ABSTRACT

Cities appear on the human horizon as enticing as hives for honeybees – as places where the intermixture of human energies might tumble, bumble, entangle, and synergistically catch. Humans so seek this energy of social agglomeration – this creative, bustling stew that makes spontaneous relationships, creativity, entertainment, and education possible – that theorist Edward Soja has consequently argued that the motor of human history might be something he calls synekism.1 As Soja sees it, such urbanism has been the ethos of human history for the last 10,000 years.2 Urbanism also suggests a human disposition toward a loose weave of social relations. Cities do, after all, inherently open us to relations beyond “kith and kin” – to the neighbor, to the friend, to the incidental encounter, to relations of choice. If humans are not so endogenously predisposed as Soja surmises, philosophers like Gilles Deleuze and Gianni Vattimo argue that the postcolonial conditions of urbanism today make preferable less oedipally determined or otherwise encoded relations. Consequently, Deleuze sets out a philosophy that attends to the immanent relational agonism of urbanism where friends must think together “how to mobilize the deterritorialization that capitalism unleashes … in the service of new ways of living together.”3 Vattimo comparably argues for the relational posture of friendship amidst the flood of former colonial subjects from Africa into Europe and from the presupposition of re-conceiving Christianity after metaphysics: “The death of the moral God marks the impossibility of preferring truth to friendship.”4 And so for humans, whether “essentially urban by nature,”5 as Soja surmises, or if needing simply to navigate it, urbanism appears an open and unobligated relational milieu. Yet if cities promise relations unprescribed, the conditions of “postmetropolis,” a chaotic urbanism without a center and admitting uneven development, challenge us anew.6 “The new urban form is marked,” writes Canadian geographer and urban planner Engin Isin, “by hitherto unimagined fragmentation; by immense distances between its citizens, literal, economic, cultural, social and political.”7 This loose weave of urban relations leaves us vulnerable to the apartheid of wealth and poverty, to psychic loneliness, to the compulsory, individualist task of identity formation and the potential political ineffectiveness of that singularly crafted identity.8