We live in an urban age. It is well known that urbanization is changing landscapes built
environments social infrastructures and everyday lives across the globe. But urbanization is
also changing the ways we understand and practise politics. What implications does this have
for democracy? This incisive book argues that urbanization undermines the established
certainties of nation-state politics and calls for a profound rethinking of democracy. A novel
way of seeing democracy like a city is presented shifting scholarly and activist perspectives
from institutions to practices from jurisdictional scales to spaces of urban collective life
and from fixed communities to emergent political subjects. Through a discussion of examples
from around the world the book shows that distinctly urban forms of collective self rule are
already apparent. The authors reclaim the 'city' as a democratic idea in a context of
urbanization seeing it as instrumental to relocating democracy in the everyday lives of
urbanites. Original and hopeful How Cities Can Transform Democracy compels the reader to
abandon conventional understandings of democracy and embrace new vocabularies and practices of
democratic action in the struggles for our urban future.
