`The City without Qualities´

Robert Musil`s `Man without Qualities` illustrated how, a general feeling of crisis characterizing the turn to the twentieth century motivated a search for a meaningful future - a political project which by itself established new structural conditions enhancing the decline of the multinational Habsburg empire. The present weakness of nation- states has brought a renewed crisis of modernity, where cities turn into the focus of theoretic and political reflection about our collective future - a political process itself contributing to state-transformation. While urban political economy tends to generalizations about economically determined urban globalization, European research has stressed the importance of historical context and political institutions. Both perspectives` unquestioned use of urban culture implies either an economization or esssentialization of urbanity, and thus an underconceptualization of culture as a source of political agency. Beyond economic determinism and institutional path-dependency, urban governments experience globalization also as a diversification of their institutional power base. This plural context can enhance fragmentation effects as well as it can serve as a self-innovating political resource for governing state-transformation. Most research of cities implies - more or less implicitly - a common ideal of urbanity which lies in the integration potential of plural societies. Urbanity, the spatialized ideal of modernity, and cities, its contextual realizations in place, constitute a reflective and open-ended process of plural collective action. Locally specific as well as globally entangled, `cities without qualities` can be defined as institutionalized central places with contextually renegotiated characteristics. Based on a theoretical review of the literature on urban political economy and its reception in the European context, this research project questions the conceptual understanding of culture and politics implied by the present theoretical debate about European urbanity. Concepts drawn from new institutionalism, social movements and modernity serve to complement the political economic model of European urbanity by political and cultural perspectives of state-transformation in the context of European integration. Defining the role of culture as mediating structures and agency in plural contexts, the `City without Qualities` provides an analytical model for empirical comparison of collective political action in central places associated with urbanity.