Building (Dys)Utopia: Urban dreams in the dust?

Building a city from scratch is easy. These days, countries all over the world are doing it: from Pakistan’s Ravi Riverfront, Nigeria’s Eko Atlantic, to Saudi Arabia and the UAE building their ‘spaceships in the desert’. But how should a country move its capital, let alone build it from scratch? In this talk I explore how Indonesia attempts to do such a thing in building Nusantara amid global processes of urbanisation, historical arcs of national economic development, and local resistance.

How does a city’s infrastructure dilute and cement the violence of capitalist colonialism while also asserting control over Indigenous land? This talk examines the current violence in Palestine, and the escalation of Zionist supremacism through its infrastructure, and sheds light on colonial legacies of capitalist operations. It will also reveal how the very architecture engineered to dispossess Indigenous communities faces increasing challenges from international disruptions.

We know that waste is a by-product of cycles of redevelopment, but it is also experienced as an excessive emotional state by marginalised children and young people. In this talk we will hear about ways that urban young people are speaking back to urban planners through the pleasures of sabotage and playful excess. From feelings of futility and loss, imaginative visions of the future are being shaped.