Unsettling the Story of Disenchantment

This chapter outlines how our book was initiated by a vague but disturbingly pervasive sense of disenchantment in the industrial city. Our concern is that disenchantment poses an ethical and political problem. It can depoliticise a citizenry and close communities of care. To seek out moments of urban enchantment, however, has ethical potential. It can give people the energy—the impulse to care and engage—in a world that is desperately in need of ethical and political revaluation and provocation. The process of writing this book, as we walked the city, somehow induced a more expansive and visionary mood, a new affective state, on account of what Bennett would call ‘the wonder of minor experiences’, of which we will be giving account.