The City of Reason: The City as Human Habitus

Pt1 Cities and Citizenship This part makes the case for expanding 'the political' as a public life at the expense of centralised abstract state politics through making available extensive public spaces for the exercise of local citizen power at the level of the neighbourhood, town, and city confederation. Pt2 The Philosophical Idea of the City This part grounds the conception of public life in a normative philosophical anthropology which identifies the city as a moral and social realm promoting culture and civilisation. Pt3 Universitas The City from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance This part examines attempts to establish universalism up to and including the Renaissance. Pt4 The Rationalisation of the City This part traces the evolution of reason via the processes of abstraction, quantification and commodification to define an ethic of urban justice which affirms values and structures of reciprocity, interaction and solidary exchange within the associational space of civil society. Pt5 The Economic Concept of the City The critical focus of this part is upon abstracting and diremptive tendencies within the city, particularly with respect to new symbolic and informational economic geographies. Pt6 The City as Social Movement This part addresses the problematic character of the “common good” in a modern plural world by developing a conception of urban justice. This part proceeds to examine the possibility of reasserting place-based social meaning through the principle of community control. Pt7 The Ecological Concept of the City Putting reason on a rational basis through the social and discursive constitution of the city makes it possible to develop the ecological implications of “rational” principles of scale and justice. This part shows that a genuine rationalization is characterized by the interpenetration of social and environmental justice facilitating the integration of communities in their ecological community