I just finished reading an article which really piqued my interest. A few days ago, I stumbled across a website called Bad Subjects. "Bad Subjects is a collective that publishes a magazine (Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life) and provides access to it via a public access website." In issue 78, published in November 2007, Zack Furness of Chicago interviews David Pinder, a Geographer from London.
What grabbed my eye immediately was the subtitle: "Geographer David Pinder talks about radical geography, cities and the politics of utopia." I've always been skeptical of the idea of utopia; this was made especially clear while attending Hampshire College. Hampshire is a cozy little school nestled in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. New England has always been a little baffling to me; this tiny, dense area of the country, rich in history and rich in contrast; home of the poorest and wealthiest people in America. These contrasts gave rise to a strange breed of folks, whom I was made aware of through my fellow Hampsters: liberal, hopefully, radical, and yet dogmatic, elitist, ignorant. (This could be said of any group of people, especially college kids, but there's something about New England elitism that stuns me.)
Anyway, what was I getting at? While living in New England, amidst the apples and the Academics, I was prone to stumbling upon these Utopian experiments. College kids and grandparents alike would find some perfect place and set up a society that ran on rules (or a lack thereof) that suited their opinions of regular society's ills. Admirably to redefine or demand something more from society, but not in a way that pre-supposes isolation. Isolation begets ignorance.
So, the article. After a bit of introduction, Pinder explains how he came to geography through an interest in different places and people, and geography's interdisciplinary approaches to addressing social problems, he mentions radical, even anarchist geography, which - ping! - grabbed me.
He goes on to describe the negative emotions surrounding the physical and cultural make-up of cities; viewing cities as intense concentrations of people and things which lead to "poverty, environmental degradation, [and] lack of sanitation."
Pinder explains that he is, like I am, critical of concepts and manifestations of utopia:
"there have, of course, been many murderous regimes that have justified their
actions in the name of a utopia to come, not to mention a long history of failed
urban utopias that have frequently been repressive and authoritarian in their
actually existing forms."
I had never experienced repressive Utopian societies on so grand a scale as to which he refers, but I could always picture this outcome while in the utopias I knew. Did you ever read The Giver or A Wrinkle in Time? Both books I read in 5th grade, both books featuring repressive utopias; my introduction to a subject at 11 which I still struggle to understand 13 years later. I still remember the conversation I had with my father about the ideals and practices of Utopian politics, specifically Communism, at that age.
So why was I so interested in Pinder's interview? Because of his reference to cities of hope, utopian urbanism, and the right to the city. He distills the points of view of influential thinkers to explain what utopian urbanism can be. A rallying cry, he calls it, in struggles for urban social justice. The city as a work of art and revolution; all citizens can and should be given the opportunity to reconsider, reclaim and restructure city space. In the face of corruption and apathy, when those in power belittle the efforts of community organizing, perhaps we - or more specifically I - should reconsider utopia. To make my own city of hope that is inclusive, not retreative.
And while I still - STILL - want to leave this silly Milwaukee town, there's no saying I can't build a little bit of wonderful before I go, right?
The problem then is going from theory to practice. What is a City of Hope? What would my ideal city look like? And how can I ensure that I always try to look at these questions from varying and even opposing perspectives? For, as interesting as Pinder was (and I recognize that only so much can be articulated in the space of magazine article), he merely bypasses his Western perspective; I would like to explore how non-Western scholars have theorized "the city" and the citizen's role in its make-up.
Anyway, things to look up:
- radical geography
- David Harvey
- anarchist geography
- Peter Kropotkin
- Henri Lefebvre
- "the right to the city"
- Situationists
- "under the pavement, a beach!"
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