Editorial: ‘You're surrounded … ’

Abstract

‘Urban residents are surrounded by discrepant infrastructural capacities … Being surrounded from all sides, and with such thick textures of surveillance and calculation, promises both the possibility of being really ‘pinned down’ and disappearing altogether.’ (AbdouMaliq Simone)¹

We are surrounded, negatively, by infrastructural capacities or, positively, extended by them? Or perhaps both, surrounded and extended? If so, in what proportions? And is it/was it ultimately a choice, or series of choices, ones that can still be made, or not?

And what are these externalities, contexts? Are they media/technologies or perhaps the one-time project of ‘the city’ now taking on the (increasingly alien?) form of urbanisation?

Or, beyond that, is there the now marginalised realm of the country/nature? And, ‘space’? Are those realms, best characterised perhaps as ‘nature’, outside or inside us?

If inside/outside, are we, somewhat paradoxically, surrounded by ourselves? Or by aspects of ourselves, whose inner/outer separation and possible distortion we need to recognise and address if we are to avoid ‘the promises [of] both the possibility of being really ‘pinned down’ and disappearing altogether’? Or … 

* * * *

Such questions and some answers are suggested by our special feature in this issue on infrastructures, from which AbdouMaliq Simone's words are taken, by papers from three other substantial projects, one on urbanisation by Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, with a reply from Richard Walker, a second on Africa by David Simon, and a third on technologised and politicised realms by Stephen Graham, now looking into ‘urban air’.

Introducing one of a series of particular temporal dimensions as explored in this journal, Melissa Wilson draws in part on a reading² of a particular period, looking into the early pages of City, an early stage of its project, as elites and ‘multitudes’, edged towards 2000, towards and away from ‘millennium.’

Further investigations are undertaken in papers on the nature of smart cities as contexts, on a possible basis for social transformation in Poland, and on London's class structure and struggles. Only the third, Mark Davidson and Elvin Wyly's paper following, as does Chris Hamnett, our occasional series on London's class structure, is touched on here.

We conclude with a return to Simone's thoughts on infrastructure's more than marginal role in social organisation and to a summing up and a polemical conclusion.

Notes

1 AbdouMaliq Simone (this issue).

2 Melissa Wilson (2015), “City's Holistic and Cumulative Project (1996–2016): (2) Towards Millennium?” City 19 (4): forthcoming. doi: 10.1080/13604813.2015.1034590

3 Graham is also working towards a major study, Vertical (Verso, 2017), covering many other aspects of the politics of verticality: elevators; housing; skyscrapers; plus sewers, walkways, flyovers, satellites, drones, geology … 

4 A more holistic or transdisciplinary (rather than multidisciplinary) extension, one attuned to epistemological dimensions, to all the approaches discussed above would require phenomenological expertise and practices, as deployed by David Abram (see his Becoming Animal, cited in Catterall (2013) and in Wilson (forthcoming) and subsequently and, particularly, in his The Spell of the Sensuous (1997), the chapter on non-urban air, ‘The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air’).

5 Wyly in a quote that provides the epigraph to our previous “Editorial: ‘Go viral or die trying’” – using a recent advertising slogan that seems to be a deliberate commercial send-up of a slogan, one coined in a seminal moment of working-class history, the Lyons silk-weavers revolt of 1831, as discussed by Paul Mason in his book Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global (2007) (see City 19 (1), p. 2).

6 Email from Hillary Angelo, March 2015.

Additional information

Bob Catterall is the Editor-in-Chief of CITY