Nueva Babilonia ahora: utopías urbanas para un futuro post-fósil

Abstract

Through the displacement of Constant Nieuwenhuys’s Situationist utopia New Babylon toward its contemporary rereading New New Babylon by Jonas Staal, this text examines the transition between the era of fossil expansion and the time of ecological collapse. Constant’s proposal, formulated in the context of the Great Acceleration, imagines a city for a new civilization liberated from labor. Despite the revolutionary scope of the project, New Babylon remains bound to the imperatives of fossil urbanism and the modern faith in technical progress. In contrast, Staal seeks to reactivate the Situationist utopian hypothesis by translating it into a context of ecosocial crisis. Based on this premise, the essay argues for the urgency of reclaiming radical political imagination as a force capable of reconfiguring the sensory, social, and energetic conditions from which to imagine and inhabit the world.