Learning Through the Wall: Magnusson and Me
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.