A Boom of Ethics?
From an analytical vantage point one can speak of urban ethics in regard to historically very different situations. In recent times, however, a particular “boom” of ethics has occurred in various social fields and continues to be controversially debated by social and cultural theorists in different disciplines and scholarly traditions. It is our aim to examine this development in the urban context. We refrain from positing an exact point in time when this preoccupation with ethics started - building such chronologies is among the goals of our research. While ethical demands were initially focussed on issues such as environmental protection and sustainability, energy consumption or how one deals with waste, today, ethics feeds many wider debates about urban living: Contemporary debates about affordable housing or the access to space and common property/commons are articulated as calls for a "good city”, not only as a political conflicts about ownership. Ethical premises are also increasingly important in debates on architecture and urban design.
Impulses for urban ethics come from various quarters. Protagonists of political movements "from below", such as protest movements against social injustice or authoritarian regimes, often understand their actions primarily as an ethical commitment when confronting an “amoral”, “ethically bad”, or “evil” economy or state power. Other civil society initiatives are aimed at improving the quality of life, such as a decelerated, “Slow City” lifestyle within fast-paced global metropolises .
On the other hand, effecting a change toward “ethical” lifestyles or initiating urban development models can also be a top-down matter exercised through various means of governance. This includes appeals to citizens as ethical subjects and the proclamation of exemplary, good urbanites. Such projects can succeed without coercion: Whether it be green citizens in times of climate change and environmental awareness, or, under different circumstances, modern and, solely on this basis, good citizens, as opposed to old-fashioned, backward, uncultured and therefore bad people in the processes of modernization, or “culturepreneurs ” in creative cities.
At the same time, top-down strategies and bottom-up movements cannot always be so clearly distinguished from each other. Many phenomena evade categorization, rather they are situated in blurred intermediate areas or they are mutually interdependent. Investigating these intermediate areas, we ask what happens in these complex, what connections are being established how the different strategies relate to one another.