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ABSTRACT
The article offers an ethnographic analysis of the imagination of the city as a mortgage environment: a space of sociability mediated by interest rates, legal language, square metres, actuary calculations and temporalities, real estate brokers, political and financial corruption, and so on. A central aim is to understand what it may mean for our contemporary political theory and anthropology to say that a society’s democratic imagination rests on a real estate and mortgage ontology. Such an imagination renders the city as a political project ‘in construction’: an ongoing, ‘building-in-progress’ development, whose social rhythm is inflected by a permanent temporal and spatial suspension; a holding in abeyance characterised by the hopeful and yet fearful economy of credit. The mortgage durée of a city-in-construction delineates the contours of our political ruins, but in this ruinous circumstance, amidst the hubris, it offers also the resources and materials for critique and reconstruction.
Acknowledgements
The article builds on a paper first delivered at the Urban Times symposium organised by Morten Nielsen at St Andrew’s University on March 2010. I am grateful to Morten for the invitation and to the other invitees for their spirited and lively engagement throughout the meeting. I am particularly thankful to Adam Reed for commenting on a subsequent version of the paper.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Spanish republicanism, that is, whose imaginary goes back to the days of the Spanish Civil War: anti-monarchical, leaning towards anarchism, and at any rate to the left of the American democratic tradition.