Welcome to Muhajir, a newsletter about what moves me. If you’ve opened this before and enjoyed reading, please consider subscribing:
I.
In a world of grindsets, Barcelona asks us to slow down. For nearly a decade, Barcelona has been experimenting with what it means to be a new type of city: green, affordable, and pedestrian-friendly. Like many cities, Barcelona has struggled with housing, particularly as a result of AirBnB and other short-term rental platforms that displace local residents by upping real estate prices. In 2022, a new law came to force banning short-term private-room rentals. I’d heard about this, in passing, and thought it was pretty cool. I’m interested in what European cities are doing from a green urbanism angle, and to see how these decisions will pan out. But recently, I was talking with someone who was in Barcelona for three weeks for research and they lamented how much money they were spending on hotels, given that you couldn’t find any room rentals for less than a month. I struggled a little with how to respond- I am aware that these are the types of sacrifices that will become increasingly common as we are forced to give up luxuries that we now consider mundane. But what was the solution, exactly?
This traveler, an Anthropology professor, went in a direction that I didn’t expect, but seems so simple in retrospect. He said that we have to fight for a world in which he can take a month, rather then three weeks, to travel. A world in which his wife would not feel isolated and overwhelmed by childcare if he was gone too long. A world in which we can slow down. This moment was a small revelation for me. We do not, in fact, have to sacrifice that much.
I find something sinister in how I was unable to imagine the future in which this person would not have to sacrifice anything, but their employer would. The imaginary and the speculative are increasingly fraught political spheres as we contend with the existential threat of climate change. It is our very way of life that is fueling the threat, and the first step to changing our fundamental way of being is imagining that there is, at least, another way to be. A lot of work goes into making sure that we are not able to imagine any such thing. Our imaginations are tightly regulated, constrained, delineated. And, well, every border implies the violence of its maintenance.
You can’t stop a person from imagining, but you can make sure that their imagination is trained to think of what you want it to. That’s why I’m so interested in urban planning: it promises the ability to shape the future, to imagine a whole world. I’m not the only person who feels this way. Planners, from the inception of the profession, have reached for modernity, hoping to create order in the spaces around them. After all, changing the urban environment might then change the dwellers, building cities and citizens alike.
This thinking is flawed, though, because it promises control. It promises the ability to sanitize and clean a city, which are elementally spaces of chaos and flux. It is a place filled to the brim with people of different hearts and diverging dreams and desires, a place of dissolved boundaries. So many cities are built as monuments to grand ideas, only to ultimately be pulled back to Earth by nature of their residents.
This truth has not stopped the quest for control, however. Consider how political elites are hell-bent on sanitizing New York City, on policing it. Consider how the architecture of Washington, DC is a monument to nostalgia, to Ancient Greece, to what has been constructed as the beginning of democracy and myths of whiteness. Colonialism and empire, according to Edward Said, are about land. His term “imaginative geography” reminds of a crucial step in the colonial enterprise: mapping and acquiring.
II.
Musha’a is a form of agrarian commons that was the primary form of land in Palestine before the British came in and began their mapping project. Musha’a equalized access to the land and spread out risks of communal cropping, and was managed by the indigenous peasant population. The British mapping project consisted of cadastral surveys: documenting the boundaries of land ownership. Except that there weren’t any boundaries or land ownership to speak of. The British, in practice, created boundaries, appraised the value of these land parcels, and introduced the notion of private property. And so began the dispossession and expropriation. As Marx wrote, the starting point of the capitalist mode of production is an “irreparable break” or “metabolic shift.”
Israel likes to claim progress and modernity. There was nothing here, the colonial state seems to argue, and look how beautiful we made it. In the essay Hating It Lush: On Tel Aviv, Kaleem Hawa interrogates the colonial urbanism of Tel Aviv. He confronts what Tel Aviv projects, and what it is built on. Of Tel Aviv University, he writes: “Like many campuses, TAU is ugly, a Brutalist monolith circled by blanched grass, and like many campuses, it is a colonial outpost, in this case built on the Palestinian village of al-Shaykh Muwannis (occupied March 30, 1948; population of 2,240).”
Here is the contrast: the myth and the truth, the monument and the embodied, but denied, history. But I can’t say it as well as Hawa can:
Tel Aviv serves as a coordinating point in a globally-integrated imperial project with dizzying financial and demographic porousness. The money generated from the purchase of settlement feta cheese in a Marina Del Ray Costco helps to finance the dispossession machines of the Jordan Valley, where the Israeli dairy conglomerate Tnuva operates a food processing plant. Former Israeli soldiers recruited into New York private equity firms make tax-deductible contributions to the 501(c)(3)-designated charitable non-profit ‘Friends of the Israeli Defence Forces’ to support the army that protects their second homes. Laundered billions stream in from Zionist mining extraction in Guinea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, while the mineral magnates flee to Israel to avoid international sanctions. This is the story of all colonialisms: settlers build their tall, shiny things on the embers of the societies they torch, enlist the dispossessed into production and maintenance, export the spoils and bury their guilt in their families, splaying out on the terraces, declaring themselves home at last.
Here is the question: do we belong to the land, or does the land belong to us?
III.
The myth building is an exercise is forgetting. They made the desert bloom. Therein lies the violence of imaginative geography. Our imagination is trained to stretch to the horizon of a shining future, one that denies the present and has no past. The British used to say that the sun didn’t set on their empire. We suffer similar delusions now, that our plunder of the Earth may go on forever, or that you can brutalize and destroy a people without the threat of resistance.
So the chant goes: we will not forget. But won’t some of us? Who deserves the pain of remembering, of suffering forever in their memories?
IV.
Urban planning’s new frontier is climate resiliency planning. This is difficult to contend with for anyone who might use the profession to exercise control. In Arkady Martine’s essay Everyone’s World Is Ending All the Time, she talks about how the nature of climate adaptation work is in permanent flux, because we do not know what is coming. Everything that will come next will be unprecedented, a new normal until the new normal is quickly upended. And so she argues for “speculative resistance:” a new way of imagining our future, for imagining how we might live.
It all feels overwhelming, but that’s by nature of my privilege. Climate change will certainly come for all of us, but many peoples have lived through apocalypses before. They didn’t resist out of some noble morality, but because there was nothing else to do. As Franny Choi wrote:
Before the apocalypse, the apocalypse of bees. The apocalypse of buses.
Border fence apocalypse. Coat hanger apocalypse. Apocalypse in
the textbooks’ selective silences. There was the apocalypse of the settlement
and the soda machine; the apocalypse of the settlement and
the jars of scalps; there was the bedlam of the cannery; the radioactive rain;
the chairless martyr demanding a name. I was born from an apocalypse
and have come to tell you what I know—which is that the apocalypse began
when Columbus praised God and lowered his anchor.
If you enjoyed this piece and want to think about these ideas a little more, here are the books and essays I was thinking about and/or referenced while writing:
Horizon Work: At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change by Adriana Petryna is a good source to think more about working in the present and with incomplete knowledges. Horizoning work as Petryna writes about in this book has allowed me to think about hope and agency when everything feels daunting and overwhelming.
This was brilliant. I share your perspective of the importance of imaginative urban planning - my entire newsletter started on that idea. Please keep thinking and writing about this! I learned so much! Thank you!