The fetishization of density in (sub)urban North America: A dialogue on the affects and desires of densification

Abstract

What makes dense urban form desirable, and for whom? Structured as a critical dialogue, this intervention puts psychoanalysis and affect theory into conversation with Marxian political economy to generate new insights about urban planning and contemporary cultural interpretations of ‘the good life.’ Urban density is conceived here as standing in for a range of sometimes-conflicting individual, professional, and societal desires. In this way, urban planning that takes high-density development as an axiomatic ideal fetishizes densification, obscuring the social relations of the production of space with the simplified idea that ‘if only’ cities and suburbs were as dense as they ‘ought’ to be, then a broad range of desires could be fulfilled. The gap between desire and its fulfillment, however, persists; cities and suburbs can always be denser, taller, better-serviced and higher-yielding. This examination of the ‘desire for density’ exposes the deeper, complex, libidinal impulse for (private-market driven) urban densification while also noting slippages within the field of urban planning that crack open dominant narratives and produce space for alternative fantasies of what the good urban life could be.