Beyond Postmodernism

At the risk of stating the totally obvious, I think Pete Leveson has got it totally right getting behind Geoff Holsclaw’s idea of global-urban-postmodern convergence. The way out from current postmodern thinking is through reflection on the dynamics of urban life and glocalisation (and because London is a hub of the global city network, it is a great place to do this from).

However, this is not new. When I started writing about the way the postmodern condition was yielding to the friction between cosmopolitanism and localism (the central tension in the urban/global convergence) back in 1999, I was already drawing on a lot of exisiting wells of thought. Perhaps one of the most telling and these days underrated is Harvey Cox’s The Secular City, which remains for me one of the most precient books on the future of faith in our evolving urban context.