Lively cities: an urban theory for the twenty-first century

In Seeing like a city Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift (2016) point to forms of “attunement” between humans and nonhumans that “orchestrate” infrastructure. Used by anthropologist Kathleen Stewart (2007) in Ordinary affects, attunement is suggestive of sensory environments and practiced learning and navigation in “charged” atmospheres of the everyday. Contemporary urban infrastructures articulate human, nonhuman and machine capacities and movement. Connections can be proximate/intimate, elusive and shadowy, periodically alternating between transaction, collaboration and conflict. These infrastructures overlap sensory and aesthetic domains and cut through familiar representational modes of the political and social, seen as unique to human-centered urban citizenship.

Years ago, I was an undergraduate at Delhi University, which rests next to a large urban forest in northern India, called the Ridge. This was a time of many student protests and university strikes; it was common among activists to paint slogans on the university walls at night – a labor of love that ended at 5am. After one such long night, I and a group of friends rested near the Ridge by dawn. I then got my first glimpse of a common sight in the Ridge – devotees and morning walkers feeding scores of macaques. The sight was astounding: communication flows between humans and simian, the circulation of food, imitative hand gestures from young macaques to devotees, and coo sounds between bodies – both human and animal. This feeding scene on Delhi's Ridge summons the dynamic mixtures of sacred, financial and secular energies that mark postcolonial urban forests like Delhi's Ridge (Crowley, 2020). In Maan Barua's Lively Cities (2023), ethnographic encounters with urban feeding landscapes stage a set of arguments about commensality. Barua defines commensality as “a common table” where humans and other than human connect in the urban. Commensality joins other conceptual pegs in Lively cities. Here the connecting thread is a “minor ecology” of infrastructure shaped by human and other than human rhythms. Ecology in this minor key addresses the generative, repurposing of infrastructure by human and other than human. This is a thread that is shared, collaborative and contested, while also unexpected, disruptive and continuous. In this reconfigured urban ecology, the other than human is constitutive rather than supplemental or transgressive. Barua's pitch is audacious, connecting Delhi and London, empire and colony, metropole and periphery, moving beyond national units or species-specific arguments.

Two decades ago, urban research in the South was emerging from the ruins of modernist planning, and the vast expansions of a zone designated as informal. Media infrastructures went hand in hand with expanding cities. It was an intellectual explosion – some of us were interested in the relationship between technics and life, the dissolution of the model of civil society (Bayat, 1997), and the plasticity of connections as old models of urban control faded (Simone, 2006). Classical Marxist and capital-centered urban geographies that emerged offered no answers. Instead, researchers looked at subaltern repurposing of infrastructures, radical innovations in low-cost media techniques, and unusual sources like street sounds, artworks, vernacular writing and case law (Sundaram, 2009). In the Global South in general this decade was a landscape of ferment, the landmark event on African Cities in Lagos as platform 4 of Documenta 11, titled State of Siege sums up the atmospherics of that moment (Enwezor, 2002).

Lively cities responds to the challenges of contemporary urbanism in the twenty-first century. Twentieth-century modernist designs may lie in ruins, but as Barua argues, the “hylomorphic” impulse of humans giving form to matter persists, shaping neoliberal and authoritarian fantasies. If we reimagine cities as a meshwork of associations between humans, technics and other than humans we must reconsider the foundational components of modernist habitation. Consider the qualities associated with human subjectivity: assembly, participation, observation, and witnessing. Lively cities shifts these capacities typically associated with human autopoiesis to a larger landscape – involving other than human interventions, simians, birds, and cattle. Work, that purposive activity seen as unique to humans, is shifted into a larger field of the “metabolic commons” where there are points of convergence between bovines, family producers, and also points of departure and conflict with states and capital. In Lively cities, other than human forms emerge as guides to a wider urban ontology. The minor key operates as a form of disturbance in this expanded sensorium, a shadow layer that periodically thwarts well-laid-out plans. What is notable in Lively cities is the importance of ethnographic and historical research to make the claims for the “surplus ecologies” of the urban. Much of the theoretical excitement around new materialism and posthumanism has not been matched by ethnographic distillations. Ethnographic engagements may suggest sharper inequalities and divergences, breaks and cuts in the vitalities of matter.

Decades ago, Michael Serres famously complained about the intellectual limits of theories of sensation at that time: “Lots of phenomenology and no sensation – everything via language” (Serres & Latour, 1995). Today the field has exploded. The shift to transduction can reference multiple disciplines: anthropological attention to interspecies connections and conflicts (Govindrajan, 2018), atmospheres and toxic air (Sharan, 2020). The symbolic and the representational have long lost hegemonic authority. Pipes can be documents, wrote Brian Larkin (2013), the technical and the medial shape the urban environment in powerful, ongoing ways. The plasticity of this dynamic is important – “matter” is in-formation. As Susan Schuppli (2020) has shown, in certain conditions machinic and material ecologies are conducive to forensic techniques and can emerge as a witness, a practice that was seen as unique to human testimony. Media environments can, of course, complicate the play between major and minor keys in infrastructure. While ambient machine activity (sensors, dashboards, RFID tags) tracks urban circulations, media platforms do not easily fit hylomorphic models; the feed-forward nature of contemporary capitalism covets tactical attachments and demands addictive connections. Populations form sticky aspiration attachments with suicidal optimism (Berlant, 2011). The multiple lines of activity that the idea of meshwork suggests will periodically be recast in twenty-first-century debates, while there be processual flows, there will be cuts and fissures, curatorial fantasies of major infrastructure and lines of escape. The crucial shift in the new scholarship is the ethnographic attention to the field, following the bibliographic intensities and vitalist excitements of new materialism and posthumanism. This is where Lively cities expands the debate significantly and productively.