Dan Webb - Critical Urban Theory, Common Property, and The Political: Desire and Drive in the City

First published 2017
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Upon reflection, the word urbane is a peculiar one. It originates from the Latin urbanus , meaning belonging to the city, but has come to signify the possession of refined, sophisticated, and cultured characteristics. The etymological connection to urbanus is telling because, of course, it is the city-dweller who is considered fine-mannered and courteous, while those who live in the country are uncouth, ignorant of culture, and lacking in social graces. There is no direct antonym for urbane in English, only a constellation of words that need to be invoked together in order to negate it completely. As a relic of the sixteenth century, the current definition of urbane as intimately tied to city life might appear puzzling. Sure, most high-culture amenities are found in cities, and urbanites tend to be more educated, but are not urban areas also where people do not know their neighbours, gang violence and drug addiction are rampant, and residents dont feel safe going out at night? Is it not in the country where people are more mannerly, hospitable, and honest, even if relatively simple and less worldly? If cities are so great at producing cultured and morally superior humans, why has it been such an object of scorn for so many of Western civilizations greatest minds: the Dickenses, Rousseaus, Emersons, and Heideggers of the world?

There are, of course, no answers to these questions because if there ever did exist a sixteenth-century consensus on the normative distinctions between city and country, it has long since collapsed. The only indisputable cultural truth about the social value of the city throughout history is that it has served as an object of fascination, invoking awe and disgust, promises of salvation and damnation, progress and corruption. If anything, in the contemporary context urbane should mean something more like culturally uncertain or consisting of ambivalent social value. From a philosophical standpoint, this ambivalence may be a result of the city resembling something akin to a Kantian sublime object, although whether it belongs to the category of the mathematical or dynamic sublime, is unclear. Some cities are overwhelming to the senses due both to their tremendous size (mathematical) and by virtue of their prodigious diversity, energy, and utter complexity (the dynamic). Although coming to conceptual grips with the city has preoccupied philosophers, novelists, poets, and politicians for hundreds of years, attempting to define the city in its totality is a fools errand it is quite simply impossible, because of its sublimity. In fact, I assert that theorizing the city poses the same problem that Theodor Adorno points to regarding the relationship between concepts and objects, whereby the truth of the latter will never be covered fully by the former. For Adorno, the task of the philosopher is to highlight that aspect of the object left out of its concept in order to grasp the truth of non-conceptuality. Politically speaking, to emphasize only one aspect of an object, while ignoring others, is always an act of power power in the service of reproducing particular social discourses that define reality. In relation to urban matters, Adornos insights are supported implicitly by Geoff Vigar et al. when they state: