How Cities Can Transform Democracy

Ross Beveridge is Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow.Philippe Koch is Professor in Urban Politics at the ZHAW School of Architecture, Design and Civil Engineering.

• 1. Why Cities?2. Politics through an Urban Lens3. Democracy and the City Reimagined4. Self-governing Urbanization5. Urban Publics and Citizens6. Urban Democracy and the State7. The City in the Age of UrbanizationNotes

“This is a genuinely exciting book. With the help of fascinating case studies and confident theoretical engagement, it persuasively builds a distinctive argument around the potential, and sometimes contemporary reality, of the city as the space of transformative – democratic – politics.”Allan Cochrane, The Open University“A fresh perspective on the meaning of democracy and how and where it takes place. Beveridge and Koch provide important insights into emergent terrains of political action that will be of interest to political theorists and urbanists alike.”Theresa Enright, University of Toronto“The book is an inspiring testament to the power of grassroots democratic mobilisation in all its diversity. We see things in reading Beveridge and Koch that we would not see from other vantagepoints, and this too is the real strength in drawing from a plurality of methodologies in urban analysis. All students and scholars of democracy and of urbanisation will benefit from this highly significant intervention.”Jonathan Davis, Local Government Studies“This generative, hopeful and well-written book … of the political meaning of the city under global urbanisation could not be more timely.”LSE Review of Books“The authors argue that while the city cannot be thought of as a discreet form any longer, urbanity can provide the conditions for democratic politics and the city can provide the horizon of democracy. […] City is the name for all those spaces where urban publics emerge and act.”City“An intellectually curious and politically provocative search for the essence of the city in democracy […] which pushes critical urban studies to take a generative and imaginative leap in its understanding of the evolving connections between urbanisation and democracy.”Urban Studies