from Post-Traumatic Urbanism.com

Urban Politics Now: Reimagining Democracy in the Neoliberal City.
Edited by BAVO (Gideon Boie and Matthias Pauwels),NAi Publishers, 2008
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“How does political change occur? Does it stutter along in a series of incremental developments, accidents and setbacks, creeping so slowly that we barely notice its happening? Or does it leap forward in a sudden rush, carrying everything along with it?
The construction of our cities and institutions can take years, decades, centuries – storming them can take hours. Urban politics might be said to operate at two speeds: the glacial and the revolutionary. Space is slow, it is built in sections over time, it accumulates and is used, it is worn, eroded and repaired -new spaces scraping into old . Events on the other hand are quick. A decade’s preparation in the contraction of an instant and though protests, riots and demonstrations all take place on a spatial stage, their appearance is fleeting and violent. After all, what are the years it took to construct the Bastille compared to the moment in which it fell?

There is an irreconcilable tension between these two types of politics. The slow activity of spatial development carries a micro-political force. It is barely detected. It is usually technical at first and only understood politically in hindsight. Evolving by accretion and the fortuitous linking up of circumstance, spatial change is intermittent. Innovation is always being filtered through the sieve of cultural expectation.

By contrast radical politics operates in time, its language is not spatial but event-based. It operates by interruption, not via continuity. But is the desire for a radical politics nothing more than a romantic longing carried in the breasts of those who harbour memories of 1968 and an under-developed reality principle? Is radical politics an impossibility? Is its impossibility precisely the point?

Urban Politics Now: Re-Imaging Democracy in the Neoliberal City is a collection of essays solicited by the Dutch urban theoretical office BAVO. The thirteen contributions from authors like Slavoj Zizek, Edward W.Soja, Neil Smith and Yannis Stavrakakis – though all taking different positions – gather round a shared sense of political impasse that they take to be characteristic of contemporary urban life. Each essay attempts to build a case against the suffocation of emancipatory urban politics under neoliberalism…..”

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