POL101Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 21: Neoliberalism, Anthropocene, Structural Adjustment
Lecture 12: The End: On Transitions
● Previously
○ Quantitative and qualitative difference of urban life and politics
■ More people live in cities now than ever before (⅔ world’s population by
2050)
■ More people in cities in the Global South
■ Cities concentrate inequality, poverty
○ Cities also offer unique opportunities to respond to crises
■ Climate change, larger scale change, greater efficiency
■ Nodes in flows of commerce and culture
■ Scale of politics: more local, more pragmatic, offer new challenges and
new opportunities
● ...and yet
○ The world is divided into states
■ Territory, sovereignty, Central (and bureaucratized) authority
● Not malleable to adapt to decisions made in a short weeks noticed
■ Difficulties of maintaining ‘Imagined Community’
● A sense of national identity that stitches together the people from
two different cities
○ States are fixed and unchanging
○Argument: nation-states are too clunky to govern the world after
globalization. What alternatives are there for leadership and collective
decision making?
● Barber: Let Mayers Rule
○ Cities are both older and newer than nation states
○ Cities are where we experience life, practice politics
○ Even megacities have a ‘feedback loop’ rooted in the local and oriented by
pragmatism, not ideology
■ Issues dealing with local garbage disposal, etc. are more
important/meaningful to most people than negotiations between heads of
state having to do with intellectual property times
○ States are outdated, overly rigid, impersonal
○ ‘Confederation of cities’ as new model more attuned to 21st century problems
● The Right to the City
○ Human Rights
■ Equity, inclusion, social justice
● Socio Economic and political vision that emphasize the need to
prioritize equity and meaningful distribution of wealth and services
○ Territory
■ Equal access to space
● Against public and private barriers
■ Housing, public space, public transit as human rights
● Territorial and spatial aspects of human rights
○ Democracy
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■ Participatory
■ Distribute
● Expanding access to public goods
● Right to the City: Infrastructure and Space as Vectors for Change
○ Participatory and Transformative
■ Access to city’s resources and right to change ourselves by changing the
city
○ Urban infrastructure has long had a ‘civilizing mission’
■ Public housing, public transit, architecture
■ The origin of cities to the president/the elites of cities have long thought of
cities as all up to the president
○ Relationship is reflexive: transit networks both shape behaviour (Althusser, ISAs)
but so too do urbanites shape their cities
● The Urban, The Politics: Who Cares?
○ ‘Trying to solve 21st century problems with 17th century tools’ is too cute, but has
an element of truth to it…
○ Cities define the political, both positively, and in a reactionary fashion (e.g.,
Brexit, Trump)
○ How cities define the political moving forward will be key to making future more
politically, socially, ecologically sustainable
○ ‘If mayors ruled the world’--downsizing prevailing approaches to sovereignty, in a
postpolitical register?
○ ‘Right to the city’ movements --city as site of political engagement and political
transformation from the ground up
○ Case of venezuela also illustrates right to the city politics are not themselves
irreversible
●Recap of the semester
○ Power
■ How we define power (force? Violence? Creativity? Collaboration?)
defines what is acceptable in politics
○ The state
■ Institutions are tools of social reproduction
■ Guarantee stability, enforce order, create common sense
■ Collective and individual subject formation as the basis of politics
● Creation of ourselves, our sense of selves, is the fundamental
basis of politics, not voting, not institutions, etc.
○ The people
■ Collective subjects are norms and verbs: we are what we do
■ Exclusions are inevitable, how they are justified or valorized is political
● Exclusions are inevitable, have to do with the limits of safe, the
limits of our ability to include everyone, limits to the political
visions we want to include in political projects, purely practical
reasons
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