Reconstructing the City - Experiments in Para-Neoliberal Urbanism

Governmental realities shaped by neoliberal understandings have been challenged after 2010 in Chile. In his talk Ignacio Farías will discuss the timid emergence of para-neoliberal propositions to re-imagine the object of urban politics.

The task of designing and rebuilding Chilean cities after the tsunami disaster of 2010 radically challenged prevailing urban governmental rationalities shaped by neoliberal understandings of the social as a field of autonomous, entrepreneurial and self-responsible individuals. The urban built environment understood as a material, technical and spatial infrastructure of life emerged as the key object of governmental intervention, replacing at least temporarily the otherwise still prevalent focus of urban politics on the regulation of land, construction and housing markets. In this talk, I will discuss the timid emergence of some para-neoliberal propositions to re-imagine the object of urban politics. First, I shall argue that the recognition of tsunamis as inhuman forces capable of radically disrupting urban arrangements did not just pose the question of which actors and knowledges need to participate of the ecology of coastal cities, but with that also a new type of governmental problem: how to deal with nonhuman forces that do not respond to economic incentives or political rationales. Second, it also became apparent that urban governmental instruments could not any longer be just oriented to set limits or conditions for urbanization processes, but had to involve propositions for cities yet to be built. Interestingly, the most important constraints for such instruments were not so much identified in the ‚autonomous' dynamics of social fields external to the state, such as markets, but rather in the internal structures of governmental action. Along these lines, I will propose the notion of a para-neoliberal urbanism, but not to describe a coherent politico-ideological project of reclaiming the state, but timid experiments into alternative ontologies of urban governmentality.

Open lecture, no registration needed
The lecture by Ignacio Farías from the Department of European Ethnology at Humboldt University of Berlin is open to all that are interested. No registration is needed. Just follow the link below to enter the virtual auditorium.

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