Posthuman Urbanism explores what it means to live in an urban environment with reference to posthuman theory. The book argues that contemporary science and technology offers radically different ways for changing the way we live in city spaces today. “If cartography creates representations of space that map bodies into power, this vivid, original and utterly compelling book hacks mapping to evoke alternative ontologies of existence within hyper-surveilled prosumer cities crisscrossed by endless commuter corridors and shopping junk. Posthuman Urbanism is in fact a treasure map, one that engages acting rather than seeing. Explore the many complex and inspiring paths that it contains to find invaluable treasures: stories, imaginings and concepts hidden in dark spaces that evade normalising twenty-four-hour high security control; ways of doing and being that queer urban planning and its belief that it can fix all social problems; ways of becoming and escaping that draw energies from unexpected animal, human, technoscientific, material mixtures. By analysing how humanism and urbanism reinforce each other only to assert control over our movements in city space, this provocative and bracing read invites us to embrace posturban city spaces and, indeed, to make them. Beneath the paving stones, the posthuman urban commons.” ―Dimitris Papadopoulos, Reader in Sociology and Organisation at the University of Leicester and author of Experimental Politics. Technoscience, Alterontologies and More Than Social Movements (Duke University Press) “As the world becomes predominantly urban, and as humans become increasingly entangled with other creatures and technologies, we need to combine current urban sensibilities with a feel for the posthuman condition. Combing cutting edge theories with grounded observations, Debra Benita Shaw shows us the neoliberal constitution as well as the promises of our monstrous urban lives, pointingus towards a reconstituted urban politics and praxis.” ―Stephen Hinchliffe, Professor in Human Geography at the University of Exeter “Posthuman Urbanism will be useful to students and scholars concerned with how city spaces and architecture include and exclude certain subjects through designing operations like separation, classification and disciplinary control. It is relevant to those occupied with the intersections of cultural geography and ideology, providing excellent insight into how humanism and urban space interact to stabilise the idea of the human as well as how posthumanism can disrupt the symbiotic relationship between urban space and dominant ideologies.” ― LSE Review of Books Debra Benita Shaw is a Reader in Cultural Theory at the University of East London. She is the author of Women Science & Fiction (2000), Technoculture: The Key Concepts (2008) and co-editor (with Maggie Humm) of Radical Space: Exploring Politics and Practice (2016). Posthuman Urbanism Mapping Bodies in Contemporary City Space By Debra Benita Shaw Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. Copyright © 2018 Debra Benita Shaw All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-78348-080-7 Contents List of figures, vii, Preface, ix, PART I: POLITICAL ANATOMIES OF BODIES AND CITIES, 1, Introduction, 3, 1 Darwin's Monsters, 51, 2 Metropolitan Others, 73, 3 Science and the Architectural Imaginary, 93, 4 Posthuman Urbanism, 121, PART II: MONSTERS IN THE METROPOLIS, 137, 5 Scavengers and Parasites, 139, 6 Pirates and Vagabonds, 153, 7 Posturban Psychogeographies, 167, Conclusion: Towards a Posthuman Cartography of Urban Space, 181, Notes, 187, Bibliography, 191, Index, 207, About the Author, 221, CHAPTER 1 Darwin's Monsters The New Weird is a recently emerged subgenre of SF/fantasy that Fredric Jameson has called Radical Fantasy (2002) but which could also easily be described as the posthuman poetic. The New Weird is grounded in abnormality, but in the context of the posthuman it becomes not so much a warning against transgression or a reminder of what we must keep at bay in order to ensure the coherence of something called 'civilisation' but rather what constitutes politics for post-anthropocentric subjects. China Mieville's Bas-Lag trilogy (2001-2005) is probably the most high-profile series of novels associated with the genre. 'The fact of the Weird', writes Mieville, 'is the fact that the worldweave is ripped and unfinished. Moth-eaten, ill-made. And that through the little tears, from behind the ragged ... edges ..., things are looking at us. ... Modernity weaves a moth-eaten cloth, and it is the final instars of those bad eaters that watch us through rifts their maggoty baby selves made' (2011, 1115). The 'things' that are 'looking at us' are the abjected excesses which will always haunt our carefully crafted distinctions but which, Mieville implies, are now demanding our attention. Mieville's writing is self-consciously political and thus differs from traditional fantasy literature in that it is