Pinball Wizard

Elvin Wyly’s record of innovative and analytically tight research on contemporary American urbanisation has addressed in particular the injustices of gentrification, and of discrimination and predatory mortgage financing abusing class, gender and racial vulnerabilities. His work has also pioneered a politically progressive application of quantitative methods. This significant corpus has recently spread its wings to encounter new socio-economic formations of the digital age, including social networking and cognitive-cultural capitalism with their circuits of contact and influencers in cyber space (Wyly, 2013). The solid ground of neighbourhoods and census tracts has been joined by virtual and ethereal spaces bearing invisible but palpable power. The work has ascended to the metaphysical in exploring the concept of the noösphere, the product of an evolutionary theory of consciousness developed by the theologian Teilhard de Chardin. And now there is an additional dimension, deep history. The present is a palimpsest, lives are ‘the tips of stems, endlessly twisting themselves down in the realms of times past’ (Wyly, 2023, quoting Torsten Hägerstrand). The geographical landscape is a surface to be excavated for the sometimesviolent origins of even inert contemporary spaces. In this complex project Wyly has immersed himself in a century-old discourse of evolutionary change, arguing how such doctrines as social Darwinism and eugenics continue to shape the competitive contours of today’s geography (Wyly, 2021) and urban geographies (Wyly, 2019, 2022). The interlocutors in this discourse would not easily recognise each other, as they occupy a transdisciplinary space without roaming limits. Voices ricochet, collide, and trade glancing blows across a virtual pinball machine of citations. Examples fall over each other in the parade of land use cases and personalities as we peer through the Vancouver portal toward the end of the paper. What are the dangers of this abbreviation of cases and sources? Are more complex positions/persons/ places overly simplified? Is this an ironic undercutting or a mimicry of modernity’s fast pace and short sound bite? What can be the epistemological, even moral, damage of the suffix-ism that we all use to collapse diversity and nuance into an enforced homogeneity? Wyly is reflexive enough to recognise the dangers in such strategies: ‘It’s risky to tear out a few textual fragments from the complex, diverse lived experiences and situated knowledges of Deloria, Jacobs, Smith, Hartshorne, Schulman, Marx, Kant, and Einstein and then to hope for coherence after tossing everything into an epistemological Vegematic’ (Wyly, 2023). Arguably, such a shared confinement, fixed by the author, might be warranted by the shifting multidimensionality of the present described alliteratively as, ‘New combinatorics of calculation, cognition, and capital accumulation’ (Wyly, 2023). What indeed could be more relevant today than a scholarly mashup? In a world where my wrist watch has the functionality of an electronics store and can also beckon planetary others over several platforms, some recognition of reconfigured categories could be warranted. Moreover, in Wyly’s recent papers there