The Urbanization of Politics

Abstract

If we live, as we are told, in an urbanizing world, then the problem of contemporary political analysis must be tackled by rethinking politics as practices of urbanizing spaces and subjectivities. This article questions whether relational ontologies of urban spatiotemporality and spatialized inter-subjectivity are sufficient as bases for analyses of the contemporary forms of politics enacted within practices and processes of urbanization. I argue that they are not, and suggest instead that urbanization puts into play multiple, overlapping aporetic boundaries between nature and culture, rural and urban, nature and urban, and ultimately between politics and its limits.

The Power of the Political in an Urbanizing International

“…47 Yet desire is imitative, hence it does not assume individual human beings as sovereign and autonomous with the capacity and authority to judge and decide before they act as commonly assumed. 48 To illustrate Morgenthau's epistemological move toward examining the human desire that concerns itself with the "position among his fellows," it is useful to briefly turn to mimetic theory. Mimetic theory, as formulated by René Girard, holds that humans are characterized by mutual imitation.…”

“…as modes of governing and self-governing, these logics operate as political logics, a recognition that is missing in the relational ontologies of the global city and even of urbanization." 50 The following section reveals two of these political logics by looking at different contentions of the political in light of Morgenthau's conceptualization.…”