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
Summary
We are commonly presented today with two diverging yet fundamentally intertwined futures: one of hightech, 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@gmail.com by October 15th 2010
Foucault News 