Radical Philosophy Review

ONLINE FIRST

published on December 12, 2013

Dan Webb

Urban Common Property
Notes Towards a Political Theory of the City

In this article I make three inter-related arguments. First, I argue that contemporary critical political theory should re-assert the city as a privileged site of political action. Second, I suggest that in the process of such a re-assertion, the dominant “open” conception of the city, characteristic of much critical urban studies, should be reworked in order to be properly “political”; that is, framed within an agonistic, Left-Schmittian model of politics. Finally, I claim that one way to “politicize” the city in this manner is to think of it as a site of “common property” (as expressed in the work of Nicholas Blomley).