UCL Discovery

Abstract

The activation of urban citizens, through the context of community, is a mode of governance that is apparent in contemporary urban policy programmes worldwide. We explore this phenomenon through the context of urban planning and community activation in Taipei, Taiwan. We develop the view that the recent focus, by nation states, on community as a mechanism of governance, is a response to broader processes of dis-embedded individualisation and cosmopolitanism (Beck, 2000). However, we also argue that this mobilisation of community lies at the heart of a paradox. While the new discourses are presented as an emancipatory response to wider epochal shifts that transcend state-based political structures and imaginations, we show that the new agendas are, in fact, focused on sustaining and extending existing power relations and political systems. In many cases the emergence of empowering and cosmopolitan governance agendas are underpinned by political projects that seek to reinforce existing power structures and regimes of control. We, therefore, concur with Delanty (2006) who argues that empirical research is required in order to explore the ‘socially situated nature of cosmopolitanism’ and its forms and characterisations in different contexts.