Perhaps Hope is Not What We Need

Abstract

Bravo Steve, for your fine take on a completely unreasonable topic. It’s just too big to meaningfully deal with, but your summary of the ills of the world is right-on and it is hard to have hope. The answers you proffer are good answers indeed, and their realisation will be so qualified that I’m not excited by their prospects. Our esteemed colleague Kurt Iveson, who is following me in this discussion, will say there are always instances of everyday equalities, inspiring practices, wonderful things happening in the interstices and reasons for hope, but they’re narrowing aren’t they? Always getting squeezed and built out. Yes of course they pop up elsewhere in different forms and expressions, but they are small and the spatial opportunities are becoming fewer. Sometimes I think we cling to this line of optimism because we have to believe, until it become almost religious in its fervour – we have to have hope. The theme of the RGS-IBG Urban Geography Research Group 2021 conference was Cities of Hope, 20 years after Harvey’s Spaces of Hope and some kind of tribute, but, really? With Harvey’s little epilogue manifesto even farther from most people’s lives than ever – except perhaps on the most intimate and privileged of scales – what is there hopeful to say? Tom Slater of the University of Edinburgh said to me years ago that if dancing around a tree and calling it transformative is the culmination of urban geography’s contribution to social change – my fine former PhD student Dr Prashanti Mayfield calls it happy clappy urbanism – he’s out (of the conference circuit, I think he meant. He’s certainly still present, thank goodness). We – by which I mean, urban, human, economic, cultural geographers, planners and social theorists, those listening to the streamed conference or reading this issue of UPR – have a serious problem. Not only are we talking more esoterically, but we’re talking more and more to ourselves. I’m by no means the first to observe this, but our increasingly arcane theorising is reaching fewer people, even as we know it. Many disciplines do this, speak internally in jargon – it is a way of measuring and establishing status amongst our peers – but we have to acknowledge it is not reaching the people who need to hear it, and it is clearly not changing anything that Steve is talking about. We have a bigger problem too of course, which is that even if we werewriting and speaking to the halls of power in language they understood, their occupants still wouldn’t want to hear. Steve’s argument for making the obvious economic case, and his perfectly rational plea for evidenced, consistent messages on inequality-busting policy reforms to swing political will, doesn’t address the depth of the entrenched social and sociopathic ideology. Let me draw one illustration of the difficulty of that task in the immediate term: The anti-vax/anti-lockdown/anti-authoritarian “freedom” fighters, supported by their strange bedfellows from QAnon and the far-right, received political and media attention that those of the equally disparate Left can only dream about. Did the anti-mandate protests attract more people than Black Lives Matter rallies? Who even knows the numbers – the obfuscation here is straight out