Lost Northern Urban Utopias: Between Melancholia and Nostalgia

• In Event: Lost Cities in Urban History: Absent Past, Conflict of Memories and Urban Utopia

Abstract

In this project, I combine human geography with philosophical and psychoanalytical perspectives to investigate the spatial implications of utopian urban projects in Russia and Canada's northern territories. I approach these utopias as a "realm of the not-yet" (Bloch), a spatio-temporal conjuncture in which the enactment of future visions requires attention to historically situated struggles and a reconsideration of the category of "loss". To understand how these urban utopias have been lost, I bring 'loss' into the realm of the spatial and political rather than the individual and psychic. Thus, melancholia and nostalgia (as the suffering of loss) become more complex analytical tools to study the matter.

Author

• Irina Shirobokova, CUNY Graduate Center