CITY: Issue 26.2-3

founding editor: bob caterrall

editor: city editors

editorial: Urban phantasmagorias, -brandi summers

I don’t predict the future. All I do is look around at the problems we are neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters. (Octavia Butler, 2000) 

We have officially entered our third year of the global pandemic with no indication that transmission of the deadly virus will wane anytime soon. As of January 2022, the global death toll surpassed 5.5 million, however as some data scientists have argued, this figure is grossly underestimated without accounting for excess mortality—‘a metric that involves comparing all deaths recorded with those expected to occur’ (Adam 2022, 312). Prevailing data that show that COVID continues to disproportionately kill poor, racialized minorities worldwide—highlighting stark inequities of health along class, racial and ethnic lines. The impact of the pandemic has extended beyond concerns about health since we have seen a spate of developments occur that disproportionately affect marginalized populations all over the globe. We are witnessing an expansion of segregation, poverty, unemployment, and homelessness via evictions, while racial and class-based disparities in education access continue to plague the world’s most vulnerable people. The impact of this global crisis has shifted our sense of the world, and our relationship to public and private spaces. We are seeing the effects of the privatization of social reproduction, and uneven patterns of (im)mobility, especially as the exploitation and devaluation of racialized and feminized care labor has been intensified. In other words, the global pandemic has exposed what gets invisiblized via processes and practices associated with racial capitalism, gentrification and neoliberal urbanism. Now in 2022, we are still in the throes of what David Madden (2020) described in a previous City editorial as ‘Covid capitalism’—one that is exhibited through crisis, austerity, risk and authoritarianism. In so many ways, the pandemic is shining a light on social fabrics and urban processes that were being eroded by gentrification, making room for platform mediated exchanges. The ‘smart’ and ‘resilient’ cities are not necessarily ‘just.’ In other words, the pandemic has effectively accelerated disruptive processes already in progress. 

I live in the United States, and when the city of Berkeley (California) enforced the first lockdown of the pandemic in March 2020, I decided to revisit some of my most favorite and captivating science fiction novels. I poured over fantastic(al) stories by Octavia Butler, China Mièville, N. K. Jemison, and Nnedi Okorafor. I decided to read Max Brooks’ World War Z because I wanted to better understand what was happening, but most importantly, what future we were poised to enter. Like in World War Z, it became clear that the pandemic had exposed faulty infrastructure and bad policy. Most notably, the pandemic exacerbated miscommunication between nations, xenophobia, greed, poverty, destitution, and the survival of capitalism through it all. Naturally, this deep dive into the dystopian worlds delicately constructed by some of our most creative literary thinkers got me thinking about how to digest the spectral images I saw on social media—empty amusement parks (in Los Angeles), desolate central business districts (in London), bountiful waterways reclaimed by wildlife (in Venice), residential apartment buildings engulfed by flames (in New York) (see Figure 1).