I’ve noticed in reading a blog post by Clive Barnett that the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research has published an Early View version of a special symposium issue titled ‘Where is urban politics’ (subscription required), edited by Clive, Allan Cochrane and myself.

This is a symposium that’s been long in the making, traceable all the way back to AAG 2009(!). It brings together various strands of thinking on urban politics – whether varied in their empirical focus, their conceptual lenses, or in terms of the disciplinary positioning of the various authors. Aside from our introduction, which we hope has some merit and substance in and of itself, the symposium hosts a quite diverse range of papers on urban politics from Warren Magnusson, Lisa Hoffman, Doug Young and Roger Keil, John Allen and Allan Cochrane, and Clive Barnett.

Using ‘where’ in the title – Clive’s suggestion if I recall correctly – is a deliberate twist on the usual questions posed around conceptualising politics as in some way specifically ‘urban’. As we put it in our introduction to the symposium:

Instead of ‘what is urban politics’ we have asked the question ‘where is urban politics?’ By displacing ‘what’ for ‘where’ the papers collected in this symposium seek to provoke somewhat different answers as to what the ‘urban’ in urban politics refers: not only answers that elucidate the different locations of urban politics, but also a wider-than-typical variety of theoretical perspectives, spaces, and methods in and through which urban processes can be understood as political in some sense. As a result, the papers in the symposium comprise a plurality of understandings that underwrite a healthy diversity of perspectives on the substance of politics rendered as urban.

Following Cochrane’s (2007) genealogical approach to thinking of the ‘urban’ content of urban policy, the collection acknowledges the family resemblances between various types of ‘political’ problematization in which the urban comes into the foreground, without suggesting that there is a single overarching meaning of the ‘urban’ to which this variety must be made to conform. Instead, the papers in this symposium start from various problems and problematizations through which aspects of urban living show up as objects of political contention, intervention or management. Thus, rather than starting from foundational definitions of what counts as ‘urban’ (or indeed, ‘the political’ or ‘politics’), the papers collected here show the urban is a quality that shows up in multiple ‘locations’, both in literal geography and in multiple political processes which constitute urbanism and urbanization as objects of political concern (as well as subjects in and of the urban).