IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/urbstu/v43y2006i11p1921-1941.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Urban Democracy and the Local Trap

Author

Listed:
  • Mark Purcell

    (Department of Urban Design and Planning, University of Washington, 410 Gould Hall, Box 355740 Seattle, Washington, WA 98195-5740, USA., mpurcell@u.washington.edu)

Abstract

This paper argues against the local trap-the tendency to assume that the local scale is preferable to other scales. The local trap is an important problem in the recent explosion of research on urban democracy and citizenship. The paper highlights one strain of that literature, the work on 'the right to the city'. It is argued that the right to the city is highly susceptible to the local trap, although it is not inherently so. As we continue to search for innovative new ideas like the right to the city that can help to democratise cities, it is critical to think carefully and strategically about scale.

Suggested Citation

  • Mark Purcell, 2006. "Urban Democracy and the Local Trap," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 43(11), pages 1921-1941, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:43:y:2006:i:11:p:1921-1941
    DOI: 10.1080/00420980600897826
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/00420980600897826
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00420980600897826?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Neil Brenner, 1999. "Globalisation as Reterritorialisation: The Re-scaling of Urban Governance in the European Union," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 36(3), pages 431-451, March.
    2. Lawrence Pratchett, 2004. "Local Autonomy, Local Democracy and the 'New Localism'," Political Studies, Political Studies Association, vol. 52, pages 358-375, June.
    3. P M McGuirk, 2001. "Situating Communicative Planning Theory: Context, Power, and Knowledge," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 33(2), pages 195-217, February.
    4. Julie‐Anne Boudreau, 2003. "Questioning the use of ‘local democracy’ as a discursive strategy for political mobilization in Los Angeles, Montreal and Toronto," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 27(4), pages 793-810, December.
    5. Mark Purcell, 2003. "Citizenship and the right to the global city: reimagining the capitalist world order," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 27(3), pages 564-590, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Caroline Patsias & Anne Latendresse & Laurence Bherer, 2013. "Participatory Democracy, Decentralization and Local Governance: the Montreal Participatory Budget in the light of ‘Empowered Participatory Governance’," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 37(6), pages 2214-2230, November.
    2. Claire Bénit-Gbaffou & Obvious Katsaura, 2014. "Community Leadership and the Construction of Political Legitimacy: Unpacking Bourdieu's ‘Political Capital’ in Post-Apartheid Johannesburg," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(5), pages 1807-1832, September.
    3. Mike Hodson & Frank W. Geels & Andy McMeekin, 2017. "Reconfiguring Urban Sustainability Transitions, Analysing Multiplicity," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 9(2), pages 1-20, February.
    4. Óscar García Agustín & Martin Bak Jørgensen, 2019. "Solidarity Cities and Cosmopolitanism from Below: Barcelona as a Refugee City," Social Inclusion, Cogitatio Press, vol. 7(2), pages 198-207.
    5. Jean-Paul D. Addie & Roger Keil, 2015. "Real Existing Regionalism: The Region between Talk, Territory and Technology," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 39(2), pages 407-417, March.
    6. David J. Madden, 2014. "Neighborhood as Spatial Project: Making the Urban Order on the Downtown Brooklyn Waterfront," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(2), pages 471-497, March.
    7. Verlinghieri, Ersilia & Venturini, Federico, 2018. "Exploring the right to mobility through the 2013 mobilizations in Rio de Janeiro," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 67(C), pages 126-136.
    8. Megan Dixon, 2010. "Gazprom versus the Skyline: Spatial Displacement and Social Contention in St. Petersburg," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 34(1), pages 35-54, March.
    9. Pereverza, Kateryna & Pasichnyi, Oleksii & Kordas, Olga, 2019. "Modular participatory backcasting: A unifying framework for strategic planning in the heating sector," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 124(C), pages 123-134.
    10. Nihad El-Kayed & Ulrike Hamann, 2018. "Refugees’ Access to Housing and Residency in German Cities: Internal Border Regimes and Their Local Variations," Social Inclusion, Cogitatio Press, vol. 6(1), pages 135-146.
    11. Philipp Horn & Diana Mitlin & Jhono Bennett & Beth Chitekwe-Biti & Jack Makau, 2018. "Towards citywide participatory planning: emerging community-led practices in three African cities," Global Development Institute Working Paper Series 342018, GDI, The University of Manchester.
    12. Wendy Mendes, 2008. "Implementing Social and Environmental Policies in Cities: The Case of Food Policy in Vancouver, Canada," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(4), pages 942-967, December.
    13. Clive Barnett, 2014. "What Do Cities Have to Do with Democracy?," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(5), pages 1625-1643, September.
    14. Allen J. Scott & Michael Storper, 2015. "The Nature of Cities: The Scope and Limits of Urban Theory," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 39(1), pages 1-15, January.
    15. Lelo, Keti & Monni, Salvatore & Tomassi, Federico, 2019. "Socio-spatial inequalities and urban transformation. The case of Rome districts," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 68(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Marisol Garcia, 2006. "Citizenship Practices and Urban Governance in European Cities," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 43(4), pages 745-765, April.
    2. Jon Coaffee & Patsy Healey, 2003. "'My Voice: My Place': Tracking Transformations in Urban Governance," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 40(10), pages 1979-1999, September.
    3. Li Wang & Heng Chao & Guicai Li, 2019. "Diversification and Local Embeddedness: The Rescaling of National New Area Governance in Post-Reform China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(22), pages 1-22, November.
    4. Paul Routledge, 2010. "Introduction: Cities, Justice and Conflict," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 47(6), pages 1165-1177, May.
    5. Raitio, Kaisa, 2013. "Discursive institutionalist approach to conflict management analysis — The case of old-growth forest conflicts on state-owned land in Finland," Forest Policy and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(C), pages 97-103.
    6. Tsu Lung Chou & Yu Chun Lin, 2007. "Industrial Park Development across the Taiwan Strait," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 44(8), pages 1405-1425, July.
    7. Alex Afouxenidis, 2006. "Urban social movements in Southern European cities," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 10(3), pages 287-293, December.
    8. Andrew M. Wood, 2004. "Domesticating Urban Theory? US Concepts, British Cities and the Limits of Cross-national Applications," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 41(11), pages 2103-2118, October.
    9. Xue, Jin, 2014. "Is eco-village/urban village the future of a degrowth society? An urban planner's perspective," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 105(C), pages 130-138.
    10. Pengfei Ban & Wei Zhan & Qifeng Yuan & Xiaojian Li, 2021. "Delineating the Urban Areas of a Cross-Boundary City with Open-Access Data: Guangzhou–Foshan, South China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(5), pages 1-17, March.
    11. Francis Leo Collins & Wardlow Friesen, 2011. "Making the Most of Diversity? The Intercultural City Project and a Rescaled Version of Diversity in Auckland, New Zealand," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 48(14), pages 3067-3085, November.
    12. Kafui Attoh, 2017. "Public transportation and the idiocy of urban life," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 54(1), pages 196-213, January.
    13. John Friedmann, 2001. "Regional Development and Planning: The Story of a Collaboration," International Regional Science Review, , vol. 24(3), pages 386-395, July.
    14. Ella Schmidt, 2006. "Sustainable Community for Sustainable Development," Journal of Developing Societies, , vol. 22(4), pages 379-400, December.
    15. Feng, Rundong & Wang, Kaiyong, 2022. "The direct and lag effects of administrative division adjustment on urban expansion patterns in Chinese mega-urban agglomerations," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 112(C).
    16. Cairns, George & Wright, George & Fairbrother, Peter & Phillips, Richard, 2017. "‘Branching scenarios’ seeking articulated action for regional regeneration – A case study of limited success," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 124(C), pages 189-202.
    17. Carol Upadhya, 2017. "Amaravati and the New Andhra," Journal of South Asian Development, , vol. 12(2), pages 177-202, August.
    18. Jean-Paul D. Addie, 2009. "Constructing Neoliberal Urban Democracy in the American Inner-city," Local Economy, London South Bank University, vol. 24(6-7), pages 536-554, September.
    19. Sandra Breux & Jean‐Pierre Collin & Emmanuel Négrier, 2007. "Political Rescaling and Municipal Cultural Public Policies: A Comparison of France and Québec," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 31(1), pages 128-145, March.
    20. Philip Catney & John M Henneberry, 2016. "Public entrepreneurship and the politics of regeneration in multi-level governance," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 34(7), pages 1324-1343, November.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:43:y:2006:i:11:p:1921-1941. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/urbanstudiesjournal .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.