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.
Table of Content
1. A disturbed book: bubbles under the throne.- 2. Unsettling the story of disenchantment.- 3. The gentle art of urban tramping.- PART ONE: 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 TWO: 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.- 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.- COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER.- 22. An urban politics of enchantment.
About the author
Dr Samuel Alexander is a Research Fellow with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute. He is co-author of
Degrowth in the Suburbs: A Radical Urban Imaginary (2019).
Professor Brendan Gleeson is Director of the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute. He is co-author of
Degrowth in the Suburbs: A Radical Urban Imaginary (2019).
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