The notion of urban vitalis as constitutive to urbanity and urbanism has not been acknowledged thus far as perhaps a premise to urban politics and planning. Critical urban studies instead see planning as a matter of designing the everydayness of everyday life by spatializing its flows and encounters. This article focuses on a force of urbanity and urbanism that at least Georg Simmel diagnosed and discusses the missing urban vitalis in urban planning and how policy makers in fact rely very much on vitalism as an a priori force to urbanism. The aim of the Danish urban regeneration project kvarterløft (neighborhood regeneration) is, politically speaking, to reconstruct bonding, inclusive, caring urban communities, and the project therefore very much relies on local interactionism and connectivity. The article discusses how this project, however, exemplifies more generally a political reliance on the existence of an urban vitalis.
Aaberg, H. (1999). Kommunitarisme: Det civile samfunds rolle i bypolitikken [Communitarism: The role of civil society in urban politics]. Samfundsøkonomen, 7, 26-32.
2.
Albertsen, N. (1994). The city, the social and rhetoric: Some rhetorical turns in the social space of the city. In R. Kazemian (Ed.), Design methodologies in the urban context (pp. 61-73). Stockholm, Sweden: Royal Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture and Town Planning.
3.
Alliez, E. (1997). Questionnaire on Deleuze. Theory, Culture & Society, 14, 81-87.
4.
Amin, A., & Thrift, N. (2002). Cities: Reimagining the urban. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
5.
Bech, H. (1999). Fritidsverden: Studier i mandighed, homoseksualitet og modernitet [Leisure world: Studies in maleness, homosexuality, and modernity]. Copenhagen, Denmark: Forlaget Sociologi.
6.
Connolly, W. E. (1995). The ethos of pluralization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
7.
Deleuze, G. (1985). Nietzsche: Et essay + filosofiske tekster [Nietzsche: An essay and philosophical texts]. Oslo, Norway: Lanser.
8.
Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations 1972-1990. New York: Columbia University Press.
9.
Deleuze, G. (1997). Immanence: A life.... Theory, Culture & Society, 14, 3-9.
10.
Diken, B. (1998). Byen, fantasien og ghettoen [The city, fantasy and the ghetto]. Øjeblikket, 8, 62-67.
11.
Fainstein, S. (1995). Can we make the cities we want? In R. A. Beauregard & S. Body-Gendrot (Eds.), The urban moment: Cosmopolitan essays on the late-20th-century city (pp. 249-273). London: Sage Ltd.
12.
Franzén, M., & Sandstedt, E. (1982). Boendets planering og vardagslivets organisering: Kvinnan, familjen och staden [Housing planning and everyday life organization: The women, family, and the city]. Kvinnotetenskapelig Tidskrift, 3, 6-15.
13.
Frazer, M., Kember, S., & Lury, C. (2005). Inventive life: Approaches to the new vitalism. Theory, Culture & Society, 22(1), 1-14.
14.
Frisby, D. (2001). Cityscapes of modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
15.
Gehl, J. (1987). Livet mellem husene [Life between buildings]. Copenhagen, Denmark: Arkitektens Forlag. (Original work published 1972)
16.
Greco, M. (2005). On the vitality of vitalism. Theory, Culture & Society, 22(1), 15-27.
17.
Hansen, N. G. (1991). Sansernes sociologi: Om Georg Simmel og det moderne [Sociology of the senses: On Georg Simmel and the modern]. Copenhagen, Denmark: Tiderne Skifter.
18.
Hillier, J. (2002). The shadows of power. London: Routledge.
19.
Krogh Jensen, M. (2003). Det reflexive rum [Reflexive space]. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus School of Architecture.
20.
Larsen, S. N. (1998). Schopenhauer. In B. Rahbek (Ed.), Når mennesket undrer sig [When humans wonder] (pp. 313-328). Copenhagen, Denmark: Centrum.
21.
Lash, S. (1999). Another modernity, a different rationality. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
22.
Lash, S. (2005). Lebenssoziologie: Georg Simmel in the information age. Theory, Culture & Society, 22(3), 1-23.
23.
Lefevbre, H. (1991). The production of space. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
24.
Lilja, E. (1999). Denifrågasatte förorten: Identitet och tilhörighet i moderna förorter [The questioned suburb: Identity and belonging in modern suburbs]. Stockholm, Sweden: Byggforskningsrådet.
25.
McBeath, G. B., & Webb, S. A. (1997). Cities, subjectivity, and cyberspace. In S. Williams & J. Westwood (Eds.), Imagining cities: Scripts, signs, memory (pp. 249-261). London: Routledge.
26.
Miami Theory Collective. (Ed.). (1991). Community at loose ends. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
27.
Nancy, J.-L. (1991). Of being-in-common. In Miami Theory Collective (Ed.), Community at loose ends (pp. 1-13). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
28.
Pløger, J. (2002a). Architecture’s ethical ambivalence: Aesthe-ethic urbanism. In P. Weibel (Ed.), Olafur Eliasson: Surroundings surrounded (pp. 480-491). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
29.
Pløger, J. (2002b). Det senmoderne nærmiljø: Livsformer og bykultur. En sammenligning af teori og praksis i Danmark og Norge [Late modern communities: Life-forms and urban culture. A comparison of theory and practice in Denmark and Norway]. Oslo, Norway: NIBR.
30.
Pløger, J. (2004). Strife: Urban planning and agonism. Planning Theory, 3(1), 71-92.
31.
Rabinow, P. (1989). French modern: Norms and forms of the social environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
32.
Rajchman, J. (2000). The Deleuze connection. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
33.
Sandercock, L. (2004). Towards a planning imagination for the 21st century. Journal of the American Planning Association, 70(2), 133-141.
Sennett, R. (1991). The conscience of the eye: The design and social life of cities. London: Faber & Faber.
36.
Sennett, R. (1999). The challenge of urban diversity. In L. Nystrøm (Ed.), City and culture: Cultural processes and urban sustainability (pp. 128-135). Karlskrona: The Swedish Urban Environmental Council.
37.
Smith, D. M. (2000). Moral geographies: Ethics in a world of difference. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.
38.
Thrift, N. (2004). Summoning life. In P. Cloke, P. Crang, & M. Goodwin (Eds.), Envisioning human geographies (pp. 81-103). London: Arnold.
39.
URP. (2000). An urban regeneration experiment in Denmark. Retrieved April 6, 2006, from http://www.kvarterloeft.dk/uk_main.htm
40.
Vetlesen, A. J. (1996). Kommunitarisme [Communitarianism]. Samtiden, pp. 14-27.
