ABSTRACT
In the city, new possibilities of destitution have created new possibilities of re-imagination. “Geographies of Threat” concludes with an articulated schema of the modern city as the combined lessons of the empty city freed of indigeneity; the closed city of restricted access; the colonial city with planned congregations of the racial “Other”; the imperial city renovated with racial and gendered city splitting; the Stateless-beyond-city of the rural and through ‘hood abandonment; the dead city that is prison; the of gentrification; and the possibilities of the old, walled fortress city and the new, selective private city, all combined to yield the eventual production of the apartheid city of confinement and restrictive order. The apartheid city is the most ideal geographical and spatially necessary response of the State to the current and coming phenomena of overpopulation, overaccumulation, and over-carcerality. The city has historically identified and situated populations into their proper place in service to the order. In the milieu of deracination, abandonment, dereliction, dispossession, and violence, there is the possibility of an abolitionist geography of possibility and wondrous imagination, a soul city or free city. All that is between us is the city.
