Vol 3 (2025) is out!

The current volume (Vol. 3, 2025) of the Philosophy of the City Journal opens with three new, peer-reviewed original articles and follows with a series of commentaries on Ronald Sundstrom’s Just Shelter (OUP, 2024). The first articles of Volume 3 are published as the Philosophy of the City annual conference is taking place, this time in Busan, South Korea. In alignment with the event’s scope, the opening articles deal with different aspects of cities and urban life, with a specifically philosophical take on urban issues.

The first article, Gray Kochar-Lindgren’s paper on Spinoza’s City: Donkeys, Deligny, & the Joy of the Streets, explores how Spinoza’s metaphysics can inform a more joyful way of inhabiting urban life by reimagining the streets through figures such as the wandering donkey and the spider’s web. Drawing on Spinoza, Deleuze, Deligny, and others, Kochar-Lindgren examines concepts like common notions, composition, immanence, and transversal empiricism to highlight how urban encounters, always containing an element of surprise, nonetheless open spaces for positive interactions and discoveries beyond technocratic rationality. The donkey’s meandering path and Deligny’s “Arachnean” networks serve as conceptual representations of practices of experimental drifting that reveal the elements of the city that act as vital sources of creative and critical joy. By aligning philosophical thought with artistic and everyday practices from Situationist dérives to Japanese street observation societies, the author paints a vision of the city as a dynamic field of immanent relations where joy, rather than control, becomes the guiding force of contemporary urban existence.

The second article, by Sebastian Jon Holmen and Thomas Søbirk Petersen critically examines Robert Rosenberger’s influential moral critique of hostile design—urban design strategies that deter or exclude unhoused people, such as anti-sleep benches, spikes, or “antipick” trashcans. While acknowledging the importance of Rosenberger’s work, the authors argue that his reliance on moral intuitions as the basis for ethical evaluation is problematic. This is mainly because intuitions are underinformed without sufficient empirical studies on the actual effects and trade-offs of hostile design. The role of intention is also unclear: if hostile design is defined or judged morally wrong based on actors’ intentions, this leads to conceptual and practical inconsistencies, since hostile outcomes can occur without hostile intent and vice versa. This contribution highlights ambiguity in Rosenberger’s position on whether hostile design is always wrong or only occasionally so—could it be permissible under certain competing moral considerations? This in turn makes his framework less useful for guiding real-world decisions by planners or policymakers. The authors emphasize that hostile design deserves rigorous ethical critique, yet they claim that Rosenberger’s account leaves unresolved gaps that must be addressed for a deeper analysis.

Isabel Argüelles Rozada offers a feminist take on the figure of the flâneur in her article The Flâneur through the Female Gaze: a Legitimization of Street Harassment? The author employs the concept of “aesthetic injustice” to argue that romanticized narratives of male urban strolling often mask or legitimize patterns of street harassment directed at women. Tracing the origins of the flâneur from Baudelaire to later literary and cinematic depictions, she shows how the archetype privileges a bourgeois, male perspective that renders women as objects of aesthetic or erotic pursuit, denying them the anonymity and freedom of movement promised by the modern metropolis. There is a sharp contrast between the idea of flânerie and women’s lived experiences in European cities. Especially when taking into account recent real-world cases of harassment, the author shows how patriarchal gazes disrupt and fragment women’s psychogeographies, producing urban environments that remain unequal and exclusionary. This contribution invites us to engage in a critical rethinking of flânerie narratives and to expose their complicity in sustaining gendered injustices in public space.

The book commentaries published as part of this volume focuses on Ronald Sundstrom’s Just Shelter (OUP, 2024). They are based on a symposium organized in the context of the Philosophy of the City Research Group’s meeting in Madrid in October 2024. The invited contributions by Shane Epting, Avigail Eisenberg, Ian Olasov, and Bart van Leeuwen reflect on and share insights inspired by Sundstrom’s work. Finally, Sundstrom himself, a Philosophy of the City heavyweight, responds to their comments in his contribution to the commentaries.

One chapter ends and another begins for the future of the journal, as my co-founder and co-editor-in-chief Dr. Ryan Wittingslow said farewell to us and moved toward new and exciting opportunities at the end of 2024. This has also become my final year in the role of editor-in-chief, and it is with pride that I look back on what we have produced in the first volumes. The Philosophy of the City community has broadened significantly since the launch of the journal, and we wish a prosperous future for the journal and the network of Philosophy of the City scholars alike. Many thanks to the rest of the founding editorial board: Marian Counihan, Tea Lobo, and Taylor Stone, new editorial board members: Bart van Leeuwen and Gerry Erion, as well as to the numerous anonymous reviewers who keep our journal going – your work is indispensable to this community.

Sanna Lehtinen.