Increasingly, we live in an environment of our own making: a ‘world as design’ over the natural world. For more than half of the global population, this environment is also thoroughly urban. But what does a global urban condition mean for the human condition? How does the design of the city and the urban process, in response to the issues and challenges of the Anthropocene, produce new ethical categories, shape new moral identities and relations, and bring about consequences that are also morally significant? In other words, how does the urban shape the ethical—and in what ways? Conversely, how can ethics reveal relations and realities of the urban that often go unnoticed? This book marks the first systematic study of the city through the ethical perspective in the context of the Anthropocene. Six emergent urban conditions are examined, namely, precarity, propinquity, conflict, serendipity, fear and the urban commons.

From Australia to North America, we need to rethink how our cities resist environmental change in the age of climate catastrophe.

Increasingly, we live in an environment of our own making: a 'world as design' over the natural world. For more than half of the global population, this environment is also thoroughly urban. But what does a global urban condition mean for the human condition? How does the design of the city and the urban process, in response to the issues and challenges of the Anthropocene, produce new ethical categories, shape new moral identities and relations, and bring about consequences that are also morally significant? In other words, how does the urban shape the ethical - and in what ways? Conversely, how can ethics reveal relations and realities of the urban that often go unnoticed? This book marks the first systematic study of the city through the ethical perspective in the context of the Anthropocene. Six emergent urban conditions are examined, namely, precarity, propinquity, conflict, serendipity, fear and the urban commons.

Combining elements of sustainable and resilient cities agendas, together with those from social justice studies, and incorporating concerns about good governance, transparency and accountability, the book presents a coherent conceptual framework for the ethical city, in which to embed existing and new activities within cities so as to guide local action. The authors’ observations are derived from city-specific surveys and urban case studies. These reveal how progressive cities are promoting a diverse range of ethically informed approaches to urbanism, such as community wealth building, basic income initiatives, participatory budgeting and citizen assemblies. The text argues that the ethical city is a logical next step for critical urbanism in the era of late capitalism, characterised by divisive politics, burgeoning inequality, widespread technology-induced disruptions to every aspect of modern life and existential threats posed by climate change, sustainability imperatives and pandemics. Engaging with their communities in meaningful ways and promoting positive transformative change, ethical cities are well placed to deliver liveable and sustainable places for all, rather than only for wealthy elites. Likewise, the aftermath of shocks such as the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic reveals that cities that are not purposeful in addressing inequalities, social problems, unsustainability and corruption face deepening difficulties. Readers from across physical and social sciences, humanities and arts, as well as across policy, business and civil society, will find that the application of ethical principles is key to the pursuit of socially inclusive urban futures and the potential for cities and their communities to emerge from or, at least, ameliorate a diverse range of local, national and global challenges.

Featuring an international, multidisciplinary set of contributors, this thought-provoking book reimagines established narratives of the Anthropocene to allow differences in regions and contexts to be taken seriously, emphasising the importance of localised and situated knowledge. It offers critical engagement with the debates around the Anthropocene by challenging the dominant techno-rational agenda that often prevails in socio-political and academic discussions.

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.

This book brings together the most current thinking about the Anthropocene in the field of Environmental Political Theory ('EPT'). It displays the distinctive contribution EPT makes to the task of thinking through what 'the environment' means in this time of pervasive human influence over natural systems. Across its chapters the book helps develop the idea of 'socionatural relations'—an idea that frames the environment in the Anthropocene in terms of the interconnected relationship between human beings and their surroundings. Coming from both well-established and newer voices in the field, the chapters in the book show the diversity of points of view theorists take toward the Anthropocene idea, and socionatural relations more generally. However, all the chapters exemplify a characteristic of work in EPT: the self-conscious effort to provide normative interpretations that are responsive to scientific accounts. The Introduction explains the complicated interaction between science and EPT, showing how it positions EPT to consider the Anthropocene. And the Afterword, by a pioneer in the field, relates all the chapters to a perspective that has been deeply influential in EPT. This book will be of interest to scholars already engaged in EPT. But it will also serve as an introduction to the field for students of Political Theory, Philosophy, Environmental Studies, and related disciplines, who will learn about the EPT approach from the Introduction, and then see it applied to the pressing question of the Anthropocene in the ensuing chapters. The book will also help readers interested in the Anthropocene from any disciplinary perspective develop a critical understanding of its political meanings.