Claiming the City: from public space to public politics - interpretative politics analysis in the urban context

The notion of the city is closely associated with an ideal space of democracy. The historic ideal of the Greek Polis still underlies societal knowledge - as a model of justice and democracy in urban studies (Le Gales 2002; Sennett 1992), of cosmopolitan or radical democracy in political science (Held 1991; Zizek 2006). The contemporary crisis of democracy and territorial national states shifts the focus of critical studies to the role of the city as a public space in a changing historical context of statehood and citizenship. The urban public sphere implies the democratic functions of a place of personal social interactions, of a stage of government politics, and - increasingly - a local arena of transnational politics and symbol of postnational legitimacies. These various functional dimensions are the focus of different normative theories and give rise to different practical challenges, claims for justice and political processes in specific urban contexts. Researching the institutional transformations of the public sphere, interpretative politics analysis stresses normative agency as public performance and deliberation of legitimacy in complex network governance (Hajer 2009; Fischer 2009). Beyond advice to top-down policies, particularly, the planning discipline has turned to collaborative practices that involve negotiating, translating and performing diverse legitimacies (Forester, 2013; Healey & Booher 2011, Healey, 2007). As cultural norms and communicative practices gain importance in transnational governance as well as local planning, urban development turns from a political economic function into diverse and plural social-political processes. By defining the political field and intervening in collective societal learning, the active role of experts contributes to transform actors, issues and institutional structures of urban politics. Whereas critical urban studies tend to focus on neoliberalism as a dominant legitimacy structure, conceptualizing urban politics as an open-ended institutional process implies interpretative agency and diversity and thus potential political choices for alternative collective legitimacies. This paper enquires how normative and relational approaches in urban studies contribute to embed interpretative politics analysis in urban contexts as concrete social relations, specific local experience and material spaces of globalisation. In return, the relational perspective of interpretative politics analysis contributes to a more open-ended conception of urban politics that turns the neoliberal paradigm of critical urban studies into an research question about shared legitimacies with diverse analytical outcomes of institutional changes to statehood and citizenship.