Business Improvement Areas and the Justification of Urban Revitalization: Using the Pragmatic Sociology of Critique to Understand Neoliberal Urban Governance

T he exchange on urban assemblages initiated by Colin McFarlane provides a welcome occasion to reflect collaboratively across a wide range of contemporary critical urban scholarship. For me, it furnishes an opportunity to bring recent developments in urban theory into dialogue with scholarship in critical development studies and transnational feminism that has long sought to probe articulations of political economy and everyday life. Like that of other contributors to this forum, my current research takes place in and on cities—it examines commercial gentrification in Toronto (Mazer and Rankin, 2011; Rankin and Delaney, 2011) and post-conflict governance in regional district headquarters of Nepal. Yet engaging relational approaches, including theories of assemblage, would seem to suggest an analytical focus not so much ‘the urban’ per se, but on how situated subaltern experience can shed light on some of the most pressing issues of our times—poverty, food insecurity, environmental injustice, political exclusion and so on. Scholarship in critical development studies has long attended to processes through which the centre and periphery continually make and remake one another (for a review, see Lawson, 2007). From the 1980s, this work has examined how a capitalist mode of production articulates other logics to produce specific class configurations and institutional forms of capital, labour, gender and race. These social formations ‘rework modernity’; they contour the way capitalist development takes shape in specific time-space conjunctures (Pred and Watts, 1992; Carney, 1991; Hart, 1986; Watts, 1983). In a series of ‘Progress Reports’ on Geography and Development, Gillian Hart (2001, 2002b, 2004) specifies the derivation of this approach from Gramsci via Stuart Hall (1980). Analytically the aim is to identify the diverse elements that constitute ‘societies structured in dominance’—to document the constitution of specific political economies through the articulation of capitalist modes of production with local social histories and cultural practice. Crucially, an ‘articulation approach’ also encompasses an exploration of the ways in which any given conjunctural assemblage of diverse elements is given meaning through everyday practice. Clearly, there are resonances here with the concept of assemblage—as a mode of historical materialism emphasizing everyday life and a networked sense of space (à la Massey, 1994). I would suggest, in fact, as Brenner et al. (2011, p. 237) also have, that assemblage is best understood as a concept well suited to probing the articulations among disparate urban places and their specific yet relational enrolments in largescale processes of capital accumulation. Utilizing the concept in this way, though, requires abandoning a defence of political economy as the supreme theoretical standpoint from which to apprehend and transform urban life. On the contrary, an articulation approach would seem to demand a healthy dose of theoretical eclecticism: a Foucauldian governmentality perspective to interrogate projects of rule, for example; a political economy perspective to detect ‘family resemblances’ in modes of regulation and processes of dispossession across disparate locales (Peck, 2004); a theory of cultural politics to understand the dynamics of dissent and consent; and

Assemblage and the politics of thick description

This paper engages key social theories of transnational mobilities in order to forge the concept of urban ‘green’ cosmopolitization, posited as a social scientific contribution to epochal conversations on climate change. Bringing Ulrich Beck's notion of ‘cosmopolitization’ to bear on recent work around ‘urban policy mobilities’, I analyze professional planning practices in large-scale world cities as privileged sites for contemporary imaginings and material implementations of low-carbon sociotechnical change. Focusing on the regions of Europe and Asia, I show how specific policies and technologies of urban greening circulate in intercity sustainability networks. These networks, I suggest, serve to organize processes of professional engagement with climate change around notions of innovation, learning, and ‘best practice’ policy transfer among urban professionals—thereby also excluding more ‘radically’ alternative futures. The paper then turns to explore how such green cosmopolitization works as a social f...

Greening Cosmopolitan Urbanism? On the Transnational Mobility of Low-Carbon Formats in Northern European and East Asian Cities:

Book Review by Pablo Mendez of Suburban Planet: Making the World Urban from the Outside In written by Roger Keil.

Suburban Planet. Making the World Urban from the Outside In

City of Quarters: Urban villages in the contemporary city

Moral-theoretical categories have almost disappeared from the theoretical vocabulary of sociology. Neither perceptions of legitimacy nor perceptions of injustice, neither moral argument nor normative consensus now play a significant role in explaining the social order. Instead the object of sociological inquiry is understood either according to the pattern of anonymous self-organization processes or as the result of cooperation among strategicallyoriented actors; accordingly, the disciplinary role models are biology or economics, whose conceptual models appear suited to explain such a complex process as the reproduction of societies. One may easily get the impression that current sociology wishes to finally bid farewell to the generation of its founding fathers; since from Weber and Durkheim to Talcott Parsons, it was a settled matter that an adequate basic conception of the social world could only be derived using the concepts, models, or hypotheses of moral theory – practical philosophy was, so to speak, the foundation and guiding discipline for classical sociology. After the “Theory of Communicative Action” – the last grand sketch of a complete social theory based on the sources of practical philosophy – all this seems to have been forgotten. In any event, it could until recently appear that with Habermas’ book the tradition of a normatively oriented sociology has come to an end. It is mostly due to the efforts of a small group of researchers in France – which assembled around Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot – that there continues to be a strand within social theory that employs sources of moral philosophy. Having emerged from an internal critique of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, the works of this highly productive circle, probing ever new directions, seek to explain the integration of our societies through the interplay of different moral convictions.1 The foundational text of this sociological school is the study On Justification, originally published in 1991.2 This book, which has meanwhile also been published in German,3 deserves careful consideration not least because it represents the most interesting attempt of the more recent past to give sociology a basis in moral philosophy.

Business Improvement Areas and the Justification of Urban Revitalization: Using the Pragmatic Sociology of Critique to Understand Neoliberal Urban Governance

References

Assemblage and the politics of thick description

Greening Cosmopolitan Urbanism? On the Transnational Mobility of Low-Carbon Formats in Northern European and East Asian Cities:

Suburban Planet. Making the World Urban from the Outside In

City of Quarters: Urban villages in the contemporary city

Dissolutions of the Social: On the Social Theory of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot

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