#dialectical

"‘We make the house and the house makes us’ is a saying that goes back to the Greeks. This was well understood by Robert Park (1967, 3), a founding figure of urban sociology, when he wrote: '[I]t is in the urban environment - in a world which man himself has made - that mankind first achieved an intellectual life and acquired those characteristics which most distinguish him from the lower animals and from primitive man. For the city and the urban environment represent man’s most consistent and, on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart's desire. But if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself.' While we can reasonably aspire to intervene in that process of ‘remaking ourselves’ and perhaps even to acquire some ‘clear sense of the nature of (our) task/ we cannot leap outside of the dialectic and imagine we are not embedded and limited by the institutional worlds and built environments we have already created. Yet we cannot evade the question of the imagination either for, as Marx (1976 edition, 283-4) observed (in a foundational statement that we will later examine in much greater depth): what distinguishes human labor and the worst of architects from the best of bees is that architects erect a structure in the imagination before realizing it in material form. When, therefore, we contemplate urban futures we must always do battle with a wide range of emotive and symbolic meanings that both inform and muddle our sense of the 'nature of our task.' As we collectively produce our cities, so we collectively produce ourselves. Projects concerning what we want our cities to be are, therefore, projects concerning human possibilities, who we want, or, perhaps even more pertinently, who we do not want to become. Every single one of us has something to think, say, and do about that. How our individual and collective imagination works is, therefore, crucial to defining the labor of urbanization. Critical reflection on our imaginaries entails, however, both confronting the hidden utopianism and resurrecting it in order to act as conscious architects of our fates rather than as 'helpless puppets’ of the institutional and imaginative worlds we inhabit. If. as Unger (1987b, 8) puts it, we accept that 'society is made and imagined' then we can also believe that it can be ‘remade and reimagined‧'"