The Urbanization of Politics

Abstract

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