Metaphor, Materialism, Metropolis

Cities are physical, material concentrations of people and structures, but they are also ongoing conversations of intergenerational negotiation, communication, competition, conflict, and cooperation. Recently, Emma Colven, Renee Tapp, Delik Hudalah, Dallas Rogers, and Christopher Silver have offered valuable critical contributions to this dialogue in urban research, evaluating the utility and limitations of a new metaphor, Dracula Urbanism, for understanding the inequalities of today's transnational real-estate growth machines. In this essay, we pursue an extended meditation inspired by some of the most valuable insights offered by Colven, Tapp, Hudalah, Rogers, and Silver. Dracula Urbanism is a fascinating yet fearful story of technologically accelerated reproduction of inequality and urban competition. Uneven yet insistently transnationalizing real estate states rely on, and reproduce, recombinant legitimations of diaspora and nativism, capital and consciousness, property and personhood, ancestry and amortization.