Urban plasticity liberates identity yet invites totalitarian control

Evidence

The city, our great modern form, is soft, amenable to the dazzling and libidinous variety of lives, dreams, interpretations. But the very plastic qualities which make the great city the liberator of human identity also cause it to be especially vulnerable to psychosis and totalitarian nightmare. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 87

Categorization

• XREF: This dialectic of liberation and control recurs in debates over flexible accumulation — the same flexibility that frees labor also undermines its security. Harvey is setting up the postmodern condition as paradox. — connects to: Once-despised urban liminal spaces get emptied of menace by corporate media culture — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 469