Towards the Great Transformation: (7) Locating Gezi Park

• Published in: City (London, England) England), 2013-06, Vol.17 (3), p.419-422
• Main Author: Catterall, Bob
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: assemblage and critical theory; Capitalist society; Cognition; ecologies; Gezi Park; grassroots organization; Guattari; Intellectuals; Occupy; planetary urbanization; Revolution; Spatial analysis; theory and intuition; urban and rural; Urbanization
• ISSN: 1360-4813; 1470-3629
• DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2013.815485

One of the major critical claims of this series is that the social and socio-spatial sciences, in their currently dominant form, cannot lead to an appropriate and continually tested strategy (praxis), effectively counter the normalized and naturalized forms and processes of late capitalist urbanization, normalized by mainstream theory in the service of established power, and their extrapolation into a 'planetary future'. Critical urban theory presents/presented a step forward but it is losing some critical momentum - hence the rise of assemblage theory - and thus purchase on present and future realities in its neglect of aspects of its own intellectual heritage, of 'extra-scientific' resources including the cognitive aspect of the arts/humanities and ordinary experience ('the university of the streets'), and in its too restrictive theoretical, spatial and temporal foundations. This episode continues a recontextualisation of that agenda in the light, particularly of the occupation this summer of Gezi Park in Istanbul and Guattari's notion of 'three ecologies' in relation to praxis - that is, an interacting and critical mutuality of theorized practice and practised theory.