The lecture explores the temporal politics of California Forever, a venture capital-backed real estate development corporation and a thesis about how California should plan 21st century cities. California Forever is deeply speculative: while no ground has been broken and its material future is uncertain, its backers assert authority to shape the future of the Bay Area as a region. The lecture argues that California Forever’s speculative urbanism embodies a fascist temporality in which repetition and return are vital to forging a new future from a decadent and disordered present. These temporal politics are evident in a renewed enthusiasm in Silicon Valley for building defense technology that serves the nation while disclaiming the industry’s consumer-facing advances of recent decades. California Forever would materialize these politics, transforming a rural, largely agricultural peri-urban periphery of the Bay Area into an advanced manufacturing district with a focus on defense and dual-use technologies, a shipyard dedicated to strengthening America’s global maritime competitiveness, and a residential community housing the labor force for both elements. The proposal’s imaginary of development is indebted to the 20th century, when Bay Area city builders sought militarization as an economic foothold for their urban projects and Silicon Valley was closely aligned with the liberal national project. Seeking to deliver on the unfulfilled promises of 20th century modernity, California Forever’s worldmaking draws on a fascist politics of repetition to realize an urban project rooted in militarization and framed as greatness.
Desiree Fields is Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley. She is an economic geographer, political economist, and urban scholar who studies the intersection of technology, finance, and urbanization. Her current project focuses on how the combination of technological progress and reactionary politics shapes the urban process. She is also an editor at Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space.
Veranstaltungsort: Marienstraße 13C (Hörsaal D), Weimar
digitale Teilnahme: https://meeting.uni-weimar.de/b/rooms/kat-jae-xzr-uoz/join (Kennwort: qpifkb)