Editorial: ‘This place is pre-something … ’

Abstract

‘[B]uffeted by economic catastrophe, vastly reconfigured by a sporting jamboree of militarised corporate banality, jostling with social unrest, still reeling from riots. Apocalypse is less a cliche than a truism. This place is pre-something.’ This place could be Rio, was/is Athens/Greece, the Balkans and beyond, now Istanbul, perhaps could come to be true of Singapore? This could be, to take an apocalyptic view, so many places in the world. But surely not London? Economic catastrophe? No, not as yet, anyhow. A militarised, corporate and banal sporting jamboree that has reconfigured the place? Some such claims have been made about the Olympised fate of London and other similarly endowed and beset cities. Some truths here, then? Jostling with social unrest? A not too uncommon phenomenon, world-wide. Still reeling from riots? Apocalypse? Surely not? Can it be, taking the lack of precision of the term ‘pre-something’ as an invitation, rather than a windy nothing, in fact a challenge, to look for and into, critically nevertheless, unfamiliar phenomena, so as to defamiliarise such places/situations in London, and other such places, we shall discover signs of apocalypse as a truism rather than a cliché? But in different proportions, ambiences and totalities, in some cases perhaps with, signs of becomings, of ‘pre-something’, even of hope as well as disaster. The provocation, the invitation to observe, imagine, rethink, is there in the agoras as much as academe, in the streets and homes (where still, permitted) as much as their so often blocked dialogue. Is it in the antagonisms and occasionally unblocked openings between agora and academe, or in the labours of transdisciplinary knowledge or, of what Andy Merrifield calls amateurism, that we will find glimmerings of a de-scientised paradigm for science, for knowledge of the contradictory, shifting realities unearthed and emplaced in the local and global fantasies and realities of ‘the twenty-first century’. On this occasion we turn, then, to three places/situations, always with activists and activisms in mind, to ‘Singaporean “spaces of hope”’, to refugees and ‘Europe’s Last Frontier’, and back/forwards to London’s housing crisis itself.