84 - How Cities Can Transform Democracy

This is the first seminar in the series 'Where is Urban Politics?' a hybrid seminar series hosted by the University of Groningen, in the academic year 2024-2025. This talk by Ross Beveridge and Philippe Koch provides a novel way of thinking about the relationship between democracy and the urban based on two main arguments. First, across the globe claims for and forms of urban collective self-rule signal that the city retains democratic significance in a very specific sense: as an object of practice and thought the city is a source and stake of the urban demos. Second, urbanisation unsettles seemingly fixed boundaries between the state and society and thus opens the possibility of weaving together a new democratic fabric encompassing both. There is a democratic politics of urbanisation that shifts perspectives from institutions to practices, from jurisdictional scales to spaces of collective urban life. Seeing democracy like a city, we argue, foregrounds a way to re-locate democracy in the everyday lives of urbanites and to unlock the transformative potential of an urban democracy. This talk draws on recent work including the book "How Cities Can Transform Democracy" (2023) and the article "Seeing Democracy like a City" (2023).