Editorial: The City
Engin F. Isin: Ways of Being Political (in English)
What would creating a new image of the city entail? This essay argues for two moves: one ontological and one genealogical. First, we must recognize the difference between 'the political' and 'politics'. The essence of the political lies in the relations between beings that are established through their comportment toward each other and toward being. Thus, ontological investigations concern the political as the condition for the possibility of politics. Second, we must recognize the difference between 'the city' and 'cities'. Genealogical investigations, thereby, examine different modes and forms of being political as the ways in which being political manifest themselves. Taken together these two investigations reveal the essence of the city as the essence of the political. The objects of ontological and genealogical investigations are the political and the city rather than politics (facts about that-beings) and cities (facts about where-beings).
François Ascher: Urbanism Faced with the New Urban Revolution (in Danish)
The industrial revolution was followed by the urban revolution and urbanism as a discipline of urban knowledge and urban planning/design. Today, in the context of the new information and communication technologies, new societal changes are putting a new urban revolution on the agenda. Urbanism is being succeeded by a 'meta-urbanism' with different goals, tools of knowledge and instruments of action. The article gives an overview of the connections between these technological, social, urban and urbanist mutations.
Rob Shields: Culture and the Just City (in English)
How can urban sociology contribute towards reshaping what has been called the 'welfare city' in Denmark and other countries as a 'just city'? The welfare city is characterized by ideals of equitable access to collective consumption goods such as services and housing, and the operationalization of programs of redistributive justice. Ethical demands for the cultural recognition of different groups now require that questions of the good life be addressed alongside deontological questions of morality and rights to create meaningful social justice. A synthesis of the politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution implies a rethinking of the relationship between the cultural and the economic. Urban sociology, with its emphases on locality, scale and contingency, is a strategic site of research which can contribute toward an ethical politics of the 'just city'.
Niels Albertsen: The City and Justification (in Danish)
This article confronts David Harvey's writings from the last 10 years on social justice and the city with Luc Boltanski's and Laurent Thévenot's analysis of justification as 'orders of worth'. The discussion evolves around Harvey's idea of a dialectic of universality and particularity. The main result is that the analysis of 'orders of worth' is able to embrace a common level of justification of universality and particularity. This level is missing in Harvey's dialectic, but it should not be neglected if one wants to understand the construction of universalities and the difficulties of such a construction. If one is confronted with complex urban processes then this level of justification is even more pertinent.
John Pløger: Urban Community - the Dissolution of a Spatial Dispositive (in Danish)
The task of urban planning is to form socio-spatial fields of interaction, and in this connection the concept of community is essential. But the community discourse ignores the moral-ethical wording and staging of community in politics and planning. The article deals with and problematises the thinking about community - politically, architectural and theoretically - by taking departure from what we with Michel Foucault could call 'a spatial dispositive'. Community as a relevant perspective for understanding urban living is criticised by outlining the particularistic and heterogeneous, constitutive conditions of urban communities. The article concludes by discussing what an adequate urban ethics could be like, here drawing upon Iris Marion Young.
Tom Nielsen: The Urban Public Sphere Between Conformity and Emancipation (in Danish)
The article addresses the problem of the urban public sphere and the related spaces of the contemporary city. The point of departure is taken in the social theoretical critique of the privatisation of the public space and the homogenisation of urban social life that this is assumed to have caused. On the basis of this critique and its foundation in abstract and universal modern ideals of transparent public spaces, the article discusses the collective urban spaces of the consumer society and the social life in these spaces. The theoretical discussion of the genealogy of 'post-modern urban space' and the contemporary urban public sphere is supported by examples of collective urban spaces in Los Angeles and Denmark. On the basis of these discussions the article proposes a concept of the urban public sphere based on urban practises that moves beyond ideas of pure divisions between public or private. Such a revised idea seems necessary in order to analyse and exploit the political potentials of the collective spaces of consumer society.
Bülent Diken and Carsten Bagge Laustsen: Indistinction (in Danish)
Since the late 1970s the focus on the 'urban question' has shifted from the question of social movements to the question of social control and violence, from political struggle to 'post-political' risk management, and the city is increasingly transformed into a network city: a fragmented space held together by technologies of mobility and flexible forms of power. In this context the transition from 'disciplinary societies' to 'societies of control' is decisive. Further, it is increasingly evident that post-politics, based on technologies of control, is not a peaceful social order in that it brings with it new forms of violence: terror. The article elaborates on the relationship between these three successive forms of power (discipline, control, and terror) by focusing on their common denominator, that is, the creation of spaces of 'indistinction'. With Giorgio Agamben, it is argued that the 'camp', not the city, is the logic that combines discipline, control and terror, constituting the bio-political paradigm of contemporary societies.
Interview with Edward W. Soja: Thirdspace, Postmetropolis, and Social Theory (in English)
Niklas Luhmann: Inclusion and Exclusion (in Danish)
The concepts of differentiation and integration have a long history in sociological theory. However, the explanatortory power of this pair may be overburdened when confronted with particular problems in developing countries and with certain problems that are found in both developed and developing countries. It is shown how the conditions of inclusion and exclusion change from segmentary to stratificatory and functionally differentiated societies. In functionally differentiated societies the principle is that each functions system (economy, politics, law etc.) orders its own conditions of inclusion in disregard of other functions systems. In developing countries and in certain regions and zones in developed countries one meets, however, other orders of inclusion and exclusion. One of them is networks of mutual personal services and benefits, often characterized as corruption or nepotism, where the principle of inclusion is active participation of whole persons. Another one is the tendency toward 'absolute' exclusion from the functions systems and from all forms of communication that demand more complex capabilities. This pattern is found in urban zones both in developing countries (e.g. the Brazilian 'favelas') and in developed countries (e.g. the North-American 'ghettos'). By this kind of exclusion people are, so to speak, reduced to sheer bodies - and, the article suggests, these orders of inclusion/exclusion are perhaps in a process of becoming the primary differentiation form in the world society.