Environmental science
Summary. Can the contemporary city qualify as the topos of the good life, as it has in classical literature on human emancipation? As geographical entities, cities are hardly discernible places with distinct identities. They have become an endless inhabited sprawl without clear boundaries and they have become sites of extraordinary circulation and translocal connectivity. Similarly, sociologically, contemporary cities do not spring to mind as the sites of community and well- being. For the vast majority of people, cities are polluted, unhealthy, tiring, overwhelming, confusing, alienating. Politically, too, the contemporary city bears little resemblance to imaginings of the times when urbanism stood for citizenship, the ideal republic, good government, civic behaviour and the ideal public sphere. The politics of emancipation with a big ‘P’ is no longer a particularly urban affair in either genesis or practice, having given way to national and global institutions and movements. What remains of the urban as demos in these circumstances? At one level, clearly very little, as one instance in a wider demos or demon that pulls in many directions. This said, the urban remains an enormously significant formative arena, not only as the daily space of over half of the world’s population, but also as the supremely visible manifestation of difference and heterogeneity placed together. Urbanism highlights the challenges of negotiating class, gender and ethnic or racial differences placed in close proximity. It also profiles the newness that arises from spatial juxtaposition and global flow and connectivity, forever forcing responses of varying type and intensity in the face of negotiating strangers, strangeness and continuous change. Possibilities thus remain for continuing to ask about the nature of the ‘good city’. This paper outlines the elements of an urban ethic imagined as an ever-widening habit of solidarity built around different dimensions of the urban common weal. It offers a practical urban utopianism based around four registers of solidarity woven around the collective basics of everyday urban life. These are ‘repair’, ‘relatedness’, ‘rights’ and ‘re-enchantment’.
Introduction
Models of the good city—of the kind of urban order that might enhance the human experi- ence—invariably tend to project from the cir- cumstances of the times. At the origins of urban settlement, providing the means of defence against invasion, starvation and the elements would have featured high on the
list, while the Greco-Roman city would have measured its worth through its capacity to embellish the built environment, project its power and develop the deliberative, political and creative energies of some if its citizens. In the context of the filthy and overcrowded Victorian industrial city, the battle against want, poverty, grime and disease would have been coupled to moral crusades of various
Urban Studies, Vol. 43, Nos 5/6, 1009–1023, May 2006
Ash Amin is in the Department of Geography, University of Durham, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK. Fax: 0191 334 1801. E-mail: ash.amin@durham.ac.uk. The author is grateful to several colleagues at Durham for taking the time and care at short notice to read an earlier draft. The author thanks Ben Anderson, Steve Graham, Paul Harrison, Gordon MacLeod, Susan Smith, and Philip Sheldrake for their generous comments and critical insight.
0042-0980 Print=1360-063X Online=06=5–61009–15 # 2006 The Editors of Urban Studies DOI: 10.1080=00420980600676717
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sorts, ranging from temperance and manners to bourgeois charity and revolutionary zeal, in defining a civilised urban existence. In our times, the basics of urban infrastructure once again come to the fore in cities recover- ing from war and destitution, while in many cities of the global South access to the staples of life, clean water, energy, shelter and sanitation remain the targets of urban pro- gress, awkwardly juxtaposed with definitions of human advancement in prosperous cities based on high-income consumer lifestyles and bourgeois escape from the ugly or danger- ous aspects of urban life.
Such contextual influence makes it highly problematic to assume that models of the good city can travel unmodified across space and time. Indeed, the history of practical effort to improve human life in cities is one that has worked the fine grain of circumstance and place. Yet, paradoxically, this history has also been influenced by universalistic imagi- naries of the good life, with cities placed at the very heart of the various projections on offer. For example, utopian thought in its various iterations through time, from the ideas of Plato, St Augustine and Thomas More to those of de Sade, Bellamy and le Cor- busier, has imagined the logos of utopia to be an ideal city, a visible emblem of order and harmony. The city of concentric circles of function and purpose, the city of modernist planning, the city of contemplation or passion ordered through particular architec- tural rules, can all be seen as blueprints for urban organisation in different parts of the world, intended to deliver the good life, however, defined.
According to Zygmunt Bauman (2003), our times, for various reasons have begun to dis- pense with universalistic models of the good life often associated with the ideal territorial community. One reason is the systematic unhinging of territorial moorings and obli- gations by globalisation in its various guises. Another is the displacement of strong and lasting senses of community by multiple and ever-changing social and cultural attach- ments. A third reason is the impossibility of teleology and heaven in an age of fleeting
pleasures, instantaneous gratification, con- stantly changing desires and scepticism towards order and ordering, especially of mass collective nature. Finally, Bauman argues that organising élites in a global market society are largely responsible only to themselves and their like, no longer inter- ested in societal projects. Utopia has lost its logos, meaning, appeal and organising force, as meanings of the good life shift to immedi- ate, temporary, private and hedonistic projects.
Whether Bauman’s analysis of contempor- ary modernity holds is not a question I wish to pursue here. Instead, I want to ask if the developments that concern Bauman might not be read as an invitation to rethink ideas of the good life, away from longings for faraway and deracinated citadels of achieve- ment that need no further work, towards a pragmatism of the possible based on the con- tinual effort to spin webs of social justice and human well-being and emancipation out of prevailing circumstances (see also Pinder, 2002 and 2005). Such an understanding, potentially, might even allow a more hopeful reading of the multiple and mobile attach- ments freed from the moorings of territory and nation that Bauman chooses to interpret as a post-utopian presentism without promise.
In prising open such a possibility, my intention is not to rewrite the ills of capitalist globalisation as the goods of a new utopia. Rather, it is to look at the contradictions and possibilities of our times as the material of a politics of well-being and emancipation that is neither totalising nor teleological. Such an approach accepts that utopia is not a dream of the attainable, but an ‘impossible place’ following Foucault, expressing a ‘hope in the not-yet’, based on many practices “of transformative intervention” that strive “to give and find hope through an anticipation of alternative possibilities or potentialities”, as Ben Anderson (2005, p. 11) has recently argued. It retains the original idea of an eman- cipated society, but now harnessed to careful obligations in the arena of personal politics, insurgent design, collective responsibilities and human rights (Harvey, 2000). It accepts
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that the constitutive multiplicity of our times is both capitalist entrapment and opportunity for a plural democracy drawing on possibili- ties that are more than capitalist trickery (Amin and Thrift, 2005a).
The Good City?
But can the contemporary city qualify as the topos of even this more pragmatic interpret- ation of the good life, given its increasingly indistinct geography as a place and its vast sociology of hopelessness and misery? As geographical entities, cities are hardly dis- cernible places with distinct identities. They have become an endless inhabited sprawl without clear boundaries and they have become sites of extraordinary circulation and translocal connectivity, linked to processes of spatial stretching and interdependence associated with globalisation. In turn, however, complex processes of global urban- isation are rendering cities into all-embracing social spaces as the world and its ways pours into them, such that they are increasingly read as emblems of the modern (Amin and Thrift, 2005b).
Similarly, sociologically, contemporary cities do not spring to mind as the sites of community, happiness and well-being, except perhaps for those in the fast lane, the secure and well-connected, and those excited by the buzz of frenetic urban life. For the vast majority, cities are polluted, unhealthy, tiring, overwhelming, confusing, alienating. They are the places of low-wage work, inse- curity, poor living conditions and dejected isolation for the many at the bottom of the social ladder daily sucked into them. They hum with the fear and anxiety linked to crime, helplessness and the close juxtaposi- tion of strangers. They symbolise the isolation of people trapped in ghettos, segregated areas and distant dormitories, and they express the frustration and ill-temper of those locked into long hours of work or travel. Cities still abound with all manner of acts of mutuality, friendship, pleasure and sociality (Thrift, 2005), but to project the good life from so much urban fracture seems a step too far.
Politically, too, the contemporary city bears little resemblance to imaginings of the times when urbanism stood for citizenship, the ideal republic, good government, civic beha- viour and the ideal public sphere. The politics of emancipation with a big ‘P’ is no longer a particularly urban affair in either genesis or practice, having given way to national and global institutions and movements. In turn, the public arena and public culture in general have not been reducible to the urban for a long time. The urban political has become part of a much larger political machinery, with the centre located elsewhere, spatially or institutionally. This is not to say that cities have ceased to be political spaces. Far from it, for they remain sites of consider- able political agency. For example, global cities have become the political base of the global capitalist class and of many globally oriented social movements, along with spark- ing new political impulses stemming from the urban juxtaposition of the rich and the poor (Sassen, 2003). But this cannot be confused with a politics of the good life, which no longer projects outwards from the city.
Any habit of urban solidarity is assailed by the incursions of state power and surveillance, by social practices and affective cultures formed in a highly dispersed and multilayered public sphere, and by orderings that include many forms such as parliaments and assembled things and virtual objects where politics is practised (Latour, 2005). Indeed, in the con- temporary geopolitics of shame and tame based on a US-led re-equilibration of the world in the name of the war on terror, the very idea of the city and what it means, is being redrawn through experiments with new spaces of exception, such as extra-terri- torial camps and military-run cities, where there are no legal rights and protections, where human rights are abused, and where new security systems are in place for intense and intrusive surveillance. A new template for the conduct and regulation of civic life is being drawn in these spaces.
What remains of the urban as demos in these circumstances? At one level, clearly very little, only as one instance in a wider
THE GOOD CITY 1011
demos or demon that pulls in many directions. This said, the urban remains an enormously significant formative arena, not only as the daily space of over half of the world’s popu- lation, but also as the supremely visible mani- festation of difference and heterogeneity placed together. While I would not go so far as Rainer Bauböck’s proposal that
We should conceive of the city as a political space inside the territorial nation-state where multicultural and transnational iden- tities can be more freely articulated (Bauböck, 2003, p. 142).
the ‘being-togetherness’ of life in urban space has to be recognised, demanding attendance to the politics of living together. The human condition has become the urban condition. In 1950, one-third of the world’s population lived in cities but, by 2050, the figure is expected to rise to two-thirds, or 6 billion people. Then, by 2015, each of the world’s 10 largest cities (Bombay, Tokyo, Lagos, Shanghai, Jakarta, São Paolo, Karachi, Beijing, Dhaka and Mexico City) will house between 20 and 30 million people. Arguably, even those people who are not included in these figures owe most of their existence to the demands that cities place on the world economy. Thus, no discussion of the good life can ignore the particularities of the urban way of life, ranging from the trials of supply, congestion, pollution and commuting, to the swells of change, scale, inequality, distribution and sensory experience in urban life. The daily negotiation of the urban environment has become central in defining the privations, provisions, prejudices and pre- ferences of a very large section of humanity.
Then, as already hinted, the urban comes with specific possibilities as an arena of direct democracy or engagement, described by some as a formative politics of citizenship (Holston and Appadurai, 1999). Urbanism highlights the challenges of negotiating class, gender and ethnic or racial differences placed in close proximity, with the spatiality of the city playing a distinctive role in the negotiation of multiplicity and difference. It profiles the newness that arises from spatial
juxtaposition and global flow and connec- tivity, forever forcing responses of varying type and intensity in the face of negotiating strangers, strangeness and continuous change. According to Saskia Sassen (2003), the plenitude of sites, spaces, institutions and associations of organisation and mobilisation in cities potentially returns the urban as a stra- tegic space for oppositional politics as repre- sentative politics with a big ‘P’ becomes increasingly corporatised. More modestly, it could be argued that the myriad bolt-holes that are to be found in cities provide some possibility to the millions of dispossessed, dis- located and illegal people stripped of citizen- ship to acquire some political capital (Amin and Thrift, 2005a). Then, urban public space, even if increasingly privatised and con- trolled, remains the visual emblem of the public culture as well as the sites of gathering where some aspects of this culture are formed and performed.
The good city might be thought of as the challenge to fashion a progressive politics of well-being and emancipation out of multi- plicity and difference and from the particulari- ties of the urban experience. This is a politics of small gains and fragile truces that con- stantly need to be worked at, but which can add up, with resonances capable of binding difference as well as reining in the powerful and the abusive (Sandercock, 2003; Hollen- bach, 2002).
In this paper, I wish to outline the elements of the good city imagined as an ever-widening habit of solidarity built around different dimensions of the urban common weal. My argument is that such a habit can play a vital role in nudging the urban public culture— expressed in the acts and attitudes of govern- ment, the media, opinion-makers, civic organ- isations, communities and citizens—towards outcomes that benefit the more rather than the few, without compromising the right to difference that contemporary urban life demands. The result is the city that learns to live with, perhaps even value, difference, publicise the commons, and crowd out the violence of an urbanism of exclusionary and privatised interest.
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How is it possible to build a chain of soli- darity out of multiplicity? How can a culture of care and regard become the decisive filter of intersubjective relations (Hage, 2003), cor- porate behaviour and public engagement when the historical momentum is so decisi- vely in the direction of urban disregard, intol- erance and self-interest? How can such a culture be sustained across the vast spaces that count as part of the same city in none but name? How can it be achieved when the composition of the urban population of the city is constantly changing due to the ebb and flow of migration and mobility?
These are central questions to which there is no easy answer, but what a practical urban utopianism offers is credibility in a shared commons and active public engagement as a counterweight to the disinterested individual- ism that has come so to dominate. In some sense, it draws on the same powers of capture and enthralment of distant others that market capitalism has perfected, but now harnessed to a different ethic of human engagement and fulfilment. Its effectiveness lies in a politics of alterity given practical expression and demonstrable effect rather than in any magical powers to wish away the seductions, distortions and divisions of market individualism. It remains experimental in its practices and outcomes, but no less significant as a model of the good city.
Registers of Urban Solidarity
Against the backcloth of corporatist urban planning in the US and an absent social state, John Friedmann (2000) has identified housing, affordable health care, reasonably remunerated work and adequate social pro- vision, as the four pillars of the good city. The key actor, for Friedmann, is
an autonomous, self-organising civil society, active in making claims, resisting and struggling on behalf of the good city within a framework of democratic insti- tutions (Friedmann, 2000, p. 471).
In a similar vein, I wish to identify four regis- ters of urban solidarity that engage with
multiplicity through the collective basics of everyday urban life. These are repair, related- ness, rights and re-enchantment—which could be labelled as the four Rs of contemporary urban solidarity.
Repair
Cities possess a machinic order composed of a bewildering array of objects-in-relation whose silent rhythm instantiates and regulates all aspects of urban life—economic, political, social and cultural (Amin and Thrift, 2002). It includes many mundane objects, such as road signals, post-codes, pipes and overhead cables, satellites, office design and furniture, clocks, commuting patterns, computers and telephones, automobiles, software, schedules and databases. These are aligned in different ways to structure all manner of urban rhythms including goods delivery or traffic flow systems, Internet protocols, rituals and codes of civic and public conduct, family rou- tines and cultures of workplace and neighbourhood.
Nigel Thrift (2005) has described this machinery as a ‘technological unconscious’ that provides the ‘interactional intelligence’ without which urban life would end. It makes things work, it facilitates circulation, it guides economic conduct, it channels distri- bution and reward, it sets the ground rules, it provides orientation, and it designates the spaces, activities and people that count (for example, by demarcating investment zones and slump zones, or the economically worthy and the undeserving). It is the life- support system of cities (Gandy, 2002), so evident when such things as sanitation, clean water, electricity, telecommunications and transport systems, medical technologies and many other survival technologies, are lacking or fail. But, it is also a transhuman material culture bristling with intentionality. Software code, timetables, traffic signals, zoning patterns, lists, databases, grids and the like, can be seen as the ‘hidden hand’ of urban social organisation and behaviour. They act as the everyday filter through which society reads and accepts social
THE GOOD CITY 1013
boundaries and demarcations, measures the achievements of modernity, assesses what it is to be modern and naturalises forms of auth- ority and control that made visible in their raw power would face considerable scrutiny and opposition. Thus, identities, material supply, functionality and social power are all tangled up in this urban machinery.
A politics of the good city has to grasp the ambiguous centrality of this hidden republic and subject it to democratic scrutiny and use. At one level, this is a matter of making public, ridiculing and neutralising the urban uses of technology as a weapon of social control. For example, as Steve Graham (2005, p. 5) argues, contemporary urbanism is impregnated with “new software-sorted geographies” silently demarcating the worth of particular zones and sections of urban society, used to exercise pervasive scrutiny and state/market authority. Graham notes, for example, the proliferation of biometric technologies that rapidly sort desirables and undesirables; the increasing reliance of com- panies on sophisticated data-gathering and classification software, in order to differen- tiate between premium customers and ‘sca- vengers and surfers’; the use of GIS and GDIS technologies that re-engineer the social map of the city by demarcating desir- able areas and taboo areas; and the use of new facial recognition software in CCTV sur- veillance to match individuals on the street to photo-fits of threat, so that the guilty can be named before the event.
There is a limit to how far the technological can be decoupled from the social when it has become so constitutive, but there is plenty to be done in terms of revealing the power dynamics of “values, opinions and rhetoric . . . frozen into code” (Bowker and Leigh- Star, 1999, p. 35; cited in Graham, 2005, p. 1) and placing them under binding public scrutiny and influence, so that the abuses of software can be revealed and then confronted with alternatives that work for citizens. This is no easy task given the hidden nature of the technological unconscious and the powerful interests behind it. However, a first step in a ‘new politics of repair’ is revelation and
open public debate on alternative ways of weaving technology into the urban social. The greater the impetus, the greater the pressure on states and élites to reconsider what for so long has been taken for granted.
At another level, so pervasive is the interac- tive intelligence of the techno-space (for example, software systems nested in homes, cars, pockets, implants, hospitals, schools, offices, roads, shops, pipes and ducts, and often talking to each other), that cities would shut down or spiral in unanticipated directions when this techno-space is threatened. This is precisely why an elaborate infrastructure works day and night to prevent or fix failure. The technological unconscious, as Nigel Thrift (2005) notes, is what allows cities to avoid the collapse that any vast and complex system of bits that need alignment and co- ordination can so easily suffer, and also to bounce back rapidly to normality after disrup- tions or disasters of various sorts.
The good city, then, is the city of continual maintenance and repair, underpinned by a complex political economy of attention and co-ordination. London managed to bounce back after 7/7 with remarkable speed as a machine of movement, work, livelihood and daily life, as the technological uncon- scious—through an extraordinary effort of co-ordination between myriad institutions and the public—kicked in to repair the city and its global connections. New Orleans, in contrast, due to the tardy response from the federal authorities as well as the sheer scale of destruction, has been switched off as a city and, while speedier recovery can be expected as the political will to do something returns, it will take some time to rebuild the technological unconscious that has thus far ensured rapid repair and maintenance. The city is discovering the chaos, risk and degra- dation that so many cities in the global South have suffered for so long owing to the deficiencies of the urban infrastructure.
The well-functioning city, however, does not reward all. It comes with its own political economy of supply and provision, discrimi- nating against the poor and the marginal. Thus, no discussion of the good city in terms
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of the politics of repair can ignore the need to ensure universal and affordable access to the basics of shelter, sanitation, sustenance, water, communication, mobility and so on. And when such a commitment is explicitly demonstrated, as the city of Bologna did in 1978 by ending bus fares, and then again in 1998 by providing free Internet access, it adds to the urban unconscious a habit of soli- darity as the city comes to be experienced as the city for all.
But there is more. There has to be an expli- cit politics of repair and maintenance, one that attends to the silent republic of things that makes cities work not only when there is a threat of shut-down, but at all times so that a preventative and curative infrastructure is in place. This requires a progressive politics focusing on central aspects of service priva- tion in especially the global South that make life so miserable for so many within cities that suffer constant blackouts, by intervening in an increasingly intricate system of soft- ware-based auto-regulation in order to know the system, prevent new auto-corrections that are harmful, and reduce lock-out. As Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift (2005, p. 27) note, “repair and maintenance are not incidental activities. In many ways they are the engine of modern economies and societies” and nowhere more so than in cities that have so come to rely on technology for their survival and well-being.
Relatedness
Closely linked to the register of repair is the register of relatedness. Cities are riddled with the misery, anxiety and desperation of the disconnected and excluded. They always have been. Now, however, there is a new scale and intensity of disconnection associ- ated with the mass migration of the world’s population to cities, the displacement of welfare commitments by market individual- ism, the expansion of the illegal and precar- ious economy in the context of jobless growth, the evacuation of capital from risky and non-lucrative areas, the growing discon- nection of the rich from the poor in all walks
of urban life, and the disjuncture between income and spend in a credit/debt economy which thrives on insecurity.
In this context, the good city has to be ima- gined as the socially just city, with strong obli- gations towards those marginalised from the means of survival and human fulfilment (Wacquant, 1999). These are obligations that should draw on a solidarity of human rights and recognise the constitutive role of the distant other in whatever counts as the social ‘ours’, rather than, as has been the case in the history of modern welfare, drawn on a solidarity of charity or instrumentalist support for the fallen insider within a pre- defined community of belonging (national, ethnic or other). The result is an equal duty of care towards the insider and the outsider, the temporary and the permanent resident. In the good city, the duty of public service through adequate welfare measures relating to financial and personal security, education, health care, shelter and so on, should extend to those least able to pay for these basics but who are most in need, ranging from disen- chanted youths and broken households, to the many migrants, minorities and itinerants that seek refuge in the city. An equivalence of right has to be assumed between those in the mainstream and those on the margins, prior to fiscally driven decisions on what scale of welfare provision is judged to be sustainable.
Is such an expanded urbanism at all realistic at a time when senses of the human collectiv- ity have all but disappeared? The ethos of unconditional hospitality that Jacques Derrida (2001) has invoked from Europe’s cities in the name of their old duty to provide sanctuary when life outside the city was barely protected has either been long forgotten by modern-day universal welfare systems or it has been gradually redirected by states towards targeted social groups under pressure from neo-liberalism. One con- sequence of the restructuring of the national welfare state has been increased pressure on politicians, élites and civic associations closest to the problems—in cities—to provide a solution. Yet, here too, the grain is
THE GOOD CITY 1015
decidedly against the city of universal care, as business and professional élites become ever more tied to transnational communities, press- ing on city leaders to serve their particular local needs (Sassen, 2002). The city for all, therefore, is by no means guaranteed, lacking as it does, considerable opposition from local élites as well as external support.
But a ‘politics of relatedness’ is becoming increasingly necessary not only because of the cost and wastage associated with wide- spread disconnection, but also because of the damage wrought by the fear, hate and anxiety that feeds on division and envy in urban life. It is becoming unavoidable to address the consequences of unequal pro- vision, which include class segregation, endless surveillance, civic disruption, urban violence, fear of the stranger, suspicion of youths, immigrants and asylum-seekers, and generalised anxiety and caution. The inclusive city, although undeniably taxing on the public purse and requiring sustained public and civic effort, is also the city of untapped potential and expanded human and social capital. Most importantly, it is the city that extracts an opportunity for individual and collective advancement out of urban multiplicity and mobility.
Solidarity based on the universal provision of the basics of existence and human associ- ation is however no guarantor of social mutuality and respect for difference. Contem- porary urban multiplicity is linked to a public culture of misanthropy, tribal affiliation and self-interest, an explicit denial of difference feeding on the comfort of welfare support in some instances. There is a ‘nasty’ politics of hate ingrained as an urban affect (Thrift, 2005). Against such obduracy, heightened by the suspicion faced by the most visible and vulnerable subjects of global displacement such as immigrants, asylum-seekers, Travel- lers and the homeless, an urban solidarity of relatedness can barely escape addressing the ethic of conduct among strangers. This is an issue that has long interested urban theorists, from Simmel and Benjamin who saw a combi- nation of indifference, inquisitiveness and alienation in urban social mixture, to
Mumford and Sennett who anticipate civic interaction under certain conditions of man- agement of public space.
The present times are particularly uncom- promising in this regard, due to growing urban segregation, the collapse of universals serving to bind difference, an eroding urban commons, and increased legitimacy for group isolationism in private and public life. Living with difference is becoming a test of endurance as the urban public comes to accept that multiplicity is best tackled though isolation or, depending on who is involved, ejection. A case in point is the rampant suspi- cion that has grown of Muslims as they go about their daily business after 9/11 and 7/ 7, grotesquely feeding on complacent neo-Conservative babble about incompatible civilisations. The actions of the very few— militant Jihadis—have been allowed to feed nationalist frenzy demanding the taming or ejection of an entire faith group on grounds of cultural incompatibility a nationalist security. Such extreme reaction, along with other examples such
