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

Bob Catterall

City, 2011, vol. 15, issue 5, 605-612

Abstract: 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, 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, moving on from the first of these, Revolt and Crisis in Greece (edited by Antonis Vradis and Dimitris Dalakoglou), to the second, Magical Marxism (Andy Merrifield,) leaving the third, Payback (Margaret Atwood), for the last of the series. There is a continuing focus on the Greek insurrection which is now extended -- drawing on a distinction between revolutionary and radical spaces and times -- to aspects of the OccupyWallStreet movement. 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’, moving across spaces and times and their attempted appropriations, seeking to resurrect and redirect 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 magic of 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: 10.1080/13604813.2011.635026

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