Public Space Unbound

Urban Emancipation and the Post-Political Condition

Sabine Knierbein, Tihomir Viderman, Sabine Knierbein, Tihomir Viderman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315449180
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Through an exploration of emancipation in recent processes of capitalist urbanization, this book argues the political is enacted through the everyday practices of publics producing space. This suggests democracy is a spatial practice rather than an abstract professional field organized by institutions, politicians and movements.

Public Space Unbound brings together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars to examine spaces, conditions and circumstances in which emancipatory practices impact the everyday life of citizens. We ask: How do emancipatory practices relate with public space under 'post-political conditions'? In a time when democracy, solidarity and utopias are in crisis, we argue that productive emancipatory claims already exist in the lived space of everyday life rather than in the expectation of urban revolution and future progress.

Part I
Everyday Emancipation. Beyond Utopia, Law and Institutions

2
Amazon Unbound

Utopian Dialectics of Planetary Urbanization

Japhy Wilson

To hope till hope creates

From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

What is the nature of utopia under conditions of planetary urbanization? In recent years, an emergent literature has begun to theorize the latest wave of capitalist development as a process of ‘extended’ or ‘planetary’ urbanization, which is collapsing traditional morphological divisions between urban/rural and city/countryside into a churning morass of ‘implosion-explosion’, through which capital implodes into ever greater agglomerations, while simultaneously exploding the urban fabric into the farthest reaches of planetary space (see for example Arboleda 2015; Brenner 2013a; Brenner and Schmid 2015; Kanai 2014; Monte-Mor 2013). The dominant strands of this literature have tended to represent this process as the outcome of abstract economic mechanisms and “large-scale planning strategies” (Brenner 2013b: 20). As such, planetary urbanization would appear to be devoid of utopian elements.

This chapter argues that planetary urbanization is in fact replete with utopian dimensions, which I frame in terms of a dialectic of utopian fantasies that function to conceal and facilitate the apocalyptic dynamics of implosion-explosion, and Real utopias constructed out of urgent necessity at the moment of direct confrontation with these dynamics. These ideas are developed through the case of the Manta-Manaus multimodal transport corridor, and its implementation in Ecuador. Launched in 2007, the corridor runs from the Pacific coast of Ecuador, to the Atlantic coast of Brazil, via the booming industrial city of Manaus in the Brazilian Amazon. It is part of the Initiative for the Regional Integration of South American Infrastructure (IIRSA), a US$158 billion infrastructure project that aims to transform the entire continent in the image of transnational capital (Sanahuja 2012). IIRSA has been identified by Neil Brenner (cf. 2013c: 184) as a paradigmatic example of planetary urbanization in practice and would appear to be a purely functional project of economic globalization. Yet my field research on Manta-Manaus has shown it to be infused with a multitude of utopian dreams and desires. Through an exploration of these dimensions of the Manta-Manaus corridor, I argue that planetary urbanization is a far more hope-filled process than it may at first appear, while suggesting that a Real utopia can only arise at the point at which all such hopes have been wrecked.

Utopian Fantasies, Real Utopias

Planetary urbanization is animated by the implacable logic of capital, which relentlessly compels the production of territorial infrastructures that drive towards “the annihilation of space by time” (Marx, quoted in Harvey 2001: 244). In his study of the emergence of globalization, In the World Interior of Capital, Peter Sloterdijk (2013: 23) has noted the profound existential consequences of this endless obliteration of spatial distance and stability, embodied in an unconscious knowledge that we “can no longer rely on anything except the indifference of homogenous infinite space”. Our subjugation to the liquid and volatile space-time of capital is disavowed by a variety of accelerationist fantasies, chief among which is “the neoliberal … zero gravity utopia, where flows push towards light speeds” (Featherstone 2010: 128). The etymology of utopia is “no place” (Pinder 2002: 237), and the fantasy space of neoliberal capitalism takes this literally, “despatializing the real globe, replacing the curved earth with an almost extensionless point” and revelling in “the cult of explosion” (Sloterdijk 2013: 13).

The explosive rage of planetary urbanization is profoundly entangled with an equally powerful drive towards implosion, which is manifested both in the massification of existing agglomerations and in the rapid urbanization of capital in previously peripheral hinterlands (Brenner and Schmid 2015). This chaotic process of implosion is both expressed and concealed by the fetish object of ‘the city’, which David Wachsmuth (2014: 356) has claimed “is an ideological representation of urbanization processes rather than a moment in them”. But ideologies themselves can of course be productive of the realities that they misrepresent. The history of capitalism is replete with utopian fantasies of perfectly ordered cities that do not merely remain ‘on paper’, but are endowed with the social power to transform reality in their image. As Ross Adams has noted, these utopian schemes are typically underpinned by a “collective fear of some palpable sort, whether it be fear of revolution (Le Corbusier in the 1920s) … or our new fear: ecological collapse (‘green architecture’)” (Adams 2010: 2). In the latter case, Adams argues, the ideological function of the contemporary ‘eco-city’ is transparently evident: “it is merely a phantasmatic screen, prohibiting us from confronting the true terrors of ecological catastrophe, while at once imploring us to silently identify this terror with the collapse of liberal capitalism itself” (Adams 2010: 7).

Planetary urbanization is thus infused with utopian fantasies of implosion and explosion that contribute to the long tradition of “obscure utopias” identified by Fredric Jameson, including “liberal reforms and commercial pipe-dreams, the deceptive yet tempting swindles of the here and now, where Utopia serves as the mere lure and bait for ideology” (Jameson 2005: 3). But, as we will see, this process also generates the conditions for the emergence of events that fleetingly traverse these fantasies through the urgent construction of possible worlds. As Isabell Lorey has argued, such events constitute the actualization of a “presentist democracy”, which “follows no teleological logic” (Lorey 2014: 59, 52). On the contrary, they are premised upon a radical renunciation of the phantasmatic promise of an emancipatory future. The planetary completion of global capitalism may be experienced as the closure of all such emancipatory possibilities. But Žižek argues that it is precisely this ‘loss of hope’ that opens the possibility of a ‘Real utopia’, beyond the utopian fantasies of perfect urban order and light-speed circulation:

We have a third utopia, which is … precisely the Real—the Real core of utopia … A truly radical utopia is not an exercise in free imagination … It’s something you do out of an inner urge. You have to invent something new when you cannot do it otherwise. True utopia … is not a matter of the future. It’s something to be immediately enacted when there is no other way. Utopia in this sense simply means: ‘Do what appears within the given symbolic coordinates as impossible. Take the risk, change the very coordinates’ … The point is not about planning utopias. The point is about practicing them. And the point is not ‘Should we do it, or should we just persist in the existing order?’ The point is much more radical. It’s a matter of survival. The future will be utopia, or there will be none.

(Žižek 2003)

Utopian fantasies function to reproduce the established coordinates of reality. A Real utopia, by contrast, can only be constructed in the context of the disintegration of all such fantasies, in which the political subject

undergoes a ‘loss of reality’ and starts to perceive reality as an ‘unreal’ nightmarish universe with no firm ontological foundation; this nightmarish universe is … that which remains of reality after reality is deprived of its support in fantasy.

(Žižek 1999: 57)

This understanding of a Real utopia bears no relation to the real utopias celebrated by Erik Olin Wright, for whom ‘real’ designates everyday reality, and who defines a real utopia as one that operates within the possibilities determined by this reality (Olin Wright 2010). For Žižek, by contrast, a Real utopia is ‘real’ with a capital ‘R’, and refers to the Lacanian dimensions of the Real excluded from lived reality by the horizon of possibility established by fantasy (Bosteels 2011: 184–188). The remainder of this chapter explores the utopian fantasies of planetary urbanization in practice, and the ‘nightmarish universe’ that remains after planetary urbanization has been deprived of its phantasmatic support, in order to illustrate my claim that the ‘loss of hope’ embodied in “the traumatic passage [through] this ‘night of the world’” (Žižek 1999: 38) is a necessary moment in the creation of a Real utopia.

Utopian Fantasies of Manta-Manaus

As Jameson (1989: 44, 49) has emphasized, the utopia of “postmodern hyperspace … is not merely a cultural ideology or fantasy but has genuine historical (and socioeconomic) reality”. This reality is embodied in the vast material landscapes that underpin the accelerated circulation of capital on a global scale. One such landscape is currently being produced under the aegis of the Initiative for the Regional Integration of South American Infrastructure. Launched in 2000, IIRSA seeks to reorient the energy, transportation and communications infrastructures of the continent towards transnational circuits of capital through the construction and modernization of ports, airports, bridges, tunnels, roads, railways, hydroelectric dams and electricity networks (COSIPLAN 2013). As such, IIRSA embodies the explosive dynamic of planetary urbanization through which “landscapes are being comprehensively produced, engineered, or redesigned through a surge of infrastructure investments … intended to support the accelerated growth and expansion of agglomerations around the world” (Brenner 2013b: 20).

Among the most emblematic of the IIRSA projects is the Manta-Manaus multimodal transport corridor (Wilson and Bayón 2015a). The Manta-Manaus corridor begins from the planned deep water port of Manta, on the Pacific coast of Ecuador, crosses the Ecuadorian Andes via over 800 km of new and modernized highways, transfers to river at the new intermodal port of Providencia on the River Napo in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and then heads downriver for over 3,000 km via Manaus to the Atlantic port of Belen. Plans for Manta-Manaus justify it in terms of “less time, less cost”, in comparison to alternative global trade routes (Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores 2010), and predict that the project will transform Ecuador into “the key node of … commercial exchange between the Amazon basin and the Pacific rim” (Autoridad Portuaria de Manta 2006).

Manta-Manaus thus embodies the commitment to competitive acceleration characteristic of planetary urbanization. But as David Harvey (2013: 48) has noted, “Speed-up, turnover time, and the like, when driven onwards by the coercive laws of competition, alter the temporal frame not only of the circulation of capital but also of daily life”. These processes can provoke resistances from those who dwell in the spaces that they transform, but are often embraced by marginalized communities hoping for inclusion in the postmodern hyperspace of globalized consumer capitalism (Dalakoglou and Harvey 2012). For the majority of the excluded and impoverished population of the Ecuadorian Amazon, the Manta-Manaus corridor has not been resisted as a threat to their established ways of life, but has been infused with utopian fantasies of market integration and geographical freedom. One inhabitant of Providencia, where the new intermodal port is being constructed, described having been “impressed” and “inspired” by a promotor of Manta-Manaus who had visited the community with a laptop computer on which he had shown them a video with animated images of “great ships” arriving there by river. His aunt then awoke him late at night, telling him that she had just had a “spectacular” dream about Manta-Manaus and insisting that they purchase land along the riverbank (Local landowner, personal interview, 11 February 2015, Shushufindi, Ecuador). The leader of the Siekopai, an indigenous nationality based near Providencia, also told us that he hoped that the corridor would generate economic opportunities, which his community would be able to “take advantage of by creating companies”. Manta-Manaus, he declared, was “the dream of the Siekopai nation” (Elias Piaguaje, leader of the Siekopai nation, personal interview, 10 February 2015, San Pablo, Ecuador). Capital’s furious abolition of all spatial limits thus comes to be draped in the futurescapes of an emancipatory modernity and dusted with “the glitter of progress, the lure of profit, the promise of circulation, movement and a better life” (Harvey and Knox 2012: 534).

The explosion of infrastructure networks across South America is dialectically related to the implosion of capital in other parts of the world, functioning to channel the natural resources of the continent into the unprecedented industrial revolution currently under way in East Asia (Veltmeyer and Petras 2014). At the same time, the production of new infrastructures and the opening of new spaces of accumulation is catalyzing the rapid agglomeratio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Everyday Emancipation. Beyond Utopia, Law and Institutions
• PART II Practical Emancipation. On Places, Projects and Events
• PART III Critical Emancipation. On Romanticisms, Agonism and Liberation
• PART IV Active Emancipation. On Influence, Recovery and Hybrid Ownership
• Conclusion
• Index