Urban service provision: Insights from pragmatism and ethics

Abstract

In their work and life, urban service providers are continually torn between policies and pressures from higher scales and the realities of the cities they inhabit. The ways in which they negotiate these tensions imply the complex adjudication of a range of normative issues, conditioned by the variety of socio-technical, political, and economic factors that are underscored in the literature. In this way, geographical debates on pragmatism and ethics have an important, yet largely overlooked, contribution to make to the study of urban services. These approaches can promote the careful consideration of how people engaged in service provision manage such complexity – including its normative dimensions – through their long-term embodied experience. Pragmatic and related ethical perspectives necessarily contextualize decision-making, taking us beyond ideology or institutional exigencies to debates about practical reason, everyday ethics and embodied practice.