[URBAN NOTE] "The Northern Powerhouse as ‘Real Mirage’"

[rfmcdonald]

Open Democracy's Steve Hanson writes about the uneasy archipelagic structure of the cities and regions of the United Kingdom.

The ‘new north-south split’ was perhaps the most popular remapping exercise, particularly across social media, after May 7th. Manchester flared up as a rebellious northern city, ready to ballot its citizens to leave the union and join with its fiercer, more socialist neighbours further north up to the top of the island.

Suddenly, the ‘north of Watford’ cliché was pushed up to divide the island in half, redrawing the M62 as the new Hadrian’s Wall, from the mouth of the Humber to the Mersey Estuary, red above and blue below. The north-south divide is not a new concept. It has just become foregrounded.

A Fata Morgana is a mirage, a physical form seen out at sea, which turns out to be an illusion. Our island is a Fata Morgana. This is not just what Britain is in our globalised present, it is what Britain has always been.

Appropriately, ‘Fata Morgana’ refers to very real mirages, seen in the Strait of Messina, thought to be ‘fata’ or ‘fairy’ castles, luring sailors to their deaths. These mirages were named after the Arthurian enchantress, Morgan le Fay. I want to look at Fata Morgana in dialectical terms, as the ‘real mirage’, which is perhaps the ultimate Hegelian ‘contradiction embodied’.

Fredric Jameson’s ‘cognitive map’ also usefully describes my intentions here. Jameson explains his form of mapping as essentially aesthetic. It is not meant to map a full totality literally – although Jameson does mean a map in the orthodox cartographic sense – but it can provide a vantage point. It is a tool to help make connections between what seem like disparate spaces and times, to begin to join up the occulted macrologistics of globalization.