Where is Urban Politics? Symposium in IJURR

Newly available on the Early View site at the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, papers from a Symposium on the theme of ‘Where is Urban Politics?’ edited by Scott Rodgers, Allan Cochrane and me. This is one of those collections that has had a very long lead-time, going back to the AAG conference in Las Vegas in 2009. The Symposium has papers by Warren Magnusson, Lisa Hoffman, Doug Young and Roger Kiel, John Allen and Allan Cochrane, and me. The idea behind the collection is to give some expression to both the range of disciplinary approaches to thinking about urban politics (including political theory, anthropology, planning studies, as well as geography) and the range of sites and places in which urban politics can be found, not necessarily all of classically ‘urban’ ones either. Scott, Allan and I try to articulate this rationale in the introductory essay. Here is our pitch:

“Whether defined through its sites and spaces, through the particular sensibilities of the urban as a way of life, through the political problematization of phenomena as urban, or indeed through the activities of local authorities and democratic assemblies, what this collection of articles draws out is the enduring and maybe even expanding relevance of urban processes in learning to challenge, think about and develop new and better ways of living together.”