Editorial: Utopia on the edge?

Abstract

“ … [F]uture urban worlds as gritty and half-decayed places ridden by extreme time-space compression, population explosions, environmental exhaustion and terrifying advances in technology (virtual realms, cyborg beings, hyper-surveillance and the like)1 This ‘gritty’ and disturbing characterisation of future urban worlds is one that Stephen Graham puts forward at one point in the most recent of his wide-ranging studies of urban and technological futures, this one on the vertical dimension of cities.2 How else can we characterise ‘urban worlds’? Might we need to make use of speculative, utopian and fictional perspectives? If some of the characterisations, or perhaps just some of the characteristics, are deeply and increasingly disturbing, how might we set about reforming or transforming that/those world/s? Are speculative, utopian and fictional visions largely irrelevant, dangerous or obsolete---or almost or just beyond our reach on or at the edge? What then? We draw in this issue3 on descriptions and analyses, touching unevenly on these topics, on aspects of London, Europe, Jerusalem and Palestine, North America, Shanghai and the Gulf. We include a rural/ ‘developing’ area of Ecuador seen from a cosmic view of the planet as our ‘worlds’ begin to enter and sometimes resist, the ultimate in apocalyptic global futures, ‘black hole capitalism’. We present this critical editorial survey through examining four sets of scenes using a mixed spatial and cultural/economic classification: first, ‘At the Centre?’ second, ‘Alpha, Aliph. Aleph: Scenes from the South-East'; and the third, ‘On the Edge?’ concluding with ‘Utopian Reciprocities: From the Edge to the Centre (and back)’.