Parched City

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Book: Parched City Read Free
Author: Emma M. Jones
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them to fall into disrepair? And how does the contemporary privatisation and commercialisation of the public realm affect the production of similar civic amenities?
    To pursue this new, spatial history of London’s drinking water, I have conducted extensive, original primary research. My trawls through London’s water-related archives, coupled with voices from some essential scholarly and literary secondary sources have produced the story that follows. That story continued to evolve as this book was being edited. Early in 2012, I talked to protestors from the Occupy movement who confirmed that their drinking water sources were twofold. The first was bottled water donated by visitors to the camp. The second was the loads hand-carted by activists from the City of London’s sleek new drinking fountain; an amenity inaugurated in 2010 as the Square Mile’s own civic challenge to corporate greed and unsustainable modes of production.
    Our tale starts very close to that fountain’s location, a few metres below ground, in the remains of Londinium.

Contemporary culture has eliminated both the concept of the public and the figure of the intellectual. Former public spaces – both physical and cultural –are now either derelict or colonized by advertising. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheerled by expensively educated hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their interpassive stupor. The informal censorship internalized and propagated by the cultural workers of late capitalism generates a banal conformity that the propaganda chiefs of Stalinism could only ever have dreamt of imposing. Zer0 Books knows that another kind of discourse –intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist –is not only possible: it is already flourishing, in the regions beyond the striplit malls of so-called mass media and the neurotically bureaucratic halls of the academy. Zer0 is committed to the idea of publishing as a making public of the intellectual. It is convinced that in the unthinking, blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical reflection is more important than ever before.

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