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.