A Political Theory of the City
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.