Urban Politics Now: re-imagining democracy in the neoliberal city

The form and future of cities is increasingly regarded as the product of inescapable processes: the strategic decisions of businesses, consumer preferences, deeply rooted cultural reflexes. Specifically, with the rise of a neoliberal and neo-conservative view of society, fundamental decisions about the everyday environment are increasingly determined by the laws of supply and demand or the clash of cultures. Is there still a place for democratic urban politics in such a climate? How can disenfranchised groups express their dissatisfaction? How can a city’s development be steered by a collective political project again, instead of profit margins or economic formulae?

The BAVO bureau for architectural theory invited a group of social geographers, sociologists, philosophers, planners, archi-tects and designers to reflect on the current repudiation of urban politics. Urban Politics Now offers an in-depth analysis of the plague of symptoms that are associated with this, such as gratuitous violence, zero tolerance, consumptive hedonism, socioeconomic polarization. It also proposes ways to re–establish the city as the driver of democratic politics with an emancipatory agenda, rather than one that ratifies the status quo.

All the contributions are globally relevant, but there is a specific focus on recent urban developments in the Netherlands. With contributions by: Guy Baeten, BAVO, Friedrich von Borries en Matthias Böttger, Bülent Diken and Carsten Bagge Lautsen, Henk van Houtum en Bas Spierings, Dieter Lesage, Juliet Flower MacCannell, Merijn Oudenampsen, Neil Smith, Edward W. Soja, Yannis Stavrakakis, Erik Swyngedouw and Slavoj Zizek