Abstract
AbstractThis article analyses the creation of a normative framework for the democratic city during the regime change in Portugal in 1975—the answers that were given to the question, ‘What should a city be like in a democratic regime?’ While I critically discuss post‐democracy and its use of post‐foundational contributions, I review the post‐revolution Portuguese constitutional debate, contending that the call for democratization brought by urban popular organizations was answered with a political compromise that exchanged expectations of a participatory city for a commitment to a social rights city, enhanced with a promise of homeownership for urban popular segments. In light of this, in this article I question post‐democratic proposals, arguing that when this approach implicitly establishes equivalence between democracy and ‘the political’, it has difficulties in interpreting how the grammar of democracy is ‘organized’ in conflictual and contingent processes of democratic institutionalization. As an alternative, I contend that a critical debate concerning democracy and the urban must address how democratic expectations of emancipation have been translated into institutions and rights through interwoven and situated processes of politicization and depoliticization that allow both politicization of the urban and the production of consent.
Highlights
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In the work of Claude Lefort, we find a conceptual analysis of the emergence of modern politics as a radical immanence turn in the legitimation of power – the democratic invention
According to Lefort, modernity institutes the legitimacy of power as an empty space that can only be filled by “society”, and it is this indeterminable concept of society that institutes a new kind of radical political conflict: it is always possible and legitimate to challenge power because political institutional arrangements are not founded on absolute principles, but are dependent on a contingent and historical reading of “what/who” constitutes society (Lefort, 1986; Poltier, 1997)
Summary
In the work of Claude Lefort, we find a conceptual analysis of the emergence of modern politics as a radical immanence turn in the legitimation of power – the democratic invention. According to Lefort, modernity institutes the legitimacy of power as an empty space that can only be filled by “society”, and it is this indeterminable concept of society that institutes a new kind of radical political conflict: it is always possible and legitimate to challenge power because political institutional arrangements are not founded on absolute principles, but are dependent on a contingent and historical reading of “what/who” constitutes society (Lefort, 1986; Poltier, 1997) Within this rupture with traditional legitimacy (after the breach of the French Revolution), the grammar of popular sovereignty, freedom and equality emerges. Democracy as symbolic space represents a potentia to challenge political order, and operates as a legitimization device for the institutionalization of a democratic regime, within certain limits Ciaramelli suggests these limits establish an ever-present tension between expectations of emancipation and the legitimacy of institutional arrangements – allowing both conflict and consent. My aim is to investigate this interplay, as Darling (2014) puts it, between the politicization and depoliticization of the urban question during the Portuguese democratic transition, and what it meant for a normative formulation of a democratic city
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