From the urban to the civic: the moral possibilities of the city (original) (raw)
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From mere urbanity to urban bioethical standards
2020
An interest in research, deliberation, and reflection on urbanity has been present for a long time. Due to rapid urbanisation in the last few decades, such interest has intensified, attracting scholars from different disciplines and creating new platforms for discussion. The first indicators of a ‘bioethical’ interest in urban life are already present in Van Rensselaer Potter’s early papers (urban ethics. However, more extensive research into urban bioethics remained on hold until recently, mainly due to the dominance of the biomedical paradigm within modern mainstream bioethics. In 2017, the European Bioethics in Action project (funded by the Croatian Science Foundation) ended, resulting in a list of general bioethical standards related to animals, plants, and human health. The aim of this paper is to present the rationale for developing bioethical standards in a specific urban context.
From Mere Urbanity to Urban Bioethical Standards: An Invitation to a Broadening of Bioethics
Jahr – European Journal of Bioethics, 2020
An interest in research, deliberation, and reflection on urbanity has been present for a long time. Due to rapid urbanisation in the last few decades, such interest has intensified, attracting scholars from different disciplines and creating new platforms for discussion. The first indicators of a ‘bioethical’ interest in urban life are already present in Van Rensselaer Potter’s early papers (urban ethics. However, more extensive research into urban bioethics remained on hold until recently, mainly due to the dominance of the biomedical paradigm within modern mainstream bioethics. In 2017, the European Bioethics in Action project (funded by the Croatian Science Foundation) ended, resulting in a list of general bioethical standards related to animals, plants, and human health. The aim of this paper is to present the rationale for developing bioethical standards in a specific urban context.
Urban bioethics – The architect of a healthy city
JAHR
Urban bioethics pays attention to the design of healthy relationships through the involvement of citizens. The main characteristics of urban bioethics: inclusion, integrity, transdisciplinarity. Involvement is a relentless engaging scriptwriter that is deployed by urban bioethics to explore the everyday application of its principles. Integrity discloses integrative mechanisms for bringing communities together in order to create a development strategy for the city and society in general. Transdisciplinarity explains the mechanism of transcendental space, bringing together a variety of languages, professions, cultures, and etcetera. In this article, we go into examples of bioethical practices that promote the development and implementation of intercultural strategies on an Integrated Bioethics Platform, which can be found in the city both - online and offline. We also make suggestions on the leading types of behavior that are indoctrinated by this platform: networking; involvement thr...
Setting the agenda for urban bioethics
Journal of Urban Health: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 2001
Urban bioethics has two goals. First, it aims to focus attention on neglected bioethical problems that have particular salience in urban settings. Three problems are highlighted: socioeconomic inequality as a major determinant of health inequality, the foundations of an ethic for public health, and the impact of social context on the therapeutic alliance between patients and physicians. Second, urban bioethics serves as a vehicle for raising deep theoretical and methodological questions about the dominant assumptions and approaches of contemporary bioethics. Demands for cultural sensitivity, so pronounced in the urban context, compel us to reexamine the central commitment in bioethics to personal autonomy. The multiculturalism of urban life also argues for a dialogic approach to bioethical problem solving rather than the monologic approach that characterizes most bioethical thinking. Although my brief for redirecting bioethics will resonate with many critics who do not consider themselves urban bioethicists, I argue that there are special advantages in using urban bioethics to expose the limitations of contemporary bioethical paradigms.
Introduction: Urban Ethics - Conflicts Over the Good and Proper Life in Cities
Moritz Ege/Johannes Moser (eds.): Urban Ethics. Conflicts Over the Good and Proper Life in Cities. London/New York: Routledge, 2021
What constitutes a good life in the city, ethics under urban conditions or ethics of urban life? How do and how should people translate normative imperatives and reflections of "the good" into their everyday conduct of life in urban contexts and would that make for a "good" and possibly also emphatically "urban" life? Who gets to live this "good" urban life, who has the resources to engage in such reflections and whose ideas of the "good," of morality and propriety, prevail in these urban ethics?
Chapter 1 Introduction : Urban ethics – conflicts over the good and proper life in cities
Taylor & Francis eBooks, 2020
What constitutes a good life in the city, ethics under urban conditions or ethics of urban life? How do and how should people translate normative imperatives and reflections of "the good" into their everyday conduct of life in urban contexts and would that make for a "good" and possibly also emphatically "urban" life? Who gets to live this "good" urban life, who has the resources to engage in such reflections and whose ideas of the "good," of morality and propriety, prevail in these urban ethics? Questions like these are implicitly and explicitly being asked, debated, negotiated and fought over all around the world. This book and this introduction explore the overarching argument that, across their differences, such questions should also be seen and studied as questions of "urban ethics," as practical negotiations and public debates over the "good" and "proper" or "right" way of living in cities and in urban ways, and that through them, conflicting values and interests are being expressed, addressed, worked through, sometimes neutralized, sometimes transposed and sometimes brought to an escalation. Urban ethics surface in concrete events and movements and in projects that are recognizably "ethical," but they also have a much wider purchase. Focusing on them can help us understand a wide variety of urban situations better in contemporary societies, and also historically. It is necessary to stress from the start that this is a book of interdisciplinary social and cultural research, not of philosophy. It also is a book devoted primarily to analysis and critical reflection, not toward finding a better and more ethical practice, at least not always and straightforwardly so. Contributions to this volume explore different aspects of the ethical dimension of urban life, of urbanism and urbanity, and the specific ways of articulating and resolving conflicts that it tends to entail. Many of them also ask how this relates to questions of politics and the political. Rather than seeking answers to urban-ethical questions in a normative register, that is, rather than trying to figure out what the "good" and proper life in cities "really" is and should be, the book's contributors-without, of course, denying the importance of ethico-political reflection and action-study ethics as a sociocultural phenomenon that involves discourses, practices and materiality. As sociologist and anthropologist Didier Fassin summarizes a recent Introduction: urban ethics 5 and Throop 2014), but the former meanings are, in our view, predominantat least within initiatives for getting people to live better lives and, thus, build better cities, which is one important starting point for research on urban ethics. Ethical events and the promise of open cities Munich, in Germany, the city where the research group is based from whose work some of the chapters in this volume stem, is a good place to start looking more closely at public representations of urban ethics-not because it is a particularly "good" city, whatever that would mean, but because it has come to stand for "ethical" action by urban dwellers in a particular way. In the late summer of 2015, this somewhat saturated, economically successful Bavarian city, with its socially liberal tendencies and conservative backbone, became a near-global symbol for welcoming migrants and refugees, a place where many urban dwellers were doing simply the right thing in the face of human suffering and the callousness of European politics-or, from the skeptics' viewpoint, Munich became an example of a symbolic excess, an overreach of ethics, out of touch with (supposed) "popular" morality and realism in immigration matters. 1 At Munich Central train station, in late summer 2015, thousands of volunteers welcomingly cheered the new arrivals in the trains that had come from Hungary and Austria, many of whom were war refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq who had crossed the Mediterranean Sea. Volunteers handed out food, clothing, SIM cards and so on, acts which were immediately televised and broadcast, as well as shared on social media. In doing so, these refugees and their supporters became part of an assemblage of actors that temporarily defeated the European Union's border regime, or so it seemed, in what can be seen as a genuinely political act (Hess et al. 2017). In these actions, people signaled that refugees and migrants were indeed welcome, at least in cities like Munich. Some of the activists-if that is the right word, not everyone would subscribe to it-involved had been active in antiracist, anti-border campaigns for many years. Some had been migrants and refugees themselves. Most, however, were neither, and they emphasized that they were motivated primarily, even "compelled," to do what is right and good. 2 In such statements, there was also something oddly and conspicuously "ethical" about the Munich events. It was not just that these actions were morally good, but that they were exemplary of acting in an ethical way. In that sense, these events were also taking place below, above, beyond and, in a way, against the realm of politics. This has not been lost on high-profile observers either: Sociologist and urban theorist Richard Sennett, in a chapter of reflections on the figures of "Alien, Brother, Neighbor" in his recent Building and Dwelling. Ethics for the City, inspired by philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Okakura Kakuzo, takes Munich in 2015 as an exemplary case for moments of ethical openness in cities where "the Other appeared as a brother" (Sennett 2018, 122). The fact that these events could be taken
Introduction: Researching Urban Ethics at the Dawn of the Urban Century.
Introduction: Researching Urban Ethics at the Dawn of the Urban Century., 2023
Now that cities congregate the majority of human beings, it is urgent to investigate the manner in which the good life is negotiated in them. This introduction to the volume sketches a framework to examine urban ethical practices and discourses. At a time of environmental catastrophe and sociocultural tensions, the various scales of negotiation – between individuals, regarding materialities and other life forms, or among institutions – configure arenas that shape novel interactive and material landscapes. The emphasis of the text is to promote a research agenda for more scrutiny over such ethics-in-practice and -in-discourse. The deliberations and contestations in question are over individual lives in the city, collective urban life, issues regarding the urban condition, as well as about the urban itself. Cities are, therefore, laboratories of sociality where dwellers and traversers act, interact with one another or avoid each other. Each of these and other deeds shapes not only the current circumstances of the urban, but also, crucially, the future of cities.
Urban Ethics: Towards a Research Agenda on Cities, Ethics and Normativity
City, Culture and Society, 2020
To live in a city is to be confronted with difference, contingency and conflict, and with questions about how one should live one's life in the urban context. What is a ‘good’ life in the city? How does my ‘good’ life affect others and vice versa? Is the ‘good’ also that which is ‘right’ and ‘proper’? Or, perhaps, who should be made to live in accordance with specific values, how and why?
2019
According to the aim to upgrade the interdisciplinary and trans-sectoral approach to modern bioethical topics, this year's conference was dedicated to urban bioethics, from which the topics, as the President of the Scientific Board, Iva Rinčić, stressed, "so far remained on the margins of bioethical interest, despite its potential". After opening ceremonies and welcome speeches held by Tomislav Rukavina, Dean of the University of Rijeka, Faculty of Medicine and Iva Rinčić, President of the Scientific Board, participants gave an impetus to urban bioethics by focusing on the entire integrated city body, its health, happiness and sustainability, thus going beyond traditional healthcare topics within the city and introducing new categories (architecture, culture, energy, environment and city landscapes, urban health, traffic, safety, etc.).
The Ethical City: A Rationale for an Urgent New Urban Agenda
The ethical city, in contrast to many other adjectives used to describe our cities, implies an approach to urban development that is about doing the right thing for and by urban citizens. Acknowledging the rich traditions of urban development studies and human ethics, this article draws on examples of existing practices in cities that reflect a principled and ethical approach to leadership, governance, planning, economic development, sustainability and citizen engagement. An increased focus on ethics and justice is central in shaping how we respond effectively to global pressing issues such as climate change while at the same time tackling diverse social and economic problems in our cities including inequality, marginalization and lack of access to opportunities for the most vulnerable. While an ethical city points towards sustainability, resilience, inclusion and shared prosperity, the opposite direction could lead to corruption, poverty and social disaffection.