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DOI: 10.1191/0309132504ph515oa 2004; 28; 701 Prog Hum Geogr

Alan Latham and Derek P. McCormack Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies

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

Moving cities: rethinking thematerialities of urban geographiesAlan Latham and Derek P. McCormackSchool 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 isoffered 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 humangeography (and, within that, urban geography) is going to return to the material, let alonearticulate some kind of rapprochement between the 'material' and 'immaterial', it needs to beclear about the terms it is employing. Therefore, and drawing on a range of work fromcontemporary cultural theory, sociology, urban studies, urban history, architectural theory andurban geography, we sketch out more precisely what a 'rematerialized' urban geographymight involve. Crucially, we argue that, rather than 'grounding' urban geography in more'concrete' realities, paying increased attention to the material actually requires a moreexpansive engagement with the immaterial. In developing this argument we outline someimportant conceptual vehicles with which to work up an understanding of the material asprocessually emergent, before offering two pathways along which the materialities of theurban might be usefully apprehended, pathways that avoid simple oppositions between the'material' and 'nonmaterial' while also restating the importance of understanding the complexspatialities of the urban.

Key words: materiality, urban geography, mobility, affect, sociality.

I IntroductionSo let us not place any particular value on the city's name. Like all big cities it was made up of irre-gularity, change, forward spurts, failures to keep step, collisions of objects and interests, punctuatedby unfathomable silences; made up of pathways and untrodden ways, of one great rhythmic beat aswell as the chronic discord and mutual displacement of all its contending rhythms. All in all, it waslike a boiling bubble inside a pot made of the durable stuff of building laws, regulations and histori-cal traditions.

(Musil, 1995: 4)In a recent review article in this journal, Lees (2002) suggested that human geogra-phy could learn much from contemporary trends in urban geography, particularly

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702 Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies

if it is to ease its increasing disquiet about the theoretical and empirical implicationsof the 'cultural turn'. As Lees (following Philo, 2000) suggests, more than a decadeafter geography's enthusiastic embrace of the 'immaterial', something rather curiousis afoot. A number of the original champions of the 'new cultural geography' havebegun 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 (andall that this term implies) needed to be given a more central place in the theoreticaland 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 materialityof 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 aneed to negotiate some sort of rapprochement between cultural geography andthose strands of human geography that have remained resolutely materialist in orien-tation. While this echoes Philo's (2000) and (to a lesser degree) Jackson's (2000) callfor a rematerialized cultural geography, Lees's argument differs because of hersuggestion that urban geography offers a particularly useful model of how thisrapprochement might take place. Thus, according to Lees (2002: 101):

Because of its subdisciplinary history - its relatively greater attachment to quantitative and appliedwork, the strong influence of political economy, and the long tradition of empirical and practicalresearch - urban geography was relatively late to embrace the cultural turn.

The result is that urban geography has - as much by accident as design - steeredclear 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 actuallybeen unobtrusively and selectively retooling themselves as acute interpreters ofthe 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 subdisci-pline is thriving [... .1. Indeed, it is more than thriving; it is located on the cutting edge of geographicalresearch that seeks to link the material and the immaterial.

Lees's account is an appealing and optimistic take on both urban geography and itsrelation to important debates about the direction and future of theoretical andempirical trends in human geography. It advocates the return of urban geographyto the centre of the discipline as part of a reinvigorated programme of study ofthe contemporary city. Yet it is also an account that on closer reading we findproblematic, and for at least three reasons.

First, it is not enough to invoke notions of 'the material' or 'materiality' in such away that they serve as a gritty reality check to the theoretical abstractions of humangeography, about which there remains a remarkably high degree of suspicion. Adegree of such suspicion seeps into Lees's piece, and is particularly evident in hernervousness about the 'immaterial', a concept that she juxtaposes to the 'material',that is to say, the 'real', world. While Lees acknowledges that the distinction betweenthe 'material' and the 'immaterial' is not so straightforward, any effort to articulate a'rematerialized' urban, or indeed human, geography, will of necessity not be realizeduntil the complexities of this relation are addressed. Indeed, how human geography


Alan Latham and Derek P. McCormack 703

is going to define (or erase) this relation is precisely the key theoretical and empiricalquestion driving much of the most important culturally inflected work in humangeography (Whatmore, 2002; Kearns, 2003). As such, it is also central to the questionof what any kind of rematerialized human geography (cultural, urban or otherwise)will look like - what it takes as legitimate objects for study, its theoretical-empiricalstyle, and its standards of evidence.

However, and secondly, any call for a rematerialized human geography serves tocomplicate and multiply rather than consolidate the reference points by which thiswork proceeds. There are many materialities at play in the work of human andurban geographers. The materiality central to political economy is not the same asthat invoked by calls for a renewed exploration of 'material culture' (Jackson,2000). Add to the mix the onto-epistemological orientations grouped togetherunder the names of actor-network theory and nonrepresentational theory and thenature(s) of things are complicated further (see, for instance, Castree, 2002). Clearly,the different concepts of materiality and the material running through variousstrands of geographical thinking are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Ourintention here is not to review and offer some rapprochement between theseapproaches (some of which are badly served by their very labelling as 'approaches').Rather, situated within and we hope speaking to wider debates about the materialityof human geographies, our concern is more specific, and centres on the need toproperly debate and work through what exactly is involved in calls for a rematerializedurban geography. In particular, we want to argue for the importance to urban geogra-phy of a notion of the material that admits from the very start the presence andimportance of the immaterial, not as something that is defined in opposition to thematerial, but as that which gives it an expressive life and liveliness independent ofthe human subject (Dewsbury et al., 2002; Kearns, 2003; Latham, 2003a).

Thirdly, running parallel to this conceptual concern, it strikes us that the kind ofvision of a new urban geography articulated by Lees seems to pay little attentionto many of the empirical contexts that make the urban a productive and excitingarea for research. It is not clear what is to be the relation between the materiality out-lined by Lees and the technologies and infrastructures which give cities their coher-ence, the forms of practical embodiments that make up the everyday functioning ofany 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 notionof the material is not used in some way to marginalize or downplay the importanceof 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 problematizingof materiality within human geography. One of the most significant of these effortshas been provided by Amin and Thrift (2002). While we do not want to engage herein 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 inwhich Amin and Thrift engage with questions of the urban not as a way to returnto some sort of 'grounded' material reality, but rather as a way to open up andmultiply the pathways along which the complex materialities of the urban mightbe apprehended. Such an engagement draws further support from the vigorousand 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



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 andHinchliffe, 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 ofurban geography. This account is not intended to be comprehensive. Rather, our aimis more modest, and consists of three parts. In the first part of the paper we outlinesome of the necessary terms of reference for beginning to rethink the materiality ofthe urban. In doing this, we argue that the material does not provide the ontologicalor political 'concreteness' required by those who express disquiet with the culturalturn. Furthermore, we also argue that, rather than 'grounding' the immaterial, pay-ing increased attention to the material actually demands that we begin to takeseriously the real force of the immaterial. In the second part of the paper, we outlinesome conceptual vehicles that can effectively facilitate an engagement with the mate-rialities of the urban. In the third part of the paper, we outline two material path-ways, the first organized around questions of mobility and the second aroundquestions of psychoactive substances, each of which, as we illustrate, is activelyimplicated in distinctive forms of sociality and urbanity.

11 The necessity of excessFor 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 pastthat he could catch in the net of his eye. He was gauging their speeds, their angles, all the livingforce 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 pocketwith 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 Leesand 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 tothe immaterial, the abstract and the unreal. This distinction is important because itprovides the very critical and conceptual purchase for any argument for 'remateria-lizing' 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 inflectedhuman geography has become too concerned with phenomena and processes thatare not 'anchored' in the lived, material reality of everyday life. However, we wishto suggest that the problem with such work is not the fact that it has engaged exces-sively with the immaterial, but, in contrast, that it has not engaged with sufficientconceptual 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 enoughto use the 'material' and 'materiality' in such a way as to invoke a realm of reassuringly



tangible or graspable objects defined against a category of events and processes thatapparently lack 'concreteness'. Rather, we only begin to properly grasp the complex rea-lities of apparently stable objects by taking seriously the fact that these realities arealways held together and animated by processes excessive of form and position. Thisis not the same as saying that the material world only makes sense, or comes to 'matter',within performatively iterative discursive economies of representation and represen-tational practices (Butler, 1990; 1993; Nelson, 1999). Instead, the immaterial needs tobe understood more expansively so as to include the prepersonal force of a multiplicityof nonrepresentational forces and practices and processes through which matter isalways coming into being (Dewsbury, 2000; Thrift, 2000a). This more expansive notionof the immaterial is important because it draws attention to the force of whatMassumi, following Deleuze, calls the virtual dimension of the material, the 'pressingcrowd 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 poten-tial of the immaterial. Or, as Guattari (1995: 103) puts it, 'there is no effort bearing onmaterial forms that does not bring forth immaterial entities'. As a result, invokingmateriality does not necessarily offer a 'solid', or 'concrete', foundation to whichthe immaterializing tendencies of the cultural turn might be tethered. Indeed, thetendency to demand, for instance, that theory justify itself in relation to somethingmore concrete is actually a tactic that postpones a fuller understanding ofthe material. This is not least because concrete itself, or indeed any other buildingmaterial, is not 'brute matter'. It is a particular aggregate organization of processand energy. It is no more (or less) 'real' than apparently 'immaterial' phenomenalike emotion, mood and affect, although it has a different duration and thresholdof 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 toweathering, capacity to bear certain kinds of load, the bond the mortar can make to it - emerges fromthe mediation of different domains. The capacity of the material to be moulded is itself the outcomeof a series of transformative operations. The clay must be prepared, for instance, so that it is homo-geneous, plastic, and yet able to maintain consistency so that it can take on contours without spillinglike water. [...] The materialized form and prepared material interact through a set of energeticexchanges which transform the potential energy of the clay under pressure into a stable, determinateequilibrium.

Thus, to argue for the importance of materiality is in fact an argument for apprehend-ing different relations and durations of movement, speed and slowness rather thansimply a greater consideration of objects. This is particularly important in terms ofthe effort to think through the materiality of body, an effort that has an importantrole to play in any attempt to think through the materiality of the city. Geographershave clearly begun to develop such an engagement (e.g., Longhurst, 1997; Hall,2000), an effort often characterized by calls to 'embody' human geographies of var-ious kinds. Here, embodying cultural geography appears as an act through whichthe free-floating, disembodied theorizing of geography may be retethered in a fleshyreality. However, as Massumi has argued, the implications of thinking through thecorporeal 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 owntransition: its own variation' (Massumi, 2002a: 5). As a result, continues Massumi,



'far from regaining a concreteness, to think the body in movement thus meansaccepting the paradox that there is an incorporeal dimension of the body. Of it, butnot it. Real, material, but incorporeal. Inseparable, coincident, but disjunct. If thisis "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 'rema-terialize' urban geography as it is to 'embody geography'. Indeed, the excessive materi-ality of the body is not simply analogous to that of the city. It is also creativelyimplicated. This is important because it also provides some purchase on the diversityof the powers of the city. In particular, an engagement with the materiality of theurban should not be taken as an excuse to shoehorn a strong version of political econ-omy back to the front of a concern with 'real' issues. Instead, any materially engagedurban geography must be based upon an appreciation of the fact that affective economiesare as important as political and symbolic economies (see Amin and Thrift, 2002). Affectiveeconomies are here not understood solely in terms of the personal, quantified and qua-lified realm of emotion. Rather, the force of affect operates prior to the personal qualityof 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; McCor-mack, 2003). The affective materiality of the urban is not therefore reducible to theemotional experience of the city. Rather, to speak of the affective materiality of theurban 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 thereflective event of thought kicks in. It is to take seriously the fact that much of what hap-pens in the world happens before this happening is registered consciously in cognitivethinking (Harrison, 2000; Massumi, 2002a; Latham, 1999a). It is to pay more attention tothe fact that when (Massumi, 2002a: 60):

Walking down a dark street at night in a dangerous part of town, your lungs throw a spasm beforeyou consciously see and can recognize as human the shadow thrown across your path. As you crossa busy noonday street, your stomach turns somersaults before you consciously hear and identify thesound of screeching brakes that careen towards you. Having survived the danger, you enter yourbuilding.

III The necessity of abstractionSuch aimless, purposeless strolling through a town vitally absorbed in itself, the keenness of percep-tion increasing in proportion as the strangeness of the surrounding intensifies, heightened stillfurther by the connection that it is not oneself that matters but only this mass of faces, these move-ments wrenched loose from the body to become armies of arms, legs, or teeth, to all of which thefuture belongs - all this can evoke the feeling that being a whole and inviolate strolling humanbeing is positively antisocial and criminal.

(Musil, 1995: 786)If the matter of the 'concrete' or material is not as solid as might be assumed thenthere is a problem with suggesting that contemporary accounts within humangeography are too abstract to apprehend the material. Instead, to paraphraseMassumi, 'the problem with the dominant models in cultural [geography] is notthat they are too abstract to grasp the concreteness of the real. The problem is thatthey are not abstract enough to grasp the real incorporeality of the concrete' (2002a: 5,emphasis in original).



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 usto 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 powersof these necessarily excessive materialities? Here we want to list four.

First, we can apprehend these materialities as emergent. They are emergent in thatthe sense of the urban is an ongoing outcome of the interaction between a myriad ofsmall-scale self-organizing processes that are not determined by a central controllingor decision-making unit (Johnson, 2001; Clark, 1998; Massumi, 2002a; Latham,2003b). In saying this, we are not suggesting that cities are happy-go-lucky placeswhere anything can happen. Nor are we suggesting that the planning, developmentand so on do not shape and reshape the city. Rather, our point is that in so far as wecan speak of a sense of the urban as something that is about the relations betweenhuman and nonhuman forms of life then this sense is not determined by some under-girding structural logic. Nor, importantly, is this emergent quality of the urban aquestion of the performative force of discursive practices. It is also a question ofthe virtualizing potential of affect, the difference immanent to the ongoing inter-action 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 interms 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 relationsbetween components, relations that are not necessarily dependent upon the com-ponents themselves. In this definition 'the organization of a machine thus has no[necessary] connection with its materiality' (1995: 39). The machinic is resolutelyabstract, 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. AsGuattari observes, 'common usage suggests that we speak of the machine as a subsetof technology. We should, however, consider the problematic of technology asdependent on machines, and not the inverse. The machine would become theprerequisite for technology rather than its expression' (Guattari, 1995: 33). Whileapparently counterintuitive, this notion of the machinic is important because itprovides a way of apprehending modes of organization that are not necessarilyimmediately identifiable as technology. Instead, the materiality of the city is seen tobe emergent transversally from technical machines, but also from social, linguistic,cognitive and corporeal machines. Such a notion of the machinic also allows a moveaway from thinking of the urban in terms of the relation between bodies and machinesin 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 betweencorporeal and machinic materialities, relations thatmay display systematic tendencieswithout being structural (see Beckmann, 2001; Mackenzie, 2002).

There are, however, important ways in which the relations between differentmachinic organizations of materiality can be apprehended. Thus, and thirdly, theemergent, machinic materiality of the urban can be apprehended diagrammatically.Three related deployments of the diagram are important here. The first is drawnfrom Deleuze's (1988) reading of Foucault's work, in which the diagram is a mapof the immanent relations of power involving both discursive and nondiscursiveforces. The second source for such diagrammatic apprehension of the city is



contemporary architectural theory and criticism (Lynn, 1998; Rajchman, 1998;Eisenman, 1999; Somol, 1999; Vidler, 2001). In such work the diagram is deployednot as a representation of future activity, but rather as a generative device, 'projectivein 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 hyper-bole) seems to restrict the diagrammatic materiality of the city to an elitist realm ofarchitectural practice (or indeed to tired rehearsals of discourses about the city aspanoptic space), a third deployment of the term stretches its connectivity further.This is also articulated by Deleuze and Guattari (1988), for whom a diagrammaticstyle of thinking provides a cartography through which to apprehend the eventfulcreativity of materiality in terms of the relations between different lines of movement.

While these mutually supportive notions of the diagram provide a way of under-standing the ethico-aesthetic resonances of various urban-based artistic and performa-tive practices, a range of ordinary spaces and spacings can be apprehendeddiagrammatically (McCormack, 2005). Consider, for example, football. The importanceof football in the life of cities can clearly be understood in relation to a range of discur-sive and political economies. Yet it is remarkable how little attention is paid to the gameitself, to what holds this game together, to what gives it an expressive potential. Thisdoes not mean ignoring the context within which football takes place. Rather, it meanspaying more attention to the fact that football is as much a matter of affective poweras it is a matter of ideology or political economy. It is the field, and the events and relationsit potentializes, that are crucial here (Massumi, 2002a). As far as this field is concerned, thelines of a pitch do not simply contain. Rather, they diagrammatically organize corporealand 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 squaresWere there like longitude and latitudeUnder the bumpy thistly ground, to beAgreed about or disagreed aboutWhen the time came.

Beyond football, one might think of games like hopscotch and a whole host of dia-grammatic territories that organize the affective potential of corporeal machinesand pedestrian protomachines (footpaths, playgrounds) into an animated space inwhich there are, perhaps, 'girls playing jacks and jumping double dutch. Boys at box-ball, marbles and ringolievio. Five boys each with a foot in a segmented circle thathad names of countries marked in the wedges. China, Russia, Africa, France, andMexico. The kid who is it, stands at the centre of the circle with a ball in his handand 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 expres-sive. This is not the expressiveness of the individual subject, however, nor is it theexpressiveness of festivals or staged events. Rather, it is the expressiveness emergingin 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 itrooted in an individual body. It is not even in a particular institution, because it is precisely the insti-tutional system that is in flux. Expression is abroad in the world - where the potential is for whatmay become. It is non-local, scattered across a myriad of struggles over what manner of life-defining



nets will capture and contain that potential in reproducible articulations, or actual functions. Deter-minate 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 allconduits through which a movement of expression streams.

This emphasis on the nonsubjectifying and nondetermined expressive event ofurban materiality is important because of what we feel is the necessity of refusingto 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 isthe fact that the expressive quality of urban materiality is not necessarily a cynicalaesthetic veneer that needs to be stripped away to get to reality. The expressivenessof place is a constitutive part of its mix, the event of its moving materiality.

IV Pathways of urban materialityAutomobiles shot out of deep, narrow streets into the shallows of bright squares. Dark clusters ofpedestrians formed cloudlike strings. Where more powerful lines of speed cut across their casualhaste they clotted up, then trickled on faster, and after a few oscillations, resumed their steadyrhythm. Hundreds of noises wove themselves into a wiry texture of sound with barbs protrudinghere and there, smart edges running along it and subsiding again, with clear notes splintering offand dissipating.

(Musil, 1995: 3)Much of the above may appear overly 'abstract' and 'theoretical'. Indeed, a commoncriticism 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. Wecan 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 materialthrough a reconsideration of political economy, there is something comfortingly fam-iliar about the terrain we are being asked to turn towards. However, as we havealready suggested above, the productiveness of the approach we are arguing forlies not only in how it allows a more subtle negotiation of the boundary betweenthe 'real' and 'imagined', the 'material' and 'immaterial'. Its productivity is also afunction of how it helps open up a range of novel and productive ways of thinkingabout how the urban comes to have the structure and consistency that it does - andthat it does so in ways that a straightforward return to political economy fails toaddress adequately.

In part, this is because of the role we understand thinking to play in any effortto 'rematerialize' human geography. Rather than understanding such an effort as away of 'anchoring' theory in the nuts-and-bolts 'thingyness' of the world, we seeit of necessity as a process by which conceptual vehicles charge and activate thedetail of the world with an enlivening potential, a potential whose creative dimen-sions are as important as any of its critical dimensions (Massumi, 2002a), dimensionsthat do not necessarily 'add up' (Dewsbury et al., 2002). Furthermore, we considerit necessary to reiterate the obvious but often overlooked fact that thinking con-ceptually is no less material than building bricks, or by that token, than producingpolicy documents. Thinking is not something that gets in the way of our engage-ments with, or moves us away from, the 'real' world, but instead it provides away, admittedly modest, of apprehending, valorizing and intervening in the multi-plicitous affects and relations through which the materialities of this reality are



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 think-ing has as much to do with its affects, with the ways in which it connects, in unex-pected and unanticipated ways, with other modes of thinking, as with other modesof thinking, moving and feeling (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988; 1994).

Thus, in the remainder of this article we want to map out two exemplary pathwaysalong and through which the materialities of the urban might be apprehended. Whilethere are any number of apparently 'new' practices and technologies through whichthis effort might be pursued, here we have chosen to concentrate on rather moreprosaic yet enduring examples. With respect to the first pathway, automobility, wewish to briefly outline how the ideas developed in the discussion above mightbe brought to bear on a long-established area of critical debate, thereby allowingus to multiply the ways in which the materialities of this issue might be appre-hended. With respect to the second, psychoactive substances, we aim to show howthe above discussion forces us to think seriously about active elements of the urbanthat 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 materialityare implicated in the production and consumption of particular kinds of socialityand urbanity.

1 Automobile urbanitiesThe first pathway of materiality with which we wish to engage is organized aroundthe idea of mobility. While the issue of mobility embraces a wide range of practicesand possibilities (e.g., Solnit, 2001), here we wish to limit our attention to auto-mobility. This issue is receiving increased attention both in geography and beyond(Eyerman and Lofgren, 1995; Urry, 2000; Miller, 2001; Beckmann, 2001), but herewe focus in particular on how the kinds of sociality and urbanity associated withautomobility are the ongoing outcoming of particular configurations of the material.Of course, it is hardly original to point out the enormous impact of mass auto-

mobile ownership on western cities. As far back as the early decades of the lastcentury, social commentators, architects and urban planners were declaring thetransformational qualities of the automobile. Lamenting the conservatism of archi-tecture 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 Wollenand Kerr, 2002: 22). At the same time, Marinetti was writing hyperbolic celebrationsof the power of the automobile human-machine hybrid, while in ever-pragmaticAmerica city boosters and property developers saw how the automobile couldopen out the city for a new form of property speculation. No longer speaking of asingle definable city, in 1931 the Californian real-estate commissioner StephenBornson (in Fishman, 1987: 155) wrote of how he saw 'California as a deluxesubdivision - a hundred million acre project'. By the 1950s and 1960s, geographersand urban planners were no longer debating the desirability or otherwise of a poss-ible automobile city; they were trying to come to terms with the phenomenal expan-sion of the spatial scale of cities engendered through mass automobility. Writers likeBrian Berry (1973) and Melvin Webber (1964) described the rise of a new kind ofsprawling, low-density metropolis. This was a city no longer defined by any obviousspatial centre, but rather by its key transportation nodes and intersections - the



world of Webber's (1964) 'non-place urban realm'. If a good deal of academic debatewas focusing on how this automobilized sprawl was drawing the life out oftraditional cities (see Whyte, 1957; Jacobs, 1961; Lynch, 1961), there were also thoseacademics who (along with the wider populace) saw the pleasures of an auto-mobile-orientated urbanity. Peter Hall (1969: 272) for one, in his prescient bookLondon 2000, envisaged a possible future London stretching out from Cambridgeto Brighton and woven together by a vast network of high-speed 'expressways'.These motorways would be as much aesthetic as technological wonders: 'London'sexpressways are a brilliant sight [ .. ] now trenching over the side of railways, nowflying over rooftops, now burrowing through the heart of reconstructed shoppingand office centres.'

For all that, what is interesting about the phenomenon of mass automobile owner-ship is how little serious social scientific attention has been paid to the emergenceof what - following Beckmann (2001) - can usefully be called the automobilizationof our cities. Urry's (2000) recent observation that sociology has 'barely noticed ...automobility' applies equally well to human geography. Urry's argument is notthat nothing has been written about automobiles. His argument is that automobileshave been treated as little more than background noise to the social transformationsof which they have clearly played a central role. In a purifying move that echoesLatour's (1993; see also 1999) argument about the modern constitution, the implicitassumption has been that the epochal changes associated with the rise of automobi-lity would somehow have happened with or without the specific invention of theautomobile and the modes of experiential embodiment in which it is implicated.But these elements of automobility are not incidental to the profound and oftenunexpected and unappreciated ways in which the urban landscape is encountered,imagined and organized. As Urry writes, 'the car's significance is that it reconfigurescivil society involving distinct ways of dwelling, travelling and socializing in, andthrough, an automobilized time-space. Civil societies of the west are civil societiesof automobility' (Urry, 2000: 59). Yet, despite this, until recently little work hasexamined the profoundly visceral and corporeal ways in which automobilityshapes 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 'automobi-lity' as the product of some kind of overarching ideological superstructure, this is notvery helpful for at least three reasons (Crang, 2002). First, it fails to engage with theremarkably popular affective resonance of the mass-produced automobile (seeSachs, 1984; Brandon, 2002). Secondly, it does not allow for the messiness and mul-tiplicity 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 otherforms of mobility can be better apprehended in another way, as an emergent setof machinic relations between various practices and technologies. Perhaps themost obvious place to start is simply the way the automobile has been involved inreworking the physical space of the city so that it could be accommodated. Quiteapart from the need for smooth paved streets, mass automobility demanded parkingplaces, service stations and garages, along with new traffic regulations and traffictechnology and so forth. These are all worthy of investigation (see Beckmann,



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 sociallypurified technics. It is about particular structures of feeling and particular sets ofmoral imperatives and dilemmas that come to be organized through the technicaland corporeal machines in which it is implicated (see McCormack, 1999). It isabout the whole world of objects, relations and affects that the car has drawn aroundit. How this organization happens, the work involved in its taking place, is not some-thing that can simply be understood in terms of the way in which a car comes torepresent a particular idea or belief. It is particularly instructive to consider theissue of car design here. This is a process that illustrates the importance to the emer-gence of the materiality of automobility of diagrammatic interventions. As adiagrammatic intervention, the design of cars holds together, or gives consistencyto, the 'complex heterogeneity' (Law, 2002) of relations between various machines:technical machines, aesthetic machines, corporeal machines, petrochemicalmachines, etc. Automobile manufacturers invest vast sums of money and humaneffort 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 longago realized the importance of these affective dimensions, the development of micro-electronics has vastly increased the precision and capacity with which they can becontrolled. Indeed, this very process of design and affective response is woveninto 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 devel-opment of the new Saab 9-3 Sport Saloon. One of the engineers is asked what the whole project isactually about. As he answers, he draws a small figure on a piece of paper. 'The idea', he says, 'isto build the car around the driver's experience of the car. Each and every detail in the car has toreinforce the communication between driver, car and road - everything, from the basic design ofthe chassis to the driver's environment.' With the last stroke of his pen, the engineer adds a bigsmile 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 sensi-ble materiality of the corporeal into the emerging organization of the car. In doingthis, they draw upon a range of ergonomic and human factor knowledges. Thesestretch from the highly technical (such as knowledge about particular materials'strength) to the sociological (drawn from surveys and focus groups on how peopleuse their cars).

Yet it is necessary to qualify the role of design in shaping the emergent materialityof automobility. First, to take seriously the effects of design does not necessarilyinvolve 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 anagent, a centre, a planner, a designer, only to the extent that matters are'alsodecentred, unplanned, undersigned. To put it more strongly, we need to recognizethat to make a centre is to be made by a noncentre, a distribution of the conditionsof possibility that is both present and not present.'

Secondly, it can of course be contended that our example of the Saab may resonatewith established narratives of the automobile as inherently masculine, but the situ-ation is more complex. To take another example, for many suburban women carownership has not only become pivotal to the way they manage the daily working



and childcare routines, but the car and its interior space have also come to embodya widely recognized element of 'good mothering' (Dowling, 2000: 352; see also Law,1999). Acknowledging this - and recognizing the implicit masculine bias built intotheir design processes - many automobile manufactures are putting an increasingamount of effort into designing cars that are more attentive to the particular needsand desires of women drivers. A good example of this is Ford Europe. In an effortto address its reputation as a producer of hypermasculine cars (think of the FordCapri, the first-generation Mondeo which through the figure of Mondeo Manbecame a cipher for a certain kind of aspirant lower-middle-class suburban mascu-linity, 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 tomake the design of its cars more women-friendly. It has worked hard to recruitmore women engineers and designers, and has formed a 'women's marketingpanel' that advises its designers on what women car-buyers seek in a car (Lees-Maf-fei, 2002: 363). The aim is to produce cars that more carefully and sensitively fit withhow 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 anunderstanding of how assumptions about the everyday are, literally and metaphori-cally, built into the materiality of automobility - assumptions about the properrelationship between car and driver, driver and passenger, car-human hybrid andcar-human hybrid, car-human hybrid and the road surface, and on and on. Theseassumptions do not involve the operation of ideology. Rather, they are about thekinds of affective practices and immersive involvements that a number of writerssuch as Katz (1999) have highlighted as being central to automobility. As Katz pointsout, the process of driving the city is very much orientated around 'practical', precog-nitive, kinaesthetic habitualities.The process of designing cars can therefore be understood in terms of the dia-

grammatic apprehension of urban materialities. It holds together a range ofmaterials, but in a way that provides a context for action, a context from whichnew 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 aboutwhat moves and what is fixed. In Houston, the speeding car projects itself into a space thatis never formed, forever evolving, emerging ahead while disappearing behind. This creates aliquidity in which the dance and the dancer are fused in a swirling, self-engendering motion pro-moted 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, treetrunks, joggers, barking dog, drifting leaves, large welt and dip, patch of sunlight. This is naviga-tional space, forever emerging, never exactly the same, liquid rather than solid, approximaterather than precise, visual but also visceral in that it is felt by the entire body, not just throughthe eyes and the soles of the feet. The body in this liquid space is suspended, held and urged onby trajectory.

Such depictions of the experience do of course need some qualification, not leastbecause they give driving a poetic quality perhaps rarely experienced. Our aimhere is not to valorize a kind of kinaesthetic escapism. Indeed, one of us doesnot even possess a driving licence. Furthermore, the design of cars is clearlyonly one element of the emergent materiality of automobility. We might add to



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 auto-mobile has become bound into so many everyday urban activities and how theseare bound into the diagrammatic apprehensions discussed above. As Beckmann(2001: 595) suggests:

... the dominance of the automobile-based transport system in industrialized countries can beregarded as the result of a spiral and self-organizing process, the automobile turns into a structuralprerequisite for the organization of everyday life, while at the same time the variety of forms ofeveryday action becomes the structural prerequisite for the expansion of the automobile.

2 Psychoactive socialitiesWhile the materiality of automobile urbanities and socialities is given an emergentconsistency by a multiplicity of technologies and practices, it is also entangledin uncomfortable ways with other pathways of materiality. One of these, andthe second example upon which we wish to concentrate here, involves psychoactivesubstances in their various legal and illegal guises. Despite the fact that these sub-stances are implicated in a multiplicity of practices and spaces, it is remarkablethat, with a number of exceptions (e.g., Kneale, 1999; 2000; Malbon, 1999; Chattertonand Hollands, 2003), there is almost a complete absence of any attention by geo-graphers to the role they play in shaping particular urbanities and socialities.There are of course a number of strands of work from which geographers mighttake their cue in this regard, including: the range of recently published studies ofaddiction and intoxication (e.g., Lenson, 1995; Plant, 1999; Walton, 2001; Daven-port-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., Dinglestadet al., 1996; Coomber, 1998); and the rich tradition of 'writing on drugs' (Stransbaughand Blaise, 1991).Our aim here is not critically to review such work. Rather, while acknowled-

ging the insights to be gained from such literatures, here we wish to suggestthat paying greater attention to psychoactive substances provides a particularlyproductive way of thinking through the materialities of the urban. This doesnot, however, involve simply using intoxication or anaesthesia as a kind of meta-phor for the experience of the modern city. Nor does it mean suggesting that theconsumption of psychoactive substances offers some privileged insight into the'reality' of the urban. Rather, we wish to suggest that thinking about these sub-stances provides a particularly useful means through which to reconsider thematerialities of the city, and the forms of urbanity and sociality in which theseare implicated.

Crucially, psychoactive substances challenge the usefulness of calls for geogra-phers to rematerialize their work through a greater engagement with the concrete.This is not least because they amplify with particular intensity the fact that whatwe take to be the 'lived' material reality of the urban is composed of variousmolecular assemblages. Such assemblages, as Nikolas Rose puts it (1996: 185), area matter of:

Organs, muscles, nerves, tracts that are themselves swarmings of cells in constant interchange withone another, linking and detaching, dying, reconfiguring, connecting and combining, where the


Alan Latham and Derek P. McCormack 71 5

outside of one is simultaneously the inside of another. And [they arel also a matter of brains, hor-mones, chemical molecules that connect and transform the capacities of various parts - excitingthem, co-coordinating them, fusing them, or disengaging them. These assemblages are notdelineated 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 bestapprehended in terms of the movements of discrete things or objects, but rather interms of affective relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness. Ratherthan the production and consumption of particular objects, the production and con-sumption of psychoactive substances are more accurately apprehended in terms oftransformations in such relations.

Such transformations can of course occur without the consumption of psychoac-tive substances, through the molecular processes implicated in everyday activitiessuch as eating or exercise. Indeed, an increasingly wide range of such everydayactivities and practices is being rendered visible as a set of technologies of the healthymolecular self (Pert, 1997; Robertson, 1997; Brownlee, 2002; Levy, 2003; Doel and Seg-rott, 2003). This is to say nothing of the production, prescription and production ofsubstances 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 thespaces and sociocultural sensibilities of contemporary urban life. However, it isalso worth paying attention to more mundane ways in which psychoactive sub-stances amplify and alter the affective materiality of the city. While there is arange of psychoactive substances through which this discussion might be devel-oped, here we want to focus on alcohol (see Edwards, 2000; Brownlee, 2002). Thisis not least because of the way in which the fluid and volatile liquidity of alcoholconfronts us with the difficult of apprehending its materiality as an object.Indeed, the object of alcohol is ultimately a thoroughly abstract thing - anarrangement of carbon and hydrogen atoms that can be diagrammed withoutactually being isolated (Ball, 2001).

Yet, despite the fluid materialities in which alcohol is implicated, it has oftenbeen all too easy to depict it as an independent agent in the shaping of the cul-ture and society: alcohol as the 'demon drink', threatening to loosen the ties thatbind civilized society together, taking control of otherwise politically obedientand responsible citizens, who then become mere conduits for irrational destruc-tive forces. Historically, the role of alcohol in this regard has been crystallizedaround particular events. For instance, in the wake of the Paris Commune in1871, a 'curious juxtaposition was established between revolution and alcohol'(Sournia, 1986: 103). In the months following the Commune, a parliamentarycommittee tried to attribute the cause of the social and political disorder to alco-hol, a view shared widely by various medical professionals and doctors. As onedoctor put it (Sournia, 1986: 103):

Alcohol was everywhere in those fatal times. It was an armed spectre on the streets and ramparts ofthe city, near the barracks, in the avenues and devastated gardens of the suburbs. Enthroned in thePalace it soiled the churches, bustled and shouted at public meetings and staggered along under afilthy tunic, a rifle on its shoulder, belching out fragments of the Marseillaise.



Clearly, it is possible to argue that alcohol plays a part in the eventful materiality ofthe urban without granting it the status of an independent actor. It is more useful tothink of the way in which the affective capacities of alcohol become implicated inand come into conflict with different machinic assemblages. In this regard, alcoholis 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 betweenalcohol 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 makingits control by customary means more difficult'. From this perspective, alcohol canbe understood as a problem that became increasingly visible in practices of govern-mentality because it had the potential to disrupt the 'right disposition' of humanand nonhumans, 'arranged so as to lead to convenient ends' (Foucault, 1991: 94) inthe articulation of increasingly complex machinic assemblages of technics, powerand knowledge.

Such concerns could come to be focused on particular kinds of urbanity and soci-ality. For example, in late eighteenth-century Paris, the tavern became the focus ofparticular suspicion. The Parisian police were wary of the 'openness and accessibi-lity' of the tavern, an accessibility that transgressed the boundaries between the pri-vate and the public (Brennan, 1988: 269). From the perspective of the municipalauthorities, the tavern contained a monstrous potential through the volatile mixtureof human and alcohol that threatened to spill over the threshold of the public houseand 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 aboutthe forms of urbanity and sociality associated with the excessive consumptionof alcohol in cities. Consider the example of Dublin, and in particular the areaof the city known as Temple Bar. In the 1970s and 1980s the area was slated forthe construction of a central city bus terminal, plans that encouraged the emer-gence of a low-rent, eclectic mix of uses. In the late 1980s, the then governmentdecided to build upon this distinctive 'feel' of the area by designating it as'Dublin's cultural quarter', a designation facilitated by generous financial incen-tives (MacLaran, 1993; McDonald, 2000). However, against the backdrop ofincreased cultural cosmopolitanism in Dublin and Ireland more generally, thedevelopment of a number of large pubs in Temple Bar began to become thefocus of intense debate during the 1990s. The increased incidence of street drink-ing in the newly created public spaces of the area fed into a critical discourse inwhich Temple Bar became understood as a contradictory space - an enclave ofcultural consumption on the one hand, a centre of alcohol-sodden street hedonismon the other hand - manifest in newspaper articles in The Irish Times such as 'Cul-tural Heartland or Temple of Doom', 'A Tale of Two Temple Bars' and 'Now its allTemple Bars'.

To some degree, the blame for spoiling the sensibility of the area was laid at thefeet of English 'stag' and 'hen' parties, who, taking advantage of increasinglycheaper airfares, were drawn to Temple Bar for weekend drinking binges. Yetincreasingly Temple Bar has come to represent broader anxieties about the centralplace of alcohol in Irish culture and society. In many ways, such debates simplyrehearse earlier debates in Ireland and elsewhere about alcohol, morality and


Alan Latham and Derek P. McCormack 71 7

civilization (see Harrison, 1971; Kearns, 1996; Kneale, 1999; Wilson, 1940). Suchdebates can be understood in terms of the way in which alcohol and its consump-tion refracts various discourses of cultural identity and morality. They can also beunderstood in relation to the all too obvious transformations in the politicaleconomies of modern Ireland. In turn, the transformation of spaces like TempleBar and a city like Dublin more generally can be understood in relation to differentmodes of urban governmentality and economy (see, for example, Chatterton andHollands, 2003).

Yet there is something more to be said about the processes at play here. To read offincreased alcohol consumption or transformations in the pattern of alcoholconsumption as simply the effect of broader structural forces is not sufficient (seeLatham, 2003b; Malbon, 1999). The affective elements of alcohol also need to beunderstood. Consider the example of 'alcopops', increasingly vilified in the popularpress for increasing the attractiveness of drinking to a younger market. One mightlook to the many advertising representations of alcopops on TV, in magazines andon billboards and explore the kinds of representations of urbanity and socialitythey portray. Yet, if we are to take seriously the affective force of alcohol in shapingthe materiality of the city, we need to think of other processes, processes that mightinitially appear of little importance. Taste, for example. Thus, alcopops might well beabout 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 imagesthat the drinker associates with that drink. Why is the simple fact of sweetnessimportant in this regard? It is important because it alters the affective potential ofalcohol, 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 inwhich the excessive expressiveness of the material becomes implicated in thelife of the urban. In so far as this is the case, however, they do not represent amomentary fall from ontological sobriety in which things temporarily becomemore fluid, more miscible. The volatile, vaporous mix of materiality is prior toits capture and consolidation in particular bodies and spaces. Alcohol does there-fore not so much cause the individual to lose the run of him- or herself so muchas it amplifies the already excessive expressiveness of a world of affective virtua-lities. Because of this, we only begin to understand the contours of sociality andurbanity in which psychoactive substances are implicated by foregrounding theactive, affective role played by the nonhuman (or inhuman) in shaping emergentmaterialities, materialities that only become part of touchable worlds through theprocessual outcome of the abstract yet real force of machinic assemblages (Pini,1998). The materiality of this affective processuality is a matter of consistencyrather than concreteness. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, this materiality 'is nolonger a question of imposing a form upon a matter but of elaborating an increas-ingly rich and consistent material, the better to tap increasingly intense forces.What makes a material increasingly rich is the same as what holds heterogeneitiestogether without their ceasing to be heterogeneous' (1988: 329).



V Conclusion: material excessesThe very streets, with all their bustle and their ornate, pompous buildings, seemed to be in an ana-logous 'expectant state', as though the hard facets of a crystal were being dissolved in some liquidmedium and about to fall back into an earlier, more amorphous condition.

(Musil, 1995: 682)The pathways we have presented here are necessarily provisional, intended asorientations rather than exhaustively researched case studies. We also hope it isclear that the kinds of conceptual vehicles through which they might be pursuedfurther are by no means limited to thinking about cities, but could also be employedto think about the multiple ruralities and natures with which geographers are enga-ging. Indeed, revalorizing questions of the material and materiality provides a cru-cial opportunity for geographers both to introduce interesting twists in any numberof already existing lines of thought and to realize the critical and creative potential-ities of new ones. However, one of the key points we have sought to develop here isthat the success of this opportunity depends upon the active cultivation of a commit-ment to think through the material not as the base from which thinking departs, butas 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 ofthe urban. First, there is a pressing need to increase the sophistication of the concep-tual and empirical tools employed to think through the materiality of the urban. It isnot enough to offer the relatively underconceptualized materiality of urban geogra-phy 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 begrowing in currency throughout the broader ecumene of urban studies; see Eadeand Mele, 2002). If anything should have been learnt from the cultural turn it isthat established conceptions of materiality and culture are inadequate. We cannotsimply take the 'material' and add 'culture' (or the 'symbolic' or whatever) andarrive at a neat balance between the two. To think about the enfoldings of culturewithin the very thereness of the urban requires a quite fundamental rethinking ofhow we understand both terms (a rethinking that places the very idea of 'thereness'into question). Indeed, if anything, the problem with cultural geography has beenthat it is not excessive enough - it has yet fully to realize an engagement withthe incorporeality of the material. The strength of the conceptual vehicles outlinedin sections II and III is that they provide a way of holding on to the expressiveexcessiveness of the urban. They allow us to gain and retain a sense of the multi-plicity, the structuredness and the productiveness of urban life. So we can begin toapprehend, for example, how automobility is something that organizes in a wholenumber of ways the everyday experience of the contemporary city, while also begin-ning to appreciate the diverse, unexpected and unplanned ways in which thisorganization is achieved. What is more, the conceptual vehicles of sections II andIII hold on to this excessiveness in such a way that nudges us to conceive of the mate-riality of the urban 'not as a substance, but as a preeminently transductive fieldin which psychical, physical, technical and affective realities precipitate' (MacKenzie,2002: 35; emphasis in the original). Of course, this process involves capture andcontainment, the organization of forces with a degree of consistency such thatthey are apprehensible as bodies, subjects and objects. Yet the outcome of such



processes is neither inevitable nor dictated from the beginning by some overarchingstructural logic.

Secondly, we are arguing for an understanding of the materiality of the urban thatworks to multiply the contexts within which we can examine its emergence. For allits achievements, traditionally urban geography (and indeed urban studies moregenerally) has presented us with a remarkably emaciated view of what cities consistof. Perhaps because of the apparent necessity of finding a general framework forunderstanding the material logic of the urban (and the progressively more dispara-ging connotations of an 'eclectic' approach), much of the work in this area has (attimes unintentionally) worked against the cultivation of an appreciation of theremarkable plurality of substances and relationships that give reality and shape tourban 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 exceed-ing of these limits produced by the city's plurality. In an effort to contribute to thecultivation of such an appreciation, here we have outlined two ways throughwhich a careful consideration of this pluralism can offer novel perspectives on theurban. Thinking about automobility and intoxication hardly exhausts the possibili-ties 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 atechnosocial 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 ourimagination of city life through asking the vital question of just what material thecontemporary city consists of.

Such an empirically inflected and conceptually energized multiplication is necess-ary and important because it allows us to better understand how particular kindsof urbanity and sociality cohere at the intersection of different lines of materiality.It allows us to think through why different cities, different urban spaces, havequite different affective capacities. Such coherence is not a smooth process ofaccretion. Therein lies the rub. If there is always change in the mix, 'the attemptto show the odd, multiple, unpredictable potential in the midst of things ofother new things, other new mixtures' (Rajchman, 1998: 76) takes on a particularimportance. In so far as urban geographers can become more fully implicated inshaping the materialities of the urban, it might well have much to do with theways in which they develop the capacities to draw out this potential. The work ofurban geographers might become much more about thinking through waysof foregrounding the productive potentialities often hidden within the materialitiesof the urban. In this way efforts to apprehend the city could in their own modest waybecome more political, more attentive to the diverse modalities and materialitiesboth of the powers that be and the powers that become.

AcknowledgementsThe authors would like to thank Ron Johnston and the three anonymous referees whosecomments greatly helped us in revising the paper. We would also like to thank the Econ-omy, Culture, Space reading group at Southampton for their many constructive com-ments on an earlier draft. Lastly, we would like to thank Donald McNeill whoserigorous scepticism helped us work out what we really wanted to say.



Notes

1. Clearly, these informal tendencies towards diagrammatic expressiveness may also becomemore formalized. Perhaps the best examples of this were the playgrounds constructed in Amster-dam during the 1950s and 1960s (van Eyck, 2003). While the design of these playgrounds is closelyassociated with Aldo van Eyck (whose distinction between concepts of 'space' and 'place' hasproved an influence on the works of various urban theorists), they arose in the context of 'semi-hierarchical, 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 ofagents, 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 monitor-ing system which allows the driver to see what is going in the car on a video cellphone or PDAwhile 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 theneed 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 ofblackcurrant cordial to Guinness to take the edge off the taste.

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