The urban impossible: A eulogy for the unfinished city

Abstract

This paper extends the debate on the right to the city through the idea of the urban impossible. The starting premise is the fundamental and age‐old question—what actually is a city, what do we want it to be and who should be involved in its making? The right to the city is not just a movement for material rights, but also the right to shape, intervene and participate in the unfolding idea of the city. Cities, then, are living organic, conflictual entities that are constantly remade and recast in thousands of ways through everyday encounters. In different moments, new possibilities for radically different cities open up. The city, then, is an unfinished, expansive and unbounded story. The urban impossible demands a much wider political imaginary to intervene in the unfolding story of the city and calls for a radical appetite for change to inform the work of urban researchers. The agenda becomes not so much about what the city currently is or what it was, but more about what it could become, what it has never been. I outline some directions that this kind of research agenda needs to take; in particular, the need to develop a broad critique of the urban growth machine and developing processes and mechanisms for more participatory and direct forms of urban democracy. This is the urban impossible: being simultaneously within, against and beyond the current urban condition. Like an Alice in Wonderland who has found herself in the city, we need to dream six impossible cities before breakfast.

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