Urban Utopias: Memory, Rights, and Speculation

The social dreaming of Utopia is the object of both fantasy and quotidian reality in the world of today. The concept of utopia has travelled across boundaries of time and space, and manifests strongly in cities, which function as sites of hope and desire. With the rise of technocratic and neoliberal agendas across the world, global imaginations of the urban future have often excluded the more urgent questions of justice and human rights. This volume, the fruit of a first collaboration between Utrecht University and Jadavpur University, comprises ten essays by scholars based in the Netherlands and India which foreground issues of rights, memory and justice in the speculative imaginaries of urban utopias in South and South-East Asia, and Europe. Embedded in literary and historical studies, this book enters into a lively engagement with questions such as: How do memory and utopia intersect in the urban? What debates and contestations emerge in the framing of the city as a place of hope, desire, and future-making? In sharp and studied contrast to speculations of the capitalist kind at the heart of urban real estate development and planning, this volume examines and uncovers new speculative insights on alternative imaginations of the city.