![]() Might be one of Calvino’s imagined metropolises they might also be The two city-states in China Miéville’s The City and The City (back) into the hustle and bustle of urban commerce. The effort to make visible alternative economies was oftenĪccompanied by the effort to disregard those alternatives, folding them Look again, I was told, and whatĪppeared to challenge economic orthodoxy dissolved into business as Marketplace transaction, a loan, a fee-held within it the possibilityįor both solidarity and its antithesis. Identify truly social and solidary alternatives. Yet as I have written elsewhere (Nelms 2015), it proved difficult to Then make them endure, give them space.” This sounded so much like myĮcuadorian interlocutors, who sought to surface Quito’s own invisibleĬity of diverse economic logics and logistics in hopes that it wouldįurnish an alternative to neoliberal capitalism. Recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, Such a part of it that you can no longer see it,” we must “learn to that we form byīeing together.” If we do not wish to “accept the inferno and become Hell exists, it is “already here, the inferno. Last landing place can only be the infernal city.” Polo replies that if The Khan despairs: “It is all useless if the ![]() Veneer of petty capitalism, fired the imaginations of bureaucrats andĮxperts who, as part of a broader left-populist regional turn, saw in itĪ model for a revolutionary social and solidarity economy ( economía social y solidaria)-one that, for its proponents, would reorient economic organization to explicitly social ends.Īt the end of Calvino’s Borgesian allegory on the diversity of urbanįorm, Polo suggests that the perfect city can only be constructed Organizational forms, technologies, social and economic values, Working with street vendor associations and savings and creditĬooperatives, I found the world of commerce and consumption in QuitoĬrisscrossed by heterogeneous means and ends, patchworks of Rereading Invisible Cities, I came to see fieldwork I hadĬonducted on collective economic life in Quito, Ecuador with new eyes. Reality they represent, change that in its constancy becomes static and Signs and reversals: memories that become futures, models that are the Valdrada,įor example, finds its inverted counterpart in its reflection in anĪdjacent lake Eusapia in a city of the dead below Thekla in aīlueprint of the stars above. New cities will continue to be born.” Limned in dreamlike prose, theĬities are often doubled or tripled, complemented or inverted. In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Marco Polo describesįor Kublai Khan the multiplicity of cities in his empire. The unconventional megacity is part of the government's ambitious Neom development project, which released conceptual videos showing the city's high walls enclosing trees, gardens and other plant life, nestling communities among work and recreational structures.Deep inside the town there open up, so to speak, double streets, doppelgänger streets, mendacious and delusive streets. It will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to build.Ĭonstruction has already begun, and Saudi projections call for 1.5 million people to live in The Line by 2030.High-speed rail will carry people from end to end in 20 minutes.Residents will be able to run errands with a five-minute walk.It will rise 500 meters above sea level - higher than the Empire State Building. ![]() It will be only 200 meters wide (roughly 220 yards).New stats and designs revealed on Monday include: Newly revealed design concepts show a futuristic walled city - its open interior is enclosed on both sides by a mirrored façade - stretching from the Red Sea eastward across the desert and into a mountain range. The Line is an ambitious part of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's plan to diversify the kingdom's economy and remake part of its geography.Ī tall and narrow stripe of a city more than 105 miles long, teeming with 9 million residents and running entirely on renewable energy - that's the vision Saudi Arabia's leaders have for The Line, part of a "giga-project" that will reshape the kingdom's northwest.
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