Designing the Post-Political City and the Insurgent Polis

Erik Swyngedouw
July 2010

Forthcoming as Civic City Cahier 5 Bedford Press, London, 2011 .

Western democracies are only the political facades of economic power. A faade with
colours, banners, endless debates about the sacrosanct democracy. We live in an era
where we can discuss everything. With one exception: Democracy. She is there, an
acquired dogma. Dont touch, like a museum display. Elections have become the
representation of an absurd comedy, shameful, where the participation of the citizen is
very weak, and in which the governments represent the political commissionaires of
economic power (Jos Saramago, 2006).
There is a shift from the model of the polis founded on a centre, that is, a public centre
or agora, to a new metropolitan spatialisation that is certainly invested in a process of depoliticisation (Agamben, 2006)

1. Happy Crisis and Merry Fear (Slogan on Athenian Wall, December 2008)

On 6 December 2008, 15 year old Alexis was shot by the police on an Athenian square,
an event that triggered weeks of violent urban protests and cascaded throughout Greece.
Less than two years later, on 5 May 2010, three people were killed during riotous protests
in Athens in the aftermath of the draconian policy measures the Greek socialist
government had to take under the policing eye of the European Union and the
International Monetary Fund to restore budgetary rigour and to safe French and German
banks overexposed to Greek sovereign debt paper. On 17 July 2010, Grenoble was set on

fire in a clash between rioters and the police. These are some of the recent installments of
a sequence of events that saw insurgent architects trying to re-assemble the urban through
anarchic outburst of irrational violence in the face of turbulent urban and social
transformations for which they felt neither responsible nor had much power over their
design. Emblematically starting with the French urban revolts of the fall of 2004, the
retaking of the streets by protesters jumped around from Copenhagen to Rome and from
London to Riga. Urban revolts and passionate outbursts of discontent have indeed
marked the urban scene over the past decade or so. Rarely in history have so many people
voiced their discontent with the political designs of the elites and signaled a desire for an
alternative design of the city and the world, of the polis. Yet, rarely have mass protest
resulted in so little political gain.

Politically impotent as they may be, these signs of urban violence are nevertheless telltale
symptoms of the contemporary urban order, an order that began to implode, both
physically and socially, with the onslaught, in the fall of 2007, of the deepest crisis of
capitalism in the last 70 years, a crisis that finally exposed the flimsy basis on which the
fantasy of a neo-liberal design for the city and the world of the 21st century was based.
Several trillion Euro worth of bailout funding was put up by governments in the US and
Europe to safe the financial system while the subsequent budgetary difficulties, manifest
from 2010 onwards, prompted radical and devastating austerity measures of which the
devastating implications still have to become clear.
There is apparently no alternative. The state as the embodiment of the commons has to be
marshaled to serve the interests of the elite few. On 7 February 2009, Newsweek
headlined its cover with the slogan we are all socialists now. Indeed, Newsweek is
correct; they (the elites of the world) are all socialist now, corralling the state to serve
their interest and to make sure that nothing really has to change that capitalism can go
on as before. And indeed, political dissent is virtually absent; few dissenting voices
among official political leaders, whether left or right , are heard. The only way or so it
seems in which real dissent can be articulated is by making the public spaces of cities as
recurrent theatres of impotent, violent, but passionate, outbursts of radical insurgent
architects.

Cover of Newsweek, 17 February 2009,

In this contribution, I shall consider the contemporary urban condition as a symptom of

this state of the situation. The city offers a privileged scale for dissecting the social body,
for rummaging through the innards of our most intimate fantasies, desires, and fears. We
shall argue that, while the city is alive and thriving at least in some of its spaces, the polis
as the site for public political encounter and democratic negotiation, the spacing of (often
radical) dissent, and disagreement, and the place where political subjectivation emerges,
is performed and thus literally takes place, seems moribund. In other words, the polis as a
political space is retreating while social space is increasingly colonised or sutured by

consensual techno-managerial policies. This evacuation of the properly political

dimension from the urban -- what will described below as the post-political condition -constitutes what I define as the ZERO-ground of politics. The leitmotiv of this
contribution will indeed be the figure of a de-politicized Post-Political and PostDemocratic city.
I shall argue that the urban process at the beginning of the 21st century has shifted
profoundly, giving rise to a new form of governmentality in the Foucaultian sense of the
word, one that is predicated upon new formal and informal institutional configurations
forms of governance that are characterized by a broadening of the sphere of
governing/controlling/policing, while narrowing, if not suspending, the space of the
properly political. Urban governing today is carried by a wide variety of institutions and
organizations. It operates through a range of geographical scales, and mobilizes a wide
assortment of social actors, including private agents, financial engineers, designers,
architects, and planners, non-governmental organizations, civil society groups,
corporations, and the more traditional forms of local, regional, or national government. It
is a governance regime concerned with policing, controlling and accentuating the
imperatives of a globally connected neo-liberalized market economy for which there is
ostensibly no alternative, while intensifying bio-political control and surveillance and.
This new polic(y)ing order reflects what Slavoj iek and Jacques Rancire define as a
post-political and post-democratic constitution. I shall insist that this post-political
condition evacuates the political proper i.e. the nurturing of disagreement through
properly constructed material and symbolic spaces for dissensual public encounter and
exchange and ultimately perverts and undermines the very foundation of a democratic

polis. This regime exposes what Rancire calls the scandal of democracy: while
promising equality, it produces an oligarchically instituted form of governing in which
political power seamlessly fuses with economic might (Rancire 2005b) and a
governance arrangement that consensually shapes the city according to the dreams,
fantasies, tastes and desires of the transnational economic, political, and cultural elites.
Proper urban politics fosters dissent, creates disagreement and triggers the debating of
and experimentation with more egalitarian and inclusive urban futures, a process that is
wrought with all kinds of tensions and contradictions but also opens up spaces of
possibilities. Exploring the design of dissensual spaces will constitute the final part of this
contribution. But first I shall highlight the contours of present-day urbanity.

2. The privileged city Musings on the contemporary glocal metropolis

Over the past 25 years or so, urban polic(y)ing in the European city, in the context of the
implementation of consensual neo-liberal socioeconomic policies, brought about critical
shifts in domains and levels of intervention and in the composition and characteristics of
actors and agents, institutional structures, and policy instruments. A new urban design,
both materially and managerially, emerged. For cities, changing fortunes means coming
to terms with the consequences of socio-economic dislocation wrought by the
reorganization of production and demand globally, the transnational networking of
companies and individuals, the flows of global hot money, and the fast restructuring of
labour markets. To meet the challenges posed by these new socio-economic realities, the
polic(y)ing agenda of cities has been drastically redefined. The new urban agenda reflects

a shifting policy focus away from regulatory and distributive considerations towards the
promotion of economic growth and competitiveness, entrepreneurship, and marketsensitive creativity. This strategic turn on the urban agenda is part and parcel of a critical
reappraisal of the form, functions and scope of the city and of inaugurates the rise of a
new mode of urban governance (Swyngedouw 2005b). While a variety of competing
styles of governance still provide for a great deal of differentiation, urban design is
increasingly framed in a common and consensual language of competitive creativity,
flexibility, efficiency, state entrepreneurship, strategic partnerships, collaborative
advantage, and design-intensive acupunctural interventions (Healey 1997; Jessop 1998;
2002; Albrechts 2006).
From the late 1980s onwards, after the initial successes of large scale urban redevelopment projects in Boston, Baltimore, and Barcelona, urban development strategies,
aimed at re-positioning cities on the map of globally competitive metropolises, have
strongly relied on the planning and implementation of emblematic projects. They are now
present all over the urban and regional landscape and are the material expression of a
developmental logic that views them as major leverages for generating future growth and
attracting investment capital and consumers. Berlins Potzdammer Platz, Amsterdams
South Axis, Rotterdams Kop van Zuid, Bilbaos Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabis
Masdar eco-city, or Beijings or Londons bid to stage the Olympic Games are just a few
examples of the sprawling number of cities that have pursued such tactics. Enhancing
urban competitive advantage is seen as largely dependent on improving and adapting the
built environment to the accumulation strategies of a citys key elites and plugging the
city into cutting edge transnational economic and cultural elite networks.

The precarious character of this form of urban re-design burst asunder with the onslaught
of the urban-financial crisis that started in 2007. Triggered by the unprecedented
ballooning of fictitious capital in the built environment (the infamous toxic mortgages),
sustained by increasingly quixotic technologies of financial engineering in speculative
derivatives markets, the excavation of the origins of the crisis as well as the consensual
subsequent state-management of the crisis exposed the fantasmagoric matrix upon which
the neoliberal claims rested. The neo-liberal revolution that Thatcher and Reagan
unleashed and was subsequently rolled-out and solidified by generalising their
prescriptions to most parts of the world, turned out, in the end, to be a radical re-directing
of the state as a collective agent from supporting an imaginary public to servicing the

interests of local and transnational elites of a particular kind, in particular the financial
and landed capital interests. The mobilisation of the commons of the urban in search of
profit and fictitious capital formation was facilitated through the consensual fusion of
state and private interests in public-private partnerships, consolidating, as Paolo Virno
put it, a socialism for the elites.
Indeed, the neo-liberal fantasy whereby the hidden hand of the market would guarantee
and sustain unlimited growth and a reasonable distribution of goods was exposed as
nothing but a phantasmagoria. Whereby the earlier urban designs more or less
successfully claimed the victory of market forces by disavowing the central role of statebacked funding and investment under the mask of public-private partnerships, it is now
clear that the prescriptions of urban redesign during the nineties and first decade of the
20th century were only the pioneering forms of a socialism for the transnational capitalist
class, one that is now consolidated into a full-fledged socialist-elite state. A consensual
state-police form has now become more deeply entrenched, whereby the state functions
to organize the survival of capitalism by guaranteeing continuing capital flows on the one
hand and repressing the various forms of radical discontent that ripple throughout the
urban field.

3. The Post-Political City

For iek, Mouffe, and Rancire, among others, such consensual arrangements signal the
emergence of a post-political and post-democratic condition. They define the postpolitical as a political formation that actually forecloses the political, that prevents the

politicization of particulars (iek 1999a: 35);(iek 2006);(Mouffe 2005): post-politics

mobilizes the vast apparatus of experts, social workers, and so on, to reduce the overall
demand (complaint) of a particular group to just this demand, with its particular content
no wonder that this suffocating closure gives birth to irrational outbursts of violence as
the only way to give expression to the dimension beyond particularity (iek 1999b:
204). The post-political condition is one in which a consensus has been built around the
inevitability of state-backed capitalism as an economic system, parliamentary democracy
as the political ideal, humanitarianism and inclusive cosmopolitanism as a moral
foundation. Imagining alternatives to this capitalo-parliamentary ideal (as Badiou calls it)
is censored, foreclosed. Post-politics is thus about the administration (policing) of social,
economic or other issues, and they remain of course fully within the realm of the
possible, of existing social relations (iek 1999b: 198). The ultimate sign of postpolitics in all Western countries, iek (iek 2002: 303) continues, is the growth of a
managerial approach to government: government is reconceived as a managerial
function, deprived of its proper political dimension. Politics becomes something one can
do without making decisions that divide and separate (Thomson 2003). A consensual
governmentality arises, one that either eliminates fundamental conflict or elevates it to
antithetical ultra-politics. The consensual times we are currently living in have thus
eliminated a genuine political space of disagreement. However, consensus does not equal
peace or absence of fundamental conflict (Rancire 2005a: 8).
Difficulties and problems, such as re-ordering the urban, that are generally staged and
accepted as problematic need to be dealt with through compromise, managerial and
technical arrangement, and the production of consensus. Consensus means that whatever

your personal commitments, interests and values may be, you perceive the same things,
you give them the same name. But there is no contest on what appears, on what is given
in a situation and as a situation (Rancire 2003b: 4). The key feature of consensus is
the annulment of dissensus .. the end of politics (Rancire 2001: 32). The postpolitical relies on either including all in a consensual pluralist order and on excluding
radically those who posit themselves outside the consensus. For them, as (Agamben
2005) argues, the law is suspended the police order annuls their rights; they are
literally put outside the law and treated as extremists and terrorists. That is why for
Agamben, the Camp is the seminal space of late modernity. This form of ultra-politics
pits those who participate in the consensual order radically against those who are placed
outside. The riots in Paris in the fall of 2005 and the police responses (both those by the
forces of repression as by the political elites) were classic violent expressions of such
urban ultra-politics (for details, see (Dike 2007)).
Late capitalist urban governance and debates over the arrangement of the city are not
only perfect expressions of such a post-political order, but in fact, the making of new
creative and entrepreneurial cities is one of the key arenas through which this postpolitical consensus becomes constructed, when politics proper is progressively replaced
by expert social administration (iek 2005: 117). The post-political consensus,
therefore, is one that is radically reactionary, one that forestalls the articulation of
divergent, conflicting, and alternative trajectories of future urban possibilities and
assemblages. The design of consensus uproots the foundation political impulses that
center on disagreement, agonistic conflict and the struggle over the Real of different
urban possibilities. This retreat of the political into the cocoon of consensual policy-

making within a singular distribution of the givens of the situation constitutes, I maintain,
the zero ground of politics.

4. The Question of Democracy: The Post-Political and Post-Democratic Polis

Suspending Dissensus

A true politics for Jacques Rancire (but also for others like Badiou, iek, or Mouffe) is
a political community conceived as:
A community of interruptions, fractures, irregular and local, through with
egalitarian logic comes and divides the police community from itself. It is a
community of worlds in community that are intervals of subjectification: intervals
constructed between identities, between spaces and places. Political beingtogether is a being-between: between identities, between worlds . Between
several names, several identities, several statuses (Rancire, 1998: 137-138).

Rancires notion of the political is characterized in terms of division, conflict, and

polemic (Valentine, 2005). Therefore, democracy always works against the pacification
of social disruption, against the management of consensus and stability . The concern
of democracy is not with the formulation of agreement or the preservation of order but
with the invention of new and hitherto unauthorised modes of disaggregation,
disagreement and disorder (Hallward, 2005: 34-35). The politics of consensual urban
design, therefore, in their post-political guise colonise the political, and contribute to a

further hollowing out of what for Rancire and others constitute the very horizon of the
political as a radically heterogeneous and conflicting one.
In contrast, proper [p]olitics exists wherever the count of parts and parties of society is
disturbed by the inscription of a part of those who have no part (Rancire, 1998: 123),
and dissensus is the proper name of egalitarian politics:
The notion of dissensus thus means the following: politics is comprised of a
surplus of subjects that introduce, within the saturated order of the police, a
surplus of objects. These subjects do not have the consistency of coherent social
groups united by a common property or a common birth, etc. They exist entirely
within the act, and their actions are manifestations of a dissensus; that is, the
making contentious of the givens of a particular situation. The subjects of politics
make visible that which is not perceivable, that which, under the optics of a given
perceptive field, did not possess a raison dtre, that which did not have a name
. This constitutes the ground for political action: certain subjects that do not
count create a common polemical scene where they put into contention the
objective status of what is given and impose an examination and discussion of
those things that were not visible, that were not accounted for previously
(Rancire, 2000c: 124-125)

And this of course stands in contrast to the consensual elite-socialist policies that define,
organize and suture the present debate and practice: [c]onsensus is thus not another
manner of exercising democracy [It] is the negation of the democratic basis for
politics: it desires to have well-identifiable groups with specific interests, aspirations,

values and culture Consensualist centrism flourishes with the multiplication of

differences and identities. It nourishes itself with the complexification of the elements
that need to be accounted for in a community, with the permanent process of
autorepresentation, with all the elements and all their differences: the larger the number
of groups and identities that need to be taken into account in society, the greater the need
for arbitration. The one of consensus nourishes itself with the multiple (Rancire,
2000c: 125).

Something similar is at work in the micropolitics of local urban struggles, dispersed

resistances and alternative practices that suture the field of urban social movements
today. These are the spheres where an urban activism dwells as some form for placebopoliticalness (Marchart, 2007: 47). This anti-political impulse works through colonization
of the political by the social through sublimation. It elevates ruptures, disagreements,
contestations, and fractures that inevitably erupt out of the incomplete saturation of the
social world by the police order. For example, the variegated, dispersed and often highly
effective (on their own terms) forms of urban activism that emerge within concrete sociospatial interventions, such as, among others, land use protests, local pollution problems,
road proposals, urban development schemes, airport noise or expansions, the felling of
trees or forests, the construction of incinerators, industrial works, etcelevates localized
communities, particular groups and/or organizations (like NGOs), etc.... to the level of
the political. They become imbued with political significance. The space of the political
is thereby reduced to the seeming politicization of these groups or entities Here the
political is not truly political because of the restricted nature of the constituency.

(Marchart, 2007: 47). In sum, particular urban conflict is elevated to the status of the
political. Rather than politicizing, such social colonization of the political, in fact, erodes
and outflanks the proper political dimension of egalibertarian universalization. The latter
cannot be substituted by a proliferation of identitarian, multiple and ultimately
fragmented communities. Moreover, such expressions of protest, that are framed fully
within the existing practices and police order (in fact, these protests -- as well as their
mode of expression -- are exactly called into being through the practices of the existing
order they are positively invited as expressions of the proper functioning of
democracy) are, in the current post-political arrangement, already fully acknowledged
and accounted for. They become either instituted through public-private stakeholder
participatory forms of governance, succumbing to the tyranny of participation (Cooke
and Kothari, 2001), or are radically marginalized and framed as radicals or
fundamentalist and, thereby, relegated to a domain outside the consensual postdemocratic arrangement. The more radical forms of urban activism become an unending
process which can destabilize, displace, and so on, the power structure, without ever
being able to undermine it effectively (iek, 2002: 101) and are as such doomed to
failure. The problem with such tactics is not only that they leave the symbolic order intact
and, at best, tickle the police order (see (Critchley, 2007)), but also, as iek puts it,
these practices of performative reconfiguration/displacement ultimately support what
they intend to subvert, since the very fields of such transgressions are already taken into
account, even engendered by the hegemonic form (iek, 1999b: 264).

A genuine politics emerges in the moment in which a particular demand is not simply
part of the negotiation of interests but aims at something more, and starts to function as
the metaphoric condensation of the global restructuring of the entire social space (iek,
1999b: 208). It is about the recognition of conflict as constitutive of the social condition,
and the naming of the spatialities that can become without being grounded in
universalizing notions of the social (in the sense of community, unity, or cohesion) and of
a singular notion of the people. The political becomes for iek and Rancire the space
of litigation (iek, 1998), the space for those who are not-All, who are uncounted and
unnamed, not part of the police (symbolic or state) order. A true political space is
always a space of contestation for those who have no name or no place. As Diken and
Laustsen ((Diken and Laustsen, 2004: 9) put it: Politics in this sense is the ability to
debate, question and renew the fundament on which political struggle unfolds, the ability
to radically criticize a given order and to fight for a new and better one. In a nutshell,
then, politics necessitates accepting conflict. A radical-progressive position should
insist on the unconditional primacy of the inherent antagonism as constitutive of the
political (iek, 1999a: 29)).
The beginning of politics proper, emerged with the demos as an active agent in the Greek
polis, with, as iek puts it the emergence of a group which, although it without a fixed
place in the social edifice (or, at best, occupying a subordinate place), demanded to be
included in the public sphere, to be heard on an equal footing with ruling oligarchy or
aristrocracy, i.e. recognized as a partner in political dialogue and the exercise of power
. Political struggle proper is therefore not a rational debate between multiple interests,
but, simultaneously, the struggle for ones voice to be recognized as the voice of a

legitimate partner . Furthermore, in protesting the wrong (le tort) they suffered, they
also presented themselves as the immediate embodiment of society as such, as the standin for the Whole of Society in its universality . Politics proper thus always involves a
kind of short-circuit between the Universal and the Particular: the paradox of a singular
which appears as a stand-in for the Universal, destabilizing the natural functional order
of relations in the social body (iek, 2006b: 69-70). The elementary gesture of proper
politicization is [t]his identification of the non-part with the Whole, of the part of society
with no properly defined place within it (or resisting the allocated place within it) with
the Universal, discernible in all great democratic events (iek, 2006b: 70). Such
new symbolizations through which what is considered to be noise by the police is turned
into speech is where a proper politicization of the urban should start from, where the repoliticisation of public civic space in the polis resides. Reclaiming proper democracy and
the insurgent design of proper democatric public spaces (as spaces for the enunciation of
agonistic dispute) become a foundation for and condition of possibility for a reclaimed
polis, one that is predicated upon the symbolisation of a positively embodied
egalibertarian socio-ecological future that is immediately realisable. These
symbolizations should start from the premise that equality is being wronged by the
given urban police order, and are about claiming/producing/carving out a metaphorical
and material space by those who are unaccounted for, unnamed, whose fictions are only
registered as noise.
The political act (intervention) proper is not simply something that works well within
the framework of existing relations, but something that changes the very framework that
determines how things work . [A]uthentic politics is the art of the impossible it

changes the very parameters of what is considered possible in the existing constellation
(emphasis in original) (iek, 1999b: 199). Designing dissensus is, therefore, an integral
part of the aesthetic register through which the re-framing of what is sensible is
articulated and become symbolisable. This is a call for a de-sublimation and a
decolonization of the political or, rather for a re-conquest of the political, from the social
or, in other words, to re-invent the proper political gesture from the plainly depoliticizing affects of post-political and post-democratic policing.

5. From Ground-Zero to Reclaiming the Polis: Designing Dissensus

Urban activism that is aimed at the state and demands inclusion in the institutional
registers of urban governance ripples throughout the urban and rituals of resistance are
staged as performative gestures that do nothing but keep the state of the situation intact
and thus contribute to solidifying the post-political consensus. Resistance as the ultimate
horizon of urban movements has become a hysterical act; a subterfuge that masks what is
truly at stake how to make sure that nothing really changes. The choreographing of
urban conflict today is not any longer concerned with transgressing the boundaries of the
possible, acceptable, and representable, but rather a symptom of the deepening closure of
the space of the political.
Yet, the Real of the political cannot be fully suppressed and returns in the form of the
violent urban outbursts with which I opened this contribution, outbursts without vision,
project, dream or desire, without proper symbolization. This violence is nothing but the
flipside of the disavowal of violence of consensual governance. And it is exactly this

repression of the properly political that surfaces invariably again in violent gestures in a
sort of re-doubling of violence. That is, the return of the repressed or of the Real of the
political in the form of urban violence, of insurgent architects, redoubles in the violent
encounter that ensues from the police order whereby the rallying protesters are placed,
both literally and symbolically, outside the consensual order; they are nothing but, in
Sarkozys words and later repeated by the Greek prime minister, scum (racaille),
people without proper place within the order of the given.
If the political is foreclosed and the polis as political community moribund in the face of
the suspension of the properly democratic, what is to be done? What design for the
reclamation of the polis as political space can be thought? How and in what ways can the
courage of the urban collective intellect(ual) be mobilised to think trough a design of and
for dissensual or polemical spaces. I would situate the tentative answers to these
questions in three interrelated registers of thought.
The first one revolves around transgressing the fantasy that sustains the post-political
order. This would include not surrendering to the temptation to act. The hysterical act of
resistance (I have to do something or the city, the world, will go to the dogs) just
answers the call of power to do what you want, do live your dream, to be a responsible
citizen. Acting is actually what is invited, an injunction to obey, to be able to answer to
What have you done today? The proper response to the injunction to undertake action,
to design the new, to be different (but which is already fully accounted for within the
state of the situation), is to follow Bartlebys modest, yet radically transgressive, reply to
his Master, Id prefer not to . The refusal to act, to stop asking what they want they
want from me, to stop wanting to be liked. The refusal to act as is also an invitation to

think or, rather, to think again. The courage of the urban intellect(ual) is a courage to be
intellectual, to be an organic intellectual of the city qua polis. This is an urgent task and
requires the formation of new imaginaries and the resurrection of thought that has been
censored, scripted out, suspended, and rendered obscene. In other words, is it still
possible to think, for the 21st century, the design of a democratic, polemical, equitable,
free common urbanity. Can we still think through the censored metaphors of equality,
communism, livin-in-common, solidarity, proper political democracy? Are we
condemned to rely on our humanitarian sentiments to manage socially to the best of our
techno-managerial abilities the perversities of late capitalist urbanity, or can a different
politics and process of being-in-common be thought and designed. I like to be on the side
of the latter. This brings me to the second register of thought required.
This second moment of reclaiming the polis revolves around re-centring/re-designing the
urban as a democratic political field of dispute/disagreement: it is about enunciating
dissent and rupture, literally opening up spaces that permit speech acts that claim a place
in the order of things. This centres on re-thinking equality politically, i.e. thinking
equality not as a sociologically verifiable concept or procedure that permits opening a
policy arena which will remedy the observed inequalities (utopian/normative/moral)
some time in a utopian future (i.e. the standard recipe of left-liberal urban policy
prescriptions), but as the axiomatically given and presupposed, albeit contingent,
condition of democracy. Political space emerges thereby as the space for the
institutionalisation of the social (society) and equality as the foundational gesture of
political democracy (presumed, axiomatic, yet contingent foundation). This requires
extraordinary designs (both theoretically and materially), ones that cut through the master

signifiers of consensual urban governance (creativity, sustainability, growth,

cosmopolitanism, participation, etc) and their radical metonymic re-imagination (see
Gunder and Hillier, 2010). Elements of such transgressive metonymic re-designs include
Thinking the creativity of opposition/dissenssus and reworking the
creative city as agonistic urban space rather than limiting creativity to
musings of the urban creative class
Thinking through the city as a space for accommodating difference and
disorder. This hinges critically on creating ega-libertarian public spaces.
Visionary thinking and urban practices: imagining concrete spatiotemporal utopias as immediately necessary and realizable.
Re-thinking and re-practicing the Right to the City as the Right to the
production of urbanization. Henri Lefebvres clarion call about the Right
to the City is indeed really one that urges us to think the city as a process
of collective co-design and co-production.
Thirdly, and most importantly, however, is to traverse the fantasy of the elites, a fantasy
that is sustained and nurtured by the imaginary of an autopoietic world, the hidden-hand
of market exchange that self-regulates and self-organizes, serving simultaneously the
interests of the Ones and the All, the private and the common. The socialism for the elites
that structures the contemporary city is Really one that mobilises the commons in the
interests in the elite Ones through the mobilising and disciplinary registers of postdemocratic politics. It is a fantasy that is further sustained by a double fantastic promise:
on the one hand the promise of eventual enjoyment believe us and our designs will
guarantee your enjoyment. It is an enjoyment that is forever postponed, becomes a true

utopia. On the other hand, there is the promise of catastrophe and disintegration if the
elites fantasy is not realised, one that is predicated upon the relentless cultivation of fear
(ecological disintegration, excessive migration, terrorism, economic crisis and
disintegration), a fear that can only be managed through technocratic-expert knowledge
and elite governance arrangements. This fantasy of catastrophe has a castrating effect it
sustains that impotence for naming and designing truly alternative cities, truly different
emancipatory spatialities and urbanities.
Traversing elite fantasies requires the intellectual and political courage to imagine
egalitarian democracies, the production of common values and the collective production
of the greatest collective oeuvre, the city, the inauguration of new political trajectories of
living life in common, and, most importantly, the courage to choose, to take sides. Most
importantly, traversing the fantasy of the elites means recognizing that the social and
ecological catastrophe that is announced everyday as tomorrows threat is not a promise,
not something to come, but IS already the Real of the present. As the Invisible
Committee put it in The Coming Insurrection,
Its useless to wait for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear
apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe
is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a
civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides