Posthuman Urbanism explores what it means to live in an urban environment with reference to posthuman theory. The book argues that contemporary science and technology offers radically different ways for changing the way we live in city spaces today. It will be of interest to students and academics in Cultural Studies, Urban Studies, Critical Geography, Science and Technology Studies, Sociology, Architecture and Anthropology.

Historically, the dynamic between philosophy of artificial intelligence and its practical application has been essential for the development of both, and thus the encounter between theory of AI and architectural/urban theory should be a site of considerable productivity. However, in many ways, it is not. This is due to two primary factors, one arising from each side of this encounter. First, legacies of overly-anthropomorphic models of AI permeate design discourses, where issues of how well AI can be constrained to social (...) issues of philosophy of mind exclude more foundational and cross-cultural questions about artificial intelligence as material process in the physical world that could inform new philosophical insights. Concurrently, the mobilization of investment in “Smart Cities” discourses dominates the space of application of AI at urban scale in ways that prematurely fixes solutions in the skeuomorphic image of architectural and urban conventions. To break this impasse, we held a series of think-tanks, workshops, and design charettes that brought together leading figures in philosophy of artificial intelligence, urban design, and commercial AI platforms. The goal was to re-think from first principles how alternative philosophical models of AI as a distributed, discontinuous, landscape-scale technology in a direct encounter with the applications in contexts of ecological sensing, automation’s impact on urban form, and issues of algorithmic governance. The design brief for this research establishes a generative framework for conceiving how embedded machine sensing and intelligence is already changing urban form and could change it in the future. The framework focuses on issues of urban zoning and architectural programming, data modeling and governance, platform cognition and design, and how these inform shifts in dynamics of public and private institutions. (shrink)

In 1947, the U.S. Secretary of State, George C. Marshall announced that the USA would provide development aid to help the recovery and reconstruction of the economies of Europe, which was widely known as the ‘Marshall Plan’. In Italy, this plan generated a resurgence of modern industrialization and remodeled Italian Industry based on American models of production. As the result of these transnational transfers, the systemic approach known as Fordism largely succeeded and allowed some Italian firms such as Fiat to (...) flourish. During this period, Detroit and Turin, homes to the most powerful automobile corporations of the twentieth century, became intertwined in a web of common features such as industrial concentration, mass flows of immigrations, uneven urban sprawl, radical iconography and inner-city decay, which characterized Fordism in both cities. In the crucial decades of the postwar expansion of the automobile industries, both cities were hubs of labor battles and social movements. However, after the radical decline in their industries as previous auto cities, they experienced the radical shift toward post-Fordist urbanization and production of political urbanism. This research responds to the recent interest for a comparative (re)turn in urban studies by suggesting the conceptual theoretical baseline for the proposed comparative framework in post-Fordist cities. In better words, it develops a “theory” on the challenges of comparative urbanism in post-Fordist cities. (shrink)

Architecture and urbanism seem to be »weak« disciplines, constantly struggling for a better understanding of their nature and disciplinary borders. The huge amount of metaphors appearing in the discourse of both not only reference to their creative nature but also indicate their weakness and the missing piece strengthening their own understanding: a definition of space for architecture and of city for urbanism. But using metaphors in this field implies a problem - though metaphors achieve to bring opposites together, (...) there remains the question how literal they can actually become in order to relate to these subjects properly. In this volume, several authors from various fields using different approaches discuss this question. (shrink)

This article examines ethical themes in the works of the celebrated writer on urban affairs, Jane Jacobs. Jacobs' early works on cities develop an implicit, 'ecological' conception of the human good, one that connects it closely with economic and political goals while emphasizing the intrinsic good of the community formed in pursuit of those goals. Later works develop an explicit ethics, arguing that governing and trading require two different schemes of values and virtues. While Jacobs intended this ethics to apply (...) to all forms of productive activity, it is particularly illuminating when applied to her own urban ideas and activism. (shrink)

Preview: /Adam Chmielewski interviewed by Eli Kramer / AC: In the nineteenth century, some people thought that the sciences should free themselves from the philosophical speculations from which they originated, and that philosophy itself, as obsolete, should be replaced by strict science. Gradually, however, the strict and uncontestable sciences resorted back again to the allegedly obsolete philosophy to understand what they are, what they are actually doing, and why. In other words, not only did science not replace philosophy but returned (...) to it. That is why there emerged the philosophy of science and philosophies of individual sciences, e.g. mathematics, biology, etc. This applies also to urban studies pursued by a great number of specialized disciplines, but a need for a general, philosophical view of the nature of the city is increasingly felt by many people, urban specialists included. The role of philosophy in today’s urban studies cannot mirror the ancient one, which was much more foundational, as in Protagoras, Plato, Aristotle, or Zeno. But it does resemble it. A philosopher cannot pretend to be an architect, urbanist, or city planner. But he or she is particularly qualified to address the problems of how contemporary cities allow their inhabitants to satisfy their needs and ambitions; in other words, to what extent the city is an environment in which human life may flourish. Such questions may profitably be addressed by moral and political philosophy, as well as philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

This book expands on the thought of Walter Benjamin by exploring the notion of modern mind, pointing to the mutual and ongoing feedback between mind and city-form. Since the Neolithic Age, volumes and voids have been the founding constituents of built environments as projections of gender—as spatial allegories of the masculine and the feminine. While these allegories had been largely in balance throughout the early history of the city, increasingly during modernity, volume has overcome void in city-form. This volume investigates (...) the pattern of Benjamin's thinking and extends it to the larger psycho-cultural and urban contexts of various time periods, pointing to environ/mental progression in the unfolding of modernity. (shrink)

‘The new city presupposes that the cables of the interhuman relations are switched reversibly, not in bundles as with television, but in real networks, respons(e)ibly, as in the telephone network. These are technical questions; and they are to be solved by urbanists and architects.’ (Vilém Flusser 1990). To reinforce the significance of public space we have to deal with at least two ‘publics’ - the global and the local public - by creating spheres where local and global public space can (...) fuse and interchange. (shrink)

Cities are sites and crucibles of creativity and destruction. How we order and imagine ourselves is revealed by the visible forms of our built environments. Cities are the ultimate material expression of human desire and design. They are also forces of energy and fields of tension that structure our everyday imaginings and activities. How we move, think, act, interact, create and maintain our lives is bounded by what cities provide us. How we make common-wealth and differentiate ourselves from others also (...) determines what cities are and might be for us. This issue explores the urbanism that is Manila in all its vital contradictions. A mega-urban region of over 20 million souls, it is both dynamic and discordant, creative and destructive. Like most global mega-cities, Manila is dangerous to its own citizens – polluted, dense, violent, and poor, with inadequate and badly maintained infrastructure and public utilities, but it is also a fecund incubator of cultural ideas, projects and networks. This issue explore both sides of this Janus-faced city – its urbanism and its visual cultures. Two common threads run through the articles in this issue: first is the dialectic of private and public, and second is the cultural traffic that informs place-making across time through the constant movement of peoples around the world-system and in the ever-pragmatic syncretic and local appropriations of cultural ideas, traditions and artefacts into new configurations, stories and views. As these contributions take issue with visual culture, we have given pride of place to photos, images and artworks themselves. For, as our colleague, Eduardo de la Fuente, has observed in this journal’s pages (2010), the sociology of art is more than a socio-aesthetics. It is also a chronicle of the experience, performance and movement of aesthetic objects lodged in and across institutions, traditions and collective consciousness. (shrink)

"An overview of modern art theory and history, this anthology treats modern art as a complex cultural, political, and social process intimately connected with larger cultural, political, and social contexts."--Pearson.

In the first years of its existence between 1957 and 1960 the efforts of the radical collective the Situationist International (SI) centred on its program of “unitary urbanism.” This program sought to challenge the functionalist character of hegemonic forms of urban planning through novel practices of urban experimentation and contestation. Situationist urbanism arose largely through the collaboration between Guy Debord and the Dutch avant-garde architect Constant. This article explores the political dimension of situationist urbanism and the tensions (...) that led to Constant’s secession from the group in 1960. Through analysis of the affinities and divergences between urbanism in its modernist and situationist forms a case is made for the crucial contribution situationist practices might make to the restoration of public space as a vital arena of contemporary political contestation and community. (shrink)

Manila is one of the world’s most fragmented, privatized and un-public of cities. Why is this so? This paper contemplates the seemingly immutable privacy of the city of Manila, and the paradoxical character of its publicity. Manila is our prime exemplar of the 21st-century mega-city whose apparent disorder discloses a coherent order which we here call ‘neo-patrimonial urbanism’. Manila is a city where poor and rich alike have their own government, infrastructure, and armies, the shopping malls are the simulacra (...) of public congregations once found in cathedrals and plazas, and where household order is matched by streetside chaos, and personal cleanliness wars with public dirt. We nominate the key characteristics of this uncanny approximation of chaotic and discordant order – a polyphonous and polyrhythmic social order but one lacking harmony – and offer a historical sociology, a genealogy that traces an emblematic pattern across the colonizing periods of its emergent urban forms into the contemporary impositions of gated zones and territories. The enduring legacy of patrimonial power to Manila is to be found in the households and on the streets that undermine and devalue public forms of social power in favour of the patriarch and his householders (now relabelled as ‘shareholders’ in ‘public companies’) at the cost of harmonious, peaceable and just public order. Such a state of affairs is not only destructive of the historic built environment of the city, especially its public parks and plazas and heritage districts, its streets, footpaths, public transport and utilities, but is directly injurious of its citizens. To address the question of Manila’s private order and public chaos is to reopen the quest for the good city as the just polis. It is also to take us beyond arguments of indigenous versus colonial forms of urbanism that are mired in nationalist and modernization ideologies respectively, and it is to reject the reductive logics of globalization arguments that Asian mega-cities are but variations of American logics of urbanism. (shrink)

This article develops a sociological reading of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Arcades Project’, or Passagen-werk . Specifically, the essay seeks to make explicit Benjamin’s non-dualistic account of structure and agency in the urban milieu. I characterize this account as the ‘dialectic of urbanism’, and argue that one of the central insights of Benjamin’s Passagen-werk is that it locates an emergent and innovative cultural form - a distinctive ‘street culture’ or jointly shared way of modern urban life - within haussmannizing techniques of (...) architectural administration and spatial domination. In the modern metropolis, Benjamin sees a new kind of collective - an embedded and effervescent sociocultural group held together not by the functionalist imperatives of capitalist urban planning but by an improvisational mode of street life. Key Words: agency • culture • embeddedness • structure • urbanism. (shrink)

The Fukushima catastrophe has led to important practical and conceptual shifts in contemporary Japanese architecture which in turn has led to a re-evaluation of the influential 1960s Japanese modern architecture movement, Metabolism. The Metabolists had the ambition to create a new Japanese society through techno-utopian city planning. The new generation of Japanese architects, after the Fukushima event, no longer seek evolutionally social change; rather, the disaster has made them re-consider what architecture is and what architects can do for people who (...) had everything snatched from them by technology and nature. Drawing on the architectural projects of Tange Kenzo and Metabolists in the 1960s and Ito Toyo’s ‘Home-for-All project’ in 2011, the paper explores this major paradigm shift in Japanese architectural theory and practices. (shrink)

A large literature on urban politics documents the connection between metropolitan fragmentation and inequality. This article situates the United States comparatively to explore the structural features of local governance that underpin this connection. Examining five metropolitan areas in North America and Europe, the article identifies two distinct dimensions of fragmentation: fragmentation through jurisdictional proliferation and fragmentation through resource hoarding. This research reveals how distinctive the United States is in the ways it combines institutional arrangements that facilitate metropolitan fragmentation and those (...) that reward such fragmentation. Non-US cases furnish examples of policies that reduce jurisdictional proliferation or remove resource-hoarding opportunities. Mitigating the inequality-inducing effects of fragmentation is possible, but policies must be designed with an identification of the specific aspects of local governance structures that fuel inequality in the first place. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between AI urbanism and sustainability by drawing upon some key concepts of Bruno Latour’s philosophy. The idea of a sustainable AI urbanism - often understood as the juxtaposition of smart and eco urbanism - is here critiqued through a reconstruction of the conceptual sources of these two urban paradigms. Some key ideas of smart and eco urbanism are indicated as incompatible and therefore the fusion of these (...) two paradigms is assessed as an unstable basis for shaping sustainable AI urbanism. The concepts in question - modernity, science and nature – are subsequently redefined following Latour’s philosophical perspective, in an attempt to define a different theoretical basis for a sustainable AI urbanism in the Anthropocene. Finally, the principles of a design philosophy shaped by Latour are used to change the design culture that informs AI urbanism towards a more sustainable practice. This paper constructs and promotes a dialogue between the disciplines of philosophy and urban theory with urban design in the conviction that the principles produced by the former and the practices carried out by the latter must start a biunivocal relationship. The paper reveals that in order to change design culture in the field of AI urbanism, it is necessary to rethink some of the key ideas that inform the Western and modern worldview through novel philosophical reflections. (shrink)

Jacques Ellul’s book, The Meaning of the City, widely recognized as one of the most important twentieth century theological reflections on the city, was also one of his most controversial scholarly contributions. Many urbanists interpreted the book as demeaning the city and diminishing the importance of urban policy, planning, design, architecture, and activism at a time when cities around the world had experience profound crises. This article reexamines The Meaning of the City and its relevance to twenty-first century urbanism.

In this article, I reflect on Benedict Anderson’s work on Indonesian urbanism. There are at least three concepts from Anderson’s work, particularly Imagined Communities, which deserve further attention in Indonesia’s urban studies, namely: 1) political cultures; 2) territorial boundaries; and 3) the urban scale of imagined communities. Besides the conceptual dimensions, the perspectives of Anderson’s work that featured ethical stance and strong commitments are useful principles in studying urbanisms in Indonesia, particularly in dealing with pragmatism in urban development. The (...) three conceptual dimensions, along with the critical stance toward political and economic elites, point towards paying increased attention to marginalized communities in conducting urban research. (shrink)

The idea that the city is a place of sin and immorality is as old as urban civilization. But what does anti-urban thought mean in societies which are highly urbanized under the conditions of modern industrialism? Furthermore, is anti-urbanism in the interwar period a German völkisch phenomenon––one further stride on Germany's special path? And what does rural revival and the “back-to-the-land” cult mean in Great Britain, the first industrial nation? This article seeks to provide an answer to these questions (...) by exploring anti-urbanist writing between the End of the First World War and 1933 in Germany, and 1939 in Britain. By examining two key themes it aims to show that the clear-cut distinction between German anti-urban radicalisation and the West's coming to terms with urbanisation cannot be maintained. Firstly, attention will be drawn to the ambiguity of perceptions of the city in the writings of “Conservative Revolutionary” authors in the Weimar Republic. In a second step, the British “back-to-the-land” movement, whose advocates developed comprehensive anti-urban third-way theories in the interwar period and were themselves part of a broader popular anti-industrial movement and a rural cult throughout the 1930s, will be examined. (shrink)

Manila is one of the world’s most fragmented, privatized and un-public of cities. Why is this so? This paper contemplates the seemingly immutable privacy of the city of Manila, and the paradoxical character of its publicity. Manila is our prime exemplar of the 21st-century mega-city whose apparent disorder discloses a coherent order which we here call ‘neo-patrimonial urbanism’. Manila is a city where poor and rich alike have their own government, infrastructure, and armies, the shopping malls are the simulacra (...) of public congregations once found in cathedrals and plazas, and where household order is matched by streetside chaos, and personal cleanliness wars with public dirt. We nominate the key characteristics of this uncanny approximation of chaotic and discordant order – a polyphonous and polyrhythmic social order but one lacking harmony – and offer a historical sociology, a genealogy that traces an emblematic pattern across the colonizing periods of its emergent urban forms into the contemporary impositions of gated zones and territories. The enduring legacy of patrimonial power to Manila is to be found in the households and on the streets that undermine and devalue public forms of social power in favour of the patriarch and his householders (now relabelled as ‘shareholders’ in ‘public companies’) at the cost of harmonious, peaceable and just public order. Such a state of affairs is not only destructive of the historic built environment of the city, especially its public parks and plazas and heritage districts, its streets, footpaths, public transport and utilities, but is directly injurious of its citizens. To address the question of Manila’s private order and public chaos is to reopen the quest for the good city as the just polis. It is also to take us beyond arguments of indigenous versus colonial forms of urbanism that are mired in nationalist and modernization ideologies respectively, and it is to reject the reductive logics of globalization arguments that Asian mega-cities are but variations of American logics of urbanism. (shrink)