Introduction

Now that cities congregate the majority of human beings, it is urgent to investigate the manner in which the good life is negotiated in them. This introduction to the volume sketches a framework to examine urban ethical practices and discourses. At a time of environmental catastrophe and sociocultural tensions, the various scales of negotiation – between individuals, regarding materialities and other life forms, or among institutions – configure arenas that shape novel interactive and material landscapes. The emphasis of the text is to promote a research agenda for more scrutiny over such ethics-in-practice and -in-discourse. The deliberations and contestations in question are over individual lives in the city, collective urban life, issues regarding the urban condition, as well as about the urban itself. Cities are, therefore, laboratories of sociality where dwellers and traversers act, interact with one another or avoid each other. Each of these and other deeds shapes not only the current circumstances of the urban, but also, crucially, the future of cities.