The Myth of Urban Politics

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Abstract
This paper contains a critical review of the concept of urban politics by means of an examination of three theoretical problems: the specificity of the term urban, the question of the local state, and the separation of the economic and the political in capitalism. Recent work on urban politics is seen to rely on untheorised notions of politics which rest on ahistoric and ethnocentric conceptions of the urban. The term the local state, it is argued, misleadingly conflates theoretical and empiricist approaches becoming therefore a slogan rather than the name of a theoretically coherent object of study. A different perspective is proposed which rejects the label urban, but which focuses on state organisation and contradictory relations between central and noncentral government. This necessarily involves consideration of historical dimensions of state formation, and of class struggle within and against state institutions and their many and varied concrete manifestations. The conclusions stress the need to replace ahistoric notions like urban politics with theoretically rigorous historical analyses, and outline some research implications in the Australian context.

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