Apologies for cross postings.
Please circulate.*
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*Call for Papers: The Green Apparatus? Political Technologies of the
Sustainable City*
Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, 12-16th April 2011,
Seattle, USA.
Session organized by Stephanie Wakefield (CUNY Graduate Center) and Bruce
Braun (University of Minnesota)
“*Nature is the new civic ideal.*”
—Alexandros Washburn, Director of Urban Design for the NYC Department of
City Planning, from *Metropolis* magazine
We are commonly presented today with two diverging yet fundamentally
intertwined futures: one of high-tech, intelligently designed buildings
complete with hanging gardens and smiling families, and another of
ubiquitous environmental disaster composed of miasmic wildfires, violent
floods, and phantasmic oil spills. It is in this context that diverse
projects are being taken up by architects, theorists, designers, planners,
and citizens alike, which can in short be called Green Urbanism. Such
projects are not confined to the realm of the technical; rather, their scope
is at once diverse and wide, taking the lived environment, the habits and
gestures of bodies, the circulation of energies and matters, and the
population itself, as matters of concern.
This session is designed to explore the conjunction of biopolitics and the
diverse apparatuses of Green Urbanism. Following Michel Foucault, we deploy
the term apparatus (*dispositif*) to denote a heterogeneous set consisting
of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions,
laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, and philosophical,
moral and philanthropic propositions that constitute a response to a
specific urgency. We are further informed by two competing readings of
Foucault’s term: Giorgio Agamben’s elaboration and grounding of Foucault’s
schematic, particularly its ontological engagement and definition as “a
machine that produces subjectifications” and Gilles Deleuze’s affirmative
and pragmatic reading of *dispositif *as a “tangle of lines” that “are
subject to changes in direction, bifurcating and forked and subject to
drifting.”
We seek to bring together those engaged in investigating the material
processes of Green Urbanism: the actual technologies by which habits,
gestures, behaviors, desires, and practices of daily life are molded and
shaped, activated and mobilized, combined and cultivated, or improvised and
expanded. Is Green Urbanism the intensification of biopolitical control? A
site for new political imaginations and new political orders? Or something
else entirely?
Topics may include but are not limited to:
Materialist theories of subjectification
Political technologies of Green Urbanism
Apparatus/*dispositif *– Agamben v. Deleuze
Bodies, spaces, and habits
Political imaginations and the low-carbon city
Design for behavior change
Green citizenry*
Oikonomia*
Biopolitics/biopolitical production
Please send questions, ideas, or abstracts to *stephaniewakefield@xxxxxxxxx
* by October 15th.
Please circulate.*
*
*
*
*Call for Papers: The Green Apparatus? Political Technologies of the
Sustainable City*
Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, 12-16th April 2011,
Seattle, USA.
Session organized by Stephanie Wakefield (CUNY Graduate Center) and Bruce
Braun (University of Minnesota)
“*Nature is the new civic ideal.*”
—Alexandros Washburn, Director of Urban Design for the NYC Department of
City Planning, from *Metropolis* magazine
We are commonly presented today with two diverging yet fundamentally
intertwined futures: one of high-tech, intelligently designed buildings
complete with hanging gardens and smiling families, and another of
ubiquitous environmental disaster composed of miasmic wildfires, violent
floods, and phantasmic oil spills. It is in this context that diverse
projects are being taken up by architects, theorists, designers, planners,
and citizens alike, which can in short be called Green Urbanism. Such
projects are not confined to the realm of the technical; rather, their scope
is at once diverse and wide, taking the lived environment, the habits and
gestures of bodies, the circulation of energies and matters, and the
population itself, as matters of concern.
This session is designed to explore the conjunction of biopolitics and the
diverse apparatuses of Green Urbanism. Following Michel Foucault, we deploy
the term apparatus (*dispositif*) to denote a heterogeneous set consisting
of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions,
laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, and philosophical,
moral and philanthropic propositions that constitute a response to a
specific urgency. We are further informed by two competing readings of
Foucault’s term: Giorgio Agamben’s elaboration and grounding of Foucault’s
schematic, particularly its ontological engagement and definition as “a
machine that produces subjectifications” and Gilles Deleuze’s affirmative
and pragmatic reading of *dispositif *as a “tangle of lines” that “are
subject to changes in direction, bifurcating and forked and subject to
drifting.”
We seek to bring together those engaged in investigating the material
processes of Green Urbanism: the actual technologies by which habits,
gestures, behaviors, desires, and practices of daily life are molded and
shaped, activated and mobilized, combined and cultivated, or improvised and
expanded. Is Green Urbanism the intensification of biopolitical control? A
site for new political imaginations and new political orders? Or something
else entirely?
Topics may include but are not limited to:
Materialist theories of subjectification
Political technologies of Green Urbanism
Apparatus/*dispositif *– Agamben v. Deleuze
Bodies, spaces, and habits
Political imaginations and the low-carbon city
Design for behavior change
Green citizenry*
Oikonomia*
Biopolitics/biopolitical production
Please send questions, ideas, or abstracts to *stephaniewakefield@xxxxxxxxx
* by October 15th.