Tackling the urbanisation of responsibility
The delimitation of urban contexts has become anew a major political issue at the crossroad of diffuse planetary urbanisation and politicisation of urban planning.
In this perspective, “cities” can be understood as the political framing of the socio-ecological challenges of urbanisation (Pattaroni et al., 2022). Sub-project 6 will consider this “urbanisation of responsibility” through the development and analysis of the notion of urban responsibility regimes, i.e., the relations between (1) moral grammars of responsibility, (2) socio-technical and legal dispositives, and (3) spatial configurations. The analysis of links between framings and practices will be consolidated through further investigation of selected controversies around the technical, legal, and/or material implementation of responsible housing (e.g., legal provisions, labels, participatory housing). The hypothesis is that each prevalent regime of responsibility engaged in the competing views of a responsible city corresponds to a spatial model of urbanisation that reorganises actors, institutions, and, more broadly, everyday life in power structures. With the aim to discuss innovation potentials (SP7), an analysis of the relative institutional and economic power of the responsibility regimes will be pursued, allowing to distinguish between dominant regimes of responsibility and emerging ones.
