Urban Ethics: Conflicts Over the Good and Proper Life in Cities

by Moritz Ege (Editor), Johannes Moser (Editor)

Overview

This book delves into the ethical dimension of urban life: how should one live in the city? What constitutes a ‘good’ life under urban condition? Whose gets to live a ‘good’ life, and whose ideas of morality, propriety and ‘good’ prevail? What is the connection between the ‘good’ and the ‘just’ in urban life?

Rather than philosophizing the ‘good’ and proper life in cities, the book considers what happens when urban conflicts and urban futures are carried out as conflicts over the good and proper life in cities. It offers an understanding of how ethical discourses, ideals and values are harmonized with material interests of different groups, taking up cases studies about environmental protection, co-housing schemes, political protest, heritage preservation, participatory planning, collaborative art production, and other topics from different eras and parts of the globe. This book offers multidisciplinary insights, ethnographic research and conceptual tools and resources to explore and better understand such conflicts. It questions the ways in which urban ethics draw on tacit moral economies of urban life and the ways in which such moral economies become explicit, political and programmatic.

Chapters 1 and 11 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781000175721
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	10/05/2020
Series:	Routledge Studies in Urbanism and the City
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Moritz Ege is Professor of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at the University of Göttingen with a research focus on popular culture studies, urban ethnography, conjunctural analysis, and historical anthropology.

Johannes Moser is chair of European Ethnology and Cultural Analysis at Munich University. His research interests include urban anthropology, everyday culture and community studies.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Configurations of Ethics and the Urban - Concepts and Theories 1. Introduction: Urban Ethics – Conflicts over the Good and Proper Life in Cities 2. The Habitat of the Subject: Exploring New Forms of the Ethical Imagination 3. The City as a Setting for Collaboration? Tracking the Multiple Scales of Urban Promises Part 2: Shifting Ethics of the Urban: Historical Case Studies 4. Mégapoles, Polyrhythmy, Porosity: Tracing Ideas of Mediterranean Urbanity in Western ScholarlyDdiscourse 5. Urbanity as an Ethic: Reflections on the Cities of the Arab World 6. The Fractious Stability of an Immoral Landscape: The Land Walls of Istanbul, 1910 to 1980 7. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Bucharest’s Urban Core as a Moral Playground 8. 1968 and Beyond. The Urban Struggle on Trial? Part 3: Building and Living Ethically – Conflicts over Housing and Architecture 9. Shaping Urban Ethics. The ‘Making-of’ a Collective Housing Project at Berlin’s River Spree 10. Commitment ‒ City ‒ Self. Ethical Self-formations in Munich’s Young Housing Cooperatives 11. Antagonisms and Solidarities in Housing Movements in Bucharest and Budapest 12. Ethical Contestation in Architecture for a Creative Singapore Part 4: Environmental Justice, Ethics of Care and the Spectacle of Urban Sustainability 13. Reimagining Urban Environmentalisms: A Comparative Framework 14. Handling Waste through Consensus, Care and Community in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand Part 5: Protest between Ethics and Politics: Collective Agents of Urban Change 15. Keep the City Clean. The Ambivalent Ethics of Ownership in Urban Routine and Non-Violent Protest in Moscow 16. Guardians of Torfjanka Park: The Fight for "Our Moscow" and the Understanding of "Ordinary People" in the Current Conjuncture 17. "They are stealing the state": Commoning and the Gilets Jaunes in France