Maan Barua, An Amphibious Urbanism, 06.03.2025, 5:30pm-7pm CET

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An Amphibious Urbanism

What might the urban become if one challenged the proposition that cities are equated with land? How might urban theory be done differently if wetness was brought into centre stage in the politics of habitation? Starting from Guwahati, a city of 1.2 million people in northeast India that constitutes the South within the Global South, this talk furnishes the outlines of an amphibious urbanism: a recalibration of urbanicity by interrogating life (bios) from the wet surrounds (amphi-). Three cuts into the amphibious are presented: 1) plotting, rather than planning, as the idiom of city-making; (2) incompletion contra built form as a feature of urban ontology; and (3) dispossession by accumulation, and not just accumulation by dispossession, as a material condition of extended urbanisation. These themes are drawn together to interrogate a future urban condition. The talk draws from a book and visual project steeped in ethnographic endeavour.

Speaker:

Maan Barua is a Lecturer in Human Geography at Cambridge University. He is an environmental and urban geographer whose research focuses on the economies, ontologies and politics of the living and material world. It fosters new conversations between political economy, posthumanism and postcolonial thought, developed through four arenas of inquiry: urban ecologies, urban surrounds, biocapital and postcolonial environments.

He leads a major ERC Horizon 2020 Starting Grant on Urban Ecologies, involving multiple partners and a research team across two continents. This work has culminated in his recent monograph Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology, published by the University of Minnesota Press (2023). His second book Plantation Worlds, interrogates planetary transformations through critical engagements with colonialism and race, and has been published by Duke University Press (2024). His work is in dialogue with cognate disciplines, especially anthropology.

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