A "Mittelpolitan" Urban Response to Climate Change

• In Event: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Thought & Politics and History
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Thought

Abstract

In recent years, many social and political thinkers have turned to the city, rather than the sovereign state, to address global problems. No thinker did more in this regard that Benjamin Barber; in his last two books, If Mayors Ruled the World and Cool Cities, he made the case that not only was urban governance the key for realizing a functional form of participatory democracy in the context of globalization and challenges to sovereignty, but that the politics of cities have the best chance of producing the policies of sustainability needed to combat climate change.

That cities are inextricably connected to the fight against global warming is something no serious student of the subject can deny. The outputs the cities of the world–including all the industries, technologies, infrastructure, and consumer habits which cities both presume and propagate–are the primary driver of CO2 levels around the planet. Similarly, the density of the cities of the world demonstrate or at least suggest patterns of life–walkability, public transportation, energy efficiencies, etc.–that would have to be a major component of any attempt to reverse global warming trends. The question, though, is whether cities, and in particular the sort of cities which Barber described and whose political leaders have been major voices in the climate change struggle, are the best site for democratically realizing this potential.

In this paper, I explore the insights of Barber’s thesis, but also present a major criticism of it. The key to that criticism involves an argument on behalf of an as yet non-existent category in urban studies: what I call “mittelpolitanism.” In Western political discourse, “the City” is generally conceived of as a metropolitan polity of significant size, characterized by a number of well-established (generally liberal) tropes: racial and religious diversity, economic creativity and opportunity, the relative anonymity of residents, etc. This conceptual arena–the details of which always vary, but the boundaries of which are usually uncontested–is contrasted with “the Village,” which is usually identified with its own (mostly republican) tropes: a more rural community, more connected to agrarian economies, lacking in racial and religious diversity, poorer, higher levels of social trust between its members, etc. These two conceptions can be aligned, crudely but with some accuracy, with the Census categories of “metropolitan” and “micropolitan,” the major city and the small town. What is needed is some way organize theoretical arguments around the small-to-mid-sized city, the city in the middle, the cities whose size and wealth make them legitimate regional centers, but by no means enable them to complete with the metropolitan agglomerations which dominate the economy and captivate global thinkers. Hence, “mittelpolitanism.”

These “mittelpolitan” places, when recognized as distinct (which isn’t often), are usually sidelined as irrelevant insofar as the future of cities are concerned--since they simply aren’t growing, or at least not growing in the way America’s coastal cities are--or instead seen as a threat to developing responses to global problems, since mid-sized cities are generally found in more conservative areas and are often closely associated with a xenophobic populism. It is my argument that these cities, despite their reputation (one perhaps justified by electoral results, but limited in explanatory power all the same), are in fact essential to developing sustainable and democratic legitimate approaches to fighting global warming. Barber’s focus on the largest and wealthiest cities of the world, despite the surface logic to it, fails to engage the growth machine logic which cities of a certain size are almost invariably captured by. To resist this logic, which forces large cities in climate-change-contributing patterns even while they may be pursuing policies in opposition to such, one must rethink urban growth entirely, and work towards an vision of non-liberal urbanism (what one might call a “left conservative,” “left republican,” or “left populist” urbanism). The practical details of such an urbanism have, I believe, the greatest chance of being worked out in someplace other than the global cities of the world, despite their surfeit of resources. In other words, a successful urban anti-climate change agenda must be, in my view, a “mittelpolitan” one. This paper aims to make that case.

Author

• Russell Arben Fox, Friends University