Person, place, and pragmatism: Theorizing urban spaces

Abstract

Cities old and new would benefit if they embraced a perspective distinct from the dominant thought regarding efforts to reinvent or contemporize themselves through urban renewal projects, specifically those related to social inclusion. Realism, as contrary to pragmatism, has been shown to impose a complacent attitude toward vulnerable urban communities through its attachments to predeterminacy. This paper analyzes the detrimental effects of a realist worldview on marginalized populations facing displacement as a result of these projects, and takes a Rortyan approach at delineating the implications of realist policy approaches in cities like Los Angeles, California, Detroit, Michigan, and Birmingham, England. The paper then turns to critique movements like ‘Detroit vs Everybody’ and Richard Florida’s model in The Rise of the Creative Class as an effort to endorse a reconceptualization of policies in which elites relinquish their realist attachments in favor of outcome driven, pragmatic solutions that will, in turn, relieve these marginalized groups of the infringement imposed upon them.

Keywords:

• Urban renewal
• pragmatism
• Richard Rorty
• realism
• creative class
• third place, city planning

REVIEWING EDITOR:

• Huifen (Helen) Cai, Middlesex University Business School, United Kingdom

SUBJECTS:

• Policy Analysis
• Cities & Infrastructure
• Postmodernism of Cultural Theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The authors have used no data to make available.

Notes

1 The authors are indebted to the referees for their feedback as well as to Ty Jones and Mohamad Rammal for their research assistance.

2 The board’s “engaged, common enterprise,” as with the realist’s metaphysically conceived “common goal,” assumes such a goal has, for humanity, an “intrinsic nature” (Rorty, 1989, p. 59), one that transcends this particular community and extends to our—as in the human—community in the objective and thus realist sense. For realists, then, there no longer exists a community but the community, one in which they seek to measure against an objective reality, and through which, they apply these theoretical frameworks as philosophical foundations on which to pass public policy. To adhere to or advocate for the realist common goal is to abstractly ask of humans to position themselves in relation to—and require that they pursue—that metaphysically preconfigured understanding of what makes a “good” community and that which contributes to “good” public policy. But to propose such a venture amounts to accepting a single, or common, way to be human, where the private self conflates with the publicly endorsed, theoretically formulated definition of human. Pragmatists like us, with Rorty, prefer delineating the private and public versions of self—the versions that reconcile these spheres—through understanding ourselves as a “band of eccentrics collaborating for purposes of mutual self-protection rather than as a band of fellow spirits united by a common goal” (Rorty, 1989, p. 59).

3 We draw a parallel from Richard Florida, here, to Rorty’s pragmatic interpretation of intellectual endeavors, specifically with respect to Freud’s activities, where Rorty writes about Freud—and we argue is applicable to Florida—that “Freud gave up Plato’s attempt to bring together the public and the private, the parts of the state and the parts of the soul, the search for social justice and the search for individual perfection. … He distinguished sharply between a private ethic of self-creation and a public ethic of mutual accommodation. He persuades us that there is no bridge between them provided by universally shared beliefs or desires. … [Freud] cannot be used to define social goals…for humanity… There is no way to force Freud into a Platonic mold by treating him as a moral philosopher who supplies universal criteria for goodness or rightness or true happiness” (Rorty, 1989, p. 33). As such, for us, neither should Florida.

4 We use the word “philosophical” as pretty much synonymously with metaphysical, which like the term “realism” presumes a neutral and knowable objectivity that theorizing can attain, something we pragmatists reject.

5 The term “universalistic,” again, like “philosophical” and “realist,” connotes what pragmatists want to lose—the pursuit at objectivity. Pragmatists, instead want to swap such a vocabulary laden with “philosophical foundations” (Rorty, 1989, p. 44) for one in which solidarity needs no “grounding” and is satisfied with eliminating cruelty as outright sufficient (Rorty, 2010, p. 293).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aaron Martin

Aaron Martin is Associate Professor of Teaching in the Irvin D. Reid Honors College at Wayne State University. In addition to teaching the Honors sequence of foundational courses, he created and leads an interdisciplinary research program where he and his student co-authors research for scholarly publication.

Amal Shukr

Amal Shukr, a member of the Irvin D. Reid Honors College, has since graduated from Wayne State University.