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Peter Critchley

City Studies



City Studies


A guide to my writings on the city and the urban environment. I supply links to my works in this field, with abstracts and tables of contents. As for the image I have used for this article, I am reminded of something that Lewis Mumford wrote about the greatness of ancient Athens: ‘the life it contained was more significant than the container.’ That’s my view of the city.


Abstract

In this book I shall develop the urban regional thought of Lewis Mumford in terms of a civic environmentalism concerned with the achievement of a public life fitted to the contours of an ecological civilization. I shall examine Mumford’s conception of ecological regionalism, democratic planning and the regional garden city as giving us both the ideal of a decentralized, balanced and humanly-scaled eco-public, and the means to achieve it. I shall show how Mumford sought to reconstruct public community aesthetically, politically and ecologically, integrating the urban and rural environments in the process. Defining Mumford’s view in terms of civic environmentalism, I connect the task of ecological restoration and preservation to a reinvigorated public life constituted by a democratic pluralism and civic mindedness. I will argue that the writings of Lewis Mumford on the garden city and regional planning suggest a conception of Ecopolis sustained by a vision of civic environmentalism. I will show how Mumford developed a planning intervention that not only countered the destructive consequences of over-urbanization but served also strengthen the civic capacity of the community and infuse political culture with an active democratic content. Mumford’s ecological regionalism combines planning, design and a biocentric understanding of natural processes within a politically grounded and civic-minded environmentalism. His work expresses a commitment to restore the health of democratic public life in the process of tackling the problems of urban life. I will therefore develop Mumford’s idea of regional planning and ecological regionalism in terms of a political or civic concern with environmentalism, in the process lifting the question of the human relation to nature out of academic confines and locating it in the public realm. In fine. Mumford envisions an Ecopolis constituted and sustained by a civic environmentalism.

Contents

1 Introduction To The Book; 2 Introduction To Lewis Mumford;

3 Mumford And Jane Jacobs; 4 Mumford’s Organic Holism; 5 Person, Place And ‘The Political’; 6 Regionalism; 7 Community And Place; 8 Organic Holism And Planning; 9 Socialization; 10 Environmental Ethics And Civic Environmentalism; 11 Democratic Planning; 12 Regional Planning, Implementation And Participation; 13 Power, Place And The City; 14 Place, Polity And Neotechnics; 15 Mumford Today




Abstract

This book traces the connection of ecology, regionalism and civilisation in the life's work of Lewis Mumford. The argument demonstrates Mumford's ecological regionalism as being grounded in a moral sense of place, Mumford offering an ecological civilisation as an alternative to the false imperatives of the megamachine. Mumford is shown to offer an alternative future based on organic plenitude as against the 'aimless dynamism' of endless material quantity within the megamachine. The book seeks to develop the moral and critical purpose at work behind the varied writings of Lewis Mumford. The attempt is made to identify the contours of Mumford’s ideal city as a city of human dimensions enabling and encouraging a vigorous reciprocity and interaction between inhabitants as citizens; a city which brings the touch, sense and smell of the countryside into the core market life of the city, brings neighbourhoods in close connection with each other, brings all city dwellers within close walking distance of parks and green spaces. Mumford’s objective, it is shown, is to make the city a communal theatre, a collective experience in which city dwellers are actors rather than mere spectators in the unfolding drama of urban life. Mumford is shown to offer a unique insight into the myriad political, social, cultural, urban, moral, psychological and ecological problems of a rationalised modernity. Reason has not brought freedom in the modern world. In many ways, human beings have come to be enslaved to their own powers, institutions and ideas. Mumford offers a means of explaining this paradox of bondage through liberty. The solutions that Mumford articulates bring the soundest features of past cities to bear upon present forms. The awareness of the past enables Mumford to address the fundamental problems of rational modernity. Although Mumford wrote on a wide variety of topics, his purpose possessed a unifying thread concerning the mode of life within modern technological society. This book emphasises Mumford's concern to put the constituents of modern urban life on a sustainable basis in relation to new technologies and techniques. The key to Mumford's vision is the scaling of social life to human dimension and proportion, thus producing a life of balance and harmony with respect to the moral and technical capacities of human beings.

Contents

1 Large Views In The Abstract And In The Concrete; The Influence Of Kropotkin; The Influence Of Patrick Geddes; Mumford’s Regionalism; 2 Mumford’s Critical Utopianism: The Story Of Utopias; 3 Reconnecting Place: Sticks And Stones And The Golden Day; The Golden Day; 4 The Culture Of Cities; 5 The City In History; 6 Regions – To Live In: The Rpaa And Regionalism; The Principle Of Regional Decentralisation; 7 The Regional City; 8 Cityscape – The Urban Prospect; 9 Technics And Civilisation: The Tyranny Of The Clock; Art And Technics; 10 The Myth Of The Machine; 11 The Pentagon Of Power; 12 Personality And Technology; 13 Mumford’s Green Republic; 14 Conclusion


Abstract

This is a shorter version of my Lewis Mumford and the Architectonics of Ecological Civilisation (2012).



The full 7 volume study (details of each volume below)


Abstract

Part 1 Cities and Citizenship

This part is concerned to return politics to its roots by defining an urban public sphere in contradistinction to the centralised, abstracted form of politics practised within the nation state. The book makes the case for expanding 'the political' as a public life at the expense of centralised abstract state politics through making available extensive public spaces for the exercise of local citizen power at the level of the neighbourhood, town, and city confederation. The key principle here is federation so as to achieve a genuine universalism through the inter-linking of ascending purposes. The perspective is developed against the narrowness of localism. Self-sufficiency or autarchy is a key principle but not in the sense of communities that remain independent of each other. Universalism through interconnection and mutuality as opposed to parochialism is crucial. Indeed, self-sufficiency in a parochial separates communities from each other and cannot fail to re-create the anarchical war of all communities against all over scarce resources that is precisely the political problem to be resolved. From this perspective, the globalisation of economic relations is valued in creating the supra-national material ties that make communal interdependence ensuring universalism possible.


Abstract

This part grounds the conception of public life in a normative philosophical anthropology which identifies the city as a moral and social realm promoting culture and civilisation. Proceeding from chapters on Plato and Aristotle, this part details the evolution of cities alongside changing conceptions of citizenship, up to and including the Hellenic world.

Contents

1 THE IDEAL CITY; 2 THE PRINCIPLE OF RATIONAL FREEDOM; 3 THE RATIONAL UTOPIA: The Origins Of The Rational City; The Greek Origins of Freedom; 4 THE IDEAL OF POLIS DEMOCRACY: The Philosophers; 5 PLATO’S REPUBLIC; 6 PLATO AND JUSTICE; 7 WHO RULES – PEOPLE OR PHILOSOPHY?: The Philosopher Ruler; The Statesman; The Laws; 8 ARISTOTLE; 9 ARISTOTLE’S URBAN ECOLOGY; 10 PLATO AND ARISTOTLE CONCLUSION; 11 THE ECOLOGICAL INHERITANCE OF GREECE: Plato and Gaia: The World as a Living Entity; Greece Boundaries – the need for limits; 12 HELLENISM AND ROME: The Hellenistic Period; 13 ONE GOD AND ONE NATURE: Character of Greco-Roman Historiography: Humanism; 14 STOICISM; 15 CICERO


Abstract

The City from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance This part examines attempts to establish universalism up to and including the Renaissance. The flaw in the attempt to establish the universal state is easy to identify: universalist theories and programmes have tried to impose beliefs, practices and identities from above and from the outside, from the centre outwards and downwards, which can only be achieved on an enduring basis by consent. These attempts pay insufficient attention to the need to identify the conditions and relations facilitating the individual grasp of the universal via social and discursive interaction.

Contents

1 CHRISTIAN UNIVERSALISM: The City of the Middle Ages; Church and state – goodness and justice

2 THE MEDIEVAL CORPORATE COMMUNITY: Medieval Christian Citizenship; The Foundations: the Roman and Biblical Background; The Hierocratic Doctrine in its Maturity

3 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY – AUGUSTINE

4 PELAGIUS

5 HUMANISM: Characteristics; The emancipating role of the monasteries and the medieval schools

6 FREEDOM IN MEDIEVAL LAW: Citizenship in the North; The New Civic Urbanism 14thC; The Intellectuals View of the City

7 THE REVIVAL OF ARISTOTLE AND ITS BACKGROUND

8 INCIPIENT HUMANISM AND NATURAL SCIENCE

9 THE NEW SCIENCE OF POLITICS

10 THOMISM

11 CHRISTIAN ARISTOTELIANISM – THE RADICAL CURRENT: Towards an Essentialist Cosmology

12 THE EMERGENCE OF THE PEOPLE AS SOVEREIGN: Alternative Conceptions of Freedom

13 DANTE

14 THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE PEOPLE: Popular Basis of the Ruler’s Power

15 MARSIGLIO OF PADUA - THE PEOPLE AS SOVEREIGN LEGISLATOR

16 THE CONCILIAR EXPERIMENT: DISINTEGRATION OF UNITED CHRISTENDOM

17 THE SECULAR REACTION

18 CITIZENSHIP IN THE RENAISSANCE: Civic Humanism

19 MARTIN LUTHER: The Anabaptist Protest

20 MACHIAVELLI AND THE CITIZEN IDEAL: Machiavelli’s Denial of Divine Law; The Art of Ruling; Fortuna and Virtu: Republics and Princedoms; Superiority of Free States; Freedom of a State; Virtue in a People Necessary to Freedom


Abstract

This part traces the evolution of reason via the processes of abstraction, quantification and commodification proceeding from the scientific and industrial revolutions. The argument establishes a concept of “rational freedom” through the work of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx. Through these philosophers, freedom is defined as an interdependent notion connecting each individual with all other individuals. This defines an ethic of urban justice which affirms values and structures of reciprocity, interaction and solidary exchange within the associational space of civil society. The modernist break with the “rational” philosophical legacy is located in a Weberian process of rationalisation, implying the commodification, instrumentalisation and bureaucratisation of the urban lifeworld. The city is no longer conceived as the embodiment of a rational telos but instead emerges as an instrument of force, of autonomy-denying alien power. This part locates the structuring and functioning of the city in the interplay between relations of production, consumption and exchange, revealing capital to be the architect of the socio-spatial order of alien power, creating the physical landscape for accumulation. The perspectives of Harvey (1973 1975) and French urban theory (eg Lamarche 1976) are developed to show how the expansionary dynamic of the capital system generates the overscale anti-city which violates the “rational” urban principles pertaining to the physical, socio-relational and anthropological infrastructure for human self-realisation. Global shifts and connections are examined with respect to economic relations, as well as to the media, electronic landscapes and communications to contest assertions of the end of geographic space (Lash and Urry 1994). The argument identifies possibilities for a renewed emphasis upon place, highlighting the intersection of the local and the global in a regional politics of scale (Storper 1997). The chapter adapts the “glocal” conception of Swyngedouw (1997) to project the recovery of the city state ideal in the face of the globalised city region. Taking the view that a genuine regeneration depends upon the quality of human relationships, the key task emerges as that of reconciling the new techno-urban paradigm with place based social meaning so as to check escalating metropolarities.

Contents

1 FROM THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY TO THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: Natural Law Theory; The English Revolution

2 HOBBES AND LOCKE;

3 VICO AND THE NEW SCIENCE;

4 THE ENLIGHTENMENT

5 WILLIAM GODWIN: ‘Political Simplicity’ : Utopian Anarchism in Political Justice;

6 ROUSSEAU;

7 THE GERMAN IDEA OF RATIONAL FREEDOM: The Germanic Concept Of Social Government; Pufendorf; Thomasius; Wolff; Schloezer; Moeser; Von Stein; Mueller; Welcker; Karl Follen; Fichte; Immanual Kant; Herder; Schiller ; Schelling;

8 HEGEL AND THE ETHICAL LIFE: Hegel’s Civil Public

9 COMMODIFICATION: The alien power of state and capital

10 RATIONALISATION AND THE CITY: Marx’s Democratic Public

11 CAPITAL AND THE OVERSCALE CITY: Urban giantism and accumulation;

12 MAX WEBER – THE CITY RATIONALISED

13 COMPLEXITY

14 THE PUBLIC OF EVERYDAY LIFE

15 FOUCAULT



Abstract

The critical focus of this part is upon abstracting and diremptive tendencies within the city, particularly with respect to new symbolic and informational economic geographies. Critical attention is paid to the iniquitous realities behind the provision of post-industrial infrastructures (convention centres, office developments, finance-insurance-real estate stations, consumer landscapes, gentrified downtowns) in contemporary urban development and regeneration. The argument concludes that the result of social division and exclusion is an “ecology of fear” generating the militarisation of urban space and the privatisation of residential and commercial space. This part examines the urban consequences of social and spatial injustice, paying particular attention to the work of Mike Davis (1990 1998).

Contents

THE CRITIQUE OF THE CONTRADICTORY DYNAMICS OF GLOBAL CAPITALIST URBANISATION

1 THE MAIN THEORIES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY; 2 INDUSTRIAL URBANISM - THE MARXIST ASCENDANCY; 3 THE PROCESS OF CAPITALIST URBANISATION; 4 THE CITY OF LIFE; 5 GLOBALISATION: The Globalisation Of Economic Relations; 6 THE GLOBALISATION OF SPACE: The Global City; 7 THE INFORMATION CITY; 8 THE TYRANNY OF ABSTRACTION: The Air-Conditioned Nightmare; Recovery of Place – global and electronic rootlessness; 9 THE DUAL CITY; 10 URBAN INCARCERATION: Socio-Economic Polarities; 11 URBAN UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA: Los Angeles – the Anti-City; 12 THE DESTRUCTION OF PUBLIC SPACE; 13 NEO-LIBERALISM AND THE SOCIAL MARKET ALTERNATIVE; 14 URBAN REGENERATION: The Crisis Of Modernist Planning; 15 POST-FORDISM AND URBAN REGENERATION; 16 FROM FORDISM TO POST-FORDISM: The Crisis Of Fordism; 17 POST-FORDIST ECONOMICS; 18 THE SYMBOLIC ECONOMY; 19 THE PARTNERSHIP MODEL OF URBAN REGENERATION; 20 PARTNERSHIP AND THE CAPITALIST MODE; 21 THE LOCAL GROWTH COALITION; 22 CAPACITY BUILDING AND COMMUNITY ORGANISATION; 23 PARTNERSHIP AND SOCIALISATION



Abstract

This part addresses the problematic character of the “common good” in a modern plural world by developing a conception of urban justice. This is achieved by locating the “rational” philosophical ideal within contemporary social and political theory. The argument defines a conception of reasonable commonality which integrates the “politics of difference” (Young 1990) within a universal frame. The conception of urban justice builds upon the work of John Rawls (1973) but rejects Rawlsian universalism as abstract and disembodied in being identified with formal legal-institutional structures. Instead, an ethic based upon the responsive social intercourse of individuals within community is developed. This ethic draws upon essentialist (Nussbaum 1986 1992), feminist (eg Gilligan 1982), communitarian (Sandel 1982) and ontological liberal (Raz 1986) modes of thought to locate individual rights within a conception of human flourishing within expansive structures of community interaction and communication. This part proceeds to examine the possibility of reasserting place-based social meaning through the principle of community control. Developing themes and perspectives drawn from the work of Castells (1983), urban social movements are examined as social experiments in the transition from the top-down, centralised “monological” modes of thought, action and organisation to recursive-interactive “dialogical” modes which emphasise the citizen interaction, association and discourse capable of constituting urban life as a public sphere. The principle of “rational freedom” connecting the freedom of each individual with the freedom of all individuals thus comes to be placed on an associative basis within community."

Contents

1 THE UNIVERSAL AND THE PLURAL; 2 POSTMODERN POLITICAL CULTURE; 3 THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE AND COMMUNITY; 4 THE UNIVERSAL FRAME; 5 THE CIVIC TRADITION OF RATIONAL FREEDOM; 6 BEYOND LIBERALISM; 7 THE CIVIC TRADITION; 8 RAWLS – JUSTICE AND THE SEARCH FOR COMMUNITY; 9 JUSTICE IN THE CITY; 10 COMMUNITARIANISM – THE SOCIAL EMBODIMENT OF JUSTICE; 11 DOUBLE DEMOCRATISATION – THE LEFT AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY; 12 PLURAL AND SOCIALIST DEMOCRACY; 13 THE ESSENTIALIST PUBLIC: The Democratisation Of Authority And Morality;

14 FEMINISM AND THE CITY; 15 ANARCHO-ARISTOTELIANISM: Universalism and consent; law – self-assumed obligation – reason and coercion; 16 ANARCHIST ROOTS: Ebenezer Howard and Green Cities; 17 KROPOTKIN; 18 LEWIS MUMFORD; 19 NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS; 20 URBAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS; 21 COMMUNITY CONTROL; 22 THE COMMUNICATIVE ETHIC, URBAN PLANNING AND THE PUBLIC: Communicative Planning And Dialogic Community; 23 THE COMMUNICATIVE ETHIC OF JURGEN HABERMAS; 24 URBAN PLANNING AFTER HABERMAS; 25 THE PUBLIC SPHERE AFTER HABERMAS; 26 THE SOCIAL ECOLOGY OF COMMUNICATION: Eco-Epistemology – the Dialectic of the Rational; The Ecology of Distance.


Abstract

Putting reason on a rational basis through the social and discursive constitution of the city makes it possible to develop the ecological implications of “rational” principles of scale and justice. This volume shows that a genuine rationalisation is characterised by the interpenetration of social and environmental justice facilitating the integration of communities in their ecological community. Recreating the symbiotic relationship between nature and culture ensures that reason no longer takes irrational (anti-human/anti-ecological) forms.


Contents

1 REASON AND NATURE: Biosphere Politics; Security; Reason and nature

2 SECURITY AS SECURING THE WORLD: The Shattering of the Organic-Holistic World View

3 URBAN ECOLOGY

4 TECHNOLOGICAL UNREASON

5 ECOLOGICAL MARXISM

6 THE STATIONARY STATE OF JOHN STUART MILL

7 MARTIN HEIDEGGER ONTOLOGY AND ECOLOGY

8 BIOSPHERE AND BEING: The recovery of Being; Global Warming; Limits to economic growth; The local and the global – the universal and the particular – biosphere; Local and global – biosphere; Biosphere; Ecologizing the Dialectic; Anarchism and Ecology

9 SOCIAL ECOLOGY: Bookchin’s Re-Enchanting Humanity (1995)

10 ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND THE CITY

11 PROXIMITY: PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY: Ecology and the urban public sphere

12 GREENING THE CITY

13 ECO-COMMUNITY

14 CONCLUSION CONSTITUTING PUBLICITY: Rationalising Cityspace


Abstract

This book is motivated by a concern that the city is in danger of losing its traditional functions as a place of human interaction and reciprocity, as meeting place and associational space. The quality of individual interaction establishes the content of civic, political and cultural life in the city. The problem is that these precious resources are being suppressed by purely quantitative measures of growth and development. This study seeks to recover the sense of the city as an urban public life, an approach which conceives the city as being something more than a commercial centre and the individual as something more than a consumer. The city is valued as a key site in efforts aiming at civic and cultural renewal. This view defines urban regeneration as involving much more than economics, as pertaining to a public, communal and civic modus vivendi. The aim of this book is therefore to recover the city as an anthropological datum through the conceptual formulation of the urban public sphere. Examining the philosophical, social and ecological conditions for the recovery of the grand narrative of “the good city”, the book challenges postmodernist celebrations of otherness, difference and conflict as an expression of the condition of urban diremption, rather than as a coherent response to it.

Contents

1 Introduction; 2 The Good City; 3 Globalisation And Localisation: The Continued Importance Of Manufacturing; 4 Postfordist Regeneration; 5 Postfordism And The Northern City; 6 Urban Political Economy; 7 Local Growth Coalitions; 8 The City Of Use Value; 9 Urban Space And Everyday Life; 10 The New Metropolarity; 11 The Urban Future; 12 City, Capital And Culture; 13 Conclusion.




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