Critical Urban Studies: Jonathan S. Davies and David L. Imbroscio

Imbroscio
Davies and
POLITICAL SCIENCE / PUBLIC POLICY
Critical
JONATHAN S. DAVIES is Reader in Public
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted
Policy at the University of Warwick and the author CRITICAL
of Partnerships and Regimes: The Politics of Urban
URBAN STUDIES
Urban
Regeneration in the UK.
New Directions
DAVID L. IMBROSCIO is Professor of
Political Science at the University of Louisville
Studies
Edited by
Critical Urban Studies

and the author of Urban America Reconsidered: Jonathan S. Davies and David L. Imbroscio
Alternatives for Governance and Policy. Together Foreword by Clarence N. Stone
they coedited Theories of Urban Politics, Second
Edition. This volume revisits the tradition of critical scholar-
NEW DIRECTIONS ship characteristic of the urban studies field. Urban
scholarship has had detractors of late, particularly in
mainstream political science, where it has been ac-
cused of parochialism and insularity. Critical Urban
Studies offers a sharp repudiation of this critique,
reasserting the need for critical urban scholarship
and demonstrating the fundamental importance of
urban studies for understanding and changing con-
temporary social life. Contributors to the volume
identify an orthodox perspective in the field, subject
it to critique, and map out a future research agenda
for the field. The result is a series of inventive essays
pointing scholars and students to the major theoretical
and policy challenges facing urbanists and other criti-
cal social scientists.
under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

EDITED BY
Cover design by Joy Taylor State University of

Jonathan S. Davies and David L. Imbroscio
New York Press
www.sunypress.edu
FOREWORD BY Clarence N. Stone
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New Directions
Edited by
Jonathan S. Davies
and
David L. Imbroscio
Foreword by
Clarence N. Stone
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Cover photo courtesy of Jonathan S. Davies. The picture is the view of

Francisco I. Madero taken from the corner of the Zocalo in Mexico City,
15 September 2008, Mexico’s national independence day.
Published by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Critical urban studies : new directions / edited by Jonathan S. Davies and

David L. Imbroscio.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3305-9 (hbk. : alk. paper)
1. Cities and towns—Study and teaching. 2. Sociology, Urban—Study
and teaching. 3. Urban policy—Study and teaching. I. Davies, Jonathan S.
II. Imbroscio, David L.
HT109.C75 2010
307.76—dc22 2010008239
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Contents
Foreword vii
Clarence N. Stone
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
PART I: Critical Urban Theory
1. 冑City 9
Elvin Wyly
2. Critical Perspectives on the City: Constructivist,

Interpretive Analysis of Urban Politics 23
Mara S. Sidney
3. Seeing like a City: How to Urbanize Political Science 41

Warren Magnusson
4. Reflections on Urbanity as an Object of Study and a

Critical Epistemology 55
Julie-Anne Boudreau
5. Back to the Future: Marxism and Urban Politics 73

Jonathan S. Davies
6. Keeping it Critical: Resisting the Allure of the Mainstream 89

David L. Imbroscio
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vi Contents
PART II: Critical Urban Policy
7. The Trouble with Diversity 107

Jeff Spinner-Halev
8. Do Multicultural Cities Help Equality? 121

Yasminah Beebeejaun
9. Why Do We Want Mixed-Income Housing and

Neighborhoods? 135
James DeFilippis and Jim Fraser
10. Dispersal as Anti-Poverty Policy 149

Edward G. Goetz and Karen Chapple
11. Beyond Sprawl and Anti-Sprawl 165

Thad Williamson
Bibliography 183
List of Contributors 209
Index 213
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Foreword
Clarence N. Stone
In the eyes of many scholars, the field of urban politics has become increasingly
disconnected from the mainstream study of politics, particularly American
national politics. Topics of interest, concepts, and strategies of theory build-
ing overlap little between the subfield and the wider field of study. One
interpretation of this disconnect is that urbanists, to their own intellectual
detriment, have failed to pay sufficient heed to the mainstream and have
isolated themselves from a much needed fount of scholarly nourishment. In
this volume, Jonathan Davies and David Imbroscio have put together a col-
lection of critical essays that suggests quite a different explanation—namely
that the mainstream itself lacks vigor, and is misdirected in some key ways.
From their perspective, the mainstream has failed to fulfill its academic
responsibility to provide intellectual guidance. At the same time, they con-
tend, for all of its shortcomings, the urban field contains sparks of vitality
capable of bringing new energy, new ideas, and fresh challenges to what has
become a stale mainstream.
My own assessment of the mainstream parallels that of Davies and
Imbroscio in several ways. Hence, I see this volume as timely, indeed as a
potential instigator of a much-needed dialogue. The mainstream itself could
usefully come under close examination. Take the study of American national
politics, the quintessential core of the mainstream, and subject it to a brief

Holmesian analysis. What are the dogs that don’t bark? There are several.
One is the interpenetrability of state, market, and society. Consider, for
example, the financial crisis that emerged in 2008. What is there in the largely
inner-directed literature of American politics that would raise the possibil-
ity of such a crisis, much less help explain how it occurred? Very little. The
mainstream remains closely attached to the pluralist assumption that politics
vii
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viii Foreword
and the economy are autonomous spheres of modern life, each with its own
inner dynamic. Politics is to be understood on its own terms, not by an uneasy
and unsteady accommodation to a changing economy and society.
For scholars of the national political arena, politics is largely about
behavior within formally constituted arrangements. The typical American
government textbook starts with the drafting of the Constitution and quotes
the Federalist Papers. Research is typically framed in terms of major institutions
and their relations. The electoral connection is the central factor in what is
largely treated as a self-contained realm of activity. Such a view of politics
provides a bounded and presumably more predictable realm of behavior. It
is also a model of politics totally at odds with the thought-provoking one
Warren Magnusson offers in the present volume. The challenge of the con-
temporary world, Magnusson argues, is to think about the ways in which
the state is linked with and mutually affected by the economy and society.
Sector autonomy is a myth, increasingly hard to embrace when so much
patent reality points in the opposite direction
Another (nearly) silent canine is inequality. Although it receives occa-
sional attention and was even the subject of a recent American Political
Science Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy, inequality is
not a core concern of the mainstream study of American politics. With its
emphasis on behavior within formal structures, the mainstream is not led
to engage inequality as a central reality of everyday life in America. Hence,
exploring the multiple dimensions of inequality and their causes and conse-
quences occupies no major place in the mainstream’s puzzle-solving efforts.
Yet America’s metropolitan configuration, where most people live their lives,
is all about inequality and how it is maintained. For urban residents it is a
fundamental fact of life, but, for national scholars, inequality is most often
a narrowly defined variable that receives occasional attention.
As an illustration of the chasm between the urban field and at least
some members of the mainstream, I cite a conversation I had some years back.
A congressional scholar asked me why I continued to study local politics. In
paraphrase, he said to me: “It’s about education and garbage collection.” The
odd pairing was jarring, and I confess I chose not to launch into a discussion
of the details and depth of service inequalities and the territorial foundations
of unequal life chances—being unsure where to begin, given the superficiality

of the comment. Deconstructed, the comment reveals a tendency to reduce
the complex interrelationships among governing, the economy, society, and
policy (in operation) to a simple matter of (assumed) routine service delivery.
To some scholars, the view from Capitol Hill reveals little about the spatial
foundations of persistent inequality.
Thanks to Rogers Smith and others, the persistence of social divides
has been put forward to challenge a pluralist assumption of a fundamental
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Foreword ix
consensus, but a once-promising debate about the nature of power in society

seems to have faded away. The treatment of the program theme of the 2006
American Political Science Association meeting on “Power Reconsidered” is
revealing. In offering a thumbnail sketch of the topic, Richard Vallely starts
with the community-power debate, highlighting pluralism versus elite theory,
makes the obligatory reference to the three faces of power, and then raises a
point about the role of mass opinion. He closes with a number of particular
questions, but gives little attention to conceptual new ground—leaving power
basically as a continuing question of who rules/who governs. As a point of
personal privilege, I note that no mention was made of my work on systemic
power or my subsequent work on urban regimes and the social-production
model. Of course, a short essay cannot cover all bases, but the omission
is still puzzling. This work was published in the American Political Science
Review and a book that received the association’s Ralph Bunche award, not
exactly low visibility places. The omission suggests that work in the urban
field is not much on the mainstream’s radar screen, although several of its
members did significant “apprenticeships” in the urban area.
Systemic power and the social-production model are not uncontested
ideas. The essay by Jonathan Davies in this volume offers a vigorous critique
from a Marxist perspective. In doing so, Davies raises anew some broad ques-
tions about the nature of power and political change. Earlier work by Davies
along this line also failed to make it into Vallely’s introductory essay, and,
as a consequence, a conceptual issue about how to reconcile human agency
with power as embodied in a set of relationships went unaddressed.
Another missing bark in this Holmesian account of the mainstream
concerns authority and its incomplete writ. Mainstream work often assumes
that congressional enactment is an adequate description of policy at work, and
many mainstream scholars regard policy implementation as an inconsequential
area of research. Implementation inevitably involves accommodation to context,
and attention to contextual factors is seen by some in the mainstream as a
drift away from theory instead of as an improved understanding of reality.
In general, mainstream scholars fail to question that the authority of
governmental institutions is a unidirectional force applied to a uniform body
of citizens. The notion that policy in reality is the result of how official
actions mesh with the behavior and capacities of citizens is a complication

rarely entertained. But the idea of co-production is a window into how deeply
inequality can affect policymaking. Consider that the initial response to Hur-
ricane Katrina in New Orleans was to order evacuation, with the implicit
assumption that residents possessed such things as automobiles and credit
cards. Differences in individual capacity to respond to the emergency got
little attention in the crucial early hours of response. Policymakers themselves
seemed to believe that individual actions would cumulate into an effective
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x Foreword
movement of people away from the dangers of flooding. I refer readers to a

somewhat parallel emergency in the form of the Chicago heat wave of 1995
and sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s “social autopsy” of that disaster.
Emergencies are not the only instances in which broad policy thinking
is not accompanied by attention to on the ground reality. In this volume,
Edward Goetz and Karen Chapple show how the implementation challenges
of policies such as HOPE VI and policy aims such as the deconcentration
of the poor are frequently inadequately understood, with wishful thinking
filling the gap between policy aspiration and reality. Thus, the rhetoric of
enactment is often an awkward match with policy experience at the ground
level. For this reason, Part II of this volume on critical urban policy is a
valuable complement to Part I on critical urban theory.
In the eyes of some mainstream scholars, public policy as a field of study
duplicates the weakness of urban politics; they view it as lacking sufficient
rigor. They regard as weakness its attention to detail, its stress on context,
and its reliance on case studies as a way of obtaining fine-grained results. I
suggest that some rethinking might find these to be virtues, not failings.
No analysis can do everything. Because there is always a need to
make simplifying assumptions, the temptation is to go too far. Formalities
such as one person/one vote and equality before the law are important,
but they do not form a reality independent of the whole lives of citizens
(not to mention their distance from the even more complicated position
of noncitizens). Interpenetrability, inequality, the complexities of authority
and co-production, and the unabridged policy story are closely related. To
neglect their importance in politics is to limit our ability to understand the
actual world of politics.
To write off the urban field, as the mainstream seems to have done, is to
cut oneself off from a vital part of reality. As this volume demonstrates, there
is much in both theory and policy practice from which mainstream political
science can learn. To come to terms fully with that fact requires knowledge
of the varied conditions in which people live their lives on a day-to-day
basis. It requires an awareness of the depth of inequality in those lives and
an understanding of how inequality is expressed territorially. Studying the
urban condition is no guarantee of obtaining the needed depth of knowledge;
that depth is always a goal to be pursued rather than an accomplishment to

be celebrated. Yet, it is hard to see how that goal can be pursued effectively
without an urban component. We are indebted to Davies and Imbroscio and
their contributors for pointing us in the needed direction.
Neither urban politics nor the mainstream study of national politics
is a monolithic body of work, and I no doubt have overlooked significant
points in my remarks. But, if I have oversimplified, I have done so in order
to add to the call by Davies and Imbroscio for dialogue. Specialization is
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Foreword xi
useful, but also an enemy of sufficient understanding. All can benefit from
confronting scholarship from alternative vantage points. Moreover, the end-
less proliferation of subfields can itself become a barrier to comprehension
(think of the root word). Dialogue indeed appears to be a much-needed step
within the current discipline of political science.
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Acknowledgments
The editors would like to thank the large audience attending the two panels
convened at the 38th annual meeting of the Urban Affairs Association, from
which this volume sprang. Colleagues sharply engaged the subject matter of
the panels and the individual papers, generously proffering useful feedback
and criticism. In this regard, we especially thank our friend and colleague Bob
Beauregard for providing follow-up comments with his usual assiduousness and
perspicacity. Likewise, we also owe thanks to the Urban Affairs Association
and its Executive Director Margaret Wilder for nurturing and sustaining the
kind of intellectual environment where ideas challenging received orthodoxies
are not only welcome but also enthusiastically supported.
The editors would also like to thank our contributors for offering such
provocative and path-breaking papers for inclusion in this volume. We thank
them additionally for their patience with the review process and their alacrity
in meeting tight deadlines for submission and revision. We are very grateful
to Amy Shelton for helping to compile the bibliography and to Amanda
LeDuke for providing vital editorial and bibliographic assistance.
xiii
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Introduction
In this volume, we demonstrate the vitality of urban studies in a double

sense: its fundamental importance for understanding contemporary societ-
ies and its qualities as a dynamic and innovative field of inquiry. However,
urbanists have detractors, particularly scholars in mainstream U.S. politi-
cal science. In 2007, Bryan D. Jones, a former urbanist, and two graduate
students, Joshua Sapotichne, and Michelle Wolfe (Sapotichne, et al. 2007),
launched a scathing attack on the urban politics subfield. They argued that
it has become parochial and moribund, ignoring significant approaches in
mainstream political science and failing to contribute anything to it. Other
than urban regime theory, they claimed, it has contributed little of value for
two decades or more. Led by Imbroscio, the attack was defended robustly in
a debate, to which Davies and others contributed.1 At the same time, Davies
was organizing a series of workshops at Warwick University designed to
develop “critical governance studies” by challenging orthodox theories, such
as Rhodes’ “differentiated polity model” of governance by network (Rhodes
1997), that have dominated urban political inquiry for a quarter century.2 The
coincidence of these developments caused the current editors to organize a
debate on Critical Urban Studies: New Directions, taking in the whole urban
field. We did so partly to emphasize the falsity of Jones’ critique and partly
to engage the field with the renewed spirit of social critique emerging since
the late 1990s. We convened two panels at the 38th meeting of the Urban
Affairs Association (UAA), held in Baltimore in April 2008, on the critical
urban studies theme. Between them, the panels attracted some two hundred
people and convinced us that critical urban studies is a matter of consider-
able interest and debate. The first panel looked at developments in critical
urban theory, the second critical urban policy, and we have structured the
volume accordingly.
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2 Jonathan S. Davies and David L. Imbroscio
The Warwick workshops provoked considerable debate about the nature

of “orthodoxy” and “critique.” By orthodoxy, we mean that which is estab-
lished, unquestioned doctrine. Orthodoxy refers to any theoretical or empirical
assumption taken for granted in a significant field of inquiry. The orthodox
may or may not be synonymous with the “mainstream” and the practice of
critique can itself become orthodox. Critique is certainly an integral feature
of the urban field. From its origins in the late 1960s to the present, the
detection and eradication of social injustice has been its dominant theme,
alongside its celebration of city life. This strand of critique—the pursuit of
social justice—features more or less explicitly in all the contributions to this
volume, as readers would expect. However, it also addresses a second strand
characteristic of the practice of critique, that of self-examination and renewal.
To remain relevant, any field of inquiry must move beyond its comfort zone,
challenge its orthodoxies, critical or otherwise, and respond to new intel-
lectual and empirical challenges.
To meet this challenge, we asked each of our contributors to identify
an orthodox perspective in urban studies and subject it to critique, while
mapping out a future research agenda for the renewal of critique. As the
result of their considerable endeavors, the volume reflects the most recent
developments in the practice of critique in the urban field, challenges preva-
lent orthodoxies, and identifies the key challenges posed for critical urban
studies by contemporary city life. It thus reaffirms and renews the tradition
of critique through which the international field of urban studies has made
its name. We see this book very much as the beginning of a debate and if it
provokes controversy and uncertainty, at a time of global crisis, it will have
achieved its primary goal.
Elvin Wyly opens Part I: Critical Urban Theory with a qualified defense
of positivism in urban enquiry. Urbanists have been particularly critical of
positivism. However, Wyly argues that the urban discipline is wrong to
reject it wholesale. Positivist research, characterized by rigorous observation
and measurement, has an important role to play in radical urban inquiry. In
Chapter 2, Mara Sidney accepts Wyly’s claim about the potential of posi-
tivist urban research to be critical, while also revealing the critical potential
embodied in an epistemic rival to positivism: constructivist and interpretive
analysis. She further demonstrates how a constructivist, interpretative approach

could do much to revitalize the study of urban politics. Warren Magnusson’s
contribution in Chapter 3 finds great value in critical urban studies’ ability
to “see like a city”—envision the world as resulting from distinctively urban
practices—as opposed to the conventional state-centric view of the world.
“Seeing like a city” rather than “seeing like a state” presents a profound
challenge to orthodox political science by detaching the discipline from its
traditional state-oriented moorings. Doing so, Magnusson demonstrates,
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Introduction 3
transforms contemporary political science into an urban discipline, as urban

political phenomena now marginal to the discipline instead become central
to it.
In Chapter 4, Julie-Anne Boudreau also asks that we envision the
world as constituted by distinctively urban practices and characteristics. If
we do so, she argues, then it is plausible to conceive of a specifically urban
standpoint from which to generate knowledge and do research. Such an
urban epistemology possesses significant critical potential, while challenging
the orthodox view that a researcher can produce knowledge in a disembodied
way. In Chapter 5, Jonathan Davies renews his critical engagement with
urban regime theory (2002), arguing against Clarence Stone (see, e.g., Stone,
1989) that urban politics needs Marxist theory. He contends that a Marxist
conception of systemic power, centered on the evolving relationship among
state, capital, and class is both stronger and more dynamic than Stone’s and
capable of explaining a variety of forms of urban governance, from informal
urban regimes to British-style urban partnership bureaucracies. In a period
of neoliberal crisis and ever-rising inequality, this Marxist conception rec-
ommends radically different forms of political action based on the potential
for revitalized class struggles. Concluding Part I, David Imbroscio argues in
Chapter 6 against the likes of Bryan Jones and his colleagues (Sapotichne et
al. 2007), and instead suggests that urban politics must resist the allure of
the mainstream and its methodological and normative orthodoxies includ-
ing ontological individualism, pluralism, and (neo)liberal political economy.
Urbanism needs to maintain a critical stance toward its own orthodoxies,
but it must also continue to look outward by challenging the mainstream
with, in his words, “sustained intellectual ferocity.”
Part II, Critical Urban Policy, begins with chapters by Jeff Spinner-
Halev (Chapter 7) and Yasminah Beebeejaun (Chapter 8) engaging the issue
of diversity. Spinner-Halev questions the orthodox view in urban studies that
blames the nefarious actions of the abstract entity of “the state” for racial and
class segregation in the United States. Such a view, he argues, is much too
simple a portrayal of the problem and neglects the role played by the actions
and preferences of individual citizens. His analysis provides a sobering retort
to those urban scholars who fail to come fully to terms with the complexities
surrounding efforts to protect minority interests from majoritarian impulses

in democratic politics. Yasminah Beebeejaun argues that multicultural theories
and policies based on the goal of racial equality have come under attack in
recent years and been replaced by a newly hegemonic policy narrative, “com-
munity cohesion.” The idea of community cohesion deflects attention from
racial inequality, placing the onus on black and minority ethnic communities
to assimilate. Beebeejaun attacks this new orthodoxy, arguing that it reflects
a “colonial attitude” toward black and minority ethnic groups, treating them
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4 Jonathan S. Davies and David L. Imbroscio
as immigrants not citizens. She mounts a robust case for multiculturalism,

while maintaining that the defense of difference “is empty if not linked to
debate about justice and equality.”
The next two chapters by James DeFilippis and Jim Fraser (Chapter
9) and Edward Goetz and Karen Chapple (Chapter 10) challenge orthodox-
ies concerning how best to confront spatially concentrated urban poverty.
DeFilippis and Fraser critique the orthodox theoretical justification for creat-
ing mixed-income housing and neighborhoods offered by mainstream urban
policy analysts. They see this theoretical justification as especially troubling
as it spawns problematic and unjust public policies. In light of this critique,
they offer their own theoretical justification for mixed-income housing and
neighborhoods, a justification that suggests policies both normatively and
programmatically superior. Goetz and Chapple question the related orthodoxy
of what Imbroscio elsewhere (see 2008a, 2008b) identifies as the “dispersal
consensus” in U.S. anti-poverty and low-income housing policy. Dispersal-
ists believe improving the lives of the poor and the conditions in America’s
inner cities requires relocating poor residents to more affluent areas within
the metropolitan region. Goetz and Chapple’s analysis marshals considerable
empirical evidence challenging the dispersalist position by demonstrating that
such policies are often both ineffective and unjust.
Finally, in Chapter 11, Thad Williamson takes a critical view of the
urban sprawl debate. What troubles Williamson is the overconfidence of much
of the conventional critical urban scholarship on sprawl. Such scholarship
views the notion that sprawl is a “bad thing” as a self-evident truth. This
overconfidence, and the absence of scholarly rigor it engenders, has provided
an opening for sprawl’s defenders to mount a seemingly compelling case for
it. Williamson takes the defense of sprawl seriously but shows how such a
defense ultimately founders on both empirical and normative grounds.
Taken together, the eleven essays in this collection considerably advance
the enterprise of critical urban studies. They challenge a wide range of preva-
lent orthodoxies and illuminate several new directions on which subsequent
critical scholarship and practice can build. On the theory side, contributions
in this volume lay the foundation for reconceiving the conduct of empirical
inquiry and knowledge production, revamping the nature of disciplinary work
in the social sciences and revitalizing the field of urban studies itself with a
renewed sense of confidence and intellectual vigor. On the policy side, the
contributors provide thorough critiques of established urban policies that
hinder social justice while offering progressive alternatives. More profoundly,
they also press policy advocates committed to social justice to develop more
rigorous and justifiable understandings of the immense challenges posed by
contemporary city life. It is our hope that the essays collected in this volume
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Introduction 5
inspire future urban scholars and activists to further advance the theory and
practice of critique in even deeper and more transformative directions.
Notes
1. See Urban News: Newsletter of the Urban Politics Section (of the Ameri-
can Political Science Association). Spring, 2008. Vol. 22, No. 1. http://www.apsanet.
org/~urban/newsletters08-1.pdf.
2. See http://go.warwick.ac.uk/orthodoxies.
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Part 1
Critical Urban Theory

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冑City
Elvin Wyly
Today, of course, there are no positivists. The positivist era is over, and
everyone is a postpositivist. Yet, is it that easy?
—Robert C. Scharff, “On Weak Postpositivism” (2007, 515)
. . . most of the contemporary work on constructing new bases for social

theory is not being carried out by self-described radicals. . . . For those of
us who come from the Left, the bitter irony of our day is that self-described
conservatives in some cases, and liberals (. . . in the continental sense) are
probably now, on average, as effective at critical social science as are self-
described radicals.
—Michael Storper, “The Poverty of Radical
Theory Today” (2001, 159)
. . . a certain form of critical spirit has sent us down the wrong path, en-
couraging us to fight the wrong enemies and, worst of all, to be considered
as friends by the wrong sort of allies.
—Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run
Out of Steam?” (2004, 231)
Were this only a dispute about epistemology, I believe the debate would
long since have ended and been declared a draw. But insofar as the quantita-
tive-qualitative dichotomy is intertwined with the contest for disciplinary
prestige and the relative valuation of different kinds of intellectual capital,
the prospects for a negotiated truce are more problematic.
—Val Burris, “Fordism and Positivism
in U.S. Sociology” (2007, 103)
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10 Elvin Wyly
The city is haunted. Urban studies shares the fate of so many other fields of
inquiry trapped by “a positivist ‘haunting,’ ” reflecting “positivism’s paradoxical
power as a zombie-like refusal to stay buried” (Steinmetz 2005a, 3, 37). It
refuses to die, “[d]espite repeated attempts by social theorists and researchers
to drive a stake through the heart of the vampire,” George Steinmetz writes in
his introduction to The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences [PoM] (2005a,
3). Because positivism has come to be associated with conservative hegemony
and intellectual as well as geopolitical imperialism, its persistence threatens
the possibilities for a progressive or radical urbanism of social justice. The
“positivist demon advances and retreats unevenly within and across the human
science disciplines, discards one costume for another to elude detection, but
resists all efforts to exorcise it, once and for all, from the practice of social and
historical research” (Burris 2007, 93, commenting on Steinmetz 2005a, 2005b,
2005c). Generations and centuries after Hume, Descartes, Comte, Durkheim,
and the Vienna Circle, debate endures, and “for every observer who insists
that renewing the positivism debate is beating a dead horse there is another
who identifies a resilient ‘positivist empiricism’ ” (Steinmetz 2005a, 30).
Urban studies seems to have been spared the most violent epistemologi-
cal clashes documented in PoM.1 Even so, interdisciplinary community and
a shared sense of purpose have not suppressed discussion of these important
matters in relation to cities and urban research (Baeten 2001; Castells 2006;
Fainstein 2005b; Markusen 2003; Storper 2001; Vigar, et al. 2005). The city
of positivist hegemony has been challenged and transformed, with a radical
pluralism of post-, anti-, and nonpositivist2 urbanists committed to a diverse,
cosmopolitan metropolis of knowledge and action. Yet positivism remains at
the city center in order to serve the oppositional constitution of all. Positivist
hegemony enhances the prestige of scientists who never need to use words
like “positivism” or “hegemony.” And positivist hegemony is the only specter
that can unite all of the diverse intellectual and political movements that have
flourished over the past forty years: regardless of all of the profound differ-
ences among urbanisms of Marxism, feminism, humanism, phenomenology,
postcolonialism, and post-structuralism, they all find common cause in the
fact that none of them are positivist. Scattered across a large city of neigh-
borhoods, nonpositivist epistemologies are forced to divide limited resources
amongst divergent projects—turning inward to build local community strength,

forging cross-community alliances with other nonpositivist neighborhoods,
or sustaining the long-running siege on Positivist City Hall.
When nonpositivists unite against the singular positivist hegemony,
however, they confront (and create) several risky paradoxes. In this chapter, I
suggest that the specter of positivism that has energized so many oppositional
movements is in fact a caricature of an historically contingent alignment
of philosophy, methodology, politics, and practice. In the Fordist urbanism
constructed across the American landscape from the late 1940s to the early
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1970s, key developments in society, culture, technology, and the state did
help to forge an organized nexus between positivist epistemology, integrated
quantitative methodologies, and state-centric, conservative-leaning politics.
This organized configuration, however, lasted only long enough to inspire
the many diverse movements evident in today’s pluralism of nonpositivisms.
The tidy postwar nexus of epistemology, methodology, and politics came
unhinged many years ago. Recognizing this collapse is essential if we are to
grasp the opportunities to do important, worthwhile things in a genuinely
rigorous, radical, and relevant urban studies.
Portrayals of Positivism
We must begin with clear definitions. Variations on the word “positivism” are
widely used as convenient shorthand—as epithet noun and/or genealogical
adjective—but the term has at least three distinct meanings (Riley 2007).
Positivism can denote a commitment to societal progress, evolution, and
development in the spirit of Enlightenment modernity. It can refer to the
philosophical heritage of logical positivism from Comte to the Vienna Circle.
Or it can describe a particular ensemble of organized, systematic research
practices—what Steinmetz (2005c) diagnoses as methodological positivism.
The distinction between the latter meaning and the first two is crucial,
and often ignored. Histories of science emphasize that methodological positiv-
ist practice—variations on the scientific method, the search for generalizable
laws of causation, the stance of objectivity and fact/value neutrality—was
built on the philosophical foundations of logical positivism, and the ontologi-
cal, Enlightenment faith in human reason and rationality. Challenges to the
mundane daily activities of positivist analysis, therefore, are usually woven
together with foundational critiques of modernity, metaphysical realism, and
the possibility of objective, value-free knowledge claims. When nonpositivists
identify specific procedural or political problems in methodological positivism,
they usually diagnose the failures with reference to the long, rich intellectual
heritage of philosophy and epistemology. Consider the typical nonpositivist’s
reaction when confronted with a conservative, equation-saturated econo-
metric analysis of laissez-faire urban equilibrium, produced by a researcher

using federal government or private, corporate funding; the usual response
is to dismiss the research as “positivist,” and to dispense with the need to
disentangle the particular mix of explicit and implicit biases of politics,
method, or research funding. For nonpositivists, the designation “positiv-
ism” has become so broad that it signals a nearly infinite array of concerns,
preferences, and criticisms—ranging all the way from a dislike of specialized
or impenetrable mathematical formulae, to skepticism toward the corrosive
effects of money on research priorities, to foundational, ontological concerns
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12 Elvin Wyly
over a hierarchical, heteropatriarchical rule of experts imposing the Western

colonizer’s worldview.
These moves put nonpositivists into intractable dilemmas. Deploy-
ing “positivism” and “positivist” as broad, multipurpose epithets presumes a
particular configuration of knowledge, method, and politics. It discourages
potentially productive alliances with scholars who are not perfectly aligned
with each particular nonpositivist critique on each of these three axes. Care-
less use of the p-word alienates potential allies, while offering an easy target
for those hard-core protagonists who really do embody certain aspects of the
conservative-positivist alignment (see Berry 2002; Fotheringham 2006). More-
over, the shorthand use of positivism ignores the partial autonomy between
contemporary methodological positivism and the centuries-long philosophical
heritage of positivism. Positivists today do not describe themselves as such.
Although nonpositivists routinely use the term as a generalized critique of
mainstream research, “positivists” typically draw distinctions between good
and bad science. Positivists also tend to use simple words with seemingly
clear connotations—accuracy, precision, validity, and reliability—that infuri-
ate critical nonpositivists while attracting a broader audience in the public
realm. Nonpositivists must then confront insistent public demands to explain
precisely what, in their view, “counts” as worthwhile knowledge, and how we
are to avoid the descent to infinite relativist uncertainty. Mainstream, acces-
sible discourse also puts nonpositivists in the position of chasing a “phantom”
(Burris 2007, 93); “One would look in vain for a positivist manifesto signed
by a prominent list of sociologists” (97), or scholars from any other social
science.3 Manifestos from previous generations are often used as surrogates
for what today’s positivists refuse to say.4 When contemporary positivists
place caveats and qualifications on a previous generation’s bold, rigid axioms
of objectivity and universality, nonpositivists resort to new labels such as
“crypto-positivism” (Steinmetz 2005c, 276),5 or they seize on incremental
reforms as prima facie evidence of unapologetic hegemony: “. . . if there is a
kind of modesty . . . it is the kind of modesty characteristic of those whose
preeminent power affords them the ability to reevaluate, revise, and ‘reconcile
alternatives.’ . . . The diffuseness of the theoretical identity . . .” is “best read
as a mark of hegemony . . .” (Hauptmann 2005, 227). Even the opposition
to positivist hegemony is said to strengthen the binary thinking at the heart

of positivist power.6
Let me be absolutely clear: This is not a defense of the positivist fir-
mament. There is ample evidence that certain privileged positions are able
safely to ignore crucial, critical questions—even to avoid entire vocabularies.7
Nonpositivists have demonstrated the dangers of treating individuals and
societies as if they behaved according to the mechanistic laws of Newtonian
physics, the inescapable interplay and constitution of subjectivity, values, and
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purportedly objective maneuvers of observation and measurement, and the

corrosive corruption of certain types of funding circuits and conservative
ideological networks. These and many other considerations require constant
vigilance, learning, and self-criticism in order to sustain scholarship that has
ontological integrity, methodological rigor, and political relevance to the cause
of human understanding and social justice. Especially in the human sciences,
epistemological and methodological pluralism are essential, and must be
strengthened throughout the intellectual-pedagogical infrastructure.
Yet pluralism also means that certain kinds of what is routinely dismissed
as “positivism” must play a role too. When specific allegations of problems with
knowledge, methods, and politics are replaced by the casual, generalized use of
“positivism” as an epithet, the move risks “guilt by association, whereby signs
of any one of these symptoms is taken as grounds for confirming the larger
malady” (Burris 2007, 98). At the extreme is an “ ‘explanation by association,’
wherein the thing (positivism) explained is allowed to shift among different
meanings during a very complex and overdetermined explanatory story” (98).
Post-positivist critique also suffers its own Cartesian anxiety: “It is perfectly
possible to oppose the View from Nowhere, and even to criticize others for
failing to understand its impossibility, and still do so . . . as if from Nowhere”
(Scharff 2007, 509). If Comtean positivism is fatally compromised, so is what
Scharff (2007) and S. Harding (2005) diagnose as weak post-positivism.
Naïve, uninformed empiricism should be held accountable. Orthodox
methodological rules should be challenged when they leave no room for valuable,
rigorous qualitative and interpretive methods. Compromised funding depen-
dencies and biased definitions of what counts as policy “relevance” should be
exposed, dismantled, and reconstructed (Slater 2006). But each of these radical
projects should be pursued with clear, specific language documenting particular
problems and (wherever possible) proposing specific suggestions for analysis,
advocacy, and organizing. Using “positivism” as a banner to unite the diverse
alliances and tensions of the nonpositivist movements of the social sciences and
humanities made sense forty years ago. Today it is counterproductive.
Urbanus Unhinged
Contemporary debates among what historian Peter Novick (1991, 703)

calls the “epistemological left,” took shape in the geographical and histori-
cal contingencies of the postwar United States, from the late 1940s to the
early 1970s. During this period the epistemological left could be considered
synonymous with the historical/political left. New social movements and
intellectual dissidents challenged a positivism that seemed to have achieved
a formal, institutional hegemony in the social sciences precisely at the
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14 Elvin Wyly
moment when it died within philosophy itself, to be marginalized as “only

a subsection of a subfield of a discipline” (Steinmetz 2005a, 31). For Stein-
metz (2005c; see also 2007), postwar U.S. Fordism explains why positivism
triumphed as an institutional apparatus despite “the long-term decline of
positivism as a vital position in philosophy” (2005c, 276). Through its far-
reaching effects in organizing various realms of economy, society, and culture,
Fordism helped to privilege and apparently validate a kind of social science
that was “acultural, ahistorical, and individualistic with respect to its basic
units of analysis and oriented towards general laws, replication, prediction,
and value-freedom” (309). Meanwhile, the “Fordist security state” provided
an enormous reservoir of funding, and an eager policy audience, for social
science that was “packaged in a positivist format” (309).
PoM includes not a single mention of urban studies. Nevertheless,
the bold theses of Steinmetz and many of the other contributors provide
a valuable conceptual lens through which to gain a new perspective on
the positivist debates that are so widely remembered and rehearsed within
urban studies and urban planning. The basic story line goes something like
this. By the mid-1960s it had become clear that urban research had moved
decisively toward various incarnations of general-systems theory, neoclassi-
cal economics, and a search for universal laws of urban structure and urban
process. Research practices were premised on rational-planning assumptions,
detached objectivity, and privileged, hard-earned expertise. Great emphasis
was placed on formal mathematical models, systematic urban inventories and
social surveys, and quantitative measurement. Given the considerable expense
of the new mainframe computer infrastructure required, the new wave of
urban inquiry came to be closely associated with long-term state funding
and certain types of policy-oriented research questions.
This brutal summary distorts and oversimplifies a very complex, turbulent
period with its own conceptual ironies, currents of resistance and creative
dissent, and shifting alliances among and within urban-oriented disciplines
(for a small sample, see Hall 2002, 359–363; cf. Harvey 1973; Harvey 1969;
cf. Berry 1972; Harvey 1972; Berry 2002).
Oversimplification is the point: Complex histories and contingencies
from four decades ago are now remembered (or described in written his-
tories) in simplified, ideal-typical form. Complexity is distilled to a concise

collective memory that implies ontological essence and necessity. Consider
the concise and eloquent urban historiographies that telescope through one
contemporary urban analysis (Vigar, et al. 2005, 1395) of today’s intricate
multicultural cities undergoing repeated rounds of destabilizing changes:
Such transformations challenge the modernist principles at the

heart of urban planning that tend to favour acting in a definable
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15
singular “public interest,” with rational “coherence” and urban

public order imposed on the city “from above” through the expert
powers of the usually White, middle-class, middle-aged and
heterosexual men who, invariably, were the planning “experts”
[Holston 1998]. Such traditions of modern city planning tended
to favour “rationality, comprehensiveness, planning hierarchy,
positivist science with its propensity for quantitative modeling
and analysis, belief in state-directed futures and in the existence
of a single ‘public interest’ that can be identified by planners and
is gender and race neutral.” (Baeten 2001, 57)
I do not believe that this example is an unfair characterization (or a

nonrepresentative sample) of scores of contemporary nonpositivist accounts. It
is brutally efficient.8 It neatly wraps up the enterprise of positivist urbanism
into a tightly packed container of (a) epistemological objectivity, rationality,
universality, and incontrovertible certainty; (b) methodological worship of
mathematical reasoning and quantification; and (c) political compromises
that condone or actively support conservative, hierarchical state authority.
Much of the contemporary science-studies literature is devoted to rich
historiographies, genealogies, and oral histories that narrate various sites,
circumstances, and performances of this interlocking triumvirate. My argu-
ment is that this unholy trinity of a mid-century American urbanism was
an overgeneralized guilt by association that mistook contingency for essence.
The “conjuncture of logical positivism . . . and the advance of mathematical
and statistical techniques,” for example, “was historically specific: it was
by no means a sign that the one is irrevocably shackled to the other. By
extension, therefore, attacks on the one need not entail attacks on the
other” (Gregory 1986, 359–360; cf. Johnston 1986, 49–50). In any event,
the attacks and counterattacks proliferated: The significant alignments of
epistemology, methodology, and politics became a site of struggle as soon
as they became clear. Because many nonpositivists define their philosophy,
methods, and politics in relation to memories and/or written histories of
1945–1973, however, the organized configuration of that era serves as the
template for how urbanists make sense of today’s disagreements.
An explicitly urban perspective illuminates the productive tensions and

risks in Steinmetz’s (2005c) ambitious regulation-theory linkage between
Fordism and methodological positivism. Central to this link, Steinmetz
(2005c, 298) argues, was the integration of the social sciences into the Fordist
national security state through funding given to a purportedly autonomous
academy—creating a dependency that “seemed paradoxically to validate the
claim that science was ‘value-free.’ ” Social scientists’ economic security allowed
an illusory sense of detached autonomy and objectivity.
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16 Elvin Wyly
Yet the urbanization of this link was no simple, monotonic function.

As a response to the crisis of accumulation in the Depression, Fordist state
intervention was highly specific, “informed by social struggles and class
conflicts in the major cities where capital and people were already concen-
trated” (Florida and Jonas 1991, 350). To be sure, the late 1940s and 1950s
brought the closest alignment between positivist currents in urban research
and American urban Fordism, with the simultaneous “closure” and narrow-
ing of the social-democratic elements of the New Deal amidst an expansive
“spatial fix” explosion of suburbanization, sunbelt-gunbelt growth, and inter-
state highway construction (Florida and Jonas 1991). But nearly every major
federal intervention today associated with any kind of mildly progressive
urbanism comes not from a stable, status quo Fordism but from its crisis
and its insurgent Others—the flowering and sometimes militant new social
movements of the 1960s. Perhaps the “social ontology of the Fordist subject
was aligned with security” (Steinmetz 2005c, 299) in the 1950s. But in the
1960s, it was spreading uncertainty, insecurity, and quite a lot of contingency
that helped to create the “urban” that we now take for granted. At the
federal level, the Civil Rights Movement and the urban crisis destabilized
the status quo, such that periodic doses of the Johnson Treatment could
deliver responses like the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Office of Economic
Opportunity, Model Cities, and the 1965 creation of the U.S. Department
of Housing and Urban Development. In the academy, the ferment of new
social movements and the glimpse of new possibilities—at least in “the brief
political space before the escalation in Vietnam”—drew a new generation to
a nascent field of urban studies devoted to “the task of rebuilding the cities
and fighting poverty and racial inequality . . .” ( Judd 2005, 121).
Clearly, it would be a mistake to ignore the Janus faces of the Great
Society, with its limited domestic war on poverty chained to a genocidal
war in Vietnam. The 1960s failed to deliver a thorough restructuring of
society. Nevertheless, it is dangerous and disempowering to remember the
postwar era as nothing more than an age of a flawed, conservative positivist
urbanism. Many of the scholars working with social statistics who are now
caricatured as unrepentant conservative positivists “were not infrequently of
an actively leftist orientation” (Livingstone 1992, 325)—continuing the dis-

sident heritage of the Vienna Circle itself (cf. Mirowski 2005). Some of the
most reactionary urbanism emerged not from quantitative-positivist research,
but from explicitly qualitative ethnographic work on the culture of poverty
(e.g., Banfield 1968). Even the state-funded research of that era that is now
recalled as the pinnacle of positivist urbanism (e.g., National Academy of
Sciences 1973) looks downright radical when viewed from the vantage point
of today’s political climate. If positivism was tainted by its enrollment in
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17
American Fordism and the military–industrial complex—and in some ways

it was—there was never any guarantee that a post-industrial, post-Fordist,
post-positivist era would deliver us from the evils of militarism, inequality,
racism, and all the other manifestations of social injustice. Indeed, the Right
has been all too quick to hijack the theoretical and tactical weapons tradition-
ally associated with the Left. The entire documentary history of the second
Bush Administration—from Karl Rove’s scorched-earth election strategies
to the infamous torture memos deconstructing the contextual meanings of
pain and organ failure while divining the torturer’s intentions and human
agency—provides a horribly perverted course syllabus on post-structuralist,
post-positivist imperialism (Greenberg and Dratel 2005; Latour 2004). Any
epistemology, and any methodology, can be co-opted and abused to serve the
cause of violence, destruction, and inequality. Conversely, all methodologies
and epistemologies can be mobilized for social justice (Klinkenberg 2007;
Lake 2002; Plummer and Sheppard 2001; Sheppard 2001; Wolch 2003).
冑City
Urban studies is a critical catalyst for progressive knowledge nurtured by a

situated, standpoint position in the city, and strategic action with and on
behalf of urbanites mobilizing for social justice. As we consider the prospects
for critical urban studies, we could choose from among many thoughtful
recommendations on what we should do (see Fainstein 2005b; Judd 2005;
Storper 2001). I would like to take a different approach, to simply describe
what people are actually doing, and to draw analytical and strategic connec-
tions that are often overlooked. A growing number of analysts and advocates,
students and citizens, organizers and attorneys are doing work that constitutes
a collective project of critical urbanism. The individual efforts are not always
coordinated—and indeed the critical heritage of intense disagreement con-
tinues to thrive—but anyone who wishes to build a critical urban research
and action agenda can choose from an expanding array of analytical resources
and strategic possibilities. Three trends are most encouraging.
First, a revived spirit of critical, constructive theory is encouraging
important work that is unburdened by the old dichotomies (see Sidney

Chapter 2, this volume). It may never be possible to determine “the urban
reality” with any timeless, universal certainty after the devastating assault on
the four corners of old-school positivism (empiricism, exclusivity, autonomy,
and universality; Gregory 2000). But we need not attain epistemological
consensus to recognize that work needs to be done, right now, with our
necessarily limited, partial, and situated knowledges (S. Harding 2005).
This recognition is most sensitive for anyone working with activists and
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18 Elvin Wyly
organizers in urban social justice organizations, but it also seems to be part

of a broader pragmatic turn that seeks to reconcile the long-term strategies
of pure inquiry and organizing with the urgent tactical imperative to fight
the latest innovations of inequality, oppression, and injustice. Moreover, not
everyone is a post-positivist: In an essay on a classic text of urban social
movements, the third most prominent living social scientist in the world9
reflected the following:
Is this discussion, and my approach in The City and the Grassroots,

an indicator of positivism? Probably yes. Because I am a positivist,
I have never had anything against positivism, and I was always
focused on doing empirical research, as coded and formal as
possible, while trying to make sense of it. . . . I never considered
myself a theorist; I am a researcher, and I am only interested in
theory as a useful tool for research. . . . I always tried to understand
the world, not the books, and then to use books, method and
observation to actually do research that could be trusted. Trusted
by at least some in the scholarly community, and trusted by
enough of us to tell people our sense of what was making their
lives one way or another. In my romantic period of studying social
movements from the trenches, I always told the militants that in
exchange for their help in my research, I would give back some
level of knowledge and consciousness of their actions. . . . By the
time I finished my careful research they were usually too tired
to reflect on their struggles. (Castells 2006, 220)
Second, a new analytical infrastructure is under construction. Its founda-

tion is built from the best of old and new components, strengthened by what
John Forester describes as “critical pragmatism,” and what Michael Storper
calls a “proceduralist revolution” of “dialogue and transparency and true atten-
tiveness to different voices . . .” (Storper 2001, 173). If we wish to reconcile
the possibilities of quantitative analysis with the “tempered naturalism” of a
critical-realist approach recognizing that “the causal mechanisms of the social
exist only within relational and meaningful (“concept–dependent”) human
practice” (Steinmetz 2007, 131), then we have a clear outline of how to do

so from Jones and Hanham’s (1995) valuable fusion of depth-realist epistemol-
ogy with an expansion-technique methodology for disentangling necessary and
contingent relations. Other powerful theoretical frameworks—summarized by
metaphors of methodological legislation (Poon 2003), statistical citizenship
(Hannah 2001), quantitative methods narratives (Poon 2003), and insurgent
quantitative practices (Sheppard 2001)—are inspiring critical, rigorous work
that mobilizes a simple yet incendiary realization: to show that a particular
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19
theory/method/policy/practice is socially constructed is the beginning and not

the end of social inquiry. Mobilization is the medium and the message in a
growing gathering of organic intellectuals, activists, and allies.
Finally, there is a resurgent, recombinant synthesis of radical scholarship,
progressive policy analysis, and community organizing on particular issues.
Much of this work is rooted in established traditions from earlier generations,
updated for contemporary circumstances, and in many cases the urban focus
remains latent or neglected. But the urban potential is there. Since 1975,
the U.K.-based Radical Statistics Group (2008) has developed wide-ranging,
interdisciplinary challenges to repressive state-driven calculative practices; most
of the group’s urban work is a byproduct of the centralization of statistical
decision making in London. The influential post-autistic economics move-
ment (Fullbrook 2003) includes no explicit urban component, but the urban
specialization of several heterodox economics departments (see Lee, et al.
2005) hints at the possibilities for a critical new urban economics.
In several domains, “the urban” does provide a crucible for radical social
justice campaigns built on rigorous, critical, pluralist social science. Harvey’s
(2000) theorization of the living-wage movement provides a foundation for
strategic and tactical maneuvers, even as theory is animated and energized by
the rich critical empirics of Pollin’s (2002) wage-rate calculations, Arvidson’s
(2000) intra-metropolitan cartographies of class, Dalmat’s (2005/2006) analyses
of the legal viability of municipal living-wage ordinances, and Martin’s (2001)
measurement of the political and economic dimensions of the movement’s
success in various parts of America’s devolutionary federalism. Rich policy
ethnographies of the injustices of simplistic poverty-deconcentration pro-
grams (Crump 2002; Goetz 2003) allow an even more potent challenge
when integrated with the precise mappings of the fine-grained geographies
of so-called “underclass” neighborhoods (Grengs 2007; Sessoms and Wolch
2008). Feminist perspectives on urban structure and policy (Hayden 1981;
Markusen 1980) catalyze new possibilities when used to transform con-
ventional analytical technologies and practices (Ellwood 2006; Gilbert and
Masucci 2006; McLafferty 2002; Schuurman and Pratt 2002). Progressives’
frustrations with the mundane, hidden biases of mainstream urban public
finance suddenly shift from reactive defense to proactive offense when the
prevailing practices of accounting and fiscal analysis are used to create a public,
community balance sheet to measure the social economy of urban economic
development (Imbroscio 2004b). And diagnoses of the roots of the crisis of
capital and credit spreading throughout American cities and suburbs into the
transnational financial system need not be limited to theoretical analysis of
the laws and injustices of capital accumulation (Aalbers 2008; Gotham 2006;
Harvey 1974); it is also possible to push aside the physics-envy connotations
of “laws” (Steinmetz 2005c) in favor of aggressive methodological legislation,
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20 Elvin Wyly
statistical citizenship, and strategic litigation—all nourished by radical, rigor-

ous scholarship. This work has helped to establish the connections between
thousands of exploited Cleveland homeowners and the intricate web of
local and global financial institutions, and to use litigation in an attempt to
hold these institutions accountable (City of Cleveland 2008). Cartographies,
quantitative descriptions, and quantitative analyses forge a new alloy from
the best elements of Harvey (1969) and Harvey (1974) at the heart of John
P. Relman’s use of the Fair Housing Act to challenge the abusive racial and
class exploitation of predatory lending in Baltimore (Mayor and City Council
of Baltimore 2008; Relman 2003).
All of these radical urban projects include appeals to the possibility of
generalization, the importance of careful observation and measurement, the
integrity of methods that can be replicated by others to yield similar results,
and the metaphysical-ontological commitment that there is an external reality
that we can know and do something about. Yet these radical urbanisms are
situated, modest, and partial rather than arrogant, hierarchical, and univer-
salizing; they are enriched by pluralist counterworlds (cf. Steinmetz 2005a,
26) built on the recognition of the negotiated, contested processes defining
so many of the social categories involved in urban studies—including, of
course, the urban itself. These projects include many elements of what has
typically been caricatured as positivist; but the casual use of this shorthand
epithet is inaccurate and destructive. The “pluralist postpositivist counter-
world” (Steinmetz 2005a, 26) will always include elements of positivism as
well, creating a complex and confusing landscape. It defies the old, clear
divisions that separated different regions of epistemology, methodology, and
politics. We must navigate this terrain. We need to search for progressive
urbanisms and to build radical cities of social justice, working with allies to
mobilize all of the tools of exploration, analysis, negotiation, interpretation,
and construction. The radical city awaits.
Notes
1. To consider one narrow indicator, a search for the term positivism in Urban
Studies yields a single article with a passing mention, while positivist yields eleven
articles and one book review. For the Journal of Urban Affairs, the same searches
turn up four book reviews and one article, and (for positivist) four book reviews, one
rejoinder, and two articles. In Urban Affairs Review, positivism makes appearances
in two book reviews and three articles—in 1975, 1998, and 2000—whereas positiv-
ist yields four articles—1969, 1971, 1976, 2007—and two book reviews. Twenty-six
items turn up with either positivism or positivist in the International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research. The meaning of these figures (obtained from simple searches
of publishers’ journal sites in February 2008) obviously depends on the technical
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21
features of various collections, including the varied pace at which publishers scan old
journal issues and make them searchable. One suspects, for instance, that the term
must have appeared many times in Urban Studies since the first volume appeared in
1964. Still, these figures do give us a sense of what students will see (or not see)
when they use typical quick searches to study the relations between urban studies
and positivism.
2. I have chosen to use nonpositivism rather than post-positivism, to acknowl-
edge many theorists’ unease with the teleological notions of linear progress embedded
in the post. Scharff (2007, 521) notes that post-positivism “is viewed as constituting
a fundamentally progressive break with our Platonic past. . . . not only has it followed
positivism in freeing itself from the older traditions of theology and metaphysics, it
has now ‘got rid’ of positivism as well.”
3. Burris’ use of the resonant Italian word is not as casual as it might
seem. Compare the opening lines of Burris (2007, 93) and Marx and Engels
(1998[1848], 49).
4. In an otherwise brilliant and valuable analysis of social-justice movements
and standpoint epistemologies, S. Harding (2005) turns to a pair of short encyclo-
pedia-of-philosophy entries, both published in 1967, to cite explicit methodological
positivist commitments.
5. To be fair, Steinmetz immediately adds, “if I can use that term without
any conspiratorial connotations.”
6. “To be sure, in some social sciences phenomenological and hermeneutical
frameworks are widely used. Yet these, too, have been influenced by positivism. For
example, insofar as they take an oppositional stance to positivist tenets, they replicate
binaries central to positivism’s power” (S. Harding 2005, 363).
7. A search of the publisher’s site for the Journal of Urban Economics yields
not a single mention of any of these terms anywhere in the text: positivism, positivist,
epistemology, ontology, or subjectivity.
8. The passage measures quite well on a words-per-concept benchmark:
one hundred six words that tie together more than a dozen fundamental themes
of social inquiry and philosophy: modernism, rationality, expertise, race, class, age,
gender, sexuality, hierarchy, epistemology, methodology, the state, the public interest,
and neutrality.
9. Excluding economists, and based on Social Science Citation Index refer-
ences for the previous five years. See Castells (2006).
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Critical Perspectives on the City

Constructivist, Interpretive Analysis of Urban Politics
Mara S. Sidney
Urban politics research usually lacks discussion of ontology and epistemol-

ogy, but most research implicitly adopts a positivist understanding of social
science. Despite the critical stance against the “positivist hegemony” taken
by some urbanists (see Wyly Chapter 1, this volume), there remains implicit
positivist orthodoxy in much urban politics research. Comparative and single-
case studies, large-N analyses, and survey research—the dominant methods
in the field—all embrace positivism, either in a strong or, more commonly,
weak form. In this chapter, I argue for return to discussions of ontology and
epistemology in general, and for the explicit development of constructivist
and interpretive approaches in urban politics research. These theoretical and
methodological approaches, which stand in opposition to positivism, are well
developed in the study of international relations and public policy, and have
proved useful in examining inequalities and power disparities in political
life, but are used infrequently to study urban politics. Bringing constructiv-
ism squarely into the study of urban politics would help to fill important
gaps that mark our research on urban inequality, would expand the range of
research methods used, and would build on, and contribute to, the tradition
of critical inquiry in urban studies.
Critiques of Urban Politics Research
In recent years, political scientists who study urban politics have been con-
cerned about what they see as a crisis in the status of the subfield within
the larger discipline. Various trends and milestones precipitated the collective
23
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24 Mara S. Sidney
malaise, including the declining membership of the Urban Politics section of

the American Political Science Association, and the reportedly small number
of young scholars who are entering the field, partly in response to warnings
from mentors about bleak prospects for jobs if they take up urban studies.
Another impetus for collective reflection was the publication of a series of
essays about the state of the field for the 40th anniversary volume of the
Urban Affairs Review (UAR; see Barnes 2005; Fainstein 2005a; Hero 2005;
Judd 2005; Pierre 2005; Rae 2006; Sellers 2005; Stone 2005). Additionally,
the 40th anniversaries of the late 1960s-era social unrest in many U.S. cities
prompted reflections about what has and has not changed in cities, urban
politics, and urban scholarship itself.
Scholars have raised multiple questions, and offered various answers
(see chapters in this volume by Davies, Magnusson, and Imbroscio). For
example, might the label urban politics reflect an outdated description of the
field, or needlessly bound its scholars, given that the scale and scope of study
seems more often to be metropolitan or regional, with layers of overlapping
government and nongovernment institutions? Is the problem related to a
lack of shared large data sets that would enable scholars to replicate and
extend research, allowing for hypothesis testing and theory refinement such
as is possible in the subfield of political behavior at the national scale? Is
the problem urban scholars—that is, are they too narrowly focused, insular,
or even backward? Are they failing to raise critical questions and to produce
theoretically interesting and sophisticated work that the larger discipline of
political science would recognize?
Some of the problems, concerns, and questions are institutional, having
to do with the organization of disciplinary academic life; others are conceptual
and substantive, having to do with the subject of study and the advancement
of knowledge. Clearly, these dimensions are connected and can be mutu-
ally reinforcing, such that there is a “sociology of knowledge” question at
stake about the norms, values, and incentives that prevail in contemporary
political science. I raise this point because other disciplines in which urban
studies occur, such as sociology, geography, and planning, do not seem to
be experiencing a similar “crisis.” This is an important issue on which to
reflect when assessing the crisis of urban studies in political science, but it
is beyond the scope of this chapter.

This chapter starts from the premises of two essays recently published
in UAR, which are also discussed by Imbroscio (Chapter 6, this volume). In
“Everything is Always Going to Hell: Urban Scholars as End-Times Prophets,”
Judd (2005) ties the marginality of the urban subfield to its insularity, and
to its hostility to new ideas and theoretical approaches that would challenge
the field’s conventional wisdom. He describes urban scholars as stuck in time
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Critical Perspectives on the City 25
and overly ideological, wedded to an era of liberal-style big government that

no longer exists and will not return, a position that results in skewed and
overly pessimistic research. Sapotichne, et al. (2007) build on Judd’s charge
of insularity in their essay, “Is Urban Politics a Black Hole?,” arguing and
demonstrating that urbanists rarely draw on selected frameworks increasingly
used in American politics research, and in turn that scholars of American
politics fail to draw on the frameworks and findings from urban politics. They
call for building connections across the subfields of American politics, public
policy, and urban politics through the use of particular frameworks, such as
collective action and common goods, agenda setting and problem definition,
and policy entrepreneurs (although they make few suggestions about how
this cross-fertilization could be institutionally fostered).
Although I agree with Sapotichne, et al.’s call for linkages between
urban politics scholars and other political scientists, and what I see as Judd’s
call for reflexivity in the study of urban politics, I find both essays problem-
atically partial in their depiction of the discipline of political science. There
is a wider range of political science scholarship than these authors describe,
and there are many more routes to enriching and expanding urban politics
scholarship than those they advocate. Indeed, one observer points to the pro-
liferation of research programs and theoretical approaches in the discipline’s
“postbehavioral era” (Dryzek, 2006). In this chapter, I present one alternative
path of linkages and frameworks for reflection. In doing so I echo Sharp’s
(2007) call to look beyond the field of American politics when seeking to
forge such linkages. I also suggest the sorts of institutional initiatives that
are needed if such linkages are to take hold. In my view, research on urban
politics could build on and contribute to a constructivist and interpretive
political science, a set of important developments within the discipline that
have taken place over the past decade or so.1
Expanding and Institutionalizing Alternative

Voices in Political Science
I call attention to four related developments in the field of political science in

which scholars sought to expand the range of theoretical and methodological

approaches used, taught, and respected by the wider discipline. Scholars not
only employed, developed, justified, and defended these alternatives, but they
also engaged in institution-building efforts so that these alternatives would
gain a place in the discipline, and continue to evolve dynamically. There is
evidence of an awareness of the processes through which knowledge is socially
produced and valued. I argue that as urbanists consider our position within
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26 Mara S. Sidney
political science, we can draw on the resources these institutions offer, as

well as consider them as models for institution building.
Perestroika
Critiques of the urban field noted above fail to mention the emergence
and outcomes of the Perestroika movement within the discipline and the
professional organization of political science. This movement emerged in
2000 within the American Political Science Association (APSA) as a chal-
lenge to disciplinary norms, standards, and governance (Monroe 2007; see
also Imbroscio Chapter 6, this volume). Scholars objected to the perceived
narrowness of topics and methods in major journals, to what they saw as
narrowing ideas about what constitutes scientific inquiry, and to a lack of
social diversity in the governance of the APSA and its journals.
In particular, these scholars critiqued the dominance of quantitative and
rational choice methods and epistemologies. They called for methodological
pluralism (and all that this captures regarding reflecting on standards of rigor
and definitions of science), reflection on topics of inquiry and their relevance,
and problem-driven research agendas. As a result of the letters, requests, and
meetings held at APSA conferences, changes occurred in APSA governance,
in editorships and policies of top journals, and the movement prompted
APSA to launch a new journal, Perspectives. The National Science Founda-
tion sponsored a project on qualitative methods intended ultimately to lead
to more funding of research using qualitative methods. Certainly, changes in
the wider discipline, its normative structure and reward systems, are uneven
across departments and hiring processes, and are slow to unfold. But the
general challenges and critiques raised by the movement are increasingly
familiar and increasingly supported institutionally in various ways.
Organized Section on Qualitative Methods and the Consortium

for Qualitative Research Methods
About five years ago, the Organized Section on Qualitative and Multi-Method
Research was founded, as was the Consortium on Qualitative Research
Methods, an organization supported by nearly sixty university departments,

research centers, and institutes. This section of the APSA offers an array of
panels and workshops at the annual meeting, along with a set of awards, like
other sections, to identify and reward excellence in scholarship that uses and
advances qualitative methods. The Consortium sponsors an annual two-week
institute on qualitative methods to supplement and promote training in, and
the development and use of, qualitative methods in political science research.
The section has grown to be among APSA’s largest.
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The Interpretive Turn in Policy Studies on Theory, Policy,

and Society Network
Over the past twenty years or so, a growing body of policy scholars has
developed a post-positivist approach to policy studies. The movement is
rooted in the general perception that policy analysis has failed to “solve” the
problems of the day, and in skepticism about whether knowledge produced
through positivist, “scientific” research has had much impact on problem
solving beyond providing fodder for the political process. Scholars have
argued that efforts to build and test theories along the lines of models in
the natural sciences are misguided and even ignore developments in the
natural sciences (quantum physics, chaos theory) that call into question
the operation of predictable and universal laws in the first place (Fischer
1998).
Rather, these scholars have called for, engaged in, and developed
approaches to policy studies that acknowledge and reflect on the social and
historical context of scientific inquiry, that acknowledge and examine the
interpretive aspects of such inquiry and the unavoidable operation of values and
normative judgments in the research process and in presentation of findings
(e.g., Fischer and Forester 1993; Hajer and Wagenaar 2003; Yanow 1996).
More concretely, such studies examine the discourse of public policymaking
processes, and of policy analysis, how perceived expertise shapes the process,
including some perspectives while excluding or undermining others; and
how public policies embody, disseminate, and perpetuate particular images
of social groups and unequal power relations. Many studies also explicitly
aim to measure actual practices against normative ideals of democracy and
justice (e.g., Fischer 1995; A. Schneider and Ingram 1997). Over the years,
edited volumes and monographs have brought together work in this vein,
and these approaches are increasingly represented in more general collections
of policy theories, which had not previously been the case (e.g., Fischer, et
al. 2007; Moran, et al 2008; Sabatier 2007).
About ten years ago, a group of policy scholars founded the The-
ory, Policy and Society Network. The network operates one of APSA’s
related groups, aiming to provide a venue for discussion, presentation of
research, and development of, generally, post-positivist policy analysis that

was missing from the Public Policy organized section of APSA. The Net-
work runs panels at the annual meeting, has held annual conferences in
Europe for the past five years, organizes a standing group of the European
Consortium for Political Research, and produces a journal, Critical Policy
Studies. Additionally, its members have been instrumental in establishing a
section of the Western Political Science Association called Interpretation
and Methods.
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28 Mara S. Sidney
Constructivism in International Relations
Constructivism emerged over the past twenty years or so as an alternative

theoretical approach to studying international relations (IR). Like the scholars
developing interpretive policy analysis, IR scholars worked consciously to
develop and elaborate this theoretical approach, writing about and discuss-
ing its ontological underpinnings, and its epistemological and methodologi-
cal implications. Constructivist studies span the range of substantive areas
within IR, from security studies, peace movement studies, human rights,
nuclear deterrence, colonialism, and more. Edited volumes and monographs
increasingly demonstrate this approach to empirical research, and contribute
to building a dialogue across researchers that has advanced the intellectual
and the practical/how-to aspects of constructivist IR scholarship (e.g., Fierke
and Jorgensen 2001; Klotz and Lynch 2007; Weldes, et al. 1999).
Scholars at first positioned constructivism as an alternative to Liberal,
Realist, and Marxist approaches to understanding relations among states. To
oversimplify, liberalism conceptualizes states as individuals, utility maximizers
who engage in bargaining, cooperation, or conflict to pursue their self-inter-
ests. Realism and its variants conceptualize states as seeking to survive in
an anarchic system by trying to expand their relative power through means
such as military build-up, diplomacy, economic policy, and the like, with the
ever-present threat that other states will try to harm them. Marxism empha-
sizes the structural resource differences between nation-states that give rise
to relationships of dependency, for example. These approaches tend to treat
interests as self-evident, and flowing from material resources. Constructivism
understands interests and political relationships quite differently. How groups
or individuals or entities (such as states) understand their interests changes
across time and place, and is a question for empirical investigation because
interests emerge from interpretations of one’s conditions, problems, opportuni-
ties, resources, allies, enemies, and so forth. Constructivism has a constitutive
rather than a causal ontology, positing an interactive relationship between
structures and individuals: “If people didn’t reinforce the dominant meanings
of structures, the structures wouldn’t exist” (Klotz and Lynch 2007).
Taken together, Perestroika, the Qualitative Methods initiatives, the
interpretive turn in policy analysis, and constructivism in international rela-

tions, constitute a set of important intellectual and institutional develop-
ments in the discipline of political science. They offer potential avenues
and communities of interest for urban politics research, and in particular for
critical work—work that aims to rethink or reconsider what have become
conventional or typical ways of doing urban research and of thinking about
cities, their problems and their politics. By building on existing work in
urban politics that engages these alternative developments and approaches,
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we can expand our lens on urban politics and also contribute to these larger
disciplinary dialogues.
What is Constructivism? What is Interpretivism?
Constructivism and interpretivism are overlapping approaches to social sci-

ence. These theoretical and methodological approaches are well developed
in the study of IR and of public policy, and have proved especially useful
in examining inequalities and power disparities in political life, but they
are used infrequently to study urban politics (e.g., Klotz and Lynch 2007;
Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2006). The worldview of constructivism is to
understand individuals and groups as both shaping, and being shaped by, the
world around them; structure and agency are mutually constitutive. People
and collectivities interpret the world around them and act according to these
interpretations, leading constructivists to assert that interpretations shape social
reality. Institutions, standard practices, and policies emerge from collective
interpretations; identities and relationships (alliance, divisions, hierarchies)
do as well (Klotz and Lynch 2007).
Klotz and Lynch (2007) discern three core aspects of the constructivist
ontology: intersubjectivity, context, and a particular understanding of power.
Constructivists see the social world as built on shared understandings that
take the form of norms, rules, languages, cultures, and ideologies—these
“create identities and guide action.” Constructivists assume that these shared
understandings vary over time and space. Additionally, any research is situated
spatially, historically, socially, and the researcher herself is located in a specific
context. Constructivists understand power as the ability to establish dominant
meanings, to reconstruct discourses and to shape practices; discourses combine
language and practices to maintain dominance or to contest it. Dominant
meanings shape individual and group identities and understandings of interests,
frame interpretations of what happens and how people behave, and particular
practices flow from these meanings. As Klotz and Lynch describe:
Money, for example, requires shared acceptance that tokens

can be exchanged for goods, which in turn requires general

agreement among buyers and sellers on what coins, papers, or
entries into a computer spreadsheet are worth. Corporations, in
turn, would not exist without the concept of profit, defined in
terms of money. Domestic and international laws, such as trade
regimes, also depend on such a monetary system. Rules and
norms establish the habitual practices and procedures that we
know as capitalism. (p. 8)
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30 Mara S. Sidney
Interpretivism, rather than espousing a particular worldview per se, is

an approach to conducting social science research. Its epistemology, accord-
ing to Yanow, stands “against the idea of a social scientific practice derived
from a model of human behavior abstracted from the physical and/or natural
sciences, denuded of the human traits of researchers and researched” (Yanow
and Schwartz-Shea 2006, xii). Researchers who take an interpretive approach
conceptualize theory and its role in research, data and interpretation, and
evaluative criteria, even the goal of research and the role of researchers
themselves, quite differently from positivist researchers. For example, inter-
pretivists might see theory as a product of inductive processes, or a resource,
as opposed to a set of causal laws (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2006, xvii);
data as co-produced by social interactions and the interactions of researcher
and researched, rather than objective information waiting to be “collected”;
the researcher as historically and contextually located rather than an objec-
tive observer collecting and analyzing data. So interpretivism encompasses
a broad stance toward research, rather than a preference or predilection for
word data, as opposed to numbers; it responds more to positivism than
specifically to quantitative analysis. That is, analysis of numbers occurs in
interpretive research, but looks different than that carried out in a positivist
approach (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2006).
Klotz and Lynch, and Yanow and Schwartz-Shea sketch a wide range
of possible research methods that emerge from the ontological and episte-
mological positions of constructivism and interpretivism. Klotz and Lynch
see IR constructivists along a continuum, with some taking a more positivist
approach and others a more interpretivist approach (Klotz and Lynch 2007).
Yanow and Schwartz-Shea (2006, xx) also discuss a continuum of methods
that are consistent with an interpretivist position, with some more descriptive
and some more critical-theoretical. Ethnography and participant-observation,
discourse analysis, surveys, interviewing and life-history analysis, historical
methods, process-tracing, analysis of public spaces and/or architecture, and
gender analysis, for example, are among the types of methods that could be
used. They emphasize that these methods share the characteristics of being
empirical, taking language and other texts/artifacts seriously alongside numeri-
cal or statistical data, and focusing on problems of meaning “that bear on
action as well as understanding” (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2006, xii).
Four Markers of Constructivist and Interpretive Analysis
Empirical research that takes a constructivist or interpretive approach tends

to be marked by: discussion of ontology and epistemology; attention to
discourse; attention to context and a related sensitivity to the interplay of
structure and agency; and reflexivity.
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Ontology and Epistemology
A conscious move toward constructivism and interpretive work in urban politics

immediately raises issues of ontology and epistemology because scholars using
these approaches have articulated specific ontological and epistemological posi-
tions. Exploring these approaches and their relevance for urban politics thus
involves considering what ontological and epistemological perspectives prevail
in urban work. What are the underlying assumptions about human behavior
and outcomes, about motivation and causality? What are the epistemological
assumptions about what we can know, how we go about knowing, and the
degree to which scientific objectivity is desirable and possible?
Sometimes urban scholars discuss these questions, but often they do
not. Regarding ontology, these questions may be engaged in discussion of
the theory guiding research—usually placing emphasis on structure or agency,
or a combination of the two. Regarding epistemology, few studies take up
these questions (usually the ones that do are the ones taking an explicitly
post-positivist stance), shifting instead immediately to a discussion of research
methods. In these cases, one usually can discern a positivist or positivist-lean-
ing epistemology—a neutral or objective researcher, collecting numerical data
or “word” data like interviews or media sources, and looking for evidence of
patterns in outcomes, for evidence of causal mechanisms and relationships,
and drawing conclusions that can be generalized to settings and instances
beyond the carefully chosen sample.
Attention to Discourse
When researchers place discourse in a central analytic position, they consider

the language, the paradigms, and the ideas that guide and justify action and
standard practices or routines, they consider the ways in which actors give
meaning to, or interpret action and how these interpretations undergird the
social structures and institutions in which action occurs. Symbols and material
artifacts (e.g., urban design, architecture, monuments, etc.) make discourse
tangible, and may be objects of struggle or contest among competing actors
and groups.
Researchers understand discourse as a dimension of power. That is, the

actors or groups who control discourse exercise a form of power over social
and political outcomes, whether these are agendas, policies, institutional
rules or designs, even group identities. Additionally, power struggles and
conflicts involve contests over discourse as much as conflicts over material
resources and decision making. Strategies for political change often involve
efforts to change or challenge prevailing discourses. Discourse analysis may
also focus attention on the “deeply embedded frameworks of tacitly known,
taken-for-granted assumptions through which humans make sense of their
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32 Mara S. Sidney
lives” because “reflecting on them and making them explicit may enable
understanding and also an opening for change or action” (Yanow and
Schwartz-Shea 2006, 15).
What does discourse analysis look like in the context of urban politics
research?
Questioning Concepts
One approach is to excavate or revisit basic concepts used in urban research

and by urban policymakers, to examine their meanings, to trace who employs
them and who contests them, and to consider the values that dominant
meanings promote, and the values that dominant meanings marginalize. This
approach might aim to pull common concepts to the surface, up from the
embeddedness of taken-for-granted or conventional wisdom, to consider and
evaluate their assumptions, and to trace how the discourse of local actors
and of public policies manifest their concepts, causal arguments and values.
For example, recent urban research interrogates dominant paradigms such
as neoliberalism, social exclusion, and diversity (Davies 2005b; DeFilippis
2004; Fainstein 2005a). Beauregard (1993, 2006) examines the language of
urban decline, and more recently the relationship between the rhetoric and
material reality of suburbanization during the Cold War era.
Even more basic concepts such as city or urban also may be investi-
gated—what is understood to be “urban,” to be “a city” and what are the
results for those places, or for people in those places (see Boudreau Chapter
4 and Magnusson Chapter 3, this volume). For example, how are traditional
dichotomies of city and suburb challenged as first-ring suburbs come to
experience “urban” problems, and as community-organizing and social-justice
movements at the local level cross borders (Staudt and Stone 2007, on El
Paso, Texas) or take place in the “suburbs” (Gordon 2005, on the immigrant
rights movements in Long Island, New York).
Linking Discourse to Actors and Institutions
A second approach to discourse analysis in urban politics research connects

ideas to actors and institutions. A constructivist or interpretivist approach

differs from an interest-based approach to these entities. The latter, for
example, might examine a city’s organizations for their functions and interac-
tions in the process of governance, considering the relative resources of each
organization as the dominant explanation for local outcomes. A constructivist
approach, however, asks what understandings and narratives about urban
issues each organization embodies, what organizational practices support
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these understandings, what are the values advanced. This also is the point
where culture might be considered.
Two recent studies use the concept of social capital as a starting
point for studying organizational behavior and local community politics.
Taylor (2007) and Goode and O’Brien (2006) each use Foucault’s notion
of governmentality to investigate how nonstate actors come to assume and
enforce the state’s ideas about local partnerships in the United Kingdom,
and economic development in Philadelphia. More broadly, they consider
the related norms and values about appropriate social behavior in cities and
methods of problem solving.
Bailey’s (1999) work on gay and lesbian politics considers discursive
elements of regime governance. The gay and lesbian agenda focuses a great
deal on changing discourse. Changing the meanings of particular concepts
(e.g., “discrimination,” and “family”) is a prerequisite for policy changes that
can bring material benefits to gay interests (e.g., domestic partner benefits,
family leave, anti-discrimination measures at the local level, etc.). This illus-
trates how discourse constitutes much more than “words” because it links
directly to practices and has material consequences for particular groups of
people. Regime inclusion, true participation in governance, thus involves the
ability to shape discourse in support of identity.
Context, Structure, and Agency
Constructivist and interpretive approaches to research emphasize the impor-

tance of context and typically seek to develop context-specific generaliza-
tions or explanations rather than a search for universal theories, outcomes,
and laws. This dovetails nicely with much urban politics research. Clearly
discourses, meanings, and interpretations occur in particular social, historical,
political contexts, and we would expect to find differences as contexts change.
Meanings of particular words shift over time and carry different messages in
different places. Additionally, constructivism emphasizes the co-constitution
of structure and agency, thus, in theory, aiming to examine mutual influence
rather than holding one as influencing the other in a unidirectional way.
This differs from a structuralist perspective by theorizing space for human
agency in challenging and changing society; it differs from an interest-based

perspective by acknowledging the impact of institutions on interest- and
preference-formation, as well as on behaviors and understandings.
My work on housing policies and local advocacy illustrates this interplay
between context, structure, and agency (Sidney 2003). I examine how national
Fair Housing and Community Reinvestment policies shape the activities
and arguments of the local advocates who use them, creating obstacles for
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34 Mara S. Sidney
advocates on the ground who seek to build broad advocacy coalitions around
housing equality. Policies, as institutional structures, drive advocates apart. My
work also explores how local context mediates the impact of national policy
on local action by making certain strategies and goals possible in particular
places. Advocates are not simple recipients of national policy structures and
local context, but active agents in tailoring policy to meet local needs.
Reflexivity
Explicit thinking about the role of the researcher in the research process
is integral to constructivist and interpretive analysis (see Boudreau Chapter
4, this volume). This approach stands in contrast to a positivist position in
which the researcher is understood as striving for (and as capable of achiev-
ing) objectivity and neutrality. Instead, scholars acknowledge that their values
will always play a role in the research process, and that interpretation is at
the heart of all research endeavors, so critically reflecting on one’s role as a
researcher is mandated and to be taken seriously. In contrast to “reflection,”
defined as “thinking about something after the event,” reflexivity “involves a
more immediate, dynamic, and continuing self-awareness” (Finlay and Gough
2003, ix). We can think about at least three levels of reflexivity: individual,
discipline or subfield, and historical and political.
Individual Level
Reflexivity can begin by considering how one’s personal characteristics and

background affect one’s perspective as researcher. For example, Pader (2006)
reflects on how her upbringing in the United States shapes her views and
definitions of “overcrowding” and more generally, the “appropriate” use of
domestic space. In her discussion of participant-observation, she advocates
developing an “ethnographic sensibility” in which reflexivity enables “opening
oneself up to trying to see through different eyes,” and, rather than being
a narcissistic exercise, has profound policy implications. “Too many social
policies start from policy analysts’ own emic expectation that others will
respond to given situations as they themselves would,” she writes. “Too many
analyses start from a commonly unspoken, well-intentioned, but culturally

constrained platform of ‘I want others to have what I want for my own
family.’ As a result, many decision makers end up working from an implicit,
individualistic, and inaccurately stereotyped perspective” (170). Relatedly,
researchers can consider how they think of themselves in relation to their
research subjects. Are they experts bringing external theories to bear on a
particular site and group of people? Are there differentials in power, and
what are the motivations of researcher and research subjects in the research?
How do these differences affect the nature of the “data” one collects? Are
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researchers outsiders or actual participants in the processes under study, and

how does that position affect interpretation?
Reflexivity involves consideration of one’s normative positions and how
they play a role in one’s interpretation of data or selection and design of
research projects. Do I value cooperation and understand conflict as a negative
occurrence? What aspects of inequality do I see as most problematic, com-
pared to others? Do I value democracy and inclusion more than efficiency?
How might these viewpoints condition my responses to and interpretations of
my analysis of local politics? Urban scholars (as well as many other scholars)
rarely are explicit if they are in fact going through this process. One excep-
tion is Beauregard’s (2006, xiv) acknowledgment in his preface of “the moral
tone embedded in my thinly veiled disappointment with the decline of the
industrial cities and my suspicion of the suburbs.” A next step would be to
move beyond acknowledging subjectivity to discussing how we grapple with,
or use, this self-awareness in the research and writing process.
Discipline or Subfield Level
Reflexivity prompts reflection on who and what we choose to study, what

people and topics do we not take up, and why. Which groups do we as
scholars render even less visible by our lack of attention? For example, to
what extent is the full range of poor people’s experiences and positions
included in urban politics research? Can patterns be identified, and is there
a relationship to the popular image—deserving or undeserving—attached to
particular subgroups? For example, children are considered the deserving poor,
whereas single men of working age may not be. Do scholars disseminate
these images or challenge them? How do research funding streams affect
which subgroups receive attention?
Some scholars have noted that urban politics research pays too much
attention to urban development, to the detriment of other important aspects
of politics. They point to other aspects of life and politics in cities that receive
less attention. For example, Bailey (1999) argues for more attention to gay
and lesbian politics and identities in urban politics. Clarke (1995) argues
that urbanists do not pay enough attention to crime, fear, and public safety,
or to gender analysis. Judd (2005) argues that an overarching pessimism and

outdated ideological views drive urbanists’ interpretations of urban politics.
Historical and Political Context
A further step in reflexivity is to consider one’s professional, historical,

and political contexts. This step gets at the relationship between one’s own
research and one’s discipline on the one hand, and the broader society on
the other. That is, what are the prevailing discourses and ideologies at this
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36 Mara S. Sidney
particular historical, political moment, and how might they be shaping one’s
own interpretations and understandings of urban politics? Furthermore, how is
one’s research contributing to, advancing, or challenging prevailing discourses
and ideologies. These questions are reminiscent of Harold Lasswell’s (1971)
discussion of “knowledge of ” and “knowledge in” the policy process. That
is, as scholars of urban policies and politics, we are learning about such pro-
cesses, but are also participating in them. To what agendas or paradigms is
one contributing with one’s research; are contributions conscious and explicit,
or implicit? What values is one advancing? A large body of scholarship
(e.g., Foucault, 1995; Kuhn, 1962; and many others) has demonstrated that
professions and disciplines—fields of knowledge—are socially constructed
and reproduced, and carry with them particular values, standards, norms,
and power relations. Reflexivity means giving these matters careful thought.
Some researchers take up these questions, at least in their critiques of oth-
ers’ scholarship, if not their own. Thus Imbroscio’s (2008b) challenge to the
Deconcentration paradigm in housing policy questions the role of research
in promoting this agenda, as well as the agenda itself. Wyly (Chapter 1,
this volume) considers whether positivism necessarily serves regressive and
conservative ends. In the field of urban geography, recent exchanges consider
the possibility and necessity of a progressive research agenda in that field
(Amin and Thrift 2007, 2005; N. Smith 2005).
Of the four components or markers of constructivist and interpretive
research, reflexivity is the least developed and demonstrated in studies of urban
politics. Indeed, during conversations with colleagues and in panel sessions at
professional conferences, audience members expressed concern that engaging in
these sorts of analysis would undermine the credibility of our research products.
Awareness of, or acknowledgment of our biases as researchers would taint the
research itself. Others feared that the process would become never-ending,
leading to constant second-guessing of one’s research practices and thus be
paralyzing. Yet others feared that reflecting on the agendas and clients that
research serves would be too depressing to dwell on.2
Building a Community of Researchers

The discussion in this chapter notes only a handful of works in urban

politics that show markers of a constructivist interpretive approach. Cer-
tainly, there are other scholars whose work consciously or implicitly fits the
description. Explicit efforts to build a community of urban researchers using
these approaches would expand and develop their use and their usefulness
in generating knowledge of urban politics and theorizing about it. Confer-
ences, workshops, and edited volumes or handbooks are among the ways
that scholars could begin to build such a community.
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Typically, urban conferences and workshops take a topical approach to

urban research. They are organized by issues, bringing together scholars and
their recent work on housing, on education, on economic development, on
urban social movements or mayoral races, and the like. Panels might more
often be organized based on methodological and epistemological similarity
or difference to try to build more awareness and discussion of these aspects
of our work. Pre-conference workshops could serve a similar purpose. Such
dialogues rooted in epistemological and methodological concerns would bridge
topical areas and perhaps promote broader theorizing about urban politics
and policy. Clearly, such efforts could be cross- or interdisciplinary as well.
Another mechanism for promoting and institutionalizing constructivist
work would borrow from the practice in other subfields of publishing hand-
books and edited volumes designed to build the quality of research methods
commonly used in these approaches (Klotz and Lynch 2007 and Yanow and
Schwartz-Shea 2006, are two examples from IR and public policy). Methods
readers could be developed for urban politics research as well, and would
have the advantage of introducing more scholars to the range of methods
and modes of inquiry beyond the large-N studies, case studies, and the
survey-based studies that are most common in our work.
Toward a Critical Urban Studies
How will constructivist–interpretive urban research contribute to knowledge of

urban politics, and can it work in the service of progressive or critical ends?
Can it help to solve urban problems? In my view, efforts at institutionaliz-
ing a constructivist–interpretive approach and a commitment to consciously
develop, disseminate, encourage, and refine such an approach would push
the field in a critical direction. The ontological and epistemological founda-
tions of constructivism and interpretivism guide researchers to examine the
unexamined. Constructivist–interpretive work on urban politics would reflect
critically on the larger system(s) in which local politics occur. Such work pulls
paradigms to the surface, up from the embeddedness of taken-for-granted
or conventional wisdom, to consider paradigms’ assumptions, and to trace
how the discourse of local actors and public policies manifest their concepts,
causal arguments, and values. In doing so, studies map the major groupings
of identities and interests in cities, linking these to the nested contexts within
which they make sense, and considering whether, where, and how actors
and/or groups might prompt change.
This is not to say that such studies automatically constitute critical
studies, or that other approaches cannot also be critical (see Wyly Chapter
1, this volume, on positivism as a progressive approach, and the danger that
postmodern approaches will fail to examine actual practices that underlie
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38 Mara S. Sidney
rhetoric). Neither is it to say that constructivist interpretive approaches are

without limitations. Rather, the point is to recognize that the markers of
constructivist and interpretive approaches push the researcher to examine
processes of meaning-making and institution building, discourses, dimensions
of power, and the taken-for-grantedness of dominant concepts and relation-
ships—all of which has the potential to result in challenging, critical studies.
The works described here do so, in various ways and to various degrees.
Chapters in this volume, and many others that reflect on the state
of urban politics research, note that classic texts in American politics are
quintessentially urban texts. The pantheon of American politics researchers
includes many scholars who began their careers studying cities ( John 2009).
Perhaps such claims will be made about our subfield once again. Building a
community of urban scholars using constructivist and interpretive approaches
to research who are drawing on scholarship and participating in dialogue
with those political scientists doing similar work across subfields, can be one
pathway toward regaining that integration. Lively debates within research
communities, and across them, about ways of knowing, methods, and sub-
stantive issues of urban politics may also lead us in that direction.
Acknowledgment
The author wishes to acknowledge the useful feedback and lively exchange
of the Policy and Place Collective at Rutgers University.
Notes
1. To some extent, our individual perspectives as scholars arise serendipitously

rather than as conscious choices, reflecting the communities and the curriculum from
our graduate training. There are scientific and intellectual reasons we choose our
questions and approaches, but there is also an element of personal preference; we
gravitate toward the sort of work we enjoy doing and the sort we do the best, and
then seek to justify its value to the discipline. My graduate training in the subfields
of American politics and public policy exposed me to the hegemony of behavioralism
in the wider discipline, but also, because of the presence of a minority of department
faculty, to the growing body of scholarship on the interpretive turn in policy studies,
and the work in comparative politics on the role of ideas in political processes and
political change. In my research, I came to draw on social construction approaches
to policy analysis and took advantage of some of the institution building noted here,
which led me later to discover the body of constructivist research in International
Relations. My urban studies scholarly life was always problem-oriented and inter-
disciplinary, but also somewhat distinct and disconnected from what I found to be
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exciting and important theoretical developments coming from political science. This
was my particular experience of the disconnect that Judd; Sapotichne, et al.; Sharp,
and others describe. In my own research and writing, then, I have tried to bridge
these gaps, but this chapter marks an effort beyond that, to suggest the possibility
of community building among urbanists with similar epistemological and method-
ological interests.
2. This was voiced by a researcher who runs a university-based research
institute funded with contract research. “We recognize we’re prostitutes, but then
we move on [with the research],” the individual said, explaining that thinking too
much about how research is tailored to fit the agendas of outside funders would be
too upsetting to dwell on.
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Seeing Like a City

How to Urbanize Political Science
Warren Magnusson
The social sciences still bear the marks of their origins in the late nineteenth
century, when the world was divided up in a new way for purposes of
academic study (Gunnell 1993, 2004). It was in this period that American
institutions of higher learning (and the academic professions associated with
them) began to take their present shape. In a crucial move, the new social
sciences were separated from the natural sciences and humanities: literature,
history, philosophy, theology, and law. Each social science was to have its
particular mandate: sociology, society; economics, the economy; anthropol-
ogy, the origins of man; geography, the environment in which men lived;
and political science, “the state.” The presumption was that this division
of labor would facilitate the scientific study of the world, and there is no
doubt that it has done so to a considerable degree. Nevertheless, it also has
interfered with other forms of study, which have less legitimacy and institu-
tional support because of their interdisciplinary character. Urbanists, among
others, have had to struggle to generate appropriate backing for their work
in an academic world that still privileges what are now thought of as the
“traditional” social sciences.
I suggest that urbanists have been much too timid in challenging

restrictive disciplinary boundaries, and, moreover, that this timidity is bound
up with an ongoing tendency to see like a state rather than a city. I borrow
the phrase, “seeing like a state,” from James C. Scott (1998), but I give it a
larger meaning than he does. In my view, the disciplinary divisions to which
I have just referred are a consequence of seeing like a state. They reflect a
particular but contestable way of understanding the world that began to take
shape in the nineteenth century and crystallized in the twentieth. Crucial
41
Account: s8989984
42 Warren Magnusson
to that understanding was the ideal of the liberal-democratic nation-state,

epitomized by the United States. To my mind, the United States is not
“exceptional,” as many analysts have suggested, but paradigmatic: Since the
beginning, the United States has provided the foremost model of a modern
“extensive republic” with a market economy, a society secured in its autonomy
from undue state intervention, and a limited but strong state buttressed by
fierce nationalism or “constitutional patriotism” (see also Imbroscio Chapter
6, this volume). Until World War II, the Europeans were able to persuade
themselves that their forms of order were the rule, and what the Americans
did was the exception. That pretense was gradually eroded between 1945
and 1989. Since then, the Communist alternative also has collapsed. Thus,
the opinion that the liberal-democratic nation-state (or extensive republic,
as Madison would have described it) is the norm toward which the world
is tending—and should tend—is now so widely accepted among the world’s
leading intellectuals that it is scarcely ever challenged. The main challenge
is from those who insist that our world—the modern world, the free world,
the civilized world—is under threat from fanatics and barbarians who have
to be dealt with by taking strong measures. This is a difference of opinion
about the nature and extent of the present danger, not about the norm of
civilization. That norm is built into present understandings of what it means
to be realistic and hence scientific.
At the end of the nineteenth century, states actually were not the
norm: empires were. Nor was liberal-democracy the norm. Nevertheless,
the disciplinary structure of the academy—especially the American acad-
emy—anticipated the form of world order that would be produced by the
political struggles of the twentieth century. In fact, there was always a close
connection between this way of seeing the world for academic purposes and
the policymakers who brought such a world into being. Since 1945, the aim
in the West has been to produce a world of sovereign states, organized on
liberal-democratic principles and buttressed by nationalism, but integrated
with one another through international institutions, a global economy, and
a shared culture of human rights. In this context, it has seemed logical to
study the economy, society, culture, and environment separately from the
state, because the former clearly affect the latter and the state’s organization
is obviously crucial to world order. Political scientists have put themselves

forward as the experts on how states are formed, how they become effective,
and what they actually do. The presumption is that politics proper is focused
on the state, because the state is supposedly the supreme authority. For
those who are not grasping for political power themselves, the key concern
is policy: What policies are being pursued and why? How can those policies
be changed for the better? The state is at the center of the policy question.
Thus, it is the silent center of the social sciences in so far as they strive to
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Seeing like a City 43
have “policy relevance.” To be relevant, it seems that the social sciences must
learn to see like a state: that is, to produce knowledge that is intelligible
to those who seek to govern the societies for which they are responsible.
The state authorities must understand their own populations, come to grips
with their own national societies, manage their national economies, secure
their own territories, and negotiate with other states. As Scott and others
(Dean 1999; Rose 1999) have argued, this means imposing uniform analytic
categories—such as land ownership, inflation, unemployment, drug addiction,
commuter-sheds, and urban development—and using them to create a gov-
ernable field. As states become more effective, the populations they govern
come to understand themselves to an ever-increasing extent within these
state-given categories. Thus, the process is self-reinforcing: A certain reality
is brought into being by insisting that it was always latent and expecting
people to behave accordingly.
Such practices should be troubling to us all, but especially to urbanists,
who carry with them the recognition that cities are not states and that the
form of political order that arises from urbanism is different from the one
implicit in the project of state building. Unfortunately, urbanists—herded as
we are into our separate disciplines—have been too deferential to the project
of state building and hence to the concepts of policy and politics associated
with it. One move has been to retreat from the state and focus on urban
society, the urban economy, urban culture, or simply “geography” as ways of
conceptualizing the field independently (Parker 2004). This just leaves the state
where it was, however—in its familiar position as the locus of both politics
and policy, properly conceived. A real change of vision involves a challenge
to political science, an attempt to detach it from the state by changing into
an urban discipline. This involves much more than promoting the study of
politics in cities or local communities. It means challenging the idea that
cities are subordinate to states. At stake is the very idea of sovereignty, the
principle that has been invoked to justify the division of the world into
autonomous states. Although this principle is a norm, it often is presented
as a simple fact about the world. Urbanists are especially well positioned to
challenge this fact or factoid because they have learned, however haltingly
and incompletely, to “see like a city” rather than like a state. To see like a
city is to envision the world in terms of what results from distinctively urban
practices: Ones that enable cities to be as they are.
These practices are not well understood when we attach the labels of
the state-centric social sciences to them. Nonetheless, I think we can bring
forward the ancient idea of politics—traditionally associated with the city—to
help us understand our problem. If modern urbanism transcends the city—as
Wirth (1938), McLuhan (1964), and Lefebvre (2003) all suggested, in their
different ways—what sort of political order do we now inhabit? Clearly, the
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44 Warren Magnusson
world is not just a polis writ large. Is it nonetheless a global city (Knox and
Taylor 1995; Magnusson 2006)? If so, what does that mean? What are the
practices that enable it to be like a city? How do the sovereignty claims
associated with the state system affect it? How do particular cities come to
be within the larger order of the global city (i.e., the world as a city)? How
are they sustained as such, and when and how are they overwhelmed? What
political practices overdetermine the particularities of cities and the generali-
ties of the wider urban order? In answering such questions, I insist on the
primacy of the political because the more modern terms—social, economic,
cultural—all obscure the fundamental questions of power and authority. To
keep those questions front and center is to recognize that the world is always
produced, sustained, and ultimately transformed by exercises of power and
authority: exercises that we need to recognize as political.
In this brief chapter, I can only suggest in a general way what might be
involved in seeing the world like a city—and hence through the city—rather
than like a state and through the state (Boudreau’s call for the development
of urban epistemology in Chapter 4, this volume, is a complementary perspec-
tive). The latter way of envisioning things is now so natural to us that we are
hardly aware of its particularity. I want urbanists to draw back, capitalize on
what they have learned, and put forward a more robust understanding of the
world that can really challenge the taken-for-granted truths of the state-centric
social sciences. We need to recognize that urbanism is a form of political
order, and that to understand it we must urbanize political science.
Re-Imagining the City
Max Weber (1978) was one of the first analysts to recognize that there
was something peculiar about urban order. The occidental cities of the late
middle ages were of particular interest to him in this regard. What entranced
him was the way that a new form of political order emerged there, at one
remove from the sovereign authorities. The medieval city was not a polis,
in the sense that it was entirely independent of other authorities. On the
other hand, it was clearly self-governing in great, if varying degree. It had
an in-between, ambiguous status: neither fully independent nor completely

subordinate. Moreover, authority of a type that we might deem political was
generated in different registers: by abbots and bishops on the one hand and
charismatic priests and friars on the other; by burgesses and guildsmen; by
communards in sworn association; and by the great families like the Mon-
tagues and Capulets. Thus, the urbanism of the time was characterized by
a multiplicity of authorities operating in different registers and at different
scales. Later efforts to resolve things by separating the state from society
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and making the former sovereign obviously had a significant effect, but the
messy urban order of the occidental city did not simply disappear. In fact,
it was extended and replicated in the context of Western colonialism and
imperialism. In that context, it connected with other forms of urbanism. At
least since the eighteenth century, Western analysts have been struggling to
understand how order has emerged locally, regionally, and even globally, despite
warring sovereignties. The immanent order of the city seems to spread and
grow stronger, even in the face of significant setbacks. On most accounts,
that order appears to be essentially commercial: hence, secular, rationally
calculative, and anthropocentric. It produces a man-made environment to
which humans become attuned. There is an economy generated by market
relations, a civil society that emerges from mutual adjustments and efforts at
solving common problems, and a common culture that reflects and enables
urban life. The rural areas and the wilds beyond are drawn in and exploited.
Gradually, most of the world becomes recognizably urban. It is a puzzle to
explain how this happens in face of territorial, national, or religious sover-
eignties that purport to divide the world up on different principles.
The suspicion that motivates the modern social sciences is that the
state is epiphenomenal: that the order in which we live is generated behind
the back or beneath the vision of the state. Political scientists have been
most resistant to this claim, but others too have had to recognize the signifi-
cance of state power. Although the disciplinary divisions we have inherited
encourage us to distinguish between the state and society, this distinction
actually begs the crucial question. Any order that emerges has to be political.
How states fit into that order is a matter to be determined empirically. If
the order in which we now live is urban, then the question is what forms
of political authority have produced, sustained, and challenged it. By what
political means is urban order effected? Do states enhance or disrupt urban
order, or both? Are there alternatives to urbanism, or are all the alternatives
now contained within it?
If we are sufficiently attentive to the dynamics of urban order, we
begin to see several things:
1. Both particular cities and the “global city” are self-organizing.

2. A multiplicity of political authorities in different registers and

at different scales is characteristic of urban life.
3. Practices of self-government enable civilized order and produce

public benefits both in the presence of sovereign authority
and in its absence.
4. Order is always temporary and local.
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46 Warren Magnusson
5. Transformations are nonlinear and hence inherently

unpredictable.
If this is what appears when we “see like a city,” the implications are far-
reaching.
To describe a particular city or the global city as “self-organizing” is
not to say that what emerges from this process of self-organization will be
good. There is no particular reason to suppose that it will be good or bad.
It is simply to say that some form of overall order will emerge whether or
not anyone is trying to produce such an order and whether or not there
is any “sovereign” authority in place. In fact, the presence or absence of a
sovereign authority will be only one factor in the complex equation that
determines the results. Before we rush to judgment, we need to understand
the dynamics of a system of great complexity. Economists—and rational
choice theorists more generally—seem to believe that they can model things
realistically, despite the simplifying assumptions they have to make to get their
models to work. I remain skeptical in this regard: Our understanding of the
dynamics of urban life is still very shallow, and it is obviously a mistake to
model all human interactions on the logic of commercial transactions. The
city exceeds the economy in complexity, and overdetermines it. One aspect
of this is that religious, ethnic, and class differences are generated within
the city and refracted through it. The resultant conflicts are as much a part
of urban life as commercial exchanges or sophisticated cultural productions.
How those conflicts play out in relation to more cooperative activities will
determine the form or order that the city takes. To speak of “self-organization”
in relation to these complex processes of adjustment is to draw attention to
the fact that shocks and changes are internalized and that the overall order
will take shape from the adjustments that various actors make.
A key factor in any situation is the multiplicity of political authorities.
Political authorities tend to proliferate: They command the loyalty of differ-
ent groups of people on different bases. Few of them make any pretense to
sovereignty in the normal sense, although some of them expect their adherents
to offer them ultimate loyalty. Many of these authorities claim to be apolitical:
This is a common political tactic, which may enable an authority to secure
itself in face of a rival (perhaps sovereign) authority that purports to have a

monopoly over political decisions. So, what is described as political in any
given context will itself be the effect of uneven struggles between authorities
that often have an interest in concealing their political character. This means
that we cannot take the labels assigned to various authorities for granted if
we want to produce a realistic analysis of the politics that produces, sustains,
and disrupts the city. In the current context, that means that we have to
treat businesses, churches, and nongovernmental organizations as political
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organizations that command different forms of loyalty and different resources.

The American city has always offered a particularly interesting analytical
field in this regard because alliances and rivalries between authorities of
different types are relatively easy to track. Although the tendency recently
has been to assess the overall effects in terms of good governance, it is clear
that much more is at stake. The proliferation of forms of political authority
reflects the diversity of human purposes, only one of which is to achieve
good government.
This is not to say that cities are ungoverned: quite the contrary. A
key to understanding how cities work is to recognize that practices of self-
government are ubiquitous (Magnusson 2005). These practices are so much
a part of everyday urban life that we often take them for granted: To a
remarkable extent people line up, take turns, let one another pass on the
street, respect one another’s privacy, dispose of their wastes appropriately,
and generally go about their business without interfering with other people.
We notice the exceptions and the cultural variations in these practices, but
are less cognizant of the fact that they constitute the infrastructure of self-
government that makes life in cities possible. Social life anywhere would be
impossible without it, but urbanization intensifies and broadens the require-
ments. These micro-practices of self-government, which enforce responsibility
on the individual, are collectivized through initiatives to deal with particular
problems: initiatives that bring people together under an authority for definite
purposes. Late nineteenth-century analysts were particularly aware of the way
organs of local self-government emerged, sometimes under state patronage
and sometimes not (Teaford, 1984; Webb and Webb 1906–1929). For a city
to work as a city at all, it must develop a political infrastructure to manage
violence, deal with external threats, and provide the public facilities, services,
and regulations necessary for people to live in relative safety and go about
their daily business. The incentive to do such things is strong because people
will try to go elsewhere if they find a particular city inadequate. To under-
stand how urbanism works, we need to pay close attention to its political
infrastructure. This infrastructure develops from practices of government and
self-government that arise from the necessities of urban life and that are at
one remove from the state.
The order of a city—however civilized it may seem—is always tem-

porary and localized. If we know anything about cities, it is that they are
always changing. To see like a city is to recognize that the static order we so
often associate with the state is an illusion. Things are in flux. What seems
benign now will not seem so benign in a decade or two. Problems that vex
us now will be transformed into something different. So, what appears in
any place at any moment will be a pattern that is about to disappear, that
differs from what went before or what will come after, and that departs
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48 Warren Magnusson
from the pattern elsewhere. The scale at which patterns emerge will itself be
highly variable: sometimes global, sometimes regional, and sometimes highly
localized. Moreover, the direction of causation will also vary. It is a mistake
to suppose that what happens on a wider scale will always determine what
happens locally. Often as not the direction of change is just the opposite:
from Silicon Valley or the valleys of Afghanistan to the wider world. So,
the principles of transformation implicit in urbanism as a way of life are of
particular interest. It may seem like the transformations occur behind our
backs, but we are always already implicated in them because they result, in the
main, from human activities: activities that are always mediated politically.
Although we would like to think that we could gain control of things—at
least to the extent of predicting what is likely to happen—it seems clear that
we are caught up in recursive processes that generate transformations whose
timing and impact cannot be anticipated (De Landa 2000). That it is impos-
sible to make accurate predictions in these circumstances is a mathematical
certainty. We have scarcely begun to come to terms with the implications of
this for public policy or institutional design. The more profound existential
issues get even less attention, especially from political scientists. It is comfort-
ing to assume that the form of the political is constant, for that enables us
to make comparisons across time and space and tease out definite meanings.
Nevertheless, a more realistic analysis—one that comes out of seeing like a
city—requires us to recognize that the form of the political (and hence its
meaning) is always in transformation. We cannot be certain about what the
politics of the moment is or what it means. We can only trace its patterns, note
its instabilities, and keep watch for signs of change. This involves a different
way of relating to what we study. To imagine ourselves as rulers—which is
what the state-centric social sciences encourage us to do—is not appropriate
to the task. If anything, we need to be more attentive to the ungovernable
and the unpredictable than to the governable and the predictable. Moreover,
we have to be aware that the relevant political actors are not necessarily the
ones we have in mind. The pattern of transformation will never be exactly
what we imagine. We have to attune ourselves to deep uncertainty just as
we do in a strange city whose ways are unknown to us.
Redeploying Our Resources
Are there guides on which we can rely, in making sense of this strange city?
This is a difficult question, because the city at issue is not just the immedi-
ate one in which you or I live, a local city like New York or Mumbai or
Cedar Rapids, Iowa. My suggestion is that we have to see the world as a city
that is already in being: a global city that transcends the United States and
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every other country. The suggestion is that the relations between East Asia
and North America or between Europe and Africa have to be understood
as urban relations, mediated by various forms of urban politics. That is not
how we usually think of things. We don’t think of international relations as
an aspect of urban politics, or imagine the U.S. president as the mayor of a
rather large city called the United States. To pose things in this way is not
just counterintuitive; it seems quite perverse. How can we analyze things if
we just give up the familiar categories, and pretend that the United States
is like a big city in a wider metropolitan area? I don’t mean to suggest that
the familiar categories are useless, but I do mean to say that they have been
reified, and that they now get in the way of realistic analysis. Urbanists can
make a particular contribution to contemporary analysis by using categories
that are already familiar to them to repose old problems in new terms. Some
of the old familiars of urban analysis can be deployed to new purposes.
Let us take two American urban thinkers: Louis Wirth and Jane Jacobs.
Wirth is famous, among other things, for developing the concept of urbanism
as a way of life. When he wrote his original essay of that title (Wirth 1938),
he was thinking about the urbanization of the United States: the movement
from the farms into the cities in the first thirty years or so of the twentieth
century. In the seventy years since, the urbanizing movement he noticed in
the United States, which had occurred even earlier in parts of western Europe,
has been replicated elsewhere. We all know that the world’s population is
now more than half urban by the standard definitions. But, we also know
that the countryside has been urbanized to a degree that Wirth could hardly
have imagined, thanks to modern transportation and communication. On
any given day, villagers in Nigeria and Indonesia may be watching the same
television programs as people in London and Los Angeles. So, the “global
village” of which Marshall McLuhan wrote more than forty years ago is
not just a dream of the future, but a palpable reality. And yet it is clearly
a city, rather than a village. Wirth offers us a double insight: Urbanism is
both a way of life and an “ism” or ideology. He poses the strange concept
of urbanism in relation to the more familiar concepts of industrialism and
capitalism, concepts developed to make sense of the form of life that had
emerged since the eighteenth century. Wirth’s key insight was that there was
something more to that form of life than could be captured by these terms:
Urbanism, which predated capitalism and industrialism, somehow overde-
termined them both. This implied, in turn, that modernity—whatever that
is—had developed from within a form of life (urbanism) that predated it. If
both scientific rationalism and the state system are aspects of modernity (as
Weber had suggested), then it follows that they too must be understood as
developments within urbanism, the overarching and overdetermining form
of life in which most if not all humans are now implicated. Moreover, the
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50 Warren Magnusson
“ism” of urbanism is a complex ideology that expresses the human desire

to turn the world into a home and to rebel against it. Wirth is too much
of a sociologist (and not enough of a philosopher and political scientist) to
quite see the full implications of his own insights. Nevertheless, he points
us toward a way of understanding ourselves as urbanites and analyzing what
we do in terms of the politics of urbanism as a way of life.
Read in relation to Wirth, Jacobs appears as a thinker who takes
productions of the urban at street level very seriously. Her insight—that
the proximate diversity of the city produces civilized order when sovereign
authority cannot ( Jacobs 1961)—is obviously crucial, because it turns our
attention away from the planners, administrators, and high-level governors
toward the ordinary folk who actually produce urban order through com-
plex and ever proliferating practices of government and self-government. To
speak of “government and self-government” as I do here is to draw atten-
tion to something implicit in Jacobs’ method of analysis: The government
of one’s own self is bound up with the government of others. If and when
I establish my own autonomy, I can make decisions for my own benefit or
for the benefit of those I care about. But, given the proximity of others and
my complex relations to them, I have to govern or limit myself in various
ways to achieve my own purposes. Thus, self-government is a matter of self-
limitation as well as autonomy. In turn, practices of self-government bleed
into practices of government as people put constraints on what others can
do, and attempt to induce appropriate conduct. What Foucaultians call the
“conduct of conduct” (Burchell, et al. 1991) is the essence of government
at all scales and in every dimension: the effort to induce people, including
ourselves, to conduct themselves in particular ways. A key to understanding
urbanism as a way of life is that it involves complex patterns of government
and self-government that conduct the conduct of everyone in ways that make
cities possible. This is the political infrastructure of urbanism at which Jacobs
was gesturing.
One can read French thinkers like Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau
(1984), and Michel Foucault (2003) in relation to Wirth and Jacobs without
setting up fall oppositions. Wirth and Jacobs follow Weber and hold Marx
at a distance. This is a problem insofar as they neglect Marx’s subtle analysis
of the unequal relationships implicit in the capitalist mode of production.

There can be a fairy tale quality to analyses that borrow from neoclassical
economics and treat the relations of power entailed by capitalism as if they
were extraneous to it, rather than intrinsic. Marx’s key insight was that
capitalism was essentially a political system masquerading as an economic
one—a political system marked by domination and exploitation. Putting
that fact into relation to what we know about the overt political system of
our day—one marked by the pluralism of the state system on the one hand
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and the overdetermining ideals and practices of liberal democracy on the

other—is an obvious challenge. Analysts like David Harvey (1982) and Neil
Smith (1991) have attempted to think through Marx to develop a clearer
understanding of contemporary urbanism (see also Davies Chapter 5, this
volume). A useful complement is to be found in the work of French thinkers
(or French-educated thinkers, like Manuel Castells [1996]) who have struggled
with having too much Marx rather than too little, and so have been trying
to get at what he left out. Reading these thinkers with Wirth and Jacobs in
relation to neo-Marxist analyses of urbanism is revelatory, because it obliges
us to take so much on board. Clearly, urbanism is characterized by unequal
social relations whose political character is always masked. On the other
hand, it is also characterized by practices of government and self-government
that are not simply the effects of those relations: Such practices challenge
as well as reinforce unequal relations. Marx and Weber were fine analysts,
and offered many insights, but neither of them could quite understand the
principles of transformation to which urbanism was and is subject. We are
obliged to read these thinkers (and the thinkers influenced by them) together
if we are to begin to make sense of what is happening.
Let me throw another thinker into the mix, one who is not usually
associated with urbanism: Friedrich von Hayek. In a sense, Hayek is the
intellectual guru behind public choice theory (although that may be giv-
ing him too much credit). What makes him interesting for our purposes is
that he builds on a tradition of thought that we can trace back at least to
Adam Smith: one that attempts to imagine the order of the market as a
self-sustaining and self-sufficient system. The market is a civic institution.
To imagine it globalized, as classical and neoclassical economists have done,
is to imagine the city—or, rather, a certain aspect of the city—projected onto
a global scale. What has come to be called the global economy is an urban
institution, an effect of urbanism run rampant. As analysts from Adam Smith
to Hayek (1960) have suggested, this urban institution (the market) is a
powerful ordering mechanism that rationalizes human conduct in a certain
way. There are definite benefits as well as costs to this rationalization. A key
insight is that markets develop in and against the state, as well as under its
aegis, and so they produce an order of sorts and/or transform existing orders
whatever the ostensibly political authorities might be doing. Read this in

relation to what Marx says and we begin to see that the market is actually
a political institution of a different type, one that tends to emerge alongside
other political institutions. On Hayek’s account, the market is self-organizing,
and state authority is external to it. Other accounts, like those of Polanyi
(1944) and Marx, put this image into question. The market does not and
cannot exist in splendid isolation. The politics that bring it into being are
related to other politics—not least the class struggles of which Marx and
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52 Warren Magnusson
Polanyi wrote—that need to be understood in relation to urbanism as a

whole. Nevertheless, the move that Hayek (following Smith) makes toward
explaining the order of things in terms of the principles of a self-organiz-
ing system is helpful. Urbanism is not a way of life that can be ordered in
accordance with a pregiven plan, no matter how beneficial that plan might
seem to its originators.
Much urban analysis has been vexed by the ideology of planning. The
well-planned city is still many people’s ideal. When we think about the city
globally, it is easier to see that this ideal is unattainable, and hence ultimately
perverse. It is bound up with the illusion of state sovereignty. Sovereignty
moves, be they on the local, regional, national, or even global scale, are best
understood as political maneuvers within the global city, intended to shape
the city in particular ways. Such moves have effects, but rarely are the effects
exactly the ones intended. (The American forces in Baghdad have been
discovering that in recent years.) Since the 1950s at least, urban analysts
have been exploring situations in which various authorities or coalitions of
authorities have attempted to impose order on the city at the local level.
There are many interesting analyses of growth machines, urban regimes, and
the like. The theories deployed to make sense of the empirical findings are
often rather weak, but certainly are no weaker than the ones routinely used
to explain the international order. In fact, it is enlightening to read theories
of the international in relation to theories of the metropolitan because both
bodies of theory deal with situations in which there appears to be no over-
arching sovereign authority. At the international level, we have competing
states, as well other authorities in different registers (multinational corpora-
tions, nongovernmental organizations, religious organizations, etc.). At the
metropolitan level, we have competing municipalities, along with an array of
other authorities. The homology is interesting, if little noted. Run-of-the-mill
urban analysis actually sheds a good deal of light on what happens when
authority is parceled out in complicated ways, and people try to generate
new forms of authority to deal with vexing issues. This is a mode of analysis
that can be used at other scales.
Claiming the World

One of the characteristics of urban analysis is its modesty: its insistence on

the limitations of its range, the partiality of its approach, and the localized
character of its insights. This is particularly true with respect to the politics
of the urban. Following the standardized divisions of political science, urban-
ists have deferred to the idea that politics is to be explained in terms of the
domestic (one’s own country), the comparative (other countries, in relation
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to one’s own), and the international (relations between countries). Some

urbanists want us to take these divisions more seriously, and start making
comparisons and generating testable theories that the big boys would be
forced to notice. The big boys, of course, study countries rather than cities.
As such, the big boys are strongly invested in the state system, because it
provides the intellectual architecture for what they do. We need not and in
fact should not follow them in this. Insofar as we identify the urban with
the lowest level of the state and examine politics only at that level, we fall
into the trap of statist thinking, and miss the opportunity to challenge the
whole edifice of contemporary political science from within an analytic of
urbanism. The world is preponderantly urban, and its politics can and should
be understood in terms of the politics of urbanism as a way of life. It would
be too much to say that we already know how to do the appropriate analysis
well, but in focusing on the city we have the advantage of seeing through
the urban, rather than through the state. It is particularly hard for political
scientists to give up on the statist categories they were trained to accept,
but only if we do will we be able to make the contribution that an urban
analytic promises.
To see like a city is difficult, because a city is much more complicated
than a state. We have to position ourselves as inhabitants, not governors, and
come to terms with an order that often appears chaotic. On the other hand,
to see like a city is to claim the world as our own, rather than treat it as an
alien production. It may be a frightening world, but we can begin to make
sense of it if we work outward from the urban realities we know.
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Reflections on Urbanity as an
Object of Study and a
Critical Epistemology
Julie-Anne Boudreau
In Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives,

Cindi Katz (2004) explores how children in Howa (Sudan) came of age as
their village was incorporated in the global economic agricultural system.
At the same time, the book shows how children in New York City were
involved in similar transformations of their everyday lives. Because of global
economic interdependence, in New York City as much as in Howa, growing
up global means, to my view, growing up urban.
This chapter is about urbanity, understood as a historically situated and
geographically unevenly distributed condition, characterized by interdependencies,
unpredictability, mobility, differences, speed, and intense affects that are shaping
sociopolitical relations and everyday life. Urbanity, in other words, is a concept
that cannot be restricted to what happens in cities. It is a mode of social
relations that has developed with the transformation of the global economic
system and the unfolding of modernity. In 1938, Louis Wirth wrote that
urbanity (or urbanism in his words) is a set of sociological characteristics
that are disseminating outside cities through the rapid development of
means of transportation and communication.1 Three decades later, Henri

Lefebvre (2003 [1970]) published La révolution urbaine, suggesting that the
transformations of the mode of production have affected social relations.
From a Marxist perspective, Lefebvre argues that we have reached a point
where the industrial mode of production is becoming urban. By this he
means that urban “sensations and perceptions, spaces and times, images and
concepts, language and rationality, theories and social practices” are taking
over the world (Lefebvre 2003 [1970], 28). In many ways, this is what Katz
55
Account: s8989984
56 Julie-Anne Boudreau
shows through her study of children playing in Howa and New York City.
Moreover, added sociologist Gérald Fortin in 1968, “this urban society is
not distributed equally across all parts of the city or across all classes in the
city. This urban society is not restricted to the physical space of the city. It
can be detected at various degrees in the countryside” (Fortin 2004 [1968],
4, my translation).
Urbanity, in this perspective, would be analytically equivalent to other
umbrella concepts such as modernity or globalization. It covers processes of
concern to most social scientists, from the unfolding of interpersonal relations
to the construction of identity, from economic practices to power relations, from
geographical unevenness to the management of emotions in everyday life. What
are the consequences—for social sciences and urban studies more particularly—of
defining urbanity in such an encompassing manner? How to operationalize
such as a broad concept? What critical potential would it yield?
These are the questions structuring this chapter. Let us begin with the
question of operationalization. In the first section, a threefold definition of
urbanity as an object of study is proposed: (a) urbanity as an ontology, (b)
urbanity as a logic of action, and (c) urbanity as a reorganization of the exercise
of power. The core of the chapter then dwells on the meso-level definition
of urbanity as logic of action. I ask: “Is there something specifically urban
in the way we act politically?” If, indeed, there were a specifically urban way
of acting in the world, would it not be plausible to also argue that there is
a specifically urban way of doing research? Could we advocate for an urban
epistemology? Would such an epistemology yield critical potential?
In a word, in line with the turn of the 1990s toward reflexive and
historicized research based on its appropriation by social actors themselves
(Giddens 1991; Touraine 1992), this chapter calls for a reflection on the
benefits of situated knowledge production (what I define here as an urban
epistemology). Situated research, as I understand it here, means recogniz-
ing that knowledge is produced with a set of questions and methods that
are intimately related to the researcher’s biography, to his or her embodied
location in time and space. As developed in the last section of this chapter,
feminist standpoint theory could serve as the inspiration for developing a
critical urban epistemology that challenges the widespread idea that the
researcher is able to extract his or her body from knowledge production

(see also Sidney Chapter 2, this volume). More than a critique of the ideal
of objectivity and neutrality in social sciences, a critical urban epistemol-
ogy questions the very formulation of research questions, in addition to
proposing new methodological approaches. In order to do so, to paraphrase
Magnusson’s title from Chapter 3, one must use an analytical lens that is
decentered from the State; one must “see like a city.” Looking for means to
“see like a city” has important consequences for modern social sciences as it
challenges disciplinary divisions and the positivist premise that knowledge
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Reflections on Urbanity 57
can be produced in order to act on a relatively fixed and recognizable reality

(see Wyly Chapter 1, this volume). Instead of a problem-solving approach
to urban studies and to social sciences generally, a critical urban epistemol-
ogy calls for a dialogical and socioanthropological approach through which
an object of study is seen as an indicator of societal and political dynamics.
The objective, in this epistemological proposal, is not to directly contribute
to the management of social, political, and economic problems, but rather
to understand how actors themselves (including researchers) define the issues
and face them. These reflections are discussed in the concluding section of
this chapter, returning more in detail to Katz’s Growing Up Global.
Defining Urbanity as an Object of Study
It is useful to break down the broad definition of urbanity stated previously

as a threefold object of study. This is but one proposal, which highlights the
political aspects of urbanity. Three levels of analysis are to be distinguished
in constructing urbanity as a political object of study (Table 4.1, next page).
At the general level, urbanity is conceived as ontology. The work of Lefebvre
exemplifies this level of analysis. For him, urbanity is a historically situated
worldview that is structuring everyday life across the globe. This was not
received very positively in the Marxist circles of the 1970s. In The Urban
Question, for instance, Manuel Castells (1972) argued that there is nothing
specifically urban about the way history progresses. According to this young
Castells, the prevailing motor of action was still class struggle. He rejected
the idea that an urban mode of production is displacing the industrial capi-
tal–labor nexus. He explained political claims arising in cities as simply another
form of capital–labor conflict that has been expanded from the workplace to
the collective consumption spaces of the city.2 There is nevertheless today a
larger consensus on Lefebvre’s proposal (see e.g., Magnusson 2005, Chapter
3, this volume).
At the meso level of analysis, urbanity could be operationalized as the
study of an urban logic of action. This take on urbanity could be found in
the work of Michel de Certeau (1990) or Richard Florida (2002), among
others. The following pages focus on this meso level of analysis. Observing
the workings of urbanity at another level of analysis, Neil Brenner (2004)
and Patrick Le Galès (2003), for instance, explore how such historically
situated and unevenly distributed condition affects the exercise of power. At
this observable level of analysis, urbanity is operationalized more specifically
as the urbanization of the political process.
This categorization is not based on a distinction between theoretical
and empirical work; both theoretical abstractions and empirical material
run through these three levels of analysis. Instead, it has to be read as a
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Table 4.1. Levels of Analysis in the Operationalization of Urbanity as a Political Object of Study
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GENERAL LEVEL Urbanity as an Ontology
Emphasizes abstractions and Historically situated worldview that guides ways of life and Lefebvre
requires much interpretation affects the whole world to various degrees Wirth
MESO LEVEL An Urban Logic of Action

Emphasizes both specific aspects Is there something specifically urban in the way we act politically? de Certeau
of the general level and If so, some of its characteristics could be: Sennett
generalized aspects of the • A rapport with uncertainty and disorder that invites nonconsequentialist Simmel
observable level rationalities for action
• Spontaneous and nonstrategic forms of action
• Rooted in everyday life, in the ordinary more than the extraordinary
• Guided by the experience (feelings, skills) of mobility
OBSERVABLE LEVEL The Urbanization of the Political Process1

Theoretically and/or empirically Is there a rescaling of the exercise of power? If so, it would be Brenner
emphasizes institutional observable through the following: Le Galès
specificities (broadly defined to • Decentralization of power and state rescaling processes
include formal institutions, • Urban issues to the forefront of the political agenda
norms, rules, modes of regulation, • Rescaling of civil society activities
regimes of accumulation, etc.) • Territorial policymaking
• Transformation of state–citizen relationship, specifically urban forms
of governance
• Emergence of newly significant city–regional political spaces
gradation of the “observable,” that is, a gradation based on the amount of

interpretative work required by the researcher. At the observable level, insti-
tutional specificities (broadly defined to include norms and conventions) are
more readily available for theory building than at the general level, where
ontological elements need to be reconstructed by the researcher.
Is There Something Specifically Urban

in the Way We Act Politically?
In a special issue of Multitudes on “a micropolitics of the city: the urban

act” (l’agir urbain), a group of researchers are in conversation with Toni
Negri (2008) on the topic of how and where political action unfolds in the
city. They ask: “What does acting in the city look like?” They insist on the
researcher’s duty to look for political acts in unexpected liminal places, such
as the street corner, the artist collective, and the vacant space between two
buildings. They argue that small gestures for bettering everyday life cumulate
to slowly create political consciousness. And the fact that a small, collective
experience fades away does not mean that it was not a political act and had
no impact. They never define why they call this type of politics “urban.”
Nevertheless, one can infer that they chose this urban qualification because
the small gestures investigated can be found mostly in dense city settings
and because the types of political subjectivity they see is largely function of
intense interactions among diverse people in close contact.
Yet, the proposal here is to go beyond the limits of the city to ask
more generally: “What elements of urbanity enter into play when people
act?” Similarly to the authors of Multitudes, the types of acts, actions, and
gestures considered in this chapter are to be found in the banal and ordinary.
Like them, I believe that acts, gestures, and actions can become political or
creative if they cumulate over time.3 Could we push their argument further
by considering acts, gestures, and actions in cities and outside them, and
still call them “urban”? At what point do these acts, gestures, and actions
become political?
These two questions are closely related. Indeed, thinking in terms of
logics of action means uncovering the various forms of rationalities behind

the behavior of individual and collective actors that are situated in time and
space. Uncovering an urban logic of political action would entail looking at
acts and gestures (located or not in cities) that are not traditionally considered
political. Focusing on the characteristics of the urban condition enumerated
at the onset of the chapter (interdependencies, unpredictability, mobility,
differences, speed, and intense affects) enables the researcher to see acts and
gestures that rarely fall under the purview of political analysis. “Looking for
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urbanity” when analyzing political action constitutes a tool to uncover in new

ways the workings of power relations as it broadens considerably the tradi-
tional definition of political action. A political act is generally understood as
conflictual (whether in the form of a confrontation between two competitive
positions or as a strategy of influence). If we shift the focus on acts that are
shaped by interdependencies, unpredictability, mobility, differences, speed, and
intense affects, it entails seeing politics as a more subtle, less confrontational,
and gradual reorganization of power relations.
In what follows, I question how each of these characteristics of urban-
ity would impact political action. In order to do so, a number of choices
have been made, taking insights from various theories of political action.
First, as French pragmatists argue, it is important to theoretically give to
context the place it deserves when studying political action. The starting
point of this group of scholars is to displace the analytical lens from the
actor to action itself. For pragmatist sociologists, actors are contextualized
in specific situations that arise when there is a disruption of routine. These
moments of tension bring a “problem” to the attention of individuals who
then try to find ways to adjust. Situations are thus imposed on actors who
suffer and modify them through their engagement. Their research question
is not: “What causes action?” or “What is its effect?” Instead, they ask:
“How does action unfold?” “What are the interactions between actors and
context?” (Cefai 2007; Thévenot 2006). The interest of this theory is that it
sheds light on nonstrategic action, while explicitly linking everyday life and
political action. Destabilization and ruptures of the daily routine is to them
the trigger of political action.
The second choice I made, however, is to reject the idea that political
action occurs solely in response to a rupture of daily routines. Indeed, one
of the most important political consequences of urbanity, Lefebvre (1968)
argues, is the fact that the most banal acts of everyday life, of what he calls
the sphere of inhabiting, are valorized against the rational-scientific logic.
This would mean that individual embodied actors should remain central to
our analysis of action. Whereas French pragmatists tend to reject individual
actors and the idea that their will and interest guide action, I argue that given
the importance of intense affects and differences characteristic of urbanity,
it would be erroneous to minimize the embodied individual experience that

guides action.
Weber’s work on the motives for action is helpful here. For him,
motive refers to (a) the meaning an actor attaches to his or her action, and
(b) the “force” that makes the actor act in a specific instance. In contrast to
the interpretation of Weber’s work proposed by C. Wright Mills, I follow
Colin Campbell’s (1996) argument that Weber did not restrict the concept
of motive to the “end goal” or the “reason” for action. When C. Wright
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Mills speaks of a “vocabulary of motives” (something later reappropriated

by French pragmatists), he suggests that a motive for action can only be
reconstructed post facto. In this framework, a motive is equal to the reasons
people give for their acts. It is a rationalized justification of their end goals.
For Weber, one can only understand action through contextualization in time
and space. The researcher needs to be attentive to (a) the actor’s position in
the means–end chain (e.g., the motive of a job-related act is directly linked
to the position of waged laborer, where the means of work is used for the
end goal of earning a wage); (b) the actor’s position in the social structure
(e.g., we can explain certain acts by looking at the expected actions in a
specific group); and (c) the actor’s feelings in the unfolding of the action
(e.g., an act of revenge, a fit of rage).
This interpretation of Weber’s definition of motive includes a struc-
tural (position in means–end chain), cultural (position in social structure),
and psychological (inner drive) dimension. This enables a reflection on both
the question of why people act at all, and why they choose certain types of
actions. As Campbell (1996, 106) puts it: “Viewed in its proper sense, as a
concept which implies movement, a motive is not a reason at all. Rather it
is a complex of meaning and affect, which serves to energise action, and as
such cannot be judged to be either reasonable or unreasonable, merely either
more or less effective.”
Weber’s definition of action opens the way for a theory of action that
is not centered solely on rational individuals, and yet does not negate indi-
viduality altogether as French pragmatists do. Indeed, for Weber, motives
have to be understood in context (in the sequence of acts, in the social and
structural setting). Moreover, this approach does not merely focus on explain-
ing actions that stand out of the ordinary. It can serve to explain the most
banal act (such as installing a car part for the waged worker). In contrast,
C. Wright Mills’ notion of a “vocabulary of motives” and his restriction of
motive to “justification” implies that the construction of motive is itself a
rational act deployed by the actor him or herself in order to explain his or
her behavior. Such justification is necessary only when an act stands out
from the expected.
In this theoretical context, what would be an urban logic of action?
What is it in urbanity that would energize political action? In what sense

would urbanity affect the type of political acts undertaken?
As mentioned in the introduction, urbanity is defined here as a condi-
tion characterized by interdependencies. Authors such as Saskia Sassen (1994)
and Manuel Castells (1996) have amply demonstrated this in their work on
global and networked cities. But beyond this systemic view, interdependen-
cies also are intensifying at the interpersonal level. Lefebvre argues that the
urban world is characterized by the fact that each situation exists within a
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whole and is in relation with other places and moments. Each situation, in
other words, is created by people who make small acts that are intertwined
with other experiences, and these entanglements “engender unexpected situ-
ations” (Lefebvre 2003 [1970], 39). One of the consequences of urbanity,
henceforth, is to create numerous unexpected situations that give salience to
small gestures that were not initially made with a strategically political goal.
The very unfolding of interpersonal relations in an interdependent urban
world tends to generate political situations.
Scott (1990) has explored the nonstrategic accumulation of uncoordi-
nated everyday acts and their gradual political impact in rural settings. He
looks at how the aggregation of individual decisions not to obey a landlord, for
instance, can cumulate to an unexpected boycott with political consequences.
In and of itself, nonstrategic political action is not specific to urbanity. The
suggestion here is that these forms of “infrapolitics” can now reach a global
scale because of the scope and intensity of interdependencies in the current
historical period. For instance, the revolts in the French banlieues in Novem-
ber 2005 were born out of uncoordinated acts that rapidly cumulated into a
riot. Given the intensity of interdependencies (in the media, between youths
around the world), these riots were immediately connected to precedent
events in France and elsewhere. Authorities in many cities (such as Brussels
or Montreal) initiated various “preventive measures” and public debates to
avoid imitation. Interdependencies characteristic of urbanity give unprecedented
salience to small acts that can easily be transformed into unexpected political situ-
ations on global and local scales.
Unpredictability not only is the result of interdependencies, but it often
serves as the very drive for action. In 1938, Wirth wrote that because people
are intensely mobile, they become accustomed to instability and unpredict-
ability. The proposal here is bolder: could we say that people do not only
accept unpredictability but are inspired by it? In other words, unpredictability
would have a creative potential; it would be a premium drive for action in a
condition of urbanity.
The end of the 1990s saw many studies and programs emerging with
the aim of inculcating creative behavior among policymakers and citizens
(the best-known proponent of this is Florida [2002]). Embedded in this
movement is the idea that people ought to take risks and transform unex-
pected situations into creative innovations. Culture plans have been adopted
in numerous cities to initiate people to art; innovation consultants have been
hired to bring a more creative mood in civil servant offices; art-based com-
munity development programs have been privileged as means of intervention
in poorer communities; artist squats have received generous grants for being
promising “breeding places”; and so on. Behind these programs is a central
message: Being creative is a duty as it facilitates individual responsibilization,
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personal growth, competitiveness, and ultimately governance. In short, the

message is: Everyone should be creative; everyone should be able to take the
unexpected and transform it into something new (see Grundy and Boudreau
2008, for a critical empirical example).
Celebrating unpredictability and its creative potential, from Lefebvre
and the Situationist International of the 1960s (who argued that the city is
a work of art) to Richard Florida at the beginning of the twenty-first cen-
tury, does not come without opponents. Insisting instead on the increasing
pace of urban life, Virilio (1986) argues that if unpredictability generates
innovation, the very speed of innovation has negative consequences on the
human ability to act. His “dromology” (the science of speed) states that the
speed of an action may change the very nature of the action. The fast tempo
characteristic of new technologies leaves no room for error. Speeding up the
mechanisms of weapons, for example, decreases the margin for error and thus
increases the potential for accidents. Accidents are inherent to technological
development and they enable further innovation. Virilio’s argument could be
simplified as follows: Speed leads to accidents—accidents generate innova-
tions—innovations lead to increasing speed. In this spiral, human agency
loses its resisting power. Virilio argues that action tends to be framed with
the sole aim of speeding up technological development.
Speed reduces the ability to deliberate, to think, to make choices. This
is what Bauman (2005, 1) highlights under the concept of “liquid modern
society,” which he defines as “a society in which the conditions under which
its members act change faster than it takes the ways of acting to consolidate
into habits and routines.” In this context, he continues, “[e]xtrapolating from
past events to predict future trends becomes ever more risky and all too
often misleading” (1). It follows that the accelerating pace of life characteristic
of urbanity favors nonconsequentialist forms of action. Reactions to a situation
are not guided simply by a measure of the impacts of an action, as rational
choice theorists would argue from consequentialist logic of interest-based
calculations. Other forms of rationalities are less grounded in a prediction
of future consequences. For instance, the malandro (the young man living in
informal settlements out of illicit activities) constantly acts out of emergency
in a hostile environment, precluding possibilities for calculated actions. Devel-
oping a “culture of emergency,” that is, being able to react, seize opportuni-
ties created by unpredictability, and rapidly adapt to his environment, the
malandro is the paradigmatic example embodying the urban logic of action
(Pedrazzini and Sanchez 1998).
Some people are more skillful than others with the urban logic of
action.4 Urbanity, indeed, is an unevenly distributed condition and this
generates differences. Such unevenness is at the very core of what consti-
tutes urbanity. In an urban world, Lefebvre argues, differences are “known
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and recognized, mastered, conceived, and signified” (Lefebvre 2003 [1970],

37). Differences energize political action and shape the type of acts chosen:
Differences enter in the very concept of acting. For example, a study of fear
experienced by women in the city shows how White, privileged suburban
women have numerous psychological resources to avoid feeling insecure in
the city. Indeed, because they construct victims as non-White and poor,
privileged women are able to feel comfortable in the city (Kern 2005). In
other words, they strategically circumscribe danger in specific (non-White)
bodies and specific neighborhoods. They are able to act in the city because
they project their fears onto an Other.
In an urban world, this logic of action based on creating differences
has been disseminated outside cities. Constructing one’s identity (which
means deciding what one is not, thus constructing an Other) is necessary for
becoming an acting persona. This can be painful. Bauman (2005, 9) explains
that one of the guiding rules of action is to constantly change one’s identity
through consumption in order to “save yourself from the embarrassment of
lagging behind, of being stuck with something no one else would be seen
with, of being caught napping, of missing the train of progress instead of
riding it.” Because of this constant dissatisfaction with oneself, “[l]iquid life
means constant self-scrutiny, self-critique and self-censure” (10–11). Sim-
mel analyzes these acts of self-restraint as a fundamental characteristic of
urban life:
Thus the metropolitan type—which naturally takes on a thousand

individual modifications—creates a protective organ for itself
against the profound disruption with which the fluctuations
and discontinuities of the external milieu threaten it. Instead of
reacting emotionally, the metropolitan type reacts primarily in a
rational manner, thus creating a mental predominance through
the intensification of consciousness, which in turn is caused by
it. (Simmel 1995 [1903], 31)
He makes a central observation: Urban life spurs emotionally charged reac-

tions to individuals, who develop the capacity to self-restrain and ignore
those emotions in order to act rationally. Simmel recognizes the strength of

emotional reactions and the individual efforts required to “tame” them. In
other words, he places the actor in direct relation with his or her environ-
ment. A century later, Bauman (2005), in contrast, argues that the intensity
of affect characteristic of urbanity is impossible to “tame”; rather than a blasé
attitude enabling rational choices, “liquid” urbanity would lead to anxiety.
Whether people react with a blasé attitude or whether they live with
anxiety, urbanity is generally associated with intense affect. The effect of this
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on action could be conceived as an embodied relation with the environment.

Because of the intensity of emotional reactions to a dense environment, this
means, “each act demands that one clears a space to make it, to co-create
it with others” (Querrien 2008, 99, my translation). Politically, this type of
affect-driven action needs to be conceptualized differently than with the
classical frame of conflict between dominant and dominated. Rather than
being energized by antagonism, the urban logic of action would be characterized
by a force of impulsion. It is the lived and felt intensity of experimentations
and creations that has the potential to induce a dynamic process of political
action. Nicolas-Le Strat summarizes this very well with what he calls the
interstitial experience:
The interstitial experience is an essentially “positive” form of radi-

cal-ness and subversion. It is directly indexed to the dynamic that
it is able to impulse. Its oppositional and contradictory capacity
does not come from the outside (as the reverse reflection of the
dominant reality), but is gradually constructed through coopera-
tion and alliances, through the intensification of the everyday
layout of life (sharing, meeting), and through the coexistence of
multiple singularities. . . . (Nicolas-Le Strat 2008, 119)
For instance, there was a small piece of land that Hamburg authorities
wanted to sell. A group of residents started to “play” there: They distributed
a questionnaire asking people what made them happy, where they went on
vacations, what it took to create a happy situation; they asked for holiday
photos. They began to plant placards all over that piece of land. Then
they installed a container filled with books and modeling clay and called
it a library on the garden. Gradually, without having planned it, that piece
of land came to be called Park Fiction by the residents. It was ultimately
redeveloped as the city initially wanted. But Park Fiction then moved to
other places in the city and ended up as a film (Schäfer 2008). Spontaneous
play on that piece of land, building on social relations in the neighborhood
and expressions of happiness, desire, and memories, became the impulsion
of an unexpected and unpredictable political project that was disseminated
worldwide through cinema.

People playing on the piece of land that became Park Fiction expe-
rienced numerous emotions that were gradually politicized. That collective
experience was transported in other places. People were initially not strategic.
There was a vague feeling that they did not want to see this piece of land
sold to promoters who would commercialize it, but there was no coordinating
committee, no clear idea of the enemy or the target. There were multiple
tactics on all sides, building on one another in nonlinear ways. De Certeau
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(1990, 60–61, my translation) argues that a tactic “cannot afford to hold

for itself at a distance and in a position of retreat enabling prediction and
mobilization: it is movement ‘within the sight of the enemy.’ ”
What is striking in this definition of tactics is that action is constructed
through mobility. Being mobile compensates for the inability to predict the
gestures of the elusive adversary. The intensification of mobility is a striking
characteristic of urbanity. Moving through physical or virtual space, people
experience various situations in different contexts and this facilitates action. For
instance, women who do not have a long experience of moving about the city
generally tend to gain self-confidence and construct a political subjectivity as
they begin to move more. In a study of domestic workers in Los Angeles,
we explored the impact of migration from rural villages in Latin America
to work in Los Angeles, on the development of political consciousness. As
women experienced the double transformation of living in a large city and
commuting long distances to work outside their homes, they became more
familiar with mobility. They accessed more information, they developed skills
that gave them self-confidence, they were able to compare various situations
and critically analyze them (often in terms of injustice). In other words,
mobility facilitates mobilization (Boudreau, et al. 2007).5
In summary, a focus on urbanity when analyzing political action high-
lights different types of political acts, as well as motives, that would be missed
by other analytical frames such as rational choice theory (Table 4.2).
If this can be analytically framed as an urban logic of action, which
would emerge out of the current historically situated context, it is obvious
that it does not eliminate other logics of action. Indeed, urbanity is an
unevenly distributed condition. Strategic, antagonistic, predictable, calculated,
interest-based, universal-oriented, and place-based (rather than mobile) forms
of action remain very important in the political process. The point here is
simply to call attention to the impact of urbanity on the emergence of other
forms of political action.
A Critical Urban Epistemology: The Situated, Embodied,

and Mobile Researcher
If there were a specifically urban way of acting in the world, would it not
be plausible to also argue that there is a specifically urban way of doing
research? We have seen social science disciplines evolve in the last century
through various epistemological and theoretical positions: methodological
individualism, (post)behaviorism, Marxist structuralism, pluralism, feminism,
postmodernism, (neo)institutionalism, and so on. This chapter suggests that
the starting point of political analysis could be urban life itself. Inspired by
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Table 4.2. Characteristics of an Urban Logic of Action
Characteristics of Urbanity What Drives Action How People Act
Interdependencies Unexpected situations are Interdependencies give

rapidly disseminated and salience to small acts
imitated worldwide that can easily be
politicized
Unpredictability The unpredictable can be Risk-taking behavior,
a source of creativity seeking for surprise
Speed Difficult to calculate future Reaction and
consequences of an act adaptation: “culture of
emergency”
Differences Constructing complex Projecting fears
identities and constructing constraining action on
Others an Other, or tactically
mobilizing the ascribed
identity of being the
Other
Intense emotions People are less energized Tactical
by antagonism (a named experimentation
enemy) than by forces of building on affect
impulsion and relations present
in everyday life
Mobility The experience of various Acting by comparing
situations provides critical various situations, by
perspective and self- mobilizing the skills
confidence developed by moving
around
feminist standpoint theory, the proposal is that from the standpoint of cit-
ies, new research questions can emerge about objects that are not necessarily
located in cities. These new research questions can yield new theoretical
developments and thus enrich various disciplines. In the 1980s, feminists

argued that research emanating from women’s everyday lives enables a less
partial and biased form of knowledge production because it gives a less
distorted account than looking at society from the standpoint of the ruling
elite. Women entered academia, asked new kinds of questions about every-
thing, from the labor market to voting behavior. In the end, these questions
enriched all social sciences and did not only produce knowledge about women
(S. Harding and Hintikka 1983).
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One of the main claims of standpoint theorists is that constructing an

epistemological standpoint results from struggle. Generally, an epistemological
standpoint is constructed by an oppressed group that gains voice. It would
be ludicrous to pretend cities are an oppressed group. For this reason, the
analogy to standpoint theory has to be read as metaphorical. Yet, feminist
standpoint theory offers very important insights for constructing an urban
epistemology. First and foremost is the claim that a standpoint refers to the
fact that knowledge is produced by people who are situated in time and
space; it recognizes that people have a biography, a body, and a set of feel-
ings. Why is it that academics such as Urry (2000) for instance, decided to
ask questions about the impact of mobility on the idea of society? It seems
fair to suggest that the very academic experience of traveling to conferences
and managing high mobility on a daily basis prompted research questions
that have important consequences for a central concept of modern social
sciences: the idea of society.
Situated knowledge production generally refers to the recognition that
research questions are influenced by a specific historical and geographical
context. From this perspective, one can easily explain why creativity, in
Lefebvre’s work, is seen as a means to challenge the dominant rational-
scientific system of urban planning characteristic of the 1960s, whereas in
Florida’s work, creativity is used as a means to alleviate the rough edges of
neoliberalism after the wreckage of the austerity measures of the 1990s. But
more than recognizing the geohistorical context of knowledge production, a
critical urban epistemology places the researcher at the center. Hence, one’s
biography and living experience in the city influence the kinds of research
questions one develops. These questions, in turn, can have important con-
sequences for the social sciences as a whole and not only for urban studies.
Moreover, the researcher’s body is directly involved in the methodological
approach privileged by a critical urban epistemology.
A specifically urban way of doing research involves integrating core
elements of urbanity: mobility, interdependencies, differences, unpredictabil-
ity, speed, and intense affect. I focus here on the first four. A critical urban
epistemology could be constructed on a dialogical comparative methodology
that recognizes interdependencies between geographically situated objects of
study. Concretely, such a methodological approach requires that researchers be

mobile in order to meet with other researchers and feel and experience other
places (Boudreau 2007b). By talking about the knowledge they produce to
colleagues located in different institutional, disciplinary, and cultural contexts,
researchers are forced to explain underlying values and taken-for-granted
premises. This dialogical process enables the uncovering of new interdepen-
dencies (Lesemann 2007). This interpersonal comparative process is based
on trust and on the mobility of researchers themselves. It is inductive and
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unpredictable. It considers differences in the knowledge-production process

of each researcher and not between objects of study themselves.
In summary, what do we learn if we adopt an urban standpoint? This
chapter attempted to exemplify the potential uncovering this approach could
yield with regards to understanding political action. In order to systematize
this standpoint, I argue that an urban epistemology is characterized by the
following:
1. An emphasis on nonconsequentialist forms of rationalities;

2. A sensitivity to disorder and mobility (at all scales and thus
requiring comparative work);
3. A non-areal geographical imaginary (places are not seen as
containers with circumscribed borders);
4. A grounding in the ordinary, the nonstrategic and the spon-
taneous; and
5. A starting point in people’s experience in order to uncover
instances of creativity and self-government (see Magnusson
Chapter 3, this volume).
Because it is grounded in everyday life, this form of knowledge production

builds on the voices of people that are often not considered interesting to
study (except perhaps by anthropologists). It also uncovers new sites for
critical political intervention. Because of the interdependent and complex
nature of urbanity, it highlights how various axes of oppression intersect
(race, class, gender, etc.).
Even though it was most probably not intended as such, one can read
Cindi Katz’s (2004) work on children’s play in Howa and New York City
as a magnificent example of urban epistemology. She opts for ethnographic
methods enabling her to look at small gestures of everyday life, their gradual
and unintended accumulation into a politics of resistance. In her preface
she writes:
In tracing the effects of and responses to capitalist develop-

ment over a generation, I found several creative strategies that

people used to stay afloat and even reformulate the conditions
and possibilities of their everyday lives. . . . Growing Up Global
focuses on the sorts of mundane things through which people
make themselves and the historical geographies in which they
live, but it was impelled by a politics intent on locating practices
that scratched at, and under certain conditions might completely
break down, hegemony. (x–xi)
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Katz develops a very interesting take on comparative studies, working

with two widely different places. She writes:
I have framed this project as a “countertopography,” which draws

on a close study of the relationship between capitalist globalism
and social reproduction in Howa refracted in parallax from the
vantage point of New York City. This strategy is meant not
only to draw structural similarities between two places—focused
around children’s learning and therefore social reproduction—but
in doing so, to make sense of restructuring in a different manner
than is customary. (xii)
While explicitly stating her urban standpoint from New York City, she
studies an agricultural village. More than uncovering structural similarities,
her comparative work also is constructed as a political intervention. Feminist
standpoint theory reflected on the relation between knowledge production
and political practice, forcefully arguing that despite being a political project,
feminism has successful explanatory potential. With similar affirmation of
her political project, particularly in the aftermath of the events of Septem-
ber 11, 2001, which threw New York City and Arabic-speaking Howa into
fatal binaries of “good and evil,” Katz shows how our world is characterized
by interdependencies:
In examining global processes in their particular historical geogra-

phies, my project disrupts the seemingly contradictory assumptions
that the imperatives of global capitalism are homogenizing, while
at the same time their effects in one locale are separable from their
effects in another. These processes are spatially as much as socially
intertwined, and while their effects are of course differentiated
in diverse historical geographies, their often startling similarities
offer interesting common grounds for political response. (xii)
This is the kind of critical epistemology that can emerge from urbanity.
To conclude, this chapter suggested that recognizing the urban stand-
point of researchers, whether they live in cities or not, may yield interesting
potential for critical theory and political action. As a challenge to the idea
that the researcher can produce knowledge in a disembodied way, an urban
standpoint involves integrating characteristics of urbanity into the very
knowledge-production process: capitalizing on academic mobility; privileging
comparative methodologies in order to build on urban interdependencies;
inductively (and thus accepting unpredictability) highlighting differences that
make our objects of study more intelligible; recognizing the biographical and
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affective energy infused in the formulation of research questions; grounding

research questions in the everyday by paying attention to how people define
problems and adapt to them (a nonconsequentialist logic based on the “culture
of emergency”). An urban standpoint involves more than a critique of the
ideal of objectivity as it transforms the very process of conducting research
and framing questions. The result is knowledge that aims to understand how
actors define problems rather than finding solutions to issues identified a
priori by disembodied researchers.
An urban epistemology is possible in this historical period because, I
have argued here, we are witnessing a global diffusion of urbanity as a mode of
social and political relations. Speaking of urbanity rather than (post)modernity
or globalization is a conceptual choice that may create confusion given that
the word urban is commonly understood as the adjective linked to city. Yet,
if it is defined concisely, urbanity is a word that refers to the general condi-
tions specific to a historical period (the suffix “ity”), while stressing the root
of the particular logic of action and ontology associated to this historical
period (these social, political, economic, and ontological relations originated
in cities). It also stresses that urbanity is not a condition that comes after
modernity (as in postmodernity); it is a condition that is unevenly distributed
and thus that coexists with other ontologies and logics of action.
Notes
1. He writes: “Urbanization no longer denotes merely the process by which
persons are attracted to a place called the city and incorporated into a system of life.
It refers also to that cumulative accentuation of the characteristics distinctive of the
mode of life which is associated with the growth of cities, and finally to the changes in
the direction of modes of life recognized as urban, which are apparent among people,
wherever they may be, who have come under the spell of the influences which the city
exerts by virtue of the power of its institutions and personalities operating through
the means of communication and transportation.” (Wirth 1995 [1938], 61)
2. In Social Justice and the City, David Harvey (1973) makes a similar argu-
ment, suggesting that the urban is still heavily dependent on industrial capital and
thus cannot be analyzed as a new mode of production. He proposes as evidence that
industrial capital is still much stronger than land capital.
3. For a discussion of the observable level (the urbanization of the political

process), please refer to Boudreau (2007a).
4. The choice of words is significant here. An “act” refers to a thing done
that generally has an effect on the world. The word “action” accentuates the dynamic
process, the way something moves, or even sometimes a notable activity. “Gestures”
in turn expresses more feelings and has an embodied connotation.
5. In The Uses of Disorder, Sennett (1970) argues that fear of unpredictability
and disorder is a symptom of stalled psychological development. It is normal for
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teenagers, he argues, to be searching for stability and purity in order to construct

their newly autonomous identity. However, adulthood should normally mean that
individuals are able to accept multiple and complex identities. City life, its disorder
and complexity, enables the flourishing of complex identities. This stage of psychologi-
cal development, for Sennett, provides the necessary skills for individuals to liberate
themselves from self-imposed oppression. The malandro, in this framework, would
be more mature than the middle-class professional living in a tree-lined, predictable,
and ordered North American suburb.
6. In a study of youth in Douala, Cameroon, Abdoumaliq Simone (2005)
makes a similar case, insisting also on the fact that some people may not be able to
move physically through space, but they can develop ways to move symbolically or
virtually, and this empowers them.
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Back to the Future

Marxism and Urban Politics
Jonathan S. Davies
Network theories of urban politics, such as urban regime theory, prospered

greatly amid the painful crisis of Marxism. Their central premise is that
power is dispersed and hence that the task of governing is to mobilize and
coordinate “power to,” the capacity to act. This perspective has become a
powerful orthodoxy in political science, largely displacing Marxist theory.
The chapter argues, however, that Marxism is essential to understanding
contemporary urban politics. Its premise is that those who regret the pass-
ing of Marxism are excessively pessimistic, whereas those who acclaim the
universal and eternal triumph of capitalism (or did so before the present
crisis) are guilty of hubris or myopia.
The chapter first explores the rise of the “network orthodoxy.” It
proceeds to develop a critique of the regime-theoretical conception of the
ruling class, building on my earlier work (Davies 2002) and arguing that
the Marxist conception is both stronger and, in the context of a theory of
systemic power, more dynamic. It next examines the position of the urban
proletariat, largely ignored by regime theory, arguing that the basic class
structure of society depicted by Marx remains intact and consequently that
working-class–led transformations remain possible. It then moves from the
macro- to the micro-level of analysis, illustrating the importance of class for
understanding the dysfunctional dynamics of networked urban governance

in the United Kingdom. Finally, it demonstrates how the approach can be
applied comparatively in explaining similarities and differences between
two different forms of networked governance, U.K. partnerships and U.S.
regimes. In conclusion, it argues that a new wave of Marxist research in
urban politics is long overdue.
73
Account: s8989984
74 Jonathan S. Davies
The Network Orthodoxy
Merrifield (2002, 129) suggests that the “glorious ruin of the Marxist tradi-
tion” is reflected nowhere better than in the intellectual journey of Manuel
Castells (1977) from Marxist author of The Urban Question to apologist for
capitalist globalization, dazzled by the dynamism of Silicon Valley (Merrifield
2002, 132). So inspired, Castells (1996) proclaimed the “network society,”
a world in which hierarchy is increasingly superseded by heterarchy with
power “dispersed among autonomous centres caught up in a web of mutual
dependence,” resulting in “interdependence rather than domination” (Callini-
cos 2001, 36). Castells may have little immediate influence in contemporary
urban politics, but his intellectual trajectory symbolized the often traveled
journey from capital and class to dispersal and difference.
Clarence Stone (1989, 4) developed an intellectual archetype for net-
work analysis in the form of urban regime theory, whose influence extends
far beyond the United States. A regime is “an informal yet relatively stable
group with access to institutional resources that enable it to have a sustained role
in making governing decisions.” It is “the informal arrangements by which
public bodies and private interests function together in order to be able to
make and carry out governing decisions” (6). Regime theory has become an
orthodoxy in urban politics over the past twenty years. It has been robustly
criticized and defended in that time but merits further attention. It does so
partly because it is orthodoxy with a critical edge, contending, unlike post-
modern network theories, with the problem of inequality from the standpoint
of political economy, and partly because it was founded on the critique of
Marxism (see Imbroscio Chapter 6, this volume).
Regime Theory and the Ruling Class
The regime-theoretical break with Marxism was neither clear, nor complete.
Early on, Stephen Elkin (1979, 23) cautioned that “intellectual ruin” would
follow, if urbanists did not maintain “a sense of the larger political economy
and Marxism.” Based in political economy, Stone’s conception of systemic
power is pivotal to regime theory. Systemic power is:
that dimension of power in which durable features of the socio-

economic system (the situational element) confer advantages
and disadvantages on groups (the intergroup element) in ways
predisposing public officials to favor some interests at the expense
of others (the indirect element). . . . Because its operation is com-
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Back to the Future 75
pletely impersonal and deeply embedded in the social structure,

this form of power can appropriately be termed “systemic.” (Stone
1980, 980–81)
For Stone, systemic power generates an indirect conflict between favored

and disfavored groups, predicated on the schematic distinction between public
and private power. The ownership of productive assets rests in the hands of
business, whereas the machinery of government is subject to popular con-
trol through elections and other public inputs (Elkin 1987, 18; Stone 1989,
9). However, business control over production tends to give it a privileged
voice in urban policy (Stone 1980, 982). Urban regimes are founded on the
need for city governments to secure the consent of corporations to the levy
of taxes and bonds, which they will agree only if they favor the planning
and development policies of the authority in question. These fiscal strictures
create an environment where businesses and city government recognize
congruent interests and negotiate around them. Regime theory therefore
accepts Lindblom’s (1977) proposition that in market societies, governments
are predisposed to indulge the preferences of business leaders.
This is a theory of class power, but one that rejects the Marxist con-
ception of the ruling class. Stone’s (1980, 979) class imprint comes about
contingently and in ways requiring no ruling elite or command forms of
domination, notions he considers central to Marxism. He sees society as
loosely coordinated and rejects the economy-centered view characteristic of
Marxism (Stone 1989, 226–27). Stone contends (1980, 985) that
business interests prevail not because a ruling-class network

promotes pro-business proposals, but because governments are
drawn by the nature of underlying economic and revenue-pro-
ducing conditions to serve those interests. . . . Business influence
is therefore greater in a policy area like urban renewal that is
related to revenue production than in an area like governmental
reform that is unrelated to revenue production.
Thus depicted, Marxism conceives the ruling class as a cohesive elite

capable of identifying decisions crucial to its interests and acting to realize

them. However, the classical Marxist approach is actually closer to the for-
mulation of systemic power outlined by Stone than to any vulgar conception
of a monistic and comprehensively rational ruling class. Callinicos (2001,
37) rejects the canard thus: “only in the most vulgar leftist (or in fascist)
critiques do a handful of monopolists get to pull the strings. Capitalist firms
are necessarily involved in a structure of conflictual interdependence that they
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cannot individually or even collectively dominate.” The structure of capitalist

management makes capitalists a “band of warring brothers,” rendering control
always partial and occasionally precarious.
Read as the self-conscious action of comprehensively rational elites,
class domination is indeed implausible. For Marxists, the force unifying the
capitalist class is the imperative to accumulate in order to compete and only
the resistance of subordinate classes generates a modicum of unity among
capitals, if then. Like regime theory, Marxism draws on an impersonal
conception of systemic power. Just as Stone’s conception leads city officials
to understand as a matter of common sense that they must cooperate with
business interests, so Marx’s analysis of capitalism predicts a tendency among
ruling and working classes alike to behave in ways that take competition,
accumulation, and expropriation for granted until periods of crisis undermine
those routines and, for the working class in particular, opens them to question
(Davies 2002, 12). This approach demands no conspiracy. However, it differs
from regime theory in one crucial detail: Prevailing commonsense is not suf-
ficient to explain class behavior. For Marxists, systemic power is embodied
in the day-to-day workings of capitalism, which cannot but produce frantic
competition, socioeconomic polarization, and economic crises, processes that
are nurtured, managed, and regulated by the capitalist state.
Notwithstanding the imperative for political parties to win elections,
states and capitals are structurally entwined. The relationship is best charac-
terized as one of dialectical interdependence (Ashman and Callinicos 2006),
where each party has distinct, but related, interests. Governmental success
in pursuing any agenda ultimately depends on the “size and profitability of
the capitals based in their territory.” This fact endows states with a “positive
interest in promoting the process of capital accumulation within their borders
and makes them liable, should they be perceived to be pursuing policies inimi-
cal to this process, to the negative sanctions of capital flight, currency and
debt crises and the like” (Ashman and Callinicos 2006, 114). At the same
time, successful capital accumulation depends on states developing a pro-
business environment, labor supply, and markets. Capital may have partially
decoupled from individual states but capital investment remains closely tied
to geopolitical regions (Ashman and Callinicos 2006, 125–26).
Structural interdependence does not therefore reduce the interests of

the state to those of fractions of capital, or even capital in its totality. The
capitalist is principally concerned with maintaining and expanding capital,
the state manager with territorial competition, intra-state competition, and
manufacturing citizen consent. However, pursuing these distinct but overlap-
ping goals makes the two forms of power congruent, whereas the modalities
of the relationship “vary significantly as capitalism develops” (Ashman and
Callinicos 2006, 114) across time and space.
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Hence, in determining economic policy, government officials respond

to territorial imperatives, as they perceive them, rather than to orders from
a self-conscious capitalist elite. The structural conflict among capitals would
preclude any other course, even if territorial interests were immediately reduc-
ible to economic ones. Economic trends invariably require interpretation,
meaning that state managers choose from a repertoire of policies seeking to
align territorial and economic imperatives, often imperfectly and in the face
of systemic crisis tendencies.
Stone (1980, 989) concedes that unlike Marxists, he is not concerned
with how specific constellations of systemic power come into being, but
rather how the system of urban governance reproduces them. As Imbroscio
(1998a, 1998b) argues, this leaves regime theory with a static conception of
the relationship between public and private power, which underpins Stone’s
theory of stratification. Stone wrote in 1980 that public officials understand
instinctively that their careers are well served by enacting pro-business policy.
However, his inattention to the production and reproduction of systemic
power leaves him unable to explain these instincts fully. Recognizing the
dynamic structural interdependence of territorial and economic power in the
context of ever-intensifying competition between cities and states is one way
of overcoming this elision.
The pro-capitalist kulturkampf during the 1970s illustrates this structural
interdependence, of which the fiscal crisis in New York was emblematic. Over
several years, the city accumulated significant debts, tolerated by creditors.
In 1975, however, “a powerful cabal of investment bankers . . . refused to roll
over the debt and pushed the city into technical bankruptcy” (Harvey 2005,
45). Under the ensuing regime, governing priorities were reversed. City rev-
enues were used to pay debts to bond-holders requiring wage freezes, cuts in
employment and social provisions, and the imposition of regressive “user fees.”
Humiliatingly, municipal unions were required to invest their pension funds
in city bonds, creating a structural incentive to moderation. The state was
central to this process. William Simon, Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, said
that the terms of any bailout should be “so punitive, the overall experience
so painful, that no city, no political subdivision would ever be tempted to
go down the same road” (Harvey 2005, 46). Harvey argues that this strategy
was “every bit as effective as the military coup . . . in Chile,” redistributing

wealth “to the upper classes in the midst of a fiscal crisis” (45).
A static analysis of the division of labor between state and market does
not suffice to explain this coup for capital. The notion of structural interde-
pendence is more illuminating. Capital acted to sustain itself in the face of
the crisis of profitability and increasing competition. It was encouraged by
a cash-strapped state machine faced with growing resistance at home and
impending military defeat overseas. When former New York City Mayor
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Abraham Beame vacillated in the face of the fiscal crisis, he was marginalized.
Hugh Carey, then governor of New York, created the Municipal Assistance
Corporation to manage the crisis, appointing Democrat financier Felix Rohatyn
to chair it and lead the rescue effort (Lankevich 1998, 216–22). According
to Berman (2007), Rohatyn later conceded “we have balanced the budget on
the backs of the poor.” This outcome, engineered jointly by state and capital,
fundamentally changed the political landscape. It led liberal New Yorkers
reluctantly to concede “new realities” and created the conditions in which
the neoliberal commonsense of the feasible and desirable became hegemonic
(Bourdieu 1984, 1990). Local state actors who disputed the restructuring
were coerced into compliance (e.g., Beame), removed or gradually socialized
into “pragmatic” pro-market dispositions.
Although neoliberalization occurred in different forms at different
speeds and is by no means the universal governing rationality, depending
among other things on local history and levels of resistance (Geddes, 2005),
this analysis works on a wider canvas. Peck and Tickell (2002, 397–98)
argue that neoliberalization has led to “fast policy transfer,” where ideas
from America spread to Europe, and domestic urban policy processes were
curtailed in favor of “off-the-shelf ” solutions from elsewhere, “leading to a
deepening and intensification” of neoliberalization, not least in the practices
of city leaders and managers around the world.
This conjuncture has made building progressive urban regimes in
the United States virtually impossible, as Stone (1993) acknowledged. His
optimism that they might be feasible lies his conception of stratification
and the loosely coupled structures of society, which mean that some areas
of governance are more or less removed from corporate influence. However,
there is good reason to question Stone’s depiction of loose coupling, or low
social coherence. The matter deserves far greater attention than it gets here,
but stratification theory would suggest a lower correlation between policy
intentions and outcomes in different fields than appears to be the case. Stone
(1998) sees education policy as an arena with some potential. However, he
offers little evidence of progress apart from the formation of human capital
coalitions, which are, in reality, cases of supply-side neoliberalism (Davies
2004a). Many spheres of urban policy are characterized by this adaptive con-
formity to the imperatives of profit and competition. Additionally, inequality

has grown across the cities of the world, not only in relation to income and
education but also across an array of indices covering many policy fields.
In the political field too, the language of social critique has been
appropriated to neoliberal discourse (Fairclough 2000). The reform of public
administration has encouraged homogenization. The attack on the professions,
the rise of general management, the imperatives of “joined-up government,”
and the marketization of public services have disciplined public officials with
Account: s8989984
any semblance of radicalism and remade their sense of what constitutes

“good governance” along neoliberal lines. The process has not been wholly
successful (e.g., Hood 2000), but the prospects for equitable regime politics
appear considerably worse than in 1993. Harvey (2006, 82) argues that
“almost everything we now eat and drink, wear and use, listen to and hear,
watch and learn comes to us in commodity form and is shaped by divisions
of labor, the pursuit of product niches and general evolution of discourses
and ideologies that embody precepts of capitalism.” These developments
indicate frighteningly high social coherence and suggest that Stone overem-
phasizes heterogeneity. The influence of capital, aggressively promoted by
entrepreneurial states with territorial ambitions, extends into every interstice
of society. At the same time, it is clear that the growth imperative does not
have to be proselytized by a capitalist elite for different components of the
state to take it seriously.
As suggested in Davies (2002), regime theory is thus unable to show,
as Elkin (1987, 17) said, that “a regime dedicated to both popular control
and a property based market system can thrive.” Despite favoring the com-
mercial republic, Elkin recognized that “the very workings of the political
economy” (181) thwart egalitarian aspirations. The notion of structural
interdependence, the congruence of territorial and economic interests within
the capitalist system, offers a more convincing explanation for this reality
than Stone’s conception of systemic power. Thus, regime theory has always
been looking over its shoulder at the “specter of Marx” (Derrida 1994). It
should now turn and face it.
The Urban Proletariat
However, it is not sufficient to argue that Marxism has a superior account

of state–capital relations than regime theory. Nor is it sufficient simply to
argue that the dynamics of market economies make sustainable egalitarian
regimes improbable. Taking egalitarian urban politics seriously demands that
a source of political agency be identified that is capable of breaking the
conjuncture. Marxist theory accords the leading role to the working class,
“those who live so long as they find work, and who find work only so long
as their labor increases capital” (Engels, cited in Merrifield 2002, 35). Bring-
ing the proletariat into the discussion takes us far beyond regime theory, but
it is essential if we are to understand the scope and limits of the neoliberal
conjuncture and the potential for resistance to it. Moreover, the concept of
a ruling class inevitably draws attention to subordinate classes. What hope,
then, might urban egalitarians invest in today’s proletariat, so comprehensively
dismissed by mainstream sociology (Beck 2007; Giddens 1998)? Answering
Account: s8989984
this question requires us to examine changing class structures in the cities

of both the developing and developed worlds.
Taking Bolivia as his example, Geddes (2008) argues that Marxists
should look to the global south for inspiration. He notes that under the
leadership of Evo Morales, a precarious coalition of proletarians, including
urban coal miners, peasants, rural coca growers, and indigenous ethnic groups
“has given new impetus to the opposition to neoliberalism.” However, the
emergence of the global south as the vanguard of resistance poses challenges
to Marxism. Mike Davis’ (2006) story of the “planet of slums” shows the
inexorability of urbanization. We have witnessed the emergence of vast
informal settlements across Africa, Asia, and South America, now consti-
tuting 78 percent of the urban population in the least-developed countries
and totaling more than one billion impoverished citizens globally (Geddes
2008). In pessimistic accounts, the slum-dwellers are outcasts; they are no
longer Marx’s reserve army of labor, but an immense underclass permanently
marooned from the labor market and the working class. In the classic accounts
by Engels in Manchester and Marx in Paris, the city may be Hell but the
proletariat is forged there. From this perspective, urbanization is the source of
revolutionary agency. The question posed by the planet of slums is whether
it now has any such power.
Recent research (e.g., Dunn 2008; Zeilig and Ceruti 2007) suggests that
urbanization could be the source of new proletarian agency. African slums
are heterogeneous, mixing enclaves of wealth and extreme poverty. Soweto
is the archetype, with formal and informal settlements existing cheek-by-
jowl with wealthy gated communities. Zeilig and Ceruti argue that the class
composition of Soweto is complicated. There is no simple distinction between
the formal working class and the déclassé slum-dweller. On the contrary, 78.3
percent of Sowetan households contain formally employed, unemployed, and
self-employed family members. Rather than forming a new labor aristocracy,
those in formal employment bear onerous duties of kinship. The situation in
Soweto, Zeilig and Ceruti conclude, is fluid. This picture lends additional
importance to the spate of trade union struggles in South Africa. In 2007,
the country witnessed the largest general strike since apartheid. If Zeilig and
Ceruti are right, this was no last gasp of a dying proletariat, but the harbin-
ger of renewal. Moreover, if the picture of class composition and household

interdependence is correct, workers and unemployed alike share a common
interest in these struggles, with solidarity between them possible. Zeilig and
Ceruti conclude that similar patterns of class composition and resistance are
evident in cities across the African continent (see also Zeilig 2002).
Dunn (2008) embellishes the point in his friendly critique of Harvey’s
(2005, 2006) conception of “accumulation by dispossession,” the predatory
Account: s8989984
commodification of the commons characteristic of neoliberalism. Accumu-

lation by dispossession has occurred continuously since the first enclosures
in England in the fifteenth century. Today, Arundhati Roy describes the
“garroting” of India’s rural economy through the privatization and transfer
of public assets to corporations (cited in Harvey 2006, 49). The widespread
privatization of the “ejidos” system of communal land ownership and farming
in Mexico was a key factor driving millions from country to city in pursuit
of a living. Here, urbanization is double-edged entailing not only migration
from the country to the city, but also the urbanization of the rural through
expropriation and the introduction of industrial production methods.
Accumulation by dispossession is also happening on a massive scale
in capitalist China (Liang, et al. 2002). However, Dunn (2008) argues that
“normal” capital accumulation, the extraction of surplus value from labor, has
also expanded. If true and new processes of surplus value extraction routinely
follow urbanization, then the class structure identified by Marx remains
intact and rising militancy is possible. According to Dunn (2008, 24), this
has occurred in China. Even official statistics suggested a tenfold jump in
the number of strikes and strikers between 1994 and 2003.
Across Africa, China, and Latin America, there is evidence that new
class-based struggles follow urbanization. Mega cities are spaces of brute
deprivation, but they are also spaces of hope where people contest the
dynamics and outcomes of urbanization. Urbanization, informalization, and
class reformation have occurred throughout the history of capitalism. The
difference today may be simply the scale and speed of events, with codepen-
dent informal and formal working classes growing rapidly in parallel. These
studies leave us with reason to be hopeful, at least, that class recomposition
may occur alongside urbanization. If so, Marxist analyses of developing cit-
ies will generate interesting insights into urban political economy and reveal
the interstices at which capitalism and its ravages maybe confronted. Much
hangs, therefore, on the class character of the new urban proletariat.
The challenge to class in the developed world is the reverse. Where
slum-dwellers are depicted as a vast underclass, the majority of the Western
working class is depicted as exiting upward, lifted by the tide of postwar
prosperity. Together with changing structures of economic production and
competition, rising prosperity has led to “individualization,” the rise of the

“me generation” (Milburn 2006). At the other end of the social hierarchy,
however, New Labour’s “socially excluded” are also depicted as déclassé. They
are an alienated underclass comprising some 3 percent of the population,
marooned from mainstream society and incapable of exercising moral agency
without the cultural re-engineering characteristic of “third-way” social policy
(Levitas 1998).
Account: s8989984
This anti-class narrative (e.g., Beck 2007) has been particularly influential
in Britain and the United States, where combative class struggles remain rare.
However, it is open to challenge (e.g., Atkinson 2007). For example, Zweig
(2001) suggests that the people on the lowest rungs of U.S. society are not
concentrated in an underclass, but tend to move back and forth from badly
paid employment to unemployment as a reserve army of labor. Other studies
reject the dominant prosperity narrative, pointing out that over the life cycle
the majority suffer some form of insecurity and deprivation and, moreover,
that in the heady days before the crisis, consumption was driven primarily
by debt rather than affluence (Crouch 2008). At the other end of the social
scale, massive and increasing amounts of power and wealth are concentrated
in the hands of a tiny “super class” (Byrne 2005). Patterns of class polariza-
tion persist and intensify, as they do in developing cities. What Lasch (1995)
calls the “revolt of the elites” is imprinted on cities from London and New
York to Johannesburg and Caracas.
In terms of working-class organization, although way down from peak
membership in the early 1980s, by historical standards a high proportion
of the population in Britain remains unionized. The proportion of workers
in full-time, permanent employment in the United Kingdom was still 81.7
percent in 1999, down only fractionally from 82.8 percent in 1984 (M.
Smith 2007). Despite the neoliberal assault, most British people still self-
identify themselves as working class (Mortimore 2002). In Europe, militant
class struggles occur frequently, notably in France, Greece, and Italy. Dunn’s
(2004) comparative study of restructuring in four major industries concluded
that some processes have fragmented the working class, whereas others have
had a cohering effect. None, he concludes, makes it inherently less significant
than it was in the era of Fordism. The point is not to paint a rosy picture
of class struggle. It is rather to suggest that those who proclaim the end of
class lack perspective, confusing conjunctural change with epochal change.
Certainly, they are foolish to dismiss Marxism tout court.
Perhaps, then, the mushrooming global-local working class has the
potential to struggle for equality, to which regime theorists and other pro-
ponents of network governance vainly aspire through collaborative politics.
However, it is also pertinent to ask what, if anything, Marxism can contribute
to our understanding of contemporary networked governance. In a premature

obituary to Marxism, Storper (2001, 158) claims that it only ever offered
macro-level descriptions and said nothing about the micro-foundations of
society. The following discussion refutes Storper’s critique, showing how Marx-
ist analysis illuminates the deflected class politics of networked governance
in the United Kingdom and developing a platform for the comparison of
distinct urban network forms, such as U.S. regimes and U.K. partnerships.
Account: s8989984
Networked Governance, Class Politics, and

Hegemony in the United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom, the neoliberal turn began in the mid-1970s

with public spending and wage cuts following the International Monetary
Fund’s New York-style bailout of government finances. Margaret Thatcher’s
Conservatives replaced the discredited Labour government in 1979. Thatcher’s
goal was to restore the national enterprise culture destroyed, she claimed, by
the social democratic welfare state (Gamble 1994, 167). To achieve it, Britain
needed purging of social democracy (220). To this end, Thatcher engineered
successful confrontations with key trade unions, notably the 1984–1985 coal
miners’ strike. In individualization theory, this was the last hurrah of a trade
union movement fatally weakened by changes in the social base during the
postwar period. For Marxists, the defeat had different connotations associated
with the dominance of pro-Labour reformism in the working class and the
cooption of militant shop stewards into well-paid full-time union positions.
In Marxist analysis, the trade union bureaucracy is a privileged, tendentially
conservative stratum, which played an important role in sapping the militancy
of the movement when Labour was in power and in the ensuing confrontation
with the Tories. Defeat was thus contingent, but its effects were devastating.
Organized labor, the left in the Labour Party and local authorities abandoned
confrontation and gradually conceded to the new pragmatics of neoliberal-
ism. Expectations of class militancy evaporated among demoralized socialists
(Gough 2002, 418), to be superseded by a “new realism” (Hay 1999, 1). The
new realism entailed, among other things, willingness among former militants
to collaborate with representatives of the state and capital in new urban
partnerships, in pursuit of scarce resources. Many citizen-activists in today’s
partnerships share painful memories of political defeat and marginalization
during the 1980s and see the partnership big tent, for all its flaws, as progres-
sive. Over time, through habituation and as old practices faded from memory,
what was first a painful necessity became, for many, a virtue reflected in the
prevalent dispositions of those now sharing an ideological commitment to
collaborative network governance (see Davies 2004b, 576–77).
This partnership ethos, or “logic of partnership” (Davies 2009a) arose
from the structural and contingent conditions leading to the defeat of the
working class in the 1980s and the contingent political effects of that defeat.
The idea of “partnership” became part of the common sense of many on
the moderate left in the United Kingdom and, as a “motherhood and apple
pie” concept, influenced citizen activists who might previously have looked
to struggle for solutions (Davies 2009a). Influenced by the United States,
the Thatcher and Major governments introduced urban policy programs
Account: s8989984
promoting collaboration between business and local government. When New

Labour came to power in 1997, the notion of partnership fitted its inter-
pretation of the conjuncture. The demise of class solidarity, the imperatives
of national economic competitiveness and the associated need to remobilize
the citizenry and offer an “inclusive” vision of society made partnership the
commonsense approach.
Since 1997, state-led partnerships have penetrated every sphere of local
government. The discourse and practice of partnership is hegemonic to a
degree that it probably would not be if not for the gravity of the class defeats
of the 1980s and New Labour’s adaptation to them. City strategic partner-
ships are a prominent example. Comprising state, market, and “third-sector”
actors, they are meant to tap into supposedly diverse centers of power, not
through hierarchy, but negotiation, diplomacy and building trust. Importantly,
they seek to include citizen activists in the governing effort. In these ways,
partnerships seek to eliminate nugatory effort, generate capacity, or “power
to,” and enhance joined-up government (Davies 2009a).
Yet, despite dominating the urban political landscape, partnerships are
frequently dysfunctional. Far from facilitating political agreement between
actors with congruent interests, political debate and dissent are taboo in
partnerships. Community activists are sometimes “captured” or “co-opted”
but they are often angry and bitter about their treatment at the hands of
state managers (Perrons and Skyer 2003). Dissenters are branded trouble-
makers and marginalized (Davies 2007). This neoliberal mode of governing,
characterized by the eviction of politics from policymaking, is rightly called
“technocratic managerialism” (Skelcher, et al. 2005).
How, then, can we explain the juxtaposition of the politics and ethos
of partnership on the one hand with conflict, citizen marginalization, and
governmental control-freakery on the other? The essence of the explana-
tion is that the technocratic managerialism characteristic of contemporary
governance is a dynamic outgrowth of contradictions within neoliberalism.
It hinges on the idea that neoliberalism is the unintended, unavoidable, and
unstable synthesis of liberalism and authoritarianism (Davies 2009b; Harvey
2005; Jessop 2002). There are three reasons for this synthesis. First, liberal-
izing governments confront the continuing legacy of postwar “welfarism”
embedded in the public and professional consciousness despite the thirty-year

long neoliberal assault (e.g., Park, et al. 2003). Technocratic managerialism
is one response to this challenge. Second, neoliberal doctrine demands the
extraction of greater value from the public pound by raising productivity and
cutting costs, placing downward pressure on expenditure and requiring the
rigorous performance management of public services. Third, however, state
managers have to manage the polarizing effects of liberalization, marked, for
example, by ever-increasing inequality and concomitant upward pressure on
Account: s8989984

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Critical Urban Studies

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Critical Urban Studies

Cover photo courtesy of Jonathan S. Davies. The picture is the view of

© 2010 State University of New York

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For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY

Production by Diane Ganeles

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Critical urban studies : new directions / edited by Jonathan S. Davies and

PART I: Critical Urban Theory

2. Critical Perspectives on the City: Constructivist,

3. Seeing like a City: How to Urbanize Political Science 41

4. Reﬂections on Urbanity as an Object of Study and a

5. Back to the Future: Marxism and Urban Politics 73

6. Keeping it Critical: Resisting the Allure of the Mainstream 89

PART II: Critical Urban Policy

7. The Trouble with Diversity 107

8. Do Multicultural Cities Help Equality? 121

9. Why Do We Want Mixed-Income Housing and

10. Dispersal as Anti-Poverty Policy 149

11. Beyond Sprawl and Anti-Sprawl 165

List of Contributors 209

politics, the quintessential core of the mainstream, and subject it to a brief

of unequal life chances—being unsure where to begin, given the superﬁciality

consensus, but a once-promising debate about the nature of power in society

actions mesh with the behavior and capacities of citizens is a complication

movement of people away from the dangers of ﬂooding. I refer readers to a

that depth is always a goal to be pursued rather than an accomplishment to

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Jonathan S. Davies and David L. Imbroscio

In this volume, we demonstrate the vitality of urban studies in a double

2 Jonathan S. Davies and David L. Imbroscio

The Warwick workshops provoked considerable debate about the nature

analysis. She further demonstrates how a constructivist, interpretative approach

transforms contemporary political science into an urban discipline, as urban

surrounding efforts to protect minority interests from majoritarian impulses

4 Jonathan S. Davies and David L. Imbroscio

as immigrants not citizens. She mounts a robust case for multiculturalism,

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Critical Urban Theory

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. . . most of the contemporary work on constructing new bases for social

amongst divergent projects—turning inward to build local community strength,

metric analysis of laissez-faire urban equilibrium, produced by a researcher

over a hierarchical, heteropatriarchical rule of experts imposing the Western

to positivist hegemony is said to strengthen the binary thinking at the heart

purportedly objective maneuvers of observation and measurement, and the

Contemporary debates among what historian Peter Novick (1991, 703)

moment when it died within philosophy itself, to be marginalized as “only