Introduction: Warren Magnuson, 1947-2025

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. 

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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.