Lively Cities – an intricate understanding of urban life

In Lively Cities, Maan Barua invites us to understand the urban as an ecological formation. He emphasizes the need to broaden the scope of urban theory by bringing together a diverse range of perspectives that allow for an intricate understanding of urban life. Asserting that cities are dynamic accomplishments shaped by heterogeneous more-than-human entities, he challenges the imaginary of a metropolis “completely fabricated by man” (Koolhaas, 1994, p. 293).

I was lucky to encounter Barua’s work early in my doctoral studies in a reading group on urban ecology, where we, together with Nitin Bathla, discussed Bio-geo-graphy: landscape, dwelling and the political ecology of human-elephant relations (Barua, 2014). The article reveals how more-than-human geographies overlay human settlements, ultimately forming shared environments. This has greatly influenced my own approach towards researching disturbed landscapes in the context of my research, where the interplay of human and more-than-human entities in the Upper Rhine Plain reveals the complexity of what we traditionally perceive as urbanized spaces; see (Just, 2022, 2023).

With Lively Cities, Maan Barua transcends the realm of traditional urban studies, introducing a minor urban key that allows us to imagine inhabiting the urban otherwise. This approach requires a set of concepts that help him challenge majoritarian urban theory and that become part of a toolset for minor urban analysis. Tim Ingolds’ “meshwork” (2011) becomes vital to describe the lively city and enables Barua to study the urban as a rhizomatic condition shaped by the relations of heterogeneous entities. Throughout the case studies, additional concepts are developed, each providing insights into different aspects that animate urbanicity, bringing into view more-than-human relations, affects and frictions.

The first section of the book takes “commensality” as an entry point to theorize the urban on the example of urban macaques in Delhi. During my time in the city in 2012, I had the chance to witness this mode of more-than-human co-habitation on a personal scale when a macaque broke into my room and chewed away the wires of my headphones. In Chapter 1, these lively relations unfold on an urban scale as Barua delves into the interplay between power infrastructures, macaques and humans. It challenges conventional anthropocentric views on infrastructure as hylomorphic design, drawing on Matthew Gandy’s “unintentional landscapes” (2016) through the notion of variations that, according to Barua, allows recognizing the becoming arboreal of the urban for the macaques (Barua, 2023, p. 35). Paying attention to co-constituted affects between humans and macaques, the author reshapes our understanding of urban infrastructure, portraying a living urban meshwork shaped by “affective economies” (Barua, 2023, p. 56) where more-than-human relations can become infrastructural. Chapter 2 explores the politics of commensality to investigate other modes of urban governance. It traces macaque bodies, from their role as lively commodities in Delhi’s colonial history to their instrumentalization within the contemporary Hindu state. Barua introduces vernacular practices, such as the langur wallah, that disrupt state policies and conventional conceptions of biopower (Barua, 2023, p. 90). He claims that such practices help conceive the governmentality of an urban milieu and open up pathways towards a more livable urbanicity (Barua, 2023, p. 93).

The book continues with an investigation into the “city of flows” through feral parakeets in London. It opens up a comparative study by following the displaced birds that arrived in Britain from India first via colonial, then via post-war trade. Chapter 3 unpacks the postcolonial nature of London by considering parakeets as more-than-human migrants. The study of “lively capital going feral” opens up new notions of political economy and allows the author to develop the concept of “recombinant urbanism”, which describes a formation that is “constituted as it is by novel relations between species with no evolutionary history of co-composition” shaped by affects and habits. The urban condition, Barua illustrates, blurs the boundaries between commodity- and wildlife, producing “lines of flight” (Barua, 2023, p. 124) as lively commodities escape the circuits of capital. Tending to the parakeet as an other-than-human migrant, chapter 4 delves into questions of hostility and hospitality. It unpacks the political economy of bird feeding in the UK alongside biopolitical strategies for governing London’s postcolonial nature. Here, Barua introduces the notion of “affective commons” (Barua, 2023, p. 187) that – generated by vernacular practices of commensality, like bird feeding – suggest modes of inhabiting the more-than-human city otherwise.

Returning to India, the final section of the book delves into questions of urban economy by bringing into view the pastoral nature of Delhi through the city’s urban cattle and dairy farms. Chapter 5 offers a counterpoint to the prevailing idea in urban studies of all-encompassing planetary urbanization. Two concepts that the author develops in reference to Deleuze and Guattari become productive for this analysis, “striation” and “ecumene”. The former describes the striated space of an urban cattle enclosure – the latter the smooth milieu of the animal. According to Barua, the inseparability of both reveals that “the pastoral is immanent to the urban” – a condition giving rise to the “nonhylomorphic” logic of “patchwork urbanism” (Barua, 2023, p. 223) that challenges urban-agrarian binaries and considers a more-than-human production of space. Barua’s analysis highlights how diverse urban practices and forms challenge conventional narratives of urbanization and foreground the limitations of viewing it as a homogeneous process. Chapter 6, on the other hand, attends to the political economy of urban cattle ranching. It uses Delhi’s dairy farms, which rely on garbage dumps as pastures, as an example of urban economies that escape the capital value chain. These “molecular economies”, Barua claims, constitute a “surplus ecology” and open up towards creative capitalist processes fostered by variations and metabolic labor. The emerging “metabolic commons” – shaped by the coming together of more-than-human bodily processes – can inspire new avenues for a postcapitalist urban condition.

Lively Cities presents a rich exploration into urbanicity. It challenges traditional paradigms of urban studies and shows that the urban is constantly “made, remade, and unmade” (Barua, 2023, p. 278) by more-than-human relations. Detailed case studies show that cities are constituted by a series of overlapping rural, wild, pastoral, agrarian, or urban conditions – rather than having clear boundaries, they flow. Barua achieves this through an exceptional, more-than-human ethnographic endeavor that diverges from the canon of works on methods in multispecies ethnography (Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010; Swanson, 2017; van Dooren et al., 2016). Instead of studying species, he attends to primates, birds and bovines, acknowledging their entanglement in the urban meshwork and in relations of many kinds. Barua’s notion of “observant participant” (Barua, 2023, p. 19), constitutes an important step towards taking animals and their specific “ecumenes” seriously: it recognizes more-than-humans as sentient beings, knowledgeable in one way or another about the urban condition. Challenging humans as an absolute reference point for urban research, the ethnographic approach brought forward in the book resonates profoundly with my ongoing research, where following birds, fish and mosquitoes on the Upper Rhine opens up towards an extended understanding of landscapes as vital milieus.

An alternative account of the genesis of urban forms foregrounds an entirely different view of the becoming urban of nature. The human is one among many competencies and powers making and unmaking cities. (Barua, 2023, p. 227)

Lively Cities is both focused and expansive. While the case studies are grounded and give nuanced accounts of Delhi’s and London’s urban nature, the theoretical concepts Barua develops alongside have far-reaching implications for urban studies: They challenge majoritarian urban theory and offer new ways of understanding and inhabiting cities, providing a powerful toolkit for analyzing the urban in a minor key. Notions like “recombinant urbanism” (Barua, 2023, p. 105), “patchwork urbanism” (Barua, 2023, p. 222), and the reading of Gandy’s term “unintentional landscapes” (Barua, 2023, p. 37) as “other-intentional landscapes” (Barua, 2023, p. 133) become highly productive for conceptualizing (urban) nature in the Anthropocene. On the one hand, they help explore urbanicity through more-than-human relations; on the other, they foreground the generation of urban form through co-constituted habits and affects. Intending a nonhylomorphic production of (urban)space, these concepts can also become generative for urban and landscape design contexts, challenging architects, designers, and planners to envision cities otherwise, considering their immanent liveliness as a vital force (and potential opportunity) shaping urban form.

All in all, Lively Cities renders diverse urban experiences visible, forming a basis for a different reading of urbanicity and politics of urban governance. In this way, it challenges its readers to rethink what makes cities livable. Through Barua’s meticulous research and outstanding conceptual work, the book constitutes a significant contribution to the field of urban studies, offering valuable insights and tools for scholars, practitioners, and anyone interested in the lively nature of cities.