I have argued that the spatial dialectic offers another approach to explore the technological and cultural changes represented by the idea of 'platform urbanism'. Instead of a nominalism which fixates on technological particularities and eschews the total process, a dialectical critique of space can recover an image of the city which maps the capitalist mode of production. To that end, the analysis of culture is still significant, particularly when we recognise how the economy of cities appears to be in a state of reversion. Culture today is reverting to its earliest meaning – the improvement of land for the cultivation of crops – but what has changed is the object of cultivation. The conversion of land into capital today mediates a global search for new ways to subject urban ensembles of social relations to a never-ending dependence on capital.

The word 'spectral', Lefebvre reminds us, has a dual meaning. It signifies, on the one hand, the influence of the dead over the living, and, on the other, a prismatic analysis, able to decompose a beam of light into its constituent frequencies. Through the prism of the spatial dialectic, the postmodern focus on the presence of the past illuminated a 'blind field' in the critique of urban space. If the practice of architecture abandoned its claim upon the process of modernisation, then what was assuming control over modernity's form? What the spatial dialectic proposed was a close investigation of the relationship between the spatialisation of capital and the capitalisation of space, since at the interface between the geography of accumulation and land speculation it was possible to recognise a social transmutation of the urban power of real estate.

Trend data about the confluence of precarious work, makeshift housing, and expensive and intermittent access to essential services like water and energy in the context of dramatic youthful population growth instil an incurable desire for ‘catalytic solutions’. Since I spend too much of my time pondering over the spatial intersection of these and other trend lines – within the vortex of probability, it is difficult not to succumb to despair. This despair can of course be a badge of honour in a half decent university, but I have little interest in, or use for, this form of intellectual cachet. On the contrary, morbid fascination with the inevitability of the status quo demands a counterpoint; it calls out for a different sensibility.

Cribbed from biology, the idea that flows of capital can materially regenerate the interconnective tissue of the environment has had a powerful hold on policymakers over the last three decades. But the metaphor of 'urban regeneration' has a range that goes well beyond new postindustrial uses for warehouses, canals and docklands. Urbanisation demonstrates a seemingly infinite capacity to regenerate age-old practices of extortion, usually through the violent exploitation of the social need for space.