Urban Eidos

Our forthcoming issue will focus on the ideology of a neoliberal market and its consequences, in particular the destruction of space and community. This will affect living spaces and the individual within society. To use the metaphor of an ecosystem, the worldwide conditions generated by a recent neoliberal market constitute the encompassing socioeconomic and cultural ecosystem we all live in…

This paper outlines some characteristics of neoliberalism and examines their impact upon the city and upon democracy and participation in urban spaces. The paper first maps out some themes of neoliberal ideals. Following this, and focusing in particular on the United Kingdom, it explores how neoliberalism has embedded itself in cities. The paper then discusses how neoliberalism employs a language…

Public space is premised on the free and equal access of citizens but its ‘order’ is always a precarious balance between homogeneity and diversity, freedom and oppression, superficial contact and deeper engagement. How is this balance tested and shifted by neoliberal urbanism when the city is both a site and agent in the process? Is the idea of public space…

Housing is a high-order human need in all societies, at all times. Under capitalism, especially in its neoliberal era, access to housing that meets basic human needs has been denied to an increasing proportion of the population. This has and is resulting in rising levels of over-crowding and homelessness that both undermines the productivity of the economy and destroys the…

This critical interrogation of the neoliberal agenda pivots around its usurpation of creativity as crystalized in the creative city and related urban politics in the global North. Cities being the engines of the economy (Jane Jacobs and Peter Hall), Florida and Landry advocate the creative city as the real motor force of the neoliberal economy – a kind of creativity…

Today’s trend toward authoritarianism is not a rejection of neoliberalism, but rather a continuation of it through other means. This thesis can be supported by looking at the debate about changes in social character in social psychological characterology. Under neoliberalism, the authoritarian character (Fromm 1932) as a threat to democracy gave way to the marketing character (Fromm 1976). In the…

This article looks at literary texts set in Johannesburg (Ivan Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys), London (Ian McEwan, Saturday) and Atlanta (FX series Atlanta, created by Donald Glover) to articulate the impact of neoliberalism in each text’s depiction of crime and communal urban society. By examining both how characters in each text react to crime, as well as how neoliberalism creates…

Our second edition Polis and Democracy – the idea of the city for free citizens is about the very idea of democracy and the kind of citizenship aligned to it. Being aware that this is a rather encompassing theme in this issue, we want to throw just some initial highlights on it.

This essay focuses instead on theoretical debates within the sociological tradition, with a view to ascertaining what a viable “realistic” account of “everyday” utopia might consist of, but here chiefly in the urban context which this tradition chiefly addresses. Two major themes are examined here: the role of the city in these debates; and the nature of concepts of “friendship”…

Will the technical, socio-economic and political landscape bring a complete disruption of life as we know it today, or will it help mankind adapt to a better way of living, and a democratic lifestyle based on the Greek words ‘Demos‘ meaning people and ‘Kratos‘ meaning power, governing which depends on the will of the people?

Taken from its Greek origin, an eidos is an image. It is a very old word, deeply embedded in our culture. From its Indo-European root, it means “seeing”, “to see”, is related to “knowing” and stands for a consistent form, appearance, gestalt, and the very nature of what is seen as a vivid fact. Eidos is the apparent specific way…

Walter Benjamin told us about what art had lost in the course of its reproducibility. In this article I want to go into more detail about the characteristics that art had to make use of in order to preserve its balance and eventually become what we know it as today.