The Political Economy of Home: Settlement, Civil Society and the (Post-)Global Eco-City

Dear Colleagues,

Global civilization is in trouble. Climate change, prospective resource shortages, degrading ecosystems, and crashing biodiversity combine with the ‘clash of civilizations’, nuclear proliferation, failing states, newly contending Asian superpowers, and disorderly mass migration. For the last two centuries, urbanization has been tied, for the most part, to capitalist modernization. Modern cities have been inextricably linked to dynamics of technical innovation, individualization, rationalization, and nation-state formation. The urban landscape has been shaped by processes of rational planning and architecture, in which technical expertise shaped by the agendas of corporations, government departments, and universities has given form to an Enlightenment commitment to rational design and top–down problem solving.

In this process, following Hayek (1944; 1962), at least when in power, the political right has prioritized the capacity of markets to process information across ever wider and more complex global economic space. In the era of globalization, the capitalist city (Harvey 1985; Quilley 2000) has been shaped by large scale commercial and industrial infrastructure, and regeneration projects defined by an uncritical acceptance of a kind of hyper-nodal, capitalist topography that is largely indifferent to the social and ecological peculiarities of particular places. More recently, populist movements have seen a more explicit rejection of globalization, hostility to mass migration, and the nationalist re-assertion of the state as a ‘natural’ container for distinctive national societies. The relation between these ‘globalist’ and ‘nationalist’ aspects of the political right is complex but reflects, in part, the balance of economic as opposed to societal/cultural concerns. To some extent, it originates in the difference between the laissez faire of nineteenth century market liberalism (hence ‘neo-liberalism’) on the one hand and Burkean conservatism, with its emphasis on social cohesion and the prepolitical, precognitive we-identity that is a precondition for market society, on the other.

On the political left, by contrast, there has been a movement in the opposite direction. Initially, the default position for the labor movement was to resist the logic of globalization and to defend the gains associated with the (national) post-war Keynesian welfare state (Quilley 2000). More recently, the emphasis has shifted to climate change, global governance, and the perceived need to accept and ameliorate mass migration. The focus for utopian rationalism and the unequivocally universal values has become a cultural internationalism that construes the global economy as a fait accompli and the focus for emerging supranational regulatory institutions. In this process, the parliamentary left has, in many Western countries, to some extent, lost touch with provincial, rust-belt, working class constituencies—a failure that in places such as Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, France, the UK, and the United States has been exploited by populist and nationalist parties.

Mainstream environmentalism has seen a similar shift. Until the 1980s, green politics was most often characterized by a Romantic, antimodern localism, animated by Malthusian intuitions about limits to growth. With the wider recognition of climate change as an existential threat and the professionalization of environmentalism, the project of sustainable development has come to be dominated by multidisciplinary scientific experts seeking to elaborate a Promethean strategy of ecological modernization—sustainable development, green growth, the eco-city, and most recently, the ‘green new deal’. From this perspective, the global scale of both problems and solutions is taken for granted. On the other hand, the propensity for small-scale localism provides a continuing patina to the grass roots culture of green activism, whether in the small-scale sustainability initiatives on university campuses, the counter-cultural activism of ‘permaculture’ or the networked localism of the Transition Towns movement (Quilley 2015). It is easier to celebrate backyard chickens, campaign against plastic straws or take on a local Nestlé bottling plant than to ask serious questions about the links between global consumer society and viability of a growth-based health-welfare-security regime (Quilley and Zywert 2019)

Although climate sceptics and nationalists on the right and radical greens and eco-socialists on the left agree on almost nothing else, there is a shared presumption that cities will increasingly be the focus of crisis and disorder. There is also a recognition that, however the existential problem of civilization is understood—climate change, societal breakdown, rapid technological change, war—the way in which we choose to build, govern, and regulate the growth of cities and the settlement of land will be a pivotal driver and expression of our collective choices. The manner in which settlements are understood will have an enormous impact on the viability and trajectory of such choices. Thus, for instance, architectural and functional design of buildings, neighborhoods and cities can be framed in various was: in terms of metabolism and the flow of energy and materials; in relation to ecological and social ‘common pool resources’; aesthetically as an expression of the long accretion of societal virtues in the built form; in cultural, religious, and ritual terms; as the embodiment of imagined (national? religious?) community; and with regard to past and future generations.

Rather than review the enormous technical commentary on the challenges of making 21st century cities more sustainable, this Special Issue will explore how the ongoing seismic shifts in the political–cultural landscape that are unsettling habitual constellation of right, left, green, and nationalist ideas are beginning to transform normative visions of the city, the suburbs, and the countryside. Contributions will engage in an extended reflection on the extent to which the ecological and social–economic disorder associated with globalization is undermining the habitual left–right spectrum and opening up new political tensions relating to issues including but not limited to:

• place-attachments: the 'somewheres' versus 'nowheres'—for instance in relation to Brexit and right-wing populism, or alternatively green commitments to bioregionalism;
• the extent to which universal rights should be tempered and tied to place- and community-specific obligations;
• the prospective re-nationalization, regionalization, and re-localization of economic life ;
• the re-emergence of place- and community-bound virtue ethics as a counterpoint to the claims of bloodless liberal universalism;
• the tension between the extended/nuclear family as a focus for integration and obligation on the one hand, and the accelerating society of individuals (buttressed by the state-market) on the other;
• secularism versus the re-emergence of both traditional and nontraditional forms of religion and ritual—and the possible re-enchantment of urban space and architecture as a necessary feature of any post-consumer society;
• Bioregionalism;
• Neo-medievalism and the re-feudalization of social relations and networks.

The idea is to relate these intellectual currents to emerging and future visions of urban, suburban and rural development – notions of 'the good city', the green-city, the humane city, the city-state, the bioregion. Possible intellectual points of departure that spring to mind are (in no particular order):

1. Christopher Alexander's The Pattern Language;
2. Virtue ethics and the Christian critiques of capitalism (Adrian Pabst and John Milbank's The Politics of Virtue; Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue and unofficial interpretations such as Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option);
3. Theology and economics: Mary Hirschfeld's Aquinas and the Market;
4. The Heideggarian concept of dwelling as interpreted by people like Tim Ingold in The Perception of Place;
5. Roger Scruton's take on Green Philosophy and conservatism and particularly the significance of beauty/aesthetics in relation to the question 'How should we build'?
6. Owen Barfield's intuitions as to how consciousness, perception and cognition have a history and change paradigmatically over time…and hence can we revive an enchanted world (‘final participation’) by rebuilding our townscapes and countryside in particular ways?
7. The economic anthropology of Karl Polanyi: How might the economy of the capitalist city be re-embedded? If self-regulating price setting markets are intrinsically corrosive of the natural order, how can they be contained? Is there a post-capitalist version of livelihood?
8. H.T. Odum’s energy hierarchy and societal complexity: Are there limits to high-energy-complexity individualism? Does long-term sustainability suggest limits to both the liberal vision of market society and the protective carapace of the interventionist welfare state?
9. Guilds, Friendly Societies, Txoko (Basque cooking clubs), city-states, market-towns: to what extent might relocalization or regionalization of economies see a new role for the ‘small platoons’ of civil society and the re-emergence of medieval and early-Modern forms of social regulation, care, and welfare?

References

1. Harvey, D. (1985). The urbanization of capital: Studies in the history and theory of capitalist urbanization. Oxford: Blackwell.
2. Quilley, S.; Zywert, K. Livelihood, Market and State: What does A Political Economy Predicated on the ‘Individual-in-Group-in-PLACE’ Actually Look Like? Sustainability 2019, 11, 4082.
3. Quilley, Stephen. (2011). Entropy, the anthroposphere and the ecology of civilization: An essay on the problem of 'liberalism in one village' in the long view.(Report). The Sociological Review, 59, 65.
4. Quilley, S. (2000). Manchester First: From Municipal Socialism to the Entrepreneurial City. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research,24(3), 601-615.
5. Quilley, S. (2015) ‘Resilience Through Relocalization: Ecocultures of Transition?’ in Böhm, S., Pervez Bharucha, Z., & Pretty, J. (2015). Ecocultures : Blueprints for sustainable communities. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge.

Assoc. Prof. Stephen Quilley
Guest Editor

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• eco-city
• virtue ethics
• settlement
• pattern language
• ritual space
• re-enchantment
• livelihood
• market-place
• dwelling
• re-embedding
• globalization
• localization
• energy and complexity
• resilience
• neo-medievalism