Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-cjp7w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-05T06:45:23.087Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The technosphere: a new concept for urban studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2016

CHRIS OTTER
CHRIS OTTER*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210–1367, USA
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

According to the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability, ‘cities are responsible for 67% of the total global energy consumption and more than 70% of greenhouse gas emissions and these trends significantly intensify the severity of some of the two great challenges of our time; climate change and energy security’. Moreover, if cities are driving anthropogenic climate change, the effects are felt everywhere on earth, from glaciers to atolls, from oceans to the troposphere. It is no longer simply society that has been, to cite Henri Lefebvre, ‘completely urbanized’. The entire planet and its atmosphere have been subordinated to the metabolic demands of extremely large human settlements.

Type
Special Section on urban agency
Information
Urban History , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , February 2017 , pp. 145 - 154
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 ‘Sustainable urban futures’, http://urban.ias.unu.edu/index.php/cities-and-climate-change/ (accessed 15 Jun. 2015).

2 Lefebvre, H., The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis, 2003), 1 Google Scholar.

3 Stone, B. Jr, The City and the Coming Climate: Climate Change in the Places We Live (Cambridge, 2012), 13, 75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Ibid ., 90.

5 Ibid ., 85.

6 Otter, C., ‘Locating matter: the place of materiality in urban history’, in Bennett, T. and Joyce, P. (eds.), Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History, and the Material Turn (London, 2010)Google Scholar.

7 Park, R., ‘The city: suggestions for the investigation of human behavior in the urban environment’ [1916], in Sennett, R. (ed.), Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities (New York, 1969)Google Scholar; Harvey, D., The Urbanization of Capital: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore, 1985)Google Scholar; Schorske, C., Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1981)Google Scholar.

8 Cited in Donald, J., Imagining the Modern City (Minneapolis, 1999)Google Scholar.

9 For a particularly bracing, caustic argument, see Chibber, V., Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London, 2013)Google Scholar.

10 Coole, D. and Frost, S. (eds.), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, B. (ed.), Things (Chicago, 2004)Google Scholar; Brooke, J., Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (Cambridge, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Latour, B., Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar.

12 Ingold, T., ‘Materials against materiality’, Archaeological Dialogues, 14 (2007), 1–16 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Pickering, A., The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science (Chicago, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Easterling, K., Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London, 2014), 72 Google Scholar.

15 Ibid ., 73–5.

16 Ibid ., 74.

17 Hughes, T., ‘The evolution of large technological systems’, in Bijker, W.E., Hughes, T.P. and Pinch, T. (eds.), The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 76 Google Scholar.

18 McFarlane, C. and Rutherford, J., ‘Political infrastructures: governing and experiencing the fabric of the city’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32 (2008), 363–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Graham, S. and Marvin, S., Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London, 2001), 11 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Swygedouw, E., ‘Metabolic urbanization: the making of cyborg cities’, in Heynen, N., Kaika, M. and Swyngedouw, E. (eds.), In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism (New York, 2006)Google Scholar.

21 Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism.

22 Smil, V., Energy in World History (Boulder, 1994), 7 Google Scholar.

23 Sieferle, R.P., The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 2001)Google Scholar.

24 Barles, S., ‘Urban metabolism of Paris and its region’, Journal of Industrial Ecology, 13 (2009), 898–913 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Cited in Fishman, R., Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York, 1987), 75–6Google Scholar.

26 For a taxonomy of US suburban types, see Hayden, D., Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth (New York, 2003)Google Scholar.

27 Easterling, Extrastatecraft, 12.

28 Seitzinger, S. et al., ‘Planetary stewardship in an urbanizing world: beyond city limits’, Ambio, 41 (2012), 790 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Sievert, T., Cities without Cities: An Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt (London, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baccini, P. and Brunner, P., Metabolism of the Anthroposphere: Analysis, Evaluation, Design, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA, 2012)Google Scholar; Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi (Minneapolis, 1987)Google Scholar.

30 Haff, P.K., ‘Technology as a geological phenomenon: implications for human well-being’, Geological Society of London Special Publications, 395 (2014), 301–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Ibid ., 302.

32 Cox, S., Losing our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths about our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get through the Summer) (New York, 2010), 75–6Google Scholar.

33 Ibid ., 82.

34 Ibid ., 32.

35 Klepeis, N. et al., ‘The National Human Activity Pattern Survey (NHAPS): a resource for assessing exposure to environmental pollutants’, Journal of Exposure Analysis and Environmental Epidemiology, 11 (2001), 239 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

36 Floud, R., Fogel, R., Harris, B. and Hong, S. Chul, The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700 (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lieberman, D., The Story of the Human Body (New York, 2013), esp. 209–92Google ScholarPubMed.

37 Pachirat, T., Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (New Haven, 2011)Google Scholar.

38 Morton, T., Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis, 2013)Google Scholar.

39 Stapledon, R.G., The Land: Now and To-Morrow (London, 1935), 5 Google Scholar.

40 Ibid ., 30.

41 Morton, Hyperobjects, 27–37.

42 America's crumbling infrastructure’, Economist, 28 Jun. 2014.

43 S. Graham, ‘Urban metabolism as target: contemporary war as forced demodernization’, in Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw (eds.), In the Nature of Cities.

44 D. Zaborenko, ‘U.S. army works to cut its carbon “bootprint”’, Reuters, 27 Jul. 2008.