Rethinking Materialities in Urban Geography

Progress in Human Geography
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Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies

Alan Latham and Derek P. McCormack
Prog Hum Geogr 2004; 28; 701
DOI: 10.1191/0309132504ph515oa
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Progress in Human Geography 28,6 (2004) pp. 701 -724
Moving cities: rethinking the

materialities of urban geographies
School of Geography, University of Southampton, Highfield,
Southampton S01 7 1 BJ, UK
Abstract: In this paper we offer a discussion of the 'materiality' of the urban. This discussion is
offered in the context of recent calls in various areas of the discipline for the necessity of
'rematerializing' human geography. While we agree with the spirit of these calls, if human
geography (and, within that, urban geography) is going to return to the material, let alone
articulate some kind of rapprochement between the 'material' and 'immaterial', it needs to be
clear about the terms it is employing. Therefore, and drawing on a range of work from
contemporary cultural theory, sociology, urban studies, urban history, architectural theory and
urban geography, we sketch out more precisely what a 'rematerialized' urban geography
might involve. Crucially, we argue that, rather than 'grounding' urban geography in more
'concrete' realities, paying increased attention to the material actually requires a more
expansive engagement with the immaterial. In developing this argument we outline some
important conceptual vehicles with which to work up an understanding of the material as
processually emergent, before offering two pathways along which the materialities of the
urban might be usefully apprehended, pathways that avoid simple oppositions between the
'material' and 'nonmaterial' while also restating the importance of understanding the complex
spatialities of the urban.
Key words: materiality, urban geography, mobility, affect, sociality.
I Introduction
So let us not place any particular value on the city's name. Like all big cities it was made up of irregularity, change, forward spurts, failures to keep step, collisions of objects and interests, punctuated
by unfathomable silences; made up of pathways and untrodden ways, of one great rhythmic beat as
well as the chronic discord and mutual displacement of all its contending rhythms. All in all, it was
like a boiling bubble inside a pot made of the durable stuff of building laws, regulations and historical traditions.
(Musil, 1995: 4)
In a recent review article in this journal, Lees (2002) suggested that human geography could learn much from contemporary trends in urban geography, particularly
.u11", Arnold 2004
10.1 191/0309132504ph515oa
702
if it is to ease its increasing disquiet about the theoretical and empirical implications
of the 'cultural turn'. As Lees (following Philo, 2000) suggests, more than a decade
after geography's enthusiastic embrace of the 'immaterial', something rather curious
is afoot. A number of the original champions of the 'new cultural geography' have
begun raising doubts about its intellectual trajectory (Jackson, 2000; Philo, 2000;
see also Thrift, 1999; 2000a; 2000b). The problem is apparently straightforward.
Where the early proponents for a new cultural geography argued that culture (and
all that this term implies) needed to be given a more central place in the theoretical
and empirical concerns of human geographers, now it seems the only thing that
'matters' is culture, and particularly symbolic, representational and 'nonmaterial'
cultural forms and processes. Human geography's newfound obsession with the
'immaterial' seems to have made it inattentive to the actual, everyday materiality
of the places in which people actually dwell (Philo, 2000).
What, then, is to be done to remedy this situation? Lees's view is that there is a
need to negotiate some sort of rapprochement between cultural geography and
those strands of human geography that have remained resolutely materialist in orientation. While this echoes Philo's (2000) and (to a lesser degree) Jackson's (2000) call
for a rematerialized cultural geography, Lees's argument differs because of her
suggestion that urban geography offers a particularly useful model of how this
rapprochement might take place. Thus, according to Lees (2002: 101):
Because of its subdisciplinary history - its relatively greater attachment to quantitative and applied
work, the strong influence of political economy, and the long tradition of empirical and practical
research - urban geography was relatively late to embrace the cultural turn.
The result is that urban geography has - as much by accident as design - steered
clear of many of the cultural 'excesses' of other parts of the discipline (Lees, 2002:
101). In fact, in Lees's account, over the past decade urban geographers have actually
been unobtrusively and selectively retooling themselves as acute interpreters of
the materiality of those cultural processes central to the structuring of urban spaces.
As Lees observes (2002: 109):
A quick glance at the 'new' urban geography, tells us that, contrary to popular opinion, the subdiscipline is thriving [... .1. Indeed, it is more than thriving; it is located on the cutting edge of geographical
research that seeks to link the material and the immaterial.
Lees's account is an appealing and optimistic take on both urban geography and its
relation to important debates about the direction and future of theoretical and
empirical trends in human geography. It advocates the return of urban geography
to the centre of the discipline as part of a reinvigorated programme of study of
the contemporary city. Yet it is also an account that on closer reading we find
problematic, and for at least three reasons.
First, it is not enough to invoke notions of 'the material' or 'materiality' in such a
way that they serve as a gritty reality check to the theoretical abstractions of human
geography, about which there remains a remarkably high degree of suspicion. A
degree of such suspicion seeps into Lees's piece, and is particularly evident in her
nervousness about the 'immaterial', a concept that she juxtaposes to the 'material',
that is to say, the 'real', world. While Lees acknowledges that the distinction between
the 'material' and the 'immaterial' is not so straightforward, any effort to articulate a
'rematerialized' urban, or indeed human, geography, will of necessity not be realized
until the complexities of this relation are addressed. Indeed, how human geography
703
is going to define (or erase) this relation is precisely the key theoretical and empirical
question driving much of the most important culturally inflected work in human
geography (Whatmore, 2002; Kearns, 2003). As such, it is also central to the question
of what any kind of rematerialized human geography (cultural, urban or otherwise)
will look like - what it takes as legitimate objects for study, its theoretical-empirical
style, and its standards of evidence.
However, and secondly, any call for a rematerialized human geography serves to
complicate and multiply rather than consolidate the reference points by which this
work proceeds. There are many materialities at play in the work of human and
urban geographers. The materiality central to political economy is not the same as
that invoked by calls for a renewed exploration of 'material culture' (Jackson,
2000). Add to the mix the onto-epistemological orientations grouped together
under the names of actor-network theory and nonrepresentational theory and the
nature(s) of things are complicated further (see, for instance, Castree, 2002). Clearly,
the different concepts of materiality and the material running through various
strands of geographical thinking are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Our
intention here is not to review and offer some rapprochement between these
approaches (some of which are badly served by their very labelling as 'approaches').
Rather, situated within and we hope speaking to wider debates about the materiality
of human geographies, our concern is more specific, and centres on the need to
properly debate and work through what exactly is involved in calls for a rematerialized
urban geography. In particular, we want to argue for the importance to urban geography of a notion of the material that admits from the very start the presence and
importance of the immaterial, not as something that is defined in opposition to the
material, but as that which gives it an expressive life and liveliness independent of
the human subject (Dewsbury et al., 2002; Kearns, 2003; Latham, 2003a).
Thirdly, running parallel to this conceptual concern, it strikes us that the kind of
vision of a new urban geography articulated by Lees seems to pay little attention
to many of the empirical contexts that make the urban a productive and exciting
area for research. It is not clear what is to be the relation between the materiality outlined by Lees and the technologies and infrastructures which give cities their coherence, the forms of practical embodiments that make up the everyday functioning of
any city, to say nothing of the uncanny natures that inhabit the urban (Whatmore,
2002; Wolch, 2002). Whatever is the exact relation, it is important that any notion
of the material is not used in some way to marginalize or downplay the importance
of particular areas of urban life and living.
By engaging with the issues raised by Lees's timely intervention, we aim therefore
to contribute to recent efforts to rethink the urban within a renewed problematizing
of materiality within human geography. One of the most significant of these efforts
has been provided by Amin and Thrift (2002). While we do not want to engage here
in a substantive review of a work that is already generating productive debate
(e.g., Moore et al., 2003), we do take some useful orientation from the way in
which Amin and Thrift engage with questions of the urban not as a way to return
to some sort of 'grounded' material reality, but rather as a way to open up and
multiply the pathways along which the complex materialities of the urban might
be apprehended. Such an engagement draws further support from the vigorous
and growing literature on the materialities of the city in disciplines such as sociology
(Clark, 2000; Beckmann, 2001; Katz, 1999; Sheller and Urry, 2000; Urry, 2000; Wachs
704
and Crawford, 1990), anthropology (Auge, 1995; Miller, 2001; Shields, 1998), history
(Fischer, 1992; Holtz Kay, 1997; Sennett, 1994; Schivelbusch, 1979; 1988; Sachs, 1984;
Solnit, 2001; Wollen and Kerr, 2002; Worpole, 2000) and architectural theory (Lerup,
2000; Biemann, 2003; Borden, 2001; Borden et al., 2001; Meurs and Verheijen, 2003;
Prigge, 1998), in addition to human geography (Amin and Thrift, 2002; Dowling,
2000; Gandy, 2002; Graham and Marvin, 2001; Latham, 1999a; 1999b; Merriman,
2003; Swyngedouw, 1996; 1999; Thrift, 1996; 1997a; 1997b; 1999; Whatmore and
Hinchliffe, 2003).
By drawing on these literatures, what we want to do in the following pages is to
provide a series of lines that can contribute to rediagramming of the materialities of
urban geography. This account is not intended to be comprehensive. Rather, our aim
is more modest, and consists of three parts. In the first part of the paper we outline
some of the necessary terms of reference for beginning to rethink the materiality of
the urban. In doing this, we argue that the material does not provide the ontological
or political 'concreteness' required by those who express disquiet with the cultural
turn. Furthermore, we also argue that, rather than 'grounding' the immaterial, paying increased attention to the material actually demands that we begin to take
seriously the real force of the immaterial. In the second part of the paper, we outline
some conceptual vehicles that can effectively facilitate an engagement with the materialities of the urban. In the third part of the paper, we outline two material pathways, the first organized around questions of mobility and the second around
questions of psychoactive substances, each of which, as we illustrate, is actively
implicated in distinctive forms of sociality and urbanity.
11 The necessity of excess
For the last ten minutes he had been ticking off on his stopwatch the passing cars, trucks, trolleys,
and pedestrians, whose faces were washed out by the distance, timing everything whirling past
that he could catch in the net of his eye. He was gauging their speeds, their angles, all the living
force of mass hurtling past that drew the eye to follow them like lightning, holding on, letting go,
forcing the attention for a split second to resist, to snap, to leap in pursuit of the next item ...
then, after doing the arithmetic in his head for a while, he slipped the watch back into his pocket
with a laugh and decided to stop all this nonsense ...
(Musil, 1995: 6-7)
To begin, we want to engage with that tendency, identified and reiterated by Lees
and others, to define the material variously as the actual, the concrete and the real,
a definition in which the material is given a reassuring solidity in opposition to
the immaterial, the abstract and the unreal. This distinction is important because it
provides the very critical and conceptual purchase for any argument for 'rematerializing' as way of avoiding the 'immaterial excesses' of cultural geography (Lees,
2002: 101). There is a real sense here that much of the work of culturally inflected
human geography has become too concerned with phenomena and processes that
are not 'anchored' in the lived, material reality of everyday life. However, we wish
to suggest that the problem with such work is not the fact that it has engaged excessively with the immaterial, but, in contrast, that it has not engaged with sufficient
conceptual complexity with the importance of excess to any notion of the material.
Put another way, we cannot simply rein things in and root them. It is not enough
to use the 'material' and 'materiality' in such a way as to invoke a realm of reassuringly
705
tangible or graspable objects defined against a category of events and processes that
apparently lack 'concreteness'. Rather, we only begin to properly grasp the complex realities of apparently stable objects by taking seriously the fact that these realities are
always held together and animated by processes excessive of form and position. This
is not the same as saying that the material world only makes sense, or comes to 'matter',
within performatively iterative discursive economies of representation and representational practices (Butler, 1990; 1993; Nelson, 1999). Instead, the immaterial needs to
be understood more expansively so as to include the prepersonal force of a multiplicity
of nonrepresentational forces and practices and processes through which matter is
always coming into being (Dewsbury, 2000; Thrift, 2000a). This more expansive notion
of the immaterial is important because it draws attention to the force of what
Massumi, following Deleuze, calls the virtual dimension of the material, the 'pressing
crowd of incipiencies and tendencies' that accompanies an event or object (Massumi,
2002a: 30).
To speak of the material is, therefore, to have already invoked the excessive potential of the immaterial. Or, as Guattari (1995: 103) puts it, 'there is no effort bearing on
material forms that does not bring forth immaterial entities'. As a result, invoking
materiality does not necessarily offer a 'solid', or 'concrete', foundation to which
the immaterializing tendencies of the cultural turn might be tethered. Indeed, the
tendency to demand, for instance, that theory justify itself in relation to something
more concrete is actually a tactic that postpones a fuller understanding of
the material. This is not least because concrete itself, or indeed any other building
material, is not 'brute matter'. It is a particular aggregate organization of process
and energy. It is no more (or less) 'real' than apparently 'immaterial' phenomena
like emotion, mood and affect, although it has a different duration and threshold
of consistency. As Mackenzie (2002: 47-48) puts it:
The brick is a domain in which different realities have been transduced or mediated. Making a brick
[...] links 'realities of heterogeneous domains'. The technicity of brick - its durability, resistance to
weathering, capacity to bear certain kinds of load, the bond the mortar can make to it - emerges from
the mediation of different domains. The capacity of the material to be moulded is itself the outcome
of a series of transformative operations. The clay must be prepared, for instance, so that it is homogeneous, plastic, and yet able to maintain consistency so that it can take on contours without spilling
like water. [...] The materialized form and prepared material interact through a set of energetic
exchanges which transform the potential energy of the clay under pressure into a stable, determinate
equilibrium.
Thus, to argue for the importance of materiality is in fact an argument for apprehending different relations and durations of movement, speed and slowness rather than
simply a greater consideration of objects. This is particularly important in terms of
the effort to think through the materiality of body, an effort that has an important
role to play in any attempt to think through the materiality of the city. Geographers
have clearly begun to develop such an engagement (e.g., Longhurst, 1997; Hall,
2000), an effort often characterized by calls to 'embody' human geographies of various kinds. Here, embodying cultural geography appears as an act through which
the free-floating, disembodied theorizing of geography may be retethered in a fleshy
reality. However, as Massumi has argued, the implications of thinking through the
corporeal are not as straightforward as might be imagined. This is not least because
'when a body is in motion, it does not coincide with itself. It coincides with its own
transition: its own variation' (Massumi, 2002a: 5). As a result, continues Massumi,
706
'far from regaining a concreteness, to think the body in movement thus means
accepting the paradox that there is an incorporeal dimension of the body. Of it, but
not it. Real, material, but incorporeal. Inseparable, coincident, but disjunct. If this
is "concrete", the project originally set out on will take some severe twists' (2002a:
4-5, emphasis in original).
This twist in what is assumed to be the 'concrete' is as pertinent to any effort to 'rematerialize' urban geography as it is to 'embody geography'. Indeed, the excessive materiality of the body is not simply analogous to that of the city. It is also creatively
implicated. This is important because it also provides some purchase on the diversity
of the powers of the city. In particular, an engagement with the materiality of the
urban should not be taken as an excuse to shoehorn a strong version of political economy back to the front of a concern with 'real' issues. Instead, any materially engaged
urban geography must be based upon an appreciation of the fact that affective economies
are as important as political and symbolic economies (see Amin and Thrift, 2002). Affective
economies are here not understood solely in terms of the personal, quantified and qualified realm of emotion. Rather, the force of affect operates prior to the personal quality
of emotion, in both an ontogenetic and temporal sense. Affect is a felt but impersonal,
visceral but not neatly corporeal, force of intensive relationality (Massumi, 2002; McCormack, 2003). The affective materiality of the urban is not therefore reducible to the
emotional experience of the city. Rather, to speak of the affective materiality of the
urban is to speak of the intensity of the relations in and through which it consists,
relations that are always more than personal and are always playing out before the
reflective event of thought kicks in. It is to take seriously the fact that much of what happens in the world happens before this happening is registered consciously in cognitive
thinking (Harrison, 2000; Massumi, 2002a; Latham, 1999a). It is to pay more attention to
the fact that when (Massumi, 2002a: 60):
Walking down a dark street at night in a dangerous part of town, your lungs throw a spasm before
you consciously see and can recognize as human the shadow thrown across your path. As you cross
a busy noonday street, your stomach turns somersaults before you consciously hear and identify the
sound of screeching brakes that careen towards you. Having survived the danger, you enter your
building.
III The necessity of abstraction

Such aimless, purposeless strolling through a town vitally absorbed in itself, the keenness of perception increasing in proportion as the strangeness of the surrounding intensifies, heightened still
further by the connection that it is not oneself that matters but only this mass of faces, these movements wrenched loose from the body to become armies of arms, legs, or teeth, to all of which the
future belongs - all this can evoke the feeling that being a whole and inviolate strolling human
being is positively antisocial and criminal.
(Musil, 1995: 786)
If the matter of the 'concrete' or material is not as solid as might be assumed then
there is a problem with suggesting that contemporary accounts within human
geography are too abstract to apprehend the material. Instead, to paraphrase
Massumi, 'the problem with the dominant models in cultural [geography] is not
that they are too abstract to grasp the concreteness of the real. The problem is that
they are not abstract enough to grasp the real incorporeality of the concrete' (2002a: 5,
emphasis in original).
707
Thus, rather than making calls for fewer abstract engagements with the world,
we need to consider more fully how the process of abstraction actually allows us
to draw out, and also to become implicated in, the excessive force of materiality.
What kinds of conceptual vehicles might then allow us to apprehend the powers
of these necessarily excessive materialities? Here we want to list four.
First, we can apprehend these materialities as emergent. They are emergent in that
the sense of the urban is an ongoing outcome of the interaction between a myriad of
small-scale self-organizing processes that are not determined by a central controlling
or decision-making unit (Johnson, 2001; Clark, 1998; Massumi, 2002a; Latham,
2003b). In saying this, we are not suggesting that cities are happy-go-lucky places
where anything can happen. Nor are we suggesting that the planning, development
and so on do not shape and reshape the city. Rather, our point is that in so far as we
can speak of a sense of the urban as something that is about the relations between
human and nonhuman forms of life then this sense is not determined by some undergirding structural logic. Nor, importantly, is this emergent quality of the urban a
question of the performative force of discursive practices. It is also a question of
the virtualizing potential of affect, the difference immanent to the ongoing interaction and performance of a multiplicity of relations.
Secondly, the emergent materiality of the urban can be apprehended as machinic
(Amin and Thrift, 2002). By this we mean that the urban can be understood in
terms of the machine as a mode of organization rather than the form of an object.
As Guattari suggests, the machinic can be understood in terms of the relations
between components, relations that are not necessarily dependent upon the components themselves. In this definition 'the organization of a machine thus has no
[necessary] connection with its materiality' (1995: 39). The machinic is resolutely
abstract, a mode of organization that is immanent to the matter of form. Furthermore,
in this definition the machinic as a category is installed prior to technology. As
Guattari observes, 'common usage suggests that we speak of the machine as a subset
of technology. We should, however, consider the problematic of technology as
dependent on machines, and not the inverse. The machine would become the
prerequisite for technology rather than its expression' (Guattari, 1995: 33). While
apparently counterintuitive, this notion of the machinic is important because it
provides a way of apprehending modes of organization that are not necessarily
immediately identifiable as technology. Instead, the materiality of the city is seen to
be emergent transversally from technical machines, but also from social, linguistic,
cognitive and corporeal machines. Such a notion of the machinic also allows a move
away from thinking of the urban in terms of the relation between bodies and machines
in such a way as to invoke an already assumed and defined materiality of both. Rather,
it provides a way of understanding this relation in terms of its emergence between
corporeal and machinic materialities, relations that may display systematic tendencies
without being structural (see Beckmann, 2001; Mackenzie, 2002).
There are, however, important ways in which the relations between different
machinic organizations of materiality can be apprehended. Thus, and thirdly, the
emergent, machinic materiality of the urban can be apprehended diagrammatically.
Three related deployments of the diagram are important here. The first is drawn
from Deleuze's (1988) reading of Foucault's work, in which the diagram is a map
of the immanent relations of power involving both discursive and nondiscursive
forces. The second source for such diagrammatic apprehension of the city is
708
contemporary architectural theory and criticism (Lynn, 1998; Rajchman, 1998;

Eisenman, 1999; Somol, 1999; Vidler, 2001). In such work the diagram is deployed
not as a representation of future activity, but rather as a generative device, 'projective
in that it opens new (or, more accurately, "virtual") territories for practice' (Somol,
1999: 23). If the invocation of such work (because it sometimes veers towards hyperbole) seems to restrict the diagrammatic materiality of the city to an elitist realm of
architectural practice (or indeed to tired rehearsals of discourses about the city as
panoptic space), a third deployment of the term stretches its connectivity further.
This is also articulated by Deleuze and Guattari (1988), for whom a diagrammatic
style of thinking provides a cartography through which to apprehend the eventful
creativity of materiality in terms of the relations between different lines of movement.
While these mutually supportive notions of the diagram provide a way of understanding the ethico-aesthetic resonances of various urban-based artistic and performative practices, a range of ordinary spaces and spacings can be apprehended
diagrammatically (McCormack, 2005). Consider, for example, football. The importance
of football in the life of cities can clearly be understood in relation to a range of discursive and political economies. Yet it is remarkable how little attention is paid to the game
itself, to what holds this game together, to what gives it an expressive potential. This
does not mean ignoring the context within which football takes place. Rather, it means
paying more attention to the fact that football is as much a matter of affective power
as it is a matter of ideology or political economy. It is the field, and the events and relations
it potentializes, that are crucial here (Massumi, 2002a). As far as this field is concerned, the
lines of a pitch do not simply contain. Rather, they diagrammatically organize corporeal
and affective forces, often in mundane circumstances, and often without being visible.
As Seamus Heaney (1991: 8), in his poem Markings, puts it:
We marked the pitch: four jackets for four goalposts,
That was all. The corners and squares
Were there like longitude and latitude
Under the bumpy thistly ground, to be
Agreed about or disagreed about
When the time came.
Beyond football, one might think of games like hopscotch and a whole host of diagrammatic territories that organize the affective potential of corporeal machines
and pedestrian protomachines (footpaths, playgrounds) into an animated space in
which there are, perhaps, 'girls playing jacks and jumping double dutch. Boys at boxball, marbles and ringolievio. Five boys each with a foot in a segmented circle that
had names of countries marked in the wedges. China, Russia, Africa, France, and
Mexico. The kid who is it, stands at the centre of the circle with a ball in his hand
and slowly chants the warning words: I de-clare a-war u-pon' (DeLillo, 1997: 662).1
Fourthly and finally, the materiality of the urban can also be understood as expressive. This is not the expressiveness of the individual subject, however, nor is it the
expressiveness of festivals or staged events. Rather, it is the expressiveness emerging
in relations and events transversal to bodies, subjects and objects. As Massumi
(2002b: xxi) puts it:
Expression is not in a language-using mind, or in a speaking subject vis a vis its objects. Nor is it
rooted in an individual body. It is not even in a particular institution, because it is precisely the institutional system that is in flux. Expression is abroad in the world - where the potential is for what
may become. It is non-local, scattered across a myriad of struggles over what manner of life-defining
709
nets will capture and contain that potential in reproducible articulations, or actual functions. Determinate minds, subjects, bodies, objects, and institutions are the result. The subject, its embodiment,
the meanings and objects it might own, the institutions that come to govern them, these are all
conduits through which a movement of expression streams.
This emphasis on the nonsubjectifying and nondetermined expressive event of

urban materiality is important because of what we feel is the necessity of refusing
to write or read off the feeling, style or atmosphere of a particular place as the 'effect'
of some already determined relations. Rather, what we need to take more seriously is
the fact that the expressive quality of urban materiality is not necessarily a cynical
aesthetic veneer that needs to be stripped away to get to reality. The expressiveness
of place is a constitutive part of its mix, the event of its moving materiality.
IV Pathways of urban materiality
Automobiles shot out of deep, narrow streets into the shallows of bright squares. Dark clusters of
pedestrians formed cloudlike strings. Where more powerful lines of speed cut across their casual
haste they clotted up, then trickled on faster, and after a few oscillations, resumed their steady
rhythm. Hundreds of noises wove themselves into a wiry texture of sound with barbs protruding
here and there, smart edges running along it and subsiding again, with clear notes splintering off
and dissipating.
(Musil, 1995: 3)
Much of the above may appear overly 'abstract' and 'theoretical'. Indeed, a common
criticism of the kind of approach we are arguing for is that its 'excessive theorizing'
gets in the way of doing significant, important, empirically orientated research. We
can see how readers might be attracted by such an argument. When Lees and others
(see, for example, Eade and Mele, 2002) argue for a refocusing on the material
through a reconsideration of political economy, there is something comfortingly familiar about the terrain we are being asked to turn towards. However, as we have
already suggested above, the productiveness of the approach we are arguing for
lies not only in how it allows a more subtle negotiation of the boundary between
the 'real' and 'imagined', the 'material' and 'immaterial'. Its productivity is also a
function of how it helps open up a range of novel and productive ways of thinking
about how the urban comes to have the structure and consistency that it does - and
that it does so in ways that a straightforward return to political economy fails to
address adequately.
In part, this is because of the role we understand thinking to play in any effort
to 'rematerialize' human geography. Rather than understanding such an effort as a
way of 'anchoring' theory in the nuts-and-bolts 'thingyness' of the world, we see
it of necessity as a process by which conceptual vehicles charge and activate the
detail of the world with an enlivening potential, a potential whose creative dimensions are as important as any of its critical dimensions (Massumi, 2002a), dimensions
that do not necessarily 'add up' (Dewsbury et al., 2002). Furthermore, we consider
it necessary to reiterate the obvious but often overlooked fact that thinking conceptually is no less material than building bricks, or by that token, than producing
policy documents. Thinking is not something that gets in the way of our engagements with, or moves us away from, the 'real' world, but instead it provides a
way, admittedly modest, of apprehending, valorizing and intervening in the multiplicitous affects and relations through which the materialities of this reality are
710
emergent (Edelman and Tononi, 2000; Connolly, 2002; Amin and Thrift, 2002;
Whatmore, 2002). In turn, in addition to evidence and effects, the power of this thinking has as much to do with its affects, with the ways in which it connects, in unexpected and unanticipated ways, with other modes of thinking, as with other modes
of thinking, moving and feeling (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988; 1994).
Thus, in the remainder of this article we want to map out two exemplary pathways
along and through which the materialities of the urban might be apprehended. While
there are any number of apparently 'new' practices and technologies through which
this effort might be pursued, here we have chosen to concentrate on rather more
prosaic yet enduring examples. With respect to the first pathway, automobility, we
wish to briefly outline how the ideas developed in the discussion above might
be brought to bear on a long-established area of critical debate, thereby allowing
us to multiply the ways in which the materialities of this issue might be apprehended. With respect to the second, psychoactive substances, we aim to show how
the above discussion forces us to think seriously about active elements of the urban
that have for the most part been ignored by human geographers. In both cases,
however, we briefly point to the ways in which particular pathways of materiality
are implicated in the production and consumption of particular kinds of sociality
and urbanity.
1
Automobile urbanities
The first pathway of materiality with which we wish to engage is organized around
the idea of mobility. While the issue of mobility embraces a wide range of practices
and possibilities (e.g., Solnit, 2001), here we wish to limit our attention to automobility. This issue is receiving increased attention both in geography and beyond
(Eyerman and Lofgren, 1995; Urry, 2000; Miller, 2001; Beckmann, 2001), but here
we focus in particular on how the kinds of sociality and urbanity associated with
automobility are the ongoing outcoming of particular configurations of the material.
Of course, it is hardly original to point out the enormous impact of mass automobile ownership on western cities. As far back as the early decades of the last
century, social commentators, architects and urban planners were declaring the
transformational qualities of the automobile. Lamenting the conservatism of architecture in general in 1923, Le Corbusier wrote (in Vers une architecture) of the need
'to use the motor-car as a challenge to our houses and great buildings' (in Wollen
and Kerr, 2002: 22). At the same time, Marinetti was writing hyperbolic celebrations
of the power of the automobile human-machine hybrid, while in ever-pragmatic
America city boosters and property developers saw how the automobile could
open out the city for a new form of property speculation. No longer speaking of a
single definable city, in 1931 the Californian real-estate commissioner Stephen
Bornson (in Fishman, 1987: 155) wrote of how he saw 'California as a deluxe
subdivision - a hundred million acre project'. By the 1950s and 1960s, geographers
and urban planners were no longer debating the desirability or otherwise of a possible automobile city; they were trying to come to terms with the phenomenal expansion of the spatial scale of cities engendered through mass automobility. Writers like
Brian Berry (1973) and Melvin Webber (1964) described the rise of a new kind of
sprawling, low-density metropolis. This was a city no longer defined by any obvious
spatial centre, but rather by its key transportation nodes and intersections - the
711
world of Webber's (1964) 'non-place urban realm'. If a good deal of academic debate
was focusing on how this automobilized sprawl was drawing the life out of
traditional cities (see Whyte, 1957; Jacobs, 1961; Lynch, 1961), there were also those
academics who (along with the wider populace) saw the pleasures of an automobile-orientated urbanity. Peter Hall (1969: 272) for one, in his prescient book
London 2000, envisaged a possible future London stretching out from Cambridge
to Brighton and woven together by a vast network of high-speed 'expressways'.
These motorways would be as much aesthetic as technological wonders: 'London's
expressways are a brilliant sight [ .. ] now trenching over the side of railways, now
flying over rooftops, now burrowing through the heart of reconstructed shopping
and office centres.'
For all that, what is interesting about the phenomenon of mass automobile ownership is how little serious social scientific attention has been paid to the emergence
of what - following Beckmann (2001) - can usefully be called the automobilization
of our cities. Urry's (2000) recent observation that sociology has 'barely noticed ...
automobility' applies equally well to human geography. Urry's argument is not
that nothing has been written about automobiles. His argument is that automobiles
have been treated as little more than background noise to the social transformations
of which they have clearly played a central role. In a purifying move that echoes
Latour's (1993; see also 1999) argument about the modern constitution, the implicit
assumption has been that the epochal changes associated with the rise of automobility would somehow have happened with or without the specific invention of the
automobile and the modes of experiential embodiment in which it is implicated.
But these elements of automobility are not incidental to the profound and often
unexpected and unappreciated ways in which the urban landscape is encountered,
imagined and organized. As Urry writes, 'the car's significance is that it reconfigures
civil society involving distinct ways of dwelling, travelling and socializing in, and
through, an automobilized time-space. Civil societies of the west are civil societies
of automobility' (Urry, 2000: 59). Yet, despite this, until recently little work has
examined the profoundly visceral and corporeal ways in which automobility
shapes our relationship to the urban (e.g., Katz, 1999; Amin and Thrift, 2002).
How then should we attempt to apprehend the kinds of emergent materiality
implicated in automobility? While it is tempting to see the dominance of 'automobility' as the product of some kind of overarching ideological superstructure, this is not
very helpful for at least three reasons (Crang, 2002). First, it fails to engage with the
remarkably popular affective resonance of the mass-produced automobile (see
Sachs, 1984; Brandon, 2002). Secondly, it does not allow for the messiness and multiplicity of ways through which automobility has manifested itself across the world
(see Shields, 1998; Richie, 2002; Barme, 2002). Thirdly, it is remarkably teleological
(see Beckmann, 2001).
Instead, following our discussion above, the materiality of automobility and other
forms of mobility can be better apprehended in another way, as an emergent set
of machinic relations between various practices and technologies. Perhaps the
most obvious place to start is simply the way the automobile has been involved in
reworking the physical space of the city so that it could be accommodated. Quite
apart from the need for smooth paved streets, mass automobility demanded parking
places, service stations and garages, along with new traffic regulations and traffic
technology and so forth. These are all worthy of investigation (see Beckmann,
712
2001; Jackle and Sculle, 1994; Banham, 1971; Bottles, 1987; Holtz Kay, 1997;
St Clair, 1986).
The attraction and importance of the motorcar, however, is about more than the
stark 'thereness' of the spaces it has generated, and it is about more than a socially
purified technics. It is about particular structures of feeling and particular sets of
moral imperatives and dilemmas that come to be organized through the technical
and corporeal machines in which it is implicated (see McCormack, 1999). It is
about the whole world of objects, relations and affects that the car has drawn around
it. How this organization happens, the work involved in its taking place, is not something that can simply be understood in terms of the way in which a car comes to
represent a particular idea or belief. It is particularly instructive to consider the
issue of car design here. This is a process that illustrates the importance to the emergence of the materiality of automobility of diagrammatic interventions. As a
diagrammatic intervention, the design of cars holds together, or gives consistency
to, the 'complex heterogeneity' (Law, 2002) of relations between various machines:
technical machines, aesthetic machines, corporeal machines, petrochemical
machines, etc. Automobile manufacturers invest vast sums of money and human
effort in making sure that their products feel, sound and smell like a motorcar should
(see Gartman, 1994; Janlert and Stolterman, 1997). Also, if most manufacturers long
ago realized the importance of these affective dimensions, the development of microelectronics has vastly increased the precision and capacity with which they can be
controlled. Indeed, this very process of design and affective response is woven
into the marketing of cars, as a recent advertisement for Saab illustrates:
The place and time: Trollhattan, Sweden, a couple of years ago. The circumstances: early in the development of the new Saab 9-3 Sport Saloon. One of the engineers is asked what the whole project is
actually about. As he answers, he draws a small figure on a piece of paper. 'The idea', he says, 'is
to build the car around the driver's experience of the car. Each and every detail in the car has to
reinforce the communication between driver, car and road - everything, from the basic design of
the chassis to the driver's environment.' With the last stroke of his pen, the engineer adds a big
smile to the face of the driver he has drawn. 'That's what it's about. The pure joy of driving.'
In this way, designers tell stories about how they build and accommodate the sensible materiality of the corporeal into the emerging organization of the car. In doing
this, they draw upon a range of ergonomic and human factor knowledges. These
stretch from the highly technical (such as knowledge about particular materials'
strength) to the sociological (drawn from surveys and focus groups on how people
use their cars).
Yet it is necessary to qualify the role of design in shaping the emergent materiality
of automobility. First, to take seriously the effects of design does not necessarily
involve understanding it as the imposition of form on material. Rather, as Law
(2002: 136) suggests, 'we need to hold on to the idea that the agent [ ...] is an
agent, a centre, a planner, a designer, only to the extent that matters are'also
decentred, unplanned, undersigned. To put it more strongly, we need to recognize
that to make a centre is to be made by a noncentre, a distribution of the conditions
of possibility that is both present and not present.'
Secondly, it can of course be contended that our example of the Saab may resonate
with established narratives of the automobile as inherently masculine, but the situation is more complex. To take another example, for many suburban women car
ownership has not only become pivotal to the way they manage the daily working
713
and childcare routines, but the car and its interior space have also come to embody
a widely recognized element of 'good mothering' (Dowling, 2000: 352; see also Law,
1999). Acknowledging this - and recognizing the implicit masculine bias built into
their design processes - many automobile manufactures are putting an increasing
amount of effort into designing cars that are more attentive to the particular needs
and desires of women drivers. A good example of this is Ford Europe. In an effort
to address its reputation as a producer of hypermasculine cars (think of the Ford
Capri, the first-generation Mondeo which through the figure of Mondeo Man
became a cipher for a certain kind of aspirant lower-middle-class suburban masculinity, or the Escort RX3, a firm favourite with estate wide-boys and joyriders alike),
Ford has since the mid-1990s been implementing a wide-ranging programme to
make the design of its cars more women-friendly. It has worked hard to recruit
more women engineers and designers, and has formed a 'women's marketing
panel' that advises its designers on what women car-buyers seek in a car (Lees-Maffei, 2002: 363). The aim is to produce cars that more carefully and sensitively fit with
how women (and their children) use them.2
Thus, far from moving away from a concern with the everyday life of the urban,
engaging with such processes as the design and ergonomics of cars provides an
understanding of how assumptions about the everyday are, literally and metaphorically, built into the materiality of automobility - assumptions about the proper
relationship between car and driver, driver and passenger, car-human hybrid and
car-human hybrid, car-human hybrid and the road surface, and on and on. These
assumptions do not involve the operation of ideology. Rather, they are about the
kinds of affective practices and immersive involvements that a number of writers
such as Katz (1999) have highlighted as being central to automobility. As Katz points
out, the process of driving the city is very much orientated around 'practical', precognitive, kinaesthetic habitualities.
The process of designing cars can therefore be understood in terms of the diagrammatic apprehension of urban materialities. It holds together a range of
materials, but in a way that provides a context for action, a context from which
new modes of experiencing the urban emerge and conflict. Thus, as Lerup (2000:
55) puts it:
The pedestrian, painstakingly circumscribing the blocks of the old city, harbours no doubt about
what moves and what is fixed. In Houston, the speeding car projects itself into a space that
is never formed, forever evolving, emerging ahead while disappearing behind. This creates a
liquidity in which the dance and the dancer are fused in a swirling, self-engendering motion promoted by the darting of the driver's eyes, touching (because so intimate, so familiar) street, canopy,
house, adjacent car, red light, side street, radio station Tejano 106.5, car upon car, instruments, tree
trunks, joggers, barking dog, drifting leaves, large welt and dip, patch of sunlight. This is navigational space, forever emerging, never exactly the same, liquid rather than solid, approximate
rather than precise, visual but also visceral in that it is felt by the entire body, not just through
the eyes and the soles of the feet. The body in this liquid space is suspended, held and urged on
by trajectory.
Such depictions of the experience do of course need some qualification, not least
because they give driving a poetic quality perhaps rarely experienced. Our aim
here is not to valorize a kind of kinaesthetic escapism. Indeed, one of us does
not even possess a driving licence. Furthermore, the design of cars is clearly
only one element of the emergent materiality of automobility. We might add to
714
this process various things like the design and planning of traffic systems, etc.
Attention to the details of such processes allows us to understand how the automobile has become bound into so many everyday urban activities and how these
are bound into the diagrammatic apprehensions discussed above. As Beckmann
(2001: 595) suggests:
... the dominance of the automobile-based transport system in industrialized countries can be
regarded as the result of a spiral and self-organizing process, the automobile turns into a structural
prerequisite for the organization of everyday life, while at the same time the variety of forms of
everyday action becomes the structural prerequisite for the expansion of the automobile.
Psychoactive socialities
While the materiality of automobile urbanities and socialities is given an emergent
consistency by a multiplicity of technologies and practices, it is also entangled
in uncomfortable ways with other pathways of materiality. One of these, and
the second example upon which we wish to concentrate here, involves psychoactive
substances in their various legal and illegal guises. Despite the fact that these substances are implicated in a multiplicity of practices and spaces, it is remarkable
that, with a number of exceptions (e.g., Kneale, 1999; 2000; Malbon, 1999; Chatterton
and Hollands, 2003), there is almost a complete absence of any attention by geographers to the role they play in shaping particular urbanities and socialities.
There are of course a number of strands of work from which geographers might
take their cue in this regard, including: the range of recently published studies of
addiction and intoxication (e.g., Lenson, 1995; Plant, 1999; Walton, 2001; Davenport-Hines, 2001) and cultural 'biographies' of particular drugs (Brownlee, 2002;
Booth, 1996); the well-established body of work in the social sciences on addiction
(see, for example, Bateson, 1973) and the use and control of drugs (e.g., Dinglestad
et al., 1996; Coomber, 1998); and the rich tradition of 'writing on drugs' (Stransbaugh
and Blaise, 1991).
Our aim here is not critically to review such work. Rather, while acknowledging the insights to be gained from such literatures, here we wish to suggest
that paying greater attention to psychoactive substances provides a particularly
productive way of thinking through the materialities of the urban. This does
not, however, involve simply using intoxication or anaesthesia as a kind of metaphor for the experience of the modern city. Nor does it mean suggesting that the
consumption of psychoactive substances offers some privileged insight into the
'reality' of the urban. Rather, we wish to suggest that thinking about these substances provides a particularly useful means through which to reconsider the
materialities of the city, and the forms of urbanity and sociality in which these
are implicated.
Crucially, psychoactive substances challenge the usefulness of calls for geographers to rematerialize their work through a greater engagement with the concrete.
This is not least because they amplify with particular intensity the fact that what
we take to be the 'lived' material reality of the urban is composed of various
molecular assemblages. Such assemblages, as Nikolas Rose puts it (1996: 185), are
a matter of:
2
Organs, muscles, nerves, tracts that are themselves swarmings of cells in constant interchange with
one another, linking and detaching, dying, reconfiguring, connecting and combining, where the
71 5
outside of one is simultaneously the inside of another. And [they arel also a matter of brains, hormones, chemical molecules that connect and transform the capacities of various parts - exciting
them, co-coordinating them, fusing them, or disengaging them. These assemblages are not
delineated by the envelope of the skin, but link up 'outside' and 'inside' - visions, sounds, aromas,
touches, collections together with other elements, machinating desires, affections, sadness, terror,
even death.
The materialities emergent through these assemblages are not necessarily best
apprehended in terms of the movements of discrete things or objects, but rather in
terms of affective relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness. Rather
than the production and consumption of particular objects, the production and consumption of psychoactive substances are more accurately apprehended in terms of
transformations in such relations.
Such transformations can of course occur without the consumption of psychoactive substances, through the molecular processes implicated in everyday activities
such as eating or exercise. Indeed, an increasingly wide range of such everyday
activities and practices is being rendered visible as a set of technologies of the healthy
molecular self (Pert, 1997; Robertson, 1997; Brownlee, 2002; Levy, 2003; Doel and Segrott, 2003). This is to say nothing of the production, prescription and production of
substances such as anti-depressants (Healey, 1997; Fraser, 2003).
It might well be profitable to investigate how a range of recently designed and
'discovered' psychoactive substances has become creative participants in the
spaces and sociocultural sensibilities of contemporary urban life. However, it is
also worth paying attention to more mundane ways in which psychoactive substances amplify and alter the affective materiality of the city. While there is a
range of psychoactive substances through which this discussion might be developed, here we want to focus on alcohol (see Edwards, 2000; Brownlee, 2002). This
is not least because of the way in which the fluid and volatile liquidity of alcohol
confronts us with the difficult of apprehending its materiality as an object.
Indeed, the object of alcohol is ultimately a thoroughly abstract thing - an
arrangement of carbon and hydrogen atoms that can be diagrammed without
actually being isolated (Ball, 2001).
Yet, despite the fluid materialities in which alcohol is implicated, it has often
been all too easy to depict it as an independent agent in the shaping of the culture and society: alcohol as the 'demon drink', threatening to loosen the ties that
bind civilized society together, taking control of otherwise politically obedient
and responsible citizens, who then become mere conduits for irrational destructive forces. Historically, the role of alcohol in this regard has been crystallized
around particular events. For instance, in the wake of the Paris Commune in
1871, a 'curious juxtaposition was established between revolution and alcohol'
(Sournia, 1986: 103). In the months following the Commune, a parliamentary
committee tried to attribute the cause of the social and political disorder to alcohol, a view shared widely by various medical professionals and doctors. As one
doctor put it (Sournia, 1986: 103):
Alcohol was everywhere in those fatal times. It was an armed spectre on the streets and ramparts of
the city, near the barracks, in the avenues and devastated gardens of the suburbs. Enthroned in the
Palace it soiled the churches, bustled and shouted at public meetings and staggered along under a
filthy tunic, a rifle on its shoulder, belching out fragments of the Marseillaise.
716
Clearly, it is possible to argue that alcohol plays a part in the eventful materiality of
the urban without granting it the status of an independent actor. It is more useful to
think of the way in which the affective capacities of alcohol become implicated in
and come into conflict with different machinic assemblages. In this regard, alcohol
is as much a part of the machinic assemblages of 'cyborg urbanization' as is water
(Swyngedouw, 1996; 1999). This is most obviously illustrated in the relation between
alcohol and the process of increasing industrialization. As Roberts (1984: 3) suggests,
'industrialization and urbanization thickened the web of human interdependence,
enhancing the potential dangers alcohol could pose to the social order while making
its control by customary means more difficult'. From this perspective, alcohol can
be understood as a problem that became increasingly visible in practices of governmentality because it had the potential to disrupt the 'right disposition' of human
and nonhumans, 'arranged so as to lead to convenient ends' (Foucault, 1991: 94) in
the articulation of increasingly complex machinic assemblages of technics, power
and knowledge.
Such concerns could come to be focused on particular kinds of urbanity and sociality. For example, in late eighteenth-century Paris, the tavern became the focus of
particular suspicion. The Parisian police were wary of the 'openness and accessibility' of the tavern, an accessibility that transgressed the boundaries between the private and the public (Brennan, 1988: 269). From the perspective of the municipal
authorities, the tavern contained a monstrous potential through the volatile mixture
of human and alcohol that threatened to spill over the threshold of the public house
and into the street.
To point to the role of alcohol in this regard may seem obvious, and rather
dated. Yet it remains remarkably topical, evident in contemporary debates about
the forms of urbanity and sociality associated with the excessive consumption
of alcohol in cities. Consider the example of Dublin, and in particular the area
of the city known as Temple Bar. In the 1970s and 1980s the area was slated for
the construction of a central city bus terminal, plans that encouraged the emergence of a low-rent, eclectic mix of uses. In the late 1980s, the then government
decided to build upon this distinctive 'feel' of the area by designating it as
'Dublin's cultural quarter', a designation facilitated by generous financial incentives (MacLaran, 1993; McDonald, 2000). However, against the backdrop of
increased cultural cosmopolitanism in Dublin and Ireland more generally, the
development of a number of large pubs in Temple Bar began to become the
focus of intense debate during the 1990s. The increased incidence of street drinking in the newly created public spaces of the area fed into a critical discourse in
which Temple Bar became understood as a contradictory space - an enclave of
cultural consumption on the one hand, a centre of alcohol-sodden street hedonism
on the other hand - manifest in newspaper articles in The Irish Times such as 'Cultural Heartland or Temple of Doom', 'A Tale of Two Temple Bars' and 'Now its all
Temple Bars'.
To some degree, the blame for spoiling the sensibility of the area was laid at the
feet of English 'stag' and 'hen' parties, who, taking advantage of increasingly
cheaper airfares, were drawn to Temple Bar for weekend drinking binges. Yet
increasingly Temple Bar has come to represent broader anxieties about the central
place of alcohol in Irish culture and society. In many ways, such debates simply
rehearse earlier debates in Ireland and elsewhere about alcohol, morality and
71 7
civilization (see Harrison, 1971; Kearns, 1996; Kneale, 1999; Wilson, 1940). Such
debates can be understood in terms of the way in which alcohol and its consumption refracts various discourses of cultural identity and morality. They can also be
understood in relation to the all too obvious transformations in the political
economies of modern Ireland. In turn, the transformation of spaces like Temple
Bar and a city like Dublin more generally can be understood in relation to different
modes of urban governmentality and economy (see, for example, Chatterton and
Hollands, 2003).
Yet there is something more to be said about the processes at play here. To read off
increased alcohol consumption or transformations in the pattern of alcohol
consumption as simply the effect of broader structural forces is not sufficient (see
Latham, 2003b; Malbon, 1999). The affective elements of alcohol also need to be
understood. Consider the example of 'alcopops', increasingly vilified in the popular
press for increasing the attractiveness of drinking to a younger market. One might
look to the many advertising representations of alcopops on TV, in magazines and
on billboards and explore the kinds of representations of urbanity and sociality
they portray. Yet, if we are to take seriously the affective force of alcohol in shaping
the materiality of the city, we need to think of other processes, processes that might
initially appear of little importance. Taste, for example. Thus, alcopops might well be
about a particular kind of lifestyle, but they are also about taste, about sweetness.
They are drunk because they are easier to drink, not only as a result of the images
that the drinker associates with that drink. Why is the simple fact of sweetness
important in this regard? It is important because it alters the affective potential of
alcohol, transforming its capacity to form relations with other bodies (Deleuze,
1988; Buchanan, 1997).3
Obviously, the affects of alcohol are implicated in particular forms of sociality,
of ways of being and relating through the urban, ways of moving, gesturing,
walking and talking variously identifiable as drunkenness and intoxication
(MacAndrew and Edgerton, 1969; Gomart and Hennion, 1997; Malbon, 1999).
Such corporeal sensings and articulations of affect are an important way in
which the excessive expressiveness of the material becomes implicated in the
life of the urban. In so far as this is the case, however, they do not represent a
momentary fall from ontological sobriety in which things temporarily become
more fluid, more miscible. The volatile, vaporous mix of materiality is prior to
its capture and consolidation in particular bodies and spaces. Alcohol does therefore not so much cause the individual to lose the run of him- or herself so much
as it amplifies the already excessive expressiveness of a world of affective virtualities. Because of this, we only begin to understand the contours of sociality and
urbanity in which psychoactive substances are implicated by foregrounding the
active, affective role played by the nonhuman (or inhuman) in shaping emergent
materialities, materialities that only become part of touchable worlds through the
processual outcome of the abstract yet real force of machinic assemblages (Pini,
1998). The materiality of this affective processuality is a matter of consistency
rather than concreteness. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, this materiality 'is no
longer a question of imposing a form upon a matter but of elaborating an increasingly rich and consistent material, the better to tap increasingly intense forces.
What makes a material increasingly rich is the same as what holds heterogeneities
together without their ceasing to be heterogeneous' (1988: 329).
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V Conclusion: material excesses

The very streets, with all their bustle and their ornate, pompous buildings, seemed to be in an analogous 'expectant state', as though the hard facets of a crystal were being dissolved in some liquid
medium and about to fall back into an earlier, more amorphous condition.
(Musil, 1995: 682)
The pathways we have presented here are necessarily provisional, intended as

orientations rather than exhaustively researched case studies. We also hope it is
clear that the kinds of conceptual vehicles through which they might be pursued
further are by no means limited to thinking about cities, but could also be employed
to think about the multiple ruralities and natures with which geographers are engaging. Indeed, revalorizing questions of the material and materiality provides a crucial opportunity for geographers both to introduce interesting twists in any number
of already existing lines of thought and to realize the critical and creative potentialities of new ones. However, one of the key points we have sought to develop here is
that the success of this opportunity depends upon the active cultivation of a commitment to think through the material not as the base from which thinking departs, but
as the necessary yet insufficient condition of the event of thought.
More specifically, we have sought to develop two substantive points about efforts
to realize more fully the implications of attending to and through the materialities of
the urban. First, there is a pressing need to increase the sophistication of the conceptual and empirical tools employed to think through the materiality of the urban. It is
not enough to offer the relatively underconceptualized materiality of urban geography as a kind of reassuring antidote to the excesses of cultural geography as Lees
(2002) suggested in her overview of the subdiscipline (a move that appears to be
growing in currency throughout the broader ecumene of urban studies; see Eade
and Mele, 2002). If anything should have been learnt from the cultural turn it is
that established conceptions of materiality and culture are inadequate. We cannot
simply take the 'material' and add 'culture' (or the 'symbolic' or whatever) and
arrive at a neat balance between the two. To think about the enfoldings of culture
within the very thereness of the urban requires a quite fundamental rethinking of
how we understand both terms (a rethinking that places the very idea of 'thereness'
into question). Indeed, if anything, the problem with cultural geography has been
that it is not excessive enough - it has yet fully to realize an engagement with
the incorporeality of the material. The strength of the conceptual vehicles outlined
in sections II and III is that they provide a way of holding on to the expressive
excessiveness of the urban. They allow us to gain and retain a sense of the multiplicity, the structuredness and the productiveness of urban life. So we can begin to
apprehend, for example, how automobility is something that organizes in a whole
number of ways the everyday experience of the contemporary city, while also beginning to appreciate the diverse, unexpected and unplanned ways in which this
organization is achieved. What is more, the conceptual vehicles of sections II and
III hold on to this excessiveness in such a way that nudges us to conceive of the materiality of the urban 'not as a substance, but as a preeminently transductive field
in which psychical, physical, technical and affective realities precipitate' (MacKenzie,
2002: 35; emphasis in the original). Of course, this process involves capture and
containment, the organization of forces with a degree of consistency such that
they are apprehensible as bodies, subjects and objects. Yet the outcome of such
719
processes is neither inevitable nor dictated from the beginning by some overarching
structural logic.
Secondly, we are arguing for an understanding of the materiality of the urban that
works to multiply the contexts within which we can examine its emergence. For all
its achievements, traditionally urban geography (and indeed urban studies more
generally) has presented us with a remarkably emaciated view of what cities consist
of. Perhaps because of the apparent necessity of finding a general framework for
understanding the material logic of the urban (and the progressively more disparaging connotations of an 'eclectic' approach), much of the work in this area has (at
times unintentionally) worked against the cultivation of an appreciation of the
remarkable plurality of substances and relationships that give reality and shape to
urban life. The urbanness of cities is precisely a product of this excessive plurality,
the multiple attempts to give this plurality shape and form, and the constant exceeding of these limits produced by the city's plurality. In an effort to contribute to the
cultivation of such an appreciation, here we have outlined two ways through
which a careful consideration of this pluralism can offer novel perspectives on the
urban. Thinking about automobility and intoxication hardly exhausts the possibilities of this pluralism. A diverse range of recent literatures on nature and the city,
on the city as a cosmopolitan mix of the human and nonhuman, on the city as a
technosocial artifact, on the urban as a site of longing and desire and attachment,
on the urban as a collectivity of different embodiments, have all opened up our
imagination of city life through asking the vital question of just what material the
contemporary city consists of.
Such an empirically inflected and conceptually energized multiplication is necessary and important because it allows us to better understand how particular kinds
of urbanity and sociality cohere at the intersection of different lines of materiality.
It allows us to think through why different cities, different urban spaces, have
quite different affective capacities. Such coherence is not a smooth process of
accretion. Therein lies the rub. If there is always change in the mix, 'the attempt
to show the odd, multiple, unpredictable potential in the midst of things of
other new things, other new mixtures' (Rajchman, 1998: 76) takes on a particular
importance. In so far as urban geographers can become more fully implicated in
shaping the materialities of the urban, it might well have much to do with the
ways in which they develop the capacities to draw out this potential. The work of
urban geographers might become much more about thinking through ways
of foregrounding the productive potentialities often hidden within the materialities
of the urban. In this way efforts to apprehend the city could in their own modest way
become more political, more attentive to the diverse modalities and materialities
both of the powers that be and the powers that become.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Ron Johnston and the three anonymous referees whose
comments greatly helped us in revising the paper. We would also like to thank the Economy, Culture, Space reading group at Southampton for their many constructive comments on an earlier draft. Lastly, we would like to thank Donald McNeill whose
rigorous scepticism helped us work out what we really wanted to say.
720
Notes
1. Clearly, these informal tendencies towards diagrammatic expressiveness may also become
more formalized. Perhaps the best examples of this were the playgrounds constructed in Amsterdam during the 1950s and 1960s (van Eyck, 2003). While the design of these playgrounds is closely
associated with Aldo van Eyck (whose distinction between concepts of 'space' and 'place' has
proved an influence on the works of various urban theorists), they arose in the context of 'semihierarchical, semi-anarchic, highly participatory process involving many people over many decades.
It was what might be called a cybernetic process, ground-up, top-down, inter-relating a mass of
agents, each playing an equally crucial role, impossible to disentangle from one another' (Lefaivre,
2003: 45).
2. One product of this design process has been the development of a backseat video monitoring system which allows the driver to see what is going in the car on a video cellphone or PDA
while she is away from the car. As at August 2003 this system is yet to reach series production.
More prosaically (but perhaps equally importantly) the marketing panel have suggested the
need for larger 'tailgate handles, and larger and simpler dashboard controls' (Lees-Maffei,
2002: 365).
3. One can think of how early relations with alcohol are mediated, for instance, by the addition of
blackcurrant cordial to Guinness to take the edge off the taste.
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Progress in Human Geography

Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies

Downloaded from http://phg.sagepub.com at KEAN UNIVERSITY on December 23, 2009

Progress in Human Geography 28,6 (2004) pp. 701 -724

Moving cities: rethinking the

.u11", Arnold 2004

Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies

Alan Latham and Derek P. McCormack

Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies

Alan Latham and Derek P. McCormack

Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies

III The necessity of abstraction

Alan Latham and Derek P. McCormack

Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies

contemporary architectural theory and criticism (Lynn, 1998; Rajchman, 1998;

Alan Latham and Derek P. McCormack

This emphasis on the nonsubjectifying and nondetermined expressive event of

Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies

Alan Latham and Derek P. McCormack

Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies

Alan Latham and Derek P. McCormack

Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies

Alan Latham and Derek P. McCormack

Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies

Alan Latham and Derek P. McCormack

Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies

V Conclusion: material excesses

The pathways we have presented here are necessarily provisional, intended as

Alan Latham and Derek P. McCormack

Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies

Ball, P. 2001: Stories of the invisible: a guided tour of

four ecologies. London: Penguin.

Borden, I. 2001: Skateboarding, space and the city:

Downloaded from http://phg.sagepub.com at KEAN UNIVERSITY on December 23, 2009

Alan Latham and Derek P. McCormack

Edelman, G. and Tononi, G. 2000: Consciousness:

Fischer, C. 1992: America calling: a social history of

Gandy, M. 2002: Concrete and clay. Cambridge,

Hall, E. 2000: Blood, brain and bones: taking the

Downloaded from http://phg.sagepub.com at KEAN UNIVERSITY on December 23, 2009

Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies

Jackle, J. and Sculle, K. 1994: The gas station in

Lees, L. 2002: Rematerializing geography: the

MacAndrew, C. and Edgerton, R. 1969: Drunken

Downloaded from http://phg.sagepub.com at KEAN UNIVERSITY on December 23, 2009

Alan Latham and Derek P. McCormack

editor, The virtual embodied: presence/practice!

technology, London: Routledge, 68-77.

Sachs, W. 1984: For love of the automobile: looking

Sheller, M. and Urry, J. 2000: The city and the

Thrift, N. 1996: Spatialformations. London: Sage.

Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.

Downloaded from http://phg.sagepub.com at KEAN UNIVERSITY on December 23, 2009

Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies

Wachs, M. and Crawford, M., editors 1990: The

Whyte, W.H., editor 1957: The exploding

Wolch, J. 2002: Anima urbis. Progress in Human

Geography 26, 721-42.

Downloaded from http://phg.sagepub.com at KEAN UNIVERSITY on December 23, 2009

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