What is to be done? Redefining, re-asserting, reclaiming and re-shaping land, labour and the city

Abstract

‘How does a global financial crisis permeate the spaces of the everyday in a city?’ This seems a precise question. But it is one that nevertheless needs analytical exploration in time and space as well as redefinitions both of the crisis and of land, labour and the city. The question is posed by the research group ‘crisis-scape’ in a brief statement about their film, ‘Future Suspended: from the Olympic spectacle to the dawn of the authoritarian-financial spectacle’. That characterisation is a touching-off point for explorations (in space and time) and for examination of aspects of the film and associated research. They are set out here on the basis of a presentation at their Athens Conference, of their film², one ‘classic’ film, ‘Ulysses’ Gaze’ by Theo Angelopoulos, and of related work in this journal, as contributions to the development of an appropriate praxis, through some preliminary answers to the question: What is to be done?

Key words:

• economic and social crisis
• Angelopoulos
• migrants and ‘natives’
• villages
• post-urban planetary deformations
• Vradis and Dalakoglou
• ‘Future Suspended’
• Abourahme, anti-racism
• Tom Clark
• Athens
• Elliniko
• non-Mediterranean Greece
• Lenin
• Chernyshevsky

Notes

1 A new version, drawing on work in progress, of a contribution to the concluding session, ‘Devaluing labour, depreciating land’, in the conference Crisis-Scapes: Athens and beyond held at Athens Polytechnic, May 9^th and 10^th, 2014.

2 Available to watch online at http://www.vimeo.com/86682631

3 An initial question posed in publicity material for the film, Future Suspended (available to watch and download at https://vimeo.com/86682631).

4 Vradis and Dalakoglou (eds, 2011), Revolt and Crisis in Greece, Oakland and Edinburgh: Occupied London/AK Press, p.14. This book, its holistic editing (as rather than a mere collection of individual chapters), and the relevance of Joel Bergner's San Francisco (Mission District) mural, ‘El Immigrante’, are discussed in Catterall, B. (2011), ‘Is it all coming together? Thoughts on urban studies and the present crisis: (23) The Greek crisis?’, City, 15.3–4, pp. 491–7. The relevance of Bergner's mural continues.

5 The title of Chernyshevsky's novel (1863), vastly influential in pre-revolutionary Russia, and of Lenin's 1902 pamphlet –see Catterall, B. (2014), ‘Towards the Great Transformation: (11) Where/what is culture in ‘Planetary Urbanisation’? Towards a new paradigm’, City, 18.3, pp. 368–379, partic. 374–376 and ‘Towards the Great Transformation: (12) Planetary Urbanisation, a Bio-social Paradigm and His/Herstory’ (forthcoming).

6 See Horton, A (1999): A Cinema of Contemplation, Princeton UP, p. 206.

7 Geoff Andrew, ‘Homer's Where the heart is: Ulysses's Gaze’, in Fainaru, D. (ed, 2001) Theo Angelopoulos: Interviews, Jackson: University of Minnesota Press, p. 90.

8 Ibid, p. 90.

9 Revolt and Crisis, p. 90.

10 Vradis and Dalakoglou, p. 13.

11 Clark, T. with Heath, A. (2014), Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, p. 3.

12 Clark, T. (2014), ‘Green shoots, dead roots’, Guardian, April 26.

13 Horton, p. 206.

14 Angelopoulos, interviewed in Fainaru, p. 88.

Additional information

Bob Catterall is Editor-in-Chief of CITY.