On the City’s Terms: Ideological Models of City Self-Government

• In Event: Participation and Urban Policy: Case Studies from around the World

Abstract

The rise of the nation-state has put local government in perpetual tension within democratic theory. On the one hand, local politics and government are celebrated in most accounts of the liberal state as a desirable political institution benefiting national governments and promoting the personal freedom of citizens (Tocqueville 2012, Mill 2011). On the other hand, those same institutions are a looming danger to justice and equality, undermining the liberal political order and unity of the polity (Frug 1980, Schragger 2016, Young 2002).
Recently, politicians, activists, and scholars alike have revisited the role of local governments within national systems (Filipcevic Cordes 2017; Weinstock 2014), and in particular, advocating redistributing power in favour of local governments (Barber 2013; Katz and Nowak 2017; Schragger 2016), and describing changes in the balance of power between states and localities (Bulkeley et al. 2018; Barak and Mualam 2022; Weinstock 2014; Magnusson 2015; Harvey 2012).
While scholars from different branches of political thought and urban theory have created multiple normative theories that suggest that local governments should yield more authority than they usually do, democratic theory has been reluctant to engage with the normative challenges involved in empowering local governments. Democratic theory has focused mainly on deliberative democracy on the local scale, seeing local government as a better scale for political deliberation within a bigger system of government (King 2014) or for political mobilization (Young 2002), but not for independent political government. This limited scope has allowed democratic theory to side-step normative questions on who, why, and how to empower politically when advocating local governments’ autonomy.
This paper examines individual political conflicts between cities and states and how they interpret the different theories of city self-government that challenge the accepted normative foundations, the democratic legitimacy and supremacy of the state, and reimagine local government and its relationship with other levels of government.
While these conflicts are over specific policies and policy goals in individual contexts, at their core they reimagine the spatial imaginary of local government and local democracy, its form and matter, and the relationship between the city, its residents, and other political actors: recasting the city as a self-governing polity, imagining and developing new institutions and government and government and contextualizing global trends (Beveridge and Koch 2023, Demazière 2020; Tomàs 2020).
Recent conflicts in Naples and Toronto between local movements and the state show how local activists not only challenge the very normative legitimacy of central governments’ control of local governments (Pagliaro 2019; de Majo 2020; Roth, Russell, and Thompson 2023), but also the very core of democratic local government (Pratchett 2004), and deal with the fundamental normative questions of local power and authority and the very definition of a city as a democratic polity. Thus, in those instances, city denizens create multitude visions ‘city self-government’, the view that cities should hold the democratically based authority to govern themselves, making ‘city self-government’ a contested concept subjected to ideological interpretation.

By using conceptual morphological analysis of existing scholarship and political speech acts employed in real-world conflicts between city and state, this paper presents the multiple normative threads that reimagine the institutional and normative foundations of the city. It shows how the liberal and radical strands of thought and understandings of ‘city self-government’, which embrace a different understanding of the ‘city’ are put into action by champions of ‘global urban governance’ and ‘the new municipalism’ in Toronto and Naples respectively. These actors adapt the theories to their local context, deal with the normative dilemmas of empowering local government, and attempt to present compelling arguments to their fellow residents. This paper will suggest that while presenting different understandings of the city, its institutions, and its scope, these instances share the attempt to recast the idea of city self-government through the republican principle of ‘popular self-government’ reinventing the city as a democratic institution of democratic government.

Author

• Michael Ziv Kenet