The urban political never sleeps: A framework for tracing emergent counter-responses to depoliticisation

Abstract

Responding to contemporary mechanisms of depoliticisation, some marginalised groups create political arenas independent from the State. The paper analyses how these groups utilise ‘cracks’ in the political landscape to forge counter-publics which transform unequal power structures. Positing that depoliticisation is always incomplete, an analytical framework is presented for understanding how ‘the political’ emerges and evolves in unexpected spaces of everyday life. The framework serves as a means to overcome some of the limitations of Rancière’s political ontology to operationalise in empirical research through integrating his notions with an understanding of self-organisation based on complexity science. Drawing on empirical research in Egypt, the paper demonstrates how the fusion between public spaces and online networks created a precondition for counter-publics to gradually revitalise local urban politics. The paper concludes with analytical considerations for inclusive city-makers who aim to engage productively with the transformative potential of such emergent counter-publics.

Reimagining hope through the political: A post-foundational reading of urban alternatives beyond postpolitics

“…It is at once achievable and precariously tangible. In line with Harvey’s (2000: 189) inclination to take hope as a starting point which can spur the intellectual work needed to recognise and nurture emancipatory urban alternatives, ‘the political’ as an unstoppable process generates an enlarged landscape of possibilities for analysing where alternatives could be taking place now (Saleh and Rauws, 2022). Positioning an attunement to hope is a necessary reference point for locating progressive urban futures embodied in everyday processes of political articulation.…”

“…Within the PFPT and postpolitics literatures, empirical cases offer in-depth analysis of actual appearances of politicisation/postpoliticisation or postpolitics, albeit reporting mostly from the Global North or West (Blakey et al, 2022). Other geographical settings or regions unfortunately can be subject to sweeping generalisations and abstractions about the kind of 'emancipatory' or 'progressive' change that can be hoped for in their local urban politics (Penny et al, 2020, but see Saleh and Rauws, 2022). The paradoxical premise here is that 'the political' is empirically presented as 'universally axiomatic' (Penny et al, 2020), whereas PFPT theoretically advocates maximum, radical openness to pluralism and difference.…”

“…Instead of teleologically considering hope as an assumed end point with which to conclude reflections on CUR, hope should be analytically distilled from disruptive acts that materialise the integral possibility for politicisation, emerging where and how it is least expected by 'politics'. Given that postpolitics never entirely devours 'the political' (Swyngedouw, 2018), we consider it a 'matter of concern' to foster critical empirical case studies that associate hope with concrete shapes of emancipatory alternatives arising from the non-stop emergence (or reemergence) of 'the political', whether in habitual, spectacular or ambivalent forms (Saleh and Rauws, 2022;Van Wymeersch et al, 2019). For example, by understanding how marginalised citizens transgress the limits of what is formally 'licit' in public space to appeal to their hitherto unrecognised needs, informal practices and counter-hegemonic practices can be examined empirically (Millington, 2016).…”

“…Given that PFPT establishes that any hegemonic urban order is always coupled with plural competing orders, we could start hopeful critical analyses by asking the question: Where do emancipatory urban alternatives grow incrementally – already within the cracks of postpolitical orders? (Saleh and Rauws, 2022) In another direction, critical urban scholars should steer clear of the tendency to assume binary relationships between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, and instead adopt an empirical, ambivalence-attuned approach to capture their enmeshed interface in everyday life (Blakey et al, 2022). Based on the post-foundational tenet implying that the categories of ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ can never be purely separated, hopeful critical analyses appeal to the question: Where could glimmers of unfinished urban alternatives be detectable in everyday situations in which ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ overlap?…”

“…This non-teleological hope proceeds without presuming any absolute grounds of politics that determine (or over-determine) courses of emancipatory action, remaining contingent, yet always detectable in the present. Rather than ontologically restricting the possibility of hopeful types of politicisation to the flashing events of rupture (Derickson, 2017), we should also welcome conceptions that acknowledge hope in the constant emergence (or re-emergence) of emancipatory change that is constantly enacted as unfinished alternatives (Saleh and Rauws, 2022). With the effort to join the ‘turns towards more processual and relational accounts’ in PFPT (Blakey et al, 2022: 5), we call for reimagining hope by engaging with the landscape of possibilities for emancipatory alternatives that could be already generated in the present.…”