21 February 2022
The following essay was originally written as a contribution intended for the Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics. I proposed and drafted it in early 2020, and then submitted it for peer review. I returned to work on the final edit in July 2021, having not thought about the work for some six months, and noticed that a new paper with a very similar thesis (and deeper research regarding the neoreactionary intellectual genealogies) had been published in April 2021 about Urbit. Not feeling equipped to update the paper to adequately reflect and build upon that work, having moved onto other research topics, I withdrew my chapter from the publication.
I make it available here as a 'preprint' in the spirit of sharing unfinished academic work I am particularly grateful to Nikolina Bobic and Farzaneh Haghighi for their close reading of the work in its draft stages, and their understanding regarding the non-publication at the time. Thank you also to Chiara Ficarelli, Francis Tseng, all those in Brown University's STS reading group for their varied contributions in form and kind. Thank you also to the reviewer two of the first draft of this piece as it was originally submitted to the handbook, who put much needed pressure on the more extensive use of Lefebvre's ideas that existed in early drafts. All editorial and formatting mistakes are mine, as the piece is slightly restructured in comparison to what was originally submitted for the handbook.