The good city

Ash Amin

Can we still see the city as a place

for a hopeful politics?

M
odels of the good city tend to project from the circumstances of the
times. Today, in many cities of the global South, access to the staples of
life - clean water, energy, shelter and sanitation - remains the target of
urban progress. In juxtaposition with this, human advancement in prosperous
cities is measured by high-income consumer lifestyles and bourgeois escape
from the ugly or dangerous aspects of urban life. The history of practical
effort to improve human life in cities is one of working with the fine grain of
circumstance and place. Yet, paradoxically, this history has also been influenced
by universalistic imaginaries of the good life. Utopian thought, from the ideas
of St Augustine and Thomas More to those of Bellamy and le Corbusier, has
imagined utopia as an ideal city, a visible emblem of order and harmony.
The city of concentric circles of function and purpose, the city of modernist
planning, the city of contemplation or passion, can all be seen as blueprints for
urban organisation in different parts of the world, intended to deliver the good
life, however defined.

In our times, utopia has lost its meaning, appeal, and organising force. We have
begun to dispense with universalistic models of the good life. The search for the
good life has shifted to immediate, temporary, private and hedonistic projects. This
can be seen as an opportunity to rethink, moving away from longings for faraway
and deracinated citadels of achievement, and towards a pragmatism of the possible
- to spin webs of social justice and human well-being and emancipation out of
prevailing circumstances.


 Soundings

The good city?

But can the contemporary city qualify as a site for this more pragmatic interpretation
of the good life, given its increasingly indistinct geography as a place and its vast
sociology of hopelessness and misery? Cities have become endless inhabited
sprawls, without clear boundaries. They can be understood as sites of extraordinary
circulation and trans-local connectivity, linked to processes of inter-dependence
associated with globalisation. At the same time these processes are rendering cities
into all-embracing social spaces, as the world and its ways pour into them.

Contemporary cities do not spring to mind as places of community,

happiness and well-being, except perhaps for those in the fast lane, the secure
and well-connected, and those excited by the buzz of frenetic urban life.
For the vast majority, cities are polluted, unhealthy, tiring, overwhelming,
confusing, alienating. They are the places of low-wage work, insecurity, poor
living conditions and dejected isolation for the many at the bottom of the social
ladder daily sucked into them. They hum with the fear and anxiety linked to
crime, helplessness and the close juxtaposition of strangers. They symbolise the
isolation of people trapped in ghettoes, segregated areas and distant dormitories,
and they express the frustration and ill temper of those locked into long hours
of work or travel. Cities also abound with all manner of acts of mutuality,
friendship, pleasure and sociality, but to project the good life from so much
urban fracture seems a step too far.

Politically, too, the contemporary city bears little resemblance to imaginings

of the times when urbanism stood for citizenship, the ideal republic, good
government, civic behaviour and the ideal public sphere. The politics of
emancipation is no longer a particularly urban affair, having given way to
national and global institutions and movements. In turn, the public arena and
public culture in general has not been reducible to the urban for a long time,
while local mobilisations of state and civic action remain largely confined to the
small politics of social provision and the management of local life. The urban
political has become part of a much larger political machinery, with the centre
located elsewhere. Nevertheless, cities remain sites of considerable political
agency. Global cities have become the political base of the global capitalist
class, and of many globally-oriented social movements, along with sparking
new political impulses stemming from the urban juxtaposition of the rich and

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the poor. But this cannot be confused with a politics of the good life, which no
longer projects outwards from the city.

This said, the urban remains an enormously significant formative arena, not only
as the daily space of over half of the worlds population, but also as the supremely
visible manifestation of difference and heterogeneity placed together. The being-
togetherness of urban life has to be recognised, and this demands attendance to the
politics of living together. The human condition has become the urban condition.
In 1950, one-third of the worlds population lived in cities, but by 2050 the figure
is expected to rise to two-thirds, or 6 billion people. By 2015 each of the worlds ten
largest cities (Bombay, Tokyo, Lagos, Shanghai, Jakarta, Sao Paolo, Karachi, Beijing,
Dhaka, and Mexico City) will house between 20 and 30 million people. Arguably,
even those people who are not included in these figures owe most of their existence
to the demands that cities place on the world economy. No discussion of the good
life can ignore the urban way of life.

The urban comes with specific possibilities as an arena of direct democracy or

engagement. Urbanism highlights the challenges of negotiating class, gender, and
ethnic or racial differences placed in close proximity. It is forever forcing responses
in the face of negotiating with strangers, strangeness and continuous change. It
could be argued that cities provide some possibility for the millions of dispossessed,
dislocated and illegal people, stripped of citizenship, to acquire some political
capital. The good city might be thought of as a place to answer the challenge to
fashion a progressive politics of well-being and emancipation out of multiplicity
and difference. This is a politics of small gains and fragile truces, which constantly
need to be worked at, but which can potentially bind difference as well as rein in the
powerful and the abusive.

I imagine the good city as an ever-widening habit of solidarity, nudging the

urban public culture - expressed in the acts and attitudes of government, the
media, opinion-makers, civic organisations, communities and citizens - towards
outcomes that benefit the more rather than the few, without compromising the
right to difference. The result is the city that learns to live with (perhaps even
value) difference, publicise the commons, and crowd out the violence of an
urbanism of minority and privatised interest. Such a practical urban utopianism
is based on four registers of urban solidarity: Repair, Relatedness, Rights, and Re-
enchantment.

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 Soundings

Four registers of urban solidarity

Repair Cities possess a machinic order, whose silent rhythm regulates all aspects
of urban life. This includes mundane objects such as road signals, post-codes,
pipes and overhead cables, satellite, office design and furniture, clocks, commuting
patterns, computers and telephones, automobiles, software, schedules and
databases. These structure all manner of urban rhythms, including goods delivery
or traffic flow systems, internet protocols, rituals and codes of civic and public
conduct, family routines, and cultures of workplace and neighbourhood. Without
this technological unconscious, urban life would end. It is the life-support
system of cities, so evident when such things as sanitation, clean water, electricity,
telecommunications and transport systems are lacking or fail. Software codes,
timetables, traffic signals, zoning patterns, lists, databases, grids, can be seen as the
hidden hand of urban social organisation and behaviour.

A politics of the good city has to grasp the ambiguous centrality of this hidden
republic and subject it to democratic scrutiny and use. At one level, this is a matter
of making public and neutralising the urban uses of technology as a weapon of
social control. Contemporary urbanism is impregnated with new software-sorted
geographies silently demarcating the worth of particular zones of urban society,
used to exercise pervasive scrutiny and state/market authority. The proliferation
of bio-metric technologies rapidly sorts desirables and undesirables; sophisticated
data gathering and classification software allows companies to differentiate between
premium customers and scavengers and surfers; GIS and GDIS technologies re-
engineer the social map of the city by demarcating desirable areas and taboo areas;
and new facial recognition software in CCTV surveillance matches individuals on the
street to photo-fits of threat, so that the guilty can be named before the event.

There is a limit to how far the technological can be decoupled from the social
when it has become so constitutive, but there is plenty to be done to place it under
binding public scrutiny, so that abuses of software can be revealed and confronted
with alternatives that work for citizens. This is no easy task given the hidden
nature of the technological unconscious and the powerful interests behind it.
However, a first step in a new politics of repair is revelation and open public debate
on alternative ways of weaving technology into the urban social. The greater the
impetus, the greater the pressure on states and elites to reconsider what for so long
has been taken for granted.

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At the same time, so pervasive is the interactive intelligence of the techno-space

(software systems nested in homes, cars, pockets, implants, hospitals, schools,
offices, roads, shops, pipes and ducts, often talking to each other) that cities would
shut down or spiral in unanticipated directions if it was threatened. This is precisely
why an elaborate infrastructure works day and night to prevent or fix failure.
The technological unconscious is what allows cities to avoid the collapse that can
so easily be suffered by any vast and complex system of bits that need constant
alignment and coordination. It enables cities to rapidly bounce back to normality
after disruptions or disasters of various sorts.

The good city is the city of continual maintenance and repair. However,
the well functioning city does not reward all; it discriminates against the
poor and the marginal. The politics of repair needs to ensure universal and
affordable access to the basics relating to shelter, sanitation, sustenance, water,
communication, mobility and so on. And when such a commitment is explicitly
demonstrated, as was done by the city of Bologna in 1978 when it scrapped bus
fares, and then again in 1998 when it provided free internet access, it adds to
the urban unconscious a habit of solidarity. The city comes to be experienced as
the city for all.

There has to be an explicit politics of repair and maintenance that attends to the
silent republic of things that make cities work. This requires a progressive politics,
focusing on those central aspects of privation, especially in the Global South, that
make life so miserable for so many, for example within cities that suffer constant
blackouts. In cities in the Global North such a politics must intervene in the intricate
system of software-based auto-regulation and correction of the technological
infrastructure, in order to know the system, prevent new auto-corrections that are
harmful, and reduce lockout.

Relatedness Closely linked to the register of repair is the register of relatedness.

Cities are riddled with the misery, anxiety and desperation of the disconnected
and excluded. They always have been. Now, however, there is a new scale and
intensity of disconnection, associated with the mass migration of the worlds
population to cities. The good city has to be imagined as the socially just city, with
strong obligations towards those excluded from the means of survival and human
fulfilment. These are obligations that should draw on a solidarity of human rights,
and an equal duty of care towards the insider and the outsider, the temporary and

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the permanent resident. In the good city, the duty of public service through adequate
welfare measures should extend to those who are least able to pay for these basics
but are most in need. An equivalence of right has to be assumed between those in
the mainstream and those on the margins, before any fiscally-driven decisions on the
scale of welfare provision that is judged to be sustainable.

Is this realistic at a time when senses of the human collectivity have all but
disappeared? Under pressure from neo-liberalism, the ethos of unconditional
hospitality has either been long forgotten by modern-day universal welfare systems,
or has been gradually redirected by states towards targeted social groups. One
consequence of the restructuring of the national welfare state has been an increased
pressure on politicians, elites and civic associations closest to the problems - in cities -
to provide the solution. Yet, here too, the grain is decidedly against the city of universal
care, as business and professional elites become ever more tied to transnational
communities, pressing on city leaders to serve their particular local needs.

However, a politics of relatedness is becoming increasingly necessary, not only

because of the cost and wastage associated with widespread disconnection, but
also because of the damage wrought by the fear, hate and anxiety that feeds on
division and envy in urban life. Addressing the consequences of unequal provision
is becoming unavoidable. These consequences include class segregation, endless
surveillance, civic disruption, urban violence and defacement, fear of the stranger,
suspicion of youths, immigrants, and asylum seekers, and generalised anxiety
and caution. The inclusive city, the city of migrants, though undeniably taxing on
the public purse and requiring sustained public and civic effort, is also the city of
untapped potential and expanded human and social capital. Most importantly, it is
the city of opportunity for individual and collective advancement.

Solidarity based on universal provision of the basics of existence and human

association is no guarantor of social mutuality and respect for difference. The present
times are particularly uncompromising in this regard. There is a nasty politics of
hate, heightened by growing urban segregation, the collapse of universals serving
to bind difference, an eroding urban commons, and increased legitimacy for group
isolationism in private and public life. Living with difference is becoming a test
of endurance, as the urban public comes to accept that it is best tackled though
isolation or, depending on who is involved, ejection. The contempt heaped on
asylum seekers is borne out of a fractured commons in an increasingly tribal or self-

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centred public culture.

Is there a specific role for cities in rekindling a habit of solidarity towards

the stranger, based on recognition? Much of the required intervention transcends
the urban: stripping national cultures of belonging of racial and ethnic moorings;
building and sustaining a certain ease with unassimilated difference in the public
domain; implementation of legislation against incitement and prejudice. But cities
are places, and everyday negotiation of diversity is crucially influenced by the
public ethos of places, which in turn are shaped by neighbourhood movements
and city centre dynamics, the habits of public office, the media and other local
institutions, public events. The thin line between suspicion and tolerance is drawn
only too frequently around prosaic negotiations of diversity. Part of the politics of
relatedness in the good city has to be about working on the prosaic as the space of
strange (be)longings and cultural transgression. The citys public spaces must be
returned to mixed public use, without excessive surveillance, gating, privatisation or
humiliation of minorities, but with adequate security against the violent, and against
corporatist homogeneity. This means creating everyday situations that bring people
from different backgrounds to work together. The aim would be in part to ensure
the reconnection of those at a disadvantage, in part to convert urban misanthropy
into an ethic of mutual regard towards those unlike us, and in part to foster a public
culture of care around the principle of relatedness. This is not a public culture
of forced mixture with the stranger and strangeness, but it is one that demands
acceptance of relatedness as central to urban existence.

Rights The register of relatedness is closely linked to the register of rights to the
city: the right of all citizens to shape urban life and to benefit from it. The right to
participate presumes having the means and the entitlement to do so. Many urban
dwellers have yet to acquire this right. In the Global South, we see this in the urban
planning driven by the needs of the economically and politically most powerful, and
in the eviction or stripping down to bare life of the masses. In the Global North we
see it in the form of a growing vilification and intolerance of immigrants, itinerants,
asylum seekers and youths, and in the gradual re-orientation of urban elites and
central urban spaces to the interests of global capital. The contemporary city remains
the city of rights restricted, notwithstanding historic gains made by liberal subjects
in certain parts of the world.

In precisely these parts of the world a new paradox of rights has arisen, involving

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constraints on the civil freedom of many urban dwellers in the name of the
individual rights of the so-called majority. For example, the rapid rise of surveillance
technologies is both an encroachment upon civil liberties and a means of protecting
the public against harm. Similarly, the injustices of racial segregation pursued through
discriminatory planning and housing allocation policies are complicated by moves by
ethnic minorities to live among their own communities in order to preserve cultural
integrity and ensure personal safety. In turn, the rules of order in the machinic city,
silently re-engineering social hierarchies through new software-sorted technologies, are
also the template through which the city functions as a whole, forcing a dependence
without which the discriminated against would be worse off. The question of urban
rights, therefore, is not straightforward, as many liberal societies come to assume that
more rights do not bring enhanced freedom for all.

This paradox, however, is being increasingly exploited by urban managers to

restrict voice and dissent in urban public life. Urban marginals, protesters, drop-outs,
itinerants, minorities, and the like, are all quickly tracked, gathered and shunted on,
as threats to an urban public space valued increasingly for its worth as a consumer and
corporate space. The principle that urban public culture might be shaped through the
free hand of a plural and equal citizenry has been compromised. The idea of urban life
made through the creative impulses of all its dwellers has become redefined as a threat
to urban order. When the role of urban public space as the arena of dissent and protest
is invoked, the acts are condemned as a violation of urban stability.

The ultimate test of the good city is whether the urban public culture can
withstand pluralism and dissent. This is not license for gratuitous protest or for
the violence of those bent on harm. Instead, it stands for a participative parity in
a public sphere, such that new voices can emerge, the disempowered can stake a
claim, the powerful can cease to hold free reign, and the future can be made through
a politics of engagement rather than a politics of plan. On the part of civic leaders
this requires a certain confidence in the creative powers of disagreement and dissent,
in the negotiated legitimacy that flows from popular involvement, and in the vitality
thrown up by making the city available to all. Far too much contemporary urbanism
is driven by the need to crush social vitality and raise the alarm against non-
conformity. The result is the city of fear and circumspection, not the city confident
with difference and multiplicity.

The city of open rights can be a place of violence against those least able to defend

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themselves or a place of only self-centred advancement. My argument, however, is

that, placed in the context of a vigorous and confident urban public culture, the open
city is better equipped to channel antagonisms in the direction of deliberative disputes
in the public arena, where there is the possibility of some degree of reconciliation or
mutual recognition. Such an urban public culture can build and extend solidarity, but
also deal with dissent and disagreement in creative ways that minimise damage. On its
own it cannot stop instituted or open violence, but it can expose its wrongs as well as
reveal alternatives rooted in a habit of solidarity.

Re-enchantment The final R is re-enchantment. The good city celebrates the

aspects of urban life from which spring the hopes and rewards of association and
sociality. In the history of urban utopian thought re-enchantment has tended to
focus on a paradise to come, usually around grand projects designed to engineer
human life materially, morally and ethically. Engineering has yielded immediate
gains, through ambitious urban design and planning exercises to provide mass
housing, sanitation, security, clean air and water, and other basic services, and it
has alleviated the misery of masses trapped in appalling urban conditions. The
significance of such intervention as a form of re-enchantment should not be lost in a
present that is trapped between the neo-liberal onslaught on the provisions secured
under socialist and social democratic planning and the general scepticism that has
grown about modernist urban planning. Many a form of urban enchantment - from
jazz and Tupperware parties to mass political meetings and open-air cinema - has
grown out of the bland and uniform regularities of the modernist ethic of care.

A certain kind of sociality comes from particular forms of gathering in public

spaces. I have in mind the associations, clubs, car boot sales, restaurants, open
spaces, bolt-holes, libraries, formal and informal gathering places and multitude of
friendship circles that so fill cities. These are an essential component of the urban
public culture and are an important filter through which urban life is judged as
a collective social good. At their best they are the civic spaces that arise from free
engagement and visibility among strangers in the citys public spaces. The vitality of
these public spaces that combine pleasure with the skill of negotiating difference acts
as the gauge of civic ownership and civic behaviour in a city.

Contemporary urbanism has put the link between free association and civic
inculcation to the test. The neo-liberal erosion of publicly owned or publicly
maintained spaces, together with their increasing surveillance, has redefined the

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principle of free association as an intra-group activity rather than as a gathering

of strangers around shared pleasures. Urban association is increasingly defined by
spectacle and consumption, gathered around urban tourism, heritage experience,
unending consumerism, ostentatious display, sensory seductions and many other
commodified forms of socialisation. This form of urban enchantment certainly
brings strangers together, but whether the result is enhanced civic regard remains
a moot point. Last, urban association has become a highly dispersed activity,
involving ties with distant others enabled by virtual media, travel, diaspora links,
the circulations of public culture, and so on. Urban association now co-exists with
so many stretched geographies of association that to privilege urban sources of civic
inculcation is indefensible.

So why bother with the urban sources of civic sociality? Precisely because of
the scope it offers for making the urban visible as a site of civic promise. Glaring
at the New Urbanism, which has fallen in love with the romance of compact cities,
mixed neighbourhoods, pedestrian thoroughfares, classical architecture and cohesive
communities, is the daily metropolis whose frenzy and pace still offers a multitude
of spaces of association, from workplace and educational sites to angling clubs and
public gatherings. These are the lungs of social respite in the fast city, but also the
prosaic spaces of civic inculcation. To value, publicise and maintain these spaces is
to recognise what is already there as a rich source of civic virtue in most cities.

The register of re-enchantment, however, can strive for more by experimenting

with everyday public spaces for transformative purposes. Urban gathering can
be used as a means of mixing protest, education, pleasure and enchantment in
the name of solidarity, new awareness and a shared commons in and beyond
the city. Public art can signal cultural heterogeneity, in the ways that cities such
as Birmingham have experimented with in recent years to publicly celebrate
multiculturalism. How successful these public expressions of ethnic and racial
solidarity are in combating race hate is a matter of conjecture, but they provide a
powerful official signal for the public culture of a city.

Conclusion
I have defined the good city as an expanding habit of solidarity, and as a practical
but unsettled achievement, constantly building on experiments through which

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difference and multiplicity can be mobilised for common gain, and against harm and
want. In articulating the good city as an ethic of care incorporating the principles
of social justice, equality and mutuality, I have deliberately chosen to avoid certain
shibboleths. One of these is the rediscovery of urban community, in the form of
empowered neighbourhoods, abundances of social capital, face-to-face contact,
and generally the goodness of urban social cohesion. I see little of all of this in
contemporary cities, marked as they are by enforcements of community, social
attachments that do not cohere, belongings that traverse the city into the ether or
across the globe, irreconcilable differences, and distributions of enormous distance
and separation within a given urban space. The city does not come together as a
community or as a community of communities, for there is far too much difference,
disagreement and escape to assimilate. On the rare occasions that it does come
together, such as during a catastrophe or a major spectacle, a certain sense of place
shared by the many is undoubtedly released, but soon the everyday steps in to
demand multiplicity.

Another shibboleth is the idea of the city managed by an enlightened urban

elite that attends to the interests of all. The current language invokes powerful
Mayors, partnerships involving multiple stakeholders, joined-up urban governance,
decentralisation and devolution, and an entrepreneurial openness. All seemingly
reasonable, but in practice a veil over the impossibility of central reach when faced
with a constantly morphing and trans-jurisdictional city, a frequently supplicant
relationship with government, with power being based elsewhere, and the mischief
of an itinerant business community that forever threatens exit if its demands are
not met. The idea of good urban governance is an illusion, not only because of all
that it cannot capture, but also because of its panoptic authoritarianism veiled as
stakeholder democracy. My preference, instead, has emphasised the role of an active
and distributed democracy based around different registers of solidarity: imperfect and
constantly renegotiated.

The four registers of solidarity discussed above - repair, relatedness, rights

and re-enchantment - together shape state and civic orientations to multiplicity in
difference in urban life. They define access to the basics of existence, attitudes to
strangers, rights of presence and expression, and the scale and purpose of the shared
commons. They act as a kind of democratic audit, working through inculcating a
particular kind of social ethos. As such, they are often contradictory and surprising

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in their target and approach: tackling obviously anti-social behaviour but also
state panopticism and easy condemnation of the rights of minorities; providing the
means for individuals and collectivities to develop civic capabilities, but also making
ample space for civic disagreement and dissent; and constantly working on the
perfectibility of democratic process but not on forecasting perfect outcomes. What
or who counts as civil or uncivil, thus, is a matter of the fine grain daily thrown up
for public debate and scrutiny, rather than the product of pre-defined categories of
civility and incivility.

A civic politics of getting the urban habit of living with diversity right is one
way of thickening the ways in which an increasingly fragmented, disoriented and
anxious society can regain its mechanism for the distribution of hopefulness. This is
not a hopefulness that works as an opiate for sustained misery, but one that works
through an ethic of care that delivers on the ground. Once the city is returned as a
vibrant democracy, those in power must respond without recourse to a politics of
containment and repression. Once the good city thus defined begins to deliver, the
politics of representation - now so thoroughly aligned to corporate power - might
be forced to give ground to another kind of politics, based on participation on the
ground, by those historically discounted as political subjects.

This article is an edited version of The Good City, Urban Studies, 43, 5/6, and 2006.

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