Learning Through the Wall: Magnusson and Me
By Eugene McCann
Eugene McCann (Simon Fraser University)
In their invitation to contribute to this collection on the legacy of Warren Magnusson’s thinking, Zack Taylor and Roger Keil stated their main aim as “reintroduc[ing] his work to a new generation of scholars.” This prompt leads me to think through how I first encountered then tried to crystalize his encouragement to “see like a city” when studying politics (Magnusson 2013) and how it influences my research on and teaching of urban politics from a geographical perspective. It is a cliché to say that one can best understand a topic by teaching it. It is a cliché because it’s generally true. Certainly, I need to get an idea “down” before I try to teach it. Then I tend to develop my understanding as I teach. This has been the case with “seeing like a city,” as I will explain below.
In the following paragraphs I will discuss how I grapple with the notion of “seeing like a city” as an urban political geographer and how I frame it for my students. I will outline my perspective on how “seeing like a city” is situated within a wider set of approaches to studying urban politics. Finally, I will discuss why it’s worth engaging with Magnusson’s approach as one valuable contribution, among many others, to the ongoing analysis of politics and space, both as a frame for one’s research and for teaching.
To be honest, I’ve always had a problem with Magnusson’s encouragement to “see like a city.” On the one hand, I understand his rhetorical attraction to this particular phrasing as a riposte to Scott’s (1998) notion of "seeing like a state.” Scott developed an analysis of how modern states seek control over society and territory by rendering them simple and legible through various means. In his reflection on Magnusson’s (2013) book, Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City, Taylor (2013, 800) summarizes Scott’s argument as follows: “[i]n its totalizing impulse, the state simplifies complex social order through the standardization of identities and practices and, in doing so, impoverishes everyday life.” Yet, a central preoccupation of Magnusson’s work, even before the publication of Politics of Urbanism, was more the impoverished and impoverishing analytical simplifications of state-centric political theory and political science, rather than in the machinations of the state per se (although the two can never be so clearly separated). He was interested in de-centering the state in political analyses, calling “for a shift away from the state as the central object of analysis and contention, and toward the political spaces people were increasingly making for themselves through social movement activity” (Ibid.).
To put it another way, while Scott was interested in what it meant for society and territory when the state engaged in simplification, Magnusson was interested in how politics could (should) be analyzed as more than that which is encompassed by, or addressed to, the sovereign state. “To see like a city,” Magnusson argues,
is to accept a certain disorderliness, unpredictability, and multiplicity as inevitable, and to pose the problem of politics in relation to that complexity, rather than in relation to the simplicity that sovereignty seeks. To put it bluntly: to see like a city is to grow up politically. (Magnusson 2013, 120)
Politics is everywhere, he argues, and it is especially evident in urbanism.
It took me some work to get my head around “seeing like a city” as a framing for de-centering the state when I first read it. After all—and I admit I may be lapsing into pedantry here—if urbanism is the model of the politics to be studied (rather than simplified out of existence), we are not trying to see like it. Instead, we should try to see through the city to see the multivalence of politics. In fact, Magnusson (2013, 123, his emphasis) uses this formulation in the book: “when one examines matters through the city it becomes clear that identities, like values and interests, are protean.” He goes on,
the city beckons us to see like political theorists who are in the midst of a world that exceeds our understanding, rather than like political philosophers who stand outside the world and judge it. (Ibid., 124)
Magnusson’s argument has the greatest resonance for me when I think of the task of analyzing politics in all its diversity since I see myself as thinking, researching, writing, and teaching about society, space, and power through the complexities of urbanism and urbanized/urbanizing places. The city is not the one who sees. It is the lens through which one sees.
With my pedantic paralysis (paralytic pedantry?) out of the way and now with a basic “handle" on Magnusson’s argument, I want to understand it in context. From my perspective as a critical urban political geographer who went through graduate programs in the 1990s, an argument that the state was not the only political game in town seemed pretty obvious when The Politics of Urbanism was published in 2013. Critical geographers, among others, had long understood politics as being a complex, ever-changing, minor as well as major, aspect of life and of cities. From studies of public space, to representation and identity, to the relationships between localities and globalization, critical geographers have long travelled far beyond the state, while still referencing its role at various scales, in our analyses (see Ward et al. 2018 for a comprehensive overview).
But I was not Magnusson’s primary audience. He was addressing political theorists and political scientists. While many social scientists had long agreed to understand the sovereign state as the primary authority and reference point through which to “see” politics, Magnusson inveighed against the recalcitrance of his disciplinary peers. From a critical geographer’s point of view, this internal disciplinary debate is like listening through the wall to a loud argument the neighbors are having: the details are muffled but you get the gist and, let’s face it, you know who’s right.
So, for me, Magnusson’s perspective, in general terms, was not particularly new. Nonetheless, the book is well-written, engaging, and shows, rather than tells, its readers how seeing politics lived, multiple, and complex is worthwhile, using a range of fascinating examples. Therefore, it is a welcome addition to the multi-disciplinary study of the political, since more voices in more rooms, echoing versions of the argument that the political is about much more than just the state, can only be useful. Moreover, Magnusson’s focus on the city, on urbanism, and on local politics that was always also part of a global context make it a valuable addition to an existing collection of approaches to place and politics that inform my research and teaching.
In my research, conducted on my own and with my graduate students, I approach politics in and through the city, which is part of the global (thus resonating with Magnusson who argues that “urbanism … is implicitly global. The frontier of the urban is not at the boundary between one state and the next; nor is it at the boundary between state and society” (Magnusson 2013, 122). This has entailed thinking about how urban politics shapes and is shaped by global networks of policy mobilities in ways that involve but frequently circumvent the state (McCann 2011 and see Prince, In Press, for an overview). Other work has involved the creative politics involved in anti-gentrification activism, including an analysis of the politics of social events held in urban public spaces (Mahieus and McCann 2023).
Magnusson has made his way into my urban political teaching through direct influence and also via interpreters, such as Enright and Rossi (2017)—political scientists with strong connections to the discipline of geography, whose edited book The Urban Political: Ambivalent Spaces of Late Neoliberalism includes engagements with the notion of “seeing like a city.” Their book was one of three core texts I assigned in the most recent iteration of an upper-level undergraduate reading and discussion-based course on Cities, Space, and Politics. I required the students to go out and experience “urban politics on the ground” through an assignment where they had to choose an event, protest, or activity that they considered political, in the most broad, small-p political sense. They then presented on a series of questions: What was the event? How was it political? How did the event use urban space and/or how was it about urban space? How did the event make you feel about politics, place, and power? The students’ experiences very much reflected Magnusson’s argument about the multiplicity and complexity of politics. They studied events ranging from political debates (a provincial election took place in fall 2024, as the course was being held, and the state is always part of politics), to art installations, and discussions of health and well-being. These and other engagements allowed them to perceive cities and urbanism as shaped by and productive of various forms of political relations and spatialities that were more or less formal, state-centric, and local, depending on the case.
Not all my undergraduate and graduate students will continue their careers in academia, but some will. Not all my research will look for politics through the city, but most will. In all these future pathways, Magnusson’s work will be a valuable addition to a nuanced, critical discussion of politics and (urban) space. It’s undoubtedly worth the attention of new generations of scholars.
References
Enright, Theresa, and Ugo Rossi, eds. 2017. The Urban Political: Ambivalent Spaces of Late Neoliberalism. Springer.
Magnusson, Warren. 2011. Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. New York: Routledge.
Mahieus, Lise and Eugene McCann. 2023. “‘Hot+ Noisy’ Public Space: Conviviality, ‘Unapologetic Asianness,’ and the Future of Vancouver’s Chinatown.” Urban Planning 8(4): 77–88.
McCann, Eugene. (2011). “Urban policy mobilities and global circuits of knowledge: Toward a research agenda.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101(1): 107–130.
Prince, Russell. In Press. Understanding Policy Mobility. Edward Elgar.
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Taylor, Zack. 2013. “Magnusson’s challenge: Can political science learn to ‘see like a city’?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37(2), 800–802.
Ward, Kevin, Andrew E.G. Jonas, Byron Miller, and David Wilson, eds. 2018. The Routledge handbook on spaces of urban politics. New York: Routledge.
Eugene McCann is Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University.
Beyond Binaries
By Diane Davis
Diane Davis (Harvard University)
Although I regret never having had the pleasure of personally meeting Warren Magnusson, his paradigm-shifting conceptual provocations and widely-cited academic contributions have given voice to much of my own scholarly aspirations over the past several decades, even as they also have clearly impacted dialogue over the role of the urban in political theory and the ways that cities and states are understood across a variety of disciplines. His ideas have long been an inspiration, and in ways far beyond the routine assignment of his writings in several of my courses. Along with Warren’s rejection of the haughty and self-serving academic distinction between high and low politics, built on claims for disciplinary hegemony among political scientists (that still prevail in far too many circles), his admonition that politics unfolding at the scale of the city should not be seen as inferior or less impactful than the politics of nation-states – particularly when it comes to foreshadowing the types of social worlds to which we all aspire – may in fact be more critical than ever in this historical moment. When Warren proposed that a deeper understanding of urbanism as a way of life would provide the basis for more freedom and equality, because by focusing on the city we could see that politics might be built on “persuasion not coercion,” he was doing much more than making a statement about the dangers of national states or even criticizing the obsession with national politics and the unchecked power of sovereigns. He also was highlighting the important role that citizen engagement, face-to-face relationality, and the material grounding of what it means to live, work, and inhabit space can and should play in making better futures based on a meaningful social contract. With these and other contributions, Warren moved political theory away from general abstractions about national state power and about which scale of politics is most ontologically meaningful even as he heralded a call for mobilizing and making claims in and on the city if emancipation is to be the desired socio-political project at hand.
Warren Magnusson’s writings and arguments will and must continue to inspire us all. Seen from the present, I would also make a plea for the urgency of the agenda that he established. In a world that has become even more rapidly urbanized since Magnusson first made these claims, it would appear almost impossible to understand humanity’s political future without seeing or thinking through an urban lens. Having said this, one must also acknowledge that the contemporary era brings us much more than accelerated urbanization. It also has ushered in a resurgence of extremist nationalism and an all-out battle for national state control of territory, whether expressed in efforts to impose national mandates on cities and on the movement of bodies within a single nation-state, or whether expressed in efforts of a given country to destroy or occupy cities of rival nations. Think Kyiv, Gaza, and now Tehran. Bringing this message close to my current home, one need only look at the ways that nationalist backlash in a country like the United States not only comes with calls to annex Canada and Greenland. This particular form of nationalism both emerges from and reinforces a new political divide between “blue” cities and the ostensible aspirations of “red” backed nation-state, with support for the latter partially built upon growing distinctions between urban and rural ways of life. Combined with ongoing global warmaking, these and other recent developments are precisely why we need to keep Magnusson’s work alive.
But might we also take it in new directions to address the contemporary era? Indeed, seeing like a city remains a priority because it will continue to keep us connected to everyday lifeworlds in an era where inequality, precarity, and fear hover over cities and their residents. When federal authorities send in the national guard and marines to Los Angeles to quell urban protest against autocratic presidential overreach and violations of constitutional law, the connection between city and nation loom large. Even if we care deeply about cities and their sovereignty, we cannot put our heads in the sand about the continued – if not resurgent – power of nation-states in their efforts to stop cities from imposing their visions on the nation let alone to advance their own urban priorities through local politics. So how should or can we see like a city while also focusing our attention on the national state? One way is to rethink these binaries.
My own reading of Magnusson suggests that he doth protest too much about the dangers of analytically embracing the politics of (national) states as the stand-in for sovereignty, and that a more nuanced reading of the territorialities of sovereign power might produce a pathway for understanding that states and sovereigns operate at various scales simultaneously, for good and for bad, including at the urban scale. To be sure, Warren has taken this city-centric posture almost as a rhetorical device in order to refocus attention on the urban as the site of politics and emancipatory practice. I am all for that. Yet as a scholar of the global south, whose original writings on Mexico focused on the inter-relationality between Mexican national state sovereignty and the growth and political influence of its capital city, I believe it would be a mistake to analytically separate the political evolution of that city from its nation and vice-versa (Davis 1994). In Mexico at least, the city and the nation were deeply intertwined over the long sweep of history, in no small part because of the political projects of colonialism, independence, and Revolution linked urbanization to political struggles and national economic development trajectories. To the extent that the historical embeddedness of urban and national politics may be less common in the global north, it might explain why Magnusson, writing with an eye to global north scholarship to a great degree, wanted to put his provocation on our collective intellectual map. Even so, we should be careful to always situate these and any other larger theoretical claims in historical and geographical contexts. What makes sense for Canada might not for Cameroon. In my current work on corruption, impunity, and drug-trafficking in Mexico, for example, I have found that coercive tactics and the political power to “grant exceptions” vis-à-vis the law occurs at the city level as much as the national level. I have also argued that drug-traffickers themselves are frequently considered active sovereigns – by citizens and state authorities alike – despite having no formal claim to national state power (Davis 2010). To the extent that in almost all parts of the world there are both local states and national states with jurisdictional authority, and to the extent that in certain places and times sovereignty is as likely to be formal as informal and may also materialize in multiple locations and manifest itself in plural forms (Davis and Mueller 2025), we must think about Magnusson’s distinction between the city and the state with a huge dose of caution.
Although thinking about and “like a city” remains on the agenda, and I would like to suggest that Warren’s legacy can be best advanced by offering an assemblage line of questioning built on critical analysis of the relations between cities and sovereignty. Should treatment of the city and state sovereignty as inseparable hold in all time and all places, why or why not? Is there something about the contemporary era that might lead to a new way of framing the relations between cities, states, and sovereignty? I am confident that if Warren were still with us he would be the first to take this provocation and run with it. Despite the fact that he spent much of his time privileging the urban by arguing that scholars and activists alike need to see like a city, Warren regularly acknowledged that (national) states were not likely to disappear. That is, he was not working under the assumption that sovereignty – or state power – was or could ever be permanently rescaled from the nation to the city. Rather, his desire to see like a city was as much a normative and analytical project as a theoretical abstraction. And that is precisely why his provocation remains so important and powerful in these dark times.
As urban and political scholars we can honor Warren’s legacies by embracing the normative project behind the call to see like a city while also recognizing that states and coercive powers will continue to operate both nationally and locally. In light of this, I would like to suggest that we try to understand the nature of the conflicts that are produced when those who want to “see like a city” – that is, who seek to embrace the urban scale on its own terms – find themselves in tension with those who choose to “see the city like a state.” When is there a clash between these distinctive ways of knowing, seeing, and politically acting in the city; and how might recognition that both are possible change our practical and theoretical understandings of sovereignty? This is an empirical question as much as a plea for urbanists to accept different ways of seeing and knowing how political power operates in cities. I have already made tentative steps in this direction through preliminary writings on competing and overlapping sovereignties and the ways that politics and coercive practices unfold within and between the urban, national, and global scales simultaneously (Davis 2020). In carrying this research agenda forward I have Warren Magnusson to thank, and I know his writings will continue to be an inspiration and a guide for me and for any other urbanists who would care to join me on this scholarly journey.
References
Davis, Diane. 1994. Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. [Translated as Leviatán urbano: La ciudad de Mexico en el siglo XX. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999].
Davis, Diane. 2010. “Irregular Armed Forces, Shifting Patterns of Commitment, and Fragmented Sovereignty in the Developing World,” Theory and Society 39(3): 397–413.
Davis, Diane. 2020. “City, Nation, Network: Shifting Territorialities of Sovereignty and Urban Violence in the Global South.” Urban Planning 5(30): 1–12.
Davis, Diane. 2025. “Deconstructing sovereignty: (Non-)life, territorial power, and the everyday ecologies of hybrid governance (co-edited with Frank Mueller), Special Issue of Territory, Politics, Governance titled, (Il)liberal Governance Arrangements and the Material Foundations of Sovereignty.
Diane Davis is Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism, Graduate School of Design at Harvard University
Forming, Deforming, Un-forming the Political
By Julie-Anne Boudreau
Rereading Warren Magnusson from the Streets of Mexico City
Julie-Anne Boudreau (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)
A political science student's annotations in The Search for Political Space (1996). Photo: Julie-Anne Boudreau.
In order to write these lines, I went back to The Search for Political Space (1996), which I read at the beginning 1997 while finishing writing my M.A. thesis in political science. Apart from the awkward feeling of seeing my annotations from almost thirty years ago, rereading Warren Magnusson was incredibly refreshing (figure 1). Warren was a political theorist who flirted all his life with urbanists. His roots are European classical philosophical texts, not the street. As an urban ethnographer who thinks from the sweat and dirt of everyday life, exchanging with Warren has meant displacing my source of thought. And it was worth it. His reflections on “urbanism as a way of life” and “seeing like a city” came not from ethnography but from a careful deconstruction of classic philosophical texts, which led him to reveal how state-centric conceptions of politics enclose the political.
“From the vantage point of the state (which is the normal vantage point of political analysis),” he writes, “the institutionalization of social movements is simply a matter of regularizing their political form” (Magnusson 1996, 67). The resonance of these lines three decades later, now that I live in Mexico City and work in an Institute of Geography, is astounding. From political philosophy, Warren speaks a geographical language of enclosure and form; he pleads for institutional flexibility in order not to suffocate the political process. Reading this from the streets of Mexico City, where the stuff of political life is all about negotiating in(form)ality, makes much sense. What is most interesting to me is that Warren Magnusson came to this conclusion on the basis of classical European texts.
The irresistible impulse to shape and give form to the political is perhaps the most visible characteristic of today’s urban geopolitical moment. Indeed, authoritarian impulses exhibited by Donald Trump, Javier Milei and the likes can be read as reactions to everything that foregoes the need for coherence, all of what resists being formed. And where does this unformed politics take place? On the streets, in what AbdouMaliq Simone (2022) calls the surround. “The question is whether we can constitute our activities without reifying them;” writes Magnusson, “give them form and presence while ensuring that they don’t become things that dominate our lives; open possibilities without foreclosing our means to reconstitute our activities in accordance with our changing needs and desires” (1996, 101). Warren always understood the dangers of the authoritarian impulse inherent to state-centric politics. This is crystal clear today with the growth of authoritarian regimes; it was not so obvious from the standpoint of comfortable liberal democratic regimes thirty years ago. This is why he dedicated all his writing to “seeing like a city.” The unformed causes discomfort. And as we can witness today, authoritarian impulses to form and shape street politics are generally also anti-urban.
Three decades ago, as a young political science student, I met Warren Magnusson during a summer school at York University in Toronto. His thought had a long-lasting influence on my work, which culminated in an intense series of exchanges with him as I was finalizing my Global Urban Politics book (Boudreau, 2017). Warren taught me many things: that one can be a political scientist and an urbanist. But perhaps more interestingly, he taught me how to combine the philosophical text and the street, how to conjugate the feeling and the form of politics.
References
Boudreau, Julie-Anne. 2017. Global Urban Politics: Informalization of the State. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Magnusson, Warren 1996. The Search for Political Space: Globalization, Social Movements, and the Urban Political Experience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2022. The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture. Duke University Press.
Julie-Anne Boudreau is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Geography at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).
The Magnussonian Approach
By Ross Beveridge
Ross Beveridge (University of Glasgow)
Warren Magnusson’s contribution to scholarship on (urban) politics was substantial. He was a brilliant writer and a highly original thinker. Daring even. I remember first encountering his work in the paper “The Symbiosis of the Urban and the Political” (Magnusson 2014) and being genuinely taken aback (is he really arguing that the urban is the only way to envisage the political? Okay…). It took a while to digest this seemingly outlandish argument, so different from other strands of scholarship on urban politics (let alone politics per se). A real engagement with his work requires a commitment, a willingness to break not only with mainstream scholarship but also sometimes with more critical strands with which he nevertheless shared political sympathies. I was never fortunate enough to meet him – my occasional emails were always answered in friendly and encouraging tones – but I wondered if he quite enjoyed being apart from the crowd: the leftist scholar who cited Hayek, the political theorist who wrote about urbanism, the urbanist who wrote about Vancouver Island, the resident of the small Canadian city of Victoria who saw the world as one giant city. His eclecticism was part of his strength even as it no doubt removed him from academic “scenes.” I am not sure when exactly it started but, no doubt in recognition of this originality, the term Magnussonian crept into my conversations with collaborators and colleagues. What might it mean, then, to be Magnussonian? What kind of commitment could it entail?
The first, and most fundamental, element in any definition of being Magnussonian would be that (1) we can never fully know politics – and this has implications not only for researching politics but also for doing politics. From this, comes the next: (2) there is no entity, no state, that can fully know and order politics – sovereignty is impossible. This is Magnusson’s most well-known, if still provocative, formulation: the state is only one horizon of politics and source of authority, one of many folded into each other in a complex, sporadically susurrous, yet causally cacophonous topography of politics; otherwise known as the “City.” This latter formulation, and the plea to See Like a City, and not like a state, is Magnusson’s most obvious intellectual legacy. It leads him to argue, sometimes almost in the anarchist vein of David Graeber, that through abandoning sovereignty we can embrace new forms of political self-organization.
But as important as this contribution was, this is Magnusson only in a nutshell, a beginning rather than an end. There is so much to glean from a (re)reading of his work, to think with him as he asks questions few other scholars ask. We should never overlook his earlier work, notably the wonderful co-edited and co-written A Political Space: Reading the Global through Clayoquot Sound (Magnusson and Shaw 2002). Of course, much of our attention will fall on his seminal The Politics of Urbanism (2011). Here, Magnusson not only addresses statists (and political scientists) but also activists (and leftist thinkers) with his appeal to disown sovereignty. His point is simple but devastating: we may be able to change the world, but we can never fully direct that change or know its outcome. Politics, for Magnusson, is far too contingent upon far too many moving parts to obey rules of theory or ideological commitment, let alone force of will. We have to ask ourselves: What does this mean for politics, and for the scholarly left? (to whom Magnusson belonged). How can we build a democratic and just politics of transformation when we cannot know where politics will lead? If Magnusson never provided a clear answer, the potency and originality of the question demands our continuing attention. It is such a compelling and vital problematic, so thoroughly resonant today in the contemporary impasse in progressive scholarship about the city and politics more generally. It is also tribute to the final element of a Magnussonian approach (3) being bold, using scholarship to ask difficult questions, rather than demonstrating fealty to a theory or movement. While this brings occasional difficulties in his work (was it really necessary to engage with Hayek as much?), it also provides a critical, self-reflective, and generative edge to his legacy.
This was apparent in what might be one of his last pieces of written work (Magnusson 2024), and what a privilege it was that he responded to a paper I co-authored with Philippe Koch with a very Magnussonian title: Seeing Democracy Like a City (Beveridge and Koch 2024). Magnusson’s focus in his piece was an absence in ours: can an urbanized democracy really deal with the crises confronting the world today? He appears almost to be asking the question of his own work as much as ours, reflecting critically on the legacy his insights provide. Can we confront the challenges of climate emergency, of Gaza, of Trump through the city, he asks? As he stresses his doubts even in his hopes, it is easy to agree with him in our anxious times. It is, as he would no doubt say, difficult to be certain about anything, and no person, scholar or sovereign can provide us with the definitive answer.
Nonetheless, in his own distinctive way, Magnusson has provided political theory, urban theory and leftist thinking with so much to consider, so many questions to ponder and so many daring moves with which we might try to inch forward. As I reflect on what a non-sovereign politics of the city might look like, and how it might compete with the state, I hope that his work reaches the even wider audience that it deserves. To this purpose, and to conclude, I hope that the term Magnussonian might come to enter scholarly discourse and be defined as follows: (1) a disavowal of certainty in knowing politics, (2) a disavowal of sovereignty as the organizing force of politics, and (3) a disavowal of conformity in political thinking, a boldness in scholarship.
References
Beveridge, Ross. and Koch, Philippe. 2024. Seeing democracy like a city. Dialogues in Urban Research, 2(2): 145-163. https://doi.org/10.1177/27541258231203999
Magnusson, Warren, and Karena Shaw, eds. 2002. A Political Space: Reading The Global Through Clayoquot Sound. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 2011. Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. New York: Routledge.
Magnusson, Warren. 2014. "The Symbiosis of the Urban and the Political." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (5): 1561–1575. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12144.
Magnusson, Warren. 2024. "Seeing the city and democracy: A commentary." Dialogues in Urban Research 2 (2): 181–183. https://doi.org/10.1177/27541258241233497.
Ross Beveridge is Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies, University of Glasgow and author, with Philippe Koch, of How Cities Can Transform Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2022).
Warren Magnusson and the Hope of Democracy
By Martin Horak
Martin Horak (University of Western Ontario)
In the ten years since Warren Magnusson published his last book, Western liberal democracies have come to a dangerous inflection point. Their institutional foundations, whose robustness most of us have long taken for granted, seem weak and brittle in the face of a rising tide of authoritarian populism. As the unwritten conventions that underpin representative democracy crumble, elections, legislatures, and legal institutions are being repurposed with shocking speed and effectiveness to serve the objectives of illiberal demagogues and ambitious plutocrats.
How we got to this point is the subject of much research and debate. It is increasingly clear, though, that the long run of democratic stability in the West that followed the cataclysm of World War II was made possible by an exceptional confluence of world-historical conditions. Continuous economic growth – fueled by technological innovation, ever-increasing natural resource use, and the exploitation of labor and resources in a colonized and post-colonial Global South – stabilized and legitimized democratic institutions by ensuring that governments could facilitate profits for capital while also ensuring steadily rising quality of life for most citizens. And until the 1990s, the Soviet bloc served as a foil, a "constitutive other” that further bolstered broad public support for liberal democratic regimes.
The unraveling of this post-war equilibrium has been several decades in the making. In the 1980s, globalization and deregulation decreased the capacity of governments to respond to the needs of their populations, even as income disparities grew. Since the turn of the millennium, the threat of climate change has increasingly called into question the sustainability of the continuous-growth model. At the same time, the rise of the politics of group identity, along with increasing social diversity and inequality in Western countries, have splintered domestic political landscapes. These transformations have in turn fueled public disaffection with liberal democratic institutions and have laid the groundwork for the rise of a technologically turbocharged illiberalism facilitated by the algorithmic fracturing of political discourse and exploited and amplified by unscrupulous political elites. As their legitimacy erodes, liberal democratic institutions risk becoming empty shells, forms devoid of their intended content.
Faced with this reality, how should political scientists and other scholars respond? Most of us believe that some form of democratic practice offers the best hope for just and sustainable governance in our world, but as state-centered liberal democracy destabilizes, what is to be done? Can social trust in liberal democratic institutions be revived? Should that even be a goal? How might the foundations of democratic practice be rebuilt in a world beset by crises and complex challenges?
In response to such questions, Warren Magnusson’s work offers an idea that is both simple and radical: Look beyond the state. For Magnusson, the idea that the state is the guarantor of political order and the primary site for democratic practice is misguided. It reflects what he called, in his 2011 book Politics of Urbanism, the “dream of sovereignty” – the belief that we can somehow become masters of our own collective destiny if we consolidate our efforts to govern ourselves in a single, overarching authority.
The dream of sovereignty, Magnusson argues, has blinded both political theorists and empirical political scientists to the actual foundations of political order, which rest on the human capacity for self-government. According to Magnusson, this capacity is most richly realized in urban settings, where the confluence of geographical proximity and social diversity poses problems of coexistence and collective goods provision that can only be addressed if people govern themselves – that is, if they behave in ways that recognize that their well-being is contingent on their interdependence with diverse others.
This notion of self-government is the foundation for Magnusson’s deeply hopeful vision of the sources of political order and, by extension, democratic practice. The complex problems that arise in urban settings challenge people to continuously develop their capacities for individual and collective self-government. The result, Magnusson says, is the spontaneous bottom-up production of social order.
“To the extent that people learn to live with people who are not of their own family, clan, tribe, village, religion, culture, or nation,” Magnusson wrote in Politics of Urbanism, “it is through the everyday negotiations of life: the ones that enable people who are otherwise strangers to live beside one another as neighbors, to pass each other peacefully on the street, work together, do business with one another, or even come together in joint projects for mutual benefit” (2011, 118-19). These local, daily interactions are not only what ground democracy – they are democracy.
Much like his account of social order, Magnusson’s understanding of democracy directs our attention beyond the state. Democracy, Magnusson writes, “is an idea of equality, a denial of the relevance of any of the familiar hierarchies – not only of race, class, and gender, but of intelligence, experience, and sensitivity – for the problem of self-government, understood not just as a question of individual freedom as modern liberals imagine it, but as a question about our lives together, how we are to manage them collectively.” Democracy thus emerges out of the ongoing practice of self-government at all scales. “To be a democrat in the fullest sense is to believe … that we can work out institutions and practices that enable us to live freely and responsibly under conditions that we decide together, with no person or group of people having any special privilege” (Magnusson 2015, 157).
For Magnusson, then, the state is but one of many spaces for politics, one of multiple sites of self-government, some institutionalized, others not. State-centered democratic politics is part of a much broader set of practices through which the norms and capacities that sustain democracy are developed and enacted. There is something of a Tocquevillian strain to Magnusson’s writing, with its insistence on the importance of local self-government. Unlike Tocqueville, however, Magnusson does not view local self-government as a training ground for representative democracy. Rather, it is a constitutive element of democracy itself, since democracy inheres in, and emerges out of, the interaction of many practices of government and self-government across multiple scales and domains of social life.
Warren Magnusson was no utopian anarchist. He acknowledged that state structures are needed to maintain macro-level social order in contemporary societies. But the democratic potential of the state, its ability to act as a venue for large-scale collective self-government, depends on the character of the many self-governing practices that permeate the society from which it arises. “Sovereignty may secure civilized life,” Magnusson wrote, “but it does not create it” (Magnusson 2011, 18). As we struggle for a way forward among nightmare visions of sovereignty peddled by authoritarian demagogues, Magnusson’s work offers us an encouraging message: Self-government is a deeply embedded human capacity. If we want to build a just and inclusive future, we must wake up from the dream of sovereignty and nurture the democratic impulse wherever it emerges in our lives with each other.
References
Magnusson, Warren. 2011. Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. New York: Routledge.
Magnusson, Warren. 2015. Local Self-Government and the Right to the City. Montréal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Martin Horak is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario.
The Global City After the Global City
By Michele Acuto
On seeing the cityness of politics like Magnusson
Michele Acuto (University of Bristol)
A stern but collegial de-anonymized peer reviewer, a gentle thesis assessor, a kind panelist and all-around champion of all things urban among young political scientists, Warren Magnusson’s insight has touched many of us aiming to make a place for ourselves as urbanists in politics in the early 2000s. Re-reading Warren’s work for this special series has not just been a much-needed treat but a return to the principles of how we make the encounter of urban and political work as the deeply destabilizing geopolitical moves that are shaking up the international order put in question the centers of gravity of the world system, global city included.
As the models of globalism that built much of the contemporary international order are deeply challenged by geopolitical tensions, rampant inequalities, retreats into inward nationalisms, and rife uncertainties, we could be tempted by more radical moves. Should we ditch once and for all the “global city” trope and the idealistic aspirations of the politics of global urbanism, and run back to the seemingly unbeatable nation state? Warren’s scholarship shouts at us to run in precisely the opposite direction. For that, Warren’s scholarship remains timeless and timely.
Warren’s theoretical moves in the late 1990s were already prescient of today’s needed rethink. They prompted us to move from the ”Global City” proper, capitalized as it was hotly debated in the nineties, to a ”global city” viewpoint, as it shaped many encounters with more planetary sciences of the noughties, on to, like Warren put it in a later classic, a (global) politics of (global) urbanism all the better. In that, Warren’s work lends us a hand as a critical viewpoint for dialogue, not just a simple conceptual fix to uneasy matches like that of Westphalian sovereignty and the polis of the city. It does so by reminding us to continually problematize the relationship between the politics of states and the politics of cities. Warren does not shy away from the political scientists’ Hippocratic oath of embracing power and the dynamics of unveiling who gets what, how, and when. It asks us, political and urban scientists alike, to politicize the global city (Magnusson 2001) and in doing so, remembering that means embracing fundamental questions for students of politics: power, sovereignty, order, to name but a few. It stresses an inherent “symbiosis of the urban and the political” (Magnusson 2014). Like all symbiotic relationships, the Westphalian and then the modern political system have benefited from their association with the city as a temporary stabilization of the visceral planetary force of urbanization. Re-reading Warren’s struggle with the global city pushes us, as he did all too recently in a commentary on the grim futures of democracy at an age of populism rampant even across our cities (Magnusson 2024), to wonder if the contemporary political, that of retreating nations and crumbling multilateralism, is still in symbiosis with the present urban.
In that, Warren’s plea is for a simpler and less totalizing conceptual shift. His work speaks of a softer use of the “global city” as a city that is globally oriented and as a global political orientation to the political foundations of the city. It reminds us of how the urban presents a condition of possibility for the political, one that, through connections and relentless encounters, opens up opportunities for a cosmopolitan ethos of (world) politics that is all too crucial in an age of populism and nationalism.
Amidst this mission, Warren’s work is a critical reminder of the need to engage and collaborate across disciplinary divides rather than cave into niche specialism. A controversial 2010s piece was central in my own positionality and came as a fitting critique of the “self-defeating attempt” to distinguish urban politics as its own domain: “not a low politics” (Magnusson 2014) but a “generative one” that sustained states and empires. Not an alcove of specialist urban insight for urbanists, but a planetary science still very much fit for a time that needs sustained international bridges. Even the earlier pieces of Warren’s work are presciently extended in their grasp of urbanization. They do so as constitutive of a “global urban” form of theorizing accessible to the scholarship of global politics. They offer a multidimensional way of thinking beyond the hold of a specific dominant dimension of the city or politics. They require a quick skim through my earlier Magnusson notes in pre-doctoral work, which tells me to have patience with the unsettled and the mutable. Investigations of what space(s) a multiplicity of social movements take place in the global city reveal a “chaotic and fluid order” (Magnusson 1994). Sovereignty is either briefly sustained with a grasp of this mutable complexity of urbanization or fast overwhelmed by urban dynamism that does not stop at the border. Criticism of the state stripping the city of its fundamental capacities to control the agglomeration needed to sustain itself is fitting, as it was in Warren’s early-2000s pieces, as it is at the turn of 2025.
Yet this is not a scholarship of blind urban adoration. Speaking of “municipal foreign policy” as early as three decades ago, at a point when few would have even conceded the success “city diplomacy” has had today, Warren’s work also reminds us that in most cases the municipality is essentially stuck with “observer status in its own affairs” (Magnusson 2013), pillaged by the state, and powerless to most all-too-big international political economic flows. A scribbled tongue-in cheek note on the side margin of a bound thesis (yes we still printed and sent them back then) in a way too long of a literature review chapter summarizing the “global city” scholarship, echoes now more clearly in my little adventure in rediscovering all things Warren: “well done, you found the ‘global city’: now go back and search for the global urban.” And so we do, again and afresh, but conscious of that tradition of nuance in grasping politics in an urban age through an attention to the multiplicity of different authorities at different registers at various scales. Warren reminds us to embrace complexity and fluidity as a politics of urbanism. And in doing so, it stresses we can embrace the possibility of the "open city” to distance ourselves from parallels between the urban political and the nation state.
That reminder sets up some homework for the contemporary political scientists and urbanists to do together, in search of what the “cityness” of the current geopolitical order is. He fittingly speaks of the global city as an “integrative order that brings the world in and lets the people out” (Magnusson 2011). It reminds us of its fragile but all too critical achievement of the city as a “community of communities” (Magnusson 2011). This is a critical normative task: to leverage the open and generative nature of planetary urbanization as a sustained cosmopolitan political project to be taught, researched and practiced even more convincingly, against the grain of those aiming to prey on the municipality’s limited powers to do away with the politics of urbanism. It is a grave task, but one that could do with reading some old-fashioned Magnusson inquisitiveness. Across the pages of Warren’s books and articles, there is a comforting sense of optimism in an age of trouble and negativity. It is placing a hope in the politics of the global city: not in the vain prospect of a global state, or mayors ruling the world through municipal foreign policy, but in the celebration of multiplicity and its generative possibilities, where city diplomacy is constitutive of the fundamentals of 21st century political institutions.
Perhaps, the “Global City” as its 1990s aspiration might have had its time as neoliberal global order slowly implodes. Yet there is still much that we can embrace in the “global city” as a site of possibility where the planetary and the urban congeal, if for a moment, in place, and in a very political way. There, what happens might be uniquely generative of the politics of urbanism that will underpin humanity long after the disruptions of contemporary geopolitics have settled. And there in the global-ness of the global city, small caps, is where we might search for the urban that is building the political of the next age, after the turmoil of the 2020s has given way to a new epoch. After all, as Warren reminds us time and time again, cities were never really contained by states.
References
Magnusson, Warren. 1994. “Social movements and the global city.” Millennium, 23(3): 621–645.
Magnusson, Warren 1996. The Search for Political Space: Globalization, Social Movements, and the Urban Political Experience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 2001. “Politicising the global city.” In Engin Isin, ed., Democracy, Citizenship and the Global city, pp. 289–306. New York: Routledge.
Magnusson, Warren. 2011. Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. New York: Routledge.
Magnusson, Warren. 2014. "The Symbiosis of the Urban and the Political." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (5): 1561–1575. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12144.
Magnusson, Warren. 2024. "Seeing the city and democracy: A commentary." Dialogues in Urban Research 2 (2): 181–183. https://doi.org/10.1177/27541258241233497.
Michael Acuto is Professor of Urban Resilience in the School of Geographical Sciences and Pro Vice-Chancellor for Global Engagement at the University of Bristol.
Seeing Like Warren Magnusson
By Jen Bagelman
Jen Bagelman (Newcastle University)
Warren was my undergraduate and then graduate supervisor in Political Science and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought (a program he co-founded) at the University of Victoria, Canada. After I graduated, he continued to be a life mentor offering patient and wise words over the years.
His mentorship often featured a Socratic prompt, or what became known as the Warren “So What?” question. Rarely satisfied with theory untethered to life, he would push his interlocutors to think in a more grounded way, to get to the “so-what” heart of things.
This line of questioning encouraged a devotion to thinking politically. It demanded an understanding of the stakes. It meant fighting for them, at least a little. It required being answerable to someone, something – somewhere. It was, as Warren put it, “to do political theory from a site, rather than a text” (Magnusson 2003, 2).
Though an urbanist, Warren was not answerable to a noun-like notion of “the city.” In fact, I’d argue Warren was a bit irreverent towards “the city” understood in these terms. Expanding on the likes of sociologist Louis Wirth (1938) – and his notion of “urbanism as a way of life” – Warren was more concerned with a processual and outward-looking urbanism-as-verb. Urbanism as a political force that bleeds out, mostly everywhere.
Analytically, Warren wasn’t consumed by the big cities of – for example – London (though he loved it and visited often). He tended to demystify the so-called capitals of power. He was just as enchanted by “obscure meetings in out-of-the-way places” (2003, 2).
One such place was Clayoquot Sound. If you’ve never been, you might mistake it for a “remote” inlet off the far west coast of Canada. If you have visited, however, you’ll know it as home to a breath-giving coastal ecosystem, teeming with old growth forests stewarded by Indigenous communities.
Here, in Clayoquot Sound, Warren shows us you can find everything: global capital, migration, greed, touristic flows of bodies and goods. And of course, loving resistance, sometimes in the form of the “raging grannies” who locked themselves to trees as a successful campaign to prevent logging.
Warren’s thinking about this place culminated in a book, A Political Space: Reading the Global through Clayoquot Sound co-authored with Kara Shaw (2002). Though its title does not showcase a cosmopolitan centre, it remains (I think) one of the most important urban texts. This is especially considering how it exposes the global realities of climate change resulting from the intensifying extraction of such regions.
Warren is of course not alone in writing about urbanism in these ways. Many will be familiar with concepts such as urban metabolism, planetary urbanism, or “seeing like a city” (Amin and Thrift 2017) each exploring the urban beyond centres or containment. But I’m going to say: Warren often did this with more heart, and in the case of “seeing like a city”— he did it first (Magnusson 2011). Maybe this is because his theorizing emerged organically from decades of living in a so-called "periphery”: an island full of political puzzles if you were willing to look carefully.
Living most of his career here (in this seemingly parochial place dressing up like a British colony) I believe informed Warren’s approach. It inflected his work with the elsewheres easily forgotten by urban theory. As far as I know, Warren never started a paper with the familiar trope: “By 2050 the world will be urban.” I think that’s because in a sense he knew it already was (and at the same time – like Clayoquot Sound – would never fully be). It always-already was entangled, messily ensnarled in a wider set of urban processes: intimately, uniquely, and completely unequally.
As well as not starting with the immediately spectacular city, Warren did not start in the global south as many urbanists have. Some might suggest this was a missed political step to unsettle one’s colonial-Canadian privilege. And yet: by starting where he was – where he lived, worked, and raised a family – and by addressing the immense power-relations therein, Warren’s brand of urbanism offers a uniquely accountable politics. Put in his own words: “refuse the temptation to search in some foreign place for the exotic ‘other’…instead stay ‘here’ where we are…plunged like Alice through the rabbit’s hole and you’ll come out ‘there’ in the world at large” (Magnusson 2003, 2).
This grounded ethos is also an agonistic politics in a Foucauldian sense: One of honestly wrestling with and through various situated struggles – as humble as this may seem. It is also a political, feminist, and anti-colonial type of geography that traces how localities inevitably connect to diverse places, times, and beings.
If politically committing to where you find yourself – right now – was a cornerstone of Warren’s philosophy, this was nowhere more apparent than in his approach to teaching. For Warren the classroom was undeniably a space bursting with urgent political life. Through wild theatrics of hand-gestures and hair flips Warren would morph our rows of wooden chairs into a polis. He became Aristotle. No slides, no notes.
He compelled us, his students, to enter this vibrant city-state. And, of course, part of that necessarily meant getting out of the classroom. He instructed us to attend a local meeting: It doesn’t matter if it is a PTA or a city council. Just get involved, start somewhere, take notes. Notice how people rule and are ruled in turn. Notice who is not there. Consider why not?
For students in their early twenties this could come off at first as a bit… boring. Humdrum local meetings hardly made for edgy headlines. He addresses this type of critique in the Introduction to Reading the Global through Clayoquot Sound where he writes: “Should we have chosen a gorier place, with bodies in the streets?” Following this he says: “If we want to understand new forms and possibilities of politics, we need to raise our eyes above the immediate deployments of violence…and look also at other things that are happening” (2003, 2).
Without ever denying the persistent violence in seemingly "peaceful” places, he would prompt us to observe: How is it that so many different people living cheek by jowl manage to – in large part – get along? Understanding the conditions of peaceful self-governance, however subtle and imperfect, was something that inspired Warren. Heeding his call to notice and learn from these subtleties, I feel, remains vital work in such deepening cycles of war and genocide.
In what might be called nihilistic geopolitical times – where apathy, fear and anger are readily present – we need Warren’s cajoles more than ever: just get involved, start somewhere. This might sound naive, but to my mind this call is one for a more grounded commitment to justice. As I look at my own students today, it’s this practice of remaining politically curious—like Alice by the rabbit hole— in ones’ everyday (expansively conceived) that feels the most challenging and pressing task of all. And in the darker times we must remind ourselves: It’s a political task that we are not alone in facing, in part, thanks to the work of Warren Magnusson.
(PS: Over the years we would occasionally share photos documenting life-updates. This was the last one that Warren sent – a fireworks display lighting up the night sky which he describes as ‘spectacular.’)
References
Amin, Ash and Nigel Thrift. 2017. Seeing like a City. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 2011. Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. New York: Routledge.
Magnusson, Warren and Karena Shaw. 2003. A Political Space: Reading the Global through Clayoquot Sound. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Wirth, Louis. 1938. "Urbanism as a Way of Life." American Journal of Sociology 44(1): 1–24.
Jen Bagelman is Professor in Human Geography, Deputy Director for the Institute for Social Science, Newcastle University.
Seeing Politics All Around Us
By Theresa Enright
Theresa Enright (University of Toronto)
When I first heard of Warren Magnusson’s passing, I was preparing my introductory lecture for a summer undergraduate course on Global Urban Politics. As in previous iterations of the course, one of the first things I have students read is a passage from Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City (2011). Indeed, the text provides the basic points of orientation for the class: establishing a lens through which to approach the multiple and dynamic authorities organizing contemporary cities and offering a challenge to the state-centrism of political science. There is a particularly striking illustration of what it means to “see like a city” elaborated near the end of the book that has long made an impression on me and my students. Magnusson describes looking out of his office window at the University of Victoria and seeing a bunny sitting on the campus lawn. From this singular, seemingly mundane detail, he then proceeds to unravel a dense web of actors and power-laden relationships that shape the landscapes and local conflicts in which the bunny is enmeshed across the global urban continuum.
In my teaching, as in my own research, I draw several important lessons from this deceptively minor example, lessons which resonate throughout Magnusson’s broader body of work. First, seeing like a city expands and deepens conventional understandings of political phenomena. It challenges us to think with complexity and nuance, encouraging analyses that go beyond traditional disciplinary perspectives. As Magnusson puts it, the task for political analysts is not to decide in advance how the world works, but rather “seeing what is there and following the connections that a state-centric view of things tends to obscure” (163). Magnusson’s political ontology thus productively challenges long held assumptions and axioms of political scholarship, according to which bunnies do not matter at all.
Second, Magnusson’s approach to urbanism shifts our focus away from what government does and toward the vital activities of citizens and denizens (even the non-human ones) as active participants in their communities and worlds. It emphasizes that power does not only flow from the top down, it circulates in democratic action, public deliberation, and everyday practices. This vital perspective opens space for imagining transformation and change in myriad and surprising guises. Magnusson’s emphasis on “self-government,” that is the way orders form in the absence of sovereignty, moreover, encourages the pursuit of egalitarian and inclusive polities at multiple scales while privileging the emancipatory potential embedded in local institutions and social movements. It promotes a sensibility attuned to and supportive of expressions of democracy that are messy, intimate, imperfect, and constantly evolving.
Third, in insisting that multiple authorities are involved in arranging and re-arranging urban worlds, the privileged points of political intervention are revealed to be many and diffuse. Territorial boundaries and jurisdictions lose their hegemony, making it possible to think of politics as something happening right outside our windows. Magnusson argues that politics is omnipresent: “the urban world is ubiquitous, and we can start just about anywhere in trying to figure out the patterns of government and politics with which we have to engage” (163). This final lesson may very well be the most important. What Magnusson offers to students of politics is a way to situate ourselves in both history and place, and an appeal to act ethically from wherever we might be located. He invites us to search for the relationships and contentions embedded in built and social environments. In so doing, he calls for reflection on what lies behind appearances – how worlds came to be the way they are – and from this, he urges us to consider how they might then be remade otherwise.
Magnusson’s interventions are not unique. His work is most impactful when read alongside and in conversation with other voices in critical urban studies who push the boundaries of where and how more just and democratic worlds are to be found and forged. But his work nevertheless holds an undeniably significant place in contemporary urban thought and is essential reading for political scientists – both those already interested in urbanization and those who should be.
My students are now completing their final projects in the course, collaborative reflections on how cities across the globe have expressed and experienced multivalent crises, ranging from extreme climate events, mass migrations, and global pandemics to economic collapse and political revolutions. The need to attend meaningfully to pressing urban political challenges has become more urgent than ever. Arguably, to do so, we must recognize and foster a political order that is “otherwise than sovereign” (158). As Magnusson himself admits, this order is non-programmatic, uncertain, and without guarantees. Magnusson thus does not provide solutions, but, with bunnies always in view, he inspires us to trace urban political patterns and probe their potentials so we can all continue to undertake this work.
References
Magnusson, Warren. 2011. Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. New York: Routledge.
Theresa Enright is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto.
On the Politics of Urbanism
By Colin McFarlane
Colin McFarlane (Durham University)
Every now and again, you read a set of ideas that seem to weave their way into how you think and see the world. When I was asked to write this short reflection, I mentioned that I had not even met Warren, much less knew him. “You have met his ideas,” one of the editors replied. For many of us, I suspect, we are in academia because at some point early in our education we felt that power of an idea to change how we see the world. It is from this position that I wish to voice here my admiration and thanks to Warren for his work.
While there is a lot that could be said for both Warren’s Local Government and the Right to the City (2015) and The Search for Political Space (1996), I want to focus here on his 2011 text Politics of Urbanism. With its felicitous and much circulated sub-title “seeing like a city,” this is a book that provides us with nothing less than a way of seeing urbanism. For all the debates on the urban, perspectives tend to fall into one or two broad ontological camps. Either the urban is approached through a focus on the spatially bounded city, or it is located in the planetary, global, and translocal. In a quiet but powerful way, Warren’s book offers another route. Here is a view of urbanism as giving rise to a distinctive kind of politics. A politics that proceeds not in spite of the messy heterogeneity of urban conditions in which the “here” and “there” are always already commingling and piling up into different, unequal arrangements, but through those conditions.
As a political theorist rather than an urbanist, Warren’s arguments emerged not from urban theory but from theories of the state and political change. Contemporary global urbanism, he argued, is a specific kind of political order, one that requires a different way of seeing political change. While radical politics almost always appeal to the power of the central sovereign state, the politics of urbanism demands a serious reckoning and engagement with the powers of urban heterogeneity. The state must be approached through the multiplicity of different kinds of actors, authority, and conditions that we find in cities – public, private, social, cultural, material, historical, and so on – and the complexity with which these authorities interact, conflict, and operate across multiple spatialities stretching across the planet. It is a message that urban activists tend to grasp more intuitively than academics.
To “see like a city,” Warren argues, is to see a politics of multiple forms of governing that must be, whether we like it or not, provisional, changing, and uncertain. This messy and indeterminate vision of politics will not appeal to those who want quick fixes to urban social and ecological injustices, or who remain wedded to the state – vital though it may be – as the sole anchor and arbiter of change, justice, rights and equality. It might reasonably be argued, at a time of rapidly increasing inequality and climate crisis in cities across the globe, that Warren’s liberal conception of a politics of working through multiple forms of authority on the ground is too slow, too accommodating, too open to compromise, and perhaps may even let the state off the hook. What is the appeal of such a politics in the face of the increasing denial of the fundamental rights to the city? (A question Warren took up a few years later in Local Government and the Right to the City.)
The response is to recognize, with Warren, that if urbanism is at once the cluttered and translocal gathering of stubborn material and historical conditions and diverse actors, powers and concerns, then so too must be our political responses. Here, Warren is close to Doreen Massey’s (2005) description of “throwntogetherness,” the concentrated co-presence of juxtaposing actors and conditions through which “spatial politics” must be forged. Any appeal to the state has to be set in a politics that is mindful that urban solutions must always already factor in relations with a plurality of actors within and beyond the immediate city, including even uncomfortable connections to actors we might otherwise wish to avoid but who nonetheless have their seat at the urban table. What Warren is offering here is the need to build politics from and with, whether we like it or not, the often slow, sometimes painful, usually uncertain and unpredictable nature of the variously loose and strong alliances through which politics is made, negotiated and worked through in urban environments.
The response to this complexity is not to retreat to the comfort zone of invoking a vague revolutionary urbanism, but to become further immersed in the here and now of everyday urban life, and to start with what we see around us. To see like a city, Warren argued, “is to accept disorderliness, unpredictability, and multiplicity as inevitable, and to pose the problem of politics in relation to that complexity, rather than in relation to the simplicity sovereignty seeks. To put it bluntly: to see like a city is to grow up politically” (Magnusson 2011, p. 120). Rather than approach this condition as some kind of deficit for a more coherent politics, the injunction here is to find generative possibilities amidst the fragments and alliances. This is a thread of thinking that has directly inspired my own work on urban fragments (McFarlane 2021).
I met Warren through these ideas, and they have been a foundation for my work since. By “foundation” I mean an intellectual grounding, but also an energy from which to write, to put a case, and to do so in an open, generous and conversational framing. This is the power of an idea, in both its content and tone, to change how we see the world.
References
Magnusson, Warren. 1996. The Search for Political Space: Globalization, Social Movements and the Urban Political. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 2011. Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. New York: Routledge.
Magnusson, Warren. 2015. Local Self-Government and the Right to the City. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
McFarlane, Colin. 2021. Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Colin McFarlane is Professor of Geography at Durham University.
An Academic Friend Since 1968
By Andrew Sancton
Andrew Sancton (University of Western Ontario)
I first met Warren Magnusson at a social event for Canadians shortly after I had arrived at Oxford University in the autumn of 1968. He counselled me not to pursue a second undergraduate degree as I had originally planned, but rather to pursue a graduate degree, the BPhil in Politics, the same program in which he had enrolled in the previous academic year. Had I not followed his advice at that time, it is doubtful that I would ever have become an academic. Subsequently, we both went on for a DPhil, even sharing the same supervisor, L.J. (Jim) Sharpe, and graduating in the same year, 1978. However, given that we were at Oxford, where the idea of learning in structured group environments did not exist, it is perhaps not surprising that we had remarkably little contact with each other.
In the academic year 1978–79, Warren was at the University of Western Ontario on a one-year contract. I had been there on various contracts for four previous non-consecutive years. Given our common interests in Canadian local government, we dreamed up the idea of an edited volume of essays on politics in seven Canadian cities, with Warren writing an Introduction and an essay on Toronto, while I took on Montreal and the Conclusion. To our considerable surprise, we managed to round up contributors for the other five cities. The University of Toronto Press agreed to publish, and City Politics in Canada appeared in 1983, long after Warren had been hired at the University of Victoria.
I followed Warren’s career with great interest. It soon became apparent that our concerns were taking quite different directions. I became increasingly concerned with the “nuts and bolts” of Canadian local government while Warren began a lifetime project of questioning the dominance of the concept of state sovereignty as the basis of human governance. In his terms, I resolutely adopted what he would characterize as a “statist” approach in my work on local government. We remained friends, although we mostly moved in different academic circles.
Most of the readers of these essays will probably be more interested in Warren’s theoretical work. His international readers might not even know about City Politics in Canada. I don’t think Warren was embarrassed by the book, but I did hear him say to a colleague at one point that he considered it unduly “careerist,” presumably because it was not primarily devoted to the more theoretical concerns that he had first elaborated in his doctoral thesis entitled “Participation and Democratic Theory: The Role of Neighbourhood Government” (Magnusson 1978).
In my contribution here, I want to emphasize that, in addition to his main intellectual project, Warren was a keen observer and analyst of Canadian local government. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his two chapters in City Politics in Canada. His introductory chapter, complete with seventeen pages of endnotes, remains our most authoritative essay on the evolution of Canadian local government from colonial times until about 1980. And it was written by an assistant professor only about three years after having completed his doctorate.
In the early pages of his Introduction, Warren discusses the principles behind the Baldwin Act, the pre-Confederation municipal legislation for Upper Canada. Somewhat surprisingly (for a “statist” like me), he claims that its first principle was
…that the municipal councils were the creatures of the provincial legislature and were subject to its sovereign authority. This was in defiance of the idea, advanced by extreme proponents of local self-government, that the right of the community to govern itself arose directly from the people and could not be abridged or denied even by the ostensibly sovereign authority. The legislature asserted that the municipalities were its creation and could be altered or abolished at will: thus, a community that was recognized one day as a municipality one day could be denied that status the next. Local constitutions were to depend not on local decision, but on provincial legislation (pp. 6–7).
Decrying the “creatures of the province” doctrine and advocating for the primacy of local autonomy was to be a theme that constantly recurred in Warren’s subsequent scholarship.
Much of the rest of the introductory essay is aimed at showing how and why municipal politics in Canada became largely divorced from the party-political battles that eventually shaped the nature of federal and provincial politics. For many political scientists, this would be a sign of the trivialization of the local. Warren’s conclusion was the opposite:
The idea that municipal affairs are outside politics reflects the popular belief that politics is a matter of party activity. One of the advantages of approaching the study of Canadian politics from the municipal level – an advantage that has sadly yet to be fully exploited – is that it forces one’s attention away from the political parties and away from the legislatures they dominate to the rich field of political activity beyond. It is there that the realities of Canadian politics and government will be found. As students of urban affairs have long been aware, it is impossible to grasp those realities by a political science that sets itself apart from the study of history, geography, economics, or sociology. To understand the politics of cities is to understand those communities as wholes. (p. 37)
As with his earlier discussion of local autonomy, this passage, in many important ways, is an obvious bridge to what would follow, as Warren turned his attention to issues that went far beyond the scope of city politics in Canada.
References
Magnusson, Warren. 1978. "Participation and democratic theory: The role of neighbourhood government." D.Phil., Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
Sancton, Andrew and Warren Magnusson, eds. 1983. City Politics in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Andrew Sancton is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario.
A Political Theory of the City
By Margaret Kohn
Margaret Kohn (University of Toronto)
Warren Magnusson challenged the conventional boundaries of political theory by decentering the state and emphasizing the political significance of urban life, democracy, and everyday practices of governance. Across his body of work, he advanced a non-sovereign vision of politics that foregrounds pluralism, decentralization, and diverse forms of association (2013, p. 235). Throughout his career, Magnusson showed that real political agency often resides not in centralized institutions but in cities, neighborhoods, and grassroots movements.
When I first came across his work, I was a committed social democrat, firmly convinced that the state alone had the capacity to counterbalance the power of capital and to hold those who exploited or dominated others to account. After reflecting on his work alongside that of James Scott and Colin Ward, two prominent anarchists, I have become much less certain (Magnusson 2013; Scott 1999; Ward 1976; 2018). One of the great strengths of Magnusson’s scholarship is that he compels us to confront these foundational questions. My comments, however, will focus on an area of agreement: his insightful analysis of local democracy, in particular the way that Magnusson explored three interconnected rights: the right of local self-government, the right to democracy, and the right to the city (Magnusson 2015).
He pointed out that despite a widespread assumption that local participation and power is important, democratic theorists rarely engage with the practice or even the structure of local self-government. When discussed at all, local self-government tends to appear in two contexts: either in the performative practices of municipal-level participation or in reflections on the growing importance of cities as hubs of culture and economic growth (Florida 2014). Magnusson sought to correct this oversight, making the case for the importance of local practice, decentralization, and democratic reform.
For Magnusson the right of local self-government, the right to democracy, and the right to the city together were related and recognizing the connection would make it possible to see old problems in new ways. He argued that local self-government underpins all other autonomy claims, whether individual or collective. The right to democracy concerns the way that autonomy is exercised, while the right to the city defines the object of political struggle: the urban way of life.
The real world of local politics, however, is far from this ideal. Using his home country of Canada as an illustration, Magnusson notes that Canada's constitutional doctrine subordinates municipalities to provincial authority by treating them as “creatures of the provinces.” He argues that an outdated and absolutist view of sovereignty, rooted in 19th-century constitutionalism, undermines democratic ideals and blocks the creation of political institutions that reflect local needs (2013, p. 225-227). While colonial and provincial governments were often imposed from above, many Canadian cities predate the provinces and emerged organically from settlement and commerce. Magnussen draws on the work of legal scholars like Patrick Macklem who have advocated for recognizing multiple forms of sovereignty, including Indigenous and local, within Canada’s constitutional framework. Local self-government, according to Magnussen, should be seen as a foundational democratic right, enabling citizen participation, direct democracy, and the creation of new institutions. In reality, however, the centralizing tendencies have only grown over time. An illustration of this trend is the decision of the Ontario provincial government to decrease the size of the Toronto City Council in the middle of an election (Archer and Sobat 2021) Despite the loud objections of citizens and local officials, there was no recourse, since the city government has no independent authority.
Magnusson contended that the right of local self-government should not be derived from or subordinated to the state (Magnusson 2015). It should be understood more broadly, applying to a multiplicity of non-territorial and overlapping localities. He rejected the statist assumption that political legitimacy flows from a sovereign national center, arguing instead for a dispersed, relational view of authority in which legitimacy can emerge from multiple sources and scales.
This approach opens the door to understanding self-government as a pervasive and necessary feature of all social life, not merely a subset of formal political arrangements. It implies that we must resist the tendency to centralize and alienate authority. This is especially important in cities, where local governance is not just a question of administrative competence but of political justice and social reproduction. The right to democracy is not just a matter of state procedures like elections or representation but must be seen as deeply entwined with the right of local self-government. Following Jacques Rancière, Magnusson frames democracy as the moment when those excluded from decision-making assert their equal capacity to govern (Magnusson 2022).
Through his work, we come to see democracy as a localized practice. Abstract invocations of “the people” obscure the fact that people live in particular places and confront specific problems. True democratic practice requires governance at a scale where participation, deliberation, and responsiveness are possible, which is usually but not exclusively in neighborhoods and small communities. Yet, as Magnusson notes, most democratic systems deny real authority at this level, disempowering local voices in favor of centralized control.
This sidelining of democratic capacity is not just disempowering; it is also demoralizing. If decisions are routinely overturned by higher authorities, why engage at all? Magnusson argued that neighborhood-level authority could support more robust democratic engagement, but he was also alert to the dangers entailed in romanticizing the local, noting that putting political bosses or charismatic leaders in charge of cities does not necessarily democratize governance.
Magnusson was critical of both capitalist and statist models of authority, which he saw as fundamentally inconsistent with local democratic self-government. Market hierarchies and centralized state control undercut democratic capacities by concentrating decision-making power in unaccountable hands. He called for modeling all organizations on small-scale, voluntary, democratic associations. He emphasized that radical change was difficult, but perhaps still more realistic than the alternative, since reform efforts seemed to make little headway in a political order dominated by the state and capitalist corporations.
According to Magnussen, social movements are the engines of democratization. The right to democracy and local self-government must be understood through their actions, rather than solely in legal or institutional terms. These rights only come alive through political struggles from below that challenge established hierarchies.
Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city” offers a compelling lens through which to integrate the previous two rights (Lefebvre et al. 2009). The urban world that was shaped by generations of collective labor is humanity’s common inheritance, yet is often treated as private property, controlled by elites and closed to the poor (Kohn 2016). Exclusion takes many forms: privatized public space, gentrification, securitized zones, and lack of access to basic urban services.
Magnusson views the right to the city as the right to access this urban world fully as a place of production, expression, and belonging. This requires not only access to housing, education, and employment but the democratic control of urban life. For Magnusson, the right to the city is not merely a matter of inclusion but of transformation. It challenges the foundational inequalities of capitalist urbanism and reimagines the city as a space of shared creation and collective responsibility. Democracy, properly understood, is not a gift from above but a capacity nurtured from below. The right to the city is thus inseparable from the right to democracy and the right of local self-government: together, they articulate a vision of political life grounded in proximity, mutual obligation, and shared power. In other words, the city is not merely a backdrop for politics but rather its primary arena.
References
Archer, Simon, and Erin Sobat. 2021. “The Better Local Government Act versus Municipal Democracy.” JL & Soc. Pol’y 34:1.
Florida, Richard. 2014. The Rise of the Creative Class--Revisited: Revised and Expanded.New York: Basic Books.
Kohn, Margaret. 2016. The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Lefebvre, Henri, Remi Hess, Sandrine Deulceux, and Gabriele Weigand. 2009. Le droit à la ville, 3rd ed. Paris: Economica.
Magnusson, Warren. 2013. Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. Routledge.
Magnusson, Warren. 2015. Local Self-Government and the Right to the City. McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP.
Magnusson, Warren. 2022. “From the Spectacular to the Mundane: Radical Democracy in the Open City.” Identities 29 (1): 63–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2021.1914952.
Scott, James C. 1999. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New edition. Yale University Press.
Ward, Colin. 1976. Housing: An Anarchist Approach. London: Freedom Press.
Ward, Colin. 2018. Anarchy in Action. PM Press.
Margaret Kohn is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto.
Finding Hope in the Shadow of Sovereignty
By Loren King
Loren King (Wilfrid Laurier University)
The whole point of a doctorate, we insist to our graduate students, is to craft original research. We were trained – and we train our students in turn – to find a new question, or a new interpretation of matters we thought were settled, and then to generate new knowledge by answering that question and, hopefully, publishing the resulting book or papers in reputable places (with a glowing acknowledgement singling out our mentors).
The emphasis on novelty is almost certainly overstated in graduate studies, and thus an inevitable rite of passage for all budding scholars is the discovery that what you thought was a pathbreaking new approach has in fact been well-explored.
This was how I first encountered Warren Magnusson.
As a fumbling doctoral student in the 1990s, desperate to find a new research question in well-trodden areas of democratic theory, I wandered into the library one evening to continue exploring how scholars had wrestled with the ridiculously broad search query “democracy and city life.” A more disciplined scholar would have already honed their research question to find a narrow but exploitable lacunae among the myriad works exploring this nebulous theme. I was not a disciplined scholar. I had recently tossed out an earlier idea for my dissertation, in the political economy of development: having found Partha Dasgupta’s magisterial Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution, I was certain that anything useful I might have to say on the subject was likely already somewhere in that volume.
So, I’d found another area of interest and plodded ahead without much focus or resolve. There were countless papers and books on the mechanics of urban politics, and of course several justly famous tomes in history, sociology, architecture, and design on the shape of the city and the minutiae of urban life. But one name stuck with me: a Canadian trained at Oxford, a political theorist, but also clearly fluent in the technical work on urban policy and public administration. He had been writing in this space for some time. As a Canadian studying in the United States, I was drawn to these early works that focused on to-me-familiar Canadian cities and places. But his was also a critical voice, drawing on theoretical frameworks and analytic stances that I was aware of, but not yet especially conversant with. And there was a theme unifying his work, the importance of which I think I only began to see much later: an effort – whether in theory, policy analysis, or political practice – to de-center the sovereign territorial state.
I eventually defended a dissertation that cobbled together, somewhat awkwardly, a range of work from urban sociology and democratic theory, using Anglo-American tools of philosophical analysis that owed a great deal to the philosopher John Rawls. The Marxist geographer and public intellectual David Harvey was one of my readers, who remarked (not without justification) that for all of his critical suggestions, he may as well have been braying at the wind. In the end, my dissertation ended up as a work of analytic political theory in which the city was something of a backdrop and useful foil for thinking about democratic engagement and the political economy of advanced industrial societies. A useful backdrop, to be sure, but neither the inspiration for, or the site of, the kinds of critical, and sometimes radical analyses of status quo power relations that has been the signature of Warren Magnusson’s work and legacy.
Looking back on the sweep of his work – which along with original books, chapters, and articles, also included astute and generous commentaries on the work of fellow scholars, often in the form of review articles – it occurs to me that at no point in his career would Warren Magnusson have ever been vulnerable to David Harvey’s concern with my fumbling efforts to become a bona fide PhD. From his earliest publications, Warren married a critical gaze with theoretical rigour and empirical sensitivity. Even in his analyses of, say, the tangled web of actors and incentives bound up in Toronto metropolitan growth (Magnusson 1981), or the historical trajectories of local government in Britain and the United States (Magnusson 1986), there were hints of the deep theoretical preoccupations of so much of Warren’s later work.
Some years ago, I was asked by colleagues to offer some thoughts, as a political theorist, for a journal issue reflecting on Warren’s delightful book, Seeing Like a City (Magnusson 2011). At the time I quibbled with what I took to be a tension in the work: I worried that the polemical uses of “the city,” as an analytic category, risked undercutting his critical aim of contesting the conceptual and imaginative dominance of state sovereignty. In particular, I felt that Henri Lefebvre went underappreciated in Warren’s sweeping indictment of the western canon, as did the European tradition of subsidiarity that my friend and mentor Thomas Hueglin traces back to Johannes Althusius (Hueglin 1999).
Warren took these quibbles, I think, in the constructive spirit I meant them, although based on subsequent conversations, I suspect he never really warmed to my reading of Lefebvre, nor saw much promise in my hopes for subsidiarity as a challenge to the statist imaginary. Looking back on those reflections over a decade ago, I notice that now – in my research and certainly in my teaching – I am far more inclined to think that we need more polemical force to our critical aims, especially in trying to unsettle, and find alternatives to, the dangerous political conceits bound up in the dominant narratives of state sovereignty.
In one of his last scholarly contributions, Warren offered his thoughts on a paper by Ross Beveridge and Philippe Koch, “Seeing Democracy Like a City,” as part of a forum of distinguished urban theorists. Beveridge and Koch (2024), in the lead paper of the forum and in their earlier book (2022), argued for a vision of the urban as radically democratic. Their project explicitly builds on Magnusson’s work, and Warren, in his comments, was constructive, yet concerned. He agreed with Beveridge and Koch that “urbanization does not undermine (or overwhelm) democracy, but it does change how democracy must be practised” and further, that “we have been plagued for many years by the idea that there must be some sovereign centre from which we can deal with these interrelated issues effectively and democratically.” This, as Warren had argued for so much of his career, “is a baneful illusion” (Magnusson 2024, p. 182).
What troubled Warren here was perhaps a dynamic that had motivated him in another late paper, published two years before this commentary, where he implored us to imagine radical democratic engagement “premised on the ‘open city’ rather than the closed nation” (Magnusson 2022, p. 64). Drawing us back to the pre-modern tensions between polis and civitas and then forward to Arendt and Merrifield (and Lefebvre and Althusser), Warren shows us how democracy is aligned with the openness and dynamism of urban life, rather than the legal and imaginative enclosure of politics understood in terms of nations and sovereign states. Reflecting on the degree to which “the practices of democracy are mostly below the surface of spectacular politics,” Warren concluded that “we already know how to radicalise democracy, but are reluctant to explore its possibilities,” and that “the familiar disjuncture between boring everyday business and the drama of great events is an obstacle to analysis and effective political action” (Magnusson 2022, p. 77).
Returning to his reflections in 2024, Warren noticed that
Distinctively urban issues, of the sort to which Beveridge and Koch refer, are always also environmental. If we need examples of political practices that relate the local to the global, there are plenty of them within the environmental movement. On the other hand, there are issues like climate-generated migration and the sharing of water resources that have led to violent conflicts. Does seeing democracy like a city help us understand how such issues might be resolved democratically? I hope so, but my hopes are often sorely tested. (Magnussson 2024, p. 183)
Looking back over the intellectual richness of Warren’s body of work, and reflecting on his quiet gifts as a scholar, and especially as a teacher and mentor for the next generations of scholars who have wandered toward the city to explore hopes for democracy, it occurs to me that, however sorely tested, Warren never lost that hope. That, to me, is perhaps his greatest gift to those who encountered and learned from him.
What have I learned from Warren? That my worries about the polemical voice were, and are, overstated. We need more critical polemic, to unsettle our familiar vocabularies and conceptual complacencies. In my research and especially in my teaching, I find myself more and more aligned with, and inspired by, Warren’s relentless but always constructive scepticism with those familiar vocabularies of the state and the sovereign center, but also with his willingness to learn from those engaged, on the ground, in the hard work of democratizing everyday politics.
On that final, vital lesson, I can only offer Warren’s own words in remembrance and hope:
When people act democratically, they have to work out how to deal with the little problems as well as the big ones, and they are surprisingly inventive in this respect. If we want to learn how things are to be done, we need to pay more attention to the actual business of local government. Revolutionary dreamers and political theorists are generally reluctant to do this, but local activists have been inventing new modes of civic engagement for years (Magnusson 2022, p. 77).
References
Beveridge, Ross, and Philippe Koch. 2022. How Cities Can Transform Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Beveridge, Ross. and Koch, Philippe. 2024. “Seeing democracy like a city.” Dialogues in Urban Research, 2(2): 145-163. https://doi.org/10.1177/27541258231203999
Thomas O. Hueglin. 1999. Early Modern Concepts for a Late Modern World: Althusius on Community and Federalism, Kitchener, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 1981. "Metropolitan Reform in the Capitalist City." Canadian Journal of Political Science 14 (3): 557–85.
Magnusson, Warren. 1986. “Bourgeois Theories of Local Government,” Political Studies 34(1): 1–18.
Magnusson, Warren. 2011a. Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. New York: Routledge.
Magnusson, Warren. 2022. “From the Spectacular to the Mundane: Radical Democracy in the Open City,” Identities 29(1): 63–79.
Magnusson, Warren. 2024. "Seeing the city and democracy: A commentary." Dialogues in Urban Research 2 (2): 181–183. https://doi.org/10.1177/27541258241233497.
Loren King is Associate Professor of Political Science at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Inheritances
By Rachel Magnusson
Rachel Magnusson
Warren Magnusson with his daughter Rachel in 1983. Photo: Sharon Walls.
Like most teenagers, I wanted to be nothing like either of my parents. My life was going to be much more adventurous, creative and engaged. Besides, it was ludicrous to assume I could aspire to be anything like my father, who went to University at sixteen, studied at Oxford, and could nonchalantly provide names, dates and detailed historical context on any possible topic at the kitchen table. No, I was going to be my own person.
Now, in my mid-40s, it is easy to see that I wasn’t successful at escaping his influence. I set out to study literature and theatre and then found myself studying political theory. I thought I might be a high school teacher and then found myself running citizens’ assemblies. I dreamed of living in a cabin in the woods and then found myself living in cities, eventually working for the City of Vancouver to design and manage spaces for public life. Turns out I was Warren’s daughter after all.
Of course, these markers of influence – political theory, democracy, cities – are a bit of a distraction, a decoy. They suggest that Warren and I simply shared the same interests. I don’t think we did, really. Instead, I think what I inherited from my dad were some core assumptions about the world and people that led me, in a roundabout way, to shared places and terrains.
When I consider this, I see two basic tenets that guided him as a person and a thinker: people are capable and be humble because the world is complex. The second of these tenets was the most obvious to me growing up, and likely also the most obvious to his students in the classroom. He would let me speak with assurance and make a righteous argument about how things ought to be. He would give my declarations space, letting me revel in my brilliance and certainty. And then, gently, he’d ask a question. Something simple. I’d find, somehow, the definite picture I’d painted begin to loosen, swirl. Maybe I’d made it too easy. He didn’t offer an answer or a way out, instead he’d hold the unraveling picture with me: it had just become interesting. The complexity didn’t scare him, it drew him. He wanted to hold it with you and marvel. Wasn’t the world an interesting place? Don’t be angry that you don’t know; relish it.
The first tenet, however, wasn’t so directly expressed. Likely because he would have been too embarrassed to assert such a simplistic belief. Nevertheless, this belief, this hope is so clearly at the root of all his thinking. As he states in the first sentence of his final book reflecting on his academic career: “This book is haunted by an old idea: the thought that people could actually come together in their own communities and decide for themselves how things ought to be” (Magnusson 2015, p. 3). It is this idea of the capacity of people and how it gets perpetually set aside and ignored in our political thinking that led to his study of local democracy and social movements, his critiques of the state and sovereignty, his arguments about seeing like a city. There is nothing simplistic in these journeys of thought – he details the complexity with care and appreciation – but there is a simple belief motivating his efforts. And this belief, this fundamental generosity towards others, quietly grounded not only his academic work but also his relationships with colleagues, students, friends.
Now that I am older, and now that Warren’s gone, I hope to try to hold these inheritances more consciously and more deeply. They are not assumptions one can possibly live out all the time – a neat and pithy answer is thrilling, and, god, can people ever be dumb and disappointing! And yet. And yet, what I want for most in my years ahead is to come back to and practice these inheritances from my dad and their profound wisdom, their profound challenge.
References
Magnusson, Warren. 2015. Local Self-Government and the Right to the City. Montréal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Dr. Rachel Magnusson is the Associate Director of Street Activities at the City of Vancouver and is Warren's daughter.
Warren Magnusson: Pedagog and Activist
By William K. Carroll
William K. Carroll (University of Victoria)
Warren Magnusson was a brilliant political theorist, but as he noted in The Search for Political Space (1996, p. vii), “I like to think that my empirical work has grounded my theoretical reflections, and vice versa.” Indeed, Warren’s astute studies of municipal radicalism informed, and were informed by, his deep critiques of state-centric political thought. Yet in the 1980s, when neoliberalism began to be implemented across the advanced capitalist world, Warren went beyond the academic dialectic of empirical work and theoretical reflection to lead two important political initiatives, centered at the University of Victoria (UVic), but with wider ramifications. Both forays into praxis led Warren on a path toward some of his major theoretical contributions, as presented in The Search for Political Space.
The first of these originated in a local political crisis in 1983, provoked by the “restraint program” that British Columbia’s Social Credit government introduced in May of that year. Inspired by Thatcherism, the program was the first full-fledged neoliberal assault on human rights and social welfare in Canada. By the closing weeks of 1983, in the aftermath of an escalating political strike and multi-sectoral protest movement – the Solidarity Coalition – academics at UVic were ready to push back. It was Warren who stepped forward, convening a group that became the Committee on Alternatives for British Columbia – CABC.
Under his leadership the CABC produced two books that critiqued neoliberalism and offered alternatives with contributions mainly from UVic academics. As a member of the CABC steering committee and co-editor of the first book, The New Reality: The Politics of Restraint in British Columbia, I experienced Warren’s democratic style of leadership directly. He inspired the team of 20 contributors to produce highly accessible, public-facing analyses. The book focused on the specificities of British Columbia yet placed them in the context of global developments, emphasizing in its Conclusion (which Warren penned most of) that “local as well as global developments give rise to opportunities for political action” (Magnusson et al. 1984, p. 277). Released only months after the political strike of 1983, The New Reality quickly became a BC bestseller, providing resources to critical social movements and publics in the ongoing fight-back. Two years later, the CABC published a second book, After Bennett: A New Politics for British Columbia, which again mobilized a network of progressive academics, this time to explore the possibility of creating “an authentically democratic society” in which British Columbians could take control of their communities and working lives (Magnusson et al. 1986, p. 14).
Under Warren’s leadership, the CABC continued to create new political spaces into the late 1980s: for instance, through a series of public forums on “The Politics of Empowerment” in 1987 and 1988. Nearly a decade on, he reflected on a key lesson from his CABC activism: that civic progressives, urban radicals, and local socialists were all searching for political space in the contemporary crisis of social democracy. “…What I sensed in the 1980s was that many radicals had been driven – sometimes against their better judgment – to explore the political space offered by urban politics and municipal government, in the hope that this would connect them with a wider political base and give them a place within the state to contest the logic of contemporary capitalism” (Magnusson 1996, p. 21).
As other progressive think tanks emerged, the CABC fell dormant, but the network that had developed within UVic served as a basis for the second important initiative. In 1987, Warren led the complex process that begat an interdisciplinary graduate program in Contemporary Social and Political Thought (CSPT) which, amid various academic orthodoxies, opened political space to critical theory in the social sciences and humanities. Warren directed the program from its inception in 1988 to 1994, when I served a term as director. In these years, the program expanded from its three initial participating departments (Political Science, Philosophy and Sociology) to include English and History (and rebranded itself as Cultural, Political, and Social Thought). Warren and I co-taught the first CSPT 500 course, in the fall of 1988, during which I came to appreciate his Socratic pedagogy, which offered more questions than answers, inspiring a keen group of students to engage critically with a wide range of theoretical perspectives. CSPT was designed as an interdisciplinary critical theory program that could be taken up within discipline-specific graduate programs. This model, Warren’s brainchild, has been effective in building and maintaining a progressive community on campus around critical theoretical perspectives, with alumni numbering in the hundreds and nine academic units currently participating.
Warren Magnusson went on, in succeeding decades, to make signal theoretical contributions, and he is rightly renowned as a path-breaking political theorist of urban modernity. But the instances I have recalled invite us to recognize his practical contributions in creating more space for critical thought and action. He combined theory and practice in creative and impactful ways, interrogating the prospects for and facilitating the expansion of the spaces from which change can emanate, within academe and well beyond it.
References
Magnusson, Warren, William K. Carroll, Charles Doyle, Monika Langer, and R.B.J. Walker, eds. 1984. The New Reality: The Politics of Restraint in British Columbia. Vancouver: New Star Books.
Magnusson, Warren, Charles Doyle, R.B.J. Walker, and John DeMarco, eds. 1986. After Bennett: A New Politics for British Columbia. Vancouver: New Star Books.
Magnusson, Warren. 1996. The Search for Political Space: Globalization, Social Movements, and the Urban Political Experience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
William K. Carroll is a Professor of Sociology at University of Victoria.
Radical Democratic Possibilities of the City
By Engin Isin
Engin Isin (Queen Mary University of London)
When I learned of Warren’s passing, my initial reaction was to write, “Warren has been a very special person and scholar to me since I began writing almost forty years ago. Our paths crossed many times, and I learned so much from him not only about scholarly writing but also about acting ethically and politically. That was his greatest gift to me. I have always been so grateful for his support and presence.” Later, I realised that the tense in which I reflected on Warren was present perfect, not past. This wasn’t only because I was deeply saddened, but because Warren has always been a strong presence as a mentor, and he will remain so.
Warren’s work published in the 1980s was revelatory when I was writing my doctoral thesis on the longue durée history of the Canadian city (Isin 1990). He had published on postwar metropolitan reform movements from a post-Marxist perspective on the capitalist city (Magnusson 1981), on the local-state in Canada (1985a), on the political economy of the local-state (Magnusson 1985b), and a critique of histories of local government (Magnusson 1986). The central argument of this work was that the local-state or local government could not be simply derived from the theories of the state, and that the city has a distinct logic that requires historical and theoretical analysis. Having conducted these analyses, Warren’s conclusion was startlingly simple yet powerful: the state needs to be retheorised as a distributed and decentralised organisation of power and capital, in which the city plays a crucial and antagonistic role. Warren provided a brilliant account of the historical development of municipal government in Canada (Magnusson 1983a) and used it to provide an equally brilliant analysis of the city of Toronto (Magnusson 1983b). I cannot claim that a newly arrived émigré in his mid-20s struggling with English could thoroughly understand the nuances and subtleties of this body of work, but it certainly left an indelible mark on my intellectual trajectory on the city and its radical democratic possibilities.
Shortly after finishing my thesis, we met either in Montreal (1992) or Vancouver (1993) during a conference. I didn’t realise he was in the audience when he introduced himself after my talk, but as our conversation progressed, I realised he was a special person. He was generous, inquisitive, and interested in my views on the long history of the Canadian city, stretching back to the twelfth century Europe, as a history of the present. I would later regard him as a mentor.
Our next encounter was probably in Berlin (1995) when we both gave papers in a conference. By then, I had published my thesis as a book (1992). Warren was once again so generous and critical. We had conversations about the long history of the Canadian city, spanning from colonial to imperial and state organisations of power and capital. His insightful comments on the emergence of the “citizen” category between the thesis and the book were pivotal in shaping my subsequent work on the city as a space of citizenship. He was working on his great book The Search for Political Space (Magnusson 1996), and I had the privilege of hearing how he had developed his earlier historical and theoretical ideas about the city into a concept of political space.
Warren’s book made a significant contribution to my understanding of the state and city, and their relations, through a political space perspective. He articulated political space as an object of analysis, challenging the notion that cities, states, and empires are stable entities. Instead, he saw them as formations of power and capital. This approach was incredibly generative, refreshingly post-disciplinary, and politically radical. For instance, his critique of the concept of the global city was formidable because it reified rather than revealed the political conditions that made it possible (Magnusson 2000).
In 1998, Warren visited York University, where I was teaching, for a conference and summer school. The intellectual excitement was immense about his work on politicizing space and the idea of the city, and it was a memorable experience for all participants.
When Warren published an edited collection with Karena Shaw on the struggles of indigenous peoples in Clayoquot Sound (Magnusson and Shaw 2002), his concept of political space as a concentration and condensation of relations of power and capital traversing diverse forms and scales demonstrated the intellectual and political force of his work over the past twenty years.
Warren often revisited his earlier concerns and concepts by engaging current political debates. He questioned whether municipalities are creatures of provinces (Magnusson 2005b), whether we need to protect the rights of local self-government (Magnusson 2005a), and recognised the place of local government in urbanism (Magnusson 2005c). This reworking introduced him to a new generation of scholars and activists engaged in new politics of cities in the twenty-first century.
Warren distilled all his experience and knowledge of almost thirty years in Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City (Magnusson 2011), where he developed a succinct statement on the city as a space of struggle over democratic possibilities. He evoked latent concerns about democratic possibilities of the city beyond local government, as a crucial political space. As Roger Keil observes in Brunet-Jailly et al. (2013, 794), Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City was anticipated as a sequel to The Search for Political Space (1996) in two significant ways: “… it steps far outside the canon of political urbanism; and it becomes a more urgent, almost corrosive force applied onto the political narratives we have been telling ourselves, in the discipline but also in the practice of politics, about what it actually is that we do.” These two books both encapsulate and rework Warren’s political theory of the city, providing new interpretations of his earlier research and anticipating or provoking further research.
Warren continued to return to his earlier research, reinterpreting and reworking it for a new generation and addressing new problems. He rearticulated the internal relation between politics and the city (Magnusson 2014), seeing the city beyond critical urban studies, how to rethink the city as an object of international political sociology (Magnusson 2015), and radical democratic possibilities of the city (Magnusson 2021) as a right to local self-government (Magnusson 2023). Warren’s continued invitation to think about the city as a transversal political space with radical democratic possibilities has been a beacon for my research, writing, and teaching. We kept crossing paths in both online and offline events, and I was always inspired by his thoughts on the current radical political possibilities.
Over forty years since I read his work, Warren continues to inspire my own writing and research. He remains the same person to me: generous but critical, stimulating yet questioning, always inviting me to think through problems as they arise by keeping an eye on political space as the space where political forms appear and radical democratic possibilities of political life unfold.
References
Brunet‐Jailly, Emmanuel, Serena Kataoka, Roger Keil, Andrew Sancton, and Zack Taylor. 2013. ‘Commentary on Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City by Warren Magnusson’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37 (2): 790–803.
Isin, Engin. 1990. ‘The Birth of the Modern City in British North America’. PhD Thesis, Toronto: University of Toronto.
Isin, Engin. 1992. Cities Without Citizens: Modernity of the City as a Corporation. Montreal: Black Rose Books.
Magnusson, Warren. 1981. ‘Metropolitan Reform in the Capitalist City’. Canadian Journal of Political Science 14 (September): 557–77.
Magnusson, Warren. 1983a. ‘Introduction: The Development of Canadian Urban Government’. In City Politics in Canada, edited by Warren Magnusson and Andrew Sancton, 1–57. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 1983b. ‘Toronto’. In City Politics in Canada, edited by Warren Magnusson and Andrew Sancton, 94–139. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 1985a. ‘The Local State in Canada: Theoretical Perspectives’. Canadian Public Administration / Administration Publique Du Canada 28 (4): 575–99.
Magnusson, Warren. 1985b. ‘Political Science, Political Economy, and the Local State’. Urban History Review 14 (1): 47–53.
Magnusson, Warren. 1986. ‘Bourgeois Theories of Local Government’. Political Studies 34: 1–18. Magnusson, Warren. 1996. The Search for Political Space: Globalization, Social Movements, and the Urban Political Experience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 2000. ‘Politicizing the Global City’. In Democracy, Citizenship, and the Global City, edited by Engin Isin, 289–306. Innis Centenary Series. London: Routledge.
Magnusson, Warren. 2005a. ‘Protecting the Right of Local Self-Government’. Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue Canadienne de Science Politique 38 (4): 897–922.
Magnusson, Warren. 2005b. ‘Are Municipalities Creatures of the Provinces?’ Journal of Canadian Studies 39 (2): 5–30.
Magnusson, Warren. 2005c. ‘Urbanism, Cities and Local Self-Government’. Canadian Public Administration/Administration Publique Du Canada 48 (1): 96–123.
Magnusson, Warren. 2011. Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. Interventions. London: Routledge.
Magnusson, Warren. 2014. ‘The Symbiosis of the Urban and the Political’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (5): 1561–75.
Magnusson, Warren. 2015. ‘Bringing Politics Back In’. International Political Sociology 9 (1): 91–93.
Magnusson, Warren. 2021. ‘From the Spectacular to the Mundane: Radical Democracy in the Open City’. Identities 29 (1): 63–79.
Magnusson, Warren. 2023. ‘The Right to Local Self-Government’. In Handbook on Local and Regional Governance, edited by Filipe Teles, 39–48. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Magnusson, Warren, and Karena. Shaw. 2003. A Political Space: Reading the Global Through Clayoquot Sound. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Marcuse, Peter, David Imbroscio, Simon Parker, Jonathan S. Davies, and Warren Magnusson. 2014. ‘Critical Urban Theory versus Critical Urban Studies: A Review Debate’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (5): 1904–17.
Engin Isin is Professor Emeritus of International Politics, Queen Mary University of London.
Thinking Alongside, Provoking Transformation
By Karena Shaw
Karena Shaw (University of Victoria)
I had the good fortune to meet Warren Magnusson at an uncertain time in my career. I was laboring away on a dissertation that was making me question whether I really was a political theorist, or wanted to be. I was engrossed in the grassroots social-ecological politics unfolding in Clayoquot Sound, but my education in politics offered me vanishingly little to contribute there – a humbling realization that deepened my uncertainty about career trajectories. I loved teaching, but it looked unlikely to lead to a job, let alone tenure.
Then Warren and I began talking about politics, in particular the politics of Clayoquot Sound. He was so curious, and thoughtful. He asked hard questions, engaged my answers seriously, and pushed me to articulate my observations and analyses as if they actually held potentially valuable insights. He tossed hand grenade queries my way, helping to dislodge my deeply held assumptions about what was, and wasn’t, important about what was happening there, and why. These were some of the most exciting, challenging, and intellectually engaged conversations of my career; they truly changed me.
There were two aspects of Warren’s approach that altered – and enriched – the trajectory of my work, both of which are deeply embedded in his scholarship. The first was his insistence that the struggles over the future of Clayoquot Sound had to be understood not only as a conflict over forestry, or Indigenous rights and title, or community wellbeing, but also as a site of urban politics. Warren insisted on redrawing the spatial assumptions that located Clayoquot Sound as out-of-the way or marginal, but also – against all the environmentalist framings – as unique and, by virtue of its (perceived) pristine nature, set apart from the mucky political economy of urban life. I protested this mightily, but of course this conceptual jiu-jitsu was essential to understanding what unfolded there, as the needs and desires of cappuccino-drinking urbanites came to reshape the resource extraction economy of and at the margins, while clearcut logging continued apace in other out-of-the-way places. Warren’s ability to appreciate the spectacular “wildness” of the Sound while simultaneously recognizing it as defined in part by its centrality to circuits of urban life opened a crucial conceptual landscape – one yet to be adequately explored.
The other gift I received from Warren emerged from how he engaged with practitioners. Warren didn’t see the activists and community members I worked alongside in Clayoquot Sound as objects to be studied, or informants, or agents acting within a determining system. He saw them as fellow travellers, engaged in the same intellectual and personal project that motivated him: that of figuring out how power and politics worked, of innovating and stretching the boundaries of how we thought about and acted in the world in the service of advancing collective efforts to make things better. When he engaged with them, he sought to think alongside them, to draw out their understandings of and insights about their strategic choices, and the landscapes that shaped them. And he did so with generosity and rigor, good humor, incisive critique, and no shortage of skepticism.
This may seem a small thing, but it isn’t. Warren’s writing is infused by his deep respect for those who practice politics, who innovate to create new political spaces amidst at times paralyzing narratives and crushing realities. His skilled questioning would lead activists to articulate nuanced strategic judgements evidencing deep insight into political space and possibility. Their responses and questions would likewise cause him to reflect, reconsider, and at times struggle with his own assumptions. And then the conversations would get really interesting, as they explored together the implications and future trajectories of their work. All would leave challenged, and changed, but also buoyed by the recognition of their fellow travelers.
The rich insights from these conversations informed Warren’s thinking, offering him the data and insight to challenge conceptual and disciplinary closures that unproductively constrained conventional understandings of politics, especially – but not exclusively – urban politics. His ability to draw out and articulate these landscapes with nuance and precision was extraordinary and offers us an important legacy: an approach to urban politics that holds open questions of how political space is constituted, and invites investigation into how and why this matters.
My intellectual and personal trajectories were transformed by my collaboration with Warren: he helped me to see how I could be the kind of political thinker I wanted to be, one deeply engaged by and responsive to the practice of politics, by how people – a wide diversity of people – understood their worlds, rejected what was presented to them as inevitable, and collaborated and innovated to open new possibilities, new political spaces. By taking interlocutors seriously and putting them into critical conversation with the rich inherited traditions of political theory, he showed me how to move what felt like a private passion into something real in the world, something that engaged and inspired other people, that held up the work of truly innovative political thinkers and actors, opening it to recognition, to critique, to being a part of the conversation about the past, present and future of politics.
I know that I am not alone in having my intellectual landscape reshaped by Warren. As a colleague, I observed generations of students gripped by and grappling with the world as Warren saw it. A gifted and committed teacher, he brought theatre into the classroom, not just offering well-crafted lectures but performances designed to provoke, to inspire, to engage. He invited students to take their worlds, themselves, and their intellectual inheritances seriously, by treating them seriously. I have a visceral recollection of walking into a classroom at the conclusion of one of Warren’s lectures, feeling the air vibrating as students paused, savouring the richness of the experience for a moment before carrying on with their lives.
Warren’s writings – infused as they are with his passion for democratic politics, his appreciation of “everyday” political innovation, and his always-incisive analysis – offer us crucial touchstones to help navigate these fraught times. But the legacy that I find myself appreciating most deeply rests in his ability to craft profound questions, of the kind that shift mental landscapes. Posing these questions required not only having a broad and deep understanding of the intellectual landscapes we have inherited, but the ability to listen deeply to others, to perceive tensions or blockages in their thinking, and to be curious about how they might navigate their way forward. His questions invited deeper engagement in hopes of opening possibilities for thinking and being otherwise.
These are the kinds of questions we need to be asking and conversations we need to be having in this political moment. Insofar as his work provokes us in this way, I think this is a legacy that Warren would value. I’m so very grateful to him for offering it to us.
Karena Shaw is Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria. She and Warren Magnusson co-edited A Political Space: Reading the Global through Clayoquot Sound (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), and enjoyed many long conversations about politics and life in the years that followed.
For Warren: I Wouldn’t be Me Without Him
By Delacey Tedesco
Delacey Tedesco (Okanagan College)
This is a hard loss. I first took a class with Warren in 1998 called, if I remember correctly, Hegel and His Discontents. I was a third-year undergraduate student, returning to the University of Victoria after an exchange year at the University of Exeter, a year teaching English in Japan, and a year off recovering from the year teaching English in Japan. I hadn’t been in an upper-level class before, and I hadn’t been in any university setting for a couple years. I was terrified. I don’t think I ever became less terrified of the class, or of Warren, that term. And I remain terrified of Hegel.
But I realized, as I thought, that actually I would have met Warren and Sharon, and I think Rachel too, in December of 1993 or 1994, as they generously hosted the graduated students in the Politics program for a holiday gathering; I was there as the date of someone doing his MA in the program and working with Warren to read William Morris as a utopian socialist. So, that means that I knew Warren for 30 years, and worked with him closely for 25 years, as he became the supervisor and co-supervisor of my Honours, MA, and PhD projects.
It was a challenge, in the early years, to overcome the fear I had developed, as he seemed this towering figure, with the all the world’s knowledge at his fingertips… as though when he closed his fingertips together as he spoke, which he did often, he was closing a circuit and allowing the knowledge to flow unimpeded. He pushed hard, and he was demanding, in ways that left me sure that he saw me as very stupid and very lazy and very unsatisfactory. He would seem exasperated and disappointed, and I would become defensive and shut down, which made him exasperated and disappointed.
Over the early years, we had to work through these stories we had created about each other and find our way to a more honest and more vulnerable place of connection. When I think back on some of those exchanges, I can notice that he was perhaps the only person I was being honest with at the time, which says a lot about how much I was willing to risk to find a way not just to work with him, but to connect with him – to trust him.
Over the past month, I’ve tried to find ways to reconnect. I have searched for videos that might capture his amazing capacity for telling stories in the classroom, weaving spells on his audience. But nothing can bring back the feeling of being in his presence as he spoke, whether in a full lecture hall or in his living room. I’ve gone back through years and years of emails, seeing everything he gave me laid out chronologically: countless letters of recommendation for countless job applications, many of them totally implausible, yet he never complained; pictures of Rachel with Daniel, sent with such love and pride, as I was getting used to mothering my own twin boys and sending just as many photos with just as much love and pride; and always, that mix of careful reading, insightful analysis, theoretical singularity, generous engagement, and what I came to trust was his absolutely characteristic warmth, under the often dry delivery.
So I want to celebrate the contributions he has made, not just to me, but to everyone who has engaged with him and his work. And I want to do so in his own words, as he was a consummate storyteller who spoke and wrote with such voice.
Anyone familiar with Warren likely witnessed his amazing ability to come into a lecture with a few notes on yellow legal notepaper and tell an elaborate story that traced a line of thought or argument through the centuries, as though it were the sole, essential perspective on all those years. The one story that we couldn’t live without. And then the following class, with another brief set of notes, he would do it all over again, only developing a different line of argument or a different concept, a different lineage of texts and authors. Everything came as an inherent story, and in duration of the telling – articulated by his gestures, wrapped in his voice – it was the only story.
In my one brief experience working with him in a more editorial capacity, on a forum Jen Bagelmen and I co-edited for International Political Sociology (Bagelman and Tedesco 2015; Magnusson 2015), I witnessed first-hand how this approach to thinking through fully-formed stories emerged in his writing. We received a first draft, Jen and I, and offered a range of editorial comments, suggestions, and queries. What we received back was simple:
IPS Forum (August 2014):
Jen and Delacey
I wrote an entirely different version of my contribution, which I have attached here. It may be better or worse. See what you think.
In other words, the thinking emerges from and through the story. If you tinker with a sentence here or a reference there, you haven’t just changed the story, you’ve changed the thinking itself. I remember him talking about writing for a day, or a week, and feeling that something was not quite saying what he wanted, or telling the story that needed to be told. It wasn’t enough to try and work with what was there and mold it into shape; it was necessary to start again, and again, until the story being told was exactly the right story.
This relationship between Warren as a scholar, a theorist, a storyteller, a writer, and a phenomenal teacher is indeed something remarkable to celebrate. It’s not surprising that so many people have commented on it. Warren is widely known as the most dedicated of teachers: inspiring, incisive, committed, magnetic.
Yet in my many, many years of working with him, what I experienced were his efforts to attune to me not just as a student, but as a person; his insight was not just analytical or theoretical, but deeply interpersonal. There were numerous times, over the years, when his comments got to the heart not just of my work, but of me. Observing battles I had with myself and inviting me into the possibility of opening up and letting go. As here, after my PhD defense left me feeling defensive and defeated, addressing the deeply self-critical assessments I had made of myself in an email to him with a generous offering of insight into himself, as if to reciprocate the sharp gaze he was placing on me and mitigate the sharp gaze I was placing on myself:
Post-dissertation (January 2016):
“It's a matter of letting go. I find that when I am trying to work out theoretical ideas I tend to get obsessive -- or at least I used to do this -- and keep re-formulating something again and again until it seems right. That can go on endlessly, so that the paper never gets finished. Teaching has helped me, because in a classroom context you are forced to let go -- be satisfied with an explanation that is good enough in the circumstances. When I allowed myself to write more like the way I teach it became easier for me because I could accept "good enough" explanations of things that were necessary to the over-all argument I was advancing -- an over-all argument that was itself simply ‘good enough’ for the purposes. Leave it to Kant or someone like that to be absolutely precise. The rest of us have to be content with approximations. The ideas we work with are all a bit fuzzy, and if you accept that and recognize that you can enter into conversations with people that are productive, not defensive.”
It’s interesting to note, looking at it now, that this was later than the previous message, where a whole piece needed to be rewritten from scratch to address something that seemed not quite right. It suggests that he was in his own process of letting go and opening up, which was perhaps how he was able to recognize and be gentle with me as I struggled with mine.
The generosity embedded in this email, his lack of academic ego, and his engagement with his students as a generative site for his storytelling about the political and its continual disavowals in the world and the academy, is something that a generation of his students will carry forward, and the students they teach, and the people they reach. This generosity appears again in comments he sent to a number of us current and former grad students, after soliciting and receiving feedback on his book draft for Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City (Magnusson 2011):
Book Draft (December 2010):
Thanks to all of you again for your extensive comments on my manuscript. It's now in production at Routledge, and so I expect that it will be out some time in 2011. The other good news is that Rachel is expecting a baby in July; so, 2011 is shaping up to be a good year.
I've attached the revised version, in case you're interested. … The book remains more abstract than I would like it to be, but I've done as much as I can to use Victoria to illustrate my analytic points. The bunnies allow me to talk about violence in the way I want: that may or may not satisfy the guns and bombs crowd, but I find it amusing.
All the best of the season, and thanks again for your help. If I didn't respond to all of your comments and suggestions, the fault is mine. In a number of cases, I thought ‘Yes, that's true, but I don't think I have anything useful to say about that. I'll leave that matter to a younger and better mind.’
Warren
And of course, I could go on and on, because there is no way of saying enough about Warren to capture what an impact he has had on me. And on everyone else who has studied with him, worked with him, or read him, too, I suspect, because we are all findings ways to celebrate him – by gathering, by re-reading, by sharing stories, and by introducing his politics of present, engaged care to our communities.
So many years of emails, and I treasure each one. When I read the last email I got from him, in the summer of 2022, I experienced all the anticipation of grief that such news can bring, and despite telling myself over and over again that I needed to respond, I could never bring myself to do so. I chose to hide, during this timeline that was both uncertain and very certain. I have my regrets, but I also hold this choice with compassion, now that the anticipated grief has arrived.
Finding a sense of togetherness with all the people who loved and admired him is very soothing, very healing. There is no one in my immediate, day-to-day life who can possibly understand what the world has lost, in the loss of Warren. Those of us who knew him – wherever we are – we know it, and we feel it, and by creating opportunities to connect, we celebrate the way we are brought into community through him. Our shared memories, love, appreciation, and embodied resonances of Warren weave together, like a protective spell, to bring his presence back and hold the grief at bay for some moments. Insofar as it works, perhaps we can thank him for teaching us how to cast such spells with our shared words. And for teaching us that it matters: it matters which stories we tell, how we tell them, why we believe them, and when it’s time to maybe let them go and tell new ones.
I have been meditating on these memories and on the felt sense of Warren that still resides in me. And I have come to see better the connection between who he was, how he engaged the world, and his commitment to focusing on the local as the site of lived politics. Warren did not live, teach, or think in abstractions, despite being deeply theoretical. He did everything in relationship with people and the world, in real time, with real heart and soul, and with so much grace.
Certainly, his intellectual work on urbanism as a way of life – understanding the deeply theoretical work that people do when they gather to solve the problem of how to live together – has irrevocably shaped my own work, from my academic projects on urbanization and aesthetic cities to my professional efforts to advance equity, diversity and inclusion in municipal and post-secondary institutions. I think Warren would be the first to say that taking up his ideas in the world, and not just the academy, is precisely the political point. This is the politics underlying his reflections on pedagogy: letting go of the precision and perfection that can only come with abstracting from the world as it is; letting the approximation of good enough drive the world forward into better; letting these seemingly modest moments of connection be the foundation for trust and the capacity to attune to one another.
And I think his arguments on the importance of the local and the scale of interpersonal life for building political community in non-sovereign ways are borne out in the collective response to his passing. His claims are evidenced in how our lives change, and our communities form, shape, and extend over time and space, as we truly open to and engage with each other, rather than stay defensive due to the stories we have made up about each other. Or, for that matter, about ourselves.
So, wherever we are, whenever we engage with Warren’s legacy we gather as a community, recognizing that nothing can approximate the experience of being with Warren in person … despite how much I’ve tried this past month: not the remnant videos online, not the endless threads of emails, not the books that invite us into the world and his way of seeing it as a city. And that’s what makes it all so precious. So worth engaging, from the places where we are, every day, with a clear mind and an open and honest heart. And so worth fighting for.
Warren teaches us this, and I am proud to have been his student.
References
Bagelman, Jennifer Jean, and Delacey Tedesco. 2015. "Introduction." International Political Sociology 9 (1): 90–91. https://doi.org/10.1111/ips.12078.
Magnusson, Warren. 2015. "Bringing Politics Back In." International Political Sociology 9 (1): 91–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/ips.12079.
Delacey Tedesco is Associate Director, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at Okanagan College.
Introduction: Warren Magnuson, 1947-2025
By Zack Taylor and Roger Keil
Zack Taylor (University of Western Ontario) and Roger Keil (York University)
Warren Magnusson (1947–2025) was a political scientist, son of Manitoba, trained at Oxford, and long-time faculty member at the University of Victoria, who was best known internationally for his contribution to urban political theory. We remember him here, in this Urban Affairs Review special series, specifically for his contributions to what might be called – contestedly and variably – local, urban, or municipal political thought and practice.
In organizing this special series, we seek not simply to remember Warren, but to make the case for the continued importance of his ideas, particularly for new generations of scholars who may not be familiar with his work. We invited a wide range of people, including intellectual collaborators, former students, and those who knew him only through his writings, to reflect on the enduring relevance of his thought. We also asked those who knew him and his work to reflect on his influence on their personal and working lives. Warren was a complete human being – deeply compassionate and empathetic – and he brought this to his writing, activism, teaching, mentoring, and scholarly relationships. The contributions to this collection demonstrate that he did not leave anyone who read his work, heard him speak, or corresponded and debated with him, untouched. That touch went deep for most. It defined the horizon of what his students, colleagues, and readers understood to be possible in an entirely urbanized world.
Contours of thought and action
To summarize anyone’s contributions, especially those as eclectic and multifarious as Warren’s over a half-century career, is a fool’s errand. Certainly oversimplifying, we can very briefly identify contours of thought and action that permeate his work.
Most fundamental was his deep suspicion of state sovereignty as the exclusive organizing principle of the modern world, appealing instead to the city as a distinct ontology, or register, of the political. Where the Weberian state exercises its sovereignty through the intention and extension of monopolistic authority, the anarchic city is a vibrant site of encounter, mobilization, and democratic self-governance. The challenge is to alter one’s accustomed perspective, to “see like a city.” Normatively, Warren proposed the city as an emancipatory model for social and political life and argued for its recovery from state-centrism. As his daughter Rachel puts it in her contribution to this series, he believed that the world is complex. Like political anthropologist James C. Scott (1998), he believed that it would be hubristic to believe that the world can be simplified, regularized, and contained. But people are capable and can be trusted to govern themselves. The dynamic complexity of the city more accurately reflects the reality of human relations than the static regularity of states.
Starting in the 1970s, he staked out ground distinct from both the centralizing “old left” and a "new left” that in his view failed to fully imagine the possibilities of local self-governance. As his thinking developed through articles in the 1980s, to his books The Search for Political Space (University of Toronto Press, 1996) and Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City (Routledge, 2011), Warren charted a path distinct from, if in dialogue with, the post-Marxist critical urbanism emerging on both sides of the Atlantic, engaging with an eclectic body of thought spanning sociology and neoclassical economics and beyond: Wirth, Jacobs, Sennett, Hayek, Foucault, and Lefebvre. As Beveridge indicates in his contribution to this series, he was in some sense neither a leader nor a follower; he marched to the beat of his own drum, observing no pieties, inviting us to use our own minds rather than falling back on convention and convenient fictions.
Dating back to his doctoral dissertation at Oxford, Warren consistently focused on social movements and social mobilization (Magnusson 1978). “Seeing like a city” was for him a method for surfacing modalities of human self-governance: “To see like a city is to put the state under erasure, and reveal what it obscures” (Magnusson 2011a). To create political spaces for humans to realize their potential, government should be scaled to the needs of politics rather than the other way around. “To speak of politics is to invoke the domain of human possibility: a world of judgment, choice, and action” (Magnusson 2010). We believed that the future was not prescribed by the past; it is ours for the making.
While Warren believed in the inherent capability and goodness of people, he did not imagine a world without conflict. Shortly before his passing, he published a beautiful commentary in a book symposium on Ross Beveridge’s and Philippe Koch’s How Cities Can Transform Democracy (2022) where he leaves us with a warning that while we might want to strengthen the ties between democracy and urban life, there is no teleological or automatic relationship between the two, as we often painfully experience (Magnusson 2024).
As Jen Bagelman writes in this collection, Warren was not the sort of theorist who trafficked in abstractions. To be sure, in habitus and style as well as in strategy of composition of his argument, Warren was unfailingly a theorist. As Bill Carroll describes, his signature pedagogical legacy at the University of Victoria was an interdisciplinary graduate program in Cultural, Political, and Social Thought. His writing as well as his performance as a lecturer was academic, learned, and scholarly, in the best possible meaning of these terms. His talks were performances; his delivery, in sonorous baritone, a rhetorical master class. Yet everything he wrote, spoke, and performed was equally informed by the practice of politics in some local context, by some real political subjects, human and more-than-human. In the introduction to The Search for Political Space (1996), he wrote: “I will be dealing less with philosophical issues than with the practical search for political space … This reflects my conviction that the important issues are ultimately practical, and that the political possibilities of the present – the ‘timeful spaces’ we can enter – have to be understood in terms of the concrete activities in which people are engaged” (7–8).
In this spirit, Warren co-edited two books in the 1980s on the assault on public governance in British Columbia (Magnusson et al. 1984, 1986). The province was profoundly politically polarized in the early 1980s. Runaway inflation and growing government deficits led the rightwing provincial government of the day to introduce a far-reaching program of tax and spending cuts, privatization, rollback of union rights, and centralization that anticipated Thatcher and Reagan’s neoliberal revolution in the United Kingdom and United States. The provincial human rights tribunal was abolished and various tenant rights and workplace standards abolished. Magnusson was part of a participatory opposition coalition, dubbed “Solidarity” in homage to Lech Walesa’s anti-authoritarian Solidarność union movement in Poland. The goal was to create a participatory “political space” around which to mobilize a response and establish a counter-vision for the province’s future. Tens of thousands participated in protest activities.
In the 1990s, Magnusson turned to his home turf of Victoria to work through the limitations of a municipal politics and governance perspective in understanding broader social, economic, and environmental processes (Magnusson 1996b). Around this time, he and Karena Shaw, another series contributor, edited a book about the mobilization and resistance to the logging of Clayoquot Sound, a remote, pristine rainforest biosphere on unceded Indigenous land on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The area was opened up to logging in the 1980s. Nearly 11,000 activists blockaded the area in 1993 – the largest episode of civil disobedience in Canadian history up to that time. Harsh policing and mass arrests followed, and more than 800 people were convicted. A political space had been created, if temporarily. The title of their book, A Political Space: Reading The Global Through Clayoquot Sound, captures Warren’s insistence that all places – even remote forests at the edge of a continent – are equally valuable “ways in” to studying politics: like a fractal, global processes can be found and understood anywhere (Magnusson and Shaw 2002). In Politics of Urbanism, his final monograph, he concludes with a discussion linking the feral rabbit "crisis” and guerilla gardening activism on the University of Victoria campus to questions of environmental justice, colonialism, and empire:
My claim … is that the urban world is ubiquitous, and that we can start just about anywhere in trying to figure out the patterns of government and politics with which we have to engage. I have no problem starting from my neighborhood in Victoria or from the campus where I work. It is a matter of seeing what is there and following the connections that a state-centric view of things tends to obscure. (Magnusson 2011a: 163)
Warren’s theorizing from real-world political spaces challenges us to look beyond urban glamour zones and alpha cities to consider the politics of everyday life wherever we may find it.
Finally, as Eugene McCann notes in his contribution, we note that Warren was a critic of the scholarly discipline with which he was nominally affiliated: political science (Magnusson 2011b, 2013). In arguing for “seeing like a city,” he rejected political science’s centering of the state and consequent assimilation of “urban politics” to local government narrowly construed, in the process bracketing the politics from much of what political scientists purport to study. For him, “seeing like a city” while decentering the state recognized the urbanity of political life anywhere and everywhere, and therefore a way to rescue the study of politics from itself. Few within academic political science have taken up this agenda – indeed, his work may be better known outside the field than within it – but the provocation, and challenge, remain.
Magnussonian encounters
Despite his misgivings about sovereignty, Warren’s writing and presentation style signaled pure authority. He mesmerized audiences with his delivery. His presence was intellectual nobility, accompanied by a rare perceived superiority – a presence that was commented on by each of the writers in this collection who knew him well. Yet, this air of superiority was deceptive, as it was counterbalanced by his deep commitment and warmth in personal and professional relationships.
As organizers of the collection, we come from different intellectual traditions and, indeed, generations, yet we too have been indelibly marked by our engagement with Warren’s work and with Warren as a person. Roger Keil distinctly remembers finding his first-ever paper by Warren when he was at a library at UCLA doing research for his doctoral dissertation on local politics in “world city” Los Angeles in the late 1980s. Warren’s 1985 paper “The local state in Canada: theoretical perspectives” ended up being directional for Keil’s work, later supplemented by Andrew Kirby’s Power/Resistance, and when tied in with Henri Lefebvre’s understanding of an entirely urbanized world, laid the foundation for his own musings on the power and limits of the local state, perhaps nowhere as clearly expressed as in Keil’s 1998 essay on the local state “Globalization makes states: perspectives of local governance in the age of the world city” in the Review of International Political Economy. For him, Magnusson’s significance lay in the meaning of the local state in or for the global city. Simplified, because such a formulation, as Warren never tired of explaining, was built on two chaotic concepts, that of a local state and that of a global city. Both contested, both radically open in their use and interpretations in the extant literature, both equally clear and confused in their application among scholars and political subjects alike.
For Keil, Magnusson’s significance increased significantly and added layers of meaning when he himself moved to Canada in the 1990s. He first got to know Warren personally during his visit to York University when he presented the argument of his book The Search for Political Space (1996) to a crowd of space-challenged and geography-averse politics colleagues. What place Canada played in Warren’s political universe once again became a guide for Keil’s own pathway into urban and environmental politics in his adopted country where he now lived and taught environmental and urban politics.
Writing a doctoral dissertation in the 2010s on the historical development of multi-level urban governance in Canada and the United States, Zack Taylor found great inspiration in Warren’s (and Engin Isin’s) earlier works on the emergence of the local state in Canada, which featured careful primary research. Warren’s deeply researched introduction and Toronto chapters in his 1983 edited collection with Andrew Sancton, City Politics in Canada, remains an unparalleled resource (Magnusson 1983a,b). (Continuing this legacy, Taylor, along with Martin Horak and Jack Lucas, will publish a new collection with the same name with University of Toronto Press in 2025.) While Taylor approached public authority and the governance of places from an institutional perspective, and does not seek to escape the sovereign, he is challenged by Warren’s work to understand authority as contingent and contested, produced and reproduced by the collision of sovereign states and the self-organizing capacities of local societies. Warren wrote in The Search for Political Space that imagining states to be “enclosures of freedom,” autonomous and self-sufficient, is a fallacy. We live in a world of networks and flows, a world in which states have become less like Westphalian containers and more like municipalities, permeable and contested. “… The spaces of political freedom do not take the form of self-subsistent communities; rather, they are venues for action that relate to one another in infinitely complicated ways” (303). Taylor’s 2019 book Shaping the Metropolis: Institutions and Urbanization in the United States and Canada (McGill-Queen’s) argues that we should not see the ostensible “high politics” of the state as separate from the “low politics” of the city or, more generically, the locality; they are mutually constitutive and ever in tension. What is interesting is why this tension plays out differently in different contexts, creating different kinds of political spaces inside, outside, and betwixt the sovereign. And contemporary absolutist demands for local autonomy are misguided in seeking to create petty sovereignties that reproduce the very logic that they seek to escape.
Coming from a variety of perspectives, the reflections in this series afford various entry points to Warren’s work and life. We can’t remember Warren’s ideas without remembering him personally, although those ideas are as close to permanently influential as any intellectual could hope for a post mortem assessment. Immortality is a flawed and immodest concept despite the tech bros’ beliefs to the contrary. Yet Warren’s ideas are built for posterity. Unlike Hegel, who may have believed that the state was an eternal safeguard of prosperity and progress, Magnusson put his trust in the permanence of democratic process without ducking the responsibilities of living together in complex (urban) society. Posterity entails radical openness.
The collection of texts that follow this introduction is a work of personal memory, scholarly evaluation and assessment of future impact. Judging by the diversity of voices from far and near alike, Warren’s influence has long term effects and lingers once it takes hold. Magnusson’s legacy is alive as a guide to living in the urban future we share.
We received an enthusiastic response to our original call to honor Warren with this collection of essays. The outpouring of personal memory and reflection and the readiness to reflect on his lasting work present in each of the individual contributions combine to form a collective expression of sadness about Warren’s passing and joy in memorializing his tremendous influence in the field and beyond. The reader can approach the collection from any entry point. Yet, we are giving some guidance by grouping the essays in three overlapping thematic sections: First, there are those closest to Warren who offer a more personal approach to his life and work. A second group engages explicitly with Warren’s ideas where they were most effective: in the world that is urban and in the urban that is the world. Lastly, a few essays point more directly beyond the existing reach of Magnusson’s oeuvre by discussing the prospects of his work for a new generation of urban political thinking and practice. We thank the authors for their sincere efforts to once again delve into Warren’s work. And we hope the readers of this collection will remember Warren Magnusson or newly discover him as the major voice he was in urban political studies.
Discovering Magnusson
For those not yet familiar with Warren’s work, or who wish to go deeper, we recommend three resources. The first two are Warren’s magisterial monograph, the Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City (Routledge 2011), and a 2013 symposium on the book in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (37:2) to which we and others contributed. The third is the 2015 volume Local Self Government and the Right to the City (McGill-Queen’s), a primer on the fundamentals of Magnusson’s urban and political thought. It collects a range of his articles and chapters from throughout his career along with introductory and concluding chapters by Warren and short essays throughout in which he reflects on his thinking at the time and how it has changed.
References
Beveridge, Ross, and Philippe Koch. 2022. How Cities Can Transform Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Brunet-Jailly, Emmanuel, Serena Kataoka, Roger Keil, Andrew Sancton, and Zack Taylor. 2013. "Commentary on Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City by Warren Magnusson." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37 (2): 790–803. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12014.
Horak, Martin, Jack Lucas, and Zack Taylor, eds. 2025. City Politics in Canada: Forty Years of Continuity and Change. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.
Isin, Engin. 1992. Cities without Citizens: Modernity of the City as a Corporation. Montreal: Black Rose.
Keil, Roger. 1998. "Globalization makes states: Perspectives of local governance in the age of the world city." Review of International Political Economy 5 (4): 616–646.
Kirby, Andrew. 1993. Power/resistance: Local politics and the chaotic state. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 1978. “Participation and democratic theory: The role of neighbourhood government.” D.Phil., Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
Magnusson, Warren. 1983a. "Introduction: The development of Canadian urban government." In City Politics in Canada, edited by Andrew Sancton and Warren Magnusson, 3–57. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 1983b. "Toronto." In City Politics in Canada, edited by Andrew Sancton and Warren Magnusson, 94–139. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 1985. "The local state in Canada: Theoretical perspectives." Canadian Public Administration 28 (4): 575–99.
Magnusson, Warren 1996a. The Search for Political Space: Globalization, Social Movements, and the Urban Political Experience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 1996b. "Victoria Regina: Social movements and political space." In City Lives and City Forms: Critical Research and Canadian Urbanism, edited by Jon Caulfield and Linda Peake. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 2010. "Scaling Government to Politics." In Leviathan Undone? Towards a Political Economy of Scale, edited by Roger Keil and Rianne Mahon, 105–120. University of British Columbia Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 2011a. Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. New York: Routledge.
Magnusson, Warren. 2011b. "Seeing Like a City: How to Urbanize Political Science." In Critical Urban Studies: New Directions, edited by Jonathan S. Davies and David Imbroscio, ch. 3. Albany, NY: SUNY University Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 2014. "The Symbiosis of the Urban and the Political." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (5): 1561–1575. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12144.
Magnusson, Warren. 2015. Local Self-Government and the Right to the City. Montréal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 2024. "Seeing the city and democracy: A commentary." Dialogues in Urban Research 2 (2): 181–183. https://doi.org/10.1177/27541258241233497.
Magnusson, Warren, William K. Carroll, Charles Doyle, Monika Langer, and R.B.J. Walker, eds. 1984. The New Reality: The Politics of Restraint in British Columbia. Vancouver: New Star Books.
Magnusson, Warren, Charles Doyle, R.B.J. Walker, and John DeMarco, eds. 1986. After Bennett: A New Politics for British Columbia. Vancouver: New Star Books.
Magnusson, Warren, and Karena Shaw, eds. 2002. A Political Space: Reading The Global Through Clayoquot Sound. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Taylor, Zack. 2019. Shaping the Metropolis: Institutions and Urbanization in the United States and Canada. Montréal, QC: McGill-Queen's University Press.
Zack Taylor is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario.
Roger Keil is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University.
We are grateful to Warren’s wife Sharon Walls for sharing photographs with us.