Urban Awakenings

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vi

   PDF

2. A Disturbed Book: Bubbles Under the Throne

   • Samuel Alexander, Brendan Gleeson

   Pages 1-10

3. Sleepers, Wake!

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 11-11

      PDF

   2. Unsettling the Story of Disenchantment

      • Samuel Alexander, Brendan Gleeson

      Pages 13-29

   3. The Gentle Art of Urban Tramping

      • Samuel Alexander, Brendan Gleeson

      Pages 31-43

4. BC (Before-COVID)

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 45-45

      PDF

   2. The ‘New World’ Is Old: Journeying Through Deep Time

      • Samuel Alexander, Brendan Gleeson

      Pages 47-56

   3. Descent Pathways in a City of Gold

      • Samuel Alexander, Brendan Gleeson

      Pages 57-66

   4. Adrift in the Devil’s Playground

      • Samuel Alexander, Brendan Gleeson

      Pages 67-76

   5. Grave Matters: Death in the Liveable City (Part I)

      • Samuel Alexander, Brendan Gleeson

      Pages 77-84

   6. Cold Lazarus: Death in the Liveable City (Part II)

      • Samuel Alexander, Brendan Gleeson

      Pages 85-91

   7. Walking the Corridors of Consumption

      • Samuel Alexander, Brendan Gleeson

      Pages 93-103

   8. A Riverside Ramble to the Last Hotel: Lostworlders Welcome

      • Samuel Alexander, Brendan Gleeson

      Pages 105-113

   9. Guardians of Gandolfo Gardens

      • Samuel Alexander, Brendan Gleeson

      Pages 115-125

   10. Tramping Against Extinction: Counter-Friction to the Machine

       • Samuel Alexander, Brendan Gleeson

       Pages 127-136

   11. The Monumental Army that Marches on the Spot

       • Samuel Alexander, Brendan Gleeson

       Pages 137-146

   12. Sisyphus in the Suburbs: Pushing the Rock

       • Samuel Alexander, Brendan Gleeson

       Pages 147-155

5. AC (After-COVID)

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 157-157

      PDF

   2. Virtually Tramping Through Post-Normal Times

      • Samuel Alexander, Brendan Gleeson

      Pages 159-164

   3. A Time for Bad Poetry

      • Samuel Alexander, Brendan Gleeson

      Pages 165-173

This book presents a series of urban investigations undertaken in the metropolis of Melbourne. It is based on the idea that ‘enchantment’ as an affective state is important to ethical and political engagement. Alexander and Gleeson argue that a sense of enchantment can give people the impulse to care and engage in an increasingly troubled world, whereas disenchantment can lead to resignation. Applying and extending this theory to the urban landscape, the authors walk their home city with eyes open to the possibility of seeing and experiencing the industrial city in different ways. This unique methodology, described as ‘urban tramping’, positions the authors as freethinking freewalkers of the city, encumbered only with the duty to look through the delusions of industrial capitalism towards its troubled, contradictory soul. These urban investigations were disrupted midway by COVID-19, a plague that ended up confirming the book’s central thesis of a fractured modernity vulnerable to various internal contradictions.

• cities
• eco-cities
• climate change
• industrial civilisation
• urban
• urban geography and urbanism

“Following their recent book Degrowth in the Suburbs, Samuel Alexander and Brendan Gleeson turn to the pulsating heart of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, their home city. Deploying age-old methods of tramping transects and direct observation, they assess this city’s contradictory enchantments and disturbances, its longer-term liveability and viability. Tramping this exemplar of the industrial city, they uncover a consumptive, unsustainable, late carbon civilization dependent on its immediate hinterland, trapped in growth fetishism and inhabited by a troubled ‘homo urbanis’—but still with its considerable charms. Navigating the COVID-19 regulatory lockdown results in an unusual natural experiment as the fault lines of the industrial city are exposed as vulnerable to depopulation, degrowth, deconsumption, and demise. The engaging narrative clips along at rhythmic tramping pace, replete with evocative metaphors, philosophical reflections on the contradictions of late modernity, deep ecological concerns and some welcome humour. This highly readable and lavishly illustrated book ends with a rousing call to action. A must read for anyone concerned about the future of cities, of humankind, and the natural world under siege from the still dominant neoliberal order.” (Jon Altman AM, Emeritus Professor, The Australian National University, Canberra)

• Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

  Samuel Alexander, Brendan Gleeson

Dr Samuel Alexander is a Research Fellow with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute. He is co-author of Degrowth in the Suburbs: A Radical Urban Imaginary (2019).


Professor Brendan Gleeson is Director of the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute. He is co-author of Degrowth in the Suburbs: A Radical Urban Imaginary (2019).

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