ABSTRACT
The aim of urban political analysis was to understand the city in terms of struggles over development, struggles that might be mediated by the state, but that were always over-determined by the requirements of capital and people’s capacities for resistance to it. Many radical critics have turned to cultural analysis because it seems to offer a way of revealing aspects of politics that might be concealed by a strict focus on political economy. The relevant territories for politics are different from the ones determined by the boundaries for states. Self-government either in the economic, or political, or the cultural realm is under the circumstances reduced to a mere figure of speech, or, at best, is subject to the unstable equilibrium of pressure groups. The market order has emerged in large degree from interactions at the margins of existing political jurisdictions, where people have to work out for themselves the terms of peaceful interaction.
