Seeing Politics All Around Us
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.