Urban Ethics
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Urban Ethics 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? Who 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 under- standing of how ethical discourses, ideals and values are harmonized with material interests of different groups, taking up cases studies about environ- mental protection, co- h ousing schemes, political protest, heritage preserva- tion, participatory planning, collaborative art production, and other topics from different eras and parts of the globe. This book offers multidiscipli- nary 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. Moritz Ege is Professor of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at the University of Göttingen with a research focus on popular culture stud- ies, 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. Routledge Studies in Urbanism and the City Ethnic Spatial Segregation in European Cities Hans Skifter Andersen Big Data, Code and the Discrete City Shaping Public Realms Silvio Carta Neighbourhood Planning Place, Space and Politics Janet Banfield Urban Neighbourhood Formations Boundaries, Narrations and Intimacies Edited by Hilal Alkan and Nazan Maksudyan Urban Ethics Conflicts Over the Good and Proper Life in Cities Moritz Ege and Johannes Moser Planning and Managing Smaller Events Downsizing the Urban Spectacle Edited by Stefano Di Vita and Mark Wilson Mega- Events, City and Power Nelma Gusmão de Oliveira For more information about this series, please visit www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Urbanism-and-the-City/book-series/R SUC Urban Ethics Conflicts Over the Good and Proper Life in Cities Moritz Ege and Johannes Moser LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa Business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Moritz Ege and Johannes Moser; individual chapters, the contributors The rights of Moritz Ege and Johannes Moser to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. With the exception of Chapter 11, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Chapter 11 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution- Non Commercial- No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing- in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978- 0-367- 33842-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978- 0-429- 32231-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra Contents List of figures ix List of contributors xi PART I Configurations of ethics and the urban – concepts and theories 1 1 Introduction: urban ethics – conflicts over the good and proper life in cities 3 MORITZ EGE AND JOHANNES MOSER 2 The habitat of the subject: exploring new forms of the ethical imagination 28 HENRIETTA L. MOORE 3 The city as a setting for collaboration? Tracking the multiple scales of urban promises 47 ALEXA FÄRBER PART II Shifting ethics of the urban: historical case studies 63 4 Mégapoles, polyrhythmy, porosity: tracing ideas of Mediterranean urbanity in western scholarly discourse 65 MARTIN BAUMEISTER 5 Urbanity as an ethic: reflections on the cities of the Arab world 80 NORA LAFI vi Contents 6 The fractious stability of an immoral landscape: the land walls of Istanbul, 1910 to 1980 96 JULIA STRUTZ AND CHRISTOPH K. NEUMANN 7 “The good, the bad and the ugly”: bucharest’s urban core as a moral playground 112 DANIEL HABIT 8 1968 and beyond: the urban struggle on trial? 130 ISABELLE DOUCET IN CONVERSATION WITH MAURICE CULOT PART III Building and living ethically – conflicts over housing and architecture 145 9 Shaping urban ethics: the “making- of” a collective housing project at Berlin’s river Spree 147 MAX OTT 10 Commitment ‒ city ‒ self: ethical self-formations in Munich’s young housing cooperatives 164 LAURA GOZZER 11 Antagonisms and solidarities in housing movements in Bucharest and Budapest 180 IOANA FLOREA, AGNES GAGYI AND KERSTIN JACOBSSON 12 Ethical contestation in architecture for a creative Singapore 196 MICHAELA BUSENKELL PART IV Environmental justice, ethics of care and the spectacle of urban sustainability 213 13 Reimagining urban environmentalisms: A comparative framework 215 JULIE SZE 14 Handling waste through consensus, care and community in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand 226 JEANNINE- MADELEINE FISCHER Contents vii PART V Protest between ethics and politics: collective agents of urban change 241 15 Keep the city clean: the ambivalent ethics of ownership in urban routine and non- violent protest in Moscow 243 ALEXANDER BIKBOV 16 Guardians of Torfjanka Park: the fight for “our Moscow” and the understanding of “ordinary people” in the current conjuncture 261 OLGA REZNIKOVA 17 “They are stealing the state”: commoning and the Gilets Jaunes in France 277 IDA SUSSER Index 295 Figures 3.1 Scenes of the promise and the city 50 5.1 Ottoman translation of Ibn Khaldun’s Prolegomena 84 5.2 Ottoman translation of “Topographie and Description of Egypt” by Taki ad-Din Ahmed ibn ʿAli ibn ʿAbd el-Kadir, also known as Makrîzî 90 7.1 Abandoned places vs. modernization and gentrification in the Old Town 119 7.2 Poor building fabric in the Old Town 120 7.3 Romanian folklorism and Orthodox events in the Old Court 122 9.1 The buildings of the housing cooperative Spreefeld 150 9.2 Inside an option space 157 9.3 The spatial arrangements between the cooperative buildings 158 12.1 Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay 198 12.2 Shading shell of the Esplanade 206 12.3 Competition model (DPA) 208 12.4 Section – Esplanade 209 14.1 Communal garbage sorting 233 15.1 Public hearing in Moscow 244 15.2 Protective bar on entrance door 249 15.3 Queue for WWII victory celebrations 253 15.4 Okkupai camp 255 16.1 Confrontation between the “guardians of the park” and orthodox nationalists 263 16.2 Watch shifts in front of the fence 264 16.3 Gathering against the construction of the church 270 17.1 Gilets Jaunes protest 280 Contributors Martin Baumeister has been the director of the German Historical Insti- tute in Rome since 2012. From 2003 until 2017, he held the chair in Con- temporary European History at the LMU Munich. His current research interests include the history of contemporary Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, and urban history. Among his recent publications: Cit- ies Contested: Urban Politics, Heritage and Social Movements in Italy and West Germany in the 1970s (co-e d. with Bruno Bonomo and Dieter Schott, Campus 2017). Alexander Bikbov is a sociologist and public intellectual. He is currently a visiting professor at the EHESS, Paris, and a former lecturer at Moscow State University. His primary fields of research are protest movements, sociology of knowledge, historical sociology of concepts and perception of inequalities. Recent publications: “Neo- traditionalist fits with neo- liberal shifts in Russian cultural policy” in L. Jonson/A. Erofeev (eds.): Russia – Art Resistance and the Conservative- Authoritarian Zeitgeist (Routledge 2017); and The Grammar of Order: A Historical Sociology of the Concepts That Change Our Reality (Moscow 2016). Michaela Busenkell is an architecture theorist, curator and publicist. Her re- search interests concern contemporary architecture in the context of so- cietal relations and transformations. She is currently working for Detail book editorial, an architecture publisher in Munich. Recent publication: “Singapore Puts On a New Face.” In: German Architecture Annual 2019, edited by Deutsches Architektur Museum Frankfurt. Isabelle Doucet is Professor of theory and history of architecture at Chalm- ers University of Technology, Sweden. Her research focuses on the rela- tionship between architecture, (urban) politics and social responsibility. Since joining Chalmers Isabelle initiated a research project centered on women architects after 1968. She is the author of The Practice Turn in Architecture. Brussels after 1968 (Ashgate 2015) and co- e ditor of “Resist Reclaim Speculate. Situated Perspectives on Architecture and the City” (Architectural Theory Review, 2018, with H. Frichot). xii Contributors Moritz Ege is Professor of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology at the University of Göttingen with a research focus on popular culture studies, urban ethnography, conjunctural analysis and historical anthro- pology. Publications include an article on urban ethics (with Dürr/Mo- ser/Neumann/Winder in City, Culture & Society 2020), “The Exhaustion of Merkelism: A Conjunctural Analysis” (New Formations 2019, with A.