From lively spatial combinations to lively theorizations

Urbanity can manifest in wonderfully surprising ways, especially if something provides you with a new lens to perceive it. Maan Barua’s publication Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology describes this new lens on its very first page: “Divisions between earth and life, animal and infrastructure, being and building are hardly tenable in contemporary urban worlds. Yet many versions of urban theory … simply brush aliveness aside as phenomena of little importance compared to the effects of capital, planning, and design” (Barua, 2023, p. 1).

As an architecture student, I was taught to read space through precisely these effects—until I went to Addis Ababa for a month during my master’s course in 2010. I was confronted with the city not as the series of Haussmann-esque promenades, of power-infused monuments of the European cities that had been my previous reference points. In Ethiopia’s capital city, I almost immediately became ill from new microbes, to which my body was poorly adapted. I missed several days at the beginning of our program; instead, I was holed up in our hotel, eating toast and watching TV.

What I happened upon, curled up in Addis, was a National Geographic program about macaques in India entitled Rebel Monkeys (Collins, 2010). In the style of animal documentary popular at the time, the documentary followed troops of macaques around Jaipur and its broader urban extents, describing the relationship between humans and macaques—and the chaos that often followed in its wake. In one episode, the macaque troop raided an apartment. In another, they cleaned out an unattended ice-cream cart and faced war with another troop of their species. The show also staged a clever back-and-forth between the macaques and the city’s human monkey catchers: an objectively antagonistic relationship. It was not obvious who behaved more “human” in this.

To me, the experience of being in a city of the Global South—an ordinary city of millions—and the lens with which I read Addis thereafter, will be forever intertwined with this image of the macaques from Jaipur. When I emerged from the hotel, I was confronted with herds of goats on the street: spatial beings with rights to the city. Yet the neon-spray-painted symbols on their fur connected them to their human shepherds, and the flows of capital to which they would eventually be sacrificed. I remember wondering about the animals’ perspectives in this, and what it meant to be a “city goat.”

Flows optimized for capital accumulation and extraction of animal life are something that might be more classically analyzed and theorized in urban studies. One can trace these chains of commodification that animals are a part of, examine how “more-than-human” forms of life are “infrastructurated” and subsumed into the urban. Yet they—not as capital flows, but simply as unruly and unpredictable and “lively” beings—are absolutely fundamental to urban life as we know it. I found the vocabulary for protagonists like my Addis goats, and their possible inner worlds, in Barua’s book: the “observant participants” of the urban realm (Thrift, 2000, p. 252).

Turning ethnographic research on its head is one of the many novel gestures Maan Barua makes in Lively Cities. By decentering the typical narratives with which we are confronted—and instead centering the narrative around all manner of beings and things that are alive—he illustrates a whole range of conditions and contradictions through the “meshworks” they form. And this acknowledgement has the potential to reveal the material politics and power structures of the urban anew.

The chapter A Minor Ecology of Infrastructure, which unpacks the infrastructural relationships between macaques and the built environment, demonstrates the potential of Barua’s work across the theory and empirics (although I may be biased by my own aforementioned affinity for the “rebel” monkeys). I was fascinated by the idea he puts forth: that “macaques’ abilities to negotiate the city draws from their enmeshment with the infrastructural environment—pipes, cables, buildings, and walls—that the animals repurpose for their own mobilities and dwellings” (Barua, 2023, p. 26). In this narrative, wires become bridges, pipes become ladders: the very essence of the “unintentional landscapes” proposed by scholars such as Matthew Gandy (2016). We humans might think of electricity provision as a utility, as a service, but it is actually furnishing a habitat such that infrastructure becomes “no longer an effect but a cause” that “escalates circulations” (Barua, 2023, p. 27).

In my own work, I am anchored in the world of the human: in Johannesburg, South Africa. These sentiments about the “minor key” of urban studies, about the importance of looking beyond capital to landscapes that are perhaps unintentional in the eyes of the state, also resonate deeply with my studies into the effects and ramifications of infrastructure like transport for social groups who, like more-than-humans, often dwell at the fringes of planning practice and theory. An example is my work on “popular centralities” made through the agency of people, with highly limited resources, as they are excluded from or are unable to participate in the “formal economy” (Howe, 2022a). In this, people interact with one another; they collide in the urban sphere to render space anew, through their co-presence and exchange and encounter. In doing so, they embody a human form of “infrastructure” AbdouMaliq Simone invokes (Simone, 2021), and without which the urban would not exist in its current form at all. I therefore like to imagine that this idea of the minor urban applies to humans too, as a call to integrate the everyday, the quotidian struggles that the majority of humans must face to get through their day, to navigate and negotiate the urban, persisting simultaneously in spite of and because of it.

There are further lines of shared struggle across geographical contexts worth exploring through comparative gestures and expanding to through a more-than-human perspective. One such example is service delivery, as Barua discusses, “which grew out of rapid spread in unplanned settlements, and with them increased demands on the energy grid” (Barua, 2023, p. 40) by the early 2000s. In South Africa, too, contestation and demanding of rights related to connections and meters and against privatization of essential services represents a key infrastructural moment, and a manifestation of how people interface with the state. The way people in Delhi utilized the nefarious legend of the “monkey man” (Barua, p. 46-49) describes to advocate for themselves reminded me of how people in Johannesburg townships like Diepsloot lobbied for improved services by widely advertising the sometimes shocking and violent crimes that occur there (Harber, 2011; Howe, 2022b). Barua’s publication confirms the necessity of the comparative moment, in weaving together the narratives of the colonizer (London) and the colony (Delhi) that represents the majority, the norm, of the world and its people. The regimes generated through objects and processes such as the bird feeder and parakeets unpack production and labor and racism, reveal elites, demonstrate what “unintended landscapes” can become.

The concept of “the urban in a minor key” also reminds me of Gillian Hart’s critiques of planetary urbanization—a stance Barua echoes—in which she interrogates the concept of two parallel forms of history proposed by Derickson (2015). Leaning on the conceptualizations of Chakrabarty (2009), she outlined the categories of: History 1, or the reified narrative of macro-scale processes of urbanization and capital accumulation; and History 2, or the subaltern story of what people do in their everyday lives, which falls outside the purview of these processes, and contains the power to interrupt capitalist modes of production (Hart, 2018). The discussion of more-than-humans Barua presents is a subaltern story, that similarly exists both within and beyond capital, and cannot be captured in such a binary. The major and the minor keys necessarily co-exist, and the messy space between them is where we need even more research.

Commensality is another powerful concept Barua introduces, as the rearticulation of relations between humans and animals. It is not merely liveliness that unfolds between the macaques and humans in Delhi, but rather an interspecies conviviality. We should all stay as open to learning from others and elsewheres as did the young macaques in Barua’s fieldwork, extending their hands to vendors (Barua, 2023, p. 55) or hoarding stolen goods to trade with humans for bananas (Barua, 2023, p. 59).

The agency of “all manner of beings” encapsulated in Lively Cities is therefore a compelling way to rethink the urban, even if you do lean toward human struggles. Resistance, adaptivity, opportunity, and agonism in the face of potentially immanent destruction is something more-than-humans reveal powerfully. What the book does so beautifully is to invite us in, to value and valorize alternative beings, readings, narratives, economies, and ecologies that configure the urban, and which reconfigure themselves in the process.

The author outlines the three goals he set for Lively Cities in the introduction. The book is powerful in the first goal it sets: decentering the typical canon of urban theory. It is also successful its second goal: acting as a diagnostic tool. What I would be interested to see develop further in future work is how this knowledge can, in theory and in practice, “open up new political possibilities,” the third stated goal of the book. Further connecting to work in feminist and postcolonial geographies, which demonstrates how space is not designed and then inhabited, but instead, is co-constituted with the existing environment, could be fruitful to explore. And I believe it is worth emphasizing that, while urban theory in a major key does not regard the animal and other more-than-human “interlocutors” in favor of its human form, many human forms remain largely neglected. Barua’s forthcoming work into the wetlands outside of Guwahati and eviction of informal settlement residents there will certainly provide fascinating insight into precisely such phenomena, at the interstice of the more-than-human and the other-than-urban-elite, and pose an opportunity to build a patois of the “polyphonies” that “deterritorialize or uncode established vocabularies” (Barua, 2023, p. 23) into order to further articulate a necessary theoretical companion to the urban in a major key.