Introduction to the Urban Revolutions

* Book: Holes in the Whole: Introduction to the Urban Revolutions. Krzysztof Nawratek. Zero Books.

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Review

Karl Baker:

"Cities are at the centre of something more fundamental; the promise of an ‘urban revolution’: a re-organisation of political life to “allow the restoration of the city’s subjectivity”. Treating the city as primarily a political entity to be re-invented offers a welcome contrast to much urban analysis that takes for granted and fails to challenge dominant forms of political economy.

Central to the book’s argument is the importance of a city-based ‘institution/ border’ that mediates between the ‘subject’ or ‘inside’ of the city and a global ‘outside’. The weakness of contemporary cities is that “they no longer decide their own fate and have instead become a resource of space, buildings, infrastructure and people … utilised by phenomena transcendent to cities – mainly global corporations”. The institution/ border then establishes a mechanism by which the city as political community might ‘contaminate’ or regulate free-ranging flows of global capital with the objective of ‘self-managing’ relations with a wider world.

This argument about loss of agency in a globalising world is a familiar one, and in applying the idea to cities rather than nations Nawratek presents a striking metaphor of the passive ‘princess city’ awaiting its multinational prince to bring it to life. If cities are to cast off this passivity and claim initiative in a context of feral globalisation, Nawratek does not advocate a defensive and inward form of ‘community’ as the foundation for a city-based polity. Dismissing attempts to create ‘strong local communities’ as the dangerous yearnings of “leftist utopians and rightist communitarians”, he nevertheless proposes a compelling notion of ‘intimate tenderness’ that binds people in a non-possessive relationship with local place. He also argues that a coherent ‘whole-ness’ to the urban political community is a vital condition for successful civic institutions. The city has today “lost its physical boundary with the exterior. Instead it has countless and ever growing number of internal boundaries”.

These contemporary ‘holes’ in the ‘whole’ of the city (as the book’s title suggests) are problematic for Nawratek. However, there is an uneasy tension between overcoming internal urban divisions to ensure an effective bulwark against rampant global capital flows and at the same time allowing for ‘internal differentiation’. The book rejects constructing the city around a ‘common good’ (it doesn’t exist), and instead imagines the institution allowing ‘fragments’ of the city to somehow coalesce into a ‘subject’. Positioning ‘wholeness’ as the guiding concept for a politics of diverse and globalised cities is a bold move, and imaginations of urban political forms that prioritise the extensive global relationships between cities (rather than the city as coherent individualised agent) may also be interesting to explore.

In line with much critical geographic and spatial theory, Holes in the Whole presents a looming ‘neoliberal capitalism’ as the current ‘not alright’ context from which an alternative must emerge." (http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2013/05/15/book-review-holes-in-the-whole-introduction-to-the-urban-revolutions/)