Читать книгу Youth Urban Worlds - Julie-Anne Boudreau - Страница 12

Much has been said in recent decades about the fact that we are living in an urban world. The United Nations and generously funded research and art projects of all sorts are repeating that more than half the world population now lives in cities (Burdett and Sudjic 2010). Such statements are debatable given well‐documented difficulties in measuring urban populations (Brenner and Schmidt 2014). However, whether more and more people actually live in cities that are covering more and more territory is not important here. The fact that people are adhering to this globalized discursive trope is.

Our conception of the global world – the images we disseminate and reproduce of this urban world – is indeed dominant. Living in a world of cities is very different from living in a world of nation‐states. We argue that doing urban research in a world of cities is also very different from doing research in a world of nation‐states, because urbanization shapes objects of analysis and constitutes the medium through which we do research. We begin this book with the following: in a world of cities, political action unfolds very differently than in a world of nation‐states because urbanity affects our conceptions of space, time, and rationality. This argument is fully developed elsewhere (Boudreau 2017), but it is important to expand on key points to situate how these transformations in our frames of perception and cognition affect the political process and how we can read and make sense of it.

As urban social movements, flashmobs, and occupations have shown over the last few decades, where, when, and how politics unfolds is no longer exclusively in the voting booth or the union meeting, during elections or strikes, and through strategic thinking about how to win the competition between opposing interests (Merrifield 2013). As state institutions lose their monopoly over governance – that is, over the distribution of justice and authority – urban ways of life are bringing new political forms to the fore. This, of course, does not mean nation‐states have disappeared or that their power has diminished. Our argument here is simply that other spatiotemporal conceptions and rationalities have been made visible. This is an argument that was already emerging in the 1980s and 1990s with postmodern critiques of positivism and developmentalism. The state‐centred worldview, a ‘particular but contestable way of understanding the world that began to take shape in the 19th century and crystallised in the 20th century’ (Magnusson 2010, p. 41), was never fully rational, but our scientific methods sought to highlight its rationalism. With the rising hegemony of urban worldviews, postmodern epistemological critiques resonate more easily with everyday practices. Furthermore, the retrenchment of the state through urban neoliberal processes over the last few decades has contributed to an increased visibilization of urban political forms, whether because they sought to fill the gaps of eroded social safety nets or because they tried to develop delegated power arrangements for service delivery. Neoliberal urbanization has thus affected the way institutions and people interact, understand their roles, sustain a now global urban order, and make political claims. Rather than solely focusing on such structural processes to examine the texture and unfolding of urban politics, we contend that a fruitful approach is to consider the effect of urbanity on the ways we act, interact, and think about the world. Such an approach brings to the fore the conceptual density of aesthetics as a critical mode of political action in a world of cities formed through unequal global urbanization processes.

‘Urbanity’, or ‘urban ways of life’, refers to a set of historically situated conditions that affect the way we act, interact, and think about the world. As cities become more prominent in our conceptions of the world, the way we sense and conceive of space, time, and rationality of politics changes. It exemplifies, as David Harvey wrote in 1985, how ‘[w]e always approach the world with some well‐honed conceptual apparatus, the capital equipment of our intellect, and interpret the world broadly in those terms’ (Harvey 1985a, p. xv). In the modern world of nation‐states, which dominated the past century and rested on a Westphalian international order, we learned to think of the political process in terms of containers. Politics, understood in this context as conflicts generated by the confrontation of opposing interests, took place within the confines of national boundaries. The modern democratic and sovereign state was there to mediate conflicts by guaranteeing the stability of the rules of the game (elections, protection of civil rights, monopoly over legitimate violence, etc.). The state was thought to have full control over its territory and was there to protect us. It was the main interlocutor of all political claims. If we were unhappy with a specific situation, we turned to the state to claim for change. In this bounded world, conflict and contention were tolerated as long as they sustained the state.

In the contemporary world of cities, where nation‐state sovereignty and boundaries are profoundly challenged by global flows, the state still plays a central role. But cultural and economic flows, and the mobility of people and merchandise across borders, have significantly affected the bounded spatial conception of the world. In a world of cities, politics is no longer seen as the exclusive domain of the state. Action unfolds in networked, fluid, and mobile spaces that are not fixed by clear borders. Global social movements, social media campaigns, and political tourism are evidence that in order to understand politics, we need to think in terms of networked and not only bounded spaces.

In the modern world of nation‐states, time was seen as directional and with constant velocity. We thought of politics in strategic terms: a political act was enacted with a clear goal and was thought out carefully in order to evaluate its chances of success. We thought of the world in linear terms. For instance, there were developed and underdeveloped countries. The assumption was that with time, underdeveloped countries, often ‘young’ nation‐states having won decolonial struggles, would modernize and catch up. Time, particularly the temporality of political change, was conceived as a historical march towards progress.

In the contemporary world of cities, we still act strategically and hope for a better future. But other forms of political action are increasingly visible. Acting spontaneously, without strategy, developing tactics as we respond to immediate situations, without thinking too much of the consequences of action, acting out of passion or rage more than ideology… this brings our attention to a different conception of time and political change. The temporality of action is fragmented, composed of multiple situations and dominated by the ‘here and now’ more than the future, by tactic more than strategic thought. Multiple synchronous paces and circular (cyclical or sequential) temporalities clash with directional trajectories and stable duration.

In the modern world of nation‐states, the stability of the space of action and of linear time facilitated pretension to scientific rationality as the motor of legitimate action. We calculated, planned, and acted because we thought we could master the parameters of the issue at stake. Of course, we still act this way, but we also increasingly assert other rationalities of action based on creativity, unpredictability, sensorial stimulation, intuition, emotion, and loss of control.

This leads to a more diffuse form of political action, where leadership is absent (or at the very least, invisible or negated). Action unfolds in a specific time and place through a network of relations. We often recognize political action only if we decentre the gaze from leaders and analyse specific situations instead (how actions unfold in time and space).

How and where are we, then, to look for urban politics?

Living in a world of cities compels us to feel and look for politics in different places. To take such politics seriously, we need to be sensitive to unusual political forms. The state‐centred model of political action that permeates conceptual frameworks for analysing urban politics can constitute an epistemological obstacle in this regard. Through these lenses, urban politics is predominantly known and thought through what Warren Magnusson (2010) calls ‘statist thinking’. While very useful for understanding state action, such a lens cannot encompass the totality of the political process.

Let us flesh out this argument more fully to locate another understanding of urban politics and its locales. As Magnusson (2010, p. 41) explains, statist thinking is an epistemological limit historically related to the development of political sciences in the context of the formation of the state throughout the Modern period and the development of social sciences in the nineteenth century, ‘when the world was divided up in a new way for purposes of academic study’. Bourdieu has also closely examined the development of such increasingly specialized fields related to the sociohistorical and situated conditions of modernity (Hage 2012). Through this sociohistorical process, the division of academic disciplines, following the sectoral divisions of state departments, held the promise of facilitating the production of scientific knowledge and the development of an efficient state administration. While sociology was given the mandate to study society, economics focused on the economy; ‘anthropology, the origins of man; geography, the environment in which men lived; and political science “the state”’ (Magnusson 2010, p. 41). Ghassan Hage (2012) and Ben Highmore (2010) have also pointed out that the domain of aesthetics was not left out of this process, as it became an increasingly specialized field concerned with the arts, ‘increasingly limiting itself to only certain kinds of experience and feeling, and becoming more and more dedicated to finely wrought objects’ (Highmore 2010, p. x; see also Saito 2017).

It is easy to observe that a state‐centred bias has been carried over in urban political studies. It is exemplified in conceptualizations of urban politics as being ‘about authoritative decision‐making at a smaller scale than national units – the politics of the sub‐national level … with particular reference to the political actors and institutions operating there’ (John 2009, p. 17). From there follows that urban politics is studied with a focus on municipal jurisdictions: land use, housing, public infrastructure, waste, water, and so on. These accounts are, in this sense, municipalist (focused on formal state institutions). Nevertheless, political scientists have recognized that municipal politics is perhaps more permeable to informal actors than politics at other government levels. Urban regime theory is the most elaborate example of the intertwinement of the formal and the informal at the local level in the North American context (Stone 1989).

As the anthropologist Ghassan Hage (2012, p. 3) argues, ‘[t]he existence of a specialised political field, for example, has not meant that the political no longer exists except in specialised institutions’. Indeed, the ‘political is still diffused throughout the social, that is, a dimension of life remains political through and through regardless of which social domain one is examining, and despite the existence of specialised political institutions and practices’ (Hage 2012, p. 3). Of course, this is a claim made forcefully by voices formerly excluded from these specialized institutions, including academia: Black feminists, disability scholars, Queer activists…

Warren Magnusson (2010, p. 43) challenges political scientists and urban studies to embrace politics from what he calls an ‘analytic of urbanism’ that presents an ‘opportunity to challenge the whole edifice of contemporary political science’, from the perspective that ‘the form of political order that arises from urbanism [what results from distinctively urban practices] is different from the one implicit in the project of state building’. He stresses that this state‐building project and the rise of nation‐states did not extinguish the urban political orders nested within, and simultaneously exceeding, the scales of state power, further adding that in some cases, such urban political orders even predate state political orders (Magnusson 2010, p. 45).⁵

Characteristically, cities are produced by multiple authorities; they function through distributive agency involving the active and reactive materiality of buildings, non‐human living beings such as plants, animals, birds. We will see in the following chapters how these proto‐agents affect the unfolding of political action in dense, interconnected urban environments. Theoretically, we are inspired by various moves to relational epistemologies, including topological thought in urban geography and assemblage theories that consider more‐than‐human sources of agency and relational production of urban space (Amin and Thrift 2002; Amin 2004; Farias and Bender 2010). However, these theorizations are not always ethnographic or participatory. For these reasons, they do not always accommodate very well the messiness, ambiguity, and sensuality of being and living in the city. They are also less apt to account for and articulate the variety of urban knowledges produced by actors situated in or engaged at different scales of urban political life (Johnson‐Schlee 2019).

Our focus here is on the transformation of political subjectivities and modes of political action at a relational, street level, and this requires ethnographic immersion. Immersion enables us to emphasize networked relations as being spatially and temporally continuous, producing youth urban worlds which connect and have connected Montreal as a node in various global urban world orders. Within these situated and interconnected contexts, we see urbanity as a logic of political action permeated by distinct features of an urban consciousness (distinct ways of perceiving space, time, and rationality).

In Chapter 2, we will meet Tivon, a young man living in the Little Burgundy neighbourhood. He slams, he writes, he dances, he acts through an urban logic of political action. Although many social scientists would not see political action in Tivon’s life because he doesn’t participate in street demonstrations or political organizations, we argue here that by paying attention to how politics unfolds in an urban world, we can see in Tivon’s life many political gestures. Describing one of his video projects, he writes: ‘It’s crazy how things change. Condos are going up at a faster rate than ever and the word gentrification doesn’t even explain how the riches of the community are being replaced with the riches of the word’ (mapcollab.org). He expresses concern about the pace of change in his neighbourhood, and points to the inability of words to keep up. Words become useless to express his political outrage. He further alludes to how his neighbourhood is linked to the ‘riches of the wor[l]d’, thereby expressing a networked spatial conception linking the local with the global.

As he describes another photo, he pursues: ‘This is my daily eye level street view. This may be your first time seeing this view. I have seen this view almost everyday for the past twenty years!’ (mapcollab.org). Tivon grounds his political analysis in everyday life. You may not think this is particularly interesting, he seems to say when describing an ordinary ‘eye‐level street view’, but this is my standpoint, my entry point into the world. He is inviting us to enter this everyday world in order to understand his politics. The inadequate intensity of the word ‘gentrification’ and everydayness impelling political gestures, these are two examples of what we want to call the aesthetics of political action in an urban world. They call attention to the importance of conceiving a political relation aesthetically.