ABSTRACT

Two questions frame this inquiry. How can the city enable citizens not merely to live, but to live well, that is, to find their way not only in a utilitarian sense, but also in a profounder sociocultural sense? How can the city provide not only the physical amenities but also the psychological contexts fundamental to a human life that connects person to community and to place?

While the inquiry is situated within a Western framework, cross-cultural references are also made—to Chinese landscape practices, and to the concept of Country in Australian Aboriginal culture—so as to foreground the importance of narrative to place, to signal parallel resonant indexes that can challenge and enrich Western perspectives, and to serve as a reparative counterpoint to contemporary urban trends pointing to a generalized virtualization and disembodiment of civic life. 

The inquiry draws on the themes of territorialization in Deleuze and Guattari, indiscernibility in Agamben, khôra (space) in Plato, Heidegger and Derrida, and the political registers in Plato’s paradigmatic cities, to venture an idea of the city as choreographing and scripting the conditions for a counteractive civic space of resistance: an urban commons that might unclench a circumstantially engaged polity.