Editorial: Where is the world at and where is it headed?

‘In retrospect, the violence at le Carillon was only a foreshadowing of the credible carnage that would be unleashed at the Bataclan. But it stood out for me, because I knew the place and had spent evenings just like that one sitting at its tables. My horror, rooted in this sense of nearness, paled in comparison to what many others I knew were experiencing; these were streets they had walked for years, bars and restaurants they knew intimately. Some of them would later find out that their own friends and acquaintances were among the victims.’-super-1 P aris, November 13, 2015. Violence … carnage … horror. Elements of the experience of the citizens are easily identified as is their placement as victims, near and far, within the city and beyond it, and the cause of their victimage easily identified as the terroristic actions of ‘the aliens’, essentially displaced/misplaced within the city but with loyalties far beyond it. A neat formulation. But this spatialised and temporalised ideology freezes time and space. Are not some placements, nationality, race, both more substantial and ethical than others and, at other times in other spaces, less so? If so, where is the world at and where is/should it be headed? Can we, scholars and others, grasp and convey all of this? What kinds of knowledge/scholarship, some of it not evident perhaps to some social scientific (scientistic?) observers, do we need, as we set out briefly the sources and forms of knowledge included in this issue? Where is the world at and heading towards, and what we can do about it? Questions raised to a new level of seriousness by the Paris attacks of November 13th, 2015, and, in new extended ‘other’ times, spaces, and motions, by their aftermath. Largely on the basis of material assembled in this issue, but not originally to that end, another exercise in transdisciplinary,-super-2 rather than multidisciplinary, readings and investigation is set out here. The first section, the ‘near’ as of this writing and much but not all of the experience behind it, is that of the West, cities/ largely urbanised (though this is a suspect term that hides as much as it reveals) regions of the globalised North -- Paris and London with an excursion to Chester, Pennsylvania and an extra one, foreshadowing our second section, to Kigali, Rwanda. The second section, the ‘far’, is that of some cities/largely urbanised regions of East Asia, mainly Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and Taipei in Thailand. The third and final section, ‘Beyond and Within (including the planet)’ returns to ‘alienated’ Paris, throwing in a little psychogeography, turning to 9/11, and to aspects of the earthy, sensual, sentient planet that the regnant school of unitary ‘planetary urbanisation’ knows not of.