Description
Book SynopsisWe 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.
Trade Review“The book is an inspiring testament to the power of grassroots democratic mobilisation in all its diversity. We see things in reading Beveridge and Koch that we would not see from other vantagepoints, and this too is the real strength in drawing from a plurality of methodologies in urban analysis. All students and scholars of democracy and of urbanisation will benefit from this highly significant intervention.”
Jonathan Davis, Local Government Studies
“This is a genuinely exciting book. With the help of fascinating case studies and confident theoretical engagement, it persuasively builds a distinctive argument around the potential, and sometimes contemporary reality, of the city as the space of transformative – democratic – politics.”
Allan Cochrane, The Open University
“A fresh perspective on the meaning of democracy and how and where it takes place. Beveridge and Koch provide important insights into emergent terrains of political action that will be of interest to political theorists and urbanists alike.”
Theresa Enright, University of Toronto
“This generative, hopeful and well-written book … of the political meaning of the city under global urbanisation could not be more timely.”
LSE Review of Books
Table of Contents1. Why Cities?
2. Politics through an Urban Lens
3. Democracy and the City Reimagined
4. Self-governing Urbanization
5. Urban Publics and Citizens
6. Urban Democracy and the State
7. The City in the Age of Urbanization
Notes
