Planetary concerns

Abstract

This paper responds to the challenge to refract Harvey’s theory of uneven development through the planetary. It does so by questioning the way in which ‘the planetary’ has functioned as an abstraction within recent work in urban and environmental studies. With some now framing the field of urban studies as caught between two perspectives—‘the planetary’ and ‘the everyday’—I reject such a typology, arguing that it fails to reflect the current state of the field and is an obstacle to the practice of genuinely inquisitive scholarship. Writing against such a myopic view of the field, I nevertheless argue that we might rethink the current planetary turn through considering the planetary as one moment in a process of abstraction. Rather than the planetary serving as the starting point for an analysis—as the whole notion of a planetary turn seems to suggest—I argue that the planetary needs to be considered an arrival point, an ensemble of social relations that can only be arrived at through the hard work of critical scholarship. I begin by detailing the so-called planetary turn in urban and environmental thought before looking at the simplistic typologies counterposing such a position to the more situated or everyday. I then suggest an alternative framing by rethinking the relationship between the abstract and the concrete. I conclude by advocating for a philosophy of praxis.

Key words:

• planetary urbanization
• planetary boundaries
• Anthropocene
• abstraction
• praxis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For an attempt to develop a ‘labor point of view’ in relation to the Anthropocene, see Wark (2015).

2 Hartley’s critique here echoes that of Ekers and Prudham (2017, 2018) on the socio-ecological fix, even if for them the foundations for such an approach might be found in Gramsci, Harvey and others rather than Jameson.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alex Loftus

Alex Loftus is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. Email: [email protected]