Events Detail

Speaker:
Maan Barua

On 13th July at 4:00 PM at Bücklestr 5a (4th Floor), next week Hemal Naik is organizing an interactive session with Dr. Maan Barua (bio below). He is coming to introduce his book Lively Cities - Reconfiguring Urban Ecology (abstract below). Maan will talk about the book for 15-20 mins and then we will have a conversation with him and discuss perspectives on humans and wildlife living in urban spaces. His work touches upon various topics that we study at MPI-AB and cluster. It would be exciting to see how we can learn to connect our research with another field of study.

Lively Cities - Reconfiguring Urban Ecology:

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 re-conceptualizes 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.

Maan Barua is an environmental and urban geographer whose research focuses on the economies, ontologies, and politics of the living and material world. It fosters new conversations between political economy, posthumanism, and postcolonial thought, developed through four arenas of inquiry: urban ecologies, urban surrounds, biocapital and postcolonial environments.