ABSTRACT
“Community” is a ubiquitous term, both in social theory and in policy frameworks, and almost invariably brings with it very positive connotations. The few contemporary philosophers who have explicitly developed theories of community, however, identify a number of analytical and political issues. Iris Marion Young, for example, critiques the idea of urban community as it tends to connote social homogeneity rather than diversity. Within contemporary European thought, thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben bring a utopian inflection to their thought on community, drawing as they do on the heritage of socialist communist thinking.
Drawing inspiration from the pioneering urban theory of Henri Lefebvre and the critical geography work of David Harvey, Neil Smith, and Andy Merrifield also tends to problematize appeals to urban community. Lefebvre’s underlying conviction was that the urban is the privileged site of social contestation. This puts the critical geography appreciation of urban sociology on a collision course with the social theory of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas’s work in the 1970s and 1980s stressed a consensual ideal underlying all human communication and this then led into the model of deliberative democracy. My own work in Constructing Community (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010) attempted to identify credible ways to mediate between these opposed consensual and dissenting theories of urban community.
Finally, there is the question of urban praxis. Since the 2008 global recession, high-profile urban uprisings have swept the world, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street to the Istanbul Gezi Park protests. While the local particularities are significant, these events have drawn attention to urban community in Lefebvre’s sense of popular contestation. Against this backdrop, what has been referred to by Stephen Graham as the “new military urbanism” is placed in stark relief. There is widespread recognition that neoliberal urban policies across the world have led to more sanitized, segregated, and hyper-commercialized urban environments. The specter of gentrification has created deep social pathologies which shape urban society in manifold ways across the world.
