We live in an urban age. It is well known that urbanization is changing
landscapes, built environments, social infrastructures and everyday
lives across the globe. But urbanization is also changing the ways we
understand and practise politics. What implications does this have for
democracy?
This incisive book argues that urbanization undermines the established
certainties of nation-state politics and calls for a profound rethinking
of democracy. A novel way of seeing democracy like a city is presented,
shifting scholarly and activist perspectives from institutions to
practices, from jurisdictional scales to spaces of urban collective
life, and from fixed communities to emergent political subjects. Through
a discussion of examples from around the world, the book shows that
distinctly urban forms of collective self rule are already apparent. The
authors reclaim the 'city' as a democratic idea in a context of
urbanization, seeing it as instrumental to relocating democracy in the
everyday lives of urbanites.
Original and hopeful, How Cities Can Transform Democracy compels the
reader to abandon conventional understandings of democracy and embrace
new vocabularies and practices of democratic action in the struggles for
our urban future.
