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Abstract
The year 2020 was accompanied by a new apocalyptic zeitgeist. After the COVID-19 pandemic shattered lifeworlds in many societies around the world, it seemed easy to imagine it to be the end of the world. No image was more evocative of this moment than that of the empty city. Due to the various lockdowns implemented in numerous countries, images of empty cities spread across the media. This paper investigates this image by emphasising the political implications of the apocalyptic imagination. By focusing on those who remain in the public space after the city was emptied, this paper questions whether the image of the empty city simply fuels the fantasies of ‘urban exploration’, as critiques have stated, or if it, rather, paves the way for an open view of the inequalities produced by urban societies today. Therefore, the paper stresses that the remaining people we see in the images of emptied public spaces are mainly those who either have no home to stay inside or work for those who stay inside. Subsequently, it investigates the particular qualities of public spaces pictured during the lockdowns. Imagining cities as empty has been vehemently criticised through the notion of ‘ruin porn’. In contrast to this critique, the paper emphasises that the image of the empty city allows us to see the city with ‘inhuman’ eyes, which leads to a shift in perspective through recognising how little public space is still available when it no longer functions under the imperative of the pre-pandemic status quo. In concluding, the paper reflects on the subversive, or ‘emancipatory’, potential of witnessing the urban void opened up by the pandemic.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Henning Füller, Roger Keil, and Friederike Landau-Donnelly for their valuable feedback and remarks on a previous draft of this paper. Thanks are also due to two anonymous reviewers and the City editors for their critical responses and helpful advice. Of course, any mistakes, errors, and omissions in the text are my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Given the changing nature of the matter I am writing about, it seems appropriate to add for contextualisation that the first draft of this paper was written at the end of 2020 and that the paper was revised one year later. Further, it is crucial to note that this paper is written by someone who experienced the pandemic from a Western European perspective. While a pandemic might suggest that this event affects the world ‘as a whole’ (as already indicated by the word ‘pandemic’ stemming from the Greek πᾶν, pan, which means ‘all’, and δῆμος, demos, meaning ‘people’), the COVID-19 pandemic has, in fact, not affected everyone everywhere at the same time but has proceeded unevenly across time and space (Bhan et al. Citation2020).
2 Yet, one should not neglect the vast number of people who died and thus physically disappeared in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time of finishing this paper, more than six million deaths have been ascribed to the virus.
3 City became an early venue for intellectual engagement with the apocalypse and, in a way, anticipated the wider interest of urban studies in studying the apocalyptic imagination that followed this engagement. As Bob Catterall (Citation2010, 477) prompted already, more than ten years ago: ‘It might seem that an apocalyptic obsession is taking hold in/of City’.
4 For another work with an ‘ordinary’ approach to the empty city during the pandemic, see Kipfer’s (Citation2020) photo essay on Toronto.
5 I refer here to Jacques Rancière’s (Citation2007a, 22–23) notion of the ‘naked image’, which describes images that do not aim to constitute art but provide the spectator solely with a testimony of a reality and trace a history.
6 On the ‘unrepresentable’, see also Rancière (Citation2007a, 109–138).
7 However, the image of the empty city is not the only trope of the urban apocalyptic imagination. There are others, such as the ‘destroyed’ or the ‘submerged’ city, as Paul Dobraszczyk emphasises in his extensive study of that topic (Dobraszczyk Citation2017, 23–52).
8 Referring to Martin’s The Last Man, I follow Horn (Citation2018), who describes this painting as marking the backbone of the modern apocalyptic imagination.
9 Another field of research this paper openly relates to is a more recent turn in cultural geography towards the powerful implications of ‘negativity’ (Bissell, Rose, and Harrison Citation2021) and ‘the void’ (Kingsbury and Secor Citation2021).
10 Rancière implicitly references here Marx’ 11th thesis on Feuerbach (Marx Citation1998, 571).
11 One should thus not neglect the more material dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic was a crisis that infected societies through its bodies as well as a crisis with a massive impact on livelihoods, especially in the poorest parts of the world. It therefore certainly is a privilege to be able to engage with the image spaces produced by this crisis, and not be preoccupied with its physical effects.
12 As already indicated in the Ancient Greek word apokálypsis, apocalypse not only refers to the end of the world but literally means ‘uncovering’, ‘revealing’ or ‘lifting the veil’.
13 However, there is a kind of populist twist at the end of Don’t Look Up. In the post-credits scene, the rich minority arrives on the new planet after the comet destroyed the Earth. After waking up from their freezing chambers, they find themselves naked in a kind of new Garden of Eden. Suddenly, an indigenous bird attacks the former president of the United States (played by Meryl Streep) and kills her. Then the film really ends. The lesson of this scene is that there is no escape from the apocalypse. In one way or another, ‘we are all’ doomed.
14 Thereby, it should be emphasised that cities in the future will not only have to deal with the pandemic but with an overlap of multiple crises: ‘The pandemic will end, but cities changed by it will still face climate emergency and the accumulated social disaster of years of dispossession and inequality’ (Madden Citation2020, 679). The future of the post-pandemic city will, therefore, be most likely rooted in a ‘combined and uneven apocalypse’ (Calder Williams Citation2011).
15 I refer here to the German translation of Baudrillard’s text because it includes extended passages that have not been published in the French original and English translation.
16 Applying Rancière’s concept of spectatorship to the apocalyptic imagination is not coincidental. In the introduction to his book The Future of the Image, which is the basis of his work on emancipatory spectatorship, Rancière (Citation2007a, 1) writes that his intention is to examine how ‘a certain idea of fate and a certain idea of the image are tied up in the apocalyptic discourses of today’s cultural climate’.
17 I took this reference from Žižek (Citation2020, 68).
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Lucas Pohl
Lucas Pohl is postdoctoral researcher in the programme History and Theory of the City at HafenCity University Hamburg and affiliated with the Department of Geography at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.