This book presents a series of urban investigations undertaken in the metropolis of Melbourne. It is based on the idea that ‘enchantment’ as an affective state is important to ethical and political engagement. Alexander and Gleeson argue that a sense of enchantment can give people the impulse to care and engage in an increasingly troubled world, whereas disenchantment can lead to resignation. Applying and extending this theory to the urban landscape, the authors walk their home city with eyes open to the possibility of seeing and experiencing the industrial city in different ways. This unique methodology, described as ‘urban tramping’, positions the authors as freethinking freewalkers of the city, encumbered only with the duty to look through the delusions of industrial capitalism towards its troubled, contradictory soul. These urban investigations were disrupted midway by COVID-19, a plague that ended up confirming the book’s central thesis of a fractured modernity vulnerable to various internal contradictions.
Author(s): Samuel Alexander, Brendan Gleeson
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 255
City: Cham
Contents
1 A Disturbed Book: Bubbles Under the Throne
Part I Sleepers, Wake!
2 Unsettling the Story of Disenchantment
An Urban Politics of Enchantment?
Walking the City as the City Writes Us
3 The Gentle Art of Urban Tramping
Part II BC (Before-COVID)
4 The ‘New World’ Is Old: Journeying Through Deep Time
5 Descent Pathways in a City of Gold
6 Adrift in the Devil’s Playground
7 Grave Matters: Death in the Liveable City (Part I)
8 Cold Lazarus: Death in the Liveable City (Part II)
9 Walking the Corridors of Consumption
10 A Riverside Ramble to the Last Hotel: Lostworlders Welcome
11 Guardians of Gandolfo Gardens
12 Tramping Against Extinction: Counter-Friction to the Machine
13 The Monumental Army that Marches on the Spot
14 Sisyphus in the Suburbs: Pushing the Rock
Part III AC (After-COVID)
15 Virtually Tramping Through Post-Normal Times
16 A Time for Bad Poetry
17 Shimmering Text: Re-Reading The Plague in the Coronaverse
Part I
Part II
Conclusion
18 Care-Full Times: Suffer the Children
19 Rewilding the Suburbs: CERES as a Site of Enchantment
20 Sojourning Through a Quiet City: Envisioning a Prosperous Descent
21 Glitter and Doom: Between Naïve Optimism and Despair
Part IV Coming Through Slaughter
22 An Urban Politics of Enchantment
Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going?
Enter the Coronaverse
More Day to Dawn
