Hypochondriac geographies of the city and the new urban dystopia

This paper questions the 'peculiar epistemological framework of problems' (p. 107) through which the city has come to be considered in the academic and policy arena, in politics of both the Left and Right, and in urban sociology, planning, architecture and other areas of urban study. Baeten argues that contemporary terminology, for example, displays a negativity towards the city, a fear of the unknown city, by turns explicit (in a discourse which favours a lexicon of 'exclusion', 'deprivation' and 'polarization') and implicit (an 'urban renaissance' presumably emerges from an urban Dark Age). In these current projections of dystopia the author identifies parallels with 19th-century obsessions and frameworks of urban morality - the categorization of an underclass, and positioning of the city's poor as 'deserving' or 'underserving'. Baeten uses recent work on Orientalist constructions of the Other in a bid to contest such negative presentation of the city in current urban studies. There are interesting links here with Gil Doron's work in this issue of City.