‘Water is a brutal delineator of social power which has at various times worked to either foster greater urban cohesion or generate new forms of political conflict’. In the paper which follows, Matthew Gandy explores this statement by looking at the expansion of urban water systems since the chaos of the nineteenth‐century industrial city. In this early period, the relationship between water and urban space can be understood by the emergence of what he calls the ‘bacteriological city’, defined by features such as new moral geographies and modes of social discipline based upon ideologies of cleanliness, a move away from laissez‐faire policies towards a technocratic and rational model of municipal managerialism, and a connection between urban infrastructures and citizenship rights. Gandy goes on to discuss that while many cities never ultimately conformed to this model, the last thirty years has seen a fundamental move away from the bacteriological city to a more diffuse, fragmentary and polarized urban tec...

Rethinking urban metabolism: water, space and the modern city

Since the term 'cyborg' first emerged in the early 1960s it has gradually evolved to encompass an ever wider array of fields ranging from in vitro fertilization to science fiction cinema. In this article the idea of the cyborg will be explored in relation to the physical infrastructure of the city. It is suggested that the cyborg metaphor usefully challenges dualistic conceptions of urban space that revolve around antinomies such as nature/culture, body/technology, real/unreal and concrete/abstract. A cyborg perspective highlights complexity, hybridity and indeterminacy and emphasizes facets of the urban experience that remain extensively hidden in conventional accounts. Yet the cyborg concept also extends to functionalist, neo-orgamcist and technologically determinist approaches in which the role of flows, networks or biomorphic patterns takes precedence over the political dynamics of urban space. This article develops an alternative reading of the cyborg based around the need to rethink relations between the corporeality of the urban experience and the continuing political salience of the public realm.

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Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City

This paper is an attempt to describe the nature of a new calculative background that is currently coming into existence, a background that will both guide and constitute what counts as ‘thinking’. It begins by providing a capsule history of how this background has become a more and more pervasive quality of Euro-American cultures as a result of the rise of ‘qualculation’. It then moves on to consider how this qualculative background is producing new apprehensions of space and time before ending by considering how new kinds of sensorium may now be becoming possible. In this final section, I illustrate my argument by considering the changing presence of the hand, co-ordinate systems and language, thereby attempting to conjure up the lineaments of a new kind of movement-space.

Movement-space: The changing domain of thinking resulting from the development of new kinds of spatial awareness

This article studies the western bourgeois home, and argues that its social construction as a familiar, autonomous, safe, private haven is predicated not only upon the exclusion of undesired social elements (anomie, homelessness, social conflict, etc.) but also upon the exclusion of undesired natural elements (cold, dirt, pollution, sewage, etc.). Using the domestication of water in the western world as a vehicle, the article analyses the historical-geographical process through which nature became scripted as ‘the other’ to the bourgeois home, and explains the contribution of this separation to the conceptual construction of the home as a distinct and autonomous ‘space envelope’, supposedly untouched bysocio-natural processes. This analysis identifies an inherent contradiction: despite the intense efforts at ‘othering’ and excluding nature from the premises of the home, the function and familiarity of this space is increasingly dependent upon the production of nature. Although the complex set of socio-natural networks, pipes and cables that carry clean, produced, commodified nature inside and pump bad, metabolized nature outside the bourgeois home remain visually excluded, it is this same excluded socio-nature that constitutes the material basis upon which the familiarity of the home is constructed. Thus, in a simultaneous act of need and denial, the bourgeois home remains the host of the elements that it tries to exclude. This contradiction surfaces at moments of crisis (such as power cuts, burst mains and water shortage) when familiar objects acquire uncanny properties. At such moments, the continuity of the social and material processes that produce the domestic space is unexpectedly foregrounded, bringing the dweller face to face with his/her alienation, within his/her most familiar environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Interrogating the geographies of the familiar: domesticating nature and constructing the autonomy of the modern home

Wastelands are a characteristic feature of many urban and industrial landscapes. Although the term wasteland has become widely subsumed within various utilitarian discourses concerning the redevelopment of ostensibly empty or unproductive spaces, the idea encompasses a multiplicity of meanings, material origins, and ecological characteristics. This article considers these anomalous spaces of urban nature as an interdisciplinary terrain that extends from renewed interest in urban biodiversity to alternative conceptions of landscape authenticity. It is suggested that a more theoretically nuanced and historically grounded conception of the intersections between critical cultural discourses and recent advances in urban ecology might provide a useful counterpoint to narrowly utilitarian approaches to urban nature.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00045608.2013.832105

Anthony Vidler

Papers

Spatial Psychology@@@Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture