Podcast Summary:
New Books Network – Dr. Shiben Banerji, "Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy" (U Texas Press, 2025)
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. Shiben Banerji
Date: December 18, 2025
Overview of the Episode
In this episode, Dr. Miranda Melcher interviews Dr. Shiben Banerji about his new book, Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy (University of Texas Press, 2025). They explore how early 20th-century architects, urban planners, pacifists, and anti-colonial figures used the language and imagery of the “global city” and occult spiritualism not just to design cities, but to imagine new forms of collective ethical belonging. The discussion weaves together urban planning, spiritual politics, anti-colonial thought, and debates on democracy across Europe, the Americas, South Asia, and Australia, illuminating surprising connections and ongoing relevance.
Main Themes and Purpose
- Examining the Overlap: Investigation into the cross-cultural encounters between modernism and occultism and their influence on the design and imagination of “global cities.”
- The Globe as Ethical Category: The evolution of the “globe” from a mere scale or frame of political-economic analysis to an ethical and spiritual metaphor for human interconnectedness.
- Planning as Spiritual Practice: Urban planning is framed as a transformative method for consciousness—changes in physical space are tied to a more profound change in collective ethics and responsibility.
- Global Urban Visions: Analysis of ambitious urban plans (“World Capital,” “World Center,” “Cité Mondiale,” garden cities, ashrams) that sought to materialize a global ethos or sense of planet-wide solidarity—emphasizing their successes, failures, and lingering lessons.
Key Discussion Points & Insights
1. Motivations and Origins of the Book
- Banerji is trained as an architect, planner, and historian.
- Two core trajectories shaped the book:
- Dissatisfaction with shallow accounts of modernism’s relationship with occultism: “...towering figures like Mondrian, Kandinsky, Yeats...all immersed in spiritual, mystical, and occultist practices at the dawn of the 20th century, but that was about all we knew.” ([04:37])
- Desire to historicize “globality” as a concept and object: approaching “the globe as an object of historical inquiry...the globe emerges as a figure for the unity of humankind, and, in some cases, all creatures and things.” ([06:45])
2. Defining "Occult Modernism" and Its Materialization
- Occult modernism saw urban form (and its representation, especially through film) as a prompt for feelings and sensations of interconnection.
- Example: The 1928 film advertisement “Beautiful Middle Harbor,” promoting the Castlecrag suburb in Sydney by Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin, uses cinematic techniques to model ecological and ethical relationships between residents and the land ([10:20]).
- “Urban form, including forms of representation like film, could inculcate a sensitivity to the sorts of relationships we all have...” ([12:30])
- Occult modernism diverges from forms like Italian futurism. Rather than destroying the past, it seeks to “destroy narratives about the past.”
- E.g., Highlighting that urban planning should reveal “this is, to use the term from that period, aboriginal land,” challenging colonial myths of progress. ([14:20])
3. Urban Planning as Vehicle for Global Ethics
- Period of focus: 1905–1945—an “early 20th century story...shaped by profound uncertainty about the future of empire.” ([16:56])
- Banerji’s central thesis: The "globe" as an ethical concept arose negatively, as a rejection of the limited, exclusive visions of liberal internationalism and international socialism.
- “Liberal internationalism...offered visions of post-imperial futures...each rejected by miscellaneous modernists.” ([18:10])
- Occult modernists sought to cultivate a “global ethos,” unbound by state, class, or ethnic exclusions.
4. Transformative Urban Plans: World Capital & World Center
- World Capital (Carl Petrus de Basel, The Hague): Cluster of academies, promoting humanitarian exchange.
- World Center (Hendrik Christian Andersen, Rome): Similar idea, focused on clustering research academies and crossing disciplinary/national lines.
- Both plans evolve “from campus plans to satellite cities,” but are spatially “unremarkable” ([23:27]).
- Central point: “...consciousness of the unity of humankind cannot be relegated to international law....urban planning...claims to organize daily life, that something like a global consciousness can emerge.” ([27:45])
5. Reception, Debate, and Iteration
- Paul Otlet, Belgian pacifist, critiques the World Capital for being tied to a center of international law (The Hague), arguing that “pacifism requires trust...best fostered in centers of commerce” ([28:45]).
- Otlet supports the more flexible World Center concept, eventually seeks to re-site it near Brussels.
- By the 1920s, Otlet grows skeptical of these architectural utopias, and looks to “real estate and financial speculation” as means of building global consciousness—an approach that fails to persuade others ([32:45]).
- Collaboration with Le Corbusier leads to the Cité Mondiale plan, moving the concept to Geneva, then Antwerp ([34:00]).
6. Competing Global Urban Experiments and Anti-Colonial Responses
- The interwar period sees proliferation and disagreement—multiple schemes for founding “global” environments, many coordinated through or influenced by the Theosophical Society ([35:24]).
- Actual built projects: Suburban experiments in Sydney and Bombay, “ashram” colonies in India, garden cities in Britain.
- Anti-colonial leaders like Annie Besant and Gandhi dispute the meaning and practice of the ashram; Banerji contrasts Besant’s pluralistic, spiritual vision of self-governing federations with Gandhi’s stricter ethic of disinterested action ([38:00–47:00]).
- “Ashram life...and the ways in which one can equalize relations across religions and castes, is possible and entirely compatible with private property rights. And I think that this explains the suburban characteristic of this ashram.” ([47:09])
- Broader point: “Anti-colonials...are deeply skeptical with the idea that government could make one good...Equality among subject peoples cannot be brought about by governmental intervention. Mere voting rights will not actually create a democratic mentality. And so...democracy is not mechanical, it’s spiritual.” ([37:00–40:00])
7. "The Magic of America"—A Feminist, Anti-Colonial Intervention
- Marion Mahony Griffin’s omnibus text “The Magic of America” is a key focus.
- Banerji: “In Magic of America, Marion Marnie is renovating...the architect's autobiography...from a specifically feminist and anti-colonial perspective.” ([51:25])
- She explicitly argues that “the conservation of the earth is the duty of women and that women are shirking this duty in the face of colonizing...actions by men.” ([52:10])
- Stresses the need to listen to unfamiliar and threatening others—the democratic “demos” as infinitely expansive, not just a crowd to be ruled by “exceptional men.”
- Frames the nuclear age as a crisis for the political meaning of the globe; ethics must supersede politics: “For democracy to be meaningful at the scale of humanity as a unified whole requires wrenching democracy from its political context...and citing it instead in the individual body.” ([58:05])
8. Lasting Implications and Takeaways
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Banerji identifies three enduring lessons:
- Ethical Commitment Trumps Institutional Design: “Changing one’s commitments is much harder than devising a scheme for institutional reform.” ([60:02])
- Danger of Capital Accumulation: The large “global city” projects teach little today, as their focus on endless capital accumulation offers little for addressing today’s crises.
- Anti-Colonial Insights—Restraint & Common Cause: Anti-colonial projects centered on the need to “put constraints on the movement of capital” and to “make common cause between the perpetrators and abettors, but also the victims, of unjust socialities.” ([63:35])
- “...the colonized subject...had an affirmative duty to save colonizers from their worst selves.” ([63:46])
- Academic history’s duty is to “restore the worldview even of those who appear to be doing injury to others.” ([64:43])
Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments
- “I wanted to tell the story about modernism's formative encounter with occultism...to explain what it was that modernists were doing when they described humans as embedded in an enchanted universe.” – Dr. Shiben Banerji ([05:00])
- “Urban planning...emerges as a method for altering perception and consciousness, and most specifically to reimagine what it is to perceive and experience oneself as unconditionally interconnected with others who do not resemble us.” – Dr. Shiben Banerji ([07:30])
- “So occult modernism has this way of actually saying that everything you know about the past must be destroyed, and you must see yourself in an entirely new light.” – Dr. Shiben Banerji ([14:00])
- “...that from these legal technologies, from practices of jurisprudence, no sense of the fundamental unity of humankind could emerge. And so, again, the thought is that it's urban planning ... that something like a global consciousness can emerge.” ([27:45])
- “Equality between and among all of these subject peoples cannot be brought about by governmental intervention. Mere voting rights will not actually create a democratic mentality. And so this is where you get these very strong arguments that democracy is not mechanical, it's spiritual.” ([39:19])
- “The only way to save democracy is to see the demos as infinitely expansive, and that...to honor what it is to be a democratic subject is to have a democratic mentality and affect and to constantly seek to hear what the other is saying, even if it is unfamiliar or threatening.” ([54:00])
- “It is important, in the words of the cultural theorist Leela Gandhi, to make common cause between the perpetrators and abettors, but also the victims of unjust socialities.” ([63:35])
- “It has become all too common to seek to apportion guilt and assign blame. And I don't think that that's actually what the institution of history can do.” ([64:43])
Timestamps for Important Segments
- [04:27] – Banerji’s background and what led to the book
- [08:13] – Definition and manifestations of “occult modernism”
- [16:56] – The emergence of the “global ethos” against empire, liberal internationalism, and socialism
- [23:27] – Comparison of “World Capital” and “World Center” urban plans
- [28:45] – Controversies and reception among contemporaries (Otlet, others)
- [34:00] – Cité Mondiale, interwar experiments, proliferation of plans
- [36:51] – Suburban/ashram experiments in Bombay and their political-philosophical stakes
- [51:25] – Marion Mahony Griffin and “The Magic of America”
- [60:02] – Final lessons and takeaways from the research
Tone and Style
The episode is deeply analytical while maintaining accessibility and warmth. Both interviewer and guest balance scholarly rigor with storytelling—anchoring abstract ideas in concrete examples, personalities, and disputes. There is a sense of genuine intellectual excitement, respect for past actors, and concern for present and future crises.
Conclusion
Banerji’s work refigures the history of the “global city” as a story not just of planning or capital, but of ethical aspiration, spiritual experimentation, and anti-colonial debate—lessons urgently relevant in an age of planetary crisis and social struggle.
Further Reading:
Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy (University of Texas Press, 2025)
For more, listen to the full episode or explore Banerji’s current research on urban planning’s role in Black civil rights movements (1930s–1960s).