Here are some comments I made at the recent meeting of the American Association of Geographers in downtown LA. The Westin Bonaventura (search Jameson, postmodernism if you don’t remember his rant about architectural anti-democratic design and downtown LA) was the site of more lefty urban theorists than you could dream of.
This panel was called “The Future of the Capitalist City,” organized by NYU PhD candidate Daniel Cohen, who invited me to do the introduction. I’m so glad he did, as it was a blast seeing so many marxists at the art-deco Biltmore.
So we started with: “How might we think about the future of the city, and think it in conjunction with the future of capitalism?”
Daniel Aldana Cohen reminds us that “social science today is often reluctant to think big about the future;” yet, he draws us together here with a challenge: “in the face of perpetual economic and environmental crisis, thinking about the future is a critical exercise.” He cites John Urry to help dispel our reluctance: “We will all be forced to become futurologists, whether we like it or not … We all need to be thinking futures even if doing so is immensely difficult.” If you explored the range of geographical expertise at the AAA, you might’ve drawn a mental map of those who were reluctant to talk about the future and those who weren’t. At a lunchtime plenary on the same day, Google’s Chief Technology Advocate (CTA) Michael Jones began with a jaunty announcement: “I’m here to talk to you about the future.” He immediately launched into an anecdote from the year 1507. Martin Waldseemüller’s famous Universalis Cosmographia (1507), his map of the world (http://www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/waldexh.html), included a picture of an elephant to represent what a traveler might see in Southern Africa. Google, Michael Jones told us, was putting the elephant on maps of the future. This is not the place to explore what he thought he meant (you had to be there); what’s interesting for us, at a discussion of the perils and challenges of thinking about the future, is the temporal structure of Jones’ talk. He began with the future, and moved immediately to the past. Then he linked the identities of those shaping the future to those who dominated past technologies of representation. He then brought it all back to geography, telling us: “Geography is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it.” Placing his own corporation at the heart of this process, he explained: “A map can actively change peoples’ behavior. We [at Google] see this a billion times a day.”
I cite Google’s CTA to remind us that some people are not shy about thinking about – and explicitly hammering at – the future. If we’re to ask “what’s left” after the corporate hammer falls, we must think early, and often, about future alternatives.
I have two suggestions for thinking about the future – and you can see how they might look like Michael Jones’ strategies, but depart from them in significant ways (via tactics we need collectively to explicate).
(1) We need to think with history to think the future:
The history of capitalism and its discontents is a useful guide to thinking its futures. Modes of resistance have, in recent decades, run aground under neoliberal governance and flexibilized subjectivities. If we are to think creatively about resistance, we need insights from radical histories.
(2) We must think with a multitude of others in order to think the future:
The postcolonial city must be thought along with the metropolitan city; the west along with the rest. This is to be done not in the standard post-Enlightenment liberal mode of add & stir, but in serious conversation with each other.
For example, Michael McQuarrie’s work on Cleveland suggests that, in the collapse of infrastructure and the promise of growth, Cleveland’s decline makes it not representative of most US cities; rather, he terms it a ”revelatory” data point, in the extreme-ness of this sample. If we compare his study, however, with studies of urban processes in the developing world, as in work by anthropologist Abdou Maliq Simone on precarious and flexible lifetimes, or economist Kalyan Sanyal’s work on an expanding army of the dispossessed with not even their labor power to sell, we might come to see that what appears as extreme in the US has become the norm in parts of the developing world. It might also be that in post-recession Euro-US sites, the post-colonial might represent the future norm.
But finally, we also need to speculate – the most risky business about thinking the future. I salute this post-disciplinary panel’s bold spirit in taking on this most difficult of tasks, and look forward to the rich papers ahead.