Abstract

In this article I make three inter-related arguments. First, I argue that contemporary critical political theory should re-assert the city as a privileged site of political action. Second, I suggest that in the process of such a re-assertion, the dominant “open” conception of the city, characteristic of much critical urban studies, should be reworked in order to be properly “political”; that is, framed within an agonistic, Left-Schmittian model of politics. Finally, I claim that one way to “politicize” the city in this manner is to think of it as a site of “common property”.