ABSTRACT
This chapter compares Marxism with anarchist thought, especially that of Emma Goldman, to describe the bird's-eye-view, systematic analysis of urban political economy. It emphasizes the value approaching the city as it is inhabited, with a recognition of its embodied diversity and the difference that makes. Critical urban theory is entangled in the same questions and struggles as the Left as a whole. Anarchist theory is proposed as a way into exploring oppression in more detail, in its lived, embodied world. Building on Kalyvas and expanding the extraordinary to include the range of political acts of the inhabited city, the chapter argues that these informal acts expose the citizenship gap and thus challenge the principles that constitute the polity in practice. The people cannot be represented by other people, even by mass mobilizations. The people can be represented, indeed constituted, by agreements, written and unwritten, that set out the principles of a polity.
