On the Politics of Urbanism
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.