Critical Urban Studies: New Directions

2. Critical Perspectives on the City: Constructivist, Interpretive Analysis of Urban Politics

2 Critical Perspectives on the City Constructivist, Interpretive Analysis of Urban Politics Mara S. Sidney Urban politics research usually lacks discussion of ontology and epistemology , but most research implicitly adopts a positivist understanding of social science. Despite the critical stance against the “positivist hegemony” taken by some urbanists (see Wyly Chapter 1, this volume), there remains implicit positivist orthodoxy in much urban politics research. Comparative and singlecase studies, large-N analyses, and survey research—the dominant methods in the field—all embrace positivism, either in a strong or, more commonly, weak form. In this chapter, I argue for return to discussions of ontology and epistemology in general, and for the explicit development of constructivist and interpretive approaches in urban politics research. These theoretical and methodological approaches, which stand in opposition to positivism, are well developed in the study of international relations and public policy, and have proved useful in examining inequalities and power disparities in political life, but are used infrequently to study urban politics. Bringing constructivism squarely into the study of urban politics would help to fill important gaps that mark our research on urban inequality, would expand the range of research methods used, and would build on, and contribute to, the tradition of critical inquiry in urban studies. Critiques of Urban Politics Research In recent years, political scientists who study urban politics have been concerned about what they see as a crisis in the status of the subfield within the larger discipline. Various trends and milestones precipitated the collective 23 24 Mara S. Sidney malaise, including the declining membership of the Urban Politics section of the American Political Science Association, and the reportedly small number of young scholars who are entering the field, partly in response to warnings from mentors about bleak prospects for jobs if they take up urban studies. Another impetus for collective reflection was the publication of a series of essays about the state of the field for the 40th anniversary volume of the Urban Affairs Review (UAR; see Barnes 2005; Fainstein 2005a; Hero 2005; Judd 2005; Pierre 2005; Rae 2006; Sellers 2005; Stone 2005). Additionally, the 40th anniversaries of the late 1960s-era social unrest in many U.S. cities prompted reflections about what has and has not changed in cities, urban politics, and urban scholarship itself. Scholars have raised multiple questions, and offered various answers (see chapters in this volume by Davies, Magnusson, and Imbroscio). For example, might the label urban politics reflect an outdated description of the field, or needlessly bound its scholars, given that the scale and scope of study seems more often to be metropolitan or regional, with layers of overlapping government and nongovernment institutions? Is the problem related to a lack of shared large data sets that would enable scholars to replicate and extend research, allowing for hypothesis testing and theory refinement such as is possible in the subfield of political behavior at the national scale? Is the problem urban scholars—that is, are they too narrowly focused, insular, or even backward? Are they failing to raise critical questions and to produce theoretically interesting and sophisticated work that the larger discipline of political science would recognize? Some of the problems, concerns, and questions are institutional, having to do with the organization of disciplinary academic life; others are conceptual and substantive, having to do with the subject of study and the advancement of knowledge. Clearly, these dimensions are connected and can be mutually reinforcing, such that there is a “sociology of knowledge” question at stake about the norms, values, and incentives that prevail in contemporary political science. I raise this point because other disciplines in which urban studies occur, such as sociology, geography, and planning, do not seem to be experiencing a similar “crisis.” This is an important issue on which to reflect when assessing the crisis of urban studies in political science, but it is beyond the scope of this chapter. This chapter starts from the premises of two essays recently published in UAR, which are also discussed by Imbroscio (Chapter 6, this volume). In “Everything is Always Going to Hell: Urban Scholars as End-Times Prophets,” Judd (2005) ties the marginality of the urban subfield to its insularity, and to its hostility to new ideas and theoretical approaches that would challenge the field’s conventional wisdom. He describes urban scholars as stuck in time 25 Critical Perspectives on the City and overly ideological, wedded to an...