The Fading Cities

Original Title: Las ciudades evanescentes

Publication: 2020

Author: (Estate of) Ramón Lobo

An urgent and contemporary essay praising the cities as we know them, as well as alerting us about their destruction in the name of globalization.

What will the post-pandemic world look like? Will we lose privacy in exchange for health security? Did liberalism die? Will remote working prevail? Are we moving towards authoritarian democracies? Will the heroes of hospitals and supermarkets return to pre-virus invisibility?

This book deals with the crisis of loneliness of liquid societies and how the business of tourist flats and the predatory financial markets destroyed the commercial and human fabric of neighborhoods, multiplying the loneliness of people. Before the crisis, we were urban characters with hardly any contact, locked in bubbles, connected socially through our mobile phones. We were part of a society that displaced the value of science and wisdom for the denial populism of Donald Trump.

Confinement has halved pollution in large cities, expelled motorists and recovered lost smells and sounds. Human experience indicates that in times of serious crisis a collective resilience occurs, and that after, the danger returns to normality. Our problem today is that this normality is our home, our planet, main threat.

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Original Language

SPANISH | Península

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