Description:
Bringing together cutting-edge studies into a range of contemporary sites of urban concern, this volume unfolds the collective research agenda of urban cosmopolitics in three directions: the relational constitution and political effects of urban technologies, infrastructures, and other material-semiotic agencies (agencements); the coming together of new urban concerns, constituencies, and publics (assemblies); and the coalescing of urban practices into shared spaces of co-existence, life-support, and survival (atmospheres). Together, we assert, this exploration of urban cosmopolitics amounts to a 'strong program' of urban studies, allowing us to shed new light on key topics of contemporary research, including urban planning and citizen publics; economic dynamics and constraints; street life and the everyday; built environment dynamics and differentiations; and disasters, risks, and sustainable transitions.
Review Quotes:
Urban Cosmopolitics offers a new way of thinking and doing urban politics. This theoretically bold and empirically rich collection shows that urban infrastructures and technologies are so much more than the supporting context for urban society and politics, they animate social life and activate political interest. Urban Cosmopolitics showcases the relevance of pragmatist and actor-network inspired approaches to understanding the most complex, multivariate, spatially extensive of socio-material assemblages - the city. It is a collection of essays that offers novel concepts for understanding the effects of urban technologies and expertise, as well as templates for alternative visions for assembling and enacting urban worlds.
Jane M Jacobs, Head of Urban Studies, Yale-NUS College and author of Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture
The appearances of the urban are insufficient to knowing how to engage the sheer multiplicity of causation at work in how the urban takes place. Cities are full of relations among forces and things that have no concern for maintaining any identity and meaning whatsoever and go beyond any agenda. But as this collection of writings orchestrated by Blok and Farías demonstrate, we can more judiciously remake ourselves as urban in the ways in which we co-exist and co-create with forces and things we can only fractionally know. And this entails a politics distributed across different domains, devices, entities and experiments, which alters the imagination of the urban as that which aims for continuous human transformation. Through specific engagements with new forms of urban activism, infrastructure, economy, everyday practices, built environments and planning practices, Urban Cosmopolitics vitally demonstrates new ethical practices of recomposing a common world among the many forms of agency, objects, infrastructures and collectivities alongside us.
AbdouMaliq Simone, author of City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads