Is it all coming together? Thoughts on urban studies and the present crisis

Bob Catterall

City, 2011, vol. 15, issue 3-4, 491-497

Abstract: What appears to be a Greek crisis is a focus for the penultimate episodes of this series of 'Thoughts on urban studies and the present crisis’, initiated in 2001 as a response to 9/11. That event, the destructive incursion into US space, and the unfolding events that revealed its impact on Western consciousness, particularly as defined by powerful elites, was taken as at least symptomatic of 'the present crisis’. That destructive incursion defined a specific 'coming together’ of 'the West and the Rest’. If the capture and death of Osama bin Laden, the events and developments of 'the Arab spring’, and the European 'financial’ crises, of which Greece (as both insider and outsider) provides the most dramatic example, lead to changes in the definition of that coming together, what remains a constant in this series is the crisis of the model of development and urbanisation which 'the West’ exported to the Rest and in which it now, though reluctant to face the fact, finds itself entrapped, still haunted and incapacitated by spectres (a discussion that owes much to Derrida's 'hauntological’ work on spectres), able to assume, invoke but not deliver civilisation and 'the city’. This deliberately eccentric series, excentric to the established pieties of the social sciences, returns to some of the notions and narratives previously explored in the light of aspects of three recent (and equally excentric) publications, Revolt and Crisis in Greece (edited by Antonis Vradis and Dimitris Dalakoglou), Magical Marxism (Andy Merrifield) and Payback (Margaret Atwood). The project seeks to bring together a range of disciplines on a transdisciplinary rather than an interdisciplinary basis. This continues to involve a series of experiments in 'critical epic’, resurrecting and redirecting the much abused notion -- much abused by mainstream urban studies, by positivism and by mechanistic forms of materialism -- of a science of society in the making, one that 'brings people (back) in’ and seeks to go beyond, without losing, the enthusiasm for radical change and sense of evident blockages ('entrapments’) experienced in the here and now. It is thus particularly attentive to cultural as well as economic dimensions of 'the crisis’, with an emphasis on the political dimension that is pre- rather than post-political.

Date: 2011
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DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2011.613617

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