Ross E Adams

Circulation and Urbanization is a foundational investigation into the history of the urban. Moving beyond both canonical and empirical portrayals, the book approaches the urban through a genealogy of circulation – a concept central to Western political thought and its modes of spatial planning. Locating architectural knowledge in a wider network of political history, legal theory, geography, sociology and critical theory, and drawing on maritime, territorial and colonial histories, Adams contends that the urban arose in the nineteenth century as an anonymous, parallel project of the emergent liberal nation state. More than a reflection of this state form or the product of the capitalist relations it fostered, the urban is instead a primary instrument for both: at once means and ends.

Combining analytical precision with interdisciplinary insights, this book offers an astonishing new set of propositions for revisiting a familiar, yet increasingly urgent, topic. It is a vital resource for all students and scholars of architecture and urban studies.

Using Silvia Federici’s work as a guide to navigate the mobilities in Ildefonso Cerdá’s concept of urbanización this essay offers a rereading of a trusted nineteenth-century concept underpinning architectures of accumulation, exposing the relation between sex and immobilization and the long history of the violent gendering of the human body.

If the body became the site over which a new struggle had emerged at the dawn of capitalism in the sixteenth century, by the nineteenth, its gendered disposition had been all but naturalized, and the governments that rose to power built their techniques around this imagined body whose biological and physiological distinctions provided the features that could in turn naturalize its new roles under capitalism. It was Cerdá’s “genius” to build a spatial theory that not only reflected but reproduced this emergent form of liberal governance, offering a far finer and more multilayered articulation of power that could obtain in the relations between bodies and space.

This essay is part of the project ‘On Collaborations: Feminist Histories of Migration’, edited by Anooradah Iyer Siddiqi and Rachel Lee and published on Aggregate.

By exploring an emerging complex of interrelated research initiatives and design projects, this essay argues that resilience names a project that operates as a technique of governance and a global initiative to reimagine large scale urban development in the age of undifferentiated crisis. Through a network of power built on the confluence of private foundations and multinational firms, global governance frameworks, university research ‘laboratories’ and municipal governments, resilience has come to identify a new kind of ‘pre-emptive’ developmentalism—a renewed urban entrepreneurialism recoded with the language humanitarian aid, whose imperial overtones should not go unnoticed.

The rise of resilience over the past decade has found itself at the center of an array of discourses and forms of knowledge. More of a template for knowledge formation than a form of knowledge itself, its broad uptake suggests a non-discursive meta-paradigm for the organization of human affairs in the age of risk and instability. It is no surprise that the world or urbanism, too, has embraced resilience. Today, resilience urbanism has emerged as a best-practice mode of producing urban space. By adapting the neo-modernist palette of smart city techniques of ubiquitous sensing and algorithmic modes of data management together with a host of ecological infrastructures to mitigate effects of extreme weather events, this form of urbanism seeks to expand the monitoring of urban populations to include the human and non-human ecologies that constitute the broader urban environment. In so doing, resilience urbanism moves the task of environmental sensing from optimization, as in the smart city, to streamlined crisis management. While the environment has ostensibly become the principal object of design in resilience urbanism, indeed much of the contemporary responses to the instabilities of our world seem to have found simultaneously a subject, object, and site of intervention in the human body. Indeed, resilience urbanism arguably does more to reorient its technologies and infrastructures to manage the conduct of bodies in space than it does to physically transform space. This is only possible because of a fundamental shift unfolding in the understanding and representation of the human body. Drawing upon quasi-philosophical currents and popular environmental sympathies, a new body has begun to inhabit the architectural and urban imaginary. In its most diagrammatic level, it appears to overturn modern depictions of the body, suggesting a more-than-human body defined not by its separation from the environments through which it circulates, but in its capacity to affect and be affected by them. The resilient body, it seems, is an ecologically entangled body, one that by definition is multiple rather than singular; immediate in the world. This corporeal imaginary is equally conditioned by the ambient notion of crisis. Just as crisis has restructured certain cultural and political horizons of possibility today, so too does it expose the body to a new, elusive volumetric politics. As David Chandler has argued (2014), crisis, uncertainty and failure for contemporary modes of government are no longer categories to exclude but have become the drivers through which policies and laws are to be iteratively perfected. Thus, while this new, resilient body may suggest its liberation in space, enacted through its non-distinction between bodies or between body and environment, it also reveals a specific opening up of the body to an unstable world—a vulnerable body that presents itself as a complex ecology of microsites, offering data points and bioindicators that can be precisely measured and monitored across space, scale and time in relation to uncertain environments. The resilient body is thus also its mirror image: a body interminably vulnerable. As environmentally entangled and cybernetically endowed bodies aggregate, their fluid totality constructs a real-time image of an uncertain urban landscape. Resilience urbanism, taking crisis as its condition of

It is tempting to imagine that each new infrastructure signals an equally new mode of power. This is one of the stakes in questioning emergent relations of architectures, natures and data bound up in the rise of ‘resilient urbanism’. A cocktail of smart city technologies mixed with the urgency of climate crisis, resilient urbanism offers itself as a spatial program to address climate change by implementing what legal scholar Mireille Hildebrandt has called ‘algorithmic law’.

Resilient urbanism suggests how contemporary design increasingly assists in the production of new modes of subjectivity, in setting limits of agency and control and in narrowing the gap between government and the governed. Yet one of the more nuanced questions resilient urbanism raises is of the status of the human body: Unlike modern urbanism, one of its primary sites of intervention is the body – it situates its innovations in the making-infrastructural of the body. For this reason, it also suggests possible historical relations that have long existed between power and space hidden in representations of the human body. This essay interrogates resilient urbanism against a broader history in which representations of the human body, on one hand, serve to call into existence certain forms of government and, on the other, to suggest an ideal order for the spaces of the world. It argues that resilient urbanism should be understood not only in the effects of its technological reconfiguration of life but in how these technologies arrive at and articulate a real, (post-)historical, social and political sensibility in the world, legible in a new representation of the human body.

This paper revisits Nicholas Grimshaw’s Eden Project in Cornwall, UK to interrogate architecture’s relation to neoliberalism. It looks to this project as a means to open a speculative approach for architectural scholarship to engage neoliberal society beyond familiar critiques thereof. Eden, I argue, coordinates its spaces, technologies and objects to project a temporality that seems to lack both past and future in favour of presenting time as continuous, homogeneous, bound to the perpetual management of the present – what I call ‘ecological time’. This project shows that, in the theatre of neoliberal governmentality, the present is the object of design, and ‘design’ becomes indistinguishable from the technological management of the world.

What capacity does landscape have for 'agency' today? What kind of agency has been mobilized in contemporary landscape practices? What could it mean to situate these practices within a 'post-historical' framework? Reading both Vilém Flusser's understanding of 'post-history' and Peter Sloterdijk's more recent reinterpretation of it, this piece looks at the increasing interest in landscape as a site of ‘agency’ and object of socio-political transformation. I argue that landscape today is too often essentialized as an ahistorical category. As a result, our attempt to politically engage it increasingly ends up treating it as a found 'archive' of cultural and social history whose political valence, paradoxically, tends to fall away. Landscapes of post-history not only translate what is political into a private, moralized pedagogy for life, but through their increasingly symbolic capacity, landscapes also constitute a kind of accidental iconography of the biopolitical present. How can practices approach landscape as an always-already political category, opening up alternative possibilities?

By examining New York City's recent megaproject, 'Rebuild by Design', this paper interrogates the way 'resilience' urban design works by spatializing strategies of government through embedded and multi-scalar technologies of urban space. In so doing, the essay reflects on how the urban--a spatiality predicated on its endless expansion--has in the face of climate change begun a violent turning-in on itself, whose technologies now coordinate a machinic space of permanent emergency where life and government become indistinguishable from one another. By incorporating the climate itself in its spatial calculus and strategies of design, 'Rebuild by Design' proposes the perverse fantasy of  an urban space conceived as a pure interior: a space capable of neutralizing and thus eliminating 'exteriority' altogether.

While ‘ecological urbanism’ promises the introduction of a new generation of apparatuses, exacting control ever more deeply within the social whole, the logic by which such networks of power operate has remained largely unchanged since the 19th century. This paper will demonstrate the persistence of this logic by placing ecological urbanism within a genealogy of the concept of urbanization. Looking at the work of Spanish civil engineer, Ildfonso Cerdá, I will examine his remarkably prescient theory in which he proposed to replace what he saw as the ‘anachronistic’
ciudad (city) with the ‘modern’ figure of the urbe—a generic, scaleless template of territorialization engulfed in expansive urbanización. The first part of the paper focuses on Cerdá’s concept of vialidad (roughly, ‘circulation’), which formed the basis of his theory of urbanization and provided its origin in ‘nature’ itself. Urbanization was an effort to free mankind from political domination and recover it’s ‘natural’ destiny by unifying a latent global society in a single, interconnected global urbe. However, not only did Cerdá’s theory introduce a new, far more pervasive technological relationship of power between government and population; it also set free to circulate what was previously fixed in the space and form of the city: the apparatus. In the second part of the paper I reexamine ecological urbanism with regard to the founding relationship between urbanization and nature. Now, because it is nature that has become pathological to humanity, it is nature which must be immunized. Ecological urbanism thus reinvigorates the capacity of the urban to stave off the end of the world, not only by rhetorically reaffirming the natural origins of urbanization but also by inverting this relationship: ecological urbanism proposes to reconstruct nature as urbanization.

“Ruralize the urban: urbanize the rural:… Replete terram [fill the earth].” Alluding to a passage in Genesis, these words appear on the frontispiece of Spanish Civil Engineer Ildefonso Cerdá’s colossal General Theory of Urbanization (1867). They capture the fervor with which he sought to construct a spatial order which would replace both city and territory and would overcome all historical boundaries and spatial distinctions. This new domestic template, the urbe, was to stretch across the earth, spanning both land and sea and uniting civilizations in a single spatial entity of private property and perpetual circulation. While more a biographer than the inventor of this new space unfolding across Europe, Cerdá’s frequent reference to the sea in describing the urbe (‘mare magnum’) extends beyond simple metaphor; it serves as an ontological model for constructing a fluid space whose power lies in its transcending of limits. In its oceanic pretensions, the birth of the urban, Cerdá imagined, would see the distinction between city and territory as a relic of the past, yielding in its place a hybrid spatiality that would erode the specificity of both. While recent scholarship has begun to theoretically address the urban (Brenner, Schmidt, Merrifield, et. al.), the historical, social and political construction of this spatiality has yet to receive much attention, and its ontological relation to ocean space, even less. This paper seeks to examine the urban in this context: if today we know the spaces the territorialization of the ocean has produced, what kinds of spaces may have resulted from a ‘maritimization of the land’? How does this help us to grasp the spectacle of our present as we extend urban spaces and technologies of circulation outward into the ocean? This essay will explore the question of ‘maritimization of land’ to show a history in which, some 200 years ago, territory, understood as a political technology, was fundamentally reformed through its augmentation by a spatiality that developed over the course of three centuries of maritime activities. The resulting adaptation of territory gave it the ability to mediate, shape and control spaces and processes across multiple scales simultaneously. The outcome of this territorial reform was the construction of a wholly new spatial order that we’re only recently beginning to grasp: the urban.

This chapter postulates that modern political form takes its cue as much from the way in which space, infrastructure and architecture are conceived as it does as a response to rational human discourse. It does so by tracing the predominance of one of architecture’s most fundamental categories – interior –  over the past century and a half, suggesting that ‘Interior’ may be better understood as a political phenomenology that precedes and supersedes its architectural manifestation. It argues that Interior is rather a name for the evermore convoluted relation between space and the immaterial, non-representational and environmental political ontology of late neoliberalism.

To pose the question of founding a critical project in architecture requires one to ask in which world architecture resides today. If it is no longer accurate to describe that world as the ‘city’, as some have conjectured, what is the spatial order which today brings architecture into visibility? What status does architecture have within it?
Identifying an array of exemplar texts and projects, this essay proposes a genealogy of the urban in order to reveal its historically specific emergence as a dominant spatio-political order. It will look to reveal a rather contradictory nature of this category: for every identity contained in the urban, its negation can be found coexisting within it. The urban is both the city and something absolutely opposed to it, something beyond it; it is simultaneously antithetical to the rural while also that which reproduces it within; it is at once the product of modern artificial processes, while also cast as the innate, natural condition of mankind, a transhistorical essentialism rooted in the heart of humanity itself. Indeed, the urban’s strange ability to contain every identity and its negation is a reflection of its totalizing inclusivity: it is a material order that appears as a domain without an outside to itself—a pure interior whose endlessness corresponds to the scaleless expansion of its grid.
Today, a clear and irreconcilable chasm has separated the historical figure of the ‘city’ from the advancing condition of the urban present—between a historically fixed, highly politicized site and the ongoing expansion of a technologically administered spatial order. Yet far from an apolitical background of contemporary life, however, I will argue that the urban is violently anti-political. Within this realm, the relationship between architecture and its urban context is permanently tempered by an evermore aesthetic demand: far from occupying a political role it once may have had, architecture today, takes on a predominantly aesthetic role in its endless play of indifferent differences.

(Full paper delivered at Association of American Geographers (AAG) 2015 )
“Ruralize the urban: urbanize the rural:… Replete terram [fill the earth].” Alluding to a passage in Genesis, these words appear on the frontispiece of Spanish Civil Engineer Ildefonso Cerdá’s colossal General Theory of Urbanization (1867). They capture the fervor with which he sought to compose a spatial order which would replace both city and territory, overcoming all historical boundaries and spatial distinctions. This new domestic template, the urbe, was to stretch across the earth, spanning both land and sea and uniting civilizations in a single spatial entity of private property and peaceful circulation. The birth of the urban would see the distinction between city and territory as a relic of the past, yielding in its place a hybrid spatiality that would erode the specificity of both. Instead, the infinite and mobile qualities of space experienced in the early modern Atlantic voyages would reemerge in the perpetually expansive process of ‘urbanización’. This paper examines the urban in this context: as a spatial order predicated on limitless circulation (vialidad) and endless expansion, I will examine how certain maritime ontologies and the orders projected onto the sea have been silently reterritorialized in the constitution of this modern spatial order. Exploring the urban in this way opens new questions about its present status: while today it may increasingly appear as a banal extension of urban space, I will reflect on how, in the face of climate change, the sea has also paradoxically reemerged as a kind of absolute limit condition to the urban.

A paper presented at 'Thinking Spatial Practices within and against Law', Birkbeck Institute of Social Research, June 2015.
It could be said that law functions as an articulation between life and space. Assisted by technology, law is increasingly operative in the ways it distributes and coordinates bodies across space. Its spatialisation emerges at the confluence of cybernetic technologies developed in and alongside military applications and the general transition of governmentality away from ideas of ‘progress’ and toward notions of ‘resilience’. If liberal positive law was constructed around a certain ‘metaphysics’ of negating the exception—the barbarism of sovereignty—in the name of Civil Society, today it has become the metaphysics of the exception—generalised as ‘crisis’—that now produces law in the name of ‘resiliency’. Under the banner of crisis, law is now able to finally dispose of any tautological pretensions toward universality, emerging instead as the excess of its pure application; what once drew its force from a rhetorical claim to nature, spirituality and universality, today feeds off of the opposite: contingency, emergency, survival. Law, as such, is situated. It operates in realtime. This paper will explore the simultaneous development of cybernetic technologies currently being deployed in urban space (‘Smart Cities’, ubiquitous computing, resilience urbanism, etc.) and the broadening presence of crisis as a political form. It will situate these parallel developments within a genealogy of the body in relation to technology arguing that, since the 19th century, technology has made the body visible as a site of calculation relevant to the rationalization of urban space and its reproduction. This visibility has lent itself to new forms of knowledge and regimes of the self as well as to new mechanisms of its modulation. However, within the current theater of crisis, and as cybernetic technologies become central to contemporary urbanisms, it is the body itself that is increasingly transformed into a technology. This marks a shift toward a more machinic form of governance that operates through an automatic spatial milieu in which individual self-regulation increasingly supplants direct regulation. This is what I will call the urbanisation of the body.

This paper contends that, if neoliberalism is to be understood as a meta-economic order—as living thought (Hayek)—, our analysis of its impact on the practice and conception of architecture must see it as more than simply a passive artifact bearing traces of neoliberal logics, policies and values, but one that actively participates in its unfolding. More specifically, this paper looks at how architecture has, since the recent past, assisted in the construction a new, non-modern temporality, whose corresponding proposals articulate a capacity for architecture and urbanism to preserve the present conditions of life in a world increasingly characterized by unstoppable change. If modernity invented ‘progress’ as the device to compress the present toward a teleological future, then this new temporality impoverishes both past and future in the fabrication of a blinding, unending present – a temporality that cuts across and synchronizes the social, political and spatial into a single economic rationality. By revisiting Grimshaw’s Eden Project in Cornwall, UK, this paper will speculate on how architecture has begun to participate directly in the production of this new temporal experience of the world. Projects like Eden reveal not only how architectural practice under neoliberalism has overcome the modern distinction between nature and culture by inverting it, but how the emerging architectural imaginary that accompanies such practices frame architecture as a problem restricted to the present. In this, architecture inscribes a temporality that seems to lack both past and future – history and possibility – in favor of presenting time as continuous, homogeneous and bound to the perpetual management of the present. I call this the architecture of preservation. The Eden Project, now a global franchise, paradigmatically reveals that in the theater of neoliberal governmentality and its perpetual production of crisis, it is now the present that is the object of architectural design, and ‘design’ becomes indistinguishable from the technological management of the world.

What is it about the urban that seems to foreclose any visibility of itself outside of its immediate present? What is it about the nature of this space that presupposes its comprehension only in its most recent changes, shifts, growths, collapses, crises and inversions? How is it that even when attempting to theorize this spatial category itself, we are stuck examining it through only those factors which are ‘emergent?’ Can the urban—a space that appears as the product of a timeless condition of human co-existence—be understood historically in itself? This paper will postulate that the relation between the urban and its temporal visibility is articulated by the fact that, unlike any other spatial order, it is both a space and a process (urbanization) born amidst what Reinhart Koselleck has called a great ‘inversion of the horizon of expectation’. If the knowledge of the urban ever since has been invested principally in mapping this space, these maps are a record of our efforts to incessantly grasp it, to contain its the expansive energies in frozen, legible form—to interiorize what is assumed to be an ahistorical force at work in the immediate present. While clearly an epistemological problem, I will argue that this perception of the urban has in recent years affected its spatial reproduction. By turning to New York City’s recent mega-project, Rebuild By Design, I will argue that the present is now the object of design. This project reveals a pathological attempt to reconstitute the urban through infrastructures and technologies that bind space and time in the totality of a singular and never ending present.

This paper will speculate on the historical emergence of the urban through the work of Spanish Engineer Ildefonso Cerdá (1815-1876) in order to describes the constitution of a new spatio-political order. Building on previous work, it will characterise the urban as a biopolitical apparatus whose mode of control revolved around the various technologies and channels of circulation, reducing the city to a machinic, expansive continuum composed of spaces of life’s enhancement (production) and those of life’s preservation (reproduction). However, by articulating a history of circulation previous to its entry into the city, as a key principle in the construction of territory, this paper will reconsider Cerdá’s idealism of circulation in order to advance an understanding of urbanization beyond that of its biopolitical capture of life. While Cerdá presents circulation as the origin of every design decision he made—the basis on which the urban unleashes a biopolitical space of administration—such an emphasis is unable to shed light on the territorial nature that the urban simultaneously demonstrates. Thus, the purpose of this paper will be to see circulation not only as a principle of design but rather as the signature of a territorial spatial order making its entrance for the first time in the space of the European city—it is the signature, in other words, of the reorganisation of political power in space.

It is impossible to deny the fundamental importance of the grid for the world’s first theory of urbanization—Cerdá’s Teoría general de la urbanización—as well as in its general deployment in ‘actually existing’ urbanization that unfolded across the planet over the course of the 150 years ever since. While for many historians the grid has played a central role in defining the urban (or the ‘modern city’), what many miss is the use of the grid as a metaphorical device for the depoliticization and neutralization of an otherwise overt spatio-political order devised in the name of unlimited circulation and domesticity. This paper will examine Cerdá’s work in an effort to demonstrate this usage.

'Everything in this century is leading towards the disappearance of limits, towards a general merging, and everything tends towards peace.'
Idefonso Cerdá, 1859
Circulation today dominates every part of urban design. We cannot imagine a world ordered outside of the supreme determinacy of patterns of movement: everything that matters circulates. Circulation is the central activity through which value is made visible and is the concrete register of ‘progress’. For this reason, infrastructure appears as the primary apparatus by which our global society mediates its needs. It is the material source of our crises as well as the diagram for their solutions. This is, however, not a new phenomenon.
From his earliest work in the 1850’s, Ildefonso Cerdá developed a concept that would occupy the center of his theories of urbanización and which drove his famous project, the Reform and Extension of Barcelona of 1859. This concept was what he called vialidad, or roughly ‘circulation’. While his positivist, liberal conception of the city was one which reduced it to the convenience of dwellings and a network of infrastructure connecting them, it becomes clear that the dominant of the two principles is that of circulation (or vialidad). Through this notion, Cerdá imagined the achievement of an earthly form of transcendence which no longer described an act of passage from one world to another, but rather designated a means of connecting the individual with an immanent universality bound up in the sentient link between the single dwelling and the totality of an urbanized society. Through vialidad, Cerdá envisioned a world civilized by and united in the freedom of unencumbered circulation; in a word, an urbanized world bearing no exterior to itself.
This paper will examine Cerdá’s notion of vialidad in conjunction with his General Theory of Urbanization in order to both trace its distinctively theological underpinnings and to chart the political foundations it provided for the modern, ‘generic city’.

Abstract for a paper that will be presented at the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) in Leeds. This paper is part of a larger session that I will be co-chairing with Adrian Lahoud entitled 'Machining Life: Architectural Theory and Regimes of Signs'

Paper abstract for 'Thinking Spatial Practices with and against Law', Birkbeck Institute for Social Research BISR), 19 June 2015. Organized by Thanos Zartaloudis (University of Kent School of Law, AA School of Architecture) & Başak Ertür (University of London, Birkbeck College, School of Law)

The urban, long a popular topic of inquiry, has become an unavoidable condition for contemporary life. For many disciplines, it has become a primary locus of research, giving birth to families of subdisciplines bearing its name. Disciplines as varied as sociology, anthropology, geography, literature, art, design, economics, history and politics increasingly find themselves in contact with and shaped by the urban. And as more and more spaces of the world are urbanized, the ubiquity of this category as a site of scholarly research could be said to rest on the urgency we face in accommodating ourselves to its contradictions, imposed forms of violence, and the environmental fallout it has unleashed. From all scales, we encounter the urban, too: popularized notions like the anthropocene shed light on this category just as much as the problem of uneven development that characterizes our everyday experiences in its spaces. Yet for as much as it has opened itself to scholarly research, there is oddly scant reflection on the category itself. Despite its irrefutable complexity, its use is often irrefutably reductive: it appears as a background condition, as much for life itself as for the many discourses that attempt to describe it. Always at the disposal of myriad forms of knowledge, it is the unquestioned specification for the definition of other problems. The urban, it seems, is a given.

This symposium opens with a simple yet perplexing question: what is the urban? It brings together a range of internationally renowned scholars in an effort less to provide answers to this question than to frame a problem that has yet to be fully constituted. What language do we need to speak about the urban? What spaces and politics does it produce? Does the urban have a history of its own? An ontological specificity? If so, what lies outside of its domain? Can we speak of the modern ‘rural’—the deterritorialized pastoral spaces of agrarian life, reterritorialized as machines of resource production and circulation—as in fact already urbanized? How does a site like Iowa allow us to understand and reimagine the ontological contours of the urban? As satellite imagery and remote sensing technologies pierce ever deeper into the natural world, translating its remoteness into maps of resource concessions to be distributed as future commodities, can we even say that ‘nature’ itself has, to some degree, been urbanized?
Indeed, despite possible appearances, one must also be cautious not to reduce the urban to a totality—a spatiality without an outside, immune to agency, change or strategic repurposing toward other ends. Thus, just as much as the symposium is a provocation to speculate on what the urban is, it will also be a solicitation to think through what it is not. What constitutes non- or extra-urban spaces and practices? What geographies, technologies, architectures or social practices resist their capture in ongoing processes of urbanization? What new spatial configurations have appeared that complicate what could otherwise be called ‘urban’? Does urbanization, now planetary in scale, harbor the mechanics to cancel itself out? While cautious of any romance toward a return to more innocent, pastoral times or a myopic turn toward localist imaginaries, how instead can globalized urban topographies and topologies be repurposed toward more positive, post-urban forms? How can one avoid the reformist trap that nearly all ‘urbanisms’ have fallen victim to, whose strategies invariably reproduce the urban unchecked under the twin guises of benevolence and novelty? Indeed, by simply addressing the urban as a problem in and of itself, the symposium aims to open radically new apertures toward a world increasingly viewed through its endlessly urbanized space.

Emerging philosophical, theoretical and conceptual apparatuses may be necessary to repose the urban outside of its traditional spatial and ontological frameworks. For instance, considering recent work in the humanities, what happens when we consider the urban to be a political ecology in its own right—a dense, complex, relational entanglement of human and non-human natures, embodied energies and materialities? What political forms and technologies does its spatial organization produce? Likewise, through juridico-political histories, the urban may begin to appear as a spatio-political order on par with a historical figure like territory, raising genealogical questions as to its emergence and formation. Can discourses on circulation, logistics and network theory be marshaled to confront the trans-scalar qualities that we observe in a spatial order visible at once at the planetary and the bodily scales? What kind of spatial theories can reconcile the geopolitical with the biopolitical?
In this regard, Peter Sloterdijk’s recent provocations around the notion of ‘world interior’ may shed crucial light on the question of the urban. Building on Walter Benjamin’s seminal work on the Paris Arcades, the ‘world interior’ operates as a metaphor to describe the end result of a long history of globalization, whose consistency is characterized by an overarching aversion to risk developed over centuries of plunderous oceanic crossing. ‘Interiorization’ for him stands as a tendency whose effect today is marked by sprawling insurance policies, unchecked security measures and a techno-media power structure whose effort to totally annihilate risk comes through endless structures and technologies of enclosure. The space of the world interior, akin to Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1851), is an interior so vast as to produce its own local weather conditions; an architecture so large as to make invisible its limits, permitting the fantasy that there is no outside; an object whose enclosures ensure not only absolute security to those inhabiting its striated interior, but that the apartheid inscribed onto the world without will remain beyond its horizon of immunized comfort. Moving from paradigm to ontology, how can such a notion of a ‘world-interior’ be useful for unfolding relations between the material, legal, social, political, architectural and phenomenological conditions of the urban today? How can it help to describe new socio-spatial ontologies of this category that transgress the familiar urban/rural, center/periphery, and even global south/north divides? What other emerging concepts and motifs can help capture the elusive yet omnipresent condition of the urban?

Installation in "The Competitive Hypothesis", an exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York City, in collaboration with Think Space, curated by Adrian Lahoud. January 2013. The image, a collage of corporate architectural renderings, was split into 6 layers, each one printed onto separate sheets of acrylic and mounted onto an in-wall light box creating a luminous diorama.

Abstract This paper revisits Nicholas Grimshaw’s Eden Project in Cornwall, UK to interrogate architecture’s relation to neoliberalism. It looks to this project as a means to open a speculative approach for architectural scholarship to engage neoliberal society. Eden, I argue, coordinates its spaces, technologies and objects to project a temporality that seems to lack both past and future in favor of presenting time as continuous, homogeneous, bound to the perpetual management of the present – what I call “ecological time”. This project shows that in the theater of neoliberal governmentality, the present is the object of design, and “design” becomes indistinguishable from the technological management of the world.

While ‘ecological urbanism’ promises the introduction of a new generation of apparatuses, exacting control ever more deeply within the social whole, the logic by which such networks of power operate has remained largely unchanged since the 19th century. This paper will demonstrate the persistence of this logic by placing ecological urbanism within a genealogy of the concept of urbanization. Looking at the work of Spanish civil engineer, Ildfonso Cerdá, I will examine his remarkably prescient theory in which he proposed to replace what he saw as the ‘anachronistic’ ciudad (city) with the ‘modern’ figure of the urbe—a generic, scaleless template of territorialization engulfed in expansive urbanización. The first part of the paper focuses on Cerdá's concept of vialidad (roughly, ‘circulation’), which formed the basis of his theory of urbanization and provided its origin in ‘nature’ itself. Urbanization was an effort to free mankind from political domination and recover it's ‘na...