Reimagining hope through the political: A post-foundational reading of urban alternatives beyond postpolitics

Abstract

This paper proposes hope as a lens for critical urban research for the purpose of grasping the interplay between forces of change and stability as manifested in popular uprisings, as well as in broader, self-organised spatial practices in everyday life. This hopeful lens allows for reimagining hope through the concept of ‘the political’, defined in the post-foundationalist literature as an ontological condition assuming the inherent impossibility for ‘politics’ to reach its final closure, fixation or stability. The hopes thus arising from ‘the political’ provide critical urban scholars with better tools to navigate the ever-present possibilities for emancipatory change and action, arising from an ontological lack of foundations, upon which political orders are temporarily based. In this paper, we show how theoretical notions from post-foundationalism can expand the current sense of hope by instilling a non-teleological view on inherent possibilities for matters to be otherwise, thus implying the absence of certainty about presupposed ideas of what genuine political change should look like. Through this lens, hope appears linked to concrete openings for alternatives found in everyday life. By laying out such a hopeful approach, we aim to expand the awareness of urban ‘scholars’ to ponder both mundane and radical materialisations and practices of ‘the political’ within urban settings. Ultimately, by reimagining hope to look beyond or alongside postpolitics, we unlock a future-oriented research agenda that adds nuance to an ontologically restricted conception of ‘politics’, which allows for broader empirical attunement to ever-present embodied signs of unfinished urban alternatives generated by ‘the political’.

Introduction

In the argument that follows, we demonstrate that thinking about hope can cultivate understanding for the ever-present opportunities for political change working to bail us out of an assumed postpolitical condition. Postpolitics persists through urban geometries of power, reducing ‘political action to a mere representation or refraction to other realms’ (Penny et al., 2020: 316). At the same time, however, these ongoing civic efforts rarely offer full-blown alternatives to existing power structures. Their claims have subsequently been critiqued by both scholars and ruling political parties as being overly utopian, bottomless, excessively abstract, unrealistic, unachievable or not grounded in the real-life conditions of economic, ecological and cultural crises. Even after having been enacted in everyday urban politics, some emancipatory practices are not considered powerful enough to challenge unjust urban orders (Beveridge and Koch, 2019). The power of neoliberalism seems undefeatable, as lamented in some theorisations of the ‘postpolitical city’, thus significantly limiting the scope of political agency and potential transformations. Bylund and Byerley (2015) go as far as to warn that ‘hopeless postpolitics’ has led to a reified notion of who can act in the name of ‘genuine politics’. Our argument for hope is not about lamenting hopelessness, but rather about advocating an epistemological attunement to hope, thereby making it possible to imagine (or reimagine) how current hegemonic power structures are always imbued with latent opportunities to be otherwise. Drawing on Post-Foundationalist Political Theory (PFPT), we propose this attunement to advance hope as a lever to explore the possibility that things could always be otherwise, as well as how this could be unfolding in everyday life. In this way, the notion that critical urban scholars have of hopeful progressive urban change can simultaneously be oriented towards future alternatives and credibly grounded in existing political practices in the here and now. The paper engages with the proliferating debate of PFPT in urban studies to ignite a hopeful line of thinking – oscillating between critiquing urban injustices and supporting the construction of emancipatory alternatives.

Written more than two decades ago, Harvey’s (2000: 17) problematisation of hope resonates today, lamenting the ‘inability to find an “optimism of the intellect” with which to work through alternatives [which] has now become one of the most serious barriers to progressive politics’. The intellectual work of progressive urban scholars is therefore never without responsibility towards relentless contestations against urban injustices and inequalities (e.g. for marginalised communities). Within this context, optimism means seeing politics in the street and micro-political efforts as signs of hope for alternatives yet-to-become. Echoing Bloch (1986), scholars of Critical Urban Research (CUR) enjoy a significant dose of ‘optimism of the will’, which entices them to invest their academic, conceptual and practical labour in resisting hegemonic structures. Expanding progressive thinking through an evidence-based intellectual optimism calls for more attention to the shaping of a CUR trajectory aimed at constructing alternatives as a complementary mode of resistance to deconstruction. To date, the inability to find reasons for hope might linger in CUR partially because hope is rarely associated with the ordinary practices of self-organised political actors. By ‘reducing everyday actions and experiences to simply the repetition of the same in ways that discount the hard-won politicization of the ordinary’ (Blakey et al., 2022: 5), analytical limitations within post-political critiques may hinder the recognition of alternatives that are already in the making. In light of this, we argue that a broader conception of hope, intricately coupled with political practice, is needed to consider (or reconsider) the vast political voices in contemporary urban politics. Simply put, we reach out to understand political actions, which do emerge and thrive outside formal institutions of ‘politics’, as these actions may support the intellectual construction of emancipatory urban alternatives. Instead of adopting either narrow or overly extended ontological theorisations of how emancipatory change ‘should’ manifest, hope may become a ‘powerful inhibitor to action’ (Harvey, 2000: 17).

What is currently missing in CUR are perspectives that balance analytical attention between deconstructing hegemony and supporting constructive emancipatory alternatives that emerge through counter-hegemonic negotiations for change and a plurality of material-discursive, transformative practices (Fisker et al., 2019). This paper intends to advance a simultaneously conceptual and empirical trajectory of hope that revives a sense of alternatives and that helps to avoid the foreclosure of new possibilities for action (Back, 2020). By doing so, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on urban politics and proposes a hopeful approach that centres on micropolitical practices. Instead of dismissing signs of alternatives that are already bubbling up from the underbellies of the urban or elsewhere, we advocate attending to these mundane modalities of counter-hegemonic practices in everyday life. Bottom-up organising might provide transitory grounds for hope, which could emerge as ‘raw materials to grow an alternative’ (Harvey, 2000: 193). It is precisely in this exploration of what or where such glimmers of hope could be that we chart the analytical potential of hope to discuss everyday political life. We associate hope with emancipatory practices that resemble ‘the political’ by unsettling the status quo, which PFPT views as a force opposite to institutionalised ‘politics’ that view radical alternatives as threats to be avoided. This sense of ‘the political’ draws on the ontological lack of final foundations, on which institutionalised ‘politics’ nevertheless claim to be grounded (Landau et al., 2021). In this paper, ‘the political’ is understood as a processual matter that can never be completely neutralised by politics (or postpolitics); rather, it manifests by continuously preventing the complete closure of hegemonic urban orders (Millington, 2016). This position supports Rosol’s (2014: 80) argument for seeing postpolitics dialectically – always encompassing ‘practices of conduct and counter-conduct’, which resonates with Karaliotas’ (2020: 259) ‘call for a dialogical, critical and empirically nuanced geography’ that attends to both neoliberal assaults on urban democracy and the ever-present agency of counter-hegemonic efforts to ward off such injustices.

Hope can be posited as a crucial element and/or motivation for much contemporary CUR scholarship. Without hope for better futures, no one would bother critiquing the status quo. In this vein, the main concern of this paper is to work against stagnating accounts of hope, which might be limited through teleological constrictions of what progressive politics should (or should not) look like. This stands in contrast to teleological assumptions in postpolitical critiques that hopeful change only materialises in radical, rare events (Ranciére, 2011). We postulate that the transformative role of CUR can be invigorated if teleological abstractions of ‘the political’ are reconsidered, in order to unlock a reimagination of hope that supports working towards and through alternatives. We plead for a non-teleological stance of hope that derives from micropolitical practices in the here and now, as opposed to teleological stances drawing on predetermined objects to hope. Here, we echo Amin and Thrift’s (2017: 13) call to avoid producing ‘too much political theory, too much social science, and too much political activism that turn on abstract ideas, and not enough engagement with concrete situations’. Our aim is therefore not to debunk approaches in CUR that are hopeless, but rather, and more modestly, to apply hope with regard to its specific function in reconsidering how ‘the political’ manifests in everyday embodied conditions of struggle and change.

In the discussion that follows, we unpack conceptual and empirical opportunities for analytically utilising hope as a lens for critical urban research to grasp the interplay between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ in everyday life. In the first section, we review problematic notions of hope within the postpolitical debate in CUR that might create barriers that obscure a broader range of ongoing emancipatory practices. Teleologically constricted views on political change and of the future lead to empirical oversights about existing signs of urban alternatives in everyday life. In the second section, we argue that post-foundationalism can use hope about urban alternatives that are always possible as a way to revive epistemological engagements with change. Drawing on PFPT’s pillars of irreducible contingency and political difference, we present a post-foundational reading of emancipatory change as an ongoing process unfolding across a myriad of micropolitical, habitual practices. The third section elaborates on the concrete opportunities of constructing alternatives in the manifold counter-responses to socio-spatial injustices. We postulate that cultivating these opportunities instills a ‘renewed feeling of possibility’ about hopeful ongoing change in everyday life (Anderson, 2006: 744). The final section offers a generative agenda for CUR to navigate and nourish potential alternatives constantly enacted by the irreducible force of ‘the political’.

Beyond lopsided hope in postpolitics

Hope is an empowering cornerstone of CUR, enabling scholars to keep resisting unjust and exclusive urban systems. Desirable emancipatory change is therefore grounded in a hopeful claim about the coming (or returning) of better future conditions. Proactive hope, rather than unfounded optimism (Solnit, 2016) or ‘naive hopes of cosmopolitanism’ stimulate CUR. Barriers to progressive politics arise, however, when hope is filtered through ‘prescribed’ imaginaries making presumptions about what is considered ‘good’ change (Penny et al., 2020). These prescriptions are often normatively suggested destinations or goals, towards which civic movements and progressive citizens are meant to voyage on their way to eventually realising egalitarian societies. Imagining hope nevertheless becomes limited through these teleological assumptions. Such ‘desirable’ destinations might be valid in, or native to, Western geographic contexts and their historical path-dependencies, but their Eurocentric tilt remains somewhat disconnected in relation to other geographic contexts. CUR tends to be oriented towards construction by negation; focussing primarily on uncovering internal contradictions of exclusive urban systems, which nevertheless present themselves as ‘all-inclusive’. This negation-based approach, or via negativa, has been heavily criticised for its lack of nuance on the future (see Inch et al., 2020; Marchart, 2007). Similarly, Harvey (2000) warns against counting only on negation, as it leads to normative abstractions of assumed futures that discredit what marginalised groups could be doing on the ground. In short, such teleological abstractions are not helpful in finding reasons for hope in actually existing counter-hegemonic urban systems, which might express hope otherwise.

The debate about foregrounding PFPT in urban studies generates both proactive and irreducible hope, thereby assuring that radical alternatives are possible. In fact, the appeal of PFPT in CUR is increasing, as it sensitises an ‘appreciation of radical contingency and radical alterity, and it focusses attention on the spaces where order and its alternatives meet’ (Blakey et al., 2022: 2). The explanatory power of PFPT theoretically rests on affirming the contingent and incomplete nature of hegemony. Despite the ever-present possibilities of counter-hegemonic practices, however, they are difficult to pin down empirically, as they are often imagined through a ‘vocabulary of ghosts and specters’ (Penny et al., 2020: 316). The mismatch between abstract assumptions about ‘the political’ and actually existing urban (political) alternatives leads to a problematic imbalance about how hope can be placed in CUR. To fully acknowledge the significance of every political action, we must question our own biases and normative presumptions about what genuine political change ‘is’, or how transformative civic actions ‘should’ manifest.

Within PFPT accounts in urban studies, the debate on postpolitics captures a horizon of hope by ‘envision[ing] other possibilities for politics and democracy’ (Penny et al., 2020: 319). At the same time, however, postpolitics remains empirically silent on ‘vital energies springing from below in people’s everyday struggles [to] produce their lives’ (Penny et al., 2020: 314). This disdain for mundane forms of politicisation partially stems from an ‘overly limited definition of what counts as politics proper’ (Blakey et al., 2022: 5). Ontologically specific descriptions of what can and cannot constitute genuine emancipatory urban change follow from this view, building on a ‘problematic binary between ordinary forms of politics and the forms of political antagonism and eruption’ (Penny et al., 2020: 324). Concerning the range of possible alternatives, postpolitics thus associates genuine change with uprisings and insurgent movements that call for ruptures of the status quo and appear as ‘discrete snapshots of time and space’ (Blakey et al., 2022: 7). Following from this, strands of the post-political critique may limit our capacity to consider everyday urban dynamics as hopeful sites of ‘the political’.

In an incisive contribution about the postpolitical city, Swyngedouw (2009) proclaims that we live in a postpolitical era. Genuine political debate, encounter and controversy are narrowing, foreclosing and/or displacing political alternatives or ‘the political’ at large. Real-life examples of postpolitical urban governance range from not (or insufficiently) empowering citizens democratically with regard to urgent urban measures (e.g. how to counter the climate emergency, questions regarding public ownership of amenities and infrastructures, etc.) to assuming consensus on said matters without actively seeking discussion (Legacy, 2016). While postpolitics exists empirically and problematically in some places, the assumption that postpolitics is an all-encompassing phenomenon is potentially harmful, too. If the underlying assumption of postpolitics as omnipresent were to be fully accepted, urban politics would inevitably be relegated to a cul-de-sac regarding how things could always be otherwise (Beveridge and Koch, 2017). As Oosterlynck and Swyngedouw (2010: 1582) put it, ‘The postpolitical, by disavowing division and foreclosing radical disagreement, generates deadlock and is bound to fail politically as its negotiated technical compromise will find itself confronted with the “return of the political”, the re-emergence of conflict’. This deadlock results from a zero-sum equation, an either/or chasm between consensus and conflict, or a binary logic that empirically overlooks small-scale or ordinary counter-responses to postpolitics (Karaliotas, 2020; Van Wymeersch et al., 2019). To overcome this deadlock, and the empirical oversight it might cause in finding reasons for hope, we propose shifting analytical focus towards a nuanced account of the interplay between post-politics and its counter-responses. Instead of strictly affirming or denying the existence and/or inevitability of postpolitics, we push against the omnipresence and implicit binary logic of postpolitics.

Under the tenet of the postpolitical city, which captures processes of urban decision-making as increasingly taken over by visionless technocracy, the disastrous near ‘end’ of politics or ‘real’ democracy has been proclaimed (Crouch, 2004). Postpolitical urban governance is widespread across the globe, yet it adapts locally – and historically – following specific rationales of managerialism, mechanisms of control and neoliberalisation. Hence, the ‘diagnosis’ of postpolitics varies from generalised global conditions to localisation within specific geographic contexts (Metzger et al., 2014). A thorough review of these contextual variations would however exceed the scope of this paper. We take particular note of Beveridge and Koch’s (2017) critique of the ‘trap’ resulting from assuming postpolitics as omnipresent, which comes at the cost of dismissing tangible glimmers of hopeful urban alternatives in everyday life as insufficiently political. According to this reasoning, the near ‘end of politics’ hypothesis may paint an incomplete picture of empirical realities by partially failing to grasp some concrete referents of actually existing politicisation. In such interpretations of PFPT, ‘the political’ is framed in temporal terms as rupture events, in which fully fledged insurgent alternatives should be enacted (Holston, 2009). This teleological thinking might block us from attending to mundane forms of political enactment, which could kickstart significant transformation. We align with Beveridge and Koch’s (2017) observation, yet are careful not to fully reverse the trap (which would constitute yet another teleological move). Instead, we invite postpolitical scholarship to encounter alternatives within and beyond the aforementioned binary logic.

As part of a non-teleological understanding of hope, we consider a complete or finite fulfillment of hope to be impossible (Anderson, 2006). If hope is thought to be a realisable end point (e.g. a specifically envisioned egalitarian future), hope moves towards an absolutist lopsided understanding of the future that might blind us to other possible futures. Hope (or hopelessness) in the postpolitical diagnosis can be absolutised, manifesting in a search for exactly what, who or where politics ‘is’ (or is not). On a brighter note, this search might be conducive to an empirical manifestation of hope, as it assumes the transformative potential of ‘the political’, yet only considering it to be ‘symptomatically discernible in ruptures’ (Penny et al., 2020: 326). A different post-foundational reading can balance hope beyond this narrow notion of potential transformations (i.e. insurgent events) by opening it towards a wider exploration of where, when, who and what else could be enacting hope. Seen non-teleologically, such processes are never expected to be completed, but are always in dynamic states of unfinished negotiation (Pløger, 2021). Empirically speaking, non-teleological hope implies that a progressive current of urban change in a certain geographic context unfolds ‘through a range of polymorphic and spatially scattered actions’, such as the feminist 8M movement, known for its diverse strategies that permeated everyday life (Blakey et al., 2022: 7). This non-teleological hope proceeds without presuming any absolute grounds of politics that determine (or over-determine) courses of emancipatory action, remaining contingent, yet always detectable in the present. Rather than ontologically restricting the possibility of hopeful types of politicisation to the flashing events of rupture (Derickson, 2017), we should also welcome conceptions that acknowledge hope in the constant emergence (or re-emergence) of emancipatory change that is constantly enacted as unfinished alternatives (Saleh and Rauws, 2022). With the effort to join the ‘turns towards more processual and relational accounts’ in PFPT (Blakey et al., 2022: 5), we call for reimagining hope by engaging with the landscape of possibilities for emancipatory alternatives that could be already generated in the present.

Signs of potential alternatives might be picked up by attending to the ambivalent interplay between order and self-organising practices scattered across urban life (Saleh el al., 2020). Although we agree with Lindroth and Sinevaara-Niskanen’s (2019: 644–646) assessment that the political implications of hope function as ‘a dynamic that simultaneously enables and disciplines; it is at once tangible and elusive’, we cannot concur with their broad generalisation that hope always entails ‘a promise of reaching an end-point, the “object” of hope’. Whereas their critique of the potential pitfalls of hope cautions us not to lapse into unconditional optimism (Solnit, 2016), they do not reflect on the potential of a non-teleological notion of hope. A teleological frame of reference can lead to speculation that hope for emancipatory urban change is exclusively, and thus rarely, attainable only after the entire architecture of postpolitics has been torn down. In contrast, we argue that a different reading of PFPT – one that detects opportunities for constructing alternatives – should depart from the ultimate lack of foundations of political or socio-spatial hopeful grounds. In the next section, we argue that a generative reading of PFPT helps to recognise a wider range of emancipatory change.

Putting post-foundationalism to work for generating hope

The particular relevance of PFPT to hopeful analyses of urban politics draws on its overarching premise that any stabilised hegemonic political order lacks a final reason or ground (Landau et al., 2021). That is to say that possibilities for change are inevitable, due to the never-ending currents of counter-hegemonic articulations that keep on emerging unexpectedly, functioning to disturb the final completion of any human-made ground for ‘politics’. With this hopeful outlook, we adopt ‘the political’ as framed within PFPT (Marchart, 2018; Mouffe, 2013). This post-foundational framework seeks to leverage hope from a radical contingency of political grounds to ensure radical openness for potential alternatives to urban space, politics and injustices to flourish. As such, processual understandings of ‘the political’ emphasise new grounds for documenting and cultivating ‘the transformative power of these collective performances of alternative practice’ (Blühdorn and Deflorian, 2021: 264). In addition, the fundamental lack of final socio-spatial grounds drives critical urban practice and scholarship to remain vigilant with regard to losing hope that any socially constructed ground (e.g. neoliberal governance and its postpolitical tendencies) could ever continue unchallenged. In Marchart’s (2007: 174, emphasis in original) words, ‘the moment of the political […] has always already come and does not stop coming’. Following from our non-teleological stance, this processual understanding of ‘the political’ generates hope that ‘locates itself in the premises that we do not know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act’ (Solnit, 2016: xiv). The contingency of human-made grounds revives a sense of possibility and hope in the analysis of urban injustices, precisely because there are no limitations or reified ways of how to get there. Within this context, the object of hope is not to be found or theoretically assumed as a future promise that should be pursued because of its ontologically good nature, but rather to be explored by attentiveness and readiness to be surprised by what is already unfolding now. The downside open-ended, non-teleological perspective is that ‘the enormity of apparent choice and the divergent terrains upon which struggles can be conducted is perpetually in danger of generating a disempowering confusion’ (Harvey, 2000: 233). To counteract this confusion while we ponder the possible, tangible dimensions of a fuzzy notion such as hope that always – already emerges, we need a pinch of faith and intellectual optimism about what has not yet been discovered by our inherently incomplete empirical understanding of present conditions. To utilise this optimism productively in CUR reflections, we also need a dose of hope in the discovery of transformative processes appearing across subtle, incremental micropolitical actions.

Our post-foundational reading of hope conceptually rests on four distinct but inter-related pillars that concern (1) the radical possibility of alternatives, (2) broadening what counts as politicisation, (3) attention to ‘the political’ in everyday life and (4) the need to cultivate closer dialogue between globally-oriented empirical research and theory-building in PFPT. First, post-foundationalism builds on the premise that any exercise of political meaning-making or articulation of power is erected upon utterly contested and necessarily ‘contingent foundations’ (Marchart, 2007), thus refusing both foundationalist and anti-foundationalist approaches to conceptualise power, politics or space. Instead, a post-foundational approach considers the radical absence or lack of foundations that are contingent and always-temporarily articulated moments of hegemony, helping to capture constant processes of politicisation, depoliticisation and repoliticisation (Kenis and Mathijs, 2014; Landau et al., 2021). The contingency of foundations unravels and conditions a non-teleological notion of hope, given that places and spaces of hope can spring from anywhere. Accordingly, any human-made foundation of society, space and hope is unfinished, transitory and cracked, simply because ‘the political’ is counteracting its closure (Dikeç and Swyngedouw, 2017). Hence, post-foundationalism opens theoretical grounds for hope by disclosing the ineradicable possibility that the future could be radically different from present conditions. In short, hegemony never goes unchallenged (Marchart, 2007). The first conceptual pillar for mobilising hopes that are generated by ‘the political’ is therefore the expectation that this excessive possibility of alternatives will arise from somewhere, to appear somehow in urban settings, inviting us to stay humble about current analytical capacities to find its empirical referents to date.

Second, we employ the analytic of political difference, which distinguishes between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ (Marchart, 2007), for highlighting post-foundational hope. The logics of ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ never appear in pure or absolute forms or spaces, but rather contaminate each other. The logic of ‘politics’ aims to construct formations of closure, stability and order that assist and inscribe seemingly incontestable solutions to manage urban space and power. ‘Politics’ can seek to impose itself as superior to ‘the political’ and, in a postpolitical condition, it risks suppressing or otherwise hampering the inherently conflictual dimension of urban politics. Swyngedouw and Wilson (2014: 10) distinguish ‘politics’ as ‘the contingent and incomplete attempt to ground a particular set of power relations on an ultimately absent foundation’, in contrast to ‘the political’, which they view ‘as the ineradicable presence of this absence itself, which continually undermines the social orders constructed upon it, and which holds open the possibility of radical change’. Briefly stated, the logic of ‘politics’ manifests as assumedly ‘common sense’ rules that regulate, structure or govern urban life towards one stable hegemonic order of urban politics. These regulatory settings, practices and institutions (as well as unwritten informal agreements or customary laws) stand in contradiction to the disruptive dimension of ‘the political’, which consistently purports dissent and questions stability, normalcy, hegemony and closure (Dikeç, 2017). What is needed to view ‘the political’ as a generative force of hope is a link between its conflictual dimension and everyday practices that prefigure alternatives beyond commonsensical orders of ‘politics’, thus possibly expanding what ‘politics’ itself could mean in practice. In agreement with Back (2020: 4), a hopeful outlook expands our sense of alternatives by being ‘concerned with not only what is, but also with what might be’. This trajectory allows us to consider the emergence and incremental realisation of emancipatory urban change as a transitory process, constantly moving between potential and actual socio-spatial alternatives. The second pillar thus fosters an analytical use of hope in CUR, which consists of broadening what counts as politicisation, or ‘the political’ for that matter. It entails the conceptualisation of counter-hegemonic action as an incremental process always in the making (Mouffe, 2013), oscillating between building up potentials through enacted practices in everyday life and possible events of radical politicisation.

To reap the full potential of this broadened view of politicisation in generating hope, more analytical attention should be directed towards highlighting the interface of possibilities (or impossibilities) between openness (i.e. the logic of ‘the political’) and closure (i.e. the logic of ‘politics’). This relational or ‘enmeshed’ perspective of urban politics brings forth the subtleties and ambivalences of emancipatory urban change (Blakey et al., 2022). For example, consider activist groups self-organising against climate change to the degree of retreating ‘into hermetically sealed echo-chambers’. This could result in further foreclosures of the transformative impact of ‘the political’, as it bars activists from engaging with laypeople (Blühdorn and Deflorian, 2021: 263). Novel reasons for hope about present conditions emerge when such practices are considered as partially unfinished alternatives. By focussing on this interface, hopeful alternatives to ‘politics’ can be found in the many cracks of urban space and power in counter-public, self-organised communities of care and ways of cohabiting and using urban space alongside or beyond the instructed norms of the logic of politics (Saleh et al., 2020; Dikeç, 2017). Guided by this expansive conception of hope, we can detect underexplored discursive-material referents of the whereabouts of ‘the political’, which could enable us to both envision and enact urban alternatives arising from the ever-emerging counter-hegemonic practices in everyday life.

Teleological claims about what are ‘good’ or ‘better’ alternatives for politically marginalised groups could also prevent us from finding such whereabouts of hope. Such claims cannot hold when confronted with the messiness of everyday lived situations, in which hope paradoxically blends with despair, as demonstrated in Anderson’s (2006: 743) account:

There is, therefore, a point of danger, or hazard, folded into becoming hopeful that indicates that a good way of being has ‘still not become’ … the present is haunted by the fact that the something good that exceeds it has yet to take place and that ‘the conditions that make it possible to hope are strictly the same as those that make it possible to despair’.

Accordingly, there are ethical challenges facing the ambition for a type of CUR that reconciles hoped-for emancipatory futures with concrete situations in the present. Given this ambivalent interplay between conditions of despair and hope (Anderson, 2006), researchers’ ethics and moral choices unavoidably underscore the recognition of certain signs of hope or alternatives, and not others. In other words, it matters whose hopes are considered progressive, or anticipated with despair – those hopes of right-wing populists instilling false aspirations for the return of national glory, or those hopes of pro-refugee movements mobilising the public’s empathy with people who are otherwise vilified by the xenophobic narratives of populists. As such, hope can be alarmingly co-opted by political movements that do not respect the equality and liberty of all, which Mouffe (2013) posits as minimum criteria for a conflict-attuned, radical democracy. Accordingly, ‘the political’ cannot be grasped as a steady substance of power, but rather as a process constantly appearing, disrupting and adapting in acts, places and laws where ‘politics’ has officially claimed to be ‘all-inclusive’. To avoid the all-encompassing and deadlock assumptions of postpolitics, reimagining hope through ‘the political’ points to insatiable possibilities of change that necessitate empirical attention (or more of it) – for example, by operationalising and accounting for contingency and difference in research practice, and by providing a more conflict-oriented mindset towards data collection and analysis (Pløger, 2021). From a post-foundational reading of hope, the latter remains inchoate and malleable, manifesting as in the embodied practices of marginalised street vendors, urban gardeners, faith-based communities, graffiti artists or playing children. Although the everyday practices of these groups might be seen as too trivial, their role in unsettling commonsensical urban orders qualifies them to be part of the conflictual dimension of ‘the political’. The third pillar of reimagining hope thus illuminates the myriad of political practices enacted in everyday life.

Within the PFPT and postpolitics literatures, empirical cases offer in-depth analysis of actual appearances of politicisation/postpoliticisation or postpolitics, albeit reporting mostly from the Global North or West (Blakey et al., 2022). Other geographical settings or regions unfortunately can be subject to sweeping generalisations and abstractions about the kind of ‘emancipatory’ or ‘progressive’ change that can be hoped for in their local urban politics (Penny et al., 2020, but see Saleh and Rauws, 2022). The paradoxical premise here is that ‘the political’ is empirically presented as ‘universally axiomatic’ (Penny et al., 2020), whereas PFPT theoretically advocates maximum, radical openness to pluralism and difference. This mismatch between theory and practice has recently provoked the question of ‘how post-foundationalism might (implicitly) reproduce Eurocentrism’ (Landau et al., 2021: 30). Do we need to reconsider the contexts to which these all-encompassing ontological generalisations remain native (Penny et al., 2020), and in which parts of the world might these conceptualisations need contextual nuance (or more of it)? Can we claim that post-foundationalist scholars, or any scholars for that matter, could ever operate as value-free academic agents who are objectively ‘neutral’ towards their adopted ontologies? They are humans upholding a plurality of worldviews enshrined within their own belief systems, meaning that their ontological claims always build on the value-charged domain of axiology (De Roo, 2021). Similarly concerned by this axiology, PFPT thus hovers over the lack of its own ultimate foundations, such that it must constantly question its own premises, build alliances and look elsewhere for further theory-building.

If PFPT is to understand ‘the political’ in a manner relevant to generating hope, its ontological underpinnings must be reconciled with a wider range of beliefs and political projects of the world. Ancient Greek philosophers and contemporary French thinkers were not the only ones to foreground the unavoidable competitions between visions for organising political life as productive means of human progress. For example, the Islamic civilisation flourished in its Golden Age (800–1200 CE) precisely because its adherents accepted and incorporated the irreducible contingency of political structures and the benign stimuli of difference (Khaldun, 2015), principles believed to be ordained by God alone to prevent the full monopoly of any unjust system (Qu’ran, 1913: Ch.22, Verse 40). Hence, PFPT resonate with a monotheistic belief system which allows for constant scepticism of human-made power structures that present themselves as ultimate or holy, despite their inherent imperfection and therefore temporary existence. The remarkable open-ended nature of PFPT is that it also accommodates a pronounced atheistic stance, denying the existence of any given Truth or God (Landau et al., 2021: 9). To expand our hopes theoretically, PFPT should be more grounded in empirical realities by opening up to cross-pollination with proximate traditions of conceptualisation. Setting out to affirm contingency and celebrate plurality, the post-foundational reading we advance holds that the analysis of urban politics should break away from ontological certitudes concerning what ‘the political’ is, towards generating a wider conceptual plurality to open empirical understandings of what else could be signs of urban alternatives (i.e. ongoing practices alluding to politicisation). Conceptual plurality is conducive to a non-teleological understanding of hope as it requires a shift in how we orient our potentiality of expectation: instead of a standpoint that expects progressive change to ‘take on familiar guises (street protests, basically)’ that may or may not come/return to save us from the doom-seeming present (Penny et al., 2020: 316), a hopeful standpoint would expect that an alternative-to-come is already in the making in the here and now. This leads us to the fourth pillar, which has to do with bridging the chasm between theory and practice in CUR in order to apply such post-foundational notions as contingent foundations and political difference within a wider variety of empirical and geographic contexts.

Taken together, these pillars constitute a notion of urban politics through which we can tangibly discover that hope for alternatives is always-already enacted through the relentless efforts of the marginalised. This perspective is placed precisely over a specific premise in post-foundationalism, which entails that ‘the political’never stops preventing the full closure of any geometry of power (Marchart, 2007). ‘The political’, therefore, constantly keeps open the possibility of alternatives to what may now seem unshakable orders of politics. This crucial claim foregrounds a profound sense of hope at a theoretical level concerning the inevitability of alternatives. Epistemologically, however, hope shrinks again if we imagine that this impact of ‘preventing closure’ sometimes retreats to a mere virtual possibility rather than to an actually existing factor in empirical realities. Arguing with Beveridge and Koch (2019), what if we consider that everyday practices are part of such ever-present challenges to orders of politics? Post-foundationalism could possibly unlock its full potential, both theoretically and practically, if ‘the political’ could be imagined as a constant process that never ceases to materialise in urban realities (see Fisker et al., 2019). A non-teleological lens could therefore shed light on new opportunities to find hope for transformative politicisation in habitual practices. If politicisation operates to prevent the full closure of hegemony, thus generating hope by promising radical alterity and contingency, we should always be able to observe this work in concrete ways. For CUR to continue resisting injustices beyond deconstruction, an epistemological shift in perspective about hope and change is needed – from focussing on what is theoretically expected to what is already ongoing in the here and now. In short, we argue for transcending a tendency in PFPT to frame the processual nature of ‘the political’ mainly as a conceptual condition that may or may not be actualised in practice, and instead to consider seeing it as an ever-present empirical reality. The question then becomes which analytical frameworks open opportunities to detect the often mundane manifestations of ‘the political’ in everyday life.

Empirical opportunities for reimagining hope

Considering both hope and ‘the political’ as yet to be realised in ongoing articulations against hegemony, signs of potential alternatives develop at the sidelines of salient competitions between order/‘politics’ and self-organisation/‘the political’. These concrete occurrences of ‘ordinary’ politicisation support critical urban analysis as ‘a constructive political project’ (Kenis and Mathijs, 2014: 154) beyond relegating the possibility for alternatives to abstractly lurk around only like a ghost. Cues for ‘the hopeful political’ therefore manifest concretely as micro-scale actions, through which marginalised groups, positions or non-conventional practices of urban governance, decision-making, solidarity, care, ownership and growth persistently (albeit fleetingly) claim spaces that are not meant for ‘politics’ imposed by formal institutions. Examples are richly scattered across urban life, including disruptive experiments in public space that replace ‘the symbolic order of the streets dominated by car mobility’ (Van Wymeersch et al., 2019: 375), with pop-up projects striving for car-free cities; indigenous communities demanding more inclusive urban futures by recognising their land claims in official maps, which paradoxically materialise ‘the very same constellation of power that they envisioned changing’ (Lindroth and Sinevaara-Niskanen, 2019: 647); and monument interventionists hoping for more critical conversations about heritage, memorialisation and narrations of a racist past. In other words, as a constant current of progressive change, ‘the political’ concerns the realm of latent alternatives that are yet to be, which may (or may not) become actualised by actions on the ground. However, hope arising from ‘the political’ is not a carrot dangling at the end of finite political debate. It is at once achievable and precariously tangible. In line with Harvey’s (2000: 189) inclination to take hope as a starting point which can spur the intellectual work needed to recognise and nurture emancipatory urban alternatives, ‘the political’ as an unstoppable process generates an enlarged landscape of possibilities for analysing where alternatives could be taking place now (Saleh and Rauws, 2022). Positioning an attunement to hope is a necessary reference point for locating progressive urban futures embodied in everyday processes of political articulation. These processes are fuelled by the agency of mundane, small and sometimes seemingly banal actions of the dispossessed, such as what has been coined ‘the quiet encroachment of the ordinary’ (Bayat, 2010). It is of particular importance to reimagining hope to not search for distinctly ‘pure’ manifestations of ‘the political’, given that they are currently folding into, or overlapping with, hegemonic urban orders of politics (or postpolitics).

Instead of teleologically considering hope as an assumed end point with which to conclude reflections on CUR, hope should be analytically distilled from disruptive acts that materialise the integral possibility for politicisation, emerging where and how it is least expected by ‘politics’. Given that postpolitics never entirely devours ‘the political’ (Swyngedouw, 2018), we consider it a ‘matter of concern’ to foster critical empirical case studies that associate hope with concrete shapes of emancipatory alternatives arising from the non-stop emergence (or re-emergence) of ‘the political’, whether in habitual, spectacular or ambivalent forms (Saleh and Rauws, 2022; Van Wymeersch et al., 2019). For example, by understanding how marginalised citizens transgress the limits of what is formally ‘licit’ in public space to appeal to their hitherto unrecognised needs, informal practices and counter-hegemonic practices can be examined empirically (Millington, 2016). For instance, Legacy (2016) demonstrates this by exploring how citizen-led initiatives enact ‘the political’ in the institutional gaps of a postpolitical consensus around a contentious inner-city infrastructure project in Melbourne. As a case of how ‘postpolitical governance provokes political contestation from beyond the state’ (Legacy, 2016: 3120), disempowered citizens invented a creative arena for voicing their critical narratives, performing urban alternatives within the cracks of postpolitical hegemony. Citizen resistance overturned a seemingly postpolitical deadlock, defied the project as a ‘done deal’ and thus gradually re-activated ‘the political’ through institutional disruptions within a smoothly planned process. As illustrated by this case, when ‘the political’ unfolds and permeates within the formalised realm of ‘politics’, ongoing actions to construct alternatives become empirically tangible. Through the incremental yet transformative efforts of self-organising citizens, urban alternatives are often shaped beyond the radar of politics (or postpolitics), without a need for recourse to the radical rupture of its stabilised institutions (Saleh and Rauws, 2022; Derickson, 2017). From a non-teleological lens, hope allows for grasping hegemonic urban orders (e.g. Melbourne’s infrastructure planning) as always coupled with creative and conflictual expressions, generating hope by embodying the ever-present transformative dimension of ‘the political’.

Another empirical account by Millington (2016) delves into the quotidian socio-spatial dynamics surrounding the 2011 London riots with regard to its political (or postpolitical) implications, arguing for an understanding of urban politics that includes disruptive sentiments outside of traditional channels of political engagement. More concretely, whereas commentators deemed the riots ‘disappointedly apolitical’ (Millington, 2016: 707), the author draws attention to hip-hop spaces as places where actors, who were not expected to become politicised, spontaneously self-organised during moments in which ‘the political’ was staged through makeshift embodied acts of contesting neoliberal governance. Considering ‘the political’ as a constant process, the riots performatively manifested ‘rehearsals for a different kind of future’ (Back, 2020: 9), whereas the scattered political sentiments of hip-hop culture constituted a fertile ground for glimmers of hope to persist and build momentum in everyday life. Together, these two empirical case studies demonstrate how traces of hopeful alternatives can be detected in the transformative effects of embodied disruptions over time, aggregating in patterns of informal use, creative behaviour and prefigurative change in urban public spaces. Self-organised political formations enacted against capitalism, racism, neoliberalisation, sexism – you name it – are living testimonies that urban alternatives are not only abstractly present, but concretely active in the nooks and crannies of hegemonic political systems (Blakey, 2021). The longer-term impacts of such micro-scale interventions matter for constructing alternatives, as they already signify ‘the becoming otherwise that is folded with the actual’ (Anderson, 2017: 594).

With this wide array of creative and/or disruptive articulations, it is possible to analyse a variety of political emotions, passions or modes that have remained underexplored in PFPT (Landau, 2019). Empirical analyses of affect-laden politics, postpolitics and cultural modes of politicisation would credibly expand the analytical registers of what or who counts as a subject of ‘the political’ (Blakey, 2021). Such diverse analytical registers illuminate a broader spectrum of ample opportunities to leverage the empirical reach of PFPT. On one side of this spectrum, March (2023) has recently proposed to tease out elements of political pluralism and ontological conflictuality innate in Islamic theological views on political life, seeing them as points of departure for potential hopeful alternatives to the so-called present day ‘Muslim democracy’. On the opposite side, some PFPT scholars suggested engaging in more intellectual exchange with the so-called ‘intersectional queer/feminist’ theories and politics to grasp hopes generated by ‘the political’ in embodied struggles for recognition and power (Blakey et al., 2022; Sparks, 2016). ¹ To locate ‘the political’ analytically within urban processes that generate hopeful alternatives, we emphasise the request of Fisker et al. (2019: 9) to ‘imagine alternative spaces that are not free-floating utopias but differentiated trajectories grounded in the material realities from which they will have to spring forth’. By expanding what could be the credible objects of hope, informal encroachments that routinely break, nudge or loosen the boundaries of unjust urban orders can enter (or re-enter) the stage of urban politics as potentially transformative actions (Saleh et al., 2020). However, we should avoid romanticising all of these practices as kernels of hope unconditionally, since some of these practices might end up being criminal, vandalistic, offensive or detrimental to other social groups. This is where the axiological position of who is hoping (or whose hopes are acknowledged and valued by which scholars) plays a key role (De Roo, 2021). Critical urban scholars who are invested in imagining and co-constructing alternatives, aware of their situated (moral) agencies in cultivating these practices, must stay reflexive by critically examining their ethical, democratic and inclusive influences (or lack thereof) vis-à-vis the material, historical and socio-cultural realities in which such practices are embedded.

In summary, we have proposed ‘the political’ as constitutive backbone to a theory of hope that stimulates a productive ‘optimism of the intellect’ for CUR scholars (Harvey, 2000). This unstoppable hopeful current of ‘the political’ operates through contingent grounds of urban politics and space that reveal the ever-present possibilities of change enacted in a plurality of everyday political practices. Signs of hopeful urban alternatives thus become empirically detectable across embodied yet ambivalent practices on various spatial scales, which resist or refigure existing hegemonic arrangements of power and space. In this vein, we propose hope neither as merely subjective, personal views about what is intrinsically better or worse, nor as a fixation, pacification or naive optimism about the coming of ‘grand historical events of uprisings and revolutions’ that would save us (Marchart, 2007: 174). We cannot afford the lopsided imagination of hope about ‘the political’ that only manifests through insurgent moments or movements, given that ‘in theorizing what a political process is we impose rigid ontological boundaries on the world that paradoxically circumscribe politics’ (Blakey, 2021: 629, emphasis in original). Instead of this limiting imaginary, we argue for exposing and negotiating our bearings about where we place our hopes, as an imbalanced viewpoint delimits ‘politics’ that may overlook on-the-ground emancipatory action of ‘the political’. In a post-foundational mindset, hope should not be viewed as ‘a destination or an achievement but an improvisation across time that links the past, present and not yet realised future’ (Back, 2020: 16). This non-teleological, processual account challenges urban injustices through a balanced interest in dismantling hegemonic orders while also exploring and cultivating the enactment of concrete, yet temporal alternatives. Our post-foundational reading therefore supports political practice beyond doom-seeming outlooks. Discarding normative accounts of the present conditions by shifting the focus away from only ‘diagnosing’ the ills of hegemonic urban orders and assuming desirable destinations for their change, we advance a non-teleological understanding of hope conducive to a ‘prognostic mode capable of elucidating other possible ways forward’ that can be credibly linked to ongoing everyday practices (Fisker et al., 2019: 10, our emphasis). By embracing this balanced conceptualisation of hope, ‘the political’ propels a revived sense of possible ways of constructing alternatives, thereby facilitating genuine intellectual optimism about urban change that is always-already underway, fuelled by constant oscillations between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’. Operationalising this in practice can equip both critical urban scholars and practicing city-makers with conceptual and practical signs of hope for resourcefully pondering emancipatory futures that extend beyond postpolitics.

Conclusion: Hopeful alternatives in a landscape of politicisation

In this paper, we facilitate the use of hope as a lens for CUR by explicating the conceptual and empirical implications of a non-teleological understanding of hope within a spectrum that spans multiple forms of ‘politics’ and ‘the political’. The four conceptual pillars and empirical opportunities presented above can be used to delineate key caveats, which illuminate the possibility of a reimagination of hope by: (1) affirming the ever-present opportunities for any status quo to be otherwise; (2) shifting the perspective on how ‘the political’ could be used to recognise the full range of conceptual and empirical plurality in urban settings; (3) opening new analytical directions for cultivating underexplored possibilities for alternatives; and (4) enriching the empirical purchase of PFPT notions through a non-teleological stance on hope. Altogether, we propose a generative agenda with which CUR can productively highlight signs of potential alternatives that are always – already enacted by ‘the political’.

To start, most accounts of ‘the political’ in PFPT project such understandings abstractly, except for their rare appearance (or re-appearance) in radical rupture events (see Rancière, 2011). Instead, we claim that ongo hopeful counter-hegemonic actions never stop never stop occurring alongside processes of (post-)politicisation. This expands our epistemological horizon of the hope for urban alternatives by capturing the political in ‘small actions, challenges, and experiments … that hold the potential to nudge established patterns of control’ (Blakey et al., 2022: 5). A non-teleological stance towards hope could evade our scholastic biases, leading us to critique politics without rendering it ‘inherently bad or seeing political events as inherently good’ (Blakey et al., 2022: 4). Rather, we should invest our hopes in ‘the good which is working its way through’ (Bloch, 1986: 198), instead of imagining change only through the flashing of rupture events (Derickson, 2017). Cultivating this emerging ‘good’ becomes possible when we choose to believe that ‘what we dream of is already present in the world’ to some extent (Solnit, 2016: xv), yet tends to be erected on an inherently contingent foundation. Moving towards non-teleological hope helps PFPT achieve its full empirical potential by valuing the significance of habitual and micro-political actions as integral parts of the constant and unstoppable processes of forming urban alternatives. We therefore posit that reimagining hope depends upon the recognition of the long durée impacts of such ever-present possibilities for things to be otherwise. This, in turn, would leverage PFPT’s capacity to actualise its progressive ethics of inclusivity and hopeful open-endedness.

Second, such possibilities and the ample hopes they carry require urban scholars adopting PFPT to welcome the conceptual plurality that arises from engaging in the cross-pollinating dialogues with wider domains of knowledge generation and ontologies, including cultural geography (Millington, 2016), spatial planning (Metzger et al., 2014) and theology (Davey, 2008; March, 2023), as well as ideas and analytical languages they use to reflect on sanguine forces of urban change. This cross-pollination allows us to evade the study of self-organised political formations based on Eurocentric imaginaries of civic actions, which helps to uproot traces of ontological certitudes about the designated agents, times and places of politicisation. In other words, such dialogues move the ongoing debate on understanding ‘the political’ within PFPT – from a kind of esoteric discussion understood and valued by a selective academic audience – towards an expansive exoteric perspective that is capable of being broadly valid. Conceptual plurality produces empirical plurality that would affirm the progressive and hopeful ethics of PFPT by finding transformative potential for emancipatory change in ‘how people organize themselves in order to live’ (Amin and Thrift, 2017: 35). As an act of imagination, hope can thus be regarded as a perspective through which society is mobilised to see the other again. Although hope might make us act, a non-teleological notion of hope should not be seen as a desire arising from experience, the traditional drive to act. In a post-foundational sense, hope may help to advance an ‘incorporative generosity towards alterity that does not necessarily change one’s own position’ (Blakey et al, 2022: 6). When coupled with academic acts of critique, such generosity maximises our appreciation of the cultural pluralism and complex rhythms of everyday urban life, and in turn reorients analytical attention from hoping for the marginalised towards hoping with what they are actually doing to organise their lives. ‘Hoping for’ implies (teleologically, and thus lopsidedly) imposing specific future destinations for the desirable emancipatory change, whereas ‘hoping with’ tends towards ethically aligning ourselves with existing directions for co-constructing alternatives. Igniting this suggested conceptual plurality can reveal new and formerly unaccounted political actors, voices and emotions that articulate counter-hegemonic or ‘other’ paths for emancipatory urban futures.

Third, framing ‘the political’ as a constant current of change facilitates several analytical directions for nuancing hope within CUR. These directions go beyond the binary and all-encompassing assumptions of postpolitical scholarship, which could imply a deadlock for politics, to view politicisation and post-politicisation as co-constitutive processes of conduct (i.e. as stabilising orders of politics) and counter-conduct (i.e. as self-organised disruptions of ‘the political’) (Karaliotas, 2020; Rosol, 2014). Given that PFPT establishes that any hegemonic urban order is always coupled with plural competing orders, we could start hopeful critical analyses by asking the question: Where do emancipatory urban alternatives grow incrementally – already within the cracks of postpolitical orders? (Saleh and Rauws, 2022) In another direction, critical urban scholars should steer clear of the tendency to assume binary relationships between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, and instead adopt an empirical, ambivalence-attuned approach to capture their enmeshed interface in everyday life (Blakey et al., 2022). Based on the post-foundational tenet implying that the categories of ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ can never be purely separated, hopeful critical analyses appeal to the question: Where could glimmers of unfinished urban alternatives be detectable in everyday situations in which ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ overlap? Pondering these exploratory questions can unlock a horizon of possibilities for a hopeful, empirically grounded research agenda on the interplay between forces of change and stability in urban politics. The added value of this research agenda to ongoing debates on PFPT in urban studies is that it complements the predominantly diagnostic mode of seeking to identify the existence or non-existence of postpolitical symptoms (i.e. deconstruction) with a prognostic mode oriented towards the co-construction of future alternatives to unjust hegemonic urban systems.

Fourth, the directions presented above co-constitute a post-foundational trajectory of hope that paves broader analytical horizons for utilising ‘the political’ within CUR. All directions stem from the urgent need for urban scholars to move beyond teleological (lopsided) positionalities that seek to define with some degree of certainty the ‘what is’ or ‘where is’ of ‘the political’. Instead, we propose a non-teleological stance to explore where ‘the political’could be. This shift is necessary to realising the full empirical potential of post-foundational notions (i.e. contingent foundations and political difference) to generate a language of possibility with which to do intellectual work on assisting the construction of alternatives through CUR. Given that post-foundationalism continues to inspire more debates in CUR, it is important to apply the aforementioned analytical directions in future case studies to grasp a wider range of material-discursive referents of ‘the political’. Future empirical, global research is needed to develop fresh analytical tools and vocabularies for detecting, tracing and mapping such concrete manifestations of hope, increasing urban scholars’ awareness of how politicisation could already be taking place in unexpected spaces that, by extension, might leverage the empirical purchase of PFPT. This would advance post-foundationalism in urban research and praxis as a generative approach supportive of engaging with a broad spectrum of tangible potentialities of hope and action (Saleh, 2021). Instead of overcharging hope as a normative promise or assumed destination for a better future that may or may not come, we offer a post-foundational reading of hope that empowers us to epistemologically and empirically find new directions to act now– with the aspiration of discovering the many realisable alternatives that are already in store for hopeful urban futures. This imagination (or re-imagination) opens up a landscape of undiscovered possibilities for transformative political differences, within which we find signs of urban alternatives, without ever losing hope that they are always-already here.