Urban Ethics as Research Agenda (Routledge Studies in Urbanism and the City)

This book provides an outline for a multidisciplinary research agenda into urban ethics and offers insights into the various ways urban ethics can be configured. It explores practices and discourses through which individuals, collectives and institutions determine which developments and projects may be favourable for dwellers and visitors traversing cities.

Urban Ethics as Research Agenda widens the lens to include other actors apart from powerful individuals or institutions, paying special attention to activists or civil society organizations that express concerns about collective life. The chapters provide fresh perspectives addressing the various scales that converge in the urban. The uniqueness of each city is, thus, enriched with global patterns of the urban. Local sociocultural characteristics coexist with global flows of ideas, goods and people. The focus on urban ethics sheds light on emerging spaces of human development and the ways in which ethical narratives are used to mobilize and contest them in terms of the good life.

This timely book analyses urban ethical negotiations from social and cultural studies, particularly drawing on anthropology, geography and history. This volume will be of interest to scholars, researchers and practitioners interested in ethics and urban studies.

Raúl Acosta is a social anthropologist specialized in urban and environmental governance. He has conducted fieldwork in Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Venezuela and Peru. He is the author of Civil Becomings (2020) as well as numerous articles and chapters. He carried out research in Mexico City as part of the Urban Ethics Research Group.

Eveline Dürr is Professor of Social Anthropology at the LMU Munich. She has roles as PI in the Urban Ethics research group (2015–2021) and as co-chair of the Collaborative Research Centre "Culture of Vigilance". She researches human-environment relations in Latin America, the USA and Oceania.

Moritz Ege is Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies of the University of Zurich. He was PI at the Urban Ethics research group. His interests lie in everyday and popular culture both in contemporary and in historical perspectives.

Ursula Prutsch is Professor of American and Latin American History at the LMU Munich. Among her nine monographs are one on Eva Perón (2015), a cultural history of Brazil (co-authored in 2014), an analysis on Populism in the USA and Latin America (2019) and a biography on Austria's cartridge producer and Fascist Fritz Mandl (2022).

Clemens van Loyen studied Romance languages, sociology, political science and philosophy. His dissertation explores the concept of anthropophagy from a philosophical and historical perspective in relation to the Jewish cultural theorist Vilém Flusser. His areas of interest range from Brazilian history of ideas to translation studies and cultural-historical urban research.

Gordon M. Winder is Professor of Economic Geography and Sustainability Research at the LMU Munich. An economic and historical geographer, he researches sustainability issues related to resource-based economies and rebuilding after disaster. He publishes on resilience and transition-making, innovation, manufacturing and business networks and geographies of the news.