IN-PERSON Lisbon Livable Cities. Section B

Abstract

For a genre so fascinated with challenging and subverting urban borders and lived practices, one might be surprised by the lack of successful urban utopic political imaginaries in contemporary Science Fiction. A particularly emblematic case of this apparent failure of spatial imagination is Sarah Hall’s dystopic The Carhullan Army. Indeed, Henri Lefebvre argues in his Right to the City that even politically radical urban planners cannot hope to plan the ideal, equitable, post-revolutionary city; rather, “One has to find it among the writers of science fiction.” If we cannot imagine a more liveable city within the confines of contemporary capitalism, then perhaps we can imagine one in a better world. Following an eco-feminist uprising against patriarchal, spatialised violence, Hall’s novel portrays the challenges of urban spatial resistance under late capitalism. While her guerrillas successfully seize the city and attempt to remake it in their own image, their analytical limitations prevent them from organising across communal lines. By considering this urban social movement through Lefebvrian and recent Marxist Human Geographic work, we can analyse the liberatory spatial politics of the novel and underline the potentially problematic nature of gendering urban borders without an intersectional and class-critical approach. Thus, if the guerrillas of Hall’s novel are unable to produce a spatial utopia themselves, then perhaps we can at least use their failure to inspire our own liveable cities.