The habitat of the subject. Exploring new forms of the ethical imagination.

Abstract

This chapter discusses ethics as a form of problematization for the urban, which is a way of approaching the urban and constituting it as an object of study. It explores why this form of problematization has emerged and what it has to offer. It also sets out how we might rethink the character of the ethical through a focus on the ethical imagination as I have developed it elsewhere. It takes African cities as the context and space of enquiry and explores how we might imagine the ethical imagination operating for residents of those cities, and how they deploy it. The chapter provides a critique of “ethics talk” or the deployment of an ethical lens in both urban studies and anthropology. Through theoretical reflection on the work of the ethical imagination it seeks to lay out a more robust understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of an ethical approach.