The idea that cities have a future is almost quaint in this age of decline and fiscal bankruptcy, yet there are those who ‘keep the aspidistras flying’ – as that indefatigable commentator of the body social, George Orwell, in diaries, letters, essays, novels, stories, etc. so aptly coined that sense of keeping with a positive hope even in the midst of decay and ruin. For as my friend Arran James from attempts at living and synthetic zero  puts it:

…as survivors, we shouldn’t be looking for ways to prevent the catastrophe but to mitigate it; we shouldn’t be looking for means of preventing the destruction but of building already from the ruins about us. The positing of the catastrophe into any kind of futurity is already a disavowal of the catastrophic real. Indeed, this might well be part of the development of a distinctly postnihilist ethics: like the survivors we are…