Conclusion: Future Spaces

Summary

Nothing looks the same. Space is different and so is time. Space is now that of a fully urbanized planet Earth.

Bruno Latour

It is strange to read Bruno Latour, an aficionado of the great wines that his family cultivates in the rolling hills of southern Burgundy, noting that the world is now entirely urbanized. A constructively paranoid response to his assertion, similar to statements by Edward Soja, an urbanist who argues for planetary urbanization, is that little is left for ecology. Latour appeals to hyperbole to argue that the planet will be entirely urbanized. The virtue of this overstatement is found in the fact that the distinction between the country and the city no longer holds, and as a result its argument can be a prompt for a continued variegation of space, which might constitute the basis for an informed sense of ecology that results from close study of the spatial crises that come with globalization. Latour notes that our world is understood less through the information we can gather about it than through the ongoing transformations we witness happening to it. Our perception of the distribution of sites, states and world-space exists only through recognition of rapid and ever-changing alignments, distributions, modes of formatting, and of linking and narrating.

The chapters above have sought to gain a sense of the alignments and their shifts. The method has entailed assembling, reassembling, comparing and contrasting nine French theorists—a mix of philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, historians and public intellectuals—whose reflections on space bear on ecology in the sense of habitability.