“People had been moving from the country to the city since about 3000 B.C., when the first urban formations took shape around the Persian Gulf and soon spread across Asia and Europe. For the next 5.000 years, countless millions of peasants, and hundreds of thousands of regional elites, made the move to the city …

For most of those 5.000 years, big cities functioned as ‘population sumps … they soaked up large numbers of rural people, held them for a few years and promptly killed them, usually before they could reproduce or settle in any meaningful way … In every major city, deaths outnumbered births, and childhood mortality was especially high … London in the eighteenth century was so lethal that it required an average of 6.000 rural migrants a year just to maintain its population of 600.000. Cities, like armies, destroyed people almost as fast as they could take them in.

In the last half of the eighteenth century, and especially after 1780 or so, the dynamics began to change. … The tightening web of global commerce and communication had created a homogenous human pool of immunity across Europe and much of Asia, rendering formerly lethal epidemic diseases endemic (that is, turning them into mere childhood diseases). The new immunity unleashed an unprecedented population boom. …”

aus: Doug Saunders: Arrival City. How the largest migration in history is reshaping our world. London: Windmill Books 2011 (Originalausgabe 2010), S. 135/136.

Abb.: Olalekan Jeyifous: Shanty Mega Structures of Lagos Nigeria, 2021, Detail, Moma, im Internet.

06/14

“To an outsider, the village seems fixed, timeless, devoid of motion or change, isolated from the larger world. We consign it to nature. To those who might glance at its jumble of low buildings from a passing vehicle, the village seems a tranquil place of ordered, subtle beauty. We imagine a pleasant rhythm of life, free from the strains of modernity. Its small cluster of weathered shacks is nestled into the crest of a modest valley. …

in peasant villages around the world, nobody sees rural life as tranquil, or natural, or as anything but a monotonous, frightening gamble. …

At the moment, only 41 per cent of Asians and 38 per cent of Africans live in cities – leaving a population of villagers that is unproductive and unsustainable. They are on the land not because it is a better life, but because they are trapped.”

aus: Doug Saunders: Arrival City. How the largest migration in history is reshaping our world. London: Windmill Books 2011 (Originalausgabe 2010), S. 5,6 und 22

06/14

“Despite having sympathy for recent forms of protest like the indignados in Spain or the various forms of ‘Occupy’, there is a reason to be concerned about the type of anti-institutional strategy that they have adopted and that is inspired by the exodus model. … They … believe in the possibility for social movements, on their own, to bring about a new type of society where a ‘real’ democracy could exist without the need for the state or other forms of political institutions. Without any institutional relays, they will not be able to bring about any significant changes in the structures of power. Their protests against the neo-liberal order risk being soon forgotten. …

I find their slogan ‘We are the 99%’ rather unsatisfactory. It might be rousing, but it reveals a lack of awareness about the wide range of antagonisms existing in society and a rather naïve belief in the possibility of installing a consensual society, once the ‘bad’ 1% have been eliminated. …

Jason Hickel … says that Occupy’s structure of non-hierarchical, consensus-based participatory democracy takes the liberal ethic of celebrating diversity and tolerance to its extreme, and that this prevents them from apprehending the nature of power in capitalist societies and the fact of hegemony. Moreover, he sees an anti-political attitude and ‘the liberal ethic in full force’ in their refusal to organise around specific demands, so as not to alienate those who might disagree and discourage diversity. …

By mobilizing a binary rhetoric celebrating the virtues of the free market against the oppressive state, they [neo-liberal advocates] have been able to justify the primacy of the market and the commodification of all social realms, thereby establishing the bases of neo-liberal hegemony. …

Such a negative attitude with respect to the state is also found in some left radical sectors. This convergence can be explained by a shared belief in the availability of a self-regulating society beyond division and beyond hegemony. …

The “horizontalist’ protest movements … celebrate the ‘common’ over the market, but their rejection of the ‘public‘ and all the institutions linked to the state displays uncanny similarities with the neo-liberal attitude. …

The Occupy movement was almost non-existent in France .. In France … the belief in the power of politics to change things has not waned like in other European countries. …

it is high time to stop romanticizing spontaneism and horizontalism.”

aus: Chantal Mouffe: Agonistics. thinking the world politically. London/New York: Verso, 2013, S.77-127.

03/14

“Coming now to your question about the moralization of politics. … The distinction between left and right has been replaced by the one between right and wrong. This indicates that the adversarial model of politics is still with us, but the main difference is that now politics is played out in the moral register. … When the opponents are not defined in a political but in a moral way, they cannot be seen as adversaries, but only as enemies.”

aus: Chantal Mouffe: Agonistics. thinking the world politically. London/New York: Verso, 2013, S.142/143.

Abb.: Eko Nugroho: Ride Your Moral, 2014, im Internet.

03/14

“… Now, if Britain was a typical country, you might expect it to have a second city of about five million, which is twice the size of Greater Manchester or the area around Birmingham.

I say this because it has been observed – very loosely it should be said – that the size distribution of cities within countries tends to follow a pattern in which the biggest city is about twice the size of the second city, three times the size of the third city, four times the size of the fourth and so on.

It is named Zipf’s Law after the American linguist George Zipf, who noticed that the frequency distribution of words in many languages followed that pattern.

For the UK, the implication is stark. As the eminent economic geographer from the London School of Economics, Henry Overman, puts it: ‘These kind of arguments imply that the problem with Britain’s urban system is not that London is too big. Instead, if anything, it’s that our cities are too small.’

Our second tier cities in particular. Having cities that are too small is potentially an economic problem because we know that big cities act as hubs which boost whole regions.

We know that cities are where a disproportionate amount of business gets done. And we know that, typically, bigger cities are more productive than smaller ones. …

Hitherto, one might say that the lack of a proper second city has allowed London to divide and rule the rest of the nation. And the argument is even more powerful now that London has become such an obvious global centre.

It is as though Britain has a great world city but lacks a great national one.
So, if you believe this analysis, which second city offers the most hope for taking on the might of London?

Manchester or Birmingham are usually put forward, and the data suggests there is a logic to those two being on the shortlist. …

However, there is an interesting alternative suggestion – Hebden Bridge. It is not a suggestion to take literally, but it does make an important point.

Hebden Bridge, nestling in the Pennines between Manchester and Leeds, is certainly one of the most interesting and flourishing towns in the UK. It was once declared the “fourth funkiest town in the world” (whatever that means) and is often said to be the lesbian capital of the UK. The suggestion that it is Britain’s second city came from resident David Fletcher, who was active in the 80s saving the town’s old mills and converting them to modern use.

His point is that Hebden Bridge is an inverted city with a greenbelt centre and suburbs called Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool.

His point was that the real second city of the UK is a northern, trans-Pennine strip that extends the relatively short distance across northern England, joining the built-up areas that lie second, fourth and sixth in the UK ranking.

Certainly, Hebden Bridge has attracted a lot of professional couples who are split commuters, one heading towards Manchester and one towards Leeds each morning. It is a place that allows both those cities to be treated as next door.

And maybe therein lies some kind of answer to the critical mass of London. It’s not a second city called Hebden Bridge, but a super-city that tries to turn the great cities of the north into one large travel-to-work area.

It would require a lot of physical infrastructure to improve links between the different centres. …”

aus: Evan Davis : The case for making Hebden Bridge the UK’s second city, Mind the Gap: London vs. The RestBBC Two at 21:00 on Monday, 10 March 2014. (siehe ganzen Text auf BBC-Website)

03/14

“To sum up: the other side of individualization seems to be the corrosion and slow disintegration of citizenship. Joël Roman … points out in his recent book (La Démocratie des Individus, 1998), that ‘vigilance is degraded to the point of surveillance, engaging collective emotions and fear of the neighbour‘ – and urges people to seek a ‘renewed capacity for deciding together’, a capacity now conspicious mostly by absence.

If the individual is the citizen‘s worst enemy and if individualization spells trouble for citizenship and citizenship-based politics, it is because the concerns and preoccupations of individuals qua individuals fill the public space, claiming to be its only legitimate occupants and elbowing out from public discourse everything else. The ‘public’ is colonized by the ‘private‘; ‘public interest’ is reduced to curiosity about the private lives of public figures and the art of public life is tapered to the public display of private affairs and public confessions of private sentiments (the more intimate the better), ‘Public issues’ which resist such reduction become all but incomprehensible.

The prospects for a ‘re-embedding’ of individualized actors in the republican body of citizenship are dim. What prompts them to venture onto the public stage is not so much a search for common causes and ways to negotiate the meaning of the common good and the principles of life in common, as a desperate need for ‘networking’. The sharing of intimacies, as Richard Sennett keeps pointing out, tends to be the preferred, perhaps the only remaing, method of ‘community-building’. This building technique can spawn ‘communities’ only as fragile and short-lived, scattered and wandering emotions, shifting erratically from one target to the another and drifting in the forever inconclusive search for a secure haven … As Ulrich Beck puts it … : ‘What emerges from the fading social norms is naked, frightened, aggressive ego in search of love and help….'”

aus: Zygmunt Bauman: Individuality, together, Foreword to: Beck, Ulrich / Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth: Individualization. London u.a.: Sage 2002, S.xviii.

04/12

(NL)

“There’s a word I keep hearing lately: “technocrat.” Sometimes it’s used as a term of scorn – the creators of the euro, we’re told, were technocrats who failed to take human and cultural factors into account. Sometimes it’s a term of praise: The newly installed prime ministers of Greece and Italy are described as technocrats who will rise above politics and do what needs to be done.

I call foul. I know from technocrats; sometimes I even play one myself. And these people – the people who bullied Europe into adopting a common currency, the people who are bullying both Europe and the United States into austerity aren’t technocrats. They are, instead, deeply impractical romantics.

They are, to be sure, a peculiarly boring breed of romantic, speaking in turgid prose rather than poetry. And the things they demand on behalf of their romantic visions are often cruel, involving huge sacrifices from ordinary workers and families. But the fact remains that those visions are driven by dreams about the way things should be rather than by a cool assessment of the way things really are.

And to save the world economy we must topple these dangerous romantics from their pedestals. …

So why did those “technocrats” push so hard for the euro, disregarding many warnings from economists? Partly it was the dream of European unification, which the Continent’s elite found so alluring that its members waved away practical objections. And partly it was a leap of economic faith, the hope – driven by the will to believe, despite vast evidence to the contrary – that everything would work out as long as nations practiced the Victorian virtues of price stability and fiscal prudence.

Sad to say, things did not work out as promised. But rather than adjusting to reality, those supposed technocrats just doubled down – insisting, for example, that Greece could avoid default through savage austerity, when anyone who actually did the math knew better. …

But our discourse is being badly distorted by ideologues and wishful thinkers – boring, cruel romantics – pretending to be technocrats. And it’s time to puncture their pretensions.”

aus: Paul Krugman: Eurozone crisis: To save Europe, topple the ‘technocrats’, New York Times Nov 21, 2011 (Internetquelle)

11/11

“Yet there is a sense today that globalisation as we are now experiencing it really is of a different hue … All that can be said at this stage is that it is likely that those who lived through earlier episodes of imperial domination probably felt the same.”

aus: Patrick Chabal & Jean-Pascal Daloz: Culture Troubles. Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning. London: Hurst & Co., 2006, S.168.

Abb.: I Wayan Upadana: Glo(babi)sation, 2013, indoartnow, im Internet.

09/09

“the State as it emerged and was consolidated in Western Europe over several centuries was the result of complex processes. … What were the main processes that led to the constitution of the State?

• First, there was a movement towards centralisation.
• Second, it entailed a protracted dynamic of resource concentration and then an attempt at monopolisation, in the first instance of military means. … the State then succeeded in monopolising legitimate violence both internally and vis-à-vis competing external polities. The process of monopolisation also (and crucially) concerned taxation. …
• Thirdly … centralisation and monopolisation led to the establishment of a bureaucracy … This involved a dynamic of differentiation and the emergency of a clear distinction between public and private spheres. … the rise of the State marked the end of patrimonialism. …
• The last aspect in the development of the State … was institutionalisation. This took the form of the written codification of laws applicable to all citizens and entailed legal responsibilities on the part of those who held political or bureaucratical office. …
• There are of course a number of other considerations that are of importance … Of note would be the relationship between the State, the nation, other territorial entities and different types of political regimes; its role in regulating competing social forces and in imposing order; its links with the élite; and, finally, its economic function, either as actor or regulator or, possibly, as manager of the welfare system …

… the use of the notion [of the State] in settings where the four processes discussed above have not occurred, or have occurred erratically, is a form of ‘concept stretching’ that is inimical to the proper understanding of the exercise of power.”

aus: Patrick Chabal & Jean-Pascal Daloz: Culture Troubles. Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning. London: Hurst & Co., 2006, S.227-229.

09/09

“Paradoxically … it is the West that holds most strongly that revolutionairies are able to provoke cultural ruptures, when the evidence (as in Russia or China) is that this is not the case.”

aus: Patrick Chabal & Jean-Pascal Daloz: Culture Troubles. Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning. London: Hurst & Co., 2006, S.165.

09/09