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2006 43: 1009Urban StudAsh Amin

The Good City  

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The Good City

Ash Amin

[Paper first received, October 2005; in final form, January 2006]

Summary. Can the contemporary city qualify as the topos of the good life, as it has in classicalliterature on human emancipation? As geographical entities, cities are hardly discernible placeswith distinct identities. They have become an endless inhabited sprawl without clear boundariesand 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 toimaginings of the times when urbanism stood for citizenship, the ideal republic, goodgovernment, 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 tonational and global institutions and movements. What remains of the urban as demos in thesecircumstances? At one level, clearly very little, as one instance in a wider demos or demon thatpulls in many directions. This said, the urban remains an enormously significant formativearena, not only as the daily space of over half of the world’s population, but also as thesupremely visible manifestation of difference and heterogeneity placed together. Urbanismhighlights the challenges of negotiating class, gender and ethnic or racial differences placed inclose proximity. It also profiles the newness that arises from spatial juxtaposition and global flowand connectivity, forever forcing responses of varying type and intensity in the face ofnegotiating strangers, strangeness and continuous change. Possibilities thus remain forcontinuing to ask about the nature of the ‘good city’. This paper outlines the elements of anurban ethic imagined as an ever-widening habit of solidarity built around different dimensionsof the urban common weal. It offers a practical urban utopianism based around four registersof 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 urbanorder that might enhance the human experi-ence—invariably tend to project from the cir-cumstances of the times. At the origins ofurban settlement, providing the means ofdefence against invasion, starvation and theelements would have featured high on the

list, while the Greco-Roman city would havemeasured its worth through its capacity toembellish the built environment, project itspower and develop the deliberative, politicaland creative energies of some if its citizens.In the context of the filthy and overcrowdedVictorian industrial city, the battle againstwant, poverty, grime and disease would havebeen 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 shortnotice 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 by Nuno Rodrigues on October 12, 2012usj.sagepub.comDownloaded from

sorts, ranging from temperance and mannersto bourgeois charity and revolutionary zeal,in defining a civilised urban existence. Inour times, the basics of urban infrastructureonce again come to the fore in cities recover-ing from war and destitution, while in manycities of the global South access to thestaples of life, clean water, energy, shelterand sanitation remain the targets of urban pro-gress, awkwardly juxtaposed with definitionsof human advancement in prosperous citiesbased on high-income consumer lifestylesand bourgeois escape from the ugly or danger-ous aspects of urban life.

Such contextual influence makes it highlyproblematic to assume that models of thegood city can travel unmodified across spaceand time. Indeed, the history of practicaleffort to improve human life in cities is onethat has worked the fine grain of circumstanceand place. Yet, paradoxically, this history hasalso been influenced by universalistic imagi-naries of the good life, with cities placed atthe very heart of the various projections onoffer. For example, utopian thought in itsvarious iterations through time, from theideas of Plato, St Augustine and ThomasMore to those of de Sade, Bellamy and le Cor-busier, has imagined the logos of utopia to bean ideal city, a visible emblem of order andharmony. The city of concentric circles offunction and purpose, the city of modernistplanning, the city of contemplation orpassion ordered through particular architec-tural rules, can all be seen as blueprints forurban organisation in different parts of theworld, intended to deliver the good life,however, defined.

According to Zygmunt Bauman (2003), ourtimes, for various reasons have begun to dis-pense with universalistic models of the goodlife often associated with the ideal territorialcommunity. One reason is the systematicunhinging of territorial moorings and obli-gations by globalisation in its various guises.Another is the displacement of strong andlasting senses of community by multiple andever-changing social and cultural attach-ments. A third reason is the impossibility ofteleology and heaven in an age of fleeting

pleasures, instantaneous gratification, con-stantly changing desires and scepticismtowards order and ordering, especially ofmass collective nature. Finally, Baumanargues that organising elites in a globalmarket society are largely responsible onlyto themselves and their like, no longer inter-ested in societal projects. Utopia has lost itslogos, meaning, appeal and organising force,as meanings of the good life shift to immedi-ate, temporary, private and hedonisticprojects.

Whether Bauman’s analysis of contempor-ary modernity holds is not a question I wishto pursue here. Instead, I want to ask if thedevelopments that concern Bauman mightnot be read as an invitation to rethink ideasof the good life, away from longings forfaraway and deracinated citadels of achieve-ment that need no further work, towards apragmatism of the possible based on the con-tinual effort to spin webs of social justice andhuman well-being and emancipation out ofprevailing circumstances (see also Pinder,2002 and 2005). Such an understanding,potentially, might even allow a more hopefulreading of the multiple and mobile attach-ments freed from the moorings of territoryand nation that Bauman chooses to interpretas a post-utopian presentism without promise.

In prising open such a possibility, myintention is not to rewrite the ills of capitalistglobalisation as the goods of a new utopia.Rather, it is to look at the contradictions andpossibilities of our times as the material of apolitics of well-being and emancipation thatis neither totalising nor teleological. Such anapproach accepts that utopia is not a dreamof the attainable, but an ‘impossible place’following Foucault, expressing a ‘hope inthe not-yet’, based on many practices “oftransformative intervention” that strive “togive and find hope through an anticipation ofalternative possibilities or potentialities”, asBen Anderson (2005, p. 11) has recentlyargued. It retains the original idea of an eman-cipated society, but now harnessed to carefulobligations in the arena of personal politics,insurgent design, collective responsibilitiesand human rights (Harvey, 2000). It accepts

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that the constitutive multiplicity of our timesis both capitalist entrapment and opportunityfor 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 thetopos of even this more pragmatic interpret-ation of the good life, given its increasinglyindistinct geography as a place and its vastsociology of hopelessness and misery? Asgeographical entities, cities are hardly dis-cernible places with distinct identities. Theyhave become an endless inhabited sprawlwithout clear boundaries and they havebecome sites of extraordinary circulation andtranslocal connectivity, linked to processesof spatial stretching and interdependenceassociated with globalisation. In turn,however, complex processes of global urban-isation are rendering cities into all-embracingsocial spaces as the world and its ways poursinto them, such that they are increasinglyread as emblems of the modern (Amin andThrift, 2005b).

Similarly, sociologically, contemporarycities do not spring to mind as the sites ofcommunity, happiness and well-being,except perhaps for those in the fast lane, thesecure and well-connected, and those excitedby the buzz of frenetic urban life. For thevast majority, cities are polluted, unhealthy,tiring, overwhelming, confusing, alienating.They are the places of low-wage work, inse-curity, poor living conditions and dejectedisolation for the many at the bottom of thesocial ladder daily sucked into them. Theyhum with the fear and anxiety linked tocrime, helplessness and the close juxtaposi-tion of strangers. They symbolise the isolationof people trapped in ghettos, segregated areasand distant dormitories, and they express thefrustration and ill-temper of those lockedinto long hours of work or travel. Cities stillabound with all manner of acts of mutuality,friendship, pleasure and sociality (Thrift,2005), but to project the good life from somuch urban fracture seems a step too far.

Politically, too, the contemporary city bearslittle resemblance to imaginings of the timeswhen urbanism stood for citizenship, theideal republic, good government, civic beha-viour and the ideal public sphere. The politicsof emancipation with a big ‘P’ is no longer aparticularly urban affair in either genesis orpractice, having given way to national andglobal institutions and movements. In turn,the public arena and public culture ingeneral have not been reducible to the urbanfor a long time. The urban political hasbecome part of a much larger politicalmachinery, with the centre located elsewhere,spatially or institutionally. This is not to saythat cities have ceased to be political spaces.Far from it, for they remain sites of consider-able political agency. For example, globalcities have become the political base of theglobal capitalist class and of many globallyoriented social movements, along with spark-ing new political impulses stemming from theurban juxtaposition of the rich and the poor(Sassen, 2003). But this cannot be confusedwith a politics of the good life, which nolonger projects outwards from the city.

Any habit of urban solidarity is assailed bythe incursions of state power and surveillance,by social practices and affective culturesformed in a highly dispersed and multilayeredpublic sphere, and by orderings that includemany forms such as parliaments and assembledthings and virtual objects where politics ispractised (Latour, 2005). Indeed, in the con-temporary geopolitics of shame and tamebased on a US-led re-equilibration of theworld in the name of the war on terror, thevery idea of the city and what it means, isbeing redrawn through experiments withnew spaces of exception, such as extra-terri-torial camps and military-run cities, wherethere are no legal rights and protections,where human rights are abused, and wherenew security systems are in place for intenseand intrusive surveillance. A new templatefor the conduct and regulation of civic life isbeing drawn in these spaces.

What remains of the urban as demos inthese circumstances? At one level, clearlyvery little, only as one instance in a wider

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demos or demon that pulls in many directions.This said, the urban remains an enormouslysignificant formative arena, not only as thedaily space of over half of the world’s popu-lation, but also as the supremely visible mani-festation of difference and heterogeneityplaced together. While I would not go so faras Rainer Baubock’s proposal that

We should conceive of the city as a politicalspace inside the territorial nation-statewhere multicultural and transnational iden-tities can be more freely articulated(Baubock, 2003, p. 142).

the ‘being-togetherness’ of life in urban spacehas to be recognised, demanding attendanceto the politics of living together. The humancondition has become the urban condition. In1950, one-third of the world’s populationlived in cities but, by 2050, the figure isexpected to rise to two-thirds, or 6 billionpeople. Then, by 2015, each of the world’s10 largest cities (Bombay, Tokyo, Lagos,Shanghai, Jakarta, Sao Paolo, Karachi,Beijing, Dhaka and Mexico City) will housebetween 20 and 30 million people. Arguably,even those people who are not included inthese figures owe most of their existence tothe demands that cities place on the worldeconomy. Thus, no discussion of the goodlife can ignore the particularities of theurban way of life, ranging from the trials ofsupply, congestion, pollution and commuting,to the swells of change, scale, inequality,distribution and sensory experience in urbanlife. The daily negotiation of the urbanenvironment has become central in definingthe privations, provisions, prejudices and pre-ferences of a very large section of humanity.

Then, as already hinted, the urban comeswith specific possibilities as an arena ofdirect democracy or engagement, describedby some as a formative politics of citizenship(Holston and Appadurai, 1999). Urbanismhighlights the challenges of negotiatingclass, gender and ethnic or racial differencesplaced in close proximity, with the spatialityof the city playing a distinctive role in thenegotiation of multiplicity and difference. Itprofiles the newness that arises from spatial

juxtaposition and global flow and connec-tivity, forever forcing responses of varyingtype and intensity in the face of negotiatingstrangers, strangeness and continuouschange. According to Saskia Sassen (2003),the plenitude of sites, spaces, institutions andassociations of organisation and mobilisationin cities potentially returns the urban as a stra-tegic space for oppositional politics as repre-sentative politics with a big ‘P’ becomesincreasingly corporatised. More modestly, itcould be argued that the myriad bolt-holesthat are to be found in cities provide somepossibility to the millions of dispossessed, dis-located and illegal people stripped of citizen-ship to acquire some political capital (Aminand Thrift, 2005a). Then, urban publicspace, even if increasingly privatised and con-trolled, remains the visual emblem of thepublic culture as well as the sites of gatheringwhere some aspects of this culture are formedand performed.

The good city might be thought of as thechallenge to fashion a progressive politics ofwell-being and emancipation out of multi-plicity and difference and from the particulari-ties of the urban experience. This is a politicsof small gains and fragile truces that con-stantly need to be worked at, but which canadd up, with resonances capable of bindingdifference as well as reining in the powerfuland the abusive (Sandercock, 2003; Hollen-bach, 2002).

In this paper, I wish to outline the elementsof the good city imagined as an ever-wideninghabit of solidarity built around differentdimensions of the urban common weal. Myargument is that such a habit can play a vitalrole 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—towardsoutcomes that benefit the more rather thanthe few, without compromising the right todifference that contemporary urban lifedemands. The result is the city that learns tolive with, perhaps even value, difference,publicise the commons, and crowd out theviolence of an urbanism of exclusionary andprivatised interest.

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How is it possible to build a chain of soli-darity out of multiplicity? How can a cultureof care and regard become the decisive filterof intersubjective relations (Hage, 2003), cor-porate behaviour and public engagementwhen the historical momentum is so decisi-vely in the direction of urban disregard, intol-erance and self-interest? How can such aculture be sustained across the vast spacesthat count as part of the same city in nonebut name? How can it be achieved when thecomposition of the urban population of thecity is constantly changing due to the ebband flow of migration and mobility?

These are central questions to which thereis no easy answer, but what a practical urbanutopianism offers is credibility in a sharedcommons and active public engagement as acounterweight to the disinterested individual-ism that has come so to dominate. In somesense, it draws on the same powers ofcapture and enthralment of distant othersthat market capitalism has perfected, butnow harnessed to a different ethic of humanengagement and fulfilment. Its effectivenesslies in a politics of alterity given practicalexpression and demonstrable effect ratherthan in any magical powers to wish away theseductions, distortions and divisions ofmarket individualism. It remains experimentalin its practices and outcomes, but no lesssignificant as a model of the good city.

Registers of Urban Solidarity

Against the backcloth of corporatist urbanplanning in the US and an absent socialstate, John Friedmann (2000) has identifiedhousing, affordable health care, reasonablyremunerated work and adequate social pro-vision, as the four pillars of the good city.The key actor, for Friedmann, is

an autonomous, self-organising civilsociety, active in making claims, resistingand struggling on behalf of the good citywithin 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 ofeveryday urban life. These are repair, related-ness, rights and re-enchantment—which couldbe labelled as the four Rs of contemporaryurban solidarity.

Repair

Cities possess a machinic order composed of abewildering array of objects-in-relation whosesilent rhythm instantiates and regulates allaspects of urban life—economic, political,social and cultural (Amin and Thrift, 2002).It includes many mundane objects, such asroad signals, post-codes, pipes and overheadcables, satellites, office design and furniture,clocks, commuting patterns, computers andtelephones, automobiles, software, schedulesand databases. These are aligned in differentways to structure all manner of urbanrhythms including goods delivery or trafficflow systems, Internet protocols, rituals andcodes of civic and public conduct, family rou-tines and cultures of workplace andneighbourhood.

Nigel Thrift (2005) has described thismachinery as a ‘technological unconscious’that provides the ‘interactional intelligence’without which urban life would end. Itmakes things work, it facilitates circulation,it guides economic conduct, it channels distri-bution and reward, it sets the ground rules, itprovides orientation, and it designates thespaces, activities and people that count (forexample, by demarcating investment zonesand slump zones, or the economicallyworthy and the undeserving). It is the life-support system of cities (Gandy, 2002), soevident when such things as sanitation, cleanwater, electricity, telecommunications andtransport systems, medical technologies andmany other survival technologies, arelacking or fail. But, it is also a transhumanmaterial culture bristling with intentionality.Software code, timetables, traffic signals,zoning patterns, lists, databases, grids andthe like, can be seen as the ‘hidden hand’ ofurban social organisation and behaviour.They act as the everyday filter throughwhich society reads and accepts social

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boundaries and demarcations, measures theachievements of modernity, assesses what itis to be modern and naturalises forms of auth-ority and control that made visible in their rawpower would face considerable scrutiny andopposition. Thus, identities, material supply,functionality and social power are all tangledup in this urban machinery.

A politics of the good city has to grasp theambiguous centrality of this hidden republicand subject it to democratic scrutiny anduse. At one level, this is a matter of makingpublic, ridiculing and neutralising the urbanuses of technology as a weapon of socialcontrol. For example, as Steve Graham(2005, p. 5) argues, contemporary urbanismis impregnated with “new software-sortedgeographies” silently demarcating the worthof particular zones and sections of urbansociety, used to exercise pervasive scrutinyand state/market authority. Graham notes,for example, the proliferation of biometrictechnologies that rapidly sort desirables andundesirables; the increasing reliance of com-panies on sophisticated data-gathering andclassification software, in order to differen-tiate between premium customers and ‘sca-vengers and surfers’; the use of GIS andGDIS technologies that re-engineer thesocial map of the city by demarcating desir-able areas and taboo areas; and the use ofnew facial recognition software in CCTV sur-veillance to match individuals on the street tophoto-fits of threat, so that the guilty can benamed before the event.

There is a limit to how far the technologicalcan be decoupled from the social when it hasbecome so constitutive, but there is plenty tobe done in terms of revealing the powerdynamics 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 publicscrutiny and influence, so that the abuses ofsoftware can be revealed and then confrontedwith alternatives that work for citizens. This isno easy task given the hidden nature of thetechnological unconscious and the powerfulinterests behind it. However, a first step in a‘new politics of repair’ is revelation and

open public debate on alternative ways ofweaving technology into the urban social.The greater the impetus, the greater thepressure on states and elites to reconsiderwhat for so long has been taken for granted.

At another level, so pervasive is the interac-tive intelligence of the techno-space (forexample, software systems nested in homes,cars, pockets, implants, hospitals, schools,offices, roads, shops, pipes and ducts, andoften talking to each other), that cities wouldshut down or spiral in unanticipated directionswhen this techno-space is threatened. This isprecisely why an elaborate infrastructureworks day and night to prevent or fix failure.The technological unconscious, as NigelThrift (2005) notes, is what allows cities toavoid the collapse that any vast and complexsystem of bits that need alignment and co-ordination can so easily suffer, and also tobounce back rapidly to normality after disrup-tions or disasters of various sorts.

The good city, then, is the city of continualmaintenance and repair, underpinned by acomplex political economy of attention andco-ordination. London managed to bounceback after 7/7 with remarkable speed as amachine of movement, work, livelihood anddaily life, as the technological uncon-scious—through an extraordinary effort ofco-ordination between myriad institutionsand the public—kicked in to repair the cityand its global connections. New Orleans, incontrast, due to the tardy response from thefederal authorities as well as the sheer scaleof destruction, has been switched off as acity and, while speedier recovery can beexpected as the political will to do somethingreturns, it will take some time to rebuild thetechnological unconscious that has thus farensured rapid repair and maintenance. Thecity is discovering the chaos, risk and degra-dation that so many cities in the globalSouth have suffered for so long owing to thedeficiencies of the urban infrastructure.

The well-functioning city, however, doesnot reward all. It comes with its own politicaleconomy 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 toensure universal and affordable access to thebasics of shelter, sanitation, sustenance,water, communication, mobility and so on.And when such a commitment is explicitlydemonstrated, as the city of Bologna did in1978 by ending bus fares, and then again in1998 by providing free Internet access, itadds to the urban unconscious a habit of soli-darity as the city comes to be experienced asthe city for all.

But there is more. There has to be an expli-cit politics of repair and maintenance, one thatattends to the silent republic of things thatmakes cities work not only when there isa threat of shut-down, but at all times so thata preventative and curative infrastructure isin place. This requires a progressive politicsfocusing on central aspects of service priva-tion in especially the global South that makelife so miserable for so many within citiesthat suffer constant blackouts, by interveningin an increasingly intricate system of soft-ware-based auto-regulation in order to knowthe system, prevent new auto-correctionsthat are harmful, and reduce lock-out. AsStephen Graham and Nigel Thrift (2005,p. 27) note, “repair and maintenance are notincidental activities. In many ways they arethe engine of modern economies andsocieties” and nowhere more so than incities that have so come to rely on technologyfor their survival and well-being.

Relatedness

Closely linked to the register of repair is theregister of relatedness. Cities are riddledwith the misery, anxiety and desperation ofthe disconnected and excluded. They alwayshave been. Now, however, there is a newscale and intensity of disconnection associ-ated with the mass migration of the world’spopulation to cities, the displacement ofwelfare commitments by market individual-ism, the expansion of the illegal and precar-ious economy in the context of joblessgrowth, the evacuation of capital from riskyand non-lucrative areas, the growing discon-nection of the rich from the poor in all walks

of urban life, and the disjuncture betweenincome and spend in a credit/debt economywhich 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 themeans of survival and human fulfilment(Wacquant, 1999). These are obligations thatshould draw on a solidarity of human rightsand recognise the constitutive role of thedistant other in whatever counts as the social‘ours’, rather than, as has been the case inthe history of modern welfare, drawn on asolidarity of charity or instrumentalistsupport for the fallen insider within a pre-defined community of belonging (national,ethnic or other). The result is an equal dutyof care towards the insider and the outsider,the temporary and the permanent resident. Inthe good city, the duty of public servicethrough adequate welfare measures relatingto financial and personal security, education,health care, shelter and so on, should extendto those least able to pay for these basics butwho are most in need, ranging from disen-chanted youths and broken households, tothe many migrants, minorities and itinerantsthat seek refuge in the city. An equivalenceof right has to be assumed between those inthe mainstream and those on the margins,prior to fiscally driven decisions on whatscale of welfare provision is judged to besustainable.

Is such an expanded urbanism at all realisticat a time when senses of the human collectiv-ity have all but disappeared? The ethos ofunconditional hospitality that JacquesDerrida (2001) has invoked from Europe’scities in the name of their old duty toprovide sanctuary when life outside the citywas barely protected has either been longforgotten by modern-day universal welfaresystems or it has been gradually redirectedby states towards targeted social groupsunder pressure from neo-liberalism. One con-sequence of the restructuring of the nationalwelfare state has been increased pressure onpoliticians, elites and civic associationsclosest to the problems—in cities—toprovide a solution. Yet, here too, the grain is

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decidedly against the city of universal care, asbusiness and professional elites become evermore tied to transnational communities, press-ing on city leaders to serve their particularlocal needs (Sassen, 2002). The city for all,therefore, is by no means guaranteed,lacking as it does, considerable oppositionfrom local elites as well as external support.

But a ‘politics of relatedness’ is becomingincreasingly necessary not only because ofthe cost and wastage associated with wide-spread disconnection, but also because of thedamage wrought by the fear, hate andanxiety that feeds on division and envy inurban life. It is becoming unavoidable toaddress the consequences of unequal pro-vision, which include class segregation,endless surveillance, civic disruption, urbanviolence, fear of the stranger, suspicion ofyouths, immigrants and asylum-seekers, andgeneralised anxiety and caution. The inclusivecity, although undeniably taxing on the publicpurse and requiring sustained public and civiceffort, is also the city of untapped potentialand expanded human and social capital.Most importantly, it is the city that extractsan opportunity for individual and collectiveadvancement out of urban multiplicity andmobility.

Solidarity based on the universal provisionof the basics of existence and human associ-ation is however no guarantor of socialmutuality and respect for difference. Contem-porary urban multiplicity is linked to a publicculture of misanthropy, tribal affiliation andself-interest, an explicit denial of differencefeeding on the comfort of welfare support insome instances. There is a ‘nasty’ politics ofhate ingrained as an urban affect (Thrift,2005). Against such obduracy, heightened bythe suspicion faced by the most visible andvulnerable subjects of global displacementsuch as immigrants, asylum-seekers, Travel-lers and the homeless, an urban solidarity ofrelatedness can barely escape addressing theethic of conduct among strangers. This is anissue that has long interested urban theorists,from Simmel and Benjamin who saw a combi-nation of indifference, inquisitiveness andalienation in urban social mixture, to

Mumford and Sennett who anticipate civicinteraction under certain conditions of man-agement of public space.

The present times are particularly uncom-promising in this regard, due to growingurban segregation, the collapse of universalsserving to bind difference, an eroding urbancommons, and increased legitimacy forgroup isolationism in private and public life.Living with difference is becoming a test ofendurance as the urban public comes toaccept that multiplicity is best tackled thoughisolation or, depending on who is involved,ejection. A case in point is the rampant suspi-cion that has grown of Muslims as they goabout their daily business after 9/11 and 7/7, grotesquely feeding on complacentneo-Conservative babble about incompatiblecivilisations. The actions of the very few—militant Jihadis—have been allowed to feednationalist frenzy demanding the taming orejection of an entire faith group on groundsof cultural incompatibility a nationalistsecurity. Such extreme reaction, along withother examples such as the contempt heapedon asylum-seekers or Travellers, is borne outof a fractured commons in an increasinglytribal or self-centred public culture.

Is there a specific role for cities in rekind-ling a ‘habit of solidarity’ towards the stran-ger, based on recognition (rather thanconsensus or affect)? I have argued elsewherethat much of the required intervention trans-cends the urban (Amin, 2002). This includesstripping national cultures of belonging ofracial and ethnic moorings in preference forcollective standards thrown up by a living cos-mopolitanism or by politically definednational virtues. It includes building and sus-taining a certain ease with unassimilateddifference and agonistic disagreement in thepublic domain, with the help of the media,politicians and opinion-formers. It alsoincludes vigorous and steadfast implemen-tation of legislation against incitement andprejudice, together with a rich opportunitystructure for social mobility and individualenhancement.

But cities also have a place. The everydaynegotiation of diversity is crucially influenced

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by the public ethos of places, which draws onmany inputs, from neighbourhood movementsand city-centre dynamics to the habits ofpublic office, the media and other local insti-tutions, public events and shared spaces. Thethin line between suspicion and tolerance isdemarcated only too frequently around prosaicnegotiations of diversity, so part of the politicsof relatedness in the good city has to be aboutworking on the prosaic as the space of strange(be)longings, the site of cultural transgression.This means returning the city’s public spacesto mixed public use, without excessive sur-veillance, gating, privatisation or humiliationof minorities, but with adequate securityagainst the violent or against corporatist hom-ogeneity (Low, 2003). It means experimentingin everyday situations that bring people fromdifferent backgrounds to work together in pro-jects of common interest, so that a habit ofintercultural formation emerges (Amin,2002; Body-Gendrot, 2000; Keith, 2005).Typical examples include experimentingwith mixed sport teams in schools and col-leges, cultural exchanges in creches, growingfood from around the world in communalgardens and multicultural events in housingestates. It means open publicity for culturaltransgression based on multiplicity, throughimaginative and bold experiments such assporting events and public art that bringtogether warring youth factions, legislativetheatre in workplaces and closed communitiesto confront prejudice, urban visuals that iconi-cise mixity and hybridity (Deutsche, 1996),and perhaps even bouts of civic duty forthose particularly hateful of difference. Thesum is the city of restless mobilisation of apublic culture based on shared space andonly ever partial claim by individual groupsover the commons (Gandy, 2002).

The achievements of such a public cultureare in part to ensure the reconnection ofthose at a disadvantage, in part to converturban misanthropy into an ethic of mutualregard towards those unlike us, and in partto foster a public culture of care around theprinciple of relatedness. This is not a publicculture of forced mixture with the strangerand strangeness, but one that demands

acceptance of relatedness as central to urbanexistence. This means extending the sharedcommons, facilitating the negotiation ofdifference and preventing harm, and minimis-ing the right to disconnect (especially seces-sion movements that have emerged in recentyears seeking escape from urban governancestructures that do not suit; see Boudreau andKeil, 2001).

Rights

The register of relatedness is closely linked tothe register of rights to the city, famouslydefended by Henri Lefebvre (1996) as theright of all citizens to shape urban life and tobenefit from it. The right to participate pre-sumes having the means and the entitlementto do so. Many urban-dwellers have yet toacquire this right. In the global South, wesee this in urban planning practices drivenby the needs of the economically and politi-cally most powerful and in the eviction orstripping down to bare life of the masses. Inthe global North, we see it in the form ofgrowing vilification and intolerance of immi-grants, itinerants, asylum-seekers and youths,and in the gradual alignment of urban elitesand central urban spaces to the interests ofglobal capital. The contemporary cityremains the city of rights restricted, notwith-standing historical gains made by subjects incertain parts of the world as citizens formallyendowed with social, economic and politicalrights.

In precisely these parts of the world, a newparadox of rights has arisen, involving con-straints on the civil freedom of many urban-dwellers in the name of the individual rightsof the so-called majority. For example, therapid rise of surveillance technologies isboth an encroachment upon civil libertiesand a means of protecting the public againstharm. Similarly, the injustices of racial segre-gation pursued through discriminatory plan-ning and housing allocation policies arecomplicated by moves by ethnic minoritiesto live among their own communities inorder to preserve cultural integrity andensure personal safety. In turn, the rules of

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order in the machinic city, silently re-engin-eering social hierarchies through new soft-ware-sorted technologies, are also thetemplate through which the city functions asa whole, forcing a dependence withoutwhich the discriminated would be worse off.The question of urban rights, therefore, isnot straightforward, as many liberal societiescome to assume that rights should not bringenhanced freedom for all.

This paradox is being increasinglyexploited by urban managers to restrict voiceand dissent in urban public life, against abackground of growing commoditisation,homogenisation and privatisation of urbanpublic space. Urban marginals, protesters,drop-outs, itinerants, minorities and the like,are all quickly tracked, gathered and shuntedon as threats to an urban public space valuedincreasingly for its worth as a consumer andcorporate space (Smith, 1996; Mitchell,2003; MacLeod, 2002; Graham, 2004;Coleman, 2004). The result is that the prin-ciple that urban public culture might beshaped through the free hand of a plural andequal citizenry has been compromised by anurbanism of differentiated rights and pre-ordained expectations from the sharedcommons. The Lefebvrian idea of urban lifemade through the creative impulses of all itsdwellers has become redefined as a threat tourban order.

On the occasions, therefore, when the roleof urban public space as the arena of dissentand protest is invoked, the acts are condemnedas an aberration, a violation of urban stability.This is vividly illustrated by the officialanxiety that surrounded the riots in Bradford,Oldham and Burnley in the summer of 2001when young Asians in these north-Englandex-textile towns clashed with White youthsand the public authorities. These riots werewidely described by opinion-formers and offi-cials as race riots, and were condemned asemblems of minority ethnic disconnectionfrom mainstream life, values rooted in Islamand diasporic tradition, social isolation andsegregation, and an anti-British race politics.At the time, and especially more recently aspublic anxiety has grown over the realisation

that the London bombers on 7/7 came fromsimilar backgrounds in nearby cities andtowns, there has been no shortage of callsfor mixed schools and mixed housing, betterintegration into mainstream culture, tests ofloyalty to Britain and core British values,and moderation of ethnic difference. Inshort, Asians have been asked to prove theirBritishness as a condition of entry into thecity.

The irony, though, is that the rioters wereyoung Britons who were bi-lingual, perfectlyat home with British modernity and Islamictradition, politicised and unequivocal abouttheir identities as British Muslims. It isincreasingly clear that their anger was aimedat the lack of economic opportunity, negli-gence by the public authorities and commu-nity elders, racism and racialisedinstitutional practices, an enduring history oftaunt and intimidation, and material depri-vation and marginalisation (Kundnani,2001). These were civic riots by a groupwanting to claim the public turf as fullBritish citizens and not the riots of culturalaliens (Amin, 2002). They were a test of theterms of public visibility and claim in a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic society. Yet, becausethey were disturbances that involved a visibleminority that could be branded culturally andethnically, they were debated as matters ofnational integration, core British values,minority obligations to the nation, and otherfamiliar tropes of the language of assimila-tion, integration and multiculturalism, thatforever plagues ethnic minorities in Britain.

The ultimate test of the good city is whetherthe urban public culture can withstand plural-ism and dissent (Pred, 2000). This is not toprovide licence for gratuitous protest or theviolence of those bent on harm. Instead, itstands for “participative parity” (Fraser,2005, p. 87) in a public sphere, such thatnew voices can emerge, the disempoweredcan stake a claim, the powerful can cease tohold free rein, and the future can be madethrough a politics of engagement rather thana politics of plan (Mouffe, 2000). On thepart of civic leaders, this requires a certainconfidence in the creative powers of

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disagreement and dissent, in the legitimacythat flows from popular involvement, and inthe vitality thrown up by making the cityavailable to all. Far too much of contemporaryurbanism is driven by the need to crush socialvitality and to raise the alarm against non-conformity. The result is the city of fear andcircumspection, not the city confident withdifference and multiplicity. As Engin Isin(2002, p. 282) avers “we may owe the exist-ence of politics not to citizens, but to stran-gers, outsiders, and aliens”.

The city of open rights can become a placeof violence against those least able to defendthemselves or a place of self-centred advance-ment. My argument, however, is that, placedin the context of a vigorous and confidenturban public culture, the open city is betterequipped to channel antagonism towardsdeliberative and agonistic disputes in thepublic arena capable of some degree of recon-ciliation or mutual recognition (Young, 2002;Connolly, 2005). Such a ‘heterotopic’ urbanpublic culture (Keith, 2005) is one thatworks with the multiplicity and transiencethat has come to define urban life, confidentthat it can build and extend solidarity, butalso deal with dissent and disagreement increative ways that minimise damage. On itsown it cannot stop instituted or open violence,but it can expose its wrongs as well as revealalternatives rooted in a habit of solidarity.

Re-enchantment

The final ‘R’ is re-enchantment. The good citycelebrates the aspects of urban life from whichspring the hopes and rewards of associationand sociality. Re-enchantment in the historyof urban utopian thought has tended to focuson a paradise to come, usually around grandprojects designed to engineer human lifematerially, morally and ethically. In timeswhen the engineering has yielded immediategains through ambitious urban design andplanning exercises to provide mass housing,sanitation, security, clean air and water, andother basic services, it has alleviated themisery of masses trapped in appalling urbanconditions. The significance of such

intervention as a form of re-enchantmentshould not be lost in a present trappedbetween neo-liberal onslaught on the pro-visions secured under socialist and socialdemocratic planning and the general scepti-cism that has grown of modernist urban plan-ning (Gandy, 2005). The aesthetic complaintand sensory deprivation, however, real, werethe children of mass provision of the basicsof life. Many a form of urban enchantment—from jazz and Tupperware parties to masspolitical meetings and open air cinema—grew out of the bland and uniform regularitiesof the modernist ethic of care.

My interest in drawing this example stemsfrom thinking about sociality as a form ofurban solidarity, rather than any particularinterest in defending the aesthetics of moder-nist urban planning. It is the prospect for acertain kind of sociality that comes from par-ticular forms of gathering in public spacesupon which I wish to focus. The sites I havein mind are the associations, clubs, car-bootsales, restaurants, open spaces, bolt-holes,libraries, formal and informal gathering-places, and multitude of friendship circlesthat so fill cities (Thrift, 2005). These sitesform an essential component of the urbanpublic culture and are an important filterthrough which urban life is judged as a collec-tive social good. At their best they are thecivic spaces imagined by urban visionariessuch as Richard Sennett (1998) and RichardRogers (Rogers and Powers, 2000) to arisefrom free engagement and visibility amongstrangers in the city’s public spaces. Alongwith the sociability associated with partici-pation in family, consumption and insti-tutional networks, the vitality of these publicspaces as sites that combine pleasure withthe skill of negotiating difference, acts as thegauge of civic ownership and civic behaviourin a city (Sheldrake, 2001; Demos, 2005).

There can be no denial that contemporaryurbanism has put the link between free associ-ation and civic inculcation to the test. Theneo-liberal erosion of publicly owned or pub-licly maintained spaces, together with theincreasing surveillance and ejection of unde-sirable social groups within them, has

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redefined the principle of free association asan intragroup activity rather than as a gather-ing of strangers around shared pleasures. Inturn, urban association is increasinglydefined by spectacle and consumption, gath-ered around urban tourism, heritage experi-ence, unending consumerism, ostentatiousdisplay, sensory seductions and many othercommoditised forms of socialisation (Milesand Miles, 2004). This form of urban enchant-ment certainly brings strangers together, butwhether the result is enhanced civic regardremains a moot point. Thirdly, urban associ-ation has become a highly dispersed activity,involving ties with distant others enabled bythe virtual media, travel, diaspora links, thecirculations of public culture and so on.Urban association now co-exists with somany stretched geographies of associationthat to privilege urban sources of civic incul-cation is indefensible.

So, why bother with the urban sources ofcivic sociality? Precisely because of thescope it offers for making the urban visibleas a site of civic promise. Glaring at the ‘newurbanism’ that has fallen in love with theromance of compact cities, mixed neighbour-hoods, pedestrian thoroughfares, classicalarchitecture and cohesive communities, is thedaily metropolis whose frenzy and pace con-ceals a multitude of spaces of association,from workplace and educational sites toangling clubs and public gatherings. Theseare the lungs of social respite in the fast city,but also the prosaic spaces of civic inculcation.To value, publicise and maintain these spacesis to recognise what is already there as a richsource of civic virtue in most cities, but isincreasingly displaced by new engineeringsof sociality that have yet to prove their worth.

The register of re-enchantment, however,can strive for more, by experimenting witheveryday public spaces for transformativepurposes. In part, this is a matter of newuses explicitly designed to disrupt existingconvention. One example is provided by therich legacy of popular radical urbanism informs as diverse as liberation theology, legis-lative theatre and community art and massevents of the political Left—today most

emblematically expressed in the culturalactivities of the anti-globalisation movementat World Social Forum meetings in differentcities. In all these examples, urban gatheringis used as a means of mixing protest, edu-cation, pleasure and enchantment in thename of solidarity, new awareness, and ashared commons in and beyond the city; gath-ering credibility for many militant particular-isms (Featherstone, 2005). Another exampleis the use of public art to signal cultural het-erogeneity, in the way that cities such as Bir-mingham have experimented with in recentyears to celebrate publicly multiculturalism.The initiatives have included comic stripsplaced in the back seats of taxis recountingthe recollections of Asian cab drivers to theartist as they drive along, blindfolded walksaround the city centre to encourage sensoryexperience of the city without the faculty ofvision, public sculptures that deliberatelyplay on the mixed racial narratives of thecity, murals that record problematic eventsand histories in order not to forget, and photo-graphic projections of faces on the street onpublic buildings to publicise multiethnicity(Kennedy, 2004). How successful thesepublic expressions of ethnic and racial solidar-ity are in combating race hate is a matterof conjecture, but they provide a powerfulofficial signal for what the public culture ofa city should be.

Embedded in both examples of urban re-enchantment is an important principle ofrupture without finality in the democraticallynegotiated city (Parker, 2004). Temporarycoalitions arise to disrupt preceding ones inthe name of an expanding urban solidarity,but are themselves surpassed by new exper-iments, so that new actors and new impulsescan be grasped as the city itself evolves.

Conclusion

In making my case for the good city, I havechosen to redefine the good city as an expand-ing habit of solidarity and as a practical butunsettled achievement, constantly buildingon experiments through which difference andmultiplicity can be mobilised for common

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gain and against harm and want. In articulatingthe good city as an ethic of care incorporatingthe principles of social justice, equality andmutuality, I have deliberately chosen toavoid certain shibboleths of urban possibilitythat have become fashionable, centredaround proclamations of new urban centrality.

One of these is the rediscovery of urbancommunity, in the form of empowered neigh-bourhoods, abundances of social capital, face-to-face contact, and generally the goodness ofurban social cohesion. I see little of all of thisin contemporary cities, marked as they are byenforcements of introspective community,social attachments that do not cohere, belong-ings that traverse the city into the ether orglobally, irreconcilable differences, anddistance and separation within a given urbanspace. The city does not come together as acommunity or as a community of commu-nities, for there is far too much difference,disagreement, and escape to assimilate. Onthe rare occasions that it does come together,such as during a catastrophe or a majorevent, a certain sense of place shared by themany is undoubtedly released, but soon theeveryday steps in to demand multiplicity.

Another shibboleth that has arisen again isthe idea of the city managed by an enlightenedurban elite that attends to the interests of all.The current language invokes powerfulmayors, partnerships involving multiple sta-keholders, joined-up urban governance,decentralisation and devolution, and an entre-preneurial openness. All are seeminglyreasonable, but in practice cast a veil overthe impossibility of central reach over a con-stantly morphing and transjurisdictional city,a usually supplicant relationship with govern-ment and power based elsewhere, and the mis-chief of an itinerant business communityforever threatening exit if its demands arenot met. The idea of good urban governanceis an illusion not only for all that it cannotcapture, but also for its panoptic authoritarian-ism veiled as stakeholder democracy. My pre-ference, instead, has been to emphasise therole of an active and distributed democracybased around different registers of solidarity;imperfect and constantly renegotiated.

This is the filter through which I wouldwish to interpret the questions of urban civi-lity and incivility tackled in this ReviewIssue. I consider the four registers of solidaritydiscussed above—repair, relatedness, rightsand re-enchantment—as defining influenceson the balance between urban civility and itsopposites. Together, they shape state andcivic orientations to multiplicity in urbanlife, by defining access to the basics of exist-ence, attitudes to strangers, rights of presenceand expression, and the scale and purpose ofthe shared commons. They act as a kind ofdemocratic audit, through inculcating a par-ticular kind of social ethos. As such, they areoften contradictory and surprising in theireffect; tackling obviously anti-social beha-viour, but also state panopticism and easy con-demnation of the rights of minorities;providing the means for individuals and col-lectivities to develop civic capabilities, butalso making ample space for civic disagree-ment and dissent; and constantly working onthe perfectibility of democratic process, butnot of forecasting perfect outcomes. What orwho counts as civil or uncivil, thus, is amatter of the fine grain daily thrown up forpublic debate and scrutiny, rather than theproduct of pure and pre-defined categories ofcivility and incivility.

A civic politics of getting the urban habit ofliving with diversity right is one way ofthickening the ways in which an increasinglyfragmented, disoriented and anxious societycan regain some mechanism for the distri-bution of hopefulness, as Hage (2003) hasrecently argued. This is not a Bush-like hope-fulness borne out of a tragedy committed bythose who shower hope, nor a hopefulnessthat works as an opiate for sustained misery,but one that works through an ethic of carethat delivers on the ground. This is not a‘love-thy-neighbour’ ethic of care, but onebased on the rights of recognition. Once thecity is returned as a vibrant democracy,those in power might be nudged to respondwithout recourse to a politics of containmentand repression (see Boudreau, 2003, on differ-ences between Los Angeles and Montrealbased on differences in the balance between

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state and civic power). Once the good citythus defined begins to deliver, the politics ofrepresentation—now so thoroughly alignedto corporate power—might be forced to giveground to another kind of politics based onparticipation on the ground, and by thosediscounted as political subjects.

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