Introduction

Ethical concerns about the good and proper conduct of life in the city are debated in the media, examined by committees of experts, represented in appeals to the public, forums and exhibitions; they influence decision-making and behaviour, and also shape the ways in which public figures present themselves. The fact that urban conflicts are increasingly being understood as an ethical debate leads to a number of questions that our research group (funded through the researched unit programme of the German Research Foundation) seeks to answer: what are the forms, possibilities and limitations of urban ethics? But also: how do we approach and theorise the relationship between urbanism and ethics more generally. Making ethical conflicts and debates about urban life and the city visible and grasp them in their social context is the main goal of our research group.

Urban ethics become visible in discourses about the good city. These discourses concern the relationship with one’s environment, with other urban dwellers issues as well as with one's self and one’s actions. The term urban ethics thus refers to a field in which inhabitants of cities employ principles and virtues in order to formulate and adhere to rules of a good and proper conduct of urban life.

In these ethical projects, the meanings of the urban can take a plurality of different shapes. Classical scholarly definitions of urbanism are also far from equivocal, and they tend to oscillate between descriptive and normative modes. According to such definitions, the urban is connected to the routine experience of dealing with difference, with specific local cultural economies, with differently scaled social networks; in many cases cities are privileged economic and political centres of power in relation to the rural periphery, and the urban always also implies the spatial representation of social orders. Conventional attributions of the urban can also be called into question through ethical action, can be challenged or changed, whether on the part of city government or by civil movements. In that sense, too, various actors’ projects of urban ethics can be seen as responses to the question: "How should one live in the city?"