Abstract
Looking at current theoretical approaches to democracy and the city, this article deepens our understanding of the democratic relevance of cities. It suggests four ideals of the democratic city which are labelled the city as a school of democracy, the urban cosmopolis, the city as a commons and the sustainable city. Tracing commonalities between the ideals, while avoiding their pitfalls, the article develops an argument for understanding the democratic promise of the city by linking John Dewey’s concept of democratic action as experimental problem-solving to the spatiality of the city. Building on Dewey, the article introduces the concept of urban experimentalism and points out prospects for a spatialized understanding of democracy and pathways for democratizing urban space.
Cities today are among democracy’s most contested political spaces. In cities, some of the pressing challenges to democracy such as social injustice, climate change and migration are intensifying and call for local responses. At the same time, a shift has taken place worldwide: Many transnational social movements, activists and progressive political actors have started to redirect their activities to cities in order to confront those problems and, in doing so, to pressure the nation state’s political prerogative. Mainstream demo-cratic theory has largely been silent about the city. In recent years, however, we can observe that at the margins of other, more classic topics of democratic theory, such as democratic innovations, citizenship, commoning or environmentalism, the city as a democratic space plays a growing role (Amin 2002; Barber 2013; Bauböck 2003; Beveridge and Koch 2022; Dikeç and Swyngedouw 2017; Harvey 2012; Hardt and Negri 2009; Kohn 2016; Shelly 2022; Taylor et al. 2020; Young 2000).
Tracing these references to the city and systematizing them along the axes of the democratic relevance they assign to the city, this article aims to approach the democratic potential of the city and, in doing so, points out prospects for a democratic theory of the city. Thereby, it is not my intention to argue for a world of small-scale city republics or a sovereign polis for the 21st century. My claim is that a changed role of cities and the democratic promises vested in them challenge us to think more intensely about democratic spaces not only beyond but also within the state. This requires a decentering of our conceptions of democracy and the acknowledgement that democracy can take different forms in different spaces.
In this article, I develop a typology of four dominant normative ideals of the demo-cratic city that emerge from a close reading of contemporary city-related political theory and urban theory. Contouring these ideals, I raise two analytical questions: First, which democratic qualities and promises are assigned to the city from a normative perspective? And second, what, if anything, is specifically urban about them? Finding commonalities, while transcending their pitfalls, I argue that the four ideals of a democratic city point to a practice-based dimension of democracy closely tied to the spatiality of the city. I subsequently propose the concept of urban experimentalism linking John Dewey’s understanding of democratic action as experimental problem-solving to the spatiality of the city. While some of the ideals seem to suggest an overly optimistic outlook that places cities in the service of specific values, my argument amounts to a more cautious assessment of the democratic potential of cities that emphasizes the chance for collective action and experience of self-efficacy as a contingent process whose ends remain open.
The argument unfolds in five steps: The first section sets the stage by providing a brief overview of the recent politicization of cities. In the second section, I introduce a typology of four normative ideals of the democratic city that I reconstruct from the literature. I call them the city as a school of democracy, the urban cosmopolis, the city as a commons and the sustainable city. The third section thus pulls the threads together by highlighting commonalities and differences between them. In the final section, I introduce the concept of urban experimentalism. This aims to capture the city as a particular space of democratic action by linking a Deweyan, pragmatist account of democratic action with the spatial qualities of the city. I conclude by highlighting prospects for democratizing urban space.
The recent politicization of cities
Although the original meaning of democracy has its roots in the ancient city (Ober 2008), there is nothing specifically urban about modern western democratic theory. Since the French and American revolutions, democracy as a system of government and as a societal practice has become meaningful and real primarily within the institutional framework of the modern state. Therefore, political as well as philosophical claims for justice, redistribution or political participation were raised for a long time quite naturally within the modern territorial state (Fraser 2008, 13). The fact that all Western democracies have some version of local self-government did not challenge modern democratic theory’s principled statism. However, this picture is changing in the wake of globalization. With the transformation of the state in a process frequently referred to as the disaggregation of state sovereignty (Brown 2010; Cohen 2014; Volk 2022), the awareness of different scales of democracy is growing.
Adopting a scales perspective is about overcoming the hegemonic frame of the unitarian model of political order as embodied in the nation state and its internationalized version of a hierarchical multi-level architecture and redirecting our attention to scales beyond and within the state as distinct political spaces within which democratic claims equally apply (Fraser 2008, 24; Sassen 2007). This conceptual shift directs our gaze towards the ongoing reconfiguration of the spatial frames of political action. In this context, cities come back to the fore in two respects: As political spaces to which political actors in the city address democratic claims and as political actors themselves that formulate political claims as distinct from the state.
First, cities today are at the centre of social struggles and increasingly matter as spaces of contestation and politicization to which activists address claims for participation and inclusion (Boudreau 2017). These actors in the city perceive the city as a place ‘where globalization 'touches down' and materializes, where global issues become localized’ (Mayer and Boudreau 2012, 284). For example, from 2008 onwards, in the context of the financial crisis and protests against austerity policies, so-called ‘new municipalisms’ emerged, especially in Southern Europe. They focused specifically on conquering municipal authorities in order to achieve fundamental democratic changes in urban policy. The most prominent example of this is Barcelona, which in 2015 became a model for urban movements and activists from all over Europe after the electoral victory of the municipalist voter platform Barcelona en Comú and the entry of housing rights activist Ada Colau into City Hall.
And second, cities themselves are increasingly entering the transnational and international stage and articulate political self-understandings and address political demands. In this context, a large number of transnational city networks notably in the fields of climate protection, human rights and migration have emerged, especially since the 2000s, within which cities coordinate their actions. Likely the most well-studied example in this regard are the sanctuary city movement which pushes for an alternative, urban vision of citizenship by guaranteeing solidarity and shelter for migrants (Bauder 2017; Boudou 2020), ‘human rights cities’ (Oomen et al. 2016) which aim at establishing higher human rights standards on the local level than on the national level or ‘transition town’ initiatives which urge for a post-fossil, sustainable urban development (Taylor 2012). Against this backdrop, international law scholars are treating cities as ‘international actors’ which are said ‘to alter the parameters of international law’ (Cartier 2021, 324).
Taken together, these city networks and social movements not only indicate a new belief in the transformative power of cities but also equally challenge our nationally embedded concepts of political membership, community, property and rights. At the same time, these activities undermine our traditional thinking in hierarchical multi-level orders and thus also ascriptions of political relevance into important (state politics) and less important (local politics). Rather, they express the ‘decentering of democracy’ as described by Rosanvallon (2011, 1) which is characterized by a multiplication of democratic forms and addressees of democratic claims. This shows that a plurality of democratic spaces exists in political practice and that the democratic processes taking place in them do not necessarily level up to state level democracy, but rather have an intrinsic democratic value for those involved.
The democratic city: An attempt at typology
This section takes an explorative approach and offers an access to the current academic discussion on democracy and the city. By carving out (both implicit and more explicit) normative ideals of the democratic city from contemporary city-related political theory, I suggest a typology of four dominant approaches to democracy and the city. My typology has a heuristic function; it provides a systematization of the scattered urban discussion. Thereby, I condense heterogeneous approaches which are not mutually exclusive under the umbrella of four dominant normative ideals of the democratic city. Each essentially building on a diagnosis of crisis, they explore alternative visions of what constitutes ‘the city’, thus combining empirical diagnoses with normative claims and legitimizing demands for transformative urban practice. 1 In doing so, they do not focus primarily on the formal-institutional level of city administration but explore how cities and their residents may resist and respond to the larger forces of society. I examine the underlying diagnosis of crisis, the democratic qualities assigned to the city and institutional ideas for urban reform. Against this backdrop, the ideals not only illuminate different reasons to value the democratic relevance of cities from a democratic theoretical perspective but also allow for a criticism of countervailing developments in urban reality and may inspire action for transformative urban practice.
The city as a school of democracy
The ideal of the city as a school of democracy has a long tradition in the history of modern political thought. More recently, the idea of a democracy-enhancing dialectic of local political activity and political community-building can be traced among contemporary republicans and communitarians. Both theories overlap when they link decentralization, subsidiarity and federalism as principles of political order to the expectation of political activation and civic engagement and, in doing so, aim at countering social and political alienation as diagnosed in liberal, capitalist societies. The urban level is supposed here to provide the space for a shared social practice and to maintain a shared lifeworld which is the basis for the double transformation of atomized individuals into responsible citizens and private interests into public affairs, as it is at the centre of republican participatory theories of democracy (Barber 2004, 119). The focus is on experience, judgement and horizontal community-building in the city, in short, on a politics enabling function: Cities shall nurture the social preconditions and social capital for the realization and stabilization of a democratic order. Political engagement at the local and neighbourhood level serves to empower citizens, to train democratic judgement and ‘to create the conditions for the exercise of power – to instil civic competence’ (Barber 2004, 268).
As a school of democracy, the city is, in a sense, a local response to the crisis of liberal democracy. Many communitarians and republicans alike agree in the observation of a threefold loss that democracy is facing in modern, capitalist societies: The first is the erosion of meaningful communities that takes place on different levels of society from family to neighbourhoods, to cities, to the nation. Liberal capitalism has celebrated the sovereign individual as ‘unencumbered self’ – to borrow a term from Michael Sandel – freed from all personal, social and civic obligations (Sandel 1996, 13). The second corresponds directly with it: The breakdown of the public sphere as an arena for a common practice of self-government due to an overall individualistic perception of citizenship which treats the citizen as a bearer of negative, individual rights at the expense of civic virtue and public engagement for the common good (Barber 2004; Sandel 1996; Sennett 1977). In the view of many communitarians, cities are only the most visible sites of these general trends in society. The secession of the affluent from the public sphere into privately managed, suburban gated communities, menace and crime in the city streets and an ever-growing social segregation are in this perspective the urban manifestation of a general crisis. While these diagnoses have been a major concern of communitarians since the 1980s, the third loss is only gaining in brisance today, namely, the sense of losing control over the forces that govern our lives (Sandel 1996, 3) which nurtures populism and its rhetoric of gaining back control.
Against this backdrop, communitarians and republicans have advised to play on the strengths of federalism and decentralization (Barber 2004; Sandel 1996; Taylor 1995; Taylor et al. 2020) and assigned to the city the possibility of restoring community, publicness and a feeling of self-efficacy. To be sure, they attach this possibility to localities in the broadest sense, including small villages and towns. Hence, the city as a political space is not of primary concern; it is of interest only in the mediated sense as a place where the crisis of modernity shows up with particular intensity. Here, the task of how a heterogeneous crowd of individuals can become a community arises with force. To overcome the alienation of urbanites, republicans and communitarians alike rely on the idea of social mixing that Jane Jacobs brought so forcefully to the fore in her seminal study of American urban life (Jacobs 1961). The idea behind it is to redirect building and using public space in a way that it fosters community-building among strangers via daily encounters and shared practices. In highlighting the importance of parks, playgrounds, public schools or public squares as sites for the promotion of civic identity, neighbourliness and community (Sandel 1996, 332), they revive progressivist ideas from the beginning of the 20th century that also transferred the idea of schooling to the built environment of the city (Follett 1918). Other, more recent examples of democratic innovations like participatory budgeting or citizens’ assemblies seem valuable as a ‘training ground for democracy’ (Barber 2004, 235). To sum up, the overall task is, in the words of Barber, ‘bringing strangers together and recreating them as neighbors’ (Barber 2004, 306).
The urban cosmopolis
While the ideal of the city as a school of democracy refers to the need of overcoming mutual strangeness and becoming neighbours, the ideal of the urban cosmopolis, by contrast, focuses on the urban promise of being and remaining strangers. This is linked to liberal approaches and theories of difference. They share the conviction that living together in the city provides the basis for the normative recognition of difference in heterogeneous societies characterized by migration. Authors from different theoretical backgrounds such as Rainer Bauböck, Iris Marion Young and Ash Amin assume that, in the city, socio-political inclusion – which builds upon the moral foundation of a ‘differentiated solidarity’ (Young 2000, 221) – is possible. Such inclusion is meant to enable a practice of affirming and respecting mutual difference.
Behind this is the normative assumption that a cultural, political and legal practice of membership based on heterogeneity and diversity can be realized in the city. Where nation states are rather reluctant to respond to an increasingly diverse citizenry, cities are supposed to foster a cosmopolitan transformation of national understandings of membership from below and provide a local response to the global challenge posed by migration (Bauböck 2003, 156). Against this backdrop, in the ideal of the urban cosmopolis, cities are seen as a ‘homebase for cosmopolitan democracy’ (Bauböck 2003, 157) and as potential pioneers of a transformation of the traditional understanding of democracy, which presupposes the national political community, to a postnational democracy that realizes the right of individuals and groups to difference. In the city, so the hope, the ideal of the cosmopolitan world citizen may manifest itself spatially and contribute to a postnational ‘democratic integration within and beyond nation-states’ (Bauböck 2020). In order to stabilize institutionally the being together of strangers in the city, Bauböck argues for the recognition of an independent ius domicilii as a formal right to urban citizenship and greater political autonomy of cities – especially with regard to policy areas sensible to difference and cosmopolitan values, namely, migration, trade and certain aspects of foreign policy (Bauböck 2003, 149). 2 Practical examples to which proponents of this ideal often refer to support their claims are the sanctuary city movement, human rights cities, postcolonial city initiatives or the numerous transnational city networks that evolved in the last two decades.
These initiatives seem normatively appealing as they resonate with the ideal of the ‘unoppressive city’ as developed by Young (1986, 20). This ideal emphasizes the normative importance of strangeness as a precondition for ‘social differentiation without exclusion’ (Young 1990, 238). Such city life as ‘the “being-together” of strangers’ (Young 1986, 21) draws from rather demanding preconditions. Urbanites are supposed to adopt an attitude welcoming and supporting difference. The unoppressive city requires the constant ‘negotiation of difference’ (Amin 2002, 959) in the everyday, conflictual coexistence of individuals and groups. Shared values emerge here at best as temporary, rather accidental ‘accidents of engagement’ (Amin 2002, 972). These negotiations require an inclusive urban space that enables the experience and expression of difference and the breakdown of spatial barriers, for instance, in terms of access to public transportation, zoning of school districts or access to cultural facilities. However, guaranteeing equal access to the cities’ amenities is only the other side of a right to voluntary self-segregation. In this perspective, a group-specific desire for ‘social group distinction’ is morally defensible as long as the groups do not face insurmountable spatial segregation that they cannot overcome by themselves (Bauböck 2003, 145; Sundstrom 2020, 224; Young 2000, 224).
The city as a commons
The ideal of the urban cosmopolis thus advocates for a cosmopolitanism from below by guaranteeing political rights for all urbanites and enabling inclusive representation of the excluded. Broadly speaking, the ideal of the city as a commons supports this concern, too. However, unlike the cosmopolitan vision of a difference-sensitive city, which is more closely tied to the liberal tradition of an individualistic rights-based concept of freedom, the ideal of the city as a commons refers on the democratic promise of socioeconomic equality and the spatial manifestations of social inequality under neoliberal capitalism. The point of departure is rather the observation that the unequal distribution of opportunities caused by global capitalism is deeply inscribed into the urban space via privatization, gentrification and rising rents and eventually threatens to undermine the right to equal participation and equal opportunity. Following Henri Lefebvre’s much quoted ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre 2010 [1968]), authors such as David Harvey or Margaret Kohn have developed the idea of the city as commons and justified far-reaching decommodification and an equal say in decisions shaping the city. In the course of a struggle for local justice, these approaches stand in a socialist or neomarxist tradition and reclaim the city as a commons to which all urbanites have an equal right.
The ideal of the city as a commons is advanced in two ways: For David Harvey and proponents of critical urban studies, cities today are the central arenas of anti-capitalist revolution and resistance. Hence, their collaboration in a global network of rebellious cities is supposed to bring down global capitalism (Harvey 2012; Hardt and Negri 2009; Purcell 2002) or, in a more radical democratic fashion, to initiate ‘a new constituent process for producing space politically’ (Dikeç and Swyngedouw 2017, 3). By contrast, in less revolutionary and more reform-oriented approaches, a new understanding of property and property rights stands at the core (Foster and Iaione 2016; Kohn 2016; Kornberger and Borch 2015). These works are situated in the context of a broader renaissance of the commons idea in the wake of Elinor Ostrom’s seminal work (Ostrom 1990). Her insights into overcoming the tragedy of the commons and its institutional governance, along with Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’, inspired urban theorists to imagine the city as the common property of urbanites. Again, the focus is on a new participatory practice of commoning that opens up routes to co-creation of the urban space and, in doing so, an opportunity to combat social inequality.
The term commons is usually used to describe natural resources such as clean air, hunting and fishing resources or forests, which benefit all people equally and are difficult to commodify (Ostrom 1990). Their character as common property corresponds to equal rights of use and access for all members of a community. Thinking of the city as a commons adopts a process-oriented perspective and highlights the social production of the city in the process of commoning (Kornberger and Borch 2015, 7–8). However, the city is not spared from the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’ – that is, the exploitation of the commons by egoistic self-interest (Hardin 1968). In the case of the city, neomarxist critical urban studies and progressive authors alike hold the political economy of capitalism primarily responsible for the real estate economy and the privatization of public space, as well as an increasingly entrepreneurial city administration (Harvey 2012). They target the prevalent paradigm of the city as a ‘growth machine’, which many city governments embrace. According to that paradigm, ‘a successful city thus needs to pursue business-friendly, growth-oriented policies that attract residents and firms, even if such policies result in increased income inequality’ (Schragger 2013, 232).
Opposing this overall trend, scholars have drawn on an idea that stems from the territorial rights debate and claimed that urbanites suffering from gentrification and rising rents may have ‘located life plans’ worthy of protection (Kohn 2016; Huber and Wolkenstein 2018; Stilz 2019, 41). This claim assumes that democratic membership is always mediated spatially. The city thus gains political significance as a space for the development of individual and collective ways of life and political participation. Therefore, limited territorial rights are justified because they empower urbanites. They serve to create egalitarian preconditions for the effective exercise of democratic participation rights, especially communication rights such as freedom of expression, assembly and demonstration. Searching for real-life examples approaching the ideal of the city as a commons, collective governance experiments as initiated in many cities around the world may come to mind. These sort of democratic innovations test user-managed governance of the urban commons with the active support of local governments, such as community gardens, community improvement districts or cooperative housing governance (Bua and Bussu 2021; Foster and Iaione 2016).
The sustainable city
The ideal of the city as commons and the ideal of the sustainable city both share an emphasis on societal transformation. While the idea of commoning refers to an alternative socioeconomic practice of generating shared wealth, the idea of sustainability refers to a far-reaching ecological transformation of society guided by the recognition of a moral, legal and political obligation to future generations. At the heart of the concept of sustainability is the idea that we have an obligation to acknowledge intergenerational distributive justice with regard to the protection of scarce, exhaustible natural resources (Caradonna 2018). Theorists of degrowth and urban political ecology alike agree that the realization of sustainability calls for ‘self-organized, locally rooted, and yet globally networked forms of resistance, subversion, and creative visions for alternative social experiments’ (D’Alisa et al. 2014; Eversberg and Schmelzer 2018; Ernston and Swyngedouw 2019; Muraca and Döring 2018, 354) which is about to be initiated in cities. By focusing on degrowth and alternative concepts of wealth, they radically oppose theories of weak sustainability which focus on the merits of growth, claiming that scientific and economic progress will enable ecologically smart, more sustainable solutions as promoted by most international organizations and governments.
At first sight, it may seem counterintuitive to link cities to sustainability, given the well-known patterns of unsustainable urban development such as air pollution, energy consumption, traffic or land sealing. But especially international organizations like the UN have started to treat cities no longer as a sustainability problem, but as a sustainability solution. They have promoted a new norm of ‘sustainability as dense, green urbanism’ (Angelo and Wachsmuth 2020, 2203; Keil and Whitehead 2012) 3 : On the one hand, international organizations expect cities to enhance legitimacy and compliance of urbanites by adopting local agendas and enabling participation and deliberation on the ground. On the other hand, they assign an epistemic advantage to cities as innovation and smart solutions are regularly found in bootstrapping bottom-up processes.
This urban sustainability agenda is subject to heavy criticism by theorists of a radical ‘urban political ecology’ who accuse international organizations, national governments and city officials of a ‘techno-managerial style of depoliticization’ that is intended ‘to sustain capitalist urbanity so that nothing really has to change’ (Ernston and Swyngedouw 2019, 8). Instead, they highlight the interconnectedness of neoliberal capitalism and the exploitation of natural resources (Keil 2003, 733). Against this backdrop, they too refer to the right to the city as a key means of empowering urban dwellers to engage in meaningful socio-ecological transformation (Ernston and Swyngedouw 2019, 3). Both share the conviction that people would choose more environmental sustainability and a good life beyond economic growth imperatives if only they were allowed to. At the centre is the idea of the ‘good life’ (Muraca 2012), which is based on an alternative concept of wealth that considers the quality of social relationships and the relationship between nature and the world instead of monetary factors.
At this point, the ideal of the sustainable city and the ideal of the urban commons converge. Both are claimed for a democratically controlled reappropriation process of the (natural) commons. While the ideal of the urban commons aims at the city as a political space in itself, approaches that emphasize the ideal of the sustainable city treat cities more as vehicles for a broader ecological transformation of the state. Along the way, cities have an important function, as ‘protected spaces where subversive practices and alternative modes of subjectivation can be experimented’ (Muraca and Döring 2018, 354). In other words, cities matter as stages of politicization and so-called ‘nowtopian’ laboratories (Carlsson 2014) of more sustainable urban practices such as transition town initiatives, sharing economy, urban agriculture or urban gardening.
Moving beyond the ‘local trap’: The ideals in comparison
Let us briefly recall the basic democratic promises that the ideals of the democratic city entail. As for the city as a school of democracy, the city promises to restore a lost attitude of civic mindedness by training responsible citizens and giving them a sense of community (city of neighbours). As for the urban cosmopolis, urban tolerance promises an inclusive practice of membership based on difference and diversity (city of strangers). As for the city as a commons, the city paves the way for overcoming our existing concept of property and for experimenting with alternative forms of ownership in order to approach the democratic promise of social equality (city of equals). And finally, as for the sustainable city, cities are laboratories on the path to ecological transformation, where alienation from the environment can be suspended and egalitarian practices can give shape to the promise of a good life beyond monetary wealth (city of the satisfied).
Taken in isolation, however, these normative ideals seem to give an overly optimistic outlook not only with regard to cities’ capacities but also given the current shape of many cities. It seems not hard to imagine a real-world counterexample to any of the assumptions reconstructed above. Consider, for example, the idea of cosmopolitanism from below as one may find embodied in sanctuary cities. There are many examples for sanctuary cities welcoming migrants, just as there are for non-cosmopolitan cities that seek to restrict immigration (Ambrosini 2013). Or take Mike Davis' research on the devastating effects of segregation and gated community urbanism, which he saw amounting to ‘spatial apartheid’ (Davis 1990) that altogether seems to dismantle assumptions of ‘pure’ city dwellers, who cherish diversity, commoning or degrowth, and of cities that foster tolerance and civic mindedness.
Against this backdrop, one may conclude that many cities today are better characterized by multiple exclusions, segregation and a neoliberal hollowing out of local governance in favour of private real estate interests than by any of the four democratic ideals as presented above. For reasons like this, authors such as Murray Low argued that cities in general ‘are not good models for democracy’ (Low 2004, 129). To put it bluntly: With these normative ideals of the democratic city, is political theory about to fall into the ‘local trap’ that Mark Purcell (2006) warned us about?
Purcell and, on a similar take also Low, make an important point reminding us not to equate cities and decentralization with democracy altogether and not to assume that cities are ‘inherently more democratic than other scales’ (Purcell 2006, 1921; see also Low 2004, 129). A closer look at the ideals above shows a more nuanced picture anyway: Neither do they support the claim that city governments would per se perform better in terms of democracy and inclusion, nor do they claim that cities are the only home of true democracy. Rather, the ideals hold a mirror up to reality by directing our gaze to urban structures of oppression and domination and examining how they might be remedied. In doing so, the ideals urge us to develop a more complex understanding of the complementarity of different scales, in particular the city and the state, to combat oppression and domination than the simplistic allegation of the ‘local trap’ suggests.
Take, for instance, the ideal of the urban cosmopolis and the urban commons. Borrowing a term from Nancy Fraser, we might say that they allow us to address an essential ‘misframing’ (Fraser 2008, 19) of democratic representation, which is that existing statist boundaries are drawn in ways that place relevant aspects of political justice, such as the domination of immigrants or the exploitation of tenants, beyond the reach of those who suffer from them. Thus, they justify more competences for cities vis-à-vis the state in areas where urban injustice shows up forcefully and the statist division of competences proves inadequate to address today’s spatial injustices and to realize democratic emancipation at various political scales. Moreover, the school ideal as well as the sustainability ideal allows to highlight gaps within the dominant representative paradigm of democracy, for instance, its tendency to neglect democracy’s social-educative fabric and its need for social capital or its inability to leave unsustainable path dependencies and to explore an alternative relationship with nature.
In another respect, however, the four ideals are not immune from being caught in the local trap. As Purcell holds, ‘the modifier “local” is regularly used to stand in for more specific ideas’ (Purcell 2006, 1924). And one may discern in the ideals a certain tendency to ascribe specific attributes to cities or to city life as such: For one thing, participation seems to be an urban matter; for another, cities seem to be inherently tolerant and diversity-friendly and their inhabitants open to alternative understandings of property; and finally, it seems to be taken for granted that city dwellers would choose a life beyond capitalist growth imperatives if they only were allowed to.
This essentialism owes less to a thorough theoretical appreciation of cities as distinct political spaces or city life, but rather reveals some problematic theoretical ‘shortcuts’. It shows that cities as political spaces are mobilized from angles of different political ideologies; hence, the ascribed promises derive primarily from the theoretical traditions that ground the respective ideal. Therefore, it is striking that the major currents of political thought that also structure our statist political imagination (communitarianism, republicanism, liberalism, cosmopolitanism, socialism, Marxism and environmentalism) are evident with regard to the city, too. The city then seems to be more of a different level to which the respective theories are applied – state and society in miniature, so to speak. However, this rather top-down approach does not get us much farther in understanding the spatial qualities of the city and their democratic value.
To sum up, the ideological dimension underlying current theoretical approaches of the democratic city hinders a proper understanding of the city’s democratic promise. The tendency to see the city as true home of whatever might be wishful from the perspective of different political theories obscures an adequate assessment of the city as a political space. With this in mind, to avoid the local trap, I suggest moving beyond the different ideals and political ideologies and begin with reviewing them for commonalities: For what reasons are cities chosen as places where the ideals might be realized? Do they share basic assumptions about the urban political? And what, if anything, is urban about the democratic promises the ideals attach to the city?
I argue that it is primarily the promise of collective action processes emanating from the city and thus the chance for new beginnings and transformation that undergird the ideals and motivate the recent turn to the city. It is this link between collective action and the city that is at the starting point of the normative appreciation of the city. To illuminate this point, I draw on John Dewey and his notion of democratic experimentalism. A reappraisal of his understanding of action as experimental problem-solving draws our attention to the interconnectedness between the city’s spatiality and the chance for collective action to overcome political, economic and social domination. I suggest such an approach by introducing the concept of ‘urban experimentalism’. Such experimentalism applies John Dewey’s practice-based idea of democracy to the urban way of life and, starting from this, explores ways for democratizing urban space as well as for a critique of existing obstacles. I develop this argument in the subsequent section.
Urban experimentalism
A closer look at the four ideals reveals that the reasons why the city as a democratic space plays a special part in the theoretical approaches underlying the ideals converge at some crucial points. All ideals refer to a practice-based concept of democracy which is not exhausted by institutionalized procedures such as the election of mayors and members of city parliaments. Whether in the more institutionalized version of democratic innovations, urban citizenship and collaborative governance or in more informal and spontaneous practices of sustainable living and daily negotiation of difference, the emphasis is on the horizontal practice of urbanites. In this context, the city appears as a place of resistance as well as a place of new beginnings. Whether it is the fall of the public sphere, increasing social differences, the economization of the lifeworld or the destruction of our natural resources, cities are seen as releasing collective practices of resistance against these forces. Hereby, a sharp distinction between private and public is undermined, both in terms of space and scope. The ideals do not presuppose a rather abstract vision of nationalism, tradition or cultural homogeneity but refer to the everyday practices and experiences of negotiating difference and community in everyday encounters.
Note that all approaches share a focus on practice and collective action. I argue that we should take this commonality seriously and built a democratic theory of the city from this point. This claim is strongly informed by John Dewey’s understanding of democracy as joint experimental problem-solving. Given the pitfalls of the ideals as identified in the previous section, this seems also more appealing from a normative perspective, as it emphasizes the openness, contingency and thus agency of city dwellers, rather than projecting partially divergent theories and ideals onto the city. Although Dewey neither explicitly addressed the city nor theorized it as a particular form of life, the urban experience is present throughout his works. The city struck him as ‘material for new creation’ as he wrote to his wife having arrived in Chicago (Westbrook 1991, 84). 4 In particular, his major work on democratic theory The Public and its Problems, although published well after the Chicago years, is influenced by a strong concern for urbanized modernity.
The contingency of democratic practice
In this book, Dewey draws a connection between the dissolution of traditional, local communities and the political apathy of the modern ‘machine age’ (Dewey 2016 [1927], 157). Dewey leaves little doubt that cities, in particular, are those places where the corrosive influence of large corporations, bureaucracies and other mass organizations on politics and valuable social relations is most evident. His conclusion from this has often been quoted: ‘The Great Society created by steam and electricity may be a society, but it is no community’ (Dewey 2016 [1927], 134). Sentences like this, and an appreciation of the local as ‘the ultimate universal’ (Dewey 2016 [1927], 230), have made Dewey appear as an advocate of small-scale, thick communities rather than large, urban metropolises. Such an interpretation, however, overlooks the urbanity of Dewey’s inquiry. He is not concerned about how to return to the traditional community or preserve its values, but quite the opposite, how to continue the democratic project of self-government under the conditions of the Great Society and where under changing conditions the chances exist for a political community to act collectively on itself. In other words, the search for the democratic public, which is at the core of The Public and its Problems, specifically addresses urbanized modernity.
There are two crucial points to take from Dewey: First, Dewey has built his democratic theory upon the basic assumption that democracy ‘is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience’ (Dewey 1930 [1916], 101) and is not exhausted by the institutional form of government. Dewey understands democracy as a comprehensive transformative project that has to be built from the ground and from very different spaces. Democratization encompasses all social spheres, including education, the economy and everyday life. To reintegrate the Great Society, Dewey relies on a communicative practice of cooperative problem-solving in sub-political associations of all kinds. This practice-based account of democracy escapes an essentialist definition of the public-private divide. Dewey holds that the public ‘consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for’ (Dewey 2016 [1927], 69). The procedural definition of the public sheds light on the practice of cooperative problem-solving in spatial publics according to the changing needs of society.
And second, in Dewey’s refusal to a accept a ‘quest for certainty’ for democracy, we find a democratic theory that strongly invites a nonbiased view at social practice. He countered revolutionary hopes with a democratic experimentalism that seeks reform on the basis of social intelligence. Dewey saw cooperative practice as an explorative way of individuals to adjust to social change and to accommodate their way of living together. He holds that modern democracy is necessarily experimental because it is a social order that not only emerges from cooperation and interaction among individuals but at the same time is the only social order that sustains cooperation and communication over time and allows each of its members ‘to develop his abilities, pursue his own interests, and seek to achieve his own purposes’ (Dewey 1973, 93). The democratic quality of this practice thus consists precisely in the inherent contingency and practical intelligence of cooperative problem-solving, not in the realization of normative ideals or eternal truths.
Spatiality and collective action
Dewey refused to take a pessimistic view on modernity. The Weberian ‘steel-hard casing’ was no option for him; instead, Dewey’s practice-based concept of democracy is about exploring ways how individuals may resist the larger forces of society. To this end, he relies on collective action as a way of communicatively negotiating our ways of living together – an insight that matters even more in contexts like the city where traditional social ties cannot be assumed. With that in mind, it is no coincidence that Dewey strongly influenced the Chicago School, the early pioneers of urban sociology. Adopting Dewey’s theory of social action, they traced democratic self-organization processes, experimental learning and autonomous community-building in everyday life in the city. The Chicago sociologists saw the city as a social metabolism of simultaneous processes of disorganization and reorganization and as responsible for both destroying traditional social bonds and creating new ones (Park 2019 [1925]). In their ethnographic studies of marginalized groups, they provided empirical evidence for Dewey’s thesis that crisis situations in particular call for change and experimentation. This was illustrated, for instance, by the community of migrant workers, the so-called ‘hobos’, whose emergence can be explained neither by a rational orientation towards ends nor by the execution of social norms, but rather as an existential community of need arising from the communal definition of the situation and creative strategies for coping with it (Anderson 1967 [1923]).
Taking Dewey’s pragmatism to the city, the Chicago School points us to the connection between urban spatiality and the emergence of collective action processes. According to the Chiacgo School’s seminal definition, the spatial distinctiveness of the city derives from the interplay of three factors, namely, size, density and heterogeneity (Wirth 1938, 10–18). 5 What at first glance may seem like a rather structural definition describes a distinct spatial quality which substantively affects the being together in the city and creates a distinct ‘urbanism as a way of life’ (Wirth 1938). Without going further into detail here, 6 however, this shows that space is not neutral for political action. Borrowing a term from Saskia Sassen, one may call the urban space a ‘productive space’ (Sassen 2007, 173) in the sense that it enables the emergence of political subjectivity. The fact of being present in the city space, which constantly exposes urbanites to heterogeneity and difference, matters for political practice. The Chicago School’s legacy reveals that this situation bears as much conflict as it does the potential for the emergence of new lines of solidarity and ‘creative action’ (Joas 1996, 207).
Where does all this leave us with regard to the city and democracy? Using Dewey’s democratic experimentalism as a lens, we arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the democratic promise of the city. An urban experimentalism informed by Dewey particularly emphasizes the connection between urban space and collective action processes. It is Dewey’s orientation towards face-to-face interaction and cooperative problem-solving that is intriguing for a democratic theory of the city. For one thing, Dewey seems to delve into the everyday life of individuals as it takes place locally and traces the constitutive conditions of communal life in everyday interactions. Dewey’s focus on experiential practice builds a conceptual bridge between everyday experience and democratic practice to capture the urban political. For another, Dewey adopts a dynamic perspective of democracy which does not settle for the preservation of what has been achieved, but rather highlights the historicity of social arrangements through the creative moment of all social action.
Given the connection between democratic problem-solving and contingency emphasized by Dewey, urban experimentalism is to see the democratic potential of the city in the very openness of collective action. In this context, the urban space itself tends to provide for new beginnings by continuously condensing heterogeneity, and thereby supporting openness. At first glance, this resembles radical democratic approaches that have recently embraced the city as a space of appearance for the urban political. But while the radical democratic perspective emphasizes primarily the rupture and upheaval of urban protest movements (Dikeç and Swyngedouw 2017), Dewey offers us more of an associative perspective that seeks to overcome alienation and conflict through shared experience, creative collective action and community-building. On this basis, the city’s main democratic mission would be to increase the agency of its residents, thus enabling social evolution. A Deweyan political theory of the city, however, would not see this task falling to the city alone, but as a democratic requirement for social order in general. Urban experimentalism thus points to a pluralist approach that captures the diversity of political spaces and different political scales and seeks democratization by enabling joint agency in various spaces.
Democratizing urban space
What does urban experimentalism teach us about how the current way our cities are governed should be altered? When it comes to exploring ways for democratizing urban space, one has to make a strategic decision in the first place: And that is between urban autonomy and urban empowerment, as Young aptly holds (1990, 249). The concept of autonomy refers to granting cities ‘final authority to decide on specific issues and actions’, implying sovereignty, while empowerment is an open concept that refers to granting agents ‘with a voice to discuss ends and means of collective life’ (Young 1990, 251). While within the presented ideals of the democratic city no clear picture emerges with regard to this question, with Dewey, we are clearly taking side for the latter. Urban experimentalism does not mean turning cities into sovereign entities, which would only risk increasing inequality and community-disintegrating parochialism, but redesigning the city as a space that empowers urbanites to engage in joint action.
Although it is true that Dewey himself did not dwell much on the concrete institutional design of his experimental democracy, one may not expect overly concrete institutional reform proposals from a Deweyan perspective. Building on Dewey, however, a number of reform perspectives can be identified, and, moreover, urban experimentalism offers a powerful critique of contemporary tendencies in urban politics that equate experimentalism with a depoliticized and expert-driven localization of politics. There is a certain trend in current urban policies, sometimes paired with innovation, economic efficiency but also environmental concerns, to refer to notions such as ‘experimentalism’, ‘experiments’ and ‘laboratories’ to promote an approach that turns the city into a smart space for collective experimentations (Karvonen 2018). Against these often technical and depoliticized solutions of social engineering, urban experimentalism invokes the demo-cratic values of publicity, and egalitarian participation.
Based on Dewey’s radical democratic project, one may instead highlight pathways for urban reform in a democratic-emancipatory sense. Dewey articulates the strong egalitarian claim that individuals shall ‘participate equally at every central point in the mediation between the individual and society’ (Honneth 2017, 92). Therefore, urban experimentalism embraces the openness and creativity of social practice. This results in a double challenge: Cities have to be inclusive spaces and open up spaces of encounter to enable spontaneous and creative action and thus experiences of self-efficacy. And on the other hand, it is about connecting this ‘political energy’ with existing urban governance. Against this background, I suggest that democratizing urban space should be orientated towards the following two pillars:
Urban citizenship
Formal political membership, and thus the right to vote, should be available to all residents regardless of citizenship. This would underline openness and access to the political space of the city and at the same time strengthen the institutions of local politics. However, the notion of citizenship is not only about status but also about realizing an egalitarian membership practice. In other words, it is about enabling social participation in a broad sense, for example, through the appropriate design of public space, places for neighbourhood encounters or access to public transport. We should think of cities as ‘popular spaces’ that is as ‘arenas in which people come together at their own instigation’ (Cornwall 2004, 2) and work to remove existing barriers.
Co-production
In order to enable experiences of self-efficacy, citizens should be understood as co-producers of the city. Most currently practiced forms of citizen participation see citizens primarily in two roles: In a consultative role as advisors to representative institutions (e.g. in the form of citizens’ assemblies and citizen consultations) or else as potential opponents of urban policy (as in the case of citizens’ referendums and petitions). Co-production, on the other hand, aims to involve citizens in decision-making processes and to initiate self-organization processes as practiced already in cooperative governance innovations such as community land trusts, cooperative architecture or cooperative housing.
To sum up, cities should be understood as spaces of empowerment on their own right that facilitate democratic experimentation and realize distinct models of democracy. Advanced in this direction, urban experimentalism contributes to re-spatialize democracy and to decentre the multi-layered concept of democracy. On this basis, a democratic theory of the city can help to further differentiate the promise of democracy today, to create an awareness of its different spatial realizations and to open up new paths for its further realization.
Conclusion
This article sought to deepen our understanding of the democratic potential of cities by examining current theoretical approaches to democracy and city and highlighting their structural limits. I developed a typology of four ideals of the democratic city which I labelled the city as a school of democracy, the urban cosmopolis, the city as a commons and the sustainable city. The aim was to overcome some theoretical shortcuts within these ideals and to develop a practice-based concept of urban democracy by finding commonalities between them. More specifically, I drew on John Dewey’s understanding of democracy as experimental problem-solving and argued that the concept of urban experimentalism can advance our understanding of the democratic promise of cities by taking the relationship between spatiality and collective action seriously. The benefit of this approach is to highlight contingency and openness as intrinsic democratic values and to point out the connection with urban space. As demonstrated, urban experimentalism ultimately calls for a reorientation of urban governance towards the values of openness, publicity and co-production of the city.
