The atmospheres of massiveness: The politics and times of the maybe in Southern megaregions

Abstract

In this introduction to the special issue on massive urbanisation, the collective that has prepared this issue reviews the thinking and experiences that have been important to them. The reflections centre on the use of ‘massive’ in Jamaican patois, where it has two countervailing meanings. On the one hand, it means an inordinate lack of sensitivity to the real conditions taking place, a sense of extreme self-inflation beyond reason. On the other, it means a collectivity coming into being without a set form, but reflective of a desire for collaboration and mutuality. Massive urbanisation thus means here both the voluminous expansion of speculative accumulation, extraction of land value, replication of vast inequities and disfunction, and the continuous emergence of new forms of urban inhabitation, a constant remaking of the social field by what has been called the urban majority. All of the contributions attempt to work with this sense of doubleness, amplifying the creation of particular atmospheres of the urban as a materiality of its heterogeneity.