This is an interesting area that I've been thinking about a lot. It's got a lot to do with living in a city but also a lot to do with living in society, so I guess it applies to most of us. I'll start with the example that got me thinking about this and then expand.
I live in a block of flats which has a shared refuse room. If you want to dispose of any large items which the council won't collect, you are supposed to organise for them to pick them up. This costs money. If you don't do this, they won't collect the items. What happens instead is that the firm that manages the building then contacts the council to pick up the items and they pass the cost onto all the residents of the block (probably knowing them also with an bit added for their bureaucracy). Recently we came downstairs to find a carpet and several other large items in the refuse room. They stayd there for a long time. Despite heartfelt appeals no-one admitted that it was their carpet, so it became apparent they had been dumped.
At the same time as this realisation dawned, a skip appeared outside the outer door to the refuse room. It was from some building work that was being done on a block nearby. So one night a little elf from our block took the items from our refuse room and put them in the skip. Now they were gone and we all didn't have to pay for them to be disposed of. But of course someone pays for the skip, and they didn't pay for it to be put there to have other people's waste dumped in it.
(this is not the skip in question but it is in London: not taken by me)
So we have counter-acted an anti-social act committed against our community by committing an anti-social act against another community. Right or wrong?
Or just a case of urban ethics in action.
How would I define urban ethics? Ethics is the branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions (you can tell I got that from a dictionary). So it would seem only right that there can be urban ethics because the values relating to human conduct must be affected by living in an urban environment.
In an urban environment deciding what is right and wrong is not governed by an abstract rule of morality, instead I think it is predicated upon the understanding that it is what works best for you. The definition of "you" is the interesting case in point here. In the case of the person who left the carpet, "you" was themselves and not having to pay for the carpet to be removed. In the case of the little elf who put the carpet in the skip, "you" was the group of which he would have been a part. I think it might be interesting to consider in more important cases of urban ethics in action how we can make the "you" more inclusive.
So for example many of those interviewed about the recent spate of gun crime said that the thing was that if they weren't in a gang, their lives were much harder, even if being in a gang meant possibly having to carry a weapon and use it. If we could change their definition of what is best for them, then we might have more of a chance of stopping them getting into a mess. I need to think more about this.
Interestingly the origins of society where about moving away from what is best for me, if you agree with the theory presented by Norbert Elias in The Civilising Process . It was about increasing self-restraint due to the interconnected nature of society. I wonder if the world has become so interconnected now that it actually feels like we are no longer connected. Too much of a good thing makes it seem like it doesn't exist (but that's another thought).