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Oli Mould, "Postcapitalist cities: Towards a common urban future" (Manchester UP, 2026)
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- [00:01]
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- [00:57]
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This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride. You this summer. Find more on Facebook. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:31]
Interviewer - New Books Network Host
Welcome to the New Books Network. On this episode I'm talking to Ollie Mould about Post Capitalist Cities Towards a common urban future. So welcome to the podcast.
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Ollie Mould - Author and Guest
Hi, how you doing?
- [01:42]
Interviewer - New Books Network Host
I should say welcome back actually, because this is I guess one in a kind of series of books where you've been writing about things like cities, visions of the future, and also kind of critiques of capitalism, particularly with a view of what we might do differently. And I guess the place to start is with the title really about this idea of a kind of post capitalist city. What I suppose is that. How do you kind of define that?
- [02:12]
Ollie Mould - Author and Guest
Yeah, well, thanks for the invitation. First off, I think the way I wanted to really position it is the fact that post capitalism often gets, I wouldn't say a bad press, but it kind of gets narrowed down to meaning, a time frame, meaning or what comes after capitalism. And I wanted to be very clear straight from the outset that what I'm really focusing on is post in the very broad sense, meaning beyond, within, in between, or even absent. So this idea of all those bits of urbanism that we experience around the world which actually exists. I'm not. I'm not trying to paint a picture of some sort of utopian vision of the future, although that might be something that readers take from it. The book is really more about a case of saying, well, look, there are pockets of really interesting and quite democratic and sustainable and radical stuff that people are doing in cities, creating, you know, very interesting and sustainable and really quite radical and lovely places to live within the suffocating confines of the sort of capitalist, gentrifying city. So when I say post, it's really meaning around, between, within, you know, all that sort of stuff. So it's not. I'm not talking a time frame here. And it's not really. It's not a blueprint as such. It's a celebration, really, of all the things that people are doing. And. Yeah, and, you know, I've been lucky enough to visit a few of them. There's obviously loads more I'd like to go to, but it's. Yeah, it's a sort of. It's a critique of capitalism, but also a celebration of all those things that, you know, we can actually visit in the here and now where people are doing things, you know, just a bit differently.
- [03:50]
Interviewer - New Books Network Host
Yeah. I mean, it's sort of terrible for radio, but it's worth saying the book is full of these brilliant pictures and images of lots of the places that you're writing about and you've been. And the book has got, I guess, and you've sort of alluded to this already, that kind of structure of, well, here is the problem, here is the kind of critique. Here is what is going on in kind of actuality. And then here are some sort of future possibilities. And I. I guess one of the big ideas that runs through the book and is one of those, I suppose, kind of facets of capitalism and post capitalism is gentrification. And this might be something that's familiar to readers, but it might not be. I wonder if you could kind of introduce it really, and say why it's so important to the book.
- [04:41]
Ollie Mould - Author and Guest
Yeah, so the notion of gentrification, I think, is, as you say, very well known. And it's a phrase and a term which has 75 years or so of analytical history. But it's interesting, when I was doing the research for it and reading around the various urban scholars that have been writing about it for decades, it's only relatively recently that people have started to yoke it specifically to race and to thinking about how racial capitalism specifically has, you know, all the racist institutional stuff that we see in the police and in the. With redlining in the states and all these various other processes of institutional processes that have racial aspects to them. They have always been kind of distinct. They've always been sort of analyzed separately. And it's only, as I say, relatively recently that they've been smushed together. And I think that's what I wanted to do. I just wanted to sort of carry that forward a little bit, because as you say, there's a, you know, there's a standard gentrification narrative which we see all around us every day. You know, I was just talking to the Guardian the other day about Elephant and Castle and how that's rampantly gentrifying space in a relatively short period of time. But like I say, that the. The aspect of race is often considered separately. So what I wanted to do was to show how it really affects people of color, different diasporas and how that manifests in the built environment. So things like the homogenization of space, how space has become incredibly similar all around the world, they often use the same architects, the same designs because it's cheaper. So you end up. Cities end up looking the same, and then obviously demographic end up looking the same because clearly that, you know, all that gentrification comes with luxury flats and places where, you know, they're not affordable for the urban poor, who are often racialized. So we see a homogenization of the landscape in terms of its architecture, but also in terms of its demographics. It gets more white, it gets more professional, it gets more kind of middle class. And as such, as we're seeing, you know, with the Elephant Castle case and many other places around the country, indeed around the world, when you get that professionalism, you often lose a lot of the social services that go with it. You know, people having fewer kids and so there's fewer schools and all that sort of stuff. So, yeah, it's about the gentrification, really, therefore, is about the homogenization about how spaces in the cities all around the world become increasingly similar demographically, architecturally, you know, in terms of what they provide, in terms of economics and the retails and because we have, you know, all the chain stores and everything else. So it's. Yeah, it's about the kind of narrowing of the urban offering, if you like, to a very small band of corporate, expensive kind of cities. And so that's really what I was trying to get at when I. When I was thinking about gentrification.
- [07:42]
Interviewer - New Books Network Host
I mean, you mentioned a London example there. And also this kind of sense of what happens when Gentrification interacts with the withdrawal or shrinking of the state. And one of the first kind of examples in the book is the Grenfell disaster in London. And I think that it's worth kind of talking about that in some depth, really, because on the one hand it's. It's illustrative of these dynamics. On the other, it's actually, you know, really kind of crucial to understand that the process of gentrification is not just a, as you say, kind of whitening, urban transformation, homogenization. It also leaves behind it, like, quite literally a trail of death and destruction. So I wonder if you can kind of sketch out what the disaster was and its kind of meaning in your analysis.
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Ollie Mould - Author and Guest
Yes. So a lot of urban geographers have picked up on Grenfell largely because, you know, it's, as you say, incredibly emblematic of all those kinds of processes of gentrification and kind of urban neoliberalism which we've been, you know, banging on about for decades. This idea that, I mean, the inquiry for Grenfell which happened painted this picture incredibly starkly, that, you know, there wasn't one institution or one person to blame. It was a myriad of different institutions, including the fire people, but also the. The housing association, the architects, the local council, all the different institutions that over the last few decades have fragmented as urban neoliberalism has spread, you know, through the managerial system, you know, the desire to outsource stuff and, you know, to corporatize and privatize urban delivery.
- [09:33]
Interviewer - New Books Network Host
It's.
- [09:34]
Ollie Mould - Author and Guest
It's created this incredibly multifarious and sort of diffuse network of institutions. And they all affect each other, but they all can kind of shift responsibility in this kind of classic, you know, almost cybernetic way. So that when. When you look at the. The results of the Grenfell, the inquiry, this is what they said. They said, look, it was just too diffuse and there was no one really able to take hold of what was going on and say, look, this is a problem. The cladding is not good enough. The residents voices aren't being heard, the fire escapes don't work, the fridges are. You know, they're not the right kind of fridges. So this multiplicity, if you like, of this sort of diffusion of responsibility happens all over the world in cities. And that was the sort of reason that Grenfell happened in many respects. So that's why it's such an important event in urban geography and kind of, you know, neoliberal urbanism more broadly, because it's exactly the kind of. It's what people have been saying for many, many years beforehand. Indeed, there was a blog post by the Grenfell Residents Association. I don't know what it was a few months or a year or so before the fire saying, look, a major catastrophe is going to happen because we, you know, no one is really kind of picking up the slack here. So that's why it's such an important event and that's why lots of people have written about it. And I, you know, obviously I teach about it as well. I use it as a teaching event. So it was, I had to put it in. Lots of people have written about it. But yeah, so that's, that's why it's. There it is, you know, it's such an important point to make, you know, and so that's, that's why we should continue to talk about it.
- [11:17]
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- [11:43]
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- [12:13]
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This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for, from a browse to a bike ride this summer. Find more on Facebook.
- [12:43]
Interviewer - New Books Network Host
I mean, it's a kind of key example, I guess, of that kind of sense crisis and the kind of failures of the capitalist and to an extent post capitalist city. The middle part of the book then shifts really to kind of stories of, I suppose, resistance and opposition. Some of that is in the Grenfell story itself where, you know, there's been, you know, quite significant campaigning and also, you know, the example you've given there of people highlighting the likelihood of that disaster come in. I wonder if you could give a few more of those kind of examples. I guess maybe the kind of framework for resistance you're thinking about before we get into some specific practices.
- [13:30]
Ollie Mould - Author and Guest
Yeah, so clearly there's all sorts of ways in which people resist that capitalization or the, the ways in which the violence, if you like, of gentrification and capitalism affects itself in the city. One of the things I really wanted to do because again, clearly there's lots of work done on, on this sort of stuff and you know, David Harvey and Alan Badger and lots of people have written really fantastic stuff around riots and the kinds of theories behind that. I guess largely because as I was moving forward, I've. I've been interested recently in kind of the countercultural movement of the 60s and 70s and some of the. As in the book, I talk about that a little bit and so. But I really wanted to focus in on 1968 as a year, largely because again, the people a lot of urban geographers and everyone else write about May 1968 in France, in Paris, is again a really key moment of resistance and how a lot of the theorists that came out of that have influenced social sciences. You know, Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Lefebvre, all these people have gone on to affect how academia has been over the last 60, 70 odd years. And they were, and they were very much part and parcel of what was going on in 1968 in Paris. So automatically that event is really important. But the more you look into it, the more you kind of see what's going on. There's a whole network and a whole hinterland of events which sort of orbit around it. Sometimes they influenced it directly, such as in North Africa and Tunisia. Sometimes you can see actual evidence where students in Egypt, for example, in Cairo, were influenced by what went on in Paris. So there's this almost kind of spreading out of, of resistance, not necessarily from Paris, around the world, but there was just a sort of fermentation of agitation. Clearly we know that that was down to the boomer generation and the Summer of Love and there was the Vietnam War. People were reacting to that. But I do think that there's something about that year. I mean, whether we want to get all kind of idiosyncratic about it and say that the world was kind of in a state of revolution, I don't Know, it's truly, it's just kind of coincidence. But ultimately, I think it speaks to the networks and the spread of information. Obviously, television and telecommunications were becoming more prevalent also at that time. But there is something about that 12 month period which I was fascinated by. So I really wanted to hone in on that and thinking about all the different kinds of things that were going on. And so we had, yes, the riots and the general strikes in Paris, which were important in trying to affect change, but also things like the civil rights movement, again, linking it back to the racial aspects. Here there was. The civil rights movement was still going on and Resurrection city in Washington D.C. was really important because Resurrection City was set up, I think, not too far from the, from the pool that Trump has kind of drained recently. And it was a sort of six week occupation, if you like, of this area of Washington D.C. by the Civil rights movement in an attempt to try and create a autonomous space where black, young, black people could, you know, experience life in the ways in which at the time, white people could. So they were speaking to their elected representatives. They had education, free food programs, all that sort of stuff. And those. That kind of occupation. We see that happening throughout history. You know, we've seen it in obviously the Occupy movement of 2011, but in black Lives Matter, you know, it's a classic tactic of resistance where, you know, you kind of occupy a space and squat it for a bit, but also not just, not just to sort of sloganize, but also to learn to create spaces of mutual aid, of reciprocity, of solidarity. And so 1968 had all of this going on and you throw into a mix, you know, the blue marble photo, if you like, the famous photo from the Apollo mission, which was the first ever photo of the Earth from the kind of mirror moon area. It just, it kind of. For me, it was a year of planetary awakening. This idea that we are a connected ecosystem and the urban fabric is an integral part of that and the democratic running of that urban environment is also really important. So, yeah, it was just. I've tried to bring it all together in this kind of 12 month period because there's just so much. There was so much going on and there's so much stuff I had to leave out as well. So, yeah, that's what I wanted to do. And it's fascinating for me, that 12 month period there's a really great book, Kaczynski, I think it is that the year that changed the world, 1968. So it's not just me who thinks this, but there's lots of people who write about this year specifically. So yeah, it was just fascinating. So it's about all those tactics, what they were doing and how they spread out around the world.
- [18:38]
Interviewer - New Books Network Host
And some of those are with us kind of right now as well. One of the chapters in the middle of the book talks about kind of Chilean sort of resistance to various bits of urban gentrification around kind of, I guess what we'd call like cost of living here in the uk, you know, the sort of cost of the urban environment. And crucially, they used art and artistic practice, which obviously has a really direct link to that example from 68. And I'm intrigued really by where these kind of artistic. And I'm saying artistic and deliberately not kind of creative because that carries quite a lot of baggage, that term. But where these artistic practices might offer some sense of resistance strategies.
- [19:24]
Ollie Mould - Author and Guest
Yes, I mean, creativity certainly carries a lot of baggage with me anyway, I think, you know, Chile was a really good example. Santiago. You know, I have friends out there. And so I was kind of quite familiar with what was going on. And you know, one of the. The catalyst for it all obviously was the fair strike by a bunch of students. There was a. They hiked up the price of a ticket on the, on the metro system. Not, not by much, by 4% or something, 30 pesos, I think it was. And the students were like, no, no, this is ridiculous. And so they, they kind of started jumping the turnstiles and again sitting in stations. And this was clearly the spark which set it all off because there was obviously underlying problems in Chilean society at the time. So. But the art that kind of came about was a deliberate attempt, I think, to reclaim the city as a canvas, to really hammer home some of the underlying, and perhaps hidden, if you like, or at least oppressed or downtrodden people, you know, the native indigenous populations, for example, but also some of the marginal folk in, in Santiago as well. So they were using the city to paint these wonderful murals and kind of artistic slogans as a deliberate choice to reclaim the city space. And I think when that happens, you know, it often really spontaneous protests and reactions often, you know, don't have that sort of stuff. It takes time for a really amazing art piece to kind of gestate. And so what this shows you was that there was latency in that protest insofar as that, like I say, that the, the students doing the. And it is often students that provide the spark, if you like. But there's a reason that it turned into a million person march. A few months later, because it wouldn't have happened if there wasn't such deep seated resistance and Protestant anger at what was going on in, you know, Chilean government at the time. So when you have that spark, it releases all of these energies and clearly artistic energy is very much part of that. And so when you have these kinds of protests which kind of are releasing something which is latent in society, art is really important because they've been practicing it, you know, all the time. And so they finally go, right, we can now present this art and reclaim the city, if you only for a little bit. So that's why I think it was really important because it evidenced just how deep the anger went in Chilean society. And so that's why I think it's a really important moment, if you like. And yeah, it ended up changing their constitution. I mean, it's, you know, I think the COVID thing was really badly timed because it meant that they wanted to shut it down. And of course now they've, I think Chilean just elected someone fairly right wing, didn't they? So these things never quite work out the way they wanted to. But I think that as far as that particular period of time goes, you know, the artistic stuff was already there. They just wanted the spark, if you like, to then imprint it onto the city.
- [22:37]
Interviewer - New Books Network Host
It's also quite a good bridge example between, I guess the kind of here are problems, here are forms of resistance, and then to an extent here are, if not solutions, but alternatives. And two other ideas are really quite prominent towards the end of the book. The idea of kind of care and then commoning or the idea of commons and we'll do both in turn. So these are two sort of alternative strategies. Where does kind of care fit in? How is care, I guess a kind of an important ethic set of practices and alternative idea to post capitalism?
- [23:18]
Ollie Mould - Author and Guest
You know, again, care is incredibly radical these days because one of the fundamental linchpins of neoliberal thought is obviously the self and the ossification, if you like, or the championing of the individual. And so care becomes almost a secondary thing, or at least it becomes part and parcel of the state, if you like, and which is to be withered away. And so, you know, championing care and pushing it back into the forefront of our minds is really quite important and quite a radical actually because it's so often denigrated and it's sort of put into the purview of private corporations and everything else which, which I mentioned. So there's a lot of work recently, the care collective There was a Verso book recently about all this. There's a great book from, in the Pluto Vagabond series called Pirate Care, which is thinking about, you know, in, in various right wing governments in Brazil and America or before Bolsonaro was ejected, you know, there was underground care, networks of healthcare, abortion care, all these kinds of things where they're, you know, they're actually going against the state or they're criminalized, but actually what they're doing is just doing things which, you know, hit beforehand have been just normal part of care. So one of the important ways of sort of theorizing care is about social reproduction insofar as it's such an important part of how society kind of goes on and reproduces itself. You know, I, I, I teach about care a lot and I use the example always to my students of, you know, you know, your cutlery or your, what you, a plate or a cup or something like that. You, a cup is made once, but it's washed a thousand times. So the, the amount of labor that goes into the kind of use value of that cup, if you like, is care work. It's washing it, it's cleaning it. The actual making of that cup only happens once. And so when you kind of think about that across society, the vast majority of the labor that we do, whether it's raising children, whether it's looking after our elderly, whether it's looking after stuff, animals, the planet, whatever, it's care word, it's about maintaining stuff, it's repairing things, it's looking after it. And so that is, it's a huge part of what we do. And yet it's not something which is ever properly thought about. You know, we care workers are paid ridiculously low amounts of money. Our elderly people, for example, you know, they're really undignified lives. And so, you know, and palliative care again is a really good example of just something which is kind of left to the charity sector, even though it's one of the most dignifying things that you can do. So care for me is it's a really important sort of process in our society which doesn't get the recognition that it should do. And so that's why I think if we want to create cities that are actually livable and sustainable and actually better than the kinds of gentrifying monstrosities that we have, then elevating care and its importance in the fabric of our cities is vital, I think. So that's why I wanted to foreground it.
- [26:26]
Sponsor - Google Chrome
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- [26:51]
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- [27:20]
Sponsor - Facebook / Show Host
Jobs this episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for, from a browse to a bike ride this summer. Find more on Facebook.
- [27:51]
Interviewer - New Books Network Host
And similarly, with the idea of commoning and the city being influenced by or maybe even transforming to a commons, what sort of alternatives does that offer?
- [28:04]
Ollie Mould - Author and Guest
Yeah, so I think the commons is about the democratic ownership, if you like, or the democratic control of land, to put it very, very bluntly. You know, the World bank and the IMF and some of the big Bretton woods institutions. They'll talk about the urban commons or just the commons in, in more broadly. But they often refer to it as kind of safeguarding measures. It's like, oh well, the Amazon or a river basin or irrigation system often that crosses borders. They need to be sort of safeguarded and taken out of sort of indigenous ownership and looked after properly because they don't know how to manage it. Which is obviously kind of goes against the ethos. It's just privatization in a slightly different way. So I often lean on people like Steve Goodman and Olstrom who sort of say, well, commenting is about a resource, but also about the community that uses it. So it's obviously very much against Darren Harden's idea of the tragedy of the commons. So it's about democratic ownership and control and management and yes, care of A particular urban environment and, you know, a city environment. And again, as I say, I point to lots of different ways in which that operationalizes. Housing is one of the main ones. So there are things like, you know, squatting is a good example of that, but also things like community land trusts, co living arrangements. There's lots of sort of variations of this which are more or less democratic, depending on kind of your point of view or at least how many people are involved and where the boundaries of it stop, if you like. But ultimately there's lots of really interesting ways in which something as simple as an important as housing is thought about, you know, from an urban common in perspective. And so that's what I really wanted to try and get across, that there's all these different kinds of ways of living that are actually quite democratic and quite sort of collective and don't actually require that much state involvement. And just quickly on that, I think one of the things I've been, I was thinking about when writing this book is I'm, I don't really talk about the state that much. It's fairly ambivalent towards it in that respect, largely because if I was to talk about it, it would be like twice the size and far more boring. But I think that it is not, it is worth pointing out that, you know, the sort of state, if you like, looms kind of like a specter haunting this book to some degree. So I, I, yeah, I just wanted to sort of nip any critiques in the blood that the state is kind of there. But a lot of these things that I'm talking about are kind of, they operate in the, in the blind spots of the state, if you like, so don't really require much of much involvement or much, you know, trying to get policies and, you know, change policies or lobbying central government of that sort of thing. So I wanted to steer clear of a lot of that. But yeah, so I just thought I'd mention that.
- [31:05]
Interviewer - New Books Network Host
I mean, this maybe comes together, this sort of sense of alternatives and if not the absence of the state, but the kind of state in the background rather than the foreground in the idea of solarpunk cities. And I mean, you know, you said at the start, you know, people might be familiar with ideas about gentrification, but I suspect they're very unfamiliar with the idea of solarpunk cities, particularly as you frame that kind of penultimate chapter as a story of hope, which is quite unusual for a kind of, you know, critical academic to be writing about hope. So what are solarpunk cities? Why Are they, I suppose, kind of a hopeful end to the book.
- [31:51]
Ollie Mould - Author and Guest
Solarpunk is a fascinating esthetic, I guess I would, would be the first term to use, largely because clearly it riffs on those other kinds of punks that we see, like Diesel punk and Steampunk and all that sort of stuff, which is obviously very dystopian. We see a lot of films and computer games and art forms that use those sorts of phrases and they're very much about large, huge dystopian cities which are dehumanizing and ugly and everything else. And the more I was looking into Solarpunk and bearing in mind this is a sort of, it's very much, it kind of stemmed from a lot of the fringes of the Internet, let's say sort of Reddit community boards and mastodon servers and all sorts of things. And it's now it kind of slowly you start to see, you know, TikTok videos about it and books written about it and then all of a sudden celebrities start to mention it. I think Emma Watson in one of her Instagram posts mentioned it back in a few years ago. So it kind of, it's, it was quite an interesting genesis of the idea. But really when you look at it, it's in, it's resolutely and obdurately against all that dystopian stuff. It's, you know, overly positive to. Some would say that it's, you know, they deliberately lean into the fact that, look, you know, we need to be hopeful because hope is actually such an important ingredient in trying to move forward. And so it, you know, deliberately uses like really nice sort of soft color palettes, low rise urbanism, you know, robotics that blends seamlessly into human interaction, you know, so it's not, it's not, it's a sort of future gazing to some degrees, looking at what the future could be like. But it's very, yeah, it's, you know, a lot of it is based on the, the sort of anime kind of the soft anime esthetics. And then, you know, from that art, you know, from the sort of, let's say call it outsider art or fringe art, it's suddenly you, you can start to see how actual urban form has been influenced by it. So in the book I go in the Netherlands, for example, there's quite a lot of cities that, or bits of cities, let's say, which have been considered solar punk. So there's the aesthetic part of it. But one of the things that's really, really important not to leave behind is the Democratic side of it. And whenever you look at particularly solar punk urbanism, you know, it's very much yoked to look. This is. It's about democracy. It's about bottom up. They use the term sociocracy, which is this idea that, you know, they don't necessarily, you know, it's about consensus and making sure everyone agrees. So there's this place in the Netherlands called Arduhusen, which I went to, and it's not particularly. I think there was like 75 people that lived there or something. It wasn't very big, but the guys that I spoke to, they were very clear, sociocracy. So we sit down and we decide and we. And we wait until everybody agrees and so we don't vote. And they were very clear that they don't vote. They said voting is a. He didn't use this phrase, but he was very sort of saying, oh, well, it was like violent or something. It's like you're just basically imposing a decision on people who don't want it. So actually they're all about discussion. And sometimes it might take days or weeks and they just sit around and they have a beer and they have a cup of coffee and they discuss it. If they want to put a new footpath in or they want to change the, the energy provider or whatever it is, most of the decisions are made in that way. And so they were very clear that the solarpunk urbanism is both. It's about this kind of hopeful aesthetic and that includes all the regenerative materials of the city. So they use like wood and as wherever they can, because it's a regenerative material, solar panels, all this sort of stuff, but they don't shun kind of technology. Sometimes they'll, they'll. They'll use smart technologies or even AI if it helps to, you know, be sustainable or increase the sustainability of the energy use. And that artifies in place. I think it's something they said, like 95% of the energy is, you know, got locally in the actual site. And they recycle 99% of their waste, including human waste as well, which I was surprised at. So, yeah, it's. So solar punk urbanism is artistically, but also democratically about being as sort of hopeful and collective as it possibly can be, which is why perhaps they're quite small scale. And I guess how they scale up is a different question. But you know, like I said at the beginning, these places exist and these people are living very happy, normal urban lives, but they're doing it in The. In this sort of hopeful and kind of sustainable and democratic way. And I think that, you know, the whole point of the book was to kind of.
- [36:44]
Interviewer - New Books Network Host
Just to celebrate that in terms of that kind of hopeful note that the book wraps up on. It strikes me that that is something that maybe is missing from quite a lot of kind of critical social science. There's possibly you know, a sort of another book in. In that kind of space. But at the same time, one of the things you kind of tease out and you've just been talking about is these examples exist, but, you know, some of them are quite kind of small scale. And the last thing we need is lots and lots of critical geographers decamping to these places to kind of study them and in some ways, you know, possibly kind of transform them beyond all recognition. So what are you thinking of in terms of, like, where next? Both, I suppose, in terms of the agenda that the book wraps up on, but maybe in terms of your own work as well.
- [37:42]
Ollie Mould - Author and Guest
Well, I think you're absolutely right. This. This sort of idea of being hopeful is quite a strange position for an academic to. A critical academic to. To occupy. I think perhaps it again speaks to my interest or my fascination with 1968. Maybe I'm a hippie before I was, you know, in the modern times. I don't know. But ultimately, you know, it's really, really important. I think it's incredibly important. And interestingly, one of the guys who read the book or who I've known before, Max Haven. Do you know Max Haven? He's like a Canadian guy, but he does a lot of stuff on the commons and creativity. He's written some fantastic books. Anyway, he edits the Vagabond series of Pluto, and he was really interested in the psychedelic stuff in the book. And I've got a paper coming out in progress and Human Geography soon about psychedelics. And so he was like, oh, maybe we could have a book about kind of psychedelics as a. Not necessarily just a narcotic ingestion of psychedelics, but actually psychedelic sort of politics, if you like, or psychedelic creativity more broadly. What does that feel like? What does that look like? How can a psychedelic sensibility help us to break out of this kind of vicious colonial cycle of capitalism? So that's where I've lent into that a bit. So I'm writing a book about psychedelics which will probably just be a relatively short kind of pamphlety sort of thing, but so that's taken up a bit of my time. And interestingly, I mean, I know that it's only very, very tangential. But there is a line in the book which I use from Star wars, from Rogue One, where he says rebellions are built on hope. And the genesis of that phrase was in Andor, the Star wars show Andor. And I'm writing a book with a colleague of mine, Rachel Squire, for Intellect Books, which is about the landscapes of Andor. And again, that's nearly done now. And that is, I wouldn't say it's necessarily just about hope as such, although, you know, Andor is a fantastic example of resistance and protest and how it sort of manifests and the difficulties of trying to negotiate that in the face of, you know, in, in the Andor world, a kind of fascist empire, but in our world, very clear correlations with Trump's America. So I'm just finishing a book about Andor, which I guess you could argue is kind of hopeful in that respect. But yeah, so those are the two projects I've got going on at the moment. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education, and if you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us
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Ollie Mould - Author and Guest
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