ABCD Lars & Roemer

Roemer
van
Toorn
in
conversation
with
Lars
Lerup
own life and social relations under conditions of cultural mixture.” The result of
this cosmopolitanism is a patchwork of urbanities who are quasi-cosmopolitan
and simultaneously provincial. Beck calls it “banal cosmopolitanism.” The
modest, familiar, local, circumscribed, or stable – in short, our protective shell –
is becoming the site of broadly universal experience; place, whether it be Houston
or Moscow, Stockholm or Amsterdam, becomes the locus of encounters and
interminglings – or alternatively of anonymous coexistence and the overlapping
of possible worlds with global dangers. All of this requires us to rethink the
relation between place and the world. What we need, according to Beck, and I
fully agree with him, is a new cosmopolitan outlook where the intermingling
between us and them, the national and the international, the provincial and the
global, is developed through a new political vision. Am I correct that your new
book, Toxic Ecology…, instead of discounting the world of suburbia as an arena
of action, sees it as a potential place for just such a political vision, a place full of
ingredients to counter banal cosmopolitanism? Do you see Houston as the
powerhouse of the political?
Yes, you are correct. I am fully aware that my suggestion that
software (IT) will reanimate the stolid carcass of suburban hardware
and that a new quasi-urbanity will result is extremely naïve and
hopeful. In fact, I believe that “urban form” is much less localized
than it used to be. It is now possible to “be human” all across the
inhabited landscape, from the totally wired tractor that plows fields
in Kansas to the apartment in New York. Is this banal? Well,
intellectuals have always had a tendency to view whatever happens
outside their own sphere as banal. Given that this “banal
cosmopolitanism” is actually what will elect a new president in my
country, I am less inclined to see it that way. (By the way, my book is
now renamed One Million Acres and No Zoning, which may be
interpreted as a stepping away from toxicity to increased neutrality.)
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