1st Edition

Urban Ethics Conflicts Over the Good and Proper Life in Cities

Edited By Moritz Ege, Johannes Moser Copyright 2021
    320 Pages 22 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    320 Pages 22 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    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.

    Part 1: Configurations of Ethics and the Urban - Concepts and Theories

    1. Introduction: Urban Ethics – Conflicts over the Good and Proper Life in Cities
    Moritz Ege and Johannes Moser

    2. The Habitat of the Subject: Exploring New Forms of the Ethical Imagination
    Henrietta Moore

    3. The City as a Setting for Collaboration? Tracking the Multiple Scales of Urban Promises
    Alexa Färber

    Part 2: Shifting Ethics of the Urban: Historical Case Studies

    4. Mégapoles, Polyrhythmy, Porosity: Tracing Ideas of Mediterranean Urbanity in Western ScholarlyDdiscourse
    Martin Baumeister

    5. Urbanity as an Ethic: Reflections on the Cities of the Arab World
    Nora Lafi

    6. The Fractious Stability of an Immoral Landscape: The Land Walls of Istanbul, 1910 to 1980
    Julia Strutz & Christoph Neumann

    7. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Bucharest’s Urban Core as a Moral Playground
    Daniel Habit

    8. 1968 and Beyond. The Urban Struggle on Trial?
    Isabelle Doucet

    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
    Max Ott

    10. Commitment ‒ City ‒ Self. Ethical Self-formations in Munich’s Young Housing Cooperatives
    Laura Gozzer

    11. Antagonisms and Solidarities in Housing Movements in Bucharest and Budapest
    Ioana Florea, Agnes Gagyi, Kerstin Jacobsson

    12. Ethical Contestation in Architecture for a Creative Singapore
    Michaela Busenkell

    Part 4: Environmental Justice, Ethics of Care and the Spectacle of Urban Sustainability

    13. Reimagining Urban Environmentalisms: A Comparative Framework
    Julie Sze

    14. Handling Waste through Consensus, Care and Community in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand
    Jeannine-Madeleine Fischer

    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
    Alexander Bikbov

    16. Guardians of Torfjanka Park: The Fight for "Our Moscow" and the Understanding of "Ordinary People" in the Current Conjuncture
    Olga Reznikova

    17. "They are stealing the state": Commoning and the Gilets Jaunes in France
    Ida Susser

    Biography

    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.