CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - David Wilson FEAR REDEVELOPMENT AND APOCALYPTIC URBANISM
Intensified neoliberal redevelopment in European and Asian cities is alarming in its massive human afflicting. My work recognizes this issue's importance and examines a provocative concept recently applied to understand city redevelopment in Europe and Asia: “narratives of fear redevelopment.” This concept, recently invoked to identify "Frankenstein urbanism and “Dracula urbanism” as co-linked city redevelopment processes, now attracts increasing attention in urban studies, the social sciences, and the humanities. My proposed work generates important understandings about this fear narrative's current operations in European and Asian cities. Inspired by Warwick's (1999) notion of the “resilience of apocalyptic thought,” I examine the degree to which city governances in Europe and Asia push forward image-rich fear redevelopment (e.g., ensembles of exploding slums, abandoned downtowns, minority-turbulent streets) which link to Frankenstein and Dracula sensibilities (subterranean forces that lurk in the city, out-of-control processes that are no longer under human direction, infectious processes embedding in the city"s cracks-and-crevices). I thus excavate the full dimensions and intensity of what can be termed “apocalyptic urbanism.”