Indistinct Politics

2011

2011

This book occupies a critical space at the local, national and international scales debate about the ongoing process of construction of the “New Urban Agenda”. Concurrently, this book shows the profiles of a new geopolitics involving cities and nation states debating at the same time in contradictory and combined way the new directions of global urbanization. This book is presented as a continuation of the various efforts made by the Ipea in preparing Brazil to Habitat III and the wording of the Brazilian Report to the UN conference. The many efforts include the elaborating on: regional and national seminars, virtual platforms for social participation, other books, publications and reports, surveys, interviews, data bases, monitoring processes, negotiations in government and civil society, television programs, video documentaries etc. This rich and innovative route involved more than 2,500 people and, according to comparisons made with 34 other countries and as presented here in one of the chapters of this publication, qualifies as the most thorough participatory process of the New Urban Agenda development. The organization of this book, as well as the invitation of several experts and scholars contributing to this debate, are directly related to the National Seminar Habitat III “Participa Brasil,” conducted by Ipea and partners in Brasilia in early 2015. Due to the complexities involved several topics addressed at that time could not be considered by the Brazilian Report for Habitat III. Most of which are due to the intersectionality of analysis necessary for understanding, escaping or surpassing the manner of an official government report to the UN is shaped. Thus, important issues such as geopolitics between states and cities, technological innovation and its impact on international networks and deepening of democracy, as well as many other pending critical issues, justify the collaboration between scholars concerned to generate these innovative ideas and to explain the current process of urbanization. The goal was to make them accessible to a broader audience. Similarly, the search for new contributions could focus precisely on issues that require deeper analyses and references.

Contour Journal, 2020

The challenge of this special issue in finding words and coming to terms with contemporary city and contemporary politics is amplified by the difficulty to pin point what and where exactly a city is and how can we perceive political activities in its context. We might be better off asking: what is not city today, which place on Earth is empty of city-ness? This special issue presents four contributions that proceed from the panel City, Civility and Post-political Models of Freedom and Conflict panel held in November 2018 as part of the Scaffolds international symposium organized by ALICE lab from the Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne, supported by the C I.II.III.IV. A, the Kanal Centre Pompidou, and with the participation of several institutions and university departments from KU Leuven, ULB, TU Delft, and TU Vienna. Without pertaining to comprehensiveness, the present collection captures some points in the debate on city and civility informed by questions that originate in d...

2011

The question of citizenship is becoming one of the central social and political problems, where sovereignty is being challenged by globalisation and militarisation. The old model of citizenship is no longer valid in the contemporary reality of mass migrations and ethnic, religious and cultural integration. Krzysztof Nawratek revives the socio-political potential of the city as a tool for social change. He proposes to establish the city s own sovereignty by introducing a new type of multiple and flexible city citizenship. City as a Political Idea combines reflection on urban planning, architecture, politics and society. It questions reasons for the existence of contemporary cities as well as their future.

In this article, I argue that there is a startling resonance between Hans Morgenthau's conception of the political and power and recent analyses of an urbanizing international realm. By making this connection clear, I depart from a mechanistic understanding of politics, which tends to inform both conventional International Relations views and some claims in urban studies pertaining to the rise of global cities as international actors. Turning to Morgenthau's conception of the political and power also has wider implications for International Relations studies of urbanization: it helps explain a tendency toward depoliticization caused by ignoring the conflictual character of the political. The emphasis on the political, on the other hand, serves as a bridge between International Relations and urbanization studies by creating conditions for the repoliticization of urban space. After illustrating the existential manifestation of the political and its violent outfalls, the remainder of this article turns to its relational and dialogical manifestation that points out the shortcomings of reading the political merely as an existential concept in the context of urbanization. Post-structuralists and critical international political theorists have long lamented the depoliticiza-tion of international politics. Depoliticization, critics contend, is the result of policies seeking mechanical causes of political problems in order to apply appropriate " instruments " to solve them in terms of both political practice and political analysis. 1 This is particularly the case where the fields of urban politics and international politics overlap. Indeed, a thriving research branch of International Relations contends with the politics of urbanization, but there is modest research on how urbanization affects the political. While there is an abundance of analysis about the politics of an urbanizing international realm, international studies often overlook the ramifications of " the political " such as the political's permeating empirical and normative features of politics and power. The political is different from an understanding of politics that is narrowly framed as a set of practices and institutions. 2 But what makes a matter a political one? To answer this question, I rely on the twentieth-century Realist Hans J. Morgenthau who defines the political as a site in which

Cities are likely to play major roles in the distribution of future global power. In 2008, over half of the world’s 6.6 billion inhabitants lived in cities. This development has led many observers to note that we now live in the “urban century.” According to one view “Our future existence as a species is, inevitably, an urban one. By 2050, some projections have it that seven out of every 10 humans on earth will be living in a city.” With at least 200 cities of a million or more already in place or developing, urban warfare is now a strategic rather than operational or tactical question. Urban warfare is remarkably diverse. Students of recent military history have observed and discussed urban sieges on the scale of Stalingrad, urban terrorist assaults like Mumbai, “Londonistan” type incubators of extremism, or feral feuds like those currently seen in the gang wars occurring in Ciudad Juárez and the world’s “invisible cities” (global slums). Here we attempt to stimulate the development of a theoretical framework for thinking about the command of the cities by states and other political communities.