Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution

new political identities and notions of justice. Consider the rise of the Occupy Movement. Occupy Wall Street groups eschew specific goals or programs other than a general commitment to social justice and in part emerge as new political identities. They inscribe new ways of acting in concert and creating participatory modes of acting. They are also elements of a participatory public sphere that is deemphasized in Johnson and Knight’s experimentalism. Yet participatory democracy was what Dewey had in mind with his notion of a great community. It is better found in the deliberative democracy found in the Occupy movement than the planned experiments of Johnson and Knight. Democratic social movements suggest that democratic innovation requires a much broader notion of practical reason than Johnson and Knight suggest. Where Johnson and Knight see everyday social action as simple convention, from the participants’ perspective it is a reflexive form of mutual understanding. Social interaction takes place through structures of mutual accountability, in which our reflexivity extends to our own identities and ethical/moral frameworks. This notion of reflexive monitoring of action and the creation of new democratic forms, however, entails a communicative not a strategic notion of action.