The Burden of the Present: On the Concept of Urbanisation (original) (raw)
Note: this piece is intended as a complementary text to accompany the extended essay I've written for issue 32.1 of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space entitled 'Natura Urbans, Natura Urbanata: ecological urbanism, circulation and the immunisation of nature'. This issue of the journal, guest-edited by Bruce Braun and Stephanie Wakefield, examines topics related to the theme 'A New Apparatus: Technology, Government and the Resilient City'.) To interrogate the relation between governmental practices and the slew of recent technologies developed and deployed in the name of sustainability-whether 'green', 'resilient', 'ecological' or otherwise-is of course to interrogate the political status of such technology itself. How does the use of this technology expand governmental knowledge more broadly into a city's population and more deeply into the intimate spaces and practices of the individuals and groups which compose it? How does it open new sites of intervention, new surfaces of interface between administration and the citizens which it oversees? What inherent directionalities do such channels of power presuppose? More to the point, what new forms of subjectification (and desubjectification) are produced by this blossoming array of spatio-governmental apparatuses and what possible consequences could they have for the future of urban life? Certainly proposals like that of Office for Metropolitan Architecture's (OMA) recent contribution to New York City's initiative, "Rebuild by Design" (a part of the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities project), highlight
Sign up for access to the world's latest research.
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.