ABE 015

Presentation: Many have commented that present crises of climate change, illiberal politics, and inequality may herald the end of an era. Is this, as John Gray might argue, the end of the ‘age of liberal reason’? Have we, as John Ralston Saul argues, overvalued abstract reason and pushed it to places where it no longer works. We can connect the ‘over-abstract’ and the ‘internal-logic-projected-as-universal’ to a current crisis of the economy for example which acknowledges no other reason but the reason internal to neo-classical economics. Different versions of the same sort of critical analysis have been applied to varied topics like globalisation and anthropology and could perhaps be applied to cities. Cities may however be even more interesting. If we must leave reason behind as adequate foundation for knowledge and action where now do we find the ground from where we know and act? An answer may come from cities themselves and the urban situations we inhabit. The knowledge and actions we need going forward may owe less to universals in a modernist universe than to different forms and ‘communities’ of particulars in a perspectivist pluriverse. 

Discussion of presentation and readings.

Readings from John Ralston Saul, Massimiliano Simons, Michel Serres, Timothy Mitchell (provisional).

Presentation: We think of modernity as being 500 years old. But the Greeks laid the groundwork for Western modernity in the bronze age, and critique of its basic precepts has existed since then. The city was central to the protomodernity of the Greeks and forms of Greek life were established in and in relation to cities and city systems. We will use the Greek polis to briefly introduce problems of politics, society, economy, inequality and climate change from a protomodern perspective. Ideas of urban and public space are introduced as questions which play out through subsequent sessions.

Discussion of presentation and readings.

Readings from Patricia Owens, David Marshall, Henri Lefebvre, Jason Moore (provisional).

Presentation: Isabelle Stengers asks what life is. Seventy years ago Erwin Schrödinger asked the same question. Their questions have led us to a ‘new physics’ and ‘complexity science’, new speculative paradigms that emphasise history, materiality, accident and ‘hybridity’. The physics of living beings is linked to two sets of processes, one involving the active self-motivated patterns that characterise life, the other the metabolic processes that sustain it. What both thinkers emphasise also therefore is energy and entropy processes on which life depends, and which, when the accounting doesn’t add up, amounts to death. We go back to the original asking of these questions and ask what a ‘new urban physics’ or a ‘complexity science of the urban’ might (or should in the case of the second) look like. What we are dealing with today is the thermodynamics of a globalised open system whose energy needs exceed the direct energy needs of the human components by a factor of 60. This opens up a whole new set of questions. What is this ‘globalised open system’ that seems to generate its own energy demand? Are we dependent on a thermodynamic heat-pump to make time for culture and politics? … to feed 10 billion people? What does the current, distinctly urban, phase of ‘economic development’ mean in thermodynamic terms? Is it possible to make global entropy processes circular? Could energy equality be the metric of future equity?

Discussion of presentation and readings.

Readings from Isabelle Stengers, Erwin Schrödinger, Robert Rosen, Marina Fischer Kowalski.

Presentation: If the essence of technology is, as Heidegger says, nothing technological, could it be that it is urban? Peter Haff, in introducing his concept of the Technosphere, points out that one of the chief characteristics of technologies is their interconnectedness with other technologies. This begs the question of the form of this global apparatus and some new very urban questions arise. How does this technical organisation happen? If cities ‘self-organise’ how does this happen? Could there be other large-scale actors? What is the role of the state? What is a ‘global actor’ today? How do Facebook/ Google/ Amazon fit in? Where and what are the modern human and nature in a Technosphere which frames and mediates the realities of both but perhaps not both in the same way? What has happened to nature in a global technical apparatus? What is the everyday human experience of living in such a thing? What does this say about equity and power? And how do we make sense of the slippages and hybridisations of our modern thinking categories as we work out the answers in a radically different framing of reality?

Discussion of presentation and readings.

Readings from Peter Haff, Andrew Pickering, David Berry, Christian Parenti.

Presentation: Where does power come from and what does it do? Weberian power vs. Foucauldian power. Power and knowledge (Saul). The power to overview, to describe, to differentiate subject and object (Uexküll, Serres). Power as scale? This opens up the question of urban space as the distributer of power. What does this mean for public space? Urban space also mediates and distributes the most visible public social process we encounter, that of commerce. We will look at the rise of commerce in 13th century Europe and China in the Song dynasty, and the tactics involved in the use of urban space to create forms of social and economic life of urban people. We will look at the counter-strategy of the ‘enclosure of the commons’ of elites and then at the rise of globalism via colonialism (the ‘Atlantic triangle’) before investigating how cities (using examples of Amsterdam and Paris) became a product of global flows of wealth from a global periphery to a global core. We will look at the more recent ‘fragmentation’ of this (still global) core-periphery space and the possible role of contemporary economic development (the current urban real-estate boom?) in this. All this raises interesting questions of the effects on cities if they substantially reduced their energy demands and energy Ginis? What is a sustainable city actually?

Discussion of presentation and readings.

Readings from Bruno Latour, Iris Marion Young, Madina Tlostanova and Walter Mignolo, Richard Sennett (provisional)

Presentation: What does modernity and liberalism look like through the lens of the urban today? How does our perspective on the future change with a shift from a reason (and reality) internal to modernity to one that comes out of an ‘urban ontology’ of urban subjects and objects? Where are the points of shear between urban categories-domains and what is the significance of these points? What happens to concepts of equity, power, nature and mankind when seen in a situational, perspectivist, urban pluriverse? How does power manifest in this space (these spaces)? How do we address the problems of today (of global-local, of circularity, of the emptying of democratic politics) through a different perspective on them? How and where do we find again a platform for a vital agonistic political practice. How do we restore a democratic globalism? What problems are not solvable from this new perspective?Discussion of presentation and readings.Readings from Jakob von Uexküll, Matthew Segall, Levi Bryant, Tim Morton (provisional).

Students will be asked to present contemporary visions (one each) of urban futures. These may come from science, politics, film or literature and include urban utopias (the Neoliberal city, the Smart City, Francis Heylighen’s ‘Global Superorganism’), urban distopias (Cormac McCarthy, Amitav Ghosh), accelerationist (Stiegler, Srnicek), decelerationist (degrowth, bioregionalism), decolonialist (Viveiros de Castro, Escobar, Mignolo), hopeless (Sloterdijk, …) and any other categories you can find.Discussion of presentations.

We will work together in the last session to draft a short document on our urban future.