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Gordon
Call for Papers on a session entitled: Contesting Post-Democratic Cities
Sponsored by the RGS-IBG Urban Geography Research Group (UGRG)
Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers
Annual Conference, July 3-5th 2012, Edinburgh
Session Conveners:
Gordon MacLeod, Durham University, UK
Lynn Staeheli, Durham University, UK
Kevin Ward, University of Manchester, UK
Contesting Post-Democratic Cities
This session aims to examine the relationship between the construction of a majority urban world and struggles to maintain or promote democracy in those urban and urbanizing places. It welcomes single case studies, comparative research papers and conceptual contributions from academics, planners, think tanks, NGOs, social and political movements, and individuals and organizations from across the world involved in shaping urban, suburban and per-urban developments and/or engaged in nurturing democracy and substantive citizenship in cities, alongside those actively planning and engineering democratic urban institutions and places.
The broader context for the session relates, on one hand, to recent research within urban geography and cognate disciplines which has revealed how political pressures to facilitate a ‘favourable business climate’ and hubs of creativity, finance, gentrification and tourism have precipitated dramatic conversions to city landscapes across the world. They are being expedited in part through substantial transfers in the ownership of land and related accumulation by dispossession as well as post-meltdown financial innovations enabling major infrastructural projects (Cahill 2006; Harvey 2008). Their governance also tends towards a predominance of ‘shadowy’ organizations like Business Improvement Districts charged with managing ‘micro’ urban territories and miscellaneous technologies of street-watch designed to strictly choreograph the spatial practices of citizens (Coleman, 2009; Ward 2010). While such endeavors are endorsed via common sense narratives to secure a ‘clean and safe’ city, critical research exposes how groups like seniors, youth, homeless, low-income, and racialized minorities often feel unwelcome or uncomfortable in the newly contrived urban and suburban corporate citadels, and how these ‘silent’ shifts in ownership of and control over land and property elicit considerable confusion about whether particular zones are public or private, and, in turn, about who has rightful access to them (Staeheli and Mitchell 2008; Minton 2009). Less confusion surrounds the status of smartly constructed new towns in peri-urban Africa and Asia where titanic privatized enclosures are devoid of material public space alongside any semblance of a public sphere of decision-making (Douglass and Huang 2007; Campanella, 2008; Murray 2011). All of which prompts crucial questions about democracy and citizenship: not least about whether the early twenty-first century urban landscape is sculpted to deny the awkward street politics that compromise the neoliberal certainty of financial capitalism and consumer citizenship, and is in effect being convened as a ‘façade of economic power’; a ‘post-political city’ whose bewildering assemblage of highly circumscribed institutions is designed to extend the sphere of governing while simultaneously suturing agonistic disagreement and ‘proper’ political dissent (Swyngedouw 2011; MacLeod 2011).
The second context for the session relates to how any endeavors to settle a (post-) political consensus invariably struggle to fully suppress dissent, alternative voices of reason, and what Castells (1983) memorably referred to as the city’s ‘grassroots’. Indeed the post-political and post-democratic concepts would appear to sit most uneasily alongside an acknowledgment of post-dictatorship democratizations and ‘insurgent citizenships’ in Latin American cities (Holston, 2008), the everyday political mobilizations shaping informal settlements in India (McFarlane 2008; Roy 2009), the role of spaces like Tahrir Square, Cairo in spatializing North African struggles for ‘emancipation’, and recent demonstrations on the streets of European capital cities demanding economic egalitarianism and democracy (Swyngedouw, 2011). And alongside this have been the Occupy protests, with their ‘multitude form’ and innovative experiments in enlightened democratic assembly, participation and political expression (Hardt and Negri 2011). However, Occupy has also revealed how the basic civil right to question the extraordinary in-egalitarian injustices being waged upon ordinary people by states – themselves appearing so keen to cushion a barefaced neo-bourgeoisie following its role in the post-2008 crisis – is inextricably linked to disputes about who has a right to be in premium urban public zones (Younge 2011; Minton, 2011). Indeed incidents like the tightly policed preclusion of Occupy London to enter the now ‘private’ Paternoster Square near St Paul’s Cathedral, alongside the revanchist military tactics waged on civil activists in Wall Street and Zuccotti Park late in 2011 (and the Department of Homeland Security’s sinister ‘silencing’ of journalists reporting the events [Wolf 2011]), in some senses translated the protests into a series of questions about the urban commons and the degree to which contemporary cities can be deemed democratic. It is with this in mind that the session conveners envisage addressing at least some of the following questions about who belongs in the city and to whom the city belongs:
· What is the relationship between the new institutions and practices of urban governance (BIDs, securitization, responsibilization) and the right to the city? Are a variety of ‘publics’ now increasingly welcome to inhabit and enjoy the city with a freedom hitherto unthinkable? Are the new governance modalities instituting a hitherto unthinkable degree of authoritarian control and an erosion of the public spaces and democratic credentials that have for so long been a cherished feature of the city?
· How are relationships between land ownership and control over property being re-shaped in cities across the urbanizing world? How generalized is the process Harvey (2008) describes as accumulation by dispossession? How are we to interpret and indeed conceptualize the relationship between shifts in land ownership, the right to urban space and democracy?
· To what extent is it plausible to interpret early twenty-first century cities as post-political sites governed and polic(y)ed by a spectral myriad of state-economic-corporate elites and shorn of meaningful democratic engagement and spirit? How far do recent events waged around land-use struggles, other civil rights (ethnic, gender, gay), and the injustices of global capitalism and financialization suggest prospects for a progressive urban commons and more democratic urban futures?
The conveners welcome abstracts of approximately 250 words, and these along with paper titles and the full contact details of all participating authors, should be emailed by Monday 23rd January 2012 to:
Gordon ([log in to unmask]) and
References
Cahill K (2006) Who Owns the World: The Hidden Facts Behind Landownership (Mainstream)
Campanella T (2008) The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and what it means for the World (Princeton Architectural Press)
Castells M (1983) The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (London: Edward Arnold)
Coleman R (2009) ‘They just look wrong’: visualizing ‘crime’ and grime in the post social city Criminal Justice Matters 78 December 29-31
Douglass, M and Huang, L. (2007) Globalizing the city in Southeast Asia: utopia on the urban edge – the case of Phu My Hung, Saigon International Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies 3 1-42
Hardt M and Negri A (2011) The Fight for ‘Real Democracy’ at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street Foreign Affairs online
Harvey, D. (2008) The right to the city New Left Review 53 23-40
Holston J (2008) Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press)
MacLeod G (2011) Urban politics reconsidered: from growth machine to post-democratic city? Urban Studies 48:12 2629-2660
McFarlane C (2008) Urban Shadows: Materiality, the ‘Southern City’ and Urban Theory Geography Compass 2/2 340–358
Minton A (2009) Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First-Century City (Penguin, London)
Minton A (2011) Should the protesters have the right to occupy public space? (Opinion, Building Design)
Murray M (2011) City of Extremes: The Spatial Politics of Johannesburg (Duke University, Durham US)
Roy A (2009) The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory Regional Studies 43 819-830
Staeheli L and Mitchell D (2008) The People’s Property: Power, Politics and the Public (New York, Routledge)
Swyngedouw E (2011) Interrogating post-democratization: Reclaiming egalitarian political spaces Political Geography
Ward K (2010) Entrepreneurial Urbanism and Business Improvement Districts in the State of Wisconsin: A Cosmopolitan Critique Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100 1177-96
Wolf N (2011) “The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy” The Guardian 25th November
Younge G (2011) “Who knows where the occupations are going – it's just great to be moving” The Guardian 6th November