Reimagining hope through the political: A post-foundational reading of urban alternatives beyond postpolitics

Abstract

This paper proposes hope as a lens for critical urban research for the purpose of grasping the interplay between forces of change and stability as manifested in popular uprisings, as well as in broader, self-organised spatial practices in everyday life. This hopeful lens allows for reimagining hope through the concept of ‘the political’, defined in the post-foundationalist literature as an ontological condition assuming the inherent impossibility for ‘politics’ to reach its final closure, fixation or stability. The hopes thus arising from ‘the political’ provide critical urban scholars with better tools to navigate the ever-present possibilities for emancipatory change and action, arising from an ontological lack of foundations, upon which political orders are temporarily based. In this paper, we show how theoretical notions from post-foundationalism can expand the current sense of hope by instilling a non-teleological view on inherent possibilities for matters to be otherwise, thus implying the absence of certainty about presupposed ideas of what genuine political change should look like. Through this lens, hope appears linked to concrete openings for alternatives found in everyday life. By laying out such a hopeful approach, we aim to expand the awareness of urban ‘scholars’ to ponder both mundane and radical materialisations and practices of ‘the political’ within urban settings. Ultimately, by reimagining hope to look beyond or alongside postpolitics, we unlock a future-oriented research agenda that adds nuance to an ontologically restricted conception of ‘politics’, which allows for broader empirical attunement to ever-present embodied signs of unfinished urban alternatives generated by ‘the political’.