My colleague and doctoral supervisor, Ignacio Farías, and I recently published a review of Urban Ethics: Conflicts Over the Good and Proper Life in Cities (edited by Moritz Ege and Johannes Moser) in Zeitschrift für Volkskunde. The book sets out an ambitious research agenda for cultural urban studies, asking a deceptively simple question: How should one live in the city?
Our review highlights the volume’s contribution to theorizing the ethical dimension of urban life—not as a set of norms, but as embodied, situated, and contested practices. Ege and Moser’s proposal to think of ethical projects and ethical events opens up new ways to understand how moral claims, public justifications, and imaginaries of the good life circulate in urban conflicts over housing, sustainability, and protest.
We particularly appreciated the editors’ effort to frame urban ethics as a field of public problematization, where planning, activism, and everyday dwelling intertwine. At the same time, we suggested that conversations with recent work on more-than-human and planetary care could further expand this agenda—linking urban ethics to multispecies and ecological forms of cohabitation.
This review forms part of my broader interest in how ethnography, design, and philosophy can trace urban life through its moral and affective infrastructures.