ABSTRACT

Invoking the notion of ‘cosmopolitics’ from Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, this volume shows how and why cities constitute privileged sites for studying the search for and composition of common worlds of cohabitation. A cosmopolitical approach to the city focuses on the multiple assemblages of human and nonhuman actors that constitute urban common worlds, and on the conflicts and compromises that arise among different ways of assembling the city. It brings into view how urban worlds are always in the process of being subtly transformed, destabilized, decentred, questioned, criticized, or even destroyed. As such, it opens up novel questions as to the gradual and contested composition of urban life, thereby forcing us to pay more explicit attention to the politics of urban assemblages.

Focusing on changing sanitation infrastructures and practices, emerging forms of urban activism, processes of economic restructuring, transformations of the built environment, changing politics of expert-based urban planning, as well as novel practices for navigating the urban everyday, the contributions gathered in this volume explore different conceptual and empirical configurations of urban cosmopolitics: agencements, assemblies, atmospheres. Taken together, the volume thus aims at introducing and specifying a novel research program for rethinking urban studies and politics, in ways that remain sensitive to the multiple agencies, materialities, concerns and publics that constitute any urban situation.

chapter 1|22 pages

Introducing urban cosmopolitics

Multiplicity and the search for a common world

part 1|59 pages

Agencements

chapter 2|19 pages

Saving (in) a common world

Cosmopolitical instances from a low-budget urbanities perspective

chapter 3|18 pages

Infrastructural becoming

Sanitation, cosmopolitics, and the (un)making of urban life at the margins

chapter 4|19 pages

Im/mutable im/mobiles

From the socio-materiality of cities towards a differential cosmopolitics

part 2|81 pages

Assemblies

chapter 5|19 pages

Exploring urban controversies on retail diversity

An inquiry into the cosmopolitics of markets in the city

chapter 6|20 pages

Manifestations of the market

Public audiences and the cosmopolitics of voice in Buenos Aires

chapter 7|21 pages

The politics and aesthetics of assembling

(Un)building the common in Hackney Wick, London

chapter 8|17 pages

Matters of sense

Preoccupation in Madrid's popular assemblies movement

part 3|60 pages

Atmospheres

chapter 9|20 pages

The aesthetic composition of a common memory

Atmospheres of revalued urban ruins

chapter 10|19 pages

The cosmopolitics of ‘niching'

Rendering the city habitable along infrastructures of mental health care

chapter 11|18 pages

Water and air

Territories, tactics, and the elemental textility of urban cosmopolitics

part 4|20 pages

Afterword

chapter 12|18 pages

Whose urban cosmos, which urban cosmopolitics?

Assessing the route travelled and the one ahead