Research Project Stephen Barber  Apocalyptic cities: transmutations in future urban space

Cities in acute states of abandonment or contamination are often described as ‘apocalyptic’: apocalyptic cityscapes. What exactly is meant by this meshing of urban space and the apocalyptic? Are cities in advanced deterioration prescient of future processes of transformation, in which entirely unforeseen urban formations will manifest themselves? Is there a pivotal point of rupture at which a city, once liveable, becomes apocalyptic? How will such apocalyptic cities be experienced by their surviving human and non-human dwellers? Cities may be evaluated as apocalyptic through the objective accumulation of data relating to depopulation due to ecological catastrophes such as floodings of riverside areas, or through social breakdown and the devastations of warfare. But cities are also imagined as apocalyptic in fiction, film and other creative media, as well as in speculative urban-theoretical works such as those of T.J. Demos and Matthew Gandy; frequently, abandoned ‘wasteland’ spaces that increasingly constellate peripheral or even central areas of cities are depicted as holding the potential to engulf the entirety of urban space and so render it ‘apocalyptic’. What precisely is the rapport between urban wastelands and the apocalyptic? Are particular worldwide cities, through their histories or futures, susceptible to transmutation into apocalyptic entities? This project will lead to several publications, including a single-authored book with the arts publisher Diaphanes.