Territoriality, politics and the ‘urban’

While a central category in the human sciences, including political geography, the urban is for the most part a curiously unexamined one. Using the very different arguments of Saunders and Harvey as its point of departure this paper examines the defensibility of a specifically urban politics. Saunders had argued against and Harvey in favor. Harvey’s approach has the merit of being anchored by a carefully thought out understanding of the relation between society and space. But wile this means, qua Saunders, that politics is necessarily about space, it does not mean that there is a necessarily urban politics. Interests in space are rarely in the specifically urban. Some may find it convenient to elaborate arguments that assume that there is something called the urban and that it corresponds to the causally significant. In some national contexts, like the US, these arguments may appear more plausible than elsewhere. But for the most part the structures of socio-spatial relations in which people and firms have interests can only be reduced to the urban with difficulty.