When people inhabit a city, they situate themselves and are situated through the intersections of infrastructure and technical systems, and the particular domains and modalities of occupation – settlement and work – that are configured by them. At the same time, people are also inhabited by the city, as a kind of possession, endowment, and series of conundrums. People figure themselves out through figuring arrangements of materials, of designing what is available to them in formats and positions that enable them (...) particular vantage points and ways of doing things. What it is possible for people to do with each other is largely a question of what it is that exists between them, and how this ‘between’ can be shaped as active points of reference, connection and anchorage. Infrastructure exerts a force – not simply in the materials and energies it avails, but also the way it attracts people, draws them in, coalesces and expends their capacities. If territory is a bundle of political technologies for measuring, administering and regulating the scope of what it is possible to do in the city, then other inventive political technologies are also at work in the making of urban life. (shrink)

At best, Fanon had an ambivalent attitude toward the potentialities of African cities. As largely colonial creations, they were never viewed as the ‘real’ locus for an elaboration of a critical national consciousness or political project. Yet now that Africa is an ‘urban continent’, with cities moving in disparate directions through various broken infrastructures and temporalities, urbanization conveys both a desire for collective capacities that would seem to exceed both the terms of colonial residues and Fanon’s revolutionary projections, yet simultaneously (...) to reiterate the fundamental tensions in their relationship. The very practices that would seem to waste political mobilization may be those which defer a definitive foreclosure of them. While African cities remain exemplars of the region’s captivation with redesigned imperialisms, they are generative of the potentials Fanon identified but assumed would never come from them. (shrink)

This introduces a series of articles in a themed section entitled City of Potentialities: Race, Violence and Invention. The section concerns how we might think more specifically about how to act in domains where complexity is both a resource for the imagination and an impediment to action. What kinds of dilemmas do residents face and what kinds of practices do they engage in in order to continuously gather up the tools and possibilities to endure in volatile urban conditions, where volatility (...) seems a critical force in the simultaneous undoing and remaking of life, as well as in providing assets and opportunities to inhabitants? How does violence obscure the various manoeuvres and practices that keep things together or apart? (shrink)

Urbanization is the mechanism for the entanglement of things and experiences as commodities, an interminable restlessness of disorientation, a suspended state, where the capacity to maintain a hold on things and attain a sense of emplacement increasingly necessitates enforced resilience, of people embracing rather than warding off their imminent expendability. As such, what are the possibilities for the city to become a space of communing as an intersection of complex ecologies, common sensibilities and new forms of provision and care? This (...) response to Adrian Parr’s reflections on these issues in her article, ‘Urban Debt, Neoliberalism and the Politics of the Commons’, draws upon various African American practices for inhabiting the city as a vehicle of strategic indifference to efforts to render collective life expendable. This indifference has long been deployed to insulate experimental practices of care, economic and social collaboration, and to ‘honour the city differently’. (shrink)

In the multiplying uncertainties of urban life, entrenched, mediated positions are increasingly difficult to sustain — a dynamic which simultaneously intensifies and counters a racialized biopolitics. In such contexts, is it possible for racial significations to become ironic instruments in the everyday experimentations of residents trying to figure out new ways of both engaging and retreating from each other, of trying to figure out new calibrations of collectivity that enhance the value of differences, not only as markers of navigation, but (...) as a means of curtailing the increased urban emphasis on individual competence and eligibility? (shrink)

As urbanization assumes planetary scales under variegated market regimes, spaces and opportunities for collective provisions of care are constrained. Long honed relational skills and the use of heterogeneous relationships for economic opportunity are disentangled in favor of intensely individuated adaptations to precarious livelihoods. Urban life increasingly becomes a continuously updated series of interoperable standardizations and probabilistic calculations. Yet endurance for large numbers of urban residents remains predicated on indifference to and acts of detachment from prevailing modes of urban power, in (...) operations of stealth and supplement long embodied by blackness, and Black Power. A notion of generic blackness is explored as conveying both the logic exhibited to define and contain the unbounded and errant forces shaping urban life and the opacities elaborated by residents of a lower-working-class district in Jakarta. (shrink)