Navigation auf zora.uzh.ch

Search ZORA

ZORA (Zurich Open Repository and Archive)

Urban ethics: Towards a research agenda on cities, ethics and normativity

Dürr, Eveline; Ege, Moritz; Moser, Johannes; Neumann, Christoph K; Winder, Gordon M (2020). Urban ethics: Towards a research agenda on cities, ethics and normativity. City, Culture and Society, 20:100313.

Abstract

To live in a city is to be confronted with difference, contingency and conflict, and with questions about how one should live one's life in the urban context. What is a ‘good’ life in the city? How does my ‘good’ life affect others and vice versa? Is the ‘good’ also that which is ‘right’ and ‘proper’? Or, perhaps, who should be made to live in accordance with specific values, how and why?

Urban dwellers do not encounter such questions in a realm of pure freedom. In contemporary cities, as elsewhere, the question how one should live often seems determined by norms and practicalities, by culture and authority, by one's access to resources, regulated by regimes and legal prescriptions, negotiated by power struggles that are both macro- and micro-political. Under such conditions questions of good life attain a cultural or political edge; they have an economic dimension, and they often concern legal matters. However, the question how one should live in the city will never be completely answered through culture, religion, politics, economics, or law alone. Negotiation through ethics and therefore a vocabulary of ethics become pivotal, we argue, when the logics of socio-economic relations, law or political conflict do not prevail. To speak of urban ethics is to point toward a dimension of normativity in cities that is constituted relationally and differentially. Urban ethics also denotes particular means with which people and institutions negotiate urban life. If urban researchers want to come to terms with the complexities of normativity in urban life, they need to address the fundamental aspects of urban ethics more explicitly.

In doing so, we also must take into account discourses on ethical urban life in recent conjunctures. Whereas the ethical dimension of the urban has been addressed through different vocabularies and practices that can be understood as forms of urban ethics in an analytical sense, we contend that over the last two decades, questions about urban life have increasingly been raised explicitly as ethical questions. These patterns of ethicization are part of a wider, in some ways problematic ethical turn that has been diagnosed in social science and humanities disciplines. In these recent conjunctures, to pose a question about urban life as a question of ethics is to envision debates about choices that individuals should make freely, on their own accord, because they are motivated by a desire to do what seems good and right – and, to some extent, urban. In this imaginary, ‘good’ urban subjects are universalist, post-cultural ethicists.

Urban research must address more directly how this rise of ethics talk leads to depoliticization and what that means in different settings. Ethical framings and concerns have been on the rise in diverse urban social fields (Amin, 2006; Mostafavi, 2013), for example, in architecture and urban planning. One signpost was the Venice architectural biennial in the year 2000 titled “Less Aesthetics, More Ethics”. This explicit demand for ethics – used here as a shorthand for good and responsible rather than merely profitable designs – represents an important aspect of practical urbanism, architecture, design and participatory art in city spaces (Bishop, 2012; Collier and Lakoff, 2005, Thompson, 2012, 2015). Discussions about living ethically in the city are also apparent in the area of ecological sustainability. Explicitly ethical initiatives target regular city dwellers and experts alike, focusing on the ways we are supposed to act with regard to the waste we produce, the energy we consume, or the traffic we cause. Ethical appeals for changing the lifestyles of urbanites – voluntarily, through bans and incentives, and through benignly authoritarian nudging (John, Smith, & Stoker, 2009) – have gained in importance in the context of global climate change, which is often presented as a consequence of accumulated individual consumption. In many academic disciplines researchers search for an environmentally ethical urbanism, while such programs’ urban-ethical frameworks have rarely been investigated.

In such settings, urban-ethical discourses and strategies are relatively easy to delineate. In everyday life, however, urban ethics have a much broader meaning that goes beyond these discursive forms with their rationalist, voluntaristic and individualist tendencies. We argue that the rationalist ethics discourse and the governmentality with which it is associated often obscure actual ethical antagonisms, complexity and subaltern critique.

In this article, we develop a research agenda on urban ethics to better understand the role of ethics in the conduct of everyday life in cities. Drawing on examples from our own research, we highlight how the ethical dimension of urban life can be analyzed without losing sight of materialist aspects. In order to carve out our argument, we first outline the main features of our research agenda, which we apply to a case study. We then scrutinize the urban studies literature and show how the relationship of urban life and ethics has been discussed so far: We include work on the anthropology of ethics, on morality in cities, and on social and environmental (in)justice and ethics, and we point out what is different from our approach. In the last sections, we review two ways of looking at urban ethics that we consider particularly promising – and challenging – for analysis because they highlight different aspects of ethical normativity: a focus on moral economies, which primarily refer to historical sedimentations of rights and responsibilities in moments of crisis, and a focus on social creativity, which stresses imagination and the future tense. Our conclusion describes the research agenda that is emerging from our interdisciplinary research.

Additional indexing

Item Type:Journal Article, refereed, original work
Communities & Collections:06 Faculty of Arts > Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies
Dewey Decimal Classification:790 Sports, games & entertainment
390 Customs, etiquette & folklore
300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology
Scopus Subject Areas:Social Sciences & Humanities > General Social Sciences
Social Sciences & Humanities > Urban Studies
Social Sciences & Humanities > Economics, Econometrics and Finance (miscellaneous)
Language:English
Date:March 2020
Deposited On:15 Feb 2023 15:31
Last Modified:24 Sep 2024 03:31
Publisher:Elsevier
ISSN:1877-9166
OA Status:Hybrid
Free access at:Publisher DOI. An embargo period may apply.
Publisher DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2019.100313
Download PDF  'Urban ethics: Towards a research agenda on cities, ethics and normativity'.
Preview
  • Content: Published Version
  • Language: English
  • Licence: Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Metadata Export

Statistics

Citations

Dimensions.ai Metrics

Altmetrics

Downloads

44 downloads since deposited on 15 Feb 2023
30 downloads since 12 months
Detailed statistics

Authors, Affiliations, Collaborations

Similar Publications