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Series Editors’ Preface
IJURR Studies in Urban and Social Change Book Series
The IJURR Studies in Urban and Social Change Book Series shares IJURR’s commitments to critical, global, and politically relevant analyses of our urban worlds. Books in this series bring forward innovative theoretical approaches and present rigorous empirical work, deepening understandings of urbanization processes, but also advancing critical insights in support of political action and change. The Book Series Editors appreciate the theoretically eclectic nature of the field of urban studies. It is a strength that we embrace and encourage. The Editors are particularly interested in the following issues:
Comparative urbanism
Diversity, difference and neighborhood change
Environmental sustainability
Financialization and gentrification
Governance and politics
International migration
Inequalities
Urban and environmental movements
The series is explicitly interdisciplinary; the Editors judge books by their contribution to the field of critical urban studies rather than according to disciplinary origin. We are committed to publishing studies with themes and formats that reflect the many different voices and practices in the field of urban studies. Proposals may be submitted to Editor in Chief, Walter Nicholls ([email protected]), and further information about the series can be found at www.ijurr.org.
Walter Nicholls
Manuel Aalbers
Talja Blokland
Dorothee Brantz
Patrick Le Galès
Jenny Robinson
Preface
As we are putting the final touch on this manuscript, the world is going through a major health crisis. The outbreak of the COVID‐19 pandemic has meant that billions of people are now confined to their houses, with varying degrees of social and state control. The scale at which we live our everyday lives has shrunk to the micro‐local at the same time as it remains globally networked through digital media. What will become of urban life in a context where going out on the street is severely restricted?
When we began writing this book, I (Julie‐Anne) had just published Global Urban Politics: Informalization of the State (2017), where I argued that in a world of cities, the political process works differently than in a world of nation‐states. Institutionally, the architecture of the state has rescaled giving more weight to cities. At the interpersonal level, urban life propels a political logic of action based on spontaneity, affectivity, and mobility. And ontologically, in a world where urbanity is a hegemonic force, people’s conceptions of space, time, and rationality are changing. Consequently, I argued that urbanization is a force of state informalization whereby the distinctions between the state, the market, and civil society are becoming more blurred. The state, I argued, no longer had the monopoly over the distribution of justice and authority.
As we are finishing this book, the state has become very present in our daily lives: closing down international borders, daily messages by elected leaders on the progress of the virus, imposing strong police or military presence on the street to ensure people respect the quarantine. This situation illustrates very well that state formalization processes are elastic: formalization is never complete. In certain periods it recedes and informalization (unwritten rules) seem to take over. At others, the state returns in force to assert its power. However, with its scientific hyperrationality in the management of the current health crisis, the state has some difficulty in imposing its reason on city life. Urban life is composed of multiple protection systems. In the case of the pandemic, the more obvious is the public health system. But urbanites also resort to other protective and coping mechanisms, such as faith, hope, or community. In these isolating times, it has been deeply moving for many to see videos taken by people on their high‐rise balconies in Milan, Rome and Madrid, coming out cheering and clapping at a rallying hour every evening, to give one another courage and salute “front line” workers. Only a few days later, it was people in similarly‐shaped urban environments all across the world that started to act in such way, spontaneously responding to calls echoed through social media and reverberating enticingly against the materiality of the contemporary urban world. Being together apart, in such dense urban environments, fully present in a here and now that is suspended in space, at a time when it has become very difficult to plan anything in the future, and yet enables the creation of a situation where everyone
