Speaker: Maan Barua – University of Cambridge - UK
Dates: 7th July 2023
Venue: Université de Liège - Belgium
Convened by:Olivia Angé and François Thoreau as joint event between the ERC projects The Bos and SeedsValues

Book launch by Maan Barua, followed by a roundtable with Pauline Chasseray-Peraldy (Université de Liègle), Else Vogels (University of Amsterdam) and Thibault de Meyer (Université de Namur).

Abstract

One of the fundamental dimensions of urbanization is its radical transformation of nature. Today domestic animals make up more than twice the biomass of people on the planet, and cities are replete with nonhuman life. Yet current accounts of the urban remain resolutely anthropocentric. Lively Cities departs from conventions of urban studies to argue that cities are lived achievements forged by a multitude of entities, drawing attention to a suite of beings—human and nonhuman—that make up the material politics of city making.

From macaques and cattle in Delhi to the invasive parakeet colonies in London, Maan Barua examines the rhythms, paths, and agency of nonhumans across the city. He reconceptualizes several key themes in urban thought, including infrastructure, the built environment, design, habitation, and everyday practices of dwelling and provides a critical intervention in animal and urban studies. Generating fresh conversations between posthumanism, postcolonialism, and political economy, Barua reveals how human and nonhuman actors shape, integrate, subsume, and relate to urban space in fascinating ways.

Through novel combinations of ethnography and ethology, and focusing on interlocutors that are not the usual suspects animating urban theory, Barua’s work considers nonhuman lifeworlds and the differences they make in understanding urbanicity. Lively Cities is an agenda-setting intervention, ultimately proposing a new grammar of urban life.

Bio

Maan Barua is a university lecturer in human geography at the University of Cambridge. He is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant Urban Ecologies.