Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The Post-Political City
The Post-Political City
Erik Swyngedouw
School of Environment and Development
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL
U.K.
E-mail: erik.swyngedouw@manchester.ac.uk
Tel: 00-44-(0)7956879213
December 2006
(Revised and final version: March 2007)
Published in: BAVO (2007) Urban Politics Now Reflect Series, Netherland Architecture
Institute (NAI)-Publishers, Rotterdam.
“Well, my dear Adeimantus, what is the nature of tyranny? It’s obvious, I
The polis is dead. Long live the creative city! While the city is alive and thriving (at least
in some of its spaces), the polis, conceived in the idealized Greek sense as the site for
public political encounter and democratic negotiation, the spacing of (often radical)
dissent, and disagreement, and the place where political subjectivation literally takes
place, seems moribund. This figure of a de-politicized (or Post-Political and Post-
Democratic) city in the late capitalist order will be leitmotiv of this contribution. Taking
our cue from Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Žižek, Chantal Mouffe, Mustafa Dikeç, Alain
Badiou and assorted other critics of the cynical radicalism that has rendered critical
theory and radical political praxis impotent and infertile in the face of the de-politicising
gestures that pass for urban policy and politics in the contemporary neo-liberalising late
capitalist police order, we shall attempt to re-centre the political in contemporary debates
on the urban.
We proceed in four steps. In the fist part, we explore the evacuation of the political from
the plane of immanence that defines the very possibility of the polis and the concomitant
liberal governmentality that has replaced debate, disagreement and dissensus with a series
management. The second part dissects the depoliticised condition of the late capitalist
city, arguing that the urban frame has been thoroughly, and perhaps fatally, infested by an
embracing a populist gesture, one that annuls democracy and must, of necessity, lead to
an ultra-politics of violent disavowal and, ultimately, to the foreclosure of any real spaces
of engagement. The final part attempts to recover the notion of the political and of the
political polis from the debris of contemporary obsessions with consensual (participatory)
the incoherencies of the contemporary urban ordering, the excess and the gaps that are
left in the interstices of the post-political urban order permits thinking through, if not
“The end of the socialist alternative, then, did not signify any renewal of
fact, was posited as a common condition which imposed the same solutions on
both left and right. Consensus around these solutions became the supreme
The late capitalist urban policy (or police) order, we maintain, is not only one that is
predicated on the elimination of dissent, but more importantly, forecloses the political,
evacuates ‘the litigation of the sensible’, and, through that, produces what Rancière and
and levels of intervention and in the composition and characteristics of actors and agents,
institutional structures, and policy instruments. For cities, changing fortunes means
companies and individuals, the flows of global hot money, and the fast restructuring (and
often dualisation) of labour markets. To meet the challenges posed by these new socio-
economic realities, the polic(y)ing agenda of cities has been drastically redefined. The
new urban agenda reflects, on the one hand, a shifting policy focus away from regulatory
competitiveness, entrepreneurship, and creativity (Oatley 1998; Roberts and Sykes 2000).
This strategic turn on the urban agenda is part and parcel of a critical reappraisal of the
form, functions and scope of urban policy and of the rise of a new mode of urban
governance (Brindley, Rydin, and Stoker 1989; Healey et al. 1995; Swyngedouw 2005b).
While a variety of competing styles of governance still provide for a great deal of
partnerships, and collaborative advantage (Healey 1997; Jessop 1998; 2002; Albrechts
2006).
From the late 1980s onwards, after the initial successes of large scale urban re-
Projects (UDP) to lead economic regeneration. These emblematic projects are now
present all over the urban and regional landscape and are the material expression of a
developmental logic that views them as major leverages for generating future growth and
South Axis, Rotterdam’s Kop van Zuid, Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum, or London’s bid
to stage the Olympic Games are just a few examples of the sprawling number of cities
that have pursued such tactics. In particular, such projects have become an integral part of
search for competitive redevelopment has become the leading objective of the new urban
advantage is seen as largely dependent on improving and adapting the built environment
to the accumulation strategies of a city’s key elites and plugging the city into cutting edge
Therefore, physical reconstruction and economic recovery tend to go hand in hand and,
providing a solid foundation for fostering future growth and functional transformation. At
the same time, urban revitalization is projected beyond the cities’ limits and linked to
formation of a set of new formal and informal institutional and governance arrangement
that engage in the act of governing outside and Beyond-the-State. In sum, a new police
order of governing and organising social relations accompanies the emergence of new
urban landscapes (Mitchell 2002; Jessop 1998; Pagden 1998; Hajer 2003b; Whitehead
2003).
associational networks of private (market), civil society (usually NGO), and state actors
hand and parts of civil society on the other in self-managing what until recently was
dispersed are increasingly prevalent in rule making, rule setting and rule implementation
at a variety of geographical scales (Hajer 2003a: 175). They can be found from the
scale (such as the European Union, the WTO, the IMF, or the Kyoto protocol
1979; Lemke 2002), in which a particular rationality of governing is combined with new
technologies, instruments, and tactics of conducting the process of collective rule-setting,
implementation, and policing. The urban scale has been a pivotal terrain where these new
arrangements of governance have materialised (Le Galès 2002; Brenner and Theodore
2002). This, so we argue, brings with it a transfiguration of the urban ‘police order’ in the
and binding decisions by negotiating with each other and cooperating in the
independent and interdependent actors who share a consensual view of objectives and
problems and a high degree of trust, despite internal conflict and oppositional agendas,
50) argues, this announces “a transformation of politics that restructures the power
techniques of government and the appearance of new actors on the scene of government
relation between state and civil society actors”. This encompasses a threefold re-
inevitably imply that non-state, civil society or market based configurations become
economic, and cultural activities. Second is the up-scaling of governance whereby the
national state increasingly delegates regulatory and other tasks to other and higher scales
or levels of governance (such as the EU, IMF, WTO, and the like), and, third is the down-
and arrangements that create greater local differentiation combined with a desire to
incorporate new social actors in the arena of governing. This includes processes of
These three processes of re-arranging the relationship between state, civil society and
construct the market as the preferred social institution of resource mobilisation and
allocation, a critique of the ‘excess’ of state associated with Keynesian welfarism, and a
(Harvey 2005). Of course, the new modalities of governance also involve the
refers to strategies of rendering the individual actor responsible for his or her own
actions, the latter refers to the mobilisation of benchmarking rules that are set as state-
imposed parameters against which (self-)assessment can take place and which require the
‘calculative regimes’ (Miller 1992). Barbara Cruikshank (1993; 1994) refers in this
community policing, the combating of various kinds of dependency and so on” (Dean
1999: 168). Ironically, while these technologies are often advocated and mobilised by
NGOs and other civil organizations speaking for the disempowered or socially excluded
(Goonewardena and Rankin 2004), these actors often fail to see how these instruments
are an integral part of the consolidation of an imposed and authoritarian neo-liberal police
(Burchell 1996; Dean 1999). In sum, a new urban police order with a new ‘partition of
the sensible’ and a reworked distribution of places and functions arises (Rancière 2000a).
This urban police order vitally revolves around a consensual arrangement in which all
those that are named and counted can take part, can participate. While there may be
conflicts of interest and opinion, there is widespread agreement over the conditions that
exist (the partition of the sensible) and what needs to be done, i.e. the creation of a
order that is defined as the post-political condition. This is what we shall turn to next.
reached in the guise of a more or less universal consensus. The political (the space
of litigation in which the excluded can protest the wrong/injustice done to them),
political in the reduction of the state to a mere police agent servicing the
In what follows, we shall argue that the late capitalist urban police order as outlined
above forecloses (or at least attempts to) politicization and evacuates dissent through the
negotiated to avoid the urban maelstrom to sink into catastrophe, economic decline, and
social disintegration. At the same time, of course, there is hegemonic consensus that no
alternative to liberal-global hegemony is possible. Not only is the public arena evacuated
from radical dissent, critique, and fundamental conflict, but the parameters of democratic
governing itself are being shifted, announcing new forms of autocratic governmentality
(see Swyngedouw 2005a). Slavoj Žižek and Chantal Mouffe, among others, define the
post-political as a political formation that actually forecloses the political, that prevents
the politicization of particulars (Žižek 1999a: 35; 2006; Mouffe 2005): “[p]ost-politics
mobilizes the vast apparatus of experts, social workers, and so on, to reduce the overall
demand (complaint) of a particular group to just this demand, with its particular content –
no wonder that this suffocating closure gives birth to ‘irrational’ outbursts of violence as
the only way to give expression to the dimension beyond particularity” (Žižek 1999b:
issues, and they remain of course fully within the realm of the possible, of existing social
relations. “The ultimate sign of post-politics in all Western countries”, Žižek (2002: 303)
politics refuses politicisation in the classical Greek sense, that is, as the universalization
of particular demands that aims at “more” than negotiation of interests. Politics becomes
something one can do without making decisions that divide and separate (Thomson
2003). A consensual post-politics arises thus, one that either eliminates fundamental
consensus does not equal peace or absence of fundamental conflict (Rancière 2005a: 8).
Difficulties and problems, such as re-ordering the urban, that are generally staged and
interests and values may be, you perceive the same things, you give them the same name.
But there is no contest on what appears, on what is given in a situation and as a situation”
(Rancière 2003b: §4). The key feature of consensus is “the annulment of dissensus …..
the ‘end of politics’” (Rancière 2001: §32). Of course, this post-political world eludes
choice and freedom (other than those tolerated by the consensus). The only position of
real dissent is that of either the traditionalist (those stuck in the past that refuse to accept
the inevitability of the new global neo-liberal order) or the fundamentalist. The only way
consensual pluralist order and/or on excluding radically those who posit themselves
outside the consensus. For the latter, as Giorgio Agamben (2005) argues, the police order
suspends the law; they are literally put outside the law and treated as extremists and
terrorists. This form of ultra-politics pits those who ‘participate’ in the consensual order
radically against those who are placed outside, like the sans-papiers or the marginalized.
The riots in Paris in the fall of 2005 and the responses to this event were classic violent
only perfect expressions of such a post-political order, but in fact, the making of new
creative and entrepreneurial cities is one of the key arenas through which this post-
therefore, is one that is radically reactionary, one that forestalls the articulation of
assemblages.
In this post-democratic post-political era, adversarial politics (of the left/right variety or
of radically divergent struggles over imagining urban futures for example) are considered
hopelessly out of date. Although disagreement and debate are of course still possible,
they operate within an overall model of consensus and agreement. The Post-Political
condition articulates, therefore, with a consensual populist political tactic as the conduit
institutional consensus. We shall briefly chart the characteristics of populism (see, among
others, Canovan 1999; Laclau 2005; Mouffe 2005; Žižek 2005b; Swyngedouw 2007) and
manner. All people are affected by urban problems and the whole of urban life as we
idiosyncrasies of different forms and expressions of urban life, silences ideological and
other constitutive social differences and papers over fundamental conflicts of interest by
‘the people know best’ (although the latter category remains often empty, unnamed),
relationship between people and political participation. It is assumed that this will lead to
a good, if not optimal, solution. Third, populism customarily invokes the specter of
from acting (in a technocratic-managerial manner) now, our urban future is in grave
danger. It instils a sense of millennial angst and existentialist urgency. Fourth, populist
tactics do not identify a privileged subject of change (like the proletariat for Marx,
women for feminists, or the ‘creative class’ for neo-liberal capitalism), but instead invoke
a common condition or predicament, the need for common action, mutual collaboration
and co-operation. There are no internal social tensions or generative internal conflicts.
Instead the enemy is always externalised and objectified. Populism’s fundamental fantasy
corrupted the system. The ‘immigrant’ or ‘globalization’ stands here as classic examples
of fetishised and externalised foes that require dealing with if a new urbanity is to be
attained. Problems therefore are not the result of the ‘system’, of unevenly distributed
power relations, of implicit or explicit silences and marginalization, of the networks of
control and influence, of rampant injustices, or of a fatal flow inscribed in the system, but
are blamed on an outsider, a ‘pathological’ syndrome that can be cut out without
affecting the functioning of the system. Fifth, populist demands are always addressed to
the elites. Urban populism as a project always expresses demands to the ruling elites; it is
not about changing the elites, but calling on the elites to undertake action. A non-populist
politics is exactly about obliterating the elite, imagining the impossible, nicely formulated
in the following Žižekian joke: “An IRA man in a balaclava is at the gates of heaven
when St Peter comes to him and says, 'I'm afraid I can't let you in'. 'Who wants to get in?'
the IRA man retorts, 'You've got twenty minutes to get the fuck out.'” Sixth, no proper
populism is associated with a politics of not naming in the sense of giving a definite or
proper name to its domain or field of action. Only vague concepts like the creative city,
the competitive city, the inclusive city, the global city, the sustainable city replace the
proper names of politics. These proper names, according to Rancière (1995) are what
constitutes a genuine democracy, that is a space where the unnamed, the uncounted, and,
project. In other words, the urban problem does not posit a positive and named socio-
environmental situation, an embodied vision, a desire that awaits its realisation, a fiction
to be realised.
Democracy’s Location: the Return of the Polis
In light of the above discussion, what would constitute a proper political democratic
sequence? For Jacques Rancière a proper political gesture is about enunciating dissent
and rupture, literally voicing speech that claims, in the name of equality, a place in the
order of things, demanding “the part for those who have no-part” (Rancière 2001: 6);
politics disrupts the police order -- “a refusal to observe the ‘place’ allocated to people
and things (or at least, to particular people and things)” (Robson 2005: 5). ‘Politics’ is
juxtaposed here to ‘the police’. The latter refers to the existing order of things and is, in
Rancière’s words, ‘a partition of the sensible’ (Rancière 2001: 8). In this sense, the police
refers to “all the activities which create order by distributing places, names, functions”
their ‘proper’ place in the seemingly natural order of things” (Dikeç 2005: 174)). For the
police order, “society consists of groups dedicated to specific modes of action, in places
occupations and these places” (Rancière 2000a: 21). As Mustafa Dikeç (2007: ch. 2: 5)
organization that becomes the basis of and for governance. Thus, the essence of the
If the supervision of places and functions is defined as the ‘police’, “a proper political
democratic voice is the voice of those who reject the prevailing social distribution of
roles, who refuse the way a society shares out power and authority”. (Hallward 2003:
192). It is, Rancière maintains, the voice of “floating subjects that deregulate all
“In the end everything in politics turns on the distribution of spaces. What are
these places? How do they function? Why are they there? Who can occupy them?
For me, political action always acts upon the social as the litigious distribution of
places and roles. It is always a matter of knowing who is qualified to say what a
Both police and politics are eminently spatial, revolve around spatiality and temporality.
As Rancière maintains:
changes a place’s destination. It makes visible what had no business being seen,
and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes
understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise” (Rancière 1998: 30).
“Politics acts on the police” (Rancière 1998: 33) and “… revolves around what is
seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent
to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time” (Rancière
2006: 13).
Proper politics then is about reconfiguring space; to produce spaces of enunciation and
speech which hitherto were only heard as noise: “The principle function of politics is the
configuration of its proper space. It is to disclose the world of its subjects and its
two worlds in one” (Rancière 2001: Thesis 8). Of course, a political sequence takes place
in the space of the police, by “rephrasing and restaging social issues, police problems and
so on”, it is the disruption of the police order (Rancière 2003c: 7). Space becomes
“political in that it … becomes an integral element of the interruption of the ‘natural’ (or,
encounter by those that have no part in that order. The political, in this account, is
signaled by this encounter as a moment of interruption, and not by the mere presence of
Of course, “… the police and politics are enmeshed. In other words, the spaces of politics
are enmeshed with the space of the police. If politics puts the police ordering of space to
an egalitarian test, then politics is possible not despite the police, but because of it.
‘Politics acts on the police’, Rancière (1998: 33) writes, “[i]t acts in the places and with
the words that are common to both, even if it means reshaping those places and changing
the status of those words.” Politics proper acts on the police space, from the police space,
and through the police space. It, however, acts not in the police space, but in between
spaces that are not determined by the police, that have no place in the police space.
where parties, parts, or lack of any parts have been defined” (Rancière 1998: 30). These
in-between spaces are the “intervals of subjectification: intervals constructed between
democratic politics from the places of public encounter; it sanitizes spaces by placing
discontent outside the police order and locating it in its proper space – suspended and
silenced. Proper democracy, in contrast, is “the symbolic institution of the political in the
form of the power of those who are not entitled to exercise power – a rupture in the order
of legitimacy and domination. Democracy is the paradoxical power of those who do not
count: the count of the ‘unaccounted for’” (Rancière 2000b: 124). The consensual
techno-managerial urbanity “is thus not another manner of exercising democracy … [It]
is the negation of democratic basis for politics: it desires to have well-identifiable groups
flourishes with the multiplication of differences and identities … [T]he larger the number
of groups and identities that need to be taken into account in society, the greater the need
for arbitration. The ‘one’ of consensus nourishes itself with the multiple” (Rancière
“[T]he political act (intervention) proper is not simply something that works well
within the framework of existing relations, but something that changes the very
framework that determines how things work …. [A]uthentic politics … is the art
of the impossible – it changes the very parameters of what is considered ‘possible’
A genuine politics, therefore, is “the moment in which a particular demand is not simply
part of the negotiation of interests but aims at something more, and starts to function as
the metaphoric condensation of the global restructuring of the entire social space” (Žižek
1999b: 208). It is about the recognition of conflict as constitutive of the social condition,
and the naming of the urban spaces that can become. It is literally about demanding the
impossible, making the impossible happen. The political becomes the space of litigation
(Žižek 1998), the space for those who are not-All, who are uncounted and unnamed,
disagree with the part assigned by the ‘police’ (symbolic, social and state) order. As
Diken and Laustsen (2004: 9) put it: “[p]olitics in this sense is the ability to debate,
question and renew the fundament on which political struggle unfolds, the ability to
radically criticise a given order and to fight for a new and better one. In a nutshell, then,
interruptions, fractures, irregular and local, through with egalitarian logic comes and
divides the police community from itself. It is a community of worlds in community that
worlds …. Between several names, several identities, several statuses” (Rancière 1998:
137-138). Rancière’s notion of the political is characterised in terms of division, conflict,
and polemic (Valentine 2005: 46). Therefore, “democracy always works against the
The concern of democracy is not with the formulation of agreement or the preservation of
order but with the invention of new and hitherto unauthorised modes of disaggregation,
disagreement and disorder” (Hallward 2005: 34-35). The new urban governmentality in
its populist post-political guise is the antithesis of democracy, and contributes to a further
hollowing out of what for Rancière and others constitute the very horizon of egalitarian
Therefore, as Badiou (2005a) argues, a new radical politics must revolve around the
construction of great new fictions that create real possibilities for constructing different
urban futures. To the extent that the current post-political condition, which combines
dystopian urban visions with a hegemonic consensual neo-liberal view of social ordering,
constitutes one particular fiction (one that in fact forecloses dissent, conflict, and the
possibility of a different future), there is an urgent need for different stories and fictions
that can be mobilized for realization. This requires foregrounding and naming different
urban futures, making the new and impossible enter the realm of politics and of
democracy, and recognizing conflict, difference, and struggle over the naming and
trajectories of these futures. Urban conflict, therefore, should not be subsumed under the
unfolds hand in glove with increasing local differentiations, inequalities and combined
but uneven development. Within the tensions, inconsistencies and exclusions forged
cracks, fissures, gaps, and ‘vacant’ spaces arise (Swyngedouw 2000); spaces that,
although an integral part of the ‘police’ order, of the existing state of the situation, are
simultaneously outside of it. These fissures, cracks, and ‘free’ spaces form ‘quilting’
points, nodes for experimentation with new urban possibilities. It is indeed precisely in
these in-between spaces -- the fragments left unoccupied by the ‘glocal’ urban police
order that regulates, assigns, and distributes -- that all manner of new urban social and
cultural practices emergence; where new forms of urbanity come to life (Swyngedouw
and Kaika 2003). While transnational capital flows impose their totalising logic on the
city and on urban polic(y)ing, the contours of and possibilities for a new and more
humane urban form and live germinate in these urban ‘free’ spaces. These are the sort of
spaces where alternative forms of living, working, and expressing are experimented with,
where new forms of social and political action are staged, where affective economies are
reworked, and creative living is not measured by the rise of the stock market and pension
fund indices. Ed Soja (1996) defines these spaces as Thirdspace, the living in-between
space that emerges through perception and imagination; a space that is simultaneously
real and imagined, material and metaphorical, an ordered and disordered space. Of
course, for the elites, such ‘thirdspaces’, spaces of unchecked and unregulated
disintegration and moral decay; excesses that need containment or from which one flees
(Baeten 2001). But of course, it is exactly these spaces where hope, new promises,
freedom and desires are actively lived. In these cracks, corners, and fissures of the
contemporary fragmented networked city looms and ferments a new hybrid conglomerate
disempowerment. These are the radical margins that are an essential part of twenty-first
century democratic urbanity. And it is exactly these practices that urgently require
attention, nurturing, recognition, and valorisation. They demand their own space; they
require the creation of their own material and cultural landscapes, their own emblematic
geographies. These are the spaces were the post-political condition is questioned and
the map of what can be thought, what can be named and perceived, and therefore also of
what is possible” (Rancière, in Lévi et al. 2007: 4). They contribute to the making of
consequently, the possible and doable. Their realization requires considerable urban and
identities, the rhizomatic meanderings of meanings, practices, and lives. It also demands
the development of visionary urban programs by and for these new ‘glocal’ citizens of
the polis, those that are simultaneously decidedly local and shamelessly global; those that
too often are excluded from the post-political and post-democratic consensus that governs
our contemporary cities. This re-centring of the polis as the space of dissensus and
disagreement, with its places for enunciating the different and the staging of the voices of
those unheard or unnoticed, is exactly the site from where proper urban democratic
politics emerge.
Bibliography