Dark Cities: Dark Ecology and Urban Studies

Abstract

Timothy Morton’s dark ecology is driven by objects as examples or sources of inspiration without offering a full-fledged theoretical methodology. The article highlights possible approaches to designing an independent set of tools suitable for dark ecology and applies them to other topics. In its complexity the city may be considered a hyperobject, which is both a product of and a permanent environment for human beings. The author analyzes the classic texts of urban researchers to show the “dark” aspects of writings by Nigel Thrift, Scott McQuire, Henri Lefebvre, Walter Benjamin, Henry Thoreau, Gaston Bachelard and others. This analysis reveals that even the most pastoral descriptions of urbanized space contain a very different image of the city: dark, unstable and strange, and a summary of those features may be incorporated into a comprehensive theoretical progam. A proposed alternative to the classical methodology centered on a modern visual analysis of the environment may be called “dark urbanism” by analogy with “dark ecology.” The author refers to Dylan Trigg on the feeling of “topophobia” as well as to the fictional images of an urban background in the works of Neil Gaiman, Max Frei and China Miéville to locate several reference points for studying the city as a multifaceted, complex object without merely declaring it as such; but those reference points form the basis for changing investigative optics. The article offers a methodological prolegomenon to “dark urbanism” by proposing analysis of the audible, sensual, tactile and other elements of the urban environment that have not been emphasized by the urbanist mainstream.