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Critical urban theory and critical urban studies form the subject of two recent edited collections on approaches to the analysis and transformation of the contemporary capitalist city. In an exchange of commentaries by the respective editors and contributors, the introduction explains the genesis of each book and previews some of the key observations. Peter Marcuse then offers his assessment of Critical Urban Studies: New Directions, which is reciprocated by a commentary on Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City by Jonathan Davies, David Imbroscio and Warren Magnusson.

Historically, the urban was the condition of possibility for the political, but the symbiosis of the two has been concealed by the rise of the state and the concomitant development of the social sciences. The effort to recover the connection by denoting a separate domain of ‘urban politics’ is self-defeating, because it re-instantiates an ontology of the political that consigns the urban to the domain of ‘low’ politics. The dominant ontology suggests that ‘high’ politics — the most serious politics or politics proper — is always in the domain of states and empires, and that everything else is subject to it. This view is constantly reaffirmed by the political theory that underpins the state system and the modern social sciences. Nevertheless, a different ontology of the political is always already implicit in the concept of the city, understood as a local phenomenon and a global way of life. To see the political through the city is to notice how proximate diversity stimulates self-organization and self-government, generates politics in and between authorities in different registers, and defers the sovereignty claims it produces. On this view, the urban is neither high nor low, but is instead the very form of the political, encompassing states and empires as much as anything else.

Although the social sciences circle about the political, and scholars in the humanities keep gesturing at it, the thing itself remains obscure. It is the silent center of endless academic debate, always already known, yet never quite revealed. A common move is to redescribe it in other terms, such as the ones from military strategy that inform “realist” IR theory, or the moral and legal principles that underpin cosmopolitan ideals. To think of the political in sociological, economic, cultural, geographic, historical, or even scientific terms involves a similarly alienating move, which obscures the original object of study and hides the alienating procedure. If we want to understand politics, we have to address it directly, but that is hard to do when we have largely deprived ourselves of the means of thinking politically. How can we think about this thing that is so central, that pulls us in and envelops us, and yet has this mysterious character that repels understanding? Is politics, like the Kantian noumenon , unknowable in principle? Or, is that apparent unknowability a false problem? Are we bound, as Kant might have imagined, to think politically in a particular way if we are to operate in the world? The conventional view is that we are bound, because politics is a response to the problem of government. That leads us directly to the state. Although we should certainly go there, we should not linger too long. The state gives us an appealing but misleading conception of politics. It is more helpful …

Many people in Canada are frightened by the right of local self-government, because they are afraid of the privatization of public authority. This article suggests that municipalities can be otherwise conceived, and that a right of local self-government can be vindicated without impairing the capacity of the state or encouraging a debilitating privatism. The key is to understand that municipalities can be non-exclusive public authorities, on a different register from the state or civil society.Résumé.La crainte de la privatisation des pouvoirs publics mène de nombreux Canadiens et Canadiennes à redouter le droit à l'autonomie gouvernementale locale. Cet article suggère qu'il est possible d'envisager les municipalités autrement, et qu'on peut justifier le droit à l'autonomie gouvernementale locale sans faire entrave aux compétences de l'État et sans encourager un privatisme débilitant. L'important est de comprendre que les municipalités peuvent exercer un pouvoir public non exclusif dans leur propre zone de compétence, jouant sur un registre différent de celui de l'État ou de la société civile.

This article explores the relationship between urbanism, cities and local self-government to identify some key issues for contemporary public administration. State-centric political theory marginalizes urban analysis, but the latter enables us to see the world in a different way. Understanding ourselves as urban is to see that conventional political categories seriously misrepresent the conditions of our lives. Various thinkers like Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift and Michael Peter Smith have suggested ways of building on contemporary urban analysis, but it is still a struggle to overcome the spatial imagination that we have inherited from conventional political theory. This poses particular problems for any “new urban agenda,” since questions of local autonomy have yet to be properly posed. Gerald E. Frug's analysis of the issue of civic autonomy is helpful in this regard because it highlights the philosophical assumptions that lie behind our fears about the misuse of local authority. Foucauldian discussions of governmentality reveal the way self-government works as a strategy to control populations by liberating them. Local self-government is thus an ambiguous and dangerous ideal - but not for the reasons usually supposed. It is in any case the practice implicit in urbanism as a way of life. The key constitutional issue today is how to recognize that practice and regulate it appropriately. Sommaire: Le present article examine les relations entre l'urbanisme, les villes et l'autonomie gouvernementale locale pour identifier certaines questions-cles dans le domaine de l'administration publique contemporaine. La theorie politique axee sur l'Etat marginalise l'analyse urbaine, mais cette derniere nous permet de voir le monde sous un nouveau jour. Se considerer comme des citadins, c'est voir que les categories politiques conventionnelles representent tres mal nos conditions de vie. Differents penseurs comme Ash Amin, Nigel Thrift ct Michael Peter Smith ont propose des manieres de developper l'analyse urbaine contemporaine, mais il est tou-jours difficile d'aller au-dela de l'imagination spatiale qui nous a ete transmise par la theorie politique conventionnelle. Cela souleve des problemes particuliers pour tout nouvel agenda urbain, etant donne que les questions d'autonomie locale n'ont pas encore ete posees adequatement. L'analyse de la question de l'autonomie civique realisee par Gerald E. Frug est utile a ce sujet, car elle souligne les hypotheses philosophiques sur lesquelles reposent nos craintes concemant l'utilisation abusive de l'autorite locale. Les discussions a la Foucault sur la gouvernementalite revelent la maniere dont l'autonomie gouvernementale fonctionne en tant que strategie visant a controler les populations tout en les liberant. L'autonomie gouvernementale locale est ainsi un ideal ambigu et dangereux, mais non pour les raisons que l'on suppose generalement. C'est en tout cas la pratique implicite dans l'urbanisme comme mode de vie. La question constitutionnelle cle qui se pose aujourd'hui est de savoir comment reconnaitre cette pratique et la reglementer adequatement.

This article challenges the standard idea that municipalities are creatures of the provinces, and suggests instead that they embody one of the major principles of a free and democratic society, the right of local self-government. Municipalities are political authorities of a different sort, which may coexist with the state but are not strictly part of it. Local self-government is a practice rooted in everyday life, and there is more to it than just having municipal authorities. Canadians have yet to have a proper debate about the constitutional implications of giving appropriate recognition to this practice.

Ce compte-rendu de la campagne pour la preservation de l'une des grandes institutions feministes a Vancouver est centre sur la relation entre l'Etat et les mouvements sociaux. Loin de se limiter au simple recit des evenements presentes comme une lutte entre les feministes et l'Etat, il met au jour les complexites d'un mouvement dont les ramifications s'etendent a l'Etat, a la societe civile et a d'autres mouvements sociaux. L'image centrale du changement est tiree des experiences de femmes en transition dont le mouvement doit ětre compris comme une ouverture sur le monde et une reflexion critique sur les relations existantes. C'est ce processus qu'on voit a l'oeuvre dans la campagne de defense de la Maison des femmes de Vancouver. This account of the campaign to save a major feminist institution in Vancouver focuses on the relation between the state and social movements. It goes beyond a simplistic rendering of the story as a struggle between feminists and the state, to reveal the complexities of a movement that overlaps the state, civil society, and other social movements. The central image of change is drawn from the experiences of women in transition, whose movement is best understood as an opening toward the world and a critical rethinking of existing relationships. This is the process we see in the Women's House Saving Action.

We wrote our paper as a plea to the Canadian Left to question its assumptions about the nature of politics. What we said was provocative, but by no means sectarian. Indeed, what seems to have annoyed some people is that we refused to exempt anyone from the need for rethinking. Our theoretical strategy was to underline both the bourgeois and the theological origins of common political assumptions. We were hoping to encourage intellectuals on the Left to press Marx's critique of bourgeois thought a step further by subjecting his own ontology and epistemology - which were very much of his own time and informed by a specifically Western intellectual heritage - to rigorous questioning.

Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space. By Margaret Kohn. New York: Routledge, 2004. 256p. 22.95 paper.In her first book, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (2003), Margaret Kohn analyzed the spatiality of early working-class activism in Italy and developed a sophisticated argument about the conditions for democratic empowerment. In this book, she shifts her attention to the United States. Aside from one chapter on the Wobblies, the focus is on the present. In both books, her emphasis is on the way in which the space for political engagement—“public space”—is constructed, sustained, controlled, or foreclosed. Her overarching theme is that theorists of democracy have paid far too little attention to the spatial conditions for democratic interaction. As she attempts to show in the present book, the privatization of public space—that is, the transformation of once-open downtowns into privately governed business improvement districts, the creation of privately governed gated communities in the suburbs and elsewhere, and the colonization of once-public space by private businesses—tends to insulate people from direct, physical encounters with people who are “different” or who may be attempting to persuade them to think otherwise about political issues. The trend toward privatization is particularly pronounced in the United States, and Kohn's concern here is to show us why we should be concerned about it, as democrats.