Broken Windows

The eighth essay takes on neoliberal economics, the aesthetics of “broken windows” policing, and the situation of race in American cities.

Notes on the Housing Question

The seventh essay examines a footnote from Friedrich Engels’ The Housing Question 2nd ed. (1888) that opens onto the infrastructures of racial apartheid in American cities.

Infrastructure and Mediapolitics

The tenth and final essay of The Urban Apparatus examines the infrastructure-as-repetition, mediating the contested dynamics of utility and waste.

Horizons of Thought

The fifth essay examines utopia, ecology, and science fiction, with reference to the imagined colonization of Mars and the actual biopolitical apartheid on Earth.

Public and Common(s)

The fourth essay examines the interacting categories of “public” and “commons” as elements of counter-hegemonic political discourse built on the ruins of socialism.

The Urban Apparatus

The Introduction proposes its examinations and theories on the “urban apparatus,” “mediapolitics” scale, infrastructure, and the essay form. In all sense a city is hardware. It is not, in the first instance, a space, a place, a territory, or a zone; nor is it, strictly speaking, a social body. For by identifying a city with hardware, it enables the recognition of it as a site of sociotechnical life and production where power is encoded, memories are stored, and possible features are recorded.

Beijing in Detroit

The ninth essay studies “Detroit” as synecdoche: deindustrialization, Chinese capitalism, “creative destruction,” and “emergency management” as investment strategy.

Polis = Oikos

The sixth essay looks into the matter of the political topology of the classical Greek polis, in relation to the feminized, administrative domain of the oikos, or household, in contemporary political thought.

Financial Imaginaries

The second essay explores the interplay of abstraction and concreteness in financial systems, in urban slums, and in luxury real estate development. For more than a century, the social relations of the metropolis have been linked analytically to financial circulation, a connection that is clearly audible in the phrase “global city.”

City, Country, World

The first essay explores the structural blind spots of enumeration, beginning with the ambiguous claim that “half the world’s population now lives in cities.” The city, as a territory, as either infrastructure or as image, is no less determined by the foundational indeterminacies of counting than it is reliably fixed in space and in time as a knowable entity.