Philosophies of Commensuration,Value and Worth in the Future City: Rethinking the Interdisciplinary

How we consider the ways in which different scholarly traditions understand the working of contemporary cities? Philosophically, the city is a socio-technical system, or system of systems, that is made visible as an object of knowledge that is in turn the function of disciplinary lenses that measure value differently. Practically, how does an economist talk about the city differently from an architect? What are the ethical values they espouse, how do they measure, calculate and predict what is valuable.  This chapter by Michael Keith reconsiders how an understanding of 21st century urban futures might foreground how we try to make commensurable the regimes of value at the heart of different measurements of urban transformation and what this might mean for an interdisciplinary understanding of contemporary urban studies and the calculus of city futures.

This is a chapter from Philosophy and the City: Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Perspectives, edited by Keith Jacobs and Jeff Malpas.