Jenseits von Souveränität und Territorialität: Überlegungen zu einer politischen Theorie der Stadt

English version

Abstract: Cities have served as projection surfaces both for the identification of problematic tendencies of (modern) society and for the development of desired futures ever since. As a focal point and driving force of socio-political processes, the city is at the heart of governing practices and their observation – and yet, Political Theory still struggles to develop an idea of the city that does justice to the status and the ambivalences of the urban. All too often reflections on the city remain committed to the paradigm of sovereignty, so that the city is treated primarily in relation to the principle of the sovereign territorial state. In our contribution we argue that a dissolution of this conceptual entanglement allows us to make visible the constitutive relationships between the urban and specific articulations of the political. To do so, we adopt a perspective from spatial theory which conceptualises the city and the territorial state not as a smaller and a larger entity of the same kind, but as distinct, both complementary and conflicting spatial modes of social organisation. We demonstrate that densification and heterogenization, as the two main spatial characteristics of the urban, are linked in specific ways with the political in the sense of a constitution of collective power and social order. The city, then, not only appears as a (interchangeable) place where overarching socio-political phenomena materialise, but as a specific spatial principle that constitutes possibilities for joint speech and action and for contesting hegemonic projects. A political theory of the city adhering to this perspective enables us to not only locate political practices in the city, but to identify these as genuinely urban political practices, which in turn allows to interrogate both the complementarities and the contradictions between the spatial logics of the city and the sovereign territorial state.