Living Cities: Towards a Politics of Conviviality

Abstract

In particular, through the notion of 'living cities' the author wants to articulate some significant challenges to the styles and practices of analysis institutionalized in scientific and policy procedures which characteristically presume and reinforce spatial divisions between civic and wild, town and country, human and nonhuman. The notion of living cities fleshes out a sense of ecological co-fabrication in which the life patterns and rhythms of people and other city dwellers are entangled with and against the grain of expert designs and blueprints. This conceptual shift from built environments to living cities is allied to a realignment of the politics of nature such that cities are appreciated as 'ecological disturbance regimes rather than ecological sacrifice zones' in which people are no longer considered inimical to nature. The theoretical impulse that threads through the politics of conviviality advanced here challenges the residual humanism that is differently inflected in both of the foregoing contributions.

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