was to examine the implications of the urbanization of social relations on political and intellectual consciousness, a parallel process to the urbanization of capital which produces the physical and material space of the city. His contention was that capitalism ‘has also produced a new kind of human nature through the urbanization of consciousness and the production of social spaces and a particular structure of interrelations between the different loci of consciousness formation’ (Harvey 1985a, p. xviii). Harvey shed light on the importance of taking the ‘urbanization of consciousness’ as a real social, cultural, and political phenomenon in its own right.
In doing so, and although he was criticized for its superstructural model of consciousness, Harvey was bringing the insights of thinkers of urbanity, or urban ways of life, such as Louis Wirth and Henri Lefebvre, to bear on a Marxian interpretation of the urban process under capitalism. Indeed, living in a world of cities requires a profound rethinking of how we act politically, how we engage with our world and create meaning through urban research.
This book explores how urban cultures affect political action from theoretical and empirical perspectives. Based on four ethnographies of youth political action in Montreal, it shows that urban cultures are challenging the very meaning and contours of the political process. Using the perspectives of racialized youth, ‘voluntary risk‐takers’ such as dumpster divers, Greenpeace building climbers, students taking to the streets during the 2012 ‘Maple Spring’, and urban farmers, it develops the theoretical idea of aesthetics as a an increasingly important dimension of life and mode of political action in the contemporary urban world. The embodied forces of attraction and desire that animate youth political action are too often ignored in studies of urban politics. This is especially true in cities of the so‐called Global North. This is why in this book we wanted to engage with theoretical frameworks developed in the Global South and from Black studies in order to understand Montreal. This scholarship helps to shed light on the diverse forms of aesthetic political action perceived in the different yet interconnected youth urban worlds in which we have been immersed. These diverse ways of acting politically, through aesthetic relations, are not all consistent with one another and tell us much about the transformation of the political process in a world where the state can no longer pretend to have sole monopoly over the channelling, organization, and mediation of conducts and resources.
In order to understand these urban political forms, we are moved to ‘look’ for and be affected by politics in places that political scientists would not generally identify for political analysis. Understanding the urban culture behind action cannot come from observing political campaigns, ideologies, political organizations, or interviews with the leaders of social movements. Instead, the ethnographic work presented in the following pages delves into the common symbols, sensations, and perceptions that structure the individual and collective imaginary, youth political gestures, and the implicit ‘grammar’ that gives meaning to these multiple gestures and feelings in different youth urban worlds situated in Montreal. We argue that living in an urban world transforms conceptions of time, space, and rationality, and that these emerging notions based on nonlinearity, mobility, and affectivity have a significant effect on political actions (Boudreau 2017).
Space–Time–Affect: The Urban Logic of Political Action4
Much has been said in recent decades about the fact that we are living in an urban world. The United Nations and generously funded research and art projects of all sorts are repeating that more than half the world population now lives in cities (Burdett and Sudjic 2010). Such statements are debatable given well‐documented difficulties in measuring urban populations (Brenner and Schmidt 2014). However, whether more and more people actually live in cities that are covering more and more territory is not important here. The fact that people are adhering to this globalized discursive trope is.
Our conception of the global world – the images we disseminate and reproduce of this urban world – is indeed dominant. Living in a world of cities is very different from living in a world of nation‐states. We argue that doing urban research in a world of cities is also very different from doing research in a world of nation‐states, because urbanization shapes objects of analysis and constitutes the medium through which we do research. We begin this book with the following: in a world of cities, political action unfolds very differently than in a world of nation‐states because urbanity affects our conceptions of space, time, and rationality. This argument is fully developed elsewhere (Boudreau 2017), but it is important to expand on key points to situate how these transformations in our frames of perception and cognition affect the political process and how we can read and make sense of it.
As urban social movements, flashmobs, and occupations have shown over the last few decades, where, when, and how politics unfolds is no longer exclusively in the voting booth or the union meeting, during elections or strikes, and through strategic thinking about how to win the competition between opposing interests (Merrifield 2013). As state institutions lose their monopoly over governance – that is, over the distribution of justice and authority – urban ways of life are bringing new political forms to the fore. This, of course, does not mean nation‐states have disappeared or that their power has diminished. Our argument here is simply that other spatiotemporal conceptions and rationalities have been made visible. This is an argument that was already emerging in the 1980s and 1990s with postmodern critiques of positivism and developmentalism. The state‐centred worldview, a ‘particular but contestable way of understanding the world that began to take shape in the 19th century and crystallised in the 20th century’ (Magnusson 2010, p. 41), was never fully rational, but our scientific methods sought to highlight its rationalism. With the rising hegemony of urban worldviews, postmodern epistemological critiques resonate more easily with everyday practices. Furthermore, the retrenchment of the state through urban neoliberal processes over the last few decades has contributed to an increased visibilization of urban political forms, whether because they sought to fill the gaps of eroded social safety nets or because they tried to develop delegated power arrangements for service delivery. Neoliberal urbanization has thus affected the way institutions and people interact, understand their roles, sustain a now global urban order, and make political claims. Rather than solely focusing on such structural processes to examine the texture and unfolding of urban politics, we contend that a fruitful approach is to consider the effect of urbanity on the ways we act, interact, and think about the world. Such an approach brings to the fore the conceptual density of aesthetics as a critical mode of political action in a world of cities formed through unequal global urbanization processes.
‘Urbanity’, or ‘urban ways of life’, refers to a set of historically situated conditions that affect the way we act, interact, and think about the world. As cities become more prominent in our conceptions of the world, the way we sense and conceive of space, time, and rationality of politics changes. It exemplifies, as David Harvey wrote in 1985, how ‘[w]e always approach the world with some well‐honed conceptual apparatus, the capital equipment of our intellect, and interpret the world broadly in those terms’ (Harvey 1985a, p. xv). In the modern world of nation‐states, which dominated the past century and rested on a Westphalian international order, we learned to think of the political process in terms of containers. Politics, understood in this context as conflicts generated by the confrontation of opposing interests, took place within the confines of national boundaries. The modern democratic and sovereign state was there to mediate conflicts by guaranteeing the stability of the rules of the game (elections, protection of civil rights, monopoly over legitimate violence, etc.). The state was thought to have full control over its territory and was there to protect us. It was the main interlocutor of all political claims. If we were unhappy with a specific situation, we turned to the state to claim for change. In this bounded world, conflict and contention were tolerated as long as they sustained the state.
In the contemporary world of cities, where nation‐state sovereignty and boundaries are profoundly challenged by global flows, the state still plays a central role. But cultural and economic flows, and the mobility of people and merchandise across borders, have significantly affected the bounded spatial conception
