VIRTUAL London.

Abstract

What is the future of “city” in a rapidly changing, liquid, interconnected, globalized world, whose inherent uncertainty creates for many “an atmosphere of ambient fear”? Bauman’s (2000) concept of “liquid modernity” describes the failure of the modernist project of increased human emancipation, and our current globalized society as characterized by instability, ambiguity and by the erosion or disappearance of apparently stable or solid categories of identity. This liquidity affects concepts and practices of spatializating and materializing identity, being, and being-in-place. Rapid change is such that individuals, social patterns and institutions no longer have time to respond and provide solid and meaningful bases of human identity and collective action. Place itself, as a substantive category, is under threat by this liquidity – seemingly established and stable constructs such as nation, territory and shared culture being disengaged, dislocated and “becoming liquid.” Such conditions of permanent and pervasive uncertainty generate fear. “Liquid fear” analyses the nature of the fear such endemic uncertainty generates, and the consequences for our ability to engage in meaningful social action to produce a viable future. Liquid fear is without obvious source, derivative and based in an internalization of insecurity and vulnerability, and “will create a reaction similar to the experience of real danger” attaining “a self-propelling capacity” (Bauman, 2006: 3). This derivative, liquid fear drives the designs of spaces and places that destabilize any manifestation and formation of just human-environment relationships. This presentation explores alternatives to the design of cities under conditions of neoliberal and necroliberal capitalism.