Introduction

This chapter introduces urban ethics as a field of interdisciplinary study and a set of analytical approaches. It delineates the main questions addressed in the volume, sketching out the ways in which research on urban ethics can consider and connect aspects of urban life and conflict in new ways. In doing so, the authors foreground the urban-ethical dimensions of social creativity, techniques of governance, moral economies and subjecthood, starting with a focus on the current conjuncture and then “zooming out” to achieve a wider historical view. The chapter primarily uses examples drawn from field research on Munich (“welcome culture,” housing questions) and Moscow (protest movements). It also gives an overview of the following sections and the connections between them, highlighting the ways in which the aforementioned perspectives help us better understand historical and sociocultural diversity of senses of ethical urbanism, the role of architecture and other socio-material arrangements, and the ethical framework and dimension of urban social/protest movements. This also includes an introduction to some of the implicit and explicit diagnostic and theoretical differences/controversies within the following sections.