domain of the state. Action unfolds in networked, fluid, and mobile spaces that are not fixed by clear borders. Global social movements, social media campaigns, and political tourism are evidence that in order to understand politics, we need to think in terms of networked and not only bounded spaces.
In the modern world of nation‐states, time was seen as directional and with constant velocity. We thought of politics in strategic terms: a political act was enacted with a clear goal and was thought out carefully in order to evaluate its chances of success. We thought of the world in linear terms. For instance, there were developed and underdeveloped countries. The assumption was that with time, underdeveloped countries, often ‘young’ nation‐states having won decolonial struggles, would modernize and catch up. Time, particularly the temporality of political change, was conceived as a historical march towards progress.
In the contemporary world of cities, we still act strategically and hope for a better future. But other forms of political action are increasingly visible. Acting spontaneously, without strategy, developing tactics as we respond to immediate situations, without thinking too much of the consequences of action, acting out of passion or rage more than ideology… this brings our attention to a different conception of time and political change. The temporality of action is fragmented, composed of multiple situations and dominated by the ‘here and now’ more than the future, by tactic more than strategic thought. Multiple synchronous paces and circular (cyclical or sequential) temporalities clash with directional trajectories and stable duration.
In the modern world of nation‐states, the stability of the space of action and of linear time facilitated pretension to scientific rationality as the motor of legitimate action. We calculated, planned, and acted because we thought we could master the parameters of the issue at stake. Of course, we still act this way, but we also increasingly assert other rationalities of action based on creativity, unpredictability, sensorial stimulation, intuition, emotion, and loss of control.
This leads to a more diffuse form of political action, where leadership is absent (or at the very least, invisible or negated). Action unfolds in a specific time and place through a network of relations. We often recognize political action only if we decentre the gaze from leaders and analyse specific situations instead (how actions unfold in time and space).
How and where are we, then, to look for urban politics?
Living in a world of cities compels us to feel and look for politics in different places. To take such politics seriously, we need to be sensitive to unusual political forms. The state‐centred model of political action that permeates conceptual frameworks for analysing urban politics can constitute an epistemological obstacle in this regard. Through these lenses, urban politics is predominantly known and thought through what Warren Magnusson (2010) calls ‘statist thinking’. While very useful for understanding state action, such a lens cannot encompass the totality of the political process.
Let us flesh out this argument more fully to locate another understanding of urban politics and its locales. As Magnusson (2010, p. 41) explains, statist thinking is an epistemological limit historically related to the development of political sciences in the context of the formation of the state throughout the Modern period and the development of social sciences in the nineteenth century, ‘when the world was divided up in a new way for purposes of academic study’. Bourdieu has also closely examined the development of such increasingly specialized fields related to the sociohistorical and situated conditions of modernity (Hage 2012). Through this sociohistorical process, the division of academic disciplines, following the sectoral divisions of state departments, held the promise of facilitating the production of scientific knowledge and the development of an efficient state administration. While sociology was given the mandate to study society, economics focused on the economy; ‘anthropology, the origins of man; geography, the environment in which men lived; and political science “the state”’ (Magnusson 2010, p. 41). Ghassan Hage (2012) and Ben Highmore (2010) have also pointed out that the domain of aesthetics was not left out of this process, as it became an increasingly specialized field concerned with the arts, ‘increasingly limiting itself to only certain kinds of experience and feeling, and becoming more and more dedicated to finely wrought objects’ (Highmore 2010, p. x; see also Saito 2017).
It is easy to observe that a state‐centred bias has been carried over in urban political studies. It is exemplified in conceptualizations of urban politics as being ‘about authoritative decision‐making at a smaller scale than national units – the politics of the sub‐national level … with particular reference to the political actors and institutions operating there’ (John 2009, p. 17). From there follows that urban politics is studied with a focus on municipal jurisdictions: land use, housing, public infrastructure, waste, water, and so on. These accounts are, in this sense, municipalist (focused on formal state institutions). Nevertheless, political scientists have recognized that municipal politics is perhaps more permeable to informal actors than politics at other government levels. Urban regime theory is the most elaborate example of the intertwinement of the formal and the informal at the local level in the North American context (Stone 1989).
As the anthropologist Ghassan Hage (2012, p. 3) argues, ‘[t]he existence of a specialised political field, for example, has not meant that the political no longer exists except in specialised institutions’. Indeed, the ‘political is still diffused throughout the social, that is, a dimension of life remains political through and through regardless of which social domain one is examining, and despite the existence of specialised political institutions and practices’ (Hage 2012, p. 3). Of course, this is a claim made forcefully by voices formerly excluded from these specialized institutions, including academia: Black feminists, disability scholars, Queer activists…
Warren Magnusson (2010, p. 43) challenges political scientists and urban studies to embrace politics from what he calls an ‘analytic of urbanism’ that presents an ‘opportunity to challenge the whole edifice of contemporary political science’, from the perspective that ‘the form of political order that arises from urbanism [what results from distinctively urban practices] is different from the one implicit in the project of state building’. He stresses that this state‐building project and the rise of nation‐states did not extinguish the urban political orders nested within, and simultaneously exceeding, the scales of state power, further adding that in some cases, such urban political orders even predate state political orders (Magnusson 2010, p. 45).5
Characteristically, cities are produced by multiple authorities; they function through distributive agency involving the active and reactive materiality of buildings, non‐human living beings such as plants, animals, birds. We will see in the following chapters how these proto‐agents affect the unfolding of political action in dense, interconnected urban environments. Theoretically, we are inspired by various moves to relational epistemologies, including topological thought in urban geography and assemblage theories that consider more‐than‐human sources of agency and relational production of urban space (Amin and Thrift 2002; Amin 2004; Farias and Bender 2010). However, these theorizations are not always ethnographic or participatory. For these reasons, they do not always accommodate very well the messiness, ambiguity, and sensuality of being and living in the city. They are also less apt to account for and articulate the variety of urban knowledges produced by actors situated in or engaged at different scales of urban political life (Johnson‐Schlee 2019).
Our focus here is on the transformation of political subjectivities and modes of political action at a relational, street level, and this requires ethnographic immersion. Immersion enables us to emphasize networked relations as being spatially and temporally continuous, producing youth urban worlds which connect and have connected Montreal as a node in various global urban world orders. Within these situated and interconnected contexts, we see urbanity as a logic of political action permeated by distinct features of an urban consciousness (distinct ways of perceiving space, time, and rationality).
In Chapter
