Life Beyond the Sustainable City Phenomenology, Post-Urban Politics, and the Environmental Crisis

Phenomenology provides us with a method for critiquing the tools and technologies we use to power our cultures, support our cities, and maintain our state institutions. The environmental crisis that we currently have is inextricably tied to various political crises as well; and how we envision the tools, media, and material structures of our world are tied to these crises. Informed by an Husserlian conception of personhood and consciousness, an anarchic communitarian politics gives us a moral grounding for a critique of liberalism, capitalism, neoliberal democracy, the State, an assumed urban future, and the concept of “sustainability” as it relates to the existential threat of climate change and global warming. Thinking “outside the city” and “outside civilization,” we come to look to the anarchic communitarian leanings of Diogenes and indigenous peoples for a view of a future that does not sustain the status quo but instead radically re-envisions it.Phenomenology provides us with a method for critiquing the tools and technologies we use to power our cultures, support our cities, and maintain our state institutions. The environmental crisis that we currently have is inextricably tied to various political crises as well; and how we envision the tools, media, and material structures of our world are tied to these crises. Informed by an Husserlian conception of personhood and consciousness, an anarchic communitarian politics gives us a moral grounding for a critique of liberalism, capitalism, neoliberal democracy, the State, an assumed urban future, and the concept of “sustainability” as it relates to the existential threat of climate change and global warming. Thinking “outside the city” and “outside civilization,” we come to look to the anarchic communitarian leanings of Diogenes and indigenous peoples for a view of a future that does not sustain the status quo but instead radically re-envisions it.