In Need of Recognition by Progressives: Dracula Urbanization

Keywords: Dracula urbanization, Flint, urbanization, rust belt cities.
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Progressive politics across the global north and global south today seeks to confront a host of new and complex dilemmas to improve the lives of residents. But what precisely are these dilemmas? This paper takes up this issue, and suggests that beyond the well identified dilemmas (the Covid pandemic, climate change, growing divides in wealth across classes), another human-punishing force lurks, what we call Dracula urbanization. We identify Dracula urbanism as a kind of city building which is spearheaded by the state melding with real-estate interests. Dracula urbanist formations are seen to have two central features. First, the political and economic resources to drive current city building are secured through ever-thickening parasitic relations, particularly with upper-level sources of power and authority. Second, city building involves unrelenting drives to kill and destroy (not rehabilitate or therapeutize) supposedly deep civic “cancers,” such as the poor’s presumed anti-civic, morally and culturally deficient dispositions and ways. The results suggest that the cultural politics of in-your-face revanchism that Neil Smith helped us to see, and is still present in cities across the globe, is today accompanied by an equally punishing, complicated, and adroitly adapting state politics in these places. We conclude that progressives and their overtures for change must recognize this new and complicated form of governance.