The post-race city: Borders, freedom, and imagination

Gassner, Gunter ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5891-6228 2025. The post-race city: Borders, freedom, and imagination. Blakey, J. and Barron, A., eds. Aesthetics and the City, Routledge Studies in Urbanism and the City, London: Routledge, pp. 94-111. (10.4324/9781003335993-6)

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Abstract

This chapter discusses the relations between borders, freedom, and imagination in the racist city. Focusing on conceptions in which freedom is not regarded as the opposite but the result of borders and borderisation, it explores links between current claims about the end of race and Nazi imaginaries of the “post-race city” that relate to an understanding of the city as an organism. While current claims about the end of race have been described as racism that is experienced in seemingly disconnected racial outbreaks avoiding structural differentiation (racisms without racism), the latter amounts to a city that is diagrammed as a continuous celebration of racism without the experience of racial outbreaks within its bounds (racism without racisms). Writing non-organismically as a critical and creative attempt to intervene in violent urban imaginaries with the help of a pendular movement that oscillates between two places and two times, the chapter develops a distinction between an unbounded aesthetic that is linked to a fascist creativity that is nothing but annihilation, and an aesthetic of un-bordering, which relates to a radical imagination that is bounded by racialised lifeworlds.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Geography and Planning (GEOPL)
Publisher:	Routledge
ISBN:	9781032372358
Last Modified:	30 Jul 2025 12:39
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/179155

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