If you’re a hip urban dweller, liberal pundits figure you’re ready to hit the swingset now that it’s fall. “Wait Your Turn for the Swings at Boston’s Adult Playground,” admonishes a recent headline in the Atlantic’s CityLab, an outlet both symptomatic of and beholden to the neoliberalization of the city. The site in question is not an outdoor burlesque, but an actual playground with lighted swings for techie entrepreneurs in South Boston’s new “Innovation District.”

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the city was home to socialist ambitions, the site of mass politics that aimed to change the world. But these days, it’s more likely to be championed by technocrats like Michael Bloomberg and Edward Glaeser or blogged about at outlets like CityLab, whose vision of urban life is more concerned with disruptive “solutions” than class struggle.

Radical critics were once at the forefront of urban thought and practice: in the 1950s and 60s, groups like the Situationists sought to counter the convention and alienation of life under capitalism by imbuing the city with the sense that everyday life held possibility, that it could be inventive and extraordinary.