Affective Urbanism and the Event of Hope

Abstract

The article discusses how hope and hopefulness become part of the life of cities, drawing on a case study of cultural regeneration: the event of Liverpool receiving EU Capital of Culture status in June 2003. Through attention to the “eventness” of the event of “receiving Capital of Culture status” and the linked practices of urban regeneration, the article argues that the “European Capital of Culture” becomes part of the assemblages that compose Liverpool in three ways: as an advent, as a crystallization, and as a blank. Each of these registers involves the assembling of specific distributions of hope. Through this focus on the relation between the event and how hope takes place, the article explores an affective urbanism—that is, an urbanism animated by a conceptual vocabulary specific to the logics of affect and emotion.