THE STOLEN IMAGINARY (part one): THE ABOLITION

THE STOLEN IMAGINARY (part one): THE ABOLITION

We hear it in the voices, in the behaviors, in our fragility and that of others: for some time now the future has been spoiled and, even in the most comfortable social areas, it does not enjoy good health at all. Asimov and the old science fiction had accustomed us to conceive our unstoppable path and increasingly projected forward. Everything was explored, already known or explorable. The world's population growth definitely incited exploration, it was a necessity. Today this forward-looking is oppressed, subject to a deprivation of time, of missing time and of what will be marred by the poor health of everything and all living things. (by living we mean every being present on earth flora fauna, human and non-human) In this very little science-fiction state, I want to try to imagine any city or any urban future. I beg the reader to be magnanimous and understanding because this imagining will seem not very serious, he is certain of the obligations of the past, but when he thinks of what will have to be, here he is renouncing the thought advances swaying, it resembles going against the current with a canoe, you you always want to reverse direction (the canoe has two bows anyway). The thought of the future oscillates between indulging in daydreams and a careful analysis of reality, between science fiction, political feminism, scientific facts, ecological facts, tragic current events, until the conditions for possible prosperity on earth are created. Neoliberal power has been able to make its own the imagination linked to the conquests of space. So the imaginary is about power! It guides our desires and our way of thinking about the future. "Reoccupy the imaginary" today is the most urgent and desperate task of each of us. Even when we think we have managed to subvert it, the imagination of power guides and determines our desires, it has robbed us of the deterrent fantasy. Simply to carry on this topic in a subversive way we have reached a real perversion, we have bothered: pedagogy (Andrea Perin, Child Town), eco-sustainable roads (Askapen, It will be a bicycle to save the world), habitability (Stefano Portelli , Sic transit real estate), medicine (Asantewaa Boykin, Medicine, rebellion and reconstruction, and Hakan Geijer, A future for urban healthcare). Inconvenient is an understatement, we do not perceive each of these personalities as an enlightened researcher, but they seem to us a monster, an entity immersed in madness, and it is a strong sensation of experiencing a perversion. It would take a manual to unravel these readings, or to get lost permanently. At this point, looking for ourselves, we need to establish some firm points, we need to orientate ourselves: a) whatever will happen, it will be within this world, b) we exclude other possible worlds, c) when a radical change comes to mind, we arrive to the concept of abolition, it is not a point in space-time that one can arrive at, because abolition is not a result, it is only a relationship. To give an example, let's ask the question: what would you do once in power? If we are to move on to abolition as a concept, then conceiving it as a relational practice means doing away with some of our deepest and most internalized beliefs: our constant focus on goals and results, the high value we place on heroic figures, , and to personal independence at the expense of the community. Politically abolishing economic growth, in its being relationship, will not be a painless affair it will produce deaths like a war. Abolishing profit seems impossible. Abolishing slaughter seems impossible. Removing the division into states seems impossible. Abolishing private property seems impossible. Abolishing the police is certainly a step forward, but it will also be abolishing prisons. To create a single world state is to create a world order, but it seems impossible. Abolishing war seems impossible. The consequence of giving abolition a political role is hard to imagine. When I subtract a thought from a category with its logic of power, I become free to build something new and immerse myself in the subversion of the present. Morally, our war is about re-appropriating the imaginary and if we now wanted to think of building a city from its deconstruction, we need to keep in mind that the image of the future urban geography will have to be able to support and include all those constructions, those ghosts, those illusions, those rubble, and all that truly enormous production that the twentieth-century political system deposited on the planet. If we want to redesign a possible world, we must keep in mind the whole history of the civilization of "mature capitalism" using the words of Giuliano Spagnul in his very well known City, science fiction, future . In short, we are at the center of a forced reconstruction, but we cannot imagine what it will be like, what each of us will become, power imposes on us the desire that technology has in its being itself, the solution to every problem. We are continually instigated to believe it, but how do we imagine ourselves? Keep on…