ABSTRACT

Seen as a specific socio-spatial conjuncture of power relations, the state should be an essential ingredient in the menu of topics examined in a volume about the spaces of urban politics. Yet utopian thought across diverse traditions has often rendered ‘the state’ invisible, unhelpful or dangerous, even as it has concomitantly elevated specific kinds of places as more worthy of our normative-political aspirations. Nonetheless stateness per se − understood here as the presence of socially legitimate institutions that articulate political democracy and help collectives to puzzle through shared problems − remains theoretically relevant in the face of constant attacks and otherwise legitimate critiques, particularly as a bulwark against corporatized economies that, untethered from popular control, have repeatedly generated social and ecological turmoil. The role of the state in reconstructing politically an ideal of the good society has returned to prominence. But the macro-dynamics of globalization, urbanization and especially city-regionalism have shifted the ways in which the state is mobilized in utopian thinking. The state now has to be smart: namely, authoritative but not authoritarian; directive but not bureaucratic; technical but not technocratic; market-shaping but not market-dominated. Or at least, that is the dream.