Affective Urbanism

and the Event of Hope

Ben Anderson1
Adam Holden
Durham University

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 urbanismthat is, an urbanism animated by a conceptual vocabulary specific to the logics of affect and emotion.
Keywords: hope; affect; emotion; event; regeneration; Capital of Culture

Preface: Can Hope Be Disappointed?

In his inaugural address to the University of Tbingen in 1961, the Marxist process
philosopher Ernst Bloch, speaking in the shadow of Nazi Germany, asked a very simple question about the event of hope: Can hope be disappointed?
Hope must be unconditionally disappointable, . . . because it is open in a forward
direction, in a future-orientated direction; it does not address itself to that which already
exists. For this reason, hopewhile actually in a state of suspensionis committed to
change rather than repetition, and what is more, incorporates the element of chance,
without which there can be nothing new. (Bloch, 1998, p. 341)
space and culture vol. 11 no. 2, May 2008 142-159
DOI: 10.1177/1206331208315934
2008 Sage Publications
142

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143

His answer discloses the problem this article addressesthe indeterminacy of an event
in which hope takes placea point of suspension that Bloch (1986) summons in The
Principle of Hope (Vol. 1) when he describes the disturbing presence of hopes that have
been lost: Even disappointed hope wanders around agonizing, a ghost that has lost its
way back to the cemetery and clings to refuted images (p. 195).

Introduction
At approximately 8:30 a.m. on June 4, 2003, Tessa Jowell, then U.K. Secretary of
State for Culture, Media, and Sport, announced that Liverpool had beaten 6 other contenders (narrowed down from 12 bids) to secure the U.K. nomination to receive the
2008 European Capital of Culture (ECoC) award. Celebrating with the official bid
team, Sue Woodward, then creative director, responded to the receipt of the award by
evoking a decisive moment of change founded in new hope for Liverpool and the
North West:
Liverpool will never look back. The city will never be the same again. 2008 will be a life
changing year. Our cultural programme includes many world firsts. It will help physically
transform this city and the perception of the north-west, bringing new jobs, investment,
visitors and a real sense of community purpose. (Woodward, quoted in Daily Post, May
5, 2003)

Immediately following receipt of the award, hope becomes attached to a range of

Capital of Culture program outcomes, and more generally hope is invested and placed
in the city of Liverpool as it is refigured through culture-led regeneration. In this article, we argue that hopes can become infrastructural to urban change and exemplify
aspects of what we term an affective urbanismthat is an urbanism animated by a
conceptual vocabulary specific to affectivity.2
We develop this argument and explore a suitable vocabulary by paying attention to
the different ways in which the ECoC takes place following June 4, 2003. Neither the
appearance nor the anticipation of the ECoC is an homogeneous event. So, put very
simply, we want to describe the heterogeneity of the event of the ECoC. Put differently,
we want to learn how to attend to the contingent (un)eventfulness of the ECoC both in
the simple sense that something happens but also in the sense that an event is an emergent singularity in which how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual
entity is (Whitehead, 1929/1978, p. 23). To grasp the actual entity of the ECoC as a
set of events defined by their particular way of becoming requires, however, suspending
immediate efforts to explain events through reference to a set of preexisting social, cultural, economic, or political conditions (e.g., urban revanchism [Macleod, 2002], the
privatization of culture [Jones & Wilks-Hegg, 2004], polarizations of income [Mooney,
2004], social exclusion [Garca, 2005], or urban propaganda projects [Boyle, 1997]).
Although we do not want to dismiss these accounts, indeed they are compelling, and we
draw on them below, too often they act to explain away the eventfulness of events by
referring them back to a set of conditions that structure and, ultimately, determine
them. Our focus is, instead, on the heterogenous multiplicity of the ECoC event.
By attending to the relation between enactments of hope and the eventfulness of
the ECoC, we aim to deepen the intuition that urban regeneration often involves

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attempts to generate or maintain hope (cf. Cox & Mair [1988] on redemptive
ideologies of locality). Enactments of hope such as those offered by Woodward are
neither only personal feelings nor a knowingly misleading rhetorical frill that can
safely be ignored in favor of attention to the interests behind it, but rather material
forces with performative effects (Anderson, 2006). From the surplus hopes that are
redistributed alongside flows of people in migration (see Hage, 2003), through to the
hopes that accumulate in processes of capital accumulation (see Miyazaki, 2006),
hope is a vital part of the multiple disjointed processes that make up the systemized
networks of a city (Amin & Thrift, 2002). Increasingly, hope is named as such in the
diagnosis of the good city. Urban regeneration strategies, for example, have in various
guises focused on those intangible aspects of community spirit, partnership involvement, or positive attitude that might better galvanize the forces of change. More
specifically, recent configurations of British urban policy have regularly identified a
lack or absence of hope as an urban problem in its own terms, to be addressed and
alleviated as such (Urban Task Force, 1999). In considering the relation between the
eventfulness of the ECoC and hope, we draw on research that explored the immediate period after Liverpool received Capital of Culture status. We attend to the geographies of hope in Liverpool through three methods: an analysis of the local and
national media from June 2002 to November 2005, a series of 10 focus groups in late
2005early 2006 from two Liverpool communities that focused on the production
and circulation of hope, and a set of 10 in-depth elite interviews with managers and
practitioners involved in the governance of regeneration in Liverpool and Merseyside
(including the Local Council, Liverpool Partnership Group, Culture Company, and
the Confederation of British Industry).3
Through this case study, the article extends the recent development of what could
be termed an affective urbanismthat is, an urbanism attentive to how various
modalities of the more than/less than rational, including affects, emotions, and feelings, compose urban life. As Thrift (2004) argued, cities may be seen as roiling
maelstroms of affect but though affect continually figures in many accounts it is
usually off to the side (p. 57). Pointing to the development of a range of affective
technologies that amplify, create, and mobilize passions, Thrift placed such attention
squarely within a set of changes to late capitalism. Affect and emotion have, however,
long been part of engagements with urban life. Witness the fear that haunts Le
Corbusiers dreams of order in the context of the confusion that is woven into the
very texture of our modern cities (Le Corbusier, cited in Robins, 1995, p. 51). Or
consider the invocation of anxiety or alienation typical of much modern urban theory. Section 1 responds to this emerging literature by offering five propositions for
an urban theory attentive to the movement, expression, and qualification of affects.
We then turn to describe the multiple eventness of the ECoCarguing first that it
emerged as an advent that through hope cut, or broke, other relations with
Liverpools past and future. We then describe two other ways the ECoC takes place
as the crystallization of already existing institutional strategies around a focal point
attached to definable hopes and as a blank around which multiple ambivalent hopes
accumulate.
Throughout these sections, we exemplify the conceptual vocabulary proper to the
logic of affect that is established in Section 1. In the conclusion, we return to the claim
of the prefacethat hope is a state of suspensionand describe how hope emerges in
relation to the taking place of events.

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1. Toward an Affective Urbanism

We begin with a set of propositions that open toward an affective urbanism, one
adequate to the complexity and indeterminacy of modern cities. Working with the
DeleuzianSpinozian line of thought on affect and the distinction between different
modalities of the more than/less than rational,4 we take cities to be made up of multiple, differentiated affects, feelings, and emotions; that is, affects as impersonal movements that constitute what a body can do, feelings as interpersonal expressions of
affects, emotions as personal qualifications of feelings.5 Within each of these modalities
are numerous differences both in degree and in kind. Such an attention to constant
qualitative differentiation begins to foster an everyday urbanism attentive to the taking
place of affects, feelings, and emotions that avoids assuming that cities have, or could
have, a single or dominant identifiable, affective register (based, for example, on the
production of an attitude of indifference [Simmel, 1908/1971] or the bundle of affects
associated with alienation). For evidence of both the need for such an urbanism and its
difficulty, consider, for example, the case of the urbanization of nature in New York City
(Gandy, 2003). Gandys (2003) magisterial account demonstrated that affects, feelings,
and emotions constantly play a part in the production of modern nature. For example,
New Yorks current water crisis is linked to declining public confidence in the safety of
drinking water (p. 60), cultural anxieties fold into the mid-18th-century growth of new
parks (p. 84), and Puerto Rican communities inhabit landscapes of despair (p. 161).
Despite the obvious importance of affects and emotions, it is not clear what this affect
or that emotion does, how it functions, as part of the production of an urban nature.
Nor is it clear how this affect or that emotion emerges, and changes, as it becomes part
of the processes that produce New Yorks nature. Now this is neither the task of Gandys
work nor an oversight unique to his analysis. Yet, we would argue that the currently limited understanding of what affects and emotions do in cities demands the development
of a vocabulary able to describe how affects and emotions emerge from urban life in
all its sticky and slack human/nonhuman, inorganic, incorporeal, phenomenal/epiphenomenal, and banal/intense everydayness (Seigworth, 2000, p. 247).
To think about the life of cities, our second proposition is that, rather than being
bracketed off into a realm of personal experience, emotions and affects are best understood as only weakly cognitive phenomena that straddle the merely individual and the
broadly social. Such affects have long been part of the material and immaterial flows
that compose cities and are institutionalized by cities (flows of labor, people, ideas,
information, objects, etc.; see Amin & Thrift, 2002; Latham, 2003). But how they are
understood and how these geographies are traced are, we argue, still emergent questions. As the example of urbanization in New York shows, albeit inadvertently, affects
and emotions act and afford as part of arrangements of human and nonhuman actors.
Consider, to offer a different example, Katzs (1999) evocative phenomenological
description of how being pissed off while driving in the city of Los Angeles emerges
from the fracturing of a series of layered entanglements between the driving body and
the technology of the car. The dramatic moment that occurs in the everyday practice of
driving, a rise and decline of anger, emerges in relation to a host of heterogeneous phenomena: the position of the automobile and oil in Americas macroeconomic policies,
the freedoms and feelings afforded by car ownership, a limited system of public transportation, the historical geographies of suburbia, the organization of work, and the economic geography of Los Angeles. Although there is much more that could be said about
this angerand Katz describes how its embodiment in giving the finger is vital to its

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difference in degree and kind from other angersKatzs salient point is to describe how
anger is always associative and collective. To retain this focus on the always-emergent
conditions of affects/emotions and the intimation that emotions and affects do not
reside within a subject, we begin by attending to how affects, feelings, and emotions are
part of assemblages that make cities complex sites for a being together of existences
(Amin & Thrift, 2002, p. 28). Here, the term assemblage designates not a static states of
affairs but rather a process of arranging, organizing, and fitting together multiple,
heterogeneous, elements (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).6 Assemblages, therefore, bring
together elements from a milieu, context, or surrounding. Understood in terms of in
connection with (Philips, 2006), assemblage is a useful concept from which to
approach cities as processual configurations of multiple states of affairs and events
(Amin & Thrift, 2002). The use of assemblage is, however, notable for its ambiguities: a
mix of the structural and the aesthetic registers that fosters a kind of nervous tension
for analytic reason (Marcus & Saka, 2006). It is worth, therefore, pausing to compare it
with other conceptual resources that have also stressed affect/emotion as collective,
weakly cognitive phenomena. Particularly instructive for purposes of comparison is
Ahmeds (2004) account of transpersonal affective economies. Ahmed offers a theory
of emotion in which affect does nor reside in an object or sign, but is an effect of the
circulation between objects and signs (= the accumulation of affective value)
(p. 45).7 Emotions, therefore, ripplethey move sideways (through sticky associations between signs, figures and objects) as well as forwards and backwards (p. 45). We
could see, then, cities as made up of multiple, highly energetic, affective economies. This
is an attractive vision, but there are two important reasons why the notion of assemblage is better suited to our task. First, assemblage is a topological concept that does not
contain the presuppositions about movement that Ahmeds figure of economy holds
(i.e., that movement necessarily occurs through processes of accumulation and displacement). Second, the notion of assemblage is underpinned by the relation between
the actual and virtual that means that assemblages are productive of qualitative differences.
Despite these two differences, what both concepts share is an attendance to immanence.
Neither has a need for an idealized context that serves to mediate between a subject
and a collective (cf. such representational concepts such as feeling rules [Hochschild,
8
1983], emotional ideologies [Boler, 1999], or emotional discourses [Lupton, 1998]).
How, then, do affects, feelings, and emotions emerge from within a set of assemblages
that intermix the biological, technical, social, and economic? In short, how can we
describe the genesis of, say, this hope in a Liverpool focus group? Our third point is that
an answer to this question requires attention to processes of individuation as the production of contingent effects rather than the misconstrued hypostasizing of alreadyconstituted individuals. To recognize how any human or nonhuman (e.g., an emotion)
comes to take on an absolutely specific existence (Simonden, 1992, p. 298) requires that
the individual is to be understood as having a relative reality, occupying only a certain
phase of the whole being in questiona phase that therefore carries the implication of a
preceding pre-individual state, and that, even after individuation, does not exhaust in the
single act of its appearance all the potentials embedded in the preindividual state.
(Simonden, 1992, p. 300)

The individuation of this emotion or this affect, say confidence in the assemblage of
New Yorks water crisis or anger in the assemblage of Los Angeless freeways, is for
Simonden (and, following him, Deleuze) one phase that occupies a relative reality.

A f f e c t i v e U r b a n i s m 147

Two mechanisms underpin the differential individuation of affect and emotion

induction and transduction. These are defined by Massumi (2002) in the following
terms:
Induction being the triggering of a qualification, of a containment, an actualization, and
transduction being the transmission of an impulse of virtuality from one actualization
and across them all. (p. 43)9

Although this is useful, because it ties us back to the concept of assemblage, it is

also too general and must be supplemented by attention to specific processes of individuation. Ahmed (2004) is again instructive here because through her work on
collective emotions she offers intensification as a specific process for the genesis of
emotions. Drawing on an example of pain, Ahmed (2004) argues that the intensity
of pain sensations makes us aware of our bodily surfaces, and points to the dynamic
nature of surfacing itself (p. 26). The notion of intensification, while holding for
certain examples, is however too specific to be used to understand every process of
individuation. What is required is instead detailed attention to the multiplicity of
processes of individuation. Others have considered, for example, attunement to
affect (Stern, 1983), the contagion of affect (Gibb, 2001), and the disposal of affect
(Munro, 2002).
In our case, the city and the process of urban change can be seen, therefore, as a
veritable theatre of individuation (Simonden, 1992, p. 305) through which singular affects and specific emotions emerge. Processes of individuation, potentially multiple and always/already part of assemblages, come to foster distributions of specific
emotions and singular affects. This is our fourth point: Affects and emotions are
unevenly distributed in cities and thus entangled in urban geographies of suffering,
loss, disappearance, and damage. Consider, for example, how debates about the privatization of public spaces in Western cities implicitly and explicitly assume a distribution of affects and emotions. The emergence of a splintered urban form is
assumed to be bound up with collectives who feel fear (White, middle classes) for
their personal safety and express that fear through an urban architecture bound up
with a logic of containment, prohibition, and control (e.g., guards, gates, and other
human and nonhuman forms of surveillance; Graham & Marvin, 2001; Macleod,
2002). Fear becomes attached to certain bodies (the poor, homeless, etc.) and is
expressed in a form of spatial organization. Part of a particular process of urban
transformation, privatization, is a distribution in which certain affects and emotions
are individuated and through that process of individuation establish relations of
conflict, and cooperation, within and between human (often raced and classed bodies) and nonhuman bodies (specific forms of architecture; on privatization and the
10
affective logic of seduction, see Allen, 2006).
The key broader problem is to understand how the uneven distributions of affects
and emotions fold into provisional, and spatially nuanced, topologies of power.
Strangely, work on affect has so far been rather one dimensional when talking about
powernote, for example, Thrifts (2004) vocabulary of the powerful and their
manipulation or engineering of affects and emotions. Following Allen (2003, p. 2),
we want to stress that rather than seeing power as centered or decentered, we need to
identify the diverse and specific modalities of power and thus attend to how
affects/emotions function differently in relation to the varied kinds and mixtures of
powers, including, for example, domination, authority, manipulation, coercion, and

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seduction. Our final proposition, therefore, is that to do this we need to be attentive to

the processes through which affects and emotions are spatially and temporally distributed. Such processes take place in between, within, and alongside the other distantiated
flows and events that make up cities.
In summary, then, processes of distribution are potentially multiple and differ on four
criteria: (a) the assemblage of extensive and intensive relations they emerge from, feed
back into, and potentially alter; (b) the process of individuation that constitutes specific
emotions and singular affects; (c) the series of metamorphoses that affects and emotions
undergo; and (d) the form, duration, and obduracy of the resulting distribution.
2. The Event(s) of Receiving Capital of Culture Status
So far, we have made some first steps toward an affective urbanism that aims to
describe the topologies and topographies of affect and emotion in cities. A conceptual
vocabulary proper to affect, therefore, forms the background of the following sections
and is central to how we make sense of the event(s) of the ECoC. To consider how different processes of distribution emerge from the heterogenous assemblages through
which cities are made and unmade is to offer the beginnings of a method for attending to how affects/emotions emerge and change. So far, however, we have deliberately
said nothing substantive about urban life. Underpinning our comments have been the
premise that cities as extraordinary complex spatial formations are defined by three
aspects: (a) a density of people, things, institutions, and built forms, (b) the heterogeneity of life they juxtapose in specific relations, and (c) the flows that occur within
and beyond cities (see Amin & Thrift, 2002).
We now want to move toward thinking more substantively about affect and contemporary urban change and the relation between the event(s) of the Capital of Culture and
the individuation of hope and hopefulness specifically by describing three ways in
which the eventness of the event of receiving Capital of Culture status was assembled before and after June 4, 2003, as an advent, as a crystallization, and as a blank.
2.1. ADVENT

In 2008, then, Liverpool will become ECoC. The official Web site refers to this
process as the city receiving European Capital of Culture status. Both highlighted
words are interesting. First, by implication of receiving, Capital of Culture status is
something that is conferred on a city by the state. Second, the word status primarily
refers to a citys importance and therefore has a legalistic flavor that suits very well this
idea of the state conferring favor. When we ask what has been won, what has been
received, it is the status as something elsea recasting of the being of Liverpool following the announcement in 2003 that opens up opportunities by establishing a rupture
with certain aspects of the citys past.
Through receiving Capital of Culture status, the event takes on its first character,
that of an advent: Something good is arriving, the form of which is yet to be determined. Wrapped up with the receipt of status were various statements, by governance
elites and in the media, which named the receipt of status as an advent of something
good or better. Woodwardcreative director at the timecaptures this advental naming most clearly: Liverpool will never look back. The city will never be the same again:
2008 will be a life-changing year (cited in Daily Post, May 5, 2003). But we could also

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consider, to give another example, the headlines in the two local papers on the day of
the awardboth of which function by inducing the affective quality of change rather
than the determinate content of change:
The future starts here. (Liverpool Echo Friday, June 6, 2003)
The future is bright. (Daily Post, June 6, 2003)

In both cases, the consequences of the future event, the Capital of Culture program,
take place as an affective qualitya bright future or a starting point. This affective
advent becomes differentiated as it was enrolled in the life of Liverpool. The participatory diagramming research in two Liverpool communities, for example, holds echoes
of the collective induction of shared affectively charged memories of the day, in memories of cars beeping horns, celebratory drinks, and announcements at work. The event
as advent was felt as a recognition for what Liverpool was and could be, and the gap
between the two. The space of the participatory diagramming exercises and certain
elite interviews became an occasion for the reenactment of affectively charged memories of June 2003 as an advent. It also provided evidence of the multiplicity of
responses to the event(s). One example of the recreation of the event as advent comes
from an interview with a regeneration practitioner who recalls a collective memory of
the day Liverpool received the award. Here, Ian talks about ECoC in the context of the
event as a break with Liverpools past:
Ian: [Liverpool] was always losing. It was always missing out, you know, whether, whether it
was the riots and the way that was positioned, whether it was the strikes and the unions,
whether it was the politics and the politicians and, and, and locally and how they really
made some very bad decisions for Liverpool. Or whether it was just err, you know, they,
they, err, you know, the football accident, you know, the deaths and, and, all of that
Ben: Yeah.
Ian: I mean, it just was one thing after another and it seemed to pile up on Liverpudlians.
And so, when something like the Capital of Culture err [pause] like that is come up and
is an opportunity for Liverpool to win, you know, the people really embraced it. And,
and I think that that was, the reaction that you got on June 4th, I was in London listening on the radio, but the reaction you got here in Liverpool, you had taxi drivers that
were blasting their horns, you had bus drivers that were err, you know, talking to the
passengers, you had people stopping everybody on the street saying, We won, we won.
And it was almost like an Olympic victory. (Interview, local regeneration practitioner,
March 10, 2006)

The event here induces newness, or rather the bare potential of newness, into urban
life. This takes place through an engraining in the bodies of the populace of anticipatory affective responses to mundane signs of the Capital of Culture (media reports,
leaflets, posters, stickers, and of course everyday conversation). In other words, a precognitive infrastructure emerged that folded into the affective geographies of
Liverpool and the wider region. Somewhat differently, urban policy practitioners
responded to the advent through the making of promises: strategic (re)formulations
intent on enabling the emergence of a good and possible future for the city. Witness,
for example, how a promissory structure animates the Culture Companys delivery
plans (see Liverpool Culture Company, 2004-2006, 2005). The 2005-2006 delivery plan
names three outcomes that would promise a better future for Liverpool:

150 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / m a y 2 0 0 8
1: Sustainable Cultural Infrastructure: Developing our cultural capital by increasing and
enhancing the cultural infrastructure, encouraging new products, processes and enterprises in the cultural and creative industries sector.
2: An Inclusive and Dynamic Community: Developing social and human capital by increasing local participation in cultural activities to increase community cohesiveness.
3: A Premier European City: Developing our economic capital by improving the range and
quality of the citys infrastructure with city centre and community renewal. (Liverpool
Culture Company, 2004-2006, p. 4)

The event as advent is connected to the possible future consequences of the Capital of
Culture itself through the offering of promises that aim to seize opportunities.
Meeting the receipt of new status, becoming Capital of Culture, with the advental
naming of promises, enables the event to strain forward into the future. For, as
Derrida stresses, a promise must promise to be kept, that is, not to remain spiritual
or abstract, but to produce events, new effective forms of action, practice, organization, and so forth (cited in Bennett, 2006, p. 610).
2.2. CRYSTALLIZATION

The conferral of status on Liverpool, this recasting of the being of Liverpool, was
greeted by the offering of various promises that define the event as an advent.
Generating the impression of the event as an advent for Liverpool occurs throughout
different parts of the ECoC program and becomesat timesboth a means and an
end in itself. Perhaps we could argue that establishing the event as an advent is one part
of the affective labor of local state elitesand folds into the emotional work of both
regeneration practitioners as well as the relation local populations have with events.
The varied consequences of the event of actually Being Capital of Culture become
possibilities located in the future, the future as a threshold that is without content but
becomes present as an affective quality that accompanies acts of naming. It is, of
course, different hopes that express and qualify the indeterminacy of this advent.
Blanchot (1992), writing in the Infinite Conversation and echoing other writers on the
mystery of hope, describes how hope is bound up with this uncertain opening to a
good spatial or temporal beyond:
Hope bespeaks the possibility of what escapes the realm of the possible; at the limit, it is
relation recaptured where relation is lost. (p. 41)

Hope for Blanchot, then, is a type of relation that emerges only from some form of dissolution, from loss, disappearance, or damage. And it is this that makes so suggestive
the resonance with regeneration. Receiving Capital of Culture status itself takes place
in a situation of extended and extant lossall too readily summoned in the context of
Liverpool under the figure of deindustrialization and urban decay. But there is something else at work here too: an attempt to bring into city governance that which is at
stake in the practice of hopingthe affective quality of a better future. Given the affective quality of the event as an advent, it was very difficult in light of the announcement
to criticize the award or to note the constant displacement of other aspects of
Liverpools urban ills by the receiving of the ECoC. This is not a novel situation for
such (city) competitions or for urban policy more generally. But the difference here is

A f f e c t i v e U r b a n i s m 151

the degree to which hope became an affective imperative containing a normalizing and
normative force with only a relatively small numbers of critical voices initially against
the hegemonization of the Capital of Culture in various projects for reimagining the
future of Liverpool (these tended to be focused around networks of left-wing activism
in the city and some community arts groups and independent retailers). It is not,
therefore, that the anticipation and announcement of the ECoC was a homogeneous
event. Far from it. It was rather that the event as an advent became hegemonic.
The event as advent is not, however, the only way in which the event takes place. We
have seen how the very act of being given capital of culture status, the formal basis of
the initiative, breaks other relations with the spaces and times of urban life. Yet, if we
return to how the event takes place after June 4, 2003, it becomes part of the everyday
life of the city in at least two other ways that resonate and interfere with one another.
First, in the elite interviews, a disruption takes place as an advent, but there is also
a crystallization that draws elements together around a focal point, in this case a set
of strategic reimaginings of the future of Liverpool around a combination of entrepreneurial and communitarian regeneration strategies. This moment of crystallization provides an opportunity to concentrate and intensify those strategies. In doing
so, the event discloses that focal point while bringing into being a set of past tendencies and linked future possibilities. Crystallization functions, then, to make the
future consequences of the ECoC simultaneously actual (in that they are tied to certain strategies) and virtual (in that the event is located in the future).11 Two examples
from the interviews with various local regeneration practitioners exemplify this
process of possibilization and its role in establishing the momentum for strategic
projects that establish a determinate direction for future urban change. A manager
involved in regeneration describes the effect of the event of receiving Capital of
Culture status in terms of an intensification of already-existing policies that attempt
to change the image of Liverpool. Here, he describes this intensification in the context of a discussion about the importance of city branding to the legacy effects of
the Capital of Culture:
We approached it [referring to the Capital of Culture] to actually put it in the bed of
obviously community engagement, the regeneration of the city, the re-branding of the
city, so if you look at brand Liverpool at the moment, we have a brand value internationally which is very strong. So in North America, we are the Nike of world brands,
everybody knows about us, everybody knows about Liverpool, mainly based on music
and the export of popular music in the 60s and beyond, but a very strong brand value,
significantly higher than any other U.K. city perhaps other than London and
Edinburgh, independent research suggests that. Unfortunately, the closer you come
back to Liverpool, the brand value decreases, so one of the work, one of the pieces of
work that weve had to do, in the [name of organization] in the last 2 years, and weve
done a lot, we only started in the last few weeks on this, is re-define brand Liverpool.
So weve actually done a lot of national marketing to say, Right this is Liverpool, this
is what Liverpools got to offer and this is different than perhaps what you expected.
And theres a lot of work in that area. (Interview, manager in regeneration organization,
February 2, 2006)

A manager at a different organization involved in regeneration describes the event in a

similar way but ties it to the legacy of breaking with past versions of Liverpools urban
politics:

152 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / m a y 2 0 0 8
Manager: Yes, its [referring to the Capital of Culture] important, but its not the only thing
because a lot of these changes would have come about anyway. Err, I mean for example, we
got World Heritage Status last year which, you know, which was huge and err, you know that
would have been part of what you know we were going for anyway. I mean Liverpool has, has
changed, physically it has changed in its look because its a lot cleaner than it used to be, you
might not think that but it is a lot cleaner [laughs] than it used to be. And you know, lots of
old buildings being refurbished and so on and so forth and the whole city centers being
redone. Whether that would have happened quite so fast if we hadnt got Capital of Culture
coming on, we dont know but it certainly would have happened, err, but youve got to bear
in mind that you know weve had the Lib Dems in power for what, 8, 9 years or something
Adam: Yeah.
Manager: And we had Labour before then
Adam: Yeah.
Manager: Who were, you know, very Militant Labour so we are sort of, who didnt like to
spend money of infrastructure, they wanted to spend big money on jobs and services point
of view, but unfortunately infrastructures starts [laughs], if you leave it alone it starts
decaying. Err so the physical regeneration of Liverpool, I think you know, would have happened anyway. (Interview, manager in regeneration organization, January 10, 2006)

In these two interviews, the event of the capital of culture, as a focal point in the
crystallization of a set of cityregion strategies, functions in part through a moment of
disposal. The event inaugurates the disposal of other versions of what the city is or
could be and the disposal of a set of past practices or events that might dampen growth
or competitiveness (decrease in brand value, Militant Labour). This is not, however, a homogeneous process. Disposal also involves the retrieval and restoration of
certain past versions of the city (e.g., Liverpool as an event in the 1960s).12 The event
takes place here as an opportunity that if taken or seized enables the intensification of strategic rearticulations of the city that were already ongoing.
The form of the event is differentnot so much a break that introduces disruption
but rather the event as advent is subsumed in various strategies for urban governance
and growth. What an event in its surprise opens up, what Nancy (2000) terms the
beyond that, is here coupled to the process of developing communitarian and entrepreneurial strategies based around the theme of creativity (see Anderson & Holden 2008).
Through the circulation of ideas around creativity, hope has accumulated in these
modes of governance and their modes of problematization and ways of governing subjects. This strategic articulation of the event, of its receiving status, is partly enabled
through the numerous ways in which the consequences of the Capital of Culture were
apprehended in advance through techniques that predict the effects of the event.
Through various forms of cooperation between local authorities and public and private
sector interests, alongside a wider embedding of anticipatory knowledge into U.K. governance across a number of sectors, attempts have been made by U.K. cityregions to
develop understandings and imaginations of their futures (ODPM, 2003). Through
anticipatory knowledge practices that take the future consequences of an event as their
object, both the regeneration effects of the Capital of Culture as a whole and the efficacy of specific strategiesin particular creativitywere keenly anticipated. In addition
to scenarios and projections, Liverpool City Council commissioned a foresight study by
the consultancy ERM Economies in 2002 (ERM Economics, 2003). The futures report
subsequently accumulated affective value, founded on the promise of a better future, and
was readily used in the legitimization of the ECOC by local state actors.

A f f e c t i v e U r b a n i s m 153
2.3. BLANK

The third, and final, way in which the eventness of receiving Capital of Culture status occurred after June 2003 was as a blank that accumulated a range of very different
hopes rather than as a focal point for particular institutional strategies. During both the
participatory diagramming exercises and elite interviews, the Capital of Culture accumulated varied hopes that exceeded any single specification of the proper object of hope.
The range and scope of hopes hoped for included poverty alleviation, employment, better consumption practices (of images, experience), an improved material infrastructure
of everyday life (environment, transport, etc.), and fewer incivilities (litter, antisocial
behavior). Here, the event as advent is followed not by the crystallization of specific
hopes in governmental strategies but by a multiplication of what could and should be
hoped for and for whom hope could be given and received. One example of this process
during a participatory diagramming exercise emerges when the event of the Capital of
Culture is encountered ambivalently as it mixes with other sources of hope. Susie and
Colin have written about their hopes for the ECoC and then talk about them:
Susie: All of the money, all of the investment, and all of the change has gone into the areas
that are very public areas, that everyone can see. But obviously theres a lot of areas, maybe
not so close to the city center, etc., where housings just awful, its all falling down, stuff
like that. But Id really like to see that those areas are getting regenerated as well, even
though, just cause theyre not in the, in the public eye as it were doesnt mean theyre not
important and those people are still doing good for Liverpool and they still deserve the
same as everyone else.
. . .
Colin: I just want all the little projects and everything just to have some kind of focus to, to
make the city better. I think its very hard for, just say Kids Club to change Liverpool.
But I think if a lot of these things all get together and they get some money from Capital
of Culture bringing in and stuff like that, it would just take Liverpool to the next level. Get
rid of a lot of the race problems that are going on and poor housing in the city and stuff
like that. Just make it a nice place to be. (Focus group, Aigburth, November 12, 2005)

The event of the Capital of Culture comes to act as an underdetermined figure, a

blank, which is constitutedhowever, fleetinglyas hope is transferred between
objects. Rendering hope contagious between objects doubles and counteracts its limitation. The transduction of hope, that is, its continual movement between different
domains (Mackenzie, 2002), suggests that we can usefully think of the Capital of
Culture as taking place through a type of affective epidemic in which the efficacy of the
event is dependent on its lack of specified content. The concept affective epidemic has
been used by Grossberg (1992) to describe how the New Right in America circulates
anger around various topics. Grossberg defines the concept of an affective epidemic
in the following terms:
A series of trajectories or mobilities which, while apparently leading to specific concerns,
actually constantly redistribute and displace investments. Affective epidemics define
empty sites which, as they travel, can be contextually rearticulated. (p. 284)

What the ECoC was or could be constantly changed as it was contextually rearticulated through the everyday hopes and fears of different Liverpool residents. Take one
example that reoccurred across the focus grouptalk around the impact of the
Capital of Culture on the housing market in 2004.

154 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / m a y 2 0 0 8
Well the good point is the tourists you know, youre gonna get money back into the city,
err, you know, build it up. But then as Karen [another focus group participant] said,
house prices you know, thats the down side of it because people just cant afford to get
on the property ladder, especially young people who like yourself are in uni, you know,
when you come to finish in uni, you need to find a job to, in order to buy property and a
decent property you know, not just a run-down property that youre gonna be spending
on for how many years just to make it comfortable. So it has got its good points and its
bad points. Good points and bad points but I mean I was quite pleased when they got that
because I go to London a lot and see a lotta things happening in London and a lot of
money goes to London and so when Liverpool won it I thought well its about time we
got something back. And you know, when I was young, growing up like 15, we had the
riots and we had the strikes and, and my prospects then at 15 was thinking well whats
there gonna be for me, theres no job prospects. But now I think that there is a future but
Im thinking so whats gonna happen after 2008. (Nicola, focus group, Aigburth,
November 19, 2005)

In this case, the event of receiving Capital of Culture status takes on a status as a
blank through, on one hand, the contagious accumulation of an ethos of hopefulness
and, on the other, the induction of mutually exclusive actual hopes.
Yet, this multiplication of hope, its constant deferral of any limit or limitation, sits
uneasily with the crystallization of specific hopes in particular institutional strategies.
The result, as can be seen above, was that breakdowns in the relation between the event
and hope frequently occurred as the event folded into other affective relations of indifference, ambivalence, or cynicism. During the talk that surrounded the participatory
mapping exercises, there were numerous ways in which hope was lost or disappeared.
In the following extract, for example, hope flickers between appearance and disappearance in one of the focus groups held in inner-city South Liverpool as the discernable
effect of the Capital of Culture is an increase in house prices. Michelle begins by
describing her initial reaction to receiving Capital of Culture status, but then the
focus group participants discuss other reactions to the event:
Michelle: I was pleased we got it as opposed to anybody else, but then once the houses that
were 40,000 jumped to 80,000 within like 4 or 5 weeks it was like, youre having a laugh
now
Helen: [interrupts] But I was the opposite, I was yes, my house has jumped up to like
150,000
Liz: By 2008
Nicola: [interrupts] But if you go to sell it, sorry [to Liz for interrupting], if you go to sell it
you cant afford to move to another cause theyve jumped up as well havent they.
. . .
Michelle: Then whos gonna be moving in? [laughs]
Helen: What?
Michelle: Whos gonna be moving in? [laughs]
Liz: All the yuppies from London.
Helen: I was gonna say you know, the
Carly: [interrupts] By 2008 all the house prices will have gone higher, well will our wages go
higher?
Nicola: Well what happens after 2008, does it crash again then?
. . .
Michelle: I mean I lived in Toxteth and after the riots they ploughed and awful lot of money
into there
Helen: [interrupts] Yeah and its just going down again

A f f e c t i v e U r b a n i s m 155

Michelle: [interrupts] And, and then its wrecked because 10 years down the line its like
whats the point you know what I mean, nothings changed and you like start off like that
though dont you. Im not saying everybody did but for the people who live on certain
estates, which were well sort after in the 80s. (Focus group, Kensington and Toxteth,
December 12, 2005)

Here, hope fades both because of the ingraining of negative affective responses to the
future in the context of the past failure of regeneration and, just as important, because
of a lack of durable faith in the various (re)sources of hope (be that economic development, the actions of the local council, or the wider sphere of urban culture). In this
context, one of the tasks of the various institutional actors becomes how best to govern expectation and thus repair and maintain specific hopes around the Capital of
Culture. This process of regulating enthusiasm was achieved through attempted specifications of what the Capital of Culture was and through operational procedures such
as the creative communities program that addressed citizens and communities affectively (see Anderson and Holden, 2008).

Concluding Comments: The Event of Hope

In concluding, we can return to the description of hope as a state of suspension.
For Bloch, the disappointment of hope is a necessary element of this state of suspension and underwrites the indeterminate ontological status of hope. So hope involves,
somehow, an interruption of the continuity of the spatial/temporal here and now. As
Bloch (1998) goes on to argue,
Hope . . . dwells in the region of the not-yet, a place where entrance and, above all, final
content are marked by an enduring indeterminacy. (p. 341)

Through a description of the event of receiving Capital of Culture status, this article has described how the not-yet that hope names is part of how events take place.
In the case of receiving Capital of Culture status, the event takes place simultaneously
as an advent, as a crystallization, and as a blank. Following Deleuze (1994), who
describes events as problematic and problematising, we could see each of these ways
as temporary, contingent, solutions to the overdetermined problem of receiving
Capital of Culture status. What is at stake is how the consequences of a future event
(the Capital of Culture) achieve effects over the here and now in relation to an event
that has occurred (receiving Capital of Culture status). As actual incarnations of the
event, each has a fragile consistency as it temporarily emerges from within the disjointed assemblages that make up the city of Liverpool. The result is that the event is
multiple. There is not a single initial event and subsequent interpretations of it.
There are, rather, relations of compatibility and incompatibility between the three
ways it takes place. As we move toward Liverpool being Capital of Culture, there are
and will be other ways in which the event happens (e.g., the event as disappointment,
the event as continuation of the same). The three actual incarnations of the event
proper therefore stand somewhere between the event as quotidian happenstance and
the event as rarefied change. It is between, on one hand, Whiteheads (1920/2004)
everyday sense that wherever and whenever something is going on there is an event
(p. 78) and, on the other hand, the more heroic, almost ascetic, sense of the event as a

156 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / m a y 2 0 0 8

rare rupture that may bring contingency, unpredictability, and chance into the world
(Dastur, 2000, p. 179).
The event of receiving Capital of Culture status, and the event to come of being
Capital of Culture, are multiplicities. Both are attributes of bodies and states of affairs
(people, materialities, statistics) and constituted by expressions and statements (e.g.,
newspaper report; see Patton, 1997). More specifically, there is a reciprocal determination of the event and the individuation and distribution of hopes. The event as multiplicity is constituted by the qualification of particular objects of hope. The result is
differences in what hopes are hoped for. But the event as multiple is also constituted
through specific mechanisms that individuate hope. In our example, these include
induction, disposal, and contagion. Through these and other processes of individuation, we would argue that hope becomes infrastructural and transversal to events of
regeneration. Hopes are part of the multiple practices that make up regeneration (e.g.,
mobilizing support for strategies), enable spatial and temporal reach (e.g., by bringing
the future into the present), and require constant, generative repair and maintenance
(e.g., by naming what could or should be hoped for). As such, the different ways
in which the ECoC take place are all unconditionally disappointable. Through the
individuation of hopes, they are made to be open in a forward direction, in a futureorientated direction because hope does not address itself to that which already exists
(Bloch, 1998, p. 341).
Notes
1. Versions of this article were previously given at the Department of Geography,
Southampton University, the RGS-IBG 2006, and the second Emotional Geographies conference. Our thanks to two anonymous referees for their detailed comments on the article. The
research was funded by a British Academy small grant.
2. The term affective urbanism was the title of a workshop organized in the Department of
Geography, Durham University, by Paul Harrison and Mark Paterson.
3. Individual names and organizational details were made anonymous in the article.
Individual names are, therefore, pseudonyms. Our thanks to Liz Davies for carrying out some of
the research on which this article is based. The focus groups involved periods of diagramming
current and past hopes for Liverpool. Practically, this involved participants cooperatively producing visual and discursive accounts of the hopes and disappointments that have accumulated
around the European Capital of Culture award. These were written or drawn on one piece of
paper and were then kept and later photographed. The resulting material was then discussed in
the focus groups.
4. The inelegant term more than/less than rational is used as an umbrella term for the different affective modalitiesaffect, emotion, feeling, and mood. For reasons of brevity, this will
occasionally be substituted with affect/emotion or affective/emotive. Please note that the terms
nonrational or postrational are not used because they imply a separation of emotions or affects
from reason and rationality. Neither are the terms prerational or protorational used because they
can be taken to imply a temporal sequence.
5. Every theory of affect and emotion makes some form of either analytic or practical
contextual distinction between modalities. Partly, this is because of the excess of theories of
affect and emotion that haunt the social sciences. Partly, it is because different modalities disclose different problems and questions for social or spatial theory. The distinctions used in this
article emerge from the context of Deleuzes engagement with Spinoza, his joint writings with
Guattari, and his writings on art (for a summary, see Anderson, 2006; on affect, as used in this
article, Thrift, 2004).

A f f e c t i v e U r b a n i s m 157

6. This use of the term assemblage develops from the French word agencement, as described
by Philips (2006): Agencement designates the priority of neither the state of affairs not the statement but of their connection, which implies the production of a sense that exceeds them and of
which, transformed, they now form parts (p. 108).
7. Ahmed developed The Cultural Politics of Emotion through an analogy with Marxs
account of Capital in debt to the wider economy of psychoanalysis. It is worth noting that
Ahmed used the terms affect, feeling, and emotion interchangeably throughout.
8. Connollys (2002) concept of body/brain/culture networks (the term network is used
interchangeably with circuit) and Williamss (1977) concept of structures of feeling, although
very different, share the same problematic. In passing, we suggest that there is much to be gained
in continuing to explore the productive tensions between such avowedly poststructuralist and
neo-Marxian perspectives.
9. Massumi (2002) took the concept of transduction from Simondenalbeit with some
modifications. Simonden (1992) described the concept in the following slightly different terms:
The term denotes a processbe it physical, biological, mental, or socialin which an
activity gradually sets itself in motion, propagating within a given area, through a structuration of the different zones of the area, over which it operates. (p. 313)
10. We should, however, take care not to assume that privatization or other urban processes
such as regeneration function only though a single logic and gather within them only certain
affects. Allen (2006), for example, wrote of how power in the public spaces of cities is constituted
not only through techniques of surveillance that prohibit but also by less directly coercive logics. Eschewing, without simply rejecting, work on the privatization of public space, Allen argued
that power also functions through an affective logic of seduction that is based on an instrumental mode of power primed to shape and mould the will of the many whilst allowing individuals
the possibility of opting out (p. 448).
11. The idea of crystallization is derived from Deleuze (1985/2000) in Cinema Volume 2.
Deleuze used various terms, crystalline sign, the crystal-image, the crystalline state, and the crystalline description. The crystal is a process of exchange between the two sides of the virtual and
actual. A process of crystallization therefore involves the consolidation of a certain reciprocal presupposition or reversibility between the actual and ideal (p. 69). Our thanks to an anonymous referee for stressing this point.
12. Our thanks to an anonymous referee for this point.

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Ben Anderson is a lecturer in human geography in the Department of Geography, Durham

University. His research interests include theories of affect and emotion, hope and utopianism,
and anticipatory logics and techniques.
Adam Holden is instructor in geography in the Department of Geography, Durham
University. His research interests are in urban politics and social theory, specifically neoGramscian perspectives and Marxist state theory.