The territory and politics of the post-fossil city

ABSTRACT

This commentary on Maarten Hajer and Wytske Versteeg's ‘Imagining the post-fossil city’ (2018) discusses some of the assumptions and implications of the authors’ two key formulations: ‘techniques of futuring’ and the ‘post-fossil city’. It begins by scrutinizing the relationship between techniques of futuring and questions of spatial scale. It then unpacks the territorial assumptions of the post-fossil city, suggesting that the latter should be situated within broader spatial understandings of the contemporary urban condition. Finally, it discusses the politics of the post-fossil city, with an emphasis on the relationship between corporate-led smart-city sustainability schemes and local democratic governance.

KEYWORDS:

• post-fossil city
• urban sustainability
• urban politics

This article is referred to by:

Cities treated as things: imagining post-fossil cities. A friendly rejoinder to Hajer and Versteeg and Wachsmuth

Imagining the urban

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

David Wachsmuth http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5689-9527