Dr. Ivonne Audirac-Zazueta

As a junior Assistant Professor, I picked up Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities for no other reason than its author, Leonie Sandercock, a planning professor whom I had met for the first time at a conference of the Collegiate Schools of Planning. She had just published her book and her presence deeply impressed me. Leonie wore red boots . . . and her charming Australian accent and humor reminded me of a dear Aussie friend, about her same age. The book’s images ipso-facto caught my eye and hijacked my mind before I could begin reading its pages. Each B & W image was a playful invitation to decode the irony and absurdity of modernist urban planning and to discover the book’s powerful postmodern manifesto for Cosmopolis, a call to “demolish the pillars of modernist planning wisdom and replace them with new concepts of social justice, citizenship, community, and multiple publics” (p. 5). In the next 25 years as an urban planning educator, I have happily witnessed Cosmopolis’ “Utopia in the becoming” progressively take shape in my students’ minds inside and outside the classroom—but paradoxically, amidst a newly engulfing computational modernity, a.k.a. “surveillance capitalism” awash in an algorithmic rationality not anticipated by Cosmopolis. “How might we live with each other in the multicultural cities and regions of the next millennium?” Sandercock asks in 1997 while offering Towards Cosmopolis for debate. Having this text set the terms of the urban planning debate for years to come, the question remains alive in 2022 against a brave new world of machine learning, data science, and data mining requiring new sets of technical literacy especially when social media bots infiltrate political discourse, spread misinformation, and exploit fake-follower markets—a ubiquitous challenge to community, citizenship, social justice, and democracy.