Radical Democratic Possibilities of the City
Engin Isin (Queen Mary University of London)
When I learned of Warren’s passing, my initial reaction was to write, “Warren has been a very special person and scholar to me since I began writing almost forty years ago. Our paths crossed many times, and I learned so much from him not only about scholarly writing but also about acting ethically and politically. That was his greatest gift to me. I have always been so grateful for his support and presence.” Later, I realised that the tense in which I reflected on Warren was present perfect, not past. This wasn’t only because I was deeply saddened, but because Warren has always been a strong presence as a mentor, and he will remain so.
Warren’s work published in the 1980s was revelatory when I was writing my doctoral thesis on the longue durée history of the Canadian city (Isin 1990). He had published on postwar metropolitan reform movements from a post-Marxist perspective on the capitalist city (Magnusson 1981), on the local-state in Canada (1985a), on the political economy of the local-state (Magnusson 1985b), and a critique of histories of local government (Magnusson 1986). The central argument of this work was that the local-state or local government could not be simply derived from the theories of the state, and that the city has a distinct logic that requires historical and theoretical analysis. Having conducted these analyses, Warren’s conclusion was startlingly simple yet powerful: the state needs to be retheorised as a distributed and decentralised organisation of power and capital, in which the city plays a crucial and antagonistic role. Warren provided a brilliant account of the historical development of municipal government in Canada (Magnusson 1983a) and used it to provide an equally brilliant analysis of the city of Toronto (Magnusson 1983b). I cannot claim that a newly arrived émigré in his mid-20s struggling with English could thoroughly understand the nuances and subtleties of this body of work, but it certainly left an indelible mark on my intellectual trajectory on the city and its radical democratic possibilities.
Shortly after finishing my thesis, we met either in Montreal (1992) or Vancouver (1993) during a conference. I didn’t realise he was in the audience when he introduced himself after my talk, but as our conversation progressed, I realised he was a special person. He was generous, inquisitive, and interested in my views on the long history of the Canadian city, stretching back to the twelfth century Europe, as a history of the present. I would later regard him as a mentor.
Our next encounter was probably in Berlin (1995) when we both gave papers in a conference. By then, I had published my thesis as a book (1992). Warren was once again so generous and critical. We had conversations about the long history of the Canadian city, spanning from colonial to imperial and state organisations of power and capital. His insightful comments on the emergence of the “citizen” category between the thesis and the book were pivotal in shaping my subsequent work on the city as a space of citizenship. He was working on his great book The Search for Political Space (Magnusson 1996), and I had the privilege of hearing how he had developed his earlier historical and theoretical ideas about the city into a concept of political space.
Warren’s book made a significant contribution to my understanding of the state and city, and their relations, through a political space perspective. He articulated political space as an object of analysis, challenging the notion that cities, states, and empires are stable entities. Instead, he saw them as formations of power and capital. This approach was incredibly generative, refreshingly post-disciplinary, and politically radical. For instance, his critique of the concept of the global city was formidable because it reified rather than revealed the political conditions that made it possible (Magnusson 2000).
In 1998, Warren visited York University, where I was teaching, for a conference and summer school. The intellectual excitement was immense about his work on politicizing space and the idea of the city, and it was a memorable experience for all participants.
When Warren published an edited collection with Karena Shaw on the struggles of indigenous peoples in Clayoquot Sound (Magnusson and Shaw 2002), his concept of political space as a concentration and condensation of relations of power and capital traversing diverse forms and scales demonstrated the intellectual and political force of his work over the past twenty years.
Warren often revisited his earlier concerns and concepts by engaging current political debates. He questioned whether municipalities are creatures of provinces (Magnusson 2005b), whether we need to protect the rights of local self-government (Magnusson 2005a), and recognised the place of local government in urbanism (Magnusson 2005c). This reworking introduced him to a new generation of scholars and activists engaged in new politics of cities in the twenty-first century.
Warren distilled all his experience and knowledge of almost thirty years in Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City (Magnusson 2011), where he developed a succinct statement on the city as a space of struggle over democratic possibilities. He evoked latent concerns about democratic possibilities of the city beyond local government, as a crucial political space. As Roger Keil observes in Brunet-Jailly et al. (2013, 794), Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City was anticipated as a sequel to The Search for Political Space (1996) in two significant ways: “… it steps far outside the canon of political urbanism; and it becomes a more urgent, almost corrosive force applied onto the political narratives we have been telling ourselves, in the discipline but also in the practice of politics, about what it actually is that we do.” These two books both encapsulate and rework Warren’s political theory of the city, providing new interpretations of his earlier research and anticipating or provoking further research.
Warren continued to return to his earlier research, reinterpreting and reworking it for a new generation and addressing new problems. He rearticulated the internal relation between politics and the city (Magnusson 2014), seeing the city beyond critical urban studies, how to rethink the city as an object of international political sociology (Magnusson 2015), and radical democratic possibilities of the city (Magnusson 2021) as a right to local self-government (Magnusson 2023). Warren’s continued invitation to think about the city as a transversal political space with radical democratic possibilities has been a beacon for my research, writing, and teaching. We kept crossing paths in both online and offline events, and I was always inspired by his thoughts on the current radical political possibilities.
Over forty years since I read his work, Warren continues to inspire my own writing and research. He remains the same person to me: generous but critical, stimulating yet questioning, always inviting me to think through problems as they arise by keeping an eye on political space as the space where political forms appear and radical democratic possibilities of political life unfold.
References
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.
Isin, Engin. 1990. ‘The Birth of the Modern City in British North America’. PhD Thesis, Toronto: University of Toronto.
Isin, Engin. 1992. Cities Without Citizens: Modernity of the City as a Corporation. Montreal: Black Rose Books.
Magnusson, Warren. 1981. ‘Metropolitan Reform in the Capitalist City’. Canadian Journal of Political Science 14 (September): 557–77.
Magnusson, Warren. 1983a. ‘Introduction: The Development of Canadian Urban Government’. In City Politics in Canada, edited by Warren Magnusson and Andrew Sancton, 1–57. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 1983b. ‘Toronto’. In City Politics in Canada, edited by Warren Magnusson and Andrew Sancton, 94–139. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 1985a. ‘The Local State in Canada: Theoretical Perspectives’. Canadian Public Administration / Administration Publique Du Canada 28 (4): 575–99.
Magnusson, Warren. 1985b. ‘Political Science, Political Economy, and the Local State’. Urban History Review 14 (1): 47–53.
Magnusson, Warren. 1986. ‘Bourgeois Theories of Local Government’. Political Studies 34: 1–18. Magnusson, Warren. 1996. The Search for Political Space: Globalization, Social Movements, and the Urban Political Experience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 2000. ‘Politicizing the Global City’. In Democracy, Citizenship, and the Global City, edited by Engin Isin, 289–306. Innis Centenary Series. London: Routledge.
Magnusson, Warren. 2005a. ‘Protecting the Right of Local Self-Government’. Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue Canadienne de Science Politique 38 (4): 897–922.
Magnusson, Warren. 2005b. ‘Are Municipalities Creatures of the Provinces?’ Journal of Canadian Studies 39 (2): 5–30.
Magnusson, Warren. 2005c. ‘Urbanism, Cities and Local Self-Government’. Canadian Public Administration/Administration Publique Du Canada 48 (1): 96–123.
Magnusson, Warren. 2011. Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. Interventions. London: Routledge.
Magnusson, Warren. 2014. ‘The Symbiosis of the Urban and the Political’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (5): 1561–75.
Magnusson, Warren. 2015. ‘Bringing Politics Back In’. International Political Sociology 9 (1): 91–93.
Magnusson, Warren. 2021. ‘From the Spectacular to the Mundane: Radical Democracy in the Open City’. Identities 29 (1): 63–79.
Magnusson, Warren. 2023. ‘The Right to Local Self-Government’. In Handbook on Local and Regional Governance, edited by Filipe Teles, 39–48. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Magnusson, Warren, and Karena. Shaw. 2003. A Political Space: Reading the Global Through Clayoquot Sound. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Marcuse, Peter, David Imbroscio, Simon Parker, Jonathan S. Davies, and Warren Magnusson. 2014. ‘Critical Urban Theory versus Critical Urban Studies: A Review Debate’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (5): 1904–17.
Engin Isin is Professor Emeritus of International Politics, Queen Mary University of London.