ABSTRACT

As the technologies that now largely determine what it means to be an embodied subject bring into doubt who “we” thought we were, the world is becoming increasingly urbanized. What then is the relationship between the production of contemporary urban space and the new descriptions of bodies emerging from the biological sciences? What effect do new informational technologies have on how we conceive of cities and the way in which they are experienced? This chapter will explore the way that urban architectures and infrastructures have, since the nineteenth century, contributed to a cartography of exclusion and how “posturban” cities of the twenty-first century have, under the terms of neoliberal capitalism, inherited and escalated these tendencies. The proposition will be that new paradigms of corporeality point the way to a posthuman politics that recognizes the contingency of boundaries and requires the imagination of new urban forms and different modes of inhabitation.