030, 41.
11. Portland 2030, 43.
12. Jim Redden, “VisionPDX Dreams Still Fuzzy,” Portland Tribune, portland
tribune.com/news/story.php?story_id =118488977243620800 (20 June 2007).
13. Anna Griffin, “Mayor Tom Potter: Symbolism vs. Substance,” Oregonian,
oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/anna_griffin/index.ssf/2008/12/mayor_tom_potter
_symbolism_vs.html (19 Dec. 2008).
14. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 120.
15. Reclaim the Streets UK website, http://rts.gn.apc.org/prop10.htm, http://rts
.gn.apc. org/ideas.htm.
16. Reclaim the Streets UK, http://rts.gn.apc.org/prop04.htm.
17. Reclaim the Streets UK, http://rts.gn.apc.org/prop05.htm.
18. Reclaim the Streets UK, http://rts.gn.apc.org/evol.htm.
19. Andy Merrifield, Dialectical Urbanism (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2002), 128–29.
20. Merrifield, Urbanism, 12.
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10_368_09_Ch06.indd 154 7/28/10 12:46 PM
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10_368_10_Bib.indd 160 7/28/10 12:48 PM

Index
Adams, Sam (Portland mayor), 143–44 67, 70–71, 77–106–107, 123–124,

advocacy planning, 136–37 133, 135, 149–150; dissenting,
Agamben, Giorgio, 21, 27–28, 30–33, 45–46, 52, 57–65, 67–68, 70–71,
35–46, 49, 54, 57, 60, 67–68, 123, 77, 119, 128, 131–32, 142, 145,
152; The Coming Community, 32, 149–52; gardening, 138, 148, 150;
35; Homo Sacer, 39–40, 43 Gemeinschaft (Tönnies), xi, 135;
affordable housing, 69, 90, 95 imagined, 15–16; intentional, 123; of
Anderson, Benedict, 15–16, 150 interest, 83, 87; singular, 27–28, 30,
Arendt, Hannah, 20 45–47, 50–51, 67, 71, 77, 106, 133;
utopian, 124–125, 149–51
Benjamin, Walter, 25n5, 36, 39, 41, 121 configuration, 21, 23–24, 27, 29, 30, 32,
Bond Sophie, 97–100 35, 49–50, 59, 64, 70–71, 123–25,
131, 133, 135, 149
Callenbach, Ernest, 125 Connelly, Stephen, 97, 99
Calthorpe, Peter, 80, 83, 86–89, 100, consensus, 4–6, 8, 11–13, 17, 33–35,
125 57–58, 60–1, 70, 84, 94, 96–97, 99,
charrette, 96–100 101, 133, 141, 150
Cisneros, Henry, 85 Culot, Maurice, 119
civil society, xi–xii, 14, 16, 20–1, 23,
52, 64–65, 70, 135, 147 Dahl, R. A., 14
Clinton, Bill, 85 Dear, Michael, 118
collective action, xii, 6, 9, 28, 33, 38, Debord, Guy, 35, 145
45–47, 49, 57, 64–65, 78, 82, 117, Deconstructivism, 105
122, 133, 135–36, 146–48, 150 democracy, 12–20, 24, 34, 37, 51–52,
collective memory, 107–8 54, 57–64, 69–70, 84, 101, 136,
communism, 29, 33, 35, 42, 62 142, 149; deliberative democracy,
communitarianism, 21, 29, 94 14–20, 23, 27, 55, 61, 83, 91; direct
community: dialogical, 4, 21, 24, 27–28, democracy, 17–20; postdemocracy,
30–35, 37–42, 45–46, 49–51, 59–61, 58; radical democracy, 13, 51, 101
161
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162 Index
Derrida, Jacques, 5, 25n5, 34, 37, 115, Theory of Communicative Action

122 (TCA), 4–5, 10, 13, 29
direct action, xii, 19, 145, 147–48 Hardt, Michael, 43
diversity, 6, 18–19, 27, 52, 62–63, Harvey, David, 23, 26n45, 51, 67, 71,
78–79, 81, 83–84, 86–88, 90, 95, 98, 78, 94–95, 109, 117, 121–22, 125–
100, 138, 141 28, 132, 149–51
Duany, Andrés, 79, 82, 84–87, 89 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, xii, 101
Hegel, Georg Friedrich-Wilhelm, 29
egalitarianism, 58 Heidegger, Martin, 10, 30, 41; Being
Eliot, T. S., 107 and Time, 30–2; destiny, 31–32, 45
Ellin, Nan, 115 Hope VI, 85
Ellis, Cliff, 97 Husserl, Edmund, 9–10
environmental determinism, xii, 79, 82,
87, 94, 126, 132, 139 inclusion, 17–20, 46, 50, 61–62, 68, 85,
Etzioni, Amitai, 26n40, 94 98–99, 106, 131
exclusion, 17–18, 21, 23–24, 27, 34, 43, the insurgent architect, 151
54, 61, 90, 95, 98, 109, 126, 150 Ivancie, Frank (Portland mayor),
expressionism, 107 112–13
Izenour, Steven, 106
Flint, Anthony, 85, 99
Flyvbjerg, Bent, 99
Jacobs, Jane, 80
Foucault, Michel, 5, 45, 120
Jameson, Fredric, 116, 118, 119–25,
Fourier, Charles, 127
132, 135; cognitive mapping, 121
Frampton, Kenneth, 125–26; critical
Johnson, Philip, 111, 115
regionalism, 125
gentrification, 66, 101, 133, 138 Kant, Immanuel, 18, 55

Giuliani, Rudy, 148 Krier, Leon, 119
globalization, 148 Kuhn, Thomas, 53
Grant, Jill, 95
Graves, Michael, 111–15 language, 33–37
guerrilla gardening, 136–39, 148; Green law, 13–14, 18–20
Guerillas, 137 Learning from Las Vegas, 106–7,
110–11, 118
Habermas, Jürgen, 3–24, 27, 45–46, 49, Le Corbusier, 80, 109
53, 56, 58, 61–62, 66, 70, 83, 91, Lefebvre, Henri, 46, 51, 65–67, 95, 119,
96–97, 99, 109, 117, 119, 127–28, 136, 139, 145, 151; The Right to the
133, 135; Between Facts and Norms City, 46, 51, 65, 68, 95, 131, 136–37,
(BFN), 13, 18, 63; communicative 139–140
action, 24, 49–50, 56, 84, 91, 97, Libby, Brian, 112
99, 133; discourse ethics, 14, 98; Lifeworld (Lebenswelt), 9, 10–14, 109,
ideal speech situation, 7–10, 13; 128
public sphere, 15–16; steering media, LUTRAQ (Making the Land Use,
14; strategic action, 6–8, 53, 56, Transportation, Air Quality
97; system integration, 11–12; The Connection), 89
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Index 163
Lyotard, Jean-François, 5, 51-60, Plato, 77

63–64, 71, 115, 119, 122, 125; The Podobnik, Bruce, 89–90
Differend, 54–56; The Postmodern Portland, Oregon, 78, 88–94, 96, 110-
Condition, 52–54 15, 140–45; Pioneer Square, 113–15,
114; Portland 2030, 140–45; Portland
Marcuse, Herbert, 25n5 Building, 111–15, 112–14; Portland
Marx, Karl, 29, 32, 39, 42, 45, 54, 118, Plan, 140, 143–44
121, 136, 150 Portman, John, 120
McCall, Tom, 88 postmodernism, 5, 79, 94, 106, 117, 120–
McLeod, Mary, 115–16 25; urbanism, 71, 78, 105–6, 111–12,
the media, 16, 143 115–19, 121–22, 125, 127–28
Merrifield, Andy, 148 Potter, Tom (Portland mayor), 140–45
Mesnard, Philippe, 40–41, 44 power, xii, 3, 11–12, 14, 17, 19, 23, 117,
militant particularism, 109, 125, 139 123, 126, 131, 147–48, 150, 152;
Mitchell, Don, 65, 138 communicative power, 20–22, 24
modernism, 81, 105–7, 110, 119–120, Prince Charles, 119
122, 125, 127, 146 public-private partnership, 118, 144
modernist urbanism, 78, 80–82, 91, 94, public space, 21–23, 47, 51, 82, 84–85,
96, 100, 105–9, 111, 116, 120, 122, 88, 115, 117, 152
127, 132, 146 public transit, 88, 95
Mouffe, Chantal, 51–52, 60–64 Purcell, Mark, 65
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 21, 27–35, 37–46, Rancière, Jacques, 25n5, 46, 51, 57–60,
49, 54, 57, 60, 123; The Inoperative 63–64, 69–70, 131, 136, 142
Community, 28–29, 33, 41 Reagan, Ronald, 139
narration, 10–11 Reclaim the Streets (RTS), 146–50
National Charrette Institute (NCI), 96 region, 87, 125
National Socialism (Nazism), 30, 32, resistance, 3–4, 33, 35, 41, 44, 46, 50,
38, 43–44 53, 59–60, 66–67, 69–70, 77–78,
Negri, Antonio, 43–44 106, 109, 117–18, 126
neoliberalism, 137 Reynolds, Richard, 137
neotraditionalism, 80, 125 Richardson, Tim, 97–99
New Urbanism, 77–103, 105, 115–16, Rossi Aldo, 108, 117
119, 125, 128, 131, 139, 145; the Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 18
Congress for, 79; Kentlands, 84–85;
Seaside, 80, 84–86; Windsor, 86 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 29, 134–36, 148, 150
NIMBY (“not in my back yard”), 87 Scheler, Max, 9
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 42
Orenco Station, 89–93, 92–93 Scott-Brown, Denise, 106
Owen, Robert, 127 Scully, Vincent, 86
segregation, 23, 66–67, 69, 86
passivity, 41–44, 66, 68, 115, 136, 146 self-determination, 20, 45, 66, 136, 140
People’s Park (Berkeley, CA), 138–39 Sennett, Richard, 21, 83, 95, 109
Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth, 79, 82, 84, singularity, 31–34, 78–79, 105–6, 108–
86–87 10, 116–17, 119, 123, 125, 139
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164 Index
Situationist International, 145, 147, universality, 18–20, 24, 71, 119, 150
151 urban design, 79, 86, 94
smart growth, 78 urban farming, 137–38
social justice, xiii, 22–24, 29–30, 34, 37, Urban Growth Boundary (UGB), 78, 88
39, 46, 50, 58, 65–71, 79, 85, 94–95, urban planning, 22, 98, 111
126–45, 150–52 utopianism, 57–58, 123–25; dialectical
socialism, 109, 124 utopianism, 78–79, 94, 126, 128,
solidarity, 68, 109 131–53
sprawl, 79, 85, 87, 99
Stein, Edith, 9 Venturi, Robert, 106–7, 116–17
Stern, Robert, 110 Vision into Action (VIA), 142–45
sustainability, 86–87, 139, 141 visionPDX, 140–45
symbolic capital, 14, 99
symbolism, 106–7 Wall, Thomas Carl, 42
Wanaka 2020 (New Zealand), 97, 99, 141
Talen, Emily, 95 Williams, Raymond, 109, 125
Thompson-Fawcett, Michelle, 97–100 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 61
Tönnies, Ferdinand, xi
totalitarianism, 29, 43, 46, 135–36 Young, Iris Marion, 17–24, 27, 34, 37,
Traditional Neighborhood Development 45, 54, 66, 68–70, 83, 95, 98, 109,
(TND), 80, 84, 87 117, 131, 133, 136; Inclusion and
Transit Oriented Development (TOD), Democracy, 17–20, 23; Justice and
78, 85, 86, 88–94 the Politics of Difference, 19–22
10_368_11_Indx.indd 164 7/28/10 12:50 PM

About the Author
Brian Elliott, born in Chester, England, studied philosophy and languages

at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and the University of Freiburg in
Germany. From 2000 to 2008 he taught philosophy at University College
Dublin. Since 2008 he has lived in Oregon and currently teaches at Oregon
State University. His latest book, Benjamin for Architects, explores the writ-
ings of the German Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin in relation to modern art,
architecture, and urbanism. Based in Portland, Oregon, he runs a “Philosophy
Café” in Powell’s Bookstore and is involved with various local nonprofit
organizations working on the connections between community and urban
development.
165
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Constructing Community

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Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom

Copyright © 2010 by Lexington Books

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Printed in the United States of America

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PART ONE: THEORIES OF COMMUNITY

PART TWO: URBANISM AND COMMUNITY

10_368_01_FM.indd vii 7/28/10 12:36 PM

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Appeals to community are to be found everywhere in contemporary discourse,

10_368_01_FM.indd xi 7/28/10 12:36 PM

of industrialized nations in the nineteenth century came immense pressure for

10_368_01_FM.indd xii 7/28/10 12:36 PM

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Habermas and Dialogical Community

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understanding of community. My point is not that linguistic practice plays no

What is widely considered Habermas’s magnum opus, The Theory of Com-

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became almost a matter of course in the mid-1980s. The most celebrated

Up to now we have conceived of action in terms of dealing with situations. The

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consensus may be either implicitly assumed or explicitly worked out. While

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a purposive-rational manner and, on the other hand, as a process of reaching

While here the distinction between communicative and strategic action is

A communicatively achieved agreement has a rational basis; it cannot by im-

The communicative/strategic distinction is maintained in one form or another

THE IDEAL SPEECH SITUATION

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Only in the theoretical, practical, and explicative discourse do the participants

[P]articipants in communication encounter one another in a horizon of un-

If the ideal speech situation refers to the openness of communicative action in

[Communication] does not exclude a fallibilistic consciousness. Members know

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In fairness to his account as a whole Habermas does identify empathy as a

In the same interview Habermas identifies three specific features of the

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In the previous section we encountered the notion of the lifeworld in the

Habermas’s reference to narration as the form of communicative action within

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mote opportunities for narration. Being able to tell an individual or collective

If narration, as the form of communicative action intrinsic to the lifeworld,

In capitalist countries the market is the most important example of a norm-free

What is referred to here as system integration essentially escapes the immedi-

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In the following section Habermas’s move from the dialogical-ethical per-

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Such an account of democratic procedure centers on an observance of rights

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community’s discursive mode of sociation is not simply at the disposition of