Introduction: Pragmatism and urban environments

Philosophers have written about cities for over 2000 years, most often metaphorically. The great works on cities and urban studies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, were not penned by professional philosophers. These works were written by sociologists, architects, urban planners, journalists, a court reporter, cultural critics, activists, and historians. Perhaps philosophers, in the end, have little to say about cities. Perhaps Plato’s great republic was the definitive statement from the philosopher, one that laid out the largely idealizing route philosophers would take in regard to natural and artifactual environments, as well as in regard to their own discipline. Certainly, philosophers today often feel obliged to (and are asked to) explain and justify what they do to those outside of the discipline. And, certainly, today there is a large amount of interdisciplinary work that blurs the edges of the fields of not only philosophy, but also history, political science, sociology, anthropology, and so on. Pragmatism, the approach taken by the writers in this issue, has generally welcomed this blurring—the more resources one can bring to inquiry, the better. But philosophers are nonetheless uniquely positioned to examine ethical, aesthetic, political, and epistemic aspects—traditional philosophical concerns—of not only environmental issues, but also of the increasingly important sphere of urban environmental studies. It is therefore curious that with the now 30-year-old philosophical field of environmental ethics, philosophical works on urban environments have appeared on the scene only very recently, in the mid-1990s. After all, the most immediate environment for human beings is increasingly the urban environment. Some 300 cities worldwide today have a population of over one million people, and thirteen have populations over 10 million. Philosophers are capable of and should begin inquiry from the conditions and exigencies of living, and this living is also increasingly done in urban environments, for better or worse. But many of the kinds of arguments that have dominated environmental ethics—many of which are at practical, philosophical, and ideological impasses—do not translate clearly into urban settings. For example, debates over the intrinsic or instrumental value of nature are problematized in urban settings by the fact that cities are complex historical constructions for dynamic human uses which, in whole or in part, may nevertheless be appreciated for their intrinsic merits. So, perhaps the urban