Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

While ‘ecological urbanism’ promises the introduction of a new generation of apparatuses, exacting control ever more deeply within the social whole, the logic by which such networks of power operate has remained largely unchanged since the 19th century. This paper will demonstrate the persistence of this logic by placing ecological urbanism within a genealogy of the concept of urbanization. Looking at the work of Spanish civil engineer, Ildfonso Cerdá, I will examine his remarkably prescient theory in which he proposed to replace what he saw as the ‘anachronistic’ ciudad (city) with the ‘modern’ figure of the urbe—a generic, scaleless template of territorialization engulfed in expansive urbanización. The first part of the paper focuses on Cerdá's concept of vialidad (roughly, ‘circulation’), which formed the basis of his theory of urbanization and provided its origin in ‘nature’ itself. Urbanization was an effort to free mankind from political domination and recover it's ‘natural’ destiny by unifying a latent global society in a single, interconnected global urbe. However, not only did Cerdá's theory introduce a new, far more pervasive technological relationship of power between government and population; it also set free to circulate what was previously fixed in the space and form of the city: the apparatus. In the second part of the paper I reexamine ecological urbanism with regard to the founding relationship between urbanization and nature. Now, because it is nature that has become pathological to humanity, it is nature which must be immunized. Ecological urbanism thus reinvigorates the capacity of the urban to stave off the end of the world, not only by rhetorically reaffirming the natural origins of urbanization but also by inverting this relationship: ecological urbanism proposes to reconstruct nature as urbanization.

A new wave of smart-city projects is underway that proposes to deploy sensorbased ubiquitous computing across urban infrastructures and mobile devices to achieve greater sustainability. But in what ways do these smart and sustainable cities give rise to distinct material—political arrangements and practices that potentially delimit urban ‘citizenship’ to a series of actions focused on monitoring and managing data? And what are the implications of computationally organized distributions of environmental governance that are programmed for distinct functionalities and are managed by corporate and state actors that engage with cities as datasets to be manipulated? In this paper I discuss the ways in which smart-city proposals might be understood through processes of environmentality or the distribution of governance within and through environments and environmental technologies. I do this by working through an early and formative smart-city design proposal, the Connected Sustainable Cities (CSC) project, developed by MIT and Cisco within the Connected Urban Development initiative between 2007 and 2008. Revisiting and reworking Foucault's notion of environmentality in the context of the CSC smart-city design proposal, I advance an approach to environmentality that deals not with the production of environmental subjects, but rather with the specific spatial—material distribution and relationality of power through environments, technologies, and ways of life. By updating and advancing environmentality through a discussion of computational urbanisms, I consider how practices and operations of citizenship emerge that are a critical part of the imaginings of smart and sustainable cities. This reversioning of environmentality through the smart city recasts who or what counts as a ‘citizen’ and attends to the ways in which citizenship is articulated environmentally through the distribution and feedback of monitoring and urban data practices, rather than through governable subjects or populations.

In an interview in 1977 Michel Foucault proposed the term dispositif for a heterogeneous set of discourses, practices, architectural forms, regulations, laws, and knowledges connected together into an apparatus of government. Drawing upon later articulations of the concept by Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, and exploring a range of innovations in the ‘management’ of urban life, this paper reworks Foucault's concept as a means for understanding—and potentially contesting—new modes of government that have emerged in response to the crisis of climate change. Against understandings of ‘government’ in terms of a totalizing plan from which new practices and technologies usher forth, this paper emphasizes the ad hoc, and ex post facto nature of ‘government’ as a set of diverse and loosely connected efforts to introduce ‘economy’ into existing relations in response to a perceived ‘crisis’. The paper concludes by exploring Agamben's notion of ‘profanation’ as an adequate political response to the dispositif of resilient urbanism.

The following essay by Giorgio Agamben is based on a lecture given in central France in the summer of 2013. Responding directly to recent occupations and insurrections—from Cairo and Istanbul to London and New York City—Agamben builds upon his existing work in order to develop and clarify his understanding of the political and, in particular, the notion of destituent power (potenza destituente). In contrast to attempts to affirm a constituent power independent of a relation to constituted power, which for Agamben both reproduce the governmental structure of the exception and represent the apex of metaphysics, destituent power outlines a force that, in its very constitution, deactivates the governmental machine. For Agamben, it is in the sensible elaboration of the belonging together of life and form, being and action, beyond all relation, that the impasse of the present will be overcome. Ultimately, Agamben points not only towards what it means to become Ungovernable, but towards the potential of staying so.

This paper is a theoretical reexamination of the traditional concept of the city in the context of urbanization processes that exceed it. Recent decades have seen a proliferation of new variations on the city concept, as well as calls to discard it altogether. I argue that both options are inadequate. The city has generally been understood as a category of analysis—a moment in urbanization processes—but might now be better understood as a category of practice: an ideological representation of urbanization processes. I substantiate this claim through an examination of three tropes of the traditional city which in material terms have been superseded in recent decades in the Global North but retain their force as ideological representations of contemporary urban spatial practice: the opposition between city and country, the city as a self-contained system, and the city as an ideal type.

Organised violence strongly shapes political boundaries. The modern state's monopoly on legitimate violence has made national borders the primary dividing line between peaceful and violent places. However, governments that are unable to achieve such a monopoly may opt for the more modest goal of moderating the distribution of violent behaviour across their jurisdiction. This paper explores how this latter approach redefines the contours of political space through a grounded ethnography of crime control strategies in Johannesburg, South Africa. In the postapartheid era, South African police and vigilantes have synthesised statistically oriented policing logics with the racial policing tactics of the past to anticipate, locate, isolate, and redistribute patterns of violent crime. In so doing, they have created forms of territorial power and violence that are neither new nor old, but undeniably postsovereign.

This paper provides two discrete contributions to urban and spatial theory. The first demonstrates that within discourse analysis conceptions of time and space have analytical utility for investigations into the framings of social and urban policy. The second moves analyses of urban obsolescence beyond Marxism to demonstrate that Foucauldian theory can provide revealing insights about the stewardship of discourses of urban obsolescence through texts and visual images created by different social actors. On the basis of these two contributions I demonstrate how the Sydney metropolitan planning authority has deployed specific spatial and temporal ‘zoning technologies’ to demarcate and evaluate sections of the city. The discourses of obsolescence that have emerged in Sydney are clearly informed by market-centric ideology and discursively constructed, not in the presence of an anemic state and a rational market, but as a technology of power that is deployed by the state and serves the interests of powerful market actors. I conclude that this discursive process is leading to the demise of Sydney's public housing estates.

This paper engages with recent work in political ecology that explores the ways in which scale is imbricated in environmental governance. Specifically, we analyze the deployment of specific ecological scales as putatively ‘natural’ governance units in rescaling processes. To undertake this analysis, the paper brings two sets of literature into dialogue: (1) political ecology of scale and (2) political economy of rescaling, drawing on theories of uneven development. Building on this literature, we develop the concept of an ecoscalar fix and explore its analytical potential through a case study of the rescaling of water governance in Alberta, Canada. We argue that although the ‘eco-scalar fix’ is usually framed as an apolitical governance change—particularly through the framing of particular scales (ie, the watershed) as ‘natural’—it is often, in fact, a deeply political move that reconfigures power structures and prioritizes some resource uses over others in ways that can entrench, rather than resolve, the crises it was designed to address. Moreover, we suggest that, although watershed governance is often discursively depicted as an environmental strategy (eg, internalizing environmental externalities by aligning decision making with ecological boundaries), it is often articulated with—and undertaken to address challenges that arise through—processes of uneven development.

Focusing on two different devices commonly deployed in emergency shelter responses, the emergency family tent and the shelter kit, this paper traces the topological associations of humanitarian spaces as enacted through humanitarian practice. The emergency family tent is shown to effect humanitarian space within the associations of a network topology by acting as an ‘immutable mobile’, connecting different places of humanitarian crises with each other through stabilising relationships between them across space and over time and ordering space according to a sequential timeline of action. In contrast, the shelter kit is shown to effect humanitarian space within the associations of a fluid topology by acting as a ‘mutable mobile’, connecting the sites of crisis not through stabilisation but through adapting to a wide variety of local contexts and conditions and ordering space according to an overlapping and partly simultaneous timeline of action. These different ‘shelter topologies’ are shown to convey different assumptions about, and underlie different topographic renderings of, humanitarian space.

National loss of territory is commonly described in corporeal language of mutilation and dismemberment. In this paper I argue that this language is not simply poetic or metaphoric but that it reflects a genuine association between the individual body and the national contours, and that this identification has been greatly facilitated by the emergence of the national map. In revisiting the common trope of the nation-as-body through inclusion of insights from neuroscience, I explore what happens when a lack of fit intervenes between the physical geographical extent of the nation and the mental map held by its inhabitants. Taking Manchuria as my main focus while suggesting a much wider applicability, I suggest that ‘lost’ territories, no longer included within the national body, remain nonetheless part of a previous national incarnation. As such, they draw national sentiments and affect, eliciting what can be labeled ‘phantom pains’.

This paper sketches out the contours of the philosopher G W F Hegel's geographical thought. Until now, geographers have shown little interest in Hegel's geographical writing. He has figured minimally in histories of geography, and critical geographers who have engaged with Hegel have done so indirectly, either through Karl Marx's work or through Marxist and postcolonial scholars' readings of Hegel. This paper offers a more direct reading. It begins from an understanding of geographical thought as both an intellectual and a practical endeavor with its own distinct historical geographies. It examines Hegel's concepts of ‘nature’ (Natur) and ‘space’ (Raum); his understanding of geography's relationship to history and anthropology; his relationship to Carl Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt; and the significance of ‘territory’ in his political philosophy. It highlights the ambiguity that characterized Hegel's thinking about geography, especially in his discussion of climate's influence on humans. It also challenges Henri Lefebvre's reading of Hegel's view on the state's relationship to territory. Finally, it suggests that Hegel's conceptions of nature, space, and geography mattered not only for his philosophies of history, nature, and subjective spirit, but for his understanding of modernity's geographies as well.