ABSTRACT
A theory of the city that abolishes its specters is an impoverished theory. The specters that have haunted historical modernity ineluctably return in the contemporary city and cannot be laid to rest. They are the historical specters of Napoleon III and the Second Empire that re-emerge in the New Empire today and that go under the term of Haussmannization. Haussmannization first manifests itself in the city of Paris, and later in the so-called ‘global cities’ – the former a product of a bourgeois capitalism in the age of Absolute Monarchy, the latter of present-day capitalism and its Neoliberal economic and political order. The contemporary global city is homogeneously scattered around the world – from New York to London, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Beijing, Lagos, Tehran, Mumbai – all of them registering, in different ways, the pressure of acceleration of hightech capitalism. This book is less about any particular instance of the global city than it is about the generic abstract idea of what we call the madiatized city, a city haunted by modernity in which the undead ghostly apparitions of the past return to stake their claim on the living. Modernity, in this sense, is permeated by specters of the past that contemporary models such as Habermas’s thesis of an ‘incomplete project’ fail to recognize, specters that are instead central to Benjamin’s theory of enlightenment’s unfulfilled utopian promise.
