In his classic text Being and Time, the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, offers a secular definition of a philosophy established in spiritual traditions of the East for centuries: we are victims of our inability to come to terms with our own finitude.  Unwilling to confront our mortality, we assume our death lies at a point in the future far enough to offer sufficient space between now and then to fulfil our intentions.  We therefore repeatedly defer resolution of conflicting demands, never reaching the point of knowing our authenticity so that we may live it.

What would our urbanism be if we imagined our cities from the viewpoint of their imminent finitude?  This might have been hard to imagine earlier but is a much more tangible proposition in the midst of a pandemic that has caused the death of urban life as we knew it.  We may believe we shall soon have a vaccine and can put the pandemic behind us, but must then consider the imbalances between nature and human life caused by the era of the Anthropocene, which means an increased likelihood of zoonotic viruses with another pandemic following on the heels of Covid-19.  We must also contemplate the spectre of climate change with its increasing frequency of extreme weather events looming before us.  Havoc launched in the city will spread to the countryside, disrupting food and transportation chains, threatening all life.  The potential finitude of urbanism is becoming an unavoidable topic

Cities are complex entities filled with unresolved contradictions we hope to resolve.  We see slums and hope to implement a policy that will solve the housing problem.  We see water shortages, traffic jams, air pollution, power outages, crime, and for each assume that the managerial and technological fixes we are pursuing will one day overcome these problems.  Assuming that a solution to the problem lies in the future, we remain within the world of intentions, failing to adequately recognise the structural barriers that obstruct change.

The French philosopher, Michel Foucault, introduced us to the term heterotopia or ‘other place.’  Our cities contain spaces whose institutional and discursive practices are somehow ‘other’, disturbing, and incompatible when viewed from the reference point of the space we have chosen as our own.  To the urban elite, the slum, brothel, prison, and a host of other spaces, are all heterotopias, even though they may be acknowledged as a part of the city.  We do not live in either an ideal unified world of utopia or a disintegrated and fallen world of dystopia, we live in a complex of heterotopias, each following its own logic.

The elite maintain spatial coherence in this complexity through what the Belgian theorist, Lieven De Cauter, calls capsularisation.  I may have a nice home and a nice workplace, each falling under the same spatial logic, and I maintain coherence because each is an introverted capsule and I am able to move between them in a car, another form of capsule that follows the same interiorised spatial logic.

Phenomena such as pandemics and extreme weather events disregard the structure of heterotopian urbanism.  Slums, because of high-density living conditions with poor access to sanitation and public health, are vulnerable to infection, and from this point viruses do not respect boundaries of class or caste and spread through the city. Fractures in spatial continuity are not conducive to efficiency of urban services such as storm water drainage, and these limitations induce lower tipping points that exacerbate systemic collapse during extreme weather events.  Urban services we depend on disintegrate because those who keep them functional are suddenly unavailable, and a class of people hitherto rendered invisible to us by capsularisation suddenly become visible through their absence.  When we increase the capsularisation of inequity in our cities, as we have been doing at a rising rate in recent years, we marginalise heterotopias to such an extent that their inhabitants are driven to feel that violence is the only means of asserting the significance of their presence, and we are seeing this increasingly occurring at a scale that provokes widespread disruption of urban life.

If we seriously contemplate the finitude of our cities, the urgency of building resilience and spatial justice will take on a new hue.  There is an ancient proverb in Bhutan that states it is impossible to be truly happy without contemplating one’s death at least five times a day.  This is a logic that initially appears paradoxical but is actually sensible and should be transferred to our imagination of urbanism.  We can restore vibrancy to our cities only by giving serious consideration to their death.