Urban Justice and the Crisis of Neo-liberalism
Professor Scott Lash is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. His books include The End of Organized Capitalism, Economies of Signs and Space, Reflexive Modernization, Global Culture Industry and Intensive Culture (2010). His books have been translated in sixteen languages. Professor Lash has directed a series of large-scale research projects on technological media from 1996 to present. He is currently running a project on the Chinese city. This research will be published under the title Local State Capitalism: Urban China. Professor Lash is a project leader in the Goldsmiths Media Research Programme.
Abstract
Three decades of neo-liberal privatization has meant the systemic destruction of the public sphere. The global economic crisis presents new possibilities for fundamental mutations of public/urban space, driven by ‘emerging’ cities like Shanghai, Mumbai and Lagos. If the global city was topographical, these mega-cities are topological, spaces of infolded atmospheres. In Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ justice was a violence that nullified the commodity and law. Benjamin’s was a temporal, messianic critique. We must ask what kind of spatial violence can create a contemporary justice of new publics in both the emerging world and the West.
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