Ronan Paddison on public space and the post-political

Abstract

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Reimagining hope through the political: A post-foundational reading of urban alternatives beyond postpolitics

“…In this paper, ‘the political’ is understood as a processual matter that can never be completely neutralised by politics (or postpolitics); rather, it manifests by continuously preventing the complete closure of hegemonic urban orders (Millington, 2016). This position supports Rosol’s (2014: 80) argument for seeing postpolitics dialectically – always encompassing ‘practices of conduct and counter-conduct’, which resonates with Karaliotas’ (2020: 259) ‘call for a dialogical, critical and empirically nuanced geography’ that attends to both neoliberal assaults on urban democracy and the ever-present agency of counter-hegemonic efforts to ward off such injustices.…”

“…As Oosterlynck and Swyngedouw (2010: 1582) put it, ‘The postpolitical, by disavowing division and foreclosing radical disagreement, generates deadlock and is bound to fail politically as its negotiated technical compromise will find itself confronted with the “return of the political”, the re-emergence of conflict’. This deadlock results from a zero-sum equation, an either/or chasm between consensus and conflict, or a binary logic that empirically overlooks small-scale or ordinary counter-responses to postpolitics (Karaliotas, 2020; Van Wymeersch et al, 2019). To overcome this deadlock, and the empirical oversight it might cause in finding reasons for hope, we propose shifting analytical focus towards a nuanced account of the interplay between post-politics and its counter-responses.…”

“…as stabilising orders of politics) and counter-conduct (i.e. as self-organised disruptions of ‘the political’) (Karaliotas, 2020; Rosol, 2014). Given that PFPT establishes that any hegemonic urban order is always coupled with plural competing orders, we could start hopeful critical analyses by asking the question: Where do emancipatory urban alternatives grow incrementally – already within the cracks of postpolitical orders?…”

Radical geography from the Drumlin: an academic commemoration of Ronan Paddison (1945–2019)

“…The next seven pieces in the SI alight upon more focussed conceptual and substantive manoeuvres within Ronan's oeuvre: Gordon MacLeod on perhaps Ronan's most distinctive offering, with complex philosophical and empirical twists, in the shape of 'the fragmented state' (MacLeod, 2020); Charles Pattie on Ronan's dabbling with both fiscal and electoral geography, the latter deploying statistical methods to expose the grubby politics of constituency 'redistricting' (Pattie, 2020); Steven Miles on Ronan's early recognition of the need to interrogate and critique 'culture-led urban regeneration' (Miles, 2020); Vee Pollock on how the culture-cities axis morphed for Ronan into concerns about public art and urban politics (Pollock, 2020); John McKendrick on Ronan's brush with attempts to measure, map, interpret and draw inferences from the construct 'quality of life' (McKendrick, 2020); Lazaros Karaliotas on Ronan's remarkably prescient late work on post-politics and 'the post-political city' (Karaliotas, 2020); and Emma Laurie and Chris Philo on the relatively marginal but intriguing early statements by Ronan (and coauthors) about 'the Arab city' or even 'the post-colonial city' (Laurie & Philo, 2020). Some features of Ronan's scholarship are admittedly not touched upon at all directly, notably geographies of planning, governance, public administration, retailing, education and housing.…”