Introduction: Urban Politics in the Twenty-First Century (original) (raw)

Theories of Urban Politics

In bringing the volume together, we engaged in a vibrant dialogue with contributors and other colleagues. We held several conference panels on the book-notably at the 2006 and 2007 Urban Affairs Association annual meetings and the British Political Studies Association annual meeting in 2006. Colleagues at these events posed important questions to us as editors. What does it mean to study theories of urban politics? Specifically, is there anything distinctive about urban theory: is it merely general theory adapted to scale; or is there something distinctive about the urban such that urban theories are not generalisable to a broader canvas? Or since, as Richard Stren illustrates in this volume (see Chapter 10), half of the world's population now inhabits urban spaces (see also Davis, 2006), is the study of the urban increasingly synonymous with the study of society at large? On a second dimension, it was suggested that we needed to think about the relationship between theory and practice in the field of urban politics. Does urban politics constitute the necessary fusion of theory and practice? If so, practice of what kind, and whose practice? That these searching questions were posed is itself an indication of the good health of the discipline. As editors, it was incumbent upon us to provide some direction to our contributors on how to address these issues. In very different ways, it is clear that all were able to meet the challenge. Here, we flesh out our thoughts as they evolved over the past couple of years. Perhaps the most interesting question posed to us was 'what do we mean by theories of urban politics?' To begin with 'theory', the first key term in the volume title, we asked authors to engage empirical (or explanatory) theories in their respective subject areas rather than explicitly normative ones. Such guidance was, of course, given with the recognition of the impossibility of value-free social science, so we take as given the idea that empirical theory will be infused with normative influences and do not try to force a strict separation. Empirical theory seeks to explain observed phenomena, usually by establishing a number of conceptually linked and generalisable causal relationships about how some factors affect (or cause) phenomena to occur. Most of the (urban political) theories or theoretical propositions collected in this volume fit this general notion of empirical theory.