Sterling on alter-urbanism

I was re-reading Bruce Sterling‘s year-old State of the World, 2008 Q&A over at The WELL – in a lets-see-how-on-the-money-he-actually-was kind of way – and came across a couple of extracts that seemed relevant to the whole alter-urbanism discussion:

*People have been talking about the twilight of national sovereignty for as long as I can remember. The thing that’s different now is those big, scary, non-integrating Gap patches where the Westphalian deal is just frankly dead. Beyond help. Failed states, non-states. People are getting used to failed states, or fake hollow-states. They are starting to talk seriously about a “failed globe.”

Sound familiar?

It should do.  He’s talking about SEZs, tax havens, and pirate ships (opens pdf). Kaliningrad, Somalia, and the self-declared Principality of Sealand.  Alter-urbanism in its rawest form.

*It’s kinda hard to imagine *cities* going away … short of a massive population crash. All the major cities in the Balkans are still there, even though the “nations” they conjure up have changed their flags, passports and currencies five or six times.

For more on the whole Balkan thing, check out Bruce‘s video from Belgrade.  Some interesting commentary on the commodification of heritage, the relationship between the past and futurity, and how this is realised in the “real” physical landscape.  I guess you could also look at the rapid emergence of the geographically tiny Republic of Montenegro – making the journey from union with Serbia to likely EU candidate & tourist-friendly film location.

*New York has a future. Chicago has a future. San Francisco is dynamic. Any place called a ‘creative class city” is very attractive. Life in American heartland Red States is cheerless and imperilled and getting worse… I’ve been to places where nations lose their primary loyalties… in a globalized world, they just… leach out.

So innovation in the Red States converge on the small blue islands – islands that swing elections.  Competition between  ideas drives innovation – which is the closest thing we have to “progress” in these post-modern times.  Perhaps we need a return to Mill‘s “experiments in living”; a seasteading stripped of its egos and sinister overtones.

*[S]ubcultures, countercultures and bohemias … generate a lot of strange ideas and alternative practices. A lot of those ideas turn out to be crap, of course, but at least they’re being pioneered by volunteers, they’re not crap ideas opposed from on high by the Stalinist Central Committee.

(image based on a photo by Guido van Nispen)