The Urban Reproduction of Subjectivities

This open access book analyzes how subjectivities are produced and reproduced by urban spatial structures in twenty-first century neoliberal London. In three steps, it examines the continuous processes of intertwining conflicts that constitute urban space: It demonstrates how contemporary neoliberal spatial processes enclose subjectivity; it addresses how these processes are mediated by design and science; and finally, it examines how detours and insurgencies might be developed.

This book interrogates the processes and consequences of privatization. Neoliberal spaces disconnect people from non-hegemonic actions and subtly control the urban experience by encouraging consumerist behavior and passive spectatorship. Despite the dispossession, expropriation, and exclusion these processes entail, people come to love these privatized urban spaces.

Using case studies from around London, the book challenges traditional notions of public spaces. Georg Simmel described the metropolitan spaces as experiences of difference, freedom, and rationality, but this book explores how spaces now construct a post-metropolis shaped by domestication and anaesthetic comfort, exerting control through invisible cages and reproducing spatial machines that reinforce consumerist subjectivities. It analyzes policies, plans, and scientific discourse to trace how fetish mechanisms contribute to the objectification of social relations in urban spaces. By helping to understand the political economy of urban production, this book aims to help overcome neoliberal hegemonic design-thinking strategies. Therefore, it also addresses conflicts, insurgent experiences, and practices that explore alternative routes, such as micro-utopias and hacking practices.

The Urban Reproduction of Subjectivities invites academics, practitioners, and activists to open new fields for critical design, urbanism, and architecture, to search for new imaginings of a different city, and to develop alternative design practices.