Full Description
Cities are now on the front line of dangers associated with the climate crisis, health emergencies, uncontrolled artificial intelligence, escalating warfare, growing authoritarianism and capitalist profligacy. This is especially so for their unprotected populations who, in large numbers, now face a dire future of precarity as powerful elites seek to turn urban assets to their advantage in confronting an uncertain future. For the vast majority of people living in cities, the future is one of foreclosure - a future of dispossession and impoverishment that is lacking a horizon of hope.
What pathways remain open for cities to avert a future of foreclosure for people leading modest lives in modest neighbourhoods? To answer this question, this book looks to the popular practices and knowledges that exist within urban communities and neighbourhoods, finding within them elements that are potentially reparative and curative. Here the engagement with time is different, involving repertoires of horizontal relations, affinities of place and restive knowledge capable of making something out of nothing, of bending adversity towards other goals. Here, rich yet neglected ecologies of urban inhabitation - with all their wiles and improvisations - emerge as the ground of future-making. The book offers a body of concepts to encapsulate this threatened yet resistant urbanism, exemplifies its workings in the streets of Kinshasa, Lagos, Mexico City and Naples, and outlines an infrastructural and aesthetic politics to bring out its potential, thereby enabling another future to shine through urban foreclosure.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. Foreshadowing the Future
Chapter 2. To Resume Reprendre. Urban Futures in the Era of the Congolese Anthropocene
Chapter 3. Hope without Future? Eko Atlantic, Climate Urbanism and the Self-Devouring Growth of Lagos
Chapter 4. To be Suspended: The 'Black Heart' of Naples
Chapter 5. Extendible present: Making the future through smart buildings, sacred mushrooms, and ghosts in Mexico City
Chapter 6. Time, Politics and the Incipient Urban
Chapter 7. The Foreshadowings of Blackness: Methods of Urbanizing Futures
