From Lifeworld to City Life: Rethinking how the Culture of Everyday Life in Cities Engages Urban Administration

Since the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic in the winter of 2020, city governments around the world have faced extraordinary demands from citizens for services, expertise, and leadership. Urban administration has rarely been so involved in everyday life. Yet, during this time, reflexive fear, justifiable criticism, and malicious disdain of public initiatives and civic authorities seem to have undermined the status of urban administration as a representation of the public interest. The links that connect everyday experiences to urban administration have become strained to the extent that there is a waning certainty as to how "the city" as a collective project is constituted and realized. City governments and those who study urban society and culture, now face the task of re-examining fundamental questions about how urban administration engages urban life.

Accordingly, in the most general sense, in this dissertation, I ask how urban administration comes to make sense to the people it serves. I aim, specifically, to foster an interest in the definition of the situations for administrating cities using a cross-disciplinary approach that engages traditions of urban theory, reflective analysis, hermeneutics and cultural sociology. I do this by looking at how these traditions elucidate the relationship between urban lifeworld and administration as it is found in various contemporary practices of city governance and urban life.

Through this analysis, I suggest that the relationship between lifeworld and urban administration is established in practical conditions, but these conditions are ultimately grounded in participants engaging in self-reflective modes of theorizing the city as a situation for taking action, a process I will refer to as order-making.

This notion of order-making is not merely an attempt to formulate a method of analysing urban administration. Nor does it simply provide an account of an individual’s encounter with institutions of urban administration. Instead, the analysis proposes a way to re-consider those who are involved in the administration of the city, both in formal and incidental ways, as active agents in the urban community engaged in the ongoing and collective project of theorizing the city as an order-making situation. This study highlights order-making as it is entrenched in the messiness and details of everyday urban culture, yet it also shows that order-making extends beyond the limits of the commonplace so as to produce an enduring order, or form, of the city itself. In this sense, what might be called the movement toward order-making underpins a multiplicity of engagements with administration while attending to the permanence—or, the formal goodness—of the city as a type of community. This enquiry thus supports a radically pluralistic grounding for urban administration by exploring what fundamentally connects the diversity of urban experience with the singularity of administration.

Instead of assessing specific administrative policies and practices, this dissertation steps back to consider a broad view of administering the city to see what underpins the relationship of the urban lifeworld to the administration of city life. To do this, I consider questions such as: How do people conceptualize the city as a project? What part do everyday routine, memory, and meaning-making play in administration? How does the administration of cities engage forms of urban lifestyle and even the notion of the good life? How is the urban community made and remade?

This analysis, in sum, aims to elucidate how order-making occurs in the confluence of legalistic and customary experiences of city life to clarify the realization of the city as a form of community.

I consider order-making in four contexts of urban administration: city planning, gentrification, technology, and theory. I first consider details of order-making as people discuss city planning at a local administrative tribunal. Next, I expand the focus by considering order-making within the context of neighbourhood gentrification and how gentrification epitomizes order-making as the desire to reconcile personal experience and identity with the city at large. I then turn to the technology of smart cities to address ways order-making connects technology to the problematics of the urban lifeworld. This sets up a discussion about the notion of making within order-making, which is subsequently treated in terms of social theory. It is in this last main discussion that I consider the engagement of the lifeworld with urban administration as a way of engaging the city as an externalized ‘thing’. In a closing discussion, I briefly outline a program for future research, suggesting ways urban order-making might contribute to an effective response to current challenges facing city governance.

Throughout this dissertation, I aim to expand the discussion about what connects everyday urban culture to urban administration in establishing a sense of order. The analysis hopefully helps turns attention to new ways in which institutions of urban administration might become better attuned to the plurality of cultural and historic experiences that now constitute much of the social life of contemporary cities. It offers an analysis of administration in terms of being self-reflexively aware of mundane actions, incidental memories, and the taken-for-granted patterns of everyday life, so that an array of experiences might not just reshape administrative practices to make outcomes just and fair but also substantially redefine the epistemological grounds on which such practices are grounded, that is, the ethos of doing urban administration. This involves imagining new ways of thinking about entrenched notions of administrative authority so that institutions of community order-making accord far more with the global, diasporic, and post-colonial dynamics of urban communities. In that sense, this work hopefully contributes to new ways of ensuring cities remain accountable, meaningful, and worthy of trust amid a period of disorientating change.