Urban Politics: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue

Abstract

Urban politics is a multidisciplinary field, in other words a number of bits — so to speak — of different disciplines work on it. While those in political science might claim to produce the bulk of the work in this field, others in anthropology, economics, human geography, planning, social policy and sociology can also claim to be making a contribution. The introduction situates the six sections comprising this essay, in which contributors discuss what their respective disciplines bring to the wider field of ‘urban politics’ and highlight some possible areas for future work. Résumé La politique urbaine est un champ multidisciplinaire auquel contribuent, dirons‐nous, des «bouts» de plusieurs disciplines. Ceux‐ci relèvent en partie de la science politique, qui revendiquera éventuellement le gros du travail, mais d'autres peuvent se réclamer de l'anthropologie, de l'économie, de l'aménagement ou de l'urbanisme, de la géographie humaine, de la politique sociale et de la sociologie. L'introduction articule les six parties de cet essai dans lequel les intervenants analysent chacun l'apport de leur discipline respective dans le champ plus général de la ‘politique urbaine’, tout en dégageant plusieurs pistes possibles de recherches.

Introduction. Urban Democracy: A South Asian Perspective

“…14 Finally, decentralization reforms have failed to address the question of the space and scale of the urban; in other words, they have not adequately considered 'what and where is the urban' (Ward et al 2011). In India, for instance, the metropolitan committees that were to be set up as per the 74 th Constitutional Amendment have either not been created or are in reality empty shells.…”

Making ‘Global Sydney’: Spatial Imaginaries, Worlding and Strategic Plans

“…In an effort to move beyond bounded territorial understandings and gestural analysis, researchers increasingly focus on how the urban and the global are constitutive of one another––how they are ‘made up’ (Farías and Bender, ; McCann and Ward, ). While this has been catalysed by the empirical fact that the city ‘is everywhere and in everything’ (Amin and Thrift, : 1), critical urban researchers from a range of disciplines have hit fertile ground by asking basic but deceptively complex theoretical questions of the urban itself (Ward and Imbroscio, ).…”

Where is Urban Politics?

“…Combining conceptual elaboration and empirical investigation in these varied ways, the contributions to this symposium disrupt the classically conceived, centred notion of the urbanity of ‘the city’ and engage the urban question through diverse settings and objects, including infrastructures, in‐between spaces, professional subjectivities, transnational and postcolonial spaces and spaces of sovereignty. The contributions also in part continue the recent ‘interdisciplinary dialogue’ in the pages of this journal (Ward et al ., ), drawing on a range of intellectual perspectives, including geography, urban studies, political science and political theory, anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, planning and environmental studies.…”