Editorial: ‘We are here’

Abstract

‘We, the sons and daughters of this land, are opening our doors, walking out into the streets and taking up positions in town plazas to say: We are here.’¹

A journey and an assertion made one morning in Jerusalem after the summer of 2014: ‘We are here’. Or it could be a journey and a position taken on summer days in squares, streets, cafes outside banks in Athens and beyond in Greece in the summer of 2015, expressed in the assertion: ‘We say No’.

Universalising the steps taken above, ‘we’ can be, not just those who come from ‘this land’ but also ‘those who came … from arbitrary and despotic lands’² or those decimated by ‘development’ across the planet. Such people are ‘taking up positions in town plazas’ and elsewhere. Who/what did or do they encounter? What support, obstacles, fulfilment, confusions that lead to what? To further ‘arbitrary and despotic’ responses and conditions, leading to liberatory movements, terminated through oppression and/or premature death, and/or transcendence, also possibly involving acute suffering, through radical change?

Re-assembling the papers and reviews in this issue of City, in the light of recent events in Athens, Greece, Europe in the summer of 2015, in order to reflect on such journeys, testing and extending Academe³ through explorations with multidisciplinary studies sometimes tending towards transdisciplinary ones that take in the spaces of the Agora and beyond, we construct a four-stage exploration.

The first is from Jerusalem to the planet, ‘reinterpreting our contemporary challenges for socio-spatial development’.

The second takes in two British cities and six cities classified as European and ‘in crisis’ (the latter grouping concluded with a comparison with Singapore). We move in the case of the British cities from notions of modelling urban futures in Liverpool to the unrealised semi-fiction of an abandoned comprehensive transport plan in London. In the case of the European ‘crisis’ cities the move is towards understanding affective encounter (s).

Third, taking up notions of gentrification and fascism, reconsidering London, drawing on City’s ‘holistic and cumulative project’⁴- itself a journey that has extended, in a reverse process from the Agora of its founding years in the late 1990s to its occasionally uneasy encampment on the borders of Academe from 2000 whilst seeking to retain and develop the disturbing urgency and vitality of the Agora.

Fourth, we return both to the planet and to some questions raised by the assertions ‘We are here’, made one morning in Jerusalem, and particularly by ’We say No’ made one day in Athens: who are we, where are we, how should we act, what knowledge do we need, how can we ensure that we are here to stay?

Notes

1 Haim Yacobi (this issue).

2 See Souza's epigraph from Emma Goldman (this issue).

3 See CITYzen's ‘Academe or Agora? Re-situating the Urban Epistemology Debate’ on our editorial website www.city-analysis.net

4 See Melissa Wilson's review-article (this issue). Sitting confidently in 'the encampment on the borders of Academe' was the work of 'the first Green Marxist'; Alain Lipietz (see Michael Dunford (1997)). The series title emphasises the fact that the journal’s project is both holistic and cumulative. One aspect of this is the increasing importance given to the notion that the planet has to have a more than an adjectival, also-ran existence than is permitted in unilateralist ‘planetary urbanisation’. With this emphasis it extends, (retaining, though re-interpreted, the rest of its agenda) the approach to critical theory that excluded earthed and embodied biological dimensions from its concerns and the approach to urban critical theory that excludes them from its now, particularly now, outdated characterisation of planetary urbanisation.

5 Haim Yacobi, email, 2015-07-15.

6 See, for example, Catterall (2014a), p. 243.

7 Abourahme (2014), p. 578.

8 See also, as Souza notes, Catterall (2013).

9 Antonis Vradis, Open Democracy, 13 July 2015.

10 Email, July 2015.

11 The Greek sections of this editorial owe much to an intermittent email dialogue with three Greek colleagues and three non-Greek ones. The debt to Antonis Vradis is evident, that to Professors Lila Leontidou and Dimitris Dalakoglou is, because of lack of space, not evident on this occasion but has been important. The non-Greek sources, which also relate strongly but implicitly to the theme Agora v. Academe are: Andy Merrifield's ‘Amateur Urbanism (to appear in City’ 19.5) - whose epigraph is “Our era of technicians makes abundant use of the nominalised adjective ‘professional’: it seems to believe that therein lies some kind of guarantee” --Guy Debord; and Slavoj Zizek (with great thanks to Mark Davidson who has long laboured in CITY, by himself and in conjunction with Elvin Wyly, to demonstrate the pragmatic value of some of Zizek's work). See particularly: www.newstatesman.com/…/Slavoj-Zizek-greece-chance-europe-awaken ‘The Greeks are correct: Brussels’ denial that this is an ideological question is ideology at its purest – and symptomatic of our whole political process.'

12 To the usual acknowledgment of the author's sole responsibility for any mistakes of fact or interpretation, an acknowledgement undertaken in order to protect the innocent, a specific apology has to be made to Mr Magoo for placing him in the company of myopic unilateral ‘planetary urbanists'. As Professor Souza has pointed out (email) ‘while Magoo gets into many comical (and potentially tragic) situations as a result of his nearsightedness (as we know, largely due to his stubborn refusal to admit the problem … ), he is very lucky, so that the situation always seems to work itself out for him. Perhaps some people don't deserve so much luck in comparison with our lovely character … ’

13 The need for such a political-economic-cultural transition arises in the concluding paragraphs of two accounts of the film in the crisis-scape special feature (see Abourahme (2014) and Catterall (2014b). The latter emphasises the unexplored potential in the film of the views of Panos Totsikas, Urban Planner, Struggle Committee of Elliniko Metropolitan Park, and member, Self-organised Allotments of Elliniko - see also the long quote from him on p. 497). How, pragmatically, could and should food and other local production be sold and distributed beyond existing capitalist arrangements in the impending financial and economic ultra-crisis with or without Grexit?