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

Through the 1990s, a strand in urban commentarydepicted contemporary cities as sites of dystopia.Mike Davis, for instance, likens the future scenario ofLos Angeles to the scripts of disaster movies. Whenthe attack on the World Trade Centre in New York –known as 9-11 – brought the projected disaster intoreality television with repeated scenes of the fallingtowers, it seemed this script had served its purpose(although since then it has been reincorporatedinto projections of climate change). This dystopianimagery contradicts earlier modernist ideas of thecity as a location of a new, utopian social orderfrom the 1920s to the 1960s. This idealism builds onromanticised images of the city as a site of culturein an uncultured landscape, or a place of safety, acitadel, in face of wild nature. A difficulty unitingdystopian and utopian images of these kinds is thatboth tend to universalise the experience of urbandwelling while privileging the plan and the designover the material reality. At the level of everyday life,as Lefebvre and de Certeau argued, urban space isproduced in another way by its inhabitants. Similarly,taking the argument to today’s alternative society andits ecological and socially equitable settlements, newsocial practices emerge as moments of liberationwithin the restrictions of present structures ofpower. The paper outlines this argument, and givesseveral examples of alternative urbanism. It makesno claim that these practices constitute an idealsociety, but rather re-frames the utopian withinthe everyday as a really possible future other thancatastrophe