For still possible cities: a politics of failure for the politically depressed

Abstract

‘[The revolution] you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’1 Let us sit with the idea, for a moment, that we have lost. For every #metoo there is a chorus of anxious neck-tie-clutching about how things have gone too far, and the deeply misogynistic and bloodied claims of ‘incels’ are receiving mainstream thinkpiece consideration. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples are disproportionately criminalised (Australian Law Reform Commission 2017), and significant and devastating health gaps remain (Holland 2018). The ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ and the Makarrata Commission it proposed offered a pathway to more substantive forms of justice (Delegates at the Referendum Convention at Uluru 2017), but was rejected by the Turnbull government (Gordon 2017). Indeed, we live in a time when papers justifying, even promoting, colonialism are published and defended (Sultana 2018). The reinvigorated alt-right is reinforcing white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism. Palestine. Manus Island. Let us not discuss the White House, or the eager adoption of Australian-style border enforcement. Our cities are increasingly inequitable and precarious places. Climate change is here. The Great Barrier Reef is dying. We’ve already lost untold, uncounted species to extinctions, and for many more the ‘slow unraveling’ (Van Dooren 2014, 12) is underway. It’s time for some of us, at least, to be ‘thinking systematically about worst-case scenarios’ (Head 2016, 3).