Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Kurniawan, Kemas Ridwan (2021). Planning the Post‐Pandemic City: Re‐Imagining New Memory in
the Post Pandemic Urban Homes, Environmentally Healthy Neighborhood, Eco‐City Environment.
Depok: Univeristas Indonesia (in print)
The Home as the City: Territorial Contextures and Conjunctural Urbanism
during COVID‐19
Author: Manfredo Manfredini
The abrupt and uneven changes in territorialisation practices and actions in urban space which occurred during
the first year of the COVID‐19 pandemic offer a unique opportunity to evaluate the crisis of public space as
locus of emplaced relationality. The arrest of many daily practices of territorial affirmation and mobilisation
(Brighenti, 2014) has exacerbated the criticality of emancipatory and egalitarian agencies of progressively
financialised urban commons, both material and digital (Manfredini, 2019b, 2019c). The idyllic escapism to
rural lifestyles, proposed by novel disurbanist “enthusiasts” a la Garreau (1991) to urbanites of increasingly
unhealthy, congested and gentrified inner cities, or of their impoverished, deprived suburbia, enabled by the
great connective potential of the new technologies, can only further amplify problems of sociospatial
fragmentation and segregation of our “liveable cities” (discussed below).
While both the expelled and resistant urbanites of these progressively depoliticised spaces of fortified,
revanchist and highly policed consumerist landscapes of expanding elite residences, festival marketplaces,
experiential malls, scenic waterfronts, and creative districts seem to confirm a drift towards what David Harvey
(2018) defines as “universal alienation,” a closer look at the opposite emancipatory potential offered by these
mediatisation and financialisation disruptions should be given to detect the emergence of a possible “space of
hope” (2000).
The way in which processes of progressive abstraction, domination and negative sublation, such as the ones
brought about by mediatisation and financialisation, host subversive forces that disrupt their dynamics has
been central to the unaligned critical theories of Henri Lefebvre, Deleuze and Guattari, and Jacques Rancière.
These are theories that occupy a central place in the contemporary discourse on urbanism and can be
effectively mobilised to interpret the extremely vulnerable political condition of cities that during the COVID‐
19 pandemic were unable to provide access to their material everyday spatialities of publicness.
This also offers an opportunity to revise how these lines of inquiries have been received in the field of urban
studies. Such revision can bring important adjustments to approaches that, so far, have not adequately
accounted for their core driver: the productive tension and codetermination between opposite
territorialisation forces of homogenisation and differentiation, coding and decoding, equality and inequality.
As a consequence, the related theoretical constructs of the single disciplines have missed creating a critical set
of conceptual tools that help interpret and respond to the increasingly disruptive transformations: societal
(e.g., pandisciplination), environmental (e.g., anthropocenic crisis) and technological (e.g., platform
capitalism).
COVID‐19’s negation of public space radical deterritorializations of the practices and actions of the city has
exacerbated the existing suppressive processes of homogenisation (over differentiation), coding (over
decoding), and inequal distribution (over equality). The power of hegemonic actors has expanded and
disrupted the capacity of many coalitions that oppose them to act in a rapidly evolving public realm
(Manfredini, 2017). Reinforced by “social distancing” policies (the global adoption of the expression “social
distancing” to indicate “spatial distancing,” was swiftly pointed out by Rosa [Latour & Rosa, 2021], as a
symptom of the unchallenged deprivation of relations), structured partitions of resources have further
weakened the forces that Lefebvre defines as differentiation of social spatial production (Lefebvre, 1991,
2003), Deleuze‐Guattarian decoding of territorial assemblages (Deleuze, 1992; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), and
Rancièrian disagreement (Rancière, 1999, 2010). For example, abstractive spatialisations have effaced
In Kurniawan, Kemas Ridwan (2021). Planning the Post‐Pandemic City: Re‐Imagining New Memory in
the Post Pandemic Urban Homes, Environmentally Healthy Neighborhood, Eco‐City Environment.
Depok: Univeristas Indonesia (in print)
differential counterspatialisations; stiffening, homogenising and halting concatenations have overwhelmed
creative, diversifying and mobilising destratifications; ordering policed consensus has ruptured political
dissensus.
A central agent of this generalised depoliticization has been the negation of access to central urban public
space for security or health reasons. This most brutal displacement en masse has been globally experienced
and has exacerbated the discrimination against the ever‐increasing leaving behind of the nonassimilated. The
condition of the “radically expelled,” cast out from what had been their lives, which prevents them from
appearing and making manifest their disagreement due to the overpowering consequences of the ample
distance, material and relational, introduced with their eviction from their networks, has been eminently
described by Saskia Sassen (2014). Yet, while Sassen referred to the material expulsions through urban
restructuring and gentrification, COVID‐19 restrictions have instigated a much wider dismissal of those who, in
various ways, challenge or obstruct the abstractive restructuring programmes. Those dismissed are the
marginalised, particularly those who have limited digital competence or access; the disenfranchised, such as
the economic migrants; and the resistants, specifically those anti‐authoritarian activists who outplay
disciplinary regimes by oscillating between actual and virtual realities (e.g., the Gezi Park Movement that was
constituted by emplaced, antagonist and grassroot relational networks supported by encrypted social media
platforms that circumvented the regime’s control with tactics that included manually sharing leaflets in the
camp indicating steadily changing passwords; Manfredini and Zamani Gharaghooshi, 2016; Manfredini, Zamani
Gharaghooshi and Leardini, 2017; Manfredini, 2021c). Overall, these are those who are expelled by systems
that negate equality by eradicating spaces of dissensus (Rancière, 2010, p. 71) through the elimination, little by
little, of any emerging “parasitical entities of political subjectification” (p. 124).
The inhibition of any protension generated by cultural diversity was guaranteed by sterilised and distantiated
visitations that annihilated any materially emplaced act of commoning. In terms of citizens’ rights and
practices, the very limited public leverage in central privatised public space was patently manifested with the
unconcerted outright negation of urban places of highest public interest. Exemplary cases were the heavy
policed fencing off of major “malled” metropolitan centres, entirely privately owned but formally designated
as civic places (Manfredini, 2019b, 2021a). Somehow paradoxically, “in a society that, as Agamben (2020)
stated, “has sacrificed freedom to so‐called ‘reasons of security’ and, therefore, condemned itself to live in a
perennial state of fear and insecurity” producing “emergency experiments” for the mediation of “every
contact — every contagion — between human beings,” such a prompt proactive reaction, followed by
micromanaged disciplinary measures during the gradual reopening phases, has reinforced the normativity of
these heterotopic paradigms. Strengthening the state narrative of “stamping out,” reifying a supreme
protection‐by‐restriction model that underlies its idea of social order, harmony, safety and wellbeing, these
enclaves of enhanced control, which I have elsewhere described, elaborating upon Baudrillard, as preceding
simulacra (Manfredini, 2021b), have accelerated their urban assimilation as prime civic centralities.
In the dominated urban centres, the “medicalisation” of public space (Low, 2020) has greatly impaired the
counterhegemonic cultural milieus, where social capital parasitically and irregularly developed collectively
incrementally generated counterspaces. The restrictions hit heavily on the reappropriative capacity of
independent, place‐based social networks with reduced capacity to coordinate responses. This typically
occurred where the interaction was based on material visitation, no matter whether for production or
consumption, as in the case of night or informal markets. Independent operators progressively supplanted by
scarcely regulated extractive and creative destruction processes enacted by the so called category‐killer
organisations (whose aggressivity in the online retail and service sectors has been strongly enhanced by the
digital spiralling during the “lockdown” instances). Antagonists of the hegemonic apparatuses have been
further decimated by the conjunctural economic hardship. Even the counter spatialites of community
networks of accomplice prosumers (Miles & Miles, 2004) have seen their concrete financialised urban
commons weakening due to their extraneity to the control of the infrastructures and activations of those
institutions.
In Kurniawan, Kemas Ridwan (2021). Planning the Post‐Pandemic City: Re‐Imagining New Memory in
the Post Pandemic Urban Homes, Environmentally Healthy Neighborhood, Eco‐City Environment.
Depok: Univeristas Indonesia (in print)
Where multi‐stakeholders’ cocreativity or consultation processes have been instituted, the loss of the voice of
the weaker has been a common phenomenon. Certainly many have been the cases where active participation
in producing spatial changes of main public spaces has achieved effective outcomes, yet these are minor and
marginal (Myrick, 2020). Indeed, most of the impromptu transformations have been embedded in larger urban
processes driven by neoliberal agendas of extractive urbanism. As elaborated by Jamie Peck (2017a),
expanding on David Harvey’s line of inquiry, extractive capitalism has determined a new model of crisis‐prone
financialised urban governance with escalating spatial financialisation (French et al., 2011) obliteration of the
commons (Hardt & Negri, 2009, p. 137) and, in extreme cases, even loss of territorial sovereignty (Peck,
2017b). Indeed, most of these processes are steered by “annihilation of space by law” agendas that self‐
legitimise with “livability” narratives. Such narratives, globally used to trigger policies aimed at erasing the
space where those left behind live, created “a legal fiction in which the rights of the wealthy, of the successful
in the global economy, are sufficient for all the rest” (Mitchell, 2003, p. 167). The effectivity of these
mechanisms of hegemonic cultural control during the COVID‐19 crisis is demonstrated by the frequent flipping
of radical challenges to pseudo‐liberalism‐framed exercise of power, such as nearly ubiquitous anti‐lockdown
protests allying individuals and movements much beyond the antagonist groups of sovereign citizens’
orientation.
During the pandemic, the hegemonic culture (regarding this notion see Gramsci, 1975; Laclau, 1996; Laclau &
Mouffe, 1985) took major advantage from the hike in digital mediatisation. The affirmation of total visibility
(Brighenti, 2010; Dahlberg, 2018) and its related totalising self‐administered psychopolitical steering, dominant
actors have accomplished the transformation of individuals into fully resolved “dividuals.” The integral
embedment in the continuous digital network space has accomplished what Deleuze (1992) postulated: we
“no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become dividuals” (5). We are
all made into algorithmically “resolved identities” (Brusseau, 2020). Civic collectives of dividuals are easily
controllable and docile assemblages (Nissenbaum & Varnelis, 2012, p. 34) of “genital organs of capital” that
morph the “negativity of freely made decisions into the positivity of factual states” (Han, 2017, p. 12). The
complete reliance on communication systems dominated by entirely privately owned services with little
regulatory leverage makes the public sphere of these dividuals ineffective, incapacitating us to come together,
engage and act independently politically.
During the pandemic’s lockdowns, the near‐totality of people’s interactions beyond their household was on
social media (active users have surpassed 40% of the world population; Kemp, 2021). Notwithstanding the
progressive contextual and environmental specificity of VAM reality, which increasingly integrated novel
features to share information, orient behaviour and act politically (Kitchin et al., 2017), the control of the
digital public sphere has concentrated in the hand of a few global organisations. A rampant quasi‐monopolisitc
platform capitalism (Peck & Phillips, 2020; Srnicek, 2017) has best the turn of capitalism into “cognitive”
(Negri, 2003, p. 64) “informational and computational” (Stiegler, 2019), a system “working from that
‘restricted layer’ that Braudel called the antimarket [‘a murky but dominating layer located above the
competition’], newly constituted as a placeless place in the clouds with its very own breed of great predators”
(Peck & Phillips, 2020, p. 93).
The progressive digitally territorialised behaviour of the increasingly (im)mobile internet users has made
possible the expansion of disciplinary control through the whole mediatised integration of private life and
public life – i.e., the blurred boundaries that have characterised the modern dualism of production/social
reproduction in practices such as play/labour, leisure time/work time and consumption/production –
concerning sociality (cognition, communication, cooperation), social roles (e.g., citizens, consumers, workers)
and, consequently, the liberal freedoms of speech, opinion, expression, association and assembly (Fuchs, 2014,
pp. 77, 96). To be effective, this control uses modulation and variance systems to perpetually increase in the
precision of case and time‐specific systems of individuation. Disciplinary control commands all functions and
tools: primary (e.g., the neighbourhood platforms for connecting and collaborating that during the lockdown
periods pervaded all geographical levels, from the building to the district), secondary implicit (e.g., services
prioritising regional content or contacts based on Sim data, IP address or basic ID settings) and secondary
In Kurniawan, Kemas Ridwan (2021). Planning the Post‐Pandemic City: Re‐Imagining New Memory in
the Post Pandemic Urban Homes, Environmentally Healthy Neighborhood, Eco‐City Environment.
Depok: Univeristas Indonesia (in print)
explicit (e.g., locative services enabling the use of specific synchronic or diachronic features to have access to
context‐specific material, social or cognitive elements).
To undo the COVID‐19 pandemic’s negative deterritorialisation that has accelerated the course of universal
alienation, abstraction, domination and negative sublation of our age, massive work must be collectively done
to sustain its immanent counterforces. Aiming for a possible “radically democratic society,” to compensate for
this further distancing, it is necessary, as stipulated by Ernesto Laclau (1996, p. 121), to reconstitute
counterhegemonic pathways that guarantee “a plurality of public spaces constituted around specific issues
and demands, and strictly autonomous of each other, [that] instils in its members a civic sense which is a
central ingredient of their identity as individuals” (121). This should be done by guaranteeing the Right to
dissensus, because, as Rancière (2010) posits, it is only through it that the permanent reassertion of equality
can exert its inherently disruptive capacity to evade coding, orders and distributions and, as such, inform
politics as “supplement to every collective body: that is, the totality of the uncounted, which does not mean
the 'excluded' but simply anybody at all” (p. 79).
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