Global Urban Politics

Global Urban Politics: Informalization of the State

In what ways has global urbanization affected the political process? This book offers a reflection on the transformations of urban politics worldwide in the past four decades, from interpersonal street-level politics to transnational governing institutions.

Organized thematically, the book examines urban social movements, diversity politics, environmental politics and security politics at a global level and argues that living in an urban world calls for a profound rethinking of how we act politically. Through ethnographic incursions into the worlds of youth activists, domestic workers, rioters, barrio bandits and peripheral villagers, among others, from Mexico City and Hanoi to Montreal and New York, the book makes a number of theoretical propositions to redefine the field of urban political studies.

Extending the view of urban politics beyond municipal and metropolitan institutions to the broader political process in cities, this book will be invaluable to advanced students and scholars interested in our urban future. For, as Boudreau convincingly suggests, global urban life is political life.

Figures xi

Acknowledgements xii

Introduction 1

Defining the urban 7

Defining the contours of an alternative field of urban political studies 15

Organization of the book 19

1 Where are the Global Urban Politics? 23

Where are the urban politics? From municipalism to a new political ontology 25

Where are politics? Urban life is political life 33

Changing relations to space: bounded and networked political spaces 34

Changing relations with time: non-linear conceptions of political change 38

La Paz, Bolivia 43

Changing relationship with affective rationalities: from calculative decision-making to affective politics 45

Where is the global in urban politics? Uneven connections and power relations 53

Informalization of the state 58

Conclusion 61

2 Global Urban Social Movements: Emerging Forms of Political Action 65

What are global urban social movements? 70

Why and how do we become politically engaged? Discordant moments, mobility practices and continuity with everyday life 78

Emerging forms of urban political mobilization 90

Youthfulness and urban political action 92

'Open-ended urbanisms' 96

Dégagisme or the politics of anti-power 98

Conclusion 100

3 Global Diversity Politics: Thinking Citizenship 102

Cities as 'difference machines': from managing diversity in cities to difference as constitutive of urbanity 105

The routes of undocumented immigrants, the neighbour and the identity card 109

The smuggling routes of socio-economic crisis, patriarchy and urbanity 113

Rethinking citizenship 116

Conclusion 125

4 Global Environmental Politics: Multiple Conceptions of Time 127

Local environmental conflicts: engaging various conceptions of time 132

The temporalities of the 'project': directional trajectory and duration 136

The temporalities of financing: pace 137

The temporalities of inhabiting new spaces: cycles 139

The temporalities of environmental degradation: directional trajectory clashing with circular metabolic cycles 141

Alternative temporalities and political action 142

Global environmental politics: articulating metabolic flows at various speeds and scales 144

A changing conception of time affecting the political process 147

Conclusion 148

5 Global Urban Security Politics: Re-emerging Rationalities of Action 150

Urban nightmares: home security and alien invasions 153

Affective micro-politics and re-emerging forms of political action 157

Conclusion 167

Conclusion: Global Urban Politics and the Informalization of the State 171

Critical urban studies: pragmatism between postcolonialism and structuralism 176

Political action and moral ambiguity: thinking in terms of stabilizing regimes 179

Notes 185

Bibliography 191

Index 207

"This is a major book: one that is set to change the field in important ways. It is brief, challenging, informative, and accessible. There is hardly anyone who has the breadth of knowledge and experience that Julie-Anne Boudreau has, and few indeed who can bring such acute analytical insights to the work at hand. This book is a very important contribution to the literature. I would use it as a principal text for any course on urban politics."
—Warren Magnusson, University of Victoria

"In Global Urban Politics, Julie-Anne Boudreau has produced a synthesis of theory and observation to provide a strikingly original understanding of the urban. Seeing the urban as demarcated by practices rather than boundaries, she provides important insights into the nature of politics in the present era."
—Susan S. Fainstein, Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Julie-Anne Boudreau is Associate Professor in the Urbanisation Culture Société Research Centre at the National Institute for Scientific Research (INRS), Montreal.