Disaster Movie or New Jerusalem? Alternative urban scenarios for the 21st century

Prof. Malcolm Miles
University of Plymouth

Through the 1990s, a strand in urban commentary depicted contemporary cities as sites of dystopia. Mike Davis, for instance, likens the future scenario of Los Angeles to the scripts of disaster movies. When the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York - known as 9-11 - brought the projected disaster into reality television with repeated scenes of the falling towers, it seemed this script had served its purpose (although since then it has been reincorporated into projections of climate change). This dystopian imagery contradicts earlier modernist ideas of the city as a location of a new, utopian social order from the 1920s to the 1960s. This idealism builds on romanticised images of the city as a site of culture in an uncultured landscape, or a place of safety, a citadel, in face of wild nature. A difficulty uniting dystopian and utopian images of these kinds is that both tend to universalise the experience of urban dwelling while privileging the plan and the design over the material reality. At the level of everyday life, as Lefebvre and de Certeau argued, urban space is produced in another way by its inhabitants. Similarly, taking the argument to today’s alternative society and its ecological and socially equitable settlements, new social practices emerge as moments of liberation within the restrictions of present structures of power. The paper outlines this argument, and gives several examples of alternative urbanism. It makes no claim that these practices constitute an ideal society, but rather re-frames the utopian within the everyday as a really possible future other than catastrophe.


OHJELMA ILMOITTAUTUMINEN JÄRJESTÖT ARKISTO		Disaster Movie or New Jerusalem? Alternative urban scenarios for the 21st century Prof. Malcolm Miles University of Plymouth Through the 1990s, a strand in urban commentary depicted contemporary cities as sites of dystopia. Mike Davis, for instance, likens the future scenario of Los Angeles to the scripts of disaster movies. When the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York - known as 9-11 - brought the projected disaster into reality television with repeated scenes of the falling towers, it seemed this script had served its purpose (although since then it has been reincorporated into projections of climate change). This dystopian imagery contradicts earlier modernist ideas of the city as a location of a new, utopian social order from the 1920s to the 1960s. This idealism builds on romanticised images of the city as a site of culture in an uncultured landscape, or a place of safety, a citadel, in face of wild nature. A difficulty uniting dystopian and utopian images of these kinds is that both tend to universalise the experience of urban dwelling while privileging the plan and the design over the material reality. At the level of everyday life, as Lefebvre and de Certeau argued, urban space is produced in another way by its inhabitants. Similarly, taking the argument to today’s alternative society and its ecological and socially equitable settlements, new social practices emerge as moments of liberation within the restrictions of present structures of power. The paper outlines this argument, and gives several examples of alternative urbanism. It makes no claim that these practices constitute an ideal society, but rather re-frames the utopian within the everyday as a really possible future other than catastrophe.

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