The Mediatized City: The structural transformation of emplaced relationality and the resilience of depoliticised urban commons

Abstract

1. Introduction The increasingly rapid transformation of our technological framework and the continuous growth of social inequalities and power imbalances are progressively fragmenting the social and spatial fabrics of the city, profoundly reforming the constitution and spatialization processes of urban communities. The relations between actual and potential are reframed by a reality–virtuality continuum that pervades all dimensions of our lives, deterritorializing appropriations, associations, and stabilization of emplaced concrete objects, networks and agents. Severe restructuring of the traditional geographical and temporal determinations make relationality progressively unstable and distracted. Criticism has associated this restructuring to multidimensional social and spatial issues including depleted transindividuation (Stiegler 2012), revanchist depoliticization (Low and Smith 2006), embourgeoisement (Harvey 2005b), inequitable public entrepreneurialism (Madanipour 2019), strategic decommoning (Stavrides 2015), biopolitical securitization (Schuilenburg 2018), disciplinary mediatization (Han 2017), and de-individuating hegemonic timescape (Hassan 2020). Studies on spatial justice have linked it with adverse dynamics of brutal enclosing (Sennett 2017) antagonistic politics (Mouffe 2008), ontogenetic despatialization (Harvey 2005b, 2008), control by privatization (Kohn 2004) negation of the Right to the city and centrality (Harvey 2008; Lefebvre 1968; Marcuse 2014; Mitchell 2003; Purcell 2002). Through an analysis of key drivers of the structural transformation of the systems that regulate the opposition between urban commons and enclosures, this entry illuminates the emerging and complex modes of territorial production by restructuring. It addresses the changing production of critical central nodes of urban systems that are progressively subject to acceleration of cycles of deterritorializations and reterritorializations moderated through articulated strategies of abstraction by transnational hegemonic financial actors supported by sweeping economic liberalization policies. It explores how the emerging forms of collective territorialization of communities, no longer bound by geographic boundaries enable novel constitutive processes across space and time, and use new technologies to form mutable and mobile assemblages of infrastructure, activation, and agents. Firstly, the discussion considers the effects of the acceleration of all processes on relational synchronization and the capacity of hegemonic actors to implement abstractive fictions; secondly, it establishes the relations between this fictional production and rampant globalization by elaborating on how double abstraction processes successfully sustain financially extractive enclosures; thirdly, it elaborates upon the combined impact of arrhythmic fictionality and abstracted redistributions of the sensible on the formation of counterforces of sociospatial transindividuation that expands the potential of the mediatized planetary city to reactivate processes of reconfigurative othering (Rancière 2010) and counter-desubjectification (Hardt and Negri 2017, p. 28).