The City as Political Center - City As Democratic Ideal, The City As Democratic Menace, Contemporary Challenges To The City's Democratic Potential
cities ideas
In Western political thought, ideas about cities, citizenship, and democracy have always been inextricably linked. Since Socrates suggested in The Republic that his interlocutors help him to create a city in speech, the city has functioned as a real and metaphorical center for struggles over what it means to be political. Ideas about civilization and barbarism, egalitarianism and exclusion, virtue and vice, civic participation and social unrest, all find expression in discussions of the city. Yet the city is and has always been an ambiguous achievement; its success (or failure) as a form of political organization rests on its citizens' dubious abilities to govern themselves, deliberate with strangers, act on principles beyond narrow self-interest, and collectively determine their future. Thus the state of a nation's cities is often used as a barometer to judge the quality of its political life.
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Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law.… [J]ust as our political life is free and open, so is our day-to-day life in our relations with each other. We do not get in a state with our next door neighbor if he enjoys himself in his own wa…
From its inception, however, the city's equality and diversity have also signified its instability—the threat it poses to moral, social, and political order. The city has been regarded as the site of sinful excess and moral turpitude, where upstanding citizens may risk succumbing to the depravity of the mob. Despite (or because of) its status as the rationalized center of Western pol…
One of the widely debated issues regarding cities in the early twenty-first century is how their democratic possibilities might be realized in practice. While (at least implicitly) remaining sympathetic to the ideal of the city as a democratic space, important contributions in critical urban thought examine the inequalities woven into the urban fabric that delimit the amount and quality of freedom…
Many predictions for the future of urban democracy are dire. As Elizabeth Wilson plainly states, "The result is that today in many cities we have the worst of all worlds: danger without pleasure, safety without stimulation, consumerism without choice, monumentality without diversity. At the same time, larger and larger numbers of people inhabit zones that are no longer really either town or…
Blakely, Edward J., and Mary Gail Snyder. "Divided We Fall: Gated and Walled Communities in the United States." In Architecture of Fear, edited by Nan Ellin, 85–99. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997. Blakely, Edward J. and Mary Gail Snyder. Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1997. Castells, Manuel . Th…
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