Grave Matters: Death in the Liveable City (Part I)

Abstract

All this reaching for the sky by capitalism reminded us of its death drive, emerging from internal contradictions, as Marx explained, that would finally end in system default and transformation. The inevitable question of death in the liveable city is invoked, leading us to tramp towards its starkest historical urban forms, three of Melbourne’s cemeteries. Here we find in the camps of the dead the denial and contortion of mortality that so defines growth machine capitalism. In one cemetery, we see signs honking ‘plots for sale’, gothically echoing the real estate festishism of urban boosterism. In others, we unearth a brutal colonial history that continues to be denied in the social mainstream that attempted unsuccessfully to extinguish the original owners of Melbourne.