Towards the Great Transformation: (6) Three ecologies

One of the major critical claims of this series is that the social and socio-spatial sciences, in their currently dominant form, cannot, for lack of a de-familiarising and recontexualising agenda, one that leads to an appropriate and continually tested strategy (praxis), effectively counter the normalised and naturalised forms and processes of late capitalist urbanisation, normalised by mainstream theory in the service of established power, and their extrapolation into a planetary future. Critical urban theory presents/presented a step forward but it is losing some critical momentum-hence the rise of assemblage theory-and thus purchase on present and future realities in its neglect of aspects of its own intellectual heritage, of 'extra-scientific' resources including the cognitive aspect of the arts/humanities and ordinary experience ('the university of the streets'), and in its too restrictive theoretical, spatial and temporal foundations. This episode begins a recontextualisation of that agenda in the light, particularly, of Gouldner's study of Romanticism and Classicism as deep structures in sociology, and Guattari's notion of 'three ecologies' in relation to praxis-that is, an interacting and critical mutuality of theorised practice and practised theory.