“Democra-city”: bringing the city back into democratic theory for the 21st century?

Abstract

Almost 50 years ago Robert Dahl maintained "we can […] reasonably hope 1 day to achieve great democratic cities. As the optimum unit for democracy in the 21st century, the city has a greater claim, I think, than any other alternative" (Am Polit Sci Rev 61: 953-970, 1967). This article intends to ascertain whether the words of one of the greatest scholars of democracy have had a concrete outcome along the pathways taken by democratic theory and whether, therefore, as was the case in classical theory, real superiority has therefore been restored to the city compared with the other territorial institutions of democracy. In this article we begin with two assumptions, each concerning the theoretical status of democratic theory. The first maintains that a realistic and an idealistic dimension coexist in variable dimensions in theoretical democratic models. According to the second assumption, it can be stated that democratic theory envisages the presence of a local territorial dimension, the importance of which is nevertheless variable in the different theoretical models. The thesis we intend to demonstrate here is that the variable nature of the importance of the local-urban territorial dimension depends on the type of balance created between the idealistic and realistic dimensions of the different models of democracy. Concluding, we aim to theoretically demonstrate why (and at which conditions) the city can become, more and better than any other institutional place, the ultimate arena within which the best results may be achieved for democracy in 21st century.

La transparencia de las administraciones locales colombianas

“…Recent research on democracy has been taxonomic (Maleki y Hendriks, 2016), defining (Muñoz, 2016), reflections on the concept itself (Sim y Krishnasamy, 2016;Tebaldi y Calaresu, 2015) or reviews of specific political contexts (Christensen, 2019;Fuchs y Roller, 2018;Repak, 2016;Calvo y Campos, 2016). However, all of these studies identify the need for an accompanying citizen of public administration.…”

Smart cities and security: Editorial preface

“…Purported tendencies of this interaction, toward the enlightened, "pastoral", care and protection of citizens, their stupefaction and ultimate insecurity or their ingenuity in public controversies over online control or in criminal entrepreneurship, alert us to the importance of the dilemmas inherent in securing smart cities. In this evolving research programme, it would be unwise to overestimate the powers of machines or to underestimate the capacity of humans for resistance and improvisation in "democratic cities" (Tebaldi and Calaresu 2015), which Robert Dahl already considered, more than 50 years before they became "smart cities", as having the "greater claim" than any other territorial alternative to becoming the "optimum unit for democracy in the twenty-first century" (Dahl 1967).…”

Security, city and democracy

“…A crucial testing ground to understand if, and up to what point, the pactional instrument is a decisive element for defining city democracies (Tebaldi and Calaresu 2015a) is therefore the development of security policies in a new polity dimension that sees local power in the front line (institutions and groups), apparently accompanying the-and in many people's expectations freed by the-traditional central powers of the state.…”