Seeing Like Warren Magnusson
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.