Towards the Great Transformation: (1) Beyond ‘the urban revolution’

Abstract

The previous series of ‘endpieces’ to issues of CITY (‘Is it all coming together? Thoughts on urban studies and the present’) were primarily concerned with two dimensions: the crisis of the model of development and urbanisation which ‘the West’ has exported to the Rest; and the, to some extent, unacknowledged crisis of urban studies, more broadly of the socio-spatial sciences and humanities, its/their failure to provide an adequate tracking of and response to the nature and impact of that model, a response with adequate pointers to policy and/or action. In the former crisis the West and the Rest came together disastrously, both actually and symbolically, in ‘9/11’, in the form of the reverse reaction of an airborne attack coming from within ‘the Rest’ (not to be excused or to be denied as a reaction) to the ‘homeland’ of the model of development that had long been exported to/imposed on it. In the last ten years it has been becoming apparent that the West itself is a victim of that model and, indeed, the planet itself. In the second crisis, that of urban studies, the socio-spatial sciences and the humanities, despite much talk of interdisciplinarity, and their relationship to policy and/or action, they have failed to come together to any great extent. Recently, there has in some circles been an influential return to Marxist political economy and historical materialism in and around an updated version of the critical theory elaborated by the Frankfurt School, and in partly overlapping circles of post-Marxist (the post-ness is too often taken-for granted) discussions, there has been talk of assemblage and of ‘new materialisms.’ This new series, in seeking to build a bridge between and beyond these two tendencies, Marxist and post-Marxist, returns to its characterisation of the model of development and urbanization, adding to its particular concerns the realities and notions of debt and ‘nature’. Turning to the relevant knowledges and practices, it continues with its series of experiments in ‘critical epic’, moving across spaces and times from the early civilisations to the present and beyond, making critical use of a wide variety of retellings and analysis, seeking to resurrect and redirect the much abused notion—much abused by mainstream urban studies, by positivism and by mechanistic forms of materialism—of an accessible science of society in the making, one that ‘brings people’, and now nature, ‘ (back) in’. In moves towards an accessible science the series as a whole seeks to rescue and enhance ordinary appreciation of nature and of enthusiasm for the commons and related radical change, extra-disciplinary knowledge, from a sense of evident marginalisation and blockages (‘entrapments’) by the market and by academe. It draws particularly on Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, on Patrick Keiller's semi-fictional documentary Robinson in Ruins, recent work by the novelist and essayist Margaret Atwood and by the wide-ranging economic journalist Paul Mason. Though it does not question the value of current critical, and some mainstream, studies in sociology, geography and the humanities in their coverage of aspects of the crisis, it does question their adequacy for understanding the full extent of the present possibly terminal stage of ‘the urban revolution’ and of the appropriate means for changing it. In so doing it seeks ultimately to direct attention away from a preoccupation with the negative experience of marketization and neoliberalism toward the positive prefigurative evidence for the possibility of a great transformation based on communalism. 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.