Preface/ Part 1: Political Anatomies Of Bodies And Cities/ Introduction/ 1 Darwin's Monsters/ 2 Metropolitan Others/ 3 Science & The Architectural Imaginary/ 4 Posthuman Urbanism/ Part 2: Monsters In The Metropolis/ 5 Parasites & Scavengers/ 6 Pirates and Vagabonds/ 7 Posturban Psychogeographies/ Conclusion: Towards a Posthuman Cartography of Urban Space
Debra Benita Shaw is a Reader in Cultural Theory at the University of East London. She is the author of Women Science & Fiction (2000), Technoculture: The Key Concepts (2008) and co-editor (with Maggie Humm) of Radical Space: Exploring Politics and Practice (2016).
If cartography creates representations of space that map bodies
into power, this vivid, original and utterly compelling book
hacks mapping to evoke alternative ontologies of existence within
hyper-surveilled prosumer cities crisscrossed by
endless commuter corridors and shopping junk. Posthuman Urbanism is
in fact a treasure map, one that engages acting rather than seeing.
Explore the many complex and inspiring paths that it contains to
find invaluable treasures: stories, imaginings and concepts hidden
in dark spaces that evade normalising twenty-four-hour
high security control; ways of doing and being that queer urban
planning and its belief that it can fix all social problems; ways
of becoming and escaping that draw energies from unexpected animal,
human, technoscientific, material mixtures. By analysing how
humanism and urbanism reinforce each other only to assert control
over our movements in city space, this provocative and bracing read
invites us to embrace posturban city spaces and, indeed, to make
them. Beneath the paving stones, the posthuman urban commons.
*Dimitris Papadopoulos, Reader in Sociology and Organisation at the
University of Leicester and author of Experimental Politics.
Technoscience, Alterontologies and More Than Social Movements (Duke
University Press)*
As the world becomes predominantly urban, and as humans become
increasingly entangled with other creatures and technologies, we
need to combine current urban sensibilities with a feel for
the posthuman condition. Combing cutting edge theories with
grounded observations, Debra Benita Shaw shows us the
neoliberal constitution as well as the promises of our
monstrous urban lives, pointing us towards a reconstituted urban
politics and praxis.
*Stephen Hinchliffe, Professor in Human Geography at the University
of Exeter*
Posthuman Urbanism will be useful to students and scholars
concerned with how city spaces and architecture include and exclude
certain subjects through designing operations like separation,
classification and disciplinary control. It is relevant to those
occupied with the intersections of cultural geography and ideology,
providing excellent insight into how humanism and urban space
interact to stabilise the idea of the human as well as how
posthumanism can disrupt the symbiotic relationship between urban
space and dominant ideologies.
*LSE Review of Books*
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